this ain't livin'

First Peach, Giving Up the Bags, Pudding | 18Aug07

When I woke this morning, I saw a bright orange spot on the ground by the back fence, under the peach tree. I was curious to find out what it was, so I threw on some shorts and wandered cautiously outdoors. The spot proved to be a peach, orange with a faint red blush, soft and smelling deliciously peachy. I picked it up, brought it inside, rinsed it, and took a bite. The skin of the peach was a bit thicker than I’m used to, but the flesh was sweet and creamy and soft, until I hit a ferociously bitter spot which caused my entire mouth to pucker.

“Pftcha!” I said, while Loki played with the peach pit.

I was going to give the peach a 9, until I hit that bitter spot. Now I’m trying to separate out the sweet delicious part of the experience from the bitterness. I’m tempted to give it a 10 for so closely imitating life, which often seems sweet until you suddenly realize that you’ve been chewing on a bitter portion and it’s tainted the whole experience.

I also decided today that it was time to give up tea bags, a great personal weakness of mine. Really, the only reason that I use tea bags is because I really like Constant Comment tea. But there are a number of reasons not to use tea bags, starting with the quality of the tea. Many tea producers cram broken tea leaves, stems, and, er, other stuff into their tea bags, since it’s not as noticeable. The finest teas tend to be set aside for loose leaf use, since consumers pay more attention to their loose leaf tea. In addition, tea bags are really wasteful, since they are often individually packaged, and you end up throwing out a lot of stuff for one cup of tea. Also, bagged tea is more expensive.

By giving up tea bags, I’ll be drinking better tea, saving the environment, and spending less money. Of course, I’ll also have to give up Constant Comment, but I think it’s worth it. I swung by Down Home Foods today and picked up some Orange Spice tea, which certainly smells viciously orangey. I’m hoping for the best.

In further food news, astute readers may remember my Mexican Chocolate Pudding adventure. Today I made a variant on the recipe, with Ghirardelli cocoa and Baker’s Chocolate instead of Ibarra. I added a dash of ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and chili powder, and the whole works is chilling in the fridge right now. If I can resist long enough to let it set all the way, I think it will turn out really well. The cocoa and baker’s chocolate are certainly going to make it much more chocolately and rich, which is awesome. I cut the sugar in the Joy’s standard recipe by about half, so it should also be deliciously bitter. Hooray.

My next pudding project is going to be a layered chocolate and coconut pudding for the next time Baxt, Petey, and I have dinner. I have, needless to say, high hopes.

A Decibel Conundrum | 14Aug07

So, I was peacefully lolling around in bed at an indecent hour this morning, sleeping off a late night frenzied bout of reading, when my sleep was profoundly disturbed, and I was jolted awake. Normally, my sleep is disturbed by one of the following: a cat jumping on me, the sudden smell of poop followed by furtive litterbox scratchings, my father knocking on the door, the incredibly loud and never ending house construction, or my insanely loud neighbor tromping up his stairs, idling his truck three feet away from my bed, or blaring nonsense into his phone. Oh, or screaming children, which appear to surround me on all sides. Why am I not living in the woods again?

This morning, however, it was a different sort of thing that woke me up, a shuddering, jouncing, windows rattling in their frames moment of utter disorientation. It felt sort of like an earthquake, but not quite right, and the cats had their ears laid back but they were holding fast on the bed, which is not earthquake behavior. As my consciousness flooded in, I realized that I had literally been shaken awake, but not by natural means. Instead, someone had their car speakers turned up to excruciating volume, and they were driving down the street. The shaking continued, actually, for several blocks.

Now, I like to listen to the music a little loud, myself. But this was…out of control. I don’t actually understand how someone could be a passenger in that car without their ears exploding. It was painful for me and I was separated, at one point, by multiple buildings. I actually woke up when they passed directly behind my bed, and for a heartstopping (literally) moment when I was waking up I thought I was dying. That was the only rational explanation my sleep deprived brain had for what my body was experiencing, because the bass was literally so high that it caused my heart to stop beating.

Now, I am fairly certain that noise over a certain decibel level is actually generally prohibited in town, and especially in vehicles. Loud music, after all, is really distracting (see My First Traffic Infraction for details). So, I am assured that this person would probably be cited for driving with their speakers turned up that high, were they ever to be caught by a cop.

