the genius of wanting

Monday, December 6, 2010

Itunes mocks me with their “suggested movies” based on my “previous interest.” I admit I could be mistaken for a forty-five-year-old divorcee with the heavy dose of Jane Austen titles in my queue, but when The Jane Austen Book Club was suggested to me last night, I’d had enough. I rent movies on itunes so I need not to explain myself to Brian at Blockbuster, much like I buy the books on my Kindle whose store bought covers feature rouge lipstick.

To make matters worse, I’ve already seen the majority of itunes’ suggestions.

In the Vegas world of glitzy technology, the current heavy weights, Apple and Google, are training for their highly anticipated match up. While Apple subtly suggests Rocky Balboa to their employees, Google underwrites catnip, in hopes that YouTube’s infamous animals keep finding themselves in compromising positions. I think Snakes on a Plane, got its title, and possibly treatment, from a YouTube clip.

Apple and Google approach the ring with vastly different tactics. Google offers the Internet on a level playing, allowing viewers to filter through and determine popularity. Apple filters on viewers’ behalf, proudly offering a roasted pig chomping an apple atop a silver platter.

The dumping ground that is YouTube does not amuse me, but I also bet to win, so my money is on Google because they do not underestimate the want of individual thought and subsequent choice. Even if that individual thought involves a cat in a coffee can.

Last week I visited Amsterdam’s Science Center. Until now I omitted this day trip from the blog because apparently I haven’t learned my lesson from the zoo (recounted here). Again, I remembered why Chuck-E-Cheese does not allow adults entrance without an accompanying minor.

My single adulthood found itself out of place amongst strollers and primary colors until I found the ‘brain profile’ exhibit. Being the quintessential narcissistic Scorpio, I delight in people reiterating my individual traits, pinpointing roads I would be apt to travel in life.

After an hour of countless questionnaires reminiscent of second grade IQ tests, the habits of my brain patterns in varying fields were numerically dissected.

I repeatedly landed in a non-favoring limbo category. From “type of lover” to “left or right hemisphere,” my personality and brain patterns were split evenly over all possible categories in the chosen field. Not even inherent surges of estrogen could swell my language governing and emotionally charged right hemisphere into domination. This pattern caused my blood pressure to rise. The non-rhyming couplet “jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none” has taunted me my entire life.

I was setting up camp in Purgatory and penciling-in play dates with non-baptized infants, when the results of  “what kind of learner are you” flashed on screen. Despite the possible five categories, “thinker’s brain” swallowed 92% of my brain space. That’s almost an A, my Scorpio narcissism beaming.

I knew Michelangelo would have my back come Judgment Day.

Michelangelo’s iconic image of Adam and God on the Sistine chapel is understood as a visual account when God gave life to Adam with a single touch, but it is puzzling that Adam’s eyes are open before their hands have touched. Michelangelo’s surviving notebooks tell us he did not believe his genius was in his hands, but rather in his head. A second look at this iconic image shows the red billowing fabric nestled behind God is a silhouette of the human brain. God gave life to man not with his first breath but with his first intellectual thought.

Somebody at Google must share my adoration of Michelangelo and his belief that the genius of people is found in their capacity for individual thought. That individual thought that causes humans to blindly cling to the power of their mouse-click-able choice.

Last night I decided to show itunes what I was made of and rented the antithesis to all things Jane Austen, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. It was a success. Jane’s estrogen clad characters and vacillating plots were cowering under embroidered duvets.

But tonight, no other voices, or masks.

You know something was good when its ending but you want to hold tight just a little longer, just to feel the pain a little bit more. The addictive properties of that physical manifestation of wanting are deadly powerful.

Both Jane Austen and Stanley Kubrick use wanting as the humanizing and communicative emotion to exploit characters. Despite genius and rationality, we are creatures of want, but perhaps that’s the genius of it.

Right now, I think I want to go home. My greatest fear in life has been not recognizing my own reflection and after two months alone its brilliance is at last vivid. The time has come, the walrus said. My time has come to couple rational thought with unabashed want.  I want home, the familiarity, the warmth, I want him.

