Same Shit, Different Toilet

I started at my new place of employment this week, sub-contracting at a Client that deals in oil drilling, transporting, and distribution.

My on-boarding was a mess since I was catching the tail end of a Sprint cycle; everyone was hustling to meet their marks. First day, they basically tossed a laptop at me and a gig worth of documentation to read up on.

The place is pretty state-of-the-art. They've got monitors on those adjustable arms so you can position the screens all over the desk at your whim. The desk and chairs both have motorized adjustment mechanisms with four memory settings, I guess in case there are days you feel like sitting high and other days you feel like lying back.

These big blue-chip index companies are pretty damn strict about their policies, particularly in regards to safety and privacy. The first two days comprised primarily of reading these handbooks, and then I had to take these dumb quizzes over the material. I call them dumb because if you answered a question incorrectly, it displayed the correct answer and asked you to try again.

I read the first handbook thoroughly because I didn't want to be "that guy" who failed the on-boarding quizzes, but then I realized that there was no way to fail, so I just clicked through the rest of the material.

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It was mid-week by the time I'd gone through the on-boarding material and was given my laptop, account, and on-line access. I have a buddy, Nick, from high school who I knew was contracting at The Client, but at another building downtown, so the first thing I did was pull up his name on the internal chat messenger and catch up.

The Client licenses this software called WorkPace, which advertises itself as a way to help "achieve safe and healthy work habits." It's basically this process that runs in the background and keeps track of how active you've been at your computer -- how fast your mouse is moving around, how often you're clicking, how fast your keystrokes are -- and tries to remind you to rest if you breach a certain threshold.

The threshold on my machine had been set to 75 words per minute. I easily sustain close to 90 words a minute casually.

Almost as soon as I began chatting with Nick, the little WorkPace panel started popping up, telling me to chill out and take a break. And because of my machine-gun-esque typing, the panel popped up every five or ten minutes, trying to slow me down.

I mentioned this up to Nick, and he told me that he ignores it. That he likes to sometimes type as fast as he can and see if he can make the little smiley face frown.

I thought that was something I'd like to see, so I began chatting and writing e-mails as vigorously as I could. Turns out, the smiley face never frowns. It keeps smiling until it locks your damn machine up and sends a warning message to somebody somewhere, probably telling them that there's a little dick in room C1202 that won't comply to company safety policies.

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Sporadically, these animated windows pop up on the screen with directions for various at-your-seat stretching exercises, and it displays a thirty-second timer to practice it. One of the exercises is to stare at the lower corner of the monitor and allow your eyes to drift, to rest and relax your mind and eyes at the same time.

I've always liked to just let my eyes to wander low and away, not to relax, per se, but because I'm a bit of a sloth and it lets my mind float lazily while looking semi-busy. I always wondered, whenever I did things like that, how all my co-workers always managed to have something to do and were always so diligent about it. I wondered if other people were just moseying around, trying to look busy like I was doing, or if they were actually more productive than me.

Now, I can do it with a guilty-free conscience, knowing that everybody around me has to do it too.

LA Trip: Day 3 & 4

By day three, I was burnt. Literally and figuratively.

I'd spent the last two days in a row walking along the beach under the sun drinking nothing but alcohol. And that's a generally bad idea.

My skin was peeling and my head was pounding, and I feel like I'm at an age now where I tend to listen to and abide by what my body tells me. So I stayed in bed straight through the day till the sun had gone down.

Found a small phở shop near Manhattan Beach for dinner. Turned out, however, that there wasn't a single Vietnamese person in the place -- it was owned and run by Japanese.

The food was terrible and expensive as fuck all.

-

I got a hold of Audrey late at night, and I met up with her downtown for some aimless walking around. Audrey is a chick I'd met some time ago through mutual friends. We circled Little Tokyo and landed at a mom and pop Ramen shop for a late night meal at around 2am.

There was a sign-up sheet on a clipboard at the door to sign your name and wait for it to be called for seating. When Audrey and I arrived, we were the only names on the list and caught the last available seats.

After we'd been seated, I noticed a large group of maybe six to eight people sign their name on the list and then loitered outside the door on the streets. Another large group of similar size appeared after them, signed the sheet, and also dawdled about on the sidewalk.

