Old blogs never die

I've always lamented my inability to keep a regular journal of any kind.

Then, a year ago, I stumbled on to the very regular journal that I'd kept faithfully and vigorously for almost a decade and then completely forgot about.

It was disconcerting.

The main subject of the last entries was about the slow, soft death of my cat.  In her final months she wanted to be held constantly, so we held her constantly.  Within two weeks after her death I found I couldn't remember her.  I could remember facts about her, but I couldn't remember the smell and sound and sight of her.  A couple months after her death, I was dancing to live music in Jerusalem, and a window opened.  I was able to feel the empty space where she had been a weight in my arms, and to cry.  Within hours, the window closed.

Four years later, I stumbled into my old journal.  

I had forgotten that we'd had a cat.

According to Blogger's Dashboard, a couple times a year since then I recognize a great developing theme or project in my life and go to journal it.  For weeks I cherish the egg of an idea until I reach a window of calm where I can pull out all the stops, staying up at night, hiding out in the bathroom, inching the careful design along, setting up an initial framework of what's it all about, launching the first passionate posts...

And, then the next emergency hits and I forget it exists, until I hitch my wagon to the next star and go back to Dashboard and find the remains.

Sometimes I haven't noticed even then. 

Of all the things I've loved and lost, I miss my hair the most, because the portion of my mind that has departed clearly includes any capacity to evaluate how much of my mind has departed. 

It's taken five years for me to put together that this is a regular pattern happening.

Apparently I have an unstoppable need to get things out of my head but once I've made the initial hole for the words to fall out they fall all the way and get lost.

It's kind of like discovering that your life's been one of those time loop stories where the mad scientist keeps starting the same project over and over without realizing it.

I've started scooping up the bits of brain I've dropped all over the Internet and piling them here, both to be responsible for cleaning up after my messes and to try to gather enough for good reflection so I'm a little less "not gone but forgotten" in my own eyes.

Old blogs never die.  I guess I'm trying to track them down and eat them and regain my lost power.

There is No Net

Complications in the Birth of a Babywearer

from old blog "Please Do Not Feed the Monkey on My Back"
Original URL: http://pleasedonotfeedthemonkeyonmyback.blogspot.com/2014/11/complications-in-birth-of-babywearer.html

I want to start my story focused on the resource I did have: education. In seven years of infertility I'd read more about newborn needs than most people do in a lifetime. I knew all about kangaroo care and vestibular stimulation and the anthropological evidence of alloparenting. I knew about just about every thing you can absorb from books or research papers. Plus, I'd seen babies worn in slings all the time back when I was getting my doula education before my health broke. At the point in pregnancy when other mothers were collecting baby clothes, I was tracking down three yards of gauze for a reboza and making my first ring sling. Who needs clothes when babies are born to be skin to skin? I was going to wear my baby everywhere!

Instead, I ended up carrying my baby in my arms for eighteen to twenty hours a day for much of the first year of his life.

It was when baby arrived that I found out just what you can and can't learn from books. Books kept us breastfeeding despite all odds. He had a latch that *looked** okay and I had what felt like an endless train of so-called "lactation consultants" playing cheerleader... all while I kept trying to tell them that I was *sure* this didn't feel right and my miracle baby's weight sank under five pounds. Because of my book-learning, I faced off with the pediatrician, demanded equipment my care providers didn't even know about, pumped for twenty minutes every hour and a half, and traded back and forth with my husband finger-feeding him with a threadlike tube for sixteen hours a day-- and all the while at the same time everyone we talked to, every time we left the house, we asked for help with the reboza I turned out to be unable to tie and the ring sling I couldn't even get on. Reading had taught me why to wear my baby, but it could not teach me how to-- and apparently, neither could anyone else (including my husband, who claimed he was a natural). The staff at our birth center, our doula, our childbirth educator, La Leche-- everywhere, the same reactions. Rebozas? Aren't they for labor? Ring-sling? What's to know, you put it on and put the baby in it, right? And why is this important when you're having feeding and weight troubles? [FYI-- babywearing is research-demonstrated to speed weight gain.]

No one we knew commented on the fact that, following internet instructions that just read "two and a half yards of a fabric you like", I'd made the ring-sling out of a dirt-cheap super light super grippy quilter's weave and **steel saddle rings** from a leather shop because I'd read there were issues with rings breaking. [FYI-- baaaaad ideas]. No one but me pointed out that, when my husband wore our little one, baby's head ended up at near right angles to his body and his little face pressed right against that (thank god!) super thin cloth. (My husband finally stopped because my already strained nerves couldn't handle it.). Meanwhile I made a "moby"style out of strips of a stretchy bedsheet on clearance, sitting at a sewing machine at my parents while family passed around the baby. The first few times I put it on were like playing twister for me, but soon it became second nature.

By three months the horror of the breastfeeding problems and procedures we'd behind us, but we were still carting around ring sling number two-- my best friend's own go-to Zosimos, mailed to me from states away. Still, no one could show us how to use it. When I'd try, I'd get a back spasm and a headache that would last hours. Our public health nurse offered to get me another sling or some time of carrier-- but was up front that she would not be able to teach me how to use it. Meanwhile our little baby turned out to be one of those who wanted skin contact at all times everywhere. After a few months, the "non-moby" was so stretched out, I chopped up the fabric for diaper wipes. My husband got fixated on buying a Becco Gemini after seeing another father wear one. It took an enormous amount of help from family to afford and acquire one but the Gemini was supposed to be "the only baby carrier we'd ever need from infancy through preschool."

Meanwhile we were still eking our way by inches out of a hoarding situation, trying to stay on top of the tangle of social services (we lost our power assistance due to an office error and then were denied three times in a year for paperwork problems that were never explained-- and some saint in DSHS had to work on our file for 7.5 hours nonstop to straighten out the hash that others had made of our food and medical benefits, all while SSI continued to stall recognition of my husband's disability). Of course, I was also going through a long distance graduate school program on a need-based scholarship that required I maintain an A- average or lose everything.

Several times, I reached a point of needing to call my father to come into town to pick us up so baby and I could have regular meals and a stable, clean place to be while I caught up on my schoolwork and my husband worked on our wreck of a home. The crazy combination of chaos and retreat came at a steep price; my son became unwilling to be held by anyone but me. At some point during all this, I finally found local BWI meeting information, but all the meetings I could see for two months were Eastside and West Seattle-- as far away as the moon to me. [FYI- BWI = Babywearers International, a nonprofit group dedicated to teaching babywearing skills.]

At least there was the Becco. Baby didn't like facing in. On my back, he just screamed-- and I had no way to get him down quickly and safely or check in on him. He loved facing out, but I was worried about his hips. [FYI - inadequate hip support from some styles of carrier, especially the popular Bjorns, are strongly correlated to hip dysplasia. The Gemini is a good carrier, but facing-out is the position that offers the least support]. I tried to limit his time facing out in the Becco to forty minutes a day-- which pretty much meant one outing a day, for me *or* my husband. I found out that I couldn't wrestle him in and out of the Becco on a crowded bus while keeping groceries upright/diaper bag at hand, so it became a short distance tool.

A pause here for gratitude-- In so many ways the Becco was a godsend-- it made groceries and the endless outdoor walking to soothe his evening colic *possible*. And everyone in the neighborhood loved, loved, loved it. Fellow shoppers at the store and homeless on the street would stop us to praise me for keeping my baby warm and near. No one around here had seen anything like it before-- on my block, mothers buy those cheap umbrella strollers for $12 when they go on summer sale, then come fall wrap up their babies like burritos and walk home with the groceries hanging in old plastic bags from the handlebars. I've seen mothers with a baby and toddler steal shopping carts to get their families where they need to go.

