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Lessons from the 51B: How riding the bus helps me be less of an asshole

Posted on June 18, 2017

Berkeley bus stop

I skipped kindergarten, which may explain why at age forty-five I still haven’t learned everything I need to know. I require periodic reminders of the most basic tenets of human decency, which is where the bus comes in.

I hadn’t intended to start riding the bus when I moved to Berkeley for work back in January. I rented an apartment less than two miles from the office so I could walk or bike my commute. Then California had one of the wettest winters on record, and the advantages of a bus stop two blocks from my front door became clear.

The bus route to my office runs alongside the Cal campus, and my fellow-bus riders were often college students. The first time I heard one of them say “thank you” to the bus driver as she got off the bus, I assumed it was an oddity. This student was surely from Kansas or someplace where people still said “aw shucks” and “gee willikers.” Then I noticed everyone—except me—said “thank you” when they got off the bus, and the bus driver usually said “you’re welcome” back. I briefly felt like an asshole, then I, too, started saying “thank you” when I got off the bus. This felt good in a way that was disproportionate to the act. It was shocking how nice it felt to be nice.

(In fairness, I don’t think my failure to vocalize gratitude after every bus ride was a breach of global public transit etiquette. A decade earlier I had lived in London and been a regular bus commuter. There I witnessed many interesting behaviors aboard a double-decker, occasionally involving the expulsion of bodily fluids—but nobody said “thank you.” The closest I got to a life lesson from that experience was to wash my hands a lot. I’ve never had more colds in my life than my first six months in London riding the 23.)

The next thing I started to notice while riding the bus in Berkeley was how many wheelchair users rely on it. Roughly every third time I boarded a bus, someone in a wheelchair did the same. There’s a procedure for this, starting with the driver lowering the bus, extending the ramp, then leaving her seat to fix the wheelchair in place using a set of straps with hooks. Nobody else can board the bus until the driver is back in her seat and the ramp is up.

The whole thing usually takes a few minutes and yet it’s long enough to notice. And what I noticed is how rarely in daily life I, a non-parent, defer to the needs of someone else. I operate my life in a series of maneuvers designed to maximize, well, me, and the on-demand economy is complicit in my selfishness. The few minutes of stillness, of waiting, while someone else goes first reminded me that most the time I’m in a hurry for absolutely no reason other than to be in a hurry. I’m addicted to self-inflicted stress. Waiting my turn was good for the soul.

***

In late spring the rain finally stopped and I mostly traded the bus for my bike. Occasionally I make exceptions, like when I need to be in the office for 6:00AM calls with my European colleagues. This happened twice in the last week, and the timing couldn’t have been better. My experience on the 5:34AM showed me I had relapsed and was due for a refresher course in decency.

That early in the morning most stops on the route are empty, and the bus makes it to my destination in half the normal time. But on Tuesday we stopped somewhere near Cal for a gentleman with a cane. I was nose-deep in my phone reading work email and yet somehow felt annoyed when he chose to bypass the priority seats in the front. The bus waited while he instead made his way to a seat up the half-set of stairs, just behind the rear door. There I was again, in a hurry when I wasn’t even late and being an asshole in the process.

On Thursday, we stopped at the same stop for the same gentleman. As he got on, the bus driver bantered with him about the Oakland victory parade for the Golden State Warriors later that day. Then I watched as again he made his way to the same spot behind the rear door. He was dressed impeccably: a white fedora with a black-ribbon band decorated with a small feather, a single-breasted overcoat atop a suit, and a crocodile-embossed bag hanging diagonally across his shoulders. I was reminded of an episode of the nineties sitcom Just Shoot Me! in which the character of Nina Van Horn, a fashion-magazine editor, blames the downfall of civilization on the rise of casual separates. It seemed to me this gentleman was making a similar case.

I was lost in thought about it when we arrived at my stop and mechanically got off through the rear doors. As I walked by the outside of the bus I snapped to, just in time to say “thank you” to the driver through the still-open front door.

