dietrich

I just got back from the gym, which I rode a bike to and from, in the rain, and while there, jogged for 20 minutes, or over a mile and a half, without stopping to walk.

This is unheard of in my previous experience. But after running nearly 10 minutes in a row the other day, I did my five-minute warmup today and then, after five minutes, figured, "why not ten?" And after ten, why not fifteen? Then all of a sudden, I'd run the whole thing.

What makes me furious is that for all the required gym classes I suffered through in school, nobody ever taught me *how* to run, or how to enjoy it. We were simply required to do it and not ask questions. From the time I was small and had to do the 600 yard dash, I recall being unable to do it. I'd run my little heart out, but after a quite short time, I'd have to stop, panting and wheezing. I'd walk for a little while, feeling the stitch in my side, my tongue swelling, the taste of iron in my mouth. But no matter how long I walked I couldn't regain the ability to run again, and when I reached the end of the course I would collapse and need to catch my breath for at least ten minutes. Meanwhile, at home, my older cousin would challenge me to foot races, giving me a ten second head start and still creaming me easily.

By high school I'd pretty much decided that I am One Who Runs Only When Chased, and, as in all other affairs of gym class, wore my athletic ineptitude as a badge of pride. (It got me teased slightly less than if I actually tried to do well.) At some point in our junior year, we were forced to run a mile. We trained for it for several weeks, basically by getting out there every day and running as far as we could.

Naturally, I hit up against the same wall: as far as I could was less than five minutes, and then I'd hit what I now know is an exercise-induced asthma attack and would be able to go no further. In the end I said fuck the gym teachers and walked the goddamn mile.

Did these so-called teachers ever think to show the weaker runners how to interval-train? How to use proper form so that you're using your whole body to propel yourself forward, not just your legs? How to prevent injury? Of course not. It was just, "Get the lead out!" and other such wonderfully creative tools of humiliation. Which at that point was as good as dooming my grade, because I responded to humiliation with anger and spite and refusal to do anything, not with trying harder.

A few months ago, all I had to do was go to coolrunning.com and get the "couch-to-5k" running plan. At first running a minute at a time was difficult.

Today I ran my mile at last. And then some. Fuck you, public school gym class.

One thing I kind of hate about moving is the way it brings up old stuff, all the memorabilia I'd shoved into drawers, old love letters and cards, sentiments no longer true but so true once, once.

By some brilliant stroke of irony I also dug the below poem out of my desk drawer in the course of packing, and it seemed appropriate to reproduce it here.


MAY DAY

I've decided to waste my life again,
Like I used to: get drunk
On the light in the leaves, find a wall
Against which something can happen,

Whatever may have happened
Long ago - let a bullet hole echoing
The will of an executioner, a crevice
In which a note was hidden,

Be a crag where a struggling tendril
Utters a few spare syllables at dawn.
I've decided to waste my life
In a new way, to forget whoever

Touched a hair on my head, because
It doesn't matter what came to pass,
Only that it passed, because we repeat
Ourselves, we repeat ourselves.

I've decided to walk a long way
Out of the way, to allow something
Dreaded to waken for no good reason,
Let it go without saying,

Let it go as it will to the place
It will go without saying: a wall
Against which a body was pressed
For no good reason, other than this.


-Phillis Levin

I hate olives.

Now, I know this may be a shocking annoucement for those in my audience with more delicate consitutions and sensibilities, but it is nonetheless a (recently) true statement, and one I have stood by for my entire life.

Not that I had any personal resentments toward olives. An olive didn't kill my brother; no olives owe me money. No, I just have never liked the damn things. And I tried. Oh, how I tried. You see, while I finally came to accept my hatred of olives, I never made fun of them as a stupid food to like, or taunted olive-eaters in their olive-eating orgies of pleasure. No, I wanted to like olives. Olives seemed like a good food, a serious food (though not a serious pastry). My whole family liked them, and I figured, given my mother and grandmother's perfect blemishless olive skin, that I was cursed with acne because I hated olives. (They really are supposed to be good for your skin. Not just olive skin, either. Shut up.)

So, every time there were olives around, I would try one. Didn't matter what kind: kalamata, canned black, green with pimientos, whatever. I'd take one, bite into it, and...purse my lips...and find a napkin...and spit that thing right out again. Yes, this was food I couldn't even force myself to swallow. But I kept on trying. Years, and no change.

Then, one night at Gargoyle's, I decided to try the olives that they serve along with some luscious Marcona almonds. They were small, and of various colors, and herby, and I popped one in my mouth and...hey...this is not so bad. Actually, this is kinda good! Lemme try another one, maybe that one was broken. No...this one's good, too!

And suddenly, for no reason at all, I liked olives.

And that's the story of me and olives.

