A Little Bit of Magic

Answering an impulse to clean, I grab a broom and sweep the bathroom floor. Down on my hands and knees, I peer into the two-inch gap beneath the cabinet that holds my sink, anticipating mounds of dust and lint. Instead I see a decorative hair comb trying to slide under the washing machine. I navigate the broom to grab it and draw it towards me.

Seeing the comb takes me back to a barefoot day on the beach fifteen years ago. My wedding. The somewhat sparkly accessory draws the hair off my face. A time in my life before so much experience. A time before so much history. A time when I believed in the love I was pledging.

That love is long gone.

I look at the comb in my hand: it’s time to get this out of my house. I feel that the wedding ornament hiding in my bathroom has kept me stuck, bonding me to my past. I don’t normally believe in such things, but I don’t question the thought. And the message goes deeper: don’t simply put the comb in the trash. I don’t know why I know this, but I do, and as my intuition is often demure, when it speaks up, I try to listen. The disposal of the comb requires something ceremonial.

I picture burying it on the beach, but that instantly feels wrong as if I’m offering it a permanent spot in my life, as if it will live in my own backyard, in my soil, and be a part of my future. I want it gone, not living with me, so instead I imagine leaving it out in the open, someplace that someone will pick it up, desire it, give it a different life.

Later in the day, just before leaving home, I remember the comb and shove it in my purse. I drop my son at his friend’s and head towards a movie theater to attend a documentary film. But I’m early. Really early. I stop at one of those warehouse-type shoe stores. Look around. Try on boots. Sightsee. And suddenly I realize this is where I must leave the comb. An accessory amongst accessories. I’m abandoning it amidst its peers.

I pull the comb from my purse, wander down one aisle, looking left, looking right. I glance about like a shoplifter. And then I see the spot, an inviting gap between two welcoming shoes on display. I place the comb carefully and quickly. It feels right, and I scurry off with a smile.

At the theater, I buy my ticket and move into line. A passing man catches my eye. Slightly shaggy hair. Walking alone. And then he’s gone. The line starts walking towards the theater. I stop in the bathroom, delaying my entry to take a seat.

Eventually I enter the theater and walk to my preferred row, close but not too close. I duck in to the right. And there he is. The man from outside, two seats away from me. As the lights go down, he leans over and asks why I came to this film. I only choke out a brief response about my general interest in documentary film rather than my more specific answer, for the first trailer is playing and the crowd is already silent.

The powerful film transports me deep into thought. I no longer think of the man beside me. If he suddenly spoke to me, I wouldn’t manage small talk. Films do that to me, take me so far outside myself that I need some time for reentry. That’s why I often go to movies alone. I need post-film silent time to process and return to the living.

But when the lights come up, my neighbor starts talking to me. I say that I wanted to see the film after reading an article explaining how the story of Jonestown and the Peoples Temple was far more complex than the media lead us to believe in the late 70s when the mass suicide/murder occurred. We leave the theater in conversation and end up having a drink. We talk about seeing another film together. We exchange numbers.

A spontaneous encounter like this hasn’t happened to me in a long time. Driving home, I remember that I recently had an image of meeting a man at a movie theater. And I realize that it’s odd that I didn’t think of that all evening.

I’m not saying my movie encounter means anything. I’m not claiming this man and I will ever see each other again. But our drink felt like the capping moment on my comb disposal ceremony. For that alone, I am grateful and willing to believe in a little magic.

Tags: magic, ritual, ceremony

Dream Weaving

I’ve been dreaming of cell phones, really specific dreams about their features and their functionality, their form and how they serve my life. I could use the word obsession.

I don’t upgrade my cellular equipment as often as my plan allows, ignoring the every two years free phone with a renewed contract offer. Free doesn’t exist. Free-er, perhaps. Read the fine print. You pay tax. Full, retail price, tax. You pay for all the money-grabbing accessories that don’t migrate from phone to phone – the car charger with the unique fit, the headset with a unique personality, and any other add-ons your sales rep can convince you are must haves.

But at this point, I am long overdue for a new phone. I can only make one call before it needs recharging. While I could simply buy a new battery, the dangling carrot tells me it’s better to leap for the new phone. Purchasing a battery for an ancient phone falls into the category of ‘throwing good money after bad’. Don’t you love such expressions? Don’t you wish you could originate one that would follow you and others around for decades as you proudly say, “I made that up”? Naturally, no one would believe you, but you’d know the truth and could find joy in that alone.

But I digress.

While it’s more environmentally responsible to keep an old phone than to participate in our disposable society, my older model is rumored to emit far more radiation than newer models, so if it’s between me and the planet, I pick me. Call me selfish.

By now, diving in and selecting a new phone feels like a considerable decision. I see how long I hold onto a phone. If I buy the next device prematurely without proper investigation, I’m stuck with it for two years, unless I want to outlay a healthy chunk of money.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so concerned about my choice. Until recently, I hadn’t noticed that I’ll soon be celebrating my current phone’s fourth birthday, which in electronic terms is far beyond retirement age. However, I might not linger so comfortably with my next phone. With all the new properties phones possess, I could miss out on a key feature if I buy today instead of tomorrow. They already offer a cell phone that has a navigational system. They might soon come out with one that can locate my misplaced item du jour. Such things must not be passed up lightly.

For purchasing guidance, I reexamine my cell phone dreams, the dreams that would likely serve me far better if they revolved around hot sex that allowed me to wake up with a smile on my face. Instead I’m REM-ing through visions of a beautiful, sleek, minute, indestructible cell phone sliding into my pocket. It’s fantasy of the consumer kind. This phone doesn’t exist.

In an effort to understand my subconscious’ longings, I visit an online dream dictionary and jump to ‘C’.

Cell Phone
To see or use a cell phone in your dream indicates that you are being receptive to new information. It also represents your mobility.

Hmmm, this is very interesting. Only, I’m a bit skeptical. Well, really skeptical. Perhaps dreaming of a cell phone means I spent an hour at the Verizon store without any sales person ever becoming available to help me. Or maybe it means I then went online and tried to decipher all the different models without getting to hold them in my hand. Or maybe it reflects back on my conversation with a kind Verizon rep I phoned to ask if she knew when the next batch of new phones was slated for release. Maybe my phone dreams were about how many of my waking hours I wasted thinking about my new device.

Or maybe this dictionary is right and I am open to new information.

So I go back to the resource. I read through many listings, fascinated by how they cover all bases. For instance, dreaming of cake signifies: needing to learn to share, selfishness, your accomplishments, missed opportunities, and learning to be comfortable in the spotlight.

I’m condensing and paraphrasing.

The listing for accordion catches my attention:

To hear the music of an accordion signifies that some amusement and joy will take your mind off a saddening and depressing matter.

To dream that you play the accordion denotes intense emotions that are causing you some physical strain and body weariness.

I used to be married to an accordion player. I heard accordion music all the time. The fact that his playing drifted into my dreams seems natural, even dismissive if it didn’t. And if he dreamt about it, am I really to believe the negative implications this dictionary suggests? I feel a disclaimer for actual accordion players and their spouses is called for. Just a suggestion.

The more entries I read, the more I think I am wading through what a bunch of drunks scrawled on bar napkins after a drinking game. I’d like to write for one of these sites. It seems like a lot of fun. Talk about creative writing.

I don’t mean to fully malign dream analysis. I suspect there are recurring themes to our dreams, common sentiments that speak to us through symbols. But overall, I just don’t see all of us as reducible to such broad generalizations. Are we really to believe that our daily encounters and experiences don’t guest star in our dreams, that it’s only the deep psyche that speaks to us as we sleep? And most obviously, how do we verify any of the claims of dream dictionaries?

For now, I will return to the loudest message from my dreams: Go buy a cell phone and get over it. It is a phone, merely a phone. You have one month to commit, and then I don’t want to hear any more of this nonsense. Buyer’s remorse be damned.

And as far as my dreams, I’ll see if I can nudge them towards a sexier variety. Maybe I’ll shop in a different kind of store this afternoon.

Tags: cell phone, dreams, dream dictionary

A Hoop of My Own

Yesterday afternoon I arrived at my friend’s home for her birthday party. The invitation said to wear yoga-like clothes, as little as possible. I certainly didn’t know how to interpret that, and I just didn’t ask.

The guests – a small group of six women – deposit our potluck offerings, introduce ourselves to each other, and journey through entrée small talk. Suddenly the hostess/birthday girl speaks up. “It’s time,” she says. Time. I have no idea what awaits us.

She ushers us into her welcoming California backyard with a nicely sculpted grass area ringed in tall plants. Beside the lawn sits a professional music system. Next to it, a pile of hula hoops.

“Oh, God,” I think. “Save me.”

We each grab a hoop of our liking having no idea on what to base our selection. I go about it much like I pick a car, reaching for a color combination that pleases me. Red, yellow, and orange. I’m normally the cool color type, but this one just speaks to me.

