Things I've Been Doing While Unemployed

#1: Moving In

Refinishing furniture! Ikea shopping sprees! Sewing portraits of Abe Lincoln onto my pillowcases! Oh the glory! After years of living at home, in dingy dorm rooms and squatting in a house full of 30 years’ worth of other people’s stuff, I can finally play homemaker. Somehow, though, my room still looks like a spinster garage sale (whatever that looks like) because I—almost inexplicably—haven’t found the time to finally put things together in what will be, I’ve promised myself and everyone else who visits, the most amazing bedroom of our time. I’ve just been too busy, which leads me to item #2.

#2: Being Busy

Amendment: Being busy 90% of the time and spending the other 10% in a paralyzing fear of boredom. I’ve known since high school that I really enjoy having lots of commitments and knowing just how I was going to spend each moment of my day. But until now, I haven’t had to worry about it. From the age of four—like most people—I’ve belonged to some kind of institution or program that has told me what my goals and dreams are. I’ve gotten the A, gone to the practice, done a “good job.” I’ve experienced success at so many turns of my road and now, I have no marker for success, no goals laid out for me. I fear that space in each afternoon or evening when I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to be doing (see items #4 and #7). I really don’t even feel like I know what I want to do. This wouldn’t be that big of a deal except that it calls into question just how independent a person I am and it makes me realize that I have no idea what I want to do with what is feeling like the zillion years that stretch ahead of me in this life. HOW CAN I NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO? WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT ME AS A PERSON? Boredom = huge existential questions of self worth = terrifying. Read about my chosen treatment to this ailment in the next item.

#3: Drinking Wine

Lots. I’ve developed a routine (see related #5) around my wine-drinking: 1. I exercise in the early evening (hence deserving whatever treat I decide to indulge in later) then 2. shower and 3. walk the few blocks to New Seasons and 4. pick out something new and that suits my mood that evening then 5. take it home and cook dinner.

If I haven’t worked that day and am feeling particularly poor, substitute the third step with a walk to Safeway. Or Freddy’s, where just last night I purchased my first box of wine since the Tour de Franzia boxed wine tour incident of Senior Week ’09. How do they fit four whole bottles into that tiny box? Magic, my friend. Magic.

#4: Looking for a Full-Time Job

Self-explanatory.

It’s funny; I spent the past many years wishing I had more free time so I could craft, write, nap, learn how to make cheese, etc. And now, when I have pretty much all day every day to do whatever the hell I want, all I want is to have a job to go to every day. And then go home and congratulate myself with wine.

#5: Settling into a Routine

It’s really the healthiest thing on this list. Another thing I’ve discovered about myself is that I thrive on ritual and routine, so I’m doing my best to cultivate that in this time of inbetweenness. I’m experimenting with a new coffeeshop almost every morning, and I’m working part-time (the unemployed is a semi-misnomer; it describes my attitude, which is part-depressed and part-liberated (and fully thus painfully self-aware), not my income, small as that may be) downtown. I ride the Max everyday, which is both thrilling and unsettling—so many different kinds of people!—and I’m exercising more regularly than at any point in my life. Zumba is a key part of my routine.

#6: Becoming a Guitar Hero

Embarrassing. It’s embarrassing how good I am.

#7: Not Writing

This is a result of a phobia which is similar to the one described in item #2. I took down my blog over the summer because, once again, it felt too personal. Despite my futile attempts, it had become what I feared it would: just like everyone else’s blogs—just musings on my life, which I find to be the wittily profound makings of a writing career, but which its audience (my mom) probably find worrying (bad) and trite (worse).

But the hiatus of my blog did not have to mean the hiatus of my writing. (Unless, of course, I’m so accomplishment-driven that I cannot write unless I know my writing will have an interested audience. Gasp! Say it ain’t so!) For a reason I’m still grappling with, the prospect of writing (especially at that witching hour in the evening when boredom lurks at the bottom of my glass) makes me nauseous and scared. I’m afraid, of course, that I have nothing to write about. Which I don’t, really. But I’m 845 words in, so obviously there was something there. I guess I fear that I’m not really a writer if I don’t write all the time, if I can’t come up with a great story, if I can’t bring myself to start a big project that mines my heart of everything meaningful it has to offer so far.

Mostly, though, it’s a fear of writer’s block combined with a fear that writing is useless unless it’s read by lots of people. In my heart, I don’t believe that to be true. But my heart isn’t usually the one in control.

#8: Being a Good Friend/Roommate/Girlfriend

At least I hope I’m doing that.

I see this as a time of my life when I can make plans with people, do my share of the housework, just hang around Tom’s apartment to keep him company while he works.

It’s a precious time, really.

Snow Day

I’m sitting up in my bed so I can look out my small window. Snow—big flakes—float to the ground outside. Only the second or third time I’ve ever seen snow in Portland.

I bought some incense yesterday in my campaign to relax more, to be in my room more, to enjoy that pink striped armchair in the corner more, to read and write more. So a stream of “sensual amber” smoke ribbons from my nightstand.

