I'll Have Beef with a Side Order of Chicken & a Garnish of Pork

It’s the week before Thanksgiving and it’s a beautiful, warm November night in Oakland. I’m making my way down the hill to meet the girls (and their boys) for dinner at a Thai place I’ve never been to before—Bangkok Palace. I laugh out loud when I think of my S.O.’s never-ending quest for “The Perfect Thai Sausage” and wonder if this place will be a contender. With the exception of Margaret, who I see a few times at week at kickboxing class, my visits with these ladies have regrettably been less frequent in the last few months. Our regularly scheduled girls’ night out has, for at least this night, morphed into a girls, Significant Others and kids’ night out.

We order a slew of food—papaya salad, spring rolls, scallops with chilis, pad thai, a few vegetable and tofu dishes. Grilled chicken for the meat eaters (okay…for me) and brown rice. Brown rice? Man, I miss eating clean and healthy. Last night, my S.O. and I went out for Chinese and had two dishes that were that were so battered, deep-fried and sauced up, they were beyond identification. Cod nuggets and chicken were my guess but my S.O. thought he tasted bits of pork and catfish chunks. Lordy.

But tonight, I was in the company of ovo-lacto vegetarians, lacto vegetarians and a few who’ve even experimented with veganism. And then there was me...a life-long lover of swine and all manner of hooved and cloven creatures. If left to my own devices, I could survive in a cave, very happily, on a diet of low-fat cottage, strawberries and walnuts, provided you throw in an occasional pork rib or chicken leg, for good measure. I’m a carnivore to the bone, albeit a carnivore with ovo-lacto vegetarian tendencies. On one occasion, while speaking to my S.O. on subject of favorite foods, I discovered that his favorite food was meat.

“Meat?”
“Yes, meat.”
“What, you mean, like filet mignon or new york strip? Or a nice pork roast or barbecued ribs?”
“Uh…yes, yes, yes…and aawww yes.” Sheesh...I thought. He must have the hardest working colon in the business. The James Brown of the colon world.

As I was reaching for the last half of the tofu spring roll and spearing another perfectly sautéed forkful of green beans and cabbage, I suddenly realized how much I’ve missed the once prevalent presence of vegetables from my diet. Despite the fact that eggplant is utterly devoid of any nutritional value, I still loved its soft texture and smoky flavor, especially in tonight’s incarnation, accompanied with tofu and basil. Though the fish sauce and Thais chilis, in fact, everything that makes it Thai, was virtually nonexistent, the papaya salad, sweet and tangy and peanutty, actually woke up my mouth from its freshness! I am not lying.

No, there’ll be no Thai sausage on the dinner menu tonight…but I—and my colon—thank you.

A Warm Bottle and a Clean Diaper

The child hasn’t even been arrived yet and she has everything a baby girl could possibly want. Actually, don’t all newborns just want to be fed, warm, and poop-and-gas free? My friends Celeste and Ajit are having their first baby in a matter or months—a girl, Madeline. The nursery in their house is brimming with baby books, toys, stuffed animals, and clothes…tons of clothes. The entire inventory, acquired from the generosity of friends and friends of friends, freed from attics and boxes marked “Kids’ Clothes”, will enjoy a second life in the Monnette De Silva household. Celeste won’t have to buy clothes for Madeline until she’s eight.

Tomorrow is Madeline’s shower and I am 100 percent stumped as to what I am getting her. If I’m having this much trouble thinking of a gift for her in her pre-natal state, what’s it going to be like for the next twenty-or-so years of gift-giving? Oy gevalt, this Madeline is hard to shop for!

I should have taken that dog-eared issue of Parenting Magazine home with me from the gym. I know next-to-nothing about the latest in baby-gear innovation. Diaper Genie? That is so 2002.

If I had Sleeping Beauty fairy powers, I’d give Madeline the gift of being a sound sleeper. A new parent’s lament often involves sleep deprivation and colicky babies. May your child find bliss in a full night’s sleep! Now that would be something!

It’s Saturday afternoon, an hour before the shower. I’m at Babies “R” Us.

“Excuse me, can you show me where the Diaper Genie 3000 is located?”

Baby You Can Ride In My Car

I’m not sure if it’s a Bay Are thing or not but every weekday morning, I take my place in a queue of commuters under the I580 overpass at MacArthur Avenue in Oakland in what’s known ‘round these parts as the “casual carpool” line. I’m not sure if other urban communities have adopted this style of carpooling but in my opinion, every community should. Basically, certain centrally located points in surrounding suburban cities have been dedicated as casual carpool pickup points. Folks get in line and two at a time, hop into cars heading to San Francisco. The relationship, albeit fleeting, is a win-win for everybody. The driver avoids the $3 bridge toll (soon to jump another dollar) and the often thirty-minute approach to the City and the two passengers get a free, quick ride to downtown San Francisco via the carpool lane. It’s a simply brilliant way to get to work in the morning and it gives me chance to ride in cars I would never get a chance to ride in otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, I have grown to love and treasure my 1988 red Acura with its “Bad Girl” decal my mother so generously “lent” me when I totaled my beloved ’95 Honda Civic not too long ago. It has served me well and faithfully. But what tickles me even more and what I tend to brag about to complete strangers is the fact that I don’t really even need to drive my car during the week. Between casual carpooling into the City every morning and taking the P line bus home every evening, I’m saving buckets of money, wear-and-tear on my car, and every now and again, get to hop into a Jaguar.

People often ask, “Aren’t you scared you’ll be getting into a car with an ax murderer?” or “Do you sign up for it ahead of time?” No and no. I have never encountered any ax murderer-types in my hundreds of times as a passenger into the City. And signing up ahead of time? Well, then, we wouldn’t be able to call it “casual” carpool at that point, now would we?

Of course, it’s not completely casual. You ride long enough and you’ll begin to see the same riders, the same drivers. There’s the burgundy Nova that shows up around 8:15 am. At all costs, I try and avoid this car. A youngish, Asian woman driver, she’s got a pair of magnetic-nosed teddy bears hanging from her rear-view mirror and Hello Kitty cozies for her headrests. She also listens to an all-talk Christian radio show that features old-school evangelists that have the peculiar speech affection that causes them to end all their words with “—aah” as in “Sin-aah no more-aah! Jesus-aah loves ya-aah!”

I love getting first-time drivers. I often take it upon myself to school them in the etiquette of casual carpooling. I got in to a car with a young woman, lured to Oakland from the City by the cheaper rents and plentiful parking. As I climbed up into her Toyota SUV, I could tell immediately she was a first-timer due to her proclivity to chat. She explained how she couldn’t find the pick up point and that she had driven up and down Grand Avenue for quite some time. I told her the Grand Avenue spot was popular as well as the Oakland Avenue and 41st Street by the Korean church. After a quick exchange of “Good mornings" most drivers and passengers remain silent, usually letting the all-talk chatter of NPR fill up the airspace on the fifteen-minute ride into the City. Not so with this lady. I learned all about her life, where she worked, where she and her husband lived. How she was lousy with car directions because all she ever used to do was ride her bike in the City and street signs and one-way roads be damned as she zipped in and out of traffic on her trusty ten-speed. So of course, I gave the inside scoop on carpool etiquette, lest some unscrupulous passenger tried to pass on mis-information in hopes of avoiding her twelve-block hike to work in the morning.

“Yes, most drivers take a left on Howard Street and let passengers out on the corner of Fremont and Howard, unless you’re crossing Market Street. In that case, most people will jump out on Market Street and walk to work from there.” She nodded her head, mentally taking notes for tomorrow’s carpool adventure. “You work at North Beach? Gosh, I work a block below Broadway. You’re going that way? You mind if you ride with you to there? That’s awfully nice of you. Just so you know, most drivers don’t offer door-to-door rides to their passengers…” I love it when the morning ride over works out that way.

Casual carpool is my favorite way to get to work. At cocktail parties (not that I go to many), it always paints a sheen of mystery about me. “Uh-huh…I do it everyday. Yes, strangers, every one…no, I’m never scared, really, it’s perfectly safe.” In reality, I’m just a cheap bastard, short on time and always ready to hop into a Mini, a Prius, a Lexus, a Jag…”

Memories of Me

I’m having one of those days where I’m walking around fully functional yet my eyes don’t quite feel completely awake. My body is craving sleep but when I try to nap, my eyes refuse to close. Do you remember those dolls when you were a kid, whose eyes shut when you laid her down horizontally, then popped open again when you stood her up? I feel like one of those dolls, but all fucked up. Lay me down and my eyes refuse to shut…stand me up and all I want to do is shut them.

It was another beautiful, sunny Saturday in Oakland today. This morning, my S.O. and I hit our usual coffee and muffin spot, Arizmendi, a co-op owned bakery a few blocks from where we live. It’s a little ritual we’ve developed over the course of our relationship and although I’m a highly ritualistic person by nature, I’m not quite sure I will ever get used to the rituals of my S.O.

It’s not quite August yet, but I already sense in him a mood swing that happens at the beginning of every month. Mr. Crankypants is coming for yet another visit. Oh, yay. Feelings of dissatisfaction, boredom, and regret envelop my S.O. every month like clockwork. And although he tells me he’s had mild depression his whole life, and even though he insists it’s him and not me…not us…there’s an annoying nudging in my side that won’t go away despite his reassurances.

The coffee thing at Arizmendi is our ritual, yes, but our weekends now mostly consist of his rituals. Hitting balls at the range, soccer games on Sunday, eating at his Vietnamese deli, playing 18 holes during Twilight hours on Sundays and me, always his trusty golf cart driver.