Supposedly, a ruthless amount of wanting will break the dykes and flood the land. I’ve already built my ark in anticipation as I vow the wanting and thinking wont cease because I think therefore I AMsterdam.

 

good fences

Friday, December 3rd, 2010

I think I’m involved in a cat and mouse chase with my neighbor. This is a problem because 1) it is not warranted and 2) I don’t know if I’m the feline or rodent.

I live in an attic studio with three floor to ceiling windows and one skylight. Even with the winter sun sulking along the horizon I am flooded in light that reflects off white walls and pine flooring. After four flights of stairs I am met with wood rafters and a cream paper lantern, presumably from Ikea, exposing my late night endeavors to neighbors.

I’ve always practiced the Dutch habit of open curtains. Drawn drapes elicit a hibernating effect, displacing time and air, creating unnecessary anxiety and stuffy rooms. Once you simply accept that your neighbors know your penchant for lip-synching “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” complete with choreographed dance steps and jazz hands at two in the morning, the drama of closed curtains seems passé. Some nights it might be Tina Turner and “Proud Mary,” but my experience shows that routine proves difficult without an Ike.

There is a large courtyard between my windows and my neighbors’ balconies. Thankfully it is not a city apartment where the size of the window and screen are built in relation to the width of the alley in which they swing open. The space provides further anonymity from my cross-courtyard neighbors. They are shape shifters, not recognizable faces, providing comfort for my own antics, but not enough to actually sing.

Supposedly I’m tone death.

I think he waved at me a week ago. I can only say ‘think’ because my instinctual reaction at the first sign of acknowledged existence was to utilize countless earthquake drills as I ducked and crawled to cover. My maturity astounds me.

In my defense, the inhabitants of this courtyard don’t wave. They respect the sliced open dollhouse and give its life-size dolls their privacy by simply attending to their own stove. My fellow courtyard gazers holdfast to anonymity and its inherent freedom.

At this point I think I am the mouse. A mouse that ducks behind cabinets, so a prepubescent mouse at best. I’d rather not be a mouse at all as I value my habit of show tunes at two a.m. over mutual courtyard flirtation.

A square plywood table, also presumably from Ikea, doubles as my desk and dining table (I swapped apartments with a twenty-five-year-old bachelor, Ikea is his Graceland). I typically sit on the far side of the table with my computer acting as buffer between the courtyard and me. Due to time differences, most video chatting occurs after sunset. Hand gestures abound as I act out my daily encounters to finger puppets sipping coffee.

Not many people video chat on a nightly basis. Fewer use hand gestures like I do. Couple that with open blinds and overhead lighting and I’ve realized I’m a nightly one-woman pantomime routine. I think he mistook my jazz hands as cries for his attention.

I’ve been cursing him for breaking the fourth wall’s façade of privacy, but now I might have to de-claw myself.

I have a haunting suspicion that the opposing courtyard inhabitants know my shape shifting self better than their wall-sharing neighbors. They watch as my nightly actions mirror and rationalize their own, together scuttling about within the bubble of city-constructed vulnerability, neither daring to pick up a pin of judgment.

I am a homebody in every respect except that I don’t bake muffins for my neighbors. I typically wish to give warmth to all, so my need to give the cold shoulder to neighbors is perplexing.

It stems from a city livelihood, and I am no longer apologetic about it as it maintains my sanity.

I categorize myself as a city girl because 1) I grew up a block away from both a Chevron and Starbucks, and 2) upon seeing cows on a cheese farm in the Amsterdam countryside I muttered the phrase “how authentic.”

The plethora of wooden shoes I encountered went beyond authentic to comic.

I think any over-wrought comparison between city and country can be whittled down to difference in per capita, because nothing affects humans more than their interactions with other humans.

It is oddly satisfying to blindly plow through a crowd once a month, feeling the pressure of a cumulative mass as you press back to create equilibrium, but that same pressure felt daily on pubic transportation is suicidal.

Our homes allow us to regulate our interaction with others, thus our sanity. After I plow through countless faces a day in the city, then come home to know my neighbor well enough to say hi, but not well enough to cry, I feel forced to re-apply the painted clown’s smile within my sanctuary. A recipe for insanity.

