Missing Fingers

The first time I went to Beijing, our professor Yomi introduced us to the blossoming underground of modern art in China by taking us to a guard house perched atop one of the few remaining segments of the old city wall, which had been taken over by a number of socially inclined artists and transformed into an exhibition space. For all its apparent informality, for all its dark corners and dank shadows, I marveled at the way the ancient cave of a building had been transformed into a museum of social criticism, a shrine to free speech and self-expression that stuck out like a wart from the glittering skyline of a city in the midst of self-congratulatory pre-Olympics modernization. A wart which, I remember thinking with some irony, if someone could find a way to pop it, would ooze the slick and very dangerously colorful pus of creativity and independent thought until it rotted rainbows into the shiny façade of comfortable apathy that stretched out around it.

Yomi had arranged a speaker for us at the gallery, an artist named Sheng Qi. Sheng Qi stood patiently in front of us, white and American and jaded as we were, and spoke humbly and unaffectedly about the art scene in China, about its influence and its ramifications and its significance. About his memories of a childhood in a society where it was illegal to paint or write or sing anything that wasn’t a form of propaganda for the Communist Party. About how, even after twenty years in an “open” society, modern artists in China still had to carve their galleries out of abandoned munitions factories and the rotting remains of old courtyard houses. About being at Tian’anmen square and watching as his own government turned on him and his friends, in retaliation for nothing more than a desire to speak their minds.

I was absolutely starstruck. And this was before I’d seen his work.

After the Tian’anmen incident the government went after Sheng Qi, putting a warrant out for his arrest for his part in the uprising. He was forced to flee China. But before he left, Sheng Qi cut off his left little finger and planted it in a flower pot.

“So a part of me,” he explained as he raised his maimed hand to show us, “would always be here.” These days Sheng Qi makes much of his living off of pictures of his hand sans pinky, his palm cradling nostalgic-looking photographs.

I was touched then on a level of passionate youthful angst. I was standing in the presence of a real revolutionary. Not a middle-class white boy who’d been mad enough at his white-collar upbringing to grow a pink mohawk, not a dreadlocked vegan peacenick protesting wars she would never be asked to fight, but a real human being who’d been asked to stand up for something he believed in. And had done it. And had risked his life – really and truly risked his life - in the process. All I wanted was to be like him.

As I grow older, though, Sheng Qi’s work takes on a new kind of meaning for me. As I learn, as I travel, as I am forced to move forward through the sometime discomfort of a life left deliberately unpadded by complacence, I see less in Sheng Qi’s missing finger of politics and heroism and more of the bittersweetness that comes necessarily from living a life that is complete and worthwhile. Of the sacrifices one is inevitably forced to make in the pursuit of something greater. Of the pieces one must shed of himself before he can become whole.

It strikes me that every time I have arrived somewhere new and then left again, every time I have made a friend and then had to say goodbye, every time I have made the effort to move forward instead of standing still, I have cut off a finger and planted it in a flower pot. I’m haunted by the phantom itches in the amputated digits: nostalgic memories of the lights in a city, a sudden whiff of an old friend’s perfume, a familiar song on a random playlist, and the fullness of my still half-lived life presses heavy on my chest. I am not as brave as Sheng Qi or his ilk, and I will not pretend to be. But every now and again I still feel as if there are pieces of me scattered everywhere, sprouting miniature unheeded flowers in neglected scraps of pottery.

And so I’m standing here again with my hatchet raised over my mangled stump of a hand, preparing to go somewhere else. Again. To once again move forward, to say goodbye, to leave cherished pieces of my soul behind like the rejected branches left behind on the ground after a pruning. One wonders whether all this docking will ultimately serve its purpose of making room for newer, stronger things to grow. Or if, in the end, I’ll just be left having to play the piano with my toes.

In Memoriam

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I’ve been having a lot of trouble writing lately.

It isn’t writer’s block. It’s something more sinister, more oppressive, more suffocating. It’s a loss of myself in a world of corporate greed and social expectations and a system that tells me who to be and how to think and what to buy. It’s a fading away of everything I believe in against a backdrop of the cynicism and resignation that inevitably haunts adulthood. Growing up. That coming of age that is supposed to be the culmination of all the years we spent in our youth looking for ways to make ourselves whole, only to find that none of it took.

I’m tired. I spend all day pushing buttons I am told to push, saying things that I am told to say, subsisting because I am told that it’s the best one can expect from life. I come home at night spent and drained and another day older.

