Photo
In all my years in California, I had never, ever seen the ocean as calm as it was yesterday.
One of my favorite people, LaurieWrites and I had about two hours together in Venice. We lunched like ladies and walked out on Venice pier.
Dreamland
You know what is a bad way to wake up? Jerking awake because you are dreaming that you fell asleep during a really boring conference call and the leader is calling your name to make a report…WAY too realistic.
Adventures in Cuisine with Mom
Mom needed nutmeg and I needed cinnamon, so I placed a Penzey’s order. If you like to cook and you don’t know Penzey’s, you NEED to. They have the best, tastiest, freshest spices at really reasonable prices.
No, they are not paying me.
ANYWAY – Penzey’s sent me some free stuff in the order, including some salt-free spice mix. I gave it to Mom and she said it sounded delicious and that she could not WAIT to try it.
Cut to the next day.
Now is where I should perhaps mention that my mother is a terrible cook. I don’t know how she does it, but she has the culinary equivalent of tone deafness.
So. She says “Do you want to taste the carrots I cooked with the new spices?”
Sure, I say. I take a taste and LIKE TO DIE.
Mom didn’t use the salt-free spice blend. She used the cinnamon and nutmeg. She threw in some honey for good measure. What on earth, people.
“Gack!” I spewed.
“You don’t like it?” she said.
I don’t know how she does it. It’s horrible. It’s like me trying to sing or something. It just should not be done.
Photo from Flickr by Funadium (Marco Bernardini). Used under a Creative Commons license.
Scratching my head
Reading the post about customer service over at Laurie Writes today started me thinking about a weird phenomenon: modern businesses that seem unfamiliar with modern technology.
I’ve had this happen: I call my phone company. I get cut off during “transfers” (are they really transferring, or are they hanging up? One begins to wonder) a couple times, so the next time I call, I get smart and say “Can I get your phone number so I can call you back in case I get cut off during the transfer?”
“Oh, we don’t have direct lines.”
Wait. You’re the PHONE COMPANY. You have ALL the lines. Surely you can spare one for each of your employees. No.
Or say you call a business. Like the phone company. As soon as you get on the call, an electronic voice demands that you enter your 27-digit account number. Sooner or later, you are transferred to a real person. And what is the first thing they ask?
Right. The 27-digit account number. Sometimes I say “Well, I already entered that just now.”
This will provoke one of two answers, depending, I believe, on the person’s state of mind. They’ll either say “I don’t have access to that,” at which point I stop myself from screaming “WHY NOT?” or “Oh, yes, here at is,” at which point I stop myself from screaming “WHY DID YOU ASK FOR IT WHEN YOU OBVIOUSLY HAVE IT THERE FOR EVERY SINGLE CALL?”
In any case: memo to Suebob – stop self from screaming.
My eye doctor took the cake though. His office is 40 miles away (in the town where I used to live), so I only go there when I have to. I needed a piece of paper from my file and I called to see if it could get faxed or emailed to me.
No. They do not fax things for customers.
Ok, then how about an email?
They do not have email.
This is what I said to that: “You…uh…um…hahaha….I don’t…you…excuse me, I thought you said you don’t have email?”
“NO, the doctor does NOT have email,” said the receptionist in a snotty tone, as if I had asked about him having gonorrhea.
I started laughing. And laughing. And whooping. And chortling. The receptionist was not amused, but I couldn’t stop. It just seemed so queer (in the old fashioned sense of the word), like refusing to change your clocks because you don’t believe in Daylight Savings Time (yes, I met that person. Another story).
That’s right. My eye doctor, in 2011, does not have an email account. I’m thinking if I told him I was Bill Gates with free Disneyland tickets, he might suddenly figure out how to log on to Hotmail, but until then, to help his patients, no. Cannot do it.
Which is why my new eye doctor is both closer to home AND lives in this century. Yeesh.
Learning a thing or two about social media
Jesse teaching social media to a group of about 30
Invited by my friend Jesse Luna, I attended the CAUSE2012 Social Media conference in Santa Maria this past weekend. It was a day-long event focused on Latinos and social media, sponsored by LATISM.
Compared to the usual social media conferences I attend, this was at a very basic level – “Why use Twitter?” “Is it more important to have a Facebook page or a website?” – that sort of thing.
The irony is that I probably learned more at this conference than I did at bigger, more well-established social media conferences I have attended.
