FLYING: Confessions of a Free Woman

It seems appropriate to resume writing on a double anniversary.  It has been a full year since my last post, and this week marked four years at my desk job.  Neither one of those things is exactly celebratory, but they do work as a backdrop for today’s ruminations.  I’d like to share with you what I wrote a few nights ago, attempting for the nth time to complete a blog post:

“I am a little ashamed to see that it has been a year since I last wrote.  I realized my absence long ago, but the little obligations that pepper life are numerous and demanding, and the longer I go without writing - whether it is a blog or a song or a thank-you note to a friend - the less momentum I have from my previous expulsions of internal dialogue, and the more self-aware I become of the entire process.

…But it’s funny, as soon as I typed the paragraph above, I got up from the computer and sat back down at the digital piano that sits next to it.  I played through a progression that has been spinning through my head for several months, playing until I was satisfied enough for the moment.  I got up, grabbed my charging cell phone which is being resurrected from a day of dead battery, and called a friend I haven’t spoken to in a few years.  I left her a message, then sat back down to type this paragraph.

…After I typed the second paragraph, I got up to do laundry and finally, close to a year after my new computer was built, began installing iTunes.”

I’m working three separate jobs - the full-time office job I’ve spoken of since my first post, teaching various voice students on weeknights, and acting as my church’s music director on the weekends.  The small windows of time I have in my home are a blur of cooking, cleaning binges, complaining about all the damn cat hair, and collapsing into a haze of video games or aimless internet browsing.  Social efforts wear me out, and so does glancing over the graveyard of my creative efforts - a coloring book, a sewing machine, recording software.  Owning these things is not the same as creativity, the same way that buying and shelving books doesn’t make me more knowledgeable.  But they’re stacked up in my room all the same. 

My reality is common, and I have to remind myself that I chose this.  I pay my rent, I buy my food, I buy something unnecessary that catches my eye, and I concede myself to perpetuate the cycle.  This is equated with responsibility, as enough.  But on its own, the process feels numb and programmed and…dehumanized.  And I realize that this is how most of us function.  Reading this article, I wonder again - at what cost?  (Do read it, it’s worth consideration.)  Earlier this week, a blogger known for traveling the world on a tiny budget and promoting a general exuberance for life wrote that one of her fears was “waking up one day to discover that I’ve fallen into a life of soul-killing disappointment and quiet desperation”.  I suppose it’s the Thoreau reference more than anything else, but my eyes widened as I thought to myself, “That!  I’m…that!”

You must believe me when I say that I know my life is one of extreme privilege and independence.  This is not lost on me, and it keeps me grateful, or at least consistent.  But more noticeably consistent has been the decline of my own vibrancy.  There are moments when I still feel like I could build something just for the sake of creation, because it’s beautiful.  Someone once told me, “Creativity is the highest act of reflecting God, who is the ultimate Creator.”  It strikes me as true.  It also strikes me as lofty in an age of disregarding art as superfluous, mere decoration.  I can understand how I’ve come to consign the majority of my awakeness to an illusion of control over my own provision.  I can understand how aberration from this well-worn pathway causes discomfort in well-meaning (or not) people, and it is almost as much for those people that I have embraced a “normal” and “steady” job as it is for myself.  Yet for every voice that has preached their message of prudence, there has been a disproportionately larger group who dissent, who recognize me, who don’t much care for the angled “we can’t all be astronauts” argument.  I have a harder time hearing them, or believing them.  But the longer I silence myself, the more I find I’ve disappeared.  And I have to evaluate whether pacifying my body with my most believable promises of rent, groceries, and shiny distractions to take the edge off is worth more than I am.

So, back to my earlier blog clip.  Despite exhaustion and an ever-lengthening mishmash task list with Sisyphian overtones, I began again, and that lurch set me in motion for all the little things I kept setting aside for the vague “later”, whether they were chores or connections or inspiration.  I hope, especially so in documenting it, that I will remember the curious feeling of unleashing, being set in motion, and that I will not be so enticed by familiarity and cowardice that I lull to a stop once more, at least not the same one.

I have a long list of other things I’m looking forward to sharing and discussing with you, but they can wait.  For now, just this, my little moment of movement.

I was raised to be an independent woman; to be free and responsible for my own life and to achieve these things through my own work and study. Somehow, in the course of my pursuit of all these things, freedom became the most cherished value of all to me. It acquired several meanings throughout my life. It meant, first of all, to be able to discover the world, to meet different people, to experience different cultures, different things, to learn more, to hear, read, write or dance. It meant an incessant search for all things that were real and true.

Second, it meant being able to make my own choices, to be able to be the one setting the course I wanted to follow (even if, of course, support from others was needed much more often than not). It also meant being economically independent which this led me to invest heavily in my studies. I always believed this to be my way, the only way I could pursue my dreams and still be faithful to the things I believed in. It was the closest I could get to the way I felt as a woman and as a person. Hence, this pursuit of freedom deeply defined who I am today. It was both liberating and exhausting. Actually, I should say that it was liberating for many years and it becomes more and more exhausting as time goes by.  

There is something to be said about what freedom really represents.  (This is why and where Flying entered my life in such a wonderful and surprising way…) The pursuit of my dreams and my independence has led me to study and work in different European countries. What a wonderful experience this was and has been…. To get to know different cultures, traditions, people, languages, how to live with and in them; to find more about myself and about my own boundaries when facing different challenges or speaking different languages. Moving around can be extremely enlightening and fulfilling at so many levels, many more than I could have ever imagined.

However, what I did not foresee when I made these choices, is what freedom, in the sense I have experienced it, really means. It is a bittersweet thing. Indeed, while the thrill never really went way, many things became burdensome. Home became a rather undefined word to me and although I still believe Portugal to be it, I often feel at home at many different places and on the downside… nowhere at all.

Relationships also became difficult to take to the next level, what is the next level when I keep moving around, and what is the present if it almost always implies some distance? Work became a collection of challenging and interesting projects that are usually temporary and thus never see the light of a new year, that never see continuity or growth. I will not even mention the possibility of motherhood… 

The choice of freedom above all things, thus, has its perks and its burdens, as any choice has anyway. What I didn’t know when I made it was that there would be a day where it would be too late to choose to stop, to belong again and to come back to the place that I left behind and still find it and feel it as my home (and vice versa).

An article in The Economist last year about being a foreigner said it beautifully: “The funny thing is, with the passage of time, something does happen to long-term foreigners which makes them more like real exiles, and they do not like it at all. The homeland, which they left behind changes, the culture, the politics and their old friends all change, die, Forget them. They come to feel that they are foreigners even when visiting “home”. Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-born writer of Indian descent living in America, catches something of this in her novel, “The Namesake”. Ashima, who is an Indian émigré, compares the experience of foreignness to that of “a parenthesis in what had once been an ordinary life, only to discover that the previous life has vanished, replaced by something more complicated and demanding.  Beware, then: however well you carry it off, however much you enjoy it, there is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner, even a genteel foreigner. Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasizes over time into its incurable variant, nostalgia. And nostalgia has much in common with the Freudian idea of melancholia—a continuing, debilitating sense of loss, somewhere within which lies anger at the thing lost. It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility of it. Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian-born intellectual resettled in France, has caught this sense of deprivation by comparing the experience of foreignness with the loss of a mother. But we cannot expect to have it all ways. Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.” [The Economist, 17.12.2009, “Being Foreign”]

What if I would have known what I know now back then (the old question…)? Well, that goes without saying… I would have chosen freedom anyway. After all, as a wise woman in the film says, being free is a luxury that many people don’t have.

