Christmas morning

I woke up early. Not like when I was little and got up at the crack of dawn and had to wait (per parental rules) until 7 a.m. to wake everyone for present-opening. I didn't mean to wake up early, but someone texted me, and my phone chimed, and I did.

The temperature on the thermostat in my bedroom was 60; I shivered as I rolled out of my warm covers. I came into the kitchen, poured a bowl of cereal, looked out the window. The sky is perfectly clear. A plane is streaking one thin white line across it, from right to left in a straight, horizontal projection from my vantage point. Above it, the sky is blue; below, a warm yellow-orange emanates from behind the dark roof of a neighbor's house. When I stand up, I can see the east bay hills, blue in the backlighting of the rising sun. The crisp wavering edge of their ridge reminds me of real mountains seen from a great distance, like in the Southwest. This is not what I think of when I picture Christmas morning.

I picture dry brown leaves spread all over a still-green lawn; we haven't felt like raking over the holidays. I picture the lawn because I can't see much of the sky from our front windows (where I sit impatiently by the tree, rearranging gifts by recipient and sometimes shaking them), Atlanta having such a long growing season that trees rise high behind all the houses, their branches filling the view. Mostly I picture the living room, with its plush white carpet that I sit on, leaning my back against the piano seat and watching the tree as though it is doing something. I have already plugged in the lights; it was the first task of the morning. When Mom gets up, she will think starting the coffee comes first. Dad will make sure all signs of the Santa for whom I left cookies are gone, and both will stay in the kitchen while I read the letter Santa left me in thanks. I will not realize this letter is in Mom's handwriting for years. I will love it for years.

When my brother finally gets up and everyone comes together by the tree, we will open all the gifts in an orderly fashion, me directing a present to each person in sequence, then issuing another round, until I sit amidst a sea of wrapping paper and bows and four tidy piles of treasures. A cat or two might look on quietly. Eventually, the dog will be allowed in the room, and she will make a royal mess of any remaining paper.

Later, the best part of the day will come. Once the sun goes down, I will turn out all the lamps in the living room and plug back in the tree. It will cast red, green, and blue fir-branch shadows onto the pale lavendar walls. It will sparkle with color. I will sit on the sofa, legs curled under me, and watch quietly for what seems to Mom a very long time for doing nothing. When I have taken it in long enough, I will sit beside the tree and play Christmas songs on the piano. I read the music with only the colorful light of the tree to illuminate it, and no one is in the room with me but I'm sure they are listening (and perhaps wishing I would get a new repertoire). To little me, this was the best part of Christmas. The making of music, the admiration of beauty, the joyful lights in the dark.

Test run: sharing some photos. (These are from Balboa Park in San Diego.)

This is a test to see whether I can put photos in my posts.

Public Service Announcement

Recently some friends and I were talking about dating. I don't remember what led into it, but I announced that I tend to go for younger guys these days. I am sure that I also declared that men over 30 or 32 have too much baggage. I know, I know. This is an unfair generalization. I do always keep my mind open; but experience has me thinking that way. So you can imagine my horror when one of the guys in the conversation, who is solidly in his mid-20s and thus in a place of knowing, responded to my comments with something along the lines of, "But the problem is that guys in their 20s don't like kids, and women over 30 are ready to have 'em." Two very loud responses immediately competed to be heard in my head. The first, I will admit, was, Shit. Is it that obvious?! Because truth be told, I would love to have babies. But the other response was the stronger—Shit. Do men really think this way? Because if so, all us single 30-somethings are screwed!!

I thought a lot about this after my last breakup, when I was told (by someone my same age) that I was more mature than he was, that I was farther along in life than he was; that he could see this going to marriage and that that terrified him because he wasn't ready. What I found incredibly odd about that was that he seemed to imply that I was. I had never said anything along those lines. Maybe, in my own being, I am in a place from which I could steadily and happily take the next steps in life. I know I will be a kickass mom, and I think I will be great in a lifelong relationship; maybe I emit something that says that. But just because I, on my own, am prepared for those things doesn't mean I'm expecting to get to them anytime soon.

For starters, I'd have to find someone I want to marry, which is no small feat! (Though the last guy was thinking that way, I actually wasn't.) And being 30 means I was born in the 1970s, not the 1950s; a lot of things have to take place before I give birth. Let's do the math to illuminate the point: By the time I find a guy I like, start dating him, get into a relationship with him, and decide I want to marry him, it's likely that two or three years have passed since we met. Maybe another year passes before we actually get married. Once we do, I can't imagine having kids for at least a year or two (and that would be longer if age weren't a factor in pregnancy). Which means it's at least five years from the starting point before I even want to pop any out! At which point, you'll take note, the men in their mid-20s are 30+ and perhaps more ready to have babies. (Meaning my younger-man fetish still has a chance!)

If I hadn't been so flabbergasted by the out-of-the-blue breakup, I might have asked that last boyfriend why on earth he thought I was looking to marry him. We never talked on that level, and we weren't even at a place of saying I love you. But he had told me enough about his previous relationships for me to guess that he had seen a pattern in the way women think, and he was applying what he had known to be the case in other situations to the one with me. And here's where we get to my PSA. All you charming single men, no matter your age, please remember: we don't all operate the same way. There may be women who have reached 30 unmarried and are upset by it; but the ones I know who are single at this age are still single because they can handle it. They may get frustrated with it sometimes, but they can handle it. Most of them have all kinds of interesting things going on in their lives, making them perhaps even more independent (and intriguing) than you can imagine. So please, don't fall into any of those generalizations I lightly started this post out with. Keep your mind open. I can promise you: we're worth it. (Like wine, we get richer with age.)

Where the wild things are

Last night I had an interesting discussion with a friend who was disconcerted by my recent post about Into the Wild. He was distressed that I said I could live without people. I'll point out that I said I could do so for a time. I certainly am not looking to become a hermit! I do enjoy entire weekends to myself sometimes, and I can imagine spending at least a couple of months alone. (A friend of mine did this a few years ago—driving to Alaska and back for a summer—and he did just fine with it.) But I would have all kinds of requirements for my lengthy-time-alone to make it enjoyable; for starters, I'd have to be in a beautiful natural setting. And I'd have to have some books around, and a computer or notebook so I could do some writing, and ideally I'd have some film and my camera (because I like to create visual poetry too). And let's just be clear on one other front: I'd need to have four walls and a door with me in my wilderness. I'm not proposing living in any magic bus like Chris did. I like to take a shower every day. I like to cook my food on a full-fledged stove, after I've taken it out of the fridge and chopped it up with a real knife (i.e. not a machete). I don't have anything against camping, but it's not something I'm looking to do with my life. Plus, have you ever spent a night alone outside? It can be terrifying!

Which brings me back to my last thought about that film. I was struck throughout the movie by the lack of fear Chris showed about being in the wilderness. I wondered if he really didn't have any (I've never been a cavalier young guy, after all, so what do I know?), or if Penn, perhaps being more of a city person, didn't think to include it. If you've never been in the woods at night (or watched Lost), you might not think of it. But I've spent a night alone away from anything, and I sure did not enjoy it once the sun went down.