However, I suspect that they turn their music down when they are in more cop-trafficked parts of town, for precisely that reason. Much to my chagrin, I also suspect that this person lives on my block, because this isn’t the first time that I have experienced this problem.

This, then, begs the question of what I want to do about it. One part of me is highly tempted to charge out in my bathrobe and note down their license plate the next time this happens. (I say “charge out in my bathrobe” because this person always seems to go by when I am sleeping or just getting out of the shower.) I suppose I could call the non-emergency line at the cop shop and report them, in the hopes that the cops will be able to nab them. I do, however, feel slightly silly calling the cops about it, especially if they have already received complaints. The DMV? You can report reckless driving to the DMV, right, so why not attempted manslaughter by bass? Ah, such just desserts if this person experienced the long arm of the DMV in the form of a license revocation letter.

I am also tempted to just charge out in my bathrobe and look menacing, but unfortunately when you are five feet tall on a good day and plump every day, it’s sort of hard to look menacing. Like many curvaceous ladies, my menacing stance is often perceived as amusing, which actually serves to make me even more furious. Let this be a lesson to you who would laugh at the short and fat: there is nothing angrier than a short, fat girl who is being laughed at because she is angry. Don’t go there unless you aren’t particularly fond of your limbs.

My other alternative is a bit more…Slytherin. This alternative involves stealthily taking note of said vehicle, and then finding out where it parks and cutting the speaker cables. Ultimately much more satisfying, and probably much more effective.

What do you think? Sometimes I feel like I am turning into an old person. I can’t wait to have a lawn to tell kids to stay off of!

I Dream of Tokyo | 02Aug07

In my dream, my father and I are driving at night through downtown Fort Bragg, on our way to somewhere, only Fort Bragg has changed, radically, into some sort of hybridized version of Tokyo on Victorian steroids. I can see the shapes of towering imitation Victorian buildings, like downtown Healdsburg, with wide sidewalks and incongruous cherry trees raining blossoms onto passerby. The trees are festooned with white Christmas lights, I almost expect it to be snowing. Every business is lit up with huge plate glass windows that seem very out of place with the architecture, but most of the sparkling altars to consumerism are hidden by mobs of people, milling at every corner, a wedding party flashes by in the windows of a suddenly ground-level Bistro while a gaggle of school girls giggles at an almost unrecognizable Laurel Street, and I see a row of old fashioned cars.Horrific vision of our overdeveloped future, or run of the mill nightmare?

“Stop,” I say to my father, “let’s see what’s going on,” but he doesn’t acknowledge the vision outside at all. He is bent on our joint destination, and we abruptly find ourselves in a landscape which resembles rural Ireland, rolling dark hills to the ocean with indistinct white blobs that might be sheep and a single rambling white gravel road. We reach a crossroads, two roads and four directions, and get out of the car.

“It’s here,” he says, “I know it’s just here,” he repeats, and he casts about in the gravel and peers up at the crooked road sign. “It’s supposed to be here, the crossroads.”

“What are you looking for,” I ask, standing awkwardly next to the car and shivering in the sudden cold.

“It must be here,” he insists, and he starts to dig.

“What?”

“It’s a box,” he says, “a box with the answer to the riddle inside.”

“Ah,” I say, and I start to look in the gravel, too, before raising a hand and crying “accio box,” and it comes to me, small and wooden and damp, cracking. It was once inlaid, I think, and precious, and now it smells musty and worthless, gobs of dirt clinging to it and rubbing off into my hands.

We open the box together and I see three rusting skeleton keys and a broken and warped piece of wood which once fit into a nest in the box. My father looks at me expectantly and I look into the box with the growing realization that I am supposed to understand what it means, what’s inside, how to use it, and I look back into my father’s face.

“I don’t know,” I say, “I’m sorry,” and I shrug helplessly.

“It’s all ruined,” he says, and we stand there in the darkness looking out over the ocean, white gravel road under us glowing like it’s on fire.

On Swimming | 26Jun07

I have a confession.

I can’t really swim. I know, I’ve been writing all these posts about going to the river, and I might have one up sometime soon about the Great Ocean Adventure, but I can’t really swim. I splash around, for sure, and I can dogpaddle with the best of them, but in an emergency situation with water, I would be pretty much fucked.

Yesterday we went to milemarker [redacted] on [road]*, because a friend of mine was just getting into town for a brief visit and we wanted to go to the river and it was a readily accessible spot. I went out early with another friend, and we crashed around in the woods for awhile because he charged up the wrong path and I didn’t correct him, but we made it there ok. It was a good day for going to the river. It was a good day for charging naked through the woods looking for logs, too.

