Day 75

I took some pretty cool pictures, I think, on campus today. The first one is of Wellman Hall, the entomology building. The inside's got a lot of nice wood paneling and exudes the spirit of the agricultural land grant college that Berkeley once was. The hallways smell like lacquered wood, and you can just swear that at any given moment, a man wearing a tweed coat and handlebar moustache, carrying his leather brief is going to stride out from behind the frosted glass pane of an office door.

Later on, I got to sitting on the steps of the old administrative building, California Hall, when I noticed a pine tree sapling poking up through a crack in the cement. I'm a sucker for tiny plants in inhospitable locales, which also explains why I took the third picture, which is of bryophytes growing in a cement ash tray. Anyway, I took a special liking to this pine tree. The little guy reminded me of the plants I used to see while hiking above the treeline in the Sierras. Basically, they find a crack in the granite and hold on for dear life, in spite of the intense UV light, poor soil, arid conditions, and daily temperature extremes. I'm always rooting for those little guys out there.

The last picture, as I mentioned, was taken in an ashtray. This particular ashtray is located in Ishi Court, named after the last known "wild indian." It's a pretty nice open space, with a bunch of benches and trees. The courtyard itself is tucked away in Dwinelle, the most labyrinthine of all the lecture halls; I usually make it a point to take a ball of twine with me whenever I go there. And minotaur spray. Never forget to bring your minotaur spray. Legend (or hearsay, whatever you want to call it) goes that there were these two brothers, both architects, who were working together on the design of Dwinelle. During construction, they had a falling out of sorts, and they stopped talking to each other, leading to a building filled with weird half-levels, abrupt jumps in room-number sequencing, and circuitous, redundant hallways. Apocryphal? Maybe. Fun to tell? Always.


Stairwell of Wellman Hall (the entomology building).


Pine seedling.


Bryophytes in an ashtray.

Well, later in the day, blinking in the sunlight after emerging from chemistry lab, I decided to use some of the remaining glorious sunlight (thanks, daylight savings!) to go for a run. Let me begin by saying that running without a shirt on is one of the great pleasures of being a boy. To feel one's chest tingle with sunlight is a joy I will refuse to ever surrender. I went up Strawberry Canyon, which is the watershed that the university originally bought to supply all of its drinking water. I ran past the frats, avoiding the crusted sidewalk puke that stood testimony to a weekend of revelry, and past the football stadium, eavesdropping in on the beefy Australian accents as the rugby squad strolled out onto the pitch, before I started climbing up the canyon.

Running alone is a meditative experience. I can breath and sweat out whatever demons I have inside of me when I go for a run. It's hard to describe, but running up hills always makes me feel strong. I think it has something to do with discomfort, and the discipline it takes to deal with that discomfort, which comes to stand in for whatever frustrations or anxieties I may be feeling that day. Mostly it's breathing that carries it away. Knowing that I can breathe and be fine is always a comfort.

The way it usually works for big climbs is that I feel disciplined on the uphill and cocky on the downhill. On the descent, I took the meandering firetrails, rather than bomb back down the road, which shoots straight down the hill. Cruising back, I seemed to be in the mood for greeting my fellow runners, of which there were many because of the nice weather. After a few smiles and friendly nods, I ended up conducting some observational experiments in social psychology. I made some unscientific generalizations and noted that lone female runners had the tendency to look down or away as they listened to their iPods, whereas lone male runners either made eye contact and returned the greeting (the old guys) or looked straight ahead with a neutral facial expression (the young guys). Just to keep things interesting, I alternated between the hang loose sign and a two-finger salute, both accompanied by a grin. The occasional stare or giggle from a group of girls was a nice ego boost, even if they were all wearing their identical sorority workout shirts. I try to keep my diet low in vanity, though I sometimes indulge myself.

By the time I made it back to my apartment, my legs were rather jelly-like. I still need to get used to running for an hour plus. On the upside, the slow release of endorphins was wonderful; taking that shower felt something akin to flying.

Day 74

Here's an original song by my friend Jeni. From what she tells me, it's the first song she ever wrote, as well as her favorite. I think this particular recording was done in a dorm practice room sometime last school year. I'll have to admit that this song kills me just about every time I hear it.

Day 72

Every so often, I eat grapefruit, maybe just a bite or two, so I can remind myself that I do not like the taste. The rest of the time, when the memory of bitterness is not fresh in my mind, I think only of the consummate pleasure with which so many other people eat their grapefruit, and I am again intrigued.

I suppose that the same principal applies to glow-paint dance parties.

