It was almost a eleven months ago when I was in Washington, DC the last time.
I will never forget the day.
It was early January of 2010 and I was with Chas. We had traveled down from Philadelphia so I could catch my flight back to Uganda out of Dulles International Airport.
At the time, Chas couldn't stop telling me how much he loved me because I was the most confident woman he had ever met. How he liked the fact that I spoke without stuttering or censoring myself. And, on that day in DC, how I walked around the city like I owned it.
I remember wanting to impress him more than anything. I remember feeling like I had found love that was "real" for the first time in many years and I wanted to show him everything and everyone I knew.
He had spent a small fortune driving and flying all over the East Coast to be with me for the four remaining days I had in the United States so I felt it was only fair to show him DC. After all, it had been my home for nearly ten years and I certainly had managed to uncover its charms, hidden as they might have been in the beginning.
From the onset, Chas was suspicious.
"This place has no soul," he told me as we rolled into town, trying to be a good sport.
"Look, I have gotten us a room in a historic DC hotel! It was built in the nineteenth century and I used to go there for business meetings all the time and I always wanted to stay there...you just wait, you're going to love it!" I told him.
He didn't love it. Not at all.
Although he was still a good sport.
"Um, where do I go to the bathroom?" he asked.
"Why, right here," I explained, showing him the bathroom in our room.
"Patti, there is no DOOR on this bathroom. I understand the whole historic thing but I cannot, um, well, I cannot go to the bathroom in a place that has no doors," he said.
"Oh, it's fine," I told him.
He favored me with a look that told me it was anything but fine.
"It's one of the oldest inns in Washington, DC!" I told him. "Don't you love it?"
"It's nice," he said, sitting down on the bed only to be firmly propelled back into the atmosphere in an upright position.
"Mattresses are historic here too?" he queried.
The next day, as he watched me pay the $286/night bill, he couldn't keep his opinion to himself.
"Patti, you know in Philadelphia we have plenty of historic stuff but no one is going to charge you $286 a night to sleep in a bed that Martha Washington probably got arthritis on and then have to go... um, poop.... with the kitchen staff down in the basement because there are NO FUCKING DOORS on the john in the room!"
Meekly I tried, "It's historic," again.
"Fuck historic...if you're going to pay that much money for historic, I'd rather go to Greece and crap among the ruins. If I can't have a door, at least let me shit next to Plato or something...."
I remember thinking this was charming...what I had missed about Philadelphia and Philadelphians.
Adorable, I thought.
Then, exactly two weeks later, Chas was showing me around his home in southern New Jersey after I had unceremoniously lost my job in Uganda.
"Look," he said, when we got to the bathroom, "it has a door!"
Touche'.
But over the past year, I came to grips with the fact that I had to go back to Washington, DC.
It was a slow realization initially but then it came hard and fast when I saw a job last month that made my heart leap out of my chest.
"Look!" I told Chas, dragging my computer out into the living room to show him the advertisement. "I can do that! I want to do THAT!"
"I knew this day was coming," he said, sadly.
"I want to go back, I want to go back to work again. I want this job....I don't care if it is in DC...I just want to go back to work!" I told him.
"So apply," he said.
And I did. And I heard back immediately. And then we were faced with something else: we had to go to DC again for an interview.
"No more historic hotels, please?" Chas asked. "I will come with you and I will drive but I will not stay in any more places that don't have doors on the bathroom, OK?"
So we stayed with my friends, Jeff and Isaac. Gay, recently, and officially, married but together forever, and two of the kindest souls I have ever met in my life.
"They're gay," I told Chas on the drive down.
"So what?" he asked. "Do they have doors on their bathrooms?"
The next morning, dropping me off for the interview, Chas said,
"You really CAN do this, it's amazing."
Nervous, sweating in a suit and heels that I haven't worn for, oh, eleven months, I asked, distracted:
"What? What is it that I can do?"
"You just changed. You look like you belong here. You can walk and talk with the best of them," he said.
Oddly, I was insulted.
"No, not an insult," he clarified. "A compliment...you never cease to amaze me...I think that's why I love you so much."
I nailed the interview.
When I came back out to meet Chas at the car, I found him huddled inside reading the paper.
"I thought you were going to go get coffee?" I asked.
"I was...but then I held the door for this woman and she didn't even say 'thank you.' And I went to order a small coffee and it was almost five dollars! I mean, really, Patti....what is in a cup of coffee that makes it cost five dollars?! I can get three times that amount of coffee for half the price in Philly. I don't mean to sound disrespectful but I am just not comfortable here. And I kind of understand why people are pissed at DC, who pays $5 for a damn coffee? But, anyway, I took this...it was free, right?"
I looked down to see him holding a Washington Post that he nabbed going out the door. No, it wasn't free but in Philly if you leave something laying around like the newspaper, someone is going to take it. They'll give it back, of course, but there are no "Starbucks Rules" in Philly.
"Let's go home," I said.
Last week, I had to go back to DC for another interview with another company. When it rains, it pours.
Chas agonized about coming with me until I proposed a solution.
"Drive me to the train station in Philly this afternoon and I will take the train to DC. You don't have to come, just pick me up tomorrow at the train station again."
He looked relieved.
I spent the night in DC and, just as Chas said, I was able to acclimate myself again without much trouble.
I don't necessarily think that I am all that talented. There was a time when I had to travel for a living so I am used to, well, getting used to someone else's world and acclimating quickly. But this time I missed home immediately.
I snuck out of bed at 7am after a long night of drinking and catching up and sent a text message to Chas.
"You awake?" I asked.
"I'm here," came the immediate reply.
"I can do both," I texted. "I can do both. But now I want to come home."
"I know you can do both, I never doubted that, but YOU doubted that," he replied.
"Can we go to the Moose tonight and drink cheap beer and then order a crappy pizza?" I ventured.
"What did you eat last night?" he asked.
"Pizza," I responded. (My capacity to eat pizza just about every day of the week never ceases to amaze Chas).
Then, the dreaded question:
"And how much is a pizza in DC?" he queried.
"Eighteen dollars for a medium pizza with one topping," I wrote back, cheeks ablaze.
"Dear Lord! Nevermind, I will be at the train station at 1pm. See you then," he replied.
Stepping off the train at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, I held the door for someone who said "thank you." I found Chas at the entrance waiting for me like an expectant parent while also helping an old lady stay out of the fray while she looked for her son.
"That was a lot harder than any of the international trips," I told Chas, driving away from the train station.
"The hardest thing in one's life is always figuring out where to come home to, right?" he asked.
"I think I know now," I told him.
"Yeah, I think so too," he agreed.
Later that night, exhausted but among friends at the Moose Lodge in Wildwood, New Jersey, the bartender said,
"So Chas tells me you're about to go back to DC and be some big shot again, is that true?"
I didn't want to talk about anything at that point and I certainly did not feel like a former or future big shot so I changed the subject.
"Did Chas ever tell you how he met me?" I asked.
"Yeah, he did. He said he picked up some hot, smart, girl at a bar in Florida who then took him to a hotel in DC where they had no doors on the bathroom and he had to, um, poop, in the basement with the kitchen staff. That's you, right?" he asked.
Yep. That's me.
11 November 2010
10 October 2010
The Mynah Bird Roosts
For many more years than I care to recall, I might have had the most annoying habit in the universe.
No, I didn't pick my nose or teeth in public and I have never once felt compelled to spit on a sidewalk...I did something worse: I was a mimic.
It certainly presaged my days of international travel, when all I could do was look out at the world and dream of the possibilities, but I was a class-A mimic. The worst part of the whole thing was that I rarely realized I was doing it until someone, convinced I was making fun of them, would rebuke me for being rude and unsophisticated. Or, thankfully, my ever-vigilant mother would catch me before I made a complete ass of myself.
"What did you just say?" she'd ask.
"What do you mean?" I'd reply.
"Well, for the past twenty minutes you have been drawling on and on like someone raised in a log cabin in the backwoods of Mississippi or on a dirt farm in Texas. Since when has 'y'all' been part of your vocabulary? And, for that matter, why did you just tell your brother he was a 'good ole hoss?' What the hell is a 'hoss,' Patti?"
Embarrassed, I would shut up.
Later, when I was in my late teens, my father became quite close with an English family of the most noble genes. I would listen, entranced, as new words filtered across my mind and familiar ones were given the most glorious treatment with that wonderful, high-stepping, accent.
Again, my mother stopped me.
"Um, Patti? What in the hell is a 'tipple?' Or, for that matter, why are you suddenly calling people 'wankers?' And did you just say 'thoust' to me?"
I'd turn red.
"Who are you?" she'd demand. "Who has stolen my daughter and replaced her with Emily Bronte or Margaret Thatcher?"
I think I finally stopped doing around the second or third month I was (finally! officially!) living in another country.
In this case, it was northeastern Hungary circa 1998.
Although a total of about ten people in the city where I lived spoke English (which was why I was there...to teach them this fine language), I immediately began mimicking their accented English words. I found it deeply romantic....until, of course, my boyfriend at the time pointed out that this could all be misconstrued as a little rude.
"Patti, is there a reason why you are suddenly talking like a lisping Russian field peasant?" he'd inquire.
"Why, what do you mean?" I'd ask.
"Well, for the past twenty minutes you've been mimicking George to the point where you sound like Dr. Zhivago and Joseph Stalin had a half-wit love child and implanted it in your body. It's a bit rude, don't you think? Why don't you just talk like...YOU?" he'd ask, flustered.
Humiliated, I vowed never, ever to do that again. I watched my speech carefully for the next year and only adapted British English words (not accents, just words) when it got my point across better than American English words. And I stopped mimicking people.
However, I did pause to consider why, exactly, I might have been doing this. At first I thought it was because I romanticized any and all things foreign and felt that the highest compliment to that love was to imitate it.
This, in part, was true, but there was a bigger reason.
And the reason was because I had absolutely nothing distinct about the way I spoke whatsoever. No accent, no charming drawl, no lilting speech, nothing.
Raised in southern Connecticut, a state that has the distinction, like California and Delaware, of being populated by many people who have no discernible accent whatsoever, I was at a loss.
Yes, years later I have had people tell me that I sound "a touch" like a New Yorker and that other people from northern Connecticut sound very much like Bostonians, but that wasn't good enough for me.
I never wanted to be "a touch" like anyone or anything. I wanted an identity, I wanted to belong to a distinct group of people, easily identified by their speech. The fact that most Americans and some foreigners could tell I was from the northeastern part of the United States was not good enough for me. I didn't want a region...I wanted a damn state or a country.
Still, I certainly did not want to give people the impression that I was being rude in my mimicry. So, with the exception of modifying the way I pronounced certain words depending on the country I was in and who the former colonial overlords were, I stuck to my own way of speech.
My own very boring way of speech.
That is, of course, until circa March 2010.
This marks the date that I became Rocky Balboa in female form. And, to be honest, I am not sure I am going back to my old ways ever again.
Mind you, other than Connecticut, the state I have spent the most time in is Pennsylvania. At this point, I collectively have logged just as many years in the Philadelphia region as I did in southern Connecticut. And no, not once during all of those years did I attempt to adopt the very distinct Philadelphia accent. I guess, because I had spent so much time there, I just didn't see it as exotic enough.
However, when I was deeply homesick while living in Uganda, all I wanted was Philadelphia. I love this city and its people in an almost over-the-top way. I know it is because some of the very best years of my life were spent here. My closest friends are all from Philadelphia, my most significant (although not always good) relationships were/are with men from Philadelphia, and I just love the way the city feels.
I'm not disparaging New York or Boston, two other fantastic East Coast cities, but I just like Philly the best. And I'm not budging on that opinion.
When fate was kind enough to land me back in the Philadelphia area after my seventeen month adventure in Uganda, I ran back to it with open arms. I think I was even a bit breathless, like being reunited with a long, lost lover.
And, of course, my boyfriend, Chas, is from Philadelphia. I think I fell in love with his thick northeastern Philadelphia accent (one I had never really paid any attention to before) before I fell in love with him.
And, around March of this year, I caught myself.
I was out in the backyard with Chas doing some minor yard work when I realized that I was mimicking him. That I was following him around like an anxious Mynah bird trying to mold my own speech to his. I heard words coming from my mouth that I had never once considered using before and I heard what had happened to any word that contained an 'e' followed by one of more 'r's'. Plus, people from Philadelphia can outdo just about any military man or woman I have ever met in the liberal employ of the f-bomb. I had gotten fairly tainted working with the military for years but had managed to almost completely lose that word from my vocabulary over the proceeding seventeen months in the face of the much more polite and proper Ugandans.
Still, once here again, words like "yo," had suddenly supplanted the much more proper "Hello" or even "Hey," as part of a greeting or an attempt to gain someone's attention. Such verbal gems as "knucklehead" were now in my once untainted speech. Calling someone a "bum" became common. And, the worst to my mind, I was using "at" at the end of sentences to clarify the location of things. It had gotten very, very bad.
"Yo, where is that knucklehead dog of ours at?" I would ask Chas. "What a fucking bum!"
I stopped short, just barely, of saying "yous" and "ain't" but I was rapidly sliding downhill.
And the 'e' and 'r' combinations? Well, let's just say I had a hard time with them in the beginning but have begun to slowly morph into that way of talking too, if only to make myself understood.
Early on, however, Chas and I had a very confusing conversation.
"What do you think of Kerry?" he asked me.
Of course, in Philadelphia-speak, when an 'e' is followed by an 'r,' it becomes a 'u.'
"What kind?" I asked. "I love Indian food in general but some of those sauces are a little spicy for me," I concluded.
He looked at me sideways, undoubtedly trying to discern if it was the last remnants of malaria or whether I truly might be a half-wit.
"Yo, what the fuck are you talking about? Indian food and sauces? I asked what you thought of Kerry...you know, the bartender?" he said.
Oh, K-e-r-r-y...not curry. My bad.
Or, when Chas is going golfing in Delaware or Maryland, he takes a "furry" to get there.
You know, the "furry" that travels across the water to get a passenger from Point A to Point B?
Most Philadelphians also do not modify or add subtlety to anything. Something is either good or bad. Words like "fine" and "well" do not exist in their vocabularies. Chas is never feeling "fine" and things are never going "well." It's either "good" or "bad" (and, on occasion, "nasty") but I have never heard him use anything more subtle than that.
The word "ignorant" also stands in for many different occasions. If you are rude, slow, in a bad mood, annoying, or just plain mean...you are ignorant. It always means something bad, the severity of the badness all depends on whether the f-word is placed in front of it.
If you are "fucking ignorant," then you might as well just curl up and die because you are truly irredeemable at that point.
Same goes with the term "bum," which truly reminds me of Rocky Balboa movies. If someone is a bit of a lazy and unmotivated person, they are a "bum (also a term for a homeless person in American English)." If they have done you wrong, personally or professionally, they are a "dirty bum." However, like ignorant, if the f-word is put in front of "bum," all bets are off. You are a social miscast, you simply do not deserve anyone's attention at all...ever...unless they are going to kick your ass for you "bum-ness."
Oddly, for all of the liberal usage of the word "fuck," the name of God is rarely, very rarely, ever taken in vain. I think it comes from some basic working class superstitions all mixed up with latent Catholicism, Protestantism, or whatever-ism is going on in Philly...but taking God's name in vain is a definite no-no.
For example, I have never, ever heard Chas say, "'Goddamn it" or "Oh my God." Nor does he put "God" in front of "bless you," when someone sneezes. Once, early on, when I tripped over something and stubbed my toe, I carelessly uttered, "Jesus Christ!" I looked over to see Chas staring at me in abject shock before quickly darting his gaze over to the Mass cards which decorate every picture frame in our home. He seemed to be uttering a silent apology to Jesus...no doubt telling Him what an ignorant knucklehead bum I was.
Also, getting away from speech for a moment, this incident brings up another interesting factor in dealing with many working-class and middle-class Philadelphians that had somehow slipped my attention in the nearly two decades of living there.
Superstition.
Philadelphians are very, very ("vury, vury") superstitious people. Particularly when it comes to God and their money. I have already mentioned the Mass card thing (you know, those cards they hand you at funerals that have a picture of Jesus or a saint on the front and a prayer and the name of the recently departed on the back?) but it gets even more bizarre.
Take, for instance, the time I accidentally washed Chas's wallet. He was furious, of course, and I don't really blame him...it was rather ignorant of me....but he was not angry for the reasons I assumed.
I thought, stupidly, that he would be upset that I had laundered his money, his credit cards, and his social security card. Hey, maybe even be a bit pissed off that I had washed a few pictures of his kids...but no, that was not the real problem, the real transgression. The REAL problem was that I had washed Jesus.
"My Mass cards!" he screamed. "You washed my Mass cards (yes, they are found in both wallets and picture frames around these parts), I have had some of those Mass cards for twenty years," he moaned, rescuing a soggy image of St. Paul from the washing machine.
I, ignorantly, tried to make a joke out of it.
"Look, Babe, it's OK. I will lay Jesus and St. Paul out in the sun on the porch and they'll be good as new by tomorrow. Maybe the printing will be a bit faded but...."
"Stop it!" he yelled. "Don't say those things!"
And, for the next 24 hours, until St. Paul and Jesus dried out, Chas crept around the house waiting for the lightening bolt to strike. He made sure to steer well-clear of me.
