Rome day minus one

A 37 day imaginary travelogue of a trip to Rome (with a few scattered other places such as New York). This is written to match the journey I am actually taking, and so each post is concurrent with the more or less actual day my wife and I are experiencing in Rome.

What day number are we on?: minus one!

Level of writer's drunkenness (in real life, scale of 1-10): Zero! But I had a cold press coffee 45 minutes ago.

What am I eating (in real life again)?: Nothing

Map or picture: General area of home

Any other notes/Status: I have ten minutes to write each of these posts. I have spent now over an hour on this one and have not begun the actual entry!

Today's Entry:

We leave tomorrow, but I have now been preparing for ten months. It all comes down to socks. How many socks should I pack. I have two imperatives: 

1. Pack as many socks as possible to cut down on required washing.

2. Pack as few socks as possible to cut down on bulk.

We are traveling with alarmingly small backpacks, one each. I have one paperback (a Nero Wolfe book I have never read!) and a minimum of clothes and papers and toiletries. I also have some cashews. I'm a little nervous. I'll go sit on the couch and and watch time pass for awhile.

I'm hoping my travelogue will have more interesting things when we actually leave. I'm a little worried what the spiders in my basement will do without me for five weeks. And don't worry, I'll bring back kittens for everyone!

The Rome plan

People ask me about my upcoming five week trip to Rome. Mostly they ask when it is. Once I hit the four weeks to go mark I have been able to answer that question in great detail and yet still be fairly brief (as I write this I do it in weeks, but as you read this I will be doing it in hours). They ask if I'm learning Italian (in theory, yes, but it's a bad theory). People never ask if I'm looking forward to going to Rome, rather they always tell me about how much I must be looking forward to it (fair enough). They ask if I'm going anywhere else in Italy (I don't understand, why would I go anywhere else other than Rome?). And every once in awhile they ask what I'm going to do about my blog.

This is the blog that they're referring to. Some of the people who asked this don't even read my blog. I hope you are as confused and outraged as I am about how someone would know about this blog and yet not read it. But some of the people who ask about my blogging plans do read my blog and presumably both sets of people are simply curious about my course of action. Up until a few weeks ago my answer was that I was going to post "best of" essays from my vast catalog of previous posts (1300 plus). I hated the thought of breaking my relentless, multi-year streak of new, daily posts, but the thought of writing what would functionally be 40 or more essays to prepare for the trip (while still meeting my daily posts in the time being) did not seem realistically manageable.

And then I had an impossible idea:

What if I got myself some fancy cheeses, prosciutto, lemoncello, melon. And on my day off alone, Thursday, I sat down at my computer for ten hours, getting increasingly drunk, and wrote a fake travelogue that matched my trip day by day in real time. You, reader, would be following along in actual time with an alternate reality version of my projected trip even as I would be on said trip!

Excited?

Well, while I write most of them I'll be drunk. Also I'll only have something like ten minutes to write each piece. So you might want to moderate your expectations. When I really consider the project, actually, I begin to suspect it will all be terrible.

But, on the other hand we're talking about Rome! What's with the doom and gloom? Starting tomorrow, in prose, we are embarking on a five week trip to Rome. This is going to be great. We are going to have such fun! 

Uh oh. Everything is beginning to spin already.











 

Worst gelato in Rome

In preparation for a month long trip to Rome I began a search for the best gelato in Rome (and perhaps the world). Though I was quickly overwhelmed I persisted, creating vast maps, lists, and rating systems. I searched far down into the deep web where people rarely go. And I came up with a just barely good enough list of 48 gelaterias in Rome that weren't just well reviewed, but also included at least a portion of people gushing over it being the best gelato they had in Rome, or often even the best gelato they have eaten anywhere. Forty-eight glowing, ecstatic collections of reviews.

Forty-eight. Just let that sink in for awhile. 

Are there truly that many fanatic artisan gelato crafters plunking out a living in the city of Rome?