I used to have rituals of my own. Every Saturday, I enjoyed long solitary workouts at my gym, then ran to Peets for super-strong coffee and a fat-free vegan scone. I’d sit across the street, plant myself on a window ledge, usually next to a trio of Ethiopians enjoying their smokes, and people-watch. I used to make up stories as to why that middle-aged lady with the pink yoga mat had such a big grin on her face. Maybe her daughter who never called her, suddenly called her just to say hi. Or maybe her neighbor, whom she had her eye on, finally made the first move and now she’s meeting him for a latte after yoga. After a good hour or so, I’d go back to the gym and catch up with my friends in kickboxing class, which was always, always, my favorite Saturday activity.

But that was months ago. And this morning, as my S.O. and I were walking back to the car from our usual Saturday breakfast, I ran into Simin, who was standing behind the green newspaper racks, sipping a cup of coffee and enjoying the sunshine. Simin was a yoga instructor that I knew from my gym. Tall, thin and soft-spoken, she was the quintessential yoga instructor. I’d often run into her around the Lake or shopping at Whole Foods, but mostly at the gym. Her Saturday yoga class was from 12 to 1:30 pm. Our kickboxing class was the class right after hers. Every now and again, she and I would chat. As the yoga people rolled up their mats and put away their blocks and the kickboxers would begin quickly wrapping their hands, Simin and I would exchange compliments and tips on staying healthy and feeling good. She would comment on how tough she thought I looked in all my kickboxing gear and I would go on about how flexible and strong she seemed doing her yoga postures. It was a mutual admiration club for two.

She said she hadn’t seen me at the gym in a while and suddenly my already-sleepy eyes became heavier for different reasons. It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t been to the gym in quite some time and all at once I felt sadness, shame, nostalgic and resentment. And anger. Anger mostly at myself for becoming the subject of countless magazine articles about women who “lose themselves” in their relationships. Oh brother. When did this happen? And how? And am I really one of those stupid, stupid women with whom I’m always getting angry?

The subject needs further investigation. All I know is, for now, I need to reinstitute some of my own rituals. Like bad habits, rituals never go away, they just get replaced by new ones.

A Minute in the Ring

I really need to start wearing a watch again. I got out of the habit after 2001, right around the time Paperloop.com laid me off. As an event planner, a watch is part of the uniform. But after 9/11, I and so many of my fellow planners across the country took off our watches, as we stuffed our pink slips in card board boxes and headed out the door.

It’s been four years and although I’ve been gainfully employed for most of that time, I never took to wearing a watch again. There was always the computer clock, the clock on my cell phone, the VCR clock. It was a great way to practice talking to strangers, Hi, do you have the time?

All day at work, I was painfully mindful of the time. At my last job, I had left my $2.99 Target wall clock in my cube as a reminder to my office mates that “May Was Here.” I had yet to put a clock up in my new cube. As I exchanged short conversations with people throughout the day, I mentally logged minutes spent chatting and counted them down until the 5 o’clock hour hit.

I had to be at Fairtex gym by 5:20 pm. I had made an appointment for my $10 introductory session with Ken earlier in the week and I had been looking forward to it all day long. The trek from North Beach to Fairtex, in the SoMa district of the City, was about 15 blocks but if I sped-walked at an energetic clip, I would just make it. Fairtex was a muay thai kickboxing gym that had recently moved to its new location, at Hawthorne Lane and Harrison. A few months earlier, I visited my old office at 2nd and Harrison, in a futile attempt to become re-employed there. After a miserable interview and needing a caffeine, fat and sugar fix—coffee and a chocolate chip cookie—I walked around corner to what used to be Boudin Bakery. Serendipitously, what I found instead was Fairtex gym.

Ah! The bones of the front room were strikingly familiar. The mechanized platform for wheelchairs was still there. Thank you, ADA! The counter that used to sit above displays of cookies, sourdough and sweet baguettes and cheese Danish, now sat above handwraps, boxing gloves and an assortment of differently-sized shin guards. The poster-size prints of old San Francisco were replaced by pictures of muay thai champions in the requisite “fists up” pose. I stepped to the back of the café, half-expecting to see the same table my friend Jodie and I would eat our chowder-in-a-bread-bowl but there was no “corner” anymore. The room had been become a hallway that lead to a huge, cavernous warehouse, the center of which stood a regulation-size boxing ring. It was beautiful. To the left of the ring, the floor was a patchwork of blue mats, the squishy, soft kind that was more forgiving to bare feet that the hardwood my feet were used to. Large, black kicking and heavy bags lined the perimeter of the blue mats. In my mind, I could already picture my leg thwacking into that bag and making a dent right there…just below the Fairtex logo. To the right of ring were the jiu jitsu mats. The floor was red and smooth and just a little tacky. I wondered what it’d be like to grapple on that surface. I imagined some wicked floorburns.

My introductory session consisted of me training one-on-one with a Fairtex trainer. A private session for $10! Not a bad deal! I used to pay $40 a session with my old trainer every other week. A trainer named Pongsansan wrapped my hands. I recognized him from the picture on the T-shirts they were selling at the front desk. Yikes! This guy is a bad-ass! I told him I was a beginner. He guessed that I had been training two years. I lied and said yes even though it was probably more like four years. I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of a Fairtex trainer and not be as good as a person should be who had been training for four years straight.

But it was Armand, not Pongsansan, who would train with me that evening. He was wiry, around 5’8” I guessed, and personable. We introduced ourselves and after I warmed up with a few minutes of skipping rope, he took me into the center ring to begin.

I had never stepped foot into a ring before. There was a time when I had considered training for a smoker, a series of matches put on by gyms every now and again. Lack of nerve and a desire not to be weighed publicly always kept me from making the commitment. I was shy to step inside. There’s no doubt, that at least for a few seconds, everyone’s eyes will glance your way and judge you. I know, because I give everyone I see in the ring the same once-over, as I would be subject to now.

The floor was surprisingly slippery, slightly powdery-feeling. I felt I could be knocked on my ass at the slightest misstep. Armand started to show me the basics, the boxer’s stance, how to throw a jab and a cross. My new job in the City and the growing difficulty I had in stealing time away, had prevented me from going to a regular kickboxing class in over a month. My conditioning had deteriorated. And muscle memory? Mine were suffering from amnesia. I prayed I wouldn’t re-injure my groin muscles again, as I winced trying to throw double-roundhouses in succession.

Armand sprinkled water on the mat to prevent me getting knocked on my butt. He held the pads from me and called out different combinations. Jab-cross-kick-kick. Cross-hook-step-knee. Sixty seconds later and my eyes started stinging from the sweat running down my forehead. Unbelievable! How do boxers go fifteen rounds?

After a few rounds in the ring, I felt fatigued but Armand wasn’t done with me yet. We stepped out of the ring and walked toward the kicking bags. The conditioning drills consisted of forty kicks with each leg then one hundred “knees”. (Kneeing your opponent’s torso is allowed and encouraged in muay thai.) After that, fifty pushups and fifty crunches. Exhausted, I thanked God Armand “cut it short” after forty minutes. I was tired, but wanted more. Kicking bags, the blue mats, the ring…I had never before complete access to this kind of equipment. I decided to observe the next kickboxing class and partake in a little cheap therapy of the kicking kind with that hanging black bag in the corner, the one with my name on it.

I haven’t been back since my introductory lesson. If my work schedule continues to eat up my free time, I doubt I’ll be able to kickbox regularly. But at least I would have had my time in the ring, even though it was just for forty minutes.

Expired Drugs Still Work

After three weeks on the new job, I had to call in sick yesterday. Not to worry, it was legit. I’m not surprised I caught a nasty head cold. All that exposure to new germs, my hands on strange doorknobs and bathroom stall doors, breathing in foreign air and the commingling of my familiar family of dust mites with theirs. It was just a matter of time before my body reacted.

I drifted in and out of sleep on the couch, the clear, cool beauty of the day wasted on me. Earlier, I woke up with my S.O. and promptly told him I felt sick. I had the feeling he thought I was faking it but my pounding head, scratchy throat and post-nasal drip made me the wiser.

The prospect of calling in sick for the first time made me a bit nervous. There was a procedure for calling in sick. Section 1, Subsection 3 of our beast of an Operations Manual detailed such proper procedure. Our department maintained and actually followed, a manual that each employee was issued upon their first day of work. It’s kept in a large, 5-in. ring binder and it detailed everything from what exactly to say on your outgoing voice mail message to how to negotiate contracts, from indemnification to force majeure. I would imagine, for the layman, a monster document like this would invoke fear and scorn. But for me and my control-freak sisters, it’s a thing of beauty; a guide for order, balance and uniformity in the small, chaotic universe, we often are forced to navigate.

But yesterday morning, I couldn’t remember exactly what Section 1, Subsection 3 described as the proper procedure for calling in sick. So I decided to play the new employee trump card and just left a voice mail for my manager. I wondered to myself how many times I could get away with playing that card.

Every time she visited, my college roommate, C, now a pharmacist, made it a point to rifle through my medicine cabinet and toss expired meds and anything else she didn’t deem fit to swallow. I silently thanked God she hadn’t visited in a while because Hallelujah! There, between the expired Claritin and the expired Cloraseptic, was some expired Walgreen’s cold medicine. Given the choice between taking old antihistamines and breathing like an asthmatic smoker, I took the former.

