Author: tuckova

Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O'Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

beneath the waves

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I don't really have a lot of fixed boundaries. It's a struggle for me to understand that other people do, and to respect them, though of course I think it's important to at least try to do so. I hear people talking about physical boundaries and I think: okay. Like there are a few people who I really don't want to touch me, ever. So I can imagine that these people who say they don't like to be touched, that's how they feel when anybody touches them. I try really hard to keep straight which people have which boundaries. But personally, with the exception of those few people who I know and don't want touching me and I have reasons for that, pretty much anybody can touch me (as a greeting, for example) pretty much any way and I'm like: cool. The part of me that would feel violated is not on my skin, it's on the other side of my skin, and nobody can touch it anyway. Similarly with emotional boundaries, personal boundaries — the part of me that would be affected is both very far inside me and nebulous; very few people get close enough in to even approach those boundaries.

I tried for a long time to explain this and then one day I watched an octopus swimming beneath me and I understood myself. How we stretch ourselves out beyond our own imaginations to reach what we want. The constant thumping desires of our three hearts, so complex. How our brains are not contained in one place, but stretch across our bodies so that the right touch can provide information that our whole bodies process. The octopus is a master of mimicry as am I, which means when we are not sure how to behave, we behave like someone else but when it's safe we go back to dancing in the sand, touching what we want to, shining our own clear colors. If you put me in a box, in a tiny treasure chest, if you lock me inside, I will find a way to be comfortable in it or I will find a way to get out of it. A boundary is meaningless to me because it cannot hold me; I am not easily held. It is true that I can be pierced although this is more difficult. If I see you coming, sharp and pointy, I will first release a cloud of ink, a torrent of words, and see if I can't escape while you are blinded, choking. I'm sorry but I warned you. 

If you do catch us, we are delicious.

exhausting exceptionalism

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One thing I like about living in a country other than the country of my birth is the expats, the immigrants, my fellow non-natives. In your home country, you tend to congregate around shared interests and sure that's true anywhere. In a foreign country in addition to liking the same music or hobby we can also congregate around the shared interest of "I don't really belong here". Some of my dearest friends in my life are people who I met abroad — not unified by the ways that we belong but the ways we don't. As a person who never felt that she belonged particularly anywhere I also enjoy that at least now it's by choice; I've noticed that several of us have that in common as well.
 
In fact even among my non-foreign friends here (and also in Japan when I lived there) I'd say a sense of not-quite-belonging is a unifying theme. Not all of my Czech friends feel that way; some are deeply, proudly, profoundly Czech. But most feel a bit like aliens. Many have traveled a lot, lived in other countries. That sense of adventure is also of course de facto standard among expats — who by design or default programming want to know what would happen if…
 
And in many many ways I think that the people you meet when they are traveling are the best of their people. Often the most curious, the most adventurous, the most interesting. Not always. Stupid doesn't stop at borders and plenty of brilliant curious people explore the world in non-geographic ways. 
 
Speaking for myself, living abroad has made it possible to do a lot of things I wouldn't have been able to do in my own country — the way I've been a parent, or the work that I do (I'm valued for speaking English here; it wouldn't be so impressive in the US), and things that I've done like starting an open mic night — if I were still in Sacramento, there would be several to choose from, created by people more skilled and less terrified than I am, and I'd just go, and I wouldn't be so pleased with myself probably. To my thinking, I'm a medium-to-small fish, and if I were in a bigger pond, or even the same size pond but with more… fish like me?… there'd be nothing interesting about me.
 
I'm thinking about this because it seems very clear to me that this is true, and I thought it was something we all knew, but lately it seems like I'm running into more and more people who think they're able to do things here (work things like have high positions in their companies or start their own businesses, and social things as well) and somehow think they'd be able to do them anywhere, because of their own innate specialness. I noticed this first specifically in terms of dudes on the ordinary-to-ugly scale dating women who so far outclassed them as to be comical. If the dudes acted like they won the lottery, fair play to them. But some of them acted like they deserved it. Like they were the prime catch that dating women out of their league would make them. 
 
