waiting for the euphoria to kick in

Night Runs

2010-01-02T21:21:00.000-08:00

Just before dusk, I headed out for a trail run. We've been staying in Pt. Reyes this week, and I've been starting many of my runs at the visitor center in Bear Valley. For some reason, I've never run here before--only hiked along the main, wide trail along the valley with Axel. So this week, all of my runs are along new-to-me trails. Can't think of a better way to transition from the end of an old to the beginning of a new year.

I lock the car at 4:30pm, figuring I have about an hour before dark. I'm going to run seven miles, so I know that the timing is close, but I also know that the trails are well-marked. Also, yesterday I started my run at 5pm and managed to find my way back to the trailhead in the gathering dusk. I carry along some candy, just in case, but leave my license in the car, since I don't have a big enough pocket for it. Nothing worse than carrying a lot of junk with you on a run.

I love running in the evening. In my twenties, I used to go for runs after my shift at the restaurant. After having wiped down the tables, stored all the saran-wrapped condiments, wrapped the silverware in napkins and counted the money. In the dark of 2 or 3 am, I would run along the edge of the street, scanning for pools of light from the street lamps above. I loved that time of night in Charlottesville, after the bars have all closed and the streets had emptied of drunken students. It's not that I wasn't a little scared; I knew how dumb it was for a twenty-one year old woman to run out alone that time of night. But the pleasure of those empty streets and my footfalls marking out a rhythm against the silence outweighed the fear. Anyway, a little bit of fear makes a run more fun.

After we moved to Oakland, I found a running buddy to run with at night. Oakland is no Charlottesville and, though the winter evenings are far more temperate than Charlottesville, I'd venture to say they're not quite as safe. She and I would meet in the dark and loop around the city streets. But the streets in Oakland are only empty early Sunday mornings, never after dark. More recently, I've been running trails in the evening with another friend, at dusk just as the sun disappears into the bay. It's harder to see at that time of day than in the pitch black of night, so my friend and I wear headlamps. Usually. I often forget mine. The familiar trails become unfamiliar; shapes loom indistinctly. Trees? Rocks? A mountain lion? The rocks and roots underfoot disappear into a murky quicksand and we have to skim our feet lightly, as if we're skating over the surface of the trail.

My run tonight climbs up to Mt. Wittenberg from the far side of the valley. The first mile and a half takes me along the gradually sloping, wide trail that borders the valley creek. Although it hasn't been a rainy winter, it has rained quite a bit for the last week. The trails are muddy underfoot and I dodge large puddles. Beside me, the creek rushes by loudly. We've started our hikes and walks on this section of the trail several times already this week and the curves and hills are familiar. The first juncture takes me up Old Pine trail, a steep, narrow path up to the Inverness ridge. The muddy trail is like chicken molé, nowhere stable to place a foot. I run along wet grass bordering the trail, but so has everyone before me: it too is muddy and slick, full of sinkholes. I head straight uphill in this manner for two and a half miles.

Finally, I reach the ridge and the trail levels out. In front of me, the sun has dipped into the pink ocean. Behind me, fog rises from the valley below. Within the tree-lined trail, I have trouble discerning the rocks and sinkholes. I run, happily, hoping that the second half of my run will be downhill and that I'll make it back before dark. Suddenly a form emerges out of the fog and dusk. A silver-haired woman walks toward me. She carries nothing and we pass one another in silence, quizzically catching each other's eye. I can't imagine where she is heading, at sunset, more than three miles from the nearest trailhead. I wonder if I should stop to talk to her, make sure she's not addled. But, remembering the flip-flop wearing Hawaiians flitting along the steep and rocky mountain trail of Kauai, I reason that perhaps she's a local and knows what she is doing.

For myself, I'm not so sure. It is now difficult to see and the trail is rising. Apparently, I am not done climbing. The trail rolls upward for another mile. The sun has disappeared entirely to the west and the ocean is now a dusky lavender under the fog. Below me to the east, the fog has crept up to the tree tops. Above, I see the marker for Mt. Wittenberg, a grassy hillock against the gray sky. There is enough light to see, but my relief disappears as soon as I begin my descent: the trail winds through a thick redwood forest. In the near-black, I cannot differentiate the trail from non-trail. I move forward, my heart beating and my thoughts racing, listening and feeling for the trail with my feet. According to the sign, I have two and a half miles of this. The panic rises and I realize that I hadn't told Mychal where I was headed. I wonder if he'll be able to figure out my route based on my offhand comment that I was going for seven miles and that it was "A new trail!"

Multiple cords of might-be trails criss-cross one another. As with most of the area, splinter trails created by scores of hikers lead to short-cuts or side-trips. In the dark, I can't tell which is the trail or which is the splinter. My feet slip on wet rocks, I slide down the hill. I force my thoughts into a calming litany, slow my breathing and steps down. Suddenly, I emerge from the forest into a meadow. Hallelujah! With the ambient light, the dirt trail separates itself easily from the grassy meadow. But my exuberance lasts only the minute that it takes me to cross the meadow and enter another, dark, forested stretch. By now, I can see nothing. But I hear a rushing creek which I tell myself, not knowing, must be the valley creek. I force myself to repeat this over and over, crowding out the anxiety that I'm not even on a trail at all, telling myself that it's impossible to get lost this close to the valley. Worse comes to worse, I just go down hill and I will inevitably reach the valley.

Luckily, worse did not come to worse. The coursing water grows louder and the trail steeper. A few more hairpin turns and slick rocks, and I find the bridge which Axel had ridden across this morning on his skuut. Only a mile to the trailhead along the gentle, wide valley trail. Even blindfolded, in the dark and fog, I can find my way to the car.

Haitch-One-Enn-One

2009-10-15T15:11:00.000-07:00

Last night was so warm that my friend and I sat on the porch until very late, drinking wine. Mychal was out with his buddies ((Laughing, we'd waved them off: three dads making the rounds of bars in a minivan. I think I'd rather be drinking wine on the porch while Axel sleeps inside than heading to a cool, Oakland bar in a minivan.)

Every so often, Axel cried out; he was having trouble sleeping, he was hot to the touch, his breathing was raspy. He was sick. And restless. And still awake when my friend left, late for me, almost 11pm. I listened to Axel's breathing: a harsh wheezing as he struggled to get air. His cries scratched in his throat, his cough a dry bark. And he had a fever. It sounded awful and Mychal was still out; I couldn't leave him downstairs by himself, so I brought him into the bed with me. Where he tossed and turned and coughed and wheezed until 5 am.

The next morning Mychal googled "wheezing toddler fever" and determined Axel should see a doctor to rule out bronchitis and pneumonia. That was sobering, so I called the preschool and told them he wouldn't be in, and called the doctor. We showed up early for our eleven o'clock appointment and waited for nearly an hour, as I tried, unsuccessfully, to keep Axel from touching anything in the waiting room. Finally, we were seen by a student of pediatric medicine who did her stuff, but Axel's a stubborn kid, and he refused to breath in and out as she moved her stethoscope around. Luckily, she'd forgotten her tongue depressor, so she disappeared in search of one.

A roll of paper hung over the back of the door with crayons on a high shelf next to it. Axel requested each color in turn, drawing long, vertical tracks down the door. The door began to open cautiously, revealing the doctor carrying a small pinwheel. As Axel puffed on the pinwheel, she moved the stethoscope over his chest and back, listening to his breathing. It's not pneumonia, she informed me once she'd taken the earbuds out. Or bronchitis. When I continued to look at her questioningly, she said, and it's not H1N1.

Can you tell me what they symptoms are, I asked. I started to say, I haven't had time to check, but stopped myself in time: what kind of mother doesn't have time to review the H1N1 symptoms? Her withering glance confirmed my hesitation. After she rattled off the symptoms for H1N1, which, it turns out, are exactly the same as for the flu, I described for her Axel's wheezing all through the previous night. It seems the student forgot to convey that information to her. Oh, she said immediately, he has the croup. Phew.

road trips

2009-07-22T16:15:00.000-07:00

The first rule of a road trip is, "Seize the opportunity." Even if it means a crab sandwich at 9:30, ten miles after two poached eggs and coffee in a one-gas station town. Pull off the freeway when you see the sign for Crab Shack, because you never know when you'll drive past another.
The same goes for Salmon King River; that's where you pull off, otherwise you may be going home without smoked salmon.

In some ways, a road trip is a series of dashed hopes and missed opportunities; at least, that's how it goes if you're out of practice, as I was when Axel and I took our road trip to Oregon. I took several road trips in my twenties: coast to coast twice, three times north to south.

My first drive across country started in Virginia, the day after Thanksgiving, and ended in Berkeley, the day before Christmas. I took a lolly-gagging northern route, sleeping on couches, in a motel room with a hitchhiker, in my car, on floors, in the parking lot of the Mormon Temple in Utah, and once, memorably, in the back of a university theater in Madison. (Hiding in a bathroom stall, feet pulled up, when the cleaning crew came through. It was below freezing and drastic measures were called for.)

The most fun on a road trip was with my brother, driving to Mexico. He downed two large Peet's coffees in Berkeley, I made him give me the wheel before we got out of the East Bay. The highlight of the trip was running out of gas on a private highway somewhere in Mexico sometime near midnight. There weren't any exits off the highway, we didn't have a map, and had arbitrarily decided to follow it to its end. Except that we ran out of gas. Our only options were fancy resorts or even fancier resorts, so we pulled into one and, at the entry booth, attempted to explain our predicament in some very pitiable high school Spanish. In much more sophisticated Spanish, the guard explained that this was a private resort and that they did not have a gas station on the premises. Textbook imperfectly, we pointed out that they must have some way to get gas into the golf carts. The guard --sweet faced, pudgy in his white uniform, motioned us to pull over and disappeared. He returned with a few other guys and a canister of gas which my brother fed to the car while I fed the guys some twenties and half a cake we'd brought along. Over cake, we found out that the guys had siphoned the gas from some of the guests' cars. We drove most of the night and in the morning found ourselves in a small town by the coast where we found a super cheap motel, parked the rental car, and spent the rest of the week buying cheap boots and every variety of street food.

The least fun trip was the southern coastal route with an on-again, off-again boyfriend. We squabbled most of the way and split ways, of course, well before the destination. In the meantime, though, we had some incredible pulled pork, saw Graceland, and I ran ten miles along a river at dawn one day in Texas, where the temperatures had already passed 100.

None of these trips prepared me for a road trip with my toddler, though this may be because my memories of them had sufficiently dropped into the netherland of my mind, trickling to the surface slowly as the miles ticked away en route to Newport, Oregon.

But, also, nothing really prepares you for traveling with a toddler, except, that is, the experience itself. If a road trip exists as a series of hopes and opportunities, it is, essentially, a trip dictated by your desire's whims. Unless your whims are hostage to your sweet-faced, pudgy, tyrant of a toddler. Axel threw approximately one tantrum per hour of driving; most of these tantrums were futile attempts to control his environment--such as it was for Axel, this meant expressing his anger at the fact that the armrest console was "clicked" (latched shut). Our stops were timed according to meltdowns, which took place approximately every one and a half hours. And all stops were suspended while he slept, which meant passing by homemade ice cream, fresh cherries, tug boats, crab shacks, taffy stores and a historic train from Oregon's Coastal Railroad. On our return, though, I broke down and woke Axel up so that he could see the sole train of our road trip.

Sometimes, though, instead of a tantrum, Axel would pretend he was Tuncer (our cat) throwing a tantrum. Which is very funny, for a minute at least. By the thirtieth minute of Axel being Tuncer throwing a tantrum because he wanted food, I was ready to leave him by the side of the road. So we discussed it, and it was decided that Axel didn't really want to walk home from Redway.

Stopping according to Axel's whims created a different kind of trip, one which landed us at a lot of fountains and statues, which, for some reason, maybe it's a question of scale, or perhaps because of their recognizability, he really appreciates. And also a fair share of ice cream stores, as well as well-situated benches, including the series that lined an elk prairie outside of Eureka. According to the logic of tantrums, one was thrown for a fountain for which we did not stop, as well as for the beach vista, where we didn't stop long enough. And, as the adult, whose life is composed of these stops and starts, I share the exact sentiment.

stories

2009-07-15T14:59:00.000-07:00

When Axel just began to talk, I compulsively wrote down each new word, keeping lists alongside the notes about what he was eating, how much he slept. It's a habit of mine, this keeping track. After a certain point, though, he learned words too fast for me to keep track, and began to put word combinations together and next thing I knew, he and I were having long conversations. Axel is fairly shy, so most people don't have a sense of just how much he talks; it's a pretty constant stream, a blend of sports commentary and embellishment, and, of late, pure invention. I regret not writing down Axel's first out-right lie, which he told last fall--he delivered some pure fiction to me about Mychal, delivering it with absolute conviction, and a gleam in his eye which told me that he knew that I knew that he was making it up.

By now, his stories are more elaborate, but they're also more obviously fiction, as he throws in formulas like "one day," or, more obviously, "once there was." He tells them to himself, with or without an audience, using his little plastic guys to act them out.

Lately, he's grown so confident with language, that he'll try out any word. "Unfortunately, you can't have a cookie, because you already had ice cream," I told him, and hear in response: "Unfortunately, I want a cookie." Or, combining phrases from books with his favorite past-times, he says, "I'd be delighted to help you sweep." Or, after watching "Up!," he tells me: "Literally, that bird was a peacock." The word this morning was "serenade," a useful word if ever, given how much music he's been playing lately.

As his language grows, we get a better sense of how much he really remembers. The other day, he asked me whether I remembered the "that show we saw in the theater with the sad vampire and the puffets?" Which we saw five months ago in Lviv. After we'd gotten back from Virginia this summer, Axel told me, "Remember, Grandpa only had one fish in a bowl on his table." I'd actually forgotten the Siamese fighting fish in the little bowl on the coffee table, as I'd been pre-occupied with my grandfather, who has Alzheimer's and was repeatedly throwing up during our visit.

This is one of my favorite aspects of parenting, getting these little glimpses into his interiority. Especially when a child is learning language, there is so much repetition: it's not always clear how much of his speech is repeating formulas or codes that he hears along the way. But as he verbalizes his recollections, out of the blue as we're driving to the store, à propos absolutely nothing, I get a hint of what's going on in his little head.

in the bird sanctuary and endurance capital of the world

2009-06-01T14:14:00.000-07:00

On Saturday afternoon, I pulled into the Overlook parking lot, the sanctioned unofficial campgrounds for the Auburn triathlon. A few patches of grass ringed the newly paved parking lot; clusters of teenagers huddled around the few cars, the thwacking of skateboards against concrete mingled with birds. Just beyond the parking lot, green grass gave way to dried brush, and abruptly the foreground disappeared, abutting against a distant backdrop of mountainous green forests. I parked, wandered up to the edge of the overlook, but all I could see below was bushes and a concrete skate ramp.

I'd arrived early so that I could go for a ride, so I left the car with the smokers and skaters, and headed out for what I hoped would be some spectacular riding. I rode about Auburn, saw many for sale signs, lots of grandly built mansions, and tons upon tons of cars. This was looking less and less like the small country town with rolling backroads that I'd imagined. Then I came across a father seated on a curb, his small child leaning between his legs, the two of them watching a parade of antique cars leaving the car show, and Auburn shifted back, slightly, towards the small towns I remember from Virginia.

When I got back to Overlook, different groups of teenagers had arrived, in small groups they headed down dusty paths, with their cold bevs and cigarettes. A few more pick up trucks joined the sparse cars; a couple of dogs added their relentless barking to the thunking skateboards. I spread a blanket on the ground and watched the world pass by--in the form of an elder gentleman who had carefully unpacked his walker from the trunk of his american car. He was dressed like my grandfather, in a short-sleeved button down, polyester slacks and probably from the same era. He took one loop of the parking lot, and on the second loop, I asked him how many laps he was going to do.

Four, he said. I figure it's about a mile, maybe more.

I nodded. What do I know, about the distance of a parking lot. And I thought about what it means to get old and require a walker, to be amidst all this spectacular beauty but prevented from taking the dusty trail, with all the teenagers, down to the overlook.

What a beautiful area, I said. And gestured vaguely to the mountains and the gorge behind us.

It's too crowded now, he complained. This used to be a nice place. When I moved here in 1946 (forty-six! I exclaimed), it was a nice town. Now it's too crowded. All those people moved up here... and he named a bunch of cities where many of Mychal's co-workers live... and they work down in Sacramento. I nodded, but didn't correct him--they work further away than that, even. They just want their kids to go to the nice schools. Again I nodded, it's true; and wondered, how this crazy experiment of America is supposed to work if we all believe that our town really is our town, and not "theirs."

The next day after the race, as I loaded my car, I saw the gentleman again. He was similarly dressed, walking his laps of the parking lot. I hailed him, and he continued where he had left off yesterday.

It used to be so nice here. All those people move up from the city, bringing their drugs. He made a fist and pointed to his knuckles--with their tatoos, he said. They were good country kids, he said, and now they've brought drugs and all that stuff.

Of course, he meant two different "they"s, his gesture made that clear, but the fact that he used the same word brings the problem to light: "they" is so impossible to define, especially when "they" begin to become "us," or vice versa, and that gesture of blame, so temptingly close, becomes all the more futile and distant.

At the edge of the parking lot, the background and the foreground merge, the unseen chasm, so deep in the gorge, doesn't provide the visual barrier necessary to keep them apart. But if you've lived there since 1946, you don't need to take the dirt path down to find the gorge. You know it's there.

once we were kings

2009-05-19T15:21:00.000-07:00

This morning, having accidentally stepped out of routine, I ended up at Lions Pool to swim. The morning swim crew is a collection of silver-haired ladies, regulars who asked, "And who are you?" the moment I walked into the building. An elderly gentleman rounds out the group and their interrogation with the observation, "You're sitting in my place." Introductions were made while we waited for the pool to open, each of the swimmers introduced themselves, and the general conversation switched gears as one of the woman described Lions Pool as she knew it from childhood--in the 1940s. There was no building, or locker room, just a gravel spot for laying about in the sun, actually, she corrected, the shade as there were so many more trees then. It only cost a dime to swim there, in the era of nickel movies.

She had gone to Oakland High School, back when the school was housed in a majestic, pink, three-story building. In front, there was a circular garden patch, where each class buried their time capsule. Now, that area is the football field. I live next to OHS, a drab, stucco, low-slung affair. The students routinely trash the grounds and cover entire walls with gang-related graffiti. But I had to wonder, as I listened to her glowing description of this regal place, how today's students would feel, if they, too, could attend school in a castle.

Chapter 10: Everything is Illuminated

2009-03-21T23:05:00.000-07:00

With my tutor's verbal directions, we found (one of? the only remaining?) Lviv's Jewish cemetery. Take the Simiorka to Yanivs'ke Cemetery, and ask there, my tutor instructed. Which we did, only not at first.

At first, assuming that the Jewish Cemetery would be somewhat off to the side, we walked past the big entry gate, past the Western border, past a long, tall fence (peeking through the crevices to see if there were any gravestones behind it). To our left, Axel pointed out a train in the distance. To our right, a small, dirt road cut between large cinder-block apartment houses. We took the dirt road, up a short hill, past dogs running around small yards filled with building materials, and found the cemetery wall. More dogs came to greet us.

We had a hunch that the Jewish graves would be at the farthest side of the cemetery: along the northern border, but whether it would be east or west, neither of us could guess. There was a small niche in the wall, a tiny footpath of tamped down snow. We edged in, squeezing past grave fences, trying to see the edge of the cemetery. We walked and walked along these tiny paths. Eventually we came to a much wider foot path and discovered a grid of these wider paths. But just rows and rows of crosses adorning graves stones and sites. At one broad crossing, Mychal and I decided to split up: he'd go North-West, Axel and I would go North-East.

Snow and graves were all we could see in any direction; slightly disoriented, as if we were in a forest, I tried to remember flowers and names so that I could find my way back to our parting spot. Neither of us had a watch, or a phone.

I asked a man, meticulously wiping the snow off a large marble mausoleum with a cloth, whether he knew if there was a Jewish cemetery here. Yes, yes, he said, and told me to go all the way to the top edge, and then to the right. Thanking him, I walked off with Axel on my back. The wide, packed down path became, briefly, a road with clear spots, then more packed snow paths, then tiny foot path through graves, and then untrampled snow. We walked, snow gathering in my shoes, slinking up to my knees. The sun emerged, I took off my hat, my gloves, unzipped my coat. Dogs barked in the distance, graves surrounded us. I began to despair that I wouldn't find the Jewish graves, nor Mychal, for that matter.

