Dear SJPD Officer who pulled me over last night:

I'm sorry my tail lights are mysteriously out. I never stand behind my car while it's running, so I truly had no idea. Were the flood lights really necessary? After you blinded me with them, finding my license and everything was really hard. I have an old car and you made it obvious that you were disappointed to find me sober with a clean driving record, valid registration and current insurance. Giving me a "warning" was the right thing to do, but did you have to act like you were doing me a favor?

Seriously.

Scary

Maybe it's my calling to rail against Scientologists. Cross your fingers that I'll find a more satisfying occupation. In the meantime, visit Apartment Therapy for an account of how this bizarre cult has taken advantage of an important institution to lure in the unsuspecting public. Maybe the market is saturated with free stress tests.

37.429N, 121.772W

I know it's dorky, but earthquakes seem so novel to me. My rainy Pacific Northwest childhood afforded little drama related to geology or weather, and every time an earthquake startles me to a door jam, my head is filled with the bragging I'll get to do. I know this is wrong and that I need to think more about what's in my earthquake preparedness kit than who I will call when it's all over. Tonight's excitement centered very close to my apartment and measured 5.6 on the Richter Scale.

Useful

By my estimation, four out of every five times I tell people what I do for a living, they say, “You’re a grant writer! What a useful skill!” They suggest I'm a “rain maker” and all want to know how I gained these mystical skills. The truth is this job requires one to write well, pay attention and stay organized. As the “organized one” on a staff of very scattered people (oh wait, I'm sorry, they're just not detail oriented), I have been identified as a “great resource” for their own projects, however irrelevant to my own job or experience. I work for a social service agency, so some of this is de rigeur and I shouldn’t condemn my co-workers for calling all hands on deck. The slope is slippery, unfortunately. Whether planning a picnic for 100 children or assembling sex ed materials for teens in foster care, I find myself indispensable to the non-linear thinkers in my midst.

This week, I was called on to plan and facilitate a Pumpkin Creature Ice Breaker for our agency staff meeting:


My thoughts about this are framed like a MasterCard ad:

• Three hours to gather the necessary gourds, fruits, vegetables and inorganic supplies for the activity.
• One hour setting up and arranging the supplies and tables.
• Half an hour socially engineering teams of employees who would otherwise avoid each other like the plague.
• Two minutes to explain the activity to my baffled co-workers.
• Twenty minutes to make our creature.

In other words, four hours and 52 minutes not spent raising much needed revenue for our work.

Yes, I have many useful skills.

The Magazine Issue

Dear ______:

I know I was supposed to be glad when you gleefully emailed about your own subscription to the New Yorker. Never again will you have to wait for me to finish reading Talk of the Town before you examine the cartoons on the back page. Your apartment is no longer the repository for my discarded issues, like so many thin volumes gathering dust at the library book sale. Now that you're dating, I hope you recycle the ones emblazoned with my name and address. She might wonder who supplied you with all that bathroom reading. The least you could do is rip the tags off.

Robin

Intersection

I think it's fair to say that Laura Bush rarely courts controversy. A notable exception is well documented in the 15th photo in the New York Times' Pictures of the Day for October 22nd. The photo by Karim Sahib/Agence France-Presse shows the First Lady sitting primly in a silk pantsuit in a room completely draped in pink. October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, for which pink is the signature color. Her association with a Breast Cancer Awareness event is thoroughly mundane. This photo is amazing because Bush is pictured next to a breast cancer survivor from the United Arab Emirates. The woman is enveloped entirely in black; we only know a human being resides within the burqa or niqab because a manicured hand peaks out from the folds of cloth. Carefully pinned to the woman's shoulder is a pink ribbon, presumably to show us what she cannot or will not say about her experience with a terrifying illness.

Laura Bush's implacability never ceases to amaze me. There in a storm of feminism, geopolitics, public health, fundamentalism and she is nothing if not serene. I'm convinced she's just sedated. On the other hand, maybe when confronted by the dissonance to which she seems so impervious, she thinks happy thoughts, like of reading a story hour at the public library back in Midland.

No Joke

A recent Friday around 4:00 PM:

Boss: Have you ever heard of the Church of Scientology?
Me: Yes.
Dumb co-worker [hereafter, D.C.]: No, what do they do?
Boss: Oh, they're just a church around here and they want to help recruit volunteers.
Me: The Church of Scientology is a cult.
D.C.: Reeeally? That sounds sketch--
[Interrupting, to me] Boss: They have tax-exempt status!
Me: I don't care, haven't you heard of Tom Cruise?
Boss: Maybe Tom Cruise would come to our gala!
D.C.: We could get so much media!
Me: I guess I'll go back to my desk.