Race for the Cure

It's been awhile since I walked to raise money, so when a nice young woman at Whole Foods asked if I would participate in the Komen National Race for the Cure, I said yes. Two women I've known for a very long time, Helen Mehoudar and Anice Nolen, are breast cancer survivors, and I wanted to do this to honor them, as well as to raise money to support breast cancer education, screening, and treatment programs.

Contributions are tax deductible, and you can pledge your support online by clicking here. And if you're in the DC area and want to join me in the walk on June 4th, you can sign up here.

Thank you so much.

A politician making sense

I don't normally think of myself as a single-issue voter, but I don't think I could ever vote for someone who wasn't pro-choice. Still, when someone is against abortion, I have some understanding of where they come from. Yes, I could say, "If you don't like abortion, don't have one." But if someone really believes that to have an abortion is killing someone, I can see how they would fight to make abortion illegal. I don't agree with them, but I have some understanding of their position. My real frustration, then, is those who are so opposed to abortion, but are also against comprehensive sex education and improving family leave policies. I think the abortion debate needs to be broadened. It's not just about abortion. There are a lot of other issues, and there are better ways to reduce abortion (it will never be eliminated) than than making it illegal. When I read E.J. Dionne's column today, I thought that Thomas R. Suozzi made a lot of sense.

In which I write about an event that I'm already tired of reading about

Last Wednesday, I attended an all-day meeting at a hotel over by Embassy Row. During lunch, someone came over to the table where I was sitting and mentioned to the group that the White House, Capitol, and Supreme Court were being evacuated. The bearer of the news didn't have any more information than that.

One woman sighed. "I hope whatever's going on is over with before too long. This could really mess up the commute out of the city this evening."

Then we went back to our food and our conversation.

When the meeting resumed after lunch, there was an announcement that everything was fine. We still didn't know what was going on, but it hadn't affected us while it was happening, so it didn't seem worth speculating over now.

I forgot about it until I got home and turned on the computer. My browser opened up to the Washington Post, with news of the small plane that had accidentally ventured into restricted airspace over the District. I had an email from a friend in the midwest, wondering if everything was okay. Was I scared? Had I been evacuated? By that time, I was sure she had the news that everything was fine, so I wrote a quick note back, telling her that we hadn't even really known anything was happening.

I've been wondering if I should write about this at all. I was going to mention how the media overreact to these kinds of things, but after reading nothing except that in the Post for the next couple of days, I'm pretty much tired of it.

I think I'm more interested now in the fact that we don't react. We don't panic. We worry about our commutes and eat our pasta. Most of these things are seen as inconveniences. Last summer, when the terror alert was raised for certain buildings in several cities, buses entering the Pentagon were being stopped. They ran mirrors along to check underneath, and bomb-sniffing dogs were led around the outsides of the buses. I heard rumors that the Pentagon police were even boarding some buses, although it didn't happen on my bus. One of my neighbors was glad they were taking these precautions.* I was upset that my seven-minute bus ride was taking 45 minutes. Add that onto my 5 minute train trip and 2 mile walk to from the metro to the office, and my commute was ridiculously long. I was noticably cranky upon arriving at work that week.

A couple of months ago, as my morning bus made its way to the Pentagon, the driver announced that people weren't being allowed to board trains at the Pentagon Metro. I felt somewhat panicky. After the bombings in Madrid, I began to worry about the terrorism and the Metro.** But none of us displayed any fear. We just concentrated on how we should get to work. The trains were apparently running, just not stopping at the Pentagon, so we got off our bus, and joined all the riders from other buses in the trek back to the previous station. As we passed a HazMat team closing up shop, a Pentagon police officer informed us that we would be allowed to board trains at the Pentagon, and we retraced our steps, and we continued on our normal journey into work.

Even though I'm continuing about my normal business, I am nervous. I worry. In November, in spite of my fear of heights, I climbed the steps to the top of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral to look out over London. I knew I was safe, but my stomach felt empty, and my knees shook. Back in Washington, I hear that the trains aren't stopping at the Pentagon station and see the flashing lights on the emergency truck, and I have to tell myself not to panic, even as my stomach feels hollow and my knees go a bit wobbly. Then I take a deep breath and head to work. And if it's happening across town, I don't pay much attention at all.


*He works in one of the buildings that had its alert level raised, so he may have just been more nervous than the rest of us in general.

**I'd like to point out here that my main fear isn't that something bad will happen on Metro during my commute. I'm more worried about something happening 30 or 40 minutes after I've exited the system, while Brian's commuting. Because, seriously, if the train I'm on explodes, I'm dead. If the train Brian's on explodes, I'm alone. For me, personally, Plan B there sucks a whole lot more (I am so freakin' eloquent). I haven't decided whether this is selfish or unselfish on my part. And when I mention this to people, they mostly are just surprised that I've thought it through so carefully.

Have you seen this blogger?

One of my favorite bloggers, Julia Montgomery of Tequila Mockingbird, has disappeared from her blog, and her readers are now staging, as one put it, a six-degrees-of-separation search-and-rescue mission. You can read about the operation, headed up by Postmodern Sass, here.

I started reading her site back in March, just before she left for Thailand. I made my way through her archives, and before too long, I had read every post on her site. Some made me laugh out loud (and when I was reading in my cube at work, that was a little embarrassing), and others made me want to cry. I love her writing. She finally came back on April 1st, with a quick post and some photos, but since then the only updates to the site are the comments on that post (almost 200 now) from readers wondering what has become of her. Selfishly, I want her back so I can read more wonderful stories. Less selfishly, I just want to know that the person I've never met but whom I admire is okay.

