Fairview House is a cooperatively owned house developed by the Northern California Land Trust. A friend of mine was involved in its creation, then he lived in it a long time, maybe as long as thirty years. Then he fell in love with a woman who owned a house on top of a hill with panoramic views of the bay, a gigantic sloping backyard perfect for a gigantic food garden. And she came with grandchildren! My friend scored. When he first moved out he kept one share in Fairview House. It was hard to let go.
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Fairview House is actually two houses. First they turned the three-story maybe-Victorian grand old house on the corner into a co-op. There was a derelict duplex next door. The hippies kept seeing that derelict building. I can just imagine my friend, who seems able to do everything from high technology programming to construction and construction management to great process consulting, community activism and just generally being a very good person. He talked his co-op and the N. California Land Trust into buying the derelict house.
He told me when they closed on the purchase, the roof had fallen in so rain fell throughout the house. The whole house was a mess. And he personally, with his own hands, did a lot of the rehab. It was soon a comfortable part of the co-op with two bedrooms in each, and some living space in each. One living room was the co-op TV room. Another living room was the co-op music room. My friend rented two bedrooms on the top, one to use as his office, one for his bedroom. He was proud to have been a part of creating that co-op.
And this was not his first hippie dippie home. He was also a founder of Black Bear Ranch, a commune still chugging along in way north California in a rural area.
I am proud to know this guy.
Today, walking past his old Fairview House co-op, I saw it was purple. I have stayed in the Fairview House guest room. I have visited Fairview House many times when my friend use to live there. I had never noticed it was painted purple.
I painted my dining room, in the last house I owned 'poet's purple'. I painted each room a different color. One day I realized I wanted to be surrounded by color so, wall by wall, I added color. I really wanted to paint a mural on my dining room wall with my daughter but she never had any juice for that project. I thought it would be educational, artistic and good family fun. Never happened, though.
I did get the dining room to be poet's purple.
My daughter's father entered that house once. Just once. I let him in when he delivered a new laptop for our daughter to start college with. I figured shelling out a couple grand for that laptop allowed me to cut him some slack and let him in my home. He's such an odd duck. He almost inspected my house, walking up close to most things to scrutinize them closely. This was about 10 years after we had divorced, I had moved 500 miles away. He had nothing to do with me getting that house. yet there he was, snooping and sniffing.
When he was done, he said "It seems just like you that you would paint your dining room purple. What were you thinking?"
It truly was a poetic purple. More of a lavendar than a true, full-blown purple.
Fairview house is mostly a deep lavendar with dark purple trim. If I had been asked, which of course I was not and I did not know my co-op creating friend when he created the co-op, I would have advised against it. It is so Berkeley, to have a hippie commune in the city painted purple.
Purple? It's still a poor neighborhood, very rough edges, although gentrifying quickly. I saw several new buildings on my walk today.
I wonder what all the poor African Americans thought when the hippies first painted that gigantic corner house with the three-story round tower on the corner lip of the lot purple?!!
Purple? I am sure it was fun to choose purple. I would have gone with a different palette. Included purple if that pleased some co-op owners, sure, but touches of purple with some other color, like a painted lady in SF is what I would have done. That's what I did with my Victorian in Minneapolis: I used a bunch of colors. No purple on the outside but I have elaborate trim on the front and back deck. I painted each band on each stick of the fencing surrounding the porches different colors. My predescessor had painted some of the trim a dark maroon which was nothing close to purple. I painted my front door periwinkle. The carved dowls in the fencing were gold, navy blue, maroon and beige. Each dowl painted identically, in the same order. Many of my neighbors complimented me on the hard work.
It turned out painting elaborate dowels spun on a wood shaping tool, all identically shaped, was easy. You just taped above and below each bit of color, let that color dry, the then again. It was fun, not work at all.
And everyone loved the periwinkle door, which didn't match anything else on the house. I chose blue for my front door because in Mexican blue doors signify happiness in the home with a blue door.
The periwinkle was close to a kind of purple but that was as daring as I got.
A whole purple house in what was, when the co-op created in the sixties, a rough, very poor neighborhood? It must have been fun making that decision. And not the direction I would have gone.
I had never noticed Fairview House was purple so I called my friend who used to live there to tell him "Fairview House is purple." He said "Wasn't it always?" I could only admit that I did not know, that I had only noticed its purple today. I would have sworn it was stucco colored years ago.
Purple. Poet's purple.
I can paint walls in my apartment if I get permission. Maybe I should paint a wall purple for old time sake. And to be more Berkeley.
Thursday, January 30, 2014
my best day of 2013, best moment that day
My best day of last year was January 28, 2013. A now-former friend came over to my place after having refused to come to my home, a refusal that had hurt me deeply, for a long time. I made soup. It turned out to be one of my tastier batches. I got the broth just right; spicy, savory, warming. The cannellini beans had simmered for hours so each one was flavored with that perfect broth.
First we just hung out and talked for about an hour. Then we ate. Then we walked to Moe's, a used book store in Berkeley. This man had sold 25 cartons of books to Moe's when he moved from Oakland into his parents' home in San Francisco. He deliberately hid the fact that he was moving from me. That hurt a lot. And he would not tell me where he lived for eight months. By the time he told me, my hurt had cut me so deep that I didn't get over it. I am not over it still. He was professing unshakeable love for me while moving in secret. Who hides a move from a friend they profess to love? Yep, it still stings. He took store credit because Moe's gives you more 'money' in store credit than they give you in cash but he still had, and probably still has, a large credit at Moe's. I had suggested we go to Moe's and maybe I'd buy a couple books, give him the cash, convert at least some of his credit into cash for him. I didn't really want any books. I was being loving towards someone I loved.
I bought two poetry books. One was the Complete Works of Marianne Moore and the other was a fat Works by Robert Frost. I don't really like Frost but when I first knew this guy, he had quoted Frost to me a few times. I thought he admired Frost and I thought I might give Frost a shot based on this guy's favorable impression. With tax, I spent about $28. He bought some books. It was warm in Moe's, cold outside and it felt great to be there, anywhere, with him. Buying those books was pure gift to him. I paid him cash. I bought them because he had grumbled about Moe's giving more in store credit than in cash. I paid him cash to help him get some cash for his store credit. I bought those books because I loved my friend, so it was an act of love.
The best moment: on the way to Moe's, as we walked along, both of us happy just to be with one another, walking up Bancroft with book browsing ahead of us. A simple, happy time. A few times, we were almost dancing or skipping, for we tipped and bounced in our happiness, our simple happiness to be walking with one another.
Suddenly he pulled back his jacket, placed his thumb in the waist of his slacks to show me the slacks fit and he said "See these pants? They had gotten too tight. Now they fit again because I've lost so much weight." I had done a similar thing the last time I had seen him. I had worn a pair of dress navy slacks, my only pair of dress slacks, actually, that I had not been able to put on for years. When he pulled out the waist of those slacks, he leaned back, his blue eyes twinkling, joy sparking off of him. He seemed so happy. And I was so happy to see him happy. I wanted to hug him, give him a kiss, but this friend never touched me so I never touched him.
After he had not, literally, touched me for a long, long time, I asked for a hug as he left from my sixtieth birthday lunch and he placed one hand on each of my arms for about two seconds, as if he was afraid I had something catching. He was stiff. It was not an embrace. It wasn't really a hug. It was the minimum touching a person could do to qualify for a technical hug. It was worse than if he had flat out refused to give me a hug but it would also been preferable to have been refused than to have received to cold, wincing, grimacing touch.
Last January 28th, when he joyfully showed me some pants fit that had been too small for awhile, I was happy. A sweet, simple happy. Just being with him, when he is not being mean, makes me feel at home. He is my anam cara for sure.
I am glad to have that memory, of him throwing back his upper body to thrust out his newly smaller waist, show off the also-nice slacks that he, like I had, had hung onto because they were good slacks so he kept them even when they got too small. Just in case.
It was a perfectly happy moment. Is such a moment worth the deep pain I am in now that he broke off our friendship? I'm not sure.
I am sure that I am very glad to have the memory of that evening. I was in the golden tunnel. So happy just to be near him. I am afraid I'll never find such moments again with anyone. I am afraid no one will ever be as wonderful as he can be. He's not always wonderful. He has a maddening tendency to be imperfect, the impediment of his perpetual Grail King wound.
I have that evening. I have that pants moment. I have the happy light in his eyes as he showed off his weight loss in the pants that fit anew.
Thank you goddess for small graces.
I wish everyone could know a person with this man's magical specialness. He is not always magically special. Sometimes he is a wounded Grail King and sometimes he is a bit of a dick. When he is in radiant mode, being with him is to know heaven. I knew heaven on Jan 28, 2013. it is hard to accept heaven is gone for good.
I believe this man is one of my Anam Cara, a meaningful soul friend but he hasnot shown me friendship. Friendship includes trust and nearly every time he has ever talkedk to me, he has said he fears and distrusts me. We can't besoul friends without trust.
First we just hung out and talked for about an hour. Then we ate. Then we walked to Moe's, a used book store in Berkeley. This man had sold 25 cartons of books to Moe's when he moved from Oakland into his parents' home in San Francisco. He deliberately hid the fact that he was moving from me. That hurt a lot. And he would not tell me where he lived for eight months. By the time he told me, my hurt had cut me so deep that I didn't get over it. I am not over it still. He was professing unshakeable love for me while moving in secret. Who hides a move from a friend they profess to love? Yep, it still stings. He took store credit because Moe's gives you more 'money' in store credit than they give you in cash but he still had, and probably still has, a large credit at Moe's. I had suggested we go to Moe's and maybe I'd buy a couple books, give him the cash, convert at least some of his credit into cash for him. I didn't really want any books. I was being loving towards someone I loved.
I bought two poetry books. One was the Complete Works of Marianne Moore and the other was a fat Works by Robert Frost. I don't really like Frost but when I first knew this guy, he had quoted Frost to me a few times. I thought he admired Frost and I thought I might give Frost a shot based on this guy's favorable impression. With tax, I spent about $28. He bought some books. It was warm in Moe's, cold outside and it felt great to be there, anywhere, with him. Buying those books was pure gift to him. I paid him cash. I bought them because he had grumbled about Moe's giving more in store credit than in cash. I paid him cash to help him get some cash for his store credit. I bought those books because I loved my friend, so it was an act of love.
The best moment: on the way to Moe's, as we walked along, both of us happy just to be with one another, walking up Bancroft with book browsing ahead of us. A simple, happy time. A few times, we were almost dancing or skipping, for we tipped and bounced in our happiness, our simple happiness to be walking with one another.
Suddenly he pulled back his jacket, placed his thumb in the waist of his slacks to show me the slacks fit and he said "See these pants? They had gotten too tight. Now they fit again because I've lost so much weight." I had done a similar thing the last time I had seen him. I had worn a pair of dress navy slacks, my only pair of dress slacks, actually, that I had not been able to put on for years. When he pulled out the waist of those slacks, he leaned back, his blue eyes twinkling, joy sparking off of him. He seemed so happy. And I was so happy to see him happy. I wanted to hug him, give him a kiss, but this friend never touched me so I never touched him.
After he had not, literally, touched me for a long, long time, I asked for a hug as he left from my sixtieth birthday lunch and he placed one hand on each of my arms for about two seconds, as if he was afraid I had something catching. He was stiff. It was not an embrace. It wasn't really a hug. It was the minimum touching a person could do to qualify for a technical hug. It was worse than if he had flat out refused to give me a hug but it would also been preferable to have been refused than to have received to cold, wincing, grimacing touch.
Last January 28th, when he joyfully showed me some pants fit that had been too small for awhile, I was happy. A sweet, simple happy. Just being with him, when he is not being mean, makes me feel at home. He is my anam cara for sure.
