special olympics.

I think Facebook invitations have gotten out of hand. I got an invite today to join a group called "Deaflympics." First of all, I'm going to ignore how deeply irritating I find the word "Deaflympics" and move on to the more glaring fact that I don't think deaf people really need their own Olympics. Where do we draw the line with this stuff? Kurt said "I'm sorry, you don't have to hear to be fast," and then got really excited about the idea of someday being able to compete in his own Special Olympics. His hopes were for gold in the:

Kind Heart Olympics
Sarcastic Olympics
Lying about Having a Big Member Olympics

They aren't as catchy as "Siamese Twinlympics" or "Centaurlympics" (both of which I would buy tickets to watch), but it's still the early phases.

meet alex.

Alex wears a lot of hats-- UW business school grad, violinist extraordinaire, thoughtful observer of the world-- but she impresses me more every time I am fortunate enough to spend time with her. Recently, she turned down an offer from the Gates Foundation (who does that?! has it ever happened before?!) to raise her own salary and work for Mars Hill Church in the UDistrict. She's following her passion of serving college kids, even at the cost of sacrificing something that she (like many others) has dreamed of doing. And she's humble about it, too, which is why I want to brag about her. If you have a heart for UW and/or ministering to college kids, and have a few cents to spare, let me know. I'll send you Alex's way.

There's more: she's also helping start up a brand-new microcredit organization in Ghana called Lumana Credit (http://lumana.org/), which provides loans along with skills training for underserved people, giving them the tools to pull themselves out of poverty. Please take a look; it's pretty exciting to be on the ground floor of a sustainable development project. If helping support a college ministry isn't your thing, but helping rebuild economic viability for families in Africa is, this would be a really good place to start.














postscript: the delicious coffee in our hands is from All City Coffee in Georgetown, hands down the best coffee in Seattle. They serve Caffe Vita, have bypassed Fair Trade by trading directly with farmers (ensuring even better prices for the growers), roast locally, and their doppio espresso with a dash of simple syrup MIGHT be the closest thing to ambrosia that mankind has discovered... Go there. Be transformed.

cost/benefit analysis of dating a monk

I developed a theory a few years ago: if a guy is still single in his mid-30s, there is ALWAYS. A. REASON. Date him long enough and you'll find out what it is. Frank, always the chipper devil's advocate, suggested that the specific reason for singledom is more important than the singledom itself-- did he recently pass the bar? become a doctor? get out of prison?

But what if he was a man of the cloth who has decided to enter the secular world? And the debate began: Frank, Marlo and I attempting to decide if dating a former monk would be worth the trouble.

"Plus side: knows how to make delicious beer."
"Downside: only wears robes."
"Plus side: has never seen the female form, thus rendering one goddess-like."
"Downside: sits alone in his room... a LOT."
"Plus side: will be so happy to leave his room that he'll do anything you want."
"Downside: he quit GOD, of all things to quit!"
"Plus side: he can always go back to God and win 3 championships like Jordan."
"Downside: God will always be making passive aggressive comments about how he left."
"Plus side: knows how to survive minimally, thereby making him a cheap date."
"Downside: he knows how to survive minimally, thereby making him a cheap date."
"Plus side: free gruel for life."

The jury's still out.

just two girls with big dreams.

lazy sunday.

Morning with the Irish at Le Pichet...

Fishies on our cappucinos...

Citrus...

Wandering Pike Place...

Afternoon drinks on Broadway...

For all this peace, would one ever guess that this was the same day we saw a misplaced HempFest attendee washing his weiner in the water fountain at Pike Place Park?

wuv. twu wuv.

In 2004, Malia and I stood at a roundabout somewhere in Northern Ireland and met a dozen people for the first time.

