This week I am signed up for a workshop called Explorations of Short Forms, through the Bay Area Writing Project. I don't know how I feel about it yet, which is unusual for me. I typically really, really like something, or I really, really dislike it, but although two days of the workshop have already passed, I'm still unsure as to whether I enjoy it or not. I know I definitely don't enjoy driving to and from Berkeley every day, although this makes me appreciate very much the fact that we stopped looking at houses in Oakland and just moved to the Peninsula.
Anyway, the week is really all about writing practice, or writing invitations, as the teacher calls them. The following is a short piece that came of one writing prompt/practice/invitation.
Unknowns
July 23, 2018
Tell me something I don’t know.
Something that you don’t know is what it feels like to bury your hands deep in hot sand, so that the grains roll over your flesh, warm and soft, until they grow cool and then cold, damp, a perfect juxtaposition to the skin on your still-sweating forearms.
Tell me something you don’t know.
I don’t know where the universe ends or how it began or if it even matters. I don’t know how many stars there are or the number of planets that lie scattered across the vastness of space. I don’t know what a black hole is, or how to measure using light years, or why a belief in god is so often used as justification for hatred and violence rather than the genesis of peace and beauty.
Tell me what nobody knows.
No one knows what kind of person you will be. No one knows what you will look like, what color eyes or hair you’ll have, if you will have skinny, knobby fingers or tiny little elvin points at the uppermost tips of your ears. You are a stranger but also not a stranger, because you live and breathe through me, and maybe you will love books like your mama, or art like your dad, or soccer like your yayo, or knowing all the names of all the plants like your grandma.
Nobody knows the sound of your voice, the strength of your grip, or the trajectory of your heart. Nobody yet knows your name. These are just some of the things that nobody knows.
What do I probably know by now?
By now you know the flavor and the feel of your own tiny thumb. You know the force of your fists and your kicks and the shape of my hands, pressing and probing from without. You probably know the vibrations of my voice and the rhythm of my heart and the rise and fall of my breath, expanding, retracting, always.
What do you really need me to know?
Above all, what I need you to know is that I have never wanted to meet anyone more than I want to meet you, that I will never love anyone the way that I already love you, and that I have never been more afraid of anything as I am that I will be responsible for you.
What I really need you to know is that despite the horrible things that are happening in the world, there is always the capacity for change, for betterment, for goodness. What I need you to know is that you have a responsibility not to be passive.
I need you to know that right now, you are just one tiny person, but already you are the most important one.
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
Monday, July 23, 2018
Stay Puft Forever
So... clearly I'm not a very good blogger. Before deciding to start using this thing, I had a thousand thoughts on a thousand subjects which to write about, and now it's all a blank. Or maybe it's not blank. Maybe it's that I'm too fucking exhausted to consider expending energy on stringing words together, like beads on a wire, in a way that makes sense let alone rings with beauty. After years and years of formal creative writing programs, that's what writing is supposed to be--beauty--and because it takes a lot of concerted effort, not to mention editing, to create anything I'm happy with (ever, for even five minutes), writing just falls to the wayside and I spend too much time doing things that don't feel satisfying in any way (read: Instagram, Wheel of Fortune app, etc). Maybe that's why I called this blog the Anonymanalog. In anonymity I don't have to worry so much about whether things are good or not. And considering I've not provided anyone I know with the means with which to find this blog, I'm not sure who, if anyone, is reading it. Each of my previous two posts show 4 views apiece. Does the counter go up if I look at my own blog or is someone out there actually reading it? I don't know. I guess it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, because writing is about more than just beauty. It's about expression and communication, even if the only person I am expressing or communicating with is myself. My present self, my future self... I'm not sure. I do know that I wish I had saved more of the things I had written in the past, so I could return to them now and see who I used to be.
