Category: TODAY

everything was beautiful at the ballet

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I went to the ballet last night. One of my dearest friends here had been gone for a month, and I wanted to celebrate his return, and another of my dearest friends has put up with a disproportionate amount of my chaos lately, and I wanted to celebrate her sweetness, and also I will not miss an excuse for what looks like a good ballet, which it did. So we went.

The first piece was Serenade, by George Balanchine. Bunch of pretty girls fluttering their arms about, with some guys trying to look like the goblin king in the pants department wandering around. One can like it, but it was: meh. I hate to say that. I mean, here I'm looking at a stage full of athletes and all I can think is: let's do math with Balanchine, because it really looked like illustrations of math problems or something. Not word problems, either. So mostly I sat there thinking about WHY I didn't like it, which is not really the feeling you want in the theater.

The second piece was Sofa, by Olivier Wevers, and that was totally different. There was a purple velvet sofa, and everybody danced on and under and around it, and it was awesome. It made me think of high school and how I couldn't have boys in my room but we could be in the living room, and how the sofa was like a way station to where we wanted to go, and the center of slumber parties, and where we watched TV, and it is still all those things, the sofa is so central, and these dancers were fighting and kicking and kissing and teasing all on a sofa, just like us, except of course way more elegantly and their feet probably hurt a lot more. And in this I felt fully engaged and delighted.

The third piece was Lunar Sea, by Moses Pendleton, danced by MOMIX, a sort of black light madness and chaos. Like the first one, it didn't have a story, but it was so busy and stimulating visually that it didn't need one. And so we watched people split open, creatures with four legs dancing across the stage, absolutely a hundred things to look at. 

We ran across the street in the rain, ducked into a clean well-lighted place for tapas and wine, and talked and talked, the beauty of this, three generations of ballet in one evening, and how the first one made sense because we could see now how that non-narrative mathematical beauty made the other two possible, and how the third one called back to it, and how amazing it is to be able to see this when it is presented like that. It was delightful. I was delighted.

the remains of the day

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When I was thirteen or fourteen, I went into a hormonal rage and pulled all the shelves in my room down. In about two minutes everything was chaos on the floor — books, toys, knickknacks, everything. And I stood there, sort of shocked, and then I started picking it up. Some things were broken, but I swept them up and kept going. I don't remember how long it took, but I remember how the violence and the drama did not make me feel better in any way, but the slow methodical work did. And the sky opened up and a beam of light on my forehead and the voice of clarity and reason, so rarely heard by the pubescent: now you know how to calm yourself. 

And now I am thirty years older, and I have been cleaning my home and other people's houses for most of that time. It's a thing I can do, dishes and dusting and floors, and it's usually soothing. Plus when you clean other people's houses they pay you, either in money or free accommodations and food, a range of delicious treats in exchange for you doing what you'd do at home anyway, haha. And I did always clean at home, too, for the meditation of it, and the feeling of calm from everything being where it belongs. Except I lived for a long time with people who did not care if it was clean, and you're allowed to not care, I'm sure it makes life much easier, but it makes cleaning up after you kind of a pain. Also my knees started to go weird, locking up, which didn't make kneeling and scrubbing any fun.

So five years ago I got a housekeeper, a teenage girl who came once a week and dusted and mopped and scrubbed. And she did not do the work as well as I did, because for one thing you cannot get a floor clean with a mop, you get a floor clean on your hands and knees, ffs, Yes I know. But she did it every week and she did it without complaining, which in some ways reminded me of my teenage self, and she was pleasant and she didn't want to be my friend, she just came and did it and got paid and left. Then she went to college, which was the worst. 

I have some ideas in here about hiring people to do menial labor, and about privilege etc., which I think I dodged by hiring a teenager, but it was on my mind.

For two years I tried to find another housekeeper, and it was just ridiculous. One who told me the house was a mess (uhm, nope) and so it would be hard to clean; one who talked and talked and talked at me so I couldn't work while she was here, which I thought: shouldn't we… both be working?; one who smelled like cat piss and mold. I did not find another teenager and I did not enjoy the dialogues in my head. So finally Squire and I have been doing the weekly cleaning together, I do the standing parts and he does the kneeling parts, it's not FUN but it helps to feel like I'm not alone and I don't feel weird about it and we get it done and whatever, it's a couple hours. But the cat hair, my god. There is one cat, and she sheds a kitten per room per week.

