Bedlam in Bed-Stuy

A Perfect Storm for Idiotic Expressions

2012-02-12T15:03:00.000-08:00

This will be a short post. I think. (I always think that, and it rarely happens). But I've been thinking about this for a while and was wondering why it is that people in finance like to use idiotic expressions such as these:

1) "take a haircut"
2) "skin in the game"

I've been racking my brain for other expressions like this -- because I know they're out there. I know because I got really tired of hearing them a few months ago and made a mental note to write a pointless blog post about the whole issue.

But forget the rest of the list; perhaps we are better off simply sticking with this list of two phrases which -- if I'm not mistaken -- both have connotations of getting "cut," and, therefore, possibly, bleeding.

Maybe I'm wrong about that second one? I mean, my understanding of, say, the idiotic sentence, "Most Americans don't pay taxes, so they don't have any skin in the game!" is as follows: "I'm the big, dumb jock out here playing rugby, so I'm the one who's gonna get all bruised and scraped and come out of this whole economy bleeding! You pansies out there just sitting in the stadium and having to eat flies for sustenance don't know what suffering is!"

As for the second one, of course, when I hear "take a haircut," I don't think of my own cheap, once-every-two-months "non-tax-payer" haircut at Supercuts, with regular old scissors, for something like $18 plus a generous tip for my "non-tax-payer" stylist who could totally realize the American dream if she could just stop being so lazy and get a (fourth) job! (Duh!) I think more of the kind of haircut that I associate with fat-headed men and razor blades -- where one false move results in blood all over the place, so for God's sake don't talk about politics, alright?

Isn't it a little creepy that these Wall Street guys are so fond of these metaphors associated with injury and blood and bleeding? I don't know; I think it's creepy. Or maybe I'm just annoyed that people who can't think of anything more clever or original to say make something like five million times more money than I do and often, on top of that, weren't stupid enough to have gone into debt on something as silly as graduate school to get there.

Less is More

2012-02-12T14:05:00.000-08:00

Divorcing stuff is easy; anyone can do it. And despite what everyone thinks, you don't even have to be married first to cross a little bit of divorcing off of your bucket list.*

And let's face it; everyone could use a little divorce every now and then.

But how to begin, you may be asking yourself. No worries. Nature has a way of making sure these things happen, with your full cooperation or not. See, sometimes you initiate the divorce proceedings, and sometimes the stuff does. And it's true that at first you may feel a little hurt and put up a fight:

"But Stuff, why? I thought we had a good thing going here!" In the end, though, you get over it, and the result is the same: you have less stuff, and in its place you have light and freedom and air.

Here's an example:

In 2005 I broke my foot. I was walking down the street wearing a clunky pair of sandals, each of which was basically just a slab of wood, a leather strap, and a buckle. And I tripped. And I mean, I tripped hard. my bones met wood, which, in turn, met concrete, and the next thing I knew, I had landed three feet ahead and had left the shoes behind me.

Thank God I'd finally gotten health insurance. A journey to the emergency room, two surgeries, at least twelve trips to the podiatrist, four metal pins (plus a weird wire strung up through the sole of my foot), enough x-rays that I'm surprised a light bulb doesn't glow every time I take one out of the package, and five months later, I was able at last to give up my crutches, just in time for spring and all that springtime can bring -- tulips and rain showers and back yard barbecues.

Including the one where I decided to throw my wooden shoes onto the fire at long last.

Let me stop here for a second to say that while I had not been married to those shoes, I certainly had loved them, as much as one could be said to "love" something. I had, in fact, longed for those very shoes since the age of four or five when they had first been in style and I'd coveted them as I'd watched the 20-year-old college girls from the nearby state university walk by wearing them along with their Daisy Duke shorts, which, at the time, I confess, I also coveted.

"Be careful what you wish for" and all of that. Fast forward 30-some years, and those shoes and I were done.

Apparently I had been on to something with this whole toxic back yard fire I had created, fueled by not just wood but also leather and some type of synthetic glue and/or finish that made the smoke turn a frightening black. Our friend Jill (now happily married and a new mother -- but at the time freshly out of a relationship with a man whose idea of love seemed to be to buy you expensive things but then somehow trick you into paying for them yourself and lending them out to him) was inspired by my symbolic declaration of shoe divorce and decided that it was the perfect time to collect all of the old bills and receipts with which this relationship had cluttered her life and add them to the fuel.

Sure, the smoke smelled awful and raised the suspicion of the firefighters stationed at the end of the block who, I was sure, already thought we were weird, but the air cleared soon enough, and we could all move on to savoring the simple things in life. Like toasted marshmallows.
------------
*Could someone please tell me who came up with the term "bucket list" -- which not only makes the idea of realizing all of your dreams sound like chemo therapy (among other thrilling things that might happen just before you die) -- but also has connotations of vomit?

It's out! I'm famous!

2012-02-10T12:02:00.000-08:00

Well. Not. Famous, I mean. Not famous.

But.

I did have a writing professor in college who confessed to being a recovering poet who finally saw the light and converted to prose. Have I? I hope not. I mean, I'm thrilled to be getting nonfiction published and do hope that my whole memoir will get published and read -- but I hope I won't stop writing poetry either.

Anyhow -- here it is! And, if you read the author's note, you'll see that my cover is completely blown. I'm bare!

http://www.sweetlit.com/4.2/proseWeaver.php

Survival of the Fittest

2012-02-04T11:50:00.000-08:00

Primates friends groom each other -- because other monkeys' lice matter too.

Having recently had a party to celebrate turning the big four-o, I am freshly reminded of the delicate issues that sometimes arise when compiling a guest list, and I will first take this opportunity to confess that I did invite my ex-husband, as well as a whole other array of people-- some of whom comprise a similarly questionable cast of characters. Having said that, though, I stand by my decision; I wanted every single one of those people there and wouldn’t have had it any other way.

In fact, it occurred to me just the other day that, among my guests, other than 1) a colleague from work, 2) my ex-husband himself, and 3) an old mutual friend of ours, plus 5) the gay boyfriend of many years who planned the whole event, along with some people I know through him, I had met every single one of these guests after my divorce was underway and, arguably, directly because of the divorce. Basically, these were all people who have helped to make me live -- or who have reminded me in some way, in the years since, that I am, in fact, still living. But perhaps that is a blog post for another time.

What I want to talk about now is the fact that a party I had RSVP’d to attend the very next afternoon unexpectedly became a vivid reminder that there are some sacred boundaries to observe when it comes to whom to invite or not invite to an event. A very obvious rule is as follows: when your guest list includes a married person, unless the event in question is some kind of single-gender event such as a stag party, you either need to explicitly invite the spouse as well or be amenable to the idea that the spouse is of course welcome to join your guest.

Especially if the event to which you are inviting your friend is a ceremony designed to legally join you to a spouse of your very own.

Duh; right?

Well, apparently, no. One would assume that this is sort of common sense, but, as the saying goes, common sense is not always so common.

So here’s the story:

My ex-husband Steven and I were once again both invited to the same party, the afternoon after I’d just seen him at my birthday party the previous night. It was a very family-oriented event where many of the less-jaded and younger members of our wide circle of friends had each arrived bearing not only a potluck item and a mystery gift but also a baby or toddler. For the most part, the people bearing toddlers were a pretty reasonable bunch – both a) so exhausted by all of the years of parenting that they could no longer be bothered with acting like high-strung control freaks and b) finally over themselves and this idea that setting some of their reproductive fluids free into this world to do their thing was somehow the most important achievement in the whole history of humankind.

I was talking to Steven when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that some woman had walked in holding a newborn. Steven said to me, “Oh, did you see Anna’s baby?”

I looked back into his eyes in search of some sign of mild retardation and said, “Uh, yeah – Anna. Not much of a fan. Not so much.”

“Really?” he said. “Why?”

“The wedding,” I said, and there it was – that same moment of embarrassment I’d read on his face all of those years earlier, followed by a rare flash of deep empathy that was registering at the realization that someone had treated me badly (someone other than him, that is, of course).

“Oh,” he said. “Oh my God; I’d forgotten about that.”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Me two – but only because I kind of forgot Anna even existed, you know?”

It had been just a few months after Steven and I had started talking divorce, and we were attending marriage counseling. One day, in passing, he said to me, “Did Anna send you you an invitation?”

“To what?” I’d asked him.

“She’s getting married. She sent me an invitation. I got it at the gallery.” Steven had been getting a lot of his mail sent to the gallery even before the separation started.

“Then why would she send one to me?" I said. I mean, it does it have both of our names on it, doesn’t it?”

He looked confused. “No,” he said. “Just mine.”

I was confused too. “Did Jill tell her what was going on with us?”

“No,” he said. “Jill doesn’t even know. No one knows.”

I shrugged. “That’s odd,” I said.

A few weeks passed, and Steven told me he’d gotten a phone call from Anna regarding how he had RSVP’d. Apparently he had just written in that he was bringing one guest (me).

She was calling to tell him that the wedding was already really big, so it wouldn’t be possible for him to bring anyone.

“Well, what did you say to her?” I asked. It did, of course, occur to me that it was both touching and strange that Steven wanted so badly to bring me with him despite everything. But really that was beside the point. We were married. Whether our marriage was on the rocks or not was nobody's business when it comes to sending out wedding invitations. They could leave it for us to decide what to do with the invitation. The fact was simple and was all that mattered on their end: we were still married.

“I – I don’t know. I didn’t know what to say. It didn’t make any sense.”

Neither Steven nor I had been huge fans of weddings; after all, we hadn’t bothered having one. And it wasn’t like the bride and I were great friends in this particular case. Very friendly to one another, yes. But friends -- no. When Steven and I would have parties, she would show up at some point and ooh and awe over how toned I was, putting her arm around my waist in this suggestive way, trying to flatter me. But that was about it. Steven said he hardly ever saw her anymore but that he and his brother had literally been the first two people she’d met in New York, and that’s why she wanted them there. “Otherwise I just wouldn’t go,” he said with this pained expression on his face.

After the date of the event came and went, Steven went out of his way to tell me how awful the whole thing was. “My big, fat Russian wedding.” That was how he described it.

“Oppulently tacky?” I asked, trying to play along. This was a descriptor we had coined together during our visit to Moscow.

“Da,” he answered.

He went on to claim that Anna had done something at the wedding that had offended Jill as well, but I don’t remember what that thing was. I just know that he was only telling me these things to make me feel better.

Now, if I were in therapy right now, the relevant comment that my therapist would make would probably be,

“Yes, I can see how that must have hurt. It must have made you feel rejected.”

But then I would be thinking, “Hurt?”

I was upset, sure. I had dreams, during the day, with my eyes open, in which I was making voodoo dolls that looked like Anna. But hurt? Rejected?

Wouldn’t I actually need to consider this person a friend to begin with to be able to feel rejected by her?

What did I really care?

So I would be tempted to say that it was my pride that had been hurt; only that didn’t quite work either, did it? To have my pride hurt implied somehow that she had embarrassed me. The truth is, no one at the wedding would have had any idea why I wasn’t there with Steven -- and when they would eventually find out that we were getting divorced, they would have just put two and two together and assumed that I hadn’t wanted to be there -- or anywhere -- with him those days. Actually, especially not at a wedding.

The only person who knew the real reason was Steven himself, and he certainly wasn’t laughing at me. If anything, he had that same look on his face as he might have had, in a more primordial setting, had an orangutan come up and made threatening gestures in my direction. One could almost speculate that he felt protective toward me about the whole thing and wished he'd done more in my defense.

So what could the real reason have been? If I didn’t want to go to the wedding in the first place, and I certainly didn’t yearn for Anna’s company or friendship? Why was I so offended that I could feel myself shaking with rage?

Well, for one thing, it had been extremely inappropriate of her. One might say rude. But even then, what did that really matter to me? She was the one making an ass of herself.

I recently heard a good definition of “rudeness,” and perhaps this is what really explains everything: we feel like someone is being rude when that person seems to be acting without taking other people into consideration. If Anna had any kind of adult human concept of empathy and really given it any thought, she would have put herself in my place or even Steven’s for just a second and immediately realized how obnoxious it would be to be getting married and yet not allowing the spouse of one of her guests to accompany him at the wedding.

But again -- she was the one making a fool of herself by overlooking something so obvious.

I put myself back into the mindset of my inner cave woman – the one who was about to be slapped in the face by an orangutan – and I thought, why do people have weddings? Why bring a whole community together to witness this thing?

The thing is, us humans, we count on each other for survival. Not all of us are the best buffalo-hunters, so when one of us does luck out, we all get a share of buffalo meatballs. But Anna was carving up the meat without considering the fact that she wasn’t the only person who mattered. I guess I must have somehow perceived, viscerally, that Anna’s behavior toward me represented a threat to my very survival. She might as well have come up and punched an infant in the face – a helpless infant who happened to be strapped to my body at the time. I could feel my killer instinct come alive.

And she had arrived to this party with the fruits of that thoughtless wedding of hers -- her most important accomplishment, she must have felt -- swaddled in her arms. And so now what?

Whether the stress of stopping at nothing to defend and care for that baby of hers will eventually cost her her own marriage -- make her just another divorce statistic too -- who’s to say? I do wonder if the strength of her own arms -- the ones holding and protecting that child, as it is only natural to do -- will be enough to get her through that.

And, if not, how many people would be around for her -- once that started to happen -- to help her in her own survival? This blog post is for my friends -- both the ones who came out to celebrate, with me, four decades of having been alive -- and the ones who wanted to have been able to make it.

"I gave you everything you ever wanted; it wasn't what you wanted."

2012-01-06T13:05:00.000-08:00

A cliche is only a cliche when it's not happening to you: "All is fair in love and war." Blah blah blah. I prefer these U2 lyrics though. They say it better. And even though I'm almost always at the receiving end when things end (and not the other way around), the words of this song are kind of scolding me right now, saying, "You're so cruel."

I guess I deserve that.

Maybe it would have been less painful if I'd been better versed at delivering this kind of news. I would have liked that. I don't like to cause pain. But I guess it doesn't matter. The truth would be cruel for you to hear either way: "I can't change the way I feel." Yada yada yada. And for that, I am sorry.

When my ex-husband and I were in marriage counseling, I remember being told (by the therapist? or maybe I read it in something my own therapist recommended to me?), "If afterwards you feel regret, then you know that going your separate ways was a mistake. If, on the other hand, you feel a tremendous sense of relief..."

Could this really have been the first time in my life when I knew exactly what it was that would bring me relief and did it?

***

I want to add that, quite by coincidence, my husband I watched Moulin Rouge -- from which the scenes in the attached video are taken -- together in a foreign country, without subtitles. I like to imagine I know what it all meant, but I don't.

I am plumber; hear me roar.

2012-01-06T12:02:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I realize that probably nobody cares-- and that this is probably precisely the kind of thing for which Twitter.com was invented -- but I just finished single-handedly fixing my 3rd plumbing issue in 48 hours, and I am PUMPED! A few months ago, I spent almost $2000 to pay a plumber, having just learned that every single drain in the upstairs I was about to rent out had a leak in it suddenly. I can only imagine what the damages could have added up to this time, had I not tried to do these things myself.

Someone please remind me that I'm never allowed to leave town. Especially not in the winter. Thank God that, while there was snow on the ground where I'd been visiting my family, there wasn't any here -- which means no tenant slipping down the unsalted homemade stoop steps that my ex had built.

Not so fast, though. While I was away, the temperature did dip down into the twenties, and while I did leave the water dripping in that shack of a room that the downstairs extension/"kitchen" is (where pipes freeze in the coldest of weather even when the heat is on -- that's how ridiculous this so-called "room" is) -- alas, I returned to find an icicle hanging from the faucet.

Really I can't claim much bravado (bravada?) for fixing that one. It was sheer luck that -- yet again -- the pipes did not burst or crack. (Thank you, God!) All of my subsequent placing of space heaters on and under that sink -- and downstairs in the basement where those pipes jut out through the original footprint of the house and out into the Arctic -- was just a matter of endurance and annoyance.

However, I get ahead of myself, as I will confess that I had already been dealing with -- or, rather, NOT dealing with -- another plumbing issue. It has been at least a month since I last used my bathroom sink. Times like these I really wish I had a landlady I could sue for these ridiculous living conditions! You see, there was an odd leak coming from the drain pipe area, under which I had placed a bucket, but who was I kidding? That was just for the transitional period when I was still in the habit of thinking I had a sink I could actually use like a normal, civilized person.

I remembered changing the ugly plastic faucet of that sink back in April for a deceptively beautiful cheap Home Depot one that looks like silver and porcelain and says "hot" and "cold" on the knobs. That had been quite the learning experience. I've known for a long, long time how to shut off the water under a sink before tinkering with it -- no big deal there -- but I'd pushed beyond my comfort zone with that project and figured out that I'd of course need to disconnect the water hoses (in order to reconnect them to the new faucet) and that the best way, in this freakish case, to have access to do this was to remove the whole basin from the top of the pedestal sink -- which was honestly just secured in place by a wire looped through a hole in the underside of the basin on one end and a heat pipe on the other. (Though I can't claim credit for my ex's creative fixes, I also can't say that I do things differently).

Upon changing the knobs those several months back, I'd learned that -- no doubt contrary to the requirements of the money-sucking entity that the City of New York calls "code" -- the sink drain was really just housed inside the drain pipe itself (and not, in fact, sealed together with it). Which means, basically, that if some large clog forms, despite sporadic use of drain openers (like, say, a large and disgusting ball of hair -- not that that's what was there or anything!), the water won't have anywhere to go except to overflow, over the top of the drain pipe and onto the floor -- because it's wide open, not sealed. Kinda gross.

I will spare you the graphic details.

Once the pipe was cleared, all systems were go -- well, I mean, in that relative sort of way in which all systems are "go" in this madhouse where I live. Note to self: find a better way to keep hair from going down the drain. And use drain opener like clockwork as a prophylactic measure.

But this last plumbing repair is what takes the cake. After learning on the internet what "backflushing" a faucet was, I followed all of the steps as best as I could, but it failed, and my tenant's kitchen's cold water continued to simply drip instead of actually flow. One problem, I suspect, was that there didn't seem to be a way of turning off ONLY ALL of the COLD water in the house. I won't bore you with the details. Of course, another issue is that while simply stopping up a faucet with a dime or a "paper towel" seems to work just fine all over the internet, in my world...well, no. Not so much.

