Crossing worlds

I left California on December 20th, after, in the same month, visiting the East Coast, (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Washington DC and North Carolina), rushing to my grandmother’s beside in Oregon for a week, giving up my Pasadena apartment and putting all my belongings and three years of my life in a storage unit. Run-on sentences are a good way to express in words how physically exhausting some of life’s experiences can be.

After I had packed up my apartment, with some precious help from friends, I managed to say goodbye to a few people the night before my flight and landed, from a warm, yet rainy Los Angeles into a freezing Paris where it had been snowing for four days. Mom and dad landed the next day, and we drove down to Saint Tropez to reconnect with all of mom’s family for a few days over the Christmas-New Year’s holiday.

We decided to escape to Italy on our way back up to Paris. We enjoyed Sanremo, on the Ligurian  coast, where there were only Italians, enjoying the New Year and strolling until very late in the cobblestoned streets. I have never seen so many fur coats as I did in Sanremo…it was actually kind of eerie. Fur coats went out of favor when I  moved to the United States in the mid-nineties, so I’d only really ever seen people wear them in movies and photographs. I can’t explain how strange it was for me to see women walking around in fur coats. They looked like they were disguised in animal hides, and sometimes, when they were more portly, actually kind of looked like grizzly bears in high heels. It was extremely unattractive to me, but maybe I’m speaking from lack of experience…I’ll always remember Sanremo for the fur coats, and that delicious raw purple artichoke salad we ate in a small restaurant. It was seasoned with olive oil made by the owner himself and generous shavings of parmesan cheese.

After Sanremo, we headed to the home of Stradivarius violins and the birthplace of opera: Cremona, a gorgeous city halfway to Venice in the Northern part of Italy. We ate one of our very worst and one of our very best meals in the city, and walked around the beautiful plaza, around the gorgeous cathedral, and admired the shop windows. It was a constant throughout Italy, and a pleasant one, how much people walk in the evening.

We made a day trip to Venice, completely unprepared for the day-long freezing rainstorm that had assailed the city and its huge size. When you arrive, if you choose to park in Venice proper, you have to pay almost 30 dollars to park your car, and you have to walk more than 30 minutes to get to the Piazza San Marco, the most famous piazza of Venice.  Couple of notes: read up a LOT on Venice if you ever go, don’t drive there, choose the train instead, if it’s going to rain while you’re there, invest in rain boots because the city floods a few inches everywhere, and don’t go in January unless you’re OK with constant freezing rain and wet socks. There were still some pretty magical moments but we were quite unprepared, and hadn’t read up enough, so when we realized the scale of the city, and how late in the day it was, we really didn’t have that much time to enjoy our stay. We were only there for a few hours, and Venice is a city that requires at least a day or two of full exploration. By the time we got to San Marco, the sun was already setting, and everything was closed, but we did get a chance to walk into some amazing Murano glass art galleries and carnival mask stores, which was fun. We made a stop at Caffe Florian, but it was a bust, not very good drinks, and everything was so overpriced it was scandalous.

The vaporetto ride back through the Gran Canal was my parents’ favorite memory, but at that point, my feet were frozen, so instead of standing out on the back of the boat, in the open night air, I sat inside in the warmth of the huddled tourist masses and was proposed to by a limping cosseyed hunchback named Alfredo. I am not making this up. He kissed my hand and I took it back and looked away, then he tapped me on the shoulder and made an awkward lunge for my lips and I firmly put my hands on his shoulders and pushed him away. Ah…Venice.

On the way back to France, we stopped in Torino, because it is apparently the most gorgeous setting for a city in the world, which we found no proof of. But we did find Caffe Platti, which, alone, is worth the trip across the Alps, through the 12-kilometer Frejus tunnel. We sat there for a good two hours, eating mini-sandwiches with the crusts cut off, sipping delicious cappuccinos con panna, and savoring numerous mini-pastries for 1 Euro each. It was the most amazing caffe experience we had in Italy and we were on a sugar high for a few hours after.

