Winter in America

The Worst of the Pain by Bob Herbert, NYTimes.

ETA: Gil Scott-Heron’s newest album, “I’m New Here” was just released this past week. Check out the single “Me and The Devil.”

Then and Now

Load The Car…

… and write the note
Grab your bag and grab your coat
Tell the ones that need to know
We are headed north.

Some of you may already know this, but I’m leaving New York for the West Coast, and it will be an indefinite stay, at least for the moment. I’ve started saying wistful farewells to this city that I’ve called my own for a solid two and a half years.

I remember very clearly the first day I stepped foot in New York City after getting off a very long 8-hour bus ride from Waterville, Maine. The smell and weight of subway and grease at Port Authority would soon become a familiar welcome over the course of the next 9 years. It was Thanksgiving 2001, probably one of the bleaker Thanksgivings in New York City history, and I was there to see my sister who lived not too far from Ground Zero which was still burning. She was waiting in the subway station, her back against a wall, and in her hands she had a cardboard pet carrier that contained one scrappy looking black and white kitten from Queens.

As a student, I had a disdain for the United States, and never wanted to “settle” here. As far as I was concerned, I was bound for Europe, and New York City was the only American city I thought I’d be able to tolerate. I came back almost every summer and every break in school I had that I didn’t spend in Europe, and lived as a temporary New Yorker for at least two summers without knowing that some day this would be a chosen home for a while.

I love New York in a way I hope does not overly sentimentalize or romanticize the platonic ideal of New York. Anyone who’s lived here for a while will probably tell you the same. The New York I love isn’t the New York of Times Square and the Statue of Liberty, Broadway musicals and Central Park, although all those things are so iconic of this city, and in their own way, love-able too. It’s a love for putzing down Metropolitan Avenue on a clunky old bicycle to pick up Pocky from the 24 hour Korean bodega between Union Avenue and Lorimer Street. It’s also a voyeuristic romance with the fireflies blinking and mating in Prospect Park in the summer. It’s watching the sun disappear underwater in DUMBO and breathing in a velvety, late-summer dusk; it’s doing a soundcheck before a show in a club with a shitty sound system and a beer-sticky linoleum floor. It’s late night Chinese food delivery and pizza slices you fold and eat with one hand while rushing to catch the subway to Penn Station to hop on NJ Transit. It’s running into people you know on the train or in a restaurant because sometimes, as big as New York City is, it still can feel like an intimately small village.

I’ll miss it.

M. seems to derive some genuine, impish pleasure from saying “We’re shacking up!” when people find out we’re moving to San Francisco, and it makes me simultaneously happy and nervous about what’s ahead. I’m too unsure and uncertain about myself sometimes. Most times, probably.

Moving to a new, far away city, without knowing what it’ll be like is not new to me. In some ways, I have an added advantage this move around because I’ve spent some limited time in San Francisco. Not enough to uncover a favorite spot yet (except for maybe Bi-Rite Creamery) but enough to know that there’s no such thing as a bad taco in the Mission, and the nights are going to be much quieter, which I think I might be ready for right now. My foursquare check-ins are probably going to be fewer, especially when compared to the past couple weeks, when M. and I have been trying to fit in “last dinners” at our favorite places and places we’ve been meaning to try.

My new job is hopefully going to be a bit of a relief from what I was doing before. For those of you who wouldn’t think it, public policy degree holders don’t always fit in nicely in the world of Sales. And that’s not meant to be an arrogant, self-righteous statement, as if I feel like I’m better than anyone else. Because I know that’s not true. It’s just a question of aptitude, and I know now, with certainty, that upselling advertising products is not a core strength of mine because it’s just not what I’m really passionate about.

I’ve been ready for a change for a while, I’m just not sure if I’m ready to leave New York. That being said, there are many strong reasons why it’s a good choice right now, and I’m ready to do it.

Three words that became hard to say
I and Love and You.

Paradis

The conversation began with the cabbie’s complaint about the MTA and the credit card company taking a cut out of debit and credit card transactions in NYC cabs, and evolved into an anecdote about a “marijuana girl” with a dog who had made him drive to Brooklyn (with a pit stop to let her dog pee along the way) and duped him out of a fare of $27.

“Do you like dogs?” He asked, a bit aggressively.
“I do, I like dogs very much.”
“Tell me: Why do you like dogs and not cows?”
“I like cows too.”

