Pocket lint
Sep. 11th, 2007 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philenaI never know when I will be presented with a crossword puzzle, so I've started carrying around pencil with me at all times. Yet I should hasten to add, nothing being too trivial for an entry that appears (so far) centered upon the most trivial of trivia, that this "carrying around" implies too much agency on my part. Adept as I am at losing writing implements, I have yet somehow managed to retain this fairly nice mechanical pencil in my bag since Easter*, and I am beginning to find it remarkably useful for things--if not less trivial than crossword puzzles, at least trivial in a different manner. To wit: striking occurrences throughout the day that seem worthy of some sort of documentation. Since my family is so supportive that this "blog" of mine might prove sensational to read on the train (assuming you have, as I'm sure today's Gwendolyn would, a laptop and wireless internet connection), I might as well test their patience. I am sure to some people pencil sagas are as juicy as the making and breaking of engagements are to others--or even more so. Relationship drama is a real yawner to me.
1. People in Berkeley hate trees. There is a beautiful, tall, slender, leafy tree a few houses down that I constantly notice and admire, and have done since I moved in. When I come home from the BART stations in the winter (well, fall and spring; in the winter all is black) its canopy still catches the sunlight while everything else is in shadow, and in the summer it shades most of the sidewalk to my driveway, easing the last few steps home. Now I learn that the fellow whose house is across the sidewalk from the tree wants to landscape his pathetic little patch of turf, which apparently requires the city of Berkeley to cut up all the roots that are on his lawn. "The tree will probably die" he responded placidly when I asked him about it. And then a few days later I pass a home that has hung "tree removal notices" outside, alerting the public that it (the house) has asked the city to remove two trees from the property. The two trees in question were strong and healthy--one a Japanese maple and the other I don't recognize, but people! Trees are a good thing! They look beautiful, they shade your property, they prevent your street from looking barren. Daniel's and my favorite street in Berkeley (Hillegas Avenue, between Woolsey and Alcatraz) is our favorite street largely because of the canopy of trees arching over the entire length. This tree removal notice house had two of the only trees on its block, and it wanted them gone! There was a number on the notice to call if I had anything to say about the matter, but I don't even live nearby, and the city will not be very sympathetic to an objection of, " . . . but they're pretty!"
I'm a bit reminded by all this of1st grade, when I somehow learned that landscapers were going to remove diseased oak trees from the school grounds, and a few friends and I, not quite understanding the reasoning, banded together to protest, which consisted in marching around the play ground at recess, chanting "Give me an S! S! Give me an A! A!" and so on, to spell out "Save the trees." When someone explained that the trees were sick and would die anyway, we amended our chant to spell out, "If you cut down trees, at least plant new ones," but wasn't as catchy as our first chant (too long) so our protest petered out shortly thereafter.
In college, my Russian professor (Valentina--the small, slender woman who took no nonsense from anyone, did yoga, and would have terrified me had she not been so awesome) came in one day, extremely distressed, because some landscapers were cutting perfectly healthy branches off perfectly healthy trees. Apparently they had been hired to prune, and since they're paid by the amount of scrap produced, they started chopping indiscriminately, as if a hairdresser, paid by how much she removes, cut off your arm to improve her profit.
In Daniel's old apartment he could see a beautiful tall pine tree that one day was cut to pieces and carted away.
Of course, I am not a crazy tree hugger like the people on the UC Berkeley campus who started living in the branches of an oak grove that the university was planning on chopping down to build a new, seismically safe stadium. I can understand the removal of trees--like the extremely ill apple tree outside my bedroom window in Chicago, which not only lost about a third of its branches in one season but also attracted hordes of unbelievably raucous parakeets to feed on its fruit and drop apples on a very echo-y garage roof below at 6:00am, when all decent being should be unconscious, not groggily cursing the green feathery beasts with no sense of the decorum of proper visiting hours--but as I said, the tree was sick. And there were pruners active a few weeks ago on my street here to make sure the branches of the trees did not destroy the electric lines (or vice versa), and they made mulch on the spot with the most amazing gadget that transforms branches and leaves into a horizontal stream of brown-green blur shooting into the mulch receptacle. I love seeing that thing working, and always find myself thinking what a great way it would be to dispose of a body.
But I didn't mean to write just about trees. Therefore, a somewhat briefer rundown shall follow on the other items I had noted down on the back of my receipt with my crossword puzzle pencil.
Overheard at the bakery
2. Two girls having a heart-to-heart over slices of chocolate cake. In reference to some boy trouble, one explains, "I just feel as if he's 70% there, 80% somewhere else." That's 150% of boy, dear. No wonder he's too much for you to handle.
