yah biquette!

Democratic Depression

2010-01-24T19:19:00.008Z

What a week in politics. First there was the upset victory of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race, ending the Democrat's ability to avoid a filibuster, meaning the Republicans can now stop any health care reform dead in its tracks. And it seems like they are determined to do this, regardless of the consequences for the country, because it makes the Democrats look bad.

Then, just after Obama announced he was getting tough on the banking industry, and wanted to limit how big they could get to avoid future economic disasters and bailouts, there was the outrageous decision of the US Supreme Court to withdraw any limit to corporate funding of election campaigns. That's right. Unlimited. Meaning, unless the Democrats find some way to stop this, through corporate law, our democracy is pretty much dead. Meaning, in the 2010 elections, you can expect the Republicans to sweep up a lot of House and Senate seats and gain a majority. Meaning we can forget about health care reform, economic recovery, or a second term for Obama. Meaning our new de facto government, will, quite literally, become a cartel of the likes of Exxon, ConAgra, and Blackwater.

The Democrats can't seem to manage to accomplish anything even when they have a clear majority. How is it that Bush and Cheney did whatever they liked even when they didn't have a majority in the House and Senate? The whole idea of bi-partisanship doesn't work. The Republicans don't want to cooperate. There is no health care plan that everyone can agree on. The Republicans just want to cause the Democrats to fail at anything they try to achieve, and they want power back as soon as possible so they can continue their agenda of dismantling what's left of democracy and solidify a shadow corporate regime.

Yes it's depressing. I feel even more full of despair than I did during the Bush years. That's because Obama got my hopes up. I tried to resist, as I explained in a post around that time. Like so many Democrats, disillusioned by a disastrous two terms of Republican rule, and waking up to the deregulatory betrayals of the Clinton era, I didn't jump on the bandwagon of hope without reluctance. But he was so charming! Barack Obama managed to revive the idealistic strain in Democrats around the country. We had to stop being cynical and band together, and believe! I did. Now, a year later, it feels like all may be lost.

This is a critical moment in the fate of the United States. If the Democrats don't stop trying to please everybody, and stop trying to compromise with a completely uncompromising GOP, they will lose the mandate that they were given by the American people just one short year ago. They need to stop worrying about alienating conservative voters because of ideological differences and just do something. Results will get votes. Prove to them that left-leaning policies will work. Now's your chance! If the country swings back into the control of the Republicans, the damage may be irrevocable. How much worse can the economy get? How long can we last with our failing infrastructure? How much more can corporate power increase its stranglehold on the rights of Americans to pursue life, liberty, and happiness?

This is scary stuff. It's terrifying and it's depressing. But depression is not going to help us. Democrats need to be as angry, as full of unmovable conviction, and as uncompromising as Republicans are in our vision of where this country needs to go. This is a war we cannot afford to lose. For the love of democracy, Obama, now is the time to martial the party and lead us into battle. That is why we elected you.

One small change

2010-01-23T02:44:00.003Z

Hip mountain Mama has a great idea.

Starting the first of January, and continuing each month until April, leading up to earth day- April 22- bloggers are making a change for the greener every month and blogging about it. I try to be environmentally conscious in my daily choices, but there's always room for improvement.

So, January is the month of no plastic bags. And that trend will continue ever after. I definitely try to minimize plastic bags already, but I need to be more organized if I'm really going to kick the habit. So I just bought some portable cloth resuable bags which I'm going to carry with me everywhere. That way I am not only ready for my usual trips to the store, I'm ready for all those impromptu ones too.

These are the bags I ordered. I thought they'd be a fun way to get into the mode. I'm kind of psyched about this project. Anyone else who wants to join in, latecomers are accepted.

Get a job!

2010-01-22T01:18:00.004Z

Every day on my way to or from work on the F, there are people asking for money. Sometimes it's the startling middle-aged white woman talking about her three children and her lay-off, the note of desperation in her voice when she says "Please! Have a heart!", somehow leaving me unable to look at her, let alone reach for my wallet. Sometimes they are charming three-piece mariachi bands, who clearly aren't living on the street but just need a little extra cash. But mostly it's really poor people, visibly homeless, tired, mentally ill, addicted, or just plain ill. They have various approaches. At Christmas time, one man sang a carol that really left me heartbroken. Others change carriages at every stop and give the same speech to the whole car. "Ladies and gentlemen. Please. If you can find it in your hearts to lend a helping hand to a homeless person in need."

Sometimes, I give a dollar here or there. But usually I don't. Because I can't give every day, and I can't choose who is most worthy. They all are. And I know my dollar isn't going to change their lives anyway.

Today, there was a homeless man outside the subway station. He asked me for change, and I gave my usual lame smile and apology. A graying middle-aged man in a shabby suit approached the subway entrance at the same time, and muttered at the man "Get a job!" As he raced down the stairs next to me, he continued "Get a fucking job! Another lazy American!" This is what I wanted to say to him, but didn't. This is what I thought to myself all the way home, and then posted on some thread somewhere, where someone espoused the same simplistic viewpoint. (I found it when I googled "homeless get a job.")

Can you explain to me how a homeless person should go about getting a job? What kind of job? Where do they go? What if they have no work experience, no high school diploma? No home. No shower, no clothes to wear to an interview. No telephone or internet to do research. How are they supposed to begin? If you don’t know the answer, how do you expect someone living on the street to know?

This is not to say that they can’t change or don’t want to change, but these people need a helping hand to get there. It is not easy to change when your life has fallen apart. Many homeless people struggle with mental health problems and addictions. They need support to put their lives back together. Of course, it’s much easier to just put the blame on them, rather than feeling morally obliged to help people who haven’t had as much luck as you have.

Of course there are stories of people who have overcome amazing obstacles and managed to turn their lives around without help. But does that mean people who don’t feel strong enough, or don’t yet know that they are strong enough to do that, should be left behind? Everyone deserves a helping hand. Most homeless people don’t have the support of family and friends that the rest of us take for granted. How far would we have gotten without it?

I wanted to say this to that man. But he probably wouldn't have listened. And I didn't want to get involved in a conflict with some strange man in a subway station. There are a lot of crazy people in New York. But that's a whole 'nother post.

Our system sucks.

2010-01-22T00:31:00.005Z

The New York Times "Health" section includes overviews of other nations with universal health care systems:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/09/29/health/health-care-conversations.html?ref=health#/13/

After the article about France, I found this comment from a reader:

"So much has been said about how good the French (and other countries) healthcare system is and how it is paid for/provide by the government. What has escaped almost every article and conversation on the subject is that most these countries have higher effcetive [sic] personal income tax rates than the USA. So what we in the US pay in healthcare insurance premiums people outside the US pay in higher income taxes.

— RichC"

And an equally uninformed, if more concise, response from another reader:

"Hmm…no mention of how high the tax rates are in France. Poor journalism but great rhetoric.

— NoBama"

This is my response:

"People often cite the higher taxes in countries with universal health coverage, and they seem to believe our lower taxes are an even trade-off, ie. we pay insurance instead. But the overall costs of taxes plus health care costs per individual is higher in the US than in countries with universal care. And they get better care.

Take France, for example. They pay 45.3% of their GDP in tax, in exchange for a great system of universal quality health care, education, sick pay, paid vacation, paid maternity leave, and subsidized child care FOR ALL.

In the USA, we pay 29.6% of our GDP in tax, and on average 15% of our GDP on health care costs. Total cost: 44.6%. And what do we get for that? Not much. That doesn’t even include parental leave and child care, which is another huge cost for Americans.

It’s time people abandon irrational fears about losing ‘choice’ or ‘freedom’, and realize that these things are already in danger, when we live without the basic rights which it is a government’s duty to provide for its citizens- universal health care, sick pay, parental leave, and quality education.

Statistic sources:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/tax_tot_tax_as_of_gdp-taxation-total-as-of-gdp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:International_Comparison_-_Healthcare_spending_as_%25_GDP.png

So, I wrote my comment in the New York Times. But it didn't make me feel much better. With the democrat's ability to prevent a filibuster now lost- (Massachusetts to the Republicans?! Can this be attributed to global warming?)- and the creeping sense that no matter what Obama wants to accomplish, our permanently log-jammed political system won't allow it, I think it's going to be at least another fifty years before the USA has anything like a functional universal system along the lines of France or Germany. Oh well. The food here really is very good. But it'll kill you. And you can't afford to get sick.

I'm confused

2009-12-04T03:50:00.008Z

All this time in England, I've been telling people that America is the land of convenience. A land where anything private runs smoothly and where good service is paramount. A land where a public gym is like something out of Dante, yes, but a land where you can refill your prescriptions on the phone or online and pick them up an hour later at your 24 hour pharmacy. In England, I was dismayed at the NHS prescription refill process. I was not only dismayed, I was in disbelief. "I have to BRING a piece of PAPER to the doctor's office, wait TWO days, and then go back and GET the piece of PAPER?" After a while, I came up with the idea of mailing my refill request and enclosing a self addressed stamped envelope, but it still seemed terribly inefficient and backwards, and I never quite accepted it. I was always looking forward to being back in the US when I pondered these matters. In my mind, it remained the land of late-night shopping every night, of 24 hour supermarkets, of supreme customer service and of easy commercial transactions. Now I'm back and I'm confused.

You see, in England, I haven't used my checkbook in years. Everything's online. I've paid my rent by direct debit, which means my money goes straight out of my bank account into my landlord's account. No paper. Nothing in the mail. No fee. I've used the same system to pay all my bills. Even if the bill was different amounts each month. I've even used the same system to pay a friend back when I owed her money. My mother-in-law had used the same system to give me a birthday deposit. No checks. No fee. It's easy and it's efficient.

So my husband and I expected the system to be the same or better when we got here. He expected it because I have been telling him that this is the land of convenience. Me, I guess, because of some kind of romanticized nostalgia for my homeland coupled with a lack of real experience in such things, as I left when I was 20.

I bank with HSBC in the US now, a big international bank which I would expect to be modern, green (at least to pay lip service to the consciences of their customers) and efficient. Instead, I find that paying a bill online merely triggers the bank to mail the company I'm paying a check. I'm sorry, but this is totally stone age as far as I'm concerned. There is also no way to make an online payment to a friend or family member or anyone else. The only system is the above mentioned bill pay system. Which we found out when my husband tried to make an electronic payment to my account (different accounts, same bank). You see, he had the money to pay the rent in his account but no checkbook. I had a checkbook but not enough money. So the payment was made from his account to mine. I received nothing. My rent check bounced. Then I received a bank check in the mail, reading "Please accept payment from our mutual client." What a farce!

I expect public things to be shambolic here. I have experienced bureaucratic nightmares aplenty. But I am really confused as to why the world's most enthusiastic free-market economy is so backwards in its day-to-day financial systems. Or is it because I'm not rich? Maybe it's easier for them- in that either Gold accounts or Business accounts come with special privileges, or in that the fees mean little to them. Or maybe the British banks are too generous and have failed to extract every penny they can from their customers, while their American cousins are taking their customers for everything they've got. Heck, most commercial banks in England abolished their ATM machine fees years ago due to public outcry. Now I'm traipsing all over the place looking for an HSBC branch everytime I want to take out $20, and no one seems to think this is weird. I guess this is the hard lesson of advanced capital. Well maybe not THE hard lesson, I'll leave that to Naomi Klein. But perhaps the US banks figure why make things so easy when you can charge extra for them? Here, if you want to make a truly electronic payment, you have to pay a hefty wire transfer fee. So I guess I've figured it out. But I'm still pissed. Maybe I should re-title this post "The grass is always greener." Maybe getting my prescription refills so easily is more about the drug industry maximizing profit than providing a convenient customer experience... Oh.

"Your blog is malnourished." -R

2009-11-17T17:28:00.007Z

So, what's been going on since my last post? I'd like to answer this with a tag cloud. "visa. flight. wedding. find apartment. move. job search. manifest new life where I am very crafty creative industrious and bloggy." Well the last one might not really work as a tag, but you get the idea.

So we moved to New York! We love it. And now, after two years in London and one month in New York, I'd like to give some initial thoughts:

This country is litigation mad! I guess I knew this but I never experienced it before. I mean official bureaucracy, yes. I have had my share of that- (see my previous post). But you need a credit check to get an apartment here. You need to sign non-disclosure forms and tax forms and authorize background checks on your "character" when you go to a job interview! It's madness.

Free stuff everywhere! New York is like a living garage sale. There's free stuff on the street, curb alerts on Craigslist, all kinds of impromptu street sales, stoop sales, and community swaps. Now mind you when we held a sidewalk sale on our street in Hoxton and advertised up and down Kingsland Road, to get rid of some stuff before we left London, we were met with everything from a lack of enthusiasm to total fear. English people don't really seem to get the concept of self-organized sales; they're more comfortable with a car boot or a jumble in a designated area. I do find it something of a paradox that the land of free market capital is also the land where commerce can easily get back in the hands of the people. But they probably just look at it as trying to make a buck. I'm the one who walks down the street past a lady selling some old baby clothes on the front stoop of her brownstone, eyes shining, and murmuring about anarcho-syndicalism.

People talk to each other here! Strangers! The other day I was in Williamsburg, which is pretty much like Shoreditch only a bit scruffier, waiting for my friend to meet me for brunch. Meeting for brunch at the weekend, with a Mimosa (Buck's fizz) or Bloody Mary, seems to be very New York. It's not much different from meeting for brekkie in London, except there's no beans or tomatoes or decent tea, and you're allowed to get a bit tipsy. So as I was standing on the corner in front of a diner, I saw a lady with a dog pass a man. He asked her if that was a beagle. She said... I'm gonna go to quotes here:

LADY: "Yep. He's a beagle. Pet a beagle and you'll have good luck all day!"
MAN: "I won't get bit, will I?"
LADY: "No, no. He won't bite."

Then they get into a conversation, which goes on for about 10 minutes. This lady tells the whole story of how she found this dog. The vet says he's about 8. She thinks he's a retired hunting dog. Sometimes he just sits on the sofa a looks at her and she wonders if he's happy. The man suggests she takes him to a park or wood, and gives him something to smell. Then she should hide the item and he can hunt it.

MAN: "You see, there's a big difference between what makes us happy and what makes them happy."

