That run to the ocean had a way of setting my mind back at ease

To listen to it, you'd never know that I had the pleasure of purchasing a botanical print for my bedroom today...To listen to it, you'd think I'm making a habit out of unhappiness.

++ AIR is everywhere ++

Feeling a bit adventurous and giving the audio blog a try... Give a listen!

worth my Salt

It's official! Come September, I'm Maine-bound, to take a 15 week crash course in Radio Documentary.

With fall fast-approaching (and Portland on my mind), I've found myself thinking about Maine as it "is" and not as I'm used to remembering it. Telling the difference between the two is practically impossible. I have four years worth of memories, distilled through a 3 year separation. Has there ever been a state more clouded by nostalgia? (Except, maybe, this one I've chosen to call home for now.) It's a minefield of sentimentality, and I'm trying to work up my bravery to approach those myths and de-fuse them.

I have to say: it's not going well. With the exciting news comes the inevitable question of my interests: "What kinds of stories will you tell?!" I begin to blather almost immediately—discussing economic strain and redevelopment woes. Maybe I address the question of immigration, or bi-lingualism in schools…but it's passionless, flat, when I talk about it. I know it's too soon to worry, but I'm already having a hard time really asking the questions I want to answer.

And so I'm trying to think small, not about the broad sweep of social stratification, but the roadside stand where I bought my bike my senior year at Bates, the pancakes I ate on picnic tables at Nezinscot. My cheeks flush with the thought of contra dancing again. I'll take a trip up the coast, and instead of gazing longingly at the sea, I'll drop eye contact with the horizon, and not even bother with the breaking waves. I'll look at the hard smooth rocks, the sea glass around my feet. I'll think about all those bottles, most of them purposefully broken.

Saving

Legs folded, deep in the slump of a mid-day work-week, I looked up from my plate of baba ganoush to see a family picnicking not too far away (their legs folded in solidarity). Their gestures to one another were comfortable, but still animated, and I envied them their nonchalance. Caught up in what was clearly an engaging conversation, their thoughts drifted away from their 2-year-old daughter, who took it upon herself to make friends with other park goers. She bypassed me (I probably looked too bitter, too weary for friendship) and headed straight for a man stretched out on his back, asleep. He did have an aura around him—unraveling backpacks piled unevenly around him like so many offerings to his continued solitude. People had been keeping their distance. He looked grizzled, happily lonely. Too young to pick up on--or to care about—such implicit social pacts, this little girl walked straight up to him, and began talking. With feeling.

It took several seconds before he stirred, several more before he sat up, disbelieving. In the manner of her family, she gestured as she spoke, to the trees, to the sidewalk. She look at him bluntly, waited for his answer to whatever slew of questions she had just posed. I watched nervously, expecting anger of his part, or a facet of the same bitterness I felt to be outside, only halfway enjoying the sun. But he drowsily responded, apparently to her liking. She continued to talk, to gesture, and he watched her patiently, waiting for his turn to respond.

Her parents had noticed her disappearance, by this point. They turned abruptly, spotted her chatting happily and watched her, waiting for a break in her speech, a good moment to catch her attention. She saw her parents call her back, and after taking just enough time to prove her indifference, she turned around and barreled back to the picnic blanket.

We get older, we lose things: pocket change, earring backs, favorite sweaters. We’re frustrated first off, and then learn to deal with loss as a way of becoming lighter, of shedding things that weren’t even necessary to begin with. We like to make this idea work in the abstract: we think of the things we lose as distractions, trappings—“everything thing we really need,” we think we gain as we grow older. We can make the choice to hold on to everything worth saving.

I like that idea of being lightened by what’s lost. For the most part, it’s kept me from going crazy over whatever’s misplaced, irreplaceable. But the clear-eyed curiosity that led that little girl away from her family, that sparked (what appear to be a highly engaging) conversation with someone unknown to her, is something I wish I had saved. That’s what’s at the root of this urge to tell stories, but I’m older, and more cautious. Given the opportunity, I’m not sure I’d have such spirited comments on the trees, the sidewalk. I’m not sure I’d be willing to stride past a barrier of backpacks, confident that neither they, nor an uneasy attempt at sleep, are cures for loneliness.

a life more ordinary

Embarrassingly, the moments directly following this year’s “Best Picture” Oscar montage found me in the kitchen, red-faced, and crying over the fact that somehow, in my inadequate movie-viewing past, I had missed Ordinary People. Just irrational enough that I felt the need to move it right to the top of my list. (After the time it took to track it down, it wasn’t rented painlessly--the smart-ass video store guys had a thing or two to say about it’s relative inferiority to Raging Bull, which was “robbed” of the Oscar in 1980…)

And so last night was the night I laid (at least those) inadequacies to rest. After 2 hours of a film about therapy, it makes sense to talk out my feelings about it.