3. One woman, tall, floppy, white, dressed with a hippy flavor, walks in with a short, compact, well-groomed black man wearing a very snazzy suit.
"We're looking for a wedding cake," she explains. "Reg is a vegetarian and a nutritional consultant, so we thought a carrot cake would be be the best way to go."
I confirm that we do in fact have a carrot cake, but alarm bells are going off in my head. I start giving them my wedding cake shpiel, but then I realize she's nattering on about other flavors--do we have anything that's healthy . . . organic . . . natural? As she trails off hopefully, I explain that one does not walk into a cake store seeking health food, at which point Reg redeems himself from his unprepossessing introduction by laughing heartily. They then sit down, look at books, do their wedding-cake searching thing, during which I overhear the woman describing how the "stars" were active in relation to "a lot of transition right now in our lives," and really now, are you for real? Reg seemed like such a reasonable guy. What can he see in this woman? Usually in such mind-blowing mismatches I say to myself, "the sex must be really good," but then it was pointed out to me that they had to get to that point in their relationship to begin with, and at least in this case Reg seemed far too much put-together to be one for drunken one-night stands. (I say this with the full knowledge of his character, gleaned from no more than two sentences' worth of exchange with him. He did not, as they say, open his mouth and remove all doubt.)
On the street
4. I saw a homeless man talking on a cell phone yesterday. How do I know he was homeless? He was selling Street Spirit, which is usually a pretty good give-away. The dirty, smelly, toothless, and generally showing signs of not being all right in his head was also indicative of that condition. Before my bike was stolen I might have laughed and said that now I've seen everything with regard to the cell phone epidemic, but now that some despicable slug ran off with my property I'm more likely to look at the underclasses' possession of valuables with distaste and suspicion. Whom does he have to call, anyway?
5. There is a kind of flower common in Berkeley called a naked lady, so named because the stem shoots straight out from the ground with no leaves to obstruct the view of the flower. The fact that the flower is, after all, the sexual organ of the plant, only makes the name all the more titillating. However, these flowers are past their prime, and whenever I pass a stand of their withered remains, I think to myself, "Hmmmm . . . naked crones." This is perhaps a less attractive title, but it is no less whimsical, and if you want to cut and paste here a rant about unfair standards forcing women to retain the illusion of youth and beauty when they are just as (or more) valuable to society and beautiful in soul after having aged (like a fine wine) for a few decades, you have a legitimate argument for using that name to refer to the flower during its entire life cycle instead of the ageist, lookist, womyn-as-sex-object-promoting name that, after all, refers only to the beginning of the flower's existence, not to its ultimate culminating fate.
6. Walking to work today (on Hillegas Ave., in fact), I saw what appeared to be a man dumping the contents of a stroller into a waste hauling truck. I'm not a big fan of the usual contents of strollers, but it seemed to me that this was a bit extreme, even for someone of my views. So I got a bit closer to investigate (also, work was in that direction), but it turned out that the stroller was a rolling container for hauling construction debris. There are a number of different paths to be taken from this set-up, ranging from a discussion of the narrowly averted consequences of excessive gun-jumping with regard to samaritanism and baby-rescue, to speculation on how construction workers feel about their materials if they haul them in stroller look-alikes, to rumination on how one might compare the usual contents of strollers to the byproducts of construction work, but I feel that none of these avenues of thought would reflect well on me if I elaborated on them, so I will simply mention their existence and move on.
Today
7. Madame customer, I am capable of making change for a $1.50 cookie out of a $10.00 bill. My hesitation was due mistrust of our elderly computer system, which screws up more than it works properly (in magnitude, if not frequency of occurrence), and your unhelpful prompting of the correct change, followed by a gentle excuse making ("It's okay; I understand; it's late in the day") only revealed your belief that we in the service industry are apparently undereducated high-school drop-outs, incapable of performing basic math functions. While I can understand the experiences which might have led you to that conclusion, it is always impolite to act upon it without proof of its accuracy. The correct thing to do is wait patiently while I make sure that the computer will not screw up in some ridiculous way that will keep me at work half an hour after I should have left (which has happened before.)
8. But I will not end on such a cranky note. When I came home, the neighbors, who have a doggy named Monkey**, had a friend over, who had brought herpuppy named Coda, and Monkey and Coda were having a marvelous time chasing each other all over the back yard. I heard them mentioning how in a month Coda would be much too big for Monkey, but this afternoon they were having a grand old time, although Monkey's age and treachery were running circles around Coda's youth and inexperience.
