En Nomine Patris — Notes from an East LA Parish

The shirt shows a white curved ramp descending from left to right. At the upper left ledge, a dashed empty circle. At the lower right flat ledge, a solid white ball. Above it all, in capital letters: I HAD POTENTIAL.

That is the whole design. No punchline beyond the drawing. No extra text. The joke is in the physics, and the physics is in the placement.

I have been looking at this shirt for a few days now, the way I look at a notice taped to a door on Fickett Street — not to admire it, but to see what it is actually asking. And what this shirt asks is a question about the difference between the circle that is drawn and the circle that is filled in.

The dashed circle is potential. In a physics diagram, a dashed outline marks a position something could occupy but does not. It is the place where the ball would sit if it had not moved. The solid ball at the bottom is where it actually is. The ramp is the path between them — the curve of what happened.

So the shirt is not saying I wasted my potential. It is saying something more precise and more interesting: I was once a possibility, and now I am a fact. The dashed circle is not a failure. It is a memory of a shape. The solid ball is not a disappointment. It is a body that arrived somewhere.

That distinction matters to me because I spend a lot of my week with people who are described — by landlords, by caseworkers, by their own relatives — as having had potential. The phrase had potential is usually a way of saying you are not what we hoped. It is a sentence passed on someone, not a description of a diagram.

But the shirt does not pass a sentence. It draws a picture. And the picture is honest about the mechanics: the ball did not fall because it was lazy. It rolled because the ramp was curved. The dashed circle at the top is not a moral judgment. It is a coordinate.

I think that is why the design works as a piece of everyday language. It takes a phrase that people use to close a conversation — he had potential — and turns it into a diagram that opens one. The diagram asks: what was the ramp? Who built it? Was it steep? Was it smooth? Did the ball have any say in the curve?

Those are the questions we ask in a peacemaking circle when two neighbors cannot agree on a fence line. Not whose fault is it, but what was the path that got you here. The dashed circle is where the conversation starts. The solid ball is where it has to end, at least for today.

If you want to wear this shirt, you can find it here: I Had Potential Funny Physics Pun Sarcastic Minimalist Quote. It is a white design on a standard t-shirt, and the ramp is curved, not a straight diagonal — that curve is the whole point. A straight line would be a joke about gravity. A curve is a joke about everything else.

I am not going to tell you it will change how anyone sees you. I am not going to tell you it is a conversation starter at the parish hall. I do not know that. What I know is what the drawing shows: a dashed circle, a solid ball, and a ramp between them. The rest is up to the person reading it.

But I will say this. The next time someone tells you that you had potential, you can look at the shirt and remember that the dashed circle is still a circle. It is still drawn. It is still part of the diagram. The ball rolled, but the shape remains. That is not a consolation prize. It is a fact of the drawing.

And facts of drawing are what we work with on Whittier Boulevard. We do not get to redraw the ramp. We get to notice it, name it, and decide what to do with the ball we have.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

The shirt reads, in capital letters that wrap around the design: LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW. Inside that ring of words sit four root vegetables — a carrot, a radish, a beet, and an onion — each with a small smile, and each with its roots drawn down into the soil. The roots are visible. That is the first thing I noticed. Not the faces, not the pun, but the thin lines trailing below the vegetables, the part that usually stays underground.

I have been thinking about that word, root, because it does two jobs on this shirt and the two jobs pull in different directions. To root for someone is to cheer them on, to stand at the edge of the field and want them to succeed. To put down roots is to stay, to hold ground, to become entangled with a place. The shirt uses both meanings at once, and the drawing makes the second one literal: the vegetables are smiling above ground, but their roots are what hold them.

That is not a small thing. A lot of the language we use about growth is really language about upward motion — climbing, rising, scaling, leveling up. The image on this shirt refuses that. A carrot does not grow up into the air. It grows down, and the part we eat is the part that stayed in the dark. The beet and the radish and the onion are the same. What looks like the harvest is actually the root. The visible smile is attached to something buried.

I read the shirt, then, as an argument about what mutual support actually requires. It is easy to root for someone in the upward sense — to applaud a promotion, a graduation, a new apartment. It is harder to root for someone in the downward sense, which is to say: to be the soil they are growing in. To stay put long enough that someone else can put down roots next to you. The shirt does not say let’s watch each other rise. It says watch each other grow, and the picture shows growth happening underground.

