Frederick Douglass, Wamba, and Jim Halpert.
January 12, 2010 by admin, under Journal.
“I have heard men talk of the blessings of freedom,” he said to himself, “but I wish any wise man would teach me what use to make of it now that I have it.” -Wamba the Jester, Ivanhoe
It took half an hour to remember what high school reading included that line, and then, to find the line itself, all thanks to Wikipedia and the Gutenberg Project.
Fate wielded its well-polished sword last week and left me, like Wamba, riding off into the sunset without a master, wondering how best to appreciate my long-sought freedom.
As readers know, I’ve been unhappy at my job for months. What you don’t know are the gory details, because I try to keep negative comments about other people to the barest minimum on my blog. Still, if you’ve made the occasional comment about “communication struggles” with your boss, and if you’ve listed her as a reason you’re so unhappy, and if your boss happens to find your blog, and if she reads all the way back to entries made in August, and if she’s already a little frustrated…
We’ll return to those not-so-hypotheticals in a second. My boss gave my coworkers and I the week between Christmas and New Year’s off, and I spent most of it alternatively dreading or mentally avoiding the fact that, come Monday, I’d have to return to work. You know how new years are- we all like to pretend we’re starting them off auspiciously. Starting mine off in what I considered an unhealthy professional relationship hardly seemed auspicious. Yet, as I bawled on my brother’s shoulder Sunday night, I was still afraid to leave.
By Monday afternoon, however, I could tell that worrying about what to do next was this close to pushing me into an OCD brainfever. It was just time to go. I also recognized that I was terrified of telling her in person, so dorky as it was, I typed up a letter of resignation to leave in her inbox after she left that night.
My coworkers went home. The sun fell outside. My boss worked in her office, me in mine, and I kept an eye on the clock- when was she going to go home so I could give her this letter?
She emerged from the office carrying a folder, pulled a chair up to my desk, and said, “I got this email linking back to your new website…”
My head-scratching began with that sentence, and didn’t end for the rest of the conversation. She was referring to the web design portfolio site I’d spent the past couple weeks building. I haven’t let anyone know about this site yet. It’s still under construction and changing daily. The odds she’d find it on a day when the links were functional are slim, but even more puzzling is where this notification email came from. I think it was a Google Analytics mishap, but the detectives are still working on the case.
My boss continued on to say that she was sorry to learn, through the blog my design site linked to, how unhappy I’d been in Buffalo. Handing me two printed entries, she said, “Here are reasons I think it’s no longer appropriate for you to work at Young Audiences.” She handed me this entry, and this one.
Even though I disagree with my boss’s argument that the blogs are a fireable offense, I had no desire to work for someone that eager for me to leave. And, I knew better than to look a gift blog in the mouth. “I’m going to Seattle,” I said, “I’m not sure how you wanted to end this, but…”
We agreed that I would work through Friday and stick to the Seattle story as the official one. But isn’t it so ironic, or coincidental, or bizarre to find your boss approach you with reasons she thinks you should leave, on the day you’re preparing to put an “I’m leaving” letter in her inbox?
Yeah, I thought so too.
Later that week, I worked at my desk while my boss and coworker met with a potential new teaching artist in the other office. He was presenting his proposed program on the Underground Railroad. An actor, his voice carried easily from the next office, and I listened as I finished up instructions to my coworkers on how to carry out my responsibilities once I left. His conversation moved from the history of slavery, to an anecdote about a friend who had had a wonderful idea for how to improve a struggling neighborhood in Buffalo. He wasn’t able to carry it out, however, because the “powers that be” had threatened him- the idea would have lessened their own power over the neighborhood. I didn’t catch whether the friend had been threatened with losing his job, or worse, but it prevented him from carrying out an idea both just and helpful to others.
“Is he free?” the actor asked my boss. He compared this friend to Frederick Douglass, adding that the moment Douglass decided to seek liberation was his moment of liberation. Not the moment Douglass actually stepped on free ground, but before that, when he decided to disagree with the entire social structure of Southern slavery. His friend, the actor said, had not made that decision- he kept his idea to himself out of respect to or fear of the powers that be. He had not freed himself to do what he thought was right.
I dug this actor’s point. You don’t need to be shackled to someone to be his slave. I was a slave for months, to fear, doubt and anger. Anger that a woman I had considered a friend now treated me and my coworkers with such disrespect. Doubt that maybe I deserved a few of her snipes and jabs, or was being overly sensitive. And fear that if I left my job in this economy, I’d never find another one.
That Sunday night, before I wrote the letter of resignation, crying on my brother’s shoulder, he said, “Mom’s got money, I’ve got money, you’ve got money. We’ve got your back.” And I knew they did. As much as I’ve complained about sharing an apartment with them, I did walk into work Monday morning knowing that our living expenses were low enough, they were generous enough, they loved me enough, that I wasn’t going to wind up living in a cardboard box if I couldn’t find another job right away.
Love and faith can be big liberators.
So, I’m free. Like Wamba, I do wonder what to do with it. Plans still evade me. But unlike Wamba, I’m not worried. I was worried. For months. Fortunately, coincidences, fateful twists, acts of God, timing like that makes worrying seem so damn irrelevant. It’s time to go, and I’m grateful that everyone- even Google Analytics- stepped in to remind me of that.