At the same time as it gave us these gifts, the Becco's limits on top of our own limitations were severe. My world dwindle to five square blocks of our neighborhood. Most days, most of the day, I simply carried him, and at night he slept naked in my naked arms or not at all. Managing this and my classwork came at the cost of my ability to feed and clean myself. By a year old our struggles to better understand and meet his high needs had only resulted in him being saddled with a formal diagnosis of "infant mental illness". Professionals kept telling us daycare would have prevented our problems and never failed to express their shock that their advice for "training" him by forcing him to be alone for increasing lengths of time only increased his agitation. Meanwhile, when we could get out, all our friends though we had the perfect baby boy [we agreed!]. He was so quiet, so sweet, so curious and focused-- so long as he was in my arms.

I cried the day I walked into my own library's meeting room and read on the white board there that there'd been a BWI meeting there the day before. Of course, no one in the library could give me any information on it-- whether it was a freak, one-time occurrence or a regular thing. That may have been when I gave up my hopes of ever becoming the kind of babywearer I'd dreamed of being. [FYI - The condition for reserving a public room at the library is that your event must be open to the public... and cannot be advertised by any kind of flyer. Meeting at the library kept the group accessible... at the cost of being able to do basic outreach. In fact, the group is almost entirely dependent on Facebook-- which is why I had such a hard time finding any information on them.]

I got my second chance when a Facebook-savvy friend had her own baby and asked me to come with her to a BWI meeting at my library. It was bittersweet for me, but I couldn't resist, even though at 18 months and walking my little guy was clearly beyond the babywearing stage, right? [FYI - NOT!]. I remember struggling to get him in and out of the Becco on our slow and halting way to the library, and letting myself really notice how his little body now went planked and rigid sliding into the carrier.

Then we reached the meeting and, pretty much, my life changed. For the first time ever I found myself in a room full of mothers who thought like I did. I'd gotten used to hanging on the outskirts of meet-ups, either listening to mothers in perfect make-up compare their new boots and exchange tips on the most distracting Baby Einstien DVDs, or watching immigrant mothers excited to find one another and speak together in their own language. Suddenly I had my own cultural home-coming. The most beautiful fabric I'd ever seen (after four years working in the industry) was flying everywhere like wings beating around me. I dared to strike up a conversation with a mother of four about separation anxiety and found myself being told almost the very words we'd said to the professionals over and over-- that he simply needed what he needed and we needed help understanding and supporting that. Even my pint-sized introvert relaxed enough to toddle after the other children. I was quick to realize that many of the kids I saw arriving and climbing into slings were much bigger than my own. In the blink of an eye, my goal changed from supporting my friend to getting help myself.

I didn't stretch myself out of my comfort zone, I threw myself out of it as if from a moving train. "Please Gd," I thought, "If there is one time in my life I can make like an extrovert, let it be now!" I made eye contact with the nearest attentive face and spilled out that fact that I didn't even know what to ask. With a few questions, we'd zeroed in on my most pressing need as some way to get my new explorer up and down easily, and I found myself sent over to the "best teacher" for... drumroll, please... a crash course on ring-slings! As I walked up, she had her hands full demonstrating a long woven wrap on a fellow newbie with a much smaller child, and missing hardly a beat, she started wrapping me up, too. It was obviously way too complicated for me to pick up and useless with a baby who couldn't stand facing in, but since I did need her help, I was hardly going to complain. We scooped my baby boy up into the mass of loops around me--

And he pressed his little head sideways against my breastbone, and I felt his little body absolutely melt against mine, letting go of every last bit of tension for the first time. "You just chill out in your mama's arms, don't you?" my new teacher cooed. "You're just where you need to be."

Then she showed me how to put on a ring sling, and how to put him in it, and how to adjust it-- and it actually worked for me!

So I rushed home and got out the Zosimos and did everything I'd been shown--
and ended up with a spamming back and a killer headache. I touched base with my friend, who rushed over the pleated-shoulder wrap conversion she'd borrowed at the meeting. I tried it-- and got a perfect fit.

There followed the tale of two babywearers-- both successful, but very different.
My friend had read about the group before getting to a meeting, enough to have already branched out into the DIY support group and the swaps. She had a few for the basics of the world of babywearing. She understood what was in the library and how it worked, and she had $30 to spare for the dues for access to the lending library of all different styles of baby carrier. She could drive.
My friend made it to three meetings in two weeks and connected with people besides. Within a month, she knew which styles of ring-sling worked for her, which didn't, and why. She'd gotten some jacquard tablecloth and very detailed instructions on how to sew it with a shoulder style she knew would work for her; she was shopping for her first woven wrap. In the end, she would get what she needed (as opposed to what she wanted, which never ends :) for about half as much money as I would spend trying to meet my needs, become a far more advanced babywearer than I, and meet her goals quicker with far less frustrations.

I fumbled my way on to the local BWI Facebook group, which seemed to be written in another language, and spent hours canvassing the thrift store and consignment shop looking for the kind of super-soft pleated shoulder ring sling that seemed to work for me. Yes, I was innocently looking around for a SBP-style WCRS to be sitting on a shelf, waiting for me. [FYI - what I didn't know at the time is that this is a $80-$180 custom-made item.]. I'd ever scraped together $35 to pay for it when I found it! When it became very clear that was not going to happen, I moved towards my hopes of a long woven wrap to duplicate our experience at the meeting. I dropped that money into the clearanced cotton curtain fabric that I would spend months trying to beat into the kind of softness I was looking for. On the group, I asked hard questions that got gentle answers... and I slowly started to come to grips with the price tag of my needs. [FYI - the type of ring sling a person is most comfortable with depends on the exact shape of their shoulders and neck musculature. The weaves or "wraps" that are soft, cushioned, and flexible enough from a really conforming fit and strong enough to do the work are enormously expensive; $200 - $400 are typical, and higher prices common. $60 -$80 jacquard tablecloths are the next step down, but it is a big step.]

I studied that Facebook group harder than my classes. For the first time, I actually had access to a community of other mothers I was in sync with. I learned names-- or at least acronyms-- for things I'd been doing all along. [FYI - "BLW" = encouraging your baby to mooch off your plate.] I learned that severe separation anxiety was much more common than "the professionals" who pathologized my child knew, that it had at least as much to do with natural personality as insecure environment, and that daycare not only would not have magically prevented it but most likely would not have been possible for our particular child. I learned why the most beautiful wraps also tended to be most durable, comfortable, and functional. I learned there was nothing strange or defective about my difficulty learning from pictures and videos, my need to be shown in person and to do it hands-on and then do it again. Like my baby, I just needed what I needed.

Then, abruptly, our time with the Becco was over. There was no more possibility of disregarding either his discomfort or mine. Suddenly, I needed that SNP-style WCRS ASAP to get our groceries home. There were hideous days of haunting the budget swap [$100 or less!] while everything went to pot. I scored ring sling #3 minutes after it had been posted, barely before the next wouldbe buyer. The shoulder *looked* right in the small photo. It wasn't, but it hardly mattered-- that sling got lost in the mail.

It was time for another retreat to my parents, and while I was there, an SBP WCRS came up on the local group. With my family aghast (I'd gone into debt over #3, and wouldn't get that money back until the post office finished their search) I told the seller that if she could bring it and it fit, I would buy it. That night, I finally danced my son to sleep in a sling... ring-sling #4.

With a ring-sling, we could get groceries again. With a ring-sling, we could ride the bus again. We could get back to the functions of the religious community I'd once been a central part of. We could dare to go farther to the bigger park, or tour the neighborhood, without fear of ending up stranded with him too tired to walk and me too tired to carry him. With a ring-sling, we had more meals, more often. We were able to join the local Buy Nothing group, to trek out to neighborhood houses and haul home what was clutter to others and treasure to us-- phones that didn't crackle, sturdy toys, a hand blender for powdered medicine, and, ironically, a stroller. And ultimately, with a ring-sling, my husband was able to sway our howling, heartbroken boy to sleep against his chest while I studied or showered.

