If our weekend wasn’t great enough with the brunch and psychic energy, Saturday night got better. After a meal of wood-roasted chicken, pork and beef with kale, squash and lots of taters (not all in one entree, Lulu’s serves family style), we headed off to a real live theater show.

The company was great, including Kevin, who has the dubious honor of being the person I know on either coast who has known me almost as long as my own family. Our birthdays are a few days apart, plus the year that he is older than me, which was true back at Central Junior High School. I like to consider the cycle of Pisces in the calendar as a full-on month of birthday celebrating for me and M., and I’m happy to include Kevin in the festival.

The real live “play” we saw was more of a theatrical experience — The SF cast of “Point Break Live.”

Here’s something that might not be my finest trait, I loves me a Patrick Swayze movie. Far as I’m concerned any afternoon or night with a remote control is enhanced by a chance encounter with Point Break or Roadhouse. Nobody did muscle-bound, soft-spoken quasi-philosopher better than Patrick. Add some cheesy dialog and over the top (or in Keanu’s case in Point Break under the top), I’m done for a couple of hours.

The Metreon in SF is one of our usual places to see new movies. From where we now live, it’s about the same distance away as the suburban movie houses, but there’s more food and fun to be had in the big city, plus it’s an IMAX theater. The last two or three times we went to see a flick, I saw the flyers and then the lobby advertising “Point Break Live.” I was becoming a bit obsessed, which was heightened when I caught 3/4 of the movie on late night cable recently. The frequency of my calling M. “dude” had been increasing. Then Kathryn Bigelow won some Oscars.

So we lived my dream.

From the minute I grabbed a can of PBR and sat on a metal bench inside a clear plastic poncho inside a dingy little theater, I felt at home. The grimy black box with stage wings created by homemade curtains and the rowdy crowd of fairly hip looking 20- and 30-somethings reminded me of the gritty fun of sipping a cheap beer in the back of the old ImprovBoston Theater waiting for the “Great and Secret Show” to start. I was disappointed from that feeling as the night wore on and the show unfurled.

The cast was great. The hook of a new Johnny Utah chosen every show worked better than Keanu’s performance. It was much funnier than I thought it might be.

The downside was the playing up of the homo-erotic closeness of the surfer boy gang. It was played broadly and for laughs, which meant an edge that teetered between homophobia and comic eroticism. However, that played out well for my creepy old lady thrills. At one point when the surfers are introduced sans their “Ex-Presidents” masks, they stand and lie and lounge along the side of the stage, including having one cast member draped on the laps of the audience. They rearranged our seating order to make sure that he was on top of women only, and there I was with a cluster of young, muscled boys surrounding me. The one on my lap with hard pecs and pierced nipples grabbed my hand to rub the suntan lotion they were smearing around into his flesh.

I was an incidental and unintended cougar with a PBR in one hand and a young man in the other. I cooperated for the sake of art.

Between the show, the dinner and the psychic, not to mention the pedicure and massage M. decided that we needed before heading out for the evening, I almost forgot to hate this weekend. It takes a lot to mellow me out during the hell that is Daylight Saving Time.

Technorati Tags: Bay_Area, beach, California, comedy, Point Break Live, Point Break, Patrick Swayze, surfing

Saturday, March 13, 2010 may go down in the history books for me as significant for its fun factor and for its diversity. It all began much to early for me on a Saturday, when I was rustled out of bed about the same time I would awaken for a work day. I hate that early-rising shit like poison.

We had to wake up early, because M.’s co-worker, a friend really, with whom we recently trundled off to Tahoe, because she believes in psychics. Or, more correctly, she believes in Felix the Psychic. Actually, he’s a medium, and while not all psychics are mediums, all mediums are psychic, or so I think Felix explained. Point is, M.’s friend hosted a brunch where Felix would give a reading to 10 or 11 of us gathered around her sunny, large living room in the suburbs of the East Bay.

To say I am skeptical about this kind of shit is an understatement. Worse, I kind of wonder about the ethical realm in which professional psychics work. Too often, I think, they work among and prey upon vulnerable folks who want answers or are coping with grief and generally are casting about for a shoulder to support them or ears to listen. I’ve had my tarot cards read after a bad breakup and burst into tears to a strange woman, who was in retrospect an inexpensive therapist for my broken heart with her vision of a wounded animal outside my door afraid to come in or commit, as metaphor for that now-forgotten boyfriend. Best case, it’s a few bucks and a few tears. Worst case, it’s a terrible and potentially expensive bandaid to deeper issues.

On the lighter side, I’m not 100 percent opposed to entertaining psychic shenanigans, both for their entertainment value and for the exercise of a different perspective. I read Carl Jung as an impressionable, precocious youth, and who the fuck knows what is buried in the various layers of our subconscious, collective and otherwise? I used to carry around my own pack of tarot cards and a handy interpretation guide and what it did for me was essentially, in new age hippie speak, guided meditation. The cards images and alleged meanings could get me thinking about my actual problems and thoughts, but aligned in a different direction or with a fresh perspective. I could also talk other people through their readings the same way.

I only really except three things when it comes to this stuff, though. Life is complicated and not everything makes sense, coincidences happen and human brains like to organize and find solutions and organization. Cold readings work, because everyone likes to help out, because everyone likes to hear about themselves in all their glorious uniqueness, and because everyone likes to connect dots. We are predictable beasts, we humans.

All of that being said, old Felix creeped me and the rest of the room out with his specificity.