The money thing is also unusual. For example, many people from Philadelphia absolutely do not trust banks. Despite the fact that Chas and most of his friends are far too young to ever have experienced the Great Depression...well, it might as well have happened yesterday.
Money is kept under beds, under floor boards, in the ceiling...anywhere but in the bank. The bank is seen as a necessary evil for occasional bill-paying when some of the money is secreted out of its location in the house and deposited (in the exact amount of the check to be written) in the bank but, otherwise, banks are viewed as Evil.
The fact that I carry very little cash on my person (my own weird superstitions gained from years of traveling to places where one can easily be relieved of one's cash) and pay for everything with my bank debit card horrifies Chas.
Never mind the fact that Chas, when not paying in cash, conducts almost all of his financial transactions online...a markedly less secure place than the bank. It doesn't matter. Banks are Evil and that is the end of the story. Money is either cash money or money that can be spent online, on the ever-so-secure Internet, but money never, ever goes into the bank. That is where The Man is waiting.
This superstition, of The Man (aka the Government), also lends itself to finer points. For instance, the fact that someone is unemployed or having a hard go of things does not ever reflect on that person's character. Sure, if you're a mass murder or someone who washes Jesus every now and then, you might be held at fault but, mostly, the fact that The Man finally caught up with you is through no fault of your own. Life is hard...we need to stick together...and so goes the philosophy.
Unless, of course, you are a bum or you are ignorant. Then, by God, all bets are off.
In the beginning, when I was reacclimating, I found Chas's Philadelphia-isms charming, worthy of complete adoration. That's why I mimicked them.
Then, about five months into the whole relationship, I made the one huge faux pax you NEVER make with people from Philadelphia: I tried to correct his speech.
He tolerated if for about a week and then we had an arguement.
"Look, this is how I talk, OK? I can, as you have pointed out, talk differently when I need to be around rich and ignorant bums, or people who will judge you about that because of me, but when I am not around them, I like to talk like me...I am comfortable talking like ME...is that such a problem?" he asked.
Ashamed, I admitted that no, it was not a problem at all. It was actually something I loved about him.
"Good," he declared. "Because you are freaking my friends out with your six-syllable words. We all can figure out what they are eventually and, hey, I even KNOW what they mean because I went to college, but why don't you take a break and find a few synonyms for words like 'perturbed?' No one really understands that one anyway..." he said.
"Perturbed is not a six-syllable word," I corrected.
Eyebrows raised, Chas said, "Yes, I understand that. But it is a word that is haughty and annoying. So, given that, why can't you just say 'upset,' or 'flustered,' or 'uncomfortable?'" he countered.
Fully reprimanded, I stopped. I didn't stop using my six-syllable (or two-syllable) words completely, of course, because I adore language and words, but I did stop acting like an ignorant bum, so to speak.
The most amusing part of this whole turn of events is that my language overlord, the woman who would not only constantly chastise me for mimicking but also correct my own English to ensure that it was both proper and expansive...my mother...has been dating a guy from West Philadelphia for over a year.
She is completely in love but went through the same thing I did, sort of, except that she never lived in Philly so this came as a whole new territory for her.
By the time she encountered it, I had accepted it. But the conversation was funny, nonetheless.
"He just said 'yous," she whispered. "And he says 'ain't' all the time...."
"Who cares?" I suggested.
"Patti, PATRICIA, instead of saying beautiful, like it's one flowing word, he says, 'Beau-TEE-ful' like a bad caricture of someone...or something...I don't know...from the mob, from a movie, maybe like from the Rocky movies or something...I just don't get it," she continued.
Knowing where she was going, I volunteered,
"He doesn't speak like that around people who are not from Philly or people that he feels that are important for you, you, to impress, right?" I asked.
"Exactly! How does he do that? How can he go from perfect English to, well, 'city' English just like that? Why can't he speak one way all the time?" she flustered.
"He's a mimic," I informed her. "He can mimic people but, at the end of the day, he has found that he is most comfortable in his own skin...with 'you' and 'yous'...so don't be ignorant," I concluded.
I hung up the phone to see Chas looking at me thoughtfully.
"She's perturbed, ain't she?" he inquired.
Very much so, I agreed.
"You birds are amusing," he opined.
Yes, we are. We are indeed.
No, I didn't pick my nose or teeth in public and I have never once felt compelled to spit on a sidewalk...I did something worse: I was a mimic.
It certainly presaged my days of international travel, when all I could do was look out at the world and dream of the possibilities, but I was a class-A mimic. The worst part of the whole thing was that I rarely realized I was doing it until someone, convinced I was making fun of them, would rebuke me for being rude and unsophisticated. Or, thankfully, my ever-vigilant mother would catch me before I made a complete ass of myself.
"What did you just say?" she'd ask.
"What do you mean?" I'd reply.
"Well, for the past twenty minutes you have been drawling on and on like someone raised in a log cabin in the backwoods of Mississippi or on a dirt farm in Texas. Since when has 'y'all' been part of your vocabulary? And, for that matter, why did you just tell your brother he was a 'good ole hoss?' What the hell is a 'hoss,' Patti?"
Embarrassed, I would shut up.
Later, when I was in my late teens, my father became quite close with an English family of the most noble genes. I would listen, entranced, as new words filtered across my mind and familiar ones were given the most glorious treatment with that wonderful, high-stepping, accent.
Again, my mother stopped me.
"Um, Patti? What in the hell is a 'tipple?' Or, for that matter, why are you suddenly calling people 'wankers?' And did you just say 'thoust' to me?"
I'd turn red.
"Who are you?" she'd demand. "Who has stolen my daughter and replaced her with Emily Bronte or Margaret Thatcher?"
I think I finally stopped doing around the second or third month I was (finally! officially!) living in another country.
In this case, it was northeastern Hungary circa 1998.
Although a total of about ten people in the city where I lived spoke English (which was why I was there...to teach them this fine language), I immediately began mimicking their accented English words. I found it deeply romantic....until, of course, my boyfriend at the time pointed out that this could all be misconstrued as a little rude.
"Patti, is there a reason why you are suddenly talking like a lisping Russian field peasant?" he'd inquire.
"Why, what do you mean?" I'd ask.
"Well, for the past twenty minutes you've been mimicking George to the point where you sound like Dr. Zhivago and Joseph Stalin had a half-wit love child and implanted it in your body. It's a bit rude, don't you think? Why don't you just talk like...YOU?" he'd ask, flustered.
Humiliated, I vowed never, ever to do that again. I watched my speech carefully for the next year and only adapted British English words (not accents, just words) when it got my point across better than American English words. And I stopped mimicking people.
However, I did pause to consider why, exactly, I might have been doing this. At first I thought it was because I romanticized any and all things foreign and felt that the highest compliment to that love was to imitate it.
This, in part, was true, but there was a bigger reason.
And the reason was because I had absolutely nothing distinct about the way I spoke whatsoever. No accent, no charming drawl, no lilting speech, nothing.
Raised in southern Connecticut, a state that has the distinction, like California and Delaware, of being populated by many people who have no discernible accent whatsoever, I was at a loss.
Yes, years later I have had people tell me that I sound "a touch" like a New Yorker and that other people from northern Connecticut sound very much like Bostonians, but that wasn't good enough for me.
I never wanted to be "a touch" like anyone or anything. I wanted an identity, I wanted to belong to a distinct group of people, easily identified by their speech. The fact that most Americans and some foreigners could tell I was from the northeastern part of the United States was not good enough for me. I didn't want a region...I wanted a damn state or a country.
Still, I certainly did not want to give people the impression that I was being rude in my mimicry. So, with the exception of modifying the way I pronounced certain words depending on the country I was in and who the former colonial overlords were, I stuck to my own way of speech.
My own very boring way of speech.
That is, of course, until circa March 2010.
This marks the date that I became Rocky Balboa in female form. And, to be honest, I am not sure I am going back to my old ways ever again.
Mind you, other than Connecticut, the state I have spent the most time in is Pennsylvania. At this point, I collectively have logged just as many years in the Philadelphia region as I did in southern Connecticut. And no, not once during all of those years did I attempt to adopt the very distinct Philadelphia accent. I guess, because I had spent so much time there, I just didn't see it as exotic enough.
However, when I was deeply homesick while living in Uganda, all I wanted was Philadelphia. I love this city and its people in an almost over-the-top way. I know it is because some of the very best years of my life were spent here. My closest friends are all from Philadelphia, my most significant (although not always good) relationships were/are with men from Philadelphia, and I just love the way the city feels.
I'm not disparaging New York or Boston, two other fantastic East Coast cities, but I just like Philly the best. And I'm not budging on that opinion.
When fate was kind enough to land me back in the Philadelphia area after my seventeen month adventure in Uganda, I ran back to it with open arms. I think I was even a bit breathless, like being reunited with a long, lost lover.
And, of course, my boyfriend, Chas, is from Philadelphia. I think I fell in love with his thick northeastern Philadelphia accent (one I had never really paid any attention to before) before I fell in love with him.
And, around March of this year, I caught myself.
I was out in the backyard with Chas doing some minor yard work when I realized that I was mimicking him. That I was following him around like an anxious Mynah bird trying to mold my own speech to his. I heard words coming from my mouth that I had never once considered using before and I heard what had happened to any word that contained an 'e' followed by one of more 'r's'. Plus, people from Philadelphia can outdo just about any military man or woman I have ever met in the liberal employ of the f-bomb. I had gotten fairly tainted working with the military for years but had managed to almost completely lose that word from my vocabulary over the proceeding seventeen months in the face of the much more polite and proper Ugandans.
Still, once here again, words like "yo," had suddenly supplanted the much more proper "Hello" or even "Hey," as part of a greeting or an attempt to gain someone's attention. Such verbal gems as "knucklehead" were now in my once untainted speech. Calling someone a "bum" became common. And, the worst to my mind, I was using "at" at the end of sentences to clarify the location of things. It had gotten very, very bad.
"Yo, where is that knucklehead dog of ours at?" I would ask Chas. "What a fucking bum!"
I stopped short, just barely, of saying "yous" and "ain't" but I was rapidly sliding downhill.
And the 'e' and 'r' combinations? Well, let's just say I had a hard time with them in the beginning but have begun to slowly morph into that way of talking too, if only to make myself understood.
Early on, however, Chas and I had a very confusing conversation.
"What do you think of Kerry?" he asked me.
Of course, in Philadelphia-speak, when an 'e' is followed by an 'r,' it becomes a 'u.'
"What kind?" I asked. "I love Indian food in general but some of those sauces are a little spicy for me," I concluded.
He looked at me sideways, undoubtedly trying to discern if it was the last remnants of malaria or whether I truly might be a half-wit.
"Yo, what the fuck are you talking about? Indian food and sauces? I asked what you thought of Kerry...you know, the bartender?" he said.
Oh, K-e-r-r-y...not curry. My bad.
Or, when Chas is going golfing in Delaware or Maryland, he takes a "furry" to get there.
You know, the "furry" that travels across the water to get a passenger from Point A to Point B?
Most Philadelphians also do not modify or add subtlety to anything. Something is either good or bad. Words like "fine" and "well" do not exist in their vocabularies. Chas is never feeling "fine" and things are never going "well." It's either "good" or "bad" (and, on occasion, "nasty") but I have never heard him use anything more subtle than that.
The word "ignorant" also stands in for many different occasions. If you are rude, slow, in a bad mood, annoying, or just plain mean...you are ignorant. It always means something bad, the severity of the badness all depends on whether the f-word is placed in front of it.
If you are "fucking ignorant," then you might as well just curl up and die because you are truly irredeemable at that point.
Same goes with the term "bum," which truly reminds me of Rocky Balboa movies. If someone is a bit of a lazy and unmotivated person, they are a "bum (also a term for a homeless person in American English)." If they have done you wrong, personally or professionally, they are a "dirty bum." However, like ignorant, if the f-word is put in front of "bum," all bets are off. You are a social miscast, you simply do not deserve anyone's attention at all...ever...unless they are going to kick your ass for you "bum-ness."
Oddly, for all of the liberal usage of the word "fuck," the name of God is rarely, very rarely, ever taken in vain. I think it comes from some basic working class superstitions all mixed up with latent Catholicism, Protestantism, or whatever-ism is going on in Philly...but taking God's name in vain is a definite no-no.
For example, I have never, ever heard Chas say, "'Goddamn it" or "Oh my God." Nor does he put "God" in front of "bless you," when someone sneezes. Once, early on, when I tripped over something and stubbed my toe, I carelessly uttered, "Jesus Christ!" I looked over to see Chas staring at me in abject shock before quickly darting his gaze over to the Mass cards which decorate every picture frame in our home. He seemed to be uttering a silent apology to Jesus...no doubt telling Him what an ignorant knucklehead bum I was.
Also, getting away from speech for a moment, this incident brings up another interesting factor in dealing with many working-class and middle-class Philadelphians that had somehow slipped my attention in the nearly two decades of living there.
Superstition.
Philadelphians are very, very ("vury, vury") superstitious people. Particularly when it comes to God and their money. I have already mentioned the Mass card thing (you know, those cards they hand you at funerals that have a picture of Jesus or a saint on the front and a prayer and the name of the recently departed on the back?) but it gets even more bizarre.
Take, for instance, the time I accidentally washed Chas's wallet. He was furious, of course, and I don't really blame him...it was rather ignorant of me....but he was not angry for the reasons I assumed.
I thought, stupidly, that he would be upset that I had laundered his money, his credit cards, and his social security card. Hey, maybe even be a bit pissed off that I had washed a few pictures of his kids...but no, that was not the real problem, the real transgression. The REAL problem was that I had washed Jesus.
"My Mass cards!" he screamed. "You washed my Mass cards (yes, they are found in both wallets and picture frames around these parts), I have had some of those Mass cards for twenty years," he moaned, rescuing a soggy image of St. Paul from the washing machine.
I, ignorantly, tried to make a joke out of it.
"Look, Babe, it's OK. I will lay Jesus and St. Paul out in the sun on the porch and they'll be good as new by tomorrow. Maybe the printing will be a bit faded but...."
"Stop it!" he yelled. "Don't say those things!"
And, for the next 24 hours, until St. Paul and Jesus dried out, Chas crept around the house waiting for the lightening bolt to strike. He made sure to steer well-clear of me.
The money thing is also unusual. For example, many people from Philadelphia absolutely do not trust banks. Despite the fact that Chas and most of his friends are far too young to ever have experienced the Great Depression...well, it might as well have happened yesterday.
Money is kept under beds, under floor boards, in the ceiling...anywhere but in the bank. The bank is seen as a necessary evil for occasional bill-paying when some of the money is secreted out of its location in the house and deposited (in the exact amount of the check to be written) in the bank but, otherwise, banks are viewed as Evil.
The fact that I carry very little cash on my person (my own weird superstitions gained from years of traveling to places where one can easily be relieved of one's cash) and pay for everything with my bank debit card horrifies Chas.
Never mind the fact that Chas, when not paying in cash, conducts almost all of his financial transactions online...a markedly less secure place than the bank. It doesn't matter. Banks are Evil and that is the end of the story. Money is either cash money or money that can be spent online, on the ever-so-secure Internet, but money never, ever goes into the bank. That is where The Man is waiting.
This superstition, of The Man (aka the Government), also lends itself to finer points. For instance, the fact that someone is unemployed or having a hard go of things does not ever reflect on that person's character. Sure, if you're a mass murder or someone who washes Jesus every now and then, you might be held at fault but, mostly, the fact that The Man finally caught up with you is through no fault of your own. Life is hard...we need to stick together...and so goes the philosophy.
Unless, of course, you are a bum or you are ignorant. Then, by God, all bets are off.
In the beginning, when I was reacclimating, I found Chas's Philadelphia-isms charming, worthy of complete adoration. That's why I mimicked them.
Then, about five months into the whole relationship, I made the one huge faux pax you NEVER make with people from Philadelphia: I tried to correct his speech.
He tolerated if for about a week and then we had an arguement.
"Look, this is how I talk, OK? I can, as you have pointed out, talk differently when I need to be around rich and ignorant bums, or people who will judge you about that because of me, but when I am not around them, I like to talk like me...I am comfortable talking like ME...is that such a problem?" he asked.
Ashamed, I admitted that no, it was not a problem at all. It was actually something I loved about him.
"Good," he declared. "Because you are freaking my friends out with your six-syllable words. We all can figure out what they are eventually and, hey, I even KNOW what they mean because I went to college, but why don't you take a break and find a few synonyms for words like 'perturbed?' No one really understands that one anyway..." he said.
"Perturbed is not a six-syllable word," I corrected.
Eyebrows raised, Chas said, "Yes, I understand that. But it is a word that is haughty and annoying. So, given that, why can't you just say 'upset,' or 'flustered,' or 'uncomfortable?'" he countered.
Fully reprimanded, I stopped. I didn't stop using my six-syllable (or two-syllable) words completely, of course, because I adore language and words, but I did stop acting like an ignorant bum, so to speak.
The most amusing part of this whole turn of events is that my language overlord, the woman who would not only constantly chastise me for mimicking but also correct my own English to ensure that it was both proper and expansive...my mother...has been dating a guy from West Philadelphia for over a year.