We arrived late at night in the middle of a full-blown snowstorm where everyone was driving 30 MpH to Le Puy, where we stayed the night at a lovely modern hotel with bright turquoise and lime-colored carpets, orange and violet furniture and bathrooms. That night, mom convinced me to share a platter of oysters with her, and I tried two. I came to the conclusion, a good fifteen years after I last tried them that I really don’t like oysters. They taste like you’re eating the sea. I understand that’s the pleasure in it, but I’ve never enjoyed swallowing sea water by accident, so I don’t enjoy doing it on purpose. I was proud of myself for trying two Irish oysters, and washed the taste down with flammekuche, an Eastern French pizza-like dish made on the thinnest dough imaginable, with cream, bacon bits and melted cheese.

Paris was another few hours drive and we got there two nights before our departure to Congo, taking advantage of the time to run last minute errands all in our separate corners of the city. We finally left, and the trip was reltatively perfect if you exlude the fact that it was the longest redeye imaginable (4 PM to 4 PM the next day in nonstop airports and flights). We had no problems other than the usual arrival into Brazzville with its complete chaos and long wait between planes, and again landing in complete chaos in Pointe-Noire.  

I’ve been here for a few days, and we’re been dealing with various relatively serious issues having to do with the school, but other than that, it feels good to be home, even with the accelerated culture shock you always endure when you go from California to Congo via various weather patterns not limited to snowstorms, freezing temperatures and ninety percent humidity levels. It’s nice to see familiar faces, be surrounded by people every day, and not be alone. The joy of seeing old friends is still tempered with updates on family tragedies, death being such a frequent visitor here, especially to youth and children, which is something I never experienced in the US.  That is always one of the hardest things to get used to.

Warm friendliness, familiar sounds, foods, smells, my very naughty puppy, home and my whole family under one roof, the knowledge that I’m not sinking into debt with every second that I’m not employed are all things that are helping me breathe.

I’m not really sure what is next for me, as always, there are many options. Right now, I’m here, and trying to find grace in the moment. And some time to assess and see clearly where the road ahead is leading, which I hope will become clearer when I’m busy and involved in the museum project and other activities around the school. I tend to make these big leaps of faith because I’m not just looking for the next job or place to live, I’m looking for what I’m meant to be doing. You could say I’m looking for my destiny, but using that word conjures up Luke Skywalker’s jedi heritage and who knows if the result of my quest will be as lofty. Although I really wouldn’t mind a light saber.

new beginnings

I sit here wondering how to start this paragraph.

I’ve been fumbling for a few months, struggling with health, not finding work, finding I fit in less and less where I’m currently living (California) and constantly re-assessing my situation, asking myself questions like “Should I go back to school and get a Master’s?” “Should I find a full-time job here?” “Am I in the right place?” “Should I go back to Congo?”

I feel like I’ve been torn right and left, beaten by the winds, until all that’s left of what used to be a flag are tattered pieces that are unrecognizable. I need to patch myself back up, and I am going back home to do it.

I’ve chewed on this long and hard, I’ve weighed the pros, the cons, and I’ve thought about it so much, I can’t think about it any more. I’ve just come to a point where nothing feels right in my life any more. I don’t see a place for myself in California, in Los Angeles. I don’t feel any attachment to the place, I don’t feel needed, I don’t survey the landscape and see a place where I would fit in, and all I can do is think of Pointe-Noire, and see all the parts that fit and the places where I could be useful.

These last ten years have been a series of new beginnings for me. Finishing college in 1999, embarking on a year-plus of service around the Baha’i world, mostly in Africa, traveling through the Pacific and South East Asia on my way back to Delaware, with a 6-month stopover in Northern California. Then leaving for Israel and a life-changing two and a half years, followed by Paris and a job in the Office of Public Information after a rough period of unemployment, finally moving to Southern California and starting work in video game localization for a large entertainment company.

Now that I look back on my last few years with the cold analytical stare of hindsight, I can see it more clearly. I see that I was plugging myself into these environments, trying to fit in, and not finding my place in Paris, not finding it in Pasadena, not finding it in the non-profit or the corporate worlds, not finding it in the journalism or the software industries. Something was not right, and all the while I kept thinking of home, of my family, of my patch of Africa, that dusty town on the Atlantic coast.