I never could hula hoop as a child. Despite exceptional athletic skills that took me from baseball field to football game, from the volleyball court to the eventual destination as a tournament tennis player, the hula hoop was my nemesis. That ring would circle me twice and hit the ground.

My inability to hula hoop, as well as my affection for sports favored by boys, made me feel like an outsider amongst girls. Every girl past the age of five seemed to have the natural ability to shake her hips and make that thing spin. I stood there in my attempts and felt I belonged to the wrong gender.

Now, decades later, I stand in a circle of women, focusing on the fact that the homemade variety of hula hoop – as in the ones our instructor has brought – is rumored to be easier to swing, that in fact it’s nearly guaranteed. I’m hopeful. I give it a go, and it almost works. I keep at it and I can actually do it, and I’m kind of excited. Phew. Mission accomplished. Can we eat now?

“Now we’ll move onto tricks,” our kind, acrobatic instructor tells us.

“Tricks?”

She gets her whole body into the action – arms, calves, neck. I reflexively gag when the hoop hits her windpipe. She lifts the hoop over her head, whips it around, does some impressive jumping maneuver – the whole time the hoop spinning flawlessly. Somehow Cirque du Soleil comes to mind.

We move to twirling the hoop with our outstretched hands. Mine keeps going AWOL and nearly decapitating the woman beside me. Luckily, she’s my one old friend amongst the guests, so she smiles kindly and encourages me on. I feel as if it’s first grade all over again.

I’m lagging behind the group. In my overly developed need to excel, I tunnel inward and focus. My neighbors move on to mimic our leader, pulling the spinning hoop up off their waists and raising it above their heads, spinning it behind their backs, and jumping through it. Okay, no one but our leader actuality achieves all these moves, but the combination seems within reach of several of my fellow partygoers. And they’re discussing the technique really seriously as I desperately restrain the jokes trying to leap from my mouth.

I decide to return to trying to spin the hoop over my hand without killing the friend beside me. And I get it! And I feel extraordinarily successful. Two skills mastered in one night – spinning around my waist and twirling in my hand. Not bad for a 1960s’ playground failure.

The most amazing discovery is how much work this all is. I feel my breath accelerating, my shoulder muscles growing sore, and my waist trimming with every spin. “This is good exercise,” I think to myself. And it’s oddly meditative. I close my eyes and picture myself on my beachside roof deck gyrating in the ocean breeze.

By the time we’re eating dinner, I’m asking the instructor where to get a hula hoop. “I make my own,” she answers. She explains she uses PVC pipe and colorful tape for decoration, though admits finding the pipe is challenging. I ask her how much she charges for the hoops, and she says, “It depends on the decoration. The sparkly ones cost more. It also depends how many colors I use. But typically, I sell a hoop for $40.”

Forty dollars? This is no impulse purchase.

I decide to investigate making one on my own. I go home and Google ‘Making your own hula hoop,’ and discover that there is a hooping.org magazine. I’m fascinated. I had no idea the trend was so big, but then again, if you base your judgment on the existence of an online magazine, I imagine that’s deceiving. Tomorrow I could launch ExpatsOfBeverlyHills.org – which would welcome those who endured endless questions in their childhood about The Beverly Hillbillies and Beverly Hills 90210 – and an innocent Googler would envision a movement.

I work my way through the hooping website and discover lots of information on making your own hoop with the concurring opinion that finding the pvc piping is a challenge. You may luck out and be able to buy 100 ft. of it at Home Depot. While that’s useful information, I hardly want such a quantity (enough for eight hula hoops, the informative site tells me.) I’m not really interested in turning this into a cottage industry out of my Venice condo, though if any location would be suited to such a business, I suspect Venice Beach is a likely success story.

I’m planning to call my friend to ask for the hula hoop instructor’s number and making what just days ago would have sounded to me like a ridiculous purchase. But after an afternoon of communal hooping, I’ve felled one of my childhood demons, albeit not the most threatening one. If I can do that for forty dollars and dive into some meditative exercise that may prime me for a future gig in a talent show, that sounds mighty inviting.

Tags: hula hoop, childhood

Objects of My Affection

Behind the wheel far from the city, whipping by wide-open land, I pull alongside a truckload of old tires tossed haphazardly upon each other, a giant heap cruising down the highway. I overhear their conversation, their moaning about how hard it is to be a passenger after all the years of transporting others. And while they could look at if differently, could relish the chance to relax, they feel old and useless and can’t celebrate the passage from carrier to cargo.

Further along, I turn onto a narrow road that runs through trees with occasional clearings to the left and right. At the base of a hill, I see a Christmas tree farm, field after field of pines being raised for slaughter.

The smallest and youngest trees, just a couple feet tall, glance to the neighboring field of older and taller pines. “We’ll be there soon,” one youngster says with a sigh to his neighbor.

They know where it all leads.

Seeing these budding trees makes me sad, makes me think how our holiday is not a holiday for them. Makes me feel their glum resignation. And later I share my experience with my friend who passed by the same farm on her way to meet me and hadn’t seen it that way. But on her way back over the hill two days later, she calls me and says, “I couldn’t see the trees in the same way as before. I imagined them talking, and I felt sad.”

Lately, all sorts of objects have been speaking to me. I hear my clock talking to my stereo. I imagine my car complaining to the road. I write the dialogue of the ocean with the shore.

And as these objects come to life, they draw me in more than the people around me, more than those who pass me in their cars, who shop beside me for food. I find myself more interested in what the celery is saying to the carrots, to what the dish soap is saying to the paper towels. These conversations are new and fresh, comedic and heartfelt. They make me smile even when they make me cry.

What can it possibly mean that I want to a have a drink with my drink rather than the person sitting beside me?

Tags: fantasy

Travels

Fingers struggle with the pinched clasp of the clear plastic box. Release. The contents explode, fly out into the room. Multicolored beads scatter to the floor. A light tickle of sound echoes off the linoleum.

The creator lowers to her knees, stares, takes in the arrangement on the floor, reaching for a needle already bound to string. As if collecting a predestined bracelet, she starts poking the needle through the beads’ tiny holes, pushing to make the evening deadline she promised, the sun already setting.

To maintain momentum, to stay interested, she sees herself crawling through the teeny holes and coming out the other side into another world. With each bead, she takes a fresh journey as a creature on the tip of a needle, emerging and becoming life-size only long enough to absorb the scene, enjoy, and depart.

She wants it to be that easy to move from life to life, to collect memories upon a strand of string. Glancing down upon the dangling beads, she sees that it is. And she knows she must close the loop, tie the knot, and hand over the very personal creation to a woman who will toss it into a box of countless other pieces of jewelry unaware of where this simple bracelet has taken its maker.

Tags: fantasy, fiction

Us and Them

“That could never be me.”

Many think such words when hearing of the detainees being held year after year by the U.S. government without charge. Honest citizens and residents want to believe that those in custody are where they are because of their actions or affiliations, something that indicates guilt.

There is so much that disturbs me about the current actions of this administration that it’s hard to know what most to single out, but holding detainees without charge rises to the top.

Thankfully, many cry this complaint. Sadly, more do not. As I drove home today hearing a lawyer speak of this issue on the radio, I thought about the future, about what I would be ashamed of having not done, of having not said. It’s easy to justify inaction by believing that someone at a higher level has a better chance of being heard. It’s easy to turn this over to the columnists of major newspapers, to claim it's all been said. But only when common citizens use their individual voices does the argument gain power.

If concern for others doesn't draw you into this issue – people possibly guilty of nothing at all – examine it via concern for yourself. You may feel safe from suspicion at this point, but why? Can’t that change with the whim of politics? What stops an outspoken critic from suddenly being rounded up and tucked away out of view? I used to consider that unthinkable, but not any more. Not in our current climate. Not with the new laws being written. Why, as a country, aren’t we uniformly outraged by this twist in our politics? Why aren’t we afraid for ourselves?

I can’t think of a better way to keep people cowering and silent, fearful of being critical of behavior and views they see as wrong, than to wave the threat of indeterminate detention. I don’t understand how anyone can see this as anything other than a complete violation of human rights. If a detainee is guilty of a crime, charge him. Let him – and us – know the accusation. Let the evidence be presented in court. With anything less, we are guilty of the appalling behavior of which we criticize other governments.

When history examines this period in the future, I don’t want to hang my head in shame for my silence. I don’t want to use the excuse, “There was nothing I could have done.” I want to use my voice in any way that I can to express my outrage at what is being done in the name of security for this country. I want to call out to others to speak up as well. I want to scream that this is not the country I was raised to value. If we are so cloaked in fear that we cease to trust our own judicial system to serve our security, we have far greater problems than the threat of terrorism. We are terrorizing ourselves, and allowing common decency to evaporate.

