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Have you ever noticed how face-like objects are eye-catching? They draw attention to themselves and away from other things... like the road.
The grocery stores and pharmacies around here sell plush toy animals with HUGE eyes, big heads, and small bodies. I think the size of the eyes is meant to make them cute, but when one is shoved, face first, into the back windshield of the car directly in front of us the effect is more creepy. It watched us. Its deep, black, glossy eyes stared at us. We changed lanes. It changed lanes. It followed us. It judged us. It found us wanting and condemned us to a soft plushy hell.
We managed to lose it on the Quebec side of the river. Freedom!
That's when we noticed that the driver in the car behind us was playing harmonica at red lights.
Originally posted by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) ms_danson, here.
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Originally posted by squid314 on January 21, 2012:
I have spent the last month on a some-expenses-paid tour of the nation's psychiatric hospitals.
...doing job interviews. You did realize that was what I meant, right?
I finish medical school this May (hopefully!) and would very much like to take a job in psychiatry when I graduate. Such jobs, like all other medical apprenticeships, are distributed by a complicated computer algorithm called the National Residency Match Program.
Yes, we are living in a dystopia. Or at least I've always been told that we would know we were living in a dystopia when our jobs were assigned us by a computer.
But this is a friendly computer, and operates mostly based on the weights I give it, and the weights different programs give me. So I am traveling around the country, investigating different hospitals and universities and allowing them to give me terrible interviews in which psychiatrists who supposedly spend their entire lives assessing people by asking them questions run out of non-repetitive questions after a couple of minutes.
So far I have visited six hospitals, with a seventh coming up in a few days. I've been very impressed by all of them, which probably means I am gullible. Just as I am trying to make myself look like a brilliant and professional doctor so they will take me, so they are trying to make themselves look like world-class hi-tech sparkling-new hospitals so I'll want to work there.
Listening to psychiatric hospitals boast about themselves is a strange experience. Some boast about their prestige. One of my interviews was at the sinister-sounding "Institute of Living", whose odd name is probably still better than their previous moniker, the Connecticut Retreat For The Insane. They told me quite proudly that they were one of only thirteen members of the "Ivy League of mental institutions", an entity whose existence I had managed to stay totally unaware of until that time.
Others boast of the interesting patient populations they serve. Maimonides Medical Center, in a very Jewish neighborhood of New York, focuses on Orthodox Jewish patients and is a center for the study of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which apparently assumes some of its most florid forms among that population. Who would have thought that having 613 rules that govern every facet of your daily life and whose infractions must be atoned for with complicated rituals could turn someone OCD? Hennepin in Minneapolis, on the other hand, has a large population of Vietnamese, Hmong, and Somalis - one of their specialties is post-traumatic disorders from war and refugee experiences. Three or four of the hospitals have boasted of serving the poorest of the poor, a subgroup known for their complicated and difficult mental conditions. Hartford takes a different tack, and boasts of their clinic serving super-rich insurance company executives - a group who apparently have a whole spectrum of their own psychological problems.
Still others boast of their methods. Long Island is known for its expertise in electroconvulsive therapy; Hartford says they have not only ECT machines, but one of the few direct transcranial magnetic stimulation machines in the country. Bay State, for their part, offers a Hypnosis elective for apprentice doctors there who want to learn about hypnotherapy (YES) and a sensation room (a little bit like snoezelen) full of weird lights and textures for patients who need a little stimulation.
And some boast of all the different fields of psychiatry available. There are the normal things like Child Psychiatry or Geriatric Psychiatry, and then there are ones I'd never heard of before which make me want to stop the interview right there and make my interviewer tell me as much as ey can about eir own specialty. One man I met was a Palliative Care Psychiatrist. Palliative care refers to patients who have been diagnosed with terminal diseases and who are on their way out; his job was to make sure these people didn't get depressed and were able to come to terms with their approaching mortality in a healthy way (I have a feeling he and my more transhumanist friends would mutually hate each other).
A few others were less interesting in and of themselves, but had great job titles. I remember meeting in Ireland a man who introduced himself as something like the chairman of pain - a perfectly reasonable title, as pain medicine is an important medical specialty and needs a department chair just like everyone else - but the name amused me, and made me wish I could introduce myself as a chairman of pain (or better, a Chairman of Pain) one day. There were no Chairmen of Pain at any of the hospitals I interviewed at, but one did have a Sleep Fellow. This ended up making perfect sense: a Sleep Fellow is someone pursuing a fellowship in Sleep Medicine, which treats insomnia, hypersomnia, sleep apnea, and various other sleep-related medical conditions. But that's another one where getting to introduce myself as "Dr. Scott Alexander, Sleep Fellow" would be the highlight of my life (and sleep medicine is actually pretty interesting).
There is a joke in most psychiatric hospitals; the specific answer changes, but the point is always the same. It's something like "What's the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychiatric patient?" and the answer is "A white coat" or "A stethoscope" or "One of them has the keys". And certainly I have seen some strange things in my travels. I think my favorite was the Institute of Living's Festivus exhibit. I was there just after Christmas, and in one of the lobbies they had an exhibit on holiday traditions around the country, and along with Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa exhibits, they had a beautiful and professional Festivus exhibit, complete with a Festivus Pole and Grievance Box.
And the interviewers themselves ranged from weird to wonderful. I have rarely met a demographic that is so consistently intellectual and up on interesting trends as hospital psychiatrists. Just to give an example, when I mentioned I was interested in the application of artificial intelligence to human cognition, one interviewer unprompted asked me "Do you believe in the Singularity and when do you think it will occur?" I've had conversations with other interviewers about everything from Daniel Dennett to Libet's free will experiment to Joseph Campbell, to the validity of the Myers-Briggs test to Himalayan Buddhism. Pretty sure I would never get those kinds of conversations talking to orthopaedic surgeons, or to shipping managers or vice-presidents of human resources, for that matter. It's that kind of thing which really makes me think psychiatry is the right field for me (among many other things).
They're also all really, really interested in their patients. I shouldn't have to say this to anyone who's been paying attention, but the old stereotype of psychiatrists as people who throw tranquilizers at their patients until they're sedated, then go off and play golf has pretty much zero basis anymore. These people are super bright and compassionate, super dedicated to doing as much for their patients as possible with as little medication or invasive procedures as possible. One of the things I love about medicine in general and psychiatry in particular is that doctors have always been their own worst critics, and that they're always on the forefront of the fight to change medicine, and nearly all of the people I've met have seemed like they're embodiments of that.
Not that there haven't been some...uh...less enthusiastic interviewers. I remember one person who sat in front of me, clearly with no idea who I was, holding a checklist with statements like "RATE PRESTIGE OF INTERVIEWEE'S ACADEMIC AWARDS 1 TO 5". He'd ask in a monotone "Did you win prestigious academic awards?" and when I started to answer "Yes, I..." he just said "Okay, good" and circled the "5". Repeat for about ten other questions. One of the residents at the hospital revealed that he was actually a quite famous forensic psychiatrist who spends all his time with the criminally insane and has adopted a brusque and impersonal manner to deal with them. I don't know how that ties in with his tendency to trust everything everyone says at face value, though.
Most interviewers have asked exactly the same questions, those being:
"So why are you interested in psychiatry?" (I've had to come up with an answer more coherent than just kind of sitting there being like "But...but...how could someone not be interested in psychiatry??")
"So are the medical schools in Ireland good?" (Of course I would say they were, but everyone seems to think asking this question has value.)
"What field of psychiatry do you want to go into?" (???)
"Do you have any brothers or sisters? What do they do?" (They're obsessed with whether I have brothers or sisters. I don't know why. I always tell them I have one brother who's a jazz musician, but I feel bad about it, because I'm afraid they use that to draw conclusions like that if I have a hip, cool brother I must myself be cool and hip. This would be inaccurate, to say the least.)
"I see your father is in medicine. How has that affected you?" (inspiration, role model, here I tell a funny little family story about a picture in the photo album of me wearing a bib saying "Future Doctor" at age 1)
"Why are you interested in our program?" (The secret is to say anything other than "Well, I applied pretty much everywhere, and you were one of the ones that accepted me." Which is too bad, because I'm not good at lying.)
I've also gotten the occasional more meaty question, like "How do you handle conflict?" or "What is your biggest concern about your medical ability?" or "Do you really see yourself living in Memphis?" (only in sleep, during my nightmares). But mostly I think I'm a pretty good interviewee and able to promote myself pretty fluently and I usually have funny stories that keep people interested if nothing else.
Also the dreaded "What questions do you have for us?", which is tough, because even if you think of ten questions before coming, by the time you've gotten through a full interview day with four or five interviewers, you're all out of questions, and you're not supposed to say that or else you sound like you're not genuinely interested in the program.
I usually start with "What's the balance in this program between training in the use of psychiatric drugs and training in the use of talk therapies?". This question is hilarious, because everyone always answers it the same way. They answer: "You know, every hospital that you ask that question at is going to answer it the same way. They'll all say they have a balance between the two. But that's actually quite rare, and this is one of the few hospitals that actually does have a balance between the two, thanks to the work of Dr. X on staff, who is a well-trained psychoanalyst." I'd kind of like to see if by publicizing this pattern, I can get them to recurse another level, and go to "Well, all hospitals answer this the same way. They all say that all hospitals answer this the same way, then say that unlike those hospitals, they really do have a balance because of the work of some doctor on staff. But unlike those hospitals, we really really have a balance." If any hospital were to do that, I think I'd sign up immediately.
Other than that, I ask about research opportunities (usually there if I want them, which by the time I do all my work and call and stuff I may not), pay (usually between $45000 and $55000; Memphis blew my mind by saying that if you wanted to work overtime on the nightshift you could make an extra $1500 a night, which is about as much as I've ever made in a month at any other job), call schedule (usually about once a week, but a surprisingly good number of them are "home call"/"beeper call") work-life balance (hahahahahahaahahaaaha), and the local area (which they always insist is Full Of Culture And The Arts And Cuisine And Several Sports Teams, even though really all I want is enough educated young people that I will have a decent chance of meeting at least one girl I can relate to on an intellectual level - even though my standards for "relate to on an intellectual level" may be kinda high).
I have one interview left, that at the University of Cincinnati on Monday. After that my next deadline is February 15th, by which I must have input my preferences into the NRMP computer in the form of a list of programs from favorite to least favorite. Right now I am thinking of putting Institute of Living in Hartford as my first choice (I promise it's not just so I can introduce myself as "Dr. Scott Alexander, Institute of Living", even though that would be pretty cool) but Zucker Hillside in Long Island might beat it out by the time I've finished all my research. Then it's the six other hospitals in one order or another in case I get rejected from my top choice. If I get rejected from all seven, which is unlikely but certainly possible (there are usually about 150% more medical school graduates than spaces available for this kind of thing) then it's hunting for something to do for a year until I can apply again next winter.
And then in the middle of next week, I fly back to Ireland to finish up medical school, which at this point is annoying. I've had a month to get excited about the idea of being a real doctor practicing a specialty and treating patients and making money, and now I've got to go back and do the whole student thing and pretend to care about obstetrics and gynecology. At least I'll have the terror of final exams to keep me in line. Speaking of terror, I still have to have passed a licensing test I took in December for this to even work. And also speaking of terror, I hear back about whether I got a job or not in mid-March.
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Saturday, October 22nd, 2011
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I was the very model of a modern Arab autocrat,
I lynched the literati and I probed the proletariat,
I promulgated policies that upset others naughtily
From IRA to Egypt and from Libya to Lockerbie!
I was a tad acquainted with all matters diplomatical,
With military action both combined and unilateral
I rooted out resistance and I terrorized the populace
And bandied mass destruction in a talk with Stephanopolus!
[piano, business]
I liked to play the Bedouin and dress as per the tribal norm
Except for television when I wore a Colonel's uniform
In short I was the paragon from Faisal to Jehoshaphat
I was the very model of a modern Arab autocrat.
I knew our mythic history from Karkar to the Caliphates
I had a reputation as the slyest kook since Kathy Bates
I dreamed to make of Africa one union international
And often made the papers with my interviews irrational!
My reputation's stern but I did seed my rule with lenience
And sometimes showed foes mercy when it was no inconvenience
I aggrandized, destabilized, monopolized and bartered too
And liberated Libya of billions in oil revenue!
[piano, business]
I learned from Machiavelli all my power eruditionings
I was a peerless study in Man's limitless ambitionings
In short I was the paragon from Faisal to Jehoshaphat
I was the very model of a modern Arab autocrat.
I ruled until the seasons turned from winter months to Arab spring
And found myself surrounded by a grass-roots homegrown uprising
Imperials and airstrikes lent the conflict some asymmetry
I had to move from Misratah and take a trip from Tripoli!
Upon pursuit the rebels found some shallow holes with bodies strewed
With dead whose names and families could not be set with Sirte-tude
Those are the only gravesites that the news has come to Hah-vard
AND THERE MAY BE MANY OTHERS BUT THEY HAVEN'T BEEN DISCAH-VARD!
[piano, business]
I died the way I made my way: with fear and sprayed with pellet
History will know my name and yet they're likely to misspell it
In short I was the paragon from Faisal to Jehoshaphat
I was the very model of a modern Arab autocrat.
Originally posted by hwrnmnbsol, here.
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Tuesday, August 9th, 2011
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originally posted by rosamicula here
I feel as tarnished and gloomy as most sensible Londoners this morning. If I'd been living in my old flat, I could have seen most of the fires out of my windows, at varying degrees of distance. I am a long way from it here, thankfully.
I said elsewhere that I'd often wondered what happened to the 13 to 20% of kids who walk away from school with no qualifications and very limited numeracy and literacy skills. A lot of you thought that's whom I used to teach, but I taught the ones who scraped through with low grades and did vocational courses, or who resat their GCSEs in the hope fo doing better. Each year's 13 to 20% largely end up on benefits or in jail or in the grey area between the two, claiming what benefits they can and supplementing that income with criminal activity. This is not a recent development; those kids at the bottom have always been there. I know the stats for the last thirteen years, because I've been a teacher for the last thirteen years. These kids often have virtually no social skills. By that I mean they literally can't sit in a room and hold a conversation with someone other than those in their peer group. That doesn't matter. They don't have the skills to fill in a job application form, they've nothing to put on it if they did, so no one is going to sit them in a room and give them an interview, unless that someone is in a blue uniform, and they are recording the interview.
Pretty much every time I've been served a coffee or a sandwich or walked past someone cleaning the streets and noted they were a recent immigrant, I've wondered about the 13 to 20% leaving school each year and going straight onto the dole. The last government, with its bold claims of 'an end to boom or bust' boasted of our growing economy needing all these extra workers from abroad. They were coming in to fill gaps in the UK labour market. We kick twenty percent of our kids out of school illiterate, innumerate and socially dysfunctional, then we import people to the lowgrade jobs those kids can't do, so the immigrants can pay taxes to pay the benefits that just about keep that underclass quiet. The last government merely consolidated the neglect of the previous ones. All governments of all hues since the seventies have failed to address this problem; the only difference between them is the narrative they have fed their respective voters about it. In the SOuth London council block where I used to live, the black single mothers who were part of that underclass hated no one more than 'the Polish'. When Southwark council flyered our flats with letters about racist abuse and attacks in the area, those same women assumed it was white on black racism. They can't countenance any other sort. The one concrete ideal they came away from school with is that most of the problems in their lives can be blamed on racism. In fact the assualts were groups of black youths attacking East Europeans, or those they deemed to be so. Amongst the other most trenchant and bitter racism I have witnessed in the classroom is black African versus black Caribbean. Not kids, but grown women, on an adult access to nursing programme.
Of course racism is - or at least was- at the heart of this problem. The Broadwater farm riots of the eighties expressed the rage of black Londoners who were subject to stringent police action when they perpetrated crimes against whites or white-owned property, and limited concern or action about the gangs whose black-on-black crime was making their lives a misery. The subsequent, often merely cosmetic, changes to police policy and behaviour since have gone some way to address the former, but the latter has come to shape, all too often, what are now, in lazy journalistic shorthand, being referred to as 'black communities'.
I have seen such idiocy spouted about this over the last few days, much of it spouted by people I like and respect: the simplistic reactionary notion that that this is all the Tories fault, left-wingers spouting class hatred and bigotry while throwing up their hands in moral outrage at the Daily Mailish outbursts of the other side. It's got personal too; I've had people who don't know my history assuming just because I'm out as a Tory (a brave thing to be, given the bigotry and self-righteousness of the left) all my opinions must be wrong, or that because I live in wealthy Richmond I have no right to comment on what's going on in Hackney. I don't usually bother arguing online about these things, because arguing online is utterly futile, but I bit back at the person a couple of days ago who claimed the riot in Tottenham was 'excellent'. I bit back because that person claims to be a socialist, or communist even, depicts themselves as idealistic.
I can't be idealistic, obviously, because I'm an (often reluctant and despairing) Tory voter. It's not something I would normally quantify in these terms, but I probably am an idealist of sorts. I must have been, to have turned down a lucrative corporate job in order to teach in the most badly paid, underfunded, politically insignificant and catastrophically mismanaged sector of the education system: the FE sector. I've taught the 'unteachable', despite being punched, kicked, having chairs thrown at me. I've taught fledgling criminals to read, and helped the ones who weren't beyond help to fly in better directions. I've taught probably a couple of thousand kids, of all races and abilities by now and taught them exactly what I had the privilege of being taught, in my home counties grammar school. Some of the kids were rightly proud to go on to jobs in cafes and shops; some made it to Oxford.
