peace a million

A project.

2011-09-30T10:20:00.000-07:00

Friends, I have been up to some creative things lately. Most notably, perhaps, is this guy.

That link will take you a Tumblr site for an ongoing art project my friend Evan and I started. It involves found poetry, upcycling, GENIUSNESS, etc. Please take part.

An Elegant Discrimination : LGBTQ Students at Messiah

2011-05-12T10:19:00.000-07:00

As I bite the Alma Mater that fed me, I seek to do so with its due respect and with a significant cache of fondness. I count my years as a student as some of the most meaningful, and certainly the most intellectually formative, of my life. And it is with a strange feeling of loyalty that I peel my glove and slap Messiah College across the face.

The recent decision by Isaiah Thomas, an openly gay Freshman, to transfer out of Messiah has brought national attention to the college's policy restricting "homosexual behavior." From my perch in Midtown Harrisburg, there's an argument within earshot that Isaiah, a graduate of Harrisburg's own Sci-Tech High School ought not to have chosen a local college so famous for its stance against something so close to his identity. The argument is based on the assumption that Messiah sings this tune loudly enough to be heard by prospective students, and that self-identifying as the Lion's Den affords amnesty for itself. Saying that he ought to have known better distracts from the crux of the issue: Messiah's policy is bad for everyone, Messiah included.

I happen to be straight and unambiguously gendered. That this was the story experienced by most of my classmates, my encounters with the LGBTQ community remained embarrassingly casual and distant until my senior year. In the Spring of 2007, the LGBTQ activist group, Equality Ride, reared its deliberately non-normative head to challenge students and faculty alike to engage in conversation and action concerning the culture of exclusion on campus. Their business model is simple: storm the castle of college policy prohibiting LGBTQ rights and ask people to ask themselves why. (Be prepared for a night in jail.) Four years later, I'm still asking why such a blaring contradiction to Biblical standards remains the skeleton in the closet of an institution identified by and named for its Christian values. It is not the raised fist of the Westboro Baptist Church, sure, but a quieter, even elegantly subtle discrimination of a specific, singled-out population. Isaiah Thomas has certainly helped bring this struggle to light recently. But this discussion needn't rest on the shoulders of Isaiah, easily dismissed by some for missteps in his campaign for equality. This is sustained discrimination hidden cleverly behind critique of the social polish of a nineteen-year-old. Recent news coverage of Isaiah's story has included the nuanced input of Louie Marven, whose work as the Director of Education and Youth Services at the LGBT Center Coalition (which earned him the Wheeler Freedom Award) has gone unpublished by Messiah's Bridge Alumni Magazine employment information section each time it was submitted. He stands in a long line of his predecessors quietly, politely ousted from Messiah's good graces, which invites conversation around the table at the cost of meaningful action. Try this on for perspective: Another local campus, Dickinson College, recently moved to campus-wide gender neutral bathrooms. This choice was made in effort to protect individual dignity, to challenge conventional binaries of gender, and to address the entitlement many of us have had the luxury of leaving unexamined.

Public opinion these days exists on as wide a spectrum as gender, and much of the rhetoric replaces nuance with passion. I have been disheartened to read and hear comments that criticize Messiah's anti-gay policies in the same breath as classist cracks about its student body being comprised of hicks. Calling Christians stupid lets them off the hook too easily. We musn't be afraid to expect good sense from individuals we know have the capacity to deliver it. And of course, my public opinion that discrimination in any form against a population of any form is both immoral and a classic example of sin will only find resonance with those of you who already agree with me. But the truth remains that the LGBTQ apartheid within some circles of Christianity is bad business for schools like Messiah. There used to be a billboard up for the school that touted claims of, among other things, being "rigorously academic." No fibbin'. Messiah ranks fourth among the "Best Regional Colleges in the North" by U.S. News and World Report. The caliber of imparted skills in critical thinking has helped co-create a growing number of frustrated alumni, eager to see the college subvert its own archaic language and paradigms. These frustrations are among the loudest sung songs, resulting in significant energy by alumni to organize formal petitions, like that in the recently formed Inclusive Alumni group and the older, established Gay At Messiah group. I count myself among that number of graduates who are responding financially to our regret that the quality of education, progressive and vigorous in certain areas of social justice, drops the ball so heavily in this regard. Incidents like that in Isaiah Thomas' case shackle the student body and faculty to a conversation we ought to be past by now. It isn't merely that Messiah College isn't keeping up with the national conversation; these archaic policies stunt its own growth as an institution of learning.

