My sophomore year at Stanford I went on a few dates with a guy who lived in Santa Clara. We had some fun. He was attractive, a good kisser, and made me think about things. However, he decided to stop dating because Stanford was too much of a commute. He was going to start seeing this guy who lived 5 minutes from him, he said.

As the world went global (I don’t know what it was before), my personal life went very local.

Perhaps, used to the instant gratification of a phone message, people are disappointed when physical contact is not as immediately available. 

Serving two million customers each day, Guckenheimer Enterprises is the largest private, domestic food service company in the nation.  From Redwood Shores, they contract-out cooks, waitresses, and busers to provide work place dining at many of Silicon Valley’s major corporate campuses.  They are fiercely anti-union.  And according to their website, their managers receive training for four weeks at "W.I.T. University (Whatever It Takes Univeristy), where the brightest and best recruits are equipped with the ingredients for success at Guckenheimer."

Tapping the star power of activist actor Danny Glover, a service workers’ union said Monday that it was stepping up its campaign to organize cafeteria employees in Silicon Valley, promising protests at companies that use a contractor that has resisted unionization efforts.

“These companies make enormous profits,'’ Glover said before a labor rally at Antioch Baptist Church in San Jose. While the companies pay their own workers good wages and benefits, “they have to bear witness to the fact that the men and women who serve them, who work for the agency they contract with to serve them, are given less than enough to live on.'’

The union, Unite Here, has been trying to organize employees at Redwood Shores-based Guckenheimer Enterprises for about a year. In November, the union launched a campaign accusing the company of forcing workers into taxpayer-paid health care by offering low-wage workers company-sponsored plans at prices they can’t afford.

The union is asking more than 50 Silicon Valley employers who contract with Guckenheimer to sign a “code of conduct'’ that would request its contractors to provide affordable health care and allow union organizing efforts without management interference. The union plans to hold its first rally targeting an employer at Broadcom’s San Jose campus Feb. 28.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/16578377.htm 

 

Stanford Professor Bruce Wooley opened Friday’s lecture on circuit design with a lesson about a more important set of connections.

“If you feel stress — and we all do, and sometimes it’s positive — say it to somebody,’’ he told his students. “Find a friend. Talk to your research supervisor or any faculty member. Anybody, just so it doesn’t build inside.’’

“They heard me,’’ Wooley, the genial chairman of the university’s renowned department of electrical engineering, said later, discussing the apparent suicide of Stanford graduate student May Zhou. “But do they actually believe me? Who knows. They put so much pressure on themselves. Things are very different than when I went to school.’’

Yes, Professor Wooley, things are much different than when you went to school.  Back then, when the good-ole-boy network set careers in motion, pressure was not a concern.  Why was that so?  Was it because certain privileges paved the way towards a secure academic future?  Was it the massive influx of government funding for certain kinds of scientific research during the Cold War that later granted your generation of academics the new found power of controlling the conditions of their employment through corporate funding?  Was it that ‘circuit design’ did not yet interfere with day-to-day communication, entertainment, and commerce?  The answer is not very important right now.

What is important now is why today’s graduate students might be thought to be inflicting upon themselves an unprecedented amount of pressure.  Why such pressure cannot be imagined as coming from the inveterate competition and salesmanship of Professor Wooley’s classroom or the corporate dynamic of the contemporary university system itself.

After she is found, is it not the most apathetic cold shoulder when today’s university claims its students’ pressures are self-imposed and then continue on with its day-to-day routines?  Is it not the most contemptuous arrogance to claim it is the students who might not be listening when Mengyao Zhou is found in Santa Rosa Community College?

Police in Santa Rosa, where Zhou’s body was found in the trunk of her car, said Saturday that although they continue to suspect she took her life, it might be weeks before a final determination. If her death is ruled a suicide, Zhou would be the second Stanford student to take her life this month, and at least the fifth since summer 2005, according to police reports. 

 more:  http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/16565917.htm

I’ve been noticing KQED’s pledge drive breaks and the corporate ads they occasionally run between programs, including one for, get this - WALMART.

I remember that I started listening to NPR when I got my first car, in 2002. It was a 1988 Chevy Cavalier, that had belonged to my friend Denise, and before her my friend Adam, and before him his dad. I paid Denise $300 for it and drove that beat up off-white beautifully rubber-bumpered car into the warm June night, with my friend John riding shotgun. I had only gotten my license a few weeks prior. Almost immediately I discovered NPR. Those voices (all of whom sounded about 40) comforted me, made me feel that there were adults in the car, when I was constantly terrified of doing something incredibly stupid. It was also the first time I really started paying attention to the "mainstream" news (if NPR is mainstream).