Someone yesterday, assuming I was a) white, b) wealthy and c) middle class suggested I shouldn't be a teacher because I would obviously inculcate Tory values. I am not white, though my brothers were, and they were in that 13 to 20% forty years ago. Both were criminals, one dead from drugs, the other's sons are now in the BNP and EDL. The social group now suffering the greatest deprivation - and most likely to be victims of crime - are young white working class men. It amused me to scan through the FB friendlists of those I've been arguing with over the last few days. None of them stooped to the 'some of my best friends are black' cliche, because demonstrably, none of them could. I'm certainly not wealthy - far from it - though I would have been if I had stuck with that corporate job. And I prefer not think of myself as middle class, incapable as I am of middle-class guilt or enjoying middlebrow culture. I'd rather think of myself as having jumped, via education and inclination straight to the upperclass, who share with the lower classes an unashamed tendency for debt, debauchery and drink. If you don't understand that link, you'll never understand why many working class Londoners would rather vote for smirking Boris than simpering Ken. As far as I know I have not taught Tory values. I've taught my pupils what I was taught. I've taught that language is a wardrobe of many costumes, and that your life is a great deal richer - and so is your bank account - if you have the liberty of choice between jeans and hoodie, an interview suit and a cocktail dress. I've taught them to question everything they're told, especally by teachers and politicians and the press. Maybe those are Tory values; one of the many reasons I became a Tory is that when I was part of the underclass, the right-wingers in positions of power around me offered me a hand-up, whereas the left-wingers merely offered me a handout.
I'm digressing, personalising, because I am angry and despairing. Right and left are meaningless in terms of what has happened over the last few nights. If you genuinely think that this wouldn't have happened if the coalition had been Labour/Lib Dem you need to get off the internet and get out more. That 13 - 20% have no respect or concern for or interest in any government, and probably can't even distinguish between the range of worthies in suits who have ruled us during their lifetimes. I've even seen someone blame Thatcher for what happened last night, as if Cameron had achieved the kind of reversal of history that was beyond Pohl Pot. Politics does not concern the 13 to 20%; criminality is their norm, just as it was their parents' norm.
They are not part of the society the people reading this belong to. Rioting last night gave them a sense of power and control, over the police, and over their neighbours. It's a huge oversimplification to say these are simply poor areas. Patterns of housing - particularly the rental market - in London are way more complex than that and Hackney, Clapham, Brixton etc have been increasingly gentrified over the last thirty years. The communities are much more mixed than many commentators will acknowledge. What these riots - which aren't demonstrations, but parties got out of hand, with fires and prizes - is the degree of alienation from their own communities, their inability to acknowledge that they are part of any community. They also don't see themselves as angry or even oppressed, because they cannot look beyond the circumstances they are in and the peer pressures around them. And it is about bad parenting, to the extent that when the 13 to 20% become parents they have no aspirations or responsibilities for their children to inherit. That won't change if you treat merely them as victims, and enhance their sense of entitlement to trainers and TVs, nor if you treat them merely as criminals and process them through a judicial system that encourages recidivism.
I commented to two of my former pupils last night, who were posting on FB about feeling scared, that they were the reason I felt less scared than most of my friends. I have been watching their responses, particularly the kids who live in the areas affected. The teenagers and younger kids I know, of all ethnicities, have cheered me enormously over the last few days, with the maturity and compassion and concern in their responses and comments. They put a lot of my reactionary acquaintances to shame. They are what I think of when I think of 'London youth'. The future is, I suspect, pretty safe in their hands. And they are only just a percentage point or two, most of them, above the dispossesed 13 to 20%. What lifts them above that is the ability to read and talk and think and the self knowledge and aspiration that comes with those abilities.
If you think you are an idealist, get off twitter, put down your placard, stop gazing at your navel to examine your privilege. Put your money and time where your mouth is. Go and volunteer in a primary school and sit with those who are struggling to read, go and become a school governor, go and do a bit of training to become an adult advocate so that when one of these kids goes through the judicial system and their parents can't or won't participate in the process, you can be called on to speak to and for them. If you can't do any of those things, work an extra shift or do some baby-sitting to free up a colleague or friend who can. Unlike gesture politics, these acts will make a difference. I've seen the difference they can make; I've seen the tragically slight difference between the 20th and 21st percentile. It's the difference between me and my brothers, between prison and college. It's the difference between the young offender I taught in Cardiff and his cellmates. His daughter, proudly ruffled in a dozen layers of pink lace, was christened with his probationer officer's and my first names, because as he said, without us, he'd be 'dead, not a dad'. I was touched by that comment, but I also thought the tragedy was that most boys who started out like him were both not dead and serial dads. His daughter is very lucky, she'll be brought up with different values to those he grew up with. Aspiration, like alienation is very easy to spread. You just have to get off both your arse and your moral highground to spread it.
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Originally posted by theuglyvolvo, here.
My track coach was one of those terrifying people who was always telling you to “run through the pain.” This was the late 90’s, when “No Fear” T-shirts and Nike slogans had taken over and people became fond of sayings like “Pain is weakness leaving the body” and “Second Place is the First Loser,” and no one was more fond of these sayings than high school track coaches, who regularly dispensed any wisdom that would keep us running—anything to keep us moving forward.
And I had never been particularly athletic, although the pain inflicted on my body during track practice was nothing compared to the pain of trying out for another sports team—soccer or basketball or lacrosse—and not making it. Or the pain of making it and feeling alone because you were not really friends with any of the girls on those teams. Knowing that no one wanted to pass you the ball because you were awkward and clingy and all your clothes were from Marshalls. But anyone who wanted to be on the track team could be on the track team and the only requirement was that you not stop running.
Looking back, I realize that I was a terrible runner because I was afraid of the gun. I would be crouched in the starting position, one knee bent, the tips of my fingers bearing my weight on the clay-colored polyurethane surface of the track. If you are a good runner or a competitive person, the anticipation of the gunshot should fire you up—there should be an eagerness in your muscles, each of them anxious to fling you forward like a rubber band at the sound of the shot, your body flying around the track like a test tube in a centrifuge. This is never what I felt. Each time I crouched, waiting for the gun and each time the thoughts that ran through my head were, “It’s going to be loud. It’s going to be loud. It’s going to be really loud and where the hell is it? Why the hell haven’t they shot the gun already?” And my heart would begin pounding and immediately I would think something like, “Why am I doing this? Maybe I should join the Drama club,” and suddenly the gun would go off, reverberating through my ears, and I would think, “Shit!” and start running.
When you are actually running is maybe the least stressful part of being at a track meet. You are not quivering, waiting for a gunshot. You are not sitting alone on the bleachers reading a book, wishing you were sitting with the large group of girls on the side lawn who are all talking and sharing water bottles. You are not last-minute studying for a test you are almost positive you will fail, poring over your poorly-taken notes that you have thrown into your bookbag and dragged to the track meet. You are running, which is the only part of track I ever loved. You are running and the people in the bleachers, whoever they are, are all screaming. And most of them are probably not screaming for you, but it doesn’t matter, really. Screaming is screaming and the sound of people screaming energizes you. And your coach, wherever the hell he is, is yelling at each of his runners to run through the pain.
You are running through it as best you can. And you don’t know at the time that the pain is nothing compared to the types of pain you’ll encounter in your future—you have decades ahead of you in which you will be rejected by people you care for and will not be chosen for things that you have set your heart on. You will be lonely at times, which is incredibly painful. Nobody really tells you that—I’m not sure why. You will lose people you love and hurt so badly you will wish you had some sort of physical pain—a severed arm—so that people could see how much you are suffering. The pain of running is nothing compared to those things, but it is pain and you cannot stop running because of it.
My least favorite event in track and field is the 400 meters because it is too long to sprint but too short to be a long distance run. You pound the track for 300 meters, pulling yourself through the ether with everything you have in you until you have nothing left and have an additional 100 meters between you and the finish line. And for that 100 meters it is not so much up to you as it is up to your legs which will either collapse beneath you like coiled rope or will somehow ferry you down the final stretch. And so now, after telling you that that is my least favorite event, I will tell you that the event that I like LESS than the 400 meters is the 600 meters, which is one of the events during winter track.
You join winter track for one of two reasons: either you are a promising track and field star (this in no way applied to me) or you want to play a winter sport and are terrible at basketball. Or maybe, more than your wanting to play a winter sport, you are joining it because you want to do something and you have no idea what you are good at yet. You want to be a part of a group and have no idea what group will take you in. That is another type of pain that you have identified and are running through until you can figure out how to make it go away. You are not really good at anything. You know that you do not want to go home every day after school and sit on your bed reading The World According to Garp over and over again. You cannot join the chess team because you are mediocre at chess. You cannot join the math club because you are horrific at math. All high school clubs seem to have been designed for people who are either brilliant or athletic.
You crouch for the 600 meters, your fingers pushing against the firmer floor of the indoor, winter track. You wait for the gun—the stupid gun that you hate because almost nothing in life begins that abruptly—and you are running. You are pulling yourself forward with the muscles in your legs and you feel a little flicker of something in your hip that you have never felt before. You are running through the pain because that is what your coach has asked of you so at least you can do that. You will never be the fastest or jump the highest or astound anyone with amazing feats of endurance, but the running through the pain thing you can do. It will not prepare you for success, necessarily, but it will prepare you for life.
You feel the flutter again but you are 400 meters through and throwing yourself forward with any remaining energy and that is when suddenly you feel something snap. And I don’t mean that in a figurative way, in that you felt something inside you snap and suddenly you realized your innate self-worth. You feel something inside you snap—something physically snaps-- and suddenly you are filled with the worst pain you have felt in your life. It is not the pain of running, it is the pain of something going horribly, horribly wrong. You note that for some reason you can no longer move your right leg. But everyone is screaming and you are supposed to keep running, so you throw your left leg forward and drag your right leg behind you, repeating this motion several times. Everyone who was not already ahead of you has now lapped you and you are thinking, “Run through the pain, dammit!” So you are tossing out your left leg, dragging your limp right leg as if it were a large animal you had killed and were bringing back to camp. Also, tears are streaming down your face because you have never felt anything this painful. And it is at that point that two seniors run off the sidelines and grab you—and say, “Are you ok? What happened? What are you doing?” They put their necks underneath each of your arms and help to carry you off to the sidelines.
The doctor will tell you later that it is an avulsion fracture—a break that occurs when a fragment of bone tears away from the main mass of bone—in this case in your hip. The bone pulled apart at the tendon, due to a muscular contraction that was stronger that the forces holding the bone together.
There are certain types of pain you should run through and certain types you should not and it will almost always be up to you to decide which is which. You will have to interpret when to stop and when you should keep going. If you are tired, keep running. If part of your bone breaks off, you should usually stop. And if you are going through the most common sort of pain found in high schools—the pain of not really feeling like you belong anywhere—then you should definitely not stop. Keep going at all costs and do not stop moving until you have found a group where you do not seem so completely out of place. Do not sit and rest somewhere where you are fundamentally unhappy and where you have nothing to offer.
After the diagnosis I lay in bed, resting the fracture for a full week and then spent the next few weeks on crutches. The doctor told me there was no way the break would be healed in time for me to join the track team again in the spring. I nodded and thanked him for his advice. That spring, after ascertaining that it did not involve a starting gun, I joined the Drama Club. I remained in the club for the final two years of high school. It was very enjoyable.
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As part of my Fourth of July celebration this year, I decided to actually learn something about the history of the American revolution. It started off with getting together with a couple friends to watch episode two of the HBO John Adams series, which spans the time of the revolution. There's a little bit in it where Abigail Adams meets Henry Knox hauling cannons from Fort Ticonderoga, and we were like, Wait, what's that all about? So I looked up the story behind it, and it turns out to be an epic tale of unlikely bad-assery.
Henry Knox was a bookseller in Boston before the revolution, a big, pudgy, friendly guy. This was back in the day, which meant that he actually read a lot and would discuss books with his customers. In fact, his bookstore was more prosperous as a social spot than a commercial venture. As things started getting tense, he started reading up on military tactics and engineering. At the outbreak of hostilities, he signed up with the colonial army, and in short order impressed George Washington with his potential. In the fall of 1775, as the British here holed up in Boston, under seige, he hatched this mad plan.
Fort Ticonderoga, up in northern New York state, had been captured by the colonials, but then abandoned with all its artillery. Knox's thought was, "Hey, we could use those. Why don't I go get them?" I.e. Why don't don't I go round up some ox carts and drag a bunch of 2000-pound chunks of metal clear across the breadth of New England in the dead of winter?
Actually, the "dead of winter" part was the key to the plan. Snow is slippery, and frozen ground would keep them from getting bogged down in the mud which covers New England for much of the rest of the year. That much of it is actually logical. The crazy bit is that they have to do this with 1775-era technology, which means muscle power and hand-made clothing. No down parkas, gore-tex boots, chemical hand-warmers, etc. Think about the last time you and your friends tried to move a large piece of furniture. Now try to imagine that outdoors in the snow with something the size of three kegs stacked end-to-end which weighs as much as an SUV. It's frozen iron and probably slippery. Right, that's one of them. There are nearly 60 of them altogether, totalling about 120,000 pounds. You've got 300 miles to go. Oh, and did I mention the mountains?
It took Knox and his guys a couple months, but they pulled it off. They show up outside Boston with all this gear sometime late January, and it takes everyone a while to figure out exactly what to do with them. Dorchester Heights is a couple of hills just across the the water from Boston, about a mile and a half from the British lines. With the elevation, that's easy canon range. The trick is getting them there. Nobody has taken Dorchester heights since the beginning of the war because the British can't hold it, but they're enough of a threat to keep the colonials from building anything useful there.
This deadlock is finally broken when the entire colonial army pulls an all-nighter and stealthily builds an artillery emplacement on top of the hills. This involves a massive coordination of men, equipment, and oxen. There's a line of hay bales all along the road to hide their movement. Bits of the emplacement are pre-fabricated. They distract the British with an artillery barrage from the other end of town, and by morning have 20+ guns up there. The whole thing has the air of a truly epic college prank.
In the morning, the British have a jaw-dropping "WTF?!" moment before opening up on it with their own guns. They only manage to prove that the elevation puts Dorchester completely out of their range. They start gearing up for a counter-attack, but a truly hellacious sleet storm derails that, and by the following morning they accepted the writing on the wall. They start start packing. Within two weeks, they're gone.
Calling that Knox's victory is certainly a stretch, but he set it in motion and made it possible. I don't even remember his name from junior high American history. It's sad that stories like this get lost in the fire-hose of testable factioids. It encapsulates a lot of both the myth and fact of the American revolution. This is back when officers in the British military were all landed gentry. This guy ran a bookstore. The fact that he got to pitch this mad scheme to General George Washington, leader of the entire colonial army, and was given the resources for it says a lot about how truly egalitarian and meritocratic the American power structure was. The fact that he pulled it off, and it marked a turning point in the war, shows the power of those values. This is the kind of thing that our mythology, our day-to-day beliefs about who we are and what we're capable of, is built on. Stories like Knox's tell us that given the chance, any of us could be that guy.
Originally posted by colinmac, July 13, 2011 at 7:18am.
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My goals for my week in Haiti have shifted from "bring medical care to some of the neediest populations in the world" down to "avoid having tarantulas drop on my head when I am asleep." I think this started either when our driver pointed out the "tarantula field" as a landmark on the way into the compound, or when the program director described the tarantulas living in her bedroom. My bed is covered with mosquito netting, which should mean nothing can work its way in, but the mosquito bites all over me suggest some unseen flaw with that plan, so I'm going to stick with freaking out every time I see any remotely dark patch on the walls.
But at least some things are going well. We got our suitcase back. See, there's this guy named Big, who is the leader of the luggage scammers outside Port-au-Prince Airport. Port-au-Prince Airport is built about a ninety second walk away from its parking lot. Just outside the airport door congregate nice people who offer to carry your luggage to the parking lot for you, of whom Big is the biggest and loudest. If you accept, then once you reach the parking lot they charge you between $20 and $50 for this "service", which in Haiti is like a week's wages for a normal person. Now to be fair, it's hot and crowded and scary in Port-au-Prince and luggage can be heavy. But really, it's not worth $50 and it's not like if you didn't have Big to carry your luggage you'd just absent-mindedly leave it in the middle of the sidewalk or something.
The first time my father and I went to Haiti, we got fooled by Big and ended up paying him lots of money to carry our luggage. The second time my father went to Haiti, this time without me, he...got fooled again by Big, who had come up with the clever tactic of claiming to represent the charity we were working for and holding a sign with its name on it. This third time, he was prepared and he wasn't going to get fooled. Sure enough, we told all the luggage scammers we didn't need their help, transported our suitcases to the parking lot ourselves, and...
...absent-mindedly left our suitcase in the middle of the sidewalk. The suitcase with fifty pounds of vital medical supplies in it.