This was in Maine. The month was March; dark fell by 6 pm. Thankfully I had a flashlight and a book (if my memory is accurate, it was Camus' The Stranger, in French). I squirmed deep into my sleeping bag, propped the book open and the light against it, and tried to ignore the rustling sounds in the woods around me. Within an hour, my eyes hurt from reading with so little light, so I closed the book and attempted sleep.

As my eyes shut, my ears opened.

I lay as still as I could and tried to block out the sounds. I thought if I envisioned everything around me, it would calm me down, so I re-built the landscape. A tree stood about four feet from me. Others were scattered around it at similar distances. The hill began to slope to my left maybe 30 feet from me, and before me, the land stretched 50 or 100 yards before dropping off into water. I tried not to think about what lay behind me, for it was only woods, dense and dark.

I could see everything in my immediate vacinity. Except the thing making so much noise. I knew it was something hungry, something going after my food. I had strung the bag as high as I could, but a bear could reach it, I knew. I listened to it knocking the branches around, and I felt a paralyzing fear in my body. I don't think I could have moved if the bear had tried to sit on me (or worse).

But somehow, it all stopped. Whether I fell asleep or the creature left, I'm not sure, but in the morning, I awoke all in one piece. My food was gone—the twine had been gnawed through, the bagels and nuts swallowed, except for a few tidbits that spotted the ground. Yet there was no sign of a large animal. The leaves all lay in place; the thundering attacker I had pictured was most likely a raccoon with sharp teeth and quick hands. I laughed at myself, thinking how incredibly sound amplifies in the dark. I laughed at myself, but I still looked in every direction, up trees and over the hillside, before starting the walk back home.

Into the Wild: a movie review and then some

Friday night I saw the film Into the Wild, based on the Jon Krakauer biography of Christopher McCandless and adapted for the screen by Sean Penn, who also directed it. I’d had a wearing week, for all kinds of reasons, and I badly needed to escape into that blessed world of the movie theater, where the big screen and loud speakers envelop you in other realities. And though the film ended sadly, I left elated, having found it to be elegant and accurate and enlightening in multiple ways. Some of my companions disagreed heartily, finding the main character selfish or unbelievable. But I found him extremely true to life in certain ways, and I think Penn did an impressive job of creating a film that fills your senses with Chris’s situation rather than just flashing images of it before your face.

An early scene reveals an aerial view of a snowfield; a pickup truck trundles down the side of the frame, emitting that crunching sound I associate with boots on frozen snow. Eventually the truck stops, and a boy gets out; as he trudges over the snow and toward a wooded beyond, the camera broadens our view a bit, revealing the jagged tops of distant mountains and only a sliver of sky above them. This type of tight-in cinematography immediately, if quietly, sets a tone for the film—a tone of enormity and enclosure all at once. The wild is massive and beautiful. And looming.

As Chris crosses his first river, a soundtrack begins; a familiar voice wavers into a song that is heartfelt, emotional, pained in a way that I associate with American Indian singing; it is not the jamming nor the acoustic rock for which Eddie Vedder is best known. Throughout the film, periodic bursts of Vedder’s singing quietly build toward a scene in which he almost wails a song as Chris peers over a vast landscape below him. Like the composition of each visual image, the timbre of each song works subtly to tell us that the character is not just adventuring, but questing.

The premise of the story is that 23-year-old Chris has been dreaming of getting to Alaska; he wants to survive there on his own, out in the elements. Leaving West Virginia, he begins to head westward, traveling for a total of two years without any money (he’s cutely given the bulk of it to charity and then burned the rest after getting drenched inside his car in a flash flood and deciding, perhaps, that it’s a sign he can survive anything). This feat alone is impressive, though he does supplement his barren savings by working odd jobs, underscoring that a world without money is a utopia, not a real place. Still, Chris wanders for two years by the end of the film, and during that time, we learn that his passion for getting “lost in the wild” has multiple layers.

First, the obvious: he wants new experiences. He wants to challenge himself. Where better to do so than out in the elements? It’s tried and true; many have turned to nature when looking for themselves. It offers challenges, and it offers solitude. It offers a peaceful quiet interrupted only by bird song or wind song, the rustling of leaves, the crackling of branches—by no voices other than one’s own. I understand turning to nature; I have always done it. I understand leaving society; I could do that. None of you will believe me because I seem so social, so people-oriented. But I can live without cities, even without human contact for a time; yet I could never give up the ocean, the mountains, the quiet places tucked in under tree branches, the quick-footed lizards of forests, the first flowers of spring. I could go on and on. I have shelves of books that do so. I have spent hours and days quietly seated by a seaside or on pine straw in the cool dark of some woods. These are private times—sometimes shared with others, but mostly enjoyed on my own. So I loved watching Chris yearn for these places; I knew what goodness he’d find.

But Chris also heads out to the wilds to get away from something. It’s not just the nature freak in me that enjoyed the movie; it’s also the kid inside, one who, like Chris, had parents who fought, who made life at home unpleasant sometimes. I know what drives one out of the house and into the wilderness; what drives even the most sociable to need a break from humanity. I think the film depicts flight from family fights with an accuracy that maybe only those who’ve been there can appreciate. Some may see his behavior as self-serving, but I see it as self-preservation. As knowing when you’ve got to do your own thing, make your own way, find out who you are entirely outside your upbringing and bring that self to life.

As part of that discovery, many of us come to the joyous realization that we can love whomever we want. We can make friends out of strangers, family out of a conversation gone right. To my delight, Chris wanders the country adopting parents. Whether they replace his true mother and father we will never know; but they certainly fill in some holes in his heart. They mean so much to him that the film takes a turn I would deem an authorial failure were it not based on what Chris truly wrote. While dying of starvation, he enters one last note in the margin between paragraphs in a favorite book. “Happines only real when shared.” My euphoria with the film broke in that moment; I wanted to shake Chris and remind him what he'd been learning, at least as I see it, which is that the minute you are able to smile and need no one else to know about it, to feel ecstacy or tranquility and enjoy it entirely by yourself—that's when you have found contentment. I wanted to shake him, but I reminded myself that he was dying, and that people are human, and humans are needy, and that craving the companionship of others is a beautiful thing as well, even if for myself it is imperative to know that my happiness does not depend on them. (I view the ability to share my joys with others as the greatest bonus of living; not a necessity but an invaluable, incredible plus.)

The end of the film is hard to watch; it’s tragic that in real life, a man died trying to follow his passion for life. But it is a reminder that how you live matters immensely. It is tragic that anyone dies so young; but I feel happier for the late Christopher McCandless than I do for many people who are still living, because I can see how much he got out of his life, and to me, that's what counts. I think I loved this movie most of all because of a message it underscores, which is one I hold dear. Don't just be part of the world around you; experience it. Don’t just live a little; live a lot.

