Fuck(, it's) the police!

Three shadows in the rafters dressed in dark clothing fall suddenly silent at the heavy footsteps below. We can see him walking two floors below us, or more we can see his flashlight at the bottom of the drop. A door closes and we hear the footsteps fade into the next room.

"Oink," one of my friends giggles, "oink oink oink!"

"This place is getting busier and busier, we may need to move on."

***

When it drizzled we all piled back into the house and under the makeshift tent, and when the sun returned we piled back out to the grills in the parking lot with fresh beers. Spirits were high; both among the partygoers and in the bottles Hammertime was using to make me another SoCo and lime.

The majority of the party did not need Hammertime's extensive bartending talents to wind up a bit besides themselves and removed from their common sense, and whoever had placed the grill under an open window on the third floor might not have had much common sense to remove. The third floor residents had never been on the best terms with the rest of unit 66 to begin with, and it wasn't too long before rumors of the police having been called on the party were flying thick as underclassmen began slinking away from the scene. I caught out of the corner of my eye Magpie vaulting up onto the railing of the first floor deck and from there onto the garage roof, bottle of whiskey in hand bolting for the pinnacle of the structure roaring "Fuck the police!" the whole way. Reaching the top he stood there, still waving the jar and screaming his head off.

It wasn't actually the police who showed up the first time but the fire department. We got Magpie down from the roof prior to that, and convinced the 20 year old carrying an illegal firearm in one hand and a beer in the other to go back in the house just prior to their arrival. Py was dispatched to greet them, and aside from the fact that he was wearing a shirt which read "Fuck politics, I just want to burn shit down," it all went rather well. He laughed and considered changing shirts after that, but decided it would be useless after the fire department already left, much to our amusement when he later had to entertain a police squad car which had found our party particularly interesting.

***

"And," the officer leans in close to Py, "Do they let you do this at home?"

Its dark outside and we're standing on a rural bystreet not too far from the university. I'm facing one cop car, and I can tell there is another behind me from my shadow. There's a third one on my left and behind the one I am facing I can see two more. Ginger, Gilby and Py aren't doing a whole ton better.

"My dad...we lit these off when I was little...I thought fireworks were a fine-able offense in this state officer...not an arrest-able one..."

The officer leans over close to Py's face and raises his flashlight, "Oh?"

They rattled us for a significant amount of time before letting us go, enough that when I woke up the next morning and put on my black robe I was still thinking a bit of them.

It is tradition that the city police line the top of the crowd the graduation procession walks through, and as I strode to pomp and circumstance I suddenly found a hand on my shoulder and upon turning, a familiar grinning face. It was the same cop from the night before.

"You're being good today, aren't you Pika?"

A flippant giggling boy from my freshman dorm was in line right behind me, "oh HER officer, she's never up to anything good..."

***

"And his hand tightened on my shoulder," I reached out and pinched Brewer's shoulder next to me at the table for effect, "and I honestly stood there and thought 'man, if I don't get my diploma out of this, the scene at my graduation will be the least of my problems' so I bolted for it."

Brewer giggled and so did the rest of his team-mates. "So," he asked, "Did he chase?"

"Nah," I laughed, "I guess he was just taking an opportunity to fuck with me, see if he could scare me. He did a damn good job I'll admit..."

Captain grinned and split his chopsticks to dig into his meal, "That's 90% of a good cop's job you realize... scaring people into behaving."

Brewer giggled a little again, "Well, looks like most of them are only good at about half of it."

Appeal to Authority

The police man looked down at Py.

"You've got to stop that."

Py looked up, still holding the fireworks, mildly bewildered.

"I've gotten three complaints about you from parents who want you to stop..."

"Really?" Py asked, not cheeky but genuinely bewildered, "Nobody has said a word to me."

***

Lines and lines of feds sit glassy-eyed in an auditorium while an African American woman paces up and down the front to continue our Prevention of Sexual Harassment Training. Personally, I liked it better when they called it Sexual Harassment Training because I could respond that I did not require any further training in how to sexually harass people.

