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.”

Evening of findings

3 findings tonight (late)

1) Crossing Delancey

…a surprise of a movie about a microcosm of the New York Jewish community, and a meditation on singlehood and finding love. A 33-year old single girl–happy, successful, loving her life in the literary circles of the city–reluctantly finds herself in the talons of a well-meaning matchmaker who sets her up with…the pickle guy. Even though the movie is over 20 years old it is still accurate and doesn’t hit any wrong notes. It’s very well written,  the dialogue is witty, funny, and the acting is great.

I’d never heard this poem by Confucius about a woman waiting for love and it was so beautiful I paused to read it online before continuing the movie:

ripe plums are falling
now there are only five
may a fine lover come for me
while there is still time

ripe plums are falling
now there are only three
may a fine lover come for me
while there is still time

ripe plums are falling
i gather them in a shallow basket
may a fine lover come for me
tell me his name

              Chinese Book of Songs

You need to hear the Jewish grandmother recounting why she married her husband, a great story delivered perfectly by Bubbie (Rizl Bozyk).

2) A random piece of writing that I did a couple of years ago that I just found by accident on my laptop. Here are the first 2 paragraphs:

She could still feel the warmth of his body where he had been standing a moment ago. She heard the familiar sound the door made behind him as he left. Her senses were vivid even as she was trying to bury the argument, let it recede into a faint memory. Senses are more stubborn than memory, she thought. She looked through the window, streaked with wayward drops from the unrelenting rain, and her vision played tricks on her. She saw him pruning the trees the way he used to before dinner. He was everywhere in the house. The faint smell of his occasional hand-rolled evening cigarette, the clean cotton scent of his work shirts. They were bound together, regardless of how many times he walked out that door.

She placed the dishes from the counter into the sink and turned on the faucet. She rolled up her sleeves, and, holding her forearms under the warm running water, closed her eyes. Even the troubled times with him weren’t hopeless. The water was still running, she wasn’t really going to wash dishes now, but she needed something to keep her mind from wandering.

3) Eduardo Recife

This is a linked image (I didn’t download it) to my new favorite artist: Eduardo Recife. He is Brazilian and works on collages with vintage images, and is a typeface designer–another one of my obsessions, have you seen Helvetica? I could write about his work, it causes little sparkling water bubbles in my imagination.

authenticity

The months that have slowly stretched, like a lazy confused cat, between January and August have been leading to a decision on my part. January is when I was laid off from my job with Disney, and I went from having the title of  “Associate International Localization Producer” to a more nondescript status as a “student”.

I could say this existential period of going from one job to another job, trying to see myself as a project manager, localization producer, document analyst, NGO administrative assistant, Parisian, Angelino has been going on for a while, more specifically since after college. I’ve always managed to be useful and productive in my search for the career, or the field, or the job, or the place I needed to live in. I think it’s fair to say I’ve given each chapter its fair trial and have really believed in each of my moves. I’ve tried to fit in, tried to find my place every time. I don’t think I’ve come to any conclusion, but along the way I’ve crossed some things off my list.

To quote U2 I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, and I’m still searching. We’re in mid-August and I haven’t signed up for any new classes at Pasadena Community College. I’m working through each day, getting up, making my bed, cooking all my meals, starting a regimen of going for walks in the evening when the oppressive semi-arid desert heat lets up a little and the birds squeal of contentment. This is a familiar state of mind for me: the evaluation of the leaving possibility.

I need a job and I don’t want to get a corporate job in the US, which is what my resume currently would point towards. I don’t want to spend productive days in school studying various classes, three-quarters of which will end up being disappointing or the wrong direction for me to go in. I’m thinking of spending three months in Congo, working on three or four different projects. A personal writing project about my country, teaching art in the elementary classes of our school, possibly teaching English at our language center, and working with my father on his museum project.

