Christopher Street

Crying

And I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
Or driven to its knees
--Paul Simon

I want to be the girl with the most cake
He only loves those things because he loves to see them break
I fake it so real, I am beyond fake
And someday, you will ache like I ache
--Courtney Love

I am not a crier. I don't cry. Before my Aunt's funeral, 2 years ago, I probably hadn't cried for a number of years. I just never saw the reason for it. It took up some amount of valuable time and it made your eyes all red and puffy and there was really no way to hide that you had done it--no amount of makeup can cover up the "been crying" look. So, I avoided it.

That isn't to say that I didn't get teary at weddings, or when watching sad movies, although truth be told, I usually try to avoid sad movies. Life is too short to deliberately inflict pain on yourself, even if it's fake pain. I worry enough about losing my cats without watching "Old Yeller";. I think enough about losing my mom without watching "Wit";. I think enough about losing my husband without watching "Untamed Heart";. But I digress.

So, teary I occasionally got but real, gut-wracking sobs were reserved for someone else. Someone who wasn't me.

And then it was September 10th and we didn't know that it was the last day that it would be normal ever in our lives and so we ignored it and then it was September 11th and it all changed.

After September 11th, all I could do was cry. I sat at home and watched the news and cried. I watched the agonizing faces of the survivors holding up pictures of the missing and the dead on TV, holding out hope that their Dad or their husband had already been on the way out, maybe to run to Starbucks for a latte, when the plane hit. Because he was on his way out, anyway, he could have gotten out, right? He might be alive and only hurt. He might have a head injury, but be alive. He might have amnesia. But he was alive, right?

Only he wasn't and I knew that. And it was--oh, God, how hard to watch them, knowing that their hope was false, knowing that Dad was really at his desk, on the 105th floor, barking orders at his secretary when he glanced out the window and saw the plane.

But I kept watching. I didn't lose anyone, see, but I felt that I owed it to the families who did, felt that if they wanted to go on TV and cry that I owed it to them to at least look at it head on, look at their pain and acknowledge it. I owed them, for taking my place, for being the ones to lose. For leaving my life untouched.

Only it wasn't untouched. In the days following, I would sit in my office and look out the window and pretend that there was a plane, sometimes heading for the building next to mine, sometimes heading for my window. I wanted to get inside the heads of the dead, I wanted to know what their last thoughts might have been. I wanted to know I would have had courage, if I would have run, if I would have cried, if I would have even had time to comprehend, to pray, to think about who would feed my cats, who would pay my bills, who would take care of my mom when she is old. Who would comfort my husband.

It's been 7 months now and I find that I still cry a lot. Not every day, but a lot. I cry most of the times that I hear the National Anthem. I cry when I see something happy, I cry when I see something sad. I cry when my cat reaches up and touches my face in that way that he does that absolutely breaks my heart. I cry when I fight with my husband. I cry when I look at my husband and realize how precious he is to me and what it would mean to lose him. I am suddenly a crier, and I don't know how to go back. Part of me just wants to go to the doctor, get a prescription for some sort of anti-depressant and be done with it. There is another part of me, though, that doesn't want to, because crying is a feeling thing and sometimes I think that the best way to honor the dead is to be in our lives, to feel our lives for all they're worth.

Bad Weather

It has been 95 degrees in Washington for the last couple days. 95 degrees. It's the middle of April.

We aren't ready for this. We aren't. The dampers on the air conditioner are still set for winter. My closet is still set for winter. The only thing that seems ready for summer are my feet, clad as they usually are from April through October in one of the 5 pairs of Tevas that I own. Other than that, though, we are really not well prepared for this. Strangely, it's still relatively cool in the evenings, which means that if we leave the air conditioner on after we go to bed, it is downright cold at 7:00 am. If we turn it off, we can't sleep for drowning in our own sweat. It's a conundrum, that's for sure.

Making matters worse is the pollen count. From today's Washington Post:

"To fully convey the brazen ridiculousness of the number you're about to see, a brief preface is necessary: When talking about tree pollen counts -- the measure of grains present in a cubic meter of air -- allergists generally classify anything above 90 as 'high.'"

Okay, ready for the number? The number for yesterday was 2,587. Today's number was really a lot better at 2, 449. No wonder my contacts felt like...well, felt like felt yesterday. Did you know that Pollen magnified enough to have a discernable shape is shaped like a mace? Little spiky things protrude, better that it grasp things like trees and bees and cars, I guess. Not to mention eyes.

And now it looks like rain. On the surface, rain might seem like a very good thing. It will, after all, lower the pollen count and likely the temperature also. But, it will also screw up my commute home beyond reasonable expectations. My 20 minutes will turn into an hour and 20. And that's rarely a good thing.

Libraries and Bookstores.

