Dream Journal

I am in a massive garden, beautifully landscaped. Trickling streams crisscross the stone paths that lead to small wooden arch bridges. This is the garden of Yu Wu Lu, Chinese peasant and robotics genius. His creations wander the hedgerows. Today there is a festival (or does this happen everyday?) and his garden is having an open-house. There are some tables set up with spare parts, and children are invited to create their own machines. The children squat in the pathways, watching their contraptions. They all look down to the ground, absorbed. All I can see are the backs of their heads and their bowl haircuts. They all wear athletic gray sweatsuits.

I am in a black, windowless room with a high ceiling. I am in theater class. Brandon the instructor tells us that we'll be improvising award acceptance speeches. One of the walls lifts away revealing a gigantic green screen. The green is so vivid it's like having lime juice sprayed in your eyes. In front of the green screen is a diminutive podium (or is it a lectern?). The relative scale is something similar to that of George C. Scott standing in front of a monumental American flag in the opening scene of Patton.

Little Sam's Finger

It used to be
That little Sam's finger wasn't strong enough
To press the button on the spray can,
The time he built a birdhouse with his dad.

It used to be
That little Sam's eye would wander,
At every falling leaf
And passing car.

But now his grip is sure,
And now his gaze is steady
When he squints through rifle sights
With finger at the ready.

The boy you knew is gone now,
No chance he's coming back.
He's off to see the world now,
And play cops and robbers in Iraq.

Day 103

Remember the days when science was fun? When candles sucked boiled eggs into jars and food coloring turned carnations blue? Well, you can live through those days once more! Behold the penny-cleaning powers of vinegar and salt on oxidized copper!

Before:


During:


After:

(Fun fact: Note the penny on the far left, which has a small "s" beneath the date 1970. This mint mark indicates that this penny is from San Francisco, just like me.)

My college-level understanding (supplemented by Wikipedia) of what happens runs something like this: salt (NaCl) dissolves in vinegar (which is already a solution of acetic acid, CH3COOH). Both acetic acid and salt dissolve in water, creating sodium (Na+), chloride (Cl-), acetate (CH3COO-), and hydrogen (H+) ions in the solution. Dull pennies, coated with copper oxide (CuO), get thrown into the mix. Chloride ions bond to the copper to make copper chloride (CuCl2) and hydrogen ions bond to to the oxygen to make water (H2O). If we had added our pennies to a solution of hydrochloric acid (HCl), we would have had the same outcome, since hydrogen (H+) and chloride (Cl-) ions were the main actors in removing the copper oxide (CuO).

It sure is reassuring to know that my college education is arming me with the tools necessary to understand an eight year old's rainy day science project, or an entire episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy, for that matter.

Well, that sure was fun.

Day 94

Today was a rainy day. I think rain pattering, on rooftops, down drains, or onto sidewalks, is one of the best sounds in the whole world. I remember sitting in my elementary school gym when they would play movies on rainy days during lunch. It was crowded and damp, and the smell of Lunchables salami hung in the humid air. I can't remember a single movie that we watched. Maybe it didn't happen.

In class, I realize now the chaotic nightmare the teachers must have had to deal with. I simply remember the contentment of building. It didn't really matter with what; tiny wood cutouts of color-coded geometric shapes or interlocking plastic cubes with sockets and connectors on their faces were some of my preferred materials, though.

Perhaps it is symptomatic of my being male, but from an early age, anything that vaguely resembled a gun was a gun. One rainy day we had an illicit gun workshop, and business was good. We were using the interlocking plastic cubes, since the ability to detach and reattach the clips of ammo was so cool. We had a stockpile of weaponry stashed away in the classroom, and I remember a distinct sense of shame upon its discovery.

Working with kids now, I am reminded of the lack of inhibitions and the plethora of anxieties that used to fill my life; how great it was to run around with arms locked rigid like the wings of an airplane, and how terrible it was to have to wait in line for ice cream when the people at the front were already getting theirs. I think it's easy to forget how much we worried as kids, maybe we worried more. How else could we channel the joy, the wild abandon of the play yard if not for the nagging possibility that one recess the sky might start falling?