I’ve been watching old masterpieces lately, Hitchcock, Film Noir, Katharine Hepburn and lined up a few silent movies too. I’m working through a mini-list I’ve been keeping in my head. Yesterday I saw a Film Noir must-see:  the 1944 Laura with a favorite actor of mine, vitriolic deadpan Clifton Webb, who has a line in the movie that I find authentic and courageous and absolutely hilarious. (He’s Lydecker and being interrogated by Detective McPherson, played by Dana Andrews, handsome devil):

Lydecker: McPherson, you won’t understand this. But I tried to become the kindest, the gentlest, the most sympathetic man in the world.

McPherson: Have any luck?

Lydecker: Let me put it this way. I should be sincerely sorry to see my neighbors’ children devoured by wolves. Shall we go?

I’m figuring it out, too. I’m trying to hit that note of authenticity in my own life, and I’ve not been taking the task lightly. But I grew up in Congo, in between a father’s middle eastern culture and a mother’s French culture binded by a shared Baha’i culture, bathed in Congolese culture. I grew up traveling constantly, and those were my formative years. I have a trunk of personal journals and letters dating back to when I was 8 where I’m still trying to find my place and figure out my life. Options for careers go from Lion Tamer to Policewoman and teacher. My list has changed over the years but I still add those three at the top for old time’s sake.

Maybe some people aren’t meant to settle down and have an apartment, and a career and formal education. The times when I feel most myself have never been when I’ve been in that exact situation, and I have tried very hard to stay in this situation. I’ve hung on longer than I should have been able to, in jobs and cities that were not a good fit for me and I am trying to learn from those experiences. It’s awkward to see this written down, but maybe I need the adventure and the crazy unpredictability of Congo, with a ton of different responsibilities in order to find my path, maybe even find myself. It’s almost the only thing right now that keeps me from feeling like I’m withering away into nothingness.

Epic confusion

I’m back from my trip in France. After the short and disappointing visit to Bretagne (I was so sick we only made it out to the beach that one time), I went to Auvergne where our family home is, in a village in the high mountains above Le Puy en Velay. I ate cherries from our tree and non-pasteurized cheese, fresh foods prepared by mom, and slowly got my health back. Then we visited a couple of castles in the Loire valley between Orleans and Tours before my flight home.

You never know what life has in store for you. I wasn’t expecting to be sick for five weeks when I left Pasadena, or to feel so anxious about my future while I was away. From the conversations I’ve been having with friends about life choices, different paths, new careers, changing directions, going back to school, trying to “figure it out” and find what it is you really want to do, and what it is you’re really good at, it seems like a lot of us are in the same boat. Single, married, parent, just out of school, in your thirties or in your forties, with a masters or without, with a long career behind you or a string of short-term jobs, a lot of us are sharing in this confusion, and it’s not a very happy place to be right now.

“what am I going to do with my life?” seems like the scratched record soundtrack of my days, in between applications, inquiring emails, personal moments of reflection. What’s strange is that in this miasma of confusion, I’m still best placed to see clearly, better placed than career advisers, job search experts, but I still can’t find my way out of the murky waters. Deep down I know from observing other people’s lives that this confusion is temporary, but on the surface, it truly feels like it will never ease, and I will forever stay far from the comfort of knowing my path and having confidence in the direction I’ve chosen.

So when I found this quote by JK Rowling (of Harry Potter fame) I felt comforted, strangely. It’s nice to know someone who has made it so successfully felt the same way I do at one point in her life. “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” That’s really interesting…

“A mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. … I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

safer than stealing

The reasons why artists do what they do, maybe not the overt suject of today’swriter’s  almanac but at least a running theme in three of the stories sent out. I’ve been thinking about why I write, especially given the fact that for a blog that’s updated as often and as much as this one is, it’s not really, as Brando would say, “a contender”.

 

“I took up writing because I needed money. And I continued to write because it’s safer than stealing and easier than working.” ~Robert Heinlein

“I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment.” ~Marc Chagall

(Thornton) Wilder told (David) McCullough how he chose a subject for his plays or novels: He would find something he wanted to learn more about, go out and see what was written about it, and if there wasn’t much or it wasn’t good, he would write it himself.

 

I’m thinking about writing because I’m leaving my home, where I tend to write constantly. Everything here inspires me, from the people to the weather, the landscape, the dust and the pollution, the electricity and the candles, stories and even just lying there, in the morning, listening to the puppy whimpering at my door and the crows landing violently on the tin-roof.