We figured this out about four in the afternoon, maybe three hours after we had reached the Partners in Development compound where we're staying. We panicked, called the airport, nothing. Then the next morning, my mother, who's back in California, got a call, which she said she assumed was a prank call because it was someone with an outrageous Carribean accent saying something about pink polka-dots. Finally she decoded it to mean that the Haitian airport was calling because they had found our suitcase and our home number was in it, and that we should go claim it if we wanted it back.
...and oh yeah, the pink polka dots. That was the most embarrassing part. My mom for some whimsical reason decided to get us pink polka-dotted suitcase, so we had to suffer the indignity of asking all around Port-au-Prince if anyone had seen a pink suitcase with polka-dots all over it. But at least we found it.
The medical supplies have proven useful, but not as useful as might have hoped. To be honest, Haitians make terrible patients.
It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don't understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just "they don't want to do it" or "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy - harrowing at the best of times - positively unbearable.
Gail told the story of the time she asked a city office for some paperwork regarding Doctors Without Borders. The local official took out a drawer full of paperwork and looked through every single paper individually to see if it was the one she wanted. Then he started looking for the next drawer. After five hours, the official finally said that the paper wasn't in his office.
Part of it is Haitian education. Even if you're one of the lucky ones who can afford to go to school, your first problem is that the schools can't afford paper: one of our hosts told stories of Haitian high schoolers who were at the level of Western 5th graders because they kept forgetting everything: they couldn't afford the paper to take notes on!
The other problem is more systemic: schools teach everything by uninspired lecture even when it's completely inappropriate: a worker at our camp took a "computer skills" course where no one ever touched a computer: it was just a teacher standing in front of the class saying "And then you would click the word FILE on top of the screen, and then you'd scroll down to where it said SAVE, and then you'd type in a name for the file..." and so obviously people come out of the class with no clue how to use an actual computer. There's the money issue - they couldn't afford a computer for every student - and a cultural issue where actually going to school is considered nothing more than an annoying and ritualistic intermediate step between having enough money to go to school and getting a cushy job that requires education.
There are some doctors and nurses, who are just as bad - though none at our compound, which is run by this great charity that seems to be really on top of things. We heard horror stories of people graduating from nursing school without even knowing how to take a blood pressure - a nurse who used to work at the clinic would just make her blood pressure readings up, and give completely nonsensical numbers like "2/19". That's another thing. Haitians have a culture of tending not to admit they're wrong, so when cornered this nurse absolutely insisted that the blood pressure had been 2/19 and made a big fuss out of it. There are supposed to be doctors who are not much better, although as I mentioned our doctors are great.
But I was going to talk about the patients. I don't really blame the patients. I think they're reacting as best they can to the perceived inadequacies around nurses and doctors. But they seem to have this insane mindset, exactly the opposite of that prevailing in parts of the States, where medicine is good. In particular, getting more medicine of any type is always a good thing and will make them healthier, and doctors are these strange heartless people who will prevent them from taking a stomach medication just because maybe they don't have a stomach problem at this exact moment. As a result, they lie like heck. I didn't realize exactly how much they were lying until I heard the story, now a legend at our clinic, of the man who came in complaining of vaginal discharge. He had heard some woman come in complaining of vaginal discharge and get lots of medication for it, so he figured he should try his luck with the same. And this wasn't an isolated incident, either. Complaints will go in "fads", so that if a guy comes in complaining of ear pain and gets lots of medicine, on his way out he'll mention it to the other patients in line and they'll all mention ear pain too - or so the translators and veteran staff have told me.
I haven't gotten any men with vaginal discharges yet, but many (most) of the patients I've seen have just complained of pains in every part of their body and seen if any of them stick. A typical consultation will be a guy who comes in complaining of fever, coughing, sneezing, belly pain, body pain, stomach pain, and headache. The temperature comes back normal (not that our thermometers are any good), abdominal, ear, and throat exams reveal nothing, and we send them away with vitamins and tylenol or maybe ibuprofen.
My cousin Samantha and my friend Charlotte, both of whom have come with us, have studied medical anthropology and think this is fascinating. I am maybe a little fascinated by it, but after the intellectual clarity of medical school, where every case has textbook symptoms that lead inevitably towards some clever but retrospectively obvious diagnosis, I'm mostly just annoyed.
Also, if I ask a question of the form "do you have X", people almost always answer yes. "Are you coughing?" "Yes." "Are you coughing up sputum?" "Yes." "Is the sputum green?" Yes." "Is the sputum coalescing into little sputum people who dance the polka on your handkerchief?" "Yes".
A depressing number of our patients have split into two categories: patients with such minor self-limiting illnesses that there's not much we can do for them, and patients with such massive inevitably fatal illnesses that there's not much we can do with them. There are a few who slip in between: some asthma patients, hypertensives, diabetics, people with UTIs and other bacterial infections, a man with serous fluid in his knee that my father drained for him - but they're depressingly few. And even when we can help them by, say, giving an asthmatic a month's worth of asthma medication, it's worrying to think about what happens when the month is up. Coming back to our clinic requires traveling on awful Haitian roads and waiting in line in the awful Haitian weather with two hundred other people and then hoping there's even a doctor who will see you, so I don't know how many people return for refills or what the effect of having to do so on quality of life must be.
To be honest I think a lot of what we're giving are placebos. And placebos have their uses, but here I think we have lost the comparative advantage to our competitors, the witch doctors, who can placebo the heck out of us. One of our translators' grandfathers is a voodoo priest, and he was describing some of the stuff he did. It sounded pretty impressive, although at least no chickens get harmed during any of our treatments.
But we have certainly helped a few diabetics, people with bacterial infections, and the like; and we're connecting a lot of kids with vitamins (not to mention stickers), so I do think we're doing a bit of good. And it is 9:30 PM of my fourth night here and I have yet to see any tarantulas, so I am pretty hopeful on that front too.
My father loves working in Haiti and has made best friends with all the translators and is always going out into Port-au-Prince to see the sights and taste the social life. I think it's great for my education, great for my resume, and great to be helping people, but I will breath such a sigh of relief when I get back on that plane to the States.
Oh, and I am sick. I think it's a reaction to either the pollution or the insect repellant. Horrible burning sore throat and runny nose. No vaginal discharge yet, thought.
Originally posted by squid314.
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Wednesday, June 8th, 2011
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On June 7, 1983, near the end of my life, I stumbled through the back door of a storefront in a Fort Worth strip mall. I tried to appear inconspicuous as I helped myself to a cup of coffee, but didn't notice the carafe was still filling. The hiss of hot java hitting the hotplate immediately identified me as a newbie. A burly grey-haired guy with cigar in his teeth stuck out a meaty paw and said, "Hi. I’m George." He poured me half a cup of coffee - I was shaking too much to hold a full cup - and guided me to a seat in the front row. He then walked behind a podium at the front of the room "My name's George,“ he announced, "and I'm an alcoholic."
After a few nights, I asked George to be my sponsor. He asked me about my religion, about how I defined God. I described the concept of God I'd grown up with. "Do you think he'll keep you sober?" he asked. Frankly, no, I didn't. My God was a god of judgement, a Heavenly Hit-Man.
"You better fire the sumbitch," advised George. "Fire the sumbitch and find you some higher power whose number one goal is keeping you away from a drink today. It don’t matter what it is, so long as it helps you.”
Even in Fort Worth, the gaudy gold buckle on the Texas Bible Belt, that's the way AA used to work. It wasn't a religion. Sure, God was mentioned, but it was “God as we understood him". There were people whose higher power was the meeting itself, G.O.D., Group Of Drunks. People who got a little too preachy during their time at the podium were counseled by older members to tone it down. "We don't come here to save our souls," said George. "We come here to save our asses."
I pretty much stopped going to AA after a few years of regular attendance. Some old-timers stick around forever, but I hit the point where I just didn't fit in anymore. I was one of the lucky ones - I haven't found it necessary to pick up a drink since that night twenty-eight years ago. But I apparently missed the rise of Evangelical AA.
AA has always been quasi-religious. It was based on the Oxford Groups, a revivalist movement begun by Lutheran pastor Frank Buchman. The Oxford Groups died out in the 1940s, but many of their principles, such as self-examination and making amends, found their way into AA.
Nevertheless, I was surprised to hear that there are schisms occurring. Most recently groups in Toronto that tried to tone down the Christian aspects of AA have been "de-listed" from the big meeting catalog maintained by AA Central Services. Since meetings don't otherwise advertise, the only way to find them is via the Central Service list. Delisted groups are effectively out of business.
What seems to have happened is that AA has been co-opted by evangelicals. It's probably not intentional; it's a product of the growth of evangelical Christianity in America and the Faith-Based initiatives of President Bush. AA is now regarded as the single most effective treatment for alcoholism by clergy, the criminal justice system and the private treatment industry. It is a victim of its own success
The trouble is (my own anecdotal evidence notwithstanding), so far as anyone can tell, it really isn't very effective. AA is faith-based, not evidence based, and there aren't very many good studies of its success rate. In part, this is because no one takes attendance and everyone is supposed to be anonymous. However, AA's own studies show that 81% drop out after a month; 95% don't make it a full year.
The more religiously dogmatic it becomes, the less effective the program will be. Even now, it seems to have polarized people into the camps of believers and heretics. The quaint and outmoded language of the Big Book sounds increasingly close to a liturgical text, not a handbook for recovery. AA likes to claim that atheists and agnostics also get sober in the program, but nowadays you'd be hard pressed to find one in the hall. People like my first sponsor George would probably be anathematized.
Maybe it's time to fire the sumbitches.
Originally posted by bill_sheehan, here.
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
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Originally posted by theuglyvolvo, here.
So the best thing about the Galapagos islands is swimming with baby sea lions. You were going to ask at some point, so there—that’s it, I’ve told you. The best part is having them swim up to your snorkeling mask, twitching their whiskers, having them bring you a piece of kelp the way a puppy would bring you a Frisbee or a stick it wants you to throw, turning around to find that they are playfully biting your flippers. It is hard, when writing a paragraph about baby sea lions, to not use the adjective “playful” seventeen times in a sentence. You chase them playfully and they playfully loop underneath you, slicing through the water like missiles or bullets, playfully circling your awkwardly wet-suited body, playful and curious and eager for the chance to explore (playfully) something that is not another baby sea lion. And they climb clumsily onto the land and look at you, their head tilted. And you see how incredibly small they are and you are touched that something so foreign and innocent is interested in knowing or befriending you. You are in a rocky cove a thousand miles off the mainland in water that is as blue as the Windex bottle that is back home under your kitchen sink. There are jagged grey rocks protruding like the masts of ships and sea turtles circling endlessly, like men lost and unwilling to ask for directions. Hundreds of fish swim back and forth, going about their business and black tip sharks glide past, not caring about you at all even though you see them and immediately think, “Shark!” and freeze and start shaking and begin thinking about all of the ways you could die out here, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Bizarrely designed sea urchins litter the floor and you are floating amongst all of it, confused, realizing how fully you do not belong here, when a three month-old sea lion nuzzles up to your mask, so desperate to play that you forget about the sharks and the cold and the enormity of the ocean and begin chasing it as if you are delirious first graders at recess.
Your honeymoon is when things start. You are with a person you love very dearly—someone you may have met at a party or online or through friends, but who you liked enough to take home to your family and say, “Thank you all very much for raising me to adulthood, but I am going to go off and live the rest of my life with this person I just met a few months ago in a bar on 2nd Avenue.” And your family goes, “Sure, that’s fine,” as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do, which by the way, it is. And you plan a wedding with cake and flowers and you hire a photographer who promises not to let your face get shiny and a DJ who swears that she will not play the electric slide or the chicken dance. And the wedding happens over the course of a few hours and everyone goes, “Wow, that was wonderful, we had a great time!” And then they go home and immediately go back to their normal lives and you look directly into the face of the person you have married and go, “Ok, so what now?”
The beginning of a relationship is plagued by questions like, “Why didn’t he call me?” and “Is she bipolar or is it normal for women to act like this?” and “Should I say I love you or wait for him to say it?” And the second part of the relationship is when you realize you will spend the rest of your life with this person, whether or not either of you has verbalized this. And once you have verbalized this; once you have said this out loud to them, you begin planning some sort of wedding. And once the wedding is over, that’s it. You look at the person you have decided to spend your life with and think, “Ok, so now we’re in this together.” Your getting married does not change anything about the nature of life or the concept of time, or the universe in general—the minute you are born you begin to die, but now, at least, you have company.
When most people think “romantic setting” they do not call to mind a volcanic plain covered in lizards, where a ten year-old in a life jacket repeatedly asks you to play cards. But that is their own problem, highlighting their inability to think outside the box. While the term “honeymoon” brings to mind images of twin beach chairs and poolside martini delivery service and private romantic bungalows with king-size beds, ours was spent in the matchbox-sized cabin of a boat that, when moving, recreated the feeling of trying to sleep while inside a clothes dryer. While we had intermittent periods in which we could lovingly gaze into each other’s eyes, we could also gaze into the eyes of an NYU Psychology professor and his boyfriend of ten years, an Asian family of five from Redondo Beach, two Ukranian physicists, two German biologists, and an Ecuadorian naturalist guide named, fittingly, Darwin.
The Galapagos islands are on a volcanic conveyor belt in the Pacific ocean, over a thousand miles off the coast of Ecuador. The islands are created by volcanic activity and spend millions of years traveling southeast. They inch slowly away from their point of creation, as if on an assembly line, becoming green and lush and developing diversified life forms—plants and bees and finches—bazillions of finches—will someone in design please put the finishing touches on the finches?—before reaching the end point and disappearing back into the ocean, being swallowed, I assume, by some sort of underwater trench. I felt bad for the elderly islands, so close to death, to being sucked under the water and destroyed in the bowels of the earth until I realized that the same thing will more or less happen to me some day, and I was forced to take my mind off my own demise by eating seventeen of the imitation Werther’s Original-like candies that sat untouched in the dining room.
The best thing about the Galapagos is the swimming with baby sea lions, but there are about a thousand million things all competing for second place. On our first day we take a short hike in which a yellow land iguana walks up to our group—walks right up to our shoes—and what you think first is, “It’s a fake iguana. Nothing in the wild would walk right up to us. It seems like an animatronic land iguana engineered by the people at Disney and it is going to say, “Hello!” and start talking to us about its lifespan and eating habits and hypothesize about how its species might have ended up in the Galapagos.” But it is a real iguana and it is, for whatever reason, curious. This is the only iguana on the trip that will do this. The rest of them will lie, indifferent, sunning themselves as you walk past, often with their legs splayed as if they had been dropped from a helicopter.
The iguanas are prehistorically beautiful and freakish. We see land iguanas and marine iguanas and one day after snorkeling we notice that a tortoise the size of a roll top desk is slowly wandering through our belongings on the beach, gazing at a pair of New Balance Sneakers that are sitting on the sand behind a pile of towels. Those are what you think of when you think of the Galapagos islands—the tortoises. They were hunted nearly to extinction by explorers in every century except the present one, which is not difficult to understand, given that their speed is only slightly slower than that of a nursing home resident walking waist deep through molasses. The turtle eyes the sneakers—perhaps imagining some updated version of the Tortoise and the Hare in which he has several corporate sponsors, his shell littered with Nike swooshes and Gatorade logos—and walks off into the brush. The NYU professor begins madly snapping pictures of its rear end as it wanders into the grass. That is something all of us do. We take rapid fire pictures of anything and everything. “There’s a flightless cormorant! A shark! There’s another shark! Penguins! Baby Marine iguanas!” The animals not being afraid, there is no real need for a zoom lens, as you can squat inches from anything living on the island and it will stare blankly at you for upward of thirty minutes while you snap two hundred pictures of it from various angles.
As much as you love the excursions you learn to love the boat that has temporarily become your home. This is not your real home—the post-honeymoon home to which you will return with 3 CDs full of photographs and restlessness and the vague desire to get a puppy. But for now, during your honeymoon, this is your home and your family. You are a newly married couple and if people ask, “Do you have kids?” you violently shake your head no, but if they ask, “Do you have two Ukranian Physicists, two German biologists, and an Asian family of five from Redondo Beach?” you smile with pride and say, “Yes. Yes we do.” You talk for hours with the Psychology professor from NYU and his boyfriend, the only people who live close enough that you might have kept in touch after returning from the trip, except that they are (go figure) moving to Abu Dhabi seven days after arriving back in New York. You play cards with the family from Redondo Beach as their youngest daughter (who is five) regales you with tales of things her mother has said she is allowed to do, using the word “actually” twice in every sentence and tugging at your pants when she feels you have stopped listening. She is tiny—just tall enough to reach the lightswitches, and has bangs cut straight across her forehead and is always laughing and smiling and running around the deck and talking in long, surprisingly complex sentences, occasionally using the words “endemic” and “ecosystem.” Her sisters are ten and fifteen. The eldest is in the midst of being a teenager, lovable but despondent and hopeful for attention, and the ten year-old is trapped in the inbetween. She is too old to be blissfully innocent—strangers do not talk to her without reserve in supermarkets anymore—but she is not old enough to know why her older sister is frustrated and upset. She is trapped in limbo between the joy of believing in Santa and the agony of hating your mother and her stupid goddamn haircut and why the hell can’t I stay out till ten thirty if everybody else is staying out till ten thirty? And there is always Darwin who stands at the head of the table, shyly answering questions, quietly explaining how they are trying to save the Galapagos ecosystem. He is always thoughtful and serious except that one time, when I am snorkeling far from the shore I come up to rest for a moment and see him alone on the beach, running back and forth, doing Scott Hamilton-style backflips.
