seriously?

Dear guy on the 38 bus,

Do you seriously think that The Joy of Gay Sex is appropriate reading material during evening rush hour?

Also, I can't decide whether the fact that it was a library book makes it better or worse.

Sincerely,

Karen

making headlines

When I work out at the gym I frequently turn on a news channel on the little personal TV screen they have attached to each treadmill and watch without sound. As you no doubt have noticed, it is now de rigueur to have a constantly running stream of mini-headlines scrolling underneath the main features. As a linguist I dig seeing the attempted synopses of various stories into such brief snippets; often it feels like you can only understand the little headlines if you're already familiar with the stories anyway.

For instance, today they periodically ran a line that said something like "Comment leads to Missouri standoff." OK...thanks for letting us know! The other day it was "Caylee's grandfather under suicide watch." Who the fuck is Caylee and why do her grandfather's death-wish issues warrant time on the national news? Sometimes the headlines are funny for entirely other reasons; my favorite one from today was "Men see bikini-clad women as objects, scientists say." Shouldn't that be a headline from The Onion? Who are these scientists? I want to know who designed the study protocol for that one. And whether any of my tax dollars were involved.

Speaking of questionable uses of my hard-earned money, the San Francisco Municipal Railway this morning provided yet another notable public transportation experience. I was heading to work on the 38, and an older woman in a dingy hoodie and sparkly but tattered skirt was sitting near me. Her personal odor was not altogether agreeable, but I've seen and smelled a lot worse on MUNI, and since I was reading a magazine I only really noticed her when she started softly and repeatedly lilting "James Brown!" in dulcet tones, followed by the observation "He and I are from the same place." The she looked at me and asked if I knew the time. I was unwilling to dig out my cell phone, so I showed my bare wrists and said "Sorry, I don't."

"You don't know the time?"

"Sorry."

"I have to take my psych meds."

I smiled and nodded sympathetically. Then she asked, "What are you?"

"What am I?"

"Yeah, what are you?"

I hesitated and replied, "I don't understand the question."

"Are you a nurse?"

flakes

My typical San Francisco MUNI experiences usually fall somewhere between barely tolerable (see Exhibit A: Spare the Fucking Air Days) and excruciating (see Exhibit B: Filthy Crack Addicts), but once in a while there are some perks to the forced commingling of residents from all over this fair city. For instance, the other morning on the 38L line I got to overhear one half of a phone conversation that went a little something like this:

Phone Guy (PG): Eloy, I don't appreciate you calling me a thief. I didn't take your money. I don't do that kind of thing. I don't like it when you say I'm stealing from you.

Woman sitting with PG: He was in the middle of the street, he went downstairs to get another beer! What's he saying?

PG: OK, OK, listen Eloy. I went and got you ALL that body wash, and then I came back and you GAVE me 18 dollars to buy shampoo.

Woman: I had to lead him back upstairs!

PG: Well then...Eloy, Eloy...listen to me listen to me. Where did all that Selsun Blue come from then? How did you end up with five bottles of Selsun Blue? Explain that to me. If I stole that money, how did you end up with five bottles of Selsun Blue? Don't call me a thief!

Woman: He was afraid that his girlfriend would see he was drunk again! That's why, he went down to get ANOTHER beer at the store, he already had three and he went to get another. He didn't even know where he was! What's he saying? What's he saying?

PG: Eloy, THEN HOW DID YOU END UP WITH ALL THAT SELSUN BLUE??

because nothing says "romance" like fullerene-related structures consisting of rolled graphene sheets

I went down to L.A. for the long weekend, technically in part to...wait for it...work on my screenplay, but really mostly just to hang out at James's house and also to attend our friend The Other Karen B's birthday party and get drunk on mojitos and lick chocolate buttercream off of ladyfinger cookies. (Apparently that's what the kids are calling it these days. Who knew?!)

Because James and I are so very, very old, we decided to go to downtown Pasadena on Saturday before the birthday party simply to ensure that we'd stay awake until 9:00 p.m., which was when the party was scheduled to begin. Sadly, I am completely serious.

Fueled by sentimentality more so than a desire for decent potables, we stopped by the restaurant/bar where we went on our very first date back in 2000. We plopped ourselves down, ordered a couple of drinks, and when they arrived James immediately (a) noticed that the two tiny straws in his beverage were of different diameters, (2) inserted one inside the other, and (iii) romantically declared, "I've now got a concentric multi-walled nanotube." He looked vaguely confused as I scrambled to dig a pen out of my purse and reached across him to grab a cocktail napkin. "I need to write this down," I explained, scribbling. "This is COMEDY GOLD."

James: "Why is that funny?"
Karen: "It's funny."
James: "The fact that I don't understand why it's funny is also funny, I bet."
Karen: "Yes."