After my visit there in July, I realized that there was somewhere I belonged, somewhere I had a place, an empty seat at the dinner table with my name on a place card, and things started to shift in my thinking. The more I applied to jobs the less I saw myself actually performing the duties involved. The more I searched for positions suited to my skills and interests, the more those skills and interests seemed perfectly served by working in Congo, in my parent’s school, helping develop the English Language Program, designing the first installations of a future Congo Children’s Museum.

I’m not saying the agony of search is over. I’m still feeling anxious and lost, confused, and misdirected, but I’m fumbling towards a direction now, and I’m sketching a plan. I’m leaving December 20th, and my return is planned for three months from then, and I’m planning projects. It’s a start, that’s all I can hope for, but I need to cut myself some slack right now, and stop judging my life on the yardstick of everyone else’s, something I do almost obsessively, because I have the ability to notice and absorb dizzying quantities of information, resumes, qualifications, life stories, CV’s…I fill my head with other people’s life stories and try to insert a cardboard cutout of myself as a university professor, a chiropractor, a Red Cross official in Darfur, a seeing-eye-dog trainer, a forensic anthropologist, an elementary schoolteacher, the owner of a bakery, a movie theater employee, the manager of a greenhouse and nursery, and inserting myself in North Dakota, Denver, Berlin, Turkey, Oregon, New Zealand, anywhere but here, anytime but now, anyway but real. I’m constantly writing myself stories of what I could be doing instead or next, or what I could have ended up doing, and I spend so much time reinventing the past, and inventing the future, and I opened the fridge two weeks ago and thought: “What I really want is a life of adventure. My home is in Congo. What am I doing all the way in Pasadena looking for adventure? It’s time to go home.”

It feels stupid to say things like this on my blog. Like I’m revealing too much of the inner workings of my  mind. But I don’t often say what I’m thinking, so I’m chalking this one up to truth and honesty and posting it anyway. It’s how I feel, and it’s what is keeping me up at night.

productivity

It’s interesting that you can stay indoors and still be somewhat productive. I settled a few issues with bills, made appointments, got in touch with people, talked with a couple of friends and family. I was really sick today, again. Luckily I managed to get out and had a lovely time (thanks guys!) watching Paper Heart, which was a lot funnier and sweeter than I thought. But while I was at home, I managed to do a few things without which the day could have been wasted. In Congo, if you stay at home all day, you won’t get anything done. There is no business out there that you can do solely by telephone or internet. Everything is analog. So I tried to be as productive as I could, while managing the sickness, thought about health insurance again–I heard Fresh Air last night about saving the nation’s health care system with the author of a new book. It’s still hot in the apartment now even though it’s past 8 PM. It seems inappropriate. It should be cool and livable.

inglourious basterds

I didn’t enjoy the scalping, or the knife-carving of swastikas on foreheads. Or the violent scenes of torture, some with bats, but I did enjoy a lot of things about the movie, most of which, disturbingly, was the main Nazi “Jew Hunter” character played by Christoph Waltz. He’s so charismatic, energetic…so enthusiastic he is almost bouncy, which is so strange when you’re describing a Nazi SS. His performance outshines every other actor (put together) in the movie. One of my favorite scenes is the very first opening scene inside the farmhouse, opposite a fantastic Denis Menochet. It’s perfect, psychologically, cinematically, a very powerful scene that sets the bar so high that you don’t often reach it again in the rest of the (very long) movie.

German propaganda cinema and 1940’s films play a very big part in the main plot of the movie, a re-writing of history in which Hitler returns to Paris to attend the premiere of a Nazi propaganda movie called “Nation’s Pride.” You get a real course in cinema history, learning about the mechanics of film projection, filmmakers, movies in the course of the dialogue, and it becomes obvious the movie was made by a cinephile. Along those lines, I recommend reading Tarantino’s interview in Filmmaker (only in print, but this is the magazine site).

The title (and misspellings) are from an italian spaghetti western movie. I would just go see it and not read too many reviews, because they can give away some of the best parts and twists of the film.

