Walking

When I was a kid, my favorite thing to do was walk. I would walk anywhere my protective parents would allow me to. I loved gardens and parks, places where I was allowed to follow trails and explore. When my family visited the Japanese tea garden in Golden Gate Park, I would make sure to cover every bit of terrain, looping back past the same areas again and again so I could follow every detour and alternate path. I felt certain there was some magic hiding where I hadn’t yet walked, that there was some amazing mystery I couldn’t leave unseen.

In high school, I was finally allowed to ride my bike instead of taking a school bus. I did that for about a month, and then I decided that I would rather walk. My parents thought I was being unreasonable the first day I told them I wouldn’t be taking my bike. It was only a mile to school, but adults in the suburbs didn’t walk distances like that. On my walk to school, I discovered all the things I had missed by driving and biking. Careful gardens of drought-resistant plants. Sculptures in windows and yards. Communes where Palo Alto’s persistent enclaves of hippies and artists preserved the Sixties version of our city. Patches of the yellow flowers whose stems tasted like lemon if you sucked on them. Crazy people walking the streets, cats, butterflies, interesting garbage and free things, lost notes and photographs. My walk to and from school was one of the most interesting parts of my day.

Walking became my major hobby outside of school. My friend Therese and I spent the entire summer after freshman year crossing our town from side to side on foot. Every day, we would choose a unexplored territory to walk to. That pedestrian overpass you only usually saw when driving on the freeway. Shoreline Amphitheater. Downtown Menlo Park. That seeming wasteland between downtown Palo Alto and the Stanford Mall.

People often reminisce about their love of their first car, how driving represented freedom. That’s how I felt about walking. You could walk anyplace. It was hard for me to wrap my brain around that kind of limitlessness. Using no resources except your own body, you could get to almost anywhere. You could get to all kinds of places that a car wouldn’t take you: the woods surrounding the Stanford campus, the deep ravine behind the mall, the hill with the giant rope swing on the way out of town. If you added public transportation, you could go to San Francisco, San Jose, or even, in theory, Richmond, Dublin, Pittsburg (wherever those places were).

I spent my twenties in universities. Every morning, from the age of eighteen to twenty-eight, I walked twenty minutes or so to the school where I took classes or taught classes. Sometimes I walked to a bus and took the bus to school. At night, I would walk to the coffee shop, the bookstore, the bar. Everywhere I needed to be could be reached by foot, like living in an old European city.

I haven’t walked like that for a while, now. I got one of those jobs that you can’t get to by foot, bike, or public transportation. For the first time in my life, my morning starts with me getting into a car. I used to counter my new driving lifestyle by walking everywhere I could. But over the last few years, I’ve lost my patience for walking, preferring biking or driving for their more immediate gratification of getting me somewhere in minutes.

For the last week, though, my car has been broken. I’ve been walking every day, to the store for groceries, to Piedmont Avenue to get tea and write. It takes longer, but I’ve already seen a lot of things I would have missed if I had been speeding past at fifteen or thirty miles an hour. I found a tree full of ripe loquats, one of my favorite foods. I found a free stepstool, something I’ve been meaning to buy for years. I have exchanged commiserating glances with people under umbrellas in the unseasonable June storm. I have passed lots of people that I see every day in the coffee shop and who I didn’t realize were my neighbors. I’ve stood on the overpass that I usually drive or bike over and watched cars speeding below me, and marveled to think that this is happening all day and night, only a few hundred feet from my apartment. I have learned a lot about where I live, my habitat, and the places between my home and my destination.

The illustration is based on a photograph demonstrating healthy walking posture from Esther Gokhale's Eight Steps to a Pain-Free Back.

Lost Potential

When I told my graduate advisor I was hoping to teach at a community college, he asked me why I wanted to throw my career away.

“I want to teach someplace where everyone can go to school and where people are a little more equal with each other,” I said. “I don’t like all the hierarchy at the university.”

He gave me a pained look, like he had had this conversation before. “Everyone comes to a point in life when we must let go of our youthful ideals,” he said. “We need to make certain sacrifices in order to live a comfortable life.”

I’m embarrassed to say, these might have been somebody's youthful ideals, but not mine. In my youth, I loved the hierarchy of the university. Everyone has their rank and everyone knows their place. Tenured professors are at the top, then untenured ones, lecturers, graduate students, then undergraduates. And under them are all those who serve the academics: the poor janitors and cooks and security guards and secretaries who don't even know just how lowly they are, on the fringes of the real business of generating knowledge.