But I wasn't going to give up. I figured that as long as I could shut the water off under the sink and take the faucet and hose apart with a wrench, at least I'd be able to see if there was actually a problem with the cold water supply pipe just below the sink (in which case I'd have no choice, I suppose, but to call in a professional) or whether the blockage seemed to be in the faucet or hose itself. After going so far as to blow, with all of my might, into one end of the hose, as well as force water into the faucet opening that I'd now exposed, I put everything back together, and voila! All systems..."go."

Which is a relief because the way those things are connected together would so enrage a plumber that surely I would have felt it in the bill. First of all, both the shutoff valves and the hose connections are all so smooshed up against a wall/ a pipe/each other, that it was almost impossible -- adding to the mix that ever-awkward posture of squatting under a sink -- to get at any of those things to completely loosen or tighten them. But I did it. Also, because this had been a replacement faucet on an old-fashioned deep-basin kitchen sink (I guess that's why) the faucet, while connected securely to the hoses, is held steady by...you guessed it: some more wire, looped around some other thing to keep everything taut and more or less in place. (Otherwise, the faucet would just sort of droop into the sink).

A plumber would have taken one look at all of this and sighed, "Who in the world did all of this?" And there would be no good answer because the truth was "my ex-husband" (subtext: I am just a little woman who knows nothing about plumbing; please financially rape me). And a lie could have been, "I did." In which case I would still face punishment -- perhaps an even harsher penalty -- because I certainly would have deserved that.

I want to end this with something cute or insightful, but I'm not feeling like I'm either of those things at this particular moment. Rather, I am crude and manly and all brute strength, through and through -- which sure takes a lot out of a woman. So, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna fix myself something to eat.

The House Where I was Born

2012-01-05T15:07:00.000-08:00

This is an actual photo of the actual house.

My oldest brother remembers everything. He remembers when our parents were still together. He remembers the storefront Baptist church where we were the only white people. He remembers how my father had been friends with the pastor. He remembers that I was only a baby and not at all happy to be there -- colicky and crying and otherwise throwing a fit. (In my mother's version of the story, I was catching the Holy Ghost). He remembers the neighborhood where we were living -- a bad neighborhood at the time and now even worse -- and how he rode his bicycle all day, all over.

I remember nothing. My sister is younger than I am and remembers even less. I don't know why it never occurred to us to ask my brother before -- or why it never occurred to him in past years to offer -- but this year , for some reason, when we had lunch together, and he had the rest of the day to kill before returning to work on Wednesday, he said, The church is still there, you know. And the house. The last time I drove by, there were people living there. Do you want me to show you?

We did.

This is the first time I'm using the real photograph. It's not a photo I've stolen from somewhere on the internet to represent something else. This is the house. No one lives there now.

See that upstairs window on the right? my brother says. It's bone-chillingly cold suddenly these past two days, and we're sitting in the car across the small street from it, just staring, because what is there to say, really? That's the bedroom where you were born.

I zero in on the tattered blue tarp blowing lightly in the window. I feel like I'm looking at a crime scene. I think of TV news reports, when they talk about something horrible that happened, standing right in front of the house, not the least bit scared, speaking confidently into the microphone. And then they zero in on the window.

Do people say, "House where I was born"? I search my brain but can't come up with an answer for certain. I know that if someone says they were born in, say, Howard, Ohio -- they don't mean that literally. I know someone from Howard, Ohio, and it's, at most, 5 blocks long. There's a church, but there are no hospitals in Howard. So if anyone says they were born there, chances are that what they really mean is, that's where the family was living at the time; the trip home from the hospital ended there. The same goes for "house where I was born," if people actually say that.

But not in my case. My parents were somewhere in the nether world between art school dropout and religious freak, and somehow that particular moment resulted in my being born at home, surrounded by mysterious circumstances that my father -- now deceased -- alluded to, but that my mother never fully explained and never will.

I looked at the boarded-up house. I couldn't stop looking, and when it was time to stop, I took a photograph with my silly flip phone. In some ways I felt this house explained everything about me, answered all of the questions. Mystery solved.

But that's a lie. It feels like evidence. It feels like a clue -- just as the list of family names and birth years and places going back to 1910 feels like a clue. When we got back to my brother's house, he showed me that list, which an aunt I never knew had written out and sent him after our father's death. What use is that when my last name is just an ordinary word in the English language? There are millions of us. And the house looks just like any other house that has been emptied of its contents over and over again -- just like any home that has been boarded up and left to quietly fall apart. Still, I took that picture; I copied that list of names by hand without quite knowing why.

A Typical Holiday Family Gathering Conversation

2012-01-05T14:24:00.000-08:00

Details have obviously been exaggerated to make a point. No one is named:

Person A: Okay, I'm going to go pick something up at the store. Groceryfest is on the corner of Main and 1st, right?

Person B: What did you say?! Listen to me. LISTEN to me! Here's how you get there: first you have to get in the car. Now, in order to do that, you're going to want to open the driver's side door with your key. Do you have a key? Because you're going to need a key...

Person A: Look, I know all of that. Just trust me, please. I plan to get in the car and drive to Groceryfest. I'm just saying that I was going to go down Main to get there, so all I need to know is if it's on Main and 1st. I don't want to miss but never mind. I'll find it.

Person B: ...Make sure your door is locked. Because men around here get funny ideas. There are old men who look like they're regular people, but really they try to abduct you and enlist you into prostitution. You really have to have faith and believe in God.

Person A: Alright, alright! I'm leaving. Oh, wait -- we were going to get wine, right? I'm trying to think of where there's a liquor store. I'm assuming you can't buy wine at Groceryfest, since it's just a grocery store.

PERSON C: [Eye roll and sharp sigh]. WELL! I don't see why you wouldn't be able to buy wine at Groceryfest. I mean, how is this city different than any other city in the whole country? Of course you can buy wine at a grocery store.

Person A: [Laughing]. Oh. You know, it's funny because I'm just so used to having to go to a liquor store in New York if you want a bottle of wine that I hadn't really given it a second thought. Come to think of it, I wonder why it is that they sell beer at grocery stores in New York but not wine. I mean, liquor I can understand, but wine is another story. Isn't that interesting? I wonder why that is.

PERSON C: Whatever. Call me crazy, but I guess I just don't find that that interesting. Anyway, forget the wine. Why don't you just buy some of that stout that the local brewery makes? That way we'd have something everyone likes.

Person A: But I don't like it. And yes -- I know, I know. I've tried so hard to develop a taste for beer, but I still just don't like the way it tastes. It's...I don't know...even the good stuff tastes skunky to me. [Laughing] Anyway I like my girly drinks.

PERSON C: [Another eye roll and sharp sigh]. WELL! I mean, do you like oatmeal? Because it's practically the same thing. It's just stuff made of grain. If you like oatmeal, you should like this stout.

Person A: [Shrug]. I do like oatmeal -- but I guess I like it because it's creamy and warm and you can add milk and lots of honey to it. Beer is a whole different taste and texture; I don't know why -- I just don't like it.

PERSON C: [While walking away to the other end of the room] You probably just haven't had good beer. There's a lot of bad beer out there. Suit yourself, though. Oh -- wait! Don't forget to get some brie. I thought we had some, but I was looking in the refrigerator and didn't see it, so I guess someone ate it all.

Person A: Sorry, I didn't hear you.

PERSON C: [Turning] I said, don't forget to get some brie. I thought we had some, but I was looking in the refrigerator and didn't see it.

Person B: Oh, no; we're not out of brie. I just wanted to make sure you saw it, so I took it out of the refrigerator and put it behind all of those boxes of crackers...

(UPDATED): hoping followers don't get slammed; I'm going to edit all my posts...

2011-12-27T18:01:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: It seems that if I "edit" a post and merely then "save" it (as opposed to "publish"), it sort of disappears from the blog until I do actually go back and "post." So I am managing to go through and do some edits without my followers getting misleading emails notifying you of new stuff when really it's not going to be new stuff -- yet. Eventually I will want to "publish" these again, though, so if any of my followers are reading this and know of a way to prevent me from making your life hell, please let me know.

In case you're wondering, this is not a New Year's resolution. Rather, a piece of my prose is coming out in a journal in January, and when they asked me for "about the author"-type info, included was the opportunity to advertise my blog if I had one. I've been anonymous all of this time, and I'm not gung-ho about changing that or anything, but I couldn't pass this up. I just worry about cyber-stalkers/ what important people might think should they stumble across this work.

Why can't I just become famous or whatever (and rich) so I could be Jon Stewart or just steal him from his wife and none of this would matter? Why?

Cafe Imagination

2011-12-24T17:01:00.000-08:00

http://mosleyart.blogspot.com/2008/01/village-cafe-click-here-to-bid-on-this.html
"Never a Day Without Painting," this artist calls his blog. I love that. Please support him!

It's somewhere east of Avenue A, but not as far east as Brooklyn. It's somewhere south of 4th Street, but not even as far south as Houston. It's a little like Cafe Pick Me Up across from Tompkins Square Park -- or like Life Cafe at the other far corner of it. Something like that.

But the tables face a different direction, if it's possible even to know such a thing.

To my right there's a wall of windows, and I always sit facing the door where the customers come strolling through for their late-morning cappuccinos or after-work glasses of pinot grigio.

There's no time there.

I go there to step out -- into the world -- with a book or my journal. Or just to sit and take in the sun and the bustle of New York City and the smell of fresh coffee and the fading color of the sky as the day ages. I can have soup; I can have sandwiches on thick, grainy bread -- but also floury scones. I always have a scone. They're never out of scones.

A little farther east there's a thrift store, and sometimes I go in to look around. It's spacious and well-organized, and somehow I know there are no bedbugs. Sometimes my college friend Teresa is there (she often shows up in these types of dreams of mine, as if to say, See? Life is easy!) Effortless -- the way she balances her latest baby on one hip of that impossibly tiny body of hers, wearing one of those magical wraparound baby slings while bending down to search enthusiastically through a box of scarves and purses and brassieres. Teresa and I see each other about once every two years in real life, but she frequents these particular dreams.

How can it not be real? I've gone so many times -- more times than my one real-life visit ever to Sine. I remember that being my first year in New York. There were stone walls and wide, worn wooden floor boards. I'd scraped together money (I was in school at the time) and ate Irish breakfast there and drank my coffee and wrote -- but I can't even tell you where it was on a map without cheating.

It was all new to me. I was new to it. I was lost.

Which is to say, from there I could have gone anywhere.

Give or Take a Mile

2011-12-21T13:08:00.000-08:00

If my tenant had seemed like a good person, maybe I would have only felt bad for him when he told me all that time ago that he had bedbugs. Bad for him and scared for myself.

But this was someone who played his music loudly enough at three a.m. to literally shake me out of a deep sleep two stories down. Someone who, in exchange for his very, very cheap rent, felt he could treat me like a concierge when, right off the bat, he locked himself out twice his first week here -- once at 3 a.m. and another time first thing in the morning on a Sunday.

Once, after my ex-husband had moved out, leaving me here to fend for myself, I noticed a water stain that hadn't been there before, under the staircase leading down from that top floor where the tenant was living. That was odd, I thought; there was a whole story of house between that water stain and the roof, and there was certainly no plumbing anywhere nearby.

Then I figured out that, not only had my tenant taken cardboard storage boxes out of his infested bedroom to store in my insulation-filled crawl space (crawl space, not attic!), but he'd also opened up, from there, the hatch to the roof -- where I would then find coffee cups and ashtrays -- and left it open. For God knows how long. In the rain.

No, really, help yourself. Make yourself right at home.

So I put a lock on not only the hatch but the door that opened onto the ladder leading there, past the crawl-space.

I didn't want to have to live like that. To bolt every single thing in sight down because I had surrounded myself with selfish, immature (even at 30+) people with the kind of sense of entitlement that says, "ask for forgiveness, not permission." And then would never even get around to the forgiveness. "Worse comes to worst, it doesn't hurt to ask."

For things you're not paying for. For things you know you have no right to. For things it's insulting to ask for. ("Oh, you don't even use air conditioning in the summer -- because it's expensive? Well, still -- I think 'utilities included' should mean I can use all the AC I want for no extra money. What's that? New York City says a couple of hundred bucks a year is a reasonable flat fee? Tell you what: how about I just give you 50?"

Interesting. So you're saying Mommy and Daddy taught you that the worst that can happen is that someone might say no?

Hmm. Funny because my mother taught me to have some humility. And to treat others as you would like to be treated. Maybe "it never hurts to ask" actually does work for you sometimes. But I'm here to tell you that I can't be the only one out there with whom it does not work. For whom it sends up a red flag that says, "This person tries to get something for nothing -- and then will try to manipulate you into feeling guilty about it if you don't go along. In the future, deal with this person as little as humanly possible."

Am I wrong about this? Just being uptight and narrow-minded? Lacking that ambitious attitude it takes to succeed? Maybe you're right. Don't knock anything until you've tried it first, right?

Hey, Hipsterboy, I have an idea. I was thinking that in addition to your rent, you give me 50% of the returns you're earning on that trust fund your daddy set up for you. No, no, no -- no hurry; just give it some thought. I don't need an answer right away. Oh, and when I came upstairs to see where the leak was coming from, I saw your new Mac sitting on the desk, so just a heads-up: I took it. You don't mind, right?

Prayer

2011-12-05T12:14:00.000-08:00

The first time was in the Himalayas, and the air
was hoarse; you were thinner even
than before -- and on your knees more

than twice now, unable to will away
the thought even of water
with curry, of curried eggs and air, curried

sleep. It is lucky to see the Dalai Lama; we didn't
know that -- it was just something to do far from the land
of camel safaris or running from thieving
monkeys on the foggy streets of Simla.
A second visit, however, will leave your life

unresolved. I needed to know that, years later,
and didn't. And he was charming, wearing those
wire-framed glassed and amped up -- this time in Central Park --
cracking jokes in a language I did not speak. We'd brought
malt liquor and a blanket. But in the mountains,
then, it had been much colder.

The hostels were full, and you were
gagging in some restaurant's back yard outside
an outhouse. Did an old man really come to us?
Was that part real? He couldn't speak, but
his grandson said to us, "Come. We go
see God tomorrow," and we slept
on an unpainted wooden floor by a fire.
And in the morning you'd never been sick

a day in your life. You, Dalai Lama, little boy,
old man -- whoever the *** will
listen to me: my passport
has expired and there are things
I cannot help. Please, fix my life.

Dinner Conversation

2011-11-24T09:23:00.000-08:00

The ex and I got invited to the same Thanksgiving dinner this year. I'm going, and he's not, but it doesn't really matter at this point; we're fine with one another, so it wouldn't have been a big deal. It might even have been fun -- reminiscent, even, of our first Thanksgiving as a married couple -- and not in a romantic way but a hilarious one. That year, the eccentric old artist we'd bribed into being our elopement witness (bribed with alcohol -- it had been late enough in the morning by his standards) -- had invited us to Thanksgiving dinner. The dinner was being held at his ex-wife's apartment and included not only her but a bunch of his screaming, yelling batcrap-crazy old friends whom he'd grown up with in Coney Island. It was an experience. Political conversations with lots of one person interrupting the other and a loving "shut up" interjected ever so often.

I guess you could say that it was the kind of divorce we would have aspired to. And, in some ways, the one we got.

When Steven and I had first started splitting up, one thing I found hurtful was the fact that he saw our commonalities -- the things that had, in part, brought us together as friends and eventually more -- as sudden liabilities. Because I remembered afternoons when my siblings and I would raid the refrigerator for ways of creating new types of condiment sandwiches (with the only "food" that was sometimes left at the end of the month) -- and because he remembered how he and his sister probably could have died of a Flintstone's vitamins overdose after munching down several handfuls of those things to ease a sweet tooth because their stomachs were growling -- we in some ways understood each other. Because each of us had fought our ways all the way to master's degrees but still just couldn't seem to get ahead, we had some common causes, one could say.

But that also meant, he pointed out, that we had the same bitterness and rage, deep down, against the world. Our bitterness only exacerbated the other's, he told me; we didn't know how to keep each other in check.

I don't know that I ever came to agree with him on that, but at this point that hardly matters.

I want to tie this up with a clean, neat ending somehow -- with what? "You live and learn" or something of the kind? But I guess the things we truly learn in life are never so cut-and-dry, are never really simple prescriptions for future choices -- what to do vs. what not to do. Our experiences are all a little bit like that Thanksgiving table back in 2002: a mixture of laughter and curse words; people you'll see again and people who will just be passing through -- men and women whose names or even faces you won't remember; a table full of potluck dishes we appreciated but forgot to even unwrap. A carcass all but picked clean. A feeling of at least having moved beyond desperate hunger.

Passive Agressive

2011-11-23T21:30:00.000-08:00

Learning when to say no has made me a kinder person. I don't know why it took so many years of therapy for me to realize that if you say no calmly, knowing that you are saying it just to be fair, not out of anger -- and hold your ground -- you won't go on to hate both yourself and the person who may end up expecting too much from you. You won't wake up in the middle of the night angry. You won't stay up late doing favors for people that you never should have agreed to do. You'll sleep well.

How had I gotten to be that way in the first place -- to such a point that I had to unlearn my anger? Was it just my temperament, my personality? Was it just the social contract of a woman to "help" other people at a great cost to herself?

When my brother started college and I was still in high school (both he and my parents had started college at some point, but I was the first one in my family to finish it), I somehow had agreed to wake him up in the morning for class before I left to catch the school bus. He would never get up the first or second time, and, after being completely unresponsive, would finally yell, angrily, things like "Yeah, I HEARD you! Shut up!"

I mean, I know we were poor, but what -- we couldn't afford an alarm clock? Why in the world did I agree to keep doing that for him?

My mother's limited interactions with other people probably had a lot to do with my passive-aggressive tendencies too, though. She has mostly -- in all the years I can remember -- really kept to herself. Never really made friends. Occasionally she would develop some kind of odd friendship with someone, and it would always end badly. And I'd always get to hear all about it and watch it like some kind of slow-motion car crash.

For instance, there was April, a woman who lived down the street from us. April was married, but I can't remember if her husband didn't have a job or what the deal was; I just know that between our dirt-front-yard, splinter-floored rental and her grimy, bacon-smelling, dirty-diaper inhabited one it was like some kind of poverty smackdown, and April was somehow actually winning: she didn't have a phone, and we did.

Now, we'd only had a phone for a few years -- starting after the grandmother I'd never met due to the price of airfare died in only her fifties, and her house got sold, leaving my mother with enough to buy a few pieces of furniture she still owns today (what's left of them, anyhow, since the cats got hold of them early on). So we had a phone. (And, by the way, in case this sounds like a story of the Great Depression era, let me clarify that I'm only in my 30s. Yes, we were just poor white trash; that's all).