I charted north-west through the snowy clear spaces, saw a star--no it's just a Soviet Army star, no! It's actually a Star of David. And lo and behold: here I was amidst hundreds of Jewish grave stones. By this point, I had begun to call Mychal's name; all I heard in return were the barking dogs getting nearer. Axel, on my back, asked whether these were graves too. And these? Yes, and I read the names, read the dates. We wandered up and down a few rows, crunching through the clean snow. A few more rows, and I still couldn't see the end of the grave sites.

Still calling Mychal's name, more frequently now, Axel chiming in, we turned back and retraced our steps. Dog footprints accompanied our previous tracks, bloody marks spelled out a skirmish. I carefully placed my feet next to my earlier tracks, marking a round-trip just in case Mychal stumbled across them (was I a girl scout?!). We arrived back at the paved road, past the now clean marble mausoleum, and there was Mychal, heading in our direction.

sweet notes

2009-03-20T22:09:00.000-07:00

My tutor had been asking me about myself and my life: standard topics for language learning. One question that kept coming us was about traditions, which, heathens that we are, we don't really have. The only tradition I can think of is bringing doughnuts to the last day of class each semester.

So for Friday's last lesson, I brought a selection of cookies from Lviv's "Veronika's," a pastry shop and restaurant of international fame. We felt a little shabby chic, with our jeans and chocolate-smeared toddler, among the Victorian lace tablecloths, stained-glass lamps, fashionably put-together ladies, and other overwrought details. The serving staff wear back-laced brocade bodices atop demure ankle-length skirts; their poker-face expressions reveal nothing as they serve the varied clients the most expensive pastries in all of Lviv.

I wasn't sure exactly what to bring to my tutor's; she kept offering me cakes and cookies at every lesson, while I brought bags of mandarins in self-defense. Neither of us wanted that much to do with the other person's offering, and after about a week of me taking smaller and smaller bites of cookies and her politely declining the mandarins because she was full, we both, in silent accord, quit offering food.

Still, a tradition is a tradition. So all week, I searched through the stores trying to find an appropriate last-lesson offering. A box of truffles? Cheesecake? A box of Baci chocolates? I finally settled on a selection of cookies from Veronika's--simply because they were beautiful (and consoling myself that, if we'd had an oven here, I could have baked her something myself). Cookies in hand, Mychal and Axel met me at my tutor's after my last lesson, as arranged. Sasha, her almost two -year old grandson woke up, singing to himself in the next room. We all sat on the floor, building block towers for the kids to knock down while my tutor made coffee and tea.

We all trooped into the kitchen where she had arranged the cookies on a platter; Sasha stayed in the room with his toys. I asked about Sasha, and she said he would eat dinner later. Crowded around the tiny table, Mychal on a stool, Axel on my knees, we made small talk as best we could between the three of us, while the boys traded stuffed animals and cars back and forth. No one touched a cookie: Mychal waiting for me, me waiting for my tutor, but no one made the first move. I felt awkward offering one to Axel, who could have been the perfect ice breaker, because I knew Sasha wouldn't get one. We were all frozen, while the four kinds of cookies waited patiently.

Afterwards, at home, Mychal and I couldn't work out the social rule: should we, as guests, have taken the first bite, or should she, as the recipient of our gift have taken the first cookie? As it was, none of us, not even Axel who looked but did not even ask, took the first cookie. But the heavy feeling in my heart tells me: we, as guests, should have taken the first cookie.

pre-modern to post

2009-03-19T22:42:00.000-07:00

As I write this, such thick snowy flakes tumble down from the sky that the air itself is white. It has been snowing for days, at times the snowdrops are so tiny and fragile that they become rain once they hit the ground. Sheets of wind-driven snow and puffy blankets of fluffy flakes have fallen since, Monday night.

The snow adds an interesting element to the daily markets, though I'm sure the vendors have many different, choice words to describe the impact of snow on their jobs. Snow covers the arranged fruits and vegetables, filling in the crevices of the tangerine pyramids, doing unspeakable things to the fragile pearl onions. My naive Californian self wondered whether they would all be there, as I reluctantly walked through wind and snow to my tutor's. But the locals would have laughed at me, like northerners laugh at southerners who try to drive in an inch of snow: of course they show up, rain or snow.

The snow has brought us indoors with Axel, who comments, each time we pass the park: I don't want to go to the park! It's too snowy, he concludes. And we agree, that none of us really wants to stand in the empty park; no one else seems to bring their toddlers in the falling snow, not just the thin-skinned Californians. So we head to the history museum (four floors, from cave peoples, through Turkish wars, to the 18th century), quickly navigating Axel's tantrum that it's not the train museum. All of the grandmotherly docents try to engage Axel who invariably presses his face into my neck or knees, taking quick peeks around me, but refusing to play cou-cou with them. In the 15th century room, amid cast-iron tower bells standing next to the radiator (where someone's handkerchief-wrapped lunch warmed), a toddler-height canon, and a traveler's tea-service in a tiny wooden box, one docent asked about the English words for "cou-cou." But even her "peek-a-boo" didn't get a smile out of Axel. By the time we got to the 16th century and ancient books, Axel was done; no interest in the fascinating 15th century Evangelical books in Old Church Slavonic, the language primers, or the professor's lecture notes, in a precisely beautiful script.

A bit later at a Turkish-themed restaurant (across from the university and filled, night and day with students leaning around beers and hookahs), Mychal and I cracked up when we dis-assembled Axel's hamburger to get at the meat patty for him. Nestled inside the top bun, which had been carved out like a San Francisco sourdough soup bowl, was a tangle of pre-catsupped fries. (Below, the burger lay on a bed of corn-and-cabbage cole slaw.) Axel didn't see the humor, but at least he ate the fries (which he ate for the first time here, and which have become our default restaurant meal for him) and denuded burger.

na bazarakh

2009-03-17T23:29:00.000-07:00

I've been picking up munitions at the markets every day--half a kilo of mandarins, bundles of ramps, fresh eggs, rye bread and a bag of assorted cookies is my usual haul. Some days I add cured fish, sausage, pears or bananas. I'm always tempted by the khrin, jams and honey, but more often than not there's no room in my bag by the time I get to those stalls. Buying just what we need on a daily basis has been a quasi-daydream of mine, to live like the fabled Europeans, buying only as much as we need immediately, consuming only the freshest available.

The reality in a cold climate, where the streets alternate between mud and slush as the snow falls and melts, is not quite so dreamy, but also, not so bad either. I don't actually mind the limitations of a small bag and how much I can carry; most markets are about a 10-15 minute walk from our apartment, the selection is reasonably broad, and the prices are fairly low. Ramps, which are a delicacy where we live, are abundant here. Citrus, which is abundant at home, is nowhere near as affordable as here. So even though it's March and most market stalls sell carrots, beets, potatoes and cabbage, we're also finding hints of spring and summer at the market.

We haven't bought much meat here; at the Railway Station Market, an entire building is devoted to meat products. Open-air stalls in a cavernous concrete arcade display every imaginable part of pigs and cows, rabbits and chickens, dried, frozen, salted and live fish. We bought a hock of veal at one market, and Mychal transformed it with cranberry beans, tiny onions and a frying pan on an electric burner. But for the most part, even thought it is winter and not, thankfully, 85 degrees out, I'm a little cautious about buying meat from open air stalls. Perhaps I shouldn't be; the rabbits are pretty tempting.

Yesterday I needed to get us some more toilet paper. At a stall across from one of several egg vendors, I waited in a short line to get some. The toiletries vendor tossed back a shot with a customer, handed another customer some violet plastic bags (three for a hyrvnia) and turned to me. "Do you want nice apple-green rolls or white?" "White," I said. "That's right, white is nicer" he said, and I handed him ten hryvnia.

Privatization

2009-03-16T22:49:00.000-07:00

Today's lesson went really well--I managed to keep feeding my tutor questions about her life and we didn't turn to the book until the last ten minutes.

I have been very curious about privatization. I've read about the process, but would like to know what it meant for individuals. How did it work, exactly? So I asked my tutor to explain how they purchased their apartment.

Turns out, they didn't.

What came next was a long story that began during World War II. Her mother served as a military nurse, traveling with an entire hospital by train and gathering the wounded soldiers for operations. Towards the end of the war, they found themselves in Lviv. Their unit was supposed to travel on towards Austria, but in 1945 she un-enlisted and found work at the Lviv State Hospital. At this time, my tutor continued, all the Poles were leaving Lviv. Willingly? I asked. Yes, she answered, and went on to describe one family who arrived in a recently vacated 3-room, or was it 4?, apartment where they discovered a cup of hot coffee on the table. Her mother needed to find lodging, her main criteria being that it be near to the hospital. She found a place in a small apartment owned by an older Polish woman, who rented a room to her. And there she stayed: my tutor was born in that apartment (literally: her father not present at the birth, it happened too quickly, she was born in the back room), the Polish babusya became her only grandmother (she never knew her biological grandparents), she grew up with Polish fairy tales and songs, and at age seven, she only spoke Polish. Even her mother couldn't understand her. And when this Polish grandmother died, she left the apartment to my tutor's mother.

My tutor still lives there, with her daughter, also raised in the apartment, and her grandson, who will grow up there too.

When she finished her story, I asked how life was for Polish residents after the war. And she answered, you know, after a while, I began to realize how many stayed. And she pointed out her kitchen window into the central courtyard, ticking off the windows belonging to Polish people.

one hundred and forty-seven

2009-03-15T12:22:00.000-07:00

Since Mychal arrived, I've more or less put the camera away. This is true of this trip, and of my life in general. I'm a singularly bad photographer; I'm not sure if it's a question of patience or skill, but I suspect I simply lack the native talent for photographs. Luckily, Mychal more than compensates; not only is he good at it, he also truly enjoys it. (and lucky me: swap out photography for any number of words: cooking, decorating, designing, shopping....)

Sitting across from me, camera and beer at hand, Mychal's transferring them to his computer: all 147 of them. And today wasn't such a big day.

Today we set off for the cemetery on the dvoika (#2) tramway. This route got us in the general vicinity of the cemetery, which was good enough for me. I'd calculated on getting off a stop before the street we needed, but we ended up getting off a stop after. The mistake was fortuitous, as it took us a big, snowy park; we walked up a snow-packed path, past the circle of tracks for the tramway turnaround, and around a corner into a fenced cemetery. Not the one we'd been aiming for, but one which was perched on a hill giving us a view of most of the city: the downtown, several of the churches we've been into or walked past, even the electrical tower near our building. The walled cemetery also looked over a stadium, bleachers on the southern half; just under the cemetery, a flat piece of ground littered with bottles formed impromptu seating on the northern side. A lone set of footprints carved out a path in the snow covered track, a solitary figure stretched over a hurdle.

We walked downhill through the snowy Pasichka Park, reaching a small street bordered on one side with (what appeared to be) single family homes and on the other another stadium and track. Of all the luck: two tracks within minutes of each other! There was an earth mover stationed at one end of this track; nearby, a small patch of concrete behind the goal had been cleared out, and a group of men, some shirtless, played soccer. Axel watched the game over my shoulder, I tried not to resent the snow on the track. There were no bleachers at this stadium, but the sides were terraced. We walked along the top ridge, sloping down the hill towards a small green gate just past the stadium. From here, we could see the rear gate to the Lichakivs'ke Cemetery--a dilapidated concrete arch housed locked iron gates, a small door to the left. More snowy paths, concrete and marble grave markers, plastic wreaths and colored glass lanterns. Simultaneously, the cemetery gave off the appearance of neglect and care: crumbling grave stones, fallen trees, snow-laden grasses and plastic flowers were accompanied by small wooden benches, bouquets of fresh flowers, and thousands upon thousands of footprints through the snow.

Axel wanted to know about the little houses, and I described the people lying within, waiting patiently for their relatives' visits. They are waiting here? he asked, pointing to another grave. And this is a grave too? He noticed the candles and lanterns, the etched faces and names, and, hidden to me, a small dog. I began to read the names, searching for something resembling my grandfather's; though I knew this was a Christian cemetery, I couldn't help but look. Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and German names lay next to one another; some stones had Polish on one side and, in cyrillic, Ukrainian or Russian on the other. We arrived at the entry-way to the cemetery, a grand affair with mausoleums of famous people. But we were tired and hungry, ready to sit on the tramway headed for home.

curving along bumpy streets

2009-03-14T23:04:00.000-07:00

Nabokov, who emigrated to America as an adult, wrote of his English skills: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a child." His lecture notes were, more properly, illuminated essays, with emotive marks and emphases penciled in. He never gave spoken interviews; without his crib-sheet, he felt, he spoke like a child.

Apart from the genius-author bit, I would feel like that too, except that all the children I have known are truly genius when it comes to language learning. Watching Axel learn language has been one of the most fascinating experiences of my life. A child's brain is so elastic, so flexible: after the first few words, they begin to assimilate words and syntax, first on a weekly, then daily, and eventually, hourly rate. Since we arrived in Lviv, Axel has learned almost as many new words as I, only his are in English, terms for experiences and objects we don't come across in California.

An adult learning language is handicapped by what she already knows, and the brain's general unwillingness to forget. A little bit forward, a lot bit back, as slowly words begin to stick and syntax to take shape. The foreign city began to take shape in similar fashion: my first ventures out with Axel, I used the varicolored shop signs as landmarks, bright valentine's pink, orange, red and turquoise marked small grocers, bars, cell phone and shoe stores. A few days later, the infrastructure of the streets began to solidify in my mind, and I realized that Lviv isn't that large after all. We can walk most places in 15-30 minutes.

Which was a useful bit of information when I realized that the #8 tramway (visim'ka) which we'd planned on taking to the cemetery seemed to be out of operation. After a couple of "troikas" passed us by, we decided to walk the tramway route towards the cemetery. We passed a few landmarks that Axel recognized (the building under construction where a black stray cat lives, the market where he searched for a firetruck, passed on an ambulance, and bought a cement mixer instead) and a grandmother who inched along with two canes and platform shoes. Axel fell asleep, and we found ourselves slightly past downtown, just past an old canal structure, where we stood to wait for the #7 to take us the rest of the way there. Three passed in the opposite direction. People craned their necks in passing busses to glimpse Axel's odd carrying contraption (the Ergo). The grandma with her canes passed by. Axel still slept.

At this point, Mychal and I gave up on our cemetery trip and decided to wander around old town. We walked through an underground passage, emerging above ground by ancient-seeming walls towering over an empty, moss-lined canal. Inside the walls we found an old church, walked past a large cistern protected by iron fretwork. We stepped into St. Andrew's Church, a flashy, gold-encrusted, high-ceilinged Renaissance affair where they sang of Mary's suffering and I tried not to weep. Axel still slept. Beggars holding small plastic cups flanked the doors, a man on the street explained the building was built in the 17th century, on a plot where a much older, wooden church had stood.

We walked further, along the cobblestone streets (which Axel has named "bumpy streets;" "did they make this street bumpy?" he asks), heading towards the craft market. Axel's subconscious noticed the tarp-covered booths, and he woke demanding a side trip to the market.

culture shock

2009-03-12T22:01:00.000-07:00

Today, food situations got the best of all of us.

We all woke underslept: Axel has been sleeping poorly, either wakeful for hours in the middle of the night, or resisting sleep altogether until 11pm, midnight. But, faithful to the sun, he wakes up every morning at 6:30 (no daylight savings here), regardless of how much he slept.

So we were all variously cranky yesterday morning, as we left the house and headed to the Museum of Ethnography and Crafts. Housed in what used to be an old bank, the entry is in a cavernous hall, the ceiling forty feet above us, a ring of stained glass windows encircling the staircase. The exhibits were housed in a warren of small rooms, interconnected by multiple doors and corridors, which kept opening and closing to reveal various, apron-clad (aprons over their winter coats, as it was not heated) docents. A docent sat in the doorway of each room, turning on the light as we entered, querying whether we were not freezing (marveling at my short sleeves that I've been wearing out of self-defense under my puffy jacket), flirting with a very shy Axel. As word got out that we were American, they kept materializing out of these secret passage-ways to check us out.

But this post is about food curios, not museum.

After the museum, we headed to a cafe suggested by our landlords. It was set slightly off the street, we walked through a tunnel alley-way, under water dripping from balconies, and into a tiny, dark cafe. The menu was several pages long, towards the back I found canapés, coffee, hot chocolate for Axel.

Axel has had hot chocolate three times in his life. The first time, we were wandering around the Ferry Building in San Francisco, looking for a gift for Mychal. Some chocolatier handed Axel a tiny cup of freshly made hot chocolate. He didn't share with me. The second time was a couple of days ago, after our failed attempt to visit the train museum. Today was the third, and it was by far the strangest. Instead of hot chocolate (for example, Nesquick, which he was given at the other Lviv cafe), a coffee cup of hot chocolate sauce was put in front of Axel. When I protested that he couldn't eat (an entire cup!) of chocolate sauce and queried whether they could give us some milk to go with it, I was told: we don't sell milk. Which I'd heard before, incidentally, at a different restaurant when I tried to get Axel a cup of milk. Luckily for us, the cook relented and warmed up a glass of milk for Axel and we watered down his chocolate sauce.

Later that day, as I sat in my tutor's kitchen, Axel asleep at home with Mychal and her grandson asleep in the next room, she put a plate of honey in front of me. And a plate of cookies. And a huge mug of sweet coffee. Eat, eat your honey, she encouraged me. Dutifully, I took a teaspoon of honey and sucked it with my already sweet coffee. It was superb. Eat more! she insisted. Ha.

In the evening, as agreed upon, we ate at the Seven Pigs restaurant. Other than the music--a violin, accordion and harpsichord, the place just kept missing all the marks. I noticed that the prices were given in grams; thus, the price for my pork chop was per 100 grams. I should have put together that drinks were sold in the same fashion--juice, sodas, beer, vodka, cognac, wine: all offered by price per 100 grams. But I didn't notice. So I was very surprised when the bill came and our two glasses of wine cost the equivalent of 10 servings (500 grams per glass, I was told by the manager, who did use the term "gram," not liter, to explain the pricing system for liquids). It's how it's done throughout Europe, he assured me with ever-so-slight condescension.

for the health of your family

2009-03-11T23:03:00.000-07:00

Villagers, in thickly padded coats, line the streets edging the markets. They stand in the slush, hawking their wares spread at their feet. Sometimes that may be as little as six or seven beets, a tiny pyramid of potatoes and some jars of home-made sauerkraut. Some bring their "home" eggs from their personal flocks, others bottles of home-made sour cream, farm cheese, and fresh milk.

Yesterday I succumbed to the temptation of "fresh milk for your family," and picked up a small bottle (a re-used "Fanta" bottle) of fresh milk for two hryvnia. Being raised on pasteurized, sanitized, governmentally officialized milk products, we offered the milk to Axel with slight trepidation--but not enough to make us take first sips beforehand. Axel assured me he liked it, drank it up and then asked for a second glass--of store-bought milk. This morning I had some with my meusli; other than a hint of Fanta orange, the milk is delicious. Not as thick as I had expected, and not altogether different from the store-bought milk.

Pyramids of eggs are offered by several stands at the market, white and brown, large and small. The first time I bought eggs, I had to ask how to get them home (imagining that residents had their own, special egg-carrying cases). Laughingly, the egg-selling grandma tore the 12x12 cardboard egg case in thirds, fashioning a 6-egg case from two pieces (top and bottom, no hinge). I've been carrying these two pieces of cardboard with me when I shop for eggs (which I haven't seen any one else here do...). Some vendors offer me a small, plastic bag to put them into, tying it tightly so that they're almost held together. Yesterday, the vendor tore off a length of cassette tape, wrapped it around my egg case several times, like a pastry box from Crixa's.

painfully hip

2009-03-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

The winter I spent in New York city, I marveled at the obstinacy of young women, who wore, regardless of temperature, precipitation or widespread grime, incredibly high heels and terribly white coats. Of course, black was the predominant color on the streets all winter, but the truly fashionable identified themselves by the height of their heels and the luminance of their dress.

Here, too, women stake their claim to fashion with stilettos, knee-high boots atop four-inch heels, and luminous, fur-trimmed coats. Of course, there is a lot of black here, too, and every variety of quilted down-wear. But what surprises me, as I tromp about in some old, lug-soled boots that, luckily, no one bought at our garage sale last summer, is women's footwear. Every other day, as snow piles up and melts away, the streets fill with marshes of dirty slush. The streets are cobbled, so hidden beneath these marshes is an uneven, ankle-breaking surface. But I seem to be the only one having trouble.

