So I got my very own taste of what it must be like to be my father over the past 48 hours.  It was instructive, thought not precisely edifying.  So get this:

I get a text message from my father on Sunday.  Why a text message, you ask?  Because he’s in Colombia at the moment, helping to organize mine workers.  Ya ask a silly question, etc.

The essence of the message is to call a friend of his — a woman whom we shall call “Savoir,” for no particular reason — in an unnamed Central American country, on her cell phone.   But to do so on the house phone.

I do so, thinking in the back of my head that this is how certain Ian Fleming novels begin.*  In any case, I reach her, and she promptly tells me that she’ll call me back in the morning, and what is a good time to reach me?  At 6:30 Pacific Time, I reply.  I then go to sleep.  This is Sunday night.

I receive no call.  I do, however, receive a text message to the effect that said friend has left her son’s passport at her apartment, and could I please pick it up and mail it to her? 

The adventure, such as it is, then begins.  That night, I call a gentleman with a name almost as ridiculous as mine — whom I’ll call “Woody,” for no particular reason — who evidently has the key to Savoir’s apartment, to coordinate when we might meet for the purpose.  We quickly discover that, he speaking no English and I speaking no Spanish we simply cannot communicate.  He calls back, and puts a neighbor on the phone, who relays directions to his apartment (a gated complex back of Arden Fair).  I meet him there and then drive to Savoir’s place, sans bilingual neighbor (her husband wisely forbade her to drive across town with some strange gringo).  Along the way my rusty Spanish comes back in fits and starts, as in “Izqierda aqui?   Ah.  Derecho a Truxel?  Bueno.   Radio musica, perque?  Si, la estacion Super Estrella es mi favorita; Shakira con trombones es la bomb, si?”  Etc. 

Our journey proceeds to another gated complex, this time back of Natomas High, where we retrieve the passports.  Yes, plural.   Figuring in for a penny, in for a pound, I take both.

It occurs to me as I’m barreling along the Garden Highway in the company of a man with whom I can only barely communicate that this is probably the first time in a long time that I will experience this level of class integration in this town. 

After depositing my new acquaintance at his apartment, I return to Midtown.  There I find a frantic voice mail (since I couldn’t very well answer the phone while driving) from some woman saying, in effect “Hi, is this RBL?  I’m Blankety-blank, a friend of Savoir’s.  She told me to contact Woody to get her son’s and (the other kid’s) passports to mail to her?  I finally got in touch with Woody, and he said he gave them to somebody.  A friend of Savoir’s.  A white guy.  Was that you?  Please call me back.”

I do.  She seems relieved to hear that I have them, and then tells me what a great man my father is.  She then asks me for Savoir’s cell number, which I give to her.  It occurs to me only know that she did this to independently report back to Savoir what had occured.

This morning, I call Savoir, to found out what address — a key piece of information — I should send the passports.  She gives me one, not hers of course, but rather one “in town,” where presumably delivery is more regular.  Her accent being somewhat thick, and the connection somewhat poor, I call the gentleman whose address it is to confirm spelling, etc.  A mistake, as another pathetic faux-Spanglishy attempt to communicate ensues (”Yo esto amigo de Savoir.  Los passeportes arriva a hora.  Todo es OK, todo es OK!”). 

I then call my father — en route, and so reachable in Miami — to confirm the address.  He sabes nada, and so tells me to call his brother in Alabama.   Said uncle knows the fellow whose address I’m supposed to send the passports to, but, sadly, cannot confirm the address. 

He then (oh blessed hour) reveals to solution to all our problems.  It turns out he’s headed to Central America tomorrow.  After a quick visit to my friendly neighborhood UPS Store, the passports are now en route, to be personally courried to their destination.

It was da partner who asked the obvious gaping-plot-hole question back at the beginning of the story, on Sunday night.  To wit: how does someone even get through security these days without a passport?  Or to put it baldly, how did Savoir’s son get to Central America without ID? 

Some things must remain a mystery.

*My paranoia was unjustified in this case.  It turns out that that phone is the only line with audio — as opposed to text — access to international numbers.

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A word to the wise: try not to think too much (better yet, at all) about Foucault’s Discipline and Punish while working out.  Especially not the chapters in the section on “docile bodies.”  The mental feedback loops are enough to cause a major CPU error.

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Some readers of this blog may know that I attended, for one year, Theodore Judah Elementary (not the same class as the then-Miss SMF: we wouldn’t meet until two years later).  TJE sits in deepest East Sac, and as such tends to draw the progeny of mid-level state workers who chose (for reasons typically linked to some kind of self-identified liberalism) to live within the boundaries of Sac City Unified and send their children to public school.  During my brief tenure there, it featured a “pull-out” GATE program, which is to say the kind of “enrichment” which featured specifically identifying “gifted kids” for a once-a-week sessions of problem solving and such stuff (perhaps it was more often.  My memory’s hazy at this point). 