The future will probably take care of itself, and meanwhile, I gotta admit, I’m kind of proud of my blog.
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yardstick of normalcy.
December 2, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
When I decided to leave New York City a year and a half ago, I attempted to do it the rational way. I found a job similar to the one I had enjoyed in Manhattan, in Seattle. I had grown up in and around Seattle and thought I knew the city well. Measured with a yardstick of normalcy, the plan was a good two and a half feet.
I began my new job, moved into a new one bedroom apartment in Pioneer Square, cleaned the cupboards, unpacked my bags, looked around me, and thought, “What the hell am I doing here?” After working to New York standards, I watched aghast as candidates showed up for interviews in rain-soaked bike gear, paperwork forgotten, to show portfolios full of sub-par work. The city itself felt eerily small, the buses empty, shops few and far between, downtown full of homeless people, one busker filling my new neighborhood with Pearl Jam’s “Indifference,” his deep voice echoing down the rain-soaked block, “How much difference does it make…”
Indeed. A week later my mom flew in from Toronto. She and my dad had closed up their house in Oregon a short time before. We went down for the weekend to check up on it. I never went back to that agency in Seattle. I told them my head had fallen off or something, I don’t remember. All I do remember is waking up in that bedroom in the house in Oregon, unable to remember why I was supposed to return to Seattle and that silly job. Driving up to Seattle to pick up my belongings, I laughed out loud at myself. I had completely flaked out. I had thrown away my yardstick of normalcy.
About five weeks later, I flew to Spain, and the next four months were some of the coolest of my life. Sans yardstick.
I attempted to do the New York-to-Seattle thing again last month. I had a job, friends, a semblance of a life here. Why not stick with it, I reasoned. Keep the job. It’s the rational thing to do. But my friend didn’t know, when she idly suggested East Aurora as a pretty place to live, that I was seriously going to consider it. So she didn’t mention how often she’d turned back because the wind and snow made the highway out to the small town unpassable. My brother visited the apartment with me in a rare black mood, which made me discount his announcement that the highways were awful. The landlord assured me he drove into Buffalo to work every day, and it took him exactly thirty-two minutes each time. I ignored my instinct, which told me I was moving out there to isolate myself even further from people in general and sink into a nice, juicy depression. My coworkers, the woman at the DMV who helped me obtain an NYS drivers license, and neighbors all assured me East Aurora was indeed calm and beautiful… if isolated.
And then the day I was supposed to move, I went to a board meeting, came home in a funk, took a nap, woke up thinking “You shouldn’t commit another year to this job,” walked into the living room to find my mom biting her nails after talking to a friend on the phone. He had “gone on and on” about how horrible that highway was in the winter, that East Aurora was in the “ski belt,” that the snow and wind was always considerably worse than in Buffalo itself.
Since then, I feel like I did when leaving Seattle. I can’t honestly remember what the normal thing would be to do in this respect. Or, that is, the normal options no longer have meaning or resonance. Normal would be to find an apartment here, talk more with my boss about how rude she is, try to meet a nice fellow. But I don’t want to. I can’t remember why I should. The yardstick is broken.
Instead, I think I’d like to go to Guam.
Meanwhile, I’m working on a new website, sucking on cough drops, losing weight because the phlegm in my lungs ruins my appetite (yum!) and spending lots of money on new passports, driving licenses, and other forms of ID I probably won’t need in Guam. I hope y’all stay tuned. The future is filled with floating pink cotton-candy-flavored question marks.
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how do you measure, measure a year?
November 9, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
How to measure the success of a journey? In the money you earned, acclaim you won, position you gained? In the love shared and offered? In the- wait- we know this song- it’s Rent‘s “Seasons of Love:”
How can you measure
the life of a woman or man?In truths that she learned,
or in times that he cried.
In bridges he burned, or
the way that she died?
I envy my friend in Mongolia, describing her frozen sink and sleeping bag bed. I stiffen with resentment talking to a girl at a garage sale, selling a cute purse that was her “one indulgence” while living penniless in Brazil. I look around at my belongings and see an accusation: this stuff is weighing you down.
Four months abroad last fall was not enough.
But I have not traveled again since last November because I measured the success of that journey in the lack of money and direction I had when I returned, the difficulty of loving someone in another country, the general shock of being told that I had a week to pack my bags and leave England.
I chided myself that I was experiencing the predictable result of making irrational, risky choices. I’ve tried all year to do the rational thing, to seek order as opposed to chaos. And look what that obsession with rationality has gotten me. I’ve had an apartment of my own for two of the past eleven months, and am not earning enough to decorate it, myself or my friends- this “real” job sure has improved my quality of life. We all know I could care less about my keen new title, much less the ever-building responsibilities of the position. The friends I’ve made- we’ve discussed that as well. I’m a drag to be around, self-absorbed and cranky in my unhappiness. If I put all this year’s intimacy, romance and sex into one clump, it still would not fill a month of the year’s calendar. I’m not writing, painting birthday pictures for nephews, creating new collages to hang on my wall, knitting.