He had a lot to say to everyone in the room, and much of it was infinitely explainable as standard carnival fare. Who doesn’t know someone with a J. name? How can you verify alleged past life identities? Who doesn’t want to be told they are intuitive or a people person? Many in the room were gifted with their own psychic abilities, many missed loved ones from the past. Some replied freely working with Felix to prompt more answers to his questions before he asked. Others, M. in particular, gave him little traction.

By the way, he told M. and me that we were brother and sister in a past life, ew, and thus our close relationship in this life. We are compatible, it seems, and the spirits think we’re fine together.

When it was my turn, I was not going to be swayed. Skeptical and unwilling were my mantras. But, Felix said some shit that I can’t explain. With the wonders of modern technology, I’ll get to play and replay the recording someone made of the readings, and then decide what was magical, what I am now remembering positively and the “truth.”

Quickly, he pegged the most significant death and the most grief I ever felt in my life. I won’t go into the details, because I’m not looking to irritate the living, but it was an eerily accurate jump point. We chatted, me trying to keep my answers fairly monosyllabic, while Felix probed. He asked me if there was a quilter or someone who sews in my family. Yes, of course, my sister. He went on to say that my mother wore something she made, well actually that’s how I’m remembering it, I’ll have a recording to verify if that’s what he said. In that moment, he was talking about my mother in the present tense, so I corrected him.

Medium that he is, communicator with the “spirit world,” he summoned good, old Pat forth to get in touch with us all. Somewhere in here, he didn’t ask, he stated that my mother had suffered hair loss, that she was in his words bald. And, that she was, unfortunately. I admitted that she didn’t just wear something that my sister, the seamstress, had made, but it was a polar fleece cap that was all but glued to her head up until the day she died. He passed along Pat’s message from the other side, “I have my hair back.”

As my brother Danny laughed, it’s funny that in communicating through the veil of death she wouldn’t have something more momentous to mention.

Of all of the words Felix could have used, the identifier he had for Pat’s spirit when she came forth and spoke to him was strangely familiar. The first word he used to describe her, according to what she herself was allegedly communicating, was “stubborn.” He said she acknowledged she was stubborn.

Now, this word is either certain proof that there is an afterlife and she was communicating from it. Or, it’s certain proof that it wasn’t her, because the Pat on earth would NEVER acknowledge that characteristic for herself. In fact, it was a running joke with my aunt and I, one with which we would tweak her whenever the opportunity arose, that is, fairly often. Pat would call my aunt and let her know how stubborn I was for not listening to her. In phone calls to me, the stubborn one would be if not me often my aunt. We would laugh and point out how it was always one of us who was stubborn, never her.

Why, I couldn’t help my skeptical but confused mind wonder, would Felix use stubborn?

I think it was later in the whole party, after the readings were done and Felix offered more time for questions, when I asked about myself and writing and performing. Early on, he saw me in a different job than I have now within two years, a different career. He “saw” teaching, because I was standing up in front of people explaining something in his vision. I mentioned writing and performing and he went with that.

I’m not sure when, but when he was chatting up Pat, she mentioned to him that her love for me was symbolized by a single, long-stemmed rose, thorns and all. He repeated about the rose and said there was some connection with me and my mom and a rose, asking, as folks in his line of work do, if this rose meant anything to me. A single rose.

Others in the room were shocked by my answer — I saved a single, red rose from my mother’s grave before they lowered her into it. A few of us did. I still have the petals, high up on a shelf in an antique blue willow glass that was her mother’s.

Old Felix told me that my mother, the one now chilling on the other side, was fine now. She’s with our old family dog, Ben, the Irish Setter, who she begrudgingly grew fond of over time. There’s another dog, he said, from our family who had “passed.” In my interpretation, I like to think in the afterlife it’s a calmer Sherlock, my aunt’s, uncle’s and cousins’, well really my uncle’s terrier, who Pat mostly referred to with the word “damn” or “damned” as a preface. It would kind of serve her right for her philosophy and strong opinions on pets here on the earthly plane for Sherlock and Ben to be underfoot.

Apart from mentioning stand-up comedy, I didn’t say anything about what I have written. Felix asked/stated that I wrote about my mother. Cue spooky music.

He went on to say that she knows that I write about her, and Pat is proud of me and my writing. She wants me to continue and isn’t angry at all, hoping that I will go ahead and live my life as I need to live. He said that she said I had to write and get my emotions out and it was a good thing. Somewhere in there he also blurted out, after I mentioned that I had moved here to try to live said life, Ma…Massachusetts. The spirit on the other side, my alleged mother, had insisted we were from Massachusetts. Could I have signaled all of that to some kind of wildly receptive con artist; I’m not even sure if I said enough to belie an accent?

Pat of the other world also said that she likes M. and that he seems to be a sweet guy. Again, my brother Danny was skeptical if it was truly her, since Felix didn’t mention that she said anything about his being Asian or Oriental. Our Pat would have had some reference to that.

One other eerie moment I have to hear the recording again to figure out if I agree still with where I thought Felix was going. We were talking about my siblings. He mentioned the Beatles and someone playing their music over and over again. The story it sparked for me was one that the brother in question would vehemently deny. I suddenly remembered a story from when we were kids and one of my brothers was angry at the rest of the household or someone in it. His revenge was to lie on his bed behind the closed door of his room, not budging to unstick a skipping album on his stereo. “Let it be…click…let it be…click…let it be.”

Similarly for M., Felix had some pretty specific things to say. He declared his mother as a cook, which seems common enough, but then he said she was a “big cook,” a person known for her cooking. She is truly a fabulous cook, and when he was growing up, she was a cook for a living. Felix also seemed to know that M.’s grandmother lives with his mother, and his mother is her caretaker. M. was pokerfaced, and I’m not sure ever admitted that was the arrangement even while Felix insisted that he saw his mother taking care of an older woman.

