You

My friend Leila published her first newspaper article NOT in a school or university publication.  She published in the real world an article about dance.  My last blog post was also about dance and the picture of the ballerinas reminds me of the picture of the ballerina on the front page of the Roseville Press Tribune, somewhere near the name “Leila Z. Mironova” (I didn’t know she had a middle name, especially not beginning with the letter Z).

My friend Leila started a blog, a blog about cheese.  In it is the cheesecake we made together under my excited instruction.  In it are pictures of us together, and just a year ago.  I spent my morning with the meaning making in words that my friend Leila does.  I spent yesterday evening with my friend Leila and her grilled cheese sandwich in a virtual meeting.

My friend Leila is dancing to this soft drumbeat on her toes, a drumbeat that is about to get louder and more ecstatic, a drumbeat that I hope to lose myself to with her.  I smile and move my head to this soft drumbeat, seeing her softly move to it on her toes, smiling back at me.  My friend Leila loves life, loves goodness, loves creative expression, loves food, loves writing, loves me.  I love my friend Leila.

-Dror

A note to say, ‘Please stop being so lame’

Dear Self:

Don’t take this too personally, but you’re awful.

You’re way too hard on yourself but you’re too stubborn to change the behavior you openly admit drives you crazy.

The size of your ego far outweighs your physical frame, and when anyone tries to cut it down, you take it so personally that you nearly suffocate in self-hatred. You know this gets you nowhere, but you’d much rather rage in hatred about your poor qualities than take any steps to improve.

You don’t know how to relax. Just for one minute. Re. Lax. The world will not stop turning if your mind lies in quiet for even a fraction of a second. If you think otherwise, that’s your ego talking.

You have zero self-discipline and you’re way too content to maintain the status quo, even if it’s hurting you. Make a schedule, stick to it, try harder. Make something happen for yourself. You’ve been wanting to be a writer since you were old enough to pick up a pencil. Honestly, it can actually happen, you just have to write.

Stop hating yourself for your regrets. Stop wishing for a do-over.

And please remember, you are a capable person with actual skills. The fact that you can’t get a single job interview does not undercut that fact, it just means you can’t stop applying to jobs yet, and that you have to keep your chin up. Give in to that miniscule voice you keep suppressing that’s shouting for all it’s worth about how maybe you haven’t gotten a job  yet because the one you’ve been pining over is actually coming your way. This might be idealism talking, but isn’t that who you are anyway?

Best,
Leila

“We live in the calloused, dented, impacted shells of ourselves, hating all manner of our parts while on some level overly smug with the clever little devils we think we are.”

- Peter Bricklebank

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

- Ernest Hemingway

Magic in the Darkness on a Sunny Saturday Afternoon

“They’re all dressed so beautifully!” I squealed, feeling more excited under the strikingly blue sky on this sun filled Saturday afternoon than I can remember feeling in years. The grass and the path leading to the theater were scattered with little girls in dresses, woolen tights, boots with pink ponpons, colorful sweaters and buttoned coats. Oh, and with their mothers, of course.

“It looks like children come to performances at this hour,” my grandma said, worried that her young granddaughter was not quite young enough for this.

“They must feel like princesses,” I said, and quickly added, “It’s amazing that they are exposing their girls to the ballet this young.” I wanted her to know that, suddenly, there wasn’t a smidgen of doubt in my mind that I will enjoy what was waiting inside.

When my grandmother called to tell me that she bought me tickets to The Nutcracker performed by the Israeli ballet for my birthday I was touched that she had been listening when I hinted at my boyfriend that I had not seen dance in some years and wanted to. I was also slightly frustrated that she could not differentiate between the gooey and intriguing modern dance I like to sink into and classical ballet, but I shared nothing of this thought with her.

So Saturday I found myself sitting in a dark theater surrounded by little princesses as warm waves of excitement undulated through my veins leaving me with a permanent smile.

Ballerina snowflakes danced behind a backdrop of pine trees in the night and white snow lightly fell and dusted them. For the first time since I was a child I believed a world in the dark, slipping out of my reality and my analyses and my criticisms completely into a realm where magic lives, where magic is. A snow globe came to life before me and I allowed tears to trickle down the warm skin of my face and to the corners of my mouth at the  shattering of cynicism in the presence of this beautiful and soft enchantment. And what thought slide into my mind? “Leila would LOVE this.” In my mind’s eye I saw the cover of a book with a drawing of a winter backdrop built with pine trees and falling snow. I think there stood a girl in a red and white dress against it. We must have been eleven. In my visual flashback, I saw my Leila holding the book with the drawing on its cover in her little girl hands as if it were the most precious object in the world.

-Dror

“Difficulties of life vanish when faced boldly.”

-Isaac Asimov

Just breathe

Everyone keeps telling me to just breathe.

I walked out to my car this morning in 45 degree weather and there was a woman on the side of the street in Bermuda shorts and imitation Ugg slippers having a conversation with the voices in her head. She had the same distant, unfocused look in her eyes that my mother now has.

