seriously.

I’m at the JStreet conference with a press pass. It has an orange lanyard and my name and Jewschool on it. So far the press pass means: the press room, where I’m leaving my stuff and where there’s free caffeine. the press table in the ballroom, where there are power strips and people are sitting with their computers looking busy and important. It also means people say, “oh, you have a press pass.”

Having the press pass means I also have to take myself seriously, which is pretty hard. This year’s conference is already very different from last year’s, when I felt like I had a specific purpose-being on a panel for JStreet U. It’s another reminder of how much has changed and how much flux my whole identity is still in-my intention at a conference is usually to be a sponge, learn as much as I can, and process it. These days I need more than that. I need more of everything.

This is the first full day of the conference, and already I’m stewing over the psyche of the American Jewish community and how there is this great possibility that people are expecting JStreet to be all things-a therapist, a band-aid, a savior-in the way that to a certain degree, we who voted for Obama expect him to fix everything, so scarred have we been by George Bush’s presidency and its seemingly never ending fallout.

Many feminist moments in a short period of time, which is heartening. Yesterday, I was feeling super messed up about the fact that I was missing the Planned Parenthood rally to be here, and so the talk here about women at the center of the peace movement is restorative. It’s excellent to see feminism in such a global context, being exercised and applied and relevant and to be reminded that everything is interconnected.

year 13

On a Friday morning during my sophomore year of college, I checked my voice mail from the library. On the machine, there was a nurse’s voice. Her name was Robin. “You should get here as soon as possible,” she said. I had spent the entire previous night and that morning thinking, that in spite of what was clear, my mother was not going to die this week. It was buying me a little time, in some way that in retrospect, I still don’t understand.

My mother died at 2.30 am on February 22, 1998. I still remember waking up in the bed in my friend’s parent’s guest room to the phone call, solidifying my fear of the sound of ringing forever. I listened to my aunt’s voice deliver the news, and hung up. I thought, my mother is dead. And then, somehow,  I went back to sleep. I may or may not have woken up, and it’s 13 years later.

For the last  nine or so months,  I’ve been shuffling my life like cards, rearranging some things,  taking others  out, pushing some off until later.  I know my mother  did the same thing. On the loveseat in her bedroom were piles of new clothes, still in their store wrappers, with the tags on, waiting to be worn on a yet to be determined occasion.  Those clothes are all gone now, yet, of all the things we went through together, that pile remains outstanding in my memory.

My mother did what everyone does eventually-she ran out of time. By the time she died, she had been sick on and off for over a decade, longer than that if you count the first time she had cancer in her teens. Her life was stained by struggle-divorce, financial stress, mental illness, a daughter who turned out to be nothing like what she had imagined.  For her, there was no space, no break from the terrifying reality of illness and fear. It occupied her, it literally lived inside her, and it seemed, from my vantage point, that every moment was full of the distraction brought on by anxiety and panic and punishment.

So on the bar mitzvah of her death, I’m thinking about my own joy-how I have deprived myself of it, assuming that there will be time to feel it later.  I forget that every second of the day, in spite of how scared I am, is still a second that I’m alive, and a moment closer to a time when I won’t be. It feels like a cliche, learning from my dead mother to let joy in , but when  it’s easy for me to forget what I have taught myself about happiness and self preservation, there it is-seemingly, at the center of  everything.

This is Why We Can Never Have Nice Things

(An old piece, but I might be famous for it. I think about it often at this time of year.)

This is Why We Can Never Have Nice Things

At age eleven, I murder the coffee table. I gouge with every available implement: thumbtacks, Lefty scissors, the plastic hand of my Barbie accomplice (who really should have known better). It is a slow death. In the end, there is nowhere to hide the body. When I am finally caught, the pads of my fingers fill the cracks of my homemade disaster. It is the stupidest lie I have ever told.

When my mother is dying, her skin sucking her bones like tentacles, we discuss important details: her curio cabinet with tiny vases and fragile teacups; clothes in her closet still in their store wrappers. She’s saving them for a special occasion; the discovery of a new planet, the victory of a coup in a small foreign country.

