A Seattle Minute

It’s been over a year since I’d been back in this town, yet so much has changed. Things feel different here; or maybe it’s that I’ve been given a new space and the old one’s gone, but I walked to this café like a ghost thinking— “I loved that park once, that café, that restaurant, that view, this crosswalk…” Life is fast— just as much as I have changed and checked my demons, so have the people that surround. This morning I met with G and her baby buckled to an eco-friendly carseat in the back of her Prius. The fact that her life had changed forever dawned on me. Baby. E. I touched his little hands and his little feet. He blew me kisses and held my fingers. Skype did none of this justice. We visited the house she and her husband are building at the top of one of Seattle’s seven hills. She pulled out the blueprints on her laptop. It was as if our life together had gotten up, grown legs, and walked off without me.

Soon after I arrived in town, an onslaught of friends and colleagues ignited my phone. I love seeing every one of them. I am who I am because of them. But amid the clanking of silverware, between bites of autumn squash frittata, boon, or salted cod, above the din of old conversations finding new— I remember I also love Seattle for moments like this: moments alone.

There is a man in his early thirties sitting across from me, tall and bearded, donned in a proper nylon rain jacket, dirty jeans, and noise-canceling headphones that seal him off from the world. He is drinking a beer before noon and reading a thin novel with no title on its cover. His chalice says, “La Fin Du Monde.” I remember sitting with E on a bus as the sun was setting deep in South London where she remarked,

- I've been seeing that everywhere recently.

- Seeing what?

She pointed to the pub sign, “La Fin Du Monde,”

- That phrase, “the end of the world.”

She mused on about Stephen Fry, or was it Zadie? I hadn’t thought about that memory until today (six years later!) when I saw this man drinking from a cup with the same insignia, that single, empty chalice on the worn, wooden table across from mine. He caught my eye as I read him, and it’s as if he said,

“This is the end of the world. Where we are today. We are born to die. We live on the edge of life at all times— it’s a terrifying but reassuring idea. It frees us from the ideas that constrain us—the fears; of the unknown, the future, and humanity— it makes us bare to our desires.”

His expression is one of complete arrest, far more intense than the generally gentle gypsies of this town. It reminds me of a professor I once knew. Actually, the professor had said all of those thoughts. In reality, this man sitting here is probably only bothered by my shamelessness. Rudeness is the worst offense here, just the way laziness is in New York. We are upstairs in my used-to-be usual corner. There is a couple downstairs: two elderly women talking a bit too loudly about a special they saw on PBS. Nazi life post World War II. The man on his laptop behind them looks slightly perturbed. He’s got a weathered murse to match his weathered face. I glance at his screen from above. He is coding. Only in Seattle would you find a man in his 50s, coding.

I worked for a judge once that told me a story of one of the first computers built in Seattle. His clerk was on maternity leave, and his secretary was at lunch. Sitting there in chambers, surrounded by windows, ancient wood and paraphernalia from his clients from around the world, I had tiptoed in to set a motion on his desk. When I asked him about his family portrait, he got talking about his family and then his wife, and then her fixation with a machine. “This machine,” she had told him as a late teen, “is going to change the life of every human on this planet.” I told him that I could see why he married her. He sunk in his leather cloud from behind the giant oak desk, robes off before his next case. His aging face lit up the dark, gray sky.

I came to town for a wedding, a cosmopolitan love affair that traipses all kinds of continents, years and life circumstances. The wedding was beautiful, mainly because the couple was so beautiful—radiating life and happiness. The bride was clothed in her constant joyous composure, the groom in his ever flippant anti-cajolery, and they were surrounded by proud family, friends and a magnanimous view of the Sound (the eighth wonder of the world). Someday, I hope when they are old and gray, they will let me write their story of young love. But for now I am off again to lunch with dear C. She is back from a year in India with her own stories of travel, love and new chapters. 

Oh, you dance, dance like how?

Four years ago, I met a girl in the mountains in a small, wooden cafe. She had set her aviators on the table in front of her, and a distressed leather jacket was slung over the chair behind her. Around her neck hung a very large camera, and her body was framed by a perfect gray linen dress. It showed her figure just slightly as she swayed towards the counter to pick up her tea. Elle was tall and athletic, with long wavy blond hair and gleeful, clear blue eyes. She was marked by something tragic, something I was sure she didn't bring upon herself-- an injustice that life had ordained for her. It was a symbol of her quiet strength, a posture she wore with elegance. When she smiled, it was as if the whole world was a better place.