The opening speaker, Giovanni Rodriguez, did a great job of summing up the feeling of the event in a blog post here.
The audience was at least 90 percent Latino and the difference was that most of them were very actively involved in community organizing, activism and volunteerism. The depth of knowledge and experience they had gave the event a sense of urgency and gravity I have rarely seen elsewhere.
During a break, I turned to the woman next to me, a community organizer, and asked what her town’s greatest need is. I was humbled to hear her answer: “Food. The first and greatest need is always food.”
I thought: here I am using twitter to talk about celebrities and YouTube videos, and this woman is trying to find ways to feed people in her town. Every single day.
I also learned something about bravery while I was there. A student stood up to ask a question during our Skype call with Juan Sepulveda from the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics.
She stood up in front of an audience and in front of a representative of the federal government and told him she was an undocumented student. An “illegal,” as so many people say.
I know that the audience and Juan were sympathetic to her situation, but it still takes huge guts to stand up in public at her age – maybe 19 or 20 – and say something that could lead to the loss of everything she has ever known. But she had a question and a concern for the White House, and she wanted to be represented, so she took that risk. I don’t know if I have ever, in my life, been as brave.
It was a little out of my comfort zone to attend a conference focused on Latinos. I’m not Latina, even though I like to turn up the Vicente Fernandez and pretend sometimes. But in the end, I’m so glad I went. I got to see another side of social media and how people are using it to make real, positive change. I was warmly welcomed and felt like I walked away with a better understanding of people with whom I share my community every day.
Wordless Wednesday: Why I Won’t be Shopping at Macy’s, Oct. 26, 2011
My accent video
Laurie Writes made me do it. Dang, I’m wrinkly. But I loved seeing all of you, so I thought maybe you’d like to see me, too.
Occupying my mind
I hear people ask about the Occupy Wall Street protesters, “Why do you hate corporations? What are you wearing Nikes for, then? Don’t you drive a car? Huh? Huh?”
Here’s my answer. I don’t hate corporations. I work for a Fortune 500 company. I’m proud of my work and proud of my co-workers and extremely happy to be employed at a job I like. Every bite of food that goes in my mouth, every month’s rent, is thanks to that. I’m also glad to have a car and telephone service and food and electricity and all the lovely goods corporations bring to me. I’m not ignorant of all those things.
But I do have a few issues with corporations. I expect them to obey the laws just as I expect my fellow citizens to obey the laws. I also expect them to be punished when they don’t. I’d love for there to be a death penalty for corporations, so the really rotten ones could be killed off, instead of living forever like Dracula.
I have heard that publicly held corporations have a duty to provide value for their stockholders. This is generally held to mean money. The more the better. They need to do the thing that provides the most money to their stockholders.
Defining value only by money is like defining the worth of food only by calories. So if a corporation were a mom feeding her kids, she would be applauded for feeding them fried mozzarella sticks and shamed for feeding them broccoli. Sure, she’s providing the maximum caloric value, but what about other important values like health and longevity?
I have one suggestion. Corporations should stop trying to provide value for stockholders, and start providing value for stockholders’ children.
Instead of making sure stock values go up, get bigger values. Make sure that everything they do contributes to a better life for the next generation. Pay their fair share of taxes so education and infrastructure will be not just good, but excellent. Make sure they keep the environment clean and safe so the next generation won’t be sicker than ours. Create manufacturing processes that use renewable energy and resources. Provide high quality jobs with humane working conditions, so parents will be able to provide for the children we are all trying to benefit.
That’s my simple suggestion. Add one word to the value equation. Add the children.
All Around You
When I was about 31, a woman I knew invited me to a poetry event to hear this cute guy she had a crush on read his work. Their relationship flared and grew and faded, but by then I was hooked on writing and reading poetry, and the poet she introduced me to had become a good friend.
Because he was too big a spirit for our little backwater town, he packed a suitcase and moved to San Francisco. After a few visits up there, he and I lost touch for the most part. We didn’t have a falling out – our lives just took radically different paths. I heard via a mutual friend that he had died last weekend after a long illness.
I want to post a poem he wrote a long time ago. It is one of my favorite poems, and I would like it to stay out in the world. I also wanted his longtime partner, Betty Blue, to see it, in case she hadn’t read it, since it was written before they met.
Blessed be, Jack. Travel light and journey lightly.