So we bought a floorbot. My sister's is named Benson so I named this one Stevens because he is also a butler (I was thinking of Miss Kenton, which is more correct, taskwise, but I just couldn't see Emma Thompson in his shiny black morning coat). He is tiny, he cleans one room and then runs out of energy and has to be recharged, so I have to pace him. It is a funny new addition. It is interesting to have watched so many programs about robots in the last year and then find myself behaving exactly as those silly humans, assigning emotions and personality to an object. I mean this is a cheap version, I don't think it even has a memory, which as Deckard will tell you is what separates the roombas from the replicants. But anyway: Stevens. New member of the household.

Well you said you wanted something a little less… sad. And I'm trying, I am. Though the fact that I named my floorbot after the butler who could talk about anything except his feelings instead of, say, Wadsworth, is not lost on me.  

In the Pitt-Rivers Museum

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Curiosity and wonder, they call it, and put it behind glass and we press our faces against it and hold our breath so as not to cloud the view. Trophies of war, declares one sign, and behind it dangles chunks of the real live hair of people who are no longer really alive. The head of your enemy, with the part that thought it could hurt you carefully removed, just the face now, the dead eyes even deader, filled with sand and looking more like fuzzy dice than anything that could do you harm, which is the point I guess. Body art is a whole floor, and there are objects from rituals once sacred in one place, now trendy in another. Still rituals, though. These cabinets are better curated than a B-lister's Facebook page, they look like chaos but each item has a tiny label in penmanship that makes my fingers cramp in sympathy and longing. Here are shoes worn by a woman who was so rich they had to hobble her to keep her from walking, the wretched smell meaning that all the perfumes of China will not sweeten this little foot. 

 
This room is for crusty old men smelling of wet tweed and pipe tobacco, and for Mrs. Frankweiler, and for me. For people who do not think in the rigid lines of time and space as well as we would like to imagine, but instead group things together in a logic that defies; a pile of thoughts, confirmation bias, and objects used for the same purpose across generations, continents. Here is a cabinet filled with things for Woodcarving, and we suspect that maybe some of them might be sex toys, though later on we find out that's in another museum. Adze is a beautiful word. Here is a world with problems, the cases say, here is rain and hunger, the need for food and shelter, and here is how it has been solved, and solved, and solved, with wood and mud and traps for feathers and meat and bone; here is what we do with what we need, here is what we do with what is leftover. There's a labret made of a soda can. Here is boredom, they say, and breathe across your mind until it fogs, and then they wipe the mist away with a piece of leather soaked in salt and vinegar, and there are so many beautiful ways to solve that.
 
You gaze into Permanent Arts, the eyes of a woman with a stack of neck rings and wonder if she feels exploited or pretty, her eyes defiant or beckoning, and beside it a corset and an x-ray of the woman who wore it, her deformed skeleton. Or in this cabinet, pig bristles and woven straw, a mixture of things to cause malevolent events, earth from the grave of a man killed by a tiger, bad beasts do not harm me, I'm quoting here. Charms, says the cabinet, and I'm charmed, magicked, transfixed. 

 

http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/

tatters

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What I wanted to write about was the feeling of being ripped up, that pieces are being torn off me, that sometimes I believe I can actually feel my soul being just a little shredded. I tried to write that and it came out as some kind of poem, the kind that my friend once said "Oh, so this is what fire is for, to toss this into." Not so good. So now I'm just trying to write AROUND the idea for a bit, and what I wanted to get to from there was the thought that if all these pieces are being ripped off of me, maybe I can make something of it, some kind of papier mache creation, if the words of me are ripped off and then dipped in liquid and then reformed, wouldn't the new me be marvelous, the way I planned it, some kind of collage beauty that only showed the parts I wanted to show, something lovely. But right now it feels mostly like the tearing part, the rip of paper, the destruction, and I feel like the pieces are just blown into the wind before they can be reassembled into anything of meaning. 