When I was an undergraduate, professors were nothing less than rock stars, amazing lucky bastards who had defeated insurmountable odds to achieve my dream job. I longed for the day when I would become one, when I would write the great, barely-comprehensible works of esoterica that would revolutionize literary studies for its rarified cadre of devotees and make me a household name in a very small, elite number of households.

As this dream became closer to a reality, it began to lose some of its luster. During graduate school, I worked as a cashier in a grocery store on weekends, and I found myself more comfortable with my coworkers than my graduate student colleagues. Many of my closest friends never finished high school. It didn’t matter. In the store, they were judged by how well they worked, how reliable they were, and how kind, how funny and clever. By the standards of the university, these workers would be off-the-charts low. If they enrolled in college in their mid-twenties, they would be “re-entry” students, the most marginalized sorts of undergraduates. They would never be the kind of people who really mattered at a university, the rock stars, recognized experts in their fields, people who demanded awe and respect.

A lot of my grocery store friends attended school at the local community college. There they paid affordable tuition to take classes with other students who were as varied as the workers at the store: young, old, parents, retirees, people starting over after layoffs or divorces, people from other countries. No one judged them because they hadn’t taken the traditional route straight from high school to college. All of them were untraditional in some way, and they all treated each other with respect. It sounded like a utopia to me: you mean you could take college classes without all that hierarchy? You could just pay your tuition, go to a class, study, all without being above somebody and below somebody else?

But once I started teaching at a community college, I saw that the students do have a sense of hierarchy, a hierarchy of institutions of higher learning, and they are at the bottom. My school is called Las Positas, but the students call it College Behind Costco, Thirteenth Grade, Lost Potential.

Having experienced both prestigious universities and community colleges, and having taught at both, I think the students get as good, or better, educations at the community college, where undergraduates are at the center of the institution instead of at the bottom.

When I taught at the university as a graduate student instructor, I was told repeatedly: don’t focus on your teaching. There were cautionary tales about young associate professors denied tenure because they had succumbed to the temptation of prioritizing their classes. There were the lessons we received in our single pedagogy course: don’t get too involved with your students. Don’t let them talk to you about their problems. They will try to suck your energy; don’t let them.

Talk to anyone trained to be a professor, and this ideology is evident. People in Ph.D. programs considering community college employment often say to me, “So, to get tenure in a community college, you don’t really need to publish that much.”

“You don’t need to publish at all,” I say. “All they care about is your teaching.”

“So, like, publications would look nice but that’s not their priority,” they say.

“No,” I say. “They don’t care at all about publishing. They would think of it as okay as long as it didn’t interfere with your teaching.”

They nod in understanding, but I can see that they are still perplexed, maybe even skeptical. How could they not care about publishing, I imagine them thinking? What else is there?

Community colleges are like bizarro universities. When I tell my colleagues that working at a community college was seen as throwing away my career, they are incredulous. But you’re still in academia, they say, baffled.

“They don’t consider community colleges to be academia,” I say. “They consider them to be teaching.”

For an academic researcher, our students would be the worst kind of distraction, teeming with the needs and demands that my pedagogy teacher warned me about. There are students with learning disabilities who flourish with some extra time and attention from their teachers, and there are students with such severe disabilities that some of their teachers question whether they should be in college. A high percentage of the students have lived through horrible trauma: medical crises, the death of siblings and parents, acute poverty and homelessness. Students come to my office hours with complaints ranging from family quarrels to mental health issues to car troubles to domestic abuse.

I remember similar students in the university. I would deflect their complaints, create distance, give them some canned speech about how everyone has personal troubles and we can’t allow them to interfere with our education. Now I can’t avoid these students and try not to get involved. Getting involved is part of my job description.

The worst part about teaching at a school that accepts everybody is that we have a large proportion of students who don’t care about their studies. Their parents are making them go, or they need to go to stay on their parents’ insurance plans, or they don’t know what else to do with themselves. They treat their studies as a chore and their teachers as bossy parents. They tell you that the reading assignments aren’t interesting, and when you ask them what topics would interest them, they say, “None, I guess.”

I always considered these students to be the major downside to teaching at a community college. But lately, many of my well-educated friends have confessed to having been these students in the past.

“Oh, that was me,” said a friend who is now working on a Ph.D. “When I was eighteen, I didn’t care about my community college classes at all. But later, when I was a little older and ready to go back, I knew where to go.”

