Sunday, April 5, 2015

Portland, Oregon

A couple weeks ago I went out of state for something other than spending time with friends. About a year ago, I went to Dave and Katie's wedding in New Orleans, and this past October I went to Las Vegas with Bahar, who was visiting from Belgium at the time. Two weeks ago I went to Portland, Oregon for the library conference ACRL. Remember when I came back from Amsterdam in summer 2013 and joked I wouldn't leave California for another five years? Yeah, that didn't last long.

Traveling really stresses me out nowadays. There is the practical stress of packing efficiently into my carry-on backpack and there is the post traumatic stress of leaving home for the unknown and probably uncomfortable. I pulled it all together and hit the road for the airport. On BART en route to SFO the all-consuming dullness of a migraine announced its formal presence, and little did I know that I would be psychically crushed in its grasp for another 3 days.

The funny thing is that the migraine negated my usual anxiety. I didn't worry about missing my plane, I didn't get preoccupied planning for security. Everything went smoothly, including taking the MAX Line from the Portland Airport to the neighborhood in which I was staying. It was raining in Portland and yet I calmly walked 20 minutes, found my accommodations, and let myself in. I was relieved to set up my homestead, yet by the end of my time there, that little basement apartment became a scene of private suffering that reminded me of Amsterdam, the weird room I rented there with the thin squeaky mattress and smoky walls in De Baarsjes.

The conference itself went fine, and only a few days in did I realize I was making a way bigger deal of it that I had to; the conference itself had become a bell jar that sealed off my equilibrium, the very equilibrium I need to recover from a migraine. I worried about the school work I was to do for credit coming out of the conference, and I worried about giving a professional show for my colleagues in attendance. Very unfortunately I caused myself a deep psychic distress, but there was a strange side-effect or tandem-effect: a nearly ravaging homesickness. I have never been much of a phone person but I talked with someone I was close to back home every day I was gone, multiple times a day.

I must have realized something about my trip, my one year educational leave, that I hadn't before -- that it changed me, or that since quality time is my love language, I want someone to share the experience with, or that I really never want to leave home. That my trip was my very own German Forest, that is to say, a difficult experience I had to put myself through to find my voice. But mostly I marveled that I had never had a migraine that bad the whole time I was away from San Francisco during that year. What is wrong with my present existence to make my chakras go so perpendicular as they have lately, crushed by migraines?

It's a new concept: maybe I am imprisoning myself by "following my dreams;" maybe while in pursuit of high achieving I have become a perfectionist, damned by her strive to produce more proof of success; maybe I am trying to do too much -- my brand is too scatterbrained.

In medias res -- it would be quitting to go back now (on library school, on book making, on book binding, on coupledom, on love), although I wish I could go back to that sweet spot of post MFA, pre 1 year educational leave, when 8 hours a day in a library and poetry all the other time was totally sufficient.

Meanwhile, beautiful Portland was blooming into a magnificent Spring, and it reminded me of May 1 in Berlin -- blossoming, blossoming, blossoming.  










Saturday, February 21, 2015

An Apology

This is an apology for going away, for leaving you, for not doing the best job at my challenge, for coming back, for wanting to pretend like it never happened, for using it as an excuse.

This is a note of self-forgivenessthere was no other way it could have happened. I wanted it so badly that proving to myself I could do it is worth more that the regrets, although I regret it everyday. I did the best I could, I planned it the best I could. I didn't expect for it to traumatize me so psychically. I didn't expect my plan to backfire so tremendously.

This is a vague reference to my milestones of danger and survival: the infections, the illnesses, the encounters, the bizarre self-created storylines. 

Whose forgiveness do I seek? 

***



In the days leading up to my departure from Amsterdam, the hot water broke in the the illegal public-housing sublet my roommates and I inhabited. I could not take a hot shower. I lugged buckets of boiled water up the stairs to the bathroom, and bathing involved standing in a dish tub with a rag.

In the days leading up to my departure from Amsterdam, I took impulsive bike rides into the city center, quickly selecting and purchasing apparel from Esprit, Didi, Mexx in a whirlwind of muted sentimentality. I was fixating on the extra suitcase I would bring back: finally I acquired it from a second hand shop in Westerpark, a hard shelled navy blue Samsonite. The center of my purpose was packing the suitcase: purple sweater dress, bottles of cranberry wine from Vlieland, Amsterdam map collage, playing cards from a local artist on Witte de Withstraat, luikse wafels, stroop wafels, jumper from Ameland, fuzzy Esprit sweater, Dutch toiletries... and the things that could not fit and would be left behind... As the physical weight of the suitcase grew, its weight as proofas evidencelikewise grew. My productivity abroad was directly correlated to this suitcase arriving in San Francisco intact and as a fully realized souvenir, while the nostalgia it represented weighed down my ability to proceed into San Francisco unhindered.

