Pardon my tirade about some labor unions

More and more often, my experience with labor unions involves corruption, strong arming, and protecting the lazy. I used to be a big union advocate, because I understood unions stood up for all of the little people and gave them the power they otherwise did not have in terms of collective bargaining.

When unions first started, they had a noble purpose, but I wonder whether they still do. I offer three different observations:

Transit. I work with a number of different transit agencies, and reading through their documentation, contracts and performance data, I think, quite often, that the operators and dispatchers and maintenance personnel would be better off without a union. I’ve had transit managers tell me that they tried to give 15% merit pay raises to their long-term drivers with the best safety records and the highest number of passenger compliments, but the union leadership argued against it, instead eking out a 3% increase for all of the drivers, including the terrible ones. I see ridiculous provisions in San Francisco Muni’s contract that allow drivers to skip work without calling in. I see agencies sideline, with full pay and benefits, bus drivers who are drunk or beat up passengers. These people should be fired.

Schools. I have acquaintances who work in education and a spouse who works as a teacher at San Francisco Unified School District. Reading the directives of an educated and fairly reasonable sounding superintendent and then the teachers’ union’s irate and unreasonable response makes my blood boil. Why is the union willing to sacrifice some of its best and brightest young and innovative teachers to protect a few substitute teachers? Why can’t one of the worst performing schools in the SFUSD, with a particularly inept and crazy teacher who cannot competently educate the students assigned to her class year after year, be fired so that young, bright and innovative teachers can transform the classrooms and be rewarded for their work? The union protects the rights of the terrible teachers without even thinking about the students in their classrooms. The union’s focus is far too narrow.

Grocery. Almost every day I walk into Bristol Farms’ store in Westfield San Francisco Centre, an urban mall anchored by Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom in downtown San Francisco. Bristol Farms is a high-end supermarket on the ground floor of the mall that has been picketed by labor union representatives since the store opened. One day, shortly after the picket started in front of Bristol Farms, I asked the 60-something looking man with a huge gut and a yellow t-shirt why he was picketing. His answer: “It’s not a union store.” My response: “So why don’t you picket Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s? I don’t think they’re union stores.” His answer: “Umm, they just told us to come down here. I don’t really know anything.”

And so nearly every day since then, I walk past the mix of disheveled people who I would certainly have laid off if I had a business. They lean against the outside of the Bristol Farms store and talk on their cell phones or to one another about somebody’s “son who beat up his cousin getting out of jail” or “getting real fucked up this weekend.” I walk inside, buy some sushi or some soup, and I make a purchase from one of the efficient, friendly people who work at Bristol Farms. It’s not to say I don’t value the supermarkets and other businesses that offer their employees benefits and health care and other things, but it is to say to this union, if you’re going to send out the laziest, sloppiest people who don’t know why they’re standing outside the supermarket to tell people not to go in, then I’m not going to listen to your whining and irrational behavior. If you want to make an impact, you might need to hire some smart non-union young people who can clearly communicate what you seek to accomplish.

It may be my upbringing. My perspectives have changed over time, but I confess that growing up in Georgia – perhaps the least union-supportive state in the US – may have tinged my opinions somewhat. My school teachers were not unionized. The hometown airline, Delta, was not a union shop. And my friend in high school who worked at a local supermarket was pissed off that he had to pay union dues that got him nothing in return.

I am not a union-basher. Really. I believe that employer-sponsored health care, vacation time, cost-of-living increases and other benefits are rights that working people should have. And I’m grateful to the labor unions for making sure that Americans are guaranteed these benefits by most employers. But I also believe in rewarding people who do a good job, firing people – without question or backlash – who are slow or lazy or inept, and that an organization should rationally and clearly communicate its goals and responsibilities if it wants people to listen to its message. I’m seeing fewer and fewer examples of labor unions that are succeeding in these three areas, and that disappoints me because I want to be more supportive. Unfortunately, some of the only unions that impress me anymore are health care workers’, manufacturers’, construction and farm workers’ unions.

The good news is that one of the neighbors up the street is a union official and often is threatened enough by another union or another organization that her union positions bodyguards on the street to protect her. I suppose after posting this, I’d better cozy up to her.

My bad driving is okay

You’ve heard me complain about people who drive the Toyota Prius. It’s that somewhat uglyish-funkyish car that looks like a wedge of cheese-something on wheels. It’s typically driven by an incompetent foolishly bad driver. In the olden days, Volvo drivers were the bad ones, but then they all moved on to the Prius, which allowed me to buy a Volvo. And to knock people who drive the Prius.

That car. The car that is driving in two lanes 25 mph below the speed limit? Yes, it’s a Prius. The car that pulls into the intersection in front of you causing you to slam on your breaks? It’s a Prius. The car that stops at every intersection, even if no stop sign exists? A Prius, of course. Of course, on the bright side, these bad drivers are saving gasoline and generating their own energy.

And what about that car driving 35 mph over the lane markings, making a U-turn on a residential street and slowing down traffic in front of Rayzor Ranch in Denton, Texas? Ummm, well, that would be me, in a Prius. Indeed, on my last trip to Texas, my rental car was a Toyota Prius. And I took advantage of my ability to be a bad Prius driver while I was doing fieldwork.

I ran a stop sign, drove as slow as a refugee boat on the freeway, and pulled across three lanes of traffic to make a left turn. “Ha ha!” I yelled out. “I’m driving like shit but it’s okay because I’m driving a Prius! You know you’d better stay away from me!” I accidentally missed a turn and backed up in the lane of traffic. I pulled over on a dirt bank. I sat in the middle of the road trying to get over into the right lane. But, again, as I proudly told my coworker, “I’m driving a Prius, so it doesn’t matter how well I drive,”

I’m usually a good driver. I’m fairly assertive, stay in my lane, pay attention to what’s going on around me, stop at crosswalks for pedestrians, parallel park quickly, etc. But I’ve realized if you put me behind the wheel of a Prius, you’ll turn me instantly into a bad driver. Cruising around in a weird sloping donut-shaped car makes Joey’s driving as bad as all of those drivers I berate, not because of their ethnicities or age, but because their brain cells are zapped when they are behind the wheel of a Toyota Prius.

The shape of the car. Is it the weird maneuvering of the incompetent driver or the shape of the car that renders a driver useless? I confess, the Prius has some serious blindspots. Even the rear window has some sort of big slat of car-colored plastic keeping the top part of the glass from being connected to the bottom part of the window.

There’s also a big television-like screen on the dashboard that is addictive to watch. I mean, come on, we all like to stare at televisions or computer screens when we see them. We think we’ll see and awesome touchdown or some shitty Fox “News” story or a crappy You Tube video of the Grape Lady falling in front of the Georgia’s chateau-esque winery. I’m sitting on an airplane right now (on my fourth glass of wine) and there are videos of Japanese art flashing across the screen that I don’t really care to watch, but because it’s all on a screen in the vicinity of where my eyes are generally directed, of course I’m going to look at it. Anyway, that screen on the Prius shows you anything you want to see, from a rear view of your car (“wow, a car cam!”) to little icons of automobiles stacked upon each other generating energy and showing you who much energy is created each time you do something or other that I don’t understand. Or if you touch the screen, you can look at all of the radio stations programmed into the car’s memory and each rectangle on the screen lists the name of the songs currently being played on my “favorite” radio stations. Lady Gaga’s Poker Face is on 99.3, while Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” is on 98.7 and Lady Gaga’s “Telephone” is on 104.2. With all of these choices on a giant touch-screen in front of my face, no wonder I’m swerving off the road at 15 mph in my weird sloping car singing Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” lyrics at the top of my lungs: “Ra ra aha ah ah rama ramama gaga ooh-la-la…”

I got home and drove my little Volvo. I could see out the windows and had a good sense of the size of the car. I stayed within the lanes and drive above the speed limit. I parked it in a snap and saw that my mpg was approximately 19. And I was fine with that.

Censorship up in the air

Dullness. I’ve been pondering why people live in incredibly dull places. Most of America is incredibly dull. Incredibly large Super Target stores with incredibly enormous parking lots. Incredibly boring malls with all of the same stores that are at all of the incredibly boring malls in all of the other incredibly dull places. Incredibly drab people shuffling their incredibly plain children in and out of their SUVs at incredibly uninteresting athletic fields and amusement parks and CVS parking lots. Eating at the Olive Garden and Outback and all of the incredibility blah dining establishments located on the side of the US’ incredibly wide freeways and shuttered shopping centers.