That’s why I love community college. It is the opposite of the university, where everything rides on our performance for four years, where there’s no time for confusion and illness and insanity and waffling, where we will waste thousands of dollars if we mess this up. It’s not rock-star college; it’s garage-band college. It’s college for whoever wants it, whenever they want it, and if they need to leave for a while, it will still be here when they get back.

By the time I finished graduate school, I had even convinced my advisor of how great community colleges are, and he supported me in my new career. For me and for my students, it’s exactly the right place to be.

The illustration depicts a cover story from Las Positas College's Naked Magazine.

Good Pain/Bad Pain

“This doesn’t hurt,” says my yoga teacher, as we squirm our way into the forward-splits. “You know what hurts? Stepping on a thumbtack. No one ever steps on a thumbtack and says, hmm, interesting.”

He squishes the ball of his foot back and forth against the floorboards, a pensive look on his face.

“Hmm, yes. Maybe I’ll just push this a little further.” He grinds his foot hard into the floor.

“No one says that. If you step on a tack, you say, Ouch! Get this thing outta my foot! That’s how you can tell it’s pain. You want it to stop.”

Any yoga student needs to learn this lesson: the difference between pain and not pain.

But if you think it’s pain, doesn’t that make it pain, you might ask? Isn’t pain nothing more than a perception?

Okay, then, point taken. Any yoga student needs to learn the difference between good pain and bad pain. Good pain is the pain of breaking through things that bind you up and restrict your motion, bunchy muscles and scar tissue. Bad pain is the pain of injury, of debilitating yourself. Good pain makes you better. Bad pain makes you worse.

It’s similar to the difference between sorrow and depression. Sorrow is horrible pain that you don’t really want to go away. I just need this time to be sad, we say. I’m not ready to be cheered up yet. You’re sad about something, and you need the sadness to help you understand that something.

When you’re depressed, you would give anything to stop it, which is why it’s really cruel to tell depressed people to stop wallowing and pull themselves out of it. Your painful emotions aren’t helping you understand anything, because they’re illogical and disconnected from your experiences. It’s odd to even call them emotions or sadness, because those terms indicate a response to something in the world, and depression is a response to nothing. It’s bad pain, pain that tells you something is wrong, pain that is a sign of damage.

If we are too frightened of pain that hurts us, we may shy away from pain that helps us. Dropping your body weight onto your tight hamstrings feels horrible at first, like you are going to rip your muscle in two. This isn’t an irrational fear; stretch too far, too soon, and it might happen. But without pushing the limits of your physical comfort, you’ll never become more flexible and mobile. So you need to learn how to relax with the discomfort, and know when that discomfort crosses the line between helping pain and injuring pain.

As my yoga teacher talks about pain, I look over at a young, attractive South American woman who has worked her way into a pretty nice-looking split. She looks familiar, and then I remember: she used to come to my kickboxing school. For a few months, she was my frequent training partner, often the only other woman in the class. She had never done martial arts before, but she had an appealing enthusiasm for kicking and punching, throwing her full weight into her techniques and laughing happily as her fist smacked against the pads.

The only problem was, she fell in love with someone in the class. I could tell, because she began training with her hair down, her long, brown tresses slapping her face each time she threw a kick. Then one night, when she waved at me from across the room, I didn’t recognize her—she looked like a different girl, with a blanker face, a photoshopped version of herself. Upon closer inspection, it turned out she was wearing a full mask of evening makeup, her cheeks rouged, her eyes shadowed in deep, smoky gray. The next week, she showed up to a wrestling class wearing pearl earrings and a cashmere sweater that felt soft against my cheek as we took turns throwing each other onto the floor.

The day that the object of her affections rejected her advances, she stormed out of the school with the jaunty walk and forced smile of a woman who wouldn’t let a man get her down. “Goodbye!” she exclaimed to me and another student as she passed us, in a voice that held back tears.

The toughness of her exit—the exaggerated spring in her step, the grimness of the smile—made me hope that she would triumph over this pain, that she would be back the next day, or next week, to show her beloved that she was too proud to let him scare her out of a class that she seemed to be enjoying.

But she didn’t come back until a year later, only to repeat the same pattern: more makeup each night, tighter clothing, until two weeks later she left in a huff, this time for good. I never saw her again, until now, when she had appeared in my yoga class.

