humor — 1 comment
02
Dec 12

it’s a good thing you don’t have to know how to take care of a car in order to own one

Whenever my family and I would go on long-ish trips, my dad would always stress my mom out by going outside to check the car’s oil and tires approximately eight minutes before we had to leave.

He’d always ask me if I wanted to help, and I always said yes, except I interpreted “help” to mean “watch.” I’d watch him open up the hood, pull the dipstick out a couple times, then pull out his gauge and test all four tires. Mom would always be most stressed when they needed more air, because that meant Dad would have to go down the street to 7-Eleven and fill them up. We really lived on the edge, my family.

As I got older and then later started to drive, Dad attempted to teach me how to take care of a car. I put a stop to that.

Dad: Let me show you how to check your transmission fluid.

Me: Haha, right.

Dad: Look, you just pull this thing out and––

Me: I’m going inside.

My poor father.

But now that I’m all grown up and stuff, I’ve realized that taking care of your car is important – not because I think it’s good to have pride in your belongings, but because it costs a lot of money if you let that maintenance stuff get away from you. Also I don’t want to die in a freak accident because I didn’t know how to correctly jump a battery.

So I started casually asking my dad about car stuff, slipping it into our normal, everyday conversation. (And, lest folks think I’m sexist for not also asking my mom, here’s what she said when I brought up a car question: “You need to ask your dad.”) I tried:

Me: Hey Dad – you hungry?

Dad: Yup.

Me: How do you change a tire?

And:

Dad: Hey, you want to go to the library with me?

Me: Depends – what’s it mean when that little orange light with the exclamation mark shows up in my dashboard?

Or even:

Me: Oh, one more thing – what’s the right way to use jumper cables?

Dad: Can it wait ’til I’m done showering?

(He answered all those questions but I neglected to write them down.)

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reflections — No comments
19
Nov 12

what a week

On my way to Louisville last Friday, my flight stopped in Charlotte, which didn’t really make sense.

I liked Louisville – it was small and I could comfortably wear a jacket. I was there to speak at a conference on piece of mine that’d been published in a book called Hungering and Thirsting for Justice (just $9.95!). All the people who contributed to the book were young adult Catholics, and were asked to write on an issue within the Catholic Church that was important to them. I wrote about why I think it’s bad that women aren’t allowed to be ordained priests, and that they’re relegated to secondary role in general – but that was more than a year ago that I wrote and submitted that. Since then, I’d become considerably less enthusiastic about religion.

Which made me nervous as I’d agreed to appear on a panel talking about religion.

But it went great – the way I can tell is that the panel flew by. Bad panel discussions never fly; they crawl. Someone asked me what Call to Action – the movement of Catholics “working together for justice and equality in the Church and society” (a.k.a. super lib) which sponsored the conference – could do in order to attract young people. They wanted our advice, as “justice activists.” I hadn’t prepared for that question, but I was like – whoa. I’m no justice activist. That’s not how I view myself – I’m a journalist, who in my work and in my life am guided by certain core principles and values, some of which have religious grounding and others that don’t. But, I said, I’m no activist – and that’s going to be important for future Catholics, especially the young ones, to know: that it’s OK to not be an activist, or a minister, or some other serious title like that. For young people to want to be part of the Catholic Church, I suggested, they need to know it’s OK to just be themselves: to be authentically Catholic through their work, their relationships, their passions, their actions. Because there’s no quicker way to get me to start backing toward the door than to call me an “activist.”

Someone also asked how Call to Action can get their message to “people of color.” Hi, I’m a person of color, I said. (That got an uncomfortable laugh.) I told everyone I was confounded by this notion of outreach to “people of color” – it’s just a matter of crafting your message, and then making sure as many people as possible hear it. “As many people as possible” implies that people with pigment in their skin are involved, but if you have to adjust/change your message so that a certain community will listen, then are you really staying true to your message? Inclusivity is one thing, but an outreach campaign aimed at different ethnicities is quite another. I said outreach – whether or not it’s to people of color – is simply a matter of engaging a community. Strategizing how to do anything beyond getting in front of a community, shaking their hands and saying “Hey, can we tell you what we’re all about?” is severe overthinking.

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reflections — 1 comment
04
Nov 12

some undoubtedly weird musings about the night sky

There’s something deeply soothing and profound about the night sky for me.

Whenever I need a break or to take a step back, I wait until it gets dark and then find a quiet spot to sit. It has to be a place outside and with a view. When I was at LMU, it was the bluff, which surrounded most of campus and overlooked neighboring Playa Vista. It’ll always be one of my favorite places – I used to love walking out there at night, plopping down on a bench and just staring out into the lights of West L.A. and letting my mind wander.

These days, it’d be a little weird for me to roam LMU’s campus, and that weirdness would rise proportionately with how late in the day it became. But after dinner with an old friend tonight, I drove to Playa Vista, where I lived for the summer after my senior year. There’s a bench there that overlooks Lincoln Boulevard, and that’s where I sat and lit up a cigar.

That always gives me a sense of perspective. I thought about all the things that have been on my mind lately – work assignments, trips out of town, finances, my family, Tuesday’s election – and realized how much having those things running through my head at such a high speed all the time just grinds on me. It’s not something people even realize, I think, until they sit down and let their minds catch up with their brains.

