Xe Sands, a Voice I Really Like

I've been listening to Euphoria on Audible books, and I liked the female reader enough to look up her name, which sounded like X-E Zanze.  It turned out to be Xe Sands--information much easier to find on the Audible website than are the translators of their books.  (My students once had a problem with Kindred because when I asked who was narrating the story, they heard on the recorded version that it was "narrated by"...I meant who was telling the story in the written form.  I wish Audible would say "Read by...")

Anyway, what I like about Xe Sands' voice is the natural, creamy quality that catches in a really lovely way.  I'd like to know how she would describe her own voice.  I'll bet she's gotten a lot of compliments on it.

Bring SUV Drivers in for Questioning by Mark Miller

This is too brilliant a column not to be online!  It came to my attention in 2001, and I used it as an extra-credit reading assignment to extend our unit on SUVs. It's one of the best post-9/11 pieces I've read. Friday, October 19, 2001 Bring SUV Drivers in for Questioning By Mark Miller Special to The Examiner Attorney General Ashcroft wants us to be on the lookout for suspicious activity. We're the guardians of our homeland, he says — America's first line of defense. Responding to my country's call, I've turned a watchful eye on my fellow Angeleños, alert for activities hostile to The American Way. At the risk of alarming the millions who read this column and rely upon it for important civil defense tips, I must report that we are completely infiltrated by people whose activities pose a "credible threat" to our national well-being. This became apparent on my first reconnaissance patrol. Slipping unnoticed into Beverly Hills, I observed hundreds of people masquerading as shoppers. Since the current economic slump began, experts have warned that if we don't keep buying lots of stuff that we don't need, but instead unpatriotically put our money in savings accounts, America's Ponzi scheme economy could collapse. As I shadowed the "shoppers," I saw that while they seemed fascinated by items such as $2,500 blouses, $400 bras, $1,400 loafers and $25,000 wristwatches, few of them bought anything. These people must be put on watch lists. Next I penetrated Santa Monica, where I was shocked to find legions of saboteurs disguised as "soccer moms" and "dads" and driving military-sized trucks their propaganda organs misrepresent as "sport utility vehicles." Political analysts have warned for years that our insatiable and increasing appetite for oil has made America a junkie nation, as desperately dependent upon Middle Eastern suppliers as heroin addicts are on their dealers. Clearly then, everyone who drives a hyper-bloated SUV should be taken in for questioning — particularly the ones whose vehicles have those massive front bumpers with no apparent utility save for pushing people in electric cars over cliffs. Posing as a "Starbucks customer" sitting at a sidewalk table, I spied on SUV movements. I noted their drivers' confident airs and arrogant pride at driving three- ton vehicles that get as little as 10 miles per gallon ("I can afford it!") and whose sluggish acceleration has been shown to slow city traffic through controlled intersections by as much as 30 percent. Ironically these are the vehicles that in L.A. since September 11th most often display American flags. Pretending to read the Santa Monica Mirror, I watched an Enemy of America back her Ford Excursion into a parking space and knock over two sidewalk tables, scattering latte drinkers like panicked tundra pigs. It was not lost on your vigilant reporter that this terrorist "mom" knew only how to drive the vehicle, not park it. Posing as a "typical upscale homemaker," right down to the rolled-up exercise mat under her arm, she professed "shock" at the toppled tables and then darted into a "yoga studio" — which judging from the number of SUVs crowding its parking lot is clearly a terrorist cell. I expanded my surveillance by enlisting operatives in West Hollywood, who alert me to others who threaten our freedoms. One reported in on Wednesday, asking if I thought her landlord, who raised the rent of an upstairs gay couple from $2,10 0 to $3,000 to force them out, and then rented the same unit to a heterosexual couple for $2,300, might be in league with the terrorists. I assured her that he is, although he might not be aware of it himself.  She has alerted the proper authorities. Security is heavy at the West L. A. Federal Building, where this week I saw a young woman in a new black BMW cut into a parking space behind an elderly couple backing their tired Oldsmobile into it — a move that in the Old West probably would have gotten her shot. Ignoring them, she popped out of her car and strode away, all purpose. Her sweatshirt was emblazoned "UCLA School of Business." No, I am not making this up. Maybe she'll join the ranks of those MBA Talibans whose predatory interpretation of capitalism ascribes to the Greed is Good doctrine — the ammoral opportunism that spurs American companies to sell DDT, the environmentally devastating insecticide long banned in the USA, everywhere else around the world. Maybe she'll find a market for her skills at one of the big tobacco companies that still give away cigarettes to kids all across the globe, every year hooking a few hundred thousand more. Since September 11th the US has worked hard to tell the world what good people we are. And we are, by and large. But meanwhile the actions of the un-Americans among us are sending out another message — and actions, as we know, speak louder than words.