And so the conversation spiraled out of my control. First came a bit of a bemused rambling about how people in the United States treat dogs as pets when for him, they had always been a dispensable part of the Moroccan farm he lived on before moving here in 2003. I rolled down the backseat window to get some fresh air as he navigated through Soho, and past Uniqlo.

“If they don’t protect the sheep, the goats, or if they harm them, then I throw [the dogs] away, you know?”

I told him I don’t like chickens. It’s true, I have an unnatural phobia of chickens, especially roosters. “I think they’re too aggressive,” I remarked with a childlike embarrassment. He concurred and went on to tell me a story of how roosters like to fight when it rains.

In an accent tinged slightly by French, he mused “I like to look out on the farm when it rains, you know? It gives me this feeling, this romantic feeling, but anyway…”

On one of those rainy days, he saw a rooster and a turkey in a bitter fight. The turkey was stabbing the rooster through its head and evidently winning the tousle. Blood everywhere. He felt sorry for the rooster and tried to move it aside with a shove, and in that way that animals that don’t really understand the kindness of humans behave, in return, the rooster raised its wing with a swift sharpness that immediately bruised his thumb, and turned it black.

“I worked with tools and this felt like… like a hammer on my hand.”

As we drove over the Williamsburg Bridge, leaving Manhattan behind, he started telling me another related story about a wolfish dog that he’d had on the farm that suddenly began attacking him. He had young children at the time, and had to have it shot. Someone else told him that these dogs could not be domesticated. With a sigh of resignation he said, “After six months, these dogs that are like wolves, they go crazy.”

I was curious so I asked how long he’d been in this country. I have a certain fascination with immigrants in the United States because I feel some kind of affinity with that experience, even though I can’t pretend my experience and his are the same in any way at all. He told me he’d gotten his university diploma in English. At the interview after winning the green card lottery, they’d seen his occupation in his passport listed as “Farmer”. “We don’t need any more farmers,” they told him. And he said, “What kind of people do you need?” He and his wife, an agronomy engineer, had taken on the farm as a matter of choice after his parents had passed away and left the farm as his inheritance, but they were keen to leave that behind for the United States.

We turned onto Roebling, and made our way towards Metropolitan Avenue.

The conversation turned to the French language, and the various complications of grammar – passe compose, imparfait, plus-que-parfait… He listed every kind of tense there was.

“Turn right here, please.” Every second brought us closer to the terminus of our conversation. He was still going on about French and English and Arabic, and how Latin, Arabic and Persian had so many similar words as a result of the melting pot that was the Mediterranean. He listed them in English for my benefit. I told him the only three words I knew in Arabic were “sokran”, “marhaba” and “habibi”.

“Those are beautiful words to know,” he said with a chuckle, and I laughed with him. While I went through the motions of paying my fare in the light of a blue touchscreen, I mentioned that the Hungarian word for “tomato” is “paradicsom”, derived from the same root as “paradise”. In German Schwabish, as I’d learnt from a friend’s mother, it’s “paradis”.

“Paradise!” He exclaimed, delighted.

I can’t remember exactly what he said, but it was along the lines about how it was a beautiful word for tomato. While he didn’t use the words “godly” or “divine”, the ghost of them hung delicately in the air.

An audio excerpt from our conversation.

For Posterity, Part 2

I love soups and recently, probably on account of the colder weather, I’ve been really into Japanese oden. Last weekend, I managed to concoct some version of oden with daikon, and it came up in conversation between M. and me -

Me: it’s indeed yummy. i have to figure what other fixings to put in there…

M: pork

Me: i don’t like touching raw meat….

M: i can do that
rawr! man spear meat. cut and eat.
that rhymes

Me: hmm.

M: caveman is poet
doesn’t even know it

Me: sigh.

M: grunt

He’s real special, that boy M is.

The Real Girl

I spent a much needed long weekend in Maine over Labor Day weekend. As usual, in its magical way, it brightened up the stressful time I’ve been having at work, and I remembered to breathe a little bit more. It wasn’t quite long enough, unfortunately, for me to recover fully, but I think I’m just greedy.

My little host-sister (now a surly 17 year old with Twilight posters on her bedroom wall) played in a soccer match against a pretty good team from away. She made an assist in the overtime that helped score the winning goal. I sat on the grass, snack shack hot dog in hand, with B. and Grandma H., watching younger kids run around by the bleachers, while a tiny toddler in a sundress practiced walking. Earlier that day, B. and I had taken the dog out for a walk to the lake, and we picked blackberries off the bushes along the way, some of them still sweet, and all of them warm from the late summer sun. Each bite brought a flavor explosion, sour or sweet, a surprise and unexpected, just like every rustle in the trees from the breeze.