That was one of the most peculiar things I'd ever seen. That shit would never fly back in Texas. It's hot as fuck down South, and people are grumpy and impatient; I'd have never waited in line like that for food.

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Because I'd gotten a hold of Audrey so late in the night and on the tail end of my trip, we agreed to hang out again the next morning before my flight home. She took me for a trip to Chinatown, which she refers to as "old" Chinatown because apparently there are newer, "unofficial" Chinatowns, kinda like the one I went to in San Gabriel Valley on my first night.

We checked out bootleg "Adiaas" and "Pumu" shops and haggled prices with street vendors over imposter beanie babies.

There was a sign set up in the manner of the famous Hollywood sign that read, "Chinatownland." I'm not sure why "land" was suffixed at the end of it.

I was looking for a street vendor that was willing to chop a live chicken's head off for me a la Chris Tucker's character from Rush Hour 2, but no luck.

-

I milked practically every minute of my trip, and was the absolute last person to board my flight, catching it just as they were closing the boarding door.

Had I been just a minute slower, I would not have been allowed to take that trip back to tedious work life and shit weather.

LA Trip: Day 2

Early the next morning, I rolled out to the Santa Monica strip, which was a recommendation of a drunk guy from one of the bars on Venice Beach. Santa Monica Beach is the beach you normally see in movies or on TV where there are big steroid addicts pumping iron along the beach front.

It's also home to a community of pothead bums.

The first sight I saw of Santa Monica Beach was a crowd of people gathered around a performer, a fast-talking Jamaican fellow with some pretty clever quips. He did a flip off of a chair and landed on a pile of broken glass, and then demanded everyone donate money into a black box. When the crowd dispersed, he angrily cursed at them for not being generous.

I thought it was peculiar for a beggar to get angry at people who wouldn't give him money, but I quickly discovered that this was actually the norm around here.

The next sight was a mime, who quickly demanded money as soon as he noticed me staring. Mimes don't fucking talk, asshole.

Around noon, a small camera crew set up around a graffitied wall and started a photoshoot with some bikini model. She was pretty damn hot, so I stood around and watched. Pretty soon a crowd of people gathered around, staring at her go through her poses. I always imagined models were sequestered on some artificial set or at least shielded from onlookers, but apparently not. By the time she was finished, there were a good dozen or more guys just standing around ogling her.

Welcome to the West Coast, Lucky, you ignorant little country boy.

The most astonishing thing I saw at Santa Monica was a gazebo along the beach, and sitting in this gazebo were two white kids in probably their early twenties and an old Asian lady in probably her fifties. And the three of them were passing around a blunt. At two in the afternoon on a weekday.

In fact, there were fully grown men and women riding their bikes along the beach, smoking marijuana, and just taking naps in the grass in the buttfuck middle of the day. California is an expensive ass place to live in; if everyone's high on the beach at two in the afternoon, who the fuck is working and paying the bills?

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I finished the afternoon at a homey little bar that feels like someone had just set up in an alleyway between two buildings and threw a roof over it. It was a bar in the classic sense, with a woodgrain counter and stools, and an old balding bartender with a full beard of white and lots of stories to tell.

I always wanted to find a bar like this back home -- a hole in the wall with bottles that aren't filled with piss liquor and a bartender that knows how to mix his drinks and tell his tales.

He carried the conversation while I muled over a Van Winkle Mint Julep, telling stories of his younger construction worker days, and of the kids that worked alongside him that lost their arms or legs or even heads to accidents.

As the five o'clock hour approached, the working class shuffled into the bar to wash away their tediums. An old school jazzy song played in the background, and the bartender mixed drinks and entertained his patrons.

I made idle chatter with the locals, trying my best but failing at pretending to not be a tourist. I talked mostly about the software industry in the area and in the Bay Area, where it has a stronger presence. I honestly don't know how serious I was about it, but I was curious if a kid like me could stack paper out West.

-

Dinner was served through a door. Literally.

I ate a Mexican dish in an alleyway, right next to a door that led to a kitchen. It was a split door where the top half opened while the lower half stayed shut, and a Mexican dude took and served orders through it.