I am so tired of complaining, moping, whining, sleeping, being short-tempered, distracted, stressed out, all with the goal of more responsibility, more rationality, more future-thinking, more boredom.
I talk to friends and feel bored with me.
Hard work does not bring one rewarding relationships, romantic love, familial peace, personal creative satisfaction, a sense of home. It just brings more work, and more worry that you won’t get all the work done, your boss will take away your right to do that work by firing you, or you’ll keep doing the work forever and ever without being any happier than you are today. It doesn’t matter how practical you are- life is still wacky and uncertain.
Working as a nanny in England, I had no future, no plans, no money, no apartment, and I was the happiest I’ve ever been. We can slave away avoiding risk or we can just follow our frikken bliss and take our chances. It’s a question of what scares you more: extreme discomfort, or that “quiet desperation” we all know too well.
I am not moving to East Aurora. Burying myself in the snow of a small town, committing to this job and this area for yet another year, alone, was a beauty of a “rational” way to avoid taking real risk. And that’s not my credo.
If I measure a year in happiness experienced or spread, my 2009 would not be worth singing about. But 2008 was play-worthy, and 2010 will be, too. You wait and see. It isn’t about luck, Cupid’s attentions or your bankroll, it’s about what you love the most and what you fear the most, and finding a way to seek both. I’ll get there. It’s just taking me a little longer to find my map this time.
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the dollhouse and the landscape artist.
November 3, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
My friend Uke sent me Naomi Wolf’s The Treehouse a few weeks ago. This morning I woke before dawn to visit the bathroom, and returned to bed with stomach roiling and head full of tasks for the coming work day. After half an hour of that, I turned on the light and opened the book, to finish it, tears rolling down my face.
Wolf’s father, a professor and poet, based his life and his teaching on identifying, cultivating and cherishing one’s unique creative purpose. He defined that creative purpose as anything one has a passion for, be it house painting or oil painting, sales or science. As long as one loves it, and one devotes oneself to it.
I haven’t fully identified why yet, but even talking about the book makes me cry.
Last Sunday morning, I picked my mom up from the airport and drove her down to East Aurora, a town of 6,600, about half an hour south of Buffalo. My new apartment, which I plan to move into this coming Sunday, has one room big enough for a bed and loveseat, a rounded doorway into an eat-in kitchen with white cabinets, and a a claw-footed bathtub with flowers painted on it years ago in gold and teal. A little gas stove heats the main room. The windows look out on familial yards bedecked with autumn leaves and plastic slides.
While wiping out the cabinets and sanitizing the bathroom, she and I caught up on the past few weeks. I ran a sponge over the molding with the same care I used to paint small pieces of dollhouse furniture. After contemplating various ways of leaving Buffalo for the past two months, I had finally realized that the only thing I truly needed was my own space. This apartment, in a town with a Main Street that has managed to keep it theater open and showing current movies, represents that autonomy, an escape from Buffalo’s less-than-lovely landscapes, and a symbolic retreat from the pain I’ve caused and experienced romantically this year.
I gravitate to cities to find romance, that rapturous moment in the circle of light a streetlamp casts against the night sky and looming, shadowed skyscrapers. Fairly or not, I do not expect rapturous connection from a town where men in work boots eat their hash browns with ketchup at the local diner. And that’s part of the reason I’m moving there.
Finished, we locked up the dollhouse and drove back toward Buffalo. As the thruway wound into downtown, I described an episode in The Treehouse when Wolf and her father meet with a landscaper to discuss the overgrown property around the nineteenth century house she’s bought in update New York. Instead of taking the conversation for granted as many would when discussing a project with hired help, Wolf’s father catches a stray comment the man makes about the landscape’s potential. He responds as one artist to another, encouraging him to express himself. The next thing they know, the gratified gardener has tamed the scrub, uncovered the land’s beauty, installed a tiny mailbox outside their daughter’s treehouse, handing in a bill at the end that “barely covered his expenses,” according to Wolf.
I choked up relating the story, apologizing to my mom, who assured me it was all right to cry. Ordinarily I agree, but I felt disconcerted as I blinked away my tears. I needed to change lanes and get off the thruway, but instead I was sobbing about a man recognizing another man’s vision… of bushes.
I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in a week and a half, struggling with my brother’s snoring from the other side of the room (as he does with mine), the animals hopping on and off my bed, the multitude of projects awaiting me the next morning at work, and the random aspects of a new venture, such as moving to the country, that only occur to someone at two in the morning.
Tomorrow I’ll turn twenty-eight still a virgin to car ownership, but moving to the country means I have to buy one, and soon. I’ve never driven in the snow, much less gone to the DMV to change a title, or bought liability insurance. But just when these sharp fears prick my thoughts late at night, I ask myself, Do you still want to do this? And the answer is, Of course.
