I’m guessing you had somewhere to go. I mean, obviously, since you couldn’t wait the few seconds between the train stopping and the train operator opening the doors that you had to pull on the emergency door stop.

Maybe it was a life or death situation.

Maybe those seconds were crucial in a 24 montage way and I should actually be addressing this to “Dear Guy Who Thinks He’s Jack Bauer” and thank you for saving the world.

Erm…somehow, I don’t think so.

You didn’t look very secret agent-y or like you were special ops.  You just looked annoyed and impatient.  And, not that this is an excuse, but you didn’t seem to be scurrying out the door to somewhere special either.

So here’s some advice about safety: The subway doors are not your personal car doors.  The train operator opens them at a specific time for a reason.  I have seen moments where the train stops and then needs to move a few inches before it stops again to open the doors.  So, given that scenario, pulling the emergency stop is probably not the best thing to do unless there’s – oh I don’t know? – an emergency.  And squeezing yourself through the doors is both un-becoming and probably not the smartest move either.

Do you know what also happens when you pull the door stop?  It is not a emergency door that automatically closes after it’s been open.  Someone (in this case: me) has to push the door knob back in.  I did this while I walked in, but just as the train was ready to go, it turns out the other door in the car had also been open by an emergency door stop.  This means,

• You probably passed on your bad behavior to someone else.
• The seconds you saved were seconds an entire subway train lost because we were delayed by the unnecessary use of emergency doors.

This is the anti-thesis of the Pass It On campaign.

So, next time, do the rest of us a favor: Be a little patient.  We all have somewhere to go and let’s get there safely.

-cct, a carless Angeleno

On my walk back to the office from lunch, my co-workers and I were stopped by this really large protest.  It even blocked traffic coming from off the freeway – sorry Los Angeles drivers and bus transit riders.  It turned out to be a protest for Justice for Janitors, emphasizing more affordable healthcare and fairer wages.

A protest like this gives reason to pause and more than just for the inconvenience of traffic. A few minutes of protest is nothing compared to where we would be without our janitorial services.  Why do we then pay people who work this difficult job poorly?  Why do we then shrink on their healthcare?  Try going a week in this city without the people who help maintain the offices of government and corporate America.  It would be pretty darn terrible for everyone all around.

The janitorial staff at my building are some of my favorite people.  They don’t seem to judge me when I work late at night (sometimes when I’m singing aloud to whatever I have playing on Pandora) and always say hello and ask me how I am as they go about their jobs after office hours.  There is a janitor that maintains the glass doors and reception area of the building during the morning, who I see almost every day.  When I arrive really early to work, he comments on my change in routine. While I may not be working on projects with this staff and while there might not even be a sharing of our names, I really appreciate their presence in my life and what they do.  This place would fall apart without their efforts, as I’m sure all the other buildings would too.

People who think they run the world because they make business decisions are wrong.  That’s only part of the process.  There are other people who keep this world running too, and one of them is likely the person that pulls in a squeaky-wheeled trash can to sort out your office recyclables.

-cct

Seven Star Cavern Wishing Well - Old Chinatown Central Plaza

This past weekend life carried me to Los Angeles’ Old Chinatown Central Plaza. While there on an errand, I threw a coin into its Seven Star Cavern Wishing Well. By “well” I don’t mean your standard hole in the ground encircled by bricks, but you probably figured that out with the phrase “Seven Star Cavern”. This is more of a replica of the Seven Star Caves of China, painted green, dotted with Buddha statues and little metal “wells” complete with signage. These signs call out to the things we often wish for – “Love” (naturally all the way at the top, no incognito throwing there), “Prosperity”, “Peace”, “Wealth”, “Good Luck”, and even one for “Vacation”.

There is also one for “Happiness”.

Happiness - Seven Star Cavern Wishing Well

This one isn’t in the picture I took above; it’s near the bottom area under the broken sign for “Wealth” (symbolic of the bad economy?). I aimed my coin for “Happiness” – since it seemed a little closer at hand and I was just talking to someone about the meaning of happiness just the other day. It might not be readily apparent, but “Happiness” has two little “wells” – one very apparent underneath the sign and a smaller one next to it on the right. When I threw a penny in, it ricocheted off either the larger well or the “Happiness” sign and into the smaller one.