I don't remember what the plate was called, but it was beef and chicken cooked into a doughy tortilla looking thing. It was fucking delicious. And for two bucks a plate, I took two more orders for the road.

-

At around midnight, I met up with Dylan, a good friend of mine from high school who had packed up his things several years ago and drove west out to Hollywood to pursue a career in the film industry -- which the locals refer to as The industry.

He showed me to a dive bar in West Hollywood that was supposed to be a popular place among the college aged kids. There were beer pong tables set up and various other drinking games. That particular night, however, was unfortunately barren and dead.

We killed maybe three pitchers of Dos Equis anyway before last call. We took a pit stop by a gas station on the way back to Dylan's apartment and grabbed three cases of beer. Apparently, they can sell beer a lot later in LA than they do back home.

Drank until the morning hours, talking about work, life, religion, and all the topics that you regret talking about as soon as you start. Crashed at Dylan's apartment.

LA Trip: Day 1

Less than twelve hours after getting home from DC, I was back on a plane, Los Angeles bound.

Everybody always talks about the weather in LA. They always say how great it is, how perfect it is. Coming from Texas, nothing anybody ever told me prepared me for it. It's beyond perfect -- to the point that only an anecdote could come remotely close to describing.

My plane touched down at 3pm. It was the better part of an hour before baggage claim came through and another for the Budget shuttle to pick me up and take me to the car rental place. And then, there was another hour of wait before they could give me a car because the genius behind the counter gave my car away to the guy that was directly in front of me in line.

Three hours after landing, I hopped in a silver Ford Cobalt and jumped on the freeway.

Into traffic.

There is no rhyme or reason to LA's traffic, seemingly. Back home, when there's traffic, it's because there's construction or a car accident or some other form of obstruction. Not in LA. In LA, there's just traffic. You get in your car and sit in traffic, and then traffic rolls along to your destination, and that's it. There's no cause for the traffic; it's just there.

At 8PM, I rolled into a Chinese hot pot shop in San Gabriel Valley. By the time I stepped out of my car, it'd been twelve hours since my last meal.

But the second I stepped foot out of that car, the weather slammed me in the face, and the only thing that went through my mind was, Fuck me! This feels perfect!

-

I spent the first night on Venice Beach, which was pretty dead since it was a Thursday night. I bar hopped along the beach and its side streets, chatting up the bartenders and locals, trying to get an idea of going-on's for the weekend. I'd hopped the flight to LA with absolutely no plan or idea of where I'd go and when.

The Lakers had just choked a huge game to the Celtics, so everyone was moping around in their yellow and purple. I tried to avoid talking basketball to the locals, but it was the only thing on anybody's mind. They all seem to think the Rockets are a joke; they're all in for a surprise.

-

Checked into a Holiday Inn near Inglewood. Piece of shit hotel in a piece of shit neighborhood.

DC Trip: Day 5

The last day in DC was spent wandering the city.

DC's layout is kind of like what you would get if you took a monkey with down syndrome and made him play Sim City. Like, there are some streets that are one-way, and then you reach a certain point, and the street is still one-way, but suddenly in the opposite direction. There are also areas where you think it's a neat grid system with simple letters and numbers, and then some wildcard street pops up just to throw you for a loop. Like, you're driving past A Street, B Street, C Street, and suddenly the street names are like Jimmy Ave, Patrick Blvd, and you're like, Where the fuck is D Street?

Also, there are no places to park. I mean, there are streets and you can drive your car to where you need to go. But you can't park the car anywhere. I'm not sure how that works; I assume you just roll your car along to where you want to go, and then you jump out of the car or something and let it roll along since you can't park it. Hey, I didn't make the rules. Ask the down syndrome monkey.

The drivers in DC love to honk their horns. All the time. For any reason. I don't know if it's maybe an East Coast thing, but in Houston, when someone honks their horn, it usually means something along the lines of, "Warning! Some shit's about to happen!"

But not in DC.

In DC, people honk for no real apparent reason. I think they have conversations with their car horns. Like someone honks to say, "Good morning! How are you?" and then someone else responds by honking, "I'm fine, thank you. Do you have any Grey Poupon?"

