Balispirit Festival (Part 1?)

  You are not the person who believes in hypnotism.  You did notice while talking to yourself, that when you were tired, what you said tended to suprise you.  Maybe there's something to the idea that the conscious mind works to suppress what you don't want to know you actually believe.  But that somebody with appropriate credentials can induce this state by asking questions of you when you can't see her?  Just because you're laying down in a similar to sleep position?  No, that is not reasonable.

But that's in your normal life.  The one in New York City where your stuff keeps you safe from things that go bump in the psyche.  Where your therapist declared you well almost 20 years ago.  Come to Bali, an out of the way island, where the food and music styles are unfamiliar.  Even the friend you made 40 years ago has changed...or has she just remained more precisely herself, while everyone else has grown older, compromised their dreams, or realized that the ever elusive green light was not worth the wait and settled for the familiar.

Se you go to the Balispirit Festival, a week long festival of yoga classes, and music performances, and sound experiences.  Your father's recent death has freed you from his side-eye, he's not there to remind you that you think all of this is bullshit.  The Balispirit Festival, started a year or two after the Bali Bombing, was intended to help bring tourism back to tourism, and it's become a haven for the spiritual minded people, who believe in alternative medicine, or that's what you learn from afar.  From the safety of your first world apartment, your traditional job, your life.  You can stay, or rather retain a certain distance, from what you are suspicious of, from new age individuals who are the result of what capitalism did to the hope of the 60s, what happened when the hippies failed.

At least, you think this is bullshit in your normal life.
But surrounded by people who believe a better way is possible, it seems almost likely that change is possible, because you know that it  must be.  Hell, with (t)Rump in office, change is necessary by now.

You have always wondered if Julie created the writers' festival so you would go there and find my own community.  Hell, given Julie's mother's preference for your choices, you've always suspected that Julie wanted me to drop everything and move to paradise, if only to give Julie's choices more legitimacy.  Julie moved to Bali long before Elizabeth Gilbert made it cool.

Every evening, in the background at the concert hall, there is a video reminding you how the forests in Bali have been eviscerated by the paper industry, and you vow to start using hankerchiefs.  Staying in a hotel where the toilets can't handle anything more serious than actual human waste -- feces and urine -- and the toilet paper is tossed into a trash can next to the toilet, where it waits for the room to be cleared, reminds you again of our throwaway culture, and what it costs not only our civilization, but all civilizations, all species, our planet.

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world;  indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."  Margaret Mead once said.

I want to preach the value of laughter yoga.  Even in my "normal" life, I am a great fan of laughter.  We know that laughter is good for you, and laughing for no reason at all seems necessary in the current environment.  Better yet, laughter is as contagious as the common cold, as transmittable as TB.  When two people start laughing, others will follow.  I don't know how you could prove it scientifically (actually, I do, measure the air content of someone before laughing, have them laugh for 20 minutes, measure again), but I'm not sure you should.  Do we really want our doctors proscribing "watch 2 hours of SNL, 1st season, twice weekly for a month."?  Would laughter yoga lose efficacy once it's required?

The Cacao festival leaves you uncertain.  You are told to touch third eyes with your neighbor and the woman next to you asks, "Are you ready for this?" she sounds hesitant.  You're not sure if you are,really, but you also can't imagine what being ready means.  You're about to touch foreheads with a stranger.  Hell, you've been in crowded subways before.  Sure you can do it.

And it's not until that spot, an inch above the bridge of your nose, is touching someone else, is touching somebody else in the same spot, and you are sharing air, voluntarily giving up the notion of personal space, THEN you realize how intimate this feels.
Her hand touches your waist.  Yours brushes her hip.  You are unsure as to whether you are touching her somewhere else to break the connection, not to feel like you're mimicking her, or to maintain that crucial distance, but later that evening, when she embraces you, you do feel accepted, and almost as friends, and you debate letting your guard down.

But you all turn, and swear allegiance to the Cacao spirit...
And she vanishes, swallowed up by the crowd that brought her to you.
You are not sure if you're relieved, or sorry at the missed opportunity...missed opportunity of what exactly?  You're not sure of that, either.