She is completely in love but went through the same thing I did, sort of, except that she never lived in Philly so this came as a whole new territory for her.
By the time she encountered it, I had accepted it. But the conversation was funny, nonetheless.
"He just said 'yous," she whispered. "And he says 'ain't' all the time...."
"Who cares?" I suggested.
"Patti, PATRICIA, instead of saying beautiful, like it's one flowing word, he says, 'Beau-TEE-ful' like a bad caricture of someone...or something...I don't know...from the mob, from a movie, maybe like from the Rocky movies or something...I just don't get it," she continued.
Knowing where she was going, I volunteered,
"He doesn't speak like that around people who are not from Philly or people that he feels that are important for you, you, to impress, right?" I asked.
"Exactly! How does he do that? How can he go from perfect English to, well, 'city' English just like that? Why can't he speak one way all the time?" she flustered.
"He's a mimic," I informed her. "He can mimic people but, at the end of the day, he has found that he is most comfortable in his own skin...with 'you' and 'yous'...so don't be ignorant," I concluded.
I hung up the phone to see Chas looking at me thoughtfully.
"She's perturbed, ain't she?" he inquired.
Very much so, I agreed.
"You birds are amusing," he opined.
Yes, we are. We are indeed.
01 October 2010
Keep Showing Up?
A couple of days ago, getting my morning tea at the local WaWa, I found myself waiting in line and skimming the headlines of the local Philadelphia newspaper next to a well-dressed man in his late fifties. I was buying the paper and he was reading over my shoulder. It was one of those adult "share with your neighbor" moments that are, thank God, frequently common in this part of the country. People in the Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey area are friendly. Gruff, but friendly.
So this gentleman and I were crammed together in a line that snaked around the counter top in a sea of humanity, most dressed in clothes speckled in paint or in nurse's scrubs, and we started up a conversation over the headlines in the newspaper, most of them covering the spiraling unemployment rate in this country.
"It's ugly out there but the worst part of this whole blasted mess is the human toll," he observed.
Curious, I asked him what he meant.
"You know, relationships busted up under this kind of strain, marriages falling apart, kids getting abused more...that kind of stuff," he said.
"And me," he continued, "I am one of those guys," and he pointed to a headline saying that workers over 50 years of age were at very high risk for never finding employment opportunities again.
"What did you do, um, before this?" I asked.
"Lawyer," he told me, "But one of the good ones, not the ambulance chasers. I worked in Trenton doing environmental protection law. They downsized all of those 'wasteful' programs, like protecting our state's environment and resources, and then I was out of a job. Just like that, after almost 30 years."
We paid for our teas, coffees, and newspapers and continued our conversation in the parking lot.
I was intrigued by this man not only because he seemed very open and friendly, but also because he was dressed as if he still DID have a job.
I pointed this out to him and he laughed.
"Yeah, I still put the suit on. I don't know why but I think it has to do with the fact that if I keep showing up everyday dressed for the job, well, maybe I will eventually get a job!"
I laughed, noticing that I was NOT dressing as if I was ready for the job, in my yoga pants and t-shirt.
"Plus," he continued, "it's my wife too. It's for her. We had to give up the house in Trenton and the place we had with my kids up in Philly. We are still able to afford our shore(beach) house because I managed to pay the place off when...well, when I had a job...so now we live down here. But it's killing her slowly so I think it is important that I put on a suit everyday like it is still the same. It's important to her even if it just...well, just an imaginary thing for now."
I felt tears start to come but I willed them back. I was not going to get all weepy around this guy who, for whatever reason, had decided to grace my life with some dignity that day.
"But you're in such a good mood, it seems," I said to him. "How do you remain in such good spirits?"
"Well, I ain't dead!" he joked, "And I still have a home and my kids are helping us out now so we're not poor...and what's the point of being miserable? If they ever decide to hire an environmental protection lawyer again, they are not going to hire the miserable guy."
I envied him his goodwill and bid him farewell and good luck. Before he asked me about my story.
On the way home I was processing what he said about the human toll of being unemployed and I was suddenly transported back to graduate school nine years earlier.
I was a student of international relations and had harbored a lifelong curiosity about war. No, not just the munitions and the battlefield, but the actual human effects of war.
I had an incredible professor at the time and she was dedicated to helping her students and everyone else she encountered understand that while war was indeed devastating, the worst part came in its aftermath.
Not just in the broken and bruised bodies, or the mass graves, or the leftover landmines, or the post-traumatic stress disorder....the worst part boiled down to one thing: unemployment.
Wars devastate national economies in their aftermath. Yes, while some wars indeed provide hyper-inflated economic growth during the time of planning and the active military campaign, almost all come to a crashing close with a shut-down economy and hundreds of thousands of people unemployed.
And that, my professor used to say, was when the shit hit the fan.
We were studying Kosovo and some small wars in Africa at the time and I remember reading articles, testimonies, books, etc., about the spike in divorces, suicides, spousal and child abuse, and stress-induced mental disorders. Alongside those statistics were spikes in alcoholism, drug use, and other substance-related abuse.
"A human being not being allowed to exhibit his or her potential is one of the most destructive forces on the planet," this professor used to say.
Years later, in Washington DC, I remembered her words when I worked on various task forces planning for post-war Iraq. I also remembered it when I was asked to do assessments of why various initiatives in post-conflict countries were not working. Why, with all the money being poured in to prop economies up, were they still on the verge of war all the time?
This is just a blog and not one intended to go into the shortcomings of international development assistance and pre-and post-war planning but something struck me that day in the WaWa parking lot talking to the unemployed lawyer in the suit that hadn't occurred to me with such clarity before:
This was us. This was me. This was the United States in 2010.
I started to count back in my head the number of couples that I knew, really good couples, that had either broken up or gotten divorced over the past year.
I thought about the phone calls from formerly upbeat male and female friends who would call with a litany of things that were suddenly driving them nuts about their significant others, their kids, their parents, etc.
And I realized that all of them, ALL OF THEM, had one thing in common: someone had recently become unemployed.
And not one of them, not one, had ever been unemployed in their adult lives. These folks are all go-getters, over-achievers, and highly skilled. They are doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists, graphic artists, musicians, former military officers, etc.
If life were a baseball game, these are the people you would definitely want in your starting line-up. Creative, impassioned, driven, and intelligent (both the school and street-smarts variety), these friends of mine are now unemployed. Most with a spouse or a significant other, many with kids, and all sharing one particular problem: their relationships are falling apart.
Sticking to spouse/significant other relationships for the moment, the theme is something like this: "He or she knew me as a certain person and now I am not that person any longer. I am still the same person inside but how can he or she know that because no one else seems to see that anymore. It's not just the money, it's the fact that I can't share in the experience anymore. I cannot be part of the experience because I have no money. I can't give or receive. And so we fight because I am angry but there is no one to be angry with. How can I feel angry when everyone else is telling me that this is happening to EVERYONE? But I am not everyone, I am me and I am angry. How can this be happening to ME?"
Something like that.
I am, of course, in that category as well. This is why I think I can articulate it clearly. I am also one of those friends of mine who sneak out onto the porch or the balcony or into the backyard with a beer or a glass of wine, and participate and initiate the phone calls. I am also one of the people whose own relationship is suffering. I am also one of those people who is angry all the time but feels guilty about feeling that way.
The cruelest part are the people who say, "You're just being picky, just go get any job."
I wish.
My friend Kelly, a graphic artist who used to work with autistic children, told me about her recent experience:
"Tom and I have been fighting non-stop and it's because of money. I used to make about $70,000 a year and now that whole income is gone and we are surviving on his $30,000 a year job as a glass blower. I have been searching for two years and nothing even remotely close to my field has come up. So I decided to go apply at the diner down the road because they were hiring and I needed to do something, anything, to make money and be active again. I went in and filled out an application where I had to list my education and prior work experience. You know what the manager did? He threw the thing back in my face and said, 'We got people who need work a lot more than you with your fancy education, go try somewhere else.'"
Same with my friend, John, a former Marine Corps engineer who left the military to work for a private contractor for a few years. When they downsized, he was out of a job and spent two years looking for something, anything, that might put his talents to use. He called two weeks ago to tell me that he and his wife were getting divorced.
"It was just too much strain. She knew me when I was bringing in about $180,000 a year and could afford to take us on all of these expensive trips. I was the asshole at the time and told her to stop working so hard as a teacher. So she lost all of her accreditation and now she has had to go back to work making less than she did when we got married. Now she works in a crappy school district making $27,000 a year and I have no job. She can get more benefits from the state with the kids if she divorces me. I can't blame her but I just never thought my life would turn out like this...I was given a full scholarship to Duke, for Christ's sake! Now I work at a drug store and make $8.00 an hour and she is too embarrassed to have me as her husband...but it's my fault."
The last significant story is about my friend's ex-girlfriend. Her name is Lydia and she was, for years, one of the most sought-after linguists in Washington, DC. Half Lebanese, half German, she grew up on military bases around the world after her father became a U.S. naturalized citizen following his service in Vietnam. She had a natural talent for languages and found gainful employment for years teaching rich kids in DC how to speak French while working part-time at a charter school giving lessons. When the war in Iraq happened, Lydia volunteered because she was fluent in Arabic. In 2008, several civilian tours later, and with her beloved boyfriend and my friend, Kevin, an Army NCO, on her arm, she returned to Washington, DC.
Kevin tells it like this:
"She was convinced she would find work again but no one was hiring. The economy had been hit hard and private language lessons were one luxury that quickly got cut from rich people's budgets. None of the charter schools were hiring and neither were the public schools. She would try to get jobs that matched what she could do, even stuff like teaching immigrants English, and she would be turned down once they saw her resume. They just assumed she wanted the same amount of money again even though she didn't. She just wanted to fucking work! So she tried and kept getting more and more angry and more and more distant. The worst time was when she was working at 7-11 and a bunch of kids came in and called her a 'dot-head' and pushed her around. I tried to do everything I could but supporting two people on my salary was getting tough. We started fighting all the time because we were both drinking too much and I couldn't find work either. It just all went to hell. I sometimes wonder how it would have been if she could have found work or I could have gotten a better job. But there's no use thinking those thoughts anymore, what's gone is gone."
This blog is not meant to be a formerly-rich or upper-middle class person's manifesto of collective distress.
But it IS reality.
Relationships at every level are being torn apart as people are cast adrift in a society that has become closed and is shedding its pool of talent. My own included.
Chas has insisted to me that things will get better and I love him all the more for his assurances. But I also know that I have had the same thing happen to me that my friends have had happen to them: my resume or job application turned back in my face and some wise ass who doesn't know me in the least say, "Oh, I am supposed to hire you? With your fancy Master's degree and all this time spent in foreign countries? I am supposed to feel sorry for you? Well, go knock on someone else's door, we hire people who really want to work."
Or applying for jobs that ARE in my field only to get: "Look, we'd love to hire you but there is no way we can pay you that salary again...I know you say that you are willing to take less but it's better for us to hire someone with fewer expectations and far less experience, we hope you understand."
What? Fewer expectations and less experience? Is this really what our country is about?
So we creep home with the news that, once again, we failed to get hired.
And our spouses or significant others try to be understanding but still ask, "How is that possible? How can you not get a job?"
They don't mean it, but the words slip out and, like a surgeon's knife, lob off another part of our identity and another piece of our soul.
Chas asks me sometimes why I stay up so late at night, why I don't come to bed with him.
He thinks it is because I am rejecting him or that I don't love him.
The reality is that the new job posts for people who work in foreign relations come up on a website at midnight and I keep watch over it like a mother would with a sick child.
Resume or CV at the ready, I write relevant cover letters, piece together writings that seem to fit, run through my list of references to find the ones that are most appropriate, and then fire off the application into the ether with a prayer.
Then I check my chat box on gmail and see about five or six of my friends online at the same time, doing the very same thing. We inevitably start chatting and then I crawl into bed at 2am exhausted but better for my late night chats with people who are experiencing the same thing.
We normally convene again the next day, sometime past 10pm, to talk about how another fight has happened, another marriage has come closer to breaking, another person is more distant and less forgiving. We send each other articles and postings of relevance and try to keep each other sane.
But no one is sane.
I shared the story of the man at WaWa the other night on one of our chats.
"That IS a good story. Inspiring," Kevin chatted.
"Maybe we just keep showing up?" another friend said.
So, yeah, I guess we just keep showing up and hope, pray, that those around us know that we all have far greater abilities and potential than what is currently on the surface.
So this gentleman and I were crammed together in a line that snaked around the counter top in a sea of humanity, most dressed in clothes speckled in paint or in nurse's scrubs, and we started up a conversation over the headlines in the newspaper, most of them covering the spiraling unemployment rate in this country.
"It's ugly out there but the worst part of this whole blasted mess is the human toll," he observed.
Curious, I asked him what he meant.
"You know, relationships busted up under this kind of strain, marriages falling apart, kids getting abused more...that kind of stuff," he said.
"And me," he continued, "I am one of those guys," and he pointed to a headline saying that workers over 50 years of age were at very high risk for never finding employment opportunities again.
"What did you do, um, before this?" I asked.
"Lawyer," he told me, "But one of the good ones, not the ambulance chasers. I worked in Trenton doing environmental protection law. They downsized all of those 'wasteful' programs, like protecting our state's environment and resources, and then I was out of a job. Just like that, after almost 30 years."
We paid for our teas, coffees, and newspapers and continued our conversation in the parking lot.
I was intrigued by this man not only because he seemed very open and friendly, but also because he was dressed as if he still DID have a job.
I pointed this out to him and he laughed.
"Yeah, I still put the suit on. I don't know why but I think it has to do with the fact that if I keep showing up everyday dressed for the job, well, maybe I will eventually get a job!"
I laughed, noticing that I was NOT dressing as if I was ready for the job, in my yoga pants and t-shirt.
"Plus," he continued, "it's my wife too. It's for her. We had to give up the house in Trenton and the place we had with my kids up in Philly. We are still able to afford our shore(beach) house because I managed to pay the place off when...well, when I had a job...so now we live down here. But it's killing her slowly so I think it is important that I put on a suit everyday like it is still the same. It's important to her even if it just...well, just an imaginary thing for now."
I felt tears start to come but I willed them back. I was not going to get all weepy around this guy who, for whatever reason, had decided to grace my life with some dignity that day.
"But you're in such a good mood, it seems," I said to him. "How do you remain in such good spirits?"
"Well, I ain't dead!" he joked, "And I still have a home and my kids are helping us out now so we're not poor...and what's the point of being miserable? If they ever decide to hire an environmental protection lawyer again, they are not going to hire the miserable guy."
I envied him his goodwill and bid him farewell and good luck. Before he asked me about my story.
On the way home I was processing what he said about the human toll of being unemployed and I was suddenly transported back to graduate school nine years earlier.
I was a student of international relations and had harbored a lifelong curiosity about war. No, not just the munitions and the battlefield, but the actual human effects of war.
I had an incredible professor at the time and she was dedicated to helping her students and everyone else she encountered understand that while war was indeed devastating, the worst part came in its aftermath.
Not just in the broken and bruised bodies, or the mass graves, or the leftover landmines, or the post-traumatic stress disorder....the worst part boiled down to one thing: unemployment.
Wars devastate national economies in their aftermath. Yes, while some wars indeed provide hyper-inflated economic growth during the time of planning and the active military campaign, almost all come to a crashing close with a shut-down economy and hundreds of thousands of people unemployed.
And that, my professor used to say, was when the shit hit the fan.
We were studying Kosovo and some small wars in Africa at the time and I remember reading articles, testimonies, books, etc., about the spike in divorces, suicides, spousal and child abuse, and stress-induced mental disorders. Alongside those statistics were spikes in alcoholism, drug use, and other substance-related abuse.
"A human being not being allowed to exhibit his or her potential is one of the most destructive forces on the planet," this professor used to say.
Years later, in Washington DC, I remembered her words when I worked on various task forces planning for post-war Iraq. I also remembered it when I was asked to do assessments of why various initiatives in post-conflict countries were not working. Why, with all the money being poured in to prop economies up, were they still on the verge of war all the time?
This is just a blog and not one intended to go into the shortcomings of international development assistance and pre-and post-war planning but something struck me that day in the WaWa parking lot talking to the unemployed lawyer in the suit that hadn't occurred to me with such clarity before:
This was us. This was me. This was the United States in 2010.
I started to count back in my head the number of couples that I knew, really good couples, that had either broken up or gotten divorced over the past year.
I thought about the phone calls from formerly upbeat male and female friends who would call with a litany of things that were suddenly driving them nuts about their significant others, their kids, their parents, etc.
And I realized that all of them, ALL OF THEM, had one thing in common: someone had recently become unemployed.
And not one of them, not one, had ever been unemployed in their adult lives. These folks are all go-getters, over-achievers, and highly skilled. They are doctors, lawyers, psychiatrists, graphic artists, musicians, former military officers, etc.
If life were a baseball game, these are the people you would definitely want in your starting line-up. Creative, impassioned, driven, and intelligent (both the school and street-smarts variety), these friends of mine are now unemployed. Most with a spouse or a significant other, many with kids, and all sharing one particular problem: their relationships are falling apart.
