With brotherhood

A German man told me recently that after moving to the U.S.A. he has developed a “zero tolerance for religion.”

“Every other day,” he said “there’s someone at the door wanting to change me. And the fanatics… the fanatics get the power. Just look at the American government. On est tous dans la merde.”

This was a casual conversation put forth in good humor, and at his last comment I began to laugh shamefacedly. Last year these were things I had head to describe America, indeed, nearly every other day. People were quick to assure me in such instances that their horror did not extend to me because, happily “you are not a normal American.” How many Americans do you actually know? I wondered, for Americans largely make up the constellation of my landscape. I am not supposed to be overly affected by other people, whether they be the ones insulting me or the ones I miss… but then, if I have not love, I am nothing. You’re insulting everyone I love over there, and those who love me, too; without knowledge.

This, on the other hand, is not without knowledge. I find it discouraging. I can defend religion or my moral position or my countrymen and point out the theoretical benefits of a stringent lifestyle until I’m blue in the face, but of any of this it is difficult to convince anyone. The best modern indication I can offer on a broad scale is the lingering Judeo-Christian tradition of helping a stranger and taking responsibility for your actions. But what else can I say in defense of America, under God, this rabid, puritanical nation of violence and guilty indulgence?

I don’t, of course, have to defend America. I don’t even have to be irritated that someone has developed a “zero tolerance for religion” while living within her borders. But I do feel the obligation to point out that on a personal level “religion” is not an indication of senility. There are beautiful and terrible people doing good in its name, living unhypocritically after hours. But why is this most important; is this arrogance, mere defense of my credibility? I know he is mostly right. In any case, if one is convincing, one runs the risk of being admonished of one’s singularity: “Yes, but you’re not a normal American.” As if that helps matters.

Wedding

Two things worth mentioning happened at Josh and Paula’s wedding on Saturday. The first was Paula’s face as she rounded the corner and the second was the length of the wedding Homily. As to the first, it was beautiful: just for the hairbredth of a second, between seeking and finding his glance, she knew nothing but trust, and then she saw what she knew she would see. She met it logically, intelligently, but with such love that she forgot, I think, momentarily, anything but that. I really hope, I thought, I really really hope someday I feel that look on my face.

As to the second, while Busby talked it occurred to me to study the list of wedding attendants. Something about the way they passed had jarred my memory. No sooner had I started to scrutinize than from the page popped the name: Annalisa Engstrom. I began frantically jogging my roommate’s elbow. “Dude, dude!” I hissed “I totally know that person!” Colleen nodded politely. We were at a local wedding; we knew lots of people. I was not to be squelched, however. Through the short-sighted haze of cheap contacts I could make out the form of the very Annalisa I had confessed my first-ever crush to, played dress-up with, discussed literature with, tried to impress with my Latin skills, all far away, far removed from this crowd, in Dallas, Oregon, when I was blossoming awkwardly into homeschooled adolescence. Annalisa was cool — she had a leather jacket and wavy locks and was older and taller than I, but she was still nice. Her parents were nice too. Her mom had cows in her kitchen, generally of the ceramic variety. I had to stop and re-evaluate my surroundings. Was I actually in Pullman? Was I actually perched airily on a pew, dressed in silk, a retro jacket and a Roman scarf, or was I writhing in highwater jeans and a sweater far, far too large for my scrawny frame? No, here I was. I looked to the left and glanced at the balcony. No, here were my Moscow friends, completely unaware of my potential nerdiness.

On the steps after the wedding I said hello, holding out my hand. “Wait,” she said “Botkin?” “Yes,” I said, trying not to shriek with the delight of being known “How do you know Paula?”

“We were roommates in Seattle,” said Annalisa. “How do you know Paula?”

I had to stop: how did I know Paula? “I live here,” I said. I live here and I know everyone because I think they might like me now, and weirdly enough I am taller than you are even though you’re wearing heels.