****

There's nothing like spending a weekend in L.A. being driven around in a purring German sports car and attending parties full of movie industry people to make you truly appreciate the misery that is the route 31 bus up here in San Francisco. Because lo, that is the bus I chose to board for the final leg of my public transportation journey home this evening, and I would be lying if I told you that one of my fellow passengers wasn't a crack-smoking transvestite in a hospital gown and a puffer jacket, sporting a dingy bar towel as a 'do rag, occasionally flashing her naked ass, and manically switching seats and talking about someone who was going to rape her and asking the driver to find her a cop and then bitchily accusing him of not being a Christian. And when I say this person was a crack smoker, I am not jumping to conclusions or falling prey to vicious stereotypes. SHE WAS SMOKING CRACK RIGHT THERE ON THE BUS.

P.S. If any of you out there are planning to take the 31 in the next couple of days, there is at least one coach with several seats you'll want to avoid sitting in. Or touching. Or being alive next to.

immemorial

I've been noticing for a couple of years now that I am a lot more forgetful than I used to be. Mind you, I can still recall verbatim every turn of phrase James may have used in a discussion from six years ago when I was convinced he was actually telling me I was unattractive, or what my 10th grade English teacher said about my writing (that it would always be "fluffy"; two Master's Degrees from Yale later, I almost am ready to beg to fucking differ), or what the soap in my German grandmother's bathroom smelled like in 1984. No, I am talking about shit that happened five minutes ago.

Like Friday I got on the bus to go to work and there was a guy in a giant piñata costume (including elaborate horse head) sitting calmly and hilariously among the normally-dressed commuters. I ended up standing right in front of him and was able to spend the next ten minutes admiring the craftsmanship and ingenuity of his work, and then he got off at Van Ness. He was clearly on his way to winning every costume contest in town, provided no one took a bat to him first.

In other words, I was perfectly aware it was Halloween. Three or four minutes later I looked up from my magazine, saw some new passengers standing near the front of the bus, and thought, "I can't believe no one is offering their seats to those nice nuns." And then, "I don't think I recall ever seeing a nun on the bus before." It was only when one of them turned fully around and I noticed they were zombie nuns that I was jerked back to my senses. Oh, riggghht. Halloween. Plus, I don't think real nuns wear Puma sneakers. So many clues.

At work I'll do things such as concentrate all morning on a set of tasks and then report to my group lead something like "OK, I've re-fracked the dirbills and the freenats, and also built for the ungrapped norbars, and I entered the stuff for the padmerizer and made sure it's working properly, so unless you can think of something else, category 1 is ready for a corpus test. Should I go ahead and file the bugzilla?" And then a look of confusion will cloud her face and she'll say, "We ran a corpus test for 1 last night. [pause] Wait, do you mean category 6?" And yes, I will have meant category 6, the very same category I had been focused on with a mad-professor-like intensity for the previous four hours. But a two-cubicle stroll is enough to knock that information right out of my short-term memory's tenuous grip.

And then there's more mundane stuff, like how I often find myself in a room wondering why I am there. I was just in the living room, and now I am in the office. Why? Oh, look at that shiny thing...I need to fix that. And then a few minutes later I will be back in the living room fixing the shiny thing, and remember that I still haven't fetched the book I wanted from the office. Or whatever.

I blank out on people's names on a regular basis, both personal acquaintances and celebrities. The one upside is that I get to experience my own brain doing that cool linguistic thing where, say, I will know that the name I am searching for has five letters, or starts with a G and is two syllables, but then can't get beyond that. Or I'll be trying to remember the name of an actress, and I can imagine the character she played on The Shield, and remember that she is married to David Mamet, but the best I can come up with is "Is it Something Partridge? No, that's not it." Five hours later (and/or after checking IMDb), I'll figure out that the name I was searching for was Rebecca Pidgeon. My brain teases me with the semantic web surrounding my target--nuptial status, some kind of bird involved somehow, employment details--but won't hand over the goddamn name.

Um, what was I talking about? Oh, look, shiny mittens I made this weekend!

spur of the moment

I have been doing this interesting thing lately where I have no life outside work. Did I say interesting? I meant retarded.

I have a lot to accomplish on a very short timeline, and then there's the small matter of how sometimes our tools are, shall we say, difficult ornery inimical satanic, and also I actually love the linguistic-y part of my job and so why wouldn't I arrive by 7:00 a.m. every day and not leave until 13 hours later? It all makes a lot of good sense, especially if you've just arrived from the planet What The Fuck Are You Thinking in the galaxy of Dipshit.

One benefit of going in early is that there is always enough room on the bus that it will actually stop to let you in. One morning when I departed home at a more reasonable hour, and I am not making this up people, I had to watch SIX buses go by my stop, each one so full of passengers that the driver would not allow anyone else to get on. At that time of the morning, even on those occasions when the bus has to stop to let someone off and you sneakily wedge yourself in via the rear doors, you are only asking for trouble. By the time you reach Market Street you will have someone's BlackBerry or vintage brooch embedded in your cheek and your body will resemble something designed by Frank Gehry, only with slightly less deconstructivist élan and a lot more throbbing spinal pain.

