Sometimes it starts with boredom. A forgotten book or dead battery on my ipod. Other times it is eavesdropping – a conversation at another table and I hear joss whedon spoken with the proper amount of reverence. But mostly it is something I can’t help. A compulsion or tic.
I have to talk to people.
Unless I’m in the foulest of moods I can strike up conversation with pretty much anyone. At a friend’s reading in the city I carried on a conversation with a man about his research and his partner’s art. In the airport it was about flamenco and the lack of respect for percussionists. On the plane it was foodie spots in the bay area. And tonight, at a grease sing-along in the castro, it was about other musicals… “sing out louise.”
And I always leave them laughing. Often with new information. The joss whedon conversation took me to an interview he gave on npr. The flight ended with a list of “must eat” spots up and down the north California coast. The flamenco player – a hug.
And I love them. These moments of time captured in my mind. Random. Seemingly unconnected the rest of my world but often not. Over time, melding into the tapestry of what I know and have experience with – can draw from.
This weekend I took golf lessons with a few friends. Mostly we enjoyed the bright sun shining down on our skin and the scenic drive to the green. After that we headed for the jazz school to listen to adult students show off their emerging skills. Walking back from that, our day together almost complete, we stumbled upon a smiling older woman beckoning us to come closer.
Oddly (given that we are all city women) we obliged, and followed her gaze to the beautiful antique car parked in her driveway. Wisteria hung from a canopy of leaves above it, shielding it from the sun. It wasn’t hers she confessed, but she let the owner park there as long as he agreed to let her take photos.
We admired and then were distracted by the sweet purple flowers hanging down. She motioned for us to walk back into her yard overgrown with all sorts of shrubs and trees and fronds. She confessed that the place was so overrun when she bought it that they found a volkswagon buried beneath the plants.
Further back, along a mosaic walkway with stones from the old property behind her house that she tried – unsuccessfully – to save. The stained glass window in the detached studio – the one with her 300 year old hardwood bed, salvaged quilt, and cedar paneling that she began but the carpenter ripped out to replace with his own handiwork.
Back further still to the three old trees at the end of her yard, the ones by the wall that her niece painted when she was a teen. Back to the fruit trees – oranges, lemons, grapes, and figs. The miners lettuce, lavender, and wild sage. We ate our way through her beautifully random backyard – grape leaves and rosemary. We stopped and admired irises and all things blooming.
Tour complete – her history and the history of the bay area interwoven – she hugged us each goodbye, handed us a sprig of blooming lavender and sent us on our way.
Another bout with a stranger. Another random moment that in a world of email and other virtual connections, could have easily not happened. And maybe she was lonely. Or maybe she saw herself reflected in the three of us walking together, smiling in the sun.
Either way, I love my encounters with strangers, sometimes they make great friends.
i’ve stopped listening to obama’s press conferences. Sounds crazy I know – especially given that he’s only on his second one. I find the prepared text less interesting than his answers to pointed questions. Not just press conferences…I only marginally pay attention to any prepared text. It’s too much like an infomercial and nothing I can’t get from the new york times the next morning (or from a million and one pundits immediately after). But him fielding questions (even if he gets to decide who he calls on) is less scripted. There is no real way to know what someone is going to ask him or exactly how I’ll answer.
The other night I laughed out loud when he finally responded to the incessant questioning of one reporter asking what took him and his administration so long to respond to aig. Obama: “I like to know what I’m talking about before I speak.”
The thing is…its intent may have been to be smarmy, but I believe him when he says it. Even his speech patterns indicate an unwillingness to speak without thinking things through. Not to say he isn’t fallible…he is merely human with all the frailties and shortcomings that come as a package set…but he is also a thoughtful man. A smart one. A funny one. One that seems to grasp the enormity of the job he has to undertake because it is too late and everyone else yelled “no tag backs” as they departed the elector scene.
