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"]

For I have sinned

I am about the furthest thing from a Catholic imaginable, it's true.  But last night I was lying awake feeling guilty for a litany of failings and vices from the past weeks.  'How Catholic of me,' I mused.  And this is not to say that my own Jewish culture doesn't have a lot to offer in the guilt department.  As I flopped back and forth under the covers, I told myself to stop spinning about my various shortcomings and try to focus on all the ways I might have been effective or kind recently.  As so many of us writing here have acknowledged, it is not easy to take those night-time demons to the mat, especially when the hours are small.  Part of the struggle is feeling alone, trapped in your mind with what you imagine to be shameful thoughts and deeds. When I was finally awoken by the chattering of the baby in the early morning, it was something of a relief.  As I extracted her from the crib and set about to start the day, I decided I would engage in something of a "confessional" exercise.  Perhaps if I purged my consciousness of some of the low moments, I could make room for fresh experiences.  Forthwith, a detailing of seven mortal sins of late.  Here is hoping that cracking open my humanity can start to heal what ails me.  At least it might make you feel superior and then you can write about all the ways in which you experienced Pride :)

Wrath - I am typically fairly internal when it comes to anger, which, if you read any study on health is not ideal.  Apparently, people who externalize anger (at least express it, if not outright explode all over the place) tend to have lower levels of depression and can experience improved communication.  This article from the American Psychological Association (and there are a host just like it in the literature) describes some adaptive qualities of anger and how to use it to your benefit.  At my worst, I employ the tactic of stuffing down things that irritate me and then completely coming unglued over something relatively innocuous much later on down the road.  This is totally unproductive and moderately to profoundly confusing for loved ones.  I am working on addressing problems in the moment and being honest about my needs.  This is tricky and can feel risky to someone like myself who likes to avoid confrontation.  But ultimately, the confrontation always happens, just maybe displaced, which is no good for anyone.  Onward.  Upward.

Greed - I want more time, mostly.  Of course, I always desire too many cookies, clothes and earthly possessions, but hours in the day . . . what I wouldn't give.  The truth is that I could manage my time better.  There is certainly some whiling away the hours on Facebook/Instagram, spending late evenings watching Boardwalk Empire instead of answering emails, iChatting with a friend rather than ordering groceries.  The balance of stealing some time to which I feel entitled ("me" time) and organizing the day around prioritizing important tasks is the struggle of all good people, right?  And listen to my language: "stealing" some time . . . from what or whom?  Still and all, I want more time for work, more time with my family, more time to noodle on the internet.  There, I said it.

Sloth - Um, please see Greed.  And then sprinkle in all the moments where I sit in the chair at the studio or on the couch at the apartment thinking 'Sarah, stop flipping through the magazine and move on to the next thing.'  How about the time last week when I recalled I had read a study somewhere (I'm big on studies) indicating that dogs have fewer allergies when you bathe them less often, so . . . On the whole, I tend to push myself to make it all happen and there are times when I actually take great pleasure in physical labor and menial tasks.  There can be a wonderful meditative quality to folding, organizing, washing, etc.  But I realize I tell myself that things are just super busy now and fitting it all in will get easier over time.  This is, of course, an exercise in self-delusion.  Everything will just continue to get busier and the tasks and demands on time will simply compound.  Operation Pull it Together in full effect, then.

Pride - I post about 74,000 pictures of my daughter on Facebook every day with captions extolling her adorableness.  I talk about her accomplishments (at 9 months, these include things like almost, maybe, no definitely, actually probably not - but it really sounds like it! - uttering, "mmmmm…" when I feed her bites of something) ad nauseum.  When people ask me about her I always start with, "She is totally @#!&-ing awesome."  Sue me.  I am a new mother.  I got nothing for you here :)

Lust - There are days when I want power and I want it badly.  This is typically applicable in my business.  I want to be huge enough and famous enough that clients line up at my door, the phone rings off the hook and my inbox is brimming with messages where the inquiry goes something like this, "We really want to work with you, exclusively and specifically, and as such, we are writing you this check with a large sum.  Please deposit this check immediately and then show up on the day of our event with whatever florals and decor you feel are appropriate.  Thanks so much."  Until then, I suppose I will continue to work really hard to prove myself in the industry, hone my brand, secure the trust of clients and exceed expectations in the execution of events like my business depends on it.  Because it does.  The mogul situation is still out of reach, as it turns out.

Envy -I always think everyone else has it easier, is doing it better, knows something I don't and so on.  I believe this to be a fairly universal issue but it doesn't make it any less potent. I am particularly uncomfortable with this aspect of my personality, as my life is so relatively rosy.  As previously discussed, I have greater flexibility and more human and capital resources than most working people.  There is real suffering all around me in this big city and my concerns about finding the time to update my website or whether my daughter has enough of whatever thing-of-the-day should consume scant mental energy.  No excuses here.

Gluttony - The unending battle with cooking at home and eating "like a real family," wages on.  We over-indulge in take-out and restaurant meals where we are inevitably served too much of less healthful food.  This is a symptom of multiple larger issues in our house (see above struggles with time management, for example) and the remedies aren't coming easily.  I picture us coming together for dinner each night, discussing important matters of the day, laughing, sharing locally sourced food we have lovingly prepared, nourishing our bodies . . . then I scrape the sauce from the (recyclable?) plastic container from Dao Palate onto day-old rice, popping it into the microwave and feel awful.  Fill the refrigerator weekly, take a cooking class (or seven), continue to try and carve out the time.  How hard could it BE?!  HONESTLY.

Well, now I see why people are into this process of recounting wrongs and requesting absolution. It does feel somewhat cleansing.  The accountability piece is where things get dicier.  Maybe writing it down will catalyze forward motion.  And reading it over will help me be a little more gentle with myself as I strive to be a better . . . well . . . everything.  Wait, is that Greed or Pride or maybe Lust?  Sigh.

 (image via)

How To Live Out Of A Suitcase

I have always resisted "How-To" musings. Their prescriptive confidence tends to oversimplify life and obliterate its intricacies. Everything would feel manageable, if only you'd buy into Steps-1-through-5. Everything comes in neatly ordered bullets or numbered lists, always in increments of 5. The first time I read a "7 tips to a healthier closet" in a magazine, I nearly fell over at the violation of the increments of 5 bit. I used to love the structured life: the healthy closet, the happy living room, the robust plants. The magazine how-to's always paired adjectives and nouns in unusual ways that made me think that "if only I could follow the steps, I, too, could have a giggling patio or a witty sink or a resplendent relationship." Somewhere along the way, I met a wonderful man who refused to think in tight increments or in standardized measures. He sets his alarm clock to 7.03 AM or 8.57 or 9.14 because "life does not need to unfold on the dot." There are few subjects for which I'd change my feelings on How-To's. When Kim said "I'd like to commission a post on practical matters about living out of a suitcase," I knew this would be the How-To corner of the internet I could call my own. This is less a "pack pashminas-they are so versatile!" guide (though do! they are!), and more a reflection on how to navigate the emotional turmoil inherent in transitions.

