Buttered Noodles

Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, and the lazy Susan

2011-12-20T17:40:00.005-06:00

My husband saw it before I did. It was Thanksgiving, and we’d made the drive from our house on the northwest side of Chicago to the western suburb of LaGrange to spend the holiday with my in-laws. “Mom, why is there a swastika on the kitchen table?” he asked. I looked to where he was pointing, and saw a wooden lazy Susan that looked like it was handmade, was an antique, and was sectioned off into quadrants with spindles of wood coming from the center, each one finishing in a right angle that, while useful as a kitchen storage unit, gave it a rather unfortunate appearance.

“What swastika?” my mother-in-law asked, incredulous.

“This one right here!” my husband said, his voice rising. She looked at him, unblinking.

“The lazy Susan,” I finally said, “it looks like a swastika.” She walked over to the table and leaned her diminutive frame over the object in question.

“Oh,” she said, “well now that you point it out I see it, but I never would have otherwise.” I stood a fair distance from the lazy Susan, eyeing it from the kitchen counter, as if getting too close to it might be dangerous. Seeing the look on my face she said, “Oh, she doesn’t like it, I can tell.”

“It’s,” I began, and lost whatever it was that I’d begun to say. “I mean, it’s funny because…” and I lost my words again, resorting to sticking my hands out at my sides, palms up. “I mean, I wouldn’t go promoting it...”

“Where did you get this thing?” my husband asked.

“At a garage sale.” What I really wanted to know was whose clever idea was it to make a lazy Susan in the shape of a symbol of tyrannical power, and more importantly, what else was up for grabs at that garage sale?

I have a long and complicated history with Judaism, which goes a little something like this: my maiden name is Cohen, I wasn’t raised religiously, and by most traditions I wouldn’t be considered Jewish because my mother isn’t – she was raised Christian Scientist, and didn’t meet a Jewish person until she went to college on the east coast, and then married one. She divorced one too, but it still counts.

For most of my life people have not only assumed that I am Jewish, but have regarded me through that lens to explain certain behaviors - an appreciation for good pickles and matzoh ball soup for instance, and a tendency to avoid overt Christianity and the south. Over the years I’ve had various reactions to this, ranging from guilt that I don’t know more about Judaism, to anger that people would have the gall to assume anything about me based on my name. I once hung up on a teenage boy who called to ask for my financial support of a Jewish organization because it bothered me that I’d ended up on a list of prospects simply because of my name, and I was irrevocably peeved when a former boss of mine asked, on Ash Wednesday, “so when is your holiday?” My high school chorus teacher was an African-American woman who taught us negro spirituals. Halfway through "I've been 'buked and I've been scorned" she looked up from her seat on the piano bench with a smirk on her face. She turned her attention back to playing the piano, and when she looked at me again was smiling broadly. Finally she stopped playing completely and burst out laughing. "I'm sorry," she said between breaths, "but you have never looked more Jewish to me than you do right now."

By the same token, it feels wrong to have my Jewishness denied. The first winter I spent in Chicago I was surprised that the office buildings downtown don't display menorahs side by side with Christmas trees the way they do in New York, and was shocked when a coworker asked me if Cohen was a Catholic name.

Years ago I felt the need to learn more about “my” religion, (although I never felt that way about Christian Science), and kept renewing the same book on Judaism from the Bezazian branch of the Chicago Public Library before finally returning it, unread. A Quaker friend of mine once gave me a menorah that had belonged to his deceased partner, and I asked a Jewish colleague to phonetically spell out the prayer that accompanies the lighting of the Hanukkah candles. For one holiday season I observed the candle lighting tradition, and now the menorah decorates the top of our television, less a religious item than a household decoration.

One less letter and my name would have been Chen - would people have expected me to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese and make Peking Duck on the weekends? The worst offense was when people told me that I looked Jewish - for those of you who’ve never met her; I look exactly like my Scotch-Irish shikse mother. How on earth can a person look Jewish anyway? I mean, I know what people were trying to get at - I wear glasses, I have curly hair that goes frizzy in the humidity, and I listen to NPR. Nonetheless, these indicators would amount to nothing if it weren’t for the name Cohen, and ever since I took my husband’s name nobody has assumed that there’s anything Semitic about me.

Now that I don’t carry the name Cohen, I feel a little nostalgic for it whenever I see it in print, and I enjoy being called Cohen by people who knew me before I was married. My husband's name is Palmer, which carries no such religious weight, although it should - the first Palmers made a pilgrimage to the holy land and returned with palm leaves as proof of their journey.

A couple years ago I accidentally learned that my father’s family had lost six of nine children in the holocaust. I overheard my father tell this to someone else, which is pretty much how I’ve learned everything about my family, not much got passed on to my generation from either side. Knowledge, while highly valued in my family – going to college was pretty much a given for me, and both sets of my grandparents had access to higher education, is treated like something one should already have, not something to be sought out or shared.

Compounding the problem is the fact that my father is a high functioning autistic, and he doesn’t react well to confrontation. When I overheard him casually answer “yes,” to the question: “did you family lose anyone in the shoah?” Anger rose up from my stomach, through my esophagus and into the back of my throat, anger that I’d gone my whole life without knowing this crucial information, and I compressed it into small, pinched statements like: “that’s the first I’ve ever heard of this, dad.” “Oh?” he asked. “Do you have a family tree somewhere with the names?” I asked. “Oh no,” he answered, with a wave of a hand, “I had one once, years ago, but I threw it away.” The person my father was talking to said:“that’s criminal,” and I was glad to have a witness. “Why did you throw it away?” I asked, gripping the stem of my wine glass as if the only thing keeping me from committing patricide was that my hands were full. “Well, that’s not so nice,” he said - the same reaction he gives when anything upsets the flow of his daily life; like when the trains are running late, or he gets overcharged at the supermarket. “Not nice?” I wanted to say, “You know what's not nice is? Not nice is letting your dead, persecuted relatives be forgotten. Does the phrase ‘never forget’ mean anything to you? People purposely pass on this information to their children. Good job, dad.” What I actually said was: “It doesn’t matter if it’s not nice, it’s important.”

That night I woke alone in the dark, my subconscious wouldn’t let me sleep, or maybe it was the spirits of my murdered relatives.

Since then I’ve gotten some information from my dad’s side of the family, a photocopy of a handwritten family tree, with the words: “died, Hitler era”, next to those who didn’t survive. I’ve had conversations with my second cousin Emilie, who grew up knowing some of our relatives who had numbers tattooed on their forearms.

From our email exchanges and phone conversations, it seems like Emilie and I have a lot in common: we both love to travel, have interests in the arts, and don’t have children. When I went to Senegal a couple years ago she connected me with a friend of hers who lives there, and we’ve brought up the idea of visiting Lithuania, where our ancestors are from.

I’ve attended Friday night services once or twice, and while I kind of feel like a giant poser, when someone wishes me “Shabbat shalom,” it’s nice. I’ve also become – not obsessed, but very interested in holocaust documentaries. I generally watch them by myself when my husband is out, which sounds dark and depressing, but I just can’t imagine snuggling up with a bowl of popcorn to watch footage of Soviet prisoners being let do their deaths on the eastern front, and interviews with octogenarian survivors describing acts of vengeance and resistance with a ferocity that I have never heard in anyone’s voice. I add the films to our Netflix instant cue, where my husband sees them, and reads the titles aloud before scrolling right past them: “Forgiving Dr. Mengele...” “You don’t have to watch that,” I’ll say, “That’s a special movie, just for me.”

I’m amazed at the stories of individual acts of defiance; the group of prisoners who broke into an SS locker room, changed into guards uniforms, and stole a vehicle. When they drove to the prison gate, and the guard manning it didn’t lift it, one of the prisoners shouted “what is this, how long do we have to wait?” The gate was lifted, and they drove right out of Auschwitz. Then there was the band of prisoners who hoodwinked a bunch of SS guards into meeting them, alone, in a workshop under the premise of having a pair of boots for them to try on, and killed them one by one with an axe. They were able to do so because they knew that since the guards were German they would keep their appointments, and would show up on time, which sounds almost like a joke.

I was dumbfounded by the film Inheritance which follows Monica Hertwig as she tries to sift through what it means to be the daughter of Amon Goth, who was portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. It wasn’t until she saw that film that she was confronted with what her father had really done, and in a blind, ignorant rage sent an angry letter to Steven Spielberg accusing him of spreading lies. I watched all four plus hours of The Sorrow and the Pity, whose subject is the French Vichy government collaboration with the Nazis, and all six episodes of a TV series called: Auschwitz: the Nazis and the “final solution,” hosted by Linda Ellerbee, to name a few.

I’m not sure what I hope to gain from this inundation of documentary material, sometimes I wonder if, in all the footage I’ve watched, I’ve seen my relatives stepping off cattle cars for selection, or witnessed images of their emaciated bodies. Sometimes I think I can guess with pretty close accuracy at what must have happened to them, but that’s not the same as knowing.

Absorbing all this visual information has done something to me, given more weight to my center of gravity, made me aware of how easily and loosely the word “Nazi” gets used to describe the most inane displays of stubbornness, and as a stand-in for curse words, and it’s made me even less tolerant of the phrase “everything happens for a reason.”

Driving home from Thanksgiving, my husband and I discussed the lazy Susan. “I know she didn’t see it, but what if that had been my first Thanksgiving with your parents?” I asked. “Well, at least it was a lazy Swastika.” I considered what it would be like to be blind to the unintentionally swastika shaped objects in the world.

Tomorrow is the first night of Hanukkah, and maybe I’ll dig out the candles I bought for the menorah last year but never used, and maybe I won’t. On Sunday, my husband and I will make the same drive out to LaGrange that we made at Thanksgiving, and despite the fact that none of us believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, we will celebrate his birth by sharing food and exchanging gifts. I just hope the lazy Susan is gone by the time we get there.

Wednesday afternoon (for chjackson)

2011-09-28T20:48:00.007-05:00

It’s Wednesday afternoon, and I’m busy pretending to look at office supplies online as a cover for the conversation I’m having with my husband via text message. My Smartphone sits in my lap, and I sit in my cube, which isn’t even a real cube - it’s a computer monitor on a shelf underneath a row of cabinets with a divider along the right side to keep me from socializing too much with my coworkers. I’ve threatened to bore a hole into the divider with power tools and fashion a window out of clear sheet protectors and double sided tape, or failing that, paste a photo of my face on the other side of the wall so that it looks like I’m hanging out with my coworkers even when I’m on my side of what sometimes feels like a rodeo bucking chute.

On the left of my computer monitor is a color printer, which jerks to life when someone sends a job to it, and hiccups its way through the four colors of the printing rainbow: yellow, cyan, magenta, and black. If I’m feeling gracious, I pick up the printed sheets from the output tray and hand them to whoever sent the job over, if not, it’s owner walks behind me and reaches into the narrow space between my body and the printer, their arm appearing in my peripheral vision like a sun spot. I steal a glance at my phone to catch up on the latest communiqué from my husband. “My hand feels weird,” I write to him. “too much mousing or something different” he replies. “I mouse with the left, and this is my right. Must be all the handjobs I give you in my sleep,” I write back, and then quake with silent laughter at my own joke. A couple minutes pass with no response. “Is this thing on?” I type. “laughter, applause.” comes the answer, with a laughing, yellow-faced emoticon at the end.

I leave my desk to take advantage of the birthday cake in the break room, a sheet cake that makes an appearance on the last Wednesday of the month, with an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper taped onto the cake box that reads “Happy Birthday September Staff!”, which is almost as personal as: “It Is Your Birthday.” I cut off a piece with the plastic spatula that’s been brought into service, and plop the heaping pile of sugar onto a snack sized Styrofoam plate. The frosting is so sweet it makes me cough as if I’d accidentally walked through a dust cloud.

If you’d told me a year ago, or even six months ago, that this is how I would spend my time at work, I’d have been incredulous. I’ve been looking for a job for almost two and a half years now. I know, I have a job doing administrative work in a gym, but I mean a real job, one that I go to on purpose in the morning, and not just because I need the insurance and it makes me look like a better candidate if I have a current place of employment listed on my resume. I’ve had some promising leads, some near brushes with success, but like Charlie Brown winding up to kick the football out from under Lucy’s fingertips, I land on my cartoon ass every single time.

One of the directors thanks me profusely for entering codes into the database, which is pretty much like thanking me for having descended from apes. He tries to be gracious, but it comes off condescending. “Hey thanks so much for getting all those codes in so quickly, you’re a rock star,” he says, breezing past me. He uses the term “rock star” to fabricate a sense of camaraderie into our exchange, a sense of “we’re all in this together”, but what it sounds like is “thanks for using about as much brain power as Koko the gorilla.”

Meanwhile, I’ve been telling stories. It gives me something to be proud of, something to be good at, something to hone. I’ve told stories in front of audiences as small as twenty, and as large as seven hundred. I’ve told funny stories, and really sad ones. It keeps my brain alive. To make myself feel better at work, I post fliers and postcards for the readings that I appear at, and when the ape-loving director sees one, he says “Well I just have to say, I am impressed.” Impressed in the way that it’s impressive to watch Koko sign for a banana? Impressed in the way that it’s impressive that Koko knows how to use a keyboard? He is eight years younger than me and takes an aw shucks, you young ‘uns approach to our interactions, talking about the old days before he was married, when he used to be a performer himself, just like me.

My colleague C is getting married soon, and someone asks where she’s going on her honeymoon. “We’re going to Mexico, and we’re going to swim with dolphins,” she says. I mishear the word “dolphins” for “Daschunds”, and I tell her so. Together we fabricate a scenario where she swims with a pod of the tiny dogs, and has a very spiritual experience. “You don’t have to fly to Mexico to do that,” I tell her, “just get a whole herd of them into Lake Michigan with you, people will come from miles around to be part of it, you could start your own small business.” Taking on the persona of a Daschund swimming participant, I say “It was amazing, they’re so beautiful. They’re so smart; they knew I was pregnant before I did!”

C speaks in a secret code that’s not very hard to crack when she thinks she’s saying something dirty. While relating the plotline of a Sex & The City episode, she tells me that the characters were “doozin’ it”, and refers to the female genitalia as “cucini”. I look the word up to confirm a suspicion – it’s a conjugation of the Italian word “cucinare”, which means “to cook,” specifically: the present tense, second person singular. I inform her of this, and add that if she ever goes to Italy, and the need to describe her genitals arises, she might have to use a different word.

Initially I wrote C off as too young and way too perky to be anything but a pain in my ageing, bitter ass, but as we spent time together in the confines of the workplace I grew to understand that beneath that Noxzema-fresh exterior and can-do spirit is a girl just as dark and funny as any I’ve met. When I bought a new hairdryer she said “that’s better than using the ones in the locker room, there are ladies who dry their pubic hair with those.” I registered surprise. “You’ve never noticed that?” she asked. “I try to notice as little as possible in the locker room,” I explained, my mind reeling with countless images of sagging naked breasts and bent over asses, women of all ages and shapes in various states of undress. I have noticed that sometimes they sit naked on the benches, and I haven’t sat on one since, but I’ve never noticed anybody blow-drying their pubes. “Do you see them sometimes styling it?” I ask, “do people use product? Is anybody feathering their pubic hair into a Farrah Fawcett ‘do?”

I can’t see into the future; I have no idea how many of my Wednesday afternoons will be spent this way. When I do move on, I imagine that it will be a little bit like leaving prison. I haven’t had to wear civilian clothes or deal with rush hour crowds for over two years now. I go downtown so rarely that I get spooked by the wide streets and tall buildings, overwhelmed by the crowds of people surging past me. The blue line sounds so loud to me now that I plug my eardrums like a tourist when it rolls into the station, and I am genuinely shocked when confronted with the dichotomy of shoppers on Michigan Avenue and the homeless people who wander the same street in the hopes of a handout. Sometimes I think that in the time since I lost my job I’ve become feral, other times I feel like I’ve become the person I was meant to be.

Addendum to 20 Milligrams

2011-09-26T22:36:00.000-05:00

I saw this on a signpost on the corner of Chicago & Milwaukee avenues yesterday.

20 Milligrams

2011-09-17T23:40:00.001-05:00

I defaced my work ID card this week; I cut out a glossy photo of a brown egg from a Clinique ad that I found in a magazine in the break room, and pasted it onto my ID so that it covers my bemused 1.5” face but leaves my hair and shoulders as they were. Glancing at it, you’d never notice the complete absence of features. The day I posed for that picture I’d already submitted to a urine test and a background check (which as far as I know never came in, eventually they put me on payroll despite the fact that I could have a rap sheet as long as a gorilla’s arm). By the time I submitted to the ID photo, I was pretty sure this job was going to be a joke, something I’d do for the next six to twelve weeks until one of the other jobs that I was interviewing for – real jobs, came through. I thought it would be something I would omit from my resume. It would be nice to have a buffer between me and unemployment, it would give me a better chance at getting a real job, and at the time that I accepted it there was talk of ending unemployment benefits for people who had reached the one year mark, which was getting precariously close. I was tired of the effort of looking for a job, the constant self-promotion, the interviews, the rejections, the dusting myself off and starting again. Psychologically, I didn’t want to cross the one year mark. I’d done well with taking advantage of my free time and pursuing travel, volunteering, working odd jobs, and pursuing writing opportunities, and hadn’t spent a lot of time feeling down about my situation but I didn’t want to celebrate another unemployed birthday, another unemployed anniversary, another unemployed marker of any kind.

None of the other jobs I interviewed for were offered to me, and time passed. I took advantage of the lax dress code and proximity of my workplace to my home, sometimes rolling out of bed and literally wearing what I’d slept in to work. More time passed, and as it became clear that I would have to do something to mark the time (as if I were doing time, which in a way I am – clocking in and out, counting hours, minutes even), I decided to take advantage of what there was. I signed up for a physical fitness course, and then a fitness challenge. 9 months later I had lost 20 pounds and dropped 2 dress sizes. I’d made some friends too, and made strides in my writing, connecting with the storytelling circuit in Chicago and making regular appearances at different venues. It wasn’t all bad, part of what allowed me to do all that writing was that my job wasn’t taking much out of me.