The third day on one of the islands we are playing with baby sea lions. They walk after you manically on the beach as if you had dropped your wallet and they are desperately trying to return it to you. They are fat and happy and, there’s that word again, playful, except for one which is thin and tired and Darwin tells us that if the mother of any of the babies is killed, the baby will also die. He looks at the sea lion solemnly. Its head is cradled in the sand and it is curled, lying anxiously on its side, its ribs showing through its skin. This is one of the last days this particular sea lion will be alive, and the five year-old has particular trouble with this, as do I, as we do not normally live in a world in which it is ok for adorable baby animals to die. We tentatively leave the beach to resume the rest of our vacation but the three girls fall silent and even the Ukranians and the Germans peer over their shoulder at the baby sea lion, as if to say I’m sorry or pay their last respects. A few days later we come to an island where there is the carcass of a baby sea lion curled on the beach and it is sad, but not as sad as seeing a live one approach various mothers, needling them for attention the way the five year-old on our boat comes up to me, hoping that I will run around the deck with her. It is hard to watch the constant rejections from various sea lion mothers, one dismissal after another until the baby resigns itself to lying curled in the sand, waiting, possibly forever.
It is not that we don’t know about death. We come across the enormous skeleton of a Minke whale, the bones bleached white, and the five year old strikes a Vanna White pose in front of it, “Ta Da!!” gesturing to it as if it were something you could win. “This 2005 premium condition Minke whale skeleton, valued at 25,000 dollars!”
We know that things will die and we know that new things will be born. We visit an island heavily populated by blue-footed boobies and see, within the first five minutes of arriving, a mating dance, an expectant couple, the male switching and taking his turn on the nest, and a third pair with a hatchling in the process of crawling from the egg. It is like watching a living textbook—this is how baby birds are made. We look back and see the male booby still lifting his feet and extending his legs, hoping that the female will find this irresistibly attractive and want to “come up for a cup of coffee.” The psychology professor takes hundreds of pictures and promises to give me copies of them, as I have forgotten my camera on that particular excursion. His boyfriend takes photos of Jonathan and I standing by the cliff, the horizon stretched out behind us and says, “These pictures are really sweet.” And I ask, “Sweet like, endearing? Or sweet like, “that’s a sweet car,” and he laughs and says, “Sweet like endearing.” I kiss Jonathan on the top of his arm, in the place where people sometimes have vaccination scars.
We walk through the rest of the island talking with the psychology professor and his boyfriend, with whom we have a great deal in common. That part was unexpected. You arrive at the boat and look at the people you will be spending your time with and wonder what on earth you will talk about with a Ukranian couple in their early fifties who were physicists working during the cold war since you are a waitress at a French restaurant near the World Trade Center. But you remember, suddenly, that people do not happen upon the Galapagos the way you happen upon the world’s biggest ball of yarn while driving cross country—to come here is a deliberate move and anyone who is here wanted to come here very much. We hike together and return to the boat, all of us poring over pictures of fish we think we have identified. We crowd around Darwin and ask about the mating habits of different species and why turtle eggs will be female if the temperature is above or below a certain point and we look at each other and go, “Aha, that’s why!” and we are all genuinely excited. I realize at one point that I am able to identify all four types of Galapagos mangroves and am dismayed that this knowledge will in no way help me become a better waitress, comedian or SAT tutor. But we all know them. Black, white, red and button mangrove. The psychology professor points over the side of the boat and yells, “Puffer fish!” and all of us scramble to see them. His boyfriend stands at the front of the boat looking for whales and I stand with him and he and I several times scream out, “Whale! No…wait. Not a whale. Wave. It was a wave. Sorry. I’m an idiot.” And we finally do see a whale—its endlessly arched back topped with a diminutive dorsal fin—“Whale! Really a whale this time!”—and the German couple pull out a zoom lens for their camera the size of a roll of cookie dough. Everyone is giddy. We are like an excited first grade class.
So the best part is swimming with baby sea lions and the scariest part, aside from maybe the sharks, is leaving and realizing that you have your whole life ahead of you and that you are not entirely sure what you are doing with it yet. We spend the last night on the deck looking at a pelican perched on the boat, while the Ukranian and German couples try to locate the southern cross amongst the stars. We exchange e-mail addresses and the girls beg me to recite the Animaniacs song that lists all the presidents of the United States, but I refuse because I have already done it once that day—I explain to them that the other adults will kill me because having to hear that song more than once is annoying. The fifteen year-old says that she will try to facebook us and the Germans nod politely and smile at everyone and the Ukranians give a long, enthusiastic speech about how wonderful of a time they have had and how happy they are and how this has been maybe the most amazing trip of their lives. Darwin thanks us and says sheepishly that he will miss us, that we have been one of his favorite groups. And the next day at the airport we huge everyone goodbye—the Ukranians grabbing us up in enormous bear hugs and grinning and all of the girls saying goodbye and then last of all we are forced to leave the Psychology professor and his boyfriend who were our favorites, and as we hug them the phrase, “I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow,” runs through my head, and the psychology professor hangs his head and says, “I hate saying goodbyes. I’ve always been bad at goodbyes.”
And I silently say goodbye to the islands and to Darwin and to all the animals that I stepped over or walked past. I walk onto the plane with Jonathan, who I do not have to say goodbye to. He is the person who I met online who I took home to my family and said, “Thanks so much for raising me and everything, but I met this person on the internet and I’m thinking about living with him for the rest of my life.” I hold onto his hand. I will have to say goodbye to Jonathan someday, eventually, but hopefully not for a long time—four or five decades at least, if I am lucky. Eventually he and I will go the way of the motherless baby sea lions or the Minke whale, but there is a lot that happens between now and then, so there is no point dwelling on it.
We sit side by side on the plane, Jonathan and I, smiling at each other. The only souvenirs, aside from the photos we have taken, are two green T-shirts that say, “Parque Nacional Galapagos.” Jonathan asks the woman if they are pre-shrunk and she assures us that yes, they are. We head home, delirious, from our honeymoon. And nineteen thousand people ask us what our favorite part of the trip was. And both of us immediately reply, “Swimming with baby sea lions.” Which is true. The swimming with baby sea lions was the best part because first off, baby sea lions are adorable and have huge awkward flippers and enormous eyes. But also because they are mammals and, aside from the Ukranian Physicists and adorable five year-olds from Redondo Beach, they are the things in the Galapagos to whom I am most closely related. You cannot identify with a shark or an albatross, but it is easy to project your own feelings onto the sea lions—that they are happy, sad, thoughtful, lonely or curious.
We arrive home. Jonathan wears his Galapagos shirt the next week and a man on the subway enthusiastically strikes up a conversation with him. It is exciting, talking to other people who have been there. Who will say, “Yes! I know! Red, White, Black and Button mangroves!” And Jonathan washes his shirt and go figure, it shrinks, and he is notably upset. And I decide to surprise him by finding the shirt online and ordering him a new one, except that of course that shirt does not exist anywhere on the internet. There are shirts that have enormous sting rays and neon scribbles on them that say, “Galapagos!” and ones that say, “I heart boobies,” that are accented by a pair of blue feet, but we do not want those. I find a site for a non-profit—the Galapagos Conservatory—that sells some shirts that look similar to his and because I do not know what else to do, I write them a letter.
Hello,
I have what feels like an incredibly vapid, stupid question regarding the items you sell online through your site, so forgive me in advance for asking it. Do you ever sell the Galapagos Parque Nacional T-shirts with the Tortoise and the Hammerhead shark logo on them? We just got back from the Galapagos and bought only one souvenir to remember the trip...a size Medium sea green parque nacional t-shirt. And though the woman said the shirt was pre-shrunk, no sooner did we wash it than it shrunk so drastically that my husband can't wear it without looking like a thirteen year-old transvestite prostitute.
And it's just a stupid shirt, but we were sort of heartbroken. I can’t totally explain why. I figured I would be able to find it easily online and surprise him with a new one but I can't find it anywhere. This site seemed to have things similar to it so I figured I'd ask if it's something you once sold or may sell in the future. Please let me know-- if I can somehow purchase one through the site I'd happily donate some additional money to the cause.
Thank you and sorry for the stupid question. I just don't know who else to ask.
Sincerely,
Raquel D'Apice
And I sent the letter into the void, only to receive a reply two days later from someone saying, “I was touched by your letter, particularly by your description of your husband in his shrunken T-shirt. I will be visiting the Galapagos later this month for a meeting. Send me a picture of the shirt and I will try to pick you up a new one when I am down there.”
And I was somewhat floored but sent a photo attached to my next e-mail, and three weeks later we received a package from someone who I later learned is the president of the Galapagos Conservatory, with the T-shirt in a larger size and a note saying, “The next time I’m in Jersey City you can buy me a beer.”
The best thing about the Galapagos—you can say it by heart with me at this point, can’t you? The baby sea lions. I know. I repeat myself. But the second best thing is also the feeling of community. The camaraderie between other people who have been there and who care about it and who love it, even though their normal life has almost nothing to do with sea turtles or mangroves or flightless cormorants. Even though they sit in offices or on subways or in traffic, they have the memory of floating in the middle of the ocean, miles from anything, realizing that whatever it was they were worrying about is probably not that important in the grand scheme of things.
Jonathan and I wake up in our own bed. One wall of our bedroom is painted brown and our comforter is blue, like the ocean. Not windex blue, like the shallow snorkeling water, but blue the color the ocean is painted on a map or a globe. This is the bedroom we will wake up in for at least the next couple of years, which is fine. Jonathan will get up and go to work and I will get up and go to work and we will both do some things each day, occasionally in each other’s company, and will go back to the bedroom and go to sleep. Most of the time nothing exciting will happen, which is why it is important to marry someone you really like. Because most of your life will be boring, so at least it will be boring with someone you love and care about who will laugh with you about how boring it is. I think of the line from the movie, Hook, that goes, "So...your adventures are over," and wonder if that has become true for us. Our adventures are over. For the first few weeks after the honeymoon we will squeal the phrase, “Baby sea lions!” at each other, but after a while we realize that that part of our life is officially finished and that it is time to move on.
I have no idea what I am doing. My adventures are not over but whatever new ones I face will be completely unfamiliar to me and I will be wholly unprepared for them, even with thirty years worth of life and experiences behind me. I turn to Jonathan who is sitting at his desk sending an e-mail and ask, “So, what now?”
He does not know either. But he turns to me, with confidence in his uncertainty, and sucks in his breath.
"Well," he says, “let’s think about getting a puppy.”
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Sunday, September 12th, 2010
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You can come if you like, but it is not the best time:
the weather's uncertain
the trees are still teetering on rust's edge
we have cake, but it is not the right cake
and we haven't been cleaning.
But come if you like.
You can come if you like, but it is not the best time:
work is beginning all round
there are things I have to get done
I can't spare more than fourteen hours a day
and the best of the flowers are over.
Do come if you like.
You can come if you like, but it is not the best time:
I should train the birds to form hieroglyphs
proclaiming your name to the sky
and persuade the city to organise a special festival
and shed three stone and ten years.
Still, come if you like.
You can come if you like, but it is not the best time:
the best time is the enemy of the good time
come now, come in possible time,
come and share some time while we're breathing,
let weather fall on us.
Come whenever you like.
Originally posted by papersky, here.
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Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
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Originally posted by rm, here.
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
What might save us, me, and you
Is if the Russians love their children too.
It's a testament both to my age and what a weird news week this has been (Russian spies???!) that I'm starting this entry with a quote from a Sting song I used to sing a lot when I was a teen, mainly because it's a nice fit for my voice, and because I grew up at the tail end of the secret nuclear club.
The funny thing about this song, even though it's all about peace, is that it's actually a bit offensive if you think about it. Of course the Russians love their children too. That's the funny thing about people, they're pretty much the same wherever you go, which is why I get a little bit cranky when people start talking about "The American Dream" like no one ever looked up at the stars or decided whoever dies with the most toys wins before Europeans got to this chunk of this continent.
I'm a hyphenated-American. The short versions of that include Italian- or Sicilian-American depending on whom I'm speaking to (I'll unpack that mess for you another time), Jewish-American, Eastern-European American and Queer-American. The long list could include a bunch more things because my family history is pretty complicated, but I usually stick to those because they're the dominant things that impact how I live every day.
Yeah. Really. Every day. They're why I call pasta sauce "gravy" or sometimes keep being tempted to call Patty shaina punim. They're also why I sometimes get embarrassed when my father asks me to "shut the light" or "if I brushed my tooth" eventhough his first and only language is English (I wish he was better at code-switching) or why I always, always think twice before I pick up money, even if it's my own I dropped, lying in the street.
All the time, I get asked where I'm from. Maybe that's a New York thing, like asking people how much their rent is. But on a pretty regular basis I get mistaken for a long list of things including Middle Eastern, French and Spanish. People tell me they know I'm a Jew because of my nose; sometimes it's affectionate, sometimes not. My nose, btw, isn't from that side of the family.
Once while traveling a San Francisco bookshop a clerk asked me if I was Sicilian. "Well, my family is," I told her.
"I knew!" she said. "I never see anyone here that looks like me. It's good you're visiting."
In Italy when people ask, I say my family comes from there (again with the Sicilian or Italian depending on locale, long story), but I'm from the States. In other countries I say New York or the States. Easy enough.
But here, in NYC, I'm Sicilian and Eastern European. I explain that Latvia and Lithuania are two different countries. I wind up answering quiet questions about what happened to my mother's family in the War. And the reason I'm those things here isn't because I'm not proud to be from the here or want to be cool and exotic, but because those markers are how I'm from here. They inform the way and nature of my Americanism.
My national experience, despite being second-generation and then some, is absolutely colored by the fact that my father's family came here through Ellis Island, that my grandmother had nothing more than a third grade education, that my father's father was a shoemaker, and my mother's grandfather a tailor. These facts are in, not just my family, but in my memory and my flesh (and not just because I also happen to have a genetic illness that correlates with my ancestry); they inform my gender, my faith and the way in which I try to build community around me. If you'd ever seen me sit alone and tend to clothes or construct mournful tunes or random syllables as I walk from the subway to my house, you would know, and you would ask, where are you from?
My life has also been shaped by the hyphenations of those around me -- from food to meeting parents to stories about how folks came to be here; their families got here on planes! which is hard for me to imagine. And then there are all the Indian folks in my life who spent the back-end of 2001 explaining that they weren't terrorists and the Muslim folks in my life explaining that not all Muslims share the same skin color or clothing choices.
So when people tell me I should drop my hyphenations because they're just about hating America or refusing to assimilate, I am confused. It is like asking me to observe, but never write, or telling me that it's somehow inappropriate for me to use each of the senses I've been given. My sense of America and its promise is less without my hyphenations. My hyphenations are an act of love.
America1 isn't, and can't, be one thing. Even if I dropped all my hyphenations, odds are my experience of American culture would be really different from a lot of people's. I've never driven a car. Or been to a football game. My high school didn't have a homecoming dance. I never learned to ride a bike. I grew up eating pizza with a knife and fork. Dinner was more often at 8 than 6. I never went to religious services for anything other than transition rituals. I never had a yard.
But here's the thing, I am sick of being told -- whether it's by political factions in this country or The Brady Bunch -- that I'm doing it wrong. I'm sick of being told that America values individuality, only to be told in the next breath I'm not really from here because I'm from New York or of the wrong faith or fuck in ways you deem too dirty to be called love.
I am also sick of being told that we're all equal here so I better act like I'm on the damn team already when my inheritance, marriage and employment rights (to name just a few) are different than yours; when people are still stopped for driving while black or flying while brown; when women are paid $.78 on the dollar to a man, when the surest way to make the value of a profession go down is to make it appealing to women or racial and ethnic minorities, and when Arizona is outlawing education about anything other than dead white guys and assuming that all Latinos are illegal.
And I'm sick of being told that this country, my country, has a monopoly on ambition, like no one else ever wanted to change the world or like ambition is the best of all virtues; let me tell you, just from living with myself and my desires that both those things are lies.
When I was a kid I gave a speech on "What's Right About America" in the Miss New York National Teenager Pageant 1987, a pageant I entered because I was trying to be American in a way that our wacked out culture had me convinced I couldn't be living in New York.2 I wasn't normal. I wasn't, I feared, American. I thought, I'll show people! Even if I did say during the interview portion of the competition that the famous person I most wanted to meet was Soviet dissident and scientist Andrei Sakarov, because I was too embarrassed to admit that really, I wanted to say David Bowie.3
I didn't win the speech category or the pageant, but my speech was about how America allows us to talk about her, refine her, criticize her and fix her. Our Constitution is a living, shifting document. And you can't have that sort of life and evolution without discussion and without multiple viewpoints.
Our virtue as a nation is a simple one. We're people, just like people anywhere. And we the people everywhere love our children. We want comfortable homes and good food. We want to get through the night. We want people to like us. We want to be happy. We want to change the world. We want to learn things. We want to do stuff just because someone told us we couldn't. We want our parents to be proud of us. We want to be free.
