the waxing crescent moon and venus in alignment
03/24 On Friday, this sight caught me walking back from my local taqueria. I stopped on the sidewalk for the length of a conversation, as if I had run into an old friend and we didn’t have anywhere to get to. I have a regular practice of looking for the moon, so you can imagine my surprise when I felt tears in my eyes.
On this walk to the taqueria—which is not far at all, just down a few blocks to 19th and Mission—I put my phone in an inner pocket of my jacket to exist fully in the world. I let my ears wander between passing conversations, my eyes roam from scene to scene, character to character. I witnessed a million little lives unfold and their worlding offspring bloom. I watched the young Friday night goers looking for drinks and maybe a quick snack on Valencia. I saw high schoolers adventuring, dashing through the streets on their transportation method of choice. I looked as a worker rolled the trash bins to the front of Tartine and closed up shop, jogging out the front door. I saw someone unlocking a city bin for cleaning supplies on the street, jamming in their own world, moving their steps to the rhythm. I saw bartenders, servers, chefs working the rush hour, eyes laced with focus.
And then I saw the moon and the stars, and the blue hour sky. I saw a gradient of blue never before seen, a combination of millions of spontaneous particles for the blue of March 24 8:03pm. I find myself stupefied by life more and more these days, seeking to understand the incomprehensible multitude of space.
ice
At the start of March, a van carrying my entire family and I almost seriously crashed.
A couple hours later we pulled over in a small strip mall for a rest stop, and the driver announced, We’ll be stopping here for lunch… In light of today’s events, get whatever you’d like on us.
In return for almost losing our lives, the tour operator treated us to Subway. I couldn’t help but laugh. Yes, it’s absurd, but you know that I got a speciality foot long with extra avocado and a canned apple juice and jalapeño chips and all the extra things I would never pay for on my own, let alone even grab for free. I felt like I had to make the most of it having almost died, like transferring more money from this tour company to this particular Subway chain was my only available form of justice, like if I didn’t, how much did I even value my life, really?
We had booked a tour to see Antelope Canyon, and the start of the morning did not bode particularly well. We woke up at an ungodly hour and waited waited at the designated pick-up spot to find out that the driver was missing. After another hour of dawdling around, we were on our way with a substitute driver. Because we were behind schedule, the driver seemed to be really trying to make up for lost time. As we were crossing through Utah on a hill slick with ice, they slammed the gas to pass a car in the opposing lane. They lost control right as they passed the car and swerved suddenly to the left. We got yanked to one side of the car and then the other as he zoomed from one side of the road to the other. Finally, after a few back and forths, he managed to stabilize the car, with a quick sorry about that. The car was silent except for the zooming of the car.
If any small number of things had been different: the car behind us hadn’t been able to slow down in time, there was closer oncoming traffic, the driver turned just a bit too hard, everything would’ve been different. It feels especially jarring because it wasn’t just me; it was the concentration of so many ties important to me into one branch of fate.
What’s wild (but understandable given the gathering of people) to me is that none of us talked about it together. We all just went on with our no-refunds tour, following the carefully doled instructions of our guides. We politely ate our Subway in the van, asked for water from the back, laughed nervously at his jokes, and sold ourselves to the illusion. We didn’t want to believe what almost happened. It’s as if we preferred for it to remain a loaned memory.
in service
In light of this case of a service for others gone drastically wrong and along with my own journey of working in service, I have been reflecting on the contours of what it means to work in service of others. In my head, two contrasting experiences of working as an engineer at a tech startup and working as a barista at a community center and cafe swirl together but rarely mixing.
There’s a deep responsibility I feel when working in service, that isn’t as apparent when I write code, even though that should demand the same if not more care and attention for the designing of the systems that people rely upon. In service, there’s an immediate face to contend with that urges you to do good. What is there in code to demand of you, other than the structure of the code itself and less the shape of the system that everyday people must operate in?
After I started working as a barista, I noticed myself paying more attention to service workers in action. I have always felt strange with my relationship to these relationships with norms of inherent power differentials baked in. I’ve viewed transactional relationships as gateways to intimacy, seeking to subvert the transactional and capitalist-oriented nature of the origin by creating authentic meaning and connection out of it. Businesses are made to earn money, yes. But so often they are also manifestations of years and years of people’s dreams, and the ongoing representation of people’s spirit, heart, and soul in showing up day after day. I think of all the care I’ve seen bartenders put into each drink and inventing new ones. The innovation I saw at Ritual’s training lab of taking a radical experimental spirit to what coffee should be and what the future of coffee can be that not only caters to consumers’ tastes but also helps the incoming revenue for baristas. I think of the small business owners who after a single meeting with me will demonstrate so much hospitality and care, asking for nothing in return.
The people in service are the invisible infrastructure of our society and communities. They are the backbone hidden under the layers of skin