Write-Only Memory

Memories of Loma Prieta

I actually wrote this in 1996, for the Cafe Utné forum.

I was in my classroom up at UC Santa Cruz when the earthquake struck. We knew it was a big one. My first thought was "I hope the epicenter is *here*." (That's always my first thought; if it's here, that means it's no worse anywhere else.) We all filed out. The building up the hill was undergoing seismic retrofitting, and it was fine, so I figured everything else would be OK too. Right?

It was big but I didn't think anything serious would happen. I went up to do some stuff at a different part of campus (there were some student government elections) -- but the power was mostly out and nothing was happening, so I went home.

Well, I tried to. The buses that went downtown (where my house was) weren't running for some reason. There was another bus that ran down to about a mile from my house that was running, so I took it instead. (The bus driver said her radio was out.) The road on the east side of campus gives a good view of the city and Monterey Bay, and you could see smoke from some buildings.

I got to Bay and Mission streets and walked the rest of the way to downtown Santa Cruz. It was getting to be twilight. As I walked I heard radios. Mostly they were playing "evergreen" tapes, stuff designed to be played when nobody knew what was going on. People were guessing on the Richter scale and where the epicenter was. As I walked I could see places where the sidewalk had buckled. Places I had been earlier where the ground was flat now made a step of six or eight inches.

I came around the corner where my house was (on Spruce Street between Pacific and Cedar if you know Santa Cruz at all, one block south of Laurel). My apartment was part of the first floor of an old Victorian house from 1893. It was a tall two-story house with an attic dormer that you could see from the end of the block. As I looked up at it from around the corner it looked tilted, like it was at a different angle than usual. I don't think it registered until I was actually in front of it. The house had fallen off its foundation, and the left half had fallen away from the right half of the house.

Pictures of it are available on priven.com.

I must have stood there for a while talking to myself, wondering what I was going to do. A neighbor -- who I don't think I'd ever talked to -- offered me a place in her living room that night. I ended up going back to campus. Everybody on campus was told to stay out of their dorms and we ended up sleeping literally on the parking lot until about midnight when we were allowed to go into the dorms. That was the first I had heard of the Bay Bridge or the Marina District fires. I stayed in the hall of a friend's dorm that night.

The next day I moved my stuff out of the apartment. My parents managed to get down from San Jose and San Mateo to help me, braving the back roads. We moved everything out and into a storage space we rented, with the help of my friend Doug and a number of passing strangers. There were no major aftershocks that day, thank goodness, and we were all OK. Still, the building was red-tagged later and knocked down. Now there is a small apartment complex there.

I arranged with campus housing to get a place in a dorm lounge. I lived in three different rooms on campus the rest of the school year.

As I write this I keep thinking of other things. I worked in the college library, and I snuck in there to call my parents around 7 pm. I remember the completely empty shelves with books tossed on the floor. I remember looking in the house amazed as the fragility struck home, windows and walls once square turning to parallelograms.

I remember walking from my house to the bus station, with streets closed off and everything smashed. I remember weeks later coming down and looking at all the empty spaces where there had been buildings and businesses.

Three people died in Santa Cruz that day from falling buildings. Many more people lost their livelihoods. I lost almost nothing -- a few kitchen things, a cassette tape or two, and an old IBM clone which wouldn't boot up again after the quake. The house wasn't even mine. Despite the stress and the hardship I still feel very lucky.

Throwing shoes at Bush

They should throw the book at him in The Hague, not shoes at him at a press conference.

I love Harriet

This blog's been abandoned for a long time, but finally I have something to say. This is my wedding day and I love Harriet Patterson very, very much.

Powerpuffs

Back in 2002, I read this review by San Francisco Chronicle TV critic Tim Goodman of The Powerpuff Girls Movie. Who ever heard of a four-star review for a kids' cartoon? It sounded like just the thing to share with my niece, then nine years old. So I asked her if she wanted to go. She said, no, she'd never heard of the Powerpuff Girls.

