Confession: I am a TV junkie.

Last fall, I started going into an office once a week. I'm self-employed, and usually I work at home, comfortably nestled into an alcove of my kitchen, with the freedom to move to the sofa, my bed, my backyard, or a cafe any time I want. Inconveniently, a few weeks into my new routine of semi-regularly sitting at a desk all day—in a small room with an open door that once would've felt like a far cry from a cubicle but now seems a lot like the walls of a box around me—a few weeks in, I made the mistake of renting the first season of The Office (American version) on DVD.

I couldn't help but watch each disk in its entirety every time I sat down to view an episode; the show is just that good. It doesn't hurt that the lead actor is adorable and endearing, nor that I have gone to school at some point in my life with four of the actors, making it intriguing to study how they've aged. But it did hurt my ability to get the job done in my own office experience. That first day I went in after watching the show, I dangled my feet from my desk chair, kicked myself side to side in the seat, and looked helplessly down the hall in search of, you guessed it, Jim Halpert. Even Dwight would do.

The Office is not the only show that's taken over my brain a bit more than the educated part of me thinks is healthy. It's hard to avoid letting Grey's Anatomy get you assessing men in a new way: McDreamy? McSteamy? McMeltMeToMyFeetsies? Then I watch some 30 Rock, and suddenly no one I know seems funny anymore, because who on Earth can rival the humor of Alec Baldwin? (Who the heck knew he was a comedian?) Now I see no need for anyone else to even try his hand at making me laugh; no one can do it like he can.

Except, well, except Chuck Bartowski, the main character on one of my latest addictions: the eponymously named CIA spoof show that features a rather hotter, funnier version of the first man of The Office. With its ludicrous action scenes and forbidden but budding love between the operative and the informant, it's like a chilled-out, goofy, witty version of my long-time love, 24. And thankfully not as soap-opera-y as last year's new favorite, Lost, which I also watched on DVDs from start to finish (two seasons) in about two weeks so I could then watch season three as it aired on tv.

Now you might think I've reached the end of the list. But the truth is, I also love Men in Trees, enjoy Big Shots, Private Practice, and Ugly Betty, find weak and pathetic but still follow October Road, and do in fact think no show in a decade or more has been better directed, written, or acted than Friday Night Lights (which I'm so fond of right now that you may someday see a separate post just about it). And while I feel a little bit ashamed of how many hours a week I seem to be spending in front of the tv (or the computer, where I watch most of these shows without many commercials, cutting their run time significantly), I know it's just my way of unwinding after packed days of working intensely, volunteering out the wazoo, socializing an awful lot, etc. I lead a crazily full life, and sometimes the brain just needs to shut down from it all in an enjoyable way. And I have to say, I appreciate the fact that there are finally decent enough shows on tv again to be good for that. (Just wish there were a few fewer...) After too many years of the reality show take-over of Americans' brains, I am delighted to find that there are still people out there who can write a good episode, and another one, and another one. (I hate to admit it, but I think the 24 writers could take notes.) Now I just wish the powers that be would do the right thing and get those writers back to work! I might run out of episodes soon, and then what would I do?!

(nostalgic)

On Monday, a friend of mine moved from San Francisco to Boston. As I’ve spent my 2+ years in San Fran marveling over the number of people I know from Boston who have re-settled here, it seemed quite novel that someone was following that path in the other direction. And I was tickled by just how much this excited me. This friend will be going to grad school at MIT, so her life will revolve around Cambridge, a town that feels just as much like home to me as Atlanta does. It, too, is where I grew up, in a sense—not in childhood, but into adulthood.

For ten years, my life took place there; experiences that shaped my sense of self unfolded there. Some things about me might never have formed quite like they have if not for the life I led there. I say that about things I am glad for and things I am not; life will be a mixed bag wherever you lead it. But for a very long time (except, each year, toward the end of winter), I sure did love that being the setting for my life. For a long time, I thought I could never like anywhere quite as much.