The still of the country begs for human facial recognition.  I would gladly bake, butter and deliver countless muffin batches to surrounding cow owners. I have no preference to either city or country as I find necessity in both, I just tend to avoid the limbo of suburbia. I ultimately wish to split my time, raising possible offspring in the cosmopolitan city but grounding them in the simplicity of the country.

I’ll have to tackle the jaw-drop every time I see a cow.

I delicately finagled my window coverings so as not to pop the vulnerability bubble with jarring movement. My blinds pull from the top down with a holding latch at 50-yardline for the indecisive types. I decided 50-yardline blinds imply, in Dutch, “Let’s be friends with no-eye contact.” Tonight I noticed his blinds mirrored mine, my action rationalized, no clown’s paint in sight.

broken snow-globes

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

I have been patiently waiting for snow, and I’m not a patient person. I pretend to be, but then I roll my eyes and aggressively thumb an outdated Economist when a fellow patient is seen before me at the doctor’s office.

I checked the weather before I left for London last week and promptly re-packed, swapping my cotton for cashmere when I read, chance of snow. While I was squinting in a sun drenched Hyde Park it was snowing in Amsterdam. Bullocks.

red coffee cups and winter sun in Hyde Park

I came home and crouched to find a few flurries clinging to cracked cobblestones. I deemed them authentically lackluster and began checking the hourly weather forecast. As of eleven this morning I braced myself for snowfall. I’m impatient because my previous encounters with falling snow were relegated to snow-globes. While my ego loves to simultaneously be God and Walt Disney, shaking the globe and winding the music, I knew authenticity awaited.  As of noon, not a flurry in sight. Investing in a carrot nose and coal buttons was ambitious.

I gave up, filled my pockets with licorice that could double as a mouth and two eyes, and trekked to the library.

I had to end the affair with Arthur Miller today when I finished The Misfits. I had devoured his alphabetized clump of spines. An experience lover, he taught me more about men from one line of text than the majority of my relationships.

Gay is a cowboy. Roslyn is a blonde divorcee. That seems sufficient background. Gay is complaining about educated women always, “wantin’ to know what you’re thinkin’” Roslyn smiles, “Well, maybe they’re trying to get to know you better. You don’t mind that do you?”

Miller writes, “I don’t mind at all. But did you ever get to know a man by askin’ him questions?”

I heard my watch clank on the table, as I lost my page in the text. My head fell back, exposing my neck, opening my airway. I sat like that for some time, letting smiles dance across my face.

I knew it. I knew it all along. I count patterns and watch habits of the men I orbit, in hopes of really knowing them. A man who prefers scrambled eggs over pouched is just as different a man as who drinks scotch over vodka, and I’ve never known a well-done man to be best friends with a rare carnivore. They may claim to be equal opportunists, but they all have preferences, and within those preferences are hidden puzzle pieces that fit snuggly to form the bigger picture of the man. He unknowingly gives you a carrot at the starting gate, are you a blonde or brunette?

Beyond preferences that are seen on the first date, there are habits, habits that show his history. Watching a man put on a suit can expose his childhood. He’ll drive his car like he’ll drive his women. I wish I could swap horses for cars, but alas, cowboys are a dying breed.

I love a good puzzle. I love solving a good puzzle to a detrimental extent, but my impatience with men’s puzzles became painfully obvious as I read Miller’s words.

Somewhere around the bend in the river I lost sight of what I always knew. My own veiled narrative confused me, and I begged to be told what he was thinking to supplant his thoughts for mine. This only frustrated me further, as I really want nothing more than to sit by his side, sipping a drink, waiting for a puzzle piece. In that scenario, I am deadly patient.

My patience paid off. I looked up and saw snow (authentic flurries of snow whose sum total could be measured in inches). My stomach growled and I warranted it an excuse to skip through winter wonderland towards my kitchen.

Turns out you cannot skip in falling snow that turns city streets into ice rinks. Dirty ice rinks that turn lips purple and let red noses drip. Falling snow was not the romantic notion I conjured. It reminded me of a distant Christmas morning, when I allowed myself to recognize the ‘Love, Santa’ notes as my mother’s handwriting. After all the fuss, the truth made logical sense.