There is a second thing the drawing does, and it is quieter. The four vegetables are different. A carrot is not a beet. A radish is not an onion. They are drawn side by side, each with its own shape and its own root, and none of them is being asked to become the others. The phrase root for each other could be read as a demand for uniformity — everybody cheering the same way, everybody growing toward the same light. But the image resists that. The onion’s roots are thin and many. The carrot’s root is one long tap. The beet’s is a bulb with a tail. They are rooting for each other without becoming each other.

I find that useful because the alternative is a kind of support that is really just recruitment. You root for someone on the condition that they grow into the shape you already recognize. That is not rooting. That is transplanting. The shirt’s four vegetables are not transplants. They are in the soil they were drawn in, and the words around them are an invitation, not an instruction.

Now, the pun. Let’s root for each other is a gardening joke, and it is also a phrase you might find on a card or a mug or a lets root for each other shirt. The humor is gentle and the sentiment is warm, and I do not want to overburden it. But I do think the shirt is doing something slightly more interesting than a generic encouragement. It is pairing a phrase about mutual support with an image about hidden work. The smile is above ground. The labor is below. That is a fair description of most of the support I have seen in a parish: the visible part is the celebration, and the invisible part is somebody showing up on a Tuesday.

I would not claim the shirt is about tenant organizing or parish councils or any particular campaign. It is a gardening pun. But the visual logic — roots visible, growth downward, different shapes side by side — is the same logic that makes a block hold together. You cannot root for a neighbor only when they are blooming. You root for them when they are still in the dark, still sending out thin lines, still not yet anything you could put in a vase.

The shirt is sold by Quirky Cotton Collective. This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. That is the plain fact of it, and I am telling you so you can weigh the recommendation accordingly.

What I keep returning to is the soil line. The drawing does not show the vegetables floating. It shows them in dirt, with their roots drawn as carefully as their faces. That is the part of the image I would point to if someone asked me what the shirt means. It means: the cheering is real, but the rooting is the point. Watch each other grow, yes — but remember that most of the growing is underground, and that the person doing it may need you to stay in the soil beside them rather than applaud from the fence.

If you wear it, wear it as an invitation to be the kind of neighbor who is still there in the unglamorous season. If you give it, give it to someone who has been rooting for you without a lot of noise. The vegetables are smiling because someone remembered to water them. That is not a small thing to be remembered for.

The shirt shows a single word, centered on a dark ground: meh. Lowercase. A period at the end. The letters are small enough that you have to be close to read them. There is no animal, no slogan, no second line. Just that flat little syllable and its full stop.

I keep thinking about the period. A period is not a question mark. It is not an ellipsis trailing off into possibility. It closes the sentence. On a shirt, that is a strange and useful thing to wear: a statement that has already decided how much energy it will spend.

Most shirts with words on them want to be read from across the room. They shout a joke, a brand, a team, a cause. This one does the opposite. Its scale is the argument. The word is meh, and the typography agrees with the word: low volume, no flourish, no exclamation. If you are standing three feet away you might miss it entirely. That is not a failure of the design. That is the design.

What a small word asks of the person next to you

In parish life I spend a lot of time around invitations. Come to the meeting. Sign the petition. Join the novena. Bring your kids to the posada. Most of these are good, and most of them are necessary. But an invitation that cannot be declined is not an invitation; it is a summons. The difference is whether the other person has room to say something smaller than yes.

Meh is that room. It is not a no. It is not a yes. It is the honest middle ground that says: I have heard you, and I do not have the energy to pretend enthusiasm I do not feel. Worn on a shirt, it is a boundary made visible before anyone asks anything of you. It tells the room, gently and a little rudely, that you are not performing today.

I have watched parishioners carry that same boundary without a shirt. The woman who comes to Mass and slips out before the greeting. The man who signs the sign-in sheet and sits in the back and leaves before the circle closes. They are not indifferent. They are conserving something. The shirt just says it out loud, in one syllable, at a size that does not demand a response.

The period is the pastoral detail

If the shirt read meh without punctuation, it would be a shrug. The period makes it a decision. A shrug invites you to fill in the meaning. A period says the meaning is already settled, at least for now.

That distinction matters in a household or a rectory or a tenant meeting. There is a difference between someone who is undecided and someone who has decided to be undecided for the evening. The first person needs information. The second person needs to be left alone until morning. The period is how you tell the difference without a conversation.

I do not know the designer’s intention. I only know what the garment shows: lowercase letters, a full stop, a dark background, no illustration. From that I take a small lesson in reading people. The shortest statement is often the most deliberate.

