iLiza's eyes

2007-01-11T00:08:00.000-05:00

I haven't written in a while, until tonight. I had a fairly traumatic experience about two weeks ago. My computer crashed on News Years Eve--I sat there and watched dumbly as it erased 4 years of my life from itself. Good news was that I had backed up--but not since last February, and I hadn't backed up everything. I put in the CD on which I had saved all of my writing, and there was almost nothing there. I felt like Carrie Bradshaw on that episode of Sex and the City when her computer crashes. The episode ends with something like, "all we can do is breathe and reboot." That's true, that was all that there was left to do. But I was still devastated--even thinking about it now makes me sick to my stomach.

You know, writing is like painting in a lot of ways. A person can never merely reproduce a painting--either his own or anyone else's. Paintings come along in creative surges that must be seized by the artist and acted out before they disappear. The writer must do the same. For the writer, brilliance flickers rarely--words seem to fly out of no where and organize themselves with such clarity the writer needs to physically stop and get them down before they frustratingly disappear forever.

This is why I am so heartbroken over my irreplaceable loss. I cannot remember what it is that I wrote about in the last year, but I remember reading through it all some weeks ago and thinking that I still liked it.

So I haven't written because I am scared to write. I am scared not only by the tiny life crisis erupting in my head at this period of my life, but I am scared of deletion. I have always been afraid of things disappearing from my life, but now, perhaps, I am afraid that my thoughts will leave me too. That those precious moments of brilliance that I managed to take by the horns, my own thoughts, my own ideas, manifestations of my own brain, will be expunged from being. That this will all be deleted, sucked away, wasted by a little machine that arbitrarily decides when it's time to cleanse itself and start anew.

And perhaps it will be. But a true writer cannot help but write through fear. We're pretty used to it, afterall: flying words themselves are pretty scary.

2007-01-10T22:35:00.000-05:00

To love a country, one must fall in love.

It doesn't matter what he falls in love with. It can be the sunset over the Pacific Ocean on a breezy evening the first night. It can be a color painted on a house that looks like it's falling apart, but he knows is still alive because someone who lives there paid for the paint and painted it that color for a reason. It can be a phrase in a language that he may or may not understand; his first words in that language, or slang that doesn't exist anywhere else but in that town at that very moment. It can be a song that repeats again and again on the radio, or even only once, that is so loved he remembers it days later, is still humming its tune without knowing the words or name. It can be a friend he makes, a woman on the street who shows him the way, a father who mixes strong drinks for recent arrivals, a maid who squeezes fresh juice and kills the spiders in his bedroom.

He can fall in love with a woman. It doesn't matter if she falls for him in return, he needn't even know her--her name, her favorite color--for he can be in love with her smile or her walk or her mere presence. He can fall in love with a night, or with a fantasy. He can fall in love with a smell, a dance, an old blind man sitting on the street corner playing the accordian with a smile on his face because, even though he is blind, there is no real reason to frown. He can fall in love with the strange bed he sleeps in every night. He can fall in love without knowing what he's fallen in love with.

To love a country, one must fall in love with it. He cannot reach every part, he doesn't have time to reflect and weigh those things he likes with those things he doesn't. No, the happy traveler is soaring on love--it is love that makes him stay, keep returning. He must return to his sunset, his song, his woman, that maid, or something like it. He is in love, and thus yearns without his lover near him, dreams of it, fantasizes. Perhaps it is the only bit of ridiculousness he allows himself, and so it exists always like a euphoric drug that he thinks of sipping everyday.

He must be in love afterall, for leaving is heartbreak.

2006-12-14T22:39:00.000-05:00

If you’re sitting on the toilet in my bathroom, you’re looking at the door. There’s a silver doorknob that looks fairly polished, especially considering I’ve never cleaned it in over a year. It acts as a mirror. Tonight I glanced at it and noticed in its weird bends the square of my purple shirt, and floating above it, my head. When I saw it, my head looked mis-shapen. The smooth turns in the doorknob had made my neck and chin disappear, and my forehead and eyes bulged out like a drop of beige water hanging on the edge of a shower faucet, about to fall. It looked squeezed, pressured, like it was on the verge of exploding.

When I moved my head to the left, my face became recognizable again, but doubled onto itself, so I saw a blurry reflection of two of my faces growing from each other, like some weird alien in a children’s book.

And then when I moved my head to the right, and passed the position where it was an exploding bubble, the reflection just disappeared altogether, and I became a purple shirt without a head. Perhaps it had exploded.

I’ve had a hard week. I didn’t go out last weekend, I spoke to myself in Spanish for two days straight instead. Needed my friends on Tuesday to talk about how I got stood up on Monday but could only talk to them through email because I was stuck in the windowless basement of the library writing seven pages about bullshit in another language.

On Wednesday I had a panic attack. On Thursday I had one too. They were different than the ones I had last year. When I printed out my edited, completed, ready to be turned in Spanish paper on Wednesday, I was overcome with the feeling that I was forgetting something. Even at 5 when I turned in my paper, it felt like I hadn’t even started, and like I was completely failing to turn something in. I looked in my planner time and again. There was nothing.

On Thursday I slaved in front of an excel spreadsheet until my contacts got so dried out I couldn’t see, and then I went to the gym. I don’t remember running. But I did.

And then tonight, I’m here. And I had a bad week. I don’t remember much of what I did, but I know it was a bad week. I know I had a bad week because I haven’t finished a hard Sudoku since last Thursday, and my room is littered with half-done level 4s and 3s and Avanzados that I can’t bear to throw out because I know I know can solve them. I just can’t solve them this week. I must have had a bad week.

I know I’ve had a bad week because I drank a half gallon of milk in two days. I almost never buy milk, and I never drink milk plain. But I don’t have cereal right now, and I drank a half gallon of milk from the same cup that I kept washing between glasses and then filling up again and gulping down, and then washing and filling up again until my stomach hurt and I whined to my roommate. If I think that milk is going to make me feel better, I’ve had a bad week.

And then my head disappeared in a reflection in my bathroom. It popped, and I watched it, and then it disappeared. And I wonder, since when has stress bothered me? Since when can I not remember running for an hour, but I can make up fake deadlines to freak out about?

It’s been a bad week.

2006-12-12T22:29:00.000-05:00

Here's one reason why the "Abstinence until marriage" message is just ludicrous to me:

If 30 is the new 20, and people aren't marrying and having babies when they're 14 like in colonial times, and so many parents encourage their kids to explore themselves and follow their dreams before jumping into marriage, and almost half of marriages end in divorce, then aren't the majority of people in this country unmarried? And thus, if we are all abstaining from sex except with our spouse, what on earth ought the never-married 35 year old do? What should the 40-something divorced woman do? Well, they're unmarried, so they ought to abstain.

...So then I guess we'll all become 40 year old virgins...

...ahh, Kelly Clarkson!!

2006-11-23T12:12:00.000-05:00

My brother couldn't wait to come home. He started talking about it in mid-October. First he missed the dog, then he missed sitting on the couch watching TV and playing video games. He missed space, he said, and alone-time. He loved school, but he missed home. He missed the way life was before college started.

And then he came home for Thanksgiving. I arrived in Philadelphia an hour after him, and by the time I stepped in the door, he looked as confused as dog did to see us both home at once. "It feels so weird," he said. "It's so quiet." Hours later, he admitted that he missed his friends at college.

What my brother was shocked at was not how different everything seemed, but rather how identical it felt. He had longed so much to return to the way he used to live in the house, and had forgotten that although it's still the same here, he was the one who changed while he was away. "It felt like I was never there," he kept saying about college. His friends at home were the same, they did the same things, they looked the same. They drink more now, and they're better at beer pong; but they make the same jokes and have the same relationships. They love each other the same way.

What's different are the things that are hidden: my brother went to school and started working out everyday, he's taking his school work seriously, he has all new friends. He feels different, I know he does. His friends do too. And yet they come home, and nothing has changed.

I'm three years ahead of my brother. Two nights ago, I went to a bar with a bunch of people from high school. We've changed more than my brother has. We're fatter or thinner, either more or less beautiful, we've traveled, we speak other languages, we hold ourselves differently and we're not as afraid of each other and ourselves as we used to be. And yet my friend laughed to me when I pointed out how different we all are now, "Yeah, but we all interact the same way. We all have the same roles in our group; we're all the same people," he said.

When I think about change, I think about time. I think about how we all move through our lives independently, growing and making choices. Each day in New York, I learn new things, I meet new people, I branch out more and more into the world and into myself. But somehow when we reconvene, we find ourselves unchanged. Home is no longer a haven that moves through life with us, but rather an island in the background that provides us shelter and comfort when we choose to take a break from the real world.

And then there are our friends: those people who will always engage with us the same way. There is that group that, no matter how old people get or what they do or see in life, will always have the same jokester, the same leader, the same type of predictable moments. I find that beautiful, and I find it comforting.

One of my other friends is moving to California when she graduates. Some people seemed angry or upset when they heard, but I told her merely how proud of her I am. And we agreed that our relationship will be the same as it has been in recent years: we will talk on the phone and through email, and we'll visit sometimes. We will never leave the others life, but we won't be in it everyday as we were in high school. Perhaps at this point we're so used to coming back to each other, we aren't afraid to be so far away anymore.

I don't have an answer here; I have no explanation about how to weigh an unchanging past with a nostalgic, yet rapidly growing present. I don't know how we can explore the world and always get back to that same tiny island. I don't know. But I find it beautiful. And I find it comforting to know that it even exists at all.

2006-11-16T01:11:00.000-05:00

I've heard it said that writers are often scared of writing. That for writers, writing is like sky-diving or bungee jumping from a cliff. Writing, sitting before a blank screen, imagining your life's work pouring from your fingertips, can cause panic attacks and adrenaline rushes; paralysis from fear.

This is not true for me. I am not afraid to write.

I am afraid when I cannot write.

And I am afraid to not write.

2006-11-14T16:52:00.000-05:00

I dreamed a lot last night.

I dreamed about Peer Health Exchange. I dreamed about journalism. I dreamed about everything that's been consuming me for the past three years. And even though I don't think I slept that well--because I was dreaming and if you wake up and remember your dreams, that means that you probably weren't sleeping so well--I woke up feeling rejuvenated. I woke up feeling truly awake. I woke up feeling good, and inspired, and like all I wanted to do was write and organize and...and drive on.

I turned 22 years old over night, exactly 9 hours ago. But maybe I just now woke up. Maybe 22 years after I was born, I truly awakened. Because for some reason today, because of my dreams, because of whatever it was, I feel like I can do anything. And for once, I don't feel paralyzed by that feeling. Maybe it's just a coincidence that this just so happened to me on my birthday; but I'm 22 years old and for the first birthday since I turned 18, I don't really feel so old. I don't feel old; I feel strong. Isn't that weird? I feel strong.

When I turned 11, I remember being in my den and Uncle Tom sitting on the couch and holding up all ten of his fingers and saying "Wow, I can't hold your age with just two hands, I need more fingers." I always remember that because I think that was the first time I really started to feel...age. And I started to understand that as each day went by, I was filling up more and more fingers. And those fingers, well those fingers symbolized less time that I had left.

Last night, at 12:00 when my frist called to say happy birthday, I told her that story, and I said "I'm 22, I'm twice as old as I was that day when Uncle Tom held up his 10 fingers and said I had grown out of just two hands."

I'm twice as old as that. And if I'm lucky enough to live to 88, I'm 1/4 of the way there. My dad used to say that as you get older, the years feel faster because each year, or each finger, is a smaller percentage of your life; so that one year when you're 5 is 1/5 of your life, but a year when you're 22 is 1/22 of your life, and when your 88, it's 1/88 of your life.

And so each year is going faster I guess. For that reason, I thought I would wake up this morning feeling depressed, feeling like I didn't know what I was doing or where I was going. Feeling old, wrinkly maybe.

Instead I feel motivated. And this day will be shorter than yesterday, because it's a smaller percentage of my life. And this year will go faster than last year. But perhaps I'm running now. Perhaps I'm running because I realize that I'm running out of time, and that everyday is going to matter more and more.

2006-11-11T11:59:00.000-05:00

So, through tomorrow, TimeSelect is free. For those who don't know, TimeSelect is the online, paid subscription to the NYTimes that gives access to things like the opinions page, archives and other good videos and blogs that people couldn't see otherwise. Anyway, I think because of the election, they made it free this week.

I beg you to go on there and check out Nick Kristof's stuff. He has lots of amazing video blogs about his trips in Darfur and other parts of Africa. In my opinion, he is basically the leading reporter in the US trying to bring the genocide in Darfur to the forefront of national issues and people's attention. I also think the New York Times has done a very exceptional job allowing him to do that and trying to generate as much attention to it as possible.

Anyway, if you read this today or tomorrow, I urge you to check it out. Go to www.nytimes.com, and then click the link at the top that says "Opinion."

2006-10-29T13:13:00.000-05:00

On CNN's "The Situation Room" they had a segment the other day about single women as a voting demographic. There are 37 million of us in the United States, and just barely half of us voted in 2004 Presidential Election. In the report, they called us "Sex and the City voters"--single women who attempt to emulate the glamorous lifestyle of Carrie Bradshaw through, in one way, being apathetic on the first Tuesday of November.

They interviewed a young women from close to where I grew up in Pennsylvania who said that there were issues that she cared about, but that she didn't vote because she didn't have time and she didn't feel like her vote made a difference.

In one sense, this drives me crazy because she's in Pennsylvania, where one of the tightest senate races is taking place and where (hopefully) young single women will contribute to a victory over Rick Santorum (the Republican incumbent who since 2000 has voted the same as George W. between 95% and 100% of the time). The race is close enough that for her to say her vote doesn't count is ludicrous, and merely proves that many girls in the country don't actually know what they're voting for and actively practice the ignorance and aloofness that unfortunately tends to come with apathy.

Now, don't get me wrong--I'm not trying to attack other females in my generation, nor am I suggesting that I'm any better. But that report scared me; it made me want to shake the millions of "single women" who won't go to the polls next Tuesday until they tune in and realize that all the political issues they complain about can be fixed FIRST by at least voting--at least taking part in the system that's making choices that effect them everyday.

I know a lot of people say that part of the joys of living in a free country is the freedom to NOT vote, and I agree. But the freedom not to vote is not an excuse for ignorance, nor is it meaningful or justifiable if one doesn't know exactly what it is that she's NOT voting for.

I've been on a mission as of late, trying to figure out why it is that we just don't care--what exactly drives such a large number of young women to shut out the news and political campaigns that are raging all around us? I have not found an answer, although I desperately search for one. Beyond our admiration for Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte (who I do love, by the way), what is it that makes us feel comfortable simply not knowing? How can young women, who have more education and opportunity now than they ever have before, permit themselves to live in the dark?

Part of the reason I don't understand is because I've never lived like that. I almost had a panic attack 3 weeks ago when I thought it was too late to apply for my absentee ballot. Enough said.

But when I signed that absentee ballot, I felt good. No, I don't love either senator whose running (which is the race that's most important to me), but by signing that ballot and sealing it, I then felt as if I had done my part, however small. Because at least I was 1 in the 37 million others like me who DID decide to vote and chose to be conscious. I used my voice, however small, to make a simple, seemingly meaningless contribution. But at least I used it, right? My voice, my feelings, my right and my mind. And that's all any of us have at the end of the day anyway, isn't it? One voice that can shout as loudly or as mutely as we each decide.

2006-10-22T21:36:00.000-04:00

How do you quantify genocide?

Do you tell the most gruesome stories you can find? Do you tell them about raping women in front of their dying husbands and sons? Throwing children into the air and shooting them as they fall into fires? Do you tell about the torture that happens as young and old men are slowly put to death? About the people waiting on the edge of town listening to gunshots in the distance and wondering who is dead and what is coming? Do you tell about women who choose to get raped as they cultivate food for their families because by doing so, they are saving their husband’s and son’s lives?

Do you tell these things when you describe a genocide? About the 1 in 400,000? About the 1 in 2.5 million? Or do you speak broadly, and explain the vastness of a “refugee camp” which is a nice way of saying a “concentration camp?” Do you talk about bombs that drop from the sky and displace and kill villages of 500? About dirty water from dead bodies that makes villages sick and unlivable? About orphans and starving children? Do you tell of the masses fleeing through a country that’s supposed to be home but has turned into a bloody enemy? Or do you remind them of the suffering of the individual at the hands of that same foe?

In one way, you show the scope, the breadth of the disaster and the many people they could help. In the other, they feel immense empathy for that one woman, that one child, that one father.

What we can’t do is do both. We cannot show the experience of each of 400,000. We cannot explain the uncertain, unhealthy routine of 2.5 million. We must choose one or the other. Otherwise, it is overwhelming and impossible to understand. It is like saying to people that millions of Jews died in the Nazi death camps. They don’t know what that means. They have no idea what that means.

But what are we losing by choosing one or the other? What are we losing when we can’t understand every individual experience?

