Dumbarton Bridge

On several occasions since I've been here, I've driven to or through Palo Alto. Palo Alto, which is best known for being the location of an illustrious campus or two, is located directly across the bay from Fremont, where I live. The two cities are connected by Dumbarton Bridge, though it takes an equal amount of time to drive south and around the bay to get from one city to the other. Which is important information if you, like me, inherited your father's allergy to tolls, because Dumbarton Bridge has a west bound (Fremont to Palo Alto) toll. The bridge does not have an east bound toll, though, and offers a spectacular panoramic view of the bay and baylands, making driving home over Dumbarton one of my favorite activities in the bay area.

One distinctive aspect of the experience is actually the smell. San Francisco Bay sometimes emits a strong, fairly sulfuric odor. The smell comes from algae, which live in the bay and give off potent gases at times. The rhythm of those times remains mysterious to me. Sometimes the tap water here smells that way, too, which is generally regarded as a local source of dread. The earth-water smell has kind of grown on me, though. One recent night, while I was recovering from a cold, I surprised myself and found the smell bright and comforting.

The baylands are also a peculiar beauty. I happened to visit the peninsula baylands on my first adventure in the area, after picking up furniture at the Ikea in Palo Alto. I had unwittingly encountered and paid the toll on the way there, and wanting to make more of the trip, stopped at the nature preserve located near the bridge. At first I was unimpressed with it. The baylands are basically swamplands. But unlike the lush Great Swamp north of New York City, the baylands' foliage, like most of the foliage I've encountered in California, is primarily red-brown, with most greens falling closer to gray or olive tones. That, coupled with the local utility structures within visible range, gives the baylands a look I imagined for the post-apocalyptic world. The red-brown foliage also makes the landscape look a little bit Martian. Overall, the look is barren and eerie. 

One of the times I was driving over the bridge at night, the moon was full or near full and the bay was clouded with a dusky, orange fog. I don't know what made the fog orange. Maybe it was light, air pollution, or some other atmospheric effect. The sparkle of the water was entirely dulled by the fog, making the bay look more like a crater in the near-distant hills. And the color of the fog was close enough to red-brown that it looked somewhat like unsettled dust. That night, the bridge was a fortified structure, guiding me home after a storm on an alien world.

Swinging Door

"When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door and we are purely independent of and at the same time dependent upon everything."

My mother has always told me I say too much, by which she means she would appreciate if more of what is in my head stayed inside my head. I have only followed her advice when I have done or seen things which have been outlined to require grave consequences if revealed, and in regard to those instances, I feel like I oppressed my soul for having taken part in something that must be hidden. Listen, I know that I wouldn't feel that way if those things hadn't been outlined as such, but they were and I do. So here's everything else.

If you don't do drugs, you will learn other ways to step back and look at your own life. You realize that's what you wanted in the first place, when you still had control. You will remember you always knew how to tear yourself away, if necessary, to open your laden arms and stop time to take stock-- what exactly are you carrying? Do you need all that? The questions have changed, and I'm getting better at making the assessment, but this act remains essential to maintaining sanity. It does matter what you step back into, too.

I need a close look, so I'm up late tonight. It's only 1:22AM in California. Still late for me these days, but I don't have to work tomorrow or the next day, I'm not tired because I didn't work yesterday or the day before. I don't have to worry about falling asleep late and missing the dawn prayer because I'm on my period, so excused this week. I'm not studying for a certification exam and I'm not in school or recovering from being in school. I haven't been in love in about 18 months. And my life has taken shape recently (read: I got my shit together) in a way that I had once imagined over twelve years ago and then completely forgotten about. Oh, and the world seems to be going to shit and I have never felt more calm about it. In other words, the universe has aligned and conditions for reflection are perfect. And I'm going to do that publicly because, don't you want to know how I did it all?

Awh, internal laudatory chorus. Stawpppp. It wasn't narcissism. I swear.

We've come a long way since the two whitest kids at my school asked me if I was related to Osama Bin Laden and if I believed in god, respectively. The other day, the whitest person at work asked me what the Muslim community thinks about ______. Chicken? Printer cartridges? Toilet Paper? I'm not actually sure. I faded out for a second and for that paranoid second, I wondered if he was asking me for A Reason and reassured myself-- this is not something I need to hide. Whatever he asked, I recovered in time to read him the first sentence of this paragraph, minus the bit about white kids. I think he got my point because he went on to express a bunch of sympathy for the disenfranchised (while maintaining a fiscal conservative stance). At least the one time that a non-Muslim POC bullied me, he had the awareness, in 2002, as a pre-teen, to put a towel on his head and imitate a muezzin. If I hadn't been terrified, I might have been impressed.

I've lost track of details. Are things worse now than they were fourteen years ago? I think so. But I can't say I've been trying to keep track of everything. It takes a considerable amount of work to go from literary studies (academic analysis of written cultural artifacts) to maintaining and building data systems. (That's a horrible description of it. My profession is not good at descriptions of our work. I apologize. I work on distributed databases. Sometimes I say, hey, it's still a matter of understanding the organization of information. Or, like, you know, the basic human experience of understanding.) First, I had to change from being a person who engages through only observation, however creatively or intelligently I did so, to a person who takes initiative and moves both ideas and resources. I also needed both an art degree and a science degree. I also fell in love and broke my heart a bunch of times. I swallowed my pride. I treated depression with unsanctioned drugs. I moved halfway across the country, and then entirely across the country. I pursued esoteric religion.

So I can't fully tell you how I ended up back on the path I meant to take when I was fifteen, the person I wanted to be before I realized how complicated global politics was going to make my life. You can't contain my whole life. You don't need to. No one can. But there are some parts that are critical for us to share.

I do still occasionally catch the news. Sometimes it can't be helped. I don't exactly avoid it, but I also don't feel constantly threatened. I do care. I pray for the dead. I pray for the living. I give what I can to people who have lost their homes, their families, their livelihood. I hope to do more of that. I work because I can and it's okay that some people can't do as much.

But I don't have all the defensive arguments down. I refuse to. I understand why they're important to some people. But I need more than that, deeper and wider. Yet, I already have everything I need.

I'm not who I'm not. I'm not even who I am. Identity, or what I project, where I feel I belong or who I show alliance with or however you want to define it, is only a small part of the self. I think most people only use a small part of the self. And when you have very little, you are likely to hold what you have very tightly. And probably spend all your money on it. But that's not the point of self. The point is to let it go.



the quote at the beginning is from a zen member of my family