'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.

TOO MUCH

I am spending this evening cleaning my closet. It's a parallel exercise with cleaning out my thought life, as well. I'm trying to get rid of the things that don't fit me anymore, belonged to a different time of my life, and that aren't really items I'd like to take with me.

I have way too much stuff.

I sit surrounded by piles of t-shirts, skirts, and pants that I forgot I ever had. I have duplicates! I have near-duplicates! How much stuff can one body wear at once? I'm feeling convicted as my head is increasingly filled with contradictory visions of my life--

One vision has me, with my backpack that holds a month's worth of worldly goods, contentedly skimming the surface of the earth with a few shirts and forgetting that I ever needed more.

The other vision has me wearing the beautiful dresses I always crave, going to fancy places and laughing lightly at things that aren't really real, but are as tempting and transient as cotton candy.

I don't need all these clothes, I don't need so much of what I have and I am tired of the self-absorbed rants that my bank account brings out in me. I'm reminded of the Sermon on the Mount, and especially am moved by the Message translation of 6:25-29;

"If you decide for God, living a life of God-worship, it follows that you don't fuss about what's on the table at mealtimes or whether the clothes in your closet are in fashion. There is far more to your life than the food you put in your stomach, more to your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body. Look at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God. And you count far more to him than birds. Has anyone by fussing in front of the mirror ever gotten taller by so much as an inch? All this time and money wasted on fashion—do you think it makes that much difference? Instead of looking at the fashions, walk out into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They never primp or shop, but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them. "

I crave a life of simplicity even as I seem to accumulate more than I need or can even use. How much is too much?

Committed

He was tall, kind, gentlemanly but not in an overbearing-please-love-me kind of way (just enough to come pick you up but you can open your own car door, this is the 2000s you know). He got my jokes, knew enough about when to just be quiet and look out the window, he was introspective. He had an ex-wife who I had graduated from high school with, a fact that bothered me until he told me the whole story, and then I never thought about it again. I hate secrets. He taught me how to drive a stick in a red 1960s British sports car in the pounding rain. He liked reading, knew how to build a fire in three minutes flat, chopped his own wood, and had the deep baritone of a real grownup.


Our second date was at my favorite Ethiopian restaurant where I gulped glasses of Gouder ('French wine is good, Ethiopian wine is Gouder') as he told me about his marriage (too soon! my brain screamed, losing all inhibition with itself as the wine flowed and my severe attempts to avoid judgment fell by the wayside), his divorce (she's an idiot!-- lips still silent as neurons fired furiously), and the six month hermitage that brought him to the chair in front of me: happy, well-adjusted, having life lessons under the belt and a clean conscience to rest next to him on his pillow every night. He was unbearably attractive.

We moved further west and found ourselves drinking IPA at a tiny British bar in Post Alley, nestled into a leather loveseat as the aproned waiter gently complained about Seattle and I read him poems by Oscar Wilde.

He closed his eyes from first verse to closing, a half-smile resting on his face. This pleased me, and I stole glances in between lines, ostensibly for poetic effect but actually to watch the words had as they filled the air between us and settled themselves into our laps.

He kissed my forehead and I was entranced, my fingers intertwined with his as I twirled through the soft glow of wine in my stomach and Christmas lights clouding my vision.

When I woke up in the morning, I knew that it would never happen again.

What kind of girl do you think I are? No. Really. I should be committed to some kind of asylum.

best gym class in history

The definition of humor is rollerskating with 30 first graders who have never put on skates before. Pure bliss.

What we have done.

I met Haley freshman year in the dorms when she moved in late. Our first conversation, she will tell you went like this:

Me: We're going to play some tennis, do you have any extra tennis balls?
Haley: (dripping sarcasm) How convenient, I have this whole drawer full of tennis balls right here!
*pause*
Me: So do you?

Since our first awkward conversation, we have done a lot of things. I bought a ticket to Guatemala, spurred on by her mysterious existence in Central America that I knew nothing about and my urge to speak Spanish next to her again. I started thinking about the things we have done since we met. And we seem to have spent quite a lot of time sitting outside and talking about things that break our hearts.

When we first became confidantes, she was shedding copious tears on our dorm room balcony over a high school love that was ending without her permission. I brought a blanket and some silence.