Know your anchors. The are few life transitions that require one to live with one T-shirt, two pairs of underwear, and some jeans. If you are embarking on one of them, there is something grand enough ahead that makes the stinkiness worth it. Nobody ever uttered "I am so moved by the world right now but gee do I wish I had all my life's belongings with me!" If you are embarking on a different kind of transition, make peace with that which you cannot let go. It may feel silly to lug a stuffed panda bear across what used to be the Uganda-Sudan border, but if it is the connoter of memories, it gets a passport to travel. Some are attached to their cooking spices, others to their stationery. Figure out what will become part of your gratuitous weight and let it come along. Minimalism for minimalism's sake is a powerful way to glide through life---but it becomes more powerful if you figure out how to violate its tenets to make them more resonant and viable.

Put down (some) roots. For a book lover, keeping books on the shelf is one of the pleasures of a semi-permanent life. Nobody ever left in the middle of the night with tomes of the complete works of Joan Didion in her one carry-on bag (though if that happens, World, let me be the first one.) Walking past used bookstores with the knowledge that "we do not have room for books" or that we must resist everything that will weigh us down creates weight in itself. So, buy the books if you need to. Find a way to receive mail temporarily if seeing your name on an envelope brings you glee. You will find a way to pass the books on to someone who will love them, and to forward the mail, and to move all of yourself and your memories. Put down (some) roots in the meantime; transitions need not be mere parentheses in the narrative of life.

Method to madness. Google Reader is as embedded in my morning routine as coffee is in other people's. It does not matter if I am waking up in Boston or Jerusalem, if I have to go to work in an hour or class in thirty minutes. Browsing the morning headlines and reading my favorite blogs helps me feel connected to the world as it was before transition. It may feel small sometimes, or downright trivial, or such a hassle to hold on to routine and ritual when the rest of life is spinning around you. But it is those very routines that make it all slow down. If you are a runner, find a way to go for a run early on in your transition to a new environment. Do you write in the morning? Then, write, even among the boxes. Write your heart out. Do not let your camera gather dust in a box if its shutter clicking will make you feel more mindfully present. And, in the same breath, make room for the new routines that emerge out of a new life.

Carry the lightness with you. I used to think I excelled in transition, if that is the sort of experience one can master, until I set foot in my new apartment in Boston on September 1st. After three years of work in conflict and post-conflict areas worldwide, the possibility of staying in one (secure) (exceedingly comfortable) place for two years was intoxicating. I turned into a Nesting Monster. In the build-up to this move, I had lived out of the same suitcase for months on end, but the second that suitcase entered our new apartment, everything had to be unpacked. Immediately. And the furniture had to be built. And the boxes had to be recycled. Immediately. It was as though I had become allergic to transition overnight. Elijah humored me and assembled the dresser and the desk and the shelves in one afternoon.

Last night I asked him if he feels that our space is cluttered. Let me be clear: it is not. But, compared to our couch-free Jerusalem living room, the furniture feels imposingly permanent. Compared to the luggage I had in Guatemala, the knit sweaters feel bulky, even if Boston requires them.

As someone who failed at this, allow me to urge you to keep the lightness as long as possible. The transition will be over one day, and suddenly you will own 13 different pieces of Tupperware. Ask yourself where that came from, ask yourself if you need it. The fact that you have space to fill and time to do so does not mean that the roots of stuff will be the roots you thought you were craving. So hang the beautiful string lights you had been wishing to have in your space ever since you dreamed up permanence. And if it all starts to feel heavy and much, remember the time all of life fit in one suitcase and try to bring some of it back to that beautifully lit space you now call home.

Looking Forward: Hello, Neighbor.

It was a Friday night. My friend Ben was visiting from out of town, and we’d made plans to go out to eat in my neighborhood. As we walked, I listed dinner options---Thai, Korean, Italian, Japanese---but it wasn’t long before I realized I’d lost my audience. Half a block behind me, a wide-eyed Ben stood transfixed in front of the window of a neighborhood barbershop, one I’d passed many times before but to which I’d never paid much attention. “Let’s go here,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, incredulous.

“Here,” he said. “Let’s go here. They’re watching the Pacquiao fight. Let’s join them.” Then, in response to my blank stare: “Pacquiao’s a boxer.”

Still several yards down the street, I proceeded to list the thousand-and-one reasons I thought this was a crazy idea. It would be rude, I insisted, to assume that this group wanted guests---judging from the music and the laughter that was coming from the shop, they seemed to be having a wonderful time as it was, without us. We weren’t invited, we’d never met---therefore we’d be intruding. And, I huffed, it was getting late. I was starving.

“We can do whatever you want after the fight, I promise,” Ben said. “Please can we do this? It’ll be fun. These people are your neighbors.” He paused. “Afterward, it’s your call, I swear. Anything you want. We can eat ice cream and watch ‘Father of the Bride’ if that’s what sounds good to you.”

Ten minutes later, I found myself seated on a bench in the front of the barbershop, in the center of a flurry of activity. Men placed bets in Spanish, swiveling in leather barber chairs. Couples salsa-danced to music on an old boombox in the back corner. Beer bottles were opened with cans of hairspray. Ben had joined some sort of raucous conversation with a cluster of Pacquiao fans; meanwhile, an old man pacing the front of the shop graciously attempted to explain to me the complexities of boxing. A girl in the corner about my age offered me a shy smile, a gesture of camaraderie.

“I told you this would be fun,” said Ben.

He was right. It was.

That was almost a year ago. I’ve passed the shop many times since then and have peeked in on occasion, but the barbers’ backs are often turned, or they’re too focused on their work to notice passersby in the street. Last week, however, I ran into the owner on the sidewalk outside a local bodega two blocks from my apartment.

I gave a cautious wave, thinking he might not recognize me; instead, I was met with a giant hug and an ear-to-ear smile. Despite our language barrier, we exchanged pleasantries: we were doing well, enjoying life, working hard as usual. Before saying goodbye, I told him I’d stop by again soon to watch another fight, punching the air awkwardly in a poor attempt to mime boxing. “Yes, yes,” he replied, holding me at arm’s length. Then he did something I’ll never forget.

“Look at you,” he said, beaming, “You’re wonderful.”

All my life, the cities I’ve lived in have felt like temporary homes. Growing up, my family moved back and forth between Los Angeles and Honolulu, and I knew that Santa Cruz, where I lived for four years in college, wasn’t a city I’d remain in after graduation. Now, though, for the first time, I’m beginning to get a sense of what it might feel like to be a part of a community. To settle in. To make a place my own.

