memory

Fullest

Standard

An excerpt:

“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
If I have made of my life something particular, and real,
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
Or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” – Mary Oliver

One of life’s greatest missteps and misfortunes is to not really live. To question what might have been, to let opportunities and people go who might have helped us grow, explore and see things in new ways – to question because we did not choose to experience those things for one reason or another. Our practical lives and minds steer us toward clear and safe paths: keep the miserable job because it is stable. Stay in unhappy relationships because you won’t find someone better suited or because you can’t bear to be alone. Don’t spontaneously travel to a far-flung land because it is dangerous – or because you just can’t see yourself being that spontaneous. Stop listening to music because it’s… I don’t know, what young people do? (As the lovely, old Australian film Strictly Ballroom reminds us: “A life lived in fear is a life half-lived.”)

Without really living – embracing, learning, loving, doing – haven’t you only visited this world?

The abuser
I had a job for many years that, in no uncertain terms, was bad. I liked the actual work and subject matter (I did learn a lot) and loved many of my colleagues. But the organizational culture and company – totally delusional. And they played the role of abuser. Most people there were zombified automatons, brainwashed to think they were making a difference, to think they could do no better elsewhere, that every place is the same or would be worse or – god forbid – that the way this place operated was normal. But my nomadic nature taught me better – I had changed roles and companies frequently and was doing other work in parallel that showed me just how miserable that place was.

Almost everyone with whom I worked closely has left and all of them express to me this feeling of having left an abusive partner – having been told repeatedly, “You will never find something better. You aren’t good enough for something else. Nothing else will be better than this anyway.” As soon as they left, a giant weight lifted from their shoulders, and they realized, “Wow, I can actually do things. I am actually effective and smart.” And the toxic nature of the relationship and culture of the previous company becomes clearer than ever.

But while there are the few who have been “liberated” there are still the herds and hordes who haven’t and probably never will be. Mostly “lifers” who have nothing to compare it to and would not have the skills or sense to make it anywhere else.

I wonder when I think of these people whether they are truly living. In some cases, I would say, no, they are not living according to my definition of living – but then they don’t have to. They can define it for themselves. Some people there are just going for the paycheck, camaraderie and flexibility on holidays and their external/non-work lives are full of living. Some like the exceedingly family-friendly nature of the company and stay for more than a decade while having a family. These things make sense. But the die-hard, drank-the-Kool-Aid types don’t make much sense, and I can’t compare what they are doing to living. (At least I would ask in the end of my life “if I have made of my life something particular, and real…” –and the answer would be no.)

The seeker
What would life be without music? It’s something about which I am passionate – even if I have never been one to make music (which I kind of regret – but at the same time, it’s not such a deep regret or loss that I will ponder it at the end of my life wondering why I didn’t do something about it).

But no, I am on a constant journey of discovering new music – and sharing it (like it or not). I’ve written about this before, and about the supposed drop-off in music discovery at age 27 (or something similarly strange. Oh no, 33. As if that is so much better). I will never understand this.

The other day I told a friend I might be in Gothenburg for a concert; she asked me what show, knowing full well she would have no idea who it was because she is just not into following music. It defies all logic for her – and for many of my friends – that I can put together a mix of music several times a year with so many things they have never heard of.

But for me I can’t say I think I would be living without constantly seeking out new music. To fully live life, it needs a soundtrack.

The lover
I do not love easily or often. When I do, on these rarest of occasions, I know it. I know I love and there are no questions or doubts about the feeling or what it is or what it means. (Does it mean there is no fear? Of course not. But there is no doubt whatsoever about what the feeling is.) When I love truly and deeply, pulled by an undeniable force that I can’t control, I would go to the ends of the earth. Despite my infamous insular, self-driven and independent nature, I am, by love, transformed to become expansive in my inclusion of the person I love, inviting them to also inhabit the world we create together – a person for whom I would go anywhere, do almost anything and defend, support and love through dark and light, bad and good. This all-encompassing approach should make it clear why I don’t and can’t feel this way about just anyone (as much as I simultaneously revile and admire people who think they fall in love with every person they meet – the whole thing must be very easy for them. Not to be dismissive, of course).

