Re:Districting

Let's Diffuse This Situation

2012-01-23T09:23:00.003-05:00

So, I use humor to do a lot of things - make new friends, diffuse an awkward situation, grapple with the deepest mysteries of the universe, etc.

I get super nervous going to any sort of medical professional for anything. Not so nervous that they're trying to sign me up for the pre-appointment valium, but I can't say I'd be entirely opposed to that. Naturally, since I get nervous and awkward, I make a lot of jokes. As trained medical professionals, they have learned to mask their humanity and remain clinical and distant at all times - at least, this is what I blame as the reason my jokes fall flat.

Today, as a follow up to my annual physical, I had to go in for an echocardiogram. So, time to take off your clothes, put on the little paper gown and lie on the table while they take some images of your heart. Now, as the tech is giving me instructions on how to position myself for the "procedure," a funny thought comes to mind.

"Roll onto your left side...okay, put your left arm up behind your head, like this. Okay, good, now let your right arm rest on your side."

Cue Celine Dion.

Jack, I want you to paint me like one of your French girls.

With only a split second of hesitation I said, "Ooh, this is just like that scene in Titanic. Ha." Get it? Get it? I have to lay like this but it is totally NOT like Titanic, amirit?

Tech says, "Uh, yeah, that's the pose, alright."

After the appointment all I could think was, Man, what I should have said was, "Jack, I want you to ultrasound me like one of your French girls."

Put a verb on it!

Later this morning, I was buying some juice in the cafeteria when the girl in front of me (with a tray full of things and multiple envelopes, etc) turned around and said, "You should go somewhere else, I've got like 5 orders."

Looking to the only other cash register, I saw 4 people in line. Same, same, right?

"No problem, I'm fine here."

So, she loads up one order, then another, paying with different cards, a wad of cash, etc. I say to her, "It's too bad they couldn't put you on the corporate card, right? AMEX Black card, maybe?" Get it, because there is no corporate card because this is the government, I mean, am I right or am I right?

She doesn't even acknowledge that she has been spoken to.

Then a kindly old fellow on the other side of the line says, "This looks to me like you've lost a football bet." Everyone smiles, I chuckle.

"No, I'm getting breakfast for everyone in the Ops center. Because of the late start I'm the only one here who can do it."

The older man says again, "Nope, looks like you lost a football bet."

She sighs heavily, clearly annoyed. Which I couldn't understand, since everyone was just trying to show her we didn't care she was taking effing forever at the register, so I said, "We're just teasing, just giving you a hard time."

"I know," she said curtly.

"I mean, we're not exactly banging down the doors to get back into our cubicles." A couple more chuckles from behind the other folks in line.

She stalked away with her heavily-laden tray without a word.

It made me a little sad. Not just that our jokes had no effect, but that she missed out on the joke, that she missed out on the joy, the tiny connection we all just made with eachother, a little story that might buoy us later on when things weren't so funny anymore.

Mary Evans Protip: Life is short. Don't take yourself too seriously.

It is Way To [sic] Early

2011-12-07T13:18:00.002-05:00

I'm on the committee to help plan my office holiday party next week. The day after our shindig, they are using the conference room we're taking over for an important meeting. I thought it would be a nice gesture to get the room vacuumed after our fete.

Figuring there couldn't be a direct way to do this, I asked someone in our executive office how I could get the room vaccumed. I was told to send a request to the e-mail box dedicated to building maintenance requests. I did so, and received a reply that my request had been made "way to early" and that I would need to send the request again the day before the party. It was a blow, not only because there couldn't be any calendar or system of logging requests if one could be made "to early," but also because they used "to" instead of "too." It's worse than there, their, they're, in my humble opinion.

I was then called and informed that the room could only be vacuumed between the hours of 2 and 3:30pm. I replied that our party was from 3-5pm and so the cleaning wouldn't be useful then, nor would it be helpful for the meeting the following morning. When I asked about simply borrowing a vacuum, I was told that I was "not allowed to touch it" per some building or union regulation.

Sigh. I think I've gotten it straightened out. I think I'm going to call after the party on Tuesday and say there's been a "massive spill" in the conference room that needs to be cleaned up before a very important meeting the next morning. Well, that's only if taking my case to the building manager doesn't work out.

And then, to rub salt in the wound, I was greeted in the kitchen by this sign on the refrigerator:

Effective 12/9/11, the refrigerator and freezer will be emptied and cleaned each Friday. Please remove items you do not wish to have disguarded.

I am, of course, sketching a hummus tub fencing a yogurt container to stick up next to it.

The Question Game

2011-11-18T13:24:00.002-05:00

The night of my first kiss I was playing the question game with my boyfriend of 2 weeks and crush of many, many months.

We stayed up far too late that summer, often with our other friends, asking each other questions about our childhoods, preferences and dreams. We couldn't get enough of eachother. All of us. The friendships we made were sudden and intense, springing up out of games of cards at fireworks stands, and hide and seek in the dark.

A few months later I was at my boyfriend's birthday party and some of his family had put together a quiz about him as one of the games. I knew all the answers but one, I think - high school colors and mascot, favorite cartoon character, favorite cartoon show (yes, they were different questions...he was really into animating) name of childhood pet, other details. I knew the answers because of the question game, mostly. What was your favorite birthday? What were you most afraid of when you were little? What was your stupidest fight with your parents about?

But after weeks of playing this game, you start to run out of questions.

So we sat there in the cold and quiet of early December, separated handily by the console in the middle of the front seat of my car. I kept pestering, thinking he was running out of ideas. "Come on! It's your turn. Ask me a question." Silence. "Come on! You are taking foreevveeerrr." I thought he was falling asleep. "Come on!" I poked him in the shoulder.

I barely heard the question, it was asked so quietly. "When are you going to let me kiss you?"

I said the smoothest thing I could think of. "Well, um, I don't know. Why don't you try right now?"

I didn't really understand what all the hype had been about. That took a good night's sleep.

But that's not really the point of all this.

I think a lot about how the people I've met in the past few years, mostly since college, I know in a different way. I know what they think is funny, where they came from, maybe a sketch of what their family is like. The truth is that what I have mostly is an idea of their personality, not much more than that.

I miss knowing everything about someone. Like how they hid notes from boys they liked in their bed posts, what every hair cut they've had since their hair was long enough to cut looked like, and their most embarassing Halloween costume ever.

And since I wasn't there for all those things with the people in my life now, I guess I'm going to have to start asking some questions. We spend all this time wanting to get out and explore things, see the vast expanse of the world. But we forget about the great unknown of eachother.

A lot of people I know are writing down something they're thankful for every day this November. I decided not to do that. But, if I had to pick one thing I was grateful for this month, it would be that knowing is the most interesting, beautiful, mysterious, wonderful thing we ever set out to do with out lives.

Ain't this just like the present...

2011-08-07T23:33:00.002-04:00

To be showing up like this?

Well, it'll be 5 years here this month. I'm not really sure if it will feel like a significant milestone, but that's a quarter (almost) of the time I lived in California, and perhaps only a tenth of the rest of my life.

I remember once when I was heartsick, I looked at my day planner during second period Calculus. I counted the pages that represented the days I felt like I'd wasted. I noted that they were just a tiny part of the whole year, not even a half an inch. And if I stacked up all the calendar pages from high school, stacked up those four years, the time seemed even more insignificant.

Granted, I was tricking myself, but it made me feel better to think that those weeks were just a fraction of what I'd lived, of what I was going to live. In retrospect I wish I'd known then that the only thing that's guaranteed, the thing you really only recognize one instant after it's passed, is the present. Now, I try to be about the business of squeezing all I can out of it, like a microwaved lemon I've rolled around on the counter under my palm.

Five years here. Longer than high school, longer than college, longer than pretty much any other point of reference I have. And people leave, and people arrive, and people go home, and people move on. Sometimes it feels like they're doing it all at once. And on days like that, days like today, you've got to remind yourself to settle into the present and accept what it's able to offer you right now.

And be grateful for it.

What's That I Hear?

2011-08-03T13:43:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I'm biking down, or east, really, D st northeast, when I hear someone whistling behind me. It takes me a minute to pick out a melody. I glance over my shoulder at a stop sign. At first, I'm skeptical.

Behind me, mounted on his fixed gear, is an older but not quiet middle-aged fellow with a significant beard.

I see and hear him pick up the riff again, and this time there's no mistaking.

"Never heard that version of Britney Spears before. It's good," I tell him, laughing just a little. You know, in a I think that's kind of awesome and humorous, maybe even attractive kind of way and definitely not a I am mocking your taste in music way. Because A) That would make me a total hypocrite since I love most songs by Britney Spears and B) Years of unfortunate experience have taught me that deflating a man's ego, even just a bit, within the first few moments of meeting doesn't usually yield positive results.

"Yeah, thanks, I just can't get it out of my head," he says as he starts to whistle again, fairly intensely.

I join in, somewhat timidly, "See the sunlight, we ain't stoppin, keep on dancin' till the world ends..." then add in a regular speaking voice as we ride together to the next stop sign, "I wish I could whistle, I've never been able to."

"Well, I have a terrible singing voice, so I figure this is all I have to offer the world," he replies.

I turn right, he carries on down D.

Maybe I should post a missed connection, just to let him know how awesome I thought that was.

Yep, that's my roommate...we're edgy!

2011-08-02T11:37:00.004-04:00

Last night Stefanie and I hustled to the library after taking Total Body Conditioning at the gym so that I could get a new library card and so that we could trade in the 3 Deadwood discs we had watched over the weekend for several new ones. Unfortunately, they were out of new library cards, so I'll have to try back again in a few days, but they did let us check out new DVDs on my old account.

To check my identity the librarian covered up the record that had come up when she scanned in the items, then asked, "What's your name?" When I got the right answer, she happily checked us out the rest of the materials, providing some commentary.

"Hmm, Deadwood. What is this? Like Cowboys and Indians type stuff?"

"Yeah, normally not my style, but I heard - "

"Don't listen to her. She loves horses."

"Thanks. Anyway, I'm not really a big Western fan, but I heard this show was good, so we're checking it out."

"Actually we're obsessed."

"Yes, somewhat obsessed."

"Well, lots of people have been checking it out, so it must be good. Due back August 22."

"Wow, we only have till the 22nd to watch all these episodes?"

"Stef, that's 3 weeks. Easy."

As we got into the car, Stefanie expressed her gratitude at Rachel loaning me an alarm clock so she would no longer have to wake me up in the morning, as she had been the past few days since the theft of my phone. "Yeah, and I was so desperate to snooze I jumped on the opportunity to get the clock from Rachel since she was awake. I had trouble falling asleep last night."

"You did? I fell right asleep."

"Yeah, I don't know, I just couldn't until like 12:30."

"How late were you up reading The Help? Don't lie to me, girl..."

"Till about 12:30..."

And that is when a small group of young twenty-somethings walked by and not so subtley laughed at us. Well, I guess we did sound particularly edgy.

Rough. Night. Stayed up past midnight reading, gotta get home and get in some episodes of a critically-acclaimed HBO show. Edgy.

I had also planned on making rice-stuffed squash for dinner...turns out what I thought was squash was actually melon. Unfortunate.

The Social Security Administration

2011-07-29T11:47:00.002-04:00

Yesterday was an interesting day.

In the morning, my wallet and phone were stolen from an unlocked locker at the public swimming pool. I blame no one but myself for growing trusting of both the early morning swim community and the hiddenness of the "secret velcro pocket" in the back of my bag. I also blame myself for not listening to my gut instincts about a woman I'd never seen before who watched me as I came in and put my stuff away, all while chatting excessively with me about the water and her water-loving cousin. But, blaming yourself only gets you so far. So, after I discoverd the items had been taken, I hustled to work, cancelled all my cards, ordered new ones, looked into replacing my phone, etc, etc.

Save for the minor inconvenience of having to mail in a request for a Certified Driver Record from the California DMV so I can get a DC license (no putting it off, now!), the process has been relatively painless. So, yes, it is wrong to steal, and yes I've had to pay for some things, there have been some inconveniences, but at the same time it's made me think about the "market" of theft, perceptions of wealth or status, and how frustrating it is to feel fundamentally unable to fix the real heart of the problem.

On Sunday night, Stefanie and I were walking home from the car, carrying a table and four chairs, and a homeless man (also very drunk) insisted on helping us carry the items the half block to the front door. I tried to tell him not to, but he took the items out of my hands. I knew he was going to ask for money for his trouble, even though we had asked him not to help.

And so I spent the next 10 minutes quietly and not so quietly arguing with him, saying, no, I will not give you money. You are so drunk you can hardly stand or speak, but I have food inside. That's all I will give you. His insistance it wasn't real help to offer him bread and fruit, handing me the bread back and growing agitated. And I thought, if I need to, I will clock him, or spray him with the pepper spray I had in my hand. I was frustrated that he was becoming aggressive, frustrated that I had to think about how to stop him if he tried to hurt me or my roommate, instead of taking the damn bread. At that moment, our landlord happened home, and the homeless man went on his way.

And there's the heart of the issue. The bread won't fix things...then again, neither would $5. Pressing charges against someone for stealing my wallet won't fix it either. You read the story of the Good Samaritan and you're like, oh okay, groovy, Jesus, I can do that. But then the people you encounter who need help are not simply innocents who you can give a warm meal, a hot compress and a pat on the back as they continue on their way, their lives are complicated by poverty, mental illness, addiction and, sometimes, violence. Sometimes I don't even know where to start with all that. Do the things you are able, I suppose, small whenever you can and big whenever you can. And somehow find a way to be grateful and humble and un-smug about being in a position to do anything at all, keeping in mind it could very easily be you next in a position of desperate need. Sigh, things to mull over.

But that wasn't even the point of what I was writing!!

The point was that the Social Security Administration has the strangest ad campaigns EVER. ever.

The first involves some member of the Star Trek cast (you know, the only Asian one? George Takei, Sulu?). The slogan? BOLDLY GO...to www.socialsecurity.gov. Really? That's what someone came up with? I guess they are desperate for people to do as much online as possible. Makes the waiting room waits a lot shorter. But really? Let's make retirement and collecting benefits cool...but using a Star Trek actor?

The other slogan involves Chubby Checker doing the Twist. The saying, I can't remember it exactly, but it says something like, "A new twist in the law means you can do x,y,z with your medicare..." I can just see them in this meeting. "A twist? Get it, a twist. Like THE twist. And then we'll get Chubby Checker to pose like he's bowling and it will appeal to people." Blank stares. I guess no one had any better ideas. It's like the B-Squad of the star power advertising campaign.

It's also interesting at the SSA, because it's a true cross-section of people - older, younger, men, women, agitated, bored, immigrant and non - all there because they have the same need.

That's all.

What I'm Excited About

2011-07-25T16:56:00.005-04:00

So, Stef and I made a list of things we wanted to accomplish this summer and put it on the fridge. We're all about goals in our household. These "goals" included things like trips to the pool, beach, outdoor movies, and to the Viriginia countryside for wine-tasting, peach-picking, and hiking in White Oak canyon so we could take advantage of the natural swimming holes along the trail.

We've accomplished some of these things...we've gone to the pool several weekends so far, we just did a Crab Feast at our friend's house on Sunday, we're probably going to the beach on Saturday, and we've got a reservation at Abram's Creek campground for August.

So, even though it's hot as all get out lately, I've been thinking about how much I appreciate all these summer-y activities, and the fresh fruits and veggies that are pouring in weekly from the farm. On Saturday night I made a blueberry pie and a cherry pie, sitting over my sink on a stool listening to the "Away with Words" podcast and pitting cherries, then baking both pies in a 425 degree oven. Hot work, but delicious work.

I also got to make a watermelon, heirloom tomato, cucumber, goat cheese and mint salad, drizzled with balsamic vinegar for lunch. It was so simple and so amazing. The bounty of summer. And we have more squash and corn than we know what to do with, really! And then in two weekends we'll be getting a bulk box of peaches and tomatoes. Time to make some salsa, jam and canned tomatoes for the winter months!

And so even though it's practically August there's a lot to be excited about...here are a few things I am excited about that relate to summer (in no particular order):

- Trying my hand at olive oil ice cream
- Did I mention CAMPING! Hikes and swimming holes and s'mores and just being outside
- Stopping at the Dogfish Head brewery going to/coming from the beach to get some goodies (including their new gluten free brew!)
- Fresh tomatoes and basil on the patio (once it's not 100 degrees) for dinner

And then the thing I'm most excited about, probably, is happening Labor Day weekend...going to Ireland with my family! I keep thinking about how a live fiddle might sound at a Pub on Dingle Bay, and what it might be like to meet these alleged "relatives" that live in Banbridge, Northern Ireland. Can't. Wait.

It will also be so nice to have my mom and dad rooting for me while I try my hand at the Nation's Triathlon on September 11.

In short, I am trying to soak in all the pleasures, big and small, of the season...it's nice to be so excited for a plant or seeing the ocean again. Makes life feel very rich, indeed :)

Gold Day Alert

2011-07-23T12:34:00.002-04:00

It's hot as sh*t outside.

In other news I accidentally crashed the surprise birthday/engagement party of a Governor's daughter last night. I didn't really think about it that way till I was talking to my parents on the phone.

DC can be a strange place.

Moments

2011-07-22T16:03:00.003-04:00

The record player scratched through one of the Ella Fitzgerald albums you picked up at the Salvation Army. Rain fell steadily outside and it was just cold enough to see your breath (if you held it in a little longer than normal before exhaling). I watched you sprinkle cinnamon on the grounds before pressing "Brew." I'd never seen that before. The next day at the office I bought chocolate covered raisins and a cup of coffee at the cafeteria and put some Ella Fitzgerald songs on Grooveshark to listen to while I answered emails, thinking that maybe I could recreate the coziness of yesterday and the comfort of your friendship. The effort fell flat.

She walked into the bathroom just ahead of me, weakened from the cancer and the chemotherapy that nobody seemed to acknowledge. I could not escape the sound of her body rejecting, vomiting. I walked out of the stall and washed my hands. I stood still. Undecided. Afraid. When she came out to wash her hands, she did not look at me. "Do you...do you need anything? Do you want a glass of water or something?" I said haltingly, finding her eyes in the mirror above the sink. She said nothing. "I know...I know...how sick that stuff can make you feel," gesturing to the IV line in her arm. "No, I'm fine," she said. "Okay," I breathed, and turned, and walked out the door.

Bored, I scrolled aimlessly, noting the brightly colored ceramic jars, decorative measuring spoons and frilly aprons, thinking of how they would look in the imagined home of my future life. And then I wanted to get out of my head, or at least get my head outside, and quickly pictured my toes snug between blades of grass, with a line of sweat forming on my hairline, the clouds puffy and pert in the palest of blue skies. Where is joy? I thought. Hidden between the blades of grass, I answered.

Can I Graduate?

2011-06-16T22:25:00.003-04:00

I saw a picture tonight on Facebook of a graduation from Dexter Middle School, a green hornet proudly emblazoned on a white banner against a fence and a crowd of parents seated in small plastic chairs and looking hot. For a second I thought, I don't remember having a graduation ceremony at Dexter, is that something new?

All I can remember about the last day of school is crying like my life was ending because I was going to a different high school than all my friends (well, except Erin and Sascha, but our relationship was "complicated" back then). Later I would find out that some reporter from the Whittier Daily News had snapped a shot of my blubbering face while embracing another student and put it on the cover of the newspaper. The cover. No, I have never seen it. I should look through some microfilms at the library, I suppose.

The other thing I remember about that day is hanging out all afternoon with Frankie Villareal, Eric Morales and maybe one other person? Why can't I remember now? I think there was definitely a 4th. Oh MIGUEL. Of course, how could I forget.

He and I would walk home from the bus together and plan "double dates" with him and his girlfriend Anjanette that were secretly designed to end in me dating Eric. This never happened. But most girls I knew in the 8th grade had a crush on Eric at one point or another and were furiously jealous when he was with Bibianca Jimenez for that one period of time. But the four of us did go to the theater at the Puente Hills mall to see Godzilla. And my dad did make slightly patronizing comments about it to other parents on the phone. Also, I got to experience the overpowering scent that is middle school boys' cologne in a car - with your dad at the wheel. A scent that endures, trust me. This was before Axe bodyspray.

Anyway, me and the boyz (cuz that's how I do!) were hanging out at Lakeridge, the uber-cool condo complex where Miguel and I lived, playing some tennis, swimming in the pool, sitting in sauna facilities, and running around generally unsupervised instead of packing for our Washington, DC trip, which we had to get up early for the next day.

A couple weeks earlier I had resolved to tell Eric about my feelings. I don't remember the phone call exactly, but I'm pretty sure it went something like this: "Hi." "Hi." "So, uh, Eric. I need to tell you something...I like you." "Oh, yeah, I know." "Oh, you know? How do you know?" "Let's just say Miguel's girlfriend has a big mouth." BETRAYAL!!! The girl code had been broken! But I was too preoccupied with what the implications of this statement were. "So you know I like you." "Yep." "For how long??" "A few weeks..." "And?" I'm pretty sure he cited our awesome friendship (cuz that's how I do!).

Anyway, I had resolved to "move on" the way any 14-year-old would, but Eric knew how to play me like a cheap fiddle. (I am WEAK, WEAK, I tell you!) So, naturally, we vowed to sit next to each other on all the bus trips/plane rides we had coming up in the next week. Four days in, I got dropped for some uppity 7th grader. I was pissed. I think I tried to show I didn't *need* Eric by sitting next to this attractive 7th grader named Andy and sharing his headphones and listening to Sublime in the back of the plane on our flight out of the East Coast. Sweet adolescent revenge.

And what do I actually remember about my trip to the Nation's capital? Well, I had a habit of doing things like singing along to my new Shaniah Twain CD loudly in a Macy's while on the trip. That should be a good indication.

I do remember the humidity, I remember The Awakening from when it was still at Hains Point, I vaguely remember standing outside a souvenir shop across from Ford's Theater, and I remember seeing fireflies near the Lincoln Memorial. I even remember taking a group photo in front of the Capitol - but I don't remember the inside! But what stands out most is the penthouse pool at our hotel, eating a gyro in a Philadelphia food court, how green everything looked, and that men and women don't sit together in Amish services (and also the nonsensical explanations our tour guide gave about Amish customs while we drove through Pennsylvania on a bus). And, of course, the unfortunate button I purchased while I was still innocent and pure that said, "Save a tree, eat a beaver." I loved me a good pun; sadly, I had no grasp on sexual innuendo. Who knows how many days, weeks, months, I proudly displayed that button on my backpack. Hopefully not that long.

But of course what I remember even more intensely than that are the feelings. Of feeling simultaneously left out and included in the "cool group," of feeling wanted and rejected by the object of my affections, of feeling like I wasn't ready to go to summer school far away from all these people I know now, looking back, I felt so ambivalent towards, and how strangely comforting it was to be able to "watch" the Earth turning at the American History Museum while turning my new pair of FOakley's over and over between my fingers.

In some ways we are always looking to graduate, to move on to new and different things, to find people with whom we can reinvent ourselves; but the past always lingers. Who we are fundamentally seems to change very little.

Just yesterday morning in the shower I caught myself singing, "The car won't start, it's fallin' apart, I was late for work and the boss got smart. My pantyline shows, got a run in my hose, my hair went flat - man, I hate that!"

Seattle in Sum

2011-01-18T22:30:00.004-05:00

Philip, our tour guide for the Seattle by Foot Microbrewery Pub Crawl, was 26 years old and bore a quiet resemblance to Ryan Reynolds. He was slight of frame, with tattoos on both arms and bit of a beard.

He warned me, shortly after I walked up, that the only other people signed up for the tour were probably going to be a couple, and that he would offer them a refund since it looked like it was going to be such a small group and that if it was, in fact, a couple, he wouldn’t blame me for bailing to avoid being a third wheel. I restrained from pointing out there would be 4 of us present on the tour, making a third wheel scenario somewhat unlikely. He told me that if the tour didn’t happen, he would give me some pointers on places where I could head by myself that evening.

I asked him where he was from, if he was from Seattle, and he said, “No one is from here. Everyone is from somewhere else.” So I asked again. “I’m from a little bit of everywhere,” he replied, “I’ve been all over.”

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Figuring shit out. Figuring life out, I guess.”

His answer seemed to capture something that I had noticed right away about Seattle. There were a lot of young people working everywhere, which isn’t strange in and of itself, but they were working at food stalls in the market or as baristas or as cashiers at book stores and they seemed remarkably happy. As if by doing this job or that job they were being given the opportunity to experience more of life, a stop on the road in their becoming...whoever they were going to become.

At the Left Bank bookstore, that I had just walked out of moments earlier, I had seen a huge “Anti-Civ” section. Took me a moment to realize that “Civ” meant civilization. Anti-civilization. Taped to the side of the bookshelf was a handwritten list of “Additional Resources” for anyone interested in further reading or internet research. In the back of my head I heard a quiet voice say, “If I had a nickel for every time so-and-so was involved in a plot to overthrow the government...” I wondered if the cashier could smell Washington, DC on me as I walked out onto Pike Street.

As Philip and I made small talk, two twenty-something girls walked up smiling. They weren’t a couple, as it turned out, but friends who worked together at a local news station. The one girl, with long dark brown hair, bright eyes and a high and excited voice explained that she just loved beer. Loved beer so much that some people made fun of her and other people, like the more reserved blonde to her right, thought to buy her tickets to a brewery tour for Christmas.

It turned out the girls were not originally from Seattle. The brunette, Rhea, had lived in New York and New Jersey and had been proud of being from “the Jersey shore” until MTV had to ruin it with Gym, Tan, Laundry. The blonde, named Jessie, was from Boston and her family still lived on the East Coast.

We started with a tour of Pike Place Brewing where I ordered their seasonal Belgian style Tripel. We found out that Washington State was the world’s second largest hops grower in the world and I correctly guessed that IPAs’ introduction to the world of beer had something to do with British colonial rule in India.

From there we proceeded down through an alley where I had my picture snapped slapping a piece of chewing gum onto a wall.

Our second stop was the Owl and Thistle, a pub that had local brews from the Pacific Northwest. I chose a Winter Ale while the other girls ordered lighter brews and our tour guide used a glass of water to help us keep pace. He had given up alcohol since he started training for his first triathlon. Unlike me, whose goal had been only to finish alive, he wanted to finish in the top 5. His goal was to be sponsored. He wanted to finish an Olympic Tri in 2 hours and 15 minutes. I wished him good luck with that.

As we sat around the table with our beers, the other girls started talking about their work in the newsroom. Jessie was the 11 o’clock news producer and Rhea worked at the desk listening to radio scanners and taking calls and emails about prospective stories. As much as I disdain local news, I couldn’t help but see where they were coming from as they talked about going into news to make a difference, to keep people informed. Rhea talked about a recent investigation into ferry workers’ schedules and salaries that had the potential to save the state a decent amount of money.

Philip told us how he had never been able to work somewhere where he felt like a cog in the machine. He wanted to work for himself and he hoped he would be a part of taking the Seattle by Foot tours to the next level as an eventual business partner with the current owner.

I talked about how sometimes you might feel like a cog or a paper pusher, but it’s important to know at the end of the day that what you do, at work and away from it, makes a difference, and that keeping that in perspective is really helpful. I then pitched the girls a feature story about a Fulbright alumna currently living in Washington State who had started a couple non-profits since returning from South America. “That would make a really great story!” Rhea said enthusiastically. I’ll have to remember to pitch it to Jessie when I get back to DC.

Our next stop was Cassia? It was there that Philip had decided he would choose our beers based on what we had ordered and what we’d said we liked. For me, two samples of regional IPAs, the names of which escape me at the moment. I think one was Barnaby Bay and the other was Cascade. Something along those lines. While I thoroughly enjoy a hoppy beer, these two were so strong I wasn’t sure I was going to finish the two small glasses.

At this stop, Rhea really started to talk. We found out that she had lived in New York City as a pre-teen and had decided she wanted to act. So her parents said, “Okay, get out there and act.” So she appeared in a variety of commercials and even a movie. Granted, it was a movie I hadn’t heard of but I seem to remember her saying something about the movie poster having Burt Reynolds on it. Or someone like that.