(note to self)

let it go--the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise--let it go it
was sworn to
            go

let them go--the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers--you must let them go they
were born
         to go

let all go--the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things--let all go
dear
   so comes love

               -- e.e. cummings

(Many of you know I have an 1100-page book of e.e. cummings poetry that I read like it's the Bible, it includes so much wisdom creatively put. In the midst of an exhausting week, at the end of an exhausting year, I've been turning to it often lately, lacking the time to put things in my own words and so relying on his incredible choice of them.)

Today I felt a pang of missing winter.

Beautiful

is the
unmea
ning
of(sil

ently)fal

ling(e
ver
yw
here)s

Now

-- e.e. cummings

Small-town San Francisco

Yesterday one of my best friends was in Palo Alto for the day, so I drove down there to have brunch with him and hang out. Per his usual routine, he was late, but having not lived in the same city as him for more than two years now, I had forgotten this tendency and arrived a little early (per my usual). The restaurant we were meeting at was near the center of town but a bit off the general path, so the only place I could wander into to pass the time was Whole Foods. Having forgotten to buy cereal when shopping the day before, I found the proximity of a grocery story opportune and popped in to make that quick purchase.

As I stepped through the parting doors on my way out, I did one of those head-turn-followed-by-full-body-realignments—mimicking the path of a guy passing me as he entered the store. Sunglasses blocked my view of his eyes, but I found his face familiar. Unwilling to ever let a potential reunion pass me by, I met his (still-shaded) stare as he turned to investigate my own, and then I queried him by name. Removing the sunglasses, he smiled, and I reminded him of my name, not knowing if someone who knew me as a child would recognize me now, as an adult.

He was born the same week as my brother, and our mothers have been friends ever since. His family moved away when we were young, and in the years between childhood and now, I’ve seen him once that I can remember—we could place where but not quite when, but it was between five and eight years ago. Why I recognized his cheek bones or jaw structure or whatever it was below the sunglasses that assured me, even in such an unfamiliar location, that I was seeing a face I knew—why I recognized him is not clear to me, but the fact of the matter is that I see people I know everywhere in the Bay Area, with great regularity, and it is making the world begin to feel wildly small.

When I moved to San Francisco, I thought I knew two people in the area—and, vaguely, a third. But the first week I lived here, I randomly encountered four people I had gone to college with. I saw two at restaurants, one at a bar, and one on the street. Within a month of my arrival, I had met another at a boutique, a few at the Castro Halloween party, and one more at the grocery store. I seemingly could not turn around without bumping into someone from a past life. For six years after graduating, I had lived one to four miles from my the center of my college world; in that time, when many of my friends also still lived in the area, I bumped into only one of them. Here, 3,000 miles from either of the cities I’ve ever called home, it immediately felt like a place where I would recognize one in every ten people who walked down the street.

It happened with strangers too. One night, I stood in a long line outside the Castro theater, waiting to see the opening show of the SF Indie Film Festival. A few days later, at a trivia night at Mad Dog in the Fog, I sat at a table next to a woman whose face I could not stop studying because I knew I recognized her. Finally, she leaned across the space between us to confirm the same feeling, and that’s when I remembered: she had been in line just ahead of me at the movie. We chuckled over the peculiarity of crossing paths twice in one week; but I didn’t chuckle when, just another day or so after that, I stood in line at a free film at the Embarcadero, and the guy behind me started chatting—only to pause as we clearly began sharing the sensation of already knowing this stranger. It took us much longer to place it, but finally we realized we had both gotten the free passes at none other than Mad Dog in the Fog; he’d been sitting at the same table as my other newly re-encountered stranger. Reasonable, then, that we’d both be at the movie; but reasonable that I knew his face so well after so brief a viewing?

Topping off all these experiences is that I once waited for the bathroom at a restaurant in the Haight beside a guy whom I saw the next night as well—at a bar in Oakland. I was thoroughly astonished by that one, given the distance between venues, as was he. The gaggle of female friends with him tried very hard to get me to believe in fate—but the truth of the matter is that I don’t, and so all this crossing of paths really gets me thinking because it is, to put it frankly, a bit eerie. But as I recounted yesterday’s reunion to a friend, she commented that there was nothing odd about it—not for someone as observant as I am. I hadn’t realized until she said that that not everyone looks at the people around them, studies them, takes mental photos of them; but I do. I people-watch constantly, apparently even when I am not aware of doing so. Maybe this explains everything I’ve just described. But I think there’s another factor at play, which is that this city—this internationally known and widely adored city—is really just a small town dressed up in a fancy glitter.

Pride (in the name of love)

I'm not using that phrase the way U2 coined it, but it's the best way I can find to peg something I've been discussing with friends lately. The question is: just what is it that holds us back, at times, from letting a person we might be interested in know about that?

Even for the most liberal, independent women, sometimes traditional ideas come into play, getting us daydreaming of not ever having to be the one to make the first move. Some of us are light-hearted about that feeling: it would just be more fun if the guys would do the asking. For others, underneath, we think we deserve it—we expect to be courted. I tend to be in the former camp, but as a romantic at heart, I do understand the latter sentiment more than those who know me might expect.

On the one hand, I've done my share of initiating—for years, I was undaunted in this regard, mostly because I couldn't help but say everything on my mind at some point. (This blog has its name for a reason.) My first experience with sharing strong feelings with a guy whose intentions I wasn't sure of was fairly comical—if painful in the aftermath. It was freshman year; he'd become my best guy friend. He was a lover of wordplay and spent hours getting in my face with good humor, conjuring up nicknames for me, hugging trees whenever he saw me coming after one fateful email that I sent out to describe quite the weekend in the woods and that he felt the need to dub "Walden II." He was a jokester and a sweetheart mixed into one, and I had trouble reading that and reading my own feelings about it; but I knew that at times our friendship verged on a different kind of playfulness. One night, wandering out of a party together and sitting atop a wall dangling our legs, I got up my nerve and said to him, sucking in a breath for strength, "Sometimes I like you." His cheeks went red and he huffed, "And what? The rest of the time you hate me?" And now I was turning purple, and fumbling with the words—"No, I meant, you know, sometimes I like you." (Such a stupid word, like, when used that way—but what other word is there?) The rest of the story isn't much worth repeating; his response is illustrative of the way things would soon be going, which is to say, quite directly down the tubes.

I took a long break from telling it all after that, but a couple of years later, I fell for my latest best guy friend, and when I let him in on my interest the first time (the first time! you say, wishing I would not be pushed to drive myself toward repeating the past), he gave me a legitimate timing-related negative response followed by a 200% increase in the intensity with which we hung out. Within a year, we had a friendship that everyone around us thought was slowly developing toward one of those movie-esque loves that come along only rarely in the real world. But this one was not to be either. When he finally told me he loved me it was in closing, after we finished discussing that he was elated to be single and feeling no wish for a girlfriend—and I commented that I dreamed of couplehood only because of him. He let me down easy, telling me he cared about me, was attracted to me, wanted everything we already had but wasn't ready for anything more. He closed with "I love you," ever so softly as we hung up the phone, and I curled into the cold flannel of my attic bedroom and wept.