It had its costs; I wasn’t feeling good about myself. 6 months into the job, I called the EAP line (employee assistance program, a confidential service that gets promoted on the company website as a resource for when things are getting grim) and they literally put me on hold, which made me think of that old Rodney Dangerfield chestnut that he rolled out during his “I don’t get no respect” era. When I finally spoke to someone, they asked me if it was an emergency. It wasn’t. They apologized for asking to call me back, but they were short staffed, or maybe the last seven people who called were all about to jump off the same bridge together, and it was taking up all their manpower to handle it. I told them they could call me back, but I couldn’t take the call when they did. I don’t have any privacy at work, and had snuck outside to place the call out to them. Then one morning I woke up crying, and couldn’t stop. The irony of the situation wasn’t lost on me – I’d managed to keep my spirits up the entire time I’d been out of work, and the reality of what kind of job I’d had to accept is what finally did me in. I called the EAP line again, and the woman on the other end of the line had to tell me to calm down because she couldn’t understand what I was saying. She connected me with a therapist in my neighborhood, and in short order I had a prescription for Prozac in my hands.

Here’s the thing about depression: it’s boring. It’s something I’ve lived with for a long time, probably forever, and prescription medication is a wonderful, life-changing thing, and without it I’d probably live in a halfway house or worse by now, but talking about depression is just, well, depressing. I was depressed for fourteen years before I was treated for it the first time, in my early 20s. The fact that I went fourteen years without anyone noticing is remarkable, but not surprising, considering my family. I had moments during those years, months even, when I was able to rise above it, but I lost a lot too, things I’ll never get back: time, opportunities, and relationships.

The first time it was prescribed to me, Prozac was a wonder drug. Everyone was on it, or talking about it, or knew people who were taking it. I’d read enough to know that mine was far from the worst case; in high school I read The Bell Jar, and resonated with it deeply, and The Yellow Wallpaper. In college I read Girl, Interrupted (I went to a reading by the author and got my book signed by her), and still later I watched the film An Angel at my Table, and was so awestruck that I read the book by the same name, all 434 pages of it, and then went on to read Faces in the Water, by the same author, Janet Frame.

All these stories had a similar theme; they were about young women, generally raised in the middle-class, generally from educated families, who were crippled by depression and had to be treated for it, sometimes with dramatic remedies like shock-treatment. I became the resident expert on depression in my family, which is funny in retrospect (sort of), because one by one all the women in my family were diagnosed with and treated for depression. Suddenly I was a trailblazer; my female relatives came to me for advice on medication, to discuss side effects, and to soundboard.

Prozac was expensive in those days, and I didn’t have any money. I slowly weaned myself off it and began pursuing other methods – I started taking St. John’s Wort, I installed full-spectrum light bulbs in my apartment, I bought a SADD lamp for the long Chicago winters. For the most part, it worked. There was the occasional party that I’d flake out on at the last minute because I just couldn’t peel myself off the couch, the odd get-together that I’d mysteriously be absent from, or sleep through, but for the most part I was functional. When things got serious with the man who became my husband I was up front about my history with depression, figuring if it was going to be a deal breaker it was better to find out early on. Apart from a short stint in my early 30s when I was dealing with some crap with my dad, I was able to get along without medication until recently. Here’s the thing about me and medication: deep down, I feel like I shouldn’t be on it. I feel like its fine for everyone else in the world to be medicated, but I should be strong enough to do without it. It’s stupid, I know. I don’t judge anyone else for taking happy pills, but I judge myself.

Prozac is pretty much the same now as it was the first time I took it, only now it’s cheap as hell. A 90 day supply of Fluoxetine, the generic for Prozac, costs me less than $8. It used to cost me almost $3 per pill. With prices like that, who the hell wouldn’t want a little help? I was recently turned down for a job that I was pretty sure was going to be offered to me; a job that, unlike the countless others I’ve interviewed for in the 2+ years since I was laid off, I actually wanted. It hurt, and I’m trying to figure out what to do next. I have my pills, and I have my husband, and I have my writing, and I have my 20 pounds lighter, stronger body. I know I’m blessed, but sometimes, as my friend Bridget once said: “it’s hard to wake up in the morning to it could be worse.” So here’s to today, and here’s to tomorrow, here’s to hoping for better things, and here’s to the 20 milligrams of magic that keep the whole thing going.

September Wedding, a 9/11 story.

2011-09-06T18:59:00.007-05:00

Everybody has a 9/11 story. That morning as I rode the Red Line to work, I wrote in my journal about the countdown to my impending wedding scheduled for that Saturday. "Just four more days," I wrote in anticipation. When I got to work my colleagues were clustered around the television in the reception area, eyes glued to the now iconic image of the World Trade Center up in smoke. I knew that very instant that my wedding would, at best, have to be postponed. I called my mother in tears before the first tower fell, sobbing openly within the flimsy confines of my cubicle and not giving a damn who heard me. Work closed early, and I got a ride home in the backseat of a colleague's car. Traffic was heavy; everyone was leaving work. I cried the whole way home. I sat on my couch and didn't move for hours, absorbing the horrors of what was happening on television.

Having grown up in Brooklyn, I felt an overwhelming urge to take every last penny that my fiancé and I had saved for our honeymoon and send it to the Red Cross, keeping just enough to get on the next Greyhound bus bound for New York to volunteer to do whatever I could. My fiancé convinced me not to send all of our money, and the talking heads on TV convinced me that unless I had a specific service that I could offer -- emergency psychiatry, for instance -- that I'd just be a burden arriving in New York at that particular moment. In the end I gave $300 to the Red Cross, and stayed in Chicago, and cried. I cried at home, I cried openly in the streets, I cried in the shower. On September 15, 2001, which should have been my wedding day, I woke to a gorgeous blue sky, and a perfect, sunny day. My fiancé went to work; and I hung out at the shop with him. Someone asked when we were getting married, "our wedding was supposed to be today," I said.

As it happened, we had been legally married by Judge Lambros J. Kutubris a few months earlier because my health insurance required that if I make any changes to my coverage, that I do so during the month of June. At the time it was a lark – we went to the Cook County Courthouse on a work day during my lunch break, fully expecting the experience to be unremarkable. Judge Kutubris could not have been more serious in his duties, speaking to us with gravity about marriage, that it is not a contract to be entered into lightly, and would we be exchanging rings today? Outside the courthouse we walked past a man with a Polaroid camera. “A picture of the happy couple,” he asked, “five dollars for a beautiful memory.” We declined, thinking that there would be plenty of time for wedding photos. What had seemed like an exercise in cutting through red tape was now soothing my battered soul; no matter what happened now - if our country went to war tomorrow, if Chicago was the next city to be terrorized, if familiar names were among the dead and missing, we were married.

The importance of our wedding, which, up until that moment, had been higher than almost anything else I could think of, plummeted in the face of what was happening around us. No one was able to fly to Chicago, or anywhere else, and we were in no mood to celebrate. I didn't want the only topic of conversation at our wedding to be the attacks, and I didn't want to have to remember, on every single wedding anniversary for the rest of my life, what else had happened that week. We made phone calls letting people know our decision; the most difficult one was to my fiancé’s grandmother in Delavan, Wisconsin. She had been the real reason behind planning a wedding; any time we felt like throwing in the towel, eloping to Vegas and leaving it at that, we’d think of how important this wedding was for her. She passed on the following month.

We indefinitely postponed our wedding date; our caterer refunded us in full, as did the airline that we had booked our honeymoon travel with. I love pie more than almost anything else in the world, and we'd planned to have scads of homemade wedding pie instead of cake at our reception. My sister had an apple pie delivered to me at work the day we postponed with a note that read, "For a wonderful sister, and a beautiful bride." I cried again, and ate the whole thing in one sitting.

In our apartment that night, my fiancé and I sat next to each other on our well-worn couch, watching the news. My wedding dress and his suit hung in the bedroom closet, a chart with table seatings leaned against a wall, and our wedding rings rested in the pillowy interiors of two ring boxes on the mantle. When I was a little girl I was fascinated with ring boxes, delighting in the satisfying pull and snap they made when my mother let me look through her jewelry and try it on myself. I’d never owned a piece of jewelry that merited its own box, and had spent what seemed like hours opening and closing the boxes that held our wedding bands as I waited for the day we would stop looking at them, and start wearing them. As we sat together watching the unrelenting images of destruction stream from the television, something took hold of me. I stood from the couch and walked to the mantle, picked up the ring boxes and returned to the couch. I opened the one that contained my fiancé’s ring.

“Give me your hand,” I commanded softly.
“What are you doing?” he asked, tears filling his eyes.
“Give me your hand,” I repeated. He held out his left hand for me, and I slipped the ring, a simple piece of jewelry made from white gold, over his knuckles and onto the base of his ring finger. “Michael Dalton Palmer, I take you as my husband,” I said. “Now you,” I said, handing him the box that contained my ring. He took my hand and slipped the antique platinum ring next to the matching 1920’s-era engagement ring that I’d been wearing for almost a year.
“Jessica Hilary Cohen, I take you as my wife,” he said.
“Now we’re married,” I said. We kissed, and settled back into viewing position, waiting to see what had become of our future.

The GrandSLAM

2011-08-03T21:48:00.001-05:00

Man, was that fun! I got to meet Peter Sagal, who hosted the event, a bunch of Moth people, and the 9 other featured storytellers. I told my story in front of a sold out crowd at the Park West, where something like 700 people hung on my every word. 14 of my friends and family came out to see me, and hooted and hollered for me when I got called onstage. I even got to use a green room, which I haven't done since high school.

It was magic.

I'm tired and spaced out now, and a little sad that it's over. Below is my story, the theme of the night was "identity crisis". Enjoy. YouTube clips to follow.

I woke with an urgent need to urinate.

I slipped out from my date’s bed, and tiptoed out to the open door of the bathroom, where I heard the familiar sound of a leaky faucet; a thin, but persistent stream of water falling from an old tap into an equally old basin. Like all nearsighted people, I squinted just to make sure I was standing in the right place. I stood fully in the open doorway, and squinted again, a little harder this time. I then took a couple steps into the bathroom, and although I was fairly certain of my powers of deduction, squinted a third time for good measure

That’s when I saw the figure of a man standing in front of the toilet, staring at me as if I were a naked, near-sighted apparition come to haunt him. The sound of falling water, I realized too late, was in fact the sound of a man taking a wiz. Although I'd been standing fully naked for a good thirty seconds, I instinctively covered my breasts with one hand, my privates with the other, and struck a pose like that of Botticelli’s "The Birth of Venus". I ran back into the bedroom, still as full of urine as when I left, and jumped under the covers. "What's going on?" my date asked sleepily. "I had to pee, and I went into the bathroom and your roommate was in there, and he saw me naked, and now I still have to pee, but I'm not going back in there," I said. He was remarkably unfazed by this turn of events and easily fell back asleep. Somehow I was able to do the same, despite the orb of urine in my bladder.

I began spending a lot of time in the apartment where I’d been a myopic flasher, and although I did learn my lesson – I never went anywhere in that apartment without my glasses ever again, I felt awkward around the roommate, Randy. At least once a day I would remember that Randy had seen me not just naked, but naked, bent over, and squinting. It was a hard image to shake, and it made me shy around him. I’ve never been good with speaking up; I’ve never sent dish back in a restaurant, even if it’s not the one I ordered, I spent the fifth grade being best friends with a girl I didn’t like because I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth, and I once allowed a teacher to call me by the wrong name for an entire semester rather than correct her. This got weird at parent teacher conference day, but at least I didn’t have to be the one to let her know. There was no way I was bringing up the naked incident. The fact that Randy was gay didn’t make me feel better about my indiscretion – if he’d been straight, maybe I could have convinced myself that I’d given him a free show, but I had inflicted full frontal, squinty nudity on a man who wanted none of it.

As our friendship developed, so did my nagging sense that the naked incident was going to become my tell tale heart – I wasn’t going to be able to relax and be myself around Randy until we had openly acknowledged that this had happened. While it turned out that we had quite a bit in common: we both had cats named “Whiskers” when we were kids; the state of Indiana was a cause for anxiety to both of us; and we were both slightly lactose intolerant but refused to give up dairy; he never once mentioned the incident. Had I really scarred him that badly?

I was trying to get better at speaking up, and I made it my mission to clear the air with Randy; after all, if I couldn’t confront this, how was I ever going to be able to send back food at restaurants, or tell people my name, or whether or not I liked them? We made a date to go to the Chicago Historical Society, and went to lunch at a diner afterwards. This was, I decided, the moment. “So, Randy,” I began, twirling a French fry in a puddle of ketchup on my plate, “do you remember the time when, um, I stayed over a long time ago…” I searched his face for some sign – some light of recognition, some indication that he knew where I was going with this. Nothing. “And it was the middle of the night, and I had to pee…” I searched his face again. Still nothing, this guy had a serious poker face. “And I was… naked?” I finally said. Randy’s brow furrowed, he leaned back, and cocked his head slightly to the left. Finally, the memory of it crawled out from deep in the files of his mind, manifesting itself first in the release of his eyebrows, then in the slackening of his jaw, and we made eye contact. I held my breath.

“That wasn’t me,” he said, “That was my ex-boyfriend, Ron.”

A wave of emotions cascaded over me: relief, embarrassment, confusion. I knew I had bad eyesight, but what was especially perplexing was that Randy was white, and his ex-boyfriend, Ron, was black. There’s something beautifully universal and post-racial about that - maybe the key to world peace is universal myopia. There’s also something really disturbing about it. This whole time I’d been shy around Randy because I thought he had seen me naked, when in fact it had been a completely different person. What did this say about me? How many other situations had I misjudged in my life? My ability to interpret my surroundings had been cast into doubt. I wasn’t sure I could be relied on to make judgments on situations like who was at fault in a car accident, or even tell the difference between a parked car and a dumpster. What I took away from it is this: in my eyes, you are all equally beautiful, and equally blurry; and for God’s sake, never call on me for eyewitness testimony, and if I’m ever accidentally naked in front of you, don’t hesitate to bring it up in conversation, because chances are I didn’t know that it was you.

Ladies Rock Camp, and other stuff

2011-07-31T17:15:00.000-05:00

I've been writing a lot for Gapers Block lately, and I don't generally cross-post, but this was a really fun time. I went to Ladies Rock Camp last weekend, a fundraiser for Girls Rock, a camp for girls that has chapters all over the country. It was really fun to write this piece, so I'm posting a link here: The Ladies Rock Experience

I'm also getting geared up for Tuesday's Moth GrandSLAM. I have a story, but I'm starting to feel unsure about it. I have a feeling I won't be thinking about much else between now and Tuesday night. Eep.

Getting ready for the GrandSLAM, and other things

2011-07-10T10:55:00.003-05:00

Some really exciting stuff has been happening lately with my writing, as well as some really stressful stuff with work. Between them, the highs in my life are getting higher, and the lows are getting lower. It's making me feel a little bipolar.

A few weeks ago I sent Kristin and Mark (my boyfriend and his wife) copies of the stories I'd written about them, because I figured they were out there on the Internet and they were going to get wind of them eventually, and it was better if I was up front about it. I was a little nervous - not very, about how they would react. There's nothing bad about them in it, but you never know.

"Best case scenario," I said to my husband, "she passes it on to her publisher."
"As opposed to: she never wants to see or speak to you again?" he asked.

As it turned out, their reaction couldn't have been more positive; Kristin friended me on facebook, sent a link to my blog post to her editor, and tweeted a link to the story out to her twitter followers. Over two hundred people read my story entitled "Don't Stop Believin'" over the course of the next 48 hours. By comparison, I generally get between 0-7 visitors a day.

It was an incredible high, and then I had to return to work - where my very performance has been called into question. I saw my doctor about a skin problem I was having recently, and while I was there she checked my blood pressure: 140/100, pre-hypertension levels. All these highs and lows are taking their toll on me.

And then I got the news that I'll be performing in next month's Moth GrandSLAM at the Park West. This is by far the most exciting thing that's ever happened to me with my writing. I'll be on stage with other Moth StorySLAM winners, competing for the title of GrandSLAM winner, at a venue that will be hosted by NPR's Peter Sagal of Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me. The theme of the evening is "Identity Crisis," which is both fantastic and completely flummoxing to me. I'm constantly in a state of identity crisis, and choosing one story is going to be hard. Here's the material I have to work with: am I Jewish/not Jewish? American/foreign? New Yorker/Midwesterner? Tattooed/not tattooed? Employed/unemployed? And for about 4 years of my life, when I first moved to Chicago, I was America's biggest fag hag, what does this say about my sexual identity?

I've been procrastinating, and it's not good. This thing keeps getting bigger - people have been asking for tickets, and when I consider the size of the Park West, it makes my heart palpitate. I've never spoken in front of that many people before. I need to be prepared - I can't get onstage with Peter Sagal and wing it. Below is my first attempt at an identity crisis story. I like it, but I don't think it's GrandSLAM winning material. It would be a shame to scrap it though, so I'm posting it here. Enjoy.

_________________________________________________________________________________________
Summer 1993

I’m standing on the corner of Belmont and Clark, dressed in four inch platform shoes, a dress, a platinum blonde wig, false eyelashes, and copious makeup. Accompanying me are two drag queens – one who goes by the name of Patty Melt; she easily clears seven feet with hair and heels, the other is named Jane Doe, whose back story is that she woke up in a ditch with amnesia, and hasn’t been identified.

By day Patty works at the customer service desk at Whole Foods, Jane is a bartender at a club called Foxy’s, where we are headed. It’s a warm night, and I begin sweating under my wig. This isn’t a sensation I’m used to, and I resist the urge to remove it. Jane and Patty have helped me with my hair, makeup, and outfit, and between the three of us we’d spent an entire workday getting ready to go out, I don’t want to ruin it before we’ve even reached our destination.

Jane wears a long, luscious auburn wig, a baby blue dress that falls mid-thigh, and an artificial flower in her hair. Patty wears a blonde wig styled into a flip, and a skirt suit*. Both of them have enhanced their cleavage with bags of birdseed.

As we stand on the corner waiting for the light to change, a car full of young men slows down, and then stops. Loud music thumps through the body of the vehicle and into the night, the bass turned up so loud I can feel it in my chest. The man riding shotgun to the driver rolls down his window, increasing the decibel count that spills out into the street, leans his head out of the window, and yells: “Fags!”

He can’t possibly be talking to me, I think. Clearly I am different than my two friends here - even with help of platform shoes I barely clear 5 feet 9 inches. Patty and Jane tower over me, we could be featured in the Sesame Street anthem: “one of these things is not like the others”.

I make eye contact with the name caller, stunned, a little frightened, and for some reason I silently implore him to look closer - look into my eyes, can’t he tell that I’m a real girl? He meets my gaze, leans further out of the window, and says: “Fags!” There’s no question about it this time; I, a biological woman, have just been called a fag.

I’m in female drag, sure, but I’m not impersonating a woman, I’m impersonating a different woman – one who wears false eyelashes and platform shoes, one who spends hours fixing her hair before leaving the apartment, and in less time than it takes to cross a street, a perfect stranger has turned me into a drag queen, one who possibly goes by the name Victor Victoria.