M.’s eerie moment of psychic truth was over his now deceased grandfather, a drinker back in the day, who came forward to tell M. that he apologizes to his mother. If you knew the whole story, which isn’t mine to tell, you’d be a bit blown away by that one.

Right at the outset with him, he also confirmed what everyone in the room, many of them his co-workers knew, that M. was working on developing a side business that had to do with design or making something. Here in the real world, M. indeed is working on a custom tailoring idea, with measurements and orders taken here and suits made back in Asia. It was one of the reasons we went to Thailand.

Per Felix, and I sure hope he’s right, the business will bring money to M.

On another note, the uncooperative M. denied any musical tendencies, even while Felix talked up someone playing a guitar and singing. The funny thing about Felix and that one for me was M.’s high school reputation. On my first and subsequent visits to Malaysia it’s been a key part of his family’s narrative about him. They remember him and his best friend at the time, Peter, pairing up and serenading the girls in their school and their neighborhood with their pop crooning. M. was an ’80s (or maybe ’70s) idol in some circles.

My favorite little thing for M. was about collecting and piling up junk. He actually hates doing that, I’m the pack rat in our house. But, ever since he’s been able to settle down here with a steady paycheck, M. has increasingly embraced the ownership, consumer culture middle-class America enjoys. So much so, he now wants to live through his own reenactment of the bastion of suburban weekend renewal — The garage sale. He’s looking forward to piling up our shit on the driveway, so that we have room for newer, shinier shit.

Felix decided M. was a hoarder and that the time had come for spring cleaning and M.’s getting rid of things he doesn’t need. Did Felix intuit the garage sale?

There was more. Some I believe I can use as information to ponder. Some stuff is dubious at best. A bit would be too personal for other people for me to share, including an allegation about a family member that I don’t know I believe.

Apart from the mimosas and the bear claw, it was an interesting way to spend a morning.

Technorati Tags: death, experience, family, cold-reading, life, medium, psychics, Pat, relationships

I kind of wish this entry was about toast. But, it’s about public speaking.

One of the things about where I work is even though it’s relatively small, negating opportunities for advancement, it’s committed to professional development. To that end, they have various workshops and talks and whatnot for the taking. I took one.

Specifically, I signed up for a two-day professional development workshop on public speaking. It was up in the big city of San Francisco, and, man, do I miss the rhythm of working in a city. For a million years or so, I was used to work and live around Cambridge and Boston. Here in the Wild West, it’s been suburban open spaces galore. I don’t lack for seeing trees and lawns.

For two days I drove in amidst the skyscrapers of SF’s Financial District, and I even grabbed a hotdog from a vendor for lunch. OK, it was an uber gourmet, free-range type of dog purchased among the foodie heaven stalls of the Ferry Building. Still and all, urban dining experience it was.

The workshop itself made me excruciating self-aware, which, of course, was part of the dealio. They filmed you speaking and played back the discs of private agony, as a few of my co-workers and I offered each other thoughts and encouragement.

Given that I have done stand-up comedy, nay, naked stand-up comedy, it was actually not that painful for me. I’ve seen much shittier tapes of myself mumbling into a microphone anxiously, caught between the physical urge to wet or shit myself or the desire to burst into tears. All of that work it turns out is completely translatable to professional, like workplace conference room-based, public speaking. Same difference without the beer.

Weirdly, watching the disks of my own performances and those of my colleagues, I had the personal epiphany of realizing how different I am today from the day before I tried stand-up. Even weirdlier, because now I’m so smart I can make up words and shit, I think I had a premonition about that epiphany before I even started the class. We were told that upon arrival, we had to give a two-minute spiel on something we felt a commitment toward. I decided to speak about what a shitty writer I am, or in the end maybe not a writer at all.

Here’s the video of that not exactly interesting interlude.

Now the whole point of this first exercise and the camera rolling and all subsequent exercises was to show how folks tend to present and then break them. Or at least highlight habits and warts and all. That’s where anyone who has maybe tried a little stand up has an edge.

In fact, before we gave it the proverbially shot and spewed our two minutes the instructor broke down the plan. Her buzzword phrase, because for fuck sake’s this was executive training type grownup stuff so there had to be a buzzword or phrase or slogan or motivational gimcrackery, was that it wasn’t about “Speaking out, but speaking IN.” Dig it, she earnestly intoned, without the actual use of the word “dig,” that the whole fucking point was the listener.

Now, if you have ever stood in a shitty open mike or a quality comedy club, and, if even stupider, you climbed on the stage, if everything is working right, you learn one fucking thing. Just the one. It’s about the audience. If your joke is a fucking gem of a concept but you can’t sell it to another human in the room, you fail. That’s about all you ever learn in comedy.

This expensive (I’m assuming), downtown San Francisco trainer was selling the same gut punch lesson you can get from any grizzled vet comic for the price of a glass of beer or soda water. It ain’t about you, Sunny Jim.

Now, the audience to this trainer’s message was my fellow work comrades, a well-educated, scrubbed and earnest bunch. These are not folks who go looking for the gut punch lesson in seedy dives. Without the “fucks” and “stupids” and without the grim march of drunks shutting you down with disinterested stares, we learned the just the same.

