popular

At the very beginning of my freshman year of high school, Joanna Christianson invited me to a weeknight pool party at her house. Everybody who was starting high school with any social credibility was going to be there. I played it cool, but I was gaga to have made the list. I'd been popular for exactly one semester and one summer so far, and the thrill hadn't even come close to wearing off. Phil Haven was going to be there, John Barcher, Linnae Dengah*, everybody. Well, not everybody—that was the point. Just the right people, of which I was now, for reasons I couldn't 100% figure out, one. 

*I've changed everyone's names up there except Linnae Dengah because I can't make up a name as good as that. I tried. So, if you're googling yourself, Linnae: surprise. 

Popularity was gold, it was security, it was everything good. Why had it decided to visit itself upon me? And how could I make it stay? Because I wanted to make it stay at all costs, and I do mean virtually all costs, barring obviously insane things like murder. But whoever I really was inside, if she/that was any impediment to my staying popular, fuck it. Fuck her. Who needs her? Never heard of her. And so, consciously or unconsciously, I set about a lifelong self-curating process that I've only in the last few years begun to try and put the brakes on. But that pool party invite shone in my pocket, and with it all the promise of...something. 

**********

What is it? What's the heroin, the MSG, the irresistible thing at the heart of popularity? If I've thrown my purest self away all these years chasing after it, what's its glamour?  All these unconscious things work better when they're allowed to keep sneaking around in the dark, and if I do have some kind of essential self I've smothered in its name, I want to meet as much of her as I can before I die. So I want to know what I was getting out of this pursuit. I want shine a flashlight on this god I was—had been—am still?—oh, shit—worshipping. Because let's face it, I'm probably not done unwinding this. It's too potent. 

What's the payoff? What's the high? What was worth selling myself out for? 

Looking back at the places and times where I knew I was in possession—at the parties and in the living rooms, at the kegs at the beach, getting the nod at the music shows and in the hallways, huddled by the lockers and gossiping at the sleepovers—I remember a feeling of plushness, of luxury. I felt like I was consuming luxury goods, or that I myself had become luxury goods. Pre-drinking (so before the age of thirteen) the feeling of popularity was bright and vibrating, flashing back and forth between security and fear, since this was all new and I couldn't trust it. But drinking soon became part of it, and then other substances, so it gets harder to separate what it felt like to be popular from what it felt like to be drunk or high, that lush, muffled hedonism.

I think the fundamental pleasure was a pleasure of covering up. There's a certain pleasure in being exposed, of becoming more naked, but then there's the pleasure of blankets, of armor. It's a relief and relaxation that comes from knowing you're protected. And then there's a sort of group white noise that protects you from your own quiet, your own depths. It's comforting, like going to sleep with the television on.

********** 

For my thirteenth birthday, my Great-Uncle Harry gave me a handwritten note on yellow legal paper. (I found it a few months ago, after all these years, but it's gone missing again. I'm frustrated because I wanted to quote it here. House! Stop eating my things!) 

I have to tell you a little bit about Harry. He was my grandmother Dora's younger brother, and though Granny scared me plenty, Harry scared me more. He had tan, leathery skin, a hawk nose, a wild white shock of hair that came nearly to his shoulders, the thickest and ugliest Dutch accent you could ever unscramble, and he smelled constantly of tea tree oil. I could not deal. Well, I could have dealt if he'd been a sweet old uncle, but Harry, like Dora, was gruff stuff. He was a chiropractor (name drop coming, sorry, but it's too weird and good—he was Martin Sheen's chiropractor!) and he practiced homeopathy, and most unnervingly of all, he was clairvoyant, like Granny. And he had no time for whatever he deemed bullshit. Like, for example, all of music except for Beethoven. And thirteen-year-old girls who didn't care about their inner lives at all, but only cared about being popular. Also on his bullshit list.

Harry and his wife Mari were staying with us right around my birthday. One afternoon, my brother and Uncle Harry and I were sitting around the dining room table, and the conversation turned to chakras. Harry was talking to us about the crown chakra, the one that hovers a few inches over the top of the head. He was saying that this is the chakra that connects us to the greater whole, to the universe/Divine and to the rest of humanity. If this one is open, your spiritual development is pretty well under way, and if it's not...well, it's not. And then he walked behind my chair and held his hand a few inches over my head, testing, and then grunted and walked back to his chair and sat down. He didn't look too impressed. 

I burned with the dismissal. I felt self-conscious about the sparkly pink lipstick I was wearing, and how shallow he must have thought I was to be wearing it. I was only partially human, it felt like, something for the reject pile. "This one's no good. Toss it."

When my birthday came, he gave me that note. Now we're fucked because I can't find it, but it was written out like a small poem, and the gist was that if you only pay attention to externals, and miss listening to your internal voice, your internal music, you're lost. 

I didn't like my present at all.

**********

What makes a person become popular? Good looks will take you pretty far, but they won't take you all the way if some other things aren't in place. But there's a baseline of reasonable physical attractiveness, some minimum that has to be met to get in the door. And then there seems to be something like a personal Teflon coating that's another prerequisite, a kind of shell off of which things can roll. You can't be too obviously vulnerable. And if you're the reactive type, you better default to something like belligerence. If your Teflon coating cracks, you need to be able to repel attacks/insults/tests. If you're not sufficiently invulnerable, you have to be able to intimidate. 

You also have to be able to monitor and minimize your faux-pas, which means you need to be attuned to social rules. And you may need to roll with some kind of necessary blandness, keep something like negative space available so people can project cool stories/acceptable roles on to you without the interruption of too much contradictory quirk. The presence of a few markers—good looks, a kind of toughness, maybe some humor, the right clothes—and the absence of particular problems (too much vulnerability or the wrong idiosyncrasies/physical flaws/pants) and then a shape starts to show. 

When you've presented the right dots to be connected—without showing your wrong dots—then people can take over and finish out the sketch of you so that it's a success. You're not complete, see, until you've been rubber-stamped. (God forbid you imagine you were born complete, or that you've remained somehow independently complete. Bzzt!) Some kind folks who have their self-presentation all worked out might throw you some advice so you can get ship-shape quicker. And once you've got the hang of it and the invitations start rolling in, keeping up your presentation is addictive, like messing around with Instagram filters. You don't have to accept yourself exactly as you are, or present yourself exactly as you are. Work those dials. 

**********

My friend Kris, who'd been my closest pre-popularity friend in junior high, whom I dumped for the popular kids after an arm-punching incident (I got mad about something and punched her as hard as I could in the arm, she laughed and said I punched like a kitten, and boom. Didn't talk to her for three years), was into something called Rugged Individualism. I was like, what even is that? That's not a thing you can be! That's not on the menu! But she didn't see it like that, and a Rugged Individualist she was. I remember one day during freshman year when she wore jeans and a denim shirt, both of which were embroidered all up and down with bees and ladybugs and sunflowers and god knows what, all of which was so far outside the current pale that I could barely believe my eyes. On the outside I scoffed, but I secretly admired her balls. You had to be rugged as fuck to rock ladybugs on your clothes in high school. I totally punched like a kitten in that regard.

**********

Once, in college, a friend from high school visited me for a weekend. This was during my junior year, when I'd dropped out of my sorority because I'd decided it was cooler not to be in one. I wore black all the time and had taken up smoking, and I fancied myself a cool, alternative type. I had a cool, alternative boyfriend who was in a band and everything. I had it going on, I thought. And my friend, who was going to a state school and getting a communications degree, was still wearing all pink like she did in high school, and she was bright and sunny and ditzy like she was (and was popular for) in high school, and I thought that was all wrong. I was embarrassed by her. This wasn't what to do now. You had to be darker now, and different, to be cool. I couldn't wait for her to leave. Oh, I was growing up so well. Boy, did I adapt. 

**********

Curate yourself long enough and intensely enough and you not only won't know how to stop, but you eventually won't even know you're doing it any more. When I was 31, back when I was an actor, I signed up for a nine-month-long acting intensive at a studio here in Seattle. This was a Meisner class, and any theatre folks reading this will know right away what that signifies. Sanford Meisner was a legendary acting teacher whose technique was based on wringing emotional truth out of you come hell or high water, and my teacher, Robin Lynn Smith, was Seattle's finest conduit for the technique. 

The class was grueling and golden and revelatory. I only lasted three months. 

During the first stretch of this Meisner training, we did a lot of what they call repetition exercises, where you sit across from a partner and, using only the simplest observations of each other (and the repetitions of those observations) as dialogue, you take in what you see across from you, call it out as truthfully as you can, and then react to each other from the gut. It sounds simple, and it should be, but it isn't. It's as loaded and complicated as the conditioning you walk in the door with, which in my case was way more loaded and complicated than I had any idea. 

I'd be in a repetition with my partner in front of the class, and I'd think I was just being straightforward, and Robin would yell, "Stop it! Tina, stop that!" I'd get confused and flustered, and keep going, not knowing what to stop, and Robin would yell, "Tina! Stop being nice!" And I was like STOP YELLING AT ME I'M NOT BEING NICE I CAN'T FEEL THAT I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT I'M JUST BEING ME.  

I was trapped inside something and I couldn't even see it. I'd built an expedient container for myself, one that brought me friends and didn't make trouble, and I couldn't figure out where it was, much less how to get out. The repetition exercises were fraught and usually ended up getting heated, too, like you were constantly having fights with your closest friends. The more honest I was, the scarier and more exhausting it got. 

