Sanctuary



I saw this image while walking along the East Side Gallery in Berlin, a one kilometer walkway of the remaining wall along the river which is covered with more than 100 murals from international artists. These two men are meant to be prominent politicians of differing values.

Though this image is in itself powerful, what I find most striking is the word "sanctuary." I thought of this picture again today while listening to news reports on the latest Prop 8 hearings. I wonder when the United States will actually function as the sanctuary it claims so wholeheartedly to be.

Hannukkah, Chanukah, Januka



This year I am celebrating Hannukkah. Lighting candles in the chanukiah, playing dreidel, frying latkes. The last time I remember taking time out of my day to remember the holiday was four years ago, as an expat in Spain. I remember the day I told my Spanish housemate that I was Jewish, and that I'd never really been to Catholic mass, and she kept blinking as if I'd shined a flashlight in her eyes. "I've never met a Jew before," she said. I wrote home and a few weeks later had received a chanukiah, candles and dreidels in the mail. I lit the first candle using the flame from our stove. My boss at the school where I worked thought I sneezed the first time I asked him about "Januka."

In the years since my return to the United States, I have forgotten what it means to observe something real. Sometimes I wonder if religion is something that grows weaker in an individual over the years, as if we don't experience a miracle early enough, or if we are crammed so full of one-sided religious indoctrination, the opportunity to reach some kind of personal resolution slowly dies out. My own relationship with faith has always been closely tied to the need to explain my family history, and with it, my own personal politics.

Now, though, I prefer to simplify things and say I just like remembering ritual, and sharing it with others. There are a half dozen Hebrew prayers that I probably will never forget. The irony is although these are the only words in Hebrew that I know, and yet I couldn't translate their meaning for the life of me. All I know is the melody that was instilled in me at a young age, the memory of yarmulkes made out of crushed paper cups, of Manischewitz grape juice and handfuls of challah, of Sunday mornings sitting in front of a bimah that looked so modest and so important all at once. I remember our annual latke parties, and the way my mom would somehow fill our kitchen with neighbors and friends, all clustered around two pans filled with hot oil, and us kids spinning tops on the Oriental rug in the next room. And my dad signing little presents for us as "Hannukkah Harry," because when we were kids, Hannukkah always had to be presented with its Christian counterpart (Hannukkah Harry worked alongside Santa Claus).

Happy Hannukkah, internet.

Pingu!



Meet Pingu.

Laurel, Ryan and I discovered this a few weeks ago and I find this little penguin and his friends to be, in a word, captivating. Here are the things to consider: Pingu goes snowboarding with his seal friend, who only has one binding to tie in his big flipper. Pingu gets hurt a few times and is rescued by a ski patrol penguin who ties a cushion to his rear end, which seems to do the trick. And then, perhaps the greatest part of it all, is the fact that I have no idea what they are saying. It sounds like some great Scandinavian language, although they squeak so high and so fast that it could just be two heavily accent English speakers.

I don't really know why, but ever since I first saw that Pingu vignette, I find myself substituting "Pingu!" for words of surprise or joy. The word is just so fun to say. Try it, I dare you: wherever you are, sit up tall, clear your throat, and shout "Pingu!"

Isn't the world a slightly happier place now?

Married to...the television?

I spent eight hours today on a grant application and my eyeballs started to go in opposite directions. Winter comes smacking in the front door early these days, and so by the time I left campus, I skipped my regular run for a jaunt at the university gym. Davis has a pretty luxurious rec center for students. I believe I could bring a sleeping bag and find a nice corner to nap in somewhere, if it ever came to that. But instead I jumped on an elliptical machine and tuned out the world for a nice long while.

Except that there was something called "Married to Rock Star" on the television just a few feet from my face. I couldn't help it; I'm not much of a television person, and the fact that so much teased blonde hair and male eyeliner dangling within eyesight made it impossible to look away. Those women stole my time, whisked it right away from me with their explicit, recognized vapidity, and their desire for Hello Kitty weddings in castles. I found myself questioning more than just their clothing choices. After a while I started to challenge my own snap judgments--who am I to say what one millionaire lady should say to another? And is it really fair to insist that all the fake conflicts on the show are fabricated, that the plots of "reality television" are dismal inflations of non-problems?