As I settled into a sort of calm, I thought about how I stared at this same night sky at countless other points in my life, and thought about all the things that had been running through my mind those other times – papers, deadlines, romance, social anxiety, fading friendships – and how looking back at those things I’d been grappling with sort of inspired a melancholy nostalgia in me. I stared at the cigar in my hand and remembered Mike, my friend from San Diego I’d get together with for a stogie when I visited home during college, and how it’d been a while since we’d been in touch. I thought about my old apartment, just yards away from where I was sitting, and the state of mind I’d been in that summer after graduating.

I thought about how LMU pushed me so hard – in a good way – to be a force of change in the world, and how working at KPCC pushes me – again, in a good way – to be as productive and creative as possible in telling the stories of the folks who live in South Central Los Angeles. And I thought about how I’m at a point where pretty much everything and everyone in my life pushes me out into the world – to leave my mark, to have others leave their mark on me, to see others and other places, to try and do at least a little bit of good for at least a few people.

And then I thought about how it’s equally important to, in addition to venturing out into the world, to stop every once in a while and just look out into the world – to watch it work, and to see how grand it is and how beautiful something as simple as the night sky and Lincoln Boulevard can be if only I take the time to sit and stare.

That’s when the ash from my cigar fell onto my jeans and ruined the moment. But it was nice while it lasted.

humor — 1 comment
01
Nov 12

i resisted arresting people on halloween, which was good

Law & Order: SVU‘s Detective Elliot Stabler falls into the category of somebody I’d like to be: a family man, totally immersed in his job, driven by a deep care for victims and unwilling to tolerate a lot of bullshit. Except he does tolerate a lot of bullshit, for quite a while, until his suspects – “perps,” if we’re getting into character – finally push him over the edge, at which point he flies off the handle, grabs the suspect he’s interrogating by the neck and throws him against a brick wall, daring him to continue obstructing justice.

“This is my ‘about-to-break-your-jaw’ stance.”

A close second in terms of people I’d like to be?

And while I would have loved for Laura and I to try and pull off the Fin and Munch costume combo last night, Laura hates Ice-T very, very deeply, and I suspect Munch is on the sex offender registry, so Laura and I decided to dress up instead as Stabler and Liv.

This is how we arrive at crime scenes.

There were a lot of things I could have done differently – like shave or get a gun that didn’t have an orange tip at the end or try even just a little bit to look like Elliot Stabler – but I was just happy I had a reason to wear a tie and clip a badge to my lapel. After I’d been writing about South Central L.A. for a while, getting to know a lot of LAPD folks in the process, I started to think about whether I had what it took to be a cop. I thought I’d love the adventure, until I saw End of Watch, which is about how you never know what the next call’s going to be when you’re a cop, and that next call could kill you.

(I prefer my calls to be scheduled and not fatal.)

But still, I love a lot of things about the idea of being a policeman, so it was fun to wear a badge and feel like I had a gun tucked into my waistline for the night. Laura’s red handcuffs were kind of throwing me off, though. So did the actual sheriff’s deputies we met at the West Hollywood Halloween Parade.

It’s like, unis? Thanks for dressing up, guys.

But they were nice, and one even conceded that “Stabler would wear that tie.” Yes, Officer. I know.

Because I’m him.

humor — 4 comments
30
Oct 12

how to: transport a 463-pound pumpkin

There I was, standing in the driveway of my girlfriend’s parents’ house, unsuccessfully brainstorming how to get a 463-pound pumpkin off the ground and into the bed of a pickup truck.

You know, typical Sunday afternoon stuff.

Last time I’d gone with Laura to visit her family in San Jose, the pumpkin had been taking over her family’s driveway and I couldn’t stop looking at it.

It’s hard to tell here, but this pumpkin is approximately the size of Lithuania.

No one knows why the pumpkin grew so large, but I’d been assuming the soil running underneath Laura’s house was rich with steroids or radioactive sludge. I also don’t know anything about gardening, so for all I knew this was a normal-sized pumpkin and I’d just been living with a narrow outlook. As it turns out, it just happened to grow on a patch of really good soil. (So definitely steroids.)

The family had a scale that maxed out at 450 pounds, which the pumpkin was too big for (!), so the next step was for the family to take it to the warehouse of their family food business, which had scales built for this sort of thing. Only thing was, there were several miles between their house and the warehouse, and – more pressing – a couple of feet between the ground where the pumpkin was and the truck bed that would transport it. In addition to weighing it, the family also wanted to move it from the driveway to near the front porch, in all likelihood to send a message to prospective burglars: “We don’t know what’s in our soil to make our pumpkins grow like this, but if you trespass we will be happy to pump you full of it. Also, happy Halloween.”

Laura’s mom, Jean, asked me to brainstorm ways to get the pumpkin off the ground, which I thought was a tragic overestimation of my brainstorming skills. This was confirmed when I immediately began visualizing schematics in my head for some sort of crane-like contraption that we could build with materials that were in the family’s garage and that would easily lift the pumpkin off the ground, using its own weight or resistance or friction or gravity or whatever. (I even visualized it on a backdrop of graph paper.) Then I realized I’d majored in theology, not physics, and that I’d once made two irreparable holes in my wall while trying to install shelves. I was out of my league.

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