So I don’t listen too much to what the speech writers’ spin for him…nor his media folks cloaking truth in a heavy coat f omission and vagaries. The press will regurgitate that within moments and I will dutifully read their words and then interpret between the lines. I prefer listening to him banter…or pause, shake his head and begin a three prong explanation about why prevention is imperative or how green jobs make a difference or who he thinks will win the ncaa championship.
I’ll take my president uncensored, I may not always like what he has to say but I can respect him for saying it.
Tags: politics, socialcommentary
i was determined today. late night be damned. today i was going to class. so when i rolled out of bed later than i anticipated i didn’t let breakfast…er…lunch, or the need for it, deter me. instead i putzed around the house for a while, got dressed and headed into the surprisingly warm noon day.
class started off pleasantly enough. but we were only warming up. shimmy pop – unlike the technical class – is all about cardio. my heart hates me. and today she saved up all her frustration with my sedentary lifestyle and mocked me with it.
never mind how i looked – i felt like i was going to die. and it wasn’t any one thing. there was the lightheaded dizziness i assume came from not feeding myself. there was the potential for an ungraceful collision with one of my classmates. and of course, the most likely, my vengeful heart exploding in my chest to spite me for so little exercising use.
i was the slow person in the class. the one who bends over periodically to catch her breath, the one who follows the movements in their most basic incarnation to appear to avoid the embarrassment of being perfectly still (although everyone can see the slow motion in the back).
and of course there was the coordination…the actual dancing part. taken separately, i move ok. it is the combination of movements that throws me off. but who could focus on that when my lungs refused to do their job of retrieving air.
but i made it. horribly sad looking but…i have to start somewhere.
so imagine my surprise when dressing this afternoon – imagine my surprise at how graceful i appear to myself in my mirror. my arms moving to whatever my ipod spit out, my pelvis riding a rhythm i wasn’t even thinking about. it is how i see others when they dance…how i seldom see myself.
of course, i can’t take it too seriously. everyone who has been to my house knows my mirror is magic. it elongates your limbs, slims your sides. nothing so drastic as a carnival fun house but oh it is a forgiving piece of warped glass. so maybe its magic has expanded, its powers have moved to movement.
no matter…i’ll be back in class this week…sweating and palpitating (albeit well fed as i won’t make that mistake again). and maybe one day the magic of my mirror will infect mirrors everywhere and i’ll be graceful in a place other than my own mind.
the thing is, I’m aware of my place in the scheme of things. Not place so much as placement. It isn’t that I couldn’t move or change – only that in this instance if there were a mandate to assemble in some sort of order – I’d be fair to middling.
Middling in the places I’ve been and the experiences I’ve had. Middling in the life I’ve chosen for myself. it is nothing to sneeze at. It is mine – my experiences. I’ve enjoyed some, been terrified by others. From sri lanka to south Africa to Guatemala. They are securely mine, have made me securely me. And I embrace them as much for the purity of what life offers up as for the fodder they provide for my writing.
bless my family and friends who urge me to write…a blog, an article, a book. Urge me to follow the passions that moved me throughout my youth and into adulthood, to snatch scenes from their places in reality and place them securely in phrases that speak to my fancy.
Clearly I have no compunction against sharing – I understand the inherent narcissism (no matter how harmless) at play in the blogging concept. More than a journal it is a public airing of my thoughts and feelings with an unspoken assumption that someone outside of my own brain would want to read it. But despite that arrogance I find I am lacking in the ultimate one…the one necessary to put pen to more than fleeting cyber thought and onto something more permanent…onto paper and offered up to publishers.
I find myself in unchartered territory. Held hostage by my own fear…of being judged… against someone else, against the life I’m not leading but should…I’m not exactly sure what I’m afraid of but it hinders my ability to let go of expectations and follow a different path..
I shouldn’t compare. My life is my life. Experiences aren’t meant to be held up and weighted against others. I’ve heard people try to out-sorrow each other…blacks vs jews vs darfur vs bosnia. And it is a ridiculous concept. As is measuring success, gandhi vs mandela vs einstein vs shakespeare. They all move and inspire people – touch folks in ways that maybe someone else couldn’t. but I still find myself doing it.wondering if my perspective is worthy of contending with others.
