lifesaver

Yesterday I spent nearly 10 hours in a conference room at the Red Cross in Manhattan, getting my CPR/AED Professional Rescuer certification.

I KNOW, right? ME? I nearly passed out last year when Stuart cut his finger on a Guinness bottle. My self-enforced fear of blood (especially blood of someone I love so much) made him hide from me the slice he cut into his thumb a few months later, until it was too late for stitches and he got yelled at by an ER doctor and it was all my fault. MY FAULT!

So I was a little nervous about the CPR training. For the first few hours, I sat there imagining all the way my students would horribly injure themselves, reading over and over the part of my packet that reminded me that once I was certified, it would be my legal duty to use my skills on the job. ACK.

Something shifted between the rescue breathing practice and the conscious and unconscious choking. By the time I got to CPR itself, and using a defibrillator, I felt strong and confident. Nevermind that I got lightheaded during the presentation about a heart attack and cardiac arrest, imagining my dad's eight years ago. (I mean, duh, I cry in father/daughter commercials, this is to be expected.)

I really nailed CPR. I started feeling confident with my rescue breathing. And hey, I aced the test! I am the valedictorian of saving lives. Nyah nyah. In some seriousness, I only realized afterwards when I was explaining it all to Stuart (and making him lie down on the floor so I could practice safely turning someone over) that this has scared me for a long time. Not knowing how to respond if someone I'm in charge of, or someone I love, gets hurt and needs my help is the stuff of my nightmares (and of course, lately, there have been dream turtles, but I'll get to them in another post).

Yesterday made me feel like if the situation calls for it - if one of my kids gets hurt - I won't have to run around in a blind panic for lack of a more productive reaction. I'll probably know exactly what to do. They say adrenaline always kicks in anyway, that even before this training I would have been more collected than I imagine (since anything is more collected than my nightmarish exploding-head technique). But the card in my wallet reminds me that I have what I need now, just in case if I didn't before. It's very empowering.

I think I'll do First Aid next, and conquer that little "See Blood, Promptly Faint" problem. It should come in handy when the universe bequeaths me seven sons and all they ever want to do is run into walls of knives.

the snail race to sunset park

Last night we sat before a dozen or so total strangers and they looked deep into our souls, and then decided as a group that we were welcome to spend our own money in the pursuit of living next to them and sharing their bills.

To you blessed people who have no idea what I'm talking about, we were approved to buy an apartment in a New York co-op. Aside from my genetic predisposition against anything ever done by committee ever (because "committee" is really just a few letters away from "commie"!), this is very, very exciting. Well, mostly it's exciting in that way that watching snails race across Montana would be exciting.

Because, people, buying an apartment in a co-op building, it's SLOW. It's slower than snails. Here's how this whole thing started.

Back over the New Year, Stuart and I house-sat for Beth and Eric and the indomitable Dexter. This accomplished several things - it made me love Method cleaning products, and it convinced Stuart and I that moving to a new neighborhood might be really fun. Also, having a dog is the bomb.

Putting aside the gut-wrenching agony that is leaving a neighborhood that I love so much it's almost a character in my life, we started looking on the web at places to buy. Yes, BUY.

A few weeks later on a rainy Saturday in January (yes, four months ago), Stuart and I very grumpily got off the subway in eastern Sunset Park, near 8th avenue, and started towards our first visit together. We got there and trudged up four flights of stairs in a simple, well-built light brick building, and the realtor opened the door and showed us, basically, this.

[For those of you who crave more, here's my steady but fast video and Stuart's thorough but Blair-Witch video.]

It's a pre-war beauty with parquet floors, french doors connecting the living room and office, a fully renovated separate kitchen, with high ceilings and beautiful walls, it's a block from Sunset Park and 15 minutes from Park Slope, and we fell head over heels in love. So in love that we didn't want to see anything else.

We did. We saw about 17 other apartments that week. The following Saturday, we did another tour of the Sunset Park one (the one we kept referring to as "ours") and we realized we'd been right the first time. We made an offer the next day, and it was accepted. And here we are, four MONTHS later, with all the straggly little pieces finally coming together for a closing. Oh, that blessed closing! When, incsh'allah, we will get keys to this beauty and it will be totally ours.

People, we are moving. The snails are crossing the finish line soon and I am so freaking excited.