How do you quantify a genocide?

2006-10-22T11:21:00.000-04:00

There's going to be a segment on Darfur on Sixty Minutes (CBS) tonight at 7:00. There is a brief video preview here. It looks like it might be a decent show, and as Nick Kristof of the New York Times reminded us in his blog, CBS has done a really horrible job until now covering the conflict in Darfur.

Additionally, the conflict there is worsening--it has spread into other countries (like Chad) and the Sudanese government is working hard to kick out all the aid that's in the region that's helping the millions of displaced people living in refugee camps.

I don't know how good this report will be tonight, but at least its not ignoring the problem. Take a look if you have time.

2006-10-17T23:54:00.000-04:00

It doesn't rain in Lima. Limenos think it does, but it doesn't.

Most of them have never seen snow, unless they've had the opportunity to leave the city and have seen the snow-capped mountains in the distance. They know they haven't seen snow. They have never touched or played in snow. They don't really understand its wetness and coldness. They don't even understand cold. But they know all these things, they will tell you they don't know, they will ask you about it.

But they think they know what rain is. They don't realize that they don't. My host mother in Lima used to announce when it was "raining" when she would come home to eat dinner with us. She would announce it like we in the United States would announce a hurricaine or blizzard. "Esta LLUVIENDO!" So we would bundle up and get ready for the monsoon weather that was apparently outside.

But when it rains in Lima, that's not what it's like. When it rains in Lima, it feels the same as always: the air dense and heavy, the sky fuzzy and muted, completely colorless and overbearingly low. The only difference is that, when it's raining, the usual wetness in the air feels alittle cooler, a little more misty and palpable. But nothing falls from the sky. Nothing gets wet. No umbrellas are necessary. No puddles can be accidentally stepped in.

No, in Lima, there is not rain. There is fog and there is humidity. There is mist, maybe, but not rain. Not drizzle, not "spit." But no one realizes it except those who come from the outside.

2006-10-15T14:04:00.000-04:00

I had a morning utilizing Facebook as a tool for grassroots organizing. I was trying to get the word out that my boss, Gloria Feldt (past president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America), had an Op Ed in the New York Times today.

It started with a minor panic attack. I got up at 10AM with an email from 8:30AM from Gloria with a link to the article and a "please get the word out about this" request. The immediate feeling that I would fail consumed me--how was I supposed to start an entire campaign around this article in two hours? How do I get people to care?

My roommate was the one who gave me some ideas about how to use Facebook, and by 12:30 I felt like I'd spread the article through a network of my peers fairly effectively. About Facebook, my roommate said, "It's such a great organizing tool," and he questioned why people don't use it more often that way.

I question that too; and after my possible success today, I wonder how my generation can be so lazy in taking positive advantage of this unprecedented network of peers. Or rather, I want to look at the lack of action critically, but I can't.

I think my feeling of anxiety when I woke up this morning is closely linked to the feeling of helplessness that people feel when they read stories in the newspaper about Darfur, poverty or human rights violations. It's the same feeling they have when they look at an upcoming election and choose apathy instead of voting for the better of two evils. It's paralysis; it's a sense that maybe it would be easier to pretend it doesn't exist instead of contemplating sorting out the overwhelming mess.

So I have sympathy for that feeling, and for the failure of modern Americans to take initiative, but I don't think it's acceptable. I think that we need to learn to get over that feeling. We need to learn to panic, but then use that energy to dive in, even if we're going to drown. I think that we need to learn to accept baby steps: we need to be okay with the idea that we might extend ourselves and make almost no difference at all, but that even the most basic action can make an impact.

I wish that we would have the courage to do this more often, and especially that my peers would care so deeply about something so as to act on it en mass and encourage its change. I wish our passion matched the capabilities of the tools we have to create this change. And finally, I wish that we would step up to prove that we have that capability ourselves, just like the revolutionary generations before us to demanded the change that they eventually got. Like Margaret Sanger, who Gloria talks about, just to name one.

2006-10-11T07:46:00.000-04:00

I was finally able to look at my pictures of the campo the other day. The urge to see them came randomly: perhaps it was because I had just gotten home from seeing my friends from Peru, perhaps I was lonely, perhaps I just wanted to feel that feeling again. I hadn't ever looked at the pictures except on my camera's screen months ago. From Ayacucho, I had gone to the campo and then taken the memory card straight to a store, had them put on CD and then deleted.

I could never bring myself to look at them. That CD, with the little girl of the future and her life in a different reality haunted me: things or people would drive me crazy in New York and then I would remember them, her, and I would want to cry. And I would feel small and in my place.

But when I opened the CD, I felt warm. I had forgotten how much color there was there, how real the people are. I hadn't realized that the memories I preserved in my mind were equal to those caught on film, to those that actually exist.

I was brought back there, more so than I ever thought I could be: to the little girl, to the pride that masked the poverty. And I remember how little sense it made there too, realized that life here can go on because in that other dimension, it's miraculously continuing as well. The little girl of the future is still waiting for her future, but she is waiting, she has not ceased to exist.

I keep returning to those pictures, especially in my mind. Keep looking back, as though if I turn away for too long, they will suddenly disappear. I find myself no longer haunted, but paranoid now. Paranoid that they will soon become obsolete; and then what will I be if I have no other reality running parallel to my own?

2006-10-04T12:13:00.000-04:00

I have a friend who's in Lancaster, PA. She's working on the story that broke on Monday. It's probably the only story that's ever come out of Lancaster, PA and made it all the way to New York City and national news stations. But the people there won't even be able to watch their 15 minutes go by.

Amish people don't believe in technological advances like we do in New York. They don't have cars or computers, Televisions or cells. They don't ride in planes or go on long trips.

The Amish used to come to my little town in Pennsylvania and sell rotisserie chickens that slowly rotated around a skewer in an oven behind a counter cooking all day. When I was a kid, we would sometimes walk into town and go to the Farmers Market where they worked and buy those chickens. My parents were friendly with the Amish man who owned the little counter, and they paid him to build a swing set and tree house for me and my brother. It's still in my backyard today--the wooden tree house with the ladder and the slide that hasn't been used for years but that we still love.

Amish people also dress differently. They have traditional outfits that they wear: solid, dark pants, suspenders and white shirts for the men; long, solid colored dresses for the women. The men grow their beards long and they wear hats. The women always have their hair up on a low bun with a cloth bonnet on their heads.

When I was younger, I remember watching the Amish children who would come to the Farmers Market and work with their parents. Sometimes the little girls would actually sell the chickens and work the cash register. I remember them being so pretty and untouchable--they were at my eye level, at my age, but completely separated from me. I could never have been friends with an Amish child, but when I would see a little girl, I would understand that she was still like me, and the little boys like my brother. If I had had a dress like that, I could have been her. I remember thinking that they looked just so cute in those dresses.

I've been thinking about those little girls a lot the past few days. How smart and hard-working they were; how adorable and gentle and perfect they seemed to me. Thinking of them is what makes my heart well up into my throat; it terrifies me to think of my 8 year old self in their place now.

My friend is in Lancaster and today she left me a message on my voicemail. She was sitting on a cinderblock watching a horse-and-buggy "klop" by. Yesterday, she said, all the bookers and newscasters from New York were there. Representatives from ABC, NBC, CBS, all standing amongst the grassy fields in Pennsylvania watching a school house where the un-explainable happened. They came in SUVs and planes and helicopters, but it smelled like manure and the beginning of Fall.

That was the paradox of yesterday. And today it seems almost as absurd as the event that brought them there in the first place.

2006-10-02T21:17:00.000-04:00

On the way home from Macchu Pichu, he told me I would become the condor.

He had had a crush on me for days, because he could tell that's what I'd end up as. He had told the bus driver on the bus in Quechua so that none of us could understand. I knew that he had been watching me. I don't remember how I understood that, I don't remember a moment when that idea came to conscious; but when he told me that he'd been falling for me, I knew I had already known.

When he had gotten on the train that evening, and saw who he was sitting with, he had panicked, he later told me. I, eating my disgusting hamburguesa con queso, had intimidated him to the point where he had gotten up and headed for the door almost immediately: I had thought he was taking care of some last minute specifics before we left, he had actually gone to the bathroom and splashed water on his face to calm down.

He told me about the condor with that Andean-accent that I still couldn't grasp, even after four weeks immersed in it. He told me stories about other lovers, being a tour guide, how he wanted to go to Sweden-- and he told me about the condor. He told me how we're all on Earth as pumas, and then one day we become the condor or we become the serpiente. As the serpiente, you must stay with the earth; as the condor, you may fly beyond it. For the Incans, this trilogy was not about heaven and hell--it was about the strength of spirit, something that one could control and enhance, not a condemnation either way.

But I was going to be a condor, he told me. He could tell that my spirit was strong enough.

2006-10-01T15:20:00.000-04:00

I remember the red shirt. He wore it the day when we came back to the residencia and surprised them. I remember the look on his face when we walked through the door: the black shorts, the genuine smile, the red shirt.

He told me that that surprise was the best he had gotten in a long time. I know he was telling the truth, they were all telling the truth. They were all overwhelmed with happiness--when they opened the door and couldn't believe we were there, when we walked into the living room and they realized that the voices they heard in the hallway were really ours. And that red shirt, and that smile, and that hand that just rested there on my knee so naturally, and that beautiful spanish accent that would have given me anything for that simple surprise.

I took it for granted that day, during all those days. I took for granted the fact that he cared so deeply, that I myself could be such wonderful gift. I took for granted the night a week prior when he had taken us all out to dinner so that he could spend more time with me. I took for granted the dancing-- the fact that he taught me how to salsa, pushed my hips from side to side, molded me into being more latin--just how I wanted to be. And I took for granted that red shirt and the smile that I can now remember so vividly that went with it.

I see him in pictures now, with that red shirt. It hurts suddenly, seeing it, remembering what used to go with it. It hurts to think that I didn't take that more seriously, that I only miss it in the aftermath, once I've already ruined what was so very simple to hold onto. And I dream of going back to that, to that ease, to that unreasonable lust. I realize that is impossible, but I wish it wasn't. I wish I could hold onto that smile, that I could create it again, and see it in pictures just as sweet as it was that day.

2006-09-30T11:59:00.000-04:00

There are days that are better than others.

Some days feel like old times. They feel like life the way you left it: busy, whirling with normalcy, but happy. They seem to push you in ways that you expect to be pushed: you're running between subway stops, living by your planner, stressed out about the next assignment. The normal days feel normal-- they feel like you never left. They feel like the two months when you were gone didn't exist, like the reel was cut and July 1st and August 22nd were glued together and nothing happened in between. Maybe nothing did. Those days feel so similar that it seems that nothing changed, we're all the same, and it was just one long night and one vivid dream that lives in a past that you'll never be able to reach again.

But culture shock is a weird thing. It hits you in all different ways, from all different sides and it lingers in you. Culture shock is like anesthesia--it gets in your body and puts you to sleep, and stays there, even after you awake.

They say that for every hour you're under, it takes a month for your body to get over the anesthesia. If that's the case with culture shock, I'll be like this forever.

The days that aren't normal are hard. They slip your sub-conscious into a catatonic state. You'll be having a conversation, and a part of your brain feels like it falls away-- you are listening in Spanish, you are living in a hut, you are totally transposed to someplace else and as a result, you can't function anywhere.

It hits you in other strange ways as well. You watch a movie, and you can't quite understand why it's in English. You can't understand why people care so much about some things and not others; and when you have nothing to say it's because you're grappling with the fact that that tiny village with the little girl of the future is still there, they are still meeting every Friday. They are meeting right now. Is that real?

Culture shock doesn't let you feel pain. You have felt pain and seen pain, and so it seems that you cannot feel it again. If I feel myself suffering, panicking, unable to breathe, I can relieve it all when I think of the people in the back of the truck who I cried for. When I think of the love, I think of the pain in leaving--and that is greater than my panic attack or my frustration.

It's the bad days that make you realize that even the good days aren't so normal and aren't so good. You realize that they are lightly weighted with sadness, or an inability to be completely happy. They are silently traumatic and they just don't feel quite right. They are burdened with a sense of responsibility and guilt. They are laced with the incredible need to go back, the overwhelming sense that you are failing what you saw. They are so normal, so peaceful, you feel that they can't be real either. The normalcy can't be real, because if it is, the abnormalcy you lived seems it cannot exist.

So everyday I hope that shock is like anesthesia, that it will linger and hold on. I hope it continues to remind me everyday of the inconsistency and of how our realities are just all so unreal.

2006-09-18T16:52:00.000-04:00

I failed to write in my blog over the summer, which is ironic because before I left for Peru, all I thought about was how ready I was to blog away while I was there. What I forgot was that writing can't be forced, and that sometimes when we experience things we cannot truly understand them until we've had some time away.

One of the first days that I was in Peru, I went to the computer lab at the unversity where I was studying. I signed in to the blog that I had set-up before I left, and sat in front of that blinking computer line that bounces around an empty page, taunting writers as it screams, "I'm ready! What are you gonna give me?!"

I stared at that line for a few minutes that morning in Lima, and for the first time since I had arrived, my mind went blank. I remember it going blank, rebooting itself from fear of the overwhelming amount of information that flooded it, and so deciding that nothing, in fact, was going on at all. I closed the page and said adios to the line. I haven't opened it since today because now I think I'm done rebooting.

I thought of Lima today when I woke up. In the 7:30AM shadows on a fairly humid mid-September morning in New York, apparently you can close your eyes, and feel like you're in a Lima winter. It was mostly the fact that you can't really tell if your chilly, too warm or comfortable, and that the air is so moist, you feel like you can squeeze it and mold it with your seemingly damp fingers. That's what made me want to write: that small moment, half asleep, buying a second cup of coffee, I when shut my eyes for just 10 seconds and imagined I was there. I believed it for two, and that was good enough to get me through my day.

So I'll keep writing. Until I go away again...

2006-07-01T23:45:00.000-04:00

I'm going on a short hiatus during my two month time in South America. You can find me here: ilizathegringa.blogspot.com

I'll be posting back here again in mid-August when I return!

2006-06-22T16:02:00.000-04:00

I am not bummed out that the United States is out of the World Cup. No, on the contrary, I smiled when I got the news. The super-power got beaten by a third world country in the poorest continent in the world.

I do not wish to sound anti-American here, because I am not. But for me, the World Cup has not been about national pride, because Americans have very little of that when it comes to soccer. The World Cup is no Olympics that dominates our TV screens—the World Cup is only being broadcast in the United States on ESPN 2 and on Spanish-language stations. The bars in New York are full of fans, but they are wearing jerseys from every country in the world, speaking an array of languages and singing British soccer anthems at the top of their lungs. I’d like to go to Texas or Alabama, or even West Chester, and see how many people are watching it in the bars there. See how many people who even own cable have the dial turned to ESPN 2. (Not ESPN 1, but ESPN 2—ESPN 1 was showing competitive bowling yesterday during the afternoon World Cup game.)

Since I went to the bars on the fateful day 2 weeks ago and got interested in the World Cup, what’s been a bummer for me is realizing how few Americans really care about it. It’s exhilarating to watch people from other places—England, Germany, even my next door neighbor from Costa Rica—who are enthusiastically addicted to the games. The World Cup holds so much significance for every other country in the world, whether it’s a country who has a team or whose team is still struggling to qualify. I wish we Americans could get behind something like that, a sport with international importance that brings true joy and unity to a country. Unfortunately, I see more and more that we cannot, or maybe we’re just unwilling to do so.

And then people get bummed when we lose. Our American pride is injured because we’re not the best. We’re the most powerful country in the world and we cannot even win the World Cup, we can’t even come close. The loss today genuinely saddened many people, and it should. The whole country should be devastated, as any country would be, but we are not.

And that is why I so appreciate the team that beat us—Ghana, who has struggled for so long to qualify for the World Cup. A country who is just as obsessed with the sport as any other, and whose dedication to its players and the true nationalism it represents is something that we, as Americans, lack horribly. Beyond that, being beaten by an African country is so symbolic painted against the history of hundreds of years of American racism and slavery. It’s a triumph of true equality, a sign that we can all compete equally, and even the underdog can win. And finally, I hope that this loss serves to humble Americans. I hope that it helps us turn our noses down a little bit and climb off our high horse of superiority. I hope that people take it with a slap in the face, feel humbled and understand that we all live on one big flat ground, and that the United States is not situated on an ivory tower that can’t be brought down.

I can hope for these things, but I will not hold my breath. Perhaps if the World Cup meant more to us, these wishes would come true. But since it carries so little meaning for so many people, I believe today’s loss will be forgotten quickly and with little lost on the way. I wouldn’t be surprised if the bars in Texas weren’t even broadcasting that game today, and besides, the people in Accra will celebrate a lot better than we ever could.