Where the shirt fits, and where it does not

This is not a shirt for a funeral. It is not a shirt for a quinceañera. It is not a shirt for the front of a procession. It is a shirt for the ordinary Tuesday, for the errand, for the meeting you attend because you said you would but you are not going to lead the prayer. It is a shirt for the person who has learned that enthusiasm is a finite resource and is spending it carefully.

If you want the exact object, the listing is here: Meh Funny Sarcastic Introvert Minimalist Saying. The preview shows the small centered lowercase meh. on a dark shirt. That is the whole design. There is no animal, no pride variant, no second message hidden in the sleeve.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

What to do with a small word

The next time someone in your building or your pew or your kitchen gives you a flat answer, do not rush to fill the silence. Notice the period. Ask yourself whether the person is saying no or saying not tonight. Then act accordingly. That is the whole assignment: read the small print before you answer it.

On the front of the shirt, in the flat lettering of a hazard placard, are the words NOT FRIENDLY and DO NOT TOUCH. Between them sits a yellow caution triangle, and inside the triangle a hand is crossed out with a single diagonal stroke. The design does not decorate the sentence; it borrows the grammar of a sign you would see on a locked gate, a wet floor, a piece of machinery that will hurt you if you ignore it.

I want to look at that crossed-out hand for a minute, because it is doing something more interesting than being funny.

Editorial note: this publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. This is not an independent review.

The shirt is the Not Friendly Do Not Touch Funny Warning Sign Introvert from Quirky Cotton Collective. The artwork is exactly what the retail title says: warning-sign lettering, a yellow caution triangle, a crossed-out hand. I am not going to tell you how it fits or how it washes. I have not worn it. What I can read is the design, and the design is a small essay about boundaries.

A sign is a promise about consequences

Think about what a real warning sign does. It does not say please be careful. It does not say I would prefer it if you did not. It says: if you do this, something will happen, and the something is not negotiable. The yellow triangle is the universal shorthand for this is not a suggestion. The crossed-out hand is the universal shorthand for this specific action is the one that triggers the consequence.

When you put that grammar on a t-shirt, you are doing something slightly absurd, and the absurdity is the point. A human being is not a wet floor. A human being is not a piece of machinery. But the shirt borrows the sign’s certainty because the wearer wants a little of that certainty for themselves. It is a joke, yes. It is also a wish.

I have spent enough time in parish halls and tenant meetings to know that most people who describe themselves as not friendly are not actually hostile. They are tired. They are protecting a small reserve of attention. They have learned that if you leave the door open, people will walk through it, and some of them will track mud. The shirt is a door with a sign on it.

The crossed-out hand is the specific part

Notice that the design does not cross out a person. It crosses out a hand. That is a deliberate choice, and it matters. A crossed-out figure would read as misanthropy — no people. A crossed-out hand reads as a boundary around a specific gesture. It says: you may stand near me. You may talk to me. You may not reach for me without an invitation.

That is a much more precise statement, and a much more honest one. Most of us are not asking for isolation. We are asking for a say in what happens to our bodies and our time. The warning sign is not a wall. It is a gate with a latch on the inside.

In the neighborhoods where I work, this distinction is not abstract. A tenant who has just received a three-day notice is not being unfriendly when she does not answer the door on the first knock. A street vendor who has been cited three times in a month is not being rude when he does not want to chat with a stranger who might be a code inspector. The boundary is not the opposite of community. It is the condition that makes community possible, because it lets a person stay in the room without being consumed by it.

What the shirt asks of the person standing next to you

Here is the useful part. A warning sign is not only a message from the wearer to the world. It is also a message from the world back to the wearer. When you see a sign, you are supposed to adjust your behavior. You are supposed to read it and act accordingly.

So the shirt is a small test of whether the people around you can read a boundary and respect it without taking it personally. That is not a small thing. In a parish, in a family, in a tenant union, the hardest skill is often not speaking up. It is hearing someone else’s no and not treating it as a rejection of you.

I have watched mediations fall apart not because the two parties disagreed about the facts, but because one of them could not tolerate the other’s limit. Why won’t she just talk to me? Because she has told you, in plain language, that she is not ready. The sign is not a puzzle. It is a sentence. Read it.

The humor is the sugar on the medicine

If the shirt were only a boundary, it would be a little grim. The reason it works as a shirt — the reason someone would wear it to a grocery store or a parish picnic — is that it is funny. The humor comes from the mismatch between the seriousness of the sign and the softness of the person wearing it. You are not a forklift. You are a person in a cotton t-shirt, and you are using industrial language to ask for a little space.

