Eating

I'm standing in my kitchen tonight with no lights on, barefoot, moving the onions and garlic to this side of caramel and adding pasta sauce. On this new alkalizing diet I have taken up, I can't (shouldn't) have tomatoes. The sky is burning out pink that's reflecting on the milk factory behind my house, and it's cool and feels like September. And a taste of the sauce (like my ersatz madeline cookie), and suddenly I remember all the meals I had at my godparents' house, of garlic bread and pasta, and sitting at their dining room table which always slanted down...Your skin turns over every 28 days, and every cell in your body replaces itself in a year, and how no wonder I feel so far away from home. I'm not composed of the same cells, the same food, the same soil, the same air. I am standing at this place that feels a little free, a little unmoored.

Last night I had a dream that I had to spend all my vacation savings on a trip to LA, and I was at a store with circle row after row of nearly impassibly-tight clothing racks paying for a shirt for the trip, when I saw that one of the quarters the cashier was going to give me was a 1949 (silver) quarter. The clink of that metal against the other coins was like a shiver. And, then, the cashier said (although she didn't know my name and I paid in cash), "Oh, we have your credit card here. We've had it here for months." But, I don't even own 3 credit cards, and then I was frantic that someone was charging on my account, or I hadn't paid my bill, and I was late to catch that flight.

Most of my anger has washed away, there are just light but wide trails of silt where all my upset and fears overwhelmed me. But wasn't there a thing comforting in being that flooded for a while? At least I had some consistency in emotion and thought. Now, today, I'm oddly silent, maybe content, or maybe resigned.

I read this letter I wrote to Jon right around the time that I posted the last entry here, and I talked about how we were on the brink of the rest of our lives - poised or teetering? Where we stand now, like my brother and I holding onto trees at the edge of a canal during a hurricane in Canada, as the winds swept the waters up over the dock and nearer our feet. I had lied to my parents, who were in the hotel room, and told them that we were going to get ice at the ice machine. Really, I had wanted to see what it was like to walk through something that powerful. The way I can't always remember why I've hooked myself to this relationship. The moments of clarity, of reminiscing, of regret, of hope, of possibility, all tangled and thrashing. I remember my hair whipping at my face when my brother and I were holding ourselves against the storm. I wanted to stay there, I wanted to go back into the hotel. I didn't want to be inside looking out the sliding glass doors at the majesty and strength of something I had never experienced before, but outside, I didn't know how long I could hang on. It got tiring and it got boring. But, it was worse inside - cooped up as the world changed just outside of my reach - my touch.

Memory

This very bizarre thing started happening to me recently/I started doing recently. Many bad memories I had have been washed over with good ones. The times in college when I felt most despondent, most alone or depressed have been scrubbed over, and now I remember the moments that were good, funny, comforting, happy. I do have a tendancy to be a little black or white, but I wonder if instead I'm just beginning the fleshing out period - seeing the other side so I can come to grips with the reality - which is never so cleanly good or bad.

I told Jon about that this morning, and as I was standing in the kitchen cutting onions (and, haphazardly, my own thumb); I said, perhaps I'm going to realize a more nuanced life for myself, perhaps I'll allow myself to be full and not 2-dimensional.

A good friend of mine is getting married on Saturday. She is a kind of free-spirited, mama-earth figure. I remember her sitting on her flat cushion bed in college, wearing her kimono and lighting the first cigarette of the morning. When I read over our correspondence from the past 10 years, I realized that not only was she a friend during hard times (and now, I can say, good) in my life, she was really a guide. She left college after a year and a half (not attending classes), but she wrote and called me through the next 2.5 years. One of my favorite memories of college is when she came to visit my junior year. I have a photo of her, my friends Tom and Katie and me all sitting on my bed, laughing. Laughing like little kids laugh, unselfconscious, unheeded by worries. Could I really be my truest self with my friends - with myself now?

If this life is supposed to connect you with certain people for certain reasons - if in every life you connect with people to learn certain lessons from them - or maybe because you were meant to travel with them throughout all your lives - then she is one. I've been thinking about love and loving and the people in your life that define you - that you help define.