And I’m realizing I don’t just want to exist as part of my neighborhood---I want to know it. More importantly, I want to know the people I share it with---and not just the ones whose lives look like mine. It makes me so happy to be able to say hello every day to the man across the street who feeds the pigeons every morning, to the bearded bartender next door, to the crew of barbers down the street, and the dreadlocked tattoo artist around the corner.

Two years ago, when I lived deep in a hipster-dominated pocket of Bushwick, someone plastered a sign over a chainlink fence that read, you are not your neighborhood.

Perhaps not. But aren’t neighborhoods largely a reflection of the men and women and children---the barbers, bartenders, artists, hippies, hipsters, and everything in between---who populate them?

We may only know each other well enough to smile and wave and say hello, but this makes us more than strangers.

This makes us neighbors. And together, we are our neighborhood.

Make Down

I'm far from knowledgeable when it comes to other parts of the country, but here in the south makeup seems to be a necessity. Little girls grow up dreaming about the day when they are allowed to imitate their mothers' daily ritual of applying lipstick, blush, and eye shadow. The youngsters turn into teens and start experimenting with heavy eyeliner, brightly colored lips, and many other trendy facial fashions. Beauty pageants, high school proms, and date nights all call for an hour or so nose dive into the make up bag. Before long, the adult version doesn't feel like herself in public without at least a puff of powder. Neither right nor wrong, somehow I skipped right over this entire phase of girlie-hood. Being almost thirty years old means that my skin is far from perfected porcelain. Like most, my face is dotted with freckles, sun spots, the occasional blemish, a couple of scars, and a fair amount of wrinkles that, at times, I wish I could erase. But when I really think about it, those unique characteristics decorating my skin are  just minor details. Details that tell my own personal story: freckles because I have fair skin, sun spots because my family enjoys vacationing at the beach and we forget to reapply sunscreen, blemishes because I get stressed out or eat too much chocolate, scars because I was an active kid, forehead creases caused by being confused or angry at times, and those deep parenthesis wrinkles between my cheeks and mouth because I've laughed a lot during my lifetime.

At this point, I wouldn't exactly know where to start the process of buying cosmetics. Besides modifying my features with a light brushing of mascara and lip gloss, I even bared it all in front of my husband and guests at our wedding. Don't get me wrong, there are many times when I look around at all the flawless faces strolling the streets, and my mind starts to wonder: "That shadow really makes her eyes pop, would it do the same for mine?" or "Her skin looks impeccable with that powder, should I invest?" or "I wonder if I would look younger and fresher with a bit of concealer?"

But in my world, being able to roll out of bed and shamelessly face the world (with under-eye bags and all) within five minutes of placing my feet on the ground trumps everything else.  I could probably just chalk this all up to the fact that, in general, I'm lazy when it comes to presenting myself.  However, I prefer to think I'm sharing and celebrating my life experiences one sun spot and blemish at a time.

Having Two

A few years ago, when I was newly pregnant with Charley, my husband and I had our first real married fight. It was at the beach in Chicago. It was July and the water was frigid, but the sun warm. The beach was fairly crowded and in front of us there was a family of four. I don’t remember much about the fight, I knew there were important topics discussed, but I have thought of that family many times since. A funny thing happens when you become pregnant: you become hyper-aware of every mother, father, baby, and family near you. You scrutinize their every movement. Would I be a mother like her? With a baby carrier and no stroller, her hair long and unkempt? Or would I be like the mom over there with the shiny new stroller, and tapping away on her iPhone? You notice which mothers are thin again, which dress well, and become depressed by their small numbers. It must be motherhood, it makes you fat and haggard, you conclude, clutching your belly nervously. That’s what I was doing during our first fight, when I was barely pregnant and still wearing a bikini at the beach. I was silently inspecting the family in front of me. The parents were on their beach chairs; they had dark hair and looked relatively fit. The kids were cute, older, maybe just in elementary school, a boy and a girl, and they played and crawled in the sand quietly. The parents were talking, and occasionally laughing, but I couldn’t hear their words, the wind carried them away. Instead, I noticed their facial expressions and actions. The looked happy, but lurking there underneath the happiness was this tired, bored feeling. They were at the beach, but not really there.

Now, as a parent, I completely understand them.

We spent this past weekend with our five-year-old niece, which was a taste of having two kids. It was exhausting. Her energy was totally different, and the sweet moments between her and Charley were rare. Instead I spent most of the weekend feeding them (on opposite schedules) and mediating conflicts (seriously, I need a law degree for this). It was the constant, ‘she has this turn,’ ‘you have the next turn’ that really wore you out. So I finally understand the couple at the beach with their two kids. It wasn’t that they weren’t happy. Instead, what I didn’t see was all the work it took to get there. But perhaps the journey matters more than the destination?

Four Feet

I signed up for my first race in the spring of 2008---a half-marathon, in Rochester, to be held in early fall. Never having run more than five miles consecutively, I spent my summer training, hydrating, and icing my aching knees. I slept at my parents' house the night before the race. The next morning, my mom was up with me before the sun rose, making coffee and puttering around, while I obsessed over my pre-run meal, my running outfit, and oh my god, why don’t we have enough safety pins to hold my bib in place? As I crossed the finish line hours later, after a grueling 13.1 miles on what turned out to be an unseasonably warm and humid September day, after witnessing more than one runner collapse on the course around me, and after looking for an exit route on the course for 8 miles, I declared that I was done with running. Finished. The End. Two weeks later, I started looking for my next race. And so began my short stint as a distance runner. With several half-marathons under my belt, I decided it was time to try my hand at the real thing, and set my sights on the New York City marathon.  Now, marathon running requires a certain level of commitment, even at the amateur level. Your entire world revolves around running, carb-loading, and hydrating properly. My husband endured months of early nights and pasta dinners;  my friends, I’m sure, grew tired of hearing me ramble on about my upcoming long runs; and my mom, well, she supported me in the only way she knew how: by telling me I was crazy. Unsurprisingly, she had a saying about marathon running. If God wanted you to run that far, he would have given you four feet! Lacking a competitive bone in her body, she also casually asked me, as I agonized over IT band pain for weeks before the race, if I couldn’t run as planned---or if I couldn’t finish---would it really be that big of a deal?

Nonetheless, my mom arrived in New York the day before the marathon, my sisters and brother-in-law in tow, to cheer me on every step of the 26.2 miles. As my sisters and I leisurely strolled around my Brooklyn neighborhood that afternoon, my mom started on a pot of sauce for dinner. We returned home to a feast, my mom doling out pasta and homemade meatballs in my tiny kitchen. My alarm clock went off at five the next morning, and while the rest of my family rolled over for a few more hours of sleep, my mom, once again, was up with me before dawn. We sat and drank coffee, and discussed, one last time, the four points in Brooklyn and Manhattan where they planned to cheer me on.  This would require a bit of hustle out of the group, and my mom, at a strapping 5 feet tall, was not to be outdone by her younger (and taller) counterparts. Not one to wear sneakers even in her backyard, she gamely came prepared with a loaner pair from my sister, ready to take on the streets of New York.