Gail Collins’ column today most likely gave Suffragettes, Sappho, and all of our Feminist Foremothers the vapors today.

Seriously.

How else to react to the following:

The health care reform bill currently being debated in the Senate contains a provision known as the Bo-Tax — so called because it would levy a 5 percent tax on cosmetic surgery procedures. The idea is to tax those who indulge in medically unnecessary procedures in order to pay for medical necessities for everyone else.

This sounded like a refreshingly good idea to me, until I read that Terry O’Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women, is against it.

“Now they are going to put a tax on middle-aged women in a society that devalues them for being middle-aged?” she complained to The Times.

The tone of Collins’ column is incredulous, as is my reaction to it. So many things to be concerned about in the Healthcare bill, and the President of NOW is objecting to the five percent plastic surgery tax?

O’Neill argues that middle-aged women face so much discrimination in the job market that many of them must lie about their age. In order to do that, they must appear younger than their years; hence the need for Botox, tummy tucks, and all the other things women do to themselves to erase the signs that they are passing out of their reproductive years.

Collins’ column is worth reading. And her questioning the fear that drives someone like O’Neill–that all women secretly fear  they are going to wind up as bag ladies, despite their wealth–is perhaps dead-on in its accuracy.

But I find myself unable to feel sympathy for these women.

First of all, plastic surgery is expensive and is not covered by insurance. So, an extra five percent is hardly Draconian. I doubt it will keep the privileged few who can afford it from getting it. And, if it’s true that middle-aged women are terrified that they will lose their jobs or not be able to find jobs without it, we are talking about women who are looking for jobs in the upper strata of the working world.

In other words, this sounds suspiciously like a white, upper middle-class feminist complaint. I thought that feminists had realized that they needed to embrace class and race as issues within feminism? If defending white middle-class women’s access to the Botox deprives a poor, white woman of an opportunity to get an abortion (because, say, someone trades their vote on the Stupak amendment for this Stupid amendment), how does that help bring women together?

I thought that, as older women, we were to have been taught to embrace our wrinkles. Our laugh lines. Our worry lines. Our creases. These are our badges of honor, they show we have lived, loved, and watched a world that is often unfair to us all.

My sense is that as feminists, we need to be fighting for things that affect us all, and I can’t help but see this as a problem that affects primarily white, upper middle-class women. Am I wrong?

This week marked the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, India, in which 162 people were killed, and scores injured. I began a series of articles that mirrored Virginia Quarterly Review’s decision to run a four-part long-form journalism piece that would be exclusively online.The articles, which all-told, totaled 19,000 words, told a stunning tale of chaos, terror, the deliberate infliction of suffering, and a response from Indian armed services and police that seemed to contribute to the death toll.

Jason Motlagh, the author of the article, spent months interviewing survivors and researching the details. The result is something stunning. And, I believe, ground-breaking. It heralds good things for what can be done online.

This type of journalism is usually saved for the pages of print. VQR’s decision to run it online was monumental, and I was curious, now that the series was complete, how its editor, Ted Genoways, felt the experiment had gone. He was gracious enough to allow me to interview him.

In our interview, we talk about the successes and limitations of writing long-form journalism for the Internet.

LB: What was the genesis of the idea for doing long-form journalism as a blog piece? Why not publish it in the print journal?

TG: Jason Motlagh had written an outstanding article for us about separatist groups in India and came by the VQR offices to discuss what he might work on next. I wondered if he thought it would be possible to undertake a long-form narrative of the Mumbai terror attacks. Jason has great contacts in Mumbai, especially with reporters there, so he agreed to give it a go. The original idea was to publish it in our Fall issue, but Jason was still working as the deadline approached–and the piece kept get longer and longer. But it wasn’t just getting bigger; it was getting better. We started talking about releasing it on the web as a way of letting it run as long as it needed to be and also timing its release closer to the anniversary.

LB:  Now that you’ve done it, what is your initial reaction to the response the piece(s) have received? Do you think it would have have attracted a larger audience in the journal? Or do you think that you’ve benefited from word of mouth (something that is hard to do with journals, I would think.)

Probably the most gratifying element of the response has been hearing from survivors of the attacks–words of praise and thanks but also additional information and refinements of the timeline. We’re working on a revised version of the article, something else that wouldn’t be possible with a print publication. It’s still too early to judge the full readership of the whole piece, but we’ve already had a strong response. The upside of the blogosphere is that it’s democratic nature allows a great piece like this, even if it’s from a small publication like ours, to circulate widely and swiftly. The real question is whether we can convince foundations or other funders to support this kind of journalism, because it’s expensive to produce and putting it up free on the web doesn’t do anything to offset those costs.

LB:  What is the future of this piece? Is it something that your writer is going to turn into a book?

That’s up to Jason–but he’s gotten a number of inquiries from agents and book editors. I think that it would make a great book, and Jason is the perfect writer to undertake that job.

LB: Having done this once, and really broken new ground, would you do it again?

That’s an interesting question. This piece was really a special opportunity, and I think that we should try experiments like this only when we feel like we have something as singular and important as this piece is. On top of that, this isn’t the kind of thing that we can afford to do often unless we can identify sources of support. So I think we’ve proven that we can undertake this kind of ambitious reporting successfully and shown that there’s an audience out there for it. Now the question is whether we can figure out a way to pay for it. The web is a cheap delivery mechanism, but multiple trips to Mumbai, months of research, and the staff time to edit the piece, prepare it for the web, and promote it, isn’t free. We’re lucky to have great support from the University of Virginia, but in tough economic times, we need to find a few altruistic supporters of journalism who see this kind of work as important, whether it’s profit-generating or not. I’m optimistic that such people are out there.

> As so many complain that the web is full of ‘bad journalism,’ this piece will become my touchstone for rebutting such nonsense.

That’s great–and you’re right: it’s untrue that the web is bankrupt of good journalism. And we’re actually very excited about the possibilities of mixing traditional media with new media. Indeed, one of our principal foundation supporters, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Journalism, underwrote an article that we published by Kwame Dawes about HIV/AIDS in Jamaica. Pulitzer funded a photographer, Joshua Cogan, and film crew to accompany Kwame. They developed that story into news segments for PBS and, with support from the MAC AIDS fund, into an incredible online project called “Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica“, that recently won an Emmy for “new approaches to news and documentary programming.”