The other weekend, I was up 2000' in the air, above the Long Island sound, and I smiled a smile that heretofore needed to be induced by something synthetic or fermented. I could not believe how I felt. Proud and excited and ecstatic. Flying has been like falling in love for me - all those same chemicals slapping my neurotransmitters with happiness. And, closer to 30, I've been re-living/re-evaluating my life. What is it? What should it be? I've been looking back on it with a certain kindness, with a certain allowance. I won't say I excuse myself, but it's like I've begun to care for myself.

The thing about flying is that I get this little feeling of fear - of claustrophobia - when we're ascending. I love the first lift-off, but about 1000' up, I start thinking, I don't know if I want to do this, I don't know if I can do this, maybe we should just turn around. But then, I'm flying the plane, I'm steering it like when I used to ride horses when I was younger. I'm guiding it and listening to it. Everytime I fly, I am proving something to myself. Perhaps that will dissipate, but for now, I'm forced to concentrate my every energy on the very moment in front of me. All anxieties, all fears, all worries just fall away, like gravity gets really heavy for them, they just tumble away from me, and I am there, my most present, my most real, my most purposeful.

Perhaps it's coincidence that at the time I'm staring to realize my life, I'm learning to fly which makes me focus on the present. Regardless, this peering into my past - maybe it's more like revealing my past - has made me both profoundly happy and sad with nostalgia. If I knew then that I would be looking so calmly and supportively at myself then, I might have enjoyed things more. But then, I have always said I'd never live with regrets for things I've done. Perhaps what's really happening is that I've lived the life I wanted to live, I just didn't realize it until now.

Waiting

The reason I've had trouble writing these (wait for it: excuse) is because in the thousand days of doing idea, I believe I imagined everyday would be inspirational. While it's true every day is ripe with possibility for change, that change is not necessarily enacted on a monumental scale. And that's the hardest part (and the easiest, I suppose, if change only takes the first footstep forward).

Yesterday, I got off the subway one stop earlier to go the grocery store before work. Just before I got to work, I began walking behind a businessman who had a slow but purposeful gait. The way he walked entranced me. He was not exceptionally tall (although he did have large feet), but his strides, though gentle and calm, were wide. He was so easily, so serenely walking that I was lulled behind him. Walking behind him was a bit like meditating, a bit like being entranced. But, then, of course, after a few moments, I stepped up my usual power-walking clip - eager to stem the time of my tardiness - and as I passed him, there lay an almost fake looking new $10 bill. I've never before found paper money in the street. It was just lying there, with so many people around who could have but didn't or hadn't claimed it.

I felt confused. After being soothed and tempered behind someone whose footsteps elicited such quiet drive (seemingly legions away from the anxious way I run to wherever I'm going - which clobbers any sense of relaxation), I stepped in front of him and was (literally) rewarded.

Maybe it means nothing. Maybe searching for meaning in every day, in every step is deconstructing life into a scale that is not meaningful, is not helpful. Regardless, the weird happenstance of finding money in the street can't demean or diminish what I gleaned from my methodical walker - that achievement can be had without an unnecessarily grueling striving. That doesn't mean hard-work or aspiration is ablated. It just means there are many more ways to achieve goals than I might hem myself into. That said, here is perhaps my new favorite quotation from Anais Nin: "Life expands or contracts in direct proportion to one's courage."

Fighting

In the past week, I've explored a dozen careers/lives I should have, could have, might have explored before - and how to retrench back to those truncated paths to enliven them again. I've been gasping through ideas of what I should be or do - like I just pulled a chord that poured down on me a thousand thoughts. And now I'm wading through hundreds of options - stymied by the surfeit of what I could do and be. Every day, I'm picking one up and examining it - then grabbing another. As I duly feared, the "what ifs" are nearly suffocating the "what is." But, that's a little too pessimistic and reductive.