I agree with those who point out that terrorists aren’t concerned with our rights. In response, I say, “That’s what separates us from them.” But if we don’t speak up, no one will ever know.

Tags: human rights, detainees, terrorism

What I Learned From My Clock

Spiritual leaders teach us to live in the moment, to be present, to not fear the passage of time. I’ve never been gifted in living this way. No matter how much I try, a part of me always glances forward, partially out of concern, partially out of curiosity. In my dance with life, a clock is my metronome.

A few weeks back after a power outage in my neighborhood, the surging return of electricity murdered one of my computers. I mournfully said good-bye, removed its hard drive, and moved on.

Little did I know there was another victim in the house.

After a day lost in work, I glance to my clock radio on my nightstand – one of the many timepieces I’d reset after the outage – and am stunned by how late it is. Where has the evening gone? But then I look to the time display on the cable box. My clock radio of glowing blue numbers that has traveled with me from abode to abode since I was sixteen is about an hour and a half ahead.

I reset it to the proper time assuming I had erred earlier in the day, and go to sleep.

My internal body clock painfully reliable, I no longer depend on an alarm, so when I open my eyes the next morning and am greeted with the blue numbers screaming that I have overslept by nearly an hour, I leap up. My heart racing, I catch sight of the wall clock, which calms me by revealing that I have in fact awakened at my normal time.

I study my clock radio. As if on speed, it is racing ahead of reality at an alarming rate, gaining roughly ten minutes each hour. I can understand a power surge frying my clock, but giving it an adrenaline rush?

Due to our long history, I give the clock one more chance, resetting the time and placing it back on my nightstand. But as the day progresses, it continues to run ahead, which completely unnerves me every time I forget about its condition, the nearby wall clock called in to bring me back to reality. As if aiming to physically demonstrate that ‘time is relative,’ these two clocks continue to charge forward through the day displaying completely differing perceptions of the march of time.

Finally, in an act of self-defense, I unplug the deviant clock radio, leaving a blank black screen staring at me. I can’t toss it in the trash. We’ve been together too long.

Weeks pass. Out of curiosity, I plug the clock radio back into the wall. I want to see exactly how fast it’s racing ahead, still marveling over its ability to move at an increased rate after a jolt of energy. But to my surprise, after a day of operation, the clock is in sync with my others, not gaining or losing time.

And oddly enough, I’m sad. When the clock moved at its own rate, as annoying as it was, it sang with personality. It refused to honor the duty bestowed upon it by its maker. It embraced a life of rebellion, albeit an amped up and slightly neurotic one, appearing unable to live calmly in the moment.

Like someone else I know.

Suddenly I wonder if for those odd few days, my clock was mimicking my behavior like cohabitants who live together for too long and begin to assume a shared personality. With my clock’s odd behavior, I certainly started to look at my own obsession with time.

While I suspect there’s a reasonable, scientific explanation for the journey my clock has taken, I’m not willing to let go of the mystery of the magical clock. I now look to it repeatedly throughout the day, not to check the time, but to check on the clock, to see if it’s honoring its duty to the local time zone or running ahead on its own accord.

So far it’s staying loyal to its job. At first I didn’t think I’d be able to trust this clock again, to have faith I could depend on it to wake me for a critical early morning departure. But as I stare at my old friend, I realize I either keep the clock and return to a place of trusting it or toss it out. The middle ground is pointless. Just like in any relationship where a break in behavior throws you off track, time is the healer. Funny what you can learn from a clock.

Tags: power surge, time

The Big Picture

Violence enters our lives. Sometimes by chance, sometimes by choice.

Unlike many, I enjoy attending films alone, to fully immerse myself in the drama onscreen and leave my present life behind. So, with a free night, I head to the movies.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints. I know little of the film, having seen the trailer but not recalling much beyond a hint of the movie’s intensity. I vaguely remember a blurb touting its merits. That’s enough for me. I prefer to arrive at a theater blind, not wanting advance knowledge to spoil the unfolding adventure.

It’s Saturday night and I sit along the center aisle of the theater, a room decently populated for an indie film with minor marketing. A couple arrives and climbs over me to take seats at the end of my row just as the opening credits begin.

The film moves powerfully through a harsh and intense depiction of life in Queens, New York in the 80s, a coming-of-age tale of the writer and his friends navigating their world and their friendships, the impact of violence a central focus of the film. Late into the movie, the man in my row turns to his date and starts complaining. “Two free nights and I’m not about to waste one watching…” I don’t know how he ends the sentence as I try to refocus my ears to the screen.

But he continues to talk in a full voice as if he were sitting in his own living room, unconcerned with the theater of people around him. And while I try to tune him out, he draws my attention – and others’ – away from the screen. A guy sitting two rows ahead turns and asks the offending talker to be quiet.

And the drama begins.

The man in my row rises, and I assume he’s on his way out of the theater. Instead, he climbs over me, walks two rows forward, and slides up to the guy who asked for his silence. He gets right down in the seated viewer’s face, his large standing stature undeniably intimidating. Focus in the room shifts to this scene, an odd parallel to the violence and tension on the screen.

The guy beside the husher tries to enter the conversation, but burly dude silences him with, “I’m not talking to you!” At this point others in the theater beg the guy to back off, but anyone who speaks to him just becomes the next object of his rage.

I’m shocked by the escalation of the incident, and can’t stand how this man is dominating the room. In favor of justice, I, too, call for his silence. He walks briskly towards me, leans over, and counters, “I paid as much for my ticket as everyone else, so I have just as much right to talk!”

Huh?

Where in the fine print does a ticket allow you to talk? How about, a ticket allows you to sit silently in a theater and enjoy – or hate – a film? To speak in a full voice? I don’t think so.

At this point investing even one more second in this guy is going to completely take me out of the film, so I let it go. But my heart is racing. I’m not sure whether it’s a response of fear – he does have at least a hundred pounds on me – or a rush of internal glee in standing up to a bully.

He leaves the theater. His date quickly follows, though if body language means anything, she was disgusted and embarrassed by his behavior. She certainly didn’t seem to be on his side.

The movie ends, highlighting the devastating effects of violence. As the lights come up, everyone near me is still stunned by the incident in the theater.

“The message of the film was definitely lost on that guy,” I say to those sitting across the aisle from me. Nods of agreement, accompanied by the words, “I’ll say.”

The two guys who took on Mr. Burly – older teenagers, to my surprise – walk up the aisle towards me.

“You shouldn’t have had to deal with that guy,” I say. “He was a real jerk.”

“Maybe I was wrong to say something,” the husher says sheepishly. He looks truly shaken.

“No. You did us all a favor. He was being a jerk,” I respond.

But he just shrugs. “Now I’ll have to talk to him,” he says, with real concern on his face.

“Nah, I’m sure he left,” I say, convinced he stormed out.

But when I leave the theater, I see I’m wrong. The dude is standing opposite the two teenagers who cower against the wall as a theater employee is trying to calm down the angry patron. A crowd hovers at a safe distance, amazed by this guy’s behavior and soaring outrage. His date is long gone. Word has it that she left in a hurry without him.

He asks to see the manager.

“I am the manager,” the employee responds. The irate man then asks for his superior, and they walk away as I overhear the manager say something about contacting the theater chain via a website.

The people filling the lobby certainly wouldn’t typically linger after a film, but the car-crash spectacle of the event has grabbed onlookers willing to come to the defense of the teens as well as to debrief like those who have suffered intense turbulence on a flight, eager to share their experience of the incident. The man takes a few more verbal swipes at patrons on his way out. At this point, we mostly shake our heads.

I walk over to the manager, fueled by a desire to assure him that the guy was a jerk and that the kids – despite their lingering feelings of guilt – had done nothing wrong.

And then it’s all over.

I hesitate before leaving the theater, cautious that the angry man could still be walking to his car, not certain I want to encounter him alone on the street. I wonder what sets a man off like that, why the anger that resides in him is so easily sparked, why it can’t die down. And despite all the violence that was played out on the screen, the incident in the movie theater resonates more.

I am fortunate to have a life where violence plays such a peripheral role. I imagine how different I would be if I encountered such events – or worse – daily, how I would learn to look upon everyone with suspicion, how I would always be prepared to fight or defend myself. The most heartening aspect of the night was the way the theatergoers bonded together. The most frightening, the way one man could put a room full of strangers on edge.

Nothing in that theater compares to the global tensions of our day. But if such a minor event can lead to such aggression, I do wonder how we can possibly begin to tackle the larger issues.

Tags: violence, films

Partners

There are days when your brain just begs to be left alone, to have a little time to itself and not have to answer questions, address concerns, and decipher emotions.

Like yesterday.

