En Nomine Patris — Notes from an East LA Parish

The shirt says I HAD POTENTIAL in white capitals. Beneath the words, a white ramp curves downward from left to right. At the upper left ledge, where the ramp begins, there is a dashed circle — an outline, empty. At the lower right, where the ramp flattens out, a solid white ball sits still.

That is the whole design. No punchline beyond the sentence, no extra arrows or equations. The joke is in the arrangement: the ball is not at the top. It is at the bottom. The dashed circle marks where it might have been.

I keep looking at the dashed circle. In a physics diagram, a dashed outline usually marks a position that is possible but not occupied — a predicted location, a path not taken. Here it sits at the high end of the ramp, the place from which a ball would have rolled down with the most energy. The solid ball is at the low end, resting. The shirt does not say the ball fell. It says the ball had potential, and then it shows you the ball exactly where potential goes when it is not used: at the bottom, still, on the flat.

That is a more precise joke than the usual sarcastic shirt. Most I had potential designs rely on the sentence alone — a self-deprecating caption with no image to carry it. This i had potential shirt makes the drawing do half the work. The words name the loss; the ramp and the ball show its shape. The dashed circle is the ghost of the starting position. The solid ball is the present tense.

I am not a physicist, and the shirt is not a lesson in mechanics. But the visual grammar is recognizable to anyone who sat through a high school physics unit: gravitational potential energy depends on height. An object at the top of a ramp has more of it. An object at the bottom has less. The shirt borrows that grammar and applies it to a person. I had potential means: I was once the ball at the top of the ramp. Now I am the ball at the bottom. The dashed circle is where I used to be.

What makes the design worth a second look is that it does not mock the ball. The ball is not drawn as a failure. It is drawn as a ball. It rests on a flat ledge, solid, intact. The dashed circle above it is the only sign that something did not happen. The shirt is sarcastic, but the sarcasm is aimed at the gap between the outline and the object — not at the object itself.

That distinction matters if you are the kind of person who might wear it. There is a difference between a shirt that says I am a disappointment and a shirt that says I had potential. The first is a verdict. The second is a description of a diagram. The dashed circle is empty; the ball is still there. The design leaves room for the possibility that the ball could be picked up and put back at the top, even if the shirt does not promise it.

I think about the people in my parish who carry a version of this sentence without wearing it. The man who was going to finish his electrician’s certification and then the shop closed. The woman who was going to retire at sixty and then her mother got sick. The young person who was told in high school that they had potential and has not heard the word since. The shirt is a joke, but the joke is not far from the kitchen tables on Fickett and Mathews. Potential is a word that gets used on you when you are young and then stops being used, and the stopping is not always your fault.

The design does not say whose fault it is. That is its restraint. The ramp is curved, not broken. The ball is solid, not deflated. The dashed circle is empty, not crossed out. The shirt presents a diagram of a situation and lets you read the causes yourself. In a neighborhood where a lot of people have had potential interrupted by a layoff, an eviction notice, a diagnosis, or a bad decision at nineteen, that restraint is worth something. The shirt does not add insult. It just draws the ramp.

There is also a smaller pleasure in the design: the wording is in capitals, but the drawing is quiet. The ramp is a thin white curve. The ball is a small white circle. The dashed outline is made of short segments, like a line from a textbook. Nothing is oversized. The shirt does not shout I HAD POTENTIAL across the chest in a font that demands attention. It states it, the way a diagram states a fact. The sarcasm is dry, not theatrical. That makes it easier to wear in ordinary places — a grocery line on First Street, a Saturday morning at the parish hall, a bus down Whittier Boulevard — without turning into a performance.

I would not wear it to a funeral. But I might wear it to a meeting where someone is about to tell a room full of tenants that they should have read the fine print. The shirt is a reminder that potential is not a moral quality. It is a position on a ramp. Some people start higher than others. Some ramps are steeper. Some balls get pushed. The diagram does not show the push, but anyone who has lived on this block knows the push is real.

The shirt is sold by Quirky Cotton Collective. Editorial note: this publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. I am writing about the design, not reviewing the fabric or the fit. What I can see is the artwork: the capitals, the curved ramp, the dashed circle at the upper left, the solid ball at the lower right. That is enough to make an argument about what the shirt asks of the person wearing it.

What it asks, I think, is a kind of honesty that is not the same as self-pity. The sentence I had potential is past tense. It does not say I have potential or I will have potential. It closes a door. But the drawing keeps the ball in view. The ball is still on the shirt. The dashed circle is still there. The design does not erase the starting position; it just shows you where the ball ended up. That is a truthful diagram, and truthful diagrams are useful. They tell you what happened without telling you what to feel about it.