One rainy afternoon at my house, I was doing repetition with my partner, a handsome, gentle, slightly awkward athlete named Tim, and the exercise took an unexpected turn. I can't for the life of me tell you exactly what we were observing in each other, but the risks we took in expressing what we saw landed us—just for that afternoon, and totally innocently—in love. Not lust, but love, a romantic love, something pure and courtly. Tons of clothing came off, it felt like, but no fabric. It was shocking and a little nerve-wracking to get my guarded social being out of the way and allow it to happen, but damned if it didn't show the payoff for revealing myself. I'd never passed an hour like it. 

After I dropped out of the class, I got a little homemade card in the mail from Tim, an index card that he'd collaged on one side with triangles of silver foil art paper. He said he understood why I was dropping out, even if he was disappointed, and that he wouldn't forget the hour we'd spent in my house, that he felt that what we'd shared there had been real. I loved the card, and I agreed. In a lifetime of posturing and hiding and positioning, that clear, pure hour rang out, something to keep as a talisman and a possibility. 

**********

On the way to Joanna's pool party, riding in the back of my mom's car, my friend Tanya and I gasped and giggled and talked in code about who was going to be there, and what music we were going to hear, which cool songs, and we loved that my mom wouldn't be able to figure out what we were talking about. Why should she? She was a mom, not a person. Only our people needed to know.  

When we got to Joanna's, everyone was there, as promised. The boys threw themselves sideways into the pool over and over, the girls stood around the pool and watched the boys, Joanna's parents wandered around making distracted chit-chat and keeping an eye out, and nothing interesting happened. Not one thing. No good conversation, nothing. The most super-popular people were all smiling and laughing and seemed to be having fun, but all my excitement evaporated, replaced by surprising dispassion. I was bored, which amazed me. I didn't actually like a lot of these people. I didn't resonate with them. We weren't really anything to each other. I'd had more fun at Kris's house the year before, listening to Black Sabbath and making prank phone calls. The only thing this party had going for it was brand-name personnel, the A-list, which was what I wanted, which was nothing. But the herd was here, the comfort of the herd. I didn't need to like each of them, did I? I didn't want to stop wanting what I wanted, this popularity, but it didn't have anything in it, not in and of itself. 

I enjoyed this observation about as much as I enjoyed Uncle Harry's birthday note, and ignored it just as hard. 

When I did find Harry's note a few months ago, I felt a pang—not of insult this time, but something else. I read it over, and I got it. It wasn't that he didn't like me, or that he thought I was bullshit. He was worried about me. He wanted me to participate in actual life, the real thing, as myself, and not a facsimile. I got it in an instant. I misjudged him (even that fucking tea tree oil, which stinks, but is terrifically antiseptic). He didn't want me going through life juggling two versions of myself, the ideal one for public consumption and the worst one, to be frantically hidden away. He just wanted me to know myself, and steer by something real. 

self-consciousness

Here's what: I'm driving down the street...let's call it yesterday. I've got the windows down, and the new mixed CD I just made for the car is playing. The sun is out, it's hot but not too hot, the fan is on, and I don't have any immediate problems. There is no crisis on deck. I'm healthy, my family's good, everybody's hanging in. I'm not in a quarrel with anybody, I don't have any major aches or pains. I'm just out to buy some shoes. I love buying shoes. 

By all rights, this should be a golden moment. But we just had a party the day before, and my brain has decided to fuck with this lovely afternoon. I try not to do it, but I keep projecting myself into my guests' brains, planting judgments I think they might have had about our house, my hostessing, the music, the food, etc. My brain throws out stupid questions every two minutes: did _______ think my house was the wrong size? Did __________ like/hate the music? Did ___________ come out of obligation? I wave the questions off like flies over and over. I don't know! Who cares? God, shut up! But the constant re-arrival of the questions and the sour feeling that comes with each one hexes the drive. 

Self-consciousness is jive and it ruins everything it touches. I'm talking about that pinching little presence that whispers to you that you're wrong somehow, fundamentally, in your very being. That if you're not currently embarrassed, you should be, and if you're not feeling insecure, you're missing something. Vigilance, dread, all related to who you are. The threat is from within. The call is coming from inside the house. 

It does, it ruins everything. Self-consciousness mars performances and auditions and interviews and dates, it sucks all the sex out of sex, and it's hell at school. I remember being the new girl at my junior high, jumping in at 8th grade when everybody already knew each other, and the miasma of self-consciousness I waded through from dawn to dusk. I wore white pants one day in September, and I remember sitting near the front of my history class in a state of terror that my period would arrive and bloom red between my legs, my ears attuned to all the small sounds of my classmates. Was that a snicker? Is it happening? Has the blood crept up to my back pockets? And then my bra suddenly unhooked itself in the back and my hand shot up so I could be excused to go to the bathroom. I ran and dove into a stall, fixed my bra and then shoved my pants down to confront my sea of blood, which of course wasn't there. Everything was pristine. I stayed in the bathroom as long as I could, putting off my return to the battlefield.  

**********

An acquaintance of mine wrote a piece for The Stranger recently about a brutal strain of bodily self-consciousness that strikes him every summer, which I imagine at least half of the reading public recognizes themselves in. As a woman with "imperfections"—God, so dumb. We're the only animals that do this shit to ourselves. -That doe has fat thighs. -You call that a bikini body, squirrel? -Fuck that giraffe! He thinks he's such a bigshot! -Yeah, he's successful, but he's going a little soft in the haunch, if you know what I mean—I'm familiar with this feeling to the point of boredom. I can't keep caring about my arms/ass/knees/whatever. It's too hot and summer is too long. Also I'm old and married and not trying to pick up dudes, which is freeing. Dave already signed the papers. But the essential horror at the center of his piece—we all carry it, or something like it, whether we just got a lucky kernel or we're dragging around mounds of it. And I'm tired of this shit. I'm mad at it, on all our behalves. 

**********

I used to collect books about the French. It was a favorite genre of mine, How to Understand/Be Like the French. I have historically been a little obsessed with French people—Parisians in particular—because they have a reputation for being tough to crack, which is catnip to my self-conscious, people-pleasing side. They're like a Rubik's Cube that I was dying to solve. If I can learn to work the French, was my thinking, then I can work anyone. (An old college boyfriend once said he thought I was a little Machiavellian, and I was genuinely like WHAT IS THIS DUDE TALKING ABOUT, but in retrospect I think he was probably on to something.) Anyway, I'm a very smiley, ingratiating person. Annoying or not, that's my autopilot. And in Paris they hate that. They hate it when strangers smile at them; they think it's stupid, unearned, a little crazy, even. Now, my smiling seems pretty innocent to me. I think, let's be temporary sidewalk friends! Why not?  But when I unpack it, I think there's a little bit of "If a bomb falls on us all right now, the people I've smiled at will be my allies in the rubble and will be less likely to eat me when we run out of food." The Parisians aren't buying it. So in one book they said if you're a foreigner in Paris and you get invited, by miracle, to a dinner party, and it's your first time among that group of people (and possibly second or third), expect/plan to be a chair. Nobody is going to talk to you or care about you or engage with you, so pretend to be a chair and make peace with being furniture for the night. Don't take it personally. Just be invisible and pointless and suck it up. This is a self-consciousness exercise that makes my brain explode to contemplate. The worst! But also, and because of that, so fascinating! Probably medicinal as well. And it gets me thinking, where else might this be applicable? Anywhere? Everywhere? Why do we need to be taken in in a certain way all the time? Why do we need to—or even believe we can—control it? Be a chair! Who cares? 

**********

I flew to California with my brother a couple of years ago to take a class with him and give him a hand while he traveled, as he's disabled. He's been dealt a rough one in this life, bearing up under loads of physical and psychological pain. And he's also an amazing being, unlike anybody else I've ever met. David is brilliant and always, always, uncompromisingly himself. He has never trimmed or tailored his personality to his surroundings like I have. He doesn't do the opposite thing, either, where you get aggressively individualistic in that kind of defensive way. He just does him, as they say, and he always has, ever since we were kids. Anyway, we were at the airport, and he had his big walking stick with him, with the silver cobra head and ruby eyes. It's a not-fucking-around walking stick that can conceal a sword. It's crackers. (The sword was not traveling with us, naturally.) He also had heavy crystal necklaces around his neck in bunches, along with a bag around his neck with a big, rose quartz crystal ball inside. We're going through security and he's unloading all his stuff, emptying his pockets (equally packed with talismans and dealie-bobbers of all kinds), taking his crystal ball out of the bag, explaining to the security personnel what everything was, all with this perfect, pure, absolute lack of self-consciousness. Total innocence. I watched him with a kind of cringing joy, like, hey! You can't have fifty thousand items at security—especially fifty thousand super magical items! This is adorable and a little embarrassing! But then there he went, and he was so damn pure and sweet, and turns out, why couldn't he? You can! You can. You can bring a crystal ball and a wizard walking stick and eleventy billion doodads through the airport and nobody dies. On the contrary, everyone fell in love with him, as people do wherever he goes. My admiration for him—which was already a pretty unwieldy Macy's-Thanksgiving-Day-Parade-style-balloon-type-deal—soared. What I wouldn't give for that particular kind of unselfconsciousness! 

