Who cares what psychiatrists write on walls?

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dateline: oZ hale

28 august 1996 11:57 p.m.

Marriott sucks. For the entire time I've been at UH -- and this goes for everyone, I'm sure -- I've complained about the quality and price of campus food. Given that Marriott has an exclusive contract at all UH campuses, you haven't got any choice when it comes to where to eat lunch. Sure, there are several different cafeterias, all with different names and moderately different decor, but they're all the same animal. Only last year we got mini Pizza Hut and Taco Bell outlets, but they were still Marriottized -- the expected downgraded food quality, plus a limited selection. Well, if a tuition hike wasn't bad enough, Marriott raised its prices this semester. And I didn't even notice until today, when I was left at the head of a long, long line at the cashier, digging fruitlessly into my pockets and ready to sell my soul for a dime. Here's the deal. My default "meal" of choice has always been chicken katsu and a medium drink. Breaded chicken cutlet, a scoop of some pale looking vegetables and passably sticky rice with a Pepsi (uck) on the side. It isn't great, sometimes downright apalling, but its just hearty enough given the price -- food, drink and tax always came out to $4.99. That is, until today. Of course, I've eaten katsu for lunch all week. Started on Monday with a $20 bill, and I didn't notice the different "change due" readout -- just stuffed it in my purse and raced off to hunt for a spot to sit. Yesterday, I handed the cashier a ten, again, I was so used to the routine I didn't notice the weird numbers. Today, during a particularly busy day at the cafeteria, I slid up to the cashier and blithely plopped down a five. Beep beep beep, click, beep. The total? $5.10. Shit. Fumble fumble fumble, apologize, fumble fumble, curse, fumble. Embarrassed beyond belief. There were maybe a few thousand people backed up in line, glaring at me and calling me things I call other people who do the same stupid thing I was in the middle of doing. No mercy from Marriott's minion. No little jar of pennies to rescue me. The guy in line behind me handed the cashier a dime. He smiled, the cashier smirked. I don't know how many times I said thank you. I almost started bowing like some hysterical door-greeter at a Japanese department store. My savior was very cute, actually. Dark, great smile, buying a big salad. Too bad he was probably thinking, "Poor, poor ditz... probably a lost freshman." I'm telling you this... I'm definitely going to be carrying dimes from now on in case I see him again (and in case they decide let me back into the cafeteria someday). I figured out the whole mess. They raised the price of the drink. From 85 to 95 cents, which with tax essentially means I'm paying a buck for twenty ounces of sugar water. Like it isn't insulting enough that it isn't Coke. So. Marriott went and raised the price on the one product it costs them the least to produce. It's gotta be a profit margin of close to 800 percent. Starving students indeed. I was walking out of Sakamaki Hall, and was smiling at a father striding past with his son, who was maybe six years old. The kid was happily babbling away, but struggling to keep up. Dad walked down the steps, pulling his son behind. The boy was apparently still getting the hang of the one-step-per-step Standard of Stairway Descent. With a military-esque turn, dad whipped around the end of the railing to head off to the left. The kid couldn't adjust his trajectory fast enough. A low, resonant "clung" announced to the world that this child's head had just tested the intregrity of brown-painted steel. I gasped. The dad turned around in brief horror. It was like the kid almost didn't notice, though he rubbed his head. Dad then turned his attention to my startled face and those of others in the area. He sniffed and headed off again, yanking his kid along. He started scolding the boy, in Korean I figure, for his deficient reflexes. I had a lot of thoughts about the whole incident: Kids are made of rubber. They should license parents. And then I remembered a report I wrote my sophomore year in high school. It was based on an essay called "A Modest Proposal," the author of which I can't remember. It was political satire, written tongue-in-cheek. The whole thing was a proposal in which the author claimed poverty and overcrowding could both be overcome with one simple addition to the regional diet: children. Anyway, my report was a proposal to abolish speed limits, specifically special speed limits for school zones. My argument went as follows: Abolish speed limits near schools. Kids who can't cross the street fast enough will die by the hundreds. A tragedy, of course. Monuments will be built, bringing more jobs to blue-collar industries. Kids who can cross fast enough will survive. They will live to later reproduce and propogate the species. Fast forward a million years. The result of this revolutionary, visionary plan? Children that can go zero-to-sixty in nine seconds. I know, it was terrible. Tasteless. Characteristic of me, even. The point, of course, was to write it in political doublespeak, so that superficially it sounded utterly reasonable. I got an "A." When I'm feeling particularly cynical, I take Darwin's basic idea and go completely nuts. Makes for great first-date material (if the guy can't handle my humor, he's out -- and yes, Derek could). Survival of the fittest in the 20th century. Sometimes, though, I really wonder if the idea is that ridiculous. If you could only see the pictures of the teens and twentysomethings they show on the news here... kids who are missing, who got lost while hiking. They've all got perpetually startled faces, blank stares -- deer-in-the-headlights syndrome. "He was in a band," the newscaster bubbles, "and she was a telemarketer." And our state spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to send helicopters and teams of people with dogs to go looking for them. It's a fairly simple concept. If you've climbed a mountain and don't want to be there any more, head downhill. During newscasts like that, I chant aloud. "Darwin! Darwin! Darwin!" Ya know, I had a Darwin fish (a parody of those Jesus fishes Christians stick on their cars -- a Darwin fish has feet) once, 'till someone stole it. Waiting to see the ad again in "Rolling Stone." Popokiolani. That's what I turned in for my Hawaiian name. It's a "modern" name, my kumu (teacher) said, an adopted, self-created name rather than a traditional, given name. "Popoki" -- the first syllable drawn out -- means cat. "O" in this context means, of, or belonging to. "Lani" means heaven. Translated it's pretty dorky, I guess, but it sure sounds pretty. To say it right, in addition to the long vowel "o" in the first syllable, you should put an accent on the "la." Po-poki-o-la-ni. "O wai koa inoa?" What is your name? "O Popokiolani ko`u inoa." My name is Popokiolani. "O Pua kona inoa." Her/His name is Pua (or "flower").