people are going to listen

J. stayed with me this weekend. We lived in the same co-op in college but hadn't seen each other in the intervening decade+. We got in touch somewhat randomly, I had a place to stay, he needed a place, and lo - there was his luggage open beside the extra bed. The night he got in, we shared beers and conversation that opened with the question: "What have you been doing in the last eleven years?"

Yesterday we met up with other friends from the co-op. H., a woman I remember to be a beatnik stoner with impossibly long hair, and J.M., whom I saw last in 2002 when we hopped a fence in Bayview and rambled around what turned out to be the police impound lot, taking photos of crushed cars. And M., whom I've seen more recently, who was a punk with a double mohawk and a multitool belted to his Carhartts when I met him and now is a resident in surgery at a prestigious San Francisco hospital.

I recognized H.'s mellow affect. And there was J.M.'s frantic, ex-raver energy as she led a woman in a lindy hop, when 1920s jazz came on the juke box last night. M. and I talk in the same way we did when we were in college - like men, looking away from each other, at something a distance away, addressing not the thing itself but rather the events and imaginations we observe in the moment. Sometimes talking about the superhero power you'd most like to have is a way of getting to the things that are harder to say.

This weekend wasn't the first time in recent memory that I've felt delighted to reconnect with someone once meaningful to me but with whom I've lost touch. There was also C., whom I saw randomly on the corner of 18th and Dolores on the Sunday morning of Pride, when I was walking back to my apartment wearing last night's clothes. C. and I were in a poetry class in 2000. Her writing affected me so much that it came to represent entire concepts, new terms, in my head. I wrote this about C. in a courtship email to another person a few years ago:

A college friend of mine, after reading Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina," wrote something she called "Sweetness Sestina." I don't remember the poem but I liked the sibilance of its titular phrase so much I have whispered it to myself for seven years whenever something makes my heart want to explode with happiness. It is most often invoked by that combination of threat and intimacy we refer to shorthand as romance.

I've been thinking lots about longevity, continuity, the lifecycles of friendships, creating communities (and then staying, to strengthen those communities), giving and receiving mentorship, and the choices you make in life that ten years later you realize were important junctures but at the time just make you feel out of focus. For example, I just bought a home. It seems like the right thing to do but I'm not sure. I don't know if I can be sure. But a few months ago I started to imagine my toes turning into roots and plunging into the earthquake liquefaction zone that is San Francisco topsoil - a weird feeling, a physiological tingle, a foreign body sensation for somebody who has switched homes once a year for the last thirteen (!) years. I have no books left! I give them all away when I move. I want a room of my own to fill with books. But is it going to bankrupt me? Or tie me to an income I don't want to sustain? Will I be robbed? What happened to the dream of collective living that I nursed for so long? Or biking to work in Beijing? It's next to the PG&E substation, and electromagnetic fields have been linked to childhood leukemia, so will I have a partner, and will she move in, and will we have a child, and will that child be more susceptible to childhood leukemia, and how can I afford the health care???

My brain sure likes to ride that crazy train. God only knows what the next station will bring. So it's really pleasing to hear the older community members I work with say things like, "Oh, I've known C. since she was a baby dyke. We started a queer Asian women's group in New York in the late 1980s," or "We worked on affirmative action together before we worked on queer issues."  And to have recently made some younger friends about whom I intend to say the same sort of thing, in the late 2020s. And have J. summarize the last eleven years by saying, "All of the good things in my life are the results of risky decisions I've made with imperfect information." And to remember that so much can happen in a decade but at the end of it we are still who we are, like C. now queer and shorthaired but still making magic with her words, or H. now with a Stanford M.D. but still sending out the same space cadet beatitude while wheeling a crooked bicycle down Lapidge Street.

And me, wrinklier, slacker, but still the same mix of anxiety, optimism, and premature sentimentality. Apologies for the last six months' mood, readers.

I'll leave you with one concrete outcome of this mood. A recent email exchange with someone I really wanted to mentor/adopt me when I was younger and unaware of how much fog was in my head:

From me to N.:

N.,

You may have no recollection of me. I met you when I was 23. It was a while ago. I had just started a Vaid fellowship at the Task Force.

We only worked together about two weeks before you left, but you said something to me that I haven't forgotten. We went to Nowhere Bar to get a drink. You were talking about the morning you turned 30. You said that as you lay in bed that morning, you realized that being thirty meant people had to take you seriously. That your opinion mattered.

I'm nearly 31 now. I've repeated your wisdom to hundreds of people. I started saying I was thirty more than two years before my 30th birthday because I was so eager to get to the state you described.

Anyway, I found myself saying that to a friend this morning, and I decided to look you up and let you know that even though we only knew each other for a brief moment in 2004, it was meaningful to me. I remember you very fondly. I hope you're doing well, wherever you're at in life!

[Bananarchist]

From N. to me:

Hey [Bananarchist] –

Of course I remember. This is a very kind email and I thank you for it. I believe what I said was that I thought: I’m thirty now, I’m going to say what I want to say and people are going to listen. As for other people taking me or my opinion seriously – that’s another matter.

my book about me

I'm on OkCupid. Again. Sort of.

Sort of because I don't use it for dating. I use it to exchange stupid messages with friends whose profiles I come across. For example, with B..:



(Also please to send the Social Security number)

 And with J.S.:  


(I flagged a magenta hanky during Pride but nobody approached me! Sad face!)

Very few people contact me and I almost never respond. Responding feels unnecessary. I meet plenty of nice people in the flesh. And more importantly the thought of getting strangers' hopes up about my emotional availability - the things we'll say, the faces we'll show each other, the friendships we'll foul, the FEMA tents that will replace our hearts in two months time - and the reputation that will follow me - makes me want to run away screaming. The last incarnation of my OkCupid profile had not one but THREE warning labels to this effect:

• "Quick to love, but not looking for it at the moment."
• "Open to other suggestions, but not looking for romance."
• "I make an excellent wingman."

 

(Caveat emptor, ladies!)

So why bother, if I don't actually want to meet anybody?

First, I like thinking about and honing my social media writing style. In the last year, I've micromanaged at least five friends' OkCupid profiles. I have strong opinions about how to not come across like a fool in Internet writing. So many things can doom a profile, including but not limited to 1) saying too little (reads as lurker), 2) saying too much (one should not have to hit Page Down more than twice), 3) misspelling words, 4) claiming middlebrow tastes, 5) claiming elite tastes, 6) identifying interests as if they're friends, like "Ani and Adrienne," 7) using the username "ilikeboobies" (a bona fide profile), 8) photos taken from a consistent angle, 9) excessive use of "Wheeeeeee!!! xoxox !!! :) <3 >.< "-like statements, and 10) being too literal in self-summary (e.g., "I was born in San Jose. Then I moved to Milpitas. Now I'm a dogcatcher. My favorite food is Greek yogurt."). So much to beware. But worst of all are those handwringers who backspace even as they type by saying "I never know what to say in these things!"

Profiles that work are those that embrace the genre and spell out the prospective's opinions clearly and unapologetically. On Friday night, I'm in the northeast corner of Washington Square Park, killing a game of Scrabble. The Ghost Writer blew. Fun Home wets my whistle.

If you would like me to improve the writing on your profile, I charge lawyer's rates - but your reward is life partnership so . . . you choose.

Second, I'm a little obsessed with the self-definitional aspect of it.

I like OkCupid for the same reason I like the Myers-Briggs types and love languages and astrology and other personality taxonomies. It gives me the opportunity and vocabulary to understand and describe people, and by people I mean myself.

(OkCupid reads my palm.)

Like the other social networking websites, OkCupid asks you to create a persona through words and photos. Your choice of words projects a certain image. You have to think about who you are and what part of that you want to let the world see. Except a dating profile probes a little deeper than Facebook. Your photo of you doublefisting Coronas works differently from one of you digging postholes for an environmental restoration project. How do I self-summarize? What six things can't I do without?