The most fascinating story she told was about how she had originally been cast as the sister in The Good Son but McAuley Culkin refused to do the film unless his sister could have the part. To make up for his behavior, the studio took Rhea on a shopping spree of sorts...and it put her through college.

“Why did you decide to stop?” asked Philip.

“I stopped, I dunno, I just stopped. It wasn’t fun anymore. When you’re young you go to the auditions and you see everyone and you’re all friends and you play together.”

“Yeah, she went to auditions with Kirsten Dunst,” Jessie chimed in.

“But then you get older and it’s just a competition. You walk in and you don’t know what people are thinking about you. So I started working at a shoe store in the mall in high school. A couple of times my agent called and was like, ‘I have an audition for you,’ and I told him, ‘I can’t do it. I have to work a shift.’ I was turning down auditions to sell shoes at a mall in Jersey!” Rhea laughed.

We were running late at this point, so Philip hustled us down to a bus stop. As we were walking down the stairs, Rhea linked her arm in mine. “You’re fucking awesome, you know that? To just come here to come here. People don’t do stuff like that. It’s fucking awesome.” The bus was pulling up and Jessie was yelling for us to hurry, so Rhea and I started running, arm in arm down the platform. All I could think was, I really should have gone to the bathroom at that last stop.

We got off the bus and, somewhat unceremoniously, arrived at the end of our tour, outside of an Irish Pub called Kellan’s. We were handed little green cards that would help us avoid covers and sent on our merry way. By now, the three of us felt as thick as thieves and we decided to get one last drink and some food at the pub before heading our separate ways.

After ordering, Rhea’s boyfriend and Jessie’s fiance (their designated drivers) showed up. Rhea’s boyfriend asked me where I was from and I said I grew up outside of LA. When he asked me where, I said, “Whittier. You’ve probably never heard of it.”

He looked stunned. “I went to Whittier College for 2 years!” he shouted over the Katy Perry that had just come on. Apparently the Irish pub did dancing after 11pm.

“What!?” I shouted back. “You were a poet? Like effing John Greenleaf Whittier?!”

“YEAH. I was a motherfucking POET!” he yelled. We both laughed. “But I couldn’t stay there. It was too small. I ended up transferring to Boulder.” He moved to Seattle from Colorado after a snowboarding trip with Rhea, who he’d met on Birthright in Israel, a detail she had filled us in on earlier in the evening.

Jessie and her fiance offered me a ride back to my hotel, which, though only a 15 minute walk away, was a long, cold and windy walk to do by oneself, so I accepted. I found out that her fiance had gone to Biola. Not only gone to Biola, but as he worked at the news station, too, I figured he’d done something in the media department. Turns out, he knew Nate Rupple and his mom, Peggy, family friends of mine who I’d gone to church with for years.

They dropped me off and we made solemn promises to become Facebook friends upon my return to DC. In my back pocket was a post-it note with all the restaurant and attraction recommendations the girls had for me, along with their full names (so I could look them up easier).

I had been awake for 21 hours, but I couldn’t help smiling to myself as I rode up the elevator to my room. Sometimes even the most ordinary things can make life feel extraordinary and interconnected. I had a feeling I was going to like Seattle.

I woke up relatively early the next morning and decided to explore Pike Place and the public market while the rest of the city slept and or pre-gamed for the Seahawks vs. Bears game.

My first stop was Panier, a French bakery and coffeeshop I’d noticed the night before because of the latte art I’d seen in two girls’ cups while they sat by the window.

I then walked through all the different stalls, sipping a cappuccino and sampling heirloom oranges, chocolate covered roasted pecans and infused olive oils.

On my way back to the hotel I stopped into Sur la Table, just in time to hear one of the managers telling the other staff about his encounter with a ghost while closing the store the night before. “Look guys, I don’t normally believe in this stuff, but last night I was standing right over there, straightening that shelf when something brushed my back. I could hear steps on the floor right beside me so I thought it must have been one of the other managers. But they were all downstairs! It was so creepy,” he smiled, suggesting it was less creepy than he was making it out to be.

“Do you think it was really a ghost?” I asked him, casually investigating their Valentine’s Day themed baking cups.

“Well, they do have those ghost tours just down the street...”

As I turned to walk out, another employee had just started his shift and was putting on his apron when I heard, “You will never believe what happened last night while I was closing the store...”

Seattle is surprisingly hilly. I didn’t expect that, though I had guessed that at least the Capitol Hill neighborhood had its name for a reason. As my little four cylinder Aveo struggled up East Olive Way I saw it on my right: Glo’s. The diner where I would be brunching at the advice of my new friends.

I walked in and immediately loved it. It was truly a diner, with a mirror along the back wall to make it look bigger than it actually was - which was pretty small. It had 6 tables and for a party of one it would be a 20-30 minute wait. Not that I minded, it gave me a chance to peruse the discount book store across the parking lot and pick up (finally) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and a present for my roommate, Rachel.

When I came back I was shown to my table by a bleach blond with dark framed vintage glasses, skinny jeans and a lip ring. In the kitchen I saw a row of bearded twenty-something hipsters poaching eggs and frying up hashbrowns.

I knew without looking at the menu what I was going to order. Smoked salmon benedict. Rhea had told me their Hollandaise sauce was the best she’d ever had and the salmon was amazingly fresh. I have to say I agree with both of those points. The eggs were perfectly poached, the salmon salty, fresh and tender, and the hollandaise as creamy and buttery and lemony as anyone could ask for. Glo, the diner’s namesake, had really been onto something.

From there, I drove toward Discovery Park and the Ballard Locks. As I crested one hill, I noticed that the thick clouds that had been clinging to the city all morning had started breaking up along the water’s edge, and in the distance was a pristine mountain range, snow-capped and illuminated by crisp sunlight.

I was grateful for the sunshine as I walked to the locks and read about the history of the Army Corps of Engineers and their projects in the northwest. I hadn’t realized how the lock system kept saltwater out of Lake Washington and freshwater in the Puget Sound, and how it enabled fishing boats, sailing boats and all sorts of recreational boats to move in and out without the crushing difference in water height that can sometimes be experienced. I watched a couple ships, one going out to the Sound and one come in to the Lake, and walked around the botanical gardens there before heading up to Fremont.

Underneath this bridge in Fremont is a giant Troll with his hand crushing a VW bug. Down the street is a sculpture of 3 billy goats. I think someone did that on purpose.

Fremont itself seemed more bohemian than the rest of the city, with vintage and boutique clothing stores, coffee shops and even a vegan cafe with a name like "Silence Heart Nest" that apparently has amazing brunch.

By that time, Bryson had gotten in from LAX, so I went back to downtown so we could go to the market together and he could pick up a few things. I made a point of getting a huge cup full of lump crab meat and cocktail sauce (I had also enjoyed that the night before while waiting for the pub crawl to start) and then dragged him to the cheese shop after he finished buying some souvenirs so that he could try “Truffle Tremor,” a truffled goat cheese by the makers of “Humboldt Fog,” a goat cheese rolled in vegetable ash.

“Kind of tastes like blue cheese,” he remarked. I sighed. It wasn’t exactly the weak-in-the-knees kind of first meeting I had had with the cheese in the fall with Adrienne. “I guess I’m not much of a blue cheese guy.”

After catching up and finding some Italian food for dinner, Bryson and I met up with his coworker Breann and her brother back for a drink at Pan e Vino, a restaurant on Capitol Hill. At 11, we realized we weren’t going to make it to the Anacortes Ferry in time in the morning if we didn’t get to bed.

The next morning was oppressively cloudy. Heavy rain had been forecast, but I had to, just had to, get out and see some scenery. If it was pouring when we got to Anacortes, we decided we’d drive down Highway 20 through Deception Pass and Whidbey Island instead of taking the ferry to the island. Things didn’t look good. It was raining our entire drive up the 5, so much so that I even hydroplaned for a second.

But as we arrived at Mt. Vernon and took a turn towards the Pacific, the cloud cover grew thinner and pockets of sunlight started opening up. As we neared Anacortes, we could see nothing but blue sky over the San Juans.

For some reason, I felt nervous. I’d never been on a ferry before and I guess I was concerned I would do it wrong. Ferries: Ur doin it wrong. Luckily, you just had to pay and get in line. Easy enough. Once we boarded and were on our way, Bryson and I left the car to explore the upper decks.

Out at the front of the ferry it was so windy and cold, but it was unbelievably gorgeous. The water was bright blue and white-capped, the islands around us rocky but lush with evergreens and expensive homes. Every so often we’d see a log floating in the water, sometimes with sea gulls or cormorants perched there and floating on top of the waves.

It’s hard to explain why some things make you feel really alive. But standing at the front of the ferry, with the wind whipping across my face, staring at the almost indescribable beauty of water, earth and sky I could feel it. I could feel life like welling up inside the hollow of my chest, the spot just between your heart and stomach you become acquainted with sometime after you fall in the love for the first time, or maybe grow reacquainted with the first time you see death in someone’s face. The spot where you can feel so much it’s like breathing isn’t working, like the hollow place has stolen all the air in the world and left you there in the ache of tremendous pain or indescribable pleasure. There. I could feel life there, pressing against my ribs and fighting to escape through a laugh or a yell or a song. The sensation didn’t last, it never does, but it filled me with gratitude for whatever lay ahead.

After disembarking on Orcas Island, we had only driven a few hundred yards when we saw a young-ish guy hitchhiking. Something I’ve never done alone, I turned to Bryson to suggest we pick him up when Bryson turned to me and said, “Hey, should we give that guy a ride?”

So into our car Patrick jumped, a tacklebox full of tattoo supplies. He had moved from Seattle to the island where his family lived when the economy tanked, but was determined to get off “Orcatraz” by expanding his tattoo business. He had just gotten back from a job on the mainland.

In the back of my head, and Bryson’s too, he later confessed, was the nagging, What if we just picked up someone who is going to rob us or try to kill us thought. But I was trying to push that aside so that I could hear the incredible tour of the island Patrick was giving us.

He explained that the island was a place for art and for healing. That the energy on the island was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. He told us that an energy meridian ran through it, and that at the top of one of the island’s few peaks his compass had gone nuts, and he and a friend had done an hour long meditation after a couple beers and some weed that was unreal. He explained that George Clooney had a summer home on the island, and that there was fantastic weed to be had because it was grown locally - for medicinal purposes.

We arrived in town, or East Bay, and Patrick told us that the point just off Crescent Beach was sacred land to the native Americans and that it was sort of “locals only” but that if we wanted to feel crazy energy, we should hike on it. “Technically, though, it’s trespassing, so just be real cool about it if you decide to go.” Instead, we opted to drive to Moran State Park on the east side of the island and explore Mt. Constitution, but only after grabbing some picnicking supplies from the organic market in town.

About 2/3 of the way up the mountain there was an overlook, so Bryson and I turned off the road to take in the views. From that point you could see almost the whole island, its valleys and lakes, the other San Juan Islands in the distance and other unknown islands and maybe Canada further out. As we were standing on the ledge, a huge bird caught a thermal and flew up and in front of us. “Bryson!” I yelled, “That’s a bald eagle!” To be completely honest, it felt a little enchanted, to be standing on the side of a mountain in the Pacific Ocean and have a bald eagle fly not more than 20 feet in front of you.

We finished our ascent and at the top of the mountain was an observation tower. From its top, you could see back to Anacortes, northeast to Vancouver and its mountains, and, to the west, Victoria, BC.

Before boarding the ferry for our return trip, we stopped at Deer Harbor on the west side of the island and met the two friendliest dogs, one a huge Australian Shepherd and the other a Husky with beautiful ice blue eyes. Bryson also had a good time taking photos of the pristine sand and the approaching sunset. I scrawled #TITTMFL in the sand and took a picture of it with my phone. Even in a place that felt so remote I had cell phone service and wanted to share this moment with some people back in DC. I had been taking it to the limit, and I wanted some immediate proof of the fact.

The ferry ride back was uneventful, Bryson and I losing steam as we tried to play a game of “Guess How Much This Real Estate on the San Juan Island’s is Going For by the Picture and/or Description" in the San Juan Islands real estate catalogue.

The drive from Anacortes was dark and rainy, and though we found a public radio station (so I could listen to the news), the signal was weak and we couldn’t find any alternatives. We had thought about meeting up with Breann and her brother again for dinner, but they seemed happily holed up in the apartment watching TV and Bryson was content to eat his leftovers from the night before.

He still was willing to humor me and accompany me to Umi, a highly rated sushi place in Belltown, even though he wasn’t going to eat anything. The service left quite a bit to be desired, but the food, especially the sushi, was excellent. I ordered only off the specials menu, as I felt like it was some sort of last hurrah in the city, even though my 7:30am flight the next day meant that I would be in bed before ten, fingers crossed. I had albacore belly and wild white salmon, followed by a seasonal mushroom selection and a special roll called the Moonraker, which was much bigger than I expected. It was a salmon roll, topped with lump crab meat, tiny fish roe, and drizzled with a sweet jalapeno and truffle oil sauce.

While I ate, Bryson and I discussed his new full time position with Virgin America, his upcoming trip to Cancun and Argentina and other tropical locales and my utter shock in his disinterest in visiting Brazil.

After dinner, and dropping Bryson off at Breann’s brother’s Capitol Hill apartment, I returned to the Edgewater for my last night’s sleep in Seattle. With a paper ticket guaranteeing my passage to the west coast anytime in the next 3 months, I hoped I would be able to come back again soon. Who knows where this year will take me?

Life Like a Fever Burning

2011-01-06T21:56:00.004-05:00

Death dips his finger down into your throat and

Draws a straight line through your middle.

Brushing your stomach, your bones and your heart and

Raking the air on your lungs.

No, don't -

His touch is soothing, you say,

Cool, not hot like the other pills you've been forced to swallow

His touch is pleasing, you say,

Cold on the places where your body burns

And Life is always like a fever burning, burning, burning

Life like a fever burning

A Wise Old Tree

2011-01-04T23:26:00.005-05:00

When I was in sixth grade my favorite movie was Pocahontas. Disney really had a good thing going there for a while. Every year my favorite movie was whatever cartoon had just been released, and I would watch the VHS over and over and over again once it came out on video until the next movie and so on and so forth. Until high school when I didn't watch Disney movies anymore (except that I loved Tarzan and was not so secretly thrilled when my bestie Sascha purchased it for me for my 16th birthday).

But anyway, as I was saying, the summer before sixth grade I would go to the park at Legg Lake with my mom almost every day, or at least it felt like every day. I would run down by the lakeside to what was, at the time, a tall willow tree and climb up into, perched and content. Sometimes, I would sing the song that Pocahontas sang to the willow tree in the movie, sometimes I would sing "Colors of the Wind," really whatever struck me in the moment. But I would just sit there, for what seems to me now like hours, cradled in its branches, held aloft - just enough - to feel like time and space were suspended beneath me.

I guess I sort of liked the idea that the tree could speak to you, that if you listened hard enough it would pass on its wisdom (and, no, the tree never talked to me, so put the phone down).

As I got older I visited giant Redwood trees outside Yosemite and the Avenue of the Giants along the northern coast of California. I remember it being so absolutely breathtaking on one drive through Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park that I had flipped the visor up on the passenger side and was leaning forward over the dash to take everything in - the blue of the sky, the emerald of the leaves, the hints of gold flickering between them. It was so lush and full and immense and it felt like my senses were completely incapable of taking it all in. I wanted to be that "translucent eyeball" Thoreau talks about, I suppose, though I wouldn't read about that for another few years. But in many ways I already understood the sentiment he expressed. I didn't want to get in the way of what I was seeing with the actual seeing part. I wanted to do more than see, I wanted to absorb, to incorporate it into myself.

And then I got a little older and I learned that trees were the keepers of knowledge in a very scientific way. When they died, or when you cut them open, you could read their life in their skin. Every year a tree grows it leaves a ring in its trunk, telling you about air, soil and water conditions, if there might have been a fire, all sorts of things you would think impossible to be recorded there. If you have enough patience, and a careful enough eye, you are a purveyor of mysteries, one who listens to the trees. Though I suppose you listen with your eyes more than your ears.

The other week while my parents were visiting for Christmas we took a walk on Roosevelt Island. We were on the boardwalk, having stopped at the sight of some woodpeckers and cardinals (my parents like birds as much as I do!) and as we began moving forward again I heard a low creaking or groaning sound.

I realized it was an old tree, bare and sighing in the winter wind. And I wondered briefly what it had lived through, what it had seen, wondered how it still stood, tall and silent after so many years. And then I saw this video today and it just really fit:

http://vimeo.com/18305022

So, enjoy.

Episode 73: Tuberculosis Joe Gets Trapped in a Mine

2010-11-26T22:43:00.002-05:00

My third year of college I enrolled in an Education class so I could start my minor. I figured it would be fun because my roommate Christine had taken it and was now TAing it (which meant we could be in class together every day!) and what doesn't sound fun about "Issues in K-12 Education"?

The first day of class we were divided into groups based on a series of activities. Christine was assigned as my group's leader/facilitator and we would spend the rest of the quarter discussing our readings together and working on a project about the role of the Arts in Education.

One of our group members was named Joe. His last name escapes me now. But he had long dark hair and smoked outside before and after class and, maybe I'm just making this up, but I seem to remember him also wearing a leather jacket. During our first group activity that would determine our groups, we had to stop where we were standing and pay the person next to us a compliment. I remember Joe said he liked my necklace. Which reminds me that he also had a pierced ear.

I soon learned that Joe was a former Catholic and his way of relating to the world was different than mine - that is to say it was a little on the morose side.

During the final days of our project, we ended up going for coffee after a group meeting at my favorite coffee shop - Gypsy Den. He bought my spiced chai and we talked about all manner of things. Including an ex-girlfriend of his (also named Mary but not from California) who decided not to keep their baby after he got her pregnant. We also talked about his affection for absinthe and how, while studying in England and drinking loads of it, he also ran out of money and had to walk to London from somewhere, and how he had to add a new notch in his belt. He also told me the story of how he tests positive for tuberculosis because somewhere on that European adventure he was exposed to it. You know, casual, friendly, run of the mill quasi-first date type stuff.

After a couple hours, I drove him back to the ARC parking lot and decided to get a head start on some homework. At some point after returning to my apartment, I decided to tell Jessica about the evening and lead with, "So, guess who has tested positive for Tuberculosis? Oh, but they don't really have it, they were just exposed."

Without missing a beat she exclaimed, "That guy Joe from your education class!?!"

"How did you know?" I asked, completely bewildered.

"Mary, he's the only person you know that's seedy enough to have been exposed to Tuberculosis in a foreign country."

Thus came the name "Tuberculosis Joe."

But the story doesn't end there.

A few weeks later, on New Year's, Erin and I had been hopping from party to party, not finding the New Year's experience we wanted. Sitting in my car just off Imperial Highway, at a loss for what to do next, I had an idea. "Let's call Tuberculosis Joe!" Unsure of who I was talking about, Erin wholeheartedly agreed.

The phone rang twice. He was surprised to hear from me. "What are you doing tonight, again?" I asked.

"Um, I'm at a party in Hollywood. You should drop by!" (Of course, TB Joe had aspiring actor friends in Hollywood)

"Okay, let me call you back for directions." I hang up. Erin and I deliberate for a moment. What do we have to lose? This could be the greatest New Year's adventure of our lifetimes. I call back.

"Wow, I didn't actually expect you to call back," he said, audibly surprised, and gave me freeway by freeway instrucitons. We arrived, some time after 10pm, to a group house in North Hollywood. I think I may have had half a Mike's Hard Lemonade (I was conflicted about drinking at the time. Technically, I wasn't 21, but I'd spent the summer in a country where I was well above the legal age and didn't understand what the big deal was). Or maybe a whole Mike's Hard Lemonade.

TB Joe kept asking Erin to go outside with him and smoke, and she kept politely declining.

Midnight came and went, and at 3am or so we got into my car and drove back to Irvine, via Whittier. I never saw Joe again. Not even on Facebook. I wonder how he would react if he knew we nicknamed him "Tuberculosis Joe." Sometimes I think he'd be angry, other times I think he'd just take a drag of his cigarette and own it like a badge of honor.

Post wherein I share my thoughts on "The Social Network" and Norman Rockwell and very few people care

2010-11-12T22:21:00.006-05:00

Okay, so tonight I had the pleasure of taking myself on a fantastic outing to both the American Art Museum/Portrait Gallery and to see The Social Network because I am kind of behind the times.

Firstly, and completely unrelated, I was absolutely fascinated by their special photography exhibit "Elvis at 21." I've never understood what the appeal was, never been a part of a screaming, sobbing throng...but THOSE EYES. My God, the photographer captured this boyish looking ruffian with absolute dream boat eyes. Maybe I am starting to see it.

But what I actually went there to see was the Norman Rockwell exhibit, sponsored by Booz Allen (only in DC) and also made possible by Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas (who, by the way, is really awkward to listen to speak, even on film) and their personal collections of Rockwells. There has always been something about a Rockwell piece that catches you, there's something like INSIDE the painting or the sketch, some tangible joy, some frivolity you're getting to peek in on. And the captions and the film about him kept saying over and over again he was portraying American values, or at least idealized American values, and wanted to get people to believe in...something. He evoked feelings of shared experience - a boy stepping on a girl's foot when they are at a dance, for example - made you believe you were a part of this bigger, more ordinary yet glamorous, more romantic whole.

And it was very interesting looking at this exhibit and then seeing The Social Network on the same night, because I think in many ways art (from painting to poetry to cinema) is the lens through which we can view society. Or, rather, to take the metaphor a bit too far, in many ways it allows us to zoom in, zoom out, refocus and compare what we otherwise experience without that sense of distance or of perspective. Norman Rockwell captured a very particular moment and sentiment of American life, and I think in many was Facebook and this movie have done the same thing.

So, let's talk about it!

One of the main complaints I read about the movie after opening weekend was that it was unfair in its portrayal of women. Not that it was outrightly misogynistic, but that women were hardly in the movie and when they were they were objects of men's lust, an ideal to strive for, or a means to an end. Arguments were made back and forth about why this was done, and, at the end of the day, I felt like the way women were portrayed is probably a pretty accurate view of how most men, Mark Zuckerburg included, view women. And I also think the movie was much more self-aware than most of the reviews I read gave it credit for.

But it's not like the motif of woman as object rather than subject (i.e. receiver rather than doer, reactor rather than actor) is new. In fact, I noticed that as I perused Rockwell's prints, I was bothered by that same thing. A beautiful woman is oogled by two men in a delivery truck and remains aloof, a woman is surrounded by hounding reporters and gazes into the distances, a girl is helpless in a farm truck being tended to by a handsome young doctor, a mother gazes upon her children as they cling to her and pray. The messages are clear - women are beautiful, delicate, holy, mysterious - they are many things, but they are not the initiators of anything, nor is what they are feeling anything but a reaction to something or someone. In Rockwell's America, women are not the originators of much, it would appear.

Not that you can blame him, there's only one picture with a person of color in it and the models for the shot weren't even photographed in the same location! It was a different era. And yet, many of those same attitudes persist.

And here's where it gets a bit interesting...at least to me...and the one person who has decided to continue reading this far. When Mark Z's character is about to be broken up with in the opening scene, his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend says to him: "You're going to do what for me?" when he insists that if he gets into a Final Club he'll introduce her to people she wouldn't meet otherwise. She is offended and assures him she's breaking up with him not because he's a socially inept nerd, but because he is an asshole.

Yet later, he says the same exact line to the Wonder Twins when they ask him to build their website. They assure him their project will give him a chance to polish his tarnished reputation, or more accurately that they will give him that chance. And how does he respond? "You're going to do what for me?"

He didn't want any favors, he didn't want to be on the receiving end of what he believed he didn't need, he didn't appreciate the way social structures of power were re-creating themselves in that moment. He wanted to be the one with the power - in the one case over his girlfriend, and in the other case over those who had more social clout than he did. He didn't want to be femenized, when you think about it.

And there are other similarities, too...Rockwell's paintings give you this sense that you're seeing more than a moment, you're seeing a story, you're seeing a vignette. Somehow it's life distilled. And that, in essence, is what Facebook and social networking is about...the illusion that you have a window into the life of another. It's voyeuristic in a sense. You are looking over someone's shoulder and feeling connected with their personality, their experience, their humanity, but it's not real. It's just a feeling, a trick of the hand - masterfully done, no argument there - but it isn't real. But you let yourself feel overwhelmed the way the teacher in that Rockwell painting does when all her young charges write on the chalk board and leave gifts on her desk, you cry a little on the inside when you see the boy with his dog in the vet's office. You want to feel connected through these shared experiences, these tropes of human existence. And so what does Facebook do? It capitalizes on these same impulses and same tropes.

Our lives boil down to a set of connections, clusters of relationships that have meaning because we give them meaning. Facebook's genius, in a way, was that it could reproduce the social experience online. But I think it's gone beyond reproducing it to becoming integral to it. It's the play within the play where suddenly the characters jump out and start interacting with everyone else. (Bad English reference, I know, but I couldn't help myself!)

And, no, Norman Rockwell's paintings weren't a part of everyday social interactions, but they have become a part of American mythology. We look back at them as history, even though they were originally conceived us as reflections of or, to put it another way, reproductions of real life.

In 60 years everything has changed and yet nothing has changed. And Norman Rockwell and Mark Zuckerburg confirm this.

An All-American Night

2010-09-11T00:16:00.003-04:00

Sometimes there are movies that make you laugh, others that inspire you...others you've already forgotten. Such is The American with George Clooney.

But that's not what I'm here to talk to you about.

After a delightful post-movie dinner with Phil, Stefanie and I were trudging home from the Potomac Ave metro, discussing our usual assortment of nothings when I stopped to investigate something. A cockroach nest! I was both repulsed and intrigued at the same time. They sensed my presence and hid in a large crack in the cement, so I stomped twice, to see if I can get them riled up. Stefanie waits 10 feet ahead of me, mildly irritated and having to go to the bathroom.

"What are you stomping on?" comes a voice from across the street, and next to a giant knight in shining armor.

"Oh," I say in embarrassment, realizing there are people watching me peer at the ground and stomp wildly, "It's a cockroach nest."

"Wait there!" the voice exclaims. "I'll be right back!"

I stand there, debating whether or not to walk away. "Hold on!" another voice says, "Stay there!"

So I stayed there.

Suddenly a man who had to be in his early 50s jogged across 14th St. with a bright red can of Raid in his hand.

"Hi," he said, "Show me where they are..." So I pointed to the cracks in the sidewalk. And he began spraying. "I'm Warren," he said, turning to look at me for a moment, "What's your name?"

"Mary..."

I hear someone behind us. "What is up with your hair?" a man, also in his 50s, asks Stefanie, a glass of wine in his hand.

I am about to fly to defend her honor when Warren engages me again.

"I fucking hate cockroaches - excuse my language - but I do. I used to live with this woman and her 2 kids. I was working at the Planetarium at the time. And one night, I get off work at the Planetarium, and she had bought this coffee table from somewhere, probably a yard sale. Anyway, I noticed that cockroaches kept coming out of it. So I got a can of Raid and started spraying up underneath it. Nothing happened. So I got down to take a look and got my lighter out. All of a sudden - woooosh - the table burst into flames. And then the motherfuckers started coming out - ON FIRE - and running towards all the fabric in the house. I happened to have a half empty bottle of beer, so I shook it up and started spraying them. I got all of 'em."

Did he mention he worked at a planetarium?

"So, where'd you go to college, Mary?" he asks, a pretty safe assumption for DC, I suppose.

"UC Irvine," I say.

"Derrida taught there," he says, still spraying the ground.

"I know, I was taught to deconstruct things very well...I was an English major."

"We're deconstructing these cockroaches right now."

"What's the 'signifier' and what's the 'sign' when you've got a can of Raid in your hand?"

"This right here is the signifier of DEATH!" shouted Warren as he sprayed some more on the other side of the sidewalk. At this point, I laughed - because it was pretty funny. I mean, come on, talking Derrida's literary technique of deconstruction while spraying Raid on the sidewalk? At midnight on a Friday?