I’m reading a book about Vermont and logging and maple syrup and the rough lives lived in the cold Northeast. Fiction, of course, as is only appropriate on a snow day.

Tomorrow I will take the bus to work early to make up for lost time. I will sit through a staff meeting and eat a leftover sandwich for lunch. I will take the (dreaded) GRE and hope my scores aren’t too pitiful.

But for today I am in my bathrobe, recovering from a nice, long workout and a well-deserved hot shower, luxuriating under my down comforter, watching the big, white flakes float to the ground outside.

Trouble the Water

I’m searching on the New York Times website trying to find something—anything—written to commemorate the birth and life of Martin Luther King, Jr., on this, the long weekend we take to celebrate his work. Which we can only hope is continuing.

Drowning. Sometimes it feels like drowning, doesn’t it? Stepping into the deep, scary waters of racism, prejudice, sexism, homophobia, media and corporate mind control—and drowning in the tension.

The day after the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tuscon last week, the pastor at my church went to the pulpit and said that she had a sermon all prepared, but that it just wasn’t right anymore. Instead, she sang.

Wade in the water.

Wade in the water, children.

Wade in the water.

God’s gonna trouble the water.

Now, I won’t do justice to her sermon (or her beautiful voice), but I’m thinking today, and I feel myself drown, of the meaning of that: “Trouble the water.”

God troubles the water twice in the Bible, so I have two possible definitions. The first is in the Old Testament when God uses Moses’ staff to part the Red Sea for the Israelites to escape from Egypt. Trouble: to rabble-rouse, to stir up, to wake from complacency. That makes sense. But then God troubles the water again, and in a different way. "For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had” (John 5:4). Trouble: to use water to cleanse, heal, and make whole. Troubling the water is subversive, freeing and healing—all at once.

A big part of my theological belief is that mercy comes to people through people. So in that same way, I can’t help but think that it’s our charge to trouble the waters we drown in. To work for freedom and healing. To wake from complacency and, at the least, remember.

Sometimes my job forces me to remember. I went to Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, Ore. last week—at the same hour in which Rep. Giffords was holding her community forum—to meet with a group of women. The Lifers Group. They all had life sentences. We talked about domestic violence and addiction and legislative advocacy. Their lives are tangled webs of injustice and violence. Humbling, to be sure.

My fingers are now sticky and smudged black from thumbing through pages of newsprint, scanning pages and pages of type for a story that remembers—that can help me remember—the life and work of Dr. King. I’m wading through water—no, right now it feels like drowning—in tragedy. In Tuscon trouble and hometown homophobia and the sexist selling and celling of my sisters.

When we start to forget, how do we subvert? How do we wade through the water toward a place of healing? I can’t answer that. But I saw this poster recently: “Join the revolution. Fall in love.” And goshdarnit every time I come to the tea shop I’m sitting in now, there is a couple there on a blind date. So be subversive: fall in love.

Or be subversive: be completely naïve. Truth be told, I didn’t actually have the day off today. I coordinate volunteers to answer prisoner mail for my organization, and I was asked to lead volunteers on Portland State University’s campus to do the same on MLK Day. Hundreds of young people were on campus, and the project itself exhausting. I was paired with a young Asian-American guy—probably 19 or so—who was supposed to assist me throughout the day and orient volunteers to the project. He wore a cardboard crown (a la Burger King) and clutched his clipboard to his chest. He was nervous. But he did a good job helping me explain the project and organize the materials. At the end of the day, while we cleaned up, he confided that he was so nervous and excited the night before that he couldn’t sleep. He was so jazzed about this day.

Too few of us are ready to pee our pants in excitement about doing good things, about celebrating a man on whose back so many people’s hopes rested. And all amidst the heaving waters of violence with which people in my generation can’t identify.

Of course, we have our own waters in which we must swim.

Shoulding

A new year!

A new year in which to drink just a little too much on a Wednesday night, to finish the scarf I started in 2008, to master (or avoid hypertension at) boot camp class at the gym.

The turning over of the year is, really, an artificial change of number that makes us feel renewed. Or feel the pressure to feel renewed. “I should get in shape,” you say. Or “I should figure out what the hell I’m going to do with my life,” you say.

And obviously New Year’s Eve needs to be the best night of both the previous and the coming year, when, in reality, you end up spending it on the bathroom floor of the house of the party that you vowed to only stay at for five minutes (or at least watch your roommates do that). The first day of the “renewal” of the year is generally spent hung over. Or, in my case, drinking a $5 soda and peeing my pants while a tutu-wearing Natalie Portland tears at her hangnails (spoiler alert!).

Nevertheless, I promised myself to write 2011. Really write. I planned all day to write tonight, and I stressed about it. I thought, Should I drink coffee beforehand? Or wine? Should I be energized or relaxed? What does it take to really write? What does it take to have something to really write about? I was afraid I’d find that I got nothin’. (Still am).

And maybe I don’t.