As the number of foreigners increases here, the less special they are — the less brave, the less adventurous, but also just generally less individual. There becomes an expat mindset and a further division (now that we have choices) in which we stick together according to the country we came from, which dude if I wanted to hang out with mostly Americans I would like, move there. I mean I know I do it too. But I'm starting to think that what I took as an expat feeling of being unique by virtue of being in an odd pond rather than anything innately special, or a dude feeling of being entitled to a better partner by virtue of being surrounded by a better class of women rather than anything deserved, may in fact just be people. I never thought I was that special. I'm surprised that people continue to think they are, especially as whatever amount of special they were has clearly diminished. Or possibly I am getting old and cranky. I think I'm on to something though. 

not that you asked but

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Imagine that you were robbed. Not today, not right this minute, but that you were robbed. I guess that correctly you have been robbed; it's happened multiple times. That you were shoved into a dark alley, pushed against a wall, and told to hand over your money, which you did. Imagine that you didn't scream. Imagine that you did, and it didn't change anything. Imagine this happening multiple times, times where you said "No, I don't want to give you my money" and they walked away while you stood dumbfounded at your success; times when you said the exact same words and they took something more valuable, something harder to replace than money. Imagine you were robbed in Prague and didn't even know it until the next day, and people told you to carry your money in another pocket, travel in groups, or don't travel at all. They got your camera too that time, all those memories taken from you. Imagine that you have friends who were robbed at gunpoint and so when it finally gets to the point where you are able to talk about the times you've been robbed you feel like: well, yes, I was definitely robbed, but they were more robbed. You try not to make these comparisons out loud in the company of people who were robbed; you try not to make the comparisons in front of many people at all. Are there degrees of violation? You had something that you did not want to give someone else and they took it from you and that was not fair and the unfairness of it is the part of the conversation that is interesting. It seems like a lot of people who were never robbed have ideas about what it means but that's okay, you know what you know, and your friends know too. Imagine that someone comes at sits at the table with you and your friends. Imagine them describing having put a dollar on the table and someone picked it up. Were they robbed? Is it even the same word; can it be. Probably it's the same, probably it feels the same. I was robbed, she insists. Sure. In your mind, you're back in that alley, a strong hand at your throat, rats chattering around you, and all you want to be is anywhere but there. So if you want to know how this feels, if you want to know what I think, imagine that. 

salt for such wounds

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When I was a little girl, salting the feathers of birds so that I could catch them. Photographs my father took: my woolen coat, salt shaker, chubby legs hopeless in pursuit. I never wondered what I would do if I caught the birds, but then I never did.

What do you even get out of that relationship? I asked him. I feel loved, he said. Me, scoffing: Right, I'm pretty sure that's the bare minimum for a relationship. Really? he asks. And have you felt loved, in your relationships?

On the phone I say I miss you. Come be with me, I say. The connection is weak, the sound drops out, my voice echoes back to me. The trick is that if you were close enough to salt it, you'd be close enough to catch it. I throw the salt as far as I can; the wind sweeps it back into my eyes and it stings like tears.

pathogen

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Here in the center there is a girl who is dancing exactly the way she is supposed to. The directions are given and she follows them. She's doing what's expected and she knows she is because everyone is laughing, everyone is delighted. She dances more and more, harder and harder, to please the people. If they like a little, they will like a lot. You can see her thinking this, or you imagine you can. Stick your tongue out, say the words, and she sticks it all the way out, she wants to do well, she wants to please, she wants everyone to be happy. When they are happy, that is like being loved. She looks ridiculous, but they keep laughing and she keeps going. Behind her there is another child who isn't moving, who doesn't know how or doesn't want to follow directions. That's okay. Some people love music differently. When she looks over her shoulder she sees that behind her there is another child who dances a little, but not as well as our girl does, since nobody is cheering for her. Probably she gets love another way. It's later then that she notices the child next to her. The child next to her is covering her face. In her exuberance at being the center of attention she has failed to notice what falls outside the circle, and what falls outside the circle is crying. 

In this story you are the girl who is dancing. In this story you are the child who is not dancing, which is also an option. In this story you are the grandmother, laughing with delight, sharing the video with friends with famous people; "what a little actress!" you say. In this story you are the child who is crying.

