Intimacy

So I have a hard time accepting nurturing from others. Don't you know that I wasn't breast-fed? The most intimate thing that a human being will ever experience -- the mother's breast, the child's mouth -- this almost killed me. I learned at an early age how painful intimacy is . Poisoned by my mother, I turned to my father. I learned to love the cold, mechanical workings of the intellect -- distant, reliable, safe. Come to find out, safety is unsatisfying, isolating. Now I'm trying to figure out how to come back to nurturing -- how to turn the poison back into mother's milk.

Living Metaphor

I saw a black man with white hands and white eyes on the train to work.

Internal Battles, Part 2

My half-Jewish, half-Swedish boyfriend taught me about Jewish stereotypes. Everything: the big noses, the dark curly hair, the greedy hoarder image, the Goldberg's and the Rosenblatt's. I didn't even knew they existed.

Ignorance has a bad rap. I wonder if pure ignorance really is bliss. It's the partial ignorance that can get so muddled and cause so much trouble.

I came out of college one year ago knowing practically nothing about our War on Terror. The towers were hit my senior year of high school. I watched it on television during drama class. None of it registered at the time. I watch the same footage now, and I am horrified. I think how awful it must have been for the people who were there. Then I remember that my brother, Ned, and my sister, Ellen, were there, right there.

Just as quickly as the smoking image came in, the image went out. I didn't want Bin Laden's blood. I didn't want to comfort the dead. I didn't want revenge. I didn't want to watch the terror-meter. I didn't want to worry. I just wanted to forget, and I did.

I had a few encounters with political conversations during college, for which I vehemently expressed my displeasure. I remember being disgusted by the idea of bringing Democracy to Iraq. Mostly because I had recently read "Democracy in America" for school, and I thought the idea went against everything Alexis De Tocqueville had so eloquently professed.

When the 2004 elections came along, I did my part as a citizen. I registered to vote, and voted against Bush. Bush stayed. I got angry. I went back into my haze.

I didn't know what to think when I heard that my brother, Lance, and later my cousin, Max, were going to Iraq, going to fight this war. Not knowing what the war meant made it hard for me to form a judgement. I knew others were horrified, but I found it hard to feel anything. I actively forgot.

When my temp agency called me for a job at a place called Al Jazeera, I was clueless. I looked it up in Wikipedia, and all it said was "Arabic news channel". I couldn't fathom what I could do for an Arabic news channel, but I took it anyway. I spent the next six months with Wikipedia and the Al Jazeera English channel (the English news channel I was actually working for) as my only friends. I felt like a character in a science fiction film getting zapped with infinite information all at once. When I found the entry for "Guantanamo Bay," I felt like the pure being in The Fifth Element looking up the word "WAR". Total disillusionment.

Now I consider myself "politically aware," even well-informed. Not just on Bush's War on Terror, but everything considered of note happening all over the world.

So I ask myself, "what now?" Now I shake my head a lot, like a boat rocking back and forth on calm water. Now my eyebrows find themselves in an upward bow pose quite often. Now I hurt for other people.

I'm just not sure of the value of information. Things stay as they are, regardless of my knowledge of them. The elections in Africa are still corrupt. Powerful nations still torture, withhold, and stifle. The children are still starving.... I know that knowledge contributes to my feeling of impotency. I just wonder if it does anything positive.

I watched a special on US soldiers who went to Iraq on our channel. The special said that many soldiers cannot re-immerse into society, and long to go back to war as a result. The special showed a few soldiers talking about their experiences coming home. How they can't sleep. How they feel constantly threatened. How they are always on edge. That's when I realized that I never asked my brother what it was like, how he felt. I never spoke to my cousin about it. I didn't even wonder. Then I was truly horrified. Then I cried.

Now I long to know. I can't wait to ask. I want to hear everything. I want to feel my bowing eyebrows, my sinking stomach, my tightening throat. I want to feel it with Lance. I want to feel it with Max. I want to hurt for them, not just for strangers and far away children. I want to understand.

Can knowledge lead to understanding?