Lisa, George and I went to see Bela Fleck's documentary on his travels to Africa to explore the roots of the banjo, and advertently or not, to glean inspiration from playing with new people, new instruments. At parts, I found myself struggling, not because the film doesn't have enough levity or joy or beautiful music - it is chocked full of that - but perhaps because I was trying so hard to "be" in the experience, to consciously remember each moment, that I was memorizing the experience instead of fully partipating in it. I was holding my breath. And when I finally let go, when I breathed, it was like the world around me grew full and vibrant, became lush and complete. And, because fighting oneself does not just evaporate with a moment, I would again be watching and hearing something so beautiful - that I'd try to sketch as quickly the moment in my mind, and as time and film are want to do, that moment would almost immediately turn into another moment, and then I was running to catch up to it.

But, in the end, I was giving of myself more freely over to the moment. Could it be that, as Oumani Sangare, "the songbird of Mali", said, Bela is not so great with speaking with words but through his banjo he is completely clear? Could it be that music is a medium that transcends worlds, languages, your own questions/struggles, that gently prods you, guides open your metaphorical arms until you feel yourself standing, arms outstretched in spite of yourself, welcoming all that stands before you?

I have lately been awed at how similar people's experience is. How alike we all are at heart. Differences in housing or job or geography are just different colored cloaks that cover the real basic needs and fears and hopes. Bela Fleck spoke about how evocative the phrase "throw down your heart" was. It was the phrase that Africans used at ports before boarding slaveships - they cast down their heart on the soil where they were born and loved. They would be dragged away, but their truest self, their most abiding faith and memory would remain unravaged by the brutality of others. And yet, Bela said, falling in love has a certain component of tossing down your heart - willfully giving your most tender self over to someone or something else. The heart - this throbbing, odd shaped thing inside us - molded in our mind like two melded teardrops, two equally shaped halves joined together, is actually a workhorse, the tangible powersource of life that we also imagine is the powersource of feeling. Robust and delicate, joy and sorrow and a thousand other contradictions. Sometimes, I feel like I'm trying to hammer a "P" shaped puzzle-piece into a "U" shaped one. The real problem is that life is not that succinct, not that linear, and not that neat.

After the movie, we got dinner and talked about it and concert experiences and dreams and work - and the world felt stretched out, expansive and encompassing again. Deep into the night, riding back on the train staring at the dark Hudson water, my thousand ideas undulated and felt rich and possible.

List and New

When I was a senior in college, I would wake up early on Sunday to meet my friend and pick up her 1.5 year old daughter for the morning. Her daughter and I would walk the path from the main building to the particle-board senior housing apartments, past beer cans and cigarette butts perhaps still smoldering. Yet in the morning dew, no one was around, and it was so quiet and green, it almost felt like hallowed ground. We walked loops around the apartment houses and name the trees or a bird or a cat, but one-day, my little babysitting charge pointed out that the doors of the apartments were different colors - red and yellow and blue. In four years, I'd noticed a lot of other things - I could do a blind walk to the campus - but never that the doors were primary colors.


The frame of the world grown dull and invisible to me - the color of a door - was a new word, a new way to classify what my 1.5 year old friend saw, an exciting moment to lay claim and stamp an order onto the world cresting around her.


Perhaps because she pointed out something I'd never noticed at the moment I was supposed to be really projected into adulthood (own apartment, own shopping, own groceries), it left an indellible impact on me. One in which I remind myself of as I try not to be inured to the basic - but not base or ignoble - elements around me. Francis Bacon said, "Nine-tenths of everything is inessential. What is called 'reality'....can be summed up in so much less." Instead of a scummy buildup of so much unnecessary, perhaps I need to scrape down the excess to the, if you'll pardon the triteness, primary - to the bone.


Yesterday, I saw the Francis Bacon retrospective at the Met. His painting after Velasquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X was my favorite at my college's museum, and I have been eager to get uptown to see his work together. Although much of his work depicts animals and people and slabs of meat whirling and wharping into a middle space of the canvas, his pieces often contain not only the grotesque or tawdry (though the placards might have me thinking otherwise), but also tenderness, longing and despair.