Wasted.

I am too tired to write. And even if I could, what would I say? Where would it come from? There is nothing left, because life is as cold and empty and worthless as I am.

And, what if it isn’t good enough?

And, what if it is?

And, look at me. Poor, miserable me, bent in two under this burden of needing to write even though I’m too frightened to do it. Of feeling that I could do something great, if only I had the courage to speak up. But I don’t. And so I push buttons and I recite scripts of inanity and I subsist. Wasted.

But this week, something happened. Somewhere far away, someone rigged an election. In a place I will never see, people took to the streets. People rioted. People gave their lives. All for their right to be heard.

People died for their right to speak up.

And here I sit in my safe, warm little bubble, feeling sorry for myself. Huddled under some asinine and illogical fear, held captive by the idiotic worry that I might not be good enough, that I might not inspire, that I might not rise to the heights of literary immortality even as people all over the world spill blood for a chance at the pen that I hold motionless in my hand. I watch my television, mesmerized, as people I will never meet in a place that I will never go, people who will never experience the comfort or the education or the security or the freedom that I have, proudly display a bravery that I will never achieve. And I am so, so ashamed.

It’s been five years almost to the day since the first time I set foot in Tian’anmen Square. I remember standing in awe, barely able to breathe, knowing that I was in a place where people had given their lives for something bigger than themselves. For freedom. Something so basic, so fundamental, and yet so easily denied. I remember thinking, in my youthful naivete, that I would never take my own for granted. And yet here I am, in the greatest of ironies, denying myself the freedom so many people are fighting for. Simply because I am afraid.

This cannot continue.

In Tehran, in Beijing, in the countless other places where people have sacrificed everything simply to be heard, to be granted the chance to stand up in a sea of the apathetic walking dead and claim the right to live by virtue of their own voices, the courage of those who have chosen to stand up for their right to speak makes it impossible for me to waste my own.

I will stand up for my friends who are denied the right to love, simply because they are different. I will speak out for those who don’t have enough to eat, a bed to sleep in, clothes to wear. Proper healthcare. An education. I will bare my soul until there is nothing left of it, until it bleeds out as though I myself were among those who sacrificed everything for the right to stand up and be heard.

I’ll be melodramatic and passionate and angry and alive if I damn well want to. Fuck the system. Screw pushing the buttons and reciting the words and going through the motions. I will write, and I will breathe, and I will cherish my freedom with every word and every breath.

I will not be afraid. I will not be wasted.

Silence is no longer an option.

About A Life

It’s almost midnight and I have work tomorrow and I’m exhausted, but I can’t sleep. I’ve self-medicated again, the end knot of a string of attempts at self-anesthetizing competing with one another for degree of numbness. Each time pushing it a little farther, taking a little more, and each time wondering if this will be the time that I’ve pushed it beyond where it can go, and wondering – sometimes even hoping – that this will be the last time I have to do this.

My heart is pounding in my chest. I can’t even remember everything I took. They were all legal, all prescribed, all considered necessary for the advancement of my very tenuous mental well-being. But I am beginning to believe that while all of them have some effect in solidarity, in tandem they can turn what at first seemed a blissful anesthetic into the simultaneously frightening and freeing premonition that I might never feel anything again. If I close them tonight, will my eyes open again in the morning?

My hands shake and my toes tingle and the only way I can keep my head from flopping backward is to lean it onto one shoulder or another in an artifically pensive and thoughtful pose. And I think as I sit here, what if I don’t wake up, and then I worry that the thought isn’t as troublesome as I think it should be.

Every day I wake up, groggy and disinterested with my day. Every day I shower and brush my teeth and do my best to manage the anarchistic army of hair which sits foxholed firmly but uncooperatively on my scalp. And every day, just as I’m about to walk out the door - just as I’m about to perform my daily routine of selling out, of deliberately abandoning all I believe in and forcing my square self into a round hole – just before I do all that, like a fool I take one last glance in the mirror.

I am fading.

Every day I disappear a little bit more. In the mirror there are only shadows of me, layers of painted cellophane that are removed one after another after another, until I have become as translucent and as meaningful as saran wrap.

Soon there will be nothing of me left. This makes me a little sad. I was one of the lucky ones who are able to find a few small things to like about themselves. Not grand conquests or historical heroism, but just little things like the way my right eye twinkled when I laughed or the way my hands felt smooth on a keyboard. Now I never laugh, and the layers which kept me writing were among the first to be peeled away.