If you are going to wear this shirt, wear it knowing what the dashed circle means. It is not a halo. It is a position. It marks the place where the ball could have been, and the solid ball marks where it is. The gap between them is the joke, and also the small mercy: the ball is still drawn. It has not been removed from the diagram. It is resting on the flat ledge, solid and white, waiting to be read.

Tomorrow, if you see someone wearing it, do not say you still have potential. That is not what the shirt is asking for. Ask them what the ramp was. Ask them who drew the dashed circle. The answer will tell you more about the person than the sentence on the chest.

The shirt says it plainly, in capital letters that wrap around the picture: 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, an onion — each with a face, each smiling, and each with its roots drawn down into the soil. The pun is doing double duty. To root for someone is to cheer them on. To root is also to put down roots, to be planted, to belong to a place. The design holds both meanings at once, and that is the whole argument of the garment.

I want to take the picture seriously, because it is not just a gardening joke. Look at the roots. They are visible. The carrot’s taproot, the radish’s little white tail, the beet’s deep red body, the onion’s layered bulb — all of them are shown below the soil line, in the dark, where the growth actually happens. The faces are above ground, smiling. The roots are below ground, working. That is a small diagram of what mutual support looks like when it is honest: the visible part is the encouragement, the invisible part is the labor that makes the encouragement mean something.

The phrase let’s root for each other is an invitation, not a command. It uses the first-person plural — let’s — which means the speaker is included in the rooting. It is not you should root for me or I will root for you. It is a proposal for a shared practice. And then the second half, and watch each other grow, adds something that is easy to miss: watching. Not just cheering from a distance, but paying attention over time. Growth is slow. It requires someone to be there to see it.

There is a tension in the design that I think is worth naming. The vegetables are smiling, which is cheerful, but they are also root vegetables, which means the part we eat is the part that grew underground. The smile is above the soil; the substance is below. That is not a cynical reading — it is just what the drawing shows. The shirt is not promising that mutual support will be easy or visible. It is promising that the rooting and the growing happen together, in the same patch of dirt.

I have been thinking about this in the context of the parish, where we do a lot of rooting for each other and not enough watching each other grow. We are good at the crisis: the rent notice, the funeral, the hospital visit. We are less good at the long middle, the part where someone is quietly trying to finish a degree, or stay sober, or learn to read a lease, or keep a small business open for another month. That middle part is the root system. It is underground. It does not photograph well. But it is where the growth is.

The shirt is a reminder that rooting is not a one-time event. It is a practice. You do it again on Tuesday. You do it when the person you are rooting for is not in the room. You do it when they fail, and then you do it again. The vegetables in the design are not competing for space. They are drawn together, in the same soil, with their roots intertwined. That is the image: a shared root system. Not a garden of individual pots.

If you want to wear the shirt, you can find it here: Let’s Root For Each Other And Watch Each Other Grow Garden. It is a standard t-shirt with the design described above. I am not going to tell you it will change your life or your garden. It is a shirt with a picture of smiling vegetables and a sentence that asks you to pay attention to someone else’s growth. That is enough.

The next time you put it on, think about the roots. Think about the part of the person next to you that you cannot see. Think about what it would mean to root for that part, and then to watch, patiently, for it to come up.

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

The shirt shows four letters and a period, centered on a dark ground, set so small you have to lean in to read it: meh. No animal. No slogan in a second color. No exclamation point doing the emotional labor. Just the word, lowercase, and the dot that closes it.

I keep looking at that period. The letters are the joke; the period is the argument. A period is what you put at the end of a sentence you have decided not to extend. It is not a question mark, which invites. It is not an ellipsis, which trails off and leaves the door ajar. It is a full stop, and on a shirt this quiet, the full stop is doing more work than the word.

Most novelty shirts shout. They put the punchline across the chest in a font that can be read from the far side of the parking lot. This one does the opposite. The scale is the message: meh. is not a manifesto, it is a shrug you have to get close to notice. That is a different kind of statement — not I am angry, not I am funny, but I have an opinion and I am not going to spend a lot of air on it.

I think that is why the design holds up. The word meh is already a refusal to escalate. It is what you say when someone asks how the meeting went, or how you feel about the new parking rules on the block, or whether you want to weigh in on the third round of a dispute that has been going since spring. Meh. It is not yes and it is not no. It is a small, honest report from the interior, and the period says the report is complete.

