Support Sharrows

The LACBC has drafted a letter to the mayor in support of sharrows. These are chevrons painted in the middle of the rightmost lane that indicate that the lane should be shared with cyclists. Many cyclists (including me) prefer them to bike lanes. Most of the bike lanes in LA feature parked cars to the right and the always impending danger of driver-side doors suddenly opening into the bike lane.

Sharrows are all over Portland and San Francisco and working great in those cities. Here in LA County, however, the only sharrows to be found are in Pasadena. (And Westwood, apparently - the above image is from an la.streetsblog.org article on the sharrows recently painted on the UCLA campus.)

Sharrows are so cheap that there's really no excuse they aren't on every single right-hand lane in Los Angeles. All they do is indicate something that's already the law: that all vehicles must share the road and that cyclists may occupy the full lane when their safety requires it.

Here's the text for the petition:

http://lacbc.wordpress.com/

There's no form to fill out, you just have to copy the text into your own email client.

Let's show the mayor that quite a few people support a more bikeable LA.

3 Morning Pages

Lately, it feels difficult to keep up with life. I injured my left arm somewhat seriously and have not been able to bike for the last seven weeks. Being deprived of what was my primary mode of transportation really put a damper on things, and put me in a funk that I'm just starting to shake off. Non-essential activities like writing for this blog have fallen by the wayside.

But I'm back! And here, in lieu of many half-conceived posts about the 2009 LA Bicycle Summit or modal equity or alternatives to capitalism or my revelations about the power of saying Hello or a million other topics that have run through my mind since January, are three morning pages that roughly encapsulate the form and content of my current life.

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4/16/2009

Whoa, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. Had a headache from all those oreos and falling asleep dehydrated the night before. Checked the calendar, and had to reschedule my PT appointment because it was 9:30 and I would run at least 30 minutes late. C was not happy about being rushed and having a lot of work in front of her. We got there on time, but I was pretty out of it the whole ride. Then when she dropped me off, I forgot my running shoes. I had been all ready to turn around this shitty day by banging out that 9 mile run, but it's now pretty impossible with my shoes on the passenger seat and all. OK. New plan. Do morning pages (not a bad fate), text C that my shoes are in her car, read Clarice's friend's book, text C that my memoir class files are starred in gmail and ask if she has a chance to print them out, have lunch, bike to PT (need to get locks ready beforehand), coast back, go for run (2 - 3:30), come back and have plenty of time to call my mom and arrange ride for tomorrow, eat, read Clarice's book, stretch, maybe even do yoga, then ride the metro to class (need to get on at 6 and not be late this time). Have class, go home, the end.

Dillon's friends are talking in the living room. They are waking up, having a civil argument about who is going to drive who where. This guy does not want to wake up. I think it's the same guy who made me feel really icky yesterday with his comments on how all people are selfish and the media is "75% liberal." I was really thrown off by the things he said, didn't know how to respond to them but felt obligated to. He said "meat-eating" Americans would abuse a single-payer universal healthcare system. He kept interrupting me. He said that we are evolved to be selfish and greedy and communism will never work. I wanted to make a critique of global economic capitalism, and I managed to say that it has produced enormous inequality. But I didn't get to say that it's predatory and unfair. I made the point that the media supports the state. Dillon said that he sees a lot of trendy talk about causes but not a lot of people taking action to help the homeless around them. I tried to respond to him and say that I would be down to take action on local, local problems anytime. I am all about the local. This was also meant as a response to Billy's idea that people in college are idealistic but when it comes to taking care of themselves after college, those ideals take a backseat.

Anyway, as you can see the whole conversation stuck with me. Mainly because the chaotic force of Billy disrupted any sense I was making of it. It stunned me all night, left me with the question (which only Caroline Heldman might be able to answer): how can one speak to a person like that, already so convinced of his worldview and willing to be pushy and loud in espousing it? I want to blog about it. I also want to keep taking more actions, with my roommates, my neighbors in the apartment, the CRA-LA advisory committee meetings for rebuilding my neighborhood. It's been a theme of my life for quite some time now that I want to prove wrong all those people (my dad, guys like Billy) who claim that nobody really cares and anyway the actions of one person don't matter. That's not true. I'll be biking and saying hi and protecting pedestrians and eating vegan and monitoring local government. And working on attending the CRA meetings and talking more to my neighbors.

We mentioned that laziness, imperfection can hold us back (Dillon and I did). So it's important that I take care of my health, spiritually through friendships, family, and AA, physically by exercising, doing my PT, and eating well (no oreos all night!) and materially by taking care of money matters and trying not to be so stressed about that. I want to participate more, I've been feeling kind of removed and lazy the past week. Even though I got a lot of recruiting done yesterday, it still felt like staying inside, overeating, and being on the computer. Not good.

Let today unfold and let me be a part of the unfolding. (This is a prayer that I say every day). May I realized that life involves many people, places and things I don't control. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better serve others. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to the power of powerlessness as a way of life. May I be humble and compassionate always, and may all beings be free from suffering.

