It is always fascinating. One time, after I had my salivary gland and concomitant calcified stone removed due to an infection (through the neck!) I came into the place and saw a man with a bandage in the exact same spot, except on the other side of the neck from my own. I had never heard of the surgery until I had it, and there we were comparing notes on the peculiarity of having a stone grow in your neck and the nerves that surround the locale of the surgery, lingual and facial, as well as the closeness of the carotid artery.
This Saturday, despite the economy, it was pretty crowded. Usually, the customers tend toward the middle aged, like myself, or older, but this day, there was a fair spate of the younger set. I never really have been one to ogle young men, not even when I was young enough myself to have them reciprocate, but one tall incredibly handsome fellow came in and I listened intently to him and his even younger stylist as she reduced the length of his straight thick hair. He was in his last year of college at Long Beach, and he was telling her his plans, to go to the East Coast for Grad school, as close as he could get to New York, where he'd stay (his certainty and optimism seemed so pure) for ten years and then maybe he'd come back to Los Angeles. She was a year younger than him, and to the best of my estimation, she wasn't in school, but she had done some interesting things, one of them to work for a few months (I wasn't quite sure of the time frame) in Rwanda. Apparently in rehabilitation areas, people of different backgrounds, would go and stay for a while and teach women who had been horribly brutalized, while they were being counselled, to learn a trade, one trade being a hair stylist. She had found it to be a startling, and satisfying experience, though hard. I was impressed as the two of them seemed to have a meaningful working knowledge of that place and a sensitivity to the complexities and indecencies of man against man, or in this case man against women and children. Typical of the "older generation" I thought to myself, maybe all is not lost with "young people." And I was perhaps a little ashamed that I have never done something quite so dramatic whether to help others or not. The thing though that was cognitively dissonant, though, was two words that she used to sum up the tragedy to which she had offered her kindness and care by offering the teaching of her talent. They have had a "gnarly genocide" she sort of summed it all up. That description sort of jarred me. I've heard a wave described as "gnarly" by a surfer, meaning extreme. Or a person described as a "gnarly dude". The adjective is for the extremely good and the extremely bad. I suppose then, she was right, genocide was an extreme, a despicable, inexplicable extreme. But that this casual urban lingo was attached to these acts of cruelty by mankind----as wonderful as this kid had been to do what she did, go there, help, I could not stop myself from feeling that the phrase trivialized the evil. But I haven't gone to the ends of the earth to save humanity, who thus am I to complain about her expression. I am not complaining, just observing, and marvelling at the variety of other experiences, some enigmatic, or interesting, or exotic or altruistic, and others, like mine, a bit of a straight line, from birth to grammar school, to (the same) high school, to college a mile from there, to law school, to LA, to the same apartment and job for 28 and 23 years respectively with nary a digression. I guess maybe I am complaining, yet again, but then, a bit about my choices, not about the universe in which I made them. That's an improvement at least!
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