The invitation comes at two thirty in the morning. “Would you like to come and see the body?” I am just awake. In the tangled blur of consciousness, there is a woman plucking a perfect nectarine from a blue crystal bowl with slim and beckoning fingers. The most beautiful part is her hands reaching.

Published in Quick Fiction, Issue 6, October 2004

“i had a lot of important thoughts about you tonight.”

saturday songs: on a freezing chicago street, margo and the nuclear so and so’s; when sal’s burned down, dar williams; no better, the garden verge; reading you, we’re about 9; photobooth, death cab for cutie; listen, sister, don’t date a hipster, menage a twang; skinny love, bon iver;  horse and cart, angus and julia stone.

Writing sex scenes in public is awkward. I’m constantly worried that someone I don’t know is going to see what I’m doing, and  that concerns me, although it probably shouldn’t. The point is that someone who isn’t me is going to be reading them, eventually.

The grammar of these scenes is an intense project in itself. I’ve spent what seems like an inordinate amount of time  contemplating things that  I don’t normally pay so much attention to until the final stage of editing, like tenses. There’s a lot of energy going in to making it witty and funny and sexy and genuine, but I’m constantly worried that it’s all going to turn into a trashy romance novel instead of the literary representation of the adventures of two neurotic people in love.

I’m figuring out, slowly, that all this late night rambunctious typing and musical schizophrenia (hipster? folk? Britney Spears?) is necessary-to give me a break from my regular thoughts (scary and askew), and allow in something unmitigatedly joyful.

I’ve been having a crisis about time spent, how slow everything seems, how long and stretchy and powerless and chaotic and  random. JF sent me an essay/advice column from the Rumpus (go there now and read everything), in which the writer tells her 20 something self what she now knows as a 40 something. On one hand, I am so tired, constantly, relentlessly. And on the other, there is this.

“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.”

the chair

I went to Israel without a camera this time, which for the most part, I didn’t regret (although now the absence of a camera is starting to impact my mental health a tad), until I saw this chair in the flea market in Jaffa. I hijacked B’s camera to take this picture.

“fifteen kids in the backyard drinking wine”

So, it seems, at least to me, like I dropped off the face of the blogging earth to cat sit, wander, drink coffee at the Zabar’s counter, listen to music (Sam Phillips, Angus and Julia Stone, Folded Light, Tilly and the Wall, the new Decemberists album that I physically cannot turn off or shuffle past), and write a lot of fiction in nothing that resembles a working order.

I didn’t plan this, but  I didn’t do anything to stop it, I just let myself  be kidnapped by imaginary friends. I feel okay about it, even though it sounds crazy, and even though it’s distracted me from many other things and my brain feels cluttered and restless, still.

Last night, after excellent adventuring with JF (pudding, dumplings, looking at New Jersey-surprisingly beautiful, ), I came home and made a series of small cards stamped with the names of my characters. I might use them like puzzle pieces, to see how things can fit together, or to see the permutations I’ve created or can create, or I might just line them up against the bottom of my computer screen because they make everything feel more beautiful and comforting.

A casualty of this temporary insanity is that I basically quit following certain crucial pieces of news. I was paying attention to Egypt, the attempt to redefine rape, and various other horrifying/revolutionary events, but at some point, looking at the news made me so tired that I just couldn’t handle it. It’s likely a reminder that a person can only maintain a particular level of stress for so long before it’s either check out for a little while or get eaten alive.

In February, everything always seems more peculiar. Maybe it’s the winter, the lack of light, ennui, the fact that it’s the month that my mother died (it always comes back to that somehow,and I’m sick of it), but I’m wanting  to do something new, something impossible and impractical. I spent several hours on Saturday with the great LA, whose words about  living a creative life always push me to open myself more fully and take my work more seriously. This time, she brought me Flannery O’Connor, about whom I’m left thinking: ”People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them.”