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.

And Comb Your Hair

… If I’m to take you anywhere
I’ve got it made, while my woman is away
Off taming goats, with compassion I suppose…

Leonard Cohen sings, “Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in” over and over again in my head. Bittersweet optimism is what’s helping me get through these past couple days, which have been much of a downer for reasons of my own making, and no real fault of anyone’s.

In graduate school, someone once sent me an anonymous note that only read, “be kind to yourself”. I was going through a difficult time then, and reading that note made me burst into tears, in public, which is something I rarely do because it embarrasses and shames me so much to cry, even in front of people who are emotionally close to me. I’ve been reminded about being a bit too tough on myself by a few people of late, including my therapist who thinks I suffer from “emotional theft”, something I still haven’t been able to fully research online because I can’t find the right references. I’m probably not able to grasp the nuances of the term or diagnosis, but in simple terms I’m able to understand that he thinks that I allow other people’s feelings to take precedence over my own, and that results in pent-up frustration and a very intense cycle of emotional self-flagellation.

On my to-do list on my computer desktop, I have a checkbox next to “be kind to yourself” and it’s the first task I look at every day. I never check it off, because it’s a work-in-progress, a reminder of how much more I have to do, and how some things can never be crossed off a list. I try hard to remind myself that it’s okay to own my frustration and my feelings, disappointment and happiness – That’s what the therapy helps with. On days when I feel the universe is vast, beautiful, open and full of tantalizing joy to be bitten into, I can be so happy and really feel one with the universe. But on the darker days, I struggle with reconciling my intellectual understanding of what’s going on in my head with the bubbling frothy tumult in the pit of my stomach.

I have so much to work on, for myself. And so much to let go. I’m so humbled by the emotional rollercoasters I go through because they remind me just as I’m getting complacent about having found a comfortable place in my life, that I haven’t figured it all out. It would be nice if everything fell into place, because then maybe that would stop the not-so-great feelings, but I suppose if everything were the way I wished them to be, I wouldn’t have a foil to joy or yardstick for satisfaction. I know things aren’t meant to be easy. But because I know I have so much to work on, I know I’m not allowing myself to develop real (but then again, what is real?) intimacy with someone because I’d like to be someone’s perfect Pygmalion. I recognize intellectually that nobody’s perfect, and don’t fault people for not being perfect, because we are all a little knocked about and chipped. But somehow the expectations I have of other people don’t apply to me.

I feel like I’m out fighting windmills and someone has strapped mirrors to their blades.

Holy cow
I want you to get out
And tell all your friends
that I’m not myself again.

But How We Move…

From A to B
It can’t be up to me
‘Cause I don’t know…

I know I’m probably way late to jump on the Lykke Li bandwagon (it probably isn’t cool anymore, is it?) but I just found this song, and I love everything about it – The toy piano, the tone of defensiveness, the inching towards the edge of falling completely, the tambourine!

I’m in the middle of reading Anaïs Nin’s “Henry and June” which has been an absorbing read for the past week, compelling reflection on a lot of my own feelings about feminism, love (what does it mean, “to love”?), passion, desire, beauty, ugliness, comfort, and being settled or unsettled. This song makes me think of that tension between being strong, independent, autonomous and that submission to love – a confession that the rational has lost out to the emotional? – which exposes us to invulnerabilities and weakness, and the occasional desperation for reassurance.

Come here
Stay with me
Stroke me, by the head
Cause I would give anything
Anything
To have you as my man

“It’s Your Ride”

I love my bicycle, even though I haven’t ridden in months because it’s not feeling well – It’s got a weird squeaky thing going on somewhere and the front brakes won’t release off the wheel. I have, however, promised multiple people that I will fix my bike in time for a) a party this weekend in Brooklyn, and b) the Five Boro Bike Tour which I think I will suffer at because I’m really out of shape and c) general riding in this New York City weather that is flirting with the idea of spring. I’ll just have to make good on my promise this weekend.

I do love bicycles, their shape, their sounds, their mechanics – it’s all more of an aesthetic experience to me than the need to ride like a speedmaven through New York’s concrete labyrinth. Hopping on for a slow, short ride towards an imaginary oubliette or a roundabout errand in my neighborhood makes me smile, and that’s usually all I ever do, really.

Enjoy this video by Daniel Leeb of Cinecycle Productions. Commissioned by Hutchinson tires, the short traces the bike paths of two different bike-riders in New York City. The music is original, by Alan Wilkis, and the track “The Hustle” can be downloaded for free on MySpace.