Hello again.

Yeah, so I started medical school on August 20, and my last blog post was on August 20.  Hmmm.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions.  To me, they’re nothing more than ways of creating stress by imposing artificial milestones or time frames.  Someone I know who went through AA told me that they’re actually encouraged not to pick big, important days like New Year’s Day or Christmas Day or whatever as a quit date for drinking or smoking cigarettes because that adds a lot more pressure to the event of quitting, like you’re going to let down an entire cadre of people, or the next time New Year’s rolls around, if you’ve relapsed, it’s very easy to feel exponentially bad about it, or hang on to your presumed failure  because it’s already an established important day.  Anyway, this is a long-winded, defensive way of saying that I do not resolve to write on this blog again, but that it’s been a really, really hard semester for me, and in a lot of ways I’ve been unhappy, and I think at least part of that unhappiness has stemmed from me not giving myself any space for creative muckery, in forms written or otherwise.  So, here’s to the pursuit of happiness!  Excuse me, happyness.  Haplynest.

I’ve devoured issues of the New Yorker this break, something I haven’t done also since August 20 (see above, reasons for misery) and have really, really enjoyed reading things that don’t relate to which holes in the skull the cranial nerves come out of.  Atul Gawande wrote a really great article comparing the health care debacle to the organized farming debacle of the early 1900s (you know, the famous farming debacle!).  There’s been a lot of space devoted to how horrible this past decade has been as well.  And I hadn’t really stopped to think about it, but it’s really true.  It’s hard to see that you’re in a deepening shithole when you’re actually in the shithole, but when you stop to actually consider for a second, MAN.  There’s this quote from Rebecca Mead’s “The Talk of the Town” article entited “The decade with no name”:

Given all that has emerged in the past ten years, the failure to invent a satisfactory name for the period seems overdetermined—a reflection of our sense that the so-called aughts were not all they ought to have been, and were so much less than they promised to be. With its intractable conflicts and its irresolvable crises, its astonishing accomplishments and its devastating failures, the decade just gone by remains unnamed and unclaimed, an orphaned era that no one quite wants to own, or own up to—or, truth be told, to have aught else to do with at all.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/01/04/100104taco_talk_mead#ixzz0bIiZukQj

Wow, thanks, New Yorker, for automatically putting that link in there.  The robots always know.

We’re obsessed with naming and quantifying.  All the radio stations both here and in Olympia and Portland where I was for Christmas are playing the top 1000 songs of the decade.  VH1 has some permutation of their packaged nostalgia where we’re counting down the most outrageous things that happened this decade, or the Top 100 Stupidest Things Celebrities Ever Said since 2001.  It’s like we need to constantly remind ourselves that these things happened in order to fully process that passage of time.  Or maybe it’s some attempt at finding something for our collective cultural consciousness (CCC) to rally around, so we don’t feel quite so alone (a.k.a. the basis of all religion).  Or that these moments or artificial landmarks in the past 10 years are also ways into our own complex memories, so that when we hear, for example, Outkast’s “Hey Ya!” we’re reminded of what we were doing the first time we heard that song, like an awesome car trip, or first kiss, or getting high and eating an entire box of clementines, or in my case, doing a photoshoot in college while wearing a crazy dress screen-printed with Salvador Dali paintings.  I hate year-end (or decade-end) lists because they seem weird and arbitrary to me, and also because the idea of making them stresses me out, but I’m always impressed by people who commit to making them.  Why this need to list, quantify, and obsessively remember, even when we want to forget (i.e. Top 10 Lists of Worst Things Ever)?  I’ll get back to you in January – that’s when I start learning about braaaaaains.

I do, however, have a reason for living in 2010, at least until the spring:

So hopefully I’ll be around here more often, if for nothing else than my own sanity.  No resolutions, though.  Happy new year!

Vel vien (one more)

Thanks for the comments and messages about the last song.  In Latvian we say “Liels paldies!” which means “Big thank you!”  Can you tell I love singing it?