What I watched last night picks up on what I’m loving about certain radio pieces right now: when, and how, we "hear people out. " With so much scene-changing of our own, with so many interruptions (many of them self-imposed), how do we learn to just let people work through what they’re thinking, to finish what they started? We like to think we’re listening to people when they discuss something difficult, we like to think we’re giving people the time they need, but we cut in when it's awkward, or we see an opportunity for ourselves to speak, or when it makes us uncomfortable. We’re constantly editing our own conversations for the best result. We do it in the name of keeping the conversation lucid, but increasingly, I'm becoming an advocate for indulging people occasional incoherence.

With the constant fear that listeners will “turn the dial,” radio-makers have relaxed into creating flawlessly-edited stories that are undeniably interesting, but predictably revelatory--a style tends to create reality instead of reflect it. I’m more and more drawn to the radio pieces that are conscious of that fact and that make some specific changes to reverse it—keeping the less-than-perfect cut, the off-mic quote, letting people speak as they come across, instead of how you wish they’d sound. By encouraging people to keep talking, the revelation happens on its own, and not through the grace of good editing.

Now is as important a time as any to let ourselves, to let each other finish what we started. Not to edit our long awkward silences, to avoid the urge for polish, for professionality. In life, just as in Art, the revelation will happen on its own.

dinner dates, roommates...

Brandishing a bunch of red romunculi (a congratulatory gesture for launching this blog, finally), Meg showed up right on Jess and David's heels. Still adjusting to this new kitchen, and my new housemates, but if anything's going to shorten the distance between all of us, it's a dinner date.

Cooking together, eating together--we've done it enough times for it to feel unexceptional. But I have a fascination with the fact that it's a rite we carried from our families into college, and from college into our lives now, our City lives, where we make comfort anywhere we can get it. Our time, our energy to reach outward to our families, our far-flung friends--it's dwindling. We approximate home with those closest to us.

And this is ultimately what we do for one another: we read articles aloud, chop fennel for large, shared salads. We brew the coffee, set the morning alarm. We send one another out the door, we wish one another good days, or good nights, and we mean it. But we cannot follow one another to work, we can’t take on each other’s troubles to ease them (even though we listen tirelessly to the sadness that never quite seems to go away).

This is why, despite our convincing re-creation of a family, it’s impossible to make it true: we can only read so many articles, pour so many cups of tea, before we’re out the door, back out into the night. Alone, again, taking the long, quiet trip back to our dark, empty rooms. We produce our own keys, we turn on the hall light.

and so it begins.

This is what it takes: a complete lack of shame, a moratorium on modesty. This is what else it takes: a microphone.

I have the microphone: a thin silver attachment for my ipod that's discreet (if a bit rough on the ear when it's played back over the radio). I've urged it toward people before, but always in the name of the Saturday Evening News. Until now, its use has been assignment-specific. I've never thrust it in the face of my friends, asked them what it means to be here, now, in far-flung cities at the blossoming age of 24/5, what it means to shift between delirious happiness and stomach-gripping anxiety in the time it takes to tunnel under the Bay.

We cling to the recent past, and move forward more slowly for it. This is what I want to discuss. Imperfectly.

And here is how I want to discuss it: with the voices of these friends, all of you who are reading this now, smiling at my flimsy effort to move forward, all of you who recognize my need to take my microphone and record your voices so that it can dissolve my fear of whatever's not-quite-ready and propel something else. Someone has to take record of the fact that we are Of Interest, if not in the grand scheme of history then at least to ourselves. Who of you doesn't feel a sense of urgency? Quick! Call me! Talk to me! Let me turn the microphone on, shrug off anything that tells me it's useless.