However, what defined her was not the cafe (it smelled like wet pine and ground coffee), nor the smooth, worn table we sat at, nor the way she inclined her head when she listened. It was in the words that came out of her mouth. Her words, her mind said to you that she was like the light. She was someone that the world and circumstance couldn't mar. She was pure and artful. Elle radiated goodness. 

I'm sure you've met her too. 

I spent a good portion of my life trying to be that girl. Her blitheness is attractive-- these women are apparently never without. But somewhere on the course of the past several years, I discovered that no matter how hard I try, I will never be one of these unmarred nymphs. In fact, I am broken. Sure, there are minutes when I feel graceful and exemplary, but there are many, many more when I am falling flat on my face. In fact, all of the women that I know and find beautiful are a little misshapen by life, full of past fortunes and past regrets, gorgeous alloys of truth and aspiration.

I was in Brooklyn a couple of weeks ago, having drinks with a friend (called W) and recounting a hilarious tale of my woes regarding men. Some of the dating blunders I have made are unbelievable. After laughing heartily over my failures, W paused for a moment and called me a "beautiful disaster." I graduated from law school and never took the bar. I made films I've never watched. I've written two-thirds of a novel. I have seen a thousand flowers fail to bloom. But I will always own to my actions, and try to run farther and try to do better the next time around. I wasn't sure how to take W's attribution then, but I do now: it is the truth, and so I embrace it. I am a beautiful disaster.

I have concluded that to be able to venture out, to get it wrong or right, to move to action and to give is to be brave. There is strength in our courage to be weak, to live in our pains and follies. Our broken shards point both to our humanity and something other within. So I get it wrong all the time; I'm always a mess, my "dress [is] hanging off my shoulder, barely sober." I'm always "making plans and starting over" and always always dancing through disaster; but in the bruises and scars of my aging skin, I see healing and something beautiful growing in the stead of all my mistakes. I'm growing to find a definition of beauty that is irresistible.

(And yes, I quoted a sad Drake song. I'm that girl.)

Letter to the Church

We sang about God's justice in church today. It's true that I have learned something about the law-- not in a classroom, but under the shade of a prison in Brixton. It's a very different vantage point than a court of justice, I know, and certainly very different from the holy pews of a church. I stood in service today, hands clapping, remembering those unwavering prison cell lights, and wondered why we were so concerned. You see, I don't think we would be murmuring our amens and singing for God to topple regimes and fell our enemies if we really knew what the word "justice" meant.  In any of its conceptions, judging ourselves under a perfectly just regime is frightening.

I've often wondered how it is that the church can cry for justice, when it was the Samaritan that clothed the naked, when it was Peter that denied him, and when it was the woman with five husbands that shared the news of Jesus with her town.  Further, I wonder why it is that the church turns such a blind eye to the circumstances of poverty and racism and sexism and prejudice and bias that so plague our neighbor, and how it came to be that we have relegated the task of 'loving others' to those brave sisters and brothers who 'save the world.'   Our lack of compassion and our arrogance are stains that turn the foreigner, the entire world away from us.

I do not think this is a failing without explanation - there is always a reason for the disconnect.  I think we are afraid of our own reflection.  For I am the whore at the well and I have denied him.  The only difference between them and me is that up until now, I wasn't willing to go that far, to recognize myself in the people the church has deemed a little different: poor, voiceless, and "other."  But if we believe the truth of sin that we so eagerly put on everyone else, we must also believe it for ourselves: I deserve what justice ought to prevail upon my soul, and I am afraid to see it. 

Now do you think I sing songs about justice?  I have seen war victims witness before an international criminal tribunal.  I have seen a man come beg the court not to foreclose his home.  I have witnessed the sentencing of defendants who robbed, raped, murdered... I have sat in the rooms of the state court, the federal court, the international court, and the prison cell -- but Lord, when I saw the accused, all I could think is that there was a time when I ought to have stood where they stand.  So from that vantage point,

Do I want justice?

Do I want to save the world?

