Fin in a Waste of Waters

My amazing life, remembered by my grandchildren

2007-10-15T20:52:00.000+01:00

The morning after the day I die, my grandchildren will gather in my house. They will gather in my kitchen and drink tea from colorful, mismatched cups accumulated over years, using the leaves left in bright ceramic pots. Someone will have brought coffee, and mixed cinnamon in the grounds the way I will have for him when he used to for him whenever he visited. Sun will stream through the windows; there will be no tears on this morning. My grandchildren will have visited me in my home often, and each will drink from their own "special" cup, the cup that he or she has always drunk from when visiting. They will gather in the kitchen, some at the table, some on the floor, some on chairs pulled in from the dining room. My grandchildren will be many. Once they are settled, once they have their drinks, someone, the wife of my eldest grandson, perhaps, will begin: "She had such an amazing life..." There will be no regrets: no one will say, "I only wish I would have known her better." They all will have gotten to know me, and I them. Old photos will be brought to the table; stories will be recalled and recounted, stories that I will have told them, stories that Rasheed will have told them; and many stories that my mother will have told my children, their parents, who will have then passed on to them.

They will recall a story my mother told her grandchildren when they first learned to ride bikes: she will tell them the story of their mother and her little yellow tricycle, which she raced over and over again all the way down the long hill of her parents' nursery, only waiting for her mother, by then 8 months pregnant with the son who would become Daniel, then Danny, then Dan, and finally, "Lil' Bro,'" to come and carry it back uphill, and she would race it down again. Until one day, when the front wheel of the little bike got caught, perhaps a stone or a rut, and its rider, who could have only be just over 2 years old, went flying over its handlebars and face-first into the dirt. My mother, of course, started down the hill - until her daughter, to the horror of Ben, an employee of the nursery working nearby, stood up, stood her tricycle back upright, mounted again, and rode it at full speed down the rest of the hill! When she reached me, my mother understood the look of horror on Ben's face: my own was covered in dirt. She will tell the story to my own children when they learn to ride, and they will laugh at their silly mother, but when the time comes, they, too, will tell the story to their own children. And on this morning, my grandchildren will laugh at their silly grandmother. Someone will add between breaths: "Oh, she was so stubborn! Such determination."

This word will render the room silent, each occupant surrendering to his or her own memory. My youngest granddaughter will stand, wander the room, opening and closing cabinets, drawers, looking through my things. She will touch the tips of my knife set - "She always took such good care to keep them sharp..." - my tea kettle - "green tea, every day" - and she will open a drawer of utensils, take out an old wooden spoon, still smooth, carved from an olive tree. "Paris," she will say to the room, holding it out to Daniel, named after his father, in turn named after their great-uncle their grandmother's brother. Daniel is the cook in the bunch; and all will know that the spoon with all of my recipes was meant for him. "They got it on the first trip together to Paris," the room will recall. "It was her birthday. She had just finished two term papers at SUssex, come home that night and thrown a party - they packed the next morning and ran to the train station - theirs was delayed, anyway." They will laugh. Remember: "he brought her a croissant and orange juice every morning in bed while they were there. How they loved..." They will recall my travels, beginning with the move to London - "She was so young...only, what? 22? 23?" They will decide on 22. "Leaving everything she knew behind for him. So brave."

"Yes, she was." They will repeat. Their grandmother, who fought a brain tumor at the age of 20 and its recurrence at the age of 24 - during college; during her first year in a PhD program. "So brave." They will repeat, not with sadness, but with the fullness like that which comes from having eaten a good meal, a nutritious meal, a deep-seated joy in the life of their grandmother.

She lived in London and Brighton and California, saw Paris, Budapest...and later, Ireland, Istanbul, India, Africa, Japan, Canada. And so many more. They will go through my rooms, dividing among themselves the pieces from these places. They will not know it until days later, but in these pieces, their grandmother will have tucked little notes, scraps - written memories not yet divulged of these travels. Last will have been one more trip to London, a visit to see friends, and to see the places that were friends themselves. Oxfam and Apostrophe were gone, they recall, but not the building at 69-71 Queensborough Terrace. "But she could not bear to go in," a granddaughter will recall from our last conversation over tea, "she could not bear to see it changed. It will be, to her, always their first home, full of books, tea-stains on the arms of the couch - all her doing, of course."

They will roam my house, thumbing through my books. They will come to, tucked away in the bottom corner of a shelf, those written by their grandmother herself. They will pull them out: all will know who has read them, and who not (the younger grandchildren, who will look sheepishly at their shoes). Laughing, understanding, the elder will distribute them amongst the younger. Their names will be inscribed in the early pages, in the plot itself sometimes. They will study my picture in the back jacket leaf, my picture, together with Rasheed, high above the noise of the streets on our plant-filled balcony, progressively older with each subsequent book, but invariably happy, at peace. "How they loved..." My grandchildren will repeat, murmuring, fingers pressed against the picture.

Finally, they will find my first pair of dance shoes. They will still fit. "A dancer up 'til her last days," one of my grandsons will smile. Dancing everywhere she lived, and starting groups where she could not find them. "A dancing spirit, a dancing soul, she always said she had," my granddaughter whom I taught to dance will say. New dancing shoes for every birthday - she wore them out as quickly as I. They will burn me in my first pair of shoes at the crematorium; I will dance with them at the wake. Each grandchild will take a portion of my ashes to a place where I have lived, and in this way, my grandchildren will never be alone in the world, regardless of where they go. "What an amazing life she led," they will breathe, letting my dust go on the wind, into the sea, into rivers. "How she loved."

Argh

2007-09-26T18:48:00.001+01:00

Or rather: rrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. Because that has been the high-pitched whine I've been listening to all morning. Never have I lived anywhere where they were so anal about keeping up the appearance of the lawn. Every day or so is there a team of men with lawn mowers, weed-whackers (don't know if that's the official name; it's what my dad calls it, so official enough), and blowers paroling our community and disrupting the morning peace. Not only my community's & my morning, but my character's morning - ironically, I am rewriting the nursery portion, and have been laboring at the early morning (ie, quiet & peaceful) opening scene. I have headphones (to little avail), green tea, and am trying to breathe myself into the stillness of his morning....

And the whine raises a pitch.

(I'm allowed to complain sometimes, right? At least they'll in all probability be out there when I'm working on the rototiller parts - LOUD parts... But right now, I just want them to go take lunch.)

Thanksgiving

2007-09-16T21:16:00.000+01:00

Last night, cooking for Rasheed & myself, I realized (not simply “thought,” but fully, forcefully [mentally, spiritually, bodily with every ounce of marrow] realized) that God has given us everything we need for health and happiness. I have more and more frequently in the last few years felt an increasing thankfulness for the good - nurturing, protective, healing, restorative qualities - in the foods God has given us, but last night, pausing over my dinner prep - the range of greens in the wakame, the asparagus, the green cabbage; the clean country rain-wet scent of the freshly cut carrots and the zing of the ginger - was the first time that I felt this staggering gratitude for what God (or Great Spirit, Allah, Yhwh, Supreme Being, Brahma or whatever name you know Him, Her by, speakable or not) has given us. Staggering gratitude, but sadness, too: God has given us everything we need, but we have pushed for more, we have thrown the balance off, poisoning ourselves with pesticides, GMOs, etc. While I have now more than ever tried to eat organic for my health, hoping to avoid these contaminants, it has until last night been science. Last night, it became an understanding of God's gift: He has given me everything I need to restore my health. And I thought: "this is Thanksgiving." Every day, every meal, I will approach with thanksgiving.

An Open Letter to Zohreh Sullivan

2007-09-14T01:49:00.000+01:00

12 September 2007

Dear Zohreh,

I’ve been meaning to write you for about a week now (the words were already coming to me as we sat across from each other at Espresso Royale), but then I had my doctor’s appointment the very next day, and this, with the move to California, has thrown off my writing, understandably, I suppose, though I feel that it is during these times when I should be writing, recording, remembering.

And the same for my dissertation/thesis: I was so exhausted by the writing of it that I still haven’t written about its writing, which is what I so wanted to tell you about at Espresso if we’d had more time – but it works out, because now I might write it to you instead of wasting my words by frittering them all away on talk (so ephemeral). Now that I’ve found a post office not too far from me, though, I can write it to you.

I wanted to write to tell you about the sheer intensity of writing about Woolf, an intensity that I had never tapped into until now (with the exception of a paper I wrote on Katherine Mansfield & “Bliss” – but that was an intensity so close that it terrified me, and I shied away from her, leaving the piece as “breathless” as its subject. Writing about Woolf, however, this intensity became rather a calm center of extreme focus, a gathering of fragments, a comfortable closeness (reading her letters and diaries, I began unconsciously to think of her as Virginia, or sometimes, if I was feeling particularly protective of her, as “my Virginia”). I realized towards the end of te writing process that (though I’d already had many undesirable interruptions during the summer) I was purposefully slowing my writing down, procrastinating not by avoiding the work but by sinking more deeply into details. I was reluctant to let either it or Virginia go; I regretted turning in what had nurtured me (if it tortured me at times) for nearly two years. (Luckily, I saved one of her novels, Flush, to read later, and carried it with me here to Irvine so that though there may be geographical disconnect, there is no severance.)

So while understanding the dangers of identifying with one’s topic (especially a subject like Woolf), I nevertheless allowed myself (or imagined?) an understanding with her, quiet, tender at times, undramatic (unlike the identification I imagined myself to have with Mansfield, which was destructive, frightening – like clinging desperately with no saddle nor reins to the slick back of a black horse who races through a lightless vacuum you know is Time; Limited Time; 5 year’s Time – while I loved her and her writing, working on her cut too close, fed my fears, would have been my collapse [here, I wanted to write “death,” but that seemed too dramatic a word]). In Virginia, however, I identified a quiet strength, a balance, a knowing guide. While writing her, I dreamed her, along with the Wars identified in her writing. During this year, these were the major moments:

An email from D.S., my first love before Rasheed (a young love – D. was a conservative who didn’t believe the ERA should be passed, but somehow he still managed to love my feminist tenacity – it was an inexperienced love that didn’t survive the year of my illness and finally the removal of the tumor in ’04, but everything for a reason – perhaps I wouldn’t have found Rasheed otherwise!). Years ago, when D. & I were still dating, I dreamt that he went to fight in the war (this must have been just before or just after Bush invaded; this of course is the ever-constant weight that bore on the writing of my diss.). In this dream, he was leaving for the service, and we stood facing each other on a wooden train platform (dusty & the color of his neatly pressed uniform – like he had never worn it before) saying good-bye. I knew in the dream I would never see him again; I knew it, and gripped his head between my two hands & sobbed, despite his calm, even slightly amused, reassurance: “It’s going to be okay. I’ll be fine.” Up until this point in our relationship (‘02-03), he hadn’t mentioned enlisting in the military. In fact, it wasn’t until years later, when I was living with Rasheed in London, that I heard from Dan that he was going into the service. I immediately recalled that dream. I phoned him the night before he left home for training to wish him luck, but didn’t tell him about the dream. I haven’t seen him since before I first moved to London, and indeed, had not even heard from him since he left, until, a couple of months ago, in the midst of writing about Virginia (and about Virginia writing about war), there was an email from him.

Then, the aeroplanes. This was nearly constant. During the summer, there were a number of air shows around Brighton – new planes & antique, show planes & trick planes. Again and again do the war planes appear in Woolf’s diary, droning over London and Monks House (she wondered that a bomb didn’t drop right through the glass ceiling of her writing house), sawing the air – it seemed as though as she wrote it, so, too, I read it – these lingering sounds (which are right now, appropriately, perhaps, if anticlimactically, the high whine of a force of lawn mowers and weed whackers driven by a team of lawn care workers attacking our grad housing grounds!).

And the death of my grandfather, a World War II veteran of the Navy. At such a distance from him, I wasn’t sure if I’d lost him at all, or if perhaps I hadn’t actually lost him already, long ago, before my birth, before the birth of my father (his son) even. If he wasn’t always-already lost to me, a casualty of the war. I dreamt the night I learned of his death that he had died in that war, yet somehow, I still existed, and more, was still his grand-daughter.

Finally, a visit to Monks House. Rasheed & I went together during his most recent visit (we went, too, to Hogarth House in Richmond). We went to see the House, their bedrooms, the balcony where she installed a telescope, the gardens where he planted & dug & declared famously that these plants would still be growing long after Hitler was dead, the small house with the glass roof where she wrote most mornings from 10 to 1 at a great butcher’s block table. I used the outhouse there just for the joke of it – the house has an indoor toilet which Virginia was so excited to have installed after Mrs. Dalloway sold so well, but now that the house has new owners, all visitors must use the outbuilding. Then, we decided to rest & relax outside for awhile as the weather had finally turned nice again (the sun came & went with Rasheed this summer), and R. let me choose out of all the gardens and lawns where we would sit. I chose a small, semi-secluded garden with a square lily pond in its center. We rested there on the grass for a time, then left the house to explore the churchyard on the other side of the fence dividing the property of “the Woolves” from that of the church, where/when I realized I had forgotten to ask where the ashes of Virginia were buried (I knew that they were buried under one of the two great trees the Woolfs had nicknamed “Leonard” and “Virginia,” but also that those trees have since come down). So we went back to the house, and asked directions which led us back to the same garden where we had rested, even to the very same side of it where we had sat. Approaching this garden a second time, I felt an overwhelming awe for this woman, and gratitude for the understanding I had been granted during my writing. Perhaps here she had found peace in life and now after; perhaps it was the sense of that peace that led me here years later.

There were, of course, other dreams (R. & I, war refugees, in danger still, running through the night, through gunfire) and many, many other moments (seeing the portrait of the son she lost to war which Vanessa had hung over her bed at Charleston), but these were the four main things.

Love,
Tessa

Cleansing

2007-08-22T08:04:00.000+01:00

First, apologies for my long absence - it's the dissertation (UK)/thesis (US) grind, so I've been exhausting all of my creative energy on this paper, and have been going to sleep too dry to dream, it seems.

Until last night, when I dreamt I was cleansed. Of what, I'm not sure, but I know that I needed it. In the dream, I wandered I don't know where, until I found myself unknowingly inside of one particular building, directionless yet somehow knowing I had meant to be there. I don't think it was a church - if so, the sanctuary was hidden deep in its body - but it had the feeling of a church: all of the rooms had the feeling of not being a center in themselves but of centering instead around some much more important heart. I was met by an old-ish woman, a starched grey dress that buttoned stiffly over full stout breasts; thick, soft gray hair pulled into a knot at the back of her head; glasses; a gentle touch and discerning brown eyes that yet did not probe. She called me "dear." A nurse or an angel? - I didn't know. But a healer. She took me by one arm - light fingertips on my elbow - to a room where I could put down my bags. Then to another, grey like her, but darker. The only light from a high window, white sunlight. Below it, a deep stone & steel basin. A bath. She bid me undress. With no need for shame, but with exhausted arms and back, I removed piece by slow piece & put them in a heap, where, in the light of the window, they seemed to skulk like a small dirty animal - and I pitied them. I climbed into the bath & sat on one of its stone steps. She sat next to me with a nozzle in her hand, waiting patiently for the water; I asked, my limbs already trembling with chill: "Will it be cold?" She smiled down on me, "No, dear." And then, not with a gurgle or splash, the water came, a vital clear silent stream that she washed over my shoulders, my arms and my back; down my legs; and finally, over my head. She adjusted my head away from her, so that the right side (the bruised and bumped; the once-poisonous side) tilted up towards her. The water ran down it, soaking my hair and tingling on my skull; and she ran her hand again and again over that side, the third of the three most-sincere, most-intense & intensely-needed moments of touch I have had there (the first, in my fiction; the second, a friend, drunk). That someone would love that ugly, scary place. Then she shut the tap off, and took my hand, helping me up the slippery stone steps, water rushing, coursing in one clear cataract from my hair down my back down my buttocks down my calves. She gave me a towel, a white shift to wear. My skin was alive with cold, almost painfully alive to the rough-cotton feel of this short shapeless dress. She took me to another room, also grey, but lit with florescent lights, empty (though I implicitly felt the presence of other women in that building) but for a few brown couches whose rough brown covers scratched the backs of my legs when I sat on them. There, I would fast for the remainder of the day. There, she left me. And I felt my body clean, alive.

(Ironic, because I now go to make a cup of coffee to get going on the diss this morning after what was initially a perfect, beautiful, whole night, into which Rasheed threw a stone as into a pool...)

Chasing down the Dance

2007-07-22T11:15:00.000+01:00

Last night, one of those moments of beauty which life delivers at the most unexpected moments, one of those moments of complete understanding between complete, disparate even, strangers... A seemingly undeserved moment of reprieve that has come during unrelenting medical antagonism and academic stress; during flatmate (who has not yet forgiven me for missing part of her birthday; but I have faith in her goodness) & boyfriend (who has forgiven me) alienation; during this time of starvation when I have no time nor resource to refuel my exhausted mind, when tango even ceases to give me peace as my body fades, when what I crave most is to sit quietly, even silently, with good friends across a table of good food and let their presence fill the cracks in my own. Despite my downfalls, last night, life fed me -

I went (a wrecked ship), last night, to the Blues Brothers show at the Royal with my boss, who apparently asked me along because a) I'm as close to Chicago as he's ever gotten, and b) he knew I would dance with abandon, which I of course did - for the entire 3 hours. This latter meant leaving our cramped seats in the center of the stalls & moving to the side aisle where we wouldn't block our (incredibly disgruntled) neighbors' view & where we could actually dance. Out there, I met a couple of guys who actually work with the show (one, a 15-year-old, has been traveling with the Bros. for 12 years & will be the "new Jake" when the current Jake retires - what amazing lives people live!) - when they learned I was from the Chicago area AND danced swing/blues, I was named a "soul brother" & duly included in their previously double side-act.

Out there, I also noticed a young man, sitting with his father on the edge of the row, right on our aisle, with Down syndrome. A young man whose unadulterated rapture with the show, the music, the lights captured me (esp. after the late-middle-aged British priggishness of our row - "You know you've given up your seats for good now!" they snapped at us as we excuse me'd and apologized our way over their knees between songs). It was so pure - the entirely unselfconscious smile on this man's upturned face - such happiness - suddenly everything else seemed so unimportant next to this.

But one thing. As the music got louder, more and more people stood to rock & clap to the rhythm - except this man. He sat, rooted in his seat, hands gripping its arms; he still smiled, but occasionally, I saw conflict flit across his eyes. It wasn't until I saw him see me that I understood: I tapped into some of my swing footwork, my black&white saddle soft-shoes flashing - and I saw his eyes follow my feet up the floor and down again, and then - sensing I'd caught him watching - he looked into my face, and he grinned - I could only grin back - I understood. I didn't stop dancing the rest of the night, and waited to meet his eye again and again to smile again and again at him -

Until he at last stood up from his seat. He started slowly. He stood. He let his arms drop at his sides at first, then swayed them back and forth a bit, his smile tightening in concentration. Then his brown eyes wandered over to me again. I started rocking back and forth to the music, clapping first on the left and then on the right - and he rocked with me, to the left and to the right. And suddenly we hit the rhythm together - left, clap; right, clap - and his grin came back, and mine. By the time they closed with "Everybody needs somebody to love," he didn't even need me anymore, only the music.

And when the curtain dropped and as he was leaving with his father, he stopped to shake my hand, but I felt so much more that I should be shaking his for reminding me again of that unadulterated joy in dance, that connection (so strange yet so perfect that a complete stranger standing several feet away from me should do this), and that peace that comes when you finally chase it down, all the way down to the end of the world which you find suddenly, unexpectedly, is at your innermost center...

A public elegy

2007-07-16T12:30:00.000+01:00

An email from my mother early this morning (GMT)/late last night (central time): my grandfather died. A multiplicity of reactions:

The first, to do unthinkingly what I had to do this morning. A strange blurring of time and place and lives. The first thing I had to do was go to the hospital this morning, but for my own unresolved (and seemingly unresolvable; I mystify my doctors; I will have to go for more tests) medical issues. I ducked soundlessly out of the dark hushed flat, already running (literally) late for my appointment, roommates still sleeping, even Jess's cough quiet finally, and into the purgatorial fluorescent hall, elevator, finally plunging out the back door of the building into the cool grey day, still quiet and surprisingly clean for Brighton - perhaps there was rain last night, rinsing the car exhaust and bar fumes from the streets? I hurried out the gate, where I ran past Ray, the insufferable day porter (a bit of background: the man comes to our flat to shout at me [last, when our tap was dripping and I was concerned for the waste of water] & threatens that he'll have no more maintenance complaints from our flat; confrontations with him have triggered seizures in me, and so generally I avoid what I consider a presence noxious to my general well-being, though sometimes the inevitable encounter, such as this morning...) - he makes some comment on the morning, I don't even understand what, I nod my head as a response, hardly looking, and keep my stride. He shouts something at me, something rude and uncalled for, I can tell by his voice, though I still cannot process language yet... I turn and shout at him: "My grandfather died this morning!" I shock myself, there on the street, blurting it out - shouting it - to Ray - how funny, after everything, that Ray, intolerable Ray, is the first person I should tell. And funnier still: when I look, I find sympathy in his face. I've lost use of my language again; I put on my big dark glasses (indispensable for every doctor's appt, to the point where I pack them the night before) despite the clouds & run off for the bus. By this point I have a near-silent Rasheed on the phone; I've told him the news; I get nearer the bus stop: it's closed for construction. Having no idea where the next closest stop was and knowing I'd never make it to the hospital in time if I walked, feeling so pressed for time, and feeling, somehow, too, the press of mortality, I ran to the nearest cab corral & threw myself in the backseat of the first in line. At least it was quiet here; I could hear Rasheed on the phone now, at least his silence, and I felt for just a moment that he could help somehow, if I could tell him what I needed; I filled him in on the details, but when I had run out of them, and we lapsed into silence, I realized, looking at the brown and grey brick buildings go by outside, the futility of it - and so I arrived at the hospital to meet one of my doctors, and there found a waiting room full of old men, dying men, men in wheelchairs and men who slouched skeletal in cramped waiting room chairs pushing their dentures in and out of slack gums, and one old man who had come along with his middle-aged daughter & waited for her when she was called in to the office (he stood when she stood; "Are you fine waiting here, Dad?" she asked, and he sat) - and none of them were him - it was as if I had rushed to the hospital to be with him before he died, and I was too late - then, suddenly, I had no idea what I needed, if anything at all.

I was directed to another waiting room, where two old men were the only other occupants. They sat together - friends? They joked like they were, but maybe it was a generalized brotherhood amongst old men; maybe there is a universal language amongst old men who find themselves in hospitals (whereas we young people keep quiet as to cover ourselves from the curious, pitying stares of the old). I took out my book, but began to think instead. The nurse called me; I didn't understand my name; she called again. When I went to her, the men smiled kindly at me. I gave her the information she needed, sat back down, put my book away, and let myself think instead...