It happens that this infernal New Age book I recently read (yes, I keep referring back to it) described well how I might describe it. In addition I would say that love is… or, maybe no, not love, but loving – active loving – is fundamentally a conversation. A conversation that goes on, lingers, does not end, that continues even in silence.

“…the value and process of soulful romance rests in what he calls radical conversation, in which one intends, continuously, to discover more and ever more about oneself and the other. Through such an exchange between two mysteries, one draws nearer to the central mystery of life.

Loving the otherness of the partner is a transcendent event, for one enters the true mystery of relationship in which one is taken to the third place – not you plus me, but we who are more than ourselves with each other.”

“Radical conversation has emotional, imaginal, sexual and spiritual dimensions as well as verbal ones. And the conversation is approached not only with skill and intent but also with innocence and wonder. Neither the other nor the self is a fixed thing. The bottom is never reached. One hopes to be forever surprised.

But of course it’s not all delight and ease. Far from it. We are constantly discovering how we project our shadow – both its light and dark aspects – onto each other. The dance of soulful romance always includes owning back those projections and transferences. Our relationship will expose all the places we are emotionally blocked, blinded, wounded, caged, protected, or otherwise limited.” -Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft

Does this mean no doubts ever creep in? No. But they don’t negate, erase, eliminate or diminish the underlying feeling or its strength.

Doubt’s a constant stream of questions (these don’t all apply to me; just a generic list): Am I rebounding? Am I clear-headed enough to embark on something significant? Am I repeating the exact same pattern that got me into a long and one-sided love affair from years ago? Am I ready for this? Or, for example, as one friend pointed out about people ending long relationships and possibly heading into new ones, have they really grappled with the question, “Who am I outside the old/long relationship?”

Yes, questions and doubts because that is what it is to interact and be with those with whom we are in love: to shut out the noise of too many superfluous questions and practicalities, all of which do not matter at the core of it all, and to find a place together (emotionally more than physically) that is both centered and calm at the same time as setting you alight and keeping you deeply rooted in the moment, wanting more but being content all at once.

At the core of it all, I will still live fully. I am fully alive. And I love. And I know I love.

Photo (c) – the late, great Paul Costanich

Your own dictator

Standard

“How could I tell you anything? You are not even talking to me.”

On to the second of the two “New Age” books I agreed to read:

“Remember that self-doubt is as self-centered as self-inflation. Your obligation is to reach as deeply as you can and offer your unique and authentic gifts as bravely and beautifully as you’re able.”

Self-doubt and struggling with a lack of sense of self are two different things – but interrelated.

I don’t feel paralyzed by strong self-doubt, and I certainly don’t feel like I lack a sense of self. But I do have those moments of doubt that stop me – maybe not the doubts that tell me I can’t do something. More that I doubt whether I have the strength to persevere through difficult things. I feel this keenly with practical things – do I have the fortitude to push through the difficulties and complexities of learning and understanding all the things I would have to learn and understand to take on X career or Y project? I never feel this doubt or self-questioning otherwise. But then, what of this obligation to reach as far, as wide, as deep as possible into your own capabilities?

Is it really an obligation? To whom? Yourself? The world? I wrote yesterday about projected expectations, and other people assuming things about you. I had a conversation with my father recently (it doesn’t happen often; he is the king of assuming things about others), and he told me something about his sudden bouts with anxiety and the nervous and constant buzz he has in his stomach; he asked if I had ever felt that way. Oh, only every day of my childhood. He was incredulous when I said this, “But why on earth would you be nervous or anxious? You were so smart.” As if being smart erases the kind of self-doubt, nervousness, shyness that shadows you every minute of your life – all it does is help you craft an identity, authentic or not, that you can use when you are out, forced to interact in the world. Does the innate ability or intelligence you possess eventually outweigh or overtake all the doubt or nervousness – or the complete misunderstanding or blindness that those, supposedly closest to you, have applied to you?

Are we obligated by having a natural gift or talent to pursue it? Sure, it seems a waste not to, but are we shirking a duty or responsibility by ignoring our “unique and authentic gifts”, or merely letting ourselves down?

Ultimately, as Julie Carr writes, “You have to be your own dictator
and the law is, hate yourself if you have to, but don’t stop doing the thing you said you were going to do”.