Five years, several cross-Atlantic moves, a few disappointments and frustrations and joys later, Malia is married to one of the random Irishmen we met that day. That summer changed the path of our lives-- we wanted to go to Africa but we got sent to Ireland ("First World?! Aw, no wayyyy"), found out that actually we loved Ireland, and now neither of us would have changed it for anything. The summer we first spent on the Emerald Isle caused our hearts to expand in directions we didn't expect (or always really want), and it brought Malia to Peter: a quietly hilarious boy who loved trees and dreamed of arriving at our doorsteps in America driving a wood-panelled station wagon. And on Saturday, after five years of chasing each other down, Peter slipped a ring on Malia's finger and they became permanent boyfriend/girlfriend!

When Josh got up to read during the ceremony, I was overwhelmed with gratefulness for having a tight little group of four that has made it half a decade and will hopefully make it for many more, for being a part of Malia and Peter's intersecting lives from the first minute, and most of all for genuine love.

wedding season!

It's been the summer of weddings, and in the past 24 hours, two more friends have gotten engaged. Plus one, very kind, invitation to be a bridesmaid.

Is it normal, in light of all this blissful and balmy love in the air, to feel the need to self-medicate with vodka and schadenfreude?

scott and jamie.

Summer 2007:

The end of Belfast was a whirlwind of visits to Child Protective Services, harsh words from angry kids, and an overall sense of having failed, massively, on almost every front.

In July, when an email from a little girl informed me that all of my efforts with CPS had only succeeded in getting her friend removed from her home--nothing helpful or restorative, nothing that would mend the situation, I found myself on the floor of a Croatian bathroom, unable to stem the flood of tears that finally were released after leaving Belfast. My heart has never felt more broken.

A couple years have passed. The weight is somewhat removed; the long separation has helped diffuse the water in my lungs, but my heart still has not fully come home to me either. It's still on a dozen doorsteps in Northwest Belfast, which is why it was so hurt again tonight: the Irish arrived, ready for Peter and Malia's wedding, bearing news that my Hawthorne Effect boys are both dads.

Scott and Jamie, in true northwest Belfast style, have now both become fathers before age 16.

I don't even know where to start describing how much I love these boys and how much more I want for their lives. It's a familiar sense, the heaviness that has settled onto my chest tonight, but so unwelcome.

'Literary Charlatan and Degenerate"

In high school, I had a wonderful friend who spoke slowly and was beautiful, even at age 15. She told me she wanted to become Colette and I thought she meant the orphan from Les Miserables, and wondered why anyone would want to walk around with smudged cheeks singing "Castle On A Cloud."


That's Cosette.


Colette is different; and while younger-days Colette may be a little much for me, old-lady Colette is a dream: living alone, fully content to sit quietly and think deeply and move slowly. She is a woman fully engaged in the process of becoming, one who does not rely on others to tell her what her name is. Having had a few decades of debauchery under her belt (that's not the word I want to use, but what else to call a lifetime of living life to the teeth and scandalizing people everywhere you go and making memories that people who become old too soon do not make? Perhaps I'll think of the word later), she is then happy to smell the smells her garden makes and to live to her own rhythms, now more peaceful.

Reading Break of Day is like looking into what I hope my own thought patterns are like when I'm older, and it comforts me that even the author herself admits that she hasn't arrived yet. "Are you imagining, as you read me, that I'm portraying myself? Have patience: this is merely my model."

And still, she is yet another grave at Père Lachaise that we didn't have time to find.

today

The following things happened today: I bought a ticket to Argentina, quit my job (in three months) only to have my boss offer to save it for whenever I get back, saw the amazing Bumbershoot lineup, and had an ice cream sandwich.

Best. Day. Ever.

this is my friend ryan.

The trajectory of our friendship has gone like this: at age 17, we were watching Being John Malkovich and I was in love with him. At 19, we became best friends ("we're just like sisters!" a drunk Ryan grinned at me that New Years, which I guess meant "siblings) as we navigated the first months of college together. It's hard not to bond when you share a small section with a painfully emo English TA who was personally living out Kafka's "The Hunger Artist." We learned firsthand that life indeed imitates art as we scribbled draft after draft of critique-- on the essay? On the TA? We lost track.