The first thing I did when I got my second car (a purple Ford Taurus ten times as expensive as my first car) was to learn to work the radio and then program in KQED (and then KALW, which I had learned about by that time. Pacifica, with its all-too-frequent "world music" programs, got assigned to number 3). My friend Rich (statistically that would most likely be you, dear reader), laughed when he heard the NPR coming out of the car radio. I didn’t have any music stations programmed, nor did I have music tapes in the car.

In those early days, the sponsor spots were read by an NPR announcer, in an unenthusiastic deadpan. From that flat, despondent "let’s get this over with" tone, we learned that Megacorp was probably NOT giving us "revolutionary ideas for a better world" or "solving hunger one family farm at a time." Now they play pre-recorded spots by earnest, intelligent-sounding women or reassuringly gravelly gentle-voiced men. 

I no longer drive a car, and I listen to NPR through podcasts, which occasionally have sponsor spots, but not as many. I do still listen to the over-the-air programs while I cook and clean, but I no longer have periods of thirty minutes to an hour of uninterrupted sitting-with-my-radio time. I don’t miss my commute, but I do miss NPR. 

Rich’s post below is rich in italics, which reminds me of a conversation I had with my brother about italics. When does a word stop having to be italicized? We say fillet, and not fillet, and we talk about genre, and not genre. It’s still quid pro quo (or is it quid pro quo?) and it’s definitely je ne sais quoi (even though je certainly sais what that phrase means).

So what’s the point? Consider another question: when does a person stop being a foreigner? When does a family assimilate? Are those italicized words part of English or not? In some sense, their inclusion is a fait accompli. Just by being here, they must be part of the language. Grammar is the only gatekeeper, and grammar has found a place for the italicized phrase. Does immigration law serve the same function for people? Or is something else the gatekeeper? Perhaps there are multiple gatekeepers, each one sui generis.

Visually, italics serve to make a phrase stand out. In speech, one is not expected to emphasize a foreign phrase, but in writing, that phrase might as well be highlighted, set at the angle as it is against all the other prose.

Another note, more a typographical accident than anything - italics lean to the right in comparison with other text. There’s this perception that recent immigrants, if they want to "make it," have to have even more conservative values than the mainstream. Their children have to study harder, they have to believe even more in the value of hardwork, they have to embrace conformity. So in other words, the successful immigrant also has to lean right. Coincidence? 

I’m vegan and a fan of all salad bars.  Fresh Choice is Silicon Valley’s version.  You pay $9.49 for all-you-can-eat salad, soup, pizza, potatoes, pasta, and ice cream.  It’s difficult to find a seat if you go at certain hours of the day.  Last night I was there and I thought a little too much about the way this restaurant works. 

It was one eight year old kid with a whooping cough about five people behind me at the bar.  He had one of those coughs that sound like they came from some deep cave in the chest where a virus has grown a luxurious home.  Of course, he stood level with the food so with each itch in his throat I watched a pile of veggies get covered with the convulsing elements of that deep, luxurious cave.  

Is it too germaphobic to also unlike the fact that each customer in the restaurant handles every one of the tongs used to place the lettuce, tomatoes, olives, etc., on your plate?  It’s also clear that silverware and dishes are never adequately cleaned.  It doesn’t seem that I mind all these health risks because I, like so many, keep coming back to Fresh Choice.  And it’s not just Fresh Choice, is it?  The Soup Plantation, Sweet Tomatoes have become staples of America’s suburban restaurant landscape.  It is a much healthier step up from McDonald’s, certainly.  But why did this model of the self-serve and the endless portion suddenly become such a keen way to go out to eat in the past five years?  What is interesting is that Fresh Choice has eliminated that middleman position known as the waitress.  Like Trader Joe’s has eliminated the major middleman distributors such as Del Monte, Dole, and Green Giant.  Like IKEA’s allen wrench system has eliminated furniture assemblers. 

In these new compelling, even aesthetically and economically ‘progressive,’ franchises are we witnessing the first baby steps of a socialized marketplace?  Or, rather, simply the elimination of that other great 20th century middleman called the middle class?