FORECLOSING ON THAT PERIL
–Julie Carr
I’ll keep explaining—because maybe you still don’t get it
Those children in California (substitute any state), dead from gunfire—
Let me begin again in a little roof garden with my friend
A perverse reader, he listens to my stories as if they were TV
I mean he mocks me lovingly on the roof and at the library book sale
My friend is not a banker but a prison activist
He used to be a philosopher, but like many philosophers, he’s taken a turn
that should be easy to understand
The trajectory from philosopher to activist is like the curve of a single brushstroke across a large canvas
Artists in the fifties paid attention to that
I hate flat language like this, but I’m pretty flat
sometimes. You have to be your own dictator
and the law is, hate yourself if you have to, but don’t stop doing the thing you said you were going to do
As I tell my daughters often
Emotion is a site of unraveling (JB)
I admit, gripping my T-shirt
I wish I were writing in prose an unfolding intensity that shocks history professors and prison activists equally
Later, in the grass, we’ll practice gymnastics and that way contribute our sweat
to Our Ephemeral City

And, reflecting on the doubt, and the not-entirely-accurate identities we inhabit in figuring out who we are, I realize we are like animals who shed their skin. You change identities no matter who you are, and the former you still informs, as memory and experience, but does not define, as the previous New Age tome I read wisely posited:

“To relinquish your former identity is to sacrifice the story you had been living, the one that defined you, empowered you socially – and limited you. This sacrifice captures the essence of leaving home.”

The writer also cited one of my favorite poems from Derek Walcott (here’s a piece); it half-applies:

“The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome,

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.”

Photo (c) of Mt Rainier by the late, great Paul Costanich.

The salesman & the sky hook

Standard

“He can’t get anything done. His hands are always groping his heirlooms.”

Who are we when we are not who we are?

“In 1969, Abdul-Jabbar was drafted by the Milwaukee Bucks, where he would perfect his signature sky hook — a balletic feat that involves an explosive one-legged leap before flinging the ball into the hoop with one hand — and win three of his eventual six M.V.P. awards.”

Some people, even someone famous like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, are out of place where they find themselves (not geographically, but in the lives they inhabit). Living, thriving, but always on the edge, a bit out of place and uncomfortable in the confines of what they do and are expected to do. KAJ was a master of basketball but seemed uncomfortable, preferring writing and intellectual pursuits.

You sell yourself every day as something and someone you are not. But how to break free of that persona and its incumbent expectations to become what you really want to be? (Moreover, how do you figure out exactly what you want to be in the face of the cacophony of voices telling you otherwise or praising your current station?)

It’s a strange dichotomy: people project identities, traits, attributes and activities onto you that may be assumptions or based on natural talent you don’t care to fulfill, but at the same time other people are often the only ones who see the beauty, potential, wells of brilliance and ideas, intelligence, depth, warmth and possibility in us – so much more clearly than we can see any of these things in ourselves. How can others see us so clearly and unclearly at the same time?

One woman who saw me very clearly – to the extent that I grew terrified and pushed her away – comes to mind. She pushed me – a lot, which is probably why I never tried to reconcile with her. I pushed her away in a way that I knew would close the door forever. In some ways she knew precisely what I needed and wanted, but went too far, becoming a kind of salesman herself, touting all the possibilities: “It could be like this all the time.”

But no, it couldn’t. I don’t want to be sold a bill of goods and pressured into something – even if it feels good. Sometimes in my own rare zeal and excitement I fear I am doing something similar.

But these days are at least content, if not happy, lying in bed talking about rhubarb or pressure and all manner of other things, reading about the history of Congo, listening to music, all before falling into a restful sleep, dreaming about all those people who perhaps filled roles they never asked for or onto whom I projected the wrong or misinterpreted expectations – like my friend T, whose absence comes to mind more frequently than it should. Today reading about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and his “sky hook” made me think of an 8th grade prank our teacher (yes, our teacher!) played on T. He sent her across the entire school during class to ask the gym teacher to give her the sky hook. She had no idea what the sky hook was so was expecting to receive an actual thing. She got all the way to the gym and forgot what she was supposed to ask for. She returned to the classroom to get a reminder and headed all the way back to the gym, where the perplexed PE teacher imitated the classic KAJ move, and when T returned, our teacher expected her to demonstrate the sky hook move in front of the class.

Photo (c) 2012 Ruth Hartnup

It’s not what we thought…

Standard

Everything turns out, in time, not to be what we thought it was.

