Isis Rising

Tasty Treats

2012-01-23T20:48:00.000-06:00

When I was a girl, my mother's cooking was legendary--as in, she told stories of how bad a cook she was. She relished telling people about the time she tried to boil eggs in a glass Corningware pot; every holiday season she told friends or relatives about the time she burned Christmas cookies, set off our fire alarm and put oven mitts on her face (to protect her eyes from smoke from the oven) and wound up with burns on her eyebrows. She was a self-proclaimed bad cook, and this part really confused me. I didn't know why she seemed to like telling people she was bad at something. Improvement, success, excellence: all these things were a big deal to my mom. I couldn't understand why she seemed to enjoy telling people that she was a bad cook.

The thing those friends and relatives never heard were the times when my mother stood in our kitchen and bemoaned her "weak" culinary skills. "I'm a terrible cook," she would say, standing in front of the stove, stirring, opening something frozen and popping it in the microwave, putting broken muffins on a plate in the center of our kitchen table. I thought my mom was a great cook. She made lasagna with shredded mozzarella cheese, ground beef and Paul Newman's spaghetti sauce (instead of ricotta cheese, fresh basil and bechamel sauce) and it tasted great. She made stuffed peppers with Manwich sauce (remember Manwich? that canned sloppy joe sauce from the 80s? I don't actually know if it was from the 80's but it seemed like the kind of thing that came out of the Reagan-administration-NASA-MTV era) and white rice--I didn't really like the peppers because green peppers were too bitter for me. But I liked the Manwich rice inside the peppers. There were foods she cooked that I didn't like, mostly for my dad, but most of the time I ate whatever she put in front of me and I was happy with it. She often pulled clean plates out from in front of me. All of the feedback she got from me said I loved her food; why she thought she was so terrible was beyond me.
Cooking has been different for me. I love to cook; it's one of the first things I learned to do that gave me a real sense of self-assuredness. My dad and I did a chemistry project about cooking, and little by little I learned how to make Kraft dinner, how to make barbecue chicken, until I was paging through cookbooks and exploring recipes with bewitching pictures. For a time, I even wanted to be a chef. When I put food down in front of my parents they made yummy noises and said they were grateful. Cooking was something I learned to do young, and I did a lot of it growing up to take care of my parents (and myself), and it became a way for me to express affection for others. It's probably also something I do to make sure I'm getting what I need: let me cook or bake my way into your heart. But whether it's a coping mechanism, a way of trying to buy love, an expression of creativity, or all of the above, I'm really comfortable cooking.

Which makes the fact that twice inside two weeks I've set off the fire alarm in my apartment kind of humiliating. Typically, this hasn't really been a big deal. In the normal, shotgun Chicago apartment with the 9-v battery-fire alarm, it beeps for a while and you open a few windows, fan your back door for 30 seconds and everything's fine. In the digs I'm in now, the place me and mine moved to not long ago, well, you're not supposed to disconnect the alarm. The whole building is wired to a big, fancy auto-report fire alarm. The hallway has fire doors that close automatically, and a signal goes off at a firehouse that sends the CFD hook and ladder screaming down the avenue. The first time I was making brunch. Bacon in a skillet, came out beautifully, but also woke my husband--whom I wanted to sleep in--with this horrible shrieking sound. Five minutes later we had three Chicago firefighters in our kitchen, one standing on a stepladder, disconnecting the alarm just like you'd do in a Chicago shotgun apartment. The Lieutenant pushed a couple of buttons and then hooked it back up. By then the apartment was freezing--we'd opened the windows and had every fan in the place running--and we were standing around him ineffectually, watching. I listened as he radioed down to the truck "Yeah, lady on three burned her bacon, I'm just gonna disconnect the alarm, get some air into it. Standby." (For the record, not burned. Cooked just fine, thank you very much. Still, filled the apartment with enough smoke to bring the engine company through my front door.)

Maybe two weeks later he was making dinner and it went off again. This time the doorman was on duty, and he disconnected the smoke alarm for us after it started shrieking, but not before the fire doors shut. Again, we filled the apartment with frigid winter air and heard a fire engine going lights and sirens toward our building. Plus, the woman across the hall came out of her apartment with a crooked look on my face as I went tearing out of my own, looking for the doorman. "Sorry," I whispered to her, wanting her to go back into her own smoky apartment (cigarettes, not food) and leave me alone.

So I've set off my fair share of alarms, but it's only a hassle for me; but here, now, it can become a hassle for the entire building. It rouses people above, below and around me. Everyone knows; and the reputation, well-deserved, for being an excellent cook, suddenly begins to look a little less sure. I think about this, about how mortified I was when the fire alarm went off and brought the fire department here, and then I wonder what difference does it make what other people think? I know I'm a great cook, even if the CFD or my neighbors may think otherwise. Then I remember how much joy my mother seemed to get out of telling others how bad a cook she was, but how really she felt insecure about her skills. What other people thought of my mother was really important, so she made the fact that she felt she couldn't cook work for her, rather than just say she was a rotten cook. Maybe it's because she operated in an antiquated idea of what a family, our family, should be, and she felt like she was shirking her responsibility by not being some apron-wearing, turkey-basting, domestic goddess.

So I suppose all the screaming alarms and the brave firefighters crashing around our building just present me with another opportunity to release the idea of caring what others think of me. Let Lieutenant FireStopper tell his people that I've burned my bacon; let Old Lady Smokes-A-Lot next door cluck her tongue at me as I rush down the hall. I know who I am when I step into the kitchen. I know I'm not cooking anymore to get someone to love me. Now I'm cooking because it makes the day slide away, or because that recipe looks really interesting, or because I've really had a taste for it, or because I want to show others that I appreciate them.

When I'm cooking for one, I know I care enough about myself to eat well, not to eat potato chips and frosting for dinner. I know why I cook.

It tastes good.

beauty instances

2012-01-03T12:13:00.002-06:00

I've been writing about the recent change in my life the last couple of weeks, trying to decide if this is just an interesting thing in my life or if it's material. In this world of zillion ways to get your voice out (including this one) it's hard to know sometimes if the amazing chicken sandwich you had for lunch is just your good fortune, or if there's some universal truth hidden in it that the world needs to hear. (Maybe it's not hard to know--maybe a sandwich is just a sandwich and it's nobody else's business. Maybe my lunch menu isn't going to change anyone's life, despite my best intentions.) I've been collecting tidbits of story, some short, some long, around beauty, identity, makeup specifically, and I thought I'd catalogue some of them today.

I am standing in front of my bathroom mirror considering my face. My chest-length locs are pulled back in a messy bun and I have a red bandana tied around my head. I’m wearing a white tank top and black yoga pants that have seen better days; and beside my right hand on the counter is what looks like a torture device.
The box does not say what it should say: eyeball scooper; finger dislocater; at-home speculum; tongue pincers. This one handy device can be used to remove any and all small appendages that offend. Hours of fun and torture sure to follow.
No. The box it came in said Eyelash Curler. It said, Great Lash; lovely; beauty; care .
I’m a 31-year-old black woman and this is the first time in my life I’ve used an eyelash curler.
How did this happen?
*
You have great legs, my mother would say You ought to wear short skirts more often.
*
I can’t figure out what I was doing in high school when other girls were learning about makeup. I have this fantasy of teenage girls learning about makeup from their mothers, who had hours of free time to spend with them and were only too pleased to teach their girls about the difference between foundation and setting powder. I think I was studying. Practicing the clarinet and reading, always reading.
I remember having acne as a teenager. It wasn’t incredibly bad, but it was bad, bad enough that I worried that people were staring at my face well into my 20s. I used a bar soap called Cuticura; it was baby blue and it smelled like antiseptic and it tried to control my unruly skin by drying it out. I would wet the bar of soap and a Neutrogena textured scrubbing pad, labeled good for “exfoliation” until they were frothy with suds, and then I’d scrub my brown face until it was red. I was looking for those dusky smears that would indicate I’d gotten all of the dirt and oil that was in my pores out. I’d rinse my face with water as it as I could bear it and then towel it dry. Sure, there was a moisturizer, but as often as not I wouldn’t use it. I believed my skin was oily enough, otherwise I wouldn’t break out the way I did, right?
*
You feel like your face is dressed, not covered--what one of my best friends said about her relationship to makeup.
*
At American Apparel, a girl used the phrase, "this season" to me. As in, "Purple is a really popular color this season. Purple and orange." What's in from one season to the next has never been something that helped me decide what to buy or what to wear.
I bought the purple scarf.

This was the least soft-core-like photo of AA stuff I could find. I'd been wondering for a few months now, but my most recent trip confirmed it: I am officially too old to be shopping there. Other retailers I've aged out of include Claire's, Forever 21 and Urban Outfitters. I feel pretty good about it.

*
Next to being beautiful herself, almost the nicest thing that can happen to a woman is to have a beautiful daughter.-- from an anthology called Beauty edited by John Miller.
*

I remember owning a Dr. Peppers Lip Smacker and thinking I was the shit.

I remember rubbing Retinol-A cream on my face until it peeled.

I remember the stress from my job at a beloved non-profit stressed me out so badly that I broke out in horrible, offensive acne, the worst it had ever been, the kind that made you wince just to look at. I avoided mirrors for months that year. The teensI worked with would ask me, What's the matter with your face? and I would say, The stress of dealing with you everyday is breaking me out.

I remember cutting off all of my permed hair until it was super short. I felt sexy as hell.

I remember when I came home with my hair cut short, my mother started to cry. She was sure I'd done it to get back at her.

I remember watching my mother put lipstick and mascara on.

I remember being scared to make risky fashion decisions. I thought people would make fun of me.

I remember wanting to be looked at and wanting to hide at the same time.

I remember railing against women who wore makeup. I thought they were fake and excessive and trying too hard.

I remember learning it was okay to want to look pretty.

I remember my dad calling me Princess, in a pejorative teasing way, like he thought I was weak and afraid to get my hands dirty.

I remember my dad calling me Goose, like he loved me, thought I was sweet little buddy that he wanted to hold close and take care of.

I remember getting a makeover at Bergdorff-Goodman in Manhattan, and getting a business card from a modeling agency rep, and thinking maybe I was pretty, after all.
*
There is a quality of beauty that happens in secret. She sends her husband to the store around the corner for bread and milk, and her kids out to play, and she sets her hair in pink foam rollers, goops her face up with cream and cucumber, waxes her upper lip, tweezes her eyebrows. By the time everyone gets home, she is washed, powdered, styled, coiffed; it is as if all of that other carrying-on never happened. when her kids tell her how pretty she is, when her husband looks at her in wonder that he managed to score such a looker, she smiles to herself and thinks, Thanks, Clairol/Elizabeth Arden/Ponds/Neutrogena/Sally Henson!
My mother hid her own beauty rituals. She seemed embarrassed by her own body, as if the hair that grew from her own legs were traitorous, the fuzz that sprouted on her upper lip a disgrace. If my father or I ever happened upon her when she was in the middle of her toilette to deal with these obscenities, she would snap at us, her voice a hiss of frustration and humiliation. "Jessica!" she would say. "Steven! I need some privacy!" And she would scurry off to the bathroom, her head lowered to avoid the horror of being discovered. Later she would emerge from the bathroom, a bit subdued but still rankled. "You weren't supposed to see that," she would say, as if one of us had planned to leap out and discover her waxing, peeling, plucking or powdering whatever she'd hidden from us.
*
I guess you think you're cute now, huh?
Yeah. I do.

So this isn't all of what I've written, but it's some of it. I am interested in the idea of makeup being this enormous industry/polarizing practice/signifier of gender/evolutionary habit/historically significant idea. But I don't know. Maybe the fact that I've started wearing makeup is only interesting to me. Maybe most women have been wearing makeup for years and most men only think women wear it to attract them (ick. I have read my fill of internet troll comments from dudes who are all, (deep, frat boy voice): "why do chicks wear so much makeup? You look better natural, I'd never hit that." Here's a clue, dudes. Makeup has nothing to do with you. Despite what Mommy told you, the sun doesn't rise and set in your pants. Get over it.). I don't really know what I have to say about this, although it's clear I have something to say. Still percolating, I guess.

2011-12-23T09:08:00.003-06:00

I saw this poster on Dearborn and Congress. I took a lousy picture of it with my camera phone, so it's hard to see.

It says, The Gentleman Shaver. Member, the Brotherhood of Shaving. "'He-time' is hard to come by."

Later I discovered a film that matches.

The Gentleman Shaver (Dir Cut) from Ben Briand on Vimeo.

Isn't it charming, with the man his bowtie rakish and handsomely slack, his trim body bending like rubber, and his lady friend, scantily clad and blissfully unaware, so caught up is she in her own grooming. With the black and white, and the French music, ooh la la.

There's a comment here, in all the work I've been doing about what it means to be a woman who cares about the way she looks in a world who demands that women look a certain way. It's percolating.

Caution

2011-12-22T10:08:00.000-06:00

When I was sixteen I rear ended someone. I was on Kemper Road headed west back toward Springdale, where I lived. My friend Angela and I had come back from taking the SATs (I think) and I'd taken my eyes off the road for a second and the guy in front of me stopped short and I didn't see it. There wasn't much damage to my car, and I don't remember much damage to his. An ambulance on its way elsewhere stopped and checked out Angela. She was black, straight hair, braces and a voice like a Disney fairy. In my memory she was always frail, underweight. I remember the police came, and I spent some time sobbing in the back of the cruiser while he wrote me a ticket. I remember Angela going to see a doctor for some physical therapy, and my parents being miffed that she'd done so and hadn't told me, hadn't at least warned me that she'd been through some series of PT and hadn't communicated with me about it. We weren't really friends after that.
When I was 24 I was in a hit-and-run. I was on Western Avenue turning east onto North Avenue when a woman turned into me headlong. I looked at her and she looked at me. Then she continued her turn onto Western and I never saw her again. This time the car was full of people. I remember shouting out her license plate number to my friend in the passenger seat so he could write it down. Then, once I turned onto North, I flagged down a squad of Chicago's finest and told them I'd just been in a hit-and-run. They told me that it wasn't their beat, and if I wanted police help, I'd have to call the police and ask for it. Never mind that I'm a citizen who pays taxes and lives in (and loves) Chicago. I ran up to a cop on the street asking for help and he/she (they) denied it. We were on our way to a party; I didn't want to ruin my friends' good time by waiting at this enormously busy intersection for someone to show up who might be as much (read: little) help as the previous officers had been. So we went on to the party.

In 2008 I rear ended a Jeep. Same scenario as the first, only we were at Wilson Ave getting onto Lake Shore Drive. I'd recently moved in with the man I married, and we'd just had a fight about something, I don't know what. I was on my way downtown to meet a publisher who liked my work on Chicago Public Radio and wanted to talk to me about a long-form project. She hasn't responded to my emails since then. The Jeep driver was very nice. He said I'd just hit his frame, and since I drive a roller skate and he drove a solid vehicle designed to haul, he said it was probably fine; we traded info just the same. My front was pretty jacked up: the hood was dented up and the bumper was really struggling. I limped home, back to my apartment in Lincoln Square and buried my face in my honey's shoulder.

Two days ago I was sitting at a stoplight on LaSalle at Clark Street. I hate that intersection. There's so much going on over there, so many streets, it seems, headed in strange curving directions, so many lanes merging or creating, and with the construction it's just worse. It was 4:40. All Things Considered was on the radio. I'd just bought some things for the Christmas table I'm setting this weekend, and I was on my way to the North Side--a few presents to buy and then therapy. The green arrow flashed, signaling a left turn onto Clark, and seconds later I heard a loud BAM and I and the car were rocked forward. Hard. I shouted something into my empty vehicle. I put on my hazard lights. The guy behind me got out of his car, and I slowly got out of mine. I was afraid of another hit-and-run, but he was polite and concerned for me. Behind us someone honked their horn, then traffic started snaking around us. We pulled into the BP on that corner and had a conversation, he in broken English because Spanish was his primary language, me in broken English because I was terrified. The cars were okay: he'd knocked his license plate off one screw, and that missing screw had gouged a hole in my back bumper, about an inch long. He gave me his name and phone number, and an approximation of where his car insurance office is located. It seemed to me that he would rather keep the insurance out of it, but it was hard to tell because he spoke in phrases, not full sentences. "If you need anything, call me, just... let me know, don't... If I can help... Please call me..." I can remember him waving his hands at me, his palms facing me, in a kind of surrendered gesture. At some point I wanted him to stop talking and kept saying, "Okay, I understand. Thank you." I got in my car. My best friend, my husband, was away in Ohio, visiting his family. I had two choices: go somewhere and get help, get checked out, or continue with my day. I am my mother's daughter: when we have to get shit done, we get shit done. So, after a failed attempt at filing a police report over the phone, I got back on LaSalle and made my way onto Lake Shore Drive, like I'd been trying to do all along.

PTSD, no nightmares (that last more than a week), no head trauma or lasting damage. But I wonder what it does to you to have things constantly ramming themselves into you. After this last accident, I felt antagonistic: I wanted to fight, I wanted to ram something or someone back, to somehow expel whatever had just been pushed into me without my permission. My body hurt; I had twinges of pain in my neck and shoulders, and when, 40 minutes later, I got out of my car and walked into Target, my hips were complaining, too. I wasn't mad at the driver. He mad a stupid mistake. I've made plenty of stupid mistakes, as evidenced by accidents 1 and 3. But I was mad at somebody, and I wanted to smash something, to be violent in order to get rid of whatever I was carrying around in my body as a result of the accident.

My husband used to know a woman, a kind of freaky-deaky, polyamorous, dominatrix sex kitten; and to use language like this demeans and judges her, and I don't mean to do that. I only mean to highlight the contrast between her and I, who think when we do it with the lights on we're being freaky. Anyway, this woman, he said, often had a longing for the physical activity, not of sex, but of like, Greco-Roman wrestling, or something. She wanted to throw her body against another's, to pull and twist and snap and yank on another human being, and to have someone do the same to her. I don't know what that communicates about her. That's also not how I feel. I feel like something has radiated through my muscles and tissues, and rather than let it pass through me, I need to transmit it or transfer it. I don't have an outlet for a lot of that feeling. I can take my husband with me to the gym and we can play racquetball, but slamming a ball around a wood-and-glass room isn't the thing. I feel like I'm walking around with an earthquake inside me and I need to release it in order to feel whole again. I'm short-tempered, I'm distracted-- but those could be the really strong muscle relaxant I got from the doctor at the urgent care across the street from my building.

(Sidebar: I was so scared after the last wreck because for months I've been trying--and failing--to get health insurance. After the way I was feeling, I thought something might really be wrong with me, and I'd lack the resources to deal with the problem. When I walked into the clinic yesterday morning and asked to see a doctor, the admin asked for insurance and I told her I didn't have any. "Oh, it's going to be awfully expensive," she said to me, a look of smug disapproval and pity on her face.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, the visit is 169 before any of the x-rays or blood work or anything--"
"Well do I need an x-ray?"
"I don't know, I don't know the extent of your injury."
It could have just been me, but this woman seemed to take some delight in my situation. There was a kind of self-satisfied smile on her face. Small, but still it was there. It hurt me.
"Well, maybe I can talk to the doctor before--"
"They don't really like to do that, consultations can get sticky--"
"I'm not talking about a consultation. I want to talk to the doctor before they perform a battery of tests on me."
"Oh, of course."
"I mean, she can't perform an x-ray without my consent, right?"
"That's right."
I filled out the rest of her paperwork and sat down. This did not help the violent tremor-feeling I'm carrying in my body. I wanted to tell her, Look Lady, it's not my fault I don't have health insurance. As much as I love where I work, they don't value me enough to provide me with health insurance to help me take care of myself, and the THREE companies where I've applied have all either dropped me or declined me because I have a "feminine problem" that I can live with but that makes me generally uncomfortable and may compromise my ability to conceive, but all the health insurance companies can think about is incurring the cost of another "female surgery" a surgery which, by the way, I don't even want, but it's the only way doctors in this country have figured out how to deal with this condition. But I'm trying. So why don't you wipe that smirk off your face and help me? I can pay your $169 or whatever, one way or another, but what I CAN'T do is feel like a valuable human being because I can't get any help from this totally fucked up system.
It's not nice that on top of feeling the need to break something I also felt humiliated for my lack of ability to play by the system's rules, because they deny me a spot at the table.)

As I was saying, the drugs I got ($4 generics from Target) are really strong, so all of my distraction and short temper could be from how groggy and incapacitated they make me. But I can't shake this feeling, that when that guy in the Honda rear-ended me, he put something in me, and it's something that I'm struggling to get out.

Late Blooming

2011-12-20T10:02:00.002-06:00

Last time I wrote here, I was writing about makeup, right? I was astonished by the change that's become a part of me, the idea that, like a Kate Chopin short story in Cosmo, I've undergone some cosmetic awakening that's freed me from bonds under which I was previously burdened. I've been thinking about this a lot--how it could be that a change like this takes place in me, what circumstances allow me to feel good about doing a complete 180, and what makeup is in the world today, how it relates to beauty, etc. I've discovered a lot of haters, but that's mostly on the internet, and let's be real, the internet is crawling with haters, right?

This morning I was checking out TheRumpus and saw this video.

Okay. I am not going to spend my energy hating on this girl. I am not going to turn this blog into a feminist (or even biological) commentary about the relationship between makeup and mate selection. I want to point out that this girl is exactly the kind of girl I was talking about in my last blog: a girl who thinks about boys and how to snag them, and who thinks about what she does with her body (examples from the video include showering, brushing your hair, and you guessed it, wearing makeup) in order to attract a boy.

This attitude is so pervasive when it comes to makeup. Lots of women, and many men, suspect that the only reason a woman would wear makeup is to snag a man--there's little to no discussion of men wearing makeup in the small amount of online "research" I'm doing (almost exclusively YouTube video at this point, and some nominal book research), so we're working with a pretty heterosexual paradigm here. Men are bitching about what women do to themselves to be found attractive and heralding the wisdom and beauty of the natural look, and saying some really mean (ahem, misogyny?) things in the process. On top of which, some women are saying, "gee I wished this feature of my body was different so I looked better" or they're also saying hateful, hurtful things about women who like wearing makeup. But so many of these people are positing that the reason women wear makeup is to attract the attention, affection and provision potential of men.

So I said that this wasn't a biological treatise and it's not. But I do want to point out that for many of the other species on our planet, when choosing a mate, it's the males who adorn themselves, who go through battles of strength and supremacy, who preen and parade and primp, in order to win the affections of the females. Lions, babboons, rams, deer, peacocks--and those are the only ones I can remember from 9th grade science and Wild Kingdom videos. I'm no scientist.

I can remember my mother encouraging me to wear shorter skirts, to wear my hair down, in high school and college, in order to look more attractive. "You have great legs," she'd say, "you should show them off more." I always wondered why she never said that about my studies-- "You should take a creative writing class; you have such an aptitude for language." The more I reflect on my mother's influence on my upbringing it's clear to me that she thought she'd be doing the best for me if she encouraged me to have the life that she wanted as a youg person: if she prevented the pain and mistakes she encountered in her own life and helped me attain the things she wanted, and maybe never got in her own. I can't fault her for that--every parent wants that for her kid--except for in the places where she pursued her own agenda for me and sacrificed my agenda for me. But being cute, attracting boys, it was just not a part of my world.