But when I think of this I don't think of the metaphysical weight the suitcase put on my psyche; I think of the often overcast summer slowly opening the trees along the canals, the distinct sound of Dutch-Moroccan children playing, and the rush of the sun shining in the afternoon. My misery was the two sides of leaving: the happiness at going home finally, and the reluctant acceptance that I would never have another experience like this again, that time I tried to live in Amsterdam when I was 30.



***

On July 1, 2013, I flew direct from Amsterdam to Philadelphia. When passing through immigration at Schiphol Airport, I was detained for overstaying my tourist visa, and was ultimately banned from entering the EU until July 1, 2014. When I arrived at PHL, the United States was mine, it was foreign, it was fascinating, it was home, I was still an outsider, I had endured many abuses at the hands of myself and of culture and of loneliness.

Watching the 4th of July fireworks from under the Echo Bridge on the Schuylkill River, I began to move on from the abuses: a sliver of resignation, a sliver of aggression: the way you feel when you discover the thing you pined for all your twenties just destroyed you, and you could not have kept living without having been destroyed... But maybe you still believe it's possible to fall in love. 




***

The one thing I learned from Amsterdam is that I need a reason to get up most days of the week, I need the pressure of something at times disdainful to be successful.

I couldn't wait to get away from the thing that made me get up at 7:20 a.m. five mornings a week, and then I was miserable and depressed when I didn't have that very thing, even though theoretically I had Amsterdam.

What is a human without a routine?

I was going back to my job at the library, and couldn't be happier. 

***
 
When the hard shelled navy Samsonite suitcase finally made its way across the U.S., from the Philadelphia Greyhound station to the San Francisco Greyhound station and to my apartment in the Richmond District, opening it was an aromatic poof of my abuses: all the second hand smoke that had clung to the walls and furniture of my room in Amsterdam, a parting gift from the previous inhabit; the light traces of my roommates' Dutch fabric softeners; even the changing seasons on the street and the stiffness brought from hanging clothes to dry in a staircase.

Nineteen months ago I returned to San Francisco, my home: the place where I understand the weather, the place I grew into an adult, the place where my mom has made a life with me. I'm a strange nationalist, a Californian. California, my favorite country.

This blog proceeds accordingly, having honored its mandate for ashamed and/or reflective silence.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Single Sweet May in Berlin


My friend Jackie and I are walking through Tempelhofer Park in Berlin, a park whose empty terminal is still and tiny across the wide expanse of the old runway. Tempelhof Airport was actively receiving and departing airplanes until 2008, then it became a park, and there has been controversy over redevelopment plans ever since. 

But today the weather is perfect, the sky mostly blue, and packs of casual, hip Berliners have swarmed the park for picnics and barbecues. Jackie and I sit for a moment and drink from our bottles of Club Mate and finish our conversation. We have been talking nonstop the past few days, and everything I have learned about Berlin Jackie taught me. But right now we’re talking about the personal, finishing our conversation about the afterlife—Jackie mentions her roommate’s philosophical take, which she says has calmed her anxiety about dying: her roommate says between life and death, only life exists if death is the end of consciousness. 

Information board about Tempelhofer Park

Panorama of Tempelhofer Park — low sling of building is the former terminal

Berliners barbecuing and picnicking in Tempelhofer Park

We’ve had a monumental walk over here, from Friedrichshein-Kreuzberg through Gorlitzer Park, onto Neukölln, and now to this strange airport-park. Along the way we were so absorbed in conversation that I sometimes had to remind myself to look around, to be a tourist. In Gorlitzer park, the fruit trees were exploding in almost surreal beauty. I couldn’t catch my breath as I took in trees unfurling savage pink blossoms in a series of stuttering realizations. In Neukölln, Jackie pointed out the hip cafes lining the street and claimed one was likely to hear American English in this part of town; when she first moved to Berlin 5 years ago it was completely different. She lived cheaply in Neokölln, very close to Temelhofer Park, and at that time it was totally Turkish and one rarely saw women or children on the street. All the establishments were Turkish owned. As if being driven in by the busload, “hipsters,” a group unidentifiable by race or ethnicity, have inundated Neokölln in the past couple years. Now the rents are higher, many of the Turkish establishments have been forced out of business, and many families evicted, Jackie says. But, on the topic of gentrification, Jackie is some sort of post-liberal: she says her eyes glaze over when the term gentrification is even mentioned because the history of cities is the history of cycles of gentrification. 

