Yesterday afternoon, while driving near my home in downtown Seattle, we passed a hilly patch of grass on the side of the road that slanted downward beneath the overpass onto the freeway. On a normal day it's a particularly unspectacular parcel of land, and one that we pass not infrequently, but yesterday it took on new personality with the presence of a group of squatters.
Namely, a herd of goats.
A herd of goats, and a sign that said "Goats for Rent."
I find this curious for two reasons. The first - and I should think the more obvious - is that someone must have gone to a bizarrely large amount of trouble to get an entire herd of goats under an overpass, onto a patch of land which has no gate, in the middle of downtown Seattle. The second is that, no matter how hard I rack my brain, I simply cannot conceive of a reason that any Emerald-city condo-dweller would have for needing to rent a goat. Stranger still is the idea that said condo-dweller, having found himself in need of a stubborn and hairy four-legged lawnmower, would think to look for said creature under the freeway. Did someone really think of this as a viable business enterprise?
Friday, August 29, 2008
Love, Actually
“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’”
-Matthew 25:41-45
“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
-1 Corinthians 13:8-13
I remember the year I was in sixth grade, coming to school the day after Bill Clinton was elected. I remember sitting on the steps to the portable classroom behind the swing set, hugging my knees to my chest, watching as my teacher approached, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“She’s crying,” someone next to me whispered.
Someone else said, “Are you okay?”
And she answered, simply – and I’ll never forget this – “We won.”
I didn’t understand any of this at the time. I’d been raised in a staunchly conservative home in a staunchly conservative part of the state, and the election the night before had cast a pall of gloom over our entire house that had persisted through the night. It hadn’t even really occurred to me, I don’t think, that there were actually people out there who had voted for a Democratic candidate. Not just now, but ever. These were theoretical agents of evil that existed, in my mind, somewhere in the realm of the monsters under my bed. Frightening, yes, and absolutely life-threatening, but invisible nonetheless. Now one of these aliens was standing before me, disguised as what had only the day before been an icon of knowledge and authority, and not only was she tangible, she was crying for joy. I was absolutely baffled.
Fast forward to 2008.
In 2008, I developed a severe health problem that drained me as much financially as it did emotionally; even with two separate insurance plans, I’m so deeply in debt that at one point I actually considered dropping out of graduate school. In 2008, the price of food in the United States became so high that for the first time I had to choose between fresh vegetables and paying my electricity bill, the price of gasoline was so high that my law student boyfriend could barely afford to commute the five miles each way to school in his beat-up Honda, and it was impossible to walk down any residential street in Seattle without seeing at least one real estate sign every two or three blocks. In 2008, even my friends who had good jobs engineering for Boeing or programming for Microsoft went to work every day fearing that it might be for the last time. In 2008, schools failed, factories failed, hearts failed. And we live in one of the more economically secure parts of the country.
In 2008, the US unemployment rate rose to almost 6%. This does not count the heads of families of four or five who were reduced to working at Burger King for minimum wage to make ends meet.
In 2008, the number of my brothers and sisters killed in a pointless, political war grew to total over 4,000.
In 2008, the number of Iraqi civilians killed as a direct result of the US invasion grew to total over one million. Which would matter, if anyone cared.
If a non-American child is hit by a stray bullet, does he still make a sound?
And still we bicker. We draw our proverbial lines in the sand and stand obstinately behind them, our ignorance and insecurity proving such threats to our egos that we are rendered utterly incapacitated. The food is at our sides, the hungry at our feet, but in the blind confinement of our need to be right we find ourselves unable to move in order to feed them. All good intentions are lost in our stubbornness. All potential for compassion is consumed by the void of our refusal to open our eyes for fear of what we might see. Before us, people are denied educations, denied rights, denied freedom, denied the very things the fight for which swells our chests with pride and patriotism when we call ourselves Americans. People are, quite literally, dying in front of our eyes. We could save them, but we won’t. Our drive to love others is nowhere near as strong as our fear of change.
So much of the status quo is built around the Christian “right”. (The potential ironically self-satisfied double-meaning of which phrase does not, incidentally, go unnoticed by this writer). But very often I wonder, should Jesus actually see fit to return to earth on a cloud of glory tomorrow morning, if he wouldn’t be just slightly startled by our current state of affairs. Try as I might, I can find nothing in the direct teachings of Jesus having to do with gay marriage or abortion. These petty, ambiguous issues we might be justified in arguing over only if every other evil in the world were already banished. These things we use to distract ourselves so we don’t have to think about the poor and the hungry and the sick, because doing so might require us to make more than the superficial sacrifice of a once-a-week visit to the guilt-assuaging congregation down the street.
What I do find, however, are almost nonstop admonitions to practice love and compassion. There are no caveats on the mandate that we turn the other cheek; this was not worded as merely a suggestion, nor is it a verse easily taken out of context for the benefit of pacifist rhetoric. We are not asked to turn our cheeks except when we are afraid, or when we are threatened, or when we think a potential enemy might be harboring nuclear weapons. We are asked instead to stand up for our beliefs by example, through love and through peace. Not the korny, acid-trip kind, but the love and peace borne of a true compassion for our fellow man, the practice of which is the only thing preventing us from becoming the very thing we stand against.
Jesus was a revolutionary. He spent his life fighting the status quo, the blind, frightened self-interest of a religious system, one with so many soap boxes beneath its feet that it had risen to an elevation from which the suffering of the humanity below it looked like the suffering of ants viewed from an airplane. Jesus dined with prostitutes and thieves. He touched lepers with neither fear nor loathing. He preached self-examination before judgment of others. Yet we studiously ignore these attributes of the man we simultaneously hold up as our ultimate ideal, because to acknowledge them would be an uncomfortable challenge to our own self-righteousness.
“My people,” I can picture him saying, “My precious people that I created with my own two hands, my precious people for whom I sacrificed my life, are paving the streets with their blood. They are sick and they are hungry, but you can’t be bothered to turn off your televisions. And you who I’ve blessed with everything I could possibly bestow on a human being, fully expecting you to extend this generosity to your fellow men in kind! You idiots are fighting over this?”
We have turned his Father’s house into a den of thieves.
We have a chance, now, to be better. Will we take it? Will we set aside the utopian ideals in which everyone sees things our way – six million utopias for six million people – even just for a moment, and look into the eyes of our sick and our poor and our hungry, not with fear, but with a resolve buoyed by a compassion free from conditions or judgments or prejudice? Are we brave enough to love our brothers? Such a love will require the courage to stand alone in the face of doubt, in the face of ridicule, in the face of a world in which compassion is a subversive and threatening concept. Are we ready?
Tonight, my life comes full circle. I understand why my teacher was crying all those years ago, because I find myself weeping. Shedding tears in the midst of daring to hope, because –maybe naively - I believe that we can be strong again. That we can once again find our capacity for compassion in the midst of a world of hatred. I believe that we can overcome the fear that tethers us and extend our hands, weak and atrophied though they may be, to those in need around us. That if we can admit our weaknesses, we can be strong in one another. That united we stand, divided we find ourselves in the midst of a hell we have created through our own blindness. And I believe we’re better than that.
They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’”
-Matthew 25:41-45
“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
-1 Corinthians 13:8-13
I remember the year I was in sixth grade, coming to school the day after Bill Clinton was elected. I remember sitting on the steps to the portable classroom behind the swing set, hugging my knees to my chest, watching as my teacher approached, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“She’s crying,” someone next to me whispered.
Someone else said, “Are you okay?”
And she answered, simply – and I’ll never forget this – “We won.”
I didn’t understand any of this at the time. I’d been raised in a staunchly conservative home in a staunchly conservative part of the state, and the election the night before had cast a pall of gloom over our entire house that had persisted through the night. It hadn’t even really occurred to me, I don’t think, that there were actually people out there who had voted for a Democratic candidate. Not just now, but ever. These were theoretical agents of evil that existed, in my mind, somewhere in the realm of the monsters under my bed. Frightening, yes, and absolutely life-threatening, but invisible nonetheless. Now one of these aliens was standing before me, disguised as what had only the day before been an icon of knowledge and authority, and not only was she tangible, she was crying for joy. I was absolutely baffled.
Fast forward to 2008.
In 2008, I developed a severe health problem that drained me as much financially as it did emotionally; even with two separate insurance plans, I’m so deeply in debt that at one point I actually considered dropping out of graduate school. In 2008, the price of food in the United States became so high that for the first time I had to choose between fresh vegetables and paying my electricity bill, the price of gasoline was so high that my law student boyfriend could barely afford to commute the five miles each way to school in his beat-up Honda, and it was impossible to walk down any residential street in Seattle without seeing at least one real estate sign every two or three blocks. In 2008, even my friends who had good jobs engineering for Boeing or programming for Microsoft went to work every day fearing that it might be for the last time. In 2008, schools failed, factories failed, hearts failed. And we live in one of the more economically secure parts of the country.
In 2008, the US unemployment rate rose to almost 6%. This does not count the heads of families of four or five who were reduced to working at Burger King for minimum wage to make ends meet.
In 2008, the number of my brothers and sisters killed in a pointless, political war grew to total over 4,000.
In 2008, the number of Iraqi civilians killed as a direct result of the US invasion grew to total over one million. Which would matter, if anyone cared.
If a non-American child is hit by a stray bullet, does he still make a sound?
And still we bicker. We draw our proverbial lines in the sand and stand obstinately behind them, our ignorance and insecurity proving such threats to our egos that we are rendered utterly incapacitated. The food is at our sides, the hungry at our feet, but in the blind confinement of our need to be right we find ourselves unable to move in order to feed them. All good intentions are lost in our stubbornness. All potential for compassion is consumed by the void of our refusal to open our eyes for fear of what we might see. Before us, people are denied educations, denied rights, denied freedom, denied the very things the fight for which swells our chests with pride and patriotism when we call ourselves Americans. People are, quite literally, dying in front of our eyes. We could save them, but we won’t. Our drive to love others is nowhere near as strong as our fear of change.
So much of the status quo is built around the Christian “right”. (The potential ironically self-satisfied double-meaning of which phrase does not, incidentally, go unnoticed by this writer). But very often I wonder, should Jesus actually see fit to return to earth on a cloud of glory tomorrow morning, if he wouldn’t be just slightly startled by our current state of affairs. Try as I might, I can find nothing in the direct teachings of Jesus having to do with gay marriage or abortion. These petty, ambiguous issues we might be justified in arguing over only if every other evil in the world were already banished. These things we use to distract ourselves so we don’t have to think about the poor and the hungry and the sick, because doing so might require us to make more than the superficial sacrifice of a once-a-week visit to the guilt-assuaging congregation down the street.