These days we are on ringslings.#5-- big enough for my super-sized husband to wear, and #6, a tablecloth special with a tail short enough for safety when I'm pushing my husband's wheelchair, custom-made as a gift for me by my friend. After I read Facebook advice offered to another new wrapper-- that to overcome the challenges of first learning to wrap, you must love the wrap, want to touch it, want to use it, want to share it with your beloved-- I finally could let go of the money and time (three months!) I'd sunk into trying to soften up that curtain fabric. That beloved "first" working ring-sling (#4) was sold to fund a Lenny Lamb, the softest wrap on the market.

Baby's still got separation anxiety through the roof and a very low tolerance of strangers. Life still has more than its share of both blessings and limitations. I still hurt over the first year and a half of losses to my baby, my family, and myself that could have been helped if anyone, anywhere in our lives could have connected us to the local BWI group. I still have babywearing ambitions that I simply don't have the resources and support to make happen. Sometimes our FB group feels like home to me and sometimes I am a stranger in a strange land, helpless to join the conversations that are happening or to formulate questions in a way that gets answers I can use. We all have challenges, and in a very large group it can be difficult to explain why/how things are hard for you without some exhausted mother reading in an implication that things are easy for them.

From the outside, it is easy to forget that poverty isn't just about a lack of money, but a profound and complicated lack of various resources. In my home, we live at what I call a multiplicity of four. $5 is like $20 to us. For me, buying and selling slings in the swap was as stomach-clenching as being as a new broker jumping into the stock market with no net. Distances are greater. it takes me and my neighbor the same amount of time and effort to reach the store that's on the corner from my home and two miles from hers. Out of town might as well be out of state. I've made it to a grand total of four babywearing events, counting the one we needed to leave due to meltdown. I'm still on the fence about membership-- I'd love to see if I could master a high back carry with a mei tai, and go hiking!-- but, realistically I just can't make it to enough meetings to be sure of returning materials, and we can't afford to sink money into something that may not earn its keep. Simple tasks take longer with disabilities; a dinner of chopped veggies with stir-fried noodles is a dedicated two hour marathon for my husband, after which he is too tired to clean up. The time for me to practice the back wrapping I'd love to learn gets swallowed by the time it takes to survive. There is a strange expectation that living in chronic crisis makes us tougher, but the reality is chronic crisis of any kind leaves all of us more fragile, and much more wary of risks. To date, babywearing has cost us a full 5% of a year's cash income (separate from food benefits). It's been worth every penny, but if we'd known what it would take going in, it would have seemed impossible.

Babywearing comes with two great barriers-- quality carriers and quality teachers. The hardest thing of all about longterm poverty is the way it strips away your people skills. When you're not eating well, you're not thinking well, and you know it. You never look your best when you're making do with what people pass along or the thrift store has left, when having your hair cut professionally is a silly pipe dream to you. In our society, people meet around money-- coffee shops, restaurants, movie outings... and you can't do that; they invite you to their homes and you are scared to reciprocate because of all the differences in how you live and what (if anything) you have to offer. You have to constantly weigh everything you share about yourself-- will this revelation that invite people closer or scare them away? And then there's the issues of shame, and trauma, and depression-- and there is no one at our level of income without shame, and trauma, and depression. Poverty strips away your people-skills... and babywearing is people-powered. Our whole group of hundreds depends on the efforts of less than half a dozen teachers... including the one who finally got me slinging... the very teacher who had volunteered her services to the very center where I get my WIC benefits, only to be turned down flat by someone who decided babywearing wouldn't be of interest to people like me.

Toe Got Hurt

Who Needs Help?

Aria for a Baby Cochroach

Hold the Sausage

Things We Must Be Taught

Poverty Is / Wealth Is

My son was born after the Age of Privacy ended.

From old blog "Please Do Not Feed the Monkey on my Back"
Original URL: http://pleasedonotfeedthemonkeyonmyback.blogspot.com/2014/06/my-son-was-born-after-age-of-privacy.html

A few weeks ago I put up a question on my Facebook, asking friends what they remembered from childhood that children now will never know.

That weekend I read a book on the subject that chilled me to the bone.

It was the second draft of my uncle's history of our family. It's also a rigorous examination of the key central mechanic of America class motility-- the key to America's success as the land of opportunity.

Privacy.

You see, every individual in my family who ever made a name for him/herself, took up a step socially, or set up her/his kids for a better future.was able to do so by moving to a new place and telling a new story about themselves.

Privacy. It is how Americans have succeeded in defining ourselves by our potential, rather than our pasts.

And it is gone.

My uncle spent 35 years puzzling out the pieces of Grandfather's side of the family. Stripping off all the veils from Grandmother's side took only five years with current information technology.

So what? you ask.

So this past month a close friend of mine was tracked down by a childhood molester. This happened despite a cross country move, name change, and years of rigorous active paranoia trying to control what personal data appeared in search engine results.

I was painfully reminded of reading about an elementary school teacher's desperate plea to Google to remove her name from the internet-- in early childhood she'd been at the center of a bizarre tragedy and her name had appeared in local news. Decades later, casual internet tinkering by her students and their parents was resurrecting the story and ruining her career. Think about that-- everything she'd accomplished in her whole life, rendered worthless by a horror that happened before she could remember.

Growing up, business books on my father's shelf had a ton of advice on how to speak about your paycheck and perks, your job duties, your previous employers-- the bread and butter of an interview, the quintessence of self-promotion. Nowadays much of that advice is deemed counterproductive-- after all, even if your real work differed from the official description (a situation about as common as dirt) saying as much these days puts you at risk of the universal interview kiss of death-- looking like you're lying.

Speaking of universal, I have several friends involved in the technological march toward universal medical records-- a utopia vision of a future collective data base where all your health data follows you from birth to grave. I live in terror of this idea: I am quite literally alive because of points in my life when I moved to a new system and specifically denied permission for my records to follow me-- forcing my new doctors to assess me with fresh eyes. Actually, studies are *very* consistent at showing that more data does NOT make for better decisions;-- the human brain is built to do more with less. (Go read _Blink_, everybody.)

And speaking of more with less, I'm forever seeing these inspirational social media memes about moving on from the people in your life who don't make you a better you-- which is ironic because social media has made moving on from people gosh darned difficult. "Friendship" has become an opt-out, rather than an opt-in, relationship...with a distinct exchange of quality for quantity as we expend our energies sharing a morning snapshot with a hundred people in a tenth of the time it would take to have a real conversation with one.

There's some huge blessings possible here-- especially for an uber-introvert like me who has a lot of love to give and not many spoons for giving it-- but there is still some part of me for whom "real friends" are the people you can read by scent and body language and by the quality of their silence. I suspect my little boy will grow up in a world where the only word for such people is "relatives." At the same time, my uncle points out that children today will grow up in a global version of small town small mindedness, where things they said and did decades ago are only a click away.

We can no longer burn our old love letters.

Looking back, I realize that as a growing child myself during the dawn of the Information Age, all the futuristic network-world fantasies I ever read had omething in common. Every single spec. fic writer I ever read, every single one, envisioned the 'Net as a place of anonymity, the ultimate field of self invention, an arena entirely separate from real world identity and action. I think the alternative was, simply, unimaginable.

We have destroyed the natural boundary between history and memory.
My son will grow up in a world where his ability to define himself, reveal himself, and ultimately create himself will be constrained beyond the imagination of his pioneer ancestors. He will live out his life in a cage of data, and all he can do in life will only add bars.

Shaving the bones

From old blog "Please Do Not Feed the Monkey on my Back"

Original URL: http://pleasedonotfeedthemonkeyonmyback.blogspot.com/2014/06/shaving-bones.html

Hoarding.
It's complicated. It's genetic, neurological, stress-triggered. Imitates OCD in some ways and Addiction in others. There are case studies, brain studies, quantitative and qualitative research, and one vitally import chart...