Kwame also wrote poems that he and Josh turned into audio slideshows. That approach inspired a project called In Verse that I created with radio producer Lu Olkowski. That project produced paired poems and photographs for the current issue of VQR (Susan B. A. Somers-Willett and Brenda Ann Kenneally in Troy, New York, and Natasha Trethewey and Josh Cogan in Gulfport, Mississippi), but it also turned into several amazing radio segments for WNYC’s Studio 360 and some incredible audio slideshows that exist solely on the web. That project got off the ground because of a pilot program called Public Radio Makers Quest 2.0, an initiative of the Association of Independents in Radio funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

What I find hopeful about those projects is that they represent a convergence of nonprofit organizations–print, television, radio, and multimedia storytellers working with altruistic funders like MAC AIDS, Pulitzer, and CPB. At a time when journals are threatened and support for journalism is dwindling, these initiatives seem vital and exciting to me–evidence that great storytelling can be carried out on the web as easily as any other medium.

Poor Sonia Sotomayor. David Brooks writes a sympathetic piece about her this morning, focusing on the fact that she has worked hard her entire life, sacrificed relationships and family, all in chasing the comfort of work.

In Brooks’ picture of Sotomayor, her loss of her father at nine took something away from her, and she’s been on a quest to fill that hole ever since. She works. All the time. And has “failed” relationships and no children to show for it.

But let’s think about this for a moment, shall we? If I were reading this as a work of fiction, I would recognize all the tropes of a moral story. Ebenezer Scrooge perhaps, who loses his humanity, works too many hours chasing the almighty dollar, and then finally, at the end of his life, finds empathy and the company of his fellow humans…?

So, now, I’m really confused. Because aren’t we told that Sotomayor has “too much empathy for her fellow humans,”  that that quality will make her a terrible judge because she won’t rule by some “philosophical-historical construct of objectivity?”

Capitalism thrives on the emotionally “crippled,” on those who are unable to form relationships with their fellow people, who retreat to their work and work and work and contribute to capitalist growth. That’s one story. The other story is that capitalism thrives on those who are so dedicated to their work out of love and passion that they spend hours and hours doing it until they find what it is they’re chasing — and then bring home the bacon, long after their families have fallen asleep, to fund their subsistence.

But it seems those characteristics only apply to men. It’s easy to imagine a man being too busy to get married, or loving his work so much that he can never come home for dinner or be there before the kids go to bed. He has a wife who makes up the slack. But a woman who loves her work that much? “Sssssh. There’s something wrong with her.”

As Brooks quotes:

“As an adult, the profiles describe her as upbeat and social, leading walks to Brooklyn, hosting poker parties, serving as godmother to many children. Yet over the years, she has been remarkably honest about the costs of her workaholism.”

“Her marriage broke up after two years. She was quoted as saying, ‘I cannot attribute that divorce to work, but certainly the fact that I was leaving my home at 7 and getting back at 10 o’clock was not of assistance in recognizing the problems developing in my marriage.’ ”

“Later, during a swearing-in ceremony in 1998, she referred to her then-fiancé, ‘The professional success I had achieved before Peter did nothing to bring me genuine personal happiness.’ She addressed him, saying that he had filled ‘voids of emptiness that existed before you. … You have altered my life so profoundly that many of my closest friends forget just how emotionally withdrawn I was before I met you.’ ”

“That relationship ended after eight years, and her biographers paint a picture of a life now that is frantically busy, fulfilling and often aloof. ‘You make play dates with her months and months in advance because of her schedule,’ a friend of hers told The Times.”

“This isn’t the old story of a career woman trying to balance work and family. This is the story of pressures that affect men as well as women (men are just more likely to make fools of themselves in response, as the news of the last few years indicates). It’s the story of people in a meritocracy that gets more purified and competitive by the year, with the time demands growing more and more insistent.”

Okay. So Brooks backs off for a moment, and says there are plenty of men and women like Sotomayor–the elites, driven by their work (who, by the way, are not having babies)–whose relationships at work become a pale shadow of a real emotional relationship.

He continues:

“These profiles give an authentic glimpse of a style of life that hasn’t yet been captured by a novel or a movie — the subtle blend of high-achiever successes, trade-offs and deep commitments to others. In the profiles, you see the intoxicating lure of work, which provides an organizing purpose and identity. You see the web of mentor-mentee relationships — the courtship between the young and the middle-aged, and then the tensions as the mentees break off on their own. You see the strains of a multicultural establishment, in which people try to preserve their ethnic heritage as they ascend into the ranks of the elite. You see the way people not only choose a profession, it chooses them. It changes them in a way they probably didn’t anticipate at first.”

“My impression is that judges feel the strain between their social roles and their social lives more acutely than anybody. They are often outgoing people who, because of their jobs, cannot freely socialize with lawyers and others who share their deepest interests. But Sotomayor’s life also overlaps with a broader class of high achievers. You don’t succeed at that level without developing a single-minded focus, and struggling against its consequences. ”

Brooks is undercutting the whole notion that judges should be in positions to make decisions about “real” American life. After all, so many of them fail to live that life (unless they’re traditionalists like those male judges whose faithful wives stand next to them on the podium as they’re introduced.) Judges are disconnected from what real Americans feel, so how can they possibly judge us?

But it’s not just judges. I have two male friends who have both opted not to marry or have children because of their work. I know men in marriages who are workaholics and ignore their families. No one seems to pay much attention to them, until the day their wives walk out on them after the kids have been raised and gone and there’s no one there. My point is, many, many families are like this. This is more the real America than what Brooks somehow thinks. Many people are cut off from the most basic of human emotions.

No wonder the word “empathy” scares the crap out of so many of Sotomayor’s critics.

But life is not just about relationships. May Sarton has written poignantly about the life of “solititude,” not loneliness. Rainier Maria Rilke insists:

“What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grown-ups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing about what they were doing. ”

We cannot grow without being able to embrace our solitude. While most of us grow within “traditional” relationships, not all of us do. The construction of the family is meant to discipline us for civic life, as well as to comfort us. Yet, to the confusion of some, there are those of us who do not want to live within that discipline.

Finally. Brooks speaks of the “elite woman” once again, who has given up love for work. Never, never does he talk about the low-income women who are working three jobs and have no time for love. Or the middle class man or the homeless person. Forgoing love is not just for the elites. Sometimes, forgoing love is forced upon us.

I just wish sometimes that Brooks could walk among the real people, see that there is not this world of happy workers who love God, their spouses, and their (even unwanted) babies and their jobs versus a world of high-achieving over-educated miserable elites who complain about everything.

The world is just not that Manichean, David. These issues are not “black and white.” Or did you not learn that when you read Augustine–the original who struggled with the life of solitude (which he thought would bring him closer to God and to agape) versus the life of the family (which gave him sensual pleasure and human love)?

What an incredible amount of change since the last time I posted.  The things I’ve done, the people around me, and the circumstances I’ve been in that make me question my place in the world… again. I am so much more accepting of it all this time, though. With a relief, I have taken most of these changes with grace, mainly thanks to the support and patience of the people around me. I feel more confident in my uncertainty. Maybe it’s the weather.

I was unemployed, was asked to start working again part time with the same company a few months later, met a wonderful couple that I did some freelance work for, and was presented with the possibility of doing more work for them in the future. I accepted a live-in weekend nanny position for a family on Park Ave that I used to work for and will be starting again this weekend. I will be working 7 days a week. Unemployed to 7 days a week. It wasn’t easy to say the least, but I think the reason I was able to take it all the way I did was because I felt some type of unity with the strangers I walk past in NYC all the time.

