The Storm

I see the storm raging outside.  I feel it.  It pulses through me, and I can feel that it’s alive, as if it’s moving through my very being and touching me on the inside.  The wind tears through the trees, pushing them, bending them, until I think they’ll break and splinter into a thousand pieces.

Dark clouds cover the sky, black and gray sentinels, floating slowly, silently over the battled being waged below.  Lightning tears through them, illuminating them in flashes of yellow and white.  Its electric fingers crackling with life and energy.  It superheats the air, expanding it as it flows through.  The air snaps back into place in its wake, creating a boom that rips through the quiet; echoing, reverberating until it fills every inch of the air around me.  And just as suddenly, it’s quiet again.

Rain is in the clouds, building and preparing.  I can smell it, fresh and wet, waiting.  The wind continues to whip around me; tousling my hair, ruffling my clothes, gusting against me.  It’s testing me, testing my strength.  Will I bend to withstand it, or will I break into a thousand pieces?

I can see the storm raging, but is it outside or inside me?

Dabbawalas

Have you ever heard of the dabbawalas?  Well, you probably have if you have lived in India, especially in Mumbai.  They are a “lunchbox delivery and return system that delivers hot lunches from homes and restaurants to people at work in India.”  Dabbawala literally means “one who carries a box.”  The dabba is an aluminum or tin cylinder that has three or four tiers inside it.  Each part of a meal is placed in a different section of the tier and is removed by unlocking a small catch on either side of the handle.

An estimated 175,000 to 200,000 lunch boxes, or tiffin boxes, are transported by 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas each day.  The meals are picked up each morning and delivered using predominantly bicycles and railway trains.  The empty boxes are then picked up and returned each afternoon.

The service was established in 1890, in what was then known as Bombay, by Mahadeo Havaji Bachche.  At the time, he had only around 100 men helping him deliver the food.  Over the years, the service has developed a simple, yet highly-effective marking and tracking system that has resulted in only an estimated one mistake in every sixteen million deliveries!  That’s about one mistake every two and half months.  This astonishing result has actually brought delivery moguls from all over the world to India to learn from the dabbawalas on how to improve their own efficiency.

Since most of the dabbawalas are either illiterate or of very low education, the marking and tracking system uses colors and symbols to mark the containers.  The markings contain symbols for the group that picked the food up, the railway station the food was sent, the railway station the food should be removed, the group that should deliver the food, the destination building, and the floor of the building.  The same system is then used in reverse to deliver the container back to the supplier of the food.  Containers are collected and taken to a sorting location, where the boxes are sorted into delivery groups.  The grouped boxes are then placed on train cars by destination and sent to the correct railway station, where they are unloaded and handed over to another dabbawala for delivery.

This group of men are so dedicated to their jobs that they will deliver their boxes regardless of the weather.  When a monsoon wreaked havoc over the area a few years ago, producing terrible flooding and shutting down the railway stations; the dabbawalas took to foot, trudging through the high water with the boxes on their backs.  And they do all of this for around $130 a month!

The demand for the dabbawala delivery service is so high that companies have started contracting them for delivery of other types of goods and services as well.  Several years ago, it was estimated that the service was steadily growing at a rate of 5-10% per year.  Not bad for a group that’s been around for over 125 years and still largely operates on foot, bicycle, and train!

Drunk Driving

When I was in Missouri, I got pulled over for drunk driving.  Now, anyone that knows me knows that this is completely ludicrous, because I don’t drink alcohol…like, not at all…ever.  So, to be pulled over for drunk driving is just ironic.  The police officer realized her obvious mistake the moment she started talking to me, but I was already over, so it was too late.

I was on the way home from the movies, where my spousal unit and I had stopped after work for an impromptu date night.  According to the police officer, I was swerving over the white lines and…and this was the real clincher…I failed to use my turn signal when changing lanes.  It should be known that the road was really windy.  So as opposed to swerving over the white lines in a drunken and disorderly manner, as she made it sound, I was actually hugging the lines as I went around the curves…racing style.  And back then, I never used my turn signals, because I came from Texas.  And in Texas, using a turn signal is just asking for someone to speed up to cut you off and block the hole.