Now, Ryan goes to MIT and is technically the smartest person I know. We shared time together last week on my front porch-- tea in hand, elbows tucked between our knees as the creeping chill settled around us, recatching up and remembering all the things that hold people together even after much distance and time separates them temporarily.

Ryan and I have many memories, and the thing I love most about good friends is that they are living, breathing insurance against the forgetfullness of time. They carry pieces of our memories around for us-- the things that would slip away with our own unreliable recollections are buttressed by the minds of the people we love. And I am so thankful that little bits of my memory and heart are wandering around all over the place.

the history of beauty

I walked into the lunchroom today and immediately commented on my coworker Katie's cute heels. "I don't want to talk about it," she smirked, still reeling from a long lecture from another coworker, this one morbidly obese, on how heels are just one example of how our superficial culture tells women to present themselves. "You'll regret them later!" she declared, wagging her chubby finger toward Katie's toes.

"Maybe I will," Katie admitted. "But I sure as hell don't want to hear about it from her."

***

Malia, sitting cross-legged on a chaise lounge, raises her tone as she reads aloud to us from a book about the American trajectory of beauty and self-image. We hear of thinness and fatness and acne and sex and how our capricious culture defines perfection. It's a sad, helpless thing; to watch the values of a culture slip from internal qualities to almost exclusively external. "How do we stop this?" she asks. We throw around pie in the sky ideas like, "wear less makeup?" "stop looking in mirrors so much?" "read more?" but when it comes down to it, we were all forced to realize that, intentionally or not, we are interwoven into what our culture tells us to focus on. So: Are we beautiful?

***

9 pm. Yoga class. "Use the mirror to square your hips and balance yourself," our strawberry blonde instructor guided us. "Don't look at yourself like you normally would-- how does my hair look? Use it to force your body into a better place." Namaste, yoga. You are one of the world's best teachers of the lesson: Here Is Your Body. Here is How to Make it Work Well. Enjoy Your Strength and Guard It."

Moving On.

"I'd say 'anytime', but I know I can't follow through on a statement like that."

"I know. I know."

What stings the fingers like a closed door? What holds a more bittersweet taste on the back of the tongue than something that never happened and that wasn't supposed to happen anyway? Time marches on. "The stars, in their firmament, behave like stars." But rooms never explored contain the strange, dusty musk of a life that can only be lived once. This is both disconcerting and comforting a la vez. I am glad for only so many options. And I also grieve for being able to follow so few.

Travel Short- WC Priču

I was locked in a bathroom in Sarajevo, and my travel buddies (one of whom had given birth to me) seemed to have completely forgotten about my existence. Thanks, Mom!

I knew what was happening outside of my tile prison. Mom was lying down on the bed in our cabin-style hostel room, flipping through the thin copy of Oscar Wilde children's stories I had just finished. Lauren was outside, dealing with round two of the drunk Finn who had spotted us on the porch earlier. He watched us conduct an unproductive conversation with the sweet desk manager who spoke no English, and, buoyed by cheap beer and unwarranted confidence, he wandered his way into the hostel foyer, ready to grab our asses and fight with anyone who wanted to stop him. Earlier, we had played along lightheartedly with his inebriated attempts at flirtation. Now, worn out by exhaustion at finding decent accomodation, his middle-aged slurriness was not quite as cute.

This is when Emir entered our lives. Oh dear God. Emir. This is what he did: he woke up that morning, he put on a tight t-shirt, he re-Biced his head till it shone, he lit a cigarette and showed up in my life and dammit Emir, why must you be a chain-smoking, espresso-guzzling seductive Muslim from the former Yugoslavia while I am stuck, STUCK I tell you! in this lame life as a white girl from American suburbia? Why can't I have an addictive personality, leather pants, at least one dark secret that gives my eyes a hooded quality? Why can't I have stories of my days as a traveling busker, when I lived off of the kindness of strangers? Emir had the relaxed cool of someone who knew that, scars and all, they were the absolute shit and didn't care if you didn't agree. He also had flawed English, a confident chuckle and the ability to make me shy just by looking in my general direction.

