Lessons from Gone with the Wind...

Dear Clara, I just returned from a few days in Atlanta last week.  I don’t think there is ever any possibility of going to that city without thinking of green velvet drapes and feisty tempers.  Margaret Mitchell’s penned classic and Vivien Leigh’s spirited interpretation of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind will remain always one and the same with that city for me.  It might be an old story by the time you’re my age, but it will still be a true classic.  Here is what I’ll always remember from it:

• You can lose everything: At almost any moment.  Scarlett definitely knows a thing or two about loss, but in any story that spans a generation, I’m always taken by how privilege at the start doesn’t necessarily mean so at the end, and vice versa. We’re born what we’re born with, and some of us got it a little luckier, but that doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed.  Anyone’s fortunes could change either by circumstance or by their own foolishness---be prepared to mitigate against both.
• Sometimes you have to create from what you have, not from what you want: Scarlett’s dress that she fashioned from her drapes is probably the best example in this story, but you’ll find that she does this over and over again.  Sometimes, if not most times, we won’t have as much as we want . . . as new as we want . . . as different as we want . . . at the time that we want it.  But people who are most resilient and most successful look at what they have, and make it fit what they need, not what they want.
• Life is under no obligation to give us what we expect: When I read Gone with the Wind, I think I must have dog eared at least twenty pages of quotes and words to remember, if not more.  I was a great collector of quotes back in the day, and I think this particular one captures how much we have to be careful about expectations since then we are often disappointed. The one I remember most though, were Rhett’s words about mending what’s broken:  “I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken---and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I live.”  That quote did, and still does, make me nearly cry because I happen believe the opposite.  I think there is room for mending, and room for forgiveness, and I don’t believe that there are things such as permanently broken---but I think Rhett is just expressing the way that many people truly feel.  And you’ll come across people who believe in that strongly sometimes, and you’ll have to know when to keep fixing, and when to let it go because they will never see past the mend.  It's always best not to break in the first place, but we make mistakes, and not everyone will forgive us.
• People always come back: There is something uncanny about the way characters unfold in Gone with the Wind, and it mirrors life very much this way.  Even though the protagonists go through all sorts of changes and life takes them on many paths, they always seem to run together at different points in life.  Always appreciate people as though you’ll never see them again, because chances are, you will.  When you do, you will be glad that you left on good terms to pick up from; when you don’t, you’ll be reassured that you left with your best foot forward.

All my love,

Mom

Raziyya al-Din: Sultan of Delhi. Leader of Armies.

I’m never more inspired than when I’m spending my Saturday afternoons researching the most illustrious, the most extraordinary, the most awe-inducing women of world history, and of course I haven’t even scratched the surface in terms of subjects to write about. If I could, I would plaster my walls with pictures of these women: Eleanor of Aquitaine atop her horse en route to the Second Crusade. Emma Goldman slamming her fist on a pulpit as she addresses a hall full of factory workers. Sojourner Truth standing up in front of a crowd of hostile white men and skeptical white feminists to speak about her struggles as a slave and demand: “Ain’t I a woman?” It’d be like one giant wall of daily affirmations.

Raziyya al-Din (c.1200-1240) is another historical woman who was both excoriated (because she was a woman) and exulted (because she did stuff anyway). Born into Mughal nobility, Raziyya would go on to become the only female sultan in medieval India. Histories alternately refer to her as either Sultana or Sultan—let’s be clear that she preferred the latter, because a “sultana” technically referred to the wife of the sultan, and she wasn’t no sultan’s wife.

Raziyya’s father was Iltumish, a ruler in the Delhi Sultanate. The Delhi Sultans were a series of Muslim Turkish rulers based in Delhi who, through the medieval period, controlled much of north India. Iltumish and Raziyya, specifically, came from the first Delhi dynasty: the Mameluks, or slaves.

Iltumish recognized early on that his daughter was particularly well-suited for sultan-ing. She had accompanied him on many military campaigns and was ambitious, smart, and full of leadership skills. Thus he formally nominated Raziyya as his successor in preference to his many sons. (This makes me very well-disposed towards ol’ Iltumish. What a progressive guy!)

The problem: Despite the ostensible power of the Sultan’s throne, the elite Turkish nobles (always, always those unruly nobles!) wielded a disproportionate say in court matters, and they were not happy with Iltumish’s choice. When he died in 1236, they overrode his nomination and put one of his sons on the throne instead.

Fortunately for Raziyya, they soon saw the error of their ways. Her brother was incompetent and his conniving, ambitious mother made his rule even more unappealing. They removed him from the throne and gave Raziyya her due as the new Sultana Sultan that same year.

Raziyya, for her short term, proved to be a terrific Sultan. She was wise, benevolent, tolerant to Hindus, and adept at crushing rebellions when they arose. Like past YHWOTD Hatshepsut, she adapted men’s clothing, discarding the veil and dressing as a Sultan, I suppose, ought. Contemporary historians sang her praises, and eminent Indian historian Farishta remarked, “The men of discernment could find no defect in her except that she was created in the form of a woman.”

Her reign went well for the first couple years, but her appointment of an Abyssinian slave named Yaqut to a high office and her close relationship with him (speculation abounds that they may have been lovers, but sometimes I wonder, would the same speculation abound if she had been a man?) caused disgruntlement amongst those same unruly Turkish nobles. They eventually killed Yaqut and imprisoned Raziyya in a fort in Bhatinda, outside Delhi.

Raziyya was able to escape her imprisonment by marrying one of her captors (!) and the two of them marched on Delhi to recapture the throne. They were defeated by a dude named Balban, who would later become Sultan, and were unfortunately killed fleeing from battle in 1240.

Thus ended the short life and even shorter reign of Raziyya al-Din. But she was remembered fondly. Contemporary historian Minaj-us-Siraj called Raziyya “a great monarch, wise, just, generous, benefactor to her realm, a dispenser of equity, the protector of her people, and leader of her armies.”

What I’m reminded of when I read the singing of Raziyya’s praises, the apparent faultlessness of her Sultancy, is that—as Ta-nehisi Coates noted in an excellent, excellent essay on Barack Obama—minorities, including women, who rise to positions of power often have to be “twice as good and half as [insert minority identity here].” I’m not deeply cognizant of the social context of medieval India, but it’s noteworthy that the one of the only woman to emerge, victorious, from the margins of history in this period was, if the historians' language is to be believed, a perfect ruler and practically a man.

Obviously, that’s how they rolled back then---male sultans and all---and I get that. But even today, I think it’s a good reminder to not get complacent about the advances of women. There will be exceptions to every patriarchy, as Raziyya proves—but even with her boundary-breaking, the system remained intact, as it often does, even when briefly and occasionally challenged by extraordinary women. But at the very least exceptions like Raziyya can serve as inspiration and/or fodder for daily wall poster affirmation.

Celebrating the Everyday

A co-worker once told me about a trip she took with a girlfriend. I don’t remember where they went or when or even if there was a specific reason for the journey. What I remember about the story is that they didn’t have a camera (this was before the age of iphones).  As they stopped at noteworthy places or scenic views, they’d take a moment, pose, and say ‘Click! Took a Mental Picture!’ This story has stuck with me for several years, maybe because when I travel, I make it a point to put down the camera and soak in the place and moment as much as I can.  Of course then I pick up the camera again and take 150 pictures of really-cool-old-stuff (not even a slight exaggeration), but I make sure I see things outside of a viewfinder and imprint the memory to my brain and not just my SD card, I take a mental picture.

Surprisingly, as much as I strive to put down my beloved lenses while traveling, I’m becoming a total shutterbug at home.  The ease of having a camera on my cell phone means I can snap a shot at the grocery store or in my backyard. I can document a particularly awesome hair day or my current shade of nail polish.  My shoes are regularly photographed as one of my favorite subjects.  All show up on my instagram account. At first I thought it might be silly, I’m not a photo-journalist or an artist. I’m not taking pictures of Big-Important-Things; just snaps of my everyday life. But now I realize that’s the great thing.  These quick snaps are a celebration of the everyday.

Every day is fantastic.  Every day there is something beautiful or interesting to see.  Every day is a new journey and a new discovery. And that should be celebrated.  The collection of ice cream scoops that caught my eye thanks to the bright colors----the sunset over the cornfield---my current favorite pair of shoes---These things make up who I am. Like little happy puzzle pieces, these square snapshots build a bigger picture.

The great thing about instagram is my everyday isn’t the only one I get to experience.  I follow friends and relatives, and even a couple of folks I’ve never met in real life (like some of the wonderful contributors to Equals Record!).  I get to catch glimpses of other everydays without stepping outside of my own.  Roxanne’s views of Boston remind me that fall is on the way, I can’t wait to see the leaves change and snap some of my own autumnal photos. My cousin Andy’s photos almost always come with a thought provoking caption or interesting story and encourage me to think about the world outside of myself.

Equal parts inspiring and instigating, that’s what I love about the every day.[gallery link="file"]

Bridget Jones Syndrome: The Female Disaster in Romantic Comedies

Recently, a piece in the Atlantic Wire criticized the pilot of Mindy Kaling’s new sitcom “The Mindy Project” with concern that it ends up reproducing “the most hoary of romantic comedy clichés, that in order for a high-powered female character to be relatable she has to be clumsy or bumbling.” There is a definite trend in the romantic comedy genre that finds our female protagonists overwhelmed, unable to juggle their professional, personal, and romantic lives. In Bridesmaids, widely hailed as a landmark in women-centered comedy, Kristen Wiig's Annie has a spectacular meltdown as her life falls apart around her. The story is sharp and smartly-written, and Wiig plays it well, but there is something a little alarming in her downward spiral over the course of the movie. We see her failing professionally (the closure of her bakery), personally (her jealousy of fellow bridesmaid Rose Byrne), and, of course, romantically (her hookups with self-absorbed jerk Jon Hamm despite the interest of totally decent good guy Chris O'Dowd).

Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that Bridesmaids is a major step forward for women in pop culture in that it boasts an almost all-female cast with a female protagonist, female writers, and a potentially chick-flick theme that still transcends gender enjoyment. As to whether that needed to include a protracted and extremely unladylike bout of group diarrhea---I leave up to you. Toilet humor is a matter of taste.

