transit statistics

On a recent business trip to Europe a consulting colleague and I went with our client to visit:

4 countries in
10 days
in 3 separate time zones
(all in the range of 8-10 hours' time difference from home).

I spent time in 6 different cities (one of which, Brussels, was apparently voted the "3rd greenest capital” in the world according to one taxi driver),
by traveling through 9separate airports,

in the process of which I was x-ray screened approx. 13 times, (though individually patted down only 2 times) and my computer and handbag went through more than 17 x-rays on their own.

I took 12 taxi rides : 2 with the same French driver in a dented mini-van in Munich, 1 with a balding Belgian cursing into his cell phone about a prior customer, “il a fait tout un cinema” while simultaneously blasting “Angie” through tinny speaker, but none with any kind of vehicle driven by a woman.


I learned that we could have attended 4 concerts by aging Anglo pop stars: the Rolling Stones (Brussels), Ozzy Ozborne (Helsinki), the Eagles (Dublin), Snoop Dog and Puff Daddy (together in concert in Munich). Had we known in advance, that is. We first learned of each concert the morning after.


I saw 1 “clamped” (translation for the Americans – “booted”) but otherwise pristine red Ferrari parked in front of the most expensive hotel in Dublin. “It makes no sense,” that taxi driver told us as we passed by at 5 AM on our way to the airport. “With all the money he (the Ferrari driver) has, so what if the fine is hundreds of Euros? It’s nothing to him.”)


I took 3 separate subway rides (2 in Munich, 1 in Brussels) but only actually purchased 2 one-way tickets (so much for the German honor system…)

I gathered 5 passport stamps (2 of which were German: the first only in transit, the second preceded by the passport agent looking me up and down several times, his eyes squinting into mere suspicious slivers as he asked, “So exactly how long are you planning to stay this time?”)

I sat in 4 different conference rooms (2 of which had windows which let in outside/exterior light)
to conduct 9 separate focus groups
with 42 attendees
who spoke a total of 7 native languages
and filled out 40 response forms (all in English), which I was tasked to haul around in my carry-on bag for each separate flight.

I watched the sun set at 12 AM over the hotel parking lot in Helsinki and then sadly realized when the rays tapped on my eyelids to wake me up again that it was only 3 AM.


I learned about -- but thankfully did NOT have to visit -- the 1 specialized Finnish "conference room" (aka standard business sauna) where meetings are routinely conducted sweaty and in the nude.

I visited 2 different German street festivals in separate cities but on the same weekend where I heard no less than 4 mediocre bands attempting a wide variety of retro English language music; (Including “you’ve got to get your boogie down,” in a German accent with precisely the same mechanical emphasis on every syllable)

I made time to sample free chocolate in 3 different stores in downtown Brussels (including one with its own chocolate fountain)

I saw 5 clever pub/eatery signs in Dublin through taxi cab windows on the way to and from the airport and conference room: “Tasty options” “Dr. Quirky’s Old Time Emporium” “Tapped Out”, "Abrekababra" (a kebab shop), and the somewhat questionable, “Happy Daze”.

I borrowed 1 cruising bicycle in central Germany and then later that weekend met a man whose own bike (with disc brakes) had been stolen from its Munich parking spot by what he claimed was the East European bicycle mafia.



I e-mailed 2 revised chapters of my novel-in-progress from 1 hotel lobby bar (in Dublin, of course) where the wi-fi internet access was free (in the room the same access cost 20 euros).

I consumed 3 meals in airports -- 1 dinner, 1 lunch and 1 breakfast – only 1 of which I actually purchased from an airport vendor (lunch in Helsinki).

When I got home, I slept for 12 hours straight (but that wasn't until 3 days later). Before that...

...only 24 hours after my return, my grandmother turned 92. Extremely exhausted, jet lagged and frazzled, I nevertheless decided to buy her 2 separate desserts to and corralled my cousin into joining me for a mini-after dinner celebration with her.