The truly fashionable squeeze into extremely tight jeans or breathtakingly short skirts; a look that blends something of Paris Hilton and Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman" (and not to be mistaken with the look on US campuses: Brittney Spears and Lil' Kim). More women wear heels here than not, regardless of age. Skirts and shorts go with boots, just as easily as jeans.

Yet, while in the US, where the streets are a hodge-podge of thrown together outfits, an entire continent of varicolored tee shirts and monocolored jeans and more often than not the question that springs to mind is: Did you look in a mirror before you left the house?, here, everyone on the street is put together. No accidents and no indifference: what you see are outfits, intentional arrangements, considered actions.

walking to the rails

2009-03-09T12:06:00.000-07:00

Because today is a holiday, the language school is closed today. But that did not deter my tutor and I, and we agreed to meet at her apartment for my lesson. She lives near the train station, she explained; get off the tramway at the Stepan Bandery statue, turn around, and my street will be right in front of you. Third floor, apartment #20.

I was happy to not schlep to the school; the only way to get to the school is on one of the hundreds of Lvivian marshrutki, whose organizational scheme remains somewhat mysterious to me. The trip to the school takes 45 minutes, assuming a correct marshrutka comes by in a timely fashion. The trip to my tutor's house takes about 10 minutes on the tramway (which I prefer just because), or maybe 20-30 walking.

We found the walking route to her apartment on accident. We set out this morning, in sprinkling snow, towards the train museum. I'd already scoped out our route: take the #2 trolley-bus two stops, make a right on Pasternak Street. Only, we found out after two #2s blew past us, that the #2 wouldn't stop at our stop today because, as a holiday, it was operating on the Sunday schedule. We should have paid attention to this detail. Instead, we decided to hoof it to the museum; it was only an inch or two on the map.

With Axel on my back, the camera on Mychal's (these things even out), we splashed through a lot of slush, past one stop, down the wrong street for a block before correcting our direction, unexpectedly down my tutor's street, past her building, then the second trolley-bus stop, and right on the unmarked Pasternak Street. This street was entirely snowed in; a building was going up, and, just past a wide plaza, the street was closed to traffic. At that moment, I looked to my right and saw the huge building, home of Lviv's Railroad Museum. Which was closed.

Plan B was a café, two espressos and a hot chocolate, buterbrod with cured fish, layer cake. We considered, but passed on the shot of vodka. It was only 10:30 am.

So, getting to my tutor's later this afternoon was a piece of cake. And I was happy to have the opportunity to see her home, an apartment in a 100+ year old building, constructed in the old style with all the apartments facing into a communal courtyard. Clotheslines stretched from the balconies across the courtyard, and we discussed the pros and cons of such communal living. I live on a street where neighbor's don't even stop by to request a cup of sugar; my tutor pointed out the disadvantages of the courtyard snoop who needs to know why #32 came home at 2am, #12 had big boxes delivered, and #27 never takes out her garbage.

We sat in the tiny kitchen, the two of us, our three books and five notebooks, four dictionaries, two cups of sweet, black coffee and a huge platter of cake ("Napoleon"), at a two-foot square table. Neighbors passed by in front of the kitchen window, a clock ticked comfortingly over the stove. Her one year old grandson slept the entire time while we discussed the Russian and Polish words in my Ukrainian novel, positive and negative personality traits, and why I was paying twice as much per hour through the language school rather than half the amount privately for her tutoring.

pigs and chocolate

2009-03-08T11:52:00.000-07:00

I was very excited to celebrate my first International Women's Day in a country that actually acknowledged it. As soon as Mychal arrived, I began dropping blatant hints about the box of chocolates and flowers, that, as a man, he was required to give his wife and mother of his child. Alas.

The day dawned beautiful and snowy; yesterday's fat flakes had accumulated into a thick blanket of snow. Branches were iced with a generous ribbon of snow, buses chortled down the street in thick snowy coats. Snow was still falling when we woke--masses of tiny flakes hurrying down as if pressed for time, not the leisurely thick flakes of yesterday.

But, the disappearance of our keys interrupted the day of pastries, ethnic museum, puppet theater and bon bons that we'd planned. After spending all morning in vain trying to get hold of our landlords, we decided to take our stir-crazy child out into the fresh air. I carried Axel and Mychal carried the things we really didn't want to disappear (our computers), and we struck out for downtown. But we only made it half-way there before my guilt over leaving the apartment unattended while our keys roamed at large with an unknown individual got the better of me. So we returned; not quite trudging up the snowy hill, because it was really quite beautiful, but definitely working hard enough to feel it in our hip flexors.

And then we waited... And waited, with a brief interlude while I sought a hardware store (closed on Sundays) and lunch (yes, more pastries and dried sausage). And waited until, finally, we got hold of the landlord who showed up at five pm, on his day off, leaving his lovely wife to celebrate International Women's Day by herself, while he changed the lock to our apartment.

Luckily, he was rather quick and we were able to go out to forge for dinner. Our plan had been to eat at a restaurant a short walk from our building; we'd passed this place several times on our trips to the park and market, stopping each time to check out the seven pigs, stuffed muskrat and miniature water wheel inside. Each time we stopped, we waved to the servers who, invariably, folded napkins in the empty restaurant. We never saw a single customer inside and joked that we'd better eat there soon, before it closed.

We'd prepped Axel in advance for our special dinner out, hoping that the novelty of the pigs and water wheel would keep him entertained while we ate. But that was not to be: the place was packed, the host scarcely acknowledged my query about dinner, interrupting me to ask if we had reservations. Oops. We should have known the holiday was a serious thing: since Thursday, we've watched people load up on flowers, chocolates and liquor. And that generations of family would get together in restaurants to celebrate the wives, mothers daughters on their day.

We walked further, this time Mychal carrying Axel, peeking in places to gauge whether there was an empty table. Eventually we found the Krakow Café, where shiny red hair, tight purple sweater dresses, sparkly maroon sequins shimmered and blended as three, then five, grandmas danced in the middle of the room.

landlegs

2009-03-06T11:07:00.000-08:00

The child peeking out of his fur-trimmed hood is a different child, already, than Axel of three weeks ago. Paradoxically, he is both older and younger simultaneously. I try to imagine what he could possibly be thinking--in a strange land where nothing is familiar: snow? trolley-busses and tramways shucking down our street? a winding concrete staircase leading to a regal, over-heated apartment? People speak, but nothing makes sense. No friends, no trains, no Tuncer. No familiar destinations: the museum, the zoo, chinatown, the library. It's not surprising that one side-effect of so much unfamiliarity is whining.

But out of all this strangeness, a different, older Axel is emerging. On our first or second day here, Axel weaned himself. It was as if he forgot what to do; and after a bit, he told me he was done. Up to this point, nursing had been the gold-standard, nothing else could soothe a fractious Axel quite so effectively. Almost at the same time, he began to stay dry through naps and the night. I'm probably jinxing myself, but I think we may not need to use diapers when we return.

In ways more and less obvious, though, Axel has grown. One day at the park, we'd been here perhaps two days, Axel decided he wanted to go to another park. He confidently took off, out of the playground, up the snowy hill, one hundred, two hundred yards away from where I stood (pointing in the opposite direction towards the park's location). He didn't care, didn't stop, didn't come back--a different Axel than the one from home.

Axel's acclimation here manifests as narration: he states what will happen next. Thus, as I put the key into the lock (the second of four), he tells me: "Mama use these keys. I take off my shoes." Once the shoes are off and the key in the last lock, I hear: "I take off my gloves. I take off my coat. I put my coat in elegator" ("elevator," or what he calls the wardrobe). Before Mychal got here, Axel prepared for his arrival by pre-telling me everything he was going to tell daddy when he got here. (I tell daddy they didn't have a firetruck. They had ambulance.) He stocked up on observations to show Mychal, too: the skylight at the top of our building's stairwell, the brush stacks which he'd watched workers create with chain-saws, the movie playing in the kids' playroom in the restaurant, the merry-go-round in the market playground. There were many--I can hardly remember them all. But they keep popping up, now that Mychal has arrived and Axel can download his stored experiences.

And when things are familiar, time stops for him. Twice we have passed street musicians, whose music stops Axel in his tracks. He listens and watches, tuning the rest of the world out. A half an hour goes by; I ask him several times if he's ready to go and the answer, even as the sun goes down and the wind whisks dinnertime away, is always a firm no.

colors

2009-03-05T08:54:00.000-08:00

Today, at 11:25, Alla showed up at our building. Blond and tall, as the director of the International Language School had predicted, she also sported a shiny gold star on her incisor. Trés hip-hop. She had been sent by the director to accompany me to the school; a kindness I thought unnecessary, until I realized that despite being less than 2 miles away, there was no direct form of transport there. As she and I walked downtown to catch a marshrutka (a van which operates like a bus), she told me she had just returned to work two weeks ago after having given birth.

I was a little surprised. Actually, I was shocked: leaving a two-week old to return to work didn't sound customary to me. When I asked her, she assured me it wasn't normal; here, a woman gets three years after birth before she returns to work. Now it was Alla's turn to be shocked when I described the six-weeks unpaid leave we get in the good ol' USA. Later, as the green van #60 wound its way up a hill towards what looked like a nice green forest (on a street conveniently named "Zelena," or green), Alla revealed that, in fact, her child was one and a half and that she was only returning part-time because the other office girl was about to give birth any minute.

The van stopped just outside a huge, rectangular, soviet-style apartment building. We walked in, headed up two flights of stairs and found the school, where we were met by the director, maroon beehive and all. The director ushered me into a darkened room where my tutor, tiny, all in black, sat behind a tiny black desk. She invited me to sit down, and there we sat, six inches apart for the next two hours. It was all terribly useful and terribly exhausting. I'm not very good at sitting for two hours straight, and fairly abysmal at talking for that long. Luckily, after we'd covered all the basics (where am I from, who's in my family, what do I do for fun, where did I study, what does Axel eat, who keeps house, what does my husband do?), she asked me if I wanted a cup of coffee. Yes! Even if, as she pointed out, it's not really coffee.

There was no clock in our dimly lit classroom, and I kept trying to sneak peeks at my watch attached to my bag at my feet. The minutes crawled by as she reviewed all nine forms of movement verbs. My mind balked when she asked me to provide examples; all I could come up with was "Everyday I go to the swimming pool." Which reminded her of a Canadian she'd worked with recently, who told her: "I go to the gym three times a week." Imagine!

Anyway, after two hours she brightly promised me that tomorrow we would review directional prepositions for movement and off I went to talk to the director about payment. Here, we switched to English, and, thusly, dollars; under the maroon beehive, the director's eyelid twitched. Even though we're in Ukraine, the policy seems to be payment in one's national currency. It's not the best deal for us, given daily vacillation in value, but, we're guests here. What to do?

traffic jam

2009-03-04T04:29:00.000-08:00

I was surprised to discover that despite the almost old-fashioned feel of Lviv, that the city does indeed get traffic jams. Yesterday evening, as Axel and I walked home after watching the skaters, we picked our way through the hundreds of cars jammed to a stop downtown. Today, we even had a chance to experience one from within.

This morning, after a fabulous, stunning, nine and three-quarter hour stretch of sleep, Axel and I took the tramway to the trolley-bus to Stryysky Park. On my map, the park takes up four quadrants, which I estimate to be about a fraction (1/3? 1/4?) of Central Park. (Hopefully some Lvivian will read this and set me straight...) It felt huge--multiple paths crisscrossed before us, young men walked by in groups, a solitary mother half-carried, half-dragged her protesting toddler, a skier whished by on cross-country skis. Axel and I headed directly to the brightly painted playground I'd noticed from the trolley-bus window.

There was no one else at the playground, not even a crow. Axel sat in the play truck, driving towards the fires burning in the distance. But there was no one to ask whether the fires were brush or warming huts for the lone skier, who passed us a second time while Axel climbed on the play structure. The park was reassuringly familiar--although painted in primary colors, rather than the "nature-like" tans and greens of our Oakland parks, the pieces are familiar (except for the merry-go-round, which, for some reason, you don't see at US parks anymore). Graffiti covers the structures, litter and beer bottles the ground--just like in Oakland.

After the park, rather than catching the trolley-bus, we walked down a huge hill (while I mentally mapped out a run to take one morning) to Stryysky market that was even more incredible than the three others I'd found downtown. Even though we only needed bread, I couldn't help but buy some pears ("Our pears, from Ukraine, perfect, sweet and crisp," promised the vendor) and dates ("finki"), animal crackers (thick, with tiny grill marks on the back), pickles, more tvorog (because how can you resist after the vendor has handed you thick bites of three varieties on her pen-knife?), and more pelmeni (tiny dumplings).

As soon as we walked into the market, Axel burst into tears. He had been under the impression that we were going to buy his toy firetruck ($1 trinkets here are his dad's Peet's fix at home). Both I and the pelmeni vendor tried to convince him that, indeed, toy firetrucks can be bought at the market (and socks, and underwear, and toothpaste, and cds, and whole chickens, dried fish, slabs of pork belly, dried fruit--in fact, what can't you get there?), but he was having none of it. But the pelmeni vendor did not give up; she told him to catch all of his tears in the palm of his hand, give them to mama, and then with them she would buy him a sweet apple pastry. Amazingly, after I translated this too him, he calmed down. But he refused the apple pastry we found on the other side of the market, insisting instead on a pouf that looked (and tasted) like a rum bun. The downside of all these sweet bribes is that 90% of them don't work--after one taste, Axel passes it back to me. And since I am constitutionally unable to throw out perfectly good food, I have to eat it. Thank god Mychal arrives tonight. So it was with the rum bun: Axel licked off the icing and passed it back to me.

It was too bad that the rum bun didn't work (nor the fried cabbage pirog, which I bought because I was told that it was "hot, tasty, fresh," (one out of three), because it took us an hour and a half to get home. The streets and the trams were packed, cars, busses, trams vying for space outside. Inside the tram, it was just as crowded but people were far more polite--a seat was found for Axel, hands grabbed my stroller and hefted it up, people smiled as Axel sang to his toy train (no firetrucks) for the entire ride.

learning curve

2009-03-03T04:08:00.000-08:00

(Axel in his pirate pants and my fancy shoes.)

It makes me nervous staying in such a fancy apartment. There are so many breakable things around--glass window panes on all the interior doors, an antique ceramic stove (the kind that was used for heating the house), rickety old wardrobes with frail door pulls, ceramic lamps by the bed, a polished dining table and brocade chairs, brocade floor length curtains, and many, many mirrors. Even though the apartment has only two rooms, at some point while Axel entertains himself someone will have to cut cabbage with the steak knife.

Which is exactly what I was doing when Axel pulled the ceramic, grecian-urn facsimile bedside lamp onto the floor, breaking off one of its feet. At least, I think he broke it. As the previous renters had broken the bathroom window, it's possible they also broke the lamp. In any case, it's now broken and all we have to show for it is some braised cabbage.

The apartment is really lovely, though our unfamiliarity with such classy lodgings is evident. The bathroom, which is as big as Mychal's study at home, has a whirlpool tub half as large as the room. I was pretty excited to give Axel his first bubble bath in it. But we lacked the patience to let the tub fill properly, and turned on the jets too early. Ooops. The entire room was doused. You'd think once would be enough of a lesson... But no, I had to try again, the moment the jets were covered with water. Again we doused the bathroom. (Clean up was rather a challenge, as the place is designed as an efficiency; the only available cleaning supplies are lysol room deodorizer and paper towels, neither of which was very much help.)

Another thing I learned since we arrived is that the market does not cater to early risers. By 8 o'clock this morning, after having entertained Axel since 4am (and quietly, at that, so as not to further piss off the neighbors), we headed out in the sun to the market. Our big plan for the morning was to go to the market and then the neighboring playground, which Axel had noticed the first time we were there, and labeled the "wheel" park. In his mind, the playground is next to "the man cutting fishes," and he threw a huge, public tantrum yesterday evening because it was too late to go to that "wheel" park.

The first time we passed the playground, it was covered with snow, and, after evaluating the situation, Axel decided it was too snowy. So it was with great patience that Axel suffered hours 4am to 8 until the sun had risen enough for us to head out today. The market is about a 15-20 minute walk, just enough, today, for Axel to fall asleep. But not enough, I found out, for the market vendors to set up their stalls. So, with Axel asleep in his stroller, I went up and down the aisles, dodging boxes and dollies in various stages of load/unload, and piecemeal, as stalls opened for business, picked up our daily fare. Axel was still asleep an hour later as we stood in a sunny patch on the snow looking at the playground. Using cookies, I tempted him awake, and he grudgingly got out of his stroller to tromp once around the playground, take a spin and a half on the merry-go-round, and decide he was done.

(Sleepy Axel with cookie on the merry-go-round.)

just another shop

2009-03-02T20:31:00.000-08:00

Today we shopped for a treat for Axel. We'd walked along a wide boulevard lined with shops on Sunday, displaying brightly colored books in their windows. The temptation was almost too much for Axel, as none of the shops were open Sundays. So this morning, which dawned sunny and clear, we walked back to find Axel his heart's desire, a train book.

The morning dawned with such promise, yet none of the three bookstores could give us the requested child's book about trains. (Incidentally, there was a Ukrainian translation of the German book on castles which Mychal had brought home from Munich a few weeks ago.) Axel was on a mission, so he insisted that we go to more shops (the first time I have ever heard such a request from him, but mostly because I refuse to shop in general.)

We found a huge department store; spanking new and filled with imported goods. Inside, we discovered a huge climbing structure--a plastic fire engine practically life-size. Children and parents began arriving; shoes and coats were removed, and the kids all played while the parents sat and watched. For a while, I tried to maintain the pretense that we were actually shopping, but when I saw the prices (Macy's prices for Target goods), I gave that up and stood around with the other parents to watch and listen to the kids play.

Poor Axel; it's all so confusing to him: playing on an indoor climbing structure in a big department store on a wintry day isn't exactly part of our repertoire at home. Nor is crunching through the snow to climb across the swinging bridge at the playground, nor sitting in his stroller for an hour while we walk around picking up our daily fare. Facing meat pies, meat dumplings, borscht, beet salad, fried eggs over meat patties--also completely beyond his ken. Worst for him, I think, was to discover that the library will not have train movies. It's no surprise that he reacts by falling apart in a rather regular fashion, but it is exhausting.

Still, it was funny, in a sad kind of way, to watch Axel fall apart after we left the department store when I refused to take him to "just another shop" as he quixotically searched for his train book.

winter how-tos

2009-03-01T21:30:00.000-08:00

Everywhere we go, Axel and I, or more precisely, I am told: Girl! Put his hat on! Are you blind? He's freezing!

So I comply, because that's what you do in an eastern european state where it is the community's job to keep incompetence at bay. And just as quickly, Axel yanks it off. We go this upwards twenty times a day. And the judging isn't reserved for head-wear; I am also informed by well-meaning women, as Axel sits on my knees on the tramway, that his ankles, made naked by his jeans riding up, are freezing, how could I not notice?
It brings back the scolds I got when I was seventeen, during the winter in Kharkov while sitting on the cold stone benches with my friend: Girls! Don't you know your ovaries will freeze? Get off those cold benches or you'll never have children!
Equally funny to me is that I'm still "Devochka!" Nearly twenty years have passed, yet I'm still "Girl!"

Today, we found the park which, as dusk fell, was filled with bundled up children and clusters of parents talking on cell phones. Axel situated himself ably in the first recognizable situation (aside from the tramway and trolleybuses) and tromped through the snow to play on the swings and see-saws and suspended bridges. I listened to the parents' conversations and noticed that they, too, were just as familiar.

a long list of foods Axel has refused and a shorter list of foods eaten in the last three days

2009-02-28T21:29:00.000-08:00

Refused:

blini
omlette
sausage cutlet
black bread
breaded, fried fish
meusli
carrot salad
beet salad
almond butter sandwich
blini with jam
fried egg
meatloaf cutlet
more bread
vermicelli with cheese
kefir
banana
orange
apple
oatmeal
tangerine
tvorog
cake
bread again
more pasta with cheese
grilled cheese

Eaten:

cookies
sugar cube (2)
milk
kefir (three sips)
jam from the package
cookies
nori crackers
2 bowls of oatmeal (one morning)
more cookies
more cookies
5/6th meat pie

six kinds of cabbage

2009-02-28T14:26:00.000-08:00

We went to the market today, a trip of raised expectations and dashed hopes for both of us. The market little resembles US farmers' markets or French produce markets. But our hopes were dashed by far more innocuous reasons: to begin, while our apartment is quite lovely (in a guady, contemporized Louis Quatorze kind of way), it lacks a functioning kitchen. I asked for a stove and got two electric burners and a microwave. Complicating factors are a complete lack of bowls, no knives or cutting board, and a dearth of cookware. This made the market trip an exercise in restraint.