At one point, I told the instructor about the wonder that is Tony V. Everything about that man on stage could be a thesis for this kind of training. From the commitment, the authority and the energy they bullet-pointed on a flip chart. With the techniques they were teaching to face the audience and sound like you give a shit and know what you are talking about, the stance, the demeanor, everything they were selling, he can turn an angry mob or hostile open mike to a goddamn show.

Turns out, one of the instructors at this impressive facility, I was told, runs his own show up somewhere in the wilds of Marin County.

My epiphany wasn’t really around the fact that I have actually learned some shit over time. Not very impressive if I hadn’t at least picked up a dime’s worth of info.

Nope, my epiphany was over the dreaded 20-somethings who were alongside me in the training. Now, I still continue my hatred and contempt for eager youth, but it was good to see them damn insecure and queasy in the realm of public speaking, one of human existence’s greatest phobias. In truth, though, they could have been me back about a thousand years ago, when the blush of youth still shown upon me.

I tried stand up, precisely because it made me want to crap my pants to even think about it. I was G. Gordon Liddy eating a rat or tying himself to a tree to overcome his greatest fears.

Now, today, right now, it’s largely second nature. That to me is the weirdest truth of all. These kids who only have met my California-living self see someone who speaks straightforwardly, bluntly even, confident-like. To them, I am fucking lying to say I was just like them. They know not of the Walsh Brothers mocking my nerves, or my total envy of watching Patterson devour an eggplant parm sub before a show.

I have become a different person, far as I can tell. And, I guess I owe the current incarnation to that day I actually got on stage and tried. Probably would have been a lot less painful and less alcoholic to pay a corporate trainer some bucks. But, jeebus knows, I wouldn’t have met a finer collection of characters.

Technorati Tags: age, aging, California, comedy, experience, work, writing, youth

I’m kind of a sucker for the thought, the idea of New Year’s as a time of reflection and maybe starting the year off on the right foot as the hackneyed notion might have it. Years in which I took charge and said “fuck it,” and did as I pleased on December 31 may have led to banner years. I don’t actually have any knowledge or examples of that, mind you, but it’s a notion.

For 2010, though, it hasn’t been one new year or new start. It’s been one a month.

It started with the actual calendar New Year’s Eve and Day. I was in Penang, Malaysia for crying out loud on the eve, and we headed to Bangkok, mother-fucking Thailand that first day. If the superstition is you set the tone on New Year’s and end up spending the rest of the year aligning with what went down on the holiday, I’m sunk. My everyday life just ain’t exotic enough to compete, although we have plenty of Tiger beer in the fridge. That’s close.

Rather than sweating on resolution tradition, I just wandered the streets of Asia soaking up sights and sounds and food, lots and lots of food, and focused on vacation.

One month after getting back and after resuming my normal existence, I got a second chance. We decided to celebrate the Lunar New Year, aka Chinese New Year, along with a whole chunk of the planet that likes a good firecracker and lantern-lighting time. I took this new year, the year of the tiger, as another time to contemplate the passing of time and assorted other bullshit deep thoughts. And, I drank more Tiger beer.

Shy of another month’s passing, and here I am again. Now, it’s time passing and mortality and the haunting air of death as I decay from this mortal coil. In other words, today was my birthday.

I think 46 is a strange age for me. Or, I’m strange at being it. My confusion begins and ends with the phrase “for your age.”

Mostly, folks say I don’t look my age or act my age, for that matter, and I don’t actually know what the fuck that means. Will there be a day when I mention the number and the look on the hearer’s face clearly telegraphs, “Oh, Jesus, yeah, you look every inch of that number?” If so, I hope maybe I’m dead or deaf the day before that happens.

On the looking my age, I’m always way more shocked in the opposite direction when someone my age looks 10 to 90 years older. I don’t know or have the trigger that gets that haircut that says, “Fuck it, world, helmets are easier to keep,” or “Frankly, why bother?” When do you go to the store and grab the easy care polyester blend sweat-shirt cardigan over the more comfortable anything with a little style? When will I launch the pastels and the Keds and go for the velour, will-never-see-a-track tracksuit or the the one-size-fits-all roominess from a catalog?

I want my pink hot and my jeans cool, damn-it. And, at this age, I can afford to buy what looks OK.

I see my peers with khaki, and I wince. There but god, go I, but by god I will not go. Nor will I buy a shuffling looking sun hat, nor eyeglasses with a line through the middle, holding on to my neck with a chain. Nor will I allow adorable prancing, applique kitties on my ample, aging bosom.

If I must applique, let it be skulls and bones.

Why should 40-something be sexless and dull and wall-flowered? The larger mystery for me is that I do meet folks who, I guess, are opting for gravitas or grown-upped-ness, and go overboard. Forties looking like 60s, at the same time that I know, and appreciate, people in their 60s, 70s and 80s having a lot more fun. When I stop having fun, I’m done.

And, now that I am older and wiser — For fuck’s sake, girls in your 20s, those grown up work clothes in polyester prints you bought for that first real job. Frumpy at 50 and just fucking sad at your age. Please stop, I have eyes and you doth offend them.

Technorati Tags: aging, age, experience, fashion, birthday, middle-age, youth

Recently, I’ve come to more and more and more and more get in touch with my inner old lady. My old lady hates the young whippersnappers and their bad manners and lack of civility. She hates how courtesy is dead and people hide behind email to front their rudeness. She is downright and damn cranky.

Here’s the first hint of my self revelation on this score. It starts with a wander down memory lane. Way back when in the dark ages when the internet was still capitalized as Internet, and Ronald Reagan and just about everyone else but the geeks had never heard the initials TCP/IP, I worked in a warehouse instead of embarking upon my not completely illustrious collegiate career. All sorts of folks worked with their hands back in those days. It was the only job I could get, and from morning to afternoon I packed school and office supplies into boxes for shipping.