I recall a conversation I had with my father in February thanking him for being so supportive of me. I began to cry as I realized that what has been getting me through the uncertainty is that I know that there are people around me who have it much more difficult than me. There are so many different people in NYC and the interactions with them are so brief, but sometimes, so intense. I am constantly moved by the people around me and sometimes deeply affected by their actions as a whole. I see their actions, not them as individuals doing those actions.

I’ve seen the way so many different types of people live, some of whom I really never thought, nor ever wanted to know existed. Like the man I have shared an apartment with this year (no, not my fiancé, but my roommate.) The lifestyle he leads, in so many ways, embodies the vision of people I knew existed, but was thankful I never encountered in my personal life. Or the wealthy people that I have been working for, whose use of money has put me to tears only because I know how difficult it is to be without it, and how hard I see the people around me working to attain it.

But on the other side, I have also been witness to a wonderful role model at my current part time job that doesn’t even realize how grateful I am for her wonderful example of hard work in the position that I hope to have one day. Or the people that I have shared my unemployment woes with and their resilience, sending out resume after resume everyday. And the wonderful man that I share my life with, who has shown me that patience is a virtue that needs to be cultivated and exalted on a daily basis.

Such deep contrasts have been running through my days. I’m grateful for living in New York City, I’m thankful for meeting all those I have, and I’m excited to learn about the ones I haven’t.

If I die, where does time go? – Kurt Elling, “Esperanto”

When people ask me what I’ve been up to lately, I usually know how to answer. “Oh, I’ve been working full time at a music licensing company.” If they’re not from my church, I’ll add, “And I work part time directing the band at my church.” Explaining work accounts for the bulk of my time, and I figure that’s enough explanation for most people. But lately, when asked what I’m up to, my real answer has been creeping through more often: “I’m not really sure.” After offering my somewhat true but lame excuse of being kept busy by my jobs over and over and over, I notice myself shifting into cruise control as pre-programmed words spill out of my mouth. This could be for a variety of reasons. Perhaps you and I have not had that moment wherein we earn a place of intimacy in each others’ lives, and so divulging my uncertainties about my identity and direction are like hefting heavy bagging on an unsuspecting passerby. Sometimes that’s a gamble I take, and sometimes I’m met with a surprising response of understanding and/or the gentle voice of experience. More often, however, I receive blank stares, uncomfortable stammering, or self-appointed advisers launching into a bank of Fix-Alls–their own pre-programmed speeches. During any of the latter three, I retreat with regret and the recurring notion of pearls going to swine.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that people bother to ask and that they care to some degree about me. However, “what have you been up to?” is often little more than a slightly personalized variation of “how are you?”, which is to say that people probably aren’t looking for me to respond “probing the potential and uncharted courses of my life”.

In any case, if I have exposed myself enough to allow “I’m not really sure” as a response to your question, it’s probably because I’m too tired or wary to offer an explanation, but I might also trust you more than the people to whom I say “oh, working.”

‘Cause Lord knows, I don’t feel like I’ve been working.

Work is like a dirty word to most Americans, conjuring up all manner of corporate hells in the mind. But work has vague promise in it, the possibility of not being for naught. I feel like there is work to be done that would connect me to the planet, to its inhabitants, to myself. For the most part, that type of work doesn’t pay. Is that important? I don’t know. I’m American. Money is another form of oxygen.

Otherwise, it actually is difficult for me to discern where my time goes. I used to keep professional-looking Franklin Covey planners at the ready, but rarely opened them. So I figured this year I’d keep with the tradition of not opening a planner by simply not buying one. Unfortunately, I missed some important events in the nascent months of 2009, so I started printing free weekly and monthly schedules from the Internet and filling in the blanks. An alarming portion of my weekdays is filled in with grey boxes representing “work”. The red boxes on the weekend are for church rehearsals and church services. And then a flurry of little boxes sectioned off with tasks left undone for several weeks to several months’ time. So, good. I’m getting organized. But where did those several months go? What have I been doing for the last few years? Or even worse—the last seven years since I graduated from high school?

Toward the end of high school, I made one seemingly innocent move that affected me for all the years after and into the present. I dropped a class. It was something I had never considered as a possibility. I quit soccer when I was 5 years old, but that’s because I was not cut out for athletics (I could often be found on the other side of the field from the action, sitting in a cluster of dandelions and confusedly detached from whatever it is that soccer players do). But by junior high, when I was the superbusykid who wanted to do everything from leadership council to jazz band to cheerleading and more, I somehow stuck with each activity to the bitter end. And I learned in high school that no matter how long I procrastinated, work somehow got done (yes, my own work). My mom would sit at the dining room table with me every night until I either started or finished my work, often sleeping at the table to keep me company. Her dedication inspired my own. So I internalized the “it must be done” ethic all the way up until my math class senior year. I was barely getting by, slipping further away from understanding with each passing day, anxiety mounting. And so, to avoid a year of many hate-filled equations, I let go.

Realizing that I could drop a class and still graduate with honors set a perilous precedent. I would repeat this formula again for university classes (and even post-grad classes) and still graduate magna cum laude, which was terribly important to me at the time. Dropping a class is no crime, but the habit of pulling back due to fear of failure is, in the end, self-robbery. Even outside of school, I’ve ceased to attempt things that I’m not positive I can more than handle. No risks. No failure. Or so I thought.

The play-it-safe mindset has cost me, surely. I’m not sure if it’s something I gravitate toward with my own desire for security, assurances—or if it’s learned behavior that the world keeps confirming with a little nod as they wave me past. Either way, I know there’s more. So why am I not doing it?

I started to think about it more after a few too many bouts of “I don’t know” in response to inquiries of my present preoccupations and/or accolades. And I noticed that a good amount of the time, I’m doing nothing. Nothing. It’s my prerogative, right? And it’s like Office Space (one of the most accurate movies ever made, in my opinion): if given the option to do whatever I want, I choose to do nothing. But in my case, it’s not because I want to do nothing. On the contrary, I usually feel pretty gross about it. I used to fill up most of my spare time with shopping, because it diverted my attention from the pain of loneliness. It was a shiny temporary fix, except that I was spending a good deal of the money I was earning, which deepened my dependency on the dollar, which in turn sponsored my ability to self-medicate rather than save and direct my money toward some more meaningful purpose. And therein lies the present story of my life. It’s easier to watch movies and browse the Internet and update my Facebook status for all of my online acquaintances’ perusal—so I’ll still feel connected, but in a distant and self-stylized way—than it is for me to face the fact that I’m unhappy, I’m not growing, and I am in fact wasting myself. Worse, I feel that I’ve earned the right to do nothing after paying my dues by shuffling papers during daylight. This was supposed to be the prize. I scaled the ladder of academia to find employment, and there it was, ergonomic chair and all. The long essays on topics I didn’t care about, the 3 a.m. cram sessions complete with Red Bull, the internal fire of stress; it was all for this, the idea that I’m safe. I worked hard for that idea, and I’d like to take a breather. But years are starting to peel away, and I’m still not sure what’s next.