Turns out this guy is like a dog whisperer. I love how people in New York just start talking to anyone randomly, and this story also leads me to another observation:

People in New York are CRAZY about their pets. First of all EVERYONE has a pet. Everyone has a cat or two and a dog. When we were apartment hunting, we started out looking at sub-lets, but it was soon clear that that wouldn't work out because everyone had a pet, and I'm allergic. The people across from us have two cats who eye us through the kitchen window whenever we get something out of the refrigerator. The neighborhood is full of pet salons, doggy day cares, and professional dog walkers. Yes, that's a job here. People give their pets birthday presents and christmas presents. People send their pets to pet resorts. It's like a child substitute for people who are too busy or selfish to have children. I don't mean to sound judgemental. It's just weird that so many people treat some animals like their own children and don't afford the same sense of kindness to the animals on their plates. But hey, I guess it's better than living in a country where ALL the animals are treated cruelly. Here it's just most of them.

Food! The food here is so freakin good. I mean there is good food in London, and in our neighborhood we were especially spoiled with great Turkish food and Vietnamese. But that was it. Decent pizza and more recently Mexican can be had in London, but you have to seek it out. Here, it's everywhere. There are so many good places everywhere. There are thousands of pizza places all over this city where you can get a slice for $2.50 and it's unbelievably good. Tacos. Deli sandwiches. Eggplant parmigiana. Any time I eat something here I pretty much reaffirm that we made the right decision.

One thing I miss about London, among many, is the free museums. Museum entry costs a fortune here! There's a real class divide; high culture is a luxury. Luckily you can get free tickets to fringe theater and off-broadway shows on Craigslist. The other area where New York clearly falls short is parks. There are two big parks we can access here, Central and Prospect. But neither really live up to London parks from what I've seen. So what's the conclusion of my research so far? Strangely, or maybe not strangely, I am dazzled by New York, but I don't feel it's my city yet. I'm presently still loyal to London, but a few more slices of pizza and a free blender off the street might turn me into to a true New Yorker.

The Trials

2009-08-24T13:39:00.003+01:00

American bureaucracy is a nightmare! I can't believe how piece of cake getting an English passport was compared to this. Funny how that was easier than RETURNING TO MY OWN COUNTRY. R and I really underestimated this. We knew it wasn't going to be as easy as it was for my great-grandparents, catching a boat from Bremen and turning up at Ellis Island with $50 in their pocket and some distant relative's address scribbled on a piece of paper. We knew it wouldn't be like that, but Jeez. It's been a stress-a-thon.

The main hurdle now is that I have to prove the USA is my real domicile. Never mind the fact that I've lived in the UK for 12 years, have a British passport, and feel pretty much half and half. No. I have to "sever my ties with the UK," provide tax records, property records, and get microchipped. Well, the latter is made up but feels very plausible after the crap they've thrown at us. The lady who interviewed R was a real sourpuss. My mom's asking me "Did you tell them your flights are booked and your wedding is all planned and you have to be there in a week?" Bless her, I didn't have the heart to tell her that these people are not interested in human concerns. It's papers that matter, printed papers in black ink in duplicate, and lots of small green ones.

Returning

2009-07-17T19:39:00.002+01:00

It’s funny how people make up your life. If you took all the people out of it, what would it be? You can look at a really lonely person and see what it is they’re living for. They’re trying to find people, even just by sitting at the kitchen table and thinking. That’s how I am with you.

When I first met you I thought why do I have to have someone like you, someone a little awkward, a mumbling non-native speaker, a man. I wanted someone else. When you came to get me, you held the door open for me and waited for me to walk ahead of you. But I didn’t know where I was going. You had to show me. So I waited for you to go ahead.

You took me into one of the rooms and asked me everything about myself. You wrote it all down slowly and looked vaguely displeased at everything I said. My dairy intake, my yellow-green urine. My past drug use and my irregular cycle. I felt annoyed by the way you seemed to shake your head ever so slightly when I told you I had been on cortico-steroids for ten years.

You told me you would see me for a few sessions and then you would give me to someone else. That’s how you said it, in a quiet, careful voice.

“Ok, I will be seeing you a few more times. And then, I will give you to someone else.”

My next appointment was a month later because I had been away. You asked if I had had any trouble arranging time off work to come.

“No,” I said. “I just didn’t want to have one session and then go away. I’ve been on holiday.”

“Where have you been?” You asked.

“Rome.”

“Ah, Mediterranean,” you said. “And the weather?”

“Beautiful.”

You smiled a kind of painful smile. You looked at my tongue and drew a picture of it, with little dots at the tip and arrows describing its color and texture: Quite thick white coating. Red dots. Then you asked me to take off my shoes and socks and lay down on the table.

“Ok, I will leave you for five minutes,” you said.

When you came back into the room and raised the table, I was laying on my back with my hands folded across my stomach. You looked at me and smiled.

“Let’s play,” you said. I laughed politely. You looked at me.

“Do you worry?” you asked so quiet I could barely hear you.

“A little,” I said.

“Since it is only your first time, we will use just four needles,” you said.

Then you slowly pushed up my trousers, and held both my legs in turn, and felt my bones and measured distances along them with your hands. You marked points on my skin with a thin marker.

“Do you have any exercise?” you asked.

You tapped the needles in expertly so I didn’t feel them.

“Ballet twice a week,” I said.

You stood over the table and talked to me the whole time.

“Ah, ballet? I know some people who do ballet. I used to teach Tai Ch’i at a place where they had dance classes.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes. You know kind of meditating movement.” You moved your arms, palms facing each other obliquely, like you were explaining something, and arced subtly to the left. “You would be a good candidate for Tai Ch’i actually.”

“Would I?” I asked. You nodded.

“Where do you live?” you asked.

“Seven Sisters.”

“Ah, Seven Sisters! I used to live there. For five years I lived there. Now I live in Wood Green. We’re neighbours.” You smiled. “And you have been in England how long?”

“Almost five years,” I said.

“It is hard.”

“Yeah, sometimes,” I said.

“You prefer home.”

“I don’t know.”

“It is hard living in England. The English men are selfish.”

“English men are selfish?”

“Ah, I’d better be careful. Your husband is English.”

“He’s not selfish,” I said. You manipulated the needle on my left leg by my ankle.

“Do you feel that?” I felt a nervy electric feeling.

“Yes.”

“And this one?”

“Yes.” You moved past my feet to my right side and turned the needle in my wrist.

“And this one?”

“Yes.”

“And this one?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, you have a good reaction.” You were pleased.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“Greece.”

“You must miss the sun,” I said. You nodded. “I miss seasons,” I said.

“Which part of America do you come from?”

“New York state.”

“New York?”

“State.”

“What is this, the suburbs?”

“No, well yes, but not of New York City. I grew up 150 miles north of the city. You could go 150 miles north again and still be in New York State. It’s a big state.”

“Oh,” you said. “I never knew that.”

“Most people over here don’t.”

You brought over the bio-hazard bucket and pulled the needles out carefully. I didn’t move but you stopped at my wrist.

“Did that hurt?”

“That one, a little,” I said. You held my wrist in your hand and rubbed the point briskly with you fingers.

“Better?” I nodded. You arranged my arm on the table. You rubbed each point with cold, wet cotton.

“This is to remove our tattoos from you,” you said.

After our last session, I went home and changed into my pajamas and they were all there. You had forgotten to remove the marks you had drawn on my legs and arms. I touched each point and I watched them every day as they faded from blue-black to purple-blue to the color of my skin.

When I went back to the clinic I learned that you used Lung 7 on me, which can help to release grief. I wanted to tell you how I had grieved, but you weren’t there. A woman, the one you gave me to, came to get me. She walked ahead of me. She told me she’d used Lung 7 before when someone’s cat died.

Our last appointment, you sat down and said “Maybe we can communicate better this week.” That was because you mumbled and I sometimes couldn’t understand your accent.

“What? Communicate?” I said.

“How have you been feeling?” You asked me, bent over your notes about me.

“Ok.” I said. “Kind of unmotivated.”

“And your mood?”

“Kind of low. And irritable.”

“You feel angry?” You looked at me.

“Yeah, I lose my temper.”

“With your husband?”

“Yeah.”

“You fight?”

“Yeah.”

“You feel tired?”

“Yes.”

“Mmm. This has to do with your lungs, which are very weak right now. You smoke?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“Occasionally marijauna.”

“Mmm. I have to tell you that this is very bad for you. It’s bad for everyone but especially for you. You need to understand how this has happened.” You looked at me. “I think your drug use, combined with your… predisposed weaknesses and the depression you have had, these have really weakened your system. And that is why you have the problems you’re having now.” You wouldn’t let me get out of your gaze. You had an earnest look that was almost a smile but worse. “So, you will need to change your lifestyle. I can help you, but if you keep smoking, it will just be three steps forward…ok? Do we have a deal?” I nodded.

When you came back in the room and I was laying on the table with my bare feet sticking out. You walked over to the side of the table.

“What are you thinking of?” You asked. “You look far away.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m just worrying about the damage I’ve done to my body.”

“Ah,” you said. “Well your drug use, that was a bad choice. Particularly for you. But you are still very young.” Your voice was slower and quieter than ever. “Right, are you?”

I nodded because you wanted me to.

“You’re not old like me.” You smiled. “You have many more experiences, eh?” I nodded. “I haven’t said don’t bother coming again, have I?” I said no. “I’ve spent hours on your case,” you said. You looked at me. You looked out in the direction I was looking and it was quiet. Then you looked back at me. You pushed my trouser legs up slowly and searched out my points carefully.

“Good strong legs,” you said. “She’s a ballerina,” you said, rolling the R over your tongue. I smiled.

“How is the ballet going?” you asked.

“It’s good,” I said. “It’s hard.”

“We will do the same points as last week and then we will do some on your back,” you said. You marked the points on my legs and wrists and tapped the needles in with quick, controlled movements.

“Did that hurt?” You asked.

“No,” I said.

“No?” You said. “Why not?” You smiled. “Do you like your job?” You asked.

“No,” I said.

“Are you going to do something else?” You asked. I felt a line of faint buzzing from my knee to my ankle.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to do something else.”

On my way to work, I think about the Tao Te Ching and try to rid myself of my desires. But then I imagine how I look sitting there, thinking.

I know that I must look inside myself and find the Tao. I know that I must bend to the natural order of the universe, because it will go on whether I bend to it or not. I know that I must allow you to have come and gone like one allows the wind to enter the front door and pass out the window.

I am going to Wood Green station now and I am going to sit outside the exit, on the railing where I waited for my husband when we met for our first date. I feel sure that you take the tube. Even if you only take it occasionally, at odd times, it is the only place I can think of. There are too many people swirling around me, moving and trailing endlessly. Only if I stay still in one place can I hope to connect with your private stream of movement.

I wonder if you would shake your head at the way I am trying to force things, at the way I am seeing only manifestations and no mystery. The only mystery I see is you. The only Tao is sitting here outside the station and scanning the faces, unmoving, contemplating you and how you have changed my life.

c. 2004
© RMT, 2009

The Practical Sublime

2009-03-05T20:14:00.004Z

Miriam was a slim girl with green eyes and red hair and milky skin. But she was not of Irish extraction that she knew of. She had grown up in Westchester County and had attended an elite college for girls where she had not worked very hard but had done remarkably well. Now she was engaged to a doctor and her mother was hovering over her and the wedding plans like a fussy helicopter.

Her fiancé had an uncanny affinity with cliché. It was beyond a joke. For example, the other evening they had gone out to dinner and there had actually been a fly in his soup. But the thing was, he had not seen any humor in it. He called the waiter over and said, quite naturally, and with carefully restrained annoyance: “There is a fly in my soup.” The waiter, deadpan not to be outdone, whisked the offending bowl away with grave apologies, and asked if her fiancé would like to choose another hors d'oeuvre. Although he had not eaten any soup, and had been complaining the whole way to the restaurant that he was famished, he declined. Miriam eyed her avocado halves drizzled with lemon vinaigrette for a moment, and quietly carved into the flesh with a long-handled spoon.

Although this was 1987, Miriam and her fiancé had been seeing each other for eight months and had never gone to bed together. It was a complicated matter. She had slept with two of her previous boyfriends, but her fiancé was under the impression that she had not. He may have also been under the impression that she was of Irish extraction. Whenever things between them became passionate, her fiancé would slip off to have a cold shower. Miriam felt rather disappointed, but did not ask herself if it was not this curiosity and ever-unfulfilled desire which had led her to accept her fiancé’s proposal, which had been given, without a hint of embarrassment, on one knee, with the delivery of the classic formula. Whatever the cause, as their wedding day drew closer, it became clear that theirs was to be an old-fashioned wedding night. Miriam felt it was charming in a way, and the difference between this relationship and her previous ones seemed to be a good omen.

It was an unseasonably warm day in late March, and Miriam lay stretched out on the sofa at her mother’s house. Her mother had gone out to the grocery store, and the house seemed to breathe a quiet sigh of relief. The window was open and through it Miriam watched the branches of the trees being taunted by a light breeze. There were no leaves yet, but small buds could be discerned on the branches nearest the window. She inspected them drowsily, and watched the little birds flitting about the branches. Suddenly she saw a kernel of white which seemed to unfold like a fern among the branches of the tree. In a moment, the tree was festooned with a confetti of white blossoms. Miriam was overwhelmed by a sensation of purity and clarity. She couldn’t move; she could only look with a mixture of fear and wonder at the enchanted tree. She seemed to hear a voice within her mind, one that washed away her fear and, with indistinct murmurs, filled her mind with a host of images: eggs, tents, green meadows, a red curtain going up, and a little boy standing on a mountain.

“Are you asleep?” her mother demanded, on her way to the kitchen. “There’s so much to be done!” Miriam rubbed her eyes. Her mother had passed through the living room, a blur of brown paper bags, frilly celery tops poking out, the jangle of car keys, and the voice which called her back to her senses.

“I might have- must have.” she said, stretching out and giving a yawn. “I got cold,” she said, and got up to shut the window.

“Are you going to Josh’s tonight?” called out the voice from the kitchen.

“Oh, maybe later,” said Miriam. “But he probably has to work late.” Miriam’s fiancée was an emergency room doctor. He often worked late, and Miriam sometimes felt that the atmosphere of the ER was one which the import of their life together could never quite compare to. Of course their relationship had ups and downs, and decisions to be made like any other, but these fluctuations and decisions did not save or cost lives in a matter of moments. In fact, she had never seen her fiancée more passionate than when he had saved the life of a difficult case. She wondered if their wedding night would bring that same expression of elation, shot through with disbelief, to his brown-eyed, clean-shaven face.

The next day was Saturday, and Miriam went to the city museum to look at the paintings. She often went there, alone, as Josh was not fond of paintings. That is, he has seen them once, and that was enough. Miriam went as usual to the Hudson River School section. She liked to sit before the big, moody landscapes. Sometimes, though not always, she felt so moved by them that she almost wanted to cry. The detailed depictions of trees and leaves, sunlight and shadow, big craggy mountains, and sometimes small people, made her want to do something, but she didn’t know what. They made her feel calm and restless at the same time. She supposed there was no one else in the museum, or even in the city, who felt moved by these paintings the way she was. She supposed there was something a bit strange about her, and that settling down with someone logical and practical, someone like Josh, would be the best thing for her. Staring at the line of treetops set against a large cloudy sky, Miriam thought that nothing much would ever happen to her, except for in her daydreams and nightdreams.