I saw my family first at mile six. With my body and mind already failing me, I found myself choking back tears at the sight of them. They were there for me again and again as planned --- my mom’s head barely visible over the crowd, my sisters and brother-in-law screaming my name, my husband looking on with pride --- as I hobbled forward to finish out the race. I learned later that as I was running, my cheering section ran into their own set of problems. My mom, in a pretty white sweater, was the unlucky target of a low-flying bird, and spent the rest of the day trying to camouflage the obvious stain. My sister, innocently using the bathroom at a McDonalds along the course, with my mom standing guard outside the door, found herself face-to-face with an overly aggressive patron who couldn’t wait his turn. By the time I finished, bruised and battered, we shared more than a few good laughs over a post-run meal.

My mom passed away three years later. We spent the last two weeks of her life in the hospital, sitting vigil by her side, pacing the hallways, hoping for a miracle. When she died, I was left with a hole in heart, and strangely enough, a sharp pain in my right calf. A wrong step left me gasping in pain for months afterward, and running was all but impossible. The hows and whys of this injury were unclear, and quite honestly, probably nothing more than a random coincidence. And yet, maybe it wasn't.

In those weeks leading up to her death, I realized in a panic that I had no idea who I was---or would be---without my mom. People assured me, repeatedly, that she will always be with me: in everything I do, and really, in everything I am. I scoffed at this initially; after all, it requires an astonishing amount of faith to believe such a thought, at a time when my faith has suffered a serious blow. But, as I limped home after each attempted run, I thought of my mom. As I stretched my calf in yoga class, I thought of my mom. And as I laughed at the irony of it all, I thought of my mom. As it turns out, she's with me every step of the way---whether I'm on two feet or four.

On learning life from life

He aprendido la vida de la vida, “I have learned life from life.” These are the words of Pablo Neruda from the poem, “Ode to the Book,” in which he casts aside words on the page for the immediacy of experience. I’ve loved this poem for the longest time, and these words have never been truer for me than now. From the time I could read, I consumed book after book, in search of compelling stories, complex characters, and literary worlds that helped me reflect on my own. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I often arrive at the first page of a book in search of answers.

I am a lover of questions, and of questions that lead to more questions, but there’s a persistent corner of my consciousness that wishes books were Magic 8-balls. I haven’t shaken up one of those round, little toys in many years, but I sometimes open a book with a similar approach.

Whether it’s fiction, memoir, or poetry, I’ve been drawn to the title by a half-formed question in the back of my mind, and by the last page, a part of me hopes I’ll have uncovered a roadmap, a step-by-step guide to the challenges and questions swirling beneath the surface of daily life. Other times, I secretly hope that by reading about an experience, I’ll be prepared for it in my own life and never be taken by surprise.

But in this time of transition—of graduating and building a career, of moving to a new city, of preparing for a wedding—the voice of Neruda nudges me again and again to simply learn life from life. To learn by doing and making mistakes. To let go and allow myself to be taken by surprise.

This is, of course, easier said than done, but I suppose it is only with such openness that we invite in the possibility for our fears of the unknown to be unexpectedly swept aside by joy.

A Traditional Marriage

This weekend I will be traveling to New England to attend the wedding of two dear friends.  Naturally, I love weddings---the pageantry, the ritual, the attention to detail---and I know this one will be memorable.  Part of the fun with weddings is evaluating each of the selections the couple has made.  One of my favorite activities is getting into bed after an event such as this and breaking it all down piece-by-piece with my husband.  We like to do the full debrief, including, but not limited to: fashion, ceremony elements, weird family dynamics, food and decor.  Clearly, I will be inspecting the floral design with a critical eye---it is a brave soul that invites a wedding professional to the Big Day. This wedding will be much the same in that I know how deliberate and painstaking this whole process has been and I can't wait to see how the couple will be reflected in their choices.  Additionally, I have been made aware that the guest list is rich with characters and we are to be seated at a table with some of the more dynamic friends of the couple.  As usual, my husband and I will immerse ourselves in all the action and take mental notes along the way for fruitful discussion later.  Although we are always delighted to participate in bearing witness to a public commitment to love, something that distinguishes this wedding from the many others we have attended is that the people getting married are two men.

The grooms-to-be in question, are, in actual fact, already married.  They ran right out and got married here in New York on the very first day it was legal.  It was that significant a step in their relationship---they didn't want to wait a single day more than they had to before making it "official."  Anyone who has ever doubted how critically important, how equalizing and normalizing a right it is to be able to get married, should really watch any footage or read any story from the day it became legal for gay people to wed in the few states where that dream has been realized.  New York was no exception when this happened in July 2011.  Appropriately, there was a collective sigh of relief in our community followed by raucous festivities---much like a wedding.

Certainly there is so much to celebrate here.  The idea that we have progressed to the place where there is majority (sometimes overwhelming) support for gay marriage in various corners of the nation is, in itself, staggering.  Although it is easy to wring hands over many social policy and civil rights issues these days, states legalizing gay marriage and our nation's president endorsing gay marriage are heartening signs.

When I think about the relationship that I am traveling to exult and sanction, I am struck by the fact that theirs is a marriage quite similar to and also much more “traditional” than my own.  Both men are working professionals with advanced degrees.  One of them is self-employed and owns a business.  They are both public servants in some capacity.  They value social justice and give to charity.  They share the aspiration of having children and are expecting a baby in the coming months.  They sit down to dinner together each night to a meal they have often actually cooked (!!), candles lit, and discuss the long day behind them.  Their home is warm, comfortable and impeccably decorated.  Most important, they are demonstrably in love and I have only ever seen them speak to one another with kindness.  I already look up to them as parents and their baby has yet to come.

When I consider the controversy around gay marriage, I absolutely cannot understand it from an entirely practical standpoint.  No question, I recoil at the notion that two men or two women couldn’t or shouldn’t love each other as much as a heterosexual couple or that they wouldn’t have the same legal rights and social empowerment.  But this couple bears out my experience that gay people who want to marry thrive in such a way as often puts most straight couples to shame.  They are doing “us” better.  Perhaps it is all the years of being “other” and observing relationships from the outside that has honed their skills within the partnership?  Maybe it is that being with somebody of the same sex has distinct advantages and allows for smoother communication?    The bottom line is that who is anybody to say that they shouldn’t have the right to kick our ass at marriage and/or bomb miserably at it?  I say, WELCOME.  Come on in, the water is fine.

So the next few days will be a whirlwind tour and I am so honored that we made the short list for this one.  These are selective people and not just any person scored an invite.  We are gearing up for a life event that will look a lot like so many that have come before it in terms of the customs.  But, the magnitude of the occasion might just mean slightly more.  I say this both because of what these two men marrying represents and who they inarguably are as individuals and as a couple.