**********

When Dave and I were on our honeymoon in Hawaii nine years ago, I lay on the bed one morning and practiced disappearing. It's a fond memory. I was wearing this diaphanous white cotton nightgown that a friend of the family had given me as a shower present, which felt like nothing on my skin, it was so light. I was gazing up at the ceiling fan, feeling so good. There was a total absence of bummers. Our relationship was blissful, the temperature was perfect and balmy, there was nowhere to be. And it popped into my head to try disappearing, as an experiment. Not in a David Copperfield way, but in a Buddhist, is-the-self-illusory?-then-let's-see-it-go kind of way. Nowhere to be? How about also nobody to be? Let's try it. I didn't intend it to be any kind of meditation, either. I was just curious. I wanted to see what would happen if I let go of my affiliation with my history, my memories, my understanding of myself. What would it feel like? Would it feel as good as this nightgown? Would it feel like taking off a nightgown? It felt interesting and good for the drips and drops I could sustain it for, whatever I was doing or stopping doing. And when I look back now, I know that hell yes, that was meditation. On the money.

**********

That experiment begged the question: does a me always need to be present? Does it need to be so up-front-and center all the time, driving everything? I'm really intrigued by this concept of the self as an illusory thing. (Those Buddhists are always throwing something interesting out there.) The self is, what, a trick of the light? A giant practical joke? As a someone who's frequently experienced the self as a burden, I'm all tell me more. I'm part-horrified, part-fascinated by the idea that this me, this central locus of consciousness, is flimsy or fake, that I can participate in existence without it, even though something might die off in the process. 

Because there are two different levels of self-consciousness I'm talking about here. There's painful consciousness of the self, and then there's just plain old consciousness of the presence of the self, an "I" taking it all in. This big display all around us — how often do I take it in without folding a me into it, a me with opinions and memories and fantasies? Like, for example,  say I'm driving around again, and there's a song on. At the very least there's an "I like this," or "I don't like this." And I like or don't like the weather, I'm rating it, and if it's a song I love, then it's me singing it, I fantasize that it's me. I wrestle me in there everywhere. Can't I be a chair in my own car for a second, and let music just be music, let the weather just be the weather? Do I have to insert myself all the time? 

And so what if my party and I aren't perfect? What if the worst were true, and everybody thought every bad thought I assigned them? So what? It's still a little revolutionary to me, the idea that what other people think of me is irrelevant, that my self-consciousness isn't preempting anything, isn't saving me from anything. Maybe my house is offensive! Maybe my music is objectively, scientifically bad! Maybe who cares! I get a thrill from this, which indicates hope. 

cherchez la femme

Tomorrow's my birthday. I'll be turning 45, which feels surreal, but I've been tooling around my forties long enough to buy it, I guess. I think it's true. 1969. The number's right. It all adds up. I'm middle-aged, no fighting it. And that's cool. It's a little improbable-feeling, but word on the street is that these birthdays keep feeling improbable until the grave, so I'm not alone, at least. 

My genes—those bringers of mixed blessings—hooked me up with a young face, which is nice now, but might possibly have stunted my maturity a little, since it's hard to feel all grown up when the people of the world have been pinching your cheeks since time began. In my first year of college, in fact, when I joined a sorority (Kappa Alpha Theta, whose...what do we want to call it, 'motto'—?—is "Theta for a Lifetime", though I ultimately went with the lesser-traveled "Theta for Two Years"), we had an awards night for our pledge class, where every young lady was honored for some notable personal quality. I was excited as the recognition made its way around the room. What fun thing were they going to honor me for? Girls were getting props for their athleticism, their toughness, their boy-craziness. Would it be my sense of humor? My fashion sense? My indomitable spirit? I couldn't wait to find out. And then it was finally my turn, and my pledge mom, Jennifer, stood up and lifted up a big, pale yellow placard emblazoned with the word "Youthfulness" in girly script, with some stupid fucking poem about youthfulness or whatever copied by hand beneath it, and everybody beamed at me while she said stupid things about how young and fresh I was, and I forced a smile instead of jumping up and yelling, "YOUTHFULNESS?? WHAT THE FUCK??" and kicking over a table like I wanted to.

Fucking let a woman be a woman, even if she isn't one yet, was my feeling. I was seventeen and the most virginal virgin ever. At a function that year with my favorite fraternity—Delta Tau Delta—where we all wore white t-shirts and got wasted and drew on each other with Sharpies, the same basic thing happened. The hottest senior Delt, upon whom I had a huge crush, stopped and wrote on my shirt, smiling. I made my way to the bathroom and twisted the shirt around so I could see what he wrote. It was the letter "V". Just a big V. It even took me a minute. V? What do you mean, V? V? And then it dawned on me. Goddamn it. 

All I wanted was to be a woman, from as early on as I figured out that girls became women. (Not hip to transgender issues as a tot.) I was like, let's get this show on the road, then. Let's move it. Mostly I wanted breasts. I stuffed my shirt with tissues when no one was looking, until I saw Half-Pint try it with apples on an episode of Little House on the Prairie, which looked promising. (Tip: nope.) In first grade, sitting at my little table of four people, I was possessed with the idea to fold my turtleneck over in a flap at the chest area and rig a proto-rack for myself. I was pleased with the results until some slobbery, total non-player at my table ogled my flap and I shut the operation down, chagrined.

What was a woman? How did you do it, besides with boobs? The women around me made their impressions, and I took subconscious notes. 

First, always, is Mom. We like our women beautiful, culturally, and I'd heard the news. My mom was beautiful, I was happy to see. And she knew she was beautiful, and I knew she knew it, because she told me how often she'd been told it in her life, which was often enough that she said it took her a while to figure out that it wasn't enough just to look good. She thought for a long time that this was her contribution, that she could just bring her face into a room and then chill, mission accomplished. Good deed done. 

I loved watching my mom get ready to go out on the town with my dad. Sometimes they'd head into New York City to see a play, sometimes they'd go square dancing. (Square dancing! I don't know why but it kind of kills me. My mom had/has a very swish, Eva-Gabor sort of European accent—she's from Finland—pronounces "darling" as "dah-ling", that kind of thing—and so the incongruity of square dancing as a hobby with her fancy lady voice gives me Green Acres feelings.) She'd put on a pretty dress, usually in some silky brown fabric of the 70s, and some Revlon lipstick, which was the only makeup she wore or needed. High heels. Pearls. I was in love. 

But home was her real domain, and domesticity was Aino's jam. Everything in our house was clean and fresh and pressed, and she cooked squishy, yummy food: cheese soufflé, Baked Alaska, potatoes in Bechamel sauce, Finnish crepes rolled up with brown sugar, waffles on weekends. And if we were entertaining, especially if we had some kind of VIP coming over, she got a real glint in her eye, something almost cocky. This was her sport. Nobody was too posh for her to impress. She presided over her end of the table in smug calm while our guests ooh'd and ah'd over their plates. 

As much of a charge as she got from entertaining, Aino came even more alive in the garden. She kept her pearls on but she knelt in the dirt and tugged and toiled all day, beaming at us from underneath her sun hat. Hard work, sunshine, nature: this was hers, only for her. Not for guests, not for her family, just a pure date my mom went on with her own life force. I saw how she came inside different after a day in the garden, dirty and tired and happy and real. Her voice sounded right. It didn't have a spin in it, or the sound of trying. 

And there was her mothering, of course. She said over and over to me and my brother that she'd wanted kids with a blind urge, and that she recommended that nobody have kids who isn't dazzled with the need for them like she was. She loved the job. She wanted the job, she loved the job, and she was built for it, especially the early childhood part, which is so endlessly physical. Clean this, feed that, change that, boom. I don't know how she did it, but she was ten steps ahead of all of that stuff. Seamless. It's obnoxious how seamless that was, I say now from experience. WTF, Aino? Nice bar to set. I'm not clearing it, by the way. I could stroll straight under it wearing a top hat.

She loved her children, too, which doesn't go without saying in our lineage. (Granny, you're up in a moment.) She was tender and devoted and cuddly, and always talked to us in a soft, sweet voice, even if it wasn't her post-garden voice. There were hugs, there was bedtime singing, and above all there was her gaze, which told us she was always happy to see us, which was no lie, no spin. 

That gaze is the biggest thing, I can feel it. Ground Zero, the central sun of my conception of womanhood. Care and attention. I can see you. That's what a woman is, someone who can see you. Someone who stops to see you, who helps you know you exist. 

And then there was Granny—read up here if you need to—whose gender seemed somehow beside the point. It wasn't on the table. She was the most powerful person in whatever room she was in. I don't know if that was true when my grandfather was alive, since he checked out before I could check that out, but it was unswervingly true afterward. I never once saw her defer to another living person. She had none of the softness that I associate with womanhood, and she didn't seem particularly allied with her gender, though she had female friends. (There was no sisterhood thing going on for either her or my mom, for that matter. Feminism was loud and shocking to Aino, and didn't draw any particular comment I can remember from Dora, whose force of personality made feminism seem almost unnecessary for her. And there sure the hell wasn't any sisterhood going on between the two of them.) 

We weren't close, Granny and I, so while she's burned into my consciousness, she didn't become one of my chosen female icons. My mental walls are not lovingly postered with her image. But I know she's deep in my mix, such was her power and her proximity for so long. Inspiration, cautionary tale, I don't know. Something to grow into, something to avoid becoming. I'm still unwinding her influence. No verdict yet, or maybe ever. 