I don't know. But I do think of this:

There were a few years where my wife and I would get together with a small group of friends and do blind taste tests. At one of these parties we tested ice cream. I don't remember how many different ice creams we cobbled together, but they included ice cream from our best local shops, high end packaged ice cream, and low end packaged ice cream. The low end ice cream was Blue Bunny and it was generally disdained except for one person among us. He had given every ice cream a high score. "It's ice cream" He said. "Sweet, cold, creamy. How bad can any ice cream be?"

I was not without sympathy to his view, though ultimately I rejected it. As long as you pay attention, ice cream can be pretty bad. You just have to pay close attention. There's nothing wrong with paying close attention. Seeing that Thomas Kinkade is a bad painter is a way of respecting someone great like John Constable and what it was he accomplished and was able to do.

But when I read those glowing freak outs of joy over 48 different gelaterias, I couldn't help but reflect upon my friend's take on ice cream. And it is hard to not wonder about people wandering around a gorgeous city, on vacation, in a delicious and happy mood, being in any position to judge sweet, cool, creamy gelato, an inexpensive treat, easy to acquire, whose bar of casual tastiness starts very low indeed.

So I have struggled with this.

And then today I realized I have been going about it all wrong. I needed to find the worst gelato in Rome. Just as we included Blue Bunny in our taste test, just as Thomas Kinkade can help set a measure of Constable, I need to find what people think is the worst gelato in Rome. I need to understand the floor I am dealing with.

Typing in a search for "worst gelato in Rome" gave me reviews of all the same places constantly included on lists of the best gelato in Rome. I sort of expected this. I had another idea. I went to Tripadvisor where 725 desert places in Rome are ranked from best (Gelateria Il Pinguino, is this even on my list?) to worst (it's complicated). I spent a long time down at the bottom of that list. There are places with few reviews. There are a lot of places where most of the negativity has to do with rudeness and being ripped off, or with the low quality of the food rather than gelato. Also there is the problem of the frankly bizarre algorithms Tripadvisor is using to rank. Down at 645 out of 725 dessert places you would expect some grim stuff. But what you get is Big Ice Gelateria. It has a 4.5 star average (!?). Its two written reviews are entirely positive. Here is a representative sample "Rome has no shortage of great gelato places. It's easy to overlook Big Ice because it's really just a little doorway along Via Merulana, but it's worth looking for. Every flavor that we tried was fantastic, and the owner is really nice."

I continued searching up the list looking for a dedicated gelateria getting a notable number of reviews with at least a few negative reviews about their gelato.

I utterly failed.

There aren't any!

Are the reviewers all like my friend with the Blue Bunny ice cream? Do people have no discerning taste? Or is it like trying to parse the difference in quality between a Michelangelo sculpture and one by Bernini?

I don't know. But I have a strong suspicion, in all my preparations and lists and plans, well, I might not have used my time productively.

You will soon be in Rome

All this with me going on about how great Rome is, how much better it is than any other city, is just me in high spirits. I'm just very excited to be going there. I am not trying to convince you to go there. It is already so crowded and full of tourists. Everyone I've ever met who went there in, say, the height of tourist season, Summer, seemed to kind of hate it. Peoples' tastes wildly differ. Just because I love Rome doesn't mean you will, or that I think you should abandon everything and go there.

Just kidding. Of course you should go there. Now. Sell the dog. Forge some Euros. Write the milkman a note. Rome is just sitting there. What are you waiting for!

I know. Easy for me to say. But then, everything is easy for me to say. That's why I started this blog and write in it every day no matter what. And today I am going to write about how good Rome is.

Here is how good Rome is:

All my life I have loved rating things. Here are my favorite cafes in order. This is a three star system for how good I think each of my blog posts are. These are the best Romantic Comedies from great to best. Here are my favorite painters, writers, albums, buildings, cheeses. I'm just saying I understand the value of ranking. I like stars and out of tens and letter grades. I like best of lists and if you have just three days lists. But I open these professional, responsible, thorough, well researched, up to date guide books to Rome, and I see their "starred sights", their three triangle systems, their top tens, or their if you can only see three things lists, and I just laugh disdainfully. "You have no idea." I mutter. "Not a clue in the world."

