18 posts tagged “friends”
Yep! For now, I'm done. Done with my semester, done with my thesis! I just ate a chocolate chip cookie and watched all the trailers for the "Sex and the City" movie on the NYT website to celebrate. Now I'm looking at old photos that I have stored in too many places online.
Tonight's a little celebration for graduation, tomorrow's a picnic and another celebration for a friend who got her Ph.D., and Sunday's the event itself, bagpipes and all. I hope it doesn't rain and it's not too boring. M. cooked all day yesterday so we'd be prepared for these various events, while I was a total witch, grumbling away about All My Work. I hope to be more human from now on. I know I've said that about a hundred times this semester, but now I really feel it.
Next week, we're headed to my parents' and then to the midwest to visit my sisters, brothers in law, and niece. I can't wait to get a change of scene! And see everyone! And traveling anywhere with M. is about the most fun thing I can think of.
The summer will be a nice transition time; several of our friends will be abroad, which is great for them, a little sad for us, but still, I think, an all around good thing.
I don't know what to say, really - I'm just relieved to have everything over with for now.
I leave you with a picture of one of those old wooden roller coasters at Coney Island - a photo I took years ago.
Hi, all,
Mostly I'm writing with another translation, but I also wanted to do two other things. First, I wanted to post this picture of the cutest thing I've seen in about forever - a little farm scene that my mom is knitting for my sister A.'s baby (she's due March 11th! M. and I are very excited to be uncle & aunt). See Fig. 1 (just practicing my APA style, guys). If this thing doesn't just cheer you right up, I don't know what will.
Second, I want to celebrate my awesome trio of new girlfriends, who are helping me to stay sane (with plenty of girliness), and also making sure that I eat plenty of dessert (not that there is any danger of that not happening). We got to hang out last night and it really is encouraging to have one of those (sorry, for lack of a better phrase) "aha!" moments where you can see that you're not the only one who is a little nuts. :)
Now, to the poem. The photo isn't related unless you think about Marx (mentioned in the poem) and thus think about the estrangement of the laborer from the product of her labor, and thus think about collective and more small-scale human projects, and thus about a TINY KNITTED ORGANIC COMMUNAL FARM!! Sorry, got a little carried away there. Not sure that what Mom had in mind was to knit a Marxist utopia for the baby. Ok. Now really to the poem, by contemporary Venezuelan poet Eugenio Montejo:
GOODBYE TO THE 20TH CENTURY
Eugenio Montejo
to Alvaro Mutis
I cross Marx Street, Freud Street;
I walk through the ring of this century,
slow, sleepless, ruminating,
a pro bono spy from some gothic realm,
collecting fallen voices, small pebbles
tattooed with infinite murmuring.
Before my eyes, Mondrian's line
cuts the night into right-angled shadows
now that no more loneliness will fit
inside the glass walls.
I cross Mao Ave., Stalin Blvd.;
I witness the instant where the millennium dies
and another sprouts into its place.
My vertical, theoretical century...
My century with its wars, its post-war this and that,
its distant drumbeats of Hitler,
between blood and abyss.
I press on, passing old suburban pavements,
through misfortunes, through a little jazz,
thinking about the gods who sleep dissolved
in the sawdust of bars;
I decipher their names in passing,
and continue on my way.
ADIÓS AL SIGLO XX
Eugenio Montejo
a Alvaro Mutis
Cruzo la calle Marx, la calle Freud;
ando por una orilla de este siglo,
despacio, insomne, caviloso,
espía ad honorem de algún reino gótico,
recogiendo vocales caídas, pequeños guijarros
tatuados de rumor infinito.
La línea de Mondrian frente a mis ojos
va cortando la noche en sombras rectas
ahora que ya no cabe más soledad
en las paredes de vidrio.
Cruzo la calle Mao, la calle Stalin;
miro el instante donde muere un milenio
y otro despunta su terrestre dominio.
Mi siglo vertical y lleno de teorías...
Mi siglo con sus guerras, sus posguerras
y su tambor de Hitler allá lejos,
entre sangre y abismo.
Prosigo entre las piedras de los viejos suburbios
por un trago, por un poco de jazz,
contemplando los dioses que duermen disueltos
en el serrín de los bares,
mientras descifro sus nombres al paso
y sigo mi camino.
n.b. this poem is from a Montejo page (link), and here's another, where you can hear Montejo and others read their poems: (link). Also, Alvaro Mutis is a Colombian poet; you can read about him (here) and here's his awesome poem about (tequila).