Opa

Posted on October 2, 2016

Opa on his 100th birthday

I, of course, didn’t know Opa until he had retired to Florida in a house just a third of a mile from where we also moved when I was six months old. I wouldn’t have picked up the information that he had earlier lived in St. Martin, Aruba, New York, Paris, and Cairo until I was at least a few years older, but relics of these past lives were everywhere in that tract home on Selby Drive—from a dinner gong to gilt-edged mirrors to the curvy armoire in the guest bedroom. It was these objects that made the most vivid impressions on me as a kid. The den at the front of the house was a veritable treasure trove: the oil portrait of Oma, the writing desk and letter opener, the camel saddle, and the cow bells and various tchotchkes on the bookshelves. Each time I visited I did a physical survey, scanning the shelves, tinkling the bells, turning over a six-sided clear acrylic picture frame in my hands.

All this stuff was downright exotic; to a kid growing up in the deep suburbia of southwest Florida it may as well have been plonked down from outer space. This was, of course, long before the Internet put the whole world in the palm of your hand. Coincidentally, Opa’s den also held a physical copy of that era’s Internet: a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. This was a nod to the importance of intellect and knowledge and, in the pecking order of reference materials, a step above the World Book Encyclopedia they had at my elementary school library.

If there was a whiff of pretension about those encyclopedias—or about any of the aforementioned objects—its smell was sweet. Pretension has negative connotations, but it’s the grease on the wheels of social and economic mobility, and I think Opa knew that. He also deserves credit for it. I spent hours on the floor of that den working on school reports with an open volume from his shelf, his house serving as both a literal and figurative reference library for me for a world outside of Fort Myers.

When I was a teen, Opa’s time working abroad and his multi-linguism also impressed me. I was resentful French hadn’t been passed down to my father and then to my sister and me, although there was admittedly nothing to stop me from learning on my own other than a tin ear and a lack of discipline. I like to think my own globetrotting adult existence owes something to his legacy, and I always got the impression he approved of—even took pleasure in—my choices, including my British husband. There was a rapport between Opa and D., a sort of mutual recognition of a fellow bon vivant. D. always looked forward to visiting Opa and being offered an ancient liqueur as an aperitif or digestif, depending, as Opa explained it, on the time of day. When I wrote postcards on vacation, Opa’s was the only one for which D. commandeered the pen.

Some years ago when D. and I were living in the UK, we were given the set of keys to a vacant apartment in Paris. We took advantage of our good fortune as often as we could, and one of the routines we most enjoyed was going for lunch on Rue Cler. It’s a pedestrianized street filled with produce stalls, specialty food shops, and the kind of outdoor cafés where all the chairs are facing out for maximum people watching. It’s also quite near the Eiffel Tower and, in my head, where Oma and Opa lived when they lived in Paris. I’m not sure where I got the idea—maybe the neighborhood was pointed out to me on a childhood visit to Paris with my parents or, more likely, it’s just something I heard over the years. In any case, as we made our way to Rue Cler on each visit I always pointed out a particularly beautiful stretch of mansion blocks to Douglas and said “That’s where Oma and Opa used to live.” Whether or not they ever did is beside the point. Even in that tiny den at the front of his house in Fort Myers, Florida, he managed to open up the whole world to me.

When Opa sold his house and moved into the nursing home, most the totems of his past life were dispersed amongst us. The cowbells and camel saddle now sit in my own den in California and, judging by my niece’s interest in the bells on a visit a couple of years ago, still hold the same allure for kids. On my visits to Opa in recent years, I always saw him in the common area of the nursing home—a pleasant enough environment but one stripped of the context his possessions had provided. The last object of his that I ever saw was a small rectangular painting he had made through an art program at the facility: a picture of a palm tree on an orange background set somewhere in the West Indies. He must have been thinking of going home, and it’s comforting to know he finally arrived. He will be missed.

Random

Some thoughts on MS, AI, and novelty human exoskeletons

Posted on January 30, 2016

Bambi the lobster mermaid on Coney Island will make sense by the end of the blog.
“Lobster” by Angus McIntyre, Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License

Yesterday I read a tweet from the MS Society UK that said “80% of people with MS are forced to give up work within 15 years of diagnosis. That needs to change…” The intention of the tweet seemed in part to be to raise awareness of the need for those diagnosed with MS to immediately go on and stay on disease modifying drugs, but the immediate effect on me was to do some math on the green paper towel sitting on my desk. It appeared that I had an 80% chance of being out of work by the end of 2027, which was a little earlier than I had expected retirement.