Here’s one more that I recorded last night, entitled “It Ka Briedis.”  Another one from my childhood, another one that I wish I had the sheet music to so I could add the tenor part.

Some early evening Latvian singing

Recently, spurred by increased curiosity at what my crazy awesome Macbook can actually do, as well as severe Maza Nometne nostalgia and missing my annual trip to Alksnitisville, I recorded myself singing one of my favorite old Latvian songs in two-part harmony.  It’s not very clean in terms of recording, as I only did a single take on each track, but I think you get the general idea.  The song is entitled “Mans Patverums.” Enjoy!

Thoughts on pre-motherhood.

I’d imagined the rest of the day for a few weeks: we drive away from the airport, having deposited his mother and son at the terminal for their flight across the country.  We drive the first half of the 30-minute trip home in silence, and when I look over at him, he has tears in his eyes.  That night I take him out to dinner, and we get as drunk as we can, letting the emotions out, as well as revelling in our newfound time alone.  The days would start to pass again like normal, and I would be the strong one, I would clean up the mess of the grieving newly-part-time dad, who is watching his son move to the very farthest-away part of a very large country, learning how to graft the words “summer father” onto his identity.  Somehow, though, these imaginings afforded me a particular distance, an objectivity I’m beginning to see was incredibly short-sighted.

Everyone who knows me knows that I love kids. I’ve been babysitting since the age of 10, when my parents learned the term “free help.”  In college I worked in a kindergarten classroom and learned just how amazingly resilient teachers have to be and just  how unsuited I was for that particular set of challenges.  I’ve tutored, I’ve mentored, I’ve listened, I’ve hugged, and in many cases I’ve formed true bonds with the kids I’ve spent time with.  And I’ve been burned out: after 17 years of babysitting, tutoring, teaching, leading birthday parties, and general kid-wrangling, I promised myself that I would stop taking care of other people’s kids, no matter how good the money was, because I was starting to feel like it wasn’t enough: I wanted to wait until I had my own.

Like all promises, this one was made to be broken: most recently, I took a job up here in West Hartford looking after 2 preteens for several hours a day, a job that has been infinitely rewarding and much more interesting than my normal age group, which falls somewhere between 2 and 5.  And three weeks ago this Saturday, Dash came to live with Ryan and me before he moves out to Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, with his mom and her boyfriend in their new home.

When I started dating a guy with a kid, I got the whole gamut of reactions from my friends and various other commenters in my life, everything from “Arija, what are you DOING?” to “Ohhhh, you’re going to be a stepmom, I just know it!”  Probably the only reaction I didn’t get was one of incredulity that I would even attempt something like this, the feeling that I couldn’t handle it.  And that makes sense empirically, given my history with kids and my self-professed love and affection for them.  But I think, now, I maybe could have used some of that healthy academic skepticism that I love so much in every other aspect of my life.  I don’t mean skepticism that inviting Dash into my world was a good idea; there is (at least to me, and I imagine to Dash and Ryan and his family and Dash’s mom and her family) no question that Dash’s life has been enriched by my presence, and vice versa.  I think maybe I could, however, have used some deeper critical analysis of the assertion that this child could be a part of my life and I could just go about my business as usual.