One day in May 2010, I blew off work for an afternoon and fell into an OkCupid wormhole. I browsed through all 56 pages of profiles on OkCupid meeting these parameters: gay women, 28-33, with 25 miles of Brooklyn. Then I had a mild panic about not being able to answer the OkCupid profile questions, and what that meant about my self-awareness:

Yesterday I was trolling for profiles of people I knew. I found the online dating profiles of A., B., C., D., and E. I was expecting more to turn up, but those that did were treasures. I read and reread and looked at pictures. I was most interested in A.'s. I was cruising along on her profile thinking, Yes, I have everything that she wants, strong shoulders, goofball tomboy personality, baseball glove, tree differentiating skills, "dizzying linguistic capabilities" - I mean, I wasn't lifted because I was flattering myself about my own attractiveness, or that I was hopeful that I could be with A. again, but because I felt like I had found a clear description of what I too valued - but then - wait. She also wants her dreambutch to have "self-knowledge and humility."

I stopped there. Is that what was wrong with me? That I didn't have either? And all that compatibility, all my androgyne to her androgyne-seeking, meant nothing because I didn't know what I wanted, or I was scared of what I wanted, or I couldn't express it, and I was a coward?

I take breaks every few years. I take long, lonely trips, dislocate myself, make myself confront new things. This, I say, is in the service of making myself a better, more self-reflective person. But I must have had the wrong idea. I think I should stay put. I think I need to sit down where I am and pay attention to what makes me happy and what makes me unhappy. I should be able to fill out questions about the movies that matter most to me without referring to my NetFlix history; because the movies don't matter when you don't remember them, and it's a lie to say that they do.

I was probably right to panic, because at that point I had wandered somewhat far away from the interests, activities, habits, and communities that I feel are part of my identity.

I was also interested in the metaphysics of self-description, i.e., how do we know we are describing ourselves accurately? How to not be three blind men describing an elephant?

I remember how dishonest the act of self-summary seemed from last year's online dating adventures, how your profile is a mixture of who you are and who you aspire to be, and how confusing it gets to differentiate the two. Yesterday, O. showed me the "Leadership Compass," a concept she picked up at a workshop at Creating Change. It's a personality chart with different characteristics on two perpendicular axes. North and south are relationship- versus goal-oriented. East and west are prudent sloth versus reckless speed, as working styles, or so I gathered, because I didn't find anything describe the axes in any coherent way. I glanced over O.'s chart and decided that I was all of the characteristics of all of the quadrants. It was baffling. On the underground walk between the Q and the 6 trains at Union Square, I told the back of S.'s head (she was tugging in front of me) that personality tests should really be filled out by the people who know you or work with you, because you can't be trusted to represent yourself honestly. Somebody has to tell me what my leadership style is, because I can't seem to perceive my inability to perceive myself as a personality dominated by indecisiveness.

On these websites you see dozens of people who appear to be within a standard deviation of yourself and your desires, with similar modestly pleasurable and unwasteful tastes, life goals, and interests, but the sell seems so different from the reality. When you meet face-to-face, why can't you two banter like your profiles do? Why are you so old and misshapen when you're not a 121k jpeg? And how much of this careful differentiation matters anyway? I found it so easy to judge a person's coarse tastes in art, poor grammar, seeming immodesty, embarrassing proclamations. But seen from outer space, how much difference is there really between somebody who likes Arrested Development versus somebody who likes Freaks and Geeks? Somebody who makes $185,000 as a corporate lawyer and somebody who makes $29,000 as a freelance radio producer/non-profit admin? In the end, we all turn bland-colored and die.

Note how my emotional defense mechanisms steered thoughts about romance toward death.

(The first thing people notice about me: halting motions, rotting flesh, blood on mouth, cute haircut!)

As I've written before, the last few months I've been busy hunting for identity in a period I'm calling a spastic second adolescence. Somebody following my profile in the last few months would have witnessed the schizophrenic evolution of my self-awareness. When I first reposted my profile, this was my self-summary:

A man set sail on a stormy sea. The boat that bore him yawed. Fleas set upon his collar. The air was salt; the food was salt; the medium was salt. He played the tin whistle and never slept. In his low voice, he said, to nobody in particular, "This is neither allegory nor reality, this is just something somebody wrote to meet the minimum word count demanded by an online dating service."

A good Samaritan sent me this helpful tip:

I left that profile up for about three months. Then I changed it to this:

Things I like: nattering on with someone awesome, learning new things, viola jokes, feeling dislocated in a foreign setting (this includes international travel as well as Billy Graham revivals in the Superdome), stringed instruments, an efficient sentence, a well-considered opinion, feats of strength, playing catch, giving gifts, walking out of a museum with the memory of just one piece of art.

I spent college in a hippie vegetarian co-op, baking bread, nerding out on art and politics. That's still my ideal household and community - warm, open, caregiving, nontraditional. I'm trying to figure out how best to live this ideal.

But this felt like too much, too humorless, too open to ridicule. Embarrassingly direct is not my style, colonoscopy cam though my blog might be. And guardedness is as much a part of my personality as the things I value. So I wanted a self-summary that would be honest and sincere but also creeping toward void for vagueness.

Which brings us to the present:

Warm, sloppy, enthusiastic, verbal, bicultural, non-judgmental, curious, searching. Sometimes uncertain, sometimes destructive, always attentive. Obscene in thoughts but traditional in unexpected ways. Values education, distrusts power. Cocky yet fearful. Too old to suffer fools. Very interested in limits. Quick to love, but not looking too hard for it at the moment.

With each revision, I feel like it's getting closer to the truth. It's a funny way to go about pinning down my identity, questions on a dating profile, but I suppose it's no less funny than the personality inventory tests that my high school sociology teacher made me take to identify my future profession. And before that, at age 5, circling professions that looked interesting to me in "My Book About Me."

In this book, I circled "Rabbi." Why? I misread the text. My life aspiration at age 5 was to be a rabbit.

i miss these kinds of conversations

December 23, 2009:

X: what are you wearing?

B: exactly the same outfit as yesterday with the exception of brown underwear with pink piping instead of blue underwear with green piping. sweater with holes on the sleeves, t-shirt, pinstripe black pants, ski socks, canoe shoes, bad posture, mullet. oh la la. you?

X: what color sweater? holes on both sleeves? did you get new canoe shoes that don’t squeak? i can’t believe you never told me! me: grey cardigan with pin (wood, floral, round), red button-up shirt with silver threads and “peter pan” collar, high waisted thick wool skirt, mud colored, white sweater tights, round brown shoes. hair pinned up. bags under eyes. i look like a substitute teacher/crazy person.

B: sweater: black, wool, banana republic via goodwill. hole (patched) on left elbow where boo’s declaw caught once, another hole on left wrist, still unpatched. same canoe shoes, same squeak, don’t care anymore. your description of your outfit made me think thoughts of you inappropriate for the workplace.

X: this is fun. what have you eaten today? please list. let’s see if your fruit/vegetable intake is greater than the number of woolly clothing items i am wearing.

B: blueberry yogurt cup, oatmeal (almonds, pecans, apricots, sunflower seeds, shredded coconut), coffee. oatmeal raisin clif bar. sliver of fudge. potatoes au gratin (not sure what that means but includes grease and salt) and spinach heap with blueberries and walnuts and thumb of smegma. feel very unhealthy eagerly awaiting 2:30 p.m. free lunch time for chinese food leftovers. you?

X: coffee, emergen-c, toasted cinnamon raisin bread spread with smooth peanut butter, bowl plain yogurt with fresh fruit (orange, canteloupe, honey dew, pineapple, blueberries), small plain bagel with veggie cream cheese, two ginger cookies and an italian butter cookie stick, leftover stir-fried beef sichuan style with celery and carrots, jonas gold apple, bag of ritz bits cheese sandwiches, earl gray tea. gonna make myself some swiss miss soon and graze for more snacks.

B: num! eat more. what’s on your plate tonight? also you know what’s totally liberating? writing short imperative sentences, e.g. “send me the sentence when you’re done.” i prefer this to indirect feminine questioning, e.g. “um could you send me the sentence please?” what are you drinking tonight? killian’s red [emphatic hoof stamp].

X: oh yes, i’ve been transitioning to the command versus the fake-ask as well. it’s awesome.

B: sit on my face.

永远不会嫁给你啦

Tonight I recorded a cover of a song called 明天我要嫁给你 (Ming Tian Wo Yao Jia Gei Ni) by 周华健 (Emil Chau). 