I tried bargaining, pointing out to my brain that it gets to sleep quite regularly, and doesn’t that amount to time off, until Brain replies, “Uh, who do you think is keeping you alive all night? You certainly aren’t pumping blood and breathing without my assistance. In other words, I never get a night off, so if I want to take a leisure day, I say, ‘Back off!’”

Message received. Loud and clear.

But what am I supposed to do in the meantime with a brain that only wants to attend to essentials, which, by the way, has been clarified to not include dealing with my life. Essentials goes back to that breathing and pumping stuff, with several other add ons that doctors and well-informed Googlers can easily sum up.

To fill the emptiness of being abandoned by Brain, I walked around my neighborhood and happened upon a romantic rendezvous of two police cruisers in an isolated and quite idyllic setting. That was sweet. Looking at their obvious love connection, I felt a bit jealous, but then silently celebrated their finding each other.

Venice is known for its eccentricity, so imagine my delight in spying a unique purchasing opportunity right at the end of my street.

I thrilled to be able to capture these moments, but struggled to not call up Brain, my best friend. But true to my word, I let Brain rest, figuring we’d share a laugh in a day or so.

Funny things happen in a day without a brain. You worry less. You strive for less achievement. You even dip into your child’s year-old Halloween candy.

~

Brain came back online today, and we had a little fight. I’m still trying to figure out who started it. I guess I wanted a little credit for giving Brain recharging space, but Brain told me that if I only took things more lightly, recharging wouldn’t be so necessary. With impatience, Brain tells me to relax, to not press so hard, and just find inner peace. I tell Brain that it can’t possibly understand the pressure I’m under, to which Brain plays the trump card, “You don’t think I’m under pressure? I keep you alive.”

It’s so unfair. With that little task up Brain’s sleeve, I’ll never successfully plead my case. Still, I claim that I carry the responsibility of making my life meaningful, and that’s a lot to shoulder.

Brain recommends getting a sense of humor, which I think is a pretty damn good suggestion. On my way there, I chant all the things not wrong with my life, which is a lengthy list and should definitely keep me content. Only, I have memory issues so as soon as I stop chanting, I start wanting. Wanting sucks. There should be repellent cream against the condition.

I take full responsibility for my immature perspective on my blessed life, and when I apologize to Brain for being such a pain in the ass, the room grows quiet. After a mighty sigh, Brain speaks up. “It’s my fault, too. We are in this together.” And I smile. I think that’s all I wanted to hear, that I had a partner in this mess, because maybe together we can do better.

On My Playlist

A sunny day in Venice, California, I leave home on foot wearing earphones that plaster an artificial soundtrack upon the life I pass. I enjoy the music I’ve selected, yet feel unsettled by not hearing the natural sounds of the scene around me. The beach without the roll and crash of ocean waves. Children running and playing, lips moving but emitting silence like home movies of decades past. And in seeing how my imported soundtrack alters the landscape, I recognize how much we impact our daily experiences through simple actions.

Music has long been a passion of mine, not only enriching my life in the obvious ways but also tugging at my heart, evidenced by a musician ex-husband and an accumulation of musical love interests that preceded him. But despite my affection for both music and technology, I was slow to embrace the iPod. I found countless reasons to stay away. I like the tactile and the tangible, and was loathe to relegating my CDs to dust-collecting shelves. I didn’t want to spend hours loading music and creating playlists. I romanticized my bond to having one CD spin over and over as the soundtrack to that day’s (or week’s or month’s) creative venture. And I’ve never been a fan of headphones.

But coaxed by my son and gifted by my mother, I found myself in possession of an iPod and speakers.

My iPod and I have developed a fine relationship. I’ve turned to my in-house DJ to create my playlists because I’m not anal enough to be so precise. Luckily, my son is, and he knows me well enough to create Mama’s Party Mix. I’m thrilled to have all my music in one handy rectangular contraption, and my CDs are in fact collecting dust. I applaud this technological progress.

But before the day on the beach, I hadn’t turned to headphones. And after my experience that day, I doubt I’ll use them much in the future. While many people simply enjoy having music or podcasts or books-on-tape serenading them on the go, others rely on headphones as a protective shield against unwanted intrusions.

I may not welcome all the commotion of city life – the horn honks or the squeal of tires, the shouting homeless guy or the wailing baby – but these sounds inform my life. And I question what we lose in order to maintain control over our environment, to constantly choose to bounce down the street oblivious to society’s natural incursions. The man sitting next to me as I drink coffee may be rudely shouting his opinions, but forcing myself to listen teaches me about those with whom I may never socialize. Or learning how to ask him to speak more quietly teaches us to better interact with each other.

I understand the desire to keep the unwanted out, but going through life in headphones keeps everything out, other than our carefully filtered selections, and I just don’t think that’s good for us as a society. Or as a species.

I should be forced to overhear the politics of my neighbor. I should hear the homeless person ranting or the assault of the chaos of my city, for only by encountering things that we may not like are we motivated to enact change. Only via a “Hello” to a passerby do we reach outside our world. But if we’re all armored in headphones – or with cellphones pressed to our ears – we miss these opportunities for engagement.

If we always opt to tune out that which is unpleasant, we may protect ourselves, but we also limit ourselves. I want to give an unanticipated birdcall a chance to intrude. Or a gust of laughter. As much as I love my music, I love the audible serendipity of life more.

Tags: headphones, iPod, serendipity

Inside the Animal Kingdom

Asking for love feels needy, desperate, and embarrassing, especially for someone bonded to self-reliance. But when my dog repeatedly hits me with his dainty little paw begging for a scratch, I think, ‘How sweet. He knows how to ask for what he wants.’ And I think, ‘I could learn from him.’ And when he keeps tapping me, never sated, slapping my hand every time I try to type on my laptop, I end up yelling at him and saying, “I’m working!”

A dog can teach you lots of things. Like the fine line between expressing your needs and desires, and becoming a demanding pain in the ass.

Throughout the years, I’ve encountered men who would praise me for being undemanding.

“I can take you to a party where you know no one, and you don’t hang all over me,” one short-term boyfriend told me. I took this as a compliment until I realized that I was basically being commended for being invisible.

I’ve decided that I don’t like playing the role of ‘The Girl Who Needs Nothing.’ But transitioning from a lifetime of being low maintenance to actually expressing wants and desires is no easy task. Fear sashays in. Fear of being labeled as needy, and thus undesirable. Fear of the request not being granted. And the favorite of psychologists – fear of getting what you want.

Beyond that, if you’ve buried your needs and desires for longer than you can remember, you lose sight of what they are. You even lose sight of self.

“You don’t know who you are?” a puzzled friend asks.

“Well, I have a hint, but I’ve inhabited so many identities as a means of being adaptable and flexible that I’ve lost connection with the real me,” I reply.

“Huh?”

In order to know what you want, you have to be connected to who you really are. To those who have never been a chameleon, this challenge is hard to comprehend. But when you’ve lived as a chameleon for ages, able to inhabit any persona to function in any situation, eventually you have to ask, which role is the real you? Does the real you even exist anymore? And while adaptability has assured your survival, what part of you – other than the shell – has survived?

As I attempt to write this, my dog stands by the side of my bed barking, determined to recruit me as his playmate. In his wisdom, he knows that every day he must engage in fun to maintain his sanity, to romp with other dogs or to have a mighty tug-o-war with a dishtowel from which he emerges victorious. Okay, maybe he doesn’t know this, but he absolutely requests it. So now I know it.

And in following my dog’s lead, I see that the best way to find my way back to me is to play, to see what constitutes for me uncalculated joy. As I gather this knowledge, I see what I choose for my life rather than what I agree to in order to please others. I find me.

The canine education doesn’t end there. My dog, the king of finding comfort, paces and burrows, rearranges, and eventually lies down. Content. He finds subtle differences in the lay of a blanket or the temperature of the floor. In observing him, I recognize how good he is at taking care of himself, of meeting his own needs, and when he can’t, in asking for help.

I always saw independence as one of the most admirable traits anyone could develop, that the ability to sustain self equaled desirability. But after traveling the relationship road for a couple decades, I see how people enjoy being needed by their mates, how women and men who directly ask for what they want offer a gift to their partners.

So with this in mind, I’m ready to say good-bye to the chameleon. I imagine I’ll remain adaptable, but I’ll strive to hang onto self more powerfully in the process. And hopefully learn to ask for what I want. It’s time to speak up rather than roll around on my own back trying to scratch the itch.

Tags: independence, dog, relationships

Keeping Tabs

Hopelessly idealistic, I never feared cultural differences in a relationship. I believed the rhetoric that ‘we’re all the same,’ so when I found myself in a two-year, long distance romance with a Russian whom I had met overseas, I never questioned that we could make a marriage work. After all, we’d spent extended time with each other in both countries and had weathered it well.

One day my husband told me that he found the expression “I owe you one” so American, that Russians would never say such a thing. He pointed out that Americans keep a running tally sheet.