So if you find someone meeting this description, could you please let the internet know?

Weekend getaway

Because I would rather regret my misspent dollars than my misspent youth, and because a weekend of my youth is surely more misspent doing laundry and grocery shopping than sightseeing in a foreign city, last week I went to Buenos Aires for the weekend. I am quite pleased with myself, even if I do feel a wee bit silly. But Brian was in São Paulo this past week for work, and he figured he might as well spend the weekend before in Argentina. I certainly wasn't going to let him go have fun with out me; I'm certain there was something about that in the vows. So on Friday night we headed to Argentina.

*****

One of the biggest problems we faced in Argentina was the language barrier. Both of us took Spanish in college, but it’s been a good five years since we’ve had any lessons, and four since we’ve had much occasion to use it. Add to our inexperience, the fact that the Argentine accent was stronger than we’d expected. One of our college Spanish teachers was from Argentina, so we had some idea of what the language would sound like, but Carlos must have controlled his accent to help us learn what Spanish sounds like in the States, Mexico, and everywhere else. I wasn’t too worried about language issues when we first arrived. A week earlier, I had called to reserve a room. I was able to understand and answer all the questions the man asked me: How many people? When will you arrive? How many nights?

We arrived at the airport early Saturday morning, and I approached the first counter marked “Remises” to find out about a taxi to our hotel.

“¿Cuánto cuesta un remis a la Calle Lavalle?” I asked, hoping they would understand me. I had no idea whether ‘remis’ was masculine or feminine, and I pronounced ‘all’ as ‘eye.’

“¿A Cah-shay Lah-vah-shay?” The woman asked after a moment.

Brian and I exchanged a glance that communicated all kinds of questions and worries. “Sí,” I replied.

*****

One in a cab, the driver asked us where we were going more specifically, and I checked the address in Lonely Planet. When we were stopped at a toll plaza, the driver asked to see the listing. I showed him, and he said something I didn’t understand. I looked at Brian, hoping he had gotten it.

“He says our hotel burned down.”

I understood that the man was offering to take us to a different hotel, run by someone he knew. Eighty pesos a night, including breakfast, he told us. Any trust I had for the man flew out the car window and was run over by some other little car on the highway into Buenos Aires. I had read posts in the Thorn Tree forum about taxi drivers in this city. They weren’t to be trusted very much anyhow. While Brian and the driver stumbled through conversations about other topics, I concentrated on figuring out how to say “I don’t believe you,” and “Let me out of this car.”

As we approached Lavalle, the driver again repeated what he had told us earlier about the hotel. I told Brian that we needed to just go to the hotel and work things out from there if there was really a problem. Brian conveyed this to the driver, and slowly started to figure out that the hotel had not burned down; that wasn’t what the driver had been telling us after all. He’d only meant the hotel was likely to be full.

“Tenemos reservaciones,” I told him, confident enough to say that. And I still had some 'reservaciones' about this driver. We declined his offer to wait for us, in case the hotel was full, and headed along the pedestrian mall to the hotel.

When we got to our room, we got out our Spanish-English dictionary. The words for ‘flame’ and ‘full’ are rather similar. Brian had simply heard one when the driver had said the other. Having figured out that, we contemplated the sign in our room:

Sr. Pasajero:
Tome nota que su equipaje puede ser revisado cuando usted retira del hotel.
-La Gerencia

Did it mean they would search our bags when we went out? Or that we could check them at the desk when we checked out if we wanted to continue sight-seeing.

“I guess your interpretation depends on how paranoid you are,” Brian said. He went to take a shower, while I turned on the TV. I heard the water start to run, and then he came back into the room.

“I’m watching Argentine cartoons,” I told him.

“This is important.”

“There’s a guy in a turban. I think he’s the bad guy.”

“No, listen. ‘C’ stands for ‘caliente,’ not ‘cold.’”

Very important indeed.

*****

Later on we checked to see if the water drained the wrong way in the Southern Hemisphere. The toilet didn’t seem like a good way to tell, and we couldn’t quite see which way the water was funneling down the drain in the sink, so I spit in some toothpaste while I was brushing my teeth. It swirled counter-clockwise down the drain.

When I first brushed my teeth after returning home, I watched the water swirl down the drain. Counter-clockwise. I did some research with my most trusted source for random information. It turns out, the water should have drained clockwise when we were in Argentina, but that we needed to let the water rest for a long time before we would see the effect.

*****

So what did we actually see in Argentina? It’s amazing what one can pack into two days. We started out wandering along Florida Street, a pedestrian mall of shops, to the Plaza de Mayo.

One of the first things that we saw was tango dancers on the street, as we’d been promised.

They were amazing. Later, we saw a sign describing tango as “the vertical expression of a horizontal desire,” and that was the honest-to-goodness truth: watching tango is like watching people have sex standing up in public.

Plaza de Mayo was mostly empty, as it was the weekend. We saw the monument there to the revolution and independence of Argentina, and lots of graffiti. The Casa Rosada is there—the government building that houses the executive power (basically like our White House). That’s where you saw Madonna sing from the balcony in Evita.

There is also an interesting cathedral lining the plaza. Outside of the cathedral we saw a camera crew and some trucks, which we’d also seen as we walked along Florida. We watched them for awhile and couldn’t figure out what they were doing.

