purple monkey dishwasher.

sipping wine at roebling grounds, a jazzy tune streaming out from the nearby speakers succinctly sums up the evening. drinking, smoking, never thinking about tomorrow... nonchalant, sings duke ellington's sophiticated lady. in the chill night time air, i swish some cab around in my glass and pull my jacket in closer to my body. in front of me kim and angie, with their respective glasses of amber gewurztraminer and violet pinot noir chat causually about familiar topics.. relationships, school, jobs, and co-workers. a helicopter passes overhead, either presumably departing from or arriving to ucla's medical center, frequented by injured presidents west of the mississippi or crazed celebrities, and kim digresses to tell us a quick story about how a police helicopter once spotlighted her on the roof of a nearby apartment building. not a patch of fluff marrs the clear night sky, as i look up into its grey darkness, dotted here and there with a handful of stars just bright enough to pierce the light-polluted veil. the only clouds visible this night are the evanescing plumes of smoke kim and i blow from our lips and the column of white cotton that rises out of ucla's steam plant - a sleeping dragon, bathed in golden light.

as the night wound down, so did we, and whether it was just us or the wine, conversation slowly dipped into the past, leaving us to reflect on eighties television and elementary school. from the race issues diff'rent strokes tried to teach to the social issues three's company tried to address, from public vs. private education to the demographic makeup of our past schools and how it affected students. who talks about this stuff? we are so old! kim exclaimed. clearly, we were no longer the first-grade kids who used to take trips to pumpkin patches with our eighth grade partners, now discussing things such as grad school, travel, and property value... particularily regarding the university of california's recent development endeavours in the central valley and its upcoming opening of uc merced. listening to jazz and sipping my wine, i wondered to myself how people learn to "grow up," feeling that when i look around at times, there are many, both my age or even older, who have not yet learned or refuse to do so. i am told accounts of people who do not know how to wash dishes becasue they have grown up with a dishwasher all their lives. i am witness to people who do not know how to do the simplest of things becasue they have been coddled all their lives, and i am on the receiving end of many who are foreigners to manners and ettiquite for the simple reason of never learning and never emulating. do these things have to be taught? my mother once asked in disbelief, after telling me about someone with some aformentioned qualities. as much as i hope not, sometimes it just may be necessary.

continuing to sip our wines, i show kim and angie what i look for in a wine, why i turn it in my glass, why i inhale air through it, and what i smell in it. these are good things to know when we get older, i say, in case we ever go out to a meal with bosses, co-workers, and other professionals - something i once made clear to someone else regarding table ettiquette. for something like the culture of wine, which becomes more of a hobby these days, as people are simply drinkning it because of a blockbuster movie or health research, the process of tasting certainly is something that needs to be taught once in a while. all the better, i suppose, unless i come across those who simply refuse to learn. showing a $250 bottle of chateau lafite rothschild to someone once, i was almost knocked down by their retort: i see no difference between that and two-buck chuck, they all taste the same to me. sometimes, i don't even bother to try.

at twenty-two, nearly twenty-three, and looking back on something as seemingly long as college, which spanned around a fourth of my life, or elementary school, which spanned almost a third, i ruminate over all i have learned thus far - all i have learned to "grow up," and revisit kim's earlier exclamation, we are so old! where will this leave us another twenty-two years from now, i wonder, before stopping and reminding myself of those sophistcated lady lyrics which started the nonchalant evening. either way, i am certain we will at least know how to wash our dishes.

in her dealings with man, desitiny never closed her accounts.
: wilde.