In so many places you might work, in all sorts of fields, but maybe especially in the soul-crushing, bone-breaking gigs for low pay, long hours and without white collars, invariably there is a crusty, crotchety, seasoned player who becomes both a nagging voice of begrudging mentorship and an invaluable ally. For my warehouse gig, there were multiple such souls; it was the entire crew of the “mother’s shift,” working the same hours as their kids were in school from cradle to quite possibly grave.

The ladies oriented me to all sorts of deep insider knowledge. The key pieces of information were to place the lid back on your glue can when you left for the night to avoid cockroaches floating in mucilage come the morning and NEVER, EVER, NEVER go to the paper aisle alone if Phil was working.

The positions at the warehouse broke down on gender lines. Men in the warehouse drove forklifts and shipped the heavy stuff, women picked items off the shelves to fulfill orders and packed the boxes of smaller items. We women folk also managed the paperwork, so it was up to us to make sure the heavy stuff for any order was in stock and set aside for delivery. This last little bit necessitated walking down the long, lonely rows of warehouse lanes, walled in by ceiling high stacks of every sort of paper or paper product imaginable, folders, bond of every shade and weight and the trusty elementary school staple of manila drawing paper in every size, to check off inventory with a stub of a pencil.

Like a spider in a paper box web, Phil rode his forklift back and forth stacking and reordering and order fulfilling, waiting for his moment. To go into his lair alone was at minimum a litany of sexist catcalls, at worst a too close forklift blocking your path for the possibility of an uninvited grope. Phil also kept porno mags in a desk drawer for break time. Nice.

I never fell into his trap. I heeded the chorus of older women and their sage warnings. I never walked alone.

It was a hard but good and invaluable lesson to learn early in my life that those women who were there before me knew shit I didn’t. In every single fucking job in the known universe, the people who were there before you got there know stuff. They just fucking do. When I learned the job, I too could share my experience with a newer comer than me.

Come to realize I am now the crusty vet. Here’s the twist, and I believe it true even if it does smell of the completely trite canard of “When I was your age…,” the difference is now the damn fucking kids don’t listen. It’s exhausting and annoying.

I blame the computers.

Awhile back and probably more than I can remember, I have commented (or whined) about the current kids bringing my workaday world down. This week, though, I thought of those old ladies showing me how to pack boxes and stay safe in the warehouse and had an epiphany. While I aspire to them, I can’t be them, because common courtesy, etiquette if you will, has gone the way of the buffalo (and likely those ladies given their serious addictions to Marlboros and other sticks of tobacco).

Increasingly, I have been getting into conversations where I end slack-jawed, unbelieving that manners don’t exist where I work. I exaggerate, they do, but not for a whole lot of folks with whom I must toil shoulder to shoulder. Daily, there are few pleases and thank yous and many more unbidden demands and full-on interruptions.

It breaks on age and class lines. People with long resumes or a varied work history tend to open interactions with (1) some kind of greeting; (2) eye contact; (3) some kind of acknowledgement if you’re in the middle of something and end with (4) a polite remark of closing with warm regard or thanks, you know like “yo homes smell you later,” or even a head nod. It ain’t much, but it’s a conversation.

Far more of the people without work experience or life experience figure cc’ing you on an email is acknowledgement enough. The double whammy of ignorant, rude stumbling is the one-two punch of shooting off an email with a cc followed by a casual encounter. Here’s the order I fucking hate. HATE.

Dickhead shoots off an email telling someone else what I will do for him. Then, that dickhead swings by desk to update me on what’s going on and for what I have now been involuntarily volunteered without any concern for my time or needs. WRONG FUCKING ORDER.

Same exact amount of time, much happier outcome, talk to me first. Simple.

Yeah, email has that fun 24-hour immediacy, but what the fuck maybe you could try conversing every now and again. It breaks down this way, if you tell me what’s up, and we agree on the next step all is cool. If you feel like you have to “debrief” once the horse is out of the barn and my phone is already ringing and my email boxes is getting replies to what you set in motion, you fucked up and you fucked me up. So now, fuck you.

And, you know what, when I called you on it, and you explained why cleaning out your email at night is efficient and you don’t have time for running things by me? That, honey, is just sheer blood-boiling, unadulterated bullshit. Make fucking time to talk to other people like a human, it will save you time. We wasted time by having to talk about what a colossal douchebag you can be.

What amazes me is last week and into this one, I’ve been having conversation after conversation where I’m trying to explain to someone why their behavior is rude, why the agency we use has stopped returning someone else’s dictatorial emails, or why professional, business emails should start with greetings end with sign offs and make no assumptions in the middle. It’s like that whole chapter in elementary school where you learned how to hold a fork and say “please” or “thank you” is now dropped from the curriculum.

In one such conversation, a truly Machiavellian co-worker listened to my advice and charted a plan of action. Only in that conversation what entered that person’s ears and then came back out restated from another orifice was, “Yes, to get people to do what you want sometimes you have to add civility and whatever, because then they will do more.” Here’s another thought, just be nice and respect other people and their time just, you know, ‘cuz it’s better than being an unmitigated asshole.

What really stunned me, though, is I whined to people my age or older than me, and in seconds, nay nano-seconds, they understood me. One simply said the dickhead scenario above is “not cool, who doesn’t know that.” Another just coaxed me off the ledge by reminding me that our lives with some cordiality were actually more pleasant.