The market itself wasn't obvious to the untrained eye--no tarp-covered stalls to indicate a market, no french-style arcade. But from some memory pocket, I recognized the little footpath between a row of permanent kiosks and we followed it into the market itself. The main part of the market is indoors: rows and rows of stalls, a random arrangement which puts vegetables next to cookies next to dried sausages, or fruit or cookies. Save for the cookie stalls, which were vast spreads of at least fifty different cookies sold by the gram (and, curiously, each of the many cookie stalls sold exactly the same variety, displayed in more or less exactly the same manner as the other cookie stalls), the stalls sold a haphazard assortment of dairy, produce, meat or packages goods. While some stalls seemed to be primarily one product, most sold other items alongside.

The cookies stalls were the site of Axel's dashed hopes and expectations. He immediately recognized the cookie that he'd been given the day before by the nice bank ladies, during our long attempt to get Ukrainian cash. He pointed them out, told me that he wanted "bank cookies," and gripped the bag of cookies tightly the whole morning. But the treat I got for him--a "keiks," which seemed more like a muffin, was a complete bomb (and which later he mixed it in with his macaroni and cheese at lunch).

Other than that, the market was great: we watched a man clean and gut a fish bigger than Axel, while others flopped about in what looked like gas canisters. The flying scales mingled with the falling snow; blood gushed off the plywood counter into the dirty slush below. Inside the market, a guy hacked at a hunk of meat with an enormous ax, bits of animal flying off the blade. A trio of matrons, wrapped in aprons and headscarves, shoved pen-knives with slices of dried sausage at us. A woman, in a heavy coat and sultry eye-shadow huskily offered us honey. More aprons offered me tvorog (like farm cheese) for my child (who wanted nothing to do with it once we got home). Stacks and stacks of eggs--in shades of light brown to pale ivory, tempted, but I couldn't figure out how to get them home in my bag. Barrels lined with plastic bags held at least seven kinds of pickled cabbages; pickled cucumbers, apples and some other large, round fruit filled three-foot tall glass jars. Tiny, fresh pasta shapes, bags of dried pastas, grains, kasha (the hot breakfast cereal), even meusli was available. Cans held preserved meats, fish and various vegetables, while bags contained milk, yogurt and preserved fish. We could get carrots, straight from the ground or presliced in miniscule matchsticks, beets, fennel, tiny onions and shallots, rutabega (which I can recognize now thanks to last week's CSA), leeks, cilantro, chives, and many, many varieties of cabbage. Stacks of tiny, perfect tangerines, oranges, apples, bananas, kiwis, even hachaya persimmons were available. It was a dream; I walked through the market wondering whether Mychal would be up to the task of cooking any of it on two electric burners.

The market was a mix of accents; Ukrainian was the language of commerce, but Russian, Georgian and others which I didn't recognize (Ossetian?) were spoken behind the stalls. I got by with Russian, and some Ukrainian politesses thrown in.

We came home with three perfect tangerines, two apples, a small black cabbage, two perfect persian cucumbers, 100 grams of tvorog, two kinds of cookies and a keik plus water for 20 hryvnia: $2.38USD.

And for lunch, Axel had milk and cookies again.

milk and cookies

2009-02-27T15:21:00.000-08:00

(Clothes-free Axel in our very warm Lviv apartment.)

This morning I was finally able to get some money (after three failed ATM attempts). For some reason my cards aren't working (don't? will never? work) in the ATM machines here. It made for a rather lean lunch, dinner and breakfast the day before (and an especially trying cashless three-hour wait in the Kyiv airport), but we persevered. On five kinds of starch.

Getting money turned out to be yet another test of a certain sleep-deprived person's patience. Even at the foreign currency exchange (of which there are so many in the small area of Lviv that we walked today, a strange largess in comparison to the one (!) for the entire Berkeley-Oakland area), it took the kind ladies several attempts and phone calls to get my card accepted; and then I had to buy dollars and change them to hryvnia. I was beginning to sweat our lack of funds a bit, because it was well after noon and I had nothing (nothing!) to feed my child. It was a trifle harrowing for me, but I shouldn't have worried: Axel, pissed off because the cafeteria-style restaurant did not have milk, refused to have anything to do with the nice blini and cutlet and egg and bread and cheese that I put in front of him. He managed to hold out until we found the bakery, where I stocked up on two kinds of cookies (sushki and jam-filled tiny planks, whose name I don't know).

And also standbys, just as I remembered them from years ago: vermicelli noodles, black bread, kefir, and smetana, each of which earned only passing interest from Axel. So it's been cookies and milk for him today.

a brief tally of the number of fits Axel has pitched since we left

2009-02-27T14:25:00.000-08:00

37

But the only culture specific one was over the sushki: these small, hard cookies resemble bagels and are looped on a piece of string, sold as a wreath. Axel was pissed that we had to break the cookie to get if off the string, he wanted it whole.

Instead of German efficiency

2009-02-26T18:19:00.000-08:00

Nothing in Terminal A of the Kyiv Boryspil Airport inspired confidence. Two hundred passengers milled about in the cavernous, smokey, concrete-floored waiting room, gathering in small clusters around enormous piles of baggage, huge, bulging, saran-wrapped suitcases, toddler-size boxes with pictures of beefy, toy 4-wheelers, young ladies teetering on four-inch heels in skirts of the same length, clutches of matrons barricaded within the fortress of their goods ate dried sausage off the knife or roughly-cut bread. There was nobody at the check-in desks, nothing posted on the information boards, no indication whatsoever whether or which flight would board. We had three hours to wait before our flight. The first hour, Axel ate through our bag of beef jerky, cheese crackers, fig cookies, oyster crackers, and pretzels. When he finished, as if informed by sonar, people began to queue at one of the destinationless check-in counters. I picked up Axel, loaded as many of the five bags onto the stroller as possible, and hurried to get in the line. My instincts were lucky--we managed to get in fourth place, ahead of the hundred-plus other passengers (Fifty of the more hitryi economy class crammed into the First-Class line).

Check-in took about a minute, brief glance at our passports and we were sent to security, which, amazingly also took about a minute (nothing had to be taken out of or off bags and bodies), and we proceeded to another smokey, information-devoid waiting room. This one had windows at least. After another hour and a half, during which my former Axel emerged who slept in my arms for the whole time, we were informed in three languages that our flight was boarding. Three airline employees materialized, pushing their wheeled check-in stations in front of them, a crowd formed instantly around them and instantaneously the crowd was scanned and rushed out the doors into an unmarked bus. Which took us, helped by three other passengers (the first time of our entire trip that people helped), for a ten-minute drive (longer than the bus-ride to our hotel from the very same airport), to a tiny plane waiting on the ground. One elderly woman whisked Axel out of my arms and into the plane, a man took over the stroller, a nicely dressed woman made off with Axel's Thomas suitcase, and I followed after with the rest. About a minute of instructions in Ukrainian and what I am supposed to believe was English (I'm sorry, but it was absolutely incomprehensible), the stewardesses ignored the still (can you believe it?) sleeping Axel in my arms, (unlike the first two flights, where the hysterical child was firmly informed by the steward collective that he had to be buckled in the purchased seat), up and down without any service interruption, we landed, people massed out, again grabbing whatever piece of our entourage they could, we were met at the plane by two people who pointed us at a bus, sat in seats, driven a block or so to another truck holding all of our checked-baggage. Again, the crowd massed, picked up all our stuff and carried us through the doors of a building and out onto the street. It was the quickest, most-efficient travel by plane that I have ever experienced in my entire life.

calling home

2009-02-26T10:13:00.000-08:00

(Axel watching the airplanes land 200 meters from our hotel room balcony.)

We spent our first night in the "Boryspil" Airport hotel (which is not to be confused with the Boryspil "Airport" hotel). I had reserved a single, which in Eastern European hotels means exactly that: a single, dorm-room size bed. Which was surfeit space anyway (see previous post). Axel spent most of the night playing with his new toys and climbing out of the bed. I spent most of the night fetching Axel's books which kept slipping between the mattress and the wall and praying.

Axel slept from just past midnight to just past four that night; and by 6am I gave up all hope of more sleep and trundled us off to breakfast, which I'm still thinking about a couple days later. I remember my first breakfast in Moscow, nineteen years ago. We all thought it so strange, the thick slice of dark bread with an equally thick slice of butter, accompanied by cold cuts and cold beet salad, sliced cucumbers, tomatoes and salt. This morning, it all looked so familiar, with slight image updates: the composed salads were mandolin-thin, the butter do-it-yourself, the cold cuts thin shaves of ham, rather than the thick, fat-laced kielbasa. That was only a third of the offering at "Boryspil" hotel, and since we had a lot of time to kill, I helped myself to one of everything: blini, eggs, meat cutlet, battered fish, sausages, cold beet salad, carrot salad, cabbage salad, olives, ham, dried sausage, meusli, kefir, sliced fruit... I'm forgetting a few dishes.

Breakfast only took up half an hour of the eight before our flight. After that, I took Axel for a walk in the snow (10 minutes, he refused to even touch it with his shoe), tried to use the ATM (5 minutes, as someone cut ahead of me in line and then card malfunction), took Axel out on the balcony (four times at 3 minutes each), and then listened while he played with the hotel phone (three hours). Pushing the buttons, he informed me he "put Daddy on speaker," so that he could tell him about the "snow airport" (Munchen, where we spent two peaceable hours pulling the wheeled suitcase along the fast(er than the US) moving sidewalks. (This did involve a few Chaplin-style full body falls.) "I having a nice trip," he told daddy over the insistent beeping dial tone. We had to check-out at noon, which gave us not quite enough time to get into Kyiv and back and left us three hours to kill before our flight (with nowhere to leave our bags). Terrible planning, but given our 11pm arrival the night before, there was no earlier flight to take for Lviv.

midnight snacks

2009-02-26T04:21:00.000-08:00

A list of the things Axel and I have consumed in the dark since we arrived:

fig cookies and cheese crackers in the middle of our night flight
raisins in bed at 4am in "Boryspil" hotel
nori crackers for a dusky dinner in our Lviv apartment
midnight snack the first night in our Lviv apartment: oyster crackers, nori crackers and pretzels

sleepless over the pond

2009-02-24T09:04:00.000-08:00

(Axel checking out the bassinet on our plane, for which he was 3 kilograms overweight.)

Two nights before we left, Axel woke up eight times before 4am. Mychal had left that morning for his work trip, so I had to muster the wherewithall to get down the steps and to Axel's room eight times in a row. By 5am, after having spent the entire night trying to soothe a fit-throwing and hysterical toddler, I turned off the monitor and gave up. Eventually Axel must have gone to sleep, because when I came downstairs two hours later, totally refreshed, he was asleep.

Needless to say, that night was nothing compared to the horror of our red-eye flight. My vision of Axel as a seasoned, easy-going traveler, and myself as the uber-competent mother of such a cosmopolitan, exploded in the hands of that fit-throwing, hysterical toddler. It was awful. Beyond awful even. I wanted to cry. And hand Axel off to the stewardesses.

But the lovely Germans would have none of it (we flew Lufthansa). They scarcely acknowledged us, some sort of professional self-preservation, I have to think. So Axel thrashed and harangued, throwing his 34 pounds liberally across our seats and into the aisles. Which only wore him out the equivalent of a one-hour nap and gave me twin rug burns on my forearms from lunging across the seat to catch him. Sadly, my attempt at translating "A two-year old is the best natural birth control!" for our German seat-mates was muddled.

Especially since that night was just the preview of what was to come the next two nights. All I'm going to say about that is that by the time woke up in Lviv, three days later, Axel had slept a cumulative 11 hours. Not pretty.

Going for first

2009-02-19T10:03:00.000-08:00

Setting my goals for this year was easy--all I had to do was pick up last year's list and change the "8" into a "9". First on my list was relocating my sense of humor. That didn't happen. I was mostly aiming to lose some of the sentimentality that I'd been carrying around since I had Axel. That was a doomed effort: if not worse, I'm no more thick-skinned at the end of 08 than I was at the beginning.

Next on my list were training goals--specific times for certain events, and a blanket-clause "first place" for everything else. Of course, I didn't meet all of those goals, though I did manage some second places.
Last on my list was finishing my dissertation, which hardly counts, because it's been on my list for a couple of years running.

This year, I'm simply reversing the order. First up is finishing the dissertation; second, going for first in my races; third, hardening the eff up. Conveniently, I'm already a portion of the way there, having gotten first in my age group in a local, extremely non-competitive 10K. The competition was further weeded out by the gale force winds and dumping rain, but I'll take it. Mychal got me new racing flats, so I also managed to take 2 minutes off my personal best, the same amount I took off a half-marathon two weeks earlier. (I'm not sure what that signifies, mathematically.)

Finishing the dissertation really means to me that I have to prioritize it over everything else (excepting, of course, a certain tow-head). In other words, training has been coming last while I bang(ed) out my final chapters. It's working--I'm most of the way through the damn thing, but I haven't biked once this year (!), and I haven't even maintained a weekly presence in the pool. This month that will be put to an even more extreme test--we'll all be in Ukraine, where snow covers the ground and the mercury hovers around 30º and the Laney pool is a few thousand miles away.

It'll be difficult to meet my third goal here--htfu, that is, because this trip is steeped in all sorts of sentimentalities. I haven't been back to Ukraine since I spent a year there in 1990; we're going now to "make up" for the trip that was supposed to happen the fall Axel was born; we'll all be here together, the first visit to Eastern Europe for both Mychal and Axel.

ending on a grace note

2008-11-16T21:11:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, I never would have thought to use the word "athlete" to describe myself. It's not that I'm not active; my mom had us swimming laps at the YWCA from elementary school age, I started running with my brother in high school, and I started taking 50 mile bike rides for fun when I got my first bike at 18. I've been pretty active for a pretty long time, but I've never thought of myself as an athlete.

For no particular reason, to me that word referred to people who got paid a lot to play sports on tv. Then one evening Mychal and I went out to dinner with a friend who's then-girlfriend had completed a triathlon. We ate a TON (as usual) and someone (I forget who, we drank a ton too) made a point about us being athletes and needing to eat a lot. I was very inspired by that and helped myself to fourths of the arroz negro with squid. That was the first time I'd consciously grouped myself as an athlete. (thus we get: athletes=people who earn a lot of money and who eat a lot)

So it's no small feat for me to use the words "race season" to describe what I've been doing from May to November for the last six years. And then, last season I started to "place" (another new term for me) in races, which got me thinking I should start using the correct terminology. So I started to sprinkle words like "training, intervals, splits, negative splits, descending, drills" into my conversations.

The vocabulary up-grade only had a minor effect on my season this year. Despite my faith that I'd have a better season this year based on the facts that Axel started sleeping last winter and that he was 99% weaned by August, it didn't translate into a perfect season. There were minor injuries and major exhaustion which made it just "ok." Four races instead of the nine or ten I'd hoped for. I didn't get the "firsts" that I was shooting for, "just" a "2" and, in the last race of the season, a "3."

Still, it's an improvement, enough of one to make me wonder if I need to start talking about my dissertation like this. Incorporate some intervals into the Intro, negative split chapter 5, descend the conclusion.

how to support a dissertator

2008-10-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

This question has bugged me and Mychal for too many years. Witness the unfinished dissertation...
Neither of us is really certain just how to support this (ridiculous) endeavor. It's not a paid position, so no one will give me a raise for turning in a chapter. It's not a sport, so no need for cheerleading (and no podiums). Mychal's not my mother, so he can't nag.

And, yet, today, without even asking, I was given a full complement of support:
-a friend in the neighborhood picked me up at 5:45am for swimming
-Mychal took Axel to daycare, giving me 45 extra minutes to work (and, goes without saying, relieving me from the sob-inducing guilt)
-a friend via facebook brilliantly offered that we needed a writing theme song, which gave me the perfect excuse for watching this
-another friend in the 'hood brought me peet's coffee for the mid-morning slump
-Mychal changed his chat icon to

WORK HARD
AND BE NICE TO PEOPLE

and then "slip[ped] quietly out of chat" so as not to distract

So that's how five more hours were billed to Chapter Four. Thanks village!

from best to worst in seven days flat

2008-10-06T21:39:00.000-07:00

Last week I made the best home-made graham crackers ever, according to Axel. With molasses and brown sugar, which made them, I thought, too sweet.

So this week I omitted the sugar and made the worst graham crackers ever. And Axel still throws a tantrum to get them.

hmmm.

loose in the caboose

2008-09-22T14:26:00.000-07:00

After a fiasco with our diaper service, involving diapers and contents left on our steps, we decided that maybe the time was right to potty train. So we cancelled our diaper service in mid-August and I stocked up on some cloth diapers for sleeping and training pants. Training, for the most part, turned out to be no big deal. Axel ran around the house nekkid for a couple weeks and then, one day, we bit the bullet: we took the train to Sacramento.

Axel's love affair with trains has been on-going for a while now, so when I heard about the Sacramento train museum a few days before he turned two, I decided we could squeeze a train trip in before he graduated to paying a fare.

Everything was a fabulous success: from the bike trip to the train station, to using the bathrooms on the train, to the huge engines, refrigerator, sleeping and dining cars, model trains, and toy trains in the train museum. Axel walked around, gripping my hand tightly, huge eyes.

That Perfect Day is how we ended up with two (2!) three-packs of Thomas the Tank Engine underpants. At least, that's how I'm trying to put the story together. Because, otherwise, I cannot explain how I, the most anti-consumer person in the brick house, became responsible for buying Axel underpants with pictures of Thomas and friends (I know, it's trademarked) stamped on the booty. Which prompted Mychal, when he saw them, to comment: gettin' loose in the caboose. Yikes! What have I wrought?

Axel held the package of train pants through the entire store (I had to wrest them from him to pay) and all the way home. And when we opened the package at home, he was beside himself: trying each pair on multiple times, trying each pair on Monster multiple times, before, in a complete dither, electing to go naked so that he could arrange all pairs on the coffee table to better see them.

souvenir from Canada

2008-09-16T19:39:00.002-07:00

Since we were so over-burdened with luggage during our extended trip, we tried to keep our souvenirs on the tiny side. I wanted to bring home tatoos for everyone, but we couldn't decide between a moose or a salmon. Instead, and inspired by my sister-in-law's clothesline, I brought home a one-item to-do list from Canada, which Mychal handily accomplished in five minutes for less than ten bucks. My very first clothesline.

Which also doubles as my new office view. And since I'm still lamenting, it merits a comparison to the old view:

I mean, who wouldn't exchange a Mediterranean-style fortress purported to be the dowry of a Borax daughter (but we haven't taken the historical walk yet, so can't say for sure), complete with lemon and olive trees, a burbling fountain and Moroccan tiles for laundry swaying in the lee of the high school shed?

Not quite the boats that someone else gets to watch all day...

before, during and after

2008-09-14T20:08:00.000-07:00

While Mychal's cooking dinner, I'll share pictures from the first leg of our trip: Vancouver, B.C. to Astoria, OR, biking by day, camping by night.

Day One: Axel fixing the bikes at our motel; his attire not too different from what the johns wore as they escorted their, ahem, lady-friends to the door.

Day in the middle: Here we are on one of the five ferry crossings.

Helping me set up the tents one evening...

our tent city with bikes

We caravaned over the Astoria bridge... four miles long and blanketed in fog. Luckily Axel and I caught up with another family, so we had moral support.

And celebrating our last day with huckleberry ice cream.

office envy

2008-09-14T19:32:00.000-07:00

It's been nearly three months since my last post. Given the much-lamented absence of both my short- and long-term memories, I'm not going to attempt an update, chronological or otherwise. Suffice to say that trips and photos were taken, involving various combinations of bicycles, tents, pop-up campers, airplanes, cars, trains, international borders, coastlines, islands, great lakes, and a variety of beds, bunks and sofas. With any luck, photo evidence will make its way here or to Axel's blog.

In the meantime, I'm going to dwell on my missing office and offer that as the most compelling reason for not having written anything in the last ninety days.

Since Axel's birth, my office has migrated three times. It's been difficult for me to adjust, especially since the punk now has what used to be my office.