I went to the bookstore to get this friend a guide book to Boston, and I found myself reading all of it, making mental notes of restaurants or museums it had overlooked, recalling the best time of year to go to this place or the best dish to order at that one. I stood in the bookstore and took a serious walk down memory lane, seeing the past through Walden-Pond-on-a-summer-day-filled glasses. I did get restless living in the same place so long, but I have an awful lot of good moments there to remember.

The best one, perhaps, was the last one.

It was an October morning. I had slept on an air mattress in my otherwise emptied bedroom; Amy had slept on the futon in the living room. We got up at 6, on schedule, and packed the last few bags into the car. We ate breakfast; we agreed on six starting CDs for the player; we hugged my roommate goodbye.

Before we could drive away, confetti filled the windshield. My landlords leaned over their rickety front-porch railing and waved, dribbling white paper dots from their fingers. It was a joyful send-off with only a few tears shed as I drove through streets I would know even blind and to a highway I had traveled many times. But this time I would stay on it much longer; I would take it all the way to the edge of the state—and then keep driving for 9 more days. I would see one too many McDonald’s. I would see the dilapidated remains of Route 66. I would see the forests and plains of this country and the breathtaking national parks of the Southwest. I would see the great houses of the ancestral Puebloans, built against the cliff walls at Chaco Canyon a millennium ago, neighbored by petroglyphs. I would feel the distance between home and California. I would take the time to make the transition not just physically but also psychologically. I would see 4,200 miles worth of this country, and I would eat up every inch of it. At the end, I would drive into my new home with a feeling of elation inside me. I would enter a city I did not know. I would start a life I could not predict. No matter how much you love a place or a life, there is something incomparable to trying a new one. To opening yourself up to everything and finding out how each possible bite tastes.

I loved Cambridge in a way that makes me pine for it as I picture myself walking down Brattle St. on a spring day . . . sitting by the river with a sandwich from Darwin’s . . . or lying beneath the lilacs in the Arboretum and looking at the sky. I lived there long enough to fall for an innumerable array of details that I hope not to forget.

It is important to recognize what you love. Cambridge was a good place to live, and I hold it strongly in my heart. Yet I cherish nothing above the sense of wonderment that exploration provides. I think my excitement for my friend truly came from the thought of her being somewhere unknown to her. Of her being at a corner and taking that first peek around.

dreaming myself mad

When I was in college, I got a job one summer in an office of 75 students. Unsurprisingly, this shaped a very fun work experience, and it was made all the better by the fact that I sat two chairs away from the—undeniably—hottest guy ever. He was eye candy extraordinaire (and totally off the market, not that I would have ever stood a chance with him anyway).

We worked long days, but the six of us who sat in the same room bonded. One night, the hottie hosted a party. By 4 a.m., everyone else had gone home, and we six were left in a cozy pile on the sofa. All that kept us from sleep was a call from a cabbie as he pulled up outside.

When I got home, I passed out immediately. But my brain, perhaps liking where it had been, picked up right where things were before the taxi’s arrival—which is to say, my dream started where the night left off. And in this version of events, the next thing that happened was that I got awakened with the hottest kiss ever. So you can imagine the redness of my face when I got to work the next day and faced him. For a moment, as he swiveled in his chair and cracked his characteristic surfer-dude grin, it felt like he knew. Like it had happened.

I find it surreal how real a dream can feel; how much you can internalize what you experience there and only stumble toward remembering that it didn’t actually happen. This week I had another dream like that—about an actual person in my life, about something that would never happen but that feels so real I can’t quite adjust my thinking to accept that it hasn’t. The problem is, this dream made me uncomfortable. The first one, at least, was enjoyable; the only hard part was wiping the taste of it off my mouth. But this one was unsettling; the hard part is wiping the thought of it from my brain. I don’t believe in dreams meaning anything; I think they are just a cobbling together of some of the millions of words, images, and thoughts that pass through the brain in a day. But when you dream about someone you know in such a vivid way, does it, in fact, hint at something in your subconscious? Do I think my friend is really thinking what she exhibited in my dream? I am, to put it mildly, disturbed by the prospect—and by the urge I am feeling to change my behavior toward her based on this thing she did not do! Readers, tell me: have you ever had the wool pulled over your eyes by your own dream? If so, how do you get the memory of the non-thing out of your head??

the seasons inside

Joy, my love, joy in all things,
in what falls and what flourishes.