From there we made our way toward Recoleta, to the cemetery that everyone told us we needed to see. It was the strangest cemetery I had ever seen. Outside there were musicians playing, and a sort of crafts fair was going on. There were more tango dancers. I had expected something a long the lines of Arlington Cemetery, with a series of graves and grave markers and the occasional larger memorial. But all of the tombs at Recoleta are above ground, and it looks like a small city.

We peered into the tombs. Sometimes there was a casket right there. More often there was some sort of altar with a crucifix, and a steep, narrow staircase descending into the ground. We finally located Eva Perón’s tomb, where she is buried with her family (Juan Perón is in another cemetery across town), mostly by following the crowds.

We awoke the next morning to the sound of rain. I dragged a very cranky Brian out in the wet, chilly morning, to look at old buildings, including el Teatro Colon (the opera house), and el Palacio del Congreso (the capitol building).

Finally Brian convinced me to stop in a café, where he ordered coffee and we had hot, fresh, delicious empanadas. We bought a newspaper, and I read that the camera crew outside the cathedral had been a Spike Lee crew filming some sort of commericial. By the time we were finished, it was still chilly, but the rain had stopped, and Brian had enough caffeine in him to make him a much happier sight-seeing companion.

The highlight of that second day was the San Telmo market. Much like Washington’s Eastern Market, the Mercado San Telmo is in an enclosed area, where there are produce stands and stands to buy meat, cheese, eggs, and bread. But there are also antiques booths, with people selling delicate-looking old toys, old-fashioned cameras, and gaudy jewelry. Outside the market, other people set up booths to sell crafts and other goods.

We went from San Telmo to Caminito in La Boca. Caminito, which is named after a tango song, is a very touristy, pedestrian strip down near the waterfront. The buildings are painted bright colors.

I had read that it wasn’t really safe to wander off the main streets in La Boca, but I found it interesting how poor the neighborhood surrounding Caminito was. There was a soccer game about to start in the stadium nearby, and the streets near Caminito were filled with people dressed in blue and yellow, many of them wrapped in their team’s flag, as they walked to the game.

People were obsessed with soccer. On our way back to our downtown hotel, we passed a bus stop that was outside a café. As we approached, we noticed half a dozen men with their faces pressed up against the glass. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing at first, but then we saw that the game had started and was being shown on television in the café. The men were watching it intently.

That game (or maybe another) was on the radio on the bus I took to the airport later that night. The three other passengers on the bus gathered up front near the driver, listening to the game. I let my mind wander as I watched the city float by the window in the darkness. The announcer spoke too rapidly for me to understand anything except his call of “¡GOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLL!” when someone scored.

One is silver and the other's gold

Brian frequently comments on how long my friendships last. Most of the people I am close with I have known for years. It’s important for me to keep friends for a long time. I like the familiarity of being with someone who has known me since I was ten years old. They know what I’m like. We’ve watched each other grow up. When I’m with someone I’ve known since the first week of college, I know that they’ve seen me through a lot of changes and that they understand something about why I am the way I am.

But underlying those reasons is something else, something that’s also important: if I didn’t have my old friends, I’d have to make new ones, and I find that prospect absolutely terrifying. I prefer to stick with the friends that I’ve known for so long that I wouldn’t know how to stop being friends with them. They’re like family: there are times when I’m not sure why I like them, but I know I love them dearly and life wouldn't be the same without them.

I’ve always been shy. Meeting new people can be a struggle for me, a painful one. I’m not entirely sure why that is, or what I’m afraid of. I suppose it’s probably a matter of self-confidence. And maybe I just don’t have enough practice. I lived in the same town until I left for college. The times when I needed to make new friends were few and far between. My closest friends, with a few important exceptions, are people I met on the first day of middle school and during the first week of college.

A couple of days ago, I had a wonderful afternoon with one of those exceptions, my friend Becca. Of my close friends, she is the one I have known for the shortest time. I met her during orientation, but we didn’t really become friends until our second year at Georgetown, when we had all our classes together. We spent a lot of time “studying” in cafes, with about a 3:1 ratio of chatting to studying. When she got married and moved to London, I was worried that we would fall out of touch and I would never see her again. But less than a year later, we were hanging out at a cafe and prowling used book stores, and it was as if she'd never left.

As we were sitting outside, enjoying the sun and our tea, talking about marriage and traveling and anything else that came up, I thought how strange it was that I felt so close to someone I've known for so short a time. It doesn't feel as though we've been friends for less than two years. If I think about it, I know that Becca doesn't know me in the same way as someone who has known me since I was ten years old, and I don't know her as well as I know the people that have been friends with for more than half my life. But somehow I feel as though I've known her forever. I started to wonder when that line was crossed, when she became such a good friend to me. Is there a specific moment in a friendship when that happens? If there was, I didn't notice when it happened, but I am happy that it did.

Don't talk to strangers

In the first few months after I moved to Washington, I noticed that strangers didn’t talk to me on the Metro the way they did on BART. Other Californians in my graduate program also noted that people were less friendly with strangers on the East Coast. I don’t think of myself as someone who talks to strangers. I rarely strike up a conversation with someone I don’t know—I’m too much of an introvert. But when someone speaks to me, I nearly always answer. Usually it’s a tourist who needs directions. Occasionally, someone will ask me about the book I’m reading. I will commiserate about the weather when a stranger offers to share his umbrella at the bus stop on an unexpectedly wet day. And these superficial conversations with strangers don’t make me uncomfortable.