And, in addition to all of that, whether by choice or fate or by theft and viciousness (by which I mean the slave trade that brought people here, for those not quite following along), we're bound up with a whole hell of a lot of other people in this cruel, brilliant, silly and sublime nation of colonizers and the colonized, where we often must desperately hope, at least if you have certain hyphenations that necessitate such hope and fear, that our neighbors, no matter what their hyphenations are, are on the same page as us.
Our history may be unique but every country's is, and people are people. Just like the Russians, who yes, Sting, do love their children too. Or the Moroccans. Or the Ghanaians, or the Dutch, or the Argentinians, or the Japanese or the Czech, or the Sudanese, or the Kenyans or any of the dozens of other countries I could name here (if I could remember them all -- Patty can, she plays a neato geography game to practice, but I'm not as good).
So don't tell me only Americans are exceptional. And don't tell me the only way to be American is to forget.4
1 Calling the US "America" as shorthand is basically shit. Lots of other countries in America, and I'm doing it here in part out of a bad habit I'm still working on and in part because of the LJ post this was written in response too. Additionally, sometimes in addressing the Myth of America, one has to talk to it on its terms, no matter how problematic.
2 The parts of the country that revile me for being queer, for being Jewish, for being not white enough, for having a certain education, and for living in New York never treated me like an American until 9/11. Now wars, one of which has had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11 have been fought in my name. I am sick of my city being used and abused for the sake of politics and quasi-national racial and religious anxieties I don't share.
3 Who I did actually meet briefly years later.
4 Seriously, did you miss that part about being of Eastern European Jewish descent?
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Comments: Add Your Own.
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QWP, from a locked post by mtaiilaurenhere. Per request of the author, comments have been enabled here.
I've been mopping the floors of my home for fourteen years.
I generally start at the front of the house, at the threshold of the front door and work my way back to the Florida Room. The breadth of my mopping exploits can stretch from my bedroom bathroom clear across to the breakfast nook - the entire width of the house.
I've mopped through funerals, a birth and after parties. I've mopped up juice, milk, blood, throw up, pee and ice cubes, melted from the heat expressed by the fans at the bottom of the fridge. I've mopped early in the morning before anyone was awake and late into the night, while most everyone was asleep.
I've mopped with a bucket full of water and either bleach, Mr.Clean, Fabuloso, laundry detergent powder (even liquid) or just when I had enough cleaner to wash out the mop and then to fill my bucket with plain water.
I've mopped with professional janitor mops, using 8, 10 or 12 inch cotton hairs, flimsy plastic covered, metal handled mops and unconventional shammy haired mops. I've mopped when the floor was pre-swept or when it wasn't. I've mopped during the winter when it would take the floor longer to dry and during the summer with the front and back doors propped open. I've mopped using old washed out paint buckets, short pinny-anny buckets and wringer buckets where you place the mop hairs in a chute and squeeze out the water using a lever on the side.
I've mopped when my arms were at their strongest, allowing me to reach, with my then obedient fingers, into the murky, semi-soapy Kool-Aid/sour milk/bathroom smelling water. I'd cradle the thinning hairs between my fingers and wring out the water with the knowing of a bereaved and bereft mother, missing her child, mourning her life. I'd mop out sections of the different floors in the different rooms, using the strength of my upper body, until I no longer could; when arthritis in my chest began to get so bad that I had to find another way. Till my upper body could no longer support the back and forth motion and the weight and drag of the mop. Till my muscles and coordination became too weak to cooperate.
I'd mop with my legs then, when my legs were capable enough to allow me to pivot from my chair to my bed with assistance; I'd hold the mop handle in my left hand, drive my chair with my right hand and use the muscles in those same legs to guide the bottom of the mop across the tile, wiping away the filth, making the floor glisten. I'd mop with my slippers on, with my work shoes on or barefoot. I'd mop in my "good clothes", without my foot pedals, with my purse still on or straight home from the doctor, grocery shopping or back from the Food Stamp appointment.
I mop now, with the aid of my Nephew, washing and wringing out the mop, changing out the bucket water, setting things up. He mainly hates it, so I don't do it as often as I would like. I leave my foot pedals on now, I usually have my shoes on too.
Mopping our floors has been my meditation. When there wasn't enough money to pay our bills or buy food, I'd have someone run the water hot and I'd seek out the steady and deliberate repetition that mopping brings. It was a way to think through my depression, our hunger, the lingering and collective worry. The clean smell of bleach and Fabuloso was generally all I would need to calm me down, while the back and forth sway of cleaning the floor reset my emotions, my thinking, my heartbeat. When I would be done, I would emerge a more centered, calmer version of myself, full of ideas, full of new hope, full of determination.
My siblings would think me crazy for mopping so much and so often. They either didn't realize the amount of mess they made or maybe I just needed that time to be by myself, in myself. In all the things that weren't, mopping made sense. It made more sense than court dates and guardianship papers or dejection and fear. There is a science to it, unlike any other uncertainty in life, that typically ensures that what you put in, you get exponentially more out. Water, bucket, bleach, some type of soap (but not too much), mop and time would give me clean floors and new understandings, peace of mind and worth, while the happenings out side of our doors, would by and large rob me of those things.
I've mopped the tiles when they were vibrant faux marble looking, with pink and gray veins running though their patterns. I mop them now when the shiny glaze has been worn away by foot traffic, wheel traffic, life traffic. I've mopped through tile changes, bursting a/c pipe works, painting mistakes and regrets. I've mopped through arguments, despair and a rodent infestation. I've mopped when it didn't make sense to, when things would have been made better by lighting a match and not looking back.
I've mopped with tears streaming down my face and pain creaking through my body. I've mopped with a heart full of ache and a mind full of confusion. I've mopped post-overdose, post-house getting fixed up, post-family being spread out. I've mopped when everyone who needed to, realized the importance of living, fighting, sticking and staying.
I've thrown out buckets of water black as tar, stink as sin and full of death and longing. Rinsed out buckets lined with a thin slick film of sorrow. I've washed away scum, mistakes and incidental indiscretions. My fingers have been pricked by shards of glass, slivers of disappointment as thorny as steel wool and malevolent splinters entangled in deceivingly thin cotton strands.
I've mopped when the mop hairs have begun to give way, rotten and disintegrating into the very water that was to make them clean.
I've mopped till family has come back, grown up, grown older, gotten better.
I will mop until there is nothing more that needs to be cleaned.
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Comments: Read 2 or Add Your Own.
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Thursday, April 1st, 2010
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Originally posted by genesisdesire, here.
It always bothers me why we don't bother keeping schedules with ourselves. For all other areas of our lives, we are set down into contracts that we must obey, or there will be consequences. From the moment a body hits five years, there's the set-down expectation that school shall be attended on the weekdays for a set handful of hours, typically from early morning to mid-afternoon. Truancy results with in-house suspensions, constant detention, reduced grades, and furious parents. Perhaps the schedules shift, spots of freedom are allotted in a car, in a later curfew, in a part-time job that allows you to buy your own frivolous clothes and sugar-laden entertainments, but you're still committed to some building, some toll of a bell and winding of a clock that winds your body down each day and tolls knowledge into your head in the name of betterment and awareness.
This goes on for most until that same body hits mid-twenties, receives an over-priced piece of paper, and can move on into some sort of "real world", as though classes and part-time jobs were only playing pretend at having some sort of life, playing house through teenage years and early twenties until some statute of accomplishment declares them an adult, with all the part, parcel and headaches that induces. Don't bother saying that because you lived on your own, paid near all your own bills, that you get to be an adult now. Until you've crossed some pre-paid overlaid poorly lit stage, it doesn't mean a whit to the world.
No one is free, though. This does not free you, this paper. This paper only obligates you to bigger buildings, expensive clocks, silent bells, lunch breaks where you're on your own since there is no meal plan promising cereal all day, no cafeteria with a daily special where your only good reason for liking Tuesday's is because there's going to be Chik-Fil-A brought in special. No, a clock, a schedule will still dominate your life, demand you keep to it, or consequences are a forfeited mortgage, a repossessed car, shut-off water, broken marriage.
Why, then, if we value all of this, do we refuse to make schedules that we enjoy? We call our lives 'free time' and waste it watching television, watching others be stars and athletes and media whores that sometimes we wish we were, if only for the attention, but bemoan our waistlines and poor skin and bad hair.
To work at 9. Off by 5.
Why not schedule yourself for well-being? Why not schedule yourself for self-love? Why don't people pencil in "Orgasm 'round 8:15" to their daytimer? People complain of disconnection to their body, of aching backs and stiff shoulders and throbbing heads. Why not aching breasts and stiff dicks and throbbing nerve endings? Why not aching feet and stiff arches and throbbing muscles because you bothered to make your body feel alive?
Our body is a temple, but how many of us work on any of it anymore? The exterior where we join a gym not for a high school reunion or thinking a size six will make us happy, but because it feels good to have strong muscles, firm skin, to know your body is capable? The interior, where we let dust in the form of fat settle around our holiest places, the tummies we should slide a hand down in the pursuit of love, the hips a lover should bruise with fingertips, the back a chest should sweat and cuddle and shake with laughter against? We poison ourselves for the sake of convenience, neglect ourselves for the sake of entertainment. We do not keep ourselves sacred, yet we act as though the ravages of the world are to blame, when no defenses are built, no pomegranates consumed in time of war and cold to stave off chills, no fish sank through with teeth in times of summer and fresh water, no care to feel connected to this earth, to anyone else.
We shall die alone in crumbled houses when we do not look after them. Go, and schedule time for love, especially if it is with yourself. Make time for laughter with people on your couch, not your screen. Find the extra five minutes it takes to feed your body right, because the smallest seed still has vitamins. Find the seconds at night to pray, meditate, build up the fire within your soul. Go and find joy, and take it home, and your house may soon clean itself, if you wait very patiently.
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Monday, February 22nd, 2010
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Originally posted by theuglyvolvo.
So first off, I’m aware that you’re going to think I’m weird and maybe disgusting, but I’m fine with that—I was fine with that years ago. But I’m sitting here on the beat-up love seat that used to be in my parents’ living room, holding the waistband of my late grandmother’s underpants and wrapping it around my hand like rosary beads. I wrap the band tightly, so that I can feel the squeeze of the elastic, and then release it so that the soft, gray writing becomes legible and I find myself mumbling the words, “Hanes Her Way,” the way other people whisper Hail Marys.
And I can hear my mother’s voice saying, “Excuse me? Her underpants?” but it’s not her underpants, it’s only the waistband of her underpants, because when my grandmother was through with a pair of underpants she would cut off the waistband and use it as a giant rubber band for holding her watercolor paintings together when she was transporting them to art shows. She had dozens of underpants’ waistbands hanging from the doorknob in her art studio and I took one the last time I was at her house—slipping it into my pocket, hoping that no one would ask why I was taking it, and as I write this now I am once again wrapping it around my fingers. It’s comforting to feel the pressure of the elastic around my skin. It reminds me of the automated blood pressure cuff they have by the pharmacy in Target—when I lived in California I would take my blood pressure all the time just to feel the tightness of the cuff squeezing my arm, like a family member grabbing me by the bicep, reminding me how much I was loved, asking why I had moved so far away. I missed my family when I lived in California. I would sometimes take my blood pressure 4 or 5 times in one sitting and I never once bothered to check what my actual blood pressure was.
* * *
Last time I was at my grandparent’s house, which is now only my grandfather’s house, he was giving their things away.
“Take whatever you want,” he said.
Most of us took my grandmother’s watercolor paintings. My sister took two paintings of gnarled trees which she eventually had re-framed at A.C. Moore and which she put in her entryway outside the door to the kitchen. She took an antique lamp and something that looked like a small milk can that she would eventually put fake peonies in. My mother took a painting of a gasoline pump and a tiny figurine of Abraham Lincoln that she found in the kitchen. I took an original pencil sketch of my great and great-great grandfather, in which they are both wearing straw boater hats. I took the family photo from my great-grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary in which my father, aged 12, is making the sort of ridiculous, obnoxious face that all 12 year-old boys make in important family photos. And then when no one was looking, I took one of the underpants waistbands that hung from her doorknob. The collection was (not surprisingly) untouched.
My father had been with his mother when she died, but the rest of us drove up to Utica for the services. We arrived at my uncle’s house and the first thing I thought as we pulled into his driveway was that it was strange being there under unhappy circumstances. My uncle’s house was where my cousin Elycia carried me around on her back and first warned me about boys and breasts and puberty (“They’re all just completely terrible,” she said) and where someone was always nailing someone else in the head (good-naturedly) with a tennis ball. I stepped out of the car and walked toward the side of the house, the heels of my dress shoes sinking into the wet grass. I looked out at my uncle’s backyard— a flat expanse of green lawn with what used to be a small tree that got in the way of our soccer and volleyball and badminton games but was now a medium sized tree that got in the way of nothing.
He had gotten rid of the above ground pool. I didn’t know you could get rid of above ground pools. I thought they were there for life—installed by burly men with tan necks; at once becoming part of the topography, the way lakes are formed by glaciers or mountains are pushed up from under the earth. But my uncle had gotten rid of the pool, which makes sense, given that all of his children are in their late twenties or early thirties, and the abdomen-high water in an above ground pool is only moderately entertaining, even to a nine year-old.
We entered the house through the garage—that was the same as it had always been. We always entered through the garage, passing through the laundry room, which led directly into the kitchen, which led directly into the room that used to have a reclining sofa (I had begged my mother to buy one but she said no) and an Atari, but now held a large dining table and a china cabinet. My cousins had arrived at the house first, also carrying packages. Everyone was wearing dark colors and hugging everyone else and talking softly.
We had spent the morning at the funeral home and everyone was wearing black or gray and those of us with pants were covered in a sheen of white lint from the balled up tissues we had shoved in our pockets. Tony and Joe and Mark had been pallbearers and they sat around the table in dark suits, which is not at all how I remember them. I do not remember any of my cousins becoming adults, but it happened at some point when I was not paying attention. We were sitting in the same room where, twenty years earlier, when the room had had a reclining sofa and an Atari, my father had filmed a home video of our family.
In the video Joey is maybe 6 or 7, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and continually commenting that he would like to grow up to be a truck driver who smashes cars into trees. Mark, who was a year older, was wearing a generic baseball shirt with the number 88 on the front, with a widow’s peak reminiscent of Eddie Munster and hair spiked violently enough to prevent birds from landing on it. Someone had given him a trick ice cream cone whose top would shoot off when you pushed a button, which he proceeded to shoot at the camera for the majority of the video. Mark is older now and as my mother’s friend commented, “very handsome!” and at the wake for my grandmother the funeral director would ask if he was Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark would say no, he wasn’t, and so the funeral director would ask if he had at least seen the movie “Titanic.” And Mark would say yes, he had, and would proceed to carry my grandmother’s casket toward the hearse.
We are all sitting quietly around the table, remembering my grandmother. Elycia is holding one of her two children and I remember back to when Elycia was ten, because in the video someone asks how old she is and she tells them using her fingers. In the video she has a ponytail and a shirt with two women on it and one of the women is looking at a man walking by and has a thought bubble that says, “What a hunk!” I remember that shirt because I wore it next, as a hand-me-down, and hated it. In the video Elycia is perpetually squinting into the camera, nose scrunched, as if staring into a solar eclipse. In the video we are all running tireless laps around the house, interspersed with appearances by my grandmother and exhausted cameos by our parents.
I am tightening the underpants waistband around my fingers, watching the blood drain from my fingertips. The top of the band is scalloped, which I hadn’t previously noticed, but I assume Hanes does this to distinguish them from men’s underpants. Whoever made the decision to scallop the top of women’s Hanes Her Way underpants might think that this detail has gone unobserved, and I want to look them up to tell them that no, it looks very nice, and that I have spent the last twenty minutes admiring their handiwork. I have been asked to write the eulogy for my grandmother and I have come to the conclusion that I will somehow derive inspiration from her underpants’ waistband—that within its elastic are insights into my grandmother’s life.
“What sort of things do you say in a eulogy?” I ask my mother.
“You could tell a story about the person,” my mother says, “or you could just talk about them in general—their traits or what you remember about them.”
“Any story?”
“Any story that’s appropriate.”
“Appropriate how?”
“Write something and I’ll tell you if it’s appropriate or not,” she says.
I begin the decision-making process over which of the stories about my grandmother to tell and which not to tell, which is hard because there are a great number of stories about her that are interesting and catchy and fun and these are the ones that in no way belong in a eulogy.
There are two stories about my grandmother that I would like to include. One is appropriate. The other is maybe inappropriate, but I am not positive. I am the type of person who holds onto her grandmother’s underpants’ waistbands, imbuing them with deep, emotional meaning, so I am probably not the best person to turn to during the “appropriate/inappropriate” decision making process. I have never had the best judgment. There is a scene in the home video where you hear my two year-old sister Karen crying off-camera as I, eight years-old and climbing up onto a stool beside my mother, say, “But she hit me with a tennis racket.”