Justice, as a road to holiness, is purifying and intangibly powerful.  But I've long lost the fever to understand power and its structures (legal and otherwise), and I don't know if it's even possible to fully grasp what it means to want justice.  So I think of what I can do and turn to the two things that I am sure Jesus told me to do: to love God and to love each other.  I have wondered what he meant, because it feels so selfish that God would want me to love him first - but the more I think on it, I am more fully aware that even this is for our own benefit.  It's the same story retold - for in loving him, we find a certain joy, absolution, freedom. So for now, I try to remember that.  I try to sing about mercy and in the end, I hope I can say that I tried to walk humbly, tried to understand somebody and to understand God-- that, in the words of Dr. King himself, "I tried to love somebody."

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
    And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
    and to walk humbly with your God.

Written on MLK, Jr. Day 2013 

Letters from Earth, part 1

So, I am laying in my bed at a hotel in the Hague, a small hotel but clean and beautiful. The rates are slightly cheaper because I am surrounded by cafes, using the term cafe very loosely as a place that doesn't sell coffee but other more illicit merchandise. But it is gorgeous here...  I can see why they think world peace is possible, sitting in a sunny Dutch city square taking coffee and a warm croissant just fifteen minutes from paradise or a beach called Scheveningen. We went to Delft over the weekend, which is the birthplace of both Hugo Grotius, the father of international law, and Vermeer, my Vermeer.

It was so strange to see my own two professional worlds collide: art and logic... at the culmination of an incredible summer. So I thought it might be a good time to reflect:

Two days after the most horrendous set of finals I have ever taken, I boarded a flight from Seattle to Seoul. The journey was cramped and dark. There was a fat man sitting in the seat next to me, and his body spilled over into my seat, so I sat there, with an enormous, sweaty heatpad for the 20 hours or whatever ungodly duration it was. When I arrived, I met my mother, moved into an apartment above a row of bars. The room was entirely wooden, void of running water and perhaps 100 years old and perhaps 10 skeletons past its remodel date. I promptly moved out, found a liveable room, and spent the next ten days with my mother - sleeping in a twin-sized bed with her, talking about her childhood, arguing with her, repeating that I couldn't drink anymore rice wine, laughing, crying, yelling, whispering, eating korean steamed ribs at 1 in the morning, talking about my father, about their love, about their restlessness, about music, and law, and art, and art, and art, and counting the dead bugs on my window sill until the monsoons threatened to sweep me from my small first floor apartment just a couple of months later.

We all learned Korean together, a group of about 15, all college-age students. In a sense, they trained me for my job in Europe, and they each taught me something different; but above all they taught me how to treat everyone like your equal, how to treat everyone as the person they can be. Shared stories of families, of friends, of lovers, of Asia and history all remain sketched in my journal and will always have a place in my memory.

And here, where my parents were born, I met my Parisians, three boys and a girl who changed my life. Nightly runs together, midnight talks, daily lunches - they rekindled more than my love for the French language, they reminded me of a different way of life and thinking. Franz, in particular, taught me how to see potential, and how to cultivate potential - both in myself and others... he taught me how to love him. Bong-sou showed me humility - he was never arrogant, he defied almost every French stereotype... yet fulfilled them at the same time. Tugdual and Kelicia were light. They were passion: loved each other and argued; lived honestly, earnestly.

In a sense, Seoul could be chalked up to a pilgrimage to my parents' home - to not only see where they came from, but to really walk on the ground they walked - the topsoil of blood, poverty, and suffering buried 70 years deep. On the surface lives a lush but somewhat crooked tree that has sprawled out viciously over its history. This can only be felt by spending more than a vacation in Seoul.

On the last night, I took a long walk with Franz. We saw half the city. As we did almost every night for those three months, we talked about the different gods we loved and found a bridge between us called humanity. I saw it that way: he and I were once the same species of spiritual creature; and if I could still see that in him, well, I could love him - no matter what things he did in secret. Korea, also then, was a test that I wouldn't recommend to my loved ones. It was a heavy test. I am not stronger than my darkness, only God is. You can see evidence of this all over the world. War was the answer to ideological conflicts between Israel and Palestine, even between the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, not to mention all the other ethnicities and religions that do not come from the Judeo-Christian tradition.

You see, my God will never be reconciled to his, because his book calls my god false and my book calls his god false. To be fair, his god is a Korean billionaire who requires money and a strange forfeiture of rights from his followers. To be fair, I spent half the time reminding myself not to resent the man for making a business of souls. To be fair, the early Christian church did the same. To be fair, that was not Jesus, but a result of human decision making. So it went, back and forth, our spirits conversing ahead of us on the Han River. So, the tension in loving all humanity is real, and the solution (though I cannot be sure yet) is not legal. I think it's as simple and as difficult as recognizing our own humanity and the humanity of our neighbor, and to love in verb form. To love, to be active in love, and to be smart about it. Blind love almost inevitably leads to destruction.