From the inside-- Hoarding is about a badly broken sense of self. There's no boundary between self, stuff, future, past, feelings, reality... No capacity to navigate between potential, and fact.

The worst thing you can tell a Hoarder is that the you you are actively being in the life that is actually happening right now IS the real you in your real life.

And the easiest things in the world to Hoard, are books. Books ARE extensions of the self. Books are people in pages-- half a conversation trapped in time, with all the power a conversation has to engage, motivate, reassure suspended where you can return to it time and again with new insights and all the while ensconced in the safety of being by yourself.

Books you've read pass themselves off in your mind as free return tickets to the most important places you've ever been... although the truth is you are always a different you, coming back, and it is never again the first time.

And books you haven't read offer the illusion that you can go every place you've ever wanted to be, learn every thing you've ever wanted to know-- complete every you you've ever dreamed of becoming... all in one lifetime.

Then the eyes start to go. And the headaches last longer. And the blessed child you have waited so long for arrives, and the now of life demands a present presence more constant than it ever has before.

And there isn't enough space.

So you begin the process of excising the external brain. You ask the necessary dehoarding question-- "What am I realistically likely to use in the coming year?"-- knowing that in this context it becomes the impossible question "What am I most likely to *think* over the foreseeable future?"

It is time for a gruesome confrontation with the reality of yourself and your life-- the eyes you won't be getting back, the time you won't be having.

All de-hoarding is about dismantling the dreams that have come to be in the way of life. Books are the building blocks of dreams. All surgery is bloody.

But it isn't that simple. You *are*, in large part, the you shaped by those books you had casual, constant access to at a child. The books that were not discovered or recommended, but just there; the books that could be prodded and taste-tested again and again over the years. The antique books. The gilded books. The battered books with the questions in the margins. The books that fall open at a special spot.

You aren't just custom-cutting away the woulda coulda shoulda of your own future-- not just giving up on the teacher, the learner, the doer you wanted to be-- you are also swinging shears through the garden of your child's future daily life with books.

But there isn't enough space.

You must become an expert in issues your friends haven't even thought about. What pictures and charts actually transfer to eReader, and what are lost in transition. How quickly seminal works may be flushed from the library shelves, and which genres are most likely to linger. What memories really need to be at hand on a moment's notice, and what may be safely put "on hold".

And there still isn't enough space.

We have a special term for culling out books by now.
We call it, "shaving the bones."

Mandatory über extroverted codependency much?

From old blog "Please Do Not Feed the Monkey on my Back"

Original URL: http://pleasedonotfeedthemonkeyonmyback.blogspot.com/2014_05_01_archive.html

So this advice columnist "epic smack down" has been making the viral rounds, and while everybody else who was ever picked last for a kickball team or left out of a birthday party has been cheering, I am just weirded out.

The core issue is a very small group of very close family women who, *once* a year, make a special retreat together... and another woman in the family, with very different life experience and lifestyle choices, who wants in.

So what's this woman doing with that desire? Is she shifting her lifestyle to take advantage of the activities that keep the others feeling close? Is she concentrating on building bridges across their differences in life experience by strengthening their individual friendships? No, she's playing the "I want to keep doing what I've been doing and for everybody else to react differently to it" game. She's throwing adult temper tantrums and slander. (Gee, I wonder if that kind of behavior might have something to do with why none out of a group of four or five women want her along on their yearly recharge session.)

Our letter writer asks-- rather mildly, in my opinion-- how to guide this woman into taking the personal responsibility of building up her own group of like-minded, experience-bonded, nurturing friends... and our advice columnist takes the letter writer's head off, to general acclaim.

Apparently the only reason a person doesn't "fit in" is because others aren't "making space" for them.

Great to know! Personality conflicts aren't real, life experiences don't matter, people don't actually grow apart, and nobody needs boundaries-- we just have to play nice and make space!

There's a difference between being gracious, and being a doormat. Pretending to want to be around somebody you don't want to be around is mostly a reeeeeally creepy, passive-aggressive, and seriously damaging thing to do to somebody. 

I appreciate that this woman is having a hard time... but the hard truth is, it doesn't matter *why* the group she's stalking doesn't want to share their once a year most-special time with her. There is just no way around the fact that this woman really does need to make her own friends who can relate to and nurture her.

I have to wonder, if this was a close knit group who were held together by their experiences of being senior citizens, or gay, or cancer survivors, or amateur gourmet chefs... would the advice columnist have been so cavalier with their once a year special time together?

Because the picture I'm getting from the way this is written is that, because these close friends are ardent churchgoers, they're not supposed to have special friends, or special times, or personal needs.

And I'm not okay with that. I'm not okay with standing by and watching "Christian" translated as "mandatory co-dependent". I'm not okay with a group of mothers getting dressed down as "horrible people" for taking one weekend a year for selfcare in seclusion with those they most trust and understand.

We Can't Keep It Real Unless We Start Real: Words and Sex

From old blog "Please Do Not Feed the Monkey on my Back" Original URL: http://pleasedonotfeedthemonkeyonmyback.blogspot.com/2014/04/we-can-keep-it-real-unless-we-start.html Annalee Newitz's has written an amazing essay, "Your Penis Is Getting in the Way of My Science", to defend Science from the asshatery of pop media prattling about a "female penis" just because we've found a female insect with a body part that ends up in her male mate. The essay is awesome. READ IT. IT'S IMPORTANT.

But the issue seems so trivial, you may be thinking-- and you are thinking that because of one of Newitz's two mistakes.

Newitz is concerned about protecting science, but the bigger issue here is REALITY. Allow me to demonstrate why how we think about and how we talk about things like this is so important.

Quiz time! Where do babies come from? Why, every comedian knows the answer to that-- there's the wild whoopee splort and then a cutthroat race to the death for a gazillon sperm swarming up the female system until the one and only winner slam dunks its way into the waiting egg.

Sounds familiar?

How about the special two day stay at Club Cervix? You know, the point right after the wild whoopee splort, where those teeming thousands get welcomed into a critical period of rest, relaxation, perfect temperature, and all you can eat food? When was the last time you heard about that part?

Or the sperm teams? You know, when Club Cervix opens the doors to release all those plumped-up powered-up little champs for the race to ovulation, and they spontaneously form teams just like Tour De France, each team providing support and buffering protection for the one in the best shape. When did you last hear about the teams in the race? They even have an equivalent to bike lanes-- the special tracks laid out inside the Fallopian tubes, with more food all along the route. Those special tracks that make it *possible* for the sperm to go anywhere, because without those tracks, sperms travel about as well as ice skates on a gravel road. Have you heard about them?

And when did you last here a comedian talk about the fact that a sperm has no way to get inside an egg? What was the last good routine you heard about the way the majestic egg sits there with that first sperm knocking at the door, and then waits for more, and then finally somehow-- and we don't know how-- SELECTS one, forms two plastic arms, and embraces that chosen one into itself?

Does that whole process sound anything like what you learned in school?
Does it sound anything like what "everybody knows"?

What kind of impact does it have on our society that from greeting cards to cocktail parties, we're all told a hundred times over that life itself begins with a ruthless, random, savage competition of male units in conquest of a passive female landscape... when that is just not the reality?

What would it mean for men in our society if every boy was taught that his father's contribution to his existence was cherished, nurtured, supported, guarded, chosen, and embraced on the journey to his conception, rather than being the random conqueror?

This is serious stuff. This is about Reality, and our ability, and willingness, to recognize reality.

Which brings me to the other error in Newitz's lovely essay-- her perpetuation of a term that has no place in science.

Consider, if you please, the reality of the human penis.
Penises are blunt. Penises bobble. Penises blunder.
A stiletto penetrates. A spy penetrates. A penis is like an enthusiastic blind puppy that has to be guided home. If penises wore T-shirts, they'd say things like "Hold Me" and "Which Way Shall We Go?" and "Help! I Fell Out and I Can't Get Back In!"
The reality is, a penis doesn't penetrate; a penis gets inserted.
That's a pretty big difference.