There has been a man on my bus in the evenings, who has decided to initiate conversations with me. Something about him made me uncomfortable the first time, a few weeks ago, but I wasn’t entirely sure what it was. I was sitting near the front of the bus, talking with Marvin, the driver. When we pulled out of the Pentagon, I opened my book.

“Excuse me? Miss?” I was totally engrossed in my book, and it took me awhile to realize I was the one being addressed. I looked up. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

I looked at the man. I had noticed him when I first boarded the bus. He had been talking on the cell phone in a loud, slightly twangy voice. He was sitting near the front of the bus, and I had wished he would go to the back to finish his conversation. And now, he was sitting not too far from me, wanting to know if he could ask a personal question.

I glanced at Marvin. I could tell he was listening.

“Okay,” I said, not totally comfortable with it, but not feeling that I could say no. Besides, if the man was out of line, I knew Marvin would make him get off the bus.

“How many pages have you read?”

I was relieved. It seemed like a silly question, but it wasn't exactly personal. I looked down at my book, checking the page number. I don’t usually use a bookmark, choosing instead to note the page that I’m on, so I knew how many pages I’d read since I’d left work, how many I’d read on the Metro, how many I’d read on the bus from the Pentagon.

“Of this book?”

“Just since you’ve been on this bus.”

“Um, eighteen.”

“In what? Four minutes? Are you some kind of speed reader?”

“I—no. It’s a good book.” [Actually, it was a great book, and if you haven’t read The Kite Runner, you need to. Now.]

He apologized for bothering me. We exited the freeway, and I got off a few stops later.

I didn’t think about him again, until I was waiting for the bus earlier this week. Brian and I had ended up on the same train coming home, and I was talking to him when the same man interrupted me to ask the time. I answered him, and turned back to Brian.

“Now is that really the time? You aren’t one of these people who sets your watch 5 minute ahead or something?”

“No,” I told him. He, Brian, and I had a brief conversation about people who set clocks ahead. Then the bus came, and Brian and I spent the ride home talking with a woman who lives in our building. When we got home, and I mentioned that the man was the same one who had asked me about the book, he agreed that something about the man made you think he was weird.

Yesterday it happened again. I had noticed the stranger in line behind me for the bus. I settled down to read, and tried not to notice the man when he sat down across the aisle from me. Marvin wasn’t driving, and I was not up front near the driver.

“Excuse me, miss?” The bus was moving off of the freeway, merging onto the traffic circle. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

I didn’t want to say yes, but I wasn’t sure why. His last personal question had been harmless. But I felt uncomfortable. It wasn’t just that I didn’t know him. I didn’t know the man who had offered to share his umbrella with me while we waited for the Metro bus outside the Spanish embassy a few weeks back. But I had taken him up on his offer, and over the course of a few bus rides we had gotten to know each other. His name is Miles, and his wife had a baby girl back in December. He’s not a stranger anymore, but he started out that way. Why did this feel different?

I didn’t say yes. I just looked at him, waiting.

“Have you ever considered growing your hair longer?”

I turned away from him, looking straight ahead. I noticed that the woman in front of me had stopped reading. I didn’t know her name, but I’d smiled at her in greeting as I got on the bus, as we use the same bus stop and we have spoken casually before. I could tell she was listening. I wished Marvin was driving.

I didn’t know what to say. It was a personal question, and while I couldn’t say exactly why I didn’t like that he had asked me, I was certainly uncomfortable. I considered not saying anything.

“I’m not going to talk with you about my hair,” I told him at last, not looking at him, as the woman in front of me pulled the cord to request the next stop.

The man apologized, and I rose to follow the woman whose name I didn’t know but who was not a stranger off of the bus.

We had gotten off one stop before ours, and walked up the hill together. She told me that I had been right to not simply ignore the man, but to be direct with him. She had requested the stop, thinking it would be a good idea to just get away from that man. She turned to walk down her street as I walked up the stairs in front of my building. Next time I see her at the bus stop, I will ask her name.

dnext

Take a look at the dnext website. I've watched the video about six times now, and I'm still not tired of it.

The pope's funeral

Although I am not Catholic, I got up a little earlier than usual today and sat down to watch the funeral of John Paul II. I don’t have a television, so I watched the video on my computer, and turned on NPR for sound, since the sound on the computer seemed choppy.

I thought it was beautiful. I have a great appreciation for traditional ceremonies—graduations, weddings, funerals—and the pope’s funeral was full of the pomp and circumstance that awes me.

For an instant I was offended by the knowledge that this one was so much more than any other Catholic would receive. It bothered me that people are dying in horrible circumstances every day, and people are making so much fuss about the death of one man. I wondered why everyone, even non-Catholics, was glorifying the leader of a religion that oppresses so many.* But I realized that these things didn’t bother me that much. He meant a lot to all the pilgrims who came to the funeral and to others around the world. The deaths of world leaders always draw more attention than the deaths of poor people in developing nations. Maybe that should upset me, but this morning it did not.

And so I sat and watched the pageantry. I loved the colors of the robes and learned about the water on the casket. I wondered how many people know what the Latin means and how many just recite the sounds. I marveled at the beauty of the singing. I was surprised by the applause. I was aware that this was a historical moment, and one that I would remember for a long time.

It was a beautiful service and I’m glad I watched it.



*I went back and forth over whether I should include that sentence. I’m not entirely sure why it concerned me so much; I guess I was worried about whether I would offend anyone. I decided to leave it in. Maybe on another day I will write something about differences between religions and the people that interpret them. But I will need to think those things through a little more before I can write anything worth sharing.