I loved him.

Emir came blazing into the hostel and argued furiously with our Finnish suitor and quite literally tossed him out by his collar. Oh, the testosterone, how can a maid in waiting not swoon? Dusting himself off, he shuffled some papers behind the counter and explained that "he needs to stop drinking, it's not attractive. And he also needs to get the fuck out of here." I felt childish that moments before I had been amused at the old guy's antics. A more worldly woman would not have taken the time to laugh.

Earlier that day, a rickety bus took us up the side of the hill where we had heard a wonderful view of the city awaited us. An old woman, holding her groceries fresh from the market, wriggled her way around in her seat and gazed at us, telling us a story in Bosnian while smiling serenely. She paused. "Zlatkas," she grinned, gesturing to her face in the way Santa Claus did for the deaf girl in Miracle on 34th Street. "Golden Girls? Golden Child?" Our limited vocabulary clued us in to "zlat," but the rest of her meaning was lost. We got off the bus together, the old vehicle kicking up dust as it made a three point turn to head back down the hill. Last stop! And beautiful it was, yes. But also surreal to stand on an isthmus between two valleys and imagine the Serbs standing, crouching, lying in the grass around us and using their massive guns to entrap the Sarajevans. We stood alone, sharing the view with an abandoned crane ("Volim te, Tito!" declared in bold, spray painted contrast to the fading yellow of an unused machine), the city's beauty holding a bitterness that we wanted to touch gingerly.

"The tunnel? No, no. I don't want to go near the tunnel. I have seen the tunnel. I have seen plenty of the tunnel, and I never want to see it again in my life."

Emir had spoken. At this point, his word was pretty much law. We had asked him about the locations one expects to see in Sarajevo-- Olympic stadiums, the Holiday Inn (Lauren's suggestion-- the exact location in which so many journalists had been confined during the war held a strange attraction, although by the time we got there, it was hardly worth the trip, since no one was willing to acknowledge that anything of the sort had ever occurred), Baščaršija. They were all met with an aloof disdain, but at the mention of the escape tunnel, we were firmly shut down. I again felt sheepish.

They say that the escape tunnel, which was the only entrance to or exit from the city for the thousand days of Serb attack, was used by every person living in the city at one point or another. Despite the fact that, much like Anne Frank's house in Amsterdam, it is a major draw for tourists in Bosnia, Emir saw it as dragging out the past, not to mention a little disrespectful to treat what once was a lifeline as entertainment for an afternoon. Isn't it too soon to go near a place that holds such bone-deep pain for so many?

Maybe. But if no one sees the tunnels and the houses and the mortar shells that represent what man can do to each other, then it will keep happening.

I had a lot of time to think about this before Emir rescued me from the bathroom with a laugh. Yes, I think I'm in love.

(July 2007)

Crush.

Timothy Padraic Sullivan, I have a crush on you.

http://americainshort.wordpress.com/

The Grasshopper and The Ant

Let me tell you a story! You’ve probably already heard it, but I’ll tell it again, this time with interjections colorfully placed by Javier Bardem’s character in the Spanish movie Mondays in the Sun, as he read it to a small child. He was meant to be babysitting, but the kid got a crash course in social ethics before bedtime as well:

The Grasshopper and the Ant

Once upon a time, there was a grasshopper and an ant. The ant was very hardworking and the grasshopper wasn't. He liked to dance and sing, while the ant went about his tasks. Time went by. The ant worked and worked all summer long. He saved all he could and when winter came, the grasshopper was dying of hunger and cold while the ant had everything. ("That ant is a real bastard!") The grasshopper knocked on the ant's door, and the ant said to him, "Grasshopper, Grasshopper, if you had worked as hard as I did, you wouldn't be hungry and cold now." And he didn't open the door! (“Who wrote this? Because this isn't how it is! That ant is a piece of shit and a speculator. And it doesn't say why some are born grasshoppers. Because if you are, you're fucked. And it doesn't say that here.”)