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We visited the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, which is where they have those dinosaur fossils and monkey-man evolution diagram things and that one famous elephant at the door with the ears flapped back and trunk raised. There were little kids all over the place from some school field trip or something.

I bumped into a couple of kids ooh-ing and ahh-ing at a fossilized bone of a Brontosaurus's leg on display.

I went up to them and told them that the bone wasn't real, that it was just plastic.

KID #1: Nah uh! This is a real dinosaur bone!

ME: Have you ever seen a bone? It's white. That thing is too brown and shiny to be a bone. It's plastic!

KID #2: Nah uh! It's a bone -- it's just old!

ME: Dinosaurs aren't real. Everybody knows God made the world in six days. How can there be dinosaurs billions of years before man? Everybody knows this stuff is plastic and fake. Dinosaurs aren't real; just like Santa and the Easter Bunny.

-

Had dinner at a riverfront restaurant and flew out the morning after.

DC Trip: Day 3 & 4

The days after the wedding were our obligatory visitations of all the relatives in the area before leaving buttfuck, Virginia.

I stopped by a handful of houses, giving traditional Vietnamese "chào" greetings to dozens of faces that seem vaguely familiar with names I'll never remember. My parents' families are so ridiculously enormous, that a long time ago, when I was young, I just completely gave up trying to remember who was who and how they were related to me. As far as I was concerned, if they were remotely near my age, I called them cousin, and if they were substantially older, I called them aunt or uncle. And if they were morbidly old, I called them, "bác."

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There was this one particular cousin/uncle person that I remember from my childhood. He used to be a priest working out of Louisiana. When I was a kid, he used to visit my parents' house every once in a while just for kicks and giggles.

I distinctly remember him because he taught me how to play cards. As a kid, my mother had seared into me the idea that alcohol and gambling were sinful. And yet, every once in a while, this priest came to our house, got piss-drunk in our living room, and made me play Tiến Lên and Mộ Binh with him for Monopoly money.

He's not a priest anymore.

-

There were dozens of little kids running around and making loud noises like little kids do. Their parents made them say "chào" and stuff to me. I bet in ten years, they'll be just like me now, and they won't give a good damn who I am or how I'm related to them.

I wonder if they'll grow up and get the hell out, or if they'll sprout new homes right next to their folks. Maybe this little town could keep growing bigger and bigger. It'll become like one big buttfuck Vietnamese redneck metropolis.

-

After a couple days of meet-and-greets, we threw our bags in the rental, said our good-byes, and drove back to Nga's hole in the wall in DC for the weekend.

DC Trip: Day 2

We stayed the night at my cousin's house in buttfuck-nowhere, Virginia.

I woke up in the morning to find my father going loony in the kitchen. He went through alternating wild bouts of inane squealing and giggling, and settling into more somber, agitated states, declaring unconvincingly, <I'm okay! It's over, I'm okay!>

My father is a diabetic coffee fiend.

I don't know what types of diabetes there are, but he has the type that doesn't have to take insulin shots, but he goes haywire when his blood sugar level is out of wack. This particular morning, he had coffee and didn't eat breakfast.

I'm not entirely sure what a diabetic sugar high feels like, but I've seen people act just like that while eating hydrochloric shrooms. My father described it like a car running low on gas. I can't say for certain what a car feels when it has no gas, and I'm not even sure my father does. But he's been repairing cars for a living his entire life, so maybe I'll just take his word for it.

My brother and uncle calmed him down while my mother fed him breakfast foods to get his system balanced out. After the situation became under control, I took a step outside to catch a view of my new surrounding.

-

I hadn't gotten a good peak at my cousin's house because we arrived in the dark middle of night, and Virginians, seemingly, have not invented streetlights yet.

The house is monstrous.

It's a three-storey mammoth of a house built into the side of a hill. A gated driveway starts from the street at the base of the hill and circles around the hill into a drop-off parking lot type of thing behind the house and garage.

From the top of the hill, you can get a 360 view of the entire neighborhood -- which consists of just this one house, because we were in the middle of buttfuck-nowhere, and my cousin has no neighbors. Nothing but trees for miles and miles around; you can't even see the horizon.