100 things about me

Lists like this apparently went around on blogs awhile back. I found out about it on an awesome blog I recently discovered. Since I didn't have a blog back then, I'm doing one now.

100 THINGS ABOUT ME

1. I would rather be near the ocean than just about anywhere else.

2. I like to fly kites.

3. Patience is not one of my virtues.

4. I have a good memory for numbers.

5. I prefer Jif or Skippy peanut butter to the natural kinds.

6. I don't care that Jif and Skippy are bad for me.

7. I don't like peanuts.

8. I keep friends for a long time.

9. I sometimes laugh before the punchline.

10. I am not a tidy person.

11. I think I have pretty feet.

12. I am a vegetarian.

13. Purple and red are my favorite colors.

14. I am allergic to cats.

15. I have a cat anyhow.

16. I think my cat is the cutest little critter ever.

17. I wish she would let me pet her belly.

18. I love pizza.

19. I wish I knew more languages.

20. I hate doing the dishes.

21. I take pride in being a liberal.

22. I hate being told what to do, especially if it was something I was
planning on doing.

23. I will sometimes not do something I was planning on doing, just because someone told me to do it.

24. I will laugh at the same joke more than once.

25. I am a Giants fan.

26. I never leave baseball games early.

27. I love Mexican food.

28. And Indian food.

29. And Italian food.

30. I like to pack light.

31. I am afraid of the dark.

32. I feel most peaceful at the beach or in a church.

33. I am not a good singer.

34. I don't like math.

35. But I'm actually not too bad at it.

36. I do things the easy way.

37. I don't wear makeup.

38. I am easy to guilt trip.

39. I sleep on my right side.

40. I like to kayak.

41. I am afraid of heights.

42. I would like to write a novel someday.

43. I like the cake more than the frosting.

44. I cry easily.

45. My feet get tired faster in museums than anywhere else.

46. I prefer history museums to art museums.

47. I like art museums best if they are small and have a theme.

48. I can be very jealous.

49. I need orange juice to start my day the way other people need coffee.

50. I like folk music.

51. I read poetry and novels.

52. My favorite part of carving a jack-o-lantern is pulling out the seeds.

53. I believe that places that make Italian sodas with Sprite are evil.

54. I can't watch scary movies.

55. I like to read travel guides.

56. I don't really like to shop.

57. Except I like doing the grocery shopping.

58. Ice cream may be my most favorite food.

59. I am surprised by how many things on this list are about food.

60. I like to have a routine.

61. I sometimes stomp my foot when I am angry.

62. I walked a marathon once.

63. I am not a very good liar.

64. I lose a pair of sunglasses every summer.

65. I lose a hat every winter.

66. I don't floss every day.

67. I tried surfing once.

68. I tried skiing once.

69. Caffeine upsets my stomach.

70. Okay, lots of things upset my stomach.

71. I like to paint my toenails.

72. I don't like to drive.

73. I tend to be a backseat driver.

74. I don't like socks.

75. I am an introvert.

76. I believe giving and receiving are both pretty good.

77. I like pens with glittery ink.

78. White wine makes me drunk faster than red.

79. I can be snobby about my writing.

80. I like apple desserts.

81. I especially like apple desserts that have lots of cinnamon.

82. People tell me I seem organized, but I'm really not.

83. I love to bake.

84. I have never really outgrown that stage girls go through in their early teens where they love dolphins.

85. But I never had a "horsie" stage.

86. I am afraid of speaking in front of groups--even small ones.

87. I am a feminist.

88. It bugs me when people try to say they are more of a feminist that someone else.

89. When I don't shave my legs it is not because of any feminist principle. It is because I am lazy.

90. I sometimes cry at movies.

91. I cry reading books more often.

92. I have cried reading a book on the Metro.

93. I worry about house fires.

94. I am a morning person.

95. I consider myself a person of faith.

96. I prefer squishy pillows.

97. I don't always handle criticism well.

98. I like to eat outside.

99. I like monkeys.

100. I like giraffes because they remind me of my grandma.

Happy, shiny people

The sun is shining, and people are smiling and talking to one another. Is it warm weather that makes people friendly? Or is it just the change from warm weather to cold? Maybe we’ll all be keeping to ourselves again in a few weeks, but right now everyone is walking slowly, stopping to talk on the sidewalk, and smiling at strangers. No more hurrying from heated car to heated building as in the winter. And we haven’t yet reached the hot, muggy weather that will make everyone scurry between air conditioned locations without stopping to say hello to the people they pass.

I went with coworkers to eat lunch in the park today (for the third time this week). As we passed a man that was standing on the sidewalk near the picnic tables, he smiled at us.

“How are you?” one of my coworkers asked.

“Fabulous, brother,” he said, drawing each letter out slowly. “Just fabulous.”

Me too.

Before and after

There was a line in Jon Carroll’s column recently that made me think. I liked the whole column, the metaphor of the trapeze artist and all that, but what caught my attention was when he said that his daughter needs to “understand how to feel the moment just before and the moment just after” the trapeze’s momentum changes.

Sometimes I try to record a moment in my mind—-usually when something good is happening. I focus on the moment, hoping I can commit it to memory to pull up again later. I’m not entirely sure it’s successful. There are moments burned into my memory as clearly as if they had been recorded on tape, and I’m sure there are other memories that I’ve tried to preserve that have been pushed aside.

But what about the moments just before and just after the times that I am trying to hold onto? When I pause to say to myself “I will remember this,” do I remember what happens just before then or just after? Maybe.