Josh called her to say that he would pick her up later. She went home to take a bath, and thought to herself, as usual, that everyone looked at their feet in the bath under the faucets, but only Dali had thought to paint it. That’s what makes geniuses, she thought. She sometimes hoped, since she herself was clearly not a genius, that one day, she might give birth to one. That would be almost as satisfying.

Josh was in a foul temper when he picked her up, because someone had left a banana skin on the sidewalk, and he had slipped and almost broken his neck on his way to her door.

“Never mind, my love,” she said, taking his arm. “You didn’t slip.” (“Though it would have been appropriate,”) she wanted to add, but refrained.

* * *

The next week passed as normal. Miriam moved in the narrow path between work and home, she visited her mother, she and Josh went out, and she slept at night alone. But she did not feel very well. She felt as if all the vitality had been sapped from her, and she couldn’t eat much.

“You’re just nervous, darling,” her mother told her. “It’s perfectly natural, the wedding is only one month away.”

“A month and a half.”

“Well, it’s coming soon! And have you spoken to the photographer? And have you met with the florist? You know there’s so much still to do.”

“Yes, I have spoken to them. It’s all under control, mom. And actually I don’t feel nervous at all.”

“Then why don’t you eat something?”

“Ughh,” she said. “I don’t know. Nothing sounds good. Maybe I’ll have a cucumber.”

Josh told her she was working too hard and promised to help more with the wedding plans.

“You shouldn’t do everything. Anyway, I’ll come with you to meet the pastor.” he said.

So they went together, through the city and into the grounds of the hall where they were to be married. Getting out of the car, Miriam put her hand to her head, and trembled. She held onto the open car door to steady herself.

“What’s wrong?” Josh asked, rushing over. “Are you ok?”

“I feel dizzy,” she said.

“Because you haven’t eaten anything,” he said. “You can’t go on like this, Miriam. Your system is reacting badly to stress.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s ask the pastor for some water.”

They walked up the grassy path to the hall, Miriam on Josh’s arm, and found the pastor by the door, waiting for them. He took them both warmly by the hands, and looked into their eyes with that longing that pastors so often have.

“I’m so glad to see you,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”

They went into a small office, furnished minimally in neutral colors. The pastor sat them on a couch opposite his chair.

“Can I offer you anything?” he asked.

“Some water would be great,” Josh said. “And some cookies or something if you have any? Miriam’s blood sugar is low; she hasn’t eaten anything.”

“Sure. Just a minute,” the pastor said, and left the room.

“Are you sure you’re ok?” Josh asked, holding her hand.

“Actually, I think I’m going…” she said. “I think I’m sick.”

The pastor came back in with two glasses of water and several slices of pound cake on a plate.

“Father, where’s the bathroom?” Miriam asked, then put her hand to her mouth.

“This way,” he said, opening the door he had come out of, and pointing.

The Pastor and Josh sat back down in the office.

“She must be coming down with something,” Josh said. “She hasn’t been feeling well all week.”

“That’s too bad,” the pastor said. “It’s the time of year for it. The change of seasons and all.”

“Yes,” Josh said. “And Miriam isn’t that strong.”

“Well, she might be stronger than you think,” the pastor said. Then, “So, how are you feeling about the wedding?”

“Oh, I’m- we’re both excited,” Josh said. “And looking forward to settling down, moving into our house, going on our honeymoon. Seems like we’ve been waiting so long.”

“Yes, it’s a wonderful time when you’re first married,” the pastor said. “But it can also be a challenging time. It will be an adjustment for both of you.”

“Oh I don’t expect much will change,” Josh said. “We’re best friends.”

* * *

Miriam was ill, but it was not like any illness she had known before. She just felt tired all the time and not hungry, and sometimes she threw up.

“It’s stress,” her mother said. “And I want you to go to the doctor.”

“Yes,” Josh agreed. “It’s been two weeks. But I’m convinced that this is psychological.”

So she went to see her doctor, who told her she was pregnant.

“But, that’s impossible.” she said.

“You mean you’ve been using protection?” the doctor asked.

“I mean, I – we’re not. It’s impossible… Can you check again?”

The doctor gave her a second pregnancy test which confirmed the result.

“So I guess this isn’t planned?” her doctor asked.

“I haven’t been sleeping with anyone,” Miriam said. “I-“

“Well, in rare cases, pregnancy can happen through sexual behavior without intercourse,” the doctor said.

“No, I, there haven’t been any instances. At all.”

The doctor looked at her.

“Miriam,” he said. “There has to have been an instance. You are pregnant. Now think about any possible time that this could have happened.”

“My fiancée and I are waiting until we get married,” she said, her eyes getting wet. “We haven’t done anything except kiss. We-” She started to cry.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you in any other way,” the doctor said. “Except maybe refer you to the family planning clinic. They have counsellors there.”

Miriam walked out of the office and to her car in a daze. She got into the car but didn’t drive towards home. Instead she drove out of the city and into the suburbs. Beside the road, an old interstate from the Eisenhower era, she saw grassy meadows, and in the distance, a canopy. Under the canopy sat an old woman at a picnic table selling flowers. She stopped the car.

The woman wasn’t doing anything. She was just sitting on a lawn-chair, in front of the picnic table, upon which sat buckets of carnations and tulips- red, yellow, pink, and white.

“Hi there,” Miriam said, and smiled at the woman.

“Yes, my love,” the lady said. “So nice to see you at last.”

Miriam looked at the flowers.

“I’ve been waiting. The world has been waiting.”

“I’m sorry?” Miriam said.

“We’ve been waiting for you.”

“I’m sorry,” Miriam said. “You must have mistaken me for someone else.”

“No, it’s you,” she said, fishing in the bucket of tulips next to her. She got out a bunch of yellow ones and tied them together with string, and wrapped them in paper.

“Here,” she said, offering the bouquet, “You take these and go tell your fiancé what happened.”

Miriam extended her hand dumbly, took the flowers, and didn’t even remember to offer to pay. She just murmured thank you and walked back to the car.

* * *

She was waiting for Josh to come over for dinner. The tulips were in a green glass vase on the table, and against the white tablecloth, it was a lovely effect. She knew she had to say something, but what was she going to say?

The doorbell rang.

“Hello, Mir,” Josh said, kissing her. “How are you?”

“Yes, good,” she said.

“Feeling better?”

“Yes, well, yes,” she said. They went into the living room and sat at the table. “You know I went to the doctor on Friday.”

“Yes, what did Allman say? Stress, I’ll bet. Like I told you.”

“Actually, he said, but I don’t understand, Josh. I can’t understand what he said.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, well, it’s impossible, but, he said I’m, we’re, going to have a baby.”

Josh stared at her. “Miriam,” he said.

“I-“

“Miriam, what do you mean?”

“He said I’m pregnant, but I don’t understand how that can be.”

“You know how babies are made, Miriam. You know how that can be.”

“But you know, we-”

“Yes, it’s impossible that we...” Josh said. He looked at the tulips on the table. He razed his arm across the table and the vase broke upon the marble floor.

“Josh!” Miriam said. “You don’t think.”

“Miriam, I’m a doctor. I know what this means. I just don’t know why you even try to pretend.”

“I am telling you,” she said, tears running out of her eyes, “there is no one else.”

“Well, what is it, then?” he asked. “The second coming?” At that, Miriam looked for a moment at the shards of green glass and yellow petals on the floor, and fainted.

She woke up stretched out on the sofa, with her feet elevated on a cushion, alone.

“Something has happened,” Miriam thought. She thought about the paintings in which the landscapes are so large and beautiful they go on forever beyond the canvas, and the people are just tiny shapes, little creatures dwarfed by that grandeur. “Something has happened to me,” she thought, placing her hand on her stomach, and smiled.

May 2007
© RMT, 2009

Yes, You Are

2009-02-24T17:53:00.004Z

I loved the way his heart fit into my hands. Pink still and fresh, the same smooth tissue as his lungs. Unlearned, unused, easily captured.

I remember last summer in faded sunshine and sweat trickling down my back as I scanned the green fields for him. The camp was swarming with children, and us, the small army of red-shirted counsellors, trying to bring them to order. Our eyes would meet at unbelievable distances, him out on the baseball field waiting to bat, me passing with my flock of five year olds. I could always recognise his form, no matter how far away and how many other children he was among. Other children would run up to me giggling and shout “Ryan loves you! Ryan said he’d die if he kissed you!” They expected anything but my smile. And if Ryan was there, and they said it to me to tease him, they only received his quiet retort: “I don’t care. She knows I love her. I told her a hundred times.”

This summer I have to give him up. But what could I say now? You see, Ryan, last year when I wasn’t letting you put your arm around me, I was in the bathroom of a dingy café sticking a needle in my thigh. You could see the bruises when I wore my bathing suit.

He ran up to me with red Kool-Aid stains at the corners of his mouth and held out a water bottle.
“Thirsty?”
“No. Yes.” I took the drink to my mouth. It was cool down my throat, burning. My stomach turned every time I saw him. He would pick the heads off yellow dandelions and pour them into my hand with a big smirk on his face.
“These are for you.” Eyelashes fluttering, as if in a play, knowing his friends were watching.
“Why don’t you kiss her?” one of the girls asks. She puckers her lips, caked orange with cheese puffs.
“Your shoelaces are untied,” I say. She extends a dirty pink sneaker. I bend down and tie the wet gritty laces, and stand back up, hands on my hips.
“I have to go pee,” she says.
“I’m coming, too,” says Ryan. We cross the gravel path and the child runs ahead to the locker room, clutching the crotch of her corduroys, and disappears behind the wooden door. There is a flash of white tiles, and I lean against the wall and smile at him.
“Why do you always look at me and smile?” he asks.
“I don’t know.” He leans his head on my shoulder, turns his face into the cloth of my sweatshirt. The girl bursts back out of the bathroom.
“Eeew!” She says and screws up her mouth.
“What?” Says Ryan, a smile sneaking onto his face, his blue eyes flattening. Back at the playground, he runs to the side of the pavilion where milkweed grows in thick bunches. He harvests quickly, filling his hands with the green pods, and runs towards me. He peels open the plants and rubs handfuls of the dense white fuzz onto my arms and shoulders as I squirm away, shouting “Stop it!” laughing and grabbing at his wrists. He pushes more cottony down onto my face and hair. I grab some off the ground and put it down his shirt.
“OK, cut it out!” I say and take off my smile. He throws the rest of the milkweed at me and runs a short distance off, turns and looks back at me, grinning.

He was so earnest. I asked him if he went to church.
“Ye-s,” he says. His voice hits two tones, grave. “And I have a rosary, and my priest, he blessed it for me.”
“Oh,” I say, and smile.
“Ryan! We’re leaving!” His counsellor beckons.
“Bye,” he says, and runs off to his friends, boys all shorter than him. He smiles at me and they disappear down the path.

The lapping water skirts my ankles, chilly at first but now almost warm on my skin. A small artificial sea, a sloping bowl of white concrete, and me at the edge of it. I lost my sunglasses again. I strain to keep my eyes open, but the brightness forces them into slits, so I can only see patches of watery blue and white dints of harsh sunlight. He hasn’t come swimming today. His group came ten minutes ago and he’s not here, but my eyes still skim the pool and grassy area for him. After swimming lessons, he used to drape his towel around my shoulders and put his arm around me. His friends and classmates would laugh and point.
“Kiss! Kiss!” They say. He turns his face to me, puckered lips wobbling in laughter. I roll my eyes and push his forehead away with my hand.
At lunchtime once we were sitting by ourselves at a picnic table.
“I humped a girl once,” he said.
“Yeah right,” I said and looked away.
“Well, it looked like we were, but we weren’t really.” I didn’t say anything. “But we could do it. Boys are usually on top. I’d have to be on top because you weigh more than me.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. I walked quickly up the grassy path along the pool fence, the warm thickness of the air stifling me. My shirt clung damply to my back, and I couldn’t get a deep breath.
When I came out of the bathroom there was a steady stream of children passing, and Ryan standing by the tree. He walked over to me and handed me a paper bag.
“You forgot your lunch,” he said.
“Oh, thanks.”
“Bye!” he said and took off.

The next day at lunch one of his friends came up to me with half a bag of potato chips. He was smiling that embarrassed smile I recognized from other children. I never saw the expression on Ryan’s face, often a joking or a funny face, but always sure.
“These are for you. From Ryan,” the kid said, and handed me the bag. “He really loves you.” I smiled and took the chips, and ate them with difficulty, almost choking on them. He came over to me.
“Thanks,” I said and smiled. “Why the messenger?” He sat down next to me.
“I don’t know. He wanted to talk to you.”
“Oh.”
“He said I can’t be your boyfriend because I’m only nine.”
“Well.” I say, and empty the bag’s last crumbs into my mouth, “It’s only ten years.”
“Yeah.” He rubs my shoulder.
“They don’t understand us,” I say, and scratch his head, and he starts laughing, his hand over his face.

But that was last summer, and now I am afraid of him. I overheard the camp director on the telephone in the office. Her professional voice floated down to my ears through the screen door. I heard her say my name with the intonation of a question and follow as an answer “She’s very sweet.” I knew she was talking to his mother.
Last year had been marked by a feeling of abandon. I’d thought it was my last summer at the camp. But here I was again, back among the same grass and trees and gym equipment, back among the same kids, who remembered everything with a kid’s perfect memory.
The first day back, my eyes chased the fields for him. I recognized his group. One of his friends, the blond chubby kid, came up to me.
“Ryan Patterson still loves you,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” I said, terrified and pleased, playing it cool. The kid ran back to his group. Where did he get this information? Ryan is not with his group. Must have been at school. He must not be here this week. He’ll surely be here next week.
Only later, by the swimming pool, wrapped in my towel and staring at the reflections of sun, I turn my head and he is standing right next to me, silent. I know it is him, but somehow I can’t believe it.
“Hi!” I say, in a cheerful counsellor voice, and look away. I look back to see his skinny legs and blue trunks receding from me. I dive into the pool and swim the length of it, wishing to remain submerged, mute and blameless as a fish.