He is not the first I have lost since being here. It's so surreal a loss, the loss you will never know because you were not physically there to experience it. In a way, it is no loss at all. Mr G, Steve, Cookie (though she was a dog, she counted as human, at least counted herself as such), and now Pop - they all are both doubly lost (because even the losing has eluded me) and not lost at all to me - there is no closure. Pop will be the first for whom I write a "public" elegy. So, too, will we here give him our own service - a service on the sea, because he served in the Navy during the Second World War.

But it is important to avoid sentimentality. Pop and I had by no means an ideal grandparent-grandchild relationship. We saw eye-to-eye on very little, if on anything at all aside from our mutual love for my mother's Christmas sticky buns. There was his sexism; there was his racism. There was his joke about the old telephone he had picked up in a ruined Japan during the war which now sits on my father's bar; pointing to the Japanese characters on its face, he asked: "You think it says Jap-bell?" A joke my father has appropriated as his own. There was the day my mother had to physically drag me from the room after I had disagreed with him about something: it was not my place to argue with him, she chastised me; besides, she continued, he was old and too set in his ways for me to change him.

But, as he aged further & I matured, our relationship - or at least my feeling for him - softened. He softened, even so much so that I felt safe introducing Rasheed to him. I began to spend a few hours beside my grandmother on their couch before each "leaving" (whether to Champaign or Savoy or London or Brighton-via-London) going through old photographs. But more, I began to identify somewhat with him. My grandfather was one of those tough old bastards who just don't die. Though understanding it as inevitable, I think I never quite believed he would. After surviving heart attacks and heart surgeries (yes, that's plural), he kept on. In his 70s, he took up roller-skating. In his 80s, he was still driving. After my own surgery, I began to understand what this meant in a way that I couldn't as a child, when his surgeries actually happened (though his scars running purple and snakelike down his white chest chilled me as a child when we all went swimming in Sunday Lake; I suddenly recall him standing waist-deep in water, putting the pier together at the beginning of one summer). Against all bodily probability, he continued to live. And not only live, but do. He continued, after his surgeries, for many years, to take trips up to Sunday Lake with the family, where he fished & sometimes swam (and largely, sat in the sun or at the campfire, ate, drank, & generally enjoyed life). Mortality, be damned!

I recall my last meal with him. Beef-a-Roo (for all of the Illinois natives) at the last house he and my grandmother lived in together before she moved to her own apartment and he was put in a home as she was unable to take the care of him that he needed. He had onion rings, and tempted me to eat them with him; I ate the fruit salad my grandmother & I made together. (Mortality, be damned, up until the last!) We ate off paper plates. I teased him ("Have you been behaving?" "You know I'll hear about it if you're up to your tricks!") - as so many old men like to be reminded of their scruffy boyish glory days, making him smile and laugh his worn-out laugh. I told him about my plans for England, shouting, so that he could hear me, but I don't think he paid too much attention. I wondered where his mind was: maybe revisiting his own trip to England (one of a few, I think), decades ago? He had come on business, with my grandmother (the trip that gave her all her ammunition to protest very vehemently against my coming; better to stay at home, get married, and have children) - they had driven "on the wrong side of the road" with one of Pop's work friends who "drove way too fast!" and who had in a restaurant ordered my grandmother a "just terrible" dessert, "thinking he was giving her a real treat" - said she. I wondered what Pop remembered - I realize now I'll never know. I wonder what streets he wandered here; what pubs he drank in with his work buddies (because I know he would have). But, leaving that day - I stood on the step, in the doorway, to look back one last time - he was unable to stand up from the table, and I looked back into the room, into his face, and into his eyes which were suddenly a bright, clear, blue - the bluest I had ever seen them, as if a light beamed through them; it lit his entire face which was suddenly smiling ever so slightly, childlike, but knowing. And standing there on the step, looking back into his eyes for what must have been only a few seconds but felt like long minutes, I knew then that it was the last time I would see him.

Though there are so many other things (his 50th wedding anniversary; summers at the house on Belvidere; the war; the painting) - I will end here for now. There will always be more to be said, and somewhere, another elegy by the sea, a novel, I will say it.

Confession

2007-07-14T08:30:00.000+01:00

The honest truth? Here it is: California (especially southern California, and even more especially LA and...Irvine) scares me. I do not think that this is because I am a particularly fearful person; indeed, there is really only the one big thing. Nor do I think it is because I am afraid of change: no, I packed up quite cheerfully for Champaign for university (granted, this was only 3 and a half hours drive away); and, just over four years later, packed up again for London in perfect faith (in God's will, Rasheed's love, my quick decision), making my first international flight alone, quitting my job and leaving family, friends, and my dearest professors behind. True, I was loathe to leave London for Brighton several months later, and even now know that my heart is still in that city, but Brighton, while ugly and irritating at times (I'm thinking of the masses of tourists & the obnoxious mobs of disgusting drunk teenagers choking the streets day and night; the street fights; the drug deals and break-ups that happen in my alley; the audacity of the children here, like the 16-year-old kid who sexually harassed me at my last catering gig & then was brazen enough to try it again not a minute later), was never scary.

Why, then, does California terrify me? (Though I wonder: when the time comes down to it, will it scare me still? I somehow doubt it.) True, it is partly because I am not yet done with Brighton; I feel instead that I've only just now gotten into it (maybe because for the first few months, I was still largely living in London, spending half of my long weekends there with Rasheed in our former flat, and when not there physically, certainly spiritually, memorially...). Suddenly it is as if, just when I've fitted the last piece together, my flatmates are starting to leave (Sari first; we went to her last Shabbat dinner here in Brighton together last night), and then I need to wrap up my dissertation (which I will never feel digs deeply enough), and then, I am asked to leave these places and people I am only just coming to know in real ways? I only just discovered that modest churchyard cemetery in Hove last night...; I begin to realize that I will likely never dance the tango on a rooftop above the beach of Brighton again in my life; and, though not Brighton, but London, I've only just now begun to make friends with the people I dance with at the 100 Club. (It's true, I've only just recently gotten a phone!) And Kirsty, who first remembered my name, a kindred dancing soul; Neil, whom I have watched learn to dance like watching a child discover the world (because it is its own world, the music, the space hollowed between one dancer's shoulders and another, against a chest & beneath a chin), and whom I have tested to that end; Zsolt, whom I knew by the freckles on his nose that we would be friends, who taught me how to tie a tie (unsuccessfully), and with whom I talked books at my second day of work; Sue, so ebullient and young, so brilliant - our friendship cannot end here, I wait for her return from Paris; George, who moves with the powerful grace of a horse, and in whose large dark eyes I see the knowing wisdom of that animal, so reminiscent of Michael, patient, strong, broad-backed and certainly stored with greater knowledge of the world than a 17-year-old me clung lightly atop his steady body, George, for whom I have no time to know better; and finally Rob Hawke, a face like his name, whom I have left behind already.

But this cannot be all; there were people left behind in Illinois, all left for the one in London. True, most of these people were family (or near enough), and I knew that no matter where any of us were, we were never "left behind"; rather, we move together still in parallel lines that, when we are lucky or just plain determined, occasionally intersect. It was, however, to my occasionally over-dramatic sensibility, near-tragedy to part with some of the swing dancers, some of the people at Pages - people a few of whom I am lucky enough to hear from occasionally or to dream full rich dreams about (last night, I was at a family gathering at my Auntie Kay's - their old house at Colorado Ave, but decorated like the Cherry Valley house, and with its porch, where I found my aunts & my cousin John in the sunshine, eating soft pretzels off of white paper plates, and where I knew instinctively that my mom was in the kitchen pouring lemonade - they were not at all surprised to see me there - happy, but not surprised; and countless times have I dreamt myself onto the swing dance floor in Champaign, literally [thanks to time zone differences] dancing with that group again, 10 pm their time, 4 am mine). My fear leaving these people was that they would forget me, who would never forget them & who dream about them still. Not an egotism, as I have been accused. No. If two people remember, there is still togetherness; if one forgets, the thread is broken.

So, I have separated from people before (Rockford & area for Champaign & area for London for Brighton) - it cannot be this that so spooks me. No, I think it is the place itself. California; LA; Irvine - they none of them seem real places to me. For weeks now, I've looked up information on the internet, I've read articles & looked at photos in magazines and newspapers, I even met a woman at Buckingham who grew up in Irvine (but who had been living in London for over a decade) - nothing can convince me that there is a substantial place that is California; that beyond the name there is landscape and buildings and people, and finally, a small home, a room, even, somewhere in the midst of this empty space for me.

You may point out (and logically so) that it can never be real to me until I am there. But I will counter (completely, utterly irrationally so) that London was always real to me, even before I had ever arrived. Sometimes I couldn't believe I was really there, but London was always Real, and from that moment on the train when I rested my head on Rasheed's shoulder somewhere between Hatton Cross & Hounslow and looked out the window at the grey, sleeting sky, it was Home. It was Real & it was Home even when I was neither. At a time when I myself was Unreal - during the worst stretch of post-operation seizures, medical misdiagnosis, soaring and plummeting blood sugar, drug disrealization - it was a comfort (more than that) to be, even if a ghost, even if only the faintest beat of blood in thin veins, even if sucked under by sudden seizures with little or no warning, it was a comfort to be surrounded by a Real city; to put my feet on real streets; to follow where Virginia walked; to sit in the green deck chairs at Hyde Park & watch the dogs romp without leads & stand by Round Pond, feeding the starlings; to put coins on the base of the statue of Gandhi; to dance at Holi and again at Gay Pride; to row in Regent's Park & drift round the back of the island. If I was transparent - the city was stone. If I was ephemeral - it was eternal, somehow.

Eternal - somehow. True, not eternal, but lasting - old - older than perhaps anything else I have known. This, I think, is what scare me most: California is so new. I imagine (mistakenly, the rational side of me knows) a film-set city-scape which will fall at the least puff of breath. In California, I imagine I must be real, and unflinchingly so - I will not have the protection, the security of a history that allows - indeed forces - me to whisp unsubstantially through its solid streets. I find, though, that this has always been true of me, even before the surgery. The more I travel east of Rockford - London, Paris, Budapest - the more solid the world feels. At my childhood home, I was comfortable with the earth, the space of the skies & fields & trees, but not with the house itself, whose walls tremble in the winds, nor with most of Rockford, especially as it develops still. In Champaign, I was comfortable on the Quad, amongst its oldest buildings, regardless of the fact the two I spent the most time in (Lincoln Hall, my sculpture studio; and the English building, of course) were rated by the fire department as the two most structurally dangerous buildings on campus; I was most comfortable in my longest-standing apartment, and was never quite at ease in my last in Savoy, a cardboard building only a few years old. No, I am terrified to leave a country who has known the ways of the Woolves, who has known and survived plague and fire and war, who changes and accepts that change (itself time-won wisdom that my natal-land, at least its current govt., has not mastered); I am terrified to leave a country whose skyline even before I knew it was built of stone, and on the downs, of earth, and to leave it for a space which to me has always been empty, a flimsy paper-and-lights world. The truth: it terrifies me to leave the place that filled in my own empty spaces.

But, optimistically, I still have time to fill the Unreal spaces of myself as solidly as I can before I leave. Today, I go to Knole (to Vita, Orlando, and beyond). Today, I fill perhaps the space between two ribs, perhaps the nook behind my knee, so that I will be at least that much more substantial when I leave for California.

[A request I have of people who have known California: not "visited" nor "touristed," but known in a meaningful way: will you tell me your stories? (I'm thinking esp. of Holly, whose story is perhaps the most lasting story I have known to come from California: will you retell it to me?) Pictures, even, cannot make it real to me, but your words & the depths in your voices can.]

Waiting for inspiration...from my inspiration

2007-07-08T11:58:00.001+01:00

In one of several installments of his autobiography, Beginning Again: 1911-1918, Leonard Woolf recalls the way in which his wife Virginia's mind often worked: for days, weeks, even months, she would sit starting out the window, at the fire, at her paper, contemplating "the problem," until, in a sudden flash, she would solve it, her pen dashing across the page so that she could hardly keep up with her own voice - she finished The Waves with "such intensity and intoxication," she recorded.

Perhaps because I know this about her, my own writing about her fluctuates between contemplation and fulguration. True, I experience those "flashes" of inspiration (who doesn't, regardless of vocation/purpose/hobby?) in my other writing (fiction, epistolary, even email, even here [today not being an example of this]), and in my critical writing about other subjects (most notably Joyce, with whom I have a love-hate relationship; trapped in a dead-lock with the man/author/myth for weeks, until suddenly, either he or I give, and the words landslide down page after type-written, single-spaced page) - but with Virginia, the struggle is more exhausting; the inspiration, purer. Perhaps all Woolf scholars like to imagine this sort of intimacy with their subject, but I like to think that after years of reading and reading about Virginia, writing informally and more recently, formally, about her; after listening to her voice in the only existing recording of her at the library; after deciphering (rather unsuccessfully) her hand in the Monks House Papers; after visiting most of her homes (and her sister's) and haunting her neighborhoods and favorite walks (Regent's Park, St. George's Gardens, the downs, etc) - I like to think that after this, I have absorbed something of the essence of this presence who still permeates London, Sussex, and that this will in turn inform my writing of her.

Unfortunately for me, however, I have not the luxury of months to contemplate - nor even weeks. 3 September, work schedules, health concerns & autumn living plans inform my writing now. I become impatient with my research; and worse, with my writing. I push unprepared into unexplored territory, and naturally, lose myself in the brambling complexities of Virginia which are otherwise part of what I love best about her. And I finally find my way only to be heartbreakingly interrupted, never to lose sight of her in the thick, but rather, to lose my way to her. Only a few weeks ago: working steadily, writing well - then, a vague email from my doctor that my blood results have come back "abnormal"; he thinks kidney problems, but isn't sure what it means. A week of nearly daily doctors' appointments combined with at-home observation throws me. Then: the weekend. Relief: doctors don't call or email on weekends; there is no post on Sundays. I work again. Monday: a provisional "diagnosis" ("in all probability," they say - thank God it's not my kidneys; rather, it's miscommunication between my pituitary gland and my kidneys, it seems) which I continue to work under, unconfirmed and untreated as it is, waiting for the doctors. I work. Then: a week-long visit from my mother. We slog through a week of rain in London and Brighton (at least she got the "authentic" British experience! Jane Eyre: "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.") which leaves me sick for days after she's gone. My writing still has not recovered, exactly a week after she's departed. The ideas are all there; I write and rewrite; I cannot organize, which is why I have come here, in the hopes of, as if I were casually batting ideas around with you, as if you were here in this room with me (a time when a woman wants anything but a room of her own!!), the form will organize itself in my mind:

In this chapter in my diss, I am looking at Night and Day as one of Woolf's most important war novels - a novel which is often overlooked in the Woolf canon, and even charged with "deliberately looking away" (Briggs) from WWI, during which it was written. At this moment, I mean to be discussing the structure of repression (and the equally dual nature of that repression: both of the war experience & civilian "madness") practiced by the novel - at once contextual (the architecture within) & textual (the "architecture" of) which Woolf parallels from the opening pages (we enter the novel as Denham enters Cheyne Walk). Further, it is temporal repression on several levels: Mrs. Hilbery & Mr. Fortescue in the novel look even further backwards, thus highlighting the novel's own self-conscious awareness of its location in the past, which at moments threatens to erupt in masked references to the present. ... Sounds easy, right? I think I need a pen & paper for this one. And a moment of inspiration, as I've been staring at this for a week now...

In pursuit of coffee perfection

2007-06-19T12:55:00.000+01:00

You will think that I am a crazy woman.

But today, I absolutely. cannot. work. until...I have the perfect cup of coffee at my side. And so, I attempt to make said perfect cup of coffee: I brew it at home, Columbian organic with a dash of cinnamon in the grounds; let it steep, then add a splash of M&S soya milk (made with sunflower oil, so it doesn't curdle in your hot drinks) followed by just barely a half of raw sugar. But whoops - I used my organic Alpro soya unthinkingly, and it curdled. Whatever, I make a new cup, and use the right milk. It curdles. Is it the coffee? I'm at the end of the bag - could be. I open a new bag of coffee, begin the process again. Again: curdles. In a big way. And you know how it is when you have those certain things for certain days that really get you in the mood for certain types of work - I usually switch it up: Tan Dun & Yo-Yo Ma with green or white tea & fruit, or Benny Goodman & Miles Davis with coffee & cinnamon rolls (days when I know I won't be doing yoga lest I need to be rolled home). Today - today is a Benny Goodman day. And Benny's working for me, but my coffee...

So, an emergency trip to Starbucks has been planned. I guess every now & then you need to splurge.

An aside about coffee cliches: you know that saying, something along the lines of: "Some things are better rich: chocolate, coffee, men"? I always think to myself: I, too, like my men like I like my coffee...strong but sweet. And most days, I'm lucky to get it how I like it. Excepting today, but better the coffee than the man.

Inspiration

2007-06-18T14:51:00.000+01:00

Working on Woolf; from her essay, "George Eliot":

"...as we recollect all that she dared and achieved, how with every obstacle against her - sex and health and convention - she sought more knowledge and more freedom till the body, weighted with its double burden, sank worn out, we must lay upon her grave whatever we have it in our power to bestow of laurel and rose."

She is buried in Highgate, having died at the age of 61 of kidney problems & throat infection as Mary Ann Cross, in the section for religious dissenters. Before I leave this country, I will go to pay my respects.

More knowledge and more freedom.

Achieving peace, one fight at a time

2007-06-12T19:45:00.000+01:00

Last week, I broke up my first street fight - it was surreal, really...

So I was walking home from a catering gig at the Holiday Inn; it was about 2 a.m., and Saturday night was in full swing; bars bumpin' & bouncers ubiquitous (in my part of Brighton, we have bouncers guarding even the doors of convenience shops). What was surreal: my arms were full of flowers. We had just done a "beach party" event, & I was coming home from a looong evening of cleaning up after some very wild revelers (also surreal: the drag-queen they had for entertainment kissed me. In. front. of. everyone.) - but instead of throwing away the flowered leis we had given each of the guests, I took them all home, planning to hang them on my flatmates' & neighbors' doors, plus give one to our elderly night porter, Joe, whom I adore.

But, nearly home, I came across two young men in the street who had gathered a small crowd. They stood chest-to-chest, and were shouting into each others' faces; one man's face was bloodied, and I could see where it had dripped down the chest of his white shirt. The crowd was apparently made up of their friends, who were shouting at the men to "come on" and "let's go" and "stop it" - but they would not move any closer to the pair.

And so, slightly irrationally (combination of a late night; drag queen; and armful of flowers), I stepped beside the men, who at first ignored me, until I put a hand on first one, then the other's arm. "Gentlemen," I said. I said it quietly; I said it once. And this was all I needed to say. They stopped shouting; the first looked at me and sort of smiled; the second (bloody), paused to catch his breath and looked at me in confusion. I put a lei over the head of the first, who began laughing; then a lei over the head of the second, who looked increasingly confused. The first laughed even more, and said to the second: "There now, doesn't that make you feel better?" Then, one of their friends ran up to me, begging a lei off me ("I will give you SO much money if you give me just one of those!" "I'll give it you for free!" I put it around his neck); then, seeing I had given another away, a woman ran up to me: "May I have one too?" I put one over her head. At this, they all flocked around me. I began throwing lei after lei into the air, where they were caught by the seafront breeze and blown down the sidewalk, chased after by the small group.

And to think those leis would have been wasted, thrown away...

More terror dreams

2007-06-08T09:19:00.000+01:00

Even when I sleep do my dreams deny me rest now. For weeks, I've been having nightmares. Sometimes every night, sometimes only every few nights. Sometimes, I'm so worn out as to hardly remember my dreams at all (which is unusual for me). I wake up still-tired (sometimes more tired than when I went to bed), my face hurting from frowning...

Of the dreams I had last night, I remember two. The second (which I'll write about first, and probably remember more about as I write), I can't remember much about. It woke me up. I was running in it; running for my life; running from someone, but also running with someone, neither of whom I can remember. All I can remember is the feel of the air full in my lungs, so full that my chest was tight. AH! I remember another detail - it started out at a dance, the sort of event I've been catering, sort of like prom, but for adults; I had gone there in a group that included Rannier & Jessica, and I danced with Rannier - to the event, I wore my old prom dress, but when we started dancing, I wore "the dress" which Jess lent me. I was running with Rannier, then...but from whom? Someone who had been at the event? Again, what I remember most clearly is the feeling in my chest as I ran, lungs so full as I ran...no, I remember the feeling in my arms, too - I pumped them harder and harder, practically pushing myself forward by their momentum, ignoring the ache that reached from shoulders to fists. I ran with deadly seriousness; I ran with power - not because I actually had that sort of strength, really, but because I had no choice but to run with that sort of determination. When you run for your life, I think this must be how you run.

And the first dream...the first dream, I write about to purge myself of it. It was terrible; it was frightening, it was saddening; it is as if it still pollutes my body (I'll not skip yoga today; I've been skipping for work, but my seizures & my dreams are catching up to me - I owe it to myelf; I need to cleanse myself of this stress & most particularly this dream). In this dream, I witnessed what for some reason was classified a terrorist act. And weirdly, there was a movie made about it later, which somehow I already knew about in the present-time of the dream, and even then, or perhaps especially then, I wondered how they (they? movie producers, I guess?) could make a commercial film out of an event so terrifying, so sad - just for entertainment value. Perhaps it was that the film had just come out, and it made me remember my own part in the actual events, a memory which was still clear in the dream, if less so now that I am awake. In it, the terrorist - a man from Turkey - killed another man, a man who worked in a garage - I didn't know why this man was so important; I didn't know who he was; I didn't know why the government labeled it a "terrorist act." The beginning of the dream, I saw it as if I were in two positions - I saw it as a newsreel, from the air, the film grainy, drained of nearly all color, a thin dark man, all tendons and muscle, leaping from a car and tearing down the street (a dirty street, gray, lined with dingy shops) - in the newsreel, it looked as if he carried a large gun; but I saw it, too, from the street, felt the air move as he ran by me, and I saw that what he carried was not a gun, but rather, a small pair of white plastic tubes fused together. I followed him to the garage - but when I got there, the act had already been completed. I saw the garage-owner crumpled at the bottom of a flight of stairs (and I knew instinctually that he lived above the garage, and I knew, too, exactly which room I would find at the end of those stairs - the kitchen, linoleum-tiled, white and yellow, small, every fissure lined with grime from the garage), and at the top of those stairs, his wife, unmoving, her hands clinging one to the other at her chest, uncrying, even...and then, I cared nothing for the murderer or even where he was, if he was still in the garage, if I was in any danger - I cared only for this couple. But when I moved to go to her, I was forcibly stopped; I was collected by the police - I was a witness.

