Years ago, it used to be a weekly affair. Glen was two years older than I and his sister, Gwen, a year younger. They would come over or I would go over to their house and our parents would sit in the kitchen for a few hours and play bridge. The three of us children would be left to find some way to distract ourselves. When it was the right season we'd follow the Laker games. And if it was late enough and when it was still funny, we would watch Saturday Night Live. But most often we found entertainment in our imaginations. We wrote ridiculous chain stories that were tossed in the trash at the end of the night. We pretended we were comic book characters and fought our way past imagined adversaries and worked our way around invisible traps, to try and steal a pack of gum from the kitchen drawer without our parents noticing.
Those days were not far from my mind two days ago as I sat waiting for the wedding to start. I stared at the glass of red and the glass of white wine that sat on the table warming in the late morning sun. And as the procession began, I wondered who would get the red and who would be left with the white. I pondered this as the energetic interfaith minister went through all of the usual wedding rituals. Then I heard him speak of mixing the wines and I felt an involuntary cringe. It was with a mix of pity and amusement that I watched the couple quaff the concoction. I guess we're all supposed to swallow a bit of bitterness to make marriage work. With the difficult part out of the way, Glen and his bride exchanged rings and vows and were wed.
There were more than enough memories to share in the hours that followed. We reminisced about how my brother had taught Glen to drive stick, which he can't quite remember but his sister remembers with white knuckled convulsive whiplash motions. And how Glen taught me how to drive a car before I even had my learner's permit: before you change lanes, SMOG -- signal, mirror, over-the-shoulder, go. And when someone commented on how heavy his ring was and asked what the material was and he replied, "Adamantium," I laughed and he looked at me and we remembered the comic book characters we had once pretended to be.
This morning or last night, depending on which coast you count time on, I boarded a plane to visit my sweet in New York. For the last two weeks I've been intermittently battling an ever-shifting set of symptoms, which have finally settled into a loud hacking cough that I now attribute to acute bronchitis. Whether or not my shoddy self-diagnosis is correct, it's not a condition you want to get on a red-eye flight with. In deference to my co-passengers, I inhaled two Nyquil capsules before boarding the plane. By the time we were in the air, I was weaving in and out of a fitful sleep punctuated by desperately restrained coughing. Luckily, the flight was only partially full and I ended up with an empty seat next to me. The girl in the window seat had decided to lie down, which I didn’t really mind, except that I had to worry about coughing on her.
Sometime after crossing over to Eastern Standard Time, the sky took on a ruddy violet cast and I knew that I had been robbed of three precious hours. Soon, the sunrise quickened and the terribly brilliant morning spilled in through unguarded windows. There's nothing quite like watching the sunrise at 30,000 feet, certainly nothing quite as bad when you have a Nyquil hangover and you're fighting to shove air down into your uncooperative lungs. The landing was blissfully uneventful and though I was practically the last person to pull my bag from the carousel, I was just happy to be back. It wasn't my first time into Kennedy so I wasn't flustered trying to find transportation into the city, but this was the first time I was using the Super Shuttle After a bit a good luck, I found the van that would deposit me neatly in front of my sweet’s apartment building.
I find myself once again in front of this window with the shifting view, no worse for wear from my fly-by-night transit. The day itself wasn't remarkable, no sights were taken in, no restaurants of note were indulged in. We bought some textbooks for her impending classes, we stopped to get some french fries from a place that sells only french fries, we bought the makings of dinner at a local grocer and we managed to avoid any semblance of the New York nightlife. And this is what I like about New York, you can step outside without a plan, without expectations even and something invariably happens.
