Cameron, Cameron, Ya Habibti, My Love March 25, 2007

Well ding dong, my kiddies, spring is here. It’s been over fifty degrees in the district for three days now and I refuse to believe the warm weather isn’t here to stay. The cherry trees outside my apartment buildings are blossoming as well, which is pretty stellar. I live in an older building with all of the sort of cute, echo-y details that older buildings have– little concrete bobs and flourishes on the brick, high ceilings in the lobby, etc. It’s not fancy– our front lock is prone to breaking and the call-up system long since gave out, but I do love it. I also love the fact that it’s quiet. No drunken frat boy rabble, no howling, no tenant squabbles. Recently someone with the initials E.E lost a diamond out of her ring, but hopefully that will be resolved via her friendly bulletin board posting. It would be a real shame if the Angolan kid who mined it lost half of his fingers for nothing. Seriously, ya’ll, please stop buying diamonds.

Okay, I’m done being preachy. That whole bit about my apartment building was really just a device, a way of winding my away around to the story I really want to tell you. So here’s the tag-line: Although my building might be calm, there is something pretty exciting going on right down the block. Allow me to start from the beginning.

When I first moved to DC, fall classes had not yet started and I spent an entire week riding my bike around the city in the middle of a horrendous heatwave, eating carrots and triscuits out of small tupperware container, looking for jobs, and willing myself to believe that I had not made a horrible mistake in deciding to go to grad school. Were it not for good times with my dear Loyal, my transition would have been much harder. Case in point: one evening I received a voice-mail from her, describing a visit to the consignment furniture store one block from my apartment. What made this place remarkable, Loyal said, was not what they had to sell, but the fact that there lived in the store a hairless cat. No shit.

Naturally, I went to check things out first thing in the morning, and there he was, reclined in the front window like the little pasha he is, taking in the morning sun and regarding all of Cleveland Park with an air of sleepy diffidence, his rhinestone collar glittering regally: my Cameron. So began my love affair with the cat, who could clearly give less of a shit about me.

When my sisters caught site of Cameron, they too fell under his spell and he became something of an obsession for us all: Loyal, the girls and I. Whenever I pass by his window, I stop and look for him. I have been known to go into the store and ask timidly “Uh, I was just wondering. Where’s Cameron?” This always goes over really well. What can I say? There is something about his little, hairless belly, the way you can see down to the bottom of his crenellated ears, that touches me. Or maybe it’s his total arrogance, that he cares not for anyone but himself. Or maybe it’s the fact that he is a fucking HAIRLESS CAT and HOW CRAZY IS THAT. In any case. Last week the plot thickened.

I was walking home from brunch with another friend (also a member of the Cult of Cameron), when she casually mentioned that she had been in to see Cameron recently and that when she went into the back room of the store she saw a cage in which, she claimed, resided a HAIRLESS RAT. That’s right, folks. I totally flipped and went over to the store investigate for myself at the first opportunity. Grad-school might be time consuming, but I still have my priorities straight. I scoped the joint thoroughly, but could not find any cage, nor any rat, hairless or otherwise. I had no choice but to ask the saleswoman. This was kind of awkward because, what do you say in this situation. I settled for “Uh, so I heard from like a friend who loves Cameron because we all love Cameron that when she was here one time there was this rat also and it was in cage. A hairless rat?”

The look of pity on the saleswoman’s face was pretty striking. She paused briefly, as if contemplating something and then said (direct quote here, folks), “Well, yes. There is a hairless rodent that is Cameron’s companion. He’s actually a ferret and he’s over at our Wisconsin Avenue location today.”

WHAT??? WHATTT???? So basically, Cameron (who is a cat) has a pet. A pet who ALSO HAIRLESS, and who is a FERRET. Could my life get any better? Could it? This all went down on Friday and I’m still walking on air. Obviously, I will be on the lookout for this new character, and will report our first meeting to you down to the very last detail. It’s the least I could do.