All this is leading up to why I ended up at work today wearing these:


Having settled into the sleep-deprived, adrenaline-fueled, hummingbird-like whir of Project Where Everything Is Due Yesterday mode, I can sometimes forget to maintain the understated and professional demeanor for which I am ever so famous. And so it happened that I had declared a certain event that was to take place this afternoon as the [Project-Related-Thing] Rodeo. And then I decided to dress for the occasion and also threaten my colleagues with spurring, should they be foolish enough to question my authority or fail to freshen my beverage in a timely manner.

You heard right, I said spurring and I meant it. I brought these in, too:


Come to think of it, those could come in kind of handy on a crowded bus. "Howdy! Oh, was that your shin? I was so distracted by your cell phone conversation that I forgot I was wearing these. Is there...oh, my...is there a doctor on this bus?"

i got yer spared air right here, pal

I'm going to preface this post by saying that I am very grateful to be fully mobile and physically healthy, and grateful to have a place to live, and I realize that sometimes all it takes is a piece of bad luck or a step into the wrong place at the wrong time for one's situation in life to turn horribly for the worse.

And also, as we've established, I don't judge.

But here is a peeve of mine. I do not like it when I pay for a product or service, only to have that product or service subsequently offered to others for free, at which point I am basically prevented from using the product or service as it is intended and/or in the form that was at least tacitly offered along with its purchase. I am, e.g., still mildly bitter about UC San Diego's policy of granting a 2-week or longer "grace period" on parking at the start of some quarters, during which diligently pre-paying drivers would arrive on campus only to find every single legitimate goddamn parking space from Torrey Pines Road to University Towne Centre [sic] taken up by non-permit-bearing vehicles, so that one would become so desperate to reach Phonetics 210 or Goethe's Influence on Kafka's Reading of Thomas Mann's Mario and the Magician or whateverthefuck other class reasonably close to on time that one would finally just park anywhere, only to then receive a parking ticket that cost half as much as the permit for the entire quarter, and you know they're not gonna let you check out a library book or get your goddamn diploma if you've got fines on your record, and so then you're fucking screwed and that, my friends, is how they get you, and you get so worked up you can't even keep your person and tenses straight when you write about it.

And so we come to "Spare the Air" days here in San Francisco. For you non-Bay Areans, typically during the summer on days when it reaches scorching, lower-80s type temps, San Francisco and surrounding regions will declare a Spare the Air day where all public transportation is free. I can always tell when it's a Spare the Air day because the buses will be a lot more crowded, late, and annoying than usual. Well, you might say, then clearly this initiative works: on days when it is hot and the air quality is poor, more people take public transportation. An ingenious example of green problem solving!

Except it's not. I can guarantee you that no one who is spending $350/month to park their car downtown is leaving that sucker in the garage in Palo Alto and taking Caltrain + MUNI to work in the city just because it's free for the day. If that were the case, then maybe they'd call it Leave Your Tacky Lexus at Home day. No, on Spare the Air days, people who normally wouldn't get on the bus think, hey! it's hot and I want to go somewhere, so I am going to take the bus because what the hell, it's free! It should be called Go Somewhere Random You Wouldn't Normally Pay $1.50 to Go day.

On Thursday I did not know yet that it was a free day, and as I was walking to the bus stop after work I saw my bus going by and thought, damn, I just missed it. But then another was right on its heels, and I thought, oh, it's a lucky going-home-timing day after all! Little did I know.

Heading home, I get on at the second or third stop of the route, so I got a seat as I usually do. Within two more stops, though, the vehicle was packed. Then we stopped to let on someone in a wheelchair. Except then neither one of the two potential wheelchair restraints was working. Meanwhile, more and more able-bodied people got on, even though there was less room than usual because a couple of benches were flipped up to expose the wheelchair restraints, and eventually the poor guy in the chair had to get off anyway, because the driver refused to take him if the restraints didn't work. And then a few stops later there was a guy on a scooter chair. And he was pissed already about the full buses, and waving his cell phone around and shouting about how the driver had to let him on, and how he already had people on the phone about it, and then the driver was trying to explain to him that it was a safety issue and the restraints were not working, and finally the driver just gave in to the guy, which also involved maneuvering the bus around a police car that was parked in the bus lane so the bus could get close enough to the curb, and naturally none of this was taking any time whatsoever. But honestly? At that point I still just felt lucky to have a seat and be able to walk when I want to.

And then the very very dirty, smelly guy crammed himself right next to where I was sitting, with his crotch at the level, and within a few inches, of my nose. And the 15 or so further minutes it took for me to get home from there, wedged in next to this guy's crotch and unable to relocate, really almost sent me over the edge. Now, I know in theory that when you pay your $45/month for a bus pass, you are not being guaranteed a seat on any bus at any time, and certainly not a seat next to a freshly laundered person who smells fresh and clean like the meadow outside grandma's house. BUT C'MON, PEOPLE. Spare the air, my ass.