 
So that's happening, the ripping.
 
Despite that I'm mostly happy, I'm working a lot and that always makes me feel useful. I play the ukulele almost every day and I have not improved even a tiny bit. I'm going to London and Oxford for a few days to visit friends, yay. I'm starting to hunker down into winter, piling my books and blankets around me and making sure there's lots of good television lined up.  Sometimes I wish you were here and we could just talk and laugh and be ourselves; sometimes I don't think about you at all. 

anne “insomnia” tuckova

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Contrary to my impressions, there are only 33 memorial roads in California that feature nicknames, and most of them do actually seem to have some relation to the person's given name. MOST. But why is William called "Ivan"? And wtf with "Fresh Air"? I'm going to take some benadryl tomorrow night, is what. 

 

Vicente “Vince” Andrade Memorial Bridge: Route 78

CHP Officer John “Jack” Armatoski Memorial Highway: I-40

William H. “Harry” Armstrong Interchange: Route 168

William Elton “Brownie” Brown Freeway: I-580

Callie “Joel” Buser Memorial Sign: Route 14

CHP Officer William “Ivan” Casselman Memorial Highway: I-80

John “Chuck” Erreca Rest Area: I-5

Lt. Leonard B. “Larry” Estes and Deputy William R. “Bill” Hunter Memorial Highway: Route 149

Caltrans Highway Maintenance Lead Worker Michael “Flea” Feliciano Memorial Highway: US 101

Signal Hill Police Officer Anthony “Tony” Giniewicz Memorial Highway: I-405

Kern County Deputy Sheriff William “Joe” Hudnall, Jr., Memorial Highway: Route 178

Richard “Fresh Air” Janson Bridge: Route 37

Harold “Bizz” Johnson Expressway: Route 65

Harold “Bizz” Johnson Interchange: Route 92/US 101

William “Bill” Lehn Memorial Highway: Route 99

Mignon “Minnie” Stoddard Lilley Memorial Bridge: US 101

Colonel William R. “Bill” Lucius Highway: US 101

Redding Police Officer Owen “Ted” Lyon Memorial Bridge: Route 273

Viggo “Vic” Meedom Memorial Bridge: US 199

Reverend Cecil “Chip” Murray Overcrossing: I-10

Special Agent Richard “Rick” K. Oules Memorial Highway: Route 140

Fire Chief F.S. “Pete” Pedroza Memorial Highway: Route 111

James B. “Sunny Jim” Rolph Bridge: I-80

CHP Officer Douglas “Scott” Russell Memorial Freeway: US 50

Roberto “Bobby” Salcedo Memorial Highway: Route 60

Correctional Officer Jesus “Jesse” Sanchez Memorial Highway: Route 83

Silvio “Botchie” Santi Memorial Bridge: Route 36

Gerald “Blackie” Sawyer Memorial Highway: Route 39

CHP Officer Ambers O. “Sonny” Shewmaker Memorial Highway: I-10

CHP Officer Charles “Chuck” Sorenson Memorial Highway: Route 12

CHP Officer Andrew “Andy” Stevens Memorial Highway: Route 16

Deputy Dennis “Skip” Sullivan Memorial Bridge: Route 44

Robert H. “Bob” Weatherwax Memorial: Route 29

my summer vacation

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This week has been a flurry of goodbyes as we all turn Brno into the summertime ghost town I love, and which I will be sad to be away from, but I have stuff to do, you guys.
 
I am going to New York to see one friend I've known since I came here, 20 years; he picked me up when I was broken last year and we went to Greece together, and sometimes we don't talk for months but now we are planning a trip to Philadelphia for July 4th, maybe also a trip to Coney Island, the pleasure of putting yourself in the hands of someone who knows how to have fun.
 
I will go and see some women in upstate New York that I have known online but not in person for over a decade, poets, women who use words to curse and to nurture, and they have promised to teach me how to apply lipstick, because I don't know how to do anything with make-up, but it seems interesting. 
 
And then my beautiful and amazing sister in California. I will meet her parrot and remind her cats that I am the boss of them, and her husband gives the best hugs because he is a man who can pick up a refrigerator. We shall put limes into everything and it will be awesome.
 