"Oh hi," my grandmother smiled and perked up and greeted my cousin (who is not actually her grandson) before me, "It's so great to see you. I'm so delighted." She turned to me and frowned "I didn't know you were coming. You should have told me you were coming because you see I don’t have any food and the girl (her housekeeper/companion) has to go out tomorrow to get me some milk and other things. But if I had known, I could have asked you instead."

conversations from a college graduation

My cousin (let’s call him Gonzalo) got his B.A. in philosophy last weekend from the University of Colorado in Boulder. Assuming, of course, that he passed that last final...

“Man, existentialism, that threw me for a loop,” Gonzalo says. “I mean, our other classes we learned if A then B or C, or how to defeat different arguments.”

“You mean like logic?” I ask.

“No, not that. I almost failed logic.” He sighs. “But for existentialism we had to read like novels and shit. Like The Stranger and Camus and man it was hard. They don’t believe in anything.”

*****************************
Gonzalo has three roommates. One of them used to have a pet snake…

“I really wanted a dog,” the roommate who used to be an amateur stuntman before giving it up to study architecture and tai chi and the best way to cook marijuana so that he could inhale vapors rather than actually smoke, explains over post-ceremony celebratory drinks, “but we couldn’t have one in the apartment.”

“So you got a snake?”

“Yeah, Lucy. A python.” He looks wistfully into the ice remaining in his glass. “She died of constipation.”

“How do you know that?”

“I got a snake book after that. I think I should have taken her to the snake vet.”

“But how do you know it was constipation that killed her?”

“Oh, you know.”

“How?”

He smiles. “When we’d feed her a mouse, you would see this bubble where she ate it. It would move down her. But that last time, the bubble just sat there at the end, and then she wouldn’t eat anything, and then she turned different colors and just died.”

*****************************
Gonzalo’s apartment had a small problem with doors…

“What’s the deal with your doors?” my other cousin, let’s call him F, asks Gonzalo one night as we wait for the restaurant to clear us a table. F, although 10+ years past his own college experience, is braving three nights on the sofa in Gonzalo’s living room.

“What deal?” Gonzalo asks.

“So picture this,” F says. “It’s 3 AM and after a night out, I have to pee really bad. I get up and start pushing on the door. But it just won’t open. I push and push but it’s stuck on the carpet or something. It’s like the door doesn’t fit the frame.”

“Oh,” Gonzalo nods. “That’s because it’s my closet door.”

We all stare at him. “What happened to the other door?” F asks.

“You don’t want to know.”

“All the doors got destroyed,” one of Gonzalo’s friends who doesn’t actually live in the apartment chimes in.

Gonzalo nods. “Yeah, at one point we had no doors.”

“What happened?”

Apparently one by one they were damaged, Gonzalo and his friends tell us, interrupting each other in turns with the details: one roommate punched through the first door. Another seems to have hurled himself through another door. I’m confused. We’re all confused. But what is clear is that at one point they had no doors for the entrances to any of the rooms and then they reallocated from the closets, hence the poor fit.

“So tell me this,” F says. “Do you guys ever lock that front door?”

Gonzalo shakes his head. “We’re lucky that thing has a handle.”

The original handle fell off, he says, as if that’s some kind of explanation. And until one of the roommates finally got around to going to Home Depot to replace it, “We just used a paper towel.”


*****************************
Hygiene seems to be a problem in Gonzalo’s apartment. The carpets, in particular, are crunchy with the crumbs of old food, and some kind of indeterminate crust….

“Do you guys ever vacuum?”

“Sometimes we let the neighbor’s dog come in and she licks the carpet,” Gonzalo says. “She loves it. Just lick, lick, lick. She eats anything.”

*****************************
And then there was the sewage backup…

“Do you mean the first sewage backup, or the second?” Gonzalo asks.

“There were two?”

“Oh yeah. It was disgusting. There was a layer a couple of inches deep over everything. Shit was coming out of the shower and everywhere, even.”

“Did they replace the carpets?”

“No just the pads.” He smiles. “Plus steam cleaning.”

He takes another sip of his mojito without noting the irony: it took a sewage backup to actually get the carpets clean.

the wisdom of accidental sages

...or what they've chosen to share with me during this week of spring holidays...