So I guess it’s natural, then, that I feel a little nostalgic, a little curious. If I were to die tonight, what is it I would miss?

There was a time when my life was so full. When the entire world sang to me, every city a calling siren, every mountain a beckoning nymph. The song has never stopped. But while it used to be sweet and tender and overflowing with the promise of adventure, its pitch has changed to an octave which is apparently audible only to myself and the dogs living one floor down. It grates on my spine like the scream of a dying cat and makes me want to gouge my eyes out with my own thumbs.

“I’m stuck!” I call to them. “I’m too old now to come when you call, and the walls around me are too high to climb! Call someone else!” And when they don’t stop, I can only curl up and rock in the fetal position, sobbing in silent, futile whispers, “Please, please call someone else.”

But oh, that call. What a life I have lived.

I have watched poor children at a coffee plantation fight to have their pictures taken with a polaroid, because it’s the first they’ve ever seen of either a camera or of their own images smiling back at them.


I’ve been there as a large load of second-hand sneakers were delivered to a Nicaraguan orphanage, after which the children, who have never in their lives had enough to eat, sat down next to us and shared their lunch.

I have wandered the streets of the Bund in Shanghai at sunset, watching as the lights across the river flash in every imaginable color, the bright intensity of a city which knows itself, which fits into its own skin, in a way I never have.


I have been to the Ming Tombs with a little Chinese girl who didn’t know me, but held my hand the whole time anyway.

I have ridden a camel on the Great Wall.

I have ridden on the back of the scooter of my friend Roy who, recognizing my constant searching for peace in the midst of the incessant siren’s call in my head, drove me far, far into the mountains above Taipei to a painted temple where his mother used to take him when he was young. And in that place, I have listened to that friend, that friend of undying devotion and love, say, “Here you can rest.”

I have gotten stuck climbing trees in tropical mountains after dark

I have wandered the streets of San Francisco and Seattle and Portland and Reno Shanghai and Beijing, all of them after dark, just to see how it feels when a city sleeps.



I have eaten boa constrictor and armadillo.

I have known love. Real love. The kind which is so fragile that when it hits the oxygenated atmosphere of the real world it retreats and evaporates as quickly as it came, and all you are left with is whatever you could grasp at as it pulled back past you into nothingness.

I will never see any of these things again. Seeing is a verb which necessarily requires an agent, and cellophane wrap cannot, by definition, see. There is no more of me. I am assimilated. I am every day the same. I am the television is my savior and beer, wine, and cocktails my holy trinity. I am save me, save me from the pain of this distortionism I have to perform every day, dislocating this moral and that standard and this most special part of who I am in order to fit into a box of conformity marked “This End Up” but which always seems to get tossed into the truck upside down anyway.

There is no happy ending here, no moral to be taken away, none of my typical reminders that life’s lemonade can truly be sweet when pressed the right way. There is only disillusionment, and the disgusting and gut-punching realization that I’m neither special nor capable nor destined to do anything, great or otherwise, with my life.

There is nothing but me. And soon there will be no more of that either.

Why I Love Seattle (or) Who Let the Goats Out?

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?

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Agnosticism Defended

Just for the record, in case no one's really figured it out by now, I consider myself, for lack of a better term, agnostic. Years of cautious and earnest moral inquiry have put me in a position where I find it impossible to reconcile the idea of a loving and benevolent creator with the inconsistencies that seem so apparent to me in the dogma of religion. That's not to say I haven't tried; when you're raised in the church, I think the hardest thing you'll ever have to do in your life is to admit to yourself that maybe it isn't exactly the perfect answer to everything that you grew up believing it was. It's far easier, really, to look for the loopholes in your own objections that will reinforce what you really want to be true. Religion simplifies your life. It codifies morality. It provides a social support system that, sadly, the secular world seems to be lacking. The idea of admitting the possibility - while by no means the certainty - that it might not be true is horrifying at best, because doing so also takes away that structure and the certainty, however misguided it has the potential to be, that there is meaning in life. Of course I miss those things. I dislike feeling like an outsider in my family because I hold a different belief system. And sometimes I yearn for the simplicity of having an entire world viewpoint already laid out in front of me. But if I am honest - an attribute we normally credit to morality, so a lack of effort toward that end would seem counterproductive - I have to admit that I simply cannot accept a dogmatic, monotheistic religion, no matter how convenient or comforting it may be. A complete explanation of the reasoning behind this would be pretty elaborate and take more space and time than I have for this post. For the time being, I'll simply say that I think by and large human beings take themselves far too seriously. What could possibly possess us to think, should an omnipotent and omnipresent being actually exist, that we would in any way pretend to comprehend his/her/its nature? Or at least that we would be able to do so to the point that we were so sure of ourselves that we were willing to kill for our beliefs? Do we really believe that those who believe the way we do are the only people endowed with any sort of capacity for the discernment of truth, and that those who believe in other religions are somehow spiritually stunted? And if so, what would possibly possess a supposedly benevolent creator to create the majority of the world to be what would essentially amount to a mass of spiritual retards?