This is not the first time that my identity has been called into question. I’ve been called a dyke, a fag, white trash (which is hilarious because I grew up speaking French). People have variously assumed that I speak fluent Spanish, that I’m Native American, and on at least three separate occasions someone has assumed that I’m pregnant. This is how it works: if I wear red lipstick, people think I’m Hispanic; if I grow my hair long people think I’m Native American; and if I wear overalls people think I’m pregnant. This would be fantastic if I were an actress, I could include in my head shots: “I can play anything from a very short drag queen to an expectant mother with equal conviction.”

But the first time I remember my identity being questioned was when I was six years old. I’d asked my mother to give my hair bangs, and just as she was about to, she was distracted by a phone call. Impatient, I decided to take things into my own hands. I stood on a step stool in front of the bathroom mirror, lifted a pair of scissors to my head, and cut my hair from ear to ear, resulting not so much in bangs as in a mullet. Satisfied with my handiwork, I presented myself to my mother, who was still talking on the phone. I did not get the reaction I expected, and ended up with a very short, very androgynous haircut. Compounding the situation was the fact that I was a messy kid; I bathed only when forced to, never wore dresses, played with messy, dirty boys, and wouldn't play dolls with my girl friends - only stuffed animals.

My friend Annie, who wore only clean, feminine clothing, and always had bows in her hair, convinced a boy in our class who was developmentally delayed that I was a boy too; with my short hair I no longer had any recognizable female sex characteristics. We went into the boy's bathroom together where he pulled down his pants, showed me his hairless member, and said "see?" The deal was I was supposed to show him mine too, but somehow I was able to get out of revealing myself. I may have simply left the bathroom before anything could be asked of me, but I distinctly remember leaving with him; we entered that bathroom as two boys, comrades, fellow penis owners, and as far as that kid knew, that's the way we exited. I never revealed myself to the man who called me a fag either.

*I can't remember exactly what Patty Melt was wearing - if you're reading this Patty, feel free to correct me.

Insomnia, part III - this is getting to be a habit

2011-06-29T04:50:00.002-05:00

There was one semester of college where I couldn't sleep. I had recently moved to Chicago, I lived in a studio apartment with the best cat ever and about eight hundred roaches, and I really didn't know anybody. I had transferred schools halfway through college and everybody seemed to already know each other. I went to Columbia College when it was still a commuter school, there were no dorms or campus housing of any kind, so it was hard to break into the social scene. I couldn't sleep at night, and instead I stayed up late watching reruns of St. Elsewhere on my giant, 1984 color TV that had no remote, so if I wanted to change the channel I had to get up from a reclining position on my futon and change it my damn self. They aired St. Elsewhere at 2 or 3 in the morning, and ran 2 or 3 episodes in a row, in sequence, so I'd follow along and feel nostalgic for Boston, where the series is set, and isn't that far from the school I had transferred from. Sometimes even that didn't work, so after the last episode of St. Elsewhere had wrapped up I would go for walks along Broadway, Clark Street, Halsted. My husband tells me that his first clear memory of me is when he and his roommate were walking home from a late night out and ran into me at 4am. I was friends with his roommate, who asked me what I was doing out. "I can't sleep," I explained. I remember that my husband - well, the man who would many years later become my husband, leaned in and hugged me when I said that. I didn't expect it, and was uncomfortable.

At some point in the early morning it would seem ridiculous to try to go to sleep, so I'd plan on staying up all day, going downtown for class, and sleeping when I got home. Invariably, I would fall asleep at around 6am, sleep right through class, and wake up at some point in the afternoon. It was a cycle I couldn't snap out of, and I got terrible grades as a result. I even failed a class for not handing in my final report.

In retrospect, I know what was keeping me up at night - I was trying to run away from myself, but it wasn't working. At around that time I read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and there's a line in it that I'll paraphrase, or maybe the Internet will find it for me (bless you Internet - first web site that popped up in a Google search had it!):

[W]herever  I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok -  I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own  sour air.  ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Chapter 15

I'd left Boston thinking that I would be happier somewhere else, but the truth was I was simply unhappy, Chicago wasn't going to change that. I'd been running from my own head, reinventing my life in an attempt to change who I was.

The week my husband and I got back from Montreal, I couldn't sleep 3 nights out of the first 4 that we were back. I know why I'm not sleeping, I'm just not sure what to do about it.

As it turns out, it shows that I'm not really invested in my job. My boss had a talk with me my first day back - a kind of pre-annual review (dear God, have I really been there for a year?!) and told me that concerns had been raised about my performance. I couldn't lie to her - it has been hard for me. I never thought I'd be working there, would never have even applied for the job if it weren't for my circumstances, and throughout my unemployed year I was able to distract myself from my job loss by immersing myself in other things - travel, volunteering, writing. It wasn't until I accepted a job that was not just a step backwards but a whole staircase of steps backwards that I felt the enormity of what I had lost. I'd done the best I could with the situation at hand - got to know my colleagues, lost 20 pounds, grew triceps where no triceps were before; but the truth is, I never meant to be there, certainly not this long.

I actually really appreciated my boss calling me out on my performance, for a long time it felt like I could do a great job or a crappy job and nobody would know the difference. It feels like we've crossed a divide, and become more honest with each other; it feels better to go to work... sort of. Sort of.

What kept me up at night in 1992 and 1993 was my brain working in overdrive, trying to figure out my life, and I guess it's not that different from what's keeping me up now. For some reason I'm unable to follow through on my own instincts - search out new opportunities, pursue them, find more meaningful work. I'm just so tired of looking, and so tired of interviewing, and so tired of rejection, but the alternative is insomnia, and it's really not doing much for me.

Don't Stop Believin'

2011-06-15T08:09:00.002-05:00

As my husband and I approached the farm, the Canadian classic rock station in the rented car began playing the 1981 monster jam “Don’t Stop Believin’” recorded by Journey at the very zenith of Steve Perry’s tight jeans and white sneakers period. My husband and I were visiting Montreal, celebrating 10 years of marriage, and I had convinced him to drive south of the border for an afternoon so I could see my high school boyfriend for the first time in fifteen years. I’d been referring to him simply as “my boyfriend”, ever since I found out where he lived thanks to the book that his wife wrote about their first year running an organic farm together. It had been quite a mental journey, I’d become a kind of time traveler within my own life. I hadn’t thought about him in years but suddenly I couldn’t stop visiting my own past. Despite the fact that I’m not a small town girl – I grew up in Brooklyn, and my boyfriend wasn’t born and raised in south Detroit – he grew up in the megalopolis of New Paltz, and neither of us ever took a midnight train going anywhere, it felt significant that Don’t Stop Believin’ was playing on the radio moments before our reunion.

My husband is heavily tattooed and I look fairly Semitic so people seem to have this idea that in our relationship I’m the one who civilized him but that’s an illusion. I was the one who freaked out when we got engaged and flew to Amsterdam with my friend Joanie and got really stoned. On our wedding day I realized only after I’d gotten my hair and makeup done, and after I’d gotten dressed that it had been a while since I’d shaved my armpits. My dress had short sleeves, and I noticed there was about a quarter to half an inch of growth that was visible when I lifted my arms. “Is this a big deal, I mean, is this okay?” I asked. “No, it’s not okay, it’s terrible!” He said. “Well, I’m already dressed and I can’t pull my clothes over my head without ruining my hair,” I said. “Fine, I’ll shave you,” he said. We stood in front of the bathroom sink, my husband dressed in a 3 piece suit, me in my wedding dress, and I watched our reflections in the bathroom mirror as he lathered up my armpits and shaved them – not for me so much, but so that he wouldn’t have to face the humiliation of showing up to his own wedding with a hirsute bride.

This wouldn’t be the last time he had to deal with my depilatory issues. A couple months ago I explained to my friend Lois that I’d discovered that since I don’t grow much hair on the back of my legs that I thought I could get away with just shaving the front, but my husband didn’t share in this opinion. “I’m beginning to think,” she said, “that you’re very lucky to have him.”

I’d gotten in touch with my boyfriend a couple months earlier, we’d spoken on the phone only once – our schedules are very different, he gets up at 4 and goes to bed at 9, and in planning our trip to Montreal I noticed that on the map, at least, it didn’t look very far from his farm in upstate New York. He doesn’t have modern conveniences like email or a facebook account, so I left a message on what I’m sure is probably an actual answering machine saying that we were going to be in Quebec and was it a long drive? I really didn’t know if it was a big deal to cross the border or how long it would take to get there. He called back the same day and said “We’d love to see you, Montreal is about a 90 minute drive, I’ve got the dates penciled in on our calendar, let me know.” It was only then that I approached my husband about making this side trip.

I chose my words carefully. “Here’s the thing,” I began, “when we visited L.A. a few years ago, we saw not one but two of your exes, and when I first moved back to Chicago and we started dating, it seemed like every girl you were friends with had slept with you at some point. I didn’t have a lot of boyfriends, and this is as close as I’ll ever get to his farm, you have to give me this one.”

“It’s not him that I have a problem with,” my husband said, “I get freaked out by farms.” I knew this to be true, having dragged him to my childhood summer camp in the wilds of Vermont a couple times, where he tolerated the wilderness that I so cherished and that I credit for making up a good part of my character. It was the first time he’d ever been away from electricity and indoor plumbing, and I had to give him his props – he stepped out of his comfort zone and actually managed to enjoy himself. In the end we agreed to make a day trip out of my boyfriend’s farm.

And then a strange thing started happening, I had stress dreams about the visit. In one, I was visiting my boyfriend, and his wife met me and was perfectly friendly, but he didn’t want to talk to me, he just sort of stood there and looked away from me, and wouldn’t make eye contact, and they put me up in this dilapidated outbuilding that was full of cats and cat litter and cat shit, and then his wife asked me if I’d like to meet with her to talk about writing, because she’s writer. When I told my husband he said “first of all, I think it’s hilarious that you didn’t recognize that the dilapidated house full of cats and cat shit is our house, and secondly, I think you’re more interested in talking to her than you are in talking to him.” He’s a fucking genius.

Then I had a dream that convinced me that my subconscious is an egomaniac, I dreamt that my boyfriend called and told me not to visit him, because he was still in love with me, and it would be just too difficult for him to see me.

Throughout this whole process I’d been referring to him as “my boyfriend,” to the point where everyone else was too, even my husband. When we discussed our travel plans, he began sentences with phrases like “so when we get to your boyfriend’s farm…” and I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to introduce him any other way, it’s just how I know him, and what I’d been calling him. I don’t think my husband would have a problem with it, but it probably wasn’t a great idea to do that in front of his wife, who I’d never met, and maybe my boyfriend would think it was a little weird.

He recognized me through the car window, we were probably the only visitors he was expecting that day, so it wasn’t too hard to guess who we were. He walked to my side of the car, looking pretty much as he always has – tall, lanky, a little more rugged from years spent working the land, dressed in a straw hat, a button down shirt, and jeans. “I’m so glad you’re here,” he said, “everyone’s been asking me ‘when is your girlfriend getting here?’”

He was having lunch outside with his crew, a small group of awesomely filthy men who looked to be somewhere in their twenties. There were visible dirt lines on their calves where their pant legs ended, with everything below caked in various shades of farm dirt. They asked my husband about tattoos, and asked me what their boss was like in high school. Feeling suddenly shy, all I could come up with was: “well, he wasn’t a farmer.” A nine month old baby girl crawled at my boyfriend’s feet. Somehow she’d managed to get a piece of old, dried up chicken shit in her mouth. “Oh man, that is the worst thing I’ve ever smelled coming out of a baby’s mouth,” he said, removing the offending fecal matter. Turning to my husband, he said: “So I hear that you’re a real nature boy and that you can’t wait to roll up your sleeves and dig in.”

“If you want to know word for word what he said to me,” I asked,

“Yes, I do.” He answered.

“He said: I will go to the farm with you, but I do not want to be involved to any part of the circle of life; I do not want to see anything get inseminated, I do not want to see anything get born, I do not want to see anything get killed. I will hang out on the porch, I will sip mint tea, and I will pet the dog.”

“Alright,” my boyfriend said, “no sex and no death, I think we can handle that.” He took us on a tour of the farm, stopping to pick stalks of asparagus for us to snack on, walking us through as much shade as possible, and making sure our water bottle was refilled regularly in the 90 degree heat. Despite himself, my husband became fascinated with the enterprise, asking specific questions about things like mobile chicken coops that were moved daily to provide natural fertilizer to the fields, draft horses that pulled equipment that was made in the 1930’s by Amish farmers, and disease vectors. “Well, we’re coming up on some pregnant pigs,” my boyfriend said, “but that’s sex, so I don’t know if you want to see that.” My husband said that would be okay, and we watched the impressively sized sows enjoying the shade. One of them turned her hind quarters toward us and started rubbing her rump up against the side of a corrugated metal structure. “I think I’m going to start doing that,” I said. “What?” my boyfriend asked. “Rub my butt up against stuff when it itches.”

“We’ve got dairy cows too,” my boyfriend said, “have you ever milked a cow?” he asked, directing his question to my husband. “He has,” I offered, “and he was surprised that it was warm.”

After the tour we met up with my boyfriend’s wife and their three year-old daughter in front of the farmhouse. The three year-old was dressed in pink striped pants and a pink top, and was riding a pony that was tethered to a rope and being guided by her mother. “Do you have any idea how many little girls would love to have a pony?” I asked her. “No, she really doesn’t”, her mother answered. To her husband she said: “we were inside and she was upstairs screaming and screaming, I went to see what was happening and it turned out her fingers were stuck in her tiara.” “That happens to me all the time,” I said. We were joined by the family dog, who leaned against me and looked deeply into my eyes until I started petting him, a pullet that had gotten loose from the pen next to the farmhouse, and the nine month-old, who began busily stuffing her mouth with grass. “Don’t worry about it,” her mother said when I went to take the greenery from the child’s mouth, “it will come out one way or another.” For a moment it seemed as if every life form possible was crowded together on that small patch of lawn, and I began to get an idea of how busy life must be for my boyfriend and his family, who, with a hired staff of five, manage to provide 200 people with 60% of their daily calories.

We were invited to stay for dinner, and the food was amazing, having all come from right outside the door. We started with cold asparagus soup and moved on to green salad and baked chicken. “Mommy,” the three year-old asked sweetly, “was this chicken slaughtered this year?” “No honey,” came the answer, “this chicken was slaughtered last year, it came from the freezer.” I silently compared the moment to a story my mother in-law tells of her own daughter sitting down to dinner and asking “Mommy, why is it called chicken?” and getting really upset when she got an answer. As it turns out, my boyfriend’s three year-old daughter who loves the color pink and wears tiaras around the house really enjoys watching animals get slaughtered, and plays a game called “slaughter” with her friends, where the ground rule is you can only pretend to kill animals, so they play with it the family dog, or whatever barnyard animals happen to be nearby.

We’d brought Canadian beer and pastry with us, which we shared at the end of the meal. We were invited to stay the night, I was on the fence. There would be literally nothing to do once our hosts went to bed at 9, and they get up at 4, which didn’t sound great. When the subject of our wedding anniversary, which was the following day, came up, my boyfriend said “we’re planting leeks tomorrow, what better way to celebrate ten years of marriage than by planting ten thousand leeks? Also, there’s going to be a steer slaughter tomorrow – but that’s death, so you probably don’t want to see that.” It seemed like a good moment to end the visit – we’d enjoyed each other’s company, but seeing everybody again at 4am, all bleary-eyed and irritable didn’t seem too appealing.

My boyfriend packed us a bag of asparagus, lettuce, and homemade bread, and walked us to our car, where my high school boyfriend and my husband of ten years shook hands, momentarily fusing my past and my future. “It was so great to see you,” my boyfriend said, and leaned in for a hug that was short enough not to get weird and uncomfortable, but long enough to acknowledge our history.

On the drive back to Canada, my husband was quiet for a few minutes. “I’d like to go back sometime,” he finally said. “Yeah?” I asked. “Yeah, maybe stay at an inn or a B&B in town for a couple days and uh, you know, work.” “On the farm?” I asked. “Yeah, I think that would be really cool.” If I hadn’t been buckled into my seat, I would have fallen right out of it.

We crossed the border back into Canada, where my civilized husband and I returned to our well-appointed B&B, where three course morning meals were delivered to our room every morning by handsome men, and complimentary slippers were provided at the front door. The experience left me feeling not so much nostalgic as much as it felt like I’d time travelled, and was now back in the present, all grown up. But mostly it got that infernal Journey song stuck in my head, so if anyone knows of an antidote – please, let me know. Unless that antidote is “Oh Sherrie,” that’s ten times worse.

Insomnia, redux

2011-04-06T06:08:00.002-05:00

the painting that my high school boyfriend gave me for my 18th birthday. Not a great photo, but I should really be asleep right now.

Once again, I can't sleep. It's 5:30, but I've been tossing and turning for much longer. Last night I read at Tuesday Funk, a monthly reading series at the Hopleaf. I'd been on the bill for some time, and had planned on reading the story I titled "my boyfriend" and have posted elsewhere in these pages. (Wow, that's the first time I've linked back to my own blog, how very self-referential of me).

But that's not what's keeping me up. A while back I actually went and bought my boyfriend's wife's book, The Dirty Life, and as it turns out, it's a pretty good read. Besides being an interesting story, it made me feel better - made me realize it was simply the pull of the past that was making me feel so nostalgic and whatnot, and it was nice to know that my boyfriend was doing well. I genuinely wished him and his wife well. So when I saw that his wife had a facebook fan page for the book, I hit "like", and posted the following comment back on February 6th:

Hello Kristin,

A couple months ago my NPR feed on facebook had a writeup about your book, and within the first three lines I recognized Mark from the description. I knew him in high school, lost track of him years ago, and although I've reconnected with many old friends through the magic of facebook, no matter what I did I couldn't find him (doesn't help that he changed his name and has no Internet presence). I've been reading articles about your farm and your book, and heard your interview with Melissa Block. What an amazing story, and what a remarkable adventure you've undertaken. Please give my regards to Mark, and all the best with your farm, your book, and your family.