I am glad to have that memory, of him throwing back his upper body to thrust out his newly smaller waist, show off the also-nice slacks that he, like I had, had hung onto because they were good slacks so he kept them even when they got too small. Just in case.
It was a perfectly happy moment. Is such a moment worth the deep pain I am in now that he broke off our friendship? I'm not sure.
I am sure that I am very glad to have the memory of that evening. I was in the golden tunnel. So happy just to be near him. I am afraid I'll never find such moments again with anyone. I am afraid no one will ever be as wonderful as he can be. He's not always wonderful. He has a maddening tendency to be imperfect, the impediment of his perpetual Grail King wound.
I have that evening. I have that pants moment. I have the happy light in his eyes as he showed off his weight loss in the pants that fit anew.
Thank you goddess for small graces.
I wish everyone could know a person with this man's magical specialness. He is not always magically special. Sometimes he is a wounded Grail King and sometimes he is a bit of a dick. When he is in radiant mode, being with him is to know heaven. I knew heaven on Jan 28, 2013. it is hard to accept heaven is gone for good.
I believe this man is one of my Anam Cara, a meaningful soul friend but he hasnot shown me friendship. Friendship includes trust and nearly every time he has ever talkedk to me, he has said he fears and distrusts me. We can't besoul friends without trust.
Monday, January 27, 2014
A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
I don't think good men in life are hard to find. The title of this
post is the title to a Flannery O'Connor short story, one of her best
known ones, I believe. O'Connor wrote a lot of Southern Gothic and this
short story is Southern Gothic. I won't say more to avoid any spoiler
alerts in case anyone reading decides to read the story. Get her work
from your library. This short story, although not to my overall taste,
is a stunner.
Once I took a writing class in which the instructor had everyone read The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. The instructor said it was a perfect short story. My daughter's Waldorf teacher had her class read it, maybe in the 7th grade so I read it. It is a horrible story. It may fit some writing academic's idea of the perfect short story but I wish I had not read it. It's very gothic, not sure if it would be considered Southern Gothic.
Another writing instructor once had all his students read The Rocking Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence as his idea of the perfect short story. Notice how so many of my instructors were male -- I hate that and it is changing but women get published much less than men and, I fear, thus it will ever be. I do not like The Rocking Horse Winner either, altho I concede it is brilliantly written. And I don't think, as my instructor insisted, that it had all the required elements of a good short story. In a good short story something has to happen in not many pages. The characters have to be introduced, the setting conveyed and then something happens that changes something about a character, their lives, their world. I don't think Rocking Horse Winner demonstrates any change in the child. And, it, too, creeped me out.
Hmm. I need to find some short stories I love. Odd how so many of my writing instructors over the course of my life have picked short stories that I did not like. I can admire things in each of these stories I have mentioned. I very much admire Flannery O'Connor's seemingly effortless depiction of many characters in a few pages. And I admire how seemingly effortlessly she evokes the Deep South, country backroads, old cars (maybe not old in her time as she wrote?) and family dynamics. Man, that chick could write. I have read that Ms. O'Connor labored painstakingly over everything she wrote to get it note perfect. To me, anything of hers I have read reads as if she wrote it in a genius flow state, as if the story flowed flawlessly in first draft. If painstakingly laboring over one's writing is the key to getting published and then selling well, I'm doomed. I hate to edit. Once I have written a first draft, my restless mind moves on to write about something else. Edit? Paintakingly labor over the phrasing of sentences? No way. I don't believe that great genius writers labored over their stuff. I don't believe Ms. O'Connor did. Oh, I believe she worked hard and cared deeply that her work was good, but I don't believe her work was great because she edited herself well. I believe genius flowed out of her, unstoppable.
The Lottery? No thanks even if it was written by a chick writer. The Rocking Horse Winner might not be creepy to most but I quite dislike it.
Once I took a writing class in which the instructor had everyone read The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. The instructor said it was a perfect short story. My daughter's Waldorf teacher had her class read it, maybe in the 7th grade so I read it. It is a horrible story. It may fit some writing academic's idea of the perfect short story but I wish I had not read it. It's very gothic, not sure if it would be considered Southern Gothic.
Another writing instructor once had all his students read The Rocking Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence as his idea of the perfect short story. Notice how so many of my instructors were male -- I hate that and it is changing but women get published much less than men and, I fear, thus it will ever be. I do not like The Rocking Horse Winner either, altho I concede it is brilliantly written. And I don't think, as my instructor insisted, that it had all the required elements of a good short story. In a good short story something has to happen in not many pages. The characters have to be introduced, the setting conveyed and then something happens that changes something about a character, their lives, their world. I don't think Rocking Horse Winner demonstrates any change in the child. And, it, too, creeped me out.
Hmm. I need to find some short stories I love. Odd how so many of my writing instructors over the course of my life have picked short stories that I did not like. I can admire things in each of these stories I have mentioned. I very much admire Flannery O'Connor's seemingly effortless depiction of many characters in a few pages. And I admire how seemingly effortlessly she evokes the Deep South, country backroads, old cars (maybe not old in her time as she wrote?) and family dynamics. Man, that chick could write. I have read that Ms. O'Connor labored painstakingly over everything she wrote to get it note perfect. To me, anything of hers I have read reads as if she wrote it in a genius flow state, as if the story flowed flawlessly in first draft. If painstakingly laboring over one's writing is the key to getting published and then selling well, I'm doomed. I hate to edit. Once I have written a first draft, my restless mind moves on to write about something else. Edit? Paintakingly labor over the phrasing of sentences? No way. I don't believe that great genius writers labored over their stuff. I don't believe Ms. O'Connor did. Oh, I believe she worked hard and cared deeply that her work was good, but I don't believe her work was great because she edited herself well. I believe genius flowed out of her, unstoppable.
The Lottery? No thanks even if it was written by a chick writer. The Rocking Horse Winner might not be creepy to most but I quite dislike it.
A Hard Man is Good to Find ;-)
the right kind of hard . . . . if you know what I mean?! Not hard mean.
Friday, January 24, 2014
elements of friendship
I recently told someone that I no longer considered him a friend. He disarmed me when he said "what does that mean, to end a friendship? I've never understood that."
I knew what I meant. And I still mean the same thing. There are three essential elements of friendship: mutual caring, trust which is built by mutual confidences and spending time together. And the quality of 'spending time together' is very specific: two people have to spend time together because they want to be with that person, not because circumstance, such as work, puts them together. Playing tennis with someone because you both like to play tennis but not spending time together talking and bonding otherwise is not friendship time. It's tennis time. An essential element of friendship, and I am practically quoting an essay by Aristotle with my elements of friendship is you have to feel drawn enough to the other person that you really want to 'be' with them, spend time with them.
This guy never spends time with me so he is not what I consider a friend.
I shared Aristotle's elements of friendship with another guy, a few years ago, and he spoke scornfully of how I was listening to other people and not trusting myself, that I was being shallow to give another's definition of friendship power. Um, Aristotle? Aristotle's elements of friendship are hardly a shallow guide for me to use. Additinally, ha ha ha, this guy totally expected me to adopt his beliefs on friendship, trustworthiness and his fear but mocked me for trrusting Aristotle. Hmmm.
I need friends. I need friends who want to spend time with me. Not email me. Not phone me every once a while because they know I am very depressed, which I am. I appreciate the caring behind an email. And my expectations are very different if a friend lives far away. But when someone lives across the bay, 20 minutes, and doesn't want to spend time with me, that is not a friend.
I get to think and believe what I think and believe. And, hey, if it was good enough for Aristotle and has been relied on by countless philosophers since as a guidepost, it's good enough for me and it is not me listening shallowly to others and letting htem influence me.
I knew what I meant. And I still mean the same thing. There are three essential elements of friendship: mutual caring, trust which is built by mutual confidences and spending time together. And the quality of 'spending time together' is very specific: two people have to spend time together because they want to be with that person, not because circumstance, such as work, puts them together. Playing tennis with someone because you both like to play tennis but not spending time together talking and bonding otherwise is not friendship time. It's tennis time. An essential element of friendship, and I am practically quoting an essay by Aristotle with my elements of friendship is you have to feel drawn enough to the other person that you really want to 'be' with them, spend time with them.
This guy never spends time with me so he is not what I consider a friend.
I shared Aristotle's elements of friendship with another guy, a few years ago, and he spoke scornfully of how I was listening to other people and not trusting myself, that I was being shallow to give another's definition of friendship power. Um, Aristotle? Aristotle's elements of friendship are hardly a shallow guide for me to use. Additinally, ha ha ha, this guy totally expected me to adopt his beliefs on friendship, trustworthiness and his fear but mocked me for trrusting Aristotle. Hmmm.
I need friends. I need friends who want to spend time with me. Not email me. Not phone me every once a while because they know I am very depressed, which I am. I appreciate the caring behind an email. And my expectations are very different if a friend lives far away. But when someone lives across the bay, 20 minutes, and doesn't want to spend time with me, that is not a friend.
I get to think and believe what I think and believe. And, hey, if it was good enough for Aristotle and has been relied on by countless philosophers since as a guidepost, it's good enough for me and it is not me listening shallowly to others and letting htem influence me.
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Feelings are just visitors.
Feelings are just visitors. Let them come and go.
Mooji (whoever that is!)
Let feelings roll in and out the way ocean tides roll in and out. Oh please, yes.
Feelings arise and pass away, just as our breath rises and passes away. Breath, trust, wait. Everything passes.
Democracy is when 2 wolves & a lamb decide what's for dinner.
The title of this post is a quote from Benjamin Franklin.
It describes the way the world seems to be run to me. Predators preying on whoever they can.
It describes the way the world seems to be run to me. Predators preying on whoever they can.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
waiting for my person
Wait for the person
who pursues you, the one
who will make an ordinary
moment seem magical,
the kind of person
who brings out the best
in you.
Wait for the person who will
be your best friend,
the only person
who will drop everything
to be with you at any time
no matter what the circumstances.
sorry there is no attribution. I don't know where I first read this.
true love will find you in the end by Daniel Johnston
He says you have to look to find it. I don't think one should look. Live your life and true love will find you if it is supposed to. A great song even if I disagree with some of the lyrics.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Mulligatawny = multicultural soup at my old lap pool
©
My closest pool pal is Bangkok Kay. Kay is ethnic Chinese. Additionally, she is Thai royalty. In Thailand, she tells me, her title is "Little Maiden", which is the equivalent of little princess.
Kay speaks an obscure dialect of Chinese. There are, of course, quite a lot of Chinese dialects. I would have no idea about any of them, obscure or otherwise. Kay also speaks, of course, Thai (is Thai a language, I think so). And Kay's English is excellent. When she is in Mountain View, she attends English class four evenings a week. She's always working on her language acquisition. I have had a lot of fun coaching her with colloquialisms and, especially, slang.
And then we have Aida. Aida grew up in London. She speaks with a lovely British accent. But Aida was born in China. Aida, it turns out, also speaks an obscure Chinese dialect. Aida has been living in Mountain View for fourteen years and she never gets to speak her obscure Chinese, except when she visits her family back in London.
And we have Lucy, the Jew-from-Ukraine who speaks a bunch of Slavic languages and English, but not so good the English, yes?
One day, about a year ago, Lucy suggested to Kay and Aida that maybe their Chinese was the same one. It had not occurred to Kay and Aida to speak to each other in Chinese.
Lo and behold, Kay and Aida speak the same obscure Chinese dialect.