Yoga teacher #1:

On the rampant commericalizaiton of yoga

"Did you see that article in Slate a couple of weeks ago?" I ask, stalling in between poses. "About the whole yogaization of our culture."

He nods and smiles. "You know, I recently decided to come up with a celebrity name for myself: Skybabba."

The whole class laughs even though we're now completely contorted again.

"Someone suggested Big Skybabba," he continues, "But since this is L.A., maybe Muy Skybabba would be better."

****************************************

Yoga teacher #2:

On "the practice" -- and its implications for friendship

"Consistency is important."

No one responds. He calls out another pose, one which requires some delicate balancing (Virabhadrasana III )

"It's like brushing your teeth. If you only brushed your teeth once a week, your teeth would rot and fall out."

No one responds in any way at all.

"And," he continues, "you wouldn't have many friends."

At which point I fall out of the pose.

****************************************

My grumpy grandmother:

Offering an unsolicited post-Passover seder postmortem:

"Do you want to have kids?" She asks, the carefully calculated affectation of innocence laid on so thick I can hear her false facial expressions straining through the phone.

I sigh. So many permutations and variations, all on the same theme.

"I don't know."

"I wouldn't, if I were you."

"Oh really?"

"Not the way the world is today. Children today are so independent. They don't bother to take care of you or even think about you most of the time."

angst that's not at all existential

“I can feel your pain,” she tells me. “It’s like waiting for a package to be delivered.”

The liar. Waiting all day for a plumber to come extract you from an apartmental emergency is nothing like waiting for someone to deliver a package to you; and at least with UPS, if you miss them the first time, there’s always a second chance.

She apologizes, again, the insincerity oozing out of her voice. She just doesn’t want to pay her guy overtime, I think, even though he deserves it. Meanwhile, a fountain of black gunk erupts from my kitchen sink when I try to use the garbage disposal (which I've stopped trying to do, after the first time it happened); then the black ooze leaks from the pipes underneath, seeping in a slow treacherous line across my freshly mopped floor.

And my toilet needs replacing.

The toilet has needed replacing for a while. It doesn’t really flush anymore. Or it sort of flushes, occasionally, a few times a day. The rest of the time it just acts senile and frail, like a patient in the late stages of Alzheimer’s: it doesn’t recognize it’s own handle, or fill tank, or water supply, or anything really.

“What model is it?” she had asked me over the phone yesterday when I first called about the sink.

“I don’t know.”

“Under the lid of the tank there should be numbers.”

“All it says is 1953.”

Which makes this particular toilet older than me, old enough, in fact, to have been a single unwed teenage mother of me. Thank goodness at least that didn’t happen.

“I assume its white,” she said. “Is that one white?”

“No it’s pink.” A 1950s rosy pink, the color of nostalgia and some of the decaying tile work next to my bath tub.

“Well, should we get white one to replace it? Do you think your landlady would agree? Or…what colors are your bathroom? What color do you think the new one should be?”

“I don’t care. I just want one that works. White is fine." There's white in the bathroom. And pink and green and blue and beige: a whole rainbow of colors and styles, an element from nearly every decade, including the giant 70s mirror with the way-too bright bulbs on top. It’s typical of a lot of the apartments around here; I looked at dozens just like this before deciding to rent this one over a decade ago. The thing was, I never thought I’d actually stay here this long. Particularly not after my very first night here when the police were pounding on my upstairs neighbor’s door at 3 AM, just waiting to haul away her abusive boyfriend whose drunken epithets echoed off the concrete driveway for the whole building to hear. But that’s another story… (and she moved out before my one-year lease turned month-to-month).

“Well do you want round or oval shaped? What will match best.”

“I just want it to flush,” I told her. “Fully. You know, each time I press the handle it should flush. The rest really doesn’t matter.”

“But what does that one look like?”

“I can send you a digital photo if you’d like.”

“No, that won’t be necessary,” she said. “I’m sending my guy to look at it first thing.”