There is delight and absence, there is laughter and there are tears. There's a lot of empathy for those feelings; you have a lot of empathy. What you don't understand is why nobody is comforting the child covering her face, why she's in the front row when she clearly doesn't want to be there. Surely there are adults making decisions here: a decision to put her there, made worse by decisions to film it, decisions to not help. You think of other situations where children are filmed and nobody helps. Can you imagine that? You find that you cannot. You wonder if it's the same kinds of people all the time, and you find that you suspect that it is. 

inventory

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It makes me happy to do something I'm good at. There's a way it feels inside me, like glowing, to be doing something well. Something I've noticed is that I used to feel that if I observed my happiness it might disappear; now I feel like observing it makes it more likely to recur. Hence. It makes me happy to be seen doing something I'm good at — literally seen or as more often happens, if someone says like "good editing job" or something, appreciates my work even if I'm not doing it.

I think I'm good at my job, I'm good at making the crooked straight and crushing down uneven places. I think I'm good at keeping my word maybe not always but pretty often, when I say I'll do something it takes a lot for me to not do it. I'm a decent storyteller and I'm also usually a pretty good listener though I remember a bit less than I used to. I still remember a lot. 

It makes me happy to read a good book, though I have read a lot of bad books and so I don't read as often as I used to or as often as I want to. Similarly I also like watching good television and movies (though movies I watch less, which is weird for a person who used to prioritize time for movies over time for almost anything else). I used to like audiobooks and podcasts but now they just put me to sleep within about 5 minutes; I still remember them fondly though. But a good book or show, the kind where I believe the characters, the story, no matter how improbable; the kind where I inhabit the story as an observer and am carried in the current of it, where I can be pulled up by a perfect sentence without losing the plot, these are a path to happiness. 

I like vinegar and salt and anything that tastes better with vinegar and salt. I like dark and bitter chocolate. I like wine outside in the summer with a cigarette and inside in the winter with cheese, either way better with friends. 

I feel most myself when I am alone and able to think through something and reach a conclusion that pleases me. I also feel this way when I am with people who help me get through to conclusions that are at least as resonant or more than what I would have reached alone. I like laughing with people much more than laughing alone. I have suffered more than the average supply of fools to reach the people whose love feels real to me and for the most part my love for them increases and deepens in ways that feel important. That brings me a lot of happiness.

I like and have always liked dancing; have often liked singing though most often alone, with the solitary smug pleasure of knowing the words; have liked writing to people I miss and pulling them closer in my mind through that communication. 

I have been, in life and of late, so incredibly unbearably sad. But that's not to say that I have not been happy, because I very much have been. I have so much.

play the way you feel it

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In the early stages of some neurodegenerative diseases, the brain starts firing more than usual. Normally as we age parts of our brains start to close down. As if the brain were a grand manor and some of the rooms, rarely if ever used, were gently draped in white sheets, with the brain's butlers locking the doors of the rooms to which we will not be returning. But with these diseases, these unused rooms are thrown wide open, as if for some tremendous party, some great revival, a revelation. The truth is that the brain realizes that the more frequently used rooms are about to be burned down and it's trying to make space for the thoughts that once inhabited those rooms, before they are lost forever. It will not succeed, but I like that it tries.

Similarly, or it seems similar to me now, the rush of happiness experienced by people who have decided to commit suicide. The serenity that looks like they've cheered up just before you find out that they did not.

I've noticed that many people in my life seem to be one or the other: those who do not seem to enjoy my whirling busyness, for whatever their reasons may be (liking me better when more reflective? viewing all this flurry as vainglorious on some level?); and those who don't like when I try to talk about the flip side of it, that my noisy busy brain is also filled with petty spite, self-doubt, overwhelming sorrow ("Chin up!" or "You're always so negative!" or "You have to stop focusing on those things"). I don't have any solutions. Most of the time I think that my acquired fluency in extroversion is interesting at best, and that I want to go back to my mother tongue now, the language of books and silence, waking alone in a sunbeam; no more feedback from anything beyond the dustmotes I stir with my breath. 

I like smoking on the balcony and watching a storm come in, the blue sky swallowed by clouds, the mix of tobacco and petrichor and the birds going crazy, a girl in a rainsoaked dress running barefoot, her shoes in her hand. I like when the SMS code to check my bank balance spells out a word. My favorite word is still bed because it looks like one. I like walking home in the middle of the street. The small and large kindnesses we do for each other. Postcards. Listening. The idea of being your own cheerleader but not letting it go to your head; how would that work. I still can't play the ukulele.

May, she will stay

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In no particular order.
 