Sticking to spouse/significant other relationships for the moment, the theme is something like this: "He or she knew me as a certain person and now I am not that person any longer. I am still the same person inside but how can he or she know that because no one else seems to see that anymore. It's not just the money, it's the fact that I can't share in the experience anymore. I cannot be part of the experience because I have no money. I can't give or receive. And so we fight because I am angry but there is no one to be angry with. How can I feel angry when everyone else is telling me that this is happening to EVERYONE? But I am not everyone, I am me and I am angry. How can this be happening to ME?"
Something like that.
I am, of course, in that category as well. This is why I think I can articulate it clearly. I am also one of those friends of mine who sneak out onto the porch or the balcony or into the backyard with a beer or a glass of wine, and participate and initiate the phone calls. I am also one of the people whose own relationship is suffering. I am also one of those people who is angry all the time but feels guilty about feeling that way.
The cruelest part are the people who say, "You're just being picky, just go get any job."
I wish.
My friend Kelly, a graphic artist who used to work with autistic children, told me about her recent experience:
"Tom and I have been fighting non-stop and it's because of money. I used to make about $70,000 a year and now that whole income is gone and we are surviving on his $30,000 a year job as a glass blower. I have been searching for two years and nothing even remotely close to my field has come up. So I decided to go apply at the diner down the road because they were hiring and I needed to do something, anything, to make money and be active again. I went in and filled out an application where I had to list my education and prior work experience. You know what the manager did? He threw the thing back in my face and said, 'We got people who need work a lot more than you with your fancy education, go try somewhere else.'"
Same with my friend, John, a former Marine Corps engineer who left the military to work for a private contractor for a few years. When they downsized, he was out of a job and spent two years looking for something, anything, that might put his talents to use. He called two weeks ago to tell me that he and his wife were getting divorced.
"It was just too much strain. She knew me when I was bringing in about $180,000 a year and could afford to take us on all of these expensive trips. I was the asshole at the time and told her to stop working so hard as a teacher. So she lost all of her accreditation and now she has had to go back to work making less than she did when we got married. Now she works in a crappy school district making $27,000 a year and I have no job. She can get more benefits from the state with the kids if she divorces me. I can't blame her but I just never thought my life would turn out like this...I was given a full scholarship to Duke, for Christ's sake! Now I work at a drug store and make $8.00 an hour and she is too embarrassed to have me as her husband...but it's my fault."
The last significant story is about my friend's ex-girlfriend. Her name is Lydia and she was, for years, one of the most sought-after linguists in Washington, DC. Half Lebanese, half German, she grew up on military bases around the world after her father became a U.S. naturalized citizen following his service in Vietnam. She had a natural talent for languages and found gainful employment for years teaching rich kids in DC how to speak French while working part-time at a charter school giving lessons. When the war in Iraq happened, Lydia volunteered because she was fluent in Arabic. In 2008, several civilian tours later, and with her beloved boyfriend and my friend, Kevin, an Army NCO, on her arm, she returned to Washington, DC.
Kevin tells it like this:
"She was convinced she would find work again but no one was hiring. The economy had been hit hard and private language lessons were one luxury that quickly got cut from rich people's budgets. None of the charter schools were hiring and neither were the public schools. She would try to get jobs that matched what she could do, even stuff like teaching immigrants English, and she would be turned down once they saw her resume. They just assumed she wanted the same amount of money again even though she didn't. She just wanted to fucking work! So she tried and kept getting more and more angry and more and more distant. The worst time was when she was working at 7-11 and a bunch of kids came in and called her a 'dot-head' and pushed her around. I tried to do everything I could but supporting two people on my salary was getting tough. We started fighting all the time because we were both drinking too much and I couldn't find work either. It just all went to hell. I sometimes wonder how it would have been if she could have found work or I could have gotten a better job. But there's no use thinking those thoughts anymore, what's gone is gone."
This blog is not meant to be a formerly-rich or upper-middle class person's manifesto of collective distress.
But it IS reality.
Relationships at every level are being torn apart as people are cast adrift in a society that has become closed and is shedding its pool of talent. My own included.
Chas has insisted to me that things will get better and I love him all the more for his assurances. But I also know that I have had the same thing happen to me that my friends have had happen to them: my resume or job application turned back in my face and some wise ass who doesn't know me in the least say, "Oh, I am supposed to hire you? With your fancy Master's degree and all this time spent in foreign countries? I am supposed to feel sorry for you? Well, go knock on someone else's door, we hire people who really want to work."
Or applying for jobs that ARE in my field only to get: "Look, we'd love to hire you but there is no way we can pay you that salary again...I know you say that you are willing to take less but it's better for us to hire someone with fewer expectations and far less experience, we hope you understand."
What? Fewer expectations and less experience? Is this really what our country is about?
So we creep home with the news that, once again, we failed to get hired.
And our spouses or significant others try to be understanding but still ask, "How is that possible? How can you not get a job?"
They don't mean it, but the words slip out and, like a surgeon's knife, lob off another part of our identity and another piece of our soul.
Chas asks me sometimes why I stay up so late at night, why I don't come to bed with him.
He thinks it is because I am rejecting him or that I don't love him.
The reality is that the new job posts for people who work in foreign relations come up on a website at midnight and I keep watch over it like a mother would with a sick child.
Resume or CV at the ready, I write relevant cover letters, piece together writings that seem to fit, run through my list of references to find the ones that are most appropriate, and then fire off the application into the ether with a prayer.
Then I check my chat box on gmail and see about five or six of my friends online at the same time, doing the very same thing. We inevitably start chatting and then I crawl into bed at 2am exhausted but better for my late night chats with people who are experiencing the same thing.
We normally convene again the next day, sometime past 10pm, to talk about how another fight has happened, another marriage has come closer to breaking, another person is more distant and less forgiving. We send each other articles and postings of relevance and try to keep each other sane.
But no one is sane.
I shared the story of the man at WaWa the other night on one of our chats.
"That IS a good story. Inspiring," Kevin chatted.
"Maybe we just keep showing up?" another friend said.
So, yeah, I guess we just keep showing up and hope, pray, that those around us know that we all have far greater abilities and potential than what is currently on the surface.
12 April 2010
The Ado about doing Nothing
So it will be, next week, officially, three months since I have not worked.
I know, I know...this is a rather insignificant and unstarteling admission given the state of the U.S. economy, but it is one that I have a rather hard time grapling with. For one reason, I have never been unemployed until now and the last time this happened, I was 12 years old and begging God in the bathtub every night to grant me breasts the size of Melinda DelGado's (it is not important who Melinda DelGado is here...it is just important to know that I was in eigth grade and wanted boobs instead of the pancakes that were currently in my bra).
The second reason is because I have what psychologists term as "an overactive mind." Kindly, we have historically called these folks...these people with overactive minds..."artists," and "philosophers" and "avant guard thinkers..." which, quite frankly, is wonderful if you were living in Paris during the 18th century or Rome during the sixth. Oh hell, for that matter, even in Greenwich Village, New York in the 1960s. But, alas, if you are living in 2010 in southern New Jersey...it just doesn't have the same ring to it. Doesn't seem to convey the same sense of deep and enlightening purpose.
But here I am, in 2010 in southern New Jersey with (thank God) decent sized breasts but no job.
Mind you, this is of my choosing. I have decided to embrace this whole "unemployed" thing for the simple reason that it is so foreign to me, so outside of my realm of comfortable experience, that I figure I might as well get this lesson down now. Who knows? I may be employed at any given time and my tits will shrink...might as well experiment with the counter-culture for now.
The first thing you learn from being unemployed is that you have A LOT of time to spend with your own mind. For me, who always fancied myself pretty aware and self-knowledgeable, this has been a shock. I have discovered things about myself that I never knew before...and not all of them are things I like...but some are.
After I "resigned" from my post in Uganda (which, to this day, is something I don't think I will ever figure out the dynamics of...whether I resigned, was fired, forced out, etc...), I went into complete shock. I basically sat down on my boyfriend's couch in New Jersey and proceeded to do nothing for an entire month but read self-help books, stare blankly at at the television screen, and avoid any and all national news.
(I watched the Lifetime channel for a solid two weeks for Christ's sake...does that not show my level of utter despondence?)
I also followed my boyfriend, Chas, around hopelessly, like a lost puppy.
This, I can tell you now that I am out of the fog, is not characteristic of me...but, again, I am realizing that I seem to have a few "not characteristic" themes up my sleeve.
So I followed Chas around for a month or so (OK, maybe two months) asking, "Do you love me? Do you still think I am smart?"
Chas, like me, has no patience after a certain point and so when he determined that my convalescence was over, he was blunt.
"What the fuck is wrong with you? You are a woman who has traveled the world, been in war zones, written a book, taught classes to Marines, and now you are following me around the house asking me if I think you're smart and whether I love you?" he said, "When do you think stage this might be over?"
He was exasperated...and I was still pathetic.
Fine, I declared. Just fucking fine. I will DO something and then I won't have to think about any of this anymore.
So I decided to cook and to garden...my two favorite things to do besides writing and thinking...both of which were not coming to me easily anymore.
I cooked.
Dear God did I cook.
I think it was somewhere between the Vietnamese Pho and the braised, stuffed artichokes that I realized I might have gone a tad too far.
"Do you know how to make a meatloaf?" Chas asked, one night after he discovered that Vietnamese noodle soup was not something he needed to heal and that he hated artichokes...something I still can't believe.
I was incensed.
"Of course I know how to make a damn meatloaf!" I said, "But I spent four hours on this soup and the artichoke recipe was hard to execute and it took time...why don't you love me?"
Chas was, quite frankly, flabbergasted.
"I DO love you and I love most of what you make. But I am not used to having a personal chef and that's what you are now. You are making these exotic meals that, most times, I appreciate, but I would rather have YOU back around again. Can we just have meatloaf or spaghetti and meatballs one night? Please?" he asked.
Of course, at the time, I couldn't see his line of reasoning.
And, Chas is no angel.
He is, at times, surly and moody and he likes to be heavily tasked.
This (not the surly or moody part) is a good thing.
I ask him to do something and he actually does it. In a timely manner. And no, not just becausehe wants to get laid...his mind actually goes bonkers if he doesn't complete a task on time to its ultimate potential.
I understand this emotion deeply. It used to run my life.
Sometimes, however, it does get out of control.
"Dog just won't shit!" he tells me, after our Pug, Mo, has defeated him another time.
Chas is facing me, crestfallen, after another dog walking during our rainy and dreary day in our little beach hideout has fallen short.
"Damn dog won't shit," he tells me, "and I know he wants to..."
He continues: "Of course he wants to! But he won't...you are the only person on the planet that can make this dog shit!" he says.
I sometimes think about this...how it might look on my resume.
I can make dogs shit.
But then I relegate it to the back burner and try to think higher thoughts about myself.
So I take Mo out and, of course, he shits.
I pick it up ("as curbing your dog" is a serious policy in Wildwood, New Jersey).
Chas greets me at the door...
"He shat for you, didn't he?" he sulks.
I have nothing to offer but a soggy dog and an even more soggy pile of...waste.
In its proper blue bag, of course.
"Yeah, he shat. I don't have any special advice to offer you...dogs feel comfortable shitting around me," I proffer, hoping to deter the subject.
Chas surprises me, as usual.
"You actually do have a lot to offer. I like that about you," he says.
So me and Chas and Mo all tuck into an incredibly warm and soothing bed at 10am on a Tuesday morning.
We sleep for an hour and then we all get up and go our separate ways.
Chas is outside trying to ascertain how to hang my new strawberry planter (yield: 40 kilos of strawberries, or so they tell me on the box) in the right light, Mo is executing a very Freudian act that has to do with balancing between masturbating and tearing Chas's shoes apart as an act of punishable pleasure, and me...well, I am just me.
So I grab my coffee and my breakfast sandwich, snuggle deeper under the sheets that line the bed where both the man and the dog that I love also sleep...and I fall into a deep slumber.
Chas and Mo awaken me an hour later.
There is no time to sleep when there are things to harvest and life to pay attention to while it is...well, alive.
So I get up.
I used to make over 100 thousand dollars a year. Now, I make nothing.
But nothing seems OK right now.
Very OK.
I know, I know...this is a rather insignificant and unstarteling admission given the state of the U.S. economy, but it is one that I have a rather hard time grapling with. For one reason, I have never been unemployed until now and the last time this happened, I was 12 years old and begging God in the bathtub every night to grant me breasts the size of Melinda DelGado's (it is not important who Melinda DelGado is here...it is just important to know that I was in eigth grade and wanted boobs instead of the pancakes that were currently in my bra).
The second reason is because I have what psychologists term as "an overactive mind." Kindly, we have historically called these folks...these people with overactive minds..."artists," and "philosophers" and "avant guard thinkers..." which, quite frankly, is wonderful if you were living in Paris during the 18th century or Rome during the sixth. Oh hell, for that matter, even in Greenwich Village, New York in the 1960s. But, alas, if you are living in 2010 in southern New Jersey...it just doesn't have the same ring to it. Doesn't seem to convey the same sense of deep and enlightening purpose.
But here I am, in 2010 in southern New Jersey with (thank God) decent sized breasts but no job.
Mind you, this is of my choosing. I have decided to embrace this whole "unemployed" thing for the simple reason that it is so foreign to me, so outside of my realm of comfortable experience, that I figure I might as well get this lesson down now. Who knows? I may be employed at any given time and my tits will shrink...might as well experiment with the counter-culture for now.
The first thing you learn from being unemployed is that you have A LOT of time to spend with your own mind. For me, who always fancied myself pretty aware and self-knowledgeable, this has been a shock. I have discovered things about myself that I never knew before...and not all of them are things I like...but some are.
After I "resigned" from my post in Uganda (which, to this day, is something I don't think I will ever figure out the dynamics of...whether I resigned, was fired, forced out, etc...), I went into complete shock. I basically sat down on my boyfriend's couch in New Jersey and proceeded to do nothing for an entire month but read self-help books, stare blankly at at the television screen, and avoid any and all national news.
(I watched the Lifetime channel for a solid two weeks for Christ's sake...does that not show my level of utter despondence?)
I also followed my boyfriend, Chas, around hopelessly, like a lost puppy.
This, I can tell you now that I am out of the fog, is not characteristic of me...but, again, I am realizing that I seem to have a few "not characteristic" themes up my sleeve.
So I followed Chas around for a month or so (OK, maybe two months) asking, "Do you love me? Do you still think I am smart?"
Chas, like me, has no patience after a certain point and so when he determined that my convalescence was over, he was blunt.
"What the fuck is wrong with you? You are a woman who has traveled the world, been in war zones, written a book, taught classes to Marines, and now you are following me around the house asking me if I think you're smart and whether I love you?" he said, "When do you think stage this might be over?"
He was exasperated...and I was still pathetic.
Fine, I declared. Just fucking fine. I will DO something and then I won't have to think about any of this anymore.
So I decided to cook and to garden...my two favorite things to do besides writing and thinking...both of which were not coming to me easily anymore.
I cooked.
Dear God did I cook.
I think it was somewhere between the Vietnamese Pho and the braised, stuffed artichokes that I realized I might have gone a tad too far.
"Do you know how to make a meatloaf?" Chas asked, one night after he discovered that Vietnamese noodle soup was not something he needed to heal and that he hated artichokes...something I still can't believe.
I was incensed.
"Of course I know how to make a damn meatloaf!" I said, "But I spent four hours on this soup and the artichoke recipe was hard to execute and it took time...why don't you love me?"
Chas was, quite frankly, flabbergasted.
"I DO love you and I love most of what you make. But I am not used to having a personal chef and that's what you are now. You are making these exotic meals that, most times, I appreciate, but I would rather have YOU back around again. Can we just have meatloaf or spaghetti and meatballs one night? Please?" he asked.
Of course, at the time, I couldn't see his line of reasoning.
And, Chas is no angel.
He is, at times, surly and moody and he likes to be heavily tasked.
This (not the surly or moody part) is a good thing.
I ask him to do something and he actually does it. In a timely manner. And no, not just becausehe wants to get laid...his mind actually goes bonkers if he doesn't complete a task on time to its ultimate potential.
I understand this emotion deeply. It used to run my life.
Sometimes, however, it does get out of control.
"Dog just won't shit!" he tells me, after our Pug, Mo, has defeated him another time.
Chas is facing me, crestfallen, after another dog walking during our rainy and dreary day in our little beach hideout has fallen short.
"Damn dog won't shit," he tells me, "and I know he wants to..."
He continues: "Of course he wants to! But he won't...you are the only person on the planet that can make this dog shit!" he says.
I sometimes think about this...how it might look on my resume.
I can make dogs shit.
But then I relegate it to the back burner and try to think higher thoughts about myself.
So I take Mo out and, of course, he shits.
I pick it up ("as curbing your dog" is a serious policy in Wildwood, New Jersey).
Chas greets me at the door...
"He shat for you, didn't he?" he sulks.
I have nothing to offer but a soggy dog and an even more soggy pile of...waste.
In its proper blue bag, of course.
"Yeah, he shat. I don't have any special advice to offer you...dogs feel comfortable shitting around me," I proffer, hoping to deter the subject.
Chas surprises me, as usual.
"You actually do have a lot to offer. I like that about you," he says.
