Hoping For The Best in the DC Bull Ring


On my way to work this morning, I met an old man. Let me just say that chance meetings are not easy to come by in a place where people rarely look you in the eyes or make any other gestures of acknowledgement, but I noticed this man and it looked like he might speak to me, so I stopped.

He was dark-skinned with a stubbly face and had that gentle, old-man quality. I wondered if he was from East Africa (there is a substantial East African population in the neighborhood, especially Ethiopians). He kept repeating something over and over, but I struggled to understand everything he said. I eventually surmised that he worked in a kitchen nearby and after some effort, he produced his driver’s license; Reyes Hernandez. He was Cuban and had simply been repeating his name…but without any “s” or “z” sounds.

I told him I learned Spanish in Veracruz and he became animated, “Ahhhh Mexico!” We chatted for a few minutes in Spanish and I told him I was late for work but that I would come to his restaurant to eat (con mi marido, bien soeur!!) and chat sometime.

Anyway, I thought I’d share a bright moment in an otherwise lonely city. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that it’s impossible to meet people here. In fact, I think it’s even harder to meet people in San Diego, where I lived for five years and never met a soul (minor exaggeration). Here I’ve met a few people already, and could probably meet more if I were more open to it. Problem is, I don’t want to know most of these people. I look at all these “young professionals,” in their meticulously coordinated outfits (men and women mind you), carrying their Starbucks ™ and chatting on their cell phone headsets while browsing at Benetton on their lunch breaks, and I think to myself “I never want to be like that.”

That’s why I respond with an inner glow of self-satisfaction when someone (usually from my office) suddenly notices that my legs are *gasp* hairy! No one would actually say anything, but the resulting facial contortions are grade A entertainment..

Anyway, there appears to be some larger purpose to all this self-inflicted discomfort aka life. Recently I discovered an old notebook wherein I recorded extended sufferings due to another instance of self-inflicted discomfort and it dawned on me that my modus operandi is just that; self-inflicted discomfort. If I simply won’t take the bull by the horns, then I will just throw myself into the ring and see what happens.



“Drop kick me Jesus through the goal posts of life”