Lyrics:

秒针分针滴答滴答在心中
miao zhong fen zhen di da di da zai xin zhong
我的眼光闪烁闪烁好空洞
wo de yan guang shan shuo shan shuo hao kong dong
我的心跳扑通扑通地阵阵悸动
wo de xin tiao pu tong putong de zhen zhen ji dong

我问自己要你爱你有多浓
wo wen zi ji yao ni ai ni you duo nong
我要和你双宿双飞多冲动
Wo yao he ni shuang shu shuang fei duo chong dong
我的内心忽上忽下地阵阵悸动呜...
wo de nei xin hu shang hu xia de zhen zhen ji dong

明天我要嫁给你啦
ming tian wo yao jia gei ni la
明天我要嫁给你啦
ming tian wo yao jia gei ni la
要不是每天的交通烦扰着我所有的梦
yao bu shi mei tian de jiao tong fan rao zhe wo shuo you de meng
(要不是停电那一夜才发现我寂寞空洞)
(yao bu shi ting dian na yi ye cai fa xian wo ji mo kong dong)

明天我要嫁给你啦
ming tian wo yao jia gei ni la
明天我要(终于)嫁给你啦
ming tian wo yao (zhong yu) jia gei ni la
要不是你问我
yao bu shi ni wen wo
要不是你劝我
yao bu shi ni quan wo
要不是适当的时候你让我心动
yao bu shi shi dang de shi hou ni rang wo xin dong
(可是我就在这时候害怕惶恐)
(ke shi wo jiu zai zhe shi hou hai pa huang kong)

Here's somebody's somewhat clumsy translation, a shame because the words are actually kind of pretty:

Second hand minute hand 'didadida' in heart
My eyes gleam blinking so emptily
My heartbeat 'putongputong' rhythmically beat
I ask myself want you love you how deeply
I want to live and endeavour with you how recklessly fast
My heart goes up and down rhythmically pulsing

Tomorrow I'm marrying you
Tomorrow I'm marrying you
If it isn't everyday traffic bothers all of my dreams
(If it isn't the night that blackout only discover my empty loneliness)
Tomorrow I'm marrying you
Tomorrow I'm (finally) marrying you
If it's not you propose to me
If it's not you advise me
If it's not the suitable time you moved my heart
(But I'm just at this moment terrified)

But can you blame the translator for not capturing it? The languages are so different. The translator renders the title phrase "明天我要嫁给你啦" as "Tomorrow I'm marrying you." In English it is eight syllables as it is in Chinese. But there is no poetry in the English sounds - you get the unattractive rhotic right away in the second syllable and again in the fifth, and "I'm" vivisects the rhythm of the phrase.  In Chinese, you get three pleasing trochees and an iamb, which track the simple 4/4 time signature of the music behind the words. Listen to that triphthong on the upbeat: woh-ya-oo. Feel the way the phrase moves from sounds at the front of your mouth to your throat to your teeth to throat to teeth to tongue.

There's no poetry in the English words, either. "Tomorrow I'm marrying you" is a literal translation of what the singer is saying, but it sounds embarrassingly direct compared to the original, like the one-year-later sequel to the future tense verb conjugation lesson that is Enrique Iglesias's obscene little hit "Tonight I'm Fucking You" (or the radio-friendly "Tonight I'm Luvving You"), the others in the series being "Yesterday I Got You Pregnant" and "Next Year I Will Have Divorced You" and "Forever I Will Be Having Deep Regrets."

Here's my translation:

You meet a small, cute, mean, brilliant, sexy, psychotic Chinese-American gal who writes like a champion, reads for pleasure, and makes quiet, precise observations about the world through her corrective lenses. What do you do? 

CALL THE POLICE!!!! 救命!!

I posted to YouTube since I don't have audio hosting. The image in the background is Ivan Aivazovsky's "The Ninth Wave." It came through the Guggenheim in late 2005, just as I was meeting the first of it turns out several small cute mean brilliant sexy psychotic Chinese-American etceteras I'd get to know. Another sexy etcetera introduced me to this song in 2009.

N. and Z.

I'm standing on my desk chair trying to drill pilot holes into my window frame for a curtain rod, trying not to fly backward off the swivel chair and out the window. N. and Z. dart into the room with bright yellow t-shirts wrapped around their heads. They duck behind my bed. They crouch behind my desk. "What the fuck are you doing?" I say. "We're ninjas!" they say. "You're wearing bright yellow t-shirts," I say. "What kind of camouflage is that?" "We're ninjas!" they repeat.

(This isn't the ninja look. This is Z. trying to make N.'s hypercolor shirts turn colors.)

We have a conflict with the sublessor about pets in the household. N. keeps saying, "We want to make room in the household for both our human animal friends and non-human animal friends." He will not refer to dogs as dogs. I think he does this in part because he knows it is ridiculous, in part because he is a bona fide hippie.

Z. comes into my bed when I and other person are undressed in it. "Can I lay down thanks!" she says. It's not a question, but a statement, and before it is completely out of her mouth she is lying between the two of us. "We're going to the Pork Store," she says. "Wanna come?" She recalls how recent dance rehearsals have been. Her friend, a Filipino boy with hair down to his waist, hangs from my pull-up bar and explains how another hair-collecting charity is better than Locks of Love. Then they leave for brunch.

Sometimes when Z. and I hang out in the kitchen, she plays music from her laptop right toward our faces, and it is so loud that we have to shout at each other to be heard.

N. pulls out the measuring tape fifteen feet and lines it along the wall. He shows me the technique for a gap jump from standing - where to throw my weight, where to place my hands, how to land. We take turns leaping for distance in the hallway. I can't get past seven feet. N. launches like a spring and lands like a cat.

Sometimes Z. comes into my room crying, and then we lay down in my bed and I put my arm around her and give her a hanky to blow snot into, and then we talk for a little while and sometimes I will command her to stop crying. Sometimes this works, and she'll smile. Sometimes I'll get choked with fear and doubt thinking about an ex-lover/doctor's mental health diagnosis, and Z. asks questions that only convey curiosity, no judgment, until I am calm and capable again.

N. and Z. shout down the hall, "Want some FRIES??" so I join them in the kitchen. They're eating enormous burgers, even though N. hardly ever eats meat and Z. is 4'10" and hardly needs food to remain alive. I clean their plates of curly fries and normal fries, then apologize for eating everything. "There's Chinese food in the fridge too," they say. We talk about Z.'s apprenticeship with a healer and her own approach to energy work. N. is quiet, because there is something else on his mind.

Z.'s parents stay for three weeks in July. They cook Ecuadorean chicken dishes and serve me a unique pineapple-oatmeal beverage. Q. pronounces it Cuaker. He says, "That is how they say Quaker Oats in Ecuador." They leave behind gifts: for Z., a matching pajama set in lime green, with the words "I <3 Me" printed all over; for me, a giraffe's head on a cork; for the apartment, an old black and white image of Z.'s mom, a beauty in her youth, which we put on an end table next to a wood cut-out in the shape of Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

I come across N. and Q. stoned in the living room. "What are you doing?" I say. "Watching trailers," they say. We don't pay for cable. All we seem to get on the television is video on demand trailers. They have passed hours watching trailers. "It's better than movies," they say.

We're all leaving the apartment at the end of the month. Moments like these only happen between people who see each other all the time, in unstructured ways, in shared spaces. I'm going to miss these fools.

philip levine

Philip Levine is the new poet laureate. These things don't usually find me but I heard an interview with him on the drive to work yesterday. His biography is a little unusual: working class, Detroit, teaches at Fresno State.

Fresno State! How many poets of poet laureate stripes choose life in the dry, dull, middle-of-nowhere inferno that is Fresno? It says a lot about his values. Color me impressed.

Here's a poem worth reading:

The Simple Truth

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat" she said,
"Even if you don't I'll say you did."
Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

You can hear him reading it in the interview, starting at 9:40. He is old, and his voice sounds spittle-rich.

engine gunk!

If you pump gas at the Shell Station on El Camino and Oxford Street in Palo Alto, this woman smiles down upon you while you slake your thirsty car:

Things of note:

The ad is cheap. Probably literally cheap to make: a model, her clothes and makeup, a photographer, two engine valves, a copywriter, and a designer. Also, cheap-looking: crappy design (note the bright red arrow pointing to "Engine gunk!", and the excitable "Engine valves after only 5,000 miles!" badly squeezed between the two valves), questionable color palette (pink, red, yellow, light blue, like the baby department of a paint store). And is that New Century Gothic?!