The basic definition and connotations here are just not right.
Every single time *any* of us speaks of a penis "penetrating", we're perpetuating a myth of male as active, female as passive, and sex as violation. It is no more accurate, clinical, or objective to speak in terms of "the penis penetrating the vagina" than it would be to talk in terms of "the vagina consuming the penis".

Frankly, we all deserve better.

Even those hinky insects.

My Scary World

From old blog "Please Do Not Feed the Monkey on my Back" Original URL: http://pleasedonotfeedthemonkeyonmyback.blogspot.com/2014_02_01_archive.html So let's talk anxiety.

Trauma + deprivation = anxiety issues. (Or triggers. Or phobias. Or whatever you get paid to call them depending on your special field. Let's move on.)

I have anxiety issues around mail, phone calls, paperwork, people, and traffic.

Yeah. Not functional. Working on that.

But before we get to the Big Girl Panties part-- which is coming, I promise you-- I need you to think about cockroaches.

Yep, cockroaches. Plural.

Like that one box they have at the zoo, where for a second you just register a big box with dark walls and no animals in it, and then you realize... the walls are moving... the walls themselves are layers of living giant Amazonian cockroaches--

--are you there with me?

Okay, think about putting your hand into that box.
Ready? Three... Two... By the way, Amazonian cockroaches *bite*... One!Stick your hand in there!





Yeah. That box, is my mailbox to me. That's how it feels.


Making, or taking, a personal phone call, is like walking a tightrope for me.





You need my signature on something?





Traffic? Russian roulette. Every. Outing.





All of these fears are experience-based. Mail can contain nasty surprises that can rip life apart-- court notices, social service failures. Between my anxiety and my neurological quirks, telephone calls involve real vertigo, and eventual sensory shut down. Nobody likes forms or paperwork, but working with government assistance is like getting constant pop quizzes for which you can go to jail for getting an answer wrong. And traffic-- abusive behavior in the home often goes with reckless driving on the streets. I grew up with that fear. Besides, have you seen how people drive?!

And speaking of people...
I grew up in an environment in which social anxiety was taken for granted. For everyone in my household, anytime spent with anyone not of our household, was spent in a state of terror of doing something ruinously inappropriate in that act of trying to reach out.




I've been more lonely than I can say for most of my life.
I've worked incredibly hard for the people skills and community that I have.
That doesn't make being with people any less exhausting.
Even fun with friends can be hard on the inside.




And reaching out to ask for help, which can be scary for anyone to do, feels like this.





Now it is almost time for those Big Girl Panties.






But before I pull them on, remember:

I'm also low income, also partially disabled, also the caregiver of a toddler and the helpmate of a significantly disabled man. All that means it takes the vast majority of each day's time and energy just to make food and clean-up happen, AND I'm trying to inch my way through graduate school to build us a better future.

So, even with the Big Girl Panties on, I can only jump out of so many planes a day.

Footsore in Seattle

From old blog "Mother Huldra"



This is what home looks like.

Home looks like hurt and healing out in the open.

There was never time and air for my feet to heal in Jerusalem. I have blood blisters layered on blood blisters, but the greatest pain came from the, er, leaking between my toes.



There was just never any questions of what to do, besides pull on the same shoes for another's days walking and learning adventure.

New York City gave me silver-dollar water-balloon blisters on top of the blood blisters on top of the cracks and callouses. My father suspects it was the cycle of my feet swelling from lack of movement on the plane, then being subjected to heavy walking, then swelling again.

Whatever the explanation, the upshot was the after six weeks of walking the WORLD, I came home and couldn't put on shoes or creep off carpet!

Which means I left under a mutual cloud of fear over *this* guy not being able to take care of himself,



and came home to spend a week with my feet up and him spoiling me!

My One Day in New York

From old blog "Mother Huldra"


Days before I was to leave, I took a good look at the far end of my itinerary and finally fully realized that I was looking at a 15-hour layover in New York City!

Well, fifteen hours, minus two hours for getting through customs on arriving and minus two hours for check-in and security before departing and minus double the two to two and a half hours Google told me it would take for me to get pretty much anywhere from JFK by public transit.

Leaving a jet-lagged six hours in which to "Do" New York City.

Immediately I began asking my laid-back Seattle resources what One Thing I should do with a few hours in New York City. I got laid-back Seattle answers. "Have a real bagel." "Look around Times Square." Seattle does this to people. I began my own investigations. Bronx Zoo? Second only to the one in San Diego... that I grew up with. Jewish Theological Seminary? Closes down in August. Chabad's historical tour of Lubavitcher Brooklyn? Might not have its intended impact after six weeks breathing Jerusalem, ya think?

Time progressed; New York plans did not. I had great hopes of meeting with Maggid Yitzhak Buxbaum, the master Jewish story-teller, but our final emails just missed one another. Brain-storming with Israelis proved invaluable for the insights into Israelis, not so much for the insights into New York City, despite the fact that every other household knows someone there.

But I had no fear.
I had a hidden lynch pin.
And on my last day in Jerusalem, I turned to that lynch pin:
I asked a New Yorker.
Who just happened to be my chavrutah and the mortal soul who knew me best in all Jerusalem.

Actually, come to think of it, I didn't have to ask her.
What I said was, "Tomorrow I have a long layover in New York City."
"And what do you want to do with your one day in Manhattan?"
"I-- well, apparently I want to spend the day in Manhattan."
"Yes, yes, you do. When, exactly, is your plane arriving? Hang on, I'm going to need some paper."

So I arrived in New York City with EXPLICIT INSTRUCTIONS:



And before you ask, no, my chavrutah is not a professional teacher.
When a teacher gives inadequate directions, odds are good that the next teacher will have to straighten things out, so each teacher learns best how to correct the mistakes of the teacher ahead of them rather than how to correct their own mistakes.
My chavrutah is a professional LIBRARIAN.
A librarian stays stuck in one place with the same fools coming back with the same questions until that librarian masters the art of giving fool-proof directions to get rid of them for a few hours and get some work done.

Librarians are not to be consulted when in doubt, librarians are to be consulted whenever there is opportunity.

Now, in order to get on to the topic at hand, it's best that I turn aside for the moment from the things that should be said about the public transit obstacle course and psychological stress test known as "busing to Ben Gurion Airport".
For the moment, we shall also pass by the idiosyncrasies of transversing the date-line at night while wedged in between an ingénue clutching a three-foot stuffed animal elephant to her bronchitis-wracked chest and a writhing fourteen year old Israeli girl dealing with her plane seat about as well as a cat deals with being wrapped in a towel on an eleven hour flight on which half the passengers are in families, half of the families are Chassidic, and each of the Chassidic families averages two anxious toddlers and one crying baby, you do the math.

This brings me up to stumbling along towards customs trying to swallow the concept that I had left Jerusalem. Immediately I discovered I was having a terrible time transitioning back to the idea of a world around me that spoke my language. Living somewhere and speaking very little of the language is like having a chastity belt on your tongue: full range of imagination but you learn real fast what not to try with strangers-- and those patterns of what not to try, like lessons learned in muscle memory, do not wear off very quickly. I was highly conscious that I was still struggling to think in Hebrew, and I could not turn it off. I was holding my breath waiting for an immersive English environment to break the spell and free me.

New York City was not that environment.

Helene Hanff (a New Yorker, and even better, a New York Jew) wrote that London presents itself as whatever London you have in your heart before you arrive.
New York City, The City of the modern world, is not so malleable.
I could not have expected that my first vision of New York City as an adult would be the immaculate grace of a shining white egret pulling itself from the mud to fly with lazy majesty under the high tracks of my train.

My parents are lucky that I settled for The Emerald City before getting time with The Big Apple.