I had actually woken up thinking that a river trip would be really nice. The weather was sunny and bright, and it would be a shame to be stuck indoors working all day when I could work at night. Which is what I have been doing, since the weather is so awesome. But I pledged to myself that I would work, unless someone called and said “let’s go to the river” and fortunately someone did.

I have a whole system at the river. First, I apply sunscreen to the visible parts of my body and I lie in the sun until it becomes almost painful. Then, I take my clothes off and put sunscreen everywhere else, before lying in the sun some more. Next, I charge full tilt into the water and splash around. My friend thought it was really amusing when I pointed out that I can’t actually swim, though. He tried to teach me all these fancy swimming strokes, and while I appreciated the effort, I really do just like splashing around. I don’t mind going out into deep water, and I can hold my own for a little while, but actual swimming is beyond me. I also noticed today that I have developed the alarming tendency to sink like a stone, and I’m not sure when that happened. I used to be a floater!

When everyone else arrived, the boys set about building an impressive engineering structure from mud, while the girls lounged on the bank and read. This is pretty much par for the course with river trips, and is part of the fun, with all of us periodically decamping to the water to splash around, play water tag, and what have you. I showed people how, if you hold really, really still, the fish in the water will come nibble on you. I think they are salmon? I assume they are salmon. Anyway, if you hold still enough, those little fuckers can really bite you. It hurts.

“Man,” someone said at one point, “this is really what I wanted to do with my day.”

And he was right. It was exactly what I wanted to do with my day, loafing in the water and then coming home tired and sated to work through the evening. The last week or so have been really, extraordinarily frustrating for me, so it was really nice to just space out at the river with my friends, thinking about nothing other than the apricots in my bag and the book I was reading. The river is one of my favourite places on Earth. I think that if I had a choice in it, I would probably buy property next to the river before I would buy property next to the ocean, since I love the thought of just running out into the back yard and taking a swim. Or, I guess in my case, taking a splash.

*What, like I’m going to give away all my sweet swimming spots? In your dreams.

Jubilation | 23Jun07

I woke up grumpy this morning, mean as a snake sizzling across hot pavement.

Sometimes it happens. I’m not really sure why. It’s not just waking up on the wrong side of the bed, it’s waking up on the wrong side of life. I’ve been feeling a bit grumpy all week, actually, for a variety of reasons. I think I probably need a warm bath, a good massage, and a hot chocolate.

So, anyway, I decided that I would do all of the things which make me grumpy today, since I was already grumpy, and that way maybe I could enjoy tomorrow. I mopped the floors, scrubbed my recalcitrant toilet, cleaned the litter box, vacuumed, and rounded up laundry. I was far too grumpy to even consider subjecting someone else to my presence by using them for a ride, so I loaded all my laundry into my backpack for a trek to the laundrymat.

Doing my laundry makes me grumpy. I got briefly spoiled on the Island with our washer and dryer, but now it’s back to the laundrymat, and I hate the laundrymat. It smells funny, it’s loud, it’s dirty, my clothing never seems to get clean, there are strange people, and it eats a huge chunk of my time. And, not having a car, I have to traipse down Franklin Street in front of Pete and everybody, teetering in and out of the gaping holes filled with gravel and cigarette butts while loaded down with 40 pounds of laundry. I arrived, started a machine, and retreated deep into my book, glancing up now and then to see if my laundry was done. It was hot. I smelled bad. And the laundry seemed to take forever before the machine finally unlocked so I could stick it in the dryer and continue sulking.

Haddock interrupted my sulking briefly with a hello, although my slightly frenzied look and fugue state may have discouraged further conversation. Sorry, Haddock. I hope the Sardine is well, and enjoying the sun right now. (By the way, my bad, Haddock, it was Wednesday, not Thursday. The event to which I was referring. And I am still enjoying the bacon. Oh, yes. Every night is carbonara night in the hobbit hole!)

Even with a brief fishy distraction, I was eventually forced to fold the laundry and load it all back up to hit the pavement again, tromping in the painfully bright sun because I forgot my sun glasses. I figured that as long as I was in the neighborhood, I might as well swing by the post office and pick up a bunch of depressing bills I couldn’t pay, since, you know, I’m already grumpy.