Then there were the female friends of the family who flew or drifted in for visits. Goddesses. They were close enough to bring love with them—that gaze—but they were distant enough and were with us in short enough bursts that there was no time or space to calculate their flaws. So they didn't have any. Case closed.

There was Renée, a philosophy professor with big, beautiful, deep brown owl eyes who sat with us in front of the fire one New Year's Eve, leading me and my brother in Socratic dialogue about Plato's allegory of the cave. I was hypnotized. She was so respectful towards us, towards the power of our minds, and her cashmere sweater was so soft, and her voice was like coffee and honey. She spoke French to us with that voice sometimes—she had a little Jeanne Moreau about her—and I died of it. She was Peak Femininity. 

And there was Emily, my mom's friend, the daughter of her Spanish professor in college, who was a world traveler and operator in high political/diplomatic circles. She had a soft, posh voice like Renee's, and sat on our couch with a ballerina's posture, legs crossed just so. Emily was fearsomely correct. But she loved us. She was crazy about my mom and so she loved the rest of us by extension, and not by default, either. Really really. So her correctness and refinement wasn't a threat; it felt more like an asset, even. She was one of ours, and she knew so much about the world, and she gave advice that felt, because of her palpable love for us, conspiratorial instead of corrective. She gave you her full attention, asked you lots of questions, and then bubbled over with ideas for how you, with your specific gifts and talents, could basically take over the world. It was hot stuff, and you felt like you could photosynthesize her charisma and savoir-faire if you sat with her long enough. She was better than a movie star. 

Then there were the walk-ons: an older Australian woman named Elizabeth, for example, whom we sometimes saw at Indralaya, with a slender figure and long white hair. She was old, chronologically, but her hair and the wrinkles on her face were the only tells. In every other respect she would have taken that Youthfulness award in a heartbeat. I remember an afternoon when she and I walked around the camp collecting pebbles, and then we retired to her A-frame to turn them into mice with black markers, which was bliss. The mice were charming but the time and attention she lavished on me were the real goods. 

And there was Hilda, an elderly Scottish lady at Indralaya who used to hold my face and exclaim, "You look just like a Victorian cameo!"—"There she is, my Victorian cameo!"—which was so unnecessary/sweet, and made me feel like ten million bucks. To this day, I do like Hilda did and don't hold back with the compliments. They cost nothing and I'm a menace with them, trying to pay it forward, assaulting mostly elderly women at the grocery store with "What a beautiful scarf!" and "The color of that sweater is so luminous!" on the off chance I can give them that same thrill of being seen and appreciated that Hilda gave me.

There were the glamour girl walk-ons, too, but I'm less inspired to talk about them now. I'll just give a quick shout-out to Charlie's Angels and my friend Amy's mom, who was an Avon lady, whippet-thin and sexy-chic, with long dark hair and long burgundy nails. She was the only real lady I knew who could have been a Charlie's Angel, though she was always harried and grumpy in a way the Angels weren't. Quick personality/schedule overhaul and she would have been there. 

It's only recently that I learned that the phrase "cherchez la femme" doesn't just mean something along the lines of "Hey, women are cool/sexy, so track 'em down!" like I thought it did. I found out that the phrase, which originated with an Alexandre Dumas novel called The Mohicans of Paris, evolved to mean something like "If a man committed a crime, find out who the broad was who drove him to it, because let me tell you, IT WAS A BROAD." This blew my mind. Also: sigh. It was better the other way. I'm reclaiming it, though, right here, right now. I'm supplying my own meaning. I'm keeping the "go to the source" part, and erasing the "of the trouble" part. We give life, after all. You come from us. You come from Dad, too, but let's be real. We're the door. You want to know who you are? You know what to do. 

P.S. I always thought I would have a daughter, but no. Two sons came. (I wouldn't, obviously, have it any other way.) I really wanted to shepherd a little girl into womanhood, and then I remembered, oh. What else have I been doing all my life? Right.

desert song

I had some different plans for this post—I'd been thinking about friendship break-ups, and my increasing reverence for deep, active friendships, what a kind of crazy miracle they are—but the instinct to get into that evaporated and now I'm just going to talk to you about what's happening at this moment, what I'm thinking about at writing time. The friendship break-up thing, though, I'll return to that here at some point. I had a big one this last year, and that's a hot topic in my brain on the regular. But today the breeze has blown me somewhere so much nicer, and I want to go with it.

I've mentioned earlier that I've been working with this spiritual teacher, Jim, whom I chat with via Skype every couple of weeks. We had a session today, and I want to take you where we went. 

Where do I start? How much do I set you up with? I can't drop you in cold.

I'll just start at the beginning. That's always solid. 

I started working with Jim last November, a few months after the recovery needle started moving up after my huge mystery illness. (For those late to the game, short form is that I had a huge mystery illness in 2012/2013 that had me bedbound for a few months and then hospitalized for a couple of weeks, and then I got all the way better and I remain at 100%.) Those first few recovery months were just about gaining strength/catching my breath/enjoying life, but the illness itself was terrorizing and relentless. I want to talk about it sometime, but not today. Anyway, a few months after I came out of the hospital, I lost nearly half of my hair in a delayed stress response, which will maybe give you a sense of scale. (Hair's all back now, been back for about six months, she said, pulling the strands around front and kissing them, mwah mwah mwah.)

So my body was recovering, but my insides needed some care. The illness was so damn medically mysterious, and I'm the sort that starts to wonder what might have contributed to it energetically or emotionally, and even if nothing did, even if my body randomly flipped out and broke for a while, I wasn't taking any chances. Once I was healthy enough, I was like fu-hu-huck this, let's grab a shovel and some mining helmets. We're getting a—what's a Sherpa for going underground?—one of those—and going in. 

Because I could feel it, while I was sick, that there was some kind of energetic mass deep inside me, like a collapsed star down in my tummy. Sometimes I could feel it move around, uncoiling and releasing, like plumes of black smoke. I made an MS Paint drawing of this while I was sick, what it felt like. Here it is:

That was the illness for me on a metaphorical level, what it seemed like it was trying to do for all those months. Cleaning house. Don't ask me yet what was getting cleaned, because I don't know, and I don't know if I'll ever know, and I don't know if I'll ever need to fully understand. My own stuff. Family stuff. Ancestral stuff. Quién sabe? But holy smoke, I must have had some kind of long-term ecological disaster reverberating down there. Gulf-of-Mexico, BP-level crud accumulating in me over who-knows-what span of time. That's what it felt like, anyway.

So, yeah, there was this something to deal with. And then Jim and I started working together. I'd approached him in the summer, after I'd taken a free class of his—in which I'd been impressed because he spotted that mass-feeling-thing down in my whereabouts and described it to me without my having mentioned anything about it—and he was like, nope. Go chill for a couple more months. You're still stabilizing. And then November came, and he asked me to meditate for half and hour every day, and we'd get on the Skype every other Tuesday, and dig in. 

It's hard to describe a typical session. It's not therapy, we're not talking about very many of the specifics of my day-to-day life. There's an improvisational vibe. It's like I'm one big, shifting metaphor, and we look at whatever gets kicked up to represent my internal terrain on any given day. We started out spending a lot of time in a kind of genie-bottle-cave right in my middle—sometimes inundated with flood-waters, sometimes clear and dry. I always had a little flame in there to illuminate things. Sometimes it was birthday-candle pitiful, sometimes it was campfire-sized, but it finally got gigantic/dazzling enough to break the genie-bottle-cave frame and deposit us in some different scenes. I've found myself at Indralaya, I've found myself in creepy, flame-extinguishing blackness, I've found myself in a forest. We take a look around, I desribe what it feels like, we see what it's connected to if we can, or we just note it and move on. 

We're getting to the good part, the thing that made me write this post.  

That desert picture up top, that's as close as I could find to give you a representation of the new terrain we discovered a couple of weeks ago. Amazingly, Google-Image doesn't have any shots from my subconscious, or superconscious, or wherever this place is. I don't know how I got there, I don't remember what came before it in the session where it appeared, but it's the best place I've ever been, so I want to talk about it. I want to say what it's like. I visit it sometimes on my own, and it's better than any vacation. Potent, alive, like a great dream that's broken out of its nighttime box and become real somehow, as real as my backyard. 

It's a pale, sandy, baked-out desert landscape. The air is still and warming, and it's usually dusk. I'm sitting there at a little encampment by myself. Home base. Maybe there's a rug and maybe there's a white tent, a kind of Laurence-of-Arabia setup, but the physical details are secondary to the feeling there. The first feeling is of permanence. This place, this warmth, this perfect stillness, they will always be available to me. It's not going anywhere. I will never be denied access, I can tell. And with the permanent feeling is a sense that this place makes all things okay.  There is no bitch or worry or heartache or fear I can arrive at this spot bearing that doesn't start getting transmuted instantly. 

When my husband proposed to me ten years ago on Balmoral Beach in Sydney, it was one of those transcendent moments where all the bad feelings in the world felt like they'd drained away. I couldn't feel a drop of darkness anywhere on Earth for the life of me. I wondered a little bit if we were still on Earth. The sensation lasted, I don't know, fifteen minutes? Half an hour? I mean, the whole day was glorious, but this shot of pure sublimity dissipated relatively quickly.