2006-06-14T22:41:00.000-04:00

My dad was a marathon runner and used to run all the time. My first plane ride was as an infant, going to Boston with my parents so my dad could run the Boston Marathon. I cried the whole way. The first and only race I remember being at was in Philadelphia. I don't remember how old I was, but I know I was walking and I was short enough that a runner dumped his cup of water on my head and didn't notice that I was below. I cried then too.

In all the pictures from when I was young, my dad is wearing his running t-shirts: on the beach in Cape May or Eagles Mere, running in short races on vacation that my brother and I used to do with our friends also. They hold dates like 1980, 1979, 1987. My favorite has the year I was born, 1984.

I don't know when, but after a couple years my dad, or maybe my mom, put all those shirts in a huge box and left them in the attic. I don't remember ever noticing that my dad stopped wearing them. Maybe he didn't even stop, he just had so many shirts that he had to leave some in the attic. Maybe he abandoned the shirts that were all too worn out, they were old and soft and even the colored ones had become see-through with age.

All I know is that when my brother and I got to them, my dad's shirts were amazing enough for us to fight over. I remember one day a couple years before my dad died when my brother and I were in the attic (I have no idea why) and we stumbled upon the big box of running shirts. Between the two of us, we divied them up and proceeded to wear them all the time. I was in middle school at the time, or else early high school, and my new soft, vintage-looking t-shirts became the most admired piece of clothing that I owned. All my friends loved my running t-shirts; they all asked to rummage through the mysterious box in my attic. I always said no: those were my dad's shirts, and the ones he didn't want were mine and my brother's.

In the years since our attic find, my brother and I have started to outgrow the shirts just like my dad did. My brother is larger than my father ever was, and so bulges out of the shirts and causes the tiny holes to stretch and tear more. And I've retired the more shelpy look for work and internship-appropriate attire. But the shirts are still in my drawer. Somehow over the years the numbers of them have dropped, but my favorites are still there: the one I found tonight is for the New York City marathon and has the World Trade Towers set against the NYC skyline. It reads 1984.

I've started wearing these t-shirts again now that I've begun running. I wear them more because they are there than anything else, b utmaybe also because of their symbolism. When I wear them I think of my dad and the way that he began running and trained for years and years for all those runs. I run myself and often times believe that I could never do it, the body that he left me is incapable or my discipline is just not strict enough. Sometimes I truly believe in that inadequacy, and other times I just push beyond it. Afterall, you don't get anywhere crying at races.

2006-06-14T10:21:00.000-04:00

It can be dangerous to wear a skirt in New York City.

A male friend of mine was recently very shocked to find this out on a walk with myself and another female. “Yeah!” we told him. “There are comments from men all the time. No matter what you’re wearing or what you look like: always men saying rude things.”

His response was a genuine, “Really?!?!”

It’s always surprising to me when men don’t realize what women go through as they walk through the streets of the city. Not that they should realize: it doesn’t happen to them and it almost never happens to a woman who is walking with a man. It’s really only the woman trudging blocks through the city, independent and without protection, who feels the eyes or hears the dirty comments behind them. And it’s only that woman who is affected: it’s only her who is the prey.

For those of you who aren’t that woman, I will tell you from shared personal experience that some men in New York have an endless storage of explicit remarks intended for females of all shapes, sizes, colors and attire walking alone, and those comments come in all different forms: from cars, from across the street, from right beside her in her ear, from the subway, walking in the opposite direction, or even in collective form—like from the workmen near my work who sit in a row against the buildings and all turn their heads and make comments under their breath to every woman who walks by.

What I think many men, including my friends, don’t realize is how very poisonous and sexually violating such commentary on the street is—how severely it can destroy a leisurely walk and leave a women feeling truly invaded and dirty.

Perhaps this sounds dramatic, but it’s not. From talking to my female counterparts, I’ve learned that we all go through it, we all feel severely degraded by it and we all make clothing choices based on the assumption that if we wear a certain type of outfit (any type of skirt or dress, shorts above the knee, tank tops, etc), we’ll get even more comments than usual. Men have a hard time understanding this, not because they don’t care or are unsympathetic, but because they just don’t have anything with which to compare it.

Today I got to thinking about how aggressively I was striding down the street on the way to work. No, not strutting, but striding: using my full concentration to keep my hips still, my face forward, my eyes dead in my head and not darting around, consciously resisting the urge to turn in response to any noise, calls, even car honks that might result in eye contact with hissing predator. And I walked fast.

But behind my dead eyes, I was thinking. I was thinking about the fact that people think New Yorkers are such jerks. New York has a reputation for coldness: people who walk along without eye contact or kindness, who push and shove in a world where we’re each just a nameless, hollow face. I realize I am one of those (dare I say “bitchy?”) women who gives New York that reputation. But I feel I have no other choice. Do any of us women here have any other choice?

New York is home to some of the smartest, most beautiful and stylish, most powerful and educated women in the world. And at the same time it’s the collision point of classes, races, cultural backgrounds and international social standards. On these streets we see combinations of people that will never match, yet they must share the same sidewalk everyday.

I believe that the catcalling and jeering that women get on the streets of New York with such abnormal regularity is the manifestation of a power struggle in an ecosystem where each individual is competing for every aspect of survival. By whistling and degrading, some men have found a fantastic way to compete against the woman who they believe—either accidentally or purposely—is using her femininity to the same ends. It seems almost like a sexual game, a mating ritual, but one into which women involuntarily enter just by living in this city, and which these men start in order to equalize a threat or feeling of inadequacy.

If this is true, my feminist side would love to say that the remarks on the street have no bearing, and are in fact a poor method of competition because they are immediately forgotten. But I cannot. The feeling alone of guardedness and anger that must be exerted to avoid such degrading comments on the street is enough to impact a woman’s energy and her feeling of self-worth. Her personal style, her manner of behavior and walking, even her possible desire to make eye contact on the street or enjoy her personal surroundings or look people in the eye is stifled by those seemingly meaningless comments.

So maybe women are perpetuating the bad New York City reputation of coldness in order to preserve their own self-worth. I know I am.

2006-06-05T14:48:00.000-04:00

Taking the LSATs and applying to law school was a recent decision. It's an idea that I've been playing with ever since I realized that my father's warnings against it were not a reason for me to disregard law as a possible career. After my freshman year of college, I got a job in Philadelphia working as an office assistant at my father's former law firm. I got all the work I needed to done in the first week and proceeded to make friends around the office, distract people, drink a lot of coffee and take 2 hours lunches everyday. The summer ended, and my boredom had determined that law was really out of the question.

Until recently. A year later and a year ago (meaning last summer), I worked with two very dear friends who were taking the LSAT in October and studying during work hours because, like I had found a year before at the law firm, there was nothing better to do. I was very inspired by them, specifically the friend who is now on her way to an amazing law career this fall. Maybe it was them, maybe it was my dad, maybe it was just something in me, but I took a constitutional law class this semester, and after the first class, I had decided for sure this time, to become a lawyer.

A lot of people, since I made and announced this decision, have asked me what I'm going to do with law. What I'm going to study, what I'm going to practice, where I want to go for school. Others have looked dismayed: I'm so gung-ho about human rights and teaching and international politics and lobbying and all that, what will I do with a law degree? What about my writing? Will I just be a sell-out and make lots of money and grow old early from anxiety and work ridiculous hours??

My answer to that is that I hope I won't. My answer is that I want to do it all: I want to be a lawyer and actively practice law, specifically in court, and I want to keep writing freelance work for magazines and newspapers, and I want to always stand up for causes in which I believe and for people whom I believe deserve more than what they are getting.

But I always feel stupid answering those questions in that way. I feel like I'm describing an impossible dream. When I say that and write that, I can feel my eyes growing bigger than my stomach, I can see a little me reaching for something I can never grasp and ending up with nothing instead of with everything.

I'm writing this because today I was inspired. Below is a link to a very very long article, but I suggest that you read the whole thing when you have time. It's written by a lawyer, professor, traveler and of course, a journalist, who before today I didn't know about and at the end of the day, I still don't know much about. But from the little I know, I understand that my dream is difficult and complex and nearly impossible, but nowhere near beyond the realm of possibility.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040830fa_fact1

This woman, Samantha Power, writes in this award-winning article about Darfur, Sudan. She gives what I think is a very fair, well-researched and well-written account of a genocide that seems overwhelmingly abstract to many of us. Read it, enjoy it, think about it, let me know what you think and realize that we can find other people living our own ideals everyday: so there is no excuse why we shouldn't reach for them.

2006-06-01T14:43:00.000-04:00

I really loved the combination of Opinion and Editorials in today's New York Times. The subtle way that they're twisted together sends a really profound message about the outrageousness of our society.

The first one is the Editorial on the rate of HIV/AIDS and the new research that has recently come out as the disease turns 25. Countries around the world were supposed to be reporting to the United Nations about how they've succeeded in meeting their goals and drafting a new action plan.

The best part reads as follows:
"The word "condom" has also gone missing [from the draft]. Depressingly, nations have been debating whether they can make any reference at all to 'empowering girls' or 'vulnerable populations,' itself a euphemism for sex workers, drug injectors and gay men. Tellingly, the United States has insisted on taking out all references to 'evidence-based prevention strategies' — strategies scientifically proven to work. Instead, Washington wants to use the phrase 'evidence-informed prevention strategies.'"

Sometimes when I tell people that abstinence only education programs lie, they don't believe me. But it's true. They either lie, or they fail to provide critical information because of a conservative-Christian moral standard surrounding the ever taboo and dirty subject of sex. Finally, now, we're seeing that such an absense of education and resources does take a real toll: it allows AIDS to spread to populations that are the most at-risk: the whores, the druggies and the queers. You know how it goes, those nasty people ought to find God so that they don't have sex or do drugs and therefore don't contract the disease. Happy Birthday AIDS.

And then there was Bob Herbert's Article that began with the story of Kika Cerpa who had sex with 19 men the first night of her forced prostitution career and held her dying friend in her arms after the girl was shot when she refused to have sex with a client. Herbert notes an interesting new piece of information that I didn't know until this morning: "It may seem peculiar, but there is no law against sex trafficking in the state of New York — or most other states, for that matter."

I love the contradiction...or rather, I hate it. I've never understood why sex is so stigmatized here. It's stigmatized to the point that the government withholds pertinent, scientific-based information from prostitutes, many of whom are repeatedly raped and abused, never picked that career and who aren't even protected by the law. In other words, this country allows women and children to be trafficked in for sex and then screws them all over again by giving them INCORRECT INFORMATION about how to protect themselves correctly and by leaving laws against trafficking off the books.

And this isn't even about prostitution, it's about sex and our government. This is about the fact that there's a general sentiment in this country that sex is always bad, sex should always be private and that sex is dirty. We've seen this time and again: in today's world the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto can shoot up all of San Andreas, but when he goes behind some closed doors, in the password-protected world of video games, to get it on, he creates a public outcry. The sad part is that the world of Grand Theft Auto is not so different from our own.

We live in a world now where apparently people shouldn't be having sex: it's such a hideous act that those who do, prostitutes and gays, don't even deserve the education to protect themselves from AIDS. In other words, they deserve to die. So then in that view, perhaps all of us deserve to die. Perhaps none of us deserve education about how to use a condom or how to get tested for HIV, because none of us should be doing anything that would put us at risk anyway. And so perhaps we're all on our own-- the Mexican girl who was trafficked in for sex and repeatedly raped, the horribly impoverished family in South Africa, the heroin addict on my street corner, me and you.

Is that what they're telling us? That each one of us deserves to die? Each one of us deserves their lies? That each one of us deserves AIDS? Is sex really that gross??

2006-05-29T12:54:00.000-04:00

I grew up listening to my neighbor play his drums. His house was diagonal from mine, and so my bedroom on weekend afternoons would be filled with a constant beat wafting through the window: a soundtrack for my life in my room. You can hear the drums from anywhere in the yard...actually, anywhere in the neighborhood. To me, the beat always sounds the same and it will go on for hours and hours.

Now that childhood is gone, it's nice to hear the same sounds in my neighborhood. The fountain in my backyard, the school buses leaving and coming daily, the little squeals of delight from the fresh lot of children galloping around our street, playing the same games we all used to play. And of course, the drums are there: the same beat as always, the same soundtrack in our lives.

When I hear the drums now, I feel as though nothing has changed. The drums mean that my neighbor is home from college, which means we're all home from college, which means we're still living back in time. At moments like this, I can close my eyes and everything feels as it used to be; perhaps the only thing that has changed is my own age, my own callousness. The children, my friends, are still playing games like "Around the House" or "Capture the Flag--" I can hear them--and that beat is still ticking away at our lives, taunting the day when we have to return to New York or State College or whereever our real world may be.

The older I've gotten, the more I've enjoyed coming home and the more thankful I am that there is such a home to come back to. It feels more and more like a respite, like I'm pushing the "Pause" button on life and sinking back to a place where the beat is strong and even and all-consuming: the drum, the pond, the children, the drum, the pond, the drum, the pond, the drum, the drum, the drum, the drum.....

It feels less and less real and lacks the pressure. Because when you're living in the past, you already know what the future's going to bring.

2006-05-26T10:13:00.000-04:00

They say that smell is the strongest trigger of memory. I remember this on days when my memory is triggered, or in random moments when I'm thrown back to the past and I'm shocked that such a memory still exists.

I remember it when I eat a certain kind of coffee cake that my mom used to make in the mountains on family vacations in Eagles Mere. Before our family went up, all four of us would go to BJ's and buy bulk quanities of food to last us the whole month in the mountains because once there, the ride to the grocery store took an hour each way and could destroy a morning on the beach. One year, my mom bought a lot of Bisquick and started making trays of this coffee cake as a munchy in the morning before heading off to our activities or as a mid-day snack. It was a really good coffee cake: a layer of crumbly cinnamon sugary goodness baked to a crisp formed a thick layer over the top, and the edges and corners used to get burned into thick cakes of solid brown sugar. I used to pick at the top.

But the cake was still made of Bisquick, so it had a distinct, grainy texture, a warm, processed kind of scent. And I remember that smell, sometimes, and I"m specifically thrown back to a cool, dreary afternoon on the screened-in porch of our annual rental house, "Fernbrook," picking at plate after plate of coffee cake and listening to Jewel's song "Painters" on my walkman as I slowly negotiated the giant family puzzle that was constantly being slaved over. With that coffee-cake smell comes the memory of high-altitude humidity, a damp forest with the distant sound of drip, the sound of a raging brook, the understanding of a enormous, silver lake nearby and a rich green color.

I remember Fernbrook as a musty, log cabin scent, a constant wetness of fresh wood. For some reason, I remember the room that my brother and I shared being really cold and bare, even though I know the heat was unbearable. I always remember it being wet there, and especially cold on the night when my father arrived from Philadelphia looking ghostly white having just hit and killed a baby deer. He had stopped the car to gain his composure after it happened, and the car driving behind him had stopped as well to make sure he was okay. They were shocked that he hadn't been killed: the baby deer had been with its mother, and from behind it looked as though he'd hit the enormous female head-on. Two days later, when driving back to Philadelphia, my father saw the baby deer dead on the side of the highway.

His car at the time was a red honda and I have two memories of that car: one is an awkward picture that my mom took of my dad standing by it in our driveway before he turned it in, and the other is the crushed, burgandy metal with baby deer fluff jammed up in all the jagged corners. It smelled like animal and sadness.

2006-05-25T10:48:00.000-04:00

I went to Philadelphia yesterday for about an hour and a half. I had made a dentist appointment six months back and realized that I wouldn't be in town once it was too late to cancel. So I took a five-hour train ride to get my teeth cleaned for 40 minutes.

I hadn't walked around center city Philadelphia during lunchtime on a summer day for two years-- the last time was during what I deem the worst summer of my life, after freshman year of college. That summer is blurred for me: the allergies, the depression, the trainrides, the heat, the ex-boyfriend, the therapy, the 9-5 workday. That summer was my greatest low, and until yesterday it was easily forgettable and over-shadowed by the memory of every other fabulous summer in my life.

I grew bitter towards Philadelphia after that summer, developed distaste for the city and for the law profession. I decided that summer that I didn't want to be a lawyer and months later, once again in New York and back to my normal, happy self, I decided I would hide in New York City forever, build my life here, and turn my back on the place where I grew up.

I should have known that that sentiment would change. I should have known I'd be drawn back to Philadelphia six months ago, when I was again overcome with the urge to be a lawyer, felt compelled to take a law class and allowed myself to be hooked in and obsessed.

I was exasperated when I got to Philly yesterday. My phone had shut down on me, it was hot and I was late to the dentist. But something felt oddly right when I was there, something felt a little more calm, a little more therapeutic: the older man at the dentist who looked at me and couldn't stop smiling and initiating conversation, the narrow sidewalks, the light traffic, the sunlit streets that aren't overshadowed by enormous buildings, and the business people lollygagging down the street who have somehow burned out the flame under their asses and learned to enjoy a full lunch hour. And then there was me, and I practically plowed the pedestrians over, just to be early to catch the train back.