Whether it’s rational or not, I don’t really think I’ll be forced to do anything because of MS. I’ve been on disease modifying drugs since diagnosis—putting aside the pesky question of when I should have been diagnosed—and the only symptoms I’ve experienced during that time have been a few weeks of what at worst could be called a nuisance. Certainly I’ve not experienced disability. That, however didn’t stop me from noticing an article about Japanese robotics that could help disabled people that kept popping up in my social media feeds this week. I never clicked through; the knowledge that someone was working on it should I ever need it was comfort enough.

What I did click through on today is a piece by Gary Marcus about the current state of artificial intelligence, including the big news this week that DeepMind beat the European champion in Go, “a game that has been notoriously difficult for machines.” I started reading it thinking nothing about MS, spurred on only by my recently acquired interest in AI, nurtured by encounters with terrific film and literature on the subject. (My late-blooming interest in AI is a matter of much derision on the part of my lifelong sci-fi-loving husband.) But when I got to the part where Marcus recounts a talk by a graduate student of a deep learning expert on the same day the Go paper went public, I immediately felt a pang familiar to any patient of neurological disease who quickly learns the answers to most of her questions are “We don’t know.” Speaking about AI, the graduate student acknowledged “(a) people in the field still don’t really understand why their models work as well as they do and (b) they still can’t really guarantee much of anything if you test them in circumstances that differ significantly from the circumstances on which they were trained.”

In other words, AI sounds a lot like the human brain. And as with the human brain, it’s inevitable (as had been the fodder for the conflicts in countless sci-fi plot) that AI will be unleashed on the world before we ever understand it. It’s already been happening for a while with products like Siri and Google Now.

I’m less concerned about this than what Marcus poses at the end of his article: “The real question is whether the technology developed there can be taken out of the game world and into the real world. IBM has struggled to make compelling products out of DeepBlue (the chess champion) and Watson (the Jeopardy champion).”

As a person with a neurological disease that has the potential to impact both my motor and cognitive function, the one that’s more terrifying is the latter. Sure, not being able to walk is a horrifying prospect, but people are working on powerful exoskeletons I’ll soon be able to suit up in to handle that; I want mine to look like a lobster, just for the record. (Note to self: business idea for novelty human exoskeletons.) If AI scientists want to deliver a compelling product, how about one that will supplement cognitive skills in patients with neurological impairment? All I ask is she’s given a better name than Siri.

Random

Big Pharma Wants to Date Me

Posted on January 8, 2015

It’s ski season, at least that’s my excuse for going off-piste with the content of today’s post to share an essay of mine on a topic about as far away from the Cotswolds as you can get: adventures in the American healthcare system. The piece is called “Big Pharma Wants to Date Me, and Other Quirks of Being Sick in America,” and it chronicles my experience being of being doggedly wooed by a pharmaceutical company after being diagnosed with a chronic illness. I tried to be serious and funny and personal at the same time, and I hope you’ll check it out. It was published on The Rumpus here earlier this week.

Random

Jesus, Fireworks, & Wine

Posted on April 24, 2012

So here we are on day five of our cross-country trip marking our return to L.A. By the fourth day I was starting to recognize the common threads between states, at least judging by the billboards along the interstate. The biggest surprise was that every state we have passed through has wineries. I had heard about Finger Lakes, NY wines, but the domains du Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Missouri were news to me. Also, and I feel very ignorant saying this, all the states have native American ancestry, even if it only shows up in a junky gift shop or a casino.

The Jesus signs started in Ohio. They kicked off with a doozie: “I knew you before you were in the womb. —God.” This reminded me of two things. First, no doubt unintentionally, it reminded me of a zen koan: “who were you before your parents were born?” It also reminded me of when I was driven to college in North Carolina for the first time and, as we entered the state, we were greeted by a gigantic Abortion is Murder billboard. I was coming from the geographic south in Florida, but that sign is how I knew I was entering the real south.