I started to see stars, the kind you see when you shut your eyes tight, then opened them again. I succumbed to the lovely, lightedheadedness from the meds and took my place on the couch. I felt…globby. The prospect of going back to work and tackling the Operations Manual and all that it represented—the meticulousness, the extreme attention to detail required to be successful—made me think of trying to stuff a globby, oozy mass into a clear, plastic cube, clearly too small for its contents. I knew in my gut that in order to earn the respect at work I secretly craved, I would have to step up, increase my game, and goddamnit, make my oozy, globby self fit in that plastic cube. But for now, I just enjoyed my foggy haze, rolled over to avoid couch sores and decided it’d be best to worry about it tomorrow.

I Am Woman, See Me Work

I’m not working for the Man anymore. Well, not literally, anyway. I started a brand new job today in the City. It’s a small company, founded and owned by a woman. A youngish-woman, at that. The receptionist-slash-office administrator lead me and another newbie on the obligatory office tour, stopping at each cube. I met many people, whose names, I’m sorry to say, were completely forgettable. With the exception of “Jennifer”. There seems to be an inordinate amount of Jennifers at my new job.

Among the many introductions, the receptionist introduced me to Sarah, a pleasant woman in her early 40s. She wasn’t trendily dressed like most of the young women in the office, but nonetheless very stylish, with a black and grey crepe skirt, pieced together in loose strips. I gave her the same smile and handshake I gave to the fifty or so people I had met this morning. I wanted to kick myself when the receptionist said later, ”Oh, and Sarah’s the president of the company.” If I would have known that, I would have turned the internal wattage up and given her my extra-special smile and handshake. Sheesh.

I have returned to my industry of choice—the events business. I have been planning, coordinating and handling the operation of trade shows, conferences, meetings and special events since 1993. The ripple effect of 9/11 had done me in and consequently I was in and out of the events biz, well, right up until today. I haven’t felt this optimistic about work in a very long time and dagummit, I finally feel like I have something I can dig my heels into.

The building I work at looks like a holdover from the dotcom bust of the early ‘90s. Exposed brick walls and vents, extra high ceilings, black bean bags and space. Lots and lots of space. I imagined, in its hey-day, its halls were filled with artsy-trendy looking young people with tattoos, black plastic bracelets and unnaturally red hair, coasting down the aisles on those little scooters.

The events business, in general, is run by women; the executives, however, almost always are male. Not so at this company, the owner and most of the VPs are female. In fact, of about seventy or so employees, I only met around five men. And while some may see working with mostly women something akin to sorority life or being backstage at a beauty pageant, right now, this minute, I choose to see it as a positive. I will do my darndest not to have any “meetings in the ladies room”—unless provoked, that is.

Downtown Walnut Creek, a suburb of the City, was not the hippest, most happening place to work. Walking around downtown San Francisco, walking down my aisle to get to my cube, I was struck by the sheer number of beautiful people wandering around. I thought, Who are these people? And what are they doing without their entourages? I almost got stabbed several times by the pointy-shoes of A-line-floral-skirt-wearing-women in the office. I’m a healthy, straight, Filipino-American woman but I felt like the butchiest of bulldykes among the women in my office. I thought the embroidered flowers on my black shirt would be enough of a feminine touch, but I was way off base. I can’t compete with faux-fur trimmed jackets and open-toed pumps. Oh well...

It was only my first day…

Mother Inabsentia

I just recently decided it would be okay to start listening to my mother again. She had given me pretty good advice up until 1988 but after that it all went downhill. Since I was an irritatingly boring and well-behaved child, I have to say she had it easy. I didn’t hang out with a rough crowd, practiced the piano, suffered no unexpected pregnancies...

She wasn’t your stereotypical Asian mother. She didn’t really pressure me to do well in school (I already did, thank you very much). Curfews? ‘Eh...never broke them because I never stayed out late. Drug problem? Please! The hardest drug I did came dipped in hard-candy shell. She wasn’t the strict, oppressive Asian immigrant mother who felt her children’s success reflected her own success as a parent. Her own mother died when she was a young girl and she was raised by her aunt. Despite her aunt's best efforts, (and by my mother's own account) she was one baaad little kid. I saw a snapshot of her and my uncle once when they were young. My mom looked to be about twelve or thirteen and skinny as a Lucky Strike. Nine out of ten people polled would agree that she wore an afro. She stared stone-faced, her eyes looking straight into the camera and smiled the same no-teeth smile she uses today. She’s not giving anything away, that one.

As I saw it, my mother’s main child-rearing objectives were to feed, house and educate us. And keep us relatively happy. In 1979, we made the move from San Francisco to Vallejo, a suburb thirty miles north of the City. Since my sister AD was just too damn smart, she moved up a year, ending up in the same grade as my sister, AM. They were about to enter the eigth grade and rather than have them miss the chance to "graduate" with their class, my mother let them live on their own in small room, in a converted garage in someone’s house. Those kinds of studio conversions or "in-laws" were very popular in houses in the Sunset. My sisters, ages thirteen and fourteen, were living by themselves in the City, with nothing but the threat of my mother’s wrath to keep them in check.

So what if Social Services may have called that neglect? The Sunset neighborhood in 1979 was a different world back them and lucky for all of us, my sisters were big fish in their little pond, remarkably trustworthy and responsible kids. The sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus Elementary school stayed blissfully ignorant.

Over the years, she did the best she could, making decisions that would make today's parents mouths drop open. Oh, we suffered as we discovered Ponds cold cream had no sun-protective protective properties whatsoever and probably encouraged extra-wicked sunburns. And a prune or two would have helped things along, rather than ingesting those deceptively chocolaty-Ex-lax candies, my mother would feed us after a particularly heavy meal. When it came to my mother’s advice, I quickly developed a filter to sift away the sludge from the gold bits.

I suspect the hardest part my mother had to do was live apart from us, often finding work that took her to neighboring cities for weeks at a time. I stopped living with my mother at around fourteen. She was my "mother inabsentia". There, but not there.

She’s got her own way of doing things and while her methodology may seem crazy to some, the proof is in the proverbial pudding. My sisters and I didn’t grow up completely damage-free; between the five of us, we have a rack full of issues just waiting for us to leaf through. But, we grew up well-fed, with a roof over our heads, and college under our belts. And at the end of the day, I’d say that’s a job well-done.

Girl-About-Town Needs a Dayjob

Somebody please rip out my ovaries. Go on...I'll bite down on this wooden spoon while you do it. While folding my socks into tight little balls, and despite the "no-reality-shows" TV rule I've instituted in my household, I inadvertently happened upon a show called, Nanny 911. Playing on the Mary Poppins myth that British women make the best nannies, the show featured a nanny (complete with hat and carpet bag) who observed a family with four unruly children and the parents whose fault it was.

The kids were spitting, swearing, hitting, running and generally being bratty and disrespectful. Oy gevalt! The worst of the lot was the six-year-old who had never had a "time out" (though he surely deserved them) and his four-year old little sister who could string expletives together better than a truck driver who had just stubbed his toe.

By 8:55 pm, everybody had learned how to respect each other and the parents figured out how everything was their fault, but really, they knew better now. Mom, Dad and the kids waved and cried as the Nanny slipped out the front door, another family saved from themselves.

Until today, I was enjoying my time off between jobs. Playing house, doing domestic things like grocery shoppping and laundry, picking up drycleaning, watching reruns of Buffy and Angel on the WB. It's been kind of fun, I have to say; it's been so easy to let my mind wander and wonder what'd it be like to pop out a few kids and call myself a "stay-at-home" mom.

Well, that little domestic fantasy of mine just went the way of Tab and Fen-Fen. I was suddenly reminded of how miserably predictable I am when I got angry at my S.O. for coming home after 9 pm from the driving range. I had a big pot of resentment simmering on the stove and it was about to boil over if I didn't watch it. I had spent the entire day doing homey things. Foodtv.com, Epicurious.com, the "Beef. It's What's for Dinner" people--I searched online in vain for a simple recipe for a top round roast that HE bought last Sunday (with no intention of cooking it himself). I separated lights, darks and delicates and laundered sheets and towels. I fought the masses at an unusually-crowded-for-a-Monday Berkeley Bowl (buying his cooking papaya) and spent twenty-minutes convincing myself that no one will die if don't buy the low-carb pasta at Trader Joe's.

Then He comes home, eats his leftover Chinese and bolts to the driving range. I spent the evening whacked out, more angry at myself than at him. How did this happen? I used to be independent..a girl-about-town, coming and going as I please and you can go to hell if you didn't like it. Resentment, anger, feelings of being underappreciated and taken for granted...guess you don't have to actually BE married to feel like you're married. With kids in the picture, I imagine those feelings would only increase exponentially. I've seen the future--and I'm backing the truck out slowly.

Oh, I have no intention of breaking up with the S.O. anytime soon. I have a wedding to go to in a month, for Chrissakes. I will, however, remember that as much as I love not punching that clock every morning for the Man, working for the Wo-Man, namely me, means more than watching Starting Over and Ellen everyday. I'll have to keep challenged, keep writing and learn how to keep a dayjob.

My Pops, the Music Man

My father is sixty-eight years old and owns a pair of leather pants. I suspect he gets a lot of use from them when he goes clubbing in Las Vegas. Oh, it’s not as seedy as you might think. He frequents karaoke clubs and fancies himself quite a singer. Did you know there are forty-two verses in “My Way”? In true Celine Dion fashion, that man can wring the life out of note till it’s going, going, gone.