It is the same appreciation of truth when you learn prince charming is a hologram.

skipping not practical

I came home to soup, bread pudding, and writing.

While a woman might be a loud cleansing thunderstorm, snow is a silent lethal man. He stalks his prey of cities, attacks, and retreats. His mark is obvious to the blind but a learned puzzle piece requires the patience to build a snowman.

His silent presence was welcomed. He answered any doubts of where I should be. His frosting of shingles and handlebars tickled me but if copiously consumed, I knew I’d lose myself in a whiteout. His weight can dust bark or break branches. When left to his own devices he is serenely clean but becomes an unappetizing grey slush when push and prodded by boots.

So no, last night he was not the robust romantic figure I imagined, until this morning, when I woke up next to something truly extraordinary. Very few things look better in the morning light.

narcissistically mundane

Monday, November 29^th, 2010

I couldn’t close my eyes Sunday morning, despite waking up before dawn. Mind you, winter ‘dawn’ is after 8am, but nonetheless I was thrilled about the non-descript day ahead of me. It was carpe diem in the simplest sense, basking in the moment-to-moment existence of reality. The ticking time bomb that was my life’s soundtrack two months prior, is now the daily pitter-patter of my habits. It crescendos with the whirl of the espresso machine, the clanging of spoons, the crunch of granola and the silence of steam escaping a cup of tea.

I lugged my film camera to Amsterdam, and then lugged it further to Bruges and Barcelona. I didn’t even bother lugging it to London this past week because I had yet to advance the film.

Film photography was my first love, when automatic and digital still referred to car transmissions and alarm clocks. We met in the heat of an elementary school summer as the darkroom provided air conditioning. I secretly loved the smell of my chemical stained hands and found it meditative to methodically rock the trays, watch the image materialize. I remember taking a lot of pictures of my dog.

Since that summer I have used the same 55mm Mamiya, despite dry spells where others might philander. The light meter is fickle, there is a dent on the rim of the lens, and I hear grinding sand every time I focus, but when I peer through the viewfinder and smash my nose against musty stained leather, the world silences itself, holding its breath as I steady myself for the satisfying snap of a click. The film exposed, my shoulders release, the camera falls, I advance the film, check light meters, twist dials, change settings, squint left eye, smash nose, hold the world in my lungs, and click again. This happens in intervals of thirty-six.

my beloved

 

Photography allowed a tunnel vision of my life. I processed my personal narrative through thirty-six consecutive frames. My contact sheets read like my diary.

Streaming podcasts with neurophysiologists debating what makes our brains ‘human’ accompany me on walks around the village. Possible answers include our ability to laugh, ability to imagine, rational thought, or deceptive lying. I would pencil-in the test bubble D) all of the above, because the black hole of personal narrative can swallow all the aforementioned traits and is the crux of the human existence.

We might recognize our reflection before we speak, narcissism at a fundamental survival level, but our lifespan is dedicated to recognizing ourselves as an individual, transcribing copious notes as we go (or vehemently updating our Facebook status), attempting to grasp the intangible.

I think the success of Facebook does not lie in the inter-connectivity of the web, but rather how it leveled the playing field for all personal narratives. While we want to know ourselves, we want others to know ourselves more, to validate us. And what better way than to edit the photos that highlight your best angle, best friends, and best slice of life.

One podcast explained that in moments of severe peril, we perceive time as slowing down, allowing us to recall mundane details from three fatal seconds. Scientists believe we always have this capacity for vivid memory, but our brains choose to discard or distort the majority. Selective and permeable memory creates the chapters, or contact sheets, of our narrative. The camera is an accessible medium because of its inherent frame, drastically cropping ones surroundings into a box. The editing involved in life is underestimated. What is not shown is more important than what is seen.

While in London I spent a chunk of an afternoon wandering the Tate Modern. While the Warhol’s and Pollock’s were welcomed, I patiently waited for one wall; a selection of Robert Frank’s contact sheets from his legendary photographic road trip, which culminated with the publication, The Americans. Starting in 1955, the Switzerland born Frank tripped across this country while photographing the breath of our society. He clicked 28,000 shots, editing down to the 83 images that comprise The Americans. Contact sheets are typically not thought of as worth the nails in museum walls. It is akin to screening audition reels at the Oscars. I view both as brilliant. You see a glimpse of the raw genius, as opposed to the polished masterpiece, skyrocketing your appreciation for the artist and craft.