Presently, I am a 24-, almost 25-, weeks pregnant woman who is both marveled and disgusted by my own body. I know, of course, many wonderful mothers who have gone through 1, 2, or even 3+ pregnancies, and I am not sure if I failed to ask or if I failed to listen to the myriad changes your bodysuffers, errr... experiences, during pregnancy. This morning I sat on my couch with a cup of coffee (yes, fully caffeinated. One of the sweetest surprises of pregnancy was my very first phone call with the OB nurse who said, "Don't just have your daily cup of coffee; enjoy it," and so I have) in a pair of shorts and gaped at the cellulite on my thighs. Of course, this led to googling "cellulite pregnancy," wherein I was assured by a thousand internet opinions that added cellulite is a perfectly normal part of pregnancy and that is will most likely retreat from whence it came once the baby has made his grand entrance into the world. Normal? Sure. Desirable? Not so much.
It's not like I felt great about my body before becoming an incubator for my son (my son. I don't know if I've ever called him that before. It's so weird. Inexplicably weird). One of the things I remember most clearly about third grade was the day I went to put some lotion on my legs, and some kid in my class said, "Wow. That sure is a lot of lotion," to which my other classmate, Rafa, responded, "That's because there's a lot of surface to cover." Or sixth grade, when I took three weeks off from school to go to Spain, and when I returned, Jennifer A. asked if I'd brought home a lot of souvenirs, and JD Palmer, the bane of my middle school existence, said, "Yeah, rolls of fat." These comments still sting a little, some twenty-five or thirty years later, and as my body grows along with the baby inside of me, a lot of these insecurities are brought right back up to the surface.
I think the world is a more body-positive place than it was when I was a kid, or even a teenager. While we're still surrounded by images of impossibly thin women, there are also other body types in the mainstream media and on social media, which I think is a great thing. Still, it's difficult to look at myself in the mirror and fully appreciate what my body is doing right now, because of the years of shame I've associated with bellies and cellulite and any sort of jiggle. I know there are people out there that would say that makes me selfish, or shitty, or unaware, because there are so many women in the world who want to bear children and simply can't. And I would never want to diminish this experience, because as shocking as I still find it to believe that I will be someone's mother (soon!), I fully appreciate the experience and wouldn't give it away for anything, even if it meant not having another day of heartburn, backaches, sciatica, or having to pee every thirty minutes. But despite the fact that pregnancy is, in such a cliched term, a miracle (I mean, come on. The placenta alone is a mind-fuck. I grew a whole new organ out of nothing to sustain this kid), I still don't feel attractive or desirable in any way. And let's not forget: I am an old mom. I'm thirty-eight years old. My fat is so stubborn at this age, I'm not sure a plastic surgeon's lipo vacuum could coax it out. At least I'm not famous. I don't know if I could deal with that sort of scrutiny (although, is the scrutiny of teenagers less toxic than the scrutiny of paparazzi? Who's to say?). At least I don't live in France, where women are regularly harassed by their OBs for gaining too much weight.
I feel like blog posts are supposed to end with some marvelous insight gleaned from whatever topic was being written about, but I don't think further pondering of my gravid body has led me to any fuzzy warm feelings about the fact that my arms, never the supple willow branches I've always longed for, are now so jiggly, I can't tolerate the idea of writing on the Smartboard when school starts in a few weeks for fear of starting a hurricane with their massive vibrations. I don't feel better about the extra layer of flab that now hangs off my butt, or my steadily growing second chin. I know I am not the only woman to "gain weight all over," as they say, as opposed to just the belly. And like I said earlier, I was kind of a chubby child, so maybe I should have known pregnancy would lead me here. I mean, I thought I was permanently past the fat stage of my life. It doesn't make it any easier when expectations for the female body are already set preposterously high. Ah, well. And "so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," as Fitzgerald so aptly put it.