I went to my version of the library the other day, which is to say that I went to the bookstore.

I used to go to libraries. When I was in school, I was in the library club. I was even president one year. Truth be told, though, I wasn't president of the library club because I had a burning love of libraries; I was president because the back room of the library was a cooler place to hang out than study hall. I also could wipe all my late fees, as president.

Which brings me to the real reason I don't go to libraries.It's that whole borrowing concept. I can't seem to ever take the books back.

I don't intend to keep them when I borrow them. I have every intention of rushing home and reading the books and then promptly returning them. Except that time goes quicker than I think and it's time to take them back and I haven't even read them yet and then they're late and then they're really late and I want to wait for a "no fine" day and then that day never comes and the books get put in a box one day when I am cleaning and then I can't find them at all and then I get a letter from the library threatening to arrest me...well, that last part only happened once. But still. I'll bet that I have books in my bookcase from more than one library, carelessly collected over the years. I sort of feel bad about it. Maybe not bad enough to actually try and return them...5 or 15 years later, though.

I have solved this problem of unintentional kleptomania by avoiding libraries all together. Now, I just go to book stores. A more expensive habit, to be sure. But one that won't likely have the sheriff after my ass.

So, on Monday, I went to the bookstore. I went with a purpose, which was to pick up 5 books that I had either read about or had seen previously and not bought. These 5 books were Losing The Race, by John McWhorter, a fairly critical look at the sociology of Black America in the wake of the civil rights movement; Practical Gods, winner of the 2002 Pulitzer for Poetry; The Universe in a Nutshell, by Stephen Hawking; Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, by Randall Kennedy; and another book whose title is escaping me...it was written by a man whose wife barely survived the September 11th tragedy. I had seen it somewhere and assumed, wrongly it turned out, that it would be easy to find anywhere. It wasn't.

What I actually came away with were the Kennedy, McWhorter and Hawking books, plus the new Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grown-Ups and The Nanny Diaries a novel about life among the ultra-privledged, written by two former nannies, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. These last two were total impluse buys, but they look like they will be good.

Before I go for today, I have to tell you how unbelievebly uncomfortable I felt, as a white woman, buying the Kennedy and McWhorter books. As I was exiting the Black American Studies section of the store, I actually covered up the Kennedy book with the copy of Nanny Diaries that I was holding. The cover is fairly shocking and I guess I just felt like maybe I didn't have the right to read such a book, hadn't earned the right to even be in that section of the store. It was odd. The book is fascinating,though, an historical and linguistic perspective on the most dangerous word in our language. The question of whether the word can be demystified, or even whether it should be, is making for fascinating reading.

5 Good Things.

Since I have been kind of down lately, I thought I would take a couple of minutes and jot down some good things:

Fresh Strawberries
We got some really good fresh strawberries the other day at the Giant. Probably the best I have tasted in 3 or 4 years—since the last time I was in Florida. I made some homemade, biscuit-style shortcakes and whipped up some fresh cream to go with. It was pretty extraordinary.

Mariners Baseball
My Mariners are 10-3. ‘nuff said. :)

Pink Sunglasses
Last fall, in an attempt to use up the rest of the money in my flexible spending account, I went to Lenscrafters and went a little crazy. One of the things I bought was a pair of prescription sunglasses with pink lenses. The “rose-colored glasses" jokes not withstanding, I think that they are the coolest glasses I have ever owned.

Spinner
Internet Radio. Okay, so it’s owned by AOL/Time-Warner. Isn’t everything? Anyway, I listen to it all day, usually to the “unplugged” channel until they play Dave Matthews and then to the “90s alternative channel” until it annoys me and then it’s back to “unplugged”. It can be a little repetitive, but that’s why they market something like 200 different themed channels--Pop or Rap or R&B or Country or 70s or 80s or 50s or 60s or 40s or Jazz or Folk or Blues or Reggae or Doo Wop or Cuban or Disco or about 185 more—so, getting bored is really your own fault. It’s www.spinner.com, if you are interested.

My ‘Things I Am Not' list
This one requires a little more explanation. See, in my current job, I am frequently asked to do things that are so far out of the scope of my job that they are actually funny. Except I rarely laugh about it, especially since I am frequently not good at the things I am being asked to do and not being good at something annoys me. So, I have started keeping a tongue-in-cheek list on my white board of all the things I am not. Many of these things are hats that I am asked to wear every day and many are just silly things designed to take the bite out of the list so that I don’t actually piss anyone off. There are 10 things on my list today:
Souffle chef, technical writer, astronaut, DBA, circus freak, web designer, saloon singer, talk show hostess, professional figure skater, process engineer

I will leave it to you to figure out which ones are real and which are decoys. :)

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I remain somewhat melancholy and

I remain somewhat melancholy and not in much mood to write. I did read this poem the other day and thought it was cool. It's by Carl Dennis and is from his 2002 Pulitzer Winning "Practical Gods":

The God Who Loves You
It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you're used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.