I dream, though, of just being an old, whisky and cigarette-voiced broad, like the ones who taught me the ropes of school-supply packing. A drag of a Virginia Slim, a withering look, and a well placed, “I guess you could do it that way. But that would be stupid. Your call.”

Technorati Tags: life, experience, business etiquette, warehouse, work

The title is M.’s spelling, which I’m kind of questioning, which is extremely obnoxious of me. His version is pretty much the Hokkien spelling, but I’ve also seen “Kung Hei Fat Choi” lying around, and Wikipedia gives it as Keong hee huat chye. You hear a lot more of the old Cantonese or Hakka, I think because there’s a lot more of them, Gung hei faat coi, Gong hee fatt choi.

Anyway, the point is, I hope you all have luck and prosperity and what not out there in both the English-speaking and the rest of the world for the lunar new year.

When I met good old M., I never heard him mention the whole Chinese thing much. Of course, he copped to it, it wasn’t like he was lying or passing or some crazy thing. But, he’s always pretty future dreaming, so it didn’t come up. I didn’t test him at the time, but I swear to god or gods or ancient ancestors, he wouldn’t have had any fucking idea what day Chinese New Year was that year.

I never heard him speak Chinese until he called his mother from my house the minute we found out about the tsunami in December 2004.

But, now, dear M. is a homeowner. And, it’s a kick ass, rocking, beach-y, California rancher with good light, an airy feel and some space to spread out for a party with some intimacy thrown into the mix. This year, his year as a Tiger in the Chinese zodiac, he decided a party must be had.

In truth, the party was merely a delivery system for M. getting his fill of a roasted pig.

He ordered that and piles and piles of other food that he likes. The guests were an excuse to not be gluttonous, I think. Actually, they brought food and wine, too. We were hoping to make a dent in drinking our bottles of wine; we netted more bottles. We’re suffering an embarrassment of riches good food-wise. If only I was better in touch with my inner alcoholic.

In the ethnic spirit, I did get my fill of Singapore’s Tiger beer. At the ancestral neighborhood of Braintree, I’d say Bud or Bud Light was the party-sipping beer of choice, but Tiger may very well be ahead in easy drinkability.

I’d been teasing M. that he was only having the party for the pig all week. It was actually confirmed by our friends who are also from the small subset of Penang-born Chinese diaspora living in the Bay Area. Sally, whose husband Peter hatched the idea of ordering the roasted pig and having a party, had pretty much spent the same span laughing about the same food focus above actual party planning.

Appropriate to living in a beach town, the party came in waves. There were about three separate parties, when you look at the peaks. Almost every glass in the house was used, and I have a cubic buttload of glasses, but only one was broken in my clean up. I think counting kids there were about 38-40 folks.

I should have taken more pictures, especially of the spread, but you can see just the snacks were ample.

I’ll tell you what, though, when it comes to food, the Chinese can party it up hardcore. Not only did we already have tables full of food, but most of the people with Chinese roots brought more. The Chongs outdid everyone with one rice cooker of Malaysian-style sticky rice, another of the dessert pulat hitam, aka black glutinous rice with coconut milk, a large pot of chicken curry, another of turkey gizzards, which I’m sure has a better, more delicious-sounding name, and a box of oranges from their tree, keeping the tradition of handing off oranges on New Year’s alive and well and prosperous. Others brought sesame balls, more oranges, candy, wine, more sesame balls and cookies.

One of M.’s co-workers brought a friend from Malaysia, who dove into the spread like the ultimate cure for homesickness. She was fun to talk with about the homeland, since she seemed surprised that a full-on white chick from the hinterlands of Braintree, could be so hip to the local cuisine and customs. I’m practically an international bon fucking vivant and raconteur. Practically.

This next statement probably only applies to me, or lives in my head in a way I won’t be able to explain well enough to make sense outside of my head. When I look at those party pictures, I have a hard time realizing that this thing that I am currently enmeshed in is my own life I’m living. I mean that I am from Braintree. More specifically, Braintree in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. It had exactly two ethnic groups of which I was aware, and I’m not even sure they are technically ethnically distinct; there were Irish Catholics, and there were Italian Catholics. Sure the town has Protestant churches and a Jewish synagogue, but the predominance of the other two groups swamped them beyond recognition.

In school, we were all born nearby, mostly in Boston. John Feldman would be asked to give a report about driedls or menorahs in the winter. Kathy Yuskauskas would speak up about how Lithuania wasn’t “Russia,” even if the Soviets had taken it over. Other than that, diverse we were not. Hell, I even told my kindergarten teacher that my aunt’s would be a “mixed marriage” (with zero understanding of the weight of the words), when she of Irish lineage was planning to marry Italian stock.

But, here, in my house now, it’s California all over the place. At our party, few were born in the neighborhood, in fact only two that I know off the top of my head, and that might still be more like a 40 to 50-mile radius. Just a quick finger tally, and I get maybe eight countries of origin, and not just the Boston notion of Irish (who usually aren’t from Ireland) or Chinese/Oriental, as the name for all of the people with almond eyes from the land of Asia, but actually being born and living elsewhere were representing. After that, there were permutations of self-identity and different kinds of Americans all melting together, as the metaphor goes.

(As a side note, the best thing about knowing folks from elsewhere, the conversations about health care make the U.S. sound crazy.)

Like being in a happy relationship, this ethnic harmony and openness confuses me in a cognitive dissonance kind of way. It wasn’t the life I pictured. It’s a pretty good life, though. It only shows I suck at guessing.