And he's semi-inhabiting Mychal's former office as well.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. We'd survived five years sharing a studio apartment which doubled as both of our home offices (mine was a board laid atop two filing cabinets in a closet, Mychal's was a door balanced on two sawhorses). We had put in the time, chosen the paint, examined the natural lighting and windows, considered the lay-out of the house. These rooms were the culmination of years of waiting and a week of cursing (who really likes to paint anyway?). And, for the single year that they functioned as offices, they were perfect.

My office now is in the eaves upstairs. My desk is still balanced on the filing cabinets, but because the space is so narrow, the drawers face inwards. Four overloaded bookshelves tower over the desk; it feels like a cave, not a good thing for someone who lives for sunlight.

Obviously, the solution is to get rid of the books.

and the crowd would have cheered on

2008-06-05T16:41:00.000-07:00

Mychal and Axel took an epic journey on Sunday. Three modes of transportation--by foot, via the coffee shop, to BART, and then on a MUNI to meet me in the Presidio where I was competing in the Golden Gate Triathlon. Even though Mychal and Axel detoured through Peet's and some tony neighborhoods above the Presidio, we weren't quite sure who would get to the finish line first.

I knew this race would not be my best race; I'd woken up with another breast infection the day before and was still kicking it on Sunday. Of course I wasn't about to call the doctor, but my voice of reason squeaked that I probably shouldn't race all out when fighting an infection. No problem. I'm still building my base anyway.*

Golden Gate was a particularly small tri (smoking gun!); I usually have the luxury of starting in the last or second to last wave, which gives me at least an hour or so after the official start before my wave starts. Not so for this race: it was so small, that everyone started together in one wave at 7:30am. I'd arrived at 7:20, which meant I put on my wetsuit as I got numbered. Four hands, half the usual time. Still, I was the absolute last person to arrive at the swim start.

The swim was freezing but beautiful. Also choppy and somewhat funny, as the out-going swimmers and the in-coming swimmers shared the same path. I'm going to blame the distractingly beautiful scenery for my slowest swim ever. And perhaps the little chat I had with a fellow swimmer somewhere in the middle:

Wow, this is hard!
No kidding!
I don't think I'm even moving!
You're not.

After the swim, I could not seem to communicate to my hands and it took me nearly ten minutes to get out of my wetsuit. Also an all-time record.

The bike route was also stunning; four loops of an out-and-back along the ocean, which allowed for nearly an hour and a half of mesmerizing waves, shifting blues and grays in the sky and water. Geese flew over-head in the most perfect formation, wings flapping in unison. All of the wings. I pointed it out to a fellow racer, but he did not seem as impressed. So I biked (two climbs per loop, four times), dodged a dog, saluted a hand-cyclist, alternately froze and sweated and vowed to myself that if my shin splints hurt too much, then I didn't have to finish the run.

All was good: I had a plan.

Until I got to the transition area and heard a woman's friends cheer her on:

You're doing great! There's practically no women in front of you!

Shit. Now I had to finish--I may even place. So I ran, down the beach, up the stairs, over the bridge, dodged tourists wielding cameras and strollers, policemen talking down a jumper or climber, bikes who'd taken the wrong path--all of this was on numb feet--finished the run just as my toes thawed. There were no more medals at the finish line, and my cheering team hadn't arrived yet, but it was all good because I got a trophy instead: 2nd place in my age group.

Somewhat anticlimactic, to get a trophy for my slowest time ever not pregnant, but what the hell: my first trophy ever. And really, the trophy should go to Mychal for the three hours spent on public transport just to get to the finish line.

*I think this is where I mention that I was riding on semi-deflated tires as well, since my stem had broken off in the tire pump and I didn't have the energy to change my tires on Saturday. This isn't the place to mention that my bike computer was broken, but I think one footnote is sufficient for this race.

in lieu of the world's toughest half

2008-05-19T19:26:00.000-07:00

For the detail-oriented readers noticing that this race report has arrived a mere twenty-four hours after the race and taking this as an ominous sign--you are spot on.

Yesterday was the Auburn triathlon. I didn't do either the world's toughest half, or the also-hard, but not-going-to-kill me olympic triathlon.

The night before, we packed our breakfasts, lunches and snacks, the diaper bag and the race bag. We set the alarm for 4am, in order to get us on the road by 4:30. And went to bed at a responsible hour.

All was good.

Until Axel woke up at 12:30am and, despite good faith efforts by me and Mychal (multiple times), cried until 2:30 am. After which point, Mychal and I tossed and turned and failed to fall back to sleep until 4am.

We'll toss the gas savings into his college fund.

race report

2008-05-17T13:27:00.001-07:00

I've checked out the blogs of real triathletes who actually win things and have pro sponsorship. Real triathletes write race reports after their races. The day after, not two weeks, and certainly not on the eve of their next race.
But, since I'm still riding my Reynold's Steel Bianchi touring bike, with my all-weather tires, I don't have to hold myself to those standards.
So here's my race report from Wildflower, two weeks ago.

This was my first triathlon of the season, and notable for these reasons:
-It was my first overnight away from Axel. Ever.
(more on that below)
-It took place one week into the beginning of my base training:
Because Axel didn't sleep for March and half of April and because spring never appeared, I didn't start my base training on the bike until the weekend before the race.
-I had to pump breastmilk in the campsite bathrooms:
in front of the entire line of pre-race jittered women, who I think were possibly more embarrassed than me.
-There was a dead pig by the side of the road on the bike course:
Luckily, and, in spite of the heat, it did not yet stink. Though there were blood skids on the pavement, which was disturbing.
-I was asked: "Are you here to watch your husband race?"
By an otherwise unoffensive little girl. Of course I set her straight, "No, honey. My husband is at home watching the baby."

I brought M.F.K. Fisher's collected works for company, ate my pizza and carrot sticks while watching the sun set, called home from the highest point of the campsite with all the other cell-phone wielders, and went to sleep in my one-person tent (which was mistaken for a dog's tent our first year at Wildflower, when I shared it with Mychal and my pregnant belly), and listened to the college kids play horse shoes naked. At that point I felt old, but that feeling was erased at the finish line, which I crossed ten minutes faster than last year.

the importance of being earnest

2008-04-21T09:41:00.000-07:00

In the past, I was funnier. I think.

I have to qualify this, and all other statements I'm making these days, because my short term memory is shot and I can't provide an accurate account of anything. I researched this and have discovered I can blame chronic fatigue for this and practically everything else going wrong at the moment. Very convenient.

I'm blaming chronic fatigue for my new earnestness as well. I didn't used to be earnest. In fact, in addition to being funny (I think), I also used to be sarcastic, cynical, witty and smart. Now I'm just earnest, which is a heartbreakingly bland state of existence.

But it's given me a lot of insight into why people are earnest: they're just too damn tired to muster the charming self-deprecatory humor, the basic price of entry into postmodern society, and too exhausted to levy self-righteous indignation or snarky witticisms, the sarcastic insulation necessary for surviving in these god-forsaken times.

No, earnest people don't have the energy for all those clever layers that disguise the banality of life, shielding us from cruel realities and providing illusory havens. Instead, we're rooted, feet firmly planted on the ground, feeling things, and doing our level best to make sure everyone else feels it too.

So my plan is to take a nap every day until I feel sarcastic again.

the common good

2008-04-08T14:28:00.001-07:00

Lately, I've been wondering how women from previous centuries did it. How did they convince their infants and toddlers to sleep through the night?

Sleep, along with every other aspect of a child's life, has become a commodity; manuals and aids abound for teaching, cajoling, training or forcing a child to sleep. And yet: to gauge by the free-floating parental angst about children's sleep, fueled by media and marketing (shoot, this may as well be one word: mediarketing), that enveloped me and Mychal well before we became parents as we listened to everyone we knew with children fantasize about a full night's sleep, these market products don't seem to be doing anyone any good.

None of these tools existed in the 19th century; yet sleep deprivation and sleep training, as far as I can tell as someone who has read a lot of women's literature from a lot of cultures, were not all-consuming topics for women (or men) one hundred and fifty years ago.

Before we became parents, we had a tacit agreement that it would not become an all-consuming topic for us either. Except, when you're sleep deprived after six weeks of hellish nights with a pissed off toddler who can and will cry for two, three, four and five hours straight, the idea of sleep becomes an obsession.

I can only speculate, of course. But it seems to me that it has something to do with the notion of "night," as well as the notion of "sleep." In previous centuries, argues A. Roger Ekirch in At Day's Close: night in times past, sleep was split into two periods, the "first sleep" for two to three hours, punctuated by a meal or quiet time and followed by a "second sleep" of about three to four hours. This, save for the middle period which in our case can be anywhere from one to five hours, is exactly how Axel has been sleeping since March 2. Perhaps parents from previous centuries didn't even try to convince or train or force their children to sleep eleven and twelve hour stretches (alone and in the dark).

More likely, though is that women simply nursed their children when they woke crying, no matter how many months past their birth or pounds past their birthweight. For the common good, so that everyone in the house could sleep.

you dropped this

2008-03-16T12:53:00.000-07:00

A bit ago, after some high-school hoodlum shot at our neighbor, as she stepped out onto her porch, I was convinced that it's official: we live in the hood. Of course, the Oakland Police, who assured the distraught woman that "these things don't happen that often," would demur, that, actually, the hood starts at least block and a half down the street, where bullets don't just break windows and lodge into the walls of the house, but actually kill.

My first reaction, when we heard the shots, was not quite as practical as Mychal's. He grabbed Axel and ducked behind the couch while I ran to the window to see if it was a string of firecrackers instead of gunshots. I was totally impressed with his safety-first response, until I put it together that the couch sits in front of glass, and isn't quite the bullet-stopper of a brick wall. Which we have plenty of. So after we'd called 911 and paced around the house a few times and went repeatedly back to the window to watch them run to their getaway minivan (minivan!), we came up with a new plan for shots outside: to duck behind the brick interior wall. Felt much relieved once this plan was in place.

It's hard not to feel like things are falling apart. Shootings happen on a weekly basis in Oakland; thefts, assault, vandalism take place daily. We experience this in our day-to-day lives, tripping over the litter that clogs our sidewalks daily, watching the constant battle between building owners and tagging gang members, witnessing the petty vandalism--snipped wires on streetlights, broken windows in cars and businesses, accounts of hold-ups, burglaries and attacks.

Crime is a fact of life. But knowing this in a rational sense doesn't resolve either my anger--that one cannot protect oneself from crime, or my feeling of injustice: why can't we all just get along? I know there are many reasons why we can't all just get along, discrepancies in wealth, privilege and opportunity being, perhaps, the most compelling and common cause.

Which makes the new Honda Civic ad on t.v. all the more interesting: two drivers, white men of privilege, wearing respectable, professional suits, driving nice, new sedans, appear as relative equals on most counts except that one of them litters and the other doesn't. The ad shows driver #2 repeatedly picking up the trash that driver #1 tosses out of his car, and ends with driver #2 presenting #1 with an elaborate tree constructed out of his litter.

I've been collecting the litter that the high students have left on my yard for exactly one week. It's not quite enough for an elaborate tree (I'd have to collect the litter off the whole block for that), but I think it's plenty for a nice flower to present to the principal.

the final journey

2008-02-19T11:16:00.000-08:00

Tuncer and I are moping. The house is already quieter. Minou died this morning.

It takes discipline to wait for death. Like childbirth, it happens on its own schedule. Death is the one certitude we have in life and, yet, it's the most unpredictable.

Minou stood up death twice. While waiting for death to arrive, I made and broke two appointments for euthanasia. I'd made his third date for later in the week, and wondered whether he'd make it til then.

Ultimately, I'm relieved death arrived by its own time-table; it was important to me that I not rush things and, at the same time, that I not make Minou needlessly suffer.

By Monday afternoon, we knew Minou was going to die. We made him a fire and set his bed in front. He slept there most of the evening, under a towel. Periodically, Axel would approach and tickle his face. Axel seemed to know something was up and he didn't try to lug him around the house or pet him with the spatulas. It was all so perfect and we were hopeful Minou would fall asleep for the last time in front of the fire.

But he outlasted the fire-log and stumbled into the bathroom, where he lay for the last few hours, next to the litter box that he tried to use periodically. He was too weak to stand, so I would gently lay him back down in his bed.

Poor Minou. You can't hope to look your best as you're dying. But for such a regal cat, the bathroom just seemed so wrong.

The last scene in "Dead Man," (Jim Jarmusch) has William Blake (Johnny Depp) propped up in a canoe, having been prepared by "Nobody" (Gary Farmer) for his final journey. It is a haunting image: gaunt, bullet-ridden and ravaged, Blake resembles a skeleton as he floats down river and out of frame. It is also one of the most beautiful renditions of death that I have ever seen. To float away from this world into the other has always struck me as the way to go.

It is what I would have wanted for Minou, but, lacking a small, wooden canoe and a river that flows into the sea, I made a nest in an Amazon box. I tucked Minou into one of my shirts and covered him with one of Axel's baby blankets, and placed some photos, flowers, toys and kibble next to him. I'd imagined him curled up, in a sleeping pose. But it turned out that he was posed more regally, like an egyptian cat in a fresco, which suits him. I thought about taking a photo, but rejected that idea as too morbid. In a way, though, it was beautiful.

cutting class

2008-02-16T12:12:00.000-08:00

My former biking buddy, who is now my former running buddy who is trying to get me into mountain biking, and I were running one cold morning around Lake Chabot. This is one of my favorite runs, because even though it's a lake, it still has hills. Unlike some lakes I could mention.

As we ran, I waxed poetic for the nth time about my swim class: it's so much fun! just like gym class! I just show up and am told what to do! My effervescence prompted my buddy to comment that he'd never heard me so happy. (Of course, I beg to differ. Has he never heard me gush about Axel?) He's right, though. I love this class; it is the best thing that happened to me in 2007.

For a long, long time, I have tried to swim first thing in the mornings. It's never worked, either because I simply can't drag myself out of the warm bed to get in the cold water, or because someone emits subsonic guilt waves if I leave bed before the sun comes up. And it's not because I'm not a morning person: I am, beyond any question, a morning person. So for years I've made promises to myself and eked out promises from Mychal to help me get up early and get to the pool. In the past decade, I probably made it four times.

Which was really a pity, because swimming in the morning is like magic for me. I start the day in a fabulous mood and finish it with a not-too-crappy one. What more could I ask for?

So a series of serendipitous events brought my swim class:
1) In a huff, I dropped my Oakland Y membership after another impossible lap workout with people doing head-above-the-water breaststroke and "running" in the fast lane. (Although, in all honesty, is it really running if he's also doing karate kicks?)
2) I couldn't convince myself that I would drive thirty minutes to the Berkeley Y to play Russian roulette with their swim lane speeds.
3) I met a woman, on a group ride one Saturday, who described an incredible swim coach at a pool that just happens to be spitting distance from my house.

Now I wake up three mornings a week at 5:30 in exchange for my endorphin dose. We meet four days a week, so that the one day a week I can't get myself out of bed and into the pool, I'm in a pissy mood. Which brings me to my Chinese New Year's resolution (since I've already broken my Western New Year's resolution): no more ditching class!

the old cat

2008-02-14T21:15:00.000-08:00

My old cat is dying. We've known this for a while, as we've watched him become increasingly thin, tired and cranky. Of course, he has always been thin, tired and cranky, so we're really just talking relative degrees here. Lately, though, Minou is skinnier than I have ever seen him, and now complains even when I pick him up, which he has never done before.

So it is time.

It was time about a month ago, the appointment set, a plan made for someone to watch Axel. We even took the last photos. Earlier that week I had watched him have what I thought was a seizure and I fell apart. It turned out he'd just fallen and couldn't get up, but I cried anyway. The day before the appointment I canceled; just not ready.

I thought I would be readier. This too is a relative thing. I've talked about his death for a couple of years now--when he turned seventeen, I thought, surely, it's around the corner. And then eighteen, now nineteen. If he makes it til August, he'll be twenty.

I wasn't even that old when I got Minou. One October evening when I was fifteen, my mother and I drove through a torrential downpour to pick him up in Culpepper. I'd found the family of cat breeders in the classified section in the newspaper--remember those days? The house was crawling with kids, kittens and grown cats, of various siamese hues. I don't remember why I chose Minou out of the bunch.

According to the papers, Minou is purebred and he's got crossed eyes to prove it. My brother noticed this right away, but it took me years to believe him.

Minou has lived in ten different homes with me. He followed me to California (drugged, on a plane). He moved to Oakland with us, wailing the entire trip from Berkeley in the front seat of our tiny Miata. And most recently, the three blocks to our home where he can bask all day on the sun-warmed bricks.

Only he doesn't. He's too tired to go out on even the sunniest of days. Instead, he curls up in his plush basket that Mychal bought him, in front of the heat vent, under my sweatshirt. It takes this much to warm him, even on these unseasonably warm days in February.

Axel is sweet on Minou; he runs his fingers through Minou's fur while he nurses, asks for him when he wakes up, and offers him cookies, milk from his sippy cup, and brings him books. He learned how to be gentle with Minou, but he also learned how to be rough. Lately, he's been picking Minou up to bring him to me, which is terribly sweet, but probably not that great for the old cat. Friends comment that Minou is so tolerant with Axel, but, really, I think he's just too tired to move.

Selfishly, I want him to sleep, because I'm pinning my hopes on death arriving while he's asleep. And perhaps death is just around the corner: he has kidney failure, it doesn't get better from here for a nineteen and a half year old cat. But I know that waiting for a gentle death is almost as futile as waiting to be ready. Even though my friends tell me that I will know when it's time, I don't think that when that moment arrives I will be any readier. Some day soon, though, I know that it will be my job to take him back to the vet. No canceling, for his sake.

nursing marathon

2008-02-05T21:08:00.000-08:00

Somewhere between a breastpump and hypothermia this Sunday, I ran a half-marathon. I'd never run this distance before, but that didn't stop me from committing to "racing" this one. Verbally, at least.

We started the race near the Conservatory of Flowers, which at 4:30am that morning, was twenty inches under water. Simultaneous pumping at 5 am, me for Axel, city workers for the race. By the time the race started, it was almost temperate, but periodic downpours and wind kept things interesting. The race snaked through Golden Gate Park and then out and back along the Great Highway; there were thousands of people on the course (6000 for the half marathon, 3000 for the 5K). Unlike the trail runs I've raced (all two of them), the course never thinned out, and I jostled for space on the road from start to finish.

Never having raced this distance before (the closest I'd come was my first 20K this December, which was mostly a bunch of stairs and then downhill), I wasn't sure what my strategy would be. I thought to divide the course in three: maintain a moderate pace for the first 30 minutes, increase my speed at mile 4, and then again at mile 8. Only, I got bored before the first 30 minutes were up, and started to increase after mile 3, never saw mile 8, and missed mile 11 too. And finished feeling like I could run another 3 miles at that pace, which I took to mean that I'd been too cautious. But that was fortunate, really, because I was parked a mile away, and had to battle wind and rain, numb hands and feet, to get back to the Cliff House where the car was.

It seems like a bad idea to make an analogy between endurance sports and nursing, but what the hell. I never thought I'd be nursing a baby for what is going on a year and a half. Even though I knew the merits of breastfeeding, I only asked of myself to make it six months. When I made it that far, I thought I'd try to make it to the first birthday. And then things got tricky--my desires to have my body back to myself--to not pump before a race, to not be on call throughout the day, to spend an entire day by myself (alone!)--began to seriously compete with Axel's desires for nursing. It's tricky, because I know and can see the value of nursing; Axel is thriving, emotionally and physically. Although he gets most of his nutrients from food now, he gets a lot of physical and emotional security from nursing.

And yet: I dream of a race season where I'm not pregnant, not nursing, and getting a full night's sleep most of the time. (oh, the audacity of dreams)

identity crisis

2008-01-29T19:31:00.000-08:00

Another trip to campus, another opportunity to revisit the ol' identity crisis. For, as I discuss my dissertation with my advisor while Axel reads his board book in the stroller next to me, I am supremely conscious of the need to self-edit. Generally, in Axel's company, we have a running dialogue; I describe our surroundings and actions, he contributes his all-time favorite word, "cat," or other exclamations (wow! ok! alright! oh wow! dat? dis!), or he tries out the new words he hears (be-rah, rwaihn, a-plane). I've noticed, in the company of others, that this behavior falls squarely in the "mommy to so-and-so" pigeon-hole of motherhood: those women who disappear completely into their children's lives, to the point that their name is actually hyphenated with their child's. A group I've always mocked and found slightly scary.