And in celebration of this, I give you my non-recipe for the thing I randomly put together tonight, which also happened to be the first thing I've ever cooked with olives in it. Because you know, I hate olives.

I was gonna call this Greek Stew, but then I kept thinking, "Saute a coarsely chopped onion in olive oil...Add one diced Greek..."

So far, it's just called ( Greek Thing. )

Jesus. Next thing you know I'll be eating mushrooms...oh wait...entrope!!

The buzzer rang yesterday at around 6:30 and I was surprised: our guests weren't due until 7:30 or 8, and imlad wasn't yet home. As I trundled downstairs to answer it (our apartment has no way of buzzing people in), I heard the neighbor's buzzer sound as well, and though I could not yet see the visitor, I had some misgivings, though I hoped it would simply be the UPS man uncertain of which doorbell was which.

Instead, I was greeted by a smooth-cheeked, toothy young lady in a red shirt, bearing the DNC logo. She was brandishing a clipboard in my general direction, and was careful to get her entire enthusiastic speech out, all the time looking directly into my eyes, before I could interrupt or say a word other than "hello."

In spite of my natural desire to dismiss her out of hand and shut the door to return to my cooking, I simply couldn't do it. Not because the cause moves me particularly or doesn't - it does, in fact; I want Kerry elected more than I've wanted anything in politics since I wanted Bush not to declare war on Iraq two years ago. It's more because I'm particularly susceptible to young kids earnestly pushing their various fundraising campaigns door-to-door.

Sure, it's hard going up to individual people's houses and bothering them around dinnertime to beg for money, and I sympathize with that. But more to the point, I empathize with that - because I did it for a summer, and man, it's the hardest frickin' job in the world.

I'm not sure how most organizations work, but I know how PIRG and Clean Water Action - two of the most successful environment and other public interest fundraising organizations - operate in terms of their lowest level employees.

Ever see those signs that say, "Work for the Environment! Make $300-$500 a week!" Yeah, I answered that ad once. And ended up working for the New Jersey Environmental Federation, an inveterate group of young wiseguys and older, earnest types who spend their time between 4 pm and 9 pm going door-to-door in various neighborhoods, spreading the word about one disaster or another (poisonous insecticides on your kids' schoolgrounds, mercury in your fish) that we're attempting to pass a resolution or law to prevent, reverse or correct. All you have to do is give us some money.

If it matters to you, and if such people have come to your door in the past, you should know that half of that money (with taxes taken out first, of course) goes into that little college student's pocket, which, for the hot (or cold), potentially dangerous, humiliating, demoralizing nature of the work, seems to me to be far less than their fair share. The rest of it goes to fund their lobbying groups and keep operations up. The people who run these things are nonprofit warriors to a man or woman, dedicated, honest, and working in lousy office conditions. We drove to our locations in beat-up Econolines. We practiced our "raps" to each other, the enthusiastic speech I mentioned earlier, over the bumps in the road and the loud engine. We had a whole vocabulary, a parlance of door-to-door fundraising, starting with the word "canvassing." People in houses were known as "doors," as in, "I had this one door tonight that let me in the house and invited me to dinner!" Once you had your door's attention, you made sure to keep their eyes as you delivered your rap, and to clip them - get your clipboard into their hands - as early as possible, without letting them look at it until you were done talking. That attitude of sunny rapport, and the pushiness and lack of change in expression when you tell them, again and again, that you simply can't give right now, that you gave at the office, that you can't afford the $25 "membership" level donation - that's called "assuming support." "That's okay," you probably hear those kids say over and over when you insist that you can't afford it, "folks are just giving five or ten dollars." Assume support. Go to every door imagining that this person is already on your side, already reaching for their checkbook. In our case, we had weird numbers, to be fun and also to get checks instead of cash, to get addresses: $6, $12, $25, $60. A $60 giver was called a sustainer, and boy were they ever, in making up half of your quota for the night. The desperation with which the fundraiser will finally just ask if you can pitch in a couple bucks became known, thanks to a hilarious, extremely bright surfer boy called John Hogan, as the "buckertwo." Once he steamrolled over a door's noisy objections to his very presence by insistently chanting, "Buck-or-two-buck-or-two buckertwobuckertwobuckertwo buck - er - two!" He later became so disenchanted with the job that he replaced our field manager's common exhortation "Make it happen" with "Let it happen."

I had a lot of highs, a lot of failures, and a lot of stories from that job. Someday they'll become a short story, I think. In any case, now, whenever one of those people come to the door, whatever their cause, with their little clipboards and their hopeful faces and endless positivity, I smile back. I grade them on their technique. Sometimes I even give a contribution. Because that's their job, and I know what that job is like. It sucks. And if you don't make your quota, you get fired.

But yesterday, I didn't. I went back into my comfortable house, back to my cooking, after she insisted three times and I, like Peter, three times denied her. Maybe I'm getting a bit hard in my old age.