I plan on writing another thing much more entrenched in my own Boston roots later today. I was going to write it here, but it would be a nonsensical segue. So, I will end with a not-at-all-justice-doing photo of my photo collage that now lives in our hallway. Here, M. and me and the families who made our here and now possible are represented. In the interest of space and the fact that my people just don’t do group photos, I left out a lot of important folks on my side. I hope you all know who you are.

One with think with a trip to Southeast Asia, well, not all of it, just some parts of Thailand and Malaysia, I’d have updated this fucker. Alas, there was the colossal fatigue, the return to work and the continued biliousness from an alien species of crab. I think it was alien. It didn’t look like any crab I have ever seen, so I ate it. It wasn’t this guy:

The upside of the Thai food-poisoning caper is that it wasn’t the sorry ass white American girl alone. M.’s uncle and aunt didn’t not escape unscathed, despite being adventurous foodie types from Kuala Lumpur. Misery loves company, and no one wants to feel like the giant pussy who can’t eat food while traveling.

One wonderful bit of traveling advice — If ever you should find yourself wrestling with sudden, urgent, unpleasant bathroom yearnings, Bangkok is the fan-fucking-tabulous place to be. In every market, mall, restaurant, hotel lobby, public place of any size I met up with clean and efficient accommodations. Even the sad-looking toilets with a matron collecting 3 baht (less than one thin dime) for a pocket pack of tissue were way better than serviceable.

It gladdened my pathetic, American, toilet-obsessed soul and unhappy belly.

In other news, we rocked in the New Year local Penang-style. This here is Penang, aka Betel Nut Island.

Actually, I’ve never heard anyone calling it Betel Nut Island, even if that is to what Pulau Pinang translates, but the world-wide web says it, so it must be true. It’s a state of Malaysia, it’s an island, and it’s about 10 times smaller than Rhode Island with roughly the same population. One thing about Asia is you do get a sense of huge amounts of sprawling elbow room back here in the U.S. of A.

An adventurous aunt had picked up tickets to a local church function room New Year’s dance, because her friends in the band Rozells would be doing up the oldies and, of course, country and western. NOTHING ever surprises me more whilst traveling internationally than the old C&W. I can go for long, long stretches of time in the country of it’s origin without hearing country music. I have to actively choose to crank up the twangy guitars and sad ballads of failure and misery. With zero effort, I don’t ever have to listen to Billy Ray Cyrus (even if Miley is ubiquitous on the old internets).

I’ve heard Elvis and Carl Perkins in the Ukraine. I’ve caught some Dolly from East African radio stations and knew a Zimbabwean who could listen to her all night long. In London in the ’80s, a popular (and conveniently located) bar was the Lone Star, albeit with a surprising skewed to Australian bunch of waitresses. In Iceland, I tried puffin and heard Patsy Cline lamentl And in Malaysia, if it has a twang, a two-step beat or a line dance, it’s what is getting heard. Man, them Chinese ladies can line dance like motherfuckers. Hugely, crazily popular.

In fact, I would say that I’ve met enough folks who know a line dance or two, that’s it’s kind of embarrassing to answer the natural question you might ask a visiting American — Is it as popular where you are. In a word, NO.

Back to the eve of the new decade.

As Rozells was pouring it’s collective soul into the saddest, loneliest ballads of the American popular songbook, the night was starting out a bit slow. I realized it wasn’t just me when an uncle pointed out this hand-made photo-op meant to advertise the party inside.

You know what livens up a party, though? Disco and beer. As soon as the Tiger started flowing and the hits from the 70s and 80s started kicking into high gear, it all felt a whole lot more comfy. Better yet, the complementary party pack for every ticket holder included not just the New Year’s staple silly hat and noisemakers, there were masks.

Seriously, how could you not have a bit of fun when this kind of party look was going down.

One key question when I’m hanging out with M.’s family and jumping in enthusiastically as a complete jackass, given my lack of dancing abilities, verified once by an actual dancing instructor who patted me on the back for at least trying, why in hell would I let control of my camera slip from my hands?

In the end, I was the sole American or Caucasian in the room, I’m pretty sure. Well, except for maybe the old man in the front of this picture, wearing a red shirt and tie, who crazily and drunkenly and creepily kissed my cheek and told me he was from a country near mine, called “New Mexico,” but not to ask him to speak his native language, because he’d given it up many, many years ago, even though he was a local scholar and expert. It was one of those random, nonsensical conversations you’re lucky to come across now and again, particularly if you chat up the homeless. After the cheek kiss, an aunt handed me a bottle of hand sanitizer in case his brand of crazy was contagious.

It was local, it was unhip, it was Penang, and it was family. Best of all, it was Tiger beer and laughing a lot.

Onward and upward to the 2010s and a brand new decade.

Finally, for anyone who cares, there is a gigantic bucketload of pictures here http://dee-rob.com/zenphoto/Malaysia%20and%20Thailand%2C%202009-10/ with aptly titled subsets.

It’s a banner year in the M. and Dee household. We’re ending it with both a bang and a whimper. Today was quite possibly the whimper. I’m expecting bigger things from our soon to be trip to Asia.

Because Malaysia is beckoning, it’s been a couple of years and M. could get a block of time off of toil, there was no New England Christmas. No snow (yay!), none of my family, no tree. Having just got a visit from two out of four siblings, I was more than ready to take a pass on heading into Boston and the cold and the hectic holiday travel. (It also helped I got to see some good friends during the year, wish I had seen more.)

What to do, then, if it’s Christmas in California and you’re saving dough to blow in Thailand? We decided to volunteer. Those less fortunate, holiday giving, counting our blessings, blah fuck blah, you dig?