So, as I sit opposite my committee advisor, talking too fast about work she hasn't yet seen, I am intensely aware of Axel's unanswered contribution to our conversation. I know better than to interrupt the adult conversation to respond to him, yet I feel that on some level, I'm doing him a disservice. And while I wouldn't describe my feelings as being "torn," I am acutely aware of the multiple selves jostling one another in the too small and too hot room.

The semester Axel was born, I returned to teaching when he was four weeks old. It was pretty horrible trying to juggle nursing every other hour with grading papers, lesson planning and clothes free from milk stains. I was very tired. But: I drew immense pride from the fact that I did it, that I managed to maintain my professional self and mother a newborn.

And, more importantly, I drew immense satisfaction from incorporating Axel into my campus routine. Many days, Axel came to campus with me, hanging out with our fabulous administrative team while I was in the classroom, and hanging out in my office while I held office hours. I loved that students could see me discussing theory while holding a baby. Because there are too few female professors with children in these ivoried halls. And it is perhaps for this reason alone--to model academic mother--that I keep on keeping on.

heart outside body

2008-01-25T16:47:00.000-08:00

When I first came across this phrase as a description of parenting, I think it was here (but I can't remember for certain), I found it a little excessive. This was before I was pregnant, or possibly right after I had found out I was pregnant, and I very much subscribed to the philosophy of discrete identities. A notion of myself as a whole entity, a discrete being clearly differentiated from others--be they my family, my husband or a possible child. I felt that the culture-wide identification of parents with children--parents whose identities are subsumed in their children, whose entire existence is wrapped up in their child, and children wholly dependent on their parents--baffling and somewhat off-putting. It was not for me. If I were to go through pregnancy, bear a child, and then raise one, it would all be accomplished with my self clearly differentiated from this child. In pregnancy, the harshest version of this line of thinking had me making Mychal swear that should anything go wrong during the pregnancy or the delivery that the doctors would save me first. Me first! was my overwhelming thought. My thoughts for after the pregnancy involved returning to work immediately, a child in nearly full-time childcare, who marched merrily along towards independence and activities that did not involve me.

All of this thinking went out the window, not quite during the pregnancy, but almost immediately after Axel's birth. Certainly within the first two hours of his life, as I waited alone for the nurses to bring him back to me after having whisked him away about a minute after he was born. I waited, getting increasingly pissed off, thinking nasty things about the incompetent nurses who were keeping me from this newborn, until Mychal showed up to tell me where they'd taken him. Of course, I immediately got up from the bed and ran to the nursery (it took my nurse about half an hour to find me there).

Now, fully sixteen months into Axel's life, I understand the phrase "my heart outside my body" differently. Having a child is having your heart suspended out there in the open, vulnerable, exposed to the elements and, at times, fully beyond your reach. My heart, as the seat of my emotions, is no longer protected within me; nor is it exclusively of me, having exceeded my own physical boundaries, it bops along to its own beat in the world at large.

Axel moves about in the world; he has my heart in his hands, and he is oblivious to that. He can be frivolous with it, as only a toddler can be: he treats himself and the world with absolute disregard for the fragility of life. With the at times brutal single-mindedness of a toddler, he pursues the world, reckless with his body as his knowledge of consequences is limited. In this reckless pursuit, throwing himself fearlessly at the world, Axel exposes my vulnerability.

and baby makes who?

2008-01-12T15:48:00.001-08:00

Last week I had to go to campus to rescue my dissertation from the uncertain hell that returning all sixty-eight of my dissertation books would have caused. I had to show up in person to convince the library privileges adjudicator that hauling sixty-eight books to the library (for the visual, that's six linear feet of books or twelve round trips from car-to-library carrying boxes of books while pushing a stroller) would be the kiss of death for my dissertation. I also brought him home-made caramels. Begrudgingly, he both restored my library privileges and waived the requirement of physically returning all my books. (But he did not thank me for the caramels!)

Anyway, the trip afforded me and Axel the chance to visit my department, where all the ladies were swept away by Axel's charm. While Axel ate bites of chicken and took things off shelves, I got to watch a video of a trapeze performance starring one of the department ladies.

As a child, I gave considerable and serious thought to becoming a trapeze artist; my first sport love was gymnastics, and swinging on the uneven bars my favorite event. That adults could be paid to experience the exhileration of swinging, flying and leaping while wearing spangled outfits boggled my mind.

Her performance was great--too short, in the opinion of one who can all too easily picture herself up there. And when it ended, we found ourselves in the middle of a discussion about what changes for a woman's identity after becoming a mother. "We" included the trapeze artist, childless by choice, a woman with three grown sons, and myself. There are so many ways to look at this question; yet without pausing to consider the question, I found myself blurting out: my autonomy.

It's a strange thing, particularly for a woman who cherishes independence, to become the point-person for a small being. In ways big and small, meeting the needs of a child comes before going where- and doing what-ever you want every minute of the day. While it's the big moments--like the thought of carting sixty-eight books back to the library with a small child in tow, or swinging thirty feet above ground while a small child watches--that remind me of the limits on my autonomy, it's the accumulation of minutes, day after day, that do their work on a woman's identity. Who I am, what I do, what I say, what I feel, how I think --all of this is channeled through the lens of parenthood.

There is, of course, much more about identity that changes with the arrival of one's child. Perhaps best to consider this the first installment of many. Stay tuned for part two: my heart outside of my body.

like smoking crack

2008-01-07T17:20:00.000-08:00

My first triathlon was a gift to myself for passing my qualifying exams.

I had given up just about everything I liked to do during the year of preparation that led up to the exams. Of course, this is all retrospective recapping and I'm more than a little bit bitter about the whole thing. I spent most of the year either reading or agonizing; even when we did get out of the house for dinner at friends houses or dates, my mind remained caught in the grip of agonizing about what I had not finished reading and what remained to be read on my lists. My head was a bit like a non-stop game of Tetris, constantly shifting titles and authors from one to-do list to another. But after nearly a year of scrapped runs, swims, rides and walks, I felt like I desperately owed myself the gift of exercise.

It is perhaps a sign of my Type A personality that I swapped out reading lists for training plans. In any case, I pored over training plans with far more excitement than any of my literature. The print was even smaller than my texts, but at least I wasn't going to be tested on the material.

My first race was a sprint triathlon in Sacramento. We swam in the American River; it was a downstream swim in what was claimed to be 70-degree water. It was a bit chilly. I knew nothing about triathlon or open water swimming, which is apparent in the photo above: there I am, in the front of the entire pack. What I didn't know was that even in triathlons marketed at new triathletes, the swim is a full-contact sport. Women swam over me, banged into me, pulled at my arms and legs. It didn't take long for me--a very confident swimmer who has swum since birth, practically--to have a panic attack. Before the first turn, I was gasping for air and on my back. Eventually I calmed down enough to do sidestroke, and with one turn to go, managed to get back into a freestyle rhythm. Based on this photo, I'm either last or first (according to my team photographer, I was kind of in front. Somehow.)

Anyway, the water was cold. My feet remained frozen for the entire race. (But I did not sit down and massage them to try to get some feeling back in them, as I did to Mychal's great chagrin during my third race. That race was in October and the water was 62-degrees. I thought I had frost-bite and was about to lose a toe.) I biked the 11-mile course on the aforementioned 30-pound hybrid mountain bike with my back rack attached (with a not-too-shabby 16 mph pace) and pulled out a 27-minute 5K. It was my first race ever.

I almost cried when I crossed the finish line; at no point during the training did I really think I could do it. And the feeling of pride for finishing this was so much more joyful than the feeling of bitterness that followed my successful qualifying exams. Of course, two 24-hour written exams and one 3-hour oral exam don't produce endorphins quite the way that triathlon does. So that was my first taste of crack; that summer (2003), I did two more triathlons. And it's just gotten more addictive with each season since.

why blog

2008-01-02T15:22:00.000-08:00

This blog lacks a theme. It doesn't lend itself toward categorization. And that elusive quality--the read-ME (or is it READ-me)--aspect is still in development. So why blog?

I kept journals throughout my teens and twenties. I dropped off writing them about the month that Mychal moved into my studio, for no specific reason other than not enough time in the day. More abstractly, though, I think I stopped writing my journal because I had an interlocutor, someone who shared my space both physically and imaginatively. I missed keeping a journal, but not to the point that I ever overcame the accumulated inertia to pick up a notebook.

At some point (ok, I just checked: in 2001), I started to keep a journal on my computer. Through all the years that I had kept a journal in various notebooks, my media of choice was pencil. This always troubled me, because I knew that pencil smudged. Whatever I wrote began to evaporate as soon as I turned the page and the friction of pages commenced. But I loved the way the graphite felt on the pages; so a large part of keeping a journal was the physical sensation of writing. I also liked the physical object--its reassuring heft, the way the paper felt after it had been written on--somewhat softer, more pliant, and that it could be leafed through, providing different entry points for thought trains. The journal as text document never gave itself to random perusing. And once the document was closed, it was as if it had never existed: no notebook to be moved from bag to bed to table to desk to bag, reminding me of its presence through it's very physicality. In a sense, the lacking physical object of the text journal is what revealed to me why I write: because I like the medium of language. I simply like to put words next to one another, to see where they will lead, to see what they produce, to hear what they say. And that this all takes place in a silent realm is all the more satisfying to me, for some reason.

More than the unspooling of one's thoughts in silence, the public nature of a blog renders it not quite a journal. Yet, unlike standing on a crate in the middle of a public square, shouting into the heavens, writing in a blog does not necessarily mean we will be heard. It is quite possibly the most basic expression of hope available today: we blog, never knowing whether we will be found, whether we will be read.

A blog is not a journal; no matter how personal one makes it, its form distinguishes it as something quite different: public, searchable, infinite, hyperlinked, textual and graphic. Lacking concrete dimensions in time and space, it is something virtual; a something forever in the process of becoming.

3-5-5-5-3

2007-12-31T12:34:00.000-08:00

When I was younger, I did not think of myself as competitive. My soccer career, despite what may be suggested by having received a varsity letter, was the implementation of a non-aggression pact between all the players on the field. Friends came to watch me sit on the bench for all but five minutes of game time, while I relieved various players for water breaks.

It's all rather unfortunate, given that I have discovered of late that I love competing. Having no experience at competitive sports, I'm at somewhat of a disadvantage when it comes to racing and training. I lack the requisite technophilia for true triathlon competitiveness: I rode a mountain bike for my first couple of races, without even removing the rear rack. My bike shoes are from the late 80s, purchased off the remainder rack at Bike Nashbar. My tires are the all-weather variety (No flats!), double the weight of race tires. Five seasons later, I don't even have clip-on aero bars. And compounding my racing career, I have little sense of how to race: keeping my focus, knowing when to accelerate, how to attack. And, from Mychal's perspective, I set my goals too low.

This season, I had hoped to get a podium finish. And I got five: two thirds, three fifths.

Next season, I told Mychal, I wanted to shoot for third place in all my races. Which, as a former track star, he found ridiculous. If you're going to shoot for anything, shoot for first.

This season, I had twelve races. Axel was nursing around the clock for the first seven races and through the day for the last five; I was top twenty in all but one (the first, my favorite.) When I set my goal of getting a podium finish, I really didn't think it would happen. So the final, and most debilitating, aspect of my non-aggression pacts is that I lack the confidence to truly believe in myself. Setting a low bar is the easiest way not to fail.

This season, instead of the race bike I've been dreaming about for four years, I'm grabbing some attitude: first place is mine, baby!

how-to manuals

2007-12-27T11:59:00.000-08:00

After Axel arrived, my dear friend Ayelet sent us some books with the note:

"You may not need books to understand your baby, but here are some books to help explain you two to him."

They've got these fabulous block images in bright colors, showing the myriad daddies and mommies out there: with mismatched socks and crazy hair, surfing and dancing, cooking and working, painting pictures and flying airplanes. He loves them. (And, despite the glaring absence of bicycles, the books are pretty accurate representations of the Mychal-Amy conglomerate.)

It took me a while, but eventually I got us some parenting books. The first to enter the house was about sleep. I know people who've read all of the sleep books and who could have given me advice. But we put it off until we'd lost all patience completely, and one day I simply got in the car, drove to the nearest bookstore that wasn't a conglomerate and scanned the shelves. Well, shelf. I was tempted by a book whose author had Ph.D. following her name and reluctant to give a second glance to a book with a corny title. By an author who calls herself the "sleep lady." Sleep lady? But the god-awful writing of the first and the practicality of the second decided the matter. Ayelet had described a sleep-training program that had a parent in a chair in the doorway of the child's room reading--an adult book, not a child's book. That sounded pretty good to me. So once at the bookstore, I scanned books looking for "chair in the doorway." It didn't take too long. The book could have been a pamphlet, as the method can be summarized in three sentences (okay, maybe ten). And it worked. So that book is on our shelf.

I bought our second parenting book that same night. I wasn't looking for one and wasn't motivated by the same desperation as our need to sleep through the night. But the easy prose and refreshing honesty sold me. So the best parenting book ever joined the sleep book on our shelf (As soon as I had read it cover to cover, in a mad dash. It's that good.).

The third book on our shelf appeared ten days after Axel had a fever of 105 degrees--under his armpit. I kind of thought it was too high--even called my sister for moral support, and, after she'd looked at her parenting books about medical stuff, called the doctor. Who is an aging hippy, and told us, "well, it could go as high as 106." Ok, but what do I do then? Especially if it's after 5 pm? So, after several calls and conversations with advice nurses and a late-night trip to the emergency room where they tortured Axel (blood draw and a catheter) to find out exactly nothing, I hopped on amazon and bought Your Child's Health. This book is still on the shelf, but having read it cover to cover in two days (impatiently, fruitlessly looking for the information I needed and cursing the book's ridiculous organization), it's shelf-life is nigh to expire. Still looking for that encyclopediac book about "My Child's Health" which will let me cross-reference symptoms with ailments. One-handed and in the dark, of course.

The last book to make the shelf just arrived for my birthday. This one will stay--despite the fact that I'd already borrowed it from the library and read three-quarters. It's one of those book that is permanently on hold (translation: no renewals). I haven't finished the library copy and it was due yesterday, and I'm wracking up fines as I write.
It's written by a neuroscientist, although the truly awful passages are not the scientific explanations, but the anecdotal examples. Otherwise, it is fascinating reading, describing in minute detail the neurological development from conception onward and how that impacts motor and cognitive development. Despite the author's biological background, she presents a strong argument for the importance of environment in shaping an individual's experience and intelligence. Too paraphrase her, "environment is everything."

running preggers

2007-12-10T17:34:00.000-08:00

Before I became pregnant, I did a lot of background research--from Naomi Wolf's Misconceptions to Ariel Gore's Hip Mama's Survival Guide, meta-analyses of childraising advice manuals Raising America and The Mommy Myth, A Potent Spell, Motherguilt and, because I hadn't yet, Backlash and The Feminine Mystique.
But the information I most sought was also the most difficult to find: research on female athletes and pregnancy. I tried every imaginable combination of pregnancy, exercise, athlete, vigorous exercise, competition, racing in google and academic search engines. Mostly what I found was advice about what not to do: don't over-exert, avoid raising your heart-beat above 140 bpm, don't exercise in the heat, avoid high-impact sports (like running), or high-risk sports (like biking). In short, most everything that I could find about exercise and pregnancy suggested walking or swimming. Which are fine things to do, indeed, but not quite the same as triathlon training.
Eventually, I discovered research by James F. Clapp, M.D. and his book Exercising Through Your Pregnancy. His research on female runners and pregnancy was the nearest I could find on vigorous exercise and pregnancy, and his book became my ersatz bible. My only complaints were that his research dated from almost ten years ago, and that his cohort's exercise patterns were still somewhat modest. In my opinion, the book could use some more current data.
What I couldn't find, however, were pregnant women like me--who continued to maintain a high level of activity (and by high, I mean averaging 10 or so hours a week of running or biking or swimming) through their entire pregnancy.
Today, nearly two years later, I came across something quite promising: a blog on Runners World magazine chronicling an avid runner's pregnancy. Like many of her readers, I am thrilled to see this topic discussed in such an open and public forum. Most pleasing of all are the comments--I knew there had to be more women like that somewhere and now, finally, I am finding their stories.

Photo: Wildflower Olympic Tri 2006, 17 weeks

the ancient mariner rumbles

2007-11-30T11:32:00.000-08:00

It has been over a year since I last wrote in this blog.

There have been a few life changes in the meantime, as chronicled here: Life with Axel

Astute readers will note that there are two contributers to that blog; the post titles are the clues.

The euphoria hasn't officially kicked in, the dissertation not yet written, and no pro teams have called. So, to all intents and purposes, this blog bears rejuvenation. Just not today.

whither the American Dream?

2006-04-06T22:47:00.000-07:00

I just finished Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. Reading this book is grueling. Each chapter told the story of a different urban environment and, despite the marked geographic differences between cities such as New York, Detroit, East Saint Louis, San Antonio and Washington D.C., each chapter exposed the same endless litany of discrimination and inequality characterizing these urban schools. It is a relentless story of racism, discrimination, corruption and poverty. But most disturbing is the revelation of the benign indifference of the privileged who not only permit the existence of these inequalities, but who also fight tooth and nail to ensure that these inequalities remain. For they, the privileged, are motivated not only to protect the benefits guaranteed by the higher revenues of their property tax, but also, and more tenaciously, to protect the privilege itself: the gap between those who have and those who don't which permits certain individuals to surpass others. At root in the local policies and state legislation is the desire to protect their "right" to have more than others.
Jonathan Kozol describes how typical press coverage focuses on the attitudes and behaviors of ghetto residents; research consistently returns to the question of the values of these residents. However, he points out, researchers never focus on "values of the people who have segregated these communities. There is no academic study of the pathological detachment of the very rich" (193 Kozol 1991).

I grew up in a suburb with this precise attitude. The city of my childhood established its boundaries in the era of desegregation; with careful attention to the demographic make-up of surrounding communities, the city elders delineated their territory with an eye to keep the white neighborhoods in and the non-white neighborhoods out. The result was that in my small city, the schools were 98% white, 2% Asian, Hispanic and black, whereas in the surrounding cities, with school populations three times as large, whites comprised the minority of the school populations. My school system was wealthy; it provided excellent teaching, demanding courses, a variety of higher level math, science, language and literature courses. A point of pride was the International Baccalaureate program, an alternative to AP courses which prioritized critical thinking and research on original documents. Although we were poor, I and my siblings were extremely lucky to have such educational wealth.

Today I am aware of these existing discrepancies, both in my childhood home and in my current home. The state took over control of the schools in Oakland in 2002, when the schools went bankrupt. Schools were closed, programs cut and teachers fired in an attempt to get out of debt. But none of these financial efforts resolve the real issues: that urban schools need more state and federal money than suburban schools for the very obvious reason that urban property taxes provides less than one-third than taxes generated in the suburbs. In urban environments where the need is greater (older buildings, more social and environmental problems, larger school populations, fewer resources), there is simply less money to address it.

In the words of Mayor Jerry Brown, the state of Oakland's school system "is a crisis that has been going on for decades." With a 52% drop-out rate, Oakland high schools are failing an enormous student population. But how surprising is it? In schools with 2000 students, classes of 35-40, no lunch programs (despite the 68% of Oakland's students qualify for the federal lunch program), and minimal resources, who can blame the kids for ditching?

Substantially less than mollified

2006-03-28T09:47:00.000-08:00

A few weeks after I contacted VW to let them know how unsavory their new fast ads are, one of their lackeys responded:

Thank you for sharing your comments with our Volkswagen website. We have noted your concerns and would like to apologize if you found the nature of this ad offensive.

We here at Volkswagen of America strive to share the experience of our brand of driving excitement to Volkswagen Enthusiast's [sic] through clever and innovative spots, created by a refreshing and entertaining national advertising campaign.

Please accept our apology, once again. We appreciate your submission and invite you to visit again soon!

Ivan
Volktalk

Right, I must have forgotten somewhere between 7th grade English and graduate studies in literature that "clever and innovative" means "discriminatory and retrograde." Somehow I am neither refreshed, nor entertained by their women-hating.

I hate to be the one to point fingers, but it feels like our country's current administration has something to do with the market's embrace of what seems best described as a "fuck all, I'm the MAN" attitude promoted on a rash of commercials today. That in this era of testosterone-charged machismo, we've ushered in a crueler, more violent national creed. In a nation where the media defines every political policy as a "War," where the president gads about in a Top Gun costume, where torture becomes a new American export, and where wars on foreign territory stand in for foreign policy, it is not surprising that violence has become the new American ideal.