It was a tough year after that. A tough couple of years. My feelings for him only grew; his for me deepened and solidified until I was like a sister to him—a crucial, beloved facet of his world but like a sister. As I struggled to get over him, I went on some of the funniest bad dates known to womankind, and I used to recount them for entertainment, even writing some of them up under the title "Manhunt." True to my nature, I was at once nursing a miserable sorrow inside me and forcing myself outward, onward. I went out with anyone someone suggested I meet; I even considered asking out random nice guys I encountered, like my pharmacist (thankfully, I pondered that one just long enough to not get my nerve up until his return from a few-week vacation—at the end of which he wore a shiny gold band.) Determined to get myself over my friend (which proved tricky since he remained one of my closest for years), I even decided to act on a lustful crush I had developed on an unlikely candidate: the guy who fixed the heating and air system at work. Not my usual hunting ground, for sure, but this guy was HOT, he was charming, and according to every woman in the office, he was into me. (I sat by the thermostat, and this gave him a chance to get to know me.) One day, when he'd spent a remarkable 30 minutes sitting on my desk chatting after making a minor repair, I excused myself from the room, accepted a double dog dare from a group of my female co-workers down the hall, and returned holding a post-it note. It read Give me a call if you want to get a beer sometime and included my phone number. Facing him, wanting him, wanting even more than that to move the hell on, I smiled, held up the yellow sticky note, and wordlessly placed it in his pocket. His front jeans pocket, mind you—a detail that had about every woman peering around the door frame falling on the floor, as it meant I stuck my hand into his front pocket—yes, the one right by his goods—to slip my note in. Needless to say, he called me that night to make a date. Needless to say again, the one date was the only date, as he had even more recently entered rejection recovery than I, and we were a friendly but emotionally distracted pair all night.

The point of these recountings is to make that point I started with, which is that I'm not shy about my intentions; I will never be afraid to let someone know that I care. I value that too much. And I've gotten one thick skin out of my experiences, even with some damage done to it in the last year or two. (My first year in San Francisco, I got spoiled with guys showing interest left and right. That year ended with a one-two punch that knocked me off the dating circuit for some time and softened my skin up a bit—but just a bit.) When you've been rejected from "I'm in love with you," you realize how small a deal it is to get turned down from anything less. You stop worrying about what you do; you just put it out there and see where you get.

But I've noticed lately that that's now how I'm operating. Friends have noticed too. So what's holding me back? Here's the other hand in the balance: the thing is that no matter how strong your will can be, how steady your sense of self, sometimes your pride steps in, and if one thing has taught me to get a grip on my chattiness, that's it. I find pride a much tougher thing to combat than a little rejection or not getting what I want.

I'm thirty years old. By now, I've experienced a lot. I am passionately engaged with my life and the people in it. I know what I want, and it's got to be as good as what I've already got; as far as dating, I find that I only want someone who sees that he has some kind of interest in me and goes after it. Pride has stepped into my mindset, and it tells me to leave alone anyone who doesn't do that. I know that sounds like a double-standard—to expect him to do all the risk-taking even when I know full well I could do it myself. I'm not saying I'll do nothing. I'll drop hints and flirtations; in some cases, I may even break down and ask some of these hims out. When it comes down to it, I will always let people know just how great I think they are. But I can’t help but want, at least for a while, to leave room for someone else to beat me to it. Because that thing called pride tells me that I, too, deserve the joy of experiencing that.

Review: Rufus Wainright / Release the Stars

Recently Omar lent me Rufus Wainright's album Release the Stars, which I've listened to with the best of my ability to give something I don't think I like right off the bat a chance. (Omar, please don't throw any tomatoes at me.) While there are moments in it when I do enjoy the music, overall I find Wainright's voice and musical style to be dischordant. I think that results from the combination of his nasal voice, love of wavering it from here to there, and use of music that seems at times orchestral and at others like the soundtrack to a musical. (Note that I'm not a huge fan of musicals other than Grease.) He also has a depressing tone to his voice, and his attempts to hop between moody and peppy music mystify me. There are artists out there who can suddenly sing pop songs without any objection from me -- Wilco's "Heavy Metal Drummer" and REM's "At My Most Beautiful" being two of my favorite examples -- but it doesn't work for me when Rufus tries it. Needless to say, his music is not my cup of tea.

A crush in my back pocket

A year or two ago, I met a guy with whom I was immediately taken; we seemed to have a clear chemistry—not that physical chemistry that can be so much fun but rather something in our personalities that drew us, in a room full of people, to want it to be each other we were talking to. As it turned out, he had a girlfriend, but as we developed a friendship, I couldn't help letting that connection grow into the basis of a crush that I actually enjoyed having. I hadn't had one in years, and I was tickled by how much I liked this one. A friend scolded me, saying a crush on an unavailable guy was a bad idea; but it was just a crush, I said, and a crush is not real interest. Crushes are innocent; you don't expect them to go somewhere. Then what's the point, she asked? And I had to think about that one. But I think it's this: I like having occasional crushes because they are recognition of something that I cherish: that I have met someone who fits the bill. Whether I can be with him or not, that my kind of guy exists. Some people get frustrated by crushes, but I see them as special reminders that, in fact, all kinds of people can make me a little light on my feet.

A friend asked me earlier about my various dating interests of late. I covered the bases, ending with one that I don't usually mention. He is someone I see infrequently. Yet he is one of those people I want to be around when he's in the room. I even get stupidly nervous around him because there is just something he emits that draws me in. And I kind of like the infrequency with which I get to feel like a fourteen-year-old girl because of him, because there is, as my wise friend Ellen then commented, something wonderful about having a crush in your back pocket. I have to admit, the brilliance of that phrase made me consider whether there's more to my fondness for crushes than just their reminding me of what appealing people are out there. I think it's also that, when you nurse a crush over time, forgetting it and then re-conjuring it up, you get the repeated (if intermittent) excitement of wondering whether maybe this one will be the exception to the rule. Crushes are innocent; you don't expect them to go somewhere. But occasionally, maybe they do.

The Northern Redwoods, part 2

Day 2 (continued)

As night set in, we didn't feel quite ready to quit our journeying, so we headed into the town of Trinidad. At first appearance a small town with little more than a Chevron station and a quick mart, a few blocks in, quaint houses and criss-crossing streets revealed a charming seaside town. Still, two minutes of driving got us through all of it, which was fine, as our final destination for the day was the water. Trinidad is regarded as among the finest sections of California seashore for combing tide pools—a favorite pass-time of my mother's. Pulling into Trinidad State Beach, we found ourselves looking down on a tucked-away, rocky Neverland. With enormous rock outcroppings looming out of the water, smaller ones scattered among the waves, and many nooks and crannies created in-between, the beaches in and around Trinidad (we also went to two just south of town) crawl with surfers, scenery-admirers, and thinkers. As the sky turned that lavendar hue it gets just before going black, a lighthouse winked at me from some distant point of land, and I thought I might just sit in this chilly night-time scene for a very long time. I'm quite sure it will become one of those visual memories I keep for life.