Fear and wine

If you are a close follower of clerkmanifesto, and there are but the eight of you who are indeed close followers of clerkmanifesto (but if you suspect you are one, you are!), you will be aware that I suffer from a sensitive back. By this I mean that any of a vast selection of instigators may combine to cause my back to seize up and become full of pain. It can be stress, bad movement mechanics, the wrong food, inadequate physical training, or even a flash of simple bad luck. Mostly my episodes are uncomfortable but manageable, persistent strains and aches that resolve over a few days. Daily I experience twinges and aches. Sometimes there are full blown debilitating episodes that are seriously limiting and force me to take stock and reconsider my approach.

Right now, two and a half weeks before an epic vacation to Rome, I am experiencing a, let us say, 7.5 on the Richter scale, episode. A certain range of movements causes something right up on the edge of excruciating spasms. I have taken a couple days off of work. I've consulted with non professionals. And I've decided not to hold it against myself. I have decided to keep at what I'm doing but more so, regular core exercise but with improved dedication, and a stronger attention to anti-inflammatory diet, and a reconsideration of what causes stress for me. But in the meantime there is the not insignificant hurt, discomfort, and stark raving terror of my back suddenly going into a period of seized up, spasm filled pain. Anti inflammatory drugs end up burning through my stomach and so are too dangerous. And so, for direct medication, I am trying wine. Red wine. 

Thus I am a little drunk. And it is working pretty well. One of the fascinating things about being drunk, and being in pain is this: yes, it may mute the pain and spasms I experience while my back is in a full blown episode, but far more importantly, instead of the serious terror I experience as my back twinges with hints of hard core pain, I still feel it, but I just don't really care. So what that I feel pain? I am the drunken Buddhist. It hurts, it doesn't hurt, it is going to hurt much worse later, what the fuck. Who cares? I don't care. You don't care. I'll have some more wine.

And then everything starts to spin.

But better spinning than terror.






 

Humor for the older crowd

CSN CSI or CSN...I

episode 2

(Midnight approaches as folk rock crime scene investigators CROSBY, STILLS, and NASH, joined by old friend and very special guest star YOUNG, carefully make their way onto the abandoned scene of an occult ritual that may be linked to two murders)

NASH: One, two, three, four.

STILLS: What?

NASH: I'm counting the pentagrams.

CROSBY: Oh please, not with the pentagrams again!

NASH: But there's something familiar about this place.

YOUNG: I feel like I've been here before.

STILLS: And I feel like I've been here before!

CROSBY: (A little freaked out) What's going on?

YOUNG: We have all been here before!

NASH: What?

YOUNG: We have all been here before.

NASH: I'm sorry, my hearing's going. One more time?

STILLS: (Butting in, a bit irritated)  We have all been here before. We have all been here before. We have all been here before!

NASH: Okay okay, Jesus Stephen! How do we know we've all been here before?

YOUNG: (Getting a little spacey and mystical as is his wont) Do you see that yellow moon, on the rise?

NASH: Yeah, what about it?

YOUNG: I just thought it was interesting, and yellow.

(CROSBY shoots YOUNG a nasty look)

YOUNG: What. I'm just trying to help.

CROSBY: Well maybe you could help less, okay.

NASH: What?

STILLS: (Ever the powderkeg) HELP LESS, NASH. HELP LESS. HELP LESS. HEH-EH-ELP-LESS!!!! 

CROSBY: (Muttering) Take a chill pill Stephen.

YOUNG: (Growing more mystical and distanced as CSN gets more dysfunctional) Look at that big bird, flying across the sky.

NASH: (Ignoring YOUNG) This might just be Deja Vu. I mean, if I had ever been here before I would probably know just what to do.

(STILLS rolls his eyes)

NASH: (Turning to CROSBY) What, don't you?

(Everyone stops. There is a slight susurration of the Earth. YOUNG squats and puts both his hands flat on the ground. Everyone looks at him)

YOUNG: It makes me wonder. What's going on under the ground, hmm?

(CROSBY is clearly exasperated with YOUNG, but STILLS turns hotly to CROSBY)

STILLS: Do you know? Don't you wonder? What's going on down under you?

YOUNG: (Chanting, as if seized by a vision) We have all been here before. We have all been here before. We have all been here before. We have all been here before. We have all been here before. We have all been here before.