The other night Dawn and I stood in a friend’s kitchen, in our Halloween costumes, hiding from the other partygoers and drinking beer from plastic cups. Leaning on the counter, I finally articulated my philosophy about this decision to move to East Aurora. This, I told her, waving my cup and teetering on my heels, is a constructive adventure. As opposed to throwing away my job, shipping my belongings upstate with my brother, and moving across the country, like I did when frustrated last year, I’m keeping my job, and carting my belongings to an apartment only half an hour away. The car is a responsibility that seems progressive, mature, all that practical stuff I rarely think about.
But until I find myself safely ensconced in that dollhouse, with a car of my own in the driveway, and a few trips to work under my belt, I’ll probably continue to lay awake at night. In those wee sma’s, I don’t know what I’ll read now that I’ve finished soaking up Leonard Wolf’s philosophy about creative individuality.
Maybe the next sleepless night I have, I’ll contemplate the tears that came when I described Wolf’s landscape artist. It sounds like a gloomy topic, tears, but like Leonard Wolf, I believe in a universe that helps those who listen to inexplicable tears. I’ve spent much of the past year trying to carve out a new life for myself and giving my mom some emotional support to do the same. And after a year of that, I’m crying on the thruway, envying the recognition another artist has received.
This is not gloomy, this is redemptive, and just in time. I’ll take myself to the dollhouse and make myself a cup of cider, while the leaves fall outside. I’ll have that long overdue talk with my inner landscape artist. She longs for someone to hear her vision of how to turn bracken and scrub into a rolling vista. And we’ll figure something out. We usually do.
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oh, it's been broughten.
October 19, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
Nothing was “right” with my life a month ago. My mom and brother were sharing the one bedroom apartment with me, I felt like a cat in heat in the dog room at the pound, like Candi had become but a memory (said with a melodramatic wrist draped over my forehead) and ducking near-constant criticism and unfair blame from my boss.
But I didn’t want to talk to any of these people about any of the things that were bothering me, I wanted to just go, go anywhere, New York, San Francisco, Milan, Beijing, Fiji. I didn’t care. Just get me out of here and away from the bullshit. I’d had a rough year. I didn’t want to talk anymore, about my parents, my lovers, the drama. Just go, before I’d say something I’d regret. But I couldn’t find a way to escape, and meanwhile…
Mr. Hotness and I started talking again. After a few polite exchanges about where the past few months had taken each of us, I lost my temper with him, and good. Instead of throwing up his hands and walking away from the e-conversation, he said he was relieved by my anger, that it sounded like the real me.
Candi ignored yet another text message, and I threw my phone at the wall, hoping she could hear it way out in the ‘burbs. After the sheetrock settled, she messaged me on Facebook, “what’s up, Toots.” We met at Cole’s. I ate chocolate madness lava extreme rich dark mousse lushness, she ate ravioli, and we talked.
One night last week, my coworker found herself unable to contain her frustration with our boss, saying a couple times, “And Palmer agrees with me.” My boss invited me, unknowing, into her office the next day, to “hear out my frustrations”… and tried to make a lot of it my fault. I’d already had the conversation two hundred times in the past month, in my head, and was firm about the amount of responsibility I’d accept for the situation.
I left winded, but fifty cent an hour richer, and working with the woman I use to work with, the boss I was friends with, the boss who is an interesting artist with lots of big ideas for the organization. Not the boss who blames me for every little thing. She and my coworker and I had lunch today after a two-hour meeting, and talked about trashy TV we love and pregnant cats in the ‘hood.
My mom’s staying in Seattle, temporarily relieving the pressure on this apartment, and dating someone whose brain is as big as this apartment.
My brother is taking professional interest in and control of his job.
My bunny’s sleeping on my bed again at least a few nights a week.
I learned that box brownies taste way better in the shape of cupcakes than they do baked in a flat pan.
I’m going to two meetings tomorrow, representing the organization to people from all over the city- yikes! New challenge, good challenge, ahhh.
I met my dad for coffee yesterday. We avoided serious topics and talked mostly of work and the weather. His presence still showed me he was willing to try. Try even though I’d told him I didn’t want to talk to him anymore, even though I’d been blunt about the problems I have with him as a father, even though difficult conversations would inevitably follow. He was there telling me what Mr. Hotness did: bring it on.
For two months I kept thinking, “If you don’t let me retreat, I’m going to lose my temper… don’t make me lose my temper…!” I don’t plan on turning into Ms. Hyde, but I also have learned from this early fall madness that I have to lose my temper, like anyone else, and people are going to deal. They’re not going to evaporate or turn into dust cubes like someone in a Star Trek episode. We’ll move on.
So bring it, bring the drama and the pain and the mess, and also the bunnies, the brownies, and the love. We’ll sort out who wins later. Just bring yourself.
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the point.
October 14, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
I work for an organization that has a roster of about one hundred artists. We book these artists at schools to teach kids about the arts. I’m talking about jazz drumming, improv inspiring, traditional Chinese theater performing, kitemaking, poetry-writing, Salsa dancing, hip-hop history sharing, printmaking-using-our-hands leading, bleeding heart, ultra-liberal, classic starving artists.