The family dog has gotten really old. He doesn’t hear so well anymore, and isn’t as spry and strong as he used to be. As we watched “Lars and the Real Girl“, a beautiful, sweet, poignant and sincere film about a shy man and a life size doll, Blazie cuddled up to me in the doggiest way he knew how, and let me slowly brush his shedding summer coat with my fingers.

I also went to a dessert social at the local UU Church – there is no better dessert on a cool September evening than homemade blueberry cake. And then there was the Windsor Fair, complete with a blue-ribbon 827lb pumpkin, midway games that we played for chintzy prizes (though MJ says we made out like bandits), and a ferris wheel ride. I avoided the poultry hut, but eagerly explored the maple sugar shack.

Snapshots of domesticity. M. says it’s my happy place. I have to agree.

Birds On Wires (by Jarbas Agnelli)

I’ve always loved birds. My dad used to keep songbirds when I was a little girl, and he and my grandfather would take them in their bamboo cages to these community spaces, usually near an open-air coffee shop, where one could hang the birdcages up for an afternoon, and dawdle leisurely with other old men to pass the time.

These spaces still exist in Singapore, and you can listen to all kinds of different tropical songbirds there. Little ones (like the mata puteh) that chirp and peep little bubbly songs, or prized songbirds (usually the hwa-meis) that belt out long rambling warbles of strung together notes, or exotic tropical birds (like the acrobatic jambul) that are housed in delicately constructed special cages to accommodate and showcase their various quirks.

I came across this video and it reminded me of my dad, and how when I was little, our birds used to sing, and sometimes dad would come home with a trophy, a spoil of an auditory war battled out between armies of caged birds.

The concept for the video is pretty neat:
Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn’t the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating.

Sameness Is The Same…

…Fighting is the game
Nameless is the lady who has gone insane…

It was sophomore year of college and I had fallen in love. And, like most monumental relationships, everything about our love was magnified because of our youth, because of our shared predicament as strangers in a strange land, and because we were full of passionate optimism for causes larger than ourselves.

Ambition drove us to different parts of the world soon after we committed to our relationship. A month after, he spent time in Costa Rica working at an orphanage in a remote village. I spent the next six months in a theater conservatory-style program in London. When I returned from London, we spent three beautiful weeks in Hungary, afterwhich I continued school in Maine, while he spent the half the year studying Arabic in Jordan, and the other half continuing research in Middle Eastern Studies in London. We spent one year living together, and then it was off to upstate New York for me for graduate school. He pursued a fellowship at Oxford. We both committed to yet another two years of calling cards, six-hour time differences, and transatlantic flights on a student budget. “We can do this,” we told each other over the phone, when it seemed like sending care packages, troubleshooting Skype, and going to bed alone were going to be the status quo for the rest of our lives.

The mechanics of how our love fell apart don’t really matter, but the relationship did collapse spectacularly after four years as the transgressions we hoped were just accidental turned out to be conscious choices in making mistakes. In the years we had shared, however remotely over continents, we had built up a platonic idea of what it was like to be “us”. Over the course of distance and time, compounded by divergent ambitions, these hopes and dreams of an eventual shared future and forever became unsustainable.

Unless you’ve been in a long-term, long-distance relationship, I don’t think you can really appreciate the energy and effort needed to keep on believing that somehow all you’re doing is worth it. While we both agreed independence and doing what we needed to do to be happy was the healthy thing to do for us, we didn’t anticipate the resentment he would feel when I was too busy to call, or the immense guilt I would feel when I was having a good time without him. We didn’t anticipate my depression being an issue, and how I became either needy or aloof because of it. The pressure to be perfect and pick up where we left off the last time we met grew too great, and made our brief in-between-semester interactions artificial. “You and me versus the world” became a sardonic joke instead of that youthful ideal that we aspired to when we first met.

When I think about if I’d ever be in a long-distance relationship again, I hesitate to say yes because I know too well that feeling of being a celibate single which I would be happy with if I was at a point in my life where that was something I wanted. I can’t describe to you how much it hurt to miss someone who just wasn’t there when things were bad, how much more it hurt when the world was unbearably beautiful and you couldn’t share that feeling in an email or a phonecall. Am I more mature now that I could handle a long-distance relationship with no particular end goal or end time in sight? Does this have anything to do with maturity? I’m no advocate of being one half of an interdependent couple, but I don’t believe that there’s much value in being in a relationship if at the end of the day I’m not able to fall asleep in my partner’s arms, on the couch, because they’re 3000 miles away. Does saying that mean I am being too dependent on someone else for my own contentment in a relationship? Am I overcommitted (by needing the condition of proximity be fulfilled) and undercommitted (by rejecting because of zip code differences) to a relationship all at the same time?