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.

Train Travel

I took the commuter train out of the city this weekend for a jaunt with old friends. I was looking forward to taking a familiar route  to meet up with familiar faces, but mostly I was excited about the few quiet hours I’d spend alone on the train. I have a deep and long-standing affection for the Metro North’s New Haven line which barrels along the Connecticut shoreline, into the belly of the beast at Grand Central, and out again. When I was a little girl, my dad worked in publishing on New York’s 5th Avenue. His building at number 666 looked to me like a giant cheese grater and on special occasions I would get to go with him there.  We rode the train together, I wore lace-up sneakers and carried my fancy shoes--mary janes--like the other commuting women. In college, the train was my salvation. I would pack a duffle and squeeze my way onto a crowded rush hour train, thoughts of my mom’s chili and the crackle of the fireplace luring me homeward. When I was lucky, the conductor would never even get to me and I’d have fare for the trip back into the city. For the two hours it took me to get home, I would lean my head against the greasy train window and watch the gray world pass by. I used to prop my weekend reading on my lap. Learning by osmosis.

For people who don’t live there, the route along the Connecticut shore can feel like an interminable middle road between New York and Boston. On summer weekends, traffic on I-95 through Connecticut is so sluggish that even the state’s most stalwart defenders will curse its name. But the train? It just rides along. If you’re lucky enough to live east of New Haven, like my parents do, a connecting train snakes you through marshes and homeward. Depending on the time of day, the light is either all pinks and blues and silvers or golds and greens and blues. Train travel is pure romance.

After college I flung myself across an ocean to live in France. My return stateside found me first in North Carolina and then in Rhode Island and all this life in other places meant years away from this particular train. I didn't have to be on the train to imagine it: the smell of the vinyl seats, the smudgy spots on the windows where other passengers have leaned their weary foreheads, the click, click of the conductor as she'd make her way toward me to punch my ticket, the crumpled brown paper bags with empty cans of cheap beer, the dog-eared copies of the New York Post left on seats, the conductors calling out the town names, their Connecticut accents causing them to eat their t’s.

The catch, of course, is that nothing stays the same for very long. The trains that I took for much of my childhood and young adulthood have recently been replaced. The new trains are glitzy by comparison---all lights and beeps and clean white and red seats. Lucky for me, on Saturday morning the new automated announcements weren’t working. I got to hear the the conductor’s voice just the way I remember it, “New Haven will be the last stop. Please remember your belongings as you exit the train.”

Time is on my side

While my daughter is still an infant, I am trying to adhere to a schedule of spending at least two solid weekdays alone with her, despite the fact that I own and run a business.  “Alone,” in our household, means that my husband (who also works for himself) might tag along and spend some portion of the day with us, as well.  This is quite obviously living the dream and I mean that in all sincerity.  Like so many people, all I ever wanted in life was to create a family and to have one in which the adults prefer palling around together to any other activity.  The addition of the portly, charming baby (who, I might add, has been impressing even total strangers of late with her glittering, two tooth-bud smile, full-body laugh and enthusiastic hand-clapping) is just the definitive bonus.  We have these epic moments, often only the two of us, where we find ourselves sitting on a blanket in the park in the middle of the day, staring up at the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building.  We are saturated in, practically oozing happiness.  But lest you think we are busy having it all (wait for it, Schadenfreudes) you should know that organizationally, domestically, we exist in a state of utter chaos---a ceaseless game of whack-a-mole. There are, as they say, absolutely not enough hours in the day and it is my perpetual struggle to prioritize appropriately.  On the days when I am solely focused on the baby, I make an effort to really and truly be present during her waking hours.  I have the great privilege of a somewhat flexible schedule and the even greater privilege of being her mother.  It is in this spirit that I strive to keep work emails and tasks tucked away in my pocket or purse.  I look at the mounting pile of laundry or the creeping clutter in the apartment and decide that it can wait.  I shrug off the light sense of despair over the two primed walls that we were supposed to paint last winter.  I tell myself that she will never be exactly this age again and that I will look back on this first year and know I didn’t miss a thing.

I am acutely aware that most women (or men, for that matter) do not even have the option to do this and I feel almost a sense of responsibility to parents everywhere to take full advantage.  Of course, this means I have to work harder and smarter when I am on the clock.  It also means that I am on the clock longer and at odd hours.  Ultimately, it means that we sort of live in a college dorm and have to run to the bodega at 7:30 PM to buy an $8 roll of toilet paper because we ran out and nobody had the chance to get more.

Meanwhile, as is my wont, I am plagued by the notion that everyone else must be doing it better---they have to be, right?  During a recent trip to the playground this was confirmed, as I zeroed in on a few other mothers and observed their whole set-up.  Each one seemed to have the diaper bag completely dialed in, down to the perfectly portioned organic snack foods in an eco-friendly/non-petroleum/possibly Swedish baggie.  Their strollers were tidy and their children even had on accessories.  They had brought galvanized tins of French sidewalk chalk and appeared to have organized play-dates.  When I arrived on the scene, my daughter was assiduously chewing on the rubber case from my iPhone (almost certainly made in China).  My stroller was pandemonium---it included incongruous items like dog poop bags, my diluted vitamin water bottle and a calcified, half-gummed whole wheat dinner roll from a restaurant adventure the day before.  I plunked my daughter on the padded playground surface and watched as she crunched fall leaves between her fingers and attempted to stuff them in her mouth.  She was not wearing shoes or a bow in her hair but she seemed pretty thrilled.  We did not have an adorable German tube of bubbles (why is everything good European?) and I hadn’t even remembered my nursing cover.  We embarrassed the family with an awkward lean-to situation using a cotton drape, which she repeatedly tore away with a whipping motion, exposing my breasts to the most populous borough in the city.

So, I am coming around to the idea that I actually only have so much bandwidth.  The letting go of certain practical elements of daily life in favor of more time for human relating seems a fairly obvious choice to me.  While I aspire to be a person who deftly balances her infant on one hip while folding fitted sheets or doing the taxes, it turns out that I only can/am willing to (?) do one thing at a time.  Most tasks, therefore, are sort of shined on or phoned in until they have the good fortune to be in the pole position.  I keep the goals small, so then when we have a fully stocked fridge or I send out a birthday gift, I feel like I have summitted Everest or passed the California bar.

Although I mostly feel good about the way I am partitioning my time for now, like every working mother I grapple with needing and/or wanting to be in two places at once.  Who knows how this will all change as she gets older and as my business evolves?  It is a little disheartening to realize that I did seem to need the “excuse” of a baby to finally feel justified in prioritizing enjoyment.  Why didn’t I do this before?  And why do I still feel like I’m “admitting to something” when I tell you I spend entire days, in the middle of the week, not just being with my baby, but actively trying to do little else?