And some of them are “better” than others. One of my favorites has worked with autistic people for nearly thirty years. She has a saucy short silver haircut, wears tribal earrings, and drums. Say wha-? Well, she brings in a bunch of drums, puts them in the hands of people who may not otherwise communicate at all, and by the end of an hour, she has half of them pounding out a rhythm. After three hours together she may have most of the room. Doing this for us last year with a group of developmentally disabled students, she watched one, who had never spoken, speak. Inspired by that, we combined her program this year with dance and visual arts classes, all rhythm-themed.
We have a new intern, fresh from art school. I went with her this afternoon to photograph and one of these drumming workshops. The visit was easily the most awesome thing I’ve witnessed since I swam in the Mediterranean last summer. I’ve talked with this teaching artist several times before, she’s met and fallen in love with my mom, and I’ve seen her drum. But I’ve never seen her lead twenty-three disabled youth, between the ages of twelve and twenty, shaking maracas, rattles, beating on African and snare drums, improvising, developing and maintaining beats.
Afterward the intern and I asked her how she was doing. She said she needed inspiration, she was feeling unchallenged, and that affected the kids’ experience. Most of them were shaking or beating something, about half freely creating their own rhythms or successfully maintaining the group beat, and this was only after three or four weeks. But she wasn’t satisfied that several more classes of the same would cause all of them to break on through to the rhythm side.
I told her I’d put my thinking cap on and put her in touch with the other artists in the program, in case they could cross-pollinate. The intern and I got in the car, I pulled out of the school parking lot, and the intern asked, “So… with this program… what is the goal?”
I stuttered and stammered my way through an answer, hiding my disgust at the question as best I could. The goal, I told her, was to give them a brush, drum, dance step or line of poetry, and the opportunity to do something with it. Sometimes schools had funding to pay for several sessions with an artist, so they could work with students often enough to build to a performance or larger artistic piece. But even then, the goal was to create that- nothing more. She accepted this but added, “I thought the organization had a mission, so the programs would have that mission… to enrich curriculum…”
She was talking about programs we’ve based on subjects already taught in schools, such as the fourth and seventh grade focus on the Erie Canal. Our artists lead kids to write in the first-person as though they lived during the nineteenth century period when the Canal was a major shipping route. Programs like this, useful programs, are easier to get funded by large corporations through grants. No one wants to pay for a visual artist to just go in and spend half a year teaching kids poetry, but they’ll pay for something that relates to all that factual garbage the kids are already required to learn. It’s a sensible, functional, effective way to get our artists into schools, but it’s not how the organization started and it isn’t, when all is said and done, what usually happens. What happens was what happened today- kids get that tool in their hands and they start doing something with it. No teaching artist is going to tell a kid halfway through a class to think more about the history, math, or science, and less about the dancing, painting, or song.
All I said was, “That part’s always evolving,” as I turned off Main St. to drop her off at her house, perhaps with a little kick to make sure she exited the car super-quickly. “We’re creating more programs that support curriculum, but even then, it just supports it. It’s the arts, should there ever be a goal?”
Her agreement was half-hearted. I still have no idea what she was talking about and should have just asked her- what goal did you have in mind?
But her question, in our current educational system, is entirely logical. What is the point? Most educators and administrators would want to measure and classify them, per standardized goals. Goals that teach obedience rather than critical thinking, knowledge rather than wisdom: what year Lewis and Clark began their expedition, how to write a thousand words on a subject you’ve only studied for ten minutes, how to sit still at a desk for an hour.
Most things taught in school have no practical use in ordinary students’ lives. They could be said to have no goal. Teachers don’t show kids how to make their parents get along, their big sister treat them more nicely, their dad make more money at work, their crush pay attention to them, their shoes magically turn into the latest style, their hearts be less vulnerable or self-esteem higher. Particularly that last one.
Compare that to what you learn from the arts: to spin, jump, fly. To get things from your head and heart out of your head and heart onto paper. To express things vocally you could never just say- in song, you can say “I hate you” or “I’m angry” or “I don’t know how to fix this,” and no one will call you a weenie or a jerk or an idiot. To manipulate people, to calm down, to beautify one’s space. And whether you enjoy the particular art form being taught, or not, they all relate to each other, and any artist you meet may be the one who kneels down beside your desk, looks in your eyes, and gives you that specific compliment that your parents never bother giving you, that makes you draw when you could be drowning your sorrows in Doritos… do you see the beautiful cycle of life I’m sketching here?
I’m not basing this on theory, either. I know that doing craft projects with my grandma as a little kid are some of the happiest memories of my childhood. I know I still can’t hear “Through the Grapevine” without remembering the dance we all had to learn to it in the third grade. I know that the fourth grade teacher who required we write creatively every day introduced me to myself.
This afternoon, I watched a boy with Down Syndrome improvise a complex rhythm I couldn’t come up with after months of lessons. While the teaching artist, intern and I discussed the workshop, and the rest of the children put on coats to go home, this boy sat with us, pounding away. He’s been assessed and classified his entire life, written off by too many as incapable of contributing to our culture… or of meeting goals. But like any artist, he had something to say today, with his hands, and he had a chance to say it. I’ve been to the Village Vanguard, I’ve watched drummers at Washington Square Park, I can judge drumming as well as the next person- the kid was good. And today he had a chance to be good.
That’s the point.