I did a little writing last year—mostly about the newness of my lifestyle in JVC Northwest. And even more about love and heartbreak and my exploration of my femininity and personhood in the context of love and heartbreak. Things too personal for public domain. Like when I felt so homesick, or when I decided to go on the pill.

So what does one write about when one feels content and settled and loved and, dare I say, is in a healthy relationship? When one has found a rare few weeks of peace admidst the larger reality of career directionlessness and separation from family?

Write about writing, I guess. Or write about love and sex because people usually enjoy reading about those things. Or write about how peacefulness and contentedness can be distractions from the larger tensions of life, things we might (or might not) deserve to have breaks from. Like war. Or apathy.

Write about how you’re afraid you’ll never get to that deeper place of existence and meaning—how you’ll float on the surface (drinking, dancing, working, etc. etc. etc.) until the end. How you’ll never find what you really want to write about.

But I’m not going to do that now. I’m in a place void of guilt or tension, and it’s boring, but I need to savor it while it lasts. I know I should be studying for the GREs; I should be more thoughtful about my relationships; I should take cold showers and discern my life vocation. But, for now—maybe for the whole damn year—I’m going to stop shoulding all over myself.

And, for the record, I’m drinking vodka.

A Season of Zero: A Reflection on Advent

To Know The Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

- Wendell Berry

Waiting. Advent is a season of waiting. Waiting for Christmas, waiting for birth, waiting for rebirth. Waiting for the impossible to become possible.

And I’m biding my time until I figure out how I’m to be useful, what my vocation is, where I’m supposed to be. It’s difficult to stay patient. But, after all, we were promised a lamp unto our feet (Psalm 119), not a lighthouse unto our lives. We were promised comfort in the mystery of the darkness, not all-illuminating knowledge.

As the days grow shorter and the world gets darker, I feel myself sinking deeper into my not knowing. I’m just going through the motions: doing my job; getting up the energy to go to the gym; making meals with my community; working on an endless knitting project so that I’ll have a matching hot-pink hat-scarf set. And it sometimes feels meaningless. I’m caught in the cliché!: what’s it all mean?

But in darkness, there is the beauty of presence. The beauty of nighttime bike rides with friends, shrieking up the bike lane past our favorite haunts on our street, gossiping about our coworkers. The beauty of your lover’s eyes sleepily looking into yours over one last drink, knowing you’ll both have to be at work in just a few hours. The beauty of dark streets covered in a sprinkling of snow, memories of walking the dog with my parents to the old middle school when I was a kid.

And then there is also darkness that is truly dark—frightening, cold, lonely. The black asphalt streets in the rain as I make the trek back home, wondering why I chose to leave my car behind when I moved here; the darkness under my bed where my dog and I hid when my brother’s temper was out of control; the not knowing what my life is for and where I’m called to be.

That’s when I I feel like I’m just biding my time, spinning my wheels. Sometimes the joys of the day-to-day are enough—laughing with friends, drinking at bars, a good book. But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes I’m craving more—a goal, or, dare I say, a dream—a reason for the money I spend, the resources I use, the energy I expel, the words I say. I’m craving purpose and passion, and I only have small clues to go on. Small clues that my life is for more than just me and my temporal happiness and satisfaction.

I thought about this today as I sat under the harsh track lighting of Chipotle eating a side of rice and beans. Not only do I feel directionless, but I was feeling gluttonous and wasteful, too—all that packaging when I had a perfectly good lunch back at work. Those rice and beans catalyzed a miniature life crisis revolving around the guilt that budgets and “simple living” can create. I mean, shouldn’t I be eating kale and doing an office meditation? Days when I feel like I’m not doing life right—those are “zero” days. An old friend who hiked the Appalachian Trail taught me that phrase. The days when he would rest and go into town for an ice cream instead of forging ahead—those were “zero” days.

How often we are unforgiving of ourselves for those days! Those “spinning wheel” days. I’m always asking myself, “What did I accomplish today? Do I deserve to go out tonight? Did I do enough work? When’s the last time I worked out?” As if each day weren’t a gift, and if we’ve gleaned some small joy out of it for ourselves or someone else, that that weren’t enough in itself.

So in this season of Advent, I pray for patience. I trust that the lamp unto my feet is more than enough. I resist the temptation to search in vain for that damn lighthouse.

“…We shall someday need not only achievements, capabilities, but above all authentic human beings. And if you only understand this present period of your life in such a way that God now desires to make of you the person whom God will later someday wish to use and put to work with all your capacities and gifts, then a great deal has been gained! And now it is surely important that we who feel incompletely utilized at present, incompletely engaged—and in this too we share a common experience—allow ourselves to be prepared by this time for a future one. It may serve us well to be put aside for a time, not to be taken seriously. Through this we can learn humility and patience, but also faithfulness. And if in this time God wants to make devout [people] of us, whom God can someday use, then lets us be very grateful to the Lord for this period.”

