After This Week, I Will Stop Boring You With Boring Stories About My Boring Classes

On Friday, I was in the fourth of the five classes I have to take before the end of the year and while I was sitting there inattentively, I was taking a lot of notes chronicling what passes for my thoughts with the aim of turning them into a blog post. After about an hour I noticed that the most interesting of these notes were,

“I wonder what time the chalupa place opens at the food court,”

and

“Itchy.”

So I abandoned that plan and instead started looking around the room to see if anyone had died of boredom yet. No one had, but I may have ducked out early (or I may not have depending on whether someone from the State Bar is reading this), so I don’t rule out the possibility that it happened later in the day. What I did notice, though, was that out of the 100+ people in attendance, all but four of the people were white. I suppose it’s like this more often than not, but for some reason it seemed especially noticeable this time. The four people who weren’t white were me (and I’m half-white/half-Asian), the woman sitting next to me (also half-white/half-Asian), an Asian woman sitting behind us, and an Asian woman sitting on the other side of the room.

Slight digression, or … well, it can’t be a digression because I am just rambling pointlessly, but we go by the term “hapa” now. “Hapa” is a Hawaiian word meaning “half,” and the term originally was short for “hapa haole” referring to someone who was half-white and half-Hawaiian. Somewhere along the line it came to refer to anyone who is mixed race with partial Asian or Pacific Islander heritage. Not everyone likes the term (as it was originally somewhat derogatory), but I don’t have strong feelings about it one way or the other. I do prefer it to “Amerasian,” because we’re already American or to “Eurasian,” but only because when I was in junior high I said it when talking to my friend Cynthia, who was Chinese, and she took great offense to it.

“‘You’re Asian!’ There’s no such thing as ‘You’re Asian’!”

(Don’t worry about what would become of Cynthia. Her parents had money.)

At any rate, you might be wondering how I knew that the woman sitting next to me was hapa. The only answer I can give is that I don’t know how, but we can always spot each other. It must be similar to the thing where balding people can always spot a toupee. Do you remember that show Lois and Clark? After it debuted, I was talking to people at work about it and saying, “Yeah, it’s cool that they got an Asian guy to play Superman,” to which they replied that I was crazy and also horrible and clearly had an agenda, but being an early adopter of the Internet I was able to fire up my 2400 baud modem and only six short hours later prove to them that Dean Cain was one-quarter Japanese. Don’t mess with our racial divining abilities. We are second to none in that regard. You know, I don’t even look all that Asian, but sometimes people I’ve just met will say, “are you half-Japanese?” and I will excitedly reply, “Yes! You?” and they will say, “Yes!” and then we will be friends for life because, as you may have heard, we are clannish like that.

I am being facetious, of course, but the thought did occur to me when I was in the bathroom at the break and standing next to me at the sinks was the hapa woman and waiting to use a sink was one of the other Asian women. “Oh no,” I thought. “This is going to support people’s incorrect assumption that we all know each other!” Then the door opened and the other Asian woman came in. She did a double-take at the first Asian woman and said, “Ann?” To which Ann replied, “oh my God, Gina! It’s been ages!” Hapa woman caught my eye in the mirror and sent me the sardonically telepathic message, “well, isn’t that great,” and I telepathically replied, “isn’t it just?” Then Ann asked Gina, “what are you doing here?” and Gina replied, “uh, well, CLE.” Evidently Ann’s not too quick on the uptake. Maybe she’s Cynthia’s cousin. Oh, who do I think I’m kidding? We’re all cousins! After that, my seatmate and I returned to the conference room, where we studiously ignored each other for the rest of the day.

