it just occurred to me how nice an old folks’ home might be, minus the “old” part. I was turning over in my mind for the forty bizillionth time how to start up a standing games night when it hit me– man, if I just lived in an old folks home, well, there’s always an agenda of activities and even a room devoted to people sitting around playing dominoes and spite and malice. and it struck me how nice that would be. cool glasses of iced tea. if only you all weren’t just waiting around to *die* or for something to break. a friend of mine whose grandmother just fell and broke her back was talking about that yesterday– how the places she’s been in are swank, like prep schools with salons and big squishy furniture, but with an evil-smelling fissure down the middle of disappointment and death. ick. that’s not really what I want. but just everyone kind of around– less of this busy-busy hyper-scheduledness. to be able to wander (*wander*! what a concept) around the corner and maybe pick up a game of ping pong. that would be cool.
a rant against the country that I love
last night a few dear friends and I took turns preaching to our own collective choir: we all feel our country, this country, the u.s., is in the midst of a very strange, very selfish, and extremely paranoid period right now.
it all started with some grousing about a student who failed to show up for her piano lesson for the fifth time in a row, offering only the most superficial “apology,” little seeming to realize that azi’s livelihood depends on the consistent income from that teaching work or reflecting on the frustration she must have felt waiting there at the appointed time for a student who never arrives. “I forgot,” or, “I had an appointment I didn’t know would run so late,” but no call, no courtesy– just the prevailing performance of a sense that the world is there to serve her, at her convenience (an attitude I see all the time in my own students– the sense of privilege, of entitlement, which seems unaccountable and outrageous to me until I begin to hear what an old fogey I sound like– “when I was a kid, a B was considered a good grade and we respected our teachers…”). because we were already conveniently grousing, it was easy enough to launch into five-part harmony against people in restaurants who demand of servers “gimme this or that” without any apparent awareness of another person’s dignity or common politeness.
and someone– actually, I ohso modestly interject, I think it may have been me– made the bold leap to speculating that the thing these behaviors have in common is a (currently) typical american ugly sort of indvidualism– the spirit of looking out for number one and letting the rest of the world (different–>muslim–>terrorists–>evil) go hang. now, I realize this is quite a leap (mine, I mean– the reasonableness of the other one I leave it to you to wrestle with). perhaps not to excuse but to explain it I should go further into backdrop and other bits of the conversation.
one piece is mimi’s work with indonesians (many muslim) and in particular last year living day in and day out with indonesian migrant workers in korea (before that she worked with indonesian students in canada, looking at how women access higher education). and yesterday mimi met with the president of our university, who is planning an upcoming trip to indonesia– to court better relations, since the numbers show enrollments from asia down 60% in recent years. there’s no doubt that this trend has to do with trickle-down policies in bush’s america, where fear and patriotism are synonymous and the media and average people persistently equate muslims with terrorists. for inhabitants of those countries why *wouldn’t* australia begin to look like a better place to go to school?
another piece is my recently having watched “hotel rwanda”– a pretty good flick in which the awesome don cheadle portrays “an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances”: a hutu hotel manager who struggles to shelter over a thousand tutsis in his hotel during the ethnic cleansings the country endured while the west simply fled. the biggest take-away, for me, from that movie was some degree of chagrin at our, at my privileged western complacency– at one point joaquin phoenix’s journalist character essentially pricks the bubble of hope don cheadle’s character has been puffing into when he reasons, with anguish, that even if people across the oceans do witness the grim footage he’s captured of people being slaughtered by machetes in the streets, they will merely shake their heads, say, “that’s terrible,” and then go back to their bowls of wheaties. which is exactly what came to pass, with that instance of genocide as with many others before and since. life goes on, I guess, but still there seems something deeply wrong. like, if this is the effect of global media, what good is it doing us? if our only response to the delivery of so much devastating information is overwhelm, rationalistic thinking, and going on with the daily routine in any case, remind me why it is we’re all so all-fired determined to get the latest feeds and downloads? anyway, I threw “hotel rwanda” into our discussion last night as a link back to brian’s several years working in africa– and it led him to tell us, firsthand, about arriving in rwanda just after the “cleansings” depicted in the film, of the devastation. which leads to a declaration of the entire continent of africa’s going down the shitter, while we just sit by over here, munching our wheaties. sorry, bono.