Anyway, I don't know if something particularly special had happened in April's life that suddenly necessitated her being on the phone all the time -- unless that special event was meeting and befriending my mother, who had a phone -- but suddenly this woman was in our house twelve times a day, sitting on the bare landing of our stairs and just gabbing away on the telephone. I want to say that my mother was friendly to her at first and smiled a lot and tried to get her to talk in tongues and admit what a lust-filled hussy she was and that she needed to repent -- but I might just be generalizing here, since that's kind of how my mother's brief relationships with other adults just tended to go down. All I know is, I'm not sure how long this phone-borrowing thing went on (except to say that it felt like forever), but at some point my mother began angrily telling us that April was too much "about the ways of the flesh" and needed to "get right with God." Usually while she was slicing potatoes or otherwise doing something that made one not want to make too much of a fuss over what she was saying. Why she felt like this was an appropriate discussion to be having with children ranging in age from eleven down to six, I can't really say.

So I know what my mother said to us, but I don't know what she said to April exactly. I just know that one day the phone-borrowing thing stopped and that it couldn't have been pretty -- that it must have gone from all smiles and "let's talk about the Lord" to "Don't you set foot in this house ever again" on the turn of a dime. I suppose one can't be witness to such things without internalizing -- and...normalizing? oh, dear God, literally -- them just a little.

So anyway, it's been lovely, dear reader, having you sit here and listen with such interest to what I have to say -- but it's 12:30 in the f*g morning now, so what the hell are you doing in my house when I'm tired and cranky and need you to get the hell out of here so I can go to sleep?

I mean -- ahem -- sweet dreams!

Thanksgiving/Pre-Christmas Post

2011-11-23T20:36:00.000-08:00

Being poor wasn't always all deprivation and sadness. Sometimes we got things other people would never get. Like the Christmas when my mother, the art school dropout, sewed for each of us, without so much as a pattern, a completely unique stuffed dog puppet -- each one built upon a sock, covered by a realistic body of stuffing and fabric store fur and brown beads for eyes -- and noses molded by clay with two holes for sewing and then painted a shiny black before she'd attached them. The red fabric tongues that would hang out happily when we held them close to us and made them say whatever we wanted them to.

Original Blame and Shame

2011-11-23T20:21:00.000-08:00

The man was Adam, the woman was and Eve, and the object was the fruit.

And the feeling was a curiosity. And the mistake was consenting.

We were in the bathroom -- playing with water, I suppose -- always a temptation. To me, anyway; I was probably four. It must have been a hot day. Maybe my brother was there. My sister must have been born by then but was too young to speak, too young to walk. One less person to blame. But definitely I was there -- and Stevie, the kid down the street, twice my age, whom my mother sometimes babysat.

I remember the bathtub. Put this in your hair, Stevie said, holding the tube of white toothpaste. It'll make it white, he said -- just like Mrs. Santa Claus' hair. Stevie must've been a good salesperson already at the age of eight -- given that, looking back, what did that have to do with anything? Christmas was months away.

Somehow, despite this, I felt he had a point. How could I resist?

Why is it, when I think back to this, I feel that Stevie meant me harm? Had he stayed back, laughing, while I ran for my mother with those stinging eyes ? I don't think that happened, so why do I envision it that way?

Why do I remember this at all; why do I come back to this over and over again like an anxiety dream that stands in as some kind of shorthand for shame? Was this the first betrayal in memory, the first time I would trust a stranger and end up regretting it? My body's way of remembering a future that hadn't happened but surely would? Was Stevie standing in as the spouse, the tenant, the Devil incarnate -- all of these, all wrapped up in one?

Stevie didn't look like any of those. He didn't look like anything. Stevie was a blur; for me, at that moment, there was only me. Me, running, yelling for my mother. Me, feeling stupid for what I'd gone along with; that was all. I ran, and my eyes burned.

Untitled Woman No. 5

2011-11-23T19:23:00.000-08:00

Eyes, brownish, brownish hair, rooted in the land

of test markets: ribless rib sandwich, Ohio, the heart of it all,

that fatless fat that passes, unchanged, through the body, although

you may feel a little sick. But why not say what happened.

She was exported (I was) forever: a one-way ticket, and not for the sole

purpose of finding herself on a map. You could look for her

but not toward that body of water to the West -- the one bearing

the name of a dead man. Lower, to the East. Moving still

farther eastward -- traversing the fastest route from Brooklyn to Queens, far

past where the streets are numbered. Not the Hudson River, not the Lower

East Side, not the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Here, they call it

like they see it: the first avenue and then the second one, and when you run out

of counting, there's the alphabet. At the Center of the city, there

is a Park, and at the heart of her body, the heart.

Mentally Unhygienic

2011-10-25T14:30:00.000-07:00

One day last week, I left for work super early because I was craving a scone from certain Bed-Stuy cafe I will not refer to here by name.

The scones are amazing. I mean, they must be; I have been known to wait in line for one for ten minutes on my way to work. And by "wait in line" I mean, wait behind the ONE other customer ordering something at the moment. I mean, waiting patiently while the same person I've seen at the cash register for YEARS now (possibly the owner, I'd always thought), squints at the computer screen, moves the mouse around, clicking and clicking -- and then messes up and starts all over. About 6 times. Same woman, every time I'm there, for years, and yet she somehow doesn't seem to know how her own cash register works. Almost every time I'm there (always to order nothing more than one scone to go), people in the line behind me eventually sigh and storm out because they can't take it any more.

Well, last night I walked past the cafe on my way home...to discover that the doors and windows had all been plastered over with yellow signs reading, "Closed by order of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene." I guess someone finally lost their mind trying to get a scone there, and the city said, enough already!

Which could probably happen almost anywhere in the neighborhood, to be honest. I mean -- just to give one other example -- after no longer being able to take the idiocy of a small local pharmacy, I gave up and finally had my prescriptions transferred to the local Duane Reade, a huge NYC chain. Bad move. Chain or no chain, it doesn't matter. Apparently people are pre-screened for idiocy before they are allowed to work customer service in Bed-Stuy. Every single time I went to this particular Duane Reade, the line would be at least 5 people long, and 4 out of 5 people (I always being one of them, unfortunately) would find ourselves saying things like, "but I got a phonecall saying the prescription was ready" or "you said come back in an hour; that was three hours ago" or "I picked these up yesterday, but one of my prescriptions wasn't in the bag; the label says PLEASE REFRIGERATE. Could you please go check in your fridge?"

And these people are responsible for dispensing life saving/life-threatening pharmaceuticals? Surely you cannot be serious. Within a few months, I joined a once-a-week Meetup group that gathers on the Upper West Side, over an hour from where I live, so I had my prescriptions all transferred there. How sad is that? The thing is, I've had prescriptions filled before at other Duane Reades -- ones that just happened to be down the street from the determatologist or whomever I'd just seen -- and they pretty much would have your order done right there on the spot, in something like ten minutes.

Oh, Bed-Stuy! Surely this cannot be good for property values.

The Nose Knows All Suffering

2011-10-25T14:15:00.000-07:00

In the continued spirit of being melodramatic and tragical, I wish to share another story about my lifetime of suffering.

Last week I had an appointment with an ear, nose, and throat specialist who deals with sleep apnea. I have no recollection of ever having been one to sleep on my back until some time in the past year when, on occasion, I started to wake myself up with my own snoring.

First, I want to say how glad I am that I had no idea how the logistics of this nose/throat examination would work; granted, it was completely painless, but only because of the use of a local anesthetic. I will say no more on this topic except to tell you that once I had been nasally violated in the required fashion, the doctor informed me that yes, my suspicion of having at some point broken my nose at a very young age (I remember something about hitting it really hard on the bedpost and how it really, really hurt afterwards) could be confirmed: to say that my septum was deviated would be the understatement of the century; my right nostril is, in fact, completely blocked -- and thus useless for breathing.

"It is obvious," he said to me in his slight Russian accent, "that this happened when you were very young -- because you do not even notice."

I told him that I had also discovered, as an adult, for that matter -- after a lifetime of having cats for family pets -- that I was allergic to them. I'd had no idea, I told him, that this kind of itching and sniffling was abnormal. By the time I found out, it was too late; I had already given away the children because the cats were allergic (as my favorite bumper sticker proclaims).

He was fascinated. "Do you exercise?" he asked me. I told him yes, I'm a runner. "But how?" he asked. I shrugged. "I've been doing it for 20 years."

He told me that a deviated septum, in his professional opinion, rarely causes sleep apnea. However, he said, in my case there might be an exception. The Sleep Institute would be calling me soon about setting up a study. I could see that he was trying to contain his excitement, resisting the urge to rub his hands together like a mad scientist and say, "INNNteresting..."

I admitted that I'd always felt that I suffered a lot whenever I had a cold -- but assumed that maybe I was just being a whimp.

"Let me tell you something," he said. "There are people -- when they fall down, they just stand back up. There are other people, however -- when they fall, they demand the assistance of twelve orthopedic surgeons. You are not the second type," he said. "This is a good thing."

I thanked the kind doctor and closed the door behind me, sighing heavily through my one good nostril, and began my daily voyage out into the sea of suffering.

The Smell

2011-10-25T13:59:00.000-07:00

"Burned Mattress & Debris in the Woods," http://www.flickr.com/photos/mundane_joy/2060779511/in/faves-29879040@N03/

A friend once said to me, "I love the scent of pine cleaner! It makes everything smell so clean." I think we were in our twenties, and she was living by herself, in one of her first apartments -- still a smoker at the time, her apartment cluttered here and there with ashtrays and textbooks and laundry baskets. Maybe we were splitting a gallon of ice cream, talking about boys while she mopped.

But I've never liked the smell. I want to say, "because it doesn't really smell like pine" -- but actually I have no idea if it does. I did eventually know what a pine tree smelled like, sure -- but by then it was too late. I know that I learned at some point, for example, that there was a particular lip balm that was red-- and that it was supposed to smell like cherries.

Does it? To this day, I don't really know. And if it weren't for the "grape flavor" label -- the purple color -- I wonder: in our natural habitat, would we know to be reminded, when we smelled it, when we tasted it, of that dark, sweet fruit?

Pine cleaner didn't remind me of the smell the plastic Christmas tree that came apart every January and sat in the basement for another year. Pine cleaner smelled like my mother's efforts to keep us from being upset when the no-name brand roach motels didn't seem to be working that well. Pine cleaner smelled like moving to a smaller, dirtier house, in a dirtier, less sunny neighborhood.

It smelled like the family that, for all we knew, was getting evicted that day when, the landlord told us, come and have a look.

It smelled like the house of the family that was leaving this place that would soon become ours -- though never really ours -- for a smaller, dirtier house, on an even dirtier, even less sunny street.

Newsflash! You Can't Get Bedbugs from Toilet Seats, but You CAN Get Them from Stuff that's Been in Someone's Infested Studio Apartment! Gasp!

2011-10-14T08:18:00.000-07:00

Anderson Cooper is hot even when he says, "Cooties!"

I don't read stuff on Bedbugger.com much anymore; I get too irritated by the whole landlord/tenant blame game that goes on there, along with the mass hysteria they seem to inspire. (As you may have guessed, I've spent way too much of my life reading anything and everything ever published on the web about bedbugs -- including all kinds of discussions of scientific research -- and that site is the only place that's ever led me to think that people in the middle of a bedbug crisis need to protect the rest of the world from their nastiness by basically either developing obsessive-compulsive disorder or never leaving the house; they don't say it like that, of course, but that's the message. To be fair, it's obvious that they don't mean to make people feel that way. They are indeed an advocacy site -- but people there are obviously so shell-shocked by what they've been through that they seem to think you can get bedbugs from someone just by looking at them -- and that this is a risk that one must not take).

So, my Google Reader alerted me to the fact that Bedbugger.com had recently commented on a Slate article called "How Contagious are Bedbugs, Really?", and I couldn't wait to read it. I read both the original article and the commentary, which...well...irritated me. Namely, the following quotation:

“The poor often live in housing where bed bug infestations are neglected or poorly managed.”

To which I replied with the following rant, which I wanted to share:

Let’s not forget that the quotation above is only ONE point that that Slate article — which deals more with how the whole problem starts to begin with — is making. We wouldn’t even need to talk about how to “manage” infestations if people would just get a clue and stop thinking that thrift store/vintage shopping, etc. is okay in this day and age. (Here’s my OWN emphasis):

“The poor are at risk because THEY OFTEN CAN’T AFFORD EXTERMINATORS and may have unresponsive landlords—factors that increase the duration of infection. THEY ALSO FREQUENTLY RELY ON DONATED OR SECOND-HAND FURNITURE, INCREASING THEIR CHANCES OF CATCHING BUGS IN THE FIRST PLACE.”

Don’t forget that 1/3 of Brooklyn residents rely on small-time landlords who rent out part of their homes as a means of being able to pay their mortgages and not face foreclosure; they, too, “often can’t afford exterminators.”

While a corporation may be able to spend $10,000 here and there just because a tenant brings home furniture that has been discarded FOR A REASON — having no personal financial stake in being informed or careful — ordinary people who are already struggling to stay employed (and stay in their homes) can’t.

I know that I personally can’t afford to buy furniture — and rarely can even afford to buy clothing, even at Kmart! But what do I do about that? I deal with what I already have and let my stuff fall apart; the same way I’ve never bought a flat screen T.V. or a microwave or an iPhone/Pod/Pad or even a DVD player, I go without a couch too. It hasn’t killed me or anything; you’d be surprised.

If bedbugs are just an inevitable part of city living, then the city should be involved in getting rid of them, the same way it’s involved in putting out fires. But if it’s true, on the other hand, as the Slate article implies, that bedbugs pretty much arrive in infested “stuff” — not just because people ride the subway or work in an office or have children in school or just sort of live their lives — then I can see why the city shouldn’t bear the responsibility. But then neither should landlords.

I realize that this whole thing is a complex issue, but if “‘the movement of stuff’ carrying lots of bed bugs, rather than contact with individual people who might be toting a hitchhiker, is what puts us most at risk of getting bed bugs,” can we please stop putting our emphasis on blaming landlords and concentrate on real prevention education — by which I mean and not this whole voodoo of “oh, if you have bedbugs, then it’s irresponsible of you, you filthy pariah, to even leave your house without having just taken a shower and changed your clothes”?

I for one am glad that the Slate article makes an effort to dispel this kind of hysteria, along with the idea that there’s nothing you can do to keep from making your landlord go broke, short of never going to work or taking public transportation and just keeping your luggage in the bathtub and your fingers crossed when you travel. Please.

Scarlet Fever

2011-10-13T19:29:00.000-07:00

I am eight the autumn when my skin
blooms along the wrists, a patch of red that spreads
like the glow beneath hot coals. The teachers,
concerned, swoop in, moving closer

and also away. Who ever fails
the third grade? But I almost do.
One minute, sitting Indian-
style (we'd actually called it that),

in Cranbrook Elementary's multipurpose room --
for some reason I won't remember -- and then
escorted away, through rows of other Natives
and to the school nurse, who will sentence me to five

hours of waiting. That, and bloodletting
in the E.R., through the smallest of openings
in a finger that refuses to betray me.
My neck has stiffened and will swell. I know

I am going to die because my father
has appeared in my life; I need to be driven there --
yesterday -- and he drives. And then: home
for a month -- feverish, asleep, consumed

suddenly with citrus fruit and a type of cheese
my mother has bought on a whim; it's on sale --
and I read Little House on the Prairie and am alive
in the wrong century, fading in and out

of eighteen eighty something. Of all things,
also, that I will never remember, there, on television,
is Laura Ingalls in braids, in calico bonnets,
her body like mine straining past hemlines --

she and I each swelling in anticipation
of winter, of hunger, of Almanzo
Wilder. We are both waiting for the one
where her sister goes blind.

Oh no they DIDN'T...

2011-10-10T11:29:00.000-07:00

Okay, so...I will let you guess who is responding, below, under the name of "OverEducatedUnderPaid," to these anti-99%ers/ anti-Occupy Wallstreeters.

Then, if you'll pardon me, I might have to go vomit.

****

c3033 on Oct 4, 12:35 PM said:

Get a life, get a life, get a life....these people need to get a life. Why are we paying attention to any of them.

Why does society need to be responsible for these people and the choices they have made???

...

The "builder" put "out of business" twice...really...you would have thought that you might have saved some money after the first time...

It is about time people start taking responsibility for their own actions...

Reply

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c3033 on Oct 4, 12:38 PM said:

@c3033:

Oh and cry me a river for the adjunct whiner, I mean professor....you work 4 hours a day max and get paid 70k+.....really!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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OverEducatedUnderPaid on Oct 10, 2:05 PM said:

@c3033:

Since when does an adjunct only work 4 hrs a day? And since when does he or she earn $70K? Actually, one of the biggest scams in the corporation that is higher ed (don't be fooled into thinking someone's not making big money off of this part of the American dream racket) is that, as much as possible, colleges and universities try to ONLY hire adjuncts (along with some graduate students, who, as if it were humanly possible, earn even less) to teach the most "important" classes that everyone has to take -- like freshman composition. And most of the people who teach those classes do it as their sole livelihood by teaching at 3 or 4 different institutions at once. It's estimated that writing instructors spend something like 25 min. per student paper they read. If they teach 3 classes a semester (a.k.a. 60 students -- considered a heavy load by full time tenured people earning 2 or 3 times their salary, which isn't even always saying that much), they are lucky to make $39, 150 per year -- and that's ONLY IF they're lucky enough to a) be able to also get a full class load during the summer (unlikely) and IF they're lucky enough to live in pricey SoCal, which pays substantially more than elsewhere. (If they live in pricey NYC and meet all the above conditions, make that a whopping $26,100 annually. Now, let's face it: you can't even wipe your a** in NYC on $26,100, and, mind you, these are people who generally need to be paying off graduate school loans). Oh -- and did I mention that these jobs usually offer no health insurance or any other benefits. But no, these folks occupying Wall Street just need to stop crying and go to school ("oh, young people are the future!" "Education is the key!" yada yada yada) and get a job...so they can aspire to...what, exactly?

Tornadoes, Earthquakes, Hurricanes, Floods, Plagues of Locusts

2011-09-29T15:26:00.000-07:00

"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," Wikipedia

The 5' x 12' space outside my kitchen window -- the low roof on which several flowerpots of dying plants and a water bowl for the cats sit -- is strewn with carcasses. If, that is, grasshoppers can be said to have "carcasses" - and if two "carcasses" can be said to be "strewn."