I strongly object to children being used in any kind of competition. I don't like it in fierce competitions and I don't even like it when it's like "this cute kid dancing on Ellen". I think it messes with their heads. I think we can't understand how it affects them in long-term ways, to have that much attention. I moderately object to children being taken to protests etc.; on the one hand I think it's nice that we share our values with our children and that's a good parenting thing; on the other hand, when I see pictures of children holding signs, I feel a little queasy and the Hart family contributes to that feeling. 
 
I find myself having issues with commemorative statues. Maybe not even individually, maybe I don't like them at all conceptually. Like, maybe nobody's good enough to have a statue commemorating them as a human being. There's a statue going up in Brno in honor of a man who was an architect but was also a child molester, an issue that came up at a trial while he was still alive and for which he was found guilty. And like all heroes are problematic or whatever but why does he get a statue, particularly. 
 
A car changed lanes for the purpose of hitting me as I was mostly across a crosswalk a couple days ago; I had to jump back to avoid him as he sped up to the next stop light. I guess it was the kind of really great traffic signal that you need to spend maximum time revving at; anyway that was what he did after he didn't kill me. I think cars make you a worse person because you think you are isolated, invisible, you can entertain ideas of being better than others when you are separated from them. The other day on the tram it was my stop and I wanted to get off and it seemed like nobody was moving, and I pushed a bit and said "excuse me, but I need to get off here" and the woman in front of me slightly impatiently said "Yes, a lot of us need to get off here" and when I had moved forward a bit saw it was one person standing in the doorway blocking us all; when that person was finally persuaded to move we all got off at normal human speed. And I laughed I'd say ruefully and apologized to the woman for pushing her and she laughed too and said she was also afraid she would miss her stop. We can't do this in cars; we spend all day being pissed off at people we might have laughed with in empathy. Or trying to run down pedestrians. 
 
I got invited to the open mic show that I organize and host by someone who is planning to perform there and I found this hilarious, like being invited to a really killer party at your own house or something. 
 
I saw a play earlier this week with some really uncomfortable themes for me — domestic violence, workplace harassment, the things we do and the people we hurt in pursuit of power. And I KNOW that sure there were some things I missed because of language. And I KNOW that the person who did bad things and experienced unpleasant consequences… well, they weren't supposed to be the "good guy". But the audience laughed so much (hahaha, his girlfriend provoked him and he punched her!) that I almost wanted to walk out. Who finds this funny? I have had this feeling often with the standup comic circuit, that the hahaha Catholic priest jokes* are going to drive me out, but maybe comedy is lowbrow, what do I know, but the theater! WTF. 
*Catholic priest jokes particularly upset me because it pretends like it's making fun of the Catholic priest but I can pretty much guarantee you that there is not a Catholic priest in your standup audience, so you are actually more likely to be heard by a victim who might actually be in your audience and haha it's not so funny now is it, asshole?
 
I voted today. I love voting. I'm super bummed I'll probably never get to serve jury duty but at least I get to vote. DEMOCRACY! such as it is.

a unified body

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Oh, haaaai. Remember when we used to blog like at least once a week? Stupid Facebook which gives me a tiny grazy snack of connection and takes away my appetite for digging a bit deeper into things that actually interest me. It's easy to say "I did this or that" "I thought about this or that" but … motivations, reasonings, responses, feelings, it takes too long. And my own attention is more and more like a hummingbird, so why shouldn't yours be? What right do I have to hold it? Nevertheless, here's what I've done in the last six weeks that I thought about (and failed to write about). Clearing the cache, so to speak. 

The Brno Expat Centre held a fair so that foreigners in the city could find out about services that are available to them and Czechs in the city could learn about what foreigners do. So there were English-friendly businesses run by Czechs and Czech-friendly businesses run by non-Czechs, and it was mostly pretty fun. It was interesting to me that some people who hadn't been here very long complained about the absence of services they simply didn't know existed and other people who had been here for rather longer resented the existence of services that they hadn't been lucky enough to have. Like one side of the room complaining that there are no vaccines when there are, and the other side of the room saying there shouldn't be vaccines since we didn't have them back in our day. Back in our day we all died of the plague and I don't see why it should be different for these tenderfooted fools. Still no vaccine for ignorance and arrogance, I guess. Most of the exhibitors had a bowl of candy out and I enjoyed going around and seeing who had the best sweets. 