NASH: (Fiddling with hearing aid) What's that? What's he saying?

(STILLS, disgusted, rolls eyes and shakes head) 

Taking pity

Many of the great experiences any of us have had with customer service have come when someone took pity on us. It can be easy to appreciate a great customer service person who cleverly helps us with all kinds of things and makes our experience positive, but when everything is going wrong, when we're having a miserable time with the blithely monstrous companies we all deal with, and there seems to be no way out, and suddenly the person we're dealing with takes pity, that can change everything. We're suffocating. There is no air. And the person says "There is this window. I'm not really supposed to open it, but..." And they throw open the window so that a gust of pure, fresh air hits us and we can breathe again. Our fine is waived, our account is cleared, the problem is resolved. And so, everything is changed.

As a person working in customer service I know the feeling of the switch that is taking place. I know that feeling of taking pity. I am holding to something, usually a rule or a policy, but sometimes to the sense of my own authority. We are all muscle so that even our souls have muscles, and those muscles tend to clench, and remember, and hold things back. Sometimes a light comes and we think, I can just let this go.

Of course, it's not that simple.

There are competing interests. I can take pity on a family who has thirty dollars in late fees, but if they are in the wrong, or, perhaps better, if they are responsible, I am also taking away something from the library and even something from some of the lost in the shuffle people who perhaps had to frustratingly wait for those items to come back for far longer than they should have. Pity has to be tempered with justice. Pity has a weight.

But the weight and value of pity can be a useful tool. If some abrasive person desperately needs to renew a book they have out, and they're telling me that no one has requested it and it's ridiculous and stupid that they can't have it again, but it has reached our generous maximum renewals limit, and so I cannot renew it, that is not the end of it. We can always take a look. We know enough of how things work to be able to see to the truth in just a few seconds. So let's see: 

1. I do not like that my or the library's authority is being challenged.

This has no value to this because it affects nothing in the library. I can let it go.

2. The patron desperately needs the book to finish a report they're working on.

That does seem pretty important, and the fact that they are arguing for it, even if inelegantly, is not an unreasonable measure of their strong need.

3. I would have to break the explicit instructions of my supervisors and the library's  management team.

I would not be breaking any rules out of self interest, or willfully. It is almost impossible for me to be caught and the repercussions would be very minor in such an unlikely event of discovery anyway. And I am a person first, an agent of the library second, and only an employee third.

3. We increased our maximum renewal limit to two, allowing for three full check out periods. We did this under the idea that that is enough, and under the understanding that books need to spend time on our shelves and be available for browsing. We did this under the idea that it would then be a strict limit. 

Fair enough. But no one wants this book. We have so many books on our shelves that we are occasionally forced to weed books that we really shouldn't be weeding, and the effect this book's absence will have on the browsable quality of our shelves will be minuscule. The patron's insistence that our policy here is ridiculous is not entirely correct, nor informed, nor deeply thoughtful. But in the particular situation it is basically true.

So I take pity. And I say "I can never renew a book for you three times, but nevertheless, as a one time thing, I have renewed this book for you again."

Because while policies and rules are useful and even comforting, they cannot ever cover even the barest tenth of the ground we walk on in this world. There is no rulebook long enough to ever take account of the vast diversity of the library, of humanity, and the world. Even the immutable laws of god and nature ever fail to cover everything. Even the deepest laws of the Universe are sometimes broken. 

We call those miracles.

Foreign languages

A woman comes up to me at the front desk of the library. She hands me a book and says ruefully "I think I might have some late charges."

I check the item in. "There aren't any late charges on this." I say, as if that might be relatively nice news.

She looks at me like I'm addled. "I want to check that book out." She says in an irritated manner.

"Oh, I need your library card."

She makes an exasperated noise as she hands it to me. I find once I've started being unreasonable it ends up going ever deeper, like standing on the rim of a hole giving in at the edge. "You have $2.40 in late charges on your card." I say.

"I thought you said I didn't have any late charges!"

"Well, no." I say. "Not on this book you hadn't checked out. These are charges from returning The Rueful Rustler eight days late."

