Promise to Smack Me

It was raining today, a day I am temping, and as I walked to the job I saw someone else holding a hotel umbrella as he scurried down the street in the opposite direction.

I love that hotels will lend out umbrellas. I love that building management of major corporate buildings lend them out too - you just have to lend them your building ID while you have the umbrella.

My friend's boyfriend says umbrellas are for pussies. Every time it rains I think of him, sloshing through the rain with just the hood of his sweatshirt for protection, and decide I'd rather be an umbrella-holding pussy than get that wet. Plus, a friend in Texas sent me an umbrella a few years ago, and it makes me smile every time I use it.

As I saw that guy with the hotel umbrella this morning it reminded me of a couple of months ago when I was temping and it was raining, and I saw something that made me uncomfortable. A white guy, clearly well-off, striding down the sidewalk with nothing in his hands. A black man in a Ritz Carlton uniform, striding alongside the white guy, holding a Ritz Carlton golf umbrella over the white guy's head.

Really? You are so full of yourself that you need a PUH? Aren't you embarrassed? Especially to have someone of a minority race holding it for you? Aren't you embarrassed to be so uncoordinated that you can't walk and hold an umbrella at the same time? Aren't you embarrassed to be forcing someone else to get rained upon so that you stay dry? I understand this may be a service the Ritz offers, and that's nice of them. But if any of you ever find out I have won the lottery, become filthy rich, and started doing this, please smack me.

You know what else I want to know? Where does this sense of entitlement end? Do you have someone cutting your meat for you? Do you uncap your own pens? One minute someone is buttoning your shirt while another person is standing behind you, brushing your hair, and the next minute you're giving the nod to someone who briskly claps their hands two times before yelling, "Wipers!"

The Bitch of it All

This morning I was on Muni, seated near the front, when I heard a commotion behind me. I never look, because people causing a ruckus want you to look - it adds more fuel to their fire, but I did listen.

Mostly all I heard was angry cursing. The people around me were looking, and I knew the man was coming closer and closer to me. He said something about how he had to get on the train in the back, and I extrapolated that he was angry at the driver. As he pushed past me, he kept cursing and yelling, and all of a sudden it was all clear.

He was hit by Muni in 2008, and it caused damage to his leg. No way of knowing if that damage necessitated amputation or if the train actually ran over his leg, but either way the guy hates Muni and everyone associated with it. Even the people like me, who just use it to get around the city.

The guy went to the very front and continued yelling at the driver, saying he blamed her, and wanted her to die for what she did. I kept watching his hands, thinking of Colin Ferguson. The driver was very cool, calmly telling the man that she personally did not injure him, that she personally, was very sorry he was in a wheelchair. He agreed with her that she was not responsible, but did emphatically tell her that he'd have to hold her responsible since she works for Muni.

At that point the driver had gotten to the stop where the man wanted to get off the train, and he rolled on down the ramp. How sad is that? I really feel for the guy. Of course his screaming and cursing is inappropriate, but if three years ago your leg were amputated, putting you in a wheelchair for the rest of your life, wouldn't you be angry at the world too? Plus, it must really burn that he has to continue using the train system, even after it hurt him.*

*We are not debating whether or not the accident was his fault. Even if it was, you don't deserve to have your leg chopped off. You deserve to have the horn blown at you and be given the finger.

High School Revisited

Just want to preface this entire blog post by saying it can be summed up in two words: Hot Mess.

So thanks to that modern wonder we call Facebook, I am "friends" with a couple of my old teachers as well as some of the kids I went to school with. Speaking of kids, does anyone else get surprised for a second when they see a picture of someone they haven't seen in almost 20 years and all of a sudden that person has boobs? No? Just me? Oh.

Anyway. So a former teacher of mine named Sara and I became Facebook friends, and right away it was weird. I was born in 1976. Sara's profile said she was born in 1972. That would mean that in 1992 when she was my marketing teacher (and also the art and Spanish teacher - it was a very tiny school), while I was 15, she was 19.

I happen to think it's lame to lie about your age to people. It's one thing to lie to get into a club or to get drinks, but another to lie about it regularly to all who (rudely) inquire. If you think you can get away with telling people you're 38 when you're really 46 then you should be PROUD to say you're 46. Then it'll be more impressive that you look so good, rather than people looking at you and thinking you look like a haggard 38.

So while I know that just because someone's a teacher it doesn't mean they're by any stretch a perfect person, something about Sara seems off. Firstly, she seems obsessed with finding this girl Jen who is my age and was a student there when I was. When I initially accepted her friend request, I clicked on Sara's wall and she'd pretty much "friended" every kid in my year that she could find, and had asked ALL of us if we were in touch with Jen.

Of course sometimes teachers and students form bonds or whatever, in fact just yesterday heard about a teacher mentoring a little boy whose parents are going through a divorce, but this set off a warning bell in my head.

The other thing I noticed about Sara is that she spoke out negatively against all police officers. When I looked at other comments she'd made they were all in a negative tone. While Sara was my teacher she was married, and she's been divorced for quite a while. I saw her ask a girl I graduated with, who now lives in Madrid, to hook her up with a Spanish man. I don't feel like I'm adequately describing Sara, but she just seems like an angry person now, which is very different from who she used to be.

Jen was found. Jen and I became Facebook friends. It turns out that right after high school graduation, she lived out here in San Francisco for a while. I am not clear on what she has done with her life since then. If she went to college. How she's been supporting herself. Why she seems to have zero relationship with the little sister I remember her having. Why every status update seems to be an extreme problem involving police, violence, hospitals, courtrooms, restraints.