M. found what seemed like the perfect thing, particularly where we both feel lucky with big, extended families that (as much as I might particularly bitch) we have each other and others always. It’s an organization that arranges visits to the elderly all year long but has special holiday events with meals and presents hand-delivered to folks who don’t get out and might be alone. We signed up and made our plans.

This morning rose and we got ready, virtually patting ourselves on the back at our own good fortune and generosity. You know, the way one does in the do-gooder vein. We drove into a temple in San Francisco, joined an orientation with coffee, snacks and other fresh-faced, smiling volunteers. We learned about the history of the organization and their choice of “flowers before bread,” celebrating and visiting and making friends not just providing aid. All good, all happy joy. I’m all for that spirit and not setting up the recipient as a charity case.

Nonetheless, my own insecurities made me a little bit nervous. What if the visit was uncomfortable, or we weren’t the sort that would float the conversational vote for our visitee? I kept thinking about how many people you meet in a day or week or month or year with whom you don’t actually click. Some poor shut in gets the ring at the doorbell and on the other side of the door is a well-wishing, do-gooder with fascinating stories about shoe laces or Cat Fancy Magazine.

I imagined myself in the future, when some boring schlub came to “help” me by boring the everliving shit out of me. Really though, I hoped that someone might find M. and me as amusing as we do.

We picked up a card with a name, gender, race, age (which all the older women I’ve ever met probably wouldn’t have appreciated as their statistical description), a map to her house, a wrapped gift labeled “pillow,” a turkey meal with sides and pie and a single rose. We headed out in the general direction.

Thanks to urban parking it actually took us a while to get to our new “friend’s” neighborhood. We eventually parked the car and started up the street. We were told it would be her first visit, and both of us, eager to not fuck it up, decided to call ahead and let her know we were almost there. I actually hate talking on the phone, and I hate calling strangers even more (never mind I earn my keep mostly on the phone), and I’m a total weasel, so I dialed and handed the phone off to M.

I could tell by the flash from smile to serious that the telephone conversation had taken an unexpected turn. After introducing himself as a volunteer for the organization, he got blasted. It seems that on Thanksgiving this woman had been stood up after waiting all day for a visit. When Christmas rolled around, the organization called and she told them, she said in no uncertain terms, to remove her from their lists and to leave her alone.

Someone clearly didn’t get the memo, and we were dispatched. She ended the call with M. telling him that she didn’t know us and didn’t want us in her house. Fair enough, I say.

We schlepped back to the temple with our gift bag and meal failure marking our resolute postures. Three guys were packing up shop, The leader, judging by his cranky, jaded demeanor, took back the small, wrapped pillow gift, but he told us to keep the meal and find someone who could use it. In fact, he led us through the temple’s kitchen back to a walk in refrigerator with a stack of leftover meal trays. He encouraged us to take a few and hand them out or bring them to another organization that feeds people. We did.

A few minutes later we were driving into San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. The ‘loin, replete with an air of human urine and the hope of any kind of drug you need, is SF’s Skid Row. Homeless and seedy own the streets. Within an easy 10-minute stroll down the street, we had no trouble finding takers. A shopping cart dude eyed the inside of our bag hungrily, and happily we gave him a full meal, a piece of pie and a festive cheese plate.

The next dude was just a guy on the sidewalk chatting with another guy. But, after we passed them he called out something like “I’ll trade you a drink for a donut.” We turned around and surprised him with more than a donut, but a full meal and a bottle of apple juice. We didn’t take any drink from him, but cheerily in the holiday spirt he wistfully let us know that he had spent the morning doling out the blunts, and he wished he had saved one to give to us. Christmas cheer abides.

We then dropped the last two meals on a cluster of three. M. presented the rose to a woman in the cluster who looked like maybe she hadn’t been handed a long stem in quite some time, if ever.

In the end, it wasn’t what we planned. It was a totally wonderful and awesome object lesson in charity, though.

It’s easy to think of yourself heading out and helping. I’m sure the volunteers and the organization feel good about the good they do in the community, and they should. At the same time, someone failed to pass along the message of what the woman we were meant to visit actually would have liked, i.e. nothing.

So much of the day reminded me of my mother, dear old Pat. To her, “charity” was a dirty word; it strips people of their dignity, forces them to rely on others, reinforces a harsh and negative hierarchy of status. Helping people for her had to come from a place of just helping out collegially. Or, she might find a simple way to flip the status of who was helping whom. Winter coats that my then young nephews didn’t like were passed along to a couple of boys in Pat’s class without proper winter coats. She explained that they were doing her a favor helping her to get rid of them. I think through her I learned that sometimes the story, the pitch, the dialog is everything in the telling.

Perhaps, I actually respect the work I’m paid to do, because it’s non-profit work in the same spirt of Pat’s philosophy, which also had a strong dose of helping folks helping themselves. Charity is easy, it helps feed the ego of the doer. But, change, helping out, being part of community, giving the other guy a chance, letting someone in line ahead of you, sharing what you have, that’s harder.

Moreover, If Pat had ever found herself on the receiving end of a kindly visitor, no doubt in my mind but the visitor would find themselves cold on the front porch on the closed end of a double-bolted door. She would have given that hypothetical do-gooder the same speech that M. had gotten and with the same conclusion of being left alone.

We were 3,000 miles away from my usual family holiday, and we were doing something neither of us had ever done. But, we were together, and I think a little bit of Pat’s spirit was haunting this holiday.

Technorati Tags: childhood, family, holidays, charity, life, growing older, Pat, volunteer