What I do find, however, are almost nonstop admonitions to practice love and compassion. There are no caveats on the mandate that we turn the other cheek; this was not worded as merely a suggestion, nor is it a verse easily taken out of context for the benefit of pacifist rhetoric. We are not asked to turn our cheeks except when we are afraid, or when we are threatened, or when we think a potential enemy might be harboring nuclear weapons. We are asked instead to stand up for our beliefs by example, through love and through peace. Not the korny, acid-trip kind, but the love and peace borne of a true compassion for our fellow man, the practice of which is the only thing preventing us from becoming the very thing we stand against.
Jesus was a revolutionary. He spent his life fighting the status quo, the blind, frightened self-interest of a religious system, one with so many soap boxes beneath its feet that it had risen to an elevation from which the suffering of the humanity below it looked like the suffering of ants viewed from an airplane. Jesus dined with prostitutes and thieves. He touched lepers with neither fear nor loathing. He preached self-examination before judgment of others. Yet we studiously ignore these attributes of the man we simultaneously hold up as our ultimate ideal, because to acknowledge them would be an uncomfortable challenge to our own self-righteousness.
“My people,” I can picture him saying, “My precious people that I created with my own two hands, my precious people for whom I sacrificed my life, are paving the streets with their blood. They are sick and they are hungry, but you can’t be bothered to turn off your televisions. And you who I’ve blessed with everything I could possibly bestow on a human being, fully expecting you to extend this generosity to your fellow men in kind! You idiots are fighting over this?”
We have turned his Father’s house into a den of thieves.
We have a chance, now, to be better. Will we take it? Will we set aside the utopian ideals in which everyone sees things our way – six million utopias for six million people – even just for a moment, and look into the eyes of our sick and our poor and our hungry, not with fear, but with a resolve buoyed by a compassion free from conditions or judgments or prejudice? Are we brave enough to love our brothers? Such a love will require the courage to stand alone in the face of doubt, in the face of ridicule, in the face of a world in which compassion is a subversive and threatening concept. Are we ready?
Tonight, my life comes full circle. I understand why my teacher was crying all those years ago, because I find myself weeping. Shedding tears in the midst of daring to hope, because –maybe naively - I believe that we can be strong again. That we can once again find our capacity for compassion in the midst of a world of hatred. I believe that we can overcome the fear that tethers us and extend our hands, weak and atrophied though they may be, to those in need around us. That if we can admit our weaknesses, we can be strong in one another. That united we stand, divided we find ourselves in the midst of a hell we have created through our own blindness. And I believe we’re better than that.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Fireworks
On the night of the Fourth of July we went to an outlook in a residential neighborhood on Queen Anne Hill to watch the fireworks. The city of Seattle is a light show in and of itself at night. Unlike a lot of other places I’ve been, it never really fades to black in the absence of the sunlight. Instead the rolling hills go to different hues of blue, deep shades of navy and sapphire and cobalt freckled with playful fireflies of light. They strike me as so unconscious of themselves, these pinpricks of iridescence; they wink at each other from behind the heavy brocade drapes of expensive mansions with the same innocent jocularity that they do the cheap plastic blinds of dilapidated basement apartments, and, in my overworked imagination, they laugh jovially at our inability to see past the difference between the two.
Every year, before colors begin exploding in space, a military helicopter with a giant American flag pinned to its belly makes a couple of strategic revolutions around the sky above Lake Union, a giant spotlight illuminating it from a barge below. The idea, one supposes, is the invocation of pride, a swelling of patriotic emotion, an overwhelming gratitude at having been born free.
This year, though, it was different. My first reaction wasn’t pride, it wasn’t patriotism, it was anger. And then it was anger that I had a reason to be angry. For some reason the Fourth of July is always a bit of an emotional holiday for me: standing underneath falling shards of glittering gunpowder for a half an hour always instantly takes me back to when I was a kid, to playing in the park with my brother and sister, singing silly songs about Henry the Eighth (I am I am!) and John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt while the giant blue and red explosions – much simpler then than they are now – cast long irregular shadows over the town.
As I grow older, I remember too how I was told as a child how lucky I was to be born an American. People here can be whatever they want, I was told. We can make a difference. We can change things if they need to be changed. And this is all because we’re free.
And I remember my grandfather last summer, talking to my best friend Lindsey as he sat rocking in his favorite chair, the naval tattoo on his arm faded from exposure to the years, saying, “I’ve always been a real flag-waver when it comes to our country.” And I remember feeling terribly proud.
And so as that arrogant helicopter strutting around with that arrogant flag strapped to its arrogant underside, I couldn’t help but feel betrayed. Lost. We don’t even try to be whatever we want (who has the money to pay for an education?). We’re skeptical of our ability to make a difference, and scared of what might happen if we do, so we don’t even try. And freedom? We’ve entered an age where criticism of our government is unpatriotic, and criticism of each other is mandatory. American community has become American isolation. American philanthropists have become American Enrons. The American dream has become the American trying-to-get-by. American hope has become American fear.
How dare they? I thought. The rich and powerful have taken what was once envisioned as a government for and by the people and used it to suffocate those it was meant to empower. How dare they ignore our poor? How dare they take the money meant to educate our children and put it toward a meaningless war? How dare they make political games out of the suffering of those in other countries? In our own? How dare they make me doubt my desire to create new life, at times even to live my own? How dare they turn their backs on the flat-wavers of this country, the grandfathers and fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles who have fought bravely, unquestioningly, nobly, and now find themselves – sometimes quite literally – without a leg to stand on?
And worst of all, how dare they rob us of our hope?
How do you impeach a government for the theft of optimism?
I stood there for a moment, seething. Disoriented. Wondering if this was even the same country in which I’d grown up, because really I recognize very little of it.
It wasn’t until I’d been standing there brooding in my self-righteousness for a few minutes that I realized that someone in the small crowd around us had been humming the national anthem softly as the flag passed. Someone else to my right was nodding – almost imperceptibly, but he was doing it – his eyes moist with tears. The closer the flag got, the more static the air around us became, until that great square of fabric hovered right in front of us. In the crowd of a hundred people, not one of us spoke. Even the drunk guy sitting in a lawn chair two rows up was momentarily dumbstruck.
What I realized standing there that night is this: we are not dead. Anesthetized, maybe, but not dead. Sometimes it’s easy to feel like we are; we watch the daily chaos on the news, the horror in Africa, the rising gas prices, the idiots in congress, the soaring prices of food, people losing their homes. And we feel lost because we can’t do anything about it. Not just for ourselves, but for others. We can’t help and we can’t make it better. So we go in one end of our day and out the other like zombies, numbed by our ineffectiveness, manipulated by our apathy. We look out on the world and all we see is gray. Gray, gray, gray.
But I think it’s also easy to forget how lucky we really are in spite of everything. My generation has only ever seen explosions in the sky in celebration of our freedom, never because we were fighting in pursuit of it. We have only ever had to associate the burning smell of gunpowder and charred meat with the lingering after-effects of a giant nationwide party. There are many, many people on earth who have far more sinister associations with such sensations.
I think, really, that deep down we know this. And I strongly believe that there is still something in us that dares to hope. However small, it is still there. And it will, I believe, transcend scandal and stupidity and greed and global warming. There is still a spark in each of us, a tiny grain of everything irrepressible about the human spirit, that clings to optimism, to the potential for good. But we have to make an effort to seek it out, and it’s going to take work. Barack Obama can offer us all the change he wants, but until we’re willing to work for it in our own lives, all the promises and all the blame of all the politicians and gurus and spiritual leaders in all the world can never hand it to us.
In America, the government is still the people, even if it is by a narrow margin. What I wonder is whether we will ever trust the government, no matter how brilliant, as long as we remain unable to trust ourselves.
Every year, before colors begin exploding in space, a military helicopter with a giant American flag pinned to its belly makes a couple of strategic revolutions around the sky above Lake Union, a giant spotlight illuminating it from a barge below. The idea, one supposes, is the invocation of pride, a swelling of patriotic emotion, an overwhelming gratitude at having been born free.
This year, though, it was different. My first reaction wasn’t pride, it wasn’t patriotism, it was anger. And then it was anger that I had a reason to be angry. For some reason the Fourth of July is always a bit of an emotional holiday for me: standing underneath falling shards of glittering gunpowder for a half an hour always instantly takes me back to when I was a kid, to playing in the park with my brother and sister, singing silly songs about Henry the Eighth (I am I am!) and John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt while the giant blue and red explosions – much simpler then than they are now – cast long irregular shadows over the town.
As I grow older, I remember too how I was told as a child how lucky I was to be born an American. People here can be whatever they want, I was told. We can make a difference. We can change things if they need to be changed. And this is all because we’re free.
And I remember my grandfather last summer, talking to my best friend Lindsey as he sat rocking in his favorite chair, the naval tattoo on his arm faded from exposure to the years, saying, “I’ve always been a real flag-waver when it comes to our country.” And I remember feeling terribly proud.
And so as that arrogant helicopter strutting around with that arrogant flag strapped to its arrogant underside, I couldn’t help but feel betrayed. Lost. We don’t even try to be whatever we want (who has the money to pay for an education?). We’re skeptical of our ability to make a difference, and scared of what might happen if we do, so we don’t even try. And freedom? We’ve entered an age where criticism of our government is unpatriotic, and criticism of each other is mandatory. American community has become American isolation. American philanthropists have become American Enrons. The American dream has become the American trying-to-get-by. American hope has become American fear.
How dare they? I thought. The rich and powerful have taken what was once envisioned as a government for and by the people and used it to suffocate those it was meant to empower. How dare they ignore our poor? How dare they take the money meant to educate our children and put it toward a meaningless war? How dare they make political games out of the suffering of those in other countries? In our own? How dare they make me doubt my desire to create new life, at times even to live my own? How dare they turn their backs on the flat-wavers of this country, the grandfathers and fathers and mothers and aunts and uncles who have fought bravely, unquestioningly, nobly, and now find themselves – sometimes quite literally – without a leg to stand on?
And worst of all, how dare they rob us of our hope?
How do you impeach a government for the theft of optimism?
I stood there for a moment, seething. Disoriented. Wondering if this was even the same country in which I’d grown up, because really I recognize very little of it.
It wasn’t until I’d been standing there brooding in my self-righteousness for a few minutes that I realized that someone in the small crowd around us had been humming the national anthem softly as the flag passed. Someone else to my right was nodding – almost imperceptibly, but he was doing it – his eyes moist with tears. The closer the flag got, the more static the air around us became, until that great square of fabric hovered right in front of us. In the crowd of a hundred people, not one of us spoke. Even the drunk guy sitting in a lawn chair two rows up was momentarily dumbstruck.