Plus also, now we can get a dog. Which, you just KNOW, is the real reason we're moving.

pallas athena

Channeling my inner goddess for good luck and wisdom tonight.

e pluribus unum

It's finally feeling like spring here in the Big Apple. We got teased a month back with mild sunny days and then we were plunged like screaming newborns at baptism into the cold rainy gloom again. It was torture.

Today, Stuart and I dragged our pale winter-weathered selves blinking into the sunshine, with thermos(es?) and books and blankets in hand, to Astoria Park for the afternoon. For reasons I swear I will go into soon, as soon as The Jinx Cloud has passed (hopefully this week), this is* our last spring in Astoria and I've been getting very nostalgic at every turned corner **. The flower guy knows me! There's a new cafe! How can I ever leave my home of five years, that I love and identify with so much?

Which brings me to one of my favorite things about Astoria. It's this modern day Babel. I get this flush of satisfaction when I'm in a shop and I hear the proprietor talking in an accent, to someone else with a different accent. Neither of them are speaking their native tongues. It's Greeks and Brasilians and Czechs and Poles and Pakistanis and guys from Jersey (ha) and every stripe of person you can imagine. I come from a huge mishmash of people, too, so I guess I feel at home here. I mean, I guess the whole city is this way but Astoria pulls it off with such charm and ease.

The subway was really crowded last night, at 1 AM. It's hard when that happens because I'm exhausted and quiet and I don't much feel like listening to you talk about that stoned guy, at the bar, MAN, he was so wasted! But I reminded myself, this is why I love it here! Enjoy this! All these people and their stories, people with whom you'd never socialize, with whom you're nonetheless rubbing elbows.

And it's true. It's comforting. I guess sometimes it's irritating when the crush of humanity is everywhere but the alternate - living in a world isolated by cars and parking lots and subdivisions - doesn't make me feel part of the world around me. In the park today, a few Brasilians walked by; a guy was asking a woman about Ceasarians. He noticed me watching, must have seen that I understood the language, and laughed and said, "curiosity!" in Portguese. I answered, "killed the cat!", right back. We laughed.

The park was full of noise. A jazz trio competed with the kids practicing soccer and the parents playing with their kids and the passel of teen girls cooing at dogs and the trains on Hell Gate and the cars on the Triboro and the speedboats whizzing by on the East River. Stuart raised his head from drawing and laughed, pointing out that this is what passes for quiet in New York.

And my god, I love it.

* Probably. PROBABLY. I can't talk about this without killing all of you before your eyeballs finish the sentence to avoid the Jinx Cloud, also known as I Am Of The Greeks And Thus Superstitious. But I've decided that the blockage on my brain is too great and after Something Which Should Happen This Week, I will tell you about it without needing to kill you. Or use quite so many capitals.

[ed note: By the way, does anyone know how to do those nice linky pop-up note things? I love those and they'd make these asides a lot easier, don't you think?]

self-aware

This little exercise is fascinating - I've picked six words that describe the way I see myself (too bad "Slightly Neurotic" wasn't one of them and "nervous" was too specific) and now it's up to you, friends and Internet strangers, to pick six that you think describe me, and we see how well we agree.

One disclaimer, though, if you pick "happy", I will mock you. Happy is never an adjective that I think should be applied to personality - only to mood or periods of life. A person described as having a happy personality is really just someone with a cheerful attitude and a good grip on their personal baggage. Happy! Pah! Who's happy?

Fire away, and if you make your own Johari, leave the link in my comments. I'd love to see it!

[idea carried on from Stuart, who provides me with so much useful wasted time on the Internet].

quick, quick:

Someone get me two of everything.

Long ears, along the side, please*.

cranktastic

I'm fighting a cloud of maudlin today. Maybe it's that school starts again after a whole glorious week off in which I was both lazy and productive and enjoyed both immensely. Maybe it's other annoying news I can't really discuss here, but will soon, I promise.

But I actually think it's hormones. The thing is, I don't get down or depressed easily without something concrete bothering me. But from about 9:30 last night to now, I've felt fragile and tense and irritated with everything. I've taken to moving very slowly and deliberately through the apartment because one tiny bump or misplaced glass or scrape on my shin will test my patience, to the point where I think, "I should just start crying and get it over with".

Even pulling on a sweatshirt and getting my head stuck in the arm hole made me cranky. And there's no good reason! It must be hormones. I must be hormonal. And it's exactly the right time of the month, too, which is weird since I rarely get affected by that. But I'm hormonal! And tetchy! Going for a run, making a cup of tea, trying to get some writing done, even cleaning the bathroom counter (shuttup) didn't help. I didn't write enough, nearly enough, because the craptacular mood kept getting irritated to the point of frazzled by all the construction going on in a one-block radius to the apartment (THREE! THREE DIG SITES!).