This woman walked back and forth between a few plastic grocery bags that were strewn about around her, and she wrung her hands like she was trying desperately to prove a point.  I tried to make eye contact as I drove past her but she didn’t even notice me. Could she notice anyone at all, I wondered.  Did she have anywhere to go?

This could be my mother when her unemployment checks run out. My mother could be homeless, cold, pleading with the voices in her head.  Do I do anything? I have to protect myself too. Just breathe.

Last night it was pointed out to me that I care. There’s no rational reason for me to be stressed about any of this, I told my therapist. She looked at me in shock.  There’s every rational reason for you to be stressed about all of this. She’s your family. You care about her.

That was really the first time I thought about it that way. As a child, whatever I felt toward my mother was taken for granted.  I was expected to love her and to care about her. I never stopped to wonder about what I actually felt for her.

Telling myself that I don’t care about my mother makes everything that’s happened since August easier to process. If I don’t care about her, then I don’t care if she’s wandering the streets at 2 in the morning without rhyme or reason in the freezing cold. If I don’t care about her, then I don’t care that she doesn’t sleep more than a few hours a night anymore, that she chain smokes for the majority of her waking hours, and that she no longer remembers what the days of the week are or what 3 o’clock in the morning means. It’s easier to go about my own life when I “don’t care.”

But my body is smarter than my mind. Of course you care, you idiot, it tells me. If you didn’t care, why are you having such trouble breathing lately? Where are these hives coming from?

I am physically having trouble taking air into my lungs because of tension.

I am terrified.

What if, after my mother’s unemployment run out, she asks to stay with me?  I know I will have to refuse her.  Then will my mother become that crazy woman on the street shouting into oblivion?

My heart is in fragments.

- Leila

“The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you’ll make one.”

- Elbert Hubbard

An unusually snowy winter in California

That’s right. I said snowy winter in California. Bizarre, and completely beautiful. Driving through the white mountains was actually wondrous.

We’ve also been getting a lot of rain this winter, so the countryside is supremely green and lush. I had to drive part of the way, or I would have taken more pictures. Here is a sample of California’s cheery beauty (with some happy California cows thrown in for good measure).

- Leila

Stop and smell the roses

“Something smells really great out here! Like laundry detergent!” I said. The smell was light and aromatic, like fragrance.

“I don’t think that’s laundry detergent,” Matt replied. It was ten in the evening and we were taking a stroll through his neighborhood.  The night was unusually warm for the middle of December.

“No? What is it then?”

Matt laughed. “Flowers…”

Had I really forgotten what flowers smelled like?

“You haven’t left the city in a while!” Matt said.

He was right. I hadn’t left the city since you and I drove to Lake Tahoe with Imri and Thai; that was the last time my shoes caught any dirt in their treads.  “I really haven’t left the city,” I said, bewildered. Lake Tahoe was…four months ago?

Matt lives in the suburbs of Citrus Heights, about thirty minutes east of Sacramento. He works as some kind of engineer for some kind of techy company in Folsom (you can tell I pay attention to details), and his hobbies include lazy house repairs and shooing stray cats out of his backyard. I’ve only seen him four times now, once when we met for frozen yogurt, once in the middle of the summer when I accompanied him to a local pear fair, and twice in the late evenings for impromptu treks around his neighborhood (we were currently on that second trek).  All four of these meetings were as far from downtown Sacramento as reason would allow.

“How sad it must be to be you,” he teased me. “Study…work. Don’t you do anything else, city girl?”

When I first moved to Sacramento two years ago, I avoided downtown and midtown out of principle and only wandered into the Grid when a social gathering mandated my presence.  I turned up my nose at the high-rise corporate buildings clustered downtown and thought about how depressing it would be to stare at nothing but glorified brick boxes all day long.  The buildings were all so close together, so that only narrow alleys separated one establishment from another, and where there weren’t any buildings, there was cracked pavement and vehicles in a hurry.  There was no beauty in any of this, I used to think, desperately.  My eyes longed for the bright green of a grass field or the epic silhouette of a distant mountain range.  If anything, I considered myself a tree-hugging nature lover then.

Fast-forward to two years later, and I can’t imagine living anywhere outside of a major metropolitan area.  Living in the city gives me – and every other twenty, thirty and forty-something year old – somewhere to be every Friday night, and something to do.  When I step into a club, pub or restaurant, I become part of a group of people that is experiencing, with some variation of course, the same kind of evening I am experiencing, and that makes me feel human.  Someone at the pub will notice a sparkle in my eye, or the way my tunic hangs loosely over one shoulder.  Someone else will note that I look just like his sister or cousin or friend of a friend. In a way, living in a major metropolitan area provides foolproof camaraderie whenever you choose to seek it out.

But ultimately, I do strive for some balance. I seek out Matt for a reason, after all, and it is largely because he lives away from the city in suburbs that happen to be surrounded by trails and trees.

“You should take more frequent breaks and come smell the roses with me on a hike sometime,” Matt said. “There are some nice hiking trails about 45 minutes from here.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “But no teasing if you find me looking around for a laundry room in the middle of a mountain pass.”

- Leila