Lessons from Ubering # 3: Reesy

Reesy is from Seattle.  She has two chihuahuas.  There's the adorable one that constantly misbehaves and there's the mean one that barks and nips at everyone but is quite obedient.  She loves them both dearly.  She has four kids - there's the older two that are adults and the twins that were unexpected surprises.  She's divorced from her husband, but they still live together with the kids and they'll probably get remarried at some point.  He's not as mean now that he's switched from tequila to wine.  They like to go skiing on family vacations.  And Reesy is in L.A. on a mission of mercy: her niece has suddenly developed MS at the age of 32 and is experiencing paralysis on her right side.  She's rushed down to help her sister figure things out.

Reesy is in her early 50's and is quite pretty.  She says she can be mean, but based on her time working as a nurse and on our 45 minute conversation, I think she's an absolutely lovely person.

I don't get to know most customers.  Many just sit in the back and we barely talk.  With some I have conversations, but it's just to pass the time.  But once in a while I get one that I connect with.

I don't visualize.  When I close my eyes, I can't picture my mother's face or the house I grew up in.  So when I think of friends or family, I don't picture them so much as a have a 'sense' of them.  It's part feeling, part knowledge, part something else.  And after Reesy got out of my car, I had a sense of her.  Which was nice ... but sad.  Because I like her.  I would enjoy having her in my life.  But she's gone - I couldn't track her down if I wanted to.  So on one hand, I had a terrific 45 minutes getting to know someone really cool.  But on the other hand, she's gone forever and in a small way I had to grieve that loss for a few minutes.

I'm not sure what the moral of the story is here.  I would rather have had the experience of getting to know Reesy than not.  But it felt like a tiny little piece of me got pulled away at the end.

Numbers: A Love Story

I just got back from my yearly Dead Poet's Retreat.  Sooo good.  In an email preceding the retreat, we were encouraged to watch this:

Embrace the Shake

It's a Ted Talk where the speaker explains that embracing limitations helped open up his creativity.  Very cool and worth watching.

While on the retreat, we had a writing session - you go off and write whatever you want, be it poetry or a story or stream-of-consciousness.  But I wasn't feeling the creativity flow.  Afterwards, I was thinking about this video, and wondering how I could give myself a limitation to possibly spark my creativity.  And here's what I came up with.  What if I had to write a story using only numbers?

Well, that seems impossible, at first.  I quickly decided that common math symbols were also fair game.  And then a story came into focus.  I spend the next 45 minutes writing it in my head.  And I spoke it aloud that night at the big anything-goes bonfire.  I'm sure it's not the most amazing thing ever written, but I'm pretty pleased with it, especially because it was the creative burst I needed.  And, bizarrely, it truly does move me.  I think it's better heard than read, but here it is:

Numbers: A Love Story

1+1=2

1x1=3

3=1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    6
    7
    8
    9
  10
  11
  12
  13
  14
  15
  16
  17
  18

18=1

1 .... 1 .... 1

1 ... +1?

1+1!

1+1 .... 1+1 .... 1+1

1 ... > ...1

1-1

1 .... 1 .... 1

1 ... +1?

1+1 .... 1+1 .... 1+1

1 ... x1 ...

1x1, 1x1, 1x1

1 < 1

1-1

1x1

1-1 ... 1x1 ... 1-1 ... 1x1 ...

1-1

1 ... / (divided by)

<1 .... <1 .... <1

1 .... 1 .... 1

1 ... + .... 1?

1+1 .... 1+1 .... 1+1

1+1=2

2 .... 2 .... 2

1x1=3