In other news, I am learning to speak Arabic. And by speak Arabic, I mean say some Arabic words. My Palestinian friends have decided that it is important that I acquire their native tongue ASAP. Their reasoning is, and I quote, “Otherwise it is hard to talk about people with you behind their backs”. Alright. I dig it. So far my Arabic lexicon includes: Weinek (Where are you?), Momtaz (excellent), Bejanen (Very Super Excellent), Habibti (Sweetie, Babe, Darlin, etc) and Biz (Nipple. Contemporarily, it has also come to mean The Little Plastic Cover You Put on the End of a Shisha Hose So You Don’t Catch Someone Else’s Cold).

Most frequently, I use these words in text messages, like the one I sent to my buddy T a few hours ago: Ani Difranco, Habibti! BTW, Weinek?

I’m growing up so good.

The Miseducation of Baby-G March 24, 2007

I think it’s absolutely criminal to neglect a young person’s education. Especially when the young person shows such obvious promise as my dear, intrepid Baby-G. As such, I make it my business to plan a variety of enriching and stimulating activities for the young prince. In addition to our regular adventures in cookery, we also take frequent trips into the city. He is young, strong and loves to ride the metro. I am young, strong and hate suburbia. We are a perfect match.

These trips are more than just crucial investments in my sanity, folks. They are also key opportunities for his precious highness to see the world. And to hear my constant commentary about it. He particularly enjoyed a recent trip to visit a friend of mine who teaches at the Studio School. Strapped to my back in the Ergo, he offered a great deal of praise for the children’s artwork that lined the walls, pointing and crowing with gusto, and listened intently as I expounded upon the virtues of a community lead, child-focused educational system. Several weeks later, as we were sharing a sandwich at Busboys and Poets, I could have sworn that he nodded sagely when I exclaimed, “And this, tiny one, is how the bohemian bourgeoisie do capitalism”.

It’s something of a joke between myself and Mama and Papa G that I am attempting to make Baby-G into a tiny anarchist. It’s one of those jokes that I always find funny, while they are at times amused and at other times a little weirded out by the whole thing. The other day Mama G came home and asked what her son and I had been up to. “Oh, well, we made that wheat bread you see on the counter,” I said. “Then we took the metro to the national mall and looked at the Kermit puppet in the Air and Space Museum. On our walk there I pointed out the Capital Building and we dialogued briefly about our current socio-political organizations, and the more sensible and humane alternative of a localized, non-hierarchical power structure”.

“Um, Oh.” said she.

The truth is that my description was perhaps verbal longhand for what was really said. Baby G is small, and I like to keep things simple. Rather wasting my time with the whole localized, non-hierarchical blah blah, I just say “smashing the state”. He gets the picture. Similarly, when the dome of the Capital came into view, I pointed to it and said “Boo-Boo, there are lot of people in that building who are going to try and make you think you’ve got to do what you say. Now you just take it from me, you are smarter than all of them put together. Nicer, too.”

He got the message. At least, I think he did. Truth be told, he was unable to offer a response because he was very intent on the more crucial task he had at once identified for himself– trying to catch and eat a bird. That’s my baby!

To Survive Love March 19, 2007

My tiny sister is dancing in the living room. She is an animal in these moments, and I am moved to a place beyond happiness by the whirl of her limbs, the stomp of her heels. Watching my sister dance, I love her in ways that make me realize how abysmal I sometimes feel. I am terrified. As often as love lifts us up, pushing us to new heights of inspiration, it also forces us deeper into whatever despair has afflicted us always– whatever misgivings we carry about what it means to be alive.

The sadness of love– that the one we care for lives in a world as full of despair as our own, can sometimes be the biggest thing we are moved to feel. There is no solution to this problem of love. We can choose to simply live through it, but that often means becoming to numb, losing touch, the end of the love itself. What we want is not to live through love, but to survive it. To survive the problem of love , we must answer it with what we hope and believe. I take a deep breath, and look at my sister– her sinews and bones in delicate traction– and repeat my hopes.