Lately I’ve taunted myself with the examples of two friends from college. each followed the “responsible” path, schools and careers…until…no more. Both are dancing now. Living lives less ordinary, more satisfying to self if to no one else (and in such cases, who else matters).
And today I glimpsed the life of an acquaintance – living the life I’d love to live, full of travel and food and adventure and writing – he just completed his book and is preparing to offer it up to the publishing world. And I can only lament…why not me?
And the answer is easy. Because I didn’t choose that. I’ve chosen stability and predictability. I’ve chosen not to try.
I used to believe that failure would be the ultimate heartache – attempting to be the me I’ve held in my head for so many years, the uber-me – and falling short. I think instead, erring on the side of trepidation kills me slower but kills me just the same.
Tags: arts, me-ness, observations, transition, travel
In the darkened theatre, my breath melded into the breathing of hundreds, all waiting for something magnificent, waiting to be moved. It is a collective inhalation of expectation while the curtain rises.
They stand in their many poses, muscles tight in anticipation. Waiting to move…waiting to move the audience.
This was my first Alvin Ailey production. Its intensity magnified by the voices of Sweet Honey and the Rock – live and on stage. It was almost too much to bear. The purity of voice mingling so directly with the movement of bodies.
By the third act – after Otis had his tribute – I found my connection. Less story and more visceral. The angle of bodies. The strength. The beauty. And the history of people, Black people, held hostage to barbarity and survival the only recourse.
I sat in the theatre with a friend, discussing between curtain calls, the definition of art – its meaning. Listening to me try to organize my thoughts and the thoughts of a writer I recently heard, my friend posited that for me it was about inspiration. That like respiration, breathing in and out, inspiration was the taking in of something sublime, releasing it again into the world.
And there is truth in that. I look at a world of creation around me and marvel at the things that people can do…that I cannot. Art is something beyond me. My appreciation stems from knowing how difficult it is to create sound that breaks my heart, or movement that indeed moves me.
As I watched skin glisten under colored lights I could not help but wonder if dancers fall in love with their movements – maybe even more than complete dances – the way I occasionally fall for a sentence, a collection of words at a certain pacing. A shimmy, an undulating arm?
No matter my place in this world, I continually seek inspiration. I crave the greedy feeling of wanting to be filled. A melody of strings, a smearing of charcoal, a thinning of glass…metered metaphors, joy on my tongue…I search out the sublime and pray an artist’s prayer at the feet of those that create it. Not because they are gods, but because I am able to see God more clearly through their art.
Friendship, honesty…these can be tricky things. Definitions taken for granted. But I find that sometimes using the same vocabulary does not mandate the same meaning
Facebook’s use of the word friend illustrates my point. I have over 200 “friends” on facebook…most of which I would withhold that title without the clarifying facebook friend. Because for me friendship conveys an intimacy that facebooking does not mandate.
And it isn’t that I don’t care anything for these people, quite the contrary – I have real affection for many. But for me, friend has always held a deeper meaning, connotes responsibility and deliberateness that reading status updates doesn’t require.
Last night I spent time with an old friend. And once again I was confronted with the definition of friendship in all its transitory and changing meanings. I realized that the definition morphs in and out of itself even within my own head, my own heart.
The only constant in life is change. And friendships, like everything else, change. But even as I know this as truth, even as I have experiential understanding of the concept, I still find myself conflicted by the concept.
How can I call someone who was once at the core of who I am, but who I have so little contact with in any earnest way now, be called friend? How can someone I realize I didn’t necessarily know the way I thought I knew him – hidden aspects of who he was emerging now to leave me questioning – be someone for whom the moniker friend fits best?
But somehow it does.
I can only gather that the common thread is love. And maybe my mistake is in trying to capture and separate out the contexts and nuances of love. How much and to whom it is given…the whys and the how of it. Because in reality, those things shift and change…
I think maybe I have used friendship as my love word. It has allowed me to giving something very special without having to name it such…in fact by calling you my friend I am sharing my love.