By the same token, though, I have a great deal of difficulty swallowing the idea of atheism. The belief that there is no god is still a belief, and one that in my view has an equally small body of supporting evidence as does theism. I'll admit that the atheist's viewpoint seems slightly more logical to me at the moment (a stance which I reserve the right to change as life experience warrants it), but that in no way means that I'm prepared to make the staunch and unwavering assertion that there is no god at all.

There's been a slew of books in the past couple of years out of the atheist/secular humanist camp, written by intensely intelligent people like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. The most recent is a book called God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, which I just today finished reading. I think the trend and the growing popularity behind it is largely a backlash against the fundamentalist right, and what might have been relegated to the fringes of heretical left-wing society a few years ago has become a major movement as more and more people are growing disillusioned by the idiocy that inflexibility often tends to bring about. (God is Not Great, for instance, has raced onto the bestseller list in the short time it's been on the shelves; walking in downtown Seattle yesterday I saw no fewer than three people reading it as they waited for the bus). And by and large I agree with the general principle behind what these men are saying: religion, and its underlying attitude of I'm-right-and-you're-wrong, often does more harm than it does good, and if you're interested (which most of my readers probably aren't), these books are chock full of historical and modern-day examples. But the problem I see is that, for all of their railing against the evils of religion, they offer little in the way of an alternative. Building a belief system on the disproving of another belief system seems oddly circular and hollow to me. Alright, educated liberals, we know what you're against. But what are you for? It seems to me that we're pulling away the rug and not replacing the floor paneling underneath. Eventually we're going to fall through the hole.

What is wrong with not knowing? Maybe not even "not knowing" so much as admitting the possibility, however small, that we might not know? Is it simply too frightening to admit that we don't know completely what's going on around us, and that that lack of knowledge basically amounts to a lack of control? Maybe we're afraid of what happens after we die. Fair enough, but if I were God I really wouldn't want a mass of people following me - and killing and proselytizing in my name - with no motivation other than fear. Maybe we think that morality can only come from religion. But kindness to others seems to lose some of its moral weight when it's borne of coercion, supernatural or otherwise. When we force a child to share his toys, we are merely passing along proper rules of social interaction so the whole of society doesn't end up going to pot. When we see a child share his toys out of his own volition, we are watching real kindness, the kind that comes from nothing other than simply wanting to love another person. Do we really believe that there is no moral difference between the two?

My question is this: why can't kindness be enough? Why can't we simply teach that loving our fellow man is the pinnacle of morality, and leave it at that? Why do we need religion to reinforce the idea with dogma on one side, and the theory of self-interested altruism on the other? Doing so really just robs us of the satisfaction of loving other people because loving other people is a good thing to do and cheapens the idea of kindness for kindness' sake. One might argue that human nature prevents this kind of utopic idea from taking shape. But I can't help but wonder how much of this idea of human nature has been pounded into us by religion in the first place. We're constantly being told that people are bad, that they tend toward evil more often than good. Our media is constantly showing pictures of murderers and thieves. But do we really believe that these people are in the majority? Isn't it possible that we simply have our cameras pointed the wrong direction? And then we have to ask ourselves who created the conditions under which these "bad" people's personalities were shaped. I'd be willing to place money on the idea that what we refer to so condescendingly as "human nature" ultimately owes far more to human nurture, or lack thereof. Might we not fear other people simply because we fear what's inside of ourselves? And wouldn't that fear be mitigated if we could convince ourselves that we are capable of the kind of altruism that goes beyond self-interested motivation? Can we create a "religion" that is founded on nothing more than the belief in the good in people? This is, after all, the one thing in life that I've seen more than my share of evidence for.

