It's cold/
but not that deep/
'cause your legs grow.
Last night we went to hear Nada Surf, a band Ali turned me onto. Her favorite song (and mine, via her) is this haunting tune about recovery. I like it because it's kind of the way a kid thinks about dealing with heartbreak or seemingly impossible odds. Just when you think the cold water is about to close over your head...stretch legs to the rescue.
To take a listen, just hit the link over here to the right.
p.s. The other thing this song makes me think about is how cold water makes your leg hair grow. Your leg (hair) groooows....sorry if I just ruined the moment, but seriously, this is true, right? Some people argue that in fact your skin just tightens and makes the leg hair stand out temporarily, but I even asked an aesthetician (waxer) who confirmed this scientific FACT that ladies who shave their legs have always known.
Friday, April 11, 2008
Monday, April 7, 2008
the diving bell and the butterfly
To watch this properly, turn the volume on your computer up. Way up. There you go.
I can't get this scene from Julian Shnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" out of my mind. I could watch that hair blowing against the blue sky all day long. It just keeps playing over and over in my head like it's one of my own memories--which, in a sense, I guess it is. Anyone who has ever been young, driving in a car to rock music with other young, beautiful people while the sun is shining and wind is blowing has this memory.
The friend who saw this with me thought the film was hard to watch, but I found it completely life-affirming. If you haven't seen it, it's about Jean-Do Bauby, editor of French Elle who becomes a victim of "Locked-In Syndrome" after a stroke. His body is completely paralyzed, except for his eyes. Unable to speak, he communicates by blinking, eventually using this method to write a memoir about his life and experiences in his frozen body. The film captures some of the horror of his conditon, but also the amazing freedom of his imagination, where he takes flight through travels imagined and real, and revisits the richness of his memories and experiences.
I think what keeps me coming back to this hair-blowing-in-the-wind scene is that the mind so often drifts to painful memories or self-criticism, when it could more often drift to moments like this, of brief but perfect joy.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
groped
I was groped on the way home from work today. The sidewalk was crowded with people coming home from work. I was lost in thought about pasta and Joan of Arc, when someone brushed past and squeezed my hand.
I thought it was my husband, who maybe spotted me on his way to the grocery. But as I turned I saw a stranger walking away; I could only see the back of his balding head. He was a small man, with longish gray curls. His walk struck me as jaunty before I snapped back around to join sidewalk traffic.
What just happened? A stranger grabbed my hand. No, he grasped my hand. Was it creepy? Was it aggressive? Did it feel like a prank? It felt like the gesture of a friend who might see you in a crowded room at a party, and passing, squeeze your hand so you know he's there, even though you're busy talking to someone else. That's it. It felt like a squeeze that said "I'm here."
Of all the touches that take place in a day, how many of them are for that purpose? I am here. I am part of this physical world--you feel me, I feel you. I am here.
Why me? I looked down at my hand. What about my hand made it the one, out of dozens, that he decided to reach for? Maybe it was because my hand is small. Maybe it looked like a good omen. Maybe to that stranger, my hand looked like it might bring a blessing or good luck, auspicious as the Blarney Stone, a smile from a first-born child, the fountain at Chapelle St. Jean-Baptise.
I thought about the hand-holder as I went through my front door, apartment door, and into my kitchen. It wasn't until then, after I got home, got a glass of water, started making dinner, that it occurred to me that it's possible the hand-holder didn't take my hand for him. It's possible that he took my hand because I looked like I needed it.
I thought it was my husband, who maybe spotted me on his way to the grocery. But as I turned I saw a stranger walking away; I could only see the back of his balding head. He was a small man, with longish gray curls. His walk struck me as jaunty before I snapped back around to join sidewalk traffic.
What just happened? A stranger grabbed my hand. No, he grasped my hand. Was it creepy? Was it aggressive? Did it feel like a prank? It felt like the gesture of a friend who might see you in a crowded room at a party, and passing, squeeze your hand so you know he's there, even though you're busy talking to someone else. That's it. It felt like a squeeze that said "I'm here."
Of all the touches that take place in a day, how many of them are for that purpose? I am here. I am part of this physical world--you feel me, I feel you. I am here.
Why me? I looked down at my hand. What about my hand made it the one, out of dozens, that he decided to reach for? Maybe it was because my hand is small. Maybe it looked like a good omen. Maybe to that stranger, my hand looked like it might bring a blessing or good luck, auspicious as the Blarney Stone, a smile from a first-born child, the fountain at Chapelle St. Jean-Baptise.