Work with me here, people.

The perpetrator is my energetic ten-year-old tabby, famous for jumping on laps, licking faces, and gnawing on fingers with his gums, all of his teeth but the fangs having been removed for decay and only one remaining intact. Last year, when he still had his one other fang (as far as I know), I watched him kill and eat an entire mouse. It was horrifying, and yet I couldn't stop watching. How on earth was this physically possible?

Toward the end of summer, a week apart, I find two dead sparrows on my living room floor. One day, a week later, as I sit outside grading papers, my kitty excitedly runs toward me with a sparrow in his mouth and lays it at my feet.

I remember how perturbed my mother had been, back when I was eight years old and one of my cats had just killed a sparrow. One minute she's assuring us that cats could go to heaven too -- because God can do whatever he wants to -- and the next minute she's squirming uncomfortably upon hearing that our house pet has committed blasphemy, responsible for the fall of the creature upon which God's eye is perpetually fixed. Luckily she becomes distracted by the fact that my four-year-old sister has apparently begun giving herself hickeys on the forearm out of sheer boredom and is also calling our pet rabbit "honey buns." Clearly Satan is at work here in more ways than one as the End Times approach.

Yet here I am, 31 years later and right after the hurricane that was so very destined to make landfall in New York City that the mayor himself had ordered evacuations along all waterfronts. And now, later, in the aftermath, my cat cannot stop bringing live grasshoppers into the house, dropping them each just long enough to let them hop a few times before pouncing on them and pulling off one leg at a time as they die slowly.

Rather, I should say, he does eventually stop bringing them into the house, at which time I begin to find their carcasses strewn across the roof outside my kitchen window.

***

My ex-husband, before we had been married, had had a landlord who understood very little English and could ill afford to make expensive repairs to the two-story house, divided into and upstairs and downstairs apartment and situated practically directly beneath the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, in a neighborhood that could have easily become known as DB2QE had it not later been declared to be part of Williamsburg.

When a heavy rain came one day, he had to explain to his landlord that the roof was leaking. "Leak?" the man had asked him. "Yes, it's leaking," Steven had responded, relieved to be understood. "Leaking?" the landlord repeated. "Yes, leaking," said Steven. The landlord had thought a moment and asked. "Leaking? Too much?" in response to which Steven had pretended to think a moment before responding, "Yes, too much. Too much leaking."

Well, similarly, I can tell you that while I still have not identified the location of the breach in the roof upstairs -- apparently a small, noncommittal sort of rupture that over the course of a year slowly brought back the small, thin, brown water stain -- upon being beaten down by the torrential downpour of Hurricane Irene, began to leak. Too much. And my financial disposition is similar to the man in the story. Thus, my contingency plan is simply to don a respirator and jumpsuit and crawl through the fiberglass insulation to drag a very, very large Rubbermaid container to a spot that should catch any future leaks until...until...until I...win the lottery. Yeah. Until I win the lottery. That's the plan, alright.

Something like the week before all of that, of course, had been the day when, as I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, I noticed the latched door bouncing in and out of the doorframe of that room as though someone were standing on the other side and violently trying the doorknob to try to get in.

A seasoned homeowner by that moment, my initial thought, of course (before realizing it was an earthquake that was causing the shaking), was, "My God; my house is going to collapse."

Then, upon returning to hear the word "earthquake" coming from the kitchen radio, my first thought was...well..."My God; my house is going to collapse."

Now, in this reverse series of End Times signs I've just reviewed, grasshoppers, of course, are not all that shocking My Brooklyn back yard harbors all kinds of life -- most notably mutant killer mosquitoes, caterwauling toms with particularly acrid-smelling piss and a curiosity about how the other half lives, and tomato-plant-destroying snails and slugs. Also overblown talk of the approach of Hurricane Irene only confirmed what I would say about hurricanes making landfall in New York City: it just doesn't happen. This was the first time in 17 years that I remember anyone even thinking that one would. An earthquake in New York, though? And what about last year's tornado -- the one that blew the roofs off of several brownstones just two blocks from my house here in Bed-Stuy? That left my storm windows intact but found one lying on the floor upstairs, having been blown in by the tremendous wind? That picked up a large iron object in my back yard and slammed it down into the ground ten feet away from where it had stood?

My energetic little single-fanged gray tabby looks up at me for a second as if to answer -- and then goes back to the quotidian task of washing his behind.

Could you Tell me Where I Am?

2011-09-03T10:13:00.000-07:00

I didn't find this house; Steven found it. No map of mine led me here, and yet here I am, all of these years later.

Nor did I find the route we took through Peru together, years ago, nor the one through Ecuador, nor the one up the Pacific coast of Mexico.

People say that men won't ask for directions.

But I was the only one who spoke Spanish, so what was there for him to ask?

The trips we took together were reminders. Of everything. It took every ounce of courage just to ask; how could I then also listen?

In any language? Even my own?

You have to be able to picture yourself there, standing on a corner. There are those who have to locate their hands -- to remind themselves which way is right, which way is left.

I don't have that problem; still, when all I can do is desperately listen -- listen for both of us -- my strengths are of no use to me. To me or anyone. Neither all the languages I speak, nor my strong sense of right versus left, nor my ability to close my eyes and see myself from a bird's eye view, nor the uncanny strength of my deceptively small body. A strength that seems to only make my heart pump harder, and that's not helping.

***

Somehow, we found our way to places together despite it all. And, after, somehow we even made it home.

Long before, two strangers from another decade brought each of us into the world. We're the ones who decide to stay.

Blood, Sweat, and Nervous Diarrhea

2011-08-14T10:18:00.000-07:00

I went on a job interview last week. It was depressing. When my friend had first told me about the position, we agreed that it was perfect me; in fact, the more we thought about it, the more perfect it seemed. Not only was the position at a company that I liked, which engaged in an enterprise I respected, but it required skills I both was good at and enjoyed using.

Or so we'd thought anyway.

After a week or so of thinking about the job, though (having sent in my resume, etc.), I started to get a really bad feeling. First I thought of the commute. It is true that I have a terrible one now, but I get to work from home half of the week, so who can complain? This commute would be less horrible but horrible nonetheless, and I'd have to do it every day. This meant there was definitely no way I could go for a run in the mornings before work like the spoiled person I had become. (How had I ever done that at a normal job anyway? My first full-time job was a 15 minute walk from where I was living, but I was also 23 when I started it. Didn't I go running every morning before the next job I had -- that required me to be there, all the way on the other side of the universe, by 8:00 every day? My memory is foggy. I know I got home earlier from that position, but still; had I been superwoman then?

This new job I was considering, I was thinking, would require me to probably stay late, and even though there was a gym on the premises (and even though Central Park was around the corner), I figured out that I would basically have no life and not get home until 9:30 every night.

And despite the fact that I'd believed that this was the rare position that would allow me to step off my current career path for a year or two while the market was bad and then transition flawlessly back, in reality, I seemed to be simultaneously overqualified, underqualified, and terrified, all at once.

At the risk of falling into a state of undeserved self-pity, I think I'm feeling this way because I've had so many crappy jobs in my life already. I've worked in fast food and warehouses; I've waited on tables and been paid $2.00 an hour to clean the toilets at the end of that shift (considering that I wouldn't be making tips once the customers were gone). I've done temp work, including one day of making up hotel beds. I've been overeducated part-time underpaid exploited labor with no health insurance. I've worked other jobs to support my addiction to that job (whatever was keeping me clearly had not been the money). I've worked with rowdy children at the farthest outer reaches of the outer boroughs.

The summer before my ex and I bought the house, my daily schedule, which included three jobs, was as follows: 1) I woke up at 5:00 p.m. (That may at first simply sound astoundingly lazy, but don't interpret that until you see how late I had to work). I got dressed and was off to teach a class that went about 2 1/2 hrs.

2) After class, I would go out on a run, take a shower, and the company I was working for would send a car to bring me to Manhattan. (Don't judge THAT luxury until you find out how late I had to work and doing what). I would arrive at a downtown law firm at 11:00 p.m. and start proofreading the most boring corporate law documents you will ever see in your entire life.

The job was so blatantly boring and the schedule so outrageously unnatural that the supervisor really didn't care if we occasionally collapsed on our desks for an involuntary nap.

I would take my "lunch" break around 2:30 a.m., and since the nap closet (I don't know what else to call it, but they did have one) was almost always already occupied, I would set the alarm on my cell phone and go to sleep for a bit on the cafeteria floor.

3) Around 5:30 or 6:00 a.m., I would walk up Wall Street to the investment bank where I was filling in until the CEO's assistant got in at 9:00.

4) I'd grab a cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese on my way home and collapse in my hot, sweaty bed until the alarm went off for my teaching job.

5) Rinse and repeat.

And it wasn't like I was 25 years old or anything. I was 30.

And now I'm tired.

Well, I'm lucky I still have a job, but the clock is ticking, and it's not going to last. I could get an even more unstable position doing what I'm doing now elsewhere and piecemeal, but it would be for about half the money. Because of the noncommittal way I would be getting paid, it might require a little more mindless busy work and be a bit less taxing, but I wouldn't exactly say HALF as taxing to merit such horrid pay.

Wouldn't it be nice if I could just say, fine; I could just have a tenant for the other half of the income I would need? But what do I do, I ask myself over and over again, when the douchebag brings home some cool, ironic bug-infested tchotchka from a flea market and I have to drop everything to explain how they have to wipe even their toothpaste tube down with rubbing alcohol and keep it sealed in plastic and cross my fingers that they'll actually comply -- so that the exterminator will actually validate the waranty on the thousands of dollars worth of work I've just had them do?

Notes to Self

2011-06-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

http://www.greetings.ca/no-dirty-dishes-day-012056.php

Just the other day, I was sitting in a discussion group in which participants were asked to close their eyes and think back to their childhood homes, as far back as they could remember.

Not anticipating that the next step indeed would be to wander around the house, I'd already instinctually started doing so, happily walking from room to room, stopping here to touch the windows sill, there the banister.

There was the black asbestos tile of the kitchen where, at the age of seven, I remember falling down and chipping my tooth one Easter morning; my brother and I had been was chasing each other in our socks. There was the bare, beige, asbestos tile floor of the sparse living room where the old couch was quickly falling apart.

Next, in my mind, I wandered upstairs to the landing with its sunny window, and then around the bend where I walked into my teenaged brother's small, carpeted room next to the bathroom, snooping around the odds and ends on his dresser while he was out with his friends as he often was.Next, I stepped into the larger middle room that contained two matching beds, where my "Irish twin" brother and I shared our space and where he would spend afternoons inventing crazy names and scenarios for all of our stuffed animals, most of which were dogs of all shapes and sizes. Finally, I stepped around the corner from our room to open the door to the sunny, gray, wooden attic stairs leading up into the light.

But I wasn't really supposed to just wander around the house, solitary; what we were really being instructed to do was to look for the people we would find in that house -- people who had the biggest effect on our lives. And as we found them, we were supposed to have specific types of conversations with them.

That's when a few strange things happened, some of which I understand, and some of which I don't:

No matter how hard I looked, two of my three siblings were always missing. Why the oldest was missing makes sense to me: he was seven years older, a teenager, and unlike anyone else in the house, he had his own room. In real life, he was often out riding his bike or skateboarding with his friends, just like any kid his age might be.

I couldn't understand why I couldn't place my sister, though. She was the youngest and slept in my mom's room. Was this the reason? The thing is, my mother was unemployed and depressed and never left the house, and my sister wasn't old enough to go to school yet, so surely she was always around. Why couldn't I find her, even when I searched?

In fact, the only sibling I could find was the one who, ironically, is distinctly missing from everything now -- missing from week-long family gatherings, missing from phonecall exchanges. Missing from my life. When we do see him every few years, he is easily agitated and short-tempered. But when I close my eyes, what I see is that he is having our stuffed animal dogs interview each other, and he seems happy. He makes me laugh.

Mostly, unsurprisingly, it's my mother with whom I converse. There are things I want from her. I want her to treat me like a human being, not just some kind of cooperative instrument of "God's will." I want her to tell me about her own life, about falling in love, falling out of love. I want her to seem human to me in every dimension and to acknowledge that I'm human too -- that one day I'll fall in and out of love, that I will have dreams I'll want to pursue. I want her to give me some idea of what the world outside this house might be like.

Unlike in real life, she thanks me for my insight and says she will try. Like in real life, she then pats me on the head, calls me smart, and tells me she loves me.

But the part that scares me most is this: I try to get her to walk with me to the living room. Every few minutes, I try. I try to picture her walking up the stairs to the sunny landing, but she won't.

No matter how hard I try, I can't get my mother out of the kitchen -- the kitchen where, when she's not patting me on the head, she is raging over a sink full of dirty dishes, over thoughts of my father, her hands wet and slippery, making so little progress, her tears silent.

Hiring Trauma Scene Cleanup (and a Good Attorney)

2011-06-18T10:10:00.000-07:00

Soon after Steven had moved out – but nowhere near soon enough -- I'd worked up the nerve to tell the hipster tenants upstairs that they would be writing their rent checks to me from now on, now that I was a few months into a better teaching job, finally earning more than my previous $34,000, and would be the one paying the mortgage – my soon-to-be-ex-husband, Steven, having moved to Boston in the fall.

So I took charge of the house – the holes in the walls and ceilings, the stacks of drywall piled in the central hallway – cheerfully proclaiming that the basement – full of almost all of his possessions (most of which he had never taken), including piles of salvaged doors and 12 cans of deck stain (even though we 'd never had a deck) – was the last place where my divorce would be final.

Really,of course, I'd meant this as a joke. I hadn't realized at the time just how far from funny all of this would actually be. Or do I really mean just how funny? Once life reaches a certain point of absurdity, the horror of it all becomes almost a parody of itself. Little did I know how much trouble his piles of belongings in the basement would eventually cause me. Little did I realize that almost three years later, his things would still be down there and I would, in the middle of contemplating a refinance that might allow me to pare down my number of tenants to one so that I might live in peace – no more stomping around above me, no more stereo speakers making the ceiling above me vibrate – find myself actually asking my friends, “Do you think it will reflect badly on my credit report to have a company called 'Trauma Scene Cleanup' appear on my Master Card bill?”

Of course, I'd thought the company's name was supposed to be ironic when the other contractor I'd been working with referred me to them as a resource for people dealing with what he called -- based on my detailed description of the state of the basement that was causing me so much trouble – hoarders. There it was: it was official; I had been married to a hoarder. Ironic, in some ways. It seemed as though Steven could let absolutely nothing go except for me.

Professional psychotherapy has this way of hinting at unhealthy behavioral patterns that one should come to recognize in one's life, for the purpose of breaking them. So the point, I suppose, is that things do not merely happen to us; rather, there must in fact be something that we are doing to attract certain elements into our lives. And so, for my part, I began to recognize a way of inviting, into my life, the love of men who are, by their own admission, even, incapable of it.

Which I suppose sounds like a feat to be proud of. I may as well be saying that I am single-handedly responsible for the final conversion of the entire nation of Israel, or that a gay man, for one moment having gazed at my voluptuous derriere, would realize he has in fact been very much straight.

So then I ask you to suspend your disbelief. Just as in my very being I have asked these men to suspend their lack of ability to love, I ask you for just a moment to suspend your doubt of my suspect story.

It was April Fool's Day and during a chilly afternoon walk shadowed by our doom-filled topic of conversation in which the word “divorce” first appeared, that he responded to my plea in the guise of a proclamation, “but see, that's precisely the problem. You love me. But I don't love.”

But perhaps it takes one to know one, as the old saying goes. Who am I to criticize others for inappropriate affect? The contractor who had referred me to Trauma Scene Cleanup must have thought I was a truly insensitive person; I'd laughed. He'd given me the name of the company, and I'd laughed!

In my defense, I have to say that it was only when I looked at the website that I realized that yes, while they did in fact work with issues of hoarding, they also cleaned up after actual suicides and murders.

And so it was official: my life was a trauma scene.

But I am beating around the bush, just as I had been beating around the bush with 90% of the people I know. I'd laugh and tell them about Trauma Scene Cleanup. I 'd say Steven was a hoarder. I'd even go as far as to tell them it was the clutter that was causing me so many problems with the house. I 'd tell them how I was so busy working on the house over the Christmas break that I'd quit running for a month and lost twelve pounds, which was when I'd get the concerned looks: “But Reluctant Entomologist!" they'd address me, gasping, "you can't afford to lose 10 pounds.” They were right. I've made mysterious references to the problem, “too horrible for words” – references almost as mysterious as the problem itself.

This has been a story of divorce, yes – but divorcing what, precisely? A husband, certainly. His belongings. The hipster tenants who'd been grandfathered in under Steven's regime. Perhaps some feelings for several insufficiently supportive people along the way. But there's more.

Time flies when you're racing against it – to keep a handyman special of a house from falling in on itself, trying to keep it rented, wondering whether whatever was left after the mortgage was paid each month would ever add up to enough to pay a divorce attorney once Steven had been gone for the two years that New York State required, at the time, to first pass in order for me to have the abandonment grounds I would need in order to have him served.

In other versions of this story, things turn out differently -- but for what little I know, in those versions, things are worse; who's to say they're not? In other versions of the story, things happen for which Hallmark has invented a line of greeting cards. (Is that better or worse? I try to imagine the cards I could have collected -- perhaps having sealed each in a small, bug-proof Ziploc bag before putting it on display: "Congratulations on your Divorce!" one of the more cliched card might say. Or perhaps, "Thinking of you and hoping you are not contemplating suicide." What about, "My deepest condolences for your loss, both of $30,000 and your mind"? "In this time of your old and hopeless house being infested with blood-sucking insects, even though we are staying far, FAR away, please know that our thoughts are with you.")

I struggle for a way to end this -- but nothing works. So I keep writing, clinging to the only thing I know I still haven't entirely lost.

Oh God of All Fonts? Hello?

2011-06-07T10:19:00.000-07:00

"Edit HTML"? Behind-the-scenes code vomit? What?

Where I was Headed

2011-06-06T11:46:00.001-07:00

image from Wikipedia

I was pretty far uptown already, pretty far from where home was now. It was Sunday afternoon, and it had only been a coincidence that an invitation from a friend had landed me in the general vicinity of my old haunts. It's funny to me now that when I'd been so young and first moved to New York to go to graduate school, Brooklyn had seemed so far away. Hell, the whole rest of my life had seemed so far away.

I'd be lying if I said that any of my thoughts that Sunday had been epiphanies. Rather, there had for years been this recurring thought, image, memory – one that I've always associated with innocence.