That's the title of the new book I'm reading, a short collection of poems by Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti, who I got into when I was living in Mexico. He and Eduardo Galeano are two of my very favorite Latin American writers. After reading some more García Lorca, I needed something more accessible and less like a Dalí painting.
Something wonderful has happened - I've become friends with some of the women I go to school with. It's been happening gradually but I finally feel like my classmates and also this neat group of women are friends... it's been a long time since I've felt that I had more than one female friend in any one place, and often far away (the south, the midwest, even the city but just busy...).
I got really sad and anxious yesterday, total victim mentality, like the program has set me up to fail, I can't possibly do anything well this semester, etc. Probably it was helpful to admit that I was feeling that way to M., who was patient (though I'm sure it must be tiring when I feel like I'm being alternately whiny and genuinely upset). Maybe I should put my efforts into preventing this from happening to future second-year cohorts. I don't know. Of course, now I've spent an hour translating this poem and reading things in Spanish, but I think my brain needed it. Or that's my story, anyway.
Nomeolvides
Mario Benedetti
Tuve un largo poema
que aunque se prodigaba en sus malvones
al poco tiempo se quedó sin rojo
tuve otro con jazmines
frágiles hogarenos e insondables
pero se descolgaron como copos de nieve
y tuve alguno más
que era un cerco balsámico de rosas
pero se marchitaron sin grandeza
por fin tuve un harén de nomeolvides
y no puedo olvidarlos porque anaden
azul a mi memoria
Forget-me-nots
I had a long poem
that, though it was profuse with geraniums
went quickly to seed, empty of color
I had another, with jasmine blooms
so delicate, comfortable, unfathomable even,
but they melted away like a water ice
and I had one more
that was a soothing wreath of roses
but it shriveled up unceremoniously
finally, I had a harem of forget-me-nots
and I can't forget them because they add
blue to my memory
So, the holidays were lovely this year. As you might guess from the illustrations, and as you probably already know, I was visiting Oregon, where things are gorgeous everywhere you look (even dogs on the beach). M.'s family treated me like one of their own, showering me with love and even a little teasing. It could have been a difficult time, I think, because this year is different than most, and to throw me into the mix is probably a bit much. Everyone was super welcoming, though, and I was very glad to be there. It's always neat to learn about how M. grew up (Of course, I could use a few more embarrassing stories from his youth, but that will probably always be the case!) I got to meet lots of family friends/friends from childhood, all of whom were really cool and, again, treated me with so much kindness. How come every time I go to the Northwest I sort of want to move there?
I had thought it might be strange to be away from my parents and sisters over Christmas and New Year's, but I talked to them a lot, and then I went to visit my sisters. As you can see, there's a baby on the way, and they think it's a girl! (Yes, that is indeed a knitted huarache that my sister's friend made for her baby shower). I don't have the first idea how to be an aunt, but I'm going to try to be good. Our other sister has worked with moms and babies for a few years now, and has been chomping at the bit for there to be a kid around, and she lives only an hour away from soon to be baby niecey, so that's awesome. Mostly I was just humbled to see the future dad, my brother in law, so cute and excited and all full of plans and opinions (e.g. "Once you have it, leave everything to me" - he's planning on wearing the baby all around in one of those bjorn things)! Overall, I think my sisters and their husbands are doing well - they both have good marriages, and seem to be total masters at their jobs, and they're great hosts. I'm very proud of and grateful to them.
My parents seem to have had a good holiday despite a few horrid snafus involving taking a long busride across the Midwest (instead of a plane) and not having their luggage and having to talk to people in South Asia about it instead of airport personnel an hour away. I worry about how stressed they get, but I'm not sure there's a lot I can do. I am seriously considering getting them a book on meditation. And I hope to visit them this month.
There are a lot of other things to ponder (why are there so many books about atheism out right now, and is it really "atheism" that they're about? are we going to have a recession? was the NH primary result a miscount? how come Iron & Wine is so good? will i write anything creative ever again?) but I promised I'd go to bed early tonight. I'm back home, but only for a few more hours, before I rush off to Atlanta. Last night I went to dinner with some friends, and it was awesome to realize that they're my friends too - all people I met through M. Once again, great people welcoming me. I'm thoroughly awed.
It's been a very quiet day, with a few errands, a haircut, an early morning run, but not much other human contact. What do I think when I'm not thinking towards anything? I just found this nice poem, on the sometimes-good poetry website Poetry Daily:
Someone opens an orange in silence, at the entrance
to fabled nights.