Meanwhile, other guy had started chatting up Stefanie. Apparently, his hair comment was a segway into his game.

"So, what were you up to tonight?" he begins.

"Oh, we went to see a movie and then had dinner with a friend, now we're just heading home."

"What did you see?"

"The American...it was okay. But everybody likes George Clooney, right?" At this point, the man looks at Stefanie, looks over at me, looks back at Stefanie and raises an eyebrow. That's right, THIS guy thought we were a couple.

"Oh, no, we're not together," I hear her say.

One thing leads to another and the guy has asked her everything from why she doesn't let her hair go natural to what our house number is. Stefanie gives nothing away.

I turn and introduce myself. Turns out, this guy lives in the hipster apartment on the corner of 14th and A, site of the infamous Christian Hipster conversation of 07 (see one of my first blogposts) and also the more infamous Halloween Party Crash of 07 (where Lydia dressed up like Alex from A Clockwork Orange). "Oh!" I say, "I know people who went to your Halloween party, but they weren't invited..."

"Hey Mary!" Warren shouts, "Have you ever seen the face in the tree?" Intrigued, I'm pulled away once again.

"So-and-so who lives here, he's an anthropologist. He used to work for the Smithsonian. I still work for the Smithsonian. His wife pointed out the face to me."

Did he mention he works for the Smithsonian?

"Mary! Can we go?!" I hear Stefanie from down the way.

"Uh, yeah. Sorry, Warren, we've gotta go."

"Don't you have an email address," the guy is pressing Stef. She's backing away down the street.

I look at him perplexed. "I was trying to do the whole contact information exchange. She's running away because she thinks I'm trying to hit on her. Well, which I am, I guess..." he laughs as he takes a sip from his glass. "How can I invite you to my Halloween party if I don't have your email?" he says to her.

"I live down the street, I can walk to it on Halloween," Stefanie replies, still backing away not-so-slowly.

And I am walking after her when I hear Warren say, "I like your sweater, it looks soft."

"It's mohair - the warmest natural fiber on the planet," I toss over my shoulder.

"Thanks for helping us kill the cockroaches!" Warren adds.

"My pleasure. It's my duty as an American. If we don't kill the cockroaches..."

"...then the terrorists win," finishes Stefanie.

Library Volunteer

2010-07-29T15:05:00.002-04:00

The summer when I moved home after graduate school, I had this notion that I really wanted to volunteer at the Whittier Public Library, perhaps with the Summer Reading Program.

I took an informational flyer and planned to attend the volunteer orientation one Saturday morning.

When I arrived, I noticed that most of the other volunteers were a foot or two shorter than me, were being dropped off in mini-vans and generally between 5th and 11th grade. Grateful for once that I looked young enough to be asked what college I'm going to in the fall, I slunk in an uncomfortably small chair in the back of the room and listened to the presentation.

I was given a bright yellow t-shirt to wear whenever I volunteered and was eager to work with the kids for 2-4 hours at a time, once or twice a week. In retrospect, I wonder if anyone thought it was strange that this girl with a Master's degree (becuase it inevitably came out after 5 minutes of conversation) was spending her summer volunteering alongside high schoolers, but I tried to push those thoughts out of my head. Being perceived as strange has never been a huge deterrant for me. Although, I sense it much more now then I did when I was younger. Instead of growing more immune to the swell of peer pressure, I've grown less immune to it.

I embraced my assignments.

I kept things clean and neat, sharpened pencils, gave younger "staffers" assignments when they were dawdling, kept the line moving, greeted children and their parents and generally acted as if volunteering for the Reading Program was my new job.

My earnestness did not go unnoticed.

One of the Children's Librarians who has been at the library since I was a young girl recognized me right away and called me by my childhood name the first time she saw me back in the library, "Hello Mary Beth!" She remembered my grandmother bringing me in during the day while my mother worked, and my eager participation in story times and evening puppet shows. She was not surprised that I would want to spend part of my summer at the library.

Soon I was shelving books and working the "middle school" reading game table, answering phones and generally working as free labor. And I loved every minute of that time. I liked that it was quiet and bright, that it smelled of books, that you made people happy and were helping them to do something good. I liked that after 4 hours, I would take off my library volunteer shirt and go home and the day had not added any weight to my shoulders.

I don't know why I wanted to write about this today. Maybe because the office has been quiet and peaceful. I'd like to think we do the same things; in my office, we help people learn, we answer their questions. I guess it just doesn't have the same light feeling. Few things do. Even working retail people's attitudes weigh on you, monotony weighs on you, tradition ways on you. Perhaps it was working with children that helped. But teaching isn't light either.

Maybe it was all a part of the joy of being a volunteer.

Who knows. But it definitely gave me the time I needed to experience Free LA.

Rhubarb and Memory

2010-05-22T15:15:00.003-04:00

I like to cook, eat and talk about both of those activities with frequency. But there's one fruit, or, er, stalk, that I hadn't eaten in years till this spring when I started getting produce in my CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) box, and that's actually rhubarb. Which makes it really special, actually. Because even though my grandparents have both passed away, everything about the way rhubarb looks, smells and tastes brings them back to me in a small way.

The smell of fresh cut rhubarb on my cutting board transports me back in time to when I was a four year old little girl, dark hair cut in a bob and a head full of ideas. I remember the swing my grandparents put up in the backyard for me, right next to the rhubarb plant. I remember my grandpa with fresh dirt on his light wash jeans, his dirty white undershirt and the promise of a pie or cobbler with ice milk in the not too distant future.

The way it pricks my tongue reminds me of a time when my legs didn't quite touch the floor and the walls of the dining room were covered in a gold wallpaper, the same wallpaper they were covered in for all the years I went over to their house for Sunday dinner.

And that sensation, makes me think that maybe, just maybe, if they were still here, they'd be standing over my shoulder, smiling approvingly as I made a pie crust or cut some roses and put them in a vase like my grandmother would.

It's amazing how the littlest details can hold so much meaning and memory.

So, I made a straw-berry rhubarb pie today. And I'm going to eat it once it cools...well, probably not all of it...and I'm going to pretend that I'm sitting in a chair where my legs don't touch the floor.

A Day in Mary's Awkward Life

2010-04-29T14:48:00.000-04:00

Have you ever been so keen on wishing someone a happy birthday on the right day that you accidentally done it on the WRONG day? Well, I have. More than once.

The most recent time was a particular gem.

One of my former roommate's birthdays is on April 30th. On April 20th, I sent her a someecard that said, "Happy Birthday to One of the Few People Whose Birthday I Can Remember Without a Facebook Reminder."

She never said anything except thanks and how are you.

Then TODAY I log into Facebook and it says that her birthday is coming up tomorrow. Wheels start turning - I freak out!

I sent her a birthday greeting 10 days in advance and SO EXCITED that I had remembered it! And, irony of ironies, it was a greeting that played on the fact I didn't NEED Facebook to tell me. Yet how did I learn of my mistake? Via Facebook.

Sigh.

Miracles

2010-04-11T22:20:00.002-04:00

Today at church we talked about miracles. Dr. Dick Foth spoke, and every time he does, there's not a dry eye in the place.

Well, he told all these stories about these miraculous things that happened to him - being healed of scarlet fever, malaria, friends who had train tickets paid for, etc. And then he got up to pray, and as he prayed he said, "And I pray for the young woman who has suffered a terrible loss this week and can hardly see straight."

And as soon as he did I knew in my heart of hearts who it was for. And I looked out and there she sat, unable to stay composed any longer. And I cried with her

...and then had to sing.

It's a powerful reminder. God still speaks. And sometimes he speaks just to let you know he's been listening and he hasn't turned his back on you, despite all the crap you've been through lately.

The God that we talked about today, that spoke through someone today, that made this glorious day - I just want to know him.

This is a Public Pool

2010-02-27T11:53:00.002-05:00

So, my friends and I are in this group called "Just Dance," which started as a Small Group for the church we go to - it was not a Bible study, it was "interest-based." We kicked off on a Thursday and proceeded to learn Thriller, the ending dance sequence to Slumdog Millionaire (Jai Ho), a stomp routine (which we failed miserably at), and then we took a couple months off for holidays. Well, we're back with a vengeance.

Only problem is that the space we normally use for dancing, Capitol Hill Presbyterian Church, was being used for 3 weeks in the middle of our meeting time. So, we decided to reach for the effing stars and change the group temporarily to "Just Swim," where we'd learn a synchro swim routine to Bad Romance. Well, the first week we were supposed to do this, there was a blizzard, the second week I sprained my ankle, lost my voice and Adrienne got stuck at work, so this past Thursday was the first time we could go.

So, 7:15pm rolls around and we find ourselves at the public pool in Eastern Market. I had been at the gym earlier, so I had my bathing suit on under my workout clothes. Lacey helped me get my straps all sorted and I walked out, wearing my bathing suit, workout pants, and tennis shoes, since the only sandals I have are leather.

I am walking towards Jenilee who's waiting on one of the lounge chairs when this man, who appeared to be some sort of coach, holding a bent noodle (get your mind out of the gutter - the pool toy), comes over to me and asks abrasively, "You swimming?"

"Yes," I say timidly and a bit perplexed.

"You have to change first," he says, blocking my path to Jenilee.

I look down at my tourquoise bathing suit, "But I'm wearing a bathing suit..."

"You can't wear street clothes in here." He herds me over to a sign by the woman's lockerroom from whence I came that says, "No street clothes." He points at my outfit, "Those are streetclothes."

I think I understand, "Oh, you want me to take my shoes off? I can, sorry..." and I start to bend down to take them off.

"No, no, no, you have to change!" he says.

"But I'm wearing my bathing suit. Can't I just take my shoes off and walk over? I can't use a locker, they don't work."

"What about those pants?" he asks accusingly.

"I was just going to take them off, I was just covering up on my way to the pool."

"See...na, na...this is a public pool," he says.

"What?" I ask, "I know it's a public pool, what are you - " but he interrupts me.

"See this is a public pool, we have to let the psychos in. They see you changing, it looks provocative, we can't help if they bother you."

"But, I'm just going to take these pants off that are covering my bathing suit. How is that more provocative than wearing a bathing suit by itself?"

He sighs in exasperation and lets me pass.

When I finally make it to Jenilee she is doubled over, laughing.

We spent the next 45 minutes "water walking" with Bad Romance claw hands and noodles before meeting up with other group members at 7th Hill Pizza. All in all, a good night.

It's Like a Second Chance at a New Year's Resolution

2010-02-24T21:45:00.002-05:00

I didn't make any resolutions this year. Not even one. Not even to take better care of my feet, which always seems plausible every year I make that particular vow and yet somehow leaves me in the same condition come March.

So, when I knew that Lent was coming up, I thought about fasting something, or doing another cleanse like I did last year (no gluten, no dairy [except for plain yogurt], no sugar, no alcohol, no caffeine) but nothing quite stuck.

And then, it was like something just changed. I was reading my beloved SELF magazine on Sunday night, and I saw that it was time once more for the Self Challenge (which I failed miserably at last year, but did with a lot of success 4 years ago). And I just said, I'm doing it.

But doing it with discipline, getting up at 6:30am every morning (did I mention how much I HATE mornings), eating a healthy breakfast, reading the Bible as a part of this year's Bible reading plan with my church, and then doing a 20-30 minute weight routine before getting ready for work. Today was only day 3, but every morning I have really been enjoying my time. As Laura said today in the car, I seem "different."

It's difficult to put a finger on, but I feel very tranquil. Maybe it has to do with the 4 days I spent unable to talk because of laryngitis, but I just feel rested, peaceful, and optimistic.

Granted, it's not easy. Knowing that I will hate myself tomorrow morning if I don't go to bed in 30 minutes is a bummer. But, it's been worth it. And I can honestly say I'm excited to do it again tomorrow and the next day and the next, even if I'm usually in the middle of a REM cycle when my alarm goes off (seriously, like dream interruption on a MASSIVE scale).

I'm grateful for this second chance to make some positive changes in my life. It's only an hour, but sometimes that's all the time you need!

The Human Condition

2010-01-14T13:33:00.002-05:00

I started this blog post 2 weeks ago. Sort of...rather, I wrote down the title and then thought about what I wanted to write and haven't found the time to say it yet.

What initially made me want to write anything at all was the story of women around Port-au-Prince walking through the streets of their devastated city singing into the night. But there was not time to reflect because I was getting ready to go to Nashville, and then work was so busy and then now I've realized I'm scheduled through February 17.

Reaching for the stars is exhausting.

Oh, by the way, that's the them for 2010. I don't think I'd mentioned that.

Reach for the effing stars.

At any rate, I had a unique opportunity through work to handle calls and emails from Haitian-Americans and other individuals who were working to find family members in Haiti . And I was always amazed with how calm and, really, thankful people were for our assistance...even when all I could say was, "I'm sorry, I can't do any more for you."

This weekend was our annual Leadership Retreat for the church I'm a part of. We had a good time, but the neatest thing for me was being prayed for at the end of the event.

There was a time, about 6 years ago now (wow, how did that happen) when I went to a SoulSurvivor event in Newport Beach. Life was kind of hard at that juncture for various reasons and I remember standing there at the "altar" and feeling distinctly like God was telling me, "I'm proud of you." And it made me cry. And sometimes when I think about it, I still cry.

And last night when someone prayed for me and said, "You don't even know how much God celebrates your life" like a father would celebrate his son or daughter, I cried again, reminded of something that I'd forgotten during the last year.

When the walls of my city fall down, and all the material and emotional security I've built up is no more, I want to pace the darkness and sing. Sing a song that declares, I am still here because You are always here.

They pulled a woman out of the rubble 6 days after the quake in Port-au-Prince. She was asked if she thought she would surive. She said yes. When they asked her why, she asked, "Why did I think I would live? - Why not?" And she began to sing.

Everyone in the World Apparently has a Short Fuse

2010-01-11T10:31:00.003-05:00

So, last night I had an epic dream. I mean, it was one of the most vivid and adventurous and wonderful dreams I've had in a long time, with an interesting cast of characters to boot.

First of all, I was on a rafting trip in Africa that went through several countries (how we did this in a matter of minutes, I'm not sure). There were these incredible gorges and waterfalls. And on the highest waterfall of them all, you were supposed to jump out of the boat, hold your breath, and let the water spin you around and carry you safely to the bottom. One of the others in the boat did this amazing jump off of it, like he was springing from a high dive. There was also a segment of the dream, now harder to piece together, that involved dense jungle.

The last thing I clearly remember is preparing for my trip to Asia, and packing all these beautiful clothes I don't really own. A coworker of mine who deals with China was there giving me advice. Only I was running late because I forgot to print my boarding pass!

I wish I could explain what made this dream so extraordinary. I suppose it was mostly the colors and the drama of the landscapes that I was conjuring.

Coincidentally, last week I dreamt about sky diving. And it was exhilerating.

In these dreams, I am not the girl afraid of breaking a bone or getting rejected - I'm visiting every corner of the world, jumping out of planes and off waterfalls and wearing bright orange shirts with gold sequins (okay, maybe I would do that anyway). All that to say, maybe my subconcious is spurring me on into 2010, chanting loudly, "Reach for the effing stars!"

And, really, why shouldn't I?

We'll start with enjoying the moment, playing ping-pong and writing and singing and dancing, planning trips across the country and around the world, playing a bigger role in my community, and continuing to find the joy and wonder that abound in every living thing. And maybe, one day, we can move on to sky diving.

And in apparently unrelated news, I feel lately like I've been a child who's been playing with matches. Like everywhere I go I'm dropping fire into a forest. It's not my intention, of course, but it's like with eveyr offhand comment or action I'm burning something between other people. I had no idea that all this dry kindling was laying about in my friends lives. We should sweep it all out!

So far, what has 2010 taught me? Visit Africa again, go to Asia, plan a rafting trip, and be prepared for the consequences of being unapologetically who you are.

I wish I could travel just by folding a map

2010-01-01T22:47:00.002-05:00

"The New Year"

So this is the new year,
And i don't feel any different.
The clanking of crystal,
Explosions off in the distance.

So this is the new year,
And I have no resolutions
For self-assigned penance,
For problems with easy solutions.

So everybody put your best suit or dress on,
Let's make believe that we are wealthy for just this once.
Lighting firecrackers off on the front lawn
As thirty dialogs bleed into one.

I wish the world was flat like the old days,
Then I could travel just by folding a map.
No more airplanes, or speed trains, or freeways,
There'd be no distance that could hold us back.

There'd be no distance that could hold us back

So this is the new year

Perspective Shift

2009-12-10T20:43:00.002-05:00

Sometimes you only need to get about 4 hours outside of where you live to have a much needed change in perspective.

For me, as I stared out the train window and the body of water stretching out from Dover, Delaware and the working class neighborhoods of Philadelphia, all I could think about was wanting more sleep, and worrying about my lack of kleenex.

But as we pulled into Penn Station and I hustled out onto the street and hailed a cab, I started to feel better - more energized, excited. Sitting and listening to panelists discussing Fulbright proposals and talking with those professors over lunch at the UN's delegate cafeteria gave me a much needed shift in thinking. Along with my devotion for the day.

I used to make it a habit to tell God everyday all the things I could think of I was grateful for before I went to bed. That habit got lost somewhere...and I think it's time to start again.

Today, this is what I'm grateful for:

Good friends who will take you in after 7 years.
Public transportation.
A good education.
The chance to travel to Europe, Latin America, and Africa.
Music.
Smiles.
Chocolate.
Individuals who are transforming lives by becoming teachers.
The ability to wake up in one city in the morning and go to bed in a different one that night.
That life can be so rich and textured - like full of all these big moments and small memories.

For example. Today, in the cab on the way to IIE, I spotted a Cosi next to Bryant Park and realized that's the first place I ate in New York with Jessica back in 2005. I got the tandoori chicken sandwich. OR...or, for example, Clara told me tonight that I was the person who introduced her to pesto. I was incredulous. But, apparently, when we were in summer school together, before Freshman year started, we went to lunch with her grandma at the Brea mall. I suggested Au Bon Pain. I also suggested the pesto, mozzarella and tomato sandwich. Because why wouldn't 14-year-old Mary do such a thing?

As my friend Clara has posted on her bedroom wall, "Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry."

You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and then you have - something that's worth remembering...and maybe even writing about...

"Oh, some choice - a bath robe or a bedsheet!"

2009-12-07T11:38:00.003-05:00

This is a line from the Best Christmas Pageant Ever, a play I had the pleasure of helping with/acting in over the weekend. Charlie, the boy speaking here, is contemplating which character he should be in his church's Christmas pageant - a shepherd or an angel. The only problem is, neither choice seems that appealing, and, at the heart of it, they're almost the same thing.

Sometimes I feel like life is like that. You are confronted with a choice or what appears to be an opposing set of possible circumstances, but it's like it's not a real choice. Becuase you're not choosing between two distinct things. You're like choosing between now and later, or never and not ever or probably and definitely. And knowing that you're actually making a non-decision should somehow make you feel better about the whole situation, because you can like prepare for it or something. But as my father so keenly remarked on Gchat the other day, "I guess cold, hard logic doesn't really fix anything."

This from the man who told me the day I broke up with my first boyfriend, "Well, you were either going to break up or get married." (He didn't like the idea of the latter)

He also liked to tell me the story of the time he was dating this girl who went to another college. One night, he decided to drive over there and surprise her with one of his friends. When he arrived, she was with another guy. He was heartbroken. His friend's tender advice, "Hey, man. Snap out of it. It isn't like somebody strung you up by your thumbs." (Whatever that means - although, I must say I've repeated the idea behind the advice).

I know a girl who's never been kissed. I know a boy who's never had a girlfriend. I know a woman who won't be wearing the dress she bought. I know a man whose wife has died. I know a daughter who's father left for another woman. I know a friend who's almost given up hope.

Alone.

Now or later? Probably or definitely? Before or after?

The inevitability of it all is wearing on me this year.

Rolling Your Suitcase Through the Rain

2009-11-28T20:44:00.008-05:00

I heard a beeping sound somewhere in the distance, but it barely penetrated the cozy haze of sleep I'd been enjoying. Nestled in the lower bunk, heavy drapes covering the porthole as we barely bobbed on the water off the Oosterdok in Amsterdam, our early morning flight back to Bristol seemed unimportant.

Suddenly, Kim flew out of the bed above me murmuring quickly, "No, no...oh no!" in that voice that she had that was somewhere between a cry and a laugh. "We overslept!" she shouted at me desperately, pulling out her suitcase and throwing clothing about. I jumped (well, rolled, really...I was in the lower bunk) out of the bed and made quick work of getting packed. Which wasn't easy considering you could almost touch every wall of our room simultaneously.

As Kim started to to line her eyes I touched her arm. "There's no time..." I said sternly, but compassionately, more like a character in a science fiction drama who's space shuttle was about to explode and was coaxing their first officer to leave the portrait of their only child on board as we left in the escape pod than someone late for a flight.

We hustled up the main deck, out the door, down the dock and onto the sidewalk where we practically ran in the rain, dragging our suitcases behind us over the cobblestone.

Upon arriving at the train station, we discovered that none of the exterior ticket machines were working so we bolted inside. We bought our tickets to the train station at the ticket counter and bounded to the platform.

Luckily a train was waiting to depart. We took our seats, relieved that it seemed we would still make our flight. Suddenly an announcement came over the PA in Dutch. The man across from us looked at our suitcases and winded demeanor and asked us kindly, "Are you trying to get to Schiphol?" he asked kindly. "This train is not going to Schipol..."

We scrambled back onto the platform.

Another train pulls in. "Is this train going to Schiphol??" we ask in unison to a passenger. She shakes her head.

Finally, someone fills in the details: there has been an accident on the tracks going to the airport - no trains are going to the airport.

We run to the front of the station. Should we take a cab?? we ask eachother with our eyes? Our flight was leaving in 20 minutes.

Resigned, I threw out a crazy idea, "What if we take the train to France and then over to London?" We run back to the ticket counter and exchange our tickets.

While rolling through the Dutch countryside, into Belgium and on into France we subsisted on stroopwafels, taking frequent naps on our tray tables.

By nightfall, we were back in Bristol, showered and cozy in front of the television with happy bowls of macaroni and cheese.

I'm late, I'm late, for a very important...

2009-11-13T23:58:00.002-05:00

Fate?

Well, that's what T9 tried to type in for me on my phone this evening as I meant to write the word "date."

In the context it even sort of made sense, as I was asking someone about the date of their upcoming wedding, which is a relatively permanent situation - once you get into it. For a moment I thought it was kind of ironic, that maybe they had a similar meaning...something pre-determined, finite, upcoming, etc.

I then decided to look the word up on Merriam Webster's website.

Main Entry: ¹fate

Pronunciation: \ˈfāt\

Function: noun

Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French or Latin; Middle French, from Latin fatum, literally, what has been spoken, from neuter of fatus, past participle of fari to speak

Date: 14th century

1 : the will or principle or determining cause by which things in general are believed to come to be as they are or events to happen as they do : destiny
2 a : an inevitable and often adverse outcome, condition, or end b : disaster; especially : death
3 a : final outcome b : the expected result of normal development c : the circumstances that befall someone or something
4 plural capitalized : the three goddesses who determine the course of human life in classical mythology

What has been spoken...

I never realized that before. Fatum - spoken. What has been prophesied, perhaps. The very nature of words - once said, unable to be retracted. The manifestation of thought.

A rabbit trail, maybe, but an interesting discovery.

And, as a side note, I love letters from good friends that bring out some of your other (mostly untapped) sensibilities.

To all the new mommies (and daddies)...

2009-11-06T16:32:00.002-05:00

So, it seems like almost everyone I know has just had or is about to have a baby. My friend Christine just welcomed her second into the world a couple months ago, my friend Lauren just had her baby girl yesterday, and a good 25% of the young women at my old church are pregnant (and they've started hatching!).

One picture I can't get out of my head is that of a new mother looking at her baby's face. It reminded me that my dad recently scanned and sent me some old photos from my childhood, including one of my mom looking at ME that very same way. There's only love there.

In a similar vein, I was watching a trailer for the movie Precious today [http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977887104&grpId=3659174697244816&nav=Groupspace]. The end of it really struck me. It said, "Life is hard. Life is short. Life is painful. Life is rich. Life is precious."

I feel like I keep coming back to this over and over and over again but I can't help it. Things can go so wrong. They go wrong all the time. And yet, somehow, love is still there and is so powerful and transformative. And even thinking about it makes me ache. It's too much for me to really understand. And it's probably pointless to think about things at work on Friday...but I had to get it off my chest.

Please stop...

2009-10-28T21:25:00.002-04:00

One of the most uncomfortable things I've ever experienced is having a Spanish professor read out a portion of his novel out loud to the class.

Now this is the class where you're supposed to be reading the classic Spanish writers of the 19th and 20th Centuries...which includes, obviously, my professor's book.

Anyway, the part that he read was one of the few love scenes in the book, where the two main characters are in the desert and they walk down into this cave. It starts raining, they disrobe and do it. But, if you've ever read a Spanish novel, it's a little more detailed than that.

So imagine your older, short, arrogant Spanish professor choosing ONE passage out of the entire book to read to the class and it's this scene. Imagine everyone tensing in their desks, biting tongues and lips as the sordid details are read aloud in rough but sensual tones of Castellano. Imagine the sheer relief when the 8.67 minutes have ended.

I just remembered that today and thought it was worth sharing.

Ghosts of Halloween Past

2009-10-06T22:15:00.002-04:00

I'm worried that if I don't write these things down, I won't be able to remember them.

When I was in 5th grade I knew this really cool girl named Megan. She had fiery red hair and used to go to a private prep school where girls brought rose petals in their lunches. Unfortunately, she wasn't really allowed to go there because she lived too far away. Her grandparents lived close enough, so they always used that address on their enrollment forms. But, unhappily for her, one day she got sick and went to the nurse's office, and when they wanted her information (maybe it was a phone number, because it wouldn't make sense for them to ask for her address) she forgot her cover story. She and her sister couldn't go back. They were stuck slumming it with me in public school.

For my birthday party that spring, I took her and two of my other friends ice skating (it was the thing I was doing that year). Megan was really good at it, since her parents had taken her skiing, but my friend Darlene clinged to the railing most of the time. Megan could even spin better than the rest of us.

The other cool and envious thing about Megan was that she rode horses.

I had just started reading these books called The Saddle Club (you may have seen the poorly produced Australian show by the same name). In it, 4 friends who lived on the East Coast somewhere rode horses at a stable called - I think? - Pine Hollow. Anyway, they all rode horses and there were adventures and hay bales and cats and dangerous rides on English saddles through forest trails. I loved it. I devoured the first four books.

Anyway, Megan suggested I come and ride horses with her sometime. And here my memories are all a jumble.

I remember horseback riding, taking crickets home at the end of 5th grade, listening to that Christian singer Rebecca St. James. I think I remember bringing up the idea of riding horses to my parents while they were in the kitchen. I seem to remember my dad saying something about the books not being like reality.

But, in the end, I went for a ride...on an old red horse named Engine...although, I sort of always imagined it was spelled Injun. He had this sort of tough, leathery look about him, but a peacefulness in his eyes, that recalled an elder of some American Indian tribe.

After our trailride with Megan and her older sister, I got to take him into the front arena and try trotting on him. It was the most glorious thing I had done. In one instant figure skating blew out of my 10-year-old life like a winter wind.

That summer I went to their horseback riding summer camp where you learn EVERYTHING about horses - the parts of their bodies, the parts of a saddle, how to bathe them, how to clean their hooves, how to polish leather, and how to shoot a potato gun.

That fall they had a Halloween party at the stables. I don't think I went that year. I think I decided to go trick or treating.

P.S. I like Post-Its

2009-10-02T13:30:00.006-04:00

What you need to know to understand this story:

In August, our office moved into a new building. This new building has shiny new breakrooms with shiny new stainless steel refrigerators. One serious drawback - the ice dispenser is either slow or close to empty almost all of the time. People like their water cold, it seems. As a shortcut, a few people used their hands to remove ice directly from the icebox (Side note: I admit I did this once, myself, but stopped once I remembered I don't actually like ice in my drinks).