This is only Tarantino’s sixth movie, which is pretty impressive given how much influence he has had on cinema in just six films. I feel like he’s made at least three times that many movies!

scents

Nothing smells like much in California unless you’re walking. I’ve started walking to think more clearly and get more exercise, and I’ve noticed all the smells I’ve been missing in my car all these months.

When I walk out of my apartment, I’ll quickly smell the woody acid scent of the jacaranda flowers, fallen and rotting in a carpet on Del Mar. A strong pine smell carries me for a block or so, mixed in with the there-and-gone-again exhaust, which doesn’t really hit unless an older car drives by. Once in a while, I’ll smell cement, if I walk too close to walls, heated the entire day by the oppressive sun. For lack of a better word, cement smells dusty, sandy.

Further along, as I get to Caltech, all the cooking smells mingle happily in between the student apartments. Tonight someone made Indian curry, and it was inviting, wrapping an entire block of buildings in the ribbon of spiciness. It made me hungry, and made me feel like I was in a small paragraph from a Jhumpa Lahiri short story.

On the western part of Del Mar, cat urine alternated with moldy wood siding. Moldy wood is an odor I associate with roaches, because it’s their preferred dwelling, so I sped up. I slowed down on the next block to inhale jasmine, and another heady white flower, planted along next to cleaner-looking buildings.

Taking Euclid, I smelled wet earth and grass, wastefully doused by a sprinkler gone mad. In this ninety-plus degree heat the grass yellows and burns, so the water is of no use. Your lawn won’t be green, baby. There might be others but I’m not remembering.

Sometimes in the late Spring and early Summer, a tree will smell like yeast, and make me salivate from the sheer acidity of the smell. It’s an unpleasant smell, but overpowering.

I wish we had magnolia trees, orange blossoms, lavender, plumeria, ylang ylang. The smell of tropical rain, washing away dirt and all our sins. Even the smell of wheat fields in the upper Auvergne sun. But you can’t be every place at once. I’m just here, in between my pleasant cooking smells and jacaranda flowers.

wag more

I have a sticker that says “wag more bark less”. I haven’t stuck it on anything yet because it reminds me of puppies, and I like having it right next to my keyboard. My desk is filled with paperwork to file and a few bills, a couple pieces of art, foreign coins, a big collection of writing implements, stacks of handwritten notes, but the sticker is definitely the most playful thing there. I’m starting to think my friend was psychic when she sent it to me.

I’ve been stressing out too much about Life in general, and that amount of anxiety has actually gotten me pretty sick. It’s likely what explains how ill I was during my entire trip and since I’ve been back. I had no idea stress could mess with your body that seriously, but apparently, I don’t know how to not stress out and that is poisoning my quality of life. I wish I had a real puppy instead of a sticker, I managed to ignore the stress very effectively when I was back home, playing with Tommy. At some point I should return to my routine of nighttime walks, cooking my meals, etc. I need to learn to live around it and cope.

I was driving home a little while ago and noticed the the lack of pitch black night sky we have from living in the city; ours is purple with orange glows from the street lights and my image of the Los Angeles area are palm trees against that background.  I was trying to figure out if that felt like home. Then I started to think back on Paris, and my image of Paris was mostly grey: grey buildings, grey rooftops, grey streets, grey skies. But what sticks out are the rooftops of Paris, all the same height, and being able to look out on a sea of rooftops from my apartment window. That was my image of Paris and so were plane trees with sun streaming through them, and their specific scent. That was never home to me. Congo is probably the only place that really feels like home when I look at it from dusty littered streets to mango trees. But I think my sense of home is when I’m doing something I’m connected to, it’s inside me. When I write, I most often feel at home, even if I’m in a dingy cybercafe with a bad connection.