My favorite painting was one created shortly after the death of his lover, George Dyer, who died from a drug overdose, alone on the bathroom floor of their hotel room. The painting was taken, I believe, from a John Deakin photo of Dyer on a bike. Beacon's outline of the body riding the bike is like a silhouette cutout, Dyer's broad nose pointed left. But inside the dark figure, there are pieces of flesh and bone and the most sad remnant of a face which faces the viewer straight-on. Religion and faith and afterlife need not enter into it (Bacon was famously an aetheist whose studies after Velasquez's Pope are often seen as a critique on the regnant humans who issued edicts - as from the divine - from their dais...A nod to the notion that no one can cast the first stone). In the portrait, Bacon's lover is hauntingly present, as man made flesh and blood on canvas, in spite of the death of his body. It is almost odd how much intimacy is impressed on the piece (or maybe it's me falling victim to the tragic story and seeing that story, laid out to me by the curator, culminate in that work).

Whatever. The primacy of emotion is the ember that still pulsates fastest and shines brightest amongst all the other works I saw there - even while particular typtichs had me transfixed for seemingly endless moments.

But, maybe it's so much striving for meaning, getting bogged down in the idea that each experience needs to cut out its own precious little souveneir to mark the importance of the moment (like the postcard of the Dyer portrait I bought after I saw it - as though I needed something tangible to bring me back to that one moment of first meeting the painting). I know that some of the things I want to do will not make me a "better person", will not enrich me in intellectually or socially sophisticated ways - and yet, it's the small, elementary moments that define me the most. I do want to continue flying, to spend time in Thailand, to mark my footprints in different places, but even when I do or if I don't, it will be the moments seemingly less profound - the marking of primary colored doors on a glittering spring morning - that are the most salient, the most important.

Nevertheless, it doesn't mean I should stop striving or trying to cross off that check-list. 9/10ths might be superfluous, but I have the strange feeling that without those, I wouldn't appreciate the other slice.

Bildungsroman

I wasn't sure what I was going to get last night in El Topo. In the audience, I was sort of hoping for a cross between that iconic 1952 Life photograph of an audience watching a stereoscopic 3D movie and Hunter S. Thompson debauchery/Jack Kerouac life-fire. A trifecta of energies all converging on the one moment I decided to see a midnight show for the first time. It's perhaps appropriate that I always found blogging a little solipsistic and navel-gazing, and yet in my forray into it, I'm expecting the experiences I'll attach to it will be like Dana Birmbaum's appropriation of Wonder Woman - getting rid of all the superflous and honing in on the power in the moment of change.

A Clockwork Orange was showing at the same time and seemed to siphon most of the late-night show crowd to the downstairs theatre. Upstairs, I was wondering if I might have the theatre to myself. I did, nearly. There was an older man accompanied by a friend/mentee in his 30s. The older man told his friend that "This is just one of those movies you have to see in life." (I couldn't have asked for better approval, right?). We might have been a troupe of 7, save for a movie aficionado couple who seemed to also believe this is one of those hallmark movies - that is until the movie was adjusted to the screen a few moments before the lights went down. It was not, alas, film, but pixelated DVD. The couple stomped off to join the Kubrick crowd, iritation about the unprofessionalism (I guess) of trying to get the film centered on the screen wafting back to me and my 5 companions in the form of "I can't believe this. I used to work in a movie theatre, and I just would not put up with this..." Or perhaps they wanted to purity of reeling film. It must have struck a wrong chord.

Suffice to say, my eavesdropping of the advice from the older man wasn't needed in order to appreciate the movie. It was a Western, a bildungsroman (albeit with the parallel journeys of a child to a man and the journey of his father/master to enlightenment/purpose/meaning/peacez), an allegory. Goaded and abbetted by his female companion, the main swashbuckler character tries to forcibly accede to the position of greatest master through finding the other four masters' greatest weakness (and here, too, the protagonist is helped by his woman companion). He can find the sweet, soft-spot of weakness in each until the last man, who is gray-dreaded, nearly naked, without a gun and only a butterfly net (Le Petit Prince?). He shoots the old man, but the old man's last words are "You have lost." This is only the first half. Or rather, this is the prelude to the rest of the story. The rest of the story I suppose is about letting go. Spent of the power of his weapons to divine himself into the position of greatest power, he becomes like one of the masters (here: a sort of Jesus/Buddha hybrid) he has initially killed, whom he later finds in a viscous bath of yolk and honeycomb, gently curled on his side like a man-fetus.