"That's what I wanted to pay for in the first place!"

And so we come to reason number 342 for why I am so looking forward to the trip my wife and I are taking to Rome: 

In Rome I have at least no expectation that I will understand anyone.

All good things must

I was working on the check in machine at my library. Up next for me was a stint at the phone station. And I was pleased to know that, because I was following one of our industrious substitutes, I would have an easy time of it when I got there. These industrious substitute workers come in and simply work steadily for the whole time they're here. They don't pace themselves, nurse grudges, or get other side projects done. They don't have side projects. They don't have ages to go before their next weekend. And they don't have a fully developed sense of self-righteousness. They are great to follow, especially on the phones. So imagine my grave disappointment when I got to the phones and found that the industrious sub was no longer industrious. She had gotten almost nothing done, and my new spot came ready made with unavoidable, backed up work!

Oh, right, this sub has been here awhile. 

Let me check her expiration date. Yep, she'd expired.

A small number of new workers are never competent and never industrious, and they never will be. They shouldn't be hired and shouldn't be allowed to stay, but they are. They can be fun to write blog posts about and surely have other virtues, none of which I will ever remember for the rest of my life. Another very small group of new workers are industrious and will forever remain industrious despite other limitations that tend to go with that. We are not here to talk about them either right now. But the great majority of new workers start out on their best behavior. They need guidance, help, and information. They want to make a decent impression in this strange new environment and the best thing they have to offer is a good application to the grunt work, to doing thoroughly the things they know. They shelve, they empty, they process, and they stay where they're supposed to be.

Bless them.

They cannot solve complicated problems independently. They do not keep things running smoothly under the surface. They are not secretly laying the tracks to keep the library running on a quiet, unseen efficiency. They cannot do it all without fuss or notice. But they can shelve more than average and they can keep working all the time they're scheduled to keep working.

This period of application and industry lasts even longer with substitutes. They work fewer hours and so stay new longer.

But eventually there comes a time where these new people know everyone. They understand how most things work. They attain a small level of comfortable familiarity. And they start to compare. They start to ask "Why am I working all the time? None of these other people are." And then they spend fifteen minutes on their Facebook page, they shoot the breeze with someone they've come to like, they finish their work and don't look for something new to do, they look for something not to do. This is a revelation to them. The world doesn't end.

And the rest of us say "Oh crap."

If they are good, these no longer new workers, they will take up their share of the secret work. If they are not good, they won't.

But the above average grunt work is over. "Oh crap." We say. "And welcome to the club."

Diversity report

My library system has been on a diversity kick. For three years now the main administrative focus of my library has been towards increasing and improving the diversity of our libraries. Every In Service Day for these few years we have focused entirely on, or prominently featured, classes, discussions, plans, meetings, and brainstorming sessions based around diversity. We seek to improve the racial and cultural diversity of our staff. We hope to improve our service to a wide range of under served communities. We are serious about this!

I do not object.

And I am going to report on what we have learned.

But I am not going to report on what we learned about, for instance, Black Lives Matter, or better serving the Hmong Community. We may have learned a few things about all that. I don't know, but we learned a great deal more about what our County and our library system means when they talk about improving diversity around here.

When one is discussing institutions the proof is always and only in the pudding.

And so here is what we've learned:

1. The library is deeply committed to both mandatory and optional staff training, lectures, book clubs, and sessions around the subjects of diversity. These are rarely if ever specific to our jobs. Rather they are more interested in personal development and general enlightenment. No expense is spared as regards staff time and the hiring of speakers and lecturers.

2. The library is not interested in practical applications. It has not come up in these sessions, and though we have in the past had things like printed library guides in a variety of languages, we found that printing them had become expensive. Signage, collections, policies, and displays remain the same.

3. When it comes to hiring we are so dedicated to diversity we are willing to make sometimes even unwise hiring decisions in the interests of inclusivity. Hiring people of color has become a major consideration in our hiring decisions and the number of people of color working in our library has increased, a little. However, this is only true in relation to our lowest paying and lowest hierarchical jobs. The higher one goes in the organization the less it is true. Thus our student workers remain somewhat diverse, Circulation is a little more diverse, Librarians are also a little more diverse in the most paltry substitute positions, but tends to remain more or less homogenous in the more permanent positions, and all managers, directors, and department heads remain strictly White. White as the driven snow, white as a perfect cloud, white as a blank page. White as a lie.