Those two ideas are sort of connected. I’m looking for work and trying to listen to my heart in my applications. That process is taking me away from higher-stress work and large corporations and bringing me closer to after-school programs and smaller-scale operations. I need less barking in my life, and maybe honing in on that sense of home will help me find my wag.

hope

I’m out of sorts, out of breath almost, as if I had run a long race but I haven’t. A young man with golden piercings on his beautiful face hugged me when I declined to sign his petition, and the Apple store employee asked me why I looked down. He said he empathized. Later in the street, a couple ran past me and the woman slowed her pace to nod and smile and say “hi!”. A few minutes later, a young girl, walking with a large backpack nodded and smiled directly at me. Then I saw a tall young man walking with a very short and plump older lady across the street, and at the same time a culinary student crossed the street in his chef’s uniform. A man who looked like an agent drove past in his convertible Mercedes, top down and sunglasses on, and all those things, life moving around me, purposefully, trees firmly planted along Green Street and the kindness of strangers, all moved together like a symphony of hope to me, on this summer morning, and I took a full breath of air, and lifted my head and looked ahead.

gifts

I was born today, thirty-some  years ago. I always think it’s not going to be a big deal for me, it’s just a day like any other, but my natural tendency is to want to ignore it, and then–when it’s too late to fix it–want to do something special to mark the event. I don’t have any sort of birthday tradition, and being the thinking type, I often turn a little too contemplative for my own good. I look at the year gone by, see where I’m at, think about the coming year, think about the steps ahead, think a lot, think too much. This year, some friends threw me a little low-key get together with red velvet cake and fun conversation. It was nice to just have some cake and hugs. I got a few other gifts today, too. A little surprise box’o'goodies, some phone calls, an antique “violette” store find, and a couple of people that I met who turned out to be like answers to prayers. Gifts come in all sorts of forms. I also read this on a random web site today, which made me smile:

“Chess is like a sea where mosquitoes can bathe and elephants can drown.”

Hollywood

An old Spiderman, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes with a dirty sagging costume, gaping around his spindly legs. Cheap tee-shirts piled onto tables, three-for-eleven-ninety-nine, underneath cardboard cut-outs of Edward from Twilight. An old broken-down black Toyota speeds around the corner, making a right on red, with the entire car singing a disco tune, Diana Ross or Dionne Warwick, a newborn baby in the front seat, between the smoking dad and the mom with tubes in her nose. Cinderella and Belle walking around like exhausted cowboys, trying to look magical to get photo-ops but not scoring, counting their money, and pulling their grey-shouldabeenwhite gloves up their arms. A girl is obsessed with Shirley Temple’s handprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese theater. The Dark Knight Joker develops three scenarios in a row for photo ops for two teenage girls in braces and matching little black dresses. A rotating box of one-dollar bills with celebrity cameos replacing the President: Britney Spear one dollar bill, Michael Douglas one dollar bill, Angelina Jolie one dollar bill, all for six ninety-nine. Hare Krishnas do what they’ve been doing for thirty years, singing with their eyes closed and twirling in their robes. Hippies with matted hair and no bras dance and touch each other while their guy friends butcher a John Lennon song on the tambourines. The sun sets on Hollywood, and it doesn’t seem to notice.

crowd

Sometimes a life can change in a moment. You are swept up by a crowd, barely noticing where you are going, and what the collective is doing and spend decades after researching crowd mentality, poring over what makes people do things they never would do if they were alone. You see a woman dance one day, and realize you must do everything in your power to spend the rest of your life with her, and she turns to walk out of the room, but you must run after her, and tell her. You fall asleep in the train, exhausted from a long journey, and your dreams are visited by a character, and another character, and a story begins to form, and you awake in a start, and you write everything down on any surface available, feverishly, and one day the book is read by people the world over. One day, an animal dies before its time, and you think of things differently. You read a book that makes you become vegetarian, and you don’t eat meat for the next ten years. You wake up one day and know what it is you must do with your life. You wake up with a certainty where there was only doubt the day before. The first time you see a snowflake. The last time you saw him walk away, and he didn’t turn around. The first time you hear the first strings of guitar on the first song of this album that will become the soundtrack of your college years. You knew you were going to marry him when you saw a photograph he took of his parents. The first time you meet someone. The last cigarette you smoked. These are moments you can write poems about. Today was not one of those moments, but maybe today is a day I will remember forever because of it. Some of my most persistent memories are unspecific and unextraordinary.