When I opened my mailbox, I did indeed find two bills, along with a thin envelope from my nice student lender*. I don’t like thin envelopes. Thin envelopes suggest some sort of major, pressing problem which could not wait until my next statement. Like a returned check, or a sudden change in my terms. I think my fear of thin envelopes stems back to my college application days, when everyone knew that a thin envelope carried bad news. (Never fear, my college applying friends! My first thin envelope also contained my first acceptance, so this piece of urban lore happens to be wrong.)

I opened it with a sigh right there in the post office, my backpack creaking.

“Dear s.e.,” it said.

“Congratulations on repaying your Group C education loan(s) with [lender]. We will mail you a formal confirmation letter regarding the paid in full status of your Group C loan(s) within sixty days.”

Yipeee! Hoooray! One student loan down, two to go! I cannot fully express in text how happy this makes me, although my exuberant use of punctuation is probably a good indicator. I mean, it was a small loan, and the remaining loan with them is rather large, because it is a consolidated loan, but still. I remember signing the loan paperwork so long ago, not really recognizing that I would have to pay it back someday, and I remember getting my first statement and thinking “ah, fuck, they really do expect you to pay for college. Wait, college cost HOW MUCH?!” So I am really quite stoked to have paid this loan off. One might even call the event a milestone, or the light at the end of the tunnel.

Clutching the letter in my sweaty fists, I ambled outside, where the sun was gently shining and there was a faint breeze. I saw someone I knew and waved and smiled before strolling down the freshly poured sidewalk, briefly sidestepping a section that hadn’t been done yet. I was only mildly irritated when I noted that the City had persisted in putting in that horrible fake wood stuff at the corners. I spotted Baxt in the window of her work and waved, shrugging when she gestured at my backpack and raised her eyebrows. I might even have caught myself whistling as I moved down Laurel Street, and stood at the corner of Main and Laurel by those idiotic fake cast iron lamp posts waiting for the light to change.

When I got home, I shit you not, there was a giant butterfly chilling on the porch, tormenting Loki, who was sitting in the window. The flowers were bright and perky, and the peaches on the mystery tree are growing larger. My laundry is clean, my bed smells of lavender, and all really is right with the world. So right, in fact, that I am going to go sit on my sunny porch with a personal watermelon and eat it while reading a book, so that I can finish before the library closes and return it.

*I have two student lenders. One is a nice, awesome, super cool student lender whom I love to pieces. (Which is a weird thing to say about a company you owe a lot of money to, I know.) The other is a mean, nasty, horrible student lender who refused to sell my ONE LOAN with them when I consolidated with Nice Lender. I’ll give you two guesses as to which lender is administered by the federal government.

On Fathers | 17Jun07

Whenever I call my father, our conversation starts out in exactly the same way. He always answers the phone as if startled to remember that it exists, clearing his throat before saying, slightly hesitantly:

“Hello?”

In turn, I reply as though I am surprised that he, in particular, answered the phone, despite the fact that I am the one who called him.

“Father!”

“Defenestrate! What’s going on?”

“Not much,” I say, “what about you?”

This conversation repeats, without fail, every time we speak. It’s a sort of ritualized dance that we do, in reverse when he calls me, regardless as to what the call is about. I could be bleeding out in a ditch in Uganda and we would still have to go through these lines before I could get to the heart of the matter.

I was thinking, the other day, about the fact that my father and I are both secretly very orderly people, with set routines in our lives which we really do not like to have disrupted. Every morning, my father gets up and brews a pot of coffee, taking a cup back to bed with him to listen to the radio and read a book, or look over student papers. It doesn’t matter if he gets up at 5:00 AM or 10:00 AM, this procedure is followed without fail. Four miles away, when I wake up, I brew a cup of tea, make up a bowl of yoghurt, and sit on the porch if it is sunny and at the table if it is not, reading while I drink tea and nibble on my breakfast. Woe to the person who disrupts either of these morning rituals.

Sometimes I think that my father and I are conservatives in rebellious clothing. Any sort of major change to the order of our day must be carefully considered before being acted on. Examples include having to fix a malfunctioning electrical circuit, going into town to purchase some vitally needed ingredient, or, god forbid, going outside the 10 mile radius of our homes which forms our habitats. Every now and then, one of us appears to do something alarmingly spontaneous, but it has in fact been carefully calculated, with all permutations considered.