The film is so thick with allusion that it's hard to contain it of dissect it - this is the stuff theses are made of. Suffice to say, he later helps cave dwellers (who have various deformities from incest after being locked in the cave for generations and who have taken/mistaken him for their prophet) extricate themselves from the darkness. Garbed in monk's cloak, he happily takes the task of helping to free the people who have saved him - and falls in love with one of them.

I was thinking/worrying this morning that perhaps we do things/occupy ourselves to get away from ourselves - something a friend suggested to me. That the sitting and being might be too psychically difficult. But then, the protagonist of the film finds purpose not in his own journey, but in the path where he gives of himself selflessly and fully, expecting nothing in return. It is at that point that he can love, that he can laugh, that he can find a robust, enduring purpose. That's a little neat-knot-and-bow to the issue of meaning, but the movie isn't that banal or trite. In the end, the main character is bereft of his most important life's work after he frees the cave dwellers and they're massacred by the townspeople outside the cave. Pounded by grief, he self-immolates (like a Buddhist monk) at the same moment his lover births his child - like the phoenix could rise from a different place than the ashes of his fire.

But, all along, it's the journey. It's the journey that is literally ignited again in the birth of the child - whatever you take that child to be.

The rest of these posts won't be so reaching and feigningly erudite, but in thinking of doing, I cannot extricate it from being.

Nascent

It's become hackneyed to say that life offers up a path that is decidedly different than the one you might have planned. I grew up wanting to be a doctor. It was my default response for "What I Want to Be" -- and I was so aggressive at getting what I wanted (forgive the immodesty), that I surprised myself when I dropped out of the dream my freshman year of college after "liking the ends" but not being able to endure the means. Or, perhaps, I realized a different path, a different path that was being drawn in front of me, even as I began to take what I thought were purposeful steps. Seven years later, I was unwinding my path to go to graduate school after I couldn't afford to finance it. Those little granules that slip through your fingers...And, a year and a half later, unable to contain the desire to go to that same graduate school (I had shored up a pretty mean credit score in the meantime), I reignited my application, and was again accepted. I intended to bolster myself for the non-profit world, but instead a professor friend of mine suggested that I take accounting - and get a tangible skillset (my english major was helpful in penning letters but a little nebulous). At that exact moment (though unbeknownst to me), sub-prime MBSs were begining their own splintering and unwinding - like the metal spiral rope that frays then pops - shards of metal skewering anything that was around.

And now, I am (luckily) working in finance (an extended internship) - which, in spite of myself or my visions of my "path" - I've come to love. But, I feel on so much unsteady grounding, and I'm still wondering what I should do with the rest of my life.

A few years ago, I drove upstate in my roommate's old diesel Mercedes with my boyfriend who had shattered his ankle and was bed-bound for 6 months. In the cool breathe of the beginning of fall, I drove us back up to the haunting ground of my alma mater. We met one of my best friends and her daughter. I was 25, and I was harping on how I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. My friend and my boyfriend are 14 and 10 years older than I, respectively, and they both looked at me and said they too still wanted an answer to that question.

It makes me think of a family friend who had a beautiful old wooden sailboat. He lived his life in 25 year increments, and the increment that ran in tandem with my childhood was his sailing around the world. I love that idea that I could parse my life's disparate interests out in full ways. It is lush and blossoming in my mind - expansive when I am nestling inside myself and my fears of what I want to be and do.

In honor of that man and my nearing 30th birthday, I want to spend the next year doing all the things I've always talked about -- but haven't had "the time" or "the money" to do. Would you believe one of them is to actually stick with one of these damned blogs? I have about 17 blogs (hyperbole - but still, at least 4) floating around in the Internet ether since 1999...

The biggest problem? My Aries nature is to shoot up fast and bright -- and then loose steam. I'm trying to complete the list today. But, if I can sustain, this should be an interesting next 1000 days.

TODAY:
1.5 flying (working to private pilot's license)
Yinka Shonibare and Judy Chicago at the Brooklyn Museum
El Topo midnight showing