Elaine hasn't called me back in a long time. Maybe she knows that I've been kind of stagnating. Maybe she is going through something. I hope she's OK.

Car-free Fridays!

The last Friday of every month is car-free Friday in Los Angeles, sponsored by the LACBC.

Apparently City Council President Eric Garcetti will be joining riders on their route from Hollywood to City Hall tomorrow morning.

I'll be riding from Pico-Union to West Hollywood at 3 pm if anyone wants to join me.

This is a nice, simple way for cyclists to focus our energy. I'd like to get one or two new people riding on the roads with me each month. The press release is right: we can build our energy, one person at a time, one ride at a time. Once a month can turn into once a week can turn into every day! Incremental change matters. We'll have that many more constituents on board when we talk about sharrows and bike lanes. We'll have that many more drivers that are used to sharing the road with bicycles.

Woo!

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Gladly Do Again

This is only the second of Wallace's books that I've read, and I approached this text hoping for some resolutions to the seemingly irresolvable Infinite Jest. I finished Infinite Jest about a year ago but couldn't finish thinking about it. I could stop thinking about it for periods of time, but was perpetually working on a review of the book, perpetually trying to decide what I thought of it. Did I hate it? Was I moved by it? I was both, and could not let it go.

I find myself in a quite similar situation: I want to have something quite profound and final to say about A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, but instead I find I must live with it in my head (and in my bookbag), unable as I am to make the final move of placing it back on the shelf. Even just writing this post, I keep telling myself not to worry about including every observation I have about the book. If I didn't tell myself this, I'd be here forever and the post would never go up. Perhaps my inability to reach a conclusion (either in writing, i.e. a logical conclusion, or in reading, i.e. putting the book down and moving on to another) is a testament to the conclusiveness of Wallace's essays. They seem to make every observation that could be made; they anticipate every counterargument that could be advanced; they track the reader's every instinctive reaction. They are not unlike Infinite Jest in this sense: everything's in there.

Even taking a shallow look at the Table of Contents proves that Wallace can write about anything. (Oh God, I just sounded like one of the thousand male critics that have gay crushes on Wallace. I spent most of last year hating those critics and their substanceless praise for Infinite Jest. They had far more to say about the author's mental capacity than about the work itself. According to them, Wallace is "brilliant" and a "genius." He's our generation's Pynchon. He can write about anything.) The essays concern: 1. Amateur Tennis 2. Television and Contemporary Fiction 3. The Illinois State Fair 4. Poststructural Literary Criticism 5. Filmmaker David Lynch 6. Professional Tennis 7. A Caribbean Cruise. Damn. The most exciting page turn of the entire book, I submit, is from the last page of essay 3, in which Wallace gazes at the bulging belly of a yuppie suspended high in the Illinois air by the cables of a bungee-like carnival contraption; to the first page of essay 4, which begins "In the 1960s the poststructuralist metacritics came along and turned literary aesthetics on its head..."

Damn.

The two things that really excited me about this book, though, are that 1) Wallace has something optimistic and redeeming to say about television, which surprised me given the fact that the dystopia imagined in Infinite Jest revolves around a society whose members literally die because they cannot stop watching TV, and 2) Wallace doubts himself and even self-deprecates in these essays, which demonstrates that he is not the dick that his omniscient narrator in Infinite Jest often is.

Let me talk about 1) first. Essay 2, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" may be the piece of writing I have spent the most time discussing with friends, often going so far as to read chunks of the essay out loud. The essay's first major point is that Joe Briefcase, an average American watching six hours a day of TV (the average as of 1990), is a teleholic. Television promises to solve Joe's lonely life with shows full of excitement and interaction, while at the same time keeping Joe's life lonely by keeping him in front of the TV six hours a day. Wallace manages to make this point without writing off television as altogether evil; in fact, he professes his annoyance with critics who do so. Conclusion: read this essay. This is the most important thing I will say in this post. You will learn about who you are when you sit before the large flickering screens that occupy a percentage of our lives second only to sleep. You can find it online here, but I recommend getting your hands on a copy of the book so that you don't have to experience the dissonance of reading this essay in front of a screen not dissimilar from a TV screen.

As I mentioned above, I'm also very glad to learn that Wallace can displace and doubt his own point of view. He is culpable and fallible in these essays. In essays 3 and 7, which were both journalistic assignments from Harper's magazine, he's present in the first-person far more than a conventional reporter. Notably, in these appearances he's more often bumbling than anything else: losing at chess to a 9-year old girl, getting nauseous with fear just looking at carnival rides, trying to flirt with the female staffer who makes his bed on the cruise.

This deprecating self-consciousness has twofold significance for me. First, it might save Infinite Jest. A few other tidbits from A Supposedly Fun Thing helped: for example, Wallace's admiration for what he decides is pure expressionism in David Lynch's movies combined with extra information about his junior tennis career and his personal entertainment consumption habits allow one to recast Infinite Jest as a kind of fictionalized autobiography. This makes its dystopia less snide, more forgivable for being the author's personal future nightmare. It deflates what originally seemed to be a claim that this nightmare awaited us all, as a society. Perhaps DFW just wants to express his fears.