He was the opposite of me as a child. I hid in the bushes when a school bus passed my house. He was loud and funny and a talker. He orchestrated several shows with his friends, lip-syncing and dancing on stage in front of the whole camp. He was sent to the director’s office once for leading them in ‘an inappropriate dance.’ I tried to react as the other counsellors did as I watched him swing his narrow hips and mouth the words ecstatically- “I want you back, baby, ooh yeah!” His friends, the back-up singers, were all laughing and being silly, but Ryan was dead serious. He sang like he was famous. After the show, I stood talking to another counsellor. One of the little girls was holding my hand.
“He’s a great kid,” the other counsellor said of Ryan. “Really talented.” I nodded. The little girl swung her arm, moving my hand back and forth like a wacky pendulum.
“I don’t like him,” she said.
“How come?” I asked.
“He’s too weird. He acts like he’s a man.”

There were glances exchanged but they were sparse. And though he avoided my eyes, he seemed to always be near me, lingering behind the bushes at lunchtime and peeping at me. Finally he made his approach to my lunch table, followed by the blond chubby kid who was smirking and pushing him from behind.
“Hi,” I said. He looked alert and quiet. Like a deer in the forest.
“Ryan still loves you,” his friend betrayed. I smiled.
“That’s ok.” He stood a moment and turned sharply before I could breathe. After that my smiles were not returned, but his blue eyes darted away from me painfully.
The summer dragged on. When I drove to camp in the mornings, I would smoke a cigarette and try to savour it. I would promise myself not to sneak one in the bathroom, smoking being forbidden on the campgrounds. I did not look forward to the end of the day, not to dinner or going into town to float and come to rest on stoops or to follow my companions into indistinct apartments where people hunched over tables and rented time next to other people they did not know.

It was the last week of camp the day the science counsellor brought in a baby robin he had found. He had it in a little cage lined with a towel, and he got the children to find tender young worms for it to eat. At the end of the day the groups all sat on the grass and waited for their parents to pick them up. At the corner of the field by the soccer goal, I saw Ryan squatting by the cage. A few others were resting by their backpacks on the grass. I went over to him and looked at the bird.
“Oh, he’s so cute.” I said. He nodded.
“Did you find any worms for him?”
“Nah, there was too many for him to eat.” The bird was chirping and hopping around in the cage, fuzzy and awkward.
“I found a baby bird once a few years ago,” I said.
“You never told me that!” He said. He looked reproachful.
“I guess I forgot.”
“Oh, it’s my mom,” he said. He gathered up his bag and ran off to the car.

The kids goggled over us. “They’re back together! Do you love her, Ryan?” He squirmed.
“They think I still like you, but I like someone else.”
“I know,” I said.
“She’s sixteen.”
I smiled wanly. She was a junior counsellor who flirted with the other juniors and wore skimpy shorts. I had seen him walking with her and wearing her sweatshirt, the sleeves covering all but the tips of his fingers.

In the evening I drove downtown. When I found myself in one of the old apartments overlooking the park, and one of my companions’ head nodded onto my shoulder, I went into the bathroom and thought about shattering the mirror, ripping the door off its hinges and hurling it into the living room where they all sat like a bunch of corpses. Instead I rolled up my jeans and took another shot and laid down on the bath mat. There was a damp patch under my cheek where someone had stepped with dripping feet.
Later, when I was walking down the street, someone I knew saw me. He stopped me and gave me a hug.
“Hey, what’s up?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“You look fucked up.”
“I am,” I said.
“On what?” he asked, amused.
“K.” I said. I had looked in the mirror earlier. My eyes were red and my pupils were black holes.
“Wanna get a coffee?” he asked. I looked at him. I had loved him for about a year but had forgotton him over the summer. His eyelids were pink; his skin seemed old and soiled by dirty air. His lungs were probably grey and tired with the smoke of hundreds of joints, pipes and straws.
“I gotta go,” I said, summoning a weak smile. “I have work tomorrow.”
It was the last day of camp. Ryan stood by me, and asked me if I ever smoked cigarettes.
“You better not smoke cigarettes,” I said. “It’s stupid, they’re really bad for you.”
“I won’t,” he said. “Did you ever smoke?”
“Yeah, I did. But I quit. It was stupid of me to ever start.”
“When you’re twenty-one, I know you’ll drink, too,” he said. “I can tell.”
“I’ll probably taste it,” I said. “You’ll have to wait ‘til you’re twenty-one, too.”
“I will.”
I ruffled his hair. He smiled hard and looked at the ground. He looked at me.
“I do still like you a little,” he said. I smiled. His mother’s green caravan swept into the dusty circle.
“Your mom’s here.” He slung his book-bag onto his shoulder and straightened up. He’d gotten a lot taller since last summer.
“Am I your favourite camper?” He asks, looking up at me hopefully.
“Yes,” I say. “You are, Ryan.” And he smiles and runs off.

c. 1999
© RMT, 2009

A pair of Poems

2009-02-15T18:46:00.003Z

Ante

Some drops of water will not slip
Even off the waxiest leaves.
I learn a new way to know eggs:
The kind which amble in curving arcs;
And those which lie still on tables
Holding themselves against tremors.
The first kind have skins both smooth and engraved
Like a beach fired badly and then cooled.
In water the others are silent divers
Which calcify even as they disclose their porosity.
I could let one of these rest in my grasp
And describe the volumes within.
If I hold it long enough my hand will forget
And the shell collapses, weightless.
For now paper eyelids open and close like moth wings
While I envision the oily surface inside the pearl.

RMT Dec. 10, 2003

Post

There is a brown germ in the blue of my father’s eye
When I look at you I see him
When I look at him I see safety.
You cracked like the faintest trace of light under a doorway
It hurts you to keep it closed
But you push your whole hard self against it
Muscles bound up tight
Blood held in close
Words vetted and vetted again
Choking you with what they want to be.

I like the look of your shell
Smooth and fine and the color of chalk
It felt different from how it looked
Cooler and more leathery, like a reptile’s egg.
I picked it up like I had not been skirting it the whole season
Keeping it free from cover by dark seaweed
Safe from the hungry gulls, the rising tide.
I held it and could feel no movement
But it was not as cold
As the wet sand, the wet wind.

The smell of salt made my wrists heavy
And the light changed in an indiscernable shift
Above me were callous legions
Of sea birds black against the grey of the sky
I pressed you.
The skin gave under the weight of my thumb
And I left it where I had found it-
On a basin of sand
On the edge of the tideline
In reach of the sea.

RMT
March 23, 2004

© RMT, 2009

Megalo

2009-02-10T21:44:00.010Z

This is two chapters of an unfinished existential novel set in London, written in 2003. Would anyone want to read this? I have no idea. But it's got to go.

MEGALO

CHAPTER 1

My story is all wrong. I do my best. I try to tie it, to tighten it, to give it an admirable shape. But it is all wrong and always has been. And so I am delayed. With that peculiar sensation I always accrue while reading a novel, I feel that as I read I am holding something in my mind, continuing but meaning to go back and re-read, to work over something more carefully, to make a note even, to fully absorb some sensation that has moved me but a little too subtly, too intangibly, that thing which has piqued my interest, or escaped my full comprehension. When it grows to an intensity sufficient to pull me out of the stream of narrative, I stop, dog-ear the page, and retrace the phrases, searching line by line for whatever has arrested my progression. Sometimes I cannot find it. And sometimes I realize that this feeling has carried over into my life, and I laugh at my own futility, my childish denial of the way things are, at how I long to go back, because it is the only thing I can see. And so it is that aspects of my life have been on hold for increasing spans of time, while I stop in vain, yet in vain to stop, and ceaselessly rework my own history, until it becomes unrecognisable, a painting whose colors have become muddied, a gesture drawing which has been overworked to the point of blacking out all negative space.

I arrived in the morning and walked calmly into the office. The receptionist and I exchanged smiles, but I reserved my firm but friendly handshake for the interviewer. She soon came out to fetch me, and led the way into the boardroom with the glass pitcher of water, the waiting glasses, the waiting panel. I smiled and greeted all round, and sat down with the perfect measure of humility and confidence, professionalism and informality. I explained my firm commitment to a challenging job in which I could utilise my natural abilities and further develop the skills I had acquired in my previous positions. I spoke to them of teamwork and self-reliance, of communication and discretion, of liasons and loyalties. They asked me about my skills. They offered hypothetical descriptions of challenging situations and I answered in an analytical and thoughtful tone which mirrored the reasoned and assured response I would elicit to any such happening. I repeated back to them what they said in arresting reversals of sentence structure, empathising with their search for a reliable and competent secretary. Carolyn, Office Manager, exchanged a glance with Tim from Human Resources. I took a sip of water. Carolyn showed me out, offering me a handshake which I recognised as closing more than the interview.

Yesterday on the way to work I witnessed a small drama under a bush outside the tube station. A flock of sparrows were darting and fluttering around an empty crisp packet, feasting on the crumbs in a completely communal manner, when one of them somehow got stuck inside the wrapper. The brightly colored foil started a panicked dance and the others chirped and flitted around it, in an unconsciously beautiful accompaniment, helpless. I stopped and stared, powerless to do anything. How could I invade their world? Could I even extract him without causing his little heart to arrest with terror at my intervention? Or without breaking up their happy party and forever darkening their beliefs in the nature of reality as they went about their daily business? I waited. Eventually the wrapper got stuck on a branch of the bush and the bird hopped out, his brown feathers shiny and littered with pale yellow flecks, but unharmed after all.

I have realized that something happened to me, and it did not announce itself as a defining moment until after the fact. Not until I went back to it, several days later, and replayed it, and listened to the tonal subtleties, which took me several times, and suddenly that warm glowy feeling crept all the way up into my face and I started. I haven’t said a word about this to anyone, and I know that this is one of the things I never will, because it is too perfect, cannot be touched. I was walking home from work and in no hurry, enjoying the balmy evening, the Indian summer which I also will say to no one, even that phrase I treasure and fear somehow, because it connects to histories I cannot comprehend, when towns thought about building stockades but by then it was too late, when ambushes and Pa’s got the shotgun, Ma’ll take the pistol, take the baby…Nevermind. I was walking and I had this gushing feeling, like I love the City. I started smiling in that way to myself. I started thinking things without worrying about what they were, or how they would sound, or if they were real, because I knew that to me they were and no one else would ever hear them, that I would not mar them with the saying and the hearing, but that I could trade it back and forth between self and self, and it would grow. I walked past Bank Station and even though it was the location of my last revelation, I could not have gone down there. I walked and I felt like all I wanted to do was walk. I will tell you in a minute how I have since walked all the way to and from work every day, seven miles, both ways, and this also I have told no one and I am happy. But there are a few people who I do not tell who witness daily (or semi-daily) various legs of my journey, and if they all just knew it, there it would be, the truth without even being said. It is possible. I don’t even need to tell this to myself, I have proved it with my own life. I walked up Poultry and turned up Old Jewry, whose enchanting name and slight curving I cannot resist even after so many times, then across and down Ironmongers, back to Cheapside and then down Bread Street, a little tour of medieval London, sitting here, seemingly quiet, yet perpetually speaking the history which exists even if it can only be felt as dream or cinema. But I still have not gotten to what happened, because each time I look there is another strand to be pulled into the embroidery, another row, row upon row, and it is all so much bigger and more vibrant than I ever thought possible, so much the opposite of what I always thought recollection to be, that is unchangeable in its nature. I have given up on those kinds of thoughts, and yet even those words makes it sound too much like a negative action, when it is ever so much more one of building. I used to worry about running out of room, running out of time. What a fool I have been and yet even to realise that makes me more happy than I can bear!

I come to the river and I climb up the stairs to Southwark Bridge. It is fully day, softened by evening but still elegantly day, and I stand and cross my arms on the railing, and lean my head on them, and look out over the scene, at a thin piece of driftwood rolling surprisingly fast through the muddy waters, at the evening sun glinting off the dome of St Paul’s. There is nothing to keep me, there is no one to tell, and I realise that my freedom is the thing that I prize above all else, and I don’t mean American Freedom, or Economic Freedom, or the Freedom to Succeed. There is no success here nor failure, there is just me, me moving, me stopping, me writing, me being quiet, me living, me dying, me keeping it all to myself, so it grows stronger and more vibrant, and more unstoppable. Oh how I stop it, oh how I bundle it up inside me and put on a different face, and go to work in the morning. But even that is not a chore, even that is a decision. There is nothing which is not my choosing. I might keep that one, and tell it to one person, perhaps, if I ever come across the one who needs it most, who might take it and not touch it too much, but put it away and not smile and say no more about it.

By the time I get to St Paul’s, the sun is low, and the churchyard has that shadowy look and I can pretend it is full summer, not September, and I can believe that more is possible than I could ever imagine. Because I sit on the stoop and I look at my body, my life, dwarfed by Wren’s achievement. And I walk past King Street and Queen Street, facing each other across the intersection like a pair of unseen silhouettes, chess pieces, cards- and I think, without a trace of embarrassment, my lips still moving with the fervor of my thoughts, Do I live here? Is this my life? Am I so lucky? See I don’t want to tell anyone. It is enough for me, too much for me, to feel this, to walk home, to take a bath, to lay on my stomach with my hand curled by my face, and to sleep.

In March I now realize that I was someone else. I can barely believe that I walked along the river and felt that it was spring, and launched into a reverie about the seasons, unable to believe that I was feeling the spring feeling, the change in the weather which I had known in my childhood and which I felt sure I had never experienced in London before. Was the weather changing or was I? I liked the rhythm of these words and I whispered them to myself as I walked. I ended up in the churchyard and I felt a contentment there which has drawn me back again and again. I like it best in the evening, when the crowds have gone, when the interior is cool and dark and unseen, and the smooth shell of the cathedral allows the air to circle and circle its perfect geometry. No one has yet realized that I haunt this place. But I will come to later what I came to know myself on a different day, which is you can never know the mind of anyone else, even if they try to tell you and you try to hear it, because what they tell you will be only what you hear, and what you hear will differ both from the telling and the teller’s hearing, as his own words play back to him, surprised, or satisfied, or ashamed. But on this day I was not having these kind of thoughts. Instead I was thinking about the dead people buried under the ground where I sat, the tombs quietly resting in the shadows of the pines under the Cathedral. What would London be without St Paul’s? What would the world be? And then I suddenly realized that people do, everyone does, I could, I was, altering the world. Even after I was dead I would be, like those dusty bones under the old ground, apparently beyond all agency, but in the world and of the world yet.

A fox wandered into the churchyard and I felt one moment of elation, bordering on fear, as I tried to orient myself to his presence. He sniffed under a tree, so light on his feet, so compact, effortlessly measuring his strength. Then he looked up at me and I did not move, but looked back at him, at the picture he made in my eye, and tried to see what picture I made in his. Then he turned and trotted away into the shadows. See that was not nothing. I might come to later what I thought it was, if I can find a way to say it without destroying it. I think I have done all right so far.

