This is getting fascinating

Today in the mail I got my first ever debit card. It was shiny and bright, and a little bit cold, with the MasterCard insignia and a shiny platinum oval with the word “debit” on it. My mom sent it to me last week Thursday. She had told me on the phone about how she spent the day going to the North Shore with my Step-Dad and picking up her new car, and then laying on the beach where the TV show Lost was filmed. I imagined her sitting at the café near Mark’s work, drinking a latte in her bathing suit under her favorite Capri jeans and a white shirt, tucked in, with her red Converse high tops. I miss her smell.

As soon as I got the letter, I looked at the handwriting that was as familiar as my own. The curving letters brought on a familiar feeling that I couldn’t quite place. I felt the hard rectangular outline of my new card inside the soft, off-white envelope.

I whipped out my card and immediately sprinted upstairs to show it to my Auntie Angie and Uncle Dave.

“I just got my first credit/debit card!” I yelled.

“Are you sure it’s a credit/debit card? It’s probably one or the other,” Dave asked.

“But it has the MasterCard logo on it, and I can use it as either in the stores,” I told him eargerly.

“Can you use it when you have no money left in your account?” he asked.

“Um. I’m not sure. I’ll ask my mom.”

“Do you mind if I look at the paper work?”

In the end I found out that it was indeed a debit card, and not the illustrious “credit/debit card” that I thought it was. My sudden impulse to shop, however, was not dampened.

“This is a new, great start in the world of finance,” Dave assured me.

Earlier that evening, after a dinner of pizza and lemonade, Angie had discussed my seven year old cousin Matt’s own leap into the world of finance: he was going to open his own lemonade company, and charge ten cents a cup.

“He should charge twenty-five cents,” Dave had argued, saying that, “it’s the going rate of lemonade.”

Over the remains of the pizza dinner, Angie said, “Matt is always asking me if he has a hundred dollars in his bank account. But he thinks about it as if there were a stack of a hundred dollar bills in Matthew’s pile, and a stack in front of Mom’s pile…” she gestured up and down, indicating the imaginary stacks of green money Matt lusts over.

Matthew is obsessed with the concept of a hundred dollars, and this obsession was heightened after he peaked inside my wallet one day to see my hundred dollar bill.

“WOOOW!” he had shouted, lengthening the “ah” sounding syllable in the word “wow.”

Ever since then, he’s been asking me whether I would give him my hundred dollar bill if he gave me a hundred ones, or if he gave me a ticket to Disney land, or if he gave me one of his baby kittens. I tell him that sadly, I need my hundred dollar bill in case of an emergency and that kittens are usually free.

“Aww man,” was his solemn reply. “So if I have change in my lemonade stand, will you give me a hundred? Wait, can I tell you something? What change do I have to give you, ninety cents? What change do I have to give you?”

“You have to give me ninety-nine dollars and ninety cents.”

“I don’t have change for a hundred, but I might have change for a fifty. Ok, hold on one second. I need to go ask mom if I have change for a fifty. Because I don’t have change for a hundred. But I might have change for a fifty. What change do I have to give you for a fifty? Because I don’t know a lot about change and stuff.”

“You have to give me forty-nine dollars and ninety cents,” I told him.

“Ok, I’m going to go ask mom if I have that. Hold on,” he said resolutely.

“I don’t have change for a hundred and I don’t have change for a fifty. But I have change for any other dollar bills that you could give me…So when you give me money for a lemonade, what dollar bill will you give me? A twenty?”

“Sure, I’ll give you a twenty, if you give me change.”

“What change do I have to give you? Ninety cents and what else? I have enough money in my bank account for change for a hundred, but not in my bank.”

“You have to give me nineteen dollars and ninety cents.”

“So you give me the twenty, and I give you the change. Let’s shake on it.”

“Did you fart?” I ask, sniffing suspiciously.

He looks sheepish and darts his eyes back and forth. “No, I didn’t,” he tries to look innocent.

“Are you sure? You have your lying face on.”

“I SWEAR!!!” he yells. “So I have to give you nineteen dollars and ninety cents for the hundred?”

“No, for the twenty,” I tell him.

“Ohh yeah,” he says. “I have a hundred dollar bill in my bank account. But guess what? I can’t open it until I’m eighteen. I’m serious.”

I tell him I believe him.

“I don’t want to wait until I’m eighteen, it’s SO far away. SOO far.”

“You’d be surprised at how soon you’ll be eighteen,” I assure him.

A little while later, out of the blue, Matt says, “If people bought infinity glasses, I’d be a millionaire.”

This surprises me, and for some reason I see a huge pile of bright orange Raybans.

Then I thought I heard him say, “No, I don’t really need them.”

“What was that?” I ask.

“You know what the two things are that I really want? I want a stack of hundreds, and a stack of fifties. But I tell myself, no I don’t really need them. Then I tell myself, yes I want them. Then, no, I definitely don’t need them. Money doesn’t need anything to me. No I REALLY NEED THEM, money is great I love it! No, actually I don’t need them, money is not good for people, it just buys stuff. Yes I really need the money! No, I don’t… That’s what I’m like.”