Mark Miller is a journalist and screenwriter in Los Angeles.

His column appears Fridays.

Contact Mark Miller at mhmllr@att.net

San Francisco Examiner

988 Market Street

San Francisco, California 94102

Main: 415.359.2600

Fax: 415.359.2766

Address Your Audience as Your Grandchildren

Last night at the RPCV (Return Peace Corps Volunteers) storytelling gathering, I realized that hearing the "Important Date in Peace Corps History" story wasn't the same as reading it in print--because I'm there looking like the grandmother of the woman experiencing it!  Getting it in print, the reader could see the young me, but hearing it from me was another experience--maybe a little creepy!  Who was this 69-year-old woman acting out the antics of a recent college graduate?  Here's part of the story:

I liked being trapped in the rain with Jim.  I started singing a song from The Fantastiks.  “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” described finding shelter in the rain and ended with these lines:

And we'll not complain
If it never stops at all.
We'll live and love
Within our own four walls.

            I loved musicals and knew a show tune for every occasion.

            But on that occasion a very nice Filipino-American couple saw us from their living room window, and the husband came across the street with an umbrella and invited us into their home.   They gave us clothes to wear while our wet ones were in their dryer.  They also invited us back to have dinner with them and to meet a friend who did authentic Hawaiian dancing.

            Were Jim and I a couple? I wondered.  That felt good—even if he wasn’t a foreigner!

            Then came our final days in Hawaii—in Honolulu, where we were given three days—like a furlough-- before leaving the United States to serve in a foreign land.    We travelled as a group, of course, but we were sometimes given moments and even hours alone.

I've decided to address the audience as my grandchildren.  I'll say something like this:

Okay, grandchildren, gathering 'round!  Grandmommy's gonna tell you a story.  That's what grandmommies are for.  And this story is about an important date in Peace Corps history!  It's one I went on in January 1970, and the guy who took me on this date said it was the best date he'd ever had!  No, I'm sorry!  This is not a plot spoiler, but it wasn't your granddaddy though he and I have had some pretty good dates too.

This one began in Hawaii.  (and on it will go)

I am no longer the Kate Winslet Rose in The Titanic.  I am now closer to the Gloria Stuart Old Rose.

How to Prepare an Old Love for the Old You 40 Years Later

Making arrangement to meet a former boyfriend I hadn't seen for forty years, I felt the need to be more realistic about what he would see.  This would not be a romantic encounter; I have a meque--mejor que un esposo--and I want to be monogamous.  (Not to mention the self-consciousness that would come with being with a man who hadn't watched me age grad-u-al-ly!)  Of course, I'd sent photos, but I'd always chosen the most flattering pictures of me.  Now he'd be seeing the me outside the frame of the carefully chosen photos.

I can face myself in the mirror every morning without a problem.  I have a healthy, un-neurotic acceptance of age and aging.  I am not an ageist or a lookist.  But when I catch my reflection by accident in my iPhone, that un-neurotic acceptance makes an abrupt exit and I'm left with a look of horror having seen that horrific image that is NOT the one in my bathroom mirror and certainly not the one in the carefully chosen photos.