I could imagine why this girl didn’t want to continue attending a school with someone who had rejected her. I have dated people from my kickboxing school. When we broke up, it was painful to see them in class, to have my private unhappiness infiltrate the space where I usually escaped my problems. The awkward greetings at the beginning of class, watching my ex-boyfriend wrestle with a new female student, waving goodbye on the way out the door as he listened to a message on his cell phone—every interaction was like a sharp little punch in the stomach. But these punches were more like the splits than the thumbtack. They hurt for a minute, but then I got used to it, and really it wasn’t so bad.

Maybe that South American girl could have worked through the pain and continued training. But the very fact that she didn’t shows that martial arts wasn’t the right discipline for her, anyway. Learning to fight is all about expanding your notion of good pain to include things that would normally be seen as bad pain: getting punched in the face, kicked in the stomach, slammed on the floor. It turns out that that the boundaries between these types of pain are blurrier than you’d think. Good pain can cross over into bad when you get a little bruised, or bleed a little, or sprain your ankle. Or those things might be good pain, pain that strengthens us, depending on how much discomfort we are willing to accept. I consider black eyes and broken noses to be too much pain, but I’ve seen people I train with shake them off like a stubbed toe. Maybe a bruised ego or a bruised heart is too much pain to encounter several nights a week. It becomes a question of weighing damage against growth, judging how much you can stretch before you snap.

Getting in There

“I was thinking about your fight,” my friend Jim said to me.

It was one week after the fight. I had lost. Everything was great for about five days. I went to sparring class the day after the fight and sparred as well as I ever had. I couldn’t stop eating like I was cutting weight. Nothing but steamed vegetables and small portions of lean meat seemed like food. I couldn’t bring myself to drink more than half a glass of water at once. I kept waking up in the middle of the night wanting to do pull-ups. I was as high as a roundhouse kick to the head.

Then on Friday came the crash. I could barely pull myself out of bed. I couldn’t stop crying. I was sure my cat was going to die. And I was right—she died two weeks later. Everything was totally, totally messed up. I was a failure.

I ran into Jim while I was running errands on Saturday. The last thing I wanted to talk about was the fight. “Yeah, so I was wondering,” he asked. “How come you never kicked the girl really hard?”

I didn’t know what to say. Because she was flitting around really fast like a 110-pound girl can do and it was a little tricky to kick her at all? Because it was a tournament scored on points, so I was trying to kick her often, not hard? Because it looks a lot more impactful when you kick someone standing still holding a pad than a skinny little body in constant motion?

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. Truthfully, I was surprised to learn that I hadn’t kicked her hard. It was like asking a stand-up comedian why he didn’t tell any funny jokes.

I told one of my coaches about it later. “It’s easy to criticize someone’s fight," he told me. "What’s hard is to get in the ring and do it yourself.”

That’s something fighters say a lot: you have to give a person respect just for getting in there. Before I competed, it was one of those abstract things I understood in principle. It’s brave to fight a stranger in front of an audience. On that level, I understood it well, because I was too scared to do it. But afterwards, it meant something different. You can prepare as much as you want for a fight, but you have no idea what will happen once you are in the ring, who you will be fighting, or how you will be judged.

Martial arts teachers have to remind their students of this because the potential for thoughtless shit-talking is so high in a situation where new students are learning to critique their own form and technique. I’ve seen people running their mouths after tournaments: Bill should have kept his hands up better, a new student will say, shaking his head in disappointment. If the teacher overhears this, he’ll raise an eyebrow and say, I didn’t see you in that ring.

I have to be that teacher myself in my writing classes, talking students out of making comments that are thoughtless, insulting, or inane as they critique each others’ essays. Students who will readily admit that they don’t know how to use a comma and have never read an entire book are happy to slam away at other people’s writing with all the contempt of a New York Times critic. Anything that expresses an opinion is a rant, anything with complex sentence structures is torture, anything from before World War II is Old English.

They’re even worse about each other’s writing. On their peer response sheets, I had to make a rule against answering nothing to the question, What is the strongest part of the essay? Granted, there are many students who love to praise their classmates’ writing with as much unilateral enthusiasm as others like to criticize it. Neither approach will provide much useful help for a writer trying to improve a draft.

It’s easy to criticize other people’s writing—much, much easier than writing something oneself. Many of the things that aren’t working in writing are glaringly apparent, just like the things that aren’t working in a fight, and both give bystanders a sense of entitled outrage:

This paragraph doesn’t make any sense!
That guy kept punching you in the face!
You don’t have a main point!
Your kicks weren’t landing!