As much as I wanted to refute his observation, to say it was just colloquial speech, I knew he was right. Americans, in my experience, don’t like to feel indebted. If someone lends us a hand – a ride to the airport, a day of moving assistance, childcare, whatever – we want to repay the favor to even the tally. If we were the one to provide assistance first, we know we won’t feel awkward asking for aid when our turn comes. And while I never consciously think this way, I can’t deny that if I end up in the giving column repeatedly, I start to feel uncomfortable with a friend.

In 1980s Communist Russia, day-to-day life functioned on neighbor helping neighbor and family members operating as a unit, even when separated by thousands of miles. My husband told me that when his oldest sister came across some boys’ shoes for sale, she snatched them up immediately even though she only had a teenage daughter. It was hard to find shoes and her younger sister had two boys. While her sister’s family lived days away by train, the older sister knew it would somehow be easier to get the shoes to them than for her sister to find some locally. Necessity bred this kind of bond beyond familial love.

Stories like this were common. As a college student in Moscow, my husband had only two friends with cars. Both were regularly called upon by a wide circle of acquaintances to make airport runs a good hour outside the city. There was never any indication that either found the requests extraordinary or that they expected any means of repayment. This was simply how life functioned. But as the American, when I came to visit I wanted to repay the friend who had collected me from the airport, and I felt at odds until I found a way. I couldn’t slide into the Russian way of thinking.

One of the advantages of marrying outside your culture is the unique perspective an outsider can offer. After my husband pointed out the American tendency, I tried to keep the tally sheet out of our marriage, to erase my cultural upbringing, but I don’t think I ever fully succeeded. While what ended our marriage resided beyond this one issue, my ears still perk up when I hear, “I owe you one,” and I wonder how often relationships – romantic and not – fall victim to this principle.

As my son gets older, I ask more of him around the house. And in his typical teenage perspective, he often feels very put out. He’s entirely unaware of the tally card, noting left and right what he’s done to help and completely overlooking how much of my day revolves around facilitating his life. As it should. I am the parent.

But in not wanting to breed a selfish child, I point out what I do for him, and without intent introduce the concept of the tally sheet. And I don’t know how to feel about that. Being part of a family – and in a relationship – requires give and take. I just wish we weren’t so aware of keeping track.

Ironically, now that my ex and all his transplanted Russian friends have lived in the U.S. for roughly fifteen years, their bonds of friendship have weakened. They still gather and come to each other’s rescue, but if one friend ends up in the need category for too long, the talk begins. Gone are the days when they were an indestructible unit, when they’d throw all their clothes into one giant pile and head off to the laundry only to return home and hold up a pair of clean underwear and ask, “Whose are these?” And if they didn’t know, they never really cared.

In a land where we need one another – yet don’t rely upon each other the way my ex and his friends once did – I wonder how to quiet the mathematical calculator in our minds. Or should we? Does this tally sheet really indicate we’re less caring in our relationships? Or does it just show that everything in life requires balance, that we use this as a way of monitoring friendships to keep them healthy?

I believe I’m as much there for my friends as those Russians I spent a summer observing through the ins and outs of their lives. And while Americans might say, “I owe you one,” – and mean it – what counts is that we continue to show up for our friends and allow them to show up for us, scorecard and all.

Tags: relationships, cultural differences, thirteen

Unbreakable Bonds

Not one to sit back and wait for life to happen, I take the reins and whip the horse…gently. Along the way, I like others by my side, so I come up with an activity and elicit companions to join in. Sometimes I offer up a dinner party of a thoughtfully constructed guest list. Other times I pick up a couple of tickets to an event and place a call to extend an invite.

Very often I get responses like, “Oh, that sounds great, but I can’t plan that far ahead,” or, “It’s too last minute. I’m tired and don’t feel like heading out.” It’s as if I am trying to make plans with Goldilocks.

Word from those who have transplanted to Los Angeles is that it is a tough city in which to cultivate friendships. People are busy, exhausted by entertainment industry work schedules, too spread out, hidden in their cars, overwhelmed by the traffic, burdened by family and children, overextended, or simply waiting for a better offer.

Some days I take the ‘not this time’ in stride and just put out more invitations. On others, my insecurity punches me in the stomach as I convince myself that if I were further up the food chain, I’d have people lining up at my door for the simple pleasure of drinking water from my tap.

But when I can collect a group under one roof, pour wine and offer experimental dishes of assorted tastes arranged for the colors they embody, it’s worth all the frustrating phone calls and dead-end emails. On the night when friends and acquaintances gather, I have created community.

As I observe my guests talking and eating, I slide into an alternate reality where time slows. I inhale the shared laughter and sway in rhythm to the music that overtakes the room like a perfectly designed soundtrack. To me, this communal moment is the heart of life.

And I wonder if others need these gatherings the way I do, if my longing for community stems from a disjointed and erratic childhood, if I’m always looking for the familial connection I never felt I had.

Through very unscientific methods, I’ve discovered that those who often feel alien on the planet felt alien in their own childhood homes having inhabited the role of the outsider taking notes from the periphery. As the misplaced child, we shook our heads side to side wondering how we ended up where we did. By the time we moved out on our own, we wondered what that had all been about.

You either dissect it for the rest of your life or become a stand up comedian. Or both.

Or you look at your past as the launching ground that got you to the present. You recognize that it served a magical purpose that turned you into a therapist or an artist, a dedicated athlete or a writer.

It’s easy to wish we could rewrite the past, to cast ourselves into arenas that we imagine as the perfect fit, to erase any pain and hurt. But certainly it’s more valuable to identify the unique traits we developed from our unique circumstances, to embrace our role as survivors of pasts and childhoods that we claim we would never have chosen.

Sometimes I wish my childhood had offered me delicious memories of shared love and laughter and unbreakable bonds with siblings, rather than fostering the hungry observer fixated on understanding human behavior. But had I found my place of belonging, I may never have developed the eye and ear that serve me in my art. And without the powerful longing for connection, I never would have become queen of the dinner party. Self-crowned.

Tags: dinner party, community, childhood, Goldilocks

Sacred Accidents

I close my eyes and type as fast as I can to invite flow and to purge. In opening my eyes, I see a land of green squiggles and red underlines, the decorative commentary of Microsoft Word. My eyes instantly leap to these adornments, granting the mistakes greater significance than when my fingers correctly connected with the keys.

And I imagine that my fingers have intervened and are speaking directly to me, spewing the words that want to be heard, voicing my true desires. The drunk dialing equivalent for the literary set.

A word waves from the page, one of my fingers’ inversions: sacred. I had intended to type scared. And I pause to consider if scared can be sacred.

In the 90s nearly every book I picked up had a title about leaving or falling, of something that would get me out of where I was, a fantasy of departure or relocation. Dreams of Leaving, Falling Out of Time, names like these. I remember nothing of the books beyond their titles. The content was inconsequential.

Staying put has always been my challenge. A gnawing sensation below the skin tells me, ‘Not here, not now.’ And in this state, it’s hard to focus, hard not to wonder, ‘Why can’t I find the life and place that call to me?’

If you walk in the inner circle and smile at your peers, if your home feels like the place that has always called to you, you can’t imagine what it’s like to never feel home. Despite living in this dwelling longer than any other in my life, despite my saying with a smirk, “I’ll be here forever,” I feel like a temporary resident, as if someday the right spot on the planet will present itself to me and I’ll sigh and smile, and say, “Yes, now I understand. I wasn’t crazy all those years of disquiet. I wasn’t home yet.”

My son told me that the reason he was so grumpy on a recent trip was because he hates to travel, that he struggles with change and adjustment. He illustrated his point by confessing to initially hating the new furniture in his room – the furniture he’d selected – because of its newness. He missed the old furniture he’d grown to despise, missed its familiarity. And in moving one piece of the old furniture back into his room to ease the transition, he knew he was taking care of himself.

Looking at his need for stability and my need for movement, I figure we must have something to teach each other.

I strive to be a good role model, yet lately in my unstructured days with no new additions to my resume and no obvious forward momentum in career, I fear I’m setting a bad example. I worry my son might not fully understand my actions of abandoning a solid career for the unknown. But in the quiet when I feel calm, I imagine I’m teaching him to take a chance, to believe in change, to believe in moving outside your comfort zone.

And in return, he teaches me. His mere existence shows me that I might need the grounding influence of being a parent, that without the responsibility of my son I could be off spinning out of control.

Scared and sacred. The words echo in my mind.

As a family, we nudge each other into new territory. I push him to move a bit more and he forces me to settle in a bit better. And while we couldn’t have picked this, I sense it’s no accident that we are paired together.

Hurry Up and Slow Down

As I drive home, the blank and colorless traffic signals for the last three blocks could have tipped me off to a problem, but they didn’t. Not in a grand way. Traffic lights go out all the time. It’s hardly noteworthy.