JP

At the time, there weren't an inordinate amount of fans on the page, less than 300, and it flummoxed me that while she had responded to some other, less intriguing comments, she never bothered to respond to mine. I thought about it, and realized that it was a bit ridiculous to wait around and feel insulted by a perceived facebook slight, when she wasn't even really the person I wanted to get in touch with. My boyfriend is so off the grid that I'm not sure he has a flush toilet, much less a facebook account, so I took it upon myself to write the following note and drop it in the mail on March 7th:

Dear Mark,

Back in November, I had the strange experience of reading my NPR updates on facebook, and coming across a story about a journalist from New York who'd gone to western Pennsylvania to interview a farmer... and something told me right then that the farmer in question was you, even before I'd read two paragraphs. I bought Kristin's book, and read it inside of a week. What an incredible story, I'm really amazed at what you've done at Essex Farms. I've tried looking you up from time to time, and now I know why I never got very far - I was looking for MG in Pennsylvania, and now you're MK in upstate New York. I left a note on the facebook fan page for The Dirty Life, but I gather Kristin doesn't have much time to mess around on facebook, as she doesn't leave a lot of comments on people's posts. I figured I should write you an actual note, since posting a comment on the facebook fan page of your wife's book is a pretty disconnected way of trying to say hello, and I'm pretty sure the last time I saw you I'd never surfed the Internet in my life much less tried to reconnect with old friends on it. (If memory serves me, the last time we saw each other was in 1996, when I was living in Boston.)

I feel like I know so much about your life, but it's strange because I know it all from reading your wife's book. I don't have any books for you to read about me, but I'll sum it up in a couple sentences: I'm still in Chicago, have been married for almost 10 years now, and I'm still a writer. I had a job writing human interest stories and grant proposals for an international humanitarian aid organization, but I lost it almost 2 years ago in the bad economy. I was unemployed for a year, and used the time to travel, volunteer, and write. Now I work doing administrative stuff, and it's not bad, if not my dream job. I get to Plymouth, Vermont about once a year in late August, which I'm guessing is a busy season on the farm, but I'd love to stop by and say hello.

It's so good to know you're out there, doing your thing,

All my best,

JP (I included my phone number, which I won't do here, just in case the government or aliens are reading this)

And then.... nothing. I started to get irritated, I'd actually bothered to reach out across the years and make contact, and for whatever reason neither my boyfriend nor his wife deemed it necessary to respond.

Then, yesterday morning, as I was getting ready to walk out the door, the phone rang. I looked at the caller ID, it said simply "New York call" from area code 518. I don't know anyone with that area code, so I let it go to voicemail... and then I thought maybe I should check and see if there was a message.

I'm nerdy enough to copy and paste the note I left on The Dirty Life's wall, and I'm nerdy enough to have kept a copy of the text of the note that I sent my boyfriend, but there's something a little creepy about transcribing phone messages from old boyfriends word for word on my blog, so I'll paraphrase:

"J, I got a great letter from you, thank you so much. It's been sitting on my desk for a month, and since I hadn't replied to it I figured I'd just call. I can't wait to hear your voice and hear all your news."

I walked into the bedroom where my husband was still asleep. He opened his eyes half an inch and I said "my boyfriend just called me!"

It was a trip; I haven't heard his voice since 1996, and he sounded exactly the same. I went to work in a daze, and called back that evening. I got his voicemail, and left a message that went something like this:

"Hi Mark, this is J calling you back. You're probably asleep, or just not in your office. Thanks so much for calling, I'm sorry I missed it. It's so crazy to hear your voice on my voicemail, I'm pretty sure the last time I heard your voice or saw you was fifteen years ago. I guess I'll try calling during the day, or - here's my cell phone number, I have my cell phone with me most of the time. Hope to talk to you soon, and I hope everything is going well out there."

Last night, as I left work and walked to the bus stop to catch the #92 to the Hopleaf, I noticed I had a message from area code 518 from a couple minutes earlier. It was Mark again. I called back, and he picked up the phone.

"Mark?" I said.
"Yes?"
"This is J,"
"Get out of town!"

We spoke for the entire bus ride, and continued our conversation as I stood outside the Hopleaf waiting for my husband. And that, dear readers, is how I came to have a conversation with my high school boyfriend, who I haven't spoken to in 15 years, minutes before reading a story about him to a live audience. (I didn't tell him that last part).

No wonder I can't sleep.

Mortified!

2011-03-18T23:23:00.004-05:00

Tonight I had the distinct honor of reading at Mortified Chicago, a reading series in which willing participants get onstage and read ephemera from their youth. It was fantastic/horrible, and really funny, and great to hear everyone's horrible/ fabulous stories. Here's mine:

My name is J.P. - in 1988 I was 16 going on 17 yrs old -- I was in my junior year at a boarding school in Poughkeepsie, New York, I’d transferred out of regular high school after the 9^th grade because I was getting really terrible grades. In April of that year, I met a boy named Mick, who lived in Brooklyn, where I lived when I wasn’t at boarding school during the week. On our first date we saw the Spike Lee film “School Daze,” and once, when we were talking on the phone, he played Pink Floyd’s “Wish you were here” to me on the guitar, it was very tortured and romantic.

April 30th, 1988.

I have never lived so much in one weekend. I have never laughed so much, I’ve never talked so much, maybe I’ve cried as much but not like this. Like this it’s like a shooting star came by and left a silver dust in my eyes.

I know I am bleeding, but I am a woman, and a woman is most a woman when she bleeds. I was bleeding when it started too. (Aside - for the men in the audience, this means we dated for approximately 28 days)

And where did all those lights come from? Did god put them there? What’s so scary about the cornfield anyway?

I must confess, I have no shame. It’s true; it’s shameful how much shame I don’t keep inside. It was I that insisted on knowing all about Mick’s wet dreams.

June 20, 1988

Mick is everywhere. I ran into him five times yesterday and once today. Can't he stay in his own neighborhood? Every time I see him he's on 7th avenue. Why? I mean, it would be one thing if I was on Eastern Parkway when I saw him, but all 7 times I've seen him in the past 3 days it's been right here on 7th avenue. Twice I saw him right across the street. What's he trying to prove? Okay, maybe I'm getting a little carried away. But you know he's probably saying to all his friends "I wish she'd stop following me." That boy is too much. I'm wondering if he's part of what's been going on with the phones lately. Playing with fire. I just don't get it.

June 24, 1988

The cigarette ashes on my windowsill look like bird shit. Somebody calls your fucking name. FUCK YOU you're everywhere. Yeah, don't think I didn't see you duck into Lisa Polanski (a clothing store) what were you doing, trying on women's clothes? Jesus, you really piss me off sometimes. "Hey everybody, its Mick the dick." "Have you ever been Micked over?"

June 28, 1988

I'm having a dilemma - Mick has my earring with him and I'm not sure I want it back. He's kind of scummy - but at the same time he's my friend. He's going after Melissa Wolf, and he's already gotten Robin. I feel like I'm just another slave of his harem. I mean, how much would it prove if I got my earring back?

This is really ill - he's going for both Melissas (there were two of them) and Robin. Somebody has to castrate him quick. Some of us have more control over our hormones than others.

I then wrote the following letter to Mick, but I didn’t just send it to Mick, I read it to him. To his face.

June 28, 1988

As you may or may not have noticed, I've been bitchy to you on and off. And it's because, well, I'm getting offended at some of your behavior. And by this, yes, I mean your "going from woman to woman like the honey bee goes from flower to flower". It's really hard for me to watch you because I know I would never let anyone treat me that way, but it's very hard for me to separate me from them. I mean, I know that I wasn't treated like that but I feel like I'm just like another girl and it makes me feel so cheap. And I know I can't ask you to stop, but as a friend I'm asking you to please stop and think about what you're doing because even if you think that what you're doing isn't affecting anyone, you're wrong. It's affecting me, and it's affecting the general atmosphere of things, and it's affecting other people. And it's turning me into a dissing machine. I feel like I have to be rude to you to maintain that I'm not one of them. And being rude doesn't really help anything, it just makes things unpleasant. So if you could just stop and think about what you're doing, or something, I'd really appreciate it.

July 21, 1988

Why don't I just start dating Claus Von Bulow?

So I kept on obsessing about Mick – and I continued to be a terrible student, and ended up having to go to summer school. And over the course of the summer I read "Catcher in the Rye". And it really made an impression on me – I even quoted it on my senior yearbook page with the line “I always pick a gorgeous time to fall over a suitcase or something.” I wrote this journal entry mere hours after finishing the book, entirely in the voice of Holden Caulfield.

August 9, 1988

So I’m sitting here reading this book about some kid who lives in New York City and goes to boarding school and totally fucked up his junior year, among other things. And I’m sitting there saying “Jesus this book is about me.” I mean it really was. And then I got really depressed like I do sometimes when I think too much about what’s gonna happen to me later on and stuff, so I took my cigarettes and went for a walk.

Now I’m not a smoker, it’s just that I smoke. Believe me there’s a difference. A smoker will buy a pack of cigarettes every day. I’ll buy a pack of cigarettes and stash them away in a drawer for three months before I touch them. This particular pack was almost finished, I bought it in June. I never smoke them in public though, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I’d ruin my priceless angel image that I seem to build for myself whether I like it or not, and everybody’d think I was a smoker, which I’m not, like I said I just smoke. The second and most important reason I don’t smoke in public is that this particular pack of cigarettes I had, they’re really just about the most retarded cigarettes you’ve ever seen in your life. Capris. I got them cause I wanted to see how thin they were. Jesus, if you’re going to smoke a cigarette, smoke a real cigarette, not one of these fancy thin Capri bullshits. It’s embarrassing if people just see them in my drawer, you know, who the hell smokes Capris?

So anyway, I grabbed my jacket and my cigarettes and went for a walk. I couldn’t believe how late it was. It was 3:30 when I looked at the lounge clock, and there were still people sitting around the lounge.

“Hi Jess,” my roommate said.

“Hi,” I had to say something, even though I really didn’t feel like it.

“Are you going to see CSN?” Rajiv asked me. (That stands for Crosby, Stills and Nash.)

“Yeah,” I said.

“You got a ticket?”

“Yeah, kind of,”

“Did you charge it?”

“Yeah.”

“You think you could charge me one?”

“Well, Allison charged it for me,”

“Oh.”

I left the lounge and walked outside. I couldn’t help it but all of a sudden I started to cry, and I don’t cry too easy. At least not here. It’s like I have to put up my defense and all, I know that sounds awful, but you have to do that around here. I’m not saying it’s a bad place or anything, but still I wouldn’t want to walk around the halls crying.

So I go outside and I’m crying and I light one of my goddamn capris. I figure as long as I’ve got them I might as well smoke them. It’d be a waste to throw em out, even if they are retarded.

So I take in a huge breath of smoke and exhale. Things got a little dizzier soon, cause I have a very low resistance to cigarettes. I could take two drags off a cigarette and you’d think I was fucking drunk, I swear. I start walking crooked and shit, it’s a riot. It’s also another reason I don’t smoke in public.

So I’m walking along, just letting the tears come out and smoking a goddamn Capri cigarette, and there’s nobody out on account of its 3:30 in the morning. I was a little scared, I’ll admit that, but I needed to get out.

So I’m thinking to myself "my God this book is about me." And it really made me depressed because it really was, and it really made me think about stuff.

So I’m thinking and all of a sudden I start thinking about Mick. Now Mick is this jerk I used to run around with for a while, and whenever I’m in trouble I seem to think about him. And I was thinking about all the crazy things he did. Like one time when we had to dress up formal. Now you’ve gotta understand, Mick is always dressed up, so when we had to dress up formal, I thought “Jesus, how’s he gonna get any more dressed up?” Well you know what he did? He showed up in red polka dotted (boxer) shorts. It killed me.

Or the time I was wearing my Amnesty shirt with the dancer on it and he said “Why’s you’re goddamn pizza bleeding?” And I guess the dancer did look a little like a pizza, but I’d never noticed it. That killed me too.

So I kept thinking and I thought how absolutely pathetic I am sometimes. I mean, he was just a kid right? So why do I think about him every time I’m in trouble? I don’t know. I never understand men.

So then I sit down and I’m not crying anymore, and I’m on my second cigarette. And I think to myself “Jess, you know you’re probably just overreacting.” I’m good at that, it’s my specialty. I always get overemotional when I’ve stayed up too late or something, I’m like a little kid that way, it’s pathetic. So I’m thinking that I should probably just go to bed and sleep it off. So I go back and it’s 4 already, so I head for bed. And all of a sudden I’m so tired I couldn’t do anything if you paid me to.

Really, so I don’t even bother washing my face or anything, I just take my lenses out. I don’t even bother cleaning them, and I take my shorts and my socks off and I get into bed. I’ve never slept so hard in my goddamn life I swear.

You never know what a good piece of reading can do to you. It’s kinda dangerous sometimes.

Insomnia

2011-03-09T05:34:00.001-06:00

at Massmouth last month in Boston, where I was judged harshly for going off topic. Photo by Paula H.S. Junn.
I've kind of been burning the candle at both ends, if working in a gym and making appearances at local storytelling venues can be considered burning the candle at both ends. I'm a featured reader this Thursday at Story Club, and I couldn't sleep because I was thinking about what to read. Meanwhile, I've been ignoring this blog. I thought I'd stop in and say "hi", and post this goofy picture of me telling my UTI story to a Boston audience. While the judges at Massmouth gave me a bad score, the audience responded really well. At the intermission - when all the women lined up for the ladies room, I got more than one "you were robbed, I don't know why the judges did what they did!" Which was hilarious, considering it was coming from women who were waiting in line to pee Even from my seat on the stage (it was standing room only, and people were encouraged to sit onstage if there weren't any actual seats left), I got a couple of mouthed "you were great!"s from women sitting in the front row right after my bad score was unceremoniously written in black marker on a sheet of paper on the back wall. Hooray for the ladies at Massmouth! Boo for the judges! Ha!

Okay, more soon I promise, hope you all slept well.

I won The Moth Storyslam!!!

2011-02-22T23:20:00.001-06:00

I took my pee story to the Moth tonight at Martyrs for the "Love Hurts" theme and won!!!! I practiced it on Sunday in Boston, where I was visiting family, at a local storytelling series called Massmouth. The theme was "The Beast," and I was pretty severely penalized for going off topic, I came in second to last. I was hoping the judges would include my UTI story under the rubric of "the beast within," but they were far more literal with the theme than I'd anticipated. When it was over, I realized I could have changed a couple lines to include phrases like "microscopic beasts," but it was too late. No matter though, I flew home to Chicago this afternoon, got home at 5:45, left the house at 6:15 so I could make it to the Moth, and won!!!! I'm stunned and giddy.

Urine, A Love Story

2011-02-11T07:50:00.000-06:00

You may recognize this one, it's one I dusted off and made some improvements to, and brought with me to last night's Story Club. Dana Norris, the woman who runs Story Club, told me I should tighten it up, get it down to 5 minutes, and bring it to the Moth later this month where the theme is "love hurts". I haven't gone to the Moth since it first came to Chicago and was jam packed, and put my name in the hat but never got called up on stage. The Moth is a little more intimidating that your usual reading: you only get 5 minutes, you're not allowed to bring notes onstage with you, you get judged by a panel and somebody wins, and you have to put your name in a hat and don't know until they call your name if you're getting a chance to read. I've been told that the Moth has slowed down since it's Chicago inaugural, and isn't quite as packed or competitive as it used to be, and have been meaning to check it out. I'll have to spend the next couple weeks working on this, and maybe I'll get a chance to do the Moth. Here, for your reading pleasure, is my pseudo-Valentine's day story:

Urine, A Love Story

My sister called me from Boston to ask me about the man I’d just started seeing, and during the course of our conversation I happened to mention the strange sensation I felt when I peed. A UTI veteran, (that’s urinary tract infection for those of you not in the know), she told me to go to the closest health food store and buy a bottle of Lakewood 100% cranberry juice - not cranberry juice cocktail, but 100% cranberry juice. No added water, no sugar, tart enough to turn my mouth inside out and sour enough to give me a stomach ache. She said that should help. We continued talking and when I described the strange pressure I felt on urinating she said “oh girl, if you’re feeling pressure when you pee, it’s too late for cranberry juice. You get off the phone and you go to the doctor. Now!”

I was taken aback by the tone in her voice, it was one she reserved for delivering really, really bad news, like when someone died or something valuable caught on fire. I was scared; really scared. The next time I peed it felt like someone was stabbing me in the urethra with a barbecue skewer, and when I looked into the toilet bowl it wasn’t yellow - it was red.

I considered my options: the closest emergency room was a block away, but I couldn't walk a block, it hurt too much. Everything hurt too much; there wasn't a position I could stand, sit or lie down in that didn't hurt. I needed someone to drive me. My roommate had a car but she was stoned, and didn't seem terribly alarmed by my situation. The only other person I knew who had a car was the guy I had just started seeing. I calmed down as much as I could before dialing his number. I don't think he even said "hello" before I burst in with “I’m bleeding, I have to get to a doctor, NOW!”
“Where are you bleeding from?” he asked. I hesitated, we had only been seeing each other for a couple weeks, he had just gotten out of a long term relationship and wasn’t ready to commit to anything serious, but I really liked him and was trying so hard not to like him too much, and this was way too intimate a conversation to be having with him at this stage in our relationship but my urethra was on fire and I couldn't think of a pretty, alluring way to say it: “When I pee,” I blurted, “blood comes out when I pee!”

He drove me to Thorek hospital on Montrose and Broadway, a place I’d heard vague rumors about, but had never actually seen the inside of. I walked up to the receptionist and said “I think I have a urinary tract infection, when I pee blood comes out!” She told me to take a seat and fill out some paperwork. I remained standing, not that it helped stop the pain.

At the time I was a heavy watcher of the NBC series ER, and I imagined that I’d be waiting for hours as people with shotgun and stab wounds were wheeled in on stretchers, surrounded by fast talking medics, maybe Dr. John Carter himself would be pumping furiously on their chests in an effort to save their lives, but the reality was much different - I was the only one in the ER that night, their biggest emergency was that blood was coming out of my pee hole.

I was seen by a doctor, and had to produce a sample. I never truly appreciated just what a wonderful thing it is to urinate without pain, what a wonderful, magical thing it is to pull down my pants, sit on a toilet, and let the urine flow while my mind wanders until that simple act of voiding made me do the silent scream - have you ever done the silent scream? I sat on the ER toilet with a plastic cup between my legs, eyes squinched closed and mouth wide open, silently screaming as a tiny river of red daggers stabbed their way out of me.

This was not how I’d imagined things would progress with my new man.

The doctor examined my bloody discharge, and wrote a prescription. My boyfriend - I mean the guy I was seeing, drove me to a 24 hour pharmacy to get the prescription filled, and took me back home. Back in the apartment my roommate was stoned and watching loud TV, and barely acknowledged my presence. She kept the TV on all night, turning it off somewhere around 6 a.m. At 6:30 my alarm went off. I had a temp job to get to, and I needed the money more than I needed the sleep. I took a shower, clothed myself, and in a haze made my way to an office building near Union Station. I looked like hell, but nobody seemed to notice. It was a fairly quiet day, and I passed the time drinking huge quantities of water and visiting the ladies room, where I slammed the sides of the stall with my hands and silently screamed every single time.