And so I see the VW "fast" as part of a crop of violent and destructive ads, such as the ad promoting the new Gap store in Manhattan featuring out-of-control customers and employees gleefully destroying the old building, or the Toyota ad which hypes larger than life destruction with a meteor careering into the earth, or the energy drink ad showcasing a robotic scare-crow blasting away farm vermin, including hippies.

I could go on; violence has become such a norm that we are nearly blind to its subtle variants of discrimination, such that marketers can label this violence as "refreshing," "entertaining," and "innovative."

He wails.

2006-03-03T13:35:00.000-08:00

Last night we saw the most fly trumpet player out there: Roy Hargrove. I know his music, but had not seen him in person before. I had read that he'd been playing professionally for fourteen years; so I expected to see someone in their fifties. Instead, a most dapper 33 year-old walks on stage wearing a Borsalino; describing his fawn colored suit, the slim-legged pants, untucked shirt and chocolate tie will accomplish nothing. Each piece was distinguishable: the tie was slightly shorter, slimmer and darker than convention, the pants gave him an almost Fred Astaire look, the shirt in cream with pleats down the front (Though M. thinks perhaps the pleats were actually new shirt creases. Either way: a statement.).
I've been in the area long enough to remember going to Yoshi's at their previous location; but the memory has faded. I can no longer summon the building's exterior, its street address, or distinguishing features other than the dimly-lit low stage surrounded by cocktail tables. I remember being slightly put off by the industrial size of the new Yoshi's: the field-size restaurant, the brighter jazz area, the slick new image. But none of this matters, really. We are incredibly lucky to have such a jazz house in downtown Oakland, where music plays three-hundred and sixty-three nights a year. Where anyone and everyone is welcome to hear jazz masters and innovators, local and far-flung talent, the elders and the youngsters.
Roy Hargrove is one of those young elders; long of experience, short of tooth. Listening to his music is like being in the middle of hailing shards of glass: his trumpet spits out jagged sounds that fall over one another pell-mell. Entrancing music with an undercurrent of violence that makes you think, just briefly, about taking cover.

we've come a long way, babies

2006-02-21T22:42:00.000-08:00

On Irina Slutskaya, who scratched the glass ceiling of figure skating costumery. The announcer: "She's wearing pants. Women can do that now."

Welcome to the 21st century, figurina.

Merkins on the horizon

2006-02-20T23:36:00.000-08:00

I'm all for women wearing what they want to wear. But breast tassels to compete in the Olympics? This isn't an audition for Las Vegas Ice Capades.

Highlights of the Ice Dancing

2006-02-19T23:13:00.000-08:00

The mid-Rumba butt hump executed by the Japanese ice skater to her partner. He seemed to like it.
Take it back: the Ukrainian woman's butt slap to her partner's head was just that much more of a winner.

discriminating tastes

2006-02-19T21:36:00.000-08:00

This wouldn't happen if I didn't insist on watching sports on t.v. But like most mortals, a trip to Torino just wasn't in the cards. So I end up watching things like the "I'm the man" commercials VW is using to pimp their GTI. In both versions of the commercial, a male driver listens to his GTI's inner robot as it directs him to behave like a sexist creep to his girlfriend, by refusing to close the windows so that he can "hear the engine" or by refusing to let her come along because the car presumably doesn't want the estrogen burden. Driving my own GTI VR6 (similar to turbo, gives the engine the special sauce that makes acceleration fun), I get the whole "listen to the engine" thing (I even keep the music low to hear it) and admit to the preference of keeping the weight down (am loath to cart around all that kitty litter we've been meaning to bring into the house). It goes without saying that a car cannot discriminate according to gender; so why does VW feel the need to do so?

get out of jail free card

2006-02-18T09:52:00.000-08:00

I know Italy is a member of the post-Industrial world. That does not explain why their legal system is mired in primordial goo. Turns out that if a step-dad forces his step-daughter to blow him, he's less guilty of the crime if she's no longer a virgin. Good to know virgin mythology dictates the civic code!

ITALY: NONVIRGINITY LESSENS SEX ABUSE CHARGE, COURT SAYS Sexually abusing a teenager is a less serious crime if the girl is not a virgin, Italy's highest court said in a ruling. The court ruled in favor of a man who forced his 14-year-old stepdaughter to have oral sex with him and appealed a prison sentence of 40 months, arguing that the fact that the girl had had sex with other men should have been taken into consideration at his trial as a mitigating factor. The court agreed, saying that because of the victim's previous sexual experiences, her "personality, from a sexual point of view," was more developed and that therefore the damage to her was less than if she had been a virgin. The decision, which drew a barrage of criticism, opened the way for the stepfather to get a lighter sentence. (REUTERS)

More to the point, though, is why U.S. media relegates this to Reuters feed and deems it not worthy of a multi-line article? Surely it passes the sensationalism test? Or is it because U.S. media enjoys being the tacit accomplice to chronic sexual discrimination against women?

quelling the angry beasts

2006-02-17T09:58:00.000-08:00

I just flew on United, which, after 4 hours of delay, I have moved onto my "Things I hate" list. Then I discovered this:
United has some very sophisticated and very sexist ads out right now. I feel kind of gypped, because the ads have lovely graphics. But cool graphics get you only so far with cranky feminists.
The woman-version ad depicts a businesswoman on the phone with a client, imagined as a monster on the other end of the phone. She travels, ostensibly, to allay her fears about the monster-status of this client. When she arrives for her business meeting, the conference table is full of various unpleasant beasts. By the end, however, they are humanized (never underestimate the strength of power point). Trip taken to quell inner anxieties a resounding success.
In the male version, however, a very different goal (and narrative technique) emerge. The man, after kissing his sleeping boy good-bye, hops on a white goose and flies to a distant forest. In the forest, he joins a round table of other business men (kings, to the man). But the business meeting is interrupted by a dragon! Never fear, the man leaps into action, slays the dragon, receives token of esteem from the princesses, and returns home to present his child with a miniature dragon. Moral of the story: men are dragon slayers, women humanizers. Nice to know that United is doing their part to clarify the division of labor.

green lantern redux

2006-02-12T21:21:00.000-08:00

I am on the edge of my seat, leaning into the curves with them as they race their oddly alien-like figures around the ice. Who knew speed skating was such an exciting spectator sport?

gimme the remote

2006-02-10T22:19:00.000-08:00

I don't watch t.v. at home; we do have one, but I'm not habituated to watching t.v. That is, growing up, t.v. watching was forbidden, and enforced in the form of a 10" black and white t.v. without cable. The only station I can recall with any clarity is pbs, my mother watching Faulty Towers after having sent us to bed. My bedroom was downstairs, and I would sneak out of bed and lean against the door-frame, listening. All grown up, I have a somewhat fractious relationship to t.v. I don't have the patience for most programs and don't really get the narrative lines of nearly most sit-coms or serials. On the other hand, I will set my alarm to wake up in time to watch World Cup games or the Tour de France.
When traveling alone, everything changes. Something about the dead air in hotel rooms impels me to turn on the t.v. immediately. The illusion of life.
A compelling illusion, I find, as I sit in a semi-trance watching "Going Tribal" and "What Not to Wear." Probably these shows were not intended to be watched in tandem, but that is how it happens for me (see above, in re not having patience). I'm struck by their similarity: both shows tap into the viewer's desire to voyeuristically observe people's most intimate details--the content's of one's closet, the minutiae of tribal daily life. This is a capitalist exchange that depends on the viewers' complicit, if unacknowledged, participation. In the preface to each installment of "Going Tribal," Bruce, the pseudo-anthropoligist explains that he pays the designated tribe an undisclosed amount of money for the privilege of filming them. Similarly, the fashion victim in "What Not to Wear" is given a $5000 Visa card in exchange for exposing the contents of her closet and her psyche to the catty barbs of the Stacey and Clinton. The participants get paid to provide the intimate content packaged for the viewers' eager consumption. Simple capitalist model, wouldn't you say?
But something more insidious is going on in both of these shows. For what pasty Britisher* Bruce promises the viewers is the ability to imagine themselves in his shoes as he "goes native." Just like Bruce, we too can consume the illusion of "being" a member of a tribe, replete with the initiation processes, drug use, nudity, and violent fighting. That these are all taboos in Western society, is, of course, not lost on the producers; they're banking on the exoticism of the forbidden to entrance their viewership. And so certain is it that taboo draws the viewers, rather than any authentic experience of "being" native, that the producers lose little sleep over the Bruce's sham participatory anthropology. It's not just that Bruce imagines he can "know" a community after coasting on the surface of their lives, playing at hunting and stick fighting and interjecting earnest asides to the camera. And, given Bruce's language ineptitude (just watching him butcher French as he attempted to communicate with the tribes in Western Africa whose first language was clearly not French made me want to clutch my head and moan), I have zero faith that he could possibly "know" anything about the people whose lives he purports to share. What is galling about this show, is the presumed "innocence" of the natives: that is, that they aren't intentionally and in full knowledge giving Bruce the "tourist's package," the bits and pieces of their lives that they know, thanks to more than a century of white men imposing themselves as "specialists" to "analyze" the content of their existence, are of interest to these white interlopers. But the producers will never acknowledge that, because that illusion is the most compelling one of all.
And it's the presumed innocence of the fashion victims on "What Not to Wear" that gets my goat too. It's not just that the show prescribes an arbitrary, inane, extremely narrow and completely insipid image of "correct" fashion (And though I'm not a long-time viewer, I'm willing to bet that most of the fashion "victims" are women, and, hence, this "correct" image is really just another way to confine a woman's preferred (personal, outsize, chosen, comfortable, sexy, colorful, loud, flexible, creative, whatever) style.). But what is infuriating is that the show presumes that the women dress the way they do because they don't know how to: for each time a fashion victim justifies her choice, for whatever fully rational reason she provides, she is dismissed as being damaged goods (she has deep-seated hang-ups) or just dumb (she's ignorant to what is truly fashionable). In other words, women choose not to look like Barbie because they don't know better; their choices are not rational, but derive from psychological problems or ignorance.
So what this capitalist model really looks like to me is: under the guise of empathy (I the viewer get to view the intimate details of another person's life and experience our similarity), what is being consumed is a free pass to Be Superior. Go Western Culture!

*I don't know for certain that Bruce is British. I am appallingly bad at identifying accents.

file under things best left unpublished

2006-01-31T22:47:00.000-08:00

But I can't resist. Sometimes ignorance deserves a public whipping.
A while back I worked for an Unnamed Principal Investigator. My job was to edit his turgid prose, but that turned out to be too painful for both of us, and I switched roles to become his office manager of sorts. It was not the worst job ever, but I definitely bear scars from a year spent reviewing epidemiological surveys. Nearly ten years have passed since I held that job, so it was an absolute surprise to hear that this very Principal Investigator had contacted my friend Office Manager at Famous Restaurant. He wanted to know whether he could secure forty reservations at said restaurant in order to photograph their meals to post on his diet analysis web-site. Actually, he specified, he was wondering whether he could get these forty meals at a discount, what with it being a bulk purchase, and whether it'd be ok if he brought his two daughters (one for whom he'd like the discounted "kid's meal price" since she doesn't eat much, and the other for whom he'd just like a chair and an extra plate, since she'd be eating off his plate).
I told my friend that I hoped she refused him on moral grounds; the people taking his surveys, the smokers and under-exercisers of the world, are not going to find matches of their meals on his web page of Forty Meals from a Famous Restaurant. Not to mention that this isn't exactly what the government has in mind when they award their research fellowships.

But it was my friend's sister who had the more appropriate response. Perhaps Principal Investigator would like to submit his request to San Quentin? Meals only cost $1.43 there, so he wouldn't need a bulk discount, and surely the inmates could whip up a kiddie seat in their workshop...

To blog is human

2006-01-25T21:51:00.000-08:00

I read in Harper's that a new blog is created every second. An incredible number, if you think about it: if my math is correct that works out to 31,536,000 new blogs a year. I have no idea how many blogs exist at the moment (each word I type represents an additional blog to that number). As of this very moment, that represents a mere fraction of the population of the United States (and I'm really uncertain of my math here, it's late, my contacts are sticky and I've had a glass of wine) but I think it's something like 1% of the current population. And as I'm a literature type, not a math type (though I loved Freakonomics), I cannot postulate how long it will be before every person in the United States has a blog. (How do you account for people's potential access to a computer, given the discrepancies of income, access and after factoring in the inflation rate?) But -- if one person per second creates a new blog (does this outpace the number of people dying of anything?), then it seems that it won't be long before blogging becomes as pervasive as talking. That fifth graders will create their own blog rather than outline one another on a stretch of butcher block paper, as I did back in the eighties, filling in the self-cavity with images of their personal interests and hobbies. And how will this impact language? Will textual representation become mundane? Will the confessional genre become so saturated that memoirs cede their status as publisher's choice?

Bike Friday throws down the glove

2006-01-21T16:47:00.000-08:00

My steel frame commuter bike from the 1970s has met its match: Bike Friday. Yesterday I saw a woman riding a Bike Friday in the East Bay hills. I do not know how she got up there, on those 12-inch wheels. Or, for that matter, how she'd navigate the 30 mph downhill. I am Duly Impressed.

culture or gender?

2006-01-20T17:43:00.000-08:00

More than a decade ago, I lived in Ukraine for a year. At the time, Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union; I lived in a Russified city replete with Soviet architecture, Soviet fashion and Soviet cynicism. It was a phenomenal year: I became very close with my Russian sister, travelled through Ukraine, Russia, Latvia and Lithuania, and ate more than my weight in colbasa. But what brings this year to mind today is a recent mini-series of public urination; for, while I lived in the Soviet Union, I became accustomed to the sight of men urinating in wide-open public. At the time, I found the practice astonishingly unclean. Somehow I thought that only happened in rural China, where the habits of blowing one's nose on the sidewalk or spitting were generally accepted, if not approved of, norms. Yet I came to realize that this was considered normal, if not savory, practice in the Soviet Union as well. In particular, women discussed it in terms of gender and politics: this is what Soviet men do in this godforsaken corner of the earth, where the government's indifference to people renders them into shameless animals. I began to understand the practice as one distinctly related to culture and history.

I am at a loss to explain public urination in my city. Oakland is not a godforsaken corner of the earth; while it has its share of ghettos and urban blight, much of the city is lovingly cared for. To wit, my neighborhood, cushioned between the city's lake and downtown, is full of lovingly cared for homes, their gardens and yards expressing in small ways the diversity of this city. So I did not expect to see, in the period of three days, three different men urinating in broad daylight on my street. Against the walls of private homes.

Is it gender or socio-econimics? Politics or culture? Contempt or brutishness? What compels, or invites, a man (For it is always men. I have never yet seen a woman squatting to relieve herself in public. In the woods, sure; but I submit this is a different issue.) to take a piss against someone's home?

coming soon to a freeway near you!

2006-01-16T20:19:00.000-08:00

The United States government has a long and proud history of legislating on issues of health and safety; the evidence of these laws make up the fabric of our day-to-day life: seat belts, nutrition standards, risks of alcohol. The government's involvement in issues of health surpass mere laws. Huge campaigns make their appearances, in newspaper or on television, promoting milk or beef, dictating the optimal diet, encouraging people to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day. And it is no secret that the government has a vested interest in these campaigns: government aid to United States farmers results in an enormous surplus of agricultural products, thus it behooves the government to encourage its citizens to buy, buy, buy.

But the government has also campaigned on other health issues, such as the prevention of cancer, diabetes and heart disease. The government's most recent involvement in huge health campaigns is fairly recognizable to anyone who drives. Childhood obesity, in any language, is not to be taken lightly.

What I want to know, is why hasn't there been a campaign to prevent prolapsed uteruses? This is a problem that impacts nearly half of the population; women who have had children, women undergoing menopause, women with chronically low levels of estrogen, overweight women are all at risk to develop a prolapsed uterus. Not just uncomfortable, this condition impacts a woman's overall health and mobility. And, not surprisingly, this condition has a very simple preventative exercise. Most women know this exercise by name, but few remember to do it on a regular basis.

I think it's time for a billboard campaign.

Prevent prolapsed uteruses. (uteri?)
Do your Kegels while you drive!

ode to oaktown

2006-01-12T17:50:00.000-08:00

My friend and I are meeting at Uptown, a new downtown place. I cannot help but think of its name in terms of New York, where distinctions between uptown and downtown are actually meaningful and the results of decades of race and class skirmishes. Not that Oakland lacks these skirmishes: race is possibly the most divisive aspect of this city, followed closely by drugs and gangs. Class seems to be somewhat less divisive, yet once you look beyond the surface of things, the divisions of money and class are everywhere evident.
By generous estimate, Oakland's Uptown is only about a block away from its downtown. It is perhaps easier to consider the place part of Oakland's downtown, given the acute necessity that downtown achieve critical mass. There is not much there, a dismal echo of Gertrude Stein's 'there's no there there,' and a stark visual reality once the working day ends and the streets empty out. Downtown Oakland can claim several restaurants and bars, quite a few of which opened in the last twelve months or so (Luka's, Uptown, Antojeria, B, and some that have been around for much longer--The Rex (which I just discovered used to be a theater in downtown Oakland), Radio, Ruby Room, Cafe Van Kleef). But compared to nearby as-it-were "destinations," in this food-and-commerce dense East Bay, downtown Oakland is practically a ghost town. Still wanting its elusive zeitgeist, something that will people the streets after the day-jobbers go home.
I'm pulling for this city, hoping against hope that it can become a vibrant urban space, where the disparate forces of art and commerce commingle with the unruly mess of humanity. But I, as are possibly many potential business owners and residents, am at a loss to explain how to bring this vision to Oakland.
Don't get me wrong: I adore Oakland, and am not complaining about a perceived 'lack.' But I want more for this city: I want her to become again 'the shining gem across the bay' that she was in the not-so-distant past.

nimby

2006-01-10T20:52:00.000-08:00

I've been watching a small drama unfold on my street. The local high schoolers had gotten very comfortable smoking out in an alley nearby, between a ... and a ... (names suppressed to protect the innocent). It is a skinny, dank, concrete path behind an overloaded dumpster. Not the most appealing place to get high, but I can understand their choice: it is steps away from the school building, allowing them to maximize their lunch hour high. I'm not entirely clear on Oakland's position towards drugs, but it seems to be one of blind permissiveness. The drug dealers on the corner greet me personally as I walk by, deals are made at all hours of the day, in broad daylight and in the middle of the street. Students and dealers alike vacillate between blatantly flaunting and stealthily concealing their commerce. Some students walk boldly down the center of the street, exchanging large bills and small packets, ostentatiously rolling joints and passing the joint around. The others sneak into the alley, post look-outs, and try to avoid the principal's surveillance by hopping fences and skulking through backyards.
Petty crime and violence, however, has been increasing, so the school and police have upped their surveillance. It did not take the kids long to abandon their alley; they now head a block or two up, with that hurried nonchalance of an addict heading towards the source.
My feeling is that kids will be kids; whether its drugs, petty crime or just being loud, they are reacting against authorities and systems that would prefer to keep them quiet and meekly obedient. Eventually one approaches this as a personal choice--either to live according to a civic code or not; in adolescence, I think, it appears less as a choice and more simply as imposed 'rules.'
I have nothing against drug use and feel that if it were legalized, then many of the real problems associated with drugs such as violence and poverty would diminish. What does give me pause is the lack of respect: why does disrespect for others nearly always accompany drug use? Couldn't they just get their high and not steal cars for joyrides, not commit random violent acts?