I rode the A Train with a black woman whose face matched the form of the green African goddess my grandfather brought home from his travels the year after my grandmother died. She slept with a midnight shawl wrapped around her, and I watched over her sleeping like that goddess watched over my nights curled on the couch in my grandfather's home. I watched a rosary come out of a pocket and move through fingers bead by bead, trusted plastic more beautiful than its polished olive wood brothers hanging for sale in the Christian quarter of the Old City. I watched men and women who did not know one another sitting down in seats side by side without fear or alarm.

Up to 79th and Broadway, up one block, look out for Zabars--



-- and now look across the street to find H & H Bagels.



Join the line as it passes in front of the fridge and grab something if you want it; there's no toast-and-schmear service here, no house-recipe blends of toppings, just the goods from a grocery store dairy and at the front of the line hot just-baked bagels tossed fast into a paper bag and go. Go try to find an empty park bench on Broadway at 7:30am in the morning. I walked around the block for the sake of the dignity of the helpful young madman who assured me there were wild animals in the direction I was headed and that I needed to go the other way unless I was carrying a gun. I wasn't carrying a gun, I was carrying a)the most precious part of Jerusalem, a photo print picked up in the Old City in honor of my father's recent birthday (I'd kept that print flat and protected through manic Israeli bus drivers and flailing teen feet on the plane, and one look into the crowded shelves of baggage storage convinced me, in my infinite experience as a traveler, that it would be safer staying in my hands through my virgin solo encounter with New York's subways, streets, weather, and populace), and b) my first Real Bagels, cooling by the moment.

This is how I ended up eating breakfast in New York sitting on the bottom steps of some unknown brownstone with a furtive eye out for passing cops and my hunched back turned to the business-people periodically popping out of their secured door and half-hurdling over me.

The Bagels were so worth it.

A Real Bagel pops like a grape when you bite into it.
A Real Bagel has a crust as thin and taut as the skin of a grape, and flesh as firmly packed as steak.
A Real Bagel is a totally textural nourishing experience, as profoundly its own thing as sinking your toes into sun-warmed mud.
Bagels are Good.

New York City has a capacity altogether previously unknown to me to be hot and cold at the same time. H & H Bagels was throbbing, open-oven heat. The street had a heat that made it tight to breathe. At the same time, a breeze cut through like a dervish spinning by with knives of ice. Acclimated to keeping early morning company with Jerusalem's cisterns and sprinklers, I received the first random drop, the second, and a handful more, and would never have realized this hesitant precipitation was falling from the sky had it not been for a passer-by muttering the once-familiar word "rain."

That word sent me scrambling through a much-abbreviated Birkat HaMazon on the hoof with a thin millimeter of plastic bag folded over the top of the precious print.

This trip I had learned that I don't follow directions well, so despite the effort I'd gone through to procure a knowledgeable itinerary for New York City, my deep gratitude for the careful detail of that itinerary, and my pains to memorize the itinerary in addition to taking it out to double-check it about every ten minutes, this is where I went off to do my own thing. See, the next step was to get on a bus, and from what I could divine with my poor map-reading skills that main purpose of that bus was to save me from walking across Central Park, an intention as well-meaning and ill-starred as any effort to save a pig from dirt.

So I found Central Park.
I found endless huge rocks stretched out like children of time itself taking in the sun and ignoring the city.



I found an Irish Wolfhound and half a hundred other dogs as distinct in their breeds as roses labeled in a collectors garden.
I saw the fantasy form of a castle rising from the tall green at the edge of a playing field.



And in no time at all I was walking along the side of the Met, curling around the entrance of the Met half an hour early, taking my place among-- what was this?! A tour group that had missed its timing? The convocation for some special pre-opening reception?
No, there were no buses, no media vans, no coherence within the humanity.
There were simply dozens on dozens of people lining up from the doors to cascade down the stairs to split like the Reed Sea at Sgt. David Gonzales USMC Hot Dog Stand and stream in long rivers down either direction of the sidewalk, people vibrating with excitement, chattering with strangers and fidgeting and crying out at each hopeful sign of movement from within, people lined up three thick and once, twice, three times a hundred long waiting as if the Met were a soup kitchen for the soul, waiting...

to see Art.

Nothing I have read could give me such hope for humanity.

We came in, and paying my student donation felt like an honor. In my only other visit to New York, tucked under the wing of my father's older brother. I was taken inside the Met in what may have been a spare hour, time to be ambushed by the Temple of Dendur and then rushed along a single wall of tiny Egyptian antiquities, trying desperately to memorize that particular shade of bluer than blue, before our time was up and we were out without even a moment for the glories of the painted picture or the treasures of my beloved Medieval Europe. Until that day, I had not understood that the Cloisters were not part of the Met proper, not even in New York proper, and I was in such agony at having come so close to the Unicorn Tapestries without seeing them that I've never since been able to look at Egyptian art without feeling the edge of a sulk, the more beautiful the art, the keener the sulk.

So the last thing I expected of the Met was to find myself sucked straight back to the one place I had been before: the gallery of Egyptian art. Within moments of clipping the donor button to the collar of my shirt, I found myself alone in a little room of a reconstructed tomb, peering through a narrow window at a small squat statue who returned my look of wistful irony, neither of us quite where we expected to be or doing what we should have been doing.

I saw a figurine I'd seen a picture of in a book at the Bible Lands Museum, and loved at once, of one woman tending to another's hair while the other woman tends to her child, a rare concrete evocation of non-sexual tenderness so not-quite-like anything else that its possible age spans half a millennium.


[this and other art photos primarily taken from the Met's Collection Database]

I took the long way through, carrying my weeks in Jerusalem with me, my path an echo of my time among the Egyptian antiquities of the Israel Museum and the Bible Lands Museum even as the painted and carved rock around me echoed the ochre to white Jerusalem stone that had gilded my mornings. I paused especially at the indigo headscarf, narrowly dated to 1336-1327 B.C.E., whose careful mends indicate its great value, and I thought of the value of blue in the making of the mishkan and the long rabbinic debate rejecting indigo as a source of tekhelet, the holy blue. I looked at the miniatures with their scenes of daily life with the special love I have for such things, and wondered if these straight-horned cattle, black and spotted and sometimes red, were the same strain as the cattle driven through the wilderness with the wandering children of Israel.

The Temple of Dendur remains as breath-taking as when I was girl.



I watched a young man, smiling in bashful self-consciousness, set up his camera on a timer and then scramble to stand in front of the temple with his hands pressed palm to palm, still blushing.

I made my own escape from Egypt to flounder up the stairs crash about the glories of European art, arrested here and there to scribble down a frantic note in the hope of not only seeing, but remembering-

Viller's "Young Woman Drawing"



I plowed my way through the huge, multi-room special exhibit on Picasso that captures, painting by painting, his transformative shift in seeing.

I was particularly stunned by this self-portrait --



-- because I have one almost identical, sketched out after a vision in which Raven plucked out my eye. While I do not have Picasso's technical skill and Picasso did not end up with a tiny tree-frog riding around in the empty socket, the similarities are so startling that I was left staring around the room at the sharp transition where Picasso field of "real" came completely apart, opus by opus, year by year, then back together to a new whole. Conventional wisdom is that Picasso left the Western way of seeing through his study of Oceanic art, but I was seeing not an external imitation but an internal shift, and I could not avoid the obvious-to-me thought, what if he simply had a vision? What if he left off depicting reality through a Western lens because he had an experience of reality outside a Western lens?

To my delight, they had "The Dreamer":



Then they had the special exhibition gift shop, where they had The Dreamer as a square silk scarf.
And I had too much taste and not enough money to buy The Dreamer as a married woman's modest head-covering.
(They also had a long, rectangular silk scarf of La Joie de Vivre, even though this most glorious of all Picasso's works was not part of the exhibit itself.
I did succeed in convincing myself that La Joie de Vivre would NOT Be Appropriate as a tallit, but I'm going to admit, it was a uphill battle.)