So me and Chas and Mo all tuck into an incredibly warm and soothing bed at 10am on a Tuesday morning.
We sleep for an hour and then we all get up and go our separate ways.
Chas is outside trying to ascertain how to hang my new strawberry planter (yield: 40 kilos of strawberries, or so they tell me on the box) in the right light, Mo is executing a very Freudian act that has to do with balancing between masturbating and tearing Chas's shoes apart as an act of punishable pleasure, and me...well, I am just me.
So I grab my coffee and my breakfast sandwich, snuggle deeper under the sheets that line the bed where both the man and the dog that I love also sleep...and I fall into a deep slumber.
Chas and Mo awaken me an hour later.
There is no time to sleep when there are things to harvest and life to pay attention to while it is...well, alive.
So I get up.
I used to make over 100 thousand dollars a year. Now, I make nothing.
But nothing seems OK right now.
Very OK.
18 March 2010
The Golf Trip: How Men and Women Travel
It has been two weeks of high drama at our little house on the bay in southern New Jersey.
It has been two weeks full of heated emotional exchanges, fierce competition, and moments of sheer glory.
And no, oddly enough, it has had absolutely nothing to do with me...although I am finding it endlessly amusing...
The subject and object of the drama, and the endless days of fretting and fanaticism, are due to one momentous yearly event: Chas is going away golfing with the boys.
Mind you, I have always been interested in the way people travel, whether near or far. I have also always been curious about the way men plan for and undertake trips versus how women do. Being somewhat of a travel nerd, I am oddly interested in how people plan, how they pack, how they approach air travel, and how they actually behave once they arrive in their final destination.
For me, travel is one of my ultimate joys and, having done it professionally for almost a decade, has become a routine that I am used to.
Sure, we all have our habits...and mine is still sometimes throwing everything into a suitcase at the last minute and hoping "mascara" has a character in Mandarin if I forget it...but travel is kind of my "bag," no pun intended, so I tend not to stress too much.
Plus, I have almost always traveled, at least for pleasure, with women. The travel I have done with men, and it has been a significant amount, has not necessarily allowed me to closely observe their travel habits as I have usually been their employee or employer. In that role, no one usually tells me if they forgot their hair gel or if they need to run out for an emergency dose of Imodium...it just doesn't often unfold that way.
And, if it is women I happen to be traveling with, we have all long before figured out each other's strengths and weaknesses and have formed a working cooperative relationship so everyone knows their role and there is minimal competition.
Oh, and if a girl forgets a razor, shampoo, a makeup item or something needed for a headache or a stomachache, you can pretty much rest assured that someone has it and is willing to share. Even if there are only two of you...
Because, and I don't say this out of disrespect for men, women are planners and tend to think of contingencies all the time (hey, we bear children, right? We're programmed to look out for two people at all times, minimum...). So when I travel with women, I never worry about whether I forgot something because I know one of two things: a) she will have it or something very close to it, or, b) she will be more than willing to come into foreign stores with me and spend hours trying to divine symbols on the back of jars, tubes and containers to find the nearest thing that I am looking for.
Hey, girls rock, right?
But men? Oh, men are a different story altogether.
Chas has been doing this golf trip with his older brother and their two close friends for more than twenty years. And, he reports, each year is another soap opera-style drama leading up to the actual pleasure...the golf.
Thank God that Chas has no desire whatsoever for me to partake in this sport as I find golf about as entertaining as watching someone scraping barnacles from the bottom of a boat but that doesn't, under any circumstance, mean I am exempt from the preparatory measures.
"Baby, get out here! You simply have to see this!" he called, two weeks ago upon checking his email.
I came in from the other room to watch Chas manipulating the most complicated Microsoft Excel spreadsheet I have ever seen in my life.
"What the hell is THAT?" I asked.
"THAT would be Bill's (his brother) attempt at planning. You see," he pointed to the screen, "we have tee times, locations of courses, addresses of courses, websites of courses, directions to the house, directions to the nearest restaurants, mileage from the house, mileage from the airport, and also this column with his own personal suggestions..."
Honestly, I have seen some pretty complicated spreadsheets before but this one was even a bit much for me.
"Haven't you been doing this for over 20 years? Don't you have a system worked out yet?" I asked, dumbfounded.
"Oh yeah, we have a system...and it starts with this fucking spreadsheet. But I don't get involved in that crap...I am just there to golf," he declared, emphatically.
I didn't believe him for a second.
Over the next hour, Chas proceeded to look up each and every one of the recommendations on that spreadsheet and then spent an hour writing an elaborate email back to his brother and their friends with HIS suggestions, including corrections on times, distances, and mileage.
Dinner was getting cold and I mistakenly said, "Baby, you said your brother and his friend have the final word on everything anyway and you don't have the time or the care to deliberate this so can you please, maybe, get off of the computer and eat dinner? It's getting cold..."
He looked at me as if I was Judas tempting Christ in the garden while he was talking to the Big Man Upstairs.
(In my case, I was tempting him with spaghetti and meatballs while he was finding the exact distance to the closest Hooters... but, hey, whatever...)
"I just need to finish this...and I don't care...not really...but I have to have my say," he declared.
This went on for two weeks.
Every morning, a new spreadsheet or a new email.
Every afternoon, an infuriated or surly Chas.
One evening, he took me aside in confidence and said, "I always take the kid's bed...you know that, right?"
A tad confused, and, yes, perhaps also a bit concerned, but still unwilling to raise the beast, I said, "OK, Baby, I am sure you do..."
He gripped my elbow...
"No, listen to me...I always take the CHILD'S bedroom WITHOUT the en suite bathroom because I DON'T CARE and I am down there to GOLF and every year we get a four bedroom house and there is one room for children and I take it and sleep in the too-tiny bed on the Winnie the Pooh sheets EVERY YEAR because I DON'T FUCKING CARE!!!"
His eyes were wild.
"Baby, it's OK...I love you for, um, consistently taking the child's bedroom. It was one of the things I loved about you first...not that you sleep in children's bedrooms, of course, um, but that you rise above the fray!" I said.
And this is absolutely true.
Chas usually doesn't get involved in petty dramas and he doesn't pay a lot of attention to people who do. I, on the other hand, usually spend way too much time listening to other people's crap so Chas has been very, very good for me that way.
So, of course, I appreciated his willingness to sleep in the Winnie the Pooh sheets.
"But what would you do?" he asked. "Would you be willing to sleep in a tiny kid's bed to avoid conflict?"
Ah, the rub.
The answer, ultimately, is yes.
But I can't picture a scenario where that would be an issue.
If it were my four closest friends...we would probably figure out who was in need of more comfort or more space or more alone time or more together time...and no, this would NOT go into a spreadsheet.
It actually would likely have never been discussed. Females have a natural sense of hierarchy combined with ingrained intuitiveness. We might fight on men and ideas...but we don't fight over beds.
Money was the other issue that was driving Chas and his golfing buddies insane.
Chas is, thank God, not uptight when it comes to money. He is prudent and has that natural Philly shrewdness about getting the most for your buck but he is caught between two people, on this trip, who are either completely stingy and uptight or frivolous and careless. One counts ever dime and the other orders six appetizers at dinner and only takes one bite of each, driving the tightwad mad.
This stresses Chas and his brother out as they generally see the trip as a chance to spend some money to have a good time. No, not extravagantly and not breaking the bank...but hell, why bicker over an extra appetizer, right?
But still...as this problem, two people disagreeing over how funds are spent, is a possible contingency that cannot be dissected and put into a spreadsheet, it needed to be discussed thoroughly.
"Here's the issue," Chas, who doesn't care, of course, told me, "Steve likes to order a lot of food but doesn't eat a lot of food. So when we're out, he'll order, say, 150 Buffalo wings or two main courses when the rest of us are just having burgers and beer."
"OK, honey, I understand, but..." I try to reply before Chas cuts me off because he didn't finish explaining the WHOLE scenario.
"Wait, let me finish. OK, so Steve does that but do you know what Bob does? Bob who is cheap as shit and gets mad at Steve for ordering too many wings...that Bob... Do you know what Bob does?!!"
"No, Baby, I have no idea what Bob does..."
(Insist on early morning laps in the kiddie pool? Do every one's astrology charts before the trip? What, exactly, does Bob do?)
"Bob," Chas spits, "throws personal hygiene items into the grocery cart when it's ONLY supposed to be things that each of us will use at the house...you know, like coffee, creamer, orange juice...that kind of shit..."
Here's the reason why (and, again, I apologize if I am being sexist here, it is not the intention):
When you travel with women you usually have this discussion (mind you, I said discussion) well beforehand and come to a consensus on who is paying for what and the manner in which these financial transactions will be handled.
When I travel with my mother or my best friend, Connie, we usually agree that if the combined airfare and hotel costs are comparable, one of us pays for the tickets and the other picks up the hotel tab. If there is overage or underage at the end of the trip we resolve it peacefully with someone picking up an extra dinner tab or something similar. And if Connie threw an extra box of say, tampons, into the shopping cart, I would not go ballistic.
Why? Well, see above. I might need to borrow them in the future in case I ran out or didn't bring them so it would be beneficial to both of us for her to do that, right?
I explained this to Chas and he looked at me like I was some exotic species of plant life that he had just realized was sitting next to him on the couch.
"That's disgusting," he told me, "Men would NEVER share a tampon!"
I sighed, resigned to my fate.
The other thing worth mentioning here is that Chas is a touch neurotic about travel preparations himself.
While outwardly very laid back about most things in life, he worries incessantly about the details when it comes to travel. The "unknowns," which he mostly embraces in all other aspects of life, drive him to distraction when it comes to travel.
(And, between you and me, if Chas' brother hadn't done that Excel spreadsheet first...Chas would have. He just won't admit to it...)
Last week, he dragged out each and every golf shirt, pair of golf shorts, shoes, socks, and golf accessory that he owns. He laid them out carefully in the living room before trying on each and every item and carefully sorting them into the "yes," "no," and "maybe" piles.
Granted, I do this too but here's the thing: I do it ONCE. Chas repeated the routine every few days and might have done it every few hours if I hadn't started teasing him about it and he didn't have to attend to 36 emails a day regarding tee times and how to arrange the luggage in the car upon arrival at the airport.
The broken shoe discovery was, by far, the all time low over these past two weeks, I must say. It nearly drove him over the edge.
"Patti, look at these!" he said, proffering up a pair of golf shoes with one missing the sole.
"I have only had these for a few years and they are very expensive and the sole just peeled off! I am going to send them back to Nike and demand compensation! I only have brown and white golf shoes now and I need black golf shoes too, you know? I am writing to Nike now!" he declared.
Then I said what might have been the stupidest thing in my life.
"Baby, they have shoe glue for those sorts of things. You won't get them, or compensation, back from Nike in time so why don't we just try the shoe glue stuff?"
Chas might have literally flown from his position in the living room surveying his broken shoe to the computer in under two seconds, flat. I swear, he definitely orbited.
"You're right! It's called 'Shoe Goo' and it's available at Rite Aid...let's go there now!" he said.
"Chas, it's 10:30 at night, let's just go tomorrow..." I said.
Clearly, this was not the correct response.
How dare I suggest that we postpone patching up his wounded comrade until tomorrow? What kind of traitor was I?
So off we went to Rite Aid and, while I busied myself reading recipes at the magazine stand, Chas swept the premises for 'Shoe Goo.'
Unfortunately, Rite Aid didn't have it. The internet had lied.
"I hate this fucking store! They're all liars..." he told me, despondent on the way home.
The next day, however, after another few hours of online research, Chas found that Walmart might carry Shoe Goo too.
And, the Gods were in their Heavens that fine day...it did.
Shoe crisis averted, we were now ready to face the golf course, properly attired.
Almost.
Last night, in the few hours before he left, Chas once again tried every outfit on and walked around the house neurotically trying to figure out how fit everything he owned into one small suitcase.
"You want help?" I asked, "I am pretty good at packing...I used to do it a lot."
"No, no...this is a one-man show, I can handle this," he insisted.
Mind you, as neurotic as Chas is about travel---from everything to the packing to the actual flying---he DID put aside his phobias to take me out to a wonderful dinner and present me with a gorgeous bouquet of flowers because he knows I love St. Patrick's Day.
He is a good man. He is just a bit of a crazy man, sometimes.
"Baby, can you help me pack? I just realized that my balls are defective..."
I nearly spit up the beer that I was drinking but then realized he was holding the packages of golf balls that his brother had given him for Christmas and there was a problem.
"I have never seen balls shaped like this! All these defective balls! See? It's a good thing I checked before getting on the plane with these. I would have had an immediate handicap with these misshapen balls!" he said.
So I packed, Chas sorted out his balls, and, in the end, it all came together beautifully.
On the way to the airport this morning, Chas asked me if Connie and I would be discussing our planned trip to France in a couple of months.
You know, going over the details and such...
"No, of course not. It is only March and we're not going for at least another few months...why would we talk about it now?" I said.
"Well, I figured you might want to get down who is bringing the tampons..." he said, and winked at me slyly.
Men and women definitely have different travel styles...and now I know how Chas operates...but hey, he's got something on me.
I would have likely thrown those defective balls into my luggage without even checking.
And there I would have been...hobbling around the golf course in one shoe with square balls after eating only a small portion of the 150 Buffalo wings that I hadn't personally ordered at a Hooters that was at least 50 miles in the wrong direction.
Men may have something to teach women afterall.
It has been two weeks full of heated emotional exchanges, fierce competition, and moments of sheer glory.
And no, oddly enough, it has had absolutely nothing to do with me...although I am finding it endlessly amusing...
The subject and object of the drama, and the endless days of fretting and fanaticism, are due to one momentous yearly event: Chas is going away golfing with the boys.
Mind you, I have always been interested in the way people travel, whether near or far. I have also always been curious about the way men plan for and undertake trips versus how women do. Being somewhat of a travel nerd, I am oddly interested in how people plan, how they pack, how they approach air travel, and how they actually behave once they arrive in their final destination.
For me, travel is one of my ultimate joys and, having done it professionally for almost a decade, has become a routine that I am used to.
Sure, we all have our habits...and mine is still sometimes throwing everything into a suitcase at the last minute and hoping "mascara" has a character in Mandarin if I forget it...but travel is kind of my "bag," no pun intended, so I tend not to stress too much.
Plus, I have almost always traveled, at least for pleasure, with women. The travel I have done with men, and it has been a significant amount, has not necessarily allowed me to closely observe their travel habits as I have usually been their employee or employer. In that role, no one usually tells me if they forgot their hair gel or if they need to run out for an emergency dose of Imodium...it just doesn't often unfold that way.
And, if it is women I happen to be traveling with, we have all long before figured out each other's strengths and weaknesses and have formed a working cooperative relationship so everyone knows their role and there is minimal competition.
Oh, and if a girl forgets a razor, shampoo, a makeup item or something needed for a headache or a stomachache, you can pretty much rest assured that someone has it and is willing to share. Even if there are only two of you...
Because, and I don't say this out of disrespect for men, women are planners and tend to think of contingencies all the time (hey, we bear children, right? We're programmed to look out for two people at all times, minimum...). So when I travel with women, I never worry about whether I forgot something because I know one of two things: a) she will have it or something very close to it, or, b) she will be more than willing to come into foreign stores with me and spend hours trying to divine symbols on the back of jars, tubes and containers to find the nearest thing that I am looking for.
Hey, girls rock, right?
But men? Oh, men are a different story altogether.
Chas has been doing this golf trip with his older brother and their two close friends for more than twenty years. And, he reports, each year is another soap opera-style drama leading up to the actual pleasure...the golf.
Thank God that Chas has no desire whatsoever for me to partake in this sport as I find golf about as entertaining as watching someone scraping barnacles from the bottom of a boat but that doesn't, under any circumstance, mean I am exempt from the preparatory measures.
"Baby, get out here! You simply have to see this!" he called, two weeks ago upon checking his email.
I came in from the other room to watch Chas manipulating the most complicated Microsoft Excel spreadsheet I have ever seen in my life.
"What the hell is THAT?" I asked.
"THAT would be Bill's (his brother) attempt at planning. You see," he pointed to the screen, "we have tee times, locations of courses, addresses of courses, websites of courses, directions to the house, directions to the nearest restaurants, mileage from the house, mileage from the airport, and also this column with his own personal suggestions..."
Honestly, I have seen some pretty complicated spreadsheets before but this one was even a bit much for me.
"Haven't you been doing this for over 20 years? Don't you have a system worked out yet?" I asked, dumbfounded.
"Oh yeah, we have a system...and it starts with this fucking spreadsheet. But I don't get involved in that crap...I am just there to golf," he declared, emphatically.
I didn't believe him for a second.
Over the next hour, Chas proceeded to look up each and every one of the recommendations on that spreadsheet and then spent an hour writing an elaborate email back to his brother and their friends with HIS suggestions, including corrections on times, distances, and mileage.
Dinner was getting cold and I mistakenly said, "Baby, you said your brother and his friend have the final word on everything anyway and you don't have the time or the care to deliberate this so can you please, maybe, get off of the computer and eat dinner? It's getting cold..."
He looked at me as if I was Judas tempting Christ in the garden while he was talking to the Big Man Upstairs.
