Thursday, July 28, 2016

Cars and relationships

   I didn't grow up in a car culture, so I haven't really ever cared much as an adult for ones that look sporty, luxurious, or have a lot of horsepower.
   When I was a child of about six or seven, I went to the New York car show. I was a fan of sports cars at that time, and recall liking the Plymouth Duster in particular. Thinking back, I believe that its' main attraction for me lied in its' logo, which looked like the Tasmanian Devil cartoon to me. That was a long time ago.
   Having lived in San Francisco (California that is!) for the past ten years, I have come to realize that it is not only a dramatically more car-based place than my native Manhattan, but that for some people, what they drive is as or more important than having a functional one to drive. For many people in this category, it seems that they might believe that their car states something a bout them.
   This became even clearer when one of my coworkers, a native, asked me my opinion on whether or not it was okay to touch another car's bumper when parallel parking. I answered that I thought that it was inevitable at times, and she was aghast! She later told me that she was fresh from an experience with another New Yorker, who had tapped the bumper of the car behind him when he had parked.
   I have thought on and off, though not too deeply, about how I feel about my own car, and more so, about whether there were objects in general that I felt as strongly about as some people seem to feel about their automobiles.
   For me, clothing comes to mind as being important, but more in the sense of liking to look a certain way than believing that it says anything important about me. I have always tried to avoid obvious labels of any kind for the express desire to not advertise for anyone, and although some of my clothing purchases as an adult have been more than strictly utilitarian, I don't think that they have ever been made so I can appear to be representing something in particular.
   It's perhaps more than just a little contradictory that a person with as many tattoos as I have should want to be sort of unnoticed, but that's how I feel.
   When I was three or four years old (some time before my interest in the Plymouth Duster), my family lived in Paris for a short time, and my mother has told me that I loved the french Citreon 2CV, or "deux cheveux". The car was inexpensive, made originally to encourage farmers to use motorized forms of transportation, and generally regarded as "ugly" by many at the time (many still think that it is). It seems that my aesthetic can be traced back that far.
   Thinking again about my own car, I have always enjoyed the fact that it is an economy model, assuming perhaps that it illustrates the beliefs I hold about my relationship to the objects in my life. Perhaps in that way, my car states something about me as clearly as the person who views theirs as a symbol of status.

Saturday, July 23, 2016

The parent question

   My wife and I went to a party a few months ago in a very secluded neighborhood on one of the hills I had never visited here in San Francisco. Held in a house that felt architecturally open and appeared to be expensively appointed, the occasion for the party was to celebrate and welcome the new principle at one of the schools where she teaches part-time.
   I don't do well with crowds in general, and as we walked in I encountered what appeared to be a large one. I felt overwhelmed, despite the modern, sparse, and what I would imagine would normally feel airy quality of the house design.
   We managed to get a little food (all of the catered items had detailed descriptions next to them), and I found the backyard, which allowed me to breathe a bit better. Fernanda introduced me to a few people, and as we snacked, we wondered what all of the people had in common. She said that she imagined that most must be parents of children at the school, and went to get us a bit more food.
   It seems that she was correct.
   A man came up to me and introduced himself in the way that people do that seem much more comfortable around strangers than I ever have ever been, and asked me what grade my child was in at the school. I told him that I don't have any children, nor did my wife as far as I knew, and told him that she was a teacher there. He told me that his child was in their "third year", and although I didn't exactly know what that meant, I nodded and smiled. I was probably close to twenty years older than him.
   Although the assumption that I had children is not new to me (many of the nurses and caregivers where I work have supposed the same thing), this particular one made a strong, albeit less-than-conscious impression on me. I don't know why it affected me differently this time, but it did.
   Perhaps it was the sense that Fernanda and I were the only adults among one hundred or more people at the house that didn't have children, or maybe I intuited that we were poorer than everyone else, but it stirred something strange within my consciousness, and unusually for me in a situation such as this, I felt satisfied in my life rather than lacking.
   I can't explained why I felt like I did. I think I'll just leave it at that.

Friday, July 15, 2016

Thoughts on ethnicity, black people, and suffering.

