Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Back Off the Bus

I was in a challenging phase.  I’d already been out of work for too long; I had begun to entertain my depression as one endures a revered but disliked grandparent.  I had to go down to the EDD - “Employment Development,” or the unemployment office, which was the sort of activity I could count on to deflate my mood even further.The office had thoughtfully been sited in an area of high local usage, down in the lower inner mission.  I rode two busses to get there at a time when my car was still my primary mode of transportation, so the trip down in itself took me rather out of my element.  As I got off the bus my feet felt foreign on the pavement, and the landscape bristled with rejection - of every kind and towards us all, each of us individually and all of us as a group.

Tuesday, June 29, 2004

on being not invisible

i never saw it coming
didn’t bother to expect it
i flew beneath the radar
left no footprint on the sand
i was sure i cast no shadow
then i found myself confronted
by a string of pointed inquiries
that left me plainly wondering
how long i’d been so obvious
to everybody else, or even
just to anybody else - it was a shock
to think that i, omniverous
observer, had in fact
been seen - and not in passing,
seen and scrutinized and rated,
given credit (more or less),
that my small ripples - those i thought
perhaps i didn’t even cast -
had moved a pebble, lapped a twig
out on some distant shore somewhere.
now i see, or am less blinded,
see myself no more transparent
don’t believe i have no impact
stand in shock and petrifaction
too afraid of what will follow
to do anything

Oh Grow Up

I’ve been wrestling with this for some time and now I have concluded that the only honorable path is to punt - to evoid it altogether through circumlocution. 

Here’s the issue: I spent some time two weekends ago with some very dear friends of the family.  Husband and wife living here in San Francsico, they are brilliant, gracious, funny, sweet and supportive - taking time to check in on my 95-year-old great-uncle, the only one left of our clan in our ancestral Ohio home, even as they jet to china to inspect their factories, or begin the chairmanship of a new major fundraising campaign, or endow a museum, or whatever.  Patrician but approachable; powerful but cuddly: these guys are great.  He used to clerk for a US Supreme Court justice and is now a managing partner in a noteworthy law firm; she has had a dozen careers and knows absolutely everybody worth knowing.  I love to hang with these guys. 

My problem is that they share a surname that I cannot even think of without giggling.  Out of respect and friendship I will defer from naming them here, but you have to believe me, everybody to whom I tell their name unfailingly asks, “What?  Is that their real name?” Well yes it is, and I’m just immature enough not to be able to get over it.  Recently Tom gave me his business card, printed in english on one side and chinese on the other.  I have to wonder, did they translate the name, or transliterate it?  Either way, I wish I had a way to really make fun of it.  But I love these guys so I can’t.  I just have to sit here and simmer in unrealized giggles. 

Or, alternatively, I could depress the general level of maturity in parallel, maybe even complimentary, ways.  For example, during all those recent trips to the vet I couldn’t help but notice that San Rafael has some kind of PR campaign going to promote, as it seems, “the canal district.” I’m not sure what that is but there are banners hanging from streetlights all over town, each with a b&w photo of some residents of the district over the words “Faces of Canal.” The part I find entertaining is that for some reason they changed the font used for the “a” in “faces.” When seen with the other letters around it, I read it as an “e” almost every time.  It looks like a public campaign to support a street caked with #2.  Now that’s funny. 

But: not as funny as the educational evaluative tool Kel mentioned to me not long ago.  She’s going for her masters in Special Ed. (I put in a period to abbreviate it so lets have no mister ed jokes) and is learning about tools used to determine a given student’s individual strengths and weaknesses, developmentally and intellectually.  There are several of these testing protocols, and they typically involve several “units” that can be combined into different “clusters” that get harder as you go along.  And no, that’s not the part I find entertaining - that’s just ambient crude immaturity.  No, the part I find really entertaining is this.  Thank you, Riverside Publishing, for picking a name that will, from this day forth, unfailingly elevate my mood. 

MORAL: People with funny names have both the right and the duty to find entertainment in other funny names.  People with boring names are stuck with making fun of television, movies and the legitimate stage.