I thought about the hand-holder as I went through my front door, apartment door, and into my kitchen. It wasn't until then, after I got home, got a glass of water, started making dinner, that it occurred to me that it's possible the hand-holder didn't take my hand for him. It's possible that he took my hand because I looked like I needed it.
Saturday, March 29, 2008
hot lips
My good friend Niedert tagged me to write a post about my husband.
Nicknames: Mr. Woolfie, Turd Ferguson, Brittany (only by his hometown buddies), B Dub.
How long have you been together? About 7 years. We dated on-and-off for six years; we have been married for seven months. What, we had commitment issues.
How long did we date? So long his Dad offered to perform free eye surgery on me if we would finally get married. Surgery--what better incentive??
Who said I love you first? He did.
Who is taller? He is. Which was a pre-requisite. I didn't date extra-short dudes for gene pool purposes.
Who can sing better? He does. He sings every commercial that comes on the T.V. The Daisy sour cream commercial was his #1 hit of the summer.
Who mows the lawn? We have no lawn.
Who drives? We have no car.
Who does the laundry? We have no laundry in the building, so we send it out. I'm starting to realize that city living is simplified--and that on paper it sounds like we live out of an abandoned school bus.
Who cooks? We both like to cook, although he is way more hardcore. I think we own at least 15 items just related to pie-making. That said, we're usually lazy and argue about who is going to make dinner--which often results in a peanut butter sandwich for dinner or another run to Yuki Sushi, where they know our orders by heart.
Who kissed who first? I kissed him. I played hard-to-get so well that he sort of refused to be the first one to make a move. I broke down after about a dozen dates.
Who proposed? He did.
Who has more siblings? He blows me out of the water on this one. He comes from a combined family, one parent on each side passed away while the kids were young, the parents remarried, and they have a combined total of 10. The grand kids come so fast we literally lose count sometimes. We'll get an email about someone and he'll be like, who's this? And I'll be like, I think that's your niece.
What's the best present he's given you? A refurbished 1964 "Debutante" Schwinn Beach Cruiser Bicycle. My roommate Katie had a couple cruisers, and when she moved I missed our bike rides. He surprised me with my own bike on my birthday, with a big red bow on it. Remember when you came down on Christmas morning and found a bike by the tree? Somehow, getting a bike is one of the best wish-fulfillment sensations ever.
What's the best gift you've given him? An industrial-strength shaved-ice machine.
What made you fall for him? His kindness. And his nerdiness. I have long thought that nerds make the best boyfriends. When we first started dating he had just quit a job as an IT manager. He have books on our shelves like "Mergers, Acquisitions, and Restructuring Models." You can bet those aren't mine.
What makes him the yin to your yang? Our mutual love of weird and cool and nerdy stuff. When you are the person who says, "I want to go to the demoliton derby," or, "I know...let's spend our summer vacation with war reenactors," and you find the person who's like, "Yeah, and let's also hit the La Brea tar pits;" hold onto that like a rear-mount choke hold, people. Because that is LOVE.
Nicknames: Mr. Woolfie, Turd Ferguson, Brittany (only by his hometown buddies), B Dub.
How long have you been together? About 7 years. We dated on-and-off for six years; we have been married for seven months. What, we had commitment issues.
How long did we date? So long his Dad offered to perform free eye surgery on me if we would finally get married. Surgery--what better incentive??
Who said I love you first? He did.
Who is taller? He is. Which was a pre-requisite. I didn't date extra-short dudes for gene pool purposes.
Who can sing better? He does. He sings every commercial that comes on the T.V. The Daisy sour cream commercial was his #1 hit of the summer.
Who mows the lawn? We have no lawn.
Who drives? We have no car.
Who does the laundry? We have no laundry in the building, so we send it out. I'm starting to realize that city living is simplified--and that on paper it sounds like we live out of an abandoned school bus.
Who cooks? We both like to cook, although he is way more hardcore. I think we own at least 15 items just related to pie-making. That said, we're usually lazy and argue about who is going to make dinner--which often results in a peanut butter sandwich for dinner or another run to Yuki Sushi, where they know our orders by heart.
Who kissed who first? I kissed him. I played hard-to-get so well that he sort of refused to be the first one to make a move. I broke down after about a dozen dates.
Who proposed? He did.