I think it is adorable that Lucy from the Ukraine is the one who figured this out. I also feel compelled to point out that I think Kay is an anti-semite. She is unfriendly, if you ask me, towards Lucy. I don't really know why Kay is unfriendly to Lucy. When I found out a few days ago that Kay and Aida learned they shared the same Chinese because of Lucy, well, I was surprised. I would think Kay would have gotten past whatever it is that has her treat Lucy with the coolness that she does.
Things at the pool are tricky. Hey, life is tricky. None of us ever spend more than a few minutes talking to one another. It's not like there are lots of opportunities for deep bonds, for lots of storytelling. I might have concluded that Kay feels cooly towards Lucy but it is also possible that Kay likes Lucy and I am missing some of Kay's cultural clues or misreading things. I don't assume that as the white American, my cultural lens is the right one.
Kay is my best friend at the pool. She and I both swim every single day and we always share a lane. If you aren't a swimmer, you probably can't appreciate, not quite, how important it can be to share a lane with someone you know.
Addendum added on January 21, 2014: I know Kay was not particularly racist, no more than all humans, because when she hired a realtor, she hired a black woman. She asked me to accompany her the first time she met the realtor. Kay had been working with a young, inexperienced and dumb-seeming white man, the nephew of her mortgage loan officer at the bank. Kay is rich and could pay cash for the house but her daughter was going to be the owner of the house and her daughter wanted some mortgage for the tax deduction. Kay thought it was how business is done to use the nephew of her loan officer. And how sweet a deal did that kid have? His auntie intimidating prospective mortgage seekers into using her completely inexperienced.
The kid was so white male entitled. So privileged. He had grown up wealthy -- we know this if he grew up in Palo Alto. He was pudgey, a college drop out and lazy. He actually believed Kay was going to buy the first house she looked at with him. He thought he was going to pick up a gigantic commission for an afternoon's drive to one house. And even so, he was boorish enough to be impatient with her when she took too long, in his opinion, to look over the 1.4 million dollar house she was considering putting a bid on. He rudely paced by the front door to signal to us to hurry up.
After meeting him, I assured Kay that with her stellar credit and considerable assets, and the fact that the bank had already guaranteed her mortgage so when she house-shopped, realtors were all eager to work with her. A guaranteed mortgage for a house shopper means not just a fast close but a guaranteed close. Nothing is going to go wrong. A realtor knows their pay day is coming. And that young lazy kid thought he was going to pick up more than $100K for one showing.
He did not know Kay. She had already looked at 200 houses, dropping one realtor after all that work because Kay felt the realtor had insulted her. The realtor had said that since Kay wanted to stay in the Mountain View area that guaranteed her residency rights at the pool in Mountain View -- it was, by far, the nicest public pool around. Residents in Los Altos got to use Mountain View parks as residents so Kay had wanted to find a house in Mountain View or Los Altos. Those suburbs are all built up, with noew empty lots. Or few lots. Kay wanted a brand new house, she did not want ghosts. She did not want to risk buying a house where someone might have died in it. Cultural differences.
This realtor had told Kay that she should buy a tear-down in Los Altos and build or else buy a decent used house and remodel it to give Kay the brand new kitchen and baths she simply had to have. Kay was deeply offended and dumped that unfortunate realtor after she had invested many hours showing Kay about 200 houses.
I immediately coaxed her into dumping the kid. I pointed out that she was an obsessive shopper, that she would have to look at tons more houses and did she want to spend a lot of time with that impatient, entitled, greedy male? I explained to her what I meant by each of those adjectives. I thought Kay was totally hooked by using the banker's nephew. I think in Thailand such recommendations are seen an an honor code and it is harder in Thailand to blow off a banker's recommendation of a nephew. I told her "If you have a guaranteed mortgage, this gal cannot queer your deal if you dump her nephew and you have to dump the kid."
She asked around and got recommended to another realtor and asked me to come to the first meeting. I ended up going out on all their house viewings until I moved. Man, Kay sure looked at a lot of hosues. When I saw the black realtor walk in though, since I had thought Kay had been anti-semitic, I thought Kay would reject the realtor for being black. She didn't. The new realtor was erudite, classy, seemingly very smart and her British accent gave her a chic-ness that was very appealing. She asked Kay to sign a contract agreeing not to work with any other realtor. I liked that.
In the end, after many more months when that realtor earned every dime of her commission because she must have spend hundreds of hours driving Kay around, Kay bought an older house in Los Altos on a rarely huge corner lot with lots of mature trees. She did a major rehab, putting in an all new kitchen, gutting and redoing both the baths and adding a beautiful 'family' room off the kitchen. It even had a two-car garage, a circle driveway and the garage also had a small guest house space.
Kay ended up doing what that first realtor had suggested, the suggestion that got the poor gal fired after investing a lot of time with Kay.
I guess everything that is meant to happen happens. I know the final realtor badly needed a sale. Her husband was a contractor and this was 2008-2009, when the economy tanked and real estate sales and rehabs plummeted even in Silicon Valley. Real estate is bang up booming down there again. I am sure Kay's new house rose in value. And she said she was going to keep the townhouse in Mountain View that she had paid cash for, buying the model home on a whim when visiting a son attending Stanford. Driving along El Camino, she saw signs for a real estate develop, swerved over several lanes of traffic, walked in and said "Sold, but you have to sell all the furniture so I can just move in." That realtor had a happy day, eh? He had to figure out what to charge her for the furnishings, which probably belonged to a business that stages houses.
I loved going house shopping with Kay. When else am I ever going to look at dozens and dozens of homes priced at 1.2 up to 2.0 million? It was fascinating to see what that kind of money buys. Even more fascinating to see some houses priced at what seemed like grossly inappropriately high pricing that sold. I guess it was the location. Kay and I didn't have the kind of home-shopping agenda that many people would have. She cared about the schools, but only because it affected house value. She didn't really cre about public schools. No relative of hers would ever go to a public school.
Kay gave birth to her first child in New Jersey, deliberately having her baby in America so her daughter could sponsor her for US residency and then citizenship. Kay said this was during the Viet Nam war and she was afraid that the communists in Viet Nam would take over all of Asia and she wanted an escape to America. Maybe it was commies but I know, now, that lots of Asian women do this. I have read that there are hotels and hospitals that specifically cater to pregnant Asian women who come here a few months before the baby is due, probably with visa timing in mind, and then have their babies and go home. Presto. Magic. The baby is an American.
Kay's American daughter went to Brown. Her fluent Chinese and fluent English scored her a job at a consulting firm, an investment banking kind of joint where the daughter gets scary large bonuses. Even in 2008, her daughter got a scary large bonus. What does she do that makes her worth a million bucks? It can't just be fluent Chinese. She is based in Hong Kong. She wanted her mom to buy a house in her name in case she ever decides to live in America but I bet she never does. Life in Hong Kong and her jetsetting lifestyle in general, is pretty awesome. Los Altos would look tame. She did it for the tax write off and to please her mom.
Kay and her ex-husband own a large chain of Home-Depot-like stores in Thailand. That's where their money comes from. Elites in Thailand. Kay is royalty in Thailand, altho very minor royalty. She swims at the same club as the royal family when she is in Bangkok.
I had a lot of fun teaching Kay some American slang. And once we had a bit of a bond, I taught her a lot of profanity.
When I lived in Bogotá, my Colombian boyfriend refused to teach me good Colombian profanity talk but his younger brother, a teenager and whip smart, couldn't resist reaching me. He didn't just teach me a few dirty words. He coaxed me on long, profane-laced sentences. He coaxed me on the nuances of the whole sentence so the intended insult would come across. Once, a few years later in Chicago, some Latinos passed me and a college pal on the street and said something insulting about her being fat. Iwas not fat then. I turned around and spit out a long, rambling and note-perfect insult. The guys were shocked. Their insult was not particularly serious. Many males feel it is their right to insult fat women. I think anyone who has not lived in a fat woman's body would be quite surprised by all the open derision a fat woman hears. Not having yet been fat, I did not know what it was like. I was shocked when those young men insulted my friend. Obviously the guys did not expect the gringas to understand them. It was fun spitting out my note-perfect insult. I said, basically, shove a stick up your ass, you little piece of nothing, you son of a whore. It was overkill but I had been trained. The lines just came out naturally. The guys' comments had been laced with profanity and my database within my being pulled up the best profanity-laced lines I had been taught. I acted on a kind of autopilot.
And it was a lot of fun to see how shocked the young Latinos were that (1) I had understood the insult and (2) my fluency was impressive. It really was. My favorite Spanish professor said I had the best Spanish accent he had ever heard from an American and he was a Spanish prof for 35+ when he said that. I've even had some native Spanish speakers, from countries other than Mexico or Colombia, which is where I picked up my accent, think I am a native speaker. Like maybe someone from Argentina might hear my decent accent and assume I am from another Latin country, one whose language he does not know as well as his own. Each country has it's own English.
We ugly Americans are so ignorant about the world. Few Americans realize that English is spoken in many places where we can barely understand the English. I honeymooned in Jamaica and supposedly all Jamaicans speak English as their first language but we could hardly understand anything a Jamaican said to us. A friend married a Nigerian who spoke truly fluent English but his accent was very thick, Briish-influenced, plus he used some dipthongs very differently because of his Nigerian language influences that I could not understand him. It took me a long time to realize he was fluent. It took even longer to admit that it was my prejudice that kept me from understanding him. I wasn't listening well enough. He was speaking very well, just with a thick accent. Live and learn.
I am a work in progress. I am sick and tired of being a work in progress. I am quite sure if someone loved me, if I had a life partner, I would be perfectly happy. Right now, I cannot conceive of the idea of me being happy. As I read some of my beautifully written posts from my first years in CA, when I lived in the Golden Tunnel, I see how happy I was then. And I know why I was happy. I thought someone in particular loved me. He did not. And like a big fat old baby, I am having a hard time accepting the loss.
At the pool I swim at now in Berkeley, it is hard to make friends. Lap hours are dispersed both throughout the day atnd at several pools In Mountain View, everyone had to show up at 10:30 am so you got to know everyone. Here, with folks dispersed in several pools and lots of lap hours, I rarely see the same face twice.
rambling, as I do
My closest pool pal is Bangkok Kay. Kay is ethnic Chinese. Additionally, she is Thai royalty. In Thailand, she tells me, her title is "Little Maiden", which is the equivalent of little princess.
Kay speaks an obscure dialect of Chinese. There are, of course, quite a lot of Chinese dialects. I would have no idea about any of them, obscure or otherwise. Kay also speaks, of course, Thai (is Thai a language, I think so). And Kay's English is excellent. When she is in Mountain View, she attends English class four evenings a week. She's always working on her language acquisition. I have had a lot of fun coaching her with colloquialisms and, especially, slang.
And then we have Aida. Aida grew up in London. She speaks with a lovely British accent. But Aida was born in China. Aida, it turns out, also speaks an obscure Chinese dialect. Aida has been living in Mountain View for fourteen years and she never gets to speak her obscure Chinese, except when she visits her family back in London.
And we have Lucy, the Jew-from-Ukraine who speaks a bunch of Slavic languages and English, but not so good the English, yes?
One day, about a year ago, Lucy suggested to Kay and Aida that maybe their Chinese was the same one. It had not occurred to Kay and Aida to speak to each other in Chinese.
Lo and behold, Kay and Aida speak the same obscure Chinese dialect.
I think it is adorable that Lucy from the Ukraine is the one who figured this out. I also feel compelled to point out that I think Kay is an anti-semite. She is unfriendly, if you ask me, towards Lucy. I don't really know why Kay is unfriendly to Lucy. When I found out a few days ago that Kay and Aida learned they shared the same Chinese because of Lucy, well, I was surprised. I would think Kay would have gotten past whatever it is that has her treat Lucy with the coolness that she does.
