The structure of the modern school year doesn't prepare you for life. In life after school, there are no graduations, no summer vacations, no studying for exams, perfecting papers, pulling all-nighters to pass tests. Okay, maybe there are, but most of these things are self-administered, self-scheduled. You pass or fail according to your own rules and standards. I was a relatively good student, adept at jumping through the hoops that others placed in front of me. I was an eager cog, not an entirely unreflective tool, but what else was there to do back then but pass tests, write papers. The markers of semester, final, end-of-year were reassuring. I never quite cultivated the ability to self-soothe, and so at 30, I am finally learning. I needed reassurances. I needed narratives to fall back on. I needed safety, assurance, control.

I don't pass some of my own tests now. I sometimes put off studying. There's no sense of safety in arbitrary patterns, in comparing your history to someone elses. Besides, these life comparisons are something school girls engage in and the irony of life is that I went from being a stellar school girl to a not-so-competant woman. Again, only by my own standards. I spent a long time looking for bread crumb trails to no avail. I know no one is out there to give me a gold star or to flunk me. I never knew what I would do with the freedom of being an adult, and I'm not sure I do even now.

I look for the narrative in everything, religiously following the crumb trail to the gingerbread house, pausing where it asks me to. The difference between relying on logic and relying on narrative is that narrative accounts for emotional and psychic variables. Human variables. Give me the beginning of a story and I am pretty adept at predicting how it will end. Maybe everyone can do this, but most people don't study narrative the way I do. Most people don't live for stories. Most people don't make story structure their mantra, and narrative their religion.

Perhaps because of a recent discussion about American Apparel and their misogynistic business practices, I dreamt last night that for years, the employees of American Apparel have been breaking into my house at 2:00 AM, quietly stitching together shirts, having sex on my couch, wrapping up with a post-coital photo shoot and then quietly packing up and leaving before I get up in the morning. I woke up totally disoriented and went into the kitchen for a glass of water and to check that there wasn't a makeshift factory set up there.

Then I went back to sleep and had another dream that I was at a rehearsal dinner for the wedding of two friends, who chose to use the time to broadcast a 2-hour documentary of themselves roller skating through Manhattan.

Then a dream about another friend who was racially profiled and believed to have committed a crime he didn't actually commit, leading to his parents disowning him and his girlfriend dumping him. Years later, he is released from prison and tries to piece together his life, to no avail.

Dream after dream about all kinds of violations of time, space, identity.

All this from a bad experience at a Toyota dealership? I don't know.

courtesy M, I love it

New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans

Summer. I am used to fleeing in the summers. Off to India. Off to the heat and pollution, the traffic, afternoons spent at cottage industries or the Ashoka or at home doing nothing. Reading a novel every two days. Dropping weight despite afternoon samosas or chaat or other things bought off the street. The same stories told and retold. The kind of summer lethargy and heat that sticks to your skin and balks at any sentiment of immediacy. The entire third world is like this, I've realized. India is beginning to not be like this and that's sad.

But I am here. Morning yoga and twists. Summer salads and diagonally sliced squash and peppers to throw on the grill in the evening. Sometimes asparagus. Martinis with muddled kumquats. Three-hour thursday meals at restaurants that act French and offer good food and deplorable service.

Driving towards LA from Orange Country the other day, the sun was like a soft egg yolk, about to break into the smog and still air of the early evening, illuminating the cityscape so that it looked one-dimensional and drawn by a child. A futuristic view of the city, drawn by a six-year old, shiny opaque glass muted and glowing against purple hills. I almost veered off the freeway looking at it. It was a different kind of familiarity. Not the familiarity that comes from looking at your own city in a different way, but the recollection of the dream I've had since I was seven. That I am driving towards a flat, one-dimensional city, nestled in hills, futuristic and yet carrying that kind of juvenile charm, a drawing made by a kindergartener. I was driving towards the city in my dreams. Just as I do, in that dream. That I've had since I was seven. And I beathed a sigh of relief. I am here, I breathed. I am just where I am supposed to be.