For a long time my problem was I kept talking. I kept looking at people and trying to say something to them, and the words just flooded out of me, almost against my will. I could tell even before I did it what I would do and what would happen. I would begin by releasing a soft sigh and floating my eyes above my head, or far out across the room, and then I would say something like “Sometimes I feel like something is happening to me,” or “I have been spending time in cafes.” Immediately how betrayed I felt by my own words, how ashamed, and yet I kept talking. “I wonder how long I will continue like this. Don’t you feel that sometimes?” And the people around me would shift uneasily, and answer vaguely or not at all. I would then leave shortly after, feeling completely drained, as if any shades of authenticity, of real feeling which I had been building up secretly for a few days, or a week, had been purged from my being, leaving only a shabby vessel, ruins. But along with the shame, I would also feel a kind of relief. At least they knew the truth about me, the paltry clichés which I employ to cover myself over, to keep myself going. At least we could all stop pretending about me and my life. And some time later I would recover, I would make my vow again, to keep quiet, to store it all away and use it to make something better than myself. But it always comes back to the same thing with me. You will see that I am right.

When I come home in the evenings I do not do what they do. I do not hang my coat on a peg and flip on the TV, or stumble in around midnight, after-work drinks having clouded the whole night again like ink in a glass of water. I do not do anything to forget myself. Everything I do is with the knowledge that I am still here and I will be somewhere else before anyone realises it. I may be accused of envy. It may not be believed that I enjoy preparing a meal for myself, or that choosing the hour of my bedtime still delights me as it would a child who knows the indignity of obeisance. I do not need to prove it. I decided not to walk today, but waited for the bus on Princes Street, and watched the people rush by. I could not make out what they were in such a hurry for, how so many could pass by the charming street names and curling lanes of the patchwork city, and not stop, not look, not take a moment to notice the world and their place in it. For there is no dividing line where one begins and the other ends. They are the city; it moves and changes with each intake of unconscious breath. What is the difference between this pulsing city and the limbs of a tree which seems to breathe in the wind? If we could find someway to be alert without noticing, to adopt the habit of effortless strength, ah, but who am I preaching to? When I come home I do not even take off my coat but quickly choose a record, something to drown out the sirens and the dogs outside the window. I pull it out of its sleeve and place it on the turntable, and I sink onto the couch and wait for the music to reveal itself. I have unwittingly chosen the rainy one, and I press my scarf to my face and feel something, like a tension, like I am in love, but there is no one it is directed to, so I pull it back in, and hold it, and wait for the music to build. I recognise the sparse soundscape, sombre strings holding themselves open to the little bunches of notes which fall like raindrops off wet trees, both expected and astounding in their strange timings. I like to listen to it and try to hear it as itself, a chance piece which I may pick again tomorrow, or not for several months. See, I don’t want to “know” classical music the way this is usually meant. I don’t want to take it up as another object of study, another canon to be mastered and expounded upon in certain circles to show that I am a credible member. Circles are not made of people. But music can describe them, if you listen and only hear that moment of hearing. Even if you have heard a piece a hundred times before, you can discover a new shape for the first time, where you previously thought there had only been green space. That is why I buy old classical records in charity shops in large quantities, and cover over their labels in white paper, and place them all in white sleeves. There may be the odd piece I recognise, or some familiarity my mind registers and cannot help but pipe up “Berloiz,” but I do my best to unlearn it. I don’t want anything interfering with my relation to the sound. I want to receive it as it is, so that all the structures which have been built around it melt away, as I used to, as an exercise, try to imagine Tottenham Court Road when it was just an empty turnpike filtering into farmland. I made the mistake of beginning with that, and spent many years in bitter disappointment.

I speak strongly to myself, but in reality I am just as weak as anyone. I still feel old feelings, and allow myself to rummage through the photographs I used to take. In fact my whole adolescence was propelled by the desire to record. I took photos of myself in the mirror. I recorded my room, my family, my daily life, the journey to school, the people on the street. There is one of an old man eating bread over a garbage can. The pigeons are flocked around him so that he has become an island. He appears as oblivious of them as he was to me, snatching his picture and feeling my eyes well up with my own humanity. See not his, mine. It is the same with all of the pictures. I acted like I was crafting something, but I was only crafting its appearance. I keep them to remind me.

My old journals I keep but don’t have the stomach to read. I tried last year but couldn’t get past the first page. It floods back a whole realm of self-indulgence. How I threw it all away, like my thoughts and my feelings were objects in and of themselves, like they could never be weakened. When really with each stroke of my pen I was killing them, one by one transforming my life into dead moments, frozen images, affectless scrap. I know better now. I walk down Green Lanes and I hold myself in. I feel my stomach tighten as I pass the open shops, men locked into tiny clapboard cubicles, speaking to their far-off families in a dozen languages, in a hundred stories. I see a bride in the hair salon, and a flock of adolescent girls in sleeveless satin gowns, sparkling on the pavement like a lost handful of gems, their bare necks shivering in the autumn air. See I still feel like I want to keep it, but I resist. I know that there is no way to keep it. Better to keep walking, to notice it and relish it and let it pass as one lets the wind enter a window and exit by another across the room. I see a mother and child on the common, the mother holds a ball out to him but the child is only interested in the changed world, in the way his path is covered with dead leaves which crush and crinkle under his steps. He laughs and she laughs and I feel myself turn again in a direction which stuns me.

Other times I let myself get too far. I may sit in a chair listening to what I can’t help knowing is Smetana’s Ma Vlast, a piece I have loved since before I decided to unlearn things, and which I don’t mind knowing, because his vision is so perfect. I feel sometimes that even if I was never told, I would see the same rolling hills, and curving river dipping down into dark woodlands, so clearly described by the music. I closed my eyes and asked myself if I was becoming narcissistic. And I answered myself, with some measure of indulgence, that if I was I had always been so, and that it was the most natural and beneficial way to be in relation to one’s self. So many people run from themselves. They do not take the time to love themselves and give to their own beings the way they would to anyone else. Swooning with myself, feeding on myself, there is no danger of letting me down. I push myself higher and higher. I make myself giddy. Even if I burst into tears, I hold my own head and enjoy the release, the pleasure of being comforted like a small child. There is no one who can treat me as well as I treat myself.

CHAPTER 2

Meg Connors is an illusion. I like to walk and sit and stand, and feel it coating me like an oily residue. It shimmers when I dance. I walk into the office and I feel myself shift. I am suddenly someone who really only wants a cup of coffee, who is nice because she will offer the same drink to others, who asks after weekends and families and lives she knows nothing about, people with whom she never makes actual contact, and who interact with her as if things were different from what they are.

Carolyn showed the first signs of insanity today which I have been expecting since I began work at the bank a month ago. She questioned my positioning of a staple on an inter-office memo, saying it would look neater if I had done it vertically. I smiled. I didn’t know what to say. So I said I’d put the kettle on. In the office kitchen I picked at a tray of triangular sandwiches left over from the board meeting- tuna and cucumber, cheese and tomato, egg mayonnaise. The kettle turned itself off, a self-contained unit. I tried to remember making the last cup of coffee before this one. I had not had one yet that morning, so it was at home. I imagined myself in my pajamas, bare feet and messy hair. I retreated to the image of waking. Did my alarm wake me this morning or did I wake before it, racing with it in my sleep, and winning, so to speak? Did I remember my dreams? Out of bed and the first walk to the kitchen. Did I stretch, rub my eyes? Was the kettle in its usual place by the cutlery tray, or was it left askant on the counter? Did I make real coffee or instant? I think it was real.

My journeys at this time were by tube. I saw Terry outside the tube station every day. Somewhere we began to exchange smiles. He had a surprisingly warm smile, face not frozen like the others. There was still lots of sparkle there. He would take off his woolly hat to reveal a balding head, with a few crazy black locks. He took to kissing my hand, after making a big show of wiping his mouth on his sleeve first. We rehearsed some strange play of princess and rogue. But see I can’t even think those words out without feeling sick. It was never about him.

On the underground at my end was nothing. I often saw the same people day after day, and yet seeing them only made me feel that I had witnessed some crazy loop of stock footage. Their images played in my eye for a moment, and I never thought of them again until another moment, indistinguishable, presented itself, and I felt a small nudge from time, nothing more.

I must avoid composing. Why can’t I just let things be? I try to eat my lunch like I have never seen it before. I try to resist rehearsing the making of the sandwich that morning, so I go the other way, and imagine it in my stomach, being digested, my body extracting nutrients from it. And then I am overcome by the intricate processes going on inside me, over which I can assert no authority. The sensation is familiar. When I was younger I often had to hunch over, cover my breast and scrunch up my eyes because I was haunted by the image of my own heart beating. I imagined the pink muscle pulsing continually, sickened at how it had been going for eighteen years already, never stopping to take a break, how did it do that? Even as I think this I feel it again, nausea and fear at that inexplicable pump, opening and closing like a fist full of blood.

Maybe I am kidding myself.

I have things I could talk to Silas about, if he’d let me. Silas is my neighbour. He probably doesn’t expect me to be like him. He’s an old man. But I think we could both sit and talk about some past which exists only like a black and white photo, images rehearsed and relived like dreams which have us convinced for a moment, like the powerful kind of déjà vu which seems untouched by the skipping synapse explanation I have been offered. I could tell him about how I was once dancing with my friends, had a few drinks, and felt my eyes turning funny, and we all danced and smiled, looking at each other, smiling and dancing, and I tried to say something. I said something, but the music was loud. I turned to the friend on my right and said, mumbling, and smiling too hard: “Sometimes.” I looked at the other one and started again. “Guys! Sometimes…” To both of them. “Sometimes…I think things have, hidden meanings.” And I turned and they weren’t even looking at me. It as almost too perfect the way neither of them even asked me to repeat myself, neither was paying any attention, like that too was part of it, some big plan, some infinite thing waiting, just waiting for me to say it louder, to admit it. See these are the kind of thoughts I have. And probably Silas wouldn’t understand them at all. I won’t tell anyone about it, and after all I am glad they didn’t hear me.

c. 2003
© RMT 2009

Deer

2009-02-08T20:03:00.003Z

hush green creeping wind murmurs
so still but for shaking leaves
under the breeze some smell of cold.
but wait ears up green wind brush-
a little runner in the ferns
did you see him rustle by so fleeting?
come close now though and quiet
and listen to the wood,
come let me run my rough flat tongue
over your wee white spots my young.

c. 1998
© RMT 2009

The great clear-out

2009-02-05T17:57:00.003Z

I am the first one to tell people how good it feels to have a clear-out. Just ask my boyfriend, a master hoarder. You might not think it if you saw all the stuff in our room- four computers, six art portfolios, a tower of shoe boxes, and assorted hardware of unknown purpose and origin, but I've actually convinced him to get rid of a lot of stuff. However, he still doesn't seem to enjoy it as much as I do. I love going through stuff and throwing stuff away, putting all my papers in order, and piling up bags for charity. But there is one area where the detritus of the past has been left unchecked, and that is my writing. So starting today, upon the advice of an old friend, I am going to launch all the old stories, poems, and fragments I've written onto my blog, where they can happily embark on existences independent of my consciousness. As Joy said of Elsa- "they were born free, and they have the right to live free!"

One patriotic expat

2008-11-07T17:52:00.003Z

I still can't get over Barack Obama's stunning victory on Tuesday. It seems to me that this victory is not only the result of the presidential race. This event represents a victory over bigotry and the legacy of slavery, over right-wing conservatism, over Bush and Cheney and the neo-cons, over the empty rhetoric of nationalism, and over the thoughtless consumerism, waste, irresponsibility, and anti-intellectualism which has characterized the dominant American culture for so long. I just can't believe it. I can't believe that we have a president-elect who I agree with. After years of shouting at the screen whenever Bush or his cronies came on, I'm now just sitting there saying- yes man yes! Our next president gave the speech of a generation, and he mentioned Native Americans and gays! Unthinkable in the last decade. At last. America has signalled a will to make a change, and move into the future, at last.

I haven't been this excited about politics in a while. I mean, I always follow it, but it generally fills me with depsair. I have tried to guard against this hope, to remain on the ground, armed with my cynicism, but I, like so many others, have been completely disarmed by Barack Obama's intelligence, charm, and apparent sincerity. In fact, the more I watch him and read him, the more I believe that he is, in fact, a great man. A man who will change history and who will leave a legacy of a better America and a better world.

It sounds like I'm towing the new line some how. It sounds patriotic and standard. But I feel in a way like all those American ideals which I grew up hearing about, which I have always admired, and whose betrayal has been so painful, may be about to be rescued. For we do, like many countries, have some beautiful ideals- the most obvious being freedom, individual expression, and the rewards of hard work. The reality has gone so far astray, but people still want to believe them, and they still want to get there. At last, it seems like we are waking up from a nightmare to build the American Dream again. Perhaps it all sounds like sentimental garbage. Perhaps it's just the residue of my cultural indoctrination. But Barack Obama has inspired a new sense of hope in so many of us, and why should we be ashamed of it? Why should we adopt some post-modern malaise because we're embarrassed about sincere feelings? I'm not. I'm going to study Romanticism after all, and I freely confess that I have utterly fallen for my new president.

Amid this excitement and hope, I still know it's not going to be easy. It's not going to be perfect. It might take a long time, many things might never happen. But the symbolic turn in a new direction, by a new generation, fills me with more hope and pride in my country than I've felt in a long time. So many people voted! So many Americans decided to take back their country. It would have been nice if they had done it after four years instead of eight, but hey- the important thing is that they have finally woken up. I really believe that Obama can make a change, or more aptly, that he can inspire the American people to make a change. In fact, his victory shows that he already has.

The Hunt

2008-08-04T19:45:00.005+01:00

I love London, even though I sometimes find just existing here stressful. There are so many people, especially in Bloomsbury where I work. My giving directions quota is way over. All these hordes of aimless tourists, needy language students and assorted randoms, it gets a bit much. So I decided a little breather was in order. Yesterday we got the train to Chingford for a tidy fiver, and roamed around Epping Forest. But first, a drink. I sat in a pub garden under a fine English drizzle and listened to a real Essexy grandad engage in eerily elaborate imagination play with his four-year-old grandson. Overlooking the plain which is best viewed from the top floor of Queen Elizabeth's hunting lodge next door, the man started spinning plots: "Watch out, here comes a highwayman!" "See the dogs, they're not after us are they?" "Look at the horses, they're coming back from the hunt!" The boys eyes widened, seeming to leap back and forth between belief and relief. When kids play with kids, there's an unspoken agreement that it's all make-believe. But grown-ups are the ones who define the real world. I kept listening, kept wondering if maybe gramps was going too far and scaring the kid, and then decided that he was probably one of the best granddads I'd ever seen.