It bums me out that so many people perceive makeup this way, as a tool in the box of feminine wiles that women use to trap men. It simply does not exist in that space for me. I can dig that I sound ludicrously naive, but so what? It's a shame to me that for so many, makeup exists in the space of a necessity in order to alter the perceptions of others--and I get the irony of this statement, given the reality of things like concealer, which are supposed to reduce appearances of qualities of your face, and foundation, which is designed to even out skin tone that may be several shades to begin with. But what if it's not about trapping a man? What if it's not about making others thinking you have perfect skin? There's a lot that we do for other people, whether they know it or not, but maybe makeup can live in the space of something that we do for ourselves. We choose how we want to look based on how we feel and what we want. If a woman has the right to her safety despite wearing a miniskirt, she should have the right to her intellect and wisdom despite wearing eyeliner.

I'm obviously still figuring this out. But the vitriol, the defensiveness (including my own) around this subject is both interesting and puzzling.

update?

2011-12-15T06:51:00.000-06:00

I'm awake at 6 am this morning because an hour ago I was lying in bed and I turned funny and my neck put a giant stop sign in my way. I've been trying a lot of RICE-- rest, ice compression, elevation--in the last hour, along with as many anti-inflammatories I can find, so that I can show up at my last class today. (I've been taking a class with one of my favorite writers and learning from her about writing and teaching and all kinds of good stuff.) But class isn't for two more hours, so while I breathe deeply and hope for healing, thought I'd return to this space and see what I have to say.

So on a different note, something new and wonderful and really interesting has happened to me: I've discovered makeup.
You're thinking, duh, Jess, now get yourself a smart phone (which I don't have) and a Facebook account (which I do have, see mixed feelings here) and we might be able to welcome you to the 21st century. But somehow I made it into my 30s knowing little and caring even less about makeup. On the contrary, I'd say my relationship to makeup was an actively antagonistic one. What little I knew about makeup was that my mother used it occasionally (but never showed me how to) and lots of girls at school used it. But I wasn't friends with those girls. They were the ones who knew boys and when boys talked to them, they could say things that didn't make them sound too smart or too bitchy, a skill I hadn't mastered when I was in high school. They were the ones who thought for more than 30 seconds about what they were wearing out of the house that day, and who wanted everyone to like them and to think they were cool. They were cool. They were effortlessly, perfectly cool, and I was a giant nerd, and wearing makeup just made me look like I was trying too hard and so I would have none of the feminine wiles they were offering like nectar to the gods of Varsity High. Of my closest girl friends who did use makeup, well, we didn't talk about that stuff. We talked about band and orchestra and what part we were hoping for in the school play and our I.B. exams.

I must have been worrying about my GPA and practicing my clarinet (yes!) and trying to graduate with a latin degree while every other girl was learning about blush and eyeshadow. That's one of the only ways I can account for the fact that I didn't start wearing makeup until after I graduated from college.

But now. something has happened. The stars have lined up a different way. I've given myself the permission to want to look pretty, and to feel good about it. That's never happened before. I always thought that if I looked too pretty, no one would take me seriously. Oddly enough, I've also always thought that those women who were so pretty were the ones who had all the advantages, all the charm and grace of social interaction that I just didn't understand. But I think the thing that's dawned on me is that I don't care what other people think of me anymore. I mean, I care that my boss thinks I'm good at my job, and that my students believe I'm dedicated to their growth; I care that my fellow writers think that I'm the kind of artist who is open and absorbing to many things and that I'm a professional joy to work with. But if I put on red lipstick and they think that makes me look all girly, they want to call me Princess, well they can stuff it. I'm no longer a woman threatened by the idea of looking feminine or attractive as a part of my self.

This feels a little rambly, and maybe it's the early morning hour or the fact that I'm in a lot of pain. Or maybe it's the newness of this idea. But I'll try to keep thinking and talking about it here. Don't worry--no beuaty tips or tricks. But I'm compelled by this journey that each woman chooses to make or not to make as she forms and discovers how she'll become a woman.

love langauge

2011-12-11T10:41:00.000-06:00

I love shopping. But I hate Christmas shopping.

I was talking with someone the other day and we agreed that Christmas shopping is easiest when you're buying for yourself because you know what you want. Buying for others is impossible. I'm taking a quick break in the middle of some shopping to vent/reflect on what the anxiety I'm feeling about plunking down money to buy things for people I don't know well in the hopes that they'll like what I get.

I want to buy good gifts for my loved ones--gifts that they'll like or appreciate that they'll use sometime in the calendar year before the next occasion comes around to buy again. In our house, this is not what defines a good gift. My husband's study is full of "good gifts" that he hasn't touched since opening them, months or even years ago. He swears that there still good gifts, that they show thoughtfulness and care and love. I have a hard time believing him. The shrink wrap is still on some, for crying out loud.If it was a good gift, wouldn't it be doing something in our home other than taking up space and collecting dust? Wouldn't it be read or used or loved in some way?

I realize this morning that I don't want to waste my money in buying gifts for people. I want to give something that they'll use because I want to know that however much time or energy or money I gave up to get the thing that it's getting used. If I buy a hundred-and-fifty-dollar sweater for my sister-in-law (to be? maybe?) I want to know she's going to wear it, not that it'll sit in the back of her closet because it's the wrong color or fabric. If I buy my father a moleskin pocket journal because I see him using an off-brand one and he doesn't use it, it will hurt my feelings. (It did.)

Maybe once I give a thing I have to let go of its gift destiny. I have to allow for the fact that once I give a thing away that it becomes whatever the owner can use it for: a sweater, a pillow, a water balloon slingshot, an item on a shelf, an item to be donated to someone else. Maybe it's about the gesture of the gift, and not the item itself.

But gift-giving has never really been the thing for me, the best way for someone to show me they love and care for me. I'm the person who will feel loved because you've spent the afternoon talking with me, not because you've bought me something expensive, or rare, or even exactly what I asked for. I get that you love me when you pony up, but it's not the best way to show me love.

So there's some kind of academic response in this about Gary Chapman's The Five Love Languages, but this morning I've got other things on my mind that I want to deconstruct. Today I just wanted to take a little time and think about why gift giving is so challenging.

This is the place where I talk about giving gifts while growing up--my mother is crazy for gifts, giving and receiving them. She loves it--loves to spend her money on folks, to be generous in her giving, and she loves to receive things that are classy, pretty, feminine and expensive. She gave gifts that were either really great (ie. How to Make Everything Vegetarian) or that completely missed the mark (I won't enumerate them here, but some that are more in the pursuit of me being someone other than I am). So the fact that gifts weren't the thing I really wanted from my parents escaped them--hell, I didn't even know it until recently. But it always made gift giving a loaded activity.

I'm not looking forward to finishing the buying. But I guess I just have to remember to try for a sincere representation of my affection, and to let go of any expectations of how the gifts get used.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-23T09:35:00.002-06:00

Ripped from a blog on courant.com, who ripped from Charles Schultz or some authorized Peanuts website.

Ubiquitous but valuable, here is the list of things for which I am grateful this Thanksgiving:

gluten-free soy sauce
my yoga practice
clean, running water and indoor plumbing
women in my life who are thoughtful, supportive and sensitive in their dealings with me
Japanese scientists who whisper sweet words to water droplets (more on this as it develops)
an ever-deepening knowledge of my body, my self, and my place in the world
my job
access to healthy food
the ability to read
writing
the view out the window beside my writing desk
a computer that still works
gravity
a life--lungs that breathe, a heart that beats, a conscious mind, an able body
sunshine
bearing witness to the transformative art of others
the ability to continue learning
the pursuit of an ever-softening heart
Charlie Brown comics
an attentive, generous, playful, honest, brave, delightful, deeply willing partner
stories
tears
down comforters
classical music stations
french fries with truffle oil, or with lemon zest and chopped parsley and herb aioli
revelatory dreams
restful sleep

This morning I woke before dawn and did some yoga that was inspired by the season; "An Attitude of Gratitude" was the theme in the Ashtanga-influenced practice. Right now it feels like there's a lot dragging on my system, a lot to be angry about, a lot of pain to distract. In the midst of all that reality, I want to take time to acknowledge and appreciate what is also lovely and sweet in my life, and to be grateful for all the lessons I can learn, even if they hurt.

Probably lots of people doing this right now, but the people I noticed are here and here. If you'd like to sound off about what you're grateful for, please share, here or on another blog.

Eat what you are hungry for, rest easy and rejoice in the company of loved ones. Happy Thanksgiving.

Hole-y

2011-11-21T10:26:00.000-06:00

The 1913 Armory Show, University of Virginia.
Goldfish and Sculpture, Henri Matisse. 1911

There's a hole in my torso.

A hole, about the size of a long watermelon. It starts right where my heart would be and slopes down, arcing through each breast, and widens at the bottom, scooping out along the contours of my pelvis. It's shaped like an egg, and as perfectly ovoid as one, too. My ribs are like spiny white knobs in the hole, and I can't figure out how I manage to hold up my body with this much of my spine gone. No heart, no lungs, no stomach, no kidneys, no fibroids (plus!), no uterus (minus!); just a great hole in my torso like someone attached a hose to the center of me and turned on an enormous vaccum cleaner and sucked out my very center.

Someone did.

I don't know what to do with this hole. I could keep it hidden beneath pullovers and t-shirts, and so far, that's what I've been doing. But it hasn't gone away--what if it's going to be here for a while? Maybe I can begin wearing clothes that show off my midriff, jeans that would fit twelve-year-olds and tiny pink crop tops, and make the hole work to my advantage. What if I line it with Christmas lights, so that it looks less grotesque? I've been toying with the idea of putting a potted plant in there, something small but pretty, an African Violet, or maybe an orchid. That way when people look through me they won't just see what's on the other side, there'll be something beautiful at the core of me for them to enjoy. Or maybe I should buy a great fishtank at setlle it in the hole. Wouldn't that be something--for three or four sweet little orange fish to be swimming around in the center of my body. It would take this hole, this gaping maw that feels regularly like it might destroy me, and make it lovely. It may be that the center of me has been carved out, neatly but certainly; but now that the hole is here, is real, I can take care of it, I can enjoy it, I can ornament it.

Maybe if it's lovely enough, it won't bother me that someone cut a hole in the center of me and now I'm left with nothing. Maybe if it's lovely enough I can learn to live with it, and not feel so incomplete.

I am the 26%

2011-11-14T17:02:00.000-06:00

Today the blond at the gym told me that I have twenty-six percent body fat.
It wasn't my idea. I joined a gym recently because there's one near my house, and because for months I've been dancing with the idea of something to supplement my yoga practice. I like yoga. I like that the names of poses are in strange Sanskrit words I often misspell, and that they're often named after animals; I like that in a good class the poses the teacher invites us to do feel intuitive, and despite being not always easy, somehow still accessible, and like there is a lesson for life stored in each one; I like that my body feels like a guide, a temple, a playground and a teacher; I like that on a good day in class, I don't spend a lot of energy comparing myself to others, or to some imaginary standard; I like that yoga was a spiritual home for me when other, more traditional worship centers became threatening.

The gym is not like that. The gym is full of people in man made fabrics and full faces of makeup who tangle with complicated-looking machines; the gym has acres of bicycles that you can't ride anywhere; the gym plays loud music with hard beats and heavy bass at levels damaging to your hearing; and the staff considers "pushing to your limit" and "giving 110%" and even that old classic, "feel the burn" to be good things.

Yoga is church. The gym...the gym is like having junior high gym class in a steel factory.

A free trainer session came with my membership, and because I didn't say Thanks but No Thanks, and partly because I was curious, I took it. It was fine, I guess. She gave me some exercises to do that required minimal equipment. I was willing to do them because I'm not afraid to look stupid anymore. I felt them working while we were at it, and now almost two hours later, I know that I will have to return to my mat this evening and stretch in order not to wake up sore tomorrow. The exercises I can do on my own; I can return to the gym, after swallowing the bile of terror that grips me whenever I walk in the door, and hop around and sweat and gasp rather like an asthmatic steam engine, and know I'm getting my heart rate up, building strength and working my lungs.

But the body fat thing. That part. That part felt like my mother saying, "Jessica, you know if you lost five more pounds, you'd have a perfect body."

I'm the kind of person who, if you measure something about me and tell me it's lacking, then whether I care or not, I'll do what I can to correct it. The actual process of measuring my body fat wasn't nearly as humiliating as I expected. I had to stand up, extend what looked like an old game controller for N64 out into the air from my shoulders, and squeeze the handles until the machine beeped back a reading at me. No biggie. But then her words of how 26 isn't so bad, but 30 is obese, and you're obviously not obese, but I can help you work on that if you want and 18-21 is what's considered ideal and yadda yadda. This is when the voices took over and it became hard to listen. One said, Jess, this is bullshit, you know you're healthy, it doesn't matter what your body fat percentage is. Don't be freaked about this. And the other voice said, Shit, Jess, you knew you weren't in great health, and now you have proof, you need to have your ass in this gym daily until you can tighten up and tone in and slim down and feel like a better human being. That five pounds my mother oh so delicately suggested that I lose (repeatedly between 9th grade and um, 2009) has dogged me all my life. Keeping or losing the weight is something that I now know would not have made my mother love me any more authentically for who I am, instead of for what I make her think of herself. I've had enough therapy to recognize the voice of the part of me that says lose the weight is the same voice that told me to get good grades, dress a certain way, go out for these activities and be this good a girl, young woman, student and professional--all in pursuit of a relationship that was never possible.

So the CNN article says it's important for me to know my body fat percentage and to pay some attention to it, in order to make healthy choices and prevent myself from becoming one of the 2/3 of Americans who are overweight or obese. The Livestrong.com calculator, which asked me to measure my (gulp) neck, waist, hips and height, puts the number even higher. But what does this mean? Does it mean that the lifestyle choices that I make to stay (emotionally and mentally, as well as physically) healthy aren't enough, and I need to be making more commitments? Does it mean that the impossible ideal of women's bodies that's plastered all over every ad I see, isn't that far off from what we "should be" in order to be healthy?

Or does it mean that some young woman who's just trying to do her job stepped on the place where my body issues cross my mommy issues?

If I am truly at risk for diabetes and heart disease, and this number bears it out, then I want to make some choices that will be good for me. But if this is just a tool by which gym personnel can quantify their clients in order to create goals and make strides, then I'd rather not keep an eye on the body fat percentage machine. I'd rather just do what will someday help me do an unsupported headstand, or help me jump back into chaturanga dandasana, or help me really feel like I'm surrendering in a seated forward fold, and not just like I'm mostly sitting up and barely moving from my pelvis at all. Another thing I love about yoga is that being goal-oriented is not the point. The point is to notice and reflect without judgment: something I'd love to teach the body fat percentage-machine. And my mother.

tell the truth, shame the devil

2011-10-22T08:52:00.001-05:00

I remember, when I was in college I took a class with Mary Zimmerman--she taught Performance of Poetry and Presentational Aesthetics, and probably a few others in my major, Performance Studies. This is all B.T.--before Tony--so I don't know if she has the time or inclination to teach anymore.

In class there was this girl, a redhead with freckles and a fierce, strong, feminist personality. Lampshade Norton. Lampshade was no one to fuck around with, I knew that from the start. There was also a guy whom I could never really get a read on: Notebook Reilly. The class was full of Theatre majors who wanted to take a class with "Mary Zimmerman", and there were a few people like me, for whom Mary was great, but also faculty in their department, so the class was kind of required for graduation. But Notebook, I think he might not have been either. He reminded me of an athlete. He was taller than practically everyone else by a foot, and broad-chested and blond--there was something about him that read offensive lineman, you know? He and I were friendly to each other, but never really connected.

One day in class it was Lampshade's turn to perform, as often happened in my classes--no tests, but performances, and occasionally papers. She stood up in front of the room, in typical dancer rehearsal ware--tights, a leotard, and ballet shoes--and took the barre in front of the mirror. She had a tape recorder somewhere that played her voice, saying things I couldn't really make out. It was clear that they were difficult things, judgemental, harsh, antagonizing, anti-woman, maybe even violent. Her voice on the tape was sharp, deep and guttural. But I don't remember what she said, and I remember not being able to hear what she was saying.

Sometime that same class period after Lampshade's performance, it was Notebook's turn to perform. He sat on the floor in front of the class, bent over, with his head in his hands, and said in a loud, shaking voice, "A year ago... I raped Lampshade."

Nobody moved.

Then Lampshade moved. She got up and ran out of the class, opening the door so hard that it slammed against the cinder block wall of the room.

The room was silent. You could hear Notebook sobbing, sniffling. Then Mary went to him, also sobbing and knelt beside him, and put her arms around him. After a few seconds, she turned around and said tearfully to the rest of us, "I think we should end for today."

The rest of us, in quiet shock, collected our coats and bookbags, and crept out of the room.

I still, after more than ten years, only sort of understand what happened that day. I don't remember if Notebook came back to class. I remember Lampshade did. She didn't look resilient, but she looked like a survivor. Shit, I guess she was, is. I think about that day a lot, when I think about honesty, what it means to confess, what it means to forgive, or to hurt, or to try to understand trauma. I think about it a lot lately.

I am glad that Mary Zimmerman hugged Notebook. I don't know what she whispered to him after the class left. Hours later, back in the building for a rehearsal, I peeked through the doors of that room, expecting to see scorch marks on the wall, a hole in the floor, the mirror broken, and bits of people left behind. But it looked normal there. Like nothing had even happened.

omg, FINALLY: my second movie

2011-10-17T17:14:00.001-05:00

UPDATE: The link to this video was broken. Now, I do believe it's fixed.

So I've been so quiet here because I've been trying to figure out how to put movies on this blog. You'd think it wouldn't be that complicated, but I'm really slow on the uptake when it comes to all this stuff.
BUT, I finally figured out a way to do it, and then an incredibly powerful thing happened.
I woke up on Friday morning from a nightmare. And I made a movie about it.
Thus

A Dream (And Its Interpretation)

bummed

2011-09-29T18:33:00.000-05:00

You guys.
I recorded an interesting video journal this week with no way to document it. I've tried three times to download it here, and it hasn't worked.
Back to the drawing board.

ceci n'est pas un film.

2011-09-26T10:35:00.000-05:00

It's just a test to see if I can put stuff I've filmed on my bog. I don't know if it'll work. I have to go slow, you know?
I shot this at an Independence Day party at a friend's house. Those are his fireworks. I'm standing in his driveway. Every time the camera jolts, it's because ash was falling on my arms.

drawing journal, week 2

2011-09-26T10:22:00.000-05:00

I was thinking of integrity this week. I thought a tree must have all kinds of integrity. It knows what it is, and all it tries to do is keep growing in the best process it has.
That sounds either zen or just utterly ridiculous. But somehow in the week of teaching, writing, sorting in and sorting out, it made sense.

In Defense of Compassion on Facebook:

2011-09-21T09:57:00.003-05:00

Or, Why Social Media Is No Substitute for Good Therapy

So I don't really love Facebook. Yes, it's been helpful in connecting me to people I've fallen out of touch with. I've given away tickets to shows on Facebook. I've been a part of thriving artistic communities. I'm trying to network--which is going slowly, and which is part of the reason I decided to connect up in the first place. But still, it makes me feel exposed in a way that makes me nervous and I find myself acting as voyeur, peeping at the kinds of lives others portray, wondering how real that life is. There are people that love it and use it as a resource, and although I'm not one of them, I may well be soon. But right now I don't have a lot of affection or understanding for it.

Which makes it hard for me to understand the way I sometimes see it used. I know this guy; he's smart and talented and quite skilled, and I respect and admire him, hope I can call him Friend. Recently my Friend posted a status update about being in a cafe and witnessing a break-up between two people. To hear my Friend tell it, she was the dumpee, an attractive woman in a pantsuit who flipped her hair too much. He was the dumper, a professional-looking dude in a suit. It was a bad break-up--she was shouting at him, evidently she hit him at one point--all of it was ugly and uncomfortable, and presumably my Friend was annoyed and made to feel so icky by witnessing such public relational carnage.

So he posted about it on Facebook. He told all of his Facebook Friends--of which I am one--about what he was witnessing. This opened up a thread of comments (35? at the point I'd read them) from people who were responding to what was happening. These were comments about how thoughtless it was for these two to break up in a public place, and suggestions for my Friend to diffuse the situation that included asking the dumpee out and trying to set her up with my Friend's single male acquaintences. The pervasive attitude seemed to me to be one of witty and careless shadenfreude.

I was confused, and a little disappointed, by what I saw. I know it sounds naive, but I wondered reading the thread, Is this what's become of us? I thought Facebook was a tool of self-marketing and networking. I mean, I've heard some of the stories--I know people have arguments and take shots at each other via their blogs, FB, etc. I know about that young woman in Colorado who was so shamed and humiliated via social media from girls and their mothers that she was driven to suicide. But Facebook is also useful, isn't it? I mean, it's a tool for outing fashion conglomerates who steal designs from working artists, and it's a place to amass awareness and raise money for Katrina victims and tsunami-ravaged Japan. But has it allowed us to become so disconnected from our common link to each other as humans that we can post about someone's misfortune and lose sight of their (and our) humanity? How do we locate the same compassion for equal marriage rights and victims of natural disaster and give it to two real people, two strangers who are sitting right in front of us?

Dig this: I'm not defending the choice to publicly end a relationship. I think I'm asking us to consider that these two people need compassion. What this guy was going through--trying to end a relationship--even in the best of circumstances isn't easy. Has it been so long that any of us got dumped or had to dump, that we forget, in our partnered privilege, how much it sucks? And the woman: I don't know her, but if my Friend's account of her behavior is any indication, she has some problems. I don't mean she's crazy like, "Aw man, I split that chick, that bitch is crazy." I mean there's some serious heavy shit that she hasn't dealt with but she lives with every day, and unless she can get it figured out, she's gonna walk through the rest of her life a damaged, incomplete human being. Who grows, who is healed, who is made better by our snickering at what happens to people like these two, even in a space like Facebook where we can't get caught?

'Cause here's the thing: we can blog about people who do dumb shit on the train, who piss in public like carriage horses, who are rude or loud or violent. But as hard as this is for us to remember, we are just like them. We are as sad, scared and broken as that woman in the pantsuit who was shrieking at her (ex)boyfriend, demanding that he love her. We are capable of that same level of fear and loneliness, and we're capable of reacting out of it, too. If your brother or sister, if your best friend since 7th grade or your new work bff were hurting to the point of humiliating themselves and others, to the point of physical violence, you'd want to get them some help. You wouldn't want me posting their public acting out to all my friends on Facebook.