Women’s fertility, thought to hit a precipitous slide downward from the age of 27 – or 35 – or some other number conjured up by dubious science, may decline in general/on average. But then it turns out fertility is not quite that simple.

“But it’s no wonder we’re so easily panicked. The fearful narrative around women’s fertility fits with a broader theme that’s become all too common as women have gained economic independence over the last several decades: we’re going to pay for our equality. Mothers going to work in the 1980’s were told they were subjecting their kids to an epidemic of sexual abuse at daycare centers. In 1986, Newsweek reported that 40-year-old single women were “more likely to be killed by a terrorist” than find a husband. These stories and many more like them, of course, are completely false. Perhaps the best way to fight the panic is to question those who’ve made a business of selling it.”

Pregnancy after 40 is becoming quite common. In fact, in the UK at least, the number of over-40 pregnancies outnumbers the under-30 pregnancies for the first time in 70 years.

I lived for years in Iceland, where it is quite common to have children (many, in fact) when you’re quite young (late teens/early 20s). This is seen as the norm. When a non-Icelandic friend lived in Iceland, everyone around her hounded her about having a baby before she was an “old hag” (meaning mid-20s, I guess???). She did not have a child until she moved to Denmark, and by then she was in her late 20s. The Danes, though, insisted that she was “so young” to be having a child, and all the other women in her maternity ward had at least ten years on her.

And this very pressing issue – fertility – reminds me not only that life goes on but also that, as it does, there are so many other things we don’t know shit about but pretend to (or to trust experts about them): Addiction, aging, the brain, radiation, education, the powerhouse Japan was supposed to be… or even pasta. Nothing is definitive – it keeps changing as the environment around it changes. We really don’t know anything – even what consciousness means.

The same can be said of people, but that’s another and different challenge.

Memory triggers

Standard

It’s strange how the memory works. Everything is stored in there somewhere – and for some of us, there is a more enduring filofax than for others. I remember everything – but sometimes I completely forget – or actually store information and memories deep in the brain’s darkest recesses, conjured up only when randomly triggered.

Today, watching a moment of BBC News, they interviewed an Icelander, and I gasped realizing that I knew him. Not because it’s so unusual to know many, many of the very few Icelanders there are if you lived in Iceland, as I did, but more because I had forgotten how deeply offended I was by this particular person’s behavior toward me; how disposable I had been; how boring he had been. I had virtually forgotten him and the whole rigmarole around our brief acquaintance, all of which took place in this wilder, risk-taking period of my life, before I had ever fallen in love, before I had ever had my heart broken, before I had moved away from Iceland forever, even before I had moved to Iceland for the second time for what was a long second (and final) act in the Icelandic phase of my life. I suppose because I had been young and there was so much life to live between then and now, it makes sense that someone so inconsequential would be filed away among inconsequential memories.

Meandering memories with The Stone Roses

Standard

“Sometimes I fantasize
When the streets are cold and lonely
And the cars they burn below me
Don’t these times fill your eyes
When the streets are cold and lonely
And the cars, they burn below me
Are you all alone?
Is anybody home?”

It was 1990, and I was in the full throes of my short-lived but passionate anglophilia. I tried to remake my suburban American life in the shape and form of something entirely different, and what better way to make anything new and beautiful – and most importantly – different – than through music? What different sound could I find that could firmly establish this otherness without the freedom to go be a part of some otherness? These were slow times when overexcited teenage musical discoveries were like hard-fought battles with near-exclusivity the spoils.

Lucky for me, I had been obsessed with reaching out into the wider world through my penfriendships, and exchanged letters with Peter, a bricklayer from Durham, England. I will never be able to express the mania, madness, joy that washed over me when his parcels would arrive, filled with cassettes (!) of exactly this otherness I had desperately sought. The first tapes he sent: The Stone Roses’ first – and in fairness near-only – album (the second could never live up to that debut). It transformed everything. He continued to send me more tapes of everything that characterized the ‘Madchester’ scene and other music from the same period. I felt like I had stumbled into a goldmine into which only I had access (it was a while before America was fully on board, and even if enclaves of people embraced this music, it was not as though it made its mark on my community).