Messiah College has significant work ahead. If this is work that remembers dignity, equality, and common sense, then shoot, I'll carry the banner. Until then, I can only afford to give my money to student loans. My hope is that the college would catch up with its own standards of excellence. My hope is that we can do better as a community in the way we expect decency from each other.

new things, old things

2010-09-27T14:25:00.000-07:00

just so we're all clear, i'm still alive most days.

and even sometimes, i still post things. but usually it's here.
rarely, but more meaningfully, it's here.

maybe i will do better this next year and posting HERE here.

in the meantime, i hope you're keeping dry on this rainy day.

How to Raise Half Your Student Loan Debt in a Single Night (or, Be Excellent To Each Other)

2010-03-11T18:44:00.000-08:00

Spoiler alert: I have student loan debt, y'all. Not only do I have it, but it rages through my blood and characterizes the culture I live in. Coffeshop-haunting, pho-eating, McSweeny's-reading, mason-jar-water-glass-drinking, whitewhine.com-embodying, hard-working, sleepy people who have probably graduated from something and who have probably thrown an ironically titled party recently and who have counted That Time When Doug Finally Bought and Installed the Beatles Rock Band System In His Living Room and Invited Me Over to Play as one of the highlights of the past two years. What was strange for me to realize, since graduating college, was that This Is My Life, and that the part of it that feels like whistling Dixie actually takes a long time to get through, and by the end of it my face will have laugh lines. (Spoiler alert: I have some laugh lines.)

When I realized that amazing things could be accomplished by me and my riffraff friends, I felt empowered in a way that Kevin Spacey usually does in a film he's in. Way back in January, my tiny hometown of Harrisburg clapped its hands together and threw a benefit show for Haiti. Bands ranging from folksy Koji On the Roof, the twangy bluegrass tunes of Wake Yankey and Hank Imhof, improv punk electronica outfit Bats, and driving, synthy rock group In Wilderness, a varied mix expressed a whole city reaching out. We raised $5,500 dollars all sent for emergency relief in Haiti, all in a single night in a dinky town. (Wait, wait. Stop this blog post. Why is this being written a month later than is appropriate? It's because I am a person who says "yes" to a lot of things, and that usually means that I'm not usually an early bird. Special apologies go to my dad and Benjamin Franklin.)

The night I heard about the earthquake in Haiti, I was halfway through the January of the strangest year of my life. I wouldn’t hear until late that night in my bedroom, clicking through pictures of ashen faces, my entire axis shifting. I would read the news right to left and think about what a year does to a person. I think about the fact that a little more than a year ago, I was sitting across from a boy outside the Hotel Oloffson in Port Au Prince as he taught me how to properly sink my teeth into sugar cane. I think about the low wall we sat on, wondering if it still stands. I think about the rows of newly planted trees, an effort by the mountain church of Sainte Etienne to counter the monster of deforestation. How climbing down the sliding slick mountain toward those rows was a task too great for my ancient sneakers, and I would spend the rest of the trip leaning on a length of tree cut from the side of the mountain by a farmer to help me hobble out of the valley. I think of Jean, our translator, who had tried to flee the country four separate times unsuccessfully and who on our last night in Port au Prince offered me a voodoo flag and his son’s phone number. I think of the dinner party on Christmas night, hunched over ceviche and mumbling the four French expressions I knew, surrounded by strangers who had taken pity on an awkward, gawking American tourist accidentally separated from her group. I think of the dripping moss of Jacmel, how the roads could have been in New Orleans, and whose artists climbed through piles of trash to find raw materials for sculptures and mixed media pieces and collages and paintings. Traveling to Haiti a year ago, when it was still Then, was more meaningful than I had prepared myself for, and watching the Now footage seep into every corner of the media, After, makes me feel older than I can describe.