Then the weekend was over. What else? I gave directions to two old ladies to the British Museum on my way to work today. I guess I didn't really mind.

misogyny is the new racism

2008-04-19T22:18:00.003+01:00

This is no longer socially acceptable

Why is this?

the p0rn post

2008-02-28T21:54:00.001Z

Instead of a picture to begin this post, I will start with some headlines/web addresses which appear when one googles 'p0rn.' The first site which appears, from the first click shows pictures of women with come on their faces, a special "f*cked up facials" section (this is the porn jargon for coming on a woman's face or in her eyes), women with pained expressions while being f*cked, and a left hand menu which goes from amateur through fisting, BDSM (which shows women with clamps on their breasts, electrodes on their vaginas, tied up so that their breasts are swollen, bound and gagged, tied up on crosses and other apparatus, and one with clothespins on her vagina), through to the teens section which advertises "girls next door abused." dirtylittlewhore.com is the fourth address, bitchdump.com is number 10.

If this sounds extreme, it is no longer considered so. This is normal mainstream heterosexual p0rn. This is what teenage boys (and girls) or younger find the first time they decide to google the word 'p0rn.' This is what is colonizing our culture and our sexuality, men's and women's. This is what I'm so pissed off about.

What I'm even more pissed off about is that not many people seem to care. In fact, not only don't people seem to care, people seem to like it. Guys like it and, increasingly, girls like it too. To speak out against it is to be misunderstood as repressed, old fashioned, anti-sex, or anti-free speech. To feel that it is disgusting and damaging, not only for the individuals who act in it, but for everyone who consumes it, for everyone who is influenced by it, in relationships and in daily life- is to feel oneself in the minority.

Does it have to be this way? According to one man I recently spoke to about it "If it wasn't about domination and submission it would be boring." So does that go for real sex too? Does real sex have to be about aggression and submission? Have you never had loving spiritual sex? Poor you.

Another person said to me "There's always been porn." Yes there has, and there's nothing inherently wrong with depictions of sex to facilitate arousal. But the images we make make us. The images we produce show us who we are. And we are currently woman-punishers, woman-haters, woman-degraders. Whole generations are learning about sex from porn, internalizing these damaging roles, and losing their sexualities to the porn industry. And it is, we must remember, an industry. With a net worth of $14billion, according to Forbes magazine.

A lot of people do object. But most people I know seem to fall into one of two categories. Either they know about it and don't see a problem, or they don't know about it, and thus don't see the problem. Unfortunately it is mainly men who fall in the first category and women who fall in the second.

I defy anyone to tell me that p0rn in its current practice is not applied misogyny. Just take one look at the first site which comes up when you google 'p0rn' : http://www.yobt.com/main.html
and tell me what you see. There is no love here, no pretense at equality, no respect. It is all about the utter dehumanization and degradation of women. It is the backlash against the feminist movement of the 70's. It is the message to women - hey you want your sexual liberation? Here you go, you slut. You like sex? I'll make you wish you never asked for it.

There is no equivalent for men in our society for the language of hate and degredation used against women- whore, slut, bitch, skank, ho. There are no equivalents for men for the ways women are depicted- dehumanized animals who enjoy being forced and who enjoy pain.

So some agree with me. Yeah it’s wrong, they admit, but what are you gonna do? I don’t know. I think the first thing I’m gonna do is bring it to peoples’ attention that we have a f*cking problem here, and we need to start taking responsibility for it. And then we need to take our culture back from the people who are selling this shit. We need to tell them that we’re not buying.

Lost youths

2008-02-11T21:17:00.006Z

I'm feeling depressed with the world lately. I'm working myself up day by day into one of those funks which are hard to shake off, because they are so easily fed with so many examples which demonstrate that the world is in many ways a terrible place. It wouldn't be so bad if the world were inherently terrible; I could accept that more easily. It's that the world is beautiful, and that I love life, and it feels like all of its potential goodness is being squandered- not only squandered but distorted into unrecognizable forms. There are so many wrongs that need to be righted and it's hard to hope that they ever will be. At times like this I question why I even want to have children. Life is hard, we don't know what it's for, we don't know what to do with it. The world is a fucked up place full of mostly fucked-up lives. Do I want to inflict existence on my progeny just because I don't know what else to do? I am afraid to imagine sometimes what kinds of lives my children and grandchildren will have, what kind of world they will live in. The signs are bad.

In recent weeks, I've seen a few things which have upset me. One, I saw a perhaps thirteen year old boy eat a chocolate bar first thing in the morning at the bus stop and then deliberately drop the wrapper on the ground. Meaning, this kid lacks even the most basic concepts of ecology, pride in one's home town, and cleaning up after oneself, not to mention of a healthy breakfast. Basically, I interpret the whole thing, the eating and the littering, as this kid screaming out "I feel like a garbage can, people treat me like garbage, I treat them like garbage. I therefore see no point in trying to avoid wading through a sea of garbage." Though, of course, as a Brit, he was probably using the word rubbish as opposed to garbage. My thoughts filled me with despair, as did the feeling that nothing I could say could get through his wall of ignorance. Not even if I quoted to him from "The World Without Us," a depressing and compelling book which details how the sea has literally become a sea of garbage, millions of tiny pieces of plastic to be precise.

A couple weeks ago, I was sitting on the upper deck of the bus. Across the aisle, two teenage girls were talking and laughing, one of them playing music on her phone. At times it seemed so loud, I wasn't even sure if it was coming from her phone, or from something more powerful. I had my headphones on, and I could still hear the music plain as day. I took a headphone out of one ear, and said to the girl "Is that your music?" with a little smile. She looked at me, immediately quizzical and confrontational. "What?" "Is that your music?" I said. "But you got your earphones on, isn't it?" she asked. "Yeah," I said. "But I can still hear it." "How can you hear it if you got your earphones on?" she asked, pushing up her face. "Because it's really loud," I said. "Do you think you could turn it down a bit?" "It's not even loud!" she said aggressively. Then looked at her friend and laughed. "I asked you politely," I said. "You could respond politely." She didn't answer.

The last and most disturbing event was also on the bus. Three twelve or thirteen year old boys piled onto the back of the bus on the upper deck. They were laughing and joking and shouting, as kids do, but literally everything they were saying was an obscenity. High pitched voices, horseplay, and "you cunt! oh, you cunt!" "stop it you twat!" "Oy, your mom's a bitch!" "Fuck you! Your mom's a dog. She takes it doggy-style." Not yet full grown-men, already fully trained woman haters.

The thing that is the saddest is these kids, the litterer and the swearers, the rude girl, are not entirely to blame. They are, in a sense, victims. They are sponges who soak up the culture we immerse them in. A culture that values above all style, surface, sexiness, and possessions. A culture which places little value on being smart or spiritual or basically caring about other people. These youths are mirrors we look into and recoil from because we don't recognize what we see. There is sickness and corruption here, in our culture, in our world, and we ought to take responsibility for that. We ought to stop wondering what wrong with these kids and start wondering what's wrong with all of us.

The Return of the Blog

2008-01-22T20:01:00.000Z

Ok, I admitted in my last post that I was a bad blogger, but this is getting ridiculous. I haven't written anything since September, and I decided it's either recommit or delete. And well, here I am.

The trouble with me is I don't do what I really want to do. I want to do lots of things: be a great writer, have my own farm, blog regularly, take pictures, bake my own bread, actually bake my own everything (maybe have my own little line of cute cupcakes and cookies - I would love that). Or... you know be an academic, learn Slovak, start painting again, or pick up the banjo. Today I was thinking that instead of continuing to agonize over the decision to start or not to start a PhD (this has been going on for years), I should just become like a serial Master's student. I did one in comparative lit., but what if I do one next in history, then sociology, then philosophy. Or maybe I should do the philosophy first... I have trouble making decisions. Actually my main trouble is I make a decision, tell everyone, and then change my mind. It's just the way I am. As my friends and family have learned. Thus, they take every decision I make with a full tablespoon of salt. And really, it's not that I don't do what I really want to do, because if I really wanted to, I would do it, right? So I must not actually want to do it. What I actually want to do must be this- spending most of my free time reading in bed, listening to music, and cooking. It's not a bad life really.

My sister is mainly responsible for The Return of the Blog. She gave me a wicked pep talk and apparently likes my blog entries- and doesn't think they're just some self-reflective crap. Anyway, I'm going to continue- at least once a week, to launch my observations and neuroses here. And I'm going to try not to worry about if I sound too British or too American. I do feel that I'm getting a little more American the closer we get to moving to New York. Then I'll no doubt be writing lots of posts about New York and London, how they're similar, how their different. I can't wait to be able to do that properly. I reckon I'm sounding rather British at this point. But what if I say hell yeah, moving to the city is going to rock!

Who am I?

Ok, this is definitely self-reflective crap. So I'll go now. Gotta heat up the kale curry I made and prepare to defend the existence of kale curry to meat-eating boyfriend.

i am a bad blogger

2007-09-11T20:41:00.000+01:00

Since I last blogged, I have moved to a new level of professionalism in my EFL "career." That is, I can now plan a lesson in five minutes, and basically blag my way through any lesson simply through my charming personality. So I guess you could say I'm a bad blogger, but a better blagger. (This is the kind of humor that flies with foreign language students; I seem to have found my niche).

The weekend was a wicked joint "big 30" blowout with Tilly. All the classic tunes were there, and a great time was had by all, followed by the Sunday of 12 bottles of champagne. What a frivolous and beautiful day, the pinnacle of which was when three middle-aged dudes walked by the pub and sparked a spontaneous cry of approval from our crammed picnic table (crammed with drunk idiots that is). The guys didn't seem to mind, they just gave a little smile and strutted on.

August provided an amazing break in New York, trawling through City, Upstate, and really really Upstate. It was a dream of shopping, riding bikes, swimming in a lake, canoeing, hiking, running through sprinklers in the back yard, BBQ's and babies. I went totally American and experienced a fierce pull towards NYC, all that good pizza, all them crazies, big tough Latina taxi drivers. You gotta love it. Can we cue Gonzo from the Muppet Movie please... Close to my soul, and yet so far away. I'm going to go back there someday.

FYI, That's the New York State coat of Arms. And, I just learned that the State Fossil of NYS is the sea scorpion. If you needed another reason to love it.

I'm back in London

2007-07-27T22:41:00.000+01:00

Not quite two weeks back in the big smoke and Trabzon already feels like a distant memory. It's amazing how quickly I reverted back to London life. The five minute stroll to my office in Turkey has been usurped by running for the bus, my glasses of tea are now paper cups with plastic lids, my hours of leisure time are now reduced to the weekend, my olives and cheese have become eggs and beans. I am teaching more for less money, and summertime ended the day I left Trabzon. Through the drizzly film of the 243's windows each morning, cinematically soundtracked by my I-Pod; (I'm currently on a bluegrass binge), I observe rowdy youths, showcase crazies, armies of workers, and battered-looking hipsters who have clearly not been to bed. I am back in a land where construction sites are carefully sealed off from the public and traffic rules are obeyed. In Turkey I got used to navigating moving bulldozers in the middle of pedestrianized streets, and habitually checking for scooters on the sidewalk. Now I find myself back in the banal safety of England. Grey church steeples are matched by a gloomy sky and pub signs swing and creak in gusts of wind. There's a lot of things they don't have in Turkey: chavs for example, or decent graffiti. You wouldn't think I would have missed such things, or laugh when my umbrella gets pulled inside out by the wind. But I did, and I do; it's nice to be back.

self-inflicted

2007-07-09T21:54:00.000+01:00

Gosh it's been a while since I blogged. As my time in Turkey draws to a close, (six days to go), I've been plagued by this nagging feeling that I should write a post that will elegantly encapsulate my experiences here on the Eastern reaches of the Black Sea coast. But I can't. The thing is, so many little things have happened, which I want to remember and launch into the blogospehere for all eternity. The said theoretical eternity may bring up complex metaphysical questions, but suffice it too say that I should have written about them as they came along, instead of leaving them all to the last minute. Isn't that always the way with me.

Tonight I had dinner with some new friends. They are an old couple who teach in the same department at the university- urban planning - and throughout dinner their smiles and carefully measured words, and appealingly open-ended questions- "What is America like?" - made me want to volunteer to be their adopted granddaughter. The Professor invited me to dinner to say thank you for editing some papers for him. I must admit I expected it to be a boring duty-driven evening, but it turned out to be very pleasant. A little glimpse of them, a little promise of an unlikely friendship, and then the kind of slightly awkward goodbye that comes from the unspoken fact that we will not see each other again, nor keep in touch, nor even make empty gestures about keeping in touch. The Professor's wife held my hand warmly, and fretted about it being cold. (The Turks have a deep-seated fear of catching cold - drafts and chills of all forms are carefully avoided - to the point that people will not open windows more than a crack on a suffocatingly hot bus). I told her I was fine, and she told me to go straight in and warm up. Such a lovely caring nature is typical of the Turks; I will miss being treated so well when I get back to England- where affection appears to be shown through insults. Right?

Last weekend I went to Sinop with a colleague, her daughter, her mother, her aunt, and a bunch of pensioners on a packed and rowdy bus. It was, as I expected, both interesting and trying. (At several points I was made to dance in the aisle of the moving bus, and at one point a microphone was proffered with the instruction to sing "a foreign song.") These Black Sea Turks are so enthusiastic and fun-loving it's amazing - they get up to all kinds of embarrassing and crazy antics, and without alcohol! I don't really relish group tours but I didn't want to miss the chance to see more of the Black Sea. Sinop is one of the longest continually inhabited cities on the coast, about half-way between Istanbul and Trabzon. And there were a lot of strange sights to behold. We toured the famous Sinop prison, which was not that interesting to me and rather scary. But what made it worthwhile was the surrounding fortifications, walls built by the Seljuk Turks incorporating Greek ruins. You could literally see classical pillars sliced up like carrots and laid into the walls. No one seemed that interested in this part, but I was haunted by the sense of so much history built on top of and cannibalizing itself through the ages. You get that feeling a lot in Turkey.