http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/the-doctor-is-within/

Moral Ambiguity

A friend gave me a cut-out New Yorker article today (I am notoriously always six months behind on the New Yorker, largely because I live in a city without a subway) about Norah Ephron and the making of the film Julie and Julia. Really it was about Norah Ephron, who is fascinating and petite and a perfectionist and makes films that bear absolutely no relation to reality. The article, written by Ariel Levy (Female Chauvinist Pigs), went on and on about how when Norah Ephron enters a room, people like Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep want to die from the awareness of their own lack of coolness, but really, the subtext of the article should have been "Norah Ephron feels no guilt." This was the part that I was most intrigued by, anecdote after anecdote about Ephron's ability to brush herself off and move on and away from a range of cinematic failures, a husband who cheated on her while she was seven months pregnant, decisions that might have been less than ideal, keeping a photograph of a confident John Gotti coolly strutting out of a courthouse during his trial, looking unscrupulously composed, as an emblem to the importance of vivacity and maybe even hubris in the face of humiliation, on her desk, the way some people post up inspirational quotes to remind themselves of the way they ought to live.

What is it that allows Norah Ephron to turn away from her mistakes when most mere mortals like us, dwell on them?

It made me think about people who are painstakingly conscious of their carbon footprints, and how I am constantly girdled by my karmic footprint, the divine equivalent. Like people who try to offset their carbon footprints, I attempt to offset my karmic one. Like people who clock how many miles they are driving, or how much fuel the plane they are on is utilizing, I try and offset my karmic footprint in a variety of ways.

I come from a family of particularly karma-sensitive folk. My grandmother spent a lifetime giving things away. Sometimes this even bordered on the impractical or excessive. At 8, I watched her, at a temple, slip a glittery ring onto the finger of a girl my age, who was begging for money. My mother has always brought home orphaned and injured animals. Pigeons with broken wings and infected feet, kittens abandoned by their mother. She feeds raccons and squirels and sparrows. There is a story about my grandfather, who, upon arriving in Delhi in the aftermath of the Partition, returned a bag of rice to the store he had bought it from because he had found ants in it. We can give you a new bag, the storekeeper told him. No, it's not that, he said. He didn't want the ants in his bag of rice separated from their family members, who had been left behind at the store.

But people who are aware of their carbon footprint sometimes have to take planes to get places. And people who are aware of their karmic footprint know that they can't curl up into a ball, and live alone somewhere in the forest and shit into a hole and eat berries off a shrub, given a range of circumstances they have either chosen or by happenstance been borne into (I should note, though, that I've actually in a hypothetical way considered this, and not because I have some sort of affinity for the great outdoors, because sadly, I don't (although I'm not entirely opposed to cultivating that relationship)). Incidentally, a fortune-teller at a temple once read my palm and told me that I had spent lifetimes meditating in a forest and eating fallen fruit and I attempted to respond to his declaration with one of the various thoughts simultaneously popping up in my head at that moment ranging from (the quizzical) "Really, me?" to (the more defiant) "Yes. Really. Me." to (the more shameful) "Thank God that's done and I never have to do that again."

Incidentally, some time ago, I was in a situation where I knew I would have to cause some amount of pain, in the between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place sort of way, and I consulted a friend who has been a practicing Buddhist for 40 years about what I should do. I'm trying to minimize the amount of emotional damage that I know I am going to cause. And I've been putting off inflicting this damage. And it's a bad situation. And I don't know what to do. I've agonized about this, lost sleep, attempted in my practiced way, to metaphorically walk backwards and sweep as I go, to tidy up any bits of dirt and grime my life has left behind in this situation, I told him. I was exhausted from lack of sleep, from knowing that there was no way out but to break something and then live with the damage I had caused. My conscience is constucted like a voluptuous woman's pregnancy hips, intended to hold more than a comfortable bit of weight, and I know I will relive and relive and relive the guilt of this over and over and over again, I told him.

He shrugged. Some things are karmic, he said. It sounds like you're doing the best you can do. And that is the best you can do.