They took me to a small room, gray as well, and brown. In it were a few chairs, a couch, a refrigerator, a TV (not on), and it smelled of cigarette smoke, stale coffee, and bodies. It was full of people. Most sat on the floor. All were "witnesses" or "suspects." Witnesses sat on one side of the room nearest the door; suspects, on the other. There were so many of us that I could not see the floor, but I knew somehow that it was thinly carpeted in brown, rubbed bare in patches, and dirty, the dirt ground in. Then I saw Mur. sitting so low on the floor on the side of the suspects, his sad dark eyes the one point of stillness - a vacuum, nearly; a black hole - amongst the flux of bodies. He saw me. And for a moment we only looked - we could not speak. I didn't understand why we were on two separate sides. I looked at the other on that side of the room. Some were strangers, but many I knew, mostly from work. I knew no one on "my" side. The room was airless; I didn't know why I'd been brought there. I wondered where the man's wife was. I waited, I don't know how long.

Then, the police brought in 3 men dressed in black combat uniforms, carrying a case of guns, all exclaiming excitedly that they'd found the guns used in the supposed "terrorist plot." I looked at the case, remembered the white tubes the murderer had carried, remembered the garage owner's body at the foot of the stairs, his wife at the top. I knew that these were not the murder weapons. "No, that's not what he used!" I tried to tell the police. No one heard my voice; as I thought how the garage owner would not get justice, I shouted: "Listen! Those guns are just a cover-up! Those aren't the guns!" No one heard my voice. "Listen to me!" No one heard me over the volume of their own voices; my voice was so small; I could not be heard, as so often happens to me now. I could not will the people to hear me. I looked back at Mur., still not understanding how he was there, how we could not speak, how we were on opposite sides, and suddenly, I saw the same in his sad brown eyes - he, too, knew the truth, but nor would they listen to him. And so we waited, unspeaking, for how long, I don't know, in that room, in forced opposition, when all either of us wanted was to speak to each other...

I woke up at 5:30 from this dream, and fell back asleep into the other.

But today, yoga, and then, at David's advice (David, bless him, who reminds me that it is my health that counts, regardless of the work ethic I was forced into...I literally don't know how to relax; I had chest pains in Paris, trying to relax...), fewer hours catering next week so that I can focus on my research.

I am so...everything - but my complaints mean nothing. On with it.

Felled

2007-06-05T12:05:00.000+01:00

On the experience of having a seizure just now:

A seizure just now, whilst I was reading - and as it tightened its hold on me, the words for this entry formed in my mind, but now that I'm free of its hot grasp, I wonder if they will still flow...the image, however, remains, if adulterated, paradoxically, by what should in all practicality be greater coherence (though sometimes with these attacks comes strange clarity). The image:

So often when these spells hold me immobile on my bed, face turned to the wall, do I suddenly see by no self-conscious volition my body as no longer my own, but rather as that of some great 4-legged animal - most often a gazelle or a horse, but always strong, swift, long-limbed & supple, muscular - felled alone, unknown in a vast tract of yellow desert, spread on the sand, legs still, but ribs rising and falling, gleaming with heat - sweat & sun & salt. My eyes, the round dark globes of this desert animal, lodged in my immobile head (now also sleek & equine, stretched at the end of a long-muscled neck, thrown onto the sand where I fell), are all that can move now, and take in with the disquiet but expectant expression of the game prey my fallen body, acutely aware of both its potential power and utter lack of it, and I wait...and then -

it's as if one of the muscles in my legs flits; my skin twitches where a fly bites my thigh, my tail gives an involuntary switch - my body becomes my own slowly; I return; I heave my limbs from the sand & the bed at once; I am for a moment both, occupying both this world and that (and "this" & "that" themselves fluctuate as I straddle them); and then I am one - the seizure has passed. Today, the vision remained (if not the words which lined themselves up before I had fallen too far).

I cannot help feeling lucky when these images stay with me - it is not unlike remembering your dreams. How, how lucky I am when I am allowed to keep these rare moments when I remember the visions of the worlds I dip into during these moments that are paradoxically both utter confusion & even unconsciousness but yet queer clarity. I once, two years ago, told my mother that perhaps the tumor was a gift - in so many ways. These moments; these dreams; these other worlds I am allowed for only moments to occupy - this is just once of those ways.

This magic...

2007-05-26T12:57:00.000+01:00

Just a little bit of writing to loosen the screws tightened by other work:

Last week exactly was the 3-year anniversary of my surgery. I debated whether or not to mark this day, the words of Ryan (whom I always thought of as "John") reverberating eternally in my memory, words spoken two years ago, only one summer after the surgery: "Wasn't this a year ago? Shouldn't you be over this by now?" I don't know if this is something I will ever "be over," or if it something I "should" be over. At this point in time, "this" itself still differs daily, demanding constant adaptation, let alone "getting over." Perhaps with more time will come equilibrium. Perhaps - I think so.

But, though not for the reason above, I decided not to "mark" this day. I told/reminded no one here, not until after the fact. I reminded Rasheed on the phone that day. After all, what will the surgery have accomplished if I insisted on marking this day? I underwent the surgery so that I could have a (mostly) "normal" life again after. So this is what I decided to celebrate that day: the ordinariness of my life. I did exactly what I would do any other day, reading for my dissertation, writing, going to work that night (catering a Lion's Club banquet at the Holiday Inn where innumerable old men sang the opening lines of "Chicago" to me after learning where I come from), and, after, sharing a bottle of wine with some friends down on the beach.

But ways I did celebrate the day: I did all with a heightened sense of pleasure in each moment, entirely content in the quiet, squirreling away each moment for some winter, remembering how easily any of us may have not been afforded these moments. Also, I filled my last book on that eve, remembering what I wrote exactly three years ago, the eve of the surgery, writing only from obligation, feeling that what was supposedly such a momentous event in my life deserved a written record. I began a fresh book & moved my list of 100 Life Goals to it a few days after this anniversary.

Also did I involve those around me in these "celebrations" - that night on the beach, before we could even open the wine, I had a seizure. During it, I was told after, did I ask: "What sense does life have without this magic?" And it is; magic, that is. Standing at the edge of the sea, standing, I felt, in more than a physical sense, on the periphery of water, rocks, and stars, and then dropping to my knees there under the weight of the seizure - on this Day - coming out of the confusion of my mind with this moment of clarity: what sense would life have without this magic? Without the seizures? They are, sometimes I feel & have felt even before I knew that they were indeed seizures, my moments when I see through life, when I stand outside of it, and see it whole. For so long, I was afraid that I had wavered too long on the borders of "real" life, that I would never slip back inside of it. But outside is its own "real" -

And isn't this what I go riding after, too, in dance, so desperately, deliberately, in the first year, and now, with ease, with peace? That moment when I am released, when I feel that physical lift when I am set free of my body & life; when I am only spirit? The very next evening: one of those perfect evenings of dance - so completely "on"; connected with everyone I came into contact with. And, though she couldn't possibly have known it, Kirsty gave me a way to mark this anniversary. At the end of the night, when the lights have come back on in the restaurant & the staff clears away the remains of dinners & drinks, when we all change back into our street shoes, and put on coats & jumpers, looking like strangers in the strange light...I had one shoe on, one off already when I hear the beginning of a song I'd sent K. weeks ago. Then, her voice: "This one's for you, Tessa!" Without even thinking, I immediately shouted: "Let me get my other shoe back on!" Then I stood, and there she was, a rose-gold light gleaming it seemed in her eyes and cheeks and hair, and we had one last dance, just the two of us, together, in the middle of the floor, under the lights, laughing all through it, and I feeling as if something in me would fly away. ...She is one of those rare dancing souls whom I have written about here, and in my journals, and whom I have sought out in every city I've danced in. She is the only one I've found here for sure (I thought maybe Murat...but we'll see if he stays "quit"; a dancer who quits is no d.s. - but I bet he won't be able to stay away). She & I have always sparked in a good way on the floor, but never yet like that night - and after, I felt so completely understood, as if for the 3-minute space of this song, I had found peace with this person. Magic.

And finally, now, it continues (and so it will still, I think...). Now, writing this after Chinese left-overs from last night, green tea, and a fortune cookie. My fortune, so appropriately timed as I reflect on this Day? Good health will be yours for a long time. Magic. What sense would this life have without it?

From the diaries of Virginia Woolf...

2007-05-18T12:22:00.000+01:00

From my reading of the diaries of Virginia Woolf (vol. II):

"And if we didn't live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, & trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic & aged."

I came here to prove that she was not indeed "mad" but saner than the "sane" who diagnosed her as such: here it is in one line.

Reading more & more of her life, I am increasingly in love with this woman & the way she lived her life.

House dreams

2007-05-16T23:36:00.000+01:00

For anyone who still checks here after my long hiatus:

Yes, another few house dreams. I've neglected writing it down for quite some time...but I'm having trouble picking through some other writing tonight, and I've shamefully neglected this blog, so here it is, if not in full detail...(because I owe myself some sort of writing tonight):

It was a house in the country-side of Greece in this dream; a low, single-storied & single-roomed stone house, warm with sun on its smooth weather-worn outside, cool and clean on the inside. Hard-packed dirt floors, and windows - all but one - with no glass: windows that were cut into the inches-thick stone and on whose stone-dry sills the sun was hot. In this house, my friend Neil (from tango) & I ran a printing press (I have been reading the diaries of Virginia Woolf, and so the Hogarth Press is much on my mind, among other things; with these latest house dreams have come dreams of wars in which I am killed & wake before my body falls). We worked in silence there: a compatible, content silence as we set the type by hand with tired but happy fingers.

Until, as always, the "seizure" came - this time, the classic mob with torches & pitchforks. Oddly, people I haven't seen, haven't thought about in ages. Years. But before they came, their words came. Words they had spoken about me back then, and in the meantime, and words that they drove ahead of them now. Hateful scrawls materialized on the walls of my home, even etched themselves into the glass of our one glass window, heralding my attackers' ambush.

In the beginning, they came one by one, appearing in this corner of the room, at that window, along this path outside, until there was no avoiding any of them. And finally, along the main road, I saw the mass of the people moving, a sinuous black snake winding down the red-brown sun-glazed road, cutting through the yellow-green fields. Panicked, I ran to Neil, who stood outside the house, who did not know these people nor at first understand their ominous significance. In our silence, which we still kept, I could not explain - only threw myself against his chest, his white shirt blinding in the sun. And the crowd surrounded us - he wrapped one arm around my back, and beat them back with the other until there was nothing left but to run, to abandon our stone house & printing press. We ran to the field behind the house - he ran behind me, and with one hand, pushed on my back, pushing me faster and faster until he himself couldn't keep up, and fell behind. But in our silence, I knew this was what he intended.

Strangely (as it happens in dreams), I understood the University of IL to be only a few hours' run through this field, and I understood that if I could get to campus, or even more specifically, if I could get to the Lieberman North Star sculpture on the engineering quad (the sculpture I went to so often when my own was finally defunct), I would be safe. But it would take hours, even running; it would be dark by then. I had to call...someone - and I had a mobile (which, incidentally, in real life, I had only just got that weekend).

So I made my "911" call, still running even as I dialed his number. I first asked how he was. Fine. I asked if he was still with his father (in the dream, it was Father's Day). No, not anymore. I asked if he could come pick me up and bring me to the sculpture (not asking if he would sit with me at its base, which I needed to feel even safer...). A long silence, during which I slowed, stopped, out of breath. "I don't think that would be a good idea." Without a goodbye, I hung up and simply began running again. At which point I woke up.

And another dream, which I had before that, but only remember a fragment of (but really, the most important bit I think):

I was in what I instinctively knew to be my new kitchen in Irvine. I stood barefoot in the unlit room alone with one box, and was unpacking one by one plates of all different colors - hefty, solid, "real" - plates, and then stacking them one by one in the cupboard above me. Doing this gave me a sense of not only filling my home, but somehow, of filling myself. Not my body, but my self. Stacking these plates, slowly, evenly, one by one - I was happy. This - this - was peace, I knew.

I drooled on the Queen's couch...

2007-03-28T10:20:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, as you all know if you read the last post, I met the Queen of England at a reception at Buckingham Palace. I have to admit, I felt pretty bad-ass walking THROUGH all of the tourists crowded in front of the gates, taking pictures through their thick black iron bars, and presenting my security passes (except, of course, I nearly couldn't find one in my enormous Mary-Poppins bag & almost had to turn around and walk back out, but luckily, it was caught in the cover of a book), to walk through those gates to the palace beyond. And then at the door of the palace, it was more security, and then more, and then the coat check - and that's when I knew I was "in."

And then it was time to chill for an hour or so in the Red Room (State Room) while we waited for the Queen. I met a woman who actually grew up in Irvine (SMALL WORLD!), so she told me a bit about my future home, and I chilled a little with my Fulbright homies (and Ray managed to say both "fuck" and "hell" in Buckingham; nice job) who were both suitably impressed by my borrowed dress "Stop staring, Ray...stop staring..." Shout out, Jess!), and then we were all called to line up in the White and Gold Room & shake hands with HRH - who wore a GLOVE, MJ-style, on only one hand, to shake hands with us. No, not even a GLOVE, because that's just not enough barrier, but a big black mitten. And then, it was back to chill in the Picture Gallery (the woman owns about 14 Rembrandts...but what I want to know is: where is she hiding all the modern art?!)....

....where I had a seizure. So, I was talking to one of the Buckingham Palace aids who was there for crowd control, and she was pretty young, and really interesting, until....I started to feel that weird derealization, at first thinking it was just Freud's entfremdungsgefuhl, you know, that I just couldn't believe I was standing in Buckingham Palace (that article, by the way, changed my LIFE) - but then the pulsing in my head began, and the conversation in the room was suddenly deafening to me, and I was dizzy and out of breath and my heart was pounding and, "I'm sorry to do this to you on your first day (that's right, it was the poor girl's first day on the job) but I'm going to have a seizure; I need to sit down," I told the aid. So she led me over to a couch that had to be over 100 years old, where I started to black out...and so drooled all over my leg & said couch (have I mentioned yet that it was white and kind of satiny?)...and then spilled my champagne glass of water onto the floor (luckily I had been drinking only water all night for fear of spilling worse on The Dress - shout out again, Jess!). I vaguely remember the aid beginning to lead me out of the room, and apparently (I didn't put two and two together until later) this other aid I had been talking to had gone to get the Palace Nurse, so the next thing I remember is sitting alone in a room with "my" aid, the Queen's Nurse, and about 5 other medical personnel. And some random guy. And what's the first thing I say when they ask me, "How are you feeling?" Answer: "Can I go back now?" They asked me a few other standard questions ("Does this happen often?" "What's your name?" "Do you know where you are?"), but then, the nurse, laughing, says to the other personnel: "She just wants to go back to the party!" And to me: "Don't you?" "Yeah I do!" Big grin. :) (Flatmate Sari says: "You made a MARK!")

And so they let me go back, where I had a brief conversation with HRH; met my new husband; and may have landed myself a guest role on a TV series that's in the works.

HRH: She basically asks you a rapid series of questions, most of which can be answered by a "yes" or "no," and then when she's done with you, turns and leaves, whether or not you've answered her last question (which I had not...). This is how our "talk" went: "So you're a student here?" "Yes." "And you study at...[peering at my name badge]...Sussex?" "Yes; I'm a Fulbrighter there." "Oh, a Fulbrighter [with approval]...What do you study?" "English literature." Long silence; blank expression, until: "There are quite a few of you Fulbrighters here tonight..." "Yes, there--" And she walks away. Should I feel dissed? I don't know how I feel about that long silence after I told her I study literature. ;) But at least she didn't make the face she made after Diep told her he's studying medical policy and NHS (which was a face of absolute disgust).

And then, my new husband: I saw this guy who had to be nearly 70, wearing the same HUGE black, thick-framed plastic glasses Larry David's dad wears on Curb Your Enthusiasm, which, appropriately as we will see, was the reason I started talking to him. As soon as I approach him: "Darling, you're a-DOR-able!" he tells me. I told him he was full of it (which he loved) and asked him what he did. Turns out, he's a TV producer who spends his time between LA and London. He asked me if I'd ever seen Curb, and I said I loved the show, and the whole reason I approached him was because his glasses looked like Larry's dad's. He said the guy stole the look from him (full of it!), but that he was actually working on a show with a similar concept, all about one socially-inept guy's life (in this case, him). While we're talking, this other TV producer approaches to start talking to Chuck, who introduces me to producer #2 as his WIFE. So what do I do? Play along. Oh yes, we've been married only a couple of weeks. Interrupted our honeymoon in Fiji to come to Buckingham. Met in LA. Etc. After all this, Chuck decides I'm okay, and says maybe I can have a guest appearance on one episode of his show. I say I'm moving to Irvine in the fall, and he says "perfect", they're doing some of their filming in LA, and then he hands over his card. We'll see how it goes.

Oh yes, and I may have dropped a sprig of something or other off one of my salmon rolls...and that was before the seizure, so we can just chalk it up to my usual clutziness. So there. ;)

Questions for the Queen

2007-03-25T02:08:00.000+01:00

Questions I've been asked to put to the Queen:

1) Say, "Hey, Lizzie!" from Jess.
2) Say, "What up, be-yatch?" from Nic.
3) Say, "Thanks for getting the fuck out of Jamaica," again, Jess.
4) Say, "Do you dance the tango?" From the dancers & More.

So, mostly I'm just scared to meet her & will likely not ask her ANYthing, let alone any of the above. Apparently, we're not allowed to wear black nor speak to her first (even if she approaches you!) nor a number of other terrifying rules...scary.

Oh yeah, did I mention I was invited to Buckingham for cocktails by the Queen & the Duke of Edinburgh? If anyone has any real questions to ask, blog me. ;) Although really, I'm just more curious to watch how she interacts with everyone...

Worth waking up to.../Happy New Year

2007-02-17T14:56:00.000Z

What they call a "deep dark secret": sometimes, I get discouraged. Yes, despite my wild love for my work, it sometimes happens, after days of solid work, when I haven't showered; grocery-shopped; nor even sometimes left the flat for more than a few minutes at a time, and then only to run outside to pick up the food I've ordered in (the delivery boys at Viceroy of India down the street know me by now); when I've gone cross-eyed reading (I literally lost the ability to focus last night for nearly twenty minutes); after I finally set it all aside for a moment before falling into fitful sleep and realize that these hours upon hours have made little or no dent in what I have left to do - sometimes, I get discouraged. And then, guilt follows: how, how do I justify letting myself get discouraged when I am living that long-worked-for goal? And then shame... And then, if I'm lucky, after tossing and turning, then sleep. Last night was one of these particularly hard nights - after days of meetings, relentless (if thoroughly, deeply satisfying) reading (from Woolf to Kristeva to Joyce), and of course, writing...all incredibly invigorating, but then last night - I realized that regardless of how much I've done in the last 5 days, I only had 2 days to get through twice as much more before my classes on Monday. Finally too tired to keep reading, I spent some quality time with Jess & Efua, playing patience on the floor of Efua's room, waiting for my body to unwind before I put it to bed (if not my mind)...this was our Friday night. Early in the a.m., a seizure woke me up (incredibly disheartening after the optimism of a 3-day streak seizure-free, a relief from the daily or twice-daily spells I've been suffering from since shortly before visiting the States in December); I ended up sleeping right up until my alarm went off at 9:30 (usually I wake up naturally by 8ish, which, with a sufficient side of coffee, is far more conducive to Kristeva; Woolf I like after lunch, reading her at the time of day when she wrote her letters...). Even with that extra bit of sleep, the seizure had left me shaky; I was slow getting out of bed, unsure if I could do it without another attack. But of course, we can't spend our days in bed, so I got up to check my email, of which there were 70 to sift through (Penn call for papers...)...one of which:

My first grad acceptance has come. Univ. of CA at Irvine. And they're willing to fight for me; they'd like to know what my other offers are (hopefully more will come) so that they can "negotiate" with me. More, they've offered to reimburse my travel expenses & put me in a hotel if I'd like to visit in March (which I will only do if they'll let me push up the date; otherwise, I'll be missing part of Rasheed's visit). Wow. This comes as such a relief - I have a place somewhere this fall - and is so humbling at the same time - have I done this? And after all of the work...what a reward.

To celebrate (and to get me out of the flat), Jess took me out for breakfast - specifically to the same table at the same Starbucks for the same drink as when I had my first moment of "waiting for grad acceptances" panic just a week ago. And what a beautiful morning: the sun was beaming on calm waves; the air, mild - warm, even; my latte & cinnamon roll, deliciously decadent (there are not enough "l's" within my momentarily limited reach (caffeine slump) to describe it, to make my tongue as happy pronouncing it as it was tasting it...); the people, easy and laughing - I saw a man playing the tuba on stilts in the Lanes, and this made me exorbitantly giddy - certainly worth the 20p I threw in the upturned hat lying at his "feet." We stopped in Jess's favorite chemist's (Boots) & then her favorite home store, where we drooled over the kitchen supplies (tea pots! coffee machines!) we can't afford to put in our non-existant houses. And finally, the Body Shop, where I treated myself to some hand cream (it's made out of hemp!), though in my defense, I had run out, and I have little cuts all over my knuckles where the skin dries and cracks...

And now, though I have come home to get back to work (and much invigorated!), I've realized, it's not over - far from. Tonight is the Eve of the Chinese New Year, the year of the pig. And I'm the pig. Already, it's my year (and a few of my flatmates & friends! In the words of Jess: "The rut is over!"). Tonight we go out to dinner for more celebration, both of the new year, and now, in my heart, of my first acceptance. Worth waking up to what? Life (the present in general, and Virginia Woolf's and Roger Fry's, whose I'm currently working through), the Lanes (and a man on stilts playing the tuba), a New Year!

Addendum

2007-02-11T00:21:00.000Z

I know that I'm bordering on redundancy of the worst kind (focusing on such a trivial matter), but I wanted to recall another moment of 'muff magic (because sometimes it's really the little things that count):

Once, just before the holidays, I was waiting for the bus. It was pretty late at night, cold, and I was alone, shivering. On top of that, I didn't have bus fare - I had a twenty pound note, but the bus doesn't take 20s, and all of the shops were closed, so I couldn't change it. A mother with her little boy stood at the other end of the stop, he gripping her hand and leaning against her knee, braced against the wind. I glanced at them, but didn't give them much else attention until: "Mama, MA-ma! I've seen her! Look! Look! I've seen Santa's elf!" The bus pulled up. He jumped up and down pointing at me. I started, bewildered - ah-ha...the muffs. The bus door opened; I shot the boy an elfish? smile, leapt on amidst cries of "Santa's elf!", proffered my twenty to the driver. He gave me a grin - "We don't take twenties - just go 'head an' sit" - and the door swooshed shut behind me.