Then Montana, where my relentlessly talented friend has just started a business which is a traveling bookstore, and we will drive around to festivals and sell books and drink good coffee and talk about love and losing our hearts and finding them again, exactly where they always were.
 
Then a group of women in a house on the beach. There will be brunch, which is the most brilliant American invention. And I have a friend who looks straight into your eyes and says: I know this to be true. And I am eager to hear what she knows is true, because it will be.
 
And all in there, other friends, more friends — from high school, from college, from later, people who are still interested in me even though I left them half a lifetime ago, people who have kept me in their lives with their words, people who have loved me enough to visit me in my life here, my pen pals made into flesh, with all those complications and all that beauty. I never feel fully myself there, but I never feel fully myself without them. There will be road trips and wine and laughing until it hurts, waiting for the moon and walking down the middle of the street. There will be board games, and there will be dancing.
 
So this is me. Hope to see you, in the summer or on the other side of it.

Black and White

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I came out of the theater last night, my hands still humming from clapping so much and so long; nobody claps like they do here. Walking out into the evening light, which is my one of my favorite parts of life here, how the summer light stays, how you can walk out of a dark room and feel the night in the air but the sky tells you you can keep going, there is still time, so much time. Last night Siegfried fell down and the queen tossed back her hair, threw her legs around his waist and held on, and Rothbart slammed his cloak into the ground and then slid across the room like a child on a sled, and so much happened, but I came out blinking into the light as if there were still things to do, as if there were anything left to say. Blinking, my hands ringing, I scanned the crowd of people. There is a version of this story where you're standing there. You asked where I was going and I told you, and in this version of the story you looked it up, found out when it ended, came and waited, and so now you are standing in front of the theater, your bag leaning against your leg, watching the door as we all emerge, and I'm wearing the black dress you haven't seen yet and there's a second where you look at me before you recognize me and it's the world. I don't want to be a person who values gestures over actual acts, and part of me stands back and says this is just a gesture, and part of me in turn wonders if this is an act, but you are there and you are waiting and your bag on the ground means you are willing to wait, as long as it takes, and part of me turns into honey, liquid warmth, covering doubt with sweetness. You look at me and recognize me, pick up the bag and walk towards me, and this is one version of the story. In another version I realize it's not you at all, just someone for a moment flickered with your face. In another version there is nobody. In one version, I don't even scan the crowd, just turn right out the door and ask someone with long fingers for a light, prop my elbow against my waist, exhale into the light sky, walk home alone. 

Just Sit Right Back and You’ll Hear a Tale

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Oh, I meant to tell you about May day. On May 1st there was a neo-Nazi ("Young Workers") march downtown. There were 100 or 200 of them, depending on various estimates, so we'll say 150. One hundred and fifty people who hate other people on the basis of things they didn't choose. I am always baffled by this. I hate plenty of people, but entirely on the basis of their choices. If there were a march against the people who stand in the doorways on trams I would be at the front (What do we want? To get off the tram! When do we want it? MOVE!) but disliking foreigners and homosexuals and brown people is just so … boring. 

They get to march, it's their right to march and they legally requested permission for their little rally in the town's main square with a march around the neighborhood, so that was that. Word went out and a lot of protesters showed up in another square nearby with the intention of blocking the marchers. There were 1000 or 2000 of us, so we'll say 2000 because that's the side that I was on and it sounds nicer. Plus the neo-Nazis were sticking together the whole time, whereas our side sort of wandered in and out, so I'd bet that it was 2000 people in attendance, just not all at once. 

Our side had live music and the city mayor and generally a good atmosphere. Between us and them was a roving wall of six hundred police officers in full riot gear, which was pretty impressive, and I was glad for them that it was a cold day because those outfits look hot. The police were mostly nice, I would say some of them were a bit cranky about having to be there when they traditionally are supposed to be out kissing a girl under a flowering tree, I mean really those pants are ridiculous and any body would rather be kissing than wearing that. 