Jen told me she wants to come out to the Bay Area, she has a cousin in Oakland. She got an offer to intern at a record company in San Diego (which is not in the Bay Area). I was not clear if this was a paid internship or not, but when I asked Jen if she's aiming to be involved in the music business for a career, she explained that she wants to work in prisons.

She made a joke about sleeping on my couch the first time we chatted. I haven't had a couch in over a year. I told her this. It was clear what wasn't being said. She was asking if she could stay with me. I was saying no. My guess is everyone who lives in a major city gets asked to host quite a bit, since hotel rates are higher there than in smaller areas.

Last night Jen called me shortly after 10pm. She's on the East Coast, so that's shortly after 1am her time. Told me she had HPV but is not contagious, in case I want to sleep with her (I hate when people think everyone who lives in SF is there because they're gay. I'm not gay, I just like it here). Told me she's getting a pap smear tomorrow. I said good luck. Told me about a future landlord she gave $1600 to, who was supposed to renovate before she moved in. He hasn't renovated, she hasn't moved in, and he's had her money since the fall. Jen told me she has to get a lawyer; I told her she doesn't need a lawyer for small claims court.

Again last night she talked about coming out here. I (thought I) very clearly said that I do not live in a place where I can host people. Jen reminded me she'd been homeless, said she can sleep on the floor.

It was a two minute conversation. Jen told me she was at her best friend's bar, but they were closing and she had to go. Now, I am very logical and kind of anal and focused. If I call you, it's when I have time to give you all the attention in the world. I call you from a quiet place, so you'll be able to hear me, and won't feel like I'm distracted by whatever you hear going on in the background. I was a little confused as to why Jen was calling me when she couldn't really talk.

I was 17, I was not so great at asserting myself, at setting boundaries. This has changed a lot. Jen would be an idiot to come out here assuming she could stay with me, indefinitely. She's very smart, and understood what I was saying, even though I didn't flat-out say the word no. But she seems to have some steamroller qualities, and I could see her choosing to ignore what she doesn't want to hear.

Hot. Mess.

Boxing Days

I worked for a lawyer who was an alcoholic (though I didn't know it). That was fun. I also worked for a lawyer who was going through a mid-life crisis. That was ... not fun.

For one thing, he was a prick, so it was almost hard to notice when he got ... well, prickier, if you will. He used to call me Laura and Suzie all the time. Laura was a lawyer. Suzie was another secretary who sat nearby. At first, whoever he called would come running, pen and paper in one hand, other hand empty - ready to catch whatever he threw at us (literally). But when the wrong person showed up he'd become enraged, so we started trying to guess which one he really wanted to see.

"GREEEEEEEN!"

"Suzie, that's probably you - he's meeting with the Wilsons in a half hour and you're working on that, right?"

The nicest thing he ever did was to give me a lovely sweater from the Gap. Which another secretary told me his wife picked out for our Secret Santa gift exchange.

For several months I thought this guy was just a bad lawyer, and I wondered why his partner, also a prick yet undeniably a great lawyer, had agreed to go into business with him. He'd miss court dates, show up late for client meetings, blow filing deadlines, basically self-sabotage. It was difficult for me to watch. More than once, after a scared Hispanic woman who spoke only broken English had been kept waiting in the reception area for over a half hour, I'd grab Laura to do an initial consultation, briefing her as we walked down the hall and around the corner.

We'd lie and tell clients he was held up in court, a mediation was running long, whatever sounded good, while Suzie and I repeatedly called his cell phone and left voicemails. A couple of times when Laura wasn't available I'd beg the third, and only non-prickish partner to step in, but he really hated that. He didn't do matrimonial and family law. He did criminal, and knew he couldn't answer the questions these scared wives had.

A few times, I even had him meet with clients with the conference room door open, and I'd bump the filing clerk from her desk to use her computer, where I could hear everything being said. As the client would ask the third partner questions, he'd encourage her to get them all out at once, and I'd be typing them out, with answers. Then he'd excuse himself to "go pull some printed research" or refill a coffee cup, and I would hand him the printout of what I'd just typed out. He'd read it, memorize it, and stroll back into the conference room prepared to answer all her questions. It was awful, and Laura and I discussed many times over lunches on Broward Boulevard that it was a miracle the partner having the mid-life crisis hadn't yet been reported to the Florida Bar.

Eventually it came out that he had a side business. Once he came clean with the other prickish partner, he felt free to bring that business into the office. What was that business? Boxing! I have no idea how he got into it, but he started representing fighters who did boxing matches. This necessitated many meetings with managers and fighters, and eventually traveling to Vegas for fights (after I'd left the firm).

What this meant for me was that I spent a lot of time tweaking contracts and getting fighters (many who didn't speak English) to sign multi-page documents (written in English) that discussed purses. Once I brought this up to the partner - should I find out how much it would cost to get a couple of our most basic contracts translated, so they could read what they were signing?

The partner smiled at me like I was a cute idiot. "Green, these guys wouldn't read them even if they were in Spanish. Hell, they probably wouldn't understand them even if they were." He went on to explain that boxers are fucking morons, because who else but a moron would get hit in the head repeatedly, for a living?

After a short time, we started doing more work related to boxing. It wasn't contracts though. The partner began handling all legal issues the boxers had. They mostly consisted of the boxers getting angry and beating people up. These could be people in a bar, or their girlfriends or wives, or their children. What I learned was that the managers picked somewhat dumb guys who were quick on their feet and had great motor skills, trained the shit out of them, and kept them psychologically and physically pumped to beat the shit out of anyone at any time.

There were many times I had a hard time restraining myself from dumping burning hot coffee in boxer's laps, mostly when they were in the office to discuss fighting domestic violence or child abuse charges brought against them.

This is why I am not a fan of boxing. It vaguely reminds me of dog fights, but with people.