Such was the magic of the muffs (in a time when we need more magic, which perhaps explains [if it doesn't quite excuse] my preoccupation with their passing).

Elegy for lost earmuffs

2007-02-08T13:40:00.000Z

Yesterday, my big fluffy white earmuffs broke...(I would never actually "lose" them, like at the supermaket or something). No, I was putting them on, and *snap* over my head, the band broke at its center.

My earmuffs...they were by no means one of a kind, not at all unique. No, we picked up one day at the Gap, my earmuffs, myself, and a pair of furry gloves. And ever since, my earmuffs and I have been inseparable - they've been with me back and forth over the Atlantic (and suffered an exploding pen situation on this most recent trip...loyal to the last, I wore them still, blue ink stains and all); they saw London for the first time with me, and Portland, OR; and finally, their ultimate resting-place, Brighton.

They were by no means unique, but they were my own, they were my trademark. They won compliments and comments and the occasional beep of a horn from complete strangers on the street; smiles from the overworked women who rang up my groceries at Marks&Spencer; drinks from lonely old men in pubs; jokes, hugs, and cuddling from those who knew me best ("You know those aren't legal in England?" prompted one professor). Walking home from tango one night with my friend Korhan - he looked away for a moment; I put on the earmuffs; he turned back to respond to some question of mine, saw the muffs, and burst out laughing, mid-sentence. "Now that was a moment!" I can't say it any better than he did that night. Such was the magic of the muffs. They had a life of their own, spirit.

And then that terrible, gut-wrenching *snap* over my head yesterday afternoon. The logical thing to do was to throw them away, right? No sense regretting irrevocably lost ties. They looked so sad and lifeless in the rubbish bin, like a small furry animal. I left them there for the day, left for campus. I came home that night, ate dinner. But when I tossed my banana peel away on top of them, it was too much, and I had to retrieve them. Such is our current condition: they lie mangled on my desk, leaving my ears cold in the weather here that's suddenly decided for the first time all winter to actually hit zero (celsius).

My poor lost muffs. What is there to do but lament your passing? (And start shopping for hats...there will never be muffs like you again.)

Preggers

2007-02-07T13:35:00.000Z

Recently, a new kind of dream (though I did dream a house-dream not too much previously; I was cleaning out my house/body, and in it, caught a bird whose warm soft body I held protectively in my hand, sensing I for some reason needed to shelter this being). A few nights ago, I dreamt that I was back at my parents' house, though it did not look like their house actually does - it was rather a log cabin, or lodge - thus is the logic of dreams. My friend Raymond was visiting me there, wearing for some reason fur. In this dream, we were closer friends than we actually are in reality; he sat with me in my bed, and I cozied up to his furs. First, he told me his own good news: that he had won another international study abroad grant (he's a fellow Fulbrighter), and that he was planning to study in Ottowa. He pointed it out to me on a map I had on my log-wall, though, and the place he pointed out to me does not actually exist, was some strange liminal land stranded between Canada and Greenland, floating somehow. When his finger touched the map, I had an immediate mental image of snow-swept plains, caves. "Explains the fur," I thought. Then he told me my own good news: that I was going to get pregnant. "Fat chance!" I laughed at him. He insisted that I would. I doubted my brash response...

In dreams, pregnancy doesn't necessarily mean pregnancy. Rather, it is the birth of something new, a new opportunity, a gift. A pregnancy dream is something to be excited about. Why, then, did I laugh? Was there some embittered part of my brain just conscious enough to deny me this dream? And why?

But the shakedown: on the same night, my friend Shadie dreamt that I was pregnant. So perhaps I am expecting...what? Something new; something big? There's a lot I have in the air right now, both new and big.

Katie Mitchell's The Waves

2007-02-06T17:56:00.000Z

Last night, I saw Katie Mitchell's stage adaptation of Woolf's The Waves at the National Theatre (they're running two more shows, Thurs. and Fri., for any of my local readers who have interest). Brilliant - a hybrid of narrative, theatre, and film. A narrator (Woolf herself, perhaps? A husky-voiced woman hunched over a desk with a cigarette and a pen, pensive but assured - perhaps a cliche representation, but Mitchell used it well) read scenes from the novel itself, and from other Woolf works (I was able to identify a few things, journal entries, A Sketch of the Past - not all...but Woolf recycles so much, it's hard to tell at times); the actors performed; actors not involved in the action at hand filmed those who were, projecting the images onto a screen dropped over the stage. The simultaneity was intense - the action as a whole unfolding while the minutest detail unravelled in tandem behind it...each character, separate, but on stage finally together (perhaps how Woolf intended, cutting so quickly from character to character, embodying them as the six/seven sides of a single carnation at dinner...) and regarding the others' individual reactions to the death of Percival, detached, watching it only on screen. And finally (achieving first Paul Fort's and then Oscar Wilde's dream), Mitchell has (unwittingly perhaps) engaged all of the senses simultaneously (at least if you sat in the front row, like me)...voice & music & the clatter of dishes, footsteps & tap-dancing & laundry flapping; the actors, at once so real, juxtaposed with the acute, painful detail of flower petals afloat in a bowl, a face - open-eyed, breathing out - underwater, red fingernails, a letter-opener; cigarette smoke; an acrid explosion on my tongue - cigar smoke; and finally, dust beaten from the gravel one woman walked in, dust kicked up to land in my eye.

The narrative decision Mitchell makes at the end, however... I will leave this blank so as not to spoil the ending of the novel or play for anyone who intends to read/see them. But whoever wants to talk about it...

I didn't want to leave at the end. Conversely, I wanted nothing but to leave, and beat my way mercilessly through the crowd at the coat-check to finally win the cold empty night air. I'm glad I went alone to this play. I could not talk about it at first, and still cannot completely. I wished that no one would talk after these things - why fritter away the effect by positing opinions, chit-chatting lamely, posing pretentiously until you have had time to think about what you've seen? The south bank, alone with my footfall and the purple lights of the theatre and the oleaginous black gleam of the river, in a light rain, following a line of street lamps...it was relief. Walking to the theatre and back...I was so nostalgic for London & for memories there, wanted so much to live there again (meeting Shadie for dinner earlier, he'd commented: "You're so happy to be here!" I was...I love Brighton, but London will always be "my city," the closest to home I've come to so far). Then, to get on the near-empty tube and rock and sway back to Victoria station... I wasn't alone. I'm never alone in that city. (And it made me think again about Woolf, about The London Scene...but now I'm in circles.)

On forgiveness

2007-01-28T10:06:00.000Z

Last night, after all of my (really) hard-won years of experience, I dreamt that my brother I went back to...high school. That's right, high school:

And to add insult to injury, we had to take the bus - and almost missed it! We had to chase it down the street. It stopped and the driver let us on board, though. It was nearly empty, just my brother and I, Brett B., and a kid that I think moved away before we even started high school, Aaron R. And finally, in the very back corner and staring out the bus window, Christina, arms crossed over her chest, dark hair loose, looking like she always did.

There's a bit of history here. Christina had been one of my friends in high school and during the first two years of college. I adored her; she was one of the most unique (and funniest!) people I'd ever met, and I always had a blast hanging out with her. So when she decided to apply to U of I for art education, I jumped (maybe a little too high) to help her get in. She filled in her application. She was approved for a portfolio review, and came down to the school, where I helped set her up, paid for the locksmith when she locked her keys in her car, let her stay with me, and then found a place to store her art for the week in case she got an interview...which she did (which was no great surprise to me). The next week, again, I helped her out. And then, terrific news: after such an arduous process, she got in! And none too late, either: at U of I, property is rented out nearly a year in advance, usually starting in October. So Mish and I started looking for an apartment and a fourth roommate for the two of us and Christina. We found both - Nicole, another waterskier, bubbly, blonde, and easy to befriend, and a cheap 4 bedroom place about 6 blocks from the quad. So we all signed the lease. And then, something happened. Christina changed her mind about coming down to school, couldn't move in with us. I have a feeling that her dad perhaps was putting pressure on her to go to school in Alabama (where he was from) or else close to home (he in fact threatened to cut her off if she came to Illinois). She could, though, pay for the first two months of rent. In that time, we talked to everyone we knew to find a subletter; we posted fliers; we ran ad after ad in the paper, Christina paying for some, me using my free words I was given as part of my salary there as an "ad-visor," finally, me paying for some more. The room stood empty. No one. Finally, Christina couldn't pay anymore, and her dad wouldn't help her. Now Mish, Nicole, and I were indebted to the landlord for Christina's rent. We got together with our parents, tried to work out a way to split it up. Mish and Nicole (understandably) didn't want to take on Christina's responsibility. And I (naturally, having known her the longest) felt guilty for bringing in the person who would fail to make rent. It came down to this: either I pay for both my own and Christina's rent, or we bring it to court to require her to pay. A terrible position for anyone to be in, especially when it's your friend (a lesson since learned: friends and money don't mix). I was a full-time student working three part-time jobs, and I was becoming increasingly ill with what I didn't yet know were seizures caused by the tumor. I was tired. I couldn't work any more than I already was to make up for the deficit. I went to court with Mish and Nicole. If I had had the money, this would have been something I would regret. But here, there was no room for regret. Naturally, however, the situation spurred a strong reaction against me not only in Christina, but in many of our mutual friends, many people who have since stopped talking to me (but still not yet about me, I hear now and again).

I held on to it for a long time. I felt hurt, I felt backed into a corner and forced to hurt her back, which was the last thing I wanted. For years, I wanted the chance to somehow make her understand that it was never personal; it was money. I wanted to be forgiven, and the chance to forgive her.

And so last night, when I met her on a near-empty bus in a dream, I picked the slightly-sticky grey-green vinyl schoolbus seat next to her. She turned to me in anger, arms still crossed. "Wait," I asked, and held out my hand to her. She at first refused to shake it. I still held it out, past any length of human pride. Finally, she took it. I looked into her face, took everything in, knowing, perhaps, it was my only opportunity to do so. It was just as I remembered it, except for her earlobes, where she wore a pear of pearl earrings which I had never seen before. I asked her what she had been doing. And as she began to tell me, I realized, everything had worked out the way it should. Her life was so different now, and it was amazing - she had done everything from going bowling with the love of her life to working on a new comic book. As her list went on, I became happier and happier for her. And then, suddenly, in the middle of our forgiveness...

The fire alarm went off in my building. At first, it was part of the dream, reverberating down the tin-can walls and windows of the bus - Christina and I broke apart, looking up and down the bus instead. And then I woke up, but didn't bother getting out of bed. I listened to Shadie (my houseguest here for a film shoot) snore through a few more seconds of it, and when he woke up, I told him it would shut off in a minute, that there was no point in getting up. And true, after a few more seconds, it was again quiet. A door slammed somewhere in the building. Shadie began snoring again after another minute. But it was a long time before I slept again.

I had a seizure when I woke up again this morning (they're still out of control), but after that, I felt good. More and more, after getting rolled earlier in the fall, hope is coming back.

God's blessings

2007-01-19T18:05:00.000Z

Today, in Victoria station, a bird shat on my head - no, more than my head, my face, from the side of which it dribbled onto the arm of my coat...

I told my roommates + honorary member Mike about it (all for a laugh), and these are their various responses:

1) He was aiming for you! (Mike)

2) It's good luck. Now your day can only go up. (Majidah)

3) Fuuuuck...! Shiiit! ("Yeah, that's exactly what it was.") In my country, they say that this is good luck. This happened to me once, and my friend said so. And I say, well, you can have this luck then. (Ivo)

4) It's God's blessings. ("Why?" "I don't know...it's just what they say.") (Efua)

Well, if God wants to rain His blessings on my head (or my face), I say: "Bring it on."

And math has the last laugh...

2007-01-14T11:13:00.000Z

Turns out, I do need high school algebra (but then, I am using it to explain the concept of the treasure map as related to "plot" [the action of the novel and charting of the map] in Dumas, Stevenson, and Joyce - so it IS for literature!)...

New dating & marriage technique:

I will marry the first man (or woman) who can tell me the NAME of this algebraic theory:

if a = b, and b = c, then a = c.

Term paper crunch

2007-01-13T19:43:00.000Z

Two days 'til deadline.

1 grande sugar-free vanilla soya latte + empty stomach = 4 hours and 1000 words of sheer brilliance.

Repeat as necessary.

Still around...

2007-01-11T17:23:00.000Z

For those who might still occasionally check here: yep, still around. Just slightly (really) stressed out....two term papers due Monday, then forum in London, then speech at Stowe (where two Harvard fellows will be in attendance - did not know about that when I agreed to this talk...).

But, my moment of total happiness today: walking home from Taj, took a random alley all the way down to the sea, so I could walk along the shore the rest of the way to the flat. Real movie-set type of alley: barred windows, blank brick walls, dumpsters, a sketchy van or two. But I met a cat along the way, really friendly, I think a little attention starved, thick hard body. Butted his heavy head against my hand when I stooped to scratch his ears. I was sorry to leave him, "poor slob without a name."

I will marry the first person who can tell me where that line is from without looking it up first...

P.S. Beetroot chips are the BEST.

Term paper time

2006-12-14T11:19:00.000Z

The first sign:

The contents of my kitchen table:
Laptop
Several books
Assorted papers and notebooks
Ditto pens
The Economist
1 jar of Nutella + spoon (JUST a spoon; nothing to spread it onto)

The second sign:

Today, my soy milk had chunks in it when I poured it over my delicious wheat bisks & blueberries (the first real breakfast I have had since last Friday). I picked out the bigger chunks and ate it anyway.

Morning view from my kitchen window

2006-11-11T11:21:00.000Z

Nights, Brighton pier - glittering and glamorous, carnival rides flying wild, lights and people blaring -

The morning after - a shapeless shadow:

dark hulk of trash heavy on the sun-glazed blazing gray waves;
a careless heap of sticks, the pier; empty eaten-out paper take-away cartons, its amusements.

Only a pair of white lights glare from its center, venomous, unblinking, set to scurry dirtily away.

A colorful quartet of sun-lit sailboats glide in a line to the hoizon behind -

Sunset on the sea

2006-11-06T16:37:00.000Z

Today, walking east down Kings Road on my way home from Taj (one of my new favorite grocery stores; they've got my miso paste for miso soup), I saw something beautiful: two women, pulled over to the side of the road, outside of their car, facing west. I noticed only the driver first: her sunglasses pushed up onto curly hair; her long, straight nose. And she raised her arm - her jacket slipped down her arm, and her wrist and hand and fingers were long and straight as well - a beautiful gesture, like the beginning of a dance, and then a pause.

I stopped walking and turned to the west as well. And there, the sun was setting over the sea - flames of pink spiraling out from the sun; a flock of birds, massing, rotating, black pepper over the sun; and the ships, smoke-blue ghosts on the horizon.

Relaxing a bit

2006-10-21T14:20:00.000+01:00

So, usually I never give myself the time to indulge myself in these things, but I was tempted this time (especially since Rasheed & I are waiting for the rain to stop its downpour before we head to Apostrophe cafe for their amaaaazing green tea & more of Lawrence's Women in Love)...

1. FIRST NAME? Tessa

2. WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE? Nope.

3. WHEN DID YOU LAST CRY? Last Sunday night (early Monday morning) at 1 a.m., doing more of that brain tumor research that you have to do, but hate to. Did you know that 50% of surgically treated lesions will recur & do so malignantly? Yeah, I sure as hell didn't.

4. DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING? Yep.

5. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE LUNCHMEAT? Ew.

6. IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH YOU? I think so.

7. DO YOU HAVE A JOURNAL? This blog, and another written journal (which I've shamefully neglected in favour of this blog...)

8. DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR TONSILS? Yep.

9. WOULD YOU BUNGEE JUMP? Oof - don't think so...

10. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE CEREAL? Marks & Spencer Deliciously Nutty Crunch. MMM.

11. DO YOU UNTIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF? Waste of time!

12. DO YOU THINK YOU ARE STRONG? More than I'd like to be.

13. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE ICE CREAM FLAVOR? Don't eat ice cream; too much sugar. Though when I did eat ice cream, any variety of chocolate floated my boat!

14. SHOE SIZE? Anywhere from 6 to 8, depending on the brand of shoes.

15. RED OR PINK? Oooohh...BOTH.

16. WHAT IS THE LEAST FAVORITE THING ABOUT YOURSELF? Workaholic.

17. WHO DO YOU MISS THE MOST? Lots of people...Mish, the Wall, D-Shof...lots of people.

18. DO YOU WANT EVERYONE TO SEND THIS BACK TO YOU? Well, it's a blog, so they can't send it...but if you want to copy & paste into email & send it to me with your own answers, I'll take it!

19. WHAT COLOR PANTS, SHIRT AND SHOES ARE YOU WEARING? "Sex Out Loud" T-shirt (hot pink); Rasheed's shorts (yellow plaid). No shoes.

20. LAST THING YOU ATE? My new favorite salad: amazingly tasty and healthy! Everyone try it! Brussels sprouts, steamed and quartered. Red onions, sliced & lightly sauteed in olive oil. Toss with walnuts, feta cheese & then dress with olive oil & balsamic vinegar. Mmmm.

21. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW? Rain, and the sound of Rasheed's palms sliding across his prayer rug as he does his mid-day.

22. IF YOU WERE A CRAYON, WHAT COLOR WOULD YOU BE? Pink?

23. FAVORITE SMELL? Citrus in the summer; vanilla in the winter...spicy stuff in the fall (cinnamon, etc), and in the spring...honeydew.

24. WHO WAS THE LAST PERSON YOU TALKED TO ON THE PHONE? I don't own a phone...

25. THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ABOUT PEOPLE YOU ARE ATTRACTED TO? Eyes.

26. DO YOU LIKE THE PERSON WHO SENT YOU THIS? She didn't send it (I stole it off her blog), but yeah I do!

27. FAVORITE DRINK? Tea: green. Or herbal infusions: lemon & ginger.

28. FAVORITE SPORT? Dance.

29. EYE COLOR? Blue.

30. HAT SIZE? Umm...

31. DO YOU WEAR CONTACTS? Yep.

32. FAVORITE FOOD? All kinds! Right now...kalimata olives.

33. SCARY MOVIES OR HAPPY ENDINGS? Happy.

35. SUMMER OR WINTER? Whatever season I happen to be in.

36. HUGS OR KISSES? I want it all! At once, preferably!

37. FAVORITE DESSERT? Pumpkin pie!!

38. WHO IS MOST LIKELY TO RESPOND? Probably Cheryl & Holly, my two best responders. :) Love to hear what you have to say, ladies!

39. LEAST LIKELY TO RESPOND? Anyone else who may or may not read this.

40. WHAT BOOKS ARE YOU READING? Women in Love (Lawrence), Salome (Wilde), The Yellow 90s (Jackson), The London Scene (Woolf).

41. WHAT'S ON YOUR MOUSE Pad? No mouse - laptop.

42. WHAT DID YOU WATCH LAST NIGHT ON TV? A Taste of Cherry, this Iranian film about a man who wants to commit suicide & is searching for someone who will agree to bury him afterwards - it ended....irresolutely. Someone else see this and tell me what you think!

43. FAVORITE SOUNDS? Rain. Otters (especially one little otter) barking. The sound of my feet - running or dancing. Or even more, the sound of tens and tens of dancers on a wood floor!

44. ROLLING STONE OR BEATLES? Beatles.

45. THE FURTHEST YOU'VE BEEN FROM HOME? Budapest.

46. WHAT'S YOUR SPECIAL TALENT? It's hard to decide for myself without sounding egotistical. Writing, I guess. Dancing, I hope.

47. WHERE WERE YOU BORN? Rockford, IL, St. Anthony's hospital. Where was I reborn? Same place. :)

48. WHO SENT THIS TO YOU? I stole it from WoollyMutts.

Talking to strangers

2006-10-16T16:49:00.000+01:00

The other day, sitting in the sun-warm window of a cafe, reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness for the third time (made even better by having just finished The Secret Agent!), I met, or rather, encountered, as she neither introduced herself nor inquired the names of any of her listeners, the most exquisite older woman.

At the start, it was just she and I. I sat down in the window - so bright I needed to wear my sunglasses to be able to read with the sun's glare on my book - and she immediately followed, stooping to ask if the seat across from my table was taken. Being empty, she put a glove - black, well-stitched, neat and small, like the rest of her, as you'll see - across it, and went to fetch a bottle of water and her drink - something clear and effervescent, appropriately, perhaps Italian soda. She was moving from another table.

At first, she simply stared out the window, directly into the sun. I kept my book open, but actually watched her, glad I had kept my sunglasses on so that she wouldn't notice I stared. She was beautiful: clear, nearly translucent blue eyes, made more so by the light; clear, nearly taut skin; weightless waves of white hair floating impeccably-shaped around her face, but thinning so that I could see her pink scalp in many places; a perfectly-cut black blazer, black skirt, turquoise blouse & one of those old Victorian brooches, and a long necklace, actually a heart-shaped stone suspended by a black cord. Finally, black stockings, knit like lace, ending in small black shoes, neatly laced and tied in tight bows. She sat like a girl, bony knees knocked together, heels out; but hands clasped properly on her lap. She didn't touch her drink, but only stared out the window. I didn't touch my book, but only stared at her.

Finally, a middle-aged mother with a baby boy and a teenaged girl came in and sat. The woman's face immediately lit up at the sight of the boy, and she began asking the mother questions about him, deducing, for example, from his hand-knit sweater that he was obviously well-cared for. Then, she began to talk. "I had two of my own," she explained. Had? The verb struck me. I wondered if she had outlived them. And later: "When my husband passed" - I studied her white hair, such a sign of age, but her skin - still so smooth - she couldn't have been any older than her late 60s at the most. But what made her seem most tragic was her loneliness, that she would approach these strangers, not even pretend to simply stumble happily upon us, but that she would reach out to us so deliberately to talk about her family and her life.

Mostly, she talked about her grandmother, who was Irish and had 14 children. This was a conversation that I was left out of, but mostly, I was glad to listen. The mother next to me, though, was able to comment here and there. Her teenaged daughter smiled once or twice at her mom's allusions to her babyhood. As the woman talked, she drank, first the soda, and then the water. And as if it were an hourglass, her time to talk ran out with the liquid. Upon finishing the water, she put the bottle in the plastic soda cup: the conversation was over. She said her goodbyes and left the cafe. "She was sweet," the mother murmured to her daughter, who replied unintelligibly.

The woman, out on the street now, threw away the bottle & cup, and continued on. As she walked, I noticed that her stockings had one very round hole - not even a run - but one hole on the back of her leg where her skin showed - glowing white in the sun - through her otherwise perfect dress.

I think I liked her best for this.