Despite my disillusionment, I know that having a job is a good thing, especially in such trying economic times in the States. I’m not an idiot, and I’m not going to run away and find myself in the woods in order to break my shackles to empty reasons in Los Angeles. I do fantasize about that, but I won’t yet do it. It’s more than the nature of having a job that is keeping me down, it’s my own mentality quelling the small sparks that light me up. So I think I’d like to wake up now and find that I’m still there, and that I can move, and that I won’t always fall. Or that I don’t have to be afraid of falling.

Can equality ever really exist any any relationship or partnership? Does the balance of power shift, however slightly, in each and every situation…? Is every interaction a negotiation or a blow stricken in the interest of making things proportionate…? Perhaps because as I am certain we’ve all been told life is so unfair, our interactions within our chosen relationships, partnerships, friendships are struggles to achieve or to maintain balance and justice.

I do not understand how it is that one relationship can be compared to another, even if the comparisons are made by someone that is in or has been in both relationships… People are capable of change, circumstances change - what is there to compare, really?

On occasion, my husband likens our relationship to the relationships or marriages of others whom he knows. The fact that he does this makes no sense to me. I do not compare him to other husbands and I certainly do not wish to be compared to other wives. Sure, from a distance, we may judge that the circumstances of someone else’s relationship are not right for us, but we really have no place to judge whether or not they are happy or whether or not their relationships are healthy or right for them… Only the people in the relationship can make those decisions for themselves.

I can’t help but wonder if relationships are, essentially, a constant power struggle. Not just “romantic” relationships - friendships, business acquaintanceships, partnerships of any nature (particularly those between people of the opposite sex). Certainly, every act cannot be a compromise or a metaphor for the control that one person has over another, can it…?

After five or so years together in some capacity or another, my husband and I seem to be arriving separately and almost daily at the same seemingly inevitable conclusion: we prefer to do things so, so differently from one another. One might think that after so much time together, people would have already realized such things about each other and probably managed to accept it or let it go. However, we seem to take more opportunities each day to point out to each other just how we would have done things differently and why, in our respective opinions, the other’s way of doing something is wrong. This makes me kind of sad, mostly because I was so excited when I first began dating my husband because there was nothing I wanted to change about him and that was a rare thing for me. I have often taken up with people as either friends or as lovers who had visible cracks and flaws - I wanted nothing more than to be used as a life vest or repair person. Those situations never worked, and likewise it never worked for me when people attempted to repair or shape or mold me - I always felt somewhat powerless in those situations - as though I was being looked after and cared for and parented rather than cared about. 

For a very long time, my husband and I did not argue. We had heated debates about a great many things, but we did not have arguments. When we finally did have an argument, it was over something silly (laundry, I believe) but it was a welcome relief to me that the argument was actually about laundry. I had become used to utilizing passive-aggressive communication in past relationships that would then escalate into a seemingly never-ending series of volatile arguments. It was a pleasant surprise to me that my husband was able to talk just about the subject at hand and that he did not attempt to bring up irrelevant things or things from the past.

While he and I were only dating and prior to us deciding that we were seeing each other exclusively, he did his best to respect my privacy (it didn’t seem to take him any effort at all) and never asked me questions to which he did not want to know the answers. I, however, have probably volunteered more information to my husband than he ever wanted or needed to know. Then, I made the mistake of expecting him be more similar to me and to communicate in the same manner that I did, so I asked him a great many questions, regardless of whether or not I wanted to know the answers to them. I sometimes got angry or insecure for reasons not his fault, and accused him of withholding information from me or not being completely honest with me. I managed somehow, in my attempts to communicate clearly, to not make it clear to him at all what it was that I actually wanted (or didn’t want to, as the case sometimes was) to know.

My husband has been an incredible understanding and tolerant man, throughout the course of our relationship and our marriage and I have taken this for granted and pushed tested the boundaries of his patience and tolerance on more than one occasion. He has done a very good job of never holding my past against me, regardless of what information it was that I shared with him. I, on the other hand, have had a very difficult time not holding my past against him.

I notice a lot of inequalities in my marriage, and most of them I feel responsible for. I allow my husband to take care of financial matters - to pay bills, to budget and to generally be accountable for how our collective income is distributed, used and invested. I imagine that this can be overwhelming for him, but when I have offered help, he has not seemed interested in accepting it.  I sometimes feel as though I should have more of a say in the handling of our money, but I suppose that it is not very fair for me to express my qualms with that when I am more than happy to let him take responsibility for all of our debts and when I take no action to do so myself.

My husband has been very supportive of me when I have been between jobs or when I have been terminated or when I have chosen to look for other work because I was miserable in a position or, sometimes, for no better reason than the fact that I was restless. I have never expected him to take care of me, not financially certainly, but he has done so and been willing to do so more often than I ever would have expected (or asked - I have a lot of difficulty requesting help - I guess that in the past I generally preferred to manipulate and to feel as though I was using people because that made me feel like I was in control and taking charge of my destiny and not a victim or a charity case).

I have somewhat recently begun to resent the characteristics of tolerance and patience that my husband possesses because they inspire me to question whether or not these are personality traits that I require in a mate. I fear that a less patient and less tolerant person would have told me to shove off by now. I am almost certain that this is the case. I know that I am not an easy person to deal with or to live with. I fear that I have the kind of personality that begs for some to be patient with me and to tolerate me.

In my marital relationship, I have noticed a general lack of impartiality and some imbalances across the board. If my marriage were the scales of justice, for instance, I guess my side of the scale would be holding more weight. Neither my husband or myself go out too terribly often without the other, but I definitely spend more time away from him and from home than he does. I have more male friends than he has female friends and he is perfectly alright with me spending time with them alone. I have encouraged him to go out to do things without me, but he has this sense of accountability that I think I must lack. I have encouraged my husband on at least an occasion or two to go spend time time with one of his female friends, albeit this may have been after some hesitation or on my part or possibly after an argument that I may have initiated.

While I like to think that I am self aware, it probably wears on my husbands nerves that I am honest with him and myself about my insecurities but that I refuse to part with them when he’s given me no reason not to trust him and when he’s given me all of the verbal and non-verbal reassurances that he can think to provide. Surely he finds my tendency to run away from situations that I do not like, my tendencies to avoid confrontation, to step aside and allow others to take the reigns and to complain about the decisions that they make, to turn my back on things that do not immediately come easily to me and my tendency to project my anger towards men onto him and to take things not his fault out on him and to generally be unreasonable aggravate him. Certainly, my often misguided or misdirected rage and temper are difficult for him to deal with.

Recently, we’ve found ourselves in an unfamiliar position - one in which I am the primary wage earner and provider for our family. This is a stressful situation for both of us. I have recently received a promotion (this is the first time in my life when I have managed to move up in a company where I have been employed) and I feel myself getting restless in my new position already, after only 6 months. I imagine he feels somewhat emasculated by the situation - whether he is willing to admit it out loud or not, he has some beliefs that I find somewhat old fashioned. One of those beliefs is that a man should support his family (and probably be the primary wage earner).