Our first winter in Washington, it snowed in January, after Brian and I returned from a visit with our families in California. We went down to the Mall, because I wanted to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial covered in snow (the Korean War Veterans Memorial was actually even more striking that day). We had a snowball fight in Constitution Gardens. I remember that moment clearly, and I remember being out of breath and covered in snow, thinking “I need to remember today.” But what happened before and after? Those details aren’t clear.

But Carroll is talking about the change in momentum, and the times that surround that change. My life was not frozen for an instant at a momentous occasion that day on the Mall. What happens when the momentum in my life changes? When I tried to think of an instant when my life’s momentum changed, my mother’s illness and death about four years ago were the first things that came to mind.

I called my mom to ask her about a recipe one evening. I remember where I was sitting. I remember that the room didn’t have enough light. I remember the notebook on my lap, where I wrote down the instructions for the acorn squash. That was the moment before. And then she told me she was sick again. Her leukemia was back. I remember the sound of her voice, but not her words. I don’t remember afterwards. I must have hung up the phone and told Brian the news, but I don’t remember. Did we make squash with dinner that evening?

I remember when I first was told that she had died, only a few months later. I was still in bed at my in-laws’ house, before they were my in-laws. My father-in-law came in and told me that my mom had died. I remember that moment clearly, even though I had just woken up. But then I remembered the moments just before. The ringing of the phone woke me, and I knew what it meant. I curled up against Brian’s back and pretended to be asleep until Andy came in with the news. But just after? The moments just after are less clear. I remember eventually going downstairs and calling the hospital to talk to my dad. I reached the nurses’ station, and they found my aunt for me. I don’t remember what I said to her. I don’t remember if my dad came to the phone. I remember my hair being wet from the shower when we arrived at the hospital. And that is all. The rest of the day, up until my brother and sister arrived that night, just isn’t there.

Those memories of the moments just after are lost in the trauma of the event. With happier memories it is easier. I do remember the moment just before my wedding: I was standing in the entry way at Brian’s parents’ house, with my dad beside me, looking at our friends and family gathered in the living room, and thinking “Am I really going to do this?” And I remember the moment after, when we kissed and the music began. I remember that moment every time I hear that piece of music. And, truthfully, I don’t actually remember the actual moment—-the reading, the lighting of the unity candle, the vows-—all that well. There it is the moments before and after that are important: standing beside my dad, and then not wanting to let go of Brian.

With the happy memories and with the sad, I don’t think I was conscious of the moments before and the moments after, at least not in terms of their importance as being the moments before the pendulum swings. And I don’t know how I used those moments. Maybe these aren’t the kind of moments that Jon Carroll is talking about. But reading what he wrote, I understood that the moments just before and the moments just after are something to be conscious of. Perhaps in the future I will become conscious of how I can use those moments. Right now, concentrating on those moments, just for their own sake, is enough.

Baseball

We've been talking about baseball a lot at work lately. Mostly we discuss which Nationals games we all want to see. Poor Nationals: no one wants to be a Nationals fan—we all just want to go see our teams play when they come to town. I guess that’s one of the problems in having a team in a city where no one seems to stay for long.

We’ve also spent plenty of time discussing steroids and Barry Bonds (and when we talk about steroids, it's a health issue and totally relevant to our jobs) I have two points I like to bring up in our discussions (both get good reactions) that I thought I’d share here:

1. Babe Ruth wasn’t using steroids, but he was playing in a segregated league, and therefore not competing against everyone he ought to have been competing against. Shouldn't that be accounted for when discussing his place in the Hall of Fame?

2. Maybe more players should use steroids. Wouldn’t the game be more interesting if more players were hitting all those homeruns?

I can't think of anything to blog about, so this is what you get

I've been to 31 states, plus DC. I've also been in airports in Washington, Arizona, and Ohio, but I don't think that counts. Hopefully, I will get to go to Washington and New Mexico for work this fall.



Create your own personalized map of the USA.

"Little" brother

My little brother makes me feel old. He’s almost five years younger than I am, so when I went off to college he was thirteen, and I guess in my mind he’s still that age. So the fact that he graduated from college last week surprised me, just as I was surprised when he had his first girlfriend, when he told me that he voted for the first time, and when he turned 21 last summer.

When my sister got a job, when she graduated college, when she moved in with her boyfriend—none of those struck me in the same way that similar milestones in Nick’s life have. Maybe it’s because she and I are only about three years apart in age. Sometime during college I got to the point where I didn’t necessarily see Lauren as my little sister, just my sister. I am slowly getting to that point with Nick, but I still find myself taken aback at times when he does something that reminds me that he is an adult, that he is older and more mature than I think, and that if he is that old, I must be even older.

Mostly, just little things strike me. Last summer he picked me up from BART in his truck. I was home for visit before starting a new job and had been off visiting with friends. It was twilight, and he thoughtfully put music on that he thought I would like for the short ride home. Right now my mind is flooded by the memory of being in the Burbank airport with my family, right after our mom died. Nick put his arm around me in a funny sort of hug. I leaned against him for a moment, my head against his chest. For a moment, my grief was broken for a moment by the surprise that this young man was my little brother.

Now he has finished his associate’s degree in sound arts, and it will be “upgraded” to a bachelor’s degree when he finishes a long internship. I wasn’t able to fly home for the ceremony. I wish I could have. He and I aren’t very close these days, and I’m not sure we ever have been. I regret that, and I hope that as we both continue to grow up that will change. Because I’m impressed by the person he is becoming, and I'm very proud of him. I always have been—even when he was five years old and covered in “b’sgetti” sauce and when he was 16 and dyed his hair green.