My immediate thought, “What does that mean?” Followed by being kind of amazed – I hadn’t even noticed that smaller container and what were the odds of my coin landing in there?

Then the obvious questions: Did it mean happiness? Did it mean almost happiness? The events of the weekend made me think that it’s both these things.

Immediately after this, I purchased a Jasmine milk tea with mini boba and had returned by the fountain to drink it and eat my lunch. I hadn’t been entirely careful when puncturing a hole into the plastic sealed cup and, with the drink perched on the grates of a bench, it fell to the ground. With a plastic cup and a plastic sealed lid, I immediately grabbed it – hoping it was just a minor spill. However, the cup had split open on the side and everything else with it. In my immediacy to grab the cup, my phone also fell into the mess as well. My drink gone, my phone sticky but intact, I sat and ate my container of chicken chow mein under the red paper lanterns, contemplating if the puddle of Jasmine milk tea and mini boba was the picture of almost happiness.

If it was, it wasn’t pretty…

But this seemed like too much of a philosophical question to tackle, especially over spilled milk tea. I roamed back to the same tea shop for another purchase – wondering if I should brace myself for an embarrassing telling of my klutziness if the salesclerk should remember me.  Although I think I noticed a slight glimmer of curious recognition in his eyes, I think I was rescued by the place’s popularity and the ordinariness that comes with looking like just another Asian-American girl in Chinatown.

I walked the few blocks of Chinatown enjoying an intact drink and taking photos, wandering through nearby Olvera Street where I picked up a mini decorative guitar – something I had always meant to buy for its iconic nature as an Olvera Street sales item, for the fact that I play guitar, and…okay, they’re just cute.

Aztec Dancer at Olvera Street

As I left the shops and restaurants of Olvera Street, I began to hear the sound of drumming at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Plaza. I heard a women nearby tell her friend that it was Aztec dancers, so naturally I scurried forward for a good view. Seated cross-legged on cement, I was in front of the crowd, camera in hand – the show ahead of me.

Bright feathers. Elegantly long headdresses. Shiny colorful outfits.
Drums. Drums. Drums.
Dance. Dance. Dance.

Meanwhile, the sun peeked in and out of light gray clouds. Even under this gray, the day was bright, but when the sun shone through – there was a kind of magic that blended with the dancing. I wasn’t knowledgeable about the history of Aztecs beyond the gentle impression of facts from TV and California and World history schoolbooks. I couldn’t tell you about the costumes, the dances, or the drums. I couldn’t name names or much less pronounce them. But dancing and drums and the reflection of a people’s history carry with it a relationship to the sky and the sun and the earth. It’s a special something that often gets lost underneath our existence in sound-controlled environments, office cubicle spaces, and clock-constrained schedules. At least, that’s how it felt in those moments watching the sky shift with the movement of people and seeing the sun act as the world’s largest spotlight, casting shadows of the dancers on the cement in front of me.

I left the sound of drumming and the motions of dance to go to where I originally intended – the Chinese American Museum. Though I wanted to see their current exhibition on Chinese American architects, I had never been there before and decided to wander it all. It’s not a large museum, but the richness of a museum – like a good book – is never about its size. It’s about how you fill that space. The Chinese American Museum takes you back in time and pushes you forward through the up’s and down’s of a people who helped build this country even if, at times, this country kept barriers in front of them.

Perhaps the journey of Chinese-Americans touches too close to home for me – despite being the daughter of more recent Vietnamese immigrants, I am Asian-American of (at least some) Chinese ancestry. I’m not connected to those roots closely – I don’t speak the language and my knowledge of Chinese culture is intermingled with Vietnamese practices – but it’s part of who I am and being no stranger to the prejudices of being a minority in America, I can feel my thin thread connected to a heavier spool of experiences and actions and heartache that yearned for something better.