   As an ethnic Jew growing up in New York City, I always identified in some ways with black people. This is not to say that I ever imagined that I was black, but I did feel akin to them in some ways, as I never sensed that I had much in common with white people. White people never seemed other in the ways that I felt it, and because there were so many black people in my environment when I was growing up, I felt like I was at the least very much among them. I did also identify with other Jews that I knew, but mainly the ones that embraced their ethnicity rather than religion.
   When I was perhaps nine or ten years old, my cousin Johanna and her family lived downstairs in the same apartment building that my family did, and I remember my sister telling me that Johanna thought, perhaps jokingly, that she thought hat she may have been black. I think that it may have had to do with her body type and hair, and though she probably did not really believe it, I could see where she was coming from. Being Jewish seemed to me to be determined on being religious, which I wasn't, while being black didn't appear to have those kinds of prerequisites. The way I saw it, if one was born black, they were black. It seemed simpler and more accepting, and black people struck me as proud. I certainly wasn't,
   As I have aged, I have became keenly aware that although I don't always feel it, I am in fact white, replete with all of the perks that I have read and have been told come with being born that way in our society. I won't list those perks here (because this blog entry is already difficult to write without sounding either racist or insensitive), but let me just say that I imagine that I may be accepted simply because of my appearance in ways than many people of color are not.
   During the past couple of years, there has been a lot of media attention given to the practices of law enforcement towards the African American community, in particular the killing of unarmed black men. With the widespread use of cell phone video, these practices have shown a wider public, including myself, what must be an ongoing issue over many, many years. Some of the videos have been quite graphic and unsettling to many, as have some of the tactics used by to protest these injustices.
   I like to think of myself, perhaps ideally, as being at least somewhat progressive and open minded, but I have come to realize over time just how conditioned I have been as a white male, and perhaps closed and protected as a person of any ethnic background. This has become especially evident to me recently, when there was a fissure in my outlook over the recent sniper attack on the police in Dallas, Texas.
   It wasn't the fact that police officers were targeted in this event that jarred me from my normal emotional response, but the investigation into the man that perpetrated it. As more information was released about the person that committed the attack, I began to think more about the kind of anger and frustration that he must have experienced to make him feel that doing something like this seemed like an option. More than thinking about it though, it was more of an experience on my part. His humanness came through to me, and with it, my own humanity surfaced.
   Amidst the conditioning and defenses that have been erected to protect my own grief, I was able to see this man in his suffering, and perhaps achieve a bit more insight into my own.
 

Saturday, July 9, 2016

An unexpected feeling of freedom

   A few days ago, I had been thinking about driving up to Ukiah to surprise Fernanda. She had taken the bus up there three days earlier to see her brother, who was in the hospital recovering from a surgery. He was okay, and was to be going home.
    It was strange that I had thought to do this trip, as driving exacerbates the pain that I feel from the bulging disk in my neck, but I woke up feeling a bit bored, like I have been having too much "me" time. I also thought that it would be wonderful to see Fernanda's face when I showed up unexpectedly.
   The day before, after buying a pair of shoes that I had felt remorseful after for doing, I had gone back to return them, which lifted my spirits. I felt like I had one less thing to concern myself with or weigh me down.
   I don't know if I still felt some leftover sensation of being less encumbered than usual, but as I put a few things into the trunk of my car, I became aware that I had suddenly felt quite free. It might have been that I felt at that moment that I didn't need more to be okay, but more than anything I think it was the notion that I could do what I wanted that day. I could do the drive up north, or not, but it was up to me. I had a choice.
   It's probably hard to fathom for those that are not me (which is everyone that I can think of) just how powerful this feeling of choice is for me, but I will say that what generally makes me feel most agitated is the sense that I am being impeded or blocked in some way.
   I am aware, of course, that I cannot do just what I want to do in the world without consequences to others, and I do care about others, but sensing some actual level of authority over my own life is a rare and wonderful thing.
   

Saturday, July 2, 2016

Offense and defense

   A couple of weeks ago, I was in Trader Joe's on Masonic Avenue doing my weekly shopping, quite contented that it was emptier than normal. I had felt pretty confident before going there that it would be so, as the Golden Gate Warriors basketball team were in the playoffs, and most of San Francisco seemed quite invested in the team's plight. I had heard a report on the news a few evenings before that for one of the earlier games, eighty percent of televisions in the San Francisco bay area had been tuned in. Mine was not one of them.
   The idea that so much enthusiam was as focused as it was on a sports team, although satisfying for me at that particular moment, was also concerning; it reminded me how banal I often find people's interests, how 'group think' seems so prevalent in so much of the world, and also, I imagine, that I could not share in that excitement due to my own beliefs and prejudices.
   It's often hard for me to tease out whether I avoid considering myself a part of large groups because of a lack of shared pursuit, or for fear of being rejected, but the satisfaction that I must receive from feeling a bit superior to people in my interests doesn't near the sadness of feeling so apart from them.
   Back to the Trader Joe's experience,  after I had finished doing my shopping, I got online to pay. When my turn came, I began bagging my items as they were being tallied by the cashier, and decided to talk with him. Sometimes, I reach out to people in this way as a way to combat my tendency to isolate myself, despite feeling apprehension at doing so. I thought I'd share with him my thoughts regarding the lack of a crowd there.
   "I wish the warriors were in the playoffs every night" I said, or something like it, and told the young man that I didn't care for crowds or sports very much.
   "Me neither", he said, and I became somewhat excited that my attempt to feel related had paid off.
   I asked him what he was interested in, thinking that perhaps we had something in common, and he began to tell me that he spent most of his free time making suits of armor, sometimes spending a lot of money on very expensive materials. I believe he said they were high tensile steels.
   I don't know if my facial expression changed noticeably, but I felt great disappointment that my experiment had apparently failed. I felt at that moment that I should have just kept to myself, that I would have felt more related to a basketball fan than this person at that moment. In hindsight, this man's enthusiasm for his hobby, which was somewhat out of the ordinary, should have given me hope, but there at the checkout counter, I was disillusioned.
   As I think about it now, I imagine that this kind of disappointment is what keeps me so defended in the first place.