Another Year Older

Today is my birthday. Again. I'm another year older. Again. This might seem like the most obvious outcome of having a birthday, getting another year older, but I'm really rebelling. Maybe by the time I'm 24 + 6 (see last year's birthday post on Lindsey's brilliant math for old people) I will have succeeded in overthrowing the oppressive tyranny that is the onward march of time. Or at least the onward march of the persistent gray hairs that have suddenly started popping up on the top of my head lately. They're tenacious little soldiers, too, let me tell you; every time I think they're eradicated, more pop up. They're like roaches. I'm too young for this nonsense. It must be stopped.

Isn't it illegal to get gray hairs before you're thirty-five?

At any rate, the fact remains that today I am a very annoying 24+2. This is not a good number. This implies that I'm on the near side of thirty - or 24+6, for those who are adapting to the new and much more geriatric-ally friendly system - and the fact that I am on the near side of 24+6 also implies that I am on the near side of 24+death. This disturbs me greatly. I have not yet published my novel, finished my Ph.D., composed my symphony, run my marathon, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, or done anything else of note on my list of things to do before I die. Well except go to China, maybe, and I'm afraid that that might have actually helped to move me a little closer to old age by causing me to age prematurely. You try riding in a taxi cab in Shanghai and coming away without at least one new gray hair. I don't think it's been done. It might, in fact, be impossible.

And yet with as much as I joke about my impending demise, in reality I'm finding that in some ways this year my birthday is giving me a lot of opportunity to reflect on my life. So much has happened in the past year, it's absolutely incredible. I may not have run a marathon, but I did run two 5K's. I haven't finished my Ph.D., but I've been accepted to grad school and gotten a fairly decent fellowship to help pay for it. I may not have climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro, but....ok, admittedly I don't have anything for that one. But I'm working on it.

My point is, God, I love my life. I love waking up in the morning. I love breathing in and feeling the air pass through my lungs. I love the sunrises and the sunsets and the rain and the sunshine. How could anyone believe that life is anything but incredible? How could we not cherish every passing moment as the perfect miracle that it is? And along with it, cherish every person that passes through those moments? What if heaven is actually right here in front of us, and we're just not looking at it? I have been so, so blessed. I have so many people who love me and care for me, so many really close and beautiful friends. I was born into a world of limitless opportunities, where I've never gone hungry and I'm allowed to be educated and I have freedoms that most of the people in the world only dream about. I've seen so many things and places and met so many people. Sometimes I feel like the luckiest person alive.

The only thing that depresses me is how powerless I feel sometimes to share that, to reach out to others who haven't had the same opportunities, the same love, the same enough-to-eat that I have. Am I doing enough? Am I doing everything I can to make the world a better place? This is the one thing that really does make me feel like I'm aging, I think: this feeling of impotence. There's so much good left to be done in the world, the thought of it exhausts me.

Spare some change?

Part of my uber-monotonous job at King County has recently been to courier documents to the courthouse down the street from my office. A couple of days ago I was passing the tiny convenience store in the lobby when I noticed a sign posted in the window.

No Change Without a Purchase, it said.

The wording struck me as being a little ironic, and the more I thought about it the more overly philosophical I became about it. I know it's a little melodramatic and backwards on my part, but my life of late has been nothing but change. The idea that I might have to make a purchase in return struck me as odd, if only for the fact that I had never considered it before.

Being back in Seattle has been simultaneously deeply gratifying and emotionally exhausting for me. I longed to come "home" - the semantics of which I have questioned before and, for considerations of length and reader boredom will ignore in this particular post, although I do reserve the right to return to the issue at a later time - but it's become painfully obvious to me that the Seattle I left in the summer is not the same Seattle I returned to in the wintertime. Or maybe it's a little more accurate to say that the Becca I left in last summer is not the same one I returned to in the winter. Everything is different now: Lindsey's not here, I'm strangely and quite frighteningly single, and - maybe the most horrifying thing of all - I've grown up in ways that I neither expected nor in many cases necessarily especially enjoy.