Supermarket kindness

2006-10-12T11:24:00.000+01:00

I meant to write about this a few days ago:

On my way home from class the other day, I stopped by Marks & Spencer to do my grocery shopping; I had 22 pounds cash - no credit card (why I didn't bring my credit card with me that day is still a mystery). Since the tumor, I've always grocery shopped with a credit card - that way, I don't stress out about the money I'm spending on healthy food (especially those fruits & veg that are loooaded with antioxidants & all sorts of goodies). B.T. (Before Tumor), I used to force myself to shop only with a limited amount of cash as a money-saving strategy (my junior year, I made 1 box of macaroni & cheese, 1 can of tuna, and 1 cup of peas [all cooked together] last for 4 meals; and I did it almost weekly - I'm serious). This was obviously unhealthy from a nutritional standpoint (but who of us hasn't been here?). Also from a mental-health perspective: grocery-shopping used to be a terror, counting numbers in my head, white-knuckling the handle of my food-basket, putting away fruits and veg, other healthy delicious things as if I were punishing myself. I used to leave the store sweating.

A.T., I promised myself that I wouldn't compromise my health (mental & otherwise) in this way anymore. I determined to always shop with a credit card, and to spend the most money in the produce section. And since then, I've nearly always hit my 6-8 servings of fruit & veg daily. Since then, I've learned how to breathe again in supermarkets.

The other day, then, shopping without plastic - it brought back those days. Standing in the produce section, staring at the prices, grasping my basket against my belly, I was determined by mental power alone to will the numbers to add up, to still get my fruits & veg (and milk and juice and cheese and chicken for dinner that night and the next and the next) for under 22 quid.

And I nearly did. Standing in line for checkout, I began to wonder, sweat, as I surveyed my goods. An older man, gray-haired, stooped, blue flannel-clad like my dad by November and wearing thick glasses, got in line behind me, and I put one of the plastic dividers on the conveyor belt behind my things for him. "Thanks! You know, you're the first person I've seen do that here!" He exclaimed. "Really?" I was surprised; this is just something I always do; I thought it was just what you did in line.

Then it was my turn. I instantly liked Margaret, the middle-aged woman scanning the groceries. She noticed the cotton bag I use to carry my groceries home in (save plastic!), and asked where I got it (it sported a photo of James Joyce...), and then cunningly pointed out the reusable grocery bags that M & S sells. She asked about my accent, where I was from. "Chicago area," I answered. "Really? Your accent isn't that strong!" She then went on to confide in me that the checker one aisle over was French-Canadian, and his accent was really strong - I liked that I was in on the gossip.

But I didn't make it - the total hit 25 pounds and some pence. My face got hot. I'd gotten rusty since those days of mac & cheese. "Uh, I guess take out the eggs. I don't have quite enough on me." "You can use credit cards here, honey." "Oh, I don't have it with me." "That's no problem then, we do this all the time." I was sweating now; the line lengthened interminably behind me. The eggs didn't get me low enough. "Uh, the apples, too. Guess I was shopping hungry." I tried to laugh. "Oh, we all do sometimes!" Margaret smiled at me and the man behind me for good measure. My total was low enough now; I paid, and began stuffing the rest of my groceries in my bag.

"Wait!" It was the older man behind me. "Wait, how much is it?" He asked Margaret, pointing to my waif-like eggs & apples left abandoned and sad alongside the till. "Not very much, only 3 pounds or so." "Let me pay for it! I'll buy 'em." My mouth literally dropped open. "No, no, it's okay," I grabbed my bag. "No, wait!" And he bought them for me. "Well, that's very nice," Margaret was beaming. "It is!" I jumped to agree. I wanted to hug the man; he shrunk from my American exuberance, but let me pat his arm - "Thank you!" "Are you a student 'ere?" He asked. "Uh huh!" "Not psychology?" "Uh...no." "Well, that's alright then!" He started laughing. "English?" "Actually, yeah!" "Well, that's good then! Literature?" "Uh huh!" "Well, that's great!" Shouting another thank -you over my shoulder, I fled the store, wondering how he knew I studied literature, forgetting in my grocery-line anxiety and ultimate relief that my bag sported James Joyce.

(And this made me remember another day, years ago, my first year at the Univ. of IL - one day during my first couple of weeks on campus, I was caught in a downpour on my walk home from class - a boy, a complete stranger, shared his umbrella with me. "Are you an English major?" He asked. "Yeah, how can you tell?" "You can always tell the English majors." I puzzled over this the entire walk home; and now, again..)

Living the sea; writing Virginia

2006-10-05T10:46:00.000+01:00

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

Virginia Woolf's The Waves begins with this description of the sea, of waves.

As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously.

The waves of each of her previous novels, beginning so particularly with the dark ocean-bottom currents that rock Rachel Vinrace of The Voyage Out, finally break on this novel.

Now, living on the sea, I begin to understand. The sea affects me; I begin to believe I hear it even in my dreams, though my window does not face it. I eat breakfast in the morning facing it. And every morning, its face is different. Every morning, I think more and more about how spending summers on the sea at St. Ives must have affected Woolf (or may I call her Virginia?).

She does not simply write about the sea: the sea is in her writing. It permeates her words - her writing, even the books themselves, rise and fall like waves. It is almost as if she were living the lives of waves. Within the books, there is a pushing, and a retreat...and the books themselves, there is To the Lighthouse, and then Orlando, as what Virginia called "a joke"; there is The Waves, followed by Flush, the biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog. There is a surge of creative power, followed by a hush of headache, voices, illness - until finally, she herself drowns, or, drowns herself, in the river Ouse. Just as so many have drowned before her - Rachel and Rhoda, the woman of Between the Acts, Woolf's own last act.

This is a pattern I had certainly noted previously, but never, until, even after a couple of weeks, actually living on the sea began to understand. I remember the first time I saw it - an hour outside of Portland, OR, Cannon Beach, my cousin Ann's wedding. I took pictures of it - picture after picture - the waves, cold and grey, kept changing, and I wanted to catch them all. The next time, Hawaii, at a conference. I went swimming in it, the day after the conference finished. Swimming against the waves, out to sea, out against the long-dead coral reef, a calcium-deposit like a bank of broken bones, like jagged teeth tearing at my feet and hands and knees as I scrambled over it. Then, to plunge into the deep unknown water on the other side to swim further still, swim until my arms and legs had gone numb, until I couldn't breathe, and had to let myself be carried back, floating, over the reef again, and then to where it was shallow enough to stand, to stand neck-deep, anyway, in the bath-warm water.

These earlier times, I glimpsed the effect of the sea, its ability to pull me out - out? - out of what? - rather, it pulled me in. It is an In.

And I stop. What is this inviting force?

Is this what she was pulled into? This is something I understand as well. Did the sea become discourse for her spells of depression, exhaustion?

This is the first time I have actually thought about what it might have been to make me keep swimming - this is the first time since then that I have remembered that sense of bordering on danger: "what would happen if I don't stop?" But there is the desire to continue -

And this is something I am too familiar with, that desire to push further, to succumb to that force, to follow the pull... I am not about to make a claim that I suffer from any sort of the depression that Virginia did. Of course not. But in the seizures, there is a similar pull. In the seizures during which I remain slightly coherent, but immobilized, except for the movement to grasp hold of someone or something. In the seizures during which I am aware of what is happening, what it feels like, but can do nothing about it. These are the seizures that act like riddles on my body, and I feel as if I only followed them a little further, a little deeper into myself, I would somehow solve it, there would be some answer there. And so I cease to fight it. I give myself up to it. And it feels like I imagine death will someday feel like. First, the yearning for it. Then, however, the pain sets in - hot and spreading from my tongue to my face across my scalp, making me believe I feel it in my brain itself, and down the entire left side of my body, a hot tingling sensation. Then, terror. But it is too late to fight. Then, I can only wait.

And I wonder: is this what it was for her? This desire? It is not weakness; it is willed. And she writes it, lives it, in the pull of the sea.

How lucky, I think to myself, that I live on the sea while I write her.

Henry James heroine

2006-10-04T14:37:00.000+01:00

So, during this time abroad, first in London, then Budapest, and now Brighton, a few of my professors have commented that I'm "living the life of a Henry James heroine!" I immediately thought of Isabel Archer, the somewhat naieve American who travels to England, France, Italy (but never Henrietta Stackpole, though perhaps I share her professionality!).

Then, in What Maisie Knew, I read:

"She was 'abroad' and she gave herself up to it, responded to it....Her vocation was to see the world and to thrill with enjoyment of the picture; she had grown older in five minutes....Literally in the course of an hour she found her initation...." (The Wordsworth Classics edition, p 141).

Aha. Yes, this is so much what I feel!

Just let me roast.

2006-10-03T10:31:00.000+01:00

Dignity. The last word that should come to your mind when thinking about university-owned housing. True, it was easier & cheaper than finding my own flat in Brighton. True, our flats are self-contained, and, for the most part, self-sustained. And there's that weekly cleaning service. It didn't seem like much of a sacrifice, then, that every now & then a pair of enthusiastic & charmingly British RAs barge into our flat to put up signs about floor meetings, pub crawls, etc (my non-attached female roommates come out of their rooms whenever they hear these male voices; makes me glad I came with my own!)...

Until the 9 a.m. fire drill. I was already awake (thank God), and getting my breakfast ready: I was hungry, and those scrambled eggs looked promising, I tell ya. The second that alarm hit its high wail, I knew it was a drill. So I did the smart thing, and turned off the stove, and took my pan off the burner (no sense setting off a fire alarm for real with breakfast-smoke). I already have a sweater and shoes on (just ask about the dirty carpet), so I just lock up my door & head out with my roommates (in various stages of sleepiness, with the exception of Evo [our one man], who had early class, and Efwah, who is still MIA). We get outside, then, only to be chastised by a woman holding a remote alarm trigger (the cause of the evil) for not making it out in less than three minutes (I'd like to add that I live on the 5th floor; or in the U.S., that'd be the 6th floor - that's a lotta stairs). "Should've just let me roast," I mutter sarcastically, not, I have to add, to the unappreciation of my similarly grumpy flatmates.

And when I get back upstairs, my eggs? Burnt. I eat them anyway, watching the sea, which I planned to write about this morning. It's calm today; yesterday, angry and gray and flinging its white frothy arms against the stones. I like its moods. So like a woman like me.

Writing (about) music

2006-09-29T22:52:00.000+01:00

Tonight, I am back up in London. Rasheed & I just got back from the BBC symphony orchestra - we saw them do Dvorak's Suite in A major, Jonathan Dove's Hojoki, An Account of My Hut (world premiere of it, beastly tenor [the music underneath was good, but the voice so distracting!], we won't talk any more about it), & finally, Beethoven's Symphony no. 3, "Eroica." All conducted by Jiri Belohlavek. Now that I've given proper credits...

It was stunning - but it is so hard to write (about) music; I can write painting or photography or sculpture or theatre - but music, I cannot write. It is perhaps the one thing for me that will not word itself (which likely explains my aversion to the Jonathan Dove piece - the narrative, completely unpoetic and borderline pedantic). And even listening to it, I listen to it visually. I notice all of the wrong things. This is what I "listened" to tonight:

The left hand of the conductor - flashing, lit up in just the right light, nearly as white as his cuff...

He didn't use a music stand on the Beethoven - maybe because he knew it so well? Plus, it gave him more room to get more into the music - he is one of those conductor's who gets bodily involved in the piece - arms waving, torso swooping and bending forward from the waist, shoulders hunching and suit bunching between them - when I saw him in profile, I saw that he mouthed the music, soft "b"s issuing from mute mumbling lips...

At one point, a stray clot of hair loosed itself from the wild gray-running-white bush from his head, maybe 3 or 4 strands thick, lit up by the light as it dropped to the floor past his rising falling arms...

And at one point, one of the moments I was so gripped by the music, and I smiled involuntarily, and the music drew my eyes and my whole attention to one point of the orchestra like it did again and again, and I caught sight of a violinist smiling that same involuntary, entirely pure sort of beam as he played...

And the woman behind him, young and blonde with a round face, also a violinist, soft pink flesh of her cheek folded onto the curve of the instrument, smiling again and again like that all throughout Beethoven, satisfied during the pauses, or completely unconsciously immersed in what she played...

A cellist, in concentration, pressing his tongue against the inside of his cheek...

And the first chair violinist - sweat sticking to the ends of his hair across his brow - sweat dark and wet and shining in the hair tucked behind his ears (while everyone else was dry; even the conductor had only a few drops across his forehead just above his eyebrows)...

And that same violinist, the curl of one single strand broken from his bow...

And the long knobbly knuckles of the bass player thumbing and finger-tipping and bowing with such long-limb'd ease.

I wanted a standing ovation tonight. I clapped and clapped while the sound of the clapping all around me thrilled something in my brain and I willed someone to stand up, to start it. Instead, I made eye contact with the first violinist - yes, we clap for you, I tried to make him understand, seeing his smile, the relieved smiles of the tongue-cellist and the joking between two other cellists as one readjusted the strap of her watch - this is my standing ovation - I clapped, pen still in hand, I will write for you.

Moving

2006-09-26T21:13:00.000+01:00

"I feel like I haven't been doing anything," I recently lamented to my friend Rannier. "Why haven't you been doing anything?" He asked. "Well, I've been moving and going to Fulbright meetings and getting stuff for the new flat." "Well, that's something," he answered (logically). But I haven't been getting any work done - a different kind of something. I haven't been reading much; I haven't worked on the Joyce paper since I've been back; today, I finally sat down and slogged through a bunch of administrative grad application details (necessary evils), but those never make me feel as if I've accomplished anything. And I haven't been writing. Even this, as I look at it, is clumsy and complaining.

Last night, however, I did have the chance to return to some of my Woolf work - she is such a restorative source of deep female power for me (like her own Mrs. Ramsay); during my Joyce work (as much as I really do enjoy it, he is so male), I have to return again and again to Woolf, even in small doses - Joyce is the "arid scimitar," "the egotistical man" (Woolf's Mr. Ramsay); he is the egoistic writer (with Eliot and Lawrence) which Woolf consciously tried to avoid being; and his Stephen Dedalus or maybe even Bloom, the egoistic modern antihero, wandering the desolate streets of postwar cities. I return to her as if to a fountain.

And last night, I returned to one of her biographies to be reminded of how hard moving sometimes is, even to places that you love, places that mean adventure and experience and life. I think that it is the literal unsettling that is hard. Back in London, Rasheed and I had not exactly a schedule, nor a pattern, but we just fell naturally into our days, writing and reading, going places, or he'd work at Oxfam, and I'd set up in a cafe nearby. Then, it was living out of my suitcases in D.C. for just under a week. Then, Illinois for just over a month, this time, living mostly out of laundry baskets. I never really got to settle there: not enough time, plus the medical upset (though I think I came close to comfortable, judging by how hard it was to say goodbye to people). And then back to London for just under a week, and now back down to Brighton (and back up to London this weekend!).

So I returned to her last night. Her work, too, suffered during moves, even the move from Richmond (the suburb where she felt so stifled) to London (that lively thriving city where she longed to be), which I read about last night (and which I think I might identify with, though I do like Brighton). She, too, ceased to write during these and other stressful times in her life (helpful to remember when I think about my own health situation; to remind myself that it's sometimes okay if I give myself an hour, a day, a half-week off).

So I will continue writing day by day, and it will become easy again. But I must write daily, work daily. ("Break myself back in," I told Rannier.)

[A fun note of a completely different tone: Sussex offers these really cheap open language courses - only 110 pounds for a 20-week course! - so I'm going to brush up on my Spanish! They might offer more in the spring and summer...think I could make a good start in French or Italian? So excited!]

Modigliani & His Models

2006-09-22T23:18:00.000+01:00

So today, I took advantage of my time in London to go to the Modigliani & His Models show at the Royal Academy of Arts (Fulbright stuff was good, too exhausting to write about again, though, and most of you were lucky to get the email!). It was small (only four rooms), but very rich - they even had one of his sculptures, and even some of his early portraits of Picasso & Juan Gris & other friends, painted when he first moved from Italy to Montparnasse in the early 1900s.

I was more engaged by his later works, however, not because they were more mature artistically (because really, a genius is a genius no matter how mature, so everything's good, right?), but because I was more interested in what was going on beneath them (not that the modern lifestyles of bohemian Parisian artists *doesn't* interest me...).

One painting that really intrigued me was a portrait of Lunia Czechowska, who was staying in the same house as Modigliani during WWI. Zboroski had brought Mod. to a house in the south of France when Paris was being bombed too heavily, to stay with him, his companion, and this other woman, Lunia. Mod. apparently became quite close to Lunia, and painted several portraits of her, including this one. When I look at it, the portrait, seems so self-possessed; and Lunia, so composed with her fan poised in midair. It is so still. Then, I read on the little info card next to the painting that Lunia was staying with Zb. while her husband was serving at the front. There is so little of the war in this painting - I immediately turned back to it, looking for any disturbance in its surface. Perhaps the red of the background? Maybe the bolder brushstrokes, not blended smooth?

And then I wondered: where was ANY of the turbulence of Modigliani's life in ANY of these paintings? This was painted in 1917. Many of the paintings that I most liked were painted between this time and 1919, about the time he died at the age of 35 from TB & alcohol (the path of so many Paris artistes-bohemes). But despite this, they all are so still; some, slightly melancholy (like this one), but never exposing any of the fin de siecle/wartime/modern angst that so many of his contemporaries showed in their use of lurid colors (I'm thinking Toulouse-Lautrec), fragmentation (like the cubism of his buddy Picasso, though I think you see some cubism in his portrait of Gris), or even impressionism. And it was this stoicism, I think, this ability to withhold artistic drama, that makes his later work so appeal to me.

Today, it begins

2006-09-17T16:26:00.000+01:00

This morning, as my alarm went off just a little too early (though far later than my 6:30 a.m. plan...), I was filled with an incredible sense of promise:

Today, it begins.

I just felt, overwhelmingly, that everything lies ahead of me.

Today, I am able to leave this house where I feel so stifled, just like I did growing up, just like I did throughout high school & during college breaks (my friend Shravan is right: when visiting your childhood home, limit it to a week; that's the longest you can stay without becoming a child again).

Today begins the Fulbright, Sussex; today, I am put back on the path.

Kindred (dancing) spirits

2006-09-15T19:32:00.000+01:00

For the last few weeks, my younger cousin, Cait, has been learning to swing dance with me. I invited her to come with me when I learned she was having kind of a rough time at home (but what 13-year-old doesn't?), and that she might sometimes feel kind of lonely. So I wanted to give her one of the greatest gifts I've relied on when I've been my loneliest: dance. It's something that she'll still be able to keep close even when I'm not around, back in the UK.

I often speak of having a dancing soul or spirit, and while many people interpret it this way, and while it certainly encompasses joyfulness and buoyancy, it cuts so much deeper that just this. There are many people who like or love to dance, and there are so many who are good at it, but then, there are a few who have what I think of as this dancing spirit, and these are the dancers who know that it is more than joy. Dancing is about pain, too, and loss; sometimes regret and forgiveness; love and melancholy - a single dance might be all of life concentrated. Dancing like this means feeling every moment of it so intensely that sometimes it threatens to be too much, almost so much that it makes you know that if death were to come to you at that moment, you might accept it. But not quite: it is a way of living on the edge. To dance with a dancing soul means you cannot live without the dance. I only began to really dance after my surgery; true, I had "been dancing" lots of times before that, but only after my surgery did I discover my dancing soul. Since then, I have discovered a couple of others: Elsie, Paul, perhaps Rannier.

Elsie is perhaps the truest dancing spirit I know. She used to dance when she was young - but then, married & had children, and ceased to dance. Now, a widow in her 80s, does she dance again, and probably like she never did before. Only after her husband died did she start dancing again, she told me. Listening to her talk about him, I know that they were one of those couples who were lucky to be very deeply in love. When she lost him, she went into a deep depression, and perhaps she still dips in and out of it - but the answer became dance. She lives in a tiny farmtown outside of Champaign, where all of the residents think she's crazy, this tiny old woman driving into the "big" city just to go dancing late at night! She dresses up, skirts and dancing shoes and lots of jewelry, and though (like me) she may not follow all of the really smooth moves, she always looks like she's having the time of her life on the floor! Some of my best dances have been with Elsie.

I first suspected Cait of having a dancing spirit after the first time she came to swing: my aunt/her Nana told me that as soon as she got in the car, she turned to Nana & declared: "Nana! I'm going to need some dancing shoes!" I told her that while she looked for her own, she could use a pair of mine, a light pair of ballet softshoes that I use when I think the dancing floor at any particular venue might be questionable. Over the past couple of weeks, I've watched her become more confident on the dance floor, dancing more & sitting with the "old people" (my aunt & mom) less. Last night, my aunt confided that the other night, she caught Cait sleeping in those dance shoes! When we said goodbye before I head back to England on Sunday, Cait returned my shoes. "Keep them," I told her. "Really?!" Excitement flashed across her face. "Just keep practicing!" I am so proud of her, this kindred spirit. (If I didn't do my own laundry, there are nights when I would have slept in my shoes, too!)

Decision

2006-09-13T07:06:00.000+01:00

I have decided to be unafraid.

Results

2006-09-06T22:07:00.000+01:00

So. Today I talked to my surgeon's nurse; he'll talk to me next Thursday, but she gave me some details today, about which I will update everyone here. Uh, so remember how my surgeon had said he got all of the tumor that summer, two summers ago, when I had the surgery? Turns out that he didn't actually. Because the pathology came back Grade 2 - still benign, but borderline - it meant that the tumor was still a free agent, I guess. I had taken it as: "Yay, he got it, and it was benign!!" Whereas it was actually: "Well, we got it, sort of - it could come back benign, or perhaps someday cancerous."

Well, it's come back. But, only by a fraction, thank God. It looks like I have another year's lease on life. Which means I get to do my Fulbright.

Which means I'd better stop wasting time not working because I'm panicking about these things, and better start writing like there's no tomorrow, 'cause really, how long do any of us really have?

Still waiting

2006-09-05T18:25:00.000+01:00

So I still wait to hear from my neurosurgeon. He is back in the office by now, but in surgery today. I might still hear from him (or more likely, one of the nurses/SAs) tonight, though. Maybe tomorrow. I'm terrified that he'll want an office visit, that this will mean hard news. Last time I had an MRI, it was just a phone call: "Your test results came back negative. Get another MRI done in a year and bring it to us." Every time I think about the possibility that he might want me to come in, I want to vomit. This time, I have so much to lose; I hate this gamble, and that it's a gamble I never chose.

It has thus been impossible (still) to work, which makes me feel even worse. Guilty (as if I don't deserve good health if I don't even use it) and worthless. I had planned to have started writing this new section of the Portrait paper at the start of September. I haven't even finished with the reading I had planned to do (though, granted, I'm close).

Yet here I am stupidly complaining - I should be glad for another day. Soon, this will be over - I'll be fine and on a flight to London, and then, this will have seemed so silly. Less than two weeks, this will all be over.