Early morning quiet

I’ve almost always been a morning person. It’s not that I always want to get up and do something, or even that I'm always in a great mood as soon as I wake up. The peace of that time of day simply appeals to me, whether it comes in the dark and cold of winter, or in the bright mornings of spring and summer, when the sunlight is a beautiful color that it doesn't have any other time of day.

When I was growing up, I liked to be up early, with the house mostly to myself, enjoying breakfast quietly with my dad, as he read the newspaper and worked the crossword. My mother took advantage of my early morning wakefulness early on: by the time I was in the later part of elementary school she had taught me how to make her coffee and put me in charge of packing lunches for myself and my siblings.

I tended to sleep in during the first couple years of college, but after that I started getting up early again, and those are some of the mornings I remember best. I enjoyed the quietness of the world at seven in the morning. The expansive campus seemed nearly empty, aside from deer, rabbits, and the occasional early morning cyclist or jogger. I suppose I could have had a similar sense of quiet and aloneness wandering through campus at night, but in the early mornings I was free of fears of mountain lions and bad guys. In the mornings, there was just cool air, clear sunlight, and damp grass. I would sit outside in the quad to read the paper without disturbing my roommate, or take walks through campus.

I still get up earlier than some people think is reasonable, even on the weekends. I like to have my alone time. For some reason, I enjoy the early morning quiet more than quiet time during the day when I am home alone. Sometimes I have my orange juice and read the paper or a book. Other times, I make the shopping list, pay bills, or mix up batter for pancakes. But no matter how I’m using that time, God help the husband who rises within an hour of me on a Sunday morning and interferes with my peace and quiet.

Yesterday morning when I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep, I figured I might as well go to work. The days are getting longer, so when I left the house around 6:30 it was already light. The bus was crowded and when we got to the Pentagon, there were plenty of people already waiting to go through security at the entrance to the building. It wasn’t until I came out of the Metro at Foggy Bottom that things felt different. The hot dog cart wasn’t there yet, nor was any other vendor. The Post Express man wasn’t there calling out good morning to everyone as he handed out papers. Only the Washington Examiner man was there with his free papers, and he didn’t say anything. I wasn’t caught up in a press of people heading toward their offices or the next bus. Washington Circle wasn’t its usual mess of honking cars. I didn’t have to wait for a long traffic signal or dodge cars as I crossed Pennsylvania Avenue against the light on the way to the bus. In the middle of Washington, I had the same sense of solitude and quiet that I used to have on a path in the center of the Santa Cruz campus, watching a doe near the library, or sitting on a slope near the music center, looking out over the town and the bay.

It’s not that I want to be alone in the world. I remember being absolutely terrified by a book I read in middle school, probably something by Christopher Pike, in which the characters woke up and found that everyone else in the world had disappeared—I don’t remember how or why or what happened after that (although that was probably scary, too), just that these characters were alone. The idea still scares me. But somehow I enjoy being awake while the rest of the world sleeps, and feeling everything else come slowly to life around me.

Monkeynaut

I like anything to do with space exploration or monkeys, so my trip yesterday to the National Air and Space Museum was pretty much complete, even though I really only spent time in the Apollo exhibit.

This is Able, a rhesus monkey, who, with her squirrel monkey companion, Baker, was the first living creature to return from space alive. She died a few days after her return, due to a reaction to anesthesia given during surgery. The autopsy revealed that she had suffered no ill consequences (physically, anyhow) during her trip. She is displayed in the capsule she flew in.

Poor little monkey.

Postcard from another time

I leave things in books—letters from friends, notes I write to myself, “important” pieces of paper that I don’t want to get wrinkled in my backpack. Sometimes I mean to keep things in a book for awhile; sometimes I mean only for the storage to be temporary. I am a re-reader, enjoying the familiarity of books I have read before and the pleasure of discovering new things in stories that I know by heart, so I always find whatever I had left for myself. And I am usually careful to thumb through the pages of a book before I lend it to someone or trade it in at a used bookstore.

Last night it was still light out when I came home from work. It was one of the first spring-like days we’ve had. I had walked the two miles between the Metro and work, and spent an hour outside with coworkers at lunch, wanting to spend as much time in the fresh air as possible. I’m glad I did, since, in early March, such weather is unlikely to last—and today it is snowy and cold. But last night at six, it was still 60 degrees, with the clear blue sky deepening into lavender, so I fixed myself a small snack, picked up a book of e. e. cummings’ poetry from the shelf in my living room, and went out onto my front step to read.

The book opened to where a postcard was stuck between the pages. I turned it over, knowing what it was, but surprised to see it. It was from a young man I’d been completely infatuated with when I was about 19 or 20. I read over the card—the writing covered almost all of it, with space left only for the stamp and my address. The date of the postmark was illegible. I looked at the poem on that page. The same young man, on a different card, had copied down the first stanza of that poem.

Had I really not opened the book in six or seven years? I supposed that was possible, since it was Selected Poems, and most of the poems in it are in other books on my shelf. I don’t remember finding the card there before. I wondered if I had put the card in between those pages intentionally, taking the book off the shelf and finding the right place. Maybe I’d had the book with me when I picked up the card in the mail room, and after reading the card, had just tucked it inside, but that seems unlikely. Interesting that it was this card I had placed in the book and not the one with the lines of poetry on it.