Presently, I am a 24-, almost 25-, weeks pregnant woman who is both marveled and disgusted by my own body. I know, of course, many wonderful mothers who have gone through 1, 2, or even 3+ pregnancies, and I am not sure if I failed to ask or if I failed to listen to the myriad changes your body
It's not like I felt great about my body before becoming an incubator for my son (my son. I don't know if I've ever called him that before. It's so weird. Inexplicably weird). One of the things I remember most clearly about third grade was the day I went to put some lotion on my legs, and some kid in my class said, "Wow. That sure is a lot of lotion," to which my other classmate, Rafa, responded, "That's because there's a lot of surface to cover." Or sixth grade, when I took three weeks off from school to go to Spain, and when I returned, Jennifer A. asked if I'd brought home a lot of souvenirs, and JD Palmer, the bane of my middle school existence, said, "Yeah, rolls of fat." These comments still sting a little, some twenty-five or thirty years later, and as my body grows along with the baby inside of me, a lot of these insecurities are brought right back up to the surface.
I think the world is a more body-positive place than it was when I was a kid, or even a teenager. While we're still surrounded by images of impossibly thin women, there are also other body types in the mainstream media and on social media, which I think is a great thing. Still, it's difficult to look at myself in the mirror and fully appreciate what my body is doing right now, because of the years of shame I've associated with bellies and cellulite and any sort of jiggle. I know there are people out there that would say that makes me selfish, or shitty, or unaware, because there are so many women in the world who want to bear children and simply can't. And I would never want to diminish this experience, because as shocking as I still find it to believe that I will be someone's mother (soon!), I fully appreciate the experience and wouldn't give it away for anything, even if it meant not having another day of heartburn, backaches, sciatica, or having to pee every thirty minutes. But despite the fact that pregnancy is, in such a cliched term, a miracle (I mean, come on. The placenta alone is a mind-fuck. I grew a whole new organ out of nothing to sustain this kid), I still don't feel attractive or desirable in any way. And let's not forget: I am an old mom. I'm thirty-eight years old. My fat is so stubborn at this age, I'm not sure a plastic surgeon's lipo vacuum could coax it out. At least I'm not famous. I don't know if I could deal with that sort of scrutiny (although, is the scrutiny of teenagers less toxic than the scrutiny of paparazzi? Who's to say?). At least I don't live in France, where women are regularly harassed by their OBs for gaining too much weight.
I feel like blog posts are supposed to end with some marvelous insight gleaned from whatever topic was being written about, but I don't think further pondering of my gravid body has led me to any fuzzy warm feelings about the fact that my arms, never the supple willow branches I've always longed for, are now so jiggly, I can't tolerate the idea of writing on the Smartboard when school starts in a few weeks for fear of starting a hurricane with their massive vibrations. I don't feel better about the extra layer of flab that now hangs off my butt, or my steadily growing second chin. I know I am not the only woman to "gain weight all over," as they say, as opposed to just the belly. And like I said earlier, I was kind of a chubby child, so maybe I should have known pregnancy would lead me here. I mean, I thought I was permanently past the fat stage of my life. It doesn't make it any easier when expectations for the female body are already set preposterously high. Ah, well. And "so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past," as Fitzgerald so aptly put it.
Thursday, July 12, 2018
Weblog, 2.0 or 3.0 or something.point.oh
I've only told one person, my old friend Lacey, that I started a blog (well, resumed might be more accurate, because I wrote a few--maybe even many--blog posts back in the day, but I deleted them all when I decided to begin again as a vegan travel blog, which clearly never went anywhere).
"What's it about?" Lacey asked.
Excellent question. What is this blog about? I gather that most blogs are thematic in some way, but I don't really want to limit myself to one particular topic. I imagine that my posts will revolve around pregnancy (because that is the primary thing I think about these days), vegan travel (because, as previously mentioned, I have been wanting to start a vegan travel blog for awhile. I never have because I always think all my greatest travel adventures are behind me, which may or may not be true, although I am guessing that with the arrival of bambino in November, our greatest travel adventures will be limited to the exotic Central Valley of California, where my husband's mother lives, and the even more exotic Chico, California, where my family lives. This falls under the realm of Very Depressing Thoughts, however, so I'll just move on), teaching (how I ended up back in high school, one of the more miserable periods of my life, is an ever-present mystery), and... I don't know what else. Whatever comes up in life that warrants writing about, I suppose. And that, I think, is what matters. This blog isn't going to be about anything in particular, so much as a place to flex those writing muscles that haven't so much gone weak as completely atrophied.
