weekend

The posts of the past few months have largely been reflective of the intense weeks, neglecting a part of this summer I've appreciated just as much--the glorious weekends.

Started a little early on Thursday, when J. and I cooked dinner (J. made a new wintermelon dish) for a classmate. She's the kind who is nice to everyone, so I've been friendly with her throughout school and have exchanged a few emails, but we've never talked for more than a few minutes at a time. So this was the first time I spent substantial time with her. She started conversation about real things like how this year has been and how the past couple years of have been, without my having to ask, and I was grateful to know that time and routine doesn't have to wear away natural openness.

On Friday J. and I went dancing, by ourselves. We dressed up, black on top and jeans on bottom, and shared the bottle of sweet summer blush I bought when I went wine tasting with the college blockmates in Long Island, back in June. Being hermits, we considered staying in after that, but got ourselves out. Our first and longest stop was at Bar, where I haven't been since first year. The cover was $3 and the drinks cheaper, so we made the most of it and danced on elevated surfaces, causing some guy to ask us if we were "girlfriends." We hopped to Black Bear before realizing we were danced out, and wandered over to Hot T's and caught up with a friend I hadn't seen since before the summer. When the place closed we migrated home, where they finished the summer blush and I ate leftovers.

After my usual Saturday sleep in, we watched District 9, which was jarring and pretty fantastic. Though afterward it led me to be my annoyingly argumentative self, we declared peace over Jamaican food at a place I hadn't been before. Then it was off to see a play with a friend I've seen more substantially this year. We saw Henrik Ibsen's The Master Builder, at the Drama School (kitty corner from the Repertory Theater). I didn't know anything about it except that it's about an architect (he never uses that word to describe himself), and it was good. More abstract and conversation than I anticipated, which allowed ample opportunity to be immersed in the set, the best part of the play. The floor was constructed like the side of a house, with the windows flat on the floor and the shutters opening and jutting up into the air. The roof extended across the floor into the back of the stage, and looked like it extended into the backdrop, a gorgeous swirl of blue that dipped into deeper blues. From the ceiling, another roof hung and represented the outside of the house; at times a strip of orange red connected the two parts as people entered or left, at other times one simply remained there as the other entertained the characters. Such that you felt in and out at once.

On Sunday, was woken from an unpleasant dream by a phone call from A., with whom I was supposed to have breakfast. We'd planned on going to a place north of Cheshire, but the directions and locations and our motivation were vague, and after a bit of haphazard googling and yelping, he says, let's just drive. So we drive down Whalley, and at the intersection with West Rock Ave, find a farmer's market. He sniffs from apple to apple, amusing other browsers who comment that they should follow his sense of smell. "That's all I know to go on." He teaches the names of vegetables, and buys a watermelon and heirloom tomatoes, and we purchase the most delicious almond croissant from a bakery claimed by Martha Stewart to be the best in Connecticut. "Martha Stewart never lies."

Various turns later and arriving in a small town called Bethany, in beautiful late summer/early fall sun, we decide to stop at a small farm stand to ask where there might be a diner. They tell us that their town has one diner--Country Corner--which is next to their one ice cream parlor, near their one pizza place. They mention one bank but don't specify a location. He looks around, grabs cider, and at the counter finds some honey that my roommate had requested before we left ("only get it if it's from the side of the road"). There he asks the woman about her life: what are the hours like? is it hard work? is it satisfying? She tells us that she works seven days a week; animals always have to eat, and during harvest she'll go 44 days before a day off. Her husband works 15 hours a day, and she 12 but not including housework, and their kids helps out. It's a lifestyle. Not just a way of making a living but a way of living. The pay's not great, but the eats are good.

In the car leaving the place, he hands the bottle of cider for me to open as he backs up...I hear a big clank, and we've hit a pole.

He ties up his loose trunk with some netting, and we continue to the Country Corner Diner, which makes me happy because diners are all the same with their big menus and cheap fatty foods and cushioned booths and stools. On the side I finish the stray almonds at the bottom of the brown bag in which the croissant was packaged. Afterwards we go next door for ice cream, even though I'm stuffed, because it's ice cream.

On the way home he says he likes how pine trees are poofy, and we pass the waterfall he likes; he says he wants to go but doesn't want to walk to it. "You could rest first"--he turns around. The narrow path, lined with lots and lots of tall thin trees, feels open with the windows open, and the temperature is so perfect I'm amazed. We park and chat intermittently, and then nap, and never make it to the waterfall. Sun spilling on face and soft breeze from one window to another, and far enough to hear the steady hum of water flowing past, too far to hear the drops clash--I feel surprise at the ease of sleep right before I fall into it.

only oblivion, and then love.

"Emotions have their narrative; after the shock we move inevitably to the grief, and the sense that we are doing it more or less together is one tiny scrap of consolation."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/15/september11.politicsphilosophyandsociety2

Ian McEwan wrote that before the lives of 9/11 victims were unbelievably and unmistakeably taken by those empty of empathy, love was their weapon and their defiance. What did they say in their last moments? I love you. I love you. I love you. Individually, again and again, until the lines and waves were cut. Only love, and then oblivion.