 I was writing in French, and I wanted the vocabulary to describe the new old me.  I Googled "description d'une vielle femme" (description of an old woman) and got a description of a woman of 87 who was méchante, arrogante, toujours énervée et ne parle a personne."  Mean, arrogant, always upset and never speaking to anyone."  The passage went on to say that she had lived alone since the death of her husband and seemed to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders.  She had a skinny frame, a rounded back, and she hobbled along the streets of the town bent over her cane.  He face gave proof of the difficulties she'd faced in life.  It was lined, wrinkled like a dried apple.  Her color was like dried sheepskin, which made her wrinkles and lines stand out.

Well, maybe that didn't quite describe me at 17 years younger, but it certainly gave me something to look forward to.  

So...I Googled the French for "description of a woman of 70 years" and got news about the disappearance of a woman of 70 in the Haute-Vienne area of France whose husband had reported her unexplained disappearance, leaving home in her pajama bottoms (not top?) without her bag or her cell phone.  

That didn't help me with my description since it's not my pajama bottoms that have aged.  

So I kept looking and saw that in Japan they'd found the corpse of a 70-year old woman in a suitcase left in a train station in Tokyo.    

Then I found the news report on a 70-year-old woman whose leg had gotten caught between the train and the platform.  (This ended happily; 12 people on the train used their weight together to dislodge her leg and save her!) 

Finally I gave up trying to describe myself, but I told him that I now wear glasses. 

A couple of years ago I wrote a poem about glasses:

He took off his glasses, I thought, to appear

More handsome to me.  But now I fear

He took off his glasses to see me less clear.

Another friend, Beth, and I took our friend Shehla to tea on her birthday at a place called The Secret Garden, right across from Golden Gate Park.  I suggested that they pose behind the three-tiered tea tray, which they did, resulting in these adorable pictures, giving them hats of sweet cakes and fruit and collars of tea sandwiches:

 When it was my turn, I couldn't stand what I saw there in my digital camera play back!  In addition to the wear and tear that comes with age, I had a sty, and I knew that my eye looked awful.  But Shehla and Beth said they couldn't tell the difference between one eye and another, so I guess both eyes look sick or...they didn't want to put on their glasses!

Interrupting a Monologue to Have a Conversation

In the past week, when I've interjected something in a friend's narrative when I thought we were having a conversation, I've seen that the person wanted to finish her monologue before having any input from me.  This happened with both a friend and a relative.  (I'm not implying that relatives can't be  friends.)

I've been guilty of high-jacking a bit of conversation and taking it off into an unplanned area against the pilot's wishes, but this wasn't one of those times. 

In both cases, I was trying to interject something that I thought would really help the other person.  I thought my interjection should that I was being attentive and concerned.  

But who knows?  Maybe if I had a recording of the conversation, I'd hear things differently.  

More on this tomorrow.

To Indent or Not To Indent

After years of considering indenting a moral law, I've been told not to do it for the piece I've written on a CCSF student.  I was obedient, but I remained curious, so I just looked it up:

But one thing I recently learned is that to properly format something you want to publish, you should never use tab to intent. I know, weird. And it's not 3 spaces either. Right click on your piece, and under the heading Special put "first line" by "0.5" And this will automatically indent for you whenever you hit enter at the end of the paragraph.

Church People Bravely Applying Religious Teachings

Today while I was on the treadmill at the Y, CNN was broadcasting today's service at Emanuel African-American Methodist Episcopal Church, the first it's had since the killings.  There was also an interview with someone who explained their concept of the difference between happiness and joy.  Even though I've always thought both depended upon internal rather than external circumstances, I liked what the interviewee said:  Happiness depends on exterior things, but joy comes from within and is "hallelujah anyway!"  He also said that this incident wasn't an isolated incident or they wouldn't have built up the strength to deal with it.  (I'm glad they think such incidents build up strength rather than wear down resolve!)

The forgiving way they've dealt with his tragedy reminds me of how the Amish responded in 2006 after their children had been killed by a man who was mentally ill.  To support his widow, they attended his funeral and stood by her side.

http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Nothing-can-kill-the-hope-and-resilience-of-kids-2468479.php

Looking for the 2006 piece by Steve Winn, I found another!  The mother of the man who murdered five children and injured others is taking care of one of the injured ones.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/mother-amish-killer-cares-survivor-son-massacre-article-1.1542337