Go ahead, click on it so you can read it.

I also enjoyed the Jesus is Real billboard. For a second I wondered where Sarah Silverman’s head was on it, then I remembered her show was called Jesus is Magic. A stretch of highway in Indiana maintained by the Association of Christian Truckers gave me a chuckle. The best, though, was: Need directions? Read the Bible. It appeared right before a billboard for a shooting range.

Though not as prevalent as Jesus, there has definitely been a dose of weaponry-related signage along the way. The scariest was the place that sold knives AND fireworks. The other thing that showed up right around the same time as the Jesus signs was the porn shops. They are almost but not quite as ubiquitous as the firework emporiums. I kind of get the lure of porn for a long-haul trucker, but I’m still stumped over what about long car trips makes people crave purchasing fireworks.

So there we have it: Jesus, fireworks, and wine with a smattering of porn and deadly weapons. If an alien or a European (same difference in this part of America) drove across America who could blame them for concluding we were a Bacchanalian, Jesus lovin’, pugilistic kind of people with a fondness for celebrating by lighting up the sky with things that sound like bombs going off.

Turns out you really can know America from her billboards.

Random

Letter from Beijing

Posted on January 24, 2012

Sculpture from 798 Art District in Beijing

This is not really a letter from Beijing. I would have liked to have written it there, but Blogger is blocked in China. Facebook is also blocked there, which was less distressful than I imagined. I can now attest to the fact that nobody ever died because they couldn’t check in somewhere cool.

Of course China has come up with its own version of Facebook, just like it has its own version of Google (Baidu) and Yahoo (Sina) and PayPal (Alibaba), to name a few. It’s really a cross between Twitter and Facebook, and it’s called Weibo. Last Tuesday my colleagues and I braved the Beijing smog (shocking even by the standards of a former Angeleno) to sit down with a few folks from their team and talk shop. I was there with the Western European, aged, behemoth of a technology company I work for, along with some partners from an American, aged, behemoth of a technology company. Together we easily averaged twice the age of the our Weibo colleagues. We sat listening attentively while Gaofei, Jerry, Terry, and Ianli regaled us with tales of their three-hundred million and growing user base. I half expected them to dab the dribble from our chins and tuck blankets over our laps before they wheeled us out to contemplate how we might capture just a few drops from their overflowing cup. Instead they gave us each a red scarf — Weibo apparently sounds a lot like the word for scarf in Chinese — which was promptly stolen from my hotel room by the maid.

There were other memorable if more predictable experiences over the course of the five-day trip. There was the restaurant lit up from the outside like a Vegas casino with hostesses dressed in matching fur-collared camel coats and rhinestone tiaras who ushered us up escalators in a corridor with AstroTurf-lined walls to eat fried fish with a spiked ridge like a dog collar. Then there was the dinner at a restaurant laid out like the villa of a rich Qing dynasty family, where women in elaborate costumes — embroidered peony pink dresses, fan-shaped head pieces crowned with a single oversize flower, white socked-sandals resting on a squat stilt under the center of the foot — served us individual carafes of hot, clear liquor alongside a taunting plate of deer tongues. The tongues were redeemed with a duck hamburger, a crisp patty sandwiched between a spongy oyster shell-shaped bun, scalloped like a madeleine.

Culinary miscellany aside, the meeting at Weibo made the deepest impression on me. I feel like I have seen the future, and it coincidentally looks a lot like the above picture I snapped in the trendy Beijing 798 art district. Because of course Beijing has trendy art districts now, just like they have Zara and iPhones and social networks that are on course to dwarf Facebook before the year is out.