Today and the following days, we work backwards. For days her presence was thrown unknown. They kept talking about how small she was. Every day the thoughts sank further and further. When she was found, in actuality so close--we are reminded that in the aftermath of nearly unfathomable injustice, we are to "recommit" to what this crime takes away from us--peace. Not in the sense of stillness, but of jostling to find the natural and unlikely fits between so many disparate pieces. When they've been flung with such malicious velocity, we're startled back into this original purpose of making connection. Holding candles, the wax's heat slides down against the creases of palms, and I think if I multiply this by a number higher than I can spend my lifetime counting to, I might barely understand the pain. A low hum of amazing grace, that strange melody suited for grief and joy alike, arises from this crumbly white staining our hands. Squeeze tight all that's in us, and spread this tragedy's opposite.

To A.L. and her family and friends and unknown passersby, and to our own and to each other's, we love you. Love. Love. Love.

angry

At the United States border, driving from Montreal Canada, a friendly man with a Southern drawl asks us where we lived, where we were coming from, what we did, and what we were doing. When I tell him we're students in Connecticut, he asks what we were studying. "Medicine." A slight grimace, and "...Why?" We break into real laughter, not of the oh-you're-funny sort, but of the oh-you're-right kind. "We've been wondering that the whole drive here."

I'm generally not that negative about the harder, less ideal aspects of medicine, mostly because 1) I keep hoping that we'll fight against them, and 2) even when that fails, I feel lucky to meet such variety of people, to witness and understand subtle individual qualities, to get strands of stories even as most are still wound tight. But this doesn't mean that I don't see the shortfalls of what we've seen of medicine, though I do worry that my modes of adapting to or coping with them will lead to passivity and unawareness.

Anyway, I get disconcerted and quietly mad throughout the days. Most days I see it and think about it and tuck it away, for storage and memory and recall and change. This keeps me sane, and optimistic even as I try to stay open to how that optimism may pan out (ie, it may not). Some days it's much harder; while the mad remains quiet, it's noticeably present to me and it gets to the point where hope gives way to worry and slight depression about why things are this way. A friend of mine who saw with me some of the saddest parts of medicine I've seen, asked me the other week to explain my distinction between sadness and depression. There's probably a lot to it that I feel and haven't yet expressed, but the best I could do at the time was that--I find sadness in loss that is natural, whereas unnatural loss brings depression. Disease and death is sad; injustice and undue unkindness or undue absence of kindness (more common than the former), depresses me. This hole amidst a profession of caretaking can really get to us sometimes.

At times like this I look around for the ground that we're supposed to stand in; at this point in our venture I don't mind if it's grass sunken from continuous downpour, if it's uneven pebbles that uncomfortably dig, even fresh tar that traps. But then there are those moments I look and there. is. nothing. We reach and reach, and we're left drifting in some two-dimensional space where the ground of taking care has been replaced with simple blank.

What to make of this, at the end of a day when I don't want to be helplessly angry? As with other modes of sustaining positivity, I'm not completely sure but hope that--in this fury we'll throw wide heavy blocks at this wall with no floor.

adjustment

It came to me recently, in a very obvious, always-known kind of way, that my life constantly requires adjustment--mostly in the most trivial corners--partly due to general circumstances and partly due to individual personality. My bedroom, which is meant to be part of our living room, doesn't have a closet. I perused Craigslist fervently for a week to find a closet, to no avail, until I found a suitable IKEA one in the lobby of our building, being thrown out and given to me for free. This is important because this revelation arrived as I was poking a hole in the side of said closet, so that I could attach a string from its metal rod inside to a hanging shoe rack outside (this rack wouldn't fit inside my closet). J. was impressed by this improvisation, much more so than by the sheet I haphazardly tied to my blinds as a pseudo-curtain, or my water-damaged phone that I often have to coax into working with a peculiar mix of turnings on and off. Granted, much of me requires adjustment because I'm clumsy and break things, because I don't throw things away when they're no longer working to maximum capacity. But a lot of things are out of my control. For example, because my body is non-ideal in several ways, a lot of my clothing requires adjustment to fit right. I've been only mildly successfully creative with tucking in, sewing up, fashioning makeshift straps, with hand-me-downs and my mom's clothes and my own since I was little. I think safety pins are as amazing as Scotch tape.

Adjustment is a blanket term. Some things just happen. For whatever reason my Polaroid takes pictures slightly off-center, so after I've framed something in the viewfinder as I want it, I have to shift it ever so slightly to the left, to have it turn out on film the way I see it (never exactly, of course). Then there's my surroundings. Growing up with siblings who had it ingrained in them to find all the roundabout ways to get the best deals, from loading a dozen people into one hotel room, buying CDs from BMG (12 for the price of 1; with shipping and handling, this comes to $5 a CD, a third of the average price), and watching four movies in one day (illicitly, for the price of one). Communication in my family is tricky as with anyone's, obstacles in the form of language, culture, age, gender. Known as the stubborn, fast tempered one in the family, I wouldn't say I've adjusted well to all those obstacles, but I think they've helped me adapt over the years, and at the very least, I'm used to things not being straightforward. It's true that logistics and emotions then get messy, but over the past couple years of struggling with how frustratingly mixed up I can be, I've grown to appreciate both the downsides and the pure value of requiring adjustment.

Ali wondered recently how people come to be well-adjusted. The above are the trivial; everyone has their smattering of more serious things to adjust to in their lives. I don't think I can say I've had much hard to adjust to, or at least, I don't see it as such because they were my adjustments, and I don't think people can always see their own very clearly. One of the best parts of seeing patients is being reminded anew every half hour, of how people adapt to the inconvenient, difficult, painful things that happen to them. It's true that some handle it with more grace than others, and that sometimes people are irreparably changed in a way that is less adjustment and more damage. In light of that, I welcome all chances to adjust, if only to feel how very very far fragility stretches before it becomes fragile.