I sound so fucking self-righteous, don't I? I don't mean to. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I've used Facebook as a message board when I'm pissed off or annoyed. I publicly lamented witnessing an act of prostitution in the basement of my building. After being nearly hit by a car on my bike, I urged motorists to keep an eye out for cyclists. But that sentiment was borne out of anger and frustration, not a desire for common safety and goodwill. God knows I have a tough enough time showing compassion to people I know, my friends and family, much less to strangers. I fail at being compassionate on a daily basis. Maybe that failure doesn't give me the right to consider how social media cultivates a lack of compassion. Maybe instead of writing this post on my blog I should be on my yoga mat, dedicating my practice to myself, my Friend, and to those two who were breaking up, that we all might learn self-compassion and compassion for one another.

Maybe I will.

But right now I'm in this space.

The thing about social media is that, for all of the connecting and access and information and voice-giving it does, it turns us all into pundits. Political, social, artistic, culutral: suddenly we all have opinions and now we all have a platform to be heard. We compete and hustle for hits and eyeballs and whatnot, and hey, that's great, right? But it's only great if we know what we're doing, if we take the choice we've made to comment on our lives and the lives of others with some reflection and some compassion. In such a tech-savvy world it's easy for us, for me, to feel like everything around is good material, is fodder for my writing or shooting or commenting. And yes, it is. You better believe it.

But what's around me is also real. The woman squatting on the Morse el platform pissing like an animal is a mother, and she has a kid she's trying to raise. The woman in the pantsuit screaming at her ex just wants to be loved. How human are these qualities? These people are just like me. They're just like my Friend. And they're just like you.

We can't let technology foster so much autonomy and independent expression of thought that it robs us of our humanity. If we do, all that connectedness is worthless.

om mani padme hum

Full Disclosure

2011-09-20T10:32:00.000-05:00

So since I finished the photo journal, I've been trying to keep a sketchbook journal.
It's not going so well.
I'm finding that for one thing, I'm not drawing every day the way I was shooting every day. My paper journal tends to be a space I go to when I want to go, when I want to write or work or just figure out what's on my mind. So I haven't chained myself to a kind of regularity in the journaling practice like I did when I was shooting photos every day.
I'm also not very good, as far as drawing is concerned. But I know that's not the point, so it's no biggie.
I've been looking to the journal of Frida Kahlo for inspiration of how to approach this part of the process. Even her journal is raw, unflinching and stunning in its imagery. What chance do I have, right?
But I'm doing what I can do. So here's an example of what I've got so far.

photo journal--day 14... er, belatedly

2011-09-16T10:00:00.000-05:00

no self portrait today. I think I got tired of myself. The day itself was so busy, and a lot's happened since then. This is my first chance to post these photos.

photo journal--day 13

2011-09-10T22:40:00.000-05:00

A busy day today, and not a lot of time to shoot. BUT, a celebration of my husband's birthday, after which I feel vaguely like a python in the grass who doesn't need to eat for a week...

self-portrait 9/10/2011

photo journal--day 12

2011-09-09T22:28:00.000-05:00

self-portrait 9/9/2011

photo journal--day 11

2011-09-08T22:33:00.000-05:00

self-portrait 9/8/2011

Went to see this movie tonight--see it. Please God, see it--and left feeling frustrated and thoughtful and vulnerable.

photo journal--day 10

2011-09-07T21:09:00.001-05:00

I'm exhausted. First day of class. Still trying to figre out how to document my class experience without violating my students' privacy.

The light in my morning yoga practice was so warm and strong, my shadows were really striking. Hard to capture...

I don't know how to shoot strangers on the train without drawing attention to myself--but this woman's toenail polish was such a great color!

For contrast, this photo I took with my finger over the flash--it didn't mask the light, it just turned it red. Bloody.

self-portrait 9/7/2011

photo journal--day 9

2011-09-06T22:40:00.000-05:00

this is a Starbucks in a part of the city that I frequent that is literally around the corner from a Starbucks. It's happening, people.

Self-portrait 9/6/2011--In my mother's white sweater

photo journal--day 8

2011-09-05T21:16:00.000-05:00

This painting, at a First Watch in Worthington, Ohio, was a beautiful pear and he and I just couldn't take our eyes off it. Got me thinking about the abstract still life work I started this summer...

self-portrait 9/5/2011--you'd never know she used to be a vegetarian...

photo journal--day 7

2011-09-04T20:07:00.001-05:00

Not many pictures today. Traveled to the Buckeye state for a family wedding. It was the first time I'd seen my parents in more than a year. We didn't speak to each other. I saw them from far away, and I don't know that they saw me; there was no eye contact.
This was the best I could do today. I was present for someone who invited me, from the sidelines to avoid drawing attention to the black cloud that hangs between my family and me. It was exhausting.
But I'm here.

self-portrait 9/4/11
That's not smugness you see on my face, it's surprise that I'm not dead. Two nights before I dreamt that two versions of myself went head-first off a skyscraper.

photo journal--day 6

2011-09-03T22:02:00.000-05:00

All day long--ALL. Day. Long.--preparing for something I'm supposed to be looking forward to, but really don't want to do.

packing. all i wanted to do was crawl into a hole and hide and never have to come out.

self-portrait 9/3/2011

at the in-laws. beads that remind me of my grandmothers house, that look like they are, but aren't, made of glass.

photo journal--day 5

2011-09-02T21:39:00.000-05:00

This project gets tricky when there's not much I'm doing from day to day. But it rebounded nicely.

"self-portrait" 9/2/11--
I did everything for this shot but push the button, that was left to my faithful helper and equipment hump.
Some debate over whether or not pushing the button makes or breaks the self part of a self portrait.
What do you think?

photo journal day 4

2011-09-01T22:50:00.000-05:00

I wanted to call this series "my overcrowded brain." But then I started shooting and instead it struck me as "My cup runneth over." Talk about how your perspective can shift...

Self Portrait 9/1--impending autumn makes me scared, along with a shit ton of other things right now...

photo journal day 3

2011-08-31T23:25:00.002-05:00

self-portrait 8/31

it was a really tough day...

L26--if they get more servers, they'd be ready for anything

photo, day 2

2011-08-30T21:57:00.000-05:00

self portrait 8/30/11: confused

reject beans

jelly jar

2011-08-29T21:09:00.001-05:00

It occurs to me that for a while now I've been considering a piece of art I have in my home, a handmade snowglobe. It looks like this.

It's been on my mind only recently, although I consider it almost every day. I see it often during my yoga practice, and my view of it looks like this.

It's on a bookshelf, and so low that unless I'm inverted and facing that direction, I rarely see it. But the other day in downward dog, I considered it, and have thought about it at least once daily ever since.

You might not be able to tell from the photo, but inside the snowglobe (a Bonne Maman jelly jar) is a woman standing with her face pressed against the glass. At her back, on the other end of the world, are several people: an athlete with a basketball under one arm, a villager with a pitchfork, and a small, cape-wearing, breasted alien-looking creature. They are all pointing something at her--a finger, a ray gun, a yard implement--and she has her arms at her sides and is facing away. I turn the jelly jar horizontal, and on the red-and-white gingham lid is written, "Too Rich or Too Thin RSM '06."

Oh, that's right. That's who gave me that. Times were different then.

I consider this snowglobe now, and I can't help but put the artist inside that static, watery world and consider the scene as some narrative of a moment of her life experience. If I think back, I remember it as a gift she gave me early in our friendship. Strange now: if it is a kind of metaphor for her life experience, how vulnerable she must have been or felt to give it away, and to someone who knew her so shallowly as I did then. Was she making a hip artistic statement about the cruelty and judgment applied to women, our lives, our bodies, how others set us apart because they deem us unfit for membership in the community? Was she telling her own story of having been kicked out (or feeling that she'd been kicked out) of some community that she just wanted to be a part of? Perhaps both?

I know now that this kind of excommunication was a part of her life experience. I know now that she has been both that girl with her face pressed against the glass, and the villager brandishing the pitchfork. I wonder if she knows this about herself, that she has been both victim and abuser.

There is a part of me that is a little sickened and saddened by the life experience that prompts a piece like this. But what is that experience, if not as common as a crack in a sidewalk? We all have been the one shunned and distanced, and we all have known the false, corrupting power of being the shunner, the alien with the ray gun, Homie #1 with his crooked finger of derision pointed at another human's back. Even more sadly, perhaps we all are frozen in this same story, doomed to repeat the role of victim or abuser, over and over.

So how may we find a way to put our hands down, to march our heavy, stiff feet over to another, and touch them on the shoulder? What must we do, or know, in order to break into that more human part of ourselves? I don't know, really. I think it involves a lot of pain. Feeling a lot of horrible things. Acknowledging a lot of ugliness. Showing a lot of compassion.

Heaven help us all.

photo journal day 1

2011-08-29T20:40:00.000-05:00

not an exhaustive list of photos taken today, but if I included them all, I think it'd get repetitive.

self-portrait 8/29/11

ask me about my journey...

My husband the creative genius; and a new project

2011-08-28T13:53:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been thinking about the journal as a tool, and what it means to use one. I started journaling in 5th grade, and have been keeping a journal regularly since my sophomore year of college. But for that long, my journal has been a place of words, where I write what I'm thinking or feeling, what I hear, what I see, what I want, what I don't understand. Words are the first and last tool I use to express myself and make sense of the world around me. I figure this is part of what makes me a writer, words being the principal vehicle for my thoughts and ideas.
But what if you're not a writer? What if you know the world through photo, or through film, or even through construction--fabric, stone, or wood? Does your journal still look the same? Can you use words to encapsulate your thoughts or feelings or ideas?
How do you assign a journal to someone who's not a writer? I know that anyone with the capacity to read and write can keep a journal, regardless of their discipline, but what does a journal of different media look like? How do you require a filmmaker to write journal entries? Or a sculptor, or a painter?
I don't know. I was talking it over with my husband, and he had this great idea: what if I experiment with journals in different media, in order to understand what kind of a journal might serve artists of different types?
Duh.
So I'm going to. Two weeks each, in photos, audio entries, film, visual images, sculptural elements, and see what I can come up with in terms of how a journal functions, and I'm going to try to record it all here. We'll see what happens, what I learn and can document.
I'm really interested in other suggestions, too. So if you wonder something, or want to point out something I haven't thought of, do it.

Summer memories pt. 1

2011-08-22T11:56:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure I even remember how to do this anymore... so instead of trying to write anything here today, I will commemorate a summer that was full. Full. Some of the struggle has already been named, so I will name some of the joy.

We recently spent a weekend downtown "stay-cationing", and went to Navy Pier. Had high hopes to ride the Ferris Wheel...

but alas, wind conditions prohibited. Sigh.

This was not a part of our weekend away, but was one of the best parts of my summer. What an amazing show.

It was his idea to get out of town for a while, since I've been thinking and working so hard and he's been thinkging and working so hard, and we've both been digging into each other, often in a positive constructive way, but not always. We had a lot of fun, we laughed a lot, we made healthy choices, and we almost forgot we had responsibilities to anyone other than each other. Thank you, Favorite, for a wonderful chance to enjoy each other and to rest.

Yesterday's 500 and some

2011-07-27T14:43:00.000-05:00

Preable: my maternal grandfather was admitted to the hospital about two weeks ago complaining of stomach pains. The doctors discovered he had cancer that had spread to most of his organs. A week later he was dead. If you read here regularly, or you know me well, you know my family relations are strained at best. Proceeding carefully, asking what is to be done to salvage my family relationship. Guh.

I remember also how during a fever I recalled that when a European is dying there is usually some sort of ceremony in which he asks pardons of others and pardons them. Now I have a great many enemies, and what should my answer be if some modernized person asked me my views on this? After some thought I decided: Let them go on hating me. I shall not forgive a single one of them either.
--Lu Hsun

I cannot bring myself to make the flight to Jackson, Mississippi, and the hour-long drive to Hazelhurst--I am too afraid of being bound by old habits, and forced to sacrifice myself at my mother's altar while she postures grief over her father; so instead I make the three hour drive from Chicago to Danville, where my mother's younger sister, has organized a memorial service for him. I have driven to Danville many times on my own, and generally there is no trouble, but this time I was late. I went west instead of east and wound up in the deep Midwest, where acres outnumber people and the streets have names like 850 E and 1600 N. I found my way to the church half an hour after the service had begun, and flustered and sweaty from the worry and the July sun, I snuck in and perched on the very last pew.
The church was very nearly empty. A 30-foot aisle flanked on both sides by red-and-wooden pews, and only one quarter of them were full. In front of me, I recognized my family: uncles and aunts, cousins and spouses; a few rows back were my great-aunt and her daughter, my mother's cousin. And behind her was my grandmother in a powder-blue suit, sitting beside her best friend. They were all collected in a little white knot of suit coats and waving hand fans that read OBAMA! in blue-and-white letters. And at the altar, in front of the pulpit, was a small wreath of flowers and a picture of this man I never knew.
A paper appeared at my left shoulder. I turned, and there was the hand of an usher, an older woman in a red blazer and black skirt, handing me a program with his name printed on it, and the same photo as was framed in front.
"I look like my father," my mother used to say, notes of sadness in her voice, when we considered her reflection in the mirror. I looked at the paper in my hand with her father's picture on the front, and the framed picture on the altar, and i can see that she's right. She has her father's broad, flat nose and high cheekbones, over which are stretched dark, shiny, velvety skin. She has his eyes, dark brown and deep-set, marry and calculating. She has his hair, thick, dark, fantastically, wonderfully nappy, in a well-shaped Afro around his head. A small flower of recognition bloomed in my chest and I thought, Oh, this guy. There was a version of this picture hanging on my parents' wall of photos in my house growing up. I hadn't looked at it much, but I did recognize his face, his suit and tie. My mother never really talked about her father, so not much was attached to him, until now.
As the choir sang a hymn with the chorus, Jesus is my All in All, I read the program: an agenda for the service, another couple of photos, a poem and an obituary, with all of the factual, passive and reductive nature that they can have--was born, was united, was employed, is survived, was preceded, et cetera. It was just the first of many tropes of black grief.
The second was the church ladies. On the fringes of the sanctuary, and even in the choir stand, were older black women, saints of the church as the expression goes, who functioned as cheerleaders. They swayed heavily in time to the organ music, moaning harmonies and singing with the choir; and when the pastor, a narrow, bent brown man with glasses and a balding head, stood up in the pulpit and started preaching, they parroted back his words like so many Echoes listening with sacred rapture to Narcissus: "Whom the Son set free ("set free", "set free') , he is free indeed ("indeed", "indeed")...

There is more, of course. Yesterday I returned exhausted, discombobulated and sore from so much sitting that I didn't write last night. These 500 were born today, with a thousand more to join, and there is still more to say. It is hard to write about this so nakedly. I've left out all family names, and so in places the rhythm feels different and I know it. But I feel my censors kick in profoundly putting this here, and so I do my best to tell the truth and cover my ass. I have still not discovered how to reconcile the memory of a person as a lying, cheating abusive bastard with the hole in your chest that is left when he dies. It's not a hole I'm living with, but I wonder about his ex-wife, his kids, my mother. I never knew the man, but I know what he has done to his family is complicated, the narrative of which lies in this cloak of shadow, half story and clever one liners, and the kind of fluorescent candor that I want to shine on it all just may not be possible.

My father, Jimmy and Me

2011-07-11T11:27:00.000-05:00

So how long ago was it that I promised that every week I'd post something here that I'd written as a part of my Summer Writing Project? Yeah, I promptly failed at that, didn't I? But, you know, all that about the horse, and if at first you don't succeed and whatnot...
Lately I've been writing about James Baldwin and my father. They were only acquainted in the way that you're acquainted with a writer you've never met but deeply admire, and I blame my father on my affection for James Baldwin, and my formation as a writer. The first collection he ever gave me was Going to Meet the Man, and a story from therein, "Sonny's Blues", has resurfaced in my life, and now makes its way into my material. This blog entry refers pretty keenly to it, so if you haven't read the story, it's so popular that the odds are good it's in an anthology you have in your house somewhere. After you read this, go check it out, it'll give you a greater context, maybe.

The story ends with a heated, complicated conversation between the two brothers, talking about the perfect storm that drives a man to heroin addiction as best they can, which is to say talking around the subject. The teller is so full of fear and misunderstanding that he can't just wait for Sonny to tell him the how and the why of his life's rough, ruthless journey. At the center of this conversation is the misery and fury and passion and desperation of the human condition: and all the things people do--legal and illegal, moral and immoral, humane and in humane--to avoid feeling it. Heroin sometimes supplies a necessary feeling, Sonny says, a feeling you need just to live, "...to stand it, to be able to make it at all. On any level.. in order to keep from shaking to pieces."
Are there many of us who can give this kind of understanding to drug addicts, recovering or otherwise? What about alcoholics? What about abusers, or wife beaters or rapists or pedophiles? I don't think so. I think our society punishes men and women who channel their misery into these kinds of behaviors. We can't understand it, why someone would hurt other, or hurt themselves, would behave ways that are so obviously destructive. Why would someone be so cruel, so disgusting, so horrible, so self-destructive, just trying not to feel what they're feeling? The narrator doesn't understand it either. He says to his brother, "'But we just agreed..that there's no way not to suffer. Isn't it better, then, just to--take it?'"
"'But nobody just takes it,' Sonny cried, 'that's what I'm telling you! Everybody tries not to. You're just hung up on the way some people try--it's not your way!'"
This sentence lands on me like a Mack truck. It is perfectly true that some methods of hiding from, denying or ignoring, this suffering, society benefits from, and that we reward. At the end of the day, though, we're all just running from our own demons. There aren't enough places we can go that will help us hold our feelings or process them or acknowledge or feel them. If we're fortunate, we channel our suffering into a life devoted to the Church, to finding a cure for cancer, to championing the rights of women. If we're banal, we turn it into crocheted hats and decoupaged coffee tables and loaves of banana walnut bread. If we're weak or vulnerable, we snort it or we shoot it or we smoke it or we fuck it. And if we're psychotic, we make others pay for it with their safety, their humanity, their lives.
Sonny found two ways to hold his misery, his suffering: heroin and jazz. The story concludes with him playing in a club with other musicians, men who understand some part of Sonny that his brother does not. Sonny sits at the piano with a scotch and milk on top of it, looking, says the teller, like the cup of trembling, hovering over his head. This metaphor is an allusion to the cup of trembling mentioned in the Old Testament, in Isaiah 51:22: "Thus saith the Lord thy LORD, and thy God that pleadeth the cause of his people, 'Behold, I have taken out of thine hand the cup of trembling, even the dregs of the cup of my fury; thou shalt no more drink it again.'"
As far as Old Testament books go, I just love Isaiah and Jeremiah; I like to think of them as tortured confused dreamers, men who just want to be left alone to paint or write or make clay puts, whom the Lord seizes as his poets and messengers to take warnings, metaphors and ideas to the Israelites. They're the artists who can never seem to get their rent or bills paid, yet Something always takes care of them. And their lives are absolutely wrecked by the visions and the words of this god who consumes them as his own.
I'm not trying to make the case that all heroin addicts are actually prophets with divine messages, and we ignore them at our own supernatural and everlasting peril--although the latter statement may be true. I'm just saying it's no accident that James Baldwin put this phrase in the mouth and mind of one character in order to describe another. Finally, in the last lines, our teller can see that Sonny has been spared the portion that was his, the wrath of God that caused him to stumble and fall. But he can also see that this cup is only a heartbeat away. It is easy, almost effortless, for Sonny to be doused in the thing that threw him into the pit out of which he has just crawled.
I don't know if my father ever crawled out of this pit, a stinky, funky, slimy, moist hole of hopelessness, deception, darkness, fear and abject loneliness. I don't know if he watched anyone else climb out of it, or if he looked into it. I tend to believe he's been acquainted with it somehow: I watched him go to and from work, walk around the house, as silent and morose as Grief, and as mysterious and disconsolate. Whenever i asked him what was wrong, he would tell me nothing and retreat even further away from me, further into himself. Somehow, he felt the need to suffer in silence, at least silence with me; my mother might have had some clue about his burdens, but with me there was always a wall between us, a wall we both knew was false, but nonetheless was immovable.
What troubled him, on so many days of silence and loneliness? Was he thinking about his father, who'd left him and the rest of his family in tight, aching poverty? Was he thinking of his mother, who raised all her children and who had now buried whatever feelings she had for her dead deserter of a husband underneath the blessing that all of her seven children were alive, healthy and had never been in prison? Was he thinking of his work, the meetings and the projects and the documents and the tests and the relentless pursuit of results that left him ragged and exhausted? Was he thinking of his own family, of his trouble with his wife, who always, at every turn, seemed dissatisfied or unhappy with things, and how easy it might be to just get into a car and drive away? What was it that troubled him so, what wrath and trembling was his alone to drink from?
I don't know. I will never know. If ever I ask him, he will smile his tight-lipped grimacing smile and tell me everything is fine. There might be language about the race and how work is work and how the challenge never ends. But the thing that is shaking my father apart, against which he is braced like a levy, that thing I will never see or know.

How to Fall Far from the Tree

2011-06-28T07:51:00.007-05:00

7430 N. Ridge Ave., Chicago

My husband and I walked the labyrinth yesterday at St. Scholastica Academy. It was a sunny, temperate afternoon, and we walked in silence, apart from each other, sometimes close together, sometimes on opposite sides of the circle. After yoga, I'd picked up my copy of Living Buddha, Living Christ and wanted to try a walking meditation. I read a section about inter-being, the idea that everything is connected to everything else, that a flower is composed of clouds and sun and time and soil, and that each of us is composed of others.

Hahn took this in an interfaith bent, highlighting the idea that Buddhism is made up of non-Buddhist elements and Christianity is made of non-Christian elements. But I'm wondering about interbeing as far as it relates to all of us. This is something that's said, right, that each of us is connected to or even part of the others around us, or even people we don't know. I was walking on that narrow gravely path thinking about connectedness, and why we need to connect, and to what.

Do you think it's important to be connected to your parents? Initially, it would seem vital. Psychologists talk about how important it is for babies to bond with their mothers, and the problems that plague children when that bonding is flawed or doesn't happen. Babies are born into the world completely helpless, right? They need someone to feed them, to hold them and keep them warm, to mirror them so that they can learn the difference between me and not-me. So if they don't bond with someone, there's a problem. They learn everything from the people who take care of them: how to eat, how to read, how to tie shoes and zip pants, how to make poopie in the potty and how to spell their name, how to make friends, how to tell the truth (or fail to), how to love, how to hate. So it's obvious that kids start out needing adults really badly, in order to survive. The adult has to meet the needs of the child, or help the child meet its needs, because children are incapable of doing it themselves.

What about the other way round? Do parents have children so that children can meet some need? Maybe they think not, but they wind up putting all sorts of their own needs onto their children that somehow went ignored. Suddenly a kid who's just trying to learn how to live is responsible for his parents, for their feelings and desires, and for their emotional reactions.