In my darkest moments, when I must force myself to hope for something, I hope for her health. I hope for her health because it is the smallest thing I can hope for in a world that seems swollen many times over with ecstasy and pain.We are taught that health is a miracle, and I believe it is true– the balance of physics and chemistry that sustains us could go awry with the smallest intrusion, the tiniest tweak. In the face of how large life is, though, health often seems like the likeliest of all improbabilities because we know that, given balance, it can be done. Not so for happiness, even in the presence of abundant love.

Not so for kindness, even when survival is assured. Even the brain, our final frontier, is at least a single orb, a solid self edged on all sides by nothing. I will set my sights on health. I hope for a common sense of stasis in her liver, business as usual in her veins– dark blood going in, bright coming out. I pray that she has the chance, for some years at least, to fall back on the oldest, unaltered way of living in her physical self– that her body surrenders to the patterns that were decided before anyone could speak words like “creativity” and “desire.”

Dancing, my sister knocks her elbow against the piano and comes to me for comfort. Holding her in my arms, I don’t dare make a wish regarding her wants, or even her actions. If I am to survive my love her, I must believe that, in wishing, we do out best work in the small, in the simple. I don’t ask life to visit her with a concert of impulses that might keep her close to me– just for a continuation of the pumping and churning that hold her in the world. Happiness, I think, entangled as it is in stuff much thinner than blood, might be beyond hope.

This is not to say that I don’t think my sister will be happy, merely that the intensity of my love for her means I must take a different tack. No, I don’t choose to hope for happiness for my tiny sister. I choose to believe in it. That, after all, is what believing in someone is: knowing that they have to ability to dance beyond the outer reaches of wispy, potential hope, and, solidly, take what they want. The conviction that if we ever forget the difference between living and surviving, they will be there to remind us.

An Ecstacy of Fumbling March 18, 2007

I don’t know about you, but for me Sundays are all about puttering around alone in my apartment, washing dishes, making grim predictions about my future and casting aspersions on the success of others. Somewhere in there, the laundry gets done. But don’t pity me! Don’t! Today was the Friends of the Cleveland Park Library’s semi-annual used book sale. Semi-annual means it happens twice a year, right? Because that’s what I was trying to say.

Considering I walked in the door six minutes before closing time, I’d say I did quite well for myself. Anybody who is everybody knows that everything in the booksale is half off for the last two hours, so we can pretend my tardiness was actually well-planned strategery. Even considering the lateness of the hour, I got some great stuff:

The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters (never actually had my own copy of this)

Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barret Browning (my grandma loved her)

The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (he wrote one of the most powerful anti-war poems I’ve read, “Dulce Et Decorum Est”)

A Place called Milagro de la Paz by Manlio Argueta (the author was quite strenuously recommended to me)

The Findhorn Family Cookbook ( lived there for five months. I actually cooked in the Cluny kitchen as my work assignment)

At the last minute I grabbed a copy Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer. Didion is best known (and well-admired) as a memoirist, but this is actually an early novel of hers. It received accolades from Tennessee Williams, which I makes me more inclined to actually read it, but I have admit that the purchase was inspired at least in part by guilt. I had the opportunity to go see Joan Didion when she came to UNC last fall and I totally squandered it. Well, not only that. I went to the reception given in her honor, ate the food, drank the wine, schmoozed like I do (I saw her! She is tiny!) then went directly to a friend’s house and watched Lost instead. I know. I do not deserve to have any good things happen to me anymore.

The funny thing is, this book of hers, which I now own, looks really trashy. The tagline is A story of passion, and the cover shows a woman’s manicured hand, clad in pearl bracelet, holding one of those old-school propane cigarette lighters with a giant, clitoris-looking flame shooting out of the middle. I just cannot tell what kind of book this will be! Sorry, Tennessee, but the fact that you liked it does not reassure me that it is not, in fact, pseudoporn. That’s what we love about you, Tennessee! The good news is, it doesn’t matter at this point what the book is actually like. With a cover like that, I feel like I really can’t go wrong– smutty bathtub read or highbrow literary-street-cred-earning-yawn-fest? Who cares! I am already satisfied!

