resolution
i will not stalk boys on the internets
i will not stalk boys on the internets
i will not stalk boys on the internets
i will not stalk boys on the internets
Day 20 – Charlotte, NC
In keeping with the recent resurgence of creativity regarding the road trip, I thought I’d post some of what I wrote. Hope you enjoy.
Charlotte, North Carolina, on August 19th, 2007, was over 100 degrees. There are many big buildings and no redeeming qualities, in terms of my interests, anyways. The city is hot, and sterile, with many bankers wearing many suits; there is so little creativity in this revolving dance we do for the dollar, now is there?
Later, when I was in New York City, I talked to my cousin who said that when he was working in Charlotte for an investment firm he often worked 20 hour days, including weekends. This I do not understand.
Annie Dillard writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,
Self-consciousness is the curse of the city and all that sophistication implies. It is the glimpse of oneself in a storefront window, the unbidden awareness of reactions on the faces of other people – the novelist’s world, not the poet’s. I’ve lived there. I remember what the city has to offer: human companionship, major-league baseball, and a clatter of quickening stimulus like a rush from strong drugs that leaves you drained. I remember how you bide your time in the city, and think, if you stop to think, “next year…I’ll start living; next year…I’ll start my life.”
I know this feeling. This feeling is the conversation in your head when you know you are self-medicating, when you know that the weed or the booze or the sex or the food will not, ultimately, satisfy, and whatever you are running from inside your heart will kill you unless you let it save you.
I get this feeling in the city. I get this feeling when I compulsively eat cookie dough or cake. It is a feeling analogous to self-hatred, it is a pervasive restlessness, it is resentment with life as it is. Often times, we have this “next year, next month feeling” in August, or March, when we realize that our New Year’s resolutions to slim down the thighs or the stomach did not work and we resign ourselves, again, to next January.
Charlotte, NC was also the embarkation of a solo journey. Tiffany was on a plane back home, Kevin on a train, and I was waiting around in the Southern heat for a friend to call me back so I would know if I had a place to stay that night.
I cooked a pot of soup on my Greatland burner in the middle of a parking lot across from UNC Charlotte. I had the butt of bread with the last of the spinach and mustard. I finished off the soy milk sitting by my cooler. At the coffee shop 50 yards away were a group of men sitting in a circle, talking, probably about the Bible, and one of them kept staring at me. I hope he was impressed, or intrigued. I know I would be if I saw a blond tan girl in a maroon dress cooking on a camping stove in a parking lot.
There were two ladies sitting behind me at the coffee shop, both African –American, one overweight, the other in a business suit who said “I study Script ure too much” and “this is my fourth time being engaged.” Damn.
I bummed a cigarette from a twenty something with a wide brim hat and goatee. We talked for a while. He wasn’t very interesting. I don’t smoke. There was nothing else to do.
While waiting for my friend to get off work, I decided to call North Carolinian farms in the WWOOFing directory, an acronym for Willing Workers On Organic Farms, or World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. It is a system set up where an individual can stay at a farm anywhere from two weeks to three months, and work around thirty hours a week in exchange for room and board. It is, in my opinion, the best way to travel, because it is free.
My plan was to eventually make it up to West Virginia. I had already connected with a guy named Dan at Claymont Community Farm in Charleston, West Virginia. Megan called me back from “Pickards Meadow” in a town called Carrboro, NC. I told her that I wanted to stay for a day or two and she was okay with that, fortunate for me because the usual commitment for WWOOFing is two weeks. She said they needed a lot of help. Carrboro was a couple hours away from Charlotte, so I decided to stop there, then eventually make my way through Virginia to West Virginia to WWOOF there.
Charlotte, but Asheville mostly, was disappointing. Ideally, angels and cherubim and saints of old would fall from the sky, their glorious light shining down on the destination, the location, the Mecca of sorts for this Southern California girl to finally rest her weary head. I was looking for home, I think, but mostly I was looking for myself.
circuitous
Fall happens every year and yet, for some reason, comes as a complete surprise. Everything gets a bit colder (Southern Californian temperature variance is minimal), some trees lose their leaves, and my roommates and I leave the house with an disproportionally excessive amount of clothing. Sweaters and beanies! “Man, its so hot!”