I just spent a little time adding a bunch of stuff to my Amazon wish list, which seemed apt since I'm often thinking about gaps in my music collection, but never feel that money spent on CDs is good money.

It's a strange thing. Living with ert, who obsessively organizes his music on a server and plays it in varying playlists through a gadget called a SlimP3, I've grown accostomed to hearing songs in no particular order, usually strung together by genre or what sounds good together by, predictably, an ex-DJ. It's pleasant, most of the time, and when he plays something that annoys me, I just ask him to change it. It also means that there is often, if not always, music going on that is semi-appropriate to whatever activity is occupying me: eating, showering, cooking, cleaning, working.

But the whole thing has subdued in me something that has been very important to me for a very long time, and something that I think is being slowly destroyed by the cult of mp3 and the iTunes music store:

Albums.

I am someone who likes to have music around, randomly, yes. But I am also someone who has been known to spend hours just lying around, or cleaning house alone, or something similarly non-absorbing of my mind, and concentrating on music. I have done this since I understood what kind of music I liked. At the age of nine, my friend Susan and I would listen to the Grease album together. We even made up an Olivia Newton-John style aerobics-cum-dance routine to the title track. I listened to Michael Jackson's last great opus, Thriller, repeatedly (it was the first record I ever owned), and learned all the words and sang along. Same with Prince's still-great Purple Rain, Cyndi Lauper's She's So Unusual, and, later, Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet. Later I listened to entire Smiths albums while moping teenagerly in my bedroom with the door closed, learned the musicals The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables literally from end to end (I was a very high soprano then, and would sing along), picked up albums like Renaissance's wonderful Tales of 1,001 Nights and the original Broadway soundtrack to Hair - for the pure purpose of learning them, and singing along in my room. This made me very, very, very happy.

This habit continued through college, with Indigo Girls (more singing), Tori Amos (ditto), and other girl-rock. Later I started getting into less sing-alongable stuff, mostly by men: Dave Matthews, They Might Be Giants, The Cure, Rush, Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, and Sting.

I always listened to them end-to-end. I had (and still have) a three-CD changer. I rarely put it on "shuffle."

One thing I truly miss about living with Scott is how well we meshed in this regard. He perfectly understood the need and desire to put in a CD, grab a drink, and just sit around and listen. He was, and I'm sure continues to be, an active listener of music, an appreciator of both lyrics and music (though he knew little about the latter, and really loved it when I would describe to him strange time signatures and other tricks performed by complex bands like Tool and Soundgarden), and a lover of albums. He would buy an album for one song, but then he would wear out the new CD, playing it all the way through and getting the flow and feeling of one song into another, growing fonder of it as he went. He was forgiving of weak or filler tracks, and rarely skipped one.

I have not done this in ages. I realize that while I was with Scott, I was also listening fairly heavily to his music, not mine. Though we shared many tastes, his tastes ran a bit harder, but what I at first felt subjected to began to turn into my daily bread of music. I learned to adore Tool in all of its complexity. I was educated in the richness of the Doors' catalogue - particularly the later blues stuff and the extemporaneous live tracks in which Jim would incite audience riots. I tripped using only my mind and the music of Pink Floyd, sat on the floor with Scott for hours, listening to Marcy Playground's underappreciated first album over and over again, trying to figure out who they reminded us of. In our last days, we listened to A Perfect Circle's Mer De Noms together - truly the best album of 2000 - and put our ears to the speakers trying to figure out the lyrics of "Orestes."

We listened.

My wish list is now filled with albums that I miss listening to in their entirety: the second Days of the New album, which flows effortlessly from one song to the next. The White Album, which rarely pauses for breath, and the splendid Abbey Road, with its unbroken progression of tracks - Sun King, Mean Mr. Mustard, Polythene Pam, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, Golden Slumbers, and Carry That Weight. Tool's Lateralus, which is like a journey through emotional states too rapid and absorbing to track. And Ragtime, musical soundtracks being a mainstay of the type of story- and lyrics-dominated music I've listened to for my entire life.

Why don't I just go through the SlimP3 when nobody but me is home (which is often enough), pick out albums, and listen to them that way? I might begin to. But it's difficult. The contraption has such a poor search interface. I can't even remember what music is in it, what I might possibly like to hear. It's not like looking at a concrete music collection on your CD rack. I used to measure time this way: I would load three CD's into my player and hit "Continue," let them all play through. When they were done, when I had to change the music, I would know about three hours had passed. I had a sense of time, of task. I would get up, choose new music, go on to something else. On dates I'd have in my house, the music ending or starting over was a handy cue to move on to the next portion of the evening: from dinner to dessert, from dessert to the couch, from the couch to the bedroom, or to parting, and goodnight.