Late-Night Rebutal– real post below this one March 10, 2007

I cannot sleep, and have nothing good to read, so I thought I would address this. It has been brought to my attention of late that some of my readership feels that I can sometimes be a little bit too link-happy. As in, I use those fun little worded-embedded links at every opportunity, sometimes to the point ridiculosity and/or obscurity. I don’t remember who it was who said this. It could have been one those Little Mean Insecure Voices In My Head, but I don’t think it was. I think was a real person. And to them, I say this:

Suck it. Linking is pleasing to me. It somehow fills, or at least allows me to touch, the void that my existentially enlightened lifestyle has rent deep in my soul. Sometimes, at dusk, when I am “alone” on the crowded metro I begin to feel as if my existence means nothing at all. As if my face, around which my relations once gathered to rejoice and crow with pride, were really just another one of those goddamned petals on a wet black bough. And then I come back to my apartment. And write in this blog. And I feel connected to the infinite possibilities that the interz0rd can provide. I am not afraid to say that this brings me joy, which I need, because am bereaved. So suck it. It’s my blog and I’ll link if I want to.

Love, AF

Jiggity-Jig March 10, 2007

Back to North Carolina tomorrow! This time I’ll be there for a week. Spring Break Durham ‘07 Baby! Man, life is really going to suck when I’m done with grad school and no longer get “breaks”. There’s really only one downside to this and that is the fact that my apartment is a HIDEOUS DUMP and I’m betting I don’t do any cleaning before I go. I noticed things were starting to backslide when I had Baby-G here last Friday and he kept munching on dustballs and twirling my dirty underwear around. It’s amazing what escapes my eagle eye! There’s nothing like a visit from Baby-G to make me feel like a real slattern. Wait–doesn’t slattern mean whore? Yes, yes it does. I think I was confusing it with slovenly or something. Anyway, you get the point. I live in my own filth.

I don’t need to say again how much I LOVE where I’m from. The veritable smorgasbord of friendship that awaits me is wonderful to contemplate. Especially after I pissed off all my DC friends today in class with two revelations:

a) I hate Beat poetry. I dare you to ask me why (I think I used the phrases “grandiose social dysfunction” and “sociological revulsion”. “Bad” also comes to mind).

and

b) I think that culture is sometimes “invitation-only”.

Oh the horror! I have dismissed an entire GENRE of American artwork! And ATOMISED the incredibly SYMBIOTIC, MULTIPLICITOUS and BLAH BLAH BLAH cultures of this wonderful world! Oh spite! Oh goat semen! My children will never know tolerance! I will die of spiritual starvation, moored on the Alcatraz of my own xenophobia!

What I really meant, of course, is that I wish to hell people would stop thinking they could buy or consume culture, then use it for their own personal devising. Culture is PEOPLE*, and interactions with people ought to be VOLUNTARY. And hopefully, GENUINE. Dare I say it– even EQUAL.

And yes, I am pissed when I think about all the people reading “Buddha* In 90 Minutes” and then thinking they have the right, let alone the knowledge, to use Buddha as a lever to lift themselves out whatever banal suburban misery they themselves have crafted. Obviously I’m in favor of genuine cultural interchange, but not some bullshit born of desperation, co-optation, mutual or one-sided exploitation or any of those of “-ations” that so often involve a bar mitzvah party henna artist, a self-help manual or a debit card.

*insert “Jesus”, “Krishna”, “Sartre”, “Cindy Sheehan”, “Rashi”, “Ann Coulter” or “Weezer” here

Beyond that, my own experience tells me that it is healthy and healing to have cultural “sacred spaces” in which the rules are implicitly understood and internal discussion/politics/exchanges are the main fare.

K, I’m done with that.