I am becoming more like my father as I get older. When I was younger, I probably would have despaired at such a thought. But, when I moved home, I realized that this was not such a bad thing. As I become more like him, my temperament is mellowing, although I may never reach his state of profound unfazedness in the face of danger, whether it come in the form of a watermelon collapse at Harvest, a runaway train, or a dangling participle. I have begun to pick up my father’s speech patterns, his way of gazing blankly at someone proposing something utterly foolish, his way of offering advice on a situation without directly appearing to do so.

I always think that it’s rather preposterous to set aside a single day of the year for appreciation of fathers. The role of fathers often seems gravely underestimated, especially when it comes to single fathers struggling to raise children in a world which pours support and praise on single mothers. (This is not to say that single motherhood is easy, rather than single parenthood, period, is not easy, and fathers deserve some props too.) I am sure that I am not the only maddening, perplexing, and tempestuous child on Earth, and sometimes I wonder why my father didn’t just dump me in the library one day with a “free to a good home” sign.

I know that some of my readers have become fathers since last Father’s Day, and that they may be introspectively pondering their fatherhood at this very moment, as the greeting card industry very much wants them to do today. In a few years, they can eagerly anticipate macaroni art, graduating to useless tools and then, perhaps, phone calls. It makes me sort of sad, sometimes, that we live in a society where expressing love and respect for parents is reserved for one day in the year.

Although I am not a parent, I imagine that parents probably reflect on their awesome responsibilities at least once a day. I know that I had to hold a baby the other day and I still wake up in a blind panic, so I cannot imagine a life where I couldn’t give the baby back after it started to chew on my hair. Children, on the other hand, don’t seem to think about their parents nearly as much, and this is rather unfortunate. I think of my father at least several days a week, and sometimes I am spurred enough to pick up the phone and call him. I have greatly appreciated the way in which our relationship has grown over the years, and at least once a week I call upon my father’s wisdom to get out of a sticky situation, formulate an appropriate response to a horrifying statement, or cook a recipe successfully.

My father and my Chinese mother dropped by the other day for some peach pie, and we sat on the porch eating it while we discussed the Mystery Tree. My Chinese mother asserts that it is, in fact, a peach, explaining that multiple fruits grow on the same branch, and that you need to thin the fruits when they are young to grow big healthy peaches.

“But I think it is diseased,” I said, while my father accidentally dropped a piece of pie on his shirt.

“You need pee pee,” she says, somewhat mysteriously. Sometimes we make errors in syntax, so I wonder if perhaps she needs pee pee. “Pee pee and lots of water,” she says. “You pee in bucket, then water, no smell, big healthy peaches!”

“Ah,” I say.

“I’ll bring some fish emulsion by later,” my father offers.

“No,” she says, “pee pee.”

“Ah,” we say, before my father cuts another slice of pie. In this moment, I think about the things we have given up for each other, and I am happy.

I am hazarding a guess that all of my readers either have, are, or know fathers. I hope that all of you enjoy this delightfully commercialized June holiday, and that those of you who have fathers find time to appreciate them more than once a year.

[Father's Day]

everything.is | 16Jun07

Anise in the air and honey on my lips, drowsy half sleep and moving shadows, bracelets tinkle out the hours like stars. I am comfortable, relaxed, at home in this skin I am in, thinking of nothing in particular other than the next song, phyllo dough crackling on my tongue like snowflakes. Rarely am I so at peace with the moment I exist in, so disinterested in past and future and content to simply be. I am confident and sure of myself in a way which allows me to forget all of the doubts which normally suffuse me.

Everything. Is all right.

Some mornings, I wake up filled with certainty, knowing that today, this day, is going to be excellent, perfect, summer fruits eaten in lazy sunlight and skies perfect blue which stops the heart with purity, single white cloud looking staged in the middle of the horizon. Today is, yes, one of those days, in which every instant is pregnant with the meaning of life and I am surprised that everyone has not fallen deeply, utterly, irrevocably, in love with the world around them, flowers blooming and ocean whispering sweet nothings into air saturated with salt, water, sweetness, summer’s tang which is so often bittersweet but is today so vibrant, simply there.

Starry eyed surprise, eyes glassy with wonder and delight, the whole world must think I am stoned in love.