I distinctly remember a day, walking home from a PSAT or SAT practice test (or something like that – a Saturday morning sacrificed to standardized testing, in any case), with “Made of Stone” playing on my Walkman. Is it overstating it to say that everything seemed different to me after that time? In some way, it was. It was – even if other friends adopted the music and we shared it – an assertion of my own tastes and identity outside of that of my friends. The first step toward something different. Sure, that something different did not turn out to be moving to England, which, in my youth, I long believed I wanted to do. But it was a big stepping stone to figuring out tangibly that there was a much bigger world out there with a lot of different kinds of people in it. Some of them were working as bricklayers and writing letters to fawning American girls. Some of them were making music and going to raves in a depressed late-80s Manchester.

Today, returning from Manchester, where I spent a few days with my brother seeing The Stone Roses reunion, seeing the iconic Haçienda transformed into apartments and generally taking it all in, I am starkly reminded of how I felt, how it was, to feel such intense feelings about music, about the sense of place (the sense of wanting to be in a different place). It’s been 26 years since I walked through the streets of the town where I grew up, overcome by and elated at this new sound – these new possibilities.

Today I am wandering the streets of Oslo, bound by sun and a few clouds, wondering in some way how I got here. In life, that is. Scandinavia was nowhere on my radar back in 1990, and yet this is where I feel happiest and at home. And listening to the Roses as I walked around the sun-dappled Oslo train station and opera house, I create new and very different memories around these same songs that carried me through suburban American streets and experiences. The songs are the same but are no longer the ones that made me feel lonely but understood – and held the promise of different ‘othernesses’ – and now hold this bittersweet nostalgia in every note and word.

Of course with nostalgia there is also the past – whatever happened to the northern boy bricklayer Peter, who introduced me to all of this and spoke in an accent I could not begin to understand? My best friend from that period, too, where has she gone? I thought of her so much as I wandered Manchester and saw this concert we would have killed to see when we were 15. I know neither she nor I are the people we were then, but the heartstrings were pulled. Hard.

 

High, Low and In Between: The Multiplying Gift of Music

Standard

Capping off a week in which I was obsessed with thinking about, talking about and listening to music, I finished the work week (almost – still have Friday to get through) watching the film Les choristes. A perfect finale.

I thought about and discussed genius songwriters this week – focusing in mostly on the late, great Townes van Zandt and to a lesser degree, Robyn Hitchcock (whose duet of van Zandt’s well-known “Poncho and Lefty” with Grant-Lee Phillips I stumbled upon the previous week).

I met someone who has placed van Zandt (rightly) on a songwriting pedestal. A songwriter’s songwriter. The striking thing, for me, though, was in exploring how each of us – and by extension, how anyone – discovers music. Discoverability is a lot easier these days – easy to spread and share. Not quite so much in the “old days”. This led me to thinking about the web music weaves – the intricate web, unique to each of us – making up the soundtrack of our lives. The web also has a kind of reach – one piece of music or musician leads us to their influences or contemporaries. It was in this way that I discovered Townes van Zandt myself back in 1990.

I had fallen under the dreamy spell of the Cowboy Junkies’ album The Trinity Sessions and, being too young, could not attend their first show in Seattle. When they came back in early June 1990 (hear me let out a sigh here – I am 26 years removed from this – “who knows where the time goes?”), I begged my parents let me attend (luckily they did). The Junkies were touring with Townes van Zandt – my first introduction to him. Since then I’ve devoured his discography, and have seen its presence proliferate in film and TV soundtracks ever since.

The woven web was taking on new parts – the initial discovery of the Cowboy Junkies had first led me to the Velvet Underground (as the Junkies gained their biggest ‘fame’ from their remake of “Sweet Jane”). I had known of Lou Reed earlier, but mostly only having heard “Walk on the Wild Side” a few times and seen him a few times on a brief and more mainstream path in the 80s. And from the Junkies, things moved on to Townes.

Thinking about all of this, I reflected, and wrote to an acquaintance that “one of the most beautiful things about music is its ability to not just endure and bring people together or even its transformative power but its “introductory” powers. That is, you hear something that means something to you… but it does not stop there”. In fact, it never stops. The web continues to multiply.