What happens when everyone goes home?
You don't know how to turn good intentions into actions.  Do you send a follow up to everyone who attended the festival, telling them about organizations where they could volunteer or give money.  The festival is too big, there are people from all over the world, so you'd have to find the appropriate international organizations, but you also suspect that the Festival was not intended to be an instrument for social change.
But you think that a conference that got this big a following should be put to good purpose.  That just sitting around and feeling good isn't enough, and so you start to plot.

Do you know your friends on FB? (and do you care?)

A drawback of being on Facebook is that people you meet and like ask, "Are you on Facebook?" and you say, "Of course!" and you promise to keep in touch that way, through Facebook;  because Facebook is SO much easier than writing actual email messages, and nobody writes LETTERS any more and Facebook is a casual means of maintaining a relationship.

Maintaining a relationship with someone via Facebook is riskier because we are more blunt when communicating electronically and often we say things that we wouldn't when talking to somebody IRL (there have been studies, and I'm sure I could find one online, but right now I want to refer you to None of the Old Rules Apply by Dave Eggers, pp 191-211 in What We Do Now, edited by Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians).  Over the past few months I have been tempted to "unfriend" people when I learn their politics differ from mine.  On Presidents' Day I changed my profile pic to a picture of President Obama and a friend disliked it.  Somebody asked her "why?" and she didn't respond.  We can only imagine that she didn't like looking at his face.  I'd posted as my status that I was going to do this on Presidents' Day, but she wanted to express unhappiness (which I actually registered as disgust) with my opinion.

I did not engage with this friend. Perhaps I should have.  But I don't really know her.  She was on a trip I took 6 years ago;  she was a grieving widow, and her daughter was taking her to a country she knew well.  We got along well enough on the trip, where everything was new and different, and we met a few months later when she came to New York to meet somebody who had flown in from Spain (one of the countries we visited).  We've never seen each other since, and I don't expect we ever shall.
So I didn't say anything.

A former coworker "liked" a post "Black Labs Matter" "All Labs Matter" and my stomach turned.  This woman should know better.  Maybe she just thought the picture of the Labrador Retriever was cute and was completely clueless to the political implications.  It's possible.

I thought about responding, but it was a post from somebody I didn't know, and....

Perhaps I am a coward.

I don't respond to conservative posts from Facebook friends, because I suspect that it is too easy for feelings to be hurt and for people to misread my comments, but perhaps I should respond.  Perhaps not responding just allows us all to continue to live in our bubbles, where everything is really awful right now because the world outside pushed through and ruined our illusions.

Also, not responding, not seeing is a privilege.  I can say "I don't think she really meant it that way," and walk on.  And perhaps it's time that we all stripped ourselves of that privilege.

Making granola and other Comfort Foods

Seasonal foods are great.  They are perfect luxury goods without being actually luxurious.  Come on!  The pumpkin spice granola I made last night will remind me tomorrow morning of Thanksgiving.  I'll sprinkle it on my oatmeal, and as I'm chewing on a pumpkin seed I'll wonder if there's any dark meat left (there is no more turkey anywhere in my house).  I'll contemplate cranberry sauce. though I'm pretty sure I can't find cranberries in the supermarkets anywhere by the end of February.  Everyone KNOWS that the cranberry fairy starts hibernating after January 3rd.

Granola is my memories of summers' past food.  I don't care that the pumpkin granola recipe isn't my great-aunt Nita's Granola recipe, which she was sure she had whenever we came to visit her up in the middle of nowhere, Vermont.  It tasted of cold mornings warmed up by berry picking afternoons, It tasted of fresh corn, and swatting mosquitoes that came from everywhere while looking out at the flowers in the front yard.  It smelled of fresh air that couldn't have come down from the mountains, because I think Nita lived in the mountains themselves.  It tasted of goodness, of simplicity like the people who had once built the Community House had wanted.
The Community House was a simple white building down the road that looked like it might have been a Shaker Meeting House.  It had walls.  It had benches.  It had nothing else.
The granola I make now isn't even the right recipe.  I have Nita's recipe;  it's in the Moosewood Cookbook, thank you very much, and I should make it, but I think it will taste different in my city apartment than it did in Nita's country house.  And since I can never get back to Nita's house (she died in the late 90s), I don't really want to alter my memories of Vermont Granola.  A granola that tastes simply of the ingredients needed and love.