All that, and the emotional roller coaster of waiting for graduate school decisions is starting to wear me thin. I've been accepted back to the University of Washington but still haven't heard from them on funding, and I've been placed on a waiting list at Princeton. The result of this scenario is that it is well past March 15th, the technical deadline for most schools' admissions decisions, and I still don't know where I'll be living in six months. This was supposed to be over by now. I am tired. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that no matter what happens I have no option of standing still in my comfort zone. If I go back to UW, it won't be the same as when I was there before. Lindsey and Andy won't be there, the school work will be of a drastically different format, and my personal life will have drastically changed. On the off-chance that Princeton actually offers me admission there are a host of life changes involved with that situation as well, not the least of which would be a move across the country to a mind-numbingly different culture. I'm more scared of living on the east coast than I was of living in China. Roy, my friend in Taiwan, used to always give me the same advice: "Just keep walking." As great as that advice is, it appears that at this point I have no choice but to keep walking, and that makes me slightly resentful of the path. Sometimes I look around me and get so jealous of the "normal" people, those who can be content to stand still.

At the same time, though, I know that in the end I could never be truly satisfied with that kind of a life. I can't make copies for the rest of eternity. I could never be content with myself if I sat here wondering what it was I could have been. I have to grow up, because everything inside of me still screams that there are things I need to do, that there's a reason I'm here, and that it is absolutely vital that I find out what that reason is. That I keep walking. And so I make the choice to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and to pay the price that entails.

No growth without sacrifice. No change without a purchase.

Sometimes I just wish they took returns.

The Ghetto Starbucks

I am at Starbucks.

This is probably not surprising. I go to Starbucks almost daily, and sometimes even more frequently than that. I lug my oversized laptop here to think and to write, because nothing stimulates the brain like a half-decaf no-whip sugar free cinnamon dolce soy latte - a drink which, when the barista announces it at the bar, never fails to elicit a response from one of the other waiting customers.

"Whew," they whisper, almost invariably. "That's a mouthful."

What is a departure today, however, is the fact that instead of going to the Starbucks near Seattle University like I normally do, I headed the opposite direction from my apartment and ended up at a Starbucks that is much closer to my apartment, but at the same time sits precariously perched on the border between the posh newly-remodeled townhomes of the Capitol Hill neighborhood and, for lack of anything better to call it, the Ghetto.

The Starbucks near the University is always virtually silent, full of trust-fund kids who'd rather not talk to one another and law students huddled over piles of books that look really thick and really boring. But here it's bustling and noisy. Everyone is talking to everyone else. They're strangers, but they're not. I find this unsettling.

I'm sitting in one of the plush oversized chairs by the window so typical of Starbucks everywhere, my laptop in my lap, headphones in my ears. I'm enjoying the energy, but I'm not entirely sure I want to be a part of it. A large woman in a thin coat comes over and waves at me dramatically.

When I take my headphones out she motions to the chair next to me and says, "Is anyone sitting here?" I say no, and she sits down. I return my headphones to my ears and my attention to my computer. The woman next to me starts talking to a man at a nearby table.

Five minutes later she waves at me again. She asks me if I'm a student. She asks me what I study. She asks me what I'm doing sitting at Starbucks with a laptop. She tells me I'm a very nice lady.

I say thank you. I go back to my writing.

Another wave, and the lady motions to the man at the table. "He's drawing you," she says. And he is. He's got pastels and brushes and paints spread out around him, and he's going back and forth between studying me intently and scribbling furiously. I'm blushing. From time to time people are stopping to look over his shoulder. A man stops and looks at the drawing, motions to his own chin, and says something in a language I can't understand.

I love this place.

The artist asks me what my astrological sign is.

"Taurus," I say.

"Oh, you were born in April then," says the woman.

I correct her and say no, the early part of May.

"Hm," says the artist. "Do you know anything about your sign?"

"Not much," I say. And he says, "I think it's the money sign."

"Oh, is it?"

"I think so. Well I don't really know, but that's what my friend said. She said Tauruses are good with money."

I laugh because I am not good with money. Money involves numbers. Numbers are not my friends.

The woman has gotten up and gone across the street to Taco Del Mar where, after prodding me for every manner of information as to the nature of the food there, she has decided to purchase a hard taco. She's been replaced by a tall skinny man who sits holding on to the arms of the chair like it's a roller coaster car. The artist at the table just handed me a drawing of myself.

I think we miss a lot in life by putting up walls, by burying ourselves in books, by looking at everyone around us in suspicion. It's striking how much the atmosphere here, where in theory I might have reason to be frightened of the people around me, is so much more alive and friendly than it is in the "good" neighborhood a half a mile away. Right now I am the opposite of frightened. It's a good feeling.