I admire this man for a variety of different reasons and one of them is that I know he has been willing and at least mentally prepared on more than one occasion to provide for my daughter and I. I do not know if he intrinsically thinks that this should be his role as the male in the relationship or if it is more a sense of obligation, but I appreciate it. I have not ever asked for it or expected it or taken advantage of the fact that he would fill this role, but I have been appreciative of his willingness to do so. I wish that I were able (willing?) to be as supportive of him finding & mapping out his own career path as he has been of me.

I know that it is not  a situation that he finds ideal, either - one in which he was not only the primary bread-winner but the only one earning a wage and bringing in money to support our family. I once brought up to him, after he made one of those comparisons that I so despise between our relationship and the relationships of others that we know, that I knew at least two women whose husbands were willing to go out and work two jobs so that their wives would not have to work, so that they could stay home with their children rather than have them raised by some anonymous third party.

I am not certain why I even said it. As much as I enjoy being a mother even though it was not planned and were I to do it again, I would go about things differently, I have never pictured myself as someone who could tolerate being expected to be only a mother. I would likely feel trapped and I would probably have quite a few complaints were I expected to stay home and keep house and look after the children. I would probably feel quite lonely and under appreciated. Besides, even with feminism and womens’ lib, how many men realistically have an expectation to by financially supported by their wives or female partners? In all fairness, why don’t we expect some men to have similar expectations of their female counterparts by now?

I think I hurt him a little when I said told him that in response to him stating that he expected me to contribute and to provide for our family as well. It is only fair for him to expect such a thing. I think his statement was a reply to my question of whether or not he’d be supportive of me trying to make a living as a writer.  I know that he wishes he made enough money so that neither of us really had to work to earn a living. I’ve also seen him work towards achieving this goal. I just have not seen him put as much work into it as I would expect someone to if they wanted to realize such a dream and make it a reality. It has, on occasion, been frustrating to watch. I imagine that when I voice this frustration, he finds it discouraging. I just do not know how to motivate him to make of himself what he wants to make from where I am at - I have tried different approaches - I have tried to be encouraging only to be resentful of offering encouragement later and I have tried to tell him to step back and to look at things more realistically only to have him resent my negative tone.

While waiting for my daughter’s ballet class to end one Saturday morning, I recall overhearing a conversation that echoed so many complaints I’d heard before, countless times from numerous other women. I leaned against the wall and watched my daughter practice pirouettes and listened as a woman beside me described to her friend her frustration with her male partner. She was talking about the few household chores for which he took responsibility and how disappointed he became when she failed to notice him doing something that she considered small and something that she expected from him when she herself kept a job and took responsibility for the vast majority of housework and never expected strokes or received recognition for it and while she looked after their children, as well, so that he could work. I laughed to myself not because the situation was amusing, but because from most of my female friends who have children and who live with men, this is a nearly universal complaint (even regardless of whether or not she works outside of the home because, as most mothers will tell you, motherhood itself is more demanding and more of a full time position than most other roles one could possibly tackle).

It makes me wonder if fatherhood is. I imagine that it is, to a degree. But probably not in the same way. I think that intrinsically, women have a more maternal nature when it comes to their children because of the umbilical chord. I imagine the physical acts as a metaphor and contributes to the way that each sex parents. I have this theory that a lot of biological factors figure into male/female relationships. I don’t know that it makes me any more accepting of certain behaviors and I think that it these biological factors may themselves be kind of lame excuses for such behavior, but I like to investigate and to research the possible reasoning behind things and to, eventually, feel as though I’ve arrived at my own informed conclusions about such things.

potential - from the root word potent - powerful - effective - able to perform (not necessarily sexually) - able to impregnate (normally masculine - see impotent)

As much as I may despise this particular word and its origins, I despise my own - my possession of this “trait” or whatever you may want to call it, even more…

I awoke at just before 5 A.M. on a Saturday morning (nearly three weeks ago now)… to make cookies. I figured while my meringues were drying, I would finally finish one of my blog posts. (I had three that were “in progress” at that time.)

It is never more evident to me than on days like that, when I wake up incredibly early to finish something at the last minute or when I am scrambling to meet a deadline, that I lack discipline.

Procrastination: it is something that I thought I would outgrow, perhaps even magically. It is not something that I can do without effort. I still have a lot of growing up to do. Apparently, I still have a lot of changes that I need to implement into my life as well.

I was fumbling around the kitchen on this morning, making three different types of cookies, making coffee and then I thought to myself that I should maybe start breakfast, too. No one else was watching me, so perhaps it would not be evident to them that I lack focus (or discipline, for that matter). I would perhaps share this information later in the day. Perhaps by that time, the fact that I was juggling baking, composing a blog, and cooking breakfast would have translated into an amusing anecdote - perhaps not.

Even as I was composing this blog entry, I found myself toggling between different windows, still seeking to be distracted from the issues at hand - I have a propensity for seeking distraction. I knew that it had not yet been anywhere nears three quarters of an hour but I found myself getting up from the chair to repeatedly check on the  meringues.

Why can I not just finish one thing at a time?

It is obvious to me, if not to anyone else, that I have commitment issues. I fear it as though it were the plague, but in a manner that is somewhat backwards, I suppose. When it comes to imperative life changes, I tend to embrace those - to jump in with both feet (if not to dive in head first). When it comes to little things, I fear that I cannot trust even myself to know what I will be doing from one moment to the next.

Recently, I was referred to as a professional adult. Just hearing these two words used to describe me, let alone in conjunction with one another, made me want to snicker aloud. For fear of being found out, for fear that someone would discover that I was doing my best to pretend and to play the roles of both professional and adult, I fought the urge. I can’t help but wonder how many other adults feel like they are just faking it and playing along and feel like they struggle with the responsibilities of day to day life? I wonder if they, too, fear being found out.

I am inspired to question myself, too,  about whether or not this feeling will ever go away.

I find excuses, justifications, reasons constantly to avoid things that I do not want to do. “Why,” I ask myself. “What will it amount to?” And then when it comes to things that I want or want to do, I ask myself the opposite. “Why not,” I say, “What will it hurt?”

I thought that with adulthood, with responsibility, there would also come a defining sense not only of self but perhaps an instinct concerning consequences, an intrinsic adoption of accountability. I sat here, typing, getting up from my chair - a perfect metaphor for my habit of running away from things just as I approach the truth - often refusing to finish things when they become too difficult or (even worse) just when I lose interest and I wait to inherit these traits of  accountability.

Thinking about how things begin, the way things start and they way that I behave when I begin things or approach things - whether it be a new friendship or relationship, a new responsibility, a new position, a new project - I realize that I often begin things with enthusiasm - with passion and fervor and a sense of urgency; I often complete things late or at the last minute and in a manner that is less than excited if I even see things entirely through at all.

I am not certain that I believe in new year’s resolutions, but I do not discount them entirely. It seems to me an awakening of sorts - what better time (however arbitrary) to attack something with both hands, to attempt to adopt new and better habits than at the beginning of a brand new year. We could perhaps begin our journeys to becoming new and better people at the start of the earth’s new journey around the sun.

