Bird in a Bucket

In Mexico, if you have hot water at all, you have to turn it on so that the gas you buy in canisters (to use for the stove and oven too) heats it up. When G was turning off the hot water this morning, he went out back to the switch, and found a bird drowned in a bucket. It's been raining a ton so the bucket kept back there was full and when I went out to see the bird, I saw a gray thing, floating, with it's little orange claw-feet curled underneath. My thought was to throw it away, but G said we should bury it. I let him do it, with a wooden spoon we use in the kitchen, and I hope he put the dead thing deep enough under the surface of our garden soil.

I have been following this whole Iran thing online. Crazy how the NYTimes has been following the blogs and posting Youtube videos. Crazy the new Google Translator. Of course it's not accurate, but damn if it's amazing they just put it up. And for this. In my mind, Tehran is something like a mix of Beirut and Damascus, but with even more rules. How must it be to live in a place where in public a woman must basically be invisible. Covered up and quiet. Or maybe that's not what it's like. And now the streets are a war-zone, with fires and clubs and people chanting their battle cries. I am intrigued by the use of such nomers as "The Supreme Leader" and "The Guardian Council." Makes it all seem a bit like Star Wars. And I can take it as ironically as I want, but of course to a good number of people it's just not. And I can barely begin to grasp whether there might be irony in the physical reality of being there.

Been away from San Cristobal for more than a week and it's good to be back "home." Why the quotes? Because this is a temporary home, because the word "home" is problematic in its definition. For me. Meeting so many new people, I have been getting asked a lot where I am from, where "home" is. And because it's most often Spanish and my Spanish is limited at best, I don't give the long explanation I would in English, but I simply say "Estados Unidos" and "Virginia" and, often "circa de Washington." That's it. Yes, we were gone to the lovely university city of Cholula, and then Mexico City, and then Cuernavaca. Since these are all G's places, I met a lot of G's people, including a drama student putting on a play that he'd worked on with poor kids in a nearby town and a group of his drama friends, one kid a drummer living in an apartment with sloppily spray-painted walls; three sisters in middle age who danced flamenco to the mariachi band that showed up as a surprise for G during a lunch in his honor--minus the dancing they reminded me of my mom and her sisters; a woman who has recently opened her own weight-loss clinic using a technique that employs body-sculpting through massage; a woman who had just come back from a landscaping job in Canada; a half-slav, half-British English teacher who has lived in Mexico for decades and made us a desert that involved berries and cointreau and chocolate and cream, as well as her translator-husband who had good stories about Obama and the Queen of Denmark and her basketball-playing daughter; an Mexican anglophile, living in an apartment with modern furniture and lounge-bar lighting; a Basque woman living with her father in a beautiful apartment in the embassy neighborhood of Mexico City; a Basque guy who just got his urban design degree in Berkeley and is about to go back and look for a job; a proudly out (kind of hard here) conservative gay man living in Mexico City's "La Zona Rosa," a neighborhood that surprisingly has a lot of Korean restaurants; a group of artists planning an arts festival in the skeleton of a house on the property where they live, south of Mexico City, in the neighborhood that claims Frida Kahlo; the woman who runs the pulqueria in San Pedro and has been selling pulque more than forty years and was going on and on about it's health properties; and many, many more.

What a varied world we live in. May the bird rest in peace. And hoping some good comes from what's going on on the streets of Tehran.

Surprize sexism

So I started going to the gym last January and I got pretty serious about it, going pretty much every day. I didn't want to lose the habit so one of our first quests here in San Cristobal was to find a gym. Our first visit to the closest gym to our house ended in a yelling match. Then we walked around the city aimlessly looking for one, asking people who looked like they might patronize a gym where they go. Then we ended up at PSAS, a close bike ride on the other side of the river south of downtown. It's pretty nice, and we got a good deal. We'd have to pay a lot more money to use the cardio machines you plug in (the elliptical and treadmill) so, thrifty me, I've gotten into using the bikes, with G. Generally most of PSAS's customers stick to the weight areas, grunting and groaning away. The cardio room is on the top floor, with big windows looking out over the neighborhood, showing some lovely churches and mountains in the distance. I block out the overhead music with my ipod and go, go, go. It's an idyllic moment, but inevitably I look up at the walls around me, where there are sun-worn pin-ups of extremely muscular men and barely clad women using gym machines. It's weird and kitschy and funny and also a little demeaning. The pictures are all over the gym and apparently all over most gyms in Latin America. The pictures of the women and for the men's enjoyment and for the women to feel insecure, and the pictures of the men are somehow for the men as well, for them to idolize and perhaps feel insecure too. Today in the women's locker room I spotted a poster that breaks out of that mold. "A hard man is good to find," it says, under a black and white picture of a man with a sculpted, bare, hairless chest, his jeans suggestively unbuttoned at the bottom of the frame. No one that picture is for but the ladies.