Still slightly nervous, but significantly less so

2006-08-29T20:29:00.000+01:00

Today, I called my neurosurgeon to ask if he had any results to report from the MRI I had done last Thursday. First, I talked to his receptionist: he's out of the office for the WEEK. And when he gets back next Tuesday, he'll be in surgery. Glad I called: I would've waited, worrying, like a sucker this whole time. But of course, this knowledge (while helpful), still doesn't decrease the wait-time. Mercifully, the receptionist retrieves the Dr.'s new surgical assistant to have a quick look at the films I dropped off at the office and at the radiologist's findings:

So the radiologist at Carle reported finding "progression." My Dr.'s SA, though, found this to be completely unsubstantiated: he said that there was evidence of neither tumor growth nor any measurements. So he thinks that the Carle radiologist just worded it in a really bad way (REALLY glad I went to my guy before I called Carle: full panic would have set in if I had just had that report!), and that it's "nothing to lose sleep over." He will, of course, have my actual Dr. look at both the report and the films when he gets back in the office.

And this is where we're at now for at least a week. I do feel slightly better after the SA's explanation, but I have to say, even just having the word "progression" appear on any of my MRI reports is less than soothing.

(I have to add that it's been absolutely IMPOSSIBLE to work these last few days. Impossible. I did manage to scout around some more grad programs' websites, enough to even rule out one school, but that's it. I have zero concentration right now, with the exception of my inordinate attraction to anything salty & crunchy.)

MRI tomorrow

2006-08-24T06:06:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow, I have my annual MRI check-up. I think that it's been bothering me more than I've let on even to myself, that I've just been burying myself in work and running around having fun when I'm not doing that...at least, this is what the entire bowl of popcorn, two pieces of string cheese, two slices of banana bread topped with cream cheese, glass of pink lemonade and then glass of milk all consumed within the space of two late-night episodes of Gilmore Girls tell me...ouch. It was more than the food, though: just going downstairs to the couch where my brother sprawled every night after work during the summer was nice - I think he spent so much time on it he left a little lil' bro' aura there. And as we all know (or will learn now), he is a v.chill guy, so this was a welcoming and welcomed sense.

But yeah, it bothers me. My MRI at the end of the summer I had the surgery didn't bother me: I figured if my surgeon didn't get it all, I would just go get the radiation. I would just do what I had to do. And I was fine. My first annual MRI in May '05 didn't bother me: I'd only had one seizure during the whole year at that point, so it was probably just a fluke, nothing to worry about. But by that summer, the seizures started rolling in hardcore, and they have been ever since. One neurologist ordered a scan last October because meds weren't controlling the attacks: this MRI made me worry a little. Clean. Thank God. Now the seizures are worse than they even were back in October (but since the Keppra, thank God a little better than they were just a couple of months ago). So I'm worried.

But what's worse: now, after two years, I feel like I've finally gotten myself back on track. That whole year unnamed seizures, I was a mess. My entire senior year I spent "making up" for the junior year I had wasted (regardless of people telling me I had nothing to make up, my [if cliche] motto was "work hard; play hard"). And my post-grad gap year, a mess, until the spring, when I finally moved out to London with Rasheed. Then, THEN things started to come together as I had been working to line them up for the last two years. London. The Fulbright. The Jack Kent Cooke. I set myself up for the fall, Sussex, for the PhD in the States to follow. I couldn't be in a better position. Except this little nagging health problem. It terrifies me. What if, after I've finally gotten everything back together again, what if -

It's hard to finish that sentence.

I know I'll be fine. I know that there's nothing I can do about it, so worry is wasteful. ...That almost makes it harder though, knowing that it's out of my control. But, that still doesn't stop a little part of me from wondering frantically: "Did I live my life as best I could this past year? Did I eat healthy enough? [Tonight being no example. NOR Burger King Thursdays in Wimbledon...ouch.] Exercise? Did I put myself under too much stress those months at Pages, or should I have taken a break/found a new job? [My dad believes that repressed stress/anger causes cancer, ironically, giving me one more thing about which to be paranoid/stressed.]"

I have to be fine, because what else could I be?

Tomorrow I go in at 12:45. Rasheed is coming. They'll probably have me loaded up into the machine by 1. Luckily, the machine itself has absolutely no effect on my mental state, nor the injections they shoot me up with halfway through the process. In fact, I've had so many of these damn things (seven, plus one CT scan in just over two years), I've been known to fall asleep in them! True story! Something about all of that banging around my head must soothe my twisted soul.

But I will be okay. Like my friend Kari wisely says: "Just think of it as going in and getting solid evidence that you're fine and all set to leave. You're already fine; now you'll just know for sure."

True 'dat.

Lucky close siblings

2006-08-17T19:28:00.000+01:00

Today my little brother left for school again, the long blue Buick ("behemoth," he says; "ghetto sled," our cousin Jon) nose-up and heavy-weighted in the trunk; the fridge emptied of all of the food and leftovers he took with him; the book I tried to lend him (Murakami, The Elephant Vanishes) left on the dining room table.

I did not want to let him go; I only just got here. What I hate to admit most is that I worry about him now: I worry about his driving to school alone; about his drinking; about his relationship (which he's not even sure how to define) with L., which has torn him up all spring. It is suddenly impossible to finish the spinach salad I had started.

I just felt such a strange (maybe not so strange) thick sadness settle into my chest and shoulders like a fog: I felt, watching the car pull down the drive, waving, as if I would never see him again. I felt it, too, when I said goodbye before flying off to London for the first time. Growing up, we've always been (roughly) in the same place, and we even went to the same university (he followed me there after he graduated from high school a couple of years after me). And now, we go our separate directions again.

(I'm going to visit him next week, but still, this feels like a severance, because next week, it is only a visit.)

I'm struck again by how lucky I am to be among those siblings of the world who count themselves as close.

Profile Pic

2006-08-16T20:55:00.000+01:00

Personal statements

2006-08-15T16:54:00.000+01:00

Currently, I am supposed to be working on a personal statement for one of my several grad school applications. I am procrastinating. I have been all morning, and did last night, too. I know I'm doing it, and why, and that it only makes it worse. I hate writing these things. I hate writing about myself like this. It is this kind of writing that makes me feel as if I've lost all ability to write, and as if I'll never write even any more fiction nor critical work again.

I think that most of my problems are organizational. I don't know how to include everything I've done that could be important to the application. So I cut things out. And then I don't know what to do with everything I've got left. I have too many interests.

I'm such a whiner.

Last night, I dreamt that giants were chasing me.

I think I'm going to go shave my legs for the first time in over two weeks. The conversation I had with Laurie about the differences between perceptions of European and American cleanliness has finally worn me down.

Ugh, I hate writing these things.

Maybe I'll go make a snack instead and stare at the computer screen a little more.

Dreams, bodies, terror

2006-08-10T14:23:00.000+01:00

Last night, I dreamt another of the "house" dreams; this time, the house was my childhood home, where I am staying right now with my parents (though the only room in the dream that was true to life was my dad's office, I knew it was this house); and again, the house was seized from me. Not only the house, but ultimately, implicitly, my body itself in the dream (usually, I only lose the house). I think that a lot of this dream is pretty self-explanatory: in a way, at least my room in the house in real life has been taken over in a way; it's completely different, and I don't feel as though I fit in it anymore. My autonomy here is threatened by my mom (which sounds terrible; I hate that I feel like this right now, as we normally, and still mostly, get along really well, but neither can I oppress it), who is incredibly controlling about everything (example: the photographer from the RR Star came to get a photo for the article yesterday, and she was telling him how to do his job, what to include in the picture and where to take it, and then after he left, she chastised me for even letting him in the house). Also, something I completely didn't expect, but which is happening, is that I'm experiencing culture shock coming back to the States. It's little things. Like the food. At first, in D.C., I just thought it was that they were serving buffet-style dorm food most days, and that's why I didn't want it. But I have absolutely no desire to eat most of what we have here at my house, either. I've only been legitimately hungry twice in the 3 and a half days since I've been back, and then, I start eating, and the appetite goes away. My dad was really helpful at first, and said I could put stuff on his grocery list that I wanted, but when I did, he got mostly different stuff (next time, I'll have to go with, I think). I don't know if it's the taste, but I think a big part of it is that it's harder to get organic food here. You can get organic everything in London. My environmental scientist friend Kari tells me that they're waaaaay ahead of the States in this respect. But I just don't want to eat. Breakfast, I'm good, but after that, it gets tricky. Maybe I'll just eat breakfast food all day.

But this dream. I don't remember too much of it, but perhaps as I write, more will come back. What I remember first is that Rasheed & I are at a bookstore in Champaign, just browsing. Then, for some reason, I start helping out, likely because I'm just used to working at bookstores. I start putting books back in order, and then clean up some trash that people have left around. Rasheed begins helping me. Then, apparently, I throw the wrong kind of trash - the core of an eaten plum - into the wrong basket, and the owner apprehends me: "Was that food-trash? Did you just throw food-trash into that can?" Annoyed because the man is so ungrateful for the gratis help, I say nothing, but jerk the trash bag out of the can: instead of just retrieving the fruit from this can and throwing it in another, I will replace the liner entirely. And then he says something along the lines of how he hates how rude people are in America and how he wishes he could move to London. And then, I drop the bag at my feet: I've been to London! We talk for a few minutes, just about London, I think, and the dream here becomes unclear...

Next I know, I'm bringing the trash to the back to throw it out. There is a truck delivering a shipment of books. There is snow on the ground. There is something sinister about the open back of the truck. I drop the trash on the warehouse floor - I will not go by the truck to take it to the dumpster - and bolt back into the store. Rasheed is gone. I go back to the warehouse. My friend Brian is there for some reason (in dream logic, I guess it makes sense, since I'll see him today when I go to Champaign, and he's taking me to visit some former fellow Pages comrades), and takes me home (I'm reminded of the "Berkeley Night" when he came to pick me up from Valente's office on campus - left work to come pick me up in the rain and then bring me home and wait with me until my brother arrived).

When we get to my home, though, we are only safe for so long. I'm not sure who they are, or why they want my house, but strangers begin infiltrating the upper floor. At first, Brian and I stick together to defend ourselves, though I cannot now remember how. Eventually, I run down to the basement, where I know my dad has the sheriff's phone number taped to the bookshelf mounted above his desk - I can visualize it, written in red-inked block capitals. I hesitate to call 911, as I'm not sure who these people are, and so if it constitutes a real emergency. Yet, I feel my personal safety distinctly threatened. I need the police there, or at least the promise of their imminent arrival. I cannot find the number. There are innumberable little white squares of paper taped along the length of the shelf, all roughly the same size and shape as the sheriff's number should be, but none with red ink. Until I see it! But it is too late -

The office is invaded. A couple of women. I run. At the bottom of the stairs (which suddenly resemble the real-life stairs), I am caught, this time by a man coming down them. He is blonde; he wears pressed kakhi shorts; there is a sinister smile curling his thin, ironic upper lip; his penetrating eyes gleam. I do not recognize him at first. He grabs my wrists and forces me to the floor on my back, his body between my legs. Only then do I recognize him - T.J. from JKC. When I recognize him, I cease to fight. I sense the betrayal this means to Brian, still fighting for my house upstairs; and somehow to Rasheed, though this assault is not my fault. But here is where the fighting stops, and here is where the dream ends.

And now. Now I have looked at the news. Oh God. Why aren't we all having dreams like these? The uncovering of the terrorist plot in Britain. Possibly Al-Q. The plan to explode 10 planes over the Atlantic, where there is nowhere to ground them. No target, such as the Pentagon or D.C. So the ultimate goal becomes the loss of those lives on the planes. Estimated it would have 3000. Thank God they caught it. They've raised the security alert to red for intl flights; orange for domestic. I am terrified. Rasheed flies back to the UK possibly in less than a week, possibly at the end of the month (they extended his thesis deadline, so he might stay longer) - I need for this to be cleared up before he gets on a plane. Then I fly over in just over a month. (The cynical/cope-through-bad-humor side of me says: maybe now the plane ticket that I haven't bought yet will now be cheaper.) I know that we'll probably both be fine, but I hate that we and so many are forced to travel in a world where we - no longer our goverments, but we, suddenly such small humans - have become the sole target. Not simply the tragic but unavoidable byproduct of war. When I visited the "Crimes Against Humanity" gallery at the War Museum in London, this is what I learned: at the beginning of the 20th century, the loss of life was 90% soldiers, 10% citizens. At the end of the century, that figure had reversed. It makes me sick with fear.

But here I am, writing about dreams. God I am self-centered.

Androgynous artistry

2006-08-08T20:38:00.000+01:00

So after a brief hiatus, I am back at work on the Joyce paper - queer desire vs. homophobia; masculine sexual passivity; finally resulting in androgynous artistic (pro)creation in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The idea of androgynous art is something that v.much preoccupied all of my modernist literary lights, not only Joyce, but Woolf of course in Room, and Jung and Freud (durr), etc. This is something that I thought has only come to occupy my mind very recently, but now, looking back through my writing, I think the impetus towards an androgynous artistry has always existed in me, and it is only now that I've become conscious of it, and only through my studies of these authors.

Right now, I'm reading an essay, "A Womb of His Own: Joyce's Sexual Aesthetics" (har har - womb/room...or HEY [!!] "oomb, allwombing tomb," the poem Stephen works on in the Proteus episode of Ulysses - womb - tomb - room - just like Stephen connects creation, death, and the poet in Portrait - "reproduction is the beginning of death," says Temple, "touch[ing] Stephen timidly at the elbow," and then asking "do you feel how profound that is because you are a poet?" - and then Cranly "points his long forefinger" - finger my ASS!! If that's not phallic I don't know what is...and while Joyce I think makes fun of Temple the connection is there, but anyway, about the essay) by David Weir, and this guy gets into androgynous art in the Shakespeare Theory in the Scylla and Charybdis ep of Ulysses (damn!! somebody always gets there first!! I thought I was original for making that deduction in Portrait, and then I come across it in this essay! But Weir doesn't think that there IS androgynous creation in Portrait, whereas I think there is evidence of it, so my argument will be rather a response to his work, and so still my own), going into Jung's theory of anima/animus (female fertilization of the male imagination and DAMMIT!! I've just started applying it to Breakfast at Tiffany's which you know is the ONLY book I only read for fun anymore again and again and again without analysing it but DAMMIT!! Holly and "Fred"!! Fred the writer! Holly fertilizing his imagination! I'm ruining myself!! My only "fun" book! No more of this now...), and of the male cultural appropriation of the female ability to reproduce (going all the way back to Genesis, with the creation of Eve out of Adam's body, and in literature, esp. in Paradise Lost as it retells Genesis), and thus of artistry as similar to female conception, gestation, birth.

But this guy Weir claims that while this theory is clear in Ulysses - not only in S & CH, but in Nausicaa, with Bloom & Gerty on the beach, and the "tumescent/detumescent" style, their male and female voices blending to argue for an androgynous art - "the means whereby Stephen arrives at this state of artistic androgyny is something of a mystery [in Portrait]." BUT. I think that there IS a clear moment of androgynous creation in Portrait, and it results from Stephen's own encounter with his own "beach girl," so thus the scenes are parallel and so reinforce each other, rather than the one retroactively explicating the earlier...though perhaps the earlier predicts the later. OOH! AND! Weir's brief summary of 19th century sexology may explain the "wild"-ness (with the allusion to the flamboyantly gay, fellow Irish author Wilde) of the beach scene in Portrait: that "the 'androgynous' homosexual was also more likely than almost any other type of person to be artistic." Weir spends only a paragraph on it, but he drops the names of a few books that will put me on the right track. But. Tell me this isn't sexual. Stephen sees the girl on the beach, and then pledges to "recreate life out of life!" and then (not unforcefully) quite rhythmically strides, pushing forward, "on and on and on and on!" down the beach, finally stopping only to fall into some sort of post-orgasmic "languor of sleep," when he dreams of a new world like "an opening flower...breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose...every flush deeper than the other": it's as if he's now incorporated, by his dream, this vaginal new world (the "new terminology" he demands in order to describe his art, the only thing missing from the philosophy he borrows from Aquinas?) into his psyche. This language is then completely repeated in the "rose-like glow" that washes over Stephen when he writes the villanelle - writes it "in the virgin womb of the imagination [where] the word was made flesh"!!!

And, quickly, back to the theory of Shakespeare and androgynous art in Ulysses. Woolf was working on A Room of One's Own in the few years after Hogarth Press published Ulysses, and she, too, comes back to the theory of the androgynous mind (though she cites Coleridge as her source). But she, too, uses the language of procreation: she says only when we have this fusion is the mind entirely "fertilised." So, too, does she use the example of Shakespeare, or rather, she invents the life of Shakespeare's sister, to examine the situation of the male/female artist. Quick detour, as promised.

As I'm reading this, though, I've just now (literally, the thought struck me and I sat down to write about it - it was a flash!) related these ideas to my own (of course inferior) writing. In my writing, I usually write from the perspective of a man, particularly in the last few years - it's somehow just become more comfortable for me. And before this, by the time I had started college, whenever I deviated and wrote from a woman's perspective, it was always with a strong undercurrent of same sex desire, partly between characters within the story, and partly between myself and the character. And this is a phenomenon just of my writing. In reality, I identify certainly as a woman; and though I've of course had desires for a few women (including H.K. of the "infamous characters" whom my imagination took over), and have acted on a few of them in my wilder years (mostly pre-surgery; but all pre-Rasheed), I've never been in a serious relationship with a woman, and so identify as mostly straight. So this is not a personal thing; this is a writing thing. However: the relationships I have with these "personas" I latch onto in my imagination and begin to mould into my own "characters" begin to feel quasi-sexual; I have no sexual desire for the person herself or himself, in some cases being actually quite averse to the possibility, but I strangely begin to desire the character I've created. This desire, then, draws me closer to my character, fuels my further conception, and thus my further creation of that character in a near-Oedipal (though from the parental side) birth of walking, talking fictional persons. And I look at the Staging Memory project, and I see that I've written that relationship with character there. Eilert has himself created the image of Hedda he thinks he desires, and the more he imposes on her, the more he wants to come near to her. It is only when she completely undermines his idea of her that he may withdraw, so to speak. So he, too, is an artist - and I had underestimated him...I thought only Hedda was the artist because she was the actress.

But back to Weir's essay. I mean just me. Reading. Bonus points to anyone who made it all the way through this entry, because it was completely me just flexing the muscles before I start the scholarly writing - my apologies.

Washington D.C., home, etc

2006-08-07T15:07:00.000+01:00

So now I am back in the States. More, I am back at my parents' house. In order:

I hit D.C. a few days ago, landing at about 10 pm Wednesday night. At first I didn't feel too much out of place (except for that whole driving on the wrong side of the road thing...anyone who wants to know how the traffic confused me - and I really didn't think it would - ask Tony of JKC how he saved me from getting hit by oncoming cars on our way to the Washington Monument), since 4 out of my 5 first interactions were with Indian people (two of whom didn't speak v. good English; my cab driver was actually from a neighboring state of Rasheed's father & spoke a variate of Tummel). But it was still...unnerving. Returning, I mean. The announcement at the airport: "And if you are a returning citizen, welcome back to the United States!" And D.C. at night was so...quiet. There was traffic on the street (when I went on my 7-11 adventure for a phone card), and the occasional pedestrian...but not the people in the streets I'd been used to. And over the next few days: a huge lack of languages. Everyone here speaks English. During the tourist season in London, I had unconsciously adjusted to hearing a multitude of languages.

Then, I had an email from my mom on Saturday: Steve died. Next-door, alcoholic, skeleton Steve. He'd fallen, getting into bed, hit his head - they don't know if the impact killed him, or a heart attack caused by the shock of the fall (apparently, the coroner has been particularly uncommunicative). My dad found him. I'm not sure how he's doing with it. Right now, he seems to be just be dealing with business, the funeral, Steve's family, the "estate" (or the run-down house that will need to be destroyed) etc. But this death - it feels more like exorcism. I think of that empty brown house (just right next door to me now) - it's seemed empty even in these last years of his life, as though he did not live in it, but haunted it. Ever since he and Cathy got rid of the horses, and the bulldogs; and then when Radar, Steve's dog expressly, died; and then when Cathy bolted for Florida (and another codependent, likely abusive, man); and when all of the remaining barn cats finally died, ferile and mangy even when alive; and when the pastures went wild and he let his lawn grow knee-deep...this is when it became empty. Even the big white Cadillac left undriven at the front of the house seemed a monument to a life that had already passed. But still, his presence persisted. And this, for some reason, makes his death more unsettling...the loss of this intangible emaciated spirit whom I remember last stumbling up the steps at the front of the house and pausing to look in my bedroom windows scaring the hell out of me but at the same time inspiring in my gut an almost agonizing pity for this man who had once been so large but still always smelling of beer and cigarettes and possibly something harder that I wouldn't have recognized as a kid. I hope I'm gone before they tear down the house.

And skipping ahead - coming home. My parents did pick me up at the airport, and it was great to see them (my mom cried; now I know at least she really didn't mind the drive). When we got home, though: they had rearranged my entire room. My bed now points feet-first out of my door, a Feng Shui faux pas I'm not entirely down with: this is how the Chinese traditionally carried their dead out of the door. And my mom had re-"organized" what I'd left behind. Everything is out of order, and it's not an out of order that I understand (at least my own "out of order" has its own intuitive system); that, and my mom has lost my mobile phone (thus, most of my phone numbers - if you read this, and I don't have your number, email or call or something) and a number of other of my things ("But I thought it was right here!"). But my music - all of my music, my CDs and vinyls - is here. I'd only taken a few "essentials" with me on my flight. The first I picked to listen to this morning as I work? The Big Boi disc from Outkast's Speakerboxxx. I can't believe I didn't take it with me.