There is a temptation to read a shirt like this as pure irony, the kind of thing you wear to signal that you are above caring. I do not think that is what the artwork is doing. The lowercase letters are modest. The period is firm. Together they read less like detachment and more like a boundary drawn in the smallest possible handwriting — the way you might write no on a form in pencil, not because you are unsure, but because you do not need to make a scene.

In parish life I have watched people spend enormous energy on the wrong sentence. They will argue for an hour about a date on a flyer and say nothing about the thing that actually hurt them. The meh. shirt is a reminder that brevity can be a form of honesty. You do not have to write a paragraph to decline an invitation. You do not have to explain your whole week to say that you are tired. A period is allowed.

The shirt is sold as Meh Funny Sarcastic Introvert Minimalist Saying by Quirky Cotton Collective, and the retail language leans on sarcastic and introvert. I understand why. Those are the words people type when they are looking for this kind of thing. But the artwork itself is quieter than the listing. The visual observation is plain: very small, centered lowercase meh. lettering on a dark shirt, no animal illustration. That is the object. The rest is interpretation, and my interpretation is that the period is the most important mark on the garment.

What does a small dismissal ask of the room? It asks the room to notice that someone has spoken, and to accept that the sentence is finished. It asks us not to demand a longer explanation from a person who has already given us the short one. It asks us to read the scale correctly: this is not a cry for attention, it is a signal that attention is not being requested right now.

That is a useful thing to practice. In a meeting, in a kitchen, on a sidewalk after Mass, when someone gives you a meh and a period, the charitable move is to let it stand. Do not pry it open. Do not turn it into a project. The word is not a puzzle; it is a report. Receive it the way you would receive a short note left on a table — read it, and do not add a paragraph in the margin.

The shirt is not a cure for anything, and I would not pretend it is. It is a piece of cloth with four letters and a dot. But the dot is a small lesson in how to end a sentence without making a war. That is worth leaning in to read.

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

The shirt reads NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH in the flat, capitalized lettering of a municipal warning sign. Above the words sits a yellow caution triangle. Inside the triangle, a hand is crossed out with a diagonal bar. The whole thing is printed on a standard t-shirt, the kind of garment that usually carries a team name or a band logo or a parish festival date. Here it carries a boundary.

I want to take the design seriously, not because it is solemn — it is not — but because it is doing something specific with the visual grammar of public safety. A caution triangle is not a decoration. It is a shape we have been trained, from driver’s ed and construction sites and hospital corridors, to read before we read the words. The triangle says pay attention before you proceed. The crossed-out hand says this particular action is prohibited. The words underneath say what the prohibition is: not friendly, do not touch.

What interests me is the order. The triangle comes first, then the hand, then the words. A person looking at the shirt from across a room sees the yellow shape and the crossed-out hand before they can read the sentence. The design assumes you will be seen before you are read. That is a strange and honest thing for a piece of clothing to assume.

The sign is not the person

A warning sign does not describe the interior of the thing it protects. It describes the terms of approach. The sign on a substation fence does not tell you the voltage or the history of the equipment or whether the workers inside are kind. It tells you: this is not a place for your hand. The shirt borrows that logic. It is not a statement about who the wearer is in private. It is a statement about what the wearer is willing to negotiate in public, at a distance, with strangers.

That distinction matters in a neighborhood like ours, where public space is dense and shared and full of people who know each other’s grandmothers. On Whittier Boulevard, on First Street, in the aisles of the mercado, the default is contact. A hand on the shoulder. A ¿cómo estás? before you have decided whether you have the energy for it. The shirt does not reject that world. It posts a notice within it. It says: the terms of approach are different today, and the difference is visible.

I have been thinking about this because the shirt is funny, and the humor is doing work. If the same words appeared on a plain white sign at a bus stop, they would read as hostile. On a t-shirt, the exaggeration — the caution triangle, the crossed-out hand, the bureaucratic bluntness — signals that the wearer knows the sign is a bit much. The joke is the gap between the severity of the graphic and the ordinary person wearing it. That gap is where the boundary becomes speakable. You can laugh at the shirt and still respect the sign.

What the crossed-out hand asks of the person next to you

Here is the useful argument I want to make: the shirt is not primarily a message to the wearer. It is a message to the person standing next to the wearer. It asks that person to do something specific — to read before reaching. That is a small civic skill, and it is not evenly distributed. Some of us were raised to hug first and ask later. Some of us were raised to keep our hands to ourselves and say nothing. The shirt proposes a third way: state the terms plainly, in a form the other person can see, and let the seeing do the work.