Magnets and Miracles | 09May07

Night often finds me sitting on the sea wall, fretting the label off a bottle of Fat Tire. Sometimes I sit so that I can see the lights of San Francisco, and when I’m finished sometimes I throw the bottle against the rocks so I can hear the crash and bitter tinkle, wasted glass sluicing through the boulders to cut an unsuspecting hand later. I feel momentarily guilty before I shrug and remember that life’s a bitch, eh, and I tuck the label into my pocket so that it will come out in the wash, filling the dryer with paper lint. Other times, I sit on the dark side, looking across the Bay to the indistinct muddle of Richmond, Berkeley, lights dancing along the bridge which glitter in an out like a tired disco ball.

For some reason, I had a dream last night that was so intense and vivid that for a moment I thought I was in a different place. I had two dreams, actually, but the one I’m going to tell you about is about books, childhood.

I remember when I was young, in Caspar, I would take my father’s coffee up to him every morning. He got in late at night from working at the bar, but somehow managed to be cheerful when I charged upstairs at eight in the morning, filled with a zest to do something. If the day was sunny, my father would say:

“Let’s make potato pancakes,” and we would, and I would see how many I could eat before I might feel faintly sick, and then we would do the dishes and pack a thermos of chocolate milk and go to the beach. Sometimes we would walk to Jughandle, and sometimes we would walk to Caspar beach, and we would build dams and pry limpets from the rocks and drink chocolate milk made with inky black Indonesian chocolate until the afternoon set in, and started to get cold, and then we would walk home and cook dinner.

Other days, it wouldn’t be sunny, and I would be filled with restlessness. My father would let me set the Monopoly board up on the bed, and we would play for pennies and later dollars, or maybe we would play chess, and he would say:

“Do you really want to move there?”

And other days, oh, glorious day, I would coax him into taking me to Mendocino, so that we could go to the bookstore and visit Katy, and the smell of fresh ink and paper would fill my nostrils, and I would use my saved up pennies to buy a book, or sometimes I would wheedle him into buying one for me. Katy used to give me reader’s copies sometimes, although I didn’t know they were reader’s copies, then. Other times, when they stripped the covers off books to send to the publisher to get their money back, she would rescue the books from the recycling and give them to me. Knowing Katy, she’s still passing on good books to kids who need them.

In those days we still owned the white Volvo with the holes in the floor in the back, and I would bound into the front seat and my father would roll a cigarette while the engine warmed up, and then we would trundle down the road to Mendocino, speculating on whether or not the fog would lift.

In those days, Bookwinkles was still around the corner from the Gallery Bookshop, in the little white building with the tower, and my father would find a parking spot and I would race out into the bookstore to run my fingers longingly over all the books while my father went down the street. I still remember that in between stage, when I would go the Bookwinkles and realize there was nothing there for me, anymore, and I remember the first time my father pulled a piece of adult fiction from the shelf and said:

“I liked this when I was a kid, I think you might like it too,” and I took The Tin Drum home and read it from cover to cover.

In my dream, my father and I were driving down the road to Mendocino, and I was little, then, wearing my favorite blue a-line skirt left over from a dance performance. But my father was as old as he is now, with white hair and nervous hands and a distant look in his eye. When we arrived in Mendocino, everything was gone, some sort of strange yuppie paradise had arisen with condos and malls, and my father’s blue jeans and plaid shirt looked just as out of place as my shabby blue skirt and Keds, and he took me by the hand and we tried to find the ice cream store, but no one would answer us when we asked for directions. And then the dream was over, and I was waking up, tasting Black Forest and smelling the waffle cones they used to make at the ice cream store, right there, while you waited in line. The odd thing about the dream was that everything which is still there in Mendocino was gone, and yet I dreamed about the ice cream store, which hasn’t been there for years. Some sort of strange flipped time warp.

I remember the last time I tried to go to the ice cream store, it was New Year’s Day, 2000, and a bunch of us woke up late after a party and walked to the ice cream store and it was gone, empty, even the ice cream cases. Each of us tried to remember the last time we had been, and realized that it might have been gone for weeks, perhaps even months, and none of us had noticed.

What haven’t you noticed?

Girl, Irritated | 04May07

I romped around the city with my good pal L yesterday, just returned from adventures in Nicaragua. She was planning on driving up to Fort Bragg this morning, but was willing to let me drag her around to eat gelato at Naia and visit Puff’s work. At the end of our afternoon together, I was tired and a little stinky, but more or less satisfied. I waited in the tunnels of the Metro for awhile while MUNI figured its scene out, and finally popped up at Embarcadero into the growingly cold and cloudy afternoon.