(In my case, I was tempting him with spaghetti and meatballs while he was finding the exact distance to the closest Hooters... but, hey, whatever...)
"I just need to finish this...and I don't care...not really...but I have to have my say," he declared.
This went on for two weeks.
Every morning, a new spreadsheet or a new email.
Every afternoon, an infuriated or surly Chas.
One evening, he took me aside in confidence and said, "I always take the kid's bed...you know that, right?"
A tad confused, and, yes, perhaps also a bit concerned, but still unwilling to raise the beast, I said, "OK, Baby, I am sure you do..."
He gripped my elbow...
"No, listen to me...I always take the CHILD'S bedroom WITHOUT the en suite bathroom because I DON'T CARE and I am down there to GOLF and every year we get a four bedroom house and there is one room for children and I take it and sleep in the too-tiny bed on the Winnie the Pooh sheets EVERY YEAR because I DON'T FUCKING CARE!!!"
His eyes were wild.
"Baby, it's OK...I love you for, um, consistently taking the child's bedroom. It was one of the things I loved about you first...not that you sleep in children's bedrooms, of course, um, but that you rise above the fray!" I said.
And this is absolutely true.
Chas usually doesn't get involved in petty dramas and he doesn't pay a lot of attention to people who do. I, on the other hand, usually spend way too much time listening to other people's crap so Chas has been very, very good for me that way.
So, of course, I appreciated his willingness to sleep in the Winnie the Pooh sheets.
"But what would you do?" he asked. "Would you be willing to sleep in a tiny kid's bed to avoid conflict?"
Ah, the rub.
The answer, ultimately, is yes.
But I can't picture a scenario where that would be an issue.
If it were my four closest friends...we would probably figure out who was in need of more comfort or more space or more alone time or more together time...and no, this would NOT go into a spreadsheet.
It actually would likely have never been discussed. Females have a natural sense of hierarchy combined with ingrained intuitiveness. We might fight on men and ideas...but we don't fight over beds.
Money was the other issue that was driving Chas and his golfing buddies insane.
Chas is, thank God, not uptight when it comes to money. He is prudent and has that natural Philly shrewdness about getting the most for your buck but he is caught between two people, on this trip, who are either completely stingy and uptight or frivolous and careless. One counts ever dime and the other orders six appetizers at dinner and only takes one bite of each, driving the tightwad mad.
This stresses Chas and his brother out as they generally see the trip as a chance to spend some money to have a good time. No, not extravagantly and not breaking the bank...but hell, why bicker over an extra appetizer, right?
But still...as this problem, two people disagreeing over how funds are spent, is a possible contingency that cannot be dissected and put into a spreadsheet, it needed to be discussed thoroughly.
"Here's the issue," Chas, who doesn't care, of course, told me, "Steve likes to order a lot of food but doesn't eat a lot of food. So when we're out, he'll order, say, 150 Buffalo wings or two main courses when the rest of us are just having burgers and beer."
"OK, honey, I understand, but..." I try to reply before Chas cuts me off because he didn't finish explaining the WHOLE scenario.
"Wait, let me finish. OK, so Steve does that but do you know what Bob does? Bob who is cheap as shit and gets mad at Steve for ordering too many wings...that Bob... Do you know what Bob does?!!"
"No, Baby, I have no idea what Bob does..."
(Insist on early morning laps in the kiddie pool? Do every one's astrology charts before the trip? What, exactly, does Bob do?)
"Bob," Chas spits, "throws personal hygiene items into the grocery cart when it's ONLY supposed to be things that each of us will use at the house...you know, like coffee, creamer, orange juice...that kind of shit..."
"Well, why don't you say something, then?" I ask him, knowing the response.
"Because I don't fucking care...really, I don't. But what dude throws disposable razors into the kitty? Like we would all have a group shave with his goddamn razors while enjoying a cup of coffee together in the morning! Who the hell does that?" he demands.
Well, obviously, Bob does.
"This doesn't happen to you when you travel with your mother or Connie?" he asks.
No, it doesn't.Here's the reason why (and, again, I apologize if I am being sexist here, it is not the intention):
When you travel with women you usually have this discussion (mind you, I said discussion) well beforehand and come to a consensus on who is paying for what and the manner in which these financial transactions will be handled.
When I travel with my mother or my best friend, Connie, we usually agree that if the combined airfare and hotel costs are comparable, one of us pays for the tickets and the other picks up the hotel tab. If there is overage or underage at the end of the trip we resolve it peacefully with someone picking up an extra dinner tab or something similar. And if Connie threw an extra box of say, tampons, into the shopping cart, I would not go ballistic.
Why? Well, see above. I might need to borrow them in the future in case I ran out or didn't bring them so it would be beneficial to both of us for her to do that, right?
I explained this to Chas and he looked at me like I was some exotic species of plant life that he had just realized was sitting next to him on the couch.
"That's disgusting," he told me, "Men would NEVER share a tampon!"
I sighed, resigned to my fate.
The other thing worth mentioning here is that Chas is a touch neurotic about travel preparations himself.
While outwardly very laid back about most things in life, he worries incessantly about the details when it comes to travel. The "unknowns," which he mostly embraces in all other aspects of life, drive him to distraction when it comes to travel.
(And, between you and me, if Chas' brother hadn't done that Excel spreadsheet first...Chas would have. He just won't admit to it...)
Last week, he dragged out each and every golf shirt, pair of golf shorts, shoes, socks, and golf accessory that he owns. He laid them out carefully in the living room before trying on each and every item and carefully sorting them into the "yes," "no," and "maybe" piles.
Granted, I do this too but here's the thing: I do it ONCE. Chas repeated the routine every few days and might have done it every few hours if I hadn't started teasing him about it and he didn't have to attend to 36 emails a day regarding tee times and how to arrange the luggage in the car upon arrival at the airport.
The broken shoe discovery was, by far, the all time low over these past two weeks, I must say. It nearly drove him over the edge.
"Patti, look at these!" he said, proffering up a pair of golf shoes with one missing the sole.
"I have only had these for a few years and they are very expensive and the sole just peeled off! I am going to send them back to Nike and demand compensation! I only have brown and white golf shoes now and I need black golf shoes too, you know? I am writing to Nike now!" he declared.
Then I said what might have been the stupidest thing in my life.
"Baby, they have shoe glue for those sorts of things. You won't get them, or compensation, back from Nike in time so why don't we just try the shoe glue stuff?"
Chas might have literally flown from his position in the living room surveying his broken shoe to the computer in under two seconds, flat. I swear, he definitely orbited.
"You're right! It's called 'Shoe Goo' and it's available at Rite Aid...let's go there now!" he said.
"Chas, it's 10:30 at night, let's just go tomorrow..." I said.
Clearly, this was not the correct response.
How dare I suggest that we postpone patching up his wounded comrade until tomorrow? What kind of traitor was I?
So off we went to Rite Aid and, while I busied myself reading recipes at the magazine stand, Chas swept the premises for 'Shoe Goo.'
Unfortunately, Rite Aid didn't have it. The internet had lied.
"I hate this fucking store! They're all liars..." he told me, despondent on the way home.
The next day, however, after another few hours of online research, Chas found that Walmart might carry Shoe Goo too.
And, the Gods were in their Heavens that fine day...it did.
Shoe crisis averted, we were now ready to face the golf course, properly attired.
Almost.
Last night, in the few hours before he left, Chas once again tried every outfit on and walked around the house neurotically trying to figure out how fit everything he owned into one small suitcase.
"You want help?" I asked, "I am pretty good at packing...I used to do it a lot."
"No, no...this is a one-man show, I can handle this," he insisted.
Mind you, as neurotic as Chas is about travel---from everything to the packing to the actual flying---he DID put aside his phobias to take me out to a wonderful dinner and present me with a gorgeous bouquet of flowers because he knows I love St. Patrick's Day.
He is a good man. He is just a bit of a crazy man, sometimes.
"Baby, can you help me pack? I just realized that my balls are defective..."
I nearly spit up the beer that I was drinking but then realized he was holding the packages of golf balls that his brother had given him for Christmas and there was a problem.
"I have never seen balls shaped like this! All these defective balls! See? It's a good thing I checked before getting on the plane with these. I would have had an immediate handicap with these misshapen balls!" he said.
So I packed, Chas sorted out his balls, and, in the end, it all came together beautifully.
On the way to the airport this morning, Chas asked me if Connie and I would be discussing our planned trip to France in a couple of months.
You know, going over the details and such...
"No, of course not. It is only March and we're not going for at least another few months...why would we talk about it now?" I said.
"Well, I figured you might want to get down who is bringing the tampons..." he said, and winked at me slyly.
Men and women definitely have different travel styles...and now I know how Chas operates...but hey, he's got something on me.
I would have likely thrown those defective balls into my luggage without even checking.
And there I would have been...hobbling around the golf course in one shoe with square balls after eating only a small portion of the 150 Buffalo wings that I hadn't personally ordered at a Hooters that was at least 50 miles in the wrong direction.
Men may have something to teach women afterall.
11 March 2010
Whose Palate is it Anyway?
"My God...I have to do something about this refrigerator!" I declared this evening, after going to retrieve a beer for me and Chas.
"Yeah, I noticed that. Actually, I barely even recognize my refrigerator any longer...it actually kind of scares the shit out of me...but I think that's a good thing," he opined.
Here's the main problem: I love to cook.
And no, not "love to cook" in some vague, new-woman-meets-old-nonna sense of the word...and certainly not as in "I love to cook because I want that man," as I saw in Glamour magazine this month with a list of recipes that are guaranteed to please men but make no gastronomical sense whatsoever (no disrespect to Glamour, they have kicked Cosmopolitan's ass way out of the ball field), but I love to cook in the sense that it is my therapy. It is one of the four things (writing, yoga, and gardening would be the others) where I can totally let my soul free and not think for a few hours. I can lose myself, and constantly do, in a new recipe or an old classic. I don't notice time, whatever thoughts have been racing around in my head like a non-stop bad songs cease to play, and it's just me and my soul having a conversation over a cutting board, a saute pan, or in the grocery store picking out ingredients. It's just my time with me...that's why I love to cook.
I come by it pretty naturally, being the daughter of a first-generation Italian. For Italians, cooking is sort of like what meditation is for Buddhists: it centers your spirit, it calms your mind, it allows you a creative outlet while, at the same time, gives you the opportunity to show someone (or a lot of 'someones') how much you love and cherish them by feeding them well.
It wasn't always this way growing up, mind you, as I was raised, in part, by my German grandmother. Granted, I respect the Germans on a wide array of subjects...from car engineering to beer...but Germans don't inherently find peace in cooking the way the Italians and the French do (I have never been to Spain but I assume it is the same). Granted too, some of the best food I have ever had was in Austria and Hungary (a former Austrian Empire country) but the biggest appreciation of food I have ever seen has been in France and in Italy.
My grandmother, 100% German, would cook a roast until you could bludgeon someone to death with it...and sometimes she tried. Until I was about 12, I never knew that bacon was not supposed to be served charred and blackened, and, most importantly, that a pork loin was not supposed to make the same sound as a potato chip when biting into it.
I learned these things later in life...when I was about 18 and cooking and eating on my own for the first time...and, honestly, I learned them from my mother.
Having been raised on burnt and charred food for many years, I always found my mother's embrace of fresh ingredients and simple recipes to be disgusting. For me, everything was undercooked.
"What to you mean the pasta should be soft? This pork loin is rare? Why isn't the steak black and crispy like Grandma makes it?" I would demand.
Then, eventually, I learned how to cook.
And no, it wasn't in my mother's kitchen.
Italian women, despite all the wonderful promotional items to the contrary, rarely share kitchens with their next-of-kin. Sure, my mother's mother had patience for me in her kitchen but put me and my mother in the same kitchen and you get a fight of colossal proportions.
"You're REALLY going to use sea salt in the soup instead of kosher salt? Really?" she'll ask.
"Why don't you dice the garlic this way? It saves time and no one wants a big chunk of garlic?" I'll say.
"You were raised on burnt bacon and charred pig's penises...what do you know?" she'll throw back.
Naturally, or at least mostly, it is all in good fun.
Because cooking for my mom is the same as it is for me: soul therapy.
We have different styles of course (she has been cooking long enough to instinctively know what ingredients will work together while I have embraced a level of precision in measuring and incorporating different spices that defies rustic cooking but ends up making beautiful music...).
But we can't share the same kitchen.
Never.
But she loves my potato soup and Hungarian goulash and I love...well, just about everything she makes.
So my first move, upon leaving Africa and coming to live with Chas, was to take over his kitchen.
I was shy at first, given that the man had only known me for a month and had decided that he loved me enough after a handful of dates to take a wager on a relationship, so I didn't invade his kitchen.
Yet as he watched me maneuver around old spices and cans upon cans of Chunky Soup, he declared something that made my soul sing:
"Alright, look, you obviously are not comfortable in that kitchen. I don't know the first thing about cooking so you take out of there anything you don't like and put back in anything you like as well. I can't cook but I can build you shelves, rearrange cabinet space, do whatever you need...but you obviously need this, so let's do it."
In three days, I had a completely new kitchen.
Then I started cooking...for real.
I cooked for about fourteen nights straight.
"You sure you're OK with this? I feel like I am torturing you with hard labor," Chas said.
"What do you like better? The shrimp fricassee or the chicken Parmesan?" I would reply.
"Baby, I honestly don't know...I have never had this before. I am used to eating soup or sandwiches or making something simple in my wok...I just don't know how to judge...it's really all good," he said.
At this I would get pissed...
"Can I still cook? Do I still have the skill? Does he like what I am making him? WHY doesn't he know what's good or bad?" my mind would hurtle through.
I would take these concerns to my mother.
"Hey, my ex-husband, your stepfather, would ask for ham and cheese sandwiches every night with the crusts cut off when I had spent hours perfecting a complicated bolognese. Most guys don't know this stuff, intuitively, so you need to teach him to have a palate..." she suggested.
(My mother and I may not be able to share a kitchen but we are on the phone about five times a week sharing recipes and techniques...that's how it goes in an Italian family).
How do you teach someone to have a palate?
How do you teach someone that bacon fried to the point of incineration is NOT good and a moist pork loin is better?
"I don't know how to do that," I told my mother, despondent.
"Well, you learned, didn't you? And now you can cook so well that it is a pleasure to eat your food," she said.
I was floored.
A pleasure to eat my food?
REALLY?
So Chas and I were in the grocery store last night when I had a bit of a meltdown.
I was intent on making an Asian noodle soup that called for Bok Choy but there was not Bok Choy to be had in New Jersey. Then there were no Shiitake mushrooms. Then there was no lemon grass.
Usually, this all makes Chas's head spin but he did something I have never seen...he asked...
"Baby, don't you think you can improvise?"
No, I assured him.
"Well, then make something else," he suggested.
I continued to fume for another few minutes and then said, "Do you want Pasta e Fagioli or Shepherd's Pie?" (fully expecting him not to know what I was talking about).
"Shepherd's Pie. Just not the one with that herb you put in it the last time. Maybe something more classic," he suggested. (I veered from my own tried and true Shepherd's Pie recipe last month and it was gross...I didn't think he'd noticed).
So we came home, I made my own mixed-up version of Shepherd's Pie, he loved it, and ate the leftovers for breakfast the next day.
Tonight we stopped in at our favorite Happy Hour joint and he ordered the jalapeno poppers.
"Not enough salt...something is off here," he said.
I wanted to jump for joy but came home and, instead, called my mother.
"I told you...he will develop a palate if you are cooking for him full-time. He's a smart guy and he will master this one too. So just keep cooking and don't compromise like I did and serve someone ham and cheese sandwiches or hot dogs when they need to learn how to eat right, there's no reason you can't share the same passion," she said.
"He used to keep paper plates in his freezer," Bonnie, his former landlord, said a few months ago.
Tonight Chas carefully takes out my frozen tubs of chicken, beef and seafood stock as he tries to get at a beer he had put in to cool an hour before. He maneuvers around the frozen lasagna and chafes at my suggestion that we give some of the food to our neighbors.
"You made that for me," he says.
"We can make more food for the neighbors and we can give that to them. But I love your lasagna. That's mine."
Then:
"Oh, and this, this we can give to the neighbors."
It was my failed Shepherd's Pie.
I love to cook. And I think I am finally with someone who appreciates it.
Feels good.
Tomorrow, I am making him charred pig's assholes in a browned butter.
Just kidding.
"Yeah, I noticed that. Actually, I barely even recognize my refrigerator any longer...it actually kind of scares the shit out of me...but I think that's a good thing," he opined.
Here's the main problem: I love to cook.
And no, not "love to cook" in some vague, new-woman-meets-old-nonna sense of the word...and certainly not as in "I love to cook because I want that man," as I saw in Glamour magazine this month with a list of recipes that are guaranteed to please men but make no gastronomical sense whatsoever (no disrespect to Glamour, they have kicked Cosmopolitan's ass way out of the ball field), but I love to cook in the sense that it is my therapy. It is one of the four things (writing, yoga, and gardening would be the others) where I can totally let my soul free and not think for a few hours. I can lose myself, and constantly do, in a new recipe or an old classic. I don't notice time, whatever thoughts have been racing around in my head like a non-stop bad songs cease to play, and it's just me and my soul having a conversation over a cutting board, a saute pan, or in the grocery store picking out ingredients. It's just my time with me...that's why I love to cook.
