Waiting

This was written during an excruciating three-hour wait at LAC+USC. The font's bound to be screwy because this is all from my phone, so happy reading.


There are five of us in this bland room whose walls were once pink but are now a kind of tired, sagging bloody beige with the scuffed wallpaper peeling of in chunks and hastily plastered over by pieces of white tagboard. The light is two dim to even be considered fluorescent. They must be bygone relics of the time of incandescence.

There are four people at the table. Two male. Two female. I'm standing off to the side simply because there only four chairs at the table. There's a stack of chairs in the corner that reaches up above my head, but I can't be bothered with walking all the way across this tiny room to set one down at the two tables whose edges don't quite meet.

The swinging doors open, and now there are four.

It irks me that one table is a dark mahogany with darker legs while the other is a pale, bleached beige. Did no one think to match fake wood types? None of the four chairs match either, though the ones in the large stack in the corner on the far side of the room are faceless in their hard, black, plastic unity. I half expect the floor tiles to suddenly change from speckled off-white to some psychedelic rendering of Travolta's dance floor. Flashing lights included.

There is a blue streamer trapped in a ceiling panel. It's one of those cheap, pre-wrinkled ones that comes in huge rolls that are never fully used. It adds a much-needed splash of color to the pink room.

The whiteboard is something else completely. On it, demanding immediate attention, is an anterior view of the human knee with all the parts labelled. MCL. PCL. ACL. LCL. I feel last year's AP Biology kicking in. Around it are scribbles: calculations for a CrCl (Chromium Chloride?), which is to be administered (according to a splattering of blue scribbles) at 54 liters per hour (or 90 milliliters per minute); neater, bluer scribbles are boxed in on the left, but all I can make out from this side of the room are ESTROGEN and PROGESTERONE written just like that in all caps; there are arrows pointing either up on down, with the word "risk" after each of them, and I see words like OVARIAN CA and ENVIRONMENTAL CA; at the very bottom is a large RISKS which is also underlined rather crookedly, followed by MI/STROKE and VTE/CUT. I come to the conclusion that this is the room where people come to die. There are just too many risks.

A girl screeches outside (or are those just the wheels of some poorly-maintained piece of death-defying machinery?).

Above the board, in foot-high capitals, a sign reads CUSTOMER SERVICE EXCELLENCE, followed by a large, yellow smiley face.

The yellowed clock face follows the red hand around.

Below that is a long double row of X-ray backlights. There are four individual panels and eight clips to each panel. Thirty-two lives could be decided here all at once. Strangely, though, there is only one socket for the four panels. Perhaps that will cut down on the death rate.

There are five of us again now.

A minuscule television sits on top of a rolling trolley by the X-ray backlights. A sign is taped over the screen: THIS TV/DVD BELONGS TO BREAST/MAMMO DEPT AT CLINIC TOWER followed by a name and a phone number. Women are so possessive. It may be just my perspective, but the trolley seems a little bent out of shape.

I just realized that the doors are blue. A kind of washed-out blue, though, not like the forced dying pink-beige of the walls.

The blue doors bang open again, but after a fluttering of paperwork, there are still five of us. Waiting.

The white trash can in the corner has a serious design flaw. It's base is less than a quarter the size of its lid. It is an inverted trapezoid. What will happen when the step-lever is stepped on? The trash can will tip over, that's what, held upright only by the weight of the stepper's foot. What will happen when the stepper steps off the step-lever? Well, the trash can will wobble precariously for a few moments, and one of two things will happen: 1) the trash can will remain standing, or b) the trash can will fall over with a crash and everyone will die for a moment.

There are no red emergency sockets in here. But I suppose this is just a conference room. So there would be no need for life-support machinery in here. But what if the blue doors somehow got stuck and we were trapped in here forever with only the minuscule television with the sign taped over the screen as our only form of entertainment? What if the only thing in the DVD player was of someone's mammogram? Would we watch it for the rest of our lives in this dying-pink room? What if there was a tumor in the mammogram? Would we be able to tell? Would be able to say, right then and there, as we were dying in this conference room that the person whose mammogram we were watching was going to die? If the lights went out and the emergency generators failed, would we sit alone in here and take comfort in knowing that someone out there was dying too?