which a few minutes later led mimi to draw the parallel up out of historical events and into the present– to mention a television report she’d seen recently in which a bbc reporter managed to broadcast from north korea– and in the course of the broadcast one car passed in what would otherwise have been a bustling city street– because kim jong il has sent all the people into the countryside to help the farmers because the country has no food. I mean, yikes. I’ve been operating on a pretty severely curtailed budget for the last five months, but as bad as it gets, there’s always stuff I’ve squirreled away in my cupboards and freezer that I can eat. despite my mom’s worries over the years to the contrary, I have in fact never gone hungry. two blocks away is a grocery store whose shelves are simply brimming with plenitude (reaped from industrial agriculture and monoculture crop farming and archer daniels midland’s whole “supermarket to the world” whitewashed approach to multinational monopolization– but that’s a whole other gripe– which I should get to sometime and maybe even will). meanwhile, all we hear about north korea is whispers of, gasp, nukes— which, by the way, don’t we have some of those ourselves, despite various “nonproliferation” treaties past and present? oh, but we’re the good guys, right? we’re not going to go off half-cocked like some religious extremist third world nation– or that’s the common argument, anyway. striking me just now like an extremely convenient rhetorical position.
another piece of backdrop is that we’d just been to a matinee of “star wars episode iii: attack of the clones”– which, I’m sorry, niall, but I feel was just a lot of simplistic, binary, and, it seems to me, particularly american claptrap. now, don’t get me wrong– I *loved* the original “star wars” and even more so “the empire strikes back”– they were big and glorious, eye-opening and paradigm-shifting. and then I saw “return of the jedi” and decided the magic, for me, was pretty much gone. I didn’t even bother with either of episodes i and ii. and it’s not about jar jar binks, excess muppetdom, or racist stereotyping– it simply seems that the lessons the lucas industry had to deliver to this audience got delivered– and now he just keeps churning out tired retreads. that particular ship of innocence in film-going has sailed. and it’s very hard to swallow– 20 years after “empire”– all this hooey about “the dark side”– such an uncomplicated delivery of bad guys who dress like history’s fascists and the fighting-monk-like-agrarian good guys. maybe it’s just me who’s gotten excessively cynical seven years into grad school– but I found it impossible to get behind a portrayed battle between Good and Evil in which I was intended to sympathize with a character who was supposedly struggling with a gruelling ethical decision and yet found it possible to snap to and slaughter a bunch of kids. maybe it’s like porn– which I also can’t stomach, due mainly to its lack of subtlety. but I’m getting off-track– my point was my sense of a kind of americanist propaganda the movie seemed to be lobbing– all that “fighting for democracy” crap. it just rang too familiar.
but I’m typically somewhat uncomfortable making such big political proclamations like I’m doing here. I mean, for one thing, I’m always acknowledgi
ng to people how I live in a self-imposed media blackout (aka “assume ostrich position”). every time I start reading papers– even just reading headlines, let alone once I start delving into the prose text and begin to wonder about the positioning of the journalist, of the paper that pays her wage, of the editor that chooses the pieces to run, etc.– I get pretty quickly overwhelmed. which is why I’ve so determinedly, years ago, staked claim in this little itty bitty area of focus, the inside of my own head, i.e. navelgazing. not that I’m convinced that it’s the most noble or courageous approach, only knowing that we all have our strength and limitations, I’m trying to mobilize some of the former of mine. and mitigate against the latter– because I tend to be all too aware of how inflated my own postulating positions and perspectives inevitably are and how limited my point of view is– and this feeling just undermines any effort to be effective I do make. I see all the holes and reasons why I’m wrong far more glaringly than I feel any conviction in my rightness. my boy willy b. once again hits it on the head: “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” though really… “best” and “worst”… there again, I dunno.
anyway lately I’m re-reading one of my all-time favorite writers, david james duncan (author of _the river why_ and _the brothers k_, fab books both, plus a couple collections I haven’t gotten to yet, but really should soon, and, damn, but once again I wish I had it in me just to sit down and write fiction, for godssake)– and looking up what he’s done lately online, I come across this piece he published in orion magazine now like 2 1/2 years ago, declaiming bush’s “patriot act,” aggressions against iraq, and general lack of reason– and in addition to being struck once again by how goldurned articulate the man (duncan, right, not bush) is, I was also struck by the date– two and a half years ago and it’s already a catalogue of the ills the people in iraq were suffering back then on account of our “patriotic” military actions (malnutrition, radiation poisoning)– how much worse must their lot be now? which of course makes me realize the answer’s probably out there somewhere in all this vast plethora of information at my fingertips, the marvel-ous worldwide web– and then I stumble on an article in today’s cnn.com (along with a particularly gorge-provoking photo of our commander and chief) that describes how shrub is now lobbying for the renewal of the patriot act– cuz it’s just worked so durn well! and then I realize I’m at the end not only of this diatribe but also of my limited powers of peeking out from inside my little ostrich hill– and my head’s itching to get stuck back inside.