In Trabzon, in fact, I am eerily conscious of the weight of its history, which remains for the most part invisible. This is an ancient settlement, and yet almost everything, apart from a handful of mosques and a caravansary, looks to have been built in the past fifty years. Trabzon is truthfully not very attractive. Fighting for ground between the mountains and the Black Sea, the architecture is almost all of the 1960's-style block variety. But I am haunted by the idea that it was a different place 100 years ago, different not only in the appearance of its buildings, but with different people and a different culture. Until the aftermath of WWI and the formation of the Turkish Republic, this whole region was a Pontic Greek stronghold - descendants of Byzantine Greeks who never left- and now, due to deeply contested historic events, read "relocations" and "population exchanges", almost all of them are gone. The thing that makes the history of this region so haunting is that no one talks about it. The people around here don't seem to want to reflect on the past. Many old buildings were destroyed to make way for six and seven-story apartment blocks, which seem out-of-place in a city of about 200,000. The main area of town has some half-dead Ottoman wooden houses whose days appear to be numbered, and, out of sight, hidden, there remain some crumbling ruins of Byzantine churches, Greek villas, and Orthodox monasteries, which almost none of the locals know or care about, which aren't mentioned in any tour guides, and which I, annoyingly, haven't been that successful in finding. I've read that one of the monasteries in the hills above the city is currently in use as a barn, but if you ask the farmer nicely, he might remove the hay and let you see the frescoes.

In any case, I have that predictable feeling that I haven't made the best use of my time here, that there's more to see that I've missed. So I'll be spending Saturday visiting mosques that used to be churches that may have been temples before that, and gulping down the last glasses for who knows how long, of fragrant black tea grown not fifty miles away.

heroic goats save the South

2007-06-06T08:16:00.000+01:00

Another reason to celebrate my favorite animal...

blog envy

2007-05-30T16:43:00.000+01:00

I'm not very satisfied with my blog. Other people's blogs seem, well, cooler. So, in aid of this, I am now going to compose the coolest post ever. Here goes.

First off, you will note this very nice picture, which was done by Rex Hackelberg, and up-and-coming cartoonist whom John Kricfalusi (Ren and Stimpy creator and my recently-elected hero) has taken under his wing. John credits this kid with keeping real cartoony stuff in his heart, and not going for the souless modern Disney-style stuff. I have to agree with John. If you check out John's blog you will see a world of delightful cartoony stuff and the reflections of a man who truly loves cartoons. In fact it's become my favorite thing to read and look at in the past few weeks. I even flirted with the idea of pursuing cartoons as a possible research field. How cool would a PhD in the cultural analysis of cartoons be? But after link-hopping from John K's site, I realized that the world is full of cartoon buffs and though I love cartoons a lot, I KNOW NOTHING.

Anyway- and I hope you are enjoying this extra-cool post- I just thought I would point out one thing about this kid's illustration. Now, don't get me wrong, I think his illustration is lovely, but...

it was even cooler when Chip and Dale were in it.

I will leave you with one more delight culled off John K's website.

I love this.

Now, you make ask, does putting pieces of other blogs which are cool onto my blog make my blog cool?

Yes.

acting with no expectations

2007-05-12T11:01:00.000+01:00

Living in Turkey is proving to be an extended lesson in Taoist wisdom. Tao, which to me is a slightly warmer version of Zen, advises above all acceptance, flexibility, and a union with the way things are, rather than trying to force them into what we would like them to be.

This is not my natural way of being but I’ve been practicing for a few years. Before I became a Taoist, however, I am and have always been a person of lists. I like to start a job and complete it, and cross it off. It makes me feel industrious and efficient. But Turkey makes a mockery of my routine. The process of crossing an item off the list has become akin to waiting for an unbearably slow internet connection to stream media content. You watch the bar. You press play. You press pause. You watch the bar. You read "buffering" over and over. You press play and get some incoherent garble. You press pause. You wait.

See, getting something done here doesn't begin with the direct statement of intent of whatever you would like to achieve. It starts with formulas of greeting and welcome, and generally moves on to a glass of tea. The overall atmosphere is not “Let’s get things done” but “Let’s talk about this for a long while, come to no fixed conclusion, and maybe we can talk again some other time.”

I have been trying to book flights for a weekend trip to Istanbul all week. I go to the company's web site and it won't accept my credit card. I know my card is ok, I've used it before with the same company for an online purchase, but for some reason, it just won't work. I mentioned this to a colleague, who advised me that sometimes it doesn’t work, and I should just keep trying. So I did, but to no avail.

I decided to call the airline, which says it's open 24/7, on the English section of its website. I called and was welcomed by a recording, and prompted "For English, press 9." I pressed 9, got a 15 second dose of muzak, was told (in Turkish) to wait, and then looped back to the beginning. I was welcomed, told "for English, press 9," treated to another snippet of a different dead-tune, told to wait, and back to the start again. I tried a variety of responses, ie. pushing different buttons, not pushing any buttons, to escape this mini-samsara, but to no avail.

The next day at work I asked my colleague to call for me. She got through to a real person, explained the situation, and made a reservation for me. The next step, I was told, was to go to a local agent for the airline in order to pay for and collect my ticket. Using your credit or debit card outside of a large company’s internet payment facility requires the physical manifestation of you and the card. Alternatively, under duress, (which I have applied in previous similar situations) they might ask you to fax a copy of your card (which is always illegible), or email a scanned copy of your credit card (great idea!).

So, it happens that last evening I went to see a performance by a Georgian theatre group. The play, which was a quite abstract treatment of “conflict,” and which didn’t seem to impress the audience much, probably due to some very ambiguous scenes of women with headscarves covering their entire heads and faces, ended at about 9.30pm. I mentioned to my friend that I needed to go to a travel agent sometime. Oh, she said, there’s one nearby, let’s go! At 9.30 on a Friday night? you ask. But, yes, the office was open for business. There are no set office hours around here. Shops open and close when they feel like it. If you’re wondering if a certain shop is open, go and check. At last, I thought, the cultural differences are working in my favour!

But it was not to be. After a lot of discussion and explanation, the agent managed to book a reservation for me. I presented my card, but the airline still for some reason would not accept payment. I offered to pay in cash. The agent tried to use the company credit card to book the ticket online, but his card didn’t work either. We all had a good chat about how there must be a problem, we can’t understand it, what bad luck, God knows why this is happening. And I was invited to come back to the office tomorrow to try again. I went home and called my bank, who confirmed that there’s no problem with my card or account, and no record of me trying to use my card.

Incidentally, while I was on hold with my bank, I was waiting for over five minutes, reading an article on the internet, and somehow ended up in a deadzone. After a lot of really great recorded advice about extra services I’m definitely going to try, there was now only silence. Had I been disconnected? I wondered. I tentatively pressed a button. “Recording stopped!” I was told. “To log into your voicemail, press 82.” I don’t know where I was, but I didn’t feel I belonged there. I felt that, like the characters in Being John Malkovich, I had somehow entered some secret zone in the back alleys of corporate infrastructure. So I hung up.

Anyway, I guess I’ll go back to the travel agent later, maybe have a glass of tea, and if the flight to Istanbul comes to me, I will accept it. If not, I will release it. My heart is open as the sky.

excuses excuses

2007-05-05T21:33:00.000+01:00

A lot of things have happened. I haven't updated in a while, and you may have been thinking that I proven to be one more person who starts a blog, and then abandons it when the novelty wears off, contributing to the vast net-fill of junked sites. Well, no! I've just been a little busy that's all.

1. My boyfriend came to visit and we trawled about town and took some day trips to nearby lakes, mountains, and a monastery carved into a mountain. We became minor celebrities wherever we went. See I can pass for a Turk (Turks come from various ethnic stocks due to the historical diversity of the region and the empires; some look Eastern European, some look Asiatic, some look Middle-Eastern), but he cannot. Everywhere we went children stared- actually everyone stared. After the initial shock passed, we were treated to a barrage of questions, smiles and general astonishment at our existence. I have to say I felt a little bit like there wasn't room in this town for the both of us. Now he's gone I'm the most interesting foreigner again. Yeah.

2. I went to see a Macedonian modern dance performance. It's part of a "theatre" festival hosting groups from various bordering countries. No details of the different performances are offered in the program; you just turn up and hope for the best. Seems like I got lucky. These Macedonians weren't actors but proper dancers. The production featured well-chosen costumes, fresh micro-beat and clicky music, and the artful use of a camera to project an aerial view of the dancers behind them. It was refreshing to have some non-Turkish input. Diversity is what I miss most about London. It's nice here but it's something of a mono-cultural deal.

3. I went to my friend's house and she cooked enough food for five people. We had borek (feta cheese pastries), a yogurt with carrot and garlic dip, green beans with olive oil and rice, orange cake, semolina pudding, apple-filled cookies, and glass after glass of tea. The Turks are some of the most hospitable people I've met. If you have a way in, ie. you know one person, all of their friends are instantly your friends, and they kiss you on the cheek (if you are of the same sex) and treat you like an old pal the first time they meet you. There are no separate words for colleague, classmate, flatmate- all the people you associate with who are not in a position of authority or dependence to you, are called friends. And friends get looked after. I have never seen anyone eat or drink anything, even gum, without offering it to the people around them. Even a candy bar will be broken into pieces and shared among five people if need be. The important thing is that everyone is included. My students are all so nice to each other- there is little of the cliquiness of American high school and college culture here. There aren't loads of competing "types;" there is just one perceived type: Turkish.

4. I accidently erased all the music off my I-Pod this evening. And I've realized first-hand what the A in apple really stands for. If you don't have an I-Pod the following is probably a ticket to the depths of dullness, but I just gotta complain about this or I won't be able to go to sleep for the knot of regret in my stomach, which has lately replaced the numbness of denial. See, I opened up I-Tunes and it presented me with an option to automatically update my I-Pod with my I-Tunes library. Without thinking too much about it, it sounded like a good idea, so I said ok. Then, without further warning, it erased everything that was on my I-Pod that wasn't in my library- like 90% of my music. Design flaw you might think. But I'm pretty sure it's a deliberate design trap. People like me, who have (had) perfected their I-Pod, filled it up with all their favorite music, spent countless hours creating playlists and labeling and ordering all the tracks, make Apple no further profit. But poor suckers like me who so easily and without a warning message lose all their music have to start over again. I guess Apple is hoping I will replace my lost music at the I-Tunes music store. Well they can fuck off. And another thing. I have done a little research and found that the newest version of I-Tunes doesn't allow for the automatic update option to be switched off. This ensures two things - that you can't use third-party software like I-pod Rip to get music off your I-Pod and onto a computer where you can share it, and that you risk wiping your I-pod every time you plug it into a computer that doesn't have all the music on it that you have on your I-pod. Well, luckily out of sheer laziness I never updated to version 7, and I never will. So in making one error, I became aware of a second more grave error in time to avoid it. I guess the moral of the story is don't fool around with stuff if you don't actually know what you're doing. But I always operate like that, and even though it leads me to do careless things sometimes, it still feels like a good approach for some reason. I like fooling around with stuff.

5. My computer knows it's in Turkey. Ok, it's probably more accurate to say that some web sites, like google and blogger, know when I open them from Turkey. But I get pleasure from personifying my computer. It makes me feel almost as it there's more than one American in this town. Actually my computer seems more British. Probably because I bought her at PC World. Right. Well I better go to bed. But I just want to add that although blogger knows that I am in Turkey, it doesn't know that I don't speak Turkish very well, so it's just a big pain in the ass when I want to update my blog and everything is in Turkish. Get it right blogger. I'm on my guard with all you blood-sucking, money-grubbing, music-eating companies from now on.

There. That ought to placate the yahbiquette-starved masses for a while.

why i love easter

2007-04-04T07:53:00.000+01:00

easter is the time for crazed fuzzy chicks and pink marshmallow bunnies. pagan celebration of spring meets late capital consumerism in orgy of sweet artificial color. yes.

i'm not sure i should be writing this

2007-03-22T09:45:00.000Z

Yesterday was Nevruz. Or Newroz. Depending on your ethno-cultural-political standpoint. It's "the w problem," a small reminder of the larger "Kurdish problem" in Turkey. Here we had an outdoor concert to celebrate Nevruz. The Turkish flag was prominently displayed behind the stage, where Black Sea music was followed by a grungy rock band. It didn't mean much to me until some background reading gave me the context of the holiday. An ancient pagan festival of spring celebrated all over the region- Iran, Georgia, Central Asia, and other countries- it was banned in Turkey until a few years ago, because the Kurds were celebrating it as an expression of their separate cultural identity and political goals. So now it's a Turkish holiday! Problem solved. You can read about it on the Turkish Ministry of Culture website, with the Turkish spelling Nevruz, where many different spellings and origins for the holiday are mentioned, except the Kurdish ones. Or you can read about it from the Kurdish point of view if you google their spelling "newroz." There seem to be lots of interesting stories to be learned in Turkey. What's most interesting is an estimated 30% of the Turkish population are ethnic Kurds and I haven't met ANY that I know of. Seems like it's the kind of thing you keep to yourself. What baffles me is that all over the world, governments are not able to identify the basic mechanics of cause and effect. Oppression of an impulse intensifies and gives strength to that impulse. Don't they get it? If they had just let the Kurds have their own cultural identity within Turkey all this time there wouldn't be a "Kurdish problem" now. And why is everyone so obsessed with having their own state anyway? They'd still disagree. We'd have to keep breaking into smaller and smaller states to maintain this ideal of purity and sameness these nationalist impulses are built on, until eventually each person becomes a nation of one. And even then, trying to remain hardline can have disastrous results.

undeniable

2007-03-19T17:20:00.000Z

This band is cool, this album rocks, and how cool is this album cover? If you don't think they are cool, well, I don't understand you.

virtual people

2007-03-14T11:10:00.000Z

Perusing the internet is much like what I imagine it must be like to trawl a great river on the banks of a wise old city, you find all kinds of garbage. And you also get a chance to gawk at the detritus of lives of people you will never meet. Take this character I recently came across. So much time. So much enthusiasm. And such a mysterious voice in the ether- just who is this guy writing for? If you are a gamer who doesn't know how to make hot chocolate, or are too lazy to read directions for a simple board game, or perhaps a precocious toddler who wants to know exactly how to pour juice into a cup, this might be what you're looking for:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/14602/shawn_grover.html

Looking over it more carefully I now realize that this guy has secreted a kernel of humor under his majestic cloak of geekdom. Thus that ineffable quality of geek-cool is born.

black sea enlightenment

2007-03-12T09:36:00.000Z

I have learned a lot from my students in the past week or so, and, being the generous soul that I am, I'm sharing some of these wise trinkets with you. Did you know...

I, yes me, am America.

"We know the so-called Armenian genocide never happened." So, no need to talk about that anymore.

In Turkish, as in English, the word for "bill" is also a name.

Please be aware that certain TV programs, especially chat shows and soap operas, can corrupt your morals!

And, to close on a positive note: "Love and peace are the enemy of war, and if we all love each other there will be no more war."