Design principles. Two vertical lines frame the person. Her gaze draws yours toward the valve on the right. So does the color and light balance. Left is sinister, right is right. Left to right motion is progress, so valve on the right is evolutionary improvement of valve on the left. Little Shell logo on the coat tells you which is the Shell valve.

They think I'm simple. A helix of blue beads juxtaposed with a greasy valve is supposed to convince me to patronize Shell.

The image that is supposed to convince me is that of a scientist. Somebody in a white lab coat. That person is a woman.  Woman is older. She is Caucasian. They could have Photoshopped the lines in her neck out, but chose not to. She does not wear a wedding band or engagement ring, which is probably true to life given the partnership and family prospects of women who pursue terminal degrees. She is thin-lipped and shapeless but not entirely without suggestive flavor - her pink shirt opens with a vulvar collar and a light application of makeup says that she has only given up on sex 90-95%.

Why not an older, white, male model? An Asian model? I'm not saying that because I'm concerned about API visibility and empowerment here but because I expect ad writers to cash in on the model minority stereotype. Is the choice of an older white woman supposed to signify Shell's social consciousness - that it is aware of and fighting the bias against women in the sciences? Because the demographic filling up their tanks at Shell gas stations skews toward older white women, who are more likely to trust reflections of their own faces? Because sex and dependability are at odds? I suppose you don't really see nubile young things pitching fire insurance.

Just things to think about in the 90 seconds one patiently endures in order to rejoin the road trip toward environmental destruction, suburban sprawl, unsustainable development, resource dependency, geopolitical gamesmanship, war and death.

challed prawn agrafee

Here's this horrible thing I did once before I had a slightly firmer grasp on professionalism. (Slightly.) I had a summer job. I thought it would be funny to tease my officemate by sending him an email. The email was very simple. The subject read: giled pinografie. 

Please note that it did not actually read "giled pinografie."  It's just that I refuse to write on my blog what I actually wrote, lest the feds descend upon me. Say it aloud, and the meaning will become clear to you.

Then, in the body of the email, I wrote, "Just kidding!"

Then I hit send.

When my officemate got this email, he put his head on his desk and cried.  The man literally cried.  He said we would both be fired.  Maybe arrested too.

Neither of us were fired or arrested. Happy ending!

eight of keys

A. saw the future on Monday and told me what was to come. It started with tarot cards on a scrap of fabric she had laid on a sunny patch of grass. Not tarot, but some lefty re-invention of the tarot set, with images of hipsters and single speeds instead of sword mages and skeletons. We were out in Dolores Park. She got a sunburn. I got a vision.

She said, Ask the cards a question. I thought a minute about this.

B. and M. were sitting in the grass next to me, B. lackadaisically eating potato chips, M. doing I'm not sure what. We sat on a slope and looked down toward Dolores Street. I asked B. why so many people were out in the park on a Monday morning. Don't they have work? I said. I guess we didn't either. 

My question was: Will I find the direction I am looking for by the end of the year?

Context for the question. After a blistering, bewildering, exhausting May and June, I spent July doing a monthlong no-fruit diet. A detox plan. Finding my center, spotting the ground. No drinking, or only cosmetic drinking, meaning where you hold a glass as you would a purse, for the colorful visual effect, but you wouldn't drink out of it any more than you would drink out of a purse. Sleeping, reading, writing, and strengthening my back. Therapy. Acupuncture. Spending time with old friends, Mom, Dad, Grandma, and a border collie mutt. Focusing on work and finding a home. And most importantly, no fruit!

(Let me gaze upon your euphemism.)

I finished the detox plan, accomplished a bit of what I wanted to accomplish, and then ended July unexpectedly filled to the brim with love: I spent last weekend at queer Asian summer camp, the NQAPIA Leadership Summit in San Jose.

The recurring theme there was making room for ourselves where there was not room before. Over a hundred activists squeezed into an LGBT community center, sharing skills and stories and an unarticulated feeling that we were working together toward something we all wanted. Someone taped a handwritten sign reading "Gender Neutral Bathroom" over the triangle-skirted Bathroom Woman placard. Five homos sardined in a bed, with a sixth lying like a plank across the top. We hustled tables and chairs to fit everyone at lunch. I tapped undiscovered resources in my heart during a heavy conversation with a beloved old friend. We aspired for more than the .02% of total nonprofit funding we get now.

Making room. Finding a spot in a schedule. Rearranging the furniture. Clearing space for a new demographic: gay, Asian, hot as fuck, ready to fight.

So.

As the weekend wound down, I wanted a hint of what was to come. A. recommended tarot.

The cards I chose were the six of keys, the eight of keys, and the ten of bones. A. read to me from a small black book the explanations for each.  Keys symbolize readiness for forward movement, transitions, opportunities, and next steps. I use my fourteen keys to open doors, start cars, and unlock bikes. Bones are currency are wealth: energy, health, emotional strength, money. Ten bones is the most wealth one can acquire. 
 

 (In traditional tarot this card is call the Ten of Pentacles. In activist tarot this card is called the Pen of Tentacles.)

I understood these cards to be answering not only the question I posed to them in Dolores Park, but also the questions I'd been mulling over since the start of the conference.

For example, on Saturday morning, E. had screened her trailer for the Asian Pride Project. It was about fifteen minutes of interviews with LGBTQ API folks and their family members, a mix of bright faces acknowledging triumphs and challenges. K. talked with a smile about her Japanese father lauching into a lecture on historical Japanese homosexual practices throughout the millenia when she came out to him; R. said he didn't have the vocabulary in Chinese to describe what he was experiencing to his parents. Many of us watching in the cafeteria of that modest suburban community center suppressed sniffles when E.'s grandmother said E. wouldn't meet her grandmother's expectations of a husband and family, and then burst into loud, relieved laughter when E.'s grandmother said that dating girls was okay as long as they were educated and financially stable. Same status expectations from an Asian granny even for a partner of a different gender!

I looked around the room while the video was screening.  I had closed the blinds so we could see the projector but the brilliant California daytime spilled through and illuminated the room anyway. Solid, tireless B.G. adjusted the PA speakers to minimize feedback. There was an asymmetrical haircut or two that I had grown so fond of in just a short time. An old friend from New York gave a new friend from San Francisco a massage. Half eaten pastries and banh mi scraps lay on paper plates on the tables. In one corner, the stylish young interns from one political advocacy group sat together, a little wide-eyed but eager to learn, roll up sleeves and help. Their teddy bearish boss, who asked such intelligent questions about decisionmaking at our board meeting on Thursday. The silver-haired elder who loved the sound of her own voice, the sharp Chicagoan who reminded us that not all Asian folks had Asian parents, the important community leader who made me feel special when she showed a few minutes of Clintonesque personal interest in me a few years ago, when I was more wide-eyed myself. How I swoon for a bow tie and a checked shirt. What were we doing here? Why did we take off work to crowd into a cafeteria in San Jose? Where did we find the patience for frustrating, unfocused meetings? For the difficult labor of building something from nothing? What wellspring of good feelings made us grin at each other passing in the hallways? How do we bottle that spring for refreshment when the conference becomes a distant summer memory? How did we all know to take off our shoes when we entered each others' hotel rooms?!

These were the kinds of questions I wanted answered.

Monday after the conference, in Dolores Park, A. concluded her description of the ten of bones card by saying: "You will be getting used to the feeling of being full."

Or . . . something like that. I was too preoccupied with the prospects of my good fortune to hear the actual thing said. I loved to think about my metaphysical pockets crowded with keys and coins. Of the image of a hundred people unlocking bikes and riding into the starry night. This we call a movement. I practically applauded when A. finished her reading.

Let me find the takeaways for you:

Now is a good time to be alert and alive. The answer to all of my questions is yes.

(Get in your go-cart and go little sister, get in your go-cart and go

Get in your go-cart and go little sister, get in your go-cart and go

Get in your go-cart and go little sister, get in your go-cart and go

Get in your go-cart and go little sister, get in your go-cart and go)

big two-hearted river

I woke to an email early and read it in a hurry on my phone before running out for a class that turned out was not being held. So I walked home past all the people who either grimaced, smiled, or expressed nothing at the short-haired girl in sneakers without socks and a bright yoga roll under her arm. Yoga nixed, wanting a workout, I drove to Aquatic Park with my wetsuit next to me for a twenty minute dip in the freezing bay.