In light of our mutual non-acknowledgment, I wish she had been sitting next to me a couple of weeks earlier when I took the utterly useless Time Management for Professionals class, which I only took because my options that week were that or some hideous thing about property boundary disputes. Instead I got this extremely social person, wearing ostentatiously low low-rise jeans and a pink thong. The class had been underway for ten minutes and I was feeling pleased that no one was sitting next to me. I mean, you guys know I’m unfriendly, right? I feel like I’ve been pretty upfront about that. But suddenly there was this face right in my face stage-whispering, “HI!” and spreading her stuff out all over the table and scooting her chair over closer to mine. Things were fine for a while until the speaker said, “how many of you know what you want to be when you grow up?” which was bad enough in itself but then Thong turned to me and conspiratorially whispered, “I want to run a fashion magazine.” I gave her the non-committal nod and half-smile and plotted her grim demise.

Then the speaker decided it was meet and greet time at the commune and told us all to introduce ourselves to the person next to us. First, I made a promise to myself that I would never again take a CLE class on a non-technical topic. I would rather spend seven hours listening to people drone on about 1031 exchanges or current issues in maritime law than deal with this bullshit. Second, I steeled myself and turned to face Thong. Oh lord, she was smiling. It was one of those enthusiastic open mouth smiles, of the Lassie or Marisa Jaret Winoker variety:

Thong could not wait to tell me all about the awesomeness of her existence, adopting pretend emotions as appropriate. Faux humility: “I’m a managing partner at [firm I wasn't familiar with]. It’s a mid-sized firm. Well, mid-sized to large.” Faux I Just Don’t Know How I Do It All: “I have two girls, they’re one and three! Thank goodness I’ve got a good husband!” Back to faux humility: “I still haven’t got my body back yet!” After what felt like twenty more minutes of this, she said, “and I guess that’s it.”

“Okay,” I said. She waited to see if I would, I suppose, congratulate her on being so inspirational and when I didn’t her dog smile faltered a bit and she asked, “what about you?”

“I work at home in my pajamas.” Should I say that they’re comfortable pajamas? Nah. Too braggy. Thong laughed uncertainly. Fortunately, she had talked so long that we had run the clock on enforced bonding time and the instructor started talking again. He had us make a list of everything we do in a workday and then rate each item as “can delegate, can partially delegate, or cannot delegate.” After we had done this, he said, “now I want you and the person you traded introductions with to convince each other to delegate those tasks that are either delegatable or partially delegatable. Before I had a chance to think about how “delegatable” isn’t even a word, Thong started talking about her high-pressure managing partner duties. She actually used the word “rainmaker.” No one says “rainmaker” except maybe Corbin Bernsen in LA Law. Normal people just say they bring in new business. Although the exercise required me to convince her to delegate some of her work, she was more than happy to convince herself, mainly so that she could tell me how many people answer to her.

“Now let’s do you!” Thong pointed at my list.

“I work alone most of the time. There’s no one I can dump my work onto.” Oh. Whoops. I think this is where Thong began to get the idea that I didn’t want to be besties. She decided to try the woman sitting on her other side, who was not partnered with anyone. Why couldn’t that woman have sat next to me? She seemed appropriately anti-social.

“Do you have a list?” Thong inquired, big open-mouthed smile, paw … er, hand gesturing toward notepad.

“I’m retired!” the woman replied, turning her back on Thong. Okay, now I want to be friends with someone.

More yammering from the instructor and then he said something about how we should get a buddy to talk to on a regular basis to encourage us to continue delegating work so that we don’t slip back into the bad habit of doing our own jobs. Then he said, “so what I want everyone to do is to trade phone numbers with the person sitting next to you and make an appointment to talk a week from today!” I can’t believe I paid for this class.

“Do you want to …” Thong began.

“No.” I said it as gently as I could, but come on. NO. She turned to the woman on her other side.

“Do you …”

“I’m retired!”

I felt a little bad for Thong then, almost bad enough to consider trading numbers with her. But then she snottily said to neither of us in particular, “well, you only get out of something what you put into it!” So then I felt less bad. By the time she started playing Angry Birds on her phone, my remorse was a distant memory. After I got home, I Googled her and it turns out she’s actually kind of a big deal, both at her firm and in the legal community generally. If I were an ambitious person looking to get ahead in my profession, I would be kicking myself for being such a standoffish jerk; fortunately for me, I am unmotivated and sloth-like.

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