A poem.

I remain somewhat melancholy and not in much mood to write. I did read this poem the other day and thought it was cool. It's by Carl Dennis and is from his 2002 Pulitzer Winning "Practical Gods":

The God Who Loves You
It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you're used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.

Melancholy.

I miss my old job.

For seven years, I worked in a distribution company, which basically means that we were a reseller of product which we then delivered or shipped. I worked in myriad capacities for them over the years, some jobs better than others, but all pretty cool. I was in customer service, I was in sales, I was a project manager, I was a department manager. I finished my career there as the regional Director of Customer Service.

Why I left is a rather long and tortured tale but it will suffice to say that we got bought, I got a new boss, the new boss asked me to do some ethically- and legally-challenged things, I refused (because I have this burdonsome sense of personal ethics), got branded as a troublemaker and was offered the delightful choice of remaining employed but taking a 2-level demotion (and watching those at my new level also get demoted to make room for me) or leaving with an anemic severence package.

I took the anemic severence package. And I got another job, on paper a better job, in a better, more marketable field, making tons more money. But sometimes, I still miss my old job.

It's not that this is a bad job. It's not, really. I work for a company that has some real challenges, sure. And I don't always agree with the way that we do business. But, no one has knowingly asked me to violate federal law in the 2 years that I have been here and that is a plus.

Still, not a week goes by that I don't miss my old job. I miss the fact that I knew our business, end to end. I was really good at what I did, whatever that happened to be at any given moment. I was a go-to person. I was a problem-solver, someone that could make things happen. Here, nothing ever happens, let alone something that I made happen. I miss the pace, which surprises me. When I left, I said that that would be the one thing I wouldn't miss. I said that life was too short to waste it running after errent packages and dealing with hostile customers. Mostly, I said that I was leaving because I was exhausted. The irony of that, of course, is that I miss it so much, that feeling of tired at the end of the day because you worked so damn hard. Most days, that kind of tired was accompanied by some sort of success story. I'm tired, but I got the toner to the irate woman in Delaware...or the A4 paper to the London office in time for the big meeting...or something like that. I was tired because I had fixed someone's problem. At my old job, I was part of the solution.

These days, I'm still tired but it's a bad tired, a tired borne of dealing with unproductive crap all day. That's not a good kind of tired.

Mostly, though, I miss the people that I worked with, many of whom are still there. I miss Laurie, who frequently drove me to drink, and usually in a good way. And, I miss Mark, who was my best boss ever and Colleen who hated dumb people even more than I did. I miss Adil, who rubbed my shoulders every day. I miss Pat, who made me laugh. I miss Tracie, who flew halfway across the country for my birthday. I miss Jim, who did jello shots with me in Vegas. I miss Pam, who prayed for me, even when I probably didn't deserve it. I miss Bianca and her warm, Carribean accent. And I miss Janet, who is probably the best person of all.

Don't mistake this nostalgia, though, for regret. I left because the people that took over after the merger were bad people, people that were asking me to do bad things, people that lied, people that asked me to treat my employees poorly and to break the law in so doing. I can't work for people like that. Pesky ethics--can't seem to get rid of them.

There are days, though, when I think back to the company that we were for a while, and I am sad. I guess this has been one of those days.

Tea

We've been drinking a lot of tea lately.

It all started a couple of weeks ago when we saw a program on the FoodTV channel on, well, tea. More specifically, home brewing loose tea.

Now, I grew up drinking tea. My parents weren't coffee people....but there was a lot of tea consumed. My mom preferred hers hot; my dad liked his iced. I liked both. But, and this is somewhat important...we weren't particularly sophisticated tea drinkers. We drank Lipton, mostly. Maybe the occasional box of mint or orange tea made it into the house and I do remember a brief flirtation with herbal at one point, but for the most part, we were perfectly happy with a good cup of Lipton.

As a grown-up person, I was slightly more adventureous, venturing into many sorts of flavored black teas. I never drank a lot of green, at least not outside of Chinese restaruants. I mostly brewed in a mug, although I have been known to brew occasionally in a coffee maker as well(although, since it never brewed coffee, I find its moniker problematic). But loose tea was always a mystery. How did you do it? It scared me.

Enter Alton Brown and the Food Network. On the "True Brew 2:Mr. Tea" episode of his "Good Eats" program, Alton explores the wonder of loose tea. Black tea, green tea, some tea called Oolong, which I have never even heard of. Alton tells me that it's important to brew at the right temperature and in the right vessel--he recommends brewing in a cast-iron Japanese teapot, called a tetsubin.

All this seems very exotic and so, last Saturday, I went off with my mom on a quest for a tetsubin teapot and some loose tea to brew in it.

