Dinner tonight with my mother and another queer transplant from Malaysia/Singapore. He expressed his dissatisfaction with Singaporean hegemony. His plans for the future: going to China to help corporations communicate with their employees there in a more emotionally intelligent way.

This morning I read a collection of interviews with Singaporean queers put together by a friend of mine (his/the book’s blog is here) from high school. It’s getting quite a bit of attention in Singapore. I like stories.

At most gatherings on campus organizers know to include food as an incentive to get students to attend.  So the amount of free food offered up each day on campus probably does not have an equivalent anywhere else on earth.  Unfortunately Stanford campus is also probably the only place on earth filled with people who don’t need, and will never need, a handout.

After one event this weekend Pijush realized he had ordered too much Chinese food and together we decided we would bring the food to East Palo Alto.  For those unfamiliar with the area, EPA has historically been the home for working class African American and Latino families since the 1950s, right around the time Stanford university began renting its land to industrial corporations that would be interested in employing, not industrial workers, but campus professors.

I know one place in EPA called Bread of Life (1852 Bay Road) that provides daily meals for the hungry at scheduled hours throughout the day.  It’s a lean operation, but as far as I know the only organized effort in EPA of its kind.  I rang the bell and a man swung open the iron door and led me inside, thinking I was one of the volunteer pickup drivers for the day.  Inside I explained that I had two big trays of rice, chicken, and chow mein that could feed about 15 to 20 people and whether or not I could leave the trays here for those coming to eat today.  He needed to ask the boss.  When he returned, still quite surprised that I wasn’t the pickup driver, he rejected the food.  The boss said they do not receive donations today; I’d have to come back in two days.  They were obviously busy, understaffed, but somehow unwilling to accept the Chinese food Pijush and I had in the trunk of his car.  Was it a contracted necessity to refuse food provided during non-designated drop-off days, or just a paranoid necessity to stick with the routine, I cannot say.

Back outside I tried to explain to my friend that they were not interested in food today.  We spoke about where we might go next.  How hard could it be to spontaneously feed 15-20 hungry people?  We stared out the windshield in shame, unable to think of a nearby place to go. 

In the meantime, a small crowd had gathered in front of us, awaiting Bread of Life to open.  One woman, Roxanne, had walked over to us and I asked her advice on where to bring this.  She thought it over and didnt understand why Bread of Life wasnt taking the food either.  She didnt know anywhere to bring it and called over Randy from the group of men gathered outside.  I opened the trunk showing the two trays of food and asked someone again where he thought we should bring it.  Randy replied, if you want to make sure it gets eaten, we’ll take it from you. 

Pijush and I and Roxane and the food drove through East Palo Alto to the house where she and Randy were living.  I helped her carry the heavy trays onto their table and then we drove Roxanne back to Bread of Life. 

A thank you to Kiersten for standing on the 101 overpass and snapping the view you see above. 

I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with a friend who was quite uptight about the game, and would get into shouting matches with other players and sulk at any perceived slight. Now I find myself quite sensitive to people’s opinions about me and can’t stand being condescended to in situations where in the past I would have just shrugged it off. I am the same age now as my friend was then. I wonder if it’s a certain stage in adulthood, coupled with a growing awareness of racism and gender-stereotyping and a resentment of those who seem to lead a more charmed life. I’m not sure what this has to do with the peninsula except that we used to play in his house in Mountain View.

Overheard on KQED’s forum, an indignant caller takes issue with guest scientists’ saying that a cell "knows" how to make bubbles or that another cell "understands" how to move through water. The caller is from Palo Alto. The scientists have to explain that they were using those terms conversationally. Metaphor. What a concept.

I was recently in home in a suburb on the peninsula.

As we walked back to the car I saw no streetlights, no sidewalks. We cast moonshadows and wondered how much light the Christmas ornaments were contributing.

The treadmill at Brixton House of Correction, 1821 (London Guildhalll Library). Prisoners did ten minutes on and five minutes off the treadwheel. In some prisons, like Coldbath Fields, the treadwheel drove a flour-mill, but in others it did nothing at all. The work was done under the Silent System. 