Day 3
Jedidiah Smith Redwoods State Park is the most northern section of California's Redwood forest. Driving north almost to Oregon, you can enter the park from Crescent City, a depressing little town that suffered at the hands of a tsunami back in the 1960s, and I have to imagine it never recovered. We stayed there only long enough to get a park map and directions to our first stop, Stout Grove. The day before, in Prairie Creek, we had entered the park on a smoothly paved road that led us from guided trail to guided trail. In Jedidiah, as soon as we turned onto the road, I knew we were in for a different experience. Once paved, the road surface is now rough and beaten, covered with a thin red glaze of dried Redwoods branches. Stout Grove is, in fact, the only stop on the road; the rest of the time, you glide slowly amidst massive trees that regularly encroach on the very pavement you'd like to roll your tires along. You can get out of the car anytime you want, but you can't enter the woods; you have to be content with being engulfed in them. I felt very deep in there, lost to the outside world, far from daylight (as the dense stand of 350+ foot trees blocks most of it) or from cities or even from time. It was magical.

Day 4
Driving home, we passed through the Humboldt Redwoods, traveling down the Avenue of the Giants for most of its 32 miles. I have to say that in comparison to the two Redwood parks I'd just seen, Humboldt truly does pale. But any Redwood is impressive, especially the fallen ones that seem to go on and on and on as you walk from root ball to tip. In Humboldt, some sort of calamity brought down a veritable fleet of massive Redwoods in one area. Some are so wide that, on their sides, they still stand two or three times as tall as me. Standing beside them feels like standing beside a grounded ship—its hull exposed, rising from the ground and looking like the whole thing should rock right on over. On some, crashing into a neighbor sent splinters up the wood, separating it into what looks like gaping hunks and shards of red flesh. On others, the ancient bark is beginning to roll off the fallen trunk and onto the ground—giving the impression of serpents slithering up the wood and then off. Needless to say, I enjoyed my brief visit to Humboldt and recommend that all of you venture into these beauties at some point!

I'll close by commenting that the drive south on 101 from Humboldt to about Santa Rose is absolutely beautiful. It's all farmland and wineries, hillsides covered in scrub oak and madrone and a variety of other decidious trees that seemed astonishingly petite and delicate after what I'd just seen. Passing through Healdsburg definitely put it next on my list of places to visit. And I'll be sure to report on that if I do!

The Northern Redwoods, part 1

Reputedly, when I was four years old I hiked an entire Redwood forest without a grumble. The journey is said to have taken a full day. I, unfortunately, don't remember my good attitude or much of what I saw. But one of those mental pictures that occasionally floats into my consciousness—generally in response to a certain combination of air temperature and dampness dangling from greenery—is of a very large Redwood, which I believe I walked through, and which therefore left in my mind an association of Redwoods with wonderland. Add to that a fanaticism developed around the same age for all things Star Wars—and thus an insuppressible urge to look for Ewoks when I set foot among Redwoods—and you can imagine how readily I agreed when my mother suggested that after Thanksgiving we should drive to the northernmost of the Redwood forests in California and spend a few days exploring.

Day 1
We left early Friday morning on one of those crystal-clear, crisp days that make San Francisco a hard place to imagine not living despite the bizarre climate. We spent 9.5 hours (including a few small excursions) alternately traveling alongside the Pacific Ocean and dipping in and out of forested valleys and rises to finally reach the town of Trinidad around 6 pm. It had been a lovely day, but we were more than ready to get out of the car when we parked outside the Lost Whale Inn.

The minute we entered, I knew I would love staying here. A young couple sat at a large wooden table like you'd find in a kitchen, sipping tea and talking quietly. An older pair lounged on a sofa, flipping through magazines with their feet up as though in their own living room. A fire flickered behind the piano. (The piano!) As we shut the door, the owner greeted us with a hearty hello, handshakes that could have been hugs, and a glowing smile. As she led us around—showing us the tv room, the hot tub, the moon, the ocean, our bedrooms, the hallway table laden with packets of tea and cocoa, mugs, and hot water—it took all of three minutes for me to feel at home. Then she suggested we come downstairs for clam chowder, which we did—and which we enjoyed so much we had seconds. She also pointed out the open bottles of wine that we were free to pour from, the punch her husband had made, and the home-made cookies piled on a plate at the end of the counter. How often does one feel so content so immediately? And I haven't even mentioned how well I slept in that bed, or how the skylight in my room let me see stars just before I closed my eyes.

Day 2
Feeling about as refreshed as one can upon waking, I was excited the next day to get out into the trees. A number of large lagoons lie just behind the seashore north of Trinidad, and these we circled around slowly, enjoying watching the Pacific roll in to meet them. Shortly we entered the Prairie Creek Redwoods, where ancient trees rise with perfect verticality on all sides of you, wherever you are. You have to lean your head way back to see the tops of these 300+-foot-tall-monsters, and even then, you know you are fooling yourself to think you can really see so high. What is more readily conceivable is the girth of the trees, some of which have grown to 25 or 30 feet in diameter. Most impressive is the aptly named Big Tree, which is breathtakingly old at 1,500 years. I had a wonderful time wandering far below the tallest branches, studying bark patterns and tree groupings and wishing the sun would come out so I could take more photos. There is a magical geometry to the Redwoods that I could take in for days and days. Each trunk is vertically striated, and on the occasional tree, the channels in the bark run perfectly upward, as appallingly upright as the sun-loving trees. But on others, they twist around the tree, as though a large hand gripped the cylinder and gave it a turn; and on still others, the wales crisscross as though braided, and sometimes burls lunge out or stout branches shower a splay of needles off an otherwise barren trunk. Amidst the Redwoods, deciduous trees like alders and vine maples fill in the spaces between behemoths, and some of them drip with lichen impersonating Spanish moss. When occasionally the sun glints through the branches, the green outlines of these enshrouded trees glow yellow and capture that wondrous feeling that my mind always associates with the Redwood forest.

Though I could happily have stayed for many more hours, we ran out of trails on which to meander, and so we drove onward, exiting the main road and taking a gravelly coastal drive that I recommend to anyone even just passing through this part of the state. As the road rises, a seashore hides below; I did not know Gold Bluffs Beach existed until we stood many hundreds of feet above it—maybe even one or two thousand. Leaning over the stone wall of the overlook, we watched swells roll in from as far as a mile out. Perfectly spaced, perfectly timed, they gave the impression of choreography.

As the light dimmed, we drove back downward, exiting near the mouth of the Klamath River and returning to the Norman B. Drury scenic highway. I recommend always choosing this route over 101, which is longer and passes only new-growth conifers. The scenic highway runs right through the Redwoods and ends near a meadow positively filled with Roosevelt elk in the last light of day. As we drove home, we discovered that the elk live all over the region, grazing not only in protected areas but also in front yards and side yards and along the shoulders of roads. We enjoyed stopping every few minutes to admire them, and we were equally pleased at the opportunity the end-of-day viewings gave us to spot egrets dotting the trees and marshes.