I must find a way to regain this. In the meantime, please share your experiences with music. I'd love to know how technologies have shaped your listening habits, and how you listen to music, and whether that has changed throughout your life.

Last night, I went with the denizens of Menage to see the lovely Anna Callahan sing jazz tunes at Ryles. A versatile, mobile soprano with airy lightness in the right places and belty sultritude in others, she worked her way up and down the scale with romantic melodies, scat flights, and soaring ending-notes that would make Ella proud. And she plays trumpet and horn, too.

I sat and enjoyed, moving unconsciously as I always do with live jazz, closing my eyes and seeing colors. A few numbers tugged at my emotions in almost uncomfortable ways. It was quite the electric performance.

But this wasn't where my envy came in. Except in her total lack of nervousness and grace, I knew the feeling of being on stage, creating music with my entire body, spellbinding an audience. For such things, I've begun to open up opportunities again, and I hope I can train my voice back into shape.

Where the envy came in was where it always does: the dancing. For three numbers, Anna invited a guest horn-player up and they did a few swing tunes. I initiated the dance by poking ert and fanw, encouraging them to dance. Soon other couples joined them, some of them amazing: light, fleet, their hips almost independent from their torsos, their feet flying, their faces glowing with grace and the athletic joy of dancing well.

From as far back as I can remember, nothing has filled me with such simultaneous joy and melancholy as watching good dancers dance. Whether it's Alvin Ailey in a large theatre where I'm in no way expected to participate, or that punk rock girl on the floor at Manray, tearing it up ten feet from me, I have always been denied that grace and agility. I have been clumsy and slow-moving my entire life, and have tried wherever I could to emphasize my strength, size, and carriage; I can make my good posture and the way I hold my head and hands come off as grace; I add deliberateness to my slowness, and thus avoid clumsiness and come off as unhurried, perhaps even catlike. But in my truest, oldest self, I am the girl picked last for kickball, the girl whom my cousin could always beat in a footrace, even if he gave me a ten-second head start, the girl who, eventually, didn't even try to be good at things in gym anymore, but adopted instead a kind of ironic smirk toward my own ineptitude - it made the teasing of my classmates hurt slightly less.

Here are the sports I will watch if they are on: women's gymnastics, figure skating. Both closer to dance than sport, yet both involving the grace, agility and balance that I have always lacked. I watch them in awe, with that pure kind of envy that borders on admiration, and vice versa. I enjoy it immensely, and at the same time in makes me suffer in a deep part of myself that I cannot change. I know. I've tried.

I do yoga now with some regularity, and since my early teen years, I've gotten less shy about getting on the dance floor, unpartnered, and just moving whatever way the music takes me. In yoga, I check my form in the mirror, partly because I want to be doing it properly, of course. But in no small part because I want to see if in my slow, controlled stretches (I have always had excellent flexibility), I am achieving any part of grace. I want to know if my arched back, my arms stretched overhead, my legs in warrior stance, inspire poetry in me the way those same movements do in the instructor.

I keep wanting to take swing dancing lessons with ert. I want to go weekly; I want to learn one dance, and learn it well, and intricately, and be able to do it with little effort. Any lessons I take that involve grace always result in my becoming frustrated, asking the same questions over and over, apologizing constantly in the way I learned to when a pre-emptive apology, then giving up, was less painful than trying again and again and continuing to fail and be laughed at.

I know that among my friends now, there is no one who would laugh at my bad dancing, or mock me in any way intended to be cruel. But when I dance with someone who dances well, I can see their gentle patience waning as they try to shape my movements to their own, as they try to fling my ungainly body about and make it respond in the way they have been taught it should. And after a dance, those partners always smile, thank me, and move on to a partner who can match them. There is, deeply ingrained in me, a feeling that it's better to give up, to sit at the table in the jazz club and watch, to smile and admire and feel the ache, not of loss, but of something never gained.

Boldface the states you've visited; italicize the ones where you've lived.

1) Alabama 2) Alaska 3) Arizona 4) Arkansas 5) California 6) Colorado 7) Connecticut 8) Delaware 9) Florida 10) Georgia 11) Hawaii 12) Idaho 13) Illinois 14) Indiana 15) Iowa 16) Kansas 17) Kentucky 18) Louisiana 19) Maine 20) Maryland 21) Massachusetts 22) Michigan 23) Minnesota 24) Mississippi 25) Missouri 26) Montana 27) Nebraska 28) Nevada 29) New Hampshire 30) New Jersey 31) New Mexico 32) New York 33) North Carolina 34) North Dakota 35) Ohio 36) Oklahoma 37) Oregon 38) Pennsylvania 39) Rhode Island 40) South Carolina 41) South Dakota 42) Tennessee 43) Texas 44) Utah 45) Vermont 46) Virginia 47) Washington 48) West Virginia 49) Wisconsin 50) Wyoming [and DC]