too many days sine linea
I lose track. I loose track– rails running all over the place, box cars clattering, precarious, full of everything under the sun: piles of dust, tilting coat racks, stained kitchen sinks, out-of-date vehicle registrations, vegetable drawers of dessicated fruit, a bed with a knit blanket in place of a bottom sheet, so many post-it notes, the wrong type of cat food, answering machine messages of robotic voices saying, please call us as soon as possible at 1-800-…
where are words in all of this? somewhere down underneath the debris. but I’m still waking to the occasional lightbulb. this morning’s revelation was that the university hasn’t actually paid me for the course I taught this spring. which seems like a pretty big one.
but anyway. consider this a place-holder. lameass, but the best I can manage. something just to say, hello. kind of like tapping the spacebar to keep the screen saver from kicking in. meanwhile, we will continue circling, waiting for a break in the fog.
sister.
today I wrote a letter to my neice, who is also my sister, and another letter to her mother, my brother’s wife, whom I also love and whom the law calls my sister. and I spoke with my very only sister on the telephone, and she was not, as sometimes she is not, a friend to my mind, but sister nonetheless. and we did not mention our mother, who cannot see us and who, while her sister lived, loathed her, not flesh, not blood, but by circumstance sister nonetheless. we spoke of our brothers, who in effect define me, as precocious one, as little sister, belonging. and then I was speaking to my therapist, who is smarter than any sister and has about a thousand sisters herself (I see them at the movie theatre with their children and outside the ice cream store downtown), and she set my head to right. I spoke to her about the friends who are not sisters and the friends who are sisters, here, and there when I wish they would be here, who mend me, who help make up my mind in various ways, though it is always work, it is always work with women.
“Tell the truth.”
most provocative bumper sticker I’ve seen in awhile. maybe ever. which says something about the extent of my relativism.
black block letters on a white background on a white honda odyssey. and little itty bitty microtext in a line below that, goddamnit, I couldn’t from my seat inside my vehicle get close enough to read, even nudging practically right up against the bumper. not even any other accompanying stickers or decals of affiliation or positionality to give a girl a clue as to context. blank fuckin’ slate.
I mean, come on— whose truth, for starters? which truth? are you talking Truth, buddy, like the bible-thumping variety? or the kind-of opposite, verifiable scientific certitude? geezo, that dang thing could mean so many simultaneous contradictory things…
and even so– even if we’re just talking the everyday variety of factual accounts, what he did then what she said– tell the truth always? and all of it? don’t you think there are some cases where that’s arguably the least constructive approach to communication?
it’s just so fuckin’ bald, that imperative. so impossible. that’s what pisses me off. of course, it’s probably meant well, crafted and marketed and peeled and stuck on the fiberglass with the best of intentions. but seriously. nothing’s given me pause like that in days.
which is probably precisely its rhetorical point.
postscript:
yikes. if it’s this, well, then I guess I have my answer. I guess it makes sense that I got so pissed off without even knowing exactly why. black and white. exactly. fuckheads.
beware of zyrtec.
the label says, “take one tablet BEFORE BEDTIME,” for good reason. if you wake up in the middle of the night, say, three a.m. with the cats doing laps across your head and your sinuses suddenly full of solid snot (so clogged indeed that you know you’d make zero progress with the flonase inhaler, your first line of defense against your body’s hypersensitivity to everything from dust mites to animal dander to common tree and grass pollens) from all those spores drifting in the open window off the flowering pear trees– WHATEVER you do, do NOT take a zyrtec. at least, if you do, do not expect to be ambulatory and coherent before noon.
me, i’ve been downing very strong coffee and careening around the place, missing colliding with walls by merest breaths since 11. because I have to teach today. I’ve got to get my head back in the game. I need to ransack and turn my house inside-out in cleaning frenzy– because only two days left, and I can’t afford to be a zombie for an instant longer.
incidentally, check out this compelling descriptor: “In ZYRTEC studies, side effects were mild or moderate, including drowsiness, fatigue and dry mouth in adults, and drowsiness…”– anything jump out at you? actually, I edited it kind of unfairly to emphasize a point– it does go on to list other side effects “in children,” but still, I think my point holds. and, remind me again, what the difference is between drowsiness and fatigue…
the waiting is the hardest part.