When it comes to female disaster protagonists, my mind always goes to Bridget Jones, the queen of messy, disaster-prone, perpetually imperfect heroines. Bridget’s whole shtick—played with admirable wholeheartedness in the film versions by Renée Zellweger—is that she’s full of insecurities and unfulfilled goals, and that everything bad follows her around like her own personal Murphy’s Law.

Compared to the often flawless actresses who play even the most accident-prone characters in major film and TV roles, Bridget Jones is a bit of a breath of fresh air. She’s slightly overweight, her hair is never perfect (properly inverting the far less realistic always perfect paradigm), and she falls on her ass on what seems like a regular basis. Most of all, she’s obsessed to Austenian proportions with finding the perfect husband, while sabotaging herself with meaningless relations with men like Daniel (Hugh Grant).

Bridget Jones is like a fairy tale where, instead of being presented as the ideal, everything in her life is seen through her eyes as never measuring up to an ideal-- that ideal perhaps arguably being informed by other representations of women in pop culture. Despite her often pathetic self-presentation, we find that Bridget is actually a fairly successful career woman with plenty of friends and no shortage of men (and, in the sequel, women) who find her irresistibly attractive.

So when Bridget waddles as she walks—when she unknowingly covers her face in red blush—when she, during a live news report skydiving, inexplicably beats the odds and lands in the one pig sty for miles around—there’s an over-the-top, every-worst-fear-and-insecurity-come-true effect. It’s almost as if we’re seeing Bridget through Bridget’s eyes, with her constant attempts and failures to become the woman she believes she should be. That’s relatable, even if it’s often executed in an incredibly over-the-top manner. (And my disclaimer is that I don’t know that this was the intent of the creators at all; in fact, I think interpreting it this way gets us into some weird mimetic representations of reality territory as we unpack the layers of interpretation through which the "actual" story is filtered, including the narrator and the audience---but let's not go there.)

I’m not saying there aren’t problems with these roles. In particular, when Bridget declares that nothing is more unattractive than “strident feminism,” she represents a definite rejection of feminism that buys into the worst kinds of assumptions about what “feminism” actually means. Moreover, if the Bridgets and the Annies are the only types of lead female roles we see in major films and TV shows, we risk depicting all women as love-obsessed, marriage-prioritizing, perpetually-insecure-and-occasionally-inept 20- and 30-somethings whose role as wife and mother can’t help but take precedence over all other roles in life. And that's problematic, if only because such ideas tend to get recycled, reinforced, and potentially relived by real women.

Back to “The Mindy Project.” I admit that I’ve wanted to like this show since first hearing about it, though I wasn’t sure it would live up to its potential. Mindy Kaling is hilarious, talented, and simultaneously strong and (hyper)feminine. Even better, she’s a non-white, non-twig-thin heroine in a TV landscape that is, well, white and thin. The premise is promising: a successful OB-GYN obsessed with romantic comedies who believes, over-optimistically, that she could have her own rom com ending one day.

Particularly with the second episode, I think we’re seeing the potential for delightful subversion in this premise. While echoing romantic comedies, and realizing that many women do, indeed, enjoy them and emotionally engage with them, it nevertheless acknowledges the illusory quality of those same tropes that most TV and film for women are based on. I enjoyed a moment in the second episode when Mindy meets a guy (Seth Meyers) who turns out to be an architect (see this dead-on Cracked article on stereotypical movie occupations). “An architect? No one is an architect in real life!” scoffs her ornery male coworker (and likely eventual love interest---yes, I still expect a lot of tropes to play out in the expected way).

Along similar lines, when we see Mindy meeting her now-ex-boyfriend (played by Bill Hader) in an elevator, she is thrilled to find their interaction playing out like a rom-com movie scene, down to her hair falling out of her ponytail as she bends over to help him pick up papers. Fast forward to their breakup several months later and one of those "hoary clichés"---Mindy giving a drunken speech at her ex's wedding. It's a playful mix of acknowledging and unsettling these clichés that, I think, gives "The Mindy Project" its potential and simultaneously gives it a chance at commercial success on a major network.

Let's not forget that every protagonist requires weaknesses—otherwise, they’re completely uninteresting and unrelatable. We should of course acknowledge that women, like men, have insecurities, and that, yes, we occasionally against our better judgment geek out and feel awkward and feel ugly and make bad relationship decisions. What’s important is that we realize that these insecurities might be, at least in part, due to fairy tales fed us by Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan and other romance-centric ideals of modern womanhood. And that the post-rom-com female characters---your Annies, your Mindys---should be more than an amalgamation of weaknesses and failures. As fun as she is, one Bridget Jones is enough.

VII. Provence

My host mother in Aix is a frustratingly loquacious woman named Agnès. She has never left the country and spends most of her time pattering around the apartment in her slippers, fussing over pillows and arranging stacks of magazines. Her social interactions outside of her son seem limited to a few men she used to be in relationships with and now come over every once in a while and sit in the kitchen while she prepares meals for them. She has a heavy torso and thin, spindly legs. At the beginning of my stay, I feel sorry for her.

Though the French dinner is typically a more family-oriented affair, ours consist of Agnès and I sitting at her small dinner table watching the news. She provides a running commentary while I nod and say mm-hmm at intervals. Sometimes I wonder if this is why she offered to host students---so someone is obliged to listen to her.

But one warm evening the television is off, and Agnès tells me a French joke over red, ripe tomatoes and mozzarella.

God, she says, is looking at the earth after its creation. He notices that France is the most beautiful of all the nations---mountains, lakes, beaches, oceans, plains, forests. Every part of the landscape is diverse and breathtaking. And so, to make it a bit more even for the rest of the world, he creates the French people.

I laugh a little too hard.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Molly Bradley is US-born but France-grown, having lived in Paris from the age of six. Her reintroduction to her native country was through Oberlin College in Ohio. She's fairly certain that aside from having changed homes, schools, or countries every three or four years, juxtapositions like the one between France and Ohio are what have lent her an eye for cultural curiosities and a taste for travel. Over the past four years she has obtained degrees in English literature and creative writing, spent a semester in Senegal, worked as a pastry and line cook at a French restaurant in the Berkshires, learned Russian, handmade a lot of pasta, and become vegan (mostly). She has just moved to Portland to pursue a travel-writing internship, work at a food cart making waffles, and write, write, write.

I read as much for writing itself as for story. Not that that’s unusual, but I’ve come to realize that the writing makes all the difference. I am perfectly willing to read a story that is anywhere from unimpressive to downright unpleasant, in terms of plot---as long as the writing enthralls. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, necessarily, though that can help.

Proof that most readers can be bewitched this way: Lolita. That’s the novel that, for me, triggered this realization. You can describe it briefly as a book about an old geezer with pedophiliac tendencies, and thusly dismiss it---or you can say it’s about a man with yearnings toward his past, unfulfilled sexual desires, an undeniable draw toward the most innocent form of beauty he knows, and a girl too young to know what it means to even pretend to fulfill all that. You might also mention that, while reading---though you are aware of the boundaries and where they should not be crossed – you do not, and cannot, villainize him. And that is entirely the doing of Nabokov’s words.

Lolita is not a particularly recent read for me, but it has guided many of my subsequent choices in reading (and writing). Here are a few things I read this summer that, if not astounded me, at least tickled me: both as a human being with emotions to be strummed, and as a writer with tools to be sharpened.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera If you have ever traveled---especially often or long enough to feel out-of-place in any given place---this is something you should read. I can’t promise it will solve any of your existential crises on the road (play-on-words sort of intended---see third book down this list), but it will be a companion of sorts. That’s largely due to the delight of Kundera’s style: it is always accessible, inviting, and impossibly intimate.

He writes the novel in two ‘modes’: in one, he tells the story of Tomas, Teresa, Sabina, and Franz. In the other, he talks directly to us: about distance, love, desire, responsibility---even about the unique consciousness of animals. In these sections, I found myself stopping after almost every paragraph. Every musing made me want to tell someone in particular, or tell someone anonymous, or at least write it down to tell myself, again and again. Or to write it back to Kundera in a letter.

He also deals delicately (and accurately, it feels) with the subject of unbalanced relationships, or unequal loves. If you’ve ever experienced this, the novel will be at once heart-breaking and -healing.

Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard This one gets a little technical, but as an English and creative writing major, it was right up my alley. Even if you don’t think you’d like a book about the nitty-gritty of technique and form in writing, what fascinates is how Dillard gives fiction a tangible place in the real world. Too often fiction is dismissed as no more than escape or fancy or, at best, a noble yet disconnected and isolated art. It may be somewhat isolated, but Dillard not only places writers beside all other kinds of artists, but places all of those artists in a room with the rest of the world. She answers the questions that most professors, students, and critics alike only have vague answers to: questions about the whether fiction can interpret the world, and how it can allow you to better understand reality. If you write, her answers may make you feel, suddenly, that you have taken far too much responsibility on your shoulders---but shoulder it you should. Someone’s got to.

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac There’s nothing like reading Kerouac to make your speech and writing both relax. That is, assuming you aren’t being too hard on yourself for not being able to achieve that casual tone while still spinning out spectacularly singular turns of phrase and cadence.

As  much as I love the classic On the Road, what I love about The Dharma Bums is that it wasn’t On the Road. Kerouac, as Ray Smith, is at once more and less focused on himself, and at once more and less perfectly embodies the way he thinks it best to live. In Dharma Bums, he is very earnestly trying to live a simpler and more spiritual life, largely fired and inspired by his friend Japhy. The greatest part is that while he does a lot better than most of us could, he still screws up sometimes just like anyone would. It’s a hopeful and reassuring thing to see someone mess up and achieve, in equal measure and equal beauty.

At one point, Ray feels he has achieved some kind of enlightenment in the woods near his home. His first thought upon achieving enlightenment is to tell Japhy; he can’t wait to put it into words for someone who is something of a mentor to him. But when he tries, Japhy dismisses him promptly, saying that to appreciate such an experience is not to blab on about it. Ray is subdued, but it remains unclear who’s really closer to enlightenment.

