I'm fine. I mean, I'm fine. Solitude and self-reflection has always been kind of my default state, you know. Staring at walls. I was saying I need a break a long time before this happened. Already said which day would be my last day in a group of more than three people. So the government said two but that's okay. I mean it's fine. More than fine really, because now there are phones and the internet so I don't even have to miss anybody. Well of course I do, intensely, but I don't have to. Sure I think about death but I think about death all the time anyway. Maybe this is a living abroad thing, that you become keenly aware at some point that you will die far away from where you were born, not only far from the place but the people, far away from the girls you played hopscotch with, if you played hopscotch, the boys you kissed in empty classrooms during recess, if you kissed boys at all, the people you once had long phone conversations with, kinking and straightening the phone cord's coils as the conversation lagged, lifted, fell silent, back when we said goodbye before we left the conversation. We used to tell people to stop talking by clipping imaginary scissors in the air, as if to cut the cord; now we slash our own throats. All far away now. The first time I moved nobody died but we never spoke again anyway and the second time I moved a lot of people died and the third time I moved I was gone so long that whether or not they died a lot of people disappeared. Of course, some disappearances are a relief, a blessed silence. And some conversations continue in my head still. My fingers make a tentative snip in the air but I'm not ready to end those conversations. Sometimes you don't even have to move and the conversation ends anyway and I guess that's okay. Dragging my fingers across my throat, the words can't come out now, can they? I miss them, of course I miss them, but they aren't there anymore, not the way I miss them. One night I dreamed I was talking to a person about someone I had lost and they were the same person. See this is why I needed a break anyway. I mean I'm fine. One thing I did in addition to work which continues to roll in and insist on being so ordinary and normal and lovely, thank you work, you've always been there for me, anyway one thing I did was read through a virtual stack of letters looking for patterns. I look at the person I was and I think how was I that person. I see myself there like some caged animal where I am trying so hard to be myself and to be right and natural, a representative of myself in my own habitat, more or less, and I am also throwing shit at the bars of my prison, the spectators, zoos are terrible and it was myself put me in there. Do you know how hard it is to stay authentically yourself when part of that authentic self wishes more than anything to be loved. How many conversations have you had in which you translated your words from your own rich native language into a formula by which you hoped to be understood. I'm honestly not sure I know how to communicate any other way anymore. Consciously or otherwise, what's my goal here, that's what I'm moving towards. Sometimes I forget to ask what your goal is but sometimes everybody's goals are so damn clear. The last time I went out in public there were so many people, speaking and speaking, and each of them was saying listen to me like me admire me, nothing more, over and over, and they shouted over each other and I couldn't hear anything but their shouting and I left because I'm not sure I'm different. I would like to be.
Category: TODAY
lonely is as lonely does
When I lived in Kokura I had Sundays and Mondays off work. I would finish teaching on Saturday and make three stops on my way home: the grocery store, the bakery, the video store. At the grocery store — coffee, miso, noodles, a vegetable if I could identify it, eggs. At the bakery — I still miss the pastries they had, light flaky dough, heavy with rich cream on the insides. At the video store, five movies, maybe more. Then I would go up to my apartment on the 10th floor and not leave again until Tuesday. I listened to mix tapes my ex-boyfriend sent in what I now realize was less a gesture of continuing friendship and more an attempt to get me back; he was playing to his strengths, he made the best mixes. I wrote letters, long honest poetic letters (playing to my own strengths) — the kind I would have liked to receive. I cleaned from one side of the apartment to the other, the tatami pressing into my knees as I wiped it down. Sheets outside drying crisp in the gray air. I sat under the heated kotatsu table, blanket pulled up under my arms, and watched movies with a gluttony matched only by how I tore through those pastries, powdered sugar fingers. Sometimes I filled the bath, which took an hour, scrubbed myself head to foot and then gingerly lowered myself into the scalding water. I was so attuned to myself then. In my memories, I was sometimes happy and sometimes I was very very sad. I don't think I was lonely, though, not exactly. Gradually I met people, let them in, and because my home was a place where I was so content it became a place where other people were also content, and I liked that. Generally I don't like people, don't like animals, don't like most things beyond my understanding, being primarily an indoor person with books and music and television, which I understand. I've been thinking about this with the current epidemic. This is not particularly hard for me. Even at my most social, at least half of my relationships are long distance. I realize I live with someone now, so it's different. But I'm thinking about friendship. I do love some people, in a physically present and tactile way, and having spent 30 years learning how to do that, it is weird to not be able to. Not hard, not yet, but weird.