Things at the pool are tricky. Hey, life is tricky. None of us ever spend more than a few minutes talking to one another. It's not like there are lots of opportunities for deep bonds, for lots of storytelling. I might have concluded that Kay feels cooly towards Lucy but it is also possible that Kay likes Lucy and I am missing some of Kay's cultural clues or misreading things. I don't assume that as the white American, my cultural lens is the right one.
Kay is my best friend at the pool. She and I both swim every single day and we always share a lane. If you aren't a swimmer, you probably can't appreciate, not quite, how important it can be to share a lane with someone you know.
Addendum added on January 21, 2014: I know Kay was not particularly racist, no more than all humans, because when she hired a realtor, she hired a black woman. She asked me to accompany her the first time she met the realtor. Kay had been working with a young, inexperienced and dumb-seeming white man, the nephew of her mortgage loan officer at the bank. Kay is rich and could pay cash for the house but her daughter was going to be the owner of the house and her daughter wanted some mortgage for the tax deduction. Kay thought it was how business is done to use the nephew of her loan officer. And how sweet a deal did that kid have? His auntie intimidating prospective mortgage seekers into using her completely inexperienced.
The kid was so white male entitled. So privileged. He had grown up wealthy -- we know this if he grew up in Palo Alto. He was pudgey, a college drop out and lazy. He actually believed Kay was going to buy the first house she looked at with him. He thought he was going to pick up a gigantic commission for an afternoon's drive to one house. And even so, he was boorish enough to be impatient with her when she took too long, in his opinion, to look over the 1.4 million dollar house she was considering putting a bid on. He rudely paced by the front door to signal to us to hurry up.
After meeting him, I assured Kay that with her stellar credit and considerable assets, and the fact that the bank had already guaranteed her mortgage so when she house-shopped, realtors were all eager to work with her. A guaranteed mortgage for a house shopper means not just a fast close but a guaranteed close. Nothing is going to go wrong. A realtor knows their pay day is coming. And that young lazy kid thought he was going to pick up more than $100K for one showing.
He did not know Kay. She had already looked at 200 houses, dropping one realtor after all that work because Kay felt the realtor had insulted her. The realtor had said that since Kay wanted to stay in the Mountain View area that guaranteed her residency rights at the pool in Mountain View -- it was, by far, the nicest public pool around. Residents in Los Altos got to use Mountain View parks as residents so Kay had wanted to find a house in Mountain View or Los Altos. Those suburbs are all built up, with noew empty lots. Or few lots. Kay wanted a brand new house, she did not want ghosts. She did not want to risk buying a house where someone might have died in it. Cultural differences.
This realtor had told Kay that she should buy a tear-down in Los Altos and build or else buy a decent used house and remodel it to give Kay the brand new kitchen and baths she simply had to have. Kay was deeply offended and dumped that unfortunate realtor after she had invested many hours showing Kay about 200 houses.
I immediately coaxed her into dumping the kid. I pointed out that she was an obsessive shopper, that she would have to look at tons more houses and did she want to spend a lot of time with that impatient, entitled, greedy male? I explained to her what I meant by each of those adjectives. I thought Kay was totally hooked by using the banker's nephew. I think in Thailand such recommendations are seen an an honor code and it is harder in Thailand to blow off a banker's recommendation of a nephew. I told her "If you have a guaranteed mortgage, this gal cannot queer your deal if you dump her nephew and you have to dump the kid."
She asked around and got recommended to another realtor and asked me to come to the first meeting. I ended up going out on all their house viewings until I moved. Man, Kay sure looked at a lot of hosues. When I saw the black realtor walk in though, since I had thought Kay had been anti-semitic, I thought Kay would reject the realtor for being black. She didn't. The new realtor was erudite, classy, seemingly very smart and her British accent gave her a chic-ness that was very appealing. She asked Kay to sign a contract agreeing not to work with any other realtor. I liked that.
In the end, after many more months when that realtor earned every dime of her commission because she must have spend hundreds of hours driving Kay around, Kay bought an older house in Los Altos on a rarely huge corner lot with lots of mature trees. She did a major rehab, putting in an all new kitchen, gutting and redoing both the baths and adding a beautiful 'family' room off the kitchen. It even had a two-car garage, a circle driveway and the garage also had a small guest house space.
Kay ended up doing what that first realtor had suggested, the suggestion that got the poor gal fired after investing a lot of time with Kay.
I guess everything that is meant to happen happens. I know the final realtor badly needed a sale. Her husband was a contractor and this was 2008-2009, when the economy tanked and real estate sales and rehabs plummeted even in Silicon Valley. Real estate is bang up booming down there again. I am sure Kay's new house rose in value. And she said she was going to keep the townhouse in Mountain View that she had paid cash for, buying the model home on a whim when visiting a son attending Stanford. Driving along El Camino, she saw signs for a real estate develop, swerved over several lanes of traffic, walked in and said "Sold, but you have to sell all the furniture so I can just move in." That realtor had a happy day, eh? He had to figure out what to charge her for the furnishings, which probably belonged to a business that stages houses.
I loved going house shopping with Kay. When else am I ever going to look at dozens and dozens of homes priced at 1.2 up to 2.0 million? It was fascinating to see what that kind of money buys. Even more fascinating to see some houses priced at what seemed like grossly inappropriately high pricing that sold. I guess it was the location. Kay and I didn't have the kind of home-shopping agenda that many people would have. She cared about the schools, but only because it affected house value. She didn't really cre about public schools. No relative of hers would ever go to a public school.
Kay gave birth to her first child in New Jersey, deliberately having her baby in America so her daughter could sponsor her for US residency and then citizenship. Kay said this was during the Viet Nam war and she was afraid that the communists in Viet Nam would take over all of Asia and she wanted an escape to America. Maybe it was commies but I know, now, that lots of Asian women do this. I have read that there are hotels and hospitals that specifically cater to pregnant Asian women who come here a few months before the baby is due, probably with visa timing in mind, and then have their babies and go home. Presto. Magic. The baby is an American.
Kay's American daughter went to Brown. Her fluent Chinese and fluent English scored her a job at a consulting firm, an investment banking kind of joint where the daughter gets scary large bonuses. Even in 2008, her daughter got a scary large bonus. What does she do that makes her worth a million bucks? It can't just be fluent Chinese. She is based in Hong Kong. She wanted her mom to buy a house in her name in case she ever decides to live in America but I bet she never does. Life in Hong Kong and her jetsetting lifestyle in general, is pretty awesome. Los Altos would look tame. She did it for the tax write off and to please her mom.
Kay and her ex-husband own a large chain of Home-Depot-like stores in Thailand. That's where their money comes from. Elites in Thailand. Kay is royalty in Thailand, altho very minor royalty. She swims at the same club as the royal family when she is in Bangkok.
I had a lot of fun teaching Kay some American slang. And once we had a bit of a bond, I taught her a lot of profanity.
When I lived in Bogotá, my Colombian boyfriend refused to teach me good Colombian profanity talk but his younger brother, a teenager and whip smart, couldn't resist reaching me. He didn't just teach me a few dirty words. He coaxed me on long, profane-laced sentences. He coaxed me on the nuances of the whole sentence so the intended insult would come across. Once, a few years later in Chicago, some Latinos passed me and a college pal on the street and said something insulting about her being fat. Iwas not fat then. I turned around and spit out a long, rambling and note-perfect insult. The guys were shocked. Their insult was not particularly serious. Many males feel it is their right to insult fat women. I think anyone who has not lived in a fat woman's body would be quite surprised by all the open derision a fat woman hears. Not having yet been fat, I did not know what it was like. I was shocked when those young men insulted my friend. Obviously the guys did not expect the gringas to understand them. It was fun spitting out my note-perfect insult. I said, basically, shove a stick up your ass, you little piece of nothing, you son of a whore. It was overkill but I had been trained. The lines just came out naturally. The guys' comments had been laced with profanity and my database within my being pulled up the best profanity-laced lines I had been taught. I acted on a kind of autopilot.
And it was a lot of fun to see how shocked the young Latinos were that (1) I had understood the insult and (2) my fluency was impressive. It really was. My favorite Spanish professor said I had the best Spanish accent he had ever heard from an American and he was a Spanish prof for 35+ when he said that. I've even had some native Spanish speakers, from countries other than Mexico or Colombia, which is where I picked up my accent, think I am a native speaker. Like maybe someone from Argentina might hear my decent accent and assume I am from another Latin country, one whose language he does not know as well as his own. Each country has it's own English.
We ugly Americans are so ignorant about the world. Few Americans realize that English is spoken in many places where we can barely understand the English. I honeymooned in Jamaica and supposedly all Jamaicans speak English as their first language but we could hardly understand anything a Jamaican said to us. A friend married a Nigerian who spoke truly fluent English but his accent was very thick, Briish-influenced, plus he used some dipthongs very differently because of his Nigerian language influences that I could not understand him. It took me a long time to realize he was fluent. It took even longer to admit that it was my prejudice that kept me from understanding him. I wasn't listening well enough. He was speaking very well, just with a thick accent. Live and learn.
I am a work in progress. I am sick and tired of being a work in progress. I am quite sure if someone loved me, if I had a life partner, I would be perfectly happy. Right now, I cannot conceive of the idea of me being happy. As I read some of my beautifully written posts from my first years in CA, when I lived in the Golden Tunnel, I see how happy I was then. And I know why I was happy. I thought someone in particular loved me. He did not. And like a big fat old baby, I am having a hard time accepting the loss.
At the pool I swim at now in Berkeley, it is hard to make friends. Lap hours are dispersed both throughout the day atnd at several pools In Mountain View, everyone had to show up at 10:30 am so you got to know everyone. Here, with folks dispersed in several pools and lots of lap hours, I rarely see the same face twice.
rambling, as I do
Saturday, January 18, 2014
I overheard a homeless kid on Shattuck say . . . love can be simple & easy
He was holding up a part from his bike, showing it as broken. He said, with an air of deflation in his voice, "I am going to have to save up five bucks, then when I get the new part, I can ride my bike again."
I almost never give money to people asking for it on the street. I pass a gauntlet of many beggars every time I leave the house. I steel myself against them, usually politely say 'no thanks'. Most are polite, some are not. They know me by sight so they know I never give money to any of them. I literally live 1/2 block away, pass by them repeatedly. It is my path to BART and buses. So it must have surprised the whole gaggle of homeless gigs when I gave that kid five bucks for his bike part.
In front of the Starbucks on Shattuck is a cluster of teens, usually, who seem very scruffy but otherwise harmless to me. Of course one would be scruffy if living on the street.
Sometimes you see one of them coddling a newborn. That breaks my being, a homeless teen nurturing her baby on the street. Fortunately the teen moms with babies don't seem to last on the streets. I sure hope social services reaches out to them.
I particularly dislike the gauntlet of teens who station themselves outside this Starbucks. They are clearly and pointedly suggesting "hey if you can afford four dollar lattes, you can help us out."
When I heard this kid say "I'm going to have to save up five bucks, man it will take forever, but once I get the new part, the bike will be as good as new."
He was not talking to me. He was talking privately to his girlfriend.
I kept walking but his broken bike part worked me. I decided I would check the pocket where I keep bills and if I had a five dollar bill, I wold go back and give it to the kid.
I did have a fiver. I did go back and give it to the kid. i said "are you the one with the broken bike part?" As he said "yeah" he waved the broken part in front of me. I handed him my five dollar bill and said "I overheard you say you needed five bucks and I told myself if I had a five dollar bill, I'd give it to you."