And now, the rest of the story:

For about 2 or 3 weeks, there has been a sign on the freezer door of our office refrigerator that says: "Please do not use your hands to remove ice from ice box. It is unsanitary. Please use ice dispenser. Thank you" in a 10 pt font, at the top of an 8 1/2 X 11 sheet of paper.

Today, when I went to put my lunch away, I noticed that someone had written in large green letters, "P.S. Some people actually like to drink the water," with two smiley faces drawn into the valleys of the W.

This made no sense to me, and apparently it didn't make sense to another individual who responded via Post-It "I Like Hamburgers," with a triple underline under the word "Hamburgers." I laughed pretty hard.

And so I responded underneath with a Post-It of my own: "Me 'too.' P.S. I want to be your friend."

We'll see what transpires.

Everything is Holy Now

2009-09-23T18:01:00.003-04:00

A song I heard covered in 2005 that really spoke to me. Just thought I'd share. I have italicized my favorite parts for your enjoyment...

When I was a boy, each week
On Sunday, we would go to church
And pay attention to the priest
He would read the holy word
And consecrate the holy bread
And everyone would kneel and bow
Today the only difference is
Everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now

When I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
That miracles don't happen still
But now I can't keep track
Cause everything's a miracle
Everything, Everything
Everything's a miracle

Wine from water is not so small
But an even better magic trick
Is that anything is here at all
So the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles
But finding where there isn't one

When holy water was rare at best
It barely wet my fingertips
But now I have to hold my breath
Like I'm swimming in a sea of it
It used to be a world half there
Heaven's second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
Cause everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now

Read a questioning child's face
And say it's not a testament
That'd be very hard to say
See another new morning come
And say it's not a sacrament
I tell you that it can't be done

This morning, outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
Singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head
I remember when church let out
How things have changed since then
Everything is holy now
It used to be a world half-there
Heaven's second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
Cause everything is holy now

Gossip Girl Premier Party Quiche

2009-09-15T11:00:00.003-04:00

As a part of Laura's birthday festivities, we watched Gossip Girl last night dressed as some of our favorite characters - photos will be up somewhere soon enough.

One of my favorite parts of the evening, though, was the quiche that I made. Recipe below. Because I can.

Gossip Girl Quiche
Adapted from Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking and Smitten Kitchen

Crust

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, chilled and cut into small pieces
2 to 3 tablespoons ice water

1. Combine flour, salt, and sugar. Add butter, and use a pastry blender on it until the mixture resembles coarse meal.

2. Add ice water one tablespoon at a time, using the pastry blender to mix it throughout. To test, squeeze a small amount together: If it is crumbly, add more ice water, 1 tablespoon at a time.

3. Form dough into a single ball, flatten it into a disk, and wrap in plastic. Transfer to the refrigerator, and chill at least 1 hour.

Filling
3 to 4 leeks, white and light green parts only, sliced
1/2 cup water
Salt
3 tablespoons butter
1 and 1/2 onions
1 tablespoon white wine
3 eggs
1 1/2 cups whole milk
1 cup grated Swiss cheese

1. Preheat oven to 375°F.

2. Boil the leeks over moderately high heat in a heavy-bottomed, covered saucepan with 1/2 cup water, two tablespoons butter and a teaspoon of salt until it the liquid has almost evaporated. Lower heat and stew gently for 15 - 20 minutes until leeks are very tender.

3. While the leeks are stewing, add a tablespoon of butter to another pan along with the onions, 1/4 teaspoon of salt and white wine. Cook uncovered over medium heat until onions become translucent.

3. Beat the eggs and milk in a large mixing bowl to blend. Gradually stir in the leeks and onions. Pour into pastry shell. Spread on the cheese (or mix it in before you pour).

4. Bake in upper third of pre-heated oven for 25 to 30 minutes until puffed and browned.

2009-09-14T12:55:00.001-04:00

The Rose

2009-09-13T23:34:00.003-04:00

Every girl, well, every girl who grew up going to Disneyland, thought that taking a boy to Disneyland could possibly be the most romantic thing ever. There are fireworks and pineapple Dole whips and fairytale characters walking around. Everything is perfect.

Sadly, life is not always perfect - so you improvise.

You do take the boy you like to Disneyland - but with his girlfriend. Not so romantic, but you've been at this for a while, an expert at emotional masochism for quite some time. Of course, you also take your best friend, for good measure.

The day drags on as you constantly observe the girl, listening to the tone of her voice, watching her hands on his, comparing yourself to her, imaging how you would be different. Finally she leaves early. Now you're down to 3. You, the boy you're pining for, and the friend who thinks your every thought laden with emotional lust is about to purchase you a one-way ticket to hell. She makes sure her pointed glances communicate those thoughts.

Somehow you find yourselves waiting for Fantasmic to start, sitting on a low fence protecting pink rose bushes. Your friend disappears for a moment, and the boy does the unthinkable: he plucks a single rose from the bush, looks you square in the eye, and tucks it behind your ear.

You stop breathing. He's confessed his love...hasn't he?

Your best friend returns with a sourdough breadbowl full of clam chowder. The spell has been broken.

You are scolded that night by your well-intentioned friend about your inability to stop flirting with the boy. Good Christian girls, after all, are not homewreckers, even if there's no ring in the picture. You counter that it "takes two to tango."

You hope, at least, that the saying is true. But the weeks pass and it becomes clear that you've been left standing with a rose between your teeth and no partner.

Overheard in my Life

2009-09-03T14:58:00.002-04:00

At work, two people in a meeting inside someone's office, but with the door open:

Person 1: I've never been one to count my chickens.
Person 2: Oh, no, no! Me neither. I'm not a chicken-counter.

I always hate it when I'm so quick to emphatically agree I made up a new noun.

Also, I joined a new gym. Yay, FitnessFirst!

Yesterday, after cardio dance class, I walked outside to unlock my bike from the planter (no rack was available) I saw a guy in work pants on his phone sort of peering amusedly into the gym. Then I heard him:

"Warmer...warmer. Oh - oh - no, now you're colder...colder...warmer...getting hotter..." until a girl bursts through the front door, laughs, and runs up to hug him.

I wasn't really annoyed by this at the time. But in retrospect, it bothers me a little. A little too "cutesy" if you know what I mean.

Also, I had grandiose plans of taking an orinthology class this fall. Unfortunately, none are being offered. At least I'll be making it to a new state in October (Massachussetts). Which reminds me, those Priceline commercials used to annoy me. But now, I find a certain subtle genius in them that leads me to hum, "Priceline NegotiAtor" in my head every time I visit the site.

Quitting the Paint Factory

2009-09-03T13:58:00.002-04:00

Taken from adamantine.wordpress.com

The essay is rather long, so if you want to just read MY favorite part, I've pulled it out here:

Although today’s version of the Covenant of Works has substituted a host of secular pleasures for the idea of heaven, it too seeks to corner the market on what we most desire, to suggest that the work of our hands will save us. And we believe. We believe across all the boundaries of class and race and ethnicity that normally divide us; we believe in numbers that dwarf those of the more conventionally faithful. We repeat the daily catechism, we sing in the choir. And we tithe, and keep on tithing, until we are spent.

It is this willingness to hand over our lives that fascinates and appalls me. There’s such a lovely perversity to it; it’s so wonderfully counterintuitive, so very Christian: You must empty your pockets, turn them inside out, and spill out your wife and your son, the pets you hardly knew, and the days you simply missed altogether watching the sunlight fade on the bricks across the way. You must hand over the rainy afternoons, the light on the grass, the moments of play and of simply being. You must give it up, all of it, and by your example teach your children to do the same, and then – because even this is not enough – you must train yourself to believe that this outsourcing of your life is both natural and good. But even so, your soul will not be saved.

The young, for a time, know better. They balk at the harness. They do not go easy. For a time they are able to see the utter sadness of subordinating all that matters to all that doesn’t. Eventually, of course, sitting in their cubicle lined with New Yorker cartoons, selling whatever it is they’ve been asked to sell, most come to see the advantage of enthusiasm. They join the choir and are duly forgiven for their illusions. It’s a rite of passage we are all familiar with. The generations before us clear the path; Augustine stands to the left, Freud to the right. We are born into death, and die into life, they murmur; civilization will have its discontents. The sign in front of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Work confirms it. And we believe.

"Quitting the Paint Factory"
Mark Slouka
Harper’s Magazine, November 2004 issue

Love yields to business. If you seek a way out of love, be busy; you’ll be safe, then.-Ovid, Remedia Amoris

I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.

When I was young, my parents read me Aesop’s fable of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” wherein, as everyone knows, the grasshopper spends the summer making music in the sun while the ant toils with his fellow formicidae. Inevitably, winter comes, as winters will, and the grasshopper, who hasn’t planned ahead and who doesn’t know what a 401K is, has run out of luck. When he shows up at the ants’ door, carrying his fiddle, the ant asks him what he was doing all year: “I was singing, if you please,” the grasshopper replies, or something to that effect. “You were singing?” says the ant. “Well, then, go and sing.” And perhaps because I sensed, even then, that fate would someday find me holding a violin or a manuscript at the door of the ants, my antennae frozen and my bills overdue, I confounded both Aesop and my well-meaning parents, and bore away the wrong moral. That summer, many a windblown grasshopper was saved from the pond, and many an anthill inundated under the golden rain of my pee.

I was right.

In the lifetime that has passed since Calvin Coolidge gave his speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in which he famously proclaimed that “the chief business of the American people is business,” the dominion of the ants has grown enormously. Look about: The business of business is everywhere and inescapable; the song of the buyers and the sellers never stops; the term “workaholic” has been folded up and put away. We have no time for our friends or our families, no time to think or to make a meal. We’re moving product, while the soul drowns like a cat in a well. ["I think that there is far too much work done in the world," Bertrand Russell observed in his famous 1932 essay "In Praise of Idleness," adding that he hoped to "start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing." He failed. A year later, National Socialism, with its cult of work (think of all those bronzed young men in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will throwing cordwood to each other in the sun), flared in Germany.]

A resuscitated orthodoxy, so pervasive as to be nearly invisible, rules the land. Like any religion worth its salt, it shapes our world in its image, demonizing if necessary, absorbing when possible. Thus has the great sovereign territory of what Nabokov called “unreal estate,” the continent of invisible possessions from time to talent to contentment, been either infantilized, rendered unclean, or translated into the grammar of dollars and cents. Thus has the great wilderness of the inner life been compressed into a median strip by the demands of the “real world,” which of course is anything but. Thus have we succeeded in transforming even ourselves into bipedal products, paying richly for seminars that teach us how to market the self so it may be sold to the highest bidder. Or perhaps “down the river” is the phrase.

Ah, but here’s the rub: Idleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite to the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press. How does it do this? By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it. By giving the inner life (in whose precincts we are most ourselves) its due. Which is precisely what makes idleness dangerous. All manner of things can grow out of that fallow soil. Not for nothing did our mothers grow suspicious when we had “too much time on our hands.” They knew we might be up to something. And not for nothing did we whisper to each other, when we were up to something, “Quick, look busy.”

Mother knew instinctively what the keepers of the castles have always known: that trouble – the kind that might threaten the symmetry of a well-ordered garden – needs time to take root. Take away the time, therefore, and you choke off the problem before it begins. Obedience reigns, the plow stays in the furrow; things proceed as they must. Which raises an uncomfortable question: Could the Church of Work – which today has Americans aspiring to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God – be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: “There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.”

Quite so. The mind, however, particularly the mind of a citizen in a democratic society, is not a boat. Ballast is not what it needs, and steadiness, alas, can be a synonym for stupidity, as our current administration has so amply demonstrated. No, what the democratic mind requires, above all, is time; time to consider its options. Time to develop the democratic virtues of independence, orneriness, objectivity, and fairness. Time, perhaps (to sail along with Lowell’s leaky metaphor for a moment), to ponder the course our unelected captains have so generously set for us, and to consider mutiny when the iceberg looms.

Which is precisely why we need to be kept busy. If we have no time to think, to mull, if we have no time to piece together the sudden associations and unexpected, mid-shower insights that are the stuff of independent opinion, then we are less citizens than cursors, easily manipulated, vulnerable to the currents of power.

But I have to be careful here. Having worked all of my adult life, I recognize that work of one sort or another is as essential to survival as protein, and that much of it, in today’s highly bureaucratized, economically diversified societies, will of necessity be neither pleasant nor challenging nor particularly meaningful. I have compassion for those making the most of their commute and their cubicle; I just wish they could be a little less cheerful about it. In short, this isn’t about us so much as it is about the Zeitgeist we live and labor in, which, like a cuckoo taking over a thrush’s nest, has systematically shoved all the other eggs of our life, one by one, onto the pavement. It’s about illuminating the losses.

We’re enthralled. I want to disenchant us a bit; draw a mustache on the boss.

INFINITE BUSTLE

I’m a student of the narrowing margins. And their victim, to some extent, though my capacity for sloth, my belief in it, may yet save me, like some stubborn heretic in fifth-century Rome, still offering gifts to the spirit of the fields even as the priests sniff about the temple for sin, I daily sacrifice my bit of time. The pagan gods may yet return. Constantine and Theodosius may die. But the prospects are bad.

In Riverside Park in New York City, where I walk these days, the legions of “weekend nannies” are growing, setting up a play date for a ten-year-old requires a feat of near-Olympic coordination, and the few, vestigial, late-afternoon parents one sees, dragging their wailing progeny by the hand or frantically kicking a soccer ball in the fading light, have a gleam in their eyes I find frightening. No outstretched legs crossed at the ankles, no arms draped over the back of the bench. No lovers. No be-hatted old men, arguing. Between the slide and the sandbox, a very fit young man in his early thirties is talking on his cell phone while a two-year-old with a trail of snot running from his nose tugs on the seam of his corduroy pants. “There’s no way I can pick it up. Because we’re still at the park. Because we just got here, that’s why.”

It’s been one hundred and forty years since Thoreau, who itched a full century before everyone else began to scratch, complained that the world was increasingly just “a place of business. What an infinite bustle!” he groused. “I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no Sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.” Little did he know. Today the roads of commerce, paved and smoothed, reach into every nook and cranny of the republic; there is no place apart, no place where we would be shut of the drone of that damnable traffic. Today we, quite literally, live to work. And it hardly matters what kind of work we do; the process justifies the ends. Indeed, at times it seems there is hardly an occupation, however useless or humiliating or downright despicable, that cannot at least in part be redeemed by our obsessive dedication to it: “Yes, Ted sold shoulder-held Stingers to folks with no surname, but he worked so hard!”
Not long ago, at the kind of dinner party I rarely attend, I made the mistake of admitting that I not only liked to sleep but liked to get at least eight hours a night whenever possible, and that nine would be better still. The reaction – a complex Pinot Noir of nervous laughter displaced by expressions of disbelief and condescension – suggested that my transgression had been, on some level, a political one. I was reminded of the time I’d confessed to Roger Angell that I did not much care for baseball.

My comment was immediately rebutted by testimonials to sleeplessness: two of the nine guests confessed to being insomniacs; a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters claimed indignantly that she couldn’t remember when she had ever gotten eight hours of sleep; two other guests declared themselves grateful for five or six. It mattered little that I’d arranged my life differently, and accepted the sacrifices that arrangement entailed. Eight hours! There was something willful about it. Arrogant, even. Suitably chastened, I held my tongue, and escaped alone to tell Thee.

Increasingly, it seems to me, our world is dividing into two kinds of things: those that aid work, or at least represent a path to it, and those that don’t. Things in the first category are good and noble; things in the second aren’t. Thus, for example, education is good (as long as we don’t have to listen to any of that “end in itself” nonsense) because it will presumably lead to work. Thus playing the piano or swimming the 100-yard backstroke are good things for a fifteen-year-old to do not because they might give her some pleasure but because rumor has it that Princeton is interested in students who can play Chopin or swim quickly on their backs (and a degree from Princeton, as any fool knows, can be readily converted to work).

Point the beam anywhere, and there’s the God of Work, busily trampling out the vintage. Blizzards are bemoaned because they keep us from getting to work. Hobbies are seen as either ridiculous or self-indulgent because they interfere with work. Longer school days are all the rage (even as our children grow demonstrably stupider), not because they make educational or psychological or any other kind of sense but because keeping kids in school longer makes it easier for us to work. Meanwhile, the time grows short, the margin narrows; the white spaces on our calendars have been inked in for months. We’re angry about this, upset about that, but who has the time to do anything anymore? There are those reports to report on, memos to remember, emails to deflect or delete. They bury us like snow.

The alarm rings and we’re off, running so hard that by the time we stop we’re too tired to do much of anything except nod in front of the TV, which, like virtually all the other voices in our culture, endorses our exhaustion, fetishizes and romanticizes it and, by daily adding its little trowelful of lies and omissions, helps cement the conviction that not only is this how our three score and ten must be spent but that the transaction is both noble and necessary.

KA-CHINK!

Time may be money (though I’ve always resisted that loathsome platitude, the alchemy by which the very gold of our lives is transformed into the base lead of commerce), but one thing seems certain: Money eats time. Forget the visions of sanctioned leisure: the view from the deck in St. Moritz, the wafer-thin TV. Consider the price.

Sometimes, I want to say, money costs too much. And at the beginning of the millennium, in this country, the cost of money is well on the way to bankrupting us. We’re impoverishing ourselves, our families, our communities – and yet we can’t stop ourselves. Worse, we don’t want to.
Seen from the right vantage point, there’s something wonderfully animistic about it. The god must be fed; he’s hungry for our hours, craves our days and years. And we oblige. Every morning (unlike the good citizens of Tenochtitlan, who at least had the good sense to sacrifice others on the slab) we rush up the steps of the ziggurat to lay ourselves down. It’s not a pretty sight.

Then again, we’ve been well trained. And the training never stops. In a recent ad in The New York Times Magazine, paid for by an outfit named Wealth and Tax Advisory Services, Inc., an attractive young woman in a dark business suit is shown working at her desk. (She may be at home, though these days the distinction is moot.) On the desk is a cup, a cell phone, and an adding machine. Above her right shoulder, just over the blurred sofa and the blurred landscape on the wall, are the words, “Successful entrepreneurs work continuously.” The text below explains: “The challenge to building wealth is that your finances grow in complexity as your time demands increase.”

The ad is worth disarticulating, it seems to me, if only because some version of it is beamed into our cerebral cortex a thousand times a day. What’s interesting about it is not only what it says but what it so blithely assumes. What it says, crudely enough, is that in order to be successful, we must not only work but work continuously; what it assumes is that time is inversely proportional to wealth: our time demands will increase the harder we work and the more successful we become. It’s an organic thing; a law, almost. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, you gotta work like a dog ’til you die.

Am I suggesting then that Wealth and Tax Advisory Services, Inc. spend $60,000 for a full-page ad in The New York Times Magazine to show us a young woman at her desk writing poetry? Or playing with her kids? Or sharing a glass of wine with a friend, attractively thumbing her nose at the acquisition of wealth? No. For one thing, the folks at Wealth and Tax, etc. are simply doing what’s in their best interest. For another, it would hardly matter if they did show the woman writing poetry, or laughing with her children, because these things, by virtue of their placement in the ad, would immediately take on the color of their host; they would simply be the rewards of working almost continuously.

What I am suggesting is that just as the marketplace has co-opted rebellion by subordinating politics to fashion, by making anger chic, so it has quietly underwritten the idea of leisure, in part by separating it from idleness. Open almost any magazine in America today and there they are: The ubiquitous tanned-and-toned twenty-somethings driving the $70,000 fruits of their labor; the moneyed-looking men and women in their healthy sixties (to give the young something to aspire to) tossing Frisbees to Irish setters or tying on flies in midstream or watching sunsets from their Adirondack chairs.

Leisure is permissible, we understand, because it costs money; idleness is not, because it doesn’t. Leisure is focused; whatever thinking it requires is absorbed by a certain task: sinking that putt, making that cast, watching that flat-screen TV. Idleness is unconstrained, anarchic. Leisure – particularly if it involves some kind of high-priced technology – is as American as a Fourth of July barbecue. Idleness, on the other hand, has a bad attitude. It doesn’t shave; it’s not a member of the team; it doesn’t play well with others. It thinks too much, as my high school coach used to say. So it has to be ostracized.

[Or put to good use. The wilderness of association we enter when we read, for example, is one of the world's great domains of imaginative diversity: a seedbed of individualism.
What better reason to pave it then, to make it an accessory, like a personal organizer, a sure-fire way of raising your SAT score, or improving your communication skills for that next interview. You say you like to read? Then don't waste your time; put it to work. Order Shakespeare in Charge: The Bard's Guide to Leading and Succeeding on the Business Stage, with its picture of the bard in a business suit on the cover.]

With idleness safely on the reservation, the notion that leisure is necessarily a function of money is free to grow into a truism. “Money isn’t the goal. Your goals, that’s the goal,” reads a recent ad for Citibank. At first glance, there’s something appealingly subversive about it. Apply a little skepticism though, and the implicit message floats to the surface: And how else are you going to reach those goals than by investing wisely with us? Which suggests that, um, money is the goal, after all.

THE CHURCH OF WORK

There’s something un-American about singing the virtues of idleness. It is a form of blasphemy, a secular sin. More precisely, it is a kind of latter-day antinomianism, as much a threat to the orthodoxy of our day as Anne Hutchinson’s desire 350 years ago to circumvent the Puritan ministers and dial God direct. Hutchinson, we recall, got into trouble because she accused the Puritan elders of backsliding from the rigors of their theology and giving in to a Covenant of Works, whereby the individual could earn his all-expenses-paid trip to the pearly gates through the labor of his hands rather than solely through the grace of God. Think of it as a kind of frequent-flier plan for the soul.

The analogy to today is instructive. Like the New England clergy, the Religion of Business – literalized, painfully, in books like Jesus, C.E.O. – holds a monopoly on interpretation; it sets the terms, dictates value.

[In this new lexicon, for example, "work" is defined as the means to wealth; "success," as a synonym for it.]

Although today’s version of the Covenant of Works has substituted a host of secular pleasures for the idea of heaven, it too seeks to corner the market on what we most desire, to suggest that the work of our hands will save us. And we believe. We believe across all the boundaries of class and race and ethnicity that normally divide us; we believe in numbers that dwarf those of the more conventionally faithful. We repeat the daily catechism, we sing in the choir. And we tithe, and keep on tithing, until we are spent.

It is this willingness to hand over our lives that fascinates and appalls me. There’s such a lovely perversity to it; it’s so wonderfully counterintuitive, so very Christian: You must empty your pockets, turn them inside out, and spill out your wife and your son, the pets you hardly knew, and the days you simply missed altogether watching the sunlight fade on the bricks across the way. You must hand over the rainy afternoons, the light on the grass, the moments of play and of simply being. You must give it up, all of it, and by your example teach your children to do the same, and then – because even this is not enough – you must train yourself to believe that this outsourcing of your life is both natural and good. But even so, your soul will not be saved.
The young, for a time, know better. They balk at the harness. They do not go easy. For a time they are able to see the utter sadness of subordinating all that matters to all that doesn’t. Eventually, of course, sitting in their cubicle lined with New Yorker cartoons, selling whatever it is they’ve been asked to sell, most come to see the advantage of enthusiasm. They join the choir and are duly forgiven for their illusions. It’s a rite of passage we are all familiar with. The generations before us clear the path; Augustine stands to the left, Freud to the right. We are born into death, and die into life, they murmur; civilization will have its discontents. The sign in front of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Work confirms it. And we believe.
All of which leaves only the task of explaining away those few miscreants who out of some inner weakness or perversity either refuse to convert or who go along and then, in their thirty-sixth year in the choir, say, abruptly abandon the faith. Those in the first category are relatively easy to contend with; they are simply losers. Those in the second are a bit more difficult; their apostasy requires something more… dramatic. They are considered mad.

In one of my favorite anecdotes from American literary history (which my children know by heart, and which in turn bodes poorly for their futures as captains of industry), the writer Sherwood Anderson found himself, at the age of thirty-six, the chief owner and general manager of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio. Having made something of a reputation for himself as a copywriter in a Chicago advertising agency, he’d moved up a rung. He was on his way, as they say, a businessman in the making, perhaps even a tycoon in embryo. There was only one problem: he couldn’t seem to shake the notion that the work he was doing (writing circulars extolling the virtues of his line of paints) was patently absurd, undignified; that it amounted to a kind of prison sentence. Lacking the rationalizing gene, incapable of numbing himself sufficiently to make the days and the years pass without pain, he suffered and flailed. Eventually he snapped.

It was a scene he would revisit time and again in his memoirs and fiction. On November 27, 1912, in the middle of dictating a letter to his secretary (”The goods about which you have inquired are the best of their kind made in the…”), he simply stopped. According to the story, the two supposedly stared at each other for a long time, after which Anderson said: “I have been wading in a long river and my feet are wet,” and walked out. Outside the building he turned east toward Cleveland and kept going. Four days later he was recognized and taken to a hospital suffering from exhaustion.

Anderson claimed afterward that he had encouraged the impression that he might be cracking up in order to facilitate his exit, to make it comprehensible. “The thought occurred to me that if men thought me a little insane they would forgive me if I lit out,” he wrote, and though we will never know for sure if he suffered a nervous breakdown that day or only pretended to one (his biographers have concluded that he did), the point of the anecdote is elsewhere: Real or imagined, nothing short of madness would do for an excuse.

Anderson himself, of course, was smart enough to recognize the absurdity in all this, and to use it for his own ends; over the years that followed, he worked his escape from the paint factory into a kind of parable of liberation, an exemplar for the young men of his age. It became the cornerstone of his critique of the emerging business culture: To stay was to suffocate, slowly; to escape was to take a stab at “aliveness.” What America needed, Anderson argued, was a new class of individuals who “at any physical cost to themselves and others” would “agree to quit working, to loaf, to refuse to be hurried or try to get on in the world.”

“To refuse to be hurried or try to get on in the world.” It sounds quite mad. What would we do if we followed that advice? And who would we be? No, better to pull down the blinds, finish that sentence. We’re all in the paint factory now.

CLEARING BRUSH

At times you can almost see it, this flypaper we’re attached to, this mechanism we labor in, this delusion we inhabit. A thing of such magnitude can be hard to make out, of course, but you can rough out its shape and mark its progress, like Lon Chaney’s Invisible Man, by its effects: by the things it renders quaint or obsolete, by the trail of discarded notions it leaves behind. What we’re leaving behind today, at record pace, is whatever belief we might once have had in the value of unstructured time: in the privilege of contemplating our lives before they are gone, in the importance of uninterrupted conversation, in the beauty of play. In the thing in itself – unmediated, leading nowhere. In the present moment.

Admittedly, the present – in its ontological, rather than consumerist, sense – has never been too popular on this side of the Atlantic; we’ve always been a finger-drumming, restless bunch, suspicious of jawboning, less likely to sit at the table than to grab a quick one at the bar. Whitman might have exhorted us to loaf and invite our souls, but that was not an invitation we cared to extend, not unless the soul played poker, ha, ha. No sir, a Frenchman might invite his soul. One expected such things. But an American? An American would be out the swinging doors and halfway to tomorrow before his silver dollar had stopped ringing on the counter.
I was put in mind of all this last June while sitting on a bench in London’s Hampstead Heath. My bench, like many others, was almost entirely hidden; well off the path, delightfully overgrown, it sat at the top of a long-grassed meadow. It had a view. There was whimsy in its placement, and joy. It was thoroughly impractical. It had clearly been placed there to encourage one thing – solitary contemplation.

And sitting there, listening to the summer drone of the bees, I suddenly imagined George W. Bush on my bench. I can’t tell you why this happened, or what in particular brought the image to my mind. Possibly it was the sheer incongruity of it that appealed to me, the turtle-on-a-lamppost illogic of it; earlier that summer, intrigued by images of Kafka’s face on posters advertising the Prague Marathon, I’d entertained myself with pictures of Franz looking fit for the big race. In any case, my vision of Dubya sitting on a bench, reading a book on his lap – smiling or nodding in agreement, wetting a finger to turn a page – was so discordant, so absurd, that I realized I’d accidentally stumbled upon one of those visual oxymorons that, by its very dissonance, illuminates something essential.

