Californians are Flaky

or, The Characters on The West Wing are my Best Friends.

I know it’s wrong to succumb to stereotypes. My generation is supposed to be above that. But people ask me, surprisingly frequently, if there is a significant difference in the cultures of the East and West coasts. And OMG, like, there totally is.

My mom says it takes 2 years to feel at home in a place. I’m sure that at least that much is true. I don’t know how you feel at home in a place where you have no history. No one who knows you or where you come from, no one who has any concept of you from before you were exactly who you are today, in the role they see you in today. It is ideas like this that I try to impart to my students when they wonder why history is relevant to them.

Ah, the relevance of history. I KNOW it’s important, but still when I stay up till midnight trying to design a series of questions and activities based on the British Museum’s interactive website on Ancient Mesopotamia, which I can then see the kids are bored with after 20 minutes, it’s hard to remember this. What I keep coming back to is, A) Wow, all this stuff happened in what is now Iraq—the home of the oldest written epic is being slowly slaughtered—and B)No wonder God sent a flood to wipe out all the filth from the earth. If ancient Mesopotamian filth was as filthy as modern American filth.

But I digress. The subject is flakiness. I realize that I have been flaky in the keeping of my promise to upkeep this repository of writing of a Sunday—don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me. And that in doing so the people I am letting down are my closest friends, my 3 gentle readers (the allusion is to Miss Manners, JDM; it might be time to brush up on your cotillion etiquette. Oh PS, I saw a license plate that said “I Heart JDM” the other day. I was like, me too! Wow.) My closest REAL friends, not to be confused with the people with whom I spend most of my time. Which would be A) my students, who are sweet but in a different category, 2)Jodi, a friend but also in a different category, and it should be mentioned that I have determined I spend more awake hours with my students than with her—sad—and C) the staff of Bartlet’s White House.

Oh, CJ, you are so tall and stunning in your all-too-occasional Donna Karan gowns bought specially for state dinners. Josh, you are a little too hot-tempered, but the righteous must also wield swords, must they not, and anyway, any friend of Mary-Louise Parker’s is a friend of mine. If you get my drift. When she took off her shoes in your office…HOTT. But Donna, don't give up hope. Your radiant idealism and trim organizational prowess will win him in the end. Charlie, don’t worry, Zoey will be a better actress someday and will then be worthy of your love. Toby, you bear the tender angst of a word-wielding gentleman with the fortitude of Atlas. And Sam?! Where is the beautiful boy when I need him most? Supposedly campaigning in the OC, which would be great if you were REAL; we could meet occasionally for lunch, I would drive you to the airport when you really needed it, because that’s what friends are for, but alas, like all the aforementioned members of Category C, you are not real. You are but a figment, albeit a beautiful figment, in whose dreamy eyes I was lost during seasons 1-4 but now in season 5 I have to reevaluate what’s most important to me….


Um, so yeah. Jodi and I have been watching The West Wing, which luckily our local library has all but one of—season 4 disc 4 to be exact, which was, according to Asif, my favorite librarian, who gives me teacher liberties like checking out Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet for 2 weeks instead of the usual 2 days, THROWN AWAY BECAUSE IT WAS DAMAGED. Luckily, trusty Asif found one at another branch and had it sent to me. I told him I was desperate. He understood. He understands me. Although I describe Asif as “trusty,” he is not immune from CA flakiness in that when I finally asked him his name, he held out his ID tag and said “As IF,” in perfect Clueless fashion.

No, The West Wing is fiction, most people who know me are thousands of miles away, and on a daily basis I have to deal with students who didn’t do their homework over the weekend because they have much more vibrant social lives than I (and who can blame them? well, I can, I guess), also people with absolutely no sense of time to whom lateness is the water in which they swim, also people who cannot make, much less keep, social commitments that would, in theory, help us get closer as friends and make them actually seem more real than my beloved West Wing characters. But hey, there are perks. I’m around kind and generous people (just how generous may be revealed next week, but for now I’m not counting any chickens), the sunsets are pretty, and Jodi and I both swear we have seen Rachel Griffiths powerwalking down our street on numerous occasions. So I’m sure we’re going to be best friends soon. And we are still wooing the cat, whom I call Clementine and Jodi calls Humpy-Butt. I’m sure we’ll settle on a name any day.


I have written far too many subordinate clauses for one sitting, so I will sign off. It’s getting late, and Season 5 Disc 3 is waiting.