What she didn’t tell me was that was all she was going to instruct him to do: look at it. He came into my apartment and I directed him to the kitchen first. “Yeah, looks bad,” he said. He went to the bathroom and glanced at the toilet.

“An antique,” I said.

He nodded. “Oh yeah.”

Then he left. Door shut, ignition started, sound of his van backing out onto the street and driving away.

He promised to be back in “two, maybe three,” hours with a new toilet and a snake for the sink. That was seven hours ago.

“I’m sorry,” she says again. “But he got tied up on another job and now there’s Friday traffic and…” she takes a deep breath. I can hear the lie coming, the pathetic attempt at a Bill Clinton. “How about 8:30 tomorrow morning? You know, I really do feel your pain."

No she doesn't. Not at all. Because she doesn't really have to: I’m just a long-standing rent-controlled tenant, not the landlady who pays her account.

global warnming

A sign of things to come, perhaps...





In the park it’s like early summer: kids play barefoot on the grass under a bright blue sky while adults gulp from plastic bottles of water and pretend to watch; couples lie on blankets under patches of shade and pretend they’re alone; the grandest array of SUVs, windows and sunroofs open, parade painstakingly slowly on the freeways toward the beach. The Santa Ana winds carry cherry blossom flowers: sprinkling them over the park, speckling the streets and lawns, the dog’s fur, my hair.

It is hot: over 90 degrees this afternoon and the dog is panting, ducking under every piece of shade she can catch. Even those LA River bunnies, plump now, after 6 months of feeding, are cowering in the shade under the bridge; the coyotes haven’t gotten them yet.

It is dry: the desert winds have brought red flag warnings in hills, closing the park where often we mountain bike ride on Sundays just like these.

It is sunny: so sunny that my sunscreen-less shoulders and face turn pinkish red even though we’ve only been out for half an hour.

What it is NOT is spring. Not yet. (10 more days and counting…)

dreams interrupted…

An ode to neighborhood monsters
and things that go bump in the night*

In those restless hours of non-sleeping
of having once been asleep, mid-dream, even, just moments before.
In those unsettled moments of too-small neon green numbers glaring
as if mocking the bleary-eyed morning to come
All I can hear is the noise:
the one which woke me up at 3:43 AM
or 2:17
or 5:03, depending
on the day, the season, the circumstance.

It's the unclaimed car alarm, unremitting, repeating at inconvenient irregular intervals.
Or sirens screaming in the distance, growing closer.
Or the thundering footsteps on the walkway, followed by pounding, "Police!" while the drunken or stoned boyfriend/ex-boyfriend/ex-son-in-law echoed curses from the other side of the hollow wood door.
Or the smoke detector’s geriatric 9-volt battery announcing its impending demise.

It's the single gunshot
murdering the man across the street and unnerving my upstairs neighbor for weeks and months to come, although the police were trying to assure us with their words,
"Yes we're certain. The vicitm knew his assailant."

It's the three newborn babies each wailing simultaneously from different apartments, as if calling to out to each other, just to check in on the status of this crazy new thing called life.
Or the husband’s insults on a hot sweaty night, echoing across the concrete driveway,
so loud compared to his wife’s muted sobs.

It's the insomniac elephant above me pacing for hours, thumping, bumping and creaking the floorboards until they screamed.
Or the thundering army of el Niño raindrops rebounding off the driveway and roof.

It's the police helicopter hovering, again: the third time in a week.
Or the car stereo blaring the loud angry bass of the rap music while the engine loudly idles and the driver honks for the dealer across the street to come down.
Or for his friends to come out and party, or both.

It's the high-pitched yelping of the dog, continuing unabated for hours.
It's the ringing of phones, the overheard calls: the anger or joy.
Or the crying.

It's the sequence of the upstairs' sultry one-night-standing: so uninhibited when it doesn't matter whether or what the neighbors might hear.

It's the thumping and thundering of my cat springing off the furniture and running circles around the apartment then jumping on the bed to hunt my ankles
then desperately meowing as he tries to persuade me to feed him again.

And only then I start to wonder...
Did I miss it?
Was there was a full moon?