It’s easy to spot these obvious design flaws. Giving constructive feedback is more challenging. I know this as well as anyone. Constructive feedback is my job, and the fact that I give it quite well means I get paid one of those cushy, union-inflated government salaries. It’s not easy to look at a rough piece of writing, relax enough to make out the contours of what the author is trying to say, determine which parts are creating that meaning and which are detracting from it, and advise the author what to keep and what to change. I don’t want the students to be perfect at it. I just want them to turn off that automatic voice, the one that feels entitled to understand everything instantly and takes a confusing idea as a personal affront.

I think people are extra crotchety when critiquing writing because writing invades our brains, and so we take it very personally when we don’t like it. When we disagree with it, it has violated the sanctity of our thoughts by making us narrate the offending words. When we find it confusing or unclear, it has exhausted us by making us work to decode it. If, god forbid, we are forced (like my students) to read the entirety of something we dislike, we consider it as a waste of our precious time and brain cells, viewing it with a sense of persecution that we would never aim at reality television, marijuana, or Farmville.

Now that I’ve written a draft of a novel, I’ve gotten all kinds of responses, many positive, many critical. I’ve been lucky not to get too many mean ones, because the novel is only being read by people I know and who care about me. Occasionally I get one that hurts a little, though, because the person has rejected the novel wholesale:

I wasn’t sure what the point was.
I just didn’t like any of the characters.
I thought, why am I reading this?

Even though this kind of absolutely critical feedback is a little painful, I don’t mind it or feel upset at the people who voice it. When you put a piece of writing into the world, you expose yourself to far, far worse than that. Just like when you fight, you potentially expose yourself to be the idiot who got the crap beat out of him in front of an audience.

These are legitimate reactions when reading a book, and I’ve certainly felt this way about many books I’ve read. I probably wouldn’t tell them to the book’s author, though, because I can’t imagine how the author would fix these problems, or that they should. There’s no way this book will ever appeal to me. Like many books, including many of the world’s most celebrated works of literature, it’s not about people or things that interest me. If asked, I would probably say, “I just couldn’t get into it,” or “It wasn’t the kind of book I like” and be done with it.

I didn’t used to be so diplomatic. When I was my students’ age, I did at times rip into a work that didn’t suit my liking, whether amateur or celebrated.

That guy’s essay was total pretentious gibberish.
Jane Austen? How can anyone stand all that quipping?

Once I became a writing teacher, I stopped subjecting works-in-progress to this kind of criticism. But published writing, writing that was projected out into the world for public consumption and critique, was fair game.

Now, having experienced a taste of the other side, of being the writer as well as the consumer of writing, I think I will be as careful when I speak about someone’s writing as I am when I speak about their fighting. Even if I don’t like what they wrote, I will respect the fact that they wrote it and remember that it’s easier to pick apart a fight than to get in the ring yourself.

What to Eat

Girls, they never befriend me
‘Cause I fall asleep when they speak
Of all the calories they eat.
—Marina and the Diamonds



“Did you know that most people have four to seven impulse moments a day, lasting 2 to 3 minutes, in which they are tempted to indulge in unhealthy foods?”

“Changing your eating habits will be easier if you have a plan. Putting together a plan means setting goals, tracking your progress, finding support, and rewarding yourself.”

“Anorexia affects both the body and the mind…You think about food, dieting, and weight all the time.”

The passages above are from the Kaiser Permanente website. This is what my heath care provider tells me about eating. Everyone is obsessed with unhealthy food. You need to carefully plan and regulate what you eat. But don’t think too much about it; that’s an eating disorder.

After Sunday sparring class, my male training partners stand around and eat tangerines and compare their diets. Somebody has cut out all grains and dairy. Somebody else has been eating as much animal fats as he wants, but no refined sugar. Another person only eats raw vegetable matter. Our teacher has just finished a cleansing fast. Two people admit to drinking their own urine for medicinal purposes. This topic can last for hours; there’s just so much to say.

One of my favorite videos from my kung fu school shows myself and another woman sparring. The reason I like it because of the off-screen conversation that narrates our fight. Just behind the camera, my teacher is talking to the raw vegan student.

“What have you been eating lately?” my teacher’s voice asks.

“High protein diet,” says the vegan.

“Really?” asks my teacher. “Where are you getting your protein?”

“Broccoli,” says the vegan.

“Broccoli has protein?” my teacher asks.

“Sure, lots,” says the vegan. “I’ve been eating mostly broccoli, greens, bananas, sprouts…”

You can just imagine how hard it is to wrap up conversation on such a fascinating topic. It lasts longer than the two-minute sparring round, so I never get to hear the end of it, which always disappoints me.