I am crying as I write now. The kid lit up like a Xmas tree. he thanked me profusely and i started to walk away. He said 'wait, wait, can I have a hug?" and I hugged him. As I did I whispered, "please buy the part, you'll have food today, buy the part no matter what." and he whispered back that he would. In my whisper, I sent him more than a wish that he would buy his bike part. I wished him all good things, happiness, love. He's just a kid, likely living homeless in Berkeley because that is better than home. I had an unhappy family growing up but they fed, sheltered, clothes and did not brutalize us physically. My family of origin was emotionally brutal but that was all they knew. As Louise Hay says in the intro to her great book "You Can Heal Your LIfe", we're all victims of victims. Reading that was a healing balm. I forgive my parents instantly after reading it. My parents abused me becuse it was what they knew. Life at home was bad enough to run away from home and live on the streets. I longed to run away. I even packed a suitcase a few times and left but I would quickly realize with no money, I had no idea where to go. I don't want to imagine how bad life at home has to be to prod a kid to live homeless instead.
Please goddess, let us create the beautiful world we know is possible.
It doesn't really matter if he bought the part, altho I was pretty sure having his bike running mattered to him.
I loved that young man, a child really, someone's son, when he asked me for a hug. Loved him more as I hugged him.
he's someone's son. Someone changed his endless diapears, fed him liquids then baby foood and taught him to walk and, I hope, sent him to school. If he is living on the street in January, he's not one of those summer vacation homeless kids out seeking the alternative life. He's out on the streets because being at home was harder than living homeless.
My five bucks was nothing.
"Please buy the part" I said. I really wanted his bike to be working again.
That young man and I loved one another for a few moments. Love can be that simple.
I almost never give money to people asking for it on the street. I pass a gauntlet of many beggars every time I leave the house. I steel myself against them, usually politely say 'no thanks'. Most are polite, some are not. They know me by sight so they know I never give money to any of them. I literally live 1/2 block away, pass by them repeatedly. It is my path to BART and buses. So it must have surprised the whole gaggle of homeless gigs when I gave that kid five bucks for his bike part.
In front of the Starbucks on Shattuck is a cluster of teens, usually, who seem very scruffy but otherwise harmless to me. Of course one would be scruffy if living on the street.
Sometimes you see one of them coddling a newborn. That breaks my being, a homeless teen nurturing her baby on the street. Fortunately the teen moms with babies don't seem to last on the streets. I sure hope social services reaches out to them.
I particularly dislike the gauntlet of teens who station themselves outside this Starbucks. They are clearly and pointedly suggesting "hey if you can afford four dollar lattes, you can help us out."
When I heard this kid say "I'm going to have to save up five bucks, man it will take forever, but once I get the new part, the bike will be as good as new."
He was not talking to me. He was talking privately to his girlfriend.
I kept walking but his broken bike part worked me. I decided I would check the pocket where I keep bills and if I had a five dollar bill, I wold go back and give it to the kid.
I did have a fiver. I did go back and give it to the kid. i said "are you the one with the broken bike part?" As he said "yeah" he waved the broken part in front of me. I handed him my five dollar bill and said "I overheard you say you needed five bucks and I told myself if I had a five dollar bill, I'd give it to you."
I am crying as I write now. The kid lit up like a Xmas tree. he thanked me profusely and i started to walk away. He said 'wait, wait, can I have a hug?" and I hugged him. As I did I whispered, "please buy the part, you'll have food today, buy the part no matter what." and he whispered back that he would. In my whisper, I sent him more than a wish that he would buy his bike part. I wished him all good things, happiness, love. He's just a kid, likely living homeless in Berkeley because that is better than home. I had an unhappy family growing up but they fed, sheltered, clothes and did not brutalize us physically. My family of origin was emotionally brutal but that was all they knew. As Louise Hay says in the intro to her great book "You Can Heal Your LIfe", we're all victims of victims. Reading that was a healing balm. I forgive my parents instantly after reading it. My parents abused me becuse it was what they knew. Life at home was bad enough to run away from home and live on the streets. I longed to run away. I even packed a suitcase a few times and left but I would quickly realize with no money, I had no idea where to go. I don't want to imagine how bad life at home has to be to prod a kid to live homeless instead.
Please goddess, let us create the beautiful world we know is possible.
It doesn't really matter if he bought the part, altho I was pretty sure having his bike running mattered to him.
I loved that young man, a child really, someone's son, when he asked me for a hug. Loved him more as I hugged him.
he's someone's son. Someone changed his endless diapears, fed him liquids then baby foood and taught him to walk and, I hope, sent him to school. If he is living on the street in January, he's not one of those summer vacation homeless kids out seeking the alternative life. He's out on the streets because being at home was harder than living homeless.
My five bucks was nothing.
"Please buy the part" I said. I really wanted his bike to be working again.
That young man and I loved one another for a few moments. Love can be that simple.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
I want this, thought I found it, but I was deluded, blind & clueless.
"it's beautiful when you find someone that is in love with your mind. Someone that wants to undress your conscience and make love to your thoughts. Someone that wants to watch you slowly take down all the walls you've built up around your mind and let them inside."
The sexiest, hottest part of who I am is my mind. I want someone who is genuinely interested in learning all the things that interest me, that I care and know about. I thought I found it. And I give interest back. I thought I had found someone and when I learned no one -- no one -- had ever read his PhD dissertation, I read it. Because I was interested but also because that is the kind of interest in me that I want. I foolishly assumed he wanted the same thing.
But. . . nope.
Once he lacerated my whole being when he wrote "did you think things were going to always stay the same between us?" with sarcasm and derision. The truth was, yes, I did things would always stay the same in the sense that we would share a lot with one another, share deeply from our hearts, souls and minds and invest a lot of our life in that. Not just that but I thought he saw me, wanted to know me as well as one can know another and disclose himself to me. I did think that would 'stay the same' forever. There is also work in the world, not just interpersonal relating but I thought I had found a much-needed partner on the path. I was blind and clueless and stupidly wrong.
As I come to terms with not having it, I am floundering the worst I ever have.
The sexiest, hottest part of who I am is my mind. I want someone who is genuinely interested in learning all the things that interest me, that I care and know about. I thought I found it. And I give interest back. I thought I had found someone and when I learned no one -- no one -- had ever read his PhD dissertation, I read it. Because I was interested but also because that is the kind of interest in me that I want. I foolishly assumed he wanted the same thing.
But. . . nope.
Once he lacerated my whole being when he wrote "did you think things were going to always stay the same between us?" with sarcasm and derision. The truth was, yes, I did things would always stay the same in the sense that we would share a lot with one another, share deeply from our hearts, souls and minds and invest a lot of our life in that. Not just that but I thought he saw me, wanted to know me as well as one can know another and disclose himself to me. I did think that would 'stay the same' forever. There is also work in the world, not just interpersonal relating but I thought I had found a much-needed partner on the path. I was blind and clueless and stupidly wrong.
As I come to terms with not having it, I am floundering the worst I ever have.
Monday, January 13, 2014
The Golden Tunnel Reveals Magic
In the Golden Tunnel
I see elemental beings
or supersensible beings
or radiance
or magic
In the Golden Tunnel
I am connected to everyone
connected to everything
I feel stars, ,specific ones sometimes
radiating, lighting up our cosmos
lighting up me
lighting up all and everything
I feel the stars in the golden tunnel
I feel sunlight, too
I can feel the sun as tactilely as I feel it in an outdoor poorl
while doing laps for an hour
The best part of lap swimming
by the way
is the light.
On sunny days, the light lights me
and bedazzles
On overcast days, esp. rainy ones
the light is just as great
different, yes, but there is light in a cold dark rain
Plus plunging into a pool on a cold dark day
is magic
You shiver out there
regretting that you were a good doobie
and showered for the pool's sake
You rush, but not run, so the lifeguard doesn't yell
It's funny to hear a teenage lifeguard yell at a sixty year old lady
"don't run on the pool deck'
So I walk fast.
Then, no matter how cold it is
or how cold I am
I fuss with my goggles
I do that to hold back the jump
It is so great to plunge in
that I like to wait, adjusting goggles that don't need adjusting
Shit, I been using the same exact goggles, occasionally replaced, for 20 years
I don't need to adjust no goggles
I stand there, shivering, enjoying feeling cold because I don't feel that much
not this kind of cold
when I am almost naked, outside, and it's cold wet air and no warming light
but there is light
there is always light
even in the darkest nights
we live in a cosmos filled with light
The Golden Tunnel
I see elemental beings
or supersensible beings
or radiance
or magic
In the Golden Tunnel
I am connected to everyone
connected to everything
I feel stars, ,specific ones sometimes
radiating, lighting up our cosmos
lighting up me
lighting up all and everything
I feel the stars in the golden tunnel
I feel sunlight, too
I can feel the sun as tactilely as I feel it in an outdoor poorl
while doing laps for an hour
The best part of lap swimming
by the way
is the light.
On sunny days, the light lights me
and bedazzles
On overcast days, esp. rainy ones
the light is just as great
different, yes, but there is light in a cold dark rain
Plus plunging into a pool on a cold dark day
is magic
You shiver out there
regretting that you were a good doobie
and showered for the pool's sake
You rush, but not run, so the lifeguard doesn't yell
It's funny to hear a teenage lifeguard yell at a sixty year old lady
"don't run on the pool deck'
So I walk fast.
Then, no matter how cold it is
or how cold I am
I fuss with my goggles
I do that to hold back the jump
It is so great to plunge in
that I like to wait, adjusting goggles that don't need adjusting
Shit, I been using the same exact goggles, occasionally replaced, for 20 years
I don't need to adjust no goggles
I stand there, shivering, enjoying feeling cold because I don't feel that much
not this kind of cold
when I am almost naked, outside, and it's cold wet air and no warming light
but there is light
there is always light
even in the darkest nights
we live in a cosmos filled with light
The Golden Tunnel
My Love Reveals Objects
My Love Reveals Objects
by Isabel Fraire
My love reveals objects
silken butterflies
concealed in his fingers
his words
splash me with stars
night shines like lightning
under the fingers of my love
My love invents worlds where
jeweled glittering serpents live
worlds where music is the world
worlds where houses with open eyes
contemplate the dawn
My love is a mad sunflower that forgets
fragments of sun in the silence
My love, who does not love me, his words still splash me with stars. My memories of him will always splash me with stars.
silken butterflies
concealed in his fingers
his words
splash me with stars
night shines like lightning
under the fingers of my love
My love invents worlds where
jeweled glittering serpents live
worlds where music is the world
worlds where houses with open eyes
contemplate the dawn
My love is a mad sunflower that forgets
fragments of sun in the silence
My love, who does not love me, his words still splash me with stars. My memories of him will always splash me with stars.
Eros by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Eros
by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The sense of the world is short,
Long and various the report,
To love and be beloved;
Men and gods have not outlearned it,
And how oft soe'er they've turned it,
'Tis not to be improved.
Does anyone besides me ever wonder if Emerson liked his name? I have always disliked the name Ralph and I quite dislike Waldo. Whenever I see his name in writing, I wonder how he felt about Waldo as his middle name. I know it was another time, with other fashions. Name one famous Waldo.
Long and various the report,
To love and be beloved;
Men and gods have not outlearned it,
And how oft soe'er they've turned it,
'Tis not to be improved.
Does anyone besides me ever wonder if Emerson liked his name? I have always disliked the name Ralph and I quite dislike Waldo. Whenever I see his name in writing, I wonder how he felt about Waldo as his middle name. I know it was another time, with other fashions. Name one famous Waldo.
Love's Philosophy by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Love's Philosophy
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle -
Why not I with thine?
See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea -
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle -
Why not I with thine?
See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea -
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Adrienne Rich was a great chick poet, eh?