Joy in today and yesterday,
the day before and tomorrow.

Joy in bread and stone,
joy in fire and rain.

In what changes, is born, grows,
consumes itself, and becomes a kiss again.

. . .

Joy in the night and the day,
and the four stations of the soul.

—from “How much happens in a day” by Pablo Neruda


Calendar years are arbitrary; they’re not like schools years, which measure personal progress; they’re not like seasons, which change the weather and redecorate our surroundings in ways that impact how we go about our daily lives. But there is something very human about counting time as it passes—about pausing as it passes and reflecting backward or looking forward.

I used to count the time by the seasons; growing up in Atlanta, the seasons worked methodically, changing every three months and each differing dramatically from the next. As they morphed, so did my outlook; different facets of my psyche thrived in different weather. The four seasons shaped four stations of my soul, and I came to rely on their multiplicitous existence.

But in Boston, those stations were thrown into mayhem. I had to adjust to the imbalance brought on by six months of winter and a quite variable summer. At some point in my decade there, I began, emotionally, to hibernate during the winter. It just went on too long; I couldn’t cope with being cooped up for so many months. But I realized I could work it to my advantage; I could use the wintertime for my internal indulgences. I treated myself to whole days of reading novels. I wrote fiction. I wrote poetry. I wrote whatever came to me because I had the time to sit quietly nestled indoors for hours on end. I came to love the new cycle, in which winter could be a time of creation just as spring would be.

Living in California, I think the stations of my soul have merged; most of the time, I live with a spring spirit in my heart. In the winter months, I find I actually yearn for some reason to feel depressed, to stay inside by myself, for I am very extroverted but still an introvert; I need quiet time to myself for revitalization. The first winter here, I hibernated a bit once again; I spent entire Saturdays sitting cross-legged on the sofa, typing away at new scenes for one of my old works of fiction. It wasn’t cold outside, but I stayed in anyway, not wanting to let my winter soul go entirely. By the second winter, I needed that season even more. I had just had a rough few months on the dating front; I was worn down emotionally for the first time since moving here. In some respects I took a much longer winter than even in Boston. At the start of the year, I declared myself to be on dating sabbatical, and I focused my attention in all kinds of other directions. I was as actively involved in things as a person can be; so much so that I wore myself down a bit physically. I was busy running work things and volunteer things and taking vacations and thinking up new goals for my future, and that would not seem like hibernation to anyone who witnessed it, but inside me, in the quiet part that feels the most deeply, while the external part was running itself (enjoyably) toward empty, the internal part was fueling up. A full year passed while I was on dating sabbatical, and during that long, singular season, the external me explored all kinds of new territory while the internal me quietly built up its fire and came back to life. I was spring and winter at one time.

Living in this climate of more unified seasons, I feel a need to take more note of the yearly sign-posts so I don’t risk losing track of time entirely. But perhaps I should let go of the counting. Perhaps it doesn’t matter how many times the spirit flares and fades, changes and comes into new being. Perhaps all that matters is that it does.

(in love)

When Isabel sleeps, her eyes water. As she lifts her face off my breastbone, I feel the soft droplets from her eyelashes resting on me now. She looks up at me with quiet eyes, her mouth working her pacifier with a rapidity like that of a rabbit tweaking its nose. Later these eyes will squint up and twinkle in concert with her devilish, enrapturing grin. Her voice will chirp as she asks me, “Que es eso? Que es eso?,” directing the question each time toward a different object or image. She will clumsily at first but soon readily repeat each word I tell her in English, stumbling on her r’s so gleen becomes gween but never green. She is a sponge for the two languages she is learning, for actions and expressions and ways of being. She will no longer wish to nap in her bed now that she has napped atop her tia, me nestled comfortably into a rocking chair, she sprawled against me, knees bent beside my hips, arms resting under mine, face pressed to a part of my body that I previously had thought of as a zone of sensuality; but now I understand it to be more. Not as a place to quell hunger, as I struggle with the concept of ever being suckled like an animal; but as a place of rest. I am reminded of how, as a child, I enjoyed hugging my maternal grandmother a little more than anyone else because she had a bosom so ample it served as a pillow for my cheek as I wrapped my arms around her. Not nearly so plush, my own breastbone seems to suffice for Isa, who shortly blinks those damp eyes at me again and then closes them, returning to my chest. She will no longer wish to nap in her bed. I will no longer wish to let her. I am in love with her, this little niece of mine who lives a continent and an ocean away. I have traveled all that way away from her now, but I can still feel the warmth of her body hug, see the slow smile that spreads when, eventually, she rubs her eyes free of tears and climbs out of the chair.