I come by it pretty naturally, being the daughter of a first-generation Italian. For Italians, cooking is sort of like what meditation is for Buddhists: it centers your spirit, it calms your mind, it allows you a creative outlet while, at the same time, gives you the opportunity to show someone (or a lot of 'someones') how much you love and cherish them by feeding them well.
It wasn't always this way growing up, mind you, as I was raised, in part, by my German grandmother. Granted, I respect the Germans on a wide array of subjects...from car engineering to beer...but Germans don't inherently find peace in cooking the way the Italians and the French do (I have never been to Spain but I assume it is the same). Granted too, some of the best food I have ever had was in Austria and Hungary (a former Austrian Empire country) but the biggest appreciation of food I have ever seen has been in France and in Italy.
My grandmother, 100% German, would cook a roast until you could bludgeon someone to death with it...and sometimes she tried. Until I was about 12, I never knew that bacon was not supposed to be served charred and blackened, and, most importantly, that a pork loin was not supposed to make the same sound as a potato chip when biting into it.
I learned these things later in life...when I was about 18 and cooking and eating on my own for the first time...and, honestly, I learned them from my mother.
Having been raised on burnt and charred food for many years, I always found my mother's embrace of fresh ingredients and simple recipes to be disgusting. For me, everything was undercooked.
"What to you mean the pasta should be soft? This pork loin is rare? Why isn't the steak black and crispy like Grandma makes it?" I would demand.
Then, eventually, I learned how to cook.
And no, it wasn't in my mother's kitchen.
Italian women, despite all the wonderful promotional items to the contrary, rarely share kitchens with their next-of-kin. Sure, my mother's mother had patience for me in her kitchen but put me and my mother in the same kitchen and you get a fight of colossal proportions.
"You're REALLY going to use sea salt in the soup instead of kosher salt? Really?" she'll ask.
"Why don't you dice the garlic this way? It saves time and no one wants a big chunk of garlic?" I'll say.
"You were raised on burnt bacon and charred pig's penises...what do you know?" she'll throw back.
Naturally, or at least mostly, it is all in good fun.
Because cooking for my mom is the same as it is for me: soul therapy.
We have different styles of course (she has been cooking long enough to instinctively know what ingredients will work together while I have embraced a level of precision in measuring and incorporating different spices that defies rustic cooking but ends up making beautiful music...).
But we can't share the same kitchen.
Never.
But she loves my potato soup and Hungarian goulash and I love...well, just about everything she makes.
So my first move, upon leaving Africa and coming to live with Chas, was to take over his kitchen.
I was shy at first, given that the man had only known me for a month and had decided that he loved me enough after a handful of dates to take a wager on a relationship, so I didn't invade his kitchen.
Yet as he watched me maneuver around old spices and cans upon cans of Chunky Soup, he declared something that made my soul sing:
"Alright, look, you obviously are not comfortable in that kitchen. I don't know the first thing about cooking so you take out of there anything you don't like and put back in anything you like as well. I can't cook but I can build you shelves, rearrange cabinet space, do whatever you need...but you obviously need this, so let's do it."
In three days, I had a completely new kitchen.
Then I started cooking...for real.
I cooked for about fourteen nights straight.
"You sure you're OK with this? I feel like I am torturing you with hard labor," Chas said.
"What do you like better? The shrimp fricassee or the chicken Parmesan?" I would reply.
"Baby, I honestly don't know...I have never had this before. I am used to eating soup or sandwiches or making something simple in my wok...I just don't know how to judge...it's really all good," he said.
At this I would get pissed...
"Can I still cook? Do I still have the skill? Does he like what I am making him? WHY doesn't he know what's good or bad?" my mind would hurtle through.
I would take these concerns to my mother.
"Hey, my ex-husband, your stepfather, would ask for ham and cheese sandwiches every night with the crusts cut off when I had spent hours perfecting a complicated bolognese. Most guys don't know this stuff, intuitively, so you need to teach him to have a palate..." she suggested.
(My mother and I may not be able to share a kitchen but we are on the phone about five times a week sharing recipes and techniques...that's how it goes in an Italian family).
How do you teach someone to have a palate?
How do you teach someone that bacon fried to the point of incineration is NOT good and a moist pork loin is better?
"I don't know how to do that," I told my mother, despondent.
"Well, you learned, didn't you? And now you can cook so well that it is a pleasure to eat your food," she said.
I was floored.
A pleasure to eat my food?
REALLY?
So Chas and I were in the grocery store last night when I had a bit of a meltdown.
I was intent on making an Asian noodle soup that called for Bok Choy but there was not Bok Choy to be had in New Jersey. Then there were no Shiitake mushrooms. Then there was no lemon grass.
Usually, this all makes Chas's head spin but he did something I have never seen...he asked...
"Baby, don't you think you can improvise?"
No, I assured him.
"Well, then make something else," he suggested.
I continued to fume for another few minutes and then said, "Do you want Pasta e Fagioli or Shepherd's Pie?" (fully expecting him not to know what I was talking about).
"Shepherd's Pie. Just not the one with that herb you put in it the last time. Maybe something more classic," he suggested. (I veered from my own tried and true Shepherd's Pie recipe last month and it was gross...I didn't think he'd noticed).
So we came home, I made my own mixed-up version of Shepherd's Pie, he loved it, and ate the leftovers for breakfast the next day.
Tonight we stopped in at our favorite Happy Hour joint and he ordered the jalapeno poppers.
"Not enough salt...something is off here," he said.
I wanted to jump for joy but came home and, instead, called my mother.
"I told you...he will develop a palate if you are cooking for him full-time. He's a smart guy and he will master this one too. So just keep cooking and don't compromise like I did and serve someone ham and cheese sandwiches or hot dogs when they need to learn how to eat right, there's no reason you can't share the same passion," she said.
"He used to keep paper plates in his freezer," Bonnie, his former landlord, said a few months ago.
Tonight Chas carefully takes out my frozen tubs of chicken, beef and seafood stock as he tries to get at a beer he had put in to cool an hour before. He maneuvers around the frozen lasagna and chafes at my suggestion that we give some of the food to our neighbors.
"You made that for me," he says.
"We can make more food for the neighbors and we can give that to them. But I love your lasagna. That's mine."
Then:
"Oh, and this, this we can give to the neighbors."
It was my failed Shepherd's Pie.
I love to cook. And I think I am finally with someone who appreciates it.
Feels good.
Tomorrow, I am making him charred pig's assholes in a browned butter.
Just kidding.
01 March 2010
Boiled Peanuts
When I was a kid, for a few years in time, my parents made a lot of money.
There is nothing presumptuous or inherently backward-looking in this statement, it is just a record of fact, but, well, there it is...for about twelve years during my childhood we were pretty wealthy.
During what me and my brother would come to term as the "fat years" later on, we (and by "we" I mean my parents, as I didn't have a cent to my name at the time) did a lot of things that people did who had money in the mid-to-late eighties. We bought a big house in a posh suburb in Connecticut, we joined a country club, I went to an exclusive Catholic school, my brother was sent to soccer camp in exotic locales...blah, blah, blah. For me, at the age of ten or twelve, money didn't mean that much as, with its occurrence, my parent's marriage deteriorated exponentially.
Still, the one thing that the "fat years" brought was something that remained in my soul as a love affair forever.
Namely, South Carolina.
The one really wise thing, to my mind, that my parents did was buy a small vacation home on Seabrook Island in about 1984. Seabrook Island was about a 45-minute drive from Charleston, South Carolina and there I had a horse, a huge yard to roam around in, and the best cooking I have ever tasted in my life.
I loved Charleston for all the things that Connecticut, New York, and Philadelphia were not.
Charleston was slow, easy-moving, polite, and considerate to a fault.
My parents would come to a slow boil at the dinner table in some expensive restaurant when the main course took an hour to arrive.
My brother and me, however, loved this time.
No one cared if we ran amok through the restaurant and we were welcome in the kitchen.
A hurricane in the late 1980s destroyed our house in Charleston and, at about the same time, a hurricane descended on my parent's marriage so that was about the last I saw of the place for many years.
Actually, for about 23 years...until last weekend.
Chas and I were making a long road trip from Florida to New Jersey and I asked to stop there.
In the 23 years since I last spent time in Charleston, the thing that never left me was the food.
Granted, I am a northeast girl through-and-through but Charleston has some of the finest food in the country.
It is fresh, it is plentiful, and it is cheap.
I couldn't wait.
Chas, however, had his own ideas.
"I swear I don't like grits," he told me, early on. "I tried them once and they are just...nasty or something...how do you eat those?"
Granted, in Philadelphia, we eat scrapple.
For those of you not indoctrinated, scrapple is, as my friend Frank used to say, "the ears, nose, lips and delicate assholes" of a pig.
Hence, scrapple.
Scraps.
But grits seem to gross northerners out more than most other foods. AND we are known for eating "delicate assholes..."
Hence, my first breakfast in Charleston with Chas:
"Did you just order grits?" he asked.
Yep.
"Alright, I am game. Let me try," he said, while precariously dipping his spoon into the white mush in front of him.
He looked like someone had just emptied a diaper on his spoon.
"Nasty!!" he declared. "How can you eat that? It tastes like...I don't know...male product or something..."
"Have you had male product lately or should I be concerned?" I asked.
He looked flabbergasted and returned to his plate of French toast and eggs, thoroughly disgusted.
A few hours later, traveling up a back road in coastal South Carolina, I insisted we stop for boiled peanuts.
Upon returning to the car with them, Chas was a good sport and took a few bites.
"Sorry, Baby, this just isn't my kind of food. The dinner last night in Charleston was amazing but all of these weird Southern things...gritty male product and mushy peanuts...well, they just ain't MY thing..." he said.
Nevertheless, five hours later, after having stopped at every gas station and roadside stand from the South Carolina to North Carolina border, Chas was digging the boiled peanuts.
"They're growing on me," he admitted, cajun brine dripping from his lips.
Suffice it to say, Chas was not in protest when we stopped at the last town in South Carolina and bought over 10 pounds of boiled cajun peanuts to take home.
I am going to find a recipe for grits to get him into next.
The northerners and southerners have a lot between them besides a civil war and food is a big issue.
After so many years of international travel, it still amazes me that my own country has such prized yet disputed culinary styles.
I'm happy about it, though.
And I was certainly happy to see Charleston, South Carolina, again. It is truly one of the best places to eat (besides grits and boiled peanuts) in our fine country.
Chas snuck into bed tonight with a can of boiled cajun peanuts...
And I am sneaking out here to report how sweet it all is.
Bon Appetit, y'all.
There is nothing presumptuous or inherently backward-looking in this statement, it is just a record of fact, but, well, there it is...for about twelve years during my childhood we were pretty wealthy.
During what me and my brother would come to term as the "fat years" later on, we (and by "we" I mean my parents, as I didn't have a cent to my name at the time) did a lot of things that people did who had money in the mid-to-late eighties. We bought a big house in a posh suburb in Connecticut, we joined a country club, I went to an exclusive Catholic school, my brother was sent to soccer camp in exotic locales...blah, blah, blah. For me, at the age of ten or twelve, money didn't mean that much as, with its occurrence, my parent's marriage deteriorated exponentially.
Still, the one thing that the "fat years" brought was something that remained in my soul as a love affair forever.
Namely, South Carolina.
The one really wise thing, to my mind, that my parents did was buy a small vacation home on Seabrook Island in about 1984. Seabrook Island was about a 45-minute drive from Charleston, South Carolina and there I had a horse, a huge yard to roam around in, and the best cooking I have ever tasted in my life.
I loved Charleston for all the things that Connecticut, New York, and Philadelphia were not.
Charleston was slow, easy-moving, polite, and considerate to a fault.
My parents would come to a slow boil at the dinner table in some expensive restaurant when the main course took an hour to arrive.
My brother and me, however, loved this time.
No one cared if we ran amok through the restaurant and we were welcome in the kitchen.
A hurricane in the late 1980s destroyed our house in Charleston and, at about the same time, a hurricane descended on my parent's marriage so that was about the last I saw of the place for many years.
Actually, for about 23 years...until last weekend.
Chas and I were making a long road trip from Florida to New Jersey and I asked to stop there.
In the 23 years since I last spent time in Charleston, the thing that never left me was the food.
Granted, I am a northeast girl through-and-through but Charleston has some of the finest food in the country.
It is fresh, it is plentiful, and it is cheap.
I couldn't wait.
Chas, however, had his own ideas.
"I swear I don't like grits," he told me, early on. "I tried them once and they are just...nasty or something...how do you eat those?"
Granted, in Philadelphia, we eat scrapple.
For those of you not indoctrinated, scrapple is, as my friend Frank used to say, "the ears, nose, lips and delicate assholes" of a pig.
Hence, scrapple.
Scraps.
But grits seem to gross northerners out more than most other foods. AND we are known for eating "delicate assholes..."
Hence, my first breakfast in Charleston with Chas:
"Did you just order grits?" he asked.
Yep.
"Alright, I am game. Let me try," he said, while precariously dipping his spoon into the white mush in front of him.
He looked like someone had just emptied a diaper on his spoon.
"Nasty!!" he declared. "How can you eat that? It tastes like...I don't know...male product or something..."
"Have you had male product lately or should I be concerned?" I asked.
He looked flabbergasted and returned to his plate of French toast and eggs, thoroughly disgusted.
A few hours later, traveling up a back road in coastal South Carolina, I insisted we stop for boiled peanuts.
Upon returning to the car with them, Chas was a good sport and took a few bites.
"Sorry, Baby, this just isn't my kind of food. The dinner last night in Charleston was amazing but all of these weird Southern things...gritty male product and mushy peanuts...well, they just ain't MY thing..." he said.
Nevertheless, five hours later, after having stopped at every gas station and roadside stand from the South Carolina to North Carolina border, Chas was digging the boiled peanuts.
"They're growing on me," he admitted, cajun brine dripping from his lips.
Suffice it to say, Chas was not in protest when we stopped at the last town in South Carolina and bought over 10 pounds of boiled cajun peanuts to take home.
I am going to find a recipe for grits to get him into next.
The northerners and southerners have a lot between them besides a civil war and food is a big issue.
After so many years of international travel, it still amazes me that my own country has such prized yet disputed culinary styles.
I'm happy about it, though.
And I was certainly happy to see Charleston, South Carolina, again. It is truly one of the best places to eat (besides grits and boiled peanuts) in our fine country.
Chas snuck into bed tonight with a can of boiled cajun peanuts...
And I am sneaking out here to report how sweet it all is.
Bon Appetit, y'all.
26 February 2010
Writing Again
I am trying to learn how to write again.
It's kind of funny as writing has gotten me through everything in my life and is, actually, my best friend.
I think we all have these gifts inside of us. I have very little in the way of talent except for writing. I am smart, mind you, but talent? No...I don't have a lot of that. I can write. That's all I have to give.
So losing the ability to write two weeks ago was paralyzing.
It left around the same time my self-confidence came back. Odd, no?
I stopped having panic attacks, stopped thinking that THIS was the end of the world, and then, suddenly, I couldn't write anymore.
"I'm fucked," I told Chas. "I wish I could tell you, after all you have done for me, that I will be your meal ticket or your salvation as you have been mine...but I just can't tell you that...I can't write anymore..."
Chas is nothing if not blunt and humorous.
"Is anything else broken?" he asked.
"No, I don't think so...I just wanted to tell you that, that, that..." I stammered.
Chas has the amazing gift of knowing when to ignore me.
"That what?" he said, eventually.
"I am a mess,"I told him.
"Yeah, who isn't?" he responded, then went back to the Olympics.
Philly is definitely about tough love. No doubt about it.
I told him I couldn't write yesterday, after nearly two weeks of trying.
He was putting together the shelves we had agreed on at Home Depot and was well into his work.
He put down his hammer and his screwdriver and came and sat down next to me on the couch.
"You feeling sorry for yourself?" he asked.
I was.
"I just don't understand...I just don't know why...I was so good at what I did...how could this happen? What happened? Why did this happen to me? Why...well, forget it..." I stammered.
"I am going to go to bed early and you are going to write tonight. That's it. Write something stupid. Just write again. This is where people get stuck...you can't get stuck."
Dear God, I wish it was that easy. I wish I didn't have panic attacks, I wish I didn't have days on end of being happy only to gripped by one or two hours of complete fear that erases the happiness. I wish I could look around and not care...but I just can't.
I wish I could appreciate what Chas says but I cannot, most days.
I wish I could take the fact that I am overwhelmingly in love with this half Syrian and half Irish male who takes me in his arms every night and fights both of our battles for us. But there is some part of me that won't.
Maybe I will find the solution...
Hope so.
But I wrote it down. That's a start, no?
It's kind of funny as writing has gotten me through everything in my life and is, actually, my best friend.
I think we all have these gifts inside of us. I have very little in the way of talent except for writing. I am smart, mind you, but talent? No...I don't have a lot of that. I can write. That's all I have to give.
So losing the ability to write two weeks ago was paralyzing.
It left around the same time my self-confidence came back. Odd, no?
I stopped having panic attacks, stopped thinking that THIS was the end of the world, and then, suddenly, I couldn't write anymore.