The teapot was actually easy enough to find. Turns out that Sur la Table keeps them in stock. I chose a lovely dark blue pot--$85! Yowza! The loose tea is also fairly easy to find, but only because I did a lot--a lot!-- of reserch prior to leaving the house. We chose a store in Vienna, VA, called "The Coffee Caboodle", which, contrary to what its name suggests, sells over 70 varieties of loose tea. It's also a family-owned and -run business,which is cool. Mrs. Owner helped me navigate through the tea-maze and I left for home with 8 different varieties, black, green, chai and the mysterious oolong.

Well, it's a week later and I will share this: loose tea is a whole different beast. Deeper flavor, more character, to be sure. Less forgiving where steep time is concerned. But it's cool. And it turns out that I don't like oolong. Who knew? :)

Take me out to the ballgame.

I love baseball.

It wasn't always thus. When I was a kid, I really, really hated the game. Actually, I hated most games. When dragged to college basketball, I would sit in the coach's office and read (my dad knew the coach...). I used to hide a paperback and a walkman in my band hat and march pre-game that way so that I would have something to do during the game. Besides the obvious balance issues, it was a great way to not have to pay attention. Same for College football. I did dig the Steeler games, but it was the 70s and this *was* Pittsburgh. Not watching the Steelers would have resulted in my Pennsylvania citizenship being revoked. I also liked tennis, but that was more about liking Bjorn Borg than the actual sport.

But baseball...man, I hated baseball.

I used to say that it was because I was raised on a softball field. My dad was a shortstop, and a pretty good one. He played with a couple of "tournament" teams and played league ball until I was 16. Some years, he played in one league on Tuesdays and Thursdays, another on Mondays and Wednesdays and yet a third on the weekends. I knew the rules better than the umpires. I could keep score by age 8. I was all over the softball. Now, in a competive softball league, it isn't unusual for players to hit over .500. Games routinely are won or lost by scores of 16-14. 12-7. 9-6. It's a game that is very offense-heavy. Compared to this, baseball seemed unbelievably boring.

In baseball, I used to say, nothing happens. If you get a hit once out of 3 times, that's really, really good. Hall of Fame good. In a 9-inning game, likely you will have 40 people come to the plate. Maybe, maybe--if you have a good team--maybe 9 of them will get a hit. And of those 9 people who get a hit, maybe 1 or 2 will actually score a run. This isn't a game that is about the offense. This isn't softball. This is boring.

I felt that way until I was 29. And then one fateful night, I fell in love.

It was late 1995, October to be exact. I was sitting at my computer in our 2-bedroom apartment in the city. John was in the living room watching TV. Watching playoff baseball, it would turn out. He yelled for me to come join him. I whined. "I don't like baseball..." "Nah...you gotta come see these guys play."

You gotta come see these guys play. Little did I know what impact that one sentence would have in my life.

I went and watched them play. And the next day, I started reading the sports section--the sports section!--of the newspaper. And I watched them play another game. And another. They actually won that series, the American League Divisional Series, against the Yankees. They lost in the American League Championship Series that year, maybe to Cleveland. Didn't matter. I was in love. With the Seattle Mariners.

Now, I get asked all the time, why them? Why the Seattle Mariners? "Are you from Seattle?" I am asked. Nope, I say. Then why?

The answer is simple. That day, that team played with such shameless joy. They touched my heart. And they continue to play that way. They love the fans, and are respectful of the game. They seem to realize that they have been given a gift, and treat it as the precious thing that it is. They sign autographs, in Mike Cameron's case till his hands hurt. They always run off the field. They run out routine ground balls. They make goofy commercials. They support each other. They refuse to lose. They play 9 hard innings, every night. They play 3 hard outs, every inning. They don't give up. Not ever.

Last night, they came from behind, scoring 4 runs in the bottom of the 9th to take the first series of the season from the White Sox. When Bret Boone hit a little single into the gap, batting in the winning run, the team came running from the dugout, onto the field. They jumped up and down, they hugged Boone, they hugged each other, heck...it's not out of the question that they hugged a White Sock or two. It would have seemed to a casual observer that Something Really Important had just happened. Would have seemed like maybe they just made the playoffs, or won a Playoff game or won the World Series. But no, what they won was the third game of a 162-game season. They won a season series, yes, but the first one of the season. Over the 6 months of the season, this game is meaningless. And yet, they poured onto the field, shouting and jumping and hugging.

Imagine a movie, one of those body-swapping ones, where a bunch of 8-year-olds get to play big-league baseball. Imagine that they have all the skills of major leagers, but that they are 8 years old inside. How much joy would they play with, in this movie?

That's how my Mariners play. Every day. You should watch them sometime. But I warn you--it may change your life.