catastrophic days

That is a photo of a dead, somewhat flattened pigeon shoved into a grate, headfirst. Encountered FRIDAY night at the corner of something and Valencia. Pretty devastating. And yesterday (SATURDAY) I saw two more, as I was biking around. Those two were much flatter, small raised discs of pigeon that I rolled by on the asphalt as I rode home from the grocery store.

On MONDAY I went to my cousin's house where they have satellite tv, and on the news there were stock market line graphs flashing downwards across the screen. Seems the market "has an upset stomach," as my father described it yesterday on the phone. And last night I was sitting in front of the same television again. We were watching something called "No Comment" on Euronews, a show that consisted of video coverage with no commentary, not even in a language I can't understand, not even scrolling across the bottom of the screen. There was footage of a mob of black-hoodied people in Prague, beating each other up, against grey walls. And then the cops showed up and then it switched to somewhere in the boondocks of Turkey, where peasants set up camp and hauled things against a stark desert. In the distance behind their tents, there were dunes of dark pebbles, what might have been coal? And all this as my little cousins expended energy at our feet:


On TUESDAY I woke up early and voted. Off-year, so there were like six propositions and of course Gavin Newsom won for mayor, perhaps because, as someone told me later that day, "He's just so damn good-looking," and the roster of people he was running against read like a variety show line-up. The volunteers were sweet, but seemed a little incompetent, and I wondered how voting could be more powerful than certain conversations.

On WEDNESDAY, this happened, but I didn't hear about it until THURSDAY, and even then I was too busy getting painfully drunk with the best coworkers a girl could ask for. And so I started to process it on FRIDAY. 36,000 gallons of oil fuel (which is somewhere in between gasoline and straight-up crude oil) spilled in San Francisco Bay. Unforgivably slow response and the poison spread quickly and far, closing down more than a dozen beaches, seriously the most amazing gems of our city and surrounds. But then this fine SUNDAY morning I happened to click on this. 1,300 tons of oil fuel spilled in the Black Sea after an oil tanker split in half?!

Still the thing that gets me most is that after a nice walk with a friend in yesterday's grey drizzle, about a half a block from my house I encountered a man I often see hanging out on the streets of my neighborhood. He was standing still right in the middle of the sidewalk, facing east, underneath one of those huge black umbrellas, the kind my dad used to have. And as I slowly walked by him, I realized his head was bowed towards his chest and he was sleeping.

celebration

Beautiful, right? This was the setting for my good friend Darren's wedding last weekend. After the ceremony (pictured here), everyone took their seats at the ten or so tables set up on the lawn, had a tasty dinner as the sun set. There was plenty of California wine to go around to fuel all the dancing that came after. This all happened in the back garden at the home of the lovely bride's grandmother in Los Gatos.

I feel over-stimulated by celebration lately, partly guilty, partly wondering if we deserve all the indulgence, the time off... And yesterday was July 4, on a Wednesday, of all days. Smack dab in the middle of our American work week, a majority of workers got the day off. In San Francisco, we had one of the record hottest days in history and everyone seemed to be aimlessly wandering about. I made it out to Berkeley to visit a friend before her bbq got under way. We sat in her shady back garden and chatted. I got back to SF a few hours before sunset, checked out the insane party that was going on in Dolores Park. Among the hundreds gathered, my roommate organized a bbq that consisted of many kinds of meat and beer and an actual arcade game that they had somehow transported to the park and were running off a gasoline motor. There were immense piles of trash around all the trashcans and scattered on the lawn. I high-tailed it home where I met some friends for dinner and then up to my friend's roof where we had a 360-degree view of the city and surrounds. We watched fireworks shoot into the sky from different neighborhoods and rooftops, spinning on our feet, ooh-ing and aah-ing. The night was balmy and the lights and sounds were stimulating--sometimes warlike and of course we jokes about the ones set off by the city that we were seeing our tax dollars at work. Afterwards, we headed over to Dolores Park. We walked against the leaving hordes and now the trash just seemed like it was everywhere. We sat at the edge of a hill and listened to some pretty bad hippy "campfire" music.