"I'm fucked," I told Chas. "I wish I could tell you, after all you have done for me, that I will be your meal ticket or your salvation as you have been mine...but I just can't tell you that...I can't write anymore..."
Chas is nothing if not blunt and humorous.
"Is anything else broken?" he asked.
"No, I don't think so...I just wanted to tell you that, that, that..." I stammered.
Chas has the amazing gift of knowing when to ignore me.
"That what?" he said, eventually.
"I am a mess,"I told him.
"Yeah, who isn't?" he responded, then went back to the Olympics.
Philly is definitely about tough love. No doubt about it.
I told him I couldn't write yesterday, after nearly two weeks of trying.
He was putting together the shelves we had agreed on at Home Depot and was well into his work.
He put down his hammer and his screwdriver and came and sat down next to me on the couch.
"You feeling sorry for yourself?" he asked.
I was.
"I just don't understand...I just don't know why...I was so good at what I did...how could this happen? What happened? Why did this happen to me? Why...well, forget it..." I stammered.
"I am going to go to bed early and you are going to write tonight. That's it. Write something stupid. Just write again. This is where people get stuck...you can't get stuck."
Dear God, I wish it was that easy. I wish I didn't have panic attacks, I wish I didn't have days on end of being happy only to gripped by one or two hours of complete fear that erases the happiness. I wish I could look around and not care...but I just can't.
I wish I could appreciate what Chas says but I cannot, most days.
I wish I could take the fact that I am overwhelmingly in love with this half Syrian and half Irish male who takes me in his arms every night and fights both of our battles for us. But there is some part of me that won't.
Maybe I will find the solution...
Hope so.
But I wrote it down. That's a start, no?
18 February 2010
Fighting Nice
One of the more interesting aspects of being in a relationship is learning how your partner fights with you. Granted, this may seem like a bizarre statement but I believe it is one that is true.
A couple of days ago, while perusing an Oprah magazine, I happened upon an article about this very topic and it made me think.
In the article, a woman described how she and her partner were "conflict adverse," or, in normal language, they didn't fight. I read on to discover that she and her husband were perfectly happy because they never fought and found "outlets" for their mutual aggression towards each other in ever-so-holistic practices like yoga, hours-long sessions at the gym, pick-up sports, and "expressing" their inner frustrations through creative outlets like painting murals with one's ass or sculpting their anger in macrame ashtrays (oh, and this couple doesn't smoke, of course, it's the creative process of making an ashtray rather than having a long drag on a cigarette that works for them).
I honestly shouldn't read these articles because they set off some deep introspective process on my part that usually ends up with me fighting with my significant other and smoking too many cigarettes. But...whatever...there I went.
So I decided to explore my own past relationships, and my present one, to discover how I fight.
Or, rather, I decided to discover how "we" fight. "We" is being used in the collective sense here, since it is rather boring to fight with yourself.
About eighteen years into having what I would term 'serious relationships,' I decided to look into my own fighting style.
I began with Will.
Will was my first significant relationship. He was from Argentina via Philadelphia and we were together for about four years, starting my junior year in high school. Will was quiet, reserved, and brainy. He would stay up all night in our cheap Philly apartment and try to work out quantum physics formulas. I would awake every morning to sheets of notebook paper strewn across our living room with mathematical formulas that made my head spin. He thought they were gifts.
However, despite all outward appearances, Will was a fighter.
Unfortunately, I was too.
Our fights would always end up in one of us throwing something valuable on the floor or off the balcony or doing something so horrendous that it would stun us both into silence for days. We'd creep around each other in our own mutual worlds of humiliation and anger.
The "morning after" would go something like this:
Him: "Did you really throw all of my art supplies, my college books, the picture of my dead grandmother, AND the antique candle holders that my mother gave us from Argentina into the dumpster?"
Me: "Yeah, sorry about that. But why did you have take my favorite plant, my dishes, AND the gourmet meal I prepared for you and throw it at the wall?"
We'd eventually apologize, replace for each other everything that we had broken, and carry on.
After four years, however, the relationship just broke...and some parts just couldn't be replaced.
It wasn't anything specific, and it wasn't really a bad ending, but something just broke that I couldn't retrieve from the dumpster and he couldn't buy again at Home Depot or Bed, Bath and Beyond.
Sometimes, things just break.
Next up was Ed, another sensitive and artistic soul from Philadelphia.
Ed and I had the amazingly brilliant idea of knowing each other for a few months and then deciding to move to a former communist country (except no one told them it wasn't communist anymore) and live in a one room apartment for sixteen months teaching English and making about $150/month.
In northeastern Hungary, the sun disappeared around the end of September and didn't make another appearance until late April.
To characterize this as depressing would be a major understatement. But we found ways to cope...the same way that our friends and colleagues, Hungarian and otherwise, coped...we drank ourselves silly. We would come home from work at about 4PM, have a beer or two or three, watch bad German television, and then start in on a bottle of wine...or two, or three.
Around midnight, facing another day or month of darkness and a tight budget, we would look at each other and find everything wrong.
Me: "I hate it here. You made me come here. I miss my mother and my family and now all I have to do is to sit in this dreary Soviet apartment and talk to you. Oh, and you have bad breath..."
Him: "You are a spoiled brat. You are an uptight, insecure, pampered...brat. Oh, and can your ass get any fatter or would you like to have another stuffed cabbage roll?"
To his credit, Ed was a hell of a lot more patient than Will. He was also nearly eight years my senior and had put up with his fair due of shit way before I entered his life so he tolerated my own insecurities and drama like a trooper...most of the time.
Underneath it all, we loved each other to death. Like Will, Ed and I always made up because neither one of us had the capacity to stay angry for more than a few hours or, maximum, a few days.
But a few hours and a few days, over a lifetime of a relationship (Ed and I were together for nearly a decade), wears you down.
When we parted ways five years ago, we did so in anguish. We both looked like people who had survived a nuclear holocaust and were still reaching for the air masks despite the fact that our limbs were falling off. Deep down inside, we loved each other and wanted to make it work. But, on the outside AND the inside, too much hurt and pain had occurred that made the relationship one long walk of pain.
Luckily, we are still friends, but that one hurt like a bitch. Mostly because we never learned how to fight with each other. We never learned how to not hurt each other...well, that destroys things in the end.
Next was Scott.
Scott was the true definition of "conflict adverse."
Despite being a decorated Army officer, Scott hated to fight.
His relationship with his ex-wife was characterized by NOT fighting. About anything, anywhere, anytime. Fighting was simply not allowed.
For me, it was torture.
Now, I had come a long way from my early years of throwing things in dumpsters and calling people names but I still believe a good (clean) fight clears the air.
Scott didn't.
So we would fight--or, rather---I would fight, he would get wounded, and we would spend weeks repairing the damage.
We had one brutally honest conversation in Texas five months ago where he admitted that he never wanted to fight again. He loved me, everything about me, but he just couldn't fight with me any longer.
It was painful as hell but we both threw in the proverbial hat.
I didn't know how not to fight, and he didn't know how to fight with me. These conversations always suck.
These days, Scott is one of my biggest supporters. He was one of the first people, in the wake of my resigning/being fired tragedy, to come right to my side.
He promised me his support, his friendship and his professional recommendation whenever needed.
Sort of the same thing with Ed.
When things went south a month ago, Ed never let me go until he was sure I wasn't going to fall down. Five years after a complicated break-up and a tumultuous relationship, he was right there for me like I had never thrown that pot of braised pig knuckles at him.
I am a lucky woman in that I date decent and kind men. We just don't always know how to fight with each other.
And now, confronted with probably the last relationship I am going to have in my life (no, not because I have some premonition of my death, but because I finally have a premonition of my future), I have to learn how to fight again.
Chas, my boyfriend and the love of my life, is also a fighter.
Part of it comes from the fact that he grew up poor and scrappy on the streets of Philadelphia. Part of it is because, like Ed, he has an unshakable moral compass. Chas has some very strong convictions about what is "right" and "wrong" behavior and he sticks to his guns. Chas was raised in a broken home and had plenty of things that could have turned him bad, but he chose to be good. He chose to be honest, loving, and trusting.
I think, in addition to Will, Ed and Scott, I admire Chas more than anyone.
But Chas and I fight the same way and this is sometimes problematic.
We rarely fight. One of the things that is so good about this relationship is that we almost never have conflict with each other. We have very similar personalities and this is a good thing.
However, Chas is a Leo and I am a Sagittarius. For those of you who don't know or believe in astrology...Chas and I are cut from the same cloth. Both of us are fire signs and fire signs are fighters. And Leos are tough. They don't back down from what they believe in and they are willing to engage in a fight to get their point across. Chas is a typical Leo.
We have had a couple of minor bickering sessions but last night we almost had a full-fledged fight.
Amazingly, I walked away before it escalated.
It was based on stupid stuff...ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, ex-whatever...those things that itch at you when you're completely sober but that suddenly gain so much significance after a few glasses of wine or a couple of beers.
So it unrolled and I walked away.
I have never done that before. I have never walked away from a fight.
But with Chas, I had to walk away.
I walked away because Chas and I don't know how to fight yet.
We both come from pasts where fighting dirty was normal and pulling out your claws was expected.
He didn't like it but he let me go.
Then, at 6:30AM he called and we talked it through.
He listened, I listened, and we actually got somewhere.
I don't think Chas and I will ever be in the same position as the woman who wrote to Oprah to say that yoga and aerobics made her never fight with her husband again.
Really, I think that woman is probably sticking her head in the sand because that shit comes out eventually.
But, hey, whatever works, right?
For now, I am learning to fight nice.
A couple of days ago, while perusing an Oprah magazine, I happened upon an article about this very topic and it made me think.
In the article, a woman described how she and her partner were "conflict adverse," or, in normal language, they didn't fight. I read on to discover that she and her husband were perfectly happy because they never fought and found "outlets" for their mutual aggression towards each other in ever-so-holistic practices like yoga, hours-long sessions at the gym, pick-up sports, and "expressing" their inner frustrations through creative outlets like painting murals with one's ass or sculpting their anger in macrame ashtrays (oh, and this couple doesn't smoke, of course, it's the creative process of making an ashtray rather than having a long drag on a cigarette that works for them).
I honestly shouldn't read these articles because they set off some deep introspective process on my part that usually ends up with me fighting with my significant other and smoking too many cigarettes. But...whatever...there I went.
So I decided to explore my own past relationships, and my present one, to discover how I fight.
Or, rather, I decided to discover how "we" fight. "We" is being used in the collective sense here, since it is rather boring to fight with yourself.
About eighteen years into having what I would term 'serious relationships,' I decided to look into my own fighting style.
I began with Will.
Will was my first significant relationship. He was from Argentina via Philadelphia and we were together for about four years, starting my junior year in high school. Will was quiet, reserved, and brainy. He would stay up all night in our cheap Philly apartment and try to work out quantum physics formulas. I would awake every morning to sheets of notebook paper strewn across our living room with mathematical formulas that made my head spin. He thought they were gifts.
However, despite all outward appearances, Will was a fighter.
Unfortunately, I was too.
Our fights would always end up in one of us throwing something valuable on the floor or off the balcony or doing something so horrendous that it would stun us both into silence for days. We'd creep around each other in our own mutual worlds of humiliation and anger.
The "morning after" would go something like this:
Him: "Did you really throw all of my art supplies, my college books, the picture of my dead grandmother, AND the antique candle holders that my mother gave us from Argentina into the dumpster?"
Me: "Yeah, sorry about that. But why did you have take my favorite plant, my dishes, AND the gourmet meal I prepared for you and throw it at the wall?"
We'd eventually apologize, replace for each other everything that we had broken, and carry on.
After four years, however, the relationship just broke...and some parts just couldn't be replaced.
It wasn't anything specific, and it wasn't really a bad ending, but something just broke that I couldn't retrieve from the dumpster and he couldn't buy again at Home Depot or Bed, Bath and Beyond.
Sometimes, things just break.
Next up was Ed, another sensitive and artistic soul from Philadelphia.
Ed and I had the amazingly brilliant idea of knowing each other for a few months and then deciding to move to a former communist country (except no one told them it wasn't communist anymore) and live in a one room apartment for sixteen months teaching English and making about $150/month.
In northeastern Hungary, the sun disappeared around the end of September and didn't make another appearance until late April.
To characterize this as depressing would be a major understatement. But we found ways to cope...the same way that our friends and colleagues, Hungarian and otherwise, coped...we drank ourselves silly. We would come home from work at about 4PM, have a beer or two or three, watch bad German television, and then start in on a bottle of wine...or two, or three.
Around midnight, facing another day or month of darkness and a tight budget, we would look at each other and find everything wrong.
Me: "I hate it here. You made me come here. I miss my mother and my family and now all I have to do is to sit in this dreary Soviet apartment and talk to you. Oh, and you have bad breath..."
Him: "You are a spoiled brat. You are an uptight, insecure, pampered...brat. Oh, and can your ass get any fatter or would you like to have another stuffed cabbage roll?"
To his credit, Ed was a hell of a lot more patient than Will. He was also nearly eight years my senior and had put up with his fair due of shit way before I entered his life so he tolerated my own insecurities and drama like a trooper...most of the time.
Underneath it all, we loved each other to death. Like Will, Ed and I always made up because neither one of us had the capacity to stay angry for more than a few hours or, maximum, a few days.
But a few hours and a few days, over a lifetime of a relationship (Ed and I were together for nearly a decade), wears you down.
When we parted ways five years ago, we did so in anguish. We both looked like people who had survived a nuclear holocaust and were still reaching for the air masks despite the fact that our limbs were falling off. Deep down inside, we loved each other and wanted to make it work. But, on the outside AND the inside, too much hurt and pain had occurred that made the relationship one long walk of pain.
Luckily, we are still friends, but that one hurt like a bitch. Mostly because we never learned how to fight with each other. We never learned how to not hurt each other...well, that destroys things in the end.
Next was Scott.
Scott was the true definition of "conflict adverse."
Despite being a decorated Army officer, Scott hated to fight.
His relationship with his ex-wife was characterized by NOT fighting. About anything, anywhere, anytime. Fighting was simply not allowed.
For me, it was torture.
Now, I had come a long way from my early years of throwing things in dumpsters and calling people names but I still believe a good (clean) fight clears the air.
Scott didn't.
So we would fight--or, rather---I would fight, he would get wounded, and we would spend weeks repairing the damage.
We had one brutally honest conversation in Texas five months ago where he admitted that he never wanted to fight again. He loved me, everything about me, but he just couldn't fight with me any longer.
It was painful as hell but we both threw in the proverbial hat.
I didn't know how not to fight, and he didn't know how to fight with me. These conversations always suck.
These days, Scott is one of my biggest supporters. He was one of the first people, in the wake of my resigning/being fired tragedy, to come right to my side.
He promised me his support, his friendship and his professional recommendation whenever needed.
Sort of the same thing with Ed.
When things went south a month ago, Ed never let me go until he was sure I wasn't going to fall down. Five years after a complicated break-up and a tumultuous relationship, he was right there for me like I had never thrown that pot of braised pig knuckles at him.
I am a lucky woman in that I date decent and kind men. We just don't always know how to fight with each other.
And now, confronted with probably the last relationship I am going to have in my life (no, not because I have some premonition of my death, but because I finally have a premonition of my future), I have to learn how to fight again.
Chas, my boyfriend and the love of my life, is also a fighter.
Part of it comes from the fact that he grew up poor and scrappy on the streets of Philadelphia. Part of it is because, like Ed, he has an unshakable moral compass. Chas has some very strong convictions about what is "right" and "wrong" behavior and he sticks to his guns. Chas was raised in a broken home and had plenty of things that could have turned him bad, but he chose to be good. He chose to be honest, loving, and trusting.
I think, in addition to Will, Ed and Scott, I admire Chas more than anyone.
But Chas and I fight the same way and this is sometimes problematic.
We rarely fight. One of the things that is so good about this relationship is that we almost never have conflict with each other. We have very similar personalities and this is a good thing.
However, Chas is a Leo and I am a Sagittarius. For those of you who don't know or believe in astrology...Chas and I are cut from the same cloth. Both of us are fire signs and fire signs are fighters. And Leos are tough. They don't back down from what they believe in and they are willing to engage in a fight to get their point across. Chas is a typical Leo.
We have had a couple of minor bickering sessions but last night we almost had a full-fledged fight.
Amazingly, I walked away before it escalated.
It was based on stupid stuff...ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, ex-whatever...those things that itch at you when you're completely sober but that suddenly gain so much significance after a few glasses of wine or a couple of beers.
So it unrolled and I walked away.
I have never done that before. I have never walked away from a fight.
But with Chas, I had to walk away.
I walked away because Chas and I don't know how to fight yet.
We both come from pasts where fighting dirty was normal and pulling out your claws was expected.
He didn't like it but he let me go.
Then, at 6:30AM he called and we talked it through.
He listened, I listened, and we actually got somewhere.
I don't think Chas and I will ever be in the same position as the woman who wrote to Oprah to say that yoga and aerobics made her never fight with her husband again.
Really, I think that woman is probably sticking her head in the sand because that shit comes out eventually.
But, hey, whatever works, right?
For now, I am learning to fight nice.
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