But Really Everything’s Always Delicious
I don't know, I don't think it's something everybody needs. I don't think it's something everybody has daily. I'm not asserting ubiquity, though if I'm being honest I feel a little arrogant claiming what I consider to be such a staple.
Because sometimes you want to punch it? Sometimes it just needs a good massage. It needs one, get it? Get it. Get it.
The simplicity of it. After it's done. The ease of it.
Rolled into balls, squeezed into something and rolled towards an overwhelming question.
I once traveled four hours for a particular kind, then traveled home, and I don't regret a minute. Sometimes it's easy to love that much.
Some people can't tolerate it. Some people can totally tolerate it and say that they can't because that kind of purity makes them feel better.
It's not bad for you in moderation and if you can't be moderate that's not its fault.
I say it meaning me.
The sorrow in the feeling of not enough butter. As if the butter were the sugar making the medicine go down. No I'm not saying butter isn't delicious. I just don't think it's the point.
Nor is melted cheese the point, nor cold cheese of varying thickness. Nor fruit in any incarnation. Those things exist separately deliciously; it's a complement, not a necessity. They can feel like a necessity but they are not. It is the thing itself, even though almost everything else makes it even better.
I'm identifying with my subject. Or, as identifying was the point: overidentifying.
The genius who said "It's done! Let's put fire on it and make it… more done!" and how that parallels with constantly striving.
Well it's not a staple everywhere, calm down, it's not that I think I'm indispensible or something.
There's probably something interesting to say about how what one historically thought of as refined is now seen as less healthy but I don't know how that parallels (although on second thought I kind of do).
First thought best thought, she said, and the toast popped up.
morally reprehensible trash
In 1989, I moved to Japan. This was seven years after AIDS was first clinically reported in the United States, after Reagan's press secretary had laughed about it, after Rock Hudson. But it was before things got really bad, before I understood how bad they would get. My move was not connected, but it is related to my perception of things. I moved to Japan, and as this was obviously before facebook, before the internet, I lost contact with a lot of my friends in what felt like a natural way. People change, their priorities change, we move away, move on. When I came back three years later, it seemed to me that about a third of the people I'd known were dead. Frankly, considering my friend circles, it's a very low number. Some friends, like me, got scared and careful early. Some of my friends are HIV positive and taking medication and surviving well. Some of us are just ridiculously lucky, I guess. This feels to me like a dark time I lived through, because I have suffered some of the repercussions of it (Michael, who introduced me to Cocteau Twins, dead; Tim, who loved movies, dead; Jason, who just wanted to be loved so badly, dead…). But I didn't, I wasn't there, I only heard about it, I saw the art and felt profoundly moved, read in the paper about the loss and knew the world was shifting but I didn't live through it like my friends who stayed on the ground tending sores and making phone calls to estranged families and the bleak and terrible humor of San Francisco real estate prices.
Every World AIDS Day (other days, too, of course) I think about this. I know the epidemic is going on still, which is just impossible to fathom for me. But I think particularly about where I was when I became aware of it. It's not my pain being commemorated. I don't have a right to speak. But I also think about what world we are in now, the loss of those voices, we are all still suffering. Some of my friends would have done nothing interesting. Some would have turned out to be people I didn't talk to anyway. Surely this is true of the population at large. Not every loss needs to be tragic to be a loss. The powerful play goes on, though, and they might have contributed a verse. What would art be like now, what would politics be, if those voices hadn't been silenced.