Obama: aligning reality and hope?

In an Op-Ed piece yesterday, David Brooks described the Iowa primary victories of Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee as earthquakes. He cited various elements of the earth-shattering nature of Obama’s win, only one of which was his being black. But it is this aspect of the win that makes it, as Brooks says, one “you’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel moved by.”

Only fifty years have passed since this country’s civil rights movement began; only forty since the federal government passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and thus committed itself to equalizing the legal status of black and white (and all other) Americans. Just two generations later, the prospect of the American people voting into the top federal office a black man has seemed to many, until this week, a left-wing daydream.

Personally, I have thought it had a chance of being viable all along. I wasn’t sure this country was ready to elect a black president, but I leaned toward thinking it was. Look at the facts: Since the 1920s, just over 100 African Americans have served in the United States Congress (interestingly, almost all were Representatives; only three, including Obama, have been Senators). This is no small deal; being elected to Congress seems like (and is) a far-off reality to most Americans, no matter their background. Plus, one-quarter of those 100 were elected in the South, which is thought to be the most racist part of the country. Having grown up in the South, I know that racism is still alive there in many ways. Yet Atlanta, for example, is often considered the city in the country with the most opportunity for blacks, as it has large black upper and middle classes and black professionals in top positions in every industry. It’s been electing black mayors since the 1970s. And this is no problem. The non-black people there don’t object; I don’t think they even think much about it. It’s just the world as they know it.

Obviously the presidency is something different than any other political office; at the end of the day, all accountability for the nation rests on the president’s shoulders, and I can imagine that some of the southerners who have accepted their local leaders being black might still dislike the thought of their president being so. But having lived 18 years in Atlanta and another 10 in Boston, I have to say, it’s the rest of the country that’s had me wondering whether Obama could really get elected. By that I mean, in the South, black and white Americans are used to the thought of each other; they’ve lived alongside each other for a very long time. But there remain today many all-white parts of the country, and while they may think they’re racism-free, I wonder sometimes if that’s just in theory. As an anecdote to that effect: At my first job, I became good friends with a co-worker who had lived her whole life—childhood, college, and post-college—in Massachusetts. At age 24, she admitted to me that the IT guy at work was the first black person she had ever met; as I gaped, she acknowledged that my roommate was also the first gay person she’d met. Now to her credit, she never showed any sort of discomfort around either of them; I don’t think she had any prejudice in her. But they did still give her pause. And how many people have you encountered who are a little bit afraid of the unfamiliar? I have encountered a lot.

However, Massachusetts floored me in 2006 by electing the second black governor in U.S. history. In that year, the state’s population was only 7 percent black. In comparison, the southern states ranged from 15 to 32 percent black, with most in the upper 20s. I was disappointed to learn that in the South, an African American had not yet held the governorship; but I was delightfully shocked that of all states, rather-white Massachusetts had been the one to lead the pack toward change on that front. Maybe, that made me think, the fact that not-being-racist is only theoretical in places where the population is all one ethnicity should not worry me so; maybe putting theory into practice is just as easy as it sounds, and more people than I think are capable of supporting the unfamiliar when it offers something positive, whether they know much about it or not. I certainly think that’s what Iowa shows us; the man is talking about a new approach to politics, and people want that above all else. That they can either put aside their feelings about ethnicity or aren’t any longer hindered by them—that either of these things is the case is remarkable in a country that has supported equality for such a short time. That either is the case gives me hope. But it is a cautious hope, as I think the prospect of a woman, a Jew, or a Muslim getting elected to the presidency is still a slim one. (Though again, I’ll be thrilled if Ms. Clinton proves my concerns wrong.)