I've been reading another book lately, For Your Own Good by Alice Miller, about how so many choices and practices that have been commonly accepted as child rearing can actually be hidden acts of cruelty. I'm seeing so many similarities in it, so many places where what I feel now as a grown adult, and what I've felt in the past as a young woman, are being personified or exemplified. It is both a relief and a huge discouragement. I don't have much faith at all that my parents are willing to acknowledge the repression and negative patterns that exist in our family history, and even less that they'll turn a discerning eye into their own pasts and discover where they were abused and mistreated. If this is impossible, is there any room where we can connect to each other? What does it mean to "inter-be" with the two people from whom I most directly descend, who deny my history? What is to become of inter-being if we can't even say we see the same truth? My past is unchangeable, yes? So says every refrigerator magnet, wall hanging and greeting card out there: live in the now. And my parents' ability or inability to acknowledge our shared past is not the thing that keeps me or prohibits me from growing as an adult. I want it so that I can have a future with them. My future without them is my responsibility.

But why do I want a future with them? Should I? Is it right, good, worth it, to have an adult relationship with one's parents? I know people who treat their moms or dads as best friends, intimates, who tell them all and include them in everything. I know people who haven't seen or spoken to their parents in years. I myself have been putting in what I consider the bare minimum: I call on holidays or birthdays, I offer attempts to make annual visits (that I almost always hope never come to pass), I express filial concern and devotion at the appropriate moments in the script. But I don't have the relationship that I want with my parents, with either of them. My fear right now is that they're not capable of it--they are so wounded that they're unwilling to consider what problems may really exist in our family, and I won't be able to treat my parents like intimates, or even like friends. Instead I'll treat them like obligations and nothing more. I find that idea so dissatisfying. So sad.

So I give the process of honest reconciliation a go. I approach them thoughtfully, grounded in my own feelings and my own needs, with an idea not to wound and destroy our family, but to be honest about what it is and what I want it to be.
So far, it's not going well. As if.
But I'm still here. And I'm still me.
I am I am I am

censor be damned.

2011-06-27T17:07:00.001-05:00

You ask me why I spend my life writing?
Do I find entertainment?
Is it worthwhile?
Above all, does it pay?
If not, then, is there a reason?...
I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still.

--Sylvia Plath

My 31st Birthday in Pictures (and words, because really, who am I kidding?)

2011-06-26T11:34:00.001-05:00

Somehow all of the best days in my marriage involve miniature golf. I love it.

Surprise tickets to Earth Wind & Fire at the Charter One Pavilion.

Alas, Mother Nature had other plans. When the skies broke, we put on our plastic ponchos and huddled under the nearest tree, told each other jokes and dodged lightning.

a little morning yoga and pranayama...

This was on someone's counter at the WF in Boystown. Random, but beautiful, like much of life.

Writing and a birthday treat @ Meinl. Cupcake from WF, gluten and dairy free. Not sugar free. Serious sugar crash later.

Dinner with friends at Broadway Cellars! Grateful for a lovely party.

June 22 was a lovely day. Thank you to everyone who made it so special. At some point birthdays become smaller; you don't get paper cone hats and balloons and noisemakers and lots of people who buy you toy robots and talking dolls because they think you're special. But I'm happy and lucky that I have friends and loved ones who will gather around me to show me how they really feel about me. Thank you. Thank you.

Mixed Roots pt. 2

2011-06-21T11:27:00.000-05:00

taken at the Huntington Library, Los Angeles, 2006

Dialogue is not a means for assimilation in the sense that one side expands and incorporates the other into its "self." Dialogue must be practiced on the basis of "non-self." We have to allow what is good, beautiful, and meaningful in the other's tradition to transform us.--Thich Nhat Hanh

Some times there's no way in except for to just do it, right?
So last week my husband and I went to see a play, Yellow Face, staged by the Silk Road Theatre Project. It's written by David Henry Hwang, who's pretty popular in Chicago right now. Chinglish is opening at the Goodman in a few days (if it hasn't already), he recently lectured at the U of Chicago, and there's something else on his docket in the fall. It was an interesting play, part-fiction, part-fact, telling the story of what happens when we have to confront our ideas of what it is to be Chinese or to be American, how we believe, project and assume race about ourselves and others. Narratively interesting, lots of movement and energy, very funny.

My husband and I really dig on this cultural stuff. As he often says, we're not an interracial couple (because interracial couples are made when one of the two is white); we're hyper-racial, because neither of us is white (and if it isn't clear yet, we're both different races). Not only do we dig on majority cultural experiences, but also, and quite pointedly, others. What this means is that often one of us is in the minority during various experiences: the day after Election Day 2008, we went to an Anthony Hamilton concert (and there are few better places to be than a roomful of happy black people about the election of America's first president of color), and though he wasn't the only non-black dude there, he might have been the only Asian-American. Ditto for The Ballad of Emmett Till a few years ago. So last week at Yellow Face, during intermission I looked around, and saw lots of Asian-American faces, and a fair amount of white people too, but I noticed I was the only sista, the only black person, in the crowd.

Sometimes this is the part of a mixed race relationship that's hard on me. We had a talk about it on the way home, and I told him that there are plenty of social situations that I understand, about which I know my role, but this isn't one. If I'd married a black man, I told him, for better or for worse, I'd know my role: to take care of him, to let him, within reason, come home and take out the abuse that the white man gives him on me, to tell him he's right about everything in order to protect his fragile ego, to curse the white man along with him, to be Madonna in the home, siren in the bed, blah blah. Yes, this is TOTALLY stereotypical, and presupposes a lot of ugly things about the world in general and this black man in particular, but it's all I've got--it's the template that would be adjusted or shattered as necessary; alternatively, if I'd married a white guy, my role would be to be an exotic Nubian queen, to speak on behalf of my people when appropriate, not to challenge too significantly his paradigm of race relations in America or in his life, blah blah. Also UBERstereotypical, with similar narrow-mindedness, but sadly, I did date this guy for a couple of years, so I feel I have a bit more experience in saying this. Point is, I have some framework, however flawed, for a cultural union with a man who is white, and one who is black. But I don't have a schema for what it's like to be married to my husband, who's Asian-American.

Is this a problem? I've been married for a year; should I know more about this now than I do? My instinct is to freak out, but I don't think I should. It's been a year. Yes, we've been together longer, but I have the rest of my life, and if I'm fortunate, I'll have decades to create a schema for what a committed relationship between a black woman and an Asian man is like.

I certainly never expected that marrying into a culture that wasn't my own and also wasn't the majority culture would require me to assimilate in the most obvious way. I had no vision of becoming a sinophile: using chopsticks at every meal, learning Mandarin, hanging wooden flutes all over my home, giving red envelopes, eating fish eyes and chicken feet, mincing around my home in silk pajamas and learning calligraphy. But, I practice acupuncture and some TCM, and I consider feng shui when I'm cleaning, and as per my husband's rather ardent request, I try hard not to wear street shoes in the house. So what is it that makes him Chinese? Is it these things, or are there others? Will I ever be some of these things too, by way of marrying him? Or is his Chinese-ness it that when he gets into a cab, the driver tells him he looks like Jackie Chan, or that the black kids in our neighborhood tell him that he's white because they've never seen someone who's Asian-American? Where is Chinese? Is there any in my blood now, or will we have to procreate for that to happen? And what about him? He knows '80s hiphop better than I do (with one or two small exceptions), and as far as soul food goes, he's crazy about it, whereas I've been known to turn up my nose to a plate of greens and chitlins, to prefer kale salad and braised tofu with brown rice. But before we went to see Emmett Till, he had little knowledge of his story. He didn't know The Black National Anthem before I told him what it was. Where is black? Is there any part of him that will become black for having married me?

The truth is, I think his experience as an Asian American, and as a first generation American, has quite a lot in common with my African American one. There are so many principles passed one from parent to child, so many pressures about perceptions from the world outside the family, superstitions and rituals, it all seems so similar, ways of interacting and coping with a majority culture. We have this in common. So it isn't our differences that give me pause. It's the infrequent but still present times when I feel like one of us is being asked (by ourselves? by the other? by the prevalent culture?) to be swallowed or assimilated. This is what challenges me. The duality of dialogue isn't always helpful--when race comes up I tend toward talking about it in a black/white dichotomy, likewise for my husband, a la Asian/white. The very nature of this language in conversation excludes half of our union. It is as if each of us believes either that what it is to be Asian (or to be specific Chinese) is the same as what it is to be black, or that it is so insignificant as to be unmentionable. What is interesting, and happens to me, probably to both of us, is that when the other's culture is being examined, celebrated, honored or displayed, there's a kind of defensiveness that rises up, as if to say, "Where is the space for me in your history?" But this can't be. Honoring and celebrating one culture doesn't always mean ignoring other(s). A play about an artist who is forced to confront his own bias about what it means to be Chinese, and who struggles by his own admission to understand them successfully, has parallels with what an individual thinks Black means relative to the world's definition and perception. David Henry Hwang is telling a similar story to George C. Wolfe. Telling one story doesn't make it impossible to tell another.

So I consider this idea through the lens of what I read this morning in Living Buddha, Living Christ. That you have to know deeply your own self/heritage/tradition/story in order to listen effectively to that of others. This means that instead of allowing my self, my story, to be replaced by another tradition, I ground more effectively into my own history, self, experience, in order to bring a centered, non-threatened self to my husband. This might allow me not to feel like an anthropologist, an interloper, or like someone who's gone native, but instead like I'm sharing with family. I've got no road map, certainly, and maybe this will give me the chance to discover what about our lives is similar, comparable and understandable, without feeling like who I am has to change.

from inside the journal

2011-06-18T22:45:00.000-05:00

It has been a really difficult week. I've been writing for days now about what would happen in my house when my dad worked too much, when he left home to travel on business or put in many long hours, and how it affected my mom and me. It's been so hard. It feels like rich material, but I'm only just realizing how still, there's so much raw pain in these kinds of memories for me; and there was no place to process any of them, no place to talk about what I found difficult to understand, what I wanted more clarity about, nothing. It hurts to look back through these windows of memory, and writing them now makes me wonder if I'm doing it okay. By which I mean that I think the feeling itself, the memory, is so raw and painful to confront, narratively much less emotionally, that the writing suffers.
I went to see a play this weekend that I want to write about here, but first I want to post some of what's been coming out of me this week.

In all the times my father was away, the late nights and the business trips, there was never another man who came over to my house. My mom buried herself in her job, in food, in sleep, but I never saw her cling to another man to keep from sinking. Instead, infidelity hung in the air like threatening fog, making everything look and feel funky, but not actually doing anything. she hinted to me that she was a woman with needs, urges, and she pouted when my father worked so hard that he neglected her. It would be easy to make her sound like some kind of black widow, a maneater who hoped to seduce and abandon as many men as possible in order to punish my father for his absence. But I think the truth is she was just lonely and weak. Something in her couldn't handle the idea of being left alone, and so when she wasn't busy failing to handle her responsibility at home (me), she was flirting with the idea of acting out. A woman as charming, charismatic, and attractive as she was could have anyone she wanted, and if her husband wasn't going to stay home and see to her, well then, maybe she should get out and see who else was out there that could see to her.
It was a threat that she seemed to hold over all our heads, like a force that threatened to ruin her marriage and our family that only she could contain. And I always thought she would.
Autumn comes like a cold crisp glass of cider after the brutal heat of summer in the Midwest. There comes a point at which things that have for months been ripening begin to burnish, orange red and gold. The air goes clean and cool, like the lid has been lifted off a simmering pot and things seem bearable, even beautiful again.

But none of this matters when you're tired or unhappy, when your knees hurt and you smell like airplane and your face is dirty and you have stale pretzel stuck in your teeth. He stood outside the international terminal baggage claim, his backpack between his legs, his passport in the breast pocket of his shirt. There might not have been any time, when his bag came off the conveyor belt, to get home and shower and change before getting back to work. A familiar black suitcase with his business card in the luggage tag was spit out of a dark hole, and he hoisted it off the carousel. He might have to go straight to the office in clothes he'd been in for the last 20 hours, but at least at the end of the day he'd be able to go home to his wife.
His wife. His wife was walking toward him now. She wore a denim jumper, black stockings and flats and she'd had a stony, composed look on her face. "Hello, Steven."

"Ashely." His own voice was creaky and low from disuse. She was a sight for sore eyes, but her demeanor didn't make him feel any better. "What are you doing here, is something wrong?"
She sighed and pulled her sunglasses off her face. Her fingernails were a bright, hopeful, bubble gum shade of pink. "Yes, Steven, I'm afraid there is a problem?"

It is astonishing to me what the human body, the physiology and mind, what we are able to withstand and what we carry around with us every day, often without knowing. How much sweeter, easier, would our lives be if we could only be free.

Spring Travels

2011-06-18T22:22:00.000-05:00

They aren't tremendously good photos, but I like what they make me remember. All the kind, funny people I met as the plus one my hubby brought to his reunion for the first time. How bright-sunny-hot Boston was, and how it made all the difference in whether or not I liked being there. Breakfast with women who made me feel like one of the family two seconds after we were introduced. Walking. Smiling. East coast-ing.

Brunch with M & C and scrambled eggs with chives and truffle oil(!). Peonies at weddings, those marvelous flowers that are signs of health and fertility. Too much wine. Riding bikes in short skirts down unfamiliar streets. The Mississippi River.

Cafe con Leche (soy, please!) at Cafe Tropical in Silver Lake(?) with K & D. A coconut macaroon the size of my fist. A grateful audience. Diversity of performers. The strange, magnetic tug I feel every time I visit LA, and the brain teaser of trying to figure out how to uproot my husband and my life and move them across the country.

Inspired by Mixed Roots

2011-06-13T16:29:00.000-05:00

Managed to stay consistent while in LA this weekend with my 500 words, a summer project I've been following for the last almost-month wherein I write 500 words a day in pursuit of a finished project by the end of the summer. I missed the night I had to perform, but the next morning woke up surprisingly early, and this is what came out. Along with a shift to another chapter, I made up the deficit.
*
When I met and started dating the man I eventually married, I told my mom about him. Over the phone, her voice had that weary familiarity of a woman consistently disappointed by her daughter's choices. "Is he white?" she asked, her voice flat and unsurprised, preparing for the Yes she felt I was certain to give. I could practically hear her eyes rolling in their sockets across three hundred miles of telecomm wire and satellite magic.
"No," I answered.
"Oh," she said. Triumph flushed my face at being finally able to surprise her.
"Is he black?" she asked, a genuine question, hope bleeding into her voice like a stain.
"No..." I said again.
She was genuinely stumped. "Oh. Well what is he?"
"He's Asian American, Mom, his parents are from Taiwan."
"Oh. Wow." She paused. Then, "You two would have such pretty kids."
I'm not sure what I expected her to say. "Wow, that must be so interesting, to date a man with a blended national heritage"? "What's the difference between Taiwan and China?" "How good is his English?" or maybe even, something in the what's he like/tell me more about him/does hie make you happy? neighborhood. But it had been less than six months we'd been going out, at that point it wasn't serious, and we hadn't had sex yet. You two would have beautiful babies caught me by surprise.
It shouldn't have: when we moved in together after a year, when we got engaged nine months after that, lots of people echoed her sentiment--strangers we met at parties who saw the ring on my finger and cooed over our upcoming wedding, my relatives at holiday celebrations, even friends of mine in single race relationships, black and white--they all exclaimed with wonder and even a little envy in their voices, oh, you two are going to have such beautiful children. Such gorgeous babies. Some people even went so far as to make the statement that they'd have such pretty skin, and the almond-shaped eyes of my husband's people and the hair texture that resulted when we mixed blood would make our kids so attractive.
I hated hearing this from people. It sounded so mercenary, as if we'd selected each other as lovers and life partners because of our genetic makeup. It struck me as horrifyingly old-fashioned. My husband and I must obviously want to mitigate the less than desirable qualities of our own genes. Why else would he marry a woman as tall as me, and run the risk of being dwarfed by his own wife when she chooses to wear heels? I must think something is bad or wrong with my brown skin and thick, natural hair--why else would I dilute it with the creamy, stick straight action that he brings to the table? I hated that people reduced a product of our union, a child, to mixing hereditary colors on a palate.
I can say now that what troubled me wasn't so much their remarks as it was my own insecurity. I still find these remarks reductive in an alarmingly negative way, but they don't make me want to start fights with people anymore. Regardless of what these people think of my husbands or my appearance--if, in fact, they think of it at all--what matters is how I feel. I love the color of my skin, the warm brown that burnishes like polished copper during the summer, and I love my hair, with its coil-like curl pattern that grows so quickly, that locks so well. I love my husband's stature, our faces that fit together like magnets, his eyes that are narrow but quite expressive, his tongue which struggles to get around words like synechdoche because until he went to first grade he spoke only Mandarin at home. And if we have a child, I will love her, regardless of how the great genetic paint shaker blends our building blocks. It is more important to me that she connect with what I believe is what really makes my husband and me beautiful. We both come from a people who know the value of education. He comes from a culture that prizes poetry, scholarship, determination, art, sculpture, meditation. I come from a culture that heralds free expression, creativity, endurance, fortitude. If our children, which, by the way, I don't know if I want to have, can inherit even some of these things from our cultural family trees, then I can say with the others that he and I really did make beautiful babies.

Grounded

2011-06-09T07:44:00.000-05:00

It has seemed somewhat impossible for me to write here for the better part of a month. I've recently started one of those summer projects, but this one's focused around writing, so on a regular I'm pouring into my journal and around a certain topic, which makes coming here to pour out kind of tough too. On top of which, I've been painting painting, and let's just say I'm not confident enough in those skills to share them with anyone. Right now I'm still trying to find the value in doing some of them for myself.
But, I'm going to try to return to this space consistently. Maybe I'll be able to put down some of what's coming out of me so frequently here. It's not bad. I'll try to use this as a grounding space, a touchstone to stay in touch with what I'm doing. We'll see...

broken.

2011-05-17T15:07:00.004-05:00

I used to argue with an artist friend of mine about which division in the world, and by some extension the church, was bigger, the racial one or the gender one (and seriously, if you're thinking, "what division?" then you need to be silent and pay attention). I was sure it was the racial one: given the pervasive nature of institutionalized racism, the way people of color are marginalized and scourged in this country by politicians and the media, given the insidious nature of wounds inflicted at the hands of racialized fear and terror, there was no contest for me. But my friend saw it a different way. The first relationship that was ever violated was between Adam and Eve--humankind hadn't even gotten going yet before the man pointed at the woman and made her a scapegoat before the eyes of God. The first man was incapable of owning his own mistake, and threw the first woman under the bus to try and escape trouble; if this is the first sin in relationship, how do you come back from that, she'd say. It's been in our flesh as long as we've been along.

(As I type this now, I don't know if the relationship between Adam and Eve wasn't an interracial one. Nothing we know about this story tells us that Cain and Abel weren't biracial kids. It feels a little ridiculous to be thinking about it this way, but still.)

Lately, I'm not so sure. It kind of blows my mind the amount of stuff that get pulled on women by men every day. This semester my class read (those of them that actually read the writing I assigned) Their Eyes Were Watching God, and the line about gender violence fell on me especially hard.

"'Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don't tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.'"

This puts being a black woman in a particularly pessimistic, brutal light. We're at the bottom of the food chain, and we're just going to take all of the shit that the world dishes out to us, according to Janie's grandmother. And hey, if you flip back through history pages, maybe there's a lot of evidence to validate that. But this made me think that maybe the male-female relationship bears a bigger fracture than the one between races.

The one thing that I think I hate about spring and summer (and there isn't much) is that somehow, with temperatures higher and more windows open and more folks out on the street that men think they're free to treat me any way they want. Men I don't even know. I wrote about how this makes me feel a while back. Now another year has blossomed and is beginning to ripen, and with that comes another year of men who think they have the right to leer, catcall, holler and verbally assault.

I didn't realize how profoundly this kind of behavior affects me until our car broke down and I had to take my bike to the places I was going. I love riding my bike and to be clear, no asshole who runs his mouth in any way is going to keep me off it. But I'd had it out only the second time this year and I was physically and verbally intimidated by men in cars. Let me be clear: I, a 150-pound woman on two wheels and a chain was bullied by several men, each in his own two-ton vehicle. One of them hollered at me repeatedly and the other nearly ran me off the street. Because they thought they had a right to it. I could have been killed. That is no contest.

Now it's not that I believe I'm impermeable in my car, and if you've seen it, you know. It's not the greatest ride in the world, and its increasing inconsistency scares the crap out of me. It scares me because when it's inconsistent, I'm suddenly at the mercy of these men on the streets who think they have the right to assault and intimidate me with their language, and worse, with their vehicles.

In the grand scheme of things, I have it pretty good. I can go home to a husband who, despite his own (not small) gender privilege, tries his best to understand what it feels like to be a woman who has your humanity stripped from you by random strangers on the street. I have the good fortune and absolute grace of having learned that the reason that someone else's behavior effects me so profoundly because of people who made me feel humiliated and dehumanized in my past, as well as having learned that those who would humiliate and dehumanize behave this way because they're victims of others' negative behavior. On a good day I have the ability to show compassion to people who are less than the best of themselves (please note, today was not a good day).
But what about the others? What about the supervisor who goes back to work and takes out his shit all over his staff, who've been overworked for weeks now? What about the divorced father who yells at his son because the way he talks reminds him of his ex-wife and that wound still hasn't healed? What about the husband who knocks his wife into the wall because someone didn't give him his way?
Will it ever be possible for us to recognize how deeply we've been hurt by people in our past, and how often we cloak that pain up in something else--intellect, sarcasm, seduction, addiction, condescension--and hurl it all over others? Can we ever have the capacity to really feel what we're feeling and to believe that things that are scary or painful won't kill us? Can we ever surrender? Can we ever sacrifice?
Lately I don't have a lot of hope in us, men or women, black, white or otherwise, and our capacity to get real with one another. We're just a world of broken people smashing through our lives, competing to see who can shoulder-check the most.

thinking.