Vermont Granola tastes of the promises of youth.  Nita used different raisins or something.  We often visited her at the end of August, just when the freedom of somewhere was getting a little wearing.  But the sparse nature of her house, added to the need to be aware of everything I could taste.  There were simple pleasures at Nita's house, I just had to stop whining about having to put a heating pad at the foot of your bed before I went to sleep.

But I have pumpkin granola now.  Made it last night from a recipe I found in November and had made once earlier.  Foods should be about more than just how we nourish our physical bodies;  Food should be how we our selves, our mind.

Do you want something that you don't really have to chew right now?  Do you have the chest bug that is making the rounds, and is the mucous setting up house in your lungs?  Then I have your recipe!  Cook up a third of a cup of brown rice with about three quarters a cup of chicken stock.  You want more liquid than truly necessary because you want to be able to slurp it down when you've finished eating the rice.  You want to something easy to digest because your body really isn't up to doing much more than moaning and coughing.  And the chicken broth will help with that chest congestion.

The fact is, the rice cooked in chicken broth is my perfect comfort food because my mother told me to make it for myself when I had the flu as a grown up.  I felt achy and slept more than people normally do, and I thought that I should eat something, but I couldn't really figure out what.


"Do you have chicken broth in the house?"  My mother asked.
"No, I don't think so."  I said, wondering what she was going on about.
"Go get some.  The supermarket should just have chicken broth.  Buy it with some rice and cook it with the stock instead of water.  It'll make you feel better."

I may have muttered something about not wanting to go outside, but I didn't really have any other option.  My parents lived 40 minutes away, and this is what I got for insisting I wanted to move out and live on my own.  What does independence get you?  It gets you the privilege of having to go out and buy your own goddamned chicken soup when your sick, that's what.


But she was right.  The fact is, the only thing you have to worry about when you're making chicken broth with rice (or Chicken Soup with Rice if Maurice Sendak needs a prop right now) is not falling asleep before the broth all gets soaked up by the rice.  It's HOT, it's got PROTEIN, it's bland, but it's got just enough salt in it to replace whatever your body is losing by sweating out a fever.  It's GOOD stuff.

And thus that is my comfort food for when I'm sick.

Comfort foods are sort of a luxury good, too.  Many people eat solely to keep from dying.  Anyone who has the time to think about what they're eating and why they want that particular food is extremely fortunate.  Perhaps that's the best comfort of all, knowing how lucky some of us are.

The Revolution will be Merchandized

I'm uncertain about the signs, not the sings we carry at the rallies, but how we find each other. I've bought three t-shirts; Samantha Bee's simple "Nasty Woman," which hasn't come yet, "I Never DREAMED I'd Grow Up to Become a Nasty Woman, but here I am Killing IT!" and I just ordered "Still, She Persisted." I have knit myself a pink pussy hat with ears (that actually make me look like an annoyed cat, because the ears tend to flatten out), and I have a few pins on my knapsack to identify myself of a Hillary Supporting Liberal.

Is this how we find each other? By our clothing choices? Because I really can't wear them all the time. At work I am supposed to wear "business like" attire, and t-shirts with slogans are not permitted.

I wear the hat to and from work, though. People smile at me. No one has said anything suggesting that they think the hat is inappropriate, but of course, that's because I'm in New York City, commuting between Brooklyn and Queens. It's a safe space, which might lessen the significance of wearing the hat. Now, when people wear them to the Westboro Baptist Church, that will be another story. But will that show that we have won? Or will that show that it's become safe and sanitized enough to wear the pussy hat.

In the 20th Century Cynthia Heimel wrote a piece Notes on Black in which she wrote, "If we didn't have clothes, we'd have to walk around wearing signboards saying 'Hello, I'm a radical lesbian mother with a Stalinist streak,' or 'Hello, I prefer you to think I'm athletic.'"  (Heimel, Cynthia.  If You Can't Live Without Me Why Aren't You Dead Yet?  Grove Press, 1991.)  So I guess I'm right after all, we do need to wear clothes to identify ourselves.

Fear leads to Anger, Anger leads to Hate, Hate leads to The Dark Side

41 people were arrested in ICE raids in New York City. ICE raids that President 45 (I will not use the title and Trump's last name together) has said will defend us from terrorist attacks. That was the reason for the Executive Order that was ruled unconstitutional. But less than two weeks after Trump announced that he was going to protect the nation by preventing people from predominantly Muslim countries from entering the country, ICE goes on raids and arrests 41 people in New York City, all of whom were born in Latin America or the Caribbean. Yeah, because the next terrorist attack is coming from......