The atmosphere in here is still a sullen silence sullied by the screeching of the girl (or machine) in the hall beyond the blue doors.

Absurdly, I realize that the telephone on the wall opposite matches the dying-pink of the walls. It's as if they died (or are dying-I'm no expert on the death of inanimate objects) together.

It's strange, the symmetry I now find in this room. The black floor trim matches the black of the non-emergency electrical sockets, some of which are upside-down like the exposed electrical cord next to me which is a sad tan-ish color like the hinges on the blue door, which is the only blue in the room except for the blue scribbles on the board that dictate risk and chromium chloride or the blue streamer hanging from the ceiling panel that is a much happier blue than either the door or the scribbles, but not as happy as the yellow smiling face after CUSTOMER SERVICE EXCELLENCE, which only emphasizes the dying-pink-ness of the walls.

Raised silver panels, also trapezoidal in shape, run waist-high around the room. I do not know what they are for and it irks me.

I'm still standing next to the waist-high silver trapezoidal panel. I think it might be electrically charged. Shiny silver things have a habit of being electrically charged.

None of this makes any sense.

Fifty-nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, I have gone through a decade-old issue of the American Journal of Nursing and read a particularly unenlightening article about bowel sounds. I now know that there are four abdominal quadrants and that gastrointestinal motility returns in the small intestine after two to four hours, to the stomach in three days, and to the colon in six days. Bowel sounds are heard through the stethoscope, and the recommended listening time per quadrant is five minutes, for a total of twenty minutes of bowel-listening. This is why bowel sounds are being called into question as a means of patient diagnosis. They take too long.

I've given up. I'm sitting down in a chair now. At the table. I feel as if my legs do not belong to me anymore. Can I listen for leg sounds?

I just stepped on the step-lever of the trapezoidal trash can. It's a great deal heavier than it looks. It didn't even wobble.

Noise

Today, I saw a man walking down a street in my neighborhood with a murderous look ill-concealed by a pair of rather large, ostentatious sunglasses. He gripped an also rather large pair of vine cutters in his hand. In fact, everything about this man was large. Except for himself.

His ill-fitting, rather washed-out yellow polo shirt hung past his elbows and flapped sadly with the violence of his motion, shaking their heads in resignation. His cargo shorts swished around his knees in a sort of counter-motion to the polo sleeves so there became an opposing balance to this man's hardly contained fury. Sleeves flap forward, shorts flap back, sleeves forward, shorts back, forward, back, forward, back.

Then his tired shoelaces joined in the chorus, plastic ends slapping against the synthetic uppers of shoes that had terribly scuffed heels, though not from any sort of physical activity. Socks drooped still lower.

Where was he going? Where had he been? Was he going to return the pliers to some erstwhile neighbor as my mother, naive in so many ways, believed? Or was he out to perpetrate the grisly murder of some former friend who had wronged him dreadfully? Perhaps there was a scandal involved. Perhaps the woman running an intersection behind him was his wife, frantically seeking forgiveness and an end to this madness.

But maybe he was just a guy in a big shirt who was really unhappy about having to carry a large vine cutter around on a Sunday morning. I can't say that I blame him.

Show

Cal stared at the numbers swimming by on blank paper. There was nothing left in his head, just a few empty thoughts rolling around in a deep sea of vague resentment. The door creaked open, then thudded shut, rattling the large plastic window above the handle. The beige wall gazed silently past the glare of the fluorescent lights. Cal ducked his head under the visual warfare and pretended to scribble.

He distantly heard two of the other occupants of the room start to talk quietly, the absence of authority prompting that which would not have been censured, just chided. Their voices released some of the tension of silence, and Cal slumped back in his seat, tossing his pencil with a sharp clack onto the chipped wooden surface.

The whiteboard at the front of the room was uncharacteristically bare, but no less than characteristically clean, polished by the alcohol that cleaned and corroded and made Cal a little giddy every time he breathed in. Sometimes, he would take a few extra breaths before the smell could fade.

The voices behind him grew louder, but Cal didn't turn around. He lowered his eyes back to the smudged page before him, shoving himself back upright, and snatching up his pencil, tapping a plastic end against his chin. The two behind him suddenly grew quiet, and Cal froze, staring nowhere.