Writing used to be such an integral part of my day. I didn't even feel like a real person unless I had written about something. These days, my writing seems to be limited to lists: what I need to do, what I need to buy, things we might name our baby. Since I will be returning to the creative writing classroom this fall, not as a student but as a teacher, I think it's important to practice what I'm asking students to do. And really, I love writing. I always have. I love making things up and stringing the words together, but mostly I love putting it out in the world and hearing how it is received (not always well, of course; I have many, many battle scars from workshops past as well as many, many rejections letters from various publications that did not see my work as befitting their pages). So we'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll be successful, and maybe I'll be a miserable failure, but I'll never know until I start trying to write more.
"What's it about?" Lacey asked.
Excellent question. What is this blog about? I gather that most blogs are thematic in some way, but I don't really want to limit myself to one particular topic. I imagine that my posts will revolve around pregnancy (because that is the primary thing I think about these days), vegan travel (because, as previously mentioned, I have been wanting to start a vegan travel blog for awhile. I never have because I always think all my greatest travel adventures are behind me, which may or may not be true, although I am guessing that with the arrival of bambino in November, our greatest travel adventures will be limited to the exotic Central Valley of California, where my husband's mother lives, and the even more exotic Chico, California, where my family lives. This falls under the realm of Very Depressing Thoughts, however, so I'll just move on), teaching (how I ended up back in high school, one of the more miserable periods of my life, is an ever-present mystery), and... I don't know what else. Whatever comes up in life that warrants writing about, I suppose. And that, I think, is what matters. This blog isn't going to be about anything in particular, so much as a place to flex those writing muscles that haven't so much gone weak as completely atrophied.
Writing used to be such an integral part of my day. I didn't even feel like a real person unless I had written about something. These days, my writing seems to be limited to lists: what I need to do, what I need to buy, things we might name our baby. Since I will be returning to the creative writing classroom this fall, not as a student but as a teacher, I think it's important to practice what I'm asking students to do. And really, I love writing. I always have. I love making things up and stringing the words together, but mostly I love putting it out in the world and hearing how it is received (not always well, of course; I have many, many battle scars from workshops past as well as many, many rejections letters from various publications that did not see my work as befitting their pages). So we'll see how it goes. Maybe I'll be successful, and maybe I'll be a miserable failure, but I'll never know until I start trying to write more.
Sunday, July 8, 2018
In transit
I.
On a recent flight to Kauai, our plane was delayed six hours, which is roughly an hour longer than the flight from Oakland to Kauai actually is. So instead of a five hour flight to Kauai, it turned into a 12+ hour ordeal that involved a lot of sitting around Terminal 1. This lengthy airport wait included ample time with the people who were also waiting to board our flight, although one family in particular seared itself into my memory, mostly because of its matriarch.
They looked pretty normal, for the most part: slim, tan dad; dainty, dress-clad mother; bony-kneed teenage son; whisper-thin teenage girl in Lululemon shorts just brushing the gluteal sulcus. Very shortly, though, it became clear the mother was a monster. She snorted every few minutes, that tell-tale sound erupting from her face when someone sucks all the snot and mucus in their nose back into the throat. But when I say every few minutes, I do mean every few minutes. And even when she relocated to charge her laptop on the other side of the gate, I could still hear her, suck-snort-suck-snort. Gross. But there was also the picking. No, not involving the nose this time (why would she need to pick her nose when her air ducts are so efficiently able to clear everything away like a Dyson Cyclone V10?), but the perpetual plucking of her underwear from her butt. It doesn't seem like the most comfortable outfit for a several-hour plane ride if you are constantly having to adjust your shit. I mean, I even saw her having to pluck the front at one point, which seems like a very personal, bathroom stall sort of activity. (Of course, at five-and-a-half months pregnant, I'm in no position to be harping on anyone's style or clothing adjustments. After all, most of my recent maternity shirt purchases have made me look much closer to a bright green sea cow than an actual human being.)