What I realized standing there that night is this: we are not dead. Anesthetized, maybe, but not dead. Sometimes it’s easy to feel like we are; we watch the daily chaos on the news, the horror in Africa, the rising gas prices, the idiots in congress, the soaring prices of food, people losing their homes. And we feel lost because we can’t do anything about it. Not just for ourselves, but for others. We can’t help and we can’t make it better. So we go in one end of our day and out the other like zombies, numbed by our ineffectiveness, manipulated by our apathy. We look out on the world and all we see is gray. Gray, gray, gray.
But I think it’s also easy to forget how lucky we really are in spite of everything. My generation has only ever seen explosions in the sky in celebration of our freedom, never because we were fighting in pursuit of it. We have only ever had to associate the burning smell of gunpowder and charred meat with the lingering after-effects of a giant nationwide party. There are many, many people on earth who have far more sinister associations with such sensations.
I think, really, that deep down we know this. And I strongly believe that there is still something in us that dares to hope. However small, it is still there. And it will, I believe, transcend scandal and stupidity and greed and global warming. There is still a spark in each of us, a tiny grain of everything irrepressible about the human spirit, that clings to optimism, to the potential for good. But we have to make an effort to seek it out, and it’s going to take work. Barack Obama can offer us all the change he wants, but until we’re willing to work for it in our own lives, all the promises and all the blame of all the politicians and gurus and spiritual leaders in all the world can never hand it to us.
In America, the government is still the people, even if it is by a narrow margin. What I wonder is whether we will ever trust the government, no matter how brilliant, as long as we remain unable to trust ourselves.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Cheerleading
My younger sister was born with a rare genetic displacement. From the standpoint of her DNA it’s almost exactly the opposite of Downs Syndrome; where people with Downs are missing a chromosome, Amy actually has an extra one swinging on the end of each of her genetic helixes. But from a practical standpoint the only real difference between the two is that Downs Syndrome, owing to the fact that it’s far more common, is more predictable. In terms of day-to-day functioning there’s very little difference. If you were asked to pick someone with Amy’s condition out of a group of people born with Downs Syndrome, it’s doubtful you’d be able to do it.
This is all really just to give you an idea of the level of cognizance at which she lives her daily life. By no means does it imply that she’s in any way dumber than I am (quite the opposite – she can memorize an entire movie after watching it once), but she does go through her existence on an entirely different mental plane than the rest of us, which can sometimes mean that she requires a different set of social circumstances.
Eager to both provide her with said circumstances and get her off of the couch, my mom signed Amy up with a local cheerleading team. It originally started out, apparently, primarily with the intention of cheering for the Special Olympics basketball games, but the cheerleaders have made such a stir in the local community that the club has evolved into its own separate entity. When I asked her what she cheered for, Amy just gave me a disdainful look and said, with the tone of a disinterested bachelor talking to a toddler, “Um, Helena.” Duh.
I was curious to see the group that had finally pried my baby sister away from the imaginary world of movies and books where she’s hidden away from the twenty-three years of the inaccessibility of her particular reality, so I tagged along when my parents took her to practice earlier this week. No sooner had we entered the door than we were swarmed with young women, all of whom possessed some degree of mental handicap and none of whom possessed any degree of social fear.
“Wow,” said Vicki, an especially friendly woman who works with my sister at a farm which employs people with special needs. She motioned to the bright yellow T-shirt I’d borrowed from my mom to work out in – a color, I might add, which does not flatter me – and cooed, “That shirt looks amazing on you! Where did you get it?”
I didn’t have time to answer before another girl, this one bearing an uncanny resemblance to Emma Thompson’s Professor Trelawney character in the Harry Potter movies, her heavily-lidded eyes magnified by thick glasses, approached and said seriously, “Excuse me. Do you have any animals? Say, for instance, a dog, or a cat? Or a hamster?”
“I have two cats,” I responded.
“Great,” said the Trelawney girl. “Do you know what I should do about a parrot with a biting problem?”
I said that I didn’t.
A young woman with bright red hair, meanwhile, was meandering around the room. She’s apparently not capable of talking, but she had an uncanny ability to mentally lock onto an object in the distance and go there, unlock, and then repeat the process with something else. She looked like the pull-back toy cars we played with as kids. I couldn’t help thinking that if someone took my own brain and whittled it down to its very essence, stripped it of all its petty mundane responsibilities and just let it to its own devices, it would very much resemble the ginger who was at the moment weaving her way randomly through other people’s conversations in pursuit of things of which only she was aware but which, I think, were almost certainly far more important.
Another woman, a little older than the others and with the thickest, darkest hair I’ve ever seen, and that sticking out so haphazardly in so many directions that she’d make Einstein look bald, came up to me and without any introduction said, “Where do you get your hair done?”
“In Seattle,” I said. I was about to add what I was sure would be a particularly witty comment about traveling to Seattle making for a very expensive visit to the salon, but before I could say anything more she continued.
“Hm. Yeah, I tried Great Clips last time, but I’m considering trying Supercuts next. I didn’t like it last time.”
And then she walked away.
“Are you going to take her home with you?” Asked another girl with glasses, motioning to Amy.
“No,” I said. “Amy will stay here in Helena.”
“No,” said the girl, raising her eyebrows at my stupidity. “I mean tonight. Are you going to take her home?”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, as far as I know. Yes. We’re going to take Amy home.”
And through went the redhead.
The leader, a volunteer cheerleader from the local college, called them to line up, and they did so with gusto, brandishing their donated professional-grade pom-poms with a special kind of pride, the little slivers of silver in the plumes of red sparkling as the girls shook their hidden fists in excitement. For them, this was barely even a rehearsal. This was a moment in their lives, and as such was to be treated with all the gravity that such an important event deserved.
“Which cheer should we do tonight?” asked the leader.
“I know!” Amy hollered. “Let’s do the one that I made up!”
I felt myself sucking in a little breath of pride. Amy? Made up a cheer? My Amy?
I should point out here that the members of my family are not necessarily genetically predisposed to playing well with others. We are born of a long line of cowboys and farmers and free spirits; it’s not inherently a bad thing, and it might even be one that has even served us well from time to time. But it’s certainly not something that leaves us naturally inclined toward team spirit. My mom said that when Amy first started on the squad she would insist loudly, “But I want to do things my way, mom!” This week, however, when it came time to leave for practice she couldn’t find her uniform sweat pants, and the ordeal nearly traumatized her. “It’s not okay!” She moaned. “If we don’t all look the same, how are we ever all going to look like a team?!”
“H-E-L-E-N-A! Helena! Helena! We’re number one!” Cried the cheerleaders. Then they waved their pom-poms, and Amy kicked her little foot into the air. She hollered at the top of her lungs, like someone had installed a bellows cramp in her stomach. I wondered, just for a moment, what she would have been if she had been born “normal.” And then I thought, God forbid. She’s a much better cheerleader this way than she would have been as a “normal” one.
The humanity, the innocence in the room was palpable, and it was all over far too soon. When they were done the redheaded girl tried to go in one direction until one of the volunteers caught her by the arm and redirected her energy toward different coordinates. Said coordinates turned out to be me, and she beamed as she gestured toward a button on my purse strap with a picture of a cat on it.
“Are you going to take Amy home with you?” asked the girl with the glasses a second time. I began to wonder if she’d been left behind somewhere at some point.
“Have a great trip home!” called Vicki. “Come back next year, okay?”
“Hey,” said Amy to Vicki, “I have an idea. Let’s don’t call ourselves coworkers anymore. Can’t we just be friends? I think that’s better than coworkers.”
Said Vicki, “Okay.”
And we got in the car to drive home, Amy sitting next to me in the back seat practicing her cheers.
“H-E-L-E-N-A.” She was whispering. “We’re number one.”
This is all really just to give you an idea of the level of cognizance at which she lives her daily life. By no means does it imply that she’s in any way dumber than I am (quite the opposite – she can memorize an entire movie after watching it once), but she does go through her existence on an entirely different mental plane than the rest of us, which can sometimes mean that she requires a different set of social circumstances.
Eager to both provide her with said circumstances and get her off of the couch, my mom signed Amy up with a local cheerleading team. It originally started out, apparently, primarily with the intention of cheering for the Special Olympics basketball games, but the cheerleaders have made such a stir in the local community that the club has evolved into its own separate entity. When I asked her what she cheered for, Amy just gave me a disdainful look and said, with the tone of a disinterested bachelor talking to a toddler, “Um, Helena.” Duh.
I was curious to see the group that had finally pried my baby sister away from the imaginary world of movies and books where she’s hidden away from the twenty-three years of the inaccessibility of her particular reality, so I tagged along when my parents took her to practice earlier this week. No sooner had we entered the door than we were swarmed with young women, all of whom possessed some degree of mental handicap and none of whom possessed any degree of social fear.
“Wow,” said Vicki, an especially friendly woman who works with my sister at a farm which employs people with special needs. She motioned to the bright yellow T-shirt I’d borrowed from my mom to work out in – a color, I might add, which does not flatter me – and cooed, “That shirt looks amazing on you! Where did you get it?”
I didn’t have time to answer before another girl, this one bearing an uncanny resemblance to Emma Thompson’s Professor Trelawney character in the Harry Potter movies, her heavily-lidded eyes magnified by thick glasses, approached and said seriously, “Excuse me. Do you have any animals? Say, for instance, a dog, or a cat? Or a hamster?”
“I have two cats,” I responded.
“Great,” said the Trelawney girl. “Do you know what I should do about a parrot with a biting problem?”
I said that I didn’t.
A young woman with bright red hair, meanwhile, was meandering around the room. She’s apparently not capable of talking, but she had an uncanny ability to mentally lock onto an object in the distance and go there, unlock, and then repeat the process with something else. She looked like the pull-back toy cars we played with as kids. I couldn’t help thinking that if someone took my own brain and whittled it down to its very essence, stripped it of all its petty mundane responsibilities and just let it to its own devices, it would very much resemble the ginger who was at the moment weaving her way randomly through other people’s conversations in pursuit of things of which only she was aware but which, I think, were almost certainly far more important.
Another woman, a little older than the others and with the thickest, darkest hair I’ve ever seen, and that sticking out so haphazardly in so many directions that she’d make Einstein look bald, came up to me and without any introduction said, “Where do you get your hair done?”
“In Seattle,” I said. I was about to add what I was sure would be a particularly witty comment about traveling to Seattle making for a very expensive visit to the salon, but before I could say anything more she continued.