Seventeen years ago, I was twenty-two years old and had just moved to New York, having only been here once before (by way of Port Authority on a Greyhound bus my senior year in college – immediately getting on another bus to catch my semester abroad flight that was leaving from JFK that night). Within the first twenty-four hours of having come to New York to live, I remember, after having opened a few of the boxes that I'd piled in what would now be my bedroom in the big, empty graduate housing apartment (where I was apparently the first roommate to arrive), the first walk that I remember taking was to Columbia's great sunny steps in front of Low Library.

I'd sat there with my journal, I remember, fully aware of the fact that I had no idea what lay before me – not in terms of this graduate program I was starting, not in terms of what I'd do for money afterwards, not when it came to where I'd end up living eventually (or how on earth I'd be able to pay for it), and certainly not in terms of any kind of long-term love. It was all incredibly vague, and in a way that was good at the time, because by vague I also mean very far into the future, which meant that despite how scary and uncertain it all was, there was doubtlessly plenty of time for all of the pieces to just magically fall into exactly the right place.

That's the moment I think of when I think about having first moved to New York – the late August sun shining down onto that wide space that opened onto the center of campus. And now, on a Sunday afternoon, I was passing through the neighborhood and had decided to walk through the gates to get to my train.

It's been nearly twenty years. The steps were to my left now. The sun was in and out, out and in.

There were things I hadn't even thought to wonder about back then. Like whether or not I'd be divorced or find myself in danger of losing my job or my house, or whether I'd get bedbugs and almost have a nervous breakdown, along with other medical scares here and there that might really take a toll on my life. I'd been afraid enough back then, without considering all of that! Afraid enough, but that's not to say sufficiently afraid.

For years now I've been thinking, some day when I find myself in the neighborhood, I should really spend some time there, just sit there quietly. Not with a book or a journal. Just sit there. Just look around. Just wait. Would I ever really remember what it had been like then, who I had been?

So I did sit, and I waited to remember some premonition I might have had back then, some inkling about what my life had in store for me. But the epiphany never came. Not this time, anyway. Maybe if I'd sat there longer, if I'd had more patience that day – but I guess I didn't. Not yet. I stood up and walked toward that subway station that would bring me home.

The Topic of Conversation in New York is Always Real Estate (Even Mere Hours Before the Apocalypse)

2011-05-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

During a meeting at work last week, one of my colleagues was laughing about the fact that the whole apartment she shares with her husband and two daughters was about the size of the room we were sitting in. We were gathered around a large table, and the only other piece of furniture there was even room for was the buffet table from which we had all just helped ourselves to lunch.

I think about this a lot -- too much -- the fact of how strange it seemed that I, who had loved the sunny studio apartment where I'd lived years ago, would be living in such a big house now: just me and my three cats.

The place had certainly had its time, years ago, of being filled to capacity. There had been a time when Steven and I had shared the ramshackle ground floor with three cats, three newborn kittens, and a fairly large dog. That sounds like Noah's Ark to me, but I'm sure that people think a thirty-something divorcee, living with only three cats, currentlyy using but a third of the house's living space (in real-estate-scarce New York City) sounds much crazier. (My protests that not only the pets but the handyman special real estate itself had all been his idea always fall on deaf ears).

At that same time period, an old friend was living in the top floor two-bedroom apartment with her boyfriend. The middle floor between us -- the parlor floor, where the cats and I are now living, this being the most recently rehabilitated area of the hundred-year-old house -- was occupied at that same time by another friend and his roommate. This was also back when the basement (and even the parlor floor hallway) were packed with building materials, including piles of drywall and salvaged wooden doors Steven had dragged in along with the cats and the dog.

Summer is almost here, and I have more time on my hands to relax, but there's been more to what I've been feeling this spring. I was having trouble putting my finger on exactly what it was -- and that's when I realize that the last tenant, this time last year, had still been yet to leave. And so there had been this nagging presence, this burden literally on top of me, upstairs.

I am of course never entirely free -- still a captive of my own obsessive mind. I have been wasting this newly liberated time on idiotic things like cruising the internet for items I've needed for a while but am only now getting a chance to think about buying.

All is not lost, however; a lot of this involves MacGyver-like problem-solving. (Does Home Depot sell some kind of tape I could wrap around this rusted water pipe that threatens to crumble apart and flooding my basement? Is there some kind of tall, inexpensive, sturdy, weather-resistant shelving I could hang outside my window upstairs so that my spoiled cats could let themselves out through an open window instead of harrassing me constantly? Is there a relatively bug-resistant, inexpensive metal cot I could put my encased old futon cushion on downstairs, so that I could still use the ground floor as a late-summer heatbomb shelter -- those nights when the 5-degree temperature difference down there will keep me from losing my mind? Should I just break down and buy an air conditioner finally -- my lack of which being yet another blasphemous oddity in the City That Never Sleeps Without Air Conditioning? If so, what kind could I buy/where could I put it, to ease my fear that air vents leading from my bedroom to the pile of infested mattresses across the street won't make my home seem to be giving off some kind of entomological version of McDonald's No. 5?)

One might argue that it's ridiculous to be thinking about spending money the day the world is slated to end -- but really, what good will having any money left be if I'm no longer around to pay my bills?

But not so fast; I'm thinking that the people spreading that version of "wars and rumors of wars" actually have it all wrong: only the people getting raptured will be off the hook; the rest of us will be left here holding the bag -- didn't I read that somewhere?

I say "us" because I'm pretty sure that the fact that I'm slowly reading the Kaballah book, God is a Verb (I just got to the part about "practicing joy," which includes things like taking a bubble bath and sitting outside and looking at flowers and otherwise making sure to have "me" time, and apparently I've been a natural at this for years; I'm not so sure what that says about me exactly) does not entitle me to a one-way Rapture ticket.

I think I may remember, though, something in Revelations (or something) about how "riches" will do a person no good when the End Times arrive.

Even if it's not written down anywhere, it's kind of a big ol' "Well, DUH," as far as I'm concerned. Which is fine by me, because personally, you'll obviously find me with plastic wrap around my head, doing a deep conditioning treatment that finally uses some of that light mayo that hasn't gone bad in my fridge for the past three years, drinking a cup of tea with whatever honey I didn't mix in with it, and writing haiku in my back yard; in other words, I will be fully armed.

Each day as I walk through the crappy downstairs floor that I no longer use, past the rustic old furniture I've left there (from under which I have finally had the chance to at least clean up the dustbunnies) -- and then through the leaky old kitchen extension that leads into the back yard -- I am struck with this previously unnoticed, not unpleasant, wet, mineral-rich scent that takes me back to the dilapidated two-hundred-year-old house in the country where my ex-husband's mother lives. And I am enraptured with this notion of having my very own, very musty, very old country home, right here in Brooklyn, just downstairs -- my shelter from the elements.

Flowers

2011-05-19T11:10:00.000-07:00

The day we'd first come to look at the house, it was April. The magnolia trees were in full bloom out in the back yards, making Bed-Stuy seem, from the view of this old, run-down house, like some kind of paradise.

What is missing from that account, of course, is that it was just warm enough outside that we wouldn't have noticed that the house's poorly built extension -- the ground floor kitchen -- would later get so cold in the winters that the pipes could freeze even when the heat was on. Had it been raining, we would have also seen that there might have been a puddle on the floor in that room.

We would find all of that out later.

Missing from the story, as well, was the seemingly ominous fact that Steven and I had arrived separately to view the place.

Missing from that story is the fact that our schedules did not permit a simultaneous visit. (Was that an omen too, though, or was it merely a fact of contemporary life?)

Missing from the story was the fact that we would buy the house together but start living apart just four short years later.

But none of this is what I'd wanted to say -- isn't true to the spirit of what I'm feeling -- that even on this chilly, rainy day in May, as I sit, staring out the window of the parlor floor I'd always hoped to live in (instead of renting out to strangers for my survival), I am looking out over the canopy of a flowering tree whose petals and branches are deliciously slick with rain water.

I am a poet who does not know the names of flowers. I cannot define, with any specificity, what a crocus is. I can tell you exactly what layaway means -- and tenement and stoop and flashing and grout and joint compound and pigeon -- but not finch or foxglove. Not really anyway.

But I can also tell you that in Spanish, the word for pigeon is the same word that's used for dove. And I can tell you that Paloma is also the name of Picasso's daughter.

But Google will not tell me the name of the beautiful tree outside this window that is currently making my day. No, the magnolia trees magnificently came and went in April; this is a different tree, a different flower -- a pink less pale and surrounded by an abundance of clusters of these small oval leaves that are slightly pointed at the end. After searching the web for an hour, I can tell you that what is missing from the internet is the identity of this flower with its darker fuzzy underside, its symmetry like a small set of lungs, from between which sprouts a small bulbous bulge reminiscent of some object of a study by Georgia O'Keefe.

No, I can say that whatever tree this is that blooms every spring -- in sync with the bush of tiny, white clusters of lace-like snowmound spirea flowers below it (thank you, Google) -- is not a magnolia tree. These newer pink flowers come to my rescue each spring, blooming just as the pink and red and orange and yellow tulips that Steven had planted (his pragmatic way of giving me flowers, he had told me) are beginning to close up and fade and die.

I can tell you that it is supposed to rain every day this week. But I can also tell you that in April the muddy, winter-ravaged back yards of Bed-Stuy bloom into clouds of pale pink magnolias, and the tulips below me open in orange and yellow and red flames, which die out to be replaced by these darker, unnamable pink blooms and snowy white ones. I can say that soon will come, accompanying an unbearable sun, the bloom of hydrangea -- first green, then white, then purple, then blue -- beneath where the tiny white clusters will have since died, along with the vines of purple morning glories that reach across the yard every relentless New York summer. I can say that the brown leaves will then fall, followed by the snow.

And I can tell you that all of this will be both preceded and followed by this green glow of rain.

The Judgment of Solomon

2011-05-17T13:00:00.000-07:00

Nice:

http://divorce-clementlaw.mt4temp.lexblognetwork.com/equitable-distribution/divorcing-couples-house-divided-by-wall/


Fresco of the Judgment of Solomon (stolen from Wikipedia)

"Re-infesting" is not a word.

2011-04-23T19:32:00.000-07:00

Time, unlike other objects in the mirror, appears larger as distance accumulates.

Thank God.

Despite all that I've thrown away, my relatively recently emptied basement floor is already strewn now with one tied-and-sealed plastic bag after another. One might believe, upon a quick glance, that year upon year had already accumulated since the unspeakable had occurred. And I suppose that that's deliberate.

A few of these bags contain kitchen items I have not been using -- some of them being bizarre specialized items that Steven had bought at Long Island junk stores, such as a heavy orange-painted meat grinder that I believe is missing a few parts. The hope of course is that he'll someday safely reclaim such things without tearing the bag open (and thus possibly re-infesting my home in the remote case that a bug might live on such a thing and for such an insanely long period of time).

My spellcheck informs me that “re-infesting” is not a word. If only that were really the case.

The other kitchen implements down there, clearly, I am not using. Other odds and ends include things like the pipe insulating kit I'd bought for my freezing kitchen, where the water has actually occasionally seized up on the coldest days of winter.

But of course as I write this now it is May already and expected to be well above freezing for a very long time to come now, and I have trouble imagining ever needing such a thing again.

I am startled by my on-going capacity to own things I do not need.

Mostly – and most depressingly – there are the books. Books I read ten years ago or books of Steven's that I'd hoped to one day read and thus selfishly had never put in with the rest of the things I’d planned to return to him. Cookbooks I'd taken from my mother's house when I first moved to New York or received as a gift from an ex-boyfriend or got from a friend that Steven and I had known as a couple – someone who was moving and didn't want them anymore. (It has become an increasingly rare occasion for me to even toast and dress up a bagel, much less actually cook. Just when I I'd thought it was nearly impossible for that to become any more true than it already was, I got these things and began, for my meals, simply microwaving the frozen vegetarian burritos -- which were a staple for me at work -- at home, standing up for fear of sitting on the possibly infested upholstered furniture or losing momentum in bagging up every single item that I owned).

There were also the books that I'd bought or obtained elsewhere in the hopes of one day reading – again, many of those being books that I'd already owned for ten years. And having them all in bags downstairs in the basement was only a depressing and powerful reinforcement of what I already knew: I would never reread this book -- or even read that one. Life was always taking over, no matter where the most dreamy of ambitions seemed to want to take us.

a boat

2011-03-27T08:58:00.000-07:00

Yes, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, I want to say that for me this is the story of a loss of innocence. Not of the obvious kind. The hardest thing about this particular loss of innocence was feeling that I was completely alone in it, unable to speak. That, and the feeling that there was nothing to be learned from all of this.

No, in this – where was the lesson? Was the lesson that anything I could ever do could be construed as careless, as dangerous? That an action as simple as laying my coat across a chair in the house of a friend could unknowingly change my life? What was there to learn in finding that something as ordinary as owning furniture or going to sleep at night could land me in bankruptcy? How could the knowledge that living a normal life – free of behavior one could only describe as obsessive-compulsive, work to somehow make me a better person, a stronger one, somehow wiser?

I see the innocence, of course, now, in the everyday habits that people take for granted. An action, in the dark, as simple as sinking down for several hours into the plush seats of a movie theater.

But I find particularly painful the recollection of two particular images – two memories of an innocence I wished to get back.

Number one: it is a chilly day of either spring or fall. My memory is limited, such that really it could be either; however, I am convinced by the hope contained in that memory, by the feeling of endless possibility – or no, perhaps not even that, for perhaps there is an innocent lack of even the need for possibility or a future – that it is spring, that everything is somehow waxing, not waning. I am probably four years old. Perhaps my siblings are around, perhaps not; I am immersed in my own green and rainy outdoor universe.

I have made a boat. Out of what, I no longer remember. Perhaps a leaf. Perhaps some portion of an egg carton; I don't recall. I do not particularly remember how well my boat stayed afloat or how well it moved. It does not seem to have mattered. It seems only that that boat did something that, for the four-year-old girl that I was, a boat was supposed to do – and that this made me deeply happy. I believe, looking back, that I was probably only a block from home – but wherever it was, I felt very far away. Far, but not scared. Not the least bit scared.

And then there was the day I brought all of my stuffed animals out onto the front lawn. At least, it felt like a lawn – the small, bumpy patch of sparse grass and dirt in front of that run-down house we'd rented. I was four years old, and the world felt like a big place – but not in that way that made me feel like the universe was utterly indifferent. Not like now, when it seemed I could live the rest of my life this way and die alone like this – when I felt I was just part of the large, ordered, impersonal web of nature.

disappearances

2011-03-23T09:09:00.000-07:00

stolen from
http://www.dreamstime.com/
stock-photography-boy-girl-mirror-reflection-
leather-jacket-image1272122

The first scent detection canine I had hired had so much trouble picking up on the problem that she and her handler were literally at the front door -- as I was writing a check for a negative find, well done -- before the man hesitated (in apparent reaction to my offhanded comment, expressing surprise that they hadn't detected anything inside the many-layered, insulated, wooden wall) and asked if I would like them to take one more look. I'd just mentioned how that area of the basement beneath my bed had been utterly spattered with spots of my blood just a few months before, prior to a few half-hearted treatments. And that's when he seemed to become uneasy that perhaps the dog had missed something.

And sure enough, it was all too good to be true. The results of just the moment before were what has become known as a "false negative."

Or were they? After all, this company did not perform exterminations (and therefore had nothing to gain by positive results) -- the very reason I had hired them. Nonetheless, why hadn't the dog found anything the first two times she'd circled around the area? Sheer incompetence? Was the handler worried that I'd sue if the diagnosis soon proved to be inaccurate? Was there a signal he gave the dog so that she would scratch the wall on command? If he took her to the same spot a certain number of times would she scratch no matter what? In the absence of seeing, what was I to believe? Perhaps, by contrast, this had been, in fact, a false positive.

If I wouldn't see the bugs or feel them (or see the bites) – and if they wouldn't necessarily get caught in the various traps designed to catch them -- and if that 2% chance always exists that a scent detection dog won't find them – then what is one to do?

After a while we start to resemble our pets. Or our spouses. What, then, if the bugs are your new pets? What if they are as intimate with us as to be in our beds? I confess I couldn't help but begin to feel simpatico with them. I thought of how twenty- or thirty-something-year-old tattooed guy that the exterminator sent had said, no worries; the caulking and wall void dusting that they were doing for me would ensure that by now the worst that could happen would just be that a single insect might very well find me – but then have nothing to mate with.

And of all things, I empathized, feeling that I too would be incapable of properly mating again until or unless my life ever got back to normal – or at least my bed.

There were other things that my enemy and I had in common. My body weight was in inverse proportion to the level of stress I was feeling, such that I -- already previously a hundred and twenty-five pounds and slim and small-breasted -- might develop the capability, like my little insect friend, of all but disappearing when turning sideways, able now to fit inside the smallest crevice in the wall...

What was Lost

2011-03-20T19:10:00.000-07:00

The day after the follow-up pest treatment, I remember that I went up the stairs, pulling my weight up by the carved and curving Victorian banister, to see, resting on the top floor skylight, a classic, Brooklyn-style 2 1/2”-long water bug. Quite dead, its legs were sprawled out in silhouette against the piece of Plexiglass that Steven had lain across the opening, to replace the original decrepit windowpane that had previously been there. No doubt it was lying on its back, as they always seem to be . It was only a water bug, I was thinking; that I was now able to use that descriptor, “only” with something as gruesome as a two-and-a-half-inch water bug was an irony not lost on me. And true, it was dead, and there was only one of them. But it lay there, in unmistakable silhouette, at the very top of the house, at the uppermost visible portion, all in distinct silhouette, such that it seemed unmistakably like an entomological victory flag.

At this point the assumption was that it was I who had won – but even to this day I can't really be sure. And anyway, even if I can put it all in the past, when will I be able to put the past behind me? My whole life had changed. All of this was, in part, a story of loss of innocence.

But loss of other things, too. I lost weight. I lost money. Trust. Sleep. Belongings. I lost hope – hope that the problem would ever end, hope that I'd live a life normal enough again to ever be able to invite anyone in. I spent money on things that to the untrained mind might seem utterly unrelated to the problem. Suddenly I had to have a purse large enough that I could put my sweater in it before setting either item down in anyone's house – and never on or near the bed; rather, always a little too suspiciously close to the closet, where perhaps, however, luggage was being stored – or, worse, bed linens. That bag needed to be not only large but made up, as well, of a sleek and seemingly impenetrable fabric. And it needed to zip completely and utterly closed, in case I needed to keep my very life inside.