Back to his style: its simplicity is deceptive. One the one hand, it’s reminiscent of those plain, easy pleasures that make you think you could live a far humbler life than you do. It reminds me of my dad talking about the brown bread, mustard, and sardine sandwiches of his youth: those three things were all he required to feel nourished.

Particularly in Dharma Bums, the great thing about Kerouac is that his easy style works to describe his vagabond’s meals of cans of beans just as well as it does to talk about becoming a Buddha, and other more complex matters of the soul.

Souls, sardines, Sabina. They’re all sort of related, and they’re all equally worth reading (and writing) about. It’s all the way you phrase it.

Sojourner Truth: Ex-Slave. Activist. Hardcore Feminist.

A few months ago, sci-fi writer John Scalzi published a blog piece that went viral entitled “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is”. In this article, he attempted to make “privilege” understood to an audience of gamer geeks by translating it into their own language—basically, that SWMs go through life on the “easy” (or “very easy”, depending on your game) button, while various minority identities increase your life’s difficulty setting. “The player who plays on the ‘Gay Minority Female’ setting?” he writes. “Hardcore.”

Our Historical Woman of the day was not, to my knowledge, gay, nor from an era that would necessarily self-identify as such, but I’m pretty sure she was still living life on one of the highest difficulty settings possible. Sojourner Truth was black, she was a woman, and she was born a slave. She lived a life that spanned from a childhood on the plantation to the difficult Reconstruction years following the Civil War. And today, due to her lifelong campaign for both African-American and women’s rights, she has become a symbol for the intersectionality of race and gender—how minority identities can overlap and how struggles can be experienced both separately and in tandem.

She was originally called Isabella “Belle” Baumfree; she changed her name to the (beautiful and rather inspiring) Sojourner Truth decades later. Belle was born into slavery on a Dutch New York plantation around 1797, and spent a childhood being shuffled from owner to owner, separated from family, mistreated by the masters and mistresses of the estates, and marrying a much older slave to whom she would bear five children, though there’s speculation that some were fathered by her white master. All part of the common experience of being a slave woman in America; but that doesn’t diminish its tragedy.

In 1826, an emancipation law was pending in New York—within a year, Isabella would likely be freed. However, she took it upon herself to exit the evil institution a little early. She took one of her children and literally walked off the plantation, finding refuge with a Quaker family and escaping the slave life forever. Later, she fought in court for the recovery of her other children, one of whom was illegally sold to a Southern plantation, and won. This was only the beginning of what was to be a long and fruitful activist career.

What Truth may have been most famous for, not unlike the firebrand anarchist Emma Goldman, was her public speaking. Illiterate throughout her life, she nevertheless had a remarkable gift for language and, from the 1840s onward, went on several speaking tours with both women’s rights groups and abolitionists.

Her most famous speech was apparently entirely improvised. At a women’s rights convention, at which Truth had agreed not to speak in order to avoid making harmful associations between the “Negro” cause and the cause of women, it happened that several men were shouting down the beleaguered women speakers. “Women expect rights? They ask us to help them down from carriages and over puddles!” cried Manly Man #1. “Women can’t even do manual labor!” exclaimed Manly Man #2. (I’m guessing at their names.)

Sojourner Truth couldn’t hold it in anymore. She marched up onto the platform and launched into an impassioned counterattack.

“Nobody ever helped me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gave me any best place—and ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed, and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it) and bear the lash as well—and ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen ‘em most all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard—and ain’t I a woman?”

Truth then pointed a bony finger (according to her histories, something she was fond of doing) at a nearby preacher, and demanded, “Where did your Christ come from? . . . From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him.”

The crowd erupted in cheers. The manly men were publicly shamed. The white feminists who had objected to her speaking felt guilty. (Or so I like to imagine.)

If this all sounds a bit too good to be true—if it sounds like the ending of a '90s family movie—it may be because, it’s not entirely true. Sojourner Truth holds the transcendent rank of symbol in our histories, particularly feminist histories, and symbols often diverge from reality. Much of this speech was recorded by a white working-class woman named Frances Gage, who even wrote it in “plantation dialect” (see above quote, replace every “the” with “de” and “children” with “chillern,” etc). Historians have noted the potential motives of contemporary white feminists for uplifting Truth to the status of symbol: her rootsy plantation background was an ideal metaphor for the need for women’s own emancipation, and her illiteracy meant she could do little to contest the narratives of her white recorders.

Yet I like to think there was at least some truth in this landmark piece of feminist expository, even if it wasn’t quite as movie-scene-y as all that. There are many recorded instances of Truth’s resounding voice echoing through convention halls and touching the hearts and minds of all who attended. She spoke alongside Frederick Douglass—famously asking him “Is God dead?” as he enumerated the injustices being committed daily against the American Negro—and diffused tense situations with unruly, antagonistic crowds—another potentially apocryphal story arises in which she bared her breasts to an Indiana audience who questioned whether she was really a woman. (Probably because she was six feet tall and deep-voiced. And she also had the balls to challenge men.)

She even staged some proto-public transit sit-ins in Washington, DC, storming onto the “white” segregated horse-drawn carriages and challenging the conductor to throw her off. The by-this-time somewhat elderly woman ended up in a scuffle with one driver, whose company she later successfully sued. Hardcore.

Sojourner Truth settled in Battle Creek, Michigan after the Civil War, where she advocated for a Reconstruction that would address the injustices done to black America by slavery—which, by her estimation, could never be fully forgiven, but at the very least the government could begin to make amends. She died in 1883, roughly eighty-five years old, fighting for this elusive justice to the very end.

Despite the nearly insurmountable challenges set out before her, and whether or not some of the accounts about her are apocryphal or idealized, the former Ms. Baumfree built a life that became an inspiration to every seeker of social justice of the last 150 years. It's hard to imagine the difficulties she faced in her life; her status as both black American and female American, not to mention former slave, informed her experience and drove her impassioned demand for equality and justice in an often ugly American century. And so Sojourner Truth, like her name, embodies a struggle that continues to inspire, that continues to matter, that we are still fighting today.

How about ginger tea?

As the years pass, my culinary taste has changed and I realized I have gained different habits, and fallen in love with new dishes or ingredients I never thought I could stand. When I was a teenager, for instance, I found sushi quite repellent. Raw fish surrounded by rice and rolled up in seaweeds? A dish like that made no sense to my Italian palate. Wasabe? How could anybody find pleasing to burn up their mouth with a green paste? And then, when I turned twenty-five, my boyfriend at the time (and now husband) took me to a sushi restaurant in Washington DC. Could I tell him “I hate sushi please take me in some Churrascaria instead!”?? That was a very cold winter night, but despite I would have rather eating a warm dish and definitely not a raw piece of salmon, I started to realize that sushi wasn’t so bad, at least drowned in soy sauce.

But ginger! No, I really couldn’t stand ginger. A piece of soap would have been better! (That was the taste I compared ginger to…) Sushi AND ginger was too much for my discriminating taste.

So when did I start to enjoy ginger and find its flavor so enjoyable? Just very recently, and I had to go to another continent to learn, once again, that even little things that seems so odd and senseless can be instead very lovable.

“Do you want some ginger tea?”

I can’t actually recall how many times I was asked this question in Myanmar. When I landed in the country, I thought I was just going to live a new adventure, to see new places and take the usual thousand pictures I like to take. I would never have expected I was going to bring home a new culinary habit---using ginger in my daily life and actually falling in love with an ingredient I had thus far kept at distance.

The story is that, while in Myanmar, I got sick for a couple of days. I had very high temperature and there was no western medicine that helped me feel better. But I didn’t want to miss a day. After all, Myanmar is not around the corner, and the chance I’ll visit it again isn’t granted. So I behaved as I was feeling great---while my face was red and burning, my spirit was in fabulous shape. But our guide, a very nice woman called Kin (not sure it is spelled this way!), had the solution (yes, she was much wiser than me and thought there was no way I could enjoy my time like that). She asked for ginger tea in every house, shop and temple, and no kidding I was offered about ten cups in ten hours. And please keep in mind that drinking tea brings other consequences, too! But anyway, by the next morning I was feeling great, filled with energy and strength (and purified!). I am still not sure if I felt so good because of the tea or because of all the attention I got. It is nice when total strangers take care of you so generously.

How weird is the taste of ginger? Hot, fragrant, explosive, peppery, and somehow also sweet. Ginger doesn’t have too much space in Italian cuisine. My mother rarely used ginger in her cooking, and I've never heard of pasta with ginger something in restaurants, haha!, so the taste was pretty much weird to me. Now I find myself searching for new recipes online and trying them out in my kitchen. I discovered ginger doesn’t discriminate.  It crosses cultures and culinary boundaries and makes its way into every cuisine and type of specialty food, from Fiji to India, Jamaica, Nigeria and China. So I learned that Chinese consider ginger a yang, or hot, warming food, which, when blended with a cooler yin food, helps balance and harmony. And surprisingly ginger can even be found in some bars crushed into a Mojito! Also, ginger’s spicy flavor is a big hit in both chocolate and cheese.

But most importantly, if someone will ask me what the best cure for cold and sore throat is, from now on I will give him a piece of fresh ginger to chew.

“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life---and travel---leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks---on your body or on your heart---are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.” Anthony Bourdain

One more short story about Myanmar and a village with no name at www.alicepluswonderland.blogspot.com

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Carrie Allen Tipton writes and lectures about classical music, American popular music, religion, and Southern culture. Her work has appeared in many publications and is upcoming in Texas Heritage Magazine, Black Grooves, and the Oxford American. Tipton has presented extensively at conferences and has lectured for the Eroica Trio and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra; in 2013 she will speak at the Houston Bach Society. Her research has been featured on KUHF radio (NPR in Houston, Texas), in the Houston Chronicle, and in The One: The Life and Music of James Brown (R.J. Smith, Gotham: 2012). Following a Ph.D. in Musicology and a stint as a professor, she flew the coop of academia to write and edit more extensively. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband where they wait impatiently for the arrival of their first baby in December. She hopes their child will one day heed the profound wisdom of the television show Reading Rainbow and “take a look—it’s in a book!” More about Tipton can be found at www.carrieallentipton.com. When I was three, my mother enrolled me in group piano lessons. For the first month, I sat next to her on my tiny bench, hands covering my eyes. When she cautiously attempted to remove my little paws, I dug in, explaining that I “was not ready yet.” The thought of new paths may conjure thrilling visions of adventure to some, but to me they signify the peculiar torture of leaving the known and familiar, now just as they did then. But the month of piano lessons did pass. Eventually I took my hands off my eyes and put them on the keys. I kept them there long enough to complete a masters degree in piano performance. Turns out that change can be scary and good all at the same time.