That mismatch is a gift, because it lets the wearer say something true without saying something heavy. It is the same move as the meh. shirt or the I Had Potential shirt: a small, deadpan statement that gives the wearer a way to name a feeling without having to explain it. The joke is the door. The boundary is the room behind it.

I do not know who needs this shirt. I know that the person who needs it probably already knows who they are. They are the one who has been told, more than once, that they are hard to read. They are the one who has learned to smile through a conversation that is costing them something. They are the one who would like a sign that says what they have been too polite to say.

What to do with this

If you are the person who needs the sign, wear it if you want to. But do not let the shirt do all the work. A warning sign on a chest is a conversation starter, not a substitute for a sentence. The next time someone reaches for you — literally or otherwise — and you do not want to be reached for, try saying the thing out loud. I am not up for that right now. I need a minute. Please ask first. The shirt is a rehearsal. The sentence is the performance.

If you are the person standing next to someone who is wearing the sign, do not make them explain it. Do not ask what’s wrong? in a tone that means why are you being difficult? Read the sign. Give them the space. That is the whole assignment. It is not complicated, and it is not optional.

And if you are in a room where someone has just set a boundary — a tenant, a parishioner, a family member, a friend — the work is not to talk them out of it. The work is to bless it. A boundary is a small act of self-respect, and self-respect is the ground a person stands on when they have to do something hard. You do not have to like the sign. You do have to read it.

The crossed-out hand is not a rejection of you. It is a request. The request is simple: ask first. That is a rule you can carry into any room, any meeting, any kitchen table in Boyle Heights or anywhere else. It is also, if you think about it, a rule that makes the room safer for everyone in it.

There is a rectangle on the shirt. Black-and-white speckle, the kind that looks like static or cheap marble. A dark binding strip runs down the left side. Inside the white ruled label, the word COMPOSITION sits at the top, and beneath it an outlined ghost and an outlined pumpkin share the space. That is the whole design. It is a printed notebook cover, not a physical notebook, and the listing calls it a teacher group Halloween costume.

I keep looking at the label. In a real composition notebook, that label is where a child writes their name, subject, and room number. The label is the part that makes the book yours. On this shirt, the label is already filled — with a ghost and a pumpkin, two shapes that belong to October and to no one in particular. The name line is occupied by the season itself.

That is a small joke, but it is a precise one. A group costume works only if everyone agrees to be the same thing without becoming identical. The notebook cover does that. It is a surface everyone in a classroom already knows, and it carries no slogan, no mascot, no team name. The ghost and pumpkin are drawn in outline, not filled in, which means the shirt does not shout. It waits to be read.

I have spent enough time around parish halls to know that the best group costumes are the ones that do not require a speech. You put on the shirt, you stand next to the other teachers, and the joke lands because the object is familiar. The composition notebook is one of the few school supplies that has not changed much in forty years. The speckle, the binding, the ruled label — they are a visual shorthand for school itself. Wearing it is a way of saying: I am at work, and I am also at a party. Both things are true.

The design does not claim that teachers are notebooks. It does not claim that Halloween is about school. It simply puts a school object on a body and lets the contradiction sit there. That is what a costume is: a visible argument between what you are and what you appear to be. The ghost and pumpkin keep the argument light. They are the only Halloween elements, and they are small. The rest is just the cover.

If you are organizing a group, the shirt does one practical thing well: it is easy to match. You do not need to coordinate colors beyond black and white. You do not need to agree on a character. The notebook cover is the character. The composition notebook shirt is the object itself, printed on a standard t-shirt, and the listing presents it as a group costume for teachers. That is the whole offer. It is not a political statement, not a mascot, not a licensed character. It is a school supply that has been promoted to a costume.

I think about the label again. In a real notebook, the label is where you write your name so the book does not get lost. On this shirt, the label is printed with a ghost and a pumpkin, which means the book is already lost — or rather, it belongs to the season. That is a small piece of theology, if you want it: the things we label as ours are often just borrowed for a while. The ghost and pumpkin will come off when the shirt is washed enough, or they will not. Either way, the label was never really about ownership. It was about recognition.

For a teacher group, recognition is the point. You want the students to see you in the hallway and know that you are in on the joke. You want the other teachers to see you and know that you agreed to do this together. The shirt does not need to be clever beyond that. It needs to be legible from across the room. The black-and-white speckle is legible. The dark binding strip is legible. The word COMPOSITION is legible. The ghost and pumpkin are legible. That is enough.

What I appreciate most is what the design refuses to do. It does not add a pun. It does not add a slogan about teaching being a work of heart. It does not add a coffee cup or an apple. It trusts the notebook cover to carry the idea. That restraint is rare in costume shirts, which often pile on text until the original object disappears. Here, the object is the text. The notebook cover is the message.