2011-05-06T09:10:00.000-05:00

I find myself frustrated about a lot right now. My favorite webcomic (and let's be honest--I only read the one) mentioned the idea of something beneath the surface of the water. That's how I feel. I've been having all these thoughts about how we communicate and what we communicate and the absolutely enormous amount of layers and lenses through which we view the world that affect our language, our perceptions and our behavior toward ourselves and others. But damn it all if I can't be consise about what I'm thinking. It's a lot of sighing and head-wagging and looking for a quote about compassion or reflection or reading or journaling, but as yet, it hasn't added up to anything substantive that I can put here.
Maybe tomorrow...

when words fail

2011-04-30T12:40:00.000-05:00

I've been away from this space for a while, both reading and writing. When I'm struggling with something emotionally, I sometimes have trouble finding words. I've learned that sometimes the words are just a veil, a kind of safe space where I can get to know my feelings on my terms, but in so doing I distance myself from them, you know? It's like I'm using my mind to hold things that are sad or scary or infuriating at bay. So in an effort not to do that, I've been wordless. Painting.
Yesterday, Honey and I went to Artropolis. It's something we've been doing for years now, an often incredible festival at the Merchandise Mart. Yesterday we were both hungry for something impactful, resonant. The conversation between the two of us was stirring, but the art was largely... not. There was a lot of stuff that was technically compelling and felt good to look at, but I wanted something to vibrate in my chest cavity, and very little did.
I did however see some work of Ed Hodgkinson from the Mark Jason Gallery, by which I was, for a short time, quite transfixed. One of the reps came up to me and explained the process, which includes a lot of firing. At first I was really intimidated by this guy. Not even on my best day am I in the market for an enameled line painting priced at 16 grand. But I listened to him, and he wasn't pushing me to buy, he was just talking process. He handed me a catalogue. It was nice. We also saw a photo of an exhibit that was at the MCA of Takeshi Moro, about the gesture of apology. It was pretty profound, given a conversation the two of us had about apology, about compassion and regret. There was a platform you could climb onto and assume the Japanese bow of apology: I did. Quite humbling. How interesting it is to (rarely? finally?) acknowledge in your sinew and bone what you try to put into your mind and behavior.
So now I am thinking of editions, like in printmaking. An artist runs off tens, hundreds of editions, and chooses however many to frame, hang, market. What if writing were like this? What if we wrote and rewrote and rewrote scenes, stories, over and over, in different shades or voices, from different points of view, and were able to market them all? I'm not talking about a Quentin Tarantino thing or "the place where six different characters intersect on the same day" or whatever. I mean editions. What if we replicated the process of crafting a story, just to see what changed and what remained the same?
Is this what rewriting is like?
The idea of ripping from other artists isn't new. After a Black Keys interview on Fresh Air (have I mentioned how in love I am with Terry Gross?) I had the idea on the brain of writers escaping to interesting far-off locations to finish a novel like a musician recording an album in a special studio, because of the juju, the sound, that was in that place. I don't know what to do with questions like these-- I don't know if the writing world has the space that the visual world does for experimentation. The publishing marketplace is so different than the visual one. If a writer's goal, if my goal, is to take my work to market and sell as much as possible, are people going to buy editions? Must they all be housed in a single volume? Does the work, in its replication, become like a magazine, and lose its story-ness?
Whew.
Oh, and one more thing. I've finally done it. But I must say, as a word of protest, that I did it in pursuit of writing.
You can find me on Facebook.
Sigh.

which one are you?

2011-04-22T10:04:00.000-05:00

craft-- 1. an art, trade or occupation requiring special skill, especially manual skill...

profession--1. a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification...

Yesterday I heard a photojournalist on Fresh Air say that journalists were craftspeople, not professionals; got me thinking about the difference, and what it means to identify one way or the other...

the p-word.

2011-04-17T10:50:00.000-05:00

I went to a festival yesterday, the Spring Chicago Naturals Meet-up, sponsored by Black Girl with Long Hair. It was pretty amazing, to see so many natural women in one place. It's true that the practice of treating natural hair with chemicals or extensions in order to make it (gulp) "more manageable" or worse (gag), "more attractive" is falling by the wayside, and that there are plenty of natural sistas out there is true. But still I was so delighted by how many women were there to network, shop, learn about and revel in their natural status. I almost bought some really cute clothes from this girl--she has a shop on etsy, psychosurplus vintage, tres cute, alas, my torso is always too long--and I came home with some sweet accessories and a new product. I'm very discriminating about what I put in/on my hair, but it was the only thing I saw that passed the label-reading test, and after the first try yesterday it seemed great. We'll see how it goes.

So this isn't a space where I often write about my body, or my beauty or my fashion or anything. It isn't to say I don't like that sort of thing; I love it. But it's not a place where I'm all that comfortable. I feel like there's a real part of being a woman that I've just started coming into truly, and it's by and large been without a lot of support from other women in my life. You know that fantasy (or reality) of girls lounging around in one another's poster-covered bedrooms, trying on different shades of lipstick, swapping clothes and dishing about which boy they'd let get to which base? Yeah, that shit never happened to me. I used to make total fun of those girls who were always in the mirror combing their hair and worrying about their makeup--life was passing them by, and they were too busy worrying if their butt looked big in these jeans.

But something changed, and I'm not sure what it was. Maybe I began to finally, finally feel like I can be the woman I want to be without having to attach to others' perceptions or judgements. Maybe I met a man who made me feel so confident about who I am inside that the real me started to shine outside. Maybe going natural was the first step to letting the woman I am out... I have no idea, one of those brilliant alchemical things. But whatever it was, I've really come into a place where I can be pretty when I want to be without feeling liek I'm compromising myself; I can adorn myself the way I enjoy and deserve, and I can distance myself from anyone or anything who complicates that.

Yesterday I came home from this expo all in a tizzy, with a renewed sense of joy and beauty at my brilliant locked hair, at my love for tending to it, at my joy in the body God gave me, and I spent the whole evening thinking about really cool things I could do to my hair.

Then, like a neon light in the 3 am-skid row of my brain, this word lit up.

Pickaninny.
Pickaninny.
Pickaninny.

oh, Farina

My mother taught me this word. It'so one of those things that you know but you don't know how you know it: you can't lay your finger on the moment in your memory when you learned it, when it touched you, when it stuck, but you know it's there in some substantive and repeated way. I imagine she used to wash her hair and braid it up in corn rows and ask me if I looked like a pickaninny.

I had no idea that this was so damaging to me. I'm only beginning to discover the ways in which all kinds of self-hatred was enacted and handed down to me, and I'm horrified at seeing the same self-hatred still be enacted today. I don't mean that black women are perming their hair because they're caught up in pursuing a white standard of beauty--many have made that argument, but it's not what I'm saying today. I'm saying that after hundreds of years black people are still colorstruck, are still caught up in concepts of good skin and good hair. How can we expect the world to treat us well if we can't treat ourselves well? And how can we treat ourselves well with next to no one to model what a healthy acceptance of ourselves?

I've often taken, after washing my hair, to braiding it into thick plaits. I've been locked for six years now, so there's a lot of hair up there, and when it's all wet it can get heavy and annoying. My sweetheart would come into the bedroom and see me tangled in my hair up to the wrists and tell me that he thought I looked nice.

"Really?" I answered, "I don't look like a pickaninny?"
And then once I really listened to myself, and I thought, why in the hell am I saying this? I know I'm beautiful. I'm nobody's dirty, ignorant, liver-lipped, watermelon-eating stereotype. On top of which, why would having an interesting, dimensional textural quality to my hair make me less attractive? This is me in my natural state. Why am I speaking such hatred and death to myself?

Because I learned it.

I'm so angry with my mom for ever thinking this about herself, and for teaching me to think it about myself. She's a smart, capable, attractive woman who simply knows too much and has too blessed a life to be caught up in such diabolical shame. But when I look back over my childhood, I see now that this bear trap of self-loathing clanked around her ankle every day of her adult life, and still does. And my churning, midnight-blue anger is run through with a red racing stripe of pity. I could pretend that I've already freed myself of the kind of humiliation that she still falls prey to, but the truth is I haven't. I can see the trap now, but choosing not to step in it is a daily activity, like choosing to put food into my body that makes me feel good, or choosing to speak life to my writing career rather than death. So angry, yes, I'm angry; my mother has come from so far that she should know better than to call herself a pickaninny or to ever have called her daughter one. She should know that being the human that you are is a fact, and one that can be celebrated and honored, not lacquered over or hidden. I'm deeply impatient, and I resent that I have to spend such time sloughing off her baggage. But all of that frustration and anger is tinged with pity. She's a woman, a person, and she doesn't know how much better her quality of life would improve if she could begin to accept and love herself.

macrobiotic haiku

2011-04-13T11:48:00.000-05:00

umeboshi pit

in my mouth reveals under

all the salty, sweet.

put a face to it

2011-04-12T09:37:00.006-05:00

"When I dare to be powerful--to use my strength in the service of my vision--then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid." --Audre Lord

I stole this off my friend's blog this morning. This kind of thing has been on my mind for weeks now. Tied to the question (that was for a while, but seems no longer to be, a burning one) of whether graduate school is right for me, is the notion of who I want to be, what I want to make, and how to put that information into the world. Do I want to be the academic with the posh leather briefcase who rides her bike to campus and invites her students over to her dark, book-filled home for finger foods, a little wine and some philosophy? Or do I want to be the writer who writes, the artist who values my skills above almost everything else and does everything in pursuit of them?

The thing about succeeding as an artist is that people have to know you--they have to read your work, see your shows, they have to follow you in some capacity. You have to have talent, skill, a working knowledge of your craft to be sure. But you also have to have the confidence to put your stuff out there (and over and over and over again, because you will almost certainly be rejected out of hand). You have to respect yourself enough to want to be heard. I've been following this blog lately and its writer recently launched a newletter of her creative stuff that you can subsribe to for five dollars. I thought it was such a courageous and appropriate thing to do. From my end (and I'm sure I'm putting words in her mouth) it seemed that she's taking herself more seriously, and wanting to respect herself and her writing enough to make this kind of leap. I respect it. My friend the painter taught me that you should always pay artists what they're worth; the world doesn't value artists enough, and unless we take ourselves seriously--and often, the price tag is the only thing anyone takes seriously--than no one else will either.

But that's really hard for me to do, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because so much of what's out there is projection--mine, yours, someone else's--and not reality, and I don't want to put a false self out into the world. And I could: I've had a lot of training in false selfs. Maybe it's because I can't tell the difference between self-promotion and arrogance. I don't want to say and do things in pursuit of, "Hey look at me," and be mistaken for a smug, arrogant know-it-all who doesn't believe that she has anything left to learn. I find the idea of drawing attention to my successes really difficult, but given the world we live in, if I don't say it, and I don't hire a publicist, than no one else will. The world--by which I mean the media and entertainment industries--have made a killing out of not very bright people jumping up and down and setting their hair on fire. If the art I'm building is about anything at all and I don't put it out there, it's gonna be run over by all the shit that's saturating the collective conscious.

At a meeting last week I had the hardest time telling my colleagues I'd been selected as a finalist for a teaching award. I don't know how good my odds are of actually winning, but it's nice, at my age, to have made the short list for something like this. But I almost choked when I said it, and I'm sure the look on my face was a perfect blend of terror, hope and mortification. Why should that be? Is it the culture of the community? Maybe; but that's too easy, to say that those people make it hard to share good news with--because really, they don't. The reality is I'm just terrified to ask others to look at me and respect me for the talents and skills I've developed.

But that's a very real block. If I don't do anything about it, it's going to hold me back in a profound and permanent way. So, I have to use my strength in service of my vision. I have to be cosistent and aggressive about seeking exposure and opportunity, and I have to do it now and keep doing it, because I believe. I believe I have something to say, something to say that someone has never heard, and that someone else doesn't want me to say, and I have to get it out there. If I am strong and motivated, and working in service of my goals, I can walk through fog without caring that I can't see the ground beneath me.

Grit Photography

2011-04-11T15:13:00.003-05:00

My friend Sooz Main is the coolest chick ever.

She works harder than James Brown (only she's not, technically, in show business) and she's been every-fuckin-where. I am such a fan. I had the fortune of writing with her in a group last year and her work changed me, as an artist and a person. She's a two time Weisman Award winner--which, to be fair, may not mean much to you if you're not a student of a particular Chicago art school. But her work, recently featured at the Book & Paper Arts Center here in Chicago, is now available for purchase.

Click here to check out the photodoc of Uptown, one of the most urban, complicated and interesting neighborhoods in Chicago. Next month, if you're in the south Loop, come check her stuff out at Manifest. It promises to be dope.

Other work--image and text--can be found here. Manifest B.A. + B.F.A. Photography Exhibition 2011: 2 May - 20 May, 2011, 1006 S Michigan Ave

percolating

2011-04-07T09:50:00.000-05:00

Father once wrote to me, "Do not forget the story of Icarus, who wanted to fly to the sun, and having reached a certain height lost his wings & fell into the sea." You may often feel that neither Anna nor I are what we hope to become and that we still lag a long way behind Father and other people, that we lack soundness and simplicity and sincerity. One does not become simple and true overnight. But let us persevere, and above all have patience. He who believes, does not hasten. Still, there is a difference between our desire to become Christians and that of Icarus to fly to the sun.

A letter from Vincent van Gogh to his brother, Theo

I think about this in the context of the artist's journey, and I feel a little less like I have to rush. There's so much outside my control. All I can do is show up and make my best, and observe what happens without judgement.

writer's process

2011-04-06T08:28:00.011-05:00

Open up a window and read this post, and then come back. Go ahead, I'll wait; just make sure you come back.

I was so excited about this post because it validated something that's been on my mind a lot lately. I think and talk with others about this idea of criticism in the workshop all the time. I run writing workshops, and feedback is kind of their bread and butter, but I encounter students who complain that in our workshops--which aren't structured classically, or as the "Iowa-method" in our hallways--they don't get enough feedback. I think it's a really common perception among writers who are working in a group session that you aren't getting good feedback if your work doesn't come back to you dripping with comments and changes, with red ink. No pain, no gain, right? You need to know what to do to make your work better, but you won't know unless you distribute it to fifteen people and they rip into it for a good forty minutes. This is probably what the instructor had to undergo in the '70s, it's only fair that you budding writers get your turn. But does this really make you a better writer?

Now, I can't say yes or no unequivocally, because I've never been in one of those standard classical workshops. I'm biased. I don't know what it's like to have your work criticized in such a manner. But I know myself, and I really, really don't think it would be helpful. I think it would make me defensive, and defeated, and I'd probably drop out of a class where the professor made it his/her goal to put my work (and my self-esteem) into a blender and hit "pulverize" on the regular. On top of which, I'm not actually sure what this teaches you to do, besides to be critical (and generally in quite an unproductive way) of others. I had a conference with a student recently who was bemoaning the fact that this isn't how we run workshops, under the misnomer of constructive criticism, and I told him why. The reason his work isn't covered in comments is because that when he gets it back, he writes to the comments. When a roomful of people take aim at your writing--which is always, I don't care who you are, a deeply personal thing--and they tell you what's wrong with it and where it sucks, you write to their comments. These comments don't tell you anything about your process, or anything about your patterns, or anything about what's working in your writing and how to make more of the story work. All you learn from these comments is that (for instance) your dialogue is unbelievable, your main character seems wooden, and nobody likes the fact that you're writing about the suburbs of Maryland instead of New York.

Don't misunderstand me. A writer needs to be critical of her work. Fall in love with her prose all she wants, the next day or week or whatever, she needs to view it with a detached, unemotional eye. She needs to have a deep sense of her standards, her voice and her message, and she needs to be able to recognize when she's saying the thing she means to say, and when she's not. But she needs to be able to recognize those things. She needs to learn how to recognize strong work in her writing, so that when her writing falters, or flounders, or just plain fails, she can recognize that too, and do something about it. Critical writing workshops give people too many opportunities to smear their own creative and emotional baggage all over other people, rather than allowing them to make ask questions and make observations that are supportive and helpful to the writer. I'm not sure if they teach writers how to recognize what's working about their writing, and how to make choices about to make the stuff that's weak stronger.

So the obvious question is, Jess, if you don't allow your students to take shots and unload on each other about their writing, how do they give feedback? Well, I don't want this post to turn into a plug for my alma mater and current employer, but I'll say this: I and my fellow directors encourage our students to listen for their voices and the voices of the work, to listen for where the story is working, where it's reaching them as audience members. We teach them how to recognize these things, and how to talk about why moments or qualities of writing are working so effectively, and also to be mindful of what questions they have about places where things aren't working, where they weren't clear or were rushed or hard to understand. We teach them to look for patterns, and we teach them to be observant about their own processes as artists. The idea, my sincere hope, is that the feedback they receive in my class is going to make them a better writer because it's putting them in touch with their process and their voice, and because it's teaching them how to reflect upon their own work in an even, honest way.

Aw, it wouldn't all fit on a onesie anyway...

2011-04-05T09:08:00.003-05:00

(brace yourself, dear reader, for I am about to be more vulnerable in this space than I have been in, I think, quite a long time...)

Over the weekend I received a message from a woman I used to call a friend. Turns out, she and her husband are expecting a baby in a few months. In this message they were soliciting some kind of contribution from their community: iron-on designs for onesies or quilt patches they can make into a baby blanket or something like that (Mom's quite the crafty one). When I saw the name in my inbox, I immediately went on the defensive. I didn't really read the note so much as press my ear to my computer screen, listening for a telltale ticking that would soon detonate and coat my hard drive in mysterious viral goo. But there was no need for all that; there was nothing even moderately provocative about this: only the request that members of their community give them something for their new baby--something handmade and with some integrity, not a giftcard to Isabella's House of Mother Couture or wherever expectant mothers buy battery-powered breast pumps and brocade baby slings.

Geeze, I must REALLY feel vulnerable because I'm being so sarcastic.

So the interesting thing about this is that forty-eight hours before I received this information, I dreamt that this same woman was pregnant, and that she miscarried. She was devastated. I knew this without having spoken to her, the way you know things in dreams; and frankly the way any woman who wants to have a child would be when God and her body have other plans. The dream was more complicated situationally and emotionally than I'm going to go into here, involving other people and lots of actions that spread pain and strife all around. But it's interesting that there was something to the dream, and I hope that the trauma remains imaginary and not realized.

(Sidebar: women keep trauma with their reproductive systems such a secret. This can't be good for us. Our downstairs neighbors have been grieving the loss of a brother for about a week now. Daily people pour into his home and eat and drink and talk--loudly--and play and run up and down his halls. This time of grieving their loss has taken the shape of an extended family reunion. This happens when someone living dies, doesn't it? We all run to the sides of the griever, deli platters and roasted chickens in tow, and sit and wail and beat breasts and pour ashes and tell stories and light incense and ghost money, and we also laugh and reminisce and have a little too much to drink and marinate in the ache of the absent loved one. Why do women not request the same when something goes wrong in their bodies? Why are we not more public about our illnesses and malfunctions? Why do we not make our grief shared, and openly, frankly, even loudly, mourn the loss of our water babies?)

This woman's been on my mind more consistently lately. My husband's been writing about her; he's working on a story about his spiritual journey, his family and our mulit-culti religious climate. Part of the narrative involves the circumstance under which we used to worship with this woman at her church, and no longer do so. Listening to the fracture from someone else's point of view is--what's the word?--provocative. It makes me feel sad all over again, and makes me wonder at what my husband must have been thinking and not saying when all of that drama was raining down between this woman and me. It shows me what he's lost in having been ostracized from the first worship community we'd found together that made him feel like he belonged somewhere, that he didn't need to know things he didn't know or practice things he didn't believe in, in order to worship.

So when I read this message in my inbox, the residual pain and fear that I'd felt after this relationship halted came roaring back in my body; it cut my breath short and my face got hot, and my finger made the mouse hand hover over "Delete". And then I hesitated. It was clear to me that this wasn't any kind of specific message to me, but more one of those corporate-shout-out-listserv-type things. But here this family was, gathering their community around them, encouraging any and all kinds of blessings and positive wishes for their new addition. As many problems as I had with my relationship with this woman, I remember how desperately she wanted to be a mom; in a few months, she'd be one. Was I really so hurt and alienated that I'd not wish her well in this new fork in her life's road? Whatever had happened between us, this was a baby: a fresh, budding new life. A new baby right now seems like the epitome of a spring metaphor, a being which by his/her very presence brings growth and regeneration and a kind of healing; could I send positive wishes and prayers for growth and discovery in the form of a onesie with the periodic table on the front?

But maybe I couldn't; maybe, given the fallout, I'm not allowed to. I felt, frankly, like persona non grata, like that one who hadn't been invited to the baby's christening, and had her knickers in such a twist that she was going to blow in on a noxious cloud of doom and belligerence and shower the baby and its family in curses for the next hundred years.

Yeah, her. I felt like tales of my brokenness and evil had reached so far into this woman's kingdom that, even if I wasn't a wicked, petty, grudge-bearing witch, that I'd be perceived by all as such, and that in that projection (likely a self-projection, but the problem is, I'm not sure) I'd not be strong or brave enough to break it, but instead would be bound by it to enact a kind of rage and ugliness that I just do not want to be a part of my life anymore.

It breaks my heart when relationships fracture and cannot be repaired in the House of God. I feel like it gives a bad name to all of us who claim that our faith and our love and our Jesus can do anything; we're willing to give Him as much power over anything that he wants, except for our pulverized hearts. What it must say to the world that we don't believe that our Jesus can heal us from ourselves, from each other. I remember as a girl that people would be "turned out" of churches that I was a member of for reasons I didn't understand--all I knew was that after a time, Brother and Sister So-and-so didn't show up to services anymore. As an adult, I watched this woman be turned out of a church we attended together, the first church I committed to as an adult. It had a lot of problems, as any body of imperfect people does, and for a while I thought simply that she was the victim of inconsistent leadership and the force of some pretty blatant evil. Now, I think that while those things are true, that also maybe she was repeating a pattern that's probably haunted her all her life: that of being the awkward Christian girl on the community outskirts who was rejected by all the cool Christian kids in youth group, or whatever socio-religious power struggle you want to insert. That kind of rejection was painful enough to bear once during puberty, and as an adult, she didn't have to take it again; so she found a worship community wherein she could become one of the cool Christian kids. Then, years later, when our relationship fractured, she found herself stuck in the same pattern, but this time--as a leader in the church we'd found--on the end with all the power, and without the ability to break the pattern; I, seeking the opportunity, not for a reinstatement of our friendship, but only the ability to worship beside each other in peace and safety, was denied. Turned out.

(Sidebar: so this is all armchair quarterbacking, right? It sounds good, but how the hell do I know if what I'm saying is true? I realize now that I know less than I thought about a woman I considered one of my closest friends for almost five years. This could be because I wasn't interested in her story; but it could also be that she was careful with what she showed me. I've put this idea together with what little I know of the social and religious scars she bears from the community she was raised in, and while it sounds good, I don't know if it holds any water. I do know that when I went to her and her pastor, seeking an opportunity to find a way wherein my husband and I could remain a part of the worship community now that we were no longer friends and was denied, I felt soundly rejected. The heavy oak door of a house of worship shut profoundly in my face, and it was fucking cold in that street, man.)

So now all this time has gone by. I have all this lovely, worthwhile perspective. I know more about myself than I did then. I can say, with some certainty, that I am not invested in any kind of relationship with this woman that is even remotely similar to the friendship we used to have. For years I felt like Timothy to her Paul--protegee to her mentor, the diminutive, slightly awkward and always in need of correction and guidance sidekick, for whom friendship is a favor. I am no longer interested in the pursuit of relationship that feels so unbalanced and unequal. I also want to be in friendships where I can be vulnerable and still be safe, where I can feel supported in uncertainty or fear, where I can be the soft, easy, quiet parts of myself without risking ridicule or chastisement. There are a number of reasons (my twisted pathology) why I sought a kind of friendship that wouldn't permit this in the first place; and there are also reasons why it worked so well for her, if in fact, it ever did. But if she's still served by this kind of friendship, well, it won't come from me.

Which is probably fine, because she doesn't want to know me anymore anyway. Which still stings. Still.