 

I write because it’s something I’ve always done from a profound need to express myself, and lay out for everyone to see the way I experience the world. Even as a five-year old kid, I was writing very long letters to my parents, my grandparents, my friends, mostly to share ideas, thoughts, new things I’d learned, and what I had been up to. In one of them, I ask my grandmother if she knew that female scorpions bite off the head of the  males after mating, in a mis-informed bit of animal-world trivia that made me smile. Even back then, I had conversation ADD, loved to write, and loved animals. Things start early. In a letter to my father, I make a very tedious argument about him needing to return my Tintin comic book because he had borrowed it for two weeks because a grownup would have had ample time to read the book in two weeks.

 

I guess I’m worried about what I am going to write about when I leave. Not worried so much as missing all the inspiration that I feel here. With Congo, I write because I know it’s such a rare place, such an out-of-the way, unknown part of the world, that anything I write is precious, almost. And probably unfairly, I feel like the only person writing about my country with such excitement and such love. I’m working on a non-fiction book of essays about Congo, which I’m going to come back to work on in October, until about January.

 

Until then, I can write about the rest of my travels and my plans. I will write about my three weeks in France, traveling with mom, and that is going to be wonderful. We’ll be picking wild fruit and berries, filling bottles at natural springwaters rushing into rivers. Making tea from garden herbs, eating cheeses made by our friends, drinking the milk of cows that have names like Marguerite and Paquerette and sleep up the road from our stone house, in warm, comfortable barns.

As wonderful and idyllic as that sounds, France has been written about so much, the challenge of making it unique, or original, or even something people have never heard or read about, which is something I feel when I write about Congo, is not there. I like the fact my country is so out of the way, and I like writing about things that are strange and unique, have their own characters and kinks, things that are irregular, customs that seem illogical, small inefficiencies and random moments. Sometimes when I’m in places that are too neat and predictable, my inspiration dries up.

give up your day job

I hope it’s not becoming lame to you guys that I quote The Writer’s Almanac so often, but it deserves it. Today is July 4th and the essay today is about James Joyce’s wedding to Nora on this day. The whole story of their romance is fantastically interesting, peppered with witty Joyce aphorisms, but my favorite, is the following paragraph and quote by his wife, Nora, (described earlier on in the essay as an ”uneducated witty girl from Galway”: 

 

Nora, for her part, complained that Joyce knew nothing of women. She was utterly apathetic to his writing, and remarked to an admirer of his soon after Ulysses was published:

“I’ve always told him he should give up writing and take up singing.”

Madam, I greet you

I had to share this story from the Writer’s Almanac, because of a few things.

1) As you all notice, I’ve been writing a lot since I’ve arrived in Congo. The adage “write what you know” is true, and I was happy to see it exemplified below, as a piece of advice to Margaret Mitchell from her husband

2) I loved what Mr. Mitchell decided to greet the new chapter in his wife’s literary life by the words:

“Madam, I greet you on the beginning of a new career.”

3) the manuscript of “Gone With The Wind”, when stacked upright was 5 feet high. That’s pretty badass.

4) This story reads as an encouragement to anyone (like myself) who has ever entertained pipe dreams of writing a novel of their own one day. You can never have too much encouragement.

 

“On this day in 1936 that Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind was first published.

In 1920, Mitchell fell off a horse and suffered terrible injuries. She sort of recovered from the fall, but she kept reinjuring herself in different ways, and a few years later she had to quit her job as a reporter with The Atlanta Journal and stay in bed. Her husband, a newspaper editor, would go to the Atlanta library and bring her back piles of books to read so she could occupy herself while bedridden. One day, he came home and said, “I have brought you all of the books that I think you can handle from the library. I wish you would write one yourself.”

 
He then went out and got a Remington typewriter. When he presented it to his wife, Margaret, he said, “Madam, I greet you on the beginning of a new career.” She asked him what she should write about, and her editor-husband gave her the famous “Write what you know” line.