If you are the one organizing the group, the practical step is simple: decide how many people are in, order the sizes, and agree on a day to wear them. The shirt does not require a meeting. It does not require a budget beyond the shirts themselves. It requires only that everyone shows up in the same rectangle. That is the assignment. The rest is Halloween.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.

There is a shirt on Amazon right now with one word on it, and the word is set in large, bold, white lowercase letters on a dark ground. The word is meh. — with the period. No animal. No slogan stacked underneath. No flag, no arrow, no second line of type to soften it. Just the four letters and the dot, sized as if it were a headline, printed as if it had something to announce.

That is the whole design. I want to sit with it for a minute, because the visual decision is doing more work than the word is.

If you have ever seen a parish bulletin, you know what small type looks like. The announcements that matter — the funeral, the quinceañera, the rent-assistance workshop on Saturday — are usually set in the smallest font on the page, squeezed between a used-car ad and a schedule of Masses. The things that get big type are the things somebody paid for. Size is a claim. When a designer takes a word as flat as meh and sets it at headline scale, they are borrowing the authority of big type and spending it on a shrug. That mismatch is the joke, and it is also the argument.

I keep thinking about how often the most honest thing a person can say in a meeting is the least impressive one. Not no. Not yes. Not a speech. Just: this does not move me, and I am not going to pretend it does. I have sat in enough tenant meetings on the Whittier Boulevard corridor to know the rhythm. A landlord’s attorney spends forty minutes explaining a relocation package, and then someone says one sentence that ends the whole performance. It is rarely eloquent. It is usually closer to meh than to anything you would put on a banner.

The shirt is not making a political claim. I want to be careful here. The artwork does not name a cause, a candidate, a neighborhood, or a movement. It is a piece of dry-humor apparel from a brand called Quirky Cotton Collective, listed under a title that strings together funny, sarcastic, introvert, and dry humor — retail language, not printed language. What is actually on the garment, as far as the preview shows, is the word and the period. Everything else is my reading of it, and I will say so plainly.

Here is the reading. meh. in lowercase is not a refusal. A refusal has edges. A refusal commits you to an alternative. meh. is the sound a person makes when they have been asked to care about something that does not deserve the care, and they have decided not to spend the energy pretending otherwise. It is a boundary drawn in the softest possible pencil. And the period is what makes it final. Without the period, meh is a hesitation. With the period, it is a verdict.

I think that is why the design works as a shirt and not just as a caption. A shirt is a public surface. You wear it into a grocery line, a waiting room, a school pickup, a pew. Most graphic tees on that surface are trying to start something — a laugh, a compliment, a conversation. This one is trying to end something. It is pre-emptive. It says, before you ask me how I am, before you pitch me your thing, before you hand me the flyer: I have already considered it, and the answer is the dot.

There is a spiritual discipline in that, and I do not mean it as a joke. The tradition I serve has a long history of people who said very little and meant all of it. The desert fathers were not chatty. The nunc dimittis is one sentence. The short word, the flat tone, the refusal to decorate — these are old tools in the pastoral kit, even when they show up on a t-shirt.

I am not claiming the shirt is about any of that. The shirt is about being tired of being asked to perform enthusiasm. But the two things share a grammar: the short word, the flat tone, the refusal to decorate.

If you want to look at the object itself, it is here: Meh Funny Sarcastic Saying Introvert Dry Humor. The listing shows the large bold lowercase meh. on a dark shirt, and that is the design. There is no animal illustration, no pride variant, no second graphic. What you see is what is printed.

What I would ask a reader to do with this is not buy it. It is to notice how often you have said something longer than meh. when meh. was the truth. In a building meeting, in a family conversation, in a committee that has met eleven times and produced nothing. The long version costs you something. It costs you the hour, and it costs you a little of your own honesty, because you are performing interest you do not have. The short version is a gift to the room. It lets everyone stop pretending.

There is a place for the long version. When a tenant is three days from a lockout, you do not shrug. You file. You show up. You bring the notice and the case number and the date. Meh. is not a strategy for the things that matter. It is a strategy for the things that do not, and the discipline is knowing the difference.

So the shirt is funny, and it is also a small instruction. It says: you are allowed to have a floor. You are allowed to look at the eleventh invitation to care about something that has never once cared about you, and answer with four letters and a period. The word is loud on the shirt because the feeling is usually quiet in the person. That is the whole design, and it is enough.

Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.