I guess it was fun. It reminded me of my late teens, when we linked arms around Planned Parenthood and chanted to drown out Operation Rescue. We started out so bold and full of purpose and folk songs but eventually we were singing the theme song from Gilligan's Island, and honestly that makes sense. These people are silly; why take them seriously?

Some people on the blockade side got taken away in police vans (detained but not charged) and some people got tear-gassed; from my point of view it looked like theater; I think they wanted to have drama and the police were bored and that happened. I don't know how it looked to them though. There was some commentary about the amount of money spent on the police being sort of wasteful on the part of the protesters, and some friends suggested that if people hadn't protested it would have been more embarrassing for the marchers, like throwing a party that nobody attends, that they wanted to be challenged so they also got what they wanted. I don't know, I can't attribute a great deal of brains and planning to people who are simultaneously carrying signs that say: NATIONALISM NOT GLOBALISM and confederate flags. Oh yeah you read that right. In that light I wonder if it wouldn't be better to feel sorry for them than to laugh at them. I mean really: it would be the kind of stupid I feel when I have a cold except ALL THE TIME. But there's ignorance and willful ignorance and I don't know, I don't need to feel too sorry for too long. I think we could sing a few rounds of Gilligan for our own amusement and get out in time for some excellent kissing under the cherry trees.

pain ahead of wisdom

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I said it hurt but I don't think at first she believed me, not really, not the extent to which I was telling the truth. I cried and she said she was sorry but I wasn't crying because she hurt me, just because there were tears in my eyes and they spilled out. I said it hurt and she looked and looked at me, thought about it, examined the data, the broken parts that couldn't heal, the smoke rising from where I'd been scorched. I said it hurt and she said she didn't mean for it to hurt but that didn't make it better. We talked about what to do now, because I had wanted everything to be the way it was but it couldn't be because everything was broken and then I realized that I didn't even want it to be the way it was so much as I just wanted it to not hurt. She said it would take time and I believed her and I went and stood on a beach and watched a storm roll in and at night everything washed over with salt water and every morning I took the pills and waited for the time that it would take for enough time to pass. Because it does pass, time, it's moving in one direction, and if you promise me it's going to stop hurting I believe you though of course I'm always left with the memory of the pain and the fear of repeating it. Today it was supposed to stop hurting, I know it was today because I marked it on the calendar. And she held my face in her hands and looked and looked at me. She said, I didn't realize how far down it went, this pain of yours. She said, I have given you more than anybody could need and you still have this hole, this ache that I could not fill, I am sorry. She said, now I understand why you said it hurt. And I said it did not hurt any more, because it didn't; I have a stone over the hole now and nothing is going to get past that so the hole is just my tiny secret and it doesn't hurt, I swear, not any more. 

mildly solatic

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We were going to go to a Lindy Hop class but we couldn't find the address so then we were going to go to a salsa class but when we went outside it was too beautiful to go back inside so we decided on drinking in a garden instead. The streets full of people as if the whole town had walked out at the same time. Two weeks ago it snowed and now all the restaurants have outdoor seating, though at U Karla they'd spilled out onto the sidewalk even, and we all sat and gazed up and around as the sky turned purple and the stars came out. An Australian, a Brit, an American, and a Czech walked into a bar and they all spoke the same language and the electrician told us the names of the stars except they were airplanes. In the morning I shaved off most of my hair because I wanted the sun on as much skin as possible and I had coffee in the garden and watched a toddler grow a egg out of his skull ("It happens" he said) and then lunch in another place and then more coffee, grinning like an idiot from one place to the next, and then board games which is how I know life continues at a weekly pace. On Friday the clouds were back and my head was so cold it was like an ice cream headache so I chained myself to the desk and hit a deadline and went to Olomouc where all the restaurant tables were reserved in case the atheist patriarch showed up, or I guess more likely his fans, and on the train home I listened to the same two songs over and over because I couldn't imagine another one being better, the small and certain pleasure of already having what you want. I took a taxi from the station because sometimes but only sometimes we must permit ourselves small luxuries and I was cold. I feel grateful and generous and generally good; if I had any idea what you wanted I would probably give it to you, but you don't tell me and I'm tired of guessing so this is me, getting on with it. I have a Monday deadline but I can't focus for beans today so I wrote this instead.