-

My other cousin, Tom, whom I've probably met before but have absolutely no recollection of, had his wedding at around noon-ish. It was your standard Church wedding starting with, "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today..." and ending with, "I now pronounce you man and wife."

1 Corinthian 13 was not read during the ceremony.

The reception took place in the evening, and was an outdoors event in the cul de sac outside my mother's cousin's home. A whole bunch of my cousins and uncles and aunts all owned and lived in these houses all along the same street. The whole neighborhood was basically a family tree. Like if you were trying to study the family records of these people, you just walked from one end of the street to the other end, and voila.

From what I've gathered -- and I could and probably am wrong -- this little community started when some dude that's related to my mother somehow or another, came to the States sometime a long time ago. He got married, bought a mobile home and parked it in buttfuck, Virginia. They started a family, and when the kids grew up and got married, they bought mobile homes and parked it right next door. This continued, until they eventually bought land, built houses, and established one big familial community in buttfuck, Virginia. Kinda like some sort of Vietnamese redneck town.

After the reception, I retired to my cousin's monster house. As far as I know, there was no Remy at the reception.

DC Trip: Day 1

I touched down in Baltimore at about 1 am local time.

Before this trip, I had no idea Baltimore was so close to Washington, DC. The only thing I knew about Balimore was that its football team is purple, its baseball team is red, and they're both birds. I think, for that reason, everytime I think about Baltimore, I think about a bird; kind of as if Baltimore were an animal instead of a location.

The drive to my sister's condo, located pretty much right in the middle of DC, took fourty-some minutes.

Her place is about the size of my bedroom plus closet back at my parents' house. My folks tease her about forking out so much cheddar for so little space, but I guess there's some sense of accomplishment in just calling a little hole your own. Plus, we've been spoiled by roomy Texas space.

Personally, I don't think I've ever owned a thing in my life, and I kind of think I'm not sentimental enough to get caught up in it.

We crashed at my sister's for the night.

-

We woke a little before noon the next day and took a stroll over to the local Chinatown.

The parts of DC that doesn't involve national monuments is pretty much crap. Complete with shady, brick-ladened alleyways like the kind from old DC (not the city) comic books. I feel like I could shank someone between these buildings and just walk away with it.

Had lunch at a mom-and-pop shop with an owner who spoke shoddy English at best. My parents spoke their broken English, and he spoke his broken English, and both sides were clearly frustrated with each other.

There's a scene in Spike Lee's 25th Hour where Edward Norton stares into the mirror and starts saying his fuck-yous to all the ethnic groups of New York. One of the lines he says is, "Fuck the Koreans [...] Ten years in the country, still no speaky English!?"

That's kind of how I feel sometimes, though not nearly as vulgar or spiteful. Or Korean. Seriously, you can learn a little more than "Sorry, I don't speak English" in twenty-five years.

-

After Nga came home from school, we jumped in the rental and headed into Virginia, where my cousin would be getting married.

The drive was about five hours long, and scattered along the road were signs that read, "Speed limit enforced by aircraft." And I wondered to myself if there were actually planes flying overhead watching for speeders. I hope those planes are powered on the joys and laughter of children, 'cause gasoline costs a buttfuck-ninety-nine these days.

We passed by a town called Harrisonburg on our voyage through Virginia. I know a girl who went to school there. We used to spend hours on the phone idly, and then somewhere along the way, it fizzled and died.

I remember one night, she laid out her plans for me over the phone -- by some age graduate, grad school by whenever, married by whatever, first kid by this or that age, etc. -- and I responded by asking her, "What if you trip?" To be honest, I thought it was cute; at least one of us knew what they were going to be doing tomorrow.

We reached a sign with arrows pointing in the direction of Richmond, Virginia, and continued past. I imagined that, at some point, she was on this same stretch of road, talking on the phone with me while commuting to her parents' home. Last I spoke to her, she was graduating and landed a gig at a company that develops defense and aerospace systems. I wonder how that's working out for her dream to be a pediatrician.

I spent a couple of hours falling in and out of consciousness, hypnotized by miles and miles of asphalt and mack trucks.

-

We arrived at our destination at around midnight, at a small town south of Roanoke. That is to say, we arrived at a small town that's south of another small town in the middle of butt-fuck.