And although it would seem that love would be a far more complicated concept, I find I am beginning to understand my friendships better looking at them through this lens.
My parents have told me and my sister that while they have always loved us, sometimes they didn’t like us very much. There is fairness and honesty I find in that statement. It lends the unconditional boundlessness of love without the absurdity that love somehow means adoring every thing about them…or even knowing everything about them.
Last night I felt confused leaving my old friend. I thought about all the years we’ve been in each other’s lives and questioned the title he held for so many years – my best friend – the person who knew me better than myself. Learning that what I knew of him was filtered and edited left me feeling abandoned and betrayed somehow. But now, I’m coming to grips with the reality that friendship, like volunteer, or griot, or program coordinator, is just a title. If I tell stories or render aid or…love…calling me something else doesn’t make it any less true.
Facebook friend or friend outright matters less when I recognize love is the thing I’m trying to convey.
Tags: Add new tag, family, friends, me-ness, socialcommentary
The bombing of the khan el khalili a few days ago quite likely went unnoticed by most people here in the US. Maybe everywhere that isn’t there. Everywhere that doesn’t share a border or a history with Egypt…doesn’t share a future. But it shook me. Reminded me how small the world is. How small I am within it.
Proximity. Not in distance but in time.
I was there just a few months ago, one of thousands of tourists strolling through stalls of imported crap pawned off as authentic wares, inhaling the aromas of spices and the grit of Cairo. It was where I bought loose leaf hibiscus tea and haggled for handmade silver earrings. And I was offered tea and was almost schemed into buying an unrequested tour. My time was probably no different than the French tourist who was killed. She was possibly retracing my steps, seeing what I saw, buying what I bought.
And now she is gone.
In 1990 my family left Killeen, TX and the following year 24 were massacred. While most of America was only shocked and awed for the few days the Luby’s shooting headlined the news, in my mind I could trace the drive from our old house to that spot. I knew people who could have been there for lunch.
Even Katrina licked at my heels. Mocked me with the proximity of her destruction. My place in the city still warm from my recent retreat as she ripped through the gulf.
And it isn’t about me. I know that. But I wonder if a tinge of narcissism is necessary in empathy. The idea that I can see self in the sorrow of others. That I can feel the heat of flames burning others almost as if it were burning me…maybe because I’ve felt that same fire or known a familiar face that has.
Sometimes the seeming foreignness of some event – some face – makes it difficult for people to care. Too different too farfetched too other…instead of seeing self or family or even friends, those suffering are just…well…those suffering. But it is personal to me. The fear of running from something “chasing” me, the wonder of travel destroyed in an unforeseen instant.
And so the khan bombing sits with me. I am saddened by the loss of life, the fear trailing its wake.
Tags: me-ness, socialcommentary, travel
the thing is…i waste time. not so much because i’m doing anything important, mostly because i’m thinking about how to do something well. at the very least better than what first comes to mind. it happens with essays, and article ideas…most recently it happened with the island reef job in australia.
i talked about it endlessly. i committed the deadline to memory. and i wondered out loud to strangers and friends alike what would be the best approach.
imagine my chagrin today when i looked online, ready to upload my still uninspired insistence that i should be the one considered for this job and found i had not thought through the time zone concept. and it is closed.
last year it was piss poor timing on the essay for the lealand hunger fellowship.
it seems the things i’m most excited about i somehow over-think and under-do.
i know the odds weren’t great but…i blog, i take pictures, i travel…and i hope one day to be able to do those things without having to contend with the rest of the world requiring rent. missing this deadline…this isn’t that time.