- Friedrich Bonhoeffer’s letter to Chrisoph Bethge, June 18, 1942

I can think of many days, weeks, months, years in my life that have felt like seasons of Advent—seasons of waiting, of dissatisfaction, of anxiety, of fear, of the guilt in feeling unprepared for life. As in, why haven’t I taken the GRE yet? I certainly won’t be ready for a career, much less the birth of Christ!

My hope is that those phases of doubt are there on purpose—a chance for examination, for rest, for “zero” days. Which aren’t really “zero” in the sense that they’re valueless, but “zero” in the sense that they can’t count toward our endless tally of what things do and do not make us feel like worthy people. Zero is an absence—like dark is an absence of light. And so much more.

Real Life

A reflection on my time with JVC Northwest so far, given at their Harvest Stomp fundraiser:

I used to think that I came out of college not ready for “real life”—whatever that may mean. I wasn’t ready to get a “real job” and live by myself in a “real apartment.” So I did something different than the “real” things my friends were doing. I’m from New Jersey, so many of them have jobs in advertising or television in “real cities” like New York, D.C. or L.A.

So I did something pretty different that my friends and family back home didn’t really get. I came to Portland for my first JV year, leaving Mom and Dad and the comforts of home in August of 2009. And that word “comfort” took on a whole new meaning. That first year, my housemates and I had what we called “no-energy nights” and that meant we would refrain from using appliances or lights throughout the day. It also meant we would eat cold sandwiches every Wednesday night by candlelight. It was all we could make without a stove. Now, I’m a vegetarian, but I have to admit: I love tuna sandwiches. And there’s nothing like having a long day at work and coming home to someone else fixing you a delicious tuna sandwich.

My JV placement both last year and this year is as the community organizer for a non-profit in Portland. We work to make the criminal justice system more effective and more just for everyone involved. Most of my job consists of getting folks together who have been affected by the system—whether they’re the parent of a kid who will be in prison out in Eastern Oregon for a long, long time, or an advocate who works with survivors of domestic violence—to talk about how we can make change. I also do organizing in Oregon prisons—as much as I can—to connect people on the inside with resources on the outside. My brother is formerly incarcerated, and while my family’s story is very different from most that I hear at my job, my journey this year has been both personal and professional. This has challenged me to make my own definition of what “solidarity” is, because it has felt quite real this year.

I guess it’s strange: Whenever I go into a prison, I feel very comfortable. As a pretty shy person, I feel more welcomed there than I have in almost any other social setting. It turns into a special occasion for the prisoners--and for me. The prisoners I get to meet are excited to have a few hours away from the humdrum of their routine, and together we talk and figure out ways they can have a political voice. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a very unnatural setting—it feels cold and oppressive and all the things you’d assume a cage built for people would be. But the people I’ve met there are deep thinkers. That’s one thing about prison—you have all the time in the world to think deeply, something I crave in my life. Something, actually, that my JV life has given me space to do. Not that community life and prison are comparable—but they’re both places that lend themselves to critical thinking and to having to do A LOT of dishes.

And yet, the work I get to do in and out of prisons is very hopeful. The folks I work with are living with the repercussions of crime and violence, but they come to me when they want to make change, knowing that changing the law won’t erase the violence they’ve experienced; it won’t get their son or daughter out of prison. I so admire them. One of my most memorable days at my placement was opening the Oregonian and seeing a letter to the editor published by one of our members. Her son was convicted as a teenager under Oregon’s mandatory-minimum sentencing law and is now serving many years in our state penitentiary. She came to Partnership for Safety and Justice as a shy, meek, wounded person. Losing a child to the prison industrial complex can feel shameful, but most of all I imagine that it’s just deeply painful. But she wants to make sure kids like her son don’t get caught up the way he did. So I told her what I tell many people: write a letter. She and I worked on it together, and many edits later, her voice went statewide in our biggest newspaper, speaking out against harsh sentencing for youth. Now, while life is still painful, she is hardly meek or shy anymore. And I’m sure that next year she’ll be at the capital with us, telling legislators her story and about how dangerous prison is for teens. She might help save kids’ lives.

JVs see a lot of pain in their daily work. My JVC experience hasn’t protected me from that pain or answered the question “Why is there so much injustice in the world?” But it has helped me to ask more questions, deeper questions. And when there are just no answers, JVC Northwest has given me communities—two of them now—where I can collapse in my chair at night—bringing my questions, my troubles and my celebrations—to the table, and ask for someone to make me a tuna sandwich.

And now, 15 months after starting this journey with JVC Northwest, I can tell you that it’s not that I wasn’t ready for that “real” life—it was that I was ready for more. I was ready to live in what Jack Kennedy calls the “sacred tension”—that place where there are no easy answers. I was ready for heartbreak and critical thought and deep relationships. And more fun—and dancing and baking and listening to Dolly Parton in our kitchen of Mac House where so many memories have been made over the years—more joy than I could describe to you now. I have laughed and cried more in the past 15 months than any other time in my life.

I can also tell you that my work, my home life, and my lifestyle feel about as “real” as it gets.

gaga: part rave, part church

I went to see Lady Gaga back in August. Obviously it changed my life. This is just one of the several essays I wrote about my experience:

At 9:19 p.m. my dear friend and housemate Sara texted me: "Is she beautiful? Are u in love?"