I’m new at the gym.  I take some time at each machine to see how the adjustment levers work and think about how much I think I can lift 15 times straight.  But I find myself more often paying attention to everyone else.  The faces people make lifting hundreds of pounds are torturous.  The grunting and teeth-grinding that goes into hoisting the bars, cranks, and levees seem inspired by an unnatural anger, an unshakable distress rooted firm in the body.  In between sets we stare at our taut muscle in the mirror, take a good look at ourself, let pride wash over whatever previously inspired us to make our faces and throats distort into displays of anguish.  It takes some getting use to this scene of everyone alternating back and forth between the bodily gesture of a cry for help and then a narcissistic admiring eye, pouring over one’s own pose. 

Isn’t the perfectly cut body today only the most ostentatious expression of affluence?  The symbol of excess leisure time and the expenditure of energy for absolutely no purpose at all.  Doesn’t the packed gym tell the story of a dysfunctional social community whose members, no matter what they do, can’t rid themselves of some lump deep down in their throat?  We place our bodies in daily agony in the name of ‘health,’ ’self-image,’ to look ‘this good.’  Others get fit as a result of their labor constructing houses or digging ditches for fiber optic cables, for example.  They aren’t working out, they’re just working.

But each day at the gym hundreds of pounds must be moved up and down.  Hundreds of miles spread across twenty treadmills simultaneously.   All wasted on vanity.  Can’t the engineers at Stanford university devise a way to channel the energy from their 200 pound squat back into the electricity running the campus generators or something?  Aren’t we supposed to be about social  progress?  Evidently they even managed to do this for Brixton prisoners in the early nineteenth century; why not for Palo Alto undergraduates in the twenty-first century?  Or would that just make your six-pack look at lot less glamorous?

Biking in Palo Alto was not a complicated affair. You had only to think in two dimensions. A quick glance at a map and you’d know which route to take. In addition, the lanes were wide and well-repaired, and so there was always room to bike without fear of someone opening their car door at an inopportune moment, and presenting you with the unappealing split second decision whether to veer into traffic or slam into someone’s never-plush-enough-to-stop-the-bruising interior. It was the kind of biking you could plan from the comfort of a hotel room.

San Francisco biking is a far different animal. There is the San Francisco bike map, which sort of tells you where the hills are and which roads have bike lanes. But just because a road has bike lanes doesn’t mean it’s in good repair. Whether it’s hills or potholes, San Francisco’s streets add a third dimension to biking that Palo Alto’s streets lack. The only way to really bike around this city is to know it, not from behind a computer screen, but from actually getting out there and putting your rubber on the road. Of course, you can always talk to your friends.

The term “undertaker” is first recorded in 1400.  Its usage refers to “a contractor or projector of any sort, an agent from the verb “undertake.”  Undertake was itself first used in 1200; it meant literally “to entrap.”  The under in the word may be the same one that also forms the first element of understand.  It’s next usage (1250) meant, “to accept.”  Undertake’s third usage, in 1300, was “to take upon oneself, to accept the duty of.”

‘Undertaking enterprise‘ is recorded in 1425, the same century that saw the new noun Undertaker arrive in the sense of “a contractor or projector of any sort.”  The specialized sense in which we use the term undertaker today emerged from the compound funeral-undertaker, a vocation arising at the end of the 17th century.  

But lets remain in the 15th century for a moment longer; we see the term enterprise appear in English, borrowed from the French word for “undertake”, entreprendre, from entre- “between” + prendre “to take.”  In 1475 the Old French word entreprendre is used as enterprise in English, and even given the very abstract sense, “readiness to undertake challenges, spirit of daring.”  However the word does not stick across the channel.  And would have to wait until 1828, for the word entrepreneur “one who undertakes and manages,” for the English to add the word into their vocabulary.

In our etymological description we have removed the social forces at work that have shaped the usage of these terms.  But what we have found without even knowing this history, is that the entrepreneur is a vocation whose closest relative, at least in name, is the undertaker.  

My freshman year I made the mistake of wearing a yellow t-shirt to a progressive around the time of Big Game, the annual flareup of Berkeley-Stanford rivalry (when Stanford frat boys condescend to stop ignoring the rest of the world in order to start hating it). I was surrounded in a corridor by boys demanding that I show them my Stanford ID. I refused. They eventually let me go, but it was tense there for a minute.

Why did I resist showing them my ID? Today I showed my student ID to get a dollar discount for a movie.