Through these contact sheets I was privileged to a chapter of Robert Frank’s diary of clicks. One such click landed a spot in the book. There, one inch by one and a half inches, without bracketed exposures or varied angles was the personal narrative of this shot:

Although Frank was funded by a Guggenheim fellowship, no American publisher would originally publish his book. The personal narrative that Frank exposed was too personal, his foreign filter so different than ours.

Sunday morning’s low-lying winter sunlight raked through my breakfast, simultaneously showcasing steam and shadows. I thought it barbaric if I didn’t expose film to this light. So I did, unknowingly igniting a tunnel vision of clicks.

My organic energy, burgeoning upon contact with caffeine, stemmed from relishing in harnessing the power of fertilizing and pruning my narrative. I also find it mildly amusing that 6 years ago, I photographed Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall for my senior thesis. At that time in my life, I found man’s greatness in the jaw dropping sleek enormity of architecture. I still find the sublime in architecture, but now I also find it when encountering a feather in my Sunday morning eggs.

from infinite steel...

 

 

… to delicate fluff

 

And my unabashed narcissistic narrative continues…

the therapy of sunday dinners

Sunday, November 21, 2010

I never describe myself as fearful, although it took me almost eighteen months to walk. My knuckles white as I clenched the life out of my mother’s hand in order to preserve my own. Verbal dialogue proved to be another hurdle. Upon entering preschool fellow parents asked my father if I was a mute. I had reoccurring nightmares necessitating a nightlight till I was thirteen because darkness let my imagination flood my reality.

I was, in fact, a child who wrapped herself in bubble wrap every morning. I required a helmet, wrist guards, elbow and knee pads if I came in contact with anything that had wheels. Neighbors called the cops after my first swim lesson because my blood curdling screams had prompted suspicions of child abuse. I suctioned myself to that pool ledge like a monstrous starfish. This was not my parents’ doing, this was me tackling my own mortality. Apparently I was desperate to see eighteen.

The kids in Amsterdam don’t know tricycles or helmets. They are oblivious to the crutch of training wheels or the subliminal fear a helmet instills in its owner. If they fall down and it hurts, they learn. Their closer to the ground anyway and their bones heal faster than bread rises.

I’ve spent the last twenty-four years with limited neck mobility and chaffed skin from suffocating helmet straps, only to arrive in Amsterdam and drool over the Dutch and their innate ability to live without fear.

I met a few people in my life prior who cheated death so often that they lived in a bubble of invincibility, thus with the capacity to do anything. I was too blinded by jealousy to understand how my bubble wrap of fear maimed me while their fearlessness blew the bubble that saved them. I just saw bubbles. And was not amused.

Now I’m in a culture that seems to breed invincibility on all levels, even in the common canal house, where curtains are never drawn, while Americans draw them nightly from fear of judgment.

You have to admit the root of your fear to tackle it, one of mine being pain and death. A hospital is Dante’s ninth ring of inferno. I’ve been known to faint within their walls when visiting the sick. The smell of sterilization singes my nose hairs. Needles and blood are my doom. The Red Cross blacklisted me after I had a seizure in high school from the sight of my blood filled bag dangling next to me. They claim my liability outweighs the possible saved lives.

But my other fear is one I believe I share with many; the human fear of not being loved once utterly known by another.

I was recently caught off guard when bluntly asked by an Amsterdonian what I want in life. You would think by week seven of a self-endeavor trip I would have a power point presentation and laser pen at the ready to field this question. But only a fearless few pull this looming trigger of a question, and as I felt warm blood trickle down my shell-shocked face, I robotically responded, ‘success within my chosen career and success within my family.’ I sounded like a greeting card. I was frankly told that was a common answer, and I frankly agreed. The conversation turned to food, and that’s when I let myself be known.

What I want in life is a long wooden table to be the focal point in my home.  A wooden table so imbued with memories that it seems to speak. It can sustain nightly family dinners, lingering Sunday papers, ceaseless writing, or a Thanksgiving feast. Stained by red wine, crayons, and candle wax.