For a few more photographs from the wedding weekend, go here. I didn't take any photos on July 4. Firework photographs are pretty tough to make interesting anyway, right?

Men on Bad Mood Day

Yesterday, in my regular comings and goings, I came across a few men who stick in my memory:

1. A block from work in the morning, after I turned the corner of Montgomery and Pine, in San Francisco's financial district, I found myself walking behind a man. I think he had dirty blond hair, was middle-aged, white. As we both kept walking, I got closer and closer to him. This meant he was going slower. He wore the clothes of someone who worked in the neighborhood, gray slacks, black leather shoes, some sort of sports coat. But as I came closer still, I noticed colorless stains on his pants and then he leaned towards and then against the building we were walking next to. And as I passed him, I turned to look at his face, eyes almost closed, mouth open, tongue sticking slightly out. He fell against the building then, but somehow kept his legs moving forward and so did manage a few steps before I turned away and walked into the building where my office is.

2. On a happily empty train going to school midday, I was seated facing the profile of a man seated across the train's width from me. In his hands he held paper sack which seemed to contain a can, though he never drank from it, but instead kept it between his legs, holding it tightly. Every once in a while he would lean over and spit an unbelievably huge amount of clear liquid onto the ground in front of him. Over the course of the ride, he managed a small pool of his own spit-up at his feet.

3. Coming back from school that night, I noticed a man waiting with all of us home bound sfsu students on the outdoor train platform. He stuck out because he had with him two large clear plastic bags, each filled with many smaller bags, those bags filled with trash: empty bottles with a few drops of liquid inside, folded and smoothed piles of paper, and other things. He gracefully weaved his way up the platform, and as I passed him I noticed a stick-like thing in his hand. A cane? The train took forever to come, and so when it did, there was a sizable crowd gathered and we all crammed our way through the two tiny doors, everyone eager for the perfect seat. I took one in the middle of a five-seat row and opened my book to read. A few seconds later, the man with the bags came and sat down next to me. As he was carefully arranging all his things and turning to sit, I had the impulse to get up and move away, but something kept me there. He sat, and his sleeve brushed my arm and I think he apologized. He kept to himself, crossing his legs carefully as not to disturb his bags, under which, I noticed then, he had laid two pieces of cardboard, to keep the ground from getting dirty where he set them down. Then I turned just a few more degrees to see the stick he held and noticed it had a handle on end and pinchers on the other. There were no unpleasant odors and he was by far one of the best stranger seat companions I've had on the muni since I moved to San Francisco just over a year ago.

Yesterday, I was in a bad mood, all day coming and going as I regularly do, but with thoughts swirling, mouth down turned, little gray storm cloud just two feet above my head.

Shaken, not stirred

Another short post, for my sister, L, who is adamant about me keeping to posting regularly. (Oh, L, I miss you! (She's also dubious about me using initials to identify people. What's the point? she says: I know who you are talking about anyway. But does the CIA? Ha...))

Martinis entered my life when I moved to San Francisco, as one of my main companions here, M, was into them and we spent many a night out together when San Francisco was fresh to me. Consequently, I take mine like he does (and probably always will): shaken, very cold, extra dirty, with three olives, and preferably Grey Goose. OK, so the fancy vodka turns it into a little investment, but it is well worth it. The buzz is...clear and intense and fun. The hangover is...minimal. But, whatever you do, always drink one glass of water for one martini and don't go over two drinks. I've done it, but I wouldn't recommend it.

A typical part of the martini experience with M involves explaining to the bartender exactly what we want, and then tasting the drink once it is poured and sitting in front of us, and then, often, sending the drink back for refinements. I used to shrink at the idea of telling someone who's served me that what they did was wrong, that they need to try again, but M has changed this in me. The places we usually go are nice establishments, often downtown. Last night we even warned the bartender beforehand that we'd be sending our martinis back if they weren't right. He sort of laughed at us but didn't flinch and poured the perfect martini the first time.

Once I found myself in a dive bar in my neighborhood, waiting for a date. I really wanted a martini but was worried that at such an establishment, the drink would be no good. So, I hesitantly asked the bartender: "How's your martini?" The pierced and tattooed man was pissed. He growled at me: "Why don't you give it a try and let me know?" Scowling, he made it. Reluctantly, I tasted, worried I'd have to confront him about not fulfilling my desires. But he did, and I tipped him well, even thanked him profusely. He didn't seem to care... My point? I don't know...

Have a happy day (it's sunny and beautiful here!)... And consider a martini the next time you go out. If I'm with you, I'll make sure you get the perfect one.