I always suspected that my father had a “secret” life. Again, nothing illicit or in the least bit pulpy. He and my mother are the permanent stars of a little passion play I like to call, “Everything You Do Irritates Me, But I’d Die If You Were Gone”. And there are no understudies in that production. He’s just always been a night owl. He used to work the swing shift so his internal clock kicks into overdrive right around dusk. He has a penchant for maintaining an air of mystery. But I suspect that if I were to follow him around on one of his nighttime excursions, I’d find him chatting with Sam, his buddy the barber, at the all-night donut shop run by a couple of older Filipino ladies.

On the nights where he’s not “gallivanting” over a few dozen donut holes, he’s most likely in the queue, waiting to sing at one of his regular karaoke clubs. With his chest puffing out just a bit, he’d recount how the patrons of the club begged him to sing “just one more song”. The volume of his voice would inexplicably increase as he would describe how people would ask to shake his hand after a particularly moving set of Filipino folk song favorites. Make no mistake, my father’s not a one-trick pony. He’s a musician, too, through to the skin.

Walk into my parents’ house and the first thing you’ll see is a drum set in the living room. A small, electric keyboard is off to the right, next to the silk flower arrangement. Across from the keyboard are a couple of guitars, one electric and one acoustic. A small amplifier is attached securely to a metal luggage wheely-thing with bungee cords. On some weekends, he loads up his blue Toyota Corolla, packs his guitars and his amplifiers, his mics and mic stand and wheels himself off to “gigs”, maybe church or association functions. He enjoys making music and entertaining people.

He’s a good “play” Dad, my father. If I want to know about what mutual funds I should invest in, I’ll call Charles Schwab. If I start to hear a funny pinging sound in my engine, I’ll give the good folks at Art’s Automotive a call. If I want to know about how the new Bay Bridge construction is spiraling out of control, I’ll read the Matier & Ross column in the Chron.

But when I need guitar accompaniment and help on how to put my own special spin on Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man”, my Pops is the only man I’d call.

The Next Filipino Serena Williams

Yesterday, I held a tennis racket in my hand for the first time in seventeen years. The last time I “played” tennis was when I was eight years old in a park by my cousin’s house near the Cow Palace in the City. If you consider hitting a tennis ball against a wall and actually making contact with it twenty-five percent of the time, playing…then I played. In my little eight-year-old delusional mind, I was the next Filipino Chris Everett. In reality, I was just thwacking balls and I spent most of the time chasing after them, swearing like an eight-year-old truck driver (“Fudge! Shoot, dog! Stupid, mother-scrubbin’ball!”).

Perhaps it’s my poor vision but I think it would help my tennis game if the balls were bigger. They’re just too small to see properly, let alone hit. The bright green color helps but if they were the size of say, a bocci ball, I think I’d stand a chance of hitting them. I feel the same way about most sports with small objects as targets—golf, hockey, baseball. Make that ball or puck the size of a small cantaloupe and I might gain proficiency in this lifetime. Watching the games (or matches, tournaments, what have you) on television would certainly be easier for me to follow if I could locate that puck on the ice as easy and as often as a hockey player swings his stick at another player’s head.

My S.O. and I caught the last hour or so of daylight at the courts at Laney College in Oakland. There were two main areas, each area housing five or six courts. The “smoother” courts, the newer ones without cracks in the ground, were occupied. The older courts had a long crack running across them and were obviously less desirable. Balls would invariably hit them and fly off at funny angles (as I would soon discover).

Less prone to fantasy than my younger self and a bit more (but not much more) grounded in reality, I had no desire to embarrass myself with my lack of tennis acumen. In kickboxing class, I often have to look away from beginners still learning, who flail their arms and kick their legs in funky, jerky ways. I lack a good teacher’s patience, one who is willing to slog through an ear-splitting, chalk-board-scratching version of a novice violinist’s “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”. As much as I know the learning process is often the richest part of any journey, yesterday, I just wanted to skip it and get to the good stuff already.

I relegated myself to playing on the “Siberian” courts, lest someone view my tennis playing as unforgivingly as I viewed a beginner’s kickboxing. My goals were simple (“See the ball. Hit the ball.”). But increased in complexity (“Hit the ball, over the net”) and specificity (“Hit the ball, over the net, in the court you’re playing on!”).

By the end of it, I hadn’t done as badly as I had anticipated. At least I made racket-to-ball contact, more times than I had when I was eight, anyway. I secretly declared it a worthy sport in my mind and one I wouldn’t mind trying out again despite the fact that I have absolutely no hope of being the next Filipino Serena Williams.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR - BETH

What Should I Wear Today?

I wear my heart on my sleeve and I’ve always wondered how that expression, came to be. My sleeve is sometimes long with large cuffs, sometimes blue, sometimes has dry ink or wet snot running down it. Perhaps a stain the dry cleaners (what is Martinizing anyway and can someone PLEASE explain why it costs three times as much to dry clean my slacks as it does the same slacks as a man?) cannot remove and if so, I get a little, colorful sticker placed around the hanger, announcing the inability to remove said stain.

My sleeves can be cotton, silk, spandex and linen, etc. When I wear linen, can you see that my heart worries about the fine lines appearing around my eyes? For example, can a stranger tell what’s in my heart at that moment and I fear aging? Or do they just see a wrinkled, linen sleeve? Do women who wear cotton sleeves have or had (once or twice) the opportunity to use them to absorb semen dribbling down their thighs after making love on a swing set at 2 am in the park? Thank God it’s dark at 2 am and hopefully there is no one around except yourself and your lover to read the emotions on that sleeve.

Occasionally I roll my sleeves up to the elbow. Does that mean I only want you to know half of my heart and I am hiding the precarious part which folds up my deepest secrets? Sometimes I have no sleeves, does that mean I have no heart or does it simply mean for today, I am going to make a brave attempt to let as little emotion be revealed as possible? I think I will try this: sleeveless vs. sleeve – heartless vs. heart – emotionless vs. emotion, as an experiment, yes, a secret experiment. Oops, too late, I’ve just “sleeved” myself and divulged my plan.

It would never work anyway as my girlfriends know my heart. Nice try they would say, but your sleeve is snagged on your ex-boyfriends heart. But don’t worry, once we pull the red thread, it will unravel itself, not only until the snag is gone, but as women together, we continue to gently pull, and the thread un-loops itself enough times that your sleeve will no longer be caught, causing the same rippling and damage as the last blouse you loved so dearly did. The only piece left will be the red fluff reminding you that once you’ve cut the damaged sleeves off (and your best seamstress girlfriend sows the seams together), spring is here and you’re fucking glad that snag was there to begin with (even though you thought you could fix it by yourself, silly girl) because going sleeveless in spring is as wonderful and necessary as wearing sleeves again in the fall!

I’ve decided to ask the cleaners if they can sell me the white, protective pieces of paper they drape over the metal coat hangers. Do you think they will safeguard my heart as well as my sleeves? Alas, those knowledgeable Martinizers will probably secure safety pinned notes (to each piece of tissue paper) stating, “I am sorry, we’ve tried and tried to remove the stain from your garment but have been unsuccessful.” Thank God there are more dry cleaners!

Speaking Softly

Tomorrow I get am getting down with my culture. No, it’s not Pistahan 2005 at the Yerba Buena Gardens. No, I’m not taking a conversational Tagalog class at the local adult school (though it is one of my life’s Must Do list). A Filipino “guru” teaches a kali class by the bird estuary at Lake Merritt. He charges $20 a class and M and I have been looking forward to it all week. Kali is a Filipino, pre-colonial martial art in which you wield a 28-in heat-treated bamboo stick as a weapon. Supposedly, a blind princess invented it and you learn to read a person’s energy to detect their next move before making your own.

It’s quite beautiful to watch, not as violent-looking as you might think. Twirling the stick once, twice, three times, then striking! Wow. If the only thing I learn to do is that, I’d be happy. M’s only taken one class but she already moves through the twelve basic strikes like a pro. She came back from her first kali class, her eyes wide and her head slowly nodding up and down, “It’s fun, May…” As if to say, Uh-oh, I feel a new obsession coming on…After our regular kickboxing class, we duck into the service hall of the gym where they store equipment, hoping we don’t trip the alarm when we bust through the door. I make M stand in front of me so I can ape her movements as she strikes her imaginary enemy’s left shoulder and slices diagonally through his torso. That’s the “one” strike. There are twelve basic strikes, the last ending with a strike that looks similar to a matador’s strike to a bull, stick in one hand, knife in the other, lunging forward with clean stabs to temple and eyes.

Practicing these moves, my body’s tempo slows down and I feel as though I’m moving through molasses. Kali requires me to call upon a different energy. It’s calmer, more controlled, rationed out slowly, like the steady drip of an IV. When I kickbox, my head bobs and weaves, I’m shifting constantly on the balls of my feet; my body’s locomotion fueled by frenetic energy and adrenalin. Four years of practicing muay thai kickboxing and my natural defensive position is to stand left foot in front of right, feet slightly shoulder width apart, shoulders hunched forward. In kali, I’m upright and my shoulders are squared up. My feet inch closer together, for better pivoting. I strike my imaginary opponent’s ankle, then knee (strike nine), pivot, then their other ankle and knee (strike ten), pivot again, then across both knees (strike eleven). The guru says the stick should become an extension of your body and suddenly, miraculously, I feel my arm’s reach become four feet long.