To be fair, his god died a week ago. To be fair, I love Franz and my heart is heavy that he is mourning.

 ...

But I said my goodbyes to the Parisians, to Kelicia, and all the other lovely students at Seoul National University and moved on to London. London. With Elena. London was magical. Remember the light Tugdual and Kelicia had pointed me towards early in the summer? London was the end of the tunnel. London was grace. London was joy. London was love. London was an old friend named David. His face had aged three years from sun and work, but his laugh was ever the same; his love for others was ever like it was, amazing. Honestly, if you want the answer to world peace, ask him. He knows what a quiet thing it should be. He had chased what he loved, what gave him pleasure, gave light to what he touched and he had only grown -- yet after three years, we were able to talk like we had only left each other yesterday. This was a different kind of pilgrimage. I visited the day shelter that I worked in. I discovered that the new director of the day shelter is an old friend who, regardless of all my darkness and stubbornness and pride, brought me to Jesus. I'm pausing now for dramatic effect, to let that coincidence turn to a chuckle.

London says to me that God laughs. A lot. Elena and I played like little school children; and London was our sandbox.

...

And then Galway. I climbed a mountain called Croagh Patrick, a vertical hike. I came back down slowly and carefully and as I soon as I saw the cow fence that led to civilization, I became so excited that I fell off a rock and scraped everything I possibly could scrap. I almost died. Not quite, but almost.

I lusted after a silver fox that looked like Colin Farrell but was honest to God a "UN Peacekeeper" - literally, a keeper of the peace... telling us his story about a successful mission in Kosovo. So, he was: a military Captain with gorgeous steel eyes and more than a note of conviction without the airs -- because nobody likes the self-righteous hero, but everyone loves the humble one even if you have to search under bravado to find it. I wrote about the Irish military and compared it to the U.S. military here.

Over a few beers in a pub, I asked him: "Where is the best place you've ever been to?"

"South of France"

"Yeah?? I'm studying human rights law right now which is terrible, it's full of suffering and people dying. But my real dream is to go open a bakery in the south of France."

"Shit. Well. Cheers."

He pauses for a minute, his gaze not leaving mine - I think he's trying to think of what to say.

"I like the finer things. Don't get me wrong - I get in the shit when I have to."

He wasn't a genius, but he really lived - which is more important than anything. He gets in the middle of things and in his way prevents nations from fighting, from destruction. Theoretically, I don't know what this means; practically, I don't know what this means - but just for this one story and one day, I saw the physical embodiment of a peacemaker. Oh, el Capitan.

Those days also changed my life. I played chess. I did what I needed to, to prevent further casualties - I did it for all the people in my care, but I wouldn't do it again. It's a rights thing. I think this is why we are meant to have free will, and not meant to play God. The only thing I can say is that I operated out of love and it worked out better than I thought it would.

Onto Dublin.

I am getting closer to the students at this point, and they are wonderful. Amazing. Bright-eyed undergrads who think that the world is at their fingertips, who love their dreams like they will all come true. And their dreams will come true, you must believe that they will - believing is one of the only requisites. It's why we have such a fascination with youth.

Dublin was a blur. One of the students and I woke up early and by serendipity stumbled across the exact spot where Handel's Messiah was first performed. We ate almond croissants and went to St. Patrick's for mass, where we were too late to participate and instead wandered the cathedral and towards the tomb of Jonathan Swift. If you recall, the first human rights piece I ever wrote, we wrote together in grade school - in response to A Modest Proposal. I have always loved Jonathan Swift, because I owe a lot of my philosophy to him, and being in that cathedral and looking at his life, his off-color thinking, his legacy -- which was largely his work on mental illness and society; and his famous wit... well, the Irishman had a life I'd like to lead. We ate lunch on the steps where Oscar Wilde lived debaucherously as a college student and went to mass with the Professor and his wife. The priest talked about compassion and what compassion means - it means love for all things, for nature, for all people, even animals and even the devil that lurks. Compassion. Isn't that what I learned this summer? Isn't that what I have been learning in the last several years? I don't know why, but I started crying silently and I felt completely free. As if on cue, the priest said, (he cannot see me because it's a large church and he's reading behind his tall pulpit) tears of compassion come not by your own volition, but from God. I read a plaque that said that the first 13 Sisters of Mercy were buried a couple of feet from where we sat. I know you don't believe in all this, but it was too perfect not to mention. Anyway, I hate crying.