And back in 2001, I traveled with my then-boyfriend and his family to England, and we made a stop in Bath. The Roman baths there in Bath, the main attraction, where people went through the centuries to heal from illness—holy gods. You can feel in ten minutes how it came to be a healing Mecca. I sat by that pool and I never wanted to get up. The air there was so tranquil and humming. It felt like it was doing something, you know? Bittersweet, because after an hour we had to go, and I wanted years.

The love and brightness on that beach, the healing vibe by the baths: mush them together and we enter the territory of this desert image/experience/thingy. But the kick is, this place is mine. I own it. I have it, I can't lose it. It may even be me, the ground of my being underneath all my history and habits and specifics. That's Jim's theory. I can't speak to that and I don't care. All I know is that every time I take myself there, it's complete, instant respite, a heaven-feeling, the spa of spas. I don't know what it is, but it makes me feel so solid to know it's there, like I've discovered an endlessly renewable ace up my sleeve.

word processor

Writer's Block (Richard Ahnert, 2011)

My friend Paul Mullin has tagged me in a blog tour meme hashtag deal called #MyWritingProcess, which he's tackled like a champ over at his place. Paul's one of those capital W writers I talked about a couple of weeks ago, a prolific and talented playwright who's bowing out of his old form for a while to jump into memoir. Go read about his process, but after you read mine, because he's got a lot more to offer you than I do and I want to look good for a minute.

You might notice that I wrote about writing only two weeks ago, and maybe it seems soon to circle back and hit it again, but this prompt appeared now and I don't have another topic wrestling for supremacy this week. So I'm going in. I promise next week's post won't be about writing, unless it is. 

So these are the four questions on deck with this meme:

What am I working on?

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Why do I write what I do?

How does my writing process work?

Let's see how faithful I am to this little group. I can tell you right now that every single question makes me squirm. But it's good to squirm sometimes. It's tonic. I'll fight through it.

What am I working on?

Are we talking about on the page? Or in my mind? Because I've got a whole Walter-Mitty-esque panoply of things getting worked on in my imagination. If we're talking about cold, hard facts, then you see everything I'm working on every Wednesday. 

But if we tweak the phrasing of the question, I can give you a little more. If the question is "What are you working on or toward?", then the answer is threefold: I'm working toward a memoir, I'm working on an application for a writing residency, and I'm working toward getting essays published in places that are not this blog. I'm making the distinction because I'm dealing with some resistance, like I talked about a couple of weeks ago. Words—you know, words, the currency of this whole endeavor—are not piling up right now, except for here. But I've made moves toward these goals. I've pitched a few things, published a couple of teeny ones, and am waiting to see if a particular pitch I've made will fly for a piece I'm dying to do, which would happen a few months from now. 

The memoir, though. Oof. It's a slippery fucker. I have the subject but not the story, even though I've been hanging out with/working on this thing for three years. Right now I have a handful of scenes, an incomplete list of scenes I haven't written yet, and an ancient mass of vamping waste product. The lack of clear handle on the story makes me want to pull my hair out. What exactly am I tracing? Where does it land? I know the terrain, I have a sense of the transformation I'm undergoing as narrator, but I want to know where the rainbow ends, for fuck's sake, which I can't find out until I stack up the scenes and find out the actual truth.  I want to see it before I make it, but I can't, and it's turning me into a stubborn little donkey. It's dark up there on that path! I'm not going. You can't make me. What if I accidentally walk off a cliff? Fuck you. 

But this is the project, this is the thing that if I don't do it, the last word on my deathbed will be one long obscenity. I want it and resist it more than anything. I've blown it up too big in my mind, too, like writing and, god willing, publishing it it will change my life and validate my whole existence. I have to shrink it, so I can get to it. 

I'm afraid. Fear, stupid fucking fear, my archenemy. I'm afraid of that cliff, or all the cliffs. I'm afraid to tell the truth and alienate people, even dead people. I'm afraid of writing a dumb book, or a shallow one, or one that just misses the mark. 

I got kicked out of college once. I got kicked out, and then they let me back in, and then I freaked out, got paralyzed and flunked out in the end, anyway. I had trouble writing my papers, because I didn't want anyone to see my opinions, because they were probably stupid. My professors were like what the fuck is wrong with you, girl and I couldn't tell them. When I was lobbying to be let back in after they kicked me out, I had to go in and face this gigantic room of faculty and plead my case. Someone asked me the "What the fuck is wrong with you, girl?" question, and I tried my best to articulate it. "I think it's perfectionism," I ventured. My Abnormal Psych professor was particularly scornful about this theory, saying, "I would hardly call your lack of work the result of perfectionism!" and I wanted to throw my purse at his head. Fuck him. It was and is. 

Anyway. That's what I'm working on. Things, and perfectionism. 

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I so badly want to tell this question to go scratch, because I hear a touch of what makes my work unique/better than others of its genre, the answer to which is I don't know/nothin'. But the part of me that understands that marketing is a thing thinks I ought to take a stab at it. 

My genre is memoir/personal essay and...blog? Is that a genre? Shit, man. Am I doing something different? I guess this blog is really all we can go on, since it, you know, exists. I think a strength and a weakness in this blog is that I don't stick to one tone. I write humorous things when the spirit moves me, but as often as not I go the other way. It's nice that I can swing both ways but it makes it tough to pinpoint what I'm doing all up in here. Maybe that's the difference. A wide straddle? This fucking question. You tell me, folks! 

I swear a lot. That's something. I swear because that's how I talk and think. I can clean up when I need to, but I like to be free and tell the truth, and swearing is shorthand for the truth/occasionally necessary to convey the truth. 

This is the worst question. I don't know, man! I will inevitably have to do better with this, but not tonight.

Why do I write what I do?

Why do I write about myself? Oh, this one's easy. Because of my childhood! 

That's flip but it's true. The drive to grab hold of the mic rose from a way-back feeling of invisibility (inaudibility?), and I think I'm perpetually trying to establish that I exist. 

How does my writing process work?

For starters, Tuesdays. Tuesday's my day. I have one inviolable writing day a week, thanks to the good loving/blockade running of my husband. He covers my ass as long as I want on Tuesdays, since I publish this blog just after midnight at the top of Wednesday. Time is the sine qua non for a writer, and so far I own one day. I need another one, or some more pieces. I occasionally pounce on a not-Tuesday, but a real standing date with my brain would help. We've got two little kids, so we're both struggling for time. 

But, okay, so it's Tuesday. We have the when. Where is either sitting on my bed or at my favorite café. I'm there right now. Check it out:

This is my office away from home. When I did intuitive readings for a living, I either did them on the phone at home or here. I love this joint. The coffee is great, the walls are red, I like the music, the crowd is sort of nicely varied and schlumpy-ish. What more could I ask?

And this is what I write on:

An iPad mini, seen here on my other office. I love the portability, and I've grown to love autocorrect. And it seems casual. What, I'm just throwing down a few words! Nothing to stress over. I used to occasionally write longhand, but my handwriting is horrible when I'm thinking and writing fast. If I want to know what I said, I better type—that is, unless I go calligraphy-slow, which nope. 

I will pull out pen and paper, though, if I'm brainstorming, which has become a go-to part of my process. I took a brainstorming class at the Hugo House taught by the smart and delightful David Schmader, and I'm so glad I did. It's the one part of my process that has specific, formal steps—even if they're very simple ones—which are a comfort when I'm flailing. 

That's the concrete stuff. I can't speak to anything else, I think. It feels premature to discuss anything more esoteric. I'll do that when I'm a Writer. I'm conscious that I'm developing as a writer, and part of that development has to do with ownership. I don't fully own it yet. For the w in my writer to go capital, I need to fight for it harder: fight for the time, fight to push my voice out there in the work itself, fight to be read by a wider audience, and remunerated for my work whenever possible, and most of all to value my own work enough to do all of that. I'm working on it. 

And now it's time to pass the tag baton. I'm going to toss this in the direction of a couple of women whose work I love, in different genres. My pals Suzanne Morrison and Keri Healey are capital Ws. Suzanne has written a memoir called Yoga Bitch (get it, read it—so smart, so charming) and is at work on a new one and also, I believe, on some short stories, one of which I've heard her read aloud, and it was the bomb. I wanted fifty more. Her voice is urbane and sharp and open and tender all at once, which is my favorite thing. And Keri Healey is a playwright. Her most recent production was a dark and brilliant piece called Torso, which rocked this town. Keri wades balls-out into tough subject matter, but her writing is also incredibly funny and personable. Seattle is lucky to have her, and I had the pleasure/challenge of performing in one of her plays while I was pregnant with my oldest son. I hope they take me up on it and spill. Keri doesn't have a blog, but hey, technicalities. She can borrow mine. 

There. I gave you all I could give you. Thanks to Paul Mullin for being curious and giving me something to write about this week, and for constantly encouraging me, which means a ton. Now you can go read his post, and the rest of his blog, and his plays while you're at it, and hold tight for his memoir. He's one of my favorite thinkers and he's got a pugilistic streak that I love. Or maybe the pugilistic part is the main part, and he's got a streak of tranquility. Whatever it is, I dig it. Go look. 

red light, green light

Starting back in January, when I made a commitment to pump life back into this blog and post once a week, I had a grace period for a couple of months where the topic for the next post would arrive well in advance, floating up to the top of my consciousness with a feeling of certainty and a few sentences ready to leap. It was a nice ride, all those ideas sidling up to me politely like little butlers, offering their services a cosmic minute before I needed them. 