I dreamed last night about Philadelphia, during the moments when I was actually able to sleep. I dreamed of Spanish and dogs and sun and calm. And I woke up this morning no longer opposed to leaving New York when the time comes, no longer feeling like I need constant stimulation to help me deal with my life, no longer feeling the need to hide under tall buildings.

2006-05-21T20:53:00.000-04:00

On a Sunday evening in late May, she is more relaxed than she has been in weeks. Muscles and hands are warm from her recent work-out, belly is swollen with a healthy, homemade dinner, and the sound of sizzling butter cackles under the rich swell of classical piano that tenderly overwhelms the small space. The voices of loved ones that drone in the corners, the feeling that we are all looming on the edge of possibility, and if only we had the courage to jump...

Her friend calls this new phase comfortable, sings her praises at her new peace of mind, her relaxation of the soul. She does not know what she did-- maybe she just learned to love herself a little bit more. Maybe it was a gift from God, a message in the form of beautiful compliments and a mirror image of her own advice. Perhaps she was just ready to open her eyes.

The smell of dried sweat, the tinkle of bells, the human munching--sweet, silent, content.

And then a voice that shatters the soft lull, and she smiles.

2006-05-21T15:33:00.000-04:00

This is the theme of my week: toxic people are like toxic drugs.

Toxic people are like toxic drugs: they can only become toxic once they're part of our beings, and they somehow feel good and addictive even as they eat us away.

I've been having moments of clarity this week about the harmful people in our lives, those individuals who make us hurt, but who we seem so afraid to let go of. And why? I wonder, because the people who hurt us the most seem to be those who we fear losing most strongly. Those that really need to leave are those who we really want to stay.

I wonder why we destroy ourselves this much. Perhaps it's in the hope of change, that one more day or week or year will improve the situation, for it's scary to release something that hasn't yet reached its full potential. Or maybe it's because many of us always want to see the good, and so we use that potential for good as an excuse for the overwhelming bad. Maybe it's because we blame ourselves: we see that this person is only toxic to us and so blame ourselves for the harm, because it certainly can't be them.

But here's the thing: we're all poisonous if we get under the skin of the wrong person at the wrong time. And so the point is that toxicity is not about the toxic person, toxicity is about the victim. Toxic people are like toxic drugs: we choose to swallow them down, even if it feels like we can't help it.

And we choose to put up with people and make excuses for them and sacrifice our own good for the sake of their potential. We choose to succumb to the poison because it's too scary to think of the detox. But here's a secret following my moments of clarity this week: the fear of what's beyond is worse than what's actually there. The fear is paralyzing but the detox is painless. And no one changes unless they really want to.

I often use the band-aid analogy when I talk about ridding ourselves of people that are less than good for us or breaking up with boyfriends or girlfriends. I remember being young whenever I think of it, having a cut on my leg that was covered with a band-aid until it was finally time to take the smelly, itchy thing off. I remember crying at the pain as I slowly tore it away from each little peach-fuzzy hair and howling with the fear of ripping another follicle apart. And I remember my grandmother telling me to just rip the damn thing off and get it over with.

To this day I'm still bad at ripping band-aids off, but I'm getting better at throwing bad relationships away. Toxic friends are like toxic drugs which are like smelly band-aids covering healed skin: the scariest part is the prospect of losing it, of each day exploding apart, the howling fear of detox, and the easy part is just ripping the damn thing off.

2006-05-10T00:26:00.000-04:00

There is an Argentinian author named Manuel Puig who once told an interviewer about his struggles writing. He said he wrote everyday, and that he felt a strong urge to write, but that he had to force himself to sit down and do it. He said that every time he sat down to write it was a struggle: writing for him was a painful mess of forced creativity that he had to squeeze out of his pours for hours a day: something that he couldn't live without, but that would end up killing him anyway.

Sometimes I feel this way: an inner battle constantly seething between by desperate need to write and the pain that ensues while the words travel from my head to the page. What an exhausting endeavor the writer has; it's like catching boiling rice on a fork: we can scoop and scoop forever, in search of the words that describe the churning feeling inside, and must strugle with all our might to catch them and hold on the moment when they gurgle forth.

2006-05-09T15:35:00.000-04:00

In my house growing up, we always had books. In the first house I lived in, my parents built a bookshelf in the living room before I was born, so that for as far back as I remember, there has always been a wall of books in my life. When we moved across the street when I was in kindergarten, one of the first things my parents did was have a book shelf built in the new living room. The book shelf was twice the size of the one from our old house, but somehow we had enough books. I have always valued books because I have always admired that wall.

Most of the books on the wall belonged to my dad. There was, and still is, a complete set of encyclopedias from the 1950s, every law book he ever used, books in latin, paperback novels with covers that are slowly disconnecting from the literature within and some history books too. When you take a book down from the shelf, there's always the chance that you'll find his words in it-- his jotted notes in that flawless handwriting of his calling to the present from 30 years ago. I think my father saved every book he ever read and preserved them on our bookshelf as a testiment to his brilliance and his profound respect for academia.

In the past few years, I have started to do the same. When it comes to the end of each semester, and my books have been read and highlighted and yet still preserved under my ginger care, I don't even think of selling them back. For some reason, I feel that I will one day need them again, I will one day want to reference back, and that need to re-read them trumps my desire to make a profit. If a book has my jotted notes, it also has a piece of my brain, and thus cannot be let go, just as my father's 20-something brilliance is still up on that shelf and taught me how to love reading through that wall.

Perhaps I save my books because I want to build my own wall one day: one that will fill a side of my living room and imprint in my children the value of all those words, the inspiration in all those pages. Perhaps I look to preserve myself in the same way my father did so accidentally: through my immediate responses in the margins of page after page.

When I was in high school, we had to read the book, "The Great Gatsby." I remember that it was on the book shelf, and my dad found it and gave it to me. It was his copy, it was old and yellowed and gingerly used, just like all the books up there. I bought my own copy of the book though, and I ended up filling every inch with highlights and margin notes, comments that I still go back to today in awe because I find they sum up humanity in ways I can only dream of.

No, I never wrote in a single one of my father's books. That was his wall, that is his memory. And I will create my own.

2006-05-08T17:35:00.000-04:00

When I used to take art classes in high school, I remember the fear of a blank canvas being common. Students, including myself, would express their anxiety at the thought of starting their piece; they would feel intimidated by that daunting expanse of whiteness that could soon become their greatest work or their most miserable failure. I remember feeling that too. Going to the art store was fun and inspiring, but placing the canvas or paper down on the kitchen table and standing above it, with a pencil poised in my left hand, was a different story. A canvas, in the moments before you place your first stroke, becomes a bleached beast that rears it's body upwards and taunts your very attempt at transforming into something beyond it's pure, colorless perfection.

I don't remember how I used to start my art. I can't recall exactly that first stroke that I made of each painting or drawing. What I remember is the moment of terror before and the moments of intense focus and concentration after. I remember wasting my body and my back slaving over canvases that used to be white or blue or yellow. I remember putting in the last stroke and making the decision to never put another one on. But the jump in, the second when I began to stain and destroy the blank available space is lost to me: perhaps my brain blocked it out because the memory was just that scary.

I feel the same feeling today when I start to write. When I click "new document" and a white canvas pops in front of my eyes to say hello. I find my name is the easiest thing to write first--ironic how I'm willing to claim it as my own before the damage has even been done.

And I feel the same with life, with the great expanse on the horizon that calls out to me post-graduation. Someone told me last week that I should take advantage of the time after I graduate to take a job that's really cool and interesting, something that I will be passionate about and enjoy. I imagine that like staring at an array of colored pencils, freshly sharpened in a box, and needing to pick the best color to start with: they are beautiful and exciting and they make me smile, and yet they represent either my greatest work or my most miserable failure. Perhaps I'm silly for worrying about the future so soon, when I haven't even finished my Junior year of college, but I find it taunting me even from so far away. The white bleached beast thrashing and seething in its own perfection, looming ahead of me, just daring me to make my first mark.

2006-04-26T23:06:00.000-04:00

I always get freaked out towards the end of the semester, especially in the spring. I guess it has something to do with the fact that the summer looms ahead as a vast emptiness of space and opportunity, of time to be taken advantage of or wasted. Maybe it has something to do with how I was brought up, going to school each year and finding no respite until late spring when I was granted freedom in the form of a last half-day with parties or movies instead of class.

When we're growing up, at least in this country, springtime almost becomes a sort of second New Year's Eve-- the last day of school is the countdown until the dropping of the ball, the first step into the unburdened sunlight is the moment we kiss our loved ones and scream "Happy New Year!" Life feels like a pattern in school--the same teacher and classmates and subjects--and our moment of freedom is the turning of a new leaf, it's the opportunity to get our stuff together, to make new academic and life goals. It feels like a new chance to spread our wings and discover something new about ourselves.

So maybe that's why I get so jittery at the end of a spring semester, especially this one. I'm not graduating, I'm not even packing and moving my things, and I'll hardly have a break before I'm in the classroom again. But regardless, that last day of school still looms and it seems to be shouting on the horizon "Happy Last Year of Childhood!" "Happy Last Year Before You're an Adult!"

With years, with experience, as each day becomes a smaller and smaller portion of our lives, I find myself looking back at all my end-of-the-year resolutions and finding myself frozen in the face of those in my future. I find myself wondering if our end-of-school-eves will become nothing but our nostalgic longings of the past; and if after all this school and all this education is done, what used to be our yearly step into the freedom of summer and possibility will merely become just another day in the office or just another change of the seasons.

So we stand here. We stand and look out towards that horizon, possibility one of the last we will have sight of. We cannot stop the time, we cannot delay the approach. Perhaps all we can do is have the courage to make the best resolution we possibly can and learn that in the future, that resolution is the kind that's always worth keeping.

2006-04-11T00:50:00.000-04:00

Regardless of what you think of NYU, no one can deny that it might very well be the most inspiring school in the country. I know I'm going to sound like an admissions officer with this post, but after today, and after tomorrow, I truly believe that NYU has a leg up on most other schools in America.

Why? Because every second at NYU, living in the heart of Manhattan, is an education. Perhaps this is true outside the classroom more so than in. Let me give you three examples.

1. This past Fall, our graduate student TAs went on strike demanding that the University recognize their union. What outsiders might not realize, is that everyone in the NYU community got to experience first hand the power of the First Amendment and the right of the worker. We chose whether or not to cross picket lines, opting for pissing off professors or pissing off protestors. We chose to walk off campus to go to class, we heard brilliant people talking about how the unions saved their ancestors, their parents, themselves, and heard up-and-coming Ph.D.s and Masters students screaming at the top of their lungs and drumming beneath an inflatable rat. Going to NYU in the Fall was in a way reliving a history that most people can only read and dream about. We watched as rights were upheld and knocked down, and maybe we took a little something away from that.

2. Today Washington Square Park was crawling with immigrants and their supporters, police barracades, ACLU watchdogs and journalists. The air was alive with a language that lots of people didn't understand, chants that meant nothing to probably the majority of the NYU community. But our sidewalks were blocked off, and our streets were covered with silent police lights and we watched the protest of our government as we ate lunch in our "quad." It was almost as if we had thousands of visitors that had come to our campus to show us just what it means to exercise our right to protest our government and not be stopped: it was an interactive lecture, a celebration of Americanism that had fallen into our laps to show us possibility.

3. Tomorrow is the tuition reform rally, which will probably prove to be much smaller than the teeming immigration protest of today. Still, it seems so fitting that it comes at such a moment at our university. We have spent the last two semesters on the sidelines or in the masses of these two great examples of the way that rights can be exercised, and here we are at a cross-roads when we can begin to take change into our own hands. I don't believe that tomorrow's rally is about the outcome, I believe it's about the act itself. It is about students, faculty, a community demonstrating for a common good, the way we have learned by just being present for the past year. Perhaps we have no other choice than to rally together, or perhaps we do it because we've been inspired.

My point is not to put NYU on a pedestal. Hardly. My point is that our education, especially here, is all the time. It happens accidentally on the street corner or while we're picniking by the fountain. It happens when we're walking between classes or getting a cup of coffee in the morning. And with it, with this knowledge and understanding, comes an immense responsibility. No longer will we be able to justifiably sit on the sidelines and watch people practice the rights they were born with, but we will have to jump into the fray, scream in any language, thump on any drum, just because we've seen it and we know how it's done. If I can wish one thing for the community at NYU, that is what I wish. I wish that they will jump in, I wish that they will prove their rights everyday. I fear that they won't, but I hope that they will.

2006-04-06T21:11:00.000-04:00

The more I hang out with people my age, the more I realize how very much the same we are, how very lost we all are. At an age when confidence is cool, when success is increasingly necessary, and to be successful, we cannot lose sight of the goal, the time when doubt is most strongly taking hold, is the first time when its existence seems dangerous to our entire futures.

It’s not only me, I realize, who hides my self-doubt. The more I think on it, every single one of us is doing it: we’ve just gotten really good at building a shield to hide the fact that we’re all freaking out. Our shields say composed, put together, happy, proud. Our shields tell the world that it can trust us, even though we have no idea what we’re doing. Even though, behind it, each and everyone of us is having a crisis, is holding back tears, is tremendously terrified for ourselves, terrified for each other.

Sometimes when I feel pain, when I feel sad or overwhelmed or generally confused about what the hell I’m doing, I feel like I’m the only one. I cannot feel another’s pain and so forget, you feel it too. Maybe that’s our problem: we’ve all forgotten that we’re a collective freak-out, our entire age group is a collective panic attack, stifled under the pressure of each other, of a world that gives us the materials to build really good walls and motes around ourselves. A world, an age, that teaches us to ignore the freak-out. But when we ignore it, we forget that every single one of us…yeah, every single one…is freaking-out behind closed doors.

This post is dedicated to our collective panic attack. It’s dedicated to the guy who doesn’t know where he wants to be or what he wants to do.

It’s to the girl who’s in the most beautiful country in the world, but still feels lonely.

It’s to the guy who can’t choose a life path because he’s still burdened by his past.

It’s to the girl who trying so hard to build on a job that doesn’t really make her happy.

It’s to the guy who will stay up all night tonight ‘cause things just don’t always work out.

It’s to the girl who’s still so haunted by a past that keeps throwing itself at her.

It’s to the girl who’s making the tough decision. The girl who’s overwhelmed with work. The guy who’s afraid of the love he’s falling into. The girl having the quarter life crisis. The guy trying so hard to make friends. The girl who had to cut the time of her life short…

It’s dedicated to our pain, our tough decisions. It’s dedicated to the face that we look at in the mirror every morning, the chin we push up high, the smile we paint on. It’s dedicated to our strength. I believe in that strength…I believe it’s harder than people realize to be us, to be our age. And the more I spend time with us, the more I realize how very strong we all are.

2006-04-01T02:31:00.000-05:00

What is spring? How do we know it when we see it?

If I could take a picture of spring, I would take a picture of the sound of my bedroom this afternoon. Passed out on my bed, lit by the dwindling sun of a late-March evening of a day when spring shined so evidently through the cracks that you could smell it even in New York, I woke up to the sound of latin pop literally pulsing through my open window. You know it is spring when you can wake up from a nap, and the darkness outside can actually make you smile because it's just as alive as the light. The car parked on the street, rocking spanish so loud that the whole block must have shaken, the swarms of people packing the streets at 2:30 in the morning. It is their sound I wish I could take a picture of-- if only I could capture that hazy moment between lucidity and dreaming when Shakira's voice invade my subconscious world to tell me the world is vibrant, that would be spring.

Spring would be the low murmer of people all around me, in the darkness of the night, partying under the distant glow of the Empire State building, the rings of cell phones, the pattering of footsteps on the ceiling from the party on the roof. If only I could take a picture of these sounds, of that morning smell that announces the new season just before it starts, me in my room with the energy of the neighborhood breezing through my window and flooding the world with life.

How do you know it's spring? Can you capture it on film? In words? In memory? Can you capture emotion, power, happiness with any one sense? Or must we always use them all to archive the scented sounds of spring?

2006-03-23T23:29:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I get mad at the media for the way they depict my generation. Usually it annoys me because the articles I read are written by a bunch of middle-aged, talented yet out-of-touch journalists who look down from their perch and try to explain teenagers and people my age to the public. They write exposes about Facebook or AIM or cell phone use as if they themselves are insiders on both teams--they are "in" with the young generation but also peers of the middle-aged readers-- and so they can explain one to the other.

For the most part, I find that they can't. And usually when I read articles about my generation-- about kids who multi-task and spend money on iPods and play video games and use their cell phones a lot--I just want to scream at the paper, "You don't get it! Your lingo is wrong, your perspective is wrong! This is just all wrong!"

That is until today. Because today, I witnessed an anecdote that I had accused the paper of falsifying. I saw a peer do exactly what I thought was exagerrated in a recent article, and I looked around and realized it was going on everywhere.