It was overcast. I left my shoes on the stone steps beyond the beach. Just as I waded in, another swimmer, standing in the shallows, said to me, "There's a seal over there." I asked him the risk. He said that last year a seal had been out biting swimmers.

(This is the face of terror.)

For the first ten minutes, I paddled breaststroke and refused to submerge my head into the water, lest my last view be a fatty, black shape materializing from the green murk to take a nibble out of the floating, flailing steak before it. Not that I could, anyway. The cold of the water was so shocking at first that putting my head into it made me breathless with alarm and fear. After a while, my limbs warmed. My fear subsided, and I was able to coax myself to swim five sets of freestyle for thirty strokes, ten breaths, before I called it a workout and swam in a diagonal line to the spot I had left my shoes. Earlybird tourists gawked at me when lifted myself from the water. I smiled in a manner that I felt to be inviting. This is an ordinarily early morning in my city, I wanted my face to say. And we are sharing it today. Some smiled in return. Others looked away quickly. I suppose my face was also saying, I am a soaking lunatic in a rubber suit walking barefoot on a city sidewalk. I will nab your footlong camera and run for the hills. Only on the drive there and back, in local traffic along Van Ness, did I let thoughts penetrate my mind. The noise of these I drowned out with a mixtape from 2008.

It's the drives that get me. I'm okay when with other people. Kevin asked a chimney sweep to come in and tell me about the condition of the fireplace - needs at least $350 in repairs, more if you account for the stacks on the roof. We stood near him and spoke about the upcoming appraisal in Chinese while the sweeper made clouds of soot with his industrial vaccuum cleaner and primitive scraping tool. The seller complained to me about something, and his freshly washed mini mutt danced all around our legs. ("Dr. Bonner's," he kept saying, "The suds are much easier to wash out.") All this time I was all right. There was a living room to consider, a window lock to be tested, papers that needed attending to.

But once I got back into my car for the long drive to Palo Alto . . .

It may just be my mood today, or this week. I've been looking backwards. Yesterday I had a Proustian moment applying a bright yellow highlighter to a page: neon shorts, mini-golf, dark arcades, riding in cargo bay of station wagon, dry California heat, mid-1980s. In the car home last night, after another grueling late night of uncertainty and zero communication from the partners and then sudden floods of work, Rihanna came on the radio and reminded me of the sharp tack of a woman who exited my life right around when that song was in fashion. I remembered sitting in Astor Place in late July, a house party, a peridot Monroe that I loved to kiss. And then this morning, just the memory of a seagull with a pine cone, a playground slide, the wooden interior of a tram on Market Street can do so much. It's like my brain cannot decide what era to settle down and cry in, so I swing between years, sniffling at everything.

(Once upon a time, a stranger gave me a dollar on this tram!)

Today's mantra, which I repeated over and over in a message to myself last night, is this: Find your spine. I meant it in the context of toughing out the stressful work/extracurricular week, but it applies equally to my weak heart. The MRI says there is foraminal narrowing in the C3 and C5-C6 area, but what I cannot see I don't believe, and so I know only that when the overstretched balloon of my heart temporarily deflates, the structure that keeps my body upright is my long, trustworthy backbone. The most private thing I am actually willing to admit is that I abhor weakness in myself, even though it is everywhere.

(The thing that ails me.)

So I turn the radio off. I don't need the falter in the singer's voice to send me on another trip. So I put the email away. I am not ready for this. So I look out the window. If the perspective is not in front of my face, find another view. So I put the memories away. I listen instead to a voicemail from Stern: twenty seconds of her meowing to the tune of "Let's Get Physical." I laugh. There. Better.

孝顺 (a.k.a. filial piety)

Just yesterday I was literally unable to tell my therapist* how warring parts of me craved but felt oppressed by my parents' approval because my throat was too choked up to express how craptastic it felt when my dad sat me down on a bunk bed in Zhong Li and suggested that I was a prostitute for performing music live in front of other people. "Somebody's daughter sings and dances in front of other people," Somebody said. Made me performing my sexless country music compositions sound like Mata Hari. Angry words, slammed doors, tears on my pillow - oh, you know the drill.

Then today I get this email that kind of illustrates my point. My mom congratulating my parents' tenants on a new baby:

Dear H____ & T__!! Congratulation new parents!! We are so happy to see your baby’s picture. He is a healthy and handsome boy. Also he is the 8th baby born in this house. The first one is our daughter. She graduated from Harvard University & NYU Law School, she is lawyer now. Your son will be a doctor too!!!Thanks so much for sharing your happiness with us. Best wishes for you and family. Regards!!!

On the one hand: they seem so proud of my accomplishments! Yay, I'm loved!

On the other hand, my identity as their daughter is described as "She graduated from Harvard University & NYU Law School, she is lawyer now."

Laugh, or cry, or both?!

*A new development in my adulthood! She's queer, andro, empathetic. I think she gets it! It feels therapeutic!

B♮

Big changes recently, all for the best, but things that make me think, Oh, yes, I'm thirty. I'm separating needs from wants from aspirations. Taking self and community surveys. Deciding what I need in an apartment, a job, a relationship, a community, and how much I can give to each. Figuring exactly how short I can wear my hair before I go past the point of androgyny.

I prefer not to think of what I'm doing as being lost but as being in transit. It’s not that I don’t know where I am, it’s that I am getting to where I want to be.

(The map of my travels.)

So I'll get to writing down this story when it's reached a destination. But sometimes in the middle of the journey it's nice to look back at where you started.

Here's an unsent letter I wrote about six months ago, when I first moved to San Francisco:

Tonight I went to a bluegrass show at a club about one mile from my house. I drove there straight from work, mostly because Elyse had parked in the spot in front of the house and I didn't feel like hunting for another spot just to change out of my work clothes.

It reminded me of how I used to spend my time when I was learning another city alone. In total I didn't do it more than ten times, but it felt like I often went to shows alone in Chicago, just to get out of the house, hear some music, try a new beer, look at some people. It never fails to make me feel lonely and alien. Even though I was just about average age in that bar, I felt so much older, older than even the wrinkled ladies in front dancing with each other, older by decades than the taut-fleshed young people wearing all manner of fashionably dull button down western shirts or horrifically unfashionable clothing - I forget sometimes that San Francisco built its modern wealth on the backs of khaki-clad nerds - God I just spilled hot herbal tea all down my mouth and pants, and I can't even remember what I'm talking about. Oh yes, how alien I feel.

The music was nice. The first band, The West Nile Ramblers, played old time country western music that veered oddly toward eastern European party music. Lots of minor chords and upbeat oompa sounds. I was reminded of Tetris. The second band was musically duller but lyrically more exciting, more traditional country themes with a wry, modern (but not too modern) twist and a weary, conscientious sensibility. Lyrics like, "I like my Mustang, but it's just one more thing / I like my flat-screen but it's just one more thing," if that helps illustrate anything. I liked them a lot. Mostly they just seemed like they were having a good time onstage together, and they appreciated the audience. In contrast, the third band was all frowny face and then guitar face from the lead singer. Apparently he was pissed that he wasn't getting enough sound out of his monitor. But really though, must you look like you sucked on a lemon? I left after one song.

What especially caught my eye was this pair of women who kept dancing together. They were the only pair brave enough to attempt real western swing dancing, square dance style, rather than just half-hopping in place like the unrhythmic young people seemed to prefer. These two women were probably late-30s or early-40s. The woman who led wore her hair short and the woman who followed wore slightly longer (but still short) hair, but otherwise they were dressed similarly. Discreet cowboy boots, trim bootcut jeans, tight cap-sleeved t-shirts. Both were fit and athletic, poised, and smiling. I found myself totally captivated in a way that I might have been if I had been thirteen years old and seeing two women dancing together for the first time. I could not stop staring. They were polite to me - the slightly butcher one looked over a few times and smiled at me, and I looked away, aghast. But then I returned my gaze. I could not stop staring. I admired how trim they were, how nicely the short haircut offset the leading woman's neck, how they seemed fearless before the crowd - but mostly I could not stop watching how they looked at each other. They held each others' gazes and looked at almost nothing else, as if there was nothing in that room but the two of them and the sound of country music. I thought about my earlier experiences with country music - in Santa Fe, in Nashville, in Chicago - and only then realized that I had been thinking of country music as only something for straight, white, conservative people - I still have that feeling despite having played country music myself and declared that it was for everybody! I guess I really didn't believe it. Hate to admit, but there was part of me that year living in Chicago that desperately wanted to fit in, and somehow I felt country music would make me more normal.