He plunges his thumbs down to where the orange
is rapidly thinking, where it grows, annihilates itself, and then
is born again. Someone is peeling a pear, eating
a bunch of grapes, devoting himself
to fruit. And I fashion a sharp-witted song
so as to understand.
I lean over busy hands, mouths,
tongues that devour their way through attention.
I would like to know how the fable of the nights
grows like this. How silence
swells, or is transformed with things. I write
a song in order to be intelligent about fruit
on the tongue, through subtle channels, unto
a dark emotion.
For love also gathers rinds
and the movement of the fingers
and the suspension of the mouth over the confusing
taste. Love also places itself at the gates
of ferocious nights
and tries to understand how they imagine its
alien power.
To annihilate fruit in order to know, against
the passion of taste, that the earth works its
solitude—is to devote oneself,
sucking dry the loved one so as to see how love
works in its madness.
A song of now will say that nights
crush
the heart. It will say that love approaches
eternity, or that taste
reveals unending rhythms, the secrets
of the dark.
For it is with names that someone knows
where a body is
through an idea, that a thought
can take the place of a tongue.
—It is with voices that silence wins.
- Herberto Helder (link to the original Portuguese)
translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin
My friend W. has taken to what he calls "microblogging," chronicling the steps he's taking on his thesis, little musings about noisy neighbors, etc. I, apparently, am veering toward the opposite end of the spectrum, with great swaths of my life unchronicled, undocumented, and then five-line posts where I spend most of the time doing a terrible translation of a poem from some language I barely know, and then add a little postscript that says "By the way, I love all my friends (even though I never write to them), I'm going to be an aunt, and one of my best friends is going to be going through a very important ceremony soon, and I wish I were doing some community service, and I'm incredibly uninformed about all news except things in Burma (which are very upsetting) but I feel vaguely unsettled about everything from China to the habits of photosensitive coral, and someday I'll be able to practice in the field I'm studying (in a way that, right now, feels disjointed and futile), and oh yeah, P.P.S., I'M GOING TO BE M.'S WIFE."
Sorry, I just had to get that out there. For some reason I've been feeling guilty (and Vox hasn't been working), and I just want to put it out there: the length and style of my posts have nothing to do with the importance and wonderfulness of the things and people described therein.
So, please bug me if I'm out of touch; I'm still here, and happy, just scattered!
As part of a wonderful night that included gin and tonics, black bean stew, and bananas sauteed with rum, M. and I finally got to see the movie "Old Joy." It features hot springs in Oregon that I really want to visit. They remind me of Japan, with little structures that anyone can enter and leave and use at their discretion, and such a sense of calm. I liked the film because the soundtrack (Yo La Tengo) is so sparse, mostly just the sounds of the woods or the car engine or talk radio, or two characters trying to make conversation. Aside from the abovementioned line that Will Oldham's character quotes from a dream, the film captures some stunning moments, especially when his character, Kurt, tries to get at the thing, the distance or awkwardness, that's between himself and his friend. I suspect that most people have had this urge, and just haven't been able to break down that social barrier and voice it. To be fair, though, saying it implies that whatever is between friends is immovable, which is rarely the case. These barriers come and go, forming in our minds, dissolving in our interactions.
On an entirely unrelated note, I'm excited that finals work is getting done, slowly, and that I'll get to have sushi with A.K. tonight and hear all about her daring travel plans, and that I'll get to visit my parents this weekend. It's been a long time since I've seen lambs, and a much longer time since I've seen the place I grew up through the eyes of someone who's never been there before.
Human Beauty
by Albert Goldbarth
If you write a poem about love . . .
the love is a bird,
the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death . . .
the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames
you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between
our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,
a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night
in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box
of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white
confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.
----
I should be editing my thesis project presentation, but I ran across this poem and liked it. A short recap: the past weekend was wonderful, involving as much beer and socializing and Thai food and hanging out with family and kickball and sleeping and holding hands as weekends should, and as much work as was absolutely necessary. Nuff said. Ok, back to work! To those of you who are far away and to whom I haven't talked in ages, I apologize; after next weekend I hope to re-emerge.
Today the NYT reports, The gross domestic product, the widest measure of all goods and services produced in the United States, rose by a sluggish 1.3 percent in the first quarter. Yeah, this is how I feel today: sluggish.
