Popping back in after a long hiatus

First order of business: holy crap WordPress looks weird. Okay, not weird, just different. It seems to be a very human thing to oppose changes of any kind, for better or for worse.

Like the budget crisis – everyone seems to agree that things need to change, but exactly what those changes might be remain a mystery. Everyone hates the tax code, but no one wants to give up their loopholes. Everyone hates wasted government spending, but no one will give up their earmarks. Everyone hates the debt, but no one wants to pay it off. Everyone hates high gas prices, but no one will give up their taxes and subsidies on our energy resources. Everyone hates unemployment, but no one will let you work for less than minimum wage. Such is the state of the union.

PS: I’m definitely digging the WordPress snow – I wish it could do a cool thing like this for every season! I wonder what the southern hemisphere thinks about this – are we being hemispherist by making WordPress snow because we think it’s winter up here?

Long Time, No Post

I haven’t been updating as much lately, as I’ve started working at a startup called Striiv (pronounced strive) as part of their QA/Validation team. It’s interesting work, which sometimes (always? ) calls for long hours beyond the traditional 40. The leadership in the company is very strong, my coworkers are fun, and the product itself is pretty nifty. I’m hoping things will settle down after we ship (sometime in the next couple of weeks), but who am I kidding? ^_- I’ll find time to get back to blogging…eventually.

Are You Wearing the Emperor’s New Clothes?

It is a sad state of affairs when your eyes are under constant assault from muffin tops and otherwise poorly-clothed individuals (who probably spent too much for how little they are wearing). Sometimes I wonder if I’m contributing to the dress code confusion (I am a big fan of Silicon Valley business casual, what can I say?), but then again, a t-shirt and baggy jeans are a far cry from some of the stranger things I’ve seen.

Sometimes I wonder if I should give up wearing tank-tops. And then I meet a girl who’s wearing a completely see-through skin-tight lace shirt. Sure, she’s a good-looking gal and she has a nice smile, but I didn’t come to Q-Cup to compare bra brands or sizes. I wish I had a spare shirt to give her; part of me is tempted to go to the store next-door and buy her a shirt, but I don’t think she’d take the hint.

Sometimes I wonder if I should wear a veil to Mass. And then I see a woman walk in with a low-cut fuchsia leopard print halter and a short skirt with her husband and three kids in tow. Suddenly my baggy jeans, plain t-shirt, and uncovered locks don’t seem so bad anymore. She looked like she belonged in a nightclub, not a pew. I think the Crucifix cringed, too.

Sometimes I wish swimsuits were actually swimsuits; alas, the era of bare midriffs, bikini booties, and fake tans seems to be here to stay. Teen girls walk around town wearing bikini tops and micro-minis, old men wear flesh-colored speedos in the kiddie pool, and more than a few women seem to have mistakenly purchased eye patches to wear across their chest and nethers. My one-piece and athletic shorts look positively Victorian by comparison, and I’m still considering adding a rashguard to my nautical wardrobe.

Don’t even get me started on ‘slut walks.’

The way you dress is more than just self-expression – it tells everyone around you how you expect to be treated. If you dress like a slut, expect to be treated as such. If you dress like an old lady, expect to be treated like an old lady (at least old ladies get respect!). Do you wonder why guys don’t take you seriously? Look at what you’re wearing – dress like the kind of girl that would attract the guy you want to be with. If you dress like a prostitute, there’s no reason to wonder why you keep dating pimps and players. And if you’re the kind of guy who wears sweat pants and stinky t-shirts that you’ve worn five times already this week and you’re wondering why you’re still single, get thee to a laundromat! Wear real pants and throw a button-down over your t-shirt in the very least  - it’s classy and girls will appreciate the effort you put in to matching all the buttons. (Bonus points: a button-down shirt can hide the fact you don’t have six-pack abs, not that the kind of girls you’d want to date would care, anyways.)

My tirade aside, I wouldn’t want a society that makes laws forcing you to wear skirts of a certain length or frumpy boring shirts – true personal growth comes through making the right choice of your own free will. You can keep buying into the lies of the over-rated ‘sexual revolution’ where thrusting your sexuality into everyone’s face is both acceptable and good and that anyone who says differently is an idiot. Or you can start respecting yourself and dress like you mean it.

And if you disagree with me, you’re probably naked

Rediscovering the Hatch Chile Pepper

After having been away from the Lone Star state for the past four years, I finally met up again with the Hatch Chile Pepper in a Lucky’s supermarket display – $0.99 per pound – I talked my grandmother into buying them.