Part of my alien feeling was due to standing next to presumably straight people, or at least women and girls who wore the feminine articles of the day - high boots, jeans, tight long scoop neck shirts, etc. - and swung their hips side to side. I was half cynical, half generous. The first half thought these women pathetic for wagging their asses in front of men, so obviously seeking attention, so obviously performing a tired (universal! many girls wore the same girly girl outfit!) expression of femininity but attracting the boys anyway. The second half thought, how wonderful, these lovely girls are moved by the music and they just need to dance! The first half was winning until the butcher of the two in the all-woman pair smiled at me, and made me feel like a curmudgeon for begrudging anyone their happiness while dancing.

I spoke to nobody in the bar, even though I looked around rovingly a few times in hopes of catching somebody's eye. I stood next to a single man for about half an hour, trying to think of entrees for conversation - like "Hey, do you know what the name of this band is?" or "How come they asked everyone to record this song on their phones?" - and wondering why he wouldn't look over at me, another single person, and attempt conversation himself, and feeling so neurotic that eventually I just fixed in a spot six inches behind him and focused on the musicians, saying nothing. I wasn't looking for sexual attention, just any kind of attention, though of course I admit that because he was alone and I was alone any kind of attention between the two of us would feel to me to be sexual. Or maybe not - maybe I can't make presumptions about San Francisco like I did about Chicago.

Anyway, feeling like a loser, but having enjoyed the music, I headed out to my car. On the way out, I caught the festival producer standing alone and decided to thank him for organizing the show. We made some small talk. I told him this was the first I'd heard of the bluegrass festival. He said, "Oh yeah, did your friends drag you out to this?" and I said, "No, I came alone." He said that was really unusual, and I said, "Because nobody goes out alone?" and he said, "No - " he seemed a little embarrassed - "but nobody admits it." I said, "Well, I just like the music." Which is what Harry would say, which made me feel extra pathetic. But I guess it's true. None of my friends wanted to go, and I wanted to hear the music. And more than the music, I wanted to stand in a bar crowded with people and watch a few people and try to make eye contact. I felt validated when that handsome butch woman looked over at me and smiled. I wanted to run up to her and ask her and her partner to adopt me. I think this would have been an awkward conversation.

Being around all these single women and single men today also made me really resent you. I projected you right on the woman standing in front of me, and I thought all sorts of insulting thoughts about her. I resented you for my feeling inferior to men, so totally foreign to me until I started dating a girl I worried was straight. You know where my imagination goes. Like even though you had all the attention I could give you, it still wasn't enough for you, and you wanted men to pay attention to you too. Maybe only a man, not just somebody playing up masculinity, can make you feel wanted or give you the whole package of gifts - status, validation, universality, acceptance - that goes along with coupling with the opposite sex.

I don't know, X. It makes my head hurt to psychoanalyze us and I wonder why I even waste my time. There are plenty of hot, confidently gay women in the world, it turns out. I wanted so badly to be part of that pair on the dance floor. I really hated you then. I really missed you, and I hated you too. How the hell do these feelings all get wound up in my head?

That is all the bullshit from me tonight. It's 3:30 in New York now. You're probably asleep. At home? At J's? Have you found somebody else already? Have you called R? Are you dreaming? Are you snoring? There's that ambivalence again - as much as I resent you and imagine you in places that only hurt me to imagine, I wonder what your hot baking body feels like under your pile of sheets. I wonder if I might not fly to Brooklyn with a rocket pack in time to let myself in with your extra keys and slip into bed with you and feel the warmth of your body in person.

I wish you had not let me love you so much. I wish you had let me cut this off a year ago, when the pain of losing you would have been much easier for me to bear. But now I love you, and I miss you, and I hate you.

Harsh words, but my feelings were what they were. Now I don't read it as evidence of horrible things that horrible people did to me, because the things weren't that bad and the people were adorable. I read it with a sense of curiosity about myself: how did I let myself go astray from the things that I wanted? Or feel that level of self-doubt? Or endure this quantum of negative feelings before making a change?

Things are changing. There was a spell between May and June where I could hardly sleep. I'd wake up after four hours of rest with my heart ready to lace up and run out the door, even though my body and brain wanted to be back under the covers. I described this to anyone who cared as feeling too excited about life to be patient enough to sleep. Every day felt like the first day of warm weather.

This extreme zest for life also had its consequences - e.g., exhaustion-related physical and mental deterioration - so this month I have tried to break my feast-or-famine pattern and find what is referred to in Northern California as Balance. (That's another thing I am learning about myself - if you said any sentence containing the words Healing, Garden, Wellness, Balance, Community, Kindness, Organic Produce, Non-Human Animal Friend, Cisgendered, Spirituality, Self-Study, Empowerment, or Nourishment, chances are high I would nod in agreement! I am serious! I love San Francisco!) That story is for another blogpost, TBD.

Until then, I leave you with my latest journal entry, to counterbalance the heaviness from February:

I saw graffiti on a Palo Alto overpass that said simply "B♮." Took me a minute but then I laughed out loud. The symbol after the B is an accidental. The tag reads "Be natural." Excellent advice in modern times.

monday morning

Monday morning commute with Boo. Heading back to Palo Alto after long glorious weekend in San Francisco filled with friends old and new, sunlight, dog love, wind-whipped sand, golden pork buns, hot professional lezzies. Highway 101 South is a parking lot but I don't care. Blasting Erasure greatest hits all the way to work, windows down. Boo sniffs for a while, then tires and falls asleep. I'm wearing a black suit, white shirt for tomorrow's depo. I'm dressed like the border collie in the backseat.

I drop Boo off in the backyard of my parents' home and drive the remaining 1.5 miles to work. More slow traffic. Left arm out the window baking to a deeper color than the right, heart-shaped sunglasses, singing Erasure's cover of ABBA's "Take A Chance On Me" as loud as I can. Nodding and grooving. Day is bright in the valley, with fog at the top of the Santa Cruz mountains. Man in forest green SUV pulls short of the light so that our windows are aligned. I look down my sunglasses at him. He looks down his sunglasses at me. He drives off craning his neck backwards. We meet again at the next light. He rolls down the window. I'm singing, "If you change your mind / I'm the first in line / Honey I'm still free / Take a chance on me . . . " He shouts, "HEY DO YOU WANT TO GET COFFEE!?" I keep singing and shake my head and hold up my left ring finger. Wag it at him, smiling. Take an abrupt right on my street and never see him again.

This week is gonna be GOOD.

shakespeare's bed

When my relationship died, I took a hiatus from, of all things, reading fiction. Don't know why, but I just couldn't stand it. These days I seem to spend more time sweating outdoors and in with strangers than I do building my brain. To the extent that I consume any media, it is in the form of self-help books, news and variety magazines, science or business related podcasts, and a couple of choice Erasure songs on loop.

Yesterday, I hardly left my room. Still fighting with death cough. Nurse napped at my place post-shift, and as she dozed, I fished a book out of my pile and started reading.

The book is a collection of interrelated short stories by Lore Segal called "Shakespeare's Kitchen." I'd never heard of her until I heard her story on a fiction podcast C. recommended to me.

I love this book. Let me share some pieces with you. The heroine is a 30-something Vienna-born naturalized American named Ilka. She has recently been appointed a position at an institute affiliated with a private university in rural Connecticut. She is lonesome for people as intelligent and warm as those she knew in her pre-institute life. In the next two group scenes, Ilka has just met some people she likes and wants to impress, but she doesn't know how to make her personality known to them:

People were moving in from the porch. Ilka saw the new director momentarily alone, slipped out, and said, "I have a theory," and told him about the Egyptian sculpture. It seemed to take a very long time.