The health teacher at the college where I work tells me that it’s typical of athletes to be obsessed with food. Martial artists might be worse than most, because they often need to drop below their optimal body weight to compete. That, and martial arts are a cross between a sport and a religion, so people tend to understand their physical demands as ethical imperatives. Maintaining a minimal body weight isn’t just a strategy for competition: it’s what the Shaolin monks would want you to do, if you were training with them on a mountaintop in China instead of here, in Oakland, across from a Pizza Hut.

I think about food a lot. I’m pretty sure everybody does. If it’s true, as they say, that women think about sex every three minutes, and men about twelve times more frequently than that, and if we need food more urgently than we need sex to ensure the survival of our species, then it stands to reason that food might cross our minds during those brief respites between sex thoughts.

When I am being polite, I try not to reveal my thoughts about food. It feels uncouth to reveal such an obsessive inner narrative, like exposing your sexual fantasies to a casual acquaintance.

And like revelations of sexual fantasies, not everyone reacts favorably to discussions about food. When I haven’t been careful enough, I’ve elicited negative responses ranging from That’s kind of neurotic to Being so obsessed with food is totally unfeminist to You are giving me an anxiety attack.

“I always wonder if eating too much fruit is bad for me,” I said to the health teacher one day.

We were having a conversation about nutritional science, a subject taught in her department. My question about fruit was meant as an example of why I thought nutrition was such an interesting field of study.

“Well, how much fruit do you eat?” she asked.

“In the summer, I let myself eat as much fruit as I want. Sometimes I eat a regular dinner and then a second dinner composed entirely of fruit.”

I saw her face stretching into an expression that communicated, Oh, you poor person, you have some kind of mental disorder.

“Did that sound crazy?” I asked.

“Listen to your wording,” she said. “You ‘let yourself.’”

Okay, it sounds a little neurotic, I’ll admit, the idea of giving oneself permission to eat some things and not others. But even Kaiser Permanente told me to have a plan. How else can someone maintain a healthy diet? Eat whatever they want, and hope it turns out to be healthy? If I didn’t give myself permission to eat some things and not others, I would eat cookies all day long.

It’s doublethink—“the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Make healthy choices about food…but don’t think about them! Just do it, do it unconsciously, do it right, and for god’s sake don’t talk about it!

Blind Dates

The tea shop I write in is a hot spot for blind dates. I am witnessing at least one of them right now. Amongst the students piled high in sweatpants and textbooks, the girlfriends grabbing dessert after a movie, and the weirdos like me, leaning over notebooks and staring out the window, are several couples, chatting over their tea. Which one of these pairs didn’t know of each other’s existence before a week ago?

That woman talking at length about how she came to accept her Filipino-American identity, while the guy across the table slouches his face into his hand and nods in understanding—they are way too comfortable to be on a blind date. Their later conversation reveals that they are gay best friends. That couple holding their cups in front of their faces, sipping their tea and barely speaking—a well-established relationship or a really bad blind date. Despite their reticence, they hold hands on the way out of the shop later on.

But the lady in the casual-but-cute outfit describing her time living in Tucson in a measured voice but with lots of hand gestures and words like cosmopolitan and juggernaut while her male companion drops the lid of his teapot loudly onto the table—these people have never met each other before, I’m sure of it.

The man takes out his phone to check the time.

“Wow, that’s a shiny phone,” the woman says. “Is it heavier than an i-phone?” She and the man take turns weighing two phones against each other in their hands.

This is the way you can tell the blind dates: their victims are talking about nothing. Either that, or narrating their entire life stories in a way we would never do to either a friend or a regular stranger. I was born in Hawaii, but I moved to Pennsylvania when I was a month old…I went to Berkeley for college and the University of Michigan for graduate school. It’s like a job interview, except both parties are being interviewed at once, and no one is relaxed.

I never wanted this sort of thing to happen to me. But my friend told me I had to do it. You haven’t even tried, she would scold me. How can you say you hate something if you haven’t tried it? She is married and has been with her husband for ten years. I suppose the idea of an awkward evening with a lonely stranger appeals to someone at such a point in life. It sounds fun, she told me. If I were single, I would totally do it!

Eventually I caved under the pressure and went on a handful of my own blind dates, one of them in this very tea shop. It was a perfectly nice little date. We had a lovely conversation about our families and what kind of music we liked. I asked him about his job. He was a film editor. It seemed like a pretty cool job to me. Someone would have to be passionate about an artistic job like that. It’s the kind of job people love. Did he love it?