After an eternity of watching the clock, 5pm blessedly arrived. I made the trek back to my apartment, opened the door, and found my roommate on the couch in the same position she’d been in the night before, stoned and reclining on the sofa, watching loud TV next to the guy I was seeing. I barely said a word to either of them, closing myself into my bedroom and curling up onto the twin futon mattress on the floor. I heard a soft knock; it was the guy I was seeing. He entered the room quietly, removed his shoes, climbed under the sheets, put his arm around me, and stayed there until I fell asleep. Neither of us could think much beyond the next morning, and if we could have seen into the future, we would have seen other apartments, roommates, and emergencies, some better and some worse than the ones we were in the thick of at that moment, but if either of us knew that we were destined, five years later, to become married, neither of us showed it. I can’t say that that was the moment when I knew I’d be with him for the rest of my life, but something had changed. Not long afterward, a friend of his told me that he’d stopped referring to me as “the girl I’m seeing,” and replaced that ungainly phrase with the more elegant “my girlfriend.” I stopped trying not to like him so much, and waited to see what would happen next.

Now if you'll excuse me, I think I have to find the restroom.

The Glamorous Life - read tonight at Story Lab Chicago

2011-01-19T23:21:00.003-06:00

I read this tonight at a brand new reading series called Story Lab Chicago, and I had a fantastic time. I've never gotten a reaction like that from an audience, and there was a little piece of me that never wanted to leave the Black Rock. I ordered another beer and hung around for a while, enjoying the moment. Tomorrow is just another day, but tonight was a blast, thanks!

The Glamorous Life

By nine a.m., at work, I’ve seen seventeen naked bodies, most of them belonging to ageing Korean women who spend the early morning in the pool doing water aerobics, and seem to have a cultural penchant for spending time together in the buff. They drape towels over the chairs near a row of sinks in the women’s locker room, where they sit in the altogether, blow drying their hair in front of the mirrors and speaking in their native tongue in energetic staccato bursts. I can’t say that seeing people naked has ever been a workplace hazard for me. I consider which is weirder: the possibility that my coworkers might see me naked some day, or that I might see them naked someday. My boss is a very fit, very socially awkward woman who reminds me of Jane Lynch's character on Glee, only she's not nearly as funny, nor as hot. I don't think I want to see her naked.

One of my first assignments at this job was to man a table outside the gym and hand out apples to people who had walked a mile for an event called the Apple Walk. I’m no monument to justice; I distributed fruit regardless of whether people actually walked a mile. I used to write human interest stories about women who gained economic stability raising guinea pigs in Peru, and grant proposals for girls’ education projects in Tanzania, among other things, for an international humanitarian aid organization. Then I lost my job in the bad economy, and took advantage of the time off by traveling and volunteering while I looked for work. I accepted a job doing administrative work in a gym because it was the only job that was offered to me after an entire year of submitting resumes, going on interviews, and collecting rejections. After a while I began to expect rejection, and it was bad for my head; if nothing else, this job would give me a break from it. I tell myself it’s what I’m doing for now, to get by, to get off unemployment, and for the health insurance.

It’s been eight months though, which is apparently long enough for Stoil Stoilov, the tiny Russian man who maintains the gym equipment, to wink at me when we cross paths. Loosely translated, his name means Stoil of Stoil. In addition to maintaining equipment, Stoil is a bodybuilder, and has all his blue jeans taken in to fit his muscular, froglike physique. He has them split down the center seam, the waist pulled in a couple inches, and then sewn back together. He doesn’t bother to have the back pockets moved though, so the final product creates the visual effect of the back pockets coming together at an angle and disappearing into his ass crack. I think he does this on purpose to direct attention to his ass, which is small and very tight. Most of our interactions revolve around the spreadsheets that I create so he can keep track of his maintenance schedule; he seems to be just as impressed by my computer skills as I am with his ability to lift heavy things. He once told me, his chest swelling with pride, or maybe it was just muscle mass: “I’m like St. Peter; I have the keys to everything.”

My working life is filled with small indignities: eating cafeteria food, getting paid by the hour, wrestling with a time clock that only counts ten times an hour – so if I clock in at 9:03, I don’t start getting paid until 9:06. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that I have a ten minute commute, I don’t have to get dressed up for work – or even shower, and my ass has gotten 6% smaller.

Sometimes I even have fun – my best friend at work is a 67 year-old woman named Lois, who was a dancer before she started working here. We go to the cafeteria together to buy our institutional lunches, she lets me practice reading my stories out loud to her, and she keeps me updated on her husband who’s almost ten years younger than she is which is just scandalous. She’s in charge of the arthritis program, and heads an annual event called National Senior Health and Fitness day, where she patrols baskets of snacks and goody bags in the lobby to make sure that only old people are getting free stuff, and that nobody gets seconds.

One of my coworkers is an enormous wall of a man named Fred, who wears t-shirts with the sides cut out so everyone can see the dragon tattoo that runs down his side, and to show off his defined musculature. My interactions with him were limited to times when I couldn’t reach something and was too lazy to go find a step stool. That changed the day he came to work wearing a ladies’ holiday sweater with an appliquéd teddy bear on it. It had a very feminine, delicately scalloped neckline, and he wore it with a black turtleneck underneath, which for some reason made it even funnier. He walked into my work area dressed like that and said “hey has anyone looked at Caitlin’s stocking?” I knew immediately what he was referring to – for the holidays, every staff member has a miniature stocking with their name written in bubble paint. It was my job to make stockings for staff that didn't already have one this year, and the rest came from a plastic storage bin, and were presumably made by my predecessor. Caitlin’s stocking had a candle rendered in glue and glitter, but it looked like something else. I looked my enormous, sweater-wearing coworker in the eye and said “I think you and I are on the same wavelength here.” At this he started laughing, which I took as a cue to continue. “It’s um… it looks there’s a cock and balls on Caitlin’s stocking.” “Yeah I showed it to her,” he said, and in a pitch-perfect imitation of Caitlin’s voice, dramatically reenacted the moment: “why what’s on it? Oh my god!” He told all of Caitlin’s clients about it, and for weeks, people came up to her and said: “I saw your stocking.”

So, I can put Stoil, Lois, and Fred in the good column when I make my list of pros and cons of this job; I've had worse. There was the job working for a hulk of a boss at an ad sales company who asked me, on Ash Wednesday, when “my holiday” was – meaning… you know, Passover, only he didn’t want to come right out and say it. He was gigantic, six foot five, easily three hundred pounds; he liked to bully people to get his way, and had breath that smelled like rotting cabbage. My male coworkers said he’d recognize their shoes in the men’s room stalls, and start talking to them about clients while they were taking a crap.

Then there was the woman at a realtor’s association who used an entire sheet of legal paper to write the sentence: “I’m having an emergency,” and left the note in my cubicle – which was located ten feet from her office. “What kind of emergency,” I asked. “I tried to make coffee,” she said, “and water went everywhere. I don’t know what I should do.” Later I discovered that she never read her emails, never even opened her Outlook program, because, she said, it was “too overwhelming.” Once, while we were meeting, her phone rang and she let it go to voicemail. Afterwards she looked at the blinking phone message indicator with bewilderment. “I didn’t even hear the phone ring, did you?” She asked.

And I once had a short-lived job assisting a training program for nurses who work in senior care. At the first and only training that I took part in, I refused to participate in an exercise that involved taking an adult diaper into the bathroom, running the absorbent center under a faucet, pulling down my pants, affixing the damp diaper to my body, and wearing it under my clothes for the rest of the afternoon as part of a sensitivity training. There are some things that you don’t have to experience firsthand in order to know that they suck. It seemed more like a sorority hazing than sensitivity training to me, and if pressed, I was prepared to tell the instructor that my previous job was at an organization that worked to eliminate child abuse, but nobody ever held a lit cigar to my arm as part of a sensitivity training.

At the gym, there are TVs around the facility that play a loop of music videos, and lately Sheila E.’s “The Glamorous Life” has been in heavy rotation. It’s been a while since I’ve heard that song, and I’d like to take a moment to share some of the lyrics:

She wears a long fur coat of mink
Even in the summer time
Everybody knows from the coy little wink
The girl's got a lot on her mind

She's got big thoughts, big dreams
And a big brown Mercedes sedan
What I think this girl
She really wants
Is to be in love with a man

She wants to lead the Glamorous Life
She don't need a man's touch
She wants to lead the Glamorous Life
Without love
It ain't much, it ain't much

I’m not quite sure if Shelia is saying that money is all you need, or that love is all you need, but sometimes I like to pretend that I’m the girl in the song that everybody knows from the coy little wink has lot on her mind. I’m not really all that interested in a big brown Mercedes sedan, but I’m down with big thoughts and big dreams. And I may run the risk of seeing my boss naked someday, but for now, anyway, this is about as glamorous as it gets. Until further notice, I’ll be at the gym, hanging out with Stoil, Lois, and Fred.

You guys are SO cutting edge!

2011-01-11T18:29:00.000-06:00

Because you've been reading me since forever, and now I'm in this thing next week: Story Lab Chicago. I'll post my story after I've read it next Wednesday. Tee hee!

Good Deed of the Day

2011-01-07T14:52:00.005-06:00

I read this last night at Story Club, enjoy.

Good deed of the day

This morning at work, Fred walked in on a woman while she was sitting on the toilet. She had a physical therapy appointment, and was using the restroom tucked in the no-man’s land between the physical therapy offices and the break room they share with program staff at the gym. Fred walked into the break room where I sat with Caitlin and said:

“hey, there’s somebody in the bathroom,” as casually as if he were announcing there was an extra can of soda in the fridge.

“Really?” I asked, because I hadn’t heard any commotion. “If it had been me, you all would have known about it right away.”

“Yeah Fred,” Caitlin said, “how long were you in there?”

“I just washed my hands,” he replied. Caitlin and I exchanged glances.

“After you walked in on her?” I asked, “and she was okay with that?”

“Well yeah, I mean, I already saw her sitting there,” he said, “she just said “go ahead.”

I considered which was weirder – the fact that Fred went ahead and washed his hands in a restroom that was clearly occupied, or that a physical therapy patient allowed a strange man to wash his hands while she sat on the pot next to him. Getting walked in on while using a public toilet is one of my top five fears in life; it’s right up there with slipping on black ice and accidentally leaving the house with the iron plugged in. Whenever I have to use a public bathroom, which is often, because I work in a gym, I double check to make sure the door is locked, and sometimes keep a hand or a foot extended towards the door, just in case.

“So,” I said, “you figured, what had already been seen could not be unseen, so why not just go ahead and do what you went in for?”

“Well what else was I supposed to do?” Fred asked, “I wanted to wash my hands before I ate.” Caitlin and I exchanged glances again.

“Use the sink in the break room,” Caitlin suggested. Fred turned to face the counter where a sink lived next to a dish drain, right next door to a microwave and a 10 cup coffeemaker.

“Oh, yeah” he said. Then he launched into a story about a woman who accidentally plugged up her new boyfriend’s toilet while he was out of the apartment. According to Fred, the toilet began to overflow, but the woman couldn’t find a plunger anywhere. In desperation, she found a plastic bag and used it to remove the blockage, tied it shut, left the apartment, and only after the door had locked shut behind her realized that she’d left the plastic bag on the kitchen counter and had no way of getting back inside to dispose of it. Fred ended the story with: “she never saw him again.”

I felt like I’d heard this story before, like maybe it was an urban legend, or something I’d heard at a party, when my attentions turned to the woman who was now trapped in the bathroom between physical therapy and the break room. The walls were paper thin, and I was certain that she could hear our entire conversation from her throne of humiliation.

“She’s still in there,” I whispered, “she’s probably going to stay in there all day until she’s sure nobody is left here.” There are two doors to the break room, one on either end. I closed the one closest to the bathroom, so that the victim of Fred’s hand washing habits could at least exit the room with a modicum of dignity, and disappear into the relative anonymity of the physical therapy office. I consider it my good deed of the day.

Another night at Story Club - My Boyfriend

2010-12-03T18:37:00.002-06:00

I read this last night, I hope you enjoy it.

My Boyfriend

As a prelude to making out, my boyfriend removes the retainer from his mouth and sets it down on the bench next to him. God, that’s sexy! Later, in an act of undying devotion, I return to the soccer field where we’d been making out to retrieve it. Its dark out, but the light of my love leads me to it. I spot the small pink dome resting on the bench. I pick the thing up; it’s like touching the inside of a plastic smile. I carefully put it in my pocket, and walk back to my dorm room.

This is something of a second chance high school - a boarding school, and some kids are here on purpose, but a lot of us ended up here either because we dropped out or were expelled from other schools, or couldn’t get into college with the grades we had. There are a number of 19 year-old seniors, and at least one kid who came here from military school, and still wakes up every morning at 5am.

My boyfriend is a day student; he gets dropped off in the morning, and picked up in the evening. For my birthday, he paints a rose on a canvas that he stretched himself, not a rose in bloom, but one that’s still closed in on itself, attached to a long, thorny stem. Our union was unlikely. I happened to mention in confidence to my roommate Alexia that I thought he was cute, she went and told him, and the next thing I knew he was sitting across from me in the dining hall, where I refused to speak to him. For a week I blatantly ignored him as we crossed paths on the tiny campus, but he persisted in seeking me out. “Why won’t you date him?” Alexia asked. It’s the principal of the thing that bothered me; I told her something in confidence and then she went and shared it. I vowed to never tell Alexia anything again, ever. Besides, I had a strict policy to only like boys who didn’t like me. My sophomore year there was Andrew; he was really sweet, tolerated my attentions with stoicism, and was totally uninterested. He signed my yearbook with: “I’m sorry that not everything turned out the way you wanted.” After Andrew graduated I moved on to Sam, who was on the cross country team with me, and actively disliked me, but this only stoked the flames of my desire. I didn’t like being pursued, and I wasn’t very graceful about rejecting my suitors. The year before, I had flat out refused to date a very nice boy named Fred who had transferred in his senior year. Without a hint of nuance or sugarcoating, I said: “I can’t go out with you.”

So it should come as no surprise that after a week of stonewalling this boy who Alexia told my secret to, I literally dare him to date me. To my shock and surprise, he takes me up on it. To save face, I have to transform my hostility into feelings of endearment and affection. As it turns out, this is surprisingly easy to do, and I soon fall completely and totally in love. I can’t imagine life without him; he’s all I think about.

After I graduate high school, I ditch my plan to work at the summer camp where I’d spent seven summers, and take a job doing office work at an agency that sends people out onto street corners to distribute fliers, just so that I can continue to see my boyfriend on weekends.

Some weekends he takes the train into the city, and some weekends I make the reverse commute. At my boyfriend’s house, I sit at the table with his family, and am included in family functions and outings. My boyfriend’s parents take me into their home every other weekend, put me up in the rec room, and treat me like I am one of their own. His little sister adores me, and on Saturdays if my boyfriend is working, I hang out with her. At my house, I do things on my own; I cook frozen or boil-in-bag dinners, which I eat by myself. My sister, six years my senior, has long since moved out on her own, my father lives in another country, and my mother is never around.

At the end of the summer, I go away to college in another state, and we break up, the distance is much for him. I am devastated; as far as I’m concerned, he is my one great love, and I will never meet another boy like him. It’s not too much distance, however, for me to keep in touch with his family. I send his mother letters from college, and she writes back. She documents the goings on of the household, tells me when her pet bird dies, and when my boyfriend’s little sister starts high school. I send her black and white prints that I develop in the college darkroom, and when I move to Chicago and discover The Reader I clip the Life In Hell cartoons and mail them to his little sister. Over time the correspondence slows, but it never quite stops. I see my boyfriend from time to time, not often, the summer after my freshman year of college I go to his eighteenth birthday party, once when I spend the summer back east we go with a group of friends to hear a singer perform at a coffeehouse. He goes to college and majors in agricultural science, and gets really into organic farming. The last time I saw him, he was working on a CSA in Pennsylvania. He told me about a woman he thought he was in love with, and I told him about the man who would eventually become my husband.

The last time I spoke to his mother was right after I’d gotten married and bought a house. There was something different in her voice, after I’d updated her on my life, she said: “wow, you just really are one of those people who stay in touch.” She’d been going through some papers, and found all the letters I’d sent her over the years. She said she was going to mail them back to me. “Why would you want to do that?” I asked. “Oh, you know, this way you get to read them and see who you were back then.” In my experience, sending back all the letters someone has ever sent to you is something you do when you break up with them, is that what she was doing? My boyfriend’s mother was breaking up with me! I reluctantly gave her my address, and hoped that she would forget about it. A few days later I received a package from her. I opened it, read one line, and stopped. It was embarrassing; the only good thing about having it was that nobody else could read it now. I stuffed the envelope in a drawer and never looked at it again.

A couple weeks ago, as I sat in my cubicle at my recession job – the one I got after I was laid off from my real job, I was surfing facebook when I came across an NPR story about a New York journalist who’d traveled to Pennsylvania to interview a young farmer at a CSA, fell in love with him, married him, started an organic farm with him on the New York/Vermont border, and had written a memoir about their first year running the farm. I didn’t need to read the rest of the story to figure out that the young farmer she was speaking of was my boyfriend. Like the magic that had led me to his missing retainer, I just knew. Something happened to me as I sat in my cubicle, a small explosion that started at the base of my neck, and radiated out and down through my extremities.

By the time I got home to my loving husband, I could no longer form coherent sentences.

“That bitch stole my boyfriend!” I blurted.

“Oh, and what am I?” he asked, after I’d managed to explain myself.

“Yeah yeah, you’re great, I love you, whatever, the point is… that bitch stole my boyfriend!”

“You would not want to be a farmer’s wife,” he argued.

I offered as counterpoint: “You don’t know!”

In the weeks since, I’ve read every interview of my boyfriend’s wife that I could get my hands on, listened to audio tracks of her on NPR, and watched videos of her speaking. I even tracked down a couple photos of my boyfriend online to confirm what I already knew. And because my brain is a jukebox of songs that were recorded between 1980-1990, Prince’s “when u were mine” got stuck in my head, even though the lyrics in no way describe our relationship.

My illogical burst of proprietary feelings for my boyfriend seems to have subsided, and I’ve come to recognize that the attachment I felt was really more to his family. I doubt that I will see him or his family anytime soon. It would probably be weird anyway. If he was to walk into this room right now, all I would really want to say to him would be: Thanks. Thanks for putting up with all my crap. Thanks for breaking through my ridiculous, self-defeating barriers. Thanks for having such a cool family (except for that one time when your mom broke up with me, that was whack.) Thanks for growing up to be a good man who does good things in the world. But mostly, thanks for taking out your retainer - not every guy would do that.