Perhaps because I was half-heartedly watching Up in the Air on my United Airlines flight from Texas – not an American Airlines flight – and hearing the grouchy young woman talking about how she moved to Omaha, Nebraska for the man of her dreams and gave up a job offer in San Francisco. Now he’s broken up with her by text message and George Clooney and the married woman he falls for are trying to make her feel better.

I was watching George Clooney fly to various places in the middle of the country. I was listening to Lady Gaga on my iPod. I saw George Clooney walking with the uptight young woman (“Natalie”) toward the airport and decided it would be interesting to listen in to see how United Airlines could get away with showing this film – a film prominently featuring American Airlines – and how they would “modify” it.

Change is in the air. The modifications are quite amusing, really. As Clooney is showing uptight chick through the security lines, he says something like “Don’t get in line behind families, with children; don’t get behind old people – they have so much metal in their bodies even they don’t know where it is. Get behind Asians – they pack lightly and follow the rules (or something equally inane). And then Natalie says, “That’s racist.” The United Airlines version is “Don’t get in line behind families, with children; don’t get behind old people – they have so much metal in their bodies even they don’t know where it is. Get behind business people – they pack lightly and follow the rules (or something equally inane). And then Natalie says, “That’s racist.” The words 'Business People' are said in a moderately bad imitation of George Clooney's voice.

The United Airlines' film's version of the American Airlines check-in counter is a weird zoomed in picture of faces only. The airplanes are blurry and unrecognizable as being part of a competitor’s fleet. The Admiral Club door is not shown. The logo is not shown anywhere. The best line for us geeky Premier Executive 100,000 Mile Flyers is when Clooney is telling Natalie that certain benefits are reserved for people with Executive status, dubbing in a uniquely (and awkward) United Airlines term in place of the “Platinum” word.

Of course, my childish side enjoys all of the poor-quality voiceovers with the following approximations:

· Fuck you=Go off

· Think of me as a version of you with a vagina = Think of me as a version of you with _____

· Fuck off you fucking asshole = Bug off you unkind person

· You’re an asshole= Don’t be an ass

And plenty of others.

It makes me wonder what the passengers on American Airlines flights are hearing and seeing when they watch Up in the Air on their flights. It also makes me wonder what I’ve missed in all of the other films I’ve seen on airplanes: those that I’ve seen for the first time up in the air. Has my movie world really been censored and modified all along, so I’m only seeing a knockoff of the original without any of the racist, foul cleverness or mindboggling product placement?

Tired of this movie soundtrack. I’ve switched my headset to another channel. I see the movie continue to play on the screen ahead of me and the one across the aisle, and the one over my head. Instead I listen to the pilots talk to the air traffic controllers and hear that my pilot is instructed to contact Emerson, wherever that may be. A Sun Country Airlines pilot asks if he may increase altitude. A Delta pilot asks if she may increase altitude. The air traffic controller tells them both to wait eight minutes until the bumps smooth out. Continental and Southwest pilots report back on their moderate light chops.

It’s better to watch the film this way.

Thank you waitress, now go away

I missed breakfast in my hotel by six minutes, so I hopped in the car and started driving through the suburban hell known as Glendale, Arizona. I passed a Chili’s and an Olive Garden, a Starbucks and a Swensens’. I drove by a Fat Burger and a Subway, and then saw a parking lot full of cars that old people drive – Buicks, Pontiacs, Saturns and Toyotas – and realized I had arrived at my destination. The sign in front announced “The Best Breakfasts in town” and I knew it was a reliable chain, where I had eaten lunch in Orange County only a couple of weeks earlier. A young woman with a baseball cap and her hair pulled back in such a way as to make her look a bit like a gawky girl who would talk about band camp greeted me outside the front door and walked into the restaurant with me, asking if I was a party of two.

“Nope. Only one for breakfast,” I replied.

She acknowledged her miscount and asked, “Booth or a table?”

I followed her into the front dining room, a dark high-ceiling room with a distinctly fake French motif and accepted the booth she offered. My waitress would be right with me, I understood.

I opened the menu and looked over the tantalizing cholesterol- and syrup-filled breakfast items. French toast filled with mascarpone and berries. Omelettes with mushrooms and cheeses described as much more than omelettes with mushrooms and cheeses. Pancakes with lemon…

Her voice interrupted my perusal of the offerings. “Oh, you. Good morning. Maybe you would like a cappuccino or white mocha cocoa latte or espresso whip? We have so many choices.” It was a voice that would have been attached to a character on a Saturday Night Live skit mocking a bossy, wacky Asian woman fresh off the boat (Or maybe I’m thinking of Ms. Swan from Mad TV?). I looked up and saw an eager grin on a thin 64-year old former snow-shoveling Gemini Korean woman who likes the winter weather in Phoenix, who has a sister who used to live in Cincinnati, who argues a bit with her coworker, sports L'Oreal Excellence 4BR Dark Burgundy Brown hair color, and who talks a lot to all of her customers, including the group of 60-something women visiting from Minnesota, one of whom offered her their camera so she could take their photo, and one of whom complimented her on her hair color after she told a long story about her hair, and how she saves $65 that she would spend at a salon by coloring her hair herself and it does a good job of hiding the gray and adds a splash of maroon. But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. I smiled and told her I’d stick to water and returned to my menu. ….Pancakes with lemon curd and eggs, oatmeal..

My waitress returned promptly. “Do you know what you want? We have many choices. Such a good menu!”

“I’ll have the French toast, with my eggs scrambled.”

She gave me warm thank yous and friendly wishes and wandered away with my order written on her pad.

I read over some of my maps and documents scatted across my small breakfast table and looked around the dining room. I saw the waitress delivering coffee to the only other men in the room and then giggling and walking away with her coffee pot. She then brought me my orange juice.

“Here is your orange juice. Such a nice day today, huh? So different from when I was growing up in Korea. I have to shovel snow – oh so much – all the winter and here is so beautiful every day.”
“Oh yes,” I obliged her. “I live in San Francisco and it’s been a little cool and gloomy lately, but this is great. I was in Ohio last weekend and it was so cold and snowy.”

“Oh yes. So nice. My sister used to live in Cincinnati and she have to shovel snow and it so cold all the time. I don’t like that. She don’t like that either. She left and moved away to another place. Here is so nice, but summer get very hot. But I like.” She laughed and told me a few more things about the weather before wandering away.

I watched her move from table to table taking orders and delivering food. She spent perhaps 10 minutes chatting with a group of eight middle-age women. She told them they were so pretty and looked like they were having a nice time together. They told her they were visiting from Minnesota. She talked about the weather and they talked about the weather. One of the women told her how much she liked her hair color. The waitress told the woman that she uses L'Oreal Excellence 4BR Dark Burgundy Brown. The woman told her it was a beautiful shade. The waitress said it was good at hiding the gray and that it also saved her $65 by doing it herself instead of going to the salon. The other women at the table laughed and volunteered their haircolors. The waitress asked if they wanted her to take a photo of them (one woman had her camera out). They all moved around the table and smiled and let her take their photo. They exchanged many other pleasantries and talked about their children.

Meanwhile, I caught a glimpse of the other waitress behind the coffeemaker. It was like watching a jealous ninth grader plotting against the popular JV cheerleading captain. The other waitress, a white woman with glasses and a mousy brown ponytail, poured decaffeinated coffee from the orange-rimmed glass carafe into two brown mugs, but she looked up and watched the Korean waitress interact with the women from Minnesota. Her eyes narrowed and her nostrils flared as she watched the Korean waitress work the crowd to rake in tips the pony tailed woman could only dream of. In her mind she was thinking, “That old Korean hussy needs to be poisoned. She needs to be taught a lesson and then move on away from the best breakfast in Phoenix. I used to be the popular one and I got all of the tips. I’m younger and prettier than she is. She talks about her flaws and somehow she charms the clients. How does that happen?”

My waitress came back and delivered my meal. “Here it is, your yummy breakfast. You will enjoy so much. Do you want some more jam? Some more syrup? Maybe some ketchup? Oh, I bet you want hot sauce? “

“Oh no, I‘m fine,” I replied.