Are they spicy? she asks. This is the woman who says raw asparagus puree, acupuncture, and foul-smelling brown liquids will cure me of my condition.

They’re only a little spicy and very tasty, I say. I laugh to myself because I have a high tolerance for pain, but honestly they’re not that spicy if you cook ‘em right.

You sure? I don’t know, maybe too spicy…

Sensing that I am about to lose the battle, I add, These peppers are famous; people roast them in front of Walmart!

My grandmother is sold and buys a big bag – they are, after all, on sale. The next day, while I’m at work teaching kids how to add and spell and not make fools of themselves, my grandmother chops up all the chile peppers and tastes a raw one. Now, I would have done the chopping for her, but I figured there was no sense cutting them until we knew what to do with them. Too late, the damage is done.

Too spicy! she declares as I walk in the door.

No they’re not, I argue. You’re not supposed to eat them raw!

Spicy makes things grow on your face, she says adamantly.

Well, that’s a disturbing image, I think to myself. After a few back-and-forths, I give up. Once my grandmother makes up her mind there’s just no sense in arguing with her. It has become an endearing quality.

So now there’s a bag full of sliced up hatch chile peppers in the fridge, and those peppers are calling my name. Since I beat my grandmother home today, I grabbed a handful of pepper, some old rice, an egg, and a stalk of green onion. I cooked the hatch chile peppers first (they taste better when well-cooked), and before I knew it I was frantically stirring my dinner with a pair of chopsticks and sweeping it into a bowl.

It was wonderful.

Luckily, there’s still most of a bag left – I’m thinking hatch chile cornbread and pickled roasted hatch chiles.

A Writer’s Afternoon at Q-Cup

People-watching is a habit of mine – I just can’t help but craft a narrative for complete strangers whom I will never see again.

For example, right now a girl and her boyfriend are sitting at a booth in front of me. The girl is texting and eating lunch; she just finished filling out an application to work at Q-Cup. The girl is in a bad mood – some customers where she works now were upset over the closure of Boomerang Bay and took it out on her, and another woman gave her an earful about how dangerous and slippery the water park was. I don’t blame her for wanting to change jobs. She’s slouching in the booth now, discussing her birthday plans.

The Q-Cup cashier’s ringtone is from Kim Possible: beep beep b-beep! She seems to know everyone who comes in, or maybe she’s just so outgoing and sweet that she can make a friend out of an ax murderer. She’s probably never left her hometown and goes to a community college just down the road. Definitely has a sweet tooth – she recommended purple plum tea – sweet and tangy, kind of reminds me of tamarind. She has brown highlights which make her hair look like fudge ice cream with caramel drizzled on top.

Q-Cup has shown Harry Potter: The Chamber of Secrets for the second time since I came in.  There’s no audio though, just the radio playing where the dialogue should be. I’ve determined that Harry Potter makes a much better music video than it ever did a movie. Dubbing the Quidditch match over with Taylor Swift was unforgettable. And the final battle between Dobby and Lucius Malfoy could not have possibly had better accompaniment than a club techno one-step.

There’s a cute little girl in a green dress twirling in the middle of the shop. Her brother is mesmerized by Harry Potter, and Mom grins and steals some ice cream from his bowl while he’s not looking. The little girl dabs at her mouth with a napkin long after the mess is gone as she watches Harry Potter unfold. Mom steals back her iPhone and grabs a last spoonful of ice cream. Once the ice cream is gone, Mom rounds up the kids and leaves.

A middle schooler saunters in with a wad of cash in his hand – my guess is Mom sent him in to buy himself a drink. He’s in line behind a woman wearing a cream lace skirt with a thin leather belt. She tucks the skirt’s elastic waistband under the belt – the skirt has no belt loops and she looks curvy enough to keep her skirt on, so I’m not really sure what she’s trying to accomplish by adding a belt. She makes her order and sits down, the boy orders next.

Unlike me, he remembered to wait for the cashier to give him change. Whenever my parents made me go up to the cashier as a little kid, I would run away as soon as I made the order, often leaving a good chunk of change behind (I was terrified of strangers). I’ve grown out of that, I think. Or maybe that phobia has simply transformed into a peculiar habit of watching and writing about people who don’t know I’m writing about them.

The shop gets louder as the gaggle of girls in the corner bursts into laughter over a picture being shown around on an iPhone.

A girl and a guy just came in; the guy is slavic with a beer-belly, glasses, an earring, a tattoo in ancient Chinese script, and a nasty smoking habit. The girl is small and thin and listens to him avidly as they wander outside to find a seat.