Yes. Well. We've moved to a different part of the program. And, of course, I knew that golden age would pass. There are a lot of weeks under the every week umbrella. They just keep coming. One of my writing mentors, Bob Ray, talks about how much endurance is a part of the deal, and that's a big set of muscles getting worked right now, though not the only set. 

Sometimes I get hit with resistance so hard that I can barely keep my eyes open. I took two long, powerful, inadvertent naps in front of the blank page just today, trying to figure out what the fuck I was going to talk to you about here, and that was after a good night's sleep. I didn't want to go under, I fought it, but it was as though I'd wandered into a field of enchanted poppies, or been slipped a roofie by some internal saboteur, which I actually think is about right. My money's on the notion that this move to develop endurance as a writer is starting to challenge some old identity, and whatever identity that is is not having it.

Soon after college, I remember hanging with my friend Tanya, complaining to her about how out of shape I was. Tanya offered, sensibly, that I could go the gym. And I was annoyed, like, THAT is not the POINT. I am not looking for SOLUTIONS here. If you drag solutions into a thing, you don't get to keep your beautiful, tragic destiny, and I guess my beautiful, tragic destiny was to be an under-appreciated weakling or something? If I went to the gym, I would become a whole different person, and nobody just becomes a whole different person. Doi. I didn't examine this resistance, either. You get an idea wedged in there and it's going to look solid at a glance, so you just leave it.

Lately, I'm having this thing where I burst into tears of longing whenever I hear of somebody getting a book published. They don't have to be real people, either. I saw Her for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and when Joaquin Phoenix's character was surprised with the news that a publisher was turning his letters into a book, I had a heart pang and a little sob popped out of me, so dramatic it was almost comical. But news of book publication, faux or no, hits me like I'm one of the people left behind after the Rapture. First it's like, wow! Yay! Rapture! How 'bout them apples?! And then I'm like, oh, no. I'm down here among the damned. Everybody's up there eating potato salad in heaven or whatever and I'm stuck down here wandering around some horrible housing development underneath a gloomy, apocalyptic sky. 

You don't even have to say it. You don't. You want to, I can feel it, YOU SENSIBLE TANYAS. You're about to say, how 'bout just writing a book, doofus? I got that part. I'm working on it. I'm just stalled, so I'm popping open the hood to see what's gumming up the machinery. 

Like, for example, I have some ideas about what real writers are. I know I'm a writer, but I'm talking about Writers. Besides being published, they're like something. You got two kinds. There are your tough, whiskey-swilling, unstoppable, Indiana Jones motherfuckers who outrun boulders and hang off the bottoms of moving trucks and punch Nazis and just get the shit done, no matter how beaten up they get in the process. They have no time for little armchair dreamers. Talk to them after you've retrieved a couple of arks. And then you have your academic, straight-A, Ravenclaw types in sweater sets, typing away primly, amassing endless stacks of pages. They have no time for Type B fuckups, people who turn in their homework late or not at all. They peer down over their glasses long enough to sniff that you all got the assignment at the same time, so you really have no excuse. 

So that's the gamut. Real writers, right there. Never mind that I know a good bunch of real writers, by my definition, and they're generally delightful human beings whose company I enjoy. I'm still toting these ideas around, which is a problem because a) I'm not like either of The Two Kinds of Writers and b) I don't want to hang around with them or be rejected/mocked by them. Why go for success as a writer if it means I'm applying to swim in and then drown amidst a pond full of dismissive assholes? That sounds bad, right? Totally bad. Give up. 

What's a bit more radioactive, and trickier, is bumping up against an outdated identity that doesn't want to let go. I can feel it in there. I felt it in there today as I struggled to stay awake. The work I've been doing—writing work and spiritual/emotional/whatever-you-want-to-call-it  work—has dug up what feels like an ancient statue, a porcelain-hard Tina-likeness, something that's calcified over hundreds of years of reinforcement. (Let's agree that I could be a few hundred years old for these purposes, okay? It's just a metaphor. It's all a dweam.) 

This Tina-statue is an unassuming, supplicant, pitiful little creature. A wimp-angel. When I look at her face, I can tell that she needs permission for the least move. She looks flinchy, like she's been beaten, and she's just trying to sneak along under the radar so she won't get hurt. I don't know exactly where she came from, but being a writer probably feels to her like a terrifying move. If you're going to say things out loud to people over and over, you're probably going to say the wrong thing—over and over, even—which is inviting the worst kind of trouble. And I think when I say the worst, I mean the worst. A survival thing. 

Okay.

So there she is. You have to walk a fine line when you pull up something like this, I think. Deciding this is a made-up problem and plowing forward disregarding it feels like a mistake, like kicking the problem down the road. But there's a heavy victim element in this statue-image that I don't want to romanticize/further attach myself to, either. 

A friend of mine, a Real Writer, likens the writing process to doing dishes. You just get in there and do them. Sometimes it goes quickly, and sometimes you hit a patch that takes a bunch of scrubbing, and you just have to hang in and scrub, and you just do it. I like this. I like the simplicity of it, the lack of drama. I feel like something similar goes for undoing old conditioning, only the scrubber in this case is just pure attention. There's something cleansing in plain old attention, something that can dissolve anything with enough patience, no matter how hard and baked-in the mess is. It's enough just to look. 

clair de lune

I'm lying in our bedroom on a clear, full moon night. We have a skylight, so at the right moment the moon appears in the middle with a shock of brightness. I reach for my iPod, slip on my headphones and lie back with Debussy. For the longest time, I didn't care for Clair de Lune, but one day that turned, and now when the moon shines into my room like this, I let Debussy describe it to me. These are my favorite nights, special nights, rare nights. The light travels everywhere. Nothing is hiding. I feel safe in a way that I don't feel most nights, which I recognize each time with surprise. 

I tense up a little bit at bedtime, I guess. I stay up late, putting off the moment when I'm going to have to turn off the light, let go of diversions and become vulnerable. It's a carryover from childhood, when I'd lie in bed and beg the powers-that-be not to make me clairvoyant that night. Every night I put it out there as hard as I could, "I don't want to see anything, I don't want to see anything, I don't want to see anything," over and over until I fell asleep. I didn't want to see what Granny saw. My mom likes to tell me that when I was very small, I'd complain about things I saw hovering at the foot of my bed. I don't have any memory of that, but something sure went into this frantic drive to stay unclairvoyant. Anyway, some of that lingers. It feels a teeny bit dangerous to get so quiet at night, to give over, to stop, like that's the cue for unseen forces to creep in and get their game on. Forces from within, forces from without, I don't know. Forces. 

Something will come, I fear, and untie some knot* holding my third eye closed, and I'll be overrun with needy spirits trying to get messages to their loved ones. Like if my third eye opens, some red light will automatically start flashing on the astral plane, some rinky-dink "open for business" sign in a bad astral neighborhood, and all the etheric junkies and thugs will crowd my bedside, taunting me and tugging at me, and I'll have no way to make them disappear. 

*Whatever I have rigged up there feels way more elaborate than a knot, frankly. If you ever saw the show Get Smart, you'll remember the opening montage where Maxwell Smart walks into headquarters through a series of heavy, mechanized doors that slam shut behind him the second he's through. Bam, wham, whoosh, thud, whomp. I installed about a hundred of these over the course of my childhood, I'd estimate, every "I don't want to see anything" a nut or bolt or square inch of steel right between my eyebrows.

Now, clairvoyance isn't the only game in town for psychic ability to work through. There's clairaudience, where people pick up information aurally, and claircognizance, where people have flashes of pure cognition, and there's what I have, which is clairsentience. I get information in my gut that shows up kinesthetically. If I tune into a situation, I'll pick up degrees of friction/frictionlessness, heaviness/buoyancy, obstruction/fluidity, constriction/expansiveness, static, tranquility, speed, etc. I used to do intuitive readings for a living until I got very, very sick for a few months—my body went on strike, which is another story altogether—and once I was better I didn't want to do them any more. My point here is that the family lineage didn't skip me. I just squelched it and then rerouted it and then let it lay fallow, which is what I'm doing with it now.

The upside of having my third eye open never really presents itself to me. I'm sure it's fascinating, and there are probably perks beyond "I see dead people", which is no perk at all in my book. I fear-imagine that I'll feel like a baby again, taking in a mess of sights and sounds and feelings I have no context for, only this time I'd be motherless, unguided, left to fend for myself. A reverse Helen Keller with no Annie Sullivan. 

If I could be guaranteed somehow that the old third eye would sneak open just a bit at a time, if I could wake up at some retreat center staffed with trusty, old-hand seers, and find myself one-fifteenth clairvoyant, and get talked through that all day, and then two-fifteenths clairvoyant the next day—if I could move at a snail's pace, my hand held all the way, then yes. I'd like that. I'd do that. I would sign up.