“Okay. She giggled. “You know, I’m 64. Can you believe it? I have so much energy and can keep working.” She then told me about “those ladies over there visiting from Minnesota” and how they complimented her on hair color and how she told them she “uses L’Oreal hair color and it makes it so nice that you can’t see her gray hair and they were all comparing colors and it was so much fun.” Then she told me how much she loved her job and how much fun it is to talk to the friendly people from Phoenix and everywhere.

I thanked her again and started eating my food.

After 10 minutes of eating and contemplating the lack of personal/private space in this massive restaurant, the waitress returned.

“Somebody just asked me if it’s my birthday,” she announced. “Oh no!” She laughed for a few seconds. “My birthday is in June.”

I think she told me the date, but I don’t recall.

She continued. “Maybe I seem happy like it is my birthday, but I am always so happy.”

“Or maybe it’s because you’re telling everyone your age.” I smiled. “Happy Birthday in June.”

She laughed, like it was the best joke she’d heard all morning. “Thank you,” she laughed again. “In June.”

While she was talking to me, I saw the jealous waitress sneak out from behind the
waitress station and refill some empty coffee cups at the table where the only other two men in the dining room were seated. Perhaps she was puffing flirtatious air at the men to stave off the Korean waitresses’ charms.

I finished my breakfast and waited several minutes for the check to arrive. I looked around and saw my waitress was busy conversing with all of the other guests at the tables in her serving area. Finally she brought me the check, we exchanged a few more pleasantries, I left her a 20% tip, and I stood up and walked to the front door. I was thanked three times by wait staff I hadn’t interacted with during my experience in the restaurant, and then shown out by the slightly gawky baseball cap-sporting young woman who greeted me when I arrived.

I settled into my rental car – a Toyota Camry – with exceptionally functional brakes, and drove to my first meeting of the day, somehow more prepared to interact with the client than I sometimes am.

Bulky items on transit (or passive aggressive ways to annoy the bad people)

I just took a break from my work. I’m sitting on a plane watching a dreary Australian movie about a single father trying to raise his two sons after his wife dies. Everything runs amok and I’m sure that eventually the nice blonde young woman will help him get it together. I’m glad that I didn’t see this film in a theatre, or waste a Netflix selection on it.

I’m on my way home from Honolulu where I have been riding buses and driving all around Oahu to try to figure out what needs to be done to make the buses work more smoothly, to make it easier to get from one place to another, and to keep it one of the best used transit systems in the United States.

Among the many challenges facing TheBus is how the agency deals with parcels and baggage and bicycles and strollers and surfboards and wheelchairs and Segways and scooters. They have a better set of policies than most transit agencies – something I’m learning because I’m also leading a national research study about how transit agencies deal with all of these large things on their buses and their trains. And although I am trying to take a purely academic look at the policies in place, I find myself wanting to write my own research report about how much parcels and baggage and bicycles and other large items on buses and trains bug the crap out of me – if they’re not mine.

My transit behavior peeves are as follows:

The backpack, usually sported by an overweight young woman or a stringy old white woman. They get on the train and turn around and bang their backpack into my head or my back or my arm. So I push against their backpack to make the experience as unpleasant as possible. I figure it is already unpleasant for me, why not roll with it and try my best to knock them off their feet? Take off your backpack and put in on the floor between your legs: you’ll take a load off your back, you’ll know if someone grabs for it, and you won’t be a pain in my ass.

The oversize handbag or shoulder bag, usually over the shoulder of a clueless woman or a old gay man. Just like the backpack person, the person with the shoulder bag assumes that if they twist their shoulder bag to the rear, it will be out of their way. But these people are very stupid, because they end up with their bag more in the way because I am secretly twisting it back in their direction, so it not only strains their shoulders but they get the end of their own bag digging into their side. Unlike the space-hogging knapsack users who stand their ground, usually these people move away from me to get out of the impossibly tight situation I’ve created for them.

The bicycle on the train, usually brought on board by a skinny white guy with strange body hair or a lean woman with a sour smell. He or she will park the bike right in the middle of all of the other riders, making us navigate around them to get off the vehicle. I understand there is nowhere else to store your bike on the vehicle, SO WHY BRING YOUR DAMN BIKE ON THE VEHICLE? Just bike all the way to your destination. Unlike backpacks or handbags, bike owners are very possessive of their two-wheeled ride, so they seem to stand aside with one hand on the bike frame and guard their wheels. The best strategy I’ve been able to come up with is to step close to the bike (pretending I have no other room and am being pushed there by other passengers) so that my shoe actually pushes against the wheel of the bike (or better yet, the rim of the bike). The bike owner thinks I’m trying to balance as their bike gets pushed further and further into the corner). Bike owners hate it!

Strollers on transit are a whole different story. About half the time, the stroller user is the bad person; the other half of the time, it’s the other passengers on the bus who are the bad ones. First, let me say that I blame the stroller manufacturers who are building SUV-sized strollers for extra fat American babies who drink Coke in their bottles and eat heaps of beefy mac by age 1. The parents go out and buy these ugly, contorted looking strollers because they are modern and new and everyone else has them. And then, they expect to bring these strollers with them when they ride the bus? Hello? Whatever happened to those umbrella fold-up strollers that everyone had in the 80s. The only people you now see using those are young women in low-income neighborhoods. Why? Because their cheap and those young women aren’t about to waste their money on a six-foot high stroller so their baby can get a spring-loaded upright view of the world. Those women also know how to ride transit: take your baby out of the stroller and fold it up. It’s usually the weekend riders who don’t have the sense to leave the ultra-deluxe stroller – the one that’s perfect for walks around the neighborhood because you can hold all of the baby’s needs as well as six bags of groceries from Whole Foods – at home and bring the umbrella stroller along for the ride. And people with double-decker twin strollers: you are not meant to ride transit.

Luggage is also a different story. As one who takes luggage on buses and trains, I move all the way into a seat and put whatever I’m schlepping on my lap. Most people with luggage are okay in my book. I think they realize they are carting around giant fabric-coated rectangles on wheels and they are best kept out of everyone’s way.

Miscellaneous parcels. I’ve talked about these from time to time. They range from a man in a wheelchair carrying a terrarium full of mice to hundreds of small Chinese women preceded by pink plastic grocery bags full of leaves and roots pushing their way in front of me on the train. Most parcels are comic relief. The old man with the grocery cart gives me an opportunity to marvel at his purchases and wonder how he feels when he buys Depends. I get to look at the boxes wrapped in brown paper with Feliz Navidad stickers and “ECUADOR” scribbled all over, wrapped lovingly and laboriously, if not improperly, only to be rejected by USPS or UPS staff. I watch the man with the brooms and the buckets and the cleaning solutions headed out to a job somewhere.

Many things are prohibited on the buses in Honolulu. Including poop.

I hope the research study finds some good solutions to address all of these problems, which are exacerbated with the overcrowding that transit agencies are experiencing as they slash bus routes due to diminished funding. I’m optimistic that some solutions can arise to make it easier for parents to bring strollers into the subway and on to the bus without being squeezed out. And I hope that people continue to bring interesting things on board buses and trains so I will have something else to write about. And complain about.

Unsuitable for eating

I am told I used to be a good cook, but I no longer am one. That is what happens when you are in a relationship: you are not told that you are a good cook. You are told that you are not a good cook.

My specialties of yesteryear have been thwarted on a few fronts. First, I think I forgot how to cook. I don’t do it enough. Second, the last few years have been the busiest of my life and I’ve found less time to cook that the carefree days of my youth. Third, I used to make lots of chicken dishes, and lots of easy turkey things. I stopped being a vegetarian several years ago and then started eating beef and pork during a visit to Argentina. I decided to abandon red meat-free diet so I could be less fussy, blend in, be invited to more dinner parties and begin to cook a more interesting variety of things. But when my spouse came along, I abandoned my omnivorous desirous maximus diet with regard to cooking. I harbor no resentment – really –about not eating these things at home, but am at a loss to cook seafood and vegetarian options. Fourth, I tend to do better sometimes cooking things with an interesting ethnic flair, but that’s not in style anymore. I don’t know where to turn.

Baked. Of course I love to bake things. But baking results in things that are often unhealthy. And nutritional value indeed has some value.