As far as this weekend goes, my schedule is filling up but I would doubtless love to see you. I have probably already made frantic attempts to get in touch with you, but if not it will happen tomorrow while I am on the train. While my grandma was sick I was afflicted with a strange but neccessary form of agoraphobia which required that I spend 90% of my social time sitting cross-legged in the playroom at my parent’s house with the space heater blasting and the other ten percent in the kitchen cooking and freezing large vats of soup and broth for her to eat. “The Minestrone of Magical Thinking”. Freezer space is still on a high premium at my grandpa’s apartment. Anyway, on my most recent trip home I discovered that I was pleased to venture farther afield, even into Orange County, and I surely hope you’ll join me as I explore the outside world once again.

In any case, I promise you that at least one lunchtime next week will find me enjoying these rice and beans, washed down with this juice. Seriously, if you have never had pitalla (some pronounce it pitaya, others call it dragonfruit) juice, you are missing out. It is like washing your tongue in rainstorm of tart, magenta…rain… that is sweet and good. Really, it’s one of the most pleasing, unusual flavors I’ve come across. I highly recommend grabbing a glass (the green guava and cacao juices are great as well) and a chair by the window and just sipping away as you watch 9th Street go by:

“Hey there, Organic Grocery Store Checkout Lady Of My Youth! Thanks for the chocolate bunny!”

“Hey there, High School Gym Teacher! Is that your pitbull? He is cute!”

“Hey there, Young Man I Slow-danced With To KC And Jojo At A Bar Mitzvah Party That One Time! Why is this so awkward?”

“Hey there, First Kids in Middle School To Experiment With Weed! Sadly, it appears that our predictions about you were correct!”

“Hello, Friends! Hello, World!” Ah, coming home.

*EDIT SEVERAL HOURS AFTER: Wait. Culture is also media. I’m not sure to what extent this complicates my argument but we’ll deal with it some other time.

Sorry March 8, 2007

When I started thinking about making this blog thing a few months ago, I solemnly swore to myself that it would not be one of those “things I did today blogs”. This promise was probably some crazed byproduct of the meta-meta-social ego-contortions that I undergo every time I think too hard about blogging. So, when I promised that to myself, and by extension, to you, my readership, I think I was probably lying. Yeah, I was totally lying. Maybe I can at least make this commitment: I will at the very least try cop to my real motivations when I slip into days-of-our-lives-mode. Sure, ok. In honor of this realization and its accompanying commitment, here’s a list of things I’ve accomplished in the past week*:

*Really just an effort at bucking myself up in light my current chest cold/heavy workload. I am a star! Plus I do things!

This week I:

– Had several writing center sessions from which the student seemed to walk away with a renewed sense of purpose regarding their assignemnt and gentler/more confident/more ambitious sense of self as a writer.

– Wrote multiple entries in this blog thing, one of which I have not posted for fear that it is too maudlin but give me some time I’ll work my way up to it.

–Checked several items off my “I Never Knew I’d Always Wanted to Do That Until I Actually Did It” list. Things like “dancing around my apartment with two Palestinian friends, singing Hava Nagila”.

– Baked two batches of chocolate chip cookies, one for an event, one for consumption with aforementioned Palestinians. Extra radical transgression points: I used the tollhouse RECIPE but another kind of CHOCOLATE. Suck it, capitalism, I’ll use you how I want to!

–Celebrated my dead grandmother’s birthday by wearing the vintage rhinestone necklace she gave me a few years ago and wondering– is she 75 now? Or is she still 74? Decided that she is still 74. Felt bummed.

–Wrote a poem which does not seem to suck, two creative essays, 1/3 of a paper on Langston Hughes and several business-y emails.

–Cooked, apportioned and froze some food for later consumption.

–Attended a session at the DC Social Forum and (maybe?) made some new friends.

Ok, that’s enough.

OH WELL OK March 7, 2007

Well, kids, it’s snowing again in the district today and let me be the first to announce that jimmy crack corn and I don’t care. Or rather, I do care, or else I wouldn’t have set my alarm an hour early just so I could check to see if my class/work combo was canceled today (it is not). What I mean to say is that I refuse to get in a snit about it. I will not be bothered by this fucking snow.