Random

Return to Beijing

Posted on January 12, 2012

I leave shortly for a work trip to Beijing. The last time I was in Beijing was about eighteen years ago. I was a graduate student in Singapore on my way to visit an old college boyfriend—let’s call him OCB, which sounds pleasingly similar to ODB—who was working outside of Tsingtao. OCB was too busy to meet me in Beijing, but it seemed crazy to visit China without first stopping in the capital city to take in some of the sights. So OCB arranged to have another one of his ex-girlfriends, a petite French woman named Agnès who was living in Beijing, take me around the city. I was pretty naive at twenty-two, but even I could smell the potential awkwardness in this arrangement. (It was awkward enough that I was flying to China to meet up with an old flame, but somehow that had failed to register.)

Agnès picked me up at my hotel on my first night in town and pedalled me, a large American woman, on the handlebars of her bike to a Muslim part of town where we bought flat breads and beer from street vendors, then sat around consuming them at street-side plastic tables. To this day I don’t know if Agnès was trying to give me an off the beaten path experience or if taking me to this dingy street was some kind of joke. Either way, the next day I decided I would take in the Forbidden City and Mao’s tomb on my own.

After four or five days in Beijing I flew on to Tsingtao where a private but rickety cab took me out to the tobacco factory where OCB was working. It was a harrowing drive that included having a bucket of worms as a co-passenger (dinner for the driver according to OCB) and witnessing what I am pretty sure was a road fatality but was too afraid to look back to confirm. When I arrived I was introduced to a couple of other ex-pats working with OCB. One was having a full blown breakdown over the fact that his case of Mars bars—apparently this man’s sole daily pleasure—had been stolen. The other’s daily pleasure was hardcore porn; from him I learned that Germans were the filthiest porn makers in the world. Thankfully we left for Hong Kong the next day.

And so it is that my abiding memories of my first visit to China are not of golden pagodas but of golden showers (explained that is) and French girlfriends of old boyfriends. I have no idea what this visit holds for me, but odds are the memories will be improved.

Random

What do people do all day?

Posted on January 2, 2012

I recently returned from a week long vacation at my parents’ house for Christmas. It included the usual stroll down memory lane as I flipped through my high school yearbooks, dusted off my once treasured Beatrix Potter figurines, and examined the contents of my childhood bookcase. The last includes a book called What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry that my father used to read to me. According to the jacket, the book “shows and tells what busy people do every day to build houses, sail ships, fly planes, keep house, and grow food.” In other words, I am not a busy person.

Nonetheless, the subject of what I do all day seemed to be a favorite of my father’s on this visit. It first came up as husband and I were on our way out the door to see a movie for the third night in a row.

“Is this what you do all day? Eat out and go to see movies?”

Well, yes, dad, we like to do those things.

“We are on vacation,” I reminded him before heading out the door for Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol, a movie in which Tom Cruise’s character Ethan Hawke breaks out of a Russian jail, rappels off a skyscraper and crashes a car from ten floors up on a parking platform to save the world from nuclear annihilation. Or, by Richard Scarry’s definition, is never really busy.

I am not surprised by father’s reaction. Something about going to the movies seems to set people off, especially people with kids. Invariably the news that I have seen a new release in an actual movie theater is greeted with wistful comments from my parent-friends who cannot remember the last time they went to a movie theater unless it was to see the Muppets or Sponge Bob or such.

But there was some subtext to my father’s comment, which translates roughly as “Ok, now that you are practically forty your mother and I accept you are never going to have kids but can you please be a little less blatant about what an empty shell of a life you live for nothing but your own pleasure?” In other words, it is ok to busy yourself with your kids, but if you are childless the ways in which you choose to busy yourself are subject to scrutiny by the virtue police. Best not to appear to be enjoying yourself too much; that would just upset people.

Normally I ignore everything my father says, but in the spirit of New Year’s Eve I have indulged in some seasonal guilt/self-flagellation. I have asked myself what the point of my life is and concluded only, pathetically, that I need to make some charitable donations. No, I am not reconsidering my decision not to have kids. Sure, children will guarantee you will be busy for the next eighteen years or so, but even parents are subject to the virtue police. Mothers tell me there is a special force dedicated to unsolicited advice on breast feeding, toilet training, and preparing your infant for an Ivy League. Besides the older I get, the less convinced I am there is any virtue in being busy. Being busy is easy; it’s the doing something I am finding hard.