One of the first dishes I created as a child was a recipe I called healthy potatoes. I served healthy potatoes #1, about which I can recall only that potatoes were an ingredient, among other things. I don’t recall whether it was really healthy or not, but I left on the potato skins which was the inspiration for the recipe’s moniker. The next time I made dinner, I made Healthy Potatoes #2. I couldn’t remember what I had put in Healthy Potatoes #1, so I created it as the next in a series that culminated a couple of years later with Healthy Potatoes #8, piping and waiting on the stovetop when my mother returned home with my leotard-dressed sister, post intermediate gymnastics class. I have some recollection that it may have included basil or another herb, because our family was growing herbs by then and I thought it was elegant to cook with herbs. Nowadays, I still threaten my family that I will make dinner and include a nice side dish: Healthy Potatoes #9.

All of these tuber compilations were originally inspired by the children’s cookbook my sister and I had. We made dark Spanish rice and catsup-clad meatloaf and other things that kids can make with minimal adult supervision when using a Betty Cocker cookbook for kids. I still remember my immense pride at uncovering and serving a plate of Spanish Rice. The wonder that one could measure white grainy bits into a pot with a mix of spices and other things, and that it would turn out to be a colorfully seasoned one-pot side dish that I served to my parents as a main dish.

My sister and I would often “play” restaurant, setting up a table and making a menu using chalk on a small chalkboard tablet like the ones the swishy waiters would use to tell us about the menu at any of Atlanta’s Pleasant Peasant-owned restaurants. We would talk about the special toasts of the evening and the chutney, featuring Callaway Gardens jam, and other seemingly gourmet delicacies that we crafted from the jars of condiments and cheeses and leftovers in the refrigerator. My parents, or sometimes my uncle, or perhaps a friend of my parents graciously put up with the alacrity of two children mimicking everything they’d ever learned by eating out.

Nowadays, I try to serve with a bit more of an understated effort, but one that is still likely to impress anyone whose usual dining adventures are conducted at dim bistros or omnipresent chain eateries. I have been baking gruyere-filled gougeres that look perfect on a common dining plate. I’ve made a couple of rounds of pickled mini carrots (not mini carrots ala Safeway: we’re talking about tiny whole organic carrots with a length of four or five inches and a diameter of 1/3^rd of an inch), lightly spiced and brined, and served on a perfectly rectangular small linen serving dish from Heath Ceramics. A little fussy, but elegant in that “I live in a remodeled house in Northern California with a white kitchen and a view, and I only serve on ceramics designed by Edith Heath.” After having my cookbooks locked away, I’m getting back to Marlene Sorosky’s easy and flavor-filled recipes: always delicious even in my hastiest execution (though I made some marinated seafood kabobs that flopped miserably when the grill refused to light, forcing me to finish them under the broiler with a loss of crispness – and flavor.). A recent successful ginger apple cream cake reconfirmed by admiration for her recipes. Pre-Christmas, I made a great pot of Dal Makhani and some nearly as authentic Tandoori Salmon and Chicken, which were not as successfully re-created as part of my Christmas Eve Indian food cooking extravaganza, where the Dal was heavy and the Bengan Bartha too lemony and oily. Although the Indian food may not have been fit for a persnickety Vishnu, the Hummingbird Cake that was crafted the same weekend, thanks for Paula Deen’s recipe and some crafty cake cutting, was a bakery success and clearly okay for the southerners in attendance. Perhaps not as good, nor as beautiful, as the vanilla and framboise macarons that I baked the following week, but still lip smacking.

My goal is to keep cooking both premeditated dishes (those which require me to go to the supermarket and buy the ingredients in advance) and work to improve my cooking with whatever I can find in the house, without resorting to spaghetti & corn or other sad courses.

I’m getting better. I’m also learning that I can do a better job when I concentrate and stop writing about how bad I'm doing.

Why have I been AWOL?

I couldn’t get it together over the last several months to complain about anything in writing because I was complaining so much about everything and everyone verbally. It takes a lot of effort to get stressed out about all of the annoying things in the world and to internalize and vocalize all of that annoyance. I’m usually pretty good as spurting out my annoyances on Splenda Sucks, but I’ve realized even I have limits.

We completed a house remodel. After all the couch surfing and even finding ourselves in a hotel for one desperate night, we cleared out the four storage units and paid off a high-priced mover and schlepped all of our stuff into our house.

I had a vision that the day I moved back into my house, I would be running around turning on faucets, flicking light switches, testing the stove flames and lying on the floor. I imagined myself giddy with excitement, gliding from room to room like the people on Extreme Makeover Home Edition, saying “Oh my God!!” every time I entered a room. I would take a deep breath and look around at the pictures on the wall, the house fully furnished. “Come here! Look at this!” I would scream in my dreams, beckoning Brad to see how the drawers opened and closed as smoothly and gently as a rocket docking with a spaceship in slow motion. “Wow! Look at all this hot water!” I would exclaim. “The paint job is amazing!!!” That was my vision.

The reality is very different. I saw every bit of construction, every fixture going in, and every cost overrun that accompanied anything that we did. For days and days, we moved things out of storage units and my friend Mark’s attic. We looked at things that had been carefully wrapped in plasticky bubbles and locked away for a year, only to pull them out of their storage spots and peer down upon them with disdain: how am I going to deal with this thing? This sofa looks like ass. This bookshelf looks old and scratched. This looks ugly. This looks uglier. And so, a few days later, after all of those precious items had been dragged to Goodwill or, in many cases, taken to the dump, I looked around at the emptiness and wondered how the hell we were going to furnish our new house.

Person after person would ask me, “How’s your house? You must be thrilled that it’s all done.”

I would always smile. “Oh, gosh. It’s great. But we still have a few punch list items that need to be dealt with.” I laughed, trying hard to be nonchalant. “Just minor things, of course.”

And then I would go home. I would look around and see piles of things that belonged in places, but didn’t know what those places would be. I would see imperfectly tiled walls, wallboards with unsightly seams, floors that popped, unpainted surfaces, an old front door.

Bit by bit, the contractors made minor progress on the punch list. The new front door arrived, the tile was fixed, the wallboards caulked. But moving into an unfinished house, knowing the contractor could pop by at any time to work on this or that, made me anxious. I was grouchy and pissy. And I wasn’t alone.

So I thought it best to spare you my wrath until I got my groove back. And now, I think, maybe I have. The house is coming together, many visitors have dropped by, and furnishings and pictures are appearing here and there. Slowly, but surely, I’m discovering other things about which I can complain: things that can find their way to Splenda Sucks.

2010: The hiatus is over

It's been a long, long year. It sucked. And there was not much time to rant and rave about all of the things that sucked.

My apologies for blowing you off the last few months, but I moved into my remodeled house and worked too hard at the same time.

I'm chilling out now and will have plenty more to complain about shortly. Stay tuned. And Happy New Year.

We were at 17

I had a relaxing flight from San Francisco to Dallas this afternoon. An open seat to my left in United’s Economy Plus section; I half-watched a movie while I worked; I listened to music for a while and made sure to avoid that Public Works Department Show starring Amy Poehler which they showed after the movie, because it’s annoying and reminds me too much of my real job. Tomorrow I fly back on the cheapest flight possible, which as usual, is on the worst airline possible: US Airways. Hopefully things will go smoothly and the air conditioning will work properly, which it did not on my flight from Charlotte to SFO last week. Hopefully there will actually be air vents on the plane, unlike the junky old US Airways flight I took from Phoenix to Houston a few weeks ago, which was most unpleasant as I fanned myself with my barf bag.

Prior to boarding my flight in San Francisco, I was working in a carrel in the Red Carpet Club – United Airlines’ version of a private waiting room with snacks, magazines, Wi-Fi, TVs and workspace. And as I was working I heard a loud man’s voice approach. “But you’re not listening. We were going at 17%.” And then the voice passed as promptly as it came. I continued clicking on my computer keyboard and then heard the same voice even louder approaching me. “Swell. Scott is an asshole. You need to invest $10 million of your own money in shares to make this work. That’s what I was saying.” I stood up to look at the body from which this voice boomed. It was a 50-year old guy wearing old man’s jeans, with dark hair and some gray, wire frame glasses and, of course, a mobile phone in his hand. He didn’t see me and I sat back down in the Herman Miller chair that’s a twin to the one I have at work.

He was marching around in the Red Carpet Lounge business center talking at top volume – yes, probably a New Yorker – having a private business conversation about getting screwed over by some deal that wasn’t going to go through.