“Hm. Yeah, I tried Great Clips last time, but I’m considering trying Supercuts next. I didn’t like it last time.”
And then she walked away.
“Are you going to take her home with you?” Asked another girl with glasses, motioning to Amy.
“No,” I said. “Amy will stay here in Helena.”
“No,” said the girl, raising her eyebrows at my stupidity. “I mean tonight. Are you going to take her home?”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, as far as I know. Yes. We’re going to take Amy home.”
And through went the redhead.
The leader, a volunteer cheerleader from the local college, called them to line up, and they did so with gusto, brandishing their donated professional-grade pom-poms with a special kind of pride, the little slivers of silver in the plumes of red sparkling as the girls shook their hidden fists in excitement. For them, this was barely even a rehearsal. This was a moment in their lives, and as such was to be treated with all the gravity that such an important event deserved.
“Which cheer should we do tonight?” asked the leader.
“I know!” Amy hollered. “Let’s do the one that I made up!”
I felt myself sucking in a little breath of pride. Amy? Made up a cheer? My Amy?
I should point out here that the members of my family are not necessarily genetically predisposed to playing well with others. We are born of a long line of cowboys and farmers and free spirits; it’s not inherently a bad thing, and it might even be one that has even served us well from time to time. But it’s certainly not something that leaves us naturally inclined toward team spirit. My mom said that when Amy first started on the squad she would insist loudly, “But I want to do things my way, mom!” This week, however, when it came time to leave for practice she couldn’t find her uniform sweat pants, and the ordeal nearly traumatized her. “It’s not okay!” She moaned. “If we don’t all look the same, how are we ever all going to look like a team?!”
“H-E-L-E-N-A! Helena! Helena! We’re number one!” Cried the cheerleaders. Then they waved their pom-poms, and Amy kicked her little foot into the air. She hollered at the top of her lungs, like someone had installed a bellows cramp in her stomach. I wondered, just for a moment, what she would have been if she had been born “normal.” And then I thought, God forbid. She’s a much better cheerleader this way than she would have been as a “normal” one.
The humanity, the innocence in the room was palpable, and it was all over far too soon. When they were done the redheaded girl tried to go in one direction until one of the volunteers caught her by the arm and redirected her energy toward different coordinates. Said coordinates turned out to be me, and she beamed as she gestured toward a button on my purse strap with a picture of a cat on it.
“Are you going to take Amy home with you?” asked the girl with the glasses a second time. I began to wonder if she’d been left behind somewhere at some point.
“Have a great trip home!” called Vicki. “Come back next year, okay?”
“Hey,” said Amy to Vicki, “I have an idea. Let’s don’t call ourselves coworkers anymore. Can’t we just be friends? I think that’s better than coworkers.”
Said Vicki, “Okay.”
And we got in the car to drive home, Amy sitting next to me in the back seat practicing her cheers.
“H-E-L-E-N-A.” She was whispering. “We’re number one.”
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Metamorphosis, But not Kafka's
In the last hundred years enough has happened to justify us in believing that the pen’s response to the challenge of force is at least not ludicrous and hopeless; indeed, it is perhaps the one serious hope we have.
- C.M. Woodhouse
I’ve been a bit moody lately.
Life this year, for those of you who don’t follow my blog lately, has come at me, to defer to the cliché because there’s no better way to put it, all at once. I won’t go into it all again here. But I have, quite simply, suffered.
Had I written that sentence a month ago, maybe two, I might have meant it just the way it reads, hinting at the bitterness with which we usually read such statements. But the past few weeks of my life have been defined by a drastic shift in attitude. Today, when I write that sentence, “I have, quite simply, suffered,” it is with a deep sense of gratitude and awe. The why me of six months ago, with all of the anger it entailed at the perceived solitariness of my pain, has transformed itself very suddenly into a why me of perplexed gratefulness. The question is no longer “Why am I the one who has to go through this?” but “Why am I the one who gets to go through this?” I feel my spirit getting stronger, the way an athlete watches her body chisel itself because of – not in spite of – sweat and exhaustion, and I wonder why it is that not everyone gets the same opportunity. I actually feel sorry for the people who have easy lives.
In an effort to quell my odd neurological problems, my doctors and I decided to experiment with taking me off of my antidepressants for a while. My psychiatrist was hesitant, since it’s become quite evident that depression is as much a physical and hormonal thing than a situational thing for me, but the physical pain had become so unbearable that I was desperate. I had to do something.
What I hadn’t expected, however, was the reversal of the other side effects, most noticeably my inability to think clearly. The medications seem to be effective on me because they block a certain part of my brain where the Sad Chemicals are stored. Unfortunately, due to what appears to be a result of the chaos typical of neurological bureaucracy, an oversight left the Smart Chemicals in storage in the same room. When the door got locked the Sad Chemicals got trapped, but we also had no access to the Smart Chemicals, which left us spending large parts of our days staring open-mouthed at blank walls and finding them, I must add here, much more interesting than they warranted. And so, when the door went and got itself unlocked I told my psychiatrist to just let it alone.
Staring at blank walls, especially when you have the constant and nagging urge to turn them to murals like the one in the Sistine Chapel, is no way to live a life.
The problem, of course, is that the Sad Chemicals got loose and have been wreaking a bit of havoc. It’s not necessarily that I’m ready to jump off a cliff, merely that life, both the up and down parts, are incredibly more intense than they would have been otherwise, and I’m having to hold on a good deal tighter to make sure the roller coaster doesn’t buck me off altogether.
And so I’ve been doing my best to struggle through this my next level of training, the part where they take away the net and force me to fly without it. It hasn’t been easy; I got my grades back yesterday – grades I nearly killed myself for, since I was in and out of the hospital – and they were C’s. The first two C’s of my college career. In grad school. My first reaction was to do things the old way and panic, to tell myself that any chance of teaching at Harvard has just gone out the window, that I’ve just lost the respect of the entire academic community, etc. etc. But when I stopped and reminded myself what I personally had had to do to get those C’s, they turned into Olympic gold medals. I could have run a triathlon, even with the headaches.
The point is, I am having to learn to live life differently. Every moment. And it isn’t easy. Especially since, because I am doing it out of a necessity very particular to my own mind, I’m having to do it very much by myself. It’s a baby step thing. But it occurs to me, even in my most difficult moments, that each of these baby steps doesn’t just teach me to be more compassionate toward myself, it teaches me to be a little more compassionate toward other people. If I want to be a fully empathetic person, I have to know what it feels like to be depressed and what it feels like to have a swollen neural membrane and what it feels like to get C’s. And then, because I’ve been blessed (and terribly, terribly cursed) with this need to write, I can put it on paper and reach even more people, and hopefully in the end it’ll all be a good thing.
I know there are a lot of people out there who love me and who would love to be able to help me. I know that there are also people out there who want to ‘fix’ me just because they like to fix things, and when they see me I kind of resemble the intoxicating temptation of a broken toaster. But I’m not broken. I’m just undergoing metamorphosis. What kind of butterfly I’ll be in the end is anyone’s guess. But at least I’m trying.
- C.M. Woodhouse
I’ve been a bit moody lately.
Life this year, for those of you who don’t follow my blog lately, has come at me, to defer to the cliché because there’s no better way to put it, all at once. I won’t go into it all again here. But I have, quite simply, suffered.
Had I written that sentence a month ago, maybe two, I might have meant it just the way it reads, hinting at the bitterness with which we usually read such statements. But the past few weeks of my life have been defined by a drastic shift in attitude. Today, when I write that sentence, “I have, quite simply, suffered,” it is with a deep sense of gratitude and awe. The why me of six months ago, with all of the anger it entailed at the perceived solitariness of my pain, has transformed itself very suddenly into a why me of perplexed gratefulness. The question is no longer “Why am I the one who has to go through this?” but “Why am I the one who gets to go through this?” I feel my spirit getting stronger, the way an athlete watches her body chisel itself because of – not in spite of – sweat and exhaustion, and I wonder why it is that not everyone gets the same opportunity. I actually feel sorry for the people who have easy lives.
In an effort to quell my odd neurological problems, my doctors and I decided to experiment with taking me off of my antidepressants for a while. My psychiatrist was hesitant, since it’s become quite evident that depression is as much a physical and hormonal thing than a situational thing for me, but the physical pain had become so unbearable that I was desperate. I had to do something.
What I hadn’t expected, however, was the reversal of the other side effects, most noticeably my inability to think clearly. The medications seem to be effective on me because they block a certain part of my brain where the Sad Chemicals are stored. Unfortunately, due to what appears to be a result of the chaos typical of neurological bureaucracy, an oversight left the Smart Chemicals in storage in the same room. When the door got locked the Sad Chemicals got trapped, but we also had no access to the Smart Chemicals, which left us spending large parts of our days staring open-mouthed at blank walls and finding them, I must add here, much more interesting than they warranted. And so, when the door went and got itself unlocked I told my psychiatrist to just let it alone.
Staring at blank walls, especially when you have the constant and nagging urge to turn them to murals like the one in the Sistine Chapel, is no way to live a life.
The problem, of course, is that the Sad Chemicals got loose and have been wreaking a bit of havoc. It’s not necessarily that I’m ready to jump off a cliff, merely that life, both the up and down parts, are incredibly more intense than they would have been otherwise, and I’m having to hold on a good deal tighter to make sure the roller coaster doesn’t buck me off altogether.
And so I’ve been doing my best to struggle through this my next level of training, the part where they take away the net and force me to fly without it. It hasn’t been easy; I got my grades back yesterday – grades I nearly killed myself for, since I was in and out of the hospital – and they were C’s. The first two C’s of my college career. In grad school. My first reaction was to do things the old way and panic, to tell myself that any chance of teaching at Harvard has just gone out the window, that I’ve just lost the respect of the entire academic community, etc. etc. But when I stopped and reminded myself what I personally had had to do to get those C’s, they turned into Olympic gold medals. I could have run a triathlon, even with the headaches.
The point is, I am having to learn to live life differently. Every moment. And it isn’t easy. Especially since, because I am doing it out of a necessity very particular to my own mind, I’m having to do it very much by myself. It’s a baby step thing. But it occurs to me, even in my most difficult moments, that each of these baby steps doesn’t just teach me to be more compassionate toward myself, it teaches me to be a little more compassionate toward other people. If I want to be a fully empathetic person, I have to know what it feels like to be depressed and what it feels like to have a swollen neural membrane and what it feels like to get C’s. And then, because I’ve been blessed (and terribly, terribly cursed) with this need to write, I can put it on paper and reach even more people, and hopefully in the end it’ll all be a good thing.