Gender on Ice

Standard

Yesterday I wrote about getting locked out of a building when it was -5C, and likened it to be left out on the ice, which kicked my memory into high gear, leading directly to a book I had to read during my master’s program. It was called Gender on Ice, and it was one of the few books in the program that I just could not get into. I barely remember it, and I am not even sure that I finished reading it at all. I recall clearly the seminars I had to attend, listening to all my classmates discuss the book, and several students being quite impassioned about it. At the time I could not imagine why. Now that I am almost 20 years removed from that (dear god – 20 years!), I wonder what I would make of the book now. Its theme – two polar explorers whose accounts of their feats were laden with self-congratulations and declarations of pioneering heroism and analysis of “the particular imperial and masculinist ideologies that each characterized” – held no appeal to me at the time. While I had no doubt that the “white man hero/trailblazer” story, excluding the contributions of anyone else, including a black man who accompanied one of the explorers, was entirely true, I think I was tired of the constant analysis of race and gender and all the things that drove my higher education.

But because I was immersed in it, it seemed the norm. This questioning, this struggle, and by extension, the autonomy and freedom to question and struggle on equal footing with everyone else, seemed a given.

It was only later that I considered more carefully that that was the construct and privilege of being at a left-wing, liberal arts college. I have never had to step or live very far outside that bubble but have become much more keenly aware of everything outside that bubble, which makes me question again the materials I read (or half-read) at the time but gave short shrift.

And, just so you know, a dude named Doug who pretends to be something of a Viking – or something – once said that “ice is evil”. I don’t think so, but maybe under such circumstances.

 

The hidden inner journey: Lupe did it!

Standard

We never truly know the inner journey of another. I can only guess at the feelings, fears, motivations of anyone… even of a partner or of a best friend. Clearly that’s true – a case in point: my best friend in youth became so estranged and not at all the girl I thought I knew. Sure, people change, but I reflect and think, “Yeah, I probably knew nothing about how she really felt.” Or what anyone has ever felt. And it’s a challenge and a pain to face that you don’t really know the people you think you know, or at least not the way you think you do.

It is stranger, though, to reflect on the hidden, inner journeys of the people whose paths crossed ours but whom we did not know at all. Peripheral characters who populated our world, briefly appeared like little more than a blip upon the screen of the movies of our own lives. We thought of these people very little, except where their actions appeared briefly before us.

In junior high school a girl named Lupe appeared. She spoke no English, which I can only imagine created the tremendous frustration and anger she regularly exhibited. At the time it was easy just to dismiss her (and I cringe as I write this) as “some Mexican kid”. The town had a large number of migrant workers, mostly from Mexico, but the truth is… what did I ever know about any of them or of the children who came with them? Or even if that was their story? Maybe they were there for some other reason. That is the point – I have no idea. It is not that we have to know the stories of everyone we meet or see, but the danger is in assuming the background story because it’s easier, and lazier. We can make assumptions and assign stories and stereotypes to people, making it easier to categorize, dismiss and dehumanize them. It is not that that was the intention at the time. No one wanted to actively make fun of Lupe. We just had no way to reach her. Even if we had been active in trying to engage her, it would have been next to impossible. Why? Because we were Americans, and despite being enrolled in basic Spanish classes, we only spoke English. Of course!

It is not as though these stories and people come to mind frequently, but in a bout of crazy exhaustion recently, I used the word “loopy” and then as if the light in my life’s film projector flickered on, there was Lupe’s face in my mind. Lupe’s overly colorful and unfashionable wardrobe, her thick, out of control hair tamed by equally colorful rubber bands, seeing her plow through the hallways silently and angrily, one morning kicking the corner of a classroom door held open by a piece of wood, sending the wood flying, causing the door to slam shut. By the time the teacher in that classroom came out to scold the offending party, Lupe was long gone, but my friend T and I were walking by, and the teacher looked at T as if she were the culprit. Flummoxed, T exclaimed, “Lupe did it!”

And that is the sum total of what I know, knew and remember of Lupe, and it’s only now, more than 20 years later, that I begin to wonder about the inner life and frustrations of Lupe. Where did she come from, how long would she remain? Where is she now? What did she think about back then? Did she share the same adolescent frustrations we all felt, compounded by the language barrier, not being able to talk to anyone in school, and not fitting in?