I mean, maybe I do have a bee in my bonnet that I haven't placed my finger on yet. But maybe I'm just hormonal. I feel like I have to give myself permission for this dark cranky mood, justify it somehow, absolve myself from not snapping right the f! out of it. Is that good, because it means I'm usually functioning at a much higher happiness level? Or is it bad that I can't just let myself be in a funk?

Who knows. Now I'm going to class and that means trying not to take it out on seven year olds.

Tried-and-true funk-lifting methods, feel free to share.

cultural detox

I think Cairo was a hard assignment for my family. I’m not sure how my dad felt about returning to the town he’d grown up in, but I know it was hard for my mom, being there without me. Wives, you know, aren’t really supposed to work on overseas assignments, but my school and my formation had always been important to her, and she’d done a marvelous, energetic job at both, and now she was there without me, since I was in college. So it’s weird when I mention it on our laundry list of overseas assignments, since I didn’t really live there.

But I did visit, four times in all. This was the fourth. Beth came with me, during the Spring Break of our sophomore year. I had never bonded with Cairo the way I’d bonded with the other countries we’d lived in. It was loud, god it was so loud, and it just never seemed to end. Not the noise, not the dust, not the sprawling poverty. I could see, objectively, its splendor and chaotic energy and the deep veins of its history but mostly, I was bored and lonely when I visited.

But I’m glad my last visit was with a newcomer to Africa, someone whose eyes were wide at every turn because it was all unfamiliar to her. Cairo through Beth’s eyes was at its best - captivating and exotic. My mom lined up stellar day after stellar day of fun and history and a little dash of decadence. It’s from whence I get my gracious hostess genes. We had a ball.

And my mom, in her ever-aware sense of hostessing, realized that the week we were visiting coincided with Eid el-Kbir, a period a few months after Ramadan that’s usually celebrated with sacrificial animals and donating food to the poor. It’s also marked, at least in Egypt, with dipping one’s hands in blood and marking walls, cars, homes. Hey, we were visitors - we never judged - and of course, this being our third Muslim country, my family was more than used to cultural differences. Only, Mom was a little worried about how Beth would react to all the, you know, animals. So she booked our last three days at the newly-minted Hilton resort, on the mouth of the Red Sea. Some cultural detox, if you will - in my family, nothing says home like the Hilton.

Of course, Beth was fine. Beth is open-minded, fearless, and the few bloody hand-prints or carcasses we did see weren’t anything to go crazy over. Still, that little gesture of my mom’s didn’t go unappreciated. For two days, we watched dolphins share waterspace with honking big oil tankers, ate home-brought chicken pie on the beach, and cavorted on the random trampoline. I remember it as the first place I read Harry Potter (in a matter of hours), a quiet, nearly empty resort that was basically all ours.

And the jumping photos sort of became a theme.

we interrupt this week's project...

... for a brief musical number.

Oh, the geeks. They are my people.

still standing

I think my luck started to turn when we got assigned this dorm, in the twilight days of my miserable junior year. The year had been bad for so many reasons I can now assign, post-apocalyptically, with collected clarity. As much as I adore SLC for its education and wide-open sense of learning, it can be a difficult place socially. To any alumni who wasn’t drunk all four years, they know that’s like saying the West Bank is an iffy neighborhood.

The story is typical - my junior year was mostly crappy and depressing. I didn’t talk to the people that could help and soothe and rescue (my parents and Beth) and I spent far too much time talking to people who couldn’t (names redacted). But then I got back for my senior year and the tides had changed. I had a confidence I’d picked up somewhere in the lowest depths, I had stopped running the newspaper which freed up, oh, my entire life. And I was living in this fabulous, fabulous apartment with only two other people and a turn-of-the-century greenhouse out my back window. It was the very last year McMasters was standing, and was all mine.

This view is still precious to me. Walking across the Slonim House lawn on my way back from class or conferences or coffee, looking at that old sloping roof and knowing my bed, my refuge, was there. I had a fire escape landing outside my room, with its own door and everything - and although my two uptight roommates didn’t like me using it since it didn’t lock from the outside, I used it a lot anyway.