That's it? I said. That's the best you can offer me about this situation after 40 years of studying Buddhism? because really, I wasn't asking him about my situation and the minutae of my circumstances. I wasn't looking for an easy out, or a way to make myself feel better. To be honest, I had even crossed the line outside of the larger question of individual karmic retribution. I was asking him about the state of humankind. I was asking about how we as a people can be confronted with such situations and how we as a people can survive in a world where it is almost impossible to not inflict some sort of damage along the way. I was asking about the futility of choosing the path of less damage, something we do to people, to this Earth, to one another constantly. And that is if we're relatively conscious and self-aware people. I think you've spent a long time thinking about this, he said. I had. And I think you've spent a lifetime trying to metaphorically curl up and be so tiny that nothing you do has any real negative impact on anyone. This wasn't entirely true. It wasn't like I was vegan or a member of PETA or adopting kids from Zimbabwe or quitting my job and devoting my life to feeding the hungry. I made a point to tell him this. He shook his head. You're human, he said, as though I had spent a lifetime attempting to ignore that fact. You can try and evade it, but you can't escape it. It wasn't about my guilt, I realized then. or about karmic retribution. It was about accepting the state of being human. And that's the maze there's really no way out of.

In a college philosophy seminar, I heard a story about Nietzsche - that immediately preceding his mental breakdown, he observed a horse being whipped by a man in the streets of Turin. Apparently, he ran to the animal, threw his arms around it and then collapsed. The question that was posed in my class was whether he did this out of pity for the horse, or out of pity for himself, and for humankind.

http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/lowered-expectations/?em

Reading the news has been like watching an episode of the Twilight Zone lately. First all these deaths - Julius Shulman and Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett and Walter Kronkite, then the Mark Sanford thing which is kind of fascinating in it's trashy tabloid trainwreck-meets-Greek-tragedy way. Then Sarah Palin resigns announcing she's not a dead fish and something about basketball and now giant flying squid are attacking San Diego? WTF?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/5852051/Jumbo-flying-squid-attack-scuba-divers-in-San-Diego.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/fashion/19drew.html?em

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/us/18cronkite.html?em

http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/16/sitting-quietly-doing-something/?em

Urban Curiosities

There are always people making out at the bus stop on the corner of Rossmore and 3rd. Always different people, always making out. This is one curiosity.

I also wonder about this: why does all mopey, melancholy, angsty music come from developed, affluent parts of the west - places like Iceland, Sweden, the Pacific Northwest, and really joyful, happy music comes out of places ravaged by great conflict (South Africa, Mali, parts of the Middle East)? I think it's safe to say that the next Elliot Smith won't be from Ghana. Or that the next Fela Kuti won't be from Silverlake.

Addendum: Except for these guys, who are from L.A.



I kind of love them. Especially after this interview:

http://larecord.com/interviews/2009/03/05/fools-gold-one-good-7-year-old-jew/

http://www.antilabelblog.com/?p=288#more-288

“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star.”

-Stephen Hawking

When I haven't slept in three nights due to overnight trips that require 6:00 AM flights and dingy hotel rooms with closets containing sticky Conair hairdryers, wet-dog-smelling brown-fleece blankets and a safe named El-safe, I get depressed. I think it's the lack of sleep that induces a drop in my serotonin levels and causes me to scan the internets for stories about successful young writers like Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss (serious uuughhh) and Zadie Smith (that's a deserved success, though) and feel sorry for myself. It's yuck, I know. Does anyone else think that Jonathan Safran Foer looks like McLovin, all growns up?

I don't know what it is about sadness or envy that causes me to respond to my own emotional distress by redoubling my demands on myself. Like a full-fledged attack on a particularly sensitive ecosystem, like those assholes who drive hummers while the environment shrivels and dies. I could have acknowledged how cranky and irritable I get when I don't get enough sleep and emotionally incubated myself from further affective strain, but my fingers were, for some reason, itching to reach out into the internets and see what other people out there in the world were doing while I was doing something relatively useless and insignificant.

