burst my bubble

It is day 2 of my 3-day weekend ("weekend" being defined as a period of time without having to go to work or school) and I felt a little guilty for having spent day 1 galavanting around town and not doing an ounce of writing, reading, or studying. So today I woke up early and besides some necessary trips to the kitchen and the bathroom, stayed at my desk. But I could tell from looking out the windows and from how happy my roommates were on coming in from the outside world that it was a pretty, sunny day out there. And so around four I gathered a pile of books, papers, and my laptop under my arm and ventured as far as the corner and found myself a little table at Maxfield's, my favorite cafe. So I got myself a nice warm cup of tea and cracked open my Arabic book to begin conjugating some new verbs. Halfway through the first set, I noticed a man coming up to me in my periphery.

Man: What's that? Hebrew?

Me: No. Arabic.

He wore jeans splattered in white paint and a similarly stained hat. He had a pencil behind his ear, and the skin on his face was red, splotched, scarred. He had a blond mustache and the idea that he was an angry person grew and grew as he continued to talk to me. Picture it: I am sitting at a small table just next to but facing away from the counter where the cafe people have put all the different kinds of sweeteners and creamers and utensils and this man is doctoring up his cup of coffee and continuing to talk at me and I vacillate between ignoring him to get back to my conjugation and turning to look at him because it seems like he wants to have a conversation but also it seems like he thinks he already knows who I am and he is angry at that person.

Man: What are you going to do with that? [Meaning, I suppose, the Arabic.] Be an interpreter for the U.S. government?

Me: No.

Man: You got student loans?

Me: Not for this. [I motion to my Arabic notebook.]

Man: You know, if you work for the government ten years they'll forgive your student loans, all of 'em.

Me: [Look up at him.]

Man: That's the problem with you kids nowadays. [I swear, these are the exact words that came from his lips.] You all want to be freelancers. Don't want to be managed. Just want to manage.

Me: [Look up at him.]

Man: You know what's going to happen? [No pause.] Our whole country's going to be run by [he might have said "illegal" here] immigrants.

Me: [Look up at him and feel a bit frightened by what I interpret as a hateful sneer and begin to have the urge to tell him to shut up.]

Man: You know where all this comes from? [No pause.] Lack of religion. No one wants to be told what to do.

And then he walks out of the cafe.

I've been thinking a lot lately how San Francisco, especially my 'hood, is like a bubble. It's all preaching to the choir. Everyone agrees. And as a result, people don't go deep, which leads me to judge them as ignorant and boring, which upsets me because I'm really working at being non-judgemental, but it's hard.

Maybe god sent me this guy to interrupt that recurrent thought.

in the beginning...

I'd like this blog to be brilliant, just like I'd like everything that comes out of my mouth to be, but, yeah...it will be what it is and this is only a beginning.

Today is Wednesday, which turns out to be my favorite day lately since I don't have to go to work but instead I get to go to school. My job is not terrible, it's actually probably the best job I've ever had in terms of what I'm paid and how I'm treated and my relationship with the people I work with; it's just not something I'm terribly passionate about. And wouldn't we all like to be terribly passionate about what we do...to keep ourselves in cornflakes? My father used that phrase with me when I was a freshman in college once, in one of those phone conversations where it feels like he might be communicating the meaning of life and I am flipping out about the fact that what I do (what I love to do, what it feels like I might have been put on this earth to do) is fruitless, in terms of the fruit of capital, which is green and has all these dead presidents all over it. Following me? Dad basically said, "Amira, do what you gotta do, do what you love to do, but also you've gotta make sure you keep yourself in cornflakes." What a weird thing to say, right? Like, is that a phrase out of the sixties or something? So, my point is, that when my dad presented the cornflakes, he made it seem like making money might never align precisely with my passion. Maybe he didn't mean that at all. Either way, I hope to prove him wrong.

So, I live on a little alley in a central part of San Francisco, a few steps from Dolores Park. The park is a good moderate size, with hills that slope up on one side to a path shaded with trees, a good swing set, tennis courts, lots of palm trees, and really neat views of all the tall buildings downtown. On sunny, weekend days, the crowds can be a annoying, even if you are a seasoned people-watcher, like me.

On my block, we've got the namesake of the park, the Mission Dolores, which is the oldest surviving building in this lovely town. The thing about it that I'm so impressed by is that from the outside it's just your basic gargantuan building that you walk by a million times and basically ignore, but from inside, it's like a whole different planet. I won't go into it now, but I suggest you go if you are in S.F. And I give the graveyard four stars.

Anyway, so it's Wednesday, my favorite day, and I was woken up by the sound of jackhammers pulling apart the concrete tiles of the walkway in front of my house. And I'm getting out of bed much later than my ambitious plan and today at school there are short stories to workshop; there is Foucault to discuss. Discourse on shifting structures of power, anyone? Here's a little video a classmate sent out to our class, a back-and-forth between Noam Chomskey and Michel Foucault that will give you a good idea of what Foucault is all about, in case you've ever wondered, like I did before I took this class.



Wasn't that interesting? Isn't Foucault Spock-ish? Where is this thing taking place? Who are those people in the audience?