Needless to say, I want my daughter to be proud of her mother as a role model and an entrepreneur.  But I am hoping she doesn’t have to feel this from a remote place.  I want her to experience that I am as available to her as I am to my work.  She will doubtless have a wide array of things to discuss with her therapist about her home and family.  I figure I won’t just hand her the line that her mother always had too many things on her plate.  I want her to work a little harder for her gripes.

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.

On place and pawpaws.

We slide the boat down the muddy bank and into the creek. The water is high and brown with silt from a heavy rain the night before. Scout, our black and white spotted pit bull mix, chases bobbing sticks and floating yellow leaves, his toenails clinking and hissing against the metal belly of the boat.  Jake paddles us along with an old kayak oar as I sit at the bow and scan the shore. We’re out looking for pawpaws this morning, a tropical tree fruit that looks like a mango and tastes like banana custard. I’d never heard of a pawpaw until moving back to Virginia. My curiosity was piqued, of course, by this curious sounding wild edible. We spot a thicket of pawpaw trees along the bank. They are thin-trunked and have big green leaves that look like floppy rabbit ears. Jake maneuvers the boat up to the shore and I grasp a branch in my hand then bend the whole tree gently over the boat. We pluck bunches of fruit from the limbs and I think of the word “bower.” I think of this word later when writing this column, too, when trying to describe the feeling of being closed in by the arch of a bent tree. I look up “bower” in the dictionary and I learn that it is also a word for an “anchor carried at a ship’s bow.” I like this very much, to have been within a bower made of pawpaw trees, and for the pawpaw tree to have also been a sort of bower in the other sense, anchoring us to the shore.

This experience made me recall a piece of writing I once read in Ecotone, a literary magazine about place, that’s published by the University of North Carolina in Wilmington. In the essay that came to mind---“Naming our Place”---David Gessner thinks on the relationship between words and things in nature. The part I thought of while picking pawpaws was this, which Gessner writes about Barry Lopez’s book Home Ground:

“Skim through this encyclopedia of terms for particular places, and if you’re  like me, your synapses will snap like popcorn. Just take the B’s, for instance: berm and biscuit and board and borderland and boreal forest and borrow pit and bosque and box canyon and braided stream.”

Add to that list bower, and my synapses do go pop!pop!pop! At the sound or sight of certain words I think of that morning on the creek. I think of the soft light filtered through the big rabbit ear leaves. I feel the silky pawpaw in my hand and taste its crème brulee-like pulp. I experience that sense of place for a second time, almost more clearly now as filtered through my imagination. It's thinking about the particular words for that place ---the bank of the creek, the bend of the tree, the shape of a bower---and  linking my experience and memories to those words, that focuses and clarifies my memories.

And that’s Gessner’s point, I guess, because he continues: “These are physical words describing physical places, and they have heft to them, and distinctness, and we can say of them what Emerson said of Montaigne’s sentences: ‘Cut them, and they will bleed.’”

I wonder if we could say of words about food:  “Eat them, and they will be tasty,” too?  While hearing or reading the word "pawpaw" may not literally fill me up, I'll still feel sated in a way.  Bower. Bank. Pawpaw. The words elicit a sense of a very particular place and time. Of balancing on my tip-toes in the bobbing boat and anchoring myself to shore, of the a cool round pawpaw smooth in my palm. I can't eat these words, but I can use them to tether me to that beautiful morning on the creek. And that, I think, is quite appetizing.

Days undocumented

I was a child of the pre-Facebook, pre-Pinterest, pre-Skype, pre-plus-one-and-like era. Our mode of digital anticipation involved waiting for someone's screen name to show up as Available on AIM or for someone to sign into MSN Messenger. Those were the acronyms that felt relevant to us. Beyond the availability of our friends to chat and the esoteric lingo that came with those conversations, we gleaned insight from carefully-crafted Away messages. Nobody was just "Away" back then, and---because we were 16 and, no matter how much self-importance we could muster, we were not quite busy---nobody was just "Busy" either. We populated Away messages with song lyrics and quotes, inside jokes and pointed messages full of the truths and feelings we could not utter face to face. In the past few weeks, I have felt the need for an Away message to hang on the door of my life---preferably one with a witty quote or Green Day lyrics for the full throwback and nostalgia effect. For the first time in four years, I am no longer living out of a suitcase. I own shelves. I have put nails in walls. I have shared coffee with people with the confidence that we will all still be right here tomorrow . . . and in 13 days, and in 4 months. My universe has been flooded with the kind of permanence of which I once dreamed.

Permanence makes me quiet. It is my love of "process" that has fueled my embrace of transitions with relative peace. I am intrigued by the little shifts: the packed box, the new photo on the wall, the coat hanging in the corner, the new bakery from which I buy muffins in the morning. Those become the markers of a new chapter, punctuated by a different routine, marked by different milestones. I document the process of moving, the process of saying goodbye, the process of making a home and then disassembling it as though it were made of Legos. The photographs freeze those transitional moments in time to remind me that life is not just the story of neat heres and exciting theres, but of clumsy in-betweens.

This time, there are no photographs of transition. My silence has been born out of impatience: an impatience to find a place for everything, and for me, and to have those places feel anchoring enough. I have not pointed the camera at the new corners that make a home feel like me, nor have I written about the new batch of muffins. I feel firmly planted here, bound to an address, magazine subscriptions, and a barista who knows my coffee order. I own possessions that make it impossible to pack up and leave into the night. Nobody left lightly with three coffee makers in tow.

Once an embracer of process, I am now embracing the photos not taken, the words not written. I am living in a blank away message, waiting for the lyrics to populate it, and for new processes to appeal photogenically to a pair of eyes perpetually in love with novelty. Inspired by Kim and, inevitably, by the 1990s.

Secrets to the South

I'm not exactly your average bear, and by bear I mean southern belle. I prefer getting dressed up like a comfy pillow in lazy boy jeans paired with an over-sized tee to a sundress and heels.  On a Saturday night, you're more likely to spot me sitting with friends in our regular corner booth tapping along to live music than out wine tasting.  In my world, vacationing in the fall means trips to our alma mater to pile our plates high with tailgating treats and cheer on the nineteen-year-old football players who can't exactly hear us.  That dreamy bed and breakfast getaway with the husband will just have to be scheduled for the dead of winter.  I shy away from wearing make-up and my sister conducts a seasonal intervention in order to get me into the local boutique to buy the latest trendy must-haves.  The all too familiar word "ain't" has been eliminated from my vocabulary.  I fancy vegetables and will never take recipe advice from Paula Dean.

Even though the southern shoe doesn't fit like a glass slipper, I adore breathing in the charm every single day.  It fills my lungs with a burst of energy but relaxation all at the same time.  There is rarely a sense of urgency around these parts.  We drag out our words which results in not repeating a sentence twice.  Or perhaps we are just all on the verge of becoming the next great country music singing sensation to hit the air waves.  We stroll at a snail's pace in order to take mental photos of the mystical landscape surrounding us and the faces we pass along our way. The autumn leaves change color a bit more slowly, but only to stay bold and vibrant for longer. Taking the time to strike up small talk with a stranger is our forte.

