I don't really talk about my job here 'cause it's a little too publicly identifiable. I started three months ago as a nurse at a big public hospital, and not surprisingly it's kind of a grind in some ways. There are plenty of good days too, but lately people have been pissing me off.
Funny thing, that. As you probably know if you're one of the 5 people reading this, I worked at two hospital jobs before, got rapidly burned out, and took a long time convincing myself to start up again after I moved here. But there were lots of good reasons for me to be unable to deal with things back then. I was living somewhere I no longer wanted to be, with a freshly broken heart; most of my old friends had left town, and all my family had moved thousands of miles away; and toward the end of my last job, I was smelling toxic smoke all day and walking through a line of heavily armed and twitchy National Guard to get to work.
Well, now I'm living somewhere I do want to be; I'm surrounded by beautiful places and excellent people; my love life is rolling along in a sometimes confusing but very satisfying way; and despite the state of the world, I feel like my head is pretty firmly on my shoulders these days. So now when I have one of those days at work where I end up all crazed and snappy and hating the system, I start to panic: oh no! if I can't handle this job when life is good, maybe I never can!
I know better, though. I knew the place would be stressful, but it's where I wanted to work, and I won't be in an entry-level grind job forever; I'm just impatient because I'm starting at the bottom of the ladder for the third time at 31. And I do have a temper, sometimes, especially if I don't take care of things like sleep. (To anyone who's kept me awake lately, though—I'm not complaining.)
10 PM on a Sunday at the local Irish bar & grill. There's football on, but oddly all the cheerful fratboys are elsewhere and so is everyone else. I'm dog-tired from work. Amanda, the big tall bartender who's planning to teach high-school Spanish, had a long day too. The kitchen just closed so she pours out the last bowl of tomato soup and gives it to me, on the house. We trade nurse/bartender aggravation stories.
Luis walks in and orders a Heineken, then he stares at my pint of Harp as if he's never seen beer in a glass before, and asks if that's beer. He's a little guy, maybe 25, looks Mexican. But really he just moved from Guatemala three months ago, invited by his friend in the Bay Area, hoping to find a way to get by, pretty optimistic. The three of us talk half in Spanish and half in English for a while. He has some questions about the neighborhood, and then he says:
"Why did this guy tell me, 'Watch out, they're gonna kill you?' And he went like this?" He points at his head.
Oh yeah: he's wearing a blue bandana. Looks nice. Unfortunately blue is the color of the Sureños on 17th Street; the Norteños here on 24th wear red. (Why do the "northerners" have territory further south in SF? It's a NoCal/SoCal thing—long story.) I like blue better, but I can wear what I want because I look like just some white guy. It probably is a pretty bad idea for Luis.
We try to explain for a while and he gets it, but he's pissed. "I can wear what I want. Why can't I just tell them I don't know anything about all that?" Dude, these guys don't care who you are, they may not even be real criminals, just wannabes looking for someone to hurt.
I know this crap goes on everywhere, but in New York it's like everything is in the shadow of big money, big buildings, big culture, big crime. Here, it's like—it's a beautiful place, and freer than most, and people still want to be at war.
Could be worse though.
Last week I was walking home from work late and looked up at our front window and saw, oh how nice, the windows are lit and my roommate is waving at me. I waved back, and she pointed at what she was really waving at: a giant glitter-encrusted steel beast pulling into the driveway right behind me. This cool Texan, an old friend of my roommate, had rolled into town for the Art Car Fest, after travelling 8000 miles around the country from Houston in the recently redesigned Tankgrrl's Treasure Chest.
I didn't get to see the San Jose festivities nor the Berkeley parade, but on Friday I tagged along with Rebecca to Oakland, where about two dozen of the car gang were parking their beasts at the Children's Hospital to entertain some sick kids. It was a fine day (including ample meals before and after) and I took a ton of pictures, most of which came out totally crappy.
I've never known beans about cars of any kind, be they art, classic, sports, race, porn, death, or whatever kinds of cars they have these days. But now I know slightly more beans, and have gazed at and/or fondled a variety of beautiful creations: some "daily drivers" (i.e. things you could reasonably take around town; there's a lot of the ever-popular "glue a bunch of toys on the roof" approach, but some pretty great sculptural and textural stuff too) and some not so practical/legal (the giant self-propelled Radio Flyer wagon)... but the Carthedral is in a class of its own.
Like so many good things I see, this all makes me want to drop everything and spend all my time making art and toys. Of course then even if I could afford it, my Quaker social responsibility work ethic thing would probably drive me nuts. At dinner Rebecca told the story of her friend the journalist who'd been under siege in a mosque in Najaf, and her response: "And I'm... driving around the country in a glitter-covered car? What good is that?" The journalist disagreed: she's brightening people's lives and making it a little more apparent that America can be about things other than harmful bullshit. Well, yeah, there is that. I'm just glad someone is doing what they're doing, and that I got to play with the cars.
Can't believe I forgot to mention something that made me pretty happy last month: Rick Veitch has been doing his stunning (to me anyway) dream comics again. He's posting them on a message board, which is a little unwieldy but lets others chime in with some mundane-to-excellent contributions in comics and prose.
Here: Little Omens
(There's another book of his dream strips out now or soon—hilarious and moving stuff. I could look at this for hours and still be giggly.)
It was very nice to get a mention of my Riddley Walker Annotations from the nifty website Apothecary's Drawer, whose author Ray Girvan also sent me some good material for the notes. It was also nice, in a spooky way, that Ray talked in the same post about how the Kyrgyz city Bishkek got its name—since Bishkek is where my roomie's commendable sister has been for the last two years.
And if you are a word-nerd and you're not already reading Language Log and Language Hat, do. I got a huge kick out of Language Log's recent investigation into "eggcorns": là, là, et là.