All Around You
When I die
fold me naked
Into the
Beautiful black flesh of the earth.
No coffin fortress
Against my mother,
No formaldehyde
Lip stitching denial
Of the
Soft Machinery of life.
Let the gentle sex
Of the probing root life
Trail downward
Along the white arches
Of my cathedral bones.
Let the holy orgy
Of the earth
Fill my domed skull
With the
Gentle loving of the world.
Each year
Fold me naked
Back into the warm flesh of my mother
And I will become the loving earth.
I will spread my spirit
On the wind.
I will have eyes of
Green roses.
I will have
Blood in the sea,
I will have
A consciousness of grass,
And I will have
Arms in all the green
Hills of the world.
Arms vast enough at last
To hold all my million children.
From my warm bed
I will be the sun’s lover
And a
Magical brother to the moon.
I will trail
Sidelong and downstream
And I will be your food,
Alive in every
Apple fruit,
Awake in the falling
Arc of each cherry blossom.
Once dead
And in the earth,
Now immaculately dissolved,
I will be there when you
Burst the veiny flesh of a peach.
I will be all around you
And silently knowing,
This is my body
Bursting for you.
Take,
Eat.
Pass me
Hand to human hand
And lip to perfect lip.
Let my name dissolve
With my flesh
But when you
Drink the blood
And eat the smooth flesh of the earth,
I will be alive,
And awake,
And all around you.
Jack Random
7-15-93
Photo by David Pham. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Telling Stories
One time when I was young – a long, long time ago – some friends and I went to a house party. We were all cute and full of hormones and there were crushes and switches of affection and flirting going on.
By the end of the party, we were all mad at each other. During the course of the evening, Scott had been brutally replaced in Cindy’s affections by Mark, who I liked, but who wasn’t really serious about her or about me either, but Scott had ignored me too even though he liked me before he liked Cindy and…so on.
It was one big boiling pot of late-teen angst and romance. Could have been an episode of MTV’s Real World if we had been 1) better-looking and 2) drunk.
Instead of staying mad, we decided to do something rather remarkable. We all wrote our stories of what had happened that night in that living room and then read them to an audience of other friends. Guilt or innocence would be decided by a vote of the people.
When we heard the stories, we were shocked. It was like we weren’t in the same room, so little overlap was there between the four realities. We all had our own histories, and they weren’t at all alike.
Four people. Same room. Same night. Completely different accounts.
*****
Yesterday at church, my dear Reverend Bonnie posed a question. “What would it be like,” she asked “If you could give up your stories of what had happened when someone wronged you?”
Zowie.
I started thinking about it. My psycho ex-boss who humiliated and tormented me and my co-workers…What if she wasn’t trying to torment us? What if she was just managing her crew the best way she knew how? What if she was behaving how she had been taught and thought was right?
What if…what if there was just no way of me knowing what the hell was going on with her?
I had a story about her that I had told myself and anyone who would listen. I told it about 1000 times. I was right, she was wrong. She was not just wrong. She was a lunatic horrifying control freak bitch bent on breaking people.
Other people popped into my mind. What if my story switched from “They are the biggest jerks, they are monsters” to “I have no idea why they behave the way they do”? What would that feel like?
And what about me? What about all the times I had hurt people? Wasn’t I just trying to get what I wanted and not necessarily going about it in a skillful way?
Yes. That was true to me. I rarely meant to cause harm, and even in those cases it was more like the lashings of a wounded animal than a deliberate attempt to cause pain.
But I knew that other people had stories about me, too, about what kind of awful person I was. I remembered one of the other managers at a job who had told my boss he would never, ever want to work with me…I had tried to laugh it off but it still stung to be so misunderstood.
What if none of my stories about what people did to me were true? Or what if there was just no way of knowing if they were true?
This switch from knowing to not-knowing felt like a miracle. A great pallet of bricks was lifted off of my heart, swinging up through the air on a crane instead of pressing down and trapping me in my past.
It wasn’t that people don’t behave in awful, hurtful, mean, crazy ways sometimes. It was just that I realized I don’t benefit or learn by carrying around a story of why they do.
I can learn what I need to know and protect myself apppropriately without having to build a tale of why I am right and why they are wrong. I can get away, I can fight back, I can inform the authorities – all without having to construct an elaborate structure of cause and blame.
Those old stories are pretty much useless.
I don’t know any more. I don’t have to. And in that, there is freedom.