The movie revolves around a group of friends who lose their jobs in a Spanish shipyard and are left to float, unmoored and seeking meaning beyond their employment (or lack thereof). They have relationship issues, they drink, they laugh sardonically at what little they have. As the “Making Of” said, it’s not based on a true story. It’s based on a million.

The scene with the kid in the bedroom, who lay wide-eyed and silent at this strange, thick-bearded man who wanted to tell him what the world was really about, struck me more than any other. Everyone has seen world-weary men drinking their pennies away in some dark bar (I will never forget the tightness I felt in my throat, senior year of college, as my friends and I drank Olympia ironically at The Knarr Bar, quite possibly the world’s dirtiest watering hole, when I saw a shriveled, bent old man come in with a wad of grimy bills in one hand. He took a seat at the bar, which appeared to fit his backside perfectly as if it had been reserved for him, and ordered the first of many brews that would get him through the rest of the night. I didn’t want to look at him anymore, so strong was my heartbreak for the way our tongue-in-cheek night out was the equivalent of his lifestyle. His sadness, and then my own, was palpable). Everyone has seen men become shells of themselves as they drown in apathy, which Oscar Wilde accurately considers the worst illness man can contract.

But to watch this character, who was fiery and alive and appropriately bitter and unwilling to shut up about it, seemed an anomaly against the grey backdrop of his tired, tired friends. And the scene in the bedroom, in which he informed an innocent that not everyone would be sleeping in a warm bed that night, that not everyone is fortunate enough to be born an Ant and not a Grasshopper, meant he hadn’t given up. He was funny and honest and smart. He was mad as hell and the kid wasn’t going to be spared any of the ugly details of Adam Smith’s world order. It was one of the most refreshing things I have scene in terms of cinematic social commentary. But it also hurt my heart because the night before, as in so many nights these past few years, I had spent an evening with a Grasshopper, hearing about the same things firsthand.

Cynthia is a mom from Mexico, and I’ve gotten to know her while working with her sweet son Emilio this year at TT Minor. I arrived at their apartment, a lovely space on a tree-lined street in the Central District. Despite being one of the best-off Latino immigrants I have met in the past two years, she struggles, now specifically because her smart and potential-laden son cannot get a break when it comes to school. She had come from the year-end carnival that the school district threw for TT, which we agreed was a pathetic consolation prize in light of the fact that they have mostly been ignored and brushed aside for so long.

(Side note—the jury is still out for me on what I think about TT closing. I want to say that the school itself isn't the real issue, in light of the fact that kids everywhere are getting the short end of the stick when it comes to education. But then I remember what Paul Farmer said in Mountains Beyond Mountains: "If you focus on individual patients, you can't get sloppy." In other words, let's not generalize the bigger picture. Let's find the kid next door, see what's going on, and if it's not good, he probably isn't the only one.)

“Where is Emilio going to school next year?” I asked, then remembering that he would be bussing down to Leschi.
“But what is the closest school to you here?” I added.
“Stevens is just a few blocks away,” she said with a smirk. “But we applied for him, and he didn’t get in.”
“Why not? He’s a smart kid. I don’t understand the district’s methods at all.”
She looked at me sideways, half a laugh on her lips and a shrug lifting her shoulders slightly. “He’s a minority, so it makes it tougher. Only white kids go to Stevens.”

It’s hard for me to forget about my Emilios when I go home at night. It’s hard to watch the Grasshoppers (which is not necessarily a race thing-- although racial lines tend to blend into class lines, they aren’t an exact intersection) get a bad rap. Why did the Ant win over wintertime? Is it because he worked harder and did a better job than the Grasshopper? No! (and if someone tries to tell you that the Grasshopper danced and sang all summer, they probably have never met one in person) and why doesn’t anyone ask about what kind of parents the Grasshopper had, if he was a different color that was looked at a little suspiciously, or whether or not he had been able to access the same quality of education as the Ant had? “This book is bullshit,” Javier told the kid. He’s right. It’s not a science, this business of success. But it doesn’t have to be so uneven to get a fair shake at the beginning.