I got pissy at first. Then I was struck with evil gleeful thoughts that I actually heard myself muttering aloud. Every time he’d pass, oblivious to the fact there were other people all around him working in the carrels, I’d hear his agitated pleas into the phone “We need to tell them this is some serious stuff” and I’d whisper, “I hope his business deal fails. What a jerk.” A few minutes later, talking as if he were ordering a team of commandos scattering about on the other end of the phone line to make way for his booming voice: “Tell them they need to make 17 work. That’s what we agreed to.” And I’d grumble: “Ha, ha. Hope you only get 12%.” He passed by over and over again, having one of those conversations on his phone that I’ve only seen on television shows where mass murderers are on the phone yelling at somebody to help them cover their tracks: pacing, emotional and making a racket.

The next time he came by, I stood up, walked into the aisle where he was pacing and stared at him. “Yeah, but that’s 17%! No, there are no showers in this lounge!” he roared and then saw me giving him the evil eye. He gave me a look of disgust and walked to the back of the club. I didn’t see him again.

Silence at last. Though now I overheard a conversation in another carrel that included “delivering 18 airbus planes in the next six months before the two really start to merge.” I figured he was a Continental Airlines executive planning to take over United Airlines. I doubt they could accomplish that in six months anyway. He spoke at a normal volume and wasn’t having a panic attack so I lost interest and typed an email to my coworker. Just then I smelled cigarette smoke. Do you remember the last time you smelled cigarette smoke? Years? In an airport? I stood up and saw smoke coming from the carrel two down from mine and saw a bewildered Japanese man standing behind the carrel looking around. I walked right over the man and only then realized he wasn’t the offender. The carrel in front of him had another Japanese man wearing a baseball cap and jacket puffing away on a cigarette and using one of the styrofoam cereal bowls from the breakfast bar as his ashtray.

I said to the man, “You cannot smoke.”

He looked at me and said, “Oh? Really?”

And I said “You cannot smoke anywhere in the airport.” Then I harrumphed and turned away as he was mashing his fag into the ash-covered, butt-marked bowl.

Do I have to be the safety and good behavior monitor in the United Red Carpet Club? No smoking. No shouting. Who cares about your $10 Million deal? I am getting cranky so I will stop here.

Blueberries thrill me

See what I picked in New Hampshire.

Fat people’s supermarket and skinny people’s supermarket

In San Francisco, two supermarkets stand at opposite corners, along Folsom Street at 14th Street. One of these supermarkets has the fattest clientele in San Francisco; the other has the skinniest clientele.

Foods Co. I used to shop at Foods Co from time to time. This is a store owned by Cincinnati-based Kroger, which also operated San Francisco’s depressing Bell Markets and Cala Foods until most of them were shuttered in the last two years. I once ran into someone I knew at Foods Co who said to me, “Wow. You do ghetto shopping too?”

The front parking lot of Foods Co is littered with cola cans, pork rinds bags and broken grocery carts tucked between Cadillacs, small Hyundais, Toyotas and small trucks. The sidewalks around the parking lot are covered with blankets and pigeons and a handful of homeless men with grocery carts, suitcases, bushels, and bags. The sidewalks have never been swept and are only washed by San Francisco’s wintertime rain showers.

What I describe may sound like an upsetting science fiction film, but turn and face the store and you’ll see the newly added aluminum siding and false façade enhancements that make the store appear to be a welcoming, sprawling suburban-style grocery. Walk through the glass doors, past the two security guards talking about their kids in prison or their cousin who was shot and take a whiff of the produce. The remodeled store is characterized by its concrete floors and bag-it-yourself checkouts, just like they had at Cub Foods when I was a child in Atlanta.

Foods Co has an amazing display of produce. Although some bins are filled with remainder plums, squished and oozing, most of the produce department is characterized by bins of red mangos, stacks of key limes, piles of pineapple, tomatillos, jicama, papayas, watermelons, yellow melons, green melons and bittermelon – all of the produce that the average white person doesn’t eat. All of the subsequent aisles are bursting with Kroger brand chips and cereal and frozen potatoes and an otherwise good supermarket selection of brand-name boxed and jarred and bagged products, with their colorful labels competing for space on the warehouse-style supermarket’s shelves. The cheese aisle is filled with 20 kinds of American cheese, Velveeta, cotija and other Mexican cheeses. The chilled drink aisle has the usual orange juice cartons, along with jugs of brightly colored fruit-flavored drinks, horchata, Sunny Delight, chocolate milk, strawberry milk, banana milk, and even more of corn syrup-packed fruit nectars.

I wandered into Foods Co Friday to buy some rum, limes, and ingredients for guacamole. All of the liquor is displayed on shelves behind lock and key up at the front of the store, with signs glued to the screen directing patrons to request alcoholic beverages from the cashier, just to make the check-out process take even longer for the poor souls waiting in line behind the wino redeeming food stamps. Fortunately for me, I found the tequila and rum cabinet had been left unlocked, so I pried open the door and dug through all of the fruit-flavored store brand rums to find a basic bottle of Bacardi. Then I marched over to the produce department to grab limes and tomatoes and onions, before heading to the back of the store for Perrier and chips. And when I returned to the front of the store to go to the checkout, I was hit with a clusterfuck of shoppers waiting to check out, no lane with fewer than 10 patrons, and the express lanes reaching halfway to the back of the store. It was as if the disarray from the front parking lot had been transported inside. I was an American visiting a supermarket in the USSR trying to figure out to which of the day-long lines I would assign myself. I stood in one for a while and looked around all of the people. The enormous woman in the motorized wheelchair buying six plastic three-gallon tubs of Kreem Tastee Neapolitan Ice Cream, potato salad, ground beef and lots and lots of chips. She seemed to know all of the other plus size patrons and was talking about how she loved her ice cream. I did exactly what large people do not like less large people to do when we are in the supermarket: I scanned their grocery carts. Jumbo hunks of cheese, piles of pasta, gallons of gloopy colorful drinks, flats of chicken thighs, packages of ham and bologna, large squeezable jars of mayonnaise, pre-made roasted chicken, and cola. Lots of cola. And dusty Mexican cookies and garbage can-sized bags of fun size candies (which I really consider to be sad size because they are so small, individually). This mass of humanity . And their carts filled and their food stamps ready for their purchases.

I switched to another line which only had three carts in front of me, not realizing that it was an express lane. I finally realized it was an express lane when the checker on my lane made an announcement over the store’s scratchy intercom system that lane 8 was limited to 15 items or less. Here, I would be negligent if I left out some of the ethnicities involves, because it was indeed a Black woman with incredibly long eyelashes and meticulously straightened hair behind the cash register who looked at the Chinese woman whose ramen noodle purchase would have exceeded the express lane’s limitations by a factor of 8. The Chinese woman took out her wallet and handed a $10 bill to each of her children and they went about dividing up the purchases to make them look smaller (maybe 30 items per person?) and each took a separate turn passing by the cash register. I sighed loudly about ten times, but my white man sighs were nothing compared to the look of a Black woman who is angry at a Chinese woman.

I finally made my purchase, put my items in a “green” bag I’d brought along, and walked out of the store. Feeling skinny and rattled and grateful not to be on welfare.

Which logo do you like better?

Across the street. Rainbow Grocery is a large supermarket, and is operated as a worker’s cooperative. The store is open almost every day of the year, excepting a few holidays, including Labor Day and Gay Pride Day. The store has three parking lots, one of which is shaded and partly sheltered, while others surround the store, offering car access from three different streets. Unlike the Foods Co logo, which Brad suggested was designed by the kid of a middle manager in Cincinnati, Rainbow Grocery has a lovingly designed image and hand-painted logo on the exterior of the store. The parking lots are clean and filled Subarus, old Volvos, VWs, Mini Coopers and SMART Cars, along with dozens of bicycles chained to the outside of the store. A security guard stands in the lot and directs people to their parking space, while animal rescue and recycling representatives solicit customers as they enter or exit the store.

Inside, the store feels green: the lights are bit dim, the shelves are made of wood, and the smell is unmistakably health food. A counter for recycling and community announcements, ATMs, and other things I’ve never given much attention to stand at the front of the store. Once you pass through the gate, you’re immediately in the bulk foods section, with a u-shaped aisle of spices and teas, followed by another with nuts, grains and legumes. The shoppers go about scooping small amounts of juniper berries or organic bay leaves into paper sacks and writing the product code on them. Some people fill their own spice sacks or jars they brought from home.