With a few girls, I had a dinner of baguettes, an assortment of cheeses, mimosas and salads in St. Stephen's Green, a lovely park with the sunlight falling in rays through a canopy of trees upon a lake that runs through it. And then if we went out, I don't remember. Everything else in Dublin was a blur.

Ah, except that the Professor and his wife sang a duet at the Hibernian Club, an exclusive military club where he hosted an evening of canapes and a High Court Judge who spoke about morality and law through Grimm's fairy tales. Such is the strength of our laws, that we extend legal theory to make-believe in order to understand morality.

We were soon off to Amsterdam, in a frenzied sort of way - frenzied probably only in my head because I'd been trying to keep track of 17 students, what they were learning, a professor and his wife and my own things, and the entire budget for this month (no small sum) -- so when we finally landed in Amsterdam and trained our way to Den Haag, I was relieved - because this was the last move, and the big one across state lines. So we got here and went to the beach and had a glorious evening of tapas and wine. More friends made, more conversations about careers, futures, law, boys, and everything else 18 to 21-year-olds worry about. It was here that I really realized I love them each and all, for their own unique character and what they bring to this world.

This letter is getting way too long and your eyes are probably bleeding because none of this has anything to do with you - but there it is. My summer, well not all of it. I've yet to leave the Hague and its wondrously flawed courts and tribunals, so this novel is only half of what I intended to write to you. Sorry there's quite a bit of Jesus in it, but trust that I've at least left out all things "law." And I promise the next one will have more photographs.

Do come in October. Come for a weekend, we'll play! It may be shit weather, but we'll play. And maybe Luke will fall in love with you because you're gorgeous and friendly. Hahah. I don't know what he's doing, Michelle's moved to Seattle - he may have popped the question - and that means that you and I will have to live in the cardboard box across the street from the Space Needle. I've made eye contact with its owner a couple of times, and he's quite friendly. So. Voila. Come!

solidarity?

Currently experiencing a perfect storm that has scared off the muse.  So until she comes back to me. . .

from "A World Made New" by Mary Ann Glendon.

on earth day

it's a well-known fact that
my major weaknesses are:

books and ferns

❤

please don't hate me, earth,
i just can't resist a good indoor plant

the flute player and the cellist

It's a well-known fact that I am a serial book-killer.  So far on my break, I've almost finished Kathryn Stockett's The Help and Jamie Ford's Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.  The first is about female empowerment through shared stories, told primarily through the eyes of a black maid and a white writer in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi.  The second is a love story about an interracial friendship wedged apart by a World War II internment camp, an Asian Romeo and Juliet of sorts, set in a tea house I often study at.  I've also re-read the first Hunger Games books, which of course is a contemporary rendition of Lord of the Flies [crossbred with the Japanese film Battle Royale and Connell's The Most Dangerous Game], a commentary for children on the ugly nature of war, politics and power.  Reading these three stories in the comfort of the home I grew up in and listening to the following song reminded me of a small story of my own.

 

And I said, "Please, I know that we're different

But we were once under the sea in the beginning

And what we're made of was all the same once

We're not that different after all"

-The Minnow and the Trout

I was born in the OC, in the part of Orange County that many associate with luxury and waste.  It's a land of Evangelical Christians and red-blooded Republicans: upstanding families of diligence, industry, and country, of warmth and hospitality.  I never had any particular wants, I always had everything that I needed— placated by the 360 days of sunshine, by a room full of books, and balmy palm tree littered play dates.  
 

I played duets with a boy, a flute player, who drove an hour to get to me.  We went around with our instruments to play in different spaces, outdoors and indoors, in parks and auditoriums.  In one particular place (a church), I performed twice a month over the course of two years.  It was the only occasion I had to see him, when we played these songs, this song, Amazing Grace to close out our performance.  He stood there with his flute before the pews and stained glass images of suffering, and I often saw a slight discomfort register on his face like he wanted to say something but decided against it.        

There was a math teacher who was fired inexplicably, an English teacher who was constantly teased, a girl who played badminton with me, who sometimes sat alone in the locker room because the others would call her names.