The new director said, "I understand that we've got you teaching in the adult program at the university."

"English for Foreigners. I'm a foreigner," said Ilka in despair: once embarked on this routine of self-conscious inanities there's no way back to good sense and propriety. If Ilka had met herself at this moment, at this party, she would have written herself off as an ass and walked away. The new director with the beautiful head and the English voice did not walk away and seemed not to be looking for some better opportunity over Ilka's shoulder. He regarded her attentively, without pretending to any peculiar interest. Ilka understood that she was talking to a patient man who might choose to distinguish between an ass and a person showing off at a party. Ilka said, "Talking to you makes people nervous. I wonder if my students feel like that talking to me?"

Leslie Shakespeare's eyes widened ever so slightly; he could be seen to be thinking. He said, "Probably so." Ilka was relieved and sorry when Joe Bernstine came to fetch his guest of honor. "Leslie, we need you to circulate. We need you to come in and eat."

The new director said, "Well then, that's what I'll do." He looked behind him, saw nobody, and putting his hand not on but just in back of Ilka's back, moved her through the door ahead of him: he was not going to leave anybody alone on the empty porch.

"It is possible," Ilka said to Martin Moses at the buffet table, "that our new director is a nice man."

And later, in the kitchen of Leslie and his wife Eliza, with a professor named Winterneet:

Sunday morning Leslie called and fetched Ilka in the car. Ilka walked into Eliza's kitchen and there was Winterneet sitting at the table smiling at Ilka.

Ilka was not some young thing; it annoyed her not to be able to keep up her end -- like Eliza, who could cut and slice, correct the seasoning, and perform last-minute maneuvers at the stove and keep the conversation flying like some high-wire act. Ilka developed a crick in the neck looking from a joke of Eliza's to Winterneet, who swung with it into a mutual reminiscence. Eliza, tossing and tasting the salad, elaborated a very tall tale that Winterneet topped with a deliciously nasty quip. Ilka wanted to play with them, up there, in the middle air, but the palpitation of her heart preempted her breathing. Ilka hunkered down waiting for the laughter to run its course before she took the running start to get her own joke airborne with enough breath for the punch line, but Eliza, removing her beautiful French bread from the oven, had started a story that grew naturally out of Winterneet's point, which Ilka missed, because it took off from what she suspected herself of not having recognized as a quotation. Ilka crouched to wait for the next opening in the hope of having thought of something that would fit whatever might by that time be under discussion.

Leslie, leaning back in his chair, observed his wife and his friend with the air of a man eating the best bread and butter, and listening to the best conversation, in his own house, at his own breakfast. Eliza had glided two coddled eggs onto Leslie's plate when the doorbell rang. Leslie looked regretful, got reluctantly up, and went to answer the door. He came back. He said, "Dear. It's Una."

Notice that in that passage you don't know the topics of the conversation, just the mood and pace, and there is not a drop of dialogue, but the scene is so vivid you could probably supply the lines yourself. How does she do this?!

And when she does dialogue, it's so sharp and perfect. Here Una, the unwanted guest, is at the Shakespeares' door:

"Tell her no," Eliza said.

"She's come straight from the airport," said Leslie. "She has her bags."

Eliza said, "I recommend the Concordance Hotel, corner Euclid and Main, a clean, well-lighted place."

Leslie went out.

"You can't do that! Can you do that?" asked Ilka in an excited whisper. "Can you tell someone to go away?"

"Watch me," said Eliza. "Or watch me tell Leslie to tell her."

"But I mean - imagine having just arrived from New York . . . "

"From London," Eliza corrected her.

"What can you say to her?"

"You say, 'If you bother me, I'll set the Concordance police on you.'"

Leslie returned. Eliza gave him back the eggs she had kept warm for him and said, "I make Leslie go and do the dirty work."

"Yes, you do," said Leslie.

Ilka said, "What were the actual words you said to her?"

"I said, 'There's a nice enough family hotel on Main - medium priced.' I wrote the address on a piece of paper and hugged her good-bye."

"You hugged Una!" cried Eliza.

"Yes," said Leslie.

"She's Paul Thayer's neice, no?" asked Winterneet.

"Niece by marriage," Leslie said. The doorbell rang again. Eliza took Leslie's eggs and covered them with foil.

When Leslie came back he had his jacket on and the car-keys in his fist. "Her driver has driven off. I'll take her to the hotel."

"She's driven her driver off!" said Eliza. "Our little Una likes Leslie to drive her. Una is always having to be driven. Una always needs picking up."

Ilka said, "You must have once liked her?"

"Una is a chilly English schoolgirl who came to America and caught the sixties."

"Why isn't that a good thing for a chilly English girl to catch?"

"Because she had to work so hard at it. Have you ever seen a hedonist with gritted teeth?"

"Poor Una," said Ilka.

"Poor, poor Una," said Eliza. "Like the baby kangaroo in Pooh Corner who keeps jumping out of its mother's pouch, saying 'Look at me jumping!' Una jumped into everybody's bed saying 'Look at me screwing!'"

"But you have to imagine having been born chilly. What was Una supposed to do?" Ilka looked at Winterneet for acquiescence. Winterneet was eating Leslie's coddled eggs. Ilka said, "Don't you think there's something gallant about warming yourself up by your own bootstraps? What do you want her to do?"

"Go back to London," said Eliza.

When Leslie returned from driving Una to the Concordance Hotel, he drove Ilka home to the Rasmussens'.

So elegant and spare. No words wasted on descriptions, no perspective jumping to explain what Leslie did between going to the door the second time and returning with his keys in hand. You're just getting to know all the characters, but right away you can sense that Leslie and Eliza trust one another but that there is also some history behind Eliza's dislike for young, clumsy, flirtatious Una. You get Ilka's worry that she is Leslie and Eliza's new Una - the clever foreigner girl once welcome in the house, later shooed off the porch - and her attempt to express mercy for Una without chiding Eliza.

I woke Nurse to read the above passages to her. She said, "I'm as interested in the writing as I am in why you chose to read me those particular passages," and fell back asleep. That was so fucking deep it left me speechless - her scrutiny from my bed of my empathy for Ilka's empathy for Una's desperate, slutty socializing in the face of Eliza's scrutiny. Which is just as well, because Nurse was unconscious by the time I parsed these subjectivities, so I had nobody to tell my thoughts to anyway.

hawaii with D.

D. says there are eighteen phonemes in the Hawaiian language. She says one incredibly boring way to spend a date is to go on a walk and read street signs aloud. In a diner in Volcano where the waitress cannot stop singing - Guantanamera first in a high key, then in a low key, then another song, and another - D. tells me a horror story about the roommate who sang loungey adaptations of songs like "Zippity Doo Dah" morning to night. "I don't know what it is - I just love the sound of my own voice!" he said when she confronted him.

Then D. spends car rides singing and pronouncing street signs using only Hawaiian phonemes. "Walmart" becomes "wa ma" which becomes "gna ma," and then "gna gna," and eventually D. is just making babbling noises. She pronounces "snorkeling" with a pirate accent so that it becomes "snarrrkeling." She says "island lava java" with an accent that is an indeterminate hybrid of Jamaican and - Irish? She particularly likes the sound of herself saying "I wanna banana" while keeping her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

The day I land, I get a terrible cough. Must be all the stress leading up to the vacation, the crush at work, the hysterical collection of time with new friends, the lack of sleep. I clean the pharmacy out of medicines with the word "mucus" portmanteaued into their names. By day two I've lost my voice completely. Neither of us can sleep at night because of my death rattle. First, D. expresses sympathy. By day four, she is mocking me. She coughs theatrically whenever I cough. "A-hwuh hwuh hwuh," she says. "Hwuh hwuh hwuhhhhh."

I give her my extra rash guard. A rash guard is a spandex shirt you can wear while swimming so UV rays don't permanently destroy the elasticity of your skin's collagen. D. insists on calling these nipple guards. "It's not guarding my rash," she says.