In parish life, we talk a great deal about welcome. We put it on banners and in bulletins and on the lips of ushers. But welcome is not the same as access. A person can be welcome in a room and still not want to be touched in it. A person can be glad you came and still need you to ask before you put an arm around them. The shirt is a reminder that hospitality has a second half, and the second half is consent. The caution triangle is not the opposite of welcome. It is the condition that makes welcome honest.

I do not know the person who will wear this shirt. I do not know whether they are introverted in the way the retail title suggests, or whether they simply got tired of being handled. I am not going to invent a story about them. What I can say is that the design gives them a way to say a hard thing without saying it out loud, and that is a real gift in a crowded room. The shirt is a small piece of infrastructure for the work of being left alone in public.

The caution triangle as a liturgical shape

I will risk one comparison, and I will mark it as my own reading rather than a claim about the designer’s intent. The caution triangle is a shape that says stop and consider. In the liturgy, we have our own shapes for that: the bell before the consecration, the pause before the Padre Nuestro, the silence after communion. These are not decorations either. They are signals that the terms of approach have changed. The shirt’s triangle is secular and comic, but it is doing something adjacent. It is asking the person in front of it to slow down and read the room before they act in it.

That is a practice worth carrying beyond the shirt. Before you put a hand on a shoulder, before you assume a joke will land, before you decide that someone’s quiet is a problem to be solved — read the sign. The sign may be a t-shirt. It may be a closed door. It may be the way a person is standing at the edge of the hall. The skill is the same. The caution triangle is a reminder that the skill can be learned.

What to do with this

If you are the person who needs the boundary, the shirt is available here. It is a standard t-shirt with the warning-sign lettering, the yellow caution triangle, and the crossed-out hand. I am not going to tell you it will change your life or fix your parish. It is a shirt. But it is a shirt that says something true in a language people already know how to read.

If you are the person standing next to someone who needs the boundary, the assignment is smaller and harder. This week, before you reach, look. Read the sign, whether it is printed on cotton or posted in the way a person holds their body. Ask. The caution triangle is not an insult. It is an invitation to be careful, and being careful is one of the ways we love each other in a crowded neighborhood.

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

The first thing I notice is the label. Not the ghost, not the pumpkin, not the black-and-white speckle that runs across the rectangle like static on a television. The label. A white ruled rectangle, headed COMPOSITION in plain capitals, sitting on the chest where a name tag might go. Inside the ruled lines, an outlined ghost and an outlined pumpkin, drawn thin, almost like a child’s tracing. The binding strip runs down the left side, dark and solid. The whole thing is a printed notebook cover, not a physical notebook, and the shirt is a costume of a school supply.

I have seen a lot of teacher Halloween shirts. Most of them shout. Teacher Squad. Witch Way to the Staff Room. I Teach Tiny Humans. They are loud, and they are meant to be read across a parking lot. This one is quiet. It does not say teacher anywhere on the visible artwork. It says composition. It says notebook. It says this is the thing you write in. The ghost and the pumpkin are small, contained, almost incidental. The design trusts you to know what a composition notebook is and why a group of adults might dress as one.

That trust is the argument. A composition notebook is not a flashy object. It is the cheapest, most ordinary writing surface in the building. Black-and-white speckled cover, sewn binding, wide-ruled pages. It is what you buy when you need to write something down and you do not need it to be beautiful. It is what a student uses for a journal, what a teacher uses for attendance, what a parish secretary uses for the list of quinceañeras and the list of funeral readings and the list of people who still have not picked up their posada invitations. It is a container for the ordinary.

When you wear a composition notebook as a costume, you are not dressing as a teacher. You are dressing as the surface a teacher writes on. That is a different claim. It says: the work is not the performance. The work is the record. The work is the page that gets filled and turned and filled again. The ghost and the pumpkin are there because it is Halloween, but they are drawn inside the ruled lines, as if the holiday itself has to fit inside the margin.

I think about what a group costume asks of the people wearing it. A matching shirt is not a uniform. It is an invitation. It says: we are doing this together, and we are doing it on purpose. The composition notebook design is especially good for that because it is inherently plural. One notebook is a notebook. A stack of notebooks is a classroom. A row of people wearing the same speckled cover is a faculty meeting, a grade-level team, a staff that decided to be silly on October 31 instead of pretending the day is not happening.

The shirt is available at the Quirky Cotton Collective listing, and the design is what it is: a printed notebook cover, dark binding on the left, white label, ghost and pumpkin inside. I am not going to tell you it is soft or that it fits well or that the teachers at a particular school wore it and loved it. I have not worn it. I have only looked at the artwork, and the artwork is clear enough to read.