FINAL NOTATIONS. ADRIENNE RICH
it will not be simple, it will not be long
it will take little time, it will take all your thought
it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
it will be short, it will not be simple
it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
it will not be long, it will occupy your thought
as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple
You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
you are taking parts of us into places never planned
you are going far away with pieces of our lives
it will be short, it will take all your breath
it will not be simple, it will become your will
it will not be simple, it will not be long
it will take little time, it will take all your thought
it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
it will be short, it will not be simple
it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
it will not be long, it will occupy your thought
as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple
You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
you are taking parts of us into places never planned
you are going far away with pieces of our lives
it will be short, it will take all your breath
it will not be simple, it will become your will
Minnie Riperton - Loving You (with lyrics)
This song was popular when I was in h.s. I had no idea it was by a local Chicago band and singer. Minnie Riperton is the actor Maya Rudolph's mom. I want to be in love and listen to gooey love songs like this with my love.
Saturday, January 11, 2014
if someone loves you, they make space for you
I can be blind and clueless.
I got the top paragraph from Marc Chernoff. I quite like his blog that I think he writes with his wife (or girlfriend?).
Thursday, January 09, 2014
what becomes of a diminished thing?
We live in a dissipative universe. What do you think becomes of everything? all diminishes. Everything comes to an end, even the universe, the cosmos after cosmos that seem to spin into infinity. It seems there is no end but there is.
I think.
Today I think this.
I think.
Today I think this.
Wednesday, January 08, 2014
the universe is made up of stories, not atoms -- muriel rukeyser, poet
Muriel's line inspired a MN friend to write this poem:
I wish the few folks who follow me on Blogger and G+ would share some stories with me. I live for stories, and not just my own. I am not an egomaniac.
I wish the few folks who follow me on Blogger and G+ would share some stories with me. I live for stories, and not just my own. I am not an egomaniac.
Tuesday, January 07, 2014
being ignored hurts grown ups too
treating someone like they and their feelings don't matter just because it is their sixtieth birthday is igoring them and the victim experiences an injury, emotional and chemical, in the brain.
Additionally, vilifying someone about their psychological disablity must cause a chemical, painful brain reaction even more intense than simply ignoring someone, such as saying in angry, vicious tones, "you are such a borderline' which this borderline hears as 'you are nothing, not good enough for me to treat humanely."
Monday, January 06, 2014
Feast of the Three Chick Magi
I choose to believe three important women decided to visit Baby JC and bring him gifts, following yonder star. I am so done with males dominating my creation mythology.
Today, I declare Jan sixth the feast of the three royal chicks who visited Baby JC.
Today, I declare Jan sixth the feast of the three royal chicks who visited Baby JC.
I'm as sweet as tupelo honey . . if you treat me well
This is what I wanted to Xmas, for someone to love me cause they see me as sweet as tupelo honey. I am, you know.
Sendoff by Fleur Adcock
I love this short poem that tells a good story most of us have lived.
Send Off by Fleur Adcock
Half an hour before my flight was called
he walked across the airport bar towards me
carrying what was left of our future
together; two drinks on a tray.
The City LIghts by A. R. Ammons
A man introduced me to this poem, telling me he had first recalled it as being about radiance and that was why it reminded him of me. He thought I was radiant. It is a great poem. The guy introduced me to Ammons, who has become one of my favorite poets even if he is a guy.
The City Limits |
||
| by A. R. Ammons | ||
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold itself but pours its abundance without selection into every nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them, not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen, each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise. | ||
If You Forget Me by Pablo Neruda
If You Forget Me
I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
Pablo Neruda
Sunday, January 05, 2014
one's own dome of heaven
Kiefer created art that reflects the darkness in life but he also created art that acknowledged the beauty, majestic and magic of this life, this cosmos, this everything.
When SFMOMA did a retrospective of Kiefer's work, the brochure for the show had a postcard size image of a self portrait Kiefer did that is, in the 'real' picture, larger than life. The painting has Kiefer laying on the ground, on planet earth. The viewer gets a sense of alost seeing the earth curving around from the patch of ground upon which Kiefer has painted himself.
He is beholding a shower of falling stars. His eyes are closed, as if he is soaking up the love of the stars, maybe also soaking up a moon bath. Have you ever gone moon bathing? I have. It can feel quite lovely to be naked under a full moon and to be still and try to soak up the moon's light.
Well, in his painting, Kiefer is soaking up the stars' light and love, the radiance and glory of being a being in his glorious universe.
That's what I see.
They did not see posters of this painting, although I am sure they asked the lucky person who owns the original painting.
I cut off the picture and took it to a printer and paid $60 to have it enlarged. The one I have is five feet long. I love it. It hangs on the wall across from my bed so I see it a lot. I put it there to remind myself that I, too, live under the same starry heavens, and I, too, can behold my own dome of heaven if I choose. It reminds me to be joyful and happy.
I wish I had the nerve to order it eight feet long but that would have been much more expensive. As it was, sixty bucks was a wild splurge.
Kiefer had anoher painting in the show I very much loved caled "Everyone lives under their own dome of heaven." This one is small. It shows a small figure, who appears, altho he is very tiny so it is hard to see for sure, as an academic, as if giving a lecture on the dome of heaven, or how to create one's own! This figure stands in a field and is surrounded by a blue dome, his dome of heaven.
This painting was reproduced on postcards but not as a poster, or I would have bought it. I took the ost card and made it as large as I could at a color copy machine at a Kinko-like place. Kinko's is gone, eh? I learned how to use compouters and esp. Pagemaker at Kinko's. Good memories. A good business in its day. It is sad it is gone. FedEx just doesn't compare.
Some friends have an expensive, gigantic color printer to print art quality prints. The woman in this couple is doing great art. I want to work up the nerve to ask them to make me a larger print of "Everyone lives under their own dome of heaven". I think Kenoli could scan my print, which is about 8 by 10 into his copmputer and then make me a larger print. This one could not be too big. Too big would betray the artist's it=ntetion. Kiefer did not paint many small paintings. It matters that the dome of heaven is a small one.
Sometimes, on happy days, I imagine all the people I pass in the world waddling through the world with their own see-through but vaguely blue dome of heaven. Such a bubble could separate us from one another but I think domes of heaven are permeable and it is possible to blend domes when one connects with others. It would be an extra charge of all the love that is heaven.
parsifal would approve, for he is the Gral King, the king of the kingdom of love.
When SFMOMA did a retrospective of Kiefer's work, the brochure for the show had a postcard size image of a self portrait Kiefer did that is, in the 'real' picture, larger than life. The painting has Kiefer laying on the ground, on planet earth. The viewer gets a sense of alost seeing the earth curving around from the patch of ground upon which Kiefer has painted himself.
He is beholding a shower of falling stars. His eyes are closed, as if he is soaking up the love of the stars, maybe also soaking up a moon bath. Have you ever gone moon bathing? I have. It can feel quite lovely to be naked under a full moon and to be still and try to soak up the moon's light.
Well, in his painting, Kiefer is soaking up the stars' light and love, the radiance and glory of being a being in his glorious universe.
That's what I see.
They did not see posters of this painting, although I am sure they asked the lucky person who owns the original painting.
I cut off the picture and took it to a printer and paid $60 to have it enlarged. The one I have is five feet long. I love it. It hangs on the wall across from my bed so I see it a lot. I put it there to remind myself that I, too, live under the same starry heavens, and I, too, can behold my own dome of heaven if I choose. It reminds me to be joyful and happy.
I wish I had the nerve to order it eight feet long but that would have been much more expensive. As it was, sixty bucks was a wild splurge.
Kiefer had anoher painting in the show I very much loved caled "Everyone lives under their own dome of heaven." This one is small. It shows a small figure, who appears, altho he is very tiny so it is hard to see for sure, as an academic, as if giving a lecture on the dome of heaven, or how to create one's own! This figure stands in a field and is surrounded by a blue dome, his dome of heaven.
This painting was reproduced on postcards but not as a poster, or I would have bought it. I took the ost card and made it as large as I could at a color copy machine at a Kinko-like place. Kinko's is gone, eh? I learned how to use compouters and esp. Pagemaker at Kinko's. Good memories. A good business in its day. It is sad it is gone. FedEx just doesn't compare.
Some friends have an expensive, gigantic color printer to print art quality prints. The woman in this couple is doing great art. I want to work up the nerve to ask them to make me a larger print of "Everyone lives under their own dome of heaven". I think Kenoli could scan my print, which is about 8 by 10 into his copmputer and then make me a larger print. This one could not be too big. Too big would betray the artist's it=ntetion. Kiefer did not paint many small paintings. It matters that the dome of heaven is a small one.
Sometimes, on happy days, I imagine all the people I pass in the world waddling through the world with their own see-through but vaguely blue dome of heaven. Such a bubble could separate us from one another but I think domes of heaven are permeable and it is possible to blend domes when one connects with others. It would be an extra charge of all the love that is heaven.
parsifal would approve, for he is the Gral King, the king of the kingdom of love.
Saturday, January 04, 2014
In a time of universal deceit . . . . . said George Orwell . . .
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." George Orwell
This seems like a time of universal deceit. Up is down, down is up. Neocons destroy the post office with insane prepayment of pension liabilities for the next 75 years, so the post office sells off National Historic Register buildings built with public funds for peanuts, the real estate company who scored the real estate transactions just happens to be owned by the husband of a Democratic U.S. Senator from California. How much ya wanna bet the post offices get sold for a fraction of what they end up being worth to the men who get to buy them for chump change? Our commons, sold off.
And once the post office no longer has beautiful buildings and its pension liability is funded for 75 years, they'll sell the whole operation and that corporation will plunder the pension funds, which taxpayers also pretty much all paid for and then they say "privatize the post office" and sell the whole shebang for peanuts to another well connected rich guy.
I could tell the same story over many things, like the private sweetheart deal Obama sold the drug companies in private before selling obamacare to the public or Wall Street and mortgage shysters getting rich while millions lost their homes and life savings and no one has gone to jail. A few gigantic companies pay what amounts to chump change fines.
So what is the truth?
This seems like a time of universal deceit. Up is down, down is up. Neocons destroy the post office with insane prepayment of pension liabilities for the next 75 years, so the post office sells off National Historic Register buildings built with public funds for peanuts, the real estate company who scored the real estate transactions just happens to be owned by the husband of a Democratic U.S. Senator from California. How much ya wanna bet the post offices get sold for a fraction of what they end up being worth to the men who get to buy them for chump change? Our commons, sold off.
And once the post office no longer has beautiful buildings and its pension liability is funded for 75 years, they'll sell the whole operation and that corporation will plunder the pension funds, which taxpayers also pretty much all paid for and then they say "privatize the post office" and sell the whole shebang for peanuts to another well connected rich guy.
I could tell the same story over many things, like the private sweetheart deal Obama sold the drug companies in private before selling obamacare to the public or Wall Street and mortgage shysters getting rich while millions lost their homes and life savings and no one has gone to jail. A few gigantic companies pay what amounts to chump change fines.
So what is the truth?
if you have hurt someone . .
If you have hurt someone, don’t expect them to be elegant in how they deliver the
message that they are hurt. Expect them to act like the imperfect human that they are. Hurt people act from woundedness, that's just how it is. Even if you hurt another unconsciously, they are still hurt and until you own what you did, acknowledge that you made behavioral choices that hurt them, they are going to keep trying to convey to you their hurt. Listen to their hurt, be sure you understand their hurt and then express regret. Don't tell criticize them for being hurt. Don't criticize them. Don't tell the person you have hurt that they shouldn't be hurt. Acknowledge what you did, whether it was conscious or unconscious, and express regret that the other person got hurt. I do this. I am quite sure I do.
Own up to having made your mistakes. And don't yell at the person you hurt for feeling hurt.
Own up to having made your mistakes. And don't yell at the person you hurt for feeling hurt.