Tags: me-ness
i can’t dance.
not really.
not the way people expect a black woman to be able to dance.
i spend a lot of time in my head. is this moving right? is that? my legs are fine as long as they are acting alone, but throw in my arms, my hips, anything else and all of a sudden there is a cacophonous look about me. as if each part of me is listening to completely different music. my head bobs to country, my behind to pop, my legs to hip hop. not an all together treat.
my initially reaction is to run and hide. i avoid dancing like the plague.
but every now and then i venture out in an attempt to overcome this phobia i have. actually, i’m not sure if it is the phobia of looking stupid in public or a genuine attempt to learn some rhythm. either way it results in a few awkward hours of me trying to be something i’m not…
in college it was west african dance. i took a class from a woman named onye. onye looked like music when she moved. and despite my attempts to mimic her, i looked more like noise. no matter. i stuck with it and even performed in a big show that year.
of course there were tears and a column i penned titled, “black girls can’t dance”…but i digress.
i put the whole thing behind me and after that only danced while visiting other countries, or after a tequila or three, or when my swing dancing friends would spin and dip me with the sheer power of their own movements.
the other day my friend invited me to join him in a dance class. i laughed uproariously and declined. an actual dancer, he raised an eyebrow and commented on my seeming unwillingness to try new things, to stretch myself. i disagreed with his assessment but left him to undertake the class on his own.
in my defense, i do a lot of things that take me beyond my comfort zone. most big things i’ve done in life are done at least in part to that purpose. traveling to another country on my own…bungee jumping…doing the vagina monologues…
heck, i even signed up for a belly dancing class. somehow when i took it i didn’t think about the dancing aspect of it. it seemed somehow removed from the concept despite the name. and after my first class my assessment seemed accurate.
but today, after my second class, i saw the dancing side of things. i watched my teacher move sensuously in the mirrored walls and tried to copy. the basic shimmy came easy to me. the choreography that followed…less so. i could feel my anxiety rise, my face contorting, my voice edging up to my head where it chided me on not getting it right.
but i shimmied and stepped. and after class i asked for help. and i’ll go back…again and again…and again (since i bought several classes). and i’ll go as much for the workout as for the idea of not letting it beat me- again.
i think i’ll probably end up going to dance class with my friend too. in part at least, because i desire to feel the freedom of my body in motion without my mind micromanaging the movement.
who knows, maybe i’ll even learn to like it.
breast isn't best?
the thing is, i’m about choice…in its purest form. i’m not talking just when it suits me…but in general. i’m not advocating that i know the right decision for anyone.
abortion…i don’t think everyone should get one, just those that want/need one.
gay marriage…like any marriage – for those who want the government stamp of approval on their love (and all the nifty perks and tax benefits that go with it)
ditto for freedom of speech. i’m not for screaming fire in the middle of a mardi gras packed venue but if you want to talk about my opinion and how it is wrong (without lying) then go for it. someone i disagree with should get the right to speak because it ensures thatwhen i am the less popular voice it can still be heard.
and then there are breast pumps…
i know, that one feels like an odd thing to throw in the mix but my sister – the self proclaimed lactivist/nipple nazi – sent me an article about banning breast pumps.
because i’m not preganant and don’t forsee being in that state any time in the near future, i find myself usually on the sidelines in discussions that involve mothers. work or don’t. attachment parenting or letting your kid wail. i have opinions but since i have no children mine are purely theory.
so when i read an article advocating for the ban of the breast pump i was eager to see what profound argument they must have to not only decide for themselves, but for every other woman – working or not – who uses one.
what it came to was a matter of perceived dignity coupled with inconvenience. but even as i read it, i couldn’t help but think that no one made any of those women breastfeed and subsequently use a breast pump. and since less than half of women are still breastfeeding at 6 months and a mere 21 % at a year, i find it hard to believe that peer pressure could even be cited.
the thing is…the women viewed this plastic contraption of plastic and tubing as an assault to their womanhood while my sister saw it as a compromise for not being home all the time but still able to provide for her daughters nutritional needs in the way she saw fit.
i don’t think any woman should have to use a breast pump. i don’t know what nipples sunctioned into a contraption feel like so who am i to say anyone else should have to…but who is anyone to say i can’t?
Tags: health, politics, soapbox, socialcommentary