Well, I'm a big kid now; bigger, but still vulnerable to the same anxiety when I was small. Some nights, I fall asleep with a feeling of dis-ease. The dark caves in, and the old feeling comes back. And when the next morning finally comes, what a joy it is to come back to the surface and feel the sunshine once more.

Day 76

Confession: When I was 13, I took a rock from the top of Half Dome in Yosemite. I wanted a reminder of what had been the best day of my young life. I've since lost the rock (given it away, actually), but I still have my memories of the afternoon that I stood on top of the world.

Day 51

There are some things about my job that make it really special.

I work in Tilden Park in Berkeley, and it's Today I was working with these kids that come in on a weekly basis for the Junior Ranger program (ages 9 to 13). They were having a meeting in their clubhouse, which is the park's old, original visitor center. It has the feeling of a ski lodge, with a cast iron stove for warmth at one end of the small, rectangular room. Chris and Colin sat next to each other in their small wooden folding chairs. Colin opened a tupperware full of saltine crackers and offered one to Chris.

The Out-of-Doors

I'm pretty happy that I've been getting to go outside more these days. There were times earlier in the semester when I was worried that I might start to suffer from nature deficit disorder if I spent one more glorious afternoon in the library.

But luckily, I just got back from my first ever Christmas tree cut with the Cal Forestry Club. The experience was a very new (and fun) one. We left Friday afternoon and spent the night at Blodgett, one of UC Berkeley's four research forests in the Sierras. Anyway, there were cabins for us (about 20) to spend the night in. Highlights: eating homemade pizza (and vegan carrot soup), winning at Apples to Apples, and singing the Cal drinking song (among others) with a room full of foresters.

The next day (today), I got to be a lumberjack (or the closest I'll ever get). I got up at dawn, put on my longjohns and flannel, and ate some flapjacks before heading out to the timeberlot to cut down some white fir. I'm surprised that the whole process didn't make a beard spontaneously sprout out of my face. I'm rubbing my chin right now just to make sure. All told, we filled a U-Haul with 214 trees, anywhere from 3-20 feet tall.

It was some good fun.

Unrelated (except perhaps tangentially), two weeks before the tree cut, I had another outdoor adventure, except it was through my work. I never thought I'd ever get paid to go backpacking, but sometimes you find yourself living the dream (which is a bit of a shame, since reality doesn't quite always measure up to one's fantasies).

I got this opportunity because I was lucky enough to work with the Junior Rangers (JRs) in the month of November. The way it works at my job as an Interpretive Student Aide in Tilden Park is that we get our work assignments on a monthly basis, so our work schedules have a good deal of flexibility (and unpredictability). The JR program is for kids aged 9-13, with additional spots for high schoolers, who bear the auspicious title of "JR Aide."

Most months, the JRs go on an overnight camping/backpacking trip. To be honest, it was the lure of backpacking that drew me in; kids be damned. In comparison to JRs, my Boy Scout troop was a well-oiled military machine. Maybe it was the saluting.

But I digress. There's a point I want to get to. The most surreal moment of the trip came at night, as the campfire was still going strong in the large structure we were all staying inside of, and everyone was asleep in their bags. It was only 11pm, but it had been dark since 5. Surveying the room, I got to see a cross section of childhood, from age 9 to 16. By the light of the fire, I could barely make out the lumps scattered across the cement floor, so mostly I stared at the fire, thinking.

I thought about the day, how it had gone, all the JRs I had met, the impressions I had of them. Collin never stop talking about liopleuridons, these badass aquatic reptiles from the Jurassic. I thought about the teenagers flirting with each other off in the corner, their heads clumped, their sleeping bags radiating out.

As I looked around the room, I had the feeling as if I could put myself into each person's head. There were the two best buddies, side by side, who earlier were talking about the relative merits of their favorite computer games. There was the boy who admitted to the nighttime anxiety he often felt as he fell asleep. There were the awkward teens with braces whose sleeping bags rustled together in the hush of the fire. I felt like I was experiencing, for the first time, that moment from the point of view of everyone in the room simultaneously. Maybe it's just that I'm getting older. The next morning, they guessed that I was 20.