Thursday, January 02, 2014
snapdragons, zinnias, tomatoes and beans
I love to garden. Alas, I have no garden to garden.
My building has a rooftop garden, comprised of tubs. It is supposed to be run by the residents but, somehow, funded by the building's owner nonprofit or the property management company. No one wants to fund plants and plants, or even seeds, cost something. And tools cost something. Compost is free from Berkeley Parks but it has to be hauled.
How does a group of disparate neighbors, literally from cultures across the globe, decide what to grow? And what to do about unsupervised children who think it is fun to pluck green tomato buds and throw them off the roof just because it is fun to throw things and, I guess, imagine they might land on a person and unsettle the person?
One year, several years ago, I personally bought about 18 tomato plants. I reasoned that if I tended that many plants, including paying for food specifically for organic tomatoes plus hauling compost from the park service, that I might be able to enjoy just one or two home grown perfectly ripe tomatoes.
But a gal who lived in the building stalked the roof. As soon as any tomato, always still green, got bigger than a grape, she would harvest them for herself and her kids. All of us on the garden committee pleaded with her to let the tomatoes at least get ripe. We did not invite the whole building to feel free to take whatever they wanted, we pointed out. She was not free to just take them. She said if we were chumps and wanted to plant tomatoes in the open, she was going to take them. She did not seem to grasp our argument that she was plucking them before they were fully grown.
I finally reduced myself to begging, tearfully. I explained that I had bought 18 plants, already started to maximize the growing sesaon, i.e. to get more tomatoes. I explained I had bought special tomato planta foot, watered the tomatoes, and everything else growing in the garden (I also planted lots of beans, lettuce and spinach, and other things). I said "If you could just let me have one tomato out of the eighteen plants, I can accept tha tyou are going to take all the rest."
Laughing at me, looking at me askance with open scorn, she said "If you dumb enough to put your money into public plants, you aren't going to get any tomatoes. You have been stupid. It's not my fault."
I told her "You are not going to take any more of my tomatoes." She said "Try and stop me."
I tripped out all my tomato plants, leaving behind the two plants someone else had planted. I don't know if that stealing tomato woman stole any more tomatoes but she didn't steal any more of mine.
It wasn't like my 18 plants were going to get many tomatoes. Little boys, who are not supposed to be on the roof at all unless accompanied by an adult, loved to tear off the tiniest green buds of tomato and throw them off the side of the roof. For fun. The boys were wholly oblivious to the fact that they were stealing and damaging someone's effort and with no parents supervising them, as our leases require, there was no way to stop the boys. Management claimed, in written letters to parents, that households that allowed unsupervised minors on the roof would be evicted. Just imagine how easy a little kid could scoot over the not-high fence that lines the roof and fall to their death. How could a sane, reasonsible parent let their kids up on the roof? So okay, ten year olds aren't goingi to thoughtlessly jump but I have seen four year olds crawling on that fence. And the ten year olds destroyed most of my tomatoes. Any tomatoes that didn't get thrown over the side, that woman harvested before they were ripe.
"I just want one home-grown, vine-riened tomato from my 18 plants," I told her several times. "You can have all the rest." But, as I wrote above, she mocked my stupidity. "If you dumb enough to plant for me, I am going to take what you grow." We had more exchanges.
I stopped gardening after I ripped out the tomatoe plants. If I wasn'at going toi be allowed one red tomato, I was not going to grow anymore for that selfish bitch. And she had three kids, setting examples for them, telling them in actions that it is okay to steal and okay to treat neighbors like dogshit on their shoes.
Since I withdrew from the garden group, other neighbors stepped in. New residents. One guy, clearly mentally ill (some of the units are set aside specifically for mentally ill, formerly homeless patients and he was definitely one of these residents!), he announced that the two year old persimmon trees, which, in two years, had, thus far, only yielded one persimmon, needed deep pruning. They were baby trees when bought. The buildilng did not invest in expensive, mature persimmon trees. How could two year old baby trees need pruning. He 'pruned off pretty much the whole tree but the central stalk. It remains to be seen if those trees will ever grow anything now. That guy was banned from gardening. He ruined some other things.
I go up there once in awhile, to see if there is any food I might like to pick. At least pluck some herbs. But whoever is doing the gardening makes such odd choices. No one has dared to plant a single tomato since that first year's debacle. We could grow tomatoes up there if management would support the lease that forbids children under 18 up there alone. And get this: the kids throwing food, like those tomatoes, over the wall, are caught on the security camera. Management has no excuse not to enforce the lease rules: evict one family for not supervising minors on the roof, for damaging people's hard-worked food crop and kids would stop destroying food on the roof.
I had plantd beans all along the fence. Since I withdrew, they plant lots of beans, which can grow fast and grow prolifically so they are fun to grow for a big building, but no one, not one bean plant, has been planted along the fence since the days when I did it. Explailn that to me? Why not use the fence? When I used the fence, the fence was covered with bean vines and beans.
What else do they plant? two eggplant plants for 97 apartments?
I tried to plant things tha would grow easily in quantity so every household could have some fresh vegetables from the roof. 18 tomato plants was just a start.
I also had started growing lettuce in the many more shallow growing tubs up there but now, those shallow tubs are full of scrawny flwoers that never bloom, are rarely green. We could grow enough lettuce in all those shallow tubs to give heads of lettuce to every apartment a couple times a month. Instead, they grow ground cover. Huh? Why that choice?
And herbs? Why don't we have a herb garden? That first year, when we met as a committee and decided as a group, we planned to have herbs growing year round. We could grow a ton of herbs in just one of the large aluminium watering tubs (these tubs were originally designed to feed large farm animals and are adapted for gardens). One tub could grow enough basil, chilis, parsley, cilantro, apazote and more, and enough for the whole building. But they don't.
A new friend in the building first tried to coax me back to the garden group. A few weeks later, I ventured up on the roof because some children had gotten past the locked gates and were running around a part of the roof with no fencing along the wall. Nothing to shield children, or adults, from falling six stories down. I saw them from my top floor apartment and went up to check out the situation before calling management. But this new friend had already gotten the manager, the children were ousted from the unsafe part of the roof. A janitor had left a gate unlocked to have an illegal smoke on our roof It is illegal to smoke anywhere on the roof because in Berkerley it is illegal to ever smoke with 25 feet of a residential window. Up on our roof, there are residential windows from the top residential floor within a few feet of anywhere on the roof: so it is illegal to smoke up there, even if you are a janitor. The janitor felt sheepish, seeing that leaving the gate unlocked had prompted those kids to go exploring. I understand the urge to explore. The photovoltaic panels are over where the kids were. When I first saw them out there, I hoped they were supervised and with a class about photvoltaics. But, nope, they were just kids from the building tempted into forbidden territory. No one fell off the roof but it would not take much.
Anyway, that day my new friend reported to me that maangement had turned off the water on the roof. New management. I guess they felt they had to show improved budgets by using less water.
Ahem. You cannot grow vegetables in an area experiencing drought without watering the plants. The lemon trees will not grow lemons without wtaer. The orange tree will not grow oranges. And the persimmons, if the pruning fool did not kill them, will not grow persimmons without water. So my new friend had also given up on the garden.
"I couldn't stand all the bullshit" I said. "what is this you say, 'bull sheet'?" Her first langauge is Farsi so I explained that bull shit was shit from a male cow or cattle. I am not clear on exactly what a bull is other than it is male, right? Bullshit to turn off water.
We had the water protected from kids. Only members of th garden group had access to the spigot, which was locked away with a code. Kids would like to go up on the roof and spray one another with water on warm days but they coudln't, not when the spigot was kept locked. But now, the gardeneers have to find staff, which is often unavaialble. Our property managers ahve more meetings than any other organization ever, I have concluded. They post hours from 9 to 5 weekdays but I don't think actual humans are in the office more than four hours a week. And if they are having a meeting, they arent going to give you access to water on the roof.
Does it really improve how a property maaner loos to her boss if she reduces water usage so much that the garden dies?
The garden tubs all have water hoses right inside them. Our first property manager, also to save money, turned all of them off. When the building opened, the rooftop was beautifully landscaped with flowers intended to attracted butterflies and bees to pollinate our vegie tubs but when the water got turned off, all the landscaping on the roof died. All of it.
That was two managers ago. No history gets passed down. and these new property managers are kids. TWenty two? If older than 22, not by much. And wherever they went to college, they did not get trained to think very well. What educated intelligent person, even if they grew up in a very rough urban environment and never grew a plant, who doesn't know that plants need water?
If I had a garden, the first things I would plant would be snapdragons, zinnias tomatoes and beans. and then an herb garden. and Lettuce.kale, collard greens and chard. These all grow easily with compost, sun and WATER. Most imortant to me: snapdragons and zinnias.
I like yellow snapdragons and pinky-yellow ones. and I like all colors of zinnias. I am not actually all that crazy about zinnias but they make nice cut flowers so I can have cut flowers on my table all summer.
Not here.
Maybe I will meet a man who will fall in love, own a garden and share it with me. That's the only way I'm ever going to get to garden again. I have been on wait ist for pubic garden lots for years and never gotten a nibble. I think the public garden lots go to insiders in the know cause the wait lsits don't move. Five years and not a nibble. I haven't moved from the same spot on the list. Maybe no one gives up lots but i doubt that. People move, die and stop gardening. Spots open up and those with connections get the garden plots, I guess.
Sigh. I have few friends in Berkeley who own yards.
How I wish Ihad a garden. Growing things is important to the human spirit. It connects us to everything.
My building has a rooftop garden, comprised of tubs. It is supposed to be run by the residents but, somehow, funded by the building's owner nonprofit or the property management company. No one wants to fund plants and plants, or even seeds, cost something. And tools cost something. Compost is free from Berkeley Parks but it has to be hauled.
How does a group of disparate neighbors, literally from cultures across the globe, decide what to grow? And what to do about unsupervised children who think it is fun to pluck green tomato buds and throw them off the roof just because it is fun to throw things and, I guess, imagine they might land on a person and unsettle the person?
One year, several years ago, I personally bought about 18 tomato plants. I reasoned that if I tended that many plants, including paying for food specifically for organic tomatoes plus hauling compost from the park service, that I might be able to enjoy just one or two home grown perfectly ripe tomatoes.
But a gal who lived in the building stalked the roof. As soon as any tomato, always still green, got bigger than a grape, she would harvest them for herself and her kids. All of us on the garden committee pleaded with her to let the tomatoes at least get ripe. We did not invite the whole building to feel free to take whatever they wanted, we pointed out. She was not free to just take them. She said if we were chumps and wanted to plant tomatoes in the open, she was going to take them. She did not seem to grasp our argument that she was plucking them before they were fully grown.
I finally reduced myself to begging, tearfully. I explained that I had bought 18 plants, already started to maximize the growing sesaon, i.e. to get more tomatoes. I explained I had bought special tomato planta foot, watered the tomatoes, and everything else growing in the garden (I also planted lots of beans, lettuce and spinach, and other things). I said "If you could just let me have one tomato out of the eighteen plants, I can accept tha tyou are going to take all the rest."
Laughing at me, looking at me askance with open scorn, she said "If you dumb enough to put your money into public plants, you aren't going to get any tomatoes. You have been stupid. It's not my fault."
I told her "You are not going to take any more of my tomatoes." She said "Try and stop me."
I tripped out all my tomato plants, leaving behind the two plants someone else had planted. I don't know if that stealing tomato woman stole any more tomatoes but she didn't steal any more of mine.
