Right Hand Drawn by Miki Huynh

Encountering this declaration at the Quickly bubble tea shop in Cupertino led to a sudden uplift in spirits.

That’s right! Who care if nobody else notices all the energy and meticulousness and love we put into making the fresh thing that matters to us, as long as we care and can derive a direct form of satisfaction from that labor.

It made me guzzle my milk tea and chew my boba with honest and renewed vigor.

Ever since moving back to California some three months back, it’s been rather difficult to get back up to speed with the Marxist-sounding pride or online journal jotting with so many long bouts of pondering and heart wrestling to mold post-Japan life into shape getting in the way. The months have involved lots of job searching, odd-job taking, longterm future projecting, deciding what job skills might need brushing up, weighing the risks worth taking… also recognizing that I share this process with so many other intelligent and talented people who’d also been let go from their previous occupations. Then also I had to sing and dance in front of the family about what their precise demands were regarding my presence in their lives. Though my mother would have me on the “stay” side, it seems the results of that would be more constrictive to my adult sensibilities than could be justified for economic purposes.

So are you really the one, California? You with your troubles and financial baggage and huge question mark to offer me about where we’re headed. I like your warmth and familiar feeling, but I still find myself fantasizing about so many place I’ve yet to discover and the unimagined possibilities that might lay outside of what most folks in-state can conceive. If security is merely an illusion, if stability can’t be guaranteed for anyone especially at a time like now, then what good is it to just sit and wait and let your fresh fries grow cold?

Words to Chew On

Been reading a couple of good, philosophic finds at the library… ah yes, English books for free again!… starting with the first one found by accident.

Reporting the Universe by E. L. Doctorow– I hadn’t read his fiction before this book, but these essays are absorbing and digestible as they let you consider what it means to be a writer. For Doctorow, as he describes in one essay, the writer is a generalist by nature and by trade, but being general grants the fluidity to wander through all sorts of different disciplines and is part of having the ability to imagine and report the unseen or unknowable. (Jacks of all trades rejoice! And get to writing…)

Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford–This one goes in the direction of specialized trade labor, but also giving mad props to vocations that involve your hands and problem-solving skills to repair or create a tangible finished product. Certain types of smart folks might just find greater intellectual satisfaction in “blue-collar” work, an idea I find myself agreeing with more and more over time. Crawford made fresh. Who care? He do.

Books

Recently finished rereading Watchmen by Alan Moore, which I do find myself appreciating more the second time around when I’m older.

Picking up where I left off nearly a year ago with Indigenous: Growing up Californian by Cris Mazza. I love her autobiographic account of scavenging and hunting and living off the San Diego land back in the rural 50s. The roughness and self-sufficiency (born in part out of necessity) of her family’s lifestyle inspires Laura Ingalls Wilder-type images in my head, and it’s fun especially to think about it happening in fairly modern times.

Coffee

Almost hitting the two month mark since returning to the south bay. It’s not been as painful as I thought, even if I’m still feeling like I have to make myself fit in again. I used to believe there was a contradiction between hipster culture and the Bay Area, based on natural logistics like how hard it is to build up grime when you have too much space between your buildings and across your streets, or how practically everyone drives an enormous vehicle so that the roads feel like a continuous monster truck rally, or how even despite my best efforts at deliberate ignorance I’m so hyper-aware of iPhones and trendy tech gadgets. I mean, I can still reach out towards our northern hipster hub, San Francisco, but as it’s been about ten years since I’ve been back on home turf, I’ve yet to really know my way around even San Jose. As it turns out, though, downtown SJ’s got its small but impressive lineup of open art galleries during First Fridays, and coffee shops like Mission City Coffee Roasters and Crema Cafe provide the proper ambiance for affecting nonchalance while I type away on my laptop.

Eggs

The job hunt continues (boy does this entry feel familiar…), and I’m feeling the unemployment statistics hit home with the repeat cycle of applications, interviews, and no responses. However, I’m widening my sails and enrolling part-time in classes at DeAnza College where I seem to get along pretty well with the mid-30s back-to-school Asian lady crowd. Seems my age bracket has shifted, but just in time where I’m once again a junior among my peers. I started to realize that many of my classmates are undercover four-year college graduates looking for some change. Feeling kind of normal really doesn’t feel so bad.

A quick scan of job posts on Craigslist also reveals that I’m now on the last year of life where my eggs are fresh enough to donate to eugenics… I mean, fertility assistance programs. Short, skinny, scatterbrained genes anyone? But, aw man, another get-rich-quick card played too late. In some donation cases, I only qualify to give eggs at the age of 29 if I’ve given birth to at least one previous child. My heart bleeds for that poor hypothetical baby who would’ve been grumpily dragged around by me onto the El in Chicago or squished next to the groceries in the front basket of my granny bike as I pedaled through Hamada. Hopefully later on in life I can provide a satisfactory explanation to my less-than-optimum kids about why I chose their slowpoke, post-20s eggs over their supersiblings’, and then proceed to accept blame for the fact that they get picked on by classmates and can’t run a mile in under seven minutes. But later on they’ll get over it and we’ll possibly cry and it’ll make for good TV drama the moment I write it all down.

Ads

I don’t know why it only occurs to me now when I’m rummaging the web for work, but I find the internet so completely swamped with ads, with anything dubbed a networking site framed with services on sale, with each internet search result sending me straight to sponsored blogs, and where just about anywhere I check for online thoughts I also have to find ads decorating the left and right hand columns, bannered across the top, and also slipped near the bottom of the page for good measure. It’s quite maddening because now that I’m so aware, I can’t ever stop noticing them. It drives me bonkers. I have to run and hide in those few ‘net places where there are no rectangular strobe lights telling me I’ve won or smiley-faces screaming, “No way!” at the top of their electronic lungs to scare the shit out of me.

Help!