Oh, there’s been hard stuff, all right.  At first it was two years of several nights a week confined to the small, cramped apartment on the Lower East Side; stalled plans and a lack of impromptu Connecticut visits, vacations; time and money that could have been spent on me, on us, in our prime, in our under-30 years in Manhattan, the center of the fucking universe!  And the indignance, the “I’m Arija, and I’m used to getting what I want,” the unavoidable jealousy — all of it made me disgusted with myself but all of it had to be felt or it would bottle up and overflow (and sometimes it did).  Maybe most of all, the uncertainty, the knowledge that the other shaper of the boy’s world, the other 50% of his DNA, was someone who, at her worst, appeared to care little whether Ryan lived or died and thought she would just do it all on her own; the deep feelings of confusion how something like this could even happen, how everything didn’t just work out the way everything sort of always has for me.  And I think you can probably see where this is going — a long time ago, back before Dash even drew his first breath, Ryan said to me that the whole experience, incredibly difficult and painful as it began, taught him that life doesn’t work out according to your best laid plans and that if you’re going to survive at all, you have to cede a little bit of that control, you have to loosen your grip on your own destiny a little bit.  And I smiled and held him and said, “That’s so great, that’s so brave, that’s so true,” all the while thinking in the back of my head, “Yeah, for you.”  Because it wasn’t going to be like that for me.  I was going to put in the effort, and the results were going to come pouring out into my waiting arms, just like I’d planned.  Because that’s how I wanted it, and that’s how it had always been.

Now, after just three weeks of waking up on the horrifying side of 6:45 AM; of relinquishing all rights to quiet, private time at the computer without a little creature climbing into my lap and telling me to “type ABC into YouTube”; of falling asleep with a dinner fork in my hand; of living with and sleeping next to someone but still feeling like I haven’t seen him in weeks; of having a little head fall asleep on my shoulder as I carry him up the stairs to the apartment; of having a blanket thrown over my head and hearing the words, “I LOVE YOU, BLANKIE ARIJA!!!”; of getting to be part of him learning synomyms for colors (azure, crimson) and how to hop on one foot; of singing songs my mom and dad used to sing to me until his eyelids descend; after all of this, I have learned two things.  One: my capacity to love a child for more than just an afternoon, for longer than the time when I get to hand off to the parents, as more than just a participant observer, is vast, deep, and terrifying.  It is a pool, the bottom visible by refractory tricks, into which I dove and was startled when I couldn’t touch the bottom, not even by a longshot.  I’ve said before of children I’ve been particularly close to, “No one else will ever love me the way she does,” and that was certainly true, but this is a different idiom altogether, one that can’t be summed up in a pithy little phrase.  This is a thing that I want, and now that I’m starting this other vast, deep, and terrifying multi-year sojourn into personal and professional enrichment, it is a thing that I will make sacrifices in other areas to be able to have.

Two: I am not ready to have kids.  Not now, and not for a long time.   I love waking up on my own terms, I love not speaking for an hour after I roll out of bed, checking my email or going on a bike ride, or going to sit in a class that I’ve chosen to sit in.  I love deciding what I want to do with my day minutes before I decide to do it.  I love staying out all night when the mood strikes.  I love using the f-word with abandon.  I love daydreaming about camping getaways, or spending a whole day in bed naked, or sitting on the porch sipping gin & lemonade and basking for hours with Ryan, or with a friend or two, or all by myself.  I love, for now, the control I have over my life, but for the first time that three-year-old advice that dragged Ryan through his darkest moments speaks to me.  I’m sort of seeing this whole thing in metaphors of physical properties of fluids and solids, so indulge me for a second:  Control is the the static container, uniform and singular in size and shape, unable to grow or shrink to accomodate life’s fluidity beyond a certain volume.  Fluids will conform to their containers’ sizes and shapes to a degree, but then they overflow, finding a larger container, one without such clearly defined walls, one that’s always existed all around you but for your insistence on specific and rigid packaging.  Control is ever fleeting, ever twitching to escape your single mind.  I don’t think I’ll ever truly abandon the idea that I can direct the course of my life, and in many ways, of course, I’ll be able to.  But for now, realizing that I don’t know how tomorrow’s car ride home from the airport is going to play out, and that that’s even better than planning to play the hero, is an excellent beginning.

It’s finally real.

Apartment facelift, vol. 4

I just realized I never put up pictures of the office.  I know you’ve been sitting at your computers with bated breath, so I apologize for the delay.