Today I'm blogging because it's raining and I feel like writing. The events in my life aren't tied together in any cohesive way that lends itself to lyricism. What common thread can I weave among my parents coming to visit, rain, a potential kickball game, a good lecture about the true mission of psychology, difficult decisions that I can't seem to give any intelligent advice about, and touchy social dynamics in my department? I can't use just one metaphor, a fruit tree, a tapestry, a road. These are things I used to try to impose on life as I wrote poems. Right now I can't do that.
Seeing my parents will be lovely, as it's been quite a while. Rain makes me want to take a nap, but at least it's not freezing, and summer is well on its way. I hope the kickball game goes on tomorrow despite what will be an extremely soggy field, and the fact that I can't remember how to play and haven't since fifth grade which was (gasp) in the late 80s.
The lecture I saw last night, by a psychotherapist called Nancy McWilliams, really woke me up. I've been so focused on class that I forgot that this field is one that is worthy of having entered with a calling. The way she put it was that the world we live in creates so many casualties, especially our particular society (so much alienation), and that the therapist's job is to ease some of the worst suffering. Unfortunately, insurance companies and the medical model of treatment sort of undermine what should be a wholistic view of the person, so it's important to keep that in mind - too often we think about mental illness instead of mental health. I can't wait until I get to start doing clinical work.
M. is facing some difficult choices right now, and I can't seem to give him any helpful advice, despite having negotiated transitions and relationships in an ethical way and without burning bridges, despite my best efforts to think creatively, despite the fact that I really want to find the magic answer. It frustrates me that wanting to and being able to are so different sometimes.
And as for the dynamics, I always find myself in this position, the diplomat, the big sister - trying to ease the strains of relationships for people who don't really get along. In college this was more overt: one roommate threw a mug at another roomate's head, I tried to calm her down, etc. Here at grad school it's different. People snub each other subtly. Not many of them, and maybe not even intentionally, but all it takes is a little roll of the eyes, a little turn of the shoulder, and someone feels excluded. I wish I could just fix it.
Anyway, last night as I heard my friend and classmate talk about how it feels to be excluded, I knew that I needed to start listening more, talking less, at least until I can say I've really heard the other person. This is my lesson.
I've been offline and will continue to be, mostly, until after the beginning of May, when finals work and other things calm down a bit. I just want to say that 70 degree weather is as wonderful as I remembered. It feels like it's been years! But I think work is under control; some light is making its way into the tunnel after all.
Last night I had a really nice break; I went out with A.K. and company, ran into both an acquaintance from college, and one from high school (the former at a happy hour, the latter at a sinkhole... don't ask), and narrowly missed seeing a third piece of the puzzle of my past, my friend P.B. from Baltimore, who I met at Governor's School during the summer of (gasp!) 1995, who was just in town for the day. Anyway, we walked around and looked at art galleries and talked about how adults sometimes misremember our actions, how people can be too judgmental, and how NLP is a plague. Then we went to see some old films made by Bell Telephone, featuring happy operators and switchboards, which I actually find to be quite romantic and interesting. There was also a nice short about Vonnegut, his life and work, and mostly had him singing in the background, which was really touching.
I'm at school, doing work, so back to that. I miss all of you though, and can't wait until it's summer, when it won't be a a novelty for flowers to be blooming, and there won't be homework, and perhaps I will get to study French...
P.S. I google-imaged "spring" and here's the first thing that came up, on a website with the same title as this post:
Last night, we were at a seder led by my friend S. and her boyfriend J., a very lovely seder, and they were using a Haggadah that included a story I hadn't heard before: Moses is standing at the Red Sea praying madly as he watches it swallow up the most daring of the Israelites, Nachshon, as Pharaoh's troops are advancing, and everyone's feeling panicked. God says to Moses, "Why are you standing there reciting long prayers while my friend Nachshon drowns? Lift up your rod!" And Moses is able to part the sea.
I like this story for two reasons. First, because God sounds so Jewish (I picture God as played by Carol Kane or Billy Crystal, simultaneously nagging and helpful and a bit absurd) -- as if everyone knows what you do when you'd like to cross a big body of water without boats, in a hurry, is use your rod! and second, because of he way God refers to the drowning man (who is subsequently saved). This is a very personal take on the relationship with God, one I haven't heard since I lived in the Southern U.S., where many evangelical preachers emphasized its importance on a weekly basis. Throughout the Haggadah last night, it was a focus, not just what happened, ostensibly, millennia ago, but what God did for me, how God gave me my freedom.
I'm sure my friend S.M. will have lots to say on this topic, as she's a religious scholar and an expert on Judaism, but for now I'll keep enjoying the idea of a personal mystery with a sense of humor.