I don't know. I looked away for a minute and the landscape shifted. Sometimes I wonder if my focused extreme attention on people who don't necessarily appreciate it is related to that, to the fear that if I blink I might lose them. If you lost someone to AIDS, I am so sorry for your loss.
just keep it like maracas
I get up in the morning with Squire and have an egg on toast, usually a fried egg but I'm trying to be a little healthy so these days a boiled egg, sliced using a kitchen gadget. It's a popup toaster; I would prefer a toaster oven for almost everything except toast. I make coffee in a French press; I used to use a drip coffee maker but found that cleaning it was annoying plus the look of horror on my dearest coffee lover's face after she took a sip convinced me to upgrade. Milk and sugar these days, needing the extra sweetness in a bitter world, but usually just black. I put a spoonful of homemade cherry syrup in a glass of water and use that to choke down vitamin pills, including vitamin D which doesn't make a perceptible difference but maybe it makes some difference anyway. We watch 20 minutes of television while we eat breakfast as neither of us is very chatty in the morning. News commentary is great, good sitcoms are better.
After breakfast, dishes, and maybe tea, and then all the social media stuff that I should cut back on and don't. Someone's wrong on the internet and I can't start working until I've seen it all. I don't read the news regularly anymore because it messes me up; sometimes I fall down an internet hole of researching something meaningless but at least it doesn't leave me with catatonic nihilism. Every day I think I should quit and every day I read at least one thing that makes me want to keep going, keep connecting. The traveling bookstore off on another adventure. My friend's daughter's Halloween costume ideas. An article about grief. People I have loved and am far away from, people I haven't met and have come to love, remember when we had to make dates to meet by mail?
Then work. Work and then a snack and then work and green tea, a cigarette break, and then work more. I love what I do although lately I feel like it's harder and harder to focus, my brain keeps skittering off into different directions, as if trying to swim through a heavily salted sea, constantly bouncing back up to the surface, on my back watching seagulls and clouds despite my desire to sink beneath the surface, tranquility and coral and marvelous fish always beyond my reach.
Sometimes I meet a friend for lunch and sometimes for afternoon coffee. It's the best possible season now, fall that's really fall this year, with leaves dying in all colors of a fire and leaving marvelously crunchy piles to kick through. Also scarves. In May when we went to New York for a wedding I bought a leather coat in a secondhand store and every time I wear it I am with my sister, my son, my now-married friends in love, Adirondack chairs. The buttons on the coat are a little loose and I should sew them on better at some point, though I'm not sure if special needles or something are required; I've never sewn through leather. In the afternoon if I'm not out I send invoices, check the internet pools to see if I've caught any fish, nap if I can. Do laundry, write email, stay useful.
In the evening I finish the work I dithered over during the day or sometimes I go out. There are friends who can't drink me under the table but then I can't seem to get them under the table either so we sit there with the bottle on the table in front of us and tell each other increasing truths until one of us realizes it's well past time to go home and goes. Some evenings there are open mic nights or theater rehearsals that may or may not involve some or several of the same friends and the same realizations. Some evenings I laugh so hard I think I might not stop, and some evenings I cry the same way.
At night I clean up because it's nice to wake up in a clean home. I brush my teeth and put on enough night-cream to resemble a 50s cartoon of a woman. I fall asleep as soon as I've packed the pillows around me or I fall asleep reading and wake up 30 minutes later to turn off the light. Sometimes I wake up in the night and lie there paralyzed by anxiety I can't name for an hour or two; sometimes I sleep through until the sun filters through the cracks between the curtains.
We changed the clocks last night. There is nothing that interesting about my life, but it seems very satisfying to me. I feel like the world is going to end soon and I try not to think about it but it's a factor in some decisions: If the world ends, will I regret having not done this? Mostly my life is things that I have chosen, things I want. And I get that you don't want it, because if you wanted it you'd only need to reach out your hand. I am really usually okay with that, because it's hardly new, but sometimes it stings behind my eyes and I look at my day from the outside and think: What's not to love? Don't answer that.
exhausting exceptionalism
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
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.
pathogen
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
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.
May, she will stay
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.
tuckova 