Self portrait with Berlin Cathedral on Museum Island

Tulips blossoming along the Spree

Fruit trees blossoming near the Oberbaumbrücke in Berlin

There is no doubt about it: Berlin is endlessly cool, way cooler than Amsterdam—more hip, more gritty, more nightlife, more street life. I love people watching in Berlin, I even love cruising in Berlin. Soon we exit the park and head into the heart of Kreuzberg and continue talking incessantly. Jackie says she feels like she is on drugs with me because we talk so much. To me it feels like we’re on some sort of connective brain transmission, corroborating all the things we have thought about but never expressed to anyone since we last saw each other. Clearly my whole point of coming to Europe on a cargo ship and struggling with the definition of home and loneliness was to meet Jackie here in Berlin and talk about it, at the very height of Spring. 

***

It’s almost bedtime for Jackie after a long day and little sleep. She’s enveloped in her duvet and about to nod off on the living room couch-bed in her shared flat. I’m flipping through channels on German television. Despite both of us being at the end of our battery packs, I ask her a huge question: What’s the deal with the Berlin Wall? I feel stupid even asking, since it’s a pretty famous part of history, but Jackie generously starts explaining what happened once the wall came down, even if her eye lids are drooping. I stop her—I need to know why the wall went up in the first place. She says simply that the Allies divided Berlin after WWII and the Soviets got East Berlin. The amazing nature of history and one’s place in it hits me: I knew the wall began to come down in 1989 and the reunification of Berlin was completed in 1990, but that was only 23 years ago. In the past 23 years, while I was coming further and further into adulthood in my own part of the world, the generations cycled through the growth and development of post-wall East Berlin unbeknownst to me, yet here I was, confronted with it on a very real basis. I was fascinated.

SLEEP IS COMMERCIAL:
Graffiti stencil on facade in Berlin, city of cool, well-placed Graffiti

Weird raised pipes that run throughout Berlin periodically (in Mitte)

Mural through dark driveway near Schlesisches Tor station of the U1

I have heard stories about disgruntled Berliners yelling things such as “Learn German!” from open windows when they hear someone on the street speaking in English. I have heard tales of graffiti signs on buildings that point an arrow to a window with a caption that reads, “Insert grenade here.” I have heard anecdotes about people sneering and saying, “Go back to America.” Jackie says some of the old time anarchist punk tenants that moved into her building in the 90s gave her roommates trouble for moving into their flat in the 00s. “Those high nose academics,” the neighbors said. Jackie retorts, “They did the same thing in the 90s! The neighborhood developed and became a cool place for people to live because they came here in the first place!” 

Reflection of illuminated trees in a Berlin canal 

Night scene along the Spree

Yours truly and Jackie on the Oberbaumbrücke

There is something interesting in my preference about getting my information from Jackie rather than a text-based source, be it online or a physical book. No doubt about it, I am a researcher at heart, but this time my preference is for the primary source interview. On my first night in Berlin, Jackie told me there was no summer one year in the 1800s. She said a late spring gradually gave way to an early fall. The pronouncement haunted me like a dream I couldn’t shake the entire next day as I wandered heavy, grey Mitte: losing such a cherished season was actually possible on this mysterious planet? Three days later, after we left Tempelhofer Park, we checked out The Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek (American Memorial Library) and Jackie pointed out the sign—she claimed the “Amerika” portion of the sign had been removed by protestors as part of a ballsy anti-America action a few years earlier. I wondered at Jackie possibly being nearby when that happened, of potentially being witness to it. In these two examples, the power of myth and vague memory propel the imagination: I found out later that indeed there was no summer in 1816 mostly because Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted in April 1815, which was the biggest recorded volcano explosion in history. In actuality, there was no spring, summer, or fall in 1816, there was just a year of winter basically. As for the The Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek, that turned out to be total myth: the sign always just said GEDENKBIBLIOTHEK. I love these layers of information, and it makes me contemplate the nature of “trueness”–if Jackie’s description of the Year Without a Summer catapulted my imagination into motion, then I think her take on it was valuable, even if inaccurate, information. 

***

It’s my last night in Berlin and I am pretty sure I’ve fallen in love with every person I’ve met, except the Americans that started talking to us outside the cafe tonight. I cringed as they claimed to be from Los Angeles (but were originally from Texas), I muttered as I admitted I was born in Glendale, I shuddered as the homely sporty one tried to pick up on Jackie’s adorable German roommate. I suppose this exposes the shell of being the only American I’ve developed in the past few months, and I am ashamed of my internalized self-hatred although I can’t wait to complain about these Americans to Jackie. But the bigger theme is the dragon I’ve been chasing ever since I conceived of riding a cargo ship across the Atlantic: I want to be unique, I want to be the trend setter, I want to be unparalleled and in order for that to happen I don’t want homely, jet-lagged Americans talking to me loudly in a hip part of Berlin.