* * *
My grandmother loved being the center of attention but in the home video she appears only briefly. My father approaches her with the video camera and as my father films her she is sitting in the corner, balancing her checkbook. She is wearing a bright orange and pink shirt because my grandmother loved bright colors and always dressed as though she were a citrus fruit or a collection of reflective traffic signs. She is wearing a sun visor over her perm and concentrating and my father’s voice says, “There she is! The woman who started it all,” and she looks up and smiles and my father goes, “Give us some attitude for the camera, Ena,” and my grandmother makes a face where she opens her mouth outlandishly, as if she has won a trip to Disney world, and puts her hands up in mock surprise. She shakes her torso back and forth, smiling, and remains on camera until my cousin Tony, who is twelve in the video, arrives in front of the camera from nowhere, making elaborate chewing faces.
“Tony, out of the way,” his mother’s voice calls from off screen.
My grandmother smiles excitedly for the camera again but Mark appears, doing an imitation of a Godzilla-type creature and other faces (mine, Pam’s, Elycia’s) appear from the background with various protruding tongues, blocking the camera’s view of her. She tries to shoo us, the way you wave away clouds of gnats but more grandchildren appear until the screen is filled with them and my father is forced to turn off the camera.
“Your grandmother liked being the center of attention,” my mother says.
“So do most of her descendants,” I say.
The appropriate story I wanted to tell was from when my grandmother was a little girl—she was the same age as my sisters and my cousins and I in the video my father made. The age at which we were running through the house like lunatics, screaming and tackling one another. I do not know if my grandmother was like this as a little girl but the fact that her seven grandchildren resembled (on a frequent basis) British soccer spectators initiating a riot, I can assume that she did not spend her entire childhood indoors doing needlepoint and practicing concertos. The story I told about my grandmother as a young girl took place in the 1920’s when her father’s wealthy friend visited her family in Tampa, Florida, which was where she grew up. Her father’s friend was a bachelor with more money than he could spend on himself and that first year he visited he took my grandmother’s oldest sister out on the town, buying her whatever it was she wanted—clothes and food and dolls, and all of the things that young children admire from store windows but can so rarely attain. And my grandmother looked on, excited.
Her father’s friend returned the following year, taking out the next oldest sister for a day of ice cream and candy and toys and my grandmother waited impatiently at home, told that next year would be her year. That next year it would be her turn. And my grandmother waited for him, eager, making a list of all the things she wanted—dresses and games and chocolate, and to travel around town in his car while people looked at and admired her. And she waited for him in the frantic way nine year-olds wait when they cannot contain their excitement, but the following year her father’s friend didn’t come back. She waited for him, buoyant, because my grandmother was always buoyant, but my grandmother’s turn came in 1929, which was not a wonderful year for rich bachelors who were heavily invested in the stock market. Her father’s friend lost his fortune in the crash but not all nine year-olds were privy to updated financial knowledge, and so my grandmother waited patiently, wondering why he had never come back for her. My grandmother, telling others the story, teetered between incredibly disappointed and abysmally heartbroken.
“Why would you tell that story?” my mother asked. “It’s so sad.”
“It’s not that sad,” I said. “It’s interesting.”
“It ends on a sad note.”
“But I like that story,” I said. I had always liked that story because she had first told it to me when I was very young and I had understood her disappointment so strongly. And because it was more appropriate than the other story I liked, which involved my grandmother driving somewhere with such determination that her van knocked the rear view mirror off a postal vehicle. And Mark, who was in the van with her, shouted, “Grandma, you knocked the mirror off that truck!” and my grandmother responded coolly, “Oh honey, don’t get worked up. The government’s got plenty rearview mirrors.”
* * *
We are sitting in the enormous Catholic church that is only a few blocks from my grandparents house, with my grandmother’s casket standing solemnly by the altar. The priest is saying a bunch of things about how my grandmother was wonderfully devout and my cousins are sitting together in a row of black suits and dresses, looking solemn. The priest mentions maybe thirty times that my grandmother is in heaven now and I am trying to think about my grandmother but my thoughts keep going back to the priest and how he could make his public speaking more effective by using emphasis and projecting his voice. I am sitting next to my father who has a small passage to read during the service that he is gripping uncomfortably. I have seen tears in the eyes of both my father and my uncle over the past few days. I can tell when they are about to cry because they will abruptly stop talking—even if they are in the middle of a sentence—they will stop talking for as long as it takes to subdue the sadness, and then they start again from where they left off, never acknowledging the silence. My aunt, my father’s sister, has been sobbing outright, and is in the front row next to my grandfather, her hand on his back to steady him.
My father goes up and reads his piece clearly, straining it of emotion, and walks back down to his seat. I am happy for him that he did not cry while he was reading it. I am up next and my father mouths the word S-L-O-W-L-Y and my mother mouths the word A-P-P-R-O-P-R-I-A-T-E and I walk to the lectern and begin to talk about my grandmother.
I am overwhelmed with the number of things I have to say about my grandmother and begin by saying that I loved her very much so if I cry forgive me, but that most of the memories I have of her are absurd and hilarious, so if I laugh, forgive me also.
I read the story about my grandmother as a little girl. I talk about her loopy handwriting and the little glass jars she used to collect from garage sales and one of the magnets on her fridge I had seen the other day that said, “If getting older is getting better, then I am magnificent.” I talk about how she used to love wearing hot pink and how she made quilts for all her grandchildren that weighed more than the lead aprons you wear at the dentist’s office but were less effective at keeping you warm, and how she would tell people “Grandmas are just antique little girls.” I say that if she IS in heaven, within a week all the angels will be wearing bright purple pants suits and enormous red hats, and that all the wall space in heaven will be taken up with watercolor paintings. I briefly mention the story about the rear view mirror and the postal vehicle and look for my mother’s face to make sure I am ok, that I am being appropriate, and my mother and my cousins are quietly laughing. And my grandfather is laughing gently and my aunt and her friends are laughing, and so are some of the other people in the church that I do not know. Anyone who is not laughing is smiling. I mention that if my grandmother is in heaven, I hope very much that she meets up with her mother and her father and both of her sisters, but that I also hope that she meets up with her father’s rich friend, and that he finally buys her toys and candy and ice cream and everything she’s ever wanted.
I finish with the eulogy and return to my seat. My grandfather, smiling, grabs me by the shoulders and says he had wanted to hop over the rail and hug me and that he thought it was a wonderful eulogy and I gave him a quiet kiss on the cheek. And then for a moment we are quiet. My cousins and my parents and my aunts and uncles, all of whom only twenty years earlier had been in front of a video camera shouting and waving their arms over their heads, did something I didn’t think my family was capable of doing—they stood completely still and fell completely silent.
And then, amplified tenfold in the acoustic horn of the church I learned that my grandmother had had only one request for her funeral service, which was that her casket be wheeled out of the church to a recording of New York, New York by Frank Sinatra.
If you have never listened to Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” in a church with wonderful acoustics, it is something I would recommend. The song thundered through the pews with its opening kickline of Broadway-style beats, a row of my Aunt Pam’s friends clapping along in the way my grandmother would have hoped for. My family gathered, alternately crying and laughing, blowing our noses and snapping our fingers, as his voice spilled out through the church.
Start spreeeading the news--
I’m leavin’ today.
I want to BE a part of it—New Yooork, New Yoork.
“She requested this?” I asked.
“Are you surprised?” my mother asked, wiping tears from her cheek with a folded tissue.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
These vagabond shooes--
Are longing to straaaay
Right through the VER-Y heart of it
In old, New Yoooork!
My grandfather had tears in his eyes but continued smiling, his rosary beads clinging to his hand, and I reached down into my purse, feeling for the elastic of my grandmother’s underpants, which I proceeded to wind around my knuckles until I could feel the blood rushing into my fingers. We wheeled my grandmother down the aisle as she shouted that she wanted to wake up in the city that never sleeps. As she announced brightly, as she so often did, that she was both king of the hill and top of the heap and (if it’s not too much to handle) possibly even A#1. And as Sinatra wound down, the pallbearers, smiling, buckled their knees and lifted my grandmother into the air like ancient royalty. She rode out of the church on the shoulders of her loved ones, the well-deserved center of attention, without (for once) her grandchildren jumping in front of the camera, begging the cameraman for their fifteen minutes.
* * *
In the best part of the video—the reason all of us like watching it— my father questions us, one by one, standing against the white aluminum siding on the side of my uncle’s house. My sister Pam slides in to the frame, her dark brown hair hanging in her face as she tells the camera that she is six. My father asks, “What do you do for a living?” and she responds: “I fix garages.” And he says, “What do you want to be when you grow up? And Pam, declining to answer, sticks out her tongue at the camera before exiting.
And my father shouts, “Who’s next?” so that as Pam leaves, my cousin Mark walks on screen, three-and-a-half feet tall, his hair standing on end.
“What’s your name?” my father says, his voice playfully impatient, as if conducting a job interview where all the applicants who had shown up that day were under the age of ten.
“Mark.”
“How old are you, Mark?”
“I’m seven years-old!”
“What’s your wife’s name?”
Mark scratches his chin, smiling, looking pleased and horribly embarrassed. He is grinning. He shouts, “I don’t have one!”
And my father says, “What do you do for a living?” And Mark answers that he plays baseball.
And my father says, “Thank you very much. Next?”
He runs the gamut through my cousins and his own children, learning that Karen is two and that I am eight and want (at that point) to be a lawyer and that Joey, though embarrassed on-camera to reveal his fondness for dinosaurs, twice reiterates that when he is older he would like to have a fast car that he can smash into trees.
And I am sorry now that he never asked his mother to come out for her questioning—asking her to stand against the side of the house with everyone else who was itching to be captured on film. My grandmother would have gotten excited and opened her mouth wide, as if she were titillated and screaming, and would say, “My name is Ena Marquis D’Apice and I’m sixty eight years old!
And my father would offer a gruff, “What do you do for a living?” and my grandmother would say, “Honey, I’m an artist!”
And my father would say, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And my grandmother would fall silent for a moment, excited, forgetting that she had already grown up several decades earlier. We would watch her visibly thinking on camera, biting her lower lip, rifling through possibilities. She would go back and forth between President of the United States and Mouseketeer. Backup Singer for the Glenn Miller orchestra. Professional Artist. Queen of Everything.
And I am sitting here alone, thinking about my grandmother, wrapping the waistband of her underpants around my fingers. I took the waistband as a way to remember her idiosyncrasies but I find that within a minute of picking it up I am wrapping it tightly around my hand again, feeling pressure that makes the tips of my fingers pulse. That there is something comforting in the squeeze of the elastic, the same way there was something comforting in the blood pressure machine holding me firmly by the arm, assuring me things would be ok.
And I know she is gone. I watched her casket as it was lowered into the earth by burly men with tan necks. I am positive she is gone but the elastic is warm and tight and fused to my skin and it feels, I finally realize, like someone is holding my hand.
My grandmother is simultaneously buried in a small cemetery in Utica and dancing through all of our imaginations in a red hat. My father is filming her with the video camera against my uncle’s aluminum siding.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” my father would ask.
“Give me a minute, honey. Give me a minute.”
And if she took too long, of course, my father would have said, “Ok, Next!” the way he did with everybody, but until that point he would capture her alone on camera, letting her enjoy the attention she craved—her bright pink shirt reflective against the white of the house, her face illuminated by a spotlight.
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Monday, January 11th, 2010
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Originally posted by bluepapermate.
Some days are like this:
You wake up late, your arm aching and bent awkwardly because a baby boy is sleeping there with you, tummy to tummy. You rush through a shower, chug a cup of coffee while nursing the baby, and forget to eat breakfast altogether. You bundle your little family into the car and head to church, confident that it will be smooth-sailing because! There are two of you against the two of them, one for each, and you are equipped with colors and books and you're old hat at this business. Things begin to unravel almost immediately. You have to slip out and nurse the baby, but you neglected to clear this with your three-year-old first, and moments later you hear her wailing behind you. By the time everyone has calmed down, the service is nearly over and you and your husband have grown snappish at each other. It's been a long time since your firstborn has behaved this way in church, and you are certain that this is somehow a reflection on you -- forget your earlier optimism. You drive home, remembering the chaos that awaits you there, the remnants of soggy cereal still in the bowls, piles of dirty laundry, a floor badly in need of vacuuming, and an endless array of little projects that didn't seem quite so daunting the day before, but suddenly their completion seems both stupidly important and totally impossible.
You grow a little weepy.
Your husband makes espresso on the stovetop, and the kitchen fills with the smell of coffee and something scorched and foul because of whatever spilled on the burner last night. Later, you steal a moment to wipe it down and somehow slice your thumb wide open. Before you can wrap your bleeding hand, the baby wakes, the three-year-old cries for you, and the dog barks to go outside. Your husband takes the baby and suggests that you take a nap, but you've finally managed to strip the bed and throw the milk-stained sheets in the wash. You opt for the couch, but you can't quite relax enough to fall asleep, and soon enough the baby needs to nurse again anyway and no amount of swaddling and swaying and shushing and changing will satisfy him in anyone else's arms.
You curl up on the couch with your baby boy, feeling suddenly as emotional and hormonal and wrecked as you did five days after he was born. You're so ridiculously in love with him; you trace the soft curve of his cheek, you listen to the sounds of his contented swallowing, you cup his head in your hand. You burp him and bury your nose in the soft hair at the back of his head, in his neck. You kiss his cheeks, you tickle his toes, you kiss the tip of his nose. You realize it's all going too fast; already he feels so solid, so unlike the tiny newborn you birthed four weeks ago. You haven't had nearly enough time to just stare at him, to memorize every sigh, every goofy newborn expression, every single little detail about the baby he is in this moment. He's the baby who gets strapped to your chest as you go about your day with your daughter; he's along for the ride. You'll never have the luxury of lying with him for hours, just the two of you, breathing in his newness, the way you did on those lazy summer afternoons with your girl three-and-a-half years ago. And you feel guilty. You feel guilty for shortchanging him. You feel guilty for disrupting your daughter's life. The rational part of you understands that you shouldn't see it this way, that their relationship will be important, that siblings are a good thing and you never wanted your daughter to be an only child, but the rational part of you is also trying to function after a night of fractured sleep. The rational part of you is lost underneath the spit-up staining the shirt you couldn't be bothered to change.
You look at your tiny, perfect little boy and think of your beautiful, perfect little girl and wonder if they deserve better than this -- someone who isn't so wrecked and crazy and completely undone by ordinary life some days.
But finally, the baby goes to sleep and your husband says, "Go have that bubble bath." So you grab the novel you'd hoped to finish reading before you gave birth and lower yourself into a tub full of water so hot it nearly scalds you. Your husband opens the door, glass of wine in hand, trailed by your three-year-old. He suggests that they give Mama some privacy.
"No, I wanna stay here. I wanna stay with Mommy," you daughter insists. You sigh and close your eyes. Your husband suggests any number of things to her: a puzzle, a story, even a movie, but --
"No. I just wanna stay with Mommy. Please," she says. You open your eyes again and there it is, that trembly little bottom lip, those huge blue eyes -- they break your heart. Nothing about the allure of fifteen minutes alone is powerful enough to compete with your little girl's need at that moment. You sigh and tell your husband, "It's all right." And it is, sort of. Your daughter closes the door firmly after her daddy and returns to the side of the tub, where she dips her fingers in the water, offers her own rubber duckie, and beams. She stays with you for awhile, totally content to hang out next to the bathtub, chattering happily. Every few minutes, she says, "I'm staying with Mommy," as though she needs to make sure it's real, this uninterrupted time, just the two of you. You remember how thrilled she was ten days ago when you took her to Starbucks, just the two of you, just for a half hour, drinking hot chocolate and sharing a cookie. ("It'll be just Mommy and Suzannah," you'd said to her, and she grinned and grinned and echoed, "Yeah. Just Mommy and Zannah.")
And it is okay. It's even good. Suddenly you don't really care about the book you wanted to read, and somehow this moment is enough. It's enough to make you get out of the bathtub and smile and mean it. It's enough to make the chaos seem manageable. It's enough to bring you back, to do it all again tomorrow.
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Friday, January 8th, 2010
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Originally posted by zoethe:
I can't decide which is weirder: that a misdialing little old lady from New Haven, Connecticut called my toll-free number with questions about the disposition of antique bird of paradise feathers under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, or that I knew the answer.
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Tuesday, January 5th, 2010
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Originally posted by ![[info]](http://l-files.livejournal.net/userhead/252?v=1321199849) billijean.
Okay. I need to come clean with you.
You see, I've gone ahead on my own and changed the guidelines, the rules, of our relationship without even consulting you. That's not fair to you, and the lack of openness is not good for any relationship - our relationship. I feel like a bad lj-life-partner and I want to fix that by telling you everything.
It all began more than a year and half ago. Sure, it was simmering under the surface before then, but if I had just taken the time to think about and address what was going on, it wouldn't have come to a head. Well... maybe it would have, because I only have power over my role, not over Outside Influences. What happened was this: we were, most of us, already somewhat distracted by Facebook and Twitter. We'd talk about how we hated it and blah blah and then spend more and more time there. And less time here. Facebook was like that slutty girl in high school - easy, much less work, but also less satisfying. We couldn't stay away. At the same time, with the baby and my health getting worse (again. omg grr), I was finding it difficult to spend time online like I had in the past. In fact, I was struggling to cope at all. And then my computer broke. It died. And I had to use an old piece of crap Dell with 7 keys missing and no disk space and it would fall over in a faint with the effort f loading a web page. I couldn't take any more. I was hardly here, I stopped updating my websites. I even stopped using my camera because I couldn't download or edit photos. But I could still update Facebook - from my phone mostly.