During class, I watch the guru as he and a student perfrom a drill where he follows the student from behind, checks his strike then counterstrikes with a series of blows to the shoulders, knees, and ankles. Muay Thai movements, in comparison, can be so flashy, so over-the-top, with face-crushing knees to the head, flying roundhouses, and bony elbows intent on breaking noses. The guru’s strikes are small, barely perceptible and lightning fast; faster than any jab-cross-hook combination one could ever throw. I am struck by the fluidity and grace of his movements; his body best expressing the art of kali. I observe in silent anticipation, and wonder when I will be become fluent in the same language.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR - MARGARET

Dear Readers, Get ready for another treat! It's contagious, no? One's desire to express oneself...It's the little moments I find so interesting. Margaret paid attention to a "little moment" on Saturday and had to share it. And I'm so glad she did! Enjoy.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR - MARGARET

What I Think About When I Should Be Working

I've had a series of interesting experiences of late. It started with a conversation with Andre which brought into focus the question regarding whether people were inherently good or evil. Why can't we be inherently both? Is Hannah Arendt right when she pondered the "banality of evil"? Evil doesn't have to be on a grand scale, but more importantly it doesn't have to be the choice we make. The conversation reminded me of a story about Wilma Mankiller, the leader of the Cherokee Nation. She was giving a talk and on this occasion she wore a beautiful, ornate choker decorated with two wolves' heads made out of abalone shells. At one point in the evening, a member of the audience asked her what the wolves' heads represented and she said, "One represents good and the other evil." The man then asked, "Which one is winning?" Wilma Mankiller paused and thought for a moment and then replied, "Whichever one I feed the most." Whichever one I feed the most.

Yesterday I was given the opportunity to witness a handful of teenagers chose selflessness over their own desires (or perhaps selflessness was their desire) and it was a humbling experience. It was an invigorating experience. I supervised a donation drive the students organized as part of their Senior Project graduation requirement. Months of preparation went into this event. Numerous little touches from homemade brownies to specially made CDs and a slide show were in place to greet the generous spirits who were to arrive bearing their offerings. However, excited anticipation was in danger of dissolving into disappointment as time ticked by and no crowd showed. Yet the students resisted giving in to such a hopeless emotion. Every new face was met with enthusiasm and gratitude as people trickled in now and again. Between "drop-offs" the students wandered in and out of the school cafeteria where the drive was being held, simply enjoying each other's company.

About an hour and a half into the drive, I found myself looking out the double doors of the cafeteria at the gorgeous day and began wishing I could be outside...especially since we've had so many dreary days recently...how silly...I would simply be inside at KB...but I was giving up my "social hour" I told myself...although I had just seen people earlier that day and knew I was going to see friends Sunday morning...OK then, at least I could have brought papers to grade instead of wasting my time mindlessly waiting for the minutes to tick by.

And then it happened. The kids came back inside and began kicking the balloons that had been scattered about the floor as decoration. The song on the CD changed. It was louder, more upbeat. The kids began running and jumping about...alternating between trying to "nail" each other with the balloons and just trying to keep the balloons from hitting the ground...don't let it touch...now only use your feet...then only heads...the beat of the music kept pace. They leapt and twirled, giggled and screamed with sheer delight. It was contagious. As adults walked in they could not help but smile as they watched the soon-to-be adults behave like the children they still are...and I realized, standing there with a grin that stretched from ear to ear, that by choosing to focus on what I "thought" I was "missing" I almost missed what I actually received that day.

I was once told that the Chinese characters for "mindfulness" actually translate "presence of heart." That is what I witnessed Saturday. We tell our children that they can make a difference if only they act on their good intentions...but what are we, what am I, doing to make a difference? I was not "losing my Saturday," I was sharing theirs. They allowed me to be a part of their day of giving. How foolish I was to bemoan my "lost time." What better way to spend my time?

Po' Folk Like Me

Friday, March 11, 2005 is my last official day at the Company. Monday, March 14, I will be unemployed. Again. It’s my own decision. This time, I can’t blame the Company for laying me off or re-orging me out of a job. This time, I left because the job was not a good fit for me. There were many other compelling reasons, I assure you, but I’ll leave it at that. Being a child of this economy and unfamiliar with the 10, 20, 30-year career employees of yesteryear, I have never considered it a blot on someone’s resume if they have had, shall we say, a dynamic, work history. Of course, a prospective employer may not hold the same opinion.

The prospect of being unemployed does not petrify me, as much as it does most people, I think. I have no outstanding debt or loans, very low rent, no car note, no children, good teeth, good health, good credit and if worse comes to worse, I can survive on baked tofu, cottage cheese, fruit and nuts. And chocolate. Schargenberger chocolate. I know I’ll never be homeless (Hi Mom!) and I know what the state of unemployment feels like. I’ve been there. I’ve lived there. Pretty comfortably, too, all things considered.

First off, there’s no room for pride when you’re on a budget. SBC runs a program called the Universal Lifeline Program. It exists so that low-income residents (po’ folk) can get a significant discount off their phone service. Chanel, a very personable and pleasant service rep, signed me up for it today. She was waaay nicer than I ever was with my customers at the Company. I think I’ll be paying something ridiculous like $2.50 a month. And of course, once you go DSL, you can’t go back to Dial-Up for your Internet access. Two phone calls later, I managed to cut my telecom and Internet budget to warrant a $420 savings by the end of the year. Hey, that’s the price of plane ticket to Machu Picchu!

Second, erase any images of yourself tooling around town in your brand new silver Mini Cooper. Temporarily. I am currently without wheels and for about a minute, entertained the idea of getting a zippy little car that could whisk me and my S.O. away for weekends in the Napa Valley. For now, if I get a jones for a nice bottle of red, I’ll hop into my Mom’s ten-year old Acura and jet on over to my local BevMo. A good trick is to start off with a decent bottle, then work your way down to the Two-Buck-Chuck wines at Trader Joe’s. I’ve found there’s no discernable difference in buzz factor, after four or five glasses.

Third, accept that you’ll have to hustle to make ends meet but enjoy the time off from a “real” job. I’m fortunate that the sweet ladies at Ascot Temporary Services have labeled me a “good” temp. I’ll get assignments here and there, be able to pay rent, and I’ll never take it personally that they’ll never bother to learn my name. Short-term gigs are task-driven and since most temp jobs border on mindless-monkey jobs, you’re free to use that precious surplus brain power to think of that million-dollar idea that will bankroll your retirement. Right now, I’m knocking around an idea that involves me, a webcam and a credit card machine.

Despite the fact that I will be without a regular paycheck indefinitely, I’m not tripping. I may feel like I’m free-falling but I know this is a temporary state. Life can turn on a dime. Just ask me how, the next time you see my chilling on my front stoop with a pocketful of change.

Courtesy Shuttle to Harrah's

How have I managed to go eighteen years without learning how to drive a stick? I have been trolling Craig’s List for the past few days, searching for a replacement for my trusty Honda, and am discovering that, goddamnit, my choices are severely limited when my only option is an automatic. Or as I like to call them, the multi-taskers.

Growing up, we owned several family-type cars, mostly station wagons and vans. Made with the family in mind, our cars were not for the single-girl-or-guy-about-town commercials often showed, zipping down curvy highways, smiling and laughing, all the while shifting smoothly into high gear.

Instead, our cars were marketed for fathers who needed an occasional hand to yank a kid back into the car as they stuck half their body out the window, pretending to be a dog. Or, moms who’d chuck mini-juice boxes behind her with one hand, shove a Chicken McNugget into the mouth of a picky five-year old with the other while still managing to make that next left, turning the wheel with her knee.

When I was growing up, we owned a commercial van, pre-mini-van era. It was a white, very plain, no-nonsense van, not the mini-vans you see today, decked out with luxury features like individual video screens and audio jacks, and (oooh!) cup holders. This van could easily seat fifteen adults or my entire sixth grade volleyball team. When my whole family traveled in it, I imagine we looked like orphaned Asian girls, sponsored by a Christian group, on our way to Disneyland with money raised from charitable donations and bake sales. Once, on a family outing to Reno (“The Biggest Little City in the World”), looking a little older and a little less “Save-the-Children”, a woman stopped us at a red light and asked if we were the courtesy shuttle to Harrah’s.

Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely advantages to driving an automatic. It’s perfect for a lazy driver (like me) who’d rather devote her higher functioning skills to programming radio stations or eating a salad versus worrying about that extra pedal down there, the clutch, I think. My friends with stick shifts swear by them! They would often say their cars are “so much fun to drive!” immediately after making a vroom-vroom sound with their mouths and miming kickin' it into high gear.

Sadly, I can’t relate. My trusty Honda was fuel-efficient, solid, very reliable, but never fun. And I could use a little fun right now. So, I have two action items on the docket in the next few weeks. One: Buy a car. And two: Learn how to drive it.

I Know You Know I Know

In the Bay Area, there are over 400 Asian restaurants. I just looked it up on sfgate.com. I’ve often walked by little neighborhood Mom-and-Pop joints and wondered if they were any good. It’s a well-known fact that if there are a decent amount of Asian folks chowing down inside, it’s probably a safe bet. Last Saturday night, my family decided to meet at Three Brothers from China, a Chinese restaurant in Pleasant Hill, near Sunvalley Mall. We were celebrating my sister A.B.’s 41^st birthday. They do a mean Honey Walnut Prawn dish that I highly doubt is eaten in China, as it is flavored heavily with mayonnaise, but since I’ve never been to China, I can’t really know for sure. In any case, there’s always a fair amount of Asian people in there—a safe bet.

