Odds and Ends

I figured I would just gab a bit today. Lots of things going down right now and I have been working a lot, thus the limited blogging.

1. I am moving. Before all of you have a heart attack and buy yet another address book, I am staying in the same building. I love my apartment, but it overlooks a supermarket and shopping mall parking lot. Farmers have roosters to wake them, I have the Krispy Kreme truck at 4:45 AM every morning. On top of this, there is a monster car stereo shop below my current apartment. As you can imagine, the patrons of said shop like nothing better than to purchase their gear and then install it directly outside my windows. Ah Oakland, quelle belle Oakland. So, I am moving to an apartment down the hall which trades my large expanse of windows for a large patio and seems to be isolated from the bulk of the noise that I am now exposed to. It is the same industrial style and the same floor plan, just less windows and a patio area. I will post photos when I have them. The patio area is quite large. (My neighbors have a basketball hoop on theirs and I imagine I could have quite a party this summer. I will definitely be investing in a gas grill.) I will be sending out a change of address e-mail, but you can all change my apartment number to 220.

2. Hector was the unfortunate recipient of a unplanned rear entry a couple of weeks ago. Granted, he is in all likelihood a gay car, but still. (Usually you ask before pulling something like that.) An elderly Latin man in an beat up 86 orange Chrysler hit him from behind while I was waiting to pull out of the parking lot of the apartments. Thankfully, there was not much damage. Hector paid a visit to the body shop this week and he emerged on Friday shiny and new. The Minis are very well constructed. This guy's car was at least double the size of Hector and the damage was less than $1K. Courtesy of our friends at Hertz, I had this horrendous orange Chevy SSR thing to drive around. It was brand new, but definitely not my style. I was mighty glad to see Hector after a few days in that beast.

3. I have begun making plans for two more trips this year. My family is having a big reunion in Cincinnati at the end of July. I have been researching how to see a few different things along the way. A friend of mine from high school lives in Louisville, so I would like to catch up with her one day. I also plan to visit the Air Force museum in Dayton, Ohio while I am in Ohio. My father is a big airplane buff and he has informed me that this is a must see museum. I have attempted to go several times, but something always ended up not working out. I hope to continue on to Pittsburgh and check out the city and the University of Pittsburgh which I attended for a year in the nineties. (I need some new sweatshirts as the old ones are on their last legs.) From there, I have not yet been able to decide whether or not to continue on east and spend the weekend in New England or not. I was born in Maine and I went to high school in New Hampshire, so I always like to see those places. I also might spend the weekend in Provincetown as I have never been there either and have heard good things. Either that or I will return home for a few days here.

At the end of November, I hope to take a week and a half and visit Asia. I definitely will visit Hong Kong and Bangkok and I am considering visiting Bali for a few days. When I was a flight attendant, Hong Kong was one of my favorite cities and it still is. There is an amazing energy to the city, the meeting of east and west, old and new. Hong Kong is one of those cities that I would consider a crossroad of the world. Some others are London, Dubai, New York, Los Angeles, New Delhi. Cities where worlds, populations, languages, cultures, and music collide and create these brilliant canvases and a cacophony of sound. I miss Hong Kong desperately and it has been calling to me in my dreams. I always have enjoyed vacationing in Thailand. Shopping in Bangkok is always fun and amazing and the beaches are beautiful. I have not visited in several years and am looking forward to seeing the City of Angels once more. I have not had the opportunity to visit Bali yet. Can anyone fill me in? I had always been under the impression that Bali was inexpensive and beautiful, but the prices I am finding online are quite steep for that part of the world. I am not the biggest fan of lying in the sun all the time, so I am hoping there is interesting things to see and a good mix of people there. Any suggestions or feedback would be much appreciated. I love to travel in early December and try to do so each year. The flights and hotels tend to have lower occupancy rates as most westerners scurry around doing their holiday shopping and attending their Christmas parties. I prefer to get away from the madness of the malls and the long lines at the post office and come back as the crowds are easing up.

4. Parties frighten me. There are a couple of work functions coming up and I find myself not wanting to go to them. Part of it is that I do not want to take someone I am dating to a work function because what will I be doing all night? Commiserating with colleagues, bitching about work, bad catered food, expensive alcohol, bad dj playing hits of the eighties, and on and on. I suppose if I liked being intoxicated more, it would help things. But I don't. I would rather be at home watching a documentary from Netflix or reading a book.

Another large issue is that I have reentered a traditional work environment where you work with the same people day in and day out for months at a time. Gossip spreads fast and we work long shifts, sometimes blurring the lines between work and your life. (I definitely have the feeling that work is my life some days.) During my years with the airlines, working with the same people rarely happened if ever. It was a very independent job and one has very little supervision or contact with management. Police work is a very different concept. Someone is always listening, watching, or critiquing and we work in a high stress environment. I am not saying that I do not enjoy my work, far from it. But my feeling is that if I go to these work parties, then I will be bored stiff the whole time and regret my decision. At the same time if I do choose not to go, then I feel like I will not be making an effort to be part of the team. Decisions, decisions.

5. On a related note, National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week will be celebrated beginning April 8th this year. (Bet Hallmark doesn't make a card for this one, huh!) Dispatchers from all over the country will be recognized for the work they do day in and day out. One of our dispatch instructors from a neighboring county had a great saying. We don't give them what they want, we give them what they need. Truer words were never spoken. I wish all of my colleagues under the headset a great recognition week.

Cuidate.

Happy St Patrick's Day

My friend Paul called me tonight to wish me a Happy St Patrick's Day. Working nights, I completely lose track of the days and I completely forgot the holiday was today. I am one quarter Irish...along with equal parts English, Czech, German. My grandfather bragged that our relatives on the English side had arrived on the second trip of the Mayflower. It is definitely possible, but I am a skeptic. My grandmother was a proud Irish woman born in 1898. She died at the age of 93 and I remember her proudly wearing green each St Patrick's Day. As I am not a huge fan of drunken brawls, my enthusiasm for these holidays is somewhat tempered. The only reason it seems people celebrate St Patrick's Day in this country is to drink green beer and get plastered. Not that Americans have ever needed a reason or an official holiday to do that, mind you.

I visited my brother, his wife, and my niece and nephew in Seattle last weekend. We had a terrific time visiting and catching up before they head back to Japan. They actually live a good distance north of Seattle, closer to Vancouver. Washington is very pretty and the area where they live is quite striking, but it poured down rain for the majority of my time there. The rain briefly cleared on Monday which gave my sister-in-law and I time to check out downtown Seattle. I have not been back to Seattle since I left the airlines in 2004, but it has not changed much. We visited Pike's Market and the first Starbucks in the world. After this, we headed over to Capitol Hill for some Thai food and window shopping. I always like being with Y and in turn, she loves being my hag for a few days.




It is hard to believe that my niece will be entering her senior year in high school next year! I remember when she was not yet two playing with the tv remotes in my parents house. Witnessing a conversation between my brother and my niece about what college she will attend and what she wants to be when she grows up was eerily similar to many conversations my father and I had around the same age. My brother and my father are have the same voice and they look and act a lot alike. I am much happier witnessing that conversation than being on the receiving end, that is for sure! A small amount of kids know what they want to do with their lives, but for the majority it is a long and arduous voyage of self discovery in your teens and early twenties. It was not until I reached my mid to late twenties that I settled into being comfortable with who I am. Still, I am very happy with the choices that I have made and I have had an incredible life with few regrets. I know a lot of people have a list of things they want to accomplish before they die. My list is fairly short. Not that I have plans to check out anytime soon or anything, but you know what I mean.

Anyhow, I hope you all have a great St Patrick's Day weekend.

Cuidate.

The 411 on Me

I am afraid I have been having the What do I blog about? quandary lately. It is not that my life is not exciting, far from it. I tend to become enveloped by my work. I am an ox in Chinese astrology. The qualities of an ox are strong, hard working, loyal, dependable, yet not always the most exciting individuals. I am definitely an ox - hard working, loyal, yet a big creature of habit. I am working overnights beginning my day at 8 PM and working through the night until 7 AM. I really enjoy the night shift. The officers that work nights tend to be younger and more fun (not to mention the dispatchers). During the day, it is constantly busy and you do not have much time to yourself. In the very early morning hours, you usually have some time to chill out and relax. I can blog, pay bills, get stuff done. Not bad at all. The downside is, on your days off it can be hard to adjust back to normal time. I work four days and then have four days off, so you spend two days getting readjusted only to have to revert back to being a vampire two nights later. Still, I am having a lot of fun and enjoying my work.

I am heading to Seattle this weekend to visit my brother and his family. After a whirlwind year and change in the United States, they are heading back to Japan unexpectedly. My brother was offered a position that he could not say no to, so they will be heading back to the Land of the Rising Sun at the beginning of April. My brother has lived in Japan most of his adult life, so it was such an unexpected pleasure to be able to call him and not have to consciously add 14 hours. My niece and nephew are both in high school, so I am very happy they had the chance to experience life in the U.S. My brother hopes they will attend college here in the States, so this was Life in the U.S. 101 for them. Most people from Japan think the United States is a dangerous place due to all of bad things they see on the news. Yes, you have to be more street smart here than in Japan, but it's certainly not a war zone or a third world country here. I know that my brother will end up living back here in another few years, but I will miss him, his wife, and my niece and nephew. Yoshimi (my brother's wife) is also pregnant and due in June, so they need to get her back to Asia soon. Otherwise, she would have to stick around here for the birth of my new niece.

I just read on Google News that Newt Gingrich admitted to having engaged in an extramarital affair during the Clinton impeachment years. I was never a huge fan of Mister Clinton, so the whole impeachment mess did not bother me. The hypocrisy of the right is the thing that irks me to no end. Everyone has sex and everyone lies about sex. As humans, deception is a part of who we are. If, as a culture and as a civilization, we focused more on empathy and understanding (and a lot LESS on judgement), we would be much better off.

Hope everyone has a great weekend. Cuidate.

The F Word

So they are at it again.

Ann Coulter, the well known right wing shock jock, blogger, and author was speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday in Washington, D.C. At the end of her speech, Coulter said: "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word faggot, so I'm kind of at an impasse."

It is impossible to justify this kind of hate speech in the United States of America in 2007. Ms. Coulter thought that this remark was humorous or an ill-conceived attempt at humor, but it clearly is not. I have no doubt that she will go on to sell millions more books and she will continue being paid thousands of dollars to speak at different functions, colleges, universities, and many other organizations across the country. This is a sad statement about how homophobia is still acceptable and "the norm" to most people in this country. While in many ways we have overcome racism or racist speech, this does not hold true for homophobic speech. The use of the word faggot as a means of feminizing John Edwards (or anyone in their sights) is a tactic that the right uses over and over again. The Swift Boat Veterans campaign of 2004 is a classic example of this. John Kerry, love him or hate him, served in the Vietnam War. He did not draft dodge like George W Bush and not show up for reserve duty that his father arranged for him through political connections, he did not apply for and receive five draft deferments like Dick Cheney, he actually served as an officer in the United States Navy and reached the rank of Lieutenant. Yes, he grew up with a privileged background and yes he speaks French. Does that make his military service any less distinguished? Because he speaks French, he is less of a man or less of an American? It is baffling how the right can effectively make a case that John Kerry is less of man than George W Bush. But they did it and very successfully.

As a gay man, it is hurtful and offensive to hear the word faggot thrown around with such candor. This is the same word that was used to torture many kids because we were different, but could not express why. This is what cruel kids used to yell at me when I sucked at baseball, dropped the ball, and could not hit to save my life. This is what the same kids called me when they pushed me down in the snow, kicked me, and threatened me. This is the word that kept me living a life of fear the better part of my childhood. In response to the controversy created her her remarks, Coulter appeared on Fox News yesterday and was quoted as saying "the word I used has nothing to do with sexual preference. It is a schoolyard taunt." Uh yeah Ann, I would argue that the remark has direct ties to sexual preference. And by your use of the word faggot, you are condoning the use of it in school yards, in news conferences, and in society in general. You are stating that it is ok to bully and belittle people that have a different point of view than yours, regardless of age. In fact, the Bill O'Reillys, the Rush Limbaughs, and your friends at Fox have made a cottage industry and a lot of money doing just that. God forbid you might find a civilized forum to debate issues like, oh, public radio or public television programs like Charlie Rose. No, that might require doing your homework and coming up with some facts to support your ridiculous and indefensible positions on issues like global warming, immigration, or same sex adoptions. Why do that when the status quo seems to work just fine?

Thanks for showing us your true colors girl. Keep up the great work.