 
So she wrote about Southern belles, and she expanded upon family stories and the stories she’d heard from Civil War veterans while she was growing up in Georgia. The one-bedroom apartment that she and her husband lived in was cramped, and she called it “The Dump.” She would sit and write in every nook and corner of the tiny place, working in the bedroom or the kitchen or the hallway.

 
She told almost no one except her husband that she was writing a novel. When friends came over to their place, which happened often, she’d hide the manuscript under the bed or the couch.

 

But one of her Atlanta friends, Lois Cole, had found chunks of the manuscript lying around that cramped apartment. Cole was now living in New York City and working in the publishing industry. Cole told her boss at Macmillan, Harold Latham, that her witty Southern friend “might be concealing a literary treasure.”
Latham went down to Atlanta to pay Margaret Mitchell a visit and ask her about the novel. Mitchell denied its existence. He spent the day with her, following along on outings with her friends, and asked about the novel again in a car full of her girlfriends. Mitchell changed the subject. But when Latham got out of the car, all of her friends in the car kept up the questioning. One friend was adamant that Mitchell was working on a novel, and asked why she hadn’t shown it to Latham.

Mitchell said that it was “lousy” and that she was “ashamed of it.” The friend goaded, “Well, I dare say. Really, I wouldn’t take you for the type to write a successful book. You don’t take your life seriously enough to be a novelist.”
That did it — Margaret Mitchell was furious and galvanized. She hurried back to her cramped apartment, grabbed the assorted piles of manuscript and shoved them into a suitcase, and drove it over to the hotel where Latham was staying. When stacked up vertically in one pile, the manuscript was 5 feet high. She delivered it to him in the lobby, saying, “Take it before I change my mind.”
It was published on this day in 1936, and immediately it was a sensation. Reports abound of people in Atlanta staying up all night to read Mitchell’s novel that summer of 1936. It revitalized the publishing industry. The next year, Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize. Her book was made into a movie starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, and when it had its premiere in Atlanta in 1939, Margaret Mitchell was there at the Loew’s Grand Theater with the movie stars.
The cramped apartment in which Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind is now the centerpiece of the Margaret Mitchell House in midtown Atlanta, which reopens this weekend after a long period of renovation. There are tours of the apartment, historical performances, and a museum devoted to her life and work.”

 

 

happy birthday, mon prince

I found out (thanks to The Writer’s Almanac) that today is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s birthday. He’s one of my favorite authors and The Little Prince is, bar none, my favorite book. I carry it with me everywhere I go and read it many times each year.

The Little Prince is singlehandedly responsible for my ability to connect with any child, any time. I took the opening words of the book (see below) to heart when I was around 7 or 8, and never forgot them, so I managed to be a grownup that isn’t stuffy. I never wanted to be one of the grownups you had to make excuses about in the opening pages of your book. And I think I managed that. It’s no great accomplishment, but victory lies in small goals being met. You just need to string them together.

From the daily almanc email:

“It’s the birthday of the aviator and author of The Little Prince (1943), Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, (books by this author) born in Lyons, France (1900). Saint-Exupéry wrote it in America, and it is a kind of fable, about a Little Prince who visits earth from his own tiny planet where he keeps a single rose that he loves. In The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry writes, “Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” Saint-Exupéry insisted on serving in the air force during World War II even when he was too old to fly, and he flew his last mission 1944, when he was reported missing after a reconnaissance flight.”

dear white brother

 

This is a poem called “Cher frère blanc” by Léopold Sédar Senghor, a Senegalese poet best known for having created the concept of Négritude (He is also one of the only African ruler to ever have resigned from the Presidency):

 

Cher frère blanc,

 Quand je suis né, j’étais noir,
Quand j’ai grandi, j’étais noir,
Quand je suis au soleil, je suis noir,
Quand je suis malade, je suis noir,
Quand je mourrai, je serai noir.

Tandis que toi, homme blanc,
Quand tu es né, tu étais rose,
Quand tu as grandi, tu étais blanc,
Quand tu vas au soleil, tu es rouge,
Quand tu as froid, tu es bleu,
Quand tu as peur, tu es vert,
Quand tu es malade, tu es jaune,
Quand tu mourras, tu seras gris.