Stop me if you've heard this one before...

2010-11-05T08:03:00.001-05:00

I went to Story Club last night, and I'm glad I did. I'm feeling a little more like myself today, and a little less like my own cautionary tale. I read a story that's a compilation of a few blog posts I published right here about a year ago, and put together back in August for an audition with 2nd Story. I was really excited to audition, I've submitted to them a couple times but never got that far. In the end I didn't get selected for the 2nd Story reading series. They were super nice in their rejection, told me to try again, yadda yadda. I consoled myself with the old adage that you're not a real writer until you get your first rejection.

Since I had the piece ready to go, and had spent so much time working on it, I figured it would be a shame not to read it somewhere, so I brought it to Story Club last night and read it during the open mic portion of the show. You've probably already read this, or some version of it, but here it is:

Cab Driver

Nothing good ever happens in an empty taxi cab idling with one door wide open. I scanned the area – I was the only person on the block. I considered my options – was I safer in the cab, or on the street? Should I open the trunk, take my backpack and run for my life? Should I abandon the backpack and run for my life? If I’d taken that grim facebook quiz that tells you the hour and means of your own demise, would the result have been: bludgeoned to death by a Portuguese cab driver, 1am, November 9th, 2009?

This journey began almost 24 hours earlier; well, actually it started six months earlier, when I was laid off from my job. Between sending out resumes, interviewing, and getting rejected, I began checking off items on a mental list of things I’d always wanted to do but never had time for. Things like being a volunteer tutor, doing a mini-triathlon, and traveling abroad with Habitat for Humanity to build a house for someone who had less than I did. With my severance package and unemployment benefits, I was still earning more than the average Portuguese worker (Wikipedia confirmed it).

The day after I was laid off, I was sent to meet with a job loss counselor who looked like Al Delvecchio from “Happy Days”. “Do you think you’ll become depressed?” he asked, as casually as if he were asking if I take coffee with milk, “are you the kind of person who becomes depressed in situations like this?”

Determined not to be the kind of person who becomes depressed in situations like this, here I was. I’d turned this trip into three week long, three country extravaganza, starting in France where I connected with family, then on to Spain, where I stayed with a high school friend I hadn’t seen in years; Portugal was the last stop on my excellent unemployed adventure.

I got a cab at the Campanhã train station, and handed the driver a piece of paper with an address on it. As he read it I asked “Braga?” the name of the town I was overdue to arrive in. There had been a small catastrophe at the Barcelona airport and I’d missed my flight to Porto, where Habitat was expecting me, and had to fly into Lisbon, take a train north to Campanhã, and take a cab from there. I hadn’t brought a phone with me, thinking it would be just one more thing I could lose. I waited in a long line to check in, only to discover that the airline wouldn’t accept passengers who check in less than an hour before takeoff. I called my husband from a payphone, and when I heard his voice come through the line was full on sobbing.

"What's wrong?" he asked, not having heard the two messages I'd left while he was still asleep. "Everything!" I said. I became a phone booth spectacle, a grown woman crying in the Barcelona airport, cursing and sputtering, tears shooting out of my eyes and running down the inside of my glasses and down my cheeks. “They don't care,” I said, “they don't just put you on the next flight, they make you pay. I'm so tired of nobody giving a shit!" Then I jotted down a phone number my husband found in an email from Habitat.

I dialed the international operator again and gave him my debit card. There was a pause, and the man connecting my call said: "There's a block on this card." "I just used it to make a call," I said, and, attempting to impress upon him the gravity of the situation, "I'm having an emergency." "I'll try again," he said, and came back a few seconds later with "It won't go through, do you have another card?"

I did have another card; it was in a sleeve, sewn to the bottom of my Rick Steves backpack, underneath all my clothes, toiletries and electronics. "Can you hold on for just a minute?" I asked, and let the phone go slack and hang from its metal cord. I hoped the operator could hear me as I unzipped my carefully packed bag and dumped its contents onto the floor - exposing my secret stash of money and backup credit card for anyone who happened to be watching. Finally I heard the voice of Habitat Portugal on the line.

With urgency in my voice and snot in my nasal cavity I explained my situation to a man named João. He told me to go to Oriente station when I landed, and to call him with my train information. I said something noncommittal like "okay".

I found a restroom and checked out my reflection, my eyes were red and puffy; I looked stoned. I ran water over my face and headed for my gate. As I boarded the plane Johnny Nash's “I Can See Clearly Now” played over the PA system, and I really, really hoped that was the case.

The cab driver talked incessantly. I assumed he was talking on a phone until I heard a whistle, looked up and saw he was making eye contact with me in the rearview mirror. His hairline started about an inch above his eyebrows, like Phil Leotardo, captain of the Lupertazzi family on “The Sopranos”. He said something that sounded like: “Capeesh?” I shook my head: no, I don't understand. He spoke again, ending his sentence with the word português? "No," I said, "I don't speak Portuguese." This agitated him. I speak French très bien, and Spanish un poquito, but as it turns out, Portuguese is not some kind of linguistic buy two get one free deal. I opened my notebook and pointed to João's phone number. “I know someone who can speak to you; can I use your phone?" I asked, pointing to it. “Si”, he replied.

João is going to hate me, I thought as I dialed his number for the fourth time; we hadn't even met and already I was causing him grief. "I'm in a taxi and the driver doesn't understand," I said. The driver was in the middle of a soliloquy, and it took some effort to get his attention. "Excuse me," I said, thrusting the phone into his personal space, "excuse me, could you please take the phone, there's someone who can talk to you." He continued on his rant, unabated. "Excuse me, excuse me," I said, touching his shoulder and repeating the same phrase as if this would make him understand English, despite the fact that I persisted in not understanding Portuguese. Finally we made eye contact, "there's someone on the phone for you." "OK?" I asked when he disconnected, figuring that this of all words would translate. "OK, OK," he said, as we drove past a highway sign that read: Braga 44km.

We continued this way for some time, the driver talking a Portuguese blue streak, and making eye contact in the rear-view mirror. He pointed to his temple with an index finger and said "cray zee, craaaaay zeeeeee!" He rubbed his index finger against his thumb, making the international sign for expensive and said "reesh, reeeeesh!" "I know," I said, "I don't usually take cabs from Portuguese train stations in the middle of the night, but there was a last minute change in my itinerary." I listened to the car radio and realized a cover of Johnny Nash's “I Can See Clearly Now” was being sung by a female vocalist.

We got off the highway and began circling; I'm not from here, the driver seemed to be saying, I don't usually take passengers this far out of my way. We drove up a dead-end street, and then turned around. We circled the area, the driver speaking in a tone that sounded more desperate and anxious than before.

I’d been watching the number on the fare box grow steadily higher, and didn't have enough cash to pay it. The driver slowed near an ATM, and I sounded out the words printed on it: "Kai-ksah out-oh-mah-ticah," I said, pointing. "Si, si," he said. I left the car door open to indicate my intention of returning, and hoped that the hold on my debit card had been lifted. I withdrew 200 Euros, and walked back outside where the car was still running, the door I'd opened was ajar, but the driver was nowhere to be seen.

Nothing good ever happens in empty taxi cabs left idling with a door wide open. What was I thinking traveling by myself to a country I knew nothing about, where I couldn’t speak or read the language? Sure, if I’d stayed home I’d probably be a little bored and maybe depressed, but at least bored to death is just an expression.

I got in the cab, and closed the door. In a moment, two men approached; the driver and a tall man dressed in a dark suit and hat. The tall man made wide gestures with his arms, and the driver nodded emphatically. The tall man walked away and the driver returned to the car. "OK?" I almost whispered. "OK, OK," he said, and put the car back in gear.

We drove around a corner and down a street that had signs for a hospital. The driver spoke to me in low tones, but the only word I understood was hospital. He pulled over and repeated himself, ending his sentence with capeesh? I shook my head. He maintained eye contact in the rear-view mirror: capeesh, capeesh? I kept shaking my head. "It doesn't matter how many times you say it to me in Portuguese," I said, "I don’t understand." Finally something clicked. "Oh," I said, "the guy from Habitat is going to meet me here?" I asked, pointing to the curb. "Si, si," the driver said. "So I should get out here?" I said. "Si, si!"

Shortly a man in jeans and a button down shirt appeared on the sidewalk. I wasn’t sure it was João, I wasn’t even sure I was in Braga. He had dark hair and brown eyes, and bore a passing resemblance to former Bulls forward Toni Kukoč. I rolled down my window: “João?” I asked. “Jessica?” he replied. In that moment, as João took my backpack from the trunk and I paid the driver the reesh, cray zee sum of 70 Euros, I could see my future again; someday I would have another job, and traveling instead of staying home and catching up on Judge Judy would turn out to be the best decision I could have made. Like Johnny Nash kept saying, I could see clearly now. Language was no longer an impediment to seeing the world but the verbal equivalent of those stereoscopic paintings that were really popular about fifteen years ago – once I learned to relax my eyes, I could see the image in front of me; and if I relaxed my ears enough, maybe I could learn a few words of Portuguese.

November 3rd

2010-11-03T22:31:00.000-05:00

cheap Polish candy arranged to spell "boo".

The keyboard drawer under my desk broke yesterday as I was preparing to leave work. I tried fixing it, but succeeded only in getting dark, soap-resistant grease all over my hands. I had to run to make it to my West African Dance class with Idy, so I left it leaning up against a corner of my work space.

I haven’t taken a West African Dance class since I got back from Senegal; I was a little nervous for my first class last Tuesday. Idy was happy to see me, and it felt good to dance again, hear live drumming, and reconnect with the joy I felt the first time I danced in the room on Lincoln Avenue that brings a piece of West Africa to Chicago, contained within four walls but loud enough that passersby on the street stop to look in the windows. I was a passerby myself the first time I heard it.

It’s been a rough week: Angelica’s father passed; my knee has been bothering me more than I thought it would after my fall in Horner Park; yesterday was the mid-term elections; and it turns out nothing has changed in my body composition over the past 7 weeks. (Have I mentioned the body age challenge I signed up for at work? It involves heart rate monitors, a lot of exercise, and occasionally submitting to a scale that measures body fat percentage.) Also, my job has the increasingly annoying side effect of degrading my self-respect. Some days are okay, other days I have to remind myself that considering the circumstances we’re all living in, I’m doing alright. It’s not all terrible, if I had to make a list of pros and cons, it would look like this:

Pro: Lois, a 67 year-old fitness instructor and former dancer who has become a quasi-maternal figure for me. If I’m lucky enough to grow as old, I hope I’m also lucky enough to be as fit as she is. We’re on the same team for the body age challenge, along with her husband, and another woman who works here. At the moment our little rag-tag team is kicking ass (we’re tied for first place), but that may well change once all the teams get their mid-season body composition results.

Con: The Scottish facilities manager with an Italian name who treats me like I owe him something. He seems to believe that because I know how to use some computer programs, I know how to use all computer programs, even ones that aren’t installed on my computer. This makes about as much sense as believing that since I speak some languages, I speak all languages, even ones I’ve never heard of.

Pro: Free yoga, free Pilates, and free access to fitness equipment.

Con: As if getting paid 40% less than I earned at my previous job wasn’t humiliating enough, I have to battle daily with a time clock that only counts once every six minutes -- if I clock in at 9:01, I don’t start getting paid until 9:06.

Pro: Having a flexible schedule that allows me to take Friday afternoons off.

Con: Getting docked 30 minutes pay for “lunch,” which consists of going across the street to the hospital cafeteria and bringing food back to my desk, and having to “make it up” by staying at work an extra 30 minutes.

Pro: Having a 10 minute bicycle commute.

Con: The manager who has absolutely no boundaries and walks right into my ridiculously small work space to ask me if I received the email she sent me thirty seconds earlier. She also looks at the work that’s on my desk, and if it’s for a different manager, asks me what I’m working on and why .

Pro: Wednesday afternoon snack time in the staff break room; I look forward to it all week.

Con: When the facility director is in charge of Wednesday afternoon snack time; he always brings something really lame, like cheap Polish candy I could buy in any of the family-run grocery stores in my neighborhood, but don’t, because it’s not very good.

Pro: The man who runs around the track singing at the top of his lungs to whatever 80’s song is playing on his old school headphones, which appear to have been bought around the same era.

Con: The man with a Mohawk who exercises in jeans and work boots, and spends all his time lifting weights and grunting like he’s taking a dump.

Tomorrow is Story Club, and I plan on reading something during open mic. Hopefully I’ll get some of my self-respect back.

For Angelica

2010-10-30T21:15:00.001-05:00

Fox 32 was airing the 1998 Halloween episode of The Simpsons when she called. I’d been expecting to hear from her, we had tentative plans. Her name showed up on my cell phone and I answered in a goofy voice. “Hellooooooooo Angelica,” I said, like the Big Bopper at the beginning of Chantilly Lace.
“Hi,” she said. And then: “so, my dad died.”

I can’t remember exactly what I said next, but there was at least one expletive, and expressions of shock and sympathy. As she explained the circumstances of her father's death my cat pressed her head into an empty yogurt cup that I’d left on the living room floor, and the 8 oz. container stuck to her face. “I’m sorry Angelica,” I said, as my cat tried to back out from the plastic cup, her shoulders lifting and dropping dramatically as she stepped backwards, like a film noir actress backing away from danger.

Earlier that day I’d fallen while running the trail in Horner Park; a root tripped me and as I flew through the air I tried to land with the least amount of damage, ending up on my stomach and chest, arms splayed wide. I wasn’t badly hurt, a smallish bruise showed up on my right knee a few hours later, but my hands, which had acted as brakes in the dirt, were fine. I dusted myself off and continued running. Now the moment seemed symbolic.

Angelica is in North Carolina now, where her brother lives... where her father died. Soon they will make the trek back to their hometown in Michigan, where funeral services will be held. I’ve been thinking about her a lot today.

The Revenge of Manual Lymphatic Drainage*

2010-10-14T16:14:00.000-05:00

H called me from her office. “Hi,” I said casually. Her name showed up on my phone display, and we have an easy rapport.

“Hi,” she said, her voice starting low and dipping lower.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“So the flier…. it has the word ‘ass’ in it.”

“Whaaaat?” I exclaimed. We’d worked on the flier promoting Integrative Therapy Week tirelessly, proofread it at least half a dozen times each, and posted it around the facility. I’d even used photos of rock formations and Lake Superior shorelines from my trip to the Upper Peninsula, to create a mood of peaceful serenity. “Where?” I asked, “in a description?”

“Yup,” H said, matter-of-factly.

I opened the document on my computer screen and started reading:

Manual Lymphatic Drainage

Experience the massage technique that uses  gentle, circular, rhythmic movements to encourage the natural  circulation of the lymph into the body.  One of its main purposes is to  help move fluids back into the bloodstream and then the tissues, ass in severe cases of  Lymphedema.  Also, MLD has been helpful for any surgery prep, those  diagnosed with cancer, among many other symptoms and diagnoses.

I made the correction and put new fliers out on a different color paper than the assy ones. “For visual clarity, the green fliers are assless,” I said to H as I handed her a stack.

Hopefully, if people even catch the typo, they’ll find it amusing.

*this one is for j.cro

The Department of Bubblegum

2010-10-10T17:46:00.001-05:00

BLOW YOUR LUNCH!

For some reason I feel compelled to pick out ridiculous gifts for my friends Holly and Jeremy. One of my favorite places to shop for them is at Walgreens, where I search out bizarre and useless candy items. I once bought them a lollipop shaped like a tongue, which protruded from a plastic face bearing the likeness of a zoo animal. The degree of protrusion could be controlled by a plastic slide. While visiting them in Grand Rapids a couple weeks ago, I came across some hot dog bubble gum in the bargain section of a local Walgreens, marked down from $1.29 to 32¢.

Everything about it cracks me up: the fact that the text covering the "hot dogs" reads: "BLOW YOUR LUNCH!"; that it's made to look like a package of Oscar Mayer lunch meat both disgusts and delights me; and that it's made in China for the Ford Gum Machine Company, Inc. of Akron, NY simply baffles me. Someone ordered this gum to be shipped all the way from China, where it was made with the ingredients listed on the nutrition label (plus or minus who knows what), then packed into a shipping container and transported to Akron, NY, where it was distributed to a Walgreens in Grand Rapids, MI, and marked down to 32¢. It's notable that the price tag marking it down is no shabby affair - it didn't come shooting out of a pricing gun, it was printed using a computer and a sheet of labels, and includes the dates that the sale price is good: 09/23-10-03/23/11.

I bought three packages, but not before accidentally dropping one that split open upon impact with the floor and sent all six pieces of fruit flavored, hot dog-shaped bubble gum into tiny shards across the aisle, prompting M to say: "I can't take you anywhere." Fortunately, nobody else seemed to be paying attention.

When we met up with Holly and Jeremy, I gleefully dug the purchase out to show them. "You gave that to us before," Jeremy said, "twice."

That's okay, I'll just wait until Christmas and send it to them again.

INSPECTED BY DEPT. OF BUBBLEGUM

The Long Way Home, Part IV - Chicago

2010-10-06T06:00:00.117-05:00

Me, in a paddle boat, on the way to Ngor Island.

On the blue line heading home from O’Hare Airport, I stare out the window as the train rattles along a raised track, dividing eight lanes of highway traffic. Miraculously, the suitcase and djembe that I checked at the Iberia Airlines counter at Léopold Sédar Senghor airport three days ago appeared within minutes at baggage claim, intact, with orange British Airways tags labeling them "rush". K tells me via email that the djembe she’d brought with her broke en route to Poland. We meet at a café later where I give her the unbroken drum, and she presents me with a set of Polish nesting dolls as a thank you gift for transporting it.

Security at the Madrid airport was tighter than anything I’ve experienced. There had been the usual x-raying of bags and bodies, followed by standing in lines determined by gender, getting patted down, answering a series of questions, and opening carry-on luggage for inspection. The plane filled achingly slowly - a number of passengers had been taken aside for more thorough screens, then wandered through the door of the aircraft bearing facial expressions that told of things that could not be un-seen.

It turns out that I missed a bad cold snap and a flu virus that had made the rounds in Chicago, and I’m grateful. Things that have changed since I left: it’s now 2010; Conan O’Brien’s days at NBC are numbered (this really hits home, his new show started when I got laid off, and it gave me something to look forward to on days when there wasn’t much else going on); I’ve received two more rejections from the same potential employer I’ve been interviewing with since September, bringing the total number of times they’ve rejected me to 4 (and in the coming months they will reject me twice more); and my husband bought us new phones and a coffeemaker that can be programmed to turn on by itself in the morning.