The history class I'm taking this semester is taught by a great professorial mind-- one of the most famous historians on the Holocaust and Jewish history. And that's good-- I better be getting taught by a great mind like that, I'm paying obscene amounts of money to go to a prestigious school. And that's the thing: so is everyone else. People are paying lots of money to attend that very class and hear that very person speak. So, you can imagine how disgusted I was when I was distracted by a flashing of a computer screen during lecture today.

Okay, I know. We're in college-- lots of people bring computers to class to type notes, and if I wasn't so into lightening my load for the walk to school, I probably would too. But the flashing on the computer screen was not caused by someone furiously writing notes, it was caused by an IM, and the kid proceeded to drop his notes, stop listening to the lecture and type to his friend for the remaining 45 minutes.

To make it worse, the kid wasn't in the back of the room, he was in the front. So half the class could see him typing to his friend. In addition, the classroom is packed, there's not an empty seat in the house, with about 50-60 students in attendence, so the poor girl next to him frivolously writing notes also got to read and be distracted by his IM conversation, and everyone around him could read what he was writing.

In general, I'm a pretty big fan of my generation. I don't have a problem with cell phones, I love the internet and I think that AIM and Skype are really awesome ways to keep in touch with people. I also think that Facebook is cool if you don't let it rot your brain and if you're not a complete idiot (this can be left for development in a future post, because I have a lot to say about it).

The problem that I have with my generation and all the cool technological stuff that we have is that we've become really bad at prioritizing experience. Under no circumstance should a menial conversation with your friend trump listening to a brilliant historian (whose class your paying for, although that shouldn't even really matter) lecture about a topic that you claim to care about. Even text messaging during class, which is really common and which journalists have not really picked up on yet, which shows just HOW out of touch they often are, is a pretty disrespectful behavior that should be avoided.

The point is that with all this stimulation and media around, we forget that face-to-face communication is actually much more meaningful and important than gadgets and virtual communication. We've put everything on the same plane, so that talking to your friend during class online is the same as passing notes used to be, or even the same as actually listening to the professor talk. And that's scary, because it means that we could technically live in a little virtual bubble and not realize that we were missing human contact, body language and confrontational communication with immediate consequence. Maybe we'll be having virtual dinners with our children instead of sitting around the dining room table and engaging about our day.

Again, I'm still a fan of my generation and all the cool things we know how to use and have access too, but I think that there are also huge down sides when we abuse the access to that technology, when we become so absorbed in it that we become dependent on it and start to isolate ourselves from what's going on in the world directly around us. I mean, we pay money to watch the Holocaust professor speak for a reason-- if we didn't, we could just watch him online from our beds in our virtual bubbles.

2006-03-16T12:42:00.000-05:00

I'm in an office for spring break and that doesn't feel weird to me.

I ran into an old friend a couple days ago. We crossed pathes in the local drug store-- I was on my way out and she was breezing in to pick up something. I was leaving for New York in the evening, she was coming back from Mexico or the Bahamas or Puerto Rico or some hot place that had caused her skin to brown slightly, that had allowed her hair to blonde even more from a natural sun bleach.

To be honest, the encounter was awkward, which was unfortunate because I really like that old friend. But I was on my way out of the store, I was in a rush to get my errands done, see my brother and head back to a city that makes my skin tingle, that isn't afraid to keep me up all night or challenge me to inch alittle closer to the edge. When I left the pharmacy, I thought that it was nice to see her, I felt a pang for what used to be, the friendships I used to have, and then I stepped on a train and walked out into my new life: the life where I don't go to Cancun for spring break, but sit in and office and make money and write about the past and read for the present and try to climb the solid ground that will lead me to the future where I fight for children dying of AIDS in Africa and write books about women's rights.

It's my spring break this week. Campus is empty, the office is empty, there are no lines at dining halls, the general student pulse is dull. And yet, the vast majority of my friends are in the city-- my friends are doing what I am doing. They are working and saving and flourishing here-- they are not naked in Cancun or wasted in Miami. And that's interesting for me; that's telling for me.

I don't wish to judge people. I don't wish to say that "spring breakers" are bad people or make bad decisions. My point is not that going on a trip like that is a bad choice. Hardly. It's actually a choice that a part of me wishes I had the capability to make. Perhaps unfortunately, I have not made that choice and I know that I never will. No-- I will do my drinking at Women's History Month Happy Hours and Karaoke parties on St. Marks. I'll spend my Saturdays talking philosophy on my roof under the guise of the Empire State Building and I will spend my spring break in an office, watching New York Times video clips about the genocide in Sudan and driving myself mad with my inability to do something just yet.

Maybe that makes me not fun. Maybe it ages me 10 years. Maybe it keeps me pale and away from the sun and just a little distant from people my own age, from other college students in America. But I'd like to think that one day I'll look back at my week in the office and be thankful for it-- thankful for the money or the time to catch up on work and writing. Or that someone will look back at my sober old-lady week and smile...or else just make fun of me.

2006-03-16T00:29:00.000-05:00

We play on facebook because sometimes our imaginations get alittle to far ahead: They can’t get out of the spectrum of what used to be and so then what can be now. We get caught on the cycle of expectation, imagining the wonderful ways in which we’ve changed and grown. The way we must be so different now than we were before; unable to imagine sameness in the world which feels so vastly changed. So we look back, page through the people of our pasts to satisfy that urge, to prove that everyone must be the dramatic other whom we’ve created in our heads.

And we go back to find that shamefully, so many are exactly the same. So many have been stuck on the same gated path since the time we first met. How terrifying to imagine that path, how devastating to be oblivious to the road signs that spell your destiny all too clearly. How unfortunate that grandiose futures have caved for a just adaquate present.

2006-03-10T18:58:00.000-05:00

There are certain things about New York that you can’t get anywhere else, basic things that you would ignore in other situations, but in New York, they make you smile. It’s almost magical the way it works, really, because as an outsider, before coming here, people dream of the special experience they will find here, and then it comes true. New York is important because it quivers with the possibility of what is yet to come, with the daily circulation of people as they weave through their patterns that have so ground down the city into a smooth arena where anyone and everyone performs.

Today was a New York day. Not because it was the first day that tingled like spring, but because it was the first day in a while when everyone could guiltlessly run through the streets with that little extra step that said “happy” is on the way. I love this city because as soon as it’s warm, people start blasting music out of their apartment windows at three o’clock in the afternoon. Girls start wearing open-toed heels. People leave their blinds up and give us a peep show into their lives past dark, probably weighing that they’d rather have the crisp breeze flowing in than their secrets kept hidden.

Perhaps everywhere on the east coast today, people felt warmth. People stopped and smiled because they thought they smelled spring. Well I smelled roasting nuts on the street corner, which still smell overpoweringly of sugary butter no matter what the weather. But people in New York felt possibility. The turning of a new season, the abandonment of the cold, is the symbol of our boundless possibility. The warmth means that our smooth stage will once more be filled with the realm of insanity that hides behind shaded windows. It is a reminder of our constantly rotating, twisting, changing lives. It is the feeling of collective smiles in a city where we’re all so very different.

2006-03-08T14:59:00.000-05:00

Get tested, it's in fashion.

Take the test. Take control.

Knowing is beautiful.

Get educated, get involved, get tested, get treated.

When we teach health in New York City, we tell teenagers to get tested for HIV/AIDS and other Sexually Transmitted Infections regularly. The world is filled with slogans and outcries over the importance of being tested, of knowing whether you carry HIV or not. Knowledge is power, afterall, isn't it? If you know you have HIV, you can get treated, get help, you won't get more people infected. Knowledge is power. Right?

Well, yes, knowledge is power. But knowledge is also pretty damn scary. It's easy to say a slogan, it's easy to see it on TV and to know everything about HIV, but it's a whole different ballgame when it's time to walk into a clinic, let them needle your arm and then walk back in a week later. It's empowering to know, but it's terrifying to hear your death sentence read out.

That's the thing about slogans and education: they can't take away the fear factor.

I've been thinking about this recently and sharing stories with fellow friends because I got tested last week. I didn't do it the way a lot of people do, I was pretty 100 percent sure my test was going to come up negative. But the doctor mentioned it and I figured, I might as well know. So, I did it before I could really think about it, and all of a sudden I was in the car on the way home and I realized that my life sentence was going to come in a few days.

That's what the slogans tend to leave out. They forget to mention that getting tested is quite an existential, eye-opening experience. Because getting tested makes you think: What would I do if I knew I had AIDS? What would I do if I knew I was going to die a premature death? What would I do if I knew I could have helped it?

I talked to a few friends about the issue in the days before my doctor called with the results. Educated, inspired, and careful guys, they admitted that even they were scared when they walked into the room to hear their verdict. And I was too. I was scared because even though everything in me was saying: There is no way you have HIV, everything in me was also envisioning a scenerio in which I did.

I didn't. I got a test back that said no, and I was really happy to hear that news. But my heart raced for the rest of the day, and I've been holding close the vision I created of my life with a death sentence looming close over my head.

The reality is that now I'm "empowered." I feel like I can relax for the first time since my car ride home, and I am now equipped with a greater understanding of myself and what's going on with my body. I'm able to rest easy now-- I know I'm healthy and I know I won't harm anyone else. But a lot of people walk into that room or dial that phone number and aren't so fortunate. For them, that moment of judgement is just the starting point of a life that's indescribably different from the one they had when they woke up. And that's what the slogans don't tell you: knowledge is empowering, but it's also catastrophic. Knowledge is empowering when you get a no, but it's also debilitating if you get a yes. And either way, it's quite humbling.

My point here isn't to dissuade people from getting tested. Obviously I would never advocate for that sort of thing and obviously I'm in favor of campaigns that encourage the population to empower themselves through an important blood test. Maybe my point here is that really we should all be walking through that lab room door, hold out our arms and watch our fate leak out. Maybe it's important that we all get a little scared, that we all step away from our lives that are full of "good decisions" or "lucky breaks" and realize how fundamentally reckless we can all be. Maybe it's a good thing for us to step up, show a little courage and have the guts to walk into the room, sit behind the desk or make the phone call and stare death straight in the eye.

Whether knowledge is power or not, I don't know. But what I do know is that self-examination might be able to change our lives just as much as the lab room judgement that we'll all face one day.

2006-03-06T00:55:00.000-05:00

Someone reminded me today of who I used to be. I was reminded of middle school and high school-- the drama that surrounded the lunch table each day, the constant gossip that threaded us all together.

I thought about it while recalling confrontation, when thinking about how little I have it now compared to back then. I wonder what happened to make me calm down? When did I get so even-keeled?

I decided that it's all a sign of maturity, it's a sign that I've grown up. I can laugh about people who watch porn and go to strip clubs because it's just not worth my time to get mad. I'll put out the extra work to right people's wrongs because I'll fix it all before a fight would even be over. I'll take a deep breath and choose to turn my back before I unleash my language.

So great. Self-control comes with maturity as we learn to grapple with the everyday challenges we face: the more confrontation we've seen, the easier it is to prioritize it. The scary thing is, though, that it also means we're more socialized. I can control myself because I'm more and more a part of the norm. I succeed because I'm more and more like everyone else. Perhaps that's a good thing: this is what generations of Americans have found to work the best so I ought to stick to that model. And yet, it's also breeding a level of creativity out of the system. The more we become the norm, the less we're able to break free.

So today I'm priding mysef on my ability to control confrontation, to mask my anger, to get shit done. And yet it also scares me in very subtle, backward ways. I'm scared because my ability to control myself is also the ability to control myself out of existence, a way of molding myself to the standard of the society in which I'm fitting. So it's a catch-22: to succeed we must be socialized, and the thing about socializing, it makes us all the same.

2006-02-13T13:07:00.000-05:00

I'm doing a presentation in class tomorrow about a Bolivian author, and while I was researching, I came across his blog. Needless to say, if a professor of English at Cornell University has enough to write about in his Spanish-language blog, I figure I should start writing in here more. Step it up a notch, you know.

However, there isn't much that you can do about writer's block, especially when you're passing out at the front desk at work because you're slowly becoming an insomniac for no good reason. Which is what is happening to me. Here's the weird thing about insomnia, or just not being able to sleep in general: you WANT to sleep. You get pissed when you can't sleep, and you THINK you're tired. But for whatever reason, your mind won't let you drift out, or it wakes you up two hours later with weird paranoia. For example, I woke up at 2:30 last night convinced that the Israeli guy sleeping on my couch was burrowing his way into my dreams and infecting my mind by the very nature of him sleeping on the other side of my bedroom wall. And then at 5:00 I was up again because my pillow was too lumpy and I couldn't get comfortable so I thrashed around until I realized I was over heating so I took off the blankets until 10 minutes later when I got too cold.

Over the summer, when I first got my bed and moved into my new apartment, I wasn't able to sleep either. It was 100 degrees in my little bedroom without air conditioning. I convinced myself by the end of the summer that I had bought the wrong bed and I would never have a good night sleep in New York again. That feeling went away come September when I got into a stage of such good night sleeps (exactly how the manager at Sleepy's had promised) that I would wake up in the morning and literally ask myself if it was possible to ever be unable to sleep again my whole life.

Well, here's the thing that insomnia is teaching me after my first night of literal inability to sleep in months: sleeping is not about the bed you're in, or the couch your on or the toilet bowl you pass out against. No no. The ability to sleep is all in our heads. It grows in our minds and it extends to our bodies. It has nothing to do with who we're sleeping beside but how easily they're able to burrow into our brains and infect our feelings. It has nothing to do with how many hours you were up the day before, but how easily you're able to accept what you did. And a lot of times, that's something that we can't control. No matter how hot, cold or comfortable we are, and no matter who's sleeping on the other side of our wall or even right beside us.

2006-01-27T15:04:00.000-05:00

More and more I'm realizing what a bubble I live in when I'm walking around New York. It's almost a law for me at this point: I walk out of a building and I enter a little bubble that doesn't pop until I arrive at my next destination. How do I know? Well, let's put it this way: I cross streets without looking for traffic, I walk by people I know and don't notice, I won't hear my phone ring, I look at people in the eyes because they just wander there but I won't remember what the person looks like, what they're wearing and I won't notice what they were doing or saying...and then of course, there is the incident that happened today:

I'm walking back from campus on the same side of the same street that I always walk on every morning, every evening, same street, to and from school. I'm passing the construction site that I always pass, the same workmen I always cruise by, the same loud noises and debris all over the sidewalk. Except today was different. Today, as I'm walking home, I happen to walk very close past one of the construction workers, who says (and I quote): "Nice to see you beautiful. YOU'RE EARLY TODAY"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And, it was true, I was early today. I walked by the construction site at 2:30 as opposed to the usual 5:30. And apparently, they noticed. Apparently, from what I gathered from that comment, they notice when I walk by everyday...because I DO walk by everyday...and I never even noticed them watching me.

Here's the problem with this. It's not that I got cat-called, it's not that construction workers are acting like the stereotypical construction workers and making me their victim. The problem is that after 2 and half years in this city, I finally realized that I can act like a pretty decent New Yorker...dare I even say, I've become a New Yorker? ....I laughed all the way home...

2006-01-12T18:55:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, I left New York City. I don’t remember why I left, what force I felt pulling me, why I knew that South America was the place to go. But I left—I walked out into Lonely Planet’s colorful world, and found that the people in the pictures are real.

*****

There is a girl in Buenos Aires who doesn’t have shoes. And she stands out in the street, with her dirty porceline face and her calloused toes on the shopping strip of Latin America’s most stylish city and pleads with English speaking tourists in Spanish. She doesn’t want food or water, but she’ll take moneras and begs for zapatos and rips your heart out with her little fingers. I gave her money, we offered her pan, she wanted shoes. Her eyes questioned our decency as humans, her hidden mother’s eyes bored into our back and made the hair stand on end.

You wonder if the little girl who kicks the heavy glass doors to try to enter the bar even has a mother. Where must she be as her daughter then uses all her might to make the door crack open, as she can see the men inside touch the little girl’s hair, her face and shoulders, her hips. She leaves to walk into the dark streets with an empty ice cream cone, somehow still a spring to her step. I wonder what she will be when she is older. How little 60 centavos is. It’s two dimes. Maybe I was generous.

2005-12-21T18:33:00.000-05:00

I'm sitting on the cusp of finishing the semester: It's a nice view.

Considering that two big finals are tomorrow, I'm surprisingly not stressed-- I can only think about cozying up with a big glass of wine and my friends tomorrow night in Philly. That'll be nice, we have lots of catching up to do and fun to be had.

Still, it's weird to think about saying good-bye to people: those who are going abroad, those who are graduating from school, those who I'm just used to seeing for hours a day and won't be seeing for at least a week. Whenever gears shift, it always hurts a bit: you look out on the horizon and you see that your patterns won't be the same. Thinking back on all the good times, you have to wonder if they'll ever get back to that, how things won't ever be the same, how you'll never have those same people in your life in that same way.