Maybe it's not just a lack of sleep, but the slow degradation of the state of the Westin Hotel that made me depressed. A broken toilet, a room that smelled musty and wet-dog, a scan of the mini bar revealing post-it notes rather than snacks declaring that the Westin is "out of honey roasted nuts," "out of peanut m n m's" "out of banana nut crisps," and "out of Pringles." What is this, the third world? We might as well start distributing ration cards. Not that I was going to eat anything out of the mini-bar. I was raised in a home where eating something out of a hotel mini bar was the equivalent of flushing a $100 bill down the toilet.

And the strange sense of alienation that I felt for the first time being away and in a different city. Normally, I'm a cheerful and adaptive traveller. I mix in well. But this time, I pondered the state of a travelling life as reduced to various vaguely similar cities filled with various vaguely similar hotels and various vaguely unattractive people and their equally unattractive germs, and wondered when exactly I had turned into J.D. Salinger without the writing skills. Is it the result of getting older that makes me want to cocoon myself into a familiar place and share it with only a handful of people? I always used to see strangers as potential friends, but now they were slothful and loud Midwesterners with screaming kids who had been conceived by too young parents who watched too much reality TV and didn't read newspapers and probably voted for McCain, if they voted at all. And I could just see it - that these young kids would undoubtedly grow up to put a strain on the country's natural resources, without compensating for this by contributing anything useful to society. And then I hated humans. And the state of the human condition. And myself. We should leave this poor planet alone. We're not worthy of it.

Or maybe it was the United flight that set me off. The self-ticketing kiosk desperately attempted to sell me/trick me into upgrading my seat/doubling my miles/buying more miles in the way that unethical gas stations switch their signage around to sell you premium gas that you don't need, even before you realize it. Then we were herded on the plane like cattle and given tiny cups of ice, each containing a shot of tepid, funny-tasting water.

My hair smells of Westin green tea grapefruit shampoo, which, while appealing (and even somewhat novel and exotic) in Shaumburg, Illinois, immediately smelled unfamiliar and even unsophisticated the moment I landed in L.A. My hair doesn't smell like me. And this was the last unfamiliar straw I could handle.

And so I came home and went to the internets seeking the elusive but masochistic something that I always seek on the internets. The scratching of an itch, or a scab. Till it bleeds. To read about people who are contributing something to society but are most probably just as unlikable as those who are not, but for entirely different reasons. And then I couldn't tell if it was coming from within or I was being assaulted by everything around. But the mixture of schadenfreude and misanthropy and guilt and sadness and futility made me curl up on my bed and read Kandinsky (to no avail) then M.C. Richards (also not the antidote) then Joseph Campbell (to whom I've built an immunity after multiple reads) and then various underlined passages in The Corrections (which only served to reinforce how I was feeling about humanity and middle America and pretentious but highly skilled authors).

And now I must work. Really work. Put together a summary of my notes. And I resist this by blogging. Throwing maybe useless words into the void. And attempting to reconcile what is with what should be.

In this one dirty hippies are introducing Indians to pot and orgies. Zeenat Amaan is getting high off second-hand marijuana smoke. And Dev Anand is pissed off about this. Note: the apathetic policeman clearly in over his head. What's not to like?

Speaking of, I also really like this song. I don't really watch Hindi movies. Unless they're super-arthouse, or 70s and kind of unconsciously porn-y. This song kind of falls into that category. There's fishnet tights, and cage dancing and heavy breathing. I don't know if the guy is wearing a mariachi costume or a bullfighting costume, but either way, it is awesome. Also note: The innocent ingenue, hair braided into a neat plait, looking scandalized and the slutty drunk dancer in red, showing thigh. Oh Indians. Your virgin/whore complexes produce the most entertaining musical selections.

There's something so charming about bad production value and a creepy expressionless guy in the corner smoking a cigarette. And music played on an early synthesizer and recorded into a mic. Note also: his white necktie. The white leotards and the seizure-inducing disco lights are pretty great too.