The Possibility Room

2011-02-21T09:52:00.000-08:00

Image stolen from Brownstoner.com: http://www.brownstoner.com/brownstoner/archives/2005/04/today_on_the_re_13.php

Like possibility itself, the number of rooms seems suddenly endless. First there is the feeling of relief: so much space now, so many places to put things. Will I look for tenants? Will I invite friends to come live with me? Will I somehow find uses for it all myself?

It often comes in the form of an attic I'd never discovered -- or some doorway on the other side of a closet. One room leading to another. Stairs going down to landings that connect to places that look like whole apartments in themselves.

There are things I'd like to do, certainly, and I need a place to do them. I want to have a writing room, a dance studio – somewhere for making leaps.

It seems too good to be true – and true enough; it is too good; all that's true of a dream is that it is a dream.

But in the dream, as one can see, mere relief has turned to joy. Where have these rooms been keeping themselves? How could I not have noticed these doors, these passages? Each room is empty. Each contains an entire possible new life.

The space is never very nice per se. Not in the traditional sense. Which only tells me that in many ways this house, of which I am now -- in the real world, post-divorce -- sole proprietor, is exactly what I'd dreamed of. The possibility room is rough, rustic. Each one of them is. The walls need a coat of paint -- look as though hey've needed it for years. But perhaps there is always something charming. Victorian wainscotting maybe. Certainly doors and window frames beyond the flatness of current design.

“If you build it, they will come,” goes the cliche.

Halfway through the summer, climbing up on a ladder in my underwear in one-hundred-degree weather, it did occur to me one day, quite suddenly, that I might be fixing the rooms up for myself. What a thought. Truly living in my own house.

The idea had really been, of course, that I would somehow find a new tenant -- someone better, someone without heavy footsteps above me, someone without a stereo, someone who didn't collect furniture from dumpsters. That continued to be the plan, but I began making floor plan sketches, first in my mind and then on paper: my bed would fit best this way, and if I looked up I would be able to see the moon through the top of the tree in they yard. The chairs could be grouped around the fireplace, and I could leave most of the room empty to let the light in.

It felt like a wish. I dreamed of situations that would allow me to be able to afford to have it all for myself. What had I been thinking? All those wads of cash the tenants had paid me, all of those checks to my divorce attorney, all of the credit card bills for pest-proofing the walls – so much money slipping through my hands this past year, my bank accounts now all but purged.

My barn burned down, the saying goes. Now I can see the moon.

Never Let Me Go

2011-01-06T16:47:00.000-08:00

"The Scream" by Edvard Munch

It is not my intention to give anything away, and I don't believe I will. I'm talking about Kazuo Ishiguro's book, now turned into a film, which I've read and which I've seen.

It's true that I'd read it beforehand, but just because we learn something doesn't mean we know. My paperback copy of the book is with the others, sealed in plastic in my basement. Life has done a lot in the years between then and now for me, and in any case, even that which touches me, I often forget.

That scream, though -- maybe I recognized it; perhaps not. It was familiar. Some memories come from elsewhere.

I watched alone as the winter sun faded, and when the time for the scream came, I found that I was sobbing; I don't know for sure whether my reaction elsewhere might have been different.

There are no deferrals. We think, we hope: love will slow things down, will let us take our time. It doesn't. We bargain, we barter our days; we delay the joining in on the insanity of work, of the frantic perpetuating of ourselves. Call it graduate school. Take your thoughts out to play. Create something; call it art. Postpone, for a few years, exactly whatever it is you were intended to become. And when putting it off is over, there's nothing left to do but to stop the car -- it's going too fast -- and to stand in the middle of the road. The scream is a sound from the throat; it's a noise from within the only body we've ever had.

How much time any of us have left, we don't know. But now I want to live. Who's to say how I may have poisoned myself this time last year, out of desperation, out of wanting to make things better but not knowing quite how, unable to keep on living that way.

There is no deferral, however brief, for any of us. We move forward, onward toward being eviscerated. We are born, and we are put to use.

It's a Wonderful Life

2010-12-12T18:02:00.000-08:00

It’s Sunday afternoon; It's a Wonderful Life has come on, and the two of us begin watching it. You quickly notice, “You like this movie,” and I smile, answering, “Yes, it’s one of my favorites.” You tell me, “You look happy,” and it’s true; I am.

We’ve stumbled upon it fairly close to the beginning, I believe. Mary is singing, walking in a bath robe, alongside George, after the two of them have accidentally danced their way into a swimming pool at a party.

The film depicts almost every romantic incarnation of young love that one can imagine: hints at accidental nudity (and in the 1940s!); a scene of heavy flirtation, abruptly interrupted by a poignant family emergency that, I imagine, makes Mary long for the kiss they never share all the more; the idea of what could have happened, had things been otherwise in her life; Mary’s attempt to make George jealous by talking to another suitor on the phone, in his presence, wearing her pretty dress, her hair shiny and curled; the steamy scene which follows, in which the two of them share the telephone, side by side, their faces just inches from one another, eyes locking and drinking in their attractive young faces, lips trembling; the ensuing wedding after all of these years in school, her never having forgotten him; the two policemen serenading them as they have their honeymoon dinner together beside a roaring fire in a formerly abandoned dilapidated leaky house in which she had made, in his presence, a wish to live with him as husband and wife, the racy allusions to the subsequent arrival of the stork…

And the two of us joke a little about the contrasting reality of it all later; great minds think alike, I suppose, and honestly, realistically speaking, it breaks no spell whatsoever that the film has always had on me – no spell broken in the least through the giving of voice merely to what I’ve for so long thought, perhaps even much before the demise of my marriage, long before the back-breaking, unromantic work of patching my own, old Victorian house together, long before the unspoken wish now for a mob of friends and family -- despite all of my gratitude for this beautiful life that I know that I have – to arrive with baskets of cash and a telegram telling me that my home is safe, that I won’t end up losing it, that there's no chance I'll go bankrupt.

I want to say, actually, that my "knowing better" almost makes the movie all the more enjoyable for me.

I’ll start here: how often does it work for an 18-year-old girl to go away to college and return to her mother’s home only to be promptly swept off her feet by the man she’d begun to fall for just before disappearing for school all those years before?

(Hadn’t we just been having this conversation the day before, as a matter of fact? The one about relationships and how a person can never really go back?)

How good of an idea is it, while we’re at it, for a woman to try to win over a man by making him jealous of some pathetic mere hint of a long-distance relationship with some goofy man in New York who schedules telephone calls to her, the girl’s mother acting as her own personal secretary?

Also, a honeymoon is a honeymoon, it is true, but what does it say about a significant other, I wanted to ask (ironically on the very day when the two of us had earlier stopped our bicycle ride/ jog to help an old woman who had tripped just down the street from your apartment) -- that Mary urges George to ignore the most unimaginable fear and chaos that had broken loose amongst the neighbors of his community, simply because the timing of the emergency happened to have coincided with the day of their wedding?

And how reliable a life partner will a man make, who screams at everyone and shoves everything off of a table in a kind of temper tantrum, having gotten a bit drunk and walked into a bar brawl, all because of a difficult situation related to money and work? And who then is so quick to contemplate suicide?

What kind of character does a partner have if he’s going to get on the phone to berate his child’s teacher, worst day ever or not -- an overworked, underpaid civil servant who certainly is not a banker like he is, simply for having given his daughter, her prized pupil, a flower? And who is uneducated enough to believe that colds are indeed caused by cold weather?

But I guess I have a fondness for that part of me that refuses to think, that only feels. Perhaps I think of all of these little scenarios, described above, just as little bumps in the road -- that the original spark, the magic that draws two people together in the first place, is all that matters in the end.

But most poignant for me is this: even at the moment of their very first kiss -- at the point when the forces drawing the two of them together become irresistible -- even then, George says to Mary, once again, but this time in a voice filled with rage and resentment (years after having dreamed aloud about shaking the dirt of the sleepy little town off of his feet and seeing the world), “Now, you listen here! I’m not going to stay in Bedford Falls; do you hear me? And I’m not going to marry you or anyone – ever!”

And this, I suppose, touches a nerve for me. In this 1940s film, these two 20-somethings are of perfectly marriageable age, not the least bit "too young" for the time period in which they are living. And despite Mary’s longing for George -- and despite the fact that Mary will end up a housewife who paints and papers the walls while George is at work, Mary does manage to finish a college degree first, before miraculously being reunited with the man who had managed to make her heart skip a beat four years earlier.

Also, despite the fact that George ends up staying in the sleepy Bedford Falls, he becomes “the richest man in town!”

I don’t know how strongly one could argue that they’ve interfered with each other’s dreams. (Still, isn't it creepy and a bit haunting how angrily George had protested the idea of settling down with her? Does this mean absolutely nothing? Would a beautiful woman like her truly have ended up an old maid who worked at the library if she hadn't simply settled for this resentful man?)

Now, today, even at the ages of 30, 35, or older, how many marriages have I seen break apart, how many have I at least seen spin into a decade of never-ending devotion, misery, and unsustainable strain over one person’s feelings of being caged, trapped, over being offered, perhaps, a job overseas, over a feeling that something is calling him or her from across the country, over a feeling a general anxiety that says, anywhere is better than here. Any thing. No more of the banister falling apart every time I run up it in Bedford Falls or Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. No more trickle of rain indoors, in our kitchen. No more certainty of what I’ll be and where I’ll be and who I’ll be with, “tomorrow, and the next day, and the year after that.”

No matter how stable a life might seem on the surface now, here, in this not-so-sleepy town -- now matter how many college degrees and graduate school degrees we have and seem to have accomplished something that looks right on paper, no matter how many mortgages or children or raises at work a person seems to have acquired, it seems as though it’s never too late, somehow, to have to sit on the edge of our seats, helplessly waiting to watch on as this wonderful life whispers into the ear of a person we believed we knew -- knew better than anyone -- to listen as that voice is saying, come, follow me; let nothing stand in your way. You are never too old to be alone again, to see the world. No love it seems, will ever seem safe from it.

All that was Left

2010-11-10T20:05:00.000-08:00

When it did happen, my ex-husband (let's call him Steven) had left with barely the shirt on his back -- and then, a few months later, moved to what I'll call the West Coast, in much the same way.

For anyone who does not know him, this must seem like a dramatic detail. What had I done, after all, one must surely wonder -- or who was I -- that I could send a man fleeing his home of so many years, a home into which he had sunken so much money -- and on which he had done so much work -- in such a hurry that he would have not so much as packed a suitcase?

Really this was a way of taking his own time in leaving, and anyway, he’d never been one for making a fuss over the details of execution before simply diving in and just doing the thing, whatever that thing just happened to be.

Apparently this is a trait I have perhaps been subconsciously drawn to somehow more than once, as I found out just a few months ago that my very first boyfriend ever, also divorced now, had recently quit his job and left for India, and then that very same phrase, “with little more than the shirt on his back.”

In my own defense, I would say that in Steven’s case it felt a little more like an instance of a young man going off to college and leaving his room intact to collect dust. (I admit, I, myself, am guilty of having done this all of those years ago, and the thought of seeing that old room of mine over the upcoming holidays, the way I left it, knowing what I know about bedbugs now, is almost more than I can stand. I think of the dressers full of clothes and the scraps of papers in the desk drawer, the cardboard boxes in the closet). Steven’s things were all over his hoarder mother’s house in another city too, and even before our fallout, it had annoyed me whenever he made reference to being upset at his mother for her having often forgotten to mention pieces of mail that he deliberately was still having sent to her address despite not having lived there in years. I remember the feeling that the way he left a closet packed full of things and continued to even receive some of his own personal important bills here left me feeling insulted, some mother he had outgrown.

I like to think of myself as having the type of metaphorical mind that can read history (or at least a story) in a single object – along with all of the emotions associated with it. All the same, though, my disinterest in material possessions makes me also profoundly pragmatic (and thus often completely unsentimental) about objects that belonged to my ex-husband.

Had they annoyed me? Sure. Had they taken up space? Did most of them seem like broken-down, useless pieces of garbage? Certainly. At moments when I was already feeling irritable, it was possible that the sight of the rusty meat grinder that Steven had bought at a garage sale, for instance, now collecting dust in the kitchen, would send me into a minor rage. But as for sadness, even when I was still having moments of missing him terribly, I don’t believe I’d shed a single tear over his big, heavy shoes with the broken laces, or even the copy of the book I’d given to him for his birthday at the beginning of our relationship. Certainly not a meat grinder.

All the same, largely to quiet the annoying insistence on the part of some of my friends – that it was presumable impossible to get over someone whose stuff was still surrounding you – I finally decided that next summer to undertake the task of cleaning his closet out.

And then a strange thing happened. In the process of piling the dirty mismatched shoes and boxes of old notebooks and old polyester blazers (yes, oddly resembling those of my absent father from years before) into contractor bags -- lazily tying them loosely shut before putting them in the basement, regrettably in the area that would be separated from my bed by only hundred year old floor planks -- I had what one could almost only call an allergic reaction. I began sobbing.

But what was I feeling?

I remember how searched my heart as I blew my nose over and over again as though scratching at a rash, completely indifferent about what I was doing or whose things these were or what all of this meant. I searched, and I found nothing.

Nonetheless, I cried, and it was a crying that did not stop -- that would not, it turned out, stop.

It would not stop until I looked into the closet and could honestly say at last that there was nothing left.

Rooms for Rent

2010-11-04T10:42:00.000-07:00

I had these horrible, disgusting things in my house last year.

"Rooms for Tourists" by Edward Hopper (yes, again; I like it).

And on top of that, of course, there were also the bedbugs...

another week fading into dusk

2010-10-30T20:27:00.000-07:00

It's on Friday nights when I think about it the most, and always with an odd sense of happiness and nostalgia: I was so out of place in college -- fraternity boys and sorority girls everywhere one was to turn. In a place where people all seem to know each other, everyone also notices whomever it is that no one seems to know -- and on that campus, one of those people no one knew would have been me.

Not like in New York, where you can be alone if you want to, even with a total stranger pressed up against you as you brace yourself against the closed door of the lurching, crowded subway train.

Or maybe I'm really just describing the difference between childhood and adulthood. For me, New York is synonymous with the end of adolescence. I'd hated college. Living in the dorms, you couldn't really stay in and write letters to your sister or your best friend on a Friday night, even if that's what you really yearned to do, given, finally, the chance. Not without taking a lot of flak, that is.

Not that one should be incapable of standing up for oneself, but doing so can take an awful a lot of energy and taint the simple pleasure of finally, after looking forward to it all week, one was left alone.

So in college, I'd avoid those conversations by quietly stealing away to the study hall across campus -- the one that was open all day and night, every day and night, seven days a week. It was a huge, quiet, "echo-y" room, in a 19th century academic hall, with a high ceiling and a sort of balcony at the top from which people upstairs could look down on the even rows of long tables punctuated by desk lamps that gave off a visual sort of warmth. I could bring food, coffee, a book, my journal -- whatever I wanted. I could bring whomever I truly was.

And now? Living by myself in my own home, if I want to sit inside in my sweat pants and write on a Friday or Saturday night, I don't have anyone I have to get away from to do that.

Or, if I want, I can do what I did late yesterday afternoon and into the evening, a Friday: I set out for the Brooklyn Bridge, moving toward Manhattan, toward the sunset, watching the sky turn pink and then a thick, milky, dark blue against the outlines of the buildings as they lit up. Around me, tourists and families and couples holding hands, and here I was on a Friday night, above the river, in the chill of the air, alone -- and was no one's business; they have their own lives.

And when I returned home, all was quiet, and the epsom salts dissolved in the steaming hot bath, and everything was right.

It took terrible things happening for my upstairs tenants to move out, to take with them their stomping up and down the stairs and coordinating Friday night bar trips loudly in the halls, on their cell phones, but I don't regret any of it now. Because it got me here, back to my life. It's not all said and done yet, not official yet, but there's a plan on the horizon that could make it affordable for me to stay here by myself after all.

Last week I was on the phone with a woman from the bank who'd called to respond to my complaint about my loan modification denial. She was friendly and warm, good at her job. Back in my hometown, she owned not one but two houses. Her home, it turns out, was built the same year of the Victorian era that mine was. She admired photos from my appraisal, complimenting me on the paint job I'd done on the front door. Further conversation revealed that her home in the old historic district was officially classified as a mansion. It was clear that she lived alone.

What on earth does anyone do with all of that space? All of those things?

I don't need all of these walls or rooms, it is true. I don't ever want to own enough to fill them.

Except for with stillness, with my thoughts. Here, my imagination has the space it needs to stretch outward, up, through the beautifully carved -- if weathered -- old Victorian banister. Reaching upward through the space around which banister curves around again at each landing, until reaching the top of the house, limited only by the clear boundary of skylight glass that lets the moon begin to show its face to me again through that opening at the top of where I live.

You can go now.

2010-10-25T10:53:00.000-07:00

Yes, I would be fooling you if I gave you the impression that my house had not already seemed, from the beginning, to have other demons. I recall how the woman who'd sold us the house confided in me -- as she led me back to the sidewalk after having just given me, for the first time, a glimpse inside the run-down townhouse (what a fancy word for such a dilapidated mess)-- about her own divorce.

“See this gate?” she'd said to me, holding open the heavy black iron one by the doorknob on it. “My ex-husband put up this fence. Last thing he did, the good-for nothing. I said to him, 'thank you very much. You cheated on me; you were no good. Now leave.' ”

And wouldn't you know that that gate was the first thing to fall off its hinges the moment my ex-husband and I moved in to this house -- still so full of dusty toys and broken down appliances and an old couch? The contract of sale had of course said the place had to be “broom clean” when we took possession of it, but after it took eight months to close, due to ten percent of the house belonging to some mysterious man in a faraway country – the ex-husband, I would gather – my own at-the-time husband's thoughts on this had been, also, “Thank you very much, but no; please don't bother to clean up after yourselves. Just go. Just please leave.”

At the time, of course, I'd thought he was crazy. It would cost us money and time to clear the place of all the belongings that had been left behind. But then I'd never been inclined toward homeownership to begin with, so what did I know. I didn't have the know-how that he had, having grown up duct-taping and re-duct-taping his hoarder-family's house -- so full of things that it came to be known in my mind as the world's smallest 17-room house – constantly together. I hadn't yet realized that when it came to owning and fixing up a house, there would occasionally come a point when either time, money, or patience became the thing you had the least of – when you would, in exchange, expend almost any amount of one or more of the other items just to save you the one.