I know there are a lot of people out there who love me and who would love to be able to help me. I know that there are also people out there who want to ‘fix’ me just because they like to fix things, and when they see me I kind of resemble the intoxicating temptation of a broken toaster. But I’m not broken. I’m just undergoing metamorphosis. What kind of butterfly I’ll be in the end is anyone’s guess. But at least I’m trying.
Airplane!
I’m sitting in an airport, waiting for a strange-looking mechanical man-made artificial bird to take me to a place other than the one I currently help to occupy. It occurs to me as I sit here that over the course of my life I’ve taken up a good number of metaphysical spaces in a great deal of different physical ones. Was the Becca who sat in the airport in Taipei a year and a half ago waiting for a flight to Seattle the same Becca who is sitting in Seattle now waiting for a flight to Helena? It’s hardly likely; the challenges of this year have refined this Becca into what feels like such a solidly strong piece of metal that she hardly recognizes the flimsy coat hanger of that other Becca on the brief occasion that she finds enough free time or audacity to look that far backward. That, and I (being the Becca writing this) just read somewhere that on a biological level we human beings completely recycle all the atoms in our bodies every seven years. So if I’m not that metaphysical Becca, and I’m not that actual-physical Becca, which Becca am I? Really, factoring in all of the changes in life, is it ever actually possible to be any kind of Becca other than the now Becca? This is a gigantic paradox, because the now Becca is definitely not the then Becca. But the now Becca wouldn’t be here if she weren’t at least a little defined by the experiences of the then Becca. Should the now Becca bear the guilt and pain of the then Becca? That hardly seems fair: the then Becca got to share in none of the happiness and strength of the now Becca, and neither of us gets a piece of the satisfaction of the future Becca, who, we hope, will go down in history as the woman who finally discovered the social formula for world peace. And so it’s all quite complicated.
I was standing in the security line today when I had some brief flash of a memory, just an ephemeral shot of a picture in my mind, of standing in a security line in another airport, somewhere, and I realized that I don’t know which airport it was. It could have been anywhere, I’ve been so damn many of them. Beijing? Shanghai? Hong Kong? Tokyo? Spokane?
This brought two particularly poignant thoughts to mind. The first was that I am incredibly lucky. How many people can say that they’ve been to so many places that they can’t keep them all straight in their heads? We could, of course, posit that I can’t keep anything at all straight in my head, but let’s leave that aside for the moment for the sake of argument.
The second, however, was that for all the blessings I’ve had in my life, it’s a bit unsettling how much of it I’ve wasted trying to get somewhere else. Really, life is just moments, strung together like Christmas lights on a cord. When we’re children each of these moments is exciting and new to the point where we can’t even concentrate and our parents have to cling desperately to our tiny wrists to keep us from running full-speed into the nearest most colorful object. What is right in front of us is all that exists. This is why kids never worry about anything. Even eating is an adventure; as adults we see it as something obnoxious that must be done quickly so we can get back to writing our papers on rhetorical devices in the Confucian classics. But kids, when they eat they go up and down and around, they stick their hands in pudding just to feel it goop and they chomp on celery just to hear it crunch and they spread spaghetti around just to make art with the sauce on the table. Everything is light and sound and flavor and color and experience. And they don’t even think to appreciate it, because that’s the way everything is to them, because that’s the way everything should be.
When do we start getting to the age where our experiences begin to run together? When do the perfect individual blessings of our sensory experiences, the celery crunches of feeding bread heels to pigeons or splashing in puddles or that really cool gum someone left on the sidewalk begin to run together like a Monet left out in the rain? And why are we so willing to be satisfied with the gray formlessness of a muddled and neglected masterpiece when we could be looking at a Starry Night?
I was standing in the security line today when I had some brief flash of a memory, just an ephemeral shot of a picture in my mind, of standing in a security line in another airport, somewhere, and I realized that I don’t know which airport it was. It could have been anywhere, I’ve been so damn many of them. Beijing? Shanghai? Hong Kong? Tokyo? Spokane?
This brought two particularly poignant thoughts to mind. The first was that I am incredibly lucky. How many people can say that they’ve been to so many places that they can’t keep them all straight in their heads? We could, of course, posit that I can’t keep anything at all straight in my head, but let’s leave that aside for the moment for the sake of argument.
The second, however, was that for all the blessings I’ve had in my life, it’s a bit unsettling how much of it I’ve wasted trying to get somewhere else. Really, life is just moments, strung together like Christmas lights on a cord. When we’re children each of these moments is exciting and new to the point where we can’t even concentrate and our parents have to cling desperately to our tiny wrists to keep us from running full-speed into the nearest most colorful object. What is right in front of us is all that exists. This is why kids never worry about anything. Even eating is an adventure; as adults we see it as something obnoxious that must be done quickly so we can get back to writing our papers on rhetorical devices in the Confucian classics. But kids, when they eat they go up and down and around, they stick their hands in pudding just to feel it goop and they chomp on celery just to hear it crunch and they spread spaghetti around just to make art with the sauce on the table. Everything is light and sound and flavor and color and experience. And they don’t even think to appreciate it, because that’s the way everything is to them, because that’s the way everything should be.
When do we start getting to the age where our experiences begin to run together? When do the perfect individual blessings of our sensory experiences, the celery crunches of feeding bread heels to pigeons or splashing in puddles or that really cool gum someone left on the sidewalk begin to run together like a Monet left out in the rain? And why are we so willing to be satisfied with the gray formlessness of a muddled and neglected masterpiece when we could be looking at a Starry Night?
Saturday, May 24, 2008
What's Wrong With Becca
So they've finally figured out what's wrong with me. At least they think they have. I'm not holding my breath. This is partially because my experiences of late have shaken my faith in modern medical science to its very core, and partially because it simply isn't a good idea to hold one's breath for an extended length of time. If there's anything I've learned in the past year of riding the nauseating roller coaster of my genetic physical oversensitivity, it's that an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure, and I would imagine that this holds especially true in the area of brain damage.
But - in keeping with my regular routine and as a sign that things truly are getting back to normal - I digress.
I had an encouraging visit with a bullet of a fireball neurologist on Tuesday who, after entering the room with the declaration "My name is Dr. Miranova, and I'm Czechoslovakian. The Czech side, not the Slovakian side, because they're different you know," proceeded to examine me with such speed and intensity that the examination was making me dizzier than my original headache. It was only after a whirlwind of tests that more closely resembled the grilling of a drunk driver that she sat down abruptly and said, "So here's what's going on."
They must not have a lot of time to poop around in Eastern Europe.
When she began with "So sometimes, when we're really stressed..." I had to fight to keep from rolling my eyes in exasperation. The reaction from most of the doctors lately has been less than encouraging, given their general tendency to write my pain off as tension headaches when they can't find anything else wrong. Forget for a moment that I'm a graduate student who works ten hours a day on a good day, that I've lived in China, that I was married and divorced by 25, and that by all rights if anyone knows what stress feels like (and this wasn't it) it should be me. We can also leave aside the fact that my condition in no way resembled any description of a tension headache that I was ever given. Apparently I just didn't know what was going on inside my own head. It's a criticism I've heard before and tend to believe, but never in the physical sense.
This time, however, the neurologist continued, "Sometimes when we get stressed out, we deplete all our physical resources. We don't realize how connected our bodies are to our minds. The lining of the brain gets inflamed and stops properly draining fluid, kind of like a stitch in your side when you're running is an inflammation of the pocket around the liver."
I nodded like I knew this. I didn't.
It was nice to be talked to like an educated adult, and by the time I walked out of her office I was halfway ready to change my specialty to neurology, an aspiration tempered only by the reality that the sight of blood does bad things for my constitution. I have, at any rate, a new found appreciation for the wonders of the human brain. It's an amazing thing. Too often, I think, we confuse psychosomatic illness with hypochondriacism, not realizing that the mind is kind of like an army private at the switchboard of a nuclear submarine. You can justify ignoring and even abusing it to a point, but neglect it too much and it has ways to show you it's irritated. Namely, blowing poop up.
I think the most interesting thing I learned was that our brains have a special way of dealing with certain kinds of stress. It's well documented that we're capable of almost superhuman mental tenacity, says Dr. Miranova, when we believe we're helping others or making the world a better place. But since we only have so much energy, the brain rotates like a magnifying glass in the sun, concentrating the normally scattered energy we do have on the task at hand, which in the end usually results in a meltdown. This is why, she said, medical students can work twenty-four hour shifts during their residencies but almost inevitably break down after the residency is over. Sometimes a day later, sometimes several years, but it almost always happens. I find this utterly fascinating and, in a way, incredibly inspirational. Human beings are literally biologically hardwired to be self-sacrificing, in the most ultimate sense of the term.
The problem, I've discovered, with psychosomatic pain is that it requires psychosomatic treatment. Aside from a deluge of pills and vitamins I'm being extolled to change my entire lifestyle, from the food I eat (no more soy ice cream!) to daily yoga and meditation. My mental and physical health - and not my academic status - has to be my primary focus, probably forever, if I want to feel better. I've been trying to hammer the idea into my neurotic overachiever of a brain, but it's been so molded by the relentlessness and competitiveness of the academic environment that it's been a bit slow on the uptake. That, and I'm starting to suspect that hammering anything at all into one's own brain might defeat the point of stress reduction in the first place.
When I asked Dr. Miranova why, if this truly is a physical reaction, all the students around me aren't suffering from the same affliction, she shrugged and said simply, "Genetics."
"Some people are just physically very sensitive to stress," she continued. "You're one of those people who's going to have to do something you love, something that makes you so happy you can do it indefinitely just for the sake of doing it. Does your job make you happy?"
What a question.
But - in keeping with my regular routine and as a sign that things truly are getting back to normal - I digress.
I had an encouraging visit with a bullet of a fireball neurologist on Tuesday who, after entering the room with the declaration "My name is Dr. Miranova, and I'm Czechoslovakian. The Czech side, not the Slovakian side, because they're different you know," proceeded to examine me with such speed and intensity that the examination was making me dizzier than my original headache. It was only after a whirlwind of tests that more closely resembled the grilling of a drunk driver that she sat down abruptly and said, "So here's what's going on."
They must not have a lot of time to poop around in Eastern Europe.
When she began with "So sometimes, when we're really stressed..." I had to fight to keep from rolling my eyes in exasperation. The reaction from most of the doctors lately has been less than encouraging, given their general tendency to write my pain off as tension headaches when they can't find anything else wrong. Forget for a moment that I'm a graduate student who works ten hours a day on a good day, that I've lived in China, that I was married and divorced by 25, and that by all rights if anyone knows what stress feels like (and this wasn't it) it should be me. We can also leave aside the fact that my condition in no way resembled any description of a tension headache that I was ever given. Apparently I just didn't know what was going on inside my own head. It's a criticism I've heard before and tend to believe, but never in the physical sense.