The answer, if I had been in any position to answer, would have been: "YES!"

Lady Gaga, however, wouldn't have liked my answer. During the middle of a set, she said to her "little monsters" (i.e. us), "When you leave here tonight, don't leave here loving me more. Leave here loving you more."

Which I did. Erika Spaet: Little Monster for life.

Why? Because Lady Gaga is a rockstar in so many senses of the word:

She's a fashion icon. Sequined masks; caution-tape bras; cigarette-lined sunglasses. And that was the audience. She changed outfits (too quickly to be human, actually) for every song. Mostly she was in her underwear and wearing glittery, stalagmite hats.

She straddles the line between aloof and intimate with her audience. Most people don't know her real name, and even her riffing with the audience was from behind her opaque scuba goggles ("Do you think I'm sexy? Because I think you're sexy.) But the next moment, she was talking about her dad's alcoholism and soulfully playing a baby grand (which was on fire).

She's got a philosophy on stardom that borders the religious and the political. "You all are the kings and the queens of the kingdom we're creating. And I'm just something of a devoted jester." Her guitarist is named Jesus, and he (or the real Jesus? She never distinguished) loves all of us. And after fake blood started bubbling from her chest while singing about the man who "ate her heart," she told us that she bleeds for us every night. For the freaks and the misfits and the ones who feel they don't belong. I'm no theologist, but that sounds like the Gospel. And in many ways, the concert was a more spiritual experience than many churches I've been to. Everyone dancing together in a spirit of acceptance of all that is "weird" and listening to a preacher with a powerful message: you are loved. Love each other.

And I got the sense that most of the people there last night really do feel like misfits. There were people with a variety of physical abilities and body shapes. There was a grandma. And Gaga embraces the rap she's gotten as a drag queen, bragging about her "huge dick." She knows she has a following in the LGBTQ community, and during "Alejandro" she yelled, "Equality for all! Repeal Don't Ask Don't Tell!" It was random, yes, and it could easily be a ploy to appeal to a fanbase that is mostly progressive, especially in Portland. But we loved it.

We loved the 50-foot "fame monster" that looked like a huge deep-sea creature, and we loved the sparks that she shot from her bra to defeat it. The music was solid (obviously), and the theatrics gave us plenty to take pictures of. Until she closed the show and told us to "go to bed, assholes!" Then the lights came on and we all exited the World of Gaga physically---and spiritually--spent.

Who lives at this address?

Hi friends,

So I guess I'm not a blogger. But I'd really like to be.

As the tagline says, this is a cozy, virtual place for my writing to live. When I say "writing," I mean things that I've had published in the past (or things that should have been published). I also mean things I'm working on now: short essays, articles and musings on my tiny, little, narrow perspective of this world and the people I know and see.

I stopped posting this past year, but not because I stopped writing. Well, partly because I stopped writing. It was a year of discernment and transition and just getting caught up in the whirlwind of day-to-day LIFE. But the things I did write got too personal for the web. Too personal for what I felt the blogosphere--full of cooking tips and fitness tips and knitting tips and other types of useful life help--would feel comfortable with.

So over the next few weeks I'll do a little catching up by posting some of the less embarrassing essays from this past year. And when 2011 begins, this will truly be a place for my writing to live. My writing will really live at this address. My writing will be bustling and fit and learning how to bake its own bread; my writing and I share this goal for 2011.

If you've read this, thanks. If you haven't, no surprise there. Peace, and be well!

Red Rose Tea

My mom used to exclusively drink Red Rose tea. This was before she knew about “good tea,” she says. I know the smell of that black tea so well. I feel like I saw her open a new box of Red Rose about a hundred times, and each time I got to fish around for the tiny ceramic figure—I think it was usually a character in the circus or some kind of regal fowl, whatever that season’s “theme” was—nestled between the tea bags. Those little figurines smelled like earth and winter and maybe England, just like its little teabag roommates in that box. I put the clown or the eagle or whatever it was on a knick-knack shelf that used to hang above our TV in the kitchen, right next to old political buttons and my dad’s dental bridge.

I’m not sure why that bridge got a spot on the shelf; its only sentimental value was that my dad had accidentally swallowed it once. Considering its journey, I don’t think it belonged in the kitchen.

Now Mom drinks “good tea” whose bags don’t have paper tags—for convenient but decidedly low-brow steeping—and that comes in flavors like “Blackberry Sage” and “English Breakfast” instead of just plain “Black.” One might say she’s a little tea crazy. She’s taken me along on visits to factories where these fancy teas are made, lingered in the “Mint Room” and tried to get free samples. One time, we went to the office of a tea manufacturer, knowing that they didn’t give tours, but we asked anyway and left happy with a catalogue and a travel teabag caddy.

For my whole life, tea has meant Mom—and home.