Over my thirty years of living here, I've discovered many hidden secrets to the south. Our buildings are lacking in height which comes in handy when viewing a fierce sunset.  Driving up on a fruit and vegetable plus boiled peanut stand makes the heart flutter with excitement.  The pure, crisp air should be bottled up and sold in all major retail stores.  The surge of humidity following a southern shower gives us a respectable excuse to let our hair go up in frizz.  Sweet tea and freshly snipped flowers are like honey for our souls.  From spiffy business suits to overalls, tube tops to cardigans, skinny jeans to the occasional jogging suit, fashion is clearly what the individual makes of it and will rarely turn a head.

Southern living may seem a bit odd to some, but we have our reasons.  Different strokes, right?

Kicked Out of Our Flat the First Day? Jolly Good Times!

The flight from New York to London is exactly long enough to get enough sleep as to be considered a night’s worth, and exactly short enough that this should be considered a travesty. I arrived at 9 am London time, better known as 4 am New York time, approximately 6.5 hours after I settled into seat, secured my neck pillow, sleeping mask and blanket---my arsenal of “I’m sleeping---don’t screw with me” devices. Zack met me at the airport with a rose, my name hand drawn on his phone. We picked our cat up at customs, where she was, if not content, remarkably nonplussed for having just crossed the Atlantic in a vibrating steel underbelly. We hopped in a black cab, which, because of the wondrous feats of British designs, fit all of us and my three bags nicely. (Fun fact: due to fold up chairs in the backseat area where I was storing my luggage, they all also are capable of carrying five people. Take note, NYC taxis.) We arrived at the flat Zack had found for us after three weeks of searching: a cheery, sunny two bedroom we’d be sharing with a PhD student in Kensington, an area you’d probably recognize from the quintessential, I’m-in-England montage in many movies. The streets were curved and lined with leafy trees; the houses a stately white, encircled with small wrought iron fences. It was, in a word, lovely. It was, in two words, too easy.

It was noon when disaster struck. In New York, people were just waking up, stretching their arms to the sky and inhaling the scent of coffee and street cleaners and the wisp of autumn that had recently begun to show itself. In London, Zack received a phone call. “It’s the letting agent,” he whispered to me after answering his phone. Zack had been subletting from the PhD student for the past week he’d been staying at the flat while waiting for the letting agent to call him back so we could officially sign the lease. I nodded and tried to keep my eyes open as Zack’s went wide. “What do you mean cats aren’t allowed?” he said. “I explicitly asked. I was told the landlord was 100% fine with that.” I looked at him questioningly and he held his pointer finger up. “The landlord doesn’t like men either?” Zack said into the phone. “Well, that’s just creepy.”

We had, we were told, 36 hours to remove ourselves from the flat before the landlord returned from his vacation, a trip to Poland taken out of the same fondness for Slavic women that caused him to ban Zack and others of his gender from the building. In New York, I would’ve been settling in front of my computer to read my favorite blogs before starting work, a full pot of tea and maybe a cat by my side. In London, Zack sighed and rubbed his temples. “Looks like we’re going apartment hunting,” he said. We are a couple with a cat. In the world of expensive, competitive apartment shares, we are what is considered “highly undesirable.” Like dating, highly undesirable is often met with highly undesirable. Any flat that looked halfway decent didn’t want us, leaving us with the kind of flat who might fart at dinner before ditching you with the check, the kind of flat that’s really hoping to make enough money playing the lottery to move out of his mom’s basement someday.

And then, as fate would have it, we hit the jackpot. On our way back from seeing a flat the size of a New York closet (and most New Yorkers don’t have a closet, so do that math) we walked by a place Zack had checked out the week before. The landlord was sitting on the stoop smoking cigarettes. An affable Greek immigrant named Chris who’d been married to his plump, baklava-pushing wife for thirty-five years, Zack and Chris had stayed on the stoop chatting for hours last time he visited the apartment. “Come in, come in!” Chris said. “I’ll take you and your girlfriend on a tour of the whole building, show you all of the renovations I’ve been doing.” The top flat, the one Zack had been previously looking at, wasn’t finished being renovated yet, but he showed us the rest of the flats, which became progressively nicer as you went down in the building. The final one had floor to ceiling windows, a balcony, hardwood floors, granite countertops. “Here’s the thing,” Chris said. “I have to be honest with you. Since Zack came to look before, I’ve decided to sell the building. So I can give you a flat, but it must only be for 2 months, until I sell. But if you choose to stay---I can give you this apartment at a discount, and you can move in tomorrow.”

Zack and I looked at each other. In my tired brain, I tried to calculate how much of a discount we would need to be able to afford the apartment. “Can you do half off?” Zack said.

Chris laughed. “You drive a hard bargain.” He shook his head and then reached his hand out for Zack to shake. “Welcome to the building.” In New York, it was those few early morning hours where the city is still as much as it can be, the streets silent and houses dark and sighing with sleep. In London, the world was waking up.

This Mother's Work

I'm more than happy to introduce a special guest contributor this week: my cousin Michelle. As children, we spent summers, holidays, and many a weekend together. Now, as  adults, we unfortunately see each other much more sporadically, as Michelle currently lives in Baku, Azerbaijan, as the Program Director of the American Bar Association's Rule of Law Initiative in Azerbaijan. Impressive, huh? Michelle writes about her mom here. My aunt, or "Annie T" as we call her, holds a special place in my heart, too.  She and my mom were night and day, but as sisters-in-law, they shared a deep respect and love that bypassed any and all differences. Personally, I'll be forever indebted to my aunt, for the love and support she has shown my sisters and I since my mom died. Clearly, commitment to family was one thing my mom and aunt shared in common. And with that, I hope you enjoy this story as much as I did.

By Michelle A. Brady

There’s a picture, stashed away somewhere in a drawer or closet at my parents’ house in Rochester, of my mom and I relaxing in our bathing suits and inner tubes at my grandparents’ old cottage in the Finger Lakes.  It’s the summer of 1982 and I’m five years old.  I haven’t seen the photo in awhile but I remember that we are smiling and laughing.  A couple months later, that September, I carried the picture with me to my first day of kindergarten.  I cried the entire morning, missing my mom, and feeling perhaps, that our five years of intensive mother-daughter bonding were about to end.  Years later we would recall that day and joke, because as an adult it seemed I was always eager to get away.

Over the years my mother and I have laughed and cried together, shopped, danced, and traveled together, and yes, at times yelled and said hurtful things to each other.  Despite our ups and downs and growing pains, I am forever indebted to her for one thing in particular, because without it I would not be the woman I am today.  This one thing she gave me above all else was the example she set as a working mom, laboring tirelessly along with my dad, to provide a better life for me and my brother.  That example, and the values it instilled in me, has made all the difference in my life.