The produce department in the back of the store is preceded by a chilled dried fruit aisle, with beautiful dried blueberries selling for more than all of the ramen noodles at Foods Co. Behind the dried fruit are locally farmed apples, berries, peaches and corn. There are kales and chards of many colors and bundles of organic carrots in red, purple white, and of course, orange hues.
Just past the produce department is a busy little cheese department with samples of raw sheep’s milk cheese from Ecuador and blocks and block of coffee-crusted Edam and olive-infused cheddar. The rest of the store is mostly aisles of packaged health foods and alternative products designed to complete directly with the foods being sold across the street at Foods Co. And of course there are a couple of aisles of vitamins and herbal supplements and shampoos without sodium lauryl sulfate.

Walking into Rainbow a couple of days ago, our goal was to find something for dinner. I headed to the soup aisle and found a can of natural non-pureed split pea soup. I also gathered a few yellow pluots, while Brad picked up a couple of orange tomatoes and a carton of wildberry kefir. I snatched a box of unsweetened almond milk to go with the cereal we had back at home and Brad pulled a box of organic saltines from the shelf.

It was not especially busy at the front of the store, but on certain days of the month, the store is a mob scene, with hippies who steal telephone books from Foods Co scrambling to redeem their “20% off your entire purchase” coupons. I have not experienced that crush load, but Brad found it on a recent expedition and walked out, giving up on some fresh cheese and breads to eat Foods Co garden burgers with me. Tonight, it was mellow, with space between the patchouli-scented beings who worked and shopped at the store. I looked at all of the employees and saw a cast of malnourishment: thin lanky bodies made to look more durable with big heads of curly hair. Women with long multicolored braids, their breasts swaddled in flowing sheer robes, making them appear larger than the stick figures they were. Although the Foods Co shoppers are primarily non-white, the Rainbow shoppers are mostly white, but I honed in on a few skinny ashen Latino children with gay parents and a Black family with dreadlocked children analyzing a wrapped package of Newman’s Own version of Oreos.

Rainbow’s strategy is to sell small lots of expensive high-quality food, so people who shop there will have very little to eat when they get home and will come back to the store tomorrow just as skinny as they were yesterday, withered but flexible from hot tubs and yoga and herbs to keep them tiny. As I took my change back from the double-pierced young cashier, I dropped the few measly pennies into my pocket and strutted out, hungrier than when I had arrived, but with a satchel of greens and healthy crackers and peas in a can that would provide my basic nourishment until I would have to return with my oversized body for more food the next day.

As I walked past a cashier with no visible signs of a butt and a young woman as pale as two day old boiled quinoa, I felt my obese self craving the squalor and brightly packaged foods of Foods Co, where a donut would surely be cooked in Crisco rather than cultured out of wheatless grains. I did not know where I belonged.

To be the skinniest person at Foods Co or the fattest person at Rainbow?

Sleeping in other people's beds

Living in California, I have known many people who are surfers. In Southern California, they pull on their swimsuits, jump in the van and launch down to a swath of ocean known for its rideable waves. In Northern California, they ease their bodies into their chilled, damp wetsuits and head to Pacifica or Ocean Beach to lollygag in the fog until they sense a big wave’s coming to carry them to shore.

Many people who are not water surfers are web surfers, taking an occasional peek at You Tube or eBay, or reading those witty random blogs full of other people’s bitter complaints.

My calling appears to have been for neither the wet nor the electronic: instead I am a couch surfer. Since November 2008, I have not lived in my own home. I have lived in friends’ apartments, houses, studios and guest bedrooms. Most of that time was spent in my friend Mike’s place, and Brad and I paid rent to make it happen, sharing a studio – charming, but nevertheless, a studio – to live under three young strapping 20-somethings who entertained themselves with karaoke and barbecues.

When you stay in someone else’s house for so long, you learn some things about them, perhaps things that you already know, but things that nevertheless make an impression on you because it is an indication that their life is different from yours.

Mike’s place is beautiful, with elegant finishes and top designer furnishings. But Mike obviously likes to sleep on a very firm mattress, doesn’t mind having small spaces for storage, and has no issues with reaching under his sink to plug in the garbage disposal when he wants to use it. We loved Mike’s beautiful oven; lush, fruit-filled garden; built in flat screen television, attractive paints and tiles and rugs. But it was not home: we like much softer mattresses, so I ran off to Ross to buy a clearance memory foam pad to soften the surface for us.

Our next couch surfing experience was furnished by Jeanna and Ale. They have a newly remodeled, rebuilt house with a funny dog to take care of.

Being with a dog was a completely foreign thing to me, but my week-and-a-half with Lola was a success. She has many really good qualities. She’s stubborn, sentimental, obedient on a walk, pays no attention to you in the house, can be tricked by the doorbell, sleeps a lot, She also sighs a lot, snores, throws up when she’s upset and will wait for hours to eat her food if no one is there to watch her eat. She seems miserable inside the house and like a lioness when she’s outside. She could care less about most other dogs that run up to sniff her butt, but she’ll stay by your side when she’s off her leash. What I like about her is that she seems a little depressed. Hers is a down in the dumps depression: she goes around with the weight of the world on her shoulders and not getting what she wants out of it. She’s a dog who behaves like a person.

I suppose I’ve gotten sidetracked with Lola, but the house itself is mostly black and steel and plywood inside, with an assortment of rustic Heath tiles in kitchen and bath and an amazing glowy red bathroom coated in water-resistant epoxy. It’s an interesting and beautiful house filled with unusual art and a stellar collection of taxidermy, which intrigues me. But they shower, use the toilet and the bidet everyday in a big glass bathroom showing off their naked bodies and all of their bodily functions to the neighbors. No trip to Ross would allow me to adapt their way of living to our bathroom shyness, so we showered downstairs in the guest bathroom surrounded by snappy white and red Heath tiles.

The next house was Mark’s Bernal Heights Edwardian, a terrific pad with a beautiful garden that he remodeled and re-landscaped himself several years ago. It was also a dog sitting stint.
This dog, Cooper was more dog-like than Lola, but like Lola, I also perceive him to have some issues. Cooper is staunchly loyal to his master, Mark, and will fret if Mark is out of site, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of Mark wherever he may be. He adapted easy to us, but is clearly a one-owner dog: if Cooper is faced with a choice of two directions to travel, he will go wherever Mark goes, even if it’s the less exciting of the two directions. With two of us going in two directions… poor Cooper.

Whereas Lola will avoid making eye contact, Cooper will study your face and offer a host of weird expressions, like he’s trying to become like you. If you’re smiling, Cooper will smile and jump up to hug you. If you look angry or sad, Cooper will tilt his head to the side as if trying to figure out what he can do to improve your mood, waiting for a smile to crack so he can dash over and share the joke with you. He’s fiercely obedient and will gleefully show his skills at high jump, high five, rolling over, and spinning in the air, climbing a tree, and other feats best undertaken by a dog.

Again, walking a dog was a new routine for me, but the house also had a few things to adapt to, mostly related to Cooper. Mark’s home has gorgeous Douglas fir floors and a terrific kitchen with an old oven and a very modern centerpiece sink that’s set forward between his butcher block countertops. His second story is a bewildering array of storage rooms and guest rooms and an office. And everywhere you go, Cooper is there. Again, no Ross purchase could have helped me adapt to Mark’s living experience, with the furry and loving paws of Cooper tugging my blankets every morning at 6:15, indicating he’s ready for food. Or Cooper’s reaction to some of the most basic actions I did, like closing the back door (he would run to the front, excited to go for a walk) or putting on my jacket (he would run to the back deck waiting for a treat and to be locked outside). I confess I am in love with Cooper in a way Lola would not allow me to love her, but having a spunky dog around means your life is not quite your own.

The next couch surf took us to New Hampshire, because there were no local couches with availability. A rustic stay in a 100+ year-old cottage on an island in a lake, all of my routines and comforts were lost. We wrapped the bunk bed mattresses in vinyl protectors to trap the mold inside and added foam covers and mattress pads on top to improve the sleeping experience. The solution to adapt the sleeping solution to my needs was lots of Claritin, Flonase and Benadryl. No Ross for miles.