But that doesn't mean I don't want to offer blessings, real blessings, to her baby:

I pray that you grow up in a place where you can run as fast as you can until your legs feel like they wanna fall off and your heart pounds loud in your ears. I pray that you grow up unafraid of bugs, because as creepy as they sometimes look, most of them won't hurt you. I pray that you get a wide diversity of food to eat, that you learn to like vegetables and that you never have any food allergies. I pray you have at least one sibling, someone to complain about your parents with, someone to learn how to share with, someone to learn how to argue safely with, a confidant that you actually like, and aren't just related to. I pray, Dear Baby, that you learn that you can be afraid of something and still stand your ground, and that you can be angry with someone without treating them cruelly. I pray that you learn to have patience with people, especially with those you don't understand. I pray that you learn to love reading, and that you learn to love travel. I pray that you suffer one real heartbreak in life, in order that you might learn that your heart keeps beating even when it's broken. I pray that you learn to love deeply and fiercely, but that you also learn detachment, from expectations, from results, from others' reactions to you. I pray that you learn to enjoy community, but also that you delight in solitude. I pray that you learn to speak truth to power, but to do so gracefully, so that you might be heard. I pray that you learn moderation in all things. I pray that you learn to value and hold safe your reactions and responses to things, and that you feel and express them safely and thoughtfully, whether or not they seem timely or appropriate. I pray that you learn to listen. I pray you dance and laugh as often as possible. I pray that you learn how to observe yourself honestly and with compassion, and that you observe others with this same honesty and compassion. I pray, Little One, that you remember that even the least, worst, ugliest and scariest of us is Christ, and that you see us all with divine, sensitive, compassionate eyes.

There. I think I can press "Delete" now.

April 4, 2007

2011-04-04T08:17:00.001-05:00

Four years ago today I met my husband. I was reading at a series at a bar in Wrigleyville and we were on the bill together. I'd just gotten back from two weeks abroad in the U.K. My head was full of image and idea about being an American away from home and I was tingling with joy from seeing my boyfriend--I had no idea that my relationship with that guy had already expired, and wouldn't find out for several more days. Nice guy that he was, he didn't dump me until I'd been home a whole five days, but whatever. I was still excited about being home, and having been totally inspired by my time abroad, and now being one of the featured reader's in one of Chicago's most beloved reading series.

I read a story about a woman who'd broken up with her boyfriend (oh! the irony!) and felt like the city was tainted for her by the memory of their relationship together. It was April, and I had on this great skirt I'd bought at Marks & Spencer, and it was finally (!) spring and I wanted to write about it.

The stoplight is about to change; people are leaking into the intersection in anticipation. But I am glued to the concrete by your memory. I am tortured by the taste of you that floods my mouth with the tangy, green bite of spring. Your laugh is in the wind, your hands are the hot breath on my legs as I walk across the subway grate; your shoulders are the shoulders of the man who stands in front of me, also waiting for the signal to cross the street, checking his watch. I reach out to touch him, already knowing it isn’t you, and when his stranger’s face looks expectantly into mine, I stammer an apology and brush past him, hoping he isn’t watching me walk away, thinking what an idiot I am. The whole train ride home I rumble past Grand, Chicago, Division, and Damen, jammed between a bored-looking businessman in a gray suit and a student with an IPod and a tube full of architecture plans sticking out of his bag. Neither of them notices me. My breath is shallow, a brick of anxiety weighing down my chest. I feel heavy and unready for spring. Your smeary fingerprints are still all over it, and I do not know how to wipe them off, or even if I want to.

They make you drink at this reading series. Well, they don't make you drink, but it's customary to, to have a shot before you read published work that you brought to share as fodder for trivia, and another shot after. Between the two shots of Jameson's I had that night and the bourbon and soda I'd had to quell the shakes before I read my own stuff, I was pretty lit by the end of the night. So all I remember about his work is that it was a first-person story about a jackass of a narrator who has sex with a girl who passes out with her head in the closet. The story is about more than this; he hates it when I describe the work like this. But honestly, I have the tolerance of a nine-year-old; after one drinks the room's a little soft focus and after two it spins. I was wasted, and that's all I can remember.

He came over to me at the end of the night, and we talked. About what, I've no idea. I don't remember; all I remember thinking is, Jess, this guy is talking to you, don't blow this, you can't let him know you're wasted. Keep smiling and nodding, and try not to sound too stupid when it's your turn to talk.

Less than a week later I was single and heartbroken. A month later I ran into him at a school reading, and a couple weeks after that I saw him again at another reading. At one of those I gave him my card, and he emailed me to ask if I like jazz and when we could get together.

I had no idea who was approaching me; I'd been pretty soundly shattered by a mediocre guy who'd treated me badly and I was sure that all men were pigs or dogs, determined to use you and then cast you aside: the story's always the same, it's only the name that changes. And then I met this guy, a writer who wasn't threatened by me and my writing; he talked as much or more than I did about visual art and theatre, and what it meant to make a thing, and he had this amazing perception of art as a sacred act; he was interested in me; he flirted with me without making me feel dirty; he reminded me I was smart and funny; he held me when I was sad and lonely.

It took me six months to fall in love with him. It took another woman to make me realize that he wasn't just the next guy to toss aside. It took me a year and a half to decide I wanted to marry him. I'm lucky that he picked me; I'm even luckier that I picked him.

photo courtesy of Grayscale Studios

Ten Books that Changed (or Are Changing) My Life

2011-04-01T09:18:00.011-05:00

I'm not sure what makes me do this. I've recently been recommending stuff to my students, and yesterday had a great conversation with one, wherein I compared him to Jacob wrestling with the angel. We all should be so lucky, to go to the mat with those things we find most beautiful and sacred and terrifying and demand that they bless us before we release them from our presence. At any rate, gazing at my bookshelfs produced this:

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison- the first time I read this book, I was a senior in high school, then again, a junior in college. It was the literary leg of my undergraduate thesis. It was the first book I ever read that made me say, "I didn't know anyone else felt this way. This is so stunning; I feel less alone." I use sections of it as a teaching tool in the classroom, because I think Ellison does some amazing literary tricks, but mostly I still just love it because the voice is so arresting and profound, and because when I read it the words vibrate in my chest like plucked harp strings: the prose provokes in me a visceral sensation. It makes my mouth water.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath-again with the doubling up: read first in 11th grade and again junior year. I had the immense privilege of staging (most of) this book with my mentor, Paul Edwards, and a handful of fellow artists while in school. It is irreverant and confused and so ardent in its desires. There's none of the cool Eastern detachment I'm supposed to want in life in this novel; it is all about frustration and passions and the carnival-colored swirling world of mental illness. Another one that vibrates in my body out of familiarity.

Immortality by Milan Kundera- I've read most of the Kundera cannon, and Unbearable Lightness twice, but this is still my favorite. It's so experimental (which I generally don't cotton for too much, and I think my husband would love it) and it does all kinds of things I didn't think a book could do. It was the first time I'd read a conceptual-philosophical-religious-international story and it made me think differently about a writer's relationship to her audience and her characters.

Running in the Family by Michael Ondatjee- this is a recent read, a purchase in pursuit of advice on a writing project, and it took my breath away. I've had a lot of trouble battling internal censorship, and this book tells its story honestly and without hesitation. Sometimes the writer isn't even there, and we're just left with images and scenes of the family, without his pesky opinion tripping up the movement. It is a fine model for my writing right now.

Going to Meet the Man by James Baldwin- my father gave me my first copy of this book when I was twelve. I don't know how he came by it, but that gesture cemented several things within me and between us, the least of which he ensured that I'd become a writer. Yes yes, everyone says that Baldwin is a stronger essayist than fiction writer, but that doesn't matter to me. This collection, and in particular "The Rockpile" and the title story, are so significant because they teach me about people I've come from. I don't know if you've ever encountered a thing and felt that you were connected to it in a way that you couldn't see or articulate, but that's how I feel when I read these stories. On top of which, Baldwin's so diverse; he fought in so much of his work against being pigeonholed as one kind of writer, despite the fact that the world wanted to define him. I admire that.

The Women's Book of Yoga & Health: A Lifelong Guide to Wellness by Linda Sparrowe and Patricia Walden- yes, yes, Light on Yoga is transformative, and right now I'm in a bit of an ashtanga groove (started reading this blog recently), but this book changed the way I look at yoga. My practice has been evolved into a spiritual practice of sorts for some time now, but this book helped me discover a kind of synthesis between my flesh, my feminine identity and how I move my body around. I am regularly consulting it for holistic advise about living with the things I live with as a woman. I'm so glad it exists for me as a resource.

The Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson- I didn't know it when I read this book, but I love Anne Carson. I read her collected poetry of Sappho translation and was transported, and I bought my husband a book-album-picture box-thing called Nox that she created, that is completely inspiring. The Autobiography of Red is one of the strangest and most beautiful love stories I've ever read. It is because of Anne Carson that I can work on the other project I'm working on, which is still much to green and incubatatory (can I make that a word?) to mention here--yet.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender- I fell in love with this book when I saw Paul Edwards' staging of "The Healer" at Northwestern a few years ago. I met Aimee Bender when she was on Columbia's campus in 2008--that seems like forever ago. She was so approachable and friendly. When this book came out I bought it at a sidewalk sale in my department and devoured it in maybe 72 hours. I was blown away by the writing, her innovative use of language and metaphor; it knocked me on my ass--and I wanted to read it slowly, but the story was so good, so marvelous and interesting that I had to read it fast. I gaze at it on my shelf, half in joy half in terror of how fucking amazing the writing is, and know I must read it again with my writer's mind at the front. But not while I'm writing--this might be one of those books I can't read while I'm writing because it'll make me wanna throw in the towel and go become a secretary or something.

Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant- this book is a sleeper, something I'd never heard of before, that I bought recently and am reading quite slowly. Like the above mentioned, this book is definitely one of those I can't read while I'm writing because it makes me want to quit. These stories--regardless of length or subject matter--are so surprising. It's like riding your bike down a hilly street and having all these strange cool things run out to you and tie balloons on your wrist and offer you strawberry Kool-Aid or something. It's alarming. It's sad and complicated. I love it.

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh- I'm reading this one slowly, too, because the structure lends itself to being picked up and put down again. I love the intimacy of personal papers, and the kind of wet, incisive truth that comes out in journals and letters that we get to be privy to because someone thought to take these bundles to a publisher. I'm on page 12. I'm so thankful.

So there are a couple others that I'll add post script but that didn't make the list of top ten for one reason or another--some of this will be obvious.

*The Bible- this one's a staple of wholesome religious midwestern upbringing, isn't it? A book I've been reading on and off my entire life for a number of reasons, and that I read now for a number of reasons; it's become quite an interesting tool in terms of writing and relationship. I hope I'm able to view it without the condescension that so many employ in casting it as a great book full of lessons but not necessarily relevant. I hope also that I don't use it as a measuring tool or a weapon or a barrier against the complications murkiness of life, so that I can blind myself with it and feel safer in a strange world.

*Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey-I've written about this book before. Say what you want to about him, this novel shook me for weeks afterward. I don't know what his process was in drafting this thing, but it was astonishing. The kind of discipline I imagine it must take to make a book like this, I should be so lucky.

My husband's book, titled but as yet unpublished (I think you can, I think you can, I think you can.)- I couldn't bear the cheese factor of putting his novel on this list. It's my hangup. Life with him is so great sometimes I think my face is going to fly off in all the joy, but I feel so obnoxious in that place, so I try to play it low key. It's a knotty tale of race, family and loyalty. Look for it. (I think you can, I think you can, I think you can.)

*one more, I thought of one more. Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose- This book has changed the way I read. And write.

What am I missing? Tons, obviously. But what changed your life?

calling it into being

2011-03-31T10:54:00.003-05:00

I had to link to this poem because I couldn't get the spacing right here.

I've been thinking of it, and of Eliot, which I hope comes later.

In like a lion and out like a lamb, they say. March has brought only more daylight in this part of the country. The high today is ten degrees lower than the average. The sun is nice, helpful; it makes it easier for me to go into the front of the apartment and do yoga early (early) in the morning. But my body is aching for warmth, for sandals and only one layer of clothing. I'm ready for it.

why do you write?

2011-03-29T17:22:00.005-05:00

I write because if I had to bear these burdens for the rest of my life without processing, they would kill me.

I write to understand what hurts or confuses or frightens me.

I write because I don't listen well; I write because I can't act.

I write because some days I think that writing will get me a better job than the one I have.

I write because the words, the ideas, the thoughts don't come out as well if I try to talk, or to make with my hands.

I write because eventually what comes out of me makes sense. I'm able to look at it and to understand what I'm thinking, where I'm struggling.

I write because while writing I am consistently surprised.

I write because I have been more deeply moved by things I've read than anything else. I still remember being a high school senior, sprawled out on my twin bed, sobbing over Emma Bovary's death, despite the fact that she was a spoiled, confused, selfish brat. I remember feeling of baptism the first time I read Ralph Ellison and felt that someone understood. I remember the emphatic bobbing of my head up and down the first time I read Sylvia Plath. I remember the wonder and silence that sat in my chest like a cast iron pot the first time I read James Baldwin.

I write because I do have a voice, and it is stronger on the page than anywhere else.

I write because I want to try my hand at the tricks that I find so impressive.

I write because I like making nice sentences.

I write because it provides me with just enough illusion that I know what's going on or that I have any control over anything around me.

I write so that I don't have to have children.

I write to lend my voice to the chorus of broken people who are trying--searching--opening and softening and searching.

the new kid

2011-03-23T08:30:00.001-05:00

I love taking yoga classes when I travel. It's become one of those things I do that's both a great way to soak up the local culture and to do something that's familiar. It's good for my body to do yoga after getting off a plane or train; it grounds me and helps me to arrive in a new place. Often, I learn a new way of thinking about a pose; in San Francisco I learned about why I should practice Parivrtta Parsvokonasana with my back heel up versus down. This week I took a class in Philadelphia and one in New York, and both times I did a variation of Warrior pose that I've not often done called Devotional Warrior: interlace the fingers behind the back, inhale and extend the arms back and down to open the chest; exhale and bend from the waist; work the front shoulder inside the front bent knee, eventually working the head down to the floor.

But I learned something else this week, too. I learned that the new kid in class always gets adjusted. Whether you introduce yourself to the teacher at the beginning of class or you come in late, the teacher's going to know you're a newbie to her class and as such, is going to press you deeper into a forward bend, exaggerate the rotation of your spine in a twist, or further deepen your rotation in a hip opener.

I generally don't mind being adjusted in class. I believe that the teacher knows more about yoga than I do, and can see things about my body that I can't see. And I've never had an experience where a teacher's ever been inappropriate. But generally, they're fine. I like that the adjustment puts me further into a pose, opens and awakens a sensation I've never felt before.

This week, though, I felt kind of like I didn't want the adjustment. One of the teachers came over to me and pressed on my thighs when I was in baddha konasana (that stretch you did in high school gym class when you put the soles of your feet together, bent your knees and opened them wide and tried to press them down to the floor) and I didn't feel anything. Nothing; her stretch didn't change my body at all. So why, I wondered, would this woman put her hands on my body and try to adjust me if nothing changes?

Maybe the teachers feels the need to prove that she can recognize that I'm new, and that she (most often it's a woman) sees me. Maybe she feels like a stranger to her class can't possibly have a practice that doesn't need adjusting because if it was all good I'd have been there for months now, and she has to catch me up by laying hands on me. Or maybe I just need to be adjusted. I don't know. I'm learning not to mind the conspicuous feeling I get from being the new kid in a new class, but I wonder about the kinds of things that yoga means to people. I'm also learning that yoga teachers aren't these great, evolved higher beings--of course, I generally tend to give people of leadership more power than they deserve--but that they bring in their own insecurities and hangups and flaws with them, and have trouble turning them off just because they're coaching me into a pose.

on the eve of a big trip.

2011-03-17T09:50:00.004-05:00

The woman beside me on my morning commute posted to Facebook this morning about two people on our train car--one who was obese, one who was anorexic. I'd noticed both of them when they'd gotten on the train this morning, but hadn't thought to blog about them until I snuck a peek over the shoulder of my bench buddy and noticed she was making some pithy, witty comment about them and the fact that only in the U.S. do we have health problems like anorexia and obesity. I found her attitude about the whole thing rather uncharitable. What if the woman (women) had some thyroid problem(s) that made it impossible for them to take weight off/put weight on? Fat people and ugly people do have it prejudicially worse than just about anyone in this country; maybe they have enough trouble fitting into toilet stalls and avoiding fainting all day long, and they don't need any of us to comment on them on our blogs or Facebook pages. If we can't think something compassionate about them, then maybe who gives a fuck what's on our minds this morning.
So,
the following is lingering from the second read of a book that, the first time I read, I was too young, and ignorant, to understand. This time around, as a piece of writing, and as a comment on knowledge, relationship and the human mind, it falls on me quite differently. I've been trying to finish it before I get on a plane tomorrow morning (at the God-awful hour of 7 am), and bring instead a collection of Mavis Gallant stories I'm working through (thank God) rather slowly; but now, twenty or so pages from the end, I might just reread it again, from the top, and think again about the writing, the voice of the teller, the use of punctuation, the way we get to see everyone in the midst of a scene as the scene moves. I don't know if this is a great teaching tool, as books go, but it's an interesting book. And I share a love of it with the lady I'm visiting this weekend, so that's another reason not to leave it behind.

You have the right to work, but for the work's sake only. You have no right to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your motive in working. Never give way to laziness, either.
Perform every action with your heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits. Be even-tempered [underlined by one of the calligraphers] in success and failure; for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.
Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work down without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahman. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.
--"Bhagavad Gita"...
O snail
Climb Mount Fuji,
But slowly, slowly!
--Issa. ...
God instructs the heart, not by ideas but by pains and contradictions.
--De Caussade. ...
"Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said.
--Kafka.

because it's time to write about March, already.

2011-03-08T16:11:00.000-06:00

Things today looked, if this is possible, both lumpy and flat. the ground was flat: brown with small, inconsistent blades of green, flat with the energy of degrading. All of the trees are budding now, or almost all. But the buds, knobby, lumpy, don't seem like they're holding anything. They seem like aberrant growths with little potential.
I noticed myself frustrated with the state of things this morning. I feel like I can barely stand the state of things. Like something has to change. I want spring to be here now, or I want to move now; I just feel so ill at ease. Spring would mean something was happening. I want something to be happening.
But I suppose Mother Earth will not be rushed. I mean, we force plants in greenhouses, but they're never as good as when they're growing in season. And the same can be said for so much growth--you can't force it; it takes the time that it takes.
But today I wish for faster.

Healing is like Spring; it is a slow, arduous process, time consuming, unrushable, happening in silent fashion, discernible only in increments until it i s through and then POW it has come raging and profound and complete, the taste of it in your mouth so wet and green and fresh it takes your breath away and makes your eyes tear. Healing is like wrestling with the angel: once it has happened, once you've been blessed by it, you are better, but you can never be again what you once were; you will always walk funny from now on.

bonding

2011-02-15T16:30:00.004-06:00

For St. Valentine's Day my sweetheart gave me several wonderful gifts, but my favorite is a set of magnets of the Periodic Table of the Elements. I'm no scientist; in fact my skills have never leaned the way of math or science. But chemistry was ABSOLUTELY my favorite science in school (maybe because it's so similar to cooking, or making art), and I used to gaze up at Mrs. Austin's Periodic Table of the Elements in class and sigh with delight at how organized and attractive everything was. Each element had a photo of what it looked like: a giant hunk of gold; a tube of neon gas; a perfect, oblong bead of mercury--a metal that was liquid at standard temperature and pressure! It was all so... measurable.

Chemistry was hard for me, but I loved the experiments, and figuring out how many oxygen atoms had to be on one side if this is how many you had on the other. I made poor Mrs. Austin's life hell, I'm sure. For days I felt like I was banging my head against a wall, and then suddenly, someone turned on the lights and I understood it all, and I loved it. And then chemistry was fascinating, a way of knowing the universe and making new things and deconstructing complexities to their smallest, most knowable pieces.

A while ago one of my best friends gave me a t-shirt with the periodic table on it, and not long ago I lost it, while doing laundry. I somehow left it at my sweethearts place (before we'd moved in together) and the laundry gods took it. I hope they enjoy it as much as I did.

And now I have my own table, color-coded, so fine, each element its own marvelous substance all mixed up out there in the soup and mud and stone that we call our life, our world.

quiet.

2011-01-31T10:53:00.006-06:00

I don't have a lot of words lately. I don't want to fill up any space right now with explanations, I just want to do what I'm doing. So this is what I'm going to do here.

My husband is smart; he knew before I did that what I was fashioning was a self-portrait.

From a journal in 2007 (because I've been going through them lately):

If you want shiny lips you have to use the candy-flavored lipgloss on top. Brenda likes to wear it plain without anything underneath, but I always wear it on top of lipstick. It makes my lips look great, so shiny and red it's like they're practically made of vinyl.

Now that it's getting warmer the girls are starting to wear the tiny tight skirts we all used to. They wear them bare-legged with those little flats, leather or canvas. I'm still rockin my skintight jeans. I'm curvy the right way, and my legs are really skinny so they always look good. Brenda and Marisol can wear those shirt skirts really well, and Marisol has great legs, kinda creamy and muscular that look really good in those tiny skirts. But poor Callie, she's a year behind the rest of us and still flat as a friggin board. She doesn't have any hips or ass to speak of, so she's just better off wearing baggy stuff and showing off her midriff and her nonexistent tits.

We spend most of our time on the streets: that's where the action is. We get looks from all kinds of men. Callie and Brenda are content to fuck around with guys from Clemente or Lane Tech, you know, boys our own age, and Marisol will sort of go with the flow. She gets her fair share of looks and stuff but I don't know if she's even into guys. The whole time she's out here, she has this real dead sorta look on her face. One afternoon she was talking with this guy who was driving a black Benz two-door, and she stretched her tight pink lips into a smile and she talked to him, but the whole time her eyes never lost that vacant dead look. She got in his car and they disappeared down Halsted, but hell only knows what happened. We didn't see her again for a couple days and when she came back she had the same vacant look.

The thing I like about it is the tease. You're out there, and you're all dressed up, and it ain't like those tight ass Lincoln Park housewives, or this sick little single girls that fry their hair flat and teeter around on high heels that they meet in bars. They see me, in my skintight jeans and my jacket that's just short enough to show my ass, and my perfectly white Reeboks, and they know I'm tight. They know my body is new and fresh, so fresh it crunches when you bite it, and their mouths water. They think, look at her, she's young, she's anonymous, she's probably never had it before, so good or so hard or so big as I could give it to her. They don't know what I know: that they aren't anything special, that I don't put out, I only suck dick, and that most of the time they won't even get that. They ask me if I want a ride, and it really doesn't matter where they're going, I'm probably going to get in, but I gotta make them think that good young girls like me don't get caught dead with grown men, with my hand down their pants or their hand down my pants, doing dirty things young girls like me know nothing about. All this is still in the future, and they look at me from behind the steering wheel, their eyes questioning and lips curling in anticipation.