I stayed on that machine a good 45 minutes, and by the time I finally extricated my feet from the elliptical, I had to remind myself where I was, who I was, and what on earth I was doing so far from an enchanted castle. It reminded me of when, as a child, I would watch my brother and his friends playing video games and have to shake myself awake after watching the same little animated figures jump on the same multicolored toadstools time and time again. Is it monotony, or is it hypnotism?

Regardless, by the time I left the gym, I had completely forgotten the stress of the workday. I'd like to attribute that to endorphins, to active, warm muscles, but in my heart I think I know what really happened.

Thanksgiving


happy graffiti on the Williamsburg Bridge
Originally uploaded by Julia_h_j

What I'm thankful for:

clear blue sky winter days
when (most of) my family fits in one room, and we're all trying to tell jokes at the same time
candied yams
insulin.
the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean
border collies
Fridays
tuition remission
friends who like to travel, cook, dance, doodle, adventure
laptops, cell phones, and iPods (oh my)
the entire month of June, and October also
National Public Radio
talking about writing with my mom and my aunt April
San Francisco
health insurance, when it's guaranteed
the best, longest, most satisfying runs, the ones where you come home feeling more hopeful about the world
my big brother and his big grin
postcards from other countries and cities
digital photography
my dad, and how he knows how to make everything better, but then shows me how to make things better too
my white flowered comforter for the bed
the First Amendment
being in love, really in love, and not thinking it's cheesy

Mavericks, renegades, and beards, oh my!



Sarah Palin and Jimmy McMillan (of "The Rent is Too Damn High" fame) exchange political opinions at a recent mixer in San Francisco.

Scary, right?

I can say with some confidence that going out in San Francisco on Halloween, dressed as Sarah Palin, complete with a button reading "Renegade: Palin for President 2012," was a bit like whispering the word "Voldemort" in a fifth grade classroom. On the bus home, people asked who I was, and when they saw me with the glasses and the button, trying to mimic that Alaskan charm, 9 out of 10 people turned away, saying, "Oh God."

Perhaps as scary as seeing a twentysomething white computer programmer glue a cotton beard to his face and pretend to be New York candidate for governor slash muse for aspiring deejays.

Weirder things could happen.

Didion doesn't slouch

Tonight I read Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Joan Didion is brilliant. She writes about all my favorite places: San Francisco, New York, Hawaii, Los Angeles, and yet she writes about them with a complete lack of sentimentality. She seems to possess this unbridled interest in the act of recording that which is truly interesting, truly human. Tragic and entertaining and thoughtful and never patronizing. Straightforward.

And then I read "Notes from a Native Daughter." Didion grew up in the Sacramento Valley, and she manages to articulate the nostalgia, boredom, listlessness and history of the place that I've never really been able to perfectly capture myself:

"...that is what I want to tell you about: what it is like to come from a place like Sacramento. If I could make you understand that, I could make you understand California and perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent."

And it struck me, that here in this most fertile of valleys, the communities themselves have grown in a manner disproportionate to the crops that thrive. Maybe that's why it sometimes takes me a few days to fall into hometown habits; because in Davis, even more so than Sacramento, the town wants to grow as much as it wants to drop leaves, or blossom flowers; that is to say, it wants to grow when it is time to grow, and not before.

It makes me feel good to know that a writer like Didion came from a place and a family not too far removed from my own. That maybe, at some point, I'll be able to put into words my own version of that murmuring culture that she captures so beautifully.

Tommy's Tale



Most families have pet folklore. My dad recently recounted the epic story of how he acquired our first family dog, Tomasino Paisano de la Lucci, a black and white springer spaniel mix that he sprung from a pound when he was in his 20s. At the time, my dad was working in the Bay Area, and one day while driving to work, he found an injured puppy in the middle of the road. He gathered him up and took him to his office where he called the SPCA to see if they could save him. The SPCA collected the dog with the understanding that they were required to turn the dog over to the local shelter for three days for the owners to come claim him before making the dog available for adoption. Meanwhile, they agreed to treat the dog's wounds.

My dad went back to the pound a few times to see how the dog was doing. Each time, the technicians reminded him that if he wanted the dog, he'd have to wait til the end of the week, at which point he'd also have to pay the vet bill. Dad showed up just before closing time on Friday, but the technician turned him away, saying that they had to wait three full days, so Dad would have to come back Saturday. They refused to let him come take the dog on the day they told him to come; according to their rules, they had to wait a certain amount of time for owners to collect the dog, but neither could they afford to keep the dog any longer than a specific amount of time.