Three decades later, I once again face bends in my own path. Where to turn for nourishment, for the reassurance that others too have set out on unknown roads and have found them to be good? To books, of course. Much of my reading this summer has explored themes of personal and communal exploration of unmapped territories. Here are a few that, in capturing the ambiguity of the gains and losses that come with change, may help you in your own journeys to new places.

Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald At the micro level, Wald writes of the personal exodus from the Mississippi Delta of bluesman Robert Johnson in the 1930s and his efforts to forge a career in the tough early years of the commercial recording industry. Wald simultaneously charts a broader unmapped path as he smashes his way through standard historical narratives. He takes issue with common notions in written blues history: that the genre represented a primal cry welling up from neo-African roots in the Mississippi Delta, isolated from contemporary pop music; that its early practitioners were unsophisticated musicians; that 1930s Black audiences heard the blues as a pure folk art rather than as commercialized pop music. Wald reminds readers that it is blues historians, not Johnson’s contemporaries, who elevated him to demigod status after his death. Using archival evidence for his assertions, Wald manages to scold blues revisionists and celebrate Johnson’s admirable output all at the same time. A new path indeed.

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann I learned of this book through an NPR interview with the author, immediately intrigued by his improbable ability to make agricultural history sound fascinating. The book does not disappoint in this regard, arguing that Columbus inaugurated the collision of previously-separate ecosystems and unwittingly launched globalization. Mann demonstrates this through quirky tales of staples such as the lowly potato, vastly entertaining as they meander clumsily through complex geopolitical contexts. Despite Mann’s fairly snappy and occasionally humorous prose, however, I often glazed over at the wealth of detail, guiltily skimming for the next cool anecdote. Additionally, Mann’s neutral stance on the ethics of globalization formed an interesting and uncomfortable undercurrent. I am more accustomed to hearing globalization roundly denounced, but appreciated the author’s encouragement to think about its positive aspects. If you’ve ever wondered how shiploads of bird guano helped reconfigure human civilization, this is the book for you.

The German Settlement of the Texas Hill Country by Jefferson Morgenthaler My point in mentioning this admittedly obscure book isn’t to imply that you should rush out and order it, but to make you wonder how your town or city or region Came To Be. My husband’s mother was born into one of the German communities that began forming in central Texas in the 1840s, and after a trip there we became curious about how and why these folks wound up on the other side of the world. Morgenthaler answered our questions many times over, relating how fallout from the French Revolution drove German nobles to finance the migration of underclass persons to, of all places, the republic of Texas. The book details the often-woeful and sometimes-humorous journeys of the Germans as they pushed forward in the Texas wilderness, surviving on bear meat and negotiating treaties with Comanches. Morgenthaler’s meticulously-researched book reminded me that the tale of new beginnings in unfamiliar places is the story of how all of us came to occupy our present plot of earth.

Mama Ph.D.: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life by Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant, editors Particularly germane to my own life circumstances recently was this collection of essays. By turns frustrating, funny, and affirming, it features the voices of female academics across a spectrum of disciplines, degree programs, and academic ranks. Some discuss remaining in the academy while raising children; others explore leaving to start a family. The book was sobering in its repeated structural critiques of academia’s inadequate maternity provisions. The writing of women who chose to leave university life upon having children deals honestly with the grief and deep embarrassment that often accompanied their decisions, but also points the way towards alternative career paths and new modes of satisfaction outside the academy for those with Ph.D.s. The book assured me I was not alone in my questions, struggles, and frustrations.

Among the Mad (A Maisie Dobbs Novel) by Jacqueline Winspear I hope you have already met Maisie Dobbs, a relatively new yet already much-beloved female sleuth. In my mind her only peer among fictional detectives is Harriet Vane, created by the great writer Dorothy Sayers, for complexity of character and full-bodied realness. Like Sayers’ Vane, Dobbs works in the interwar period in England. The books, and Dobbs herself, are shot through with shadows and scars of the first World War, and a major thread in the series is how Dobbs’ own wartime pain slowly and haltingly gives way to new beginnings in her personal and professional life, though never in a pat or easy way. In this book, as with all books in the series, Dobbs works her way through a new mystery related to the war that gripped Europe fifteen years earlier (the book is set in 1931). She also forges new inroads into her personal relationships, an ongoing theme for Dobbs’ character after the life-altering tragedies she experienced as a nurse during the war.

Artist Envy

Do you ever wonder what it’s like inside someone else’s creative world? Are you a photographer who wishes she could write? Or a painter who wishes she could dance? Sometimes I am a writer who wishes she could paint or sing or sculpt. Of course, I realize I can learn about other media by taking a class or simply experimenting on my own. And often this sort of experimentation facilitates a kind of creative cross-pollination, in which trying out a new medium allows you to see your most familiar medium in a new light.

But sometimes I just get a little restless with the joys and challenges of working with words, the material I’ve been wrestling with since I learned to put pencil to paper. I begin to wonder whether life would be more exciting or whether my stories would be more effective if they were told through music or visual arts or dance.

I often feel this tinge of artist envy when I catch a glimpse of some of the interesting and beautiful spaces in which other artists sometimes work and the worn, tactile objects they use. For example, I love this book, Inside the Painter’s Studio, by Joe Fig, and I can’t wait to dive into Jennifer Causey’s new book, Brooklyn Makers.

Most of the time, I love that writing requires so little from the tactile realm—simply a pen and paper or a keyboard of any sort. Chalk on a sidewalk works too, or a finger tracing out letters in the sand. I love that I can write almost anywhere, as long as I can muster up the presence to hear the sound of my own voice inside my head.

But after a long stretch of arranging and rearranging letters on a page, black on white, line after horizontal line, I can’t help but daydream about the lives of artists whose creative worlds are made up of vibrant colors, infinite shapes, and rich textures. I can’t help but fantasize about artists whose days are brimming with sounds and movements far more diverse than the tapping of fingertips at a keyboard.

Similarly, when I received this collection of poems by Jorge Luis Borges as a gift a couple of years ago, I was confused at first, then shocked, then delighted. Borges is renowned for his brilliant, imaginative fiction, and I had no idea that he identified primarily as a poet throughout his life. Although poetry and fiction are, of course, crafted from the same material, I was surprised to learn that this author, who was so beloved for one form of his work, seemed to have left his heart in another.

How about you? If you are an artist or maker or creator of any sort, do you work in one medium, or multiple? Have you ever dreamed of switching lives with another artist for a day, or trading one format for another?

Grunge and the Goddess Girl

By Rhea St. JulienImage from the cover of In Utero

At the tender age of 12, I got my period, fell headlong into rock and roll, and unwittingly had my heart broken by the girl of my dreams. Let's start with the body. In a few short months, my skinny frame had grown a layer of downy brown hair over it, my thighs had thickened so fast I had stretch marks, and menarche arrived with such a torrent of muddy red blood that I was sure I had shit my pants. It was just my luck that I was wearing white jean shorts, at the mall, on the way to 5.9.7 from Claire’s. I tripped over my own feet rushing to the bathroom, and got the nib of the pencil I was carrying stuck in the side of my leg, which I can still see in there, 19 years later. It’s a permanent memento of that day, as if I don't already have a reminder every single month.

When I showed my mom my shitty underwear in horror, she threw a pad at me and said, "That's blood. Use this. Shower every day." That was about it. No big "Welcome to Womanhood" speech, no talk of the dreaded word "menses". My mother's unsentimental approach belied how she felt about all things woman-related (including me): they were a hassle. So, I figured it out like I did everything else, with my girlfriends. We tried to fit tampons up there, not knowing to take out the applicator, and having it all kill so bad we gave up and stuck to pads, even though they bulked out our cut-offs.

The one friend that seemed to do just fine with all things lady-bits was Lauren D'Agostino. Her long blonde hair shone as she ran full tilt down the soccer field, leaving all the boys and a few of us girls feverishly fawning in her wake. No matter how close I came, I could never catch her.

We spent hours, the two of us, in her huge attic bedroom, dancing to The Doors and Ugly Kid Joe, trying on outfits for the school dance and talking deeply about our families. The other girls in our clique could not for the life of them understand what Lauren saw in me. I was a perennial misfit, a “freak”, who got straight A’s but also had a permanent seat in the vice principal’s office. I was too everything: too smart, too wild, too loud, too poor, too fast. When Lauren dipped her Venus hand in my direction, inviting me into her inner circle, the collective population of my small town middle school took an inward breath, “HER?!” The girls we shared our lunch table with, who I can just call “The Melissas”, were positive I had stolen my place in Lauren’s BFF photo album from their shinier, worthier visages.

But there I was, despite all odds, feeding horses on her father’s farm and sipping hot chocolate he brought us in steaming paper cups. What no one understood was that since I wasn’t a friend that Lauren needed to keep up appearances with, she could really be herself with me. She was so buttoned-up in the lunchroom, attempting to keep her Queen Bee status, but with me she let herself go, trying out head banging and dressing up with me and another friend like Huey Duey and Louie for Halloween instead of a “sexy witch” like the Melissas.

I knew that I adored her, but I had no idea that I was actually in love with her, until, without a word of explanation, she dropped me. The Melissas were triumphant, noisily whispering throughout the halls about how Lauren and I were no longer, how one of the Melissas (whose name was actually Mary) had dethroned me, and how pathetic I was after all.

Absolutely certain this was all a misunderstanding, I ignored them and called Lauren’s personal telephone line, repeatedly. I imagined it ringing, pink and perfect on her trundle bed, and willed her to answer. But she never did. I wrote long missives about our friendship and how much I missed her, reminding her of all the fun times we’d had together, but there were no return notes from Lauren in my locker. She never spoke to me again. The following year, she headed off to a private Catholic school, so I blissfully did not have to see her beautiful face any longer, and be reminded of my unrequited love.