So I try not to be a coffee drinker. I remember my mom pouring a cup of tea from a carafe after church in the narthex one morning about ten years ago. She took a sip and wrinkled her nose. Someone had—perhaps very long ago—put coffee in that carafe, and her sensitive taste buds detected it.

But coffee shops (especially in Portland) are just so cool and full of possibilities: lattes, macchiatos, Americanos—single, double, triple! And the smell is so mysterious and sexy; one feels like one could write really good poetry and pull off any number of fashion risks (beret?) when lounging at a coffee shop. And this says nothing of the benefits of being able to manipulate one’s mood and worldview with a strong cup of caffeination.

Mom will drink coffee, but it’s more like coffee-flavored sweet milk. If there’s ice cream involved, that’s even better.

When I moved into the house where I live now—with seven strangers on the other side of the country—one of the first things we found among a lot of junk bequeathed to us by the previous tenants was a little, green ceramic falcon. It sits now in a cast-iron frying pan that hangs from its handle on the wall because it gets too hot to use. And that little figure watches us cook our big meals from there. Watches us bake apple pies and sing Dolly Parton, Michael Jackson, Cole Porter from there. Watches us sit at the dinner table for hours because there’s no place we need to be, leaving the table when it’s time for bed and our cheeks hurt from laughing so much. And that bird still smells like Red Rose tea.

A lot of the time, I think I’m actually turning into my mom.

And this house smells like a home.

Peeing at Nordstrom

September 7, 2009

I really had to pee.

Easy enough: I’ll use the Ladies’ Lounge at Nordstrom. I’ll pass the Clinique counters with their white-coated cosmetic technicians and politely refuse the free perfume samplers. I’ll smile at the young moms changing their babies’ diapers in the bathroom, and I’ll use the sweet-smelling foamy soap in the dispenser. I’ll fluff my hair in the spotless mirror and apply my lip-gloss. Shade: Cabanacrush. Then I’ll stroll out of Nordstrom, and the friendly lab-coat ladies won’t think any less of me for not buying anything.

Is it possible that this whole year is the ultimate mockery of poverty? Because we’re doing just that: whole-heartedly and half-assedly replicating poverty in our own lives. And why? So we can experience what it’s like to be a little hungry at the end of the month, to not buy a latte whenever we feel like it, to go a whole season without a new outfit? Maybe. And we don’t even realize it. We don’t always see how economic injustice really is or how free we are to make whatever economic choices we want to.

I’ll go home to my housemates and make potato pancakes for dinner and think how nice it is to live a little more simply than I ever have before, and I’ll forget how pathetic my attempts at being just are.

Because I’ll always fit in at Nordstrom’s, even though I might pretend I don’t want to.

Bottles

August 30, 2009

I turned in some bottles for money yesterday. It was the first time I had done this. Where I come from, we toss our recyclables carelessly into a skunky blue bin on our deck; I started checking that little arrow-encircled number on the bottom of my plastics recently, but more often than not I pitch everything into that canister and hope for the best.

But the parking garage of Safeway—it’s like a big version of that blue thing. Bigger and skunkier. And, if you wait for your bottles to build up enough on your back patio, it’s kind of a goldmine.

I arrived (in all my glory, with a noisy, bottle-filled bike baby carriage [precariously] attached to the rear of my Schwinn’s burgundy frame—I knocked over more than one “Sidewalk Sale!” sign on my trek to the store with this carriage, hoping no passersby thought I had an actual baby in there) ready to cash in.

It turns out there is quite the bottle-cashing-in culture in that Safeway parking garage. The five or so depositers there seemed to know each other. Actually, at one point there was a little bit of drama as tensions mounted waiting for the next available machine. An older gentleman helped me navigate the system, opening the bottom of the bottle-eater with winter-gloved hands to smooth out the bins that were overflowing with broken glass. Neck first. Barcode up. Next time, tell your roommates not to absentmindedly peel the labels off: makes the bottles worthless. A woman, probably in her forties, a little overweight and in a bright pink tank top, unloaded a black garbage bag of plastic water bottles into an oversized shopping cart and started feeding them to the recyclables eater. Some of hers had the labels peeled off too, and I identified with her pissed-offness at the people who had drank the pure spring water out of those bottles. There’s really no reason to peel the label off a bottle, unless you’re going to use it for a science project and plant a little seed in it. Otherwise, I’ve heard that peeling the label off is a symptom of sexual frustration. I didn’t tell my tank-topped colleague this, but maybe next time.

She was working with another gentleman, maybe her husband. A couple of guys speaking Spanish were at the can machine with a toddler, feeding it (the machine, that is) Keystone forties. Out of everyone, I had the fewest containers, probably because I had saved up all the containers—organic root beer, microbrews, Oregon wine—from my own house. These were strangers’ bottles the others were depositing, and I don’t have a clue how long it took to collect them in those huge quantities or how often they visited the Safeway parking garage.

I watched my bottles add up, five little cents at a time. Listening to the crunch/shake—like the machine was taking a bite and then burping afterward—each time a bottle got sucked out of my hand distracted me from the smell. After a while, the mix of soda, beer, wine and sparkling grape juice even smelled kind of sweet.