One lowered voice broke the silence.

"Hey, want to see the video of the fight? I have it on my phone."

The other replied, fast and guilt-low.

"Yeah, sure."

"It's HD, man."

"Wow."

"It's pretty tight."

"Where was it?"

"Vernon Park."

"You went?"

"No, I... I didn't go. Wait, wait. You have to see this part. I'll tell you when Michael dislocates his shoulder."

"Why'd they fight?"

"Because Michael and Rodney, they... You know. They had this thing and... I don't know."

"There a lot of people there?"

"Yeah. Oh wait. Wait. There."

"Oooh."

"See, Michael's trying to punch, but he can't."

"Shit."

"And then he breaks Rodney's nose right... there."

"Wait, he broke his nose!?"

"Yeah. If you wait, you'll see this huge thing of blood on the ground."

"Oh, man."

"They say that when Michael got home, he was covered in blood and stuff and he passed out and ended up in the ER."

"Holy-"

"-There, you see it? The blood?"

"What-oh."

The door creaked open again, and Cal sensed a flurry of movement behind him. He sank back down in his seat, pencil dropping again from twitching fingers. He breathed deeply, once.

The show was over.

Loneliness

Loneliness once had a glass. He'd kept it polished so that the struggling rays that filtered through the musty air would fall through the glass and with their final, dying breaths, scatter themselves around the dark room like the dancing personalities Loneliness once knew. Loneliness would hold lengthy conversations with his glass, for he had noticed the pale, drawn face at the bottom that surely must have indicated a shy character; it disappeared if Loneliness but glanced aside. The face at the bottom of the glass never replied to Loneliness's questions, but Loneliness was glad that he had a good listener as a friend.

One day, Loneliness tried to fill his glass with brackish water from the well. He thought that perhaps the glass was thirsty, for it always seemed that the face at the bottom of the glass was speaking back to him, but Loneliness never heard a sound. Loneliness set the glass gently down and peered into the swirling water. A terrible misshapen face, constantly undulating, gazed back at him. Horrified, Loneliness thought, "I've killed my only friend!"

Dashing back to the well, he hurled the water from the glass, but his trembling fingers slipped, and Loneliness watched it tumble into the murky waters of the half-empty well. Petrified, Loneliness stared at the pale face that appeared far below, a terrified expression written across its wide eyes.

"I will save you!" Loneliness cried, gathering himself - never before had his heart hammered so! - and threw himself into the well.

As the darkness closed in around him like so many accusing eyes, Loneliness absently realized that he did not remember how to swim.


I cheated. I wrote this yesterday. But I'm too beat today to do anything else.

Dream

I still very vividly remember the last baseball game I ever attended. It was in the waning years of the Dodgers, after Steve Finley and the back-to-back-to-back home runs that had me amazed over Sunday's dumpling lunch. It was after José Lima and Paul Lo Duca and Shawn Green and Adrián Beltré and the sweaty palms that came with Eric Gagné and those brilliant ninth-inning saves.

My father had gotten the four of us seats right behind the right field foul pole, and I remember spending most of the game straining to see around its bright yellow bulk. It came to be, then, after the hard, bright field lights had come on and the blazing sunset had given way to a cool early-summer chill, that the Dodgers were down by one in the bottom of the ninth. Oh, it was tense. There was one man on first and one out to go. Quiet whispers rustled through the stands as the final batter stepped to the plate. A pinch hitter. Jim Thome.

One foot in the box. One toe digging in. The other foot followed. I thought I could hear the crunching of his cleats over the muted roar of the crowd. He hitched up his right shirtsleeve with his left hand, bat pointed straight down the line, loosening up his wrists, settling in. We thrummed with excitement.

The man on the mound drew back, settled, glove to his mouth as all eyes in the stadium glared daggers at his back. The wind up. The pitch.

And Jim Thome cocked his foot, reared back, and the resounding crack echoed through the field, through the hearts of a thousand breathless dreamers who arched back to follow the streaking white ball as it streaked across the blackness, straight towards the center field wall, and going, and going, and

dropping just short into the glove of the center fielder whose cleats ground the dirt of the warning track.