And then I know I can have whatever I want.

"write a little every day, without hope, without despair."

2011-01-18T10:43:00.004-06:00

There comes a time when all your outlets are blocked, as with wax. You sit in your room, feeling the prickling ache in your body which constricts your throat, tightens dangerously in little tear pockets behind your eyes. One word, one gesture, and all that is pent up in you--festered resentments, gangrenous jealousies, superfluous desires--unfulfilled--all that will burst out of you in angry impotent tears--in embarrassed sobbing and blubbering to no one in particular. No arms will enfold you, no voice will say, "There, There. Sleep and forget." No, in your new and horrible independence you feel the dangerous premonitory ache, arising from little sleep and taut strung nerves, and a feeling that the cards have been stacked high against you this once, and that they are still being heaped up. An outlet you need, and they are sealed. You live night and day in the dark cramped prison you have made for yourself. And so on this day, you feel you will burst, break, if you cannot let the great
reservoir seething in you loose, surging through some leak in the dike. So you go downstairs and sit at the piano. All the children are out; the house is quiet. A sounding of sharp chords on the keyboard, and you begin to feel the relief of loosing some of the great weight on your shoulders.

This is from a journal entry Sylvia Plath wrote the summer she was eighteen. She took a job nannying for a family at the seashore, and evidently was struggling with some feeling while there. I read it this morning, yet another gray day dawning, and felt some resonance.

I do not have to finish anything, to be anything--a master of a pose, a wife, a friend, a teacher--in a complete form. Every piece of work or action, every choice I make is a practice. It is an easy thing to say, but sometimes I feel like I am in such pursuit of things, of mile markers or evidentiary benchmarks, that I feel like I'm pulling, or tugging my way down the road.

I would love to be able to blame the way I'm feeling on something easily corrected, like my diet. Like the absence of sunshine. Like too much or not enough sleep. But it isn't that. I don't know what it is, or where it comes from, but it is both truer and more elusive than that. It is something thin and invisible and undetectable, but ever-present. It's terrifying in its ever-presence.

I don't know if I can afford to feel this way right now. I have things to do, there are expectations. The clock doesn't stop, people still want me to produce. I cannot hit the pause button on my life, or my relationships, while I take a week to recuperate.

I'd like to continue writing, to chronicle and to confront and to keep making work despite this awful feeling descending on me like fog or rising tide. But I fear I sound incomprehensible. It's like writing high: you think you're all wise and poetic, but really you're trite and indecipherable.

I have also tried to tell myself that these vacuoles of despair are part of my legacy, part of the journey of being an artist. The writer's life is many things, among it a rhapsody of rejection, and the emotional sewage that comes with that is just what the talent through the ages has bequeathed me for choosing this path. Maybe if I look at that then this feeling has a purpose: maybe it will increase my talent; maybe it will increase my determination; maybe I will know better how to cope the next time. But even that sounds a bit hollow in its consolation. It feels like a positive spin.

Sigh.

don't answer that, it's rhetorical.

2011-01-10T09:47:00.004-06:00

The little girl, the nine year old who was killed in Saturday's shooting in Arizona, she was born on September 11, 2001. She'd just been elected to her third-grade student council, and went to see Congresswoman Giffords to stimulate a budding interest in politics. Think of that: she entered the world on the date of one act of terrorism and exited it by means of another.

An act of terrorism. I'm not sure if I've heard this kind of language around what happened at the Safeway in Tuscon. Which is interesting to me, because language has been a big deal in the fallout of this tragedy. Keith Obermann put out an editorial about rhetoric and language of violence right after the shooting --and a friend of mine critiqued it, and he also linked to a really cool article in the Atlantic, keep clicking to find it. A sheriff in the area connected these actions to political rhetoric from the climate in Arizona, and is now being condemned and judged and distanced by a ton of people in the media. Malibu Barbie and her brood are being chastised for some target list they've put out, and are rabidly defending their use of this kind of language. Fascinating that after such human life is destroyed that language is the first thing that people start to talk about: the why of a disaster like this is in the language. That's the reason I'm a writer.

The thing I notice is that people who are called on to comment and respond to the shooting keep calling the suspect "a monster", "a deranged individual", a lone, crazy gunman with little to no evidence of this having been anything more than a random act of violence. Why is that? Don't get it twisted: I'm sure this guy is not well, is mentally unstable. But why do we need to strip him of his humanity when we talk about his actions and motivations?

Because, Jess, you say, he stripped so many of their humanity; turnabout is fair play. But I don't know. Maybe this guy is crazy, and maybe he acted alone, but maybe this isn't so random. Maybe he's angry about a lot and thought he was out of options. Maybe he wanted to have his voice heard, and thought the only way to do it was to smear blood and brain all over parking lot tarmac. Maybe he's not a monster; maybe he's just a guy.

That's the reason that I think we're all in such a hurry to call this guy crazy, to chalk him up as a nut job, to make this the random violence of a deranged man and not an act of terrorism.

My Honey pointed out that the vernacular in this country makes acts of terrorism committed only by brownies: The Oklahoma City bombing was an act of terrorism, he says, but does the nation remember it that way, the way that the remember the Twin Towers bombings as acts of terrorism? Tim McVeigh was one of ours, he was no towelheaded, camel jockey Muslim. He was a good ol' boy. He wonders if this shooting will linger in our collective memory as an act of terrorism--which is what it is.

I'd argue that given the path of the rhetoric conversation that the odds are slim. Everyone wants to write this guy off as a nut job, so that the pain and fear we feel is a little less real, so that instead of vulnerable, we are brave, fearless, indestructible. Not only do we need to make what might have been a political statement into an apolitical violent expression, but we need to keep the same dark face on terrorism. If people who blend in as easily as these men do can violate and destroy our safety and our freedom, then we are never safe.

instead, joy.

2011-01-07T11:01:00.008-06:00

So.

I was working on a post about Las Vegas and about how my maiden voyage there was a series of firsts, but even before I sat down I found myself sounding altogether too wise and sum-uppy and here's what I learned on my vaycay. Yuch. I also recently did a bit of griping about how difficult San Jose was with the in-laws who seem as different, distant and inscrutable as Martian epic poetry. But no more of that either. Instead, some favorites from Sin City and San Francisco. I've left out all the ones of me looking contemplatively out at the Golden Gate Bridge and wondering if I should move my husband and my life out to the West Coast. (It's a real question, but there's such a thing as too many furrowed brows.)

Thus.

open letter in pursuit of writing time

2011-01-03T09:59:00.000-06:00

Dear Professors:

I'd really like to be selected for your residency. The truth is that for the first time in a while I feel like I might be beginning to understand the path that I'm on as an artist. I've been working on a memoir for more than a year now, and I discover that the question I want to explore is what it means to be an American.

It's a fascinating, quite alarming time to be alive. I feel as if the stakes of identity and interaction are so high. People who could take their citizenship for granted are now feeling acutely threatened, are beginning to circle the wagons. The question of American identity affects our politics, our relationships, our jobs and schools, our artistic expression. America is changing; I ask myself is American optimism, our relentless can-do, pick-up-by bootstrap attitude a virtue or a vice? As we toil toward a better existence (individual or collective?), what problems are we ignoring that will hinder our nation? I am fascinated, arrested by the question of what it means to be an American, a black woman in America, in an adolescent country that has prospered faster than it can keep pace, that wants desperately to forget horrors it's committed in the name of America, or to justify them as necessary and appropriate. I feel like I'll be writing to ask this question for a long time in my artist's life.

Right now I'm writing about my family, my upbringing, my race, all of the things closest to me that make me an American. I guess I'm writing inside out. But I know that this is just the beginning.

I get so excited about this work it makes me shake. Salivate. Ache. I'm desperate for it.
I've been working really hard with mixed success. I've learned that teaching is super important to my writing. When I am able to be super disciplined and focused, the students I work with reflect back a boundless amount of energy, energy that feeds brilliantly back into my work, and also allows me to funnel back into them at my best. Unfortunately, what generally happens to this symbiotic relationship is that I pour into their writing, and am often left without enough time or energy to approach my writing in a way that feels truly satisfying. A residency like this would afford me the time to focus my efforts on my work without having my attention divided.

I don't really know how to ask for a good opportunity except for to ask. To say please, I'd love the chance to come to your university and finish what I've been working on for months. To say that I'm vibrant and hard working and ambitious and that one day you'll want your uni to be a part of my bio because of what I'm doing in the world.

Pick me.

loss of yuletide innocence.

2010-12-24T19:56:00.005-06:00

I wish I had some lovely picture to attach to this blog, something that was stunning in its composition and was the perfect blend of joy and nostalgia and confusion and sadness that I feel. But all that's on my camera are pics of the intersection of Western and Pratt Avenues, and a couple pictures of my husband poking himself in the nose.

I'm writing this from San Jose, California. Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite has been set to animation of Tom and Jerry, and my mother-in-law is slouching in a fashion reminiscent of my husband's watching it silently, rapt. Northern Cali is temperate for December; I am without my family, a family that would be trying their best to enjoy the holiday with me but I'd be struggling with our special brand of dysfunction. Instead I'm struggling with the Chang brand of dysfunction.

As a child I used to love Christmas. I was so excited by the darkness and the lights, the joy of opening amazingly gorgeously wrapped presents, the moving mystery of celebrating the birth of Christ. I used to get so excited about Christmas cookies and crackers and fresh fir trees. There was just so much magic in the season.

Now, all the magic is gone. I reminisced today about the day I found out there was no Santa Claus. There are no cookies, there are few around me who feel the way I do about the mysterious, spiritual nature of this holiday.

Tonight my Favorite and I are going to a late-night Christmas service. It's the first time I've done something like that. I pray for candles and carols and contemplation, and a remembrance of Christ. I pray that He still has the power to remind me of what I love about Christmas.

from the journal.

2010-12-06T17:28:00.004-06:00

So twenty minutes ago my husband and I were talking. He was, oh-so-graciously warming my feet with his hands, and I was reading to him something I'd jotted down in a recently-taught workshop. Nice work if you can get it, I know. I read it to him because I thought I'd put it here. It's an incomplete telling of a malevolent stepmother who gives her teenage stepson a blow job in pursuit of a superpower that he doesn't know he has. It can only be transmitted genitally, evidently.

"Sexy," he says, when I've finished reading. "I told you about this website, clean$heet$dotcom, yeah?"

"No, what is that?"

"Something like this would be perfect here."

Turns out it's a website for "literary erotica"=mediocre storytelling meets mediocre sex.

I sigh and grumble: turns out sex is still too hard and vulnerable-making for me to write well, at least in the ten minutes I gave myself in the last workshop.

So, instead.

Mom never let her do her homework on the table, so she was splayed out in the living room floor. Her math book was open, a sheet of paper under her hand, between her fingers a dull nub of a pencil.

Will's footfalls thudded against the floorboards, and she felt the vibration against her ribcage, even through the braided rag furg on the floor. He clomped through the living room to the kitchen where her mother was sweating over several pots on the stove. All was silent, then she heard, "Get the hell off me, you see me tryin' to fix dinner."

Will came out of the kitchen, his hands on his hips. Bea could see his body, tall, angry, in the dining room. The light above the dining room table was on: Will's eyes were in darkness but Bea watched his lips move as he said, "Damnit Annette, all a man wants when he get through workin' is a cold beer and a little sugar. is that to much to ask, Annette? Is you to good to give me that?" He said her name, Annette, in two syllables, hitting the first just as hard as the second. Ann-nette. It sounded so hard and heavy in Bea's ear, and she winced, rubbing her ear against her shoulder, to rub the sound of his voice out of her head. She couldn't feel it, but the corners of her mouth were turned down in a frown, two commas creasing her cheeks;she couldn't see it, but in the kitchen, hovering over the stove, the same frown dug into her mother's face.

From far away she heard her mother's voice continuing the argument. "Yeah, it ain't to much to ask if I ask for help with the cleaning or the washing up after dinner."

"Get onea them kids to do it. Ain't that what you had all them kids for? Besides, I worked too hard all day just to come home and clean up after your black ass."

"If my ass so black, what you doin reachin for it all the time?"

He laughed a laugh like a dirty car engine. "'Cause black is how I like 'em."

Bea hated it when her parents were like this. The way they act, she could never tell if they were fighting or flirting. They go from friendly to mean so fast. And they were always shouting.

Annette's head popped out of the kitchen and peered into the shadow of the living room. "Bea! Get in here and set this table."

She scrambled up from the rug, all knees and elbows, and went through the dining room into the kitchen. She hoisted a stack of plates out of an overhead cabinet, feeling her father's eyes measure and examine her body. He was standing in the doorway, and when she passed between them with the plates, he pinched her ass, right underneath where it was fullest. God, she thought, he's always doing that. I wish he'd just keep his hands to himself.

frog boiling slowly.

2010-11-22T10:00:00.003-06:00

I was at work the other day listening to the BBC News Hour, and I heard a story about how great it is living in Singapore. It's an incredibly international place, with myriad Asian and Indian populations, and attracts businessmen and ex-pats from all over the world. It's clean, prosperous, cultured, crime-free, and its citizens are happy with their wonderful quality of life.

But it has these rules. Rules about things like spitting and littering and vandalism that get American teenagers caned, yes. But rules also about things like saying what you want to say about the government. According to this story--which I haven't found yet, google your heart out--speaking out against government leadership can get you publicly ostracized and economically blackballed by the government and anyone else who wants to save their skin and protect their interests. Not only can the government fine and/or imprison you, but anyone you know has to turn their backs on you. What baffled this reporter (and me too) is that so many of the citizens in Singapore seem just fine with this kind of censorship. The prevalent attitude seemed to be, "Yeah, okay, so we don't have your 'free speech' or whatever, but who needs it? We're clean and well-fed, we're educated and employed: our needs are met. What do we really have to complain about?"

Now there is a small community of people who believe this system of government is out of line, who are resisting this willful ignorance and are fighting for their right to speak their minds. But it is small, and what they're doing is dangerous.

What scares me about it so much is that it seems to be happening in so many places.

I've been hearing lots of stories on NPR about Chinese citizens who leave their villages and go to county seats, or even to the capital, Beijing, to complain about corruption, deceit, and destitution perpetrated by the local government on its citizens. These people, who complain, are imprisoned without any trial or cause. They lock their own citizens up in hotels that double as prisons, torturing them, barely feeding them. For months, even years. One girl, a twelve year old, is living on the streets; she went to Beijing with her mother, who was taken away for filing a complaint. She didn't want to stay home in her village. If she were still home, though, she could have been in school; now she's homeless, without any family. There are hundreds of these people, being denied their own humanity, because they are speaking out against their own government.

I'm not so naive as to believe that this kind of thing hasn't, or doesn't still, happen in our country. I know about people who lost their jobs in the Fifties because of one man's paranoia that he couched as vigilance against Communism. And I'm sure that I'd be sickened by the things my government does to its citizens in the name of protecting American Democracy. But are we so gripped by fear that we're willing to allow our basic human rights to be taken from us, just so we can live more comfortably?

This weekend an Ohioan raised a ruckus because she was allegedly violated by a TSA agent in a pat-down while flying. Someone wrote in to comment on the story and said, "if you don't like it, don't fly. I feel safer knowing my fellow passengers have been searched." This person's in good company, too. But I'm not sure: I'm not willing to let some security agent stick a latex-fingered glove between my legs just so that I know that everyone else on the plane has been subjected to as much scrutiny. When does good security cross the line and become sexual assault? Can we ensure the safety of our citizens without debasing them by subjecting them to such intimate and harsh scrutiny? And don't we have the right to protest if we feel we're being taken advantage of in the name of security?

My husband and I are getting on a plane in a few weeks. I don't know what to expect, I don't know who's going to touch me where, and I don't know what profile they're going to use when they look at me. But I know I can feel the temperature rising. And I don't like it.

a window into the work.

2010-11-12T10:51:00.002-06:00

Poor—adjective, noun plural. What your parents work tirelessly to avoid being now that your family has moved to The Suburbs. Poor is delineated by: buying and wearing used clothing; having cooked rice for breakfast (because it is cheaper and more available than designer cold cereals) (ironically, as an adult you do both of these things by choice, not out of economic necessity); poor hygiene and mediocre grooming habits (a fact your mother would NEVER allow to be true about you, see also nappy); infestation of vermin and or insects; irregular bedtime patterns; inability to speak with proper verb tenses or subject-verb agreement; malnutrition; ashy skin and bare feet.
Both your parents were plagued with the concrete reality of being poor growing up. Your parents work for years at jobs they don’t like, in order to make the money that allows them to forget that they know what poor feels like: the rub against the skin, the emptiness in the stomach, the burning sadness and frustration churning in the heart of poor. They have survived it like warfare. They have toiled diligently, desperately, incessantly, to prevent the stench and infection of poor from touching their adulthood or your life. You are not poor and you do not know poor.

restless.

2010-11-01T09:18:00.003-05:00

I feel the spirit of a wanderer on me today. I think it's been here for quite some time.

On the mat this morning, I realized that I've been torn between feeling the need to move and the reality of staying. It might be easier if there was something compelling me to set down roots and make something here, something steady and permanent. I whined to my Favorite the other day that maybe I should be more like the people we know, people with "real", steady jobs who want to make babies and knit doilies and invest in 401K's.

I can't help feeling like this is an inherently female struggle. I'm sure that's not the case, but it seems to me that the men I know just aren't beset by the question of life choices that make them happy and life choices that make them comfortable. I'm not saying men have it easier because they don't have to make these kinds of choices; I'm saying that I don't know how many men think like this, what they should do versus what they want to do. I don't know how many of them feel this tension.

My Favorite and I are looking at ways to make plans: immediate, middle distance and long term. I get skittish about the things that I want to be true about my life and how they accommodate--or don't--those plans. Is it reasonable to plan for a life abroad for a month? Three? Six? Is it reasonable to consider completing a PhD program in the next ten years? Do I even want a PhD? Is it even reasonable to hope that this book I'm working on will actually get me any of the things I want (namely, a wider scope of recognition as a writer and enough leverage to contend for a teaching position on which I can earn a decent living)?

I feel plagued by uncertainty. I'm not depressed about it, but I feel very much like I'm walking through fog, and that it's quite difficult for me to tell what it is that I want, which is rare. Even in all of this, I don't want to send my roots deeper into the ground; I want to fly. But I just don't know how the skies are, or if I'm strong enough.

Blame it on the falling leaves.

processing...

2010-10-04T12:02:00.004-05:00

It has been so hard for me to write here within the last couple of months. I've been spending a lot of energy writing in other places, as of yet, places that are simply not as public as this one is, and that makes it hard to share. It isn't that I'm not reflecting, not thinking or speaking or engaged with the world. It's that I'm doing so much of that other places, that trying to do it here also feels somehow a little forced. I think, "what can I write about on my blog today/this week?" which feels a lot less genuine than the things that I have to scribble down urgently at night, or for hours while the sun is still high.

I've been reading lots of others' papers. Diane Arbus, an American photographer I didn't know until a dear friend exposed me to her work. Her photos make me think of what we know as our American experience, and what we show or hide from the camera, from the world. Sylvia Plath. I suppose it's no accident that I happen to be reading these women at the same time, reading the prose of a poet who struggled with things that were and still are challenging for me: identity, commitment, vulnerability, discovery and the ever moving beast that is making art. A Moveable Feast, a book that languished on my shelf for years until I recently picked it up; I am kicking myself for not having read it sooner, despite my Hemingway bias, but now is better than never--better for my writing, for certain. Francine Prose and her discussion of books and writing, that I want to use both as a writing and teaching tool.

I am thinking, sometimes with lust, sometimes with fear, always with intensity, about travel. Movement, and work and relationship, and how to see and do and know more of the world in a safe and risky way that will invest in my private life and my shared life.

I am teaching, and off to a rip-roaring and quite fun start.

I am working, writing, so hard.

On top of which, I've been processing, slowly, like chewing cabbage, a lot of history that is locked in my body and mind, some recent, some long past, and it makes touching and engaging the real world--being present and meeting the demands of others--at times quite difficult.

It's hard to shed light on what's on my mind these days. It'd look rather like a mind map or a bulletin board of some kind: snippets of quotes and images, some of things I never thought I'd look at, and receipts with phrases jotted down on the back of them and a map of Paris and a found red mitten.

593 Gilbert Street, Christmas 2007

2010-09-15T11:22:00.002-05:00

what is it that you really find, when you begin to excavate in your past, peeling back paint and promises and stories told over and over? what waits for you there, showing itself to be the truth?

On consideration of the artist's process

2010-09-13T09:45:00.004-05:00

Thank you, Paul Edwards.

From a letter from Diane Arbus to Marvin Israel:

A parable: yesterday on the Fifth Ave bus Amy found a little padlock and a key on the end of a knotty chain. She played with it delightedly locking and unlocking it, and then decided it would be better without the chain so she undid the key from the chain, and very pleased, like she'd solved everything, she slid the hook of the padlock through the hole in the key and locked the padlock. Now the key cannot be lost but it cannot be used either.

what I did with my summer vacation

2010-09-01T09:16:00.002-05:00

September dawned wet and gray here; it felt like a giant middle finger from Mother Nature. I know, I know, everything that grows dies, without the decay and slumber of autumn and winter there would be no blossom and ripe of spring and summer. I know that we haven't seen the last of warmth or sun for a while yet. But while my honey wished me a Happy September, veritably vibrating with pleasure at the turning season and his imminent birthday, I grumbled about the temp dip that approaches and dreaded this afternoon's faculty meeting.
So in the spirit of the first assignment back to school,
What I did on my Summer Vacation:

I wrote. And wrote. More than I was prepared for, and in quite a satisfying way.
I taught writing workshops to a bright, dynamic group of Chicago teens for After School Matters at Gallery 37.
I taught a writing intensive for the Albany Park Theatre Project, one of my most beloved ensembles here in the city. I love what they do.
I stood on the top of a dormant volcano, more than ten thousand feet above sea level.
I married my best friend.
I had a kick-ass wedding.
I spent time with old friends I hadn't seen in years, and new friends I'd just met, although not nearly enough time with any of them.
I broke up with two women, one of whom was a close friend, the other whom I thought was a close friend, but just turned out to be a whiter, younger version of my mother.
I flew halfway around the world to spend a week in paradise with my husband. I giggled, I broke out in a rash (stupid sunblock), I kayaked, I luaued.
I ate meat for the first time in nearly three years.
I read books.
I saw movies.
I did Marychiasana II.
I met some family that were warm and kind and really sweet to me.
I rode in a hot air balloon over rolling hills and plains of northwestern Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin.
I began apprenticing at a yoga studio in Rogers Park.
I had breakfast with a writer friend I hadn't seen in several years, and rejoiced in the truth that sometimes relationships are easier than you think they are.
I almost beat my husband at Scrabble.
I gave this blog a face lift.
I grieved.
I laughed.
I connected.
I learned a ton about myself as a teacher, about my strengths and weaknesses, and ways I can grow in order to provide the best experience for my students and myself.
I had a five elements acupuncture treatment.
I rested. I rode bikes. I spent a fair amount of cozy-cozy time with my Favorite and I showed more discipline than I thought I had in my own life.
I learned that the thing to do is what is set in front of you, fully and wholly, without attachment to the outcome.