“Wow,” Annalisa was saying “we still talk about you guys all the time. Your dad was so cool; man, as a little kid… He knew everything. And your mom drew all of these wonderful creations…”

I had forgotten, my saving grace as a clueless pinhead was that my family was eccentric enough, and talented enough, that I was also allowed to be eccentric, and given the benefit of the doubt. Not that I took it; I stayed in my room, read, and combed my waist-length hair when it was absolutely necessary…

“Weird,” I said. We chatted and I gave her my e-mail address, and then I sat around with my Moscow friends rather dazedly, until late in the evening.

Devil’s Dictionary, College edition

Course: from French, course: race, racetrack. A forum for profuse sweating.

Essay question: from French, essai: try. An attempt to satisfy the unsatisfiable.

Hunger: sensation of physical need, usually occurring in conjunction with a scholastic urgency.

“Intro to the study of” classes: In which one is taught a little about the subject at hand, though not so much that one would be able to spot the errors camouflaged by the teacher’s pedantic accent.

Student: one who pays to be indoctrinated.

One of the boys

Maybe it’s because they see less often the connection from this moment to the burning toast of five minutes hence, and thus are less distracted. Maybe it’s because they’ve been trained to cut to the chase, or maybe it’s an abundance of stimulants naturally present in their minds. Maybe they’re trying to impress me. Whatever the reason, conversations with men are usually far different than conversations with women.

There are few things more pleasant than sitting around a table, drinking coffee or tea or beer with a few good men. You know the look of your position (is she dating one of them, or is she one of them?) but this is a smaller part of your enjoyment.

In such situations, I listen first as a soul and secondly as a woman. I rejoice first at the truth, and only then at the fact that it has been revealed to me, by him. I rarely find myself falling in love with my compatriots. Having grown up with this sort of thing, I enjoy it, but find it, in the long run, rather inconsequential.

Or perhaps I am delusional. Perhaps I have only bought into the fantasy, not that uncommon, of being up to the challenge of being one of the guys. Not exactly one of the guys, either. There is this very Elizabeth-Bennett notion of walking into a room, looking at ease; unconscious, but mind-blowing, sitting across from a crowd of males, and, with no guile but a warm dose of slyness, meeting their attempted wit and throwing it bodily out the window. The males would then sit up and cease to see what is obviously your dazzling beauty and see a flame capable of consuming them.

Women want two things: they want men to be able to momentarily forget their beauty (or lack of it), blinded by the charm of their minds, and they want men to be able to momentarily forget their minds (or lack of them) at the charm of their beauty.

Not that this excuses women who think delusionally that they actually are Elizabeth Bennett. Or, for that matter, those who hate talking with other females. If you can’t relate at all to your own gender, it’s probably not the gender’s fault. Women have a lot going for them. They bring you tea, unasked, in the middle of the night when you’re choking on your own sputum trying to sleep. They have insight.

On the whole, given the choice, I would rather be a woman.

Superbowl highlights: if I could just remember who played

I’ve watched the Superbowl almost every year since I was 11. I remember that first time… at my parents’ friends’ house… a cornucopia of partially hydrogenated snacks and fizzy syrup, this sport I knew nothing about, and A BOY TO EXPLAIN IT TO ME. Actually, I don’t think he had a clue either; we talked about books.

By 14, I was interested in watching the events on-screen, but only for the commercials. We didn’t have television, but I, cowed and homeschooled though I was, even then claimed cynicism. I was not impressed with mere spectacle. The Sprite Commercials were the best. Oh yes. I don’t remember the number, the teams, the mvps, or even the halftime show, but I recall the Sprite Commercials. Actually, they were Mountain Dew. Maybe. (eyewitness accounts are considered less than perfect evidence in court, although really all you have to do is convince the jury… but I digress).

Here are three facts I do remember: in 2000 the Rams won and in 2004 Janet Jackson had her famous wardrobe malfunction. And yesterday, Seattle lost 10-21.