When I pull up to my building, flicking at my garage door opener to no response, I still don’t react. It often takes two or three presses to activate the aging device. But when I get a full view of the lightless garage through the mesh gate, an eerie quiet slides over the scene like a horror film moment. Electricity to the entire neighborhood is out.

The technology gods are at it again, roughhousing in the heavens, knocking out my utilities, forcing me to slow down and take notice.

I pull my car into the exterior guest spot, and climb the outside stairs to the building’s side entrance. Opening the door, I see the windowless hallways are pitch-black, the back-up emergency lights clearly not backing up anything.

I walk to the front of the building, to the stairway graced with windows, climb to the third floor, and think, “Two weeks ago no water. Now, no power. Coincidence? I think not.”

We all dance with spirituality in our own way.

Months ago I was speaking to my decidedly non-spiritual friend via our cell phones when suddenly – yet certainly not surprisingly – our conversation abruptly ended. My friend was at her gym peddling away on a stationary bike where I know she’s not supposed to use her cell phone, so when she didn’t call back, I figured another exercise enthusiast had sat down beside her and snarled, prompting her to end the call.

Hours later when she never called back, I picked up the phone. “What happened to you?” I asked.

“When we got disconnected, I took it as a sign that we shouldn’t talk longer at that moment,” she explained.

“This is how you find spirituality?” I asked. “By way of your cell phone?”


As I find my way into my unpowered home, I decide to take this latest environmental intervention as a sign for me to slow down. I can gamble with the life of my laptop battery and power it on to write or take a break and turn from technology.

I reach for a book. A printed book. Of the paper kind.

I often feel as if I’m cheating to step away from my own work and enjoy someone else’s, forgetting that if we never did this, there’d be little point in any of us creating. But conditioned to plow forward, I find giving myself permission to not progress challenging.

Thirty minutes later, I’m startled from my calm when the power returns in an energetic poof! My dog leaps from the sound of technology surging to life all around him, and he starts trembling as if the apocalypse is moments away. No matter how I try to reassure and comfort him, he shakes and shakes. How can I explain electricity to my Chihuahua when I can’t even explain it to myself?

And suddenly I have no excuse to keep me from work. But the characters in the book on my lap call to me, plead to tell me more of their story. They promise me I will have time to tell my own, that sometimes the best way to move forward is to stay still. And because I have been forcing and pushing and tensing and straining, I decide to listen. After all, these characters may know something I don’t.

Tags: reading, writing, electricity, spirituality

Down the Rabbit Hole

From time to time, I wander through my computer-housed address book to remind myself of friends who have drifted into the creases of my mind. I fire off an email to say ‘hi’ or to set up plans.

But sometimes I hit upon an unknown name. Henry? Who the hell is Henry? No address, no email. Just a first name and a phone number.

Faced with this mystery man, I force myself to admit that I’ve been participating in far too much disconnected dating over the past few years, mostly courtesy of online introductions.

I started out as the typical Internet dating newbie, sheepishly typing out phrases like, ‘I never thought I’d be doing this…’ or ‘I’m just giving this a try…’ or ‘Just looking around…’ And I was polite, responding to every letter that came my way.

‘I’m sorry. I’m just not comfortable with the age difference,’ I wrote to the gentleman in the sixty plus category when I had just nudged across the border to forty. When he took offense, I offered up my single mother since she was closer to his age. That ended our communication quickly.

Over time, I grew frustrated.

To the one who explained he was on a strict schedule where he sat down to work at 6 p.m. and continued to work until dawn and slept most of the day, I explained, ‘I need to have some overlapping wakeful hours with my mate.’ He thought that our differing schedules would allow me plenty of undisturbed hours to write. I thought we’d never actually see each other while conscious.

Finally, I became unyielding.

‘I’m sorry. I fear death by traffic,’ I wrote to the man who lived more than sixty miles south of me, reachable only by the 405 Freeway, a freeway often referred to as ‘the parking lot’ amongst Los Angeles dwellers.

After four years of on and off Internet explorations – and still seeing many of the same faces I saw when I first embarked, which definitely qualifies as discouraging (which I’m sure is how others feel when they see my smirking mug) – I recognize that I’ve changed, transformed much like the rotting piece of fruit neglected in the bottom drawer of a refrigerator.

In analyzing my demise, I tally what I warmly refer to as…

“My First 13 Stages of Online Dating (with notable repeats)”…

1. Shame
2. Optimism and enthusiasm
3. Mini-affair disguised as possible relationship
4. Disappointment
5. Self-delusional pep talk and another attempt
6. Mini-affair
7. Disgust
8. Proclamation that I will never online date again
9. Dry spell and self-assured ‘this-time-it-will-be-different’ return via a new site
10. Mini-affair
11. Proclamation that I will never online date again
12. Dry spell and sheepish return to dating site
13. Major disappointment in form of bad dates, bad responses, no responses, any of the above

Peppered through all these phases are more dreadful dates than I care to admit, including the one who commented that he heard chewing sounds when I ate (I subsequently polled my friends who assured me the noise I make while eating falls into acceptable levels), the one who confessed suicidal tendencies over our first cup of coffee (I was only hung up on him on and off for three years), the one who expressed disappointment that I wasn’t taller (I seduced him via one extremely suggestive follow-up email), the one who was open to a relationship as long as we confined it to one night per week, and the one who sent me a lengthy caustic email following a date where I told him I didn’t think it would work between us.

I’ve blocked out many more. The heart and mind can only take so much. I admit I displayed poor judgment in many of the abovementioned examples, but hey, I’m only human.

Or I was.

I finally arrived at Stage 14 of online dating – The Evil Transformation.

I send the perky first email, which may lead to a couple back and forths. Sometimes a red flag sneaks in. Sometimes I get an impulse, an uncomfortable sensation.

And I disappear.

If we’ve met, I find a gentle way out. If we haven’t, I vanish. Without a word. Without warning. I disappear over little things. After a restorative night’s sleep when I awake with clarity realizing that I’m communicating with a guy I suspect I have nothing in common with, where there’s no attraction, no geographic opportunity to successfully achieve a relationship. I vanish due to common sense and due to no sense. I vanish in disgust and despair. I vanish because I can, with no repercussions, aside from witnessing my own decline in common decency.

I can’t help it. Really. I‘ve been pushed over the edge by too many false starts, too many false promises, too many misses. It all can make a relatively normal person go nuts.

Nonetheless, I apologize. I didn’t mean to become one of them.

“One minute he was sending me ten emails a day. The next, he was gone. No explanation,” numerous friends have told me in variations of these words as I nod my head with understanding.

I hear the unexplained disappearance is the second most common complaint about Internet dating, trumped only by lying and the misleading photo, which I consider to be the same thing. Some justify the behavior as being part of the game, that the Internet is the Wild West. But by saying that, we just make room for a decline in civility.

And the thing is, as much as I can joke about the misconnections, poke fun at others’ behavior which is really a way of poking fun at myself as well, I see how this journey has hardened me, has made me feel a little less hopeful for connection. I see how when I slip from optimism to disappointment, I add a layer of armor to better protect me the next time around. Yet in adorning this armor, I also grow less sensitive to others’ feelings. I let my hurt justify my bad behavior.

I don’t want to be that person anymore. I’d rather slide through this life with irony and grace, maintaining a sense of decency. I'd rather be laughing. And if I ever – shoot me first – return to online dating, I pledge to better behavior, to not disappear, and to tell you about all my bad dates.

Tags: Internet Dating, disappearance

Graduation

Today I broke up with my housekeeper. It was inevitable. We’ve had our problems in the past, and while I tried to address them with direct communication – pointing out the neglected areas of my home, and gently offering rags to spare the life of my paper towels – things never improved.

After struggling for weeks with the decision to end the relationship, I decide the time has come. When she arrives, before I reconsider or lose my nerve, I leap in.

“Hi, Veronica. How are you?” I say, more manically than intended.

“Fine, miss.” (She refuses to call me by my first name, a subservience that adds to my unease.)

“Uh, today is going to be the last day I have you clean,” I say. “I can’t really afford you.” (Which is true, but for the perfect relationship, I’d make an exception.)

Blank stare and delayed response. “Excuse me, miss. I don’t understand.”

“Today is the last day I will have you clean,” I repeat.

“Sorry? I don’t understand.”

It’s tough enough to blurt out break-up words once, but now I have to say them three times, and my discomfort grows alongside my understanding of why it’s been so difficult to get Veronica to meet my cleaning needs. She doesn’t understand me when I speak, her English appearing stronger than it really is. When she’d greet my requests in the past with a smile and say, ‘Okay,’ she in fact never understood what I was saying.

And this miscommunication reminds me of the night my ex-husband and I decided to get married, the night I nearly spoiled his proposal due to another of many language barriers that has impacted my life.