The truth is that while Lauren may have been more of herself with me, I was less and less of myself with her. I was so desperate to hold on to her that I contorted myself into her mold, pretending I liked 50’s-style boy-girl sock hop parties and banal trips to the mall, like the fated one where I bloodied my underwear for the first time. So, once Lauren broke my little 12 year old heart like a slinky stretched too far, I was free to explore my darker tendencies.

I found myself in Mystery Train Records, eyeing cassettes and CDs through my growing-out bangs, which I had to keep tossing back with a flip of my head in order to see the cover art. Music, particularly the “alternative rock” that was pouring out of Seattle at that time, fed the painful part of me that was sore over losing Lauren, and humiliated over proving the Melissas right. If had to be a loser like they thought I was, I was going to fucking rock out.

That Fall, Nirvana released In Utero, and I got on the Kurt Cobain train right before it was blown to pieces by his shotgun. With Heart Shaped Box on repeat, I yelped along, “Broken hymen of 'Your Highness', I'm left black/Throw down your umbilical noose so I can climb right back”. I couldn’t consciously conceive of the fact that I was wishing I had broken my dear highness’s hymen myself---I sub-knew it. The fact that I didn’t just miss Lauren or want to be her like the Melissas did, but actually wanted to be in her, and rub my hands up her blondy legs was never stated, not even in my reams of diaries. Instead, I howled along to Hole, Pearl Jam, and Stone Temple Pilots in my room 3 streets away from Lauren, hoping she would hear me, pick up the phone, and ask me to crawl back into the folds of velvet-girl goodness that I was nearly received into.

An Ode to the Female Cop: Benson and Prentiss

Of the weighty Law & Order franchise, Detective Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is the only female protagonist who really takes the lead. Other detective pairs which include females—Gorem & Eames, Logan & Wheeler, both of L&O: Criminal Intent—have a decided focus on the quirks, quips, and leadership skills of the male half. Female D.A.’s are frequent, but less protagonist-y. Olivia is by far the most prominent female hero to emerge out of Dick Wolf’s vast TV empire.

This is likely because SVU is like the “special episode” spinoff of Law & Order---it deals with, as the intro states, the “particularly heinous” crimes of sexual and physical violence against women and children. Accordingly, SVU has become the only one in the franchise to give equal, if not more, weight to a female investigator.

What’s interesting to observe is the ways in which, as a woman occupying the often masculine-associated role of NYPD detective, Olivia Benson both transcends and, conversely, highlights her gender at strategic moments. Like many female cops on TV, Benson isn’t, well, girly. She often wears her hair in short cuts. She dresses plainly. She even has kind of a low voice (not a huge thing, but we’d definitely be noticing if her voice was high-pitched and/or squeaky).

Yet very much of her character remains defined by her gender. As noted, it would seem that it was a deliberate choice to place a woman at the forefront of SVU because of the fact that it deals with crimes against women and children. Olivia is extremely sympathetic, touched deeply by each case she comes across and concerned deeply for each victim. She’s the one who sits and talks to them in a soft voice, coaxes out difficult-to-speak-about details, and gently advises that they take the stand to testify and put this or that bastard away for good. These all fall into line with "traditional" ideas about women's strengths.

And of course, the two lead detectives—Benson and Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni)—occasionally regress into tired gender role clichés. Olivia is sensitive! Nurturing! Gets emotionally involved in her cases! While on the other hand, Stabler is hot-headed! A tough guy! Gets physically involved in his cases—as in, he almost beats up dirtbag suspects in the interrogation room! The show tends to make up for this by having Benson and Stabler be both well-written and well-acted, but there is the occasional moment when you pull yourself out of the show long enough to go: “Really?”

Beyond relating to victims, Olivia has a more explicit connection to their ordeals---she herself is the product of a rape. And in one episode, Olivia goes undercover as an inmate at a woman’s prison where a guard is suspected of sexual assault, and she herself is attacked by the guard before she's saved by her team. In this case, she becomes a “special” victim herself, a situation that only she, and not Stabler, could place herself in (by the way, I'm not sure if that would ever happen in real life---a cop going undercover as an inmate? I don't know, I get all my skewed criminal investigation knowledge from these shows.)

In this last phenomenon, I’m also reminded of Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster) from the crazy addictive serial killer show, Criminal Minds, which follows the work of an FBI behavioral analysis unit as they profile horrible, twisted rapists and murderers before they strike again (usually just in the nick of time to save the latest victim!). The subject matter is equally dark and grotesque, if not more so, than SVU, and the victims are, again, often women.

(There’s a whole subconversation to be had about the depiction of violent and sexual crimes against women as entertainment, and whether it is or isn't made more acceptable by the fact that the shows so clearly depict right and wrong and underscore the significance of such crimes—but that's for another day.)

There are three regular women on Criminal Minds, who tellingly remain at about fourth and fifth position in the cast photo phalanx (see picture)—yet they are important characters with a lot of screen time and subjectivity. Prentiss, like Benson, is a strong woman with minimal “gendered” qualities, a downplayed wardrobe, and a tough exterior. Yet she and J.J. (A.J. Cook) are often the ones who must “coax” a victim or bereaved family member, using their special lady powers to put people at ease.

In an episode where there is an outbreak of a deadly strain of anthrax, it is Prentiss and J.J. who we see struggling with the ethical quandaries of maintaining public silence about the disease in order to protect the greater good (which the men don’t seem to have a problem with). Prentiss fights the urge to notify a woman who lives across the street from their diabolical scientist suspect that she and her children may be in danger. And J.J. has a small emotional crisis about her own young son and the fact that, ethically, she can’t do anything to protect him in advance, because she has “inside knowledge” that the public doesn’t. The "mother" role often, overtly or subtly, plays into the female cop experience on these shows.

Prentiss, like Benson, has also used her gender to her advantage when dealing with suspects. In the interrogation room, she has flattered and flirted with sociopaths who tend to open up when faced with worshipful female attention. (These scenes are always a little sickening.) Meanwhile, Benson and Stabler have played on gender dynamics by playing roles when interrogating misogynists: Benson plays the bad cop who comes down hard on the guy, while Stabler winks and nudges—“women, right?”—and makes the guy think Stabler sympathizes with his woman-hating ways.

All in all, both shows produce interesting perspectives on the quandaries and ambiguities of gender in a fictional workplace that privileges traditionally “masculine” qualities; yet they often still reproduce traditional ideas about women's skills and perspectives. Benson and Prentiss are tougher than your average female character, but we don’t lose sight of the challenges they face and the separate circumstances they sometimes find themselves in as women, which is good. While there are clichés—the Benson-Stabler dichotomy, for example, or the repetitive "mother" theme—overall I think the net result of having heroines like these can only be positive in terms of female representation on TV. I mean, that is, if you can stand horrifically violent and disturbing plots.

V. Provence

There is a woman who sells American and English pastries at the market in the Place des Prêcheurs. She is beautiful and reminds me of the photographs I have seen of Cherokee women. For a school assignment we have to interview an aixois, someone from Aix, so one day at the market I ask her if she might be willing to talk to me about her life in the south of France. She agrees. Her name is Juliette, and we meet the following week for coffee at her favorite café on the Cours Mirabeau, the main, plane tree-lined street in Aix. She is so impressed with my French that she invites me to come to her house and bake with her later that week. It happens to fall on my birthday. Juliette makes me a cheesecake and tells me about how she spent a year in Wisconsin when she was sixteen.

“There is no better city in the world,” she says, “than New York.”

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Roxanne Krystalli’s passion for gender advocacy, conflict management, and international development has brought her to communities affected by conflict worldwide, where she has designed programs that benefit women in affiliation with international and community-based organizations. This journey has stretched from Egypt to Colombia, from Uganda to Guatemala, from the Balkans to Jerusalem. Roxanne is intrigued by questions of memory and forgetting, attachment and loss, home and away. She is a Joan Didion fanatic and, perhaps relatedly, a perpetual nostalgic. A fervent believer in the power of storytelling, Roxanne documents her journey on Stories of Conflict and Love. "Oh my God, we are going to die."

After three years of living and working in conflict and post-conflict zones around the world, I did not expect to hear the above sentence uttered outside a library in Boston, Massachusetts.

"We are going to die, I'm telling you."

This time it is neither of cholera nor of rocket fire, neither of a mine nor of malaria. You see, we will allegedly die of . . . reading.

"Four hundred pages. A thousand. Eighteen thousand six hundred and fifty eight." People try to calculate the number of pages we will have to read per week to complete our graduate coursework in law and diplomacy. We signed up for this, just as we did for that stint of work in Sudan or Colombia, in Uganda or on the Iraq border, and our freedom to parachute in and---most importantly---out will always make every page turn feel like a privilege to me. Imminent death does not feel like autumnal breeze, the laws of humanitarian intervention, or blank pages waiting for ideas to populate them.

***

If there came a moment of grief for me in this process, it had to do with having Susan Sontag stare at me every morning. It is the first time I can call a bookcase my own since I lived in my childhood home in Greece. It is firmly planted here, as am I---ready for roots to grow past suitcases and for books to gather dust on a shelf in a way that anchors me in place and time. When I celebrated the symbols of permanence, I had underestimated the power of book spines to stare you down on your way to yet another class with "Conflict" in the title.

They stare because they remember the era when you made time in your life for conflict and dreaming, for imaginary journeys and real footsteps in daring directions. It was the era of reading a book a day or a week, of carving out room for writing your own. Susan Sontag has a way of reminding me of previous selves and the reasons I loved them. "Man, you look . . . dead. Dead tired," someone will inevitably remark as I leave the library. Eyes may look weary behind glasses, but they now know to make time for Susan Sontag. She nags quietly from the shelf, making sure I carry the past into the present, forcing me to weave dreams together that previously seemed disparate.

Here is what is squeezed between Fighting for Darfur and Understanding Peacekeeping on those shelves that anchor me:

NW by Zadie Smith. It was neither White Teeth nor On Beauty that cast a spell over me, though I savored both of these books. It was Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays that shaped my understanding of reading and writing as acts of love. In Smith's own words:

"It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art's heart's purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved."