The Darjeeling Limited: a subtly sweet ride

Owen C. Wilson is the type of actor who can either make a movie or make an audience want to toss things at the screen so he will shut his surfer-dude trap already. The Darjeeling Limited may have offered him the role of his life; I found him down-right endearing. The film is tender and sweet, and, with just a sprinkle of humor, inspires one to wonder if Wes Anderson had a real-life spiritual experience in India while writing this script.

The only negative: Adrien Brody's somber yet cartoonish face did not, for me, suffice to replace a larger role by Bill Murray, who is the master of quiet characters and the seeming embodiment of Anderson's outlook on the world. In my opinion, Brody has a lot of acting classes to attend before he will merge well with the Wilson-Schwartzman machine. Though what a pair of legs. His lankiness goes unrivaled.

In someone else's words

An interesting article. Amen to Lloyd Dobler.

Orion

I have had an attachment to the constellation Orion for as long as I can remember looking at the stars. I used to walk out into our driveway at night, round the corner of the carport, and stand beside a juniper that I had a particular fondness for because of the way it held the raindrops on the tips of its green fingers after a downpour. Right there at the start of the driveway, I was just below Orion and he above me. I would look up at him and count out the three stars of his belt before adjusting my eyes to the dark palette behind him and picking out one or two more. I knew other constellations—the dippers, of course, and Cassiopeia's chair was easy to find as well—but there was something about this hunter, this man leaping to action across the sky, that caught my attention.

There wasn't too much to the relationship back then; I just liked to leave the house at night and look up at him. Thinking about that makes me realize just how precious my home setting was, because I lived in a city, ten minutes from everything, and yet my house was surrounded by woods, and my sky was astrally lit. I lived in a city, and yet I could wander outside without my parents knowing and feel perfectly comfortable, no question of safety in my mind. I'd listen to an owl hooting or bats fluttering by; I'd watch a raccoon I knew slinking across the neighbor's lawn, heading toward cat food; I'd listen to all those trees around me shaking their leaves and soothing me toward sleep. I'd only spend five minutes out there, maybe ten, not long enough to be missed from the long, low house at the other end of which my parents slept. I'd come out and find him, take it all in, and then head for sleep.

When I was in high school, I spent a semester away from home, living on a farm in Maine. The night I arrived, I was terrified by the deep snow around me—four feet in places—and the frigid sub-zero air that made my nose hairs go rigid and turn to ice. I was nervous to enter the cabin that I would live in with nine other girls for the next four months. But it was only a few days into the experience that I realized a friend had followed me all the way to that northern forest. Walking back to the cabin one night, listening to the crunching of packed snow beneath my boots, watching the trees sway in the clear, blue light of snow-reflected-moon, thinking about a math assignment or an English essay or some science field trip we were about to undertake, I happened to look at the sky at the right moment and saw Orion perched just off the far corner of the hilltop home to which I returned. After that I took my nightly walk home slowly, often took it alone, so I could have those five minutes I used to waste just looking to whisper things to my night-time confidante.

I have never been a religious person; I have always believed that relationships with external agents—whether of the stellar or spiritual composition—are really just relationships with oneself. I may personify Orion, but I don't truly believe he is anything but an arrangement of fading gases that happen to have locked into relative place. Still, though, I appreciate the longevity of nature that constellations reveal; I appreciate the creativity of ancients—some as far back as the days of Sumerian (our first) civilization—who saw them too and named them after what they knew. But mostly I appreciate Orion for serving as one of those signposts in life that you cycle past here and there and, at each visit, are reminded to think about where you've been since the last pass.

I sometimes chuckle over what city people I am surrounded by in San Francisco, where I moved in hopes of regenerating my connection to nature, which suffered heavily from the chills of ten New England winters (during many of which I stayed mostly inside). It may be a green city, but it's a city! I tell myself, amused now by my earlier expectation. One night a friend and I made our way out of the city; how long, she commented, it had been since she'd seen a starry night. I smiled quietly, remembering something I read half a lifetime ago in a Neruda poem ("Las Estrellas"). I smiled not at her mistake but at my own knowing; you can see the stars in San Francisco any time the fog frees up the sky. And if you stand on my street, about two-thirds of the way toward the far sidewalk and two or three car lengths up the block, when you look at my house your eyes will rise, because above it Orion lingers, waiting for my next thought.

Pondering Prince Charming

All these discussions of men and dating led a friend to ask me about my notion of Prince Charming. She wondered if I think that way. And I do, in a sense. But boy have my thoughts on it changed over time! When I was younger—a teenager, in college, even recently graduated—I imagined "the guy for me" being someone with all these various traits that seemed important to me then. He would be into nature; he would be into poetry; he would have dark hair and tower over me and he'd occasionally crack a cheshire cat grin at me; he would be an extroverted introvert like I am; he would like to talk and to be together silently; he would be an explorer, have a sense of wonder--his inner child would be alive at all times. The list went on and on.

By my late twenties, I clued in a bit, realized that I could fall for guys who lacked half my requirements and find little zing flying between me and someone who fit me to a T on paper. I did take note of certain things that always mattered: if not a love of poetry, at least an appreciation of creativity; if not an extroversion, at least an ability to listen well and communicate about the things that matter; if not a deep-seated sense of whimsy, at least, for the love of god, the ability to laugh, and laugh often, and most importantly, to laugh at himself. Over time I fine-tuned Prince Charming, realizing that in most cases the things that make him right for me and not you are broad things, not specific predilections or inherent ways.

But as I settle into me thirties, I have to admit, my image of him has broadened beyond expectation. For at this point, I have days when all I really require is a backbone; a passion; an unshaken ability to pursue a woman whether he is sure he is interested or not. That is to say, following up on my previous post, it is possible that at this point in life ALL that makes a frog into Prince Charming for me is his stepping up, stepping forward, and exploring ME, whether or not he knows right away that I'm one heck of a catch.

Wishy Washy

During my epic acupuncture session last week, Joseph the acupuncturist repeatedly whispered a phrase as he paddled my limbs and stretched me out. I am sure that the phrase was in a language other than English, but all I could discern each time he said it was "wishy . . . washy." And what a chord that phrase strikes in my mind when I think about dating in this town.

San Francisco has been, on the one hand, a hotbed for dating and fun for many of my female friends and, on the other, a real pain in the arse. In our first year here, we got asked out just about every time we met a new guy. California men seemed completely at ease with going on dates, and some of them seemed quite charming about it. But too many of us experienced something similar: though date after date occurred, though some of these guys professed how incredible we were, though action was gotten or romance seemed afoot, in the end, we were told, "I'm just not sure..." or "I can't do this..." or "I'm not ready...." What does such an epidemic of wishy-washyness represent?