In facing his expiring tourist visa to the United States from the then Soviet Union, he mentions how maybe it’s time for him to go home. But after six straight months together and two years of a long distance relationship, we understand the significance of his getting on a plane. We understand how that would be the same as ending our relationship, something neither of us wants.

“I can’t even work here,” he explains, acknowledging how his visitor status has made him feel helpless.

“I would do anything to have you stay,” I say.

“Do you want to get married?” he asks.

“Why, do you?” I respond, thinking we’re still in the problem-solving mode.

“What do you mean, ‘why?’” he asks, uncomfortable puzzlement spreading across his face.

And suddenly I’m blushing, aware I’ve massacred what for most couples is the romantic tale they tell their grandchildren. With a little more back and forth, we clarify the conversation, decide to get married, and place a long distance phone call to Siberia to share the news with his mother.

I figure if I remedied that miscommunication, I can clear things up with Veronica.

“I’m sorry. Today is the last day I will have you clean here. I’m not working. It’s expensive for me. I won’t be here when you go. Can you please leave your key on the counter?” my voice rambles, picking up speed, fueled by nerves.

She looks around, finally getting it, and seems a little sad. We barely have any relationship. She hasn’t worked for me long, but I feel guilty as if I blindsided a lover who had no idea my feelings were fading.

I quickly disappear into my bedroom. And I think how I should have known that one of our issues was a language barrier, how when she neglected to use the rags I handed her after seeing her plow through nearly two full rolls of paper towels with each visit, she wasn’t simply defying me and asserting her personal preference. Having never seen the rags again, I had wondered what she had done with them, but I was too timid to ask. I now assume she took them home, thinking they were a tacky gift.

Once it’s over, once I tell Veronica that we’re through, I feel incredible relief. I no longer have to tolerate her half-hearted cleaning and her constant cellphone chatter. I can almost imagine enjoying the added cleaning I must assume. And I think of the monthly saving of $130 as money earned, a chance to be frivolous in other areas of my life.

The thoughts are all a bit crazy, and I sense they come courtesy of the adrenaline rush from ending a relationship before it buried me. And while I see this as progress, a sign of growth that may indicate I’m ready to graduate to a relationship of a more tender and heart-felt kind, I still race from my home to avoid any more contact with Veronica.

And as I do, the woman who didn't understand 'rags' says, "Thank you for the opportunity to work for you." In hearing her flawless English, it was my turn not to understand.

Tags: break ups, proposal, housekeeper

Pass the Memories

The last time I walked into The Forum in Los Angeles – Inglewood, actually – I was still in my teens. Nearly all the concerts I attended before heading off to college were hosted at The Forum, along with Lakers’ games and other random events.

Decades later as I drive through the crowded LA streets, Yahoo! directions guiding me, I comment to my son and his two friends, “Coming here when I was your age, it seemed so far.” The streets were unfamiliar back then, neighborhoods away, an unusual distance before one could drive. But tonight, I realize it’s only a matter of a few miles.

We snake into the parking lot, find a spot, climb from the car. I force the boys to pose for a few commemorative photos, and then we move quickly past other fans and line up to enter. The sexes divide into two distinct lines for prodding by security personnel. And just like the sexism of bathrooms where it should be easily noted that women need more stalls to move through a line in a timely fashion, the single line for each gender screams inequity as men cruise through, their pockets quickly patted down, while women’s purses require unloading, jiggling, and painstaking examination.

The three boys wait for me on the other side of safe as I impatiently wait my turn to be inspected. Just like the boys, I’m eager to get inside.

The trip to The Forum has been on my calendar for months, ever since I battled online for four tickets to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a gift to my son and self for his thirteenth birthday.

“Do you miss when I was young and cute?” my son asks when seeing our two-year-old neighbor strut through our communal garage, a straw cowboy hat upon his little head with a royal blue star on the front.

With complete sincerity I tell my son that I love where he is now, that we enjoy so many of the same things, can share more with each other with genuine enthusiasm rather than with the feigned joy so many parents plaster upon their faces when playing toddler board games or attending G rated movies. We love it for them, but we don’t necessarily love it for ourselves.

But tonight isn’t just about doing something for my kid.

The Forum is noisy and crowded with none of the slick newness of the Staples Center, the cross-town rival that has snatched up many of the most popular performances coming to Los Angeles. As I navigate to our seats, I see myself at thirteen coming here with my fourteen-year-old date, a boy I met at tennis camp, accompanied by my date’s older sister and – I search to remember, a friend of hers? – to see Chicago, how that date was our one and only as I found myself talking more to the sister than to the boy. And I flash on the time I came to see Queen and went backstage afterwards, courtesy of my friend’s father, a high-level music executive, to peer at a hyped-up and sweaty Freddie Mercury scurrying about greeting friends and strangers. And Yes on New Year’s Eve escorted only by my high school date where when the lights went out, he lit up a joint and offered me some.

I turn to my son and his friends. They can’t possibly imagine the flood of memories coming at me.

I buy the boys T-shirts, $35 a piece, the night an enormous outlaying of cash with $20 for parking on top of $320 for four tickets. How did we ever go to concerts as teenagers? I could only imagine asking my parents for money on that scale, parents who weren’t raised on rock and roll and couldn’t possibly understand the grand importance of being there, being a part, creating a memory that would never fade.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers. The hometown boys bred in the tiny local clubs of the 80s where the cover charge was around $5. A time when I had friends who took their turns on stage in other home-grown bands. A time when going out for music felt so personal.

But tonight, when the lights go down, an arena erupts in cheers. The three boys beside me leap to their feet, eager, anticipating. The smell of marijuana soon wafts through the room, but not in the cloud-creating quantities of my teen days. Tonight you can actually identify the location of the smoker. The aroma adds to my nostalgia as I inhale deeply, wanting more, wanting that connection.

I turn to see the boys with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders, swaying to a slower song, and I think, “I’m passing the torch.” Tonight the memory belongs to them. At thirteen, this moment won’t fade into an unremembered event only vaguely called up with a photograph. By thirteen, the memories stick, a piece of past never feeling so far away.

And when Flea, the bass player, comes to the mike and says, “You can’t imagine what it’s like to be someone who grew up in LA, driving to The Forum, knowing you’re going to perform there.”

But I can imagine. I can imagine how incredible that feels, how it symbolizes a completed journey even if there’s much more to come, even if other milestones have appeared more impressive. This one is personal. And suddenly I feel an inexplicable connection to the band as if they’re truly my peers rather than celebrated rock stars, a connection of overlapping childhood memories. I imagine that since their dreams have been realized perhaps mine be can, too. Rather than envy, I feel optimism. I feel the pursuit of a passion, to remember to chase a dream even if you can’t clearly see a destination.

Since the concert, I’ve been walking around with one corner of my mouth upturned, an unconscious smile creeping onto my face. I’ve been sparked to life, remembering what makes me want to pull myself from bed in the morning. I imagine that someday, in some context, I can feel like Flea and breathe in my dream realized, can nod and say, ‘This is what I was looking for and I didn’t even know it.’

Not only did the Chili Peppers give me a great evening and a great memory to share with my son, they gave me hope. Suddenly the price of the evening seems like a bargain.

Tags: Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Forum, concert, memory

Water, Water Everywhere

I wake up and stumble into my bathroom, sleep in my eyes, teeth coated with morning residue, and turn on the faucet to discover a trickle of water that disappears into nothingness. Grungy and sweaty, I feel a surge of panic. I need a shower, a cleansing, the morning ritual that launches my day.

I see why they say the next war will be fought for water.

Today isn’t a camping trip of planned dirtiness. It isn’t the carefully timed water shut off with twenty-four hours notice that our building requires. This is the mystery of, “Where the hell is our water?”

After a little investigation courtesy of the telephone – another relationship I count on without question – I discover that the fault doesn’t lie with a negligent property management company and an unpaid bill but rather a burst pipe at the end of my street that has left the entire block of homes dry.

And when the Department of Water and Power explains, “We’re on it and won’t leave until it is fixed” but they can’t say when that might be, I envision a life of not knowing where or when you can find clean water, a life of being unsure whether the liquid pooled in front of you offers relief or disease.

I have the luxury of walking to the kitchen and brushing my teeth courtesy of the three-gallon Sparkletts bottle perched on my counter. I can take that water, splash it on a wash cloth, add a little soap, and pass myself off as clean. I can do this until the delivery trucks stop driving or the money runs dry.

I know my water is coming back. I feel calm. There is nothing like loss to teach you gratitude.

When all is stable, when basic needs are met, the usual result is not contentment but an invitation to dissatisfaction. Wants see an opportunity to speak up, to demand recognition, to creep into your subconscious and plant themselves in a corner to prod and harass.

And I question, ‘What in my life is want and what in my life is need?’