*I know it is since Easter because the pencil's provenance is guilty. My mother borrowed it from my aunt when the whole family went to brunch that weekend to do--surprise!--a crossword puzzle with, and somehow it ended up in my bag. I have never returned it--indeed, I forgot all about it for several months, which might explainin part why I have not lost it yet--but I comfort myself with the knowledge at least it's still performing its true, original duty.
**Whose name, I might add, once very much confused a small girl who met the dog on the street. How can he be Monkey when he was so clearly a doggy?
1. People in Berkeley hate trees. There is a beautiful, tall, slender, leafy tree a few houses down that I constantly notice and admire, and have done since I moved in. When I come home from the BART stations in the winter (well, fall and spring; in the winter all is black) its canopy still catches the sunlight while everything else is in shadow, and in the summer it shades most of the sidewalk to my driveway, easing the last few steps home. Now I learn that the fellow whose house is across the sidewalk from the tree wants to landscape his pathetic little patch of turf, which apparently requires the city of Berkeley to cut up all the roots that are on his lawn. "The tree will probably die" he responded placidly when I asked him about it. And then a few days later I pass a home that has hung "tree removal notices" outside, alerting the public that it (the house) has asked the city to remove two trees from the property. The two trees in question were strong and healthy--one a Japanese maple and the other I don't recognize, but people! Trees are a good thing! They look beautiful, they shade your property, they prevent your street from looking barren. Daniel's and my favorite street in Berkeley (Hillegas Avenue, between Woolsey and Alcatraz) is our favorite street largely because of the canopy of trees arching over the entire length. This tree removal notice house had two of the only trees on its block, and it wanted them gone! There was a number on the notice to call if I had anything to say about the matter, but I don't even live nearby, and the city will not be very sympathetic to an objection of, " . . . but they're pretty!"
I'm a bit reminded by all this of1st grade, when I somehow learned that landscapers were going to remove diseased oak trees from the school grounds, and a few friends and I, not quite understanding the reasoning, banded together to protest, which consisted in marching around the play ground at recess, chanting "Give me an S! S! Give me an A! A!" and so on, to spell out "Save the trees." When someone explained that the trees were sick and would die anyway, we amended our chant to spell out, "If you cut down trees, at least plant new ones," but wasn't as catchy as our first chant (too long) so our protest petered out shortly thereafter.
In college, my Russian professor (Valentina--the small, slender woman who took no nonsense from anyone, did yoga, and would have terrified me had she not been so awesome) came in one day, extremely distressed, because some landscapers were cutting perfectly healthy branches off perfectly healthy trees. Apparently they had been hired to prune, and since they're paid by the amount of scrap produced, they started chopping indiscriminately, as if a hairdresser, paid by how much she removes, cut off your arm to improve her profit.
In Daniel's old apartment he could see a beautiful tall pine tree that one day was cut to pieces and carted away.
Of course, I am not a crazy tree hugger like the people on the UC Berkeley campus who started living in the branches of an oak grove that the university was planning on chopping down to build a new, seismically safe stadium. I can understand the removal of trees--like the extremely ill apple tree outside my bedroom window in Chicago, which not only lost about a third of its branches in one season but also attracted hordes of unbelievably raucous parakeets to feed on its fruit and drop apples on a very echo-y garage roof below at 6:00am, when all decent being should be unconscious, not groggily cursing the green feathery beasts with no sense of the decorum of proper visiting hours--but as I said, the tree was sick. And there were pruners active a few weeks ago on my street here to make sure the branches of the trees did not destroy the electric lines (or vice versa), and they made mulch on the spot with the most amazing gadget that transforms branches and leaves into a horizontal stream of brown-green blur shooting into the mulch receptacle. I love seeing that thing working, and always find myself thinking what a great way it would be to dispose of a body.
But I didn't mean to write just about trees. Therefore, a somewhat briefer rundown shall follow on the other items I had noted down on the back of my receipt with my crossword puzzle pencil.
Overheard at the bakery
2. Two girls having a heart-to-heart over slices of chocolate cake. In reference to some boy trouble, one explains, "I just feel as if he's 70% there, 80% somewhere else." That's 150% of boy, dear. No wonder he's too much for you to handle.
3. One woman, tall, floppy, white, dressed with a hippy flavor, walks in with a short, compact, well-groomed black man wearing a very snazzy suit.
"We're looking for a wedding cake," she explains. "Reg is a vegetarian and a nutritional consultant, so we thought a carrot cake would be be the best way to go."