Jim Thome slowly turned his jog away from second base back to the dugout as the other dreamers beside me gathered their things and stopped dreaming about high fly balls and started worrying about traffic and how congested the 605 would be and wouldn't it be better to take the 5 at this time of the day.

As I trailed behind my family as we oozed up the stairs, I cast one last glimpse over my shoulder at the field, a green patch of mundane wonder, a haven of brightness that kept away the night, and, if only for a moment, allowed a man to dream.

Open

I blog a lot about school. These posts usually contain excessive moaning about tests for which I'm too lazy to study in classes I never really wanted to take. No, I don't understand myself either.

But tonight was open house at this over-achieving public high school in Southern California. As a senior, I had no motivation to go and suck up to next year's teachers, so I decided to go for a nice long (painful 3-mile) run in the afternoon back to school just to troll my ASB friends who had to help set up and guide poor lost 8th grade parents around campus. My timing was off by just enough for me to miss virtually everyone I wanted to see, so I ran a painful 1.5 miles back home. Thoroughly unsatisfied with myself, I decided to attend open house just for the sake of attending and doing nothing. Besides, the alternative was me sitting in my room and staring at my laptop and the twenty million other things I've been putting off in favor of MUN.

I walked onto campus and exchanged snarky comments with one of my prom dates, then drifted around from the math department to the MUN simulation, where I stayed just long enough to snicker at the sophomores, and then I drifted back to the math department to meet up with my adoptive mother. For some odd, reason, I thought I should pay my Lit teacher a visit. I don't know. English teachers and I have a thing.

I walked into his classroom, and it was completely empty. He was standing up at his podium in a shirt and tie, idly thumbing through a book for his Lang class. I burst out laughing, and he pulled his customary wry face at me. Somehow, I ended up sitting on his table chattering about banana peels and ruptured testicles while he went crawling through one of his cabinets for a book that would make me "stop being depressed." Apparently, I'm to read Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko. After his latest book recommendation (Sophie's World), I'm a little hesitant about this one. Oh well. We'll see how it goes.

Open house was winding down by now, the dim night lights flickering on under the eaves, looming shadows thrown out before and behind me as I savored a peculiar sense of freedom that only comes with being out alone at night and feeling perfectly content with life. I don't get that feeling so often anymore.

I helped MUN throw the library back into shape and was about to leave when I saw my physics teacher trudging out of the science building to his car, bags in each hand and a large backpack hanging from his shoulders. I've previously made no secret of how much I loathe my 4th period CP Physics class. But after our short, thirty-second exchange, I can't bring myself loathe the man himself. It is I who deserves the blame.

What's always been so attractive to me about school and the art of teaching is that under the veneer professionalism, there is a genuine human being that is more than a robot that doles out A's and B's and (heaven forbid) C's at  the semester. Sometimes, as students, we forget about that person and just look at the factual information with which we are presented by this robot, someone we can't care to know well at all. Sometimes, we forget that these robots can have uncertainties and doubts and fears that they can never show to us because we are students and we must learn the impersonal and the distant.

But then I look back on my fourteen years in school and remember that I've spent the majority of my life in the classroom, not at home, not with friends. I remember that some of the best friends I've had are teachers. Young teachers just getting married and popping out their first kids, old teachers with three times more teaching experience than I've had life experience, in-between teachers who've seen enough to understand but not enough to disregard.

We're all human, I guess. And it's human nature to forget. But there are some things we should always try to remember.

Blues

Sometimes—it doesn't matter where—it comes,

Creeping,

Like stair-footsteps in the night,

Merciless.

Meaningless.

Like twisted sheets, they reach,

White hands so cold

And so bright

That all else dies.

And then I’m sinking,

Drowning,

Rushed along with the

Inevitable tide.

And then I’m lost,

Lost in white

That black becomes.

Blue.

And then it’s not.

It can’t be

Blue

Because blue is

Soft, and

Sky, and

Silk, but

This is

Hard, and

Feet, and

Glass.

Shivered.

Sometimes—it doesn't matter where—it comes,

Loud,

Like the fall,

Proud, and

Small.