A year and a handful of days ago I was actually cold.
I’m not sure what prompted this remembrance. When I was writing a book about the road trip, I mainly wrote about leaving – my 45 day journey to Boston and what happened inside me through those adventures. But I didn’t write about coming home. Lately, I have been telling people these stories – about my 12 hour drive from Toronto to Chicago, picking up the Australian in Boulder, almost freezing in Utah, driving through Monument Valley and finally camping at the Grand Canyon North Rim the last night of the road trip; it was an adventure coming to a close three months later across the ridge from where it began at the South Rim on the first night.
Still, I consider it one of the best decisions I have ever made. It would not have been possible without the misery, though. Leaving for college with my parents’ marriage in tact and coming home to find them separated, becoming depressed, hopeless, my thoughts futile and sad. Best friends getting married. But all the misery spurred me on to take one of the greatest adventures I have ever been on, which, in hindsight, after having a year to contemplate, I am still grateful for and would never change.
Here are some pictures of that time:
And here’s a favorite video I took on my drive through Canada:
she is still my hero
Thomas Merton wrote, “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous tempation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.
- Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
floating. sinking.
the Absolute is the waters
and I am a diver
standing with paint-chipped toenails
dragging on sandpaper hesitant
God, are you a deep well?
are you a shallow pool?
will I sink or float?
I’m not sure where I left
All of Me
to throw down upon you
I am a deep well
I am a shallow pool
Fill me up
leaving
My friend Taylor is very tall and works at the lagoon studying plants and other living things. He once got hired to walk into a field on Catalina Island and document every plant on this respective property. I stopped by the lagoon to say bye to him today and I told him, sheepishly, that I have a blog. “Nope”, he said quickly. “I want to hear about it when you come back and have dinner and see the fire in your eyes.”
Others, though, may want to know about this rollercoaster of a summer I am about to have, so I will keep writing, for my sake and for yours.
Thank you to everyone who came to the party last night. Thank you to the Wigfields for hosting it. Thank you to my friends who road their bikes there. Thank you Long Beach.
See you in two months.
biking in the city
If you would like to know about the roads in Long Beach, ask the bikers – we have them memorized. We can tell you about potholes, bike lanes, which stop signs to bomb through, and the most spacious streets. We can speak of broken bones, stolen bikes, careless drivers, cracked helmets, and getting hit by cars. If you would like to know what it feels like to speed between the lanes of rush-hour ridden vehicular cages at 25 mph, we can tell you of its incomparable exhilaration. Our awareness of automobile and pedestrian movements has increased to a degree unnecessary on alternative transportation.
Last year, I went on an 11,000 mile road trip around America. When I came back, I was winsome, unfettered, tempestuous; it is another story. I also began biking. By myself. At night. It worried my mother.
I loved my thirty minute bike ride home – in the dark, at one, maybe two in the morning- on the streets of Long Beach, my cadence rhythmic, my quads and calves strong, my mind racing with prayers, apologies, always pondering the Meaning of Things. My route is memorized – down 7th St., merge into the left lane onto Ximeno (watch out for the bump), right on Anaheim, up the hill, left on Clark, swerve to miss the pothole, then a palliative 5 mile straightaway towards home.
There was talk amongst my girlfriends of “A Death Wish” and “Crazy” and “Taunting Fate.” The proverbial question “is that safe?”, to which I have no answer, still lingers in my guilt-ridden mind when I realize that its 1:30am and dark, and that I am, still, mortal. “Aren’t you scared of getting raped?” was asked on one-too-many occasions – a question rich with racial, cultural, and sociological narratives, and mostly rooted in fear.