An old joke I'm telling you at the last possible moment

I hate, hate having to do things at the last moment.

That dreadful, sweaty feeling of all time running out, all beautiful options closing down on me one by one until suddenly I am herded, trapped, and narrowed into an absolute single path. Our free will is so sweet. Oh how we love to pretend it is bigger than it is. Sometimes all I am doing for hours is collecting options, and as I collect them they wind down and I am left alone, staring down the gauntlet of the only thing left for me to do, that which I have avoided until it has covered over every window, and every door, sealed the vents, bricked the walls. Ah Lord God, the injustice, the breaking of your one stupid bribe and covenant and promise, ah God how I hate having to do things at the last moment.

So naturally I put them off for as long as possible.

The dangers of obsession

As I have noted several times here I was a passionate fan of The Lord of the Rings from the beginning of my formative adult reading. From somewhere in my mid to early teens all the way into my thirties I read the ink right off the pages of those books. Not only have I read the books dozens of times, I've read the books aloud in full and in parts, and they are one of the lenses I look at life through. Though my extreme familiarity with the books finally squelched my ability to read them I still feel a deep attachment to them.

And so like anyone sensible and informed I am not particularly fond of the films. I won't give my lecture on just why, here, now, but I give that lecture an awful lot.

So today at the front desk of the library I work at a man came to get a new library card. He was wearing a shirt that said:

"The book was better"

It warmed my heart a little. I said "I have a theory about that, your shirt."

The man gestured assent to hearing my theory, or perhaps a resignation that I was probably unstoppable.

"A great book will always be better than any movie made of it. Even a really good book will be. But It is possible to make a movie version that is better than a mediocre or poor book." I lectured.

"I can see it." The man said.

"Wizard of Oz, mediocre book, great movie. The Godfather, fairly entertaining pulp, masterpiece of a movie." I said for example. And he got it.

"Right." He replied. "I can see it. And then even no matter how great the movie is of To Kill a Mockingbird, the book is better."

I nodded, very satisfied. Then he added, musingly "Now Lord of the Rings, that was about equal."


NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ambivalent meaning

In a conversation with one of my co-workers this morning I came to understand that it is possible for me to like a co-worker who I do not entirely respect. I may think someone is basically bad at this job and still, somewhat, like them. But, and this was the surprise to me, I believe it turns out that concurrently I am incapable of disliking any co-worker who I basically respect. I have had hundreds and hundreds of co-workers here over the years. Many of them have been quite good at their jobs, barring a few flaws here and there that we are all heir to, and of those there is not a single one I did not like. Imagine that.

Although I have to admit there have been incredibly few people I have really disliked here over the years.

And also, on reflection, I can't help but notice that if I don't like someone it's not that hard to see them as not all that good at their job. 

Like I said, everyone has a few flaws. 

More fun with Dylan

I know what you're thinking:

How come he hasn't made fun of Dylan lately?

First of all, I'm not making fun of Dylan. My respect for him as the single greatest artist concurrent with my lifetime is in no way diminished by how he can be a, well, fool. Also I have a strong suspicion that he threw away true love, and there is no monument, no gift to human kind great enough to make up for throwing away true love. 

So I'm really just reporting the facts as I make them up.

No, thank you

Last night I was reading through some of my ancient blog posts embedded now into the history of the Internet. I do this sometimes when there is nothing new to look at on the Internet. I'm not sure there is ever anything new on the Internet. I might have even written this before.

I find that when I'm reading my old posts it is a good idea to stop after about fifteen minutes. My view of these posts as occasionally brilliant and occasionally hilarious devolves slowly into a desperate hope that "surely I can find one more decent one before I stop!"

I have been thinking today about one I wrote concerning my use of the phrase "No problem". I talked about "no problem" vs. "you're welcome" and concluded that I liked "It was my pleasure" best of all. Whether I read it in my first fifteen minutes and found myself an engaging raconteur, or whether I read it later with a sense of profound disquiet is lost to me. 