But I never picture anything that gentle. I fear a sudden burst, or something else, something worse, closer to death. That's what I'm subconsciously braced against at night. It's not quite that I fear I'll die. What I fear is that something will happen that will make my current understanding of the world dissolve, and my identity with it, and then I won't die. I'll experience annihilation, then rearrangement, and then strangeness. Strangeness might be the worst, worse than death. Death feels familiar, cozy, well-populated, compared to what I fear. What I fear is exile. Strangeness, loneliness and exile, in some pure form. I stay vigilant because at any minute I think this could strike. And if it's going to strike, it'll surely strike at night. 

But I don't have to worry about any of that tonight. My moon is out. There's a book I loved when I was small; it's out of print now, but it was called When the Sky is Like Lace, and it was about three little sisters in white nightgowns who'd keep an eye on the sky for signs that a special kind of night was about to take place. These were bimulous nights, that was the word, and the sisters would sneak out through the woods to the sea and make spaghetti in a gazebo and dance all night and play poker with rabbits and exchange presents, all under this full, rare moon. I get exactly that excited on nights like this, but I don't move. I lie there, too happy to sleep, feeling so safe. The thing can't strike tonight. The moon is looking out for me. Debussy's piano wafts over me on repeat, and the moon is my mother, my bodyguard, my familiar friend. I gaze at her wide-eyed until she wanders away from view, and then I slip into sleep in the trails of her blessing, the world made briefly so easy.


P.S. The painting up top is "Clair de Lune", by Felix Vallotton, whom I'd never heard of until today. If you want a treat, Google-image his work. You might be all up in the Vallotton already, but I just got here, and I'm fresh with the fever about him. Go look. 

sun break

You can tell that my sons are real Seattleites when you ask them how they feel about sunshine and summer weather. "It's too crazy!" beefs Finn. "It was 68 at school the other afternoon and I was dying!" Fred rides around in the back seat on sunny days, grimacing and shouting, "My eyes!" 

I'm deep Seattle myself, so on the one hand this deformity in my children pleases me. If I had to choose between cloudy forever and sunny forever, I'd pick cloudy, because that's reading weather. I don't like the sun berating me when I'm caught up in a novel. But I spent my first few years in New York, where the summer sun wasn't kidding, and except for on the most extreme, humid days, we loved it and it was good. Beach, pool, popsicle, sprinkler. The Official Weather of Childhood Fun. So I'm a touch bummed that my boys don't have the sunshine bug, especially since summer vacation is a long stretch when bitching replaces wonderment. 

When we moved to Seattle, just as I turned nine, I found out that the summer sun wasn't such a guarantee. On a summer morning, I'd be up at dawn checking things out. You knew right away if it was going to be a good one, a hot one. And you also knew if you were shit out of luck, if it was pouring and there was no hope. And then there was the middle kind of sky—overcast-lite, cloudy with a glow—that could develop either way. The trick there was to exert your will on the sky as much as possible while also managing your expectations and being ready for disappointment. 

But when it was a good one and I stood outside in the dawn with the sun flexing its muscles already, an outsized promise-thrill rolled through me, hinting at something better than any actual day could probably deliver.

***************

I learned as a girl that you're supposed to stay out of the sun between the hours of 10:00 am and 2:00 pm, because the sun does the worst damage then. Good to know! Those became my most prized teenage sunbathing office hours. 

It was a job, getting tan, or trying to. And you had to get tan. There wasn't a choice when I was young. Or, sure, duh, there was a choice, if you knew who you were and didn't care about fitting in and loved yourself unconditionally and other wondrous, far-fetched things. Like I said, there was no choice. And I had vampire-pale skin—I began more at light blue than white—so I had miles to go before I slept on a summer day if I was going to move the dial to ecru or, if heaven allowed, gold.

Supplies:

Back deck or yard where the sun was brightest 

Towel

Pillow

Coppertone (SPF 4 in a slight nod to danger, a reluctant 6 or 8 if it was a scorcher, baby oil if fuck you)

Lemony-smelling tan accelerator (?) in a spray bottle

Bowls of water/strips of tin foil to set around me for their reflective powers

Walkman, once I acquired one 

Before I had my Walkman, because I was too clueless to bring a watch with me outside, I had no way of figuring out how long I'd been out there. I'd oil up and close my eyes and just wait. The first few seconds were fine. Then I started getting bored and hot and irritated and twitchy. But I'd grit my teeth and dig in, lying there doing nothing but willing brownness until I couldn't take it anymore and I had to dash into the house to check the time. Surely it's been an hour, or at least half an hour. No. Fifteen minutes max, every time, that I'd been out there before cracking. Fuck! And the house felt so cool, felt so good. No sun headache, lots of entertainment. The TV right there, all tantalizing. Refrigerator full of drinks. Fuck. But I'd go back out. 

After I got my Walkman, though, I was a force. I could lie on my back in the sun for an hour or even an hour and a half without flinching. My eyelids went hot orange and everything was Duran Duran or Van Halen (which was a little sexier) and the sun on my skin didn't feel like a test but something else, something sensual and, okay, maybe a test, but a good one, more like a dare. 

When I'd put in all the time I could stand, I was free once again to relax in the Great Indoors. Time to pop a Fresca and curl up in the cool, wading through reruns of Three's Company, enjoying vicarious television sunshine. There was a bathroom run at every commercial to check my tan lines and see if anything good was developing. Sometimes I felt guilty, like I should be out there fighting for it while the sun was still up, but the fan was on and The Love Boat was next, and there was always tomorrow, maybe, if the weather held.

One time I was on the back deck—bowls of water everywhere, tan accelerator accelerating, skin heating up, "Panama" pumping in my ears—when I became aware of a hubbub in the air above me. I opened my eyes and there were 20 or 30 or who-knows-what-horrible-number of crows in a crow-cloud about fifteen feet up. They were cawing and flapping and beating the shit out of each other, and it was the worst thing I'd ever seen. I yelled and fell over myself to get inside, spilling some bowls of water on the way. Work day over. Tan as I'm going to get. But once I got inside, it was great, because the crows had removed the television guilt.

***************

The first time I went to the beach with the girls from my new school, I woke up excited and nervous. It was great to be invited, but I was a disaster of whiteness. But I had a plan. I would rise at dawn, sunbathe and use my new bottle of QT. Quick Tan. This was the answer to my prayers. A tan could come out of a bottle. I would never have to worry again. The air was still cool when I set out my towel at 8:00 am, but those were sunbeams, so something could happen. I was covering my bases. I spread the QT with an emphasis on my legs, stretched out on my towel and waited, until it slowly became clear that the shade I was going to take to the beach was partially-eaten Creamsicle: my regular vanilla, with streaks of sherbet-y orange. Scrubbing didn't help. 

Nobody said anything at the beach, and it got cloudy pretty soon so we didn't stay long anyway, so I guess I got lucky.

My bathing suit that year was a one-piece in skinny royal blue and white diagonal stripes that aimed down in a V-shape. What promise the early mornings held was whittled away by the feeling of lying next to the other girls, whose bodies looked perfect. I wasn't fat, but I was so pale, and I had stretch marks from developing too fast. Nobody else had those. I stole glances down at my body while we all lay in a row, and tried to find the parts that looked nice.

When I was a little girl in New York, my problem was my shoulder blades. My best friend, Allison, had blonde hair and golden skin, and her shoulder blades jutted out in a cool way in her halter tops. My shoulder blades didn't do that. I used to try to stick them out, but that was uncomfortable/unsustainable and I never knew if it was working. At thirteen, non-jutting shoulder blades seemed like a dream dilemma, now that my pale skin was such a problem, and these marks.

***************

For years as an adult, I disliked the noonday sun. It was so battering and obvious. But one summer day in my late twenties I was walking through my neighborhood to a coffee shop a couple of blocks away, and I had a change of heart. The sun was beating down from straight above, but everything looked good. The clouds were high and light and the sky seemed taller than usual, and the blue was pale and hazy, like the sunbeams were almost visible. And the sun was hot but it felt therapeutic. I flashed on the Aztecs and their sun gods, and in that moment the light and heat on my head felt both personal and impersonal, like receiving a blessing in a crowd. It was for me because I happened to be here and I received it, but it was for everybody. And here was the sun, a god I could see right up there, giving us everything in plain view, making the planet habitable, giving us life. I felt acutely grateful for it, and when the gratitude gets that acute on the receiver's side, it seems as though something like love is implied on the other.

***************

It's always summer in Hawaii, basically. I went there on my honeymoon for my first marriage, and then again with a couple of girlfriends a few years after that marriage ended. And then I went again a couple of years after that, and that's where I met Dave, which I'm going to talk about just a little, but first I have to sing the praises of Hawaii for a second. In Mexico (I'm suddenly dragging Mexico into it), the sun feels challenging and masculine, but in Hawaii, everything feels lush and feminine and maternal, splashing out with the luxuries and the wish fulfillment and the TLC. 

I met Dave on a yoga retreat. We were in a little group of people in a rented house on the North shore of Maui, and five days into the ten-day retreat, after five days of wanting to, we got together. On the sixth morning, I woke up with the sun, with Dave right there. The light was streaming into our room around the corners of the shades, and I knew as I watched him sleep—I didn't hope, but knew—that I was going to get to keep him. I got it, I got all of it; I was good just how I was, and loved how I was, marks of all kinds and all, and I was getting what I'd hoped for, exactly, like this was the kind of thing all those bright, balmy mornings of my youth were hinting at. I sat up on my elbow beaming at him, until he woke up and beamed back.