My first week home I sleep like it’s the key to unlocking some ancient mystery. I commune with my pets. I’m even less capable of handling trips to the grocery store than usual – my sensory perceptions are overwhelmed by the sight and smell of food stacked eight feet high in cavernous aisles, sealed and wrapped in refrigerated display cases, most of it processed and packaged to the point where it no longer resembles its original ingredients, all of it accompanied by incongruous music piped in through overhead sound systems. The cold Chicago weather, while comforting in its familiarity, feels willful and unnecessary.

When people ask me about Senegal I answer in generalities: "it was amazing," or "it was challenging," unsure of where to begin or what to say. The tiniest events have become large in my memory – someone handing me a choice morsel of food from the other side of a plate because it’s considered rude to reach across a communal dish, and rude to keep the best pieces for yourself; Ibou punctuating his sentences with “Che Yallaaaah,” and, after being taught how to say it in English, “Oh mai god”; the empty plastic water bottles that accumulate by the front door during our stay in the rented house; joking with my Polish roommates that they should invent a new dance based on their gastrointestinal distress called “The Toubab Two-Step,” comprised of alternately sitting on a toilet and kneeling in front of it; and Abdou’s perennial refrain to my questions – “this is Africa.”

My husband marvels at the objects and photos I’ve brought back with me, the stories I tell him, and the sounds I was able to record using somewhat dated technology (I still have to upload the files to our computer). I take the last of my malaria pills – the prescription began a week before my departure, and I have a few left.

In the months since then, I’ve taken special notice of cab drivers; Idy had told us that a lot of Senegalese immigrants in Chicago drive taxis for a living. I always overtip them.

More songs I never thought I'd hear again

2010-10-05T05:00:00.031-05:00

Music videos I never thought I'd have to see again before working in a fitness center, that I am now forced to reckon with on a regular basis:

The Romantics - Talkin' in Your Sleep, entertaining, but stabbity.
Paula Abdul - Forever Your Girl, I can't bring myself to link this one.
Hall & Oates - Private Eyes, check out the 'stache on Oates.
Survivor - Eye of the Tiger, from the walking-while-singing school of music video production.
En Vogue - Free Your Mind, I can't make myself link to this video, I simply can't.
Toni Basil - Mickey, what I just said about the Free Your Mind video x 12.
The Go-Gos - Vacation, nope, not going to link to this one either.
David Bowie & Mick Jagger - Dancin' in the Streets, I find this one particularly stab inducing.

Music videos I see on a regular basis at work that are awesome, either in their own right or in the context of being played in a fitness center:

Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It On
Kiss - I Was Made For Loving You
Stevie Wonder - Living For the City
Rick James - Give It To Me Baby - AND - Superfreak
The Gap Band - You Dropped a Bomb On Me
P-Funk - Atomic Dog
Earth, Wind & Fire - Boogie Wonderland
Queen - Somebody to Love

The Long Way Home, Part III - Madrid

2010-10-04T05:00:00.040-05:00

Thousands of displaced passengers wait in lines that snake around the multilevel sprawl of the Madrid airport. Passengers stuck en route from one European destination to another appear far more harried than the passengers who’ve arrived from Dakar. “We’re going to die here,” a French-speaking woman complains dramatically within earshot. “Really?” I think, “this seems pretty nice to me… people are waiting in orderly lines, customer service representatives are helping stranded passengers - in the order that they present themselves, no less, and information is being disseminated as it comes in...” I spot my fellow passengers from the Dakar-Madrid flight; tranquil islands in a sea of irritated Europeans, but I’ve lost track of Ram. A tall man in a kaftan turns to the woman behind him, points to his suitcase and then to his eyes, indicating that he wants the woman to watch his bag for him, then leaves to find a payphone or perhaps a toilet. Unfamiliar with the sense of common interest that exists on the continent a couple hundred miles south, the woman bears a surprised expression as the man walks away without his property. She watches the bag for a few minutes, her eyes darting around until she locates it's owner, then picks it up and marches purposefully in his direction, plops the bag down next to him, and stiffly returns to her spot. I smile, remembering my own reaction when Idy asked me to transport luggage for him.
“I’ll have to look inside,” I said to him, “they’re going to ask me at check-in if I’ve received any packages from anyone else, if I packed the bag myself, and if it’s been under my control since I packed it.” For emphasis I added: “And I’m not a good liar.”

“That’s fine,” Idy said, not a trace of worry in his voice, “you can look inside, it’s just presents.” The bag had been filled with brand new clothing with the tags still on them, and unopened toiletries. He’d asked the favor casually, leading in with the question: “how many bags are you bringing?” Now – wherever it was, I hadn’t seen the bag since I checked in at Dakar yesterday, it contained my clothes and items I’d purchased in Senegal. I had a sweatshirt and a pair of long pants in my carry-on, my electronics, the two talking drums I’d bought from Malaal, and little else. Even my toothpaste and deodorant are packed in Idy’s suitcase.

I send M a text message: “So, looks like i'll be spending the night in Madrid, they had snow and it screwed everything up, 1000s of stranded ppl.” I make my way to the front of the line, where an Iberia Airlines representative explains my options: I can stay here for two nights and get a direct flight to Chicago, or I can come back tomorrow morning and fly: Madrid-Barcelona; Barcelona-NY JFK; take a shuttle between NY JFK and NY LGA; and finally LGA-ORD. "Um, make that 2 nights in Madrid," I text to M.

After receiving instructions to come back the next day to pick up my boarding pass, I go out into the drizzle and find the courtesy bus that winds it's way through Madrid and drops me off in front of the Hotel Tryp Atocha,where displaced passengers make an orderly line that reaches across the reception area, the front stairs, and out into the street. I check in and weave my way through the maze of a hotel until find my room, which once again inspires me to take pictures.

S had my outlet converter and I was almost out of battery power; this is one of the only photos I took in Madrid.

The next few hours are filled with little luxuries: I run hot water into the cavernous marble tub in the en-suite bathroom, take a bath, then go downstairs to the dining room where a buffet dinner has been set up. I help myself to a heaping plate of pasta, visit the dessert table twice, and head out into the drizzle to find a payphone. I call M and we talk for 30 uninterrupted, unhurried minutes. Then I go back to the hotel and watch Spanish TV until I fall asleep, and stay asleep for 9 hours.

In the morning I help myself to a complimentary breakfast that includes fresh squeezed juice and espresso, and navigate my way back to the airport using the clean, efficient Madrid Metro, where people are reading newspaper headlines about the recent unexpectedly snowy weather front. While transferring subway lines, someone asks me for directions. I shrug, smile, and say: "no habla español," secretly delighted that I'm blending in with my accidental surroundings. Last night's mayhem has dissipated at the airport, and it only takes a few minutes to get my boarding pass for tomorrow's flight home. With the entire afternoon on my hands, I make plans to take in some art; M had told me - no, more like pleaded with me, to see Diego Velásquez's Las Meninas and Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Prado Museum.

The museum is walking distance from my hotel, but before paying a visit I take stock of the situation: although I've bathed, I've been wearing the same socks and underwear for going on three days, and haven't had access to toothpaste or deodorant; I have begun to look and smell like a homeless person. I stroll the Calle de Atocha in search of inexpensive underpants, stopping at what looks like a budget clothing store. "Buenos dias," the proprietor says to me as I walk through the glass doors. "Buenos dias," I reply. I locate a cheap umbrella and a 3-pack of argyle socks, but can't find underwear. "Um..." I begin, while standing at the register, "do you have... sous-vêtements?" I say, trying the French word. The proprietor doesn't understand. "Underwear?" I say, patting my hips. The proprietor watches my demonstration, walks out from behind the register, and picks up a pair of leggings. "Oh," I say, "no, um... " I pat by butt with both hands, hoping this will clarify my needs. The proprietor's eyes widen, and he searches the aisles, returning with a 3-pack of white cotton underwear that look like they might actually fit me. "Perfect," I say, "thank you... gracias." Next I find a convenience store that has toiletries within easy reach, where I purchase a stick of overpoweringly manly deodorant, and a tube of gritty toothpaste.

I shower, brush my teeth, and apply deodorant like a civilized person, dress in the same pants I've been wearing and the one extra shirt that I'd rinsed out in the tub the previous evening, and head to the Prado, where I am overwhelmed by art. M is the artist in the family, but I'm the one who gets to see this; I feel undeserving of the experience, and make sure to soak up as much as I can. I'd seen depictions and reproductions of Las Meninas, but had been completely ignorant of Bosch until this very moment, and stare open-mouthed at the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, my gaze moving slowly from one panel to the next, resting on something new and unexpected every time. I'm equally impressed by the other Bosch pieces in the Prado collection, and Francisco Goya's Black Paintings. I end up spending the entire afternoon at the museum, returning to the Bosch paintings before finally leaving the museum with the last remaining stragglers, employees in the the museum bookstore and cafe closing out their registers as I make my exit.

I consider making my way out into the rainy Madrid evening to find something more exciting than the hotel buffet - tapas y cerveza perhaps, but I've been enjoying my quiet, hermit-like existence after spending so much time surrounded by people. I go for another pasta dinner at the Tryp Atocha, and spend the evening watching more Spanish TV and preparing for tomorrow's journey home.

Poetry from Cassie's refrigerator

2010-10-03T11:28:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I went to a clothing swap at Cassie's apartment; I brought three pairs of shoes and a bunch of headbands and hair clips with me, and left with a skirt and two tops. She has poetry magnets on her fridge, here's some choice lines:

virtual twine
she likes a slice of casserole
I celebrate coffee of the wicked morning
drunk death scratch sludge
care to evacuate toast
sorry the knuckle is funny but I play for the synthetic hair
live high and late
cold as an ocean gazelle above a night landscape
stare out my eye
sing magnificently with some gristle
why are broken electronics always tragic

October Already

2010-10-02T13:42:00.000-05:00

I didn't post anything yesterday because the September Blog Challenge is over, and the piece I was working on didn't feel finished. It made me feel kind of sad and lazy. I liked having a reason to post something every day, even if sometimes what I posted was nonsense. It kind of kept everything moving in my head, and forced me to notice things around me that I might not have otherwise. Some good posts came out of it too. I counted the number of posts I've written about Senegal - 15 so far, and I still have at least one more to go. The first post I wrote that mentioned Senegal was back in March, and I'm still thinking of things I want to say about it; the September Blog Challenge really pushed me to write more about it, and I'm glad. It was an experience I'm not likely to repeat, and this blog will give me a place to archive my memories of it. Having taken very few notes while I was there, I wasn't sure how much I'd end up writing about it, and it turns out to be the biggest subject I've written about. Once it's done, I'll have to figure out where else to turn my attentions, which will be it's own challenge.

September 30th - The Long Way Home, Part II - Léopold Sédar Senghor Airport

2010-09-30T21:50:00.011-05:00

Across the street from the rented house I spent two weeks in.

The view from my hotel suite. Compare and contrast.

It’s not until I wake that I see how luxurious the hotel I’ve been transported to truly is. I have an ocean view from the patio of my suite, and breakfast is served in a restaurant with cloth napkins. The buffet features eggs, sausage, waffles, and most importantly – real coffee. There has only been Nescafé instant since my arrival; every morning Idy brought a pot of hot water and a tin of the dark, powdery stuff out to the living room floor, along with a box of sugar and a can of condensed milk. Breakfast was always fresh bread from a local bakery, a chocolate flavored spread, butter, and fresh fruit. I’ve been drinking the tea that I’d brought with me instead of instant coffee. I never got a taste for the watery nothingness of Nescafé, but it seems to be a popular beverage in the city - vendors sell it from wheeled carts on sidewalks. At the hotel, I fix myself a plate of eggs and join Ram - still dressed in his suit, at a table. I’ve only slept for a few hours, but the hot shower I took – the first since arriving in Senegal, felt like an unquantifiable luxury, and put me at ease.

“You didn’t get dinner last night,” Ram says when I sit down. There were containers of airline food waiting to be distributed in the lobby amid last night's frenzy, but I hadn't bothered to get one.

“I was so tired by the time I got my room key, I just wanted to go to sleep,” I reply. It’s sweet that Ram is worried about my food intake, when clearly I have a pile of hot food right in front of me. I can't eat much of it though, this western-style food is foreign to me now and sits strangely in my stomach.

After our brief respite we repeat the previous night’s exercise of piling onto buses, and are transported back to the airport. Having gone through security once already, we are routed through quickly. There aren’t many officers manning the security checkpoints this early in the morning, and as I peer into an empty security booth I glimpse a computer with an unfinished game of spider solitaire on the screen.

Also repeated is the endless wait at the gate. Tempers flare as the time drags, Ram breaks his cool exterior responding to a large man who insists that he wait his turn. “I have been waiting,” he says in perfectly accented, pointedly angry French. “I have been waiting here as long as you have.” It's like watching Jean-Luc Picard dress down an insubordinate officer, only with a different accent. Once everyone finally squeezes their way through the gate, there's a bus on the tarmac that we sit in for at least half an hour before it taxis us to the aircraft, followed by a slow, agitated climb up a staircase into the craft itself. I wonder if I will ever get home. It isn’t until we’ve all been seated for some time that we get an explanation for last night’s cancellation: there had been a snowstorm in Madrid, the region was unprepared for the weather, resulting in mayhem on the roads and airports. No flights have been able to arrive or depart since late last night.

Once we finally, definitively take off, exhausted passengers all around me cover their heads with airline blankets, the only parts of them visible are calves and feet. Making my way down the aisle to use the bathroom I feel like I'm participating in some kind of performance piece, or anti-war demonstration where people drape themselves in cloth to represent the dead. The bathroom is fetid and lacks toilet paper, but I've gained valuable squatting skills. I proudly hover over the toilet receptacle, victorious in the face of filth. I return to my seat serene; I've successfully left Dakar, now all that's left to navigate is Madrid.

September 29th - The Long Way Home, Part I - Dakar

2010-09-29T20:40:00.020-05:00

A uniformed woman at the boarding gate makes an announcement in Wolof, and the crowd bursts forth in her direction. “Vous parlez Français?” I ask a woman near me. She shakes her head no and says “Italiano”. My time in Dakar has prepared me for this - the trip to the post office, for instance, where it took half an hour to buy 3 stamps, taught me all I needed to know about how fast things move here, and I’m able to keep a clear head as all semblance of order descends into chaos. Earlier today I’d met Abdou for lunch, and then my cousin’s friend Ndeye. Both of them met me later than our agreed upon time, which I’d grown accustomed to – schedules here are beyond flexible, but when I got back to the house at 8pm it turned out that I was holding everyone up. It wasn’t clear that 8pm was a drop-dead deadline, and I was scheduled to leave for the airport with S, who had an earlier flight than me. The power was out on the block, and everyone was sitting in the living room in the dark. “We almost left without you,” S says to me. I rush upstairs to my room to zip my bags shut – fortunately I’d already packed. I leave several items behind, either because there isn’t room or because I don’t want to bother bringing them back with me: a towel, a bottle of saline solution, half a roll of toilet paper, the shoes I’d worn for two weeks straight and were completely caked in dirt and red dust. Malaal calls my name in thirty second intervals while I scurry around the room in the dark, scanning the space with the miniature flashlight that’s attached to my keychain.

I lug the bags downstairs: my backpack, the suitcase that I’d brought here for Idy – originally filled with gifts to distribute to his family, and a djembe that K had bought and then realized she didn’t have room to take back with her. She’d bought two of them, and was stopping through Poland for a few days to visit family before heading back to Chicago, so I’d offered to take one with me – we don’t live far from each other.

Our goodbyes are rushed. Malaal, Mustafah, Ibou, S and I pile into the car with all our luggage, and head for the airport. Malaal insists on making pit stops – first to pick up the missing stick that goes to a talking drum I’d bought from him, and then to his home to pick up a soccer jersey I’d asked him to buy for me once I grew weary of the haggling process. “You can send the shirt and the stick back with Idy,” I implore, “S is very pressed for time.” Malaal, in control at the steering wheel, will not be moved. His tone is demanding and authoritative. “You asked me to buy the shirt. I bought the shirt, and we’re going to stop at my house to get it,” he says. There is silence in the car. “Do you have gum?” He demands. S thinks he is asking out of concern for our comfort on the airplane, “no, I didn’t buy any for the flight,” she says. “That’s not what I asked,” he says, his voice becoming sharper, “I asked – Do. You. Have. Gum.” My discomfort piques; last night, at Malaal’s request, I had ridden along to the airport with my roommates to see them off, and on the way back he sat in the back seat with me where I thwarted his advances. He’d put his arm around me, taken me by the hand, and asked “are you my friend?” I’d repeatedly removed his hand from my shoulder, released my fingers from his, looked away from him. We’d been in close proximity to each other for two weeks, and just last night had gotten into a deep discussion regarding the societal differences between the U.S. and Senegal – I’d said that I really liked how women could nurse their babies anywhere and everywhere here, and that children were included in every part of life, but I’d never meant to engender this kind of response from Malaal. When I got back to the house all the lights were off and I had to sleep alone in the room I'd shared with my Polish roommates.

It was a rotten way to end our acquaintanceship, and now Malaal, for my benefit, was being difficult. I can’t explain this to S, at least not right now, so instead I pat her on the shoulder and say “you’ll be fine.” She recoils from my touch and says “you knew when we were leaving, and you know how things work here, you were in control! I can’t miss this flight.” Conversation stops in the car as Malaal, Mustafah, and Ibou strain to understand what is being said between S and I in English. “I’m sorry,” I say to S, “if I were you I’d feel the same way.” “Thank you,” she says, staring forward. I watch the clock until we pull up to the departures area at Léopold Sédar Senghor Airport.

I check the djembe and suitcase at the counter, make my way through the long, slow line at security, and find my gate. The seating area is packed. I find an empty seat in the waiting area and ask the woman next to it, a blonde wearing khaki shorts, a knit top, and expensive-looking jewelry, if it’s free. “It absolutely is not!” She says sharply, her arms crossed. Her tone takes me by surprise, “are you…. joking?” I ask. “I most certainly am not, my husband is sitting in this seat,” she says, and crosses her legs to match her arms. I retreat to a wall, where a line has formed, and alternate between sitting on the floor and standing. My flight is due to leave at 11:30pm, gets delayed until past midnight, and then the uniformed woman at the boarding gate makes the announcement.