The benefit show in January was one of the most meaningful examples of pulling together I've ever experience. Each band donated their performances, The Midtown Scholar Bookstore donated the space and food, and a million billion local folks donated money, time and silent auction pieces. What we raised was a drop in the bucket in terms of the need, but it was a beginning. A push out the door. And it expressed exactly who we are, here in this (oh) little town of Harrisburg.

I have felt my world, my culture, shift toward Haiti. I will not claim an expert voice in this process. I haven’t yet been to Haiti more than once, and even that was for five days, crammed between Christmas and New Years. My French and Creole are parsley-small. What I can tell you is that I think about Haiti more than I think about men, a fact that makes my mom pretty sad. I can’t have a nuanced conversation about the environment, racism, classism, educational reform, poverty, public health, personal responsibility, faith, art or social justice without mentioning the state of affairs in Haiti. What makes me hopeful is a long string of stories about riffraff friends banding together and using Exactly What They Have and Who They Are and What They Like to engage the issue. It's important us to not separate what happens in Haiti with what happens in a dive bar. It's important to remember that whatever is to be done has to be done with excellent words, excellent music, excellent art, excellent lighting. This is the part of the article when I end with a warm handshake and a reminder to be excellent to each other. All of the each others.

an important thing.

2010-01-24T21:20:00.000-08:00

apples, obviously

2009-10-27T12:57:00.000-07:00

i spent some time in the hudson river valley this past weekend. this was the land of my childhood, and the leaves and rain and sun and river were so nostalgic, i could throw up. (i won't get into the amateur body building competition which was the ACTUAL reason we went that way any more than to say that i was entirely fascinated by all of the bronzer and egg whites.) (okay, i will get into it a little bit: louie's sister, rene, has found herself drawn to this aspect of fitness and health, and that meant that on saturday, i sat with the marven family, including grandma emily, in poughkeepsie high school to watch people who look like this walk around on stage.)

we also went apple picking, which is the aspect of this entry i hope you'll stress when you talk about it later over dinner. guys, apple picking is the BEST. if you have absolutely no pressures on your time and a penchant for plucking, i urge you to give into your whims. megan and i returned home with more apples than is okay, and that is why i am making apple pie this evening.

an internet shout out to Twig and Thistle, a blog i found when trying to find an adorable pie recipe.

spoiler alert: ain't no way you can be a body builder AND eat this adorable pie.

the day i lost my friendship with megan bennicoff

2009-09-27T20:52:00.000-07:00

it was today! i'm not sure how much recommending y'all do for people, but i have been doing my fair share lately. i have all sorts of friends who are doing things like "applying to college" or "applying to the sycamore house" or "trying to get parole", etc etc. one of these "friends" is megan bennicoff, and she asked me (via the internet) to fill out a recommendation form for the peace corps.

the first sign of trouble was when i was given the option to fill out the pre-set form questions or to upload my own letter of recommendation. SUCH A TRAP. obviously if i go with the pre-set form questions, i am occupying the lowest stratum of intentionality available on this green earth. it's like the Looking For: Whatever I Can Get option on facebook: all you really need to be my friend, at this point, is a finger to click Accept with. maybe a face.*

after clicking the pre-set form question box, i was then made to click a box that would adequately describe why i know her. (what i WON'T tell you is that it took me about twelve minutes of trying to figure out a way to honestly describe why i was her employer before seeing that Friend was an option on the line over.) HERE is where the peace corps blew up my spot. after each description of relationship, the recommend-or is required to fill out a timeline. a timeline! and when i wrote "2003-present" i got an error message that read "The field format for this question needs to be MM/YYYY."

THE PEACE CORPS SPOKE THE END OF OUR FRIENDSHIP INTO BEING.
sure, there was still the option of picking a future date, but that seemed a little fatalistic. which is why it came to a close today, guys. 09/2009 marks the end. i feel liberated, sure, but i also feel cheated out of my right to be friends with megan bennicoff indefinitely. i'll miss her. she ate the strangest food of anyone i knew. also, she is still my roommate. and we spent the day together, which was super awkward since we're not even friends.

*one of the stranger things i learned recently was that a lady in france GOT A FACE TRANSPLANT when her dog ATE HER FACE. that is all.

i live in harrisburg.