Grand total: $1.90. The walk upstairs to the store was like an Ascension—so much good food to buy! Fragrant flowers! Bright, halogen lights! People with carts that brimmed with deliciousness. And everywhere temptation: Blue Moon six packs on sale; Entenmann’s chocolate-frosted donuts like Mom used to buy for a treat; Coffee-Mate creamer in all the flavors of the rainbow.

The Descent after I made my purchase was less glorious, but not by much. There had been enough (only eight cents short!) for a dozen eggs and bread that was on sale. Fried egg sandwiches for lunch.

Back underground, I unlocked my bike, secured the carriage, and rode toward the light of the outside world, leaving the bottle crew where I had found them, in the dim light of the parking garage, breathing in an odor they probably didn’t notice anymore, waiting for a machine to suck the umpteenth bottle from their hands, with hundreds more to go until they, too, could Ascend into the edible carnival upstairs.

Where would they take their goodies once they bought them? Would they make egg sandwiches for kids at home, or would they buy just enough food to take outside with them while they looked for a place to sleep that night? Did pink-tank-top lady drink bottled water? Did the Spanish-speaking family really drink beer while eating tasty tamales? I think there are probably a lot of stories people bring with them to the recycling deposit machines at Safeway, but those stories can’t be exchanged for a new life where one can afford to be careless—or drink organic root beer. Because I can buy a six pack of Blue Moon anytime I want; I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again. I won’t pretend to know their stories or that I’m not one of the most careless people that I know.

My story is unremarkable and privileged, and I was humbled yesterday in a small way. I had never pictured myself counting up bottles, five cents at a time, in the green glow of a small LCD screen at a recycling deposit machine.

Nor had I ever had a better-tasting egg sandwich in my life.

Okay, We're Sisters

published September 2009 in Abroad View

The ties that bind two women worlds apart

When I was 13 years old, I was taking Algebra in Budd Lake, N.J. I had soccer practice on Thursday nights at my old elementary school soccer field, and Danny, my first real crush, was my lab partner—I made him dissect the frog.

Meanwhile, in a small, rural village in central Morocco, a few thousand miles but worlds away from the suburban New Jersey house where I grew up, a young woman, also 13, was taking her wedding vows. Her family was gathered. The girl had henna covering her hands and feet in celebration. The groom was a strapping, mustached, 23-year-old farmer with dark, sunned skin. They drank sweet tea that night in a house passed down for years in the groom’s family. The bride’s kaftan was amber-colored and silky; her cheeks sprinkled with the freckles of youth and long days working in the sun.

Almost a decade later, Hannan and I were brought together during part of my study abroad program. In spring 2008, I went to Morocco to try to improve my Arabic and to see someplace different—and that someplace different turned out to be Hannan’s modest but tidy stone home. It’s the same home where she was married to Abdelkabir seven years ago in Fryad, a village a few hours outside of Casablanca, where homes are spread across miles of rolling countryside. My program traveled there for a one-week stay to get us out of city life in Rabat. Hannan became my host “mother” for that week.

One evening we were peeling fava beans together in the kitchen and, in an overture of warmth and welcome, Hannan said, “You are my daughter.”

“But we’re the same age!” I answered.

“Okay, then we’re sisters,” she said.

We laughed, both relieved and a little giddy at having a rare moment in which we could understand one another in Darija, the Moroccan Arabic dialect.

Hannan does have a daughter of her own, Ilkham, a freckled little thing with sass, born when Hannan was 16. The joke around the house was that Ilkham looked more like my child than Hannan’s because we both have blonde, curly hair. Hannan also has a son, Abdeele, a 14-month-old who gets into everything and who Hannan brings to her breast anytime he starts to cry.

Over the week, Hannan taught me how to make butter from start to finish. Together we pulled the weeds to feed the cow, rode the donkey to the well to water the cows, milked the cows (I was horrible and my contribution was purely for a picture’s sake, though I was eventually successful), and shook the chigawa, a lamb’s skin whose legs are tied to a tripod, to make the butter and a sour milk called libbon. We also kneaded bread together each day, her with strong and able hands. And we made msimmon, Moroccan pancakes that I accidentally burned on the skillet.

We rested together, too. In the heat of each afternoon we would lie down on the floor and try to convince the kids to join us in a nap. She would shower them in kisses, asking if we kiss our kids like that in the States. I said of course we do, though I’m not much of a kid person myself. It was when she was sleepy that I saw how young she really was. She didn’t hesitate to pick up a crayon out of the carton I brought with me from the United States and color in Ilkham’s new coloring book.

Since her wedding, Hannan has grown a little thicker around the waist and become the cornerstone of her small family. She works all day to provide for her family, both in terms of food and affection for her husband and, especially, children. Inshallah, or God willing, they will become teachers, or doctors, or whatever they want. Neither she nor her husband can read or write, but at each meal Ilkham recites the letters of the Arabic alphabet. Hannan wants to learn the letters too, and she asked me to write them out for her so she could watch. I was glad to do it—it’s one of the few aspects of the Arabic language that I’m confident in—but more than a little uncomfortable teaching a native speaker how to write her alphabet.