Sure, it is annoying. And wet. And means I have to wear my hiking boots to campus, thereby ensuring that my ankles will chafe and it stings oh how it stings and my lotion bill for this month will probably skyrocket. It’s all good. I have a space heater. And a…lot of…many blessings for which I am surely most extremely thankful. And I refuse to shit on this exciting meteorological event! I refuse to be negative about an occurrence which has undoubtedly put stars in the eyes and roses on the cheeks of the seven DC area children who still give a crap when it snows!

Besides! Snow means long underwear! And I love long underwear! It’s true. Anyone who has seen me scour the lingerie section of a thrift-store, a special twinkle in my eye, knows that I love long underwear. If it is under forty degrees, I put a pair on, and I’ve never been sorry. Besides the fact that it is practical, it adds a certain cuddly feeling to cold, stiff blue jeans. So, in honor of today’s snow, by which i am not at all bothered, I offer you a short list of long-underwear tips.

1. Make sure that they are close fitting. They can’t be baggy or they will bunch and your pants will not fit.
2. Don’t buy them new. It is silly to do so when you can get them for fifty cents at most thrift stores.
3. Wash them on hot after you buy and before you wear. We’ve all heard the story about the guy who got the crabs from the pair of thrift store pants.

Ok, those are all the long underwear tips I have. The list seemed like a better idea in my head. Give me a break, it’s snowing. And I have a chest cold. Good day to you sir.

Get Ready March 4, 2007

Four weeks and three days ago my grandmother lay in a hospital bed in the apartment she shared with my grandpa. I sat on the queen-sized bed next to her, shimmied as close to the edge as I could get, my elbows asleep, holding one of her hands in both of mine. Everything about her looked different than I was used to– her skin, her eyes, her hair. I loved it all anyway. All I wanted was to be near her. Everything that I could do for her– and there was little– felt like the thing that I was born to do. I had never had that experience before– when you know with certainty that there is nothing more important than exactly what you are doing, right now, just this way.

It sounds strange to say it, but I have perhaps never been more content in my life than in those moments that I passed next to her, touching her shoulder, tipping the mug to her lips. It surely doesn’t make sense, because both of us– me and my grandma– were struggling mightily during that time. She was struggling to make an end for herself that felt right, I was struggling to find grace in the middle of cataclysm, preparing to watch my own life split wide open. I remember watching her sleep and thinking, this is loving someone. This is it. When you find that whatever they are at that moment, that is what you adore. When doing the smallest things for them is what you were born to do.

Four weeks and three days ago my grandma struggled to sit up in her her hospital bed. She couldn’t. I helped ease her back down.

I asked her, “Is there something you want, grandma?”

She said, “I want you to know how I feel.” She said, “I’m ready to go”.

I still don’t understand how someone can be ready to go. Selfishly, I don’t understand how she could be ready to leave me. But I tried, I am trying, to put my trust in her. I asked her, “Are you sure?”

She said, “Yes. I’m ready.”

I told her, “Ok”. I told myself, “I’d better get ready.”

And when it happened, in some ways I was. I certainly survived with soul intact. In other ways, though, readiness is a concept that just doesn’t make sense to me anymore. At every moment of her illness, I imagined a string of events that stretched before me, each of which I thought I would surely not be able to endure. I will not be about to keep my composure when I see her very ill. I will not be able to see her dead body. I will not be able to help put her body into the ground. But I could, and I could, and I could. And each time, I did. It’s now that’s the trouble.

There’s nothing left to do. There are no more obstacles left to mark. There is just a booming absence, and a life stretching far ahead. In almost all respects, it is a life I am excited about and grateful for. It feels expansive and fresh– her death has made my life seem limitless in ways that I had not previously considered. I look forward to living it– so many moments are so sweet. Why then, at odd intervals, do I long so much for that close room, and her strange breathing, the unfamiliar texture of her skin and the deep, deep terror of those last days?