Making sense of Madrid

“This could be Wisconsin Avenue,” I whispered to my mother as we sat down on the bus, and she smiled and agreed. My brother, who seemed not to have made the comparison before though he knows both streets well, commented that the two were even similar socially. While not lined with the embassies that fill a long stretch of Washington’s Wisconsin Ave., homes of some very wealthy madrileños pack the broad, sycamore-lined paseo, mirroring other stretches of Wisconsin. Mind you, in Madrid the rich live in apartments (whereas in Washington they might inhabit a house, apartment building, or row-house), and from the exterior, it’s not altogether clear that one building is any finer than the next. But the wide streets filled with cars, the interspersed homes and trees, and the sedate but sophisticated construction of the buildings in the residential parts of both towns are, in fact, quite similar. (The neighborhood in which we boarded the bus, near which my brother lives, was constructed in the 1960s, giving it a very different look than the grandiose old buildings that loom over the narrow streets and ubiquitous plazas of Madrid’s downtown areas.)

I first explored Madrid five years ago, when I flew there for my brother’s marriage to a Madrid native. Two years later, the two moved to the city permanently, and since then I have visited annually. Because the more recent visits have involved spending as much time as possible with my young nieces, whom I only get to see once a year, I haven’t gotten to know Madrid as well as I’d like; but we always take a few long walks around the city, and as I’ve come to not only recognize the places I’ve been before but learn how to get to and from them, I’ve studied the city and tried to shape a firm notion of it in my mind.

The tricky thing is that Madrid has never felt foreign to me. I am very comfortable there; the city is easy to understand (in terms of transportation options, cultural expectations, etc.). People are friendly and helpful and (perhaps most importantly) happy to speak slowly when they realize I don’t speak the language that well. They also tend to speak to me in Spanish, which may result from many Spaniards not knowing English but is often, I get the sense, because they think I’m Spanish. Now I’ve done enough people-watching throughout Spain to know that my facial features aren’t one bit Spanish, and as my sister-in-law points out, I’m too tall to be Spanish (only the rare Spaniard stands taller than about 5’8” (my height), and those who grew up during the Franco era and weren’t well nourished are quite short—many not even 5 feet tall). But, like just about everyone else in the country, I have dark hair. Brunette does have some variation there, but it ranges from honey brown to chocolate brown, occasionally reaching black. The “blonds” are a leap of imagination away from the light-haired girls I grew up with in the South. Thus, at a glance, I blend right in, and this I find a bit surreal, as I have nowhere else experienced it. But while the lack of intense heterogeneity of the United States is striking to me, my lack of immediately seeming foreign to the natives relieves me of any sense of being out of place.

I have, however, started to get a glimmer of an aspect of Spanish culture that makes it quite other-wordly to me. As we boarded that bus to head downtown, I noticed across the aisle three women whose dangling feet were all that showed below their fur coats, which covered them straight up to their coiffed hairdos; in front of me sat another fur-clad lady. It’s not the prevalence of fur that shocked me so—though it does surprise me when, just about anywhere I turn in Madrid, I see someone wearing one. It’s that the rich ride the bus in Madrid. For a girl who grew up in an all-driving city, where only the poorest of the poor would not own a car and thus need to ride the bus, this is earth-shattering. Even though, since Atlanta, I’ve lived in Boston and San Francisco—which both run heavily-traveled subway and bus systems and discourage reliance on a car for all transit—I still think that in the United States, the regular use of the bus by the very wealthy is, at best, a rarity. That it is the norm in Madrid is, to me, a blessed statement about the culture there. That Spain is led by a socialist party and has universal health care does indicate that it takes a different approach to class than the United States. But a government is not assured to be representative of all its people; these women on the bus are emblematic of their culture’s worldview in an entirely other way. Of course I understand that sharing a bus doesn’t mean there is no classism in Spain; but I still find promise in its being the case.