It wasn't like my 18 plants were going to get many tomatoes. Little boys, who are not supposed to be on the roof at all unless accompanied by an adult, loved to tear off the tiniest green buds of tomato and throw them off the side of the roof. For fun. The boys were wholly oblivious to the fact that they were stealing and damaging someone's effort and with no parents supervising them, as our leases require, there was no way to stop the boys. Management claimed, in written letters to parents, that households that allowed unsupervised minors on the roof would be evicted. Just imagine how easy a little kid could scoot over the not-high fence that lines the roof and fall to their death. How could a sane, reasonsible parent let their kids up on the roof? So okay, ten year olds aren't goingi to thoughtlessly jump but I have seen four year olds crawling on that fence. And the ten year olds destroyed most of my tomatoes. Any tomatoes that didn't get thrown over the side, that woman harvested before they were ripe.
"I just want one home-grown, vine-riened tomato from my 18 plants," I told her several times. "You can have all the rest." But, as I wrote above, she mocked my stupidity. "If you dumb enough to plant for me, I am going to take what you grow." We had more exchanges.
I stopped gardening after I ripped out the tomatoe plants. If I wasn'at going toi be allowed one red tomato, I was not going to grow anymore for that selfish bitch. And she had three kids, setting examples for them, telling them in actions that it is okay to steal and okay to treat neighbors like dogshit on their shoes.
Since I withdrew from the garden group, other neighbors stepped in. New residents. One guy, clearly mentally ill (some of the units are set aside specifically for mentally ill, formerly homeless patients and he was definitely one of these residents!), he announced that the two year old persimmon trees, which, in two years, had, thus far, only yielded one persimmon, needed deep pruning. They were baby trees when bought. The buildilng did not invest in expensive, mature persimmon trees. How could two year old baby trees need pruning. He 'pruned off pretty much the whole tree but the central stalk. It remains to be seen if those trees will ever grow anything now. That guy was banned from gardening. He ruined some other things.
I go up there once in awhile, to see if there is any food I might like to pick. At least pluck some herbs. But whoever is doing the gardening makes such odd choices. No one has dared to plant a single tomato since that first year's debacle. We could grow tomatoes up there if management would support the lease that forbids children under 18 up there alone. And get this: the kids throwing food, like those tomatoes, over the wall, are caught on the security camera. Management has no excuse not to enforce the lease rules: evict one family for not supervising minors on the roof, for damaging people's hard-worked food crop and kids would stop destroying food on the roof.
I had plantd beans all along the fence. Since I withdrew, they plant lots of beans, which can grow fast and grow prolifically so they are fun to grow for a big building, but no one, not one bean plant, has been planted along the fence since the days when I did it. Explailn that to me? Why not use the fence? When I used the fence, the fence was covered with bean vines and beans.
What else do they plant? two eggplant plants for 97 apartments?
I tried to plant things tha would grow easily in quantity so every household could have some fresh vegetables from the roof. 18 tomato plants was just a start.
I also had started growing lettuce in the many more shallow growing tubs up there but now, those shallow tubs are full of scrawny flwoers that never bloom, are rarely green. We could grow enough lettuce in all those shallow tubs to give heads of lettuce to every apartment a couple times a month. Instead, they grow ground cover. Huh? Why that choice?
And herbs? Why don't we have a herb garden? That first year, when we met as a committee and decided as a group, we planned to have herbs growing year round. We could grow a ton of herbs in just one of the large aluminium watering tubs (these tubs were originally designed to feed large farm animals and are adapted for gardens). One tub could grow enough basil, chilis, parsley, cilantro, apazote and more, and enough for the whole building. But they don't.
A new friend in the building first tried to coax me back to the garden group. A few weeks later, I ventured up on the roof because some children had gotten past the locked gates and were running around a part of the roof with no fencing along the wall. Nothing to shield children, or adults, from falling six stories down. I saw them from my top floor apartment and went up to check out the situation before calling management. But this new friend had already gotten the manager, the children were ousted from the unsafe part of the roof. A janitor had left a gate unlocked to have an illegal smoke on our roof It is illegal to smoke anywhere on the roof because in Berkerley it is illegal to ever smoke with 25 feet of a residential window. Up on our roof, there are residential windows from the top residential floor within a few feet of anywhere on the roof: so it is illegal to smoke up there, even if you are a janitor. The janitor felt sheepish, seeing that leaving the gate unlocked had prompted those kids to go exploring. I understand the urge to explore. The photovoltaic panels are over where the kids were. When I first saw them out there, I hoped they were supervised and with a class about photvoltaics. But, nope, they were just kids from the building tempted into forbidden territory. No one fell off the roof but it would not take much.
Anyway, that day my new friend reported to me that maangement had turned off the water on the roof. New management. I guess they felt they had to show improved budgets by using less water.
Ahem. You cannot grow vegetables in an area experiencing drought without watering the plants. The lemon trees will not grow lemons without wtaer. The orange tree will not grow oranges. And the persimmons, if the pruning fool did not kill them, will not grow persimmons without water. So my new friend had also given up on the garden.
"I couldn't stand all the bullshit" I said. "what is this you say, 'bull sheet'?" Her first langauge is Farsi so I explained that bull shit was shit from a male cow or cattle. I am not clear on exactly what a bull is other than it is male, right? Bullshit to turn off water.
We had the water protected from kids. Only members of th garden group had access to the spigot, which was locked away with a code. Kids would like to go up on the roof and spray one another with water on warm days but they coudln't, not when the spigot was kept locked. But now, the gardeneers have to find staff, which is often unavaialble. Our property managers ahve more meetings than any other organization ever, I have concluded. They post hours from 9 to 5 weekdays but I don't think actual humans are in the office more than four hours a week. And if they are having a meeting, they arent going to give you access to water on the roof.
Does it really improve how a property maaner loos to her boss if she reduces water usage so much that the garden dies?
The garden tubs all have water hoses right inside them. Our first property manager, also to save money, turned all of them off. When the building opened, the rooftop was beautifully landscaped with flowers intended to attracted butterflies and bees to pollinate our vegie tubs but when the water got turned off, all the landscaping on the roof died. All of it.
That was two managers ago. No history gets passed down. and these new property managers are kids. TWenty two? If older than 22, not by much. And wherever they went to college, they did not get trained to think very well. What educated intelligent person, even if they grew up in a very rough urban environment and never grew a plant, who doesn't know that plants need water?
If I had a garden, the first things I would plant would be snapdragons, zinnias tomatoes and beans. and then an herb garden. and Lettuce.kale, collard greens and chard. These all grow easily with compost, sun and WATER. Most imortant to me: snapdragons and zinnias.
I like yellow snapdragons and pinky-yellow ones. and I like all colors of zinnias. I am not actually all that crazy about zinnias but they make nice cut flowers so I can have cut flowers on my table all summer.
Not here.
Maybe I will meet a man who will fall in love, own a garden and share it with me. That's the only way I'm ever going to get to garden again. I have been on wait ist for pubic garden lots for years and never gotten a nibble. I think the public garden lots go to insiders in the know cause the wait lsits don't move. Five years and not a nibble. I haven't moved from the same spot on the list. Maybe no one gives up lots but i doubt that. People move, die and stop gardening. Spots open up and those with connections get the garden plots, I guess.
Sigh. I have few friends in Berkeley who own yards.
How I wish Ihad a garden. Growing things is important to the human spirit. It connects us to everything.
fire is the glue of the cosmos
Anselm Kiefer, a German artist whose work left a deep impression on me, was quoted in a major retrospecive of his work in 2006, saying 'fire is the glue of the cosmos'. I like that.
Fire is light and heat, forging together different elements of the heavens.
We are in the heavens now. I am in the heavens. You are in the heavens.
I dare you to escape the heavens. You could not more escape the heavens than I could prove Marc does not love me, even though I don't believe he does. But I can't prove it. It is cheap, easy, to throw around 'I love you' when you are dumping someone. Is there any glue in that?
Step away from sad thoughts, Tree. Be happy. The sun is shining. The pool is calling. And people love me. An old friend called me on New Year's Eve. How's come I never think to call old friends on such nights? I am not as selfless and kind as some. I become absorbed with my own suffering and forget that others suffer. This old friend who called has had some very hard challenges but she remembered me.
I am reminded of my favorite, obscure Lou Reed song. Here are some of the lyrics:
Why can't I be 1/10th as cool as Lou Reed? or something better than me?
Fire is light and heat, forging together different elements of the heavens.
We are in the heavens now. I am in the heavens. You are in the heavens.
I dare you to escape the heavens. You could not more escape the heavens than I could prove Marc does not love me, even though I don't believe he does. But I can't prove it. It is cheap, easy, to throw around 'I love you' when you are dumping someone. Is there any glue in that?
Step away from sad thoughts, Tree. Be happy. The sun is shining. The pool is calling. And people love me. An old friend called me on New Year's Eve. How's come I never think to call old friends on such nights? I am not as selfless and kind as some. I become absorbed with my own suffering and forget that others suffer. This old friend who called has had some very hard challenges but she remembered me.
I am reminded of my favorite, obscure Lou Reed song. Here are some of the lyrics:
Why can't I be good
Why can't I act like a man
Why can't I be good
And do what other men can
Why can't I be good
Make something of this life
If I can't be a god
Let me be more than a wife
Why can't I be good
Why can't I be good
Why can't I be good
Why can't I be good
I don't want to be weak
I want to be strong
Not a fat happy weakling
With two useless arms
A mouth that keeps moving
With nothing to say
An eternal baby
Who never moved away
Why can't I be good
Why can't I be good
Why can't I be good
Why can't I be good
I'd like to look in the mirror
With a feeling of pride
Instead of seeing a reflection
Of failure a crime
I don't want to turn away
To make sure I cannot see
I don't want to hold my ears
When I think about me
Why can't I be good
Why can't I be good
Why can't I be good
Why can't I be good
I want to be like the wind
When it uproots a tree
Carries it across an ocean
To plant in a valley
I want to be like the sun
That makes it flourish and grow
I don't want to be
What I am anymore
Why can't I be good
Why can't I be good
Why can't I be good
Why can't I be good
I was thinking of some kind of whacked out syncopation
That would help improve this song
Some knock 'em down rhythm
That would help it move along
Some rhyme of pure perfection
A beat so hard and strong
If I can't get it right this time
Will a next time come along
Why can't I be good
why can't I be good
Why can't I be good
Why can't I be
Why can't I be 1/10th as cool as Lou Reed? or something better than me?
Wednesday, January 01, 2014
Men: women are giving you a gift
this quote is from http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/hesaid-how-narcissism-harms-your-relationships/
Men, when women tell you that you have hurt them, they are giving you a gift. Listen to them. Receive the gift. Learn how to be loving to them and you will be rewarded with love.
Men, when women tell you that you have hurt them, they are giving you a gift. Listen to them. Receive the gift. Learn how to be loving to them and you will be rewarded with love.
I [male speaking] learned from my partner that when women blame, shame or criticize men, it’s usually because the man won’t listen to them. They then have to escalate the delivery of their message. After a few frustrated attempts at telling you what you did to hurt them, their communication starts to sound and feel like emotional castration. Beneath their rising anger, women are trying to inform and inspire us to become more kind, loving and virtuous. It’s our own block-headedness that gets them so riled up. It’s as if someone is trying to hand you a gift, and you refuse to accept it, so they start pushing it in your face until you figure out that it’s good for you.
A woman, at her best, is a beacon of the truth. If you hurt her feelings, whether by unconscious mistake or a narcissistic act, she will tell you about it, either verbally, or in non-verbal body language. The truth is often uncomfortable to hear, but when a woman tells you that she’s hurt, or someone else is being impacted by your insensitivity, it’s time to button up, quiet down your narcissistic ego, and be humble. In other words, shut up and listen. And if you’ve hurt someone, don’t expect them to be elegant in how they deliver the message.