I never thought it weird that I had a mom who worked full time.  From kindergarten onward, my mom went back to work, remaining at Eastman Kodak Company---along with my dad---until retirement many years later.  I stayed with baby-sitters and at after-school latch key programs and, quite honestly, never thought twice about it.  In fact, I have positive memories of using these morning hours at the baby-sitter to watch cartoons: G.I. Joe, Jem, and Transformers, in particular.  I ate snacks in the afternoon at latch key and finished my homework while waiting for my mom to pick me up.  And when I was older, I’d arrive home to an empty house and immediately call my mom to inform her I’d arrived safely and that yes, of course, I would get started on that homework right away!

Having a working mom, though, often proved to be a major lesson in organization and planning ahead.  When I was in junior high, my dance lessons really took off.  This required cross-town transportation to dance class right after school, in order to be dressed in my leotard and tights with hair pulled back by 4 p.m.  More school days than not, my paternal grandmother was tasked with this responsibility.  Like any doting grandparent, Grandma Kay arrived on time everyday in her Cutlass sedan, smoking a cigarette and carrying a Wendy’s large chocolate frosty, because every budding ballerina needs some carbs before a workout. Hours later, my mom would arrive at the dance studio with dinner and a ride home.  I would often collapse into the seat, sweaty, exhausted, and not too happy with her efforts to catch up on the day.  Yet she paid for the classes and costumes, supported me at competitions and recitals, and even joined a mother-daughter tap class to spend more time with me.

While my mom was busy with my dance lessons, my dad was similarly busy with my brother and his hockey and lacrosse activities.  During the winter season---which is excruciatingly long in Rochester---my mom would often cook chili on Fridays, a low-maintenance meal that could simmer all day and be ready when we arrived home late after my brother’s hockey game.  In typical pre-teen fashion, I didn’t appreciate this practical dinner choice in the least; in fact, I hated that chili. So one Friday, knowing my fate for dinner, I “came down” with the stomach flu at school.  This, of course, required my mom to leave work early and pick me up at a school.  She was calm and quiet as we drove home, seemingly concerned about my well-being.  But within just a few minutes of questioning, my mom had me confessing that no, I was not actually sick; I just didn’t want chili for dinner that night.  In hindsight, I’m sure my mom didn’t appreciate having her work day interrupted like that, but she never said a word to me. And I never did eat the chili again.

So many of my childhood memories are connected in some way to my mom, and especially, to her role as a working mother. When I look back on it all now, as a 35 year-old single woman, living out my dreams halfway around the world, I realize the extent to which it has affected me. My mom gave me the example of a working mother who handled stress at work and paid the bills at home; a mother who cleaned the house and organized everyone’s schedules; a mother who was tough and forceful when necessary, and equally conciliatory and compromising; a mother who did all of this while remembering every detail and splitting responsibilities with my father in a gender-equal way.  Above all else, I witnessed first-hand the benefits of organization, multi-tasking, and motivation, and along the way, saw the rewards of goal-setting, hard work, and investing in education.

I haven’t told my mom nearly enough how much I appreciate the example she set for me.  So I will tell her now, and then again the next time I see her in person.

Thank you, Mom, for showing me what is possible, and for selflessly paving the way for me to realize my dreams.

Autumn's Dying

By Joy Netanya Thompson Growing up in Los Angeles, I am accustomed to hearing transplants and tourists informing me that my fair city does not experience the four seasons. I always nod in agreement, but with a smile that hides something I know and they don’t: we do have seasons here in L.A., but they are subtle and nuanced, a familiar rhythm to the native who knows the scent of fall coming in on the heels of August, the sight of jacaranda trees celebrating the summer solstice with brilliant purple confetti, the majestic oak trees’ stately look of determination as they stand bare and waiting through winter.

Autumn is the most discreet of Los Angeles’s seasons. Though the scorching heat of summer does not often subside until late September, the fall-fragranced breeze always dances into our days in late August, preparing us for darker mornings and cooler evenings, accompanied by frothy pumpkin lattes and hearty dinners. Even now in my late twenties, these subdued signals of autumn are enough to give me the same butterflies I’ve felt since I was a child anticipating a new school year.

We are just entering September and the autumn breeze arrived last week to sweeten my bike rides through tree-lined avenues of my neighborhood in Pasadena. But for the first time in a long time, I’m not starting school in a few weeks, and those anticipatory butterflies only fluttered for a moment before I shooed them away. In June I finished graduate school, and this summer, which started with a glorious month of resting, celebrations, and vacation, has ended on a long monotonous note of job-hunting in a sweltering apartment.

As the seasons prepare for their quarterly changing of the guard, my tediously long days become almost unbearable, and I itch for change not just in the weather, but in myself and in my life.

Yet this is how the seasons save us, and shape us. If I am still unemployed come October, the crisp sunny days cartwheeling toward pumpkin patches, football games, and changing leaves—and eventually, turkeys and giving thanks and even the distant twinkling lights of Yuletide—will lift my heart and give me a sense of movement, even as I sit at the same chipped wooden table in my apartment, hunched over the same sluggish Macbook and searching for jobs.

We need change, and the seasons are a release valve for our need, as well as a chance to surrender to this facet of our humanity with grace and glory. Often it seems the whole year is leaning forward toward summer, with visions of cookouts, beach trips, and watermelon dancing through our heads. But by the end of that yearned-for season—those long dazzling days of sunlight and draining heat, of thinking up ways to fill the endless hours between the tireless sun’s rising and setting—our mouths are dry and dusty with their thirst for change, for relief from the unceasing heat and light.

What’s interesting about our turn toward fall is that we are so desperate for change we actually choose to embrace death. That’s what autumn is, really—if not death than dying, a quick trot through crunching leaves and golden sunlight to winter’s deadness. Our desire for change is so fervent and ingrained we are willing to exchange the eternal bright glory of summer for the crimson decaying glory of autumn and, inevitably, the dark, dead, iced glory of winter. Our souls are seeds and they beg to be buried in the silence, away from the light. Our souls are squirrels, instinctively busying ourselves through autumn so we might survive the meager portion winter will dispense.

Yet somehow autumn, with its first signs of death, gives us a shiver of new life, an echo of what is on the other side of our winter’s death. Even as children, we couldn’t help feeling excitement at the prospect of the school year, although it meant the lowering of summer’s flag of freedom. We busied ourselves accumulating school supplies, reading lists, rumors about our new teachers; we buried ourselves in schoolwork and activities. Now that we are grown, we realize that every fall we learn to surrender as squirrels and seeds do: to burying and being buried, to hibernating and waiting, so our souls might feed on the change that is their food, and so in the soft light of springtime we might produce new life—green tendrils shooting forth from the rich soil of our being, promise of hope and nourishment once more.