2009-09-15T12:29:00.000-07:00

i love this town. i have the advantage of not having grown up in central pennsylvania, so i'm not sick of it yet. my friends that were born here have that sort of geographical velveteen rabbit syndrome, warily eying it all in distrust and boredom (before ultimately being stricken with scarlet fever). but i know that i will still feel a whirling stir in my heart when i cowboy-squint into the susquehanna, trembling funnel cake in hand at a riverside fest (which are things that happen compulsively, and which are 200% attended by sweating families, limply holding hands and eying everything with distrust and boredom.) truly i tell you, my heart soars with the smog tumbling up from three mile island's stacks babel-ing toward the heavens, a nod to a tenous, chernobylian grasp of sustainability. (spoiler alert: i wrote that sentence ONLY because i wanted to use the term "chernobylian." but rest assured that i CAN see three mile island from four out of seven bridges spanning the river, and that it is comically scary.)

a concept i write about too often is Being Known and how that looks and whether it feels okay or not. how it looks as a citizen of harrisburg, for example, is that 80 percent of people in my life know that i love the number 2 on the menu at roxy's. (eggs over medium, sourdough toast (because it is delicious and delivered fresh everyday), potatoes-whichever-way-they-happen-to-be-that-day, coffee, gruff/sweet/annoyed waitstaff, strange wallpaper, and a neckbreak staircase to the basement bathroom. perfect.) it feels okay to Be Known in this way, and it also feels like i am predictable and a little bit gross. it reminds me of when, a few years back, we would go to Wings On Wednesday at kokomos, and louie would faithfully order the chicken fingers until it became clear that he was expected to. i think it's a safe bet to assume nobody wants to be known as The Guy Who Always Wants Chicken Fingers.

a sidenote: i was third-handedly referred to by our roxy's waitress as "church-goey" to a fella i currently work with at the swanky pan-asian restaurant. i think this description is hilarious.

Being Known also means, in harrisburg, that i will be constantly reminded of how very very small and navigable this place is. a favorite restaurant of mine is Arepa City on 2nd street, which serves very venezuelan food very late very affordably. (lately, since my work schedule means that i have almost no human interaction during the day, i have taken to nighttime conversations with nighttime friends at nighttime establishments, one such being Arepa City.) the chef, daniel, is becoming a fast friend and the best example of the theory laid out in the first sentence of this paragraph. by methods i am unable to guess (and am also being very consciously untold), my friend Chef Daniel found my blog (this one. that you also found. good job.) and has been reading up on my piffle-y thoughts. each time i have implored that he tell me how he even knows who i am, as i drown my black bean empanada in jarringly-awesome guasacaca (i promise it's a word and that it is a jarringly-awesome thing), he refuses to tell me until i write about him on this blog. i am honoring his wishes with this paltry entry, and i am encouraging all y'all locals to eat up. i'll come along, as long as you go late enough for me to join.

i have more to say, but i am sleepy. i will close by telling you all that i cleaned my room for the first time in a long, long while. it's a little hard to tell, though, because i have old house structures taking up every corner of free space. i have dresser drawers piled up like smokestacks. (all of these things will be used as canvases for an art exhibit at midtown cinema during the month of december. Being Known as a scavenger of sidewalk trash heaps is also a familiar thing to me. i will write more about this show later, but you should know that justin arawjo and ollie mikse are taking the advertisement-of-this-show to task, tackling this sucker like a huge squid, say, might attack a ship.)

peace, dearhearts.

i am writing graffiti on your body

2009-08-31T11:58:00.000-07:00

i got a tattoo! here is the story: megan bennicoff, perhaps the person who knows the most about me, is edgier than me. because of that, she promised me a tattoo for my birthday last december. saturday, we were finally both free on the same day.