So if every summer is as full as this one, then who needs fall or winter? This season felt full, burgeoning. I'm not looking forward to the slowing down and scaling back and piling on and the sluggish, moody, dark that is the back half of the year. I know a few people for whom autumn and winter are the best season, the time when they grow into luscious fullness, and hey, it has to be good for somebody. But summer, I just know it, is super good for me; I gotta find somewhere I can stand to live where it lasts longer than it does here.

radio silence?

2010-08-30T10:14:00.003-05:00

Today's reason why I love this woman so much is because she shamelessly cites National Public Radio programs on her blog. Terry Gross is my hero. Someone needs to teach me how to air interview so I can be the kind of rock star that woman is.

Lately I've been feeling really, really lukewarm about this whole blogging scene. I've been thinking a lot about what we say and why we put our voices into the world in the first place, Andy Warhol, Langston Hughes... my mind's a mash-up right now. I haven't lost any confidence in my voice, just perhaps some confidence in this space as a medium for it.

I suspect though, that there is something beautiful and good about the reality of speaking in hopes of an audience, and of listening in hopes of connection; some days we're not just yacking to hear the sounds of our voices, or listening to be entertained. Some days we're actually connecting.

... sigh.

I'd like a baby now, please

2010-08-23T09:54:00.004-05:00

No, not me. My heart pounds and my ovaries scream in panic at the very thought.

But, I know a woman on this fantastic journey; she and her husband have just started trying to conceive. I am so glad I know her, so glad I still know her, so glad that she's chronicling her journey, and so SO glad I get to share it with you. Read her stuff at I'd like a baby now, please.

Lately I've been ricocheting about my thoughts about this blogging thing: not always sure how I feel about it from one day to the next, given some of the things I read, or write (or don't write). But this one, this makes me glad that there are people who do this.

silent does not mean static

2010-08-16T17:14:00.004-05:00

"Consider Van Gogh. Among his many problems was... the cost of pigments. He couldn't afford the pigments he wanted and turned the lemons of poverty into lemonade by adding the sugar of precedent. He wrote to his brother Theo, who paid for his supplies, 'In case you should be a bit hard up, I could manage perfectly without the expensive blues and the carmine. One tube of Prussian blue yields as much as six of ultramarine or cobalt and costs six times less. Delacroix swore by that vulgar blue and used it often.' This is a prayer to Maya, the Hindu goddess whose name translates as illusion.

"Maya is a necessary god. We must maintain illusions. We must maintain the illusion that what we create matters and that we are not pointless, discardable energy packets but creatures every bit as valuable as our best sentences seduce us into believing that we are. We must create these adaptive illusions and then believe them, even though we know that we ourselves have created them. If you want to know why Existentialists call life absurd, this is why...

"Every honest, intelligent person will see through her adaptive illusions often enough. That isn't the main problem. Suddenly writing poetry or stage plays may seem meaningless and ridiculous to you. All right. That realization isn't the danger. The danger is that you will forget that you must maintain your illusions by force of will and that this moment must be met with a hearty Of course! I always knew that about poetry! Nothing new here! You must quickly argue yourself back into the belief that poetry matters--at least to you--or face a meaning crisis in proportions you do not want to contemplate."

--Eric Maisel, A Writer's Paris

8 July 2010 Thank you, Lawrence Weiner

2010-07-17T16:07:00.003-05:00

TAKEN FROM HERE TO WHERE IT CAME FROM
AND TAKEN TO A PLACE
AND USED IN SUCH A MANNER THAT IT CAN ONLY REMAIN AS
A REPRESENTATION OF WHAT IT WAS WHERE IT CAME FROM

reclamation.

2010-07-06T08:58:00.000-05:00

He mau ke Aloha.

Thank you, Lizzie.

one year later

2010-06-22T07:35:00.002-05:00

It's been a year since I began using this space as a place to write, to make noise about race and art and relationship. I haven't given much thought to units of time measurement. As a girl, days were all I had, weeks were too long, months seemed unbearable and years, unknowable. When I graduated from college I spent three months feeling like I was skating through a vacuous white space, unsure of where I was, because all my life's efforts had been building to that date in 2002--which, incidentally, was my birthday.

But now a year seems reasonable. A year ago I was eager to get done some of the stuff that was on my "stuff to do before I turn 30 list" (sadly, no progress whatever, but not for lack of trying), and to push myself ambitiously and artistically. It's been a year, and things have happened. People have revolved in and out of my life, the nature of several relationships has changed--namely, I'm a married lady--and I've grown a lot into the fullness of myself. But some things have stayed the same: our apartment is as it was, with perhaps more appliances working than before; my job is both in the most satisfying and nauseating of ways, still the same.

But I wonder if change is the way to measure growth. It is with something. If a plant doesn't go to seed, in order to propagate, it's going to die, right? It has to grow taller and fuller, to be fed and to respond to that food, in order to grow. So it is with people: if anything stops moving it begins to atrophy.

But people are more nuanced. A person keeps growing regardless of the fact that they may not get any taller. While the major majority of things around me look the same as they were a year ago, I know that they're not.

I turned 30 on the 22nd. He took me to dinner at a sushi restaurant where he'd taken me for my birthday the year we began dating each other, three years ago. It was nice to be in a place we'd been in before, to remember the newness of our relationship--which at that point wasn't even a relationship, was just two people dating and enjoying--in our present newlywed context. The food was amazing (a hamachi carpaccio I won't soon forget), and there was a lot of looking back. These days I feel an energy to look forward, to move toward what's next with his hand in mine. I find marriage, and turning 30, to be freeing acts; they make me want to fly instead of nest.

I don't know what's coming. He thinks 30 is going to be a good year. There's definitely some 29 shit to leave behind me, and some things to be tidied up. But maybe it will be.

you're glowing.

2010-06-21T20:42:00.003-05:00

The sky outside my kitchen window turned an astonishing cloudy cool periwinkle blue tonight, and I stopped in the middle of doing dishes and making egg salad for lunch, to run out into it. Once outside, on the back porch, I discovered that the sky was the kind of color that makes everything under it the same color: sometimes the sky is an unreachable palette of color, sometimes it is a color that brings every other color into its fullest expression, but sometimes, it dyes the world beneath it. This night, the concrete, the untreated wood of my porch, the cars below, my arms and legs and my beloved's torn shorts on my legs, everything glowed, vibrated with this periwinkle blue.

I thrust myself into it, sitting down on the porch steps to let the blue soak into and glow off my skin. It was marvelous. I listened to birds, and bugs, and sirens and whines of planes arriving and departing, slicing their metal noses through the low clouds above.

And then, silent as grass growing, one at a time, the fireflies went off. Green: beep, beep.... beep,......... beep, beep. Their little rumps glowed one after another, each looking for her partner, hoping to find his mate.

I ran into the kitchen, and dragged my mate out of it, whose hands were still wet with soapy water. We sat, nearly silently, letting the sky turn our skin blue, whispering at the fireflies.

Summer is so perfect, and complicated and fleeting. I wish every day that I had more of it, that I lived in a place with summer six months out of the year, instead of three or less. I know I'd never take all that for granted.

stoicism is for pussies.

2010-06-16T10:59:00.003-05:00

Two weeks ago, my sweetheart sent me a New York Times article about stoicism as a principle of philosophy and what it costs American soldiers to employ stoicism in their practices protecting our nation and its interests. I reread this paragraph several times.

The Stoic doctrine is essentially about reducing vulnerability. And it
starts off where Aristotle leaves off. Aristotle insists that happiness depends
to some degree on chance and prosperity. Though the primary component of
happiness is virtue — and that, a matter of one’s own discipline and effort —
realizing virtue in the world goes beyond one’s effort. Actions that succeed and
relationships that endure and are reciprocal depend upon more than one’s own
goodness. For the Stoics, this makes happiness far too dicey a matter. And so in
their revision, virtue, and virtue alone, is sufficient for happiness. Virtue
itself becomes purified, based on reason only, and shorn of ordinary emotions,
like fear and grief that cling to objects beyond our control.

When he and I first got serious about each other. I'd tell him he was stoic. While it's true that beside my passion and energy even a Big 10 cheerleader is, at times, bound to seem stoic, he struck me as the kind of guy who was unflappable. He took everything in stride, and when he spoke about emotional extremes, he did so in a measured and rational way. This way of life is completely foreign to me. I feel everything so deeply, sometimes more than I wish I did. (And today is probably not the best day for me to be writing about stoicism and vulnerability. There's nothing like launching yourself into the stratosphere to marry your favorite person in the world to dilate you emotionally, only to crash back to the rocky surface of the earth and deal with the complicated detritus of your everyday existence.) So watching this man deal with things in a way that I didn't understand was at times fascinating, frustrating, confusing and maybe even scary.

One of his best friends, Frank Crist, died not long into our relationship. It was a strange and tenuous time for me; I knew Frank, and was sorry to lose him, but we weren't close. I didn't know how to respond to my sweetheart in the midst of his grief. He had a number of people around him grieving deeply over the loss of such a good man and a gifted writer and teacher, and they held each other in the best way they knew how and nursed their wounds. People aren't always good at dealing with emotions that scare them, but they did what they could.

I don't know how or what he was feeling when he was with me, after having lost Frank. I know that he was feeling something. I remember the morning that he woke up in my bed from a dream, sure that Frank had said goodbye to him. I remember the quiet, and the stillness, the feelings that masqueraded as stoicism, and the lightly tapping fingertips with which we touched each other around that time, confirming our presence, gently touching to accommodate tenderness.

And people change each other, right? They say that women in relationship are always trying to change men, and so men are loath to commit because they want to be free to be themselves and women are bending over backward not to come off as rigid, tyrant shrews who want to nag or manipulate our men into being someone else.

So my man isn't any Iraqi or Afghan veteran. He's someone with more than his fair share of sorrow and pain, but also with some pretty amazing blessings and talents. (Who isn't?) I don't know if he would describe himself as stoic, or as vulnerable. I think I know that he gets to be more vulnerable with me than maybe with anyone else he knows.

What a gift that is, to have someone in your life that you can be so vulnerable with. It isn't something that each of us have, it isn't something that it's easy to have and we shouldn't take it for granted.

We were standing underneath a chandelier, in front of a mantle, in what constitutes an altar in an antique warehouse, and I listened as he pledged himself, his life and his efforts to me and mine. Then I got to say this:

My Favorite, my ai-ren,
You are the man who loves me. You are the only man I have ever known who has not been too afraid to love me as I am. You are the most thoughtful, wisest and humblest person I know. You are a student of the world, and you teach me to listen, and to seek lessons in surprising places. You are a human who cares about humanity, and who seeks to make small but indelible marks on the hearts of others. You are Bear, my playmate, you are my best friend; you are the one who makes me feel held and safe and loved in this world.
I choose you as my husband and my partner. I promise to love, honor and respect you. I promise to be faithful to you, and to walk beside you in all things. I promise to support and encourage the artist in you, in whatever shape or form your artist’s life takes. I promise to love you even when you hurt me. I promise to try to speak with honesty and tenderness, and to listen with an open heart. I promise that whenever I am scared or angry, I will always try to move toward you, and not away from you.
I want to reflect back to you the humor, the beauty and the joy I see in you. I want to be the woman who provides room and safety enough for you to take the risks that will help you grow into the truest expression of your self. I wish for us a marriage that learns to balance togetherness and intimacy with individuality and solitude; I wish for us a life of growth and discovery, full of affection and sharing.
I am a better woman for loving you. I hold you in my heart as my favorite today and forever.

I wasn't a mess: I knew I'd be crying through the entire thing, and I did, so I had an antique lace-trimmed hankie to wipe at my face. But I was awash, I mean, I can't feel the bottom of the ocean floor awash, in my emotions. It felt great. I felt like standing there with him, feeling all that stuff that made me so knocked out, I was the safest I've ever been. Later, people came to me and told them how emotional our vows had made them, or how they were worried for me and what I was feeling. But not me; for all the lip trembling and the heavy breathing and the pausing I had to do, I felt so safe in my vulnerability with that man. My husband.

So of the two of us, I guess he's still the one who operates on a more even keel. But he's touchable; he's vulnerable; he feels things, and I'm better able to tell sometimes that he's feeling something.

Vulnerability absolutely comes at a high cost. It means that you spend a fair amount of your time feeling like crap, because not every feeling can be good. But I'm glad I have a partner who can touch and be touched.

cellstories

2010-06-14T10:23:00.002-05:00

So I have a story that's being run on Cellstories, a website that allows you to get short fiction on your smart phone on a daily basis. It's going up tomorrow, Tuesday June 15, in conjunction with 2nd Story, a cycle of oral storytellers I'm involved with here in Chicago. On June 15, even if you don't have a smart phone (like me, I don't have one) you can read it, just for the day at
www.cellstories.net

Check it out.

mrs.

2010-06-14T09:59:00.004-05:00

returned. feeling a bit buried under the mountain of what piles up while you're in paradise, being all blissed out. lots to tell, but today, this is all I can offer to do the talking.

we are so happy.

wheeeeee!

2010-05-28T07:12:00.004-05:00

the roller coaster begins. wish i had some tidy, pithy, stunning photos to provide you with what's around me and what's coming, but alas, the only one is below, taken last fall.

it's been getting steadily, incrementally more real as days go by. and now it's here.

i'm just trying to keep my eyes open and my feet on the ground. it helps when we can touch each other; makes me feel myself more.

right now, beneath me, the clack-clack-clack of the climbing car. my stomach's already dropping, in excitement, in fear, in anticipation.

lucky me, what an amazing person I have to fall with.

photo courtesy of grayscale photography

take the hit.

2010-05-24T10:35:00.005-05:00

This morning I felt amazing. Literally brilliant. Supernatural. I stepped onto my mat, and one salutation in, I felt like light was shining out of my pores. I felt strong and graceful and competent, and very grounded.

Sadly, that feeling is pretty transient. Less than an hour later, while trying to iron out a detail or two of the remaining week, I suddenly became vulnerable again, made of flesh, not light or granite, human, pliable, and able to be hurt.

I'm getting married in seven days, six, if you don't count today. I've been quite quiet on this space because my wedding and marriage have been ruling the majority of my brain space for some time now, and this is not a wedding blog. I didn't want to log on here and use more of my time to think about centerpieces, or organizational skills, or conflict with loved ones. This is a space about questions and identity and discovery and joy and struggle. Weddings and marriages encase both of those, of course, but some of my life has felt so pedestrian lately, that I just couldn't bear spreading it all out here.

Things I've been meaning to think about instead of my wedding:

my upcoming 30th birthday
my long-form writing project, and what decisive direction I can take it in to continue trying to reach my goals as an artist
how to get a better teaching job, or a better job of any kind
how much longer my sweetheart and I want to live here in Chicago
how to get health insurance, now that my health insurance company has dropped me--or will, within the next 30 days
how to increase discipline into my life
how to make strides in my yoga practice, without actively wanting to be stronger or more flexible
his writing
his life as an artist

All these things I have run my fingers over, and then left behind on a shelf, to think about seating charts and bars and shoes and jobs for my hideously large family to do.

I am so looking forward to this coming day, to all of the people who will be there, who will be happy to be there, to have some of the magic and the beauty and the dedication that exists between me and mine rub off on them. I am equally looking forward to the time where we can sigh and sleep and tangle our limbs together and eat tasty food off our fingers and get up and go to bed when we want to. Rest.

I believe that something good happens when I am vulnerable, instead of indestructible. I believe that I am better able to feel, to feel myself, to feel the world around me, to feel loved ones, when I am soft and touchable, instead of invincible. It doesn't mean I don't get hurt; it's not even noon yet and I've already gotten hurt. I can't say something trite like it's worth it. I can only say that I want to be able to feel his fingertips, and all the hugs (good lord all the hugs) and the bubbles in my mouth, and that means taking the hit. Not bracing against it, just taking it.

journal entry: notes on Manifest May 14, 2010

2010-05-15T22:03:00.006-05:00

"Pickering reveals our predilection to deflect fear by trying to anticipate and plan for it--and our tendency to process it by turning it into narrative."

What marks do you use to show that people have been in a space? How do you see objects, footprints, detritus, fingerprints, smears on a place to reveal something about who lives here and the lives they lead?
a magazine shrine to Paris Hilton on a slanted wall--hiding a stairwell on the next floor--painted lavender. models. one leg in front of the other, blue water, palms.

(If I were going to go back to school, I'd want an interdisciplinary degree. I think theory is useful, but it's only useful to academics. I don't want to cut teeth and earn chops on it.)

"I am going because it is worthwhile, it is my particular challenge, it will most likely bring benefits, but that is not why--I am going because I would have no peace if I stayed."
The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst Sara Andrews

So many women in the BFA exhibit are white. An overwhelming number. Is it because so many of the photographers are white? Or is it because of the fashion industry's homogeneity? What does the industry say to a changing world? Does it say, give us more women of color we can put on the cover of our fashion mags? in movies?
and what do we say? loosen your grip on what's attractive, sexy, striking about women? How do you define pretty?

There's a lot of the white story being told. White women. White men. White families. Who's telling my story? Who's telling our story?

How much training in a thing does one need to practice it?

the s-word=should

"everyone had a drink in their hand to help them keep their balance"

"in a congregation, gossip moves on good intentions"

30 lines with my new name in memory of absent partner

Project US

2010-05-12T08:45:00.003-05:00

So occasionally I've lent my space to others who are doing things that I think people should know about, and today I wanted to share something that my friend Johanna Middleton is working on.
I met Johanna about a year ago, when we worked together on a stage play produced at Northwestern and directed by my good friend and Performance Studies professor Paul Edwards. She's an incredibly talented and focused woman, and she's recently shared with me a project that she's working on, that creates a forum wherein young people can talk about sexual health. Often this topic seems a bit radioactive, as evidenced by the woefully inadequate education in our school systems, and the blanketing of abstinence education from religious organizations as the only way of talking with young people about their sexuality. That's the reason I'm so excited about this project; it sounds empowering for young people, like it meets them as individuals and agents in their own destiny. I'm so excited about what Johanna's doing. She's hoping to take this project to a conference in Austin, and to continue her work in Chicago. If you're interested in how you can help further what she's doing, she can be reached at johannamiddleton2007@u.northwestern.edu

Project US recently developed through collaboration between myself and a thoughtful and talented team of Northwestern alumni and students.
I am very proud of this program, which has toured to schools and youth conferences throughout Chicago over the past several months. Recently, Project US received an exciting honor. We have been invited to present and perform our play at the internationally acclaimed Theatre of the Oppressed Conference in Austin, Texas in June 2010. This is the worldwide hub of socially-engaged arts and education!
Project US is an original, participatory performance that works to initiate conversations around young people's sexual health. We created the project in response to the lack of comprehensive sexual health education in Illinois public schools. We strongly believe that it is necessary to create a space for productive and meaningful conversations around health and well-being for youth, using performance as a framework.
Devised in partnership with Chicago youth from schools and youth groups, Project US combines performance, improvisation, and participatory actions to actively engage young audiences in personal dialogue. It is designed so that young people steer the play’s direction; each performance is specific to the individuals in our audience. Students partake in a series of activities and games that actively engage them and challenge them to think and respond critically.
The response has been incredible! Young people tell us repeatedly how much they want more programming like this. When given the opportunity to take personal responsibility, a space to practice tools for healthy communication, and armed with accurate, comprehensive information, students are asking important questions. They are taking charge of their lives and developing the self-confidence and self-esteem to make healthy, informed decisions about their health and futures.
We partnered with Sisters Empowering Sisters (SES), the social justice and leadership youth group of the Chicago Girls' Coalition, on initial project planning and they have been on tour with us. They provide peer-led sex education trainings that supplement the performance. We also partner with the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health (ICAH), which serves as our umbrella organization.

Sensual.

2010-05-07T11:40:00.006-05:00

I've been tearing through books lately--I go through fazes where I don't read much for months, and then for months I devour almost anything, really amuses my sweetheart--and I just this morning put one down that has been messing with me ever since I picked it up.

James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning.

I could write about my opinion about A Million Little Pieces, and the state of the American memoir, or I could write a review of the book, which is crafted artfully and thoughtfully and is a sprawling tale of an enormous community told well (sometimes alarmingly, viscerally, achingly well).

But I'm going to write about feelings.

Last week I read a book my Janice Y. K. Lee called The Piano Teacher, about interracial relationships separated by decades in Hong Kong. It was interesting, and I'm sure Ang Lee would make a beautiful film of it, with Ming-Na and Ralph Fiennes and Tony Leung and other Asian American actors, and mouth-wateringly gorgeous costumes and sweaty jungle air, and it would do well in the box office. But it made me think of relationships, and prioritization, and how you choose to love someone and how you give to them.

This James Frey book, it makes me think about Los Angeles, California (the book is set there) and why I've been in love with it for so long, and how, in a very real way, I've been longing to engineer my life and the life of my sweetheart to wind up there. And it makes me wonder if all that desire isn't absolutely misplaced, isn't me trying to make a mistake, make a choice I would later regret.

The last book that made me cry, really sob, was called The Bone People, about three New Zealanders--one white, two Maori--who made a misfit and at at times utterly dysfunctional family. It was painful and brutal in places, and I was profoundly affected by it. Lee's novel puts me in a place of wondering about the mashing of two different cultures, and if it's ever possible to succeed at loving across lines of that kind of demarcation. Frey's novel makes me think that the jewel I've been dreaming of on the west coast is really just a cesspool of damaged, deeply wounded people left to bake and congeal in the sunshine with really good PR.

The truth is that these books are good, really good, but not great. Not transformative for me as a writer, at least not yet. The truth is I lately feel like a cup of hot dark liquid filled to the brim, perched on top of a car or clutched in the hand of someone distracted, that is threatening to turn over and stain whatever I land on. I feel tender and emotional. My mom used to tell me, "Jessica, you feel things more deeply than anyone I've ever known." There are all kinds of theories about why people are excessively sensitive, right? It doesn't help that I'm three weeks away from a major life change.

Today I am looking at a gray sky, wishing it were blue, and thinking about what it is to be someone who feels so deeply, who, despite a fair amount of damage from a number of sources, still has skin the thickness of rice paper. Does it mean that a career as a writer is a colossally bad idea, and instead I should choose something with less public interface, like work in a warehouse? Does it mean that sensitivity is an endangered quality of the human condition, and it makes me a better artist, and that I should treasure and preserve it, despite the fact that that means a painful life?

Or is this just how everyone feels when they're about to get married?

p.s. Big thank you to my good friend, and great writer, Andrew. I don't think he reads this, but he's the reason I'm reading all these books.

inside looking out, part II

2010-05-05T10:23:00.001-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/opinion/05cope.html?emc=eta1