Intersection of Oppelnen Straße and Skalitzer Staße, Berlin

View of interesting architecture from the Oberbaumbrücke, Berlin
Sun setting through tunnel of the Kottbusser Tor station of the U1

Walking to the next bar, I finally get my chance to complain, but through the course of my diatribe I realize to be set on fire by Berlin means to writhe in its cultural complex. Earlier in the day, walking home from the Berlinische Gallerie, I was making hasty resolutions to learn German and emigrate to Berlin; in the afternoon I scrapped the plan, pinpointing all the cultural strife one would have to overcome; now, on the eve of my departure, I relished the strife as only an outsider could. I laughed at the Germans so fervently clinging to their language, their culture, their post-wall city. Racism is alive and well in Europe, I said to Jackie, while in the U.S. political correctness has ravished any attempt at a productive conversation, and while in Amsterdam, the clever Dutch have capitalized on their reputation of tolerance and good English speaking abilities.  

Sunday morning vantage between the U-bahn and S-bahn after a night of dancing at the Berghain

Luckauer Straße (easy easy easy easy easy)

Home sweet home: Görlitzer Bahnhof station of the U1

After a few more Cinco de Mayo shots of tequila (after all, Jackie and I did meet in San Francisco where the bastardized Mexican holiday is celebrated by getting wasted), we shuffle home under the rails of the U1 and Jackie promises me David Bowie’s newest music video, which is a tribute to the years he spent in Berlin in the 70s. She keeps saying everyone thought it was great because it was made by a famous videographer but she’ll wait for me to make my own pronouncement. I sense an indictment brewing. Once home, she cues it up on her laptop and I try to view it with an open mind. I think, well the song absolutely sucks. I think, who is that chick’s face? I think, why are there subtitles of the lyrics? Jackie yells, “How could anyone take this seriously?! All the names of the streets are spelled wrong!” 

With Jackie’s familiar world view I find something I had lost inside myself a long time ago: the courage to be outspoken, the self assurance to love, the promise of blossoms unfurling their petals. Spring has come to Europe and this won’t be another year without a summer. 

Blossoms...

...blossoms...

and more blossoming Berlin

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Queen's Day 2013 in Amsterdam

de Bijenkorf department store on Damsplein got in the full spirit

The new royal family waving from the balcony of the Palace in Damsplein (from wodumedia.com)

In case you didn't know, The Netherlands has a constitutional monarchy, and the Dutch love their Queens. This is most apparent on Queen's Day (Koninginnedag), April 30, the Dutch national holiday in which basically all people of the Netherlands flood Amsterdam wearing orange and paint Dutch flags on their cheeks. The entire city turns into a combination of an open air market, a dance party, and a endless procession of boats blasting techno music. But, the fun starts on Queen's Night, the night before, but you gotta be careful not to party too hard, because the next day is even better!

View of a politie mobile with the decorated de Bijenkorf in the background, Queen's Night

The palace balcony the night before the grand appearance

Close-up of the inflated crown on the roof of de Bijenkorf on Queen's Night

2013 was a very special Queen's Day because it is the last for a long time. Queen Beatrix's son Willem-Alexander ascended the throne this year (first king since 1890!), so beginning in 2014, the holiday will be known as King's Day (Koningsdag) and will be moved to April 27, Willem-Alexander's birthday.

Most of the pictures in this little section were taken either on Keizergracht or Prisengracht.


Homomonument represent! (flashing the "W" sign for Willem-Alexander)


My roommate and me

Prisengracht is the most popular canal for boating

My roommate and I went to that dance party under the clown for a while




This was my second Queen's Day and I enjoyed myself just about as much as I did in 2004 when I studied here. I sort of remembered it as drunk people flooding the streets along the canals and huge concerts in all the squares, but this year it drove home a very endearing characteristic of Dutch culture to me: their ability to be enterprising and sell almost anything (fruit, sandwiches, clothes, electronics, furniture, records, baked goods, recyclable cups, access to their toilets) and their ability to make a fun, almost naive party for all ages—my favorite just might have been all the children getting in on the fun which is clearly not reserved for adults only. This might sound crazy but I also admire how the holiday is almost comprised of people wholesomely celebrating their country and their culture. It's refreshing to not have to constantly question patriotism and just have fun.

View from a friend's 3rd floor apartment near Leidseplein 



Detail of my orange shoelaces! 

The Dutch flag 

After a long day of walking around the city, dancing with strangers on Prisengracht, meeting new people, having dinner with friends, and watching the royal parade on boats along Het Ij on big screens at Museumplein, I headed home. As I neared the canal closest to my apartment, Kostverlorenvaart, I slowly realized that debris from a boat was floating in the silvery purple water, and then I realized the last of a group of Dutch hipsters were extracting themselves from the canal. Poor partiers! Their boat had capsized and their speakers, bean bag chairs, and beer cans were floating in the canal. Well, at least everyone got out safely!

Debris from capsized boat in canal Kostverlorenvaart


This dude seemed jovial enough even though his party had officially ended

Good night Amsterdam!