This time, however, the neurologist continued, "Sometimes when we get stressed out, we deplete all our physical resources. We don't realize how connected our bodies are to our minds. The lining of the brain gets inflamed and stops properly draining fluid, kind of like a stitch in your side when you're running is an inflammation of the pocket around the liver."
I nodded like I knew this. I didn't.
It was nice to be talked to like an educated adult, and by the time I walked out of her office I was halfway ready to change my specialty to neurology, an aspiration tempered only by the reality that the sight of blood does bad things for my constitution. I have, at any rate, a new found appreciation for the wonders of the human brain. It's an amazing thing. Too often, I think, we confuse psychosomatic illness with hypochondriacism, not realizing that the mind is kind of like an army private at the switchboard of a nuclear submarine. You can justify ignoring and even abusing it to a point, but neglect it too much and it has ways to show you it's irritated. Namely, blowing poop up.
I think the most interesting thing I learned was that our brains have a special way of dealing with certain kinds of stress. It's well documented that we're capable of almost superhuman mental tenacity, says Dr. Miranova, when we believe we're helping others or making the world a better place. But since we only have so much energy, the brain rotates like a magnifying glass in the sun, concentrating the normally scattered energy we do have on the task at hand, which in the end usually results in a meltdown. This is why, she said, medical students can work twenty-four hour shifts during their residencies but almost inevitably break down after the residency is over. Sometimes a day later, sometimes several years, but it almost always happens. I find this utterly fascinating and, in a way, incredibly inspirational. Human beings are literally biologically hardwired to be self-sacrificing, in the most ultimate sense of the term.
The problem, I've discovered, with psychosomatic pain is that it requires psychosomatic treatment. Aside from a deluge of pills and vitamins I'm being extolled to change my entire lifestyle, from the food I eat (no more soy ice cream!) to daily yoga and meditation. My mental and physical health - and not my academic status - has to be my primary focus, probably forever, if I want to feel better. I've been trying to hammer the idea into my neurotic overachiever of a brain, but it's been so molded by the relentlessness and competitiveness of the academic environment that it's been a bit slow on the uptake. That, and I'm starting to suspect that hammering anything at all into one's own brain might defeat the point of stress reduction in the first place.
When I asked Dr. Miranova why, if this truly is a physical reaction, all the students around me aren't suffering from the same affliction, she shrugged and said simply, "Genetics."
"Some people are just physically very sensitive to stress," she continued. "You're one of those people who's going to have to do something you love, something that makes you so happy you can do it indefinitely just for the sake of doing it. Does your job make you happy?"
What a question.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Chronicle of the Quiet Rebel
I’ve just noticed how loquacious my blog postings have become lately. It’s not that I’m trying to wax philosophical, so much, but with everything that’s been happening lately I’ve relapsed into an overly pensive state of mind. If you think my posts are convoluted, you should see what’s going on inside my head.
A few weeks ago, I was in my weekly appointment with my psychiatrist. For the most part she just lets me talk and nods sympathetically; every once in a while she’ll offer some quiet observation, but it’s rare that she interjects into the one-sided conversations which, more often than not, amount to little more than hollow rivers of my subconscious spewing out of my mouth. Verbal diarrhea, I think they call it. I can’t shut up on a good day. Being in a small, comfortable room where I’m the undisputed center of attention for an hour affects me like mental crack.
At any rate, on this particular day my psychiatrist, sweet and quiet and barely older than myself, surprised me when she looked up from her notes to ask, “How do you think Jeremy deals with your rebellious streak?”
I stopped. I didn’t know I had one of those.
When I was young, my mom used to refer to me as a “quiet rebel,” someone who would smile sweetly until you left the room, and then rearrange your furniture while you were in the bathroom just to mess with your head. I like the term: it’s much more mysterious and romantic than simply calling me passive-aggressive. But I’ve never really thought of myself as a rebel. The word seems to imply a sense of antagonism that I’ve never really felt, a desire to make other people uncomfortable that I’m not aware of ever having had. I like other people, and I like being a productive member of society. I just don’t like being told what to do.
The older I get and the more I experience in life, the more conscious I get of the fact that we’re all just carbon-based life forms, that most of the people in charge aren’t any smarter than I am (and many cases are probably a little dumber), that tradition and dogmatic religion are artificial constructs designed to neatly package mores and morality so we don’t have to think for ourselves. That there are things that are universal, like love for our fellow man, and that these are the things that you have to search for; they don’t find you. Not while you’re watching TV in your boxer shorts, and not when you’re sitting in a church pew in your best Sunday dress. No preacher or political reformer is going to hand you a Bible or a Little Red Book with World Peace neatly hidden in a hole cut out of the pages inside. In my mind the realization of this isn’t rebellion. It’s just a willingness to go against the grain in the event that you realize that everyone else in life is wandering around as blindly as you are. The funny thing is that so few of us just cowboy up and open our eyes. Bumping into the sharp corners of metaphorical coffee tables is apparently much more fun, if slightly less spiritually rewarding.
A few weeks ago, I was in my weekly appointment with my psychiatrist. For the most part she just lets me talk and nods sympathetically; every once in a while she’ll offer some quiet observation, but it’s rare that she interjects into the one-sided conversations which, more often than not, amount to little more than hollow rivers of my subconscious spewing out of my mouth. Verbal diarrhea, I think they call it. I can’t shut up on a good day. Being in a small, comfortable room where I’m the undisputed center of attention for an hour affects me like mental crack.
At any rate, on this particular day my psychiatrist, sweet and quiet and barely older than myself, surprised me when she looked up from her notes to ask, “How do you think Jeremy deals with your rebellious streak?”
I stopped. I didn’t know I had one of those.
When I was young, my mom used to refer to me as a “quiet rebel,” someone who would smile sweetly until you left the room, and then rearrange your furniture while you were in the bathroom just to mess with your head. I like the term: it’s much more mysterious and romantic than simply calling me passive-aggressive. But I’ve never really thought of myself as a rebel. The word seems to imply a sense of antagonism that I’ve never really felt, a desire to make other people uncomfortable that I’m not aware of ever having had. I like other people, and I like being a productive member of society. I just don’t like being told what to do.
The older I get and the more I experience in life, the more conscious I get of the fact that we’re all just carbon-based life forms, that most of the people in charge aren’t any smarter than I am (and many cases are probably a little dumber), that tradition and dogmatic religion are artificial constructs designed to neatly package mores and morality so we don’t have to think for ourselves. That there are things that are universal, like love for our fellow man, and that these are the things that you have to search for; they don’t find you. Not while you’re watching TV in your boxer shorts, and not when you’re sitting in a church pew in your best Sunday dress. No preacher or political reformer is going to hand you a Bible or a Little Red Book with World Peace neatly hidden in a hole cut out of the pages inside. In my mind the realization of this isn’t rebellion. It’s just a willingness to go against the grain in the event that you realize that everyone else in life is wandering around as blindly as you are. The funny thing is that so few of us just cowboy up and open our eyes. Bumping into the sharp corners of metaphorical coffee tables is apparently much more fun, if slightly less spiritually rewarding.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
Waiting
In a few minutes, I will have my first MRI. I'm sitting in a waiting room at the hospital now.
It's the hardest part, the waiting, when you're not feeling well and they don't know what's wrong with you. It's a constant practice in the art of not thinking: not thinking about the unceasing and unexplained ringing in my ears and swelling behind my eyes, not thinking about the bizarre chemicals they'll soon be putting in my body and the long needles they'll have to use to do it, not thinking about my irrational but persistent fear of enclosed spaces and what it's going to be like in twenty minutes when I'm in a dark, whirring tomb, tied down by plastic tubes that artificially navigate through my veins. My precious veins, those tiny little freeways of life that spread like a spider web through my body and which, until just a moment ago, I have never in my twenty-seven years of breathing oxygen even stopped to consider.
This is the great irony of the practice of not thinking. The more you try not to think, the more you end up thinking. And practicing trying not to think only doubles the effort, which ultimately doubles the thinking.
And so all day long, in spite of constant attempts at defeating my apparently natural tendency toward mental masochism, I've been thinking of nothing but spinal taps and morphine drips and white lab coats. I've been hating doctors and nurses and receptionists and, more than anything else, the people inhabiting the planet around me who seem so destined to slide easily through life without so much as an ingrown toenail, while I struggle my way through grad school with a severe dopamine deficiency, a constant postnasal drip, and now a head that throbs so badly and so constantly that even my prescription narcotics no longer dull the pain.
I've been thinking, too, how frightened I am, in spite of all my efforts to the contrary. I've found it's much easier to soldier on when you aren't actually battling anything. One assumes, too, that winning the war would be significantly easier if it were a little more obvious who the enemy was. The worst part is not knowing, especially given all the thinking I'm apparently doomed to do, whether I want to or not. When you don't know, there are no limits on what your mind can make up; it's a situation which, when you have an imagination as wild as mine, is almost as frightening as the illness itself.
I don’t mind having to face my own mortality. It’s my inadequacies I’m not interested in confronting. The fact that I am weak enough to feel this level of pain – or worse, this level of fear – is unnerving. I like to pretend I’m stronger than this.
But I’m grateful, too, for the lessons this experience is teaching me.
Last weekend the pain became so intense that I ended up back in the emergency room. Convinced that I was suffering from an intense migraine, the doctor gave me an IV drip of something that was supposed to open the blood vessels in my head, but for some reason ended up shutting down the rest of me instead. All the muscles in my body contracted, and I had the most severe feeling of nausea I’ve ever experienced. I thought I was going to die. Jeremy’s in the middle of finals at school and couldn’t stay with me, so he called my good friend Aydin and asked him to come sit in the hospital with me.
When Aydin arrived he sat next to me, stroked my hair, and put his head next to mine on the pillow.
“You’re going to make it through this,” he said. “You’re a really strong woman.”
A few minutes later they came in and gave me a powerful dose of morphine. It’s impossible to explain the sudden and overwhelming sensation that it’ll have on you, if you’ve never had a morphine drip before. It comes on all at once, makes you feel hot and heavy and sore for just a moment, and then suddenly releases you downward into a state of absolute release. It slices through the pain like a knife, cuts away whatever it is that binds it to you and lets it fall to the floor, and you’re suddenly convinced that you will never be in pain again, that you might never have been to begin with, and that it’s quite possible that the concept of pain in and of itself might simply have been nothing more than a product of your imagination conceived in a moment of weakness.