Sleep

He could not sleep. He was trying to lie still in his bed. But his foot was at the wrong angle, so he adjusted it. The foot adjustment had wrinkled the sheets and now he felt like the sheets were twisted about his knee so he squirmed with his whole torso to even things out. There. That was better. Now all he had to do was be still enough and then it would be light outside again and he would feel better and everything would be better again. It's as simple as that. All I have to do is close my eyes and stay still. Before I know it, it'll be tomorrow. He had heard somewhere, probably some big scientific study, that thinking about falling asleep while trying to fall asleep is a surefire way to not fall asleep. Damn.

Self-conscious of his mistake, he tried to visualize the desert. He saw the endless plain of cracked, dried ground extend to a hazy smear of a horizon in the distance. The pure pale blue of the sky above, pierced by the blinding eye of God.

He sweated in the flannel sheets. He felt the humid cloth against his back. He twisted again and the sheets sucked in a breath of cool, fresh air. He was on his side now. He wished he had something to hold onto. No, he wished he had someone to hold onto. It wasn't something he wanted to admit. But the comfort of it was undeniable. The ebb and flow of someone else's breathing as comforting and hypnotic as watching the tide come in.

When he was a child, when he was safely tucked into his bed, there was always the lingering sense of anxiety in the darkness until sleep would finally come. Some nights sleep came quickly. Other nights, he would listen for passing cars, and then watch the distant beams of light struggle through the blinds, into his room, and across the ceiling. He wondered what people would say about him if his funeral were tomorrow. He would think about the ridiculousness of monsters living under his bed, only to shudder in fear. Eventually, he would wrap himself into a tight cocoon, wedging himself against the wall. He would be safe there.

But now he was big and he didn't have to wrap himself in a cocoon of sheets and wedge himself against the wall anymore. He didn't have to listen to passing cars, and he didn't think about what they'd say of him if his funeral were tomorrow. But even though he was comfortable and safe, alone in his bed, he still felt the lingering sense of anxiety until sleep finally came.

Aircraft Carriers

He liked to sit on the carpeted stairs and read. Each step was just wide enough for him to stretch his legs out, back against the wall, head beneath the wooden banister. He liked to look in the books with cut-aways of tanks and airplanes, cathedrals and castles, the heart and the spleen. Nuts and bolts and bricks and mortar and blood and guts spilled out of the pages. He couldn't get enough. The best times to read were during the golden hours of the afternoon that stretched on endlessly, when the light soaked in through the windows and stained everything with a luminous glow. The sun traced the shape of the window across the carpet, but he did not notice. He had more important things to attend to; the castle was under seige and the invaders with the battering ram were having boiling oil poured on their heads.

Many years later.

He sat in the library of the university, staring into one of the beige boxes bolted down to the table. The keyboard clacked satisfyingly. He was reading about nuclear-powered aircraft carriers on en.wikipedia.org. Nimitz-class supercarriers can stay at sea without refuelling for up to 20 years. They displace 100,000 tons of water. They carry over 3,000 aviators and seamen and a compliment of over 50 aircraft. And for a little while, he sat on carpeted stairs on a golden afternoon.

Smells

I remember the smell of waking up on Saturday mornings in my house. The aroma would hit me as soon as my foot touched the last step at the bottom of the staircase into the dining room. Sitting in his dining room chair with its sagging cushion would be my dad, back from his morning run in the Marin Headlands. That was back when he ran marathons. Sometimes he still does, even though it's bad for his knees. Anyway, he'd sit there and read the newspaper and maybe eat some junk food as a reward. And the room would smell like his sweat. Not like the body odor of the armpit in need of deodorant squeezing against you on the bus. Rather, it was the smell of sweat that has gone cold and permeated into one's clothes.

Usually (always, actually) it was just me and him, awake that early in the morning. I'm pretty sure I prided myself on being the second earliest waker in the family, even if it was only to watch morning cartoons instead of train for a marathon. I liked the tense stillness in the air of those Saturday mornings, like the house was holding its breath, about to sigh. My dad sat there, seemingly at rest, and yet I knew where he had come from and how the house would start buzzing again once my sisters and my mom woke up.