After about ten minutes of an awkwardness I thought I had left behind in high school, I knew I had to leave. I ended up spending three hours talking and catching up with a long-neglected friend. Somehow, that conversational marathon really turned my mood around for the better. I think my preferred form of social interaction involves an interesting human being and a candid space. All through my life, this has been the pattern. Over bowls of pho, on long schoolbus rides home, on mountaintops under a starry skies, in deserts under full moons, through computer screens, on hills looking over the City skyline, and in bedrooms I've gotten the chance to talk, honestly and earnestly.

On these occasions, the talk is so satisfying that afterwards, for a little bit, everything else feels completely insubstantial in comparison. These were some of the best moments.

Day 64

I just got back from a play. It was an independent production put on by my school's theatre department. I still feel a bit disoriented. It was all over the place, touching on topics like labor rights, gender, sexuality, and the demon that is memory; a veritable boiling pot of psychoses dreamt up by college students. I think my favorite character, as listed on the playbill, was "The Sausage Man," a strange anachronistic apparition that haunts the dreams of troubled minds with his hand-held sausage grinder. I think I liked it best when his big bug eyes popped out from beneath the brim of his bowler hat, the clanking gears of his sausage grinder doing the talking for his fiendish smile.

If I let my imagination run too free, sometimes I forget where I am. Leaving the playhouse, walking back to my apartment, I traveled through an amazingly surreal world as the reality slowly began to seep back in. It more like percolated, really. It had to gurgle out of my mind and come back in splotches.

Friday nights in Berkeley, especially around the Telegraph Avenue area, are always filled with life. There are bubbly packs of girls in skirts. There are surly stags, waiting on street corners, cell phones in hand as they wait for the call. There are sirens blazing down the street to somewhere else, and it doesn't worry anybody because the sirens are headed somewhere else. There are the hot dogs sizzling in the hot dog shop (Top Dog is a Berkeley institution), and there are people dressed for a soirée clacking by.

I guess I better go to sleep now; I have work tomorrow.

Day 60

Today I was exploring a part of campus known as Observatory Hill, where the ruins of a century-old observatory remain (a few bricks from the foundation and some boards that are now a beehive are all that's left). It's nice there, full of shade and oak trees and tranquility. I must have spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes during my break just watching the birds and squirrels going about their business in the oak grove. There was a really high density of life in there. The sensory of all the activity and commotion was almost overwhelming at times. There was the jay at the top of the canopy working on its nest. There was a woodpecker that stayed to watch. There was the chirping of chicks in the nest. There were the robins rooting around in the grass for grubby things to eat, and occasionally they'd squabble over territory. One bird would make an alarm call, all the birds would go quiet, and an accipiter (1) would pass overhead. There were the cute, little, round, sparrow/finch-type birds looking for seeds. There were the tree squirrels doing acrobatics in the branches. And then there were all the birds chasing each other around because it is spring and that is what birds do when it is spring.

I found a nice spot to take a nap and I woke to the sound of the Campanile's bells tolling on the hour.

Day 52

This week has been something of a roller coaster ride for me. So much so that I ended up writing an e-mail to Mr. David Hathwell, retired AP English teacher.

I think it's a good exercise: having an audience in mind to scrutinize my writing forced me to pare down my words using to the sharpest analytical tools I have available to me. I ended up answering a lot of my own questions because of the clarity with which I approached each source of frustration. I considered not sending the e-mail to him, since the process of writing itself helped me work through my problems. But I still want to thank him.

Thanks, Mr. Hathwell.

Year

I don't really know whether to look forwards or backwards. Time is funny like that. Maybe I should just stay trapped in now. Like the woman I talked to the other day. About twenty years ago, she was in a coma for eleven days. She had been riding her bike in San Francisco (something I do with a certain irregularity but with great pleasure) when she was hit by a car. Her advice: live every day like it's your last, because you might not wake up to see the next. I bumped into her as I was running in my neighborhood and she was walking her dog. We started talking because she made some crack about running the Bay to Breakers. So I stopped and we chatted, and I learned about her daughter with a learning disability and how she likes running to the ocean and how I absolutely have to run the Bay to Breakers next year for its centennial. What a sweetheart.

But under different circumstances, I might not have so wholeheartedly approached her the way that I did. I'm not sure if the version of me from a year ago would have allowed myself to give a stranger a chance to open up a little. Well it was a nice chat, and it only reinforced the idea that the most valuable things I can ever hope to accumulate are the connections I make with other people.

What a nice thought.

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.