It’s a pity that the apartment was the scene of the total dissolution of a friendship with a girl I’d known since freshman year. If I can speak in therapist-talk, she stopped being able to handle my truth just as I was growing the balls to show it, all the time, and damn what people expected of me. She broke up with me, even, in a nasty Dear John letter left on my desk; when I showed it to my therapist, foaming with indignation at the leveled accusations, Maureen wisely asked, “do you want to KEEP this friendship? No? Then she’s done the work for you.” A wise point.

It was a good year regardless. There were long talks with boys that didn’t mean too much, there were hilarious late-night photo sessions and cigarettes smoked happily off the back stairs (damn the roommates again). My car was parked right downstairs and it was my ticket to all the fun I had that year, free at last from the heavy burden of the paper. The room, in my memory, was always littered with color test prints, piles of clothes, and nothing but true friends. It’s a trend I’ve held onto.

I know SLC needed the arts center they built on that lot, but I wish that apartment was still there.

packing up

My sophomore year at Sarah Lawrence started at the crack of dawn in New Jersey, when I left my parents sleeping at a family friend’s place in Union and drove to Westchester. I remember telling them, grown-up that I was, that the first few hours of Registration Day were going to be a zoo and they were better off joining me later in the afternoon.

How prescient. I got to campus and ran smack into a housing crisis. My gorgeous off-campus dorm house, a rambling early-1900s home rented from nearby Concordia College, that I’d expressly picked because I’d get an enormous room all to myself, was suddenly equipped with a roommate paired in haste and probably not thoughtfully, either. I would have thrown a full-grade tatty but my situation was nothing compared to the students allotted rooms in the living rooms of other dorm houses, on campus. After a quick conference with Beth, my freshman roommate and anchor of friendship on campus, we proposed that my unknown roommate take Beth’s single on campus, and Beth move in with me over at Ressmeyer. Everyone was happy.

And the year went on. Eventually, a room cleared out downstairs - oddly enough, by an unnaturally quiet girl named Alexis who would have a profound and sometimes devastating impact on my junior year - and Beth moved into it. It was an amazing year, living in this glorious old house ten minutes from the incestuous bubble that was SLC. We had a big kitchen, a wraparound porch, and street parking. We had Trader Joe’s down the street, late evenings on the stoops with beer (never mind being 19), and long, funny talks well into the night.

It wasn’t a perfect year, it never is. Two of the friends we had in that house aren’t really friends any longer, for very different reason. One had her own layers of baggage about Beth and me, but mostly aimed at me. Our friendship dissolved in rather annoyingly close quarters, my senior year. Another brilliant girl in the house was a mixed blessing housemate - genius and funny and full of surprises, but also going through her own high-level trauma that impacted Beth more strongly than me. Both of these once-friends are names and memories that draw difficult ambivalence in us. They’re names and stories with which Josh and Stuart are familiar.

So the year came to an end, and this is Beth moving out of her sun-drenched room and into her forest-green Honda Civic, packing to head back to Texas to find herself, and Josh. It’s the first picture I remember taking of Beth with her adult confidence, a new mantle she was trying on and which she still wears so well today. There’s that Ben Folds Five teeshirt of which I was always so covetous. And those worn wooden steps that I sat on, or dashed down, or dragged groceries up.

It feels like my entire sophomore year, in one frame.

the last days

I don’t know who took this picture. It was the very last day of classes at ISK, in Nairobi, and no one was doing any work. I was with my friend Erik on the left, whom I’d wisely did not to date and is thus still a good friend, and the great first love of my adolescence, Siegfried, who was looking at my yearbook.

I think Siegfried was being coy, in this photo. We’d broken up back in September of the previous year, halfway between my birthday (August 31) and his (September 15). Really, I’d broken up with him. I’d found myself attracted to another friend of mine, a Brazilian, and the damage was done - Siegfried and his crazy moods were getting too much for me to handle and the Brazilian seemed like a sane option. Of course, he ended up doing far worse damage but that’s another story I may never tell here.

So Siegfried, with all his Italian passions (and, I suspect, a small dose of bi-polarity), absolutely stopped talking to me after the breakup, especially when I started going around with the Brazilian. I lost another, far more valuable friend in the breakup. It wasn’t until our end-of-year dance, in April, that Siegfried and I mended ways, as friends. Things weren’t perfect, of course, because of afore-mentioned Italian passions, but in this photo, at least, we are cautiously friends.