But for the time being, it was still quiet in the house, so I would make my bowl of cheerios and head towards the living room TV, without saying anything.

This morning I went running with my roommates. When we came back, I got a whiff of that same sweat smell, and was immediately transported back to this memory.

Birthday

He loved the park across the street. Sometimes, after school, his older sister would walk him across the green pedestrian bridge that spanned the cement river below, the occasional car speeding down.

But today was a special day. It was a warm day in late May, rare in San Francisco. Not only that, but he was turning six. All his friends he made in Kindergarten would be there, including some of the children who weren't.

He knew what a birthday was. It was a day when his parents smiled a lot and took a lot of pictures and looked tired and exhausted at the end. He had observed this very phenomenon before at other birthday parties, at swimming pools and bowling alleys and museums. The parents would smile a pained smile as the children ran circles around them. At play time and cake time and presents time, always smiling, or chatting with other grown ups, gesturing occasionally toward their specific child.

So on this particular morning, he was especially excited as he brushed his teeth and even more excited as he velcroed his Power Rangers shoes onto his feet.

I could go on, but I feel tired. I could describe his yellow t-shirt with a pocket over the left breast that felt too hot in the sun. I could tell you about the juice he spilled on himself and the way it felt sticky against his skin for the rest of the day, except that after a while he stopped noticing. I could go on about the guests, and how some of them were friends, and some of them he felt ambivalent towards. I could go into the complexities of the social life of a six year old, but right now, I don't have the energy.

Outside

I came home and my childhood playground was missing. No, I didn't misplace it, it was gone. Torn out of the ground. My slides, my fort, my tire swing, even my cypress tree. All gone. Now it's just a big dirt field across the street from my house.

I can remember playing with plastic green soldiers in the sand. I would dig in the sand until I hit clay, then dig a little more before giving up. I was part of an afterschool program called "Latchkey Kids" run by SF parks and rec. And everyday I'd come back home, but before I could come into the house, I'd have to shake the sand out of my shoes and pants and hair.

Inside the big cinder block building at the park there was a kitchen, an office, some bathrooms, and a common area with some old MacIntosh computers. There was this one vector game I was pretty good at, where you get to drive a tank. For a while, I had the high score, which made me pretty damn proud.

I remember the other kids who went there after school, though not too well. I was probably about 9-10 years old when I went, and there were some other kids who went who were probably in middle school, I don't know where. Well, I guess that they were just at the age when the opposite sex starts to become mysterious and fascinating and despicable, so they'd play these games that really made no sense to me.

I suppose that some of the older boys had seen Starship Troopers, and thought that it was pretty awesome, being a rated "R" action movie and all, complete with human brains sucked out through a translucent tube and the obligatory one second flash of female nipple. Well, the way that this plays in is that the boys would play the part of the Starship Troopers, and the girls the part of the alien bug species bent on destroying the human race.

There was this pile of scrap wood near the door in the cement blockhouse that Latchkey Kids was based out of, old pieces of wooden picture frame mostly. Well, when you're a boy in a certain age range, anything and everything that can resemble a gun is a gun. And so, in their post-modern version of cowboys and indians, the boys and girls played starship troopers and aliens.

Basically, the way it went, as in the movie, was that the alien girl species would charge the boy troopers, armed with their picture frame machine guns, sputtering off rounds as rapidly as their sounds effects could allow. Most of the bugs would get blasted away, their dead strewn by the swing set and the slides. But occasionally, one would make it through the hail of gunfire sounds, and leap onto a hapless trooper.

At this point, no one really knew what to do. The girls usually didn't make it this far, and when they did, there was a sense of "now what?" And so, in this moment of weakness, picture frames at the ready, his comrades would rescue him from certain ... I don't know what.

I didn't know what. I was in fourth grade then. My favorite color was red and the best show on TV was Arthur, the anthropomorphic aadrvark. But even then, I could sense that the game was more than just cowboys and indians the way that your dog senses your bad day. There was a tension in the air whenever they played the game. I did not play.