I want the atoms of that table to magnetically draw all around it. To sit, to ponder, to argue, to love. Not in a traditional dining room format, where a swinging door hides the magicians tricks, but rather a large open plan living area, where kitchen and life collide. Philosophical arguments obviously need nourishment.

Fresh baked bread whose doughy innards beg to be drenched in cold pressed olive oil. Bowls brimming with dates and figs. Red-flaked chili curry poured over rice noodles. A rosemary and honey mustard roasted chicken with crispy crackled brown skin, and flakey dark meat, whose juice cooks the surrounding root vegetables until they have the consistency of butter. A chocolate chip cookie crumbling over fingertips, dusted in sea salt. The smell of brewing coffee wafting in over lingering cigar smoke as napkins are taken off of laps and top buttons undone.

The food continually passed around, being held and offered by all. No buffet. No three courses with five knives. No fine china. The food, the drink, the laughter, oh the laughter, creating the candor, the color, the center. The sun that is the table being the center of their universe. Radiating elusive warmth that can be seen and felt but not physically grasped and bottled. All one can do is continually orbit and glom energy from its liquid gold rays.

The kicker being that the orbiting bodies are in fact the suns for the others. The table and benches are just the means for them to stop and gather. A flat surface composed of planks of wood with eye shaped knots seeing all.

Come morning, when I’m alone with a cup of coffee, I want to run my hand over the uneven surface of the table and know that I am loved through the patina that is found on that wood. Because through that patina, I will know I have truly shown myself to others, and they to me, and yet still we come back for more, loving the vitality of truth so much more than a fearful charade.

initials and scents

Wednesday, November 17, 2010.

When I landed in Barcelona at sunset I personified a monkey with brass symbols. Clanging away because the notion of warmth outweighed the nauseous end to another day. Upon disembarking, customs did not stamp my passport. This baffles me. The EU is too cooperative for my liking.

I dedicate too much brain space to the decision of a travel outfit. This jaunt was especially trying, as the outfit would transition from Amsterdam to plane to strolling the streets on my first night in Barcelona. I decided on ‘blendable chic’ consisting of tights, boots, a printed shift dress, and grey cardigan, all cinched with a belt. Two blocks later I mistook myself as a polygamy bride amongst Vegas showgirls.

There is a damp sexuality in the air of Barcelona. It is the same sexuality that hugs Rome, Los Angeles, and any other Mediterranean climate. While a mild climate might be scoffed at as not ‘true weather’ due to a lack of ‘seasons,’ it is weather nonetheless, as it conjures a joint, albeit sexually imbued, sentiment from its inhabitants. It only took two months in 40-degree temperatures to eradicate all twenty-three years of learned experience in a showboating climate. I was not chicly blending.

Sunday morning brought sun, skinny jeans, a tank top and blazer. I partook in a sangria-monument-beach-bike tour. That was the order of importance of all things that occurred on the tour. In the traditional Spanish style, we were given sangria after our arrival at each noted monument in our guidebooks, as a way of saying “congrats, you accomplished something, now take a break.” No wonder the estimated date of completion for Gaudi’s architectural masterpiece is 2080.

ever present construction cranes are seen in the background

I found an immediate biking buddy in a Hermosa Beach mother of two who was traveling alone in Barcelona just because. I knew we could be friends when her second sentence was, “I forgot how nice it is to have a glass of wine without being interrupted.” She followed that with, “I accidentally booked a hotel on the nude beach, and have disappointedly learned the men that decide to go nude are not futbol players. ” She happened to be wearing a red leather jacket, and well-worn brown leather boots and crowned herself with a pile of charm necklaces, the Veronica uniform in a nutshell. She brazenly ordered two gin and sodas at the beach without needing to ask if I was saturated in sugar-marinated wine and its headache inducing side effects when consumed in barrels. Hallelujah.

the beach. at last!

I could drone on about the jovial-relaxed-sexual climate of Barcelona, as a backdrop to the Catholic churches I saw, paella I ate, and one sentence of Spanish I mustered enough courage to whisper (“tienes una bolsa?”) but honestly, it has taken me an excruciating two hours, three snacks, and one headache to write the above, and I could just as easily select all and hit delete.