And so it wasn't for another seven years that I would come to this point, to this realization, myself. In my case I would have paid almost any amount of money. And my thoughts were just that, simply, “I would pay anything. Just get out of my life.”

Where did I get them?

2010-10-23T18:35:00.000-07:00

Knowing doesn't always matter. Where the bugs came from exactly, when they arrived, is immaterial. Is history.

What I do want to know is, where did I get these things -- and by these things I mean both this, that tendency to have been driven to near madness over them, and that, the endurance to do whatever was necessary to kill them off -- and even if, yes, it meant losing both my mind and ten percent of my body weight in the process.

Of my parents' four children, I'm the one who looks like my mother. My father of all people would have known, and this was one of the last -- one of the only -- things he ever said to me before dying.

My mother...a haunted person. And all my life, I, in turn, have been haunted, always, by her. It's not a criticism. It just is.

But there's more. I've always felt that it's from my father that I inherit my strong body, compact, wiry. And maybe, just maybe, it's from this same thrice-married man -- this man who had a fondness for cigarettes and alcohol -- that I get this persistence, this unrelenting hunger. He has been, for me, a last name, a word in English -- one that says I come from ordinary people who worked with their hands. It all starts to make sense.

Where do you come from?

Sometimes it seems like everyone in New York has an interesting, yet easy, answer to that question. A story of immigration eventually told by rote. And so, for many of us originally from nondescript American families -- in nondescript American cities -- it feels, sometimes, as though we came from nowhere. My curiosity to know more -- to have a story -- gets me nowhere. Not with one parent dead. Not with the other one not talking.

But this much I do know, and maybe it's sufficient for now: my hair springs up into perfect ringlets -- curls that come from my father. My hair is, simultaneously, perfectly straight -- and that comes from my mother.

But what about me?

Me? I come from myself. Or I come from nowhere. Or everywhere, simultaneously. From a lack of compromise. From conflict.

I am from both confusion and determination.

Bedbugs can too fly.

2010-10-20T19:20:00.000-07:00

On airplanes, that is.

Personally, I have never had the pleasure of being on an overnight flight in first class, and I hope now that I never will. In fact, if I never find myself hermetically sealed, at however many thousands of feet, with hundreds of other blood-filled, exhaling furless beings, crammed into the upholstered seats of one great big movie theater in the sky, except with pajama-filled cloth bags that have recently been splayed open on one or more beds, both above me and all over the carpet floor beneath , well, frankly, I will be just fine with that.

As if being surrounded by other people in close quarters had not already presented enough annoyances. Now, despite the urban legends, I actually have very little fear of getting bedbugs from someone on the subway. The seats, the poles, the walls, the doors -- everything is a cold, unwelcoming hard, slick plastic or metal or graffiti-resistant plexiglass of sorts. Half the time, it's too cold on those trains for humans, let alone bugs whose interests include cuddling in bed. However, the subway has its own problems, most notably the young people, the volume of whose iPods announce, from the other end of the car, that either 1) there's something wrong with this young person's earphones, 2) there's something wrong with this young person's ears, or 3) there will very soon be something wrong with this young person's ears.

But no matter. It is clear, based on the present state of pestilence, tornado touchdowns in Brooklyn of all places, earthquakes, etc., that the end is near anyway; who needs to hear all of the final screams?

10/10/10 Dream

2010-10-10T08:37:00.000-07:00

All of my life, I've had dreams about someone breaking into the house; sometimes it's the house where I grew up, and sometimes it's the house where I live. Usually I'm home and trying to keep the person from getting in. Sometimes I'm pushing against the door to try to keep the intruder out. Sometimes I'm rushing upstairs to close a window that I remember that I've left open, racing against a menacing figure that's lurking outside, trying to find a way in. Other times, I dream that I'm living in a city that's at war; the enemy has flooded into the area, and I'm looking for somewhere to hide because I know that they're coming, and it's just a matter of time before they find me and kill me.

In my waking life, I've never been afraid of anyone breaking in; I've never had anything worth stealing. But when I sleep at night, somehow, this is what I dream about.

Last night, in this latest dream, I had just come home. Nothing else in the house had been touched, only the bedding -- all of which had violently been ripped from my mattress, torn in places.

Beneath that, I noticed that the bed suddenly looked old and and gray. At the head of the bed, beside the pillows, when I looked closer, I could see that there were gashes in the mattress now. The gashes oozed pus as though it were a living thing. Living, but in pain and slowly dying.

Wanted Alive, Leaping with Joy

2010-10-02T10:46:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up, we always had outdoor cats, and they often had fleas. I don't remember whether they bit anyone else, but they certainly bit me. I'd get this intense itching on my ankles and reach down to grasp the small, shiny black bug firmly between my thumb and forefinger and roll it back and forth until it was dead. You can't just squeeze them, you see; they survive that. They have a hard exoskeleton to protect them. They are survivors.

That, and the fact that they hop.

You go to grab a flea, and if you're not sneaky enough about it, you watch it seem to literally disappear. One minute it's on your skin, and the next it's just not.

Blood-sucking insects are magical this way. Other ways too.

Think of the bedbug: evolved to come after us -- we who have opposible thumbs and fly swatters and flashlights, we who can destroy the earth several times over with merely a word -- while we are soundest asleep. Designed to inject us with an anesthetic that keeps us from knowing. Designed to be as thin as a piece of cardboard (the non-corrugated kind), able to hide almost anywhere (including inside the holes of the kind of cardboard that is).

Designed to feed upon what is abundant. What's a drop of blood in the oceans of our bloodstreams? They aren't vegetarians; it is true. But they aren't carnivores either. In much the way we know that a cow won't notice a little missing milk, they know, as well -- with their bodies, that is -- that there will be an endless supply of nourishment for them if we stick around. You see, we're no good to them dead. They want us awake and worried in the middle of the night, driven to the refrigerator for a nervous snack.

Alive.

Well, I've been alive; I'll say that. Drenched with sweat in the middle of the night, next to my flea-bitten cat who's been shedding the disgusting "black pepper" form that the dried, digested blood from the fleas' meals usually will take. A lot on my mind, I suppose, to be breaking out in a sweat like that. A lot going on in my life.

And a glance down to reveal tiny spots on the still-moist bedsheet, exactly at the place where the cat had snuggled up next to me. Fear, my heart leaping.

But part of my drive for life, I suppose, is also my intellectual curiosity, too -- the mad scientist that lurks inside of me.

Pulling some specks of flea dirt from my poor cat's scalp and sprinkling them on the sheet (disgusting, yes, but science is calling), I am off to the bathroom for a spray bottle of water, which I use to spritz a light mist over where the "flea dirt" is.

Lightly, I press the skin of my arm down onto the dampened flea waste, and there they are. Beautiful, brownish red.

Spots.

I am saved.

No big deal, then. Just some hard-shelled, blood-sucking insects that leap into the air when you try to kill them and that make my cat scratch himself angrily for relief.

Not these horrible, polite little bugs that have the decency to hide from me. Not these insects that, unlike us, wouldn't even know the first thing about taking more than they need.

Would I say it, even to myself?

2010-09-26T16:05:00.000-07:00

Whom would I tell? If I got them again, I mean. The bugs.

What is the truth now, at this moment?

It is true that the cat has fleas.

It's true that something was crawling on my sock while I was in the back yard, out in the sun, just last weekend.

It's true that when I crushed it to keep it from getting away, it left a red spot like blood.

It's true that I found a bug right next to the bed this morning. I didn't even know it was a bug until I put a pair of tweezers near it to pick it up and it moved. It was trapped, running around in circles. It was so small and covered in the slick talc that I had to kill it with a drop of rubbing alcohol to try to see it. I couldn't make it out, but I could have brought it for free to the exterminator, to ask him to have a look.

I smashed it. It had been dark in color but left no blood.

Everyone knows that anyone sane would never tolerate these things in her house -- would spend any amount of money and time getting rid of them, over and over again and into infinity. So if it turns out to be true, I must not say anything unless I am prepared to go through this again. If I confess it to anyone, I must, also, in my next breath, explain exactly who will be coming to save me and exactly when and exactly for how much money for this time.

The truth is that I feel alone.

And so of course it would be just my luck if these things were in my bed again now. If the truth was that I wasn't alone after all.

Dress-Up

2010-09-19T12:36:00.001-07:00

It would have been after school, and General Hospital would have been on downstairs – in which I imagined that I was Holly, slowly but surely falling in love with Robert Scorpio, to whom I had originally only pledged myself as part of a marriage of convenience. Upstairs, in my actual house, (which did not have a sauna as their apartment did), our damp laundry was hanging on a clothesline all along the dark and narrow hall. Perhaps it was the case, also, that an earlier load -- finally dry in the modestly heated, rented townhouse (an awfully fancy word for the leaky wreck this house was) -- had just been taken down. And maybe that batch of clothing had been folded by now and was stacked neatly for me on the top bunk, in the small room where the old red dresser that my mother had been given by her landlady back in art school just barely fit against the end of the stacked beds, just enough to allow the door to shut.

This was the shared bedroom where, on a weekend afternoon, I'd climb to that top bunk in my jeans and sweater, reading Little Women, imagining myself first to be the sickly Beth – having done my own time nearly failing out of third grade, home, sick with my chapped lips and a fever for half the year – and ultimately always the eccentric Jo -- tomboyish, defiant, intellectual, odd, running off at the end with an older European man.

At the end of the hall was in my mother's bedroom, also known as the “laundry room,” though of course I did not really understand what that was really supposed to mean -- didn't know that really that a laundry room was supposed to mean a place with a washer and dryer, not just a room where my mother kept the clean clothes all in baskets for us to sort through and where she simply requested that we just throw our dirty clothes on the floor for her to deal with later. Really the “laundry room” should have been the oft-flooded basement, where one would find the washing machine that my mother bought, the same year she finally bought a couch -- which she still owns thirty years later (now all clawed up by generations of house cats) -- with the few thousand dollars she received after my grandmother died and her house was sold.

And if calling the bedroom -- or even that leaky dungeon -- a “laundry room” had already been quite the exaggeration to begin with, then this would have become a doubly absurd descriptor for the place once the machine stopped spinning and had to be drained by a sad system that involved lowering a hose to the drain in the corner of the cement floor.

In my mother’s room, the “laundry room,” there was a closet, and in that closet hung the musty polyester suits of the father I had no memory of ever having lived with us. They were pushed all the way to the end, against the wall, out of use, but still they there, still smelling of a stranger. They followed my mother from one house to the next when we moved, and I would see and wonder about them whenever my sister and I played dress-up or, more likely, bored with our threadbare thrift store clothes, looked inside that closet yet again, the way a hungry person continues, against logic, to open the refrigerator door again and again as though something satisfying will finally, magically, suddenly materialize.

I never knew the right way to feel about my father’s suits or my father himself, since I knew the fact of his being my father but did not know him. And so I remember how puzzled my sister and I both felt the day when my father, on one of his rare visits, brought over a bag of hand-me-down clothing from the young strangers who would, now that (he also announced) he was remarrying, become his stepchildren – and we began, as soon as he left, crying hysterically, not knowing why. Our eyes watered as though in reaction to some type of allergy.

Maybe his announcement and his bringing of the clothing didn’t happen on the same day; I put them together in my mind, though.

And after he left, my mother bitterly took away the clothing, perhaps saying something about them being tainted or evil or cursed. I can’t remember whether I knew what ever happened to them after that, whether they got added to her closet perhaps, sealed up in plastic below my father’s suits.

When exactly did clothing, things, belongings, become haunted for me, become so troublesome? Was it when bedbugs entered my own home, twenty-five to thirty years later, or was it sooner? Had it already happened? What day did I wake up and realize that all the daydreaming about Little Women from my top bunk after school or in the middle of a Saturday would just end? When did I decide I could no longer just look in my mother’s closet for some piece of fabric that would take me back in time, that would give me hope, that would allow me to live, even for a little while, someone else’s life?

Story Problem

2010-09-12T16:07:00.000-07:00

The bedbug discussion forums are full of detailed descriptions of rituals in which people strip in their garages when they get home, standing on a rubber mat and placing each item into a new plastic bag as they disrobe. One woman describes rubbing a comb dipped in rubbing alcohol through her hair when she gets out of bed each morning. Bedbugs make people behave as though they have obsessive-compulsive disorder, especially if they actually do. People lose track of reason; they can't even remember the logic behind their actions anymore.

There's some strange new pseudo-kosher set of rituals being invented in which everything is kept separate from everything else; everything is kept somehow pure.

I'm tired of being pure. I want to whore around; I want to wallow in my own filth. I want to be dirty.

***

I don't know where the piles of dishes come from. Except that I do.

I've made a bargain with myself, though: no more scolding myself over them. Instead, I've devised a plan; if I go into the kitchen to eat something and see that there are dishes in the sink, the rule is that I cannot be lazy and simply take a clean plate or spoon or knife or bowl from the dish rack; I have to wash whatever I'm about to use, plus at least two other items.

Under this system (washing more dishes than I dirty each time), the pile will always get smaller. It's simple math. A story problem.

If that sounds obsessive-compulsive, I say, truthfully, in my defense, that my bargain with myself is, on the contrary, progress away from obsession and compulsion. I refuse to let the desire to make my house perfect take over my mind anymore, especially when I'll never even come close. Life is too short.

Except for the past year -- which was far too long and which I'll never get back.

No one should live in fear that waiting another day to change the sheets will become all the difference between a few thousand more dollars in extermination bills, the difference between life and death -- or at least the difference between life and no kind of life.

It may be that dirty dishes attract roaches. Fine. But I'd rather leave crumbs in the drain and put out the sure-fire roach traps, "birth control for roaches," the inventors called it. It works; call me a slob, but I treasure the luxury of my dirty dishes now.

When will someone invent the equivalent for bedbugs? Something that will allow the people of New York City to just live a little again, leaving ourselves out for food at night and thinking, go ahead; it's fine. You'll die trying.

Sex in the City Part 3: The Sandfleas of Our Time

2010-09-11T12:56:00.000-07:00

After returning from Abu Dhabi, Samantha realizes she has bedbugs. The ladies go out to brunch, and everyone gangs up on Miranda, implying that because she lives in Brooklyn, she surely must be the source. Miranda, attorney that she is, sites the recent trip abroad and all of Carrie's shopping in NYC, which gets everyone thinking.

Carrie sits at her Mac that night, at the window of her penthouse apartment, reflecting on the recent tensions among the group of best friends. Just as she types "I couldn't help but wonder," she notices a small insect climbing out of her USB port. Big comes home to report that his office has been shut down, the trading floor currently being sniffed over by a beagle who earns a modest income rivaling that of Carrie, a mere writer.

Meanwhile, Charlotte has not only had all of her upholstered furniture encased but has begun putting all of the toys and clothing in the house in giant Ziploc bags.

The rumor that Miranda has bedbugs has somehow reached her hired help, Magda, who calls in sick the next day and then returns on the first flight back to Eastern Europe without a word.

Samantha, in the middle of inspecting her suitcases, receives a phone call from a lover from a few months ago who lives down the street from the Mayor; he says that while in the process of moving, he found some of her lingerie stuffed under his mattress and that she should check with her doorman, as it should be arriving in a package for her the next day.

Samantha picks the package up on her way to the elevator the following day while talking on her cell phone, explaining in a hushed voice that no, the person on the other end of the line can't come spend the night with her. "Well, yes," she says, "I was surprised to be getting my period after all of this time too, but they say that that can happen. In fact, I was told that it will probably last for at least the next three weeks. I'll let you know when it's over."

She hurries off of the phone and gets on the elevator, beginning to open the package as the door closes. As she makes her way into the apartment -- where all of her things are in clear plastic bags -- she pulls the leopard-print negligee out of the envelope to see a family of bedbugs crawling on the fabric.

Aiden calls Carrie to tell her that he's been forced out of the antique business, people being too afraid now of second-hand items, and is wondering if Big would be interested in collaborating with him to find some investors to start a pest control company. One thing leads to another. Carrie tearfully confides in Aiden that she has thrown all of her Manolos in the garbage and that the big walk-in closet her husband had gifted her in lieu of an engagement ring has now become a horrible place to her. He and Carrie end up checking into a midtown hotel for an illicit romp.

That night, after taking her Mac out of a plastic bag, Carrie types "I couldn't help but wonder why my life totally sucks" and then checks the online bedbug registry to discover that every hotel in midtown Manhattan is on the list.

The film ends in a sequence in which one partner in each couple opens his or her front door to find out that he or she is being served divorce papers.

Hauntings

2010-08-27T10:40:00.000-07:00

What I originally had posted here was an early draft of a chapter from my memoir-in-progress. Since then, I am happy to announce, that chapter has been accepted for January 2012 publication, as a nonfiction essay, in Sweet: A Literary Confection !

So, if you're viewing this any earlier than that, sorry! You'll just have to work up your appetite and check the link again when the time comes! Surely I will post a blog entry about the whole thing then (to toot my own horn, since that horn ain't gonna toot itself!)

And please, by all means: be an agent who wants to publish my book and make me famous! Seriously, I could use the money.

"Rooms for Tourists" by Edward Hopper

In Case I Offended Anyone...

2010-08-23T19:12:00.000-07:00

And I'm not referring to the naked men in my last post but, rather, my perhaps insensitive (at worst) or ridiculously melodramatic (at best) reference to Auschwitz.

Perhaps my heart having been in the right place is utterly beside the point, but let me at least just explain where my mind was when I wrote what I did, lest people just assume I'm a horrible person.

And before I get any farther with this, let me just say that I really did not mean to be offensive, so please accept my apology if it touched a nerve for you.

Honestly I did think long and hard about it, for the very fear that people would be offended (if for no other reason other than the mere mention of such an atrocity, especially in a post where I was being such a smartass and making jokes).

I was not in any way intending to imply any triviality whatsoever in the horrible things that happened at Auschwitz. On the contrary, I was (unsuccessfully and stupidly, I suppose) merely trying to explain that people who haven't been through this have NO IDEA how horrible and utterly life-changing bedbugs are.

Personally, I had to deal with the whole thing completely alone, lost 12 pounds in 10 days (110 lbs, we're talking; it felt was like I was literally dying) and really did want to die. My husband, who, of all things, had bought this house with me, had left several years earlier, and we were embroiled in divorce settlement discussions (including property disputes, if that doesn't just drive the nail into the coffin) when this all started.

I really felt as though I had died. I had never felt so alone, scared, and completely overwhelmed in my entire life.