What the picture of George W. Bush flushed into the open for me was the classically American and increasingly Republican cult of movement, of busy-ness; of doing, not thinking. One could imagine Kennedy reading on that bench in Hampstead Heath. Or Carter, maybe. Or even Clinton (though given the bucolic setting, one could also imagine him in other, more Dionysian scenarios). But Bush? Bush would be clearing brush. He’d be stomping it into submission with his pointy boots. He’d be making the world a better place.

Now, something about all that brush clearing had always bothered me. It wasn’t the work itself, though I’d never fully understood where all that brush was being cleared from, or why, or how it was possible that there was any brush still left between Dallas and Austin. No, it was the frenetic, anti-thinking element of it I disliked. This wasn’t simply outdoor work, which I had done my share of and knew well. This was brush clearing as a statement, a gesture of impatience. It captured the man, his disdain for the inner life, for the virtues of slowness and contemplation. This was movement as an answer to all those equivocating intellectuals and Gallic pontificators who would rather talk than do, think than act. Who could always be counted on to complicate what was simple with long-winded discussions of complexity and consequences. Who were weak.
And then I had it, the thing I’d been trying to place, the thing that had always made me bristle – instinctively – whenever I saw our fidgety, unelected President in action. I recalled reading about an Italian art movement called Futurism, which had flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century. Its practitioners had advocated a cult of restlessness, of speed, of dynamism; had rejected the past in all its forms; had glorified business and war and patriotism. They had also, at least in theory, supported the growth of fascism.

The link seemed tenuous at best, even facile. Was I seriously linking Bush – his shallowness, his bustle, his obvious suspicion of nuance – to the spirit of fascism? As much as I loathed the man, it made me uneasy. I’d always argued with people who applied the word carelessly. Having been called a fascist myself for suggesting that an ill-tempered rottweiler be put on a leash, I had no wish to align myself with those who had downgraded the word to a kind of generalized epithet, roughly synonymous with “asshole,” to be applied to whoever disagreed with them. I had too much respect for the real thing. And yet there was no getting around it; what I’d been picking up like a bad smell whenever I observed the Bush team in action was the faint but unmistakable whiff of fascism; a democratically diluted fascism, true, and masked by the perfume of down-home cookin’, but fascism nonetheless.

Still, it was not until I’d returned to the States and had forced myself to wade through the reams of Futurist manifestos – a form that obviously spoke to their hearts – that the details of the connection began to come clear. The linkage had nothing to do with the Futurists’ art, which was notable only for its sustained mediocrity, nor with their writing, which at times achieved an almost sublime level of badness. It had to do, rather, with their ant-like energy, their busy-ness, their utter disdain of all the manifestations of the inner life, and with the way these traits seemed so organically linked in their thinking to aggression and war. “We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia,” wrote Filippo Marinetti, perhaps the Futurists’ most breathless spokesman. “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers….. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind….. We will sing of great crowds excited by work.”

“Militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers,” “a feverish insomnia,” “great crowds excited by work” … I knew that song. And yet still, almost perversely, I resisted the recognition. It was too easy, somehow. Wasn’t much of the Futurist rant (”Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly”) simply a gesture of adolescent rebellion, a FUCK YOU scrawled on Dad’s garage door? I had just about decided to scrap the whole thing when I came across Marinetti’s later and more extended version of the Futurist creed. And this time the connection was impossible to deny.

In the piece, published in June of 1913 (roughly six months after Anderson walked out of the paint factory), Marinetti explained that Futurism was about the “acceleration of life to today’s swift pace.” It was about the “dread of the old and the known… of quiet living.” The new age, he wrote, would require the “negation of distances and nostalgic solitudes.” It would “ridicule . . . the ‘holy green silence’ and the ineffable landscape.” It would be, instead, an age enamored of “the passion, art, and idealism of Business.”

This shift from slowness to speed, from the solitary individual to the crowd excited by work, would in turn force other adjustments. The worship of speed and business would require a new patriotism, “a heroic idealization of the commercial, industrial, and artistic solidarity of a people”; it would require “a modification in the idea of war,” in order to make it “the necessary and bloody test of a people’s force.”

As if this weren’t enough, as if the parallel were not yet sufficiently clear, there was this: The new man, Marinetti wrote – and this deserves my italics – would communicate by “brutally destroying the syntax of his speech. He wastes no time in building sentences. Punctuation and the right adjectives will mean nothing to him. He will despise subtleties and nuances of language.” All of his thinking, moreover, would be marked by a “dread of slowness, pettiness, analysis, and detailed explanations. Love of speed, abbreviation, and the summary. ‘Quick, give me the whole thing in two words!’“

Short of telling us that he would have a ranch in Crawford, Texas, and be given to clearing brush, nothing Marinetti wrote could have made the resemblance clearer. From his notorious mangling of the English language to his well-documented impatience with detail and analysis to his chuckling disregard for human life (which enabled him to crack jokes about Aileen Wuornos’s execution as well as mug for the cameras minutes before announcing that the nation was going to war), Dubya was Marinetti’s “New Man”: impatient, almost pathologically unreflective, unburdened by the past. A man untroubled by the imagination, or by an awareness of human frailty. A leader wonderfully attuned (though one doubted he could ever articulate it) to “today’s swift pace”; to the necessity of forging a new patriotism; to the idea of war as “the necessary and bloody test of a people’s force”; to the all-conquering beauty of Business.

Mark Slouka is the author, most recently, of the novel God’s Fool. He teaches in Columbia University’s School of the Arts. His last essay for Harper’s Magazine, “Arrow and Wound,” appeared in the May 2003 issue.

*NB: He also has a current essay in the current issue of Harper's regarding Humanities Education.

An article about using a stability ball at work...giving the people what they want.

2009-08-19T14:38:00.001-04:00

A stability ball can do a lot for your health and wellness. The simple act of swapping your desk chair for a stability ball for a period of time each day at work or while you're surfing the web at home could dramatically improve your posture, your core strength and help tone your tummy, glutes and thighs. You could effortlessly burn calories at your desk at quite a high rate.
When you first try sitting on a stability ball you'll realise it's tricky. It requires core strength to keep from wobbling and before long, you'll find that you have that strength and you can even feel a difference in your stomach.

Sitting on an exercise ball won't burn fat but it can build muscle and strength and help you define your abs underneath any extra fluff you've accumulated. You'll be actively sitting which, after a while, won't feel like work but will be helping you to tone and strengthen.

Sitting on a ball while you're at your computer could also improve your cognitive functions. In fact, many classrooms are putting children on these while they do school work because some kids often have trouble staying still. Sitting on the ball actually helps them focus on school work and sitting on the exercise ball becomes what can be described as productive fidgeting.

Deskercise
Beyond just sitting on the ball and gaining balance, you can do several deskercise type exercises such as:
Sit on your desk chair and use the ball like a thigh master. Squeeze thighs together repeatedly with the ball between your thighs

Go to a nearby wall (or your cubicle wall will do) and lean against the ball at the small of your back. Roll up and down, doing squats. Once you're doing well with that, try suspending one foot in the air while you do it

Put the ball between your feet as you sit in your desk chair and use your feet to lift the ball. Squeeze together as you lift

Whenever you can, align your knees against a stable surface and lean back and do some crunches. Once you've found your balance, you won't even need that surface and can just do them on the fly

Twist while on the ball and define your obliques

Conference calls at your desk that allow you to hit mute on a headset are a great time to do some ball work!

Use your imagination and you'll probably come up with plenty of ways to exercise at your desk. You could burn an extra few hundred calories a day during working hours (or computer surfing hours).

Choosing an Exercise Ball
Exercise balls are not expensive. You can often find them for less than $20. It's important to choose a ball that's large enough to make sitting at your desk and working comfortable. You still need to think ergonomically with using an exercise ball as a chair. Buy an exercise ball that allows you to sit so that your belly button is about level with the G and H on your computer keyboard and so that your knees are at a ninety degree angle. You can also buy special stability ball chairs.

Onto Heavier Things...

2009-08-18T16:45:00.003-04:00

I just found out my aunt has cancer. I don't like that. It means she may be sick and not get better. It may mean my parents one day leave me before I'm ready. It may mean that I don't make it home.

It means that death is still here and I can't do anything about it.

I listened to this song on the way home from my grandma's funeral when I was 21. Whenever I feel confronted by loss or the hardness of life, I go back to it.

Doubting Thomas
Nickel Creek

What will be left when I've drawn my last breath,
Besides the folks I've met and the folks who know me?
Will I discover a soul saving love,
Or just the dirt above and below me?

I'm a Doubting Thomas,
I took a promise, but I do not feel safe,
Oh me of little faith.

Sometimes I pray for a slap in the face,
Then I beg to be spared 'cause I'm a coward.
If there's a master of death I'll bet he's holding his breath,
As I show the blind and tell the deaf about his power.

I'm a Doubting Thomas,
I can't keep my promises,'Cause i don't know what's safe,
Oh me of little faith.

Can I be used to help others find truth when I'm scared I'll find proof that its a lie?
Can I be lead down a trail dropping bread crumbs that prove I'm not ready to die?
Please give me time to decipher the signs,
Please forgive me for time that I've wasted

I'm a Doubting Thomas,
I'll take your promise though I know nothin's safe.
Oh me of little faith.

Exercise Ball

2009-08-17T16:06:00.002-04:00

I was surprised upon doing a google search about using a balance ball as a chair at work that most of the entries were blogs. Not that I don't write about many things that may not really meet the qualifications of being "blog worthy." But balance balls? Really.

Here is my diary from today's first use:

1. Biked in with deflated ball in bike bag. Took ball and pump to break room to inflate with minimal interruption to coworkers.
2. Took ball back to desk to 2-3 concerned looks in hallway. Sat on ball and fielded at least 5 comments/questions about the ball and what it's purpose was.
3. Had to re-inflate ball 2-3 times during first half hour to keep my body high enough.
4. Felt both improved posture and small sense of moral superiority. Coworkers not enlightened enough to use such a practical method for core strengthening and alignment.
5. Back got sore and switched to chair for 6 hours.
6. Got bored and switched back to ball after re-inflating it yet again.
7. Listening to Sufjan Stevens while balancing on ball.

More to come!!

Maybe.

Pet Peeves

2009-08-10T10:35:00.002-04:00

Hypochondriacs (myself included)

Overheard in office bathroom:

Person 1: There's still no hot water from these automatic faucets?
Person 2: No, the water doesn't seem to ever get hot.
Person 1: You know, that's going to be a real sanitation problem when Swine Flu season hits again.

Christianity Today

For running an article about the dangers of post-poning sex AND marriage and encouraging people to marry younger. Not that I don't think this is an interesting topic to discuss, but I don't like the dichotomy. It's either "You're dating, so in order to not have sex, you should get married younger" OR "You're dating, so in order to wait to get married, it's okay to have sex now."

As we all know, or at least a lot of us ladies know, there are 3 women to every 2 men (more or less) in the church.

This fact suggests that perhaps a third category could be: you're not dating anyone. The current discussion of sex and marriage within the church (as almost always presented) does not apply to you. Additionally, it often leads to feelings of inadequacy and loneliness.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Whether overtly or not, every church I've ever gone to has made marriage seem like the end-all, be-all. I've even been to a service where during one very long prayer in particular, the Elder (or whoever he was) prayed for all the single people there, that God would bring that someone special, that future spouse into their life. Try as they may to encourage you with words about "being content in your singleness" and "preparing yourself for your future mate," it is always obvious which state is considered inferior.

We get it. Marriage. Family. Important. Check.

But those who do not have that, be it by choice or circumstance, should not be made to feel less-than, and all too often I think they are.

There are myriad ways to love and be loved, many relationships in addition to marriage that can challenge and fulfill. So, let's be a little more honest. Marriage is a beautiful thing, but it can also be a very hard thing - people get sick, people leave, people hurt eachother. It is far from the end-all. Singleness can be very freeing and joyous, but it can also be incredibly lonely feeling like you're living life without someone in your corner.

In whatever state we find ourselves, the fact remains that, as Christians, we have been charged to live life in such a way that we love others as we love ourselves, that we sacrifice and have compassion, that we carry other people's burdens - whether those "others" are our spouses, children, neighbors, friends, or little children in other countries.

And I just wanted to write this out to remind you...but probably more than that - to remind myself.

Moving on Up

2009-07-31T15:52:00.002-04:00

Or West, as the case may be. Today is my office's last day in our current building. As of Monday, we will be located on 23rd St, NW - near GW where I went to grad school.

It's been interesting to hear everyone's worries and concerns about the new building - the long walk from the metro, the lack of dining options, the switch from offices to a cube farm. Many of us, too, seem less concerned. Maybe because I lived there for a year I don't fear the area so much. Maybe because I would have to walk 3/4 of a mile to any metro (or more) I don't think it sounds so bad. And maybe because I'm already in a cubicle, I think any other cubicle would be just as fine.

Who's to say?

We'll see what it's like when we get there!

White Houses Lyrics

2009-07-16T17:44:00.001-04:00

Crashed on the floor when I moved in
This little bungalow with some strange new friends
Stay up too late, and I'm too thin
We promise each other it's 'til the end
Now we're spinning empty bottles
It's the five of us
With pretty eyed boys girls die to trust
I can't resist the day
No, I can't resist the day
Jenny screams out and it's no pose
'Cause when she dances she goes and goes
Beer through the nose on an inside joke
And I'm so excited, I haven't spoken
And she's so pretty, and she's so sure
Maybe I'm more clever than a girl like her
Summer's all in bloom
Summer is ending soon
It's alright and it's nice not to be so alone
But I hold on to your secrets in white houses
Maybe I'm a little bit over my head
I come undone at the things he said
And he's so funny in his bright red shirt
We were all in love and we all got hurt
I sneak into his car's cracked leather seat
The smell of gasoline in the summer heat
Boy, we're going way too fast
It's all too sweet to last
It's alright
And I put myself in his hands
But I hold on to your secrets in white houses
Love, or something ignites in my veins
And I pray it never fades in white houses
My first time, hard to explain
Rush of blood, oh, and a little bit of pain
On a cloudy day, it's more common than you think
He's my first mistake
Maybe you were all faster than me
We gave each other up so easily
These silly little wounds will never mend
I feel so far from where I've been
So I go, and I will not be back here again
I'm gone as the day is fading on white houses
I lied, wrote my injuries all in the dust
In my heart is the five of us
In white houses
And you, maybe you'll remember me
What I gave is yours to keep
In white houses

H St Musical

2009-07-13T22:58:00.002-04:00

Tonight we held auditions, in my living room, for our Youth Summer Arts Workshop production of High School Musical, to be performed August 9 as a part of Y-Knot? A benefit concert for Interstages, a non-profit in Southeast DC that teaches music and performing arts classes to young women in the Anacostia area.

It's less than a month away, officially, and while I feel like there is so much to be done, I am finally more excited than stressed out about things. We had 6 young women audition for "leading roles" today, 5 that came late, and 2 boys that are interested in the design class we're doing and are coming on Wednesday. One of the girls currently participates in Interstages' programming and two more girls will be coming from Southeast Whitehouse, also in Anacostia.

As Adrienne and I pumped our arms furiously to "Wildcats everywhere throw your hands up in the air!!" and several girls from the neighborhood poured down the outside steps and rang the doorbell, I realized I did not envision this. Any part of it.

Learning High School Musical - certainly not. Opening up our house on a regular basis to 3 - 8 young ladies who live on our street to bake, learn choreography or just talk about their day? Not really.

Now, some people might think it's weird to take such an interest in your neighbors. To care about other people's children and have them over, especially if you're a single 20-something. But, this is what we're working with. And I'd rather have these girls decorating a cake or singing a Disney song than getting into fights on the street at the age of 7. And if I'm seen as a little weird, then so be it. That's never stopped me before.

This life is an adventure, and I'm excited to live it. Now we'll just have to see where it goes next.

The Sum of All its Parts

2009-06-10T21:55:00.002-04:00

There were 20 people or so waiting for him today when he walked back to his cubicle. They were waiting to say good-bye, to wish him well, to help him pack up the gifts and Dilbert calendars he'd collected along the way. But there would be time for that on Saturday. Twelve years of your life, and suddenly it's all over. You stop and wonder, where did those twelve years go?

And I think about this on the metro. I notice the space in between my leg and the woman sitting next to me, hear the Texan lilt in the voices of the two women in front of me chatting about partisan strategies for making America energy independent, feel the heat of all the suits and high heels pressing in on their way home during rush hour. And I think all this is life. Every little moment.

The feel of the humid air on your skin, the smell of garlic burning in butter, the pinch between your eyebrows when you get an ice cream headache. It's so easy to let all those moments and feelings pass, glossing over them in the hopes of seeing something larger and more significant - the sum of those parts.

But maybe it's not the sum total we should be concerned with, maybe it is those fleeting moments that hold the most mystery and the most meaning. So, don't blink...or, at least, maybe try not to.

Blogabbatical

2009-06-06T15:06:00.002-04:00

So it's been a little more than a month since I've written anything. I think part of that has just been trying to get used to have days filled up with an actual job. And with that comes a lot more doing and less reflecting.

Although I have been reading. I finally picked up and finished The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao which had been getting a lot of attention/buzz. I don't know what it is about Latin American writers and their need to constantly discuss "masculinity" so extensively in their books. An old professor of mine would have referred me to the "cultural encyclopedia," cited machismo and that would have been that. All that to say, it was funny, but it didn't "WAO" me. Ba dump cha.

Work has been going quite well, I think. Besides planning an orientation for Fulbright grantees going to Latin America in the fall, I've been able to learn something about visa processing and yesterday got to visit the Bangladeshi Embassy with students going this summer to study Bangala. All in all, I've been busy, it's been interesting, and I'm trying to learn about all the programs that the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs does.

In other news, I finally made it over to Roosevelt Island with Laura this week. We took a long walk around and happened upon some deer feeding near the water's edge. That was a beautiful moment.

I've also decied that this summer and this year I'm gonna go ahead and try to carpe diem - take an orinthology class, finally buy a new computer, maybe go to Niagra Falls before the Fall. It's the year of making it happen, afterall.

How to Impress People

2009-04-28T18:48:00.000-04:00

...especially a new boss.

Develop a skin rash after you get out of the shower that won't go away and kind of makes you look/feel like you have a sunburn. Then go through your first day of work with it.

Not that this has ever happened to me.

Haiku! God Bless You!

2009-04-23T15:28:00.002-04:00

Some poetry inspired by my life, of late. I have italicized my favorites. Please let me know which ones YOU like!

Test taking today
All of our desks in a row
Our minds are elsewhere

She gave me a C
And yelled when a boy laughed
I look back and smile

Pencils long and sharp
Make dark bubbles on the page
And then seal our fate

No sound but silence
Echoes in the bright classroom
Fold your hands and wait

To finish the test
We have forty minutes left
Not eternity

Old, thick and heavy
With the stink of age and must
Lies the math textbook

I dream a great dream
That I may one day attain
Perfect attendance

New, thick, hard and short
I grip it with my fingers
White chalk in my hand

They gave me a badge
And attached the phrase "high stakes"
Look my way in fear

You punctured me there
Where I sought to bind my work
Wait for death, stapler

Puffed up to be popped
Covered with the daily news
Paper mache mask

Eagerly I wait
Refresh my inbox again
Will I have a job?

Delicate flavors
A gift from the ocean depths
Sushi draws me in

I catch sight of it
The tomato sauce spot there
No Tide Pen, no hope

Long, black tendrils are
The arms of my nemesis
They call you "Cursive"

Quarters flung at me
Bouncing off the wall they drop
I am substitute

Majestic and proud
Hunting in the tall spring grass
Is my daring cat

Oh, Subconcious

2009-04-23T07:15:00.002-04:00

This morning I woke up with a start when my alarm went off. I had been having the most intensely real feeling, and yet also not so real feeling, dream I'd had in a while.

Yesterday, I had that job interview, right? Well, last night as I was drifting off and then this morning I kept thinking about how I'd find out today and worrying about what I said or didn't say, and wishing I'd phrased things differently. I will say that I was nervous until I saw the woman and her colleagues. They put me at ease. Which seems good. I don't know. Anyway, so I think that informed my dream.

In my dream I was vying for a job against another candidate (like in real life). Only, we were going to find out when the choice was published in some magazine or another. I kept flipping through the pages trying to find it, but all I kept seeing were ads for jobs with my name under them, which I didn't think was a good sign.

Anyway, someone that I know (I think it may have supposed to have been an uncle?) came to the house and I explained the whole ordeal and how we had to wait on the magazine inside, for whatever reason. But when we get inside, there's Lily and Rufus from Gossip Girl. I immediately apologize to my guest, saying, "Okay, they're totally ridiculous. I'm so sorry you have to endure this" as if they were on television and NOT standing there. But then, Lily's white trash ex-husband (okay, I made that up) comes onto the scene and starts chatting it up to Lily and Rufous' chagrin.

And he wants a beer. And you know what kind of beer he pulls out of the cooler? Rock Creek. Like the giant park in the middle of DC. Anyway, we're all waiting to hear about the job...and then I wake up.

So, now I'm eating some breakfast, getting ready to head up to the school (forgot I wasn't getting there until 8:30am today and got up at the same time as normal) and trying not to be nervous. Gah, distract me, world!

A mixed bag

2009-04-22T20:47:00.003-04:00

Thoughts from a conversation with my neighbor:

"In college I knew a girl who was obsessed with Disneyworld. No joke, she was once brought to tears by a Disneyworld commercial on TV. And, freakishly, her two closest friends were named Jasmine and Mickey.

When I was in elementary school we would play Aladdin. Me and my friend and his 5th grade girlfriend would pretend that she was Jasmine, he was Aladdin and that I was Jafar. This girl was the girl I had sat behind on the bus for two years, trying to think of something interesting to say and never getting the words out. Looking back, it was like we were playing out some sort of subconcious love triangle."

Memories that surfaced today while DC-CAS monitoring:

- Not making the second round of tryouts for the 8th grade girls' basketball team.
- How I was inducted into the "B+ -but not an A-Club" in 8th grade by Eric(k) Morales. Although I can't remember if he spelled his name with a k instead of or in addition to a c.

I want to write about these things.

What happened today:

- I got up before my alarm!
- I had a job interview! I find out about it tomorrow. Gulp. I wasn't nervous, but now I am a little. OR maybe a lot. The extra caffeine can't be helping.
- We ate "B for D" and it included waffles, eggs, ham, coffee and orange juice. Mmm mmm good.
- Had an artists meeting. Hopefully some people will wanna help out with the Summer Arts Workshop idea I had for the kids in the 'hood :)

Going to bed early again tonight sounds like a great idea.

Cruel and Unusual Punishment

2009-04-21T14:06:00.004-04:00

Today I was working as a test monitor, supervising some standardized testing procedures at a school in Northwest. One of the reading passages was about chocolate chip cookies. They're buttery, crispy, delicious. All those words. All those words at 11am, that tricky time in between breakfast and lunch. Cruel for the students and cruel for me. I heard many a tummy grumble.

My first (almost) kiss

2009-04-12T23:24:00.002-04:00

We had it worked out to a science.

After youth group, I would take her home first then go to drop you off. You would take your guitar out of my trunk and we would hug good-bye. I remember the first time I furtively kissed you on the cheek and ran back towards the driver's side door before you had a chance to react. We worked it out to a ritual over the weeks; the drive, the unpacking, the quick kiss on the cheek. Then one night it felt different.

I couldn't put the feeling into words, but something seemed to change. I went to let you go but you didn't release your arms. I stayed there for a moment, then went to kiss your cheek as I'd done before, only you had turned your head. Half your mouth met mine, and the feel of your lips was so new and unsettling. I said something silly and awkward like, "Uh-oh" or "That was close" - something I can't remember now. And then I buried my face into your shoulder, afraid to look up or move away, embarrassed for some reason I couldn't name.

And we said good night.

The next day I went to Jessica's house. The first words out of my mouth were, "I think he tried to kiss me last night!" I laid on the floor and listened to Incubus in her room, staring at the ceiling, hoping you'd try again soon.

But you never did.

I thought you might on Valentine's Day, while we sat on the half-pipe in your backyard, arms touching, and I was disappointed because you had to babysit your little brothers that night. Or after we walked down to the wash to watch the river, that day when the road, the sky and the water were all the same color of gray. But you didn't then, either.

And that's okay.

Say What?

2009-04-10T16:32:00.002-04:00

My phone rang a minute ago. I didn't recognize the number on caller ID but I picked it up anyway.

When I answered the strains of "I'm black ya'll, and I'm black ya'll!" started coming through the speaker. For a moment I thought that perhaps a friend of mine, who had somehow found my number, was messing with me or trying to make me laugh. I was a little confused but kept listening to see what might happen next. Sadly, it was just a marketing call, attempting to get me to purchase "ring-back" music.

In those 44 seconds I ran the gamut of emotion. Confusion, excitment, amusement, disappointment and disgust.

Here is my only question: why that song? These are just the things.

Burning Time

2009-04-08T15:42:00.001-04:00

I just made this using some Facebook chain note thing - but it's kind of cool. The pictures are flickr's answers to the following questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What is your favorite color?
4. Favorite drink?
5. Dream vacation?
6. Favorite Hobby?
7. What you want to be/do when you grow up?
8. What do you love most in life?
9. One word to describe you?

Day 4 in Ethiopia

2009-04-06T12:04:00.004-04:00

After a bit of a hiatus, I've come back to telling you all a little bit more about my experiences in Ethiopia.

Tuesday morning came warm and windy as Min, Mat and I arrived at the compound in Sidistkilo to facilitate another Self-Help group. This one would be about work ethic, as some of the leadership had expressed to us that these individuals were barely completing the minimum amount of work each week and would frequently complain to one another.

As soon as the group came inside the feeling in the room was so much different than it had been the previous day. You could almost feel the skepticism and hopelessness; there were no smiles today. We started asking questions about what people did with the Outreach project, what they liked about their job, what they disliked - and we heard a lot of conflicting stories. It also seemed like people were just saying what they thought we wanted to hear.

It had been suggested that we also share some scripture verses about work and it's importance, as Ethiopians are a very reverent and religious people, even if they are not practicing Christians, and they do respect the Bible. But, as we were sharing, it felt like there was this huge disconnect.

So finally I felt moved to say, basically, we are not here trying to preach to you about things that we don't understand. It's very easy to say, "Work as if you're working for the Lord" or "Be joyful when you work" but we know that's not really that simple. I shared about how my own family member was sick, with a condition that was not cured by medication - only managed - much like their own HIV/AIDS. I said, I know what that feels like, but I also know that you have an opportunity here to give hope to people around the world. You are giving them the chance to participate in your story. When they buy your jewelry, you are connecting with them, giving them hope that one day your life will change and that they can be a part of it.

And then Mat started sharing about his job and about how to be encouraging while they were there working. And when one woman said she would rather serve God in church and that the job creation program actually took her away from that I said, "Where did Jesus teach? On the mountain. And that is where you live now, so why not put his lessons into practice here?"

At that point, the leader of the job creation program, Tamara came in, and everyone began to have an honest discussion about the program - what they felt was unfair and why, the reasoning behind why it was organized the way it was, etc. It was like group therapy! At the end, it truly seemed like a new level of respect and understanding had been built. The whole tone of the discussion had changed. A weight felt lifted. As we went around and greeted each group member with a kiss and a thank you, I felt like we had genuinely connected with these people and that together we'd found honesty and hope in the midst of things that are very difficult. It was very encouraging!

For lunch we had some tasty traditional Ethiopian food at the park/garden again and then headed out to the orphanage for our first visit!