What the artwork asks of the person standing next to you is a small thing. It asks them to recognize the object. It asks them to remember their own composition notebooks, the ones with the marble covers that cost fifty cents at the start of the school year, the ones that got dog-eared and stained and filled with handwriting that changed as the year went on. It asks them to see a group of adults and think: oh, they are dressed as the thing we all wrote in. That is not a punchline. It is a shared memory.

In a parish, we have a word for that kind of shared memory. We call it tradition, and we mean the things we hand down not because they are impressive but because they are ours. The composition notebook is not a sacred object. But it is a common one, and common things carry a kind of weight when a group agrees to wear them together. The ghost and the pumpkin are the feast day. The notebook is the ordinary time that makes the feast day possible.

So here is the assignment, if you want one. If you are a teacher, a staff, a team of any kind, and you are thinking about a group costume for Halloween, consider the composition notebook. Not because it is clever, but because it is plain. It does not ask you to perform enthusiasm. It asks you to stand next to someone else in the same ordinary cover and let the label do the talking. The ghost and the pumpkin will take care of the holiday. The ruled lines will take care of the rest.

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

The shirt does not say whatever. It does not say I don’t care. It says meh. — lowercase, bold, white against a dark ground, with a period at the end. The period is the part I keep looking at. A period is a full stop. It is the punctuation of a sentence that has decided it is finished. And yet the word it finishes is the softest, most deflating word in English: not a curse, not a refusal, just a small collapse of enthusiasm. The shirt is loud about being unimpressed. That contradiction is the whole design, and it is worth sitting with before we decide whether it is funny, rude, or something more useful.

I am not going to pretend I wore it to a meeting. I have not. What I have is the image: large bold lowercase letters, no animal, no slogan, no extra decoration. The word is meh and then a period. The shirt is Meh Funny Sarcastic Saying Introvert Dry Humor from Quirky Cotton Collective. That is the object. The rest is what the object asks of the person standing next to it.

In a parish, meh is a dangerous word. Not because it is profane, but because it is contagious. Someone proposes a novena and the room says meh. Someone asks for volunteers to chalk doors for Guadalupe and the answer is a shrug. The word does not refuse. It deflates. It is the sound of a person who has been asked too many times and has decided that the safest answer is no answer at all. The shirt puts that sound on a chest in large white letters. It is a boundary disguised as a joke.

But here is the argument I want to make: the period is not a wall. It is an invitation to ask a second question. A period ends a sentence, but it also creates a pause. The person wearing meh. is not saying leave me alone forever. They are saying I have nothing left for this particular ask right now. The shirt is a small, public statement of depletion. And depletion, in a community that runs on volunteers, is not a sin. It is a fact that needs to be named before it becomes resentment.

I have seen this in tenant meetings. A building leader who has been knocking on doors for three months will sit in the back and say nothing. Not because she does not care, but because she has used up her words. The shirt would fit her. The shirt would say what she cannot: I am here, but I am meh. And the room would have to decide whether to shame her or to ask what she needs. The shirt does not answer that question. It just makes the question visible.

There is a risk, of course. Meh can become a habit. It can become the thing you say before you have even heard the request. It can become a way of protecting yourself from disappointment by refusing to hope. The shirt does not cure that. It does not claim to. It is a piece of clothing with a word on it. But the word is a mirror. If you wear it, you are telling people something about your energy. If you see it, you are being told something about theirs. The period is the part that asks you to stop and notice.

So what do you do with a person who is meh.? You do not argue with the period. You do not try to talk them out of it. You sit with them. You ask a smaller question. Can you do one thing this week? Can you make three phone calls? Can you just show up and sit in the back? The shirt is not a resignation. It is a boundary. And a boundary is a gift to a community that has learned to ignore exhaustion. The person who says meh is telling you the truth. The person who says nothing is telling you a lie.

I think the shirt is funny. I think it is funny because it is true. The large bold letters are not angry. They are tired. The lowercase meh is the sound of a person who has been asked to care about too many things and has decided to care about one thing: the honesty of their own limit. The period is the seal on that honesty. It is not a rejection of you. It is a rejection of the pretense that they are fine.

If you wear it, wear it to a meeting where you have nothing left. Wear it to a family gathering where you are tired of being asked about your plans. Wear it as a small sign that says I am here, but I am not performing. And if you see someone wearing it, do not take it personally. Ask them what they need. The period is not the end of the conversation. It is the beginning of a different one.

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