Who has more siblings? He blows me out of the water on this one. He comes from a combined family, one parent on each side passed away while the kids were young, the parents remarried, and they have a combined total of 10. The grand kids come so fast we literally lose count sometimes. We'll get an email about someone and he'll be like, who's this? And I'll be like, I think that's your niece.
What's the best present he's given you? A refurbished 1964 "Debutante" Schwinn Beach Cruiser Bicycle. My roommate Katie had a couple cruisers, and when she moved I missed our bike rides. He surprised me with my own bike on my birthday, with a big red bow on it. Remember when you came down on Christmas morning and found a bike by the tree? Somehow, getting a bike is one of the best wish-fulfillment sensations ever.
What's the best gift you've given him? An industrial-strength shaved-ice machine.
What made you fall for him? His kindness. And his nerdiness. I have long thought that nerds make the best boyfriends. When we first started dating he had just quit a job as an IT manager. He have books on our shelves like "Mergers, Acquisitions, and Restructuring Models." You can bet those aren't mine.
What makes him the yin to your yang? Our mutual love of weird and cool and nerdy stuff. When you are the person who says, "I want to go to the demoliton derby," or, "I know...let's spend our summer vacation with war reenactors," and you find the person who's like, "Yeah, and let's also hit the La Brea tar pits;" hold onto that like a rear-mount choke hold, people. Because that is LOVE.
Monday, March 24, 2008
hippity hoppity
Easter is probably my favorite holiday spirituality-wise (not as commercial as Christmas) and also confectionary-wise. Holidays sometimes are an interesting situation for me in NYC, though, because we're so far away from family.
When I first moved here I had fantasies about having a new persona, shedding my old self and re-creating an all-new me (I think in this particular fantasy I dyed my hair black, in the end I just cut bangs). It turns out being an all-new me is not what it's cracked up to be. Because I didn't know anyone when I moved here, none of my new friends knew anything about my past--I had no context. Creating a personhood proved kind of a chore and I wished that people knew my family, my embarassing moments so we could rehash them, personal jokes like when I say..."What's the time?" They're supposed to say, "Time to get ILL!" But no one knew me or my Beastie Boy references.
This year I got to spend Easter I was especially grateful for Easter brunch with old friends; especially B Dub and this awesome lady. We bonded, many years ago, over marshmallow peeps. Which I have found to be as good a measure of friendship as any.
Friday, March 21, 2008
long life cool white
While in Boston last weekend, I stumbled upon an exhibition of Moyra Davey's photos.
I liked them because
1) The title of the show reminds me of a noodle house, and of a fluorescent light bulb.
2) The subjects tend to be completely mundane. Lots of them were pictures of DUST. Like, closeups of dustbunnies in corners, or a big ol' wad of dust stuck to a dog's paw. That reminded me of learning in freshman biology class that dust is mostly made up of human skin cells and hair, and possibly fallen matter from dead stars. That last part I think I made up or read in a Robert Fulghum book.
In the same class I learned about COHESION, which is the property that makes water molecules stick to each other and form one body, instead of bouncing around like a bunch of tiny water marbles. This is the same property that allows your cornea to adhere to your eyeball--with no stitches or anything--after it's been shaved off for laser surgery. The cornea just clings on there for dear life all by itself until it heals, thanks to cohesion.
3) Her photos are fragmentary, which is something I like in collages and lists and lyric poems. She has a bunch of series or "groupings" that make more sense together than individually. Or, rather, you take in the individual stills and your brain makes a story out of them because that's what brains like to do: order information. For example, one could look at a sampling of magazine covers and come to the conclusion that Britney Spears is crazy, while someone else could look at the same covers and decide that she's crazy and knocked up and strung out on drugs. To each brain its own.
4)Her photos provided an all new art medium for B Dub to assess with the words, "I could've done that." Until now, this dismissal was reserved for painters like Jackson Pollack or Mark Rothko.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
a person frying squirrels
I got to hear Philip Gourevitch talk about writing a few weeks ago. His was a useful and endearingly earnest attempt to give good advice to new writers. Here are some of my favorite things he said, many of which apply to new and aspiring artists of all kinds.
PG on beginners:
People will say, Why are you writing about that? You don't even know anything about it. You look at something for the first time, and everyone seems to know more than you do. You think, I must be ignorant...but let me have a look. Your authority is your curiosity.
You have to have a basic confidence you're going to make it work. Use your amateur spirit. [This seemed much better to me than beginner's luck, which sounds dumb and fickle. Amateur spirit, he implied, was a sort of fire-in-the-belly only a first-timer can bring to a project].