Random

Willie

Posted on December 16, 2011

My grandmother, Willie Pearl, is dying. Willie is her real name, not a nickname or short for Wilhelmina. It is a name as blunt and bleak as her early life in Texas where she was raised by her grandparents after the Spanish influenza epidemic left her orphaned as an infant. It is not, however, appropriate for the grandmother I got to know when I was growing up.

In my eyes my grandmother was all about sophistication, from her royal blue Mazda RX7 to her beloved Pomeranian, Foxy, to her weekly visits to Doris the hairdresser with copious amounts of aerosol hairspray in between. Her most glamorous accessories were a diamond bee brooch and a matching three-piece Samsonite luggage set in Dijon mustard yellow leather. (The carry-on for the latter was a tackle box-shaped treasure trove of cosmetics mysteriously referred to as her “training case.”) She never left the house without lipstick, jewelry, matching knitwear, and three-inch heels—the last until sometime in her seventies when she broke an ankle at the garden store. By the time I knew her, she and my late grandfather, Woody, had realised the American middle class dream. This was not so unusual for their generation, but what was unusual was that this was not achieved on the income from my grandfather’s career alone. Willie didn’t just work; she had a career too, culminating in heading a county department complete with headcount and her own office where I remember hiding as a little girl when we came to visit. When she retired it was a big deal. Woody threw her a party at the Arrowhead Country Club with all her friends and the people who had worked for her as guests. It was big as any wedding I had ever been to.

I came of age in the nineteen-eighties, the era of industrial-strength shoulder pads and Working Girl. Society was doing its best to tell me that women could do it all, but I already knew that. I had learnt it from Willie. I will always have more grandmotherly associations with her—of roses and snapdragons, the strawberry planter and hummingbird feeder on the back porch, her copious supply of Delaware Punch drunk through bendy straws, and shopping, lots of shopping: at Fashion Island, Bal Harbour, Rubel’s jewellers, and the Cooper Building. But looking at my life today, I suspect being a working girl is her real legacy to me.

For the past few days Willie has been at home in a hospital bed. Her name has again become appropriate for her as she faces down death, no longer eating or drinking or speaking except for the occasional words summoned to chastise my mother. I am told she is setup with a view out the window to where the snapdragons would be planted in spring. Her roses are just the other side of the bedroom wall.

Random

Giving Thanks for Failure

Posted on November 24, 2011

Some time ago in a fit of writerly ambition I setup a Twitter account and a Facebook page for this blog. I added HTML widgets to its margins so the world could adore me with a single click. I methodically Tweeted and posted each new blog. This is, after all, what you are supposed to do if you have aspirations of going from blog to book: build your platform. I had read the publishing blogs, and I knew a lovingly crafted manuscript was not enough. I had to talk unique visitors and followers and likes in those query letters I sent out to literary agents.

And now, many months in, it is time to admit my failure. It’s not like it’s a secret. The two likes I have garnered on the blog are there for everyone to see. (Not that I am ungrateful to husband and my friend Bertie, who sometimes appears in my blog as R. number one, for their unfailing support.) On Twitter I have fared slightly better. There I have three followers: a friend from my old L.A. writing group, a Cotswold local and wine bar stalwart, and, my favorite, somebody named Candelaria whose last tweet was “super experience with hooking up with chix.” In social networking terms I am a nerd. A loser. A geek. It’s like high school all over again.

When it comes to querying literary agents my stats are more voluminous. My rejections positively dwarf my social network admirers, weighing in at nineteen not counting the two queries I wasted on perfectly good agents last year before my rewrite. Still I think my manuscript for Cotswoldia: A field guide to the not so simple life is good enough to be published, even if my percentage odds are about the same as the number of my Twitter followers. I think this because I read a lot, and I have put in the work, and because other people, including a handful of those nineteen literary agents, have read it and told me so. And so I query on, working my way down my ever dwindling Excel list of agents looking for memoir. I suppose I should remove the Facebook Like button from its prominent position on my blog seeing how it practically bleats “no platform” to potential agents with its measly proclamation “2.” But I won’t, because on today of all days I am thankful for them both.

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