the lord's day

I skipped church on Sunday morning and went to the laundromat, where I washed some of my own clothes but mostly rags and cleaning cloths, soaked with homemade furniture polish from our training on Thursday. While I was there my boss stopped by with presentation copies from Kinko's, which all turned out to be missing the even pages. he went back and re-did them, and we met up later for some collating and a long conversation about organizational behavior.

after a long work-related afternoon, I took BART to Emeryville to meet up with Han, a friend from college. he lives with his sister in a cute little loft, where he cooked us some awesome thai curry. besides the sandwich I ate the first day we were here, it was my first home-cooked meal, and it was amazing.

after dinner we smoked some cigarettes on the porch and I talked about the strange hatred I felt towards the tourists I'd seen on Saturday. Living on Cape Cod for so long, I feel justified in hating the tourists there, because I depended on them for income and so often they were cheap jerks. But i was kind of surprised to find myself hating tourists here too, especially since technically, I'm one of them. Han made an excellent point, that there's a difference between the tourist who comes to "observe" from the outside, and the tourist who comes to be a part of what's going on.

While I'm certainly fascinated by the things that make this place different from my hometown(s), I make it a point not to come here acting like I'm at the zoo. In fact, I hate the very idea of zoos precisely because I think it's so offensive to observe animals like that. I'm sure I don't "fit in" here, but I try not to act like local things and local people exist simply for my enjoyment. I feel like a lot of tourists are here to extract and exhaust local resources, always ethnograph-izing about the strange and exotic things they see, which because they are tourists and confine themselves to tourist attractions suggested in guidebooks, aren't even representative of wherever they are.

So anyways, we talked shit about this kind of tourist for a while, then went to a store in Berkeley called the Elephant Pharmacy, where I tried not to ogle too much, despite the fact that it was the kind of place that inspires me to think I'm not in Kansas anymore. Oh, the irony. This "pharmacy," which I gather caters to UC Berkeley students, did sell all the regular pharmacy stuff, but was mostly stocked with stuff like $80 yoga mats and hemp stationery. We got some organic blueberry newtons and raw juice "health tonic."