After watching this woman's gangly children consume chicken fingers with fries, teriyaki chicken bowls, two pizzas, and a couple of bags of chips, I wasn't sorry to hear we would finally be able to board the plane and be on our way to Kauai.
Of course, the same family was on our return flight, because the worst people are always on the return flight. [A few years ago, we went to Mexico for a week. I always request an aisle seat, because I get a little claustrophobic and my knee starts to hurt if I don't pop it every so often. We took our assigned seats, but soon enough a group of drunken surfer people boarded the flight. Three women, in what you could barely call clothing, took the three seats on the opposite side of the aisle from us. Their dude friend had the window seat in our row. After we stood up to let him into his window seat, then resettled ourselves, he leaned over and said, "Do you mind switching seats with me? So I can sit next to my friends?" I hesitated for a minute, because yes, I actually did mind switching with him. I reserved an aisle seat for a reason, but I understood wanting to sit with friends. Before I could say anything, though, he added, "If you don't switch with me, I'm just going to talk over you with my friends for the whole flight." Ummmm.... are you giving me an ultimatum? Against better judgment, we caved, and I switch seats with him. Guess how much talking he did with his friends? About as much as one does when they immediately fall asleep. Of course, going through customs, none of these surfer people had a pen, meaning they all had to borrow mine to complete their customs forms, and do you think they returned my pen to me? NO. Needless to say, I was very disappointed, but not at all surprised, when they were on our return flight: tanner and drunker than ever.] Anyway, when our little nuclear family showed up for the return flight from Kauai, I was a little surprised (ten days in Hawaii seems like a long vacation for a family of four) but also completely not surprised. They were all wearing the same outfits they had been wearing on the way over (and, for the record, ain't no shame; so was I), so I knew I was in for some snot-sucking, butt-picking action. Fortunately, we were not delayed again, so our airport time with "the family" wasn't long. After watching the mother-monster elbow and shove her way to the front of the general boarding line, I heard one last farewell snort-suck and bade them farewell.
II.
We'll preface this next section by freely admitting that I haven't always been a huge follower of rules. Of course, many of the rules I shunned in my formative years were ones that didn't seem all that important. Do not chew gum in school: How would I make sure there wasn't the lingering scent of fried mozzarella sticks on my breath if that cute boy with the perpetual ski google tan ever decided to talk to me [and in case you're wondering, he didn't]? You must wear socks to school: How would all of my classmates be able to appreciate my cute new sandals and pedicure? You must wear your uniform shirt tucked into your pleated uniform khakis: Ummmmm.... just, no.
But somewhere along the way, I became a big proponent of rules. Maybe not alllllll of the rules, allllll of the time. Like, there was that one protected left-hand turn at the intersection of Carroll and Third in San Francisco that never turned green. At two in the morning, long after the last MUNI train had whistled goodnight and there was nary another vehicle in sight, I may have willingly run that red light. Once or twice. And that whole thing about not using the garage at my new apartment complex as storage space. Well, if my bikes and the stroller for my baking baby fit there, and all of the other neighbors do the same, is it really hurting anyone? And that, I think, is the key. My decision not to wear socks with my high school uniform or keep my bike in the garage doesn't affect the safety or comfort of other people.