A male friend said to me recently that any guy who says he's not sure whether he wants to date a woman or just be friends with her truly only wants to be friends. I lean toward agreeing with this analysis; but what of the part-time interest these men show? What explains that? I dislike generalizing about people; I dislike the practice of reading into one person's behavior lessons learned from another's. Yet I've seen such repetition of action here in SF, both in my own dating life and in my friends', that I have to start to wonder. Is it just an east-coast-girl/west-coast-guy conflict of interest? Or is there something about life here that keeps these guys from wanting to commit? Is the problem that California so well satisfies one's desire for the good life—one's desire to live to the fullest, experience everything, always find a new adventure soon enough—that people become restless souls, that "settling down" seems the antithesis of happiness?

Lara's Man Blog: The Rules

Some of you are familiar with a long-ago proposal called Lara's Man Bar. Thoughts of it have recently revived, and we've discussed a more modern discussion forum for it; that is, Lara's Man Blog.

Here are the rules:
1. I will tell funny stories about dating. My own dating. Which is sadly less full of romantic stories than terrible—but-later-deemed-funny—stories. This is my pitcher full of lemonade made from those lemons.
2. Sometimes I will be need to abandon my good humor and be reflective. I will channel my inner Carrie Bradshaw. This will be the sprig of mint in my lemonade glass.
3. I will not share full names so no one finds oneself being advertised as the tool on the other end of the my dinner table.
4. I will take inspiration from your comments. Egg me on. Ask for more details. Ask for favorite tales. But remember: we have a mission. We still have to build Lara's Man Bar (in some form). SUPPORT THE CAUSE. This girl needs to get her groove on.

More soon.
Founder, Sponsor, and Public Relations Manager, Lara's Man Bar

Ode to Driving

Living in the Bay Area, I’ve never met so many people who frown on driving. I notice it because I’m a driver—both here, where public transportation doesn’t get me everywhere I need to go very quickly given where I live, and in general, because I grew up in an all-driving city, Atlanta. If you’ve never been to the South, you don’t know just how car-reliant people can be; but when it’s as hot as hot gets and extremely humid, you’ve got no desire to walk, so public transportation is unnecessary; and when you’ve got no geographic boundaries on your expansion, and when you’ve got a city built largely in the woods, you can just expand the city, take down forest and lay down road after road, build fourteen-lane highways, and enjoy cruising down beautiful streets and speedways at high speeds or low ones—whatever you fancy.

I grew up knowing no other option than the car, so I never questioned its use. When I moved to the Boston metro area, where I lived for a decade, I loved being able to take the T places, to walk a mile or two to get somewhere and pass stores and eateries along the way. But I still used my car to get to different parts of town, to get to the coast, the mountains, the rest of New England. I do that here, too, but it’s different because here I work for myself, at home, and thus have no commute. Suddenly, I live a life in which driving is something I do once or twice a week and generally for short distances—to go to the grocery store or the movies, to go to Target, sometimes to go to the East Bay.

Recently, I’ve been going to Palo Alto once a week for work. I hate the time it takes from my life to drive this route at rush-hour, adding up to two or two-and-half hours roundtrip, and I do sometimes wish I was sitting on a train so I could be reading. But highway 280 is beautiful, and when I get out of traffic, I find myself feeling elated by once again soaring down a highway and seeing what I pass by.

When I was a child, my family went hiking many weekends. We would drive north, through towns and open spaces that are now the metro area, and up to the mountains, the Appalachians. Sometimes we’d hike near Dahlonega, an old gold-mining town, and I would daydream about striking it rich (forgetting, every time, that thousands of people had already sifted the soil, leaving now only the glitter of thin sheets of micah poking out of the dirt). Other times, we’d go to Panther Falls, where we once saw a bald eagle perched at the top of the waterfall and were thrilled when he lifted his wings and flew away overhead. My dad’s favorite was Sweetwater Creek, where the remnants of an old mill blend in with the scenery, the cut-stone walls the same color as the large rocks he liked to jump to and from, trying to reach the other side of the sudsy river without falling in.

I grew up seeing a rich fabric of places in Georgia and got to all of them by car, often on many-hour journeys. On those car rides, while my mom and brother talked, I generally sat quietly, cheek pressed to the windowpane, and watched. It may seem remarkable to people who know me now, but I sat without saying anything on yearly driving trips to my grandparents’ houses in Miami and Rhode Island, on six-hour drives to the coast of Georgia for long weekends, on most every roadtrip we took. It wasn’t that I was anti-social; I was just engrossed in absorbing America. I had grown up in a city that wasn’t really a city; it was residential and wooded, and I had a swamp and a creek in my backyard. But it was not the small towns in south Georgia where people’s cars rusted in their front yards, propped up on metal rims without tires, near metal trash bins in which tomatoes grew or flowers blossomed. It was not the small towns in south Georgia that had streets named Settin Down Road and Jottin Down Road or, less cutely, Jim Crow Lane. Nor was it the Okefenoke Swamp or the Everglades, the homes of alligators and ospreys that we watched for hours; nor was it the transition from southeastern woodlands, dense with thousands of types of deciduous trees, to boreal forests, in which an oak or a maple might be the dash of color in an otherwise coniferous landscape. As we drove in every direction, there were so many changing details for me to see that I didn’t want to miss a single one.

I have often met Americans who have never been outside the part of the country they come from. Some have rarely left their own state. I, on the other hand, had parents who drove us everywhere, having little money for plane tickets. So it was out of necessity that we took long car trips, but I think my parents enjoyed being able to show us so much. Maybe if I hadn’t had such parents, I would have gotten restless spending such long stretches in the car; maybe I would have needed the DVDs and other distractions that kids these days get to enjoy just to drive up the street. But my sense of curiosity had been piqued at a very young age, and I think it is from the first big trip we took that I developed such an attention to detail on all the ones that followed.

I had been one month from turning four when we left Atlanta for my dad’s sabbatical in Davis, California; we had arrived on my birthday. Over the course of the weeks in between and the additional month we later took to drive home—in one direction crossing the country on a southerly route and in the other crossing toward the northern border—I had seen Anasazi ruins in Arizona, Redwood forests in California, gold country (I even found a little nugget in a stream on my dad’s friend’s property, though I don’t think he let me take it home), Canon Beach in Oregon and banana slugs in Washington, bison in Yellowstone, as well as moose and big-horn sheep and Old Faithful. I had seen things so far from the reality I knew that I would never forget them.

Twenty-four years later I would finally retrace our steps, getting in my own car and traveling all the way across the country on wheels for the third time ever, to settle myself on this western coast. In the intervening years, I frequently dreamt of two things: the American frontier—true wilderness—and driving through it. When I was eighteen, I hiked for six days on mountain goat trails in New Mexico, seeing no other humans than the ones I was with, and I summitted at 13,100 feet. I could see four states; I could see the amphitheater-like ridge we had come in on and the path we would take back out. This was the frontier alright, and we had driven straight from Atlanta to it. This would quell my urges to see the unknown for nearly a decade. But some six years later, I would begin writing a piece of fiction in which a character woke up one day and, spur of the moment, got in her car in Boston and drove to New Mexico, seeing all she could on the way; and my wanderlust would reawaken; and I would feel the need to do it all again. To see that changing scenery—to see the way both the natural world and the people within it vary as you pass from place to place.