The main difficulty in reading Infinite Jest as expressionism without also reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is IJ's omniscient narrator. The problem of the narrator really plagued IJ: sometimes the narrator appears to be Hal, sometimes the story is told from Joelle's point of view, sometimes the narrator is omniscient. Worst of all, the omniscient narrator displays a subtle-yet-present brand of misogyny and homophobia. He's an asshole, when you really look. It becomes very hard to like Infinite Jest if one concludes that it endorses these oppressive (and sometimes just downright mean) attitudes. The self-deprecating narrator that speaks in A Supposedly Fun Thing introduces the possibility that IJ's omniscient narrator could be imperfect and wrong just like the rest of us, and perhaps DFW just wanted to display that narrator in all his fucked-up ideologies as well as his "brilliant" and "genius" observations.

Second, the fallible and clumsy narrator is just one key element of what I believe is really DFW's enduring gift to us all: his style. This narrator allows him to be intellectual and readable at the same time. He can discuss poststructural metacriticism in all its jargon-y details, but he eventually comes back down to a kind of individualized layman's truth:

"For those of us civilians who know in our gut that writing is an act of communication between one human being and another, the whole question seems sort of arcane."

He can make up words and employ an enormous vocabulary, use layers of footnotes and a seemingly endless reserve of knowledge and research, but often his best points are made after his famously long and diagrammable sentences, in a short and plain summary sentence:

... Still, for the fact that individual American human beings are consuming vulgar, prurient, dumb stuff at the astounding average per-household dose of six hours a day - for this both TV and we need to answer. We are responsible basically because nobody is holding any weapons on us forcing us to spend amounts of time second only to sleep doing something that is, when you come right down to it, not good for us. Sorry to be a killjoy, but there it is: six hours a day is not good.

Wallace's human narrator - himself - tones down some of his most condemning points about humanity. When the statement involves a personal expression of Wallace's, we read it not as ideological tome but as unavoidable, real, human:

... the promise to sate the part of me that always and only WANTS - is the central fantasy the [cruiseliner's] brochure is selling. The thing to notice is that the real fantasy here isn't that this promise will be kept, but that such a promise is keepable at all. This is a big one, this lie. And of course, I want to believe it - fuck the Buddha - I want to believe that maybe this Ultimate Fantasy Vacation will be enough pampering, that this time the luxury and pleasure will be so completely and faultlessly administered that my Infantile part will be sated.

Here Wallace can't help but interject his own feelings, even going so far as to use the uncharacteristic and not very diagrammable dash. Fuck the buddha, he says, and it makes concrete this detailed and abstract point about the human condition.

I'm not done with this book (well, I have read the whole thing, but that's not what I mean) and I'm not done with Wallace, I can tell. This is embarassing, but when I am feeling delusions of grandeur I sometimes think that he is the Eliot to my Crane. I can't seem to get past him.

Parking enforcement is cruising

It's just after midnight, and it just started to rain (hooray! we need it). While I was taking a porch break I saw an LAPD parking enforcement car cruising the street behind my building.

Damn, they issue tickets in the middle of the night? Poor officer that has to do that job.

I wonder if they train them to drive their Priuses efficiently. Those things do awesome at slow speeds with lots of stopping.

A few minutes after the parking enforcement went by, a couple pedestrians ambled along. I could see them past the empty lot, framed by cacti, which is now greening with the recent rain. I love my neighborhood.

Seriously.

No On Proposition 8!!

Never Use Monistat again.

In case there was ever any doubt as to my sex (and there is and should be; Curbed LA recently referred to me as a "he" and my presentation is generally androgenous), this post will put it to rest.

I hesitated to write this post because the subject matter is certainly not dignified. You would not find this discussed in Virginia Quarterly Review, for example. But if a blog can function as a citizens' information network, this is certainly the type of information I believe should be circulated: information that empowers us to act independently of advertiser's wishes and take control of our own bodies.

I have a clove of garlic in my vagina.

A few days ago, I started to get a yeast infection. Being broke and generally averse to sticking synthetic, expensive anti-fungal agents (Monistat and co.) into my vagina, I decided to try some home remedies.

Yesterday morning, following the advice of this website, I cut a notch in a peeled clove of garlic and tied some floss around it as a rescue string. I then stuck it up there. I left it in for 8 hours, took it out, went to sleep, and then stuck another clove in this morning. I've also been drinking cranberry juice and eating soy yogurt and miso soup for the live acidophilus cultures.

It's working brilliantly! Garlic doesn't ooze out disgustingly like Monistat, and it has completely relieved my itching. It's less noticeable than a tampon when its in.

I recommend it, if you're unfortunate enough to get an infection. And I recommend visiting the website I linked above, if you want the full and complete DIY on yeasties.