When I was even younger, just a small child, a Cambodian refugee joined my second-grade class. His name was Praseuth. His “plight” had a deep influence on me to the point that I remember him very clearly even now. And the sensitivity of my youth intact, I felt so much for him and his situation, even if I could not fully comprehend it back then. I was untainted by the hideousness of … society, judgment and misconceptions. People did make fun of him and his ill-fitting wardrobe, and this broke my heart. I wanted to jump to his defense, which was something I did infrequently in general because I was ridiculously shy – could barely defend myself. He was quiet, but exceedingly polite, always making an effort to converse politely, rapidly picking up English.

I remember very clearly a picture he drew, particularly in contrast to pictures the other students drew. They drew over-the-top, brightly colored rainbows and unicorns and his monochrome pencil drawing was a lone tree, bare of its leaves, with just a few leaves blowing away in the wind. I am sure I have written about it before because I found the picture so striking, so lonely and so haunting then, so much so that it still haunts. And what of him? Where is he now? What of his hidden, inner journey?

Endless videotaping quest – “Stay vertical and don’t get shredded”

Standard

Recently saw a film, 1000 Times Good Night, set mostly in Ireland (though it was technically a Norwegian film), and U2’s drummer Larry Mullen, Jr played a bit part.

Check this out – a little clip of the movie but also Mullen on a Norwegian talk show. Is this NOT the dorkiest thing you’ve ever seen? The film was good, if a bit preachy, and showcased the boundless talent of Juliette Binoche (and featured Game of Thrones’s Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Orphan Black’s Maria Doyle Kennedy). Mullen was an unexpected bonus. It’s not his first acting gig, but it’s the first one I had seen.

His surprise appearance triggered intense memories of youth and the perils of waiting for desired – and rare – content to appear on TV and attempting to videotape it before it was too late. It’s funny how these long hit-or-miss quests to capture videos ruled my sleepless nights, drove so much of my activity, caused me to invest so much in VHS technology. Never in my wildest dreams back then would I have dreamt that I could go to a computer, type something into a search engine and immediately find exactly the video I eagerly and desperately sought, along with hundreds of other similar videos. Oh, technology, how you have changed us.

This sense was triggered again when I saw footage of a recent U2 concert in which they played “Two Hearts Beat As One” – something they had not played live, according to them, in a quarter of a century. I have recently gone back to early U2 – the Boy and October albums in particular (“Two Hearts” comes from the third album, War). I recall the tension of spending long nights awake wanting to see and record specific U2 videos – but MTV rarely played the really old ones, so it was middle-of-the-night waiting, watching NightTracks on TBS (I shudder to think about what TV used to be like, when we received “SuperStation WTBS” broadcasts among one of very few non-cable channels available), where I was as likely to see the infrequently played “Two Hearts” as I was to see Aretha Franklin’s “Freeway of Love” (and even then I asked, “Why would anyone choose to listen to this?”… “How’d you get your pants so tight?”). I was always the one among my friends who was allowed to stay awake to all hours of the night so tried to see and record all the things my friends and I wanted to see.

One of the strangest things that I remember seeing, which I only saw three times in my entire life is a Yamaha PSA about motorcycle safety… starring Larry Mullen, Jr., on whom my best friend had the biggest crush.

I saw it once and waited literally for months to see it again with the sincere intent of recording it for her so she could see it too. I succeeded. She swooned upon hearing his voice. We shared the delusion that we would move to Ireland after high school. We had planned a kind of graduation “Ireland or bust” trip, but by the time we graduated, we were not close. She did go to Ireland, and I didn’t. She returned claiming to be disappointed by so-called mountains that amounted to little more than hills. I did not set foot in Ireland myself until many years later during the Celtic Tiger years – and my own “job interview tourism” period. I was equally disappointed – it was definitely no place I could, by that time, imagine living. Back in the late 80s, though, as foolish teenage girls, hearing an Irish accent made us weak in the knees (to the point that we would phone Aer Lingus to inquire about potential trips to Dublin, or go annually to St Patrick’s Day Irish festivals just to hear the accent), which cracks me up now. I look back at old U2 interviews and shake my head, thinking, “Drunk, high idiots!” But god forbid someone trying to tell me that back then. Haha.

And now, U2 is still out there playing (it had been my biggest dream back then to see them live, but I still haven’t!)… and who knows where my VHS tapes with Mullen and his motorbike-riding safety videos are… or where I might source a machine to play it even if the tapes could be found?