The worst part about this experience is that my spousal unit, who was in her own car, saw me get pulled over and just kept on driving.  How do I know this?  Because she texted me to tell me.  Followed by her food order for the Subway sandwich I was supposed to be getting.  I’m not quite sure her priorities were in the correct place.

Luckily, I got off with a warning to start using my turn signals; and that outrageous, embarrassing experience was finally over.

Nutless Banana Nut Bread

After my grandfather passed away, my mother continued his tradition of baking banana nut bread.  She lovingly protects his secret recipe, vowing one day to pass it down to my brother and me.  And she still cooks them to order, mine without nuts and my brother’s with them just like we like them. 

Unfortunately, gone are the days when she’d bake them in an old Folger’s coffee can.  The bread a cylinder of golden-brownness with a bulging muffin top protruding out of the top.  I can still remember her coaxing that loaf out of that can and the ringed indentations every few inches along its sides.  I couldn’t wait to cut into its warm, softness; to spread butter across its surface and watch it melt into the pores of the bread.  The combination of salty and sweet intermingling into an explosion of perfection.

Crap!  Now I’m hungry for some nutless banana nut bread.  Maybe I can convince my mother that it’s time for another batch.

Vekin Fingers

HR is on a whole vegan kick now, after seeing the state of containment of the luwak in Bali.  Some of her comments are ludicrous and downright incorrect, like the fact that they kill bees to get their honey.  And others are conveniently altered to suit her needs, like her belief that it’s okay to eat the yeast in bread, because the bacteria in yeast is not alive, or is too simple to be considered a true animal.

But she still has cravings for meat, so she has taken to trying to find alternatives, like vekin fingers, which are vegan chicken fingers.  Or veak, which is vegan steak, and vice cream, which is vegan ice cream.  Personally, I don’t see how giving up meat is helping the luwak in Bali.  If she’s that concerned about them, then she needs to start a group of people for the ethical treatment of the luwak (PETL).  That seems like that would have a more direct impact on their lives than one person on the other side of the world refusing to eat meat.

Monster Repellent

My spousal unit woke me up last night and told me that I was snoring.  She was trying to be nice about it, gently nudging me and speaking in the softest voice.  I don’t know what possessed me to say it or how I managed to put these thoughts together in my half-asleep stupor, but I told her, “I’m not snoring, I’m growling to ward off evil spirits and monsters.  I’m protecting you.  And now that you have woken me up, you have put us both at risk.  So, I’m going to go back to sleep, and I might growl a little, but it’s all for the greater good.”  As I rolled over and started to slip back into my peaceful slumber, I could hear her snickering on the other side of the bed.

Parkinson’s Barber

My stepmother was telling me about a friend of hers that had Parkinson’s Disease really badly.  If you’re not familiar with this disease, it’s a degeneration of the central nervous system, and it affects the person’s motor skills.  The most common symptoms are shaking, stiffness, and slowness of movement.  It eventually starts to destroy their mental faculties as well, and many people suffer from dementia or a lack of awareness of their environment.

This friend of my stepmother had really bad shaking of his hands, which was quite a detriment based on his chosen profession.  He was a barber.  She’s telling me this at the barber shop, as I’m watching this barber do a fade on this guy’s head with a razor.  And I’m trying to picture this shaking man attempting to do the same thing.

My Brother from Another Mother

My barber was telling me a story about these two little boys.  They were best friends.  They grew up together.  They did everything together.  They were practically brothers.  One day they went to the barber together and asked for the exact same haircut.  When their parents asked them why, they said that they didn’t want their teacher to be able to tell them apart.

One of the little boys was black and one was white.  Only children would see themselves as exactly the same, despite the rest of the world seeing them as different colors.  I always used to say that underneath it all, we’re all pink.  Maybe if we got back to a mentality more aligned with this, we’d have less problems in the world.