And skipping back to D.C. I've run into another one of those characters who will inhabit my imagination for an indefinite amount of time. Only the fourth in my life, after Kat, H.K. (until I learned that what she had on those headphones was DMB), P.K., perhaps Elsie (though I feel like I know her story like I know my own; we are the same in that we are dancing souls). He is one of those people who gives away very little, and thus is fertile ground for my imagination to make what it will of him; on first meeting him in a group of scholars, he confessed that he wasn't very "interesting," which of course, tells me he is. He is not a performer like most of us (and especially me) were there at the weekend; unlike me, he has not been selling himself since he could talk/write/paint/photograph/dance. He relinquished just enough detail to give my hooks a hold; the full flesh will be my conception. He is like a little boy in man's clothes - a future lawyer, dressing in green-striped button-ups and pressed kakhi shorts with New Balance tennis shoes. His talk is affected - "Good evening, gentlemen..." - as if he is in constant rehearsal for his future lawyer-life, including smoky evenings at the club, world events over cigars, but his voice is still teenager-young, not in depth, but in self-assuredness. It was this (likely) perceived vulnerability (and his weak stomach: bread & applesauce) that intrigued me. He confessed on the last day (Sunday) that he was a preacher's boy, which explained the religious-resentment vibe I'd been getting all weekend: I had blindly (lazily, more like) guessed ex-Catholic guilt. Now I wonder if religion has let him down - if his church father, his father, has let him down (which now feeds into, perhaps will deepen my writing of Eilert), though I cannot speak for the Big Father. Suddenly I had an image of that same little boy in Sunday shirts and shorts - here he still was, thick blonde hair still too big for him...especially right behind his right ear, halfway to the back of his head...I wanted to touch it, get a sense of its texture (you know I am a tactile person), but again, just because I've invented this person in my head does not mean I know the real subject well enough to touch him. But his face is old; it is his age. Perhaps a little older. I'm not sure exactly how old he is, but I'd set him at mid/late-twenties...probably closer to late. 26, maybe. But there is a serious maturity (not aging, though - gravity) in his face that says 30s. He has very clear-cut, stone-clean (granite), potentially monumental features: the kind of features that I would have given anything to sit firmly down in the studio in front of a black drop and take high-contrast black & white photos of in medium format film (and likely large-format, if I had much experience with it). He has the lawyer-look: lean, slightly hungry but well-fed, sitting back in his chair but still pushing agressively forward with penetrating eyes hooded by low brows. And an ironic mouth, a thin upper-lip. Perhaps a potential for cynicism. But still, a vulnerability.

This will be the extent of my writing for the day. I've decided to give myself a few easy days - today, will work on Fulbright paperwok & entry clearance; perhaps some reading; tomorrow...don't know; day after, newspaper photo shoot & work; day after, doctors; day after, Rasheed's visit. And family, of course.

And I call her "mother"

2006-08-02T00:29:00.000+01:00

Tonight is my last night here in London. Rasheed just got a call from his little brother, so I'm chilling here for a few minutes. We just got in from one of our favorite neighborhood walks (down "millionaires' row" in Notting Hill, where we laugh about what must go on in all of those big houses; we don't even touch the embassies, though).

It's been a good last day, too. We went to the Tower of London & revelled in all the torture & murder & scheming there (special exhibit on the 1605 Gunpowder Plot). Crown jewels, though, very dull. But seeing them with Rasheed made it entertaining. Frankly, I think we were most impressed by the security, especially the vaulted doors they lock everything behind at night!

And then I call my mom to give her my flight info and let her know what time I'll be landing in Chicago on Sunday night...so someone can come pick me up, or so I think. The only problem is that she and my dad will have just spent the weekend in St. Louis, and HE doesn't want to do any more driving and SHE doesn't want to brave the O'Hare traffic NOR does she want my little brother driving in to get me. So the verdict? "Take the bus," she says. And she's so excited to see me, but: "take the bus." The logical side of me says that this is not a big deal, that this is totally understandable, that yes, this is a pain-in-the-ass amount of driving, and it would be so much easier for them to just come get me in Rockford; but another part of me is whining, "But I will have just had an eight hour flight a few days ago, and then a flight from D.C. to Washington with a stopover in Pittsburgh & two time changes in just a few days whinewhinewhine..."; but then, this little pathetic part of me just wanted someone to BE there at the airport, happy to see me after I've just left Rasheed and spent a few days in a strange city (yes, it's exciting, but at the same time, I will have just left this city and this person I LOVE to go hang out with a bunch of people I don't know in a city with which I'm unfamiliar). I just wanted to be able to SEE someone there, to have someone to go to as soon as I got in, to do the whole cheesy arrivals gate thing, run and hug and, hell, maybe even do the emotional girl thing and cry a little. "Take the bus," she says. "Good thing I have overdraft coverage," I say. "Now I'm going to go enjoy the rest of my last night in London." And so I turned back into logical-girl and looked up bus times from O'Hare to Rockford: they leave every hour and tickets are less than twenty bucks one-way. This isn't so bad. Hell, I've shared a bus with just-released convicts (their scant belongings still in brown paper bags) from Champaign to Chicago for one of my interviews, and those guys were beyond charming (we shared my left-over Halloween candy). This should be nothing.

And as soon as Rasheed is done on the phone, I will (enjoy my last night, that is, not share more candy with non-present convicts). Cheryl, I just read your entry, and ice cream isn't sounding so bad right now - the shops here are open waaaay late at night - and I can't get enough of this neighborhood before I go!

Aaaaand I hear him saying good-bye...

So good-night to all and see most (if not all) of you soon!

So long, soldier

2006-07-30T10:36:00.000+01:00

Last night was Dan Shofner's last night at home before leaving for basic training today; he's going into the Navy, and nuclear school, and hopes to work on a nuclear sub. I called him to say goodbye & to ask him to take good care of himself.

Several years ago, when we were still dating, I dreamt that he went into the Navy. But it was during a full-blown war, and the dream was itself set in the 1940s. In it, I was saying goodbye to him on a train platform; the train was stopped, steaming and whistling, next to us; it, and the platform and the air, were all a dusty, faded tan. He was in full uniform, also tan, even the hat, and had only one square sleek black bag of things in one hand. I held his face and told him goodbye, knowing that it would be the last time I ever saw him, tears uncontrollably rolling down my face. I didn't tell him this knowledge, and he didn't understand why I was so upset, and awkwardly (vainly) tried to comfort me. I couldn't tell him that I knew he was going to a war from which he wouldn't come home. In the dream, I woke up before he got on the train. But even now, I can feel his head in between my palms as I held it so tightly.

I didn't tell him about this dream on the phone last night. At first I was sad that I missed his last day at home - he actually ended up having to leave earlier than expected; otherwise, I would have caught him - but now, I think it might be okay. Saying goodbye in person would have been too much like the dream; it would have felt almost like somehow jinxing him. Saying goodbye over the phone like this sort of broke its charm. Though I'll still keep his safety in my heart.

[And still, I haven't written about the Islam & Middle East galleries! I still want to; other stuff just butts in - maybe the third time's the charm, like they say...]

Another house dream

2006-07-29T19:24:00.000+01:00

Last night, a new dream in my series of house/body dreams. I dreamt that Rasheed's mother came to visit, but it was strange, because she was disguised as Dan Shofner's mom (Dan is a former boyfriend). And the dream:

I am at home with Rasheed in our flat, but it is somehow not our flat - the hall is longer, the room bigger, darker. I'm leaving the very next day for Washington DC, for the JKC scholars' weekend. But that night, Rasheed is having some sort of party there, just a few people. I know no one (or can't remember?), but they are all familiar. It's a fancy dress party, and I'm wearing the dress that I wore as a bridesmaid in my cousin Ann's wedding: lilac, strapless, a straight cut across the chest, a flared skirt - but now, instead of being cocktail-length, it's a long dress, and reaches the floor.

And suddenly, with no knock, in walks Rasheed's mother, but disguised as white, blonde, blue-eyed Cathy Shofner. She is early for her visit! Unannounced! She wasn't supposed to come until after I'd gone. Luckily, I duck unnoticed into a closet. Only once the door is shut, and I am in complete darkness, do I wonder how long I'll be in there. I worry slightly about what I'll do if I need to use the toilet.

As I'm in the closet longer, it becomes a room of its own. It lengthens. The floors are a rough wood, and smell of damp. There is a window at the far end of it, near to the floor. I sit down near the door, but look down the long dark room - almost like a tunnel - at the window. London is not outside of it. Instead, there are tree branches, a lake, snow, I think. It is winter outside of that window, and its world is colorless, but high contrast. The branches are a thick, liquid-black; the lake glistens like wet ink; and the spaces between are blank white (the snow?).

The door to the closet opens a bit; someone has propped it ajar. He comes just inside and sits cross-legged next to me, offering me a drink - a fruit-smoothie type of drink in a clear plastic cup, strawberry and something, a dark, bruised pink with seeds suspended in its inconsistent viscous substance. I accept (nevermind the toilet-anxiety), glad for the company. But another man comes to sit just outside the door. I'm afraid they'll give away my presence there.

But still, I am due to leave the very next day, and I need to pack. She is still there, but distracted, near the windows at the far end of the flat. I escape the closet and clamor up into the loft where we've stored my suitcases, and where, in this dream, we've also stored my winter clothes. I pack my sweaters into my large suitcase, resolving to leave it all behind. I will pack only what I need in my small suitcase and take only this to D.C.

And here, there is a rift in my dream. Suddenly, I have escaped (through the window?)! I am running - sprinting! gulping for air! - down empty platform after platform at the underground, racing on high heels across the dirty concrete under the dingy flourescent lights to catch a train (what train?). But there, on one of the platforms, is an old friend of mine, Cone, whom I haven't seen since winter. She wears a dress similar to mine, lilac, floor-length, but the skirt does not flare, instead clinging to her body all the way down to her feet. She stands facing the empty track and lets me run on behind her. We are the only two on the platform.

"Tessa!" She says my name as I run by. Not quite calls it out: states it. I keep running 'til I've run past a newstand, but then I stop and turn, walk back to her.

"She shot you?" Cone sees the wound straight through my dress. It's the first time in the dream that I realize I'm wearing the dress, and it's the first time I realize that Rasheed's mom has shot me. I had bandaged the wound, right below my ribs, and put the dress back on over it (the dress, miraculously, is neither torn nor blood-stained). I touch my hands to the place where it's happened, and I can feel through the dress and through the bandage that it has already begun to heal; I can see already the skin closing up again over it.

This is where the dream ends. I don't remember the shooting, but maybe it didn't happen in the dream. Was the gunshot the physical manifestion of the invasion of the house? And where was Rasheed during this dream? I hadn't even said goodbye.

I woke up still feeling the wound, and woke not afraid, but slightly disturbed. I make no conclusions.

(And then I read Lee's Virginia Woolf and then did an interview for the Rockford Register Star and then Rasheed & I went to the Victoria & Albert to see the new gallery of Islamic Middle East art that just opened last week which I may or may not write more about later but he's just brought what he calls "chippos" [allusion to The Simpsons] and Gilmore Girls on DVD home, so I'm off for now!]

Working towards worthiness

2006-07-27T10:11:00.000+01:00

[Note: yesterday, I attempted to post an entry; I've been reading the Hermoine Lee biography of Virginia Woolf, and wrote about the way actually living her in London has given me a more profound understanding, as if by osmosis, of Woolf's literary world, more so than my calculated efforts to visit each of her homes here, though this of course helped, too. But something happened with the computer, and it all got deleted, and I was frustrated and just needed to let it be. Sad, that.]

And today.

Last summer, at about this time, I prayed/meditated to be broken during this just-lapsed year (I can't believe it's been a year). Applying for the Fulbright (and Rhodes and Marshall and just starting grad school applications), I somehow felt sure that this year would be "my" year, that this year, I would be awarded the Fulbright. I can't explain it: I just knew it - my blood knew it, that this would be the direction it would go - before I even picked up my pen to begin drafting my preliminary notes.

But this feeling scared me. I wondered if I wasn't perhaps being a bit egotistical, assuming too much. So I began praying to be broken, and I meditated on humility and on achieving true understanding and appreciation of the Fulbright. Many (most) of the applicants for these awards come from a pool far more privileged than even mine, and unlike me, they don't apply because without it, they can't study abroad - they apply for the prestige. They apply because they're already very accomplished scholars, and they need something to set their CV apart from all of the other accomplished scholars. I didn't want this to be me. So I prayed to be broken.

And I think that perhaps I was. Apart from the year of the tumor, I think that this last year might have been the hardest year of my life in many ways (not to say that there wasn't a lot of good, too, particularly bringing Rasheed to Christmas at my family's, and spending time at his home with his family, too; swing dancing with everyone; and running randomly into Cheryl in the Gap in Chicago and getting back into touch; and of course, every Buffy Friday night with my lil bro). First, I began work at an independent bookstore that initially seemed really cool, but which I quickly learned was a really abusive environment, in which the owner controlled her managers with threats ("is it worth your JOB?!"), which then filtered down to lesser employees like myself (at least the employees had some solidarity). I was forbidden from wearing high heels ("forbidden" was the word used), and felt completely castrated for about two weeks, and then was temporarily alienated from who would soon be my fellow comrades when a manager told me that I was a snob and was alienating THEM. "Only a year" was my mantra; only a year, and I would start grad school and get out of there. But it was part of the process: by the time I left, I didn't care at all for my appearance - no make-up, no attention to my clothes, nothing. I wanted to spend my time outside of that hell on the things that really mattered to me, my research and my writing.

And then the Rhodes and the Marshall. I was a finalist for the Rhodes, and an alternate for the Marshall. But I won neither. When I lost the Marshall, I panicked a little: I wanted to have a back-up in case I didn't take the Fulbright; I HAD to get to Sussex to study Woolf and get to the Monks House papers. The Rhodes would have been amazing as well, as I hoped to study with Hermione Lee (author of the above-noted Woolf bio) at Oxford. The loss of the Rhodes didn't hit me too hard, though, especially since now, as I've learned more about Cecil Rhodes himself, and about his history with Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and colonialism and the diamond trade, and his prejudice against the African people, and where that money originally came from, I don't think I would have been comfortable with that fellowship (though to give the man some credit, he DID support Home Rule for the Irish). But: each of these interviews took me to Chicago for a weekend, and each of these weekends was so good, despite the eventual loss of the award. For the Marshall, I got to hang out with Cheryl & one of her roommates, and it was just so good to be reunited with my long-lost friend. For the Rhodes, Rasheed was actually in town, and came with and stayed with me at the hotel, where we met up with Cheryl for dinner. And the process of this interview was actually a lot of fun: we had a fancy dessert/drinks hour the night before, where the nine interviewees got to meet each other and the interview panel (4 of "us" already knew each other, having gone to Harvard together - an intimidating first few minutes for a girl from Illinois). This way, I knew the two kids that won the award, and was genuinely happy for them. And I got to discuss Freud with the circuit judge of Chicago. Also, though, after everyone was leaving at the end of the process, she pulled me aside to let me know that my interview, the things that I've done and been through, was "moving," and that if she could do anything for my future, I was to let her know. And just that quick whisper, I think, meant more to me personally than any award.

And then, the return of the seizures. And they became increasingly worse. I had gone a year after surgery with none. Now it looked like they were back for good. Anti-convulsants made me sicker the higher the dose; doctors didn't listen to me; I drooled and blacked out everywhere, at work, on the street, on my bike, in talks I still went to on the U of I campus. It's still a process, but I think that there's hope in the newest (fifth) drug we're trying.

And perhaps my darkest few months: I was turned down at all of my grad schools in the States. I was shocked. The night I heard back from Berkeley, the first, my brother and I watched hours of bad TV and ate the ENTIRE contents of my fridge and cupboard (I put chocolate syrup on popcorn). My professors were shocked. A few immediately asked me if I'd mentioned my "condition" in any of my personal statements. I had. I believed it showed my dedication to my work, as I had continued with school even after the diagnosis of the tumor, finishing the semester with straight As/A+s. They told me that schools not only looked at their applicants as potential scholars, but as potential employees, TAs, and they didn't want someone who would perhaps be sick too often. They believed I had been discriminated against. It made me sick. One by one, my prospects slipped away. My safety net: now I would have NOWHERE to go if I didn't get the Fulbright and couldn't afford to attend Sussex (the only school I was accepted at, and also, the only school to whom I didn't mention my "condition"). In the meantime, though, I applied for yet another award, the Jack Kent Cooke, just in case.

And then, a major turning moment: I returned from an arts & humanities conference in Hawaii where I had presented two papers, and my abusive boss had slashed all of my hours for the week (I'd actually only have missed Monday because of my trip). My comrades told me that this was a common Susan-thing, to slash hours as a way of both punishing her employees and saving money on payroll. My reaction? I resolved to move to London with Rasheed. In a month, I sublet my apartment, consolidated my bank accounts, quit my job, and bought my ticket. On 6 March (our one-year anniversary), I boarded the plane.

And then. Amazing London. Rasheed took me around the city I'd been waiting my whole life to see.

Things began to turn around more. I was given an interview for the Fulbright. I made it to the final round of the Jack Kent Cooke. I met the professor I would work with at Sussex if any of this funding came through.

But then. Another jolt: I was named an alternate for the Fulbright - I was first alternate, but only an alternate. I resolved to live in a tent in South America for three months if I had nowhere to go. I was honored in a far greater way, though. One of my favorite neighbors - the neighbor who was the neighborhood - passed away. He died a day before a postcard I had just sent to him and his wife arrived. (And it was SUCH a Mr. G card!!) But, when Doris got it, she passed it around all of the family who had come to the visitation, and everyone chuckled at it (it was def Mr. G's humor), but then...she put it in the casket with him to be buried. I was so humbled that this tiny little thing I'd sent them was helping to see him off to eternity. This was honor.

And just as suddenly: I won the Fulbright; and then, not long after, I won the Jack Kent Cooke. My funding at Brighton will be taken care of, and now, wherever I go to grad school in the U.S. (after another round of applications, of course), most, if not all, of my Ph.D. will be covered.

It didn't hit me for a long time. Rasheed and I had planned to celebrate the Fulbright by going to this waffle house in our neighborhood, and we still haven't; for weeks, I still had walked by it longingly, still not understanding that I'd already won the Fulbright. It only just now is beginning to, only now, since I leave in less than a week for a JKC scholars' weekend in D.C., and then have only a month at home before returning to London for Fulbright orienation, and then, on to the dream! On to Brighton!

And suddenly I feel so small. The press release for the Fulbright has gone out; newspapers are already running things or contacting me; I've just approved my press release for the JKC. "You live such an exciting life, girl," my mom said to me on the phone last night. It's keeping me up at night, this excitement. I am excited (birthday-excited!), but at the same time, I feel so humbled by it all. These things are so big. Too big? And I'm so afraid that something will happen to take it all away (when my seizures were at their worst, right after I won the Ful., I was afraid something was "coming back," and I'd have to sacrifice Sussex to my health, but I've gotten beyond that now). And I think about all of the amazing people who have come before me...Sylvia Plath was a Fulbrighter, for example. It just blows me away, this amazing heritage I've stepped into. And I feel so small. Will I live up to it? There is so much pressure. I know that my love for my study and my crazy work ethic will drive me through, but I'm so afraid to disappoint, to somehow not live up to it. This is what I lay awake thinking about.

Is this true appreciation, I wonder? I look back on the year, and I feel as if I were pretty soundly broken.

I think it must be.

Londoner

2006-07-25T19:53:00.000+01:00

The sign of a belonger? Giving directions. Over the last few weeks, I've been giving directions to more and more people, or rather, I apparently look like I know what I'm doing, and people approach ME for directions, and I surprise myself by being able to give them. (SO MANY people have asked Rasheed and I where they shot the movie Notting Hill. Gross.)

Yesterday, though, I got to play "tour guide" for the first time. My old friend Dave from the States was passing through on his way home from swing dance camp in Sweden, and gave me a call to see if I'd want to hang out one of the two days he'd be here. So we hung out, did touristy stuff (I took him to Little Venice, as that's one of the really cool places in London that nobody knows exists; and then on a riverboat cruise down the Thames) and then finally - of course - swing dancing at the 100 Club on Oxford St. We got dinner, too, at this so-called Tex-Mex tapas bar in Notting Hill (so-called because they list SALMON BURGERS on the menu...how's that for Mexican?!), and he paid for my meal, saying: "Well, it's the least I can do for my tour guide." And then I realized, hey, I was sort of the tour guide!

And it made me feel so much more at home here, and so much more that the city was somehow "mine." For so long since I've been here, I've wanted to share it with people, especially my mom. My dad and I really worked on her to come visit (but, of course, she's kind of apathetic about these things, won't even get her passport), but she won't come, and the best we could get was that she'll come visit me next spring in Brighton (if she remembers my name by then!). There were just so many things that I wanted to show her and my dad, and so many places I wanted to take my little brother to just hang out (and he WOULD have come to visit if he wasn't shit-broke). So Dave was the first person of "mine" to come visit. (I was afraid to leave him on the tube alone at the end of the night! But I got him [and myself] home safely.) I loved being able to take someone new to all of these little places that have become familiar to me over the past few months, to see someone see "my" city for the first time, to show off my city.

Today, I had another, smaller opportunity to act as a guide. Rasheed & I met this sweet little old woman on the train platform at Euston Sq, where we were picking up the Circle Line (or so we thought). She was in the city to meet up with her sister at High St Kensington, but then, there was trouble with the Circle Line (an "incident with a passenger" at another stop, says the announcement), so our options were to stay stranded at Euston for God knows how long, or to get on the next train to wherever and switch where we could get a train taking us to our goal-destination. But this woman obviously had very explicit directions to get her directly to High St Kens, and these, of course, didn't include train "incidents." So we hop on the train with her, and then at another Station, get a train that will take her to where she's going (luckily us, too, only a few stops away). I just couldn't leave her there, you know? Standing alone and confused and short, thin-haired (dyed red), slightly hunched over and trembly-handed with a slow walk and sandals too tight for her soft white old-woman's feet with the little toes pointed in naturally and lying over the toe next to them as if she (like me) had spent her entire 20s squashing her feet into high heels that were too narrow. And when we were getting on the train, she said to me, "Oh, dear, you always will find someone to help you, won't you?" And it's been true: since I've been here, people have always been more than willing to help me out with directions or trains. Maybe it's just like that everywhere, when it's "your" city: you love it, so you want other people to love it, too, and you want to help them see it the way you see it.

It saddens me (sadden? more like a horrible gaping ache in my gut) so much to think that I leave in a week (but don't get me wrong; I'm ridiculously excited to see all of the people I've missed so much back in the U.S.!!!!), and that the next time I'm in London, it will be as a "visitor." People tell me that Brighton is lovely, and that I'll have a great time there; I know that if I feel for it even a sixteenth of the attachment I feel for London, I'll be happy. And please, please come visit me there (you can have my bed; I'll sleep on the couch). Let me show you another city that I know I'll love, and if you stay long enough, let's hop on a train 40 minutes north to my first great love.

Cracking India

2006-07-23T12:25:00.000+01:00

Currently, I'm in the thick of Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa. Generally, a seven-year-old girl's eye on the post WWII upheaval in India, on religious differences, and on Partition and the holocaust there.

Some bits from the book itself & my reactions:

"And I become aware of religious differences. It is sudden. One day everybody is themselves - and the next day they are Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian. People shrink, dwindling into symbols. Ayah is no longer just my all-encompassing Ayah - she is also a token. A Hindu. Carried away by a renewed devotional fervor she expends a small fortune in joss-sticks, flowers and sweets on the gods and goddesses in the temples" (101).