It’s funny to see me smiling because there aren’t many like that, from the end of that school year. I had a lot of miserable baggage, created by small schools and smaller minds (other international-school brats know of what I speak). When my parents announced we were moving back to Houston for my senior year, directly after this, I was almost physically lighter with relief. But it was a tough balance because those two years in Nairobi had taught me so much about myself and what my limits were. I grew exponentially in those years, and going back to the Houston of my freshman year felt like cramming back into a tiny, cheerleader-shaped closet.

So I’m smiling, maybe because it’s the last day of the year, maybe because my traumatizing haircut (a direct result of the breakup with Siegfried, who always swore undying devotion to my long curls) was behaving itself, maybe because Erik really was that awesome of a guy; a friend I made in that last year when I was shedding friends like snakeskin.

I don’t know what Siegfried ultimately wrote in that yearbook, and I don’t know where he is these days. I always remember him as a well-intentioned guy who loved me very much in his own manic way, a boy I would later describe as a Knight of the Round Table, hundreds of years too late. I can’t be as generous about other boys I loved, but that’s how we learn, right?

Anyway, it’s good to see myself genuinely smiling on one day that year.

maggie's surprise

I lived in Austin for three months in the summer of 1999, all by myself in a rented apartment on Guadalupe and 39th Street. It was an experiment in adulthood - I learned how to make dinner, manage an internship, pay rent, keep myself in line. I also learned how to not drink too much and how to change the damn tires on my car so that I didn’t hydroplane on I-10 going 87MPH - well, I learned that one the hard way.

I lived there, for all intents and purposes, with my then-boyfriend Alex. We had been together, long-distance, for my first and his second year of college, and I think that summer of adulthood was our undoing. My best memories from it very rarely involve him - they’re about riding around on William’s Vespa, or working for Ken, or dropping watermelons with Erin and Rachel. My worst memories of the summer very much involve Alex - realizing I would completely go to pieces if someone left the house during a fight, having to lie to his parents about whether he was living with me (he was! Rent free!).

One scorching Austin day, we went to the PetsMart to get food for one or another of Alex’s beastly little beasties (he was a fan of snakes and snapping turtles. Why I thought this was The Big One, I don’t know). There was a woman giving away puppies outside, swearing up and down that they were eight weeks old. They were two weeks if they were a day, and Alex and I felt so bad, we took one home immediately, checked for male genitalia and finding none, pronounced her Maggie.

I think we got a dog to save our relationship. And to be fair to Maggie, she was a little godsend. Puppies are adorable, and she took our minds off our ever-increasing fights. Of course, I took far better care of her, making sure she was fed and weaned and potty-trained, teaching her to walk around on a leash and not bark when I left the room. Alex mostly played with her. And then one day, about a week before I packed up to leave and after Alex had finally moved into his own place (his backyard in the photo), Maggie’s balls dropped.

It was shocking. Alex thought it was funny but I was traumatized. My sweet little Maggie was a boy. And she wasn’t even my boy anymore - she was Alex’s, staying behind in Austin. He promptly named her JB, after Jimmy Buffett. I have no idea where she is now, and she’ll always be Maggie to me.

Alex and I broke up less than a month later. Although when it happened, I was upset, it was like the anguish of amputating a limb that’s more pain than its worth. We were never right for each other, which was duly proved that summer. Still, I was glad to have Maggie in my life, before she became Alex’s JB.

wayback week

I spent some premium time with my scanner this weekend, getting nostalgic on myself with photographs from my high school and college years. Then I decided, what the heck, I can't seem to blog about the present so voila, I'll blog little snippets from the past.

Five posts, about five photos, and I think pictures aren't really worth a thousand words but I did decide they were worth five hundred, so that's what they get.

I was a lot more honest about friends and lovers gone by in these posts than I necessarily usually am. It was a weird feeling to be both honest and delicate about people who might be reading it - I found a hasty but nasty little blurb about myself on the site of a person I knew in college recently, and I guarantee you, it's not fun and I wouldn't inflict it on anyone. But the friends and lovers I lost in these stories, they know what went wrong, and I was very careful not to write about any clashes of will that weren't well discussed and understood at the time. Let's hope I don't pay forward any hurt feelings.

All in all, it was an interesting exercise - why is it that it's so easy for me to write about life and friends and experiences and such a teeth-gnashing drama cycle to write fiction? Why was I wearing my hair like that? Why DID I date him?

And other critical questions. Few of which are answered this week. Stay tuned, I'll publish one every morning. And let's just be grateful I've got blogging material, even if it is a decade old.