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scare me.
October 1, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
“Why is familiarity worrisome?” I asked my mom, trying to puzzle out the source of my discomfort with comfort. She couldn’t answer me. That afternoon I drove through the rain that defied my flapping windshield wipers, to Buffalo’s West Side, where drug deals are often spotted on corners, and the crime lords have fireworks contests on the Fourth of July that light up the sky.
In a largely black neighborhood, at a Boys & Girls club servicing largely black families, my organization is providing a dance program conceived, managed and taught by white women. This was on my mind as I hesitated in the car outside the green and red clubhouse, eyeing the children on the sidewalk, the waistlines of their pants cresting their knees. The carwash across the street was vacant, its three covered driveways for cars empty, its sign still brightly lettered, weeds sprouting around its base. A lot next to the clubhouse had patches of concrete fading into weeds and gravel. I couldn’t tell if that was the parking lot, or part of the play field of tall, grayish grass surrounding the building. I parked in the driveway in front of the door and walked inside, to be told by the first adult I saw that the parking lot was around the corner.
I circled the block for almost ten minutes, looping and looping, growing more and more frustrated with my inability to find this mysterious Brigadoon of a parking lot, and the arrogance of we six, four teaching dancers, myself and my boss, taking it upon ourselves to educate children who grew up in an alien lifestyle, about dance. The houses I passed had dark windows, bars over glass and doors, sagging corners, tiny front lawns. Everyone I knew had a story about this neighborhood, but my boss was the only person I knew who lived here, much less had a friend who lived here. Who were we, I muttered to myself as I leaned over the steering wheel, peering through the quarter inch of rain sheeting down my windshield, to proclaim ourselves providers of culture, when we knew so little about the culture of the people we were providing it to? We were arrogant, missionaries.
“They” would hate us, “they” would be insulted by my proselytizing presence, I thought, as I finally found the parking lot and ran the ten feet to the door of the clubhouse. Shoulders and arms wet, I opened the door and was greeted with “Hey it’s another dance teacher!” Walking in, wearing pink paisley rain boots and a purple shirt under my black jumper, I blinked into the bright yellow gymnasium, several adults moving toward me. “I can’t dance,” I responded, silently chiding myself for falling back on a white girl’s defense when several black men had effectively told me this summer that I’d make a great stripper. “But I work with her,” I said, smiling at the dance instructor who is leading this program for us. A thin woman with a penchant for the tanning booth and ruffly clothes, she led me into the room where she was going to train the staff as a prelude to the program.
I sat down in a corner, surprised by the friendly smiles from the staff. There was no resentment of the missionary here. As the dance teacher discussed metabolism, heart rate and serving size, the clubhouse director ran out of the room to answer a phone call. I interrupted the dance teacher to add that even though we wanted children to leave the program knowing more about nutrition and fitness, the important thing was for them to have fun moving. One of the staff waved a hand and said, “We’ll sneak it in, they won’t even notice, they’ll be too busy dancing.” A while later she asked if they could use the dance steps with the kids on days of the week when the dance teacher wasn’t there. They all teased the male staff member about the McDonalds Angus burger he’d eaten that day, and the one he’d eaten the day before.
The clubhouse director returned to suggest we keep the session short, because the front of the building was flooded, and the water could easily flow this way.
The dance teacher rushed through the last page of her handout and turned on her CD player, telling everyone to get up. Clomping along in my rain boots, I danced along with the staff to Christina Aguilera singing “Car Wash.”
We shook those booties. Hand on hip, one foot out tapping to the beat, I thought about whether I was keeping up as well as the clubhouse staff. I thought about whether I seemed stiff and vanilla to them. I thought about why I didn’t go dancing every single weekend. Hell, with these women.
Water flowing in gentle streams into the gymnasium outside our classroom, we finished the routine, out of breath but remarking on how “jazzed up” we felt. I asked the dance teacher and clubhouse director about one performance date we hadn’t yet finalized, and then I started to leave.
The woman who’d assured me she’d “sneak in” the nutrition knowledge complimented my rain boots. I told her I hadn’t known I’d need them inside. She laughed. I left, running back to my car, to turn on the Beyonce CD I’d been listening to for the past three days, and drive home.
On my way, I wondered why I felt so high. I felt, in fact, the exact antithesis to the uncomfortable comfort I’d felt that morning. It wasn’t comfort I’d felt, I realized, but a lack of risk. The two aren’t necessarily synonymous; in my case, I lack certain comforts, but am also not taking any risks. The combination leaves me feeling asleep and unhappy at the same time.
Driving into that alien neighborhood, representing my organization at an outside venue, alone, for the first time since I started this job, meeting these women, dancing to “Car Wash,” realizing that they don’t care if it’s a white lady teaching their kids Salsa, or a black one, so long as some nice, smart, creative adult, just gets up with these kids and gets them to move, hell, that made me feel all right.
It made me feel alive. It involved risks, even if those risks were just tripping on my rain boots during the dance, saying something stupid, or being mugged in the parking lot.