Nevertheless it was rolling around in my mind when one of my colleagues thanked me for plugging in a bin for them. I almost said "No problem". I thought of "You're Welcome" and "My pleasure", but what I said was "Are you kidding me? I live for doing stuff like this. Thank you for the opportunity."

And so I was on my way, and as small thanks came to me for small deeds...

"Are you thanking me? But it was an exquisite experience for me, perhaps the best time I have ever had in my life."

"Oh god. Thank you! I learned so much and am such a better person now."

"Let us pray together in thanks for this unique opportunity for personal growth."

Of course, I haven't been out with the public yet. This all is just with my co-workers. With the public I might have to tone it down a little. I don't want them to think I'm being sarcastic.

Parking karma

While taking a break eating olive oil popcorn in the back room of my library I entertained myself by watching people parking in our "Carpool and Vanpool Parking Only" spots. This is an entertainment that never fails to astonish and fascinate me. Though usually it's too emotional for me after about 15 minutes and I have to turn away. But today something extraordinary happened. A van pulled up and a person climbed out of the driver side door just like normal, but then other people started getting out of the van. There were at least five people in that van!

I had been watching these carpool/vanpool parking places for about ten minutes and, as usual, I had seen maybe five or six vans and cars, pulling up or leaving, and everyone of those vehicles carried but one person. Who even knew that a van could carry as many as five people? I mean, besides the visionaries who created the "Carpool and Vanpool Parking Only" spots.  Those people must have the kind of imagination the rest of us can only dream of possessing!

Years of watching lone people park in the "Carpool and Vanpool Parking Only" spots has given me a kind of revenge over the years. At first it was all a bit upsetting, seeing people violate with seeming impunity something so sensible, but slowly I noticed our carpool parkers were growing more and more crippled over time. These regular library patrons, parking scofflaws, had so devoted themselves to avoiding physical activity that they began to fall apart. They can now hardly walk into the library even from the cozy proximity of the "Carpool and Vanpool Parking Only" spots. Pretty soon they'll be legally eligible for our disabled parking spots, opening up our carpool spots to a new group of self-punishing criminals.

I see some of these vanpool parking people in the library, after they've transmuted into library patrons. They seem more troubled than evil. I even help them.

They say revenge is sweet. I don't know.

Dear Bill Gates

Dear Bill Gates:


Because you are the richest person in the world I am guessing that you get a lot of letters asking you for money. However, I also suppose you don't read those letters because you pay someone to do that for you. However again, you probably don't pay them very much money to do that because one doesn't get to be the richest person in the world by paying out lots of money.

At this point you are probably wondering "Why am I reading this letter then? Don't I pay someone as little as possible to do that for me?"

The answer is: This is not a letter asking for money. This is a personal letter. And one cannot, no matter how wealthy they are, pay a person to live their personal life for them. Or so I have heard. I have never had the money nor the inclination to try.

But speaking of money I would like to suggest that you are doing it all wrong. You seem to have this giant foundation that is repeatedly credited in our culture for a plethora of donations, and you also seem to have a reputation as a great benefactor. I think this belies a desire on your part to do good. I do not mean to mock or discredit this noble desire. Indeed I support your impulses towards philanthropy. But I think you might be surrounded by people whose livelihoods, success, non-profits, wealth, and lifestyle depend on you and your good will. And I am afraid these people are protecting you from a very simple truth:

You are the richest person in the world.

You are the richest person in the world!

You can't be generous and also have more stuff than everyone else in the entire world ever. It just doesn't work like that.

I tell you this as a friend, a personal friend who is asking nothing from you. I know it is hard to hear. I am sure you have started to think of yourself as quite the philanthropist. But I have to say that until you start plummeting down the Forbes list of richest people because of all the money you give away, until that happens you are not actually giving anything away. Rather you are buying. And while it is entirely possible to buy an image like this if you have enough money, which you do, that does not make it mean anything. Alas, it is never possible to buy the truth.


Your friend (not like the others),


F. Calypso