Other than that, I can only recall the people I spent the pseudo-meaningful high mass of commercialism with: the Heberts, the Ewers, my brothers (eating those pork link stubs and nearly wetting themselves when Denver scored), friends from youth group, and now (yesterday) the Big Haus.

Theory

Davis has a hilarious post on the reasonability of desiring the impossibly beautiful girl here. I don’t think he is alone in his quest. He is right on many counts, not least of which is that girls often want to be extreme; the best. If not the best at beauty, then the best at flipping beauty off.

As he hints, this is due partially to masculine desire. People-watching in Bucers the other night, there sat the usual table of gorgeous NSA girls, slender and smooth, well-coiffed, well-dressed (in the NSA way) sitting amid the skinny and effete NSA males with their steel-rimmed glasses. In came a UI couple; and this was obvious by the emo flair of the male’s eyebrows and the unkempt dumpiness of the girl. I glanced from the UI guy (hot) to the NSA guy (not) and back to their women. I thought to my classes, the ephemeral charm of freshman sex-poured-into-a-short-skirt having long since passed; overflowed into senior beer belly, beer things and beer neck rolls. Per capita, NSA girls are at the very least twice as hot as UI girls.

And yet the NSA girls seemed somehow more desperate. Not because they knew their own beauty and wished to see it appreciated — that, momentarily, they had forgotten  — but because they knew their futures rode on the dagger’s edge of being lovely (but never wanton) clever (but never more clever than the boys) accomplished (but mostly, we hope, in feminine arts) with-it (but not of the world) and Christian (of the right persuasion). This, because the NSA male will expect perfection.

The UI male will not. The UI male is pragmatic. He wants to get laid.

In fact, the NSA guy and the UI guy represent two warring factions in the male psyche: desire of ultimate greatness and desire of immediate satisfaction. Both types go about it the wrong way. There is no way I’m going for a skinny, effete dictator-in-waiting. Just because you want perfection doesn’t make you worthy of it. Neither, of course, would I go for strictly pragmatic: I’m getting on in years, so I guess you’ll have to do.

Even though I am still a UI girl (“dumpy” and “unkempt”).

Take that, Cream Puff

Apparently, France is fattening at about the same rate as America (“France following the path of the United States,” runs the headline. Otherwise, all you may get from this is a nice picture of a fat woman’s derriere).

How did we get to this point, you ask? Was it the Normandy butter, the four thousand cheeses, the morning pastries? No, it was fast food, apparently. But guess what, Frenchies: it doesn’t affect you if you don’t eat it. (Image that springs to mind: Count Borgel, moqueur des americains, a soft, pasty 18-year-old I lived with last year. Ate entire pizzas and wore Armani to cover his paunch while he sat in front of the TV and complained to me about the American reportage he was watching in which the obesity of Texans was duly noted)

If nothing else, our largesse has gotten to them at last.

Aphasia

On the way back to my apartment, I see my parents have called twice. No message. I call back anyway. “Can you check on B?” Dad asks “She’s having one of her complicated migraines.”

Complicated migraines, meaning the vasodialation of the vessels in her brain have depleted blood to certain regions of it, usually the linguistic regions, like a mild stroke. She will be virtually incapable of speech. “Yeah,” I say “I’ll go over there right now.” In the rain, I turn north.

D has beat me. “Hi,” I say to B, who is sitting in the darkness half-laughing half-whimpering. “How’s it going? Do you need anything?” I sit at her feet– accidentally on them, although she doesn’t notice.

“You,” she says, pointing to me “What?”

I repeat the question, ask about her pathology, ask how school was.

“Peachy,” she says, putting her head on her knees “Like a peach. Peach pie… good… oh, golly. Is golly a word?”

“Yes,” we say.

She pauses, then, carefully: “School. Was. Good.” And then, to clarify: “Dead. Uhh-uh.”

“Some people pay lots of money to drug themselves up for this sort of experience,” says D.

B turns. “No, not. I didn’t. Hi,” she says to him “I forgot who you were.”