But the Chinese-American Museum timeline lets you choose how long you want to linger across time, urging you to move forward to the successes that stem from them, to those that persevere – the war heroes who fought in spite of it all, the acknowledgments that arrived with positions in public office, the (few) faces of celebrity fame. My journey there closed with their current exhibition of Chinese-Americans who shaped the Los Angeles landscape and architecture.

I think we often forget that there are faces behind buildings and a part of me feels that maybe there’s beauty in that amnesia. But in this instance, at this museum having ran through the timeline of where Chinese-Americans had to begin, I was glad to learn the names and faces tied to the complexities of structures, glad to see them as places that rise above a past that could easily hold us all back.

New View of Los Angeles - Midway Point at the Chinatown Firecracker 10K

The day landed me in unexpected places, even in the one place I had intended to go. The next day would echo the same as I ran the Chinatown Firecracker 10K. I had signed up for the race twice before and had to bow out due to one reason or another. This third time signing up, I was determined to give it a full go – and I did…and it was wonderful. But it was more than starting and crossing a long awaited finish line. I’ve lived in Los Angeles all my life and though I had to run (okay – walk…) some hills to get there, it was nice to see views I had never seen, to run around Dodger Stadium where I had only gone to baseball games, to gather with thousands of people I might never know but who experienced the same spaces with me.

Almost happiness IS happiness, but it’s the kind that you get without looking. It’s the happiness that you achieve after a certain string of events, some by chance – like a coin ricocheting off a sign and into an unseen wishing well – and others by attempting a goal but achieving far more than that.  It’s happiness in unexpected and unseen places.

In a conversation with my friend before all this – that gave me part cause to throw a coin toward happiness – I described that “being happy is a limited effect and all we’re really seeking are the things that will cause it.” While I still believe this is true, I also think that those two wells in front of “Happiness” tell me something: that there is happiness that you can seek, but all around you is the possibility that happiness can also find you in the process.

-cct

I bought these earrings myself.  $25.  Church silent auction.  They’re butterflies – something anyone who keeps up-to-date with on this blog realizes is a favorite symbol of mine.

But despite the lack of cost (and let’s face it, almost lack of diamond), there’s something about being able to tell myself that I bought my first diamond earrings all by myself.  There’s something in that message that I’ve always found empowering.

I find many jewels beautiful, but the diamond has this reputation that’s hard to shake as being a gemstone of worth in society.  My earrings are certainly not like the baubles on the fingers of celebrities that roam this town.  And that’s fine.  I grasp not at the diamond as this visual object since obviously most people would likely not see them in my earrings without squinting (maybe), but rather how much this fraction of something could hold more worth than even the largest diamond.

Don’t get me wrong.  If someone wanted to give me the Cullinan diamond I wouldn’t necessarily say no, but my desire for that would be monetary.  I don’t love these earrings because they’re $25.  I love them because they remind me that no matter where I am in life and the future, achievements don’t have to be grand; they don’t even have to glimmer like diamonds in the sun to be worth more than even the largest diamond in the world.

Ultimately you define for your own self what it means to be successful and happy.  If it’s about getting the largest diamond in the world (or heck – the universe!), by all means go ahead, but remember the steps that took you there and enjoy every minute of the journey as if they were tiny diamonds you bought all by yourself.

-cct

In the end, I think I realized that being a vegetarian for 30 days (give or take) was not bad at all, but actually pretty great.

• I felt better.
• I cooked more.
• I thought about what I ate.
• I explored LA from a different angle.

I think those statements are helped by being in Los Angeles, a place where a number of restaurants provide you with vegetarian alternatives and plenty of places where it’s also their specialty.

Most of all, I have also accumulated a ton of photographic evidence that a vegetarian diet can be a beautiful and delicious experience!  See slideshow below or click here for my Flickr set.

For any interested parties (who don’t follow me on Twitter), my first non-veggie meal after this adventure was a rib eye steak from Morton’s (I had to keep up with the superb level of my vegetarian diet).

But seriously, I kind of like this veggie diet, so I think I’ll keep it (for the most part).

-cct

Pictured: Beet Salad.  The Farm of Beverly Hills – Downtown LA.