While Zadie Smith's latest novel is not devoted to advice on words and love, it deftly places one in the service of the other, as she traces the webbed lives of four characters in contemporary London.

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed. The problem with reading in tiny spurts, with eyes half-shut from fatigue and thoughts of humanitarian law swimming in your head, is that such mental states are not conducive to enveloping yourself in an imaginary universe and allowing it to sweep you away. They do not create the necessary conditions for magic; magic requires time and a desire to give in to a plot, regardless of bedtimes, alarm clocks, or beckoning libraries. Perhaps this is why I so appreciated Cheryl Strayed's ability to create magic out of directness, to bear beauty out of her honesty. This book was the product of an advice column Strayed wrote (anonymously, at the time) for The Rumpus under the moniker "Dear Sugar." One of my favorite Dear Sugar columns gave this collection of essays its name. Read that column here, and dive into the book with---as Strayed puts it---"the courage to break your own heart."

1oo selected poems by e.e. cummings. It was our umpteenth stint of long-distance love. He dropped me off at the airport two hours before writing that email; I landed in Dublin to a message whose  subject line declared "e.e. cummings never legally changed the spelling of his name." So it was E.E. Cummings who, in fact, penned "nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands" and "i like my body when it is with your body." e.e. cummings (no, really, lower case, I insist) feels like autumn, reunions, airports, emails, new beginnings, young poetry, younger selves, hands that are still small, hands that still love another.

Reborn Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh by Susan Sontag And, of course, there is Susan Sontag, with her published journals and notebooks, edited by David Rieff. Reborn is the one that comes back to haunt me, though I cannot resist As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh. Illustrated diary excerpts from the latter are available on Brain Pickings, in case you, too, like to start your day with "Can I love someone . . .. AND . . . still think/fly?" On 11/01/1956, Susan Sontag's diary entry read "We've been discussing the soul." A peak into that soul at the age of 17 and 23 and 39 is a mind-spinning journey. In January 1960, Sontag wrote "Inspiration presents itself to me in the form of anxiety." Her anxiety speaks soothingly to mine, her inspiration kindles my own. If there were a book spine to stare you down from the shelf until you remember your own humanity, this would be my chosen one.

***

Nobody has uttered "oh my God, we are going to DIEEEEE!" when faced with the prospect of reading a thousand pages of Zadie Smith. Eighteen thousand and fifty eight pages of Susan Sontag. Exactly two hundred and forty nine poems of e.e. cummings'. These are not the books for highlighters, fluorescent lights, squinty eyes behind glasses, or bad coffee. They are not the books for bright orange or bright yellow. They are for scribbling in the margins, for crawling under the blanket, for remembering and forgetting. For soft, warm light, open eyes, open hearts.

Isla Negra

Every morning, on a remote shore along the Chilean coast, in a small house overlooking the sea, a bulky man blew his trumpet while observing the ever-moving sea surface. This man was Pablo Neruda, the most famous poet from South America, and the place where he chose to spend the later part of his life was Isla Negra, a tiny hamlet an hour’s drive from the capital, Santiago. In 1939, when Neruda started to compose Canto General, he felt the need of a new shelter. He found Isla Negra, a precious spot unknown to most people, on a newspaper ad. The place, a lot with a tiny stone cabin that back then looked more like a wreck, was sold to him by an old sea captain, and it slowly became the poet’s own boat . . . anchored on land.

And soon “the house was growing, as people, as trees . . .” African sculptures, Chinese prints, Buddhas, compasses, maps, old paintings, and even a skull. Ship’s figure heads, shells, nautical decors and more than a hundred bottles the poet bought in the flea markets in France. Neruda loved to surround himself with collected objects, remains and relics from the past, while growing dreams about the future.

“The wild coast of Isla Negra, with the tumultuous oceanic movement, allowed me to surrender with passion to the venture of my new song”.

Rambling and creative architecture, quirky collections of world art, and a stunning ocean view. In the house of Isla Negra Neruda found the perfect place to write, and put together an important part of his literary work. The poet’s appetite for life was endless. He indeed described himself as omnivorous---“I would like to swallow the whole earth, drink the whole sea".

Neruda hoped to leave the house as a heritage to Chilean people (“I don't want my heritage of joy to die”), but sadly that refuge wasn’t far enough to escape Pinochet’s oppression. During a search of the house at Isla Negra by Chilean armed forces at which Neruda was present, a soldier asked Neruda if he hid weapons or something threatening in there. The poet remarked: "Look around---there's only one thing of danger for you here---poetry."

Sonnet LXXX by Pablo Neruda

My Love, I returned from travel and sorrow to your voice, to your hand flying on the guitar, to the fire interrupting the autumn with kisses, to the night that circles through the sky.

I ask for bread and dominion for all; for the worker with no future ask for land. May no one expect my blood or my song to rest! But I cannot give up your love, not without dying.

So: play the waltz of the tranquil moon, the barcarole, on the fluid guitar, till my head lolls, dreaming:

for all my life's sleeplessness had woven this shelter in the grove where your hand lives and flies, watching over the night of the sleeping traveler.

Hildegard von Bingen: Composer. Mystic. Nun.

The other day, Google ran a Doodle in honor of 19th-century composer/pianist Clara Schumann’s birthday, and it took me back to my days as an undergraduate music major. Yes, it’s true—before I was Miss History ‘n’ Pop Culture, I was studying to be a composer. I switched gears, but I still harbor a deep passion for music, and I still play piano. Mostly show tunes.

Anyway, I was reminded how, in my music history studies, of the dozens and dozens of important names we learned, there were maybe three female composers that came up. There was Clara Schumann---wife of Robert Schumann. There was Fanny Mendelssohn---sister of Felix Mendelssohn. But the one who always stood out for me—maybe because she stood entirely on her own—was Hildegard von Bingen, a Benedictine nun from the twelfth century who wrote, of all things, monophonic morality plays. Fun!

Saint Hildegard (she was “equivalently canonized” earlier this year) was another one of those historical women who seemed to do it all, with the added benefit of living an uncommon 82 years in medieval times. She was born in 1098 in Germany, and as a teenager, she was instructed in psalm-reading by the head of a local Benedictine community. When the woman died, Hildegard was elected the new head.

I should mention---Hildegard had been having these visions ever since she was a child, which she often described as in terms of bright lights. Modern-day physicians would attribute these “visions” (and the visions of many other medieval mystics) to migraines, hence the light sensitivity, which, all in all, is a perfectly satisfactory explanation. But I’d caution against getting too wrapped up in modern scientific understandings of things; for Hildegard, these visions were real, as they also were for many of those who surrounded her. And their very “realness” was the impetus for many of the great things she accomplished.

It was at age 42 when Hildegard had THE vision, the first one that would serve as the divine inspiration for her work. “A burning light of tremendous brightness coming from heaven poured into my entire mind,” she recorded. “God told me, ‘Write what you see and hear.’” And, in the Middle Ages, when God talked, you listened.

From then on, Hildegard was a writing fiend. She would produce a book on theology, two books on science and medicine, over seventy musical pieces, and go on four speaking tours of Europe. She did this all while recording her visions and managing her convents. Notably, she also held regular correspondence with kings and popes and important dudes like Abbot Suger, not easy guys to impress.

This story, I think, illustrates what she was able to achieve very well: In 1148, Hildegard claimed she had been commanded by God to move her nuns to a new location near the town of Rupertsberg. The monks over her head refused, wary of the expense and the loss of personnel. Hildegard then took to her bed, struck sick, too weak to move. Her sickness was, of course, attributed to her failure to follow God’s divine orders. Eventually, the abbot agreed with this interpretation and granted her permission to move to the new site, overruling the monks, and Hildegard got what she wanted. And within a few years, the Rupertsberg convent became so popular they needed to build a second convent just across the Rhine River to accommodate demand. Hildegard managed both.

It’s been noted that, despite her gender, Hildegard didn’t quite jibe with modern feminist ideas—that she sometimes spoke ill of women, associating them with weakness in accordance with dominant ideas of the time. Unlike her male contemporaries, she didn’t toot her own horn when it came to her musical talents, considering herself a mere vessel for the voice of God. (Note: This wasn’t an idea particular to Hildegard or women, however; Jorge Luis Borges notes that writers of antiquity such as Plato considered the poet nothing more than a “fleeting instrument of divinity.”)

But Hildegard’s attitude needs to be placed in its appropriate context, as do her migraine-visions. In fact, they’re kind of related. Much of Hildegard’s power was derived from her claims to legitimate communion with God; this was an incredibly effective means to personal agency in the Christian-dominated paradigm of medieval Europe. Her visions, her orders from heaven, her illnesses were tools from which she could carve out an autonomous space, provoke action from male higher-ups, and, ultimately, leave her mark on music history, religious history, and medieval history, something so few other women were able to achieve.

This is not in any way to say that Hildegard’s successful maneuverings within the system were planned or intentional. But it’s worth noting that, of the privileged few medieval women from the lower (read: not queen) classes who show up on the historical record, a large number were saints and mystics. There was no feminism in 1150. You did what you could.

In honor of St. Hildegard, who according to Wikipedia celebrated a birthday on Sunday (happy 914^th!), I recommend listening to one of her lovely compositions, like Spiritus Sanctus or O vis aeternitatis. Though solemn and ordered by today’s standards, for her time she was very original, breaking many of the hallowed rules of music theory to write soaring vocal lines and even (gasp!) switching modes in mid-song. For perspective, mode-switching didn’t become a la mode until five hundred years later.