When people get angry with me, I don’t know how to react. More to the point, I don’t react in a conscious way. I usually focus on trying to pour oil on the water, calming them down, no matter what the cost to their or my integrity. What I have almost never done is gotten angry in return. Sometimes that comes later, but it’s often too late. It often seems rather artificial to then call somebody up and let them know that I am now angry.

No startling insight into how this relates to my time as an undergrad.

On Sunday, around noon, two teenage boys were killed with machine guns in East Palo Alto.  The San Jose Mercury article says there have been 17 shootings in EPA since the new year.  In 2006, 7 were shot to death in EPA.  This is down from 15 in 2005.  Which is down from 42 in 1992. 

The Mercury News is notorious for only reporting on EPA when crime or violence has occurred there.  So I want to place the homicide rate in East Palo Alto in converation with the suicide rate among teens in Palo Alto.  The number is much harder to dig up as suicide in PA is less likely to make the headlines that guns in EPA make.  If anyone knows the exact number, please comment below.  What i do know is that by May of 2006, 7 people in Palo Alto and its adjacent affluent cities, placed themselves intentionally in front of a speeding Caltrain.  Two of them were teenagers.  And that Caltrain has the second-highest rate of "trespasser" fatalities among the nation’s 13 major commuter railroads from 1996-2005.  (The San Diego Northern Railway is numero uno.)

I signed up today for Community Law, also known as "Street Law," which is a program out of USF in which law students teach a course on law to high school kids. I remembered the few times I’ve taught or spoken in a classroom setting. Once as a substitute teacher in my old middle school in Singapore, as well as the times I’ve been on speakers’ panels in American high schools on the peninsula. I’ve also tutored high schoolers and elementary school kids on the peninsula.

It’s old hat by now for teachers to say that we learn more from our charges than they do from us (or at least, we learn as much). I’m not entirely sure what this statement could mean - how do you know how much your students are learning from you? Are you comparing your present experience with your remembered experience of learning at a younger age? Are you perhaps leaving out all the social roles you learned from your teachers along with the stuff in the books?

I think this "we learn more from our students" line might be more of an emotional and social indicator than a meaningful statement of fact. I know that the times I’ve said it, what I really wanted to convey was my excitement at interacting with students, and the surprise and delight that comes from being with people who are learning. I also wanted to indicate that I belonged to the group of "idealistic young teachers" who seemed to be the ones saying this the most.

"The Loop"—the three and a half mile sidewalk paved behind Stanford—is especially crowded on sunday mornings.  Cars are parked on both sides of Stanford Ave often almost all the way to Peter Couts Road.  It’s couples pushing a stroller, or mothers gossiping, or headphoned middle-age men gasping for air; they all pass me coming and going.  I’m mostly here for the view (and to step briefly away from my dissertation).

But if you come here for any reason other than “the exercise” you’ll find that you are out of place.  It’s telling that the only location in Silicon Valley that has a clear sweeping view from San Francisco to San Jose should not have one bench or even a carved out place to sit and think it over.  No one stops on the sidewalk.  No one sits on the wooden fence or on the grass.  No one stays still longer than the time it takes to tie a shoe.  Entering ‘the loop’ is a commitment to keeping you body in motion for the duration.  I wonder if stopping up there isn’t implicitly looked upon as a sign of weakness.  Occasionally the grazing cows look over at the moving, speaking mothers.  Does this continuing flow of people give these cows a complex?

All kinds of animals are on the move up there: falcons, hawks, mountain lions, crows, squirrels, spiders, gophers.  All of them on the look out for each other, each one is another one’s dinner.  A falcon waits a few seconds before diving into the brush amidst a parade of circling exercisers. 

But this isn’t even the irony I wanted to point out.  I wanted to point out that in this ‘wildlife preserve’ the major attraction is the gigantic satellite dish intently aimed up at the heavens.  As one of the few local gathering places not embedded within a shopping district, the loop is the most fascinating place in Silicon Valley, and I’m predicting now that this is only the first of many posts on this subject.  But for now let’s add up what we’ve got going down in the foothills perched between Stanford and the 280.  One cement sidewalk providing the much-needed exercise for local laptop carriers; plus one sky filled with screeching red-tail hawks hungry on the hunt for nesting field-mice and squirrels; plus one twelve-story satellite dish imaginably receiving signals from a galaxy far, far away; minus any place to sit, relax, reflect, or lay down.  Equals:  La Piazza de Silicon Valley.