You know, I was going to make a comment that's probably racist, or would certainly be taken that way, but 45 is terrifying people, tearing families apart, in the name of protecting us from terrorists, but really just shipping out people who he can pick on.
Has he even thought about this?
Two people I know have responded negatively to FB posts of mine (or shared, let's be honest) in the past few days. One accused me of living in a liberal bubble and not seeing West of the East River. The other just gave a thumbs down to a suggestion that people post a picture of President Obama as a profile pic for Facebook on President's Day.

One hurt my feelings. I have lived west of the East River for over half my life. I've only been living in the Eastern boroughs of New York City for the past 16 years, plus for two years in Astoria inbetween college and Graduate School (both at institutions on the Continental United States, and therefore very WEST of the East River. I have spent more than HALF of my life living WEST of the East River.
But she doesn't mean where I live, she means I live somewhere where I don't see "real Americans," because, well, because I don't agree with either of these women, and these women believe they are representative of "real America" because their friends agree with them and know the problems they're having.
The foreclosure crisis is nowhere near as bad as it was 10 years ago, the year before Obama was elected. In 2007 people were talking about banks failing, and the FDIC was increasing the amount it would insure people's cash deposits to $250,000. It used to be only $100,000. Detroit is no longer the ghost town it was.

When 45 one the election, one of the stories was how could the Media be SO wrong? Phrases like "liberal bubble" were tossed around, but it's not hard to shake the feeling that 45 is a fraud. That he doesn't even WANT to be President, because he isn't acting Presidential. He's acting like a spoiled child who isn't getting what he wants quickly enough.
I don't want to engage the woman who gave a thumbs down to the idea of changing your profile picture, though one of my friends did. Perhaps that's the bad thing. If you don't think that 45 is a fraud, tell me why. Come up with a good reason, but tell me what your reasons are.. Just saying "NO!" isn't helping the discussion.
And if you don't want the discussion, don't talk at all.
Fear of hurting somebody's feelings is a powerful thing, though. I could post a link to the Unemployment Statistics to my FB page, but I suspect she doesn't trust facts, and I don't *want* to get into an argument that will (probably) degenerate into ad hominem attacks because that's where these arguments tend to go, particularly when the phrase "bubble" is used. So we have fear, which leads to hate, which leads....
Enter Yoda.

Safe memories

I didn't look around much as I got on the Brooklyn bound Q train, I was just grateful for the Q instead of the N. Changing trains isn't THAT big of a hassle, but it's just so nice to be able to get on the subway at the first/last stop and take it to where you need to get off. You can pick where you sit, make yourself comfortable, get out your book, and settle in.
So that's what I did. I'd been sent to a different branch than my regular one for the day. They'd let me out a few minutes early, and the sun was setting. The sun was setting over the West behind the Continental United States, but I knew that if I sat on the right side of the train I'd get to look out the window and see the sunset over Manhattan, the high point of my day. A coworker once looked curiously at me as I did that. "Film companies give our state MILLIONS of dollars for that view," I told her. "I get it for the cost of a subway token." She shrugged. She was still too cool to think that it was significant, but I loved the view.
As I got out my book, I almost didn't notice the young man sitting across from me. His shoes probably made too much noise as he sat down, that might have drawn my attention, but what I noticed when I looked up at him, just for a moment, was his eyelashes; thick, long, the sort of eyelashes that women spent hours to get and envy terribly when the men they know have them. He sat across from me, also facing forward. I smiled to myself, and began to read.
Two stops later I glanced up, and there was a young woman sitting across from me, expertly applying makeup. She was trying to look older than she probably was. She wasn't wearing enough foundation for that not to be her skin, but her cheeks were clearly painted on perfectly. Her skin was flawless! Odd, I thought the young man was wearing that same colored hat...Where had he gotten off?
A bob underneath her chin caught my attention, and my concern. The young man had metamorphosed into a overly made up young woman while I was minding my own business. Why was he doing that here? Why couldn't he...
And I realized he was underage. Not THAT underage, exactly, he might have been 17 or even just barely 21, but he was probably still living at home, and telling his parents he was going to visit Jim and they were going out, and he securely painted on his face on the subway where no one he knew could see him, and I realized he was wearing panty hose, and I worried for him.
I worried because I was certain his parents didn't know where he was going and that he was going to make sure they never did. Perhaps he figured at some point he would tell them, one day when he was living alone somewhere, when what they thought didn't matter, but right now they could never know. Was he taking chances that he was sure he was prepared to deal with? Did he know what men were like?
I know nothing about being a gay man, but I still don't think a young man going out in drag is putting himself in a safe place, particularly if he has to get into costume on the subway. I don't think he has a safe place to retreat to if things get ugly out there, and I can't help but worry that a young man thinks he knows how men think but doesn't know how they think about women. And I wanted to tell this young man to be careful.
He put on a wig before we got to 57th street. I was suddenly sitting next to a tall beautiful blond woman with long curly hair that made me envious, but I wanted to call out before he got out at Times Square,
"Be careful out there! Give yourself to someone who cares!"
I minded my own business. New Yorkers are known for that. He was young and didn't want my advice. I wasn't sure I even wanted to give it. His world was different from mine.
That was about 10 years ago. Another Republican was living in the White House. I hope that young man has a safer place to put on his face and get into costume.