"Yousaf is twirling [Hari's] plume of hair and tugging at it as if he's trying to lift him. I feel a great swell of fear for Hari, and a surge of loathing for his bodhi. Why must he persist in growing it? And flaunt his Hinduism? And invite ridicule? / And that preposterous and obscene dhoti! Worn like a diaper between his stringy legs - just begging to be taken off! / My dread assuming a violent and cruel shape, I tear away from Ayah and fling myself on the human tangle and fight to claw at Hari's dhoti....Someone pulls off his shawl....hands stretch and pull his unraveling mauve lady's cardigan...and rip off his shirt. His dhoti is hanging in ragged edges, and suddenly, it's off! / Like a withered tree frozen in a winter landscape Hari stands isolated in the bleak center of our violence: prickly with goosebumps, sooty genitals on display. / With heavy, old-man's movements, Imam Din wrenches the shawl from under our feet and throws it at the gardener....He is not at ease with cruelty" (126).

[Note: our young narrator, Lenny, is Parsi, or "Parsee," in the British colonialist spelling - I think it's REALLY interesting that the author uses this latter spelling in the book - a group of people who emigrated from Persia and who were generally associated with Zoroastrianism, which I know nothing about, except that it had some influence on a lot of other religions, including the dharmic tradition, and even Christianity and Judaism - seems appropriate that Lenny be "all-encompassing" herself. And I'll def be turning to Wikipedia after I'm done here.]

This may seem totally obvious, but as I was reading this, I thought, yes, people who are symbols/tokens are no longer PEOPLE - and this is what makes the violence possible. Only after you dehumanize your neighbor may you slaughter him.

And on Ayah, the figure who interests me perhaps most (except Lenny, of course):

"Only the group around Ayah remains unchanged. Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Parsee are, as always, unified around her" (105).

"The covetous glances Ayah draws educate me. Up and down, they look at her. Stub-handed twisted beggars and dust old beggars on crutches drop their poses and stare at her with hard, alert eyes. Holy men, masked in piety, shove aside their pretenses to ogle her with lust. Hawkers, cart-drivers, cooks, coolies and cyclists turn their heads as she passes, pushing my pram with the unconcern of the Hindu goddess she worships. / Ayah is chocolate-brown and short. Everything about her is eighteen years old and round and plump. Even her face. Full-blown cheeks, pouting mouth and smooth forehead curve to form a circle with her head. Her hair is pulled back in a tight knot" (12-13).

"Things love to crawl beneath Ayah's sari. Ladybirds, glow-worms, Ice-candy-man's toes. She dusts them off with impartial nonchalance....I learn also to detect the subtle exchange of signals and some of the complex rites by which Ayah's admirers coexist. Dusting the grass from their clothes they slip away before dark, leaving the one luck, or the lady, favors" (28-29).
And at the part where I'm just at now, when Sidhwa first really starts to write about the violence, she writes it as having a very physical effect on Ayah:

"And on their heels, a mob of Sikhs...shoving up a manic wave of violence that sets Ayah to trembling as she holds me tight" (144).

And on witnessing a man pulled apart by two jeeps driving in opposite directions: "Ayah, holding her hands over my eyes, collapses on the floor, pulling me down with her" (145).

"The whole world is burning. The air on my face is so hot I think my flesh and clothes will catch fire. I start screaming, hysterically sobbing. Ayah moves away, her feet suddenly heavy and dragging, and sits on the roof slumped against the wall. She buries her face in her knees" (147).

I've been reading Ayah as a figure for the (mother)land itself. Ania Loomba, in Colonialism/Postcolonialism, a really good overview of that subject, writes (I paraphrase because I can't remember her exact words) that women are the "porous boundary by which the nation is penetrated," a device I think is operating here, even with the British on the verge of leaving, even internally. And Ayah is that woman/nation, rich-bodied and fertile, literally the NURSE, voluptuously sexual and explicitly able to reproduce whatever ethnicity catches hold of her, able to literally (pro)create whatever may potentially be the new nation. All of the men - or, to see with Lenny's new understanding, all of the different religions - cluster around her and vie for her. But at the same time, as these same men tear apart the land, they tear apart Ayah. Superficially, her reactions to the violence are natural to a Hindu woman watching the brutality that has subsumed her holiday, Holi, but I think, too, that they reveal her visceral connection to the female body of India, land and nation.

And finally, on Holi:

"And the Muslims shouting: 'So? We'll play Holi-with-their-blood! Ho-o-o-li with their blo-o-o-d!' / And the Holi festival of the Hindus and Sikhs coming up in a few days, when everybody splatters everybody with colored water and colored powders and laughs and romps... [...] And instead the skyline of the old walled city ablaze, and people splattering each other with blood! And Ice-candy-man hustling Ayah and me up the steps of his tenement in Bhatti Gate, saying 'Wait till you see Shalmi burn!' (144).

Reading this, I had such a personal reaction of horror, more specific than the horror of such massive massacre. A few months ago, I serendipitously stumbled upon a huge group of people celebrating Holi (the holiday of spring and renewal) and, curious to know what was going on, joined them. And it WAS such an amazingly joyful experience! The colored powder, the food, the dancing! And everyone was so good-willed! People had just dropped their bags and coats and whatever else all along the peripheries of the square so that they could dance and eat and talk unhindered - no fear of theft! And people were so welcoming, and so happy to explain things to me. And there was one especially wild dancer, Ram, who invited me to dance, and taught me some moves. Another kid wanted me to try some of the different kinds of food. Another gave me a keychain to remember it all by. It was one of the first sunny days, too, since I'd arrived in London. I think, too, the day rates among my top experiences here.

After having this experience, and then reading this paragraph - it made it so much more real. Remembering the absolute joy I'd seen, it made me sick to think of such an amazing celebration being appropriated for violence. And this is violence that still has reverberations today, obviously on the large-scale, but still even in my personal life. Rasheed is a practicing Muslim, and was at first a little resentful of my participation in Holi, and then was made very uncomfortable by the sudden appearance of my new keychain in the flat. He won't ever carry my keys, and when the keychain is just lying around, he turns it goddess-side down (the other side is just text) if I forget to. At first, I was a little unnerved by his minute attentions to this seemingly harmless token. I was upset by it, and I wasn't quite sure why; I knew it wasn't at all about me, but still, it nearly felt like a personal affront. I was a little disturbed to discover this seeming anti-Hindu tenacity in my loved one, though he of course does not discriminate against PEOPLE (only, apparently, their religious icons, but I think this has a lot to do with the poly/monotheism split and the non-representation of God in the Islamic faith, something I wish would have happened in Christianity, as I find the image of a white, blue-eyed Christ a little irrelevant and irreverant), and speaks with sympathy for the way Hinduism seems to drop out of the family with each generation in America. I think, too, that it made me uneasy because I've never had such strong feelings against any other religion (in fact, I remember getting into quite the altercation once with a Sunday school teacher who insisted that EVERYONE but Lutherans were going to hell - I was aghast by her intolerance). I've always been ready to learn about any aspect of any other religion, any new aspect of God.

I guess with that, I'll just say: please read Cracking India. Though written about events that transpired half a century ago, it's still so relevant today. I own a copy, and will more than happily lend it to anyone when I'm done reading it.

Also, I want to leave you with some pictures from my own first Holi experience:

Developments

2006-07-22T18:01:00.000+01:00

Welcome to that crazy roller-coaster called love. Rasheed and I are now back together.

This morning, he looked really, piteously tired, so I asked him if he wanted some coffee (or "coffee drink" in his case - he's not ready for the real thing yet, but we're working on it). And he asked me: "Why are you still so good to me?" And then sort of realized that he has been distanced lately, and that he should take better care of me, and wants to try.

I am moving to Brighton on my own, though, while he moves back to the States to live with his brother in St. Louis. I'll be back for a couple of weeks around Christmas/New Year's time, and he'll come visit me, as well. I think this will be good, or, in the words of his cousin's husband: "Studio apartments are relationship suicide." That, and apparently masters theses and seizures.

So here we go!

Thunderstorm

2006-07-22T11:10:00.000+01:00

Two nights ago, I told a friend how much I missed midwest thunderstorms - you know the kind: booming & crashing thunder; flashing lightning; torrential rain; wind whipping around the house, making the windows twitch in their frames. I've heard thunder twice since I've been here - once each on two separate occassions (couldn't have anything to do with the major drought we're in the middle of here, right?).

But last night, I had my thunderstorm. First, a loud boom - it's what woke me. I thought I was dreaming until I realized the sound of pouring rain. Clattering tinnily on the empty cans left below by the hostel kids, smattering against the glass of our windows, washing over our tiny balcony. Then I got up and pulled our wide-open window down 'til it was open only a little (let some of that cool air and fresh rain smell in!). There were a few flickers of lightning, a couple of stubborn, reluctant grumbles of thunder - and then one more boom! - and then the rain really started rushing down. I laid wide awake, eyes open, thrilled with it. The entire city - even the hostel, even the planes! - was silent beneath it - the quietest I'd ever heard it. It was as if I were the only one awake and aware of the storm, as if it were mine. (And I know that this is a totally romantic, dangerously solipsistic idea...but I had my storm, at last, just two weeks before I'm due to fly back to the States...I wonder what weather there is in Brighton?)

The wisdom of Holly

2006-07-22T01:28:00.000+01:00

My friend Holly is one of those people whose words you want to get in print, in text, on some sort of recording - in short, in some sort of PERMANENT form. I was lucky to have her on the phone for a short time this afternoon, and even this fleeting conversation was richer, perhaps, than the entire rest of the day.

Holly, you are going to write your memoirs and share this wisdom with the world, right?

Disservice to society

2006-07-21T18:55:00.001+01:00

Rasheed & I have broken up. It's mutual, and I know that for the future, this is for the best. It was friendly (no fight), which is good, since I'll still be here, living with him, sharing his tiny studio flat and the couch/bed for another two weeks until I leave for D.C. (this is slightly weird, I have to admit). It's also slightly weird being here, because other than him, I'm basically on my own. My friends were his friends first. He has friends outside of those I know. He claims that he has "nowhere to go" to hang out, but he has no idea. (I have, however, made a couple of slightly neurotic phone calls to a former high school teacher who will go unnamed but whom I can always trust to make me laugh and who now no longer needs Elimidate as a guilty pleasure because his former student is making the drama. I have also called a friend/professor who lovingly [mostly] calls her husband her "oldest and least cute child" to complain; lucky for me, she was pissed at him, and he throws the same kind of tantrums that Rasheed does ["I never get any work done and it's all your fault" tantrums], so we had a good bitch-fest and then made plans to visit and do girly stuff when I'm in the area. And this, I think, was the longest aside I've ever written.)

We've broken up partly because he cannot deal with my "condition": the drugs, the doctors, the seizures on a daily basis. Though he put it somewhat more dramatically - overdramatically, perhaps - by claiming that it's taking over his life. Amazing, that. I don't think I could say it's taken over my OWN life, let alone another person's. True, it makes things suck pretty damn hard sometimes, these last couple of weeks being a particularly good example of that, but taking over? Never. And this is perhaps selfish of me, but I feel that regardless of this "taking over" my illness has contracted over his life, he hasn't been able to take care of me, that I've taken more care of him than he of me. It's only stupid little things, like cooking meals and then cleaning up after them, things like that, but still. With these recent medicine switches and seizures, I think I just wore myself out and snapped. He grew up verrrrry spoiled by his parents, particularly his mother (Indian immigrants to the U.S. who made phenomenally well for themselves and therefore will give anything unquestioningly to their sons), and I think I just realized that I was filling in for that role he'd been missing while living alone here: now I was here to "mother" him and take care of him and spoil him. Fine and good, but when you've had three seizures in one night...I wanted someone to take care of ME. Beyond holding me while I was actually having it, and then patting my shoulder - "Poor little penguin" - when it was done and then being over with it.

But now I'm complaining. He obviously is a good kid, if a little immature still, if I stayed with him this long. And he did make me very, very happy. A giddy, unadulterated happy that I hadn't felt since before the year of the tumor. My strongest memory of the spring we fell in love is of the color - just clear, white light; the white light that was coming through my window and reflecting on my white sheets the first morning I woke up next to him and my head was cradled on his chest, and he was already awake, and reading. And we read Rumi together on those mornings, and then Hafiz. He made me settled again.

Before that, it had been a few years of jumping from boy to boy, never committing to anyone. I broke a lot of hearts, I think. I did a great disservice to, well, men. I was terrified. I was living alone in so many senses of the word, but I didn't pity myself - I liked alone. I revelled in alone.

I hope that this has not unleashed that onto the world again.

A House Possessed

2006-07-20T10:47:00.000+01:00

Last night, I dreamt that I came into possession of what I insinctively knew was my ancestral home. It was beautiful; it was all mine, and it was only mine. The first two floors were rooms and rooms of books, of old carpets, musical instruments, kitchens and dining rooms. The third floor consisted entirely of bedrooms; innumberable, small, cozy rooms crammed with overstuffed down beds and lit only with short bedside lamps. This floor itself was smaller than the other three, going by square-footage (dream geometry). The fourth floor, however, was by far the most expansive, its borders stretching beyond my vision. The floor was made of hard dark wood and blonde wood in a chessboard pattern, but the squares were all at different levels; I climbed from square to square like stairs. Lost somewhere in the center of this room, leaking through a few low squares, was a dark garden pool; it was small, but the sound and smell and cool feel of the water filled the huge room. There were no lights. I don't know if there was even ceiling (if there was, it was high). Instead of walls, the room was entirely bound by glass - no frames; only windows. Even at night, when I first saw it, the room was lit by the landscape outside. Green glowing land rolling lush and voluptuous for miles, stretching until it met black pine forest. And only my house at the center all of these miles.

But just as I came into my own in this home was it seized by strangers, many of whom, to be specific to the non-logic of dreams, were involved in organized crime - that's right, my house was taken over by the mafia. And they brought their crime in with them. There was in-fighting, and for the first time, blood in my house. There was a shoot-out in the library and the room next door. I was in the library, saw first the bullet holes peppering with ugly black wounds the aging yellowed wallpaper of the room before I realized there were still bullets whizzing through and threw myself to the ground. I was aware of the sound of the guns, but hadn't connected it with the bullets. But once I was on the thick carpet, I stayed there until all was quiet.

With all of the people the mafia brought, they filled all of the bedrooms. At the end of the night, I climbed the stairs to my room to find the bed filled. Its occupant told me my room was on the fourth floor. Exhausted, I continued to the chessboard room, where I would sleep on one of the hard platforms, high up, to keep dry. There was more of the mafia up there, however, planning a murder. I commanded, then demanded, and finally begged them not to commit such atrocities in my house. The police would come, I reasoned - the police, meaning still another seizure. I suddenly felt, for the first time, vulnerable in the chessboard room, vulnerable surrounded only by glass and sky. I didn't sleep that night - I waited, wandering the squares and looking out at the hills, for the police to come and arrest me and my guests. They never came - I woke up.

A house at battle with itself, invaded by unwanted guests, seized and under seige. Only a house? I wonder. No, I don't wonder - I often ascribe to that belief that the house stands for the body. Since the surgery, my always-already vivid dreams have become even more so real, and more, I've wandered through house after house in them, exploring this new, ever-shifting body. I have shared it with enemies (like the mafia, apparently), but I have shared it with friends, too, sometimes one at a time, sometimes all together, men and women. It has been rich and colorful (I once wrapped its rooms in red and purple curtains and then filled them with cushions; this was in the first two weeks post-op), but it has been spare, as well. Once, it sat on the beach at night. And so many times, I've returned in my dreams to the real-life house, the shithole apartment I shared with two girls during the senior year of my undergrad, but which was finally my own (all my own!) that summer, that I most associated with my body, with which I most (still) identify, and which has become the tangible location of my imagination.

Stalled

2006-07-19T17:12:00.000+01:00

I want to be writing right now. I have the chapters I'd like to be working on open in front of me. But I'm stalled:

1) Hot & sticky
2) Loud construction
3) Seizures
4) Incompetent doctors
5) Restless energy

So in an attempt to alleviate some of the problems:

Rasheed and I go for a walk in Hyde Park (no cure for the hot & sticky, but nice in the shade and when a strong breeze whips up over the round pond) to feed the ducks some bread that was starting to go bad. Then, come home to a nice cold mug (all other dishes dirty) of water and possibly the BEST vanilla yogurt I've had ever (better-than-ice-cream yogurt, seriously). And for the construction, I'm just telling myself that I can't do a thing about who's going to make noise when and where and how, so I'll just put on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue and turn it up a little louder.

The seizure/doctor problem there is no quick fix for. This new medicine is "a kind in glass and a cousin" (in Steinese) to an abusive boyfriend. For the first six days I was on it, I was seizure-free. None!! It was like being able to breathe again! The first few days, tentative first steps. But by day three, I was running all over this city by myself and going out dancing, unafraid. I allowed myself some hope. Then, my doctor stepped up the dose, the idea being to bring me up to therapeutic levels of this new drug, and take me off the former. And immediately the day after (last night), I'm slammed with three seizures in rapid succession (rapid for me, anyway, spaced about every 2 hours). And then another one this morning (while I was writing; sometimes, I actually write myself into a seizure; it just gets too intense). So I email my doctor, since I have a history of higher doses of seizure medicine actually making me sicker (2 out of the 3 drugs have done this to me; though the jury is still out on this newest); it's as if I get too much in my system, and it shocks me (literally, when you think of the electrical activity going on up there). And my doctor emails me back and tells me to increase my dose by another 500 mg!! No explanation. And I do the rational thing (having been exhausted by three seizures & not a lot of sleep last night and then capped with another seizure this morning) and wig. Just a little. Okay, okay - I cried. Just a little. And then I called one of my good professor-friends (I have two women professor-friends who have had experiences eerily similiar to mine [how many women does this happen to?]; they began having problems that were initially diagnosed as anxiety before it was "discovered" that there was actually an underlying quite serious physical illness, Graves in one case, uterine cancer in the other) to talk. And she was, like I knew she would be, wonderful. Worried, yes, which was not what I wanted to do, but helpful, and rational. So now I've emailed my doctor back with good questions, and I've let him know that I'm not comfortable increasing my dose again so quickly, especially since this last increase, only 2 days ago, caused such system-shock.

But, of course, he has not emailed back, and I just feel stalled. I need answers so I can move on with my day. Right now, this is such a distraction to me. I just want to WORK, but I feel so restless, and so scattered. I was hoping that writing here would help center me.

I should use the frustration, though, because right now, I'm hoping to write frustration into one of my characters. And it's a hot day there, too. A Saturday. And he, too, feels entirely impotent, but restless.

We'll see.

Censhorship

2006-07-19T10:43:00.000+01:00

So, I understand very little about computers and the internet or how one would even go about this, but apparently, the government of India has blocked access to a number of blogging websites, including, yes, blogspot. Read the article here:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/07/19/asia/web.0719india.php

The specter of terrorism, of course, was speculated having invited the censhorship, but what I found more sinister: this speculation comes as afterthought. It is the ever-present villian, lurking, if it IS to be found in the text itself, in the last paragraph, a fleeting familiar word, a brief mention, a long-since understood fact of life. And yet it is there, grinding away to push the chugging machinery of the article "forward" (where?) -

And does this not show that it pushes US?

A small incident from my own life:

I once got off the tube because a man in my carriage made me extremely nervous. He had a bag on the ground between his knees which he constantly fidgeted with, nervous fingers running over it like flies, flickering over all of the zippers and tabs. His foot was in constant motion, his heel drumming against the ground faster than you could keep rhythm to any techno beat. And his eyes darted up and down the cab, though stopping and dropping so that all I saw were his shiny lids when he caught me staring, daring him to reveal himself. He won the game, though, and I got off at the next stop, rationalizing "better safe than sorry."

Nothing, of course, happened (but what if it had, a voice persists in me? the fleeting familiar word), and this is nothing compared to the magnitude of the censorship in India. We let it win; we let it push us (and certainly not forward). Too many of us, entire governments, let it push us into silence & basements and off trains & planes and out of cities and into Canada (oh wait, that's Bush, but it's all the same, isn't it?).

And now, worse, we take it for granted.

Something meaningful

2006-07-18T01:53:00.000+01:00

A few words of introduction. Beginning this blog, I thought about the last time I did any online journaling. The first time was during my sophomore year of college, a pink "Diaryland" account, young & frivilous. The second, my junior year, "Livejournal," increasingly (unconsciously) despairing as I became increasingly sicker with the tumor, until my surgery, when the descent suddenly reversed, becoming a steady climb. The Livejournal became a record of my progress, of recovery. My bedroom was on the second story of the house; the computer, downstairs. In the beginning, when no one was looking, I used to shuffle on my bottom down the stairs (I wasn't allowed to dare the stairs yet) to the computer, turn it on, log into my account, and write about the thoughts that had occured to me as I laid on my bed smelling the summer tree-smells that came through my window (my mother always used to ask, "How are you doing? Are you dozing?" "I'm thinking," I always answered), then turn off the computer so no one would know I had been there, and then crawl back up the stairs and get back into my bed or the chair in the living room. Then, they became entries about walks outside in the yard; then, about excursions for ice cream, and once, terrifyingly, the first movie I saw in the theatre post-surgery, and then about fireworks over Green Lake on the Fourth of July, and about my first Fulbright application, Dorothy Parker, and my senior honors English thesis (Jane Austen and Susanna Rowson's transatlantic discourse of gendered space). And then. The last entry. The day of my second MRI after the surgery, taken after most of the swelling had gone down, taken at the end of the summer, just before my senior year. The MRI to determine if the doctor had successfully removed all of the tumor. And. He had. I wrote about it, and ended the journal there, feeling it appropriate to end what had become "the brain surgery diaries" with this last, most important, triumph.

And I thought that this would be the triumph to end all the troubles. I honestly believed that after the surgery, I could go back to being the "normal" girl I used to be, the pink-template, "bubbly" Diaryland girl, that I could go back to talking about "normal" (easier at the time than so many other things) things like boys, magazines, my birthday party nearly a year away (one of my favorite things to daydream about, that birthday, in the first couple of weeks right after surgery). But after a year of intensely obsessive-living ("work hard, play hard"; "go balls out"), attempting to "make up" for the year that I had "wasted" being so sick, attempting to live as intensely as possible, I've learned that after spending so much time out of reality, severed from it by the seizures which heralded the tumor and that have now returned to plague me, and that after being confronted with mortality, there is no return to "normal." But, instead of obsessive living, there is living deliberately.

I don't mean to leave you with a moral, though. Just an attempt at an explanation of my life. I still struggle with "obsessive." I still sometimes live like I dance - never sitting one out, and living 'til my hands shake with nervous-manic energy. So here is the process with which I open this new blog.

Many stories and thoughts to come.

First Post

2006-07-18T01:21:00.000+01:00

This post is just to test if I set this up correctly. Cheryl & Holly, you've inspired me to start blogging again (and it's likely that you'll be the only two to read it, so the pressure's on!).

I promise to write something meaningful soon.