When I checked my phone, it looked like the bus would already have left, so I ambled to the TransBay rather than bolting willy nilly through the crowds.

As I hit the bottom of lane three, I noticed two things, more or less simultaneously:

1. The bus was still there, loading up, which meant that I could be on it if I ran.

2. There was a woman with a camera at the bottom of the staircase.

Now, I’m all for photography. I think that photography is awesome, although photographing the TransBay is a little odd. But something about this woman made me suspect that she was planning on photographing me, and that made me uncomfortable. You see, she obviously had no intention of asking me for permission, and I had no idea where the photo might end up, or what she would do with it.

And this bothers me.

It’s one thing when I’m riding the cable car, eating a doughnut, basking in life, and I end up in some tourist’s photo. I’m on a major tourist attraction, doing my thing. I also don’t mind being caught in sweeping cityscape shots, because, hey, it happens. I wouldn’t ask for permission from everyone in the area before snapping a picture. But I would ask before photographing a specific person, unless he or she was participating in a public event, such as a parade. I don’t care if that person is in a public place or not. It just seems…reasonable to respect that some people like going out in public, but do not like being photographed. I have always respected requests not to be photographed, although I am sorry to say that not everyone has done the same for me.

It just bothers me.

I can’t put my finger on why I like to be photographed…I just don’t. I don’t photograph well, but that’s because of my dislike and awkwardness of being on the other side of the lens. I’m not sure that I’m superstitious enough to believe that being photographed takes away my soul, but I don’t like having random pieces of myself scattered around. I especially do not like the thought of being the subject of a photograph and not being able to control its distribution. I am, bluntly, not ok with it.

So I was caught in the horns of a dilemma. I could go up the other stairway, and probably miss the bus. Or I could go up lane three.

“Hey,” I said, “please don’t photograph me,” and then I started bolting up the stairs. As I ran, I heard the characteristic snap of a shutter…so I did the only thing I could do, a small token act of a rebellion, and raised the middle finger of one hand as I thrust it behind me.

Why would someone choose to be so disrespectful? I’ll keep my eye on Flickr for awhile to see if the photo pops up, and if a story accompanies it. I don’t really see the point in being callous and rude like that, and I hope that no one does it to her, because it leaves you with a bitter and angry feeling in your mouth.

Being photographed against your will may not be rape, but it’s still violating.

[photography]

Missing | 29Apr07

Walking on the seawall, the City looks like a chalky smear of tall buildings in fog, burnt orange by the setting sun. The ocean was choppy today, coarse and rough with spitting plumes of spray which occasionally smacked my face, turning it salty and tight in little clouds of droplets. Raw white crests on the waves danced, turning yellow and spongy before disappearing when they hit the shore. There is a cold, sharp wind which tries to whistle in under my jacket, and my earrings clack in the wind, growing colder and brushing my neck like icy fingers. My mouth tastes bitter and metallic. My eyelashes are crusted with salt and I want to tear my garments and rub myself with earth, rub myself in the Earth.

There are so many things and people I miss right now. I feel sometimes that I cannot hold all the missing in, it is like a black hole which gapes hungrily out from me. I am going to collapse and suck the world inside of me.

I am the elephant in the room.

Sometimes I am surprised by the words and language which come out of me, much as I imagine a woman is embarrassed when her water breaks in public. It’s such an intrinsically private act, suddenly there for the whole world to see, and everyone is solicitous and caring. I wonder, sometimes, if women like that secretly wish they could disappear, melt away, like I do. If the attention of people concerned about them almost makes it worse, highlights the glaring error of what is not in the scene. I don’t want a concerned bystander to call a cab, I want to see the face of someone I love. I long for something which I may never have again, not the hand of a stranger on my arm, sickly sweet syllables in my ear, shaking my head, confusion. I am filled with jagged anger and longing which orbit each other around my sun. I am reminded of my bitterness and sorrow daily, I taste these things in my food and see them in my dreams.

Everything is broken.

More and more lately, I feel like the rock in a middle of a stream of water, fixed and going nowhere while everyone else rushes by. They brush me as they bustle past, but I cannot reach out to them because I am immovable and hard, brittle. They are moving by too quickly to stop.

Nothing is broken. Everything is fine. Carry on.

Sometimes I want to just disappear, slip away over the horizon to a place where no one can find me. More and more these days, I feel like no one would really notice.