But as difficult as that is to describe, it’s nothing compared to the comfort that can come from having friends by your side. Aydin’s presence that day, the way he simply sat next to me, quietly helping to shoulder a burden that by all rights I should carry by myself, was absolutely cathartic, the morphine to my emotional pain. The way he and Jeremy and my other close friends band together and pass around the responsibility of taking care of me makes me feel like something precious in a museum. Something worth guarding. I’ve been in a great deal of pain lately, and yet somehow I can’t help feeling like I’m one of the luckier people on the planet.
It's the hardest part, the waiting, when you're not feeling well and they don't know what's wrong with you. It's a constant practice in the art of not thinking: not thinking about the unceasing and unexplained ringing in my ears and swelling behind my eyes, not thinking about the bizarre chemicals they'll soon be putting in my body and the long needles they'll have to use to do it, not thinking about my irrational but persistent fear of enclosed spaces and what it's going to be like in twenty minutes when I'm in a dark, whirring tomb, tied down by plastic tubes that artificially navigate through my veins. My precious veins, those tiny little freeways of life that spread like a spider web through my body and which, until just a moment ago, I have never in my twenty-seven years of breathing oxygen even stopped to consider.
This is the great irony of the practice of not thinking. The more you try not to think, the more you end up thinking. And practicing trying not to think only doubles the effort, which ultimately doubles the thinking.
And so all day long, in spite of constant attempts at defeating my apparently natural tendency toward mental masochism, I've been thinking of nothing but spinal taps and morphine drips and white lab coats. I've been hating doctors and nurses and receptionists and, more than anything else, the people inhabiting the planet around me who seem so destined to slide easily through life without so much as an ingrown toenail, while I struggle my way through grad school with a severe dopamine deficiency, a constant postnasal drip, and now a head that throbs so badly and so constantly that even my prescription narcotics no longer dull the pain.
I've been thinking, too, how frightened I am, in spite of all my efforts to the contrary. I've found it's much easier to soldier on when you aren't actually battling anything. One assumes, too, that winning the war would be significantly easier if it were a little more obvious who the enemy was. The worst part is not knowing, especially given all the thinking I'm apparently doomed to do, whether I want to or not. When you don't know, there are no limits on what your mind can make up; it's a situation which, when you have an imagination as wild as mine, is almost as frightening as the illness itself.
I don’t mind having to face my own mortality. It’s my inadequacies I’m not interested in confronting. The fact that I am weak enough to feel this level of pain – or worse, this level of fear – is unnerving. I like to pretend I’m stronger than this.
But I’m grateful, too, for the lessons this experience is teaching me.
Last weekend the pain became so intense that I ended up back in the emergency room. Convinced that I was suffering from an intense migraine, the doctor gave me an IV drip of something that was supposed to open the blood vessels in my head, but for some reason ended up shutting down the rest of me instead. All the muscles in my body contracted, and I had the most severe feeling of nausea I’ve ever experienced. I thought I was going to die. Jeremy’s in the middle of finals at school and couldn’t stay with me, so he called my good friend Aydin and asked him to come sit in the hospital with me.
When Aydin arrived he sat next to me, stroked my hair, and put his head next to mine on the pillow.
“You’re going to make it through this,” he said. “You’re a really strong woman.”
A few minutes later they came in and gave me a powerful dose of morphine. It’s impossible to explain the sudden and overwhelming sensation that it’ll have on you, if you’ve never had a morphine drip before. It comes on all at once, makes you feel hot and heavy and sore for just a moment, and then suddenly releases you downward into a state of absolute release. It slices through the pain like a knife, cuts away whatever it is that binds it to you and lets it fall to the floor, and you’re suddenly convinced that you will never be in pain again, that you might never have been to begin with, and that it’s quite possible that the concept of pain in and of itself might simply have been nothing more than a product of your imagination conceived in a moment of weakness.
But as difficult as that is to describe, it’s nothing compared to the comfort that can come from having friends by your side. Aydin’s presence that day, the way he simply sat next to me, quietly helping to shoulder a burden that by all rights I should carry by myself, was absolutely cathartic, the morphine to my emotional pain. The way he and Jeremy and my other close friends band together and pass around the responsibility of taking care of me makes me feel like something precious in a museum. Something worth guarding. I’ve been in a great deal of pain lately, and yet somehow I can’t help feeling like I’m one of the luckier people on the planet.
Friday, April 18, 2008
More Proof That the Truth is Stranger Than Fiction
Today - as far as I know, and nobody has told me otherwise - is April 18th. Only twelve days to go until May. Another 7 days beyond that is my birthday, a day that usually dawns bright and warm in Seattle, and one that ordinarily functions as the culmination of a few weeks of steadily increasing temperatures.
My question, then, is why when I came out of the mall at eight o'clock this evening, there were two inches of snow on the car. It's freezing outside.
Things seem to be taking a turn for the strange lately. Not only has the weather been indescribably (and, as far as I'm concerned, uncomfortably) odd, although that would give me reason enough to complain. Jeremy and I were joking on the way home, as his little Honda braved the slush on the roads, that when we have kids we'll tell them stories about how when we were young it only snowed during the winter and they, in turn, will laugh and call us liars.
But no. Not content with environmental oddity, I decided to push the limits of the bizarre and - you may want to sit down - switch to a Mac. I am no longer a PC user. I'm frightened of this new alien technology. The button to close windows is on the left instead of the right, and there's no right-click on the mouse. Who does that? Surely dashboard widgets are against the laws of nature, and viruses are just God's way of teaching us patience. Apple computers are an abomination. And yet here I sit, watching out the window as snow falls on this crisp April night, and reveling in the fact that my keyboard has a backlight. I feel dirty.
My question, then, is why when I came out of the mall at eight o'clock this evening, there were two inches of snow on the car. It's freezing outside.
Things seem to be taking a turn for the strange lately. Not only has the weather been indescribably (and, as far as I'm concerned, uncomfortably) odd, although that would give me reason enough to complain. Jeremy and I were joking on the way home, as his little Honda braved the slush on the roads, that when we have kids we'll tell them stories about how when we were young it only snowed during the winter and they, in turn, will laugh and call us liars.
But no. Not content with environmental oddity, I decided to push the limits of the bizarre and - you may want to sit down - switch to a Mac. I am no longer a PC user. I'm frightened of this new alien technology. The button to close windows is on the left instead of the right, and there's no right-click on the mouse. Who does that? Surely dashboard widgets are against the laws of nature, and viruses are just God's way of teaching us patience. Apple computers are an abomination. And yet here I sit, watching out the window as snow falls on this crisp April night, and reveling in the fact that my keyboard has a backlight. I feel dirty.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Maybe Old Eleanor Was Wrong?
Once again I'm writing from a coffee shop, this one an independent -- and usually absurdly crowded -- little joint in Tanglewood, not far from Greenlake. It's a beautiful day, really our first nice day of the year here in our rainy little corner of hippie heaven, and the sun is falling in at bright angles, illuminating an irrationally large number of very white legs and ugly sandals. We don't have much occasion to wear sandals here in Seattle, so we don't spend much money on them. As a consequence, most of our summer footwear choices are desperately wanting for taste in the area of fashion.
Aside from our handicaps of apparel, I love this city. It's academically alternative; one of those rare places where people not only believe that change is necessary, but also tend to believe quite pragmatically in making those changes a reality. Here, my eyebrow piercings are sexy, my veganism a perfectly valid lifestyle choice, my love of the Beatles universal enough to raise eyebrows when I dare to think it even warrants mentioning. In Seattle, I can have a tattoo and still be an academic. I can listen to rock and still be feminine. I can write irreverent blogs and still be considered a writer.
They're hosting a five-day conference on compassion this weekend. It's unfortunate to me that this is something that anyone anywhere would need to host a large conference to promote but, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes. They keynote speaker is the Dalai Lama, and Jeremy and I had a rare opportunity today to attend a huge gathering at the Key Arena to see him speak in person. It was an amazing experience. He's a phenomenal man; there's no gravity or self-importance to him, only a sense of passion for the cause of peace and a jolly sense of humor that makes him seem more like Santa Claus than a religious leader.
So we're sitting here in this coffee shop, enjoying the first sunset we've seen since sometime in September through a plate glass window and, adding an ironic cohesion to my day, someone put a Beatles anthology on the sound system. A few minutes ago "Eleanor Rigby" was playing.
Ah, look at all the lonely people.
It got me to thinking. Mostly because I think way too much about way too many things (especially when it comes to the Beatles, I guess, given that a high percentage of their songs were reactions to a chemistry that had nothing to do with how well they got along), but it was an abrasively odd song to hear after the experience we had today. There were so many people there. And not a one of them looked especially lonely.
I know that it's impossible to know what's going on inside someone else's head. I also know that the odds that no one in a crowd of 30,000 people might be feeling isolated are rather small. But it's also hard to explain the sense of unity that permeated the crowd today. The fact that a large portion of Seattle's population would spend the greater part of their Saturday afternoons celebrating the mere concept of being nice to others - something which seems so simple on the surface but is apparently a rather difficult one to grasp - without any agenda other than basic altruism, was infinitely refreshing. I'm tempted to think that there may be hope for the human race after all.
I know there are a lot of people in this world who are lonely. But I'm starting to wonder if it's really as necessary an emotion as we think, if it's not something we might choose, however unconsciously. Could the simple act of treating others as you want to be treated - a principle as philosophically universal as it is theoretically ignored - end the cycle of isolation that seems to haunt my generation? It seems, at the very least, worth a shot.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
The Birth of a Food Nazi (or) How Books Have Created a Monster
A month or so ago, after suffering something of a nervous breakdown that actually landed me in the hospital for a couple of days, I came to the determination that I desperately needed some time off of school. Two years' worth of health problems, relationship problems, money problems, living abroad problems, and just life in general had exploded like a giant pimple on the already pock-marked face of my psyche. I did finally get hooked up with an amazing psychiatrist and an amazing prescription for pills that make me feel more clear-headed than I have in years, but the initial side-effects of the medication, which take several weeks to accumulate in your brain to the level at which they'll be effective, were close to debilitating. I was constantly nauseous and my brain was doing imitations of Speed Racer on...well...speed, latching onto irrelevant subjects and whirring them around in my skull like a salad spinner. One day at the bus stop I noticed a girl wearing black-and-silver striped sequined ballet flats, which induced a panicked and literally horrified mental analysis of people's fashion choices and the philosophy behind the phenomenon of social interaction that lasted the entire trip home.