“La libertad es alas,” the Mexican poet Octavio Paz once wrote. “Freedom is wings,” he would have said in English. I understand the impact of the car on the environment; I respect the need for more of us to walk and travel by train or bus than do now. But the sentimental side of me will never let go of that love of traveling across a vast and changing universe with watchful eyes and learning all its pieces and parts. You might think it’s a funny route to enlightenment, but for me, driving IS freedom. It is both momentum and a moving vantage point.

Acupuncture gets more than just my qi flowing.

I wasn’t expecting acupuncture to put me into the introspective mindset that it did today. When I did it a few years ago, my acupuncturist would regularly set me up in a dimly lit room, lodge into me almost unfelt needles, and then leave me for an hour to float in what seemed like a fully conscious form of bodily sleep. I rarely thought about anything specific; instead I lay in what felt physically like a comatose state and let my mind rest; just listened to noises in my surroundings; just processed the sensation of being utterly still and yet feeling energy throughout my limbs. When she roused me, it felt like being ripped out of deepest slumber, which I ached to get back to; I generally felt miserable for the rest of the evening. But the next day I would awaken like a newborn; I would awaken more energized than I could remember feeling.

Today’s session was entirely different. Before lying on the acupuncturist’s table, I was seated in a jointed chair-bed and asked to lie back. Before I knew it, he had whipped spring-bound stirrups out of the wall and was slipping them over my socked feet, letting them tug my legs gently upward. “This is lazy yoga,” he told me, arranging one of my legs in a pose in mid-air and then beginning to gently pat and shake it. “Gravity is one form of god,” he also told me, nodding toward the unattended leg, which was bending deep at the knee and sinking groundward. He explained that before he started acupuncture, he wanted my body to release the fatigue that has been giving me headaches. “Breathe deeply, yawn very big,” he instructed many times; “let the exhaustion out of you.” My previous acupuncturist had said something similar; had explained that my migraines might get worse before they got better because balancing my qi was a bit like an exorcism. I would have to expel my migraines before I would move past them. To expel them, I would have to have them.

That first time, I had gone in with a completely open mind. I knew nothing of how acupuncture is thought to work biologically, and, as someone raised by scientists, I would normally have wanted to know that. But I needed to go in without expectations; I needed to just try it and see if it worked for me. I have had severe headaches and migraines for most of my lifetime; I have tried prescription drugs for treatment and prophylaxis; I have tried everything doctors have thought to tell me to try. Little has ever changed. I still have headache season every so often, and during such times, I get severe headaches every day for weeks and weeks. Last time, three months of acupuncture seemed to cure me; I had very few headaches for more than a year afterward. I hope the current sessions will go as well. But as I wait to see that, I am already marveling at what they have done to me.

Today, after more than 30 minutes of lazy yoga and heavy yawning, I finally lay in the dark on a padded table, settled into stillness under layers of blankets, let the spring-loaded stirrups hold my feet in place, and felt the tingle and subtle electrification of such skinny needles you can hardly see them dipping their sharp tips into my bloodstream. The acupuncturist stood over me and explained that the breathing exercises I had just done were qi gong; “gong,” he told me, “is artfulness.” He was teaching me the art of breathing. And I was floored by how overpowering so much yawning could be. As I turned each breath into a yawn, opening my mouth wide, what had started as inhalation seemed to change—it felt like a wave of oxygen flooded some part of my body not normally filled with air, and, repeating this action so long, I had become light-headed and my eyes dripped with tears. “Now you are ready for acupuncture,” he told me as he turned out the lights.

In this state—body gently paddled and stretched, limbs light, joints airy, head sinking like lead into the pillow—he left me. Only the sound of trickling water kept my attention. But as I shut my eyes, my mind immediately flickered through a curious pattern of thoughts.

Image: the face of someone I wonder if I will eventually fall for. Then a scene of us together, my envisioning of what it is like if that happens. I watch this on my mind’s movie screen for what seems like many minutes. That my mind landed here seems very reasonable; I am feeling, in the scene, those same sensations as my body is feeling now—floating yet stimulated. But eventually, my mind moves on.

Image: the view of a long bridge from the passenger seat of a car; sunshine and water in the background. This is a static image, but momentarily my mind fills in the other details. The song playing is Enigma's “Return to Innocence,” which is eerily fitting; the driver is my mother. We are leaving the town of Wiscasset, Maine. I have just lived for four months in an arctic daydream, working on a farm, trudging through snow to study forest ecology, learning to spin wool and knit and even to practice meditation. I am in high school. I have just spent four months away from the school I’ve attended since kindergarten, four months away from my parents’ divorce. I have just lived in a frozen climate, which once was unimaginable, and I have loved it. My cheeks are soggy; I am not ready to go home. As my body floats, as my qi begins to circulate, my mind has gone from something very present to something long past, and now the stimulus is sad, which surprises me. And yet I am just viewing it. No emotions arise.

Image: a windowsill, pane pushed upward, warm air flowing in. Branches block my view of the sky, but it is up there; it provides a dark backdrop, and when oak leaves rustle, one or two stars glint through. This is my windowsill. This is my bed. I have slept beneath this skyscape every night since I was seven. This is the image that, for all my childhood, I have seen just before going to sleep. This is my metaphorical treetop hiding place; my sanctuary. Sometimes I get in bed ridiculously early because this is where I do my thinking-things-through.

Image: I am in a hammock. Indoors, by a bay window. The air streaming through the glass panes is frigid, but I have what might be the worst of all migraines, so I am too numb to move. I watch snowflakes patterning the blue sky outside and picture a spider, thick like a tarantula, wrapping its legs around my skull and digging the tips of its feet into my skin. This image will inspire poetry when I feel better, but for now the only poetics in my presence are the sudden strumming of guitar strings behind me and the quiet—quietest ever—singing voice the body attached to the fingers emits. He is seated where I cannot see him, but I know that he has never sung in front of anyone. I take this fulfillment of a promise to let me hear one song, and one song only, some day, some time—I take this fulfillment of his promise right now as a sign that he loves me. In a year or two, I will find out that he does but not in the way I thought. In this moment, however, I am frozen, aching, and feeling like I might puke; this gesture of his is such that later I will allow myself to hold onto just this one memory even after I let him go from my heart. This migraine is hell; but he has allowed me to have it in his room, and he will sit with me through all of it.

The acupuncturist picked that moment to whisk the blanket off me and loosen my feet. I didn’t think it was time, but the clock showed that half an hour had passed. “How are you feeling?” he asked me, a hint of curiosity mixed with bashfulness in his voice. “Other-worldly,” I whispered, rubbing my eyes. Physically I was feeling elated; I would have liked to stir up my qi a little longer. But my mind had to wonder: where else would this exorcism have taken me before it was done?