Min, Everly and I had prepared a lesson about colors and had planned on doing a song and some finger-painting. When we arrived we were overwhelmed at the number of kids and how excited they were to see us! We had nearly 100 kids ready to do a lesson with us, from toddlers to teenagers - we knew finger-painting was out! So I made up a song about the color wheel Everly had made and the three of us learned it quickly. Somehow, we filled the time and made new friends! It was joyful and fun.

Afterward, we went to see the little babies in the nursery section of the orphanage. Something about being in there with them overwhelmed me. I saw this one sweet little girl sitting in her crib, just smiling a sweet gentle smile and I started to tear up. There were so many babies, not enough women to hold them all, and yet they were so quiet and looked up at you with such big expectant eyes. I decided than that I would want to adopt some day. How could you look at such a precious little baby and not want to wrap it up in your arms and care for it like it was your own?

That night, we were all exhausted, eating dinner and doing some more planning before heading to bed and beginning day 5.

(Insert your name) Getting Married

2009-03-30T22:49:00.002-04:00

Over the weekend I went to a wedding. It was held inside of a barn about 45 minutes outside of DC. It was beautiful. They had made all these paper flowers and hung them from the corners and light fixtures, decorated the stage with giant paper lanterns and strings of lights. And the bridge and groom are some of the goofiest and loving people I know, and I felt like their wedding reflected that. It was a short ceremony, where they shared vows they had written and laughed many times. Afterward, we ate delicious bbq and home-made cakes and danced for hours.

Before leaving that afternoon, Laura, Stefanie and I were getting ready in our bedroom. We were joking about what an anthropologist studying us and our customs might say as we preened and plucked and painted and glossed. I put on my best British accent and remarked on, "Important cultural events that draw unattached males and females into the same social space where their own courtship may begin." We giggled. We are ridiculous sometimes. But it's always nice to feel pretty and photo-worthy, and weddings are one of the few occasions where I try really hard to do so.

We decided that our outfits each described a bit about our personalities. Stefanie's was black and white and silver, with thin straps and a fitted waist. She donned her glasses and was going to wear her pointy black shoes, when I dissuaded her in favor of some strappy silver ones. Laura wore a fun and classic top with a frilly front along with a knee-length skirt and elegant hair. I wore my hair down and curly, a blue dress with ruffles, and shoes with ruffles. I don't know if I like what this psychoanalysis of my outfit portends to reveal...

And tonight we watched Rachel Getting Married. Which I think might actually have been better without all the strange musical interludes. I mean, they were nice, but when does that happen in real life? I just felt like the other emotions in the movie were so raw and so very humanly real, that the strange and fantastical musicians and other talented performers that would constantly pop in and out didn't really fit.

At any rate I love this scene where Kim, the character played by Anne Hathaway, comes home from a long time away at rehab for her sister's wedding and she's standing in an old room in the house. And she just stands there. I wonder if other people have shared that experience like I have. A home-coming that makes you look at the furniture and wonder, "Was it always really this small?" Or where you try really hard to remember things exactly as they were, and you think you probably should be able to because you spent every day there for most of your life, but you can't seem to conjure anything without blurry edges. And the feelings are complicated; because life is complicated and so are the relationships we form. You're relieved to be home, but afraid that it's changed, and maybe also afraid it hasn't, and there is the love and the hurt and the broken bones and the fights right there in that moment, standing in the doorway of some long-vacated room.

I love weddings because they are celebrating the choice two people are making to intertwine their lives together for the rest of their time on Earth. Everyone around them is celebrating their love and their pledge. Even if it gets complicated, they've made their choice, they'll never leave - and, yes, I guess, if you want to be all realistic about it, maybe one day they will. But in that moment, at the altar, in front of all your friends and family, you're making one of the greatest promises and the greatest sacrifices any human being can make. Your life is your own no longer. And that is a beautiful thing.

Spring is Coming

2009-03-23T15:08:00.003-04:00

I just had to interject with how absolutely lovely it is outside (albeit a bit chilly). The blossoms on the trees are making my heart swell. I love the spring so much! I can't wait to see what new lessons and adventures this season holds for me.

Plus, my dad is coming on a visit in a week and a half! Hopefully the cherry blossoms will be in peak bloom as they predict!

Day 3 in Ethiopia

2009-03-23T14:32:00.003-04:00

Monday morning in Addis arrived warm and sunny. The whole team piled into our two mini-buses and headed up to the compound at Sidistkilo. Along the roadways people approached the car begging, holding their hands up to their mouths and gesturing to their children and asking for food. And since there are not very many sidewalks, even on busy roadways, the streets were a crowded mess of diesel spewing trucks and vans, people walking and biking, vendors and smaller cars.

When we arrived about 40 minutes later we were greeted by over 20 men and women who are a part of the job creation program at the Entoto Outreach Project. They were in the middle of sorting coffee beans - large, symmetrical ones for necklaces, small ones to be hand pounded and ground into drinking coffee.

After introductions, Mat, Min and I (yes, the three Ms) went inside with the group to facilitate a self-help session about saving. Now, working with the job creation program, people make between 100 and 150 birr a month, or about $10-15. Trying to have a discussion about saving, especially when many people can barely make ends meet as it is, was challening for the three of us. But, as we started talking and asking participants to write down their monthly expenses and their income, and come up with ideas for saving, they were incredibly responsive. We also talked about setting some short term goals, and how savings can help us be intentionally generous.

The Ethiopian people are so generous. They all told us that on the Mountain, if your neighbor does not have any food, you share with them without question. That sort of unquestioned giving, especially in the face of poverty, is pretty amazing.

For lunch, we walked down the road to this park that has a cafe inside of it. There we shared a large plate of vegetarian choices like lentils and cabbage and beets, and extra orders of shiro, a mixture of chickpea flour, butter and spices.

In the afternoon, we had an ESL planning meeting where we talked through what lessons we wanted to do for the afterschool and program at Entoto, and also for the four afternoons we'd be spending at a state-run orphanage nearby. We then spent the rest of the afternoon peeling off wall paper in preparation for painting, fighting off "that's what she said moments" (but not very well).

For dinner, Kate, Dave, Adam and I chose a place inside a shopping center down the road from the Guest House. About half the menu was apparently "unavailable" according to the waitress, and so were sodas, even though we saw most of the restaurant drinking them. Undeterred, Adam went up and ordered 4 different slices of cake for us to eat before our food came. We then rolled back to the guest house for time with our team.

Days 1 and 2 in Ethiopia

2009-03-18T16:45:00.005-04:00

After arriving at the Addis Guest House, setting our things down and enjoying a leisurely pizza lunch, our team of 21 boarded our two mini-buses, chartered for the week, and drove through Addis to Sidistkilo (6 Kilo) where the Entoto Outreach Project has its building. They have only just recently moved in there, less than a month when we arrived!

We went over the week's activities and descriptions of some of the tasks and events and then split into two groups. One group went in pairs to make home visits with those that have been a part of the job creation program with Entoto Outreach. I went with the other group to play soccer on a large field on the mountain with some of the neighborhood children.

As we walked down the road from the church where we parked the van, young boys came running out of their houses and from small roads and groves of eucalyptus trees (planted to use as lumber because of their quick growth rate). They seemed to recognize Esias and Giovanni, two Ethiopian men who work with the Outreach Project that were helping us to organize a game. The children grabbed our hands and asked us to swing them in the air as we walked.

One point that Anna made before we split up was that one of the most important things we could do with the children, and with all the people on Entoto, really, especially since we couldn't always communicate, was touch. We could use hugs or handshakes or kisses on the cheek to communicate our care for them. She told us that these people are often outcasts from their towns and families, they are viewed as some of the lowest of the low in Ethiopian society.

And Ethiopian culture is very touch-oriented, especially in comparison with American culture. Men are often seen walking down the street hand in hand or with one arm slung around the shoulder or waist of another as a gesture of friendship. A traditional greeting is a kiss on each cheek, plus one for good measure on the first cheek. As you do this you say, "Denanesh?" "Denanegn. Denanesh?" "Denanegn." Which is translated "How are you? I am well" The greeting is slightly different depending on if it is a man or woman being greeted.

When we arrived on the field, I sat down with a group of children, mostly girls, and we tried to teach eachother handgames. They taught me one, but the only part of it I can remember is "Eh-oh...something something...leh-loh...something something something...STOP!" where you immediately stop the game and press one finger to your lips.

So, we played at this for a while. We also counted in English and Amharic. We tried to learn eachother's names. And then we just started running around. We played a version of crack the whip, and we raced. Just plain racing up and down the field. At the mountain elevation I felt old and out of breath.Out of nowhere, this older man, brandishing a stick, appeared and started talking to me and trying to help me organize a race. He smelled vaguely of alcohol and was very forceful in his direction giving. The children seemed to listen to him, especially because when they started to fall out of line he waved the stick threateningly in their direction. (Later in the week he apparently made an incredible save during a soccer game, running in like a flash of lightning from the sidelines. One of our team members exclaimed, "It's crazy stick guy!" which caused much giggling among the young people.)

The afternoon was winding down, and so the last thing Sarah and I got to do with the kids was have our hair braided. Marta (she probably didn't spell it that way) braided my hair and did a pretty good job for how fine and unruly it can be. It's amazing how willing the children were to befriend us and to touch or hands and arms and hair. I hope that they knew that we cared for them and wanted to be their friends, too.After that, we loaded into the vans and drove back to the guest house to freshen up before dinner at a restaurant I think was called Abyssinia. They had singing and dancing from different regions of Ethiopia on stage the entire time we were eating. It was hard to believe the dancers had enough stamina to keep going! There was also someone making coffee the traditional way to our right during the meal.

In the morning, we went to Beza International, a sister or cousin church of NCC here in DC. The sermon was given that morning by a man named Andy from Texas, who is going to start a ministry that brings teams of young Habesha (Ethiopian) youth from the United States to work and volunteer in Ethiopia.

Sunday afternoon we split up and got to engage in some more leisurely pursuits. I went with a few other team members to a public pool where I lounged in the sun for the first time in months. We also watched a couple of the guys on the team, Adam and Mat, attempt to dive off the restricted diving boards.

That evening we worked out some logisitical plans for the week, and it came to be that I would be working with Min and Mat to help facilitate some self-help groups during three of the mornings on Entoto. I also volunteered to help with ESL planning for both the kids that go to the program at the Outreach Project and those at a state-run orphanage where we would be going Tuesday through Friday.

A few of us were directed to a "Greek place" for dinner and ended up eating the most delicious crepes imaginable (they were a little on the pricey side for Addis) and sharing our stories. I loved hearing about how people had ended up in DC, the work they did for a living, how they decided to come on the trip and I especially enjoyed Dave's story about growing up in India and being deaf until the age of 5. Ask him to tell you about it sometime!

Loving from a Distance

2009-03-16T13:06:00.004-04:00

As I went to bed on Saturday night, tucked into a queen-sized bed with Sarah at the Addis Guest House on Hiya-Hulet road, just minutes from Bole International Airport, I realized I had been awake for 35 hours.

Nearly 16 hours of that time was spent on Ethiopian Airlines flight 503. Spending that much time awake on a plane gives you a lot of time for reflection. I journaled, I read a novel, I sudoku-ed, I wrote quotes from the novel that I liked, I studied a map of Africa, I tried to draw pictures to help me learn Amharic faster, I watched a terrible Jessica Simpson movie (Major Movie Star) and then parts of Madagascar Two, and then Max Payne, just when I thought all my entertainment options had been exhausted.

Not only was the flight to Ethiopia the first time in my 25 (yes, 25 now) years that I have been able to successfully complete a sudoku puzzle, but it was a time for me to think about the first time I used my passport. I was 17 and on my way to Pula, Crotia, with youth from across Europe. This is what I was thinking during the flight:

"On Tuesday, I will be turning 25 and I will be in Africa! I can hardly imagine choosing a more fitting way to celebrate the adventurous life I've been given. And, really, when I look back, all those adventures started because of a summer camp in Croatia, a passport application, and a week with people who taught me that the world and those who live in it are to be embraced with open arms and an open heart."

I am too drained physically and emotionally at this moment to even begin to write everything down. This week I made new friends, stripped wall-paper, ate injera 100 times, kissed the faces of those living with HIV/AIDS, held the hands of orphans, served lunch to men who sleep on the streets of Addis, sang songs with adults and children, puked my guts out, and cried to those on my team that I am tired of loving from a distance.

Other stories will come, but I thought I wanted to share this one thing, this one lesson I feel I've taken away. It is easy to hold a child and to love it and to kiss it and coo at it - but it is not easy to embrace a grown man despite his smell, despite the mistakes he's made, despite his anger, and despite his potential to hurt you. But if we are to really love as Christ has loved, then that is the love we are to give. It is too easy for me to love at arm's length, to hold my breath as I pat the back of the homeless, to love my neighbors as my neighbors - but not as my son, or daughter, mother, father, brother or sister, let alone as myself.

I want to see this so bad!

2009-03-01T21:53:00.002-05:00

Was her name Ivana? No, it was Polina!

2009-02-28T22:57:00.003-05:00

...There was a female foreign exchange student from Russia who attended my high school. I can't remember her name, but I do remember her bright blond hair and soft features. She looked almost like a fox or a minx - it was her eyes that gave her that look.

I was brushing my teeth tonight and suddenly I had a memory of her running for student government. I think she used several languages in her speech and charmed the hordes of teenagers with her Slavic accent. (I took over her position the next year, and during my speech I wore a sweatshirt, which, apparently, is not good form)

Anyway, I was brushing my teeth thinking about this one time at Hula Hawkins, our school's last dance of the year. It was her senior year and I remember she was dancing with someone in the middle of a large crowd, wearing a very short skirt. And she was dancing wildly and her skirt was riding up, and everyone in the circle around her was pointing and giggling and covering their mouths in mock outrage. I think I was ashamed of the reaction, but couldn't convince my eyes to look another direction.

I was starting to feel bad about that while I was brushing my teeth. Thinking about how mean a place high school can be.

But then another memory floated into view. She took a class with another one of my friends - I think it was health class. Anyway, he sat behind her, and during one of the classes they were given an assignment to write a list of all the things they liked about themselves. Apparently, she wrote down so many things, she had to use more than one sheet of paper. And the list was basically a laundry list of physical features. And my friend made up a fake list ("my eyes, my hair, my legs") all in a poorly done Russian accent when he retold the story. And thinking of it over the sink made me giggle.

I wonder what she believed about herself and the way people perceived her. Interesting to have that come to mind after eight years never having seen her again after that spring night. The same night where I remember relishing every slow dance with my date, someone that I had a massive crush on despite the rather inconvenient fact he was my friend's boyfriend. I especially remember the last song: "Girl you're my angel of the morning...closer than my peeps you are to me-ee." I was at his house a few days later when that song came on television and we looked up at eachother from opposite sides of the living room and smiled, a young and bashful smile that filled every empty place in me with butterflies.

Meh

2009-02-28T10:49:00.002-05:00

Yes, I titled this blog "meh."

We had a joke at the Bible study I go to on Thursdays about a group ice-breaker: "What was the high and low of your week?" I said, maybe next time we can do one that is: "What was really mediocre this week? What could you have taken or left? What was 'meh'?"

This week for me has been "meh." I don't know how else to explain it. I have been in a strange and surly mood, not wanting to be around people as much (although there have been some breaks involving food and music). I have also felt incredibly homesick this week. I don't know if it's just the anticipation of a parental visit at the beginning of April or talking with my roommate of four years and near-sister, Jessica, but whatever it is, it's compounded the feeling of "meh."

I know I should probably be more excited. I am still gainfully unemployed and going on bike rides and doing pilates and taking dance classes. I am leaving the country in less than a week to go to Ethiopia!

Here's hoping I snap out of it soon!!

Valentine's Cake

2009-02-14T21:52:00.002-05:00

My mom baked my dad a cake for Valentine's Day. She made hearts out of redhots and decorated the top of it. When he came home, he had bought some Hershey's kisses which they added.

It makes me cry a little because it gives me hope.

To Reiterate

2009-02-10T23:51:00.002-05:00

I am thankful for Providence.

prov⋅i⋅dence

–noun

1.	(often initial capital letter) the foreseeing care and guidance of God or nature over the creatures of the earth.

2.	(initial capital letter) God, esp. when conceived as omnisciently directing the universe and the affairs of humankind with wise benevolence.

3.	a manifestation of divine care or direction.

4.	provident or prudent management of resources; prudence.

5.	foresight; provident care.

Welcome to Paradise

2009-02-09T18:41:00.002-05:00

Last Saturday night I arrived home from a short retreat in West Virginia and promptly packed my bags so that the next morning I could move into my new home: Paradise.

Why Paradise? Well, because the other house my roommate/landlord lived in was "Murder Row."

Everything went as smoothly as possible, I think. And except for being unable to locate two items (no need to mention them right now) I am all settled in.

You know how you spell bliss? B-U-N-K-B-E-D-S. Not really. BUT, so far living with Laura has been great. I know it's only been a week, but it's been a great one. It's like I only had one issue with living in the same room as another person (noise when falling asleep) and I fixed it when I lived with Jessica (earplugs). We've already had fun nights debriefing, trips to Ikea and the grocery store, and mornings and nights full of friends and homemade goodness.

I've also been continuing my job search. I didn't get a position I interviewed for two weeks ago, and so I have submitted a few more applications this past week. We'll see if I hear back on any of them! I am hopeful that I will end up where I'm supposed to be.

Ethiopia is coming up fast and I almost have all my money raised! Very exciting :) People have blown me away with their generosity and the way things have worked out seems nothing short of Divine Providence.

Sidebar: I like the way the Puritans would attribute things to "Providence," as if it were the incarnation of God that ordered things so that they would work out a certain way. I like that name for God. Because, no matter how you slice it, everything that has happened to you had to happen to you to bring you to exactly where you are. Deep, eh?

Yesterday was glorious. We went walking again. You know, like 37 miles...not really...more like 8.5. And it felt so good to be out in the warmer weather, watching the golden sunshine wash over the monuments and the Potomac. The Tidal Basin still had chunks of ice floating in it. An interesting study in contrasts. We initiated Laura into the "Walking Circle of Trust" because you can only fill four hours of walking time in one decent way: girl talk.

And last night, after cooking Cruze Family Lentil Soup (which was DELISH btw) and buttermilk spice muffins, I passed out in front of the TV while the Grammys were on. It was delightful. I love the feeling of being unable to stay awake. I struggle so many times to fall asleep that when I am just sitting down and I drift off it is one of my simplest pleasures. I was so tired my roommate's boyfriend was able to place a pillow on my face without waking me up. When I did come to and notice the pillow, much to my confusion, they started giggling in the kitchen.

It's amazing how the smallest things, like catching a bus on time, laughing hard, the tightness of your hips after walking 5 miles can make life feel so so so good.

Wanted

2009-01-29T23:39:00.003-05:00

SWF seeks prompt, responsible, administratively-oriented individual for long-term relationship; project management experience a plus.

The details of my life and the lives of others could use some orienting. In completely unrelated news:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Guantanamo Baywatch - The Final Season

Daily Show Full Episodes
Funny Political Videos

Virgin Margaritas

2009-01-26T22:48:00.003-05:00

When I was growing up, sin consisted mainly of three things: alcohol, sex and cigarettes. (Oh, and I guess R-rated movies, too, but the list sounded better without it - better alliteration, you know). These were the things from which we were supposed to abstain. When we signed our names on the dotted line and pledged to give Jesus his half hour every day, we also promised to just say no to these worldly vices.

One time I got a virgin strawberry margarita at a Mexican restaurant. I was 18.

He came up to me at the beach. "Now, we saw you the other night at the restaurant," he said, "And what you were drinking."

"It didn't have alcohol in it..." I answered, somewhat confused, "I'm not old enough anyway." I dug my big toe into the sand.

"Well, but it *could* have been alcohol," he replied. "If someone who didn't know you saw you drinking that, what would they think? Now, my wife, she really likes those blended drinks, too, but she can't get them when we go out. Not in those glasses. People would think they were real. Sometimes she asks for them in a different glass." I hadn't realized that I'd used the wrong prop.

"So, if I ordered it in a water glass it wouldn't matter?" I asked, trying to speak with respect.

He smiled again and walked away. I turned towards the water and unclenched my jaw. My friend murmured something about spiritual maturity.

I wish I didn't remember the incident so well.

Obama-rama

2009-01-20T18:28:00.004-05:00

I don't know if it really hit me until I saw the National Mall on television. I'd been hearing for weeks about how millions of Americans were going to descend upon our fine city, clogging streets, metro stations and restaurants, how this would be an inauguration unlike any before it.

But, this weekend I'd been trying to avoid all the historicism, honestly.

I helped sort coats for a winter clothes drive on Saturday, ate dinner and played board games with friends, went to church on Sunday and watched romantic comedies with Lydia on Sunday, went to Peregrine Espresso to continue my job search on Monday morning and prepped for my Ethiopia trip with NCC. And then things subtly (or not so subtly) started changing...

Bryson came in Monday night and after arriving at Union Station, went out for a beer with me, Ryan, Laura and Rob at Granville Moore's before participating in "Inaugural Sleepover and Pancakes 2009" which involved sleeping about 4 hours and eating delicious banana pancakes at 6:30am.

A little after 7:00am, I biked into downtown via K St, noticing the tour buses parking blocks from Union Station and the crowds of people starting to pour south. I was trying to get to a hotel in downtown by 8:00am so I wouldn't be late for my babysitting job. What? Oh, yes, when my grandchildren ask me what I was doing the morning Barak Obama, first African-American President of the United States of America was sworn into office I can tell them: darlings, I was baby-sitting for the Vice-President's son's lawyer. Thanks again to my friend and future landlord and housemate, Rob.

And so it was. I watched with my one-year-old charge as the millions filed onto the Mall, filling it up all the way to the Lincoln Memorial (a 2 mile distance) and as Barak gave his first speech as President.

Don't worry, though, I still battled the crowds to and from the parade. I was lucky enough to have Charise offer festivities at her office building to some of her friends (1/2 block from the White House). We caught the tail-end of the parade - the Obamas got back into their car mere feet from where we could see them, but we got to see the Bidens turn onto 17th St and give those of us peering from office windows a thumbs up. Plus, there was shrimp cocktail involved.

And now here I sit...knowing that people are out all dressed up at inaugural balls as I lounge in my pajama bottoms. I wonder how much things are really going to change, or if some of it will be in ways not easily perceived.

I'm grateful to be here, in this physical, historical and spiritual place. Sorry I didn't take very many pictures!!

A Human Touch

2009-01-18T22:46:00.002-05:00

During the second service at church today I met a woman named Deborah (or maybe Debra - I don't know which). The band usually hangs out in the foyer after grabbing some Au Bon Pain during first service, and then has coffee and hangs out again during the second service. We usually sit in to watch the third service.

Anyway, during the second service I saw a woman come into the theater (yes, my church meets in a movie theater) in a wheelchair. A few minutes later, I saw her come back out. She wheeled herself to the center of the foyer and just sat there. I was talking with some of the band, and I noticed her out of the corner of my eye. She had a hospital wristband on her right arm, a cane was hanging from her wheelchair, and she was talking to herself.

Normally a group called In Service passes lunches out to the homeless at around 11am and I thought she might be interested in a lunch, and maybe a coat since today was the coat drive. She looked like she'd had a rough time of it lately.

I went over and talked to her for a little bit and she told me how things were looking up a little bit. She was finally out of the hospital and she had her wheelchair delivered...she also said some things that didn't make sense. But I asked her if she wanted a lunch and she said yes so I asked someone to run and get her one because we had to go back inside and play the communion song.

As I told her I had to go back inside and that a lunch was on its way, I placed my hand on her forearm.

What she said took me aback: "That feels really nice."

"This?" I asked, stupidly, squeezing her arm a bit. "Yeah..." she said.

It hit me how we take so much for granted, even the loving touch of another human being. And so, I'd like to remind myself and anyone else who reads this: even if you don't have spare change, dignity is free, and it's always welcomed.

Mermaid Tears

2009-01-14T22:41:00.003-05:00

I raised my head from where it rested while I talked and laughed with her on the phone, then swung my legs around until I sat cross-legged and supported by the headboard.

While we talked I had taken out an old jewelry box from Macy's (Not the velvety kind, but the box that the velvety one had come in). For Christmas last year my parents had bought a beautiful necklace for me - a small diamond heart - and I liked keeping the box around for good measure. I picked up the objects I've collected, letting my fingers linger on the shells and the paper and the glass.

I talked about you to her. And I thought about what I said as I toyed with the corners of the things you've made. And I wished I could use it, like a voo doo doll or something. Like I could say an incantation or a prayer or burn it up so that it might change the way you felt. Not that I knew exactly how you felt about me, or really about anything, anyway. But I had this crazy, childish thought that somehow touching my hand to what you had touched might do...something.

And then I put it away, put it back in the box, back in the drawer.

And so, for the moment, your heart sits surrounded by mermaid tears.

Obligatory end of year reflection and perhaps countdown

2008-12-31T18:04:00.003-05:00

Oh 2008. What to say? It was a year of good and bad decisions...or bad decisions that were actually really good decisions? It was a year of leaving and home-comings, and then leaving and coming home again. Like any year it came with its dose of joy and pain, memorable jokes and meals, travels to new places, good books and bad movies, and things I'd like to do again. I'd like to make a brief list of the highlights (for own narcissistic enjoyment) and then perhaps share a couple resolutions (for the same reason):

Year in Review:
- Successfully ended my work with Global Classrooms, DC.
- Started leading worship again for the first time in a long time.
- Graduated with my M.A. from George Washington University
- Moved back to CA
- Took a trip to Scotland to visit Jessica
- Explored Free LA
- Moved back to DC
- Was a bridesmaid in Rachel's wedding
- Walked from DC to Mt. Vernon (almost 20 miles, b*****)
- Participated in fabulous Halloween costume (bearded lady and 3 Ring Circus)
- Helped to throw epic Hipster House Party
- Voted
- Logged countless hours of research on African foreign exchange regulations
- Cooked delicious potato dishes 3 times for holiday dinners!
- Created/arranged a handful of thoughtful Christmas gifts and purchased nothing tangible ;)

What to expect in the year to come?
- Continue to go the gym
- Cook food at home more
- Save more
- Pick up a new hobby
- Read more books
- OVERCOMMIT! I mean, try to NOT overcommit?

Hoping that a couple journeys to far off places will be just a part of the exciting year to come. After all, it is 2009: Make it Happen!

Prospero Ano Nuevo everybody!!

Musings From the Airport

2008-12-23T01:07:00.003-05:00

A list of things I thought, listened to, and/or wrote down while waiting 6 hours to board my delayed flight:

"She hunkered down in the airport lounge, opening a tattered Stephen King novel as she pulled a Christmas cookie covered in red sprinkles out of a plastic bag."

Quotes from a too-loud phone conversation:
- "On the way over here I was watching the Real Housewives of Orange County. It was a marathon. I couldn't stop watching it. It was so bad. So good!"
- "Which is worse? Being in a car cooped up or being on a plane? I think it's 50/50."
- "I think being ridiculously busy is like the care-all for everything. Except for like your mental health...also you get far being on internet TV."

(I had just drawn a flamingo on my notepad) "As I drew the flamingo I had the urge to turn to the woman who had just sat down next to me, 'Do you like birds as much as I do?'"

____________________________________________________________________
I saw him come out of the bathroom and walk over to her. He grabbed the suitcase and raincoat she had been standing beside, and with other hand took hers. They started walking on ahead of me. She was smiling at him and he held her hand tightly.

Just fifteen minutes earlier I had eaten dinner at the table next to them in the only restaurant available in the B terminal at Dulles Airport (unless you're willing to walk a half mile to the other end and risk missing important flight announcements). Max and Erma's, I think it's called. There are these photos on the wall of an older couple - Max and Erma, I presume. In one of them, Max is wearing a white t-shirt and holding an orange. He reminds me of my grandfather in his backyard, picking oranges to make juice to go with our Sunday morning waffles.

When I sat down to eat, the couple was already engaged in conversation to a family on their left. I hear snippets as I order a diet Pepsi and ask for a menu.

"One is seven and the other is three."

