A co-worker - the only one I like at all, and in fact I like him quite a lot - is relocating to Berkeley. Ever a Berkeley booster, I cheerfully backed this plan and offered to be his guide to neighborhoods while he apartment-shopped. This was poorly thought through on my part. I failed to actively realize that I know nothing of street names and have no sense of where anything is in relation to anything else. I failed to realize that I would be shown maps, referred to a specific point on the map and be expected, quite reasonably, to grasp what I was looking at and correlate the map-point to a concrete impression. "OK, what about around Alcatraz and Telegraph?" How on Earth did I know myself so poorly? Oh god, the blank panic, the mute staring at the map, the quavering, inarticulate stalling sounds!

[Next Owls! will appear on Tues. 6/1.]