Alors, de nous deux,
Qui est l’homme de couleur ?

 

Dear white brother,

When I was born, I was black,
When I grew up, I was black,
When I am in the sun, I am black,
When I am sick, I am black,
When I die, I will be black.

While you, white man,
When you were born, you were pink,
When you grew up, you were white,
When you go in the sun, you are red,
When you are cold, you are blue,
When you are scared, you are green,
When you are sick, you are yellow,
When you die, you will be grey.

So, between you and me,
Who is the colored man?

 

Disappearing act

 

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a week, but also most of my life. It’s about the disappearing act of moving to a place like Congo.

My mom and dad moved here when they were a young, artistic couple, with a toddler. Mom is French and at the time was a trendy young thing, a trained soprano singer, singing along with Maria Callas vinyls. Dad was an artist, a fantastic photographer, grad of Stanford’s French lit department with a thesis on absurdist theater. They left a pretty cool lifestyle to move to Kinshasa in 1981, shutting the door to that life. We lived in Limete, for the first years. A dusty, bustling, populous “Cité” neighborhood, and we had a busted-up sky-blue Renault R4 (4 standing for 4 horse-power) that usually broke down on the way to my primary school.

I have no concept of what it was for them, and honestly, if I ask them, the troopers ususally chuckle and shrug. That was 28 years ago. They’ve lived through birthing a kid in a Kinshasa hospital, raising two kids into adulthood through 2 countries, 4 kinasorta wars, 2 evacuations, one in an Israeli military plane and one in a French tank. A TANK. Dad spent 4 months under fire during a full-blown war, running out of food to the point where he was rationing himself a limited number of almonds a day, and to the point where his dogs ate grass. He lived through bombs falling inside the house, alone, being robbed and nearly attacked on a daily basis, driving out into the forest with a carfull of possessions. He was almost executed by a doped-up rebel. So, honestly, when your kid asks you “what did it feel like when you first moved here?” you just drop and roll, chuckle and shrug.

I do have to say…I remember one thing very vividly about moving to Mobutu’s Zaire in the 80’s: the first thing people would tell you, and this is engraved in my mind is:

“If you run someone over, don’t stop. The mob will beat you to death. If you run someone over, drive away, as fast as you can.”

That’s not something you forget, even if you’re five years old when you hear it said. And for all of its alarmist, over-dramatizing undertones, that shit was REAL. And it still is, although DRC-Zaire was and always will be more more violent than Congo.  I remember being a kid and seeing a guy beat to death for having stolen someone. I assume he was beaten to death by the mob, but I didn’t stay and watch, I was whisked away as it started.

The only thing I can say is that Zaire in the 80’s and 90’s was not what living here is like now. No phone lines, no internet, no email, no cell phones, and snail mail was literally delivered at a snail’s pace if it was not confiscated or censored, or just plain lost.

One time, we got a letter in the mail that was six years late.

We lived in complete isolation from our previous life, and mom and dad kept in touch only with family. They lost touch with every single other person, only to get back in touch, decades later, and be greeted as if they had returned from the dead, which of course, in a sense, they had.

It’s obviously not the same now, but there is something that happens, when you’re in a place like Congo and your friends know how far it is: you lose touch gradually, almost imperceptibly. It’s a fact of distance, it’s a fact of isolation, it’s a fact of life far away from your friends. It just happens. One day, months or years after you’re there, you realize…hey, I used to know this person, whatever happened to them?

I know what you’re going to say…Facebook is AWESOME for exactly this!

I just don’t do that. I deleted my account a couple of months ago, and haven’t regretted it. I didn’t feel that the type of “keeping in touch” that Facebook was providing me was worth the junk, the neverending trivial applications, the getting showered with information you can do nothing with, the constant buzzing of information that you have to prioritize and sort through, and the generally shallow level of communication. It wasn’t cutting it for me, so I deleted it from my life, and have not gone back on that decision, but I do miss out on some things. And I’ve caused quite a disappearing act of my own. :-)