And yes, that's sad. But hope has a way of sticking in the air, and it's the relationships that really matter that somehow burrow themselves deep into your life and hanker down for the long haul...forever really. It's those friendships, those good times, that keep coming back again and again; so no matter how many times you have to say good-bye, or feel sad, or change gears, they'll always be a next time. They'll always be a party or a reunion or a weekend or a vacation or even just a quick phone call that throws you back to the past as you tread the uncertain future.

Relationships air out, people change, the way we define eachother goes to shit, and yet we can still always reach across eachothers pathes and make them cross again.

2005-12-19T16:32:00.000-05:00

January 22, 2004

The car was beautiful and blue,
Like a wrinkle in the ocean that’s made just for you.
It was a car that was made for an exciting trip,
One through the air for a tiny guy named Skip.
Now Skip was real small, like the size of a seed,
He loved living at home, but he longed to be freed.
He liked smoking cigars and swimming nude,
And in his high-pitched voice, he called everyone “dude!”

Now Skip was ready to see all the world,
So he packed all his bags and his sails he unfurled.
All morning he drove through the hairy woods,
The dandruff bugs scared him, he’d get out if he could.
So once in the open, he felt much less fear,
And he whistled a tune to the blue sky so clear.

But after a while, he became kind of bored,
So he made a quick right in an effort to head ‘nord.
Yet all of a sudden, Skip gave a quick shout,
In his effort to go one way, he’d really gone ‘soud!

Suddenly Skip was going real fast,
Past eyeballs and cheekbones and then this was last…
He spun…
He whirled…
He bobbled…
He burst…
In beauty and boom
He sailed to the moon…
He twirled…
He twittered…
Tootle-loooooo…….

Now Skip found himself in a new land,
On the edge of a thigh the color of sand.
It was fun to think of his glorious flight,
But not he was lost and wanted an end to his plight.
It was then, like a kiss from the moon he had touched,
When a gift came to him that he needed so much.
A telephone sat on the knee of time,
A teleportal home, an excellent find.
Skip called a friend from the home he had lost,
Who said, “I love you Skip, our friendship has no cost.”
So Skip found his home at the top of the ear,
Where he had lots of smiles, but one memory he kept near.
He never forgot of his journey through space,
He loved it at home, but oh, what a place…

2005-12-19T10:40:00.000-05:00

THE GAME. You know what I'm talking about.

I think this semester has been the semester of THE GAME. The break-ups and make-ups and make-outs and almost-marriages of my friends and my family have got us all hashing out the details of relationships. Every week someone is going to someone else, analyzing the hickey on their neck or the disappearance of the condoms from their bathroom vanity or the date that they're freaking out about. And then when friends see friends it's hashed out all over again, going over different angles, hearing another opinion, letting the flutter in the their stomach get alittle stronger again.

And I realize more than ever now that we all play it. In New York City, THE GAME is almost mandatory, and it works on many levels. Let's say you're in a bar: there's the game of finding someone you like, the game of eye contact and subtle body language across the room before someone caves and approaches, the game of flirting, the game of giving out a number, the game of making out/deciding whether to go home together, the game of whether to have sex, (a biggie) the game of calling back later in the week, the game of dating, the game of admitting how you feel, the game of defining the relationship....and it goes on.

It's really all a game: a game of chance, words, body language, eye contact, intimate conversations, mixed messages...And it sucks, and people bitch about it. It's arguably one thing that I DON'T like about NYC.

But here's the thing (and I attribute this understanding to a very special unnamed friend)...THE GAME is all about pain. THE GAME exists because we're older, and no longer in a childhood playland where we have a crush and then start holding hands. THE GAME exists because the older you get, the more baggage you have to carry, the bigger the burden on your back, the tougher the skin that's been beaten around a bit. With our baggage comes our pain, our break-ups, our first loves, the unaviodable defense that grows from being hurt. We all have it...and if you don't, maybe that's why you haven't won a round yet.

THE GAME was created out of those defenses, from our unwillingness to make ourselves vulnerable again. It's the result of the ego that rises when you've survived being ripped open from the inside: it's a battle wound that's ready to kick ass before someone slices you open again. It's that realization that the dating world isn't such a nice place, and all our egos clash together and make it hard to get to the tender flesh beneath.

We all know we're better than the foe that hurt us. We survived. And everyone else better know it too.

Is there a moral of the story here? No. But it's something that's worth taking into account: that our fear of getting hurt is the thing that keeps us away from eachother. Rejection is a scary animal that's easy to beat if you never expose yourself from behind the shield.

2005-12-12T00:28:00.000-05:00

I'm back to hating on definition, for those of you who knew that I ever hated on it.

On so many levels I feel like rebelling against juicing out meaning and pinning down labels. Because what do they mean anyway?

What does it mean to define a relationship? What is a boyfriend? What is a best friend? Well, by definition they're people in your lives, but the way we each label them is individual and unique to ourselves; what makes my best friend a best friend is not what makes your's your's. And what is a boyfriend really, beyond the feelings that lay esoteric between two people, they way you decide to conduct yourself, the way he decides he must conduct himself too?

Our definitions are meaningless: simply societal constuctions that help us pin down an emotion or an action or a responsibility. It's a way of making ourselves feel legitimate in our actions, in our feelings and a method of protecting our fragile confidences. But in no way is a definition a course of action, or an immortal promise, or an actual change of attitude.

A definition is just words: formulated expressions that we construct in our heads which can be molded and conformed and altered and destroyed. And when I think about it that way, I have to almost laugh: because isn't our courage to truly feel, and to act in accordance with those feelings so much stronger than those silly words? Why do we feel that we need language to hold something together that's too strong and complicated and organic to even be expressed in words at all?

2005-12-04T23:47:00.000-05:00

I pulled a piece of gravel out of my knee today that's been a part of my body since I was about 8.

I fell off my bike when I was on vacation one summer, and the gash that I cried over for a week ended up healing around a bunch of Eagles Mere gravel that was too painful for me to pick out. So it's there, all purple and concealed under my skin until today. My skin finally started the process of pushing out those little gravel pieces, expelling the excess waste from my body in the form of the little black speck I could pull out with a tweezers.

I wonder about temporality: about the comings and goings in our lives. The way we can be so bonded together at one point and then simply fall away from eachother with the greatest of ease. I wonder how our minds are able to fathom that, how the elimination of people and things from our lives is somehow acceptable enough to happen, despite how much we might fight it. How a friend or you can slowly change to the point when things just don't work anymore; how a relationship can disappear after years of unequivocal intimacy.

How a relationship can appear and slip almost perfectly into the hole that the others left behind.

For some reason this doesn't seem fair. It seems that we should be able to truck along with our individual lives and carry our friends beside us on parallel tracks. We should be able to keep what we work so hard to establish. We should have the solidarity to know that what we win is ours, is a trophy on our shelf, is a permanent prize in our hearts. It's funny: we're all travelling to the same place, but we can't all go together.

As a matter of fact, there's very little we get to hold on to. Most things just slip right by us, kiss us a bit of grace as they truck on by. And those that stick around, never do forever: our friendships, our boyfriends, our hubbies, our passions. They'll move on too...and yet they still feel worth fighting for.

Even the gravel in my knee is starting to readjust it's own place in the world. I told my mom that I thought the rest of it would come out sometime in the future. When I'm an old lady in my rocker, I'll pick out the last piece of purple.

2005-11-27T19:59:00.000-05:00

Do you ever get overwhelmingly stressed out?

That's how I'm feeling today, and I have no reason to be. I had a great weekend, enjoyed my family, drank my life away, saw my friends, partied with my cousin, and a certain someone even told me that I was missed these last few weeks.

So, why do I feel like I want to jump out of my body and squeeze all the adrenaline and guilt out of my stomach? Why is my stomach even knotted?

I've been paralyzed by this feeling for the last couple of hours-- I tried sleeping, I tried deep breathing, I tried reading, I tried EVERYTHING. And ironically, the only thing that seems to be working is this Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper and all the caffeine that comes with it.

Ya think that's a problem when you can only relax with caffeine? Maybe that's proof that I'm ADD...maybe that's just proof that I'm crazy.

2005-11-23T23:40:00.000-05:00

My 17 year old brother goes out more than I do. He goes out during the week, he goes out when he has a free 1st period in the morning and can wake up at 8:45 instead of 6:30. He goes out for lunch, he goes out on a Sunday afternoon...he's always out.

I can drink legally, and I'm just not interested. It's funny, whenever I come home, I feel like I climb into a cocoon and die: I drink wine with my mom and fall asleep at 11:30, I sleep in until 1:00 in the afternoon, I wear my brother's sweatshirt the entire time. I've said this before and I'll say it again: coming home, leaving New York City, always makes me feel like my real life doesn't exist. Because my real life is in New York City, and coming home is merely for family engagements and a small hand-full of friends who I can meet up with. But seriously, let's be honest: most of my high school friends, I'd be happier and more able to meet up with them in New York than in Lower Merion.

It's weird for me now then to look at my brother and see what he is. He's like me, what I used to be in high school. He drives around aimlessly trying to figure out what other people are doing, trying to get some beer, trying to juggle a million friends and their plans so that he doesn't have to stay home and do nothing. I was just like that, and it was so much fun. And it was here, in this house, in that car, in this community. And I just don't care for it anymore: I love the past, but I've moved so far beyond it. I've grown up, turned 21, built a new home in New York and actually miss my bed there when I'm here. I miss my apartment and my roommate and my noisy neighborhood there when I'm here.

Each time I come back it gets easier to be here, and more enjoyable to see my mom and to hang out with David. And yet each time I come, it also looses its significance. My Philadelphia home has become more of the place I go to visit people I love than the homebase I return to. And that's hard to grapple with, but I guess that's life.

2005-11-19T10:17:00.000-05:00

The person who lived here before me subscribed to Victoria's Secret catalogue. For some reason, I've always loved that catalogue even though I've never bought anything from it and I rarely buy from Victoria's Secret. It's still really fun to look at--probably because you can fantasize as you look at the beautiful girls in clothing that fits perfectly, in bras and panties that are just the epitome of sexy. I think think that girls probably fantasize looking at that catologue even more than guy: from the material want of the clothes, but more from the longing to be like those girls.

I was flipping through the magazine this morning, and I was doing my fantasizing. I didn't even realize I was doing it until I turned all feminist on the magazine. I thought to myself: Wow, look how far we've come in 100 years. This magazine would have been completely unacceptable, offensive and un-ladylike in the early 1900s. Women practically naked, radiating sexuality? No, that would never have passed.

It's funny though: that feminism is so fake. No, I dont' mean fake in the way that "The models are so skinny, real girls don't look like that," I mean fake in terms of sexuality.

I mean, seriously, let's look at them. They exude sexiness, but do they exude sex? As a girl, can you really picture a guy slamming one of those girls against a wall and really banging the shit out of her? Can you imagine their perfect hair getting all matted down by sweat? Their underwear on the floor and not perfectly arranged around their hips?

I can't. And I can't because those magazines create this look-don't-touch screen of femininity. They frame women in the way we've always been framed: as sexual objects who, regardless of what we're wearing or not wearing, are supposed to preserve our chastity and our dignity by NOT having sex. We're supposed to be sexy but not act on it and not let men act on it either. Beauty and sex-appeal are a necessity, but sex is taboo and disgusting.

And that's how it's always been. Or rather, that's the new sense of how it's supposed to be. Girls are supposed to be sexy like that, and make guys want them, but they're not supposed to have sex. Girls need to make guys want them, but they're also supposed to stop the advances of the men who persue them. What a twisted concept of sexuality. What an underhanded way of controlling women.

Well, the best part of my story is my goofy reaction it all. I was leafing through the back pages of the magazine, where all the clothes are. I was still oogling over these hot girls and their clothes and how much I wanted it all. And then I got to the last two pages and as I was finishing up the magazine, I literally said outloud: "Eh, I'd rather travel."

I left the magazine out in the kitchen in case a roommate wanted to look at it. But I'm not going to pick it up again.

2005-11-10T17:22:00.000-05:00

As I neared the picket lines today, from Broadway walking down Washington Place toward the Silver Center, I got a little jumpy. Let's be honest: a bunch of grad students-- teachers, really, who you might have received your grades from--are waving signs, screaming opinions, marching like pro-life supporters outside of Planned Parenthood and chanting in sing-song melodies that I used to hear at camp during naked raids or during middle school softball games. I was a little intimidated, and so when I walked by I slyly looked away...I actually I looked down at my NYU ID in my hand...ya know, just to make sure that it was oriented correctly as I flashed it to the guards.

I was ashamed, in a way, that I was crossing the picket lines, that I was giving in to the apparent injustice. I felt attacked, stared at, mocked...until I realized it was all in my own head. No one said anything to me, no one looked at me. My shame was only within me as my passion for civil liberties were trumped my drive for good grades.

When I got to the stairwell, I overheard two kids talking about the strike. Mocking the grad students until we got to the 3rd floor. And as I walked out onto the Fine Arts floor, the kid that was mocking the most says genuninely, "Wait, so the grad students don't have a union? Wow, that really sucks."

Well, yeah, it does. And the more I think about it, the more confusing it gets.

I don't know where I come out on this issue: if I think this is worth their battling right now or not. And so at first it was confusing why I felt so ashamed walking by them, yet felt so empowered all afternoon as I looked out my boss's window at those very same protesters still chanting a song that reminds me of camp. (P.S. The funny thing about that song is that the camp words which keep popping into my head are: Hey Hey, Ho Ho, this penis party's got to go!-- I still don't know what the grad students are saying, and yes, my camp experience was delightfully insane)

But I figured it out finally as I was walking past Silver again today, on my way home. The cheers, the chants, the drumming and honking echoed through the streets, bounced off of buildings, got swallowed up by the cold. And I looked around and I pictured March of 1911 when the noises that resonated through those same streets, around that same building, were the noises of bodies hitting the ground and getting swallowed up by death.

I imagined the 146 workers who gave their lives to that striking sidewalk and didnt' even have the right to strike on it. The way that things only started to change after they were dead and gone. How they got the labor movement running through their tragedy.

And today, 100 years later, the fruit of their suffering culminates in a strike against the very building from which they jumped and protesters march over their graves. And that's beautiful, and that's honorable. And that's democracy. And I hope they keep fighting.

2005-11-10T14:36:00.000-05:00

Those who are in NYU, please read this article from today's WSN. It probably effects you if you have grad student teachers and definitely just by being at NYU are you involved.

http://www.nyunews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/11/10/4372f5ee4a129

2005-11-06T13:28:00.000-05:00

So, Joe wrote a really interesting entry in his blog this weekend (bearbeatsrock.blogspot.com) and I kinda wanted to write off of what he's saying.

He wrote all about how we stalk eachother online-- through facebook, through instant messenger-- and how we ALL do it. And it's true, as college students, we soak up any opportunity to avoid doing work, to pass away the Sunday afternoons or to avoid finishing the paper that's due in 2 hours. It's undeniable that we do it, and yet as Joe pointed out, a lot of us are alittle ashamed of it.

But why? Why is it embarrassing and hard to admit that we find out stuff about eachother online? That we communicate our feelings and ideas and actions even better through an away message or the "About Me" part of our facebook profile than when we actually sit down and talk? Well, my feeling is that we're embarrassed because of just that: the internet allows us to be passive participants in each other's lives, and we're humiliated to a certain extent that we often can learn more about eachother by reading what we write in these public forums than by actually asking eachother, than by any of us willingly volunteering that information or establishing any sort of active dialogue.

Granted, I'm just as big a victim of this as anyone. I write more of my feelings in this little blog thing than I tell anyone to their face...which is awkward, because strangers read this more than people I actually know. It doesn't seem make sense, but it does. Because, as I'm writing this, I'm pouring out my ideas and feelings in an empty room to an inadament computer, and I'm posting it because I know that these thoughts are something that I should be sharing with others: with my friends, with someone. It's just easier when I don't have to see or hear the reaction that everyone has. I throw the information out into the open and ask for no response.

It's kind of like text messaging. I told Jonna last night: I love text messaging because it makes it so much easier to communicate. I text message someone when I want to talk to them or tell them something but I'm too afraid to hear their answer or I don't want to have to respond to them on the spot. Texting for me is all too often a passive aggressive way of getting what I want or hearing what I want but without the pressure of the voice on the other line. It's so pathetic, but it's so true...and I feel it with everyone. I think we all do it, or at least a lot of us.

The point is that all this technology has allowed us to stray away and avoid what used to be absolute necessity. We don't need to face eachother anymore to communicate. We don't even need to communicate directly in order to glean a lot of insight and information about others-- even strangers. And perhaps most frightening is the fact that we never have to talk to eachother in order to understand one another-- we don't even have to look at the other person to know what's going on in their life. And that's terrifying, because we can be abstractly connected to eachother by just sitting in an empty room on a Sunday afternoon writing to an inadament computer and still have "friends."