This is how a day goes. We wake up when we wake up. I get up and turn off the white noise machine D. has brought with her to the Big Island. I put contacts in, brush teeth, wash face, and I am dressed and ready to go in ten minutes. D. is still in bed, wearing the eye bra that blocks out the harsh, low-latitude sunlight. I do push-ups and sit-ups while she gets ready and I cut a mango for us. She apologizes profusely for making me wait, but I don't care. We drive ten feet to eat breakfast somewhere. Me egg whites plus fatty meat, her vegetarian and healthy. We drive to a beach. Nipple guards go on. Drop in the water face down. Float for an hour looking at coral reef five feet from our faces, teeming with shining fish. Burn backsides. Return to car. Drive to lunch. Drive to new hotel. Drive to scenic spot: volcano, beach cliff, amphiteather valley, mountaintop, museum, inside of a yoga studio. Snap a million glamour shots, many of us pretending to eat or hold or hug the scenic spot. Talk about boyfriends and girlfriends. Talk about our on-the-job leadership lessons. Talk about that annoying boy with no life experience to share who would respond to stories by talking about Nietzsche. Talk about the 100 essential wardrobe items every woman should have. Argue about whether I could find black knee high boots suitable for my gender presentation. Get into a horrible argument involving crying about whether "person of color" is a useful demographic category. Drive to dinner. Buzz on half a drink. Drive to hotel. Lay in bed eating mac nuts from a jar, reading maps. Write postcards. Make fun of postcard images. Sleep. Cough. Make fun of coughing.

D. loves plants and birds. She makes me pull over on the road to Kohala so she can investigate wild morning glories by the shoulder. I sit in the car and eat carrot sticks while she does this. She explains the experiment she and A. ran on their morning glories to see whether they actually bloomed only once. They did.


That's a flirty little hibiscus, not a morning glory.

On day seven, in Hilo, termites descend upon our room while we are out for the day. First I spot one on my bed. "Yuck!" I say, and swat it away. Then I notice the floor is moving. The bottoms of my flip flops look like a fly strip after I walk across the room. Termites everywhere. We had left our bags open. Termites on my contact lens solution, in my shoes, in my bikini bottom. I revise my opinion and prefer the dry, sunny Kona-side of the Island to the seamy, jungley, termitey Hilo-side. The hotel owner gasps and says we can take another room. We get to work and don't talk to one another. My method of coping: shake out article, stomp on floor until all termites shaken out of article are flattened. D. says, "It's so against my religion to be killing these things." I say fuck that, we dominated Termocalypse 2011. Wish I had photos, but we were so focused on cleaning house we couldn't pause for the disgusting photo op.

While snorkeling, we catch each others gazes underwater and gesticulate toward cool things. Big ass fish! Sea turtle! We hold hands and flipper-kick out to where the reef drops off and the ocean becomes an imperceptibly deep, profoundly terrifying blue nothingness. Our grips tighten. It's the kind of scene where in the movies a shark suddenly materializes out of the blue (is that where that phrase comes from?) five feet from your face and gnaws off your arm. But no shark materializes, and we float around like otters holding hands for a few minutes, circling the bottomless depth, looking wide-eyed at each other through our snorkel masks, before kicking back over to the safe known world of the reef.

We look at the world underwater. We look at the world's volcanic insides. We go to a 14,000 foot mountain and look for Arcturus, Hawaii's most important star. At the observatory, a video tells us Earth will one day lose its magnetosphere and we will all be broiled to death by a solar flare. D. and I split a bag of mangosteens while watching this video. I eat a teriyaki chicken musubi.

D. says I enable her. She doesn't want to jump off the cliff at South Point, but I do it, so she does it too. She doesn't want to put on her wet swimsuit, but I want to go snorkeling, so she does it too. She says it's good, because she would tend toward passivity without me.

But I tell D. she is the ultimate enabler. She emailed a month ago to say, "I'm going to Hawaii. Come!" It was all her idea. I wasn't planning any vacations but I'm of the mind these days to say yes to every invitation. So I said yes.

And that is how I spent nine days on the Big Island, listening to D. say, "I wanna banana" over and over and over again.

next thursday, i'm still in love

Bike commute group gets canceled but I show up anyway. A couple shows up too - let's call them David and Sigrid. Sigrid is not as fit as David, so while I ride up with the latter, he curses the former, telling me she lacks motivation and prefers to sit on her ass. "Just follow my wheel!" he says, exasperated. As the sun warms up the bay so too does David shine upon Sigrid, eventually giving her a sweaty peck at a stop light. Still they bicker. "The bike fitter will measure the power output in each leg," she says. "No, don't be ridiculous, that's not what he's doing," he says. Eventually I shout, "I'm never riding with a couple again!" It's light enough to be said with a smile, but passive aggressive enough to make them sheepishly stop the quarreling. Sigrid tells me how her bike seat relieves pressure on her "soft tissue" and I complain that marketing around women's bike seats is so euphemistic that I can't tell what's supposed to be happening to which portions of one's beef flaps.

Then work. Pull on the spandex again to run Thursday errands - walk Boo, date with Grandma to shop at Costco. Back into business casual for three more hours of work, then back into spandex for the train ride home.

I'm exhausted and all I want is 6 oz. of beef flaps ground up into a burger with blue cheese, caramelized onions, sauteed mushrooms, honey dijon sauce, lettuce, tomato, and a crisp plank of pickle. While I eat alone at the bar, I take great pleasure in a local IPA and an article about Hollywood's lessening disinterest in a raunchy blond comedienne.

I finish the magazine an hour after I finish the food, then wander out drunk (one beer! blame it on the bike fatigue). I follow the sound of coronets to the corner of Valencia and 22nd Street, where ten musicians all on brass are playing Balkan folk music as they move down the street. Like many others, first I ogle then I join, walking slowly with a growing pack of people right behind the band. Diners in the restaurants look mesmerized. Hippies (dreads) and hipsters (tattoos) pour out of one particular bar and soon there are clouds in the air and people dancing along. A woman in a red boatneck shirt and leggings appears to be having the time of her life. A younger Asian woman named Kim in a crocheted hat and a crocheted waist-length poncho smiles at me and we chat about the experience. One of Kim's friends randomly bikes by and she convinces him to join. We follow until the band turns inside a venue and sets up on the stage. Another of Kim's friends joins. Kim takes out a beaten-up soup thermos and sets it on a table, and turns to me and says, "We're going to go smoke pot!" I demur, and they smoke outside the bar and while I keep watch on the companionate thermos. It stays with me like a quiet friend. Kim returns with a third friend and says, "Let's dance!" And then I am dancing, awkwardly, hands nowhere, feet out of time with the incomprehensible 5/4 or 9/8 or whatever it is Balkan rhythm, and Kim's second friend is doing that dancing thing where you hunch up your shoulders, keep your fists near your chest and make a motion with them like you're turning a crank, with your brow furrowed and lips pursed all the while. It's charming. Then she cranks over to me and rubs her shoulder against mine to indicate that I should be dancing more zealously, and I should be having more fun. After the Macedonian love song, I say, "It was so nice to meet you all," and leave. Half an hour after seeing the band on Valencia and 22nd Street, I'm right back where I started, except there is a sharpie mark on my hand and $5 less in my wallet, and I have been hugged by four strangers.

Nurse texts to ask can I meet at Tartine for coffee at 7am? She gets off the night shift then. I am not sleepy and I am not ready to go home, so I buy a 24-pack of Ferrero Rochers from the drugstore - she says that nurses on the night shift need two things: chocolate and coffee - and walk the mile to the hospital. Halfway there I get bored of walking and pick up my bag and run. I show up at the emergency room and there is a man shaking on a gurney and vomiting into a bed pan, and a girl holding a steady wail in the waiting room, and dozens of other people in states of disrepair. I find my nurse in a low-ceilinged, well-lit room partitioned by curtains and filled with unwell, unconscious people. Chocolate hand off. We sit in her car while she takes her break and she shows me the tools she keeps in her pockets. Stethoscope, scissors, pen, pill pushing thing. Half hour later she texts to say the chocolates are almost gone.

At home, Z.'s meeting ends and she and the attendees play around on my gymnastics rings and talk about a contortionist friend who teaches "extreme stretching" at a local acrobatics gym. Z. shows me the paltry, unlovable responses to her w4w Craigslist ad, and I bully her into responding to one promising ad and she dutifully drafts an email until we realize that the promising ad belongs to our roommate A. A. comes down the hall and we have a laugh about this most awkward of situations. Thursday is starting to be my favorite day of the week.