It is this fear of other humans that I find to be most debilitating. When did communities of people turn inward? When did we start locking our doors? When did we become distrustful of the people around us? When did we begin to see the general public not as fellow mothers and brothers and neighbors but as potential muggers, thieves, or rapists? What is the difference between courage and recklessness? And so, with, or in spite of these thoughts, I bike, because I feel truly free. Like Kerouac wrote, “the only ones for me are the mad ones”, within me is this insatiable appetite for adventure, for independence from the expand-at-all-costs capitalism and the reckless and corpulent consumerism. And not only is biking good for the planet, your wallet, and your body, but you become acutely aware of people who you would normally ignore.
If there ever was an age or place where it was more possible for a woman to bike around a city I do not know. All I know is that there are women around the world that do not have the choices I have – whom to marry, and when, access to clean drinking water, birth control, an education, health care. I bike because I love it and, well, I can.
Dust
Last week I sat in a pew at a small Episcopal church down the street from my mom’s house. It was the 7pm Ash Wednesday service, much different than the pedestrian circus act we do on Sunday mornings at modern churches, with our mediocre rhymes on LCD display and virginal Abercrombie & Fitch-like warblers on stage. I longed to flee what Annie Dillard calls “the clanging of Protestant guitars” for something more liturgical, more rooted in history, something simpler. This chapel was a modest structure, built in the 1960s, with thirty or so pews, each equipped with hymnals and prayer books, and a lone crucifix was centered on the front wall edged by stained glass.
This was my second experience at an Episcopal church. The first was in Paris one December before Christmas, where I sat alone and watched the children reenact a Nativity scene with profligate parental camera flashes. Few noticed me. But that was a long time ago. This Wednesday, I was the only twenty-something, and there were about ten kids scattered throughout the chapel, the oldest no more than twelve. Their parents, disheveled and tired, seemed eager to receive the dust on their families’ foreheads only to wipe it off again before bedtime.
The rector stood at the front of the chapel, a man in his fifties with a mustache and wedding band. He spoke awkwardly, as someone aware they are on public display- aware he was talking, but uncomfortable that it was to people. His name was Bryan, and he wore a purple mantle over his white robes, which he will do for the entire Lenten season.
I sat behind a mother with two boys on either side, both wearing suits. I was wearing jeans. There is a special sort of absurdity induced when attempting to fake religious liturgy. I did my best to mimic them, but twice caught myself sitting when I should have been standing, and reciting prayers a half second off. We went to the front for the administration of ashes. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” Bryan said, as he smudged a black cross mark on our foreheads.
It was time for Communion. The boys bowed when they left the pews, the youngest proud of this athletic mastery, as if he had practiced in the mirror, and we walked up to the altar to receive the bread and the wine.
We knelt, and Bryan passed out wafers, which were the size of a quarter but weightless. The suit-clad boy kneeling earnestly next to me held his wafer in his hand. I looked at his mom. Her eyes were closed, her fingers folded together in solemnity. The lady next to me also had her hands folded. I decided they already ate the wafer when I wasn’t looking, and that I must eat it quickly. So I put the wafer in my mouth. It tasted like paper.
The vestry, an older woman with short gray hair, came by with a chalice. To my horror, I saw people dipping their wafers into the wine. The vestry went to the littlest boy, then his mother, who extricated her carefully concealed wafer from her folded hands and dipped it into the chalice. I almost laughed out loud. The other boy also had his wafer, and dipped it in. I looked up into the vestry’s amused eyes, my hands clearly unfolded, clearly empty, and shrugged my shoulders, hoping to maintain a look of sincere innocence. She condescended compassionately, and let me take a brief sip from the chalice before wiping it off and moving on to the lady beside me, who had her wafer ready.
I went back to my pew, thoroughly humbled. The dust on my forehead reminds me of my own mortality, which, I think, we eagerly dismiss in Southern California. We Angelenos are sufficiently insulated from death. We are protected by our iPhones, a college education, Botox, concrete, and the 8-5 grind. But we all left that night with dust on our foreheads. We left that night married, single, gay, with children, with student loans, with grocery lists. We left needing a drink, needing a diet, happy, sleepy, and solemn. We left with dust on our foreheads.
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