When board said flight from Kauai to Oakland, I did not immediately notice that the mother, son, and father were seated in the row directly in front of us. Which means I also didn't notice that gangly Lululemon girl was seated in seat 22A, directly next to my husband. It was not until the flight attendants provided the first announcement to unplug all electronic devices from the seat outlets that I paid her any attention at all. Because she didn't unplug. In fact, she didn't unplug the first five times they made the announcement. The flight attendants make three rounds up and down the aisle, obviously not being very thorough in their work, because it wasn't until the third time that Marla (whose name I happen to know from her sharp-tongued mother's admonishments of her) finally unplugged her iPhone. Here's the thing: Is it unsafe to keep your phone plugged in during takeoff? Probably not. There hasn't been any research on it either way. Does it really matter if one person keeps their phone plugged in? Probably not. What does matter is that the plane isn't taking off until your phone is unplugged. On some flight to some place in the not-too-distant past, the flight attendant said over the intercom that they have a light in the attendant's station that tells them when someone is plugged in. Is this true? Fuck if I know, but since those flight attendants made five announcements and three sweeps down the aisle to check every goddamn outlet, something tells me that they must know, and if they know, this damn plane isn't going anywhere until Marla unplugs her phone. So, just follow the stupid rule and unplug your phone the first time around, because there is a plane full of passengers--147 of them, in fact--whose comfort you are violating every second the plane stays on the ground.
Can I really blame Marla for being a pile of shit, though? When her mother shrieked, "Don't touch me!" at her son as the passengers were deplaning, when she barked orders at her family the entire way through the terminal to baggage, when she barreled her way through the Uber/Lyft pick up area not caring whose luggage she knocked over, it just reinforced what everyone already knows. Shitty people make shitty children. Hopefully, with a little luck and a lot of foresight, my fetus won't turn into a shitbag. Hopefully, I'll never be such a miserable mother that I tell him not to touch me.
On a recent flight to Kauai, our plane was delayed six hours, which is roughly an hour longer than the flight from Oakland to Kauai actually is. So instead of a five hour flight to Kauai, it turned into a 12+ hour ordeal that involved a lot of sitting around Terminal 1. This lengthy airport wait included ample time with the people who were also waiting to board our flight, although one family in particular seared itself into my memory, mostly because of its matriarch.
They looked pretty normal, for the most part: slim, tan dad; dainty, dress-clad mother; bony-kneed teenage son; whisper-thin teenage girl in Lululemon shorts just brushing the gluteal sulcus. Very shortly, though, it became clear the mother was a monster. She snorted every few minutes, that tell-tale sound erupting from her face when someone sucks all the snot and mucus in their nose back into the throat. But when I say every few minutes, I do mean every few minutes. And even when she relocated to charge her laptop on the other side of the gate, I could still hear her, suck-snort-suck-snort. Gross. But there was also the picking. No, not involving the nose this time (why would she need to pick her nose when her air ducts are so efficiently able to clear everything away like a Dyson Cyclone V10?), but the perpetual plucking of her underwear from her butt. It doesn't seem like the most comfortable outfit for a several-hour plane ride if you are constantly having to adjust your shit. I mean, I even saw her having to pluck the front at one point, which seems like a very personal, bathroom stall sort of activity. (Of course, at five-and-a-half months pregnant, I'm in no position to be harping on anyone's style or clothing adjustments. After all, most of my recent maternity shirt purchases have made me look much closer to a bright green sea cow than an actual human being.)
After watching this woman's gangly children consume chicken fingers with fries, teriyaki chicken bowls, two pizzas, and a couple of bags of chips, I wasn't sorry to hear we would finally be able to board the plane and be on our way to Kauai.
Of course, the same family was on our return flight, because the worst people are always on the return flight. [A few years ago, we went to Mexico for a week. I always request an aisle seat, because I get a little claustrophobic and my knee starts to hurt if I don't pop it every so often. We took our assigned seats, but soon enough a group of drunken surfer people boarded the flight. Three women, in what you could barely call clothing, took the three seats on the opposite side of the aisle from us. Their dude friend had the window seat in our row. After we stood up to let him into his window seat, then resettled ourselves, he leaned over and said, "Do you mind switching seats with me? So I can sit next to my friends?" I hesitated for a minute, because yes, I actually did mind switching with him. I reserved an aisle seat for a reason, but I understood wanting to sit with friends. Before I could say anything, though, he added, "If you don't switch with me, I'm just going to talk over you with my friends for the whole flight." Ummmm.... are you giving me an ultimatum? Against better judgment, we caved, and I switch seats with him. Guess how much talking he did with his friends? About as much as one does when they immediately fall asleep. Of course, going through customs, none of these surfer people had a pen, meaning they all had to borrow mine to complete their customs forms, and do you think they returned my pen to me? NO. Needless to say, I was very disappointed, but not at all surprised, when they were on our return flight: tanner and drunker than ever.] Anyway, when our little nuclear family showed up for the return flight from Kauai, I was a little surprised (ten days in Hawaii seems like a long vacation for a family of four) but also completely not surprised. They were all wearing the same outfits they had been wearing on the way over (and, for the record, ain't no shame; so was I), so I knew I was in for some snot-sucking, butt-picking action. Fortunately, we were not delayed again, so our airport time with "the family" wasn't long. After watching the mother-monster elbow and shove her way to the front of the general boarding line, I heard one last farewell snort-suck and bade them farewell.