“Matt,” I said to him, “you are not alone.”

So today in the car, Matt was asking Angie how much money he would get if a certain about of people bought lemonade.

“How much money would I make if ten people bought lemonade?” he asked eagerly, and I could almost see the dollar signs swimming in his eyes.

“You would make a dollar,” Angie said.

“And how much would I make if a hundred people bought lemonade,” Matt shook his head with excitement in the way that only kids under 8 can do.

“ Ten dollars.”

“This,” Matt said, “is getting fascinating.”

So, thinking of Matt’s wise words, I fingered the smooth plastic of my golden debit card.

“This,” I whispered to myself, “is getting fascinating.

Independence Day

Mingling is not my area of excellence. But depending on the perspective, mingling can be a prime source for intriguing subjects. Behind the lens of my camera, I managed to dodge the smalltalk at Friday’s party. The bikini clad fourth of July merrymakers, and the hulking bodies of their counterparts roamed the deck of the beach house, and I walked around with my film SLR camera help up to my face, searching for the perfect frame.

“Can I take your picture?” I asked the tall man standing on the roof deck, the pretty high school freshmen, the two little girls in their pink bikinis, the group of three girls and two guys, balancing on the goofy bubble of just enough margarita.

“What kind of camera do you have?” one man inquired.

“I used to be a photographer,” another one insisted.

Though I was related to the host, I hadn’t met any of the attending partygoers, and I couldn’t shake the feeling of being on the outside of some interesting zoo exhibit, looking in. But that’s what I’d been doing recently on the bus to work, and I throughly enjoyed it.

Paying my two quarters to the bus driver the other day, a woman wearing matching demin jacket and pants with hundreds of two inch zippers on it caught my imagination. I couldn’t help but wonder were she shopped or at least who her seamstress is. I imagined a scenario on a similar bus, where one of her butt zippers came undone, and an elderly man reaches over to zip it up, starting an instant brawl starts after the woman shrieks, “Pervert!”

As my bus enters Chinatown, my favorite people to think about come into view. The old Asian women with their faces in a thousand wrinkles stare at me through the bus window, their eyes shaded with a complicated life story that I give to them, free of charge. Or the British family of four (husband, wife, son, daughter) wading through the throbbing crowd, dazzled by the ornate characters spelling out something exotic in bright neon colors.

I started catching the San Francisco bus about an hour after I got of the plane. Before I got on the plane in Hawaii, I made a list for myself of things that I needed to do at the airport and when I arrived in San Francisco. “Walk to security, show them ticket, show them ID, take off your shoes, put shoes back on, get on plane, find seat, sit…” and then “…catch a cab, get to the house, take a shower, eat breakfast, drink coffee, walk to bus stop, regard map, find work…” and it actually goes on for quite a while. Looking at this list constantly at first, I was desperately attached to it. Slowly, (by the time I found my own seat on the plane and realized I was sitting across from a fox) I was less dependent on my frantic scribbling.

A similar thing happened with my map. At first, the constant folding and unfolding of my printed google map nearly ripped it. I got off the bus at the wrong stop twice, and I discovered that when you ask directions from a San Franciscan, they really are committed to getting you to the right spot. This surprised me because my instant reflex to lost people is to point randomly and assure them warmly that they are almost there. One time, a woman I asked for directions actually walked me all the way to where I wanted to go, chatting cordially about her office job, and her recent trip to Europe. “Everyone says that Parisians are as sour as lemon,” she tells me, “but I never met one any less sweet than splenda”

Eventually, pounding the familiar city streets with confidence, I became familiar with just enough mileage to get me where I want to go.

Living and working in a new city, without the safety net of parents who’ll save my ass with one m’aidez call, it’s like buying a new lense, one that isn’t so magnified as my old one. It’s hard to describe, but it’s the subtle differences that add up that make what I would call independence; the difference between needing to know where you are so you won’t have to call your dad to drive you places, and knowing where you are so you can actually get home, the difference between making money so you won’t have to ask your mom for some extra cash and making money so you can buy yourself food and a  bus ride, the difference between learning in a classroom for grades and learning in real life so you can survive and flourish in the business world. Planning has changed for me, thinking about transporation has changed for me, my network (physical and virtual) has changed for me; all in subtle, small shifts.

The fear of this somewhat sudden push off the comfortable cliff ledge has mutated, also. Never before had I tested the jetpack that I’ve been building for my entire life and so twinges of nervousness at my potential fall plagued me. Now I’m a little bit more aware of my capabilities. I’m not confined beneath the clouds, and aerial shots are a lot easier.

Looking through a different lens, much like through a looking glass, changes my perception of reality.

But if I were to completely blame the scope of the lens, I would be misinterpreting myself and my recent, new found Independence. The person behind the lense has changed as well.