“she speaks like a woman, but her tone is so young”

sunday songs: for emma, forever ago, bon iver;  sex with ducks, garfunkel and oates (just trust me on this one); sweet darling, she and him; amnesia, britney spears (not to mocked or underestimated); i’ve been tired, the pixies; down by the water, the decemberists; , the killers; summer skin, death cab for cutie, rose for the lady, folded light.

It’s a night of the week, which means there’s a rerun of Teen Mom on. Things are pretty uneven this season in terms of disasters and repercussions. If you don’t watch, in summation, it looks like this: Leah has twins, one of whom has a yet to be determined spinal issue (although she did just graduate high school). Jenelle signed temporary custody to her mom, after a lot of violence and screaming and false starts. Chelsea’s dad is paying her rent while she finishes high school and lives with her seriously adorable child and best friend,and Kailyn is living in a pretty manipulative situationwith her ex-boyfriend/child’s father and his family.

Every time I watch this show, I think basically the same things: how poverty is so obviously exacerbating certain situations, how much I wish things were different for all of these girls, how much potential has been lost, all the things that they can never get back. (There are likely two blog posts here-one about the situation of these teen moms, which I’m about to get to, and another about the idea that people who are pro choice just love abortion so much that they want everyone to have them, no matter what. I’ll write that one soon.)

One of the more notable moments in this episode is Chelsea considering getting back together with her ex boyfriend, Adam, who, when we last met him, emotionally abusing and manipulating her. While he wanted their daughter Aubree to take his name on her birth certificate, Chelsea changed her name after he sent her a text calling Aubree a mistake. He wants back in now, claiming that he’s done screwing around and wants to be Aubree’s father. I’m skeptical, since it seems to be a lot of posturing about being a man and not wanting another guy to come and take away his job. I really, really want Chelsea to not fall for this (because I tend to overempathize with people on television), not just because it’s probably going to go badly, but because I’m tired of this “two biological parents-one of whom sucks- are better than one person who loves a kid” trope.

To be clear-I’m not glamorizing single parent-ness. Of course, it’s easier to have more than one person raising a child, but family planning-the literal sort, being able to plan if you have a family and whom you have it with-is privilege, and therefore, not everyone has it. In a lot of the Teen Mom scenarios, the emphasis seems to be on making it work no matter what, because that’s what people who have a baby together have to do, and also on having a traditional family.

There’s some psychology at work here, which I can’t fully appreciate because I’m not a teen mom. It’s not hard to understand why someone would not want to parent alone, but for me, it seems like a particularly creepy agenda: the ideal family is a man and woman, both of whom contributed genetic material. I hope that at some point soon, the message manages to get to them that this is only one version of a family, but in the meantime, it’s not hard to see that this is mostly about survival, about piecing together a life that looks hideously different than what was ever imagined.

“if I believe that everything that everything is just fine”

saturday songs: train tracks at dawn, folded light; the debt collector, ben lee; don’t carry it all, the decemberists; the ocean, tegan and sara; how do you get high, the weepies; before the morning, steve damstra; cross you from my mind, nate borofsky

I keep trying to do things and then getting distracted, it feels impossible to concentrate on anything. I took a walk, which is like medicine for me, but still, the fictional loved ones seem very far away. Some days, they make perfect sense, and then there are days like today, when I feel like I’m just gluing my fingers together.

In other news, I wrote a small post last night for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal’s Oy Gay blog about gender presentation and the assumption of sexuality. You can read it here. There is a lot more to say on the subject, including the way that we use stereotypes steeped in sexism and homophobia to create fear and distract people from working for justice and from being able to live lives of integrity, joy and safety.

“if you can’t remember a better time, you can have mine”

Monday songs: Comfort, Deb Talan; I Don’t Wanna Talk About It, Indigo Girls; Mercy House, The Nields; I Love, I Love, Dar Williams; Dream Cafe, Greg Brown; Saddest Sound, Lucy Wainwright Roche.

I breached the door of my apartment for the first time in three days. (FYI, it’s super cold outside, and not just for those of us who have recently returned from the Middle East.) I’m currently learning the hard way that it’s challenging to type with gloves on. I am a public service announcement today, apparently.

The Barnes and Noble near Lincoln Center is gone. It was gone before I left for Israel, but now it’s officially a shell of its former self. It’s sad even though it was a Barnes and Noble, because it was part of a small and lovely routine I had once (buy movie ticket well before the movie, go down the street, spin through new fiction, visit old fiction, select pile of books I will never buy, sit down with them until it’s time to leave again.)

Mondays are the worst. Thursdays aren’t great, but Mondays are particular hard, because they bring with them the post weekend panic attack, which is exacerbated by my every day panic attack, leading me to realize once again that I want out of this moment in life. I’m so tired of the person that I am,which is someone in perpetual survival mode, someone incapable of or unwillingly to imagine that I’ll ever be strong or hopeful or at least not terrified again. In some ways, it’s like being in love with someone who is not in love with you, far after the point of realization or break up. There comes a moment when you are  so sick of feeling the way that you feel that you just propel yourself out of it. I haven’t been in love a lot in the conventional sense, but I have been scared, and I hope the prescription is also applicable here.