An Insolent

It's interesting to see how people react to the homeless. When you've just met someone, and he is accosted by a beggar, he suddenly looks as though he's been caught masturbating by his mother. How does one respond to these encounters? Each person's experience is different and somehow intimate. When there is a witness to this experience, one feels violated. Lending to the embarrassment is perhaps that most of the homeless are mentally disabled in some way. And let's face it, no one knows how to interact with the mentally disabled, unless they have been trained or have an inherent gift. Doubled with this unfamiliar feeling is the feeling of scorn, but also pity. Scorn for the audacity of someone wanting your hard earned money without offering anything in return. Pity for the hopeless state they are so obviously trapped in. Scorn and pity fold together with the unfamiliarity to create repulsion, a secret repulsion. It is secret, because, no matter how low they seem to be, you cannot deny their humanity. You also know that there isn't very much separating you from them. But the repulsion remains. You are embarrassed about your repulsion, and each person reacts to their own embarrassment differently. Some are offended, some are ashamed, some become angry.

I witnessed a bony girl in a tube top refusing a beggar passing her street-side table at a hip Latin American restaurant in Eastern Market. She informs the bum of her tax paying status, and then ventures into her well-rehearsed tirade about how alms-giving only perpetuates the problem. In this situation, our heroine is surrounded by her tight-fitted comfort zone, though she is purposely informing the rest of the restaurant of her views through them. I know this tactic well, because I have used it often. It is quite useful when trying to initiate an intoxicated brawl. There's something quite empowering about your comfort zone. She never would have ventured on her tirade without them and certainly not with a new acquaintance. Strip the indignant lady of her support group, and she becomes an impetuous child.

Alone, you fear judgement. With friends, you invite it. The brave invite judgement indiscriminately, and I envy them.

Megrim 2

A fanatic is just a bored existentialist.

Megrim 1

A conspiracy theorist is just an idealist throwing a tantrum.

Internal Battles, Part 1

I watch it bubble over on the rotating plate and make no attempt to stop it. I'm not a fan. I thought split pea soup was supposed to be creamy. This is just water with hard peas literally split in half all sunk at the bottom with a piece of celery here and there to dress it up. I'm gonna eat it anyway, though, because there are starving children in Africa, and because a enough salt and pepper can make almost anything bearable. I'll even drink the birth water; they can't say I didn't do my part to help the skinny kiddies.


"Myanmar Devastation," "Mexico Drug Violence," "Peru Floods," "Lebanon Clashes" flash past my eyes. Save everything in our jurisdiction. Myanmar out, Mexico in; Peru in, Lebanon out. Each screen shows me some new piece of reality, and it is stark. The news is never good news. And I can't care about Mugabe, because I cared about Kenya. I can't like Clinton, because I love Obama. I have to choose my internal battles.


A recent grain of sand in the ocean of horror -- a pearl really, as it is a product of that ocean, is Sami Al-Hajj, cameraman for Al Jazeera. A name I heard at least once a day, everyday, announced through a picture of a dark-skinned man with round glasses. 2139 days in prison, 465 days on hunger strike.


Now he is freed. No reasons, no apologies, just freed. Can this really be? Can I be witnessing the end of this appalling injustice? One of several festering in my stomach? How do I celebrate the freedom of a man I never knew? A man I effectively helped imprison? A man who must despise me, my country, and everything I believe in? Yes, he has a right to his hatred, too. I daydream about kissing his feet. I imagine bowing my head in shame at the sight of him.

I rejoice at the recognition that I will never have to meet him. I can love him from afar, admire his courage, and say my prayers for him, but I can never face him. I cannot celebrate his freedom, because his imprisonment remains a fact. I cannot celebrate his freedom, because I have no right to. I cannot celebrate his freedom, because I still believe in all the things I believed in before I learned of the injustice he endured. Injustice is a fact, a disgusting, horrifying, relentless fact, laughing in the face of the ancient philosophers. I cannot celebrate his freedom, because I am still powerless to stop that injustice.


My friend's reaction is an easy one. "Did you know that a freed prisoner of Guantanamo Bay blew himself up in a suicide bombing the other day?" This observation echos through me for weeks. I doubt it is enough to make him feel justified, but perhaps it serves as a comfort to him. There is indeed evil everywhere.