*all sounds actually heard during a decade of living in an unremarkable one-bedroom apartment in a not-particularly-bad neighborhood

between the lines, or outside them entirely

Snippets of the unsaid, and the silences that speak volumes:


Every day, I see him at the public library: using the same computer terminal, the same black duffel bag lying on the floor next to his chair. His hair is thick and curly, almost wild; his clothes show signs of age but are still cared for, and he keeps them as neat as discarded clothing can be. Through the thick squares of his brown plastic glasses, he stays perfectly focused on the screen as he types, frantically pounding each key in succession.

As he hunches over the keyboard, I notice, yet again, the pre-printed message on the back of his lime green t-shirt, the same one he's been wearing for weeks: “I’m the son of rage and love.”

*******************

“I can’t believe you’re having this conversation from the supermarket,” the woman at the laundromat yells into her cell phone over the roar of the dryers. “Can you even concentrate on what you’re buying?”

*******************

“How are you doing today?” the telemarketer asks as I pick up the phone.
“Fine, but I don’t really want to talk to you.”
Long pause.
“Oh…well…uh…I’m calling you today because…,” he restarts the pitch, his tone tentative at first, then gradually building toward smug.
“Really. I’m not interested.”
Click.
"But..."
I shrug as I put the phone back in its cradle: does anyone actually want an honest answer?

*******************

“Any spouse or dependents?” the bank rep asks as part of setting up my new Health Savings Account.
“No”
“That’s why you’re so cheery.”

*******************

“I get lots of suggestions: footholds, pictures on the ceiling.”
“Pictures on the ceiling?”
The gynecologist nods. “One woman thought we should have pictures of guys being tortured on the ceiling so she could look at them during her exam.”

*******************

“So you see,” my friend tells me as she evokes the grandest spirit of the recent holiday season, “that’s why lots of women want to marry men from orphanages.”

Guilt-ipulation

Guiltipulate (v): to manipulate using guilt. The primary weapon in the arsenal of lonely and slightly depressed Jewish mothers and grandmothers. Variations on this technique may also be employed by certain East European and/or Catholic maternal figures. This technique is so enduringly popular worldwide that it must, at some point, have worked well on someone. See also: guiltipulation (n), guiltipulating (adj), guiltipulatingly (adv)

Real-life examples of attempts at guiltipulation via telephone:

12 years ago when I was living in New York:

“Hello.”

“Oh...um..." My grandmother sounds confused, as if she’s dialed the wrong number. “Hi.”

“What’s wrong?”

She breathes loudly into the receiver, huffing and puffing. “It’s just that I didn’t expect to find you at home,” she says, finally. “I thought I was going to leave a message.”

“Well I’m here today,” I reply. “I’m at home.”

Long stagnant pause.

“So, grandma, why did you call?”

She hangs up.

***********************************
5 years ago:

“I just called to tell you I love you,” my grandmother says quickly, before I can even greet her. “Just in case I die before I talk to you again.”

*************************************
last week when, not coincidentally, my parents were out of town again:

“Hello,” my grandmother’s voice drops discernibly between the first and last syllables. I know this sound, the sighing whine: it means she was hoping to catch me live but now has to deign to leave a message. She sighs loudly before continuing. “I wanted to wish you a happy new year and to tell you that I have no food.”

I call her back 10 minutes later.

“Hi grandma.”

“Oh,” she snaps. “It’s you.”

“Happy new year,” I say, even though there are still a few days left in the old one.

“It’s all taken care of,” she says.

“Huh?”

“The food. We don’t have any now, but we’ll be fine.”

“I was in the shower when you called.”

“Well, it’s fine anyway,” she says. “We figured it all out.”

“Oh.” Long pause. “What do you need from the market grandma?”

“I don’t know," she says. "But it’s fine. She (the woman who takes care of my now quite handicapped grandmother) is just going to shower me and put me in the chair and I’m going to stay here all alone while she goes out to the market before the holiday.”

“So you’re okay?”

“I told you, it's fine. I’ll just stay here by myself in the chair. You know I should never be alone now. In case something happens.”