When my college boyfriend and I finally parted ways at Gatwick airport, both of us in tears because at the time we didn’t have the clarity of mind to understand what went wrong beyond the most immediate situational causes, it was without a doubt painful and emotionally draining. Hindsight is always 20/20, and I know now that removing myself from that situation made me realize I didn’t have to be the sailor’s wife gazing out at sea for a ship’s return to port, turned to stone, waiting for a nebulous something to change course.

City and sea
Light versus tree
Mapping out the stars inside your brain
Completely different
But the same sort of sound
More easily found
This is what I wanted from the start
The day is light the night is dark

Save Up All The Days…

… A routine malaise
Just like yesterday
I told you I would stay…

My life is currently being lightly jostled by thoughts and suggestions of things that will change it. It’s sort of like being a little leaf, riding the ripples of a pond, and trying to figure out which direction to float in, or if to decide at all or instead do nothing. The changes that are adrift could be called negligible or monumental, depending on their interpretation and depending on the ultimate decisions that are made, but nevertheless, a shifting and a shuffling is palpable in my breath.

And it is all about the timing. These whispers of a morphing future have caused me to ask questions perhaps a little before their time, and I find myself being nudged and prodded, gently forced to confront some challenging, but not necessarily difficult, issues. At the same time, I wonder if my sense that I’m being coaxed to face up to some issues in my life in an untimely fashion is just an indication of how I’ve been holding off on answering questions whose time is due. I know I shouldn’t let those unspoken questions fester.

I’m ready for a change, but change doesn’t necessarily mean a moving forward, or “progress” – just something different. I’m ready for a reconfiguration, whereby some aspects of my life that I’m very happy and content with remain as they are, and others are adjusted to make for a happier future. I am ready to change things and, simultaneously, let things happen – like reorganizing the inner workings of a slowed down, tired machine to make it run more smoothly.

I’m optimistic. I think good things are about to happen, and I’m beginning to plan for their execution.

Would you always
Maybe sometimes
Make it easy
Take your time

Sweet Disposition…

… Never too soon
Oh reckless abandon
Like no one’s watching you…

M. and I took a break in early July, off to New Mexico where we got to spend some time outdoors in New Mexico’s ecotonic ecology, and gorge ourselves on tamales, carne asada and sopaipillas. I never knew really, before going to California for the first time last year, how good real Mexican food could be, and what a disservice restaurants in New York do to burritos. (Burrito Loco, I’m looking at you.)

My absolute favorite spot on our trip was a town called Chimayó – a quiet spot in between Taos and Santa Fe most famous for its Santuario. At our bed and breakfast, I got to watch hummingbirds buzz frantically at the birdfeeders while I ate my pancakes, and we made friends with Griffin, the cat. There were also horses and a rooster that we didn’t get to see, but we could hear from our room that opened up into the garden. The world’s best tamales (no offense to anyone’s grandmother) are to be found in Chimayó, at Leona’s, right next to the Santuario. I can’t describe heaven. You have to go there. Or order tamales FedExed to you.

Returning from New Mexico back to New York City left me somewhat on a low as I struggle to deal with being reminded of what life could be – free, outdoors, seeing beautiful things and being inspired – and what I feel constricts the full extent of my possible happiness in parts of my life right now. That sense of inhibition has slowly sucked me into a throbbing despair, misplaced frustration, and misdirected anger that I hope is only temporary. The red rocks and open skies of New Mexico are a reminder of how much I don’t want to live coldly like a cog in a machine. I desire so much for a life that is of inspiring daily experiences.

I’m definitely feeling restless, and looking for some kind of a change. What that change must be, I’m not sure. I’m passing milestone after milestone on a long highway, but still unsure of where I’m going. People seem to have their lives figured out, and I don’t necessarily want to execute a ten year plan, but I’d like the option to at least deliberate over my choices so I could evaluate acceptance or rejection. In grad school, MAK and I used to play the “what do you think we’ll be doing a year from now?” game. Right now, it knocks the breath out of me to think I’ll be doing the same thing.

And while our bloods still young
It’s so young
It runs
And we won’t stop til it’s over
Won’t stop to surrender.