Category: Stories

The doors are closing; please stand clear of the doors.

I got sick of driving, so I’ve been taking public transit to work every day. BART train to Ferry Building, ferry to Marin (and vice-versa). The best part about this change is that now I get to have BART adventures like everybody else in San Francisco.

I can has BART adventures?

One of the Buddhist monks from the monastery on 22nd and Capp was sitting down on the seat in front of me. She was small, with a shaved head and robes. I was standing, packed into the train car, next to a tall man with long hair.

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An Outbreak of Hair

Painting this LEGO portrait series has really made me get LEGOs on the brain.

When we were children, my siblings and I had tons and tons of LEGOs which we played with almost daily. We had a small core set of main characters, and tons of peripheral characters. As you may have guessed, our “main characters” were mostly just Minifigs that my siblings and I had assembled to best resemble ourselves.

And this point is what lead to the hair outbreak: back in the day, LEGO had a very limited selection of hair for Minifigs. Being of mostly Danish ancestry, my brood of siblings 1,000 young consisted of roughly 700 blonde girls. Some of them were very dissappointed that they couldn’t make a blonde Minifig, so my mom actually called LEGO to complain.

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Learning to Laugh

As a child, I did not smile or laugh as a response to the emotions I felt.  I would laugh in response to physical stimuli, such as when being tickled, but that was it.  This first presented a problem for me when I was enrolled in dance classes.  Each class had an annual dance recital, and as part of that performance we had to smile.

When I was first asked to smile during practice, I did my best approximation of a toothy smile, learned entirely through observation.  The teacher seemed satisfied by this attempt, but after a while of my consistently smiling in this way, some of the girls in the class told me quite frankly, “You smile weird.”  Indeed I can hardly blame them, my smile was weird.  Almost terrifyingly so.  I would pull back my lips and show both rows of teeth, as big as I could, and for some reason I favoured the right side of my mouth.  I know this from looking at my old dance photos, which I’m now embarrassed to look at what I once thought was a totally normal smile.  In light of this new information, in order to perform the dance correctly, I decided to teach myself how to smile.

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