And now I am on my final couch surf. We temporarily reside at Lou and Neil’s modern, hip SOMA/Mission digs, enjoying views in all directions, Cubba original paintings, great cross breezes, a very comfortable choice of three showers, and a kitchen decked out for gourmet culinary accomplishments, not to mention a Brian Barneclo mural that never quits intriguing me. It is the perfect final couch surf of our journey. We find ourselves lounging on their ultra-lounge comfortable sofa and pondering the purpose of the fireplace tools in front of the gas fireplace. Remarkably they have already made some of the adaptations that we would have made: a hepa air purifier whirs and refreshes while we sleep, bed sheets are light and airy, and the fresh mint in the garden helped us create memorable mojitos. The only thing I would need to do if I lived here would be to lug out the Ross memory foam to better approach my sleep number, but otherwise all is good.

I am a nomad. I don’t know where my bed is. I don’t know what my own house is like. I know what I would need to do to adapt other people’s houses to suit me if I lived there for a long time. And others will need to adapt to mine to satisfy their own living habits. But I offer many thanks and not a speck of criticism to friends who have offered us the couch surfing experience. You have let us live your experience and make only minor shifts to allow us to find a comfortable zone inside.

And now that I’ve nearly finished my couch surfing. I am ready to move on to web surfing or water surfing.

Peevey

Why won’t people do what I want them to do? I can look at person and think to myself that I would not do that if I were them, and they do it anyway. They talk in ways that I don’t like, do things that are unhealthy or annoying. Some of my peeves:

The old couple with the Texas accents at the Houston airport opening Wendy’s salt packets with their teeth and dumping them on a hamburger for the husband of the pair to eat. He will surely die of a heart attack. Why do they do that?

People who do not know how to manage meetings. They have lots of interesting things to talk about – things that are interesting and pertinent only to them. They waste my time, and sometimes my project budgets, because the meeting schedule was not organized or facilitated to maximize the value of my participation. And so I sit there and squirm and think about how I would be managing the meeting to get a better outcome. I’m good at that stuff, but apparently other people are not. Why do they do that?

People who don’t believe in change. How can you buy the same tube of toothpaste every time you go to the store? Or stay at the same vacation home year after year? Republicans don’t believe in change and, frankly, I can’t understand why they exist. Change is critical, especially for those of use with short attention spans, but some people are so rigid. Why do they do that?

Couples that cover for one another. I know several married couples where one spouse covers for the faults of his or her partner. The husband tells bawdy jokes or talks about inappropriate things and his spouse says nothing and pretends that husband-dearest was just a little tired that evening. Or one person in a couple doesn’t take full responsibility for caring for the child, and the other member of the couple just says that perhaps someday things will change. Why do they do that?

People who stay in jobs forever. A job is fun for a couple of years and then begins to lose its luster, even if it’s a job you basically like. You end up doing them same things over and over again and attend dozens of meet and greets with new employees and they all leave and you’re still there trying to figure out what do to with the rest of your life. Why do they do that?

People who live in dull places and acknowledge it. I think San Francisco is a great place, and I don’t understand when people say negative things about their own cities. I don’t mean that I can’t complain about our insane politics, lousy Muni transit service, or high prices. If you’re going to live in a dull place, own in and be proud of it. If not move to a city you like. Not to pick on any cities in particular, but when I’ve been asked where I’m from by people who live in cities like Atlanta; Houston; Grand Rapids; Phoenix, Bakersfield; Lafayette, Indiana; or Columbus, to name a few, and I get the reply “Oh, wow. You’re so lucky. It’s so nice there,” I think to myself, “Oh wow, then why don’t you move there if you feel like you’re unlucky to live in a place that you feel is not so nice?” I just want to hear everyone say they love the city where they live. A lot. Why do they do that?

People who get overly stressed and panicky. There are plenty of things to make a person freak out. On nearly every corner there’s a car crossing through an intersection or a person running toward you. How can you really drive your car safely without running over small children? What’s up with flying – blasting through the air in a big metal tube? Being in Hawaii surrounded by thousands of miles of oceans in every direction? Being at the top of a very tall building? So many things exist to freak us out, but so few of them actually succeed. But some people are at the mercy of their irrational panic and fear. Why do they do that?

I have buried two of my faults in the list above, just so I don’t sounds too overly negative about everyone else. Anyone who knows me well would be able to guess them.

A tale of two cities

Detroit is the city that played a major role in changing the world for the worse. And in the end, the world got back at it, leaving it one of the most troubled – and troubling – cities in the hemisphere. Ann Arbor, I learned today, is the fantasy complement to the hard core reality of Detroit.

I started my day in lively Ann Arbor. It’s a small city, and it would feel too small for me to live there today, but its riverside parks and greenways and plazas around the University of Michigan campus provide a quintessentially college town setting. Before I moved there to go to college, I thought about why they would name this place Ann Arbor. I always pictured two young women sitting under a gazebo (I don’t know why I didn’t think of an arbor), and one of them was named Ann. I didn’t give a name to the other woman, but for purposes of reminiscing about a memory I don’t really remember, we’ll call her darling Deirdre. In my mind, they would meet every day and sit in a swing or on a bench under the gazebo. Ann was very kind and very smart. When Deirdre died suddenly in childbirth, Ann insisted to her father, the farmstead administrator, that he rename the gazebo for Deidre, perhaps calling it Deirdre Arbor. But nobody in the unnamed community liked it – so difficult to pronounce, they worried it would be called Deer Drarber – and they asked the administrator to name it after his daughter, Ann, because it was Ann who was so kind to want to name it for Deirdre. And when Anne died, they went ahead and named the whole town after that gazebo.

I don’t know why I thought of this story but it was one that made some sense to me. And today, my friend Robin and her mother Pam – the famed Guenzels of Ann Arbor for whom the town should later be renamed by Bob, the county administrator, accompanied me on a tour of their fine village. The streets were lined with artists manufacturing merriment, selling their Panera pan and Greek Chili dogs, but also woodcutters and whimsy-makers, fairies and painters, but mostly stern looking women from the Midwest with that look that would be accepted as lesbian anywhere else in the country, but here it’s perfectly normal to walk around without makeup and have your hair chopped into a hairstyle that looks unpleasant to touch. These women, and a host of retired men, toted marketing bags and pocketbook purchases from the Art Fairs of yore. They sought a perfectly executed painting or a colorfully felted bag or a wood block print or a block of wood or a local guitarist’s DVDs to play when one seeks harmony in the afternoon summertime heat. I bought a wood block with an old woman sprayed in black paint onto its pink flowery surface.

I always crave a good street fair and am often left disappointed by the trashy street closures that claim to be street fairs in San Francisco every weekend during the cold summer and balmy fall months. But this Ann Arbor fair was a spectacle with lots and lots of terrible art, some good art, bad [very, very bad] Splenda-covered microwave popcorn that Pam and I sampled, and lots of good looking and smelling food. I should also mention the booths filled with socialists and foreskin reclaimers and bunny rescuers and those freaky sad Jews for Jesus.

In downtown Ann Arbor, I discovered the fairies really do live there, and a few goblins, with many buildings having hidden entrances for fairies or goblins only. It’s a bit inspiring, especially for the children, but it also reminds me a little bit of the crap one would buy at a Mole Hole or Gold Crown Hallmark Store.

After Zingerman’s Road House and art and terrific hospitality at the Guenzel Inn, dining with renowned LEED-certified architect Dave Richardson and child language expert/author Debbie Feit, not to mention low-humidity 75-degree temperatures, it wasn’t easy to sneak away from a town that once was home, but now is a series of strange memory flashes. At one point, we walked along the side of a downtown building, and there I remembered hearing about vaginal discharge from a friend of mine in college. At another corner, I remembered meeting someone for a blind date. As we walked by Cottage Inn Pizza, my salivary glands remembered the flavor of Spicy Mediterranean pizza, and as I looked into storefronts that are not as they once were, I remembered what was there when I was there before. To me, Ann Arbor is a fantasy of what it was, and even when I see new buildings and restaurants, I still am unable to update my mental inventory of buildings and businesses and keep them current. I think they will always slip back to recollections rather than reality, like a person with short-term memory loss or Alzheimer’s.