A group of kids, big and small, just came in. The little girl’s haircut makes her look like Ringo Starr. It could be worse – she could have had my hair cut. In my childhood photos, I look like the long-lost daughter of Spock. I think I was supposed to look like Dorothy Hamill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Hamill); I guess I can’t fault my mother for at least trying to be hip.

The Q-Cup manager looks slightly foreign, but seems nice enough. The first time I encountered him I thought he was a little too intense, but he seems fairly involved and concerned with his franchise, so that’s something. He just took a couple of orders while his other employee was busy making a crepe.  I consider that a sign of a good manager – someone who’s willing to help out with the small things when your employees already have too much to do. The shop now reeks of fried calamari. Well, at least it’s not durian or halitosis.

A lot of the customers are quite enthralled by their iPhones – I guess I’m not much better – I’m typing away madly on my ancient laptop, glancing up on occasion to capture yet another interesting but quickly forgotten moment in the lives of others. Is it considered theft to record these moments that are so easily discarded by human memory? I hope not. Sometimes I wish I had perfect recall so I could savor every moment – but then again, it might be like recording extra programs on TiVo that you never get around to watching. If I had perfect recall and I were living life to the fullset, would I have time to rewind and relive? Probably not, so maybe being able to forget isn’t such a bad thing. And there are plenty of things worth forgetting, like heartbreak or a bad day.

Whoah, one of the girls in the corner just whipped out a Polaroid knock-off – I haven’t seen a snap-’n-print since the early ’90′s! I feel so old. Perhaps this should be an addition to Godwin’s law – when you start feeling old, you probably are too old to be hanging out there (Well, at least I’m not sitting at Chuck-E-Cheese).  Okay, this is the third time I’ve seen Dobby kick Lucius Malfoy’s butt – I think I need to find a new haunt. Although to be honest, I think Q-Cup beats Starbucks as a writing environment – I don’t have to put up with the monstrous howl of the coffee grinder every 15 seconds. Maybe someone should invent a silent, ultrasonic coffee grinder – that would be pretty cool (but perhaps mildly dangerous – what if you don’t realize it’s on and stick your hand in there?). Or maybe they could put it in a vacuum and bring the air pressure down to outer space levels so the beans silently explode.

P.S. Q-Cup, you are a business genius for not having a bathroom, otherwise I would stay here forever. However, I believe the resolve of my personal needs is much weaker than your resolve not to install a bathroom by several degrees of magnitude.

Teaching Hazards: Part 1

Teaching is a surprisingly hazardous job – one would think that teachers are boring people to whom nothing ever happens, but I’ve been finding it to be quite the opposite.

During my first week teaching third-grade math, in fact, my class dissolved into hysteria over the entrance of a large, pill-shaped cockroach (a classic coffee-brown) skittering around the perimeter. My formerly bold and boastful students, who had earlier been torturing a pair of tiny black beetles, proceeded to knock over chairs in their desperation to climb up on the table and escape the relatively harmless beast. I eventually herded them out of the classroom. The cockroach briefly dashed out under the door (and on the other side rose the screams of my students) and then dashed back into the classroom (probably terrified by the screams), where he met his maker under my sneaker. Yuck – the roach was all green and squishy inside, although the worst part was that I had to smear him across the carpet multiple times to actually kill him- apparently just stomping on him isn’t enough – he sprang out from under my foot unharmed despite the fact I practically jumped on him!

And just today, one of my students found a spider the size of my thumbnail in another classroom. She ran over to the office and asked me to squish it for her. I was about to do so when she leaned over and started counting its eyes. I asked her if she still wanted me to squish it, and she shrieked, jumped up, and ran away, after which I promptly squished it.

With this same student I am now playing ‘Shop’ with the contents of her backpack while trying to write this blog post. I have thus far bought a red pen, a pair of red scissors, a fluffy soccer ball,and a notebook, all for the price of a dried out piece of clay and an empty paper cup (and my change was given in the form of the most disturbing disembodied doll head I’ve ever seen). Ah, youth – what use have you for toys when you have a million mile an hour imagination?

Waka

I wrote these poems a couple years ago in the Japanese waka form for a class on Japanese culture. Enjoy, and happy Friday!

Starlight rains a chill
upon my withered hands like
wind beats upon the
naked trees who weep away
the winter for an iris.

Would that I, beneath
the bloodshot maples
and their spinning seed pods,
could capture such elegance
like my loved ones in my sleeves.