I can feel myself pulling in, shuttering, closing down. I don’t want to go anywhere, see anyone, do anything. I just want him to get here.
favorite games.
birthday parties I remember– “fishing” down the laundry chute. somebody down in the basement attaching toys and prizes to the end of the line– sister or a brother, surely, but to me it seemed magical– as if the architecture of everyday had grown transformed by MY BIRTHDAY. kept that sense for many years– listening to the beatles’ “birthday” in 9th grade boarding school dorm room, thinking my birthday– my very birthday. same way the name sarah used to feel– my very own, distinctly mine (long before the legions of the current day). something inherently mine inside a day, a name.
and the other good games– the spider web made out of eight different rolls of string for eight little girls, each line with a treasure at the end; easter egg hunt at the country club, clutches of dark chocolate foil-wrapped eggs and jellybeans in the folds of curtains in the bar room– the last time anything felt like something for nothing; capture the flag in the woods up in michigan in the summer after-dinner twilight or flashlight tag in the grosse pointe pitch-black– and the ecstatic thrill of daring to rescue prisoners from jail; spite & malice and dominoes with gran; the game of lucy that first time new year’s eve in the old henry ford cabin with the two storey living room ceiling and the windup plastic bird that actually flew in circles in the vast space overhead; masterpiece; mastermind; clue; poker the christmas the high school boyfriend came home to michigan for a visit with the parents; sardines; kings in the corners; backgammon; kick the can; boston; killer; murder.
ann arbor is overrated. so you say.
this morning while I was busy waxing nostalgic, I did a google search on drakes and ended up at the scathing “cultural commentary” site of one anonymous “unemployed gay conservative pseudo-bohemian named Ryan, or maybe Jeff, who drives around in a late-model Acura with tinted windows.”
pretty sharp stuff. makes me take a step back and go, whoa. what am I, middle-aged, suspiciously identifying more with those returning football-fanatical alumni than the cynical drakette of yore? god. for. bid.
what is it about the glowy tint of nostalgia that so sets its barb in my mandible? crikey, but I am once again reminded of my voluminous sapishness. which is, I suppose, why I seldom indulge in reading Cultural Commentary of any stripe. because I come away feeling just ever so callow and unhip. and, I mean, yeah, sure it’s the truth, but, come on, I’m trying to maintain a little momentum here, guys.
just keep swimming, just keep swimming. there ya go. that’s about my speed. no sharp edges, nothing to take an eye out on.
nobody in here but us dames
we’re shooting a live-action comic book– or at least blocking the scene with live actors prior to inking– the play centers on a bunch of tough guys and a single dame, and it’s moving right along when the director yells, cut! the problem is, he explains, she’s getting upstaged by the guys– and that cannot happen. come on, sweetheart, snap to it! and she just stands there for a count of ten, vaguely insulted– no one moves (they all know it’s a good call)– but then she’s moving, sashaying across the floor right into the clot of men, and, as she swishes past, swinging her purse with deadly accuracy a hair’s breadth from one guy’s face– it whistles through the air and his hair luffs back. the action comes out of nowhere, and he just stands there gaping, unsure how to react. she’s not a star for nothin’. and now the chips are all hers. she reaches the far side of the room and pivots on her spike heel, gun barrel tracing a wide arc parallel to the floor to come to rest– and she stops. the face in her sights stops her dead– his face, his deadly beautiful face.
I’m visiting my sister who’s staying with her in-laws, a bunch of israeli jews– the grandmothers sit holding the babies, and they’re tough old bats. the mothers are breast-feeding, though one of them hasn’t gotten the hang of it, and she asks me to turn away– I’m embarrassed to have been staring, and I wish I could explain how happy the sight makes me, but it’s evident I’m intruding here. rain comes through the ceiling and fills up the light fixtures and clocks.
there’s bombing in the sky, zapping alien laser warfare, targeting just over the ridge– we’re unsheltered and sneaking through the night, trying to get a sense of what’s going on– but then the zaps are coming too close, and we realize we should take shelter. the others go on, and I climb up into a slatted outbuilding, kind of a chicken coop but clean, up and up the rungs of roosts– it’s dim and blue inside, and after sitting quietyly in the shadows for a bit, it comes to me that the place is full of people– and I make my way down to join them in the darkness.