2005-11-04T16:21:00.000-05:00

Here's my hunch:

She'll be beautiful in that older, wiser woman way. Sitting straight in a chair, her legs crossed at the knee, a soft pink sear-sucker skirt suit that stops where her knees touch. She's perched on a plush white couch in mid-town Manhattan, and as the evening falls, the lights from central park below play shadows on the sheer curtains that blow casually around the french windows. Everything is white: she's white and vanilla and her carpet is thick and snowy and her couch is white and her walls are white. But they're filled with antique paintings and artifacts that line the tables and the counters and flat surfaces.

Everything is white except for the plants: the rich green, tall, leafy plants that accent the corners and that add a bit of splash. And she's perched, smiling sugar sweet, with her hands resting on her knees that touch together where her legs are crossed under a pink sear sucker suit.

And she's painfully beautiful and serene and composed. And she's talking about sex.

2005-10-30T21:04:00.000-05:00

It's nice to feel hooked in sometimes.

For a while, I thought about getting a Blackberry. They're really expensive, but I was rationalizing it like this: not only are they "really cool," but I needed it to organize my newly busy life. I wanted an electronic calendar and I was obsessed with the idea that I could be hooked into my email at any point during the day. Afterall, any even slightly type-A person needs that, don't they? I imagined looking like some formal business-woman on campus: miles above the rest of the students because I had a blackberry and an internship and a busy life that necessitated being connected to the whole world at all times.

Silly me, the whole world isn't in a Blackberry...but I kind of thought it was.

I guess blackberries are like online personal ads. They're like lying in bed next to someone just because it's a body, not because of the soul. Blackberries are like best friends, kind of how iPods are like a good nibble on the earlobe. Technology can be my boyfriend, and whenever I start to miss him, he's there to hook me in and hook me up. He eliminates the drama, the need to work hard...and if things start falling apart between us, he's easily understood with a manual or a 1-800 number that doesn't even use up minutes on my phone bill.

The problem with technology is that it becomes just that: for some of us, maybe all of us. Think of how much better we are at typing text messages than reading the pain in eachother's eyes. How we match our steps to the beat of the music and so forget to smile at the stranger passing by.

How the ease of impersonality makes the personal connections that much harder to read. How hooking into the world on a hand-held piece of plastic is now easier than hooking up with one person and comfortably holding hands.

2005-10-27T09:26:00.000-04:00

Do you know how many 2,000 is? I don't, but I know it's a lot.

2,000 is the number of years since Jesus was born. Imagine: 1 person killed for each year since he was around. Imagine what's happened between then and now. That's a lot of years.

2,000 is a lot of graves.
It's a lot of trees knocked down to make caskets.
It's a lot of dead flesh.

What if 2,000 soldiers each got a tomb, like honored kings did in ancient Egypt? Each one had a pyramid that reached towards the sky. That his soul could jump from to get up into the clouds. That the sun would bask with warm rays. And each would be buried with his riches: whole hoards of things from jewlery to gold to silver to rubies to gems and dog tags. There would be so many pyramids...all over America. So many pyramids that they wouldn't even be a great world wonder anymore: even in 2,000 more years.

But maybe they would make us understand. Somebody understand. Just how many 2,000 really is. Because I imagine that when you walk through a forest of pyramids, you'd feel quite overwhelmed. Because you'd have 2,000 souls looking down from their peaks to stare at you. The sunlight rolling down their sides so you couldn't hide from it anymore.

2,000 pyramids for 2,000 men.
Men and their riches and their dogtags in their jaws.

Yeah, maybe that's what 2,000 is.

2005-10-23T23:38:00.000-04:00

There is a fly in my apartment. It got in because the window in the living room has been open for a couple of months, and there is no screen, and I think he flew in. I don't know what he eats, but he drinks from the water in the sink and he flies around people's heads because he's not afraid.

Asaf tried to kill him tonight with a half-assed attempt to grab him in the air as he was flying by. Asaf missed.

I wonder if the fly came in on purpose or not. If he meant to get himself stuck up in this big place. Maybe he smelled something good, like hookah tobacco or hummus. Or maybe it was all an accident. Maybe he was flying one day, minding his own business, and all of a sudden he found himself in my apartment, unable to find the window that would release him back to freedom.

I imagine that this fly will live here until he dies. I won't kill him, because I feel bad for him. Plus he's fast, and darts away out of swatting range before I can wind up.

But I imagine he'll die here. Maybe on the window sill, on his way out.

2005-10-22T11:56:00.000-04:00

"When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling. My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition. I mock this skull. I look at it and I say, 'You've got the wrong fellow. You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!' The skull snickers and moves ever closer, but that doesn't surprise me. The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity--it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, posessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud."

Life of Pi
Yann Martel

2005-10-20T08:32:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry, but are we ABSOLUTELY INSANE?!?!

The Senate committee who is reviewing Harriet Miers' responses to questions regarding a whole number of things (her legal record, opinions on issues that she is bound to make decisions about on the bench and even the fact that she was temporariliy thrown out of the DC Bar association for FORGETTING to pay her dues), returned her answers to her today, saying that they were insufficient and she must re-write and re-submit them.

That's right, the woman who could potentially be the next Supreme Court Judge of our country, and make important rulings about abortion, separation of church and state, etc, had to "re-do" her "application" because it was "offensively" bad.

Who are we kidding?

If my brother sends an application to a college that's that bad, they'll reject him straight out, no if, ands or buts. But here we have "big shot" lawyer Harriet Miers (who has basically become the brunt of every NY Times op-ed joke this week) who just got a "second chance" to apply to be a Supreme Court Justice. Even money-hounding NYU wouldn't be that nice.

Well, here's a possible explanation: Rumor has it that Miers is not a good writer...so, benefit of the doubt, maybe she did work really hard answering those questions...Maybe we shouldn't have her re-submit them until enrolling her in an english course. Just a thought...

2005-10-17T17:37:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I hate the fact that I'm an anal writer. Because what it means is that I can't write unless I'm feeling inspired, and I can't force myself to be inspired. Like this post, for example, do you see how horribly boring it is? How I have no voice??? It's because I'm totally UNinspired, and I'm supposed to write a paper right now and I can't because i'm UNinspired...and that sucks, because I'll get INspired at like 10:30 tonight, just because i HAVE to be inspired then, so my brain will wake up. Ugh...Let's see if this idea works...

okay...it doesn't. I was going to force myself to write somethinag I care about...i paused, I looked out the window, and I thought, "i'm not feeling anything right now...except that I wnat to lie on my bed and listen to janis..."

DAMN WRITER'S BLOCK!!!!!!

2005-10-14T16:00:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the rain, I've recently realized that I have a serious condition which I've fittingly named "Sidewalk Rage." That's right, even when you don't have a car or a bike or a skateboard to angrily maneuver through the city, you can still have rage. This has come to my attention because I recently estimated that I walk about 4 miles a day, mostly from home to school. Well, walking in the recent weather conditions is horrendous in and of itself, and so my rage been building more than usual.

Here are some things that make me want to kick some ass:

1. People who walk slowly down a narrow sidewalk, making it impossible to pass.

2. Couples who walk slowly down the sidewalk next to eachother, so regardless of the width of the sidewalk, you cannot pass.

3. Groups of people who stand on street corners talking, so that you have to weave between them always saying "Excuse me."

4. People who try to send text messages as they walk.

5. People who try to send text messages as they walk WHILE holding an umbrella and not watching where they are going.

6. Tourists.

7. People who walk into buildings and take their time upon entry, forcing the other people to wait outside, in the rain, for them to move.

8. People who stop right in front of the door on their way OUT of the building to gwak at the rain (as if it hasn't been there for the past week), thus causing a traffic jam inside and WORSE, blocking the entrance way for the people who are in the rain, trying to get inside.

9. People who have goloshes...I'm just jealous. You can stop showing off by walking through the huge puddles that I try to jump over and which STILL manage make my feet wet all day.

10. People who don't control their umbrella, so it hits mine as I walk by or bumps my head.

11. People who walk slowly down the sidewalk, but don't walk straight. Instead, they take up the whole sidewalk as they walk, almost moving like a drunk person, making it impossible to pass.

12. Disgusting men who stand on the side of the street and make comments as I walk by. Hello! I'm soaking and I'm wrestling with an umbrella, I'm not hot right now!

13. Men who call out from their car or honk. Okay, as if I"m going to stop on the side of the street and say, "Oh, I've found the man of my dreams!," run after the car and drive into the sunset with you.

14. People who walk faster than me on the sidewalk, especially when I'm running late. It's a competition! How can ANYONE walk faster than me when I'm trucking? I try to beat them to every light and then get the head start by almost getting myself killed as I walk into oncoming traffic.

15. Men who cut you off as they walk. HELLO!! I'm going on my path, walking straight, and you saw me, and now I'm practically stepping on your heels.

16. Workmen who take up the entire sidewalk. One day, there was a truck backed up onto the sidewalk and there was all sorts of furniture making it impossible to pass. I had to walk into the street, risk getting myself killed by the cars, walk around the truck and then make it back to the sidewalk. I mean, seriously.

17. Girls walking down the sidewalk in heels. Okay honey, I know you're in pain. It's not worth it...

18. People who let their dogs take shits in the middle of the sidewalk. That's disgusting, even if they pick it up. It means that I have to watch your dog pooping right in front of me and I have to look in order to avoid stepping on it.

19. People who hold their ears when a firetruck goes by. I'm sorry, firetrucks just aren't loud enough to warrent putting your hands over your ears. Plus, it slows you down, and then I can't get to school on time.

This is an ongoing list...Anyone have anything else they'd like to vent?

2005-10-09T18:21:00.000-04:00

We live in a culture of fear.

I’m trying to find a roommate and spending my evenings interviewing around the hookah, and then we find someone. Someone who is perfect in everyway, except that the someone is a guy and my mom is scared. She says you never know, he could attack you in the night, he could be pulling the veil over your eyes, there’s a good chance he’s dangerous and scary, a villain underneath. You should do a background check.

But Mom, I’m thinking as she rattles on, the number of people that things like that actually happen to is very small. This almost never happens, and when it does it’s usually careless, easily coerced girls who aren’t good judges of people and probably don’t use their heads. It’s the news that plays it up as if this is a huge epidemic sweeping across the nation, something to which everyone is susceptible and could fall into.

I’ve had enough of propaganda.
We live in a culture of fear.

On Doctor Phil this week, there were two activists talking about sex education in high school—one said condoms should be easily accessible, the other said kids shouldn’t even learn what they are because it will put “ideas” in their heads. Since when can kids not think for themselves? Since when do adults have the right to keep knowledge from kids that will help them to help themselves? Since when do we raise children on the basis that education will put ideas in their heads that might cause them to make “bad decisions?”

That’s like not explaining to a child what it means to be vegetarian out of fear that they might become one and not get enough protein. That’s like not telling a child about 9/11 for fear they might become a terrorist.

In addition, since when is sex so morally wrong? Since when is it such a horrendous thing to be a healthy human being? Kids will have sex, they will know about sex—if not from school, then from their friends who tell them about it—and they will get the idea to have it, and they will choose to do it whether it’s wrong or right, “sinful” or not. And if they don’t know about how to protect themselves, they’ll end up sick or with a baby. Not the other way around.

I’m sick of moral judgements.
We live in a culture of fear.

This week, the terror level on New York City subways went up. Lots of people called their kids, friends, family and said “Don’t take the subways, there’s going to be a terrorist attack.” Yeah, okay. Orange, green, magenta, Moroccan red…who cares? President Bush or someone up there in the untouchable tower realizes that Americans are getting tired of the war, losing faith in Bush and feeling vulnerable.

Hey! I have a brilliant idea! Let’s just scare the shit out of all of them! Let’s make them feel like we’re on the ball and our intelligence is up to speed because we’ve picked up on this terrorist attack, and throw them into a little hysteria so they start supporting and believing in everything we say again. Ahh…we’re back on track: we messed up with Katrina, but we’ll get away with being racist, elitist, self-serving manipulators as long as people are too scared to think about outing us.

Hello! If there was really going to be a terrorist attack on the subways, do you really think they would leave them open for millions of passengers to continue using?? That would be like leaving tenants in a building that you knew was going to collapse—yeah, against the law.

I’m fed up with the veil over our eyes.
We live in a culture of fear.

And I admit: I’m scared too.
But I’m not scared of the guy next door. And I’m not scared of being “immoral.” And I’m not scared of riding the subway.

We live in a culture of fear.
But what are you afraid of?

2005-10-05T23:05:00.000-04:00

I had an "I'm going to live forever" moment today. I was in Philly (yes, I made it to Philly and back in under 24 hours), walking in the oddly beautiful October weather-- and I realized how much longer I have to live. It didn't feel abstract, suddenly, it felt tangible and real: I didn't just think it, I knew it.

Feelings like this come along rarely for me. I think for many people, they're just concepts that you're intellectually aware of, but not truly understanding. They often come for me at times when I have to wait for something, like when my desire for immediate satisfaction is hindered by the annoyance of bad timing.

It seems so typical that we hear phrases like "Wait a few years," or "maybe in the future it'll work out." And the future seems so far away...and it is...but it's also all we have.

On my walk today I thought back to where I was 3 years ago. And I thought of all the ways I was different, all the things I've done and suffered through and accomplished. It was a true "How did I get here?" moment.

And then it was terrifying. To imagine three years from now; everything else I can do in that time. The possibility that lies in even a short life. I thought maybe that's the point of it all: to acknowledge those fleeting moments of amazement and gratefulness at our simple little lives, and truly appreciate.

2005-10-02T23:13:00.000-04:00

Over the past few days I've become increasingly interested in the phenomenon of online personal ads. I started looking, egged on by some friends who did the same-- and I spent an afternoon perusing through them: baffled but also increasingly intrigued.

In New York, there are hundreds, thousands of people who post listings-- everything from "Wanting to get spanked tonight" to "Looking for a woman to carry my baby" to "I just want to fall in love." The ironic part to me is that these people are desperately trying to make a connection with someone out there on this huge island, and they're doing it by sitting at their computer in their apartment. Alone.

This seems insane on some levels. I think three years ago, before I moved here, I would have thought it was ridiculous. And yet, I found myself spending three hours doing the same thing; and my time was more out of curiosity than actual seriousness. To understand the oxy moron, you have to live in New York. But I think anyone who's frustrated that they can't make a connection can understand the act of at least browsing.

In this city, it's easy to feel alone. You can be surrounded by people at every moment, even your best friends, and you will always feel stranded. I think everyone must have that moment on an empty Saturday as they wake up and seriously consider going back to sleep so they don't have to face the hollow day.

I think a lot of people spend their weekends in front of the TV instead of seizing the day.

I think it's really scary to be here. To feel like EVERYONE has this brilliant, beautiful life flourishing in this city of "endless opportunity" and you're the only one who doesn't. Because everyone seems happy, but it's tiring to always play along.

And then you come home, and you're lonely and isolated, and just yearning for the connections that "everyone else" has. And so you log online and feel it, even superficially, from the pictures and postings online. Just like you watch TV all day Saturday to feel on some sort of level with humanity.

Or maybe just to block out the silence.

2005-09-28T18:22:00.000-04:00

I found a phone number in my back pack today. It's from Israel. It's on a small piece of lined paper, written in awkward blue pen on a line near the top. It's the type of paper a waiter might use to scribble orders on. It doesn't have his name on it, but I know it's his.

I was shocked when I found it crumpled up next to my chapstick and in a pocket towards the front. I just stared at it, as people filed out of the class that just ended, and felt thrown back to another world. It's a bit of him: something he held and wrote on and passed along to me. Everything about it screams his name.

It's 1AM in Israel when I find the number. I know exactly where he is. Him and his bar and his restaurant and his belgium waffles and his cigarettes and the best sorbet in the world. I feel like he's so much closer. Like, he's up town by Columbia, close and reachable. I close my eyes and picture it. The bar, the bike, the secret moments in public.

The size of this planet is screwing with my head. I feel that I miss him, or there, or the moment, or the cigarettes. I cannot fathom that he is so far away-- so far from me, so far from the bit of him I'm holding between my fingers. But here he is, and I think "So, I've been carrying you along with me this whole time."

2005-09-28T11:16:00.000-04:00

Due to a special request, I've decided to revive the blog. I don't really know why I stopped...maybe because I've been so busy that I haven't been able to see any of my friends, let alone think enough to write. Who could have guessed?
_____________________________________________________________________________
Today, the New York Times has an excellent feature about women in Africa, mostly teenagers, who have have experienced fistulas while giving birth. This basically means that, because their birth canals are so narrow and they lack sufficient medical attention, their insides (inc. urethra and bowels) are ripped apart as the baby comes down the birth canal....

Five hours with your blood and bowels and baby all smeared around in the equator sun on a bumpy carriage on a dusty path.

This image will haunt me all day--the feeling that I'm lying on my back with my dead baby's head coming out from between my legs and I'm frozen in horror as my insides split apart and lay in chaos within me.

I want to puke.