II.
We'll preface this next section by freely admitting that I haven't always been a huge follower of rules. Of course, many of the rules I shunned in my formative years were ones that didn't seem all that important. Do not chew gum in school: How would I make sure there wasn't the lingering scent of fried mozzarella sticks on my breath if that cute boy with the perpetual ski google tan ever decided to talk to me [and in case you're wondering, he didn't]? You must wear socks to school: How would all of my classmates be able to appreciate my cute new sandals and pedicure? You must wear your uniform shirt tucked into your pleated uniform khakis: Ummmmm.... just, no.
But somewhere along the way, I became a big proponent of rules. Maybe not alllllll of the rules, allllll of the time. Like, there was that one protected left-hand turn at the intersection of Carroll and Third in San Francisco that never turned green. At two in the morning, long after the last MUNI train had whistled goodnight and there was nary another vehicle in sight, I may have willingly run that red light. Once or twice. And that whole thing about not using the garage at my new apartment complex as storage space. Well, if my bikes and the stroller for my baking baby fit there, and all of the other neighbors do the same, is it really hurting anyone? And that, I think, is the key. My decision not to wear socks with my high school uniform or keep my bike in the garage doesn't affect the safety or comfort of other people.
When board said flight from Kauai to Oakland, I did not immediately notice that the mother, son, and father were seated in the row directly in front of us. Which means I also didn't notice that gangly Lululemon girl was seated in seat 22A, directly next to my husband. It was not until the flight attendants provided the first announcement to unplug all electronic devices from the seat outlets that I paid her any attention at all. Because she didn't unplug. In fact, she didn't unplug the first five times they made the announcement. The flight attendants make three rounds up and down the aisle, obviously not being very thorough in their work, because it wasn't until the third time that Marla (whose name I happen to know from her sharp-tongued mother's admonishments of her) finally unplugged her iPhone. Here's the thing: Is it unsafe to keep your phone plugged in during takeoff? Probably not. There hasn't been any research on it either way. Does it really matter if one person keeps their phone plugged in? Probably not. What does matter is that the plane isn't taking off until your phone is unplugged. On some flight to some place in the not-too-distant past, the flight attendant said over the intercom that they have a light in the attendant's station that tells them when someone is plugged in. Is this true? Fuck if I know, but since those flight attendants made five announcements and three sweeps down the aisle to check every goddamn outlet, something tells me that they must know, and if they know, this damn plane isn't going anywhere until Marla unplugs her phone. So, just follow the stupid rule and unplug your phone the first time around, because there is a plane full of passengers--147 of them, in fact--whose comfort you are violating every second the plane stays on the ground.
Can I really blame Marla for being a pile of shit, though? When her mother shrieked, "Don't touch me!" at her son as the passengers were deplaning, when she barked orders at her family the entire way through the terminal to baggage, when she barreled her way through the Uber/Lyft pick up area not caring whose luggage she knocked over, it just reinforced what everyone already knows. Shitty people make shitty children. Hopefully, with a little luck and a lot of foresight, my fetus won't turn into a shitbag. Hopefully, I'll never be such a miserable mother that I tell him not to touch me.
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