"If you want the dog, you’ll be here at 8:00 am sharp," they said, "or he’ll be put down on the first rounds tomorrow morning."

Dad was pissed. Why did they even bother treating the dog in the first place, if they wouldn't put him up for adoption, and would end up killing him anyway? He asked to speak to the supervisor, and was told the same thing. Come back Saturday morning, or forget the dog. They would not even take payment and hold the dog until Monday.

He didn't know what to do. He felt trapped. Here he had gone out of his way to follow the center's instructions, and was happy to pay the vet bill, would have arranged for someone else to pick up the dog for him, but they wouldn't allow that either. He went out into the parking lot and watched the dogs interacting in their cages. Tommy was sitting in a little pen surrounded by a chain link fence.

He approached the fence, stuck his hands through the holes and whistled for the dog. Once he was close enough, Dad reached out and took Tommy gently in his hands, slowly edging him up the length of the fence, first withdrawing one hand through the gaps, then the other. Miraculously, no one seemed to notice. He got the little dog him up the height of the fence, he pushed him through a small, puppy-sized opening. Dad says Tommy was a bit confused, but offered no resistance as he hopped across the parking lot and into his car, and eventually, our life.

Tommy lived to be 15 years old. He went where my dad went. I'll never forget the night he died. I was eight years old and it was a school night, so I was surprised when my mom woke me and Josh up in the middle of the night and took us out onto the lawn. Tommy usually slept in a little bed on my parents' floor, but my dad had carried him, wrapped tenderly in towels, down the stairs and outside. I think the moon was full. Tommy was old and frail, his eyes lost in flappy ears and withered fur. And my dad, my dad leaned low over him, as if whispering to him, and stayed that way for what seemed like hours. When it was over we had a little service and dug a little hole for him under the rosebush.

For years my dad referred to Tommy as "my fine dog." My parents have had dogs since, always rescue dogs, always black and white, always T names: Tipper (during the Clinton administration), Tam, and Taj. They were all wonderful dogs, but to be called "fine" -- that was a distinction my dad reserves for a rare few.

Forget cellar door. Open road is where it's at.



This summer, driving cross country, we passed many cars with decorative antennae. The cacti were often my favorite. Watching their little flapping plastic tendrils zip by on the I-10 made it look like all the passing cars were sticking out their hands for high fives. Parked cars with dangling antennae smirked at us when we stopped to refuel.

I miss watching the scenery change. The concept of settling anywhere is fundamentally mature, and while with every passing year it seems less final, less scary, the romance of the open road is often more attractive than the stability of staying put.

Open road. Can you think of two words more beautiful?

How Ingrid Betancourt Woke Me Up

I tend to stress out when I'm on deadline. I'll circle my room like a dog preparing to lie down, and when I finally do get down to work, it will start out feeling so arduous. But then I'll learn about someone who has done something far braver than I, something requiring much more intellect or raw individual power, someone who has faced situations more harrowing and unimaginable than those I have ever experienced, and then I'll stop circling.

One such example is an interview I heard recently with Ingrid Betancourt, the former Colombian politician who was running for president in 2002 when she was abducted by the terrorist organization the FARC. I first learned about Ms. Betancourt back in 2007, when I was working for the International Museum of Women in San Francisco. We were curating an online exhibit on Women, Power and Politics, and it was hard not to see the parallel between notable female presidential candidates in the months leading up to the 2008 election here in the States.

I remember watching a soul-wrenching documentary about Ms. Betancourt's presidential campaign, which, after she was taken away, was carried on by her then-husband. Kidnapping is such a big problem in Colombia that there are laws stating that political candidates can continue their campaigns even if they themselves cannot participate; in the case of Ms. Betancourt, her husband stepped up in her place. The documentary filmmakers had started the film before she was abducted, so it was especially tragic to see the interviews with her, bright-eyed and idealistic, in the months before her forced exile. By the time I learned who she was in 2007, she had been away for five years, which I took to mean that if she hadn't died already, she probably wouldn't survive.