Since that spring night back in 2000, when I was at soccer practice and Hannan was promising to devote her life to her husband and children, we have both become women. I’ve since given up soccer and most of the things unique to my middle school days—except, of course, silly crushes on lab partners—while Hannan has learned the skills essential to fulfilling that promise she made. Ilkham will undoubtedly become a teacher and Abdeele a doctor, in no small thanks to their mother’s selfless work and all those kisses.

Now I’m back in Budd Lake; the week in Fryad was too short, my semester in Morocco a sweet memory. But I’m glad to be with my family and friends and to go to our favorite diner again. Before I left, Hannan asked our program assistant if she could just keep me. I know she will miss the companionship of a girl her own age, even if I was more like a child who she needed to monitor than a true equal. I even had to ask Hannan each time I needed to use the field as a bathroom—on account of the fierce dogs that lingered outside the house—and it should go without saying that I was no help in the kitchen.

But Hannan and I found kindred spirits in one another; though we live lives so different from the other, we’re women just the same. In many ways, I envy her. Her life is filled with the most important things: children, love, and the purpose that those bring with them. My life, on the other hand, is now being spent trying to find my purpose. My worries are focused on finding a successful job that will look good on my resume and thinking about whether I should open a Twitter account.

More than once, especially after admitting that I had no idea how she intended for me to chase a chicken out of the house, I asked myself, “What must she think of me?” I was ashamed that I was simply not equipped to do the many chores and skills she performed with ease every day.

To Hannan, though, it must seem that I’m living the life she hopes for her children, one of intellectual pursuits and wealth. I do wish for Ilkham and Abdeele to learn everything they want to learn, but I wanted to tell Hannan that intellectualism and wealth are not really better than simplicity. I also wanted to tell her that she’s living the life that I hope for my children, and the one I hope to live: one based on loving my children and providing for them. I’d like to think that someday I could be as selfless as to sacrifice something­—something just as important as my youth, as she did—for the people whom I love.

And I hope that I, too, can learn and pass down my own mother’s recipe for homemade bread to my daughter. I think I’ll teach her how to make msimmon, too.

See the online version

Preventing Death Sentences and Protecting Human Rights

posted December 9, 2008 on the ACLU's Blog of Rights

On September 20, 2004, Jonathan Magbie, a 27 year-old quadriplegic, was sent to the D.C. Central Detention Facility to serve a 10-day sentence for possession of a single marijuana cigarette. Just four days later, after two transfers to a local hospital, Magbie died a tragic and unnecessary death due to the failure of staff at the jail to treat him for acute pneumonia, to provide him with the ventilator he needed to breathe when he was tired, or even to give him enough food and water to sustain himself. One correctional officer at the jail infirmary locked him in a cell, so that he had no way to communicate his distress for hours. Just last week the National Prison Project (NPP) helped to secure a settlement with District of Columbia officials that mandates the implementation of policies that will protect disabled prisoners and assure that prisoners with medical conditions the jail cannot handle are sent to better-equipped facilities.

This is just one of the many tragic examples of gross violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ Article 5, which states: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” As Magbie’s death exemplifies, prisoners and detainees are often confined under conditions that turn their sentences into death sentences. According to a 2007 study commissioned by the California state government, as many as one in six prison deaths in California could have been prevented with proper medical care. Most of the NPP’s cases address the crisis of over-incarceration in the United States, including prison and jail overcrowding that results in deliberate indifference to prisoners’ mental and medical health needs.

For far too long, unnecessary deaths due to improperly treated medical conditions have been tolerated in this country, as well as deteriorating and disgusting living conditions that cause prisoners to suffer far beyond the punishment imposed by a court. For example, the NPP recently proved that detainees in the Maricopa County, Arizona jails are denied necessary medical care. These detainees in Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s jails in Phoenix were forced to stand for hours in crowded rooms while they suffered untreated illness, deprivation of sufficient food, and unsanitary conditions. In the Virgin Islands, Jonathan Ramos, a prisoner with mental illness incarcerated for stealing a bike, was locked up for five years, even after charges against him were dropped after he pleaded not guilty because of his mental illness. Prison officials left him to rot in isolation, where his condition deteriorated by the day. The NPP has since secured a court ruling that ordered Ramos transferred to a stateside hospital.

It would not be surprising if prisoners assumed that they are not entitled to medical care and a toilet that flushes, that they are not among the “humans” entitled to the rights stated in the UDHR. After all, U.S. prisons haven’t done such a bang-up job of adhering to this international treaty even though, according to the U.S. Constitution, it is the binding law of the land. The NPP has taken on the responsibility to combat torture in our prisons and jails and to remind prisoners that they, too, deserve protection from cruel and inhuman treatment, because the NPP believes that the rights of all Americans are not secure until the law protects prisoners as well as the rich and the powerful.