Instead of measuring myself against others, using similarly arbitrary standards like age for instance, perhaps I will have a new measuring tool or unit of measurement - I will be able to see my success by counting short term goals I’ve actually managed to achieve, or tasks I’ve managed to perform and complete, things I’ve managed to ACTUALLY accomplish.

The final sad irony of this composition is not that the one thing I completed on the day that I set out to begin, to do, to accomplish so many things was that the one thing I completed was my blog post about not finishing things; it was, in fact, quite the opposite - it has taken me over three weeks to complete this blog entry… How sad is that?

So, regardless of how commonplace or cliche it may be, I am setting out to change myself - not to become a brand new person - but to develop a new discipline. I am vowing to finish things that I begin, no matter how tumultuous or tiring they may become. I believe that I owe it to myself (and probably to other people as well) to put my best foot forward and to tackle one thing at a time instead of doing several things all at once with less of the effort than I should be exerting - to minimize distractions and to truly focus. Perhaps I will discover new passions - perhaps I will attain a great sense of accomplishment from actually completing tasks, no matter how mundane they might have seemed at the time during which I was completing them. Maybe I will discover things about myself.

The new year is young and my resolve still adolescent at best… I have seen the futility of things that fail to endure - of accomplishments, of human life itself. Perhaps one is just giving in and giving up, throwing in the proverbial towel and resigning one’s self to mediocrity at best when they fail to even try to disprove the futility of their own efforts, which are at best human.

I do not yet know how my exercise will turn out. I do know that I was once described as having a laziness that was almost masculine and that I found that funny at the time. Over time, however, I have become disenchanted with others who I have witnessed display so much potential and so much passion as they begin something, only to abandon it later on… It almost hurts me to watch because, while I hate to admit it, I am very likely doing the exact same thing myself.

My mother, who is about to turn 80 years old, asked all of her children to spend the holidays with her and my father in Florida for her birthday. Three of her five children could come, along with children and partners. My parents rented a house near the beach and we spent five days together, swimming, talking, eating, and playing. Something seems to be happening in my family that I suspect happens in many families: all my life I thought my father ran our family, he was the power, he bossed and told and was the final word, but now as they both age, it is clear that the power is shifting and my mother is blossoming. I am not quite sure why this is happening or when it began, but it could be that my mother is still energetically engaged in her career, while my father is semi-retired, mostly doing consulting jobs. But perhaps it is something subtler than that. Maybe I am just noticing again, that mothers are the center of families, like the center of a wheel. Father’s flex their muscles, come and go, assert and demand, and keep the law — but everyone, including Dad, competes for Mom’s attention.

As we gathered last night for her unofficial birthday party — her real 80th will be in January - it dawned on me how jealous we all are of her love, how we all want to be her favorite, the one she talks to the most. I couldn’t have said this when I was younger. I was too busy running away from her and refusing to compete with my brothers and sister. But last night I was left wondering, wasn’t this flight, a symptom of my voracious need of her that could not be satisfied? Something like, ‘Better to leave if you cannot win…?’ Of course, I am one of five children, which is a lot of competition, but I wonder if all families don’t make constellations around the mother? Because after all the mother is the one your life depends on from conception, fathers are needed later.

It is strange to see my Mom gaining strength with age, and my Dad fading, not physically, but in his ability to steal the light… But somehow it all makes sense, as if the sun had been eclipsed by the moon temporarily, only to come out of the shadows again.

 Inspired by Natasha’s post “Birthdays”

As the year races to an end, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of stability. The outer world market has made it impossible to avoid. At the same time, I work with a lot of young people, fresh out of college, and I have noticed how hard it is for them (as I well understand) to find their way, and keep a sense of themselves in an unpredictable world. I know they look at me thinking, “she doesn’t have these problems; she’s established”, but what I want to say to them is that, even if you get old like me, there is no safety.  As an independent documentary filmmaker of nearly 30 years, I have lived a rollercoaster ride of the creation and re-creation of myself, and my career. But what I have never had is stability. I have often looked at my friends working in the corporate world with awe and disbelief – how can their lives be so predictable? And of course, now for many, this has not been the case, which can be devastating.

As a so-called artist, every time a project finishes, I am faced with the task of how to survive and create a new piece that can be supported by the marketplace while achieving my goals, creatively and politically. The sands of taste, technology and funding are shifting all the time. There are filmmakers that do the same thing over and over each project, so that you can say – “oh, that’s a Harry film…” or “oh, that’s a Mary film…” – but for me that is not the case. All of my films are different paradigms, structures and languages. So each film is like beginning again and it is a very scary process: Will this one be able to find funding? Will it find an audience? Will it “work” and be successful? The rides are bumpy and unpredictable, often with financial worries at different points along the way.

When starting this summer, my little company began to experience funding problems with my new film project, and I had to remind myself that I had been there before. In the past, two of my most important films closed down midway through the edit for lack of monies. Luckily, with these films, after the prerequisite struggle, we were able to open again and finish the projects and they were quite successful. No matter how much I have been though this before, it is always hard when it happens on a new project, and I have to readapt my vision and change my strategies. At least I have past experience to rely on, but for the young people working for me, who had some concept that since I had made many films, I was immune to these problems, I think it was a shock.

I have used many metaphors for my life and work. On the business side I think of my company as an accordion: it collapses between projects, or sometimes even in the middle of projects, and it expands again with funding and with new projects. I often close offices between films and retreat to work from home and then find a new office when I am in the edit of a next project. I have chosen to work like this rather than become a factory taking on work that I don’t necessarily want to do to support a space and team – and provide “stable” income. I am not knocking another path of growing a company, it has just never been my goal. Sometimes I envy people who have done so.

The other metaphor I use sometimes is that of a monkey swinging from tree to tree. Every project is like trying to swing to the next tree branch hoping that when I fly out into the air, holding onto my new “great idea” with nothing but space looming before me, that there will be another tree branch waiting for me to grab onto. I never know if there will be. And of course the possibility of falling to the ground in a nosedive looms dangerously. I suppose if I lived in Europe, I might be more secure as an independent artist, because they respect the trajectory of the director and tend to fund people, not just projects. I am not complaining, but I have never had that luxury.

For me this “artist’s life” isn’t just for us artists, but is actually the true nature of reality. It means that no one can predict what will happen and all of our futures depend on our abilities to adapt to an ever-shifting, highly competitive world. I realize that many people are just waking up to this new reality of life – and it must be that much more devastating for a person who believes in the idea of security. It seems now that this “curse of the artist” is a kind of blessing, but I am not at all smug. I hope I am creative enough and deft enough at absorbing all the new input to survive, but I am never sure. This keeps me very sharp and very aware, because after all, my life is at stake. Of course as human beings we all crave stability and surety – and I do as well – but the nature of life is continual change. Being a so-called “artist” has taught me well in this fact. I long ago gave up the fantasy that I can tread water. Treading water means drowning; the only possibility is to move forward whether I like it or not.

And at the risk of sounding like a fool, I think there is something to be said for embracing the fact that life is uncontrollable.  Maybe if we human beings stopped fighting reality so much, and really accepted it, we could dance with the movement better.