A couple of autumns later, we sat outside on a dusty brick ledge in the middle of Spain, carefully eating falafel and trying to wrap our minds around the fact that Kyle was dying.

I like us because we talk about things that are true and things that are real.

Being Really, Really, Ridiculously Good Looking Is a Full Time Job

December had already started off on a fortuitous foot when Tara and I snuggled into our seats at Joe Bar on Capitol Hill, steaming up the paned windows with our foamy cappucinos as we watched Blizzard 2007 draw the movie-like qualities out of life: as a soft white began to cast the outside world with a gentler tone, passerby got cuter and people became visibly nicer to each other. A middle-aged couple, appropriately clad in Danskos and Teva gear, opted to take their lattes outside and let the massive flakes settle onto their hair and eyelashes as they sat together on a lazy Saturday morning date. People grinned at each other as they entered the cafe, stamping their boots and shaking their wet hair. Somber dogs peered through the glass as their best friends warmed themselves on coffee and crepes. Joe's provided the jazz-heavy soundtrack, and Tara and I kept hugging ourselves and beaming about how perfect the world was at that exact moment.

(Later, as we tromped through Broadway, we found a bookstore I'd never been to that had, quite possibly, the world's most perfect cards. One summarized our day succinctly: "I bet snowflakes wouldn't be quite so lovely if they were shaped like prostitutes." So true.)

So the blissful beginning of December meant that, despite not feeling my greatest (5 am bedtimes and too much Three Buck Chuck will do that), I had a good feeling about Studio 54 Lives Again. My high school friend Ryan, who works for the Seattle Models Guild, had invited me to this fundraiser for a school in Kathmandu and obviously, despite the fact that I hate people (especially kids) with a passion, I wanted to go to see what the craic was all about. I donned a one-piece pantsuit (tight in the waist but loose in the crotch, for maximum awkwardness in the lower torso region), brushed my hair into a serious white girl fro, and headed out into the snowy night to see what I could find.

The first thing I found was a homeless guy who mumbled to me as I passed him outside the Last Supper Club, "I'm tempted to stab you for no reason." This was, perhaps, the scariest thing that's ever happened to me, besides the time I got groped on the street in Alicante. I chalked it up to him not appreciating the lace tube top portion of my pantsuit and hauled ass into the club.

After tromping ungracefully down a plush red carpet, the second thing I found was: myself, right in the thick of Model Central. Apparently, Studio 54 is a yearly phenomenon in which the big three Seattle model agencies put all their people together in the same room so they can stare at each other and write fat checks for poor kids while getting beautifully drunk (unfortunately, my drunk can more accurately be described as "Bag Lady"). To the untrained eye, watching shirtless guys with bow ties wander around flexing their oiled chests and asking for dollars in exchange for beads seems like a scene out of a skeezy Miami back alley, but to a professional model, this is what "fundraising" looks like. Cover your eyes, kids.

I clutched my free drink tab and headed straight for the bar, desperate for a higher gin:blood ratio before I could face the gorgeous hordes head-on. The bartender winked at me in a non-sexual way, which brightened my mood, and I turned back to the dance floor, sucking on a lemon and looking for a short redhead I could relate to. I scanned the room: giants. Lush-lipped, smooth-skinned, eight foot Glamazons. Not a split end or zit, as far as the eye can see. What an annoying crowd.

I made a personal goal of being purely observant for the entire night, but having at least one entertaining conversation. This is when Ryan popped up, and insisted on taking me around to his various circles and introducing everyone at length ("this is Sergio, he's a photographer..." "Daria, model..." "Francisco, agent..."). After the fourth or fifth blank stare I had to forcibly stop Ryan from continuing on his social rampage and let me stumble around in my own awkwardness. He dragged me to one last circle, and rambled off a few more models' names. One of the guys I recognized from my gym, so I attempted a little friendly chitchat with the most basic of commonalities-- "Haven't I seen you somewhere?"

KIDDING!! I didn't say that. As Mike Birbiglia would advise, what I should have said was NOTHING. What I did say was something sarcastic about not only knowing where he works out, but knowing where he sleeps (trying to make light of my already semi-stalkeresque comment... you know?). My joke went over like the Hindenberg. "So how do you know where I live?" my new friend asked me a minute later.

I'd like to pause narration here for a second to mention that this gentleman was named BLISS. That was his God-given name. Write that down, it becomes all too applicable later on.