I was shocked. They were the big thing, I said. They were the hip cartoon of 1998-2002. If I knew about them -- through a coworker who was interested in hip cutesy cartoons -- surely every nine-year-old girl had heard of them? This was the same girl, after all, who couldn't spend enough money in the Hello Kitty section of the Sanrio store.

Lupita said no, she didn't want to see it, but that if I were too embarassed to go alone, she would be willing to see it with me.

Having a nine-year-old tolerantly condescend to me is something I didn't expect to live to see.

The reason I bring this up now is that, while having a cold, I finally got around to watching The Powerpuff Girls Movie, which I had set my TiVo to record. And I have now firmly come to a conclusion which I should have realized from the outset and which I have suspected for some time:

Tim Goodman is a moron.

Thank you, Lupita, for saving me from spending $8 on this garbage. At least this way I saw it when I was so zonked out on medication that I wouldn't have been able to appreciate something better.

Adobe's icon scheme

This seems to be the general reaction of users to Adobe's new icon scheme:

Recovering chocoholics

Do people recovering from addictions to chocolate become "Friends of Bill M. & M."?

Jen Spool

A few months ago I heard Jen Spool at an open mic at the Freight and Salvage. I thought she was good, in a Dar Williams-y sort of way. I went to her CD release concert and bought the album. I liked it. Check it out. Support local artists, and all that.

(Sorry if the new "music" department pulls up old posts. I'll finish the favorite songs series one of these days.)

Xiao peng you zao

I don't know how long this article will be up on the San Francisco Chronicle's web site. It's about the new Mandarin immersion class in San Francisco's Starr King Elementary School.

My nephew is in this class. As he is is already bilingual in English and Spanish, the third language will open up many new doors for him.

I always figured someday I would take him on a vacation trip somewhere and have him translate for me. I just never thought it would be China!

Seriously, I am so proud. And jealous. Oh, so jealous.

On Carpool Lanes

Once upon a time, high occupancy vehicle lanes (aka carpool lanes) were pretty simple. If you had some number of people in your vehicle over one, whether a carpool or van or bus, you could use a lane of traffic set aside for you. Nowadays there are all kinds of other people in the carpool lane as well: motorcyclists, people who drive hybrid cars or other clean-air vehicles, and people who pay money in "high-occupancy/toll (HOT)" lanes.

Allowing these other groups of people in HOV lanes is controversial, as is, for that matter, allowing children in carpool lanes to count for purposes of carpooling. And there is good reason for this.

Although it isn't usually stated this way, HOV lanes generally work, when they do, because they directly compensate for what they are intended to encourage.

Carpooling, or taking a bus, takes more time than driving alone. Either way, the vehicle goes out of its way and stops more often to pick up passengers than a single occupancy vehicle would do.

Society benefits from carpooling and transit use, but except for the additional time it takes, in most other ways individuals benefit as well. It's generally cheaper to carpool or take transit than to pay for gas and parking, and because passengers are not busy driving, they can use the time for other things.

But it takes longer. HOV lanes directly compensate for this extra time by reducing the difference in the time needed to travel. Depending on the trip and the mode chosen, it can actually make the trip take less time than driving alone, but even if it isn't that beneficial, it still reduces some of the cost in time. This directly advantages carpooling and transit use in precisely the way that is needed most.

But this is not true for the other possible ways people can use carpool lanes, which trade money for time or cleaner air for time. To the extent that these things make HOV lanes more crowded and less valuable for real HOV travelers, they harm HOV traveling in ways that cannot be easily compensated by the other benefits that they undoubtedly provide.

Sometimes I hate the Internet

So, last night I was thinking about poetry, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and it occurred to me that it would be fun to have a young witch read "A Child's Garden of Curses." I thought I was being oh-so-original. Then it occurred to me that somebody might have thought of it already, and it turns out, not only did someone think of the joke, she actually wrote it.

Sigh. All my best original ideas were thought of by somebody else.