Others may know that my parents then decided that “pull-out GATE” was not exactly what I needed.  A decision which, for the record, I was fine with: coming into an already-established elementary-school social scene as “that smart kid” is pretty much guranteed to produce social awkwardness.  The next year my parents looked around for a “full” GATE program, which is to say one of those schools where it was “all challenging all the time” (or somesuch).   Sac City Unified at that time — back in the long Indian Summer of racial liberalism in California — strategically placed its full-time GATE programs at “bad” schools, and reserved penny-ante “pull-out” GATE for majority-white schools (such as those in East Sac).  This initiative was meant to further the larger project of “voluntary” desegregation sans bussing, the strategy preferred by urban northern districts seeking to avoid Boston’s horrific deseg riots. 

In a word, this meant that my parents sent me to school for a year in (schockers!) Meadowview.*  This was, on balance, useful for a variety of reasons.  None of which, of course, were “intended” and few of which could be anticipated (except perhaps the bullying that results from being identified as “that smart white kid” who transfers in during sixth grade.  No real physical violence resulted, but it wasn’t exactly an easy year for this naive honkey.

Where I did not intend to spend my Friday evening was in a house not six blocks from where I went to sixth grade, drinking pinot grigio and noshing on sushi in a sixties-era tract house with Pottery barn this and Target that, in a perfectly fine neighborhood.  This with a bunch of ex-engineering chicks from UC-Davis who, while they weren’t precisely members of the sandwich brigade (”damn, all these bitches need a sandwich), still managed to greet each other with air busses and comments of “Christ, when did you get so skinny?”

Life is wierd, let me tell you.   Da partner spent the evening networking, like a good WASP.  I split my time talking to a perfectly nice McKinley Park hausfrau who used to work for the state and now works for a local municipal agency, and reading Belize travel guides (alternating with Beowulf) while reclining on a vintage Eames chair.

Yes, life is wierd.

*This was, in fact, where I first became acquanted with Miss ADA, who while she was also GATE happened to live in the neighborhood catchment area of that particular school.   She was, needless to say, one of the “cool kids” in the class.  I was not. 

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Someone has mashed up Marvin Gaye and Radiohead.

This discovery made all the sweeter by the fact that da partner and I made it while dining in Midtown.

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Thankfully, irony is alive and well in this country, despite the Christabigots’ best attempts to throttle all humor and critical thought.

So, if you’re interested in honoring San Francisco’s piss and sh*t with the name “George W. Bush Sewage Plant”, here is where the magic happens.

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One of the benefits of swimming is that allows me just enough brain processing time in between keeping track of my laps that I can let the mental gerbil run uninhibited.  This allows me to daydream, or more precisely to follow trains of thought just far enough that I think (at the time) that I’m on to something profound, but not far enough that I can reconsider the real implications of what I happen to be mulling.

In that spirit, I had some more half-baked ideas regarding Rex’s question to me about Protestant angst.  To wit:

One of the problems with pretty much any religious principle is that while it is usually created to avoid (or solve) some “previous” problem, by following this new principle one creates a whole new order of issues.  Not to get too Hegelian or anything, but the setting forth of a thesis creates the logical space for a whole new antithesis. 

So, one of the fundamental tenets of most versions of Anglo-American Protestantism is the Calvinist thesis of predestination.  This idea was, of course, created precisely for the purpose of knocking a major hole in the superstructure of Catholic thought.  And in that it succeeded: Protestants do not confess to their priest, they do not purchase candles, or say rosaries, or any of the other things that go along with the general principle of “works” (or, if they do such things, it is for reasons other than building up heavan-earning merit badges — “because they Bible commands it,” for instance). 

There are many problems with the principle of predestination, of course.  One — and Weber hinted at this — was that it creates a nice little question of why in heaven’s name anyone would ever “do the right thing” if doing the right thing has precisely nothing to do with getting into heaven.  The answer, as unsatisfactory as it may seem, is that we should act “as if” those things mattered, even if they don’t really.  Or, to state it differently: we must obey the law because that’s what the elect do — even if obeying the law doesn’t make you a member of the elect.  We must work, unceasingly, precisely because we can never know that we have succeeded in “making it” according to God’s purposes and plan for creation.

There are at least three second-order problems that flow from this point.  One (call it the unrepentant drunk problem) is that once one decides one is not and can never be a member of the elect there is no incentive at all to try and build back up what one has lost.  Once you “choose” the wrong path — flout the law in whatever way is to your taste, or even worse take up an identity that is definitionally fallen — there is no getting back. 