How do you grieve? And for what?

I'll tell you, the thing I think I miss most about my Dad is his disdain for fools.
I'm having a discussion with a relative about how we're going to make "Mexico to pay for the wall," and my cousin pointed out that people would be more likely to buy American if Mexico has a 20% border tax on all its exports, and that's not the point. My father would have told me not to bother, and said something disparaging. I'm not listening.
Of course, I'm not listening because my father's been dead for almost 13 months, and he isn't talking to me anymore. I don't hear his voice from beyond the grave, I just *think* I know what he would have said based on years' of experience, and a fair amount of projection.
A few weeks ago I was reading the obituaries in the New York Times. Nicki Scarfo died in Federal Medical Center in Butner, N.C. He was part of the mob in Atlantic City in the 80s when he got sent away for (I think) basic racketeering involving hotels in Atlantic City. That's when Trump was busy buying real estate and turning Atlantic City into what it has become. (In the mid 1970s, it sounded kind of small townish, if Tiger Eyes, by Judy Blume is a reputable source.) And I mourned my father, because he might have remembered the case (he had an exceptional memory) and he would have had a smart comment, and we would have commiserated over how awful things are right now. We also would have taken a moment to suggest whether he knew Fat Hugo or Jimmy the Greek, two imaginary gangsters who could be relied on to beat up, injure and maim ANY bully who chanced to make me cry.
But he would have pointed out that I am not doing too badly. And while he would have agreed that I should care for people who are, he might have suggested that I not get carried away. He was always glad when Mom and I went to bond on political causes, but he hadn't joined us in that since....No, I'm not sure he ever joined us.
And what I grieve for is the special relationship I had with my father; he loved me, not someone he wished I would be, not someone he thought I really was. He was exceptionally proud of me, and his chest pushed out when I suggested that I was what happened when he and my mother were trusted with the upbringing of children. But I wondered if that was selfish -- I didn't miss Jack Robbins, I missed my Dad. I miss my Dad who would hold my hand as I walked along a ledge by Teachers' College on the eastern side of Broadway on my way to Nursery School, allowing me to see the world I was going to inherit. I missed a Dad who was always glad to hear from me when I called. I missed....
No, seriously, I worried that I was treating Dad as less than his own person because I mourned the person he was for me, not who he was as himself. I even got all philosophical about it, worrying that as saying, "I missed my Dad" meant that I missed the end relationship that I had with Jack Robbins and not Jack Robbins as himself (treat everyone as their own ends and never as a means, I think the that section of the categorical imperative went).
And then I laughed at myself, as I thought of him laughing and shaking his head at me. "You too hard on yourself, baby. Don't DO that!"
Of course I miss my Dad, and the special relationship I had with him. I was fortunate to have someone who loved me unreservedly, but was willing to discuss my flaws while warning me not to take myself (or my flaws) too seriously. There is no reason for me to have thought to have had a relationship with my father other than, well, father and daughter. That's who he was to me, and if we hadn't shared blood there would have been no reason for him to think so highly of me (unless he'd married my mother after I was born, or had been EXTREMELY creepy). He probably wouldn't have noticed me if I hadn't been his daughter.
So I will try to not be foolish when mourning him, a year after his death. Of course I miss MY DAD, who else should I miss?