"lapè" is the haitian creole word for peace. i really like peace, guys. and, my understanding of peace was challenged considerably by my trip to haiti. i am more and more convinced of romero's words that "peace is generosity; peace is dynamism." the reality of peace on the ground requires social equality and global health and fewer hungry bellies. i want to remind myself of that always.

also, if you google "lape", like i did, you find these:


LAPE	: Local Alcohol Profiles for England
LAPE	: Low Altitude Parachute Extraction
LAPE	: Laboratoire d’Analyse et Prospective Économiques

number 2, please.

demons, alpo, etc

2009-08-25T13:10:00.000-07:00

so, i am dog-sitting this week for my friends, the lawpenroses. (a sidenote is this: i am fascinated by the combined-last-name-upon-marriage phenomenon. i applaud it for its egalitarian efforts, and i look forward to a day when my daughter, ophelia laribeestephenopoulos marries william tinswinton, and they become the laribeestephenopoulostinswintons.) dog-sitting is way easy, and it takes the form of me walking in a better neighborhood than my own and eating free granola as i watch ruckus, my charge, chew on an actual pig ear (which is a thing i will always almostvomit at the sight of).

my story:

[also, louie's reaction was "wait, that's it? that's the whole story? that's stupid. that's like saying you almost fell but didn't." which is why i hate him.]

so, last night, around 4:58 a.m. (i am acknowledging the disconnect of "last night" and "a.m.", whatever), i am sleeping in the lawpenroses Incredible Bed. all of a sudden, ruckus STANDS UP and starts howling toward the open bedroom door, which, because of the angle, i can't see out of. obviously, at this point, i know that a gunman is in the hallway waiting (now) for the dog to shut up so that he can come in and kill me. so, i flip on the lamp and start talking to the person not sharing my bed. "man what time is it?" "[deeper voice] man i don't know. shut up, Ruckus." etc etc. i also begin replaying sophomore year's Self Defense gym-credit-class in my mind, but honestly the only thing i learned there was how to somersault/belly flop away from a wooden sword. as time sweats out of me, i remember the time a few years back when i had seen The Exorcism of Emily Rose, the only film after which i had prayed to Christ for protection over me from demons. i switch my fear to demons and presume my wide-eyed peering. i spend eight minutes in prayer and contrition, knowing that the REAL danger lay in locking eyes on a guman/demons and wetting the lawpenroses' Incredible Bed.

ultimatly, this story ends in me falling asleep in a pool of my own anxiety. i survived. that's why louie think's this story is boring. i think he never updates his blog. so it seems we are at an impasse.

the hardest year of my life

2009-08-18T07:12:00.000-07:00

this is how i will remember 25. sitting in a pool of light by a window, nursing a cup of coffee and a small ulcer in my gut. this life is dolce, for sure. and it is tacked, stretched over the canvas so tightly that i think the untacking might be disastrous, flinging clear across the room.

i have begun a lot of things, lately.

i have begun to research kurdistan. my sister is moving there in a little more than a week. i don't have any words for this right now.

i have begun to smell like bok choy because, lately, i started as the barista/expo at a swanky pan-asian restaurant. my nights have become later, my feet have become achier, my vocabulary has become more asianculinary. for example, i now know what congee, sudachi, and tataki are.

i have begun to lesson-plan. come september, i will start teaching a few times a week at a latino community art center. i am teaching creative writing and recycled-craft-making to kids in a low-income community. this is so close to my heart that i can't even breathe.

i have begun to write bylaws. i have, lately, joined the board of an urban sustainability non-profit to continue my work with environmental education and forestry. i have also begun wooing smart people to my court to help me do this, and if you are interested in that crap, holler at your girl.

i have begun to write sku numbers. since selling things at a recycled-craft shop in harrisburg, manufacturing crafts has been squeezed into pockets of my day. a set of coasters when i wake up, a curtain made of slides before bed, etc.

i have begun to love, dearly, the walk from midtown to downtown. it takes about 25 minutes for me to amble from my home, past all of those hanging-ferns-from-porches-wide-grinning neighbors, to the bok choy. that time is mine. it is hot, sweaty, alone, and mine. it slows me down to feel every minute. to see every fern.

these beginnings are filling me up. dolce, sure, but i'm pretty full. i am remembering earlier times in my life when i have been This Busy, and i am gearing up for implications. i am writing apology emails in my mind for all of the times i won't be coming out for a drink. sorry, guys. i am also gearing up for later, and a time of life when i will look back on how dolce this was.

dolce, dolce, dolce.
filling.