PG on his own writing:
I look at stories as containers--I approach it not knowing what's inside, and I have to shape it.
Writing is a great act of distillation and compression. It starts with a vast amount of over-reported material. At some point I go back to this database and confront the material and look at it as a set of characters and start to study the material as a text.
You are writing your world--slicing your way toward a cleaner version of it.
Density and swiftness fascinate me.
I figured out there were 3 things I wanted to do for a living: Imagine, think, and speak. I wanted to get on the road. I wanted to put people into motion across large landscapes.
PG on writing about real people:
You have a pretext for asking people nosey questions. That's one perk. You are looking at people and you don't have to pretend you're not.
A reporter goes to a village and gets a sound bite from Mala Tawala Walla and moves on. What if you threw out all the statistics and spent a month with Mala Tawala Walla? That's where the story is.
Official sources are boring, mostly. I want to talk to somebody I have to protect a little bit when I write about them, because they're that un self-aware.
PG on the kinds of stories he likes:
Too often nonfiction doesn't serve its subject matter. It slams data at you. Nonfiction and fiction have the same test: Be truthful. Good stories are works of imagination and observation. Why should they be divorced?
I'm interested in people who do or think things I wouldn't. What's the belief system of this person that makes him do things nobody else does? What about a person I've never heard of. A person frying squirrels.
I wanted to get up and hug PG when he got to the frying squirrels bit. That's pretty much my raison d'etre and inspiration for writing: The guy who fries squirrels. (Metaphorically speaking. And, sort of literally.) Bless PG and the dude with the deep-fat fryer.
Philip Gourevitch is the author of "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families," an in-depth account of the Rwanda genocide. He is editor of the Paris Review, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a contributing editor to the Forward. In the aftermath of the genocide he spent over nine months in Rwanda trying to understand how this extraordinary crime had come to pass, how it was organized, how the Western powers had stood by and watched it happen, and how Rwandans are living with its legacy. His latest book is "A Cold Case."
PG on beginners:
People will say, Why are you writing about that? You don't even know anything about it. You look at something for the first time, and everyone seems to know more than you do. You think, I must be ignorant...but let me have a look. Your authority is your curiosity.
You have to have a basic confidence you're going to make it work. Use your amateur spirit. [This seemed much better to me than beginner's luck, which sounds dumb and fickle. Amateur spirit, he implied, was a sort of fire-in-the-belly only a first-timer can bring to a project].
PG on his own writing:
I look at stories as containers--I approach it not knowing what's inside, and I have to shape it.
Writing is a great act of distillation and compression. It starts with a vast amount of over-reported material. At some point I go back to this database and confront the material and look at it as a set of characters and start to study the material as a text.
You are writing your world--slicing your way toward a cleaner version of it.
Density and swiftness fascinate me.
I figured out there were 3 things I wanted to do for a living: Imagine, think, and speak. I wanted to get on the road. I wanted to put people into motion across large landscapes.
PG on writing about real people:
You have a pretext for asking people nosey questions. That's one perk. You are looking at people and you don't have to pretend you're not.
A reporter goes to a village and gets a sound bite from Mala Tawala Walla and moves on. What if you threw out all the statistics and spent a month with Mala Tawala Walla? That's where the story is.
Official sources are boring, mostly. I want to talk to somebody I have to protect a little bit when I write about them, because they're that un self-aware.
PG on the kinds of stories he likes:
Too often nonfiction doesn't serve its subject matter. It slams data at you. Nonfiction and fiction have the same test: Be truthful. Good stories are works of imagination and observation. Why should they be divorced?
I'm interested in people who do or think things I wouldn't. What's the belief system of this person that makes him do things nobody else does? What about a person I've never heard of. A person frying squirrels.
I wanted to get up and hug PG when he got to the frying squirrels bit. That's pretty much my raison d'etre and inspiration for writing: The guy who fries squirrels. (Metaphorically speaking. And, sort of literally.) Bless PG and the dude with the deep-fat fryer.
Philip Gourevitch is the author of "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families," an in-depth account of the Rwanda genocide. He is editor of the Paris Review, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a contributing editor to the Forward. In the aftermath of the genocide he spent over nine months in Rwanda trying to understand how this extraordinary crime had come to pass, how it was organized, how the Western powers had stood by and watched it happen, and how Rwandans are living with its legacy. His latest book is "A Cold Case."
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