How can women bear to live in a world where their culture forces them to marry young but can't save them from the ailments that result when tiny, undeveloped people give birth? Can the culture even help it? How can they then shun them away as they spew out urine and feces uncontrollably? These girls wallow in their own shit that someone else tossed them into and can't pull them out from.

I imagine being 12 and pregnant; I imagine being now and pregnant. The inexplicable nature of human reproduction that nags my own body implodes itself in them with no one to hold it up. Perhaps this is feminism: that I can feel at one with their ravaged bodies.

I picture being in Africa with the condition that I had: being unaware that my ovary was growing a toxic ball and slowly commiting suicide as it turned on itself; my tubes turning black; the eggs too infected to escape. And I picture the moment that I avoided with surgery--the moment that was so close, the moment I skimmed past with just a little scar-- the moment my body goes into shock from the dead organ within. I see myself convulsing on the floor in violent ceizures and dying slowly on a straw mat in a mud hut; or during the five hour buggy ride to the nearest hospital; and never even knowing why.

2005-08-30T09:23:00.000-04:00

The thought of leaving is terrifying now that the world is so big.

2005-08-27T16:31:00.000-04:00

Today my "Murphy's Law Waiter Boy" told me a story about his friend in the army. One day, they were riding in their tank through a dangerous Arab area where "most people would not want to go," and a very young child started running towards their tank holding out a teddy bear.

The friend, 18 years old, shot the child dead.

When they went out to inspect the child, they found explosives in the teddy bear that the child had been instructed to throw under the tank in a "suicide mission." The friend had saved himself and 7 soldiers.

The friend left the army soon after that because he was starting to go insane. Before the teddy bear shoot-out, he was standing next to another soldier who got shot in the head, and miraculously came out alive but with a mutilated face.

"Yes," my "waiter-friend" says, "I have met him a few times. That's the sad part. Everyone feels bad for the child who was shot, or the children who throw rocks. They should feel bad for the soldier."

"I think I'd rather have the guns with rubber bullets than be the children throwing rocks," I tell him.

"No," he says. "Because the soldiers have to be there, in a place where they don't want to be, doing what they don't want to do. The children are free, they can throw rocks and go home to sleep or play when they get bored."

No, he's never shot anybody, he says. But he becomes a giddy little boy as he tells me he can hit a balloon 700 meters away.

2005-08-17T12:20:00.000-04:00

Today Dan bought a 4 foot hookah in Yaffo. How fitting.

I'm somewhat still in culture shock, as my third day in the Holy Land continues. I went to two markets today, and of course forgot my camera. I loved the market in Yaffo-- it was filled with funny things, beautiful clothes and furniture, and everything was so...middle-eastern. I loved it. We walked down this street that had about 15 refrigerators for sale, and next to them this old Arab man was sleeping on a leather couch. Men were loading furniture onto trucks that were covered with oriental rugs and yelling at eachother in hebrew: "Do it soft, what are you, an animal??" And of course, in the midst of all this jewlery, there was a rack of porn videos in Hebrew and in English. My favorite cover said: She will make all the sexual you have fantasies come true. The translation cracked me up.

Anyway, then Dan bought his hookah at a hookah store. He got a 4 foot hookah with 3 hoses, coals and nargila for the equivalent of about $45. Yeah, take that over-priced hookahs in the US! I'm not ready to buy mine yet, but you know me, a hookah store? Please, the day could not have been better.

Anyway, we finished it off with a few-mile walk home along the Mediterranean Sea in the scorching heat, carrying the 4 foot hookah. Then we went to the mall and had huge sandwiches. And then we came back here to chill before the reggae party on the beach tonight. Yeah, this was all one day.

Thing I love about NYC #1

2005-08-14T15:46:00.000-04:00

I think it's so funny when it starts to rain in New York City. For some reason, the rain always feels like it's coming out of nowhere. It's hot and gross out and all of a sudden, it's pouring rain and everyone looks at eachother and says, "Well that came out of nowhere!" I think it must be because we can't see the clouds rolling in and there isn't that calm in the air before the storm. New York City air, especially in the summer, is always still. Every once in a while there will be an eerie gloss that hangs in the air and tells you it's going to rain. But mostly it's the Weather Channel that gives the heads-up.

But here's what's so funny about rain in New York City. It's the way people react to it. Most people stop and go under an awning, so you get the most interesting smattering of humanity, huddled together so they don't get wet. Other people freak out and start dashing around, while still others will just whip out the umbrella that they always have in their bags for occasions just like this.

And finally, the taxis. The second it starts raining, it's impossible to find a taxi in New York. They're all taken instantly, probably by the people who freaked out and started running.

If you didn't notice, I'm soaked to the bone because I just got stuck in an East Village thunderstorm in an outfit I was going to take on my flight tonight. At least summer rain smells good.

2005-08-12T21:52:00.000-04:00

For the past two weeks, work has been slowing down. Follow-up calls turned into searches on MonsterTrak or email conversations between cubicles, and I can certainly in part attribute this blog to my growing disillusion with the company I dedicated so much time to. So this morning, I rolled in fresh as a daisy, prepared for my last day in Freah Air prison, with a content little smile on my face.

Today was my last day of work. Congratulate me-- I'm 20 years old and I managed to spend 8 months as an intern at a non-profit, and live to tell about it.

The last day of work is always really weird. It's about about tying up loose ends and making lists of unfinished tasks that you need other people to complete for you and packing up the random assortment of things your collected at your desk. For instance, here's what I ended up bringing home today:
1. A Fresh Air teddy bear
2. Spiedie Sauce (if you know what this is, you get a million bucks!)
3. Two pairs of shoes
4. Nalgene
5. A "Fresh Air" bracelet
6. Advil
7. A hair clip
8. A folder with my resume and some receipts
9. My reimbursement check

For the rest of the day, I went through my outlook contacts and wrote down the names and emails of everyone I might ever want to contact again, and emailed a whole slew of people thanking them for the good times. I had sushi for lunch and I spent 45 minutes on the phone with a supervisor for another organization I'm part of. And then I had a good-bye ice-cream cake and almost cried.

That was the weird part-- I got choked up. After 3 weeks of being miserable getting out of bed every morning and spending my days searching for new jobs, I realized that I am going to have to mourn the loss of this job from my life.

I can never figure out why I get sad at times like those-- why freeing myself from a tedious obligation and moving on to bigger and better is somehow always painful. I don't think I was sad about leaving the great friends I have made or the children who once upon a time "needed me" so much.

The older I get and the more times I choke back these tears, the more I realize how unexpectedly horrible change can be. When you pull into Grand Central station at least 6 times a week for 8 months, it's scary to think about not being there anymore. What will happen to Grand Central if I am not there twice a day? What will the little man at the convenient store do without my hello?

Perhaps change is something to mourn: something to feel sad for as it steals the familiar from your everyday life, as it takes away a part of who you are used to being. Perhaps we must mourn change in the same way we mourn a death or a break-up: like the death of a lifestyle or pattern.

And maybe I are lucky that my reaction to change is always be this painfully nostalgic. As moments graduate from present to past, we all need something to remind us not to take anything for granted.

2005-08-09T19:52:00.000-04:00

I hate my roommate. That's right-- I hate him, and I have NO idea why.

Okay, I kind of do-- I can list many things that he does that make me squirm or make my blood curdle, but apparently they don't drive anyone else nearly as crazy as they drive me. This is why I hate him:

1. He has a mullet-hawk and gnarled yellow teeth.

2. I think he's a vampire-- who covers up the windows in their beautifully-lit bedroom in the summer with a black cloth other than a vampire?

3. He uses a lot of electricity. The rice cooker has been on for 3 days and counting, and he leaves the air conditioning on all day, while no one is home.

4. He doesn't clean his dishes.

5. He leaves the toilet seat up-- huge no-no when you're the minority sex.

Finally, 6. He's a hoverer-- That's right, in Iliza's world, he's the worst type of person you can be. He hovers, badly. He follows the other roommate around all in the morning, he follows me around when I get home from work. Example: last week, I get home from rollerblading around the city for two hours. I'm tired, sweaty, it's one of those horribly humid days from last week. ALL I want is to get my disgusting clothes off and get in the shower. I walk in the door, and head straight for my room. Roger appears in my doorway as I'm closing the door, and stands there trying to talk to me for at least three minutes. Fine. Except he badgers me. You seem like you had a bad day, where were you? How was work? Who did you go with? I roller blade too. Do you work out a lot...blah blah blah.

Moral of the story is, I finally just got the guts to turn off the air conditioner because he left. But no, he came back, comes immediately to my door and says, "you didn't like the air conditioner??"

I hate my roommate. I need to get out of the city.

2005-08-08T14:53:00.000-04:00

When I was little, I used to be really afraid of the world. I came from a family who didn't travel farther than Disney World, and lived in a suburban town that my 9th grade English teacher said should be deemed "The Best Town in America." Everything outside my bubble seemed threatening. For a while, I was afraid a tornado would come destroy our house. When I told my parents that, they explained that tornados didn't come to Pennsylvania, and I felt better. I remember at some point seeing an article on the Gulf War in Newsweek magazine on my coffee table. There were pictures of soldiers, blood, dirt, and I remember being terrified by it-- thinking that we would be attacked and my perfect little town would turn into the Gulf. My parents made me feel better by explaining that we lived in America and that didn't happen to us because our government was strong; all wars would be fought on someone else's soil, and destroy someone else's town, but it would never destroy ours.

So when I was young, I was the safest little girl in the world because I was cozy in my comfy bubble.

There's an article in the New York Times today about kids living on the Gaza Stip in Israel. The kids play games about soldiers and police officers and jail and terrorism because that's what they live in all the time; that's the way they make sense of their world because their parents can't deny that a war is already there. I used to play cops and robbers too-- but where I'm from cops and robbers is really just another name for tag. These kids pretend to blow themselves up because that's what someone did on their school bus.

I'm going to Israel next weekend, as Israeli troops force their own people out of the Gaza strip, amid much controversy. So today I'm wondering when I started hating my bubble. I figure at some point I began to resent it--somehow I got to this point where I want to run away from it, pop it and immerse myself in all the shit. And I'm about to--I'm going to the place that I used to fear as a child, I'm going to see the children whom I was afraid I would become.

Last year, I got a giddy call from my mom, and a couple of emails from my friends from the "Best Town in America." There was a freak F1 tornado that touched down in the local field and knocked down some trees. I remember laughing, and being so amused that this dinky tornado had blown through my perfect world. Funny how that works, isn't it?

Again

2005-08-05T20:25:00.000-04:00

So, it happened again. But today, it was worse.

I was on my way to the Astor Place Barnes and Noble in search of this praised book on the Middle East written by one of my favorite NYTimes opinion writers. The approach was again a double threat-- two young guys with Children International in their baby blue crew neck t-shirts looking chipper in 98 degree weather.

The first one holds out the clipboard, "got a moment?" Friendly.

I look him straight in the eye. He looks nice, he's probably about my age and I think Children International is a decent cause. And as I side-step him, I say, "I'm sorry," as meaningfully as I can.

I keep walking. Sarcasm follows me, "are you really though?" I hear him say.

What? I want to spin around and tell him off. I want to turn around and look at him. It crosses my mind for a second, but I take control and roll my eyes instead.

Fifteen feet later, threat number 2. I don't even have to look at him, he's already glaring me down. A sneer on his face.

Practically shaking his head in disappointment, he snides, "it's just for the children."

Perhaps I should give them the benefit of the doubt-- maybe standing there in the scorching heat all day in a baby blue crew neck can make you a little psycho. But if your job is customer service, is that an excuse? Is there any excuse?

The way they approached me, I could tell they'd been doing it like that all day. Watching one another's backs, pulling a guilt trip on people who said no, being sarcastic with the various responses they got.

Regardless, I walked away once again angry and bitter towards a good cause. And as I climbed the steps to Barnes and Noble, I literally paused and considered giving them my piece of mind. "Who do you think you are, " I imagined myself saying, "that you can intimidate me on the street for not participating in your cause? Who are you to know enough about me that you can sneer as though I don't help 'the children?' I don't help your children, the ones in your fancy binder who you've never even met. You know what? I would if I could-- I truly would. I'd help every child I possibly could, I'd save every poverty stricken, un-educated, malnurished child in the world. But I can't-- and just because I don't stop to talk to you on the street in one of the richest areas in New York City, does NOT mean that I don't do anything. I'm wearing this skirt and these heels because I spend my days slaving away in an office in an effort to help children. Children who I have touched and seen and spoken to and helped. I spend a zillion hours a week trying to educate children on my own time. And yet you have the audacity to sneer at me because I won't give you my credit card information and give you your commission?"

What kind of campaign to save the children of the world are we leading if we get people to sign up by putting them on the defensive? Why do we feel like we have to pounce in order to get others to hear us? Why do we attack eachother in the name of peace?

As I left Barnes and Noble I almost gave my intimidators the finger when I walked by them again. I held back because you can't fight fire with fire-- I just fumed for the next 2 hours.

I have never disliked Children International-- in fact last summer, I was very close to sponsoring a child. Now I'm bitter towards the organization, and I probably will never give them the time of day again. I can't help it. The thing is, this isn't about Children International. It's about the way advocates drum up support in a mostly apathetic nation and encourage people to step outside their bubble. What a huge, looming goal. What a worthy cause.

The thing is, these goals can't be reached through intimidation--they need education. And I saw today that we really can't fight fire with fire, because we'll end up watching all those causes burn.

Just think: when a child throws a temper tantrum, ignoring it is the fastest way to make it go away. And I know THAT because I care about "the children."

Work

2005-08-02T22:46:00.000-04:00

An anonymous wiseman once told me that if two people can work well together, the relationship is meant to last. And although that particular relationship he spoke of did not last, I still keep what he said in my memory, because I think it's true.

Sitting in my living room, smoking my grandpa hookah tonight, I brought those words up to a good friend. We were talking about a relationship she's in, and they came to me. And then I kept thinking about them--not who said them or why, but rather how true they are.

Everyday we interact with colleagues. All types of people with whom we problem solve and depend on and trust. Beyond our cubicle neighbors nine to five, we do business with almost everyone we talk to. We exchange money at the deli, we sign leases with our friends, we participate in class in hopes of a better grade.

And when we date, we interview on a couple of evenings over wine and movies, and eventually sign a verbal contract of monogamy. And one day, we sign a written contract, get an ID to wear around our finger and maybe get a baby as a signing bonus. Perhaps dating relationships, maybe even all relationships, are really just esoteric business ventures. Afterall, co-workers who work well together rarely break a contract. I mean, you could land in court for that.

Do you have a moment?

2005-08-01T21:42:00.000-04:00

“Do you have a moment… for gay rights?"

It’s a boy standing on the sidewalk. He’s holding a clipboard, and as I was walking across the street towards him, I could have sworn he was going to ask me where I get my hair done.

I was wrong. He’s skinny, medium height, brown hair, insignificant features, except he looks at me with this look that makes me feel bad for him and his gay rights. I brush it off.

“Sorry.”

I turn away from him and accidentally lock eyes with predator number two. She’s less passive, and I know she just saw me casually reject her doe-eyed friend and his signature-seeking attempt.

“Do you have time to spare for gay rights?”

She stares at me directly. Her question seems innocent, but she penetrates me with the accusing stare-down. And I feel a pang of guilt as I say, “I’m sorry,” and drop my eyes.

As I walk away, I think of Dan, and the agitated sigh he would release if he were standing next to me. He hates people like that, and for the first time, I do too.

It’s not because they’re interrupting my walk home, I decide, I’m used to people standing on the corner with clipboards and blocking my way or shoving flyers into my face. That’s fine, that’s New York. What made me fume was the fact that, in a matter of 10 seconds, the Gay Rights duo had managed to make me feel guilty for saying “no.” They made me feel bad for not stopping to support THEIR idea of how to improve gay rights.

Perhaps it was the wording, “do you have time?” “do you have time to spare?”. Well, of course I have time to spare for gay rights! I read the paper, I took a class on sexuality and American Public life, I’m an informed voter who thinks about those issues when I go to the polls, I have numerous gay friends, and yes, I’m for equal rights—not just for gays, but for everyone.

But that’s not what my street-corner accusers meant, was it? What they meant was, “do you care enough right now to stop and listen to what I think about gay rights and agree with me and sign my paper?”

And I said no. And by the way they stared me down, that means I don’t care about gay rights. And I’m a bitch. And for a second, I agreed with them. And I felt bad for not stopping.

By the time I get to the next street corner, I no longer feel guilty. I feel annoyed. I’m annoyed by what just happened, I’m annoyed that it bothered me for even just a second, and mostly I hate the fact that I can’t stop thinking about it.

There are so many ways to incite change, or to be a good citizen, or to care about important issues. There are so many ways to serve others and to serve the world, and so many different issues and people who deserve to be served. And yet some overly-righteous strangers on the street can shut-out their should-be allies. And all for a signature on a two dollar clipboard.