Also, if you just got back from being in Israel with me and are now following this blog, welcome to my attempt to shift the paradigm.

January 20, 2011, Gan Meir, Tel Aviv

Caffe Dante in New York-3

In front of the big window, they’re digging a pit in the street,
The shame of the earth is revealed in the open,
Like a drunkard, with torn clothes, dirty.
A surveyor puts his binoculars
On her thin legs and measures straight lines
Through everything, as through an empty desert.
And a young woman at a nearby table
Said to another woman: “I got a small part
In a new play: to enter the room,
Pass through it and exit the other side.”
She said this and got up to go.

Stay here, stay here near me.
Stay at least until one prophecy is fulfilled.
But she left, and I stayed. Half the cake
On my plate and half inside me.
The spoon fell on the floor.

Sometimes a man bends to pick up something
That fell out of his hand, when he gets up,
The world has changed.

Yehuda Amichai

“she likes her coffee the way she likes her kisses: hot, sweet and strong.”

lovely: “ideas are bulletproof.” being complimented on my Hebrew handwriting by an Israeli. struggle. “you keep leaving parts of yourself all over Israel.” crying over hatikvah every single time. turtles eating cucumbers with their turtle hands and turtle tongues. being in the sun. re: bumblebees: “are they fuzzy?”  ”they are fuzzy.” loveat. giant orange cat in Ein Gedi. sunrise over Jerusalem. black shapes in the Negev that are us. “not the tank will win, but the human being.” Maale film school. surprise phone call from E. the smell just now in the Carmel shuk. an entire bus of 40 people dissolving into uncontrollable laughter. the way it feels when it’s really working. recognizing the woman who works in this cafe from when i came here every single day six months ago. her hair is short now. “this is not a normal winter day.”

go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back

lovely: “Jerusalem-ites, we’re a little twisted.” sheep running in Beit She-an. the curious. tmol shilshom. people who take notes during lectures. what feels familiar. surprise conversations. little kids wearing tefillin. unexpected chills. rallying. “is sarcast a word?” friends in this city. having so much to give them, and knowing it.

now to break (yehuda amichai)

Now to Break

The words between us

Into sharp slivers:

“I can not ever live without you,”

And thrust them one by one

in the other’s heart:

I

Can

Not

Live,

Ever,

Without you.

Live.

Not.

“no, no. don’t save. it’s a sin.” (coffee shop owner to a customer)

lovely: mount meron. my internal alarm. corny jokes on the bus. cats that are good at being cats. truly weird tiny cafe in a Tzfat alleyway with excellent coffee. brilliant green grass. my readers. a fellow perfectionist. how the fictional loved ones follow me everywhere. being the good kind of  surprised, for a change.

this time is not like the others.

lovely: seeing rain in Israel for the first time ever. outstanding people meeting me at the airport.  the tree i saw today in the Golan. coffee. smart questions. first cat sighting of trip. surprise view in Tel Dan through very tall willows to the valley below. the verb project. milk in a bag. finishing a journal and starting a new one here. our amazing tour guide. throwing proverbial darts and finding out that one stuck. sleep. the way things manage to be familiar and new at the same time.

“a presumption that once our eyes watered” (tom stoppard)

the betty bakery, smith street, brooklyn

My sinuses are a bunch of jerks who see to it that I have a limited window of clarity each day, and I have yet to focus this attention in any remotely productive way. Everything feels insurmountable, even though I really just have a head cold, which makes me think about the fallibility of my body in the future, of course, because I’m not on such an even keel.

I’m leaving for Israel tomorrow, technically, since right now it’s midnight ish on Saturday. The other night, I said to S that going to Israel while feeling like you’re on the outs with Judaism is like trying to break up with someone while at the same time having sex with them and telling them you love them.

Like I said before, I seriously need this trip, in all its frenetic energy, to distract me, to shift my brain, to do something to jog things in a different direction. I keep thinking about the places in Israel that I miss all the time, the familiar and the scary and the dysfunctional and the strange and the mysteriously comforting, and again what it means to see them through the eyes of someone who is there for the first time. I wonder if it’s possible to think differently about all those places, to see them as just buildings, or just history, as opposed to something so existential, so much of a part of me. I think it’s often hard for me to process Israel in any sensible way, because it’s the first place I ever traveled to, the first time I decided I wanted something more than I was afraid of it.

Again, I am renting out my brain, separating from the part of myself that just wants to keep creating , and about to spent ten days with the part that cares about other things. It’s so strange and lovely and disarming that they can all exist together in the same person.

(As usual, I have delusions of blogging  the trip, but I also really like sleep, which is a precious commodity during the adventure. The best I’ll probably be able to do is check my email.)