"No, we've never seen them."

"Well, we don't know very much Amharic."

I turn to the blond woman, who looks and sounds very much like my Sunday School teacher, Jill. She has an incredibly careful and gentle air about her, but her eyes and smile are still bright and excited.

"Did you say 'Amharic'?" I ask. "Are you going to Ethiopia?"

"Yes, we're going to adopt two girls - two sisters."

"How long will you be there?"

"Only five days. The government wants adopting families to keep a low profile and not travel, especially with children, in the country."

They are from Colorado but had lived for about a decade in Fullerton, California, only miles from where I grew up.

I tell her I know how to say "Thank-you" in Amharic and she asks me to say it aloud with her. And we practice.

"All I know how to say is 'Don't be afraid' and 'I'm your new mommy!'" she says, all at once looking so brave and uncertain.

"We have a phrasebook," the husband adds, "And we've got a long time to learn some more during the flight."

When I see them again they are stretching their legs before embarking on a fifteen hour flight. The sight of them walking hand in hand moves me. I see love in their hands...and strength, and companionship. Their hands held say, "Let's not be afraid. We are together." And talking with them reminds me that I am never alone, either.

____________________________________________________________________

Our top stories:

- Your flight is delayed.
- A fire chief beat a puppy to death.
- Michael Jackson needs a lung transplant.
- People are buying cell phones for gifts this year.
- ZOMG it's snowing!

Tell them Sam sent you

2008-12-13T22:19:00.003-05:00

Today I went to Peregrine (for the 3rd day in a row...I know, I know...BUT I was supposed to be meeting my friend Heather there, otherwise I would have forgone for a day) and got some tasty China Breakfast tea and a scone. As I sat down at one of the tables I introduced myself to the man who had offered half his table since space is so tight in there on the weekends.

I noticed that he was wearing a shirt on it that said "Ethiopia." I decided to ask about it. Turns out he was a foreign service officer and had been in Addis Ababa for the past three years working at the embassy there. He didn't speak any Amharic, but wanted to give me some tips for travel.

He suggested which vaccines to get, where to go out at night if we wanted to, etc. But my favorite thing he told me was to register with the embassy, which is a good idea I think, and also that if I need anything to go to the embassy and tell them "I met Sam in a coffee shop in DC and he told me that if I needed anything to come to you guys."

Just goes to show you never know who you're going to meet. And it also goes to show that when you're focused on something - a trip, a job, a person - it's like you're riding that wavelength of perception that allows you to see things you wouldn't normally. I might previously have dismissed the shirt that started our conversation as some hipster outift. Sometimes I wonder how much of coincidence is really an amazing happenstance and how much of it is just adjusting our perception of what is out there in the world.

Something to think about, I guess...

A Christmas cab story

2008-12-11T23:30:00.003-05:00

"So you've been here 12 years?" I asked him as we approached Stanton Park from the northwest. The rain was coming down hard on the windows and I could feel the wet on my umbrella leaning against my leg on the floor, puddling on my jeans. "How long have you been driving a cab?"

"Eight years," he replied.

"You must have a lot of stories...do you have any you could tell us?" I look at Stef as I say this, asking her with my eyes I wonder what we're going to get? To be fair, I ask him this after he tells us about the time he was mugged at 4am near 13th and Mass NW and lost all his night's earnings. I knew he had stories, but I wanted to one of the extra special ones.

"Oh, yes, lots of stories. Some good, some bad. Many stories."

"Let's hear one of the really good ones," I say as we head down Massachusetts towards Lincoln Park.

"Okay, one really really good one. So, a while ago I was driving this person to the L'Enfant Hotel, and then they needed to go out to Dulles. I was talking with her this whole time. And as we talked we got closer, she started asking me about my country, how things were like there. So I told her about my country, about my work. At that time, I was taking classes at A Plus - you know it? Like business and computer classes. And I told her about those classes.

Anyway, when I drop her off the fare was $45 and she gave me $80. And I said, 'Wow.' But that was not all, she asked for my information, phone, address, and a while later she sent me a check for $1,200 for my school. I could not believe it!

She also sent me a video tape, a movie, about an immigrant who comes to this country. He had had many problems, he was an alcoholic, a very hard life, you know? But he worked hard, he learned English, he changed and he became a millionaire. I couldn't believe she had remembered me.

There was a card with the check, so I called her to say thank you and to ask her what I could. If I could take her somewhere if she was in DC again for free or do something. And she said no. She said I had to give someone something that they could not pay me back for. She told me to give someone something without them being able to give back. "

"Wow, that's amazing..." I say as we stop outside of Stefanie's house and I pull out a $20. I'm not going to give him $1,200...but I feel like there is more to be said, so I wait a bit. "What's your name?" I ask.

"Solomon," he replies and we shake hands.

"Good luck in Ethiopia," he says (I must interrupt here to explain that as Stefanie and I discussed my job prospects for the next few months the topic of Ethiopia came up. He heard and, being from Eritrea, wanted to talk about it) "I am very happy you are going. I am proud. You must have a good heart to want to go there."

"Let me tell you. I want to go, but I want to give because I believe in a God that gave to me when I couldn't give, that Christ loves me and so I should try to love other people the way he does."

"So you are a Christian?" he asks, "You have Christ in your heart? That's good, I am a Christian, too. With Christ in your heart everything is okay, you can do anything."

I smile at him and extend my hand to him again. "It was good meeting you, Brother. I hope I will see you again." I don't think I've ever called anyone "brother" before. But in that moment I meant it. And then he grips my hand, and I grip his back. Then scooting off the seat into the rain, I make for the front door.

And I don't want to end this with a moral, because I think the story is enough. But I can't help but say that this reminds me. Reminds me that the best gift we can ever give someone is to acknowledge them, to remember them and to love them. To be remembered like he was by that woman still brings tears to his eyes. It wasn't the money that moved him, though it was a wonderful surprise, it was that she remembered his story, picked out a video that she thought would speak to him and his experience, and took the time to send it all to him, asking nothing in return. He was a stranger but she loved him anyway.

I can't think of a better way to celebrate Christmas than by giving the gift of unexpected and maybe even unrequited love, no matter who you are. So pick your target(s). You may never know how you changed their life.

I had a dream...

2008-12-11T10:46:00.003-05:00

I already told this dream to my co workers, but I think it's worth repeating. I really wanted to tell you about the dream I had last night, but can' t quite remember enough about it to make the retelling worthwhile. It involved me and a handful of friends, cohorts, if you will. We were out in the wilderness somewhere. There were scary metro elevators, pine trees that were forced to bend down towards the earth, a sick, possible lame dog, who was a friend and companion of ours, that could also talk. And I believe in one horrible moment we were a part of a crowd awaiting the arrival of someone - some king or very important person. But he wasn't a good person because he made the trees bow down to him even though they should be standing up straight. It was like he wanted them to be deformed. And everyone was afraid of him - and I'm pretty sure that after he left with his entourage he caused a muddy deluge. But things ended well from what I recall.

The dream I had on Monday night involved me "waking up" and realizing I was supposed to get married. I've had these sorts of dreams before. It's like I've been sold for a bride-price, all of a sudden I'm walking down the aisle toward someone I don't know. There have been tears in these dreams.

This wasn't as traumatic, but I remember asking my friend Rachel, the most recently married of my friends, if she was nervous, or if she felt anything at all the morning of her wedding, because I didn't. What I also didn't want to ask or admit was, "And who is the groom?"

Anyway, the best part of the whole dream was that I was supposed to get married at some sort of a saloon with large pink decorations and hideous centerpieces. But, the ceremony was actually going to be on the roof, so I guess I didn't mind that much.

At any rate, I became convinced that my groom couldn't love me because of the way he didn't look at me. All I remember about him was that his eyes were blue.

Yet the dream ends and we are seated together on a couch. And I am sort of fiddling with a fold in his shirt, clasping my fingers around the warmth of the fabric, which seemed very much like flannel. I guess we decided to get to know each other first before trying the whole marriage thing again. Ha ha.

Dream analysts out there? Analyze away ;)

Love is not like magnets

2008-12-04T18:59:00.002-05:00

Remember in elementary school when your third grade teacher, or perhaps for you it was kindergarten because in retrospect my school was a little behind, handed you a pair of magnets? Probably the magnet was curved, with one end sporting a large "S" and the other an "N." (I still don't understand why they are labeled as north and south and why they are called poles and why our Earth has poles or what magnetic fields actually do. But that is not important to this story.)

You were told you were going to do a science experiment and were instructed to begin playing with two magnets, to write down what happened. You soon discovered that if you held up the "S" end of the magnet to the "N" side of the magnet, they would be inexplicably pulled together, sometimes so quickly and tightly that your small fingers could not easily detach them. You found that if you put the "S" side toward the others' "S" side you could not, no matter how hard you pushed, get the two magnets to come together.

In the world of magnets there is no in between. There is either attraction or repulsion, and it is always mutual.

But we talk about love like it was like that experiment in grade school. We throw around words like "attraction" and "magnetic" and "draw" and "pull" to describe what is going on.

Yet, what I have found is that love, or at least looking for it, is not like magnets.

Mutual attraction is actually an elusive thing. A mystery. Be grateful when you find yourself pulled toward another with the same force they're being pulled toward you.

Usually you are standing out there, hoping to be noticed by the good-looking "S" walking by - but they are not drawn to you. Or there is some "N" staring at you over coffee but you can't muster even the vaguest of tender thoughts toward them. Or, when life is particularly cruel, there is just enough there to pull you toward someone and them toward you, but not enough to pull you together all the way. And then the force of a breath pushes you back apart.

Someday, I am told, I may change my mind and think that love is more like magnets than I do at present. Maybe so. But for now, isn't it funny to think that all these things - toy magnets, the invisible electric charges that somehow shield and affect our planet, and the workings of our heart - are all described in the same way? What is implied? Maybe nothing. Or maybe it's that we're secretly hoping that the most elemental forces of the universe are also at work arranging the matters of our hearts...

Quotes I like from a book called Gilead

2008-12-04T18:47:00.002-05:00

“There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal.”

“I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face…You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest in the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision.”

“Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing. I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.”

Difficult is Beautiful

2008-12-02T22:52:00.002-05:00

Why is the idea of redemption so beautiful to me? To us?

The idea of something being restored to what it once was, or to something even greater...

Friends that are reconciled, lovers that kiss and make-up, children that come running back into their parents' arms. Why do those images make you feel that way inside?

Because they aren't images of perfection, they're actually evidence of the opposite - that we hurt each other and run away. But, it's almost like, when you think about it, they're more perfect than perfect. They're beyond perfect because perfect feels like stasis, stillness, inactivity, perfect feels boring. Those pictures goes beyond that because they show movement, something that breaks things apart and puts them back together, something that runs the gamut and stretches the very limits of our hearts. It's gone through and come out the other side. It's difficult and because of that, it's beautiful.

Maybe that's a skewed perspective.

A good friend of mine, who is a much better writer than I, said of the weather in Southern California, "Things just live, forever, and I understand the tension of paradise, wanting to break from it. Eve was relieved when she got kicked out."

But it's not a totally new thought - think of Milton, of Paradise Lost, of the "happy fall." If we don't fall, then what? What would that have been like? C.S. Lewis wrote about it in his Perelandria series. But think about it, God may have walked and talked with Adam and Eve in the garden, but now he lives inside of us somehow, it's some sort of deeper communion than there ever has been. And there is only more to look forward to. Is that right? How is that possible?

In any case, I believe that God made us. Made us knowing that having us as children on this Earth was going to be more difficult than not having us. We were going to do terrible things to each other, terrible things to the Earth that he gave us, terrible things to him. But somehow, he felt it was worth it. That even though it was difficult, it would be more beautiful, more perfect, somehow, to make us than to not. Wrap your mind around it - God thought we were worth all of it.

"And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love."

Giving Thanks

2008-11-29T13:17:00.005-05:00

This year I have so much to be thankful for. I especially happy that I got to spend Thanksgiving Day with my darling Lydia and cook a delicious feast. Below find some photos of our culinary endeavors.

Foreign Exchange

2008-11-26T14:46:00.003-05:00

I'd just like to share a few of the forex bureau names I've come across today. Thanks, Ghana!

Holy Child Forex, Ltd.
Love Me Forex, Ltd.
Sweat Money Forex, Ltd.
Unisex Forex, Ltd.
All Day Forex, Ltd. (FOREX ALL DAY B****es!!)
Friends and Helpers Forex, Ltd.

I think if I were going to trade out my USD I would definitely go to Sweat Money. That sounds awesome. Which would you pick?

Rules Fail

2008-11-24T23:09:00.002-05:00

Have you ever visited the site "Fail Blog" (.org)? It has some really great examples of "fails" - from the SUV that drove into the Checkers by H St and Benning Rd (Drive-thru Fail) to squirrels in trash cans (Habitat Fail). If you ever read Cake Wrecks, the blog that's to the right of the text here, then you may know about my favorite post that was a "Fail Cake" where the word "fail" was spelled "fial." As was said, maximum irony has been achieved.

Over the summer, my friend and I were discussing dating relationships and a mysterious element we have labeled, since high school, as "mojo." We never thought mojo was something that could be acquired, we only knew when our friends had it - they could call boys from across the mall with only a look.

But my friend had been reading about the body language of courtship if you will, and had also perused The Rules, a book for women about how to snag a man, keep him, and eventually get him to marry you because he's realized it's the only way he can have you around all the time. Perhaps, we thought, if we take elements of the book and adopt certain mannerisms or body language, we could finally obtain the mojo that we had thought for so long was beyond our reach.

We joked about doing experiments in seedy establishments just to see if these "tactics" would work. But the very first body language signal, the 3-second eye lock, was too much for either of us to endure. Our experiments never really got off the ground.

But we still toy around with some of the chemicals.

For example, if someone we're interested in shows remote interest in us, our previous inclination would have been to show enthusiasm, make plans to spend time together, etc. We now rejoice when we are able to say "I'm sorry, I already have plans" and look for support and solidarity when we ignore an email or a text.

Although that tactic doesn't seem to be working like it should...

All that to say, we have talked about keeping journals of our experiences trying to live out The Rules, realizing that most of the stories would be us failing miserably. But, as my friend so wisely pointed out last night, The Rules wants you to play at relationships in a way that assumes you have all the time in the world...she and I tend to be more impulsive and, quite frankly, hedonistic at heart.

What other rules have I broken lately? I'm not sure. But I may have taken one of Stefanie's red flags out of the closet, blown the dust off, and set it neatly on top of my dresser in case I need it over the holidays.

I'm very excited about Thanksgiving! And the delicious dinner Lydia and I are making. Be prepared for food porn photos soon. I'm also excited about snow flurries tomorrow, and a short work week. These are just the things...

Also, how's this for a slogan: Make it Happen 09. What about Lookin Fine in 09? Or, Umm...maybe you shoudn't eat that...09. Please vote.

Migratory Habits of Quatercentury Birds

2008-11-21T16:09:00.003-05:00

This summer I read a collection of short stories that had won the O'Henry Prize. The last story in the book was told in the form of music professor's lecture. He uses all these metaphors to describe music and, in the process, goes off on several tangents.

One tangent I enjoyed was about the habits of migratory animals, animals that in nature are said to have two distinct homes which they occupy according to the season. He cautions that this is a different phenomena than that which afflicts the very rich - possessing a vacation home. No, a migratory animal has two homes that are both its home equally.

And that's how I felt this morning as I flew across farmland, the Rockies, desert, and finally, Saddleback Mountain and the LA basin. A general haze was occupying the space as far as the eye could see - due to smoke from countless wildfires and not only smog. I flew over streets and freeways I knew almost by heart, reservoirs, golf courses, the LA river in all it's majesty...ahem.

Washington DC is a home for me. I love so much about it, can visualize a map of it on command, can think of 10 places I'd like to eat there at the drop of a hat, can see the faces of the countless people who make DC home for me through their love and friendship. But Southern California is also my home, I feel instantly at ease here, from the minute I step off the plane. And there are also all these feelings bound up with being here...with being in the room I grew up in, with driving on the streets I drove on in the middle of the night for no other reason than because I could and I was in high school, with seeing the places where parts of my heart still live.

There are things I really appreciate about this arrangement...of having two places that feel like home to me...some things that I suppose could be considered disadvantages.

One quick anecdote and then I'm off to do some more work.

I was discouraged on first arriving home because my first interview for this work trip got canceled. I had some ideas for where I could find Salvadorans, but was nervous I wouldn't get the job done (I have to interview 8 - 10 Salvadorans about their intention/plan to invest in El Salvador through purchasing a home, small business, etc). Then my mom reminds me about our friend, Sonia, who owns the flower shop down the street from us. She and her husband are both from El Salvador but have worked in that shop since I was a little girl. When she saw me she couldn't believe how I'd grown up!

We walk down there together, my mom and I, and pop in to say hello and make what to most people would be a crazy request - can I interview you about buying a home or investing in a business in El Salvador? Do you know anyone who would be interested in that? Basically, can you help me out here?

But Sonia was wonderful. She was very busy because of the approaching Thanksgiving holiday but told me her husband would probably be able to speak with me this weekend about the small business she and 4 others want to invest in down there, along with a vacation home. Additionally, she told me about an organization she knew of in LA called ASOSAL that they belonged to. She told me I should visit there to do some more interviews.

When I got home I looked them up online, called, and within 10 minutes was told I could come tomorrow to interview people who were there waiting for legal or other services. Now I have two non-profits that I can visit tomorrow and Sunday and one interview scheduled for today. Things are looking up!

I love LA.

Dame lo mio

2008-11-17T22:04:00.006-05:00

So, Inauguration is coming. People are renting out floorspace on Craigslist at obscene nightly premiums. College students are chattering at coffee shops about the influx of the hundreds of thousands (at least) that are going to descend on the city for about 4 days.

And when I arrived home tonight I discovered that we, too, will be having a house guest during that time. Who will it be, you ask? None other than several members of the media crew from Univision. Yes, yes, let me repeat that: Univision.

Life continues to prove itself more and more interesting.

Les puedo acompanar a la ceremonia? These are just the things.

Wild and Wonderful

2008-11-16T17:51:00.005-05:00

There are so many things that I wish to say tonight. And I don't think I'll have the space or the time to fit it all in. Plus, I want to include pictures.

First of all, you know if you live in or around DC that once you drive into Virginia it's like you're in another country (I'd say "another state" but you ARE in another state and the effect of my hyperbole would be lost). This is exemplified by Great Falls Park. It's only a 20 minute drive from my house, but it feels like it's in the middle of some national park in the middle of the country. Laura, in fact, said it reminded her of Colorado.

Since Maureen was in town and some other friend's had the day off, we decided to go hiking there. None of us had ever been. Joe and Ryan "Broganed Out" at the last minute, but Robert, Laura, Maureen and I grabbed some food at Union Station and headed out. It was beautiful and cold; we took lots of goofy pictures more than actually hiked anywhere.

Second, I have a beard. Not a real beard, a costume beard. I wore it on Halloween when I went as the bearded lady. It got some strong reactions. Friday night, Mike and his roommates threw a 007 Lumberjacks joint theme-party in honor of hot men and beards. I thought if there would ever be a chance for me to get more use out of my beard, it would be a party where I could go dressed as a lumberjack.

About an hour into the party I decided to take the beard off. I had planned on this because it has this strange effect on men - mainly, they can't talk to me while I'm wearing it. They may think it's funny, they may think I've got cojones for wearing it, but deep down, it makes them very, very uncomfortable. Adam got especially freaked out when I pulled part of it below my chin to eat some potato chips. So, ladies, here's a tip: if you want to hook a straight man, avoid growing a beard.

Thirdly, Steve works at a private school in Maryland where he teaches students things about photography, film and (I'm not joking) origami. The school is focused on serving students with "language based learning disabilities" but what this translates to in practice can be interesting.

Two interesting questions one of his students has asked: "How do I sculpt a hermaphrodite?" (in reference to a human body sculpture project they were doing) and "What is the difference between sensual and erotic?" My favorite thing about this student is that she is also currently writing an epic poem. Yes, in the style of Milton or the Romantics. Only her poem is written in haiku. And it is about a princess who is rescued by some hero or other who is also...wait for it...her brother.

The only other thing I wanted to share is that today at the grocery store the leaves were piled up against stairs and walls like drifts of snow.

Let's Get Political

2008-11-13T22:15:00.008-05:00

No, that doesn't mean we're going to talk about politics. What it does mean is that I'm making a pop culture reference to that awesome 80s song: "Let's Get Physical."

Now, I don't know what you did on the night of November 4th. Maybe you watched CNN, maybe you ate 4 cupcakes, maybe you listened to that old Fall Out Boy song you really like. I did something I haven't done in four years - that's right, I went to a political event. A "rally" of sorts, if you will.

Four years ago I watched on the big screen as George W. Bush won the presidency, surrounded by a throng of ecstatic Republicans in the last Republican outpost on the West Coast - Orange County, California. I dressed up, put my hair up in a conservative French twist, waved around my "I am a fan of Ed Royce" fan, and had a really great time with Jessica.

And then something happened last year. I became a registered Democrat. Yes, yes I did. My grandfather has officially rolled over in his grave.

Now, some of you may be reading this in horror, but the truth is, nothing really changed. I simply acknowledged the fact that I disagreed with a lot of Republican policies. And when it comes to international issues, especially, I don't think either party does a particularly good job. I couldn't bring myself to back Dr. Dobson and pull the lever for Rudy Giuliani. Instead, I wanted to vote against a Hillary Clinton nomination. I know, I know, I'm a bundle of contradictions. I get so sick of people saying things that are blatantly untrue or impossible. But that's another story for another time.

What I'm here to talk about tonight is Election Night 2008 spent at the "D-Trip," the DCCC, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee soiree. I had the opportunity to attend along with Stefanie, who has been a Democrat since she was in the womb.

We each got a free drink with our admission ticket, so that was stop number one. We pushed like cattle against the cash bar, me sweltering in my stylish yellow H&M jacket and giant earrings from Queens. And then out to the general floor to watch coverage and to hear announcments of Democratic pick-ups in congressional districts across the nation. I have a poorly taken photo of Nancy Pelosi at the podium. Flash just doesn't work for those far away shots in a dark room.

As the results began to come in, they would turn down the bumping dance party music so that the crowd could cheer. And then someone started passing out American Flags. And thank heavens they did. Because shortly after a Black-Eyed Peas song, word came that Obama had won Ohio. The Dems around me lost it. People started chanting, "Yes, We Can!" waving their flags furiously and crying. And then it happened, Barack Obama won.

And DC turned into a party. I wasn't there to see it, but people moved out onto the streets, they were dancing and hugging eachother, wandering down to the White House until all hours of the morning. People were driving around as we walked home after his acceptance speech honking and cheering. Even last night two older gentlemen called me a Princess then asked who I voted for. "Obama," I said. And they patted me on the shoulder. You see, DC voted almost 94% for Obama.

But the thing is...I'm still skeptical. And nervous. I don't chant. People who get worked up in large crowds make me uneasy.

Word on BBC news tonight is that Germany has officially entered a recession and that Great Britain, the US and Japan are not far behind. People can't get health coverage or afford to live in their homes and drive their cars. Our schools are still struggling to utilize their funding effectively and make a difference in children's lives who have been at a disadvantage since the day they were born. There is war, starvation, death, disease and environmental degradation.
The world is sick in more ways than one.

And so, I'm hoping to be a part of the hope and the change that are sweeping our country...but maybe in a different way. Stay tuned to hear about what's going on in Washington, DC over the next few months.

But, I'd like to leave you with this, because I think it demonstrates so clearly how Stefanie and I differ on things like this.

Stefanie at the DCCC event: Me at the DCCC event:

Like a Song

2008-11-03T22:56:00.003-05:00

And so we stopped, yards from the Washington Monument, sat on a bench, and I cried into her shoulder. I cried because I have words stuck inside my chest like tiny pieces of shrapnel the doctor couldn't take out. They still make me bleed. You don't realize that a casual conversation over a plate of French toast will begin to press and prod at your weakest places.

She saw your face when you looked away and began fiddling with the pyramid of creamers you'd constructed. You don't mask things as well as you'd like to think.

Somewhere in her there is a crack. There are words that slipped out of our mothers' mouths and off our fathers' tongues hiding in there.

So let me hold it together for a minute and you can put your hand on my heart; maybe we can do surgery on each other. Maybe this time the stitches will hold. Or maybe we will have to try again tomorrow. But I think our only shot is to help fix each other.

So let me hold you together, and you can put your hand on my heart. Let's fix each other.

Remember that time...

2008-10-26T22:24:00.005-04:00

It's been a little while since I've had time to reflect and write about what's going on. I promised that this post would be funny, so I'm going to do my best. But it may also be a bit newsy - I can't help it.

So, Stefanie may never be able to get on a plane again. Why, you ask? Well, we may or may not have found ourselves at a Free Palestine rally tonight. Okay, so, it wasn't actually a "rally," it was a hip-hop concert at the Hard Rock Cafe. However, when you start laying down beats about 1948 and quoting Bob Marley it can get intense. And Stefanie is already ethnically ambiguous enough as it is without being placed on some sort of Federal watch list. Steve, also ethnically ambiguous and who suggested the outing in the first place, seemed unconcerned.

Getting to the show was kind of, well, it was involved. We were supposed to go to a movie about the group before-hand, but by the time it was established where the movie was playing and how much it would cost, it was sold out ("Steve, if we ever rob a bank, you are NOT the details man." - Stefanie Boltz).

So, using the Onion as our guide, we thought about seeing a free screening of this movie called The Wave where a high school teacher creates a totalitarian state in his classroom as an object lesson but things spiral out of hand. When we got to the gallery the security guard informed us that there was no screening and that the papers were often wrong. Great. Thanks. Helpful. So, then we decided to just wait it out for the hip-hop. There were tacos and a magazine scavenger hunt. We made the most of it. And the show was really awesome. Very enjoyable, in my opinion. A reminder of how hip-hop music is really seen world wide as the music of struggle, a way to communicate the problems of youth and oppression. Maybe it's not gonna sell like fiddy, but it's important work and it sounded great.

But the way this evening turned out is not unlike how the rest of the week has been in some ways. Friday night I was supposed to go to a pumpkin patch and corn maze (are you sure you don't mean corn maize?) with some people from the Bible study I've been going to. But one thing lead to another and I ended up driving to Andrew's Airforce Base with my friend's girlfriend, grabbing some Happy Meals, picking up our other friend back in DC and then walking around the National Mall at night and watching the last half or third of the movie Idiocracy (great movie, by the way) before getting lost on our way to Anacostia to watch Donnie Darko and eat pizza. Not what was expected, but definitely fun.

A highlight of the night for me was having to go the bathroom so desperately that I asked a tour bus driver parked along the side of the street to use their little one in the back of the bus. I scared him half to death knocking, but he let me. Never hurts to ask - the worst anyone can say is no.

The week was also full of spending time with old and new friends. Coffee and paninis with Liz, Lydia's birthday party (sidebar: she cooked bacon-wrapped dates, stuffed with manchego cheese. I was in heaven. It was like it was MY birthday), a trip to the Red and the Black, Robert's birthday lunch today. Needless to say, I may need a social vaction. I'm not joking. I'm tired, and I need to go grocery shopping in a bad way. And next weekend is not looking good; between Halloween and the Hipster Party, it's going to be another full few days. But that's okay, it keeps it interesting. I just wish I'd taken more pictures. It's good to have resolutions.

And as I write this I'm waiting in AGONY for my clothes to finish washing (the express cycle has taken over an hour now) so that I can go to bed.

I wonder what wacky adventures tomorrow will bring, if any at all...I'll be sure to let you know.

Omens

2008-10-13T22:11:00.002-04:00

I wouldn't call myself a superstitious person. If I read my horoscope it's for pure entertainment value (although when they call for new romances or fantastic trips, I really hope they come true!). But at the same time I have a very strong intuition that very rarely leads me astray.