I’ll leave it if only as a testament to the growing pains of writing.

Honestly, in Barcelona I had the realization that I was a foreigner twice removed. I barely slept the first night despite no change in time zone as I tried to understand where I was in relation to who I was. At seven a.m. I decided it was a decent hour to make espresso and stop pretending to sleep. Once caffeinated, I emailed my choice finger puppet a list of in-case-of-emergency instructions and contacts, not because of fear, but because of the comfort I find in seeing my parents’ names and phone numbers concurrently listed.

That tattoo I will never get out of fear of pain and permanence (but nonetheless ceaselessly ponder) is my parent’s initials, one set on each rib cage:

J.A.M.                                                  L.M.B.

I guess that would technically be two, but I would define it as one.

I am the only thing to come of their union, and the only time their names are concurrently listed are in matters concerning me. Since childhood I have used their two names to splice through the overwhelming concept of infinity to find my unique nature and nurture and ultimately myself.

Couple a restless night with copious amounts of sangria and biking, and my age showed itself. Come Monday I simply wandered from church to boqueria to beach and back again. Head games ensued when I boarded a plane back to Amsterdam as opposed to Los Angeles.

catholic church...

... to boqueria...

i

... and back again.

A smell can save or ruin me; both occurring within twenty-four hours is the twilight zone.

While staying at the hostel in Barcelona I woke up every morning to a bouquet of steam and cologne from the bathroom across the hall. I had been told there was a man staying here for an extended time as he test-drove a nine to five. I never shook his hand or saw his face, but his morning shower schedule was agonizing. His anonymous scent sat heavy in my lungs, producing labored breathing as I longed for the cologne and warmth of a specific testosterone clad DNA, but could only roll over onto a cold, Downey scented pillow and will myself back to sleep.

Now I know why single white females have twenty cats. That about equals the warmth of one man.

When walking through the terminal at Schipol, I caught the scent of Amsterdam. I was not expecting the return to 40-degree temperatures to also be the return to a familiar scent. It was unmistakably Amsterdam with its cold undertones, wood-burning top notes and sweet lingering trail of sugar and space cakes, and I immediately recognized it. So perhaps I was only a foreigner once removed.

Despite minor panic and chest pains, Barcelona was a success because it was another pilgrimage, another chance to find myself and spur growth through the fertilization of discomfort, but alas no passport stamp. Even my control freak self can rationalize that as beyond my control.

Three more weeks for me to write and live in my own head. As I commit myself even more to the thought of producing something bigger than what is, I notice my writing drifting into an internalized form that is becoming difficult to expel. The library has graciously agreed to support my advantageous want, although I should pick my daily location carefully. For the past three hours I have been listening to the pair next to me obnoxiously laugh at not-so-funny jokes because the moment when a pun drops is an opportunity for the pent up hot air in their excited selves to escape. Oh, right, they’re flirting. How quickly I forget the banter and tango of two. My cynical interior monologue exponentially growing with every clandestine giggle that vibrates off my eardrums.

The rest of my night consists of shallot and split pea soup, to which I added pureed potatoes and meatballs to give it a thicker consistency and savory flavor. The cooking chronicles continue, and with any luck, more writing with less labored typing and muffled chortling.

sunflowers

Sunday, November 14, 2010

I may live and die by my Scorpion blood but I am not a birthday celebrator. Come November I cough on the residual chalk dust from the tally marks that accumulate in my mind.

My discomfort with my birthday follows the same logic as my discomfort with dusk. Time is exposing itself, giving an absolute maker by which to judge your productivity. Dusk causes hyperventilation if my day has been of waste. Imagine a year of dusks, trash compacted into one day; I’m surprised I don’t have influenza. Instead, my birthday typically consists of hives.

Hives run rampant when I cannot find proof of growth. My impatience mocks the notion that a stalk’s daily growth may seem inconsequential until its height is measured against a sapling. Not good enough. I want to sprout a stupid sunflower already. Even if surround by friends wearing elasticized cone hats in my honor, I feel suddenly alone if I can’t find a yellow burst on the horizon of the year past.