Perhaps the most contentious color choice, this room turned out to be our favorite, at least in terms of number of times we both wandered into it, exclaiming, “I LOVE this color!”  The full effect won’t really be apparent until we get all the ridiculous stuff we have planned up on the walls, but enjoy this arguably dubious color choice until then:

Ugly brown, finally almost gone

Green living room peeking through...

And now this is happening.

I think I like the molding contrast the best in here.

Avant garde? Or The Joker? You decide.

I'm hiding. You can't see me.

One of the few spots in the apartment when you can see at least a sliver of all four colors!

So that’s it for the painting (for now).  We have a few small spots where that brown is still on the walls, but seeing as we’re sick of painting, and how starting tomorrow we’re going to have a three-year-old running around for the rest of the month, we’ve put painting on hold for now.  The next couple posts will be some more self-indulgent photo-heavy material about the other decorating projects (i.e. how Ryan is building me wall-mounted bookshelves because HE IS AWESOME) and the funny artistic details around the apartment.  So, you might want to go get snacks now because I expect you won’t be leaving your desks until that happens.

Two other cute things.

This is a thing that my friend Jessica sent me in the mail to celebrate the new apartment.

And this is a photograph of a magnet that was the giveaway at the hipster dance party we went to last night.  This is the second such party we’ve been to in as many weeks, both organized by a group called the Hartford Party Starters Union.  We were absolutely not disappointed by the sheer number of bonafide hipsters, complete with specials on PBR and 40s, day-glo painters caps, Ray-Bans indoors as night, DJs from Brooklyn, etc.  Last night’s party was a little more packed with meatheads, but it was still pretty interesting and fun to be at for a few hours.  Plus, we got these great fridge magnets!

Yeah!

Painting the living room is the best because you can watch TV.

We watched a lot of Jeopardy! this week.  And on last night’s episode, I knew the contestant who won!  Well, sort of.  I used to work with her, back at my first job in New York.  And by work with her, I mean work at the same place as she did.  So, I recognized her name.  In sum, we are basically best friends.

The living room color was the one about which we were the least sure.  Unlike the bedroom and kitchen, where we agreed almost immediately on both color and shade, the living room and office (post TK) were much tougher.  We wanted to have four different colors and shades (this was especially important to me), so no other yellows or blues.  For the living room, we definitely wanted to have a really warm, inviting color, since this is the room where most of our entertaining (for our millions of friends) would happen.  It’s also a room where I knew I’d default to sitting and reading or writing, since I prefer to study in a comfortable chair and not a desk chair.  We had actually selected a dark green for the office and were pretty confident that that’s where we were going, so we argued for days about what color to do the living room.  We were each allowed one apartment-wide veto on a color — I chose oranges of any kind, and Ryan chose teal or aqua, which was too bad because that was sort of my idea for the living room.  We went through at least 25 paint swatches until we finally, tentatively settled on a bright, sunny green called Hidden Meadow.  (This, of course, changed the plan for the office, but you’ll see what happened there later!)

[Side note: To any Mazas Nometnes dalibnieki reading this, yes, the name of the paint did not escape me and it literally almost swayed me away from going with this color.  But I couldn't really in good faith expect Ryan to accept that as a valid complaint.]

Anyway, green it was!  We felt a degree of trepidation with this choice, especially when we picked up the paint and saw the dollop of it on the paint can, which I know looks nothing like it does on the walls, but still…we were about to paint the living room neon green.  This room gets most of its light in the afternoon, as the only windows face west.  It’s 4:41 PM right now and the color is absolutely gorgeous.  I feel really happy and peaceful sitting in here right now (also the apartment is empty), and Ryan realized that if we can minimize the sheen with the proper lighting, we can use this room as a green screen for his video projects.  Lord knows we have the freaking space.

Enough talking.  Pictures! (Click on pictures for larger images.  Also, the quality isn’t great because they’re camera phone pictures, as my little point & shoot was in the stolen purse.  I think the iPhone camera is skewing the green a little more yellow than it is in reality.)