We’d been there before and since we had an “in” (my brother-in-law knew the owner), we always were treated extra-special-nice, often scoring a free sweet red bean dessert after dinner. The northern California contingent of mi familia showed up in full force. My oldest sister (A.J.), Moms, Pops, Brother-in-law (B.O.L.), the birthday girl (A.B.) and her daughters, Big S, and L’il S. I sat beside my S.O., with my back against the wall, imagining myself to be a steely-eyed gambler in the Old West, always watching the door.

I thought to myself, Who am I kidding? I can’t bluff worth a lick. Earlier, I toyed with the idea of downplaying the news of my impending freedom (call it unemployment, if you’d rather) to my family, who I knew judged my actions to be less than wise. Could I possibly contain my emotional grab bag of terror and excitement and keep them from rallying together and issuing a group finger-wag? Could I possibly bluff them into thinking I’m cool, calm and collected about this whole quitting-my-job-business?

They already knew, it wasn’t a secret, just my first family “public appearance” since the event. I told A.J. immediately after I had given notice at work and assumed (correctly) that the news would trickle down. Later, I remember speaking to A.B. about it only to immediately regret it. “I should have kept it a secret.” I told her. “You can’t keep anything a secret in this family. You may think you can but we would have found out.” She replied so matter-of-factly that it pissed me off. But in truth, I conceded she was right. Secrets have a way of spilling out in my family. The tricky part, though, is that when we find out a secret, we won’t let on we know. It turns into a game of Who’s-Gonna-Fess-Up-First? Currently, I am wringing the shit of out my hands, sitting on a big secret about one of my sisters. And no, I wouldn’t tell you, even if you promised you wouldn’t tell a soul.

Toward the end of the evening, I scanned the dinner table, looking into the eyes of every single family member there. I knew in my heart, that even if I could act as though I wasn’t terrified I’d fall flat on my face, they would never let on they knew. In some weird way, if they were to acknowledge the fear and doubt they see me trying to hide, they’d be legitimizing its power over me. That’s something they’d never knowingly do. I know they know I’m scared shitless. But they know me well enough to trust that I’ll always land on my feet and that’s good enough for them. My family’s a pretty safe bet that way.

Kumquat Coulis

I had a good food weekend. Come Monday morning, when you’re begrudgingly reacquainting yourself with your 5-ft by 5-ft cube and nodding hello to your neighbors’ heads as they pop up and down from their cube walls, the question “What'd you do this weekend?” inevitably arises.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the answers. The kid weekend: “Oh, I was team mom and my kids had three basketball games.” The house project weekend: “I re-tiled my bathroom.” The errands-only weekend: “I did sixteen loads of laundry.” The banana slug weekend: “I rented ten DVDs and stayed home.” But the good food weekend is close to the top of my list of favorites.

Friday night, my friend C hosted a “girls’ night in”. It was obvious C had put some time and consideration into making M and I feel at home. We had three courses with two different wines. The cheese course included a selection of French cheeses (and a Spaniard): double-cream brie with green peppercorns, camembert, roquefort, chevre and manchego with sweet baguette, walnut levain and water crackers. C made Boeuf Bourguignon that took four hours to braise. Oh, it’s pronounced “buff” not “beef”, you philistine. And coconut sorbet with kumquat coulis for dessert. Fresh kumquats have only just recently made it into my fruit repertoire but never in its coulis incarnation all tangy and sweet…sublime!

C’s home did not present the cool, modern aesthetic you may associate with a woman of her sophisticated taste. Bold yet warm colors dominated her walls; every piece of furniture and art had a story that started with, “a woman I met in Singapore…” or “my brother and I took those photos…” Large floor pillows beckoned guests to stretch out, lay down and prop their heads up with a bent arm. As we lingered over a bottle of Bordeaux, our conversation flowed languorously. The evening’s flow chart of topics sprung with spokes of conversation that surprised even me. Each time I get together with C and M, they manage to nudge my perspective just a little bit wider than it was before. That night, we covered some serious girl-talk ground. It was nearly midnight by the time M and I slipped out of C’s comfy cocoon. I drove back to Oakland with the heater blasting, sadly aware of the delicious wine buzz slowly dissipating from my system.

I love good food. I have been known to bookmark certain restaurant’s websites just to track when my favorite dessert (chocolate budino with vanilla ice cream) makes it on their rotating menu. I can sit for hours leafing through beautifully photographed cookbooks, imagining what small miracles I can produce in the kitchen. I can keep a circle of dark chocolate between the roof of my mouth and my tongue for a good two minutes, savoring its crazy-good mouthfeel. I look forward to an evening’s promise of gastronomical adventures almost as much as the company I am about to keep.

Almost. In the case of C and M, the company will always be the main course.

Breathing Easier

For the last two days, I have been conscious of my breathing. A faint asthma-like wheeze had developed in my chest since my Valentine’s Day car wreck. I suspected that my belabored breath had something to do with the accident but later I decided it was due to good ol’ fashioned life stress. I had made my mind up that I would quit my job (without a new one lined up) and give notice to my boss at the end of the day. Because that’s when people quit jobs or fire people, right? At 4:45 pm on Fridays. It lessens the chances of drama being played out with freshly fired employees shoving picture frames and dying plants into cardboard boxes. And, if you quit too early, the water-cooler chatter about who’s just quit may incite the malcontents to follow suit and cry “Revolution!”

In my attempt to quiet the gurgling in my chest, I bumped up my 5:00 pm target quitting time and sent my boss an instant message at noon. The conversation took about eight minutes. A company veteran of eighteen years (unheard of!), employed straight out of high school, this Company was the sole source of income for this woman for little more than half her life. Amazingly, for the most part, she remained bitter-free. I imagine my boss was a World War I sergeant in a past life. I picture her in full soldier regalia, face dirty and determined, dragging the half-alive bodies of her subordinates into fox holes, dodging bullets and grenades and crawling through circles of barbed wire. But in this life, she sat across from me, a woman so petite you could put her in your pocket, her head tilted to the left and the corner of her mouth slightly turned up. “It’s really okay,” she says. “You need to find out what makes you happy.” Unbelievable, I thought, she saw this coming a mile away. I am amazed at my own transparency.

For the last few months at work, my body spoke what I could not. My mother would have been greatly disappointed with the slumpy posture I adopted and she would have been appalled (but not really surprised) at the Grumpy-Gus face I wore, as I dragged my chunky black heels through the cube maze day after day. I rarely took off my coat, always ready to bolt out the door. K, my cube neighbor to the right, was a sixteen-year veteran of the Company. She had designed a diorama depicting her life story using 3-in picture frames, company plaques, commemorative cup-and-saucer sets and refrigerator magnets on the shelf above her cube. The only “decoration” I had in my cube was a $2.99 plastic wall clock from Target. I never really made myself comfortable.

It’s 12:08 pm and I walk out of my boss’s office, relieved of the letter of resignation still warm off the company printer, and breathing much easier, thank you.

Monkey Wrench

Remember that movie 9 to 5? It was an early ‘80s movie that starred Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton, and the great Lily Tomlin. They played administrative assistants (They were called “secretaries” back then. Can you believe it? Crazy!). They kidnap their miserable boss, keep him captive and in his absence, proceed to give the office a visual and professional makeover. They give the joint a “woman’s touch”, painting the walls warm colors and sprucing up the place with ferns and other foliage. At the same time, they increase their office’s productivity, start up work-share programs and even provide the holy grail (to this day) for working parents—an onsite child care facility.

Dolly Parked rocked. Lily Tomlin ruled. Even Jane Fonda smoked the ganja. It must have imprinted a feminist sensibility on my ten-year-old psyche because ever since then I have always harbored a desire to stick it to the Man. I delight in poking, prodding and digging my digits into the Man at any opportunity.

“The Man” are the cops who ransacked our house when I was eleven searching for evidence. Keep looking, motherfuckers. He’s also my English teacher who told me I shouldn’t take my AP English exam because if I failed it would bring the schools test scores down. Bitch. He’s my high school counselor who told me the only way I’d get into UC Berkeley would be if they still hadn’t reached their quota for minority enrollment. Asshole. The Man struts around my office, Executive-Ken-like, brandishing his race, sex and good looks as if it were an all-access back stage pass at a rock concert. I just wanna bash your face in.

Sometimes, I’ll stick it to the Man in little ways. I won’t fast-food it. Ever. Period. Have you read Fast Food Nation? The fast food chains and the industries that support them are willing to sacrifice the health of the world for, okay, trillions of dollars. They’re creating a lot of little Happy Meal junkies who’ll grow up to need insulin shots, angioplasty and gastric bypass surgeries. No, I’m not helping the Man in that effort; he’s not getting my $1.99 for my Burger Royale with Cheese.

In my mind, tomorrow, I’m sticking it to him in a big way. The Man wants me to be beholden to him for giving me a job and wants my sweat, blood and tears in exchange. Well, guess what, Man? That’s an unfair barter and I’m not playing. I’m out. I’d rather take my chances and hustle to pay the rent than feel like someone’s extorting my life away. Tomorrow, I’m firing the Man and giving him a pink slip, but most likely, he won’t even notice I’m gone. He’ll just notice a blip in the system, look up long enough to grab a replacement drone flying down the conveyor belt, then reset the machine to keep the cogs turning. But one day, the monkey wrench I will have left there so innocently wedged, deep in the machine, will have rusted. It will have caused millions of dollars of irreparable damage. So much damage, in fact, that their shareholders will lose faith in them and force them into filing the largest Chapter 13 bankruptcy in the history of the world, after which, the highest court in the land rules in favor of them righting the wrongs they have inflicted upon the country by paying out billions of dollars in reparations to every single person they’ve ever affected in any negative way. Wow…all from little ol’ me. Poke-poke.