Shogun

2006-01-08T22:36:00.000-08:00

It's a funny thing to ride the Oakland hills on a beater bike. I don't know much about my Shogun, other than it's a Japanese bike and the eggplant color makes me think it's from the 70s. But I do know that it was the oldest bike in them thar hills today. Couple of raised eyebrows as I passed the lycra-clad on their Sevens, Cervelos and Calfees.
Uphill.
It's been raining a lot lately. So on the first fully sunny weekend after a spate of floods and downpours, I and the entire biking population of the bay area set out for a ride. Like most, I take Tunnel Road up to the hills; it's a nice, gentle climb, on a road that curves so graciously that it's fun going up or down. I knew that a mudslide had closed off most of the road during the week; but I also knew that it was walkable, from my inside source. So I wasn't too phased by the road-closed warnings from the bikers coming down the hill. Turns out They'd posted a live guard to keep bikes and people from walking on the footpath around the slide. There was no budging or bribing our gate-keeper, so I and another bike decided to kludge together an alternate route up to the top.
It was all downhill for a while, so bike guy peeled off onto a random uphill. I decided to keep going till I got to a road I recognized--which was just one more curve away. I knew I'd biked on Thornhill before, and knowing it'd get me somewhere, I decided to see where that was. On Thornhill, another nice, gradual up-slope, I passed what appeared to be a friendly neighborhood guy. And asked him whether I could get there (the top) from here. Yes, and he named a couple of streets and turns. But just as I was about to start off, he remembered a better route. Straight, then left, onto Thorndale, which is great, because there aren't any cars on it. You'll have to make another turn but it'll get you up there. Thanks, and away I go.
Turns out he was actually the friendly neighborhood sadist.
By 'straight,' he meant: straight up, as in up the 90-degree road, and then take a left. And he was absolutely right: there was not a single car on Thorndale. No small surprise, I discovered, as the road is practically impassably steep, with a blend of rut-gravel-mud terrain.
But it got me up there, gasping and cursing, and pretty glad I'd brought my thick-wheeled beater.

why not?

2006-01-04T22:29:00.000-08:00

I am thinking about joining the local Y. Part of this is my personal perversion, best illustrated by the fact that I don't understand most of the languages spoken in the sauna. Part of this is my more general proclivity towards working class chic--I grew up wearing clothing that arrived in enormous garbage bags on our porch from our cousins in Illinois, delivered annually by my mother's cousin who brought his 7th graders to the nation's capitol during spring break. Alternatively, and on special occasions, we shopped at Zayre's--a version of K-mart, though much lower on the totem pole, and, as far as I know, only on the East Coast. I googled Zayre's and found out that my recollection of the store precisely matches this anonymous person's childhood experience.
Basically, the store was filthy, the floors stretched for miles, and you knew it was low-fi because the colors, garish, did not exist in nature, and the lighting, florescent, felt like an on-coming seizure, and because there just wasn't much there--I recall expansive aisles, spaciously situated clothing racks (circular), and literally empty spanses of floor. I wore this clothing through middle school...
Compounding my perversity, I am drawn to the Y because it too belongs to a childhood pigeonhole in my memory-desk. We went to the Y many times a week--now that I am older, I recognize this for the transparent baby-sitting that it represented for my single mother of four. But then it was such a welcome break from the home--to be in the pool, moving through the water, doing flips, doing laps (my mother, bearing no small resemblance to a drill sergeant, had us doing 20 laps --that'd be 40 lengths-- by the age of 7 or 8). It was scummy, the floor always reeked of disinfectant, the locker rooms were tiny, permanently humid dank, poorly lit, mildewy spaces with lockers that didn't completely close and insufficient benches. It was always freezing as soon as we left the locker room, and we always had to wait an eternity for our mother to emerge, with her hair in rollers, from the locker room. This Y was completely bare bones: in addition to the pool and locker rooms, there was a great room, which one could rent for parties (imagine the streamer bedecked great room in local Baptist Churches--this was where most of our birthdays were celebrated after the age of 5, with the Rondald McDonald cake for my younger sister, and certainly later than middle-school, judging by the woven-lace barettes in my sister's hair). My mother, consummate bargainer, had managed to get a major discount (single mother, four kids) on our membership. We went there for years.
And yet, I find myself drawn to the Y, for it's unashamed messages posted in 2-foot hight letters on the wall (honesty, being the only slogan that I recall at the moment), for the generic basic features, and more specifically, for the diversity of people, ages, colors, classes and languages.
So nostalgia meets up with life ethos and I find myself, of all places, back in the world of my childhood.

mongols on parade

2006-01-02T22:50:00.000-08:00

Driving home along the lake, we notice a car stopped in the middle of the road. Both airbags have popped, and the right front tire is perpendicular to the wheel base. The driver is slouched low in the car, cell phone against ear, and I stereotype the driver as a woman.
We stop to make sure there are no injuries and ask if they need help. "Yeah," says the driver, who turns out to be male, "I'm all fucked up." We call 911 and try to figure out how his car got in this shape by itself in the middle of the road. No immediate signs of accident or cause, such as shards or another car, or a large, immobile object that could do such damage to his wheel. There's no getting much out of him, other than protestations that he's not a loser-guy, and requests that we not stereotype him as a dumb Chinese, because he's not Chinese, he's Mongolian. I am fascinated by Mongolia; it is a linguistic hybrid whose past is an intricate network of Empire seizures and overthrows. About a dozen languages are spoken in the country: in the north, Russian and Kazakh are spoken, in the South, Chinese and Mandarin; throughout the country Mongolian and various Turkic languages are spoken by about 90% of the population. But he is too drunk for me to ask him about his country; instead he takes a leak by the lake. My annoyance that he is in no shape to tell me about his country is compounded by the fact that it takes nearly an hour for the police to find us.

flooding the new year

2006-01-01T17:47:00.000-08:00

We're driving along the Embarcadero, on our way towards the Presidio. It has been raining for days--mudslides and flooding up north, sand bags bordering storefronts. As an aesthetic experience, I love rain. This is due to my more basic lust for water--any water. Lakes, ponds, oceans, swimming pools, baths: catching sight of a body of water, my immediate response is an overwhelming desire to be in it. So it is not a surprise that my reaction to the flooded sea walls along the Embarcadero was one of joy: the water has come to meet us! Slowly, we drove along the Embarcadero, watching the brown waves foam and slap into the buildings. My happiness at the water's nearness was somewhat irrational, as M., who had been concerned of being stuck in the flooding, pointed out to me later. Irrational, but accurate nonetheless.

mediterranean holiday

2005-12-21T14:46:00.000-08:00

It is warm and rainy today; across the way from my window is a mediterranean style apartment complex, with lemon trees, olive trees, red tile roofs, glimpses of the courtyard fountain through the trees. California winters are an odd mix of seasons and latitudes--fallen leaves, low-hanging clouds, crimson and amber on the oaks and maples, saturated greens on the citrus and cedars. And California lacks the gung-ho holiday spirit of the east coast--it is rare, the shop window or home with holiday decorations. This is right up my alley: I kind of loathe this season--mostly because of the rampant consumerism that defines the American version, but also because of the monopoly of Christmas over any other religious or spiritual or pagan or seasonal association to this time of year. Bring back the yule of pagan mythology!

new view

2005-11-20T09:44:00.000-08:00

Standing on tippy-toes at the highest point in the backyard I can just make out a dove-colored shadow--which I know to be on the other side of a bay, but of which bay, I could not say. I think it's south of here, enough of an intuition to send me in search of the box with the atlas. Looking at the map only shuttles me into reveries of possible day trips, and I look up from the atlas a full half hour later, still ignorant. And distracted enough to seriously consider scrapping work for a day trip...

old view

2005-11-11T13:41:00.000-08:00

Over the past two and a half years of living in the old victorian, I have endured a one-sided love affair with a boy-squirrel. He spends a lot of time in the enormous tree in front of my window, and I directly opposite him at my desk. Very shortly after setting up my study, I noticed him--although it is entirely possible that he noticed me first. His acrobatics first caught my eye--he would take a flying leap from the tree on the north side of the house to the tree in front of me, on the south side. To be honest, it was not his grace or athletic ability that caught my eye so much as the small earthquake of his landing on the branch in front of me. Doesn't matter--that I looked indentured me for life to his courtship.

Imagine a 6-inch tall animal imitating the chest beating of a lusty ape. Now imagine this happening for hours on end, every day, accompanied by intense hip-gyrations and a high-pitched, repeating 'chirrrr'p.' Poor lover-boy. I hope he does not miss me now that we're moving.

Hummingbirds were another distraction from my desk. I didn't know that hummingbirds had any truck with evergreens--yet there they were, hovering next to branches two-stories above ground, less than half a foot from my keyboard. They were an irresistible distraction, their aerodynamics shanghaied my attention and set my imagination on a destination-less journey. Sometimes, though, the trip was short and steep, to the sidewalk below where a hummingbird teased the gray cat with a game of hide and seek.

File under things I will miss.

good-bye to all this

2005-10-31T22:51:00.000-08:00

My favorite thing about the Portland apartment is the light. The space has a perfect layout--Southwestern exposure, enormous windows in each room. Often the cat and I follow the light throughout the day: in the kitchen under the sunlights in the early morning, into the dining room for the mid-morning light, to the study for the mid-day, and into the sun-room to catch the golden hour. Of course, it is often longer than an hour, and often not even golden: fuschia and pink predominate. The late afternoon light is the second most compelling reason to live in this state. Eight months on the East Coast this year helped me distill precisely what the distinction is: warm undertones. On the east, the afternoon light has blue and purple undertones; the west coast brings out the red and gold base. In the afternoon, the sunroom floods with golden pink shadows; buildings carry a salmon-colored five-o'clock shadow.

The other day, biking with my buddy, I made a tiny ode to the beauty of the afternoon light. He gave me a look, then said earnestly: I don't know what I'm supposed to say to that. I cracked up. S'ok. You can just say, Yeah.
Boys.

Men and Bikes

2005-09-02T20:37:00.000-07:00

We spent the day at the San Francisco Grand Prix. It is a fun day, minus a few major detractions. The first is that the Women's Race is scheduled for 7:30am. I'd like to be the kind of fan for whom this isn't an obstacle... But no problem, the second detraction solves that problem: the Women's Race is CANCELLED.

I attempt to capture a single rider (any one, will do; I'm a fan, but not fanatical enough to id the riders as they whiz by), but I realize that I am an inept photographer. For the best, really: nothing compares to the sensation of watching the cyclists climb Taylor Street. It would be a pity to turn squeeze them into two dimensions.

On the other hand, what a great shot of the race heavies!

sea creatures

2005-08-28T09:03:00.000-07:00

One of the most compelling reasons to succumb to the insane real estate of this state. Food.

milk sky

2005-08-17T10:57:00.000-07:00

This is home. Fog down to the knees. I am so happy to be out of the humidity that I briefly engage in some active fog adoration.

Sun on the Green

2005-08-16T15:17:00.000-07:00

Am momentarily distracted from working on my article. The sun has hit a green ball we got a while ago. We got it for the children of our visiting friends, but after one post-dinner game of soccer played among all the doorways of our apartment (6 interior), it has languished in neglect. The sun is doing spectacular things to it, and feeling somewhat like a Saint-Exupery creation, I attempt to capture its beauty.

Go West

2005-08-14T20:52:00.000-07:00

No small irony: tomorrow I leave Cambridge to return home. And only today I discover a glorious ride. This time I turn inland, heading west rather than for the coast. And I find myself rolling along empty roads, small narrow streets with names like "Shade Street" (and am very pleased that it does not undersell: over 90 degrees and humid, one is sensitive to such promises). I make a mistake at one point and find myself entering a military airstrip. The guards very kindly, and with no small alacrity, point me to the way out. My route is a kludge of a few local rides, and a few times I have to make it up to get from the end of one map to the beginning of another. One road proves to be stubbornly elusive; I ask at three gas stations, wave down a few motorists, but it is the beer-pushing baseball team that gives me the right directions and a few unsolicited huzzahs. People are bemused to see a lone woman cycling, and i can't figure out whether it's because I'm alone or whether it's because I lack all of the paraphernalia that typically identifies "real" cyclists: matching team-logo'd lycra, expensive new bike, mirrored shades and plastic shoes. Or maybe it's just the heat.

this is hull

2005-08-09T00:19:00.000-07:00

We biked to Hull today. It took a lot of cajoling on my part to convince my bike partner that we could do the whole trip. Not for the distance--one way is only 15 miles--but because we have to go through a lot of South Boston before reaching the more aesthetic coast. Warnings of dangerous neighborhoods dancing in her head. But I am insistent... and we pack our bikes with swim suits and a map and head through the city. It is not an ugly ride, mostly fascinating to see the varying shades of class so firmly defining each neighborhood we encounter.

At Quincy we head over to the coast and briefly engage in unfriendly chatter with a senior biker--he's mad at us for riding two abreast. We handily pass him, listening to his incensed breathing as he tries to catch up... Jokes on us, however, as my partner gets a flat shortly after, and we wander around a tiny coast-side town in search of a bike shop. (She swears, never before has she embarked on a trip without a spare.) We get to our hosts sometime in the afternoon; people are lounging on a floating dock, about 30 chickens have given themselves to the cause, and a sweet youth runs among the adults, reeling in all of the attention. The water is perfect; I fantasize about convincing my husband to give it all up for a house with a dock on the bay.

In the evening, we walk along the isthmus that appears at low tides to an island. We misjudge the time of the tides, and race against the rising water. The sun comes down behind us, intense reds streaked with shades of fuschia and peach. My east coast childhood tugs at me: memories of the warm Atlantic come flooding back. I dearly love the West Coast, but there are two yearnings it will never satisfy: thunderstorms and warm oceans.

chartreuse

2005-08-02T22:18:00.000-07:00

I am biking quite a bit, on my maroon bike. It is wonderful to get out of town, to spend an entire day meandering up and down the coast. I forgot my camera on my last ride, which is probably just as well, since I got roundly caught by a thunderstorm. I caught the wheel of an older gent, going by his silver sideburns. He sped along, pulling me with him, as we tried to out-run the storm. We failed, in our attempt, but it was a good race. Through the trees to my right, I caught a glimpse of purple heather and chartreuse--too quick, really, to take it all in. But the image remains--the dappled light emerging from behind storm clouds, filtering through the trees lining the banks of the river and catching the bright oil-slick green of the moss against the purple heather. Fabulous.

park swings

2005-07-30T17:36:00.000-07:00

Who knew? Swing dancing in public. I am slightly shocked to see exuberance in public. So much of my experience in Boston has been about prohibition (locked doors and minds...) that presents a stark contrast to the permissiveness of the west coast. So I stop, balanced on my bike, to take in the dancers. A motley, if enthusiastic, crew. Am thoroughly charmed by the ghetto blaster valiantly piping out music from the 30s.

Rockport

2005-07-28T21:02:00.000-07:00

I am here with my husband, who has come for a visit. It is hot and muggy, and we have already hit all of the iced coffee slinging cafes. We tried to swim--on a small semi-circle of sand that stood for a beach. No breeze, no waves, just endless toddlers carrying their water-logged diapers like valiant sailors. We try to read, balanced on the hotel towel, but the damp sand below and the still air send us back to the car to find a better beach.

Our search introduces us to a particularly East-Coastian feature of beaches: fees. Our Californian sensibilities reel from one-two punch of parking and entry ($50 for four hours! $20 to step on the sand!). Of course, the tony neighborhoods provide stimulating visuals and cat-and-the-canary responses. Of course, I wouldn't mind living in a mansion on the cliffs overlooking a private beach... and, certainly, such largesse exists on the West Coast, too. But we cannot help but think of the hundreds of miles of free public beaches in California alone.

The first time, I biked up here on my commuter bike, loaded down with books. It was a nice ride, despite the shoulder pain from my haphazard book-bag (spawned a resolution to buy an actual commuter's bag asap). Stopped for half an hour at a drawbridge, I had an interesting conversation with the cyclist next to me--a boat captain for hire. What a life that would be! I asked him whether his clients shared their food and wine with him. Ah, that'd be a no.

public irony

2005-07-26T11:38:00.000-07:00

Am unduly charmed by the incongruity of the public alley and private solarium. Also must firmly put my covetousness in check: verdigris and windows are a deadly combination for me.

Chocolate Factory

2005-07-20T21:55:00.000-07:00

Quite often, I walk between home and the college along Main street. The first time I did this, I was on the phone talking with my mother. It was hot (natch), and humid, and I was walking slowly through building shadows in a futile attempt to not completely soak my dress in sweat. In the midst of my mother's volubility, the smell of tootsie rolls yanked me into a confused olfactory hallucination--a vivid memory of the chocolate river in Charlie and the Chocolate factory, from the original movie.

I was bemused, when I refocused on the real world, to see only a group of men in shirtsleeves, smoking on the steps of a brick building. Clearly not the oompah loompahs. Nonetheless, as I walk by this building nearly every day, I am briefly enveloped in gently chocolate, sometimes chocolate mint, clouds.

At night, the building is equally entrancing--its old factory windows softly looming in the night. Generally, I phoned home or my mother on my walks, and it was with a twinge of regret that I walked past this building always in the middle of a conversation, rarely in the midst of a reverie.

Roxbury

2005-07-15T21:49:00.000-07:00

This is my second trip to Roxbury, where I have come to pick up my bike from the good people at Bikes not Bombs. They refurbish bikes, and in the hour plus that I spent here three weeks ago picking out the pieces of my bike-to-be, I witnessed several good-intentioned, kid-toting mothers dropping off rusty and unused city bikes. It's an interesting business--the bike donors must pay $5 to donate the bike, which Bikes not Bombs resells for, at minimum, 57 times as much. Local kids stop by to borrow tools, handily making street bikes out of former suburban health goals. I am amused to overhear some local kid describing the bike he's fixing--"no, man, I didn't steal it. It was there when I went into school, and still there when I came back. It was nobody else's."

I've never owned a refurbished bike, but none of that matters: as soon as I step on the petals, I am filled with elation. Even though it's about to rain and nearly dark, I cannot resist a quick ride. I bike back from Roxbury to the Charles, along the way discovering the quirky pattern of Boston bike paths--which so eerily resemble sidewalks, that I and not a few pedestrians stumble over negotiations and confusions. Along the river, I break two spokes; the root systems have turned the path into a mountain biking experience. Dodging roller-bladers, joggers, strollers and roots: this is the last time I ride along the river.

Free!

2005-07-14T08:47:00.000-07:00

This summer institute at Harvard marks, at minimum (I may have repressed some), the 6th institution of higher learning that I have attended. And my experiences have varied--from community colleges to state universities, national institutes and private colleges. Harvard isn't the first private college I have attended, but it is the most, ahem, privileged.

My favorite indication of this I discovered in the women's bathrooms. Lo, and behold, the tampons are Free! Administration figures it's investing a lot in their co-eds' education--heaven forfend a few forgotten quarters bring it all to a socially catastrophic end.

(nb: This bathroom was in the law building... I should have compared other departments--like the humanities or hard sciences--to see whether their future careers were as considerately insured. However, when I returned home, I discovered the exact feature in the bathrooms at my husband's work-place. Who knew the corporate world was so generous to their female employees? And why haven't state universities picked up on this habit?)

this is not self serve

2005-07-09T19:11:00.000-07:00

I went to the market today; I could have walked, but decided to take public transit instead. This was not the wisest choice, as the green line subway has been replaced by a shuttle bus. Kind of defeats the purpose.

It is funny to compare markets in different cities: Northern California with its pristine markets and beautiful, overpriced produce; Kharkiv (when I knew it) with aisle and aisles of vendor selling everything--from fresh meat, to dried fruit and nuts, to fresh vegetables and fruit, to even, one day, kittens; Chinon with two well-behaved aisles, the requisite produce outshined by the olives, pates, sausages, cheeses, pastries and paella; Paris markets ten times as large as Chinon's respectable offering...

And then, there's Boston's Haymarket.

"Don't touch. This isn't self-service," grumble the vendors. This is a bit jarring, and it seems selfish on the part of the vendors: without the sensory and tactile experience of the market, what is the point?

And the produce, unlike the chichi markets in California, isn't organic. Instead, it comes from large area producers who sell on market what didn't get bought up by local grocery stores.

On the other hand, there are interesting things to be found: gooseberries, true vine-ripened tomatoes, and unexpectedly, fennel. Much less corn, summer squash, and basil, but plums and apricots by the dozen for a dollar, and an unrecognizable item, a kneopka.

The theme of the day, was trash... cartons outnumbered the produce displays, bad produce flew through the air behind the stalls, landing in graceful formations against the brick.

searching for hills

2005-07-06T22:54:00.000-07:00

I'm wandering around my neighborhood in search of hills. Instead of hills, I find the other side of the tracks at the end of my block. My neighborhood is very working class, and as it turns out, very international.

Across the street is a small bar with, hardly needs to be said, bud on tap. I can follow the tracks to Somerville, which, it turns out, is less than five minutes by foot from my place.

And there I discover even more international flair, lawyers consorting with Portuguese,

and fraternity among the Chinese, Portuguese and Brazilian.

You'll have to imagine the best find on Somerville Avenue, because my request to take a picture was refused. Picture a storefront, with big picture windows and linoleum floors, entirely filled, as if it were a barn for hay, of sacks of rice. Big sacks of rice--as large as the biggest bag of dogfood. And three young Latinos, like farmhands, lazing about on them.