I confirm that we do in fact have a carrot cake, but alarm bells are going off in my head. I start giving them my wedding cake shpiel, but then I realize she's nattering on about other flavors--do we have anything that's healthy . . . organic . . . natural? As she trails off hopefully, I explain that one does not walk into a cake store seeking health food, at which point Reg redeems himself from his unprepossessing introduction by laughing heartily. They then sit down, look at books, do their wedding-cake searching thing, during which I overhear the woman describing how the "stars" were active in relation to "a lot of transition right now in our lives," and really now, are you for real? Reg seemed like such a reasonable guy. What can he see in this woman? Usually in such mind-blowing mismatches I say to myself, "the sex must be really good," but then it was pointed out to me that they had to get to that point in their relationship to begin with, and at least in this case Reg seemed far too much put-together to be one for drunken one-night stands. (I say this with the full knowledge of his character, gleaned from no more than two sentences' worth of exchange with him. He did not, as they say, open his mouth and remove all doubt.)
On the street
4. I saw a homeless man talking on a cell phone yesterday. How do I know he was homeless? He was selling Street Spirit, which is usually a pretty good give-away. The dirty, smelly, toothless, and generally showing signs of not being all right in his head was also indicative of that condition. Before my bike was stolen I might have laughed and said that now I've seen everything with regard to the cell phone epidemic, but now that some despicable slug ran off with my property I'm more likely to look at the underclasses' possession of valuables with distaste and suspicion. Whom does he have to call, anyway?
5. There is a kind of flower common in Berkeley called a naked lady, so named because the stem shoots straight out from the ground with no leaves to obstruct the view of the flower. The fact that the flower is, after all, the sexual organ of the plant, only makes the name all the more titillating. However, these flowers are past their prime, and whenever I pass a stand of their withered remains, I think to myself, "Hmmmm . . . naked crones." This is perhaps a less attractive title, but it is no less whimsical, and if you want to cut and paste here a rant about unfair standards forcing women to retain the illusion of youth and beauty when they are just as (or more) valuable to society and beautiful in soul after having aged (like a fine wine) for a few decades, you have a legitimate argument for using that name to refer to the flower during its entire life cycle instead of the ageist, lookist, womyn-as-sex-object-promoting name that, after all, refers only to the beginning of the flower's existence, not to its ultimate culminating fate.
6. Walking to work today (on Hillegas Ave., in fact), I saw what appeared to be a man dumping the contents of a stroller into a waste hauling truck. I'm not a big fan of the usual contents of strollers, but it seemed to me that this was a bit extreme, even for someone of my views. So I got a bit closer to investigate (also, work was in that direction), but it turned out that the stroller was a rolling container for hauling construction debris. There are a number of different paths to be taken from this set-up, ranging from a discussion of the narrowly averted consequences of excessive gun-jumping with regard to samaritanism and baby-rescue, to speculation on how construction workers feel about their materials if they haul them in stroller look-alikes, to rumination on how one might compare the usual contents of strollers to the byproducts of construction work, but I feel that none of these avenues of thought would reflect well on me if I elaborated on them, so I will simply mention their existence and move on.
Today
7. Madame customer, I am capable of making change for a $1.50 cookie out of a $10.00 bill. My hesitation was due mistrust of our elderly computer system, which screws up more than it works properly (in magnitude, if not frequency of occurrence), and your unhelpful prompting of the correct change, followed by a gentle excuse making ("It's okay; I understand; it's late in the day") only revealed your belief that we in the service industry are apparently undereducated high-school drop-outs, incapable of performing basic math functions. While I can understand the experiences which might have led you to that conclusion, it is always impolite to act upon it without proof of its accuracy. The correct thing to do is wait patiently while I make sure that the computer will not screw up in some ridiculous way that will keep me at work half an hour after I should have left (which has happened before.)
8. But I will not end on such a cranky note. When I came home, the neighbors, who have a doggy named Monkey**, had a friend over, who had brought herpuppy named Coda, and Monkey and Coda were having a marvelous time chasing each other all over the back yard. I heard them mentioning how in a month Coda would be much too big for Monkey, but this afternoon they were having a grand old time, although Monkey's age and treachery were running circles around Coda's youth and inexperience.
*I know it is since Easter because the pencil's provenance is guilty. My mother borrowed it from my aunt when the whole family went to brunch that weekend to do--surprise!--a crossword puzzle with, and somehow it ended up in my bag. I have never returned it--indeed, I forgot all about it for several months, which might explainin part why I have not lost it yet--but I comfort myself with the knowledge at least it's still performing its true, original duty.
**Whose name, I might add, once very much confused a small girl who met the dog on the street. How can he be Monkey when he was so clearly a doggy?