Every parent teaches their child a different way to release, escape and conquer fears. My parents taught me their favorite: to move somewhere new. That may be what I wind up doing. But it’s not the only way. Telling difficult truths, having to pretend you know what you’re doing, meeting someone new, wearing high heels, learning a new dance step, sometimes just looking someone in the eye can be scary. They all can be edges on which to tiptoe, and that’s what I need. I need to be scared. If I’m not, I’m failing at living.
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my day, backwards, or, all the good and bad in a lovely heap.
August 18, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
At the end of July, my Executive Director retired, simultaneously firing one of her four employees. Another gave her two weeks’ notice shortly after. The new ED and I have spent the past three weeks learning our new roles while doing the work of five. Meanwhile, my mom and brother have just returned to Buffalo from Oregon; while they look for apartment(s), my brother sleeps on a second mattress in my room, my mom on the futon. Meanwhile, summer has finally arrived, bringing oppressive heat and humidity. This is how a “great day” plays out in that context.
With fans running in both corners of the living room, my mom, brother and I watched an episode of Boston Legal tonight, ignoring the piles of clothing, books, shoes and luggage my mom has desperately tried to stash away since they moved in last week. No matter how hard she works, the piles don’t seem to shrink, and my brother and I find drinking and socializing a lot more rewarding than putting stuff away.
Before that, my mom and I argued about nachos, the kitchen counter and air-drying laundry.
Before that, my mom brought us down those controversial nachos while my brother and I sat on the picnic table discussing our zombie movie project. I started the whole thing by saying, “We were just about to come up, before the zombies, I mean mosquitoes, attack.”
Before that, all three of us visited an apartment for rent about three houses down from the house my brother lived in before deciding to leave Buffalo in June. A two bedroom they could share, the apartment had spacious rooms, tall windows and an updated kitchen. But my brother quoted Funny Bones, saying he thought the landlord, a slender young architect who lived with his fiancee upstairs, “smelled French,” which is Davisese for, “He’s weird in an unquantifiable way I may or may not be justified in holding against him, but will anyway.” See the movie for more information, she said with a smile.
Before that, my boss and I visited a Boys & Girls Club, to discuss a dance program we’re holding in one of their clubs. I tried not to project my own terror of forced socialization on the children I saw reading magazines and playing games on laminated tables under florescent bulbs. The woman we spoke with was proud of their new ability to feed every child, in every club, a snack and dinner. She showed us their kitchen, full of industrial-sized cans of spaghetti sauce and Campbell’s soup, and I told her that was cool.
Before climbing in the car, my boss and I joked with Reverend Armand of the Episcopal church where we rent office space. He had just printed business cards on his office printer, we had just received freshly designed cards from a commercial printer. Ours were way prettier. Armand is a fellow Seattlelite who won my heart last week when I found him in the foyer, on his hands and knees, scraping paint from a large panel. He explained that a Holocaust survivor had recently done a series of paintings called “Jesus through the eyes of a Jew,” that the nearby Jewish Community Center had refused to exhibit. Armand had promptly invited him to show his work at his church. The panel was for the exhibit. “It sounded like radical welcoming to me,” Armand said with a gleeful laugh, scraping away.
My boss and I were just as gleeful about the business cards; they represented radical welcoming of a different kind. Our nonprofit’s mission is to provide school students with arts experience they wouldn’t ordinarily have. In the words of my boss, that arts experience had, for the twelve years of her predecessor’s traditionalist leadership, consisted of “white men with guitars.” Buffalo is not a white town, nor is it a folk-music-listening town. My boss and I have brainstormed for weeks on ways to recruit younger and more diverse people to our organization. Our new yellow and orange cards, replacing the sterile blue-and-white design of yesterday, beautifully symbolized those efforts.
Before that, I met Candi for breakfast, sitting outside on the first cool morning we’d had in two weeks, enjoying a souvlaki chicken breakfast and a cup of tea. We compared notes on the Brooks & Dunn concert we’d seen last weekend, the difference between men who wear boots to church and men who wear Cons to the bookstore, and how much we were overeating. The bees circled low over her plateful of syrup and my jam-slathered toast, and I didn’t even question that I had gotten up early to hang out with someone at a Greek diner in Buffalo. What else would I be doing?
And before that, I dreamed about my dad, friends in New York, and a spiral staircase in Grand Central Station that would only let you climb so far uptown, before you found yourself going down again.
Call me crazy, but I feel like it was a pretty good day, all in all.
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reblog: ask and ye shall receive.
June 22, 2009 by admin, under Journal.
Editor’s note: Ordinarily I leave posted entries as-is, to maintain an honest timeline, regardless of whether my knowledge or perceptions change. However, blogging about my decision to stay in Buffalo was so difficult for me last week, that the results show in what may be the most incomprehensible entry I’ve ever written.
Hopefully this will be the only time in my blogging career that I re-write an entry after publishing it. This is why I chose to stay in Suckallo instead of moving back to New York City.
In late May the man I worked for a year ago in New York offered to hire me back in a position similar to, but not quite as “high,” as the one I held in 2008. After complaining about the town I’d not-so-lovingly dubbed “Suckallo” for the past six months, aware that my father’s necessary job-change was about to rip the funding rug from under my mom, who had been subsidizing my existence, and not seeing any full-time openings at the financially tight-fisted nonprofit where I worked, I naturally said, “Yes!”