"We have to be," she says, "understanding of the comfort levels of different people. For example, some people might not feel comfortable with something you consider harmless, such as a miniature of the statue of David..."

For a split moment I considered the image of my laboratory decorated with dozens of miniatures of the status of David. To distinguish them I could put little feather boas and ill-advised flamboyant hats...

"But you have to realize it is wrong even if nobody says anything. Your coworkers might not feel comfortable confronting you, so you need to be considerate on their behalf and think of how other people might feel."

***

I understand that sexual harassment is serious business, but I can not agree to see it as a reason to automatically stoop to the lowest common denominator.

***

"Mom!" a seven year old me stomped into the room, "Why does Amy always go first and chooses everything when she comes to visit us?"

"Because that is proper manners. Amy is our guest."

"But when I'm at her house she always gets her way because her mom says it is her house and her rules."

"What does Amy say?"

"She says what her mom says goes."

***

This pattern became familiar to me over the next few years: my peers, who were either unable or unwilling to advocate for their own needs, appealing to figures of authority to enforce a system where they would be catered to as much as possible.

***

"SHARPIE!" I shouted the first time I saw him in the cafeteria. He was year older, but still the same shaggy looking kid. His eyebrows raised and then his face cracked into a huge smile, "Hey Pika!"

"It is so good to see you!" I ran up and hugged him. Sharpie flinched and stood stiffly when I reached out to hug him, and then, as if to not to rub in my foolishness, extended his arms to offer the most contact-free return of my gesture humanly possible. I stepped back a little puzzled, when I lived with him and Carne I always hugged him hello.

"Uh, so they just hired you recently didn't they?"

"Erm, yeah..."

"Alright let's get some food."

***

"Look," I said, pointing to the mini roller coaster we had hastily erected on my new boss' desk when he was out for a day.

"Where?"

"There," I returned, still futilely pointing.

The man down the hall turned his head and still missed the obvious point.

"Here," I said and grabbed his wrist, carefully by my thumb and index finger, and took two steps away, dragging him along with me to a better view.

"Woah!" he said, "You can't do that."

"What?"

"You touched my arm, that's sexual harassment."

I looked at him as blankly.

"No physical contact man..."

***

I would like to tell you that Amy grew up and eventually learned to advocate for herself and make reasonable compromises, but I haven't any idea what happened to her. I do know that by the time I moved away she, like so many of the little girls I spent childhood playdates with, was royally fucked up.

The scarier part is that I know that there is absolutely no reason she should have grown out of this trend. We have created a society where appealing to authority to force others to cater to you is a wildly successful tactic, and if done right, requires no compromise at all. This is opposed to confronting people with your issue, discussing it rationally, and seeking a compromise.

People have all but completely done away with person to person conflict resolution. Now you always need a mediator, or so many top-down rules that you have completely rewritten normal human interaction.

This constant appeal to authority and top-down thinking means that everything eventually gets boiled down to a series of rules which are made to handle all situations. The reality is that our world is far more complicated than these rules can handle, and that you can not lawyer morals into a society. The rules enforced on us tend to swing from extreme to extreme depending who is winning the appeal to authority, and they make an awful lot of people spend time doing very stupid things.

"Pika." Gadget had a fantastically wicked grin as he walked out of the Sexual Harassment Prevention Training, "Do you think I can order miniature statues of David online?"

Better People

The "Help Wanted" sign did not stand out among the peaches. At first I mistook it for one of the price signs. I stand staring at it for a long while, thinking to myself that farmer's markets were nice places.

Exupery waits tables on Sundays in a little Chinese cafe because she's in the same position I am. She is always amused and a little pained when asked if she is working her way through college only to explain that she has already graduated with her degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Stanford, thank you very much. I know other coworkers have been considering things like this.

Curiosity finally catches me and I asked one of the girls working behind the stand about the little red sign.

"Paul!" she shouts, not bothering to turn her head, "We have one for the help wanted!"

Paul looks to be in his early fourties, or at least old enough to thoroughly misjudge my age. He smiles at me like I was a child and my brain immediately clicks into the conclusion that he had one. It was probably one of the other girls working the fruit stand. I smile, this act was never too difficult. Paul fits the description perfectly of somebody who I could manipulate pretty easily.

Paul looks at me like I am a child with a big grin on his face, "Can you be outgoing? Aggressive... but friendly?"

"Yes." I say. It isn't until after I said it that I realize I was probably suppose to say something more to prove I was a good salesman.

"This is a hard job," he returns, "some people really aren't cut out for it you know."

I'm not entirely sure what to say. I want to tell him I'm a professional, that I graduated fairly well decorated, and that this job will supplement a fairly respectable job in a federal agency, but he didn't ask that. If I told him these things I would sound pompous, and I know the only reason I want to tell him is because I'm a little ashamed to be in this position. A very ignorant and selfish part of my mind tells me that I did everything right, and that I somehow deserve something better than this, that work like this is for somebody else.

"You think you can do it?"

"Yes sir."

He hands me a bucket of grapes and a pair of plastic salad tongs, "I'll give you five minutes and see how you do." He nods to one of the girls at the stand, "She will teach you. She is one of our best."

I look at the grinning 20 year old. If she even goes to college I bet she majors in some unemployable bullshit like women's studies. I'm taken aback a moment by the ignorance and irony of my own mental statement.

"Alright," she says to me very sweetly, "All you have to do is smile at the people and give them free samples. Just say nice things and keep their attention, like 'fresh seedless grapes, super sweet!' and 'once you try you have to buy!' and whatever else you can think of."

This is so cheesy.

She assists me in handing out a few of the grapes and then goes her own bucket of Pluots to hand out. I stand there, salad tongs in hand, still wearing the backpack I brought to the market, asking each passersby if he or she would like a grape.

There is a small bubble of people around my teacher, all enjoying the Pluots and talking to her. Pluots (apricot plum hybrids) are larger than grapes and take longer to eat, but there is still a skill in getting people to stand and talk as they finish their food. I should be able to do this at least as well as she can, my mind tells me. The girl looks wholly unruffled and uncompetitive. It suddenly occurs to me that she might have begun handing out fruit as well not to provide a benchmark for Paul to grade me against, but to provide camaraderie in a new situation which Paul thinks might be frightening for me. It occurs to me that by most measures of being human she is probably a better person than I am. I viewed her as a competitor, somebody to be beaten and she viewed me as somebody to be kind to, to be taught.

The next ring of people clears and she smiles at me to offer some cheerful help, "Always keep talking." I smile back at her and tried a little louder, "Fresh seedless grapes!"

People don't go to the farmer's market to be in a hurry. They don't drag crying children or complain about the service, instead they smile at me and thank me for the grapes. I was standing in the sunlight on a beautiful day doing easy work which leaves me plenty of time for my own thoughts. I will not have to wear a suit, there are no meetings, no deadlines, and no overtime. The pay will be abysmal and I know it, but it isn't like I'm quitting my real job. Really, this is not so bad at all.

"And one for you!" I say, holding the tongs above a small child in a stroller. "Open your hands!" He did and I drop the grape into them. While he pops it into his mouth I hand one to his mother.

"Mmm!" he says, waving his hands in the air with delight. His mother, evidently pleased with her son's interest in fresh fruit, reverses the direction of the stroller in favor of the cash register.

This is a pretty good life.

I hand out every grape and bring the empty bucket back to Paul. He smiles at me. "Did you like it?" I nod. He hands me a slip of paper. "Write down your name, a phone number, and that you handed out Pluots."

"I handed out grapes."

"Write Pluots anyway so I remember."

I do as he asked. I find it amusing that he didn't ask for my card. I realize how set in my ways I am, at only 22, seeing only one way to behave, one way to be taken seriously. When I was first introduced to the business world I abhorred it. I claim I still do and tell myself that I would never buy into it, never be a part of it, but here I am as prejudiced as any of them. I am so glad I did not go into defense work. We believe we are strong enough to resist our environment, but in reality we are weak and impressionable things. I never wanted to be that asshole who hides behind her degrees and honors as an excuse to be a miserable and condescending person, but I can see now that that is who I am becoming.

I waved goodbye to Paul and thanked him for the hefty bag of fruit he has given me. No other employer has ever paid me in any form for my interview time. I have one interviewer who has been interviewing me since April and 13 interviews later can not even be bothered to tell me when a final decision will be made. I went to an interview once where they sat 12 of us in a room and announced they would only be hiring one of us in an attempt to pit us against one another. The oddest part was Py was one of the 12. Paul handed me easily 10 dollars of fruit for under half an hour's work, which is more than what he normally pays I am sure.

As I walked down the row my teacher extends an arm with her own salad tong and a juicy Pluot on the end.

"Fresh Pluot?" she asks with a smile.

"Don't mind if I do," I laugh, taking the fruit from her. I realize I feel terrible for not knowing her name.

I won't tell them about my other job unless they ask. I decided, walking away. I will stay and learn from these people. The work is good, and I could stand to be like them. They are better people than I.

Busted

I've been attending to other matters but out of the corner of my eye I'm minding the table.

A blond girl with a beach bag of a purse approaches the table from the wrong angle to be coming off the table where you assemble a burger. She takes her soda from the table, then throws it in the bag, then a second. Emboldened by her success she grabs another one in each hand and begins moving them to her bag.

"What are you doing?"

The girl is cool as she keeps pocketing more sodas, "Our hotel doesn't have a soda machine, I'm stocking up. You know what I mean..."

"No, I don't."

The girl turns red and keeps taking the sodas "I'm just taking a few." She's probably taken at least 8.

"Stop."

"I'm just getting them for my team!" The girl is shouting now, "I don't know why you care!"

I stare at her for a moment. She takes one last defiant soda and stalks off in the opposite direction. Honestly if I cared about the girl I would have made her give them back, but I honestly was too pissed to care if she learned a lesson or not from all this. I have enough kids of my own that want to be taught for me to take on more that don't even want to change their ways.

Looking back on it though, I probably did that kid a disservice. Success only makes you bolder.

The next few kids try to take two sodas just to prove they can. I roll my eyes and give them a hearty "You're pathetic" look. Kids rarely respond to adult's rage, but anybody who ever survived middle school should know that people drop dead if you can combine disdain with any inner source of their guilt.

"Don't be such pigs."

One kid who already has two sodas in his hand takes them to prove he's not scared of me, but the line goes back to one a person after that.

I guess that's the latest and greatest in the American way. If you get busted, pretend you're right, and if pressed, its the messenger's fault. After all, we're all delicate and unique snowflakes right? Being wrong might hurt somebody's ego.

What I find most impressive was that these kids were also jacking what I personally thought to be some pretty nasty soda. When was the last time you saw high schoolers buy fruit seltzer?

***

Once when I was in Hong Kong I was on the subway with about 20 non-native kids from my university when in walks a little girl and her mother. The child is holding her mother's hand by the thumb. I smile and wave at her. The little girl looks at me for a long moment and then says to her mother in Cantonese, "Look mommy, there's a devil here."

Chinese body language is so subtle compared to ours, but I don't see any visible reaction from the mother. She instead walks to a hand loop and puts her arm in as she guides her daughter to a cherry red pole to hold on to so she can weather the movement of the train.

"Mommy," she continues still in Cantonese, "There are so many devils here."

There's not hatred in this little girl's voice. The sentence wouldn't have sounded a whole lot different if it had read "There are so many chairs here." She continues her ramble, but her speech is becoming progressively more complicated and I have trouble following it.

"Mommy, I have never seen so many devils together here."

I feel bad calling out a little girl, so I sit quiet and turn to smile at her.

"Devil's looking at me!"

By this time we're all looking at each other, and a few of us are chuckling nervously. We had read how in Hong Kong the language barrier meant that racial slurs had just become part of the language. If somebody started calling me names in America I might fear for my physical safety but here there was supposedly no need to fear. We had all read that this wasn't culturally meant as a serious insult, and that it carried no threat of harm, but we all felt a little awkward being cursed out and not knowing what the socially acceptable thing to do about it would be.

"Devil's are laughing!"

I remember looking around the train for any sort of social cue at all but everybody on the train, including the kids from Hong Kong University who were helping us learn our way around, were avoiding our eyes. For a brief few seconds I could hear every clatter of every wheel on the train track. The little girl turned away from us and was quiet.

I remember being very impressed that the mother seemed to share in the shame she thought her daughter should feel rather than ignoring its existence or handing it all back to her kid. What I found more bizarre was that everybody on the train seemed to share the kid's shame, like one bizarre cold shoulder of an apology. Oddly enough, the shared guilt which created this neat little line between "us" and "them" was more alienating than being called names in some sense.

Half in defiance, and half from not knowing what else to do with ourselves, being called out as "ghosts" after that became a sick little game. I would wait until somebody went on a reasonable rant calling me a ghost and a devil, and then turn and respond in my politest Cantonese, "yes."

The response was always the same. The speaker would always look away in shame, and sometimes even apologize in Cantonese a few times. Apparently most white people didn't learn to speak any Cantonese there, so they were not use to being caught. I was amazed though that none of them ever got in my face about it, they just acted embarrassed.

Where did our society lose that skill of admitting we are wrong when we are?

***

"And," the officer leans in close to Py, "Do they let you do this at home?"

Its dark outside and we're standing on a rural bystreet not too far from the university. I'm facing one cop car, and I can tell there is another behind me from my shadow. There's a third one on my left and behind the one I am facing I can see two more. Ginger, Gilby and Py aren't doing a whole ton better.

"My dad...we lit these off when I was little...I thought fireworks were a fine-able offense in this state officer...not an arrest-able one..."

The officer leans over close to Py's face and raises his flashlight, "Oh?"

"Look," I interrupt, "Officer, we're sorry and we have given you everything. Please let us go."

The officers tried hard to rattle us after that and we pretended to be appropriately terrified of jail time or not graduating or whatever they were theatening at that moment (for portions of it, I'll admit, I did not have to pretend). Then they took our fireworks and left. I remember being thunderstruck. All they wanted to see was a little fear in us, scare us into saying sorry and hopefully into not doing it again.

***

"So what happened then?" I asked.

"Not a whole lot," Magpie shrugged, "The kid who ratted got suspended for a year, the kid he ratted on just went on academic probation."

"But I though that was part of his plea...he turns in his cohort and..."

"Guess the campus hearing board didn't feel that way for very long. Ratter didn't apologize in his closing statements, CoLo did."

"And that made..."

"All the difference I guess."

English Teachers Detained in South Korea

This place is getting absolutely depressing. Lets try a little change of pace shall we?

Py told me to post a recipe I cooked last night, but I think that would bore you all to tears. Nobody wants to read recipes instead of content. Ok, so its the internet, and someplace there is probably somebody who does, but that's still not a good reason to do it. Maybe when I make a proper blog I'll throw a little section where you can all read in great detail about what culinary forms of trauma I make my friends suffer through, but that's not really something for today.

This might not particularly be on a lighter note to the rest of the blog but I'm positively fascinated with http://underquarantine.tumblr.com/ It tells the story of one of over 50 detainees in South Korea. They are American English teachers, and the story is unfolding right now.

I haven't got any idea if its true or not but it is for some reason incredibly interesting. I'm pretty sure most news stations don't know they are there yet or if anybody has verified that this is true.

Anyway, check it out, and I'll give you guys a real post tomorrow.