A famous anthropologist was once giving a lecture on the history of man, and he paused when he got to a slide of two skulls side-by-side that were almost identical.  He looked out over the quiet crowd, took in the sea of faces, each one different and unique.  He noted that there were men and women from every race and culture represented in the large audience filling the auditorium.  And when the silence had dragged on almost too long, he said, “On this slide you see the skulls of two men approximately the same size and age.  Which one is the black man, and which one is the white man?” 

He paused again to let the question sink in.  He watched the eyes of the audience flick back and forth between the two skulls, trying to note the differences, trying to pick out characteristics that would prove the races of the two men.  A slight smile crept over his lips as the people became increasingly more frustrated by the task.  One by one, their eyes were drawn back to the professor, questioning and imploring.  He had proven to them that he was smarter than them all.  He had beaten them.  So, they waited for him to answer the question and show them the slight nuances that would prove a man’s race from his bones.

But the professor didn’t do that.  He simply said, “There is no way to tell.  In all aspects, these skulls are essentially identical.  If we dig deeper to get beneath the surface of people, to get beneath the color of their skin, we’ll find that they are just like us.  Sure, we come from different cultures and backgrounds.  We’ve had different experiences, but the same can be said for people of the same color too.  So, why do we act like skin color changes us somehow?  We act as if we’re a completely different species.  Well, as you can see on the screen here…we aren’t.  And life would be so much better for everyone, if we remember that.”

Pareidolia

Today, I found out that I apparently have the psychological phenomenon known as pareidolia.  It is the ability of your mind to respond to a stimulus, such as an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists.  In other words, I see faces in things.

I have always known I had a propensity to see faces in the swirls of the paint on the wall or ceiling, in the bathroom tiles, in the steam patterns on the glass during my shower, in the folds of fabric, or pretty much anywhere there is a change of textures.  I see animals, humans, and sometimes creatures that don’t even exist!  I just thought I had an overactive imagination, but apparently, it’s an actual phenomenon.

Studies have shown that people who are highly empathetic or perceptive of moods and mental states in others, have a greater chance to have pareidolia.  This is because these people are processing a greater amount of information about a perceived friend or enemy to determine if they should engage or flee.  All of this pre-processing occurs before the cognitive mind even has a chance to consciously process the data.  It’s an adaptive defense mechanism!

So, I’m perceiving patterns in objects before my mind even has a chance to tell me that it’s just paint, or steam, or fabric.  Despite the fact that I have a potential “psychosis,” it’s still pretty cool.

Still Kids at Heart

Today is my wife’s birthday, so I want to pay homage to it by recounting one of our best dates.  Way back when we were in Missouri, we had stopped off one night at Pizza Hut for dinner.  I know that it wasn’t the fanciest date, but it’s about the time together, not the price of the food.  Now, pay attention!  This Pizza Hut (and maybe all Pizza Huts) was notorious for the time it took to get your food, sometimes taking over an hour even when the place was completely dead…like it was this night.  So, we had lots of time to talk and catch up.  However, this can only last so long before my playful side takes over, and without warning, I picked up my straw and blew the wrapper at her right in the middle of her sentence.

The look of shock and horror on her face was priceless.  Her eyes oozed, “how dare you!” at me like daggers.  The feeling of betrayal and outrage was written all over, as I grinned gleefully back at her.  But this was to be short-lived as she grabbed up her straw and blew the wrapper back at me.

However, her aim was not quite as good as mine, and the wrapper flew over my right shoulder and landed on the pizza of the family behind me.  The pizza that they had waited almost an hour to get and which had just minutes before been brought to their table.  In a twist of unfairness and justice (depending on who you ask), I was forced to walk over to their table, apologize for the inconvenience, and retrieve the straw wrapper off their pizza.

To this day, we still play with each other in restaurants while we wait for our food.  Personally, I hope we always do, and forever stay kids at heart.  Life it too short to grow old without a fight.

I love you; my wifey, my spousal unit, my best friend, and my play buddy.  Happy Birthday!