Motherlies

If I rotate my shoulders just right, I can tuck the entire top half of my body into one of the tall gym lockers; then, I can lean on my arms so my upper body is comfortably supported in a warm, cozy box where I can check in with my phone things and update the various lists I maintain for keeping track of my workouts.

I was shivering when I cam inside, dizzy and bumping into things, and needed a quiet moment to relax. When I pried my body out of the locker, the cleaning lady was staring at me, and she burst out in a big belly laugh.

"I was about to ask if you were okay, and then I saw you texting in there."

"Aw, yeah, if I had just passed out standing inside my locker, I've got bigger problems in life."

Earlier, a police officer blew into the building in a gust of icy wind as I was leaving. She was bundled head to toe, and I was carrying my jacket over my arm and only wearing a flannel shirt and jeans.

"You're gonna need way more clothing than that, dear," she chided as I passed her.

I'm practically breaking my teeth while chomping down on uncooked ramen in my lab, and idly wonder if somewhere, somehow, my mother is flinching and doesn't know why.

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27 February 2014 17:06

Bottlenecks

It's rare to see any of the workmen take the stairs; even when they're empty-handed, they'll take the elevator down one floor no matter how long they have to wait. I was surprised, then, to walk past an electrician who stood in front of the elevator doors for no more than two seconds before rolling his eyes and walking towards the stairwell.

I carried a load of packages and walked slowly behind him, not even pausing to see what the elevator wait might be. He looked over his shoulder once he heard my footfalls on the stairs.

"You need a hand with those?"

"Nah, I got it. But thanks."

He outstripped me fairly quickly, and I still can't get over the novelty of it.

---

Years ago, after one of the summer floods, we hired movers to bring all of the equipment out of the area so the labs could get rebuilt. I found a bottleneck at the elevator, where a line of enlargers had to wait to get sent upstairs. There was one mover standing at the elevator, not moving anything.

"What's up?" I asked him, while trying not to tap my foot too visibly. I wanted to keep the operation on a tight schedule, since I knew that the sooner we cleared out the equipment, the sooner we'd start reconstruction.

"I need to wait for my supervisor. These might be more than fifty pounds and I don't want to touch them."

"Oh. Well, I'm not under any weight restrictions," I said, before shoving four of them into the elevator and sending them upstairs. Since there wasn't room in the elevator for me, I sprinted up the stairwell and caught them as they reached the first floor.

This went on through the entire week of moving, that I would find places where movers twice my size would decide against moving something, and I'd move things myself rather than wait for the entire crew to rearrange itself. Partway through the week, I was scolded by the movers for taking away their work, that I was acting disrespectful to their jobs, and violating their safety regulations.

We finished the moving phase before their complaints got very far.

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25 February 2014 13:07

Practical Responses

The reading included an anecdote illustrating how the differences between ethnic groups in Xinjiang are often not immediately visible, despite attempts to maintain clear ideological boundaries. As the story went, children at play accidentally kicked a ball into the street, and called to a passing student, "Hey Han, would you get the ball?" but the student simply responded with "I am a Tungan," and moved on.¹

At this point, the professor called attention to the anecdote, attempting to elicit an explanation from the class. There came an expected chorus of mumbled about indistinct features separating each group, a morality tale about not making assumptions about a stranger's backgrounds, maintained ethnic pride, until I pointed out that the Tungans are Muslim, therefore the Tungan child was unlikely to touch a ball that might have been an inflated pig's bladder.

When living in an environment of celebrated integration, it becomes easy to forget that separations of groups exist as more than just names.

1. Rudelson, Justin; Oasis Identities

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24 February 2014 19:06

Safety First

"Looking pretty good up there," I say to the builder, who is sitting on the roof of the garage when I pull in.

"Almost," he mumbles, shaking his head. "Almost."

I feel bad that he has to work on the house through the winter, but not that bad; his inability to manage a project timeline was what led him to sitting on an icy half-built deck with power cables snaking around icicles.

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20 February 2014 18:08

Twenty-Seven

At night I listen to the howling winds while refreshing the weather forecast for the morning. Some days, I don't want to be spoiled for what the dawn will bring me, but often I feel the need to be prepared.

My new rule is that days which I fail to arrive on time are not allowed to be erased from my calendar; the little numbers written on a corner of my whiteboard must remain, more or less indefinitely, as a haunting reminder of my bad morning habits. Somehow, there is no negative reinforcement strong enough to motivate me to arrive at the time I plan when I have no actual obligations beyond keeping my word to myself.

The snores of the downstairs neighborhood reverberate impressively into my room; once, he knocked on my door at 11:30 because the basement laundry machine I started had woken him up.

The world is a layer of slush ponding rainwater and snowmelt, and I manipulate the flow of traffic around me to minimize the amount of splashback I get from cars that pass inappropriately. Subtle shifts in lane position and velocity, and a well-timed peek over my shoulder keeps the cars in their place, and I am the shepherd dog racing through stampeding sheep.

Today is a good day to be. Today is a good day to look up and see the occasional patch of blue, to get coated from the waist down with salt and sand. Today is good.

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18 February 2014 11:56