Doorway leading to the kitchen. Hello, yellow!

North and west walls.

Our front door.

After 2 coats plus spot treatment

Literally all the furniture that's in here at the moment.

It’s green!  I love it!  Its definitely intense and it will definitely take some more getting used to, but no one will ever accuse us of being bland.  Since there was a huge risk of that earlier.

Thanks, Hartford.

On the two-week anniversary of waking up in my new apartment, I woke up to discover that someone had gotten onto our (third floor) back porch, sliced open our kitchen window screen, and taken my purse off the kitchen table, which was resting near the window. Gone is my wallet with all cards replaceable (license, credit cards, bank cards) and non-replaceable ($50 Best Buy giftcard, undergrad Yale ID that sometimes still gets me into movies at a discounted rate); terrible, dying cellphone (hastening the switch-to-AT&T-so-I-can-get-an-iPhone process); almost new point & shoot camera, fuck; iPod; birth control pills (easily remedied for $28.40, thanks generics); and most annoyingly, apartment and car keys, the latter of which was the only copy, and leaves my poor stupid little car vulnerable to theft should the crack addict that stole my purse put two and two together (not likely, as he/she left two unlocked bikes untouched on the porch.) I’ve been calling credit card companies and banks all day, canceling and restarting, thanking my lucky stars that my Macbook wasn’t on the kitchen table like it normally is, and generally not freaking out. I’m most annoyed about the keys, of course, and I guess I’ll miss my iPod and camera eventually…but ever since having bedbugs 2.5 years ago dictated that I throw away more than 50% of the things I owned, I’ve been a lot laxer about stuff in general. It’s just stuff. I guess I could have been raped or knifed (I was in the next room when it happened), but I wasn’t. And I lost $40 cash, but my life is worth $40, at least. I think.

This is the second time I’ve been robbed; the first was in college and they took my brand-new laptop and digital camera, and I was an absolute mess. This time, after the actual incident, things went really, really smoothly. Our super was actually there fixing our stove when I discovered the missing purse, and he immediately called in a work order to get replacement screens for the window, change the apartment locks, and put in a door between our back deck and the back stairs leading down to the parking lot (which, frankly, should have been there before, but we figured, who could get in from the parking lot? Famous last figurings.) The family for whom I babysit was incredibly understanding and sympathetic, and the mom immediately told me not to come in today so I could figure this out, which was beyond helpful (not that I could have driven to pick up the daughter from school anyway). The people at the bank were wonderful and amazing and helped me set up a whole new account without any hassle, and Ryan bought me a giant burger and a gin & tonic. Also, it didn’t rain today for the first time in like 59 years. All is well. It could be so much less well.

Apartment Facelift, vol 2

Kitchen

For reasons unknown, I’ve always wanted a yellow kitchen.  I painted one wall of my Brooklyn kitchen yellow several years back but sort of gave up on doing the whole room, since kitchens are sort of hard to paint, what with so many small walls and appliances getting in the way (i.e. I am lazy).  This time, we opted to do the whole thing in a bright, sunny yellow, the lamely named Behr color Sweet Chamomile.  I was sort of pushing for an even more intense, orangey yellow, which Ryan talked me out of, and I’m glad he did, because this bright yellow came off as pretty intense on its own.

The kitchen was the same brown color (with white detailing) as the rest of the apartment.  And just as with the bedroom, we did a layer of primer before putting the color on:

Ryan actually did all the priming and edging while I was at work. What a guy!

You can still see the ugly brown in the hallway connecting all the rooms.

Those windows face out onto our BACK DECK.

Yellow!

Still yellow!

ADORABLE.

Adjacent to the kitchen is a pantry the size of some NYC bedrooms, and a little foyer with closet space leading out to the back deck (this is in addition to the ENORMOUS closet that is in the kitchen itself).  The pantry and foyer are painted that brown color, and we want to paint them an as-yet-undecided complementary color.  Thoughts?