When I got back to Seattle, I visited my folks, and told them I'd fallen in love, and showed them pictures of Dave. There was one photo of me and Dave on the beach in our bathing suits, standing and embracing and smiling at the camera under a blue sky. My dad took the photo and disappeared upstairs a while, and when he came back he'd blown it up into an 8 x 10 print. "I played with the color a little," he said. "Is this close to what it was like?" 

Who knows if the color was right? How could I say if it was like that, if the sun shining on us gave everything that exact tint and brightness? But his instinct to try and bottle it, the generosity and impossibility and hope of the gesture, I got it and loved it and said that it was.

snow white

This is something I've been putting off talking about because I was afraid I was going to look stupid or do it wrong, somehow. But then I remembered that passively protecting my image is maybe not my highest ideal, and maybe I can handle looking stupid or doing something wrong. 

I was inspired by a pal of mine on Facebook this morning. There's a post that's been circulating on the Internet, written by a playwright here in Seattle, called "Walking While Fat and Female — Or, Why I Don't Care Not All Men are Like That" , which is a good and important read, so go for it if you haven't run across it. And I see lots of women sharing it, but not so many men, except my pal. This is how he prefaced the link:

There are times when I'm embarrassed to be male. Not because I've given or received the abuse Courtney Meaker describes so simply and eloquently here, but because that abuse just isn't part of my life, and that privilege is an embarrassment for our entire culture.

And when a guy piped up and said he was tired of the collective shaming that men endure, my friend replied like so, "Really? Because it's easy to avoid that collective shaming. If I didn't want to think about any of this, I wouldn't have to. No one forces me to read these articles, women don't force me talk about it, there are no consequences if I ignore it. What are you tired of?" 

The conversation went on, and my friend did a damn good job addressing what he saw as a responsibility on behalf of men to actively contribute to the dismantling of this unfair privilege and the oppression that keeps it in place. And it meant a lot to me to see a man take this on publicly, and see him not only accept the discomfort that comes with recognizing his privilege, but take a stand and gracefully deal with the pushback that followed. 

In that kind of discussion, I get the narrative privilege of being among the oppressed, since I'm a woman. When it's just talking time, nobody wants to wear the oppressor suit. (Out in the world, in real time, being the oppressor is the comparative jam.) But if we switch up the discussion, and turn our attention to white privilege, then that's my suit to wear.

I've been alive for nearly 45 years on this earth, and if there's one thing I've given minimal thought to during that time, it's the privilege I experience just by virtue of being white. And hey! That's part of this dreamy loot bag of prizes I get for my skin color. Like my friend said above, I don't have to think about it if I don't want to. I can organize my day so it never comes up. And, in fact, I've been doing just that. I live on the white end of a very segregated city that feels whiter than it really is. My friends, with very few exceptions, are white. My family is white. I mostly read books and watch movies and television shows about well-to-do white people. It's how I've been doing it, and I never thought to sweat it. Soaking myself in all that whiteness just feels familiar and cozy and unchallenging, and nobody can accuse me of spending a lot of my entertainment hours challenging myself. I'm somebody who can spend three hours in the bathtub replenishing the hot water with my big toe.

Last summer, a Twitter hashtag begun by a woman named Mikki Kendall—who tweets under the handle @Karnythia—woke me up from my long slumber. The hashtag was #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, which has a long backstory that you can google if you're curious, but at its heart was frustration and disappointment with mainstream white feminism. The hashtag took off, with women of color venting about their experiences, and white women jumping on in various ways: to defend themselves, to chide, to offer support, etc. 

The hashtag caught my attention when somebody I follow started responding to Martha Plimpton, who thought that the conversation was divisive, and then she and Karnythia got into it, and anyway, ANYWAY, the upshot, for me, was the realization that I had spent basically zero time in my life listening to women of color—particularly Black women—and learning about what it's like to live in a culture that doubly disrespects and devalues you.

Embarrassing. Not just a little embarrassing, either, but cold-water-in-the-face embarrassing. I'm a grown woman who professes to care about people, and the attention I'd given to race was the passing, get-upset-at-the-news-when-it's-in-my-face-and-then-change-the-channel kind. It didn't stick with me all day, it didn't linger in my mind, it didn't wake me up at night.

But something happened. You hear the phrase "hashtag activism", and it sounds tepid and half-assed, but you have to acknowledge social media for giving a microphone to whomever feels like picking it up. A shard of democracy remains there. And what is a hashtag besides words? Nobody ever started a social and cultural fire without them. For the first time, at age 44, I woke the fuck up and started seeking out Black women's voices. Better late than never, I guess. Around the same time as the #Solidarity hashtag, someone started a #SmartBlackWomenOfTwitter hashtag, and I went on a follow-binge. (This is the part where I worry about doing this wrong, but fuck it, this is how I did it, and I'm open to correction/suggestion.) I listened to conversations that were outside my white world, I went and read blogs written by Black women about their experience in white society. I questioned if this was okay to do, like if this was quietly invasive, somehow, but this seemed like a place to start, and I hoped that if I just lurked and stayed in listening mode, I would be doing more good than harm. 

It was bracing to hear what a pain in the ass white women can be for Black women. Besides stories of outright racism, I heard a lot of weariness with the barrage of "But I'm a white woman and I don't do those things!" that Black women get. Like if you want to vent about your experience with white people, you have to always throw in a long disclaimer, "...except for Christine Adams, Molly Sims, Jennifer Christensen, Frances Niedermeyer, Corinne Davis, Tracy Smith and the other 234,758 awesome white women who would never do that, whom I'll name for you in a second after I have another sip of coffee." 

In that Facebook discussion about male privilege, my friend linked to a cartoon which makes me laugh and laugh, and is transferrable to this very thing. Here you go:

Even if I haven't personally collared a Black woman mid-complaint to impress my innocence and the innocence of many white women everywhere upon her, I've certainly had the thought, "Well, not all white women are like that. I'm not like that," which drags the conversation in my head back over to me, away from where it ought to be, which is with my fellow humans who don't get to enjoy the sweet, sweet perks I get to enjoy because of the color of my skin. And there are various things in my life which have conspired to make me feel small/unimportant/unworthy/invisible—some of them cultural, some of them personal and familial. I have some problems with self-confidence as a result of those things, and that feels pretty difficult to me sometimes. When I take a goddamn minute to think about people who have received far, far worse messages from birth, and live in a culture that makes them feel unwelcome, unprotected and dismissed every single day, my heart squeezes and it better squeeze. 

In my house I have some super flattering, totally unhelpful mirrors. The mirror in my bathroom and the mirror next to my closet...god bless them. They're liars. I love them to bits, but they're obsequious little bastards straight out of Snow White. They make my figure look adorable in ways that I regularly—and with some sadness—come to understand are not quite true. Whenever I leave my house and run across  alternative reflective surfaces, I'm all fuuuuck. Mirrors. You were not straight with me. 

White women have these cultural mirrors installed everywhere that tell them they're the fairest, best, most important of them all. You might think that's not what you're getting out there if you're white like I am, but you are. We are. And you have to work a little bit—leave the house, as it were—to get in range of a less flattering, more truthful mirror. Once I started paying attention, what I saw in this new, clearer mirror, was a privileged, coddled, comfort-loving creature. I say this with love and compassion— and not, indeed, to hate on myself—but I saw something a little grotesque. Think about The Hunger Games, if you've seen it. The people who live in the Capitol—your Stanley Tuccis and Elizabeth Bankses—are wealthy and pampered and disconnected from humanity. And they look ridiculous, like fancy, freaky space poodles. When Dave and I saw the movie, the analogy hit me: I'm one of those space poodles.  

(I come back to the idea of narrative privilege, because if we're in a Hunger Games analogy, you want to be Katniss Everdeen. You don't want to be Stanley Tucci. You don't want to be Elizabeth Banks. You want to be the cool heroine who has to struggle nobly for survival, not the glitter-covered asshole eating hors d'oeuvres and watching the destruction from the sidelines. But if I'm white, and if I'm not thinking about this, and I'm not trying to figure out what to do next, how to make it better—even if I am doing those things—that's exactly what I am until this culture changes, and I better know it. And if that's not what I want to be, then I better get my nose to the grindstone. And, shit, isn't it enough to have all the real-world privilege? What kind of jerk then demands to also have the most flattering role in the story?)

That's what I am. It's the luck of my draw, being born white, and also the result of my own long unconsciousness. I may be a lovely person in many regards, but I have a huge amount of privilege and I have done next to nothing to offset this. I'm at the beginning, the very beginning of my work. And the thing is, I'm still trying to figure out what to do, what's mine to do and what's not mine, how I can best help. 

There's a video that was going around the web a little while ago of a woman named Glozell Green, a comedian who went to Disneyland and saw a black princess there for the first time. It's beautiful and sweet and heartwrenching, and you can't watch it without falling in love with her. If you can, a) I don't fucking want to hear about it, and b) you better go set off a grenade in your heart chakra. This is it:

 

 All I know is that the Glozell Greens of the world, be they five or fifty, mean something to me, and I want them to walk around in a world that sees them, that loves them, that welcomes and celebrates them and tells them they're just as beautiful and worth every bit as much as anybody else alive. And if some heads don't get pulled out of some asses, that's not going to happen, and when you're advocating heads getting pulled out of asses, you have to check yours first.