Off-kilter

The last few weeks I’ve been waking up before the alarm. 5:48 am, 6:02 am; this morning, 5:56 am. It is not as if I have been getting to bed any earlier, usually around 11 pm or midnight. Sometimes, I will feel awake enough to get up and out the door and get my run out of the way for the day. Sometimes, I’ll feel alert enough to sit and write and get my blog entry done before heading to work. But most mornings, I just lay quietly, waiting for my sleepy body to catch up with my wide-awake eyes.

Lately, I’ve been feeling…off-kilter. February has been an eventful month in my highly-regulated and predictable routine of a life which I have so carefully designed. Things have happened as of late that have given me pause. Not a “pause” as in a Joycian epiphany-scaled pause or a giant-fluorescent-light-bulb-turning-on-above-my-head-type-of-pause. Wouldn’t that be convenient? For me, a random string of events have slowly unraveled to reveal…what? I’m not sure. I squint my eyes to try and make some sense of my life right now but my feelings about the last few weeks still hover over my head like fireflies impossible to catch.

It’s 2:30 in the morning and I slipped out of bed because I hadn’t submitted an entry for the day yet. Somedays, you just have to wait to see what happens. Today was one of those days. I wanted to wait and see how my day and evening would unfold before I sat and finished this entry. But now it’s already 3:25 am and it is officially Thursday, February 24. A lifetime of watching 22-minute episodic television has lured me into thinking the chapters in our lives should have a denouement. Shoot! I know better than that. People spend years trying to figure out their lives and it’s ridiculous of me to expect answers…now, right now, please, for the love of Pete!

We are imperfect creatures. We want, we desire, we disappoint, we struggle, we question, we ruminate, we plan, we act, we succeed, we fail, we love, we hate. It would be so easy to slip into a self-imposed paralysis, for fear of…everything. If I was to take a piece of paper and split it down the middle, one side being “Things I’m Unsure Of” and the other side, “Things I’m Sure Of”, I would come up with the list of a hundred “unsure things” and maybe one or two “sure things”. Sure things rarely happen in real life. But when you do come across them, like the love of good friends or the unbelievable luck you had in ending up in a loving family, you’ll want to hold that knowledge close to your heart.

Do you really need that much more?

GUEST CONTRIBUTORS - BETH and JOANY

Readers, don't be surprised I am sitting here at almost 4 in the morning because look at the precious gems I discover when checking email! My good friends, Beth and Joany, have sent me pieces they've written to post for the blog and I am glad to bring it to you, verbatim. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did. If you ever have the need to express yourself in a semi-public-private way (because c'mon, it's just us here), please send me something. I'll gladly post it!

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR - BETH

Bittersweet chocolate

I had a premonition it was coming before I actually knew it. Like when your intuition or gut tells you something but you choose to brush if off as paranoia, like when see your own shadow behind you because the moon is making a reflection, startling you for a minute and you laugh it away but you still find your self looking over your shoulder. I could feel and sense that the change was coming even before I was ready to accept the situation. I tried not to see the changes in my girlfriend’s body language or the furrow in her eyebrows and her slightly lower eyes that were usually bigger especially when she clowned around doing her ghetto fabulous dance moves that always made me laugh in appreciation while I felt like a klutzy, white girl.

In the past few weeks she seemed to be burrowing more deeply in her orange pea coat, like she was protecting herself from the bullshit corporate politics, possible racism and doldrums while creating a cocoon around her in the same coat to keep in the things that make women survive. Protecting her inner dreams and hopes that cannot be destroyed by boredom, complacency or a disappointment in not hearing from a company she hoped to interview with. Surviving a corporate office where she never really belonged, which crushed her creativity, but she made the best of it always knowing she had the power to change it, to change her destiny. She gave me a gift, a gift that I can fly too. I have so much respect for this woman.

All the women in my life that lift me to a higher place that sometimes I just cannot see until they give me a boost so that I can see the beauty on the other side. Fearful that the other side will be barren until I place my feet into their palms as they heave me over the side and I roll, laughing and landing in plush grass and fragrant flowers. It’s an extraordinary gift in my opinion, which I hope to never take for granted that we all take turns giving each other a boost when we most need it. And there is always one of us on the side to catch us if we fall!

I have been feeling a shift in my own consciousness in which I made a decision to be willing to open myself up to the possibility of trusting that I am and will be taken care of. Taking a leap from fear to faith is a difficult one. But I know that I am being guided by my good friends and I certainly trust and learn from them. I have sense of peace recently that I used to struggle with constantly. But how can I live with such uncertainly when I am surrounded by women of integrity, kindness and love. So instead of making this a pity party for myself which I could easily do knowing that I will not have Lucy there everyday to listen to my pessimism (and foul mouth), I embrace and honor her friendship as all my friends. I have faith that Lucy will find and get just what she needs allowing her to write and be creative which gives me the courage to write as well and not be afraid to share my own ideas while knowing that my feelings of vulnerability are safe.

Even though she will no longer be my partner in crime at work, I’ll be sure to see her down at kickboxing (an easy guess) and swing that fucking stick at her while she gracefully twists it out my hand and turns my arm into a pretzel. Oh you know you have it coming–a couple of right round houses to your leg–but no fair hitting me with the stick until my shoulder comes out of the sling. Seriously sista I will selfishly miss you. You made the grind and monotony of work a little more tolerable. By the way, does this mean no more fat free scones from Peets and who the fuck am I going to kick under the table during those snoozing meeting? Oh Lucy – will I ever get my Hot Sex book back from you now? I’ll trade you for The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe! Hey Sister, thanks for holding my hand so many times when I was afraid to walk alone. XOXO Beth

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR – JOANY

Olympian

After work today I went for a run from my house, up wildwood road to the piedmont high school track. It’s one of the nicest tracks in the bay area. Several top athletes train there and tonight Regina Jacobs was finishing her work out about the time that I got there. She's a tiny thing (I’m 5’9” and 150 #, most women are tiny in comparison to me) and moves like a wave on the ocean, as though the sole purpose of the earth's creation was for her to run on it. The stadium lights were thankfully turned off tonight lest I be even more humiliated with full exposure. It was safe to run because there was light cast from the parking lot and street lights and several other people were on the track. Yet, there was also a feeling of seclusion and anonymity because of the way the darkness eliminated the details of individual features. So I fantasized that I could pass for Regina Jacobs, albeit a little slower, until someone got close enough to see the details. Who’s gonna notice a five - inch and 50 - pound discrepancy on a night like tonight?

As I was lollygagging and slogging along on my next to last lap, I heard "coming behind you". My reaction was to look over my right shoulder, which meant that I veered into the left lane. Again, she said "behind you", as she then passed me on the left as though I was a power bar moving through your colon.

It’s reminiscent of the time in 1994 that I shook the hand of Mohammed Ali or recently when I said hi and shook hands with Andre Ward. They’ll never remember me amidst the hoards of people they meet in their lives, but they’re athletes, and I’ve admired and honored athletes my whole life. I love their bodies and respect them because of the discipline and training that it took to get where they are in their individual sports. Tonight, my excitement was that I was passed by Regina Jacobs. I’m thinking, “She only lapped me twice in my three miles here. Of course, it's nearly pitch black and she's probably been here for XX hours already. But hey! She knows a challenge when she sees one.” Oy vey! I guess that’s what’s kept me going all these years: the hope and desire to be an Olympian, if only in my mind.

I Wanna Be An Asian Action Film Star!

“The next Asian action star will be….my friend P!” Years from now, I will be able to say that I knew P when he was a still a struggling checker/coffee jockey at Trader Joe’s/Starbucks. He’s auditioning today for an action movie but come to think of it, I’m not sure if he’s auditioning for an Asian action movie or your standard Jerry Bruckheimer action movie. P happens to be of the Chinese variety and I have chop-socky action movies on my mind because S.O. and I went to see Ong-Bak yesterday at the AMC gazillion-plex in Emeryville.

Ong-Bak is about a country bumpkin (who happens to be Muay Thai kickboxer of the highest ass-kicking order) who ventures into big bad Bangkok to retrieve a stolen Buddha head that apparently holds the key to his villages’ prosperity. It was released a couple of years ago and is finally now being shown in the U.S. The delay for its U.S. release is typical of most Asian action movies, I suspect distributors want to make sure it’s a moneymaker before issuing a wider release. Oh, don’t get S.O. started on Asian action film stars.

I understand his beef. It seems that all Asians in movies have super human, wire-walking, gravity-defying abilities. Make no doubt, I’m a huge fan of the “sword-and-silk” genre (i.e. House of Flying Daggers, Hero, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) but it’s true, you don’t see the talky, indie movies with Asians in lead roles. You won’t see an Asian version of Garden State at your local movie house any time soon. I ask the question but I know the answer. If you put an Asian actor in a movie and not address her ethnicity at all, it leaves a taste of inauthenticity in your mouth. You’ll wonder why no one brought it up and suddenly, the whole movie’s integrity is jeopardized because…it’s an issue in real life! A person’s ethnic background IS an issue. Honest to God, I wish it wasn’t, but it is. People deal with big, bold issues everyday--you hear someone say something so racist and bigoted, straight out of 1950 and it makes your jaw drop and renders you speechless. But it also can hit you from the side, slyly, when you hear someone refer to Filipinos as being “shifty”. I think to myself, Should I be offended? It sets off a dialogue in my mind, “Well, I do know some shifty Filipinos…” “But you can’t label a whole race of people as shifty…” “But look at the history of corruption in the Philippines…” See? Someone’s off-the-cuff statement made me disparage my entire race! It’s no wonder why an undercurrent of cultural self-loathing insinuates itself throughout my psychology.