People who haven't gone through this don't understand how demoralizing it begins to seem to have to be alive every day, not only to be told that the exterminator's warranty will be no longer valid unless everyone involved agrees to basically have everything they own taken from them (and either put it through the dryer or wipe it down with rubbing alcohol) and then agree to keep it sealed away for at least three months -- but to ALSO, as Saturday's NY Times article indicated, be treated (or fear being treated) as some kind of filthy sub-human entity.

I was thinking of, specifically, when I wrote that last post (and had been haunted for some time, actually, by) a blurb on Barnard's College's website that I'd happened to stumble upon and found downright creepy in its draconian description of what a student who finds bedbugs in her dorm is required to do, down to when and how she must take a shower, immediately before she is escorted off campus -- and how she may take nothing with her, save a single change of clothes.

I meant to be neither melodramatic nor offensive in reflecting on the creepy undertones in the way I hear people talk about the pariah that we become -- and how begin to feel about ourselves and even being alive any longer.

Obviously, that's not your problem, and I certainly didn't explain, in my post, what I'd been thinking (and that wouldn't probably change the effect of what I wrote). However, I like to think that I write about these things, largely, in part, to help others get through this, now that I'm in a better position to help others; I don't want to hurt anyone.

Again, I am sorry.

My Activist Agenda: "Go to the Movies Naked, NYC!" Day. Who's In?

2010-08-23T11:35:00.000-07:00


But no one be hot, okay? Photo by Antonio Petrozio, stolen from The London Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1935321/Naked-sportsmen.html

As we have long been advised, when it comes to "the terrorists," it now seems as though we, as New Yorkers (and Americans more generally), are being expected to (when it comes to bedbugs now, in this case) simply go on living our lives as usual and not be afraid that the worst will happen when really, to a large extent, it already is happening.

Recent headlines suggest that even doing something as innocent as going to a movie theater is like sending a personalized friend request to Mr. Lectularius, beseeching him to snuggle up to us in the dark, making his way, quietly, finally, into our pocket or pocketbook, or that probably already-infested shopping bag we've brought with us from Abercrombie & Fitch. And yet, despite all of this, the cheerful blinking of the AMC Empire 25 sign that I couldn't help but notice just days after it reopened (having been shut down for bedbug treatment and seat replacement) suggests that we should just go about throwing down our 50 bucks (or whatever ridiculous price it's up to by now) for that very privilege.

Well, I say we let the government know that no, we're NOT going to go on acting like everything's just fine. I say, why not show up to the movies in droves, naked, just to make a point?

Think about it: a bunch of us concerned citizens arrive with no clothing or belongings (nothing for the bugs to get into or lay eggs on). Maybe we make some picket signs or something, and then burn them afterwards just to be safe?

We could do this at whichever movie theater is the closest to City Hall. Who's in?

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad that Gail Brewer cares, and that even the mayor cares now (now that his rich friends all have bedbugs). I'm glad they finally created that whole advisory board. Now we have a law about refurbished mattresses, and the governor's signing a disclosure law stating that landlords have to tell potential tenants about the building's one-year bedbug history. There's even going to be a portal on the city's website, listing buildings where there have been complaints.

Don't get me wrong. Personally, I hate it when people complain about how I'm doing my job, especially when they don't know how to do my job and I'm working my ass off -- even if what I've been doing has been completely idiotic and misguided.

But hell, I pay taxes, so I'm going to ask anyway: how many entomologists did our local government consult to arrive at these (excuse me for saying this, but it's true) pathetic, misguided, and completely inadequate actions?

Spraying some Sterifab on a mattress doesn't kill bedbugs or their eggs if they're inside the mattress, and they definitely are. Enough heat could, but under this fantabulous new law, mattress refurbishers are not required to use heat, only these pathetic kinds of surface "sanitizing" methods. So people will continue to buy "new" pre-infested mattresses. Only now they'll be convinced that they aren't.

Also, companies that use the same trucks to deliver new mattresses and pick up old mattresses are now required to wrap stuff in plastic. Umm...right...because plastic certainly would never tear! Especially when you're, say, dragging a huge, awkward thing like a mattress off of or onto a truck and up into or out of someone's home. Plastic is made of kryptonite. And a hungry bedbug certainly would not have any reason to find its way out through the tears.

About the portal: funny, but I thought there already was a portal. It's just called bedbugregistry.com instead of "portal" or "beam me up, Scotty" or whatever, and is already equally incomplete and pointless. Why do we need two of these? In case one develops a tear?

Oh, but wait! landlords who actually know that there have been bedbugs in their buildings are now required to tell potential tenants. Never mind that roughly half of all people don't react to their bites and may not know a bedbug if it bit them on the ass -- or that they may be keeping this information to themselves out of shame or the desire to not have to relive their ancestors' trip to Auschwitz as they prepare their apartments for treatment?

So, yes, I'm glad all of you in City Hall or wherever give a crap, but there's an old saying, "don't work harder; work smarter," which translates into, why don't you try talking to someone who knows what the hell they're doing? You know, before passing misguided laws that encourage dangerous behavior and give people a false sense of security?

We need tosend the message that we expect more from our leaders than an online big gaping hole that will soon contain information adding up to, "basically, the whole city has bedbugs." We need more than laws that force landlords out of business for lack of helping them with the exorbitant expense that effective treatment currently costs (I can tell you from personal experience that this is happening, and at this rate, we are about to replicate the Burning of the Bronx) or the draconian preparation instructions that make overwhelmed tenants who don't get itchy from the bites refuse treatment or simply look the other way.

So what the hell do I think we need to demand, exactly?

The government needs to make the funding of bedbug eradication research (research that's not in bed with profiteers; ha!) a number one priority.

After all, what happens when Hollywood starts to suffer because no one will go to the movies? What happens when people refuse to contribute to NYC's economy as tourists and shoppers?

So maybe a bunch of us going to the movies naked would get their attention.

Alternatively, since it's always too cold in those stupid theaters anyway, and since management probably wouldn't let us sit on their seats naked for hygienic reasons, why don't we all just strip out front of the theater after the film -- and put all of our stuff in prominently-displayed plastic bags (except our picket signs, which we will set on fire afterwards, of course).

Please get back to me on this a.s.a.p.! There's a definite chill in the air, so if we're going to do this, let's make it soon!

Also, lest we inadvertently muddle our message, I ask only that no one be "hot"; we want legislative passersby to take notice, but only in a way that quickly makes naked protests a thing of the past, not in a way that makes them something that the pervs in City Hall would like to see happen over and over again.

I look forward to hearing from you.

WANTED: Wait! I mean, no, NOT wanted -- wanted only if they're dead. Hold on...

2010-08-20T09:29:00.000-07:00

It's gotten so that the only thing I dread even more than bedbugs themselves is the possibility that I might have to look at either of these two photos, even one more time, ever again.

Actually, no, that's a lie. (Just kidding, God, really! You know -- joke?)

Just trying to make a point here. Work with me.

I mean, okay, I get it. Just because bedbugs are all of the place (or at least all over NYC: Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister, the New York Public Library -- though a library has them in Cincinnati too now, I understand -- the Time-Warner Building, city agencies, the big 25-feature multi-story cinema in Times Sq.), doesn't change the fact that they're so good at hiding that you're unlikely to ever actually see one. Since they're also so clever about injecting you with their special bedbug novacaine, you're also unlikely to know you've been bitten until the bug has returned safely home to kick off its shoes and wash down its meal with a nice cold one -- if even then). I understand perfectly well that you may in fact be getting eaten alive on a nightly basis and still have a devil of a time finding the evidence, nevermind recognizing the bites, and that there's even a chance that a scent detection canine might miss the suckers. Fine.

But seriously? Are you telling me that these are the only photos of the complete life cycle of the bedbug that anyone in the entire universe has had a chance to capture? For that matter, it has not escaped my notice that these aren't even, in fact, two different sets of photographs. Just because one person preferred Photoshopping them in a neat little line, while another preferred to put them into a circle doesn't make them different pictures. I mean, look at the blond one in the middle -- shot from exactly the same angle as the blond in the other picture. Granted, the big, long, overfed, bloated one is curved in one direction in one picture and the opposite direction in the other, but notice that they are perfectly symmetrical, right down to the way the light reflects off of them. But that's a simple matter of exactly two clicks in PhotoShop.

I'm not saying there are no other pictures of the bedbug life cycle out there. But I am pointing out that they're all drawings, some of which look like cartoon illustrations of ticks, colored in red and displayed in 6 different sizes like the identical parts of some Russian doll.

And just how many years ago did bedbugs start reappearing in droves? And just how long ago did Al Gore invent the internet? This is the best anyone can do?

I thought that pest control professionals farmed these things (for the purposes of research and keeping their dogs' detections skills sharp). You're telling me there's not one complete extended family of bedbugs anywhere in this entire city, aside from the billions living inside the walls of every single building in central Brooklyn?

Now, I don't mean to sound crazy -- but what the hell; it's too late for that, right? So...I start to wonder if the supposed existence of bedbug infestations is just some huge conspiracy. Think about it: I pay a company thousands of dollars for the privilege of being ordered to take everything I own and either a) put it through the dryer, b) wipe it down with rubbing alcohol, or c) throw it out -- and then keep everything, including my toothpaste tube, sealed in plastic when not in use for at least THREE MONTHS? And vacuum every day for four weeks?

For something I will never see? And possibly never even feel? And just because someone trained a beagle to stick his paw up whenever he sees a mattress, suitcase, or piece of upholstered furniture?

No, no, no -- you're right; you're right. You saw where I was going with this. True, I was about to say that maybe bedbugs don't even exist, but I take it back.

They exist, alright. But not after I pay someone all of that money just so that I can do ALL THE WORK,while they simply mist my apartment with peppermint-scented snake oil. How could any living thing survive being sucked into a vacuum, put through the dryer, suffocated in plastic, or drowned in rubbing alcohol? Pretty clever racket.

However, as you can see, I'm starting to doubt even that much. I need some convincing. Something a little more current than this set of photographs from the Museum of the History of All Things Nasty.

It's a simple request -- someone, please, I beg you: do another lineup of the perps. Maybe put a dated newspaper heading in the background so I'll know it's legit.

And please make sure these are clear photos, not cartoon illustrations or tiny little blurry brownish-yellowish blobs. I can't tell you how many types of bugs there are out there who bear some resemblance to these pathetic shots. Both the insect and human worlds await your action; until then, there are perfectly upstanding spider beetles, pill bugs, and book lice in my house who almost got the electric chair for a crime they didn't commit.

The Good News is, I Got the House; The Bad News is...I Got the House

2010-08-19T15:15:00.000-07:00

Need I say anything more?

Well, actually, yes. Just this: whether the bedbug situation would have entitled me to even more in the divorce settlement, I don't know -- because I was too ashamed to tell my attorney.

And what? Risk having my file quarantined in a plastic bag for the next 18 months?

As it was already, New York was still one of the two remaining states in the country, at the time (a whopping 7 months ago) where no-fault divorce wasn't an option. Of course, that changed within six months after my divorce was finalized. Otherwise, the whole process might have only taken 2 years instead of 3.

But that's always my kind of luck, and it'll probably be no different when it comes to the bedbug situation. Now that an infestation shut down the AMC Empire 25 movie theater in Times Square this past week, the city will probably bring back DDT, the A-bomb -- something. Some time in the future, now that all those thousands of dollars of mine are long gone.

I did, at the time, finally 'fess up to my soon-to-be ex. I couldn't take it anymore; I felt like I had been left behind to care for our Special Needs child alone. All I wanted was for him to safely take his things, and so he did. And he felt just horrible about the whole situation, tried to help however he could. It had just gotten to the point where I couldn't take the weird, horrible irony of his saying he finally wanted to come get his junk after all of those years another minute. I had to tell him.

And oddly, I think we became friends again over the whole ordeal.

And then, something like four months later, he found out that his whole office at work had them too. (All kinds of office buildings in New York are getting infested these days). We came up with our own special jokes and code words about the situation, just like we always had about everything back when we'd been a couple. We referred to the problem as “the ants” -- or, sometimes, “the AIDS.”

Well, I guess we should all be grateful we have jobs and a place to live -- and no actual AIDS, only the house AIDS.

But I to tell you, I'd kill sometimes to disappear to nudist colony somewhere on a desert island – no furniture, no walls, no ceiling.

Nothing but the sky.

Another Utterly Dispassionate Dissemination of Fact

2010-08-16T12:51:00.000-07:00

excerpted from the abstract of

"Traumatic Insemination and Sexual Conflict in the Bed Bug Cimex lectularius"

Alastair D. Stutt and Michael T. Siva-Jothy, Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, United Kingdom, Edited by Thomas Eisner, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, and approved February 28, 2001 (received for review September 14, 2000):

"The bed bug, Cimex lectularius, has a unique mode of copulation termed 'traumatic' insemination [Carayon, J. (1966) in Monograph of the Cimicidae, ed. Usinger, R. (Entomol. Soc. Am., Philadelphia), pp. 81–167] during which the male pierces the female's abdominal wall with his external genitalia and inseminates into her body cavity [Carayon, J. (1966) in Monograph of the Cimicidae, ed. Usinger, R. (Entomol. Soc. Am., Philadelphia), pp. 81–167]. Under controlled natural conditions, traumatic insemination was frequent and temporally restricted. We show for the first time, to our knowledge, that traumatic insemination results in (i) last-male sperm precedence, (ii) suboptimal remating frequencies for the maintenance of female fertility, and (iii) reduced longevity and reproductive success in females. Experimental females did not receive indirect benefits from multiple mating. We conclude that traumatic insemination is probably a coercive male copulatory strategy that results in a sexual conflict of interests."

http://www.pnas.org/content/98/10/5683.abstract

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) is one of the world's most-cited multidisciplinary scientific serials. Since its establishment in 1914, it continues to publish cutting-edge research reports, commentaries, reviews, perspectives, colloquium papers, and actions of the Academy. Coverage in PNAS spans the biological, physical, and social sciences. PNAS is published weekly in print, and daily online in PNAS Early Edition. PNAS is available by subscription. PNAS is abstracted and/or indexed in: Index Medicus, PubMed Central, Current Contents, Medline, SPIN, JSTOR, ISI Web of Science, and BIOSIS.

Sure, I'm Going Your Way! -- OR, My Latest Tasteless, Suggestive, and Utterly Incomplete Abuse of Metaphor

2010-08-15T13:16:00.000-07:00

Results of spring 2008 Greater Cincinnati Health Survey, conducted by U. of Cincinnati Institute for Policy Research & containing a series of questions from the Joint Bed Bug Task Force (JBBTF):

14.5% of City of Cincinnati resident respondents reporting that they had had a problem with bedbugs in the previous year(1)...

*****

Meanwhile, it has been said that "bedbugs are transported into homes by hitchhiking on used furniture, or in luggage, backpacks, pillows or bedding" (2).

According to news sources, the state of Ohio recently found a defendant guilty of having slain, thirty-seven years ago, a Cincinnati hitchhiker (3)...
--------------------------------------------

1. Corea, Renee. "Greater Cincinnati Survey: 14.5% of Cincinnati respondents (7.9%, Hamilton County) Report a Bed Bug Problem." New York Vs Bed Bugs. http://newyorkvsbedbugs.org/2008/12/22/greater-cincinnati-survey-145-of-cincinnati-respondents-79-hamilton-county-report-a-bed-bug-problem/December 22, 2008.

2. Pellitteri, Phil. Insect Diagnostic Lab Notes. University of Wisconsin Extension. www.entomology.wisc.edu/diaglab/labnotes/bedbug.pdf . Dec. 2008.

3. Ritz, Ian. "Michael Beuke Executed For Ohio Hitchhiker Murder," Epoch Times. www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/35359/ . 13 May, 2010.

P.S.

2010-08-13T08:30:00.001-07:00

We have been my secret.

A "Dear John" Letter

2010-08-13T08:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Lectularius,

But why, you might wonder, be so formal? I can call you Cimex, can't I? After all we've shared, after all we've been through together this past year -- the sleepless nights, the packing of belongings into slick black bags, tied in a knots in the unlit basement, the searches, in dark corners, with flashlights?

There's a coolness in the air now, and so I imagine that you are probably feeling sentimental about our time together, though really I suspect that you were around even before autumn, before I knew -- that you had come into the house while everyone was sleeping, that you were watching me even in the August heat. I know you said you couldn't live without me, that you would do anything to be near me, in my bed, that you would risk death, and that you did.

I confess that I think about you all the time. Of course I can't forget. All of those evenings on the phone, the hushed voice inside my office, my heart racing, my desperation for help, desperation to try to figure out how to end this. In two weeks' time, my clothes began to hang off of my body. Part of me went missing.

I will come out and say it, then: I think this time apart has been good, and I do not want you back. Soon I will be very busy with work again -- and I don't think I'll have the time or energy for this. You know more about me than anyone -- my schedule, my sleeping habits, everything -- so you realize I'll be working almost every day, even twenty-seven out of the next thirty-five weekends. How I made time for you last fall, winter, spring, I will never know. Mostly it felt like I just worked for you -- cleaning, sorting, packing up the things that had become yours, no longer mine.. No amount of rest, later, gets me back the parts of life I've lost.

But what am I saying? That's probably how you feel about being away from me. You must think this blood of mine has no heart through which it is pumped, that its warmth's just an illusion. After all, I realize that it's killed you to be out of my life this long. But that depends on what the definition of "it" is. And so perhaps it is more accurate to say you had to be killed in order for that to happen.

I've regained the twelve pounds; it is true. But it's not the same twelve pounds; I think I'll always wonder where I went.

It is possible this letter will never reach you. No one is more sorry about all of this than I am.

Reluctantly yours, etc.

fragment/ of a draft/ of a poem/ of an unrequited love...

2010-08-11T10:41:00.000-07:00

Cimex Lectularius

Awake now, in breathing, from across these streets,
through invisible traffic. Rising from garbage, from dust,

through the smallest of openings, through puncture wounds,
a theft of opportunity, I smell the whisper

Night Windows by Edward Hopper

in your blood , will come to you
from distance, without light, from crevices.

Lie still, then; I anesthetize you, will travel
outside of consciousness

as you dream of others and never see me. Rather, you
douse me with poisons – your extracts of chrysanthemums,

powdered bone meal -- & mean to tear me apart. You wait,
but I wait longer, multiply, outlive my hunger.

Blog? What Blog?

2010-08-10T06:47:00.000-07:00

I don't have any blog.
Wha--? What's that?
Bedbugs? Me? My house?
Heavens!