I walked into the lobby of the Westlake Hyatt hoping that I wouldn't feel too out-of-place. Looking back at my four years at Thousand Oaks High, I felt that I hadn't made many enduring friendships outside of Band, and those that I had made were, after ten years, tenuous at best. Walking down that corridor to the nascent mob assembled in at the check-in, I was horrified at the prospect of standing around with no one to talk to. Luckily I caught sight of a couple of people that I recognized. Usually, I'm horrible with people's names and faces, but on that night I would prove to be little better than myself. Jenny, Sommer, Danny, Colin ... names I hadn't thought much about in the last ten years. Sharif, A.D., Sharon ... people I had grown close to my last year in school; connections that had frayed in the intervening decade. Then there were the six of us that went to Berkeley: me, Sheetal, Amit, Cynthia, Trevor, and the organizer of the night, Alexis. I had seen each of these at least once during our time together in college. And five of the six had come back for the event. Finally, there were also those there that I had spent all four years of high school with. Band and Color Guard: Renee, Jenny, Karen, Amy, Jeremy and Jimmy. I caught sight of Julie and Abigail too, but didn't get around to talking to them. There were, of course, a number of people missing, Phil, Frances, Nathan, Geoff and Rika to name a few.
The night was a cacophony of questions. What are you up to these days? Where do you live? Did you get married? Do you have kids? Answers started becoming cumbersome and we turned to asking about those that didn't come. Do you still keep in touch with so-and-so? Why didn't they come? Where are they now? In the end, we didn't pry too deep below the surface, that wasn't the point. After ten years, we already knew who we would keep in touch with. Perhaps there were a few that we would make a renewed attempt to stay in touch with. But we all knew that the turn of time and pull of moon and tide would pull most of us irrevocably apart. What was the point then? Perhaps it was just a touchstone. Like so many things in our hometown, it existed for us just as a way to measure how far we had come. To see then also, how far others had gone. To feel again that camaraderie that only comes from growing up together.
At some point in the night, Sommer told me that someone was rounding a bunch of people up for a Weathersfield picture. They wanted to round up as many of the people as they could find that had come up through elementary, junior high and high school together. These were people that I had known for over twenty years, but most of them I don't think I had spoken twenty words to. Matt Elam, Laura Ise, Trevor Thompson. To me they represented the "in" crowd, a group that I was never part of. But there I was, talking to a very excited Laura, who held on to my hand as if I was a dear friend. Then, at that moment, as the distinction between jock, socialite, and band geek dissolved, I wondered whether they had changed or I had. For a moment I didn't feel the ungainly weight of embarrassing memories. For a moment I didn't see myself as the kid with large glasses and funny clothes. It had taken me all of these years, but I had finally come to accept who I had been.
By midnight we had grown tired of the hotel ballroom and we wanted to go somewhere where we could talk. After ten years there was still only one choice. So, Jimmy, Sommer, Jenny, Sheetal, Renee, her husband and I, headed over to Denny's. We talked of more things then, interests common and disparate. So much was lost then to the lateness of the hour. We were not as we once were, bright eyed teenagers trying to burn their way through the night. One question still lingers in my mind, do you think we've changed much? I had said that I thought we had all changed, but in ways that were similar. We had all gone to college, been changed by that experience. Some of us had gotten married, some of us were still in school. But for those small differences, we were all on the same path. I thought that the next ten years would bring the real differences. The disparity between those of us with children and those of us who were still single would be glaring then. Thinking about it now, I'm not so sure. Ten years from now, I just hope we're all around to compare notes.
Homeless: I was sitting yesterday, with my head tilted against the faux brick veneer in the Numero Uno on the corner, when I saw a homeless woman cleaning the newspaper stands next to the parking garage across the street. It seemed all so pointless, this woman in a ski jacket with the hood pulled over her head, probably sweating in the heat of a California summer, wiping down a grimy newspaper stand with a grimy rag. She was at it for awhile, running the rag over the entire stand several times before moving on to the next. My first thought was that she must be crazy. I thought that for awhile as I sat there watching her. Then I started thinking, perhaps she was just sitting there one day looking at the dirty stands, sitting there thinking that someone should clean these things, thinking that she could be someone. I think that we all want to be someone; we all want to be useful.