So, yes, I find it unfortunate that female Asian actors rarely find work outside of playing domestics, prostitutes, superheroes; their male counterparts busy, too, perfecting either the super-nerd or super-hero character. Hollywood seems like they can only process our Asian faces in one, two, three ways, max. That’s fine…for now. In the meantime, I’ll continue to support projects and movies that feature Asians in a (hopefully) positive light. If that means paying $9 to see Michelle Yeoh fly-run effortlessly over rooftops, I’ll gladly fork over the dough.

My Trusty Honda

I said good bye to my 1995 Honda Civic today. My adjuster, Randy, called me this morning and told me, “I’ve judged the car to be a total loss. It wasn’t even close.” Dang. He had visited my car at Baron Von Frien’s autobody shop in Berkeley and judged it not worth repairing, a total loss. My car, my trusty little car for the last ten years, was sentenced to the scrap heap.

S.O. and I went down to Baron Von Frien’s to collect my possessions from my Honda. With a couple of white garbage bags and a cardboard box in tow, we began the task of sorting through the peculiar mix of junk and precious mementos that found its way inside my trunk, in the glove compartment and in random pockets and slots of my car.

The functional. Emergency car kit. Contents include jumper cables, flashlight, flares. Plastic, duffel bag with more car stuff. Bungee cords, maps, motor oil with funnel, towel. Extra box of organizational, wire cubes. Intended to bring some semblance of order to my closet in anticipation of the arrival of the S.O.’s stuff. The recreational. A variety of CDs earmarked for trade but never making it to Amoeba. A small representation includes Arrested Development’s 3 Years 5 Months & 2 Days in the Life of…. The System’s Don’t Disturb this Groove, Aswad’s Greatest Hits. More CDs that better represent my recent taste in music, ones I’m not embarrassed to admit I own. Joss Stone’s Mind, Body and Soul, the Isley Brother’s Greatest Hits, Jill Scott’s Beautifully Human. A Radio Shack brand tape to CD adapter, rendered useless when my car radio’s digital display went dim. A box cutter. A Philips head screwdriver.

The nutritional. A box of Lo-Carb Solutions protein bars, chocolate brownie flavored. Unopened. A box of Atkins Advantage bars, Mocha crisp flavored. Half-opened. Kept in the trunk of my car because of a need for a well-timed post-work, pre-workout snack. And, because I have, in the past, demonstrated poor judgement with chocolate-flavored items stored in my kitchen.

The sentimental. Renderings depicting Disney princesses, dolphins, seals, flowers and houses, me, rainbows and salmon dinners. Most common medium would be Crayola crayons and colored pencils. Artists include Samantha and Sydney, now ages nine and seven; works recovered from my car include pieces from their younger selves, as early as age 6 for Sam and age 4 for Syd. A coin purse shaped like a cat head from Olivia’s trip to Japan.

The recoverable. A factory model in-dash radio. A 6-CD changer mounted in the trunk. Two JBL front door side speakers. The S.O. has designs on these items, being as his car was stripped clean of any music-enabling equipment months ago. The screwdriver and box cutter came in quite handy.

The unexpected. Three pillows. A variety of used medical books. A microbiology textbook. A pocket guide on nursing. A green binder containing a study on cultural sensitivity in the Lao Community.

My S.O. says to toss his pillows. I find myself feeling a little relieved because I take this to mean he’s planning on sticking around for a while, and that pleases me. As I move the rest of his stuff into my “keep” box, I realize how lucky I am to have walked away from this accident essentially without a scratch. Wish I could say the same for my Honda.

Food Coma at Ranch 99

For the uninitiated, the Pacific East West Mall in El Cerrito is Ground Zero for all kinds of Asians. The Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Filipino and a host of other Asian flavors congregate, eat, shop and hang out there. We suck down mango-flavored bubble teas from thick straws, slurp up cheap bowls of pho and pick out bean-filled pastries from the shelves that cover the walls of the Chinese bakery inside the mall. S.O. and I cruised the parking lot, looking in vain for a spot to park my Ford Escort rental car. After fifteen minutes, I was ready to settle for any space in a yellow, white, or green zone, the lot maxed out with an inordinate number of Hondas, Toyotas and Lexuses.

Ranch 99 is the grocery store that anchors the mall. Since it’s an Asian store, instead of getting two choices of rice to buy, you get twenty. You may be accustomed to buying whole roasted chickens or have a sandwich made for you at the deli section of your local grocery store. Ranch 99’s “prepared food section” sells ducks and chickens hanging from hooks; the counter across the way sells tripe stew, among other intestinal delicacies of cows and pigs (over rice, of course).

Yes, we are standing in that line. S.O. waits patiently for his Stewed Pork Taiwanese-style over rice. It comes with spongy tofu, a whole egg and some type of preserved greens. (“Excellent!”). I’m craving animal protein and have reached my carb-limit for the day so I order a whole soy sauce chicken. The man behind the counter asks if I want it chopped. I nod my head yes and he proceeds to unhook a caramel-colored chicken from the dozen or so birds hanging by their necks behind the glass. Deftly and quickly, he hacks that sucker into bite-sized, uniform pieces on the large wooden block that looks like a cross-sectioned slice of a tree. I think to myself that my dream kitchen will have a butcher block just like that one. I’m sure that block of his has seen a lot of action.

Two dozen or so teenagers with Styrofoam containers (“3-items-over-rice”) descend on the small cafeteria setup just as we settle into our lunch. It must be an Asian church group or something like that because there were two adults (who didn’t look much older than the kids) doling out bottled waters; they were the last to sit and eat.

A collective steamy cloud rises, as the kids open up their containers. I look around and take an inventory of what everybody is eating for no particular reason; it’s just what I do anytime I go out to eat. The young chick next to S.O. is a slip of a girl, her eyes rimmed harshly in black liner and her lips, freshly glossed, about to get glossier from her lunch. Chow mein noodles, deep-fried crab croquettes, chicken drummettes, battered, fried and covered in a smoky-smelling sauce. Over rice. She also has a large eggy-looking bun wrapped in plastic next to her. For dessert, maybe?

I, being the age that I am, and knowing what I know from the countless articles and websites I read on nutrition and food, can recite the rules (sorry, I mean guidelines) they tell you should follow for a happy, healthy life. Don’t get me wrong—I am not a “hater”. So I can say this from experience and completely without bitterness, One day, her metabolism will catch up with her...

My S.O. and I eat until we’re just a little too full and I consolidate my leftovers into his Styrofoam bowl. He and I are both feeling kind of drunk from the meal and we make a pact to talk ourselves out of it next time coming to Ranch 99 sounds like a good idea. We bounce out of there, our thirty-something metabolisms, rapping us on the ass.

Rocket Man

My S.O. has agreed to carry a rocket on his back during the Chinese New Year’s Parade. I reluctantly sit inside a Starbucks on 1^st and Market Streets in San Francisco. Outside, it’s pouring. Inside the belly of my enemy, it’s warm and dry. I am temporarily placated by the free cup of coffee the Starbucks “barista” has accidentally poured. This parade will happen, rain or shine; it’s a San Francisco tradition. I have tried to convince my S.O. to BART back to Oakland with me, but for some reason he feels obligated to walk the mile and a half parade route with a rocket on his back. I try and convince him to be a gong bearer instead but I think he has his heart set on carrying the rocket. The Lao Association (San Francisco chapter) is a small, group of individuals dedicated to keeping Lao culture alive. I admire their dedication to their cause. If it were me, even the promise of down-home Filipino cooking at the end of the parade route would not provide enough incentive for me to walk a mile and a half in the rain with a rocket strapped to my back.

In college, I never even attended one PAA meeting. That’s “Pilipino American Association”. Pilipino, with a “P”. Somewhere along the line, the “f” sound made its way into the mutt language of Taglish (English and Taglog), even though there is no “f” sound in Tagalog. My Mom calls my Pops, “Prank” for “Frank”. I never really ran with the politico-Filipino set in college. They’d all hang out at Sproule Plaza, passing out flyers and being pro-Pilipino. Fatima, Charles and Amy were my Filipino friends. They were a year or two older than me and I met them, not through the student Filipino association, but because we all worked at the student-run store on campus selling Cal-themed sweatshirts and baseball caps. They’d invite me to attend; I’d politely decline. I wasn’t a “joiner” in college but now looking back I regret not going to at least one. At the very least, I could have swapped adobo recipes or found out where the best turo-turo Filipino joints were.

We take advantage of a reprieve from the rain that has pounded down all day and step out from the protection of my new best friend, Starbucks. Market and 1^st streets are the main staging areas for the parade. Beautiful, young asian faces are everywhere. Rooster-headed children and pretty, teenaged girls in Asiatic costumes are corralled and set in formation by adults wielding digital cameras and whistles. A float with a giant gold Buddha waits for the signal to move forward. I wonder how the dragon troupes wearing only T-shirts and pants will survive the cold, wet weather as they wind down Market St. A heavy wool coat and an oversized umbrella doesn’t seem enough protection for me, as I huddle as close to my S.O. as possible. In a move that belies his mid-western constitution, my S.O. has wisely chosen to skip marching in the parade, opting instead to be a spectator. He walks, rocket-less, along side me, as we weave through groups and troupes waiting to take their place in the spotlight.