I saw -
- Quentin Massys 1520 "Portrait of a Woman", far out of its time for the sheer power of personality captured:



- Beloved Bruegel's "The Harvesters", which seem to come in a kind of call and response dialogue across the ages with Van Gogh's "Corn Harvest in Provence" so fresh in my memory.



- Arcimboldo's "The Four Seasons"



- Moroni's "Abbess Lucrezia Agliardi Vertova", a woman I would trust with my life just from her face-- did she know she was dying?



- Velazquez's noble rendering of "Juan de Pareja", painted at the time of his slavery and in and of itself an argument for the liberty and dignity of all humans.



- and Portail's "The Benediction"



I saw the work of El Greco for the first time, three paintings of El Greco, and understood immediately why the art books had all referred to him but neglected to show him, his approach so impossibly alien to anything happening anywhere else in the sixteenth century.

There was the "View of Toledo",



the "Adoration of the Shepherds",



and the "Vision of St. John"...



...which is so impossibly modern that my memory still refuses to retain it.

Around this time the jetlag, the lack of a watch, the state of my feet, and art-overload began to seep through, and I became seriously concerned about needing to leave before scratching the surface of the Met's Impressionists
This urgency led to the rare opportunity to walk up and ask, "Excuse me, where is the Nineteenth Century?" and receive a cogent and useful answer.

The directions I received sent me straight into two rooms-- two rooms!-- full of Degas's dancers.

With the professional tutus of Paris all about me, I had eyes only for the one I'd never seen before, the charcoal "Russian Dancer" of 1899.



Old friends and new surprises continued to mix.
I was touched by the moment in time caught by Tissot's "Tea" 1872 -



- drawn in by Carriere's searching "Self-Portrait" of 1893



- and chilled by the confidence of Reghault's "Salome", 1870



But there are no true celebrities but familiar works of art, works of art that are seen and seen again through the decades, talked about, written about, loved from afar and known from afar, works of art to which one comes with a whole relationship, a whole history, all on one's own side. The art stands innocent, belonging to its own self alone; it has never seen you, never imagined you, yet been part of you from the moment you learned of it, and you realize that the art has made you, it is you who belong to the art. You realize that every work of art you have ever studied but never seen is a moment of your life that has been waiting to happen, a completion of your being that has been waiting to come true.

And here in living canvas before your eyes is Cot's "The Storm"



- and "Springtime"



- and Friedrich's "Two Men Contemplating the Moon"



and Bonheur's extravagance "The Horse Fair", sweeping you away as it did a horse-crazy girl twenty, twenty-five years ago.



Then, past sweet Renoir, childhood friend and lifelong inspiration ("tie the brush into my hand"), there is Van Gogh. You had never really seen a painting until you saw a painting by Van Gogh, long ago, your fifteenth year when you were visiting the Smithsonian at the same time that "Starry Night" was visiting the Smithsonian, and you stood before it and knew you did not know this painting, had never known this painting, everything you had ever been taught about Art in general and Impressionism in particular was absolutely wrong, and you understood something you had never understood before.
Next year Miss Caine will make you read Camus's "The Stranger", which you'd already read twice before coming to her class, Camus, like Van Gogh, familiar without being a friend, and she will make you read it again, and again, and again, forcing you to strain to see something in the nothingness of that book, something to write about, until you see it, you see the Nothingness of that book, and you see that you have never read a book before in your life, and you read it again for the sheer joy of reading.
Fourteen years after that there will be a man who will touch you so deeply that you will realize why they call it "knowing".
You will live the life you were set on as a grasping, frustrated child, the life of seeking the light of understanding. It will be life in which, when you make time, you work hard, and you get lucky, doors open in your mind. You live, more than for love, for those moments when a beam of light comes in.
Three times alone, the roof flew off.
Of those three times, Van Gogh was the first.

There was a Van Vogh, the greatest Van Gogh, at the Smithsonian that year.
There was a notable Van Gogh at the Israel Museum this summer.
There are half a dozen Van Goghs at the Met. They leap from the walls into your brain. The paintings around them are not the same genre, not the same medium; it is as if there is Art, and then there is Van Gogh. And you realize, with a little wistfulness for the creeping conventional nostalgia of your tastes, that your whole life put in words could be simmered down to the simple description "a slow process of learning to appreciate Van Gogh".

There is "Wheat Fields With Cypresses", which you stand and stare at, and the college girl sitting on the bench stares at right through the other visitors who are pulled by it to stand in front of her, and the museum guard who sees these paintings every day for hours each day stands and stares at. You can taste the smell of the green leaves on the breeze that crosses the fields to you.



There is "Cypresses", painted in the same year.



There is the "Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat",



- and the paintings of olive trees, made more dear in my eyes by my time sharing that same red earth with those same twisted trunks, the same quality of sunlight that makes olives prosper and eyes squint and people brown.




There was somehow room for me to take in two more disparate beauties--

Breton's "The Weeders", 1868,



and Cross's "The Return of the Fisherman", whose subtlety I found a much more compelling use of pointillism than any Seurat I've seen (but as I confessed through the creeping conventionalism above, I know I'm a plebe).



After that I literally fled the paintings section on my limping feet with a sense of such overdone gluttony as not to bear another bite. I am the sort of person who will willingly, joyfully, spend an hour in careful contemplation of a half dozen canvases. I've complained before about Seattle's poor excuses for museums, but let's face the truth: the world-class ones could kill me through sheer unaccustomed overexposure.

So I went for something completely different and paid my respects to a photography exhibit I only wish I had either the historical or aesthetic ability to properly appreciate, and then wandered with low expectations into the Special Exhibit: American Woman - Fashioning a National Identity.

Because fashion is so very my "thing".
And oh what joy I take in the triumph of the modern American figure as a standard of beauty over the classic curvy French type.
And do you happen to have any salt I could pour on this cut to complete the experience?

I forget that what modern marketing calls "fashion" is what in college we called "costume history", which is of exquisite interest to me as an amateur sewer, amateur historian, and women's studies maven, because literally year by year the possibilities and limitations of being a woman are directly reflected by the-
Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Fire! Am I actually standing in the presence of House of Worth gowns?!?
-ahem, manipulations of acceptable women's dress. The tremendous physical and financial restrictions imposed by House of Worth gowns being a key example. (Worth Gowns! Wow!)

For my fellow costume geeks, the Metropolitan has graciously provided us with a photo-stream of the whole exhibit on Flickr, here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/metmuseum/4581970781/in/set-72157624000343850

What the photos cannot convey is the power of the large video presentation in the final room, the one dedicated to "Screen Sirens", in which we piled up by the dozen and stared with our mouths open like turkeys drowning in the rain as five-minute scenes with Anna May Wong, Katherine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, and other classic greats turned our brains to goo. As one reporter quoted, "They don't make them like that anymore."

I walk through the world and timespan of musical instruments. I walk past American utilitarian art from the colonial period onward, proud silver and ceramic, glowing glass. I walk into the art of ancient Iran, and am felled by a civilization that was sophisticated when my ancestors were still figuring out how to turn cream into butter.

This antelope [my own photo] predates the art of Egypt,



as does its companion, this anthropomorphic bull likewise from 3000 BCE



The perfection of these pieces, the balance, the musculature, the character, the expressions-- are such that it would hardly be more miraculous if they started moving.

But if they started moving...

then, just around the corner, THEY might start moving.


[my photo]

That would be... bad.

Perspective:


[my photo]

That impression of size is not an optical illusion.


[from a stranger's private blog, thank you jcsparks.com]

One is leonine.



The other is bovine.



Technical information: They are the guardians of the palace at Nimrud, of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, who reigned from 883–859 BCE. To the misery of archeologists and linguists, despite the survival of individual names from different periods in the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Assyrian tongues, today they all get called "lamassu".

Which doesn't make a lot of difference from the Jewish perspective because I KNOW the Hebrew word for them.