It may be unpopular of me to say it, but I still love Jesus and I do love the church for what it means to many people around the world, and what it has the potential to be.  But it may be even more unpopular of me to say the following: In one of the most Christian cities I have ever lived in, I experienced an unspoken hatred, a casting off of a group of people—out of what? Out of fear, out of intolerance, out of a distaste for the unexplored, the foreign, unexplained?  It is natural to push away issues that are confusing to you, but if we say we love this faith we hold so dearly to, it breaks my heart that we could push anyone away.  We are called to love, but I too often see the hate that courses like a thick, pulsating vein through the spine of the history of the Christian church.  (Need I parade the persecution, enslavement, mistreatment— the blood on our hands?)

I don't know everything, or anything really.  And in my world, not many of the people I love agree with what I am saying (what I often say).  God knows I should be a much braver and better person, but I do know one thing, one fundamental tenet of my faith.  It teaches me to meet with a person, to run outside when I see her walking up my driveway, to embrace her, to welcome her; my faith also teaches me to build people up and not to strip them down, not to "fix" or "cure," but if you insist on doing anything, then love as you have been loved.  My faith teaches me that we are equal, you and I.  We are made of the same dust, and we will return to the same dust.  Anyway, so in my senior year, I went to prom with the flute player.  We lost contact after that, but some years ago, I ran into him while taking a walk from a friend's apartment in L.A.  He saw me from across the street, shoved his Whole Foods grocery bag onto his partner, threw his arms around me, and gave me the warmest embrace.  We're made of the same stuff, you and I.

P.S.  Please at least ask yourself, what does this mean?

When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."

John 8:7

control

queen anne

I was taken by surprise-- how much this place turned me around.  It has been a wonderful few months of travel and newborn babies, of panic and calm, of snow and singing, of cake and morning, of despair and hope, of justice and justice and mercy.  Tonight, I turned out the lights, said goodnight to the skyline, and locked the door for the last time.  I walked past the neon signs of the gentleman's club, the doughnuts and the books, the rubber chickens hanging from red drapes, and something nameless suddenly shed from me with the rain.


I stopped, and realized I didn't know where I was going.  For a year now, I had told myself that I only had to make it through to March, to the end of this externship, and I would reassess what exactly it was that I was doing in law school, what I was here for.  Everything I had planned up until tonight were plans already put into motion.  Many months ago, I had made it so that I would only need to put one foot in front of the other.  But tonight my feet had no further destination.  So I kept walking.  I talked it out with a friend.  I chased the moon, up the hill and back down it on the other side.  I always had a plan (not measured by anything physical like what I was doing in my life, by time, or by social accolade) but by the direction of my soul.  I always had dreams and with them little steps lined up months, years in advance to achieve them.  But for the first time in a long time, I had nothing.  I didn't know what classes to take, and I didn't know what to do in the summer, or afterwards.  I hadn't made a single real plan for over a year now, and I felt no anxiety, no sadness, no feeling of incompetence attached to this lack of direction.  For the first time, I trusted that what would happen next was up to God, to the universe, to actions belonging to people I didn't know.


With so many variables, I didn't need a plan just yet, and I decidedly enjoyed the rest of my walk.  When I finally made it home, I found something curious.  Some months ago, I had made a wish and had forgotten about it because I needed money to make it happen and I knew free money wasn't easy to come by.  But the money came, in a little envelope on my kitchen counter, and nudged me forward to find those little steps again.  O dreams, you have good timing.

legal pad

the other pages are full of notes
i promise

Interjection!

At around 1AM last night, I was standing in front of a 7-eleven, about to tuck away the change remaining in my hand when a leering, drunk homeless man in want of four dollars asked for it.  Without having a better excuse, I mumbled we could pop inside and get him something to eat or drink.  So we went into this 7-eleven, and he picked a Gatorade.  I told him to have a good night and went upstairs to my condo.

As I took off my coat, I saw the man through my window inside the 7-eleven.  He was negotiating a cash return for the Gatorade I had purchased for him.  I could barely make out the worn expression on the cashier's face but she was (obviously) telling him this wasn't possible except his presence and the nuisance was probably reaching some sort of a threshold... I could just about feel her desire to hand over the cash so he would leave the premise, and after about five minutes (or actually I'm not positive how much time had lapsed at this point), I didn't have the heart to keep sitting by the window.  I slipped into the shower and thought, "February 11-- no wait, 12, 2012: Enabled a drunk man."

In almost the same vein, I saw this today and it changed my life: