concocted glimpse

“The real problem with cars is not that they don’t get enough miles to the gallon; it’s that they make it too easy to spread out” (48, cf. 104). Green Metropolis gave me an expanded understanding of the infrastructure of a car. Cars fuel all kinds of infrastructure. Zoning laws are fueled by cars. It’s hard to zone the sort of neighborhood where you can walk to where you need to go. Sprawl — fueled by cars! — derails public transit since successful public transit requires not willpower but a critical population density (98, 119-20). We’re struggling with this in my neighborhood right now.

“With the home and the workplace separated, often by long car commutes, two well-serviced developments are created with duplicate retail, service, and parking institutions” (111). [Sounds like the infrastructure of divorce.] Parking institutions are my least favorite. They’re a concrete illustration of how “No one who moves into a new suburban subdivision pays anything like the real cost of the infrastructure that is required to support them” (258, cf. 102-3). Parking lots have to be lit even when unoccupied, and that takes insane wattage. Empty lots are crime magnets.

It’s our cars that stand between us and solutions to our gathering energy nightmare. And it’s easy to see why. … A car is speed and sex and power and emancipation.

And everyone’s a little driven by one of those.

My neighborhood has a walk score of 72. This makes my heart go pitter patter. And my feet, too, for that matter. I go to the grocery store, the library, a running trail, even my doctor’s office, all on foot. For everything else, I can walk to the transit station.

Transportation is a big issue to me. Last fall Metro launched its In Motion program. I participated. And I felt, more keenly than ever, the split between the suburbs and the city. I was told about this dynamic when I moved here: Seattle dwellers VS. the East Side/ the suburbs/ the namby pamby NIMBYs, willing to claim the glitz of the city but not the dirt, retreating [with private transportation] to their greenbelted homes in their monied school districts. I was promised I’d encounter this discord, and I have. I’ve picked up that apple and I’ve polished it. I have trouble stomaching the suburbians’ green, so purchased and plastic. I’m allergic to their (!) pollution. I wish that the ferry system here worked like a Roman barge. The ferry riders file into the galley and pick up an oar and work to get to the other shore. The ferry captain pipes some R&B over the sound system, something with an appropriate number of beats per minute. Beats driving to the gym and sitting at the rowing machine, right? Sweet, sweet fantasy, baby.

Bus ABCs exhibit A

Quite some time ago I witnessed a scene on the bus. That happens all the time; my route is very scenic: scenes … acts … entire plays. But this one particular drama stored itself in the Ti-Vo of my brain. It was a battle between a mother and her preschool-aged son. The mother started singing a nursery song of some sort to the son in her native tongue [Chinese, I'd wager]. The kid, in clarion protest, began singing the ABCs. His timbre was angry, his posture rebelliously ashamed. He kicked and squalled. She shushed and clutched. He got stuck between “M” and “P”; no, no, NO! The emotional cacophony was more piercing than the mismatched tunes.

It caused a vital organ ache—the kidneys more than the heart, really. Theirs was a little battle, but this is a big war, and I worry about the casualties.

Bus ABCs exhibit Z

About a month ago I witnessed a counterpoint. A family got on the bus; a father, a toddler, and a grandma. The father helped the grandmother get situated in a convenient seat, then sat across the aisle with his wee one on his lap. He began carefully, self-consciously drilling his child in the ABCs. Whenever he spoke to the child he used an English cobbled with syntax errors and flavorfully tinged with a foreign accent. When he directed anything to the grandma he used not-English. The one time the grandma spoke to the child the father supervened with English.

A law, it seems, would be superfluous.

I got my hearing tested last week. My hearing has been slightly muffled since I’ve been sick, and during the otoscopy my external auditory meatus felt swollen, and apparently I had a lot of cerumen impaction. So I was a bit surprised to find that my hearing was at fabulous levels of normal¹. It was the best of anyone in my lab, and I’m the oldest, too. [Although I am yet far too young for presbycusis to set in, high frequency loss starts younger than I am old.] I bet it’d be even better if I wasn’t sick. Something about me is super healthy!

I attribute this in part to the fact I am very protective of my ears. This protectiveness is largely just personal predilection. I’m very particular about my noise exposure, but my habits were established so early on that it’s a simple lifestyle thing for me. It’s normal to me and I like it, but I’ve found several people who think that my choice to not wear earphones, for example, is weird, or ascetic, or backwards. So many people just don’t leave the house without at least one kind of contraption to stick in their ear. Pas moi! But I’ll reconsider as soon as they release Babelfish 1.0.

I like hearing all the things around me. It’s especially fun on the bus. A few months ago Roscivs came home and told me he’d seen a woman furtively rocking out on Air Supply on the crowded 36. Of course, without her ear contraption, she couldn’t have gotten her groove on with the ultimate in 80’s heartbeat pop. But if Roscivs’ ears had been occluded with the noise of his own world, he wouldn’t’ve noticed, and I couldn’t’ve conjured up an image for the phrase “furtively rocking out on Air Supply” that evening, and that’d be too bad, because it still makes me smile!

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¹Anything below 25 dB HL is considered normal; I had an average of -2.5 dB HL. Remember decibels are logarithmic, and a 3 dB change is a doubling [+] or halving [-] of sound intensity [the perceptual correlate of which is loudness].

Somebody shared their Seattle bus story with me after I shared a tidbit of bus literature.

* * *

This fellow was new to Seattle and had to pick up some documents downtown. He got on a bus outside of the city and asked the driver how he’d get where he was going when they got downtown. The bus driver responded thusly: “Just remember, Jesus Christ made Seattle under pressure.” The fellow befuddled: “Excuse me?” The bus driver repeated: “Jesus Christ made Seattle under pressure.”

Bus riders hear wacky non-sequiturs from people on the bus all the time—just not usually from the driver. Where was he coming from? Where was this going? I’ll, ahem, spell it out.

Jesus [Jefferson, James] Christ [Cherry, Columbia] made [Marion, Madison] Seattle [Spring, Seneca] under [University, Union] pressure [Pike, Pine]—the city streets in order from south to north. He’s never gotten lost downtown.

There are bus reader riders, and there are bus writer riders. The busses even sponsor some writers: Poetry on Busses. The poems are posted inside the busses alongside two kids of ads: -vertisements and -monitions. Of the bus writer riders there are those who write while on the bus and those who write on the bus while on the bus. I have now seen an editoral and a poetic exposition on the bus omnibus. Exhibit 1: INFANTSIDE written in a blue Bic on a women’s reproductive health agency ad. Exhibit 2: A succint iamb proffered in bold Sharpie underneath this poem: HE DIED.

I’ve got a new job! I’m a tutor at a college writing center.

I’m part-time, so perquisites are limited, but as an employee of the college, I am eligible for a full bus pass for only $10. Chump change! [For reference, a weekend afternoon downtown costs $5 to get there and back again.] I proudly procured mine last Friday.

I’ve been making a lot of changes to travel green lately. I walk to the library—backpack to the library, really—a hilly 3.2 miles round trip. I made trips to the market on foot this summer when I only had a couple fresh food items on my list. I’ve made a half dozen other little efforts, too. I’m excited about this green bus option for me.

My husband takes the bus now, now that we don’t kill the earth together.

The other evening he was waiting for the bus and heard a man with very low-level English trying to ask people how to get to the Lake of Shining Waterston. Nobody helped, so Roscivs walked over and said “I hear you’re trying to get to the Lake of Shining Waterston?” for that is where we live. In the town by the Lake of Shining Waters, natch.

Roscivs, all cordial and Southern-like like he is, told the man which bus to take, and they struck up a conversation like a match and a scratch pad. When the bus came, they got on and sat together.

Turns out this man is a Czech opera singer who won the green card lottery on the first try. He entered at the suggestion of a friend who has been trying for ten years. He’s sung all over Europe, and speaks several European languages. He begged R. to correct his English, and R., a natural teacher [seriously, you've got to keep your eye on the guy or before you know it he will be teaching somebody something] and a veteran language learner, happily helped him.

Opera Singer man hadn’t been in America for more than a week, and had no résumé, but he had an audition coming up the next day. From what R. could gather, he’s hoping for virtuoso spots. He sang some snippets on the bus and sounded impressive, even with rumble tumble bus acoustics; sound waves richocheting off vinyl seating, starless dark seeping in the bus windows.

Roscivs gave him one of his business cards so the man could contact him again, but we haven’t heard anything. I hope he wins an audition; I hope we can go see him in some production. I want to stand in his crowd, listen to his music, and clap wildly for him; for a dream come true.