And then, somewhat miraculously, she reappeared in 2008. I remember hearing the news rather off-handedly,so subtly that I thought perhaps I had made it up. But then I heard her on KQED's Forum, in an interview with Dave Iverson, talking quite earnestly about what it felt like to be captive in the jungle, struggling to hear her mother's voice over the radio airwaves. This was a woman of privilege, who during her latter year or so of captivity, was chained to a tree by her neck. And yet the honesty and emotion with which she expressed herself really woke me up.

Ms. Betancourt's experience - that was true captivity. There was no circling there. I was listening to her interview while biking to work, and by the time I got there and removed my headphones, it was as if I was aware of new sounds in the world.

There are more out there like her - maybe next time I'm stressing about a paper or a deadline I'll revisit Aung San Suu Kyi.

Seeking guard turtle

About a month ago I came home to find a little turtle in the front yard. I thought it was a large rock until Taj sniffed it and pointed his nose, just like a regular bloodhound. And it wasn't until both the dog and I had backed away that I saw four little legs squirm their way out, one at a time, from the shell. The head slinked out last. For a moment the three of us stood there, dog, turtle, and human, regarding one another, none of us sure how to react. And then Taj found something more interesting behind the bushes and I went on to get the mail, and when I came back the turtle was still there, one leg slowly retreating into its shell.

I wondered, at that moment, if I would ever have that kind of patience, if I'd ever be quiet and slow enough to gauge the difference between actual danger and momentary risk.

My mom and I named the turtle Sushi. I imagined us becoming great friends, her acting as my little guard turtle, warding away bad spirits and unwelcome snails. I left some old lettuce out for her. Well, to be perfectly frank, I more or less threw the lettuce onto the surface of her shell as I was rushing out of the house to get to work.

I've been checking the front of the house every morning, but she hasn't been back yet. Either that, or she's waiting for me in a place I haven't yet found.

--

This image is taken from

Delanco Camp

's T-Shirt contest. I'm not familiar with this camp, but I found the picture on Google Image.

(Home)Town

I recently moved back to my hometown to attend graduate school, and it was only this week that the words home and town seemed like two such disparate worlds.

What is home? Home is a reflection of body memory. A sensual experience involving the food I grew up eating, the smell of our house on cold nights in late winter, the sounds of the records that sometimes skipped while my dad and I washed the after dinner dishes. The awareness that wherever I went there were people I knew.

What is town? Town is a small place, in which social circles overlap so dizzyingly that there are rarely moments of quiet, despite the wide expanse of dried safflower and last season's tomatoes. Town is a place where people gather for the sake of gathering, where my grocer knows my rabbi, who knows my previous employer, who knows my parents and back again. And occasionally they all gather, and when I do go to the farmer's market, the wealth of social knowledge is so abundant that there is simply no way to just walk, and walk, and not talk.

I wonder at what point in our lives we stop longing. For years, I wanted nothing more than to get further away, and further away still, as if with every mile I was proving the power of independence, of unleashed, unabashed curiosity about the world. And yet, each time I moved, I took with me a sense of what I had left behind. I carried photographs of my family and friends, longed for that nuclear sense of familiarity, missed what it felt like to be somewhere where people knew you were before you opened your mouth.

But what happens when you move back, and the dialogue picks right back up where you left off?

It's not a question of good or bad, or even better or worse. It is a revision of memory, a rewriting of the way things used to smell or taste, a new concept of the way you understand your immediate world. And sometimes, I worry that by coming home to work and study, I'm not properly home, but rather just back in town.

Bathroom Stall Series, #8



Not sure where exactly to locate the tragedy in this particular installment of the Bathroom Stall Series. This was taken in the humanities building bathroom at SF State, which means this girl is probably in her 20s, and is probably pretty torn up about her boyfriend's actual sexuality. I glean all this from the elegantly long downward curve of her frowny-face.

What perhaps is more tragic are the attempts to assuage her feelings of sadness and remorse: "He's confused" counters nicely to "Woo! Fag hag!" I wonder what it feels like to be stuck between two polarizing reactions. It's as if our culture still doesn't know how to approach the complex nature of adolescent sexuality. I mean, we really must not be ready to talk about it, otherwise we wouldn't write about it on bathroom walls.