making do

2009-08-11T15:39:00.001-07:00

i'm broke almost always, and that fact has formed my backbone. most of what i think of as beautiful, fun or delicious can be made out of things that don't cost much. (exceptions to this rule are college, traveling, and cheesecake.)

how that is playing out in my life tonight is that i am making zucchini hummus because we have so much more zucchini than is appropriate. i got my recipe here. i will let you know if it's delicious.

culinarily,
liz

a poem from awhile ago

2009-08-05T21:45:00.000-07:00

Hiroshima

"let thine everlasting light shine upon us."
- the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6

It occurred to us later, after the light
had burned itself into memory and history, our skin
blanched onto walls, our faces toward God
like unkillable humans, like birds from ashes,
that this transfigured earth never stood a chance.

commerce

2009-07-29T17:09:00.000-07:00

locals! i have begun selling wares at the hodgepodgery on the corner of third and herr streets in harrisburg. dawn and jessica are ze nicest people ever, and the store is full of awesome art and wearable crafts made by local people. AND, it's all recycled raw materials. it's my jam, guys. my jam.

look at all of the store's merchandise here, and look at photos of my stuff below. also, let's make crafts sometime. mm?

Magnetic Poetry earrings

Tile Coasters

Vintage Nixon/ Agnew political button earrings

Clever studs (just the kind I like)

Scrabble Tile earrings

Ceviche

2009-07-23T23:29:00.000-07:00

I live in this sort of terrifying and normal balance between being absolutely smashed-cookie crazy and completely soup-stirring boring. Right now, on my back balcony (which is one of the dearest parts of my Harrisburg life with the pigeons that scream and squawk flingingly past my windows and a chalk scrawling of I Love Betty on a wall across the tangle of backyard over-turned flower pots) right now, half of my clothes drape over the railing to aid in the living of life with a dryer that neither works nor contributes positively to anyone’s carbon footprint,. Instead of soaking up dry, of course, each one of them clothes is drenched in the rainstorm raging down from the clouds and into the gutters. So now, what should be boring has soaked itself into crazy. Dear readers, this is just one of many reasons why my life sits on the plate, delicious and crumbling.

I am remembering Panama. This will be my beginning. I’ll explain, wistfully and with a slant toward literary absurdity, that the trees like green Chewbaccas march toward interstellar salvation. That each leaf trembles, I tell you, is no lie. There is a verdant and mildly frightened breathing in the air, water packed into the wind and down the veins of leaves and into gutters and sneakers and trenches and eyes and flower pots. And yes, there’s a canal. I’ve seen it, friends, and in my mind the khaki swept up and the linen drooped down, machetes gleaming. The canal scrawls a ship eight hours across the middle of the country and quietly mocks the French with each swollen lock of water. To have been French in Panama means that you will have died, grossly, of cholera and have taken your place in a marching band of graves down the mountain in a sort of timeline of failure. You will have attempted to best the Americans by your canal design, a clean cut through the Panamanian belly, and instead you will have died, grossly, of cholera. You will also be remembered as a brasher and stupider older brother to the Americans, nearly toppling the world into environmental disaster because of your crazy idea of having a level canal bridging the Caribbean and Pacific seas, sillily joining ecosystems as akin to each other as French is to Spanish: similar ideas but different in very real and dangerous ways. You didn’t speak Spanish, the French. And for that, you died, grossly, of cholera.

Cholera will be remembered as the protagonist in many stories, including my very favorite dirty secret of Panama, in which the mustachioed big wigs of the railroad company, decades before the French had their silly ideas, operated a slick side business of shipping cholera-ed cadavers of railway workers to medical schools internationally, except for the bodies fallen on the tracks left to be eaten by ants and land crabs. Now that we guard against things like Death By Cholera and Disposal by Ants and Land Crabs, my only connection with such a story is that upon leaving Panama, bug bites composed 13 percent of my body. You could hardly tell I was still chalky white, so red were the fire ants.