Which was the theme of my June 9th entry. Not only did I say “yes” to leaving Suckallo in favor of the Met, haircuts by my beloved Massimo, and Cafetasia’s spring rolls with plum sauce on 8th St, I was saying “yes” to one of the fairest, most perceptive, generous employers I’d ever had.
A man who had taught me much about client service, communication both personal and professional, and all things geek, he was just a really cool guy. When I left his employ last May, I was in love with him. We talked it over later, and his wife had since given him permission to re-hire me not once, but twice. But, the night before my nonprofit held its annual fundraising benefit, I sat at my computer folding laundry and chatting with my friend José. He mentioned Fight Club, I mentioned that the movie had partially inspired my decision to leave New York last year. He asked if I had to return, probably the only New Yorker in recent memory who hasn’t assumed I would automatically be happier in their city. “Buffalo’s been good to you,” he said. I remembered how soggy and upset my heart had felt for most of last winter, working for this man I was about to return to NYC for.
Tears fell on the laundry. When upset, I (naturally) curl up in a ball in the dimmest space available, or I wash dishes. I excused myself from the chat, that night, pitifully saying I “needed to go clean.”
When my dish drainer was full, I sat on my bed with a Sharpie and a stack of index cards, classic tools of the indecisive. On one card, I listed every association I had with New York, and on the other, Buffalo. As I drew my little spider charts, I discovered that I wasn’t struggling with doubt about New York. I knew that city, its attractions and its dangers. I was struggling with Buffalo, afraid to commit (by saying “no” to New York) to a city I’d belly-ached about for months.
Every issue I listed on the Buffalo card, however, had ceased to or was about to cease to be an issue.
Yet I had said yes to him. I loved this man, perhaps less than before, but still enough to make me feel obligated to please him. He had based business decisions on my returning. I needed the work, I couldn’t afford to live here. I had to return.
The next day, the Benefit. For several weeks, this silent auction and dinner had commanded the attention of myself, my Executive Director, and half a dozen Board Members, including two or three elderly women who collect the most gift certificate and theater ticket donations simply because business owners justifiably fear these grandmotherly types will collar them and check behind their ears for dirt if they hesitate. Held at an elegant, if overcooked, restaurant on “Buffalo’s Historic Harbor,” it invited more than a hundred teachers and moneyed locals to bid on gift baskets, eat salmon, and pretend to listen to speeches about the value of incorporating dance into grade school educational programs. Having processed nearly all the items and created most of the information about attendees, I found myself directing the nubile (as my pervy brother would call them) “Junior Volunteers,” organizing the gathering of won items, and generally bossing people around.
Somehow, my coworkers and I collected credit card and check payments, sent everyone home smiling, safekeeped all the important slips of paper, and sat down around ten to eat our long-warmed dinners and drink from the bottles of wine we were thrilled to learn we’d get to bring home.
It was an opportunity to wear a cute little purple dress I’d bought in Vegas (the Value Village there has really cute stuff, not surprisingly), chat with strangers, drink up a convivial atmosphere, and smile like I meant it. I got home to find an email from Uke, giving me permission, literally, to say no to my former boss, no to New York, No, No, No.
Reading it, I finally admitted to myself that I was afraid to say no to that man because I didn’t want to offend him. Tsk, tsk, I thought. Either one learns in middle school that pleasing others is a disastrous motive, or one spends the rest of one’s life buying clothes one doesn’t like because one doesn’t want to upset the store clerk.
The next morning, he emailed asking that we talk details that afternoon. I knew that if I answered the phone that afternoon without a plan, I’d be in New York next month. I went to work, suggested a meeting in the “outside conference room,” as my boss calls the porch where she takes her smoking breaks, sat on the ledge while she lit her slender Capri 120′s, and told her my situation. I needed full time work, which I had not when she hired me two months ago, and not only that, had the opportunity to do interesting work in New York. But, I didn’t want to return.
Instead of saying, “That’s really too bad, let me ask my friends if they have any other part time jobs you could supplement this with,” or even, “Sure, you can work here full-time as a bookkeeper or Manager of Filing Cabinets,” she revealed a (still top-secret) change afoot that would open most of the work in the organization to me as potential directions to grow. She said that, meanwhile, I could start full time at a dollar more an hour the next week.
Ask, and ye shall receive.
I have forty thousand rejection letters from LA producers, vouching for the fact that wishes are not granted based on the volume of your desire or even your effort. I also have experienced forty thousand moments like these, where a seemingly impossible situation simply becomes possible. Realizing I would survive offending my old boss, deciding to take a chance on this crazy town, and choosing to continue along my creative-flakey path, I did say, “Yes!” Just not in the way I’d originally planned.
I said “yes” to working at an arty nonprofit instead of servicing the advertising industry; yes to Champagne Thursdays with the Rainbow Brite Sisters; and yes to discovering just how many more friends I can make in this rugged town, where the weather softens no blows, people scream at each other in traffic, and strangers say hello as you pass them on the street.