And this is the way darkness and light, humor and despair, play upon the dreamy waters of the Black Sea.

tea for twelve

2007-03-01T19:22:00.000Z

I recently attended a dinner party at the home of one of my colleagues. It was different from any dinner party I've ever been to before, and not only because everyone was speaking Turkish and I only had the most general sense of what was going on. For most of the evening, I focused intently on the words and gestures and reactions from people, and kept a running commentary in my mind, along the lines of someone's ill. what a shame, is it someone i know? probably not. is it serious? i have no idea.... something about a film. iran. ok... and? why does she keep saying banana? maybe it's not banana.

The evening began for me as all the guests set off in a cavalcade, children pressing their faces to back windows and waving, adults in the front smiling and waving back, to our hostess' house on the other side of town.

We arrived and left our shoes outside the door. You can always see when your neighbors have guests in Turkey, because there's a pile of shoes by the front door. Or sometimes only a single pair of men's dress shoes with a pointy, slight curled toe, which for some reason I always imagine becoming animate and tapping up to me, heel-toe, heel-toe. Creepy.

Anyway, we were welcomed in, kissed, given slippers, and seated in the living room. I realized that I was the only one wearing jeans, then excused myself to myself, thinking hammily, hey I'm American. Most of the women had made an effort; some had makeup, some had straightened their hair, except for one of the wives, who covers her hair and was dressed simply. The mothers were called at one point to round up their children, and serve them, and settle them in the kitchen, while the table was laid for the adults in the dining room. I stayed in the living room with the men. Being neither a mother, nor a man, I felt vaguely uncategorizable.

Dinner was served once the children were secured. It consisted of various platters: cheese pastries, walnut bread, fruit cake, lentil-cakes, zucchini with yogurt, sweet carrot balls, and glasses of hot tea. Everyone ate slowly and chattered away, while the hostess barely ate but urged more food on all of us and refilled our tea-glasses ceaselessly. After we'd finished, we stayed at the table drinking more cups of tea, talking (or listening), and eating baklava. Later the hostess brought out a remarkable paste she uses as a cleaning product, explaining its benefits to the women of the table, and passing it around for everyone to smell. Yes, it's true.

Some got up to smoke off the balcony. Conversation never faltered for a moment. People joked and laughed, and I smiled, having not a clue what was so funny. Occasionally someone offered to translate a little snippet of the conversation for me. After we had had a chance to digest a bit, a huge bowl of fruit appeared, and everyone set to peeling and cutting apples, oranges, and kiwis on little plates with little knives. The children had finished their meal and were causing a general ruckus by this time. After the fruit, the hostess offered us each a few drops of refreshing lemon cologne for our hands. I was exhausted from so much food and focused listening. Around midnight, the head of the department announced, well friends, it's late, let's go. So we all got up and filed out.

I got a ride home with the head of department and his family, who are all painfully quiet and unfailingly polite, and somehow always leave me without a thing to say. It's his wife who covers her head; they're a conservative family. The children are very quiet and well-behaved. So we drove in silence, and as the car rolled up and down the hills around the city, the radio incongruously tuned to a house station- "Saturday night disco!"- I felt that truly refreshing sensation of finding yourself an incongruous object in your surroundings, of finding the terrain of your own life unfamiliar and inexplicable. I love it when that happens.

decade of my birth

2007-02-26T17:24:00.000Z

Sometimes I can't really connect with the fact that I was alive in the seventies. Ok, only for the last couple years. And I was obviously too small to engage with the realities of 1970's America very deeply. But still.

It seems to me that everything was somehow more authentic then. It seems like that was the real America. I mean, we had the method actors, De Niro and Kaitel and Streep, we had Coppola and Scorcese at their peaks. Sure they're all still around, but when I look at Meet the Fockers, hell, when I look at Charlie Sheen... it's hard not to think that those were the good old days.

Vietnam was there, I mean the war, the cause. The dawn of health food in California was a joke for a Woody Allen film. The TV was big and convex. There were woods all around my suburban town, enough for my uncle to have a salt lick for deer in his backyard. The bad economy. The population explosion. Crime-ridden NYC. Lines for gasoline. And big cars! Why does all that sound so great? And not just great, but somehow more durable and tangible than anything I can say about life now?

As for London, I guess London was full of wooden buses and buck teeth, bad plumbing and bad food. Jellied eels and the like. Right? I don't have the references for the UK that I have for America. Obviously. I mean I have a skeletal framework. But basically London didn't exist before 1997 as far as I'm concerned. When I arrived there, on my twentieth birthday, I expected it to be like Ab Fab. That's why I was there darling.

I wonder if my kids will look at old pictures and laugh at my haircuts, as I did. ("That was the style!" my mom insisted.) I wonder if they will be disappointed that I haven't done some of the things or been in some of the "scenes" that they will later come to associate with the nineties and the first decade of the 21st century, just as I never forgave my parents for living in upstate New York in 1969 and not going to Woodstock.

I wonder how long this retrolicious, all the past is for sale, hey remember when, I love 19childhood-memory-of-our-target-market thing will go on? I feel like buying up everything about the seventies before they run out of stock. I feel like connecting with the reality of the decade of my birth- which is clearly impossible, and exactly what some man in a board room came up with, smoking and laughing evilly, circa 1986.

what’s happening to me?

2007-02-20T17:23:00.000Z

There’s quite a lot of variables you see. Let’s look for a moment at the constellation that is now. I'm listening to a song which is stylistically locused in 1970’s America, but it might just be a very convincing pastiche. Browsing the web I find a page for the Catholic school I attended from ages 5 – 12. The uniforms are the same and two of my teachers are still there, as is the school nurse, who must be in her sixties by now. I look at the map on the wall, and realize how far away I am from the world that made me. I scan the school calendar- “Saturday February 10, ziti dinner!” And even more heartbreaking- “Friday February 9, set up for ziti dinner.” So many layers of nostalgia, like the most sorrowful filo pastry in the world. I guess that would be a burnt one, or one with a not-so-tasty filling.

It's hard to define that suburban American world, which I left ten years ago now, on what sometimes feels like an extended vacation from my real life. Impossibly cozy and mildly oppressive. There's a certain brand of feel-good philosophy which is ceaselessly forwarded like a garbled e-greeting-card, willfully upbeat. It's the kind of world where, when faced with difficult news on the television, one only smiles gently and says “I just don’t like to believe that things like that really happen.”

There’s my laptop, which I have named and personified, and feel attached to. I feel like she (Periwinkle) is an individual, that she is different from other Compaq Presarios, and if something (god forbid) should happen to her, I would not only feel a distressing sense of disconnection to the world, but I would not be able to replace her. She’s different because she’s mine.

There is the kitchenette in the corner of my apartment in the East of Turkey. In an apartment building erected 50 or 60 years ago, it has the feel of an even older apartment in the States. One that an old person has been living in for an awfully long time, without making any changes. I like to think that, like Neal Cassidy in the beginning of On the Road, I’m living in a “cold water flat.” Of course there is a hot shower, but the other taps are indeed cold water only. And my shower at the moment is cold, too. I’ve run out of gas and I’ve forgotten to order another canister. Ok... I didn’t forget. It’s just I don’t know how to say canister in Turkish, and I don’t want to sound like a fool.

I did call the water company. I’m an old hand at that, since I was in Istanbul. Most people in Turkey order these big containers of water for their homes, about the size that go in water coolers in offices. But here, instead of a stand, you have a handy pump which you stick into the cooler, like a straw for a really big, really thirsty person. Of course it’s nearly impossible to gage the amount of pressure needed to fill a small glass of water without overflowing. But it's become a kind of game.

I called them up and delivered my lines: “Good evening. I’d like one container of water please.” The man here replied just as they do in Istanbul- “Buyurun,” which means lots of things, like “go ahead,” or “help yourself,” or “can I help you?” I gave him my four digit code. I'm pretty sure I said all this correctly. And yet because of the speed, maybe because of the accent, the man stopped me and said “new teacher?”

“Yes,” I said. There was a silence, words in the background, and then a new voice on the phone.

“Hello. Gutten’tag.”

“Hello,” I said.

“Specken zie deutsche?”

“No.”

Silence.

“My number,” I said slowly, “is 6 4 2 7.”

“2?”

“6…..4…..2…..7”

Then I listened while the two men I had given my number to compared notes in the background. Satisfied with the non-falsifiability of their results, the second man got back on the phone.

“Ok!” he said.

“Ok!” I said.

What pleasure every mundane yet successful transaction of life can bring! I’m not feeling waves of melancholoy anymore; maybe it’s the upbeat nature of the song I’m listening to now, or the knowledge that I’m about to launch this little reflection onto my blog, where everyone can read my thoughts, and I can feel validated. God Bless My Blog. And you my friends. And you strangers; or should I say "friends I haven't met yet"? I’m off now. I’ll be tucking myself in bed to reflect on my dog-eared copy of "Chicken Soup for the Soul."

yah spring term!

2007-02-19T06:41:00.000Z

Today is the first day of the new term. I've spent the last two weeks reflecting on methodology , creative ideas for presenting material, content, and assessment. I've cut and cut again the texts on my syllabuses, and I still think it's too much. The funny thing about the literature students I'm teaching is they don't seem to like reading much. I have come up with a lot of ideas to cajole, trick, tempt, and force them into engaging with literature, and I was looking forward to trying them out.

My approach for the first class of the term- this morning, Monday, 8am- was to use a clip from "Apocalypse Now" as a lead-in to Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," which was the loose basis for the film. In TEFL terms, this is known as "generating interest." My mistake last term was to assume that an interest in literature is already present in my students' hearts and minds. But a few weeks was enough to alert me that this is not the case.

In secondary education in Turkey, students and teachers dwell in the dark shadow of a standard university entrance exam of massive significance. Students must choose the subject questions they will answer on the exam, which generally means the ones they can get the highest scores in. Students list the universities they would like to attend, and the subjects they would like to study; this is based on what is presumed feasible for them, with lots of direction from their secondary school teachers and parents. If students have the potential to score high enough to study the prestigious subjects like science and engineering, you can be sure this is where their future lies. Incidentally, English and Literature subjects are at the low end of the scale.

Test results determine where they go and what they study. Thus, questions like "Why did you choose to come to this university?" or "Why did you choose to study this subject?" usually generate the standard reply, "Because my test scores were enough to come here."

Add to this the "mixed" nature of the degree program at this university- a heady blend of linguistics, teaching methodology, language skills, and literature, plus a moderate dose of Turkish history, and you get my students, who just want to pass the degree so they can be teachers, and seem to resent the intrusion of dense texts like "Heart of Darkness" in their already heavy hearts.

But these reflections have all been spurred on by the unexpected denoument of this, my first class of the term. I set up the projector, arranged my notes, and was feeling positive. I looked out over the empty seats in front of me, just arranged in neat rows, like a freshly-dug seed bed. I cued the film clip. I had a sip of water. I looked over my notes again. And the students did not come. I sat in the empty classroom for half an hour, going over possible explanations in my mind. I decided they had mutinied.

I questioned one of my colleagues, who assured me that this is normal. Students have gone to their home towns for the month-long winter break. And they usually don't come back until Tuesday. Another example of what is proving to be a common theme to life in Turkey- you get information when it comes up- why would you need it before?

stories from Cairo

2007-02-17T09:20:00.000Z

So I recently went to Cairo and it was amazing. Because I have what I generally refer to as "a 35mm camera" (a description of which some have questioned the aptness of, but nevermind), and I don't know of any scanners I can use, sadly I can't post any photos right now, maybe in future. But I have some stories...

Cairo Story 1:

I was in a taxi with three other women, on the way to an American diplomat's house, to attend a reception in the evening after a day of conferences at the American University. The taxi driver didn't speak English, but due to my very little grasp of Arabic, I was nominated speaker of the car. I gave him the address, he nodded, and we set off. We learned that a taxi ride in Cairo really takes the word "ride" seriously- as the man in charge of the Scrambler at the travelling fair says: "Hold on tight!" Cars weave in and out of traffic; lanes are fluid and seem to play with the gaps, fissures, and problematic attempts at boundaries which characterize the text that is the road. Horns are used liberally and with great fervor.

At some point, the driver seemed to ask for the address again. I told him the address; someone else showed him the paper, which was written in English and therefore of no use to him. He pulled off to the side of the road and, without a word, got out of the car.

We looked at each other, and occasionally surveyed the shops and little alleys which fanned out in the direction our driver had gone walking.

After about five minutes, a man came up to our car and peered in the window.

"The driver?" he asked. I guess he could tell we weren't locals.

"We don't know," we said. The man looked at us, looked at the car, then opened the driver's side door, reached in and put the car in neutral. Then he proceeded to move the car forward, steering the wheel to the right. "Uh..." we all said to each other. "What's he doing?" "I don't know!" "Wait, wait!" I said to the man. "No problem! Thank you!" The man shrugged, put the car back in park and walked off.

After a few more minutes, our driver returned with three men. One of them eyed us through the crack in the window and said "Hello, where you going?" We carefully explained the address, and named a landmark.

"Oh!" he said loudly, with a big smile. "I know. Big house for Americans?"

"Yes," we whispered.

So we went on our way, and had a pleasant evening eating American food, which is shipped all over the world to those in the foreign service. I mean everything, including lettuce. The diplomat's apartment was furnished with Middle-eastern carpets, wall-hangings, cushions, etc. And yet the life of the diplomat and family, in the middle of the Egyptian megalopolis was so... American. Interesting window into a strange world, but I much preferred the taxi ride.

helpful phrases for women

2007-02-16T19:13:00.000Z

Greetings my friends and family and strange roving members of the public.

As I'm sure I'm not the only woman out there who sometimes feels herself at a loss of what to say, I am posting this helpful guide I recently came across:

"The following exclamations all have approximately the same meaning. They are generally used by women and express surprise, astonishment, fear, or consternation.

Heavens! Heaven forbid!
Goodness! My goodness!
Good heavens! For goodness sake!
Heaven help us! For goodness sakes!
For heaven's sake! Mercy!
For heaven's sakes! Mercy me!
Land sakes!

Other exclamations frequently used by women:

My! (said in surprise or admiration)
Oh, my! (said in surprise, admiration, or a worried fashion)
My, my! (said in surprise or in a worried fashion)
My word! (said in surprise or astonishment)
Well, I never! (said in amazement)
Eeek! (said when the speaker is frightened by a mouse or is in a similar frightening predicament)
Oh dear! (said in worry or consternation) "

From: Dobson, Julia. Effective Techniques for English Conversation Groups. OELP: Washington, DC, 2005.

At least now I know what to do in those awkward pauses.