Tech: I think of us as the Star Wars generation. Science Fiction was our escape. As we started take over from the baby boomers, we turned fiction into reality. We built an entire economy out of technology. Now there are newspaper sections and cable tv channels devoted to it. I think about what today's children are growing up with. Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. What's their escape? Magic. I wonder what they'll give us when we had the reins over to them.
Outrage: This is funny, scary, and hopefully inspires you to stand up for your rights.
Photos: I revamped the site photos again to be easier for you and easier for me. A big shout out to the creators of DAlbum.
It's 1:00a in the morning and I'm tired, but the photos of New York are up ... at least partially. I'll try to find time to get the rest up ... and maybe find a more user friendly program, but until then. Follow the link on your left. Nite.
Bloggerazzi: I think it started with the Gulf War. Suddenly there was coverage of something interesting and terrible, something personal and distant, and it was here, 24/7. Those of who had it, watched CNN. Afterward, Americans wanted their news to come in around the clock. Now there's a block in my cable line-up, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, and FOXNEWS devoted to giving me the latest and greatest. But it's not enough. Real-time isn't fast enough. I need it to be prescient. I can't rely on facts. Facts are old news, someone thought of it before it happened. I need to find those people. I need opinions. Heck, anyone can come up with an opinion. They don't even need to be right most of the time. Heck, I have an opinion. (And I'm certainly not right all the time.) So here I am, refreshing my browser every thirty seconds, googling key words, developing my own trusted sources, gestating my own opinions. I admit it. I am bloggerazzi.
Alone with Sociotechnology: Today I'm taking a break from spinning facts and cutting my own facet of the truth. Today I happened to engage in two entirely different IM discussions with entirely complimentary themes. A. commented: "it's our human weakness that causes us to feel lonely...lack of trust [in God]" But what is lonely? Is lonely simply the fear that I will never find the right person for me? Then people in solid relationship should never feel lonely. I suggested: "it is fear then that your connectivity to others is decreasing, either on an individual basis or as a whole." A very broad definition of lonely if you will. Equally applicable to a social butterfly going through withdrawal, a foreigner lost in a crowd, or a person whose loved one is far away. In my other IM window B. was searching for short thesis for a talk he's slated to give tomorrow.
"On-line communities and the evolution of false positive friendships." I offered.
"Is there a level at which this differs fundamentally from off-line (or real-world, if you prefer) connections?" he fired back.
"It really does two things ... it partially eliminates the limitations of distance and enables a greater disassociation for the individual, both from the created identity and from the community at large."
It's a blessing and a curse that the internet allows us to be stripped of ASL (Age, Sex, and Location.) Toss in race and religion and one might argue that you've stripped most indicators by which you can discriminate. Maybe on-line communities should be blind to these factors. But if I am not 28, Male, Asian American, and Agnostic. Then what am I besides a set of shifting ideas? If I am not part of these groups, what am I a part of? Should I not fear that my connectivity to others is decreasing?
I comfort myself with this paradox: "Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see each other whole against the sky." - Rainer Rilke
When I flipped to KQED (NPR) this morning I heard that magic word that I had been waiting to hear for over a month: "boba." It was a total fluke, I had been searching on the website for the last couple of weeks, hoping to find the report under "Pacific Time," but to no avail. And here it was, the long awaited report on boba (bubble tea or pearl milk tea), I had caught it by accident. I had missed the beginning of the report, but I eagerly awaited my five seconds of fame. It never came. I suppose the reporter had a lot of interviews to choose from and really, I shouldn't be irked because she didn't choose mine. But I was, if only a little. I can't help thinking that if she had only asked me the question I was waiting for, I might have made the cut. Or maybe I should have volunteered the information, because she ended up skipping over a humorous bit of history. The drink is really called zhen zhu nai cha, which translates accurately to pearl milk tea. Boba is a name that used to be reserved for movie stars with large breasts. Maybe that would have been worth a few seconds of air time. But then, maybe they wouldn't have wanted to hear, "Yeah, so sometimes my friends and I call it, 'big boobies'."
Still, if you want to hear the report, which actually has a lot of interesting things to say, just not by me, hear it is, about a third of the way down the page.