It was my birthday and my friends took me out to dinner but I was so tired I almost fell asleep in my sushi. Still, aren't friends the best? I've been doing the "review and measure of my life by decades" and I think in my 20s I worked on developing myself professionally, and in my 30s I focused on being a mother, in my 40s I focused on how to be a good friend, and in my 50s it seems to be (so far) how to build a sense of community. Not like I've completely sorted myself professionally, but while I love my work, thinking about its meaning is no longer my primary focus and I feel like I've got a pretty good grasp of my skill set. Similarly I think I did okay at being a mother, and my friends are clearly the bomber type of people who love you even when your head lolls to the side before you've finished your nigiri. So here's hoping I figure out what community means in the next 8 years.

One of my oldest and dearest friends got married in New York and Squire and I went to the wedding as if we were proper jetsetters who will hop across the pond for a weekend. But it was so magical! My sister came from California and having the three of us together seemed like a perfectly reasonable explanation for enduring a four-hour delay in the Philadelphia airport. Also the wedding included gorgeous weather, Adironack chairs, fireworks, and the most intensive test of "waterproof mascara" I've been put to in recent years. I don't know how I feel about weddings or marriage — it depends on the wedding or marriage itself — but two people deeply in love and surrounded by people who love them is a pure good. I was glad to be there.

Next week I'm going to do standup in an actual venue, rather than in a corner of a bar, in Vienna and I'm extremely pleased and honored and terrified.

The play we've rehearsed for two months with the theater group is happening now and makes me think about honesty, art, creativity, stress, process vs. product, and how much sleep I'm not getting. That's about all I can say about that. 

fell to earth

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One thing I remember is that we were riding around in your car. Was I in the front seat? I think I was, which would mean it was just the two of us, because if there was anybody else I was in the back seat. I think this is true, that I was consistently relegated, though that seems cruel and deliberate which you really weren't, so maybe I was in the front seat and somebody else was in back. Anyway maybe we were alone, maybe we weren't,  maybe I was in the back seat. This is when I felt myself somehow at the lower outer edges of your circle, but increasingly in my own independent circle almost everywhere else. I felt like belonging in your group excused me from trying to belong anywhere else. It was remarkably freeing when I was anywhere except with you. Gosh I loved you, or loved isn't quite right. Admired? Aspired. Loved though, too, in retrospect, knowing what I know now of myself and of you and of love. Anyway we were in your car. At the time we all shaved our eyebrows, I thought it was… a thing we did. Like piercing our ears multiple times, shaving parts of our hair was just like, an extension or an exaggeration of what other people did. Everybody had their ears pierced once and we had once and more; everybody shaved their legs and we shaved our legs and eyebrows. Etc. I thought it was just a thing. And then in the car you turned to me… at a stoplight, I guess. I had the full force of your attention for a moment. You turned to me — sideways if I was in the front seat, or looking over your shoulder if I was in the backseat, diagonal from you. Does it matter if there was anyone else? It's mostly that the shame I remember makes me think there were witnesses. You looked at me fully and said  my name, the name I used then, and said "stop shaving your eyebrows, you look ridiculous." It is interesting to me how in so many of my memories, when I remember them I fully inhabit them. I can inhabit this memory too: the hot flush that starts at my collarbone and creeps up my neck, cheeks red, all the piercings in my ears burning. Eyes stinging with tears. The full realization that the group I thought I was in… I wasn't in, after all. The feeling of loss when you lose a balloon, when your beloved suddenly lifts from your hand and escapes your grasp forever. At the same time, I associate this memory with a feeling of freedom: I am also the balloon; I am set free. And interestingly now, increasingly, I see this memory through your eyes. I would be kinder, I like to think I would be kinder; I'm also a lifetime older than you were then. But in that moment you turned to me, this person who would have died for you, and shoved me away: be yourself; live for yourself. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, about how to tell someone that their hunger, their visible ravenous hunger, is the thing that keeps them from being fed. That their need to belong is what holds them back from belonging. I know that I have tried to love people I didn't love because there was a girl in a car seat with bald eyebrows who just wanted to be loved. In a way, looking back, knowing what I know, what you did was love. And looking back, in a way I'm grateful. Although you also looked ridiculous, to be honest. And knowing what I know now, also wanted very much to be loved.