Kinda makes you want to go join a medieval convent, doesn’t it? Or at least write a pretty song with a hurdy gurdy in it. I might just go do the latter.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

In March of this year, Ally moved from Brooklyn to Leesburg, Virginia. While in New York, she worked as a barista and in retail in order to support her writing and acting habits. She studied classical acting in Oxford, UK, at The British American Drama Academy and English Literature at American University in Washington, DC. Ally and her husband (who is a musician and writer) decided to leave city life on a whim---their lease was up and instead of renewing, they packed up their two cats and moved into her dad's old hunting cabin in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. When she's not pickling poisonous spiders or getting charged by groundhogs, she's a kitchen helper to food writer Cathy Barrow and recipe tester for the Washington Post. She blogs about cabin life at www.thegreencabinyear.com The big comfy armchair in my living room is upholstered in a hunter’s dreamscape. Deer, geese, elk, and moose frolic across the fabric. There are pine trees and creeks and hunting dogs. This is my reading chair, my special spot reserved for reading only actual books. I say “actual” because I think of the printed word as a material thing in addition to its immaterial narrative. A book in the “actual” sense is a specific vessel as well as a world. Sure, I love e-books and laptops, but those mediums show you too much. They take you anywhere, everywhere. The actual book takes you to only one place, to one particular story.

You also get a whole different sense experience with an actual book. You feel the flex of a page heavy with a big glossy photograph. You notice how unlike in texture and weight the rigid cover is from the pulp flecked page. You can hear the spine crinkle and see the deepness of the black ink. Let’s not forget the smell, of course…the must or dust or that of crisp fresh paper.

When learning something new, especially a physical skill like gardening or cooking, I find it particularly helpful to learn from an actual book. That’s what this column is about for me – books that are teaching me new things. As I learn to garden, to cook, to read, I find that I enjoy the flipping back and forth through pages, running my finger up and down a block of text, and sandwiching in post-it notes and neon tabs to keep my place.

In short . . . Hooray for actual books!

Here is what I’m reading now:

New Book of Herbs by Jekka Mcvicar I’ve got a thing for Passion Surfing. Never heard of Passion Surfing? Well, that’s because I just made it up. Passion Surfing is when you find someone who is really passionate about what they do and then you catch a smaller version of their wave and see where it takes you. Usually my Passion Surfs are fun for a few weeks, then glide to a halt on the shore of boredom. But not so with Jekka Mcvicar. Her wave of enthusiasm has inspired me for a really long time.

This book gives guidance in planning new garden beds, growing herbs from seeds and cuttings, and also has sections about uses for fresh herbs in the kitchen and the home. There are recipes and how-tos and manifestos for organic gardening practices. There are so many helpful tidbits of information---did you know that using a seeping irrigation system rather than a spray hose will cut down on the spread of weed seeds? Neither did I! My favorite part of the book, however, is the last section that details 100 of Jekka’s favorite herbs. Jekka and I have been hanging ten so hard lately, I want to grow every one of them!

The Wild Table by Connie Green and Sarah Scott When I moved to western Virginia from Brooklyn I became obsessed with finding a particular type of mushroom called the morel. I imagined that finding this particularly delicious and wild delicacy would free me from the heartsick feeling I’d had since leaving New York. I missed my friends, my job, and the great theatres, cafes, and bookstores. I missed the feeling of “happening”, of hopefulness, of my phone buzzing in my pocket as a pal called me up for a spontaneous after work cocktail. When I got to Virginia all I saw was the traffic and the big box stores and the laser-eyed looks directed at my tattoos. And my phone? My phone became a still and useless rectangle of regret.

Strangely enough, the morel did help me adjust. It became my beacon of hope. I didn’t need anyone calling me if I was poking around in the woods searching for fungi. Soon I took a “grow-your-own wild mushrooms” class at a local organic farm and found a cool job through connections I made there. Eventually I even became more adventurous in the kitchen, which I also credit to my love of wild mushrooms---because if you spend a whole day searching for your food, you’re certainly going to put in the effort to eat it well that night. I found myself appreciating the beauty of Virginia after all. Morel hunting truly helped me see the world in a different way. But wait . . . not that kind of different way, I’m not talking about those types of mushrooms.

The Wild Table is a beautiful book filled with tasty recipes, brilliant photographs, and useful, easy to read information about preserving the morning fetch.  You can use this book even if you have no desire to go tromping around in the woods; just swing by your local farmers market.  If you are in the mood for some fungi fulfillment there’s a helpful “Wild Calendar” in the back that tells you when certain mushrooms and other natural treats are in season.

Living, Thinking, Looking by Siri Hustvedt This book is a collection of essays about a lot of stuff: desire, memory, sleep, literature, visual art. Oh yeah, and neuroscience. Can’t forget the neuroscience. (Except I do forget the parts about neuroscience and then I have to go back and read them over and over again…)  These topics might make you wonder how this book is making an appearance here, among all these other books about things you can eat. Mushrooms, herbs… ideas? Exactly!

In my journey to become a better home cook I’ve hit a few roadblocks every so often. Learning new skills takes some endurance. This book helped me reinvest in my quest to become a skilled cook because of how Hustvedt thinks about memory. She writes:  “it is clear that memory is consolidated by emotion, that the fragments of the past we recall best are those colored by feeling …” Good meals can be bookmarks in the brain.

The example that comes to mind is from my recent weekend trip to New York. I can only vaguely describe the events of that weekend as a whole. But ask me about that delicious meal I shared with my dear friend at a nice restaurant in the East Village? I can give you a play-by-play of the whole experience, not just about what we ate. I vividly remember our conversation, the energy of the room, even details of the place down to the type of air freshener that was in the bathroom. (A lemongrass diffuser, in case you were wondering.)

My dinner that night was pleasure distilled into three courses and a bottle of sparkling wine.  It was certainly a “consolidating” emotion I felt that evening – an emotion I am slowly learning to create again and again for myself, for my family, and for my friends.

The food will be for our tummies; the pleasure of eating it will be for our minds.

"New Girl," or In Defense of Zooey Deschanel

Zooey Deschanel’s hit sitcom “New Girl” will have its second season premiere in a couple weeks, and I’ll most likely be watching, because I love her, and I’m clearly not alone—in fact, if both her converts and critics are to be believed, she leads a massive charge of women ages 13 to 50 that want to get in touch with their inner sunshine princess.

Culminating in her role in 2009’s romantic comedy-ish (500) Days of Summer—in which she, paradoxically, plays the gold standard Manic Pixie Dream Girl in a film that shows the dream of the MPDG to be airy and insubstantial—Deschanel has made a name for herself by tweeting about kittens, by wearing thrift store dresses, by starring in too-cute Cotton commercials, by singing vintage songs in a husky voice accompanied by a tiny ukulele, and by essentially being, as Jada Yuan from New York Magazine designated her, the Pinup of Williamsburg.

“New Girl,” when it premiered last fall, featured promos about Deschanel’s “adorkable,” very Zooey-like Jess Day moving into an L.A. apartment with three guys---who just can’t figure her out! Cue billboards of Jess standing slightly apart in an oblivious, pigeon-toed stance, as three dudes styled to be average-looking give her “uhh . . . what?” looks from the other side of the poster. Jess is quirky, awkward, and yes, loves girlish, silly things like making pancakes and being sweet to everybody. Based on the promos, even I thought it might be too much Zooey-ness. But it turned out much better than I expected.

For one thing, “New Girl” is actually funny. More than other sitcoms on the air, which are either aimed at the 35-and-over parenting set or continue to be filmed on 1990s-style soundstages with live audiences, I relate to this show and its characters, from the fact that Jess meets her new roommates via Craigslist to the career, dating, life issues that they face as people in their late 20s/early 30s.

And despite the promos, Jess turns out to be a fairly solid character. Sure, she’s got fluffy interests and a sunshine personality, but she’s smart and surprisingly self-possessed. She owns her cutesy persona with pride. This is best illustrated in an episode where she squares off against Lizzy Caplan’s tough lawyer character—a bit of a straw (wo)man, maybe, but I appreciated the implied message about women criticizing other women for undermining their own position as women.

To sum up: Why can’t you love rainbows and cupcakes, if you really love rainbows and cupcakes? Why does that automatically cast you in a submissive role that sets all womanhood decades back? Why must we police other women’s behavior and circumscribe their choices? In the grand scheme of things, Jess’s brand of girlishness seems pretty innocuous when compared to, say, action movie trailers or Carl’s Jr./Hardee’s commercials. Though Caplan’s character also brings up a good point: if she acted like Jess, she’d never make it as a lawyer. But what is that really a comment on?

This particular debate seemed to indirectly address the controversy that surrounds Zooey Deschanel herself. More than most other actress/singer/public figures of her generation, Deschanel is often at the center of fierce feminist debates. For those on one side, she’s an unproblematic symbol of indie culture: friend crush, girl crush, actual crush, style icon. For those on the other, she represents everything that’s wrong with third-wave (read: new) feminism: the idea that it’s totally okay to be quirky, child-like, cutesy, and, yes, a Manic Pixie Dream Girl because we’re over women having to be tough to be strong role models.

Much of this criticism came out of the woodwork with the premiere of “New Girl” last fall. They contend that Zooey represents a flippant post-feminism that, while rejecting the more limiting female ideal of second-wave feminism (ambitious, successful, not crying all the time), reverts instead to a pre-feminist ideal that sees women as childlike, naïve, innocent, to be taken care of. More explicitly, the retro fetishism of the Zooey set creates a female character that seems stuck squarely in 1962, vintage Shirelle crooning and all.

The aforementioned Zooey set is much larger than Ms. Deschanel herself (though some would say she started the trend). It’s in cupcake trucks. It’s in Mindy Kaling. It’s in every woman who has bangs. (Read comedienne Amy Klausner’s vicious takedown of the whole phenomenon.) And ultimately, for critics, it’s seen as a step backwards for womanhood because it allows grown women to present themselves as little girls and thus infantilizes women everywhere.

On the one hand, I understand the danger in constantly presenting women as girls, and how that can be damaging in what is undoubtedly an ongoing struggle for gender equality. Read: We are not post-feminist, and any action taken with the assumption that we are is a misstep.

On the other hand: I love Zooey. And I believe my defense of her stems from two parts, one intellectual and one entirely not.

One part is simply not preoccupied with what she means for feminism. In other words, I love her dresses, I love her hair, I love her bangs. I want to be as cool as her. As I write this I’m wearing a bright red, slightly flouncy A-line skirt and something called Audrey flats and nibbling on a piece of cheese and brie and listening to “Friday, I’m in Love” on my tiny purple iPod, and the image this produces is, all in all, incredibly gratifying to me.