In Kuna Nega, a glorified reservation that slumps together one of Panama’s indigenous groups, I saw my first albino. She walked cautiously through the ruts with chalky skin and her umbrella belched open. The Kuna, in heights that come up to my collarbone, have more albinos than anyone. They are regarded as children of the moon and asked to do nothing more than walk cautiously through the ruts with umbrellas. I saw her on the hottest day yet on my bumbly timeline, and later in the din of an air conditioner with my feet slung over the lower bunk, I would imagine her life as something a little bit like French among Spanish. I wondered if she too, crouching low to the ground with the Kuna draped in indigeny, sings the broken meter of the songs belted out low over the din of the television in the town hall. The meter goes like this: one two three four five one two three one two three four five six. It’s boring and crazy. The women wrap canals of beads over their arms and legs, their heads shrouded in fire ant red. Since the move to Kuna Nega, government land slipped to them like drugs in their drinks, the ruts have begun filling with candy wrappers and phone cards. They have begun to learn Spanish, their children sunlit and climbing over an abuelo in the doorway, peering out like television.

I learned Spanish in high school, my final lesson seven years ago. A hole in my memory had leaked most of it, and I was left to English and pantomime much of the time, the Kuna beaming like moons and laughing deeply in their bellies. The children, sunlit and climbing over an abuelo in the doorway, spoke mostly in fish and monkey faces back at me, the camera clicking. Later, in the farmacia, I would yearn for the unimportance of knowing the word for fish as I bulge-eyed the farmacista in a pricey effort to buy rash cream. A delight of a fact but a pain of a reality is that mango contains the same poison as poison ivy. I didn’t know this on the shore of Santa Clara, on the Pacific underbelly of Panama, when I bought a bag of mango from a boy, peering at my American skin like television. I also didn’t know that in Panama, the taste buds yearn for ceviche always, and that this bag of mango had been treated like fish or shrimp or octopus and had sat stewing in lemon and salt until the biting into it would turn up the nose. We would sit spitting out salty mango into the sand and writing ruin in the form of welts under our arms.

Our arms were lain waste to the elements, the albino sun and the soup-stirring rain. We had come to Kuna Nega to begin the muddy task of building a house for a family perched on the edge of a mountain, just above a sewage-y river filled with laughing, beaming children. Ulpiano, the mustachioed father of sunlit children, peered at us from his collarbone-height with a strange mix of appreciation and suspicion of women shouldering cement bags. Upon the understanding that we would be strangling our way through Spanish with him for the entire week, his mustachioed suspicion twisted its way somewhere toward amusement, and his arms built a tent somewhere toward the back of the garden, the maize marching like graves down the mountain. We marched our cement through the mud, the canals of bracelets on the Kuna women clamping their arms to their sides and their land to the government and their candy wrappers to the ruts.

Panama was sweating. Panama was religion marching through the marketplace on bracelets on signs in churches on vials of potions from a Santeria shop, the promise that Santa Antonio would at last bring me a boyfriend if I sipped long enough. Panama was wrapped around our arms and legs, peering into us like television. In my context, in this soup of a life spilling over onto the burners, I am remembering the sliced avocado of that place. I am remembering the curve of Panama, the way it sits stewing like ceviche in a cup, lemony.

between

2009-06-18T19:20:00.000-07:00

the past week looked like virginia. (for four years now, i have led a service trip of yoots to the eastern shore in june. tiny episcopalians crammed on a roof. bugs. laughing, mostly at my expense, and mostly in the form of tiny episcopalians putting my toothbrush in a cup of water in the freezer. this past week was about service. and a sunburned head and no sleep and nailing a new roof over an old woman's crumbling house. and too many games of two-truths-and-a-lie.)

the next week looks like panama. (my dad, sisters and i are going for ten days to panama city with an inter-faith service group to build houses. my houses will probably be poetic and unstable. i anticipate pranks, mostly because my sister sarah hasn't traveled anywhere in the past decade without bringing along her fake vomit. this next week is about service. and nursing a newly vaccinated arm and no sleep and nailing a new roof over some panamanian's crumbling house. and too much rum?)

this, now, looks like my mother's pillowcase. (i have a day between virginia and panama, and so i am in baltimore at my mom's house. today is about catching up on sleep retroactively and preemptively. and a shared coke with my mom. and using her laundry detergent because mine is travel sized and only to be used in a sink in a developing country. )

these are busy times, dearhearts.