Not really, he told me. It just paid the bills. He had gotten a two-year-degree that qualified him to do it, and it had provided him with stable work editing commercials for beer and prescription drugs. He performed his duties faithfully, with neither relish nor disgust.

What he really wanted to do was be in a band. “It was always my dream,” he told me, “but I can’t even play an instrument.”

“You could learn,” I said. “You should learn to play an instrument and then start a band!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, sounding dejected. “You have to be good if you really want to be in a decent band.”

Well that’s silly, I thought. “You work at it until you get good.”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think you need to have some kind of talent to begin with. I’d know by now if I were supposed to be a musician.”

Later, as I recounted this episode to my pro-blind-date friend, I felt like an episode of Seinfeld, with my ridiculous fussy reason for not seeing him again. I couldn’t even find concise words to encapsulate the problem.

“He wasn’t passionate about anything,” I tried. Well, that wasn’t true. He was passionate about the bands he liked to listen to. He had told me about a few already, adding that we should go to a show sometime.

“He didn’t have anything he was proud of,” I tried again. But this was still wrong. He was quite proud of his fancy stereo system, which he had described to me in loving detail.

“He wasn’t creative?” my friend suggested.

I’m not sure if this was dead-on, but it was at least a little closer. I wouldn’t need him to be traditionally creative, just to create something. It could be anything: a song, a poem, a computer program, a dinner, an automotive transmission. A perfectly edited beer commercial. Anything. Just something he cared about, something that he had actually done himself.

Considering I couldn’t describe this criterion in something shorter than a paragraph, it seemed like a petty reason not to date somebody. That’s how I felt after every blind date I ever went on, all four of them. Non-creative guy was my last one. I couldn’t take it anymore, shopping for people online like shoes, callously sending back each pair that didn’t fit my fussy standards. I emailed him and told him I didn’t plan to see him again. He took the rejection poorly, with lots of complaining and bafflement.

A week later, I sat in the tea shop, writing in my journal about how I regretted hurting the guy’s feelings. Maybe I should have given him a chance, I wrote. How would I even know if I liked somebody after one date?

This was the heart of the problem: how can people be attracted to somebody based on a date? Or two dates, or six, or twenty? How can you develop feelings for somebody that you only ever meet out of context, never observing how he deals with a challenge, or treats his friends, or does something he’s really good at, or does anything at all besides sit and drink tea and talk?

Should I go out with him one more time, I wrote? Or give up this whole dating thing altogether?

As if in answer to my question, I looked up and saw him walking past the window of the tea shop.

What is he doing here? In Oakland. In my neighborhood. In front of the tea shop that I told him I spent all my time in. He lived in San Francisco, and had talked about Oakland like it was an exotic vacation spot that he had never before visited. Was he trying to find me? Was he stalking me?

He walked by the window once more, then checked his watch and walked in, right past my table.

“Hi,” I said as he walked by.

“Oh, hi,” he said, looking surprised. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said, confused. “Funny seeing you here.”

“I’m meeting somebody,” he said, looking around. “Oh, there she is!” He walked to the back of the coffee shop, sat down across from a woman about my age, and began a stiff conversation.

“Uncreative Guy stole your date spot?” my pro-blind-date friend said, when I told her the story that night. She was laughing so hard she could barely talk. “That’s classic! He’s not even creative enough to come up with a new place to go.”

I suppose this showed that my intuition had been right: he really wasn’t very creative. Or maybe just not very wise. Either way, I had made the right choice.

I think what I hate about blind dates is really what I hate about dating in general: that it is treating a person like a commodity. But I don’t see any way around it. That’s how we get things. We shop for everything else we need: food, clothing, shelter, a school, a car. I suppose shopping for a mate is like shopping for a job. We all hate to do it, but we’re scared of where we’ll end up if we don’t.

Pink

I love pink. It looks like health, spring, rosebuds and the cheeks of babies. Of all the decorative items in my apartment, I would approximate that forty percent are pink. Pink tapestry on the wall, pink glass votive holders, dusty pink velvet upholstering my dining chairs, pink stripes and spots on the leaves of my houseplants.

I have enough pink clothing to assemble an entire fuchsia outfit, hat-to-shoes. I did it one time in order to try to get excused from a jury. It didn’t work, so I sat at the day-long trial dressed like punk Barbie. The defendant, accused of assault with a deadly weapon, gave me a big smile as he entered the courtroom.