So I plead health issues and took the last few weeks of the quarter off. I'll have to make it up later - next quarter is going to be torture - but having the time to do nothing but rest, something I haven't allowed myself in years, has been nothing short of cathartic. The Zoloft is finally starting to kick in, and the combination of chemical-induced mental clarity and free time has allowed me to do a great deal of recreational reading, something else I haven't done in ages. The great irony of getting an advanced degree in literature is how seldom you actually get the chance to ...wait for it...read.
In the past three weeks I've read more books than I have in the past three years combined. It's been so long since I've had the ability to focus on anything that I'm finding myself pretty voracious where books are concerned, devouring everything I see with words on it. This includes return policies on the backs of store receipts, street signs, the insides of CD jackets, ingredient lists on cereal boxes, and the manual for how to use my microwave. I've read a monograph on New Testament textual criticism, a defense of atheism by Richard Dawkins, and a book on the research of the effect of Buddhist meditation in neuroscience; raced through books on reading and books on writing; finished three of the Harry Potter books and one imaginative retelling of the Wizard of Oz; and consumed (no pun intended) a large stack of books about food.
It's really a pretty interesting subject, food, for as mundane as it sounds. It's fascinating to see where our food comes from, and depressing to see how political an issue it turns out to be. I suddenly consider myself enlightened. That, and unwilling to die of cancer induced by food ingredients I can't even pronounce. Call me rebellious. As a result of my new education I've been drastically changing my diet, slowly cutting out anything at all processed and opting to buy organic and local whenever I can. I can't say the move impresses my boyfriend Jeremy much, who already finds me difficult to feed because of my veganism, and I'm almost always broke because real food is twice as expensive as the fake stuff. But for the first time I actually feel like I have a relationship with my food. Eating is a pretty intimate action, when you think about it; I don't know of anything else you can do that connects you quite so directly to the world around you.
I also kind of see the whole thing as a bit of a microcosm for life in general. Maybe it's the medication. Maybe it's finding hope at the end of an almost lifelong tunnel of depression. Maybe I'm just being a melodramatic hippie. I don't know. But I do know that I'm finding living to be a much more deliberate pursuit than I have in the past. Rather than viewing the days as a mundane succession of minutes to be tolerated - or my meals as a mundane succession of calories to be consumed - I'm starting to see it as a string of moments to be appreciated and meaningfully navigated, to be, if you'll forgive the metaphor, milked for all it's worth.
And to be used to read. And read. And read.
So I plead health issues and took the last few weeks of the quarter off. I'll have to make it up later - next quarter is going to be torture - but having the time to do nothing but rest, something I haven't allowed myself in years, has been nothing short of cathartic. The Zoloft is finally starting to kick in, and the combination of chemical-induced mental clarity and free time has allowed me to do a great deal of recreational reading, something else I haven't done in ages. The great irony of getting an advanced degree in literature is how seldom you actually get the chance to ...wait for it...read.
In the past three weeks I've read more books than I have in the past three years combined. It's been so long since I've had the ability to focus on anything that I'm finding myself pretty voracious where books are concerned, devouring everything I see with words on it. This includes return policies on the backs of store receipts, street signs, the insides of CD jackets, ingredient lists on cereal boxes, and the manual for how to use my microwave. I've read a monograph on New Testament textual criticism, a defense of atheism by Richard Dawkins, and a book on the research of the effect of Buddhist meditation in neuroscience; raced through books on reading and books on writing; finished three of the Harry Potter books and one imaginative retelling of the Wizard of Oz; and consumed (no pun intended) a large stack of books about food.
It's really a pretty interesting subject, food, for as mundane as it sounds. It's fascinating to see where our food comes from, and depressing to see how political an issue it turns out to be. I suddenly consider myself enlightened. That, and unwilling to die of cancer induced by food ingredients I can't even pronounce. Call me rebellious. As a result of my new education I've been drastically changing my diet, slowly cutting out anything at all processed and opting to buy organic and local whenever I can. I can't say the move impresses my boyfriend Jeremy much, who already finds me difficult to feed because of my veganism, and I'm almost always broke because real food is twice as expensive as the fake stuff. But for the first time I actually feel like I have a relationship with my food. Eating is a pretty intimate action, when you think about it; I don't know of anything else you can do that connects you quite so directly to the world around you.
I also kind of see the whole thing as a bit of a microcosm for life in general. Maybe it's the medication. Maybe it's finding hope at the end of an almost lifelong tunnel of depression. Maybe I'm just being a melodramatic hippie. I don't know. But I do know that I'm finding living to be a much more deliberate pursuit than I have in the past. Rather than viewing the days as a mundane succession of minutes to be tolerated - or my meals as a mundane succession of calories to be consumed - I'm starting to see it as a string of moments to be appreciated and meaningfully navigated, to be, if you'll forgive the metaphor, milked for all it's worth.
And to be used to read. And read. And read.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Pigeon Hunting
For the most part, I really like my place. It's huge for a studio, has a full kitchen, and is pretty reasonably priced for a downtown apartment. The only big complaint I really have is that it has no view at all; I'm on the ground floor, and the few windows I have look out onto a courtyard that I'm pretty sure no one's entered in at least a generation. There's some sort of big box in the middle of it - I'm not sure what it is, but it looks a little like one of those old green electrical boxes that used to pop up every once in a while on the side of roads in the suburbs - and the pigeons and an occasional seagull have adopted the place as a base of operations for what I can only assume are their strategic bombing maneuvers. I myself find the constant chirping and scratching slightly irritating. My two cats, however, both in the young adult stage of their development, are eager to see their share of the action in the War on Things That Move and Make Noise and see the situation as a call to arms.
We have, as a result, entered the War on the eastern front and embarked on a daily drama of alternating espionage and displays of military strength. I awake every morning to the rattling of the plastic window blinds as the kittens peek around, under, and through them in an effort to find the best vantage point from which to conduct their gathering of intelligence. Lola, the older of the two by a few months, then proceeds to give the smaller one, Bob, lessons on the art of pigeon hunting.
"First," she says with all the gravity of the expert, "you twitch the tip of your tail like it's on fire and you're trying to put it out."
"Like this?"
"A little faster than that. You want to show them you're serious. Stop beating mom in the face with your tail, though, or she'll throw us off the bed."
"Sorry."
"Shape up, soldier! Here, let's touch noses."
Whereupon they normally kiss. I suspect it's to make a show of their solidarity.
"Okay," Lola says then, "it's time for tactical maneuvers. Start making noises like you're possessed."
"I'm trying. I've never quite been able to get it."
"Just pull your whiskers back and chatter your incisors a little more. Try to look scary. It won't be long before we actually catch one, Bob, and then we can leave it in the kitchen as a present for mom."
"I'm tired," says Bob. "Now that we've effectively attracted every pigeon in Seattle and permanently woken mom up for the day, I think I need a nap."
"Yeah now that you mention it, I could stand to sleep a little too. Race you to the armchair!"
And so on and so forth.
We are also waging the battle, rather fiercely, against post-pubescent rebellion. Lola has entered the stage where the fast majority of her responses to the world around her involve rolling her large green eyes and - I swear it's true - shaking her head dramatically. Bob, slightly more gregarious and far more, well, male, has developed an oddly passive-aggressive side, meowing nonstop at me and getting into everything that could possibly get him into any trouble, only to roll over onto his back submissively when I get close. Worse yet, they've developed a system of cooperation to their rebellion. Lola has figured out how to open drawers and cupboards, and regularly does so in order to allow Bob easy access to the hidden treasures of the kitchen. For his part Bob, once again probably owing to his gender, will eat anything that even remotely resembles food, and has divined the fine art of opening packages with nothing more than his claws and a can-do attitude. Their favorite thing to pilfer, oddly enough, is dry spaghetti. I've come home more than once to a kitchen floor littered with half-eaten stems of uncooked pasta and shards of plastic wrapping.
The thing is that it might all be rather annoying, if it weren't for the tremendous company that the two little ratfinks provide. For all of their little idiosyncrasies, there are few things that can match the contentment I feel when I wake up in the middle of the night with two fuzzy little heads nuzzled into mine, even if the sound of their purring in stereo does make it feel like I'm at a motorcycle convention.
We have, as a result, entered the War on the eastern front and embarked on a daily drama of alternating espionage and displays of military strength. I awake every morning to the rattling of the plastic window blinds as the kittens peek around, under, and through them in an effort to find the best vantage point from which to conduct their gathering of intelligence. Lola, the older of the two by a few months, then proceeds to give the smaller one, Bob, lessons on the art of pigeon hunting.
"First," she says with all the gravity of the expert, "you twitch the tip of your tail like it's on fire and you're trying to put it out."
"Like this?"
"A little faster than that. You want to show them you're serious. Stop beating mom in the face with your tail, though, or she'll throw us off the bed."
"Sorry."
"Shape up, soldier! Here, let's touch noses."
Whereupon they normally kiss. I suspect it's to make a show of their solidarity.
"Okay," Lola says then, "it's time for tactical maneuvers. Start making noises like you're possessed."
"I'm trying. I've never quite been able to get it."
"Just pull your whiskers back and chatter your incisors a little more. Try to look scary. It won't be long before we actually catch one, Bob, and then we can leave it in the kitchen as a present for mom."
"I'm tired," says Bob. "Now that we've effectively attracted every pigeon in Seattle and permanently woken mom up for the day, I think I need a nap."
"Yeah now that you mention it, I could stand to sleep a little too. Race you to the armchair!"
And so on and so forth.
We are also waging the battle, rather fiercely, against post-pubescent rebellion. Lola has entered the stage where the fast majority of her responses to the world around her involve rolling her large green eyes and - I swear it's true - shaking her head dramatically. Bob, slightly more gregarious and far more, well, male, has developed an oddly passive-aggressive side, meowing nonstop at me and getting into everything that could possibly get him into any trouble, only to roll over onto his back submissively when I get close. Worse yet, they've developed a system of cooperation to their rebellion. Lola has figured out how to open drawers and cupboards, and regularly does so in order to allow Bob easy access to the hidden treasures of the kitchen. For his part Bob, once again probably owing to his gender, will eat anything that even remotely resembles food, and has divined the fine art of opening packages with nothing more than his claws and a can-do attitude. Their favorite thing to pilfer, oddly enough, is dry spaghetti. I've come home more than once to a kitchen floor littered with half-eaten stems of uncooked pasta and shards of plastic wrapping.
The thing is that it might all be rather annoying, if it weren't for the tremendous company that the two little ratfinks provide. For all of their little idiosyncrasies, there are few things that can match the contentment I feel when I wake up in the middle of the night with two fuzzy little heads nuzzled into mine, even if the sound of their purring in stereo does make it feel like I'm at a motorcycle convention.
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