The second part is this. I find it problematic when we define the “ideal” female character within such narrow boundaries. While not prescribing a defined list of rules---i.e., women must wear pants—in the sense that we must repeatedly tell prominent female figures what they should not do, we are creating a limited space in which women are allowed to represent themselves. While it’s completely valid to criticize representations of women in media that are demeaning, or that reproduce negative tropes, or that seem unrealistic (see The Incredible Shrinking Liz Lemon), those criticisms must be tempered by an understanding that a huge part of feminism is women choosing to do what they want to do.

Can I be asked to break down why I buy into elements of this subculture and its imagery? You might as well ask a woman why stiletto heels make her feel sexy. Sure, we could get into the problematic gendered history of shoe fashion and how heels represent a tortured, demeaning misogyny and, in an ideal world, should be discarded altogether. But does that change how they make her feel? And are we going to convince a country full of women that they should convert to a standard-issue, progress-approved flat for the sake of the symbolism? That feels like treating a symptom of patriarchy and not a cause—and, at the same time, getting on a bunch of ladies’ cases for making their own life choices.

I might be overthinking the whole Zooey Deschanel case. Or, I might be criticizing others for overthinking it. I can’t quite tell at this point. Either way, I suppose the most I can do is recommend “New Girl” (which, if you want to know, also has great male characters who are also hilariously quirky and awkward), and leave you with something like “Leave Zooey Alone.”

I Say Goodbye, You Say Hello: A Facebook Story

By H. Savala Nolan I’m in the doctor’s waiting room. I’m on the couch during commercials. I’m waiting for my latte. I’m in bed, restless. I’m waiting for my boyfriend to get dressed. I’m in the train station. I’m lined up to board my flight. I idle, therefore, I Facebook.

In moments of quiet—moments I might use for serenity, to smell the scents and see the colors of the world around me—I grab my phone and tap the icon, a plain blue square with a friendly white “f” just slightly off center. Behold: my friends. I’m idle, but they are busy. They are fawning over baby animals, baying for blood because of politics, announcing spiritual truths, loafing in tropical sun, sitting down to the best meal ever, cataloging the day’s humdrum  triumphs and defeats, staring alluringly into the eye of a camera, getting engaged, having children, praying over dying aunts and granddads. Despite myself, and despite how over-stimulated, drained, or jealous  it can leave me, I log on. I can’t seem to help it.

Everyone is ambivalent about Facebook. How can we not be? Status updates—the meat of the log-on—do one of two things: elevate the boring, or degrade the profound. Both are bothersome. It exasperates me that some friends think hundreds of people hang on edge, craving  ruminations on how much they love coffee, every day. (And yet, the prosaic is the real juice of life, how we string our days together—why shouldn’t we honor it?) I’m uncomfortable when my friends announce the death of a relative with a stroke of text—silent, clinical, hovering in ether—transmitted to people who will read, dash off sympathy, and forget. (And yet, we know people all over the world. We can’t make 478 phone calls or address 478 letters. This is how we live now.)

But here is the real trouble with Facebook: I never talk to my best friends anymore. In high school, Louise and I sometimes chatted on the phone for 6 or 7 hours a night. We talked about seniors we pined for (their leather jackets and spiky hair and the pretty girls they dated). We talked about music (Green Day and Nine Inch Nails). We talked about diets (cabbage soup) and drinking (did we dare?) and what color to dye our hair (purple). Adulthood at 30-something renders that omnipresent intimacy impossible; she produces reality television, I practice law, we are busy and live 2,000 miles apart. But even in our roaring twenties, we still spoke almost daily. Now, after the entrenchment of Facebook, it is typical for us to go nearly a month without speaking. Recently, with aching disbelief, I realized that the sole reason I know anything about her life is because of her status updates, which tend to be pithy and unremitting, headlines refreshed every few hours as if she were a newspaper. But could that be true?  To test my theory, I blocked her from my newsfeed. A month passed. Radio silence, except for my birthday, when she called. But before that, I couldn’t tell you if she was alive or dead.

At first, confirming the fallow state of our friendship chagrined me. I felt wronged—by her. What sort of person has time to broadcast her whereabouts, food and beverage intake, disgruntled moments, workouts, and crowd-sourcing inquiries upward of a dozen times a day, but cannot find time to connect with her best friend, one on one? To be sure, this isn’t all Facebook. She and I hammer out resolutions when, periodically, I feel I’m single-handedly doing the work of friendship. Perhaps we are simply growing apart. I, of course, could have called her; but why would I? I had Facebook. And so our affinity for Facebook—the estranged, thoughtless intimacy of it—allowed the primary challenge in our incredibly important friendship to become to the substance.

Then, after a few weeks, something unexpected happened: the irritation waned, and I began to miss her. I began to miss her in a way I never did when following her every move and thought online. In fact, I couldn’t have missed her on Facebook: she was everywhere, always.

Yes, I missed her, with the fresh, affectionate curiosity that used to precede a phone call to say hello. And I realized that, despite the constant “updates,” I missed my other best friends, and some family members, too. I didn’t want the curated comic book of their lives; that’s what Keeping Up with the Kardashians is for. I wanted noise,  texture, and monogamy, not silence, a screen, and a stranger “liking” what I wrote. I wanted interjection. I wanted to hear laughter and sighs, and remember that I know some voices so well I can see the speaker’s facial expressions over the phone. I wanted to see, or at least recall, familiar bodies that take up real space. I wanted the moments of silence that come, they say, about every seven minutes in a conversation. And I wanted to hear my voice, too. I needed the grounding and fruition that comes from contact, not the bargain-basement copy that comes from interface.

So I blocked everyone I’m close to. It was a strangely anxious goodbye, as if I were strapping myself into a space shuttle, only perhaps to return. My  mom, my best friend, my boyfriend. All the inner circle, and the next-to-inner circle. Gone.

But suddenly present. Suddenly, again, real. Suddenly, again, in my awareness because they are not constantly in my face. Just like a fish can’t think about water, maybe we can’t truly contemplate—or properly love—people who are always in front of us in the most superficial ways. Good though it may be to “keep in touch” by knowing my brother-in-law ran four miles today, that news is the emotional equivalent of junk food. I don’t see my loved ones when I log on, and I feel a pang of, well, love. After a few days, I think, Hey, where are Jane and Quinn and Melissa and David? How are they? What are they doing these days? It’s like letting yourself get truly, empty-stomach, slightly-on-edge hungry; then you truly want to eat! If you graze all day, you never feel hunger, and you’re never satisfied by what you eat because your eating isn’t connected to satisfaction.

Now, if I want to know what’s up with my brother, I call. And I was surprised to discover that calling was scary. It turns out that I, a social butterfly, have developed a Facebook-induced shyness. Calling feels so forward, so direct, so daunting. But only for about a minute. Then you come to your senses. You give yourself an inward smack across the cheek, and snap out of it. Afraid to call my brother? Are you kidding? I’ve known him for 32 years, and we get along! What’s there to debate? Call. And I do. And we are, as in the old days, family. It feels great.

And there is a bonus, though it’s not one Facebook’s shareholders would be thrilled to know about: I log-on less. Much less. After all, what is there to see? The photographs of puppies that my Mom’s former best friend is currently into? The engagement news of people I never liked but was too meek to ignore when they requested my friendship? The wit and attitude as my cousin’s pals outdo each other’s comments? How entirely, intensely boring.

Especially when there is a city outside my window, and sunshine, and late-summer fruit, and music, and people. My friends, my family, and myself, to be seen and heard.

Nothing new under the (wedding) sun

Last week, I wrote about DIY illusions, and I feel like I have to come clean. Roxanne’s comment reminded me that it’s nearly impossible to discuss DIY culture and not mention weddings. I did it, though—I churned out the whole piece without mentioning the “W” word once. As it turns out, my fiancé and I are awash in the final weeks of planning our wedding. Although the topic is at the forefront of my mind, I thought I’d do this space a favor and leave all of that wedding business out. I figured there’s already enough (and perhaps too much) internet real estate devoted to the chiffon/taffeta/burlap/mason jar dream of getting hitched with all the trimmings.

If you’ll allow me, though, I’d like to reflect a bit further on DIY culture, a trend that has both fascinated and bewildered me as we’ve navigated the wedding planning process since our engagement in March. Much of our wedding is “DIY,” in the sense that we’re doing it ourselves. The only professional we’ve hired is a photographer, so many of the logistical and material aspects of the day will be created and executed by ourselves or our loved ones. But this isn’t what I mean at all when I use the letters “D-I-Y.”

DIY culture, I think, is a pervasive sense that the material aspects of a wedding, or a home, or a life, for that matter, are only special and meaningful when they are crafted and personalized and customized by oneself, for oneself. There's certainly something special about the things we make ourselves, but the pressure to create-your-own everything can sometimes be overwhelming. Perhaps this anxiety is fueled by our overexposure to the intimate details of the lives of others and a resulting desire to differentiate ourselves.

Weddings are such a common life cycle event, but after you’ve ogled wedding blog photos from around the world, followed by a healthy dose of your 500 favorite Facebook friends’ weddings, “common” takes on a whole new meaning. It’s hard not to wonder whether there is anything new under the sun.

I went to a talk this weekend by Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist, and I couldn’t help but apply his perspective on creativity more broadly to weddings and other aspects of life too (I hope he doesn’t mind!). The idea is simply to get comfortable with the idea that nothing is completely original. Our creative works (and our homes and our weddings) are composites of the objects and the people and the ideas that have come before us.

This approach isn’t meant to be depressing, but rather freeing. What’s different and special each time a new poem is written, or a new couple gets married, is simply the remix of influences and the presence of the individuals themselves who are creating or transitioning or moving through life, like those who’ve gone before them. That’s all, and that’s enough.

Sometimes I’ve wondered in the past few months whether we’re doing enough to make our wedding feel personal or unique. We haven’t managed to cover anything in burlap or chalkboard paint (yet?), because we’re too busy arranging basic things, like matching up the number of chairs with the number of tushes. I’m relieved to be reminded, though, that everything we’re doing has been done before. What’s different this time is simply that we’re the ones doing it, together.