If he wanted his own pink outfit, he was out of luck, because in America, men don’t wear pink. That’s the only rule we have for colors. Everyone else can wear any color they please, but for half the population, sorry, no pink.

You might argue that there are other rules for wearing colors. You can’t wear a white dress to a wedding if you’re not the bride, and if you live in a neighborhood with gangs, your high school won’t permit you to come to class in red or blue. You can’t dress your baby girl in blue—unless it is a blue flowered dress with ruffles, in which case you can. A few limited rules…but when the guest leaves the wedding, or the student leaves the neighborhood, or the girl gets past the age of about two years old, then they are all free to wear any color without earning any concerned glances or snide comments.

Baby boys, on the other hand, are never dressed in pink clothes. There are plenty of flowery blue baby dresses, but there are no rugged boyish pink baseball jerseys covered in pink dinosaurs or pink fire trucks, because boys just don’t wear pink, period.

We all know the rule is arbitrary. At the beginning of the century, pink was the color for boys, a variation of aggressive red, while tranquil blue was appropriate for girls.

Still, like all our bizarre cultural mores, it seems only natural that pink is not for boys. A recent study tried to demonstrate the naturalness of this association, claiming that women have a greater innate preference for pink than men do, all the better for performing primitive women’s duties like finding ripe berries and determining if a child has a fever.

The methodology of this study was widely considered unsound, but it’s easy to see where they got their hypothesis. Little girls seem to love pink as soon as they love anything, just like all my friends’ sons have been obsessed with trains and garbage trucks since they were old enough to point and squeal. Pink was one of my favorite colors (second to red) when I was little, until mid-elementary school, when I decided that green better represented the non-frivolous person I wanted to be. But pink worked itself back into heavy rotation in my clothing during graduate school, when I didn’t care whether I was frivolous anymore.

For the first two years that I studied martial arts, I avoided wearing anything pink to class. I was often offered pink gear: We have pink boxing gloves made especially for women!

I didn’t want any part of it. I had seen women who wore pink boxing gloves, and there were two types of them. The first type were martial arts newbies who wanted to show that they were still cute and feminine, even thought they were learning to fight. That type made up approximately ninety-five percent of the pink-gloved girls. The other five percent—meaning maybe two women I knew of—were straight up badasses who could easily take out a man twice their size. They wore pink as war paint, a challenge to anyone who dared to view them as cute.

I knew I wasn’t that second type of woman, and I didn’t want to be the first type, so I avoided all pink. Not just in my equipment, but also in any clothing I wore to my martial arts schools, including my training clothes and my street clothes. I didn’t want my male training partners to think of me as female, so like a baby boy, I wore blue, grey, orange, red, anything but pink.

Eventually I got so used to avoiding the pink shoes and t-shirts that make up a good percentage of my wardrobe that I forgot I was doing it. One day, a male classmate made a comment about pink being my favorite color. How did he know, I wondered?

“It’s a joke,” he explained. “You’re not the kind of girl who wears pink.”

“I’m not?” I asked, surprised. Why would he think that? Then I remembered: because I never wore it to class. Like the self-monitoring prisoners in Foucault’s panopticon, I had enforced the masculine no-pink rule upon myself.

After that, I started wearing pink all the time. I would wear my pink motorcycle boots to and from class, and pink t-shirts when I trained. I wasn’t scary enough to become a type-two pink-gloves girl, but I was secure enough to stop pretending I was a boy.

Lately, though, the boys at one of my kickboxing schools have taken to wearing pink. It started with some bright pink kickboxing shorts that the school was selling. They only came in sizes so tiny that none of the women could fit our curvy hips into them. They sat unpurchased in the display case until the very small, but decidedly male, Thai teacher started wearing a pair.

Of course, being a non-American, he probably didn’t believe that pink was a girls’ color. In Thailand, pink is traditionally associated with Tuesday and recently has been worn to show support for ailing king Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Whatever his own associations with the color were, leading class in his pink shorts, he was like the type-two pink-gloves girls, a tiny badass fighter daring you to look askance at his shorts so he’d have a reason to kick your head off. Soon he began adding more pink to his outfit: pink t-shirt, pink hand wraps, pink ankle supports.

Then all the boys at the school started wearing pink. The school purchased multiple shipments of pink handwraps to keep up with the demand. I suppose they are using the color to show that they are type-two scary men like their teacher. Or maybe they just think it's pretty.

Coke Chunhawat