But you know what? I missed you. I missed US. I kept trying with Facebook because it was easier to update with my broken equipment and you were mostly not here but over there. And Facebook sucks. It's like 2001 all over again. Don't get me wrong, 2001 was great... IN 2001. Do you remember 2001 - when almost everyone updated several times a day and entries were generally shorter? Some people updated like they were Twittering when there wasn't even any such thing as Twitter. But do you know why people on lj stopped don that for the most part? Because it's BORING. Because it lacks meaningful interaction. Because it was too much chatter. It was great for a while - when we couldn't stand to be away from each other for longer than a couple hours. But our relationship matured beyond that constant need for reassurance and feedback and then those constant, short updates became an annoyance.
I remember the exact moment when I had finally really had enough. It was when I was reading my friends page and one person's entry, in it's entirety was, and I quote: "*fart*". Really? This is what we had come to? I liked the playfulness, but I wanted more, too. I wanted substance; I wanted meaningful interaction. My journal began to change then, and so did my friends list. I wasn't the only one. I saw lots of complaints over the next few years about frequent, low substance updaters. The tide had changed. And so did my friends page. There were fewer and fewer one or two line updates and more and more longer posts. I got to know you better. Some people became essay writers. More of us got digital cameras and began adding photos to our posts.
But that change also brought pressure to "properly prepare" an entry. There was an unspoken rule against the one-line entry, or more than x number of entries in a day. Entries had to be detailed and forthcoming because the vague post (except maybe with acknowledgement and apologies) was also out of vogue. And then there were the days that were too full to allow time to sit and write up a 'proper' entry and we were afraid of 'cluttering' each other's friends pages with multiple entries, so we wouldn't write one, and that happened more and more often until we were out of the habit of sharing with each other, largely for fear of not following the new rules.
Recently, in the comments to one of my posts complaining about Facebook someone said that they don't have a lot of time to write longer entries and they are uncomfortable posting short updates to LJ, so send them to FB instead and I thought BINGO! We've become update snobs. We want all well-considered and carefully constructed posts on our friends pages. We want not-too-many posts because no one likes an attention whore. ... and then we're sad as the tumble weeds blow by and the crickets chirp because the place seems deserted.
So I have been rethinking what *I* want to see on my friends page and what *I* want from LJ. What I want from LJ is simple: I want you; I want us. And we can't have that if aren't making the effort to talk to each other - and if we don't feel free to do it.
- You know what? I don't actually have an objection to more frequent and shorter posts.
- I do object to continuous posting without ever revealing what the fuck you're talking about. Being cryptic is even less cool now that it was 8 years ago. If I can't figure out what you're talking about from reading the previous 3 entries in your journal, then uh.. no. More info or shush.
- I also have to admit that I'm not fond of the Twitter stuff. The formatting makes it difficult to read and so much of it is one part of a conversation between two or more people that I probably don't know on a topic I can't identify. I don't read them and I don't even register them as 'updates' any more.
- I love photos. Always have.
- I like recipes and lists and schedules and plans and timelines and summaries.
- I love travelogues, even if you only went to the dentist. [info]ohmyhead is excellent at this. He cracks me up.
- I want to know what your kids are doing, how your mother is and why you want to strngle her this week.
- I like to hear your interpretation of things,what you think it all means.
- I want to hear about your goals, successes and failures, and when you just came out even.
- Your work, your play, your health... all of it.
And I like to hear it in 50 words or 850... whatever works best for you. So I'm doing the same. I know my posts tend to the tl;dr end of things, but I also go periods of time with no updates because of time constraints. Obviously, going with shorter updates would sometimes work for me. (Though, as a person who rarely gets to converse with other adults, I kind of tend to go all verbal diarrhea on y'all.)
So... while I'm not making actual official New Year's Resolutions,
++ I have decided to put my money where my mouth is and update more - even if that means several times in a single day (I know... *gasp*).
++ I'm going to relax the rules a little bit, and try to be okay with shorter updates too.
++ And I'm going to intentionally spend much less time on Facebook - I've stopped using the apps and I make a point of coming *here* first.
++ And, more importantly, I'm making an effort to set aside more time for commenting, because as much as I need an outlet for my diabolical and diseased mind, it is the interaction that matters most.
These are my intentions and I hope it helps brings us closer together again. I want to be a good lj-life-partner. And because Facebook sucks.
*smooch*
***ETA*** By request this entry was made public so it could be linked. So by all means, link away. Maybe we can start a Revolution ;)
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Sunday, December 20th, 2009
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Originally posted by theuglyvolvo, here.
I am taking the seeds out of a Pomegranate the way I was shown by Holly, the forty-two year old woman who I worked with two jobs ago. You cut the Pomegranate into fourths, leaving the knife in what looks like a puddle of translucent, magenta-toned blood on the cutting board. You fill a large mixing bowl with cold water and roll up your sleeves. Rolling up your sleeves should maybe be the first step, but I inevitably forget to do it until later—sometimes until after I have already gotten them wet or stained with Pomegranate juice and am holding my dripping hands out in front of me, yelling to anyone within earshot, “Hey—can someone come in here and roll up my sleeves?” And I stand there, soiled and thankful, as my mother folds my cuffs back and pushes them past my elbows. I have lost two good shirts to pomegranate juice.
But roll up your sleeves and immerse one of the pomegranate pieces in the cold water, separating the white pulp from the bright, jewel-toned seeds. The seeds will sink to the bottom and the white pulp will float to the top, and the water will keep the juice from staining your palms, keeping you from looking like Lady MacBeth in the first scene of act five, which really is not such a great look for anyone. When I spilled things on myself as a child my parents would take the garment, running it under cold water, and chanting, “Out, out, damn spot!” I was seventeen years-old—a junior in High School, before I learned that the phrase “Out, out damn spot,” was not about getting food stains out of clothing. I was twenty-three before I learned how to open a Pomegranate. I do not know at what ages other people learned these things, or whether they learned them at all, so I have nothing with which to compare myself. I will assume, for the time being, that my experience is normal.
Holly introduced me to pomegranates. They were her favorite fruit, she said, and her husband would sometimes bring one home for her, the way other men would bring their wives bouquets of roses. When she said this I nodded quickly to give the impression of understanding, as if I received bouquets of roses all the time—as if the men hoping to meet me were lined up around the block, like the nannies in Mary Poppins who are eventually blown away by the wind.
I was twenty-three when I learned how to artfully open a pomegranate and I was twenty-four when I first went on a date, which was something no one had ever shown me how to do.
I knew nothing about dating. I had not had a great deal of luck with the opposite sex. The Dorothy Parker adage states, “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses,” but I had discovered several unfortunate addendums, including: Men seldom make passes at girls who wear loafers, Men seldom make passes at girls who are constantly doing Walter Matthau imitations, and Men seldom make passes at girls who sit in front of their computer for nine hours, trying to beat their high score in Minesweeper.
I was not normal, and I knew that boys did not have crushes on girls that were not normal. I had learned from numerous 80’s movies that cool, popular guys would sometimes ask you to go to the prom with them, but when you actually arrived at the prom in your dress and corsage it would turn out to be a trick and the guy who had asked you out would be laughing at you, standing arm in arm with a popular girl who was usually blonde with feathered bangs and whose mother was ok with her wearing eyeliner. I spent a good amount of time horrified that I might find myself in this situation, and decided that the best way to avoid it at all costs was to avoid anyone who appeared to be interested in me. This led to a decade in which I became extremely adept at playing Boggle, Scrabble, and Tetris. Also, I read a lot.
My very first date ever was with someone I met online. I wore a brown cotton sweater from the Gap over a blue crewneck T-shirt. We went to a bar that had two bowls of pretzels to a table and beer advertisements from the 70’s on the walls, and he told me about himself and why he had moved to the area and what his plans were for the future. And the whole time I sat opposite him in my brown cotton sweater thinking, “I’m on a date! This is what a date is like!” And at some point he took a calm sip of whatever beer he had chosen and asked about me, and I answered cheerfully with what I realize now is the mortifying statement, “This is my first date ever!” And he exercised what must have been a great deal of restraint and said, “Ever?” And I said, “Yeah, ever!” And I do not remember specific details about him, such as his name or what he looked like, or anything he said over the course of the night, but when we parted ways he said, “I’ll call you,” which I remembered from the movies meant, “I will not call you.” And I parted ways with him the way I had parted ways with everyone up until that point. I smiled and extended my hand and told him it had been very nice to meet him and thanked him for coming out, grinning with a smile normally reserved for disappointing job interviews. And as expected, he did not call to ask for a second date. I assumed that my biggest mistake had been wearing the brown cotton sweater and the blue T-shirt. The sweater, I remembered, had never been particularly flattering.
At the job where I worked with Holly there was me and there were a lot of girls my age or a few years older, most of whom were blonde and lived in Hoboken, one of whom would not talk to me after she caught me eating popcorn out of the garbage can in my cubicle. (And I would like to clear my name by saying that the popcorn was not actually touching the garbage—it was still in the microwaveable bag in which I had popped it, and there was nothing else in my garbage can but computer paper, and I had initially thrown the bag away hoping that the act of putting it in the garbage would force me to stop eating it. But I had not really committed to throwing it away, since I had placed the bag, opening facing upward, gently on top of the garbage where it could easily be pulled back out. My paltry allotment of willpower is no match for the olfactory supernova of popcorn.) I liked Holly best out of the people in the office because she understood that there are certain circumstances under which it is ok to eat food out of an office trash can and she liked me because I understood that there are certain plays that cannot really be appreciated until you have seen them fourteen times, namely, the Broadway musical “The Light in the Piazza,” and anything starring Brenda Bleythn.
Holly’s husband, the one who would intermittently buy her pomegranates on a romantic whim, had worked in an office until he one day decided that he couldn’t go on working in an office any longer. And he had said, “I’m going to be a playwright.” And Holly had been a little nervous, because, as she reminded me, they had two children at that point, and the life of a playwright is not particularly lucrative, if it generates any income at all. But she had said, ok, we’ll try this, even though the whole idea sounded crazier than eating popcorn out of a perfectly clean garbage can, and he turned out to be a successful playwright, and now they lived together in their little house with the caddy corner piano in the living room, and the 1989 Volvo in the driveway.
When you fill out an online dating profile it is divided into two sections: what you are like, and what you are looking for, which might also be accurately labeled, “Outright lies,” and “horrifically unreasonable expectations.” My favorite online profile that I ever came across was a man who claimed to be a well-respected surgeon, who (when he was not saving lives by deftly cutting out tumors) was busy flying his private plane or playing catch with his 4 year-old Labrador retriever, Watson, throwing a tennis ball off the back of his deep sea fishing boat. He played in a band when he had the time, and had fond memories of his grandmother, and his favorite food was sushi, and his favorite movie was Finding Nemo. All of his photographs appeared to have been cut out of an L.L. Bean catalog.
An online profile will ask you to list a great deal of information about yourself and it is important that you be as accurate as possible, while being careful never to include anything unflattering or extremist. It is a pre-requisite of online profile composition that you include the line, “I love going out, but sometimes I also like to stay in.” People who do not enjoy both going out AND staying in are not eligible for online dating. The beginning of your profile will look something like the following:
· 24 year-old woman
· Brooklyn, New York, United States
· Seeking men 26-33
· Within 25 miles of Brooklyn, New York, United States
Sometimes it will ask you questions, such as, “What sort of music do you listen to?” and you have to be careful not to write something like, “I love Phil Collins and own two copies of the Tarzan soundtrack,” because even if it is true, very few people will read that sentence and fall head over heels in love with you. There will be some parts of the profile where you will get to write long passages about yourself and there will be some parts where they will offer you a series of boxes that correlate with people’s interests and will ask you to check all that apply.
I am interested in:
· Camping!
· Coffee and Conversation!
· Dining Out!
· Gardening/Landscaping!
· Movies/Videos!
· Museums and Art!
· Playing cards!
· Travel/Sightseeing!
· Wine tasting!
I found two pictures of myself that I did not think were terrible and uploaded them to the website. In the first one I am sitting in my office cubicle in a coat and scarf reading a book. In the second I am wearing a homemade Halloween costume, dressed as a “chick magnet,” clad in a chunky turtleneck sweater and jeans, which are covered in dozens of small, yellow chicks. For a brief period I put up a third picture, depicting Steve Carrell’s character from the movie “Anchorman,” but the site took it down, claiming that posting licensed photos was against site policy.
You pick photos that depict you as you would like to imagine you look every day. And you look over your profile to make sure it says all of the things you would like the world to know about yourself and that it reveals none of the things you were hoping to keep secret. And you look over your photographs, wondering if you have any that are better. And then you realize that this is it, this is all you have and all you are, and that maybe someone will like you and maybe someone will actively dislike you, but that most likely, no one will care one way or the other. You check back every few hours to see if anyone has left you a message, and most of the time nobody has.
I am pulling apart the pomegranate underwater, hundreds of clustered seeds nestling in its crevices. Pomegranates do not look like most other fruit—there is no meaty flesh to be scooped up by a melon baller, and you cannot bite through a thin skin, the way you can with a peach or an apple. The first time I saw the inside of a pomegranate, I thought that it had gone bad—that the pure white of the inside had been compromised by what appeared to be a series of thin red worms tunneling through the pulp.
“That’s a normal pomegranate,” said Holly. “That’s how they’re supposed to look.”
“It looks gross.”
“Try it.”
“It looks infested,” I said.
“Don’t be put off by how they look,” she said. “Lots of things look fine but taste terrible.”
Someone told me once that the apple that Eve samples in the garden of Eden is a mistranslation—that the actual fruit taken from the tree of knowledge is a pomegranate, which makes that particular creation myth more palatable. As a child my mother would pack me a bag lunch five days a week, consisting of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (which, by my lunch period had been flattened to the thickness of a sparsely packed Fed Ex envelope) with a juice box and a Red Delicious apple, deep red and broad shouldered with a waxy shine to its skin. Every day she would pack me a Red Delicious apple and every day I would walk politely to the cafeteria garbage can, lift the lid, and deposit the apple as if I were mailing a letter. My mother purchased Red Delicious apples because they were inexpensive and because they didn’t go bad as quickly as some other varieties of apple, but failed to take into account that the reason they are so inexpensive is because in blind taste tests Red Delicious apples are indistinguishable from pieces of cardboard.
“You threw them away?” she asked, years later, after my confession that I had discarded thousands of untouched apples, all of which were nestled in a landfill somewhere, clustered like pomegranate seeds, covered by the thin membrane of the earth.
“I threw all of them away. They were bad. They were gross.”
“Red Delicious apples almost never go bad.”
And that was when I explained to her that Red Delicious apples do not “go” bad because they are already bad. That the word “Delicious” was included in the name to entice people to use them as something other than paperweights.
* * *
My first date that was not a complete train wreck was also with someone I had met online (Height: 5’11”, Eyes: Blue).
“Hi, it’s nice to meet you,” I said.
“Nice to meet you,” he said. He was in his third year of a Ph.D. program and had a cat and liked comic books and we dated for three years, despite the fact that we had little to nothing in common aside from a love of spareribs and distaste for the movie “Seabiscuit.”
“How are things with Dan?” Holly asked occasionally. “Are you still together?” And I answered, “Yes,” for several years. And then at some point he realized that despite being in a relationship we were both lonely and not particularly well matched, and he broke it off. I was inconsolable for several months, at one point walking into a Ranch 1 Fast Food chicken restaurant and breaking into tears at the song, “My Boo,” being played over the loudspeakers.
And I would occasionally think of Holly and her wonderful family. Her husband, bent over his desk, scribbling endless pages of convincing dialogue. Her children asking if they could paint their rooms some horrible color like dark green or fluorescent orange and Holly politely telling them, “No, that is not such a good idea,” and the children exhibiting disappointment imbued with an absurdly mature level of understanding. Their home filled with warmth and good cheer and the innumerable things people hope to depict on holiday greeting cards. The last time I visited them at their house they were sitting around their Christmas tree, hugging each other. I wondered, at times, if I was visiting a co-worker or had undertaken a surrealistic journey through a Norman Rockwell painting.
* * *
I created a new online dating profile almost a year after my breakup, filled with fascinating tidbits about my personality (Pets I have: None! Pets I like: Dogs, Cats, Horses!) and forced myself to go out on dates. People would occasionally ask if all the bad dates blended together after a while, but I asserted that no, they were all unique in their awfulness. I had moved onto a new job in the city at that point and no longer worked with Holly, but e-mailed her occasionally to see how she was doing. She was always doing well, seeing Broadway plays and working and coming home to her two wonderful children and her cats and her two geckos and her wonderful husband who sometimes bought her pomegranates out of love.