I’ve been sharing a travel revelation with my finger puppets. I need to know a city’s freckles to love it. Sure, the tourist traps of angular jaw structure and chiseled cheekbones are aesthetically gorgeous, but when I discover the freckle behind the ear, I fall in love.

I had heard of the fries in Amsterdam. I had even seen them on numerous occasions nestled in their paper cones and drowning in mayo. They are purported as the best and sold at a number of restaurants, but anything other than the original snack shack that churns them out is said to be an imitation, similar to the Pink’s Hot Dog phenomenon of Los Angeles. Hype typically ruins anything of worth so I began inquiring about their origin immediately, less I become jaded. No one gave me a concrete answer beyond, “down the alleyway in Centrum.”  Centrum is the center of Amsterdam that is solely comprised of alleyways.

I rationalized, that I didn’t even fancy fries that much. That’s a lie. I order salad because I feel closer to God, and then proceed to eat my date’s fries.

Two days ago I found myself perusing a vintage book sale while a stream of salt and saturated fat wafted by. Then I saw a red-checkered cone. Then another. I didn’t even think, I just headed into the oncoming traffic of fry cones.

Sure enough, down an alleyway in Amsterdam, Centrum, a non-descript maroon awning juts out of a brick wall. A sign reads “Vlaamse Frites” (Flemish Fries). Amsterdonians eat them with a glob of mayo squirted on top. I like to think I have a French intellect and palate, so ordered mine with mustard.

I had a paper cone full of melodiously salted and oiled deep fried pillows of starch. While the mustard provided a surge of tang, I understand how mayo would coat these oil sticks into perfection.

This was a good freckle.

I ponder forms of traveling with my finger puppets because I’m beginning to believe I could live ten months on, then two months off, discovering freckles on every continent, freckles that could be my sunflower seeds. One finger puppet wondered if that extreme wandering might produce a great sense of loss, having to continually say good-bye to a city’s belly. But the secret is, I’ve never felt so found in my life. Although thousands of miles away from any loved one on my birthday, I am as content as can be.

Amsterdam may found me, but now I need some heat, in two forms.

I’m cheating on Amsterdam with Arthur Miller. We spent another afternoon together. I couldn’t help it. He has a poet’s sensibility, a novelist’s eye for detail, and a playwright’s ear for dialogue. With one foul line of sarcastic written word, he exposes the absurdity hidden within our profound. The friction from thumbing through his pages produces a sublime heat on my fingertips.

The genius of Miller was lost on my prepubescent self when Death of a Salesman was assigned in 9^th grade. I labeled the play as a tragedy and moved on.

As a 9^th grader I lacked the gumption to question why it was a tragedy. While the topics of Miller’s collected essays vary from his childhood in Brooklyn to Italian mafia heists, the continuing thread harks on a spirit lost. Miller conjures images from a time when the sport of boxing was king because life was mano y mano. For ten rounds, power dynamics are eliminated between two men, allowing them to see eye to eye.

Some say we have matured beyond this brutality. Technology and modernity allow us to dress our men in pinstripe suits and skinny ties; the savior of man. Miller ponders, “with struggles solved, natured tamed and abundant, all that will be left to do will be the adornment of existence, a novel-shaped swimming pool, I take it.” Has technology killed the very concept of man as a value of himself?

Barcelona and I are rendezvousing for the weekend. I might have a French intellect, but my body and soul are a solar powered Mediterranean and I haven’t seen the sun in two weeks.  So my birthday present to myself is another stamp in my passport, another pilgrimage, another chance to find myself. But beyond everything, to make Arthur Miller smile from the grave as his words plead for us to fertilize ourselves with discomfort, spurring growth, or perhaps a sunflower.

“Today, the good life itself is not the life for struggle of meaning, not the quest for union with the past, with God, with man that it traditionally was. The good life is the life of ceaseless entertainment, effortless joys, the air-conditioned, dust free languor beyond the most supine dream. Freedom is, after all, comfort; sexuality is a photograph. The enemy of it all is the real. The enemy is conflict. The enemy, in a word, is life.”

Excerpts from Arthur Miller’s essay ‘The Bored and the Violent’