But maybe the card had been some place else only a couple years ago—tucked into a journal or another book, perhaps. Maybe I had found it, wherever it was, and slipped it in between the pages of the book. I could have done just that when I was packing for my cross-country move, intending to put it with other cards and letters when I unpacked. I concentrated, trying to remember, but the memory wouldn’t come to me.

Without rereading the poem, I put the postcard back in the book, between those same pages, and turned to another section to read. The next poem I found seemed fitting for the warm day:

in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me

I still write to my senator

I frequently write to my senators and representative. Well, okay, I frequently send letters to my congressmen: I am on a lot of mailing lists for organizations that write letters for me. All I have to do is fill in my name and address and hit send. Also, most of the organizations save my information, so I don’t even have to fill in anything. So several times a week, a message appears in my in-box from NOW or NARAL or CDF or the UCC, and I follow their link, put in whatever information is required, and hit send.

I told a friend who works on the Hill that I do this.

“I hate you,” she said.

I live in Northern Virginia. My representative is a Democrat—one with questionable ethics and his foot in his mouth, but a Democrat. My senators are both Republicans. I get letters back from them occasionally. The ones from Senator George Allen are my favorites. He seems to think I am some baby-killing, sodomizing, pacifist pinko. Senator Allen and I have different world views.

I recently sent e-mails to my senators about Social Security reform. Today I received a letter back from Senator John Warner, thanking me for my “thoughtful inquiry.” He explains* the worker to beneficiary ratio and tells me about the problems Social Security will face in the future. Then he states that “President Bush’s 2001 bipartisan commission on Social Security co-chaired by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan found that Social Security would be strengthened if modernized to allow individuals to invest voluntarily in personal accounts.”

That statement bugged me. I want to write back to him and tell him the commission was given guidelines (which he no doubt already knows). The last of those guidelines was that the commission’s recommendations “must include individually controlled, voluntary personal retirement accounts.” So I’m not sure I’d say that the commission “found” the program would be strengthened, so much as they were told that finding such a thing would be a good idea.

Also, I would like to tell him (or the LC) that commas before “co-chaired” and after “Moynihan” would improve that sentence.

*Out of respect to my friend who hates me, I should point out that it is more likely an intern or legislative correspondent who explains this to me.

Commuting into Washington

Yesterday was a normal day, aside from the fact that I was a little earlier than usual. Marvin, who drives the 7:40 bus, greeted me when I boarded his bus outside my house with “Hello, stranger,” reminding me that I hadn’t been able to get myself out the door before eight for over a week. I found a seat and read a few pages of my book on the way to the Pentagon Metro. Before he opened the bus doors at the Pentagon, Marvin called out for us all to have a good day, which is what he says every day, unless the weather is bad, in which case he tells us "Now let's be careful out there." For some reason I noticed a tall woman with short blonde hair and a long red coat alighting from nearby bus as I stepped down onto the sidewalk. I followed her up the escalator toward the Metro.

On a lawn near the entrance to the Metro, a group of about 20 people joined hands to form a circle, their heads bowed in prayer, while one woman read aloud from a Bible. There are often demonstrators in this area during my morning commute, especially on days when I am early, though not usually a group this big. Last week I saw two women holding up signs that said “Thank You.” More frequently, I see a group of four to six people with anti-war messages printed on their signs. One woman regularly carries a sign that tells soldiers heading into the Pentagon “You are killing and dying to make Bush and Cheney rich.” The demonstrators never chant or yell. They just talk to each other and stand there with their signs.

Yesterday was different. The group was larger than I’d ever seen it before, and there were at least a dozen Pentagon police on hand to supervise. Six or seven lined the walkway between the demonstrators and the Metro entrance (although they didn’t stand between the demonstrators and the commuters on the way into the Metro). One sat on a motorcycle nearby, and several others stood talking to him. Maybe these police officers wouldn’t have surprised me—I’ve grown accustomed to seeing bulky men with large guns around Washington over the past three years—but there was one that stood out. The lawn sloped up beyond the demonstrators, and at the top of the rise stood a single officer, holding his gun in front of him, watching as they prayed in the damp chill of the February morning.

I didn’t read any more of my book on the Metro ride. Instead I thought about the scene I’d witnessed. I don’t know the politics of the people praying—they had laid their signs on the grass while they prayed. I hadn’t been able to hear the woman who was reading. I hadn’t even stopped to watch or try to hear, though I slowed my pace to take in the scene. Now the image of that military policy officer holding what looks to me like an automatic weapon is burned into my memory. I considered who he was protecting. The demonstrators? The commuters? The building? And what was he protecting them from? He seemed more threatening than protective to me. The other soldiers seemed less imposing, less ominous. In spite of the guns slung over their shoulders and dangling in front of them, I was less concerned by the men who stood casually talking than by the man who stood silently in the background, his feet apart and his gun in hand. I wondered if that officer could hear the prayer, if he listened to what the woman with the Bible was reading.

When I came up onto 23^rd Street to head for my next bus, music was playing from a boom box. The melody was played by some sort of low woodwind, and it sounded African to me. A man was setting up a card table so he could sell hats and jewelry. Another man was loudly greeting commuters and handing out free newspapers. A siren screamed as an ambulance made its way around the traffic circle to the hospital. Shuttle buses lined up at the curb, and a woman with long blonde hair and a long red coat climbed out of a cab. I fell in step with the rest of the crowd, hurrying toward my next bus.