The movie comes to its emotional conclusion with a speech in a bar, after a (SPOILER ALERT!) friend of theirs dies from alcoholism. The remaining group is bickering about whether or not their dearly departed friend left anything tangible in his wake.

"He didn't say anything."

"He did, but he was hard to understand. Like... like Siamese twins. They're stuck together. If one falls, we all fall. And if one gets fucked, that's it. So do the others. Because we're the same thing. The same thing."

"And then he kissed me on the cheek!"

This woman is so amazing. I wish I could be as peaceful, kind and loving! Maybe when I'm 90.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_R76gf67Bk

Talking to 15 Year Olds

Real conversation between me and my darling Little Sister (recently 15) today, outside Safeco Field:

Me: Do you want me to take a picture of you in front of the Home Plate sign?

Kirsten: IDK.

Me: Does that mean "I don't know" or did you mean to say "IDC," meaning you don't care?

Kirsten: Oh. I guess I meant to say "IDC." (wanders off while I wait for the light to change)

...30 seconds later...

Kirsten: Hello?! Aren't you going to take my picture?

She had assumed a seductive pose against a flower pot with the stadium as her backdrop. "IDC" means "yes please," as I learned today.

We are exactly ten years apart, and I love Kirsten so much for so many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that she is a walking, talking time capsule of who I was at her age. Ten years of social polishing make it so I can now say, "Yes, please" and "No, thank you" and a thousand other phrases expressing how I really feel (and a thousand more that I am trying to learn), but which she doesn't have in her arsenal yet. I love her nerves in social situations, love the way she holds situations and thoughts in her hands and examines them closely, like little bugs caught in a garden, love the way she is becoming the person she is meant to be in front of my very eyes (despite immense roadblocks and challenges that threaten her at every turn). She is a teenager, in all her glory, and I just want to scoop her up and let her know that absolutely everything will work out for her if she can just get through this awkward phase.

I want to say that I can't wait for the day when we both laugh together over the fact that she used to communicate with three-letter acronyms, but that would make it sound like I'm not enjoying the journey. And not just hers-- one of the great things about having a Little who is old enough to keep track of time with you is that one day, she will be able to laugh with me at my own foibles of my mid-twenties, and we can marvel together at how much we have changed. Until then, I will keep growing in my understanding of communication via abbreviations.

My 15 Minutes!

I read the Sartorialist and Garance Dore religiously. Thank goodness someone in Boise finally noticed.
http://www.boisestyle.com/2009/05/saturday-style_9451.html

Sunday morning hope at the church of IHOP

I was given a reminder this morning of how mankind continues on hopefully, despite circumstances that scream at us to give up. IHOP on Mothers Day in Corpus Christi, Texas was a madhouse of balloon-sword wielding children, overlipsticked mothers, and waiters who literally sprinted from table to table, hurriedly rushing out "Happy Mother's Day" to no one in particular before taking orders.

The slowest moving of the waiters was a heavyset black girl with three colors of hair, who ambled from table to table, rushed by no one, refusing to notice the chaotic scene surrounding her. As I gazed at her nonchalant demeanor, which was set off even more by our tattooed Latino waiter with a bandaid on his friendly face (the classiest of Mothers Days, this was not) who spoke quickly and moved even faster, I noticed her eyes.

They were lidded with the thickest, longest false eyelashes I had seen outside of the Greek system on Halloween.

I whispered to Uncle Dave that I thought her eyes were a perfect example of how amazing humans can be. Humans can get up for work at a stressful, low-paying job serving people who tend to barely look twice at you and still take the time and energy to put on the fancy lashes. God Bless Us, Every One.