All About Evil, San Francisco Style


And now, for my latest love letter to San Francisco, I invite you in to the Victoria Theater, the historic Mission theater that has been around more than 100 years. This weekend I had my first opportunity to walk inside its handsome doors, when I went to see All About Evil, the campy slasher flick directed by notable SF drag queen Peaches Christ. The show was marketed as a "4-D experience" not only because Peaches had organized an entire pre-film performance, complete with choreographed monster dances and movie-specific ballads, but also because the film itself was shot in the theater, and all of the gory scenes took place in our very seats. The fabulous SF-based performer Trixxie Carr introduced the show by belting out some impressive ballads while dressed as the film's main character, the diabolical Deborah Tennis (pronounced "de-BOR-ah ten-ISE"). I might go even as far to say that the lovely Ms. Carr would have been just as excellent cast in the film itself--maybe in the sequel? The film also highlighted classic actresses from John-Waters-era camp and gore such as Mink Stole and Cassandra Peterson (a.k.a. Elvira).

I'll be the first to admit that my tolerance for gore is low at best, but perhaps what made this experience so awesome was that the cast and crew were so committed to its campiness, so utterly loyal to an artistic vision that constituted a tribute to slasher films past, that it was hard not to get swept into the visceral excitement in the room. Besides, there's really now way to avoid giddiness when one is just two rows away from the sheer glamor of tangoing zombies and arrogant murderesses in period costume. Add to that the a palpable sense of suspense when we, as an entire theater full of people, collectively realized that the room in which we were very sitting, with its victorian air and old-fashioned decor, was as real a character in the film as the evil twin girls or the naive theatergoers who break Deborah's rules.

I was amazed by the artistry and impressed by the scale of the production, which has been on the road for several weeks now. But perhaps more than anything I was moved by the sense of community that linked all of these performers together. After the first set had finished, Peaches introduced all of the dancers by their stage names, and pointed out who had written the lyrics and who had choreographed the steps, who had put in extra time in the art department and who had helped with costumes. It was a true collaborative effort, and it was as fun to see them acknowledged, and the pleasure that gave them, as it was to see them perform.

The alchemy of that show was heightened by the fact that we got to see it where we did, in a beautiful theater just a week before Halloween in the best city in the world.

San Francisco, I'm so not over you yet.

Go Team!




This is in tribute to Mr. Alpers, who was the world's best runner assistant today at the San Jose Rock N' Roll Half Marathon. He was our chauffeur, our baggage-check boy, our acquirer of GU and our cheerleader. Our bearded cheerleader. Sometimes I have to stop and remind myself how it is that I find myself in these situations: jogging in place with Shirlee (his mom, my running partner today) at 8 am in the morning in a sea of runners, weaving my way through a city still waking up on a foggy Sunday morning. We were surrounded by people in Team in Training jerseys, or in homemade t-shirts with the names of their loved ones written on in puffy paint. I had forgotten my favorite "Diabetes Sucks" cap, but was wearing a belt with pump, GU, continuous blood glucose monitor and blood sugar monitor.

We kept a good pace until about mile 7, at which point I decided to increase my pace. Ryan was waiting at mile 10, which (incidentally) was located right in front of the high school where he works. I kept looking from one side of the street to the other, wondering how on earth I'd see him in this moving, sweaty mob, but when I did finally spot him, he insisted on running alongside me, chattering away, passing me water and GU, his big bicycle bag thumping against his back.

And then we passed the cheerleaders from his high school, all decked out in their school colors, some with ribbons, some with braces, all of them chanting. They slapped high fives and I heard him yell, "That's my girlfriend!" And I felt lucky.

The last two miles were a lot harder than I thought they'd be, especially when I started noticing the number of runners who had stopped, or were seeking medical attention on the side of the road. Ryan later said that, while biking from the 10 mile mark to the finish line, he saw a runner "bonk"; that is, he saw the guy begin to fall backward, until another runner caught him as he fell and helped him to the ground. "I saw a runner go off the course in an ambulance, and it wasn't you or my mom, so I thought the day was a success."

And, all in all, it was. I'm so glad I finally did it, and I'm incredibly grateful for the support not just of Ryan, his family, and my own unstoppable Team HJ, but of all the friends and family members who have donated to JDRF, offered emotional support and overall made it possible for me to do something I at times doubted I could do.

Until next time...