I met a very nice guy online (Height: 6’0”, Eyes: Brown) who had curly brownish reddish hair and whose mother raised purebred dogs in Ontario. He was friendly and nice and we dated for a few months. He was many of the things I was looking for, which, rather than causing me to step up the intensity of the relationship, made me wonder whether the things I was looking for were horribly misguided. A friend of mine in college had once taken an evening and listed the traits of her perfect match—of her soul mate, she said. The list began with things such as:
· Funny
· Handsome
· Not allergic to dogs
· Gets along with my parents
· Kind
And in the middle it included things such as:
· Likes Thai food
· Speaks another language in addition to English
· Works in the music industry but volunteers at a Non-Profit
· Has a great singing voice
And at the end it included things such as:
· Has memorized the lyrics to “In Your Eyes,” by Peter Gabriel
· Favorite color is orange
· Second favorite color is brown
· Does not own anything from IKEA
· Is willing to watch my “When Harry Met Sally” DVD with me once every few months without complaining
And the very last bullet point, which is the only reason I remember her writing all this out in the first place, was the line:
· He should not meet all the criteria of this list.
* * *
The most ridiculous message I received while online dating was from a 33 year-old man living in Jersey City (Height: 6’2”, Eyes: Hazel) written under the subject line, “I hate puppies.”
“Hello,” he said. “I just read through your profile and thought, ‘Wow! I have never met anyone with whom I am so horribly mismatched and in whom I am so horribly uninterested.’ After going through your “About Me” section (and falling asleep several times, by the way) I made it to your “interests,” desperately hoping that you (like myself) are looking for a relationship based solely on a shared interest in seagull migration patterns and a passion for memorizing train schedules. That being absent, I thought that perhaps you were that person I have searched for all my life, with whom I could walk around lower-income Midwestern towns, buying antique Vaseline jars at garage sales. THAT being absent, I thought that perhaps you shared my disdain for adorable, large-footed puppies which, given the information in your profile, is also not the case.
"All that being said,” he continued, “I really liked your profile and am horrible at writing to people online.”
I responded in the only way you can respond to a letter of that sort, which is to tell him that I was unable to write very much at that time, being that I was involved with a 3-day project involving Busby Berkeley choreography and tarantulas. And that the following evening I would have loved to chat, except that I would be busy translating the phrase, “Where have all the flowers gone?” into a number of Mayan dialects. And also, I confessed, in actual seriousness, that I was involved in a highly intensive online project that would be completed in two weeks. But if he would like to write e-mails back and forth for two weeks, that it would be a welcome break from the work. And he said “Fine,” and for the next two weeks I received lighthearted e-mails from him in which he pretended to be senator Chuck Schumer.
“I’m at home,” he said. “Watching this great Schoolhouse Rocks! special about how a bill becomes a law. I think I almost understand it. On Monday I’m going to try and explain it to Congress.”
And occasionally I would ask about one of the details of his actual life, wondering if I might learn something about him.
“You live in Jersey City?” I asked. “Do you like it?”
“What’s not to like about it?” he asked. “Jersey City is not only the birthplace of the toothpick, it’s also the first place where churned butter was genetically modified in our attempts to create a biological weapon in our epic struggle against the soviets. It’s also home to some of our most renowned scientists, including Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Jefferson Davis, E.O. Wilson and Georges Sand. Also, it was recently named ‘Happiest City in New Jersey’ by Jersey City Magazine—the first time it’s won the award in the publication’s 127 year history.”
“Are you ever serious about things?” I asked.
“I’m not wonderful at being serious,” he replied. “But I can try, if you really want me to.”
At the close of two weeks I asked if he would still like to meet up and he said yes, he would, very much. And he asked what sort of food I liked, and I said, “Anything except Indian food,” and he suggested Ethiopian food and since I did not want to appear to be an uncultured cretin, I said, “Yes, sure, Ethiopian food would be fine.” I remembered that in the movie “When Harry Met Sally” they go out for Ethiopian food and the movie ends well—with the two of them getting together, so maybe there is something about Ethiopian food that bodes well with budding relationships.
And I received the following message:
“So I’ll see you on Saturday night then. We can spend an hour or two chatting over Ethiopian food before leaving the restaurant in disgust (with each other—not with the food.) And then we can part ways and think about all the better ways we could have spent the evening."
Before I left the house I brushed my hair and put on a three quarter sleeve tomato-colored peacoat. I took the subway to West Fourth street and walked past the basketball courts and past the hardware store and past a parking garage and a nightclub called, “The Fat Black Pussycat.” I walked past dozens of people my age, some of whom seemed happy, some of whom seemed confused, sitting thoughtfully in pizza parlors or on stoops.
“So I’ll be able to recognize you?” I had asked. “You look like you do in your pictures?”
“Of course not,” he wrote. “I cut the pictures out of a Land’s End catalog that my mother was throwing away. I look nothing like any of my pictures. But meet me in front of the restaurant regardless—I’ll be the four-foot tall man in the Stegosaurus costume with the extending telescopic eye.”
“Ok,” I said quietly. “I’ll be the nine foot tall Elton John impersonator holding a taxidermied nightingale and reciting lines from Nicholas Cage movies.”
“Ok,” he said. “I will keep my eyes peeled. I am looking forward to meeting you.”
I am walking down the street in my peacoat, wishing I had worn gloves. I get to MacDougal street and begin walking down the street, staring up at signs, muttering the words, “Ethiopian restaurant, Ethopian restaurant, Ethiopian restaurant.” I do not know exactly what I am looking for, but have the name written down on a torn piece of paper, which I continually pull from my pocket, unscrolling it and holding it taut between my cold, ungloved hands. I look down at the paper and up at the street and I hear a voice say, “Raquel?”
And I look up and standing politely by a doorway is a four-foot tall man in a stegosaurus costume, with an extending telescopic eye.
“It’s so nice to finally meet you,” he says, through an electronic voicebox that translates dinosaur-style grunts into conversational American English. His eye extends slowly, protruding from his reptilian face, looking at me for the first time.
“No, stop,” my mother said, as I recounted the story. “Tell the actual normal story.”
“Ok,” I tell her.
So I’m walking down the street in my peacoat, wishing I had worn gloves. I get to MacDougal street and begin walking down the street, staring up at signs, muttering the words, “Ethiopian restaurant, Ethopian restaurant, Ethiopian restaurant.” I do not know exactly what I am looking for, but have the name written down on a torn piece of paper, which I continually pull from my pocket, unscrolling it and holding it taut between my cold, ungloved hands. I look down at the paper and up at the street and I hear a voice say, “Raquel?”
“And?” a friend asks.
“And I turn around to see Senator Chuck Schumer, handing out informational pamphlets.”
“Stop it. How did the date go?”
“It went fine.”
“Was he normal?”
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
So here is what really happened. Really. I promise. I heard a voice say, “Raquel?” and I turned around and there was a regular person behind me.
“What did he look like?” my friend asked.
“He looked like Waldo.”
“Waldo who?”
“You know Waldo from the ‘Where’s Waldo?’ books.”
“He looks like Waldo?” she asked.
“A little,” I said. “And a little bit like Adrien Brody. If Adrien Brody and Waldo had a baby, he would look like that.”
“Ok,” she said.
I looked at his face. He was tall and thin. He was handsome, with very dark brown hair and hazel eyes and freckles across his face and his hands. I looked behind him for lists of his interests or habits or an additional “More About Me” paragraph, but there was nothing except himself, wrapped tightly in a black jacket, hands stuck anxiously in his pockets. He extended one of them for a handshake, and his warm glove enveloped my hand.
“I’m Jonathan,” he said, and I smiled and said, “You seem sort of like a normal, regular person.”
“I am one,” he said.
“That’s ok,” I told him. “We might still get along.”
I am peeling apart the pomegranate the way Holly showed me, and pushing out the seeds, watching them float to the bottom of the bowl. I put them in the refrigerator so they will be cold for later, which was not one of the steps that Holly taught me, but you are allowed to add additional steps if you want to. There is no universal pomegranate preparation agenda.
I place the seeds in the fridge. I was twenty-three when I first learned how to cut up a pomegranate and twenty-eight before I had someone with whom to share one. In a basket on the counter are two additional pomegranates and zero Red Delicious apples. Later today I will bring one of the pomegranates out into the living room where Jonathan is sitting on our uncomfortable futon, reading a book, and I will offer to share it with him. We will sit in front of the gas fireplace and eat pomegranate seeds. I think back to Holly with her warm, enviable house and the visible vapors of bliss that emanated from her cats and her children and her husband and herself. I think back to her kitchen table where she sat, most likely, when her family ate casseroles or take-out Chinese food or pizza, and to their cared-for Christmas tree, and to the warm feeling I got being near her family, even though I am always notoriously cold, even when wearing layers.
“Teach me how to do this,” I wanted to say. “Teach me how to have what you have.”
I will be thirty years-old when Jonathan and I get married and start our ridiculous life together, but I was twenty-three when I looked over Holly’s shoulder, desperately trying to learn the two things she understood so effortlessly: how to be happy, and how to be loved. There is a lot of trial and error involved. I squinted and pursed my lips.
“Like this?” I asked her.
“Not exactly,” she said. “Try again. Sometimes it takes a little while before you get it down.” I nodded, trying to take in an invaluable lesson and still get home in time to have dinner with my parents.
“Like this?” I asked.
“No,” she said, frowning. “Definitely not like that.”
I paused, discouraged.
“Try again,” she says.
“Like this,” I say, with conviction. “You do it like this.”
“That’s it,” she says. “Like that.”
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Monday, November 16th, 2009
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Originally posted by anahata56, here.
On Facebook recently, I had the interesting experience of seeing a photo album posted to an acquaintence’s page. This acquaintence was someone I knew from having attended the same church she currently attends, long, long ago.
The pictures she posted were of a dance, conducted in the main meeting room of the church.
These pictures brought on a fit of uncontrollable laughter. I’ll explain.
When I was a young teenager, I recall a certain meeting of the “Brothers”, on the weighty subject of roller skating. You heard me correctly–roller skating. This special meeting was called because, apparently, there was much consternation that the church was sponsoring trips to the local roller rink, and there was some question as to the appropriateness of this activity for young people. You see, the crux of the issue was that they played MUSIC at the roller rink as people skated, and it was thought, by some of the elders, that this movement to music could somehow be interpreted by some onlookers as “dancing”. And if it was, indeed, dancing, or could be interpreted as such by those unsaved individuals who could actually see us skating, then what sort of a testimony for Jesus would we be, and how many of those unsaved would we cause to “stumble” in their quest for Jesus’ truth?
I remember quite a bit about this meeting–I was allowed to be there but, of course, being a female, I was unable to speak or participate. I remember the red faces, the shouting–even the tears as one brother pled with another on points of scripture, regarding our position in the world, and our duty to remain unsullied by the sensual pleasures of the same. I remember their discussing the finer points of roller skating, and which movements which were executed in roller skating crossed over from the wicked world of dance. Of course, there were some folks there who felt that being in the roller skating rink at all was sinful, because they played rock music in any case, and if you exposed yourself to that, even without moving at all, one was in a place that shamed the Lord, and no good Christian should even want to be there. And rumor had it that some folks drank beer in the lounge before and after skating–so there ya go!
Roller skating=rock music=dancing=beer=Hell. An astonishing slide from the Friday night mirrored ball to the Lake of Fire.
I remember the faces of my contemporaries as the old folks levied their judgment on what was turning out to sound like the most evil of activities–some were shocked, some were outraged, some were confused and some, clearly the most backslidden among us, were simply bored, and no doubt planning their next excursion to this den of wickedness on the next Friday night, in the company of the rest of the youth group or not. Those were the folks who, no matter how UNdevoted to the activity of roller skating they might be, were prepared to go and defend its honor, on principle. Or out of sheer rebellion–but then, it was the time in history when the line between principle and rebellion was very, very thin anyway.
And it was painful. Really, really painful. So painful, in fact, that many left that meeting, never to return.
I remember it in my mind as The Great Roller Skating Schism of 1971.
So you can imagine my astonishment when initially presented with photographs of young people from my old church, not only dancing, but dancing in the auditorium of the church. The very room in which the Lord’s Supper is served every Lord’s Day!
But not astonishment alone, but extreme amusement. Because while, at this stage of my life, trying to roller skate would no doubt mean certain death, and while dancing never was and never shall be my strong suit (having gone through my most formative “dance learning” years spending all my energy trying not to move to music), I am taken back in my mind to those days when it was such a big hairy deal as to be the final nail in the coffin of some folks’ connection to their “brothers and sisters in Christ”, and wonder at the ironic and hilarious way the world turns, and wonder at how things that, at one point in history, were so incredibly important to the fabric and dogma of The Church, are, after a few years, meaningless.
And it leads me, when I hear the screaming and hollering coming from the Fundamentalist faction of society about the dire consequences of some action or another, to picture them all on roller skates.
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Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
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Originally posted by amenquohi, here.
We lay snuggling in my bed, our nightly ritual after bathing, putting on jammies, reading and discussing the school day. I’d put her brother to bed a few minutes before her, then we snuggled in under the big comforter and she picked a subject for us to discuss – another ritual. The sky is the limit, and the only caveat is time: five minutes to be exact. Then we usually sing a lullaby, and I carry her (all 53 pounds of her) into bed with a kiss and an ‘I love you’ and a promise to meet up with her in my dreams that night. The night before we’d decided to meet in Egypt, to see the pyramids together. I hadn’t yet received the dream destination for the evening, but I knew she’d get around to picking someplace before I laid her in her own bed.
"So what’s the subject?" I asked, brightly, as I pulled her close.
"Holidays.” She said. “Like Friday. Why don’t we have Friday off to celebrate 9-11?"
I stared at her, at a loss for a moment. Once again, I have to wrap my head around something enormous and make it understood in a way an eight year old will get. You’d think it gets easier as she gets older, but it doesn’t really. She understands more now, and it’s a fine line between giving her the answers she’s looking for and information overload.
"Sweetie, we don’t celebrate 9-11. It’s not really a “celebration” kind of day."
"Oh, I meant the other word. You know…starts with a “C” and it means remember." She says.
"Commemorate?"
"Yeah, commemorate. A girl in my class is going with her parents to some field to commemorate. She’s missing school that day. We should all be off that day."
"Oh," I say, with realization dawning. "She’s going to Shanksville."
We live about 3 hours from the crash sight of United Flight 93, a lonely field outside of Shanksville, PA. I’ve never been there, but I think about going. I haven’t been able to yet, due to workload or personal reticence. I do think about it, though, every year.
“So what was important about a field? Didn’t 9-11 happen in New York? And to Stephanie at the Pentagon?” Stephanie is her cousin, and she was working at the Pentagon on 9-11. She survived, physically unharmed but mentally trying to make sense of what she lived through, as we all are.
So I explain the story of United flight 93, how brave the passengers were in the face of a nearly certain death, how they fought with everything they had, how many countless lives they saved by forcing an airplane into the dirt instead of into a building. How proud their families and we as a nation are of them, and of everyone who showed bravery in overwhelming adversity that day. She asks for more stories, so I tell her about her Aunt, an EMT for Fairfax County Virginia, and the work her unit did to help after the Pentagon attack. We talk about how the firefighters and policemen ran into the burning buildings in New York, when everyone else was running out. I told her about the two men who carried the wheelchair-bound woman down 80 flights of stairs to safety.
She asked if there were more stories, and I told her there were probably hundreds. We’re going to look them up online tonight, and talk some more. Then she smiled and said "You know what would be cool, Mom? If someone on Flight 93 had found a four-leaf clover, and all of the sudden a bunch of parachutes appeared for them!"
I ruffled her hair fondly and said "Yeah, that would have been great. It didn’t happen that way, though."
Finally, she snuggled in with her back to me and I sang her lullaby and stroked her hair. When the song was done, I got ready to tell her something wonderful about her – something I always do – praising her abilities or her good heart or her smarts. I want her to end her day with something good, always. I opened my mouth, and the words just poured out.
"Oh, Boo…it was an awful, awful day. So many people died, there was so much chaos….and the news – the news kept playing all night. There weren’t any other programs on TV, just pictures and video of people dying over and over and over again. I just kept holding you tight and hoping…praying….and thinking of your Aunt Sue. I kept praying “Please God, don’t let it be her child.” And I knew that all over America, thousands of mothers and fathers were praying that same prayer and they wouldn’t get the answer they wanted. Most of all I wondered what kind of a world you’d grow up in – a world where people could do something like this. I know, people do horrible things to other people all over the world every day, but we all felt it would never happen to us, and it did. It did, and everything changed and all I could do was hold you and hold you and promise that I’ll put myself between you and danger any way I can, for as long as you need me to. I promise, Boo. Always."
She rolled over in my arms, hugging me tightly. "You can’t stop bad things from happening, Mom. And when stuff happens, you just have to be one of the brave ones. That’s what I’d do."
In that moment, I realized why I clung to her so tightly that day. It wasn’t just that she was my only child at the time, and a baby, at that. It wasn’t fear for my life, her life, or the lives of my loved ones. It was what she represented in those hours.
Hope.
And as the years go by and we take the lessons of that day and teach them over and over again, we raise a generation of children who will do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, because they will be the brave ones, just as many were before them.
I laid her in her bed, kissing her again, and she said sleepily, "Mom, I think we should go to that field tonight, in our dreams. Maybe we can tell them all thank you."
"I’ll see you there."
"Mom?"
"Yes?"
"Bring flowers."
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