“I speak English,” a man who has been standing behind me for the past hour or so says. He is dressed in a business suit, wears glasses, and speaks in a soothing tone with an accent I can’t quite place.

“Do you know what’s happening?” I ask.

“I’m not sure,” he says.

“I’m going to see if I can find out,” I tell him, “I’ll be right back.” The uniformed woman is surrounded by passengers demanding information. There is no semblance of a line, and she addresses people in a seemingly random order.

“What’s happened?” I ask her in French when she finally looks at me.

“The flight has been canceled.” She says.

“When is the next flight?” I ask.

“Same time tomorrow.”

“What… what do we do? Where do we go? Do we stay here in the airport until tomorrow?” I ask.

“I don’t know, the airline will be making an announcement,” she replies.

I go back to the wall where the suited man is waiting, and relay the information, take my cell phone out and dial Idy’s number, but the call gets dropped. I’d made arrangements with AT&T for service in Senegal just in case, but this is the first time I’ve had to use my cell phone since arriving here. I try again but the call doesn’t go through, so I call my husband in Chicago and ask him to call Idy for me. Eventually the calls to and from Chicago get dropped too, so we communicate via text message. E’s flight home was later than mine, so I know that Mustafah and Malaal will be back here with the car at some point, but I’m not sure I want to ride back to the house with them alone; I’m not even sure if Idy is staying there tonight. Another announcement is made – there will be buses in the parking lot that will take us to a hotel, the flight to Madrid has been rescheduled to 8am tomorrow. The crowd surges toward the exit, and outside I see Ibou, having just dropped E off at the airport.

“You need to come back?” he asks, searching my face. I touch his shoulder, look him in the eye.

“thank you SO much for finding me Ibou,” I say, thinking about the odds of him actually finding me in this mess, “but the airline is taking us to a hotel. I think it’s best if I go with them because they’ll have to make sure I’m back in time for the flight tomorrow morning. Thank you Ibou, Thank you!” And with that I re-enter the stream of people heading for the buses.

I find the man in the suit and we sit next to each other on the bus. “My name is J,” I tell him.

“Nice to meet you, my name is Ram, short for Rambhujun” he says. We engage in small talk: what we’re doing here in Senegal, how long we’ve been here. Ram is originally from Mauritius, and works at the University of Bordeaux as a professor of business administration. He was giving a lecture at the local university, and is due back home to teach. The bus pulls up to a long, low building where everyone piles off and walks through a set of automatic sliding glass doors into the lobby of the Hôtel des Almadies, a resort hotel.

There is one clerk at the front desk, and two hundred and fifty displaced passengers. The crowd surges toward him like brokers at the opening bell on Wall Street, and the clerk starts handing out forms to whoever is the closest and the loudest. I press my way forward to the reception desk, the crowd pushing me forward until I’m pressed against it. I’m able to maintain my cool as long as I don’t look behind me, I stay holed up inside my mind and absorb the experience as if from a distance. I hold my completed form in my outstretched hand, but the clerk ignores me in favor of louder patrons. When he finally catches my eye and takes the paper from me, he flips it over and returns it to me – there was a second side to the form that I hadn’t filled out. I fill out the backside of the form and hand it to the clerk again, where it is entered into a stack with two hundred and fifty others, in no particular order. He is joined by a second clerk, who takes the stack of papers, and begins reading names and distributing room keys.

My name is finally called and I receive my key, which opens the door to an overwhelmingly opulent suite with a king sized bed, television, sliding glass doors that lead to a patio, bathroom that has western style fixtures, and air conditioning. I am so amazed that I take photos of it. I leave my cell phone on the nightstand and just before I fall asleep, at 3am, get a text from my husband: Du u feel safe where u r staying? I'm feeling a little worried but not too much. I reply: Its pretty swanky actually, by african standards, and theres an english speaking passenger whos taken me under his wing.

In four hours I have to wake up and get ready to pile back on the bus. I climb under the luxuriously soft covers, and rest my head on unimaginably fluffy pillows – for the past two weeks I’ve been resting my head on a balled up sweatshirt, and sleeping on a thin foam mattress in a full sized sheet that’s been sewn together to form a lightweight sleeping bag. It doesn’t take long for sleep to overtake me.

The fanciest bed I'd seen in weeks.

Compare and contrast.

September 28th - Random Thoughts

2010-09-28T22:58:00.001-05:00

Something smells terrible in the house, but my husband can't smell it. Is it me?
I totally made my friend drive me home tonight; I'm a dork.
I've been back at work for one day and I'm already thinking about my next day off.
There's algae growing in our filtered water thing.
There's three days left to the September Blog Challenge.
There's nothing to eat in the house except bread from the Wealthy Street Bakery in Grand Rapids.
Because Michigan is an irony-free zone, south of Wealthy Street is a bad neighborhood.
Thursday some water sealing people are coming over to look at the basement; I hope we can get it fixed soon.
Just for fun, we looked at house listings in Grand Rapids; we could buy a giant house there for $100K. I probably couldn't find a job there though. Also, we'd have to live in Grand Rapids.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I scared our upstairs neighbor last night because he didn't hear me knock on the back door. I had a box of treats from Wealthy Street Bakery in my hands and he happened to open the door because he was about to feed our cats. He got so freaked out he closed the door in my face. Even though I knew it was reflex, I was sort of insulted.
We've started watching season 1 of The Wire on Netflix, it's really good.
I saw The Funny Ha-Ha Show tonight, it was great.
Wendy McClure read at the Funny Ha-Ha Show, I've been reading her column in Bust magazine for years, I was all starry eyed meeting her in person.
My eyeballs feel weird.
I don't do Twitter, but I get the feeling that if I did, my tweets would be a lot like this blog post.

September 27th - On the way back from Grand Rapids

2010-09-27T20:22:00.001-05:00

The roads were clear until we got to the Dan Ryan, where traffic was heavy. A man in the car next to us rolled down his window, pulled a piece of bright green gum from his mouth, and dropped it out the open window. It stuck to the door of his SUV like a gigantic booger. I hope that piece of chewed up gum stayed on that car the whole way home.

September 26th - Notes from The Brayton House

2010-09-26T22:32:00.020-05:00

I. I first came here in May with Angelica, we needed a hotel in Grand Rapids on our way to and from the U.P. We wanted something close to the Amtrak station, and were hoping for something cheap. Someone was smart enough to make their website bandbofgrandrapids; it was the first listing that came up when I typed those words into a Google search. "Goooood morning, Brayton House, this is George, how can I help you?" a man with a radio announcer's voice answered when I called. I told him the dates we needed, and he described each of the three rooms available -- what kind of bed was in it, how much it cost per night. The smaller rooms were $80 a night, and the big room with bay windows was somehow only $5 more. I said we wanted the big room, and asked if it was possible to get two beds. George paused, and asked: "Well, what's the situation, are you two ladies?" "Yes," I said, barely containing the urge to laugh. "There's a cot that we can bring in but it's not very comfortable," he said. I said it was probably fine just to have the one bed, but before booking the room he made me call Angelica first to clear it with her. "No way, I'm not sleeping with you," she said, in her flattest sarcastic voice, which can be mistaken as serious if you don't know better. I called back to reserve the room, and George asked if I had a credit card. "Just to hold the room," he explained, "we accept cash, checks, and credit cards, but we prefer cash because the bank fees are killing us." "Okay," I said. "We take Visa, MasterCard, and American Express," he continued, "do you have one of those?" "Yes," said. "Well if you've got that rascal out, I'll take the number now," he said. I relayed this tidbit to Angelica. "All I can say is," she said, "welcome to my people."

II. In our room, there were stacks of old magazines: Smithsonian; National Geographic; The New Yorker. I read a 1976 New Yorker article on the Carter v. Ford Presidential race.

III. In every room is a sheet of paper that explains, in flowery, italicized font, the house rules:

No rules - No regulations

Most of our guests are ladies and gentlemen, who are just naturally decent and orderly, and are considerate of the rights of others, therefore, the "rules and regulations" they have applied to their own lives are much better than any printed list we might suggest.

To that very small minority of people who through ignorance or just plain cussedness, smoke or burn candles in the building, endangering the lives of all our guests, who drink loud and long, who have their televisions going full blast when others have turned in for the night, who think it is their (right) privelege (sic) to take towels and other articles when they leave, who throw refuse most anyplace, who feel the entire water supply belongs to them, who allows (sic) their children to roam the building without supervision, and who leave a dirty mess in the rooms.

A list of "rules and regulations" a mile long wouldn't change their habits of living, therefore, none has been applied.

We enjoy having you as our guest and hope your stay is pleasant and memorable.

IV. Also in every room is a brief history of the house, typed on letterhead with a black and white rendering of the building in the header:

THE BRAYTON HOUSE
516 College Street

James P. Brayton was the builder and original owner of the house we are enjoying this evening.

Mr. Brayton was born November 23, 1840 in the state of Wisconsin. At age 15 he moved to Michigan and earned his living as a county surveyor in Ottawa County. He was assisted in his job by his father. Through this position he came in contact with men who were making history in Michigan lumbering operations. Some of these individuals were: T.R. Lyons, T. Steward White, and Thomas Friant. Mr. Brayton himself became well known all over the United States.

In addition to buying and selling lumber for himself, his signature was accepted as the last word regarding the value of standing lumber. Mr. Brayton was a quiet man and aside from being an early member of the Masonic Lodge, he was not a figure in society and did not take part in public life. He built this house in 1889. The architecture of the house is called Georgian Revival and it is listed on the National Historical register.

The next owner of this house was Stewart Foote, President of Imperial Furniture Company, which at one time was the largest manufacture (sic) of quality tables in America. Mr. Foote occupied the house from 1920-1935.

In 1935, James McInerny, (President of McInerny Spring and Wire Company, the world's largest manufacturer of seat springs for automobiles) purchased the home. He and his family lived here until 1945. During their ownership, the kitchen and bathrooms were remodeled and wallpapers were put up. They also adjusted the size of the ballroom on the third floor in order to add three extra bedrooms. The Carriage House was made into living quarters at about the same time.

In 1945, Mr. McInerny gave the house to the Catholic Diocese and it was used as a residence for priests until 1970.

Mr. Walter Kehres, Director of Waldon Village, an alternative high school, purchased the home in 1970.

In September 1971, the property was bought by Gene and Phyllis Ball. Mr. Ball passed away in 1976. Mrs. Ball continues to reside in the home, as well as rent out some of the guest rooms to tenants.

V. Phyllis likes to serve breakfast early. I'm here again in September, this time with my husband. We're visiting Holly and Jeremy, who were already putting up several people in their apartment; the Brayton House is only about a mile from them. "What time do you want breakfast?" Phyllis asked us when we checked in. "We're here visiting friends, and we'll probably sleep late tomorrow," I said. "So, nine o'clock?" She asked, her unblinking eyes fixed on me from behind her wire-rimmed glasses. M considered saying something jokey about nine o'clock not really being late, at least not to us, but reconsidered. "Um, we're meeting our friends for breakfast," I said, "I don't want to trouble you with making breakfast for us, but thanks."

VI. Phyllis reminds me of David Letterman's mother.

VII. Phyllis leaves two After Eight mints on a little red tray on the nightstand when she makes up the room. Angelica thought they were condoms.

VII. There's a WiFi connection, but it's not very good.

IX. I went for a run in the morning, then took a shower. Phyllis opened the door to the bathroom while I was drying off. I gasped as I saw the top of her gray head, which only comes up to my shoulders, and held a bright yellow towel between my body and the widening crack in the door. "Oh sorry," she said loudly, closing the door, "sorry, I wasn't sure where you'd gone or where you were." "That's okay," I said from inside the bathroom.

X. There are 20 rooms in this house, and only 3 are rented out to guests. There's an entire floor I haven't seen, not to mention the carriage house. The wallpaper, bathroom and kitchen fixtures date from 1935-1945. Antiques and curios are everywhere, including quilts hung from picture molding on the walls.

XI. Someone at the end of the hall, in the residential part of the house, has a TV or radio turned on at a low volume all day, and I can hear people walking on the floor above us.

XII. In May, on our way back from the U.P., Angelica and I stayed in the same room with the bay windows that we'd stayed in on our way north. We sat on the porch eating burgers from Black Castles - a burger joint that looks like it operates out of the converted living room of somebody's house, has a pool table, framed photos of Malcolm X and Tupac, and a TV set that blared infotainment news when we walked in. Our order came to $7.50; the cashier - who was the only other person there besides us, couldn't break $8 so he gave us back $1. Angelica found two quarters in her purse so that we could pay what we owed. On the walk back, we realized we'd just visited the neighborhood where, back when the Brayton House was first built, the day servants lived. A group of Heritage Hill tourists stared at us from across the street. One of them walked over to us and asked: "Do you own this house?".
"Yes," Angelica said, in her flattest sarcastic voice, which can be mistaken for serious if you don't know better.

September 25th - Michigan State Motto

2010-09-25T23:53:00.001-05:00

If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.

September 24th - Dance Recital; Lunch with Abdou

2010-09-24T22:13:00.006-05:00

Chadit and her dance troupe (Chadit in the center)

Idy's daughter and Chadit's son at the recital

Closeup of the beads and fabric

On our last night together as a group, we danced in the courtyard of the Centre Culturel Blaise Senghor to a small audience consisting of Idy and his family, Malaal, Ibou, our dance teacher Chadit, the drummers who provided live percussion for us at every dance class, and members of the dance troupe that Chadit works with professionally. She outfitted us in traditional dresses and jewelry from her own collection; I wore a blue dress with bright stripes, a matching headdress, and two thick coils of multicolored beads that crossed my body from the shoulder to the waist, forming an X. We danced in the open air in our bare feet, performing the dance that Chadit had taught us, and when the dance was finished we did it a second time - Idy and the others joining us at the end and forming a circle. We took turns dancing in the center, showing off our best moves. Later, at the house, Idy praised our performance in his understated way. "That was good," he said, a small curl of a smile on his face as he watched the scene replayed on a hand-held video camera that K had brought with her. Abdou stopped by the house; he had planned on attending the performance but had been called away by business. Idy showed him the video and they watched together.

My roommates left for Poland that night, and I was once again alone in the room. It felt strange, and I had trouble sleeping. The next day I packed my bags and waited for Abdou; we had lunch plans. He drove me out to his house, in a neighborhood where government officials lived. After spending two weeks in the rented house, it was strange to see such relative opulence; his was easily the largest and most ornate house I'd seen. He introduced me to his wife, son, daughter, and grandson. Abdou has four grown children, and two grandsons; about half of them live in the house with him. He kept his earbud on at all times; it seemed Abdou was always on the clock. He took a call while giving me a tour of the house, and wore the apparatus while we ate lunch. I misunderstood something that he said - he asked if I wanted to eat at the dining room table, or with "les gens." I understood this to mean "with the people." I wasn't quite sure what Abdou meant by this, and said that the dining room table was fine. Apart from the time I went to dinner with my cousin's friend Ndeye, it was the only meal in Senegal that I'd eaten at a table with silverware.

Abdou's house

We discussed the Alliance Française, where Abdou had taught first my husband, and then me. He asked what my fellow classmates were up to: Kim is now married and has two young sons; Caroline is in graduate school; Carla is studying to become a medical coder. I mentioned my current teacher, Tim, who is American but speaks French like a native. I said that Tim was learning Swedish, to which Abdou replied: "really, maybe he wants to marry a Swedish woman." I almost choked. Tim shows up to class wearing Hermès shirts, frequently breaks into song during class (he heavily favors Céline Dion), and openly discusses his personal life with his students. To even the most casual observer it is clear that Tim does not want to marry any woman, Swedish or otherwise. I marveled - if that's the right word, at Abdou's absolute cultural blindness to what for me is a very obvious fact. Homosexuality is essentially not recognized in Senegal, and Abdou was unable to pick up on the fact that he had a gay colleague at the Alliance Française.

Abdou's grandson

I had noticed that in the absence of any outwardly visible signs of gayness, men were much more affectionate with each other in Dakar than in Chicago. At the house one evening, over the course of a late night conversation, Malaal and Mustafah were both reclining on the mattress in the living room that Idy and his family used as their bed. They lay on their sides, propped on on one elbow, so close to each other that they were practically spooning. "Um... yeah, maybe he does want to marry a Swedish woman," I finally replied, not wanting to blow Abdou's mind.

In Abdou's courtyard - note that he is on the phone

Later he showed me the second floor of the house, where his family was eating, African style, on the floor; I now understood what Abdou meant by eating with "les gens." "I didn't mean that I didn't want to have lunch with your family," I said, and suddenly felt very stupid. I recalled a moment a few years earlier when Abdou had come to my house and made mafé, a stew made with peanuts. He'd been fascinated by the fact that we kept animals inside our home. I'd seen plenty of cats and dogs in Dakar, but none of them were pets. They ate garbage, humped each other in the streets, and were treated as vermin. More than once I'd secretly invited a cat to come closer, and Malaal would wave his cane at the animal and hiss. Animals were only kept if they were useful - like the goats that Malaal and Chadit kept in a pen behind their home. In my home, Abdou had asked about the decorations (of the antique banjo mounted on the living room wall he'd said: "that's an African instrument"), but he seemed most fascinated by our cats. He asked what they were named, what they did, what they ate. He told us about an uncle of his who lived alone and kept a dog, as if this were the strangest thing a man could do. I thought he'd asked everything he possibly could when a look of deep concentration came over his face. "Where do they go to the bathroom?" he asked me in French. "Um, in a... a box, in a closet" I replied, and, not knowing the exact French words for it (we'd never studied this in class) said, "there's.... sand that they do their needs in. Afterward... we throw it away." "And it's in the house?" Abdou asked. "Yes," I replied. Abdou's curiosity was not satisfied until I showed him the litter box.

September 23rd - True Confessions

2010-09-23T21:42:00.000-05:00

I have never seen the film Rocky. Oh, I've seen clips from it - the montage where he runs up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and punches sides of beef in a meat locker, but I've never actually seen the whole thing. I still haven't - it was on My50 Chicago and I caught the first half hour before the season premiere of 30 Rock, then caught the last half hour after the season premiere of The Office. Between the first and last half hours, I learned a few things about Sylvester Stallone that might surprise you, they certainly surprised me. For instance, did you happen to know that Sylvester Stallone wrote the screenplay to Rocky? I didn't. And if his Wikipedia entry is even close to accurate, he had a pretty rotten childhood. I mean the rest of it - the endless sequels, Rambo, hanging out with Ronald Reagan... none of that is really to my taste, but I'll take my inspiration where I can get it. I think I might have to put Rocky on my Netflix instant cue sometime soon. In related news, I took my first (and possibly only) kick class today at the gym, and it was really hard.