Claire Marie Davidson

I Have Bad Facial Recognition Skills (and Other Confessions)

Here is something I’m just beginning to realize: I recognize people by their hair, not their faces.  I don’t think it’s a great habit, especially because everyone has different faces, but a lot of people have similar hairstyles.  But for some reason, faces are hard for me to remember.  Hair is so much easier, especially when people have really distinctive hair and you can recognize them right away just by looking at the back of their head.

With that said, new haircuts throw me off.  On several occasions, I have failed to recognize people I talk to on a daily basis as soon as they change their hair in some drastic way, like buzzing it all off or straightening it.  It’s a little embarrassing.  They have to tell me their name and, in really bad cases, where I have no context clues, they also need to remind me that we work together.

Today, after a splendid weekend in Palm Springs, I took a shuttle back from the airport to Santa Cruz.  The driver looked so familiar.  I could have sworn that he had given me a ride three months ago; he had the same name and everything.  The only thing that was different was his hair.  It used to be long hair; now, it was cut really short.  It was one of those really strange situations where you don’t know if the person is, indeed, the person is the person you think he is, but there’s enough evidence to suggest he could be.

The haircut thing has tripped me up so much in the past few months, I decided that the driver was, indeed, the person I remembered with a new ‘do, so, taking a gamble, I said, “Hey, nice haircut.”

This is probably, come to think of it, was not the best thing to say to someone you may or may not have met fleetingly three months ago.  In the best case scenario, he would have recognized me and said, “Thanks!  I remember you so well from when I drove you to the airport three months ago, back when my hair was long!”  And the worst case scenario was that he was a different person altogether and that I had identified myself as a stalker within five seconds of meeting him.

The driver squinted at me.  ”Do I know you?”

I contemplated this.  ”Probably not,” I said, feeling very bad about my facial recognition skills.  ”I thought you drove me to the airport a few months ago, but I probably confused you with someone else.”  I wished, in vain, that I had not complimented his haircut.

After talking about global warming for ten painful minutes, I changed the subject to Civil War reenactments, which, truth be told, isn’t a much better conversation-starter than global warming.  The whole time, I was trying to figure out if he was actually the same person as I thought he was or not.

When he dropped me off at my apartment after the longest, most awkward hour ever, he looked at the address again.  ”Huh,” he said.  ”I remember this place.  Maybe I did drive you before.”

So maybe my facial recognition skills aren’t as horrible as I had thought they were.  Maybe his facial recognition skills are worse.  Still, from here on out, I’m going to compliment people on their new haircuts with great caution. 

The Silence of Waiting

Call me the Queen of Public Transportation.  After traveling to Chicago and Galesburg, IL, I feel like I know trains, planes, and buses like the back of my hand.  Reading a bus schedule is like seeing an old friend again.  The lady at the airport coffee shop actually remembers my name.  The sound of a train horn no longer makes me jump out of my skin (now that’s what we call progress!).  But despite my growing familiarity with modes of transit, something that I still wonder about is how people wait.  

When you’re at a train station, a bus stop, or an an airplane gate, there’s a lot of waiting involved.  Have you ever noticed how quiet people get in these situations?  People almost never talk on buses (at least not on most of the buses I’ve been on).  They rarely speak on flights, except to order drinks, and they’re completely silent on trains.  When I was on a three-hour train to Chicago with my friend Michele, there were these little kids who didn’t get the memo on the “being quiet” part.  They belted out “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,” “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” and “Let it Be” as loudly as possible.  Their parents were embarrassed about it, but I thought it was awesome.  Waiting loudly, it seems, is like the ability to see the Polar Express.  After a certain age, it just doesn’t happen, except for special occasions. 

Union Station in Chicago is one of the most crowded places I’ve ever been in my life, comparable only to the miniscule dance floor at my high school Winter Formal that was supposed to accommodate 400 sweaty teenagers (lies and heresies!).  It’s impossible not to bump into people, because everyone is constantly dodging out of each other’s way, making the flow of traffic completely unpredictable.  There are people from every walk of life, from every age, who all need to get somewhere, but apart from the people at the cafes and the people at the counter, there is not much talking.  Even when people say goodbye at the station to their families or loved ones, they don’t say too much.  Most of the noise is made up of dragging suitcases and footsteps.  So many footsteps.

There is a chapel in the Chicago Midway airport.  I’ve never seen a chapel at an airport before in my life, but on Sunday morning, they invited everyone to mass over the intercom.  It makes so much sense.  People at the airport are literally and figuratively in a place of transition; they’re often filled with doubts about making it to the place they’re going.  Likewise, churches are also places of transition; during communion, especially, the message of transition (the bread becomes flesh, the wine becomes blood) is particularly clear.  Oftentimes, during prayers or a service, they also have moments of silence for reflection, which are similar to the silence in waiting rooms.  Maybe the moments of silence are also moments of waiting, or maybe moments of waiting are just moments of silence. 

The simplest explanation is that people are trying to be courteous by not speaking in waiting rooms.  But I wonder if there’s something else going on.  I wonder if the tendency to wait silently is an American thing, a repression of emotions.  Maybe people see waiting as a kind of “non-activity.” Or maybe waiting silently is a universal thing, something that people just DO, not because they think about it, but because it’s human.

Half Marathon trip: Part 2

Gigi (left) and me after the race.

The night before the race, I had a horrible nightmare.  I was standing at the start line in tights and realized I had forgotten a water bottle and my watch.  As the race started, I realized I really needed to use one of the pit stops.  (I think most runners can agree that running in tights AND needing to stop at a port-a-potty during the race is the worst thing that could ever happen ever.)  

Deciding to sacrifice my hopes of getting a PR, I got to one of the port-a-potties– but my tights wouldn’t go back on.  It was like that episode of Friends where Ross uses all the lotions and powders in the bathroom to try to shimmy his leather pants back on, to no avail.  So in this dream, I was trapped in a port-a-potty with a line of impatient runners outside in the middle of a race.  Just when it couldn’t get any worse, I hear from a bleacher outside (yeah, in this dream, there are bleachers on the side of half marathon routes; don’t ask) my Greek professor reviewing a portion of Ajax that I desperately need to review.  And I can’t hear her.

Needless to say, I woke up stressed out of my mind, feeling claustrophobic and tights-o-phobic with a bizarre urgency to look up Greek verbs.  Aside from that, my cold returned and I was feeling kind of gross.

I decided to run anyway.  I had been preparing for months, so I wasn’t too eager to just pass the race by, and I was really looking forward to running with my sister.  I read somewhere that if you’re sick from the neck up, you can run, and if you’re sick from the neck down, you shouldn’t run.  Honestly, I usually don’t run at all if I get the sniffles, and I definitely don’t run when I get a cold.  But when I make weird life decisions, I like to quote hardcore stuff like this.

The race went exceptionally well.  Even though I was sick-ish, I still got 2:18!  My PR is 2:13, so it wasn’t my best time– but it wasn’t my worst, either.  Afterwards, I took a two hour nap, ate an awesome goat cheese and tomato sandwich, and went to the animal shelter with my mom and sister.  It’s great to be home.