A second problem (call it the George W. Bush conundrum) has to do with how to understand the manifestly evil actions of supposed members of the elect.  If one is in fact chosen — especially if one has, as Luther demanded, confessed our Saviour and commited one’s soul to the new life in fides unus — then it goes without saying that one’s actions are by definition those of the elect.   Or, to paraphrase our dear President , God acts through the elect.  Who are we to question God’s purposes?

The third problem — and this is really Rex’s question to me — is how to best understand the rewards showered upon people who are manifestly not members of the elect.  This, I believe, is the ultimate source of Protestant resentment in all its various flavours:

- Rage at teh gays, who have chosen deliberately to be impure, and yet are rewarded by our society with “coolness” and even — horrors! — entry into society’s most sacred institutions.

- Fear of immigrants, who have adopted the substance but not the form of the faith, and so have managed to out-achieve the native born at their own game.

- And finally, unremitting hatred of “elites” (Hollywood, latte-sipping urbanites, Jews, lawyers, whatever) who have not confessed our Savior’s creed, in no wise obey the sacred purity codes, and who by thought, word, and deed give the lie to the idea that there is any connection between faith in that which is to come and rewards in the here and now.

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There are many surprises, it turns out, to living in this town.  The particular one that I experienced last night is part of a larger analytical problem I’ve been puzzling over for some time now, but I’ll save that for a later post.

The gist is this: while going to a party always involves meeting new people, I did not imagine the particular kinds of people that I would meet.

In particular, I did not imagine that I would spend a Friday night drinking margaritas and playing Wii DonkeyKart with a bunch of evangelicals.

Nor did I imagine that I could bring up this case – as a kind of aside, mind you, as in “The Distillery?  Isn’t that where they serve up killer three-martini lunches?” — and find myself being yelled at.  Not for the tasteless of my joke, but rather in regards to the facts of the case.  This by someone whose strongest argument appeared to be that one of the people killed in the accident was an infant who (and I quote) “wasn’t strapped into their car seat.” 

For the record, this was not one of the Wii-playing evangelicals.  They did not appear to know anything about the case, actually.

Nor did I imagine that I would be witness to two lesbians describing — for the benefit of said evangelicals — how they met.  An amusing story, the main plot elements of which involved mud wrestling, Strawberry Shortcake pajama bottoms, and a Pepsi machine that dispenses Coors light.    I studiously avoided looking in the general direction of the evangelicals while we were being regaled.

Thankfully, however, I did not have to navigate the normal hazards of status-signalling in mixed company.  Though I was witness to one of the better examples of misunderstood semiotics:

Da Partner: …..oh we met in Massachusetts.  I went to school there.

Evangelical #1: Oh, so that means you went to Harvard, right?  ‘Cause everybody that says they went to school in Massachusetts actually went to Harvard.

Da Partner: Um, no actually.  I went to a school with 2000 people in the northeastern corner of the state that nobody’s ever heard of.

Evangelical #2: Oh, you mean [blank]?  The only reason I know is ’cause I went to a school with 2400 people, in Houston.

DP: That would be Rice, I assume?  

E2: Um, yes, actually.

[turning to me] E1: So did you also go to school in Massachusetts?

Moi: Not for undergrad.  We met while I was in graduate school in Boston.

E1: Oh. [befuddled, turning to the hot Latina intern]: What about you?  Where did you go to school?

HLI: Connecticut.

It occured to me later whether anyone noticed that at no point did any of us ask E1 where he went to school.

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Yowza was the day wierd.  The comparisons to early-80s LA are, I think, no longer accurate.  We’re in Dante country, and it’s very unsettling.  It’s a good thing I don’t have asthma.

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1.) So one of the things about living here (as opposed to Texass) is the daily urge to spew vile has steadily receded. 

This is, on the whole, a good thing.  It means, among other things, that I don’t drink as much (those of you who know me in other contexts may now get scared).  But it also means that I’m often left with very little to post about, since the umbrage buttons don’t get pushed nearly so often.

2.) The other thing that isn’t pushing the umbrage buttons is the election.  I suppose it’s a good thing that all the fakety-fake-fake-fake controversies (flag pins, terrorist fist jabs, veiled campaign volunteers, elitists, baby mammas, etc.) have gone over like so many lead balloons.  Let us hope that this trend continues — though in general I find it distasteful in the extreme that this is the stuff of political debate in this country.

3.) Swimming when the particulate matter index is over 100 is probably not good for my health.   But boy does it do my soul good to get my fat ass out from behind a desk and doing some exercise.

4.) One would think that taking a tarot deck on a camping trip would be a recipe for a hilarity.  One would, upon reflection, ought to have know better. 

5.) Dutch blitz is a fecking awesome card game.  Despite — or perhaps — because of its aggressive heteronormativity.

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