As I backpedaled my way out of my overly sarcastic "new friend" test, Bliss became even more confused about whether or not I was actually his stalker or not. Let the records note that the only reason I recognized this guy was because he was awkwardly flexing in the weights section and not because I thought he stood out as a paragon of male attractiveness. As I kindly helped him get over himself, he relaunched the conversation in a new direction that sent me even deeper into my G&T. "So tell me something interesting about yourself," he said, apparently competing for "Biggest Cliche of the Evening." I mentioned something about my near-obsession with travelling and seeing how other people do things, which brought up his recent travels.

I was so excited to have something in common with this vacant-eyed dolt, but when I asked him to tell me more, he just rolled his eyes. "Well, I told you a few minutes ago, but I went to Southeast Asia for a month." I looked around, trying to figure out who exactly he had been speaking to previously that looked remotely like me, but let it go in favor of hearing more... the story already sounded suspiciously drug-induced.

"I went to Asia to search... for bliss. And I found it, right here (points to heart)."

Oh my good God. He just made an analogy with his name. This is gold. I'm leaving this conversation while it's at the peak. Fortunately, Whit showed up and pulled me away to dance at that exact moment.

Ah, Whit. How to describe a person like Whit? He is more of a force of nature than a person, a tornado of random inappropriate comments and stories that are better than fiction. Throughout college, I could always rely on Whitney to bring a heavy dose of the unusual to my life. He would call on a Monday afternoon from outside the sorority, waiting to take me for a spin in his new ride; a massive, gas-guzzling farm truck that looked better suited for central Wyoming than the middle of Seattle. One week later, he would call again, but this time the ride was in his shiny new Audi. Whit had mullets, he had rat tails, he had a joie de vivre that some saw as annoying but which I adored. He worked as a sandwich delivery guy on a bike, as the captain of a massive ship, as a model in Thailand. He came up with elaborate plans to buy Thai property and become a music television VJ. He showed up in random magazine fashion spreads we didn't even know he had done. He always makes me laugh.

Whit was there as one of the Beautiful People, but also bridged the gap as one of the sarcastic people who didn't really try too hard, so we danced in a very aerobics-friendly, non-sexy manner for quite a while. At some point in my Jazzercise endeavors, I got pulled away by Latin Lover Jorge with a minor ponytail who matched my rhythm (miraculously, because after a few more of those drink tabs, it didn't really "sync up with the music" per se) and stuck by my side for the next hour or so. After throwing a few stray dollars into the direction of one of the ubiquitous bare nipples, I closed the night out, content. I think I had more fun the pretty people in the end, anyway.

...Y después de todo.

The mail came last week, on an evening when I was at home visiting the padres, and what appeared in the middle of a stack of Macy's ads and Visa bills but an envelope with the familiar stamp of the Spanish embassy, postmarked from Barcelona.

I knew immediately: Spain found my mom's license and had the courtesy to send it back to her! For all my doubts, Spanish chivalry isn't dead. I would give anything for the little picture of mom to come to life and tell us all about the aventuras she has been through since July. Who knows? Maybe the license has better stories than we do...

sentences need not apply

As someone who lives and breathes words more every day, who feels incomplete without some kind of literary food and feels more at home than ever when language plays a central role in what I'm doing, it makes me uncomfortable to say this: lately, words haven't really done justice to the quiet peace that I have found washing over me as I find more and more contentment with my job, my home and with my place in the world. It's an unexpected blessing and I can't really hope to describe it well.


Sometimes words are too frail for thoughts.

Volver

I love Pedro Almodovar, and even though it's a year or so late, I love Volver. And I loved watching it with my mother, because Volver seems to touch on all those things that moms and daughters never talk about, and looks at what it's like to "come back"- what does it mean to begin again, to reconcile, to finish things that were once left undone, say the things that were unsaid, to try again to do them better.
In the last scene, Penelope and her mother embrace in a dark hallway and Penelope says genuinely, "I need you, Mom." And her mom answers her in that brusque tone that you can only use with people you love deeply, "Stop it. I'll start crying."
I wanted to ask my mom if there was anything left unsaid between her and my grandmother, wanted to know what she'd say if Helen Ruth were standing in front of her today. But I didn't, because I know that there are, and I know that they are none of my business. But it also reminded me that I don't want to have anything left unsaid between me and my own mother. Life's just too brief.