I’m trying to figure out if she’s playing the situation up, but I doubt it. She’s taken Imatrex and many shots of coffee. She says her brain hurts excruciatingly, especially the left side, but she can’t stop giggling-whimpering. She goes off occasionally into a string of nonsensical mumbles. Mostly she moans, wishes to be well, says she has too much to do to. We tell her it’s getting better, and that she will be fine by morning.

“It tastes like hot dogs,” she insists “and all I ate was a ginger cookie.”

“You could have some macaroni,” says D, who is kind but slightly diabolical “twisted or elbow.”

“Elbow?” echoes B, shocked “What’s elbow? I’m not a mandarin!”

We both snicker. We can’t help it.

“A mmmmm… a mm..?” asks B.

“Cannibal,” I say. I know what she means. The first time this happened, we were in High school, with friends, and she was too scared to even try to talk, so I translated for her. She used mostly American sign language, which worked better than English, for some reason. I’ve forgotten most of my ASL but can usually figure out what she means by the wrinkling of her nose.

“I have a crush on a boy,” B is saying. She turns to D again. “I think it’s you.”

“B,” I say “You should try to sleep.”

“It’s past your bedtime,” B tells me, petulantly “Go read a book.”

“Ok,” I say, putting on my coat. There isn’t much I can do; she wants neither food, drink, noise nor light. I pat her head. She has very smooth hair, just like when we were infants, only she brushes it now.

“Thanks for the top ramen,” B says. She ponders, again. “I mean, I mean… thanks for stopping by.”

I call Dad as I walk home, tell him she’s fine. Dad worries, but is logical: yes, he says, she should be fine. She got bad migraine genes from both Mom and me. So did we all, I say, but B gets them the worst. I want to know why, but I don’t ask, because there’s no way of knowing.

School

Third day of classes, and I’m back in the mindset of a careful sponge. I try not to sound too pedantic or too shy, roll my eyes at the list of journals we’re supposed to look up to develop good study habits, hang my attention on the space between the proff’s lips and teeth, trying to catch his drift before he elaborates. I am both new and old. Gone are the days when I walked into a classroom and recognized no one. Now it is only a matter or remembering where I have seen these people. In one class are a boy from my hometown and a boy I met at the Big Haus, a girl whose band I interviewed for an article in the school paper and another boy, an ex-classmate of a friend, who we watched The Usual Suspects with us the night Bess and I got hit by a drunk driver. I don’t imagine they remember me. I lean across the aisle and say hi to one of them. I’m right.

Despite the farmilliarity I am not heartbroken to be still at UI. Yesterday afternoon I liotered downtown, buying a baguette and cheese with Ash, sitting on a bench and eating almost the whole thing in the mild chill of an odd January. I like that I can do that in this town, and then walk home in the drizzle.

2005 in review

It was a strange year, dawning on the Champs Elysees with a few friends and ending in Sandpoint, Idaho with a few friends — one of which was an overlap.

Last April, in the South of France, my contact proff’s husband was teaching me how to snorkle. The water was freezing, streching from gray to turquoise to dark blue. As the waves pulled me up and down I forced myself to put my head underwater and breathe, the panic of the idea and chill and swell making me gasp and surface repeadly. “Lie, lie!” Pierre admonished in English. Finally I lay, floating face-down, staring at the huge world of weeds and fish and bubbles, breathing air, salt and spit, until, waterlogged, aching with chill, I drifted to shore.

We hiked back to their little house, drying in the semi-temperate air, and ate cheese and dark chocolate and coffee. And I tried to tell them, unsucessfully, that in the flux of sunrise, sunset; somewhere else twice a year, I had found my lost sense of home at their table.

I am only beginning to see the flaws inherent in me, wounds ground open in the sandy ocean of a larger life. And all the while I’m looking over my shoulder for home, hoping it’s sneaking up on me without my knowing, hoping I’ll drift to shore and safety while I keep one eye on the swirling seaweed, because, hey, seaweed makes a better story than coffee.