Ann Arbor progresses; Detroit falls. Detroit is something different. I often read news stories about Detroit; I hear NPR features on Detroit. I remember spending some time in Detroit, being afraid for my life to see so much decay and inept political ruin. Detroit will always be America’s shame, and could fade to ghost status. Or it could become something remarkably different and special if it were undertaken as a special project to create something that matches the memories of how it once was. In every story I hear of Detroit, people talk about what used to be there: the successful hat shop, the glamorous restaurant, the remarkable lobby of a building downtown, a full block of houses. Young people working hard in good jobs. Neighbors who didn’t set the neighborhood on fire every October.

Unlike most American cities that have grown away from what they once were, with new housing developments and new urban communities, Detroit could recreate itself as it was: the classic, successful, robust American City built on manufacturing. Our country still needs to manufacture things: solar panels, computer components, water filtration systems, wind mills, building materials, energy-saving materials, transit rail cars, and buses. Even cars. But Detroit will have to get over itself to return to itself. New technology center? I don’t think so. The tech people will be happier in other cities. Union bosses? Probably not. They are to share some of the blame for what happened to Detroit, and a break from the promises of the Big Three would be needed to manufacture everything else our country needs. What Detroit needs is restoration, not progress. Restoration of good schools, low crime, good transportation, nice neighborhoods. With these in place, Detroit can change. Without them Detroit will wither.

Even if Detroit disappears, it will still have an airport. I ended my Ann Arbor afternoon at the Detroit-Wayne County Airport, major hub of what was once Republic Airlines and then Northwest Orient and then Northwest and now Delta. A center for reinvention if I’ve ever seen one. It was my first time in the airport for a long time, and I had never experienced the immensity and efficiency and cleanliness and self promotion of this marvelous airport. With Northwest’s nearly 40 year-old DC-9s, one of which I just flew, the only thing the airline had going for itself was its hub, and now it’s a Delta hub. Another point for Atlanta business management, another loss of what once was in Detroit. Detroit takes another step toward losing something that signified it.

Selling frutas

There is a discussion in our house that one day we’ll recount for our children those rough days during the recession of2009 when people were so poor, they had to sell fresh fruit on the street.
This week I have had the opportunity to experience Houston, San Diego, and of course, my own home town, San Francisco. I’ve given each city an urban planning check-up and decided that San Francisco is the most Latin American of any of them, because of the fruit.

Although I spent the earlier part of this week in Houston – which is not unlike a large Latin American city in that it sprawls, has lots of poor people on the fringes, is incredibly hot and has a collapsing infrastructure of incomplete sidewalks, dangerous intersections without traffic signals, and oddly pieced together parcels of land with lots of gates around them – San Francisco has the fruit sellers. And I spent five hours in North San Diego County, which is just over the border from Tijuana, has popular radio stations broadcasting from Mexico, and has lots of signs in Spanish, but I didn’t see any fruit sellers.

In fact, in San Francisco, it is more than only fruit sellers. It includes a cotton candy man and a couple of churros sellers and paletas hawkers in Dolores Park. But it is the fruit sellers who have made their way into all of San Francisco’s neighborhoods, including neighborhoods where the only people typically heard speaking Spanish are the construction crews and landscapers, and perhaps school children being sent to schools outside of the Mission District, the heart of San Francisco’s Latino community.

Growing up in Georgia. There were often some old white southern people who would park their truck on a bridge on Johnson Road and sell watermelons and peaches. Over the years, the old white people were replaced by younger black people who sold the same things in the same location.

I remember being in our bright orange station wagon, my mom driving, as we approached the produce-packed parked truck. My mother would remark, “Oh, there’s a farmer selling fruit. I wonder how their peaches are?” She would drive to the next block and turn around in someone’s driveway and return to the truck, pulling up behind it. She would get out and my sister and I would follow, standing there beside my mom, who was busy picking up peaches, looking at them for worms, and sniffing them. “They’s Georgia peaches ma’am,” the farmer person would say. My sister and I would look at each other, filled with pride that our state produced these little furry fruity gems, but knowing that they often didn’t live up to their reputation. We had learned several years earlier, while driving through Aiken, South Carolina, that South Carolina peaches are supposedly more flavorful than Georgia peaches. A South Carolina farmer had told us that, and we had felt like it was a truth to be reckoned with because those peaches we bought in Aiken from the farmer were better than anything the crappy Winn-Dixie ever sold.

At the truck on Johnson Road, I would gently squeeze a peach and smell it too. My sister would do the same. “Get this one mommy,” my sister said as she handed it to my mother. My mother added it to the pile the farmer was gathering for us.

“Mommy.” I had noticed something. “Look they sell corn, too.”

The farmer would say something like, “Yes ma’am. The corn’s real fresh. Just picked today.”

My sister and I would glance at each other again, knowing that if this corn had been picked earlier in the day, it could not possibly be good. Our family planted about 12 rows of corn in our backyard garden and we only picked it moments before we were prepared to eat it. My mother would insist on getting the water to a rollicking boil. Only then, when the pot was bubbling and the kitchen filled with steam, would she dispatch us to the garden to pick four ears of corn. My sister and I scattered into the towering stalks of corn, moving as fast as we could, to find four perfect ears: our hope was to pull back the husk at the top to reveal a wig of brown covering a glow of bright worm-free kernels. Once we had the booty, we’d dash as fast as we could back into the kitchen to shuck the ears and drop them into the boiling water. We had been taught from a very young age that these hurried hysterics were the only way to ensure the enjoyment of fresh corn and that anything picked earlier in the day would most certainly be a tremendous let down.

Although we didn’t buy corn from the farmer person on Johnson Road, we would gather the peaches and perhaps thump the watermelons, and with the old man’s assistance put the items into paper bags to carry to the car. My mom would pay the few dollars it cost for the produce and we would return to the station wagon for our drive home. When we arrived home, we’d sample the fruit. The peaches from the farmer person’s truck were really juicy and sweet, much better than those South Carolina Peaches any day. My shame of the Georgia peach faded away.

Street corner produce shopping. It’s different in San Francisco. You might expect people to sell fruit from small stands in the Mission District, or perhaps even from the back of their truck in the Excelsior District along busy commercial strips. But today in Cole Valley, Noe Valley, the Castro District – some of San Francisco’s core middle and upper-class neighborhoods – fruit sellers stand at the corner of two residential streets with a dozen flats filled with crimson, glistening California strawberries. Some also have a few large boxes of mangos. And lately, I’ve seen a few with oranges and cherries. On the corner, next to the house owned by a couple of yuppies and across the street from the home rented to two college students and diagonally across the corner where the older woman lives alone, as she has since 1978 in the same house, the man stands there all day and sells fruit to the white people.

Their buyers’ market is not only the scattering of pedestrians found on virtually any residential street in San Francisco, but also the people driving their cars to pick up their kids or go to the orthodontist or on their way home from Whole Foods. These are the people the fruit sellers eye, waving a hand and flagging the driver of a Volvo or Prius or Subaru passing by. And sometimes, the drivers stop and pull into the adjacent driveway, or double park or angle up to the corner, rolling down the window to inquire, “Oh they look lovely. How much are the mangos?”

The fruit seller tells them the entire box is available for ten dollars. Twelve mangos for ten dollars. And then the fruit seller hoists one box of the bright squash-toned Philippine-style mangoes from the small stack on the sidewalk. The driver extends a ten-dollar bill through the window and tells the fruit seller to put them on the back seat. The back window moves down, controlled by a button or small lever next to the driver. The fruit seller holds the box and leans awkwardly through the window. He places the box of mangos on the back seat, next to the empty toddler seat belted into position on the opposite side of the car. The car pulls away with a box of fresh mangoes. The toddler will learn to eat mangos when the parent arrives home.

In the evening, the fruit sellers are no longer on the sidewalk. Perhaps their strawberries sold. Or the mangos became too soft, and their bright skin wrinkled and blemished in the sun. Maybe somebody picked the sellers up and drove them away with their meager earnings. Perhaps the police told them to move on. Or maybe they sold their fresh fruits and returned home, to small flats in the Mission District, packed with other families with children and other fruit sellers and day laborers, leaving Cole Valley, Noe Valley, the Castro District and the other neighborhoods without fruit for sale at night. The seven o’clock streets of San Francisco’s Noe Valley, not unlike those of any city’s pretty midtown or old suburban neighborhoods, remain quiet. The sun begins to set.