Usually this is the case when it comes to interpersonal or emotional matters. Often I "know" something before I should know it. I've had strange experiences where I've felt like someone was in danger, only to find out they were almost hit by a car earlier in the day, had dreams that seemed to indicate I was about to get broken up with, only to have them come true (listen to your subconscious I say!), and I have, in the past, been filled with an overwhelming sense of dread that something is over, that someone has changed their mind, that someone has a "secret girlfriend" (shoutout to my new friends, separate blog to follow) or that all is not right in the world. One good thing going with my gut did was keep us from moving into a house on Columbia Heights on a street known for it's gang murders (we found out later). This decision moved us to Capitol Hill, blocks from Stef and the girls, and a mile from the church that I call home.

And also, for like a week, I kept seeing Mourning Doves all over the place. Roosting in our door way, in the tree outside my window, as I walked to Stefanie's house. And anyone that's ever read a Latin American novel KNOWS that birds are never a good sign. This corresponded with my feeling of dread. And, in a way, the birds were right. What I was so anxious about was something I would have to mourn the loss of not too long after.

Anyway, that's not the point. The point is I don't like receiving uber negative work emails on a holiday when there's nothing I can do to fix it. When you take a girl like me who is hypersensitive, feels anxious sometimes, wants to please, etc and send her an "ominous and disapproving" email, it can be devastating. To sleep patterns and other things. It's like telling your kid "You see this stick? Tomorrow, I'm going to hit you really hard with it. You've really disappointed me." All night all you can think about is that awful stick you just saw, wonder what you did wrong, and dread the morning because you know that when you wake up you'll feel terrible physical and emotional pain. This is what I liken an email like that to.

And what a contrast from this morning. I can't remember what I dreamt but I woke up feeling so happy, so content and so expectant. I knew deep down that today was going to be good...and it was. This whole weekend was wonderful! Friday and Saturday we had so much fun celebrating Lydia in Alexandria, eating and drinking and spending time together. Saturday afternoon I got my Halloween costume and a new haircut (it's pretty fab) and then went out with Phil and Taishya for his birthday...and then Sunday I got to go to church and then go canoeing and then see a concert and hang out with some great people who make me laugh really hard. This morning Stef and I took an 8 mile walk and then worked at Murky and made new friends and saw ones we already had. The world felt good.

And just five minutes ago, a friend of mine turned my whole attitude around. She and I used to work together at Global Classrooms: Washington, DC and she's recently taken over as the new Program Director; she is awesome. One of her "trademarks" is to randomly, perhaps even a few times a day tell you, "You're doing a great job." Even if you're in the middle of eating a pizza. She's got a gift for encouragement. So when I told her I was feeling bad, she gave me a pep talk that brought tears to my eyes. Everyone should have cheerleading moments like that.

Ah, I wish we took more time to encourage eachother. We spend so much time tearing things down, inlcuding ourselves...

This post has totally lost its focus and or momentum. But I don't really care. I just wanted to get these feelings out. Life is about feasting and fasting someone said this weekend. Making sacrifices, loving deeply, eating good food, giving to the poor, crying like you're never going to get over it, laughing so hard you lose your voice, hugging someone like it might be the last time you'll ever see them, flying across the country to see the people you love, yelling and swearing sometimes because there's no other way to express how angry and disappointed you are, spinning around in the sunlight, staring at squirrels...okay, I'm cutting this off.

The intensity of life, the beauty of being able to really feel things, it takes my breath away sometimes. Even when I feel consumed with doubt, I know that it's worth it, I know that there is Someone out there who made me and this place and that He's got the whole world in His hands. And the faith, the hope, the love that we get to have as a window into the eternal makes so much of the hellishness seem worth it.

I once wrote a song that said, "How is it a better life to lose because you loved?" referring to the old maxim "Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." But, at this moment, I would rather have felt the high and the low than never to have really lived at all.

And so ends the overly emotional and disjointed post.

A funnier one will be coming next, I promise.

Losing its Leaves

2008-10-08T21:50:00.006-04:00

Well, I don't know if you've heard, but it's that time of year again. When the days become shorter, the nights colder, your mom starts making stews and pies, the squirrels hustle and hoard and the leaves change to brilliant shades of red, gold, persimmon and orange, and then fall to the ground dead. Ah yes, fall is here.

I love fall. I have declared it my favorite season numerous times. Perhaps too many to count. And so here I sit, new, fluffy pajama bottoms donned (the left leg has a "Dia de los muertos" skull on it, okay? I don't mess around), Oktoberfest beer nearly finished beside me, and a delicious 8 servings of some barley and asparagus concoction chilling in the fridge. Next week I think I'm going to make Lydia's famous lentil soup...I thought it was a stew before, funny story, because she didn't have quite enough broth so she tried adding water instead, but it wasn't quite enough, and so it came out thicker than normal. But I loved it. Especially because we ate it with some sort of delicious muffin concoction. Mmmm...

Here are some fall activities I've participated in this past week that you yourselves have, or should have, taken part in.

1. The never-ending Halloween costume discussion (additional email discussion recommended, but not required).

So, what are you going to be this year for Halloween? A french maid? Indiana Jones? Sarah Palin? Or are you going the route of the group costume?

Last Friday night at the Columbia Heights Target Lydia and I got into a wild Halloween costume discussion. Wild, of course, because it is something we are both extremely passionate about. It all started when I contemplated going as Sarah Palin for Halloween. Spooky, I know. But I figured, hey, I'm a brunette, I can dig up a conservative red suite and stick an American flag pin on it, I can puff up my hair and wear glasses, and dog on it, I can sure do that "Alaskan" accent, folks. While watching the potential veeps debate, my friends Stefanie, Liz, Charise, Des and I had another, revolutionary thought. Could you make that a group costume? Could you be the Palin Family? If I were Sarah, Stefanie immediately called dibs on Bristol (as she enjoys pretending to be knocked-up [it's ironic because of where she works...long story]), we thought Des would make a cute Piper carrying around a baby doll whose head she periodically licked; Liz had said she already wanted to be "Lipstick on a pig" or something like that, and I tried to convince Charise to be a bloodied wolf.

The next morning Joel VerBurg, my oldest friend as we knew eachother from the womb, shattered my costume aspirations with his idea to throw a "Where's Waldo?" Halloween party. It was kind of like a group costume (which, originally was what I thought he meant), but perhaps better. You could come as Waldo, or some variation of red and white stripe. It was genius.

Which leads us to Friday night in front of the shoe section in Target.

"I mean, that would be a good costume. But if you were by yourself, no one would get it."
"That's true, it only works as a group costume. So, what were you thinking of going as?"
"Alice in Wonderland. I have a vintage waitress type dress and everything I'd need."
"Oh, would you wear a blonde wig?"
"Yeah, I think so..."

Cut to where we decide that all our lady friends should dress as twisted versions of fairy tale heroines.

"Oh my god! And Snow White could be a vampire. Becuase, really, what's with the apple biting, anyway?"
"Yeah, and Sleeping Beauty, she can be a Zombie!"
"Right, that's perfect!"
"And someone could be a man-eater...Little Red Riding Hood?"
"Yes!"

Insert Mike: "You two have worked yourselves into a tizzy. I could hear you getting louder from mensware all the way to shoes"

"But what about Alice?"
"She could be a druggie?"
"Like, all strung out? With track marks and that rubber tube thing...I don't know, you guys would have to help me..."
"I don't know...you could not take your contacts out for like 3 days or something?" (My helpful suggestion)

Lydia decides to buy a stool on which to display her vintage train case.

Me, pondering the stool in line: "You know what an awesome costume would be? A Lion Tamer and a lion."
"Ooh, yeah, good couple costume. Who do you see as the Lion Tamer?"
"The guy I guess"
"No, I see the girl! Hot pants and a top hat?! Come on!"
"You're, right, that is better...Who do we know that's a couple? Only Mandy and Troy, right?"
"OUCH."
"Ughh...people who don't already HAVE a costume picked out."

Less than a week later I think we are pushing to have our entire group go as a Three Ring Circus. Mike will be the Ringmaster. And everyone else just has to think of something cirucsy and show up. I like it. Plus, Mike can talk about how he's bringing a "three ring circus" to any party we get invited to.

2. Take a long walk to enjoy the change in season.

Don't be fooled; 11 miles is a long way to walk. That's about how far it is from my house near Lincoln Park to Alexandria, VA. Four miles over the Potomac and 7 miles to historic downtown Alexandria.

It was gorgeous, don't get me wrong, but by the time we got there, we were all out of sorts. Charise pretty much sprained her ankle along the way, we got all punchy watching Stefanie do her velociraptor run, and I managed to spill bright red curried chicken on my shirt, down my pant leg, onto my shoe and onto the carpet of the over-priced Indian food establishment where we chose to eat. Also, this was the second time in a week that we rolled in gym clothes to a restaurant where the entrees were around $20. We're classy like that. I've decided, I just don't care. If I'm hungry after I exercise and I want some braised beef with Belgian fries, I am gonna go have me some of that, no matter what I'm wearing. May explain why service was slow.

At any rate, we finally get on the metro and we're all giggles the whole way. But what really set us off was this dour looking couple (or maybe they just worked together) wearing dark brown tweed jackets and green "Amtrack" pins. The older man walked onto the train and scowled at us the entire time he found his seat and well after he sat down. The woman, too, did not withold her share of scornful glances.

"Why are they silently judging us?" Stefanie mouthed to me, which is always a struggle since I can't read lips.
"I dunno," I say like a smart aleck, "Maybe it's because they're wearing Amtrack pins."
"They are?"
"Let me check," I say as I swivel my head around in this bizarre, slow and over-exaggerated glance toward them. To which we burst into giggles.
"People in green Amtrack pin houses shouldn't throw stones!!" I say triumphantly. More giggles. If you asked yourself, "What?" or something similar at that point, don't worry, you're right, it makes absolutely no sense.

And then of course we had to relive the moment last winter where I showed Lydia a paper I was working on for my remittances class. "It's just, this guy in our class is getting his PhD in Econ. He developed some sort of 'econometric' model showing the effect of remittances on currency valuation. He had a regression! Mine is just so simple in comparison."
"Oh come on," Lydia said, "I'm sure it can't be so bad. Show me."

And so I pivot my computer screen toward her to reveal a pie chart, divided into three sections, each a primary color. We laughed for neary 10 minutes I'd say. We laughed again on the train so hard that I cried and people stared. To make matters worse, we were at a transfer station.

3. Get your first cold of the season.

So then Monday came and I woke up sick. Not sick like puking, but sick like my head hurt, I had a stuffy nose, sore throat and felt weak and tired all over. So, I stayed home from work, which is hard to do when you work from home. I ended up working for 4 hours and sleeping, oh, pretty much the rest of the day.

That's right. I went to bed at 10:30pm, got up at 8:00am, felt sick, went back to sleep until almost 11am, got up and worked until about 1:00pm, slept again until 3:00pm, woke up and worked for a couple more hours. Later that night I went over to Stefanie's to watch Gossip Girl and didn't say anything. Didn't even look through a magazine. It was a sad day. I then fell asleep at 10:30pm that night.

So, I have one last thing to say. These are just the things...

Spread it like wildfire.

Living the Dream

2008-09-29T21:51:00.003-04:00

Tomorrow, I take a step forward - a step into the unknown. I cross into the uncharted territory of working from home three days a week. Long have I heard tales of those mighty souls who have gone before, working for hours in their pajamas, un-showered, reveling in their unpresentability. In my head and my heart I have typed with them, conference called with them, spent an entire day at a Starbucks with them, but tomorrow, it will no longer be a mental and emotional exercise. No, my friends. Tomorrow...I live the dream.

I know not what grand adventures await me as I search for wi-fi and listen to Pandora through my Virgin America headset. However, I know one thing to which I will hold firmly: tis sweeter to have worked at home and returned to the office, then to never have worked from home at all.

Please don't let the cartoon trick you into thinking I'm heartless.

Playing Second String

2008-09-26T19:07:00.002-04:00

You ever have that feeling that next year you're gonna get off the bench? You've been training hard, putting in extra hours, memorizing plays, putting yourself out there, taking some hard hits, asking veterans for advice.

And yet, after Hell Week is over the list goes up and you still haven't made it. You're still good enough to play if #45 and #88 have injuries, are out of town, or are otherwise unavailable, you're pretty good once you're in the game, but you're not Varsity. You're not going to get your own cheerleader, a sports drink and perhaps a homemade cake on Fridays, no pep rallies, no songs from the band, and very few spectators.

Ah, life on the bench. It's not always as bad as it sounds.

Maybe next year.

Spinning Wildy on its Atlas District

2008-09-24T21:37:00.006-04:00

"What is the place called again?"
"Granville Moore's. You'll love it. It's your kind of place."

I wasn't sure what she meant as we padded down, or rather west, on H St headed toward the row of bars and music establishments that have become known in DC as the "up and coming" (i.e. in the process of urban renewel [i.e. gentrification]) Atlas District.

The restaurant was so unobtrusive I almost missed it as we approached. There was no large sign, just a plain looking door that lead into this amazing pub-like interior with a hostess knitting what looked like a beanie at the bar, worn-looking walls and furniture, and candles on every table.

We opted to sit outside, hoping that the citronella candle would keep the mosquitoes at bay, as it was such a beautiful night to be there. It felt like you were sitting in someone's well decorated backyard, with wrought iron gates meaningfully tacked to the fences, garden benches arranged around each table, and some innocuous looking potted plants dangling from above and threatening to join our conversation.

Almost immediately we settled on the moules bieres (mussels in a beer sauce with sausage, fennel, cheese and other deliciousness) and the frites avec horseradish and truffle aioli dipping sauces. Picking a beer would be more difficult. Because the food part of the menu only took up the first page, and the beer/wine menu took up the rest.

So, we settled on our first 750ml bottle, appropriately called Lucifer. Not because we're devilish, by any stretch of the imagination, but because the beer was light and bubbly, almost deceptive on the outside. It looked nothing like it tasted; it had the same effervescence as champagne and the mild sweetness of honeywine, without being overpowering.

By our second 750ml bottle of MacChuffe (made by my dear Belgian friends who make La Chuffe, my favorite beer because it was one of the first beers I ever drank; and it was with mussels and fries, in France, no less) we had started waxing philosophical. Or at least I had.

In the past few days I've been realizing a lot about myself. Two of the most significant revelations were that 1) I sometimes hide how much I know and 2) my heart is not as open as I'd like. The first is probably a result of the teasing I endured throughout my academic career for being several things I will not name here; or the breakdown-induced rantings of a best friend who felt slighted by my existence. But it's no matter.

Now, I'm so afraid to seem too smart or too capable, that I phrase things in such a way that I can disguise it. I try to stay funny so that no one will see that I really do think a lot about the world that we're living in.

The open heart part is a lot more difficult. Talk to me about it on Saturday.

And so my friend also does her share of talking. She talks about these dreams she has where she wakes up crying (so I guess you could call them nightmares). We've had the same one: our father dies and in the dream we're sobbing, and so we wake up with tears fresh on our cheeks and pillows. We wonder how many others have had this same experience.

Now, as much as I hate to admit it, I'm a romantic at heart. I want the world to be full of music, butterflies, sunshine...and squirrels. And so when I see someone falling in love, I want to call them out on it. Because what other feeling can match falling in love - loving someone and having them love you back. You know that look in someone's eye when they adore the person they're talking to, or the sensation of warmth you get from head to toe? I think it's beautiful. And there's no point pretending it's not there when we all know that it is.

She had one of these dreams about a certain young man. To which my response was, "You love him." I can't tell you whether or not she agreed, or anything else that was said - it would ruin my confidentiality agreements.

So as we left the restaurant and investigated a couple other establishments down the way - Showbar and the Red and the Black, particular - I felt content. What a wonderful way to spend a night; with mussels, fries, plenty of beer and conversation, and an affirmation that there's more to life than our jobs or our worries. There's so much more. There's hip-hop. Just kidding.

At the end of my life I don't want to look back and only see what jobs I had or what essays I wrote or how important I thought I was - I want to see who and how much I loved. "It's not a matter of striving toward where you think you're going. Just worry about who you are and the rest will take care of itself." Copywright Mary Evans 2008.

Blisters

2008-09-22T21:44:00.002-04:00

So, I was doing a little yoga tonight (Taishya challenged us to practice the splits or the "leap of faith" every day this week, to which I scoffed during class, but then thought was probably a good idea) when I remembered the dime-sized blister on my second to pinky toe. My ring toe, if you will.

I had a band-aid on it all day to give it some extra cushion. Who knew that walking 10 miles might give you a blister?

But then, I got all philosophical thinking about blisters.

They're really amazing. They're a temporary cushion of interstitial fluid (glorified body-water, I say) that covers over new skin that isn't ready to be out in the world yet. They're a natural pillow! And yet all the time I want to do everything to get rid of them. Because the handsy part of me can't stand that there is something "unusual" on my body, that it hurts a little, that it feels really cool to poke at. And so usually I break the topskin and let the water out, which causes a sensation of firey rawness and usually leads to a small scab or bigger blister.

I don't like to just let myself heal. I want to explore what irritates me, what hurts me, what could possibly have the potential in the future to hurt me - I am an emotional masochist. Oh yeah, we're now talking pseudo-metaphorically about the blister.

I think that for my heart, distractions are kind of like blisters. They're covering up a soft and tender place that has done a little bit of walking lately. They're giving my mind and fingers something else to think about while the skin underneath gets ready to come back out into the world, or while it gets a little bit tougher, and a little bit better prepared for the road ahead.

So, maybe, instead of pressing on them, prodding at them, examining them, agonizing about how long they'll last, I should just let them be. When it's time, it's time and I won't need them anymore. I guess I should just enjoy the healing process, eh?

p.s. I also had a yoga-induced realization about why I don't like to talk about things of consequence with most people. It bothers me when people take themselves too seriously. Now, obviously, I have to take myself a LITTLE seriously; after all, I did write like a M.A. thesis and in my line of work I am making statements about things that matter. Supposedly. Oh, and, also, I write this blog imagining that it's being read.

But I guess I just feel like there is so much to know, and so much to experience, and so much joy to be had...and, really, who am I, anyway? You have to laugh when you can, because there will be times when you can't. You have to make fun of yourself sometimes to prepare for when others do the same...jk jk (Do you smell smoke? Cuz somebody just got BURNED).

I don't know how to explain it. I like talking about art, religion, politics, nature, beauty, love, all those things. But not in this certain way that I find extremely difficult to express verbally. Alas, I'll try again later.

Armed and Dangerous

2008-09-21T00:40:00.004-04:00

Tonight was really very fun. It was not only our Rosh Hashanah dinner at Lydia's pad, where we gorged ourselves on the following: baked brie with berries, onion dip, home-made challah bread, a "harvest salad" [of mine own making with mixed greens, endive, bell pepper, beets, goat cheese, toasted pine nuts and home-made lemon champagne vinegarette], chicken, skin stuffed with goat cheese and basil, noodle kugel, and an apple crisp for dessert. But it was also a birthday/housewarming for a friend of mine named Elisabeth who I know from church. We petted her cat, talked out by the grill and I spread "Give into Glebe" like wildfire...it was fetch...rufalicious if you will.

And then...

A group of 5 guys leaving her party were held up at gunpoint as they were approaching their vehicle about 2 blocks down the street from her house . Two men came out of the shadows, one drew a gun from his jacket and said, "You see this? Take out your wallets and put them on the ground," not raising his voice, not pointing the gun at anyone. So they took them out, dropped them, the guys picked them up, and they took off.

Less than one minute later we were herded into the house, less than 5 minutes later three police cars showed up; two went off to try and find the perpetrators and one stayed behind to take statements. Rides home were arranged and all decided to make a quick exit while the police presence was still there.

I don't usually acknowledge how much I think about the possibility of being the victim of a violent crime, but after things like tonight happen, it's good to come clean. Walking the two blocks between Lydia's house and mine this evening at 9:30pm, I wasn't carrying a purse [I avoid taking one if I'm out at night always], but I had a brown bag with handles and a large ceramic bowl inside. I had a moment where I envisioned myself hurling the bag full force into someone's head, wondering if it would be enough to knock someone out. Because that's what I think about sometimes. Or when I have my bike lock, I carry it on the U-side so that if push came to shove I could shank someone in the head with it.

Maybe it's not normal to think that way, but you can never be too aware, and it never hurts to have a plan, in my opinion. Because for women, we have more to fear than a robbery. Most women I know are afraid of, or at least have thought about, the possibility of being raped. And most of us would rather fight and risk losing our lives than endure that experience. And so we think of ways to protect ourselves.

Which is a huge reason I endorse biking. I biked tonight to Union Station from the house, took the red line 3 stops, got off, and biked to Elisabeth's. I didn't want to ride through some of the dodgier bits of Northeast, but I also didn't want to walk even a block alone in a neighborhood I didn't know. Biking was a great way to avoid that.

One other thing. At around 11:30, maybe 5 or 10 minutes before the group of guys wanted to leave, my friend Sarah said that she was getting ready to head out, and was going to walk to the metro herself. Me, being somewhat of a jackass, said, "No, tough it out with me until 12:00. Bad decisions 08!!" and she agreed. And maybe nothing would have happened. But she would have been walking in the same direction, alone, toward the metro.

What is the lesson to take away? Sometimes it pays to be a jackass.

Is that too light-hearted a way to end this post?

Okay, what about this: one of the guys who was robbed asked, "Hey, can I just grab my ID real quick?" The answer was no.

Or this: one of the party guests, after the police arrived, mentioned the idiocy of congress for relaxing gun control laws in the district (and I suppose she meant the Supreme Court, too).

Only in DC.

Workaholics Anonymous

2008-09-17T21:54:00.005-04:00

A long time ago I swore that I would never be a workaholic. I would put in my 8 hours and go home. Not because I didn't think that what I was doing was important, but because if you work much more than that, out of the 168 hours you have in a week to live, you have to figure that approximately 60 hours is devoted to sleeping, leaving you only 108 waking hours. After working 40 hours a week (plus an additional hour or two for commuting, which really makes it 45 or 50), you're left with 58 hours. Okay, you think, 58 hours, that sounds like so much! But think of it - about 1 hour every day is devoted solely to grooming! That's only 51 hours left. And I didn't even mention the "have tos" - the laundry, the grocery shopping, the errands, the tooth brushing. All those minutes add up. And before you know it, you are in an office, staring at a monitor more than you're living the rest of life.

It's less time to look at the sky and marvel at the clouds and the hands that made them, less time to sing, to dance, to smile, to say a kind word to someone you pass on the street, to make something creative with your hands, less time to giggle with a friend or hold someone's hand, or pine...

Now, I don't want you to think I'm a) over-reacting or b) complaining, as I've worked plenty of overtime hours in my day, and pushing to get this project done is a privilege as I think it's important work that should be shared.

However, I don't want to make a habit out of it.

Hello, my name is Mary, and I'm not a workaholic...just yet.

Sex, Drugs, and Rock Band

2008-09-16T23:38:00.010-04:00

Even though I am utterly exhausted tonight, I thought it might be worth jotting down some of the highlights from this whirlwind weekend that's left me pretty happy with life.

So, let's talk about sex first.

On Saturday, I had to do some interviews in the Ethiopian community in DC as there was a "miscommunication" between the marketing firm hired to do 100 interviews with 11 different ethnic groups and the organization I'm working for. So, in a last minute scramble, we gathered a ragtag army from across the nation of friends and acquaintances (I may have called or emailed you) to do as many surveys as possible over the weekend.

For about 4 hours I paced two blocks on 9th St, NW, near Florida Ave, stopping every 3rd person and asking, "Excuse me...are you Ethiopian" "Yes..." "Would you like to take a survey?" (big smile). Surprisingly, out of the 17 I did over 8hrs and 3 days, I only got about 4 or 5 rejections. That's not too bad! So, not only did I learn a little bit more about Ethiopian culture and food, and how to say "Thank you" and "God bless you" in Amharic (which will come in very handy when I actually make it to Ethiopia in March [fingers crossed, genuflecting]) but I had a couple marriage proposals, two job offers, and was furnished with free bottles of water and cookies from a local bakery. What can I say? Ah mah say gah na loh (that's thank you in Ethiopian).

But perhaps a highlight for me came Sunday afternoon. I was conducting an interview with a 40-something man, and we had just started discussing some of the Ethiopian-made products he buys on a regular basis, when he suddenly got very excited discussing Ethiopian peppers and spicy foods.

He lowers his voice to a tight whisper, "Have you ever been with an Ethiopian man?"
"No..." I say, wondering where in the world this could be going, reaching for the razor I keep in my back pocket in case I need to cut a b****. (Just kidding)
"Well," he continues, "When an Ethiopian man...makes love...to a woman...it has a different sensation...because of the spicy food that we eat. This woman in England - she had a lot of experience - she wrote a book about it. You should read it."
"Oh, is that so? So how many times a week do you buy these peppers?"

How funny is that? So, apparently, eat lots of spicy foods and you will be a better lover. The Ethiopians are apparently VERY interested in love-making as another young man told me that that was what he did for a living. I think he was taken aback when I laughed at him and said he must be very poor. But we got along eventually and he helped translate for me as I surveyed an older Ethiopian woman.

Onto the drugs. Well, okay, I'll be honest - I didn't do any drugs this weekend. However, if you can be high on life, then call me an addict!

It was fun to play bass at church again. The three services and 5 hours really fly by. No, really, they do. It's a lot of fun, and I love the people I get to play with. Later that night we had Catacombs, a night of worship, lead by a guest band we're assuming is from San Diego, judging by the accent, designer jeans and rainbow flip flops that were taken off before the start of the service. No judgment.

So, as Stef and I are sitting there being are fabulous selves: "You, me, this hand-basket...straight to hell," I notice this young gentleman sitting a seat away from us, looking around, and trying to appear uninterested in our antics. He was not succeeding. After introducing myself, we found out that he was British, from Manchester, no less, and a youth pastor out in DC for a conference. He happened to find the church because they do their church in a movie theater and wanted to see one in the U.S. that did the same. We decided to befriend him and invited him to join us to hang out later that night for point three:

Rock Band. Two.

A few of us gathered post-worship to try out the latest version of the game that real and wannabe musicians all over the country? world? have become enthralled with. I finally feel that I may have the bass prowess to move up my difficulty level to medium. Among the highlights for me were watching Jeremy sing Paramore: "That's what you get when you let your heart win. Oh woah, a oh oooh" (Paramore: great band or greatest band?), playing a mean lick back to back with Steve, and dancing like fools with several people there.

Shortly after Stef left to walk home, the Englishman and I started discussing our plans for the coming Monday. I confessed that work was going to be on the agenda, and asked him if he was doing anything touristy. He said he wasn't sure, something, something, but that he wanted to go to a baseball game that night. Only problem was, he needed someone to explain the game to him, so would I like to go with him. Doth mine ears deceive me? Oh, dont' worry, it gets better.

So, I say, "Sure, that'd be fun" and as soon as the words are out of my mouth he adds, "And could we invite that Steve fellow as well." So, I inform Steve that he and I have just been invited to a baseball game, and they exchange phone numbers and we discuss inviting others as well. Could it be a man-crush I think to myself?

The night of the game rolls around, and the three of us meet in Chinatown to metro down to the new stadium, which I hadn't seen. Stef was meeting us later after she got done working on a group assignment out in NoVa. The Englishman is utterly captivated with Steve. And, I thought I might be imagining it, so I asked Stef to check out the situation as well, and she concurred. Most of the night they walked 10 steps ahead, engaged in conversation, and there was even a moment when Steve went to get a drink and the Englishman promptly exclaimed, "Oh, wait, I'll just go with you!" leaving me alone in the nosebleeds.

Outside of "Scrubs" I'd never been in a situation where I could sing, "It's guy love between two guys..." Now, I can't say if the man-crush was mutual. But it was interesting to watch unfold, nonetheless.

And now here I sit, ready to sleep, tired from days out of the routine. My laundry is piled, I just made it to the grocery store, and I haven't gotten 8 hours since Thursday. But, sometimes, it's good to get out of the ordinary and see what delightful morsels life has to offer. In this case, it was all just a little sex, drugs, and Rock Band.