Giving it up

This past month has been like a misplaced lent. I gave up gluten and dairy, followed by alcohol, followed by caffeine, followed by candy, followed by sleeping late, followed by... well, anyway. It's like a reverse If You Give a Mouse a Cookie scenario. It's the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie of the masochist set.

So what has all this deprivation done for me? Friends and strangers alike— especially and most understandably at work— look at me askance when they find out all the things that I am not allowing myself. "What's the point?" they ask. "Why would you even get up in the morning?"

I suppose that's a good question. I guess my take on it is, if you're getting up in the morning for gluten and dairy and caffeine and alcohol and anyone but yourself, you've got a problem.

I've been biking around a lot recently. Almost every day I ride past a memorial on the corner of H--- Ave. to a girl who died there in a biking accident recently. A month before that, a young man was killed in a bike accident farther downtown. Yesterday, as I rode down M--- Ave. to my night class, the whole street was blocked off, and there were fire trucks and a mangled bike and a crowd of curious onlookers. All I had to see was the bicycle and the impression of a body half covered by a paramedic blanket to know that I didn't need to see any more. I got off and walked my bike on the sidewalk for awhile, whispering Hail Marys like a crazy person according to my old flashing siren reflex. The boy on the fixed gear bike that I had been racing since the square rolled past me, helmetless, with a look of what I could only interpret as pity. He was right. I'm a wuss.


Maybe I'm giving so much up because I have been surrounded by death lately, and if you practice giving up the little things it makes the big ones easier. Or maybe I just want to look good in a bathing suit. For my next trick, I give up thinking too much.

Bad Babysitter and the Alien Vegetable

During work yesterday, a friend of mine currently living in Philadelphia left me a voice mail message. "Nora!" it said. "I am working at a coffeeshop in Philly, and a girl I work with says she used to babysit you!"

...Now, this kind of thing is not unusual for me. There are always strange B-list connections like this showing up in my life. In high school, my close friend Kate's ex- girlfriend went to school half a state away with an acquaintance of mine, a connection that the two of them somehow worked out and then relayed the information back to me. When I came to college, my theatre camp best friend's middle school best friend came to Emerson too. Sophomore year, it turned out that I moved into this girl's former dorm room... and a few days after we bonded over shared living space, said middle school best friend of my theatre camp best friend ended up running into an early high school friend of mine from back home, who was visiting Boston for the weekend— and they somehow figured out the connection... and then relayed the information back to me. Absurd, yes? Get the idea?

So it wasn't the fact that one of my ex-babysitters had found her way to the same coffee shop in Philly where my ex/friend happened to be working that surprised me— it was the fact that this woman suddenly existed again outside of her role as The Bad Babysitter in my childhood newsreel. Lynn was one of a very few babysitters who made a lasting impression on me, and might be responsible for many of my misguided notions about what it means to be a grown-up. All or most of the speeding down dirt roads with windows open that I did with boyfriends in later years was done because of her, and the way she made climbing down her mother's trellis after 9PM look glamorous. Looking back, she was young— 14, 16 at most—but from my upstairs window (she lived next door) the laughter that rolled away with the crunch of tires on gravel was exactly what I wanted out of adulthood.

When she came over, she terrified me. She spent the whole time lying upside-down on the sofa, watching MTV and talking on the phone about things she would hiss at me not to hear. I think there was a boy once or twice. One time she told me that my food was made of dog poop, and then yelled at me when I wouldn't eat it. I ratted on her to my parents every time, who I think gave her a talking-to so the next time she came over we painted T-shirts and she talked with me straight about not being like her when I grew up. I listened, but those illicit still-frames of Madonna's bustier, the boy on the couch, and the long legs of the babysitter swinging for footholds as she climbed out her window were filed away somewhere to make me always slightly dissatisfied with my safe choices. I wanted crop tops and cigarettes and laughter like car exhaust trailing behind me when I went out after twilight in the summer. I was four years old and I fell asleep with the window open.

In the morning, I owned the world again. The dewy hours before 8AM were my familiar territory, and I could go next door to where Lynn's mother had her garden and pull up the Kohlrabi she grew for me on the back stretch by the nature preserve. Who knows why I ate that stuff— I was a picky kid who wouldn't eat sandwiches, yet couldn't get enough of the green alien pod things that Carla coaxed out of her raised beds. My favorite foods then were kohlrabi and fried calamari— alien vegetable and fried squid, who knows. I would pull one of the bulbs up and rinse it off at the garden hose before setting down to snap off the stalks and eat it over by where the tree surgeon had illegally buried the petrified trunks in our yard. I crunched the mild sweetness of the vegetable meat and poked at the petrified trees with bamboo twigs until they frayed or bent limp in my hand. I waved to Carla on her knees in the dirt with the big holey straw hat that scattered speckles of light across her shaded face. In the morning it was easy to be a good girl.

I Am the Cake of Life?

A customer walked into Finale this afternoon to a friendly but intense (for a bakery) debate between myself and my metalhead coworker about spiritual beliefs. It had started (harmlessly enough) with me explaining my long list of excellent reasons why reciepts should be handed to the customer or immediately discarded upon completion of a transaction. Being the friendly and accepting person that I am, however, I reassured Co-worker that he was not obligated to follow my procedure, it was merely a suggestion to improve our effectiveness and quality of service.
MH: "That's like saying it's okay not to believe in God, but if you don't you're going to hell."
NM: "Well, not really."
MH: "It's exactly the same!"
NM: "Do you believe in God?"
MH: "No!"
NM: "Admirable. Most people these days hedge their bets with agnosticism."
MH: "Not me!"
NM: "What gets you through your day, then?
MH: ::perplexed look::
NM: What's the point? Why bother?"
MH: "The point is... to be here, I guess."
NM: "To be here and enjoy yourself, or be here and help others?"
MH: "Um...."

CUSTOMER: ::cough cough::

NM: How may I help you, sir?
C: I'll have a dark chocolate decadence to go, please.
NM: Would you like an existential dilemma with that?

Anyway, long bike rides and work hours apparently strengthen the idealist in me. This passage I found by Rilke sums up the hamster wheel of questions that my mind has been running on this week rather well.

"We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God. But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry, scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."
- Rainer Maria Rilke