So do you.

Think Rilke:
Jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
Every Angel is terror.
[Duino Elegies, 1912]

These, are Cherubim.

I'm not speaking metaphorically: the Hebrew word Cherub (keruv) is a derivative from one of the Assyrian names for these beings.
This IS the biblical Cherub; when you encounter that word in translation, this is the image, of impassive, awesome power, that the authors are invoking.



Jeder Engel ist schrecklich.

My chavrutah doesn't "do" angels. She's very particular on that point.
At the moment I envy her that stance, because honestly, after this experience, rereading Prophets is going to use up a lot of antacid.

Let's look at some works from Tiffany Studios, shall we?

Here's the "Garden Fountain". It is pretty.



Here's the "Autumn Landscape". It has trees. Trees are pretty.



Here is the "View of Oyster Bay". It is sublime.



I knew a man who had in his home a paraphrase from Mayakovski:
"Art is not a mirror. Art is a hammer."
(I believe he had it scrawled across a mirror. If not, that's where it should have been, and I choose to remember it that way.)
It was an important concept for me.

But sometimes--

Art is a little fish pond.

This was the point where, in the interests of sanity, I began looking for the way out of the Met.

Since I don't find sanity very interesting, I did not go about this with great efficiency, or let this search interfere with lingering in front of -

- Severini's "Dancer-Airplane Propeller-Sea", 1915


[my photo]

- Leger's "Woman with a Cat", 1921



- "The Lovers", my first Chagall in person after all these years (no, I don't want to think about the irony of spending six weeks in Israel and seeing my first Chagall my first day stateside, thank you)



and then I found the O'Keeffes.
Because I hadn't induced an adequate aesthetic concussion by this point in the day, I had to go fall into the O'Keeffes.
O'Keefe is one of those artists, like Van Gogh, that I was very happy to flip through in books with sophomoric nonchalance right up until the moment of actually having my psyche pillaged by real life encounter with their work.

Here's "Pelvis II", 1944



Here's "From the Faraway, Nearby" 1938



There was one flower. From across the room I could tell it was something I have no business studying before the traditional age of forty. I scraped up my sense of self-preservation and limped out the door.

Good-bye, Met.



Good-bye, William Hippo Herd.



Good-bye, William-Shaped Backpack.



I will remember you. Fondly. With indecent speed if I ever have the opportunity to compose a new-baby wishlist.

(When I was five years old I tried to recreate William the Hippo with my first block of real clay.
I did a really good job.
I did such a good job that one of the other kids stole it after it came back from the kiln.

Elul is the month of forgiveness.

And as soon as they call me and express repentance, they're scot-free.)

It is time to walk outside.



It is time to bow in recognition to the fact that at this point in my travels, the pain in my feet has actually become physiologically disorienting at multiple points of the day, and finding some way to elevate my feet has become a priority.

Obviously, the best way to accomplish this is to walk down the length of Central Park and then take a ride on the famous Carousal.

Hello, Central Park.









Hello, closed-up and shut-down Carousal House.



I expected New York to be a hotbed of tzedakha opportunities. I failed to realize I'd entered the busking and street-performer capitol of the world.

I would love to tell you that what I remember most about this man was the iridescent beauty he was giving to the world, but what I actually remember most is the schadenfreude with which I'm still wrestling. You see, there were a crowd of visitors to the park gathered to enjoy the ballons, several of us trying to take pictures, and one very small boy standing directly in front of the bubble-performer waiting to punch each bubble to make it pop at the moment of its release, to the repeated disappointment of all. Street performers who yell at small children in public parks do not tend to make a lot of money and the voluminous censure of the crowd had no effect on the child but gave the child's parent considerable incentive to remain anonymous, motionless, and silent. This lasted until Small Boy punched a bubble *directly* over his head.

I know what bubbles are made of.
Do you know what bubble are made of?
That's right.
Bubbles are made of SOAP.
Thus, the small boy who pops an enormous bubble directly over his own face, has just effectively poured soap in his eyes, and will next run right to his embarrassed parent, ending the anonymity, provoking a brisk decampment, and leaving a summer crowd free to enjoy iridescent schadenfreude.



On the other end of the spectrum, we have a saxophone serenade for a young lady in a stroller. This musician was brilliantly blending the end of each short piece into the beginning of the next, as the toddler squealed with recognition and delight time after time and the mother laughed aloud at her own unwillingness to pull away mid-piece.

He was playing a certain melody by Mancini when I snapped this shot...



Now leaving Central Park.







(On film, the conflation of the marble perfection slouching shirtless and the ordinary mortal slouching shirtless is less, well, disturbing than it was in real life. New York City-- disturb the comfortable, comfort th- hey! look at that!)



At this point, I was off the map as far as my careful instructions were concerned, but of some things I was sure.

I was sure I did not want to rent a bicycle, which is an essential thing to be sure of while leaving Central Park because a *lot* of people will try to convince you of the contrary.

Also, I was fairly sure that on the East Coast as on the West, the number two follows the number one, and that on the East Coast as on the West and as distinct from Jerusalem, knowing that the number two follows the number one can actually assist in finding a particular intersection. This little coincidence is surprising rare in international urban navigation.

Limp or no limp, I was past ready to glory in vast indulgence of a city built of streets that run by grid.

It would be some time before I was to find my immersive English environment, but my cultural transition out of Israel happened over the fourteen blocks between Central Park and the best kosher shwarma joint in the city and final destination on my list of instructions.

In Jerusalem, infinite small neighborhood stores cater to each separated aspect of life like the drawers of a kosher kitchen: the candy corner, the pharmacy, house-cleaning supplies, locks and hardware.
In New York, infinite small neighborhood stores sell whatever the market will bear-- like the ice cream shop advertising cell phones.
In Jerusalem, pedestrians fear crazy drivers.
In New York, drivers fear crazy pedestrians. (They can't get up enough speed to be sure of getting away from us.)
In Jerusalem, while the walk light is green you still check for oncoming cars in the turn lane and then cross.
In New York, while the traffic light is green you walk out to the edge of the farthest double-parked car and watch for the traffic light to turn yellow, at which point you step boldly (farther) into the street to show you mean business. (There *are* walk lights in New York City. I presume they represent budgetary surplus spending.)
In Jerusalem, the schwarma guy is a human super-speed food assembly machine who has no time to show feelings on the job.
In New York, the schwarma guy is an Israeli, who is so happy you have come here straight from Jerusalem try my falafel.

This is The Place to buy good-as-Jerusalem kosher schwarma in New York City.



This is the building across the street from the schwarma place.



It's rather imposing.


I'm pretty sure Times Square might be somewhere that way.



I did not depart from the directions again to go find out.
I crawled down into the transit-station-cum-mall at 42nd and 8th Ave and found the subway.

I wish I could have caught a picture of the triune beautiful young men with dreadlock manes who leapt on to the train each with a long conga drum that they proceeded to play in concert.
I wish I had a picture of the tall and crooked headstones of the old, old graveyard on the last leg to Howard Beach Station.
I wish I could have caught the sunset spreading across the airport as we turned.

But I was content to find myself back in JFK, picking up my bags with three and a half hours before flight, just barely enough time to be tortured by unmoving lines for unlabeled purposes, to be claimed for a seventy-five person long pied-piper journey led by a Delta representative along the backdoors of the terminal, and to pay for the privilege of a double-drubbing over by security (characterized at the midpoint by the necessity of explaining to multiple members of a security team that I had been awake for over twenty-four hours and was not arguing but simply needed someone to think for me, please, and at the endpoint by a backpack containing several halakhically sacred texts together with one very large jar of honey and coated entirely with four by four inch stickers wailing "Fragile".)

Until we meet again, New York. My breath's been taken away each time I see something so simple as a comic strip and immediately recognize a place I've been in our short time together. You are truly the mapland of stories.

And, JFK? I'll be back in spite of you.