It’s been seven years and it feels like it was yesterday. 15 November 2001, the day summer became winter and day became night: that was the day I first felt the impact of crime. Things were happening to other people, and I read about terrible deaths in newspapers and saw them on television. I felt pity for them and prayed every day for God to protect the ones I love from becoming statistics.

My dad - my loving, caring, reserved, and protective dad - was brutally murdered by his friends. He was beaten and left to die in the bushes, lying in a pool of his own blood. He died a slow, painful, humiliating death. That day, I lost the only person that made my life worth living. He was everything a daughter could ever ask for in a father. A day before his death, we were tending to the garden and as we were working, he took a deep breath and said, “Girl, you know i don’t want to do this job anymore. I am so tired. I don’t have the strength and power to keep on running away from the law.” I asked him how we are going to survive. He said, “God will provide, and you know that he always has a back up plan.” In case you were wondering what kind of job he had that made him run away from the law, he was a fraud master. At times, he would spend the whole month doing a job without luck, or maybe end up in jail.

The following day, three of his friends came to our home to fetch him early in the morning and they left, same as always. But this time, something went wrong, and my dad didn’t come home that day. The following morning, my siblings and I took off to search for him with the help of one of the friends, and we found his lifeless body, face down. Most of the body was OK, but the face and head were vandalized; you could see the skull just by looking in the big hole in his head. I couldn’t understand, and still can’t, why he had to die such a horrible, unmerciful way. I remember the whole community was shaken by the news of his death… but their pain and disbelief was nothing compared to mine. I found myself wanting to know what he was doing as they were beating him. Was he crying? Was he begging for forgiveness? Or was he quiet and accepting? I wish I could know the last thing that came to his mind as he realized that he was dying and leaving his beloved. What was he thinking about before he took his last breath?

We had no funeral policy, and no money to bury him. Our funerals are expensive too: you have to cook for everyone and organize transportation to and from the gravesite. Thousands of people came to his funeral - he was a people’s man. Jennifer Fox was there for me from day one. She gave financial, emotional, spiritual, and physical support. She paid for the coffin, and the groceries with the help of Robyn, Don, and Teresa. They gave my dad a funeral fit for a king. Jen went as far as paying school fees for my sister and even bought her school uniform. Sometimes i wonder what would have done without her. Wherever my dad is, I know that he is resting in peace. My only prayer now is for the law to take its course, not only for my father’s killers, but for all who commit crime, and for our goverment to create more jobs for people like my daddy. In that way we will all leave peacefully. Jen, Robyn, Don, Teresa: thank you guys very much, may the God of love and peace bless you and give you much more in return. To you, dad: I love you and deeply miss you. Years have passed, tears have dried, but your memories remain in my heart. Rest in peace.

Hidden in my father’s closet was a wooden shoeshine box, filled with shoe polish and cloth. He brought it out every night precisely before he went to bed and polished his leather work shoes one by one, leaving them on the day’s newspaper on the beige carpet floor. Later I would learn that his ritual came from his tour in the Navy, but as a child I didn’t know that. To me it was the same as the fact my father had to grab me screaming once a month and trim my nails when I wanted to grow them long like my mother, or the fact that his black leather belt was taken off the belt hanger in the closet where he also hung his ties and stored the shoe shine box - the same belt that was always used when it was time to put me over his knee, also howling, to pay off whatever wrong my mother had kept track of during the day. It was one of those things that she promised would happen “when your father gets home”, just as sure as the polishing of his shoes.

As I grew older, around six or seven, I begged to do this special job for my father. He showed me how to rub the black Melatonin crème on his workday best, and then whip the cloth over the leather so it snapped like his belt on my rear end. I remember the acid smell of the chemicals and the leather mixing into some kind of aphrodisiac and I would start to sing songs. Sometimes he would come in and watch me working and start the singing himself, with words like, “I am a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech and a heck of an engineer”. It was the song of his collge alma mater where he went on a Navy scholarship after World War II.  I would make the shoes shine and shine as we sung together, lining up the pairs, and then wait for his inspection, a smile and a quarter for each one approved. Sometimes he would point out the flaws in my work and make me repeat the effort until I passed his ruthless eye. Often I would come to him when I was short on pocket money and ask for the job and polish off as many shoes as I could get him spare.

It was only years later that I noticed I had inherited his habit, looking down at peoples feet when they came to job interviews to see the shine of their character. Or finding myself sitting in shoeshine chairs in strange cities or airports to get my boots sparkling. Sometimes if I noticed that I was walking around with soiled, scuffed shoes I could even feel the onslaught of a depression rising from up my legs. My father was a man of order and of ritual. He always said, “If you want to be neat, start with the feet.”

Yesterday I bought a job market paper - I wanted to try my luck.  To my surprise, there was no job I could apply for, since I don’t have any qualifications.  The only job that was available was domestic work.  When I realized that, I started crying.  I asked myself, what have I done?  Why is God punishing me?  I’ve been good to Him, I am a loving, caring, honest person, and I will always think about others and share the little things I have with them.  Then my baby girl walked in and she started to cry.   She opened her arms and hugged me and at that instant I knew I had to stop crying, to avoid her asking me why I am crying.  I can’t let my kids know that their mommy is a failure.

I had an unhappy childhood that contributed a lot to the situation I am in today.  My parents were both unemployed and uneducated and most of their off-days drowning in alcohol.  My father committed crime to at least put food on the table, and most of his other time was spent in prison.  As a result, we had to stay with our grandmother who was also unemployed and owned a shebben as a source of income.  She took out all of her stress on me, and all the beating and swearing has affected me to this day.  And now history is repeating itself - my siblings and I are unemployed and uneducated.  I sometimes wish I wasn’t born into this family.  I am going to try and give it my best, I will do it for my kids.  I can’t suffer for the rest of my life.

I’ve had so many chances, but messed them up.  I am no longer a little girl, play time is over.  I have to do this right this time, I have to secure the future of my kids.  They are looking up to me and no one can do that for them except me.

“When I grow up I want to become a cook, dressmaker and mother of children,“ I said to my family when I was a few years old. Everybody laughed.  I had forgotten this statement, but now that I look back on it I realize that all of the “professions” I was choosing (I don’t know how!) deal with the same abilities. Maybe the vocation is hiding in us from the beginning, and from time to time sneaks outside, no matter what we do. The most important thing is to pay attention to our hidden talents.

My talent is scissoring, by the way. I believe I was born obsessed by cutting: words, paper, textiles, ingredients, food, film, problems. I’m an editor, basically, and I know I have skills. I also edit my life, cutting unimportant, unnecessary aspects (though I save details). The result is a criticized detachment.

In cinematography, details represent images that the human eye cannot distinguish or disassociate from a whole, like a tear, a button or somebody ’s mouth. In life, details are fragments, actions, gestures, issues, obsessions, habits, or samples, which we can miss, being so busy with daily routine. Details are very important in my life, usually a few details are enough for me to jump to conclusions. Or fall in love at first sight. Or take action.

About these kinds of details, which are the seasoning my life, I’m mostly blogging.