In looking at need, we default to food and water. To shelter and sufficient clothing. We need sleep. And when we get to the end of that list and feel the urge to add more, we feel greedy as we envision the impoverished, the homeless, children dodging bombs, and all the other ills we can call up at will.

But are we wrong to list more, to include, let’s say, purpose as a need? Love? Community? In the hierarchy of survival, why does the physical trump the emotional? To keep the body alive without care for the heart and soul is a mighty compromise.

In a land of abundance, it seems as if we should be able to do both, but despite all my resources I’ve been struggling a lot lately, unsure of my place, unsure of my future, feeling isolated and without community. And this has shamed me. A lot. Left me feeling both ungrateful and undeserving.

But as I travel and read and listen and observe, I realize I'm not unique in my feelings. I realize how many crave love and community they can’t find.

In growing up in a neighborhood where children gathered in the streets eager to play, in attending college where dorms offered up constant playmates of a different variety, I never imagined life could be so isolating. I never knew understanding one’s place and purpose would be so challenging.

Emotional pain still carries a stigma in this society. We roll our eyes at those secure in their physical wellbeing if they moan about anything lacking in their lives. We admonish ourselves for wanting too much, for needing too much.

And maybe we should, but maybe we should also feel okay with admitting the challenges.

My hairdresser recently showed me a stone he keeps in his pocket. “A gratitude stone. I touch it and it reminds me to be grateful.”

In a land of abundance, sometimes we need reminders to prompt gratitude. I’d like to say that I will never again take water or love or friendship for granted, but I know that’s not the case. I am not unlike my hairdresser. He turns to a stone and I turn to a showerless morning to remind me of how much I have to be thankful for on an average day.

Tags: water, gratitude

Shifting Gears

‘I’m bored.’

For two days, this phrase leaks from my son’s nearly teenaged mouth more times than in all his previous twelve and 7/8’s years combined. I list all he can do sprawled across the backseat as we motor from Los Angeles to Zion National Park, Utah – via a stop in Las Vegas where I also hear, ‘I’m bored’ in the hotel room as we recharge car-cramped bodies – and I think, “Is this it? Is this the arrival of the trying teen years that has been promised since my son’s birth?”

I nudged us towards nature for our last adventure of summer, eager for my son to see different scenery, a different lifestyle, to consider worlds away from freeways and media saturation, with both of us untethered to the computer. But as he grumbles past stunning scenery of towering red cliffs and vast open landscapes that he dismisses as “just boring desert,” pining to be back in the commercial chaos of Vegas where money leaked from my pockets, my disappointment and annoyance build, and I fantasize about shipping him home and venturing onward alone. After all, this is my vacation, too.

“We live pretty unplugged,” a new acquaintance tells me as we sit in her Springdale, Utah home beside our mutual friend, a home designed with views of red sandstone and rock from every room, kids free to roam the entwined small town life, the entrance to Zion National Park just a hop up the road. And I think how opposite I live, how completely ‘plugged’ in I am, how every ill seems to sneak into my ear canal and whisper its woe. How I listen and feel powerless and wonder how the human species can be so cruel.

And suddenly being unplugged sounds so nice even though in the past I thought such a life seemed irresponsible and selfish. But in this setting it appears calm and reasonable and a fine way to achieve sanity.

I said to my son, “Imagine living here,” when we arrived in Springdale and drove down the quiet main road dotted with an occasional home, a few hotels, and small shops and diners. Looking out the window he responded, “It seems like people only live this way in the movies,” and he sneered with disinterest.

I first came to Springdale and Zion in 1992 to visit a couple I’d met on the 1988 Soviet-American Peace Walk through the Ukraine, the walk that introduced me to my son’s father. Returning fourteen years later, a son in tow and greeting my now married friends and their two sons, we couldn’t help but compare lives.

“What a luxury to be able to pick you friends,” my friend tells me. “Here you’re given who there is and you learn to like each other.”

“Kind of like an arranged marriage,” I say, but she doesn’t hear me because some neighbor kid charges through the room looking for the peers hanging out somewhere.

And within one day of arriving, my son runs with these kids and I no longer hear ‘bored.’ Instead my son confesses that he’s a little jealous because all the kids in this town know each other so well, know each other’s siblings and parents and homes.

Within one day.

Before my son’s turnaround, before he asks to stay an extra day despite my offer to return to Vegas early, I was ready to call this our last roadtrip together forever, battered by his teenage lack of enthusiasm. At my peak of anger and frustration, weary from shouldering all the responsibility for the trip and my son’s complaining entitlement, I suddenly wanted a stern dad to appear in the car beside me telling my son to quit moaning and be appreciative, spewing some 50’s slogan that kept kids in their place.

And when my son grew uncomfortable and disinterested on our first hike as we waded upriver nestled by high rock walls, protecting us from sun and civilization, I imagined myself as that stern father not yielding to the child’s request to turn back but forcing him to keep moving as the adult desired and in order to make a man of the son.

But I’m not that stern man, and I can’t enjoy myself if my company is miserable. So I agree to turn around. And when I do, my son asks if I’m sad and I say, “A little because I was really enjoying it.”

And despite my fantasy that I’d earned the right to bypass the tough teen years with all my parental preventative medicine of open discussion and interests shared, I realize that I’m just like every parent who has greeted thirteen. There is no free pass.

But then there’s the teenage turnaround.

Day three. We venture up a trail, and faced with a cliff and a narrow path and a metal chain to grab for security, I must decide whether or not to go to the end. I must decide whether thirteen is when I trust my son’s feet and judgment to steady him along the trail. I must shift from protective parent to trusting parent.

We go on.

And after we make it to the end and look out on the view, we start back, and my son says to me, “Usually you say you’re proud of me, but this time I’m proud of you.” And I imagine he thinks I was scared and that I’d been brave, but what he doesn’t understand is that any fear I’d had had been for him.

When we meet my friend and her kids a couple hours later, she tells me someone died in the park that day. A twenty-nine-year-old woman went off the top of Angel’s Landing and fell 1200 feet as she and her husband prepared to take a celebratory photo near the edge.

“People come here thinking it’s Disneyland,” my friend tells me sadly.

And I think of my son’s feet on the trail and how I trusted him and how hard that was. And I think of how difficult the trip has been, all the transitions, all the near fights, the harsh words I swallowed and the harsh words that spilled out. I think of how angry I’d been with my son for acting his age rather than meeting me at my own.

On our last day I push my son to go a bit further than he wants. It’s hot, but an easy climb. No drop offs. Nothing too steep. Just sun and red dust and the promise of an emerald pool at the end.

We arrive at the top, hot and sweaty. And as we make our final descent in Zion, my son thanks me for bringing him. I don’t clarify whether he means on this particular hike or the trip in general. It doesn’t really matter.

Finally I see that this vacation wasn’t about fun and escape. My son and I tested each other and learned how much change lies ahead for both of us. Ultimately we both found a way to shift gears, but without pushing each other, we never could have done it.

Next week I welcome thirteen with my son. I’ll be sure to wear my seat belt.

Tags: Zion, thirteen, vacation

A Bedtime Tale

The boy could sleep anywhere except in silence. This presented his father with a grand dilemma for how could he keep the presence of sound so that his child could sleep while at the same time allowing himself to drift off?

In search of a solution, the father bought sound machines and multi-CD players, but nothing soothed the boy like the sound of his father’s flute.

“Play for me, Papa,” he demanded, and before his father had hit five minutes, the boy’s eyes grew heavy and he found a spot to call his bed.

Soon the father could go nowhere without his flute for fear his son would tire yet have no means to achieve sleep. His friends started calling him the Pied Piper and he countered with, “Perhaps. But I have only a following of one.”

The bond between father and son grew stronger and stronger, yet eventually the love felt like a prison, for one could not venture off from the other. And while both desired moments of independence, the body’s need for sleep always pulled them back together.

“We must break this habit,” the father told his son as tears filled the boy’s eyes. And they tried, but nothing could take the place of the father’s flute. No recording. No stand-in.

“Just another year,” the boy pleaded, and the loving father nodded.

And when the anniversary of that request arrived, the father gathered his friends as witnesses. “A party,” he called it, “to celebrate a bond of love and the loosening of that bond so that my son can find his own way.”

After cake and ice cream and a sharing of stories around the room, the father reached for his flute. The boy climbed upon his lap, and as the father began to play, his arms encircling his son, the boy closed his eyes and leaned against his father’s shoulder and fell asleep to the music for the last time.

The next several nights were torture for both father and son as the boy thrashed in bed searching for sleep.

“What have I created?” the father asked his friends. “How did I let this go on for so long?”

But they had no answer.

The following night as the father hid away from his sleepless son, he heard a sound, a sound of music coming through the crack below his son’s door. The boy, in finding his own way, was singing to himself, a self-made lullaby.