where i have spent the last few months and every well of energy i have

2009-05-17T11:39:00.000-07:00

Excited about ArtsFest? Well here's another great event to add to your ArtsFest itinerary. The Roots Music Benefit Show, hosted by St. Stephen's Cathedral on Front St. Harrisburg, will be a jam packed evening of irresistable, toe-tapping, good time tunes. The event will feature a range of blues rock to classic folk jams. Proceeds from the show will go toward planting trees both locally and in Haiti where deforestation has had a devastating effect on the local environment. So at 7:00 on May 23 come join us for a celebration of roots folk and reforestation. Tickets are $10 or $5 with a student ID and can be purchased at the door.

If you are unable to attend but would still like to contribute to this effort, please send a check made out to St. Stephen's Cathedral (with Roots Music Benefit Show in the memo line) to the following address:

The Cathedral Church of St. Stephen
221 North Front Street
Harrisburg, PA 17101

how to leave something

2009-05-16T13:15:00.000-07:00

this is my third to last saturday as a member of the sycamore house. it's difficult to speak intelligently and freshly about the bumble of emotions in my gut. mostly, things have been dear and whole and healing. and mostly, things have been hard and messy and exhausting. it doesn't seem productive for me to try to simplify my reaction, to chalk this up to one long sip of the same drink. even the swell of the room, the lay of the furniture, the tilt of each frame on the wall will seem justsoslightly different each time i see them again from a different geography. this room stinks of the year. for example, here is a list (as i dearly love lists) of things directly in my line of vision that will serve as hallmarks of this year:

1. louie's feet slung over the ugly red couch in our living room. (there is a smear of mud creeping over his heel from earlier today when we were at the world's biggest chicken barbecue (yes i'm serious. the biggest. don't try to tell me you know of a bigger one, because you are wrong.)
2. the peach muffin batter on the hem of my skirt. i'm messy, guys. and i make a hell of a lot of muffins. the peach of it all is that this is the very last of the peaches from last year's kipona festival (we had a peaches and cream fundraiser, and as a result we have been nursing a violent abundance of frozen peaches from sandy schultz's freezer (because our freezer is jammed with all of megan's frozen loaves of lite bread)).
3. arrested development dvds strewn like birdseed. i reckon you couldn't survive a day in this house without knowing the name "bob loblaw".
4. the hole in the wall behind the couch. one time, last summer, that hole was the source of even more bees than bags-of-peaches-in-sandy-schultz's-freezer. as in, there was a bee hive in our wall, and then they burrowed through to the living room. these bees were but one of many in the litany of pests tempered by the residents of the sycamore house (see number 3 in louie's sycamore house top 10 list). ask me if one of those bees stung me in the ass. (the answer is yes.)
5. kate's housewarming candle, a gift from her sister, that when i got ahold of it ended up slouching like babel from being rested on the radiator in the middle of winter. it is the most busted thing in this room besides
6. the rabbit ears atop our enormous television (a grandly generous donation from our patron, todd gibson gibson). the rabbit ears mean that each thursday, after community meal, the throng of faithful dinner-goers crouch around and peer through layers of haze to 30 Rock. (sidebar: the most commonly quoted quip from this gem of a show is "a blahfair to rememblack". no no, i take that back. it's "i want to go to there." but continuing to talk about this will reveal how much television has formed this year, so you know.) also of note is doug's gleaming collection of dvds stacked (like memories) e'rrywhere.
7. a glass of water, half full, on each horizontal surface i see. something i have noticed about life here, this year, is that people drink a lot of water, and our standards of cleanliness have shifted somewhat. for awhile, last year, i felt frantic to clean the living room. now, after having calmed down a little, after rethinking some of my own expectations for community, after having replaced a high-maintenance earthworm sofa for two gloriously low-maintenance kevin's-grandma's sofas that make it look unbelievably cleaner with no effort on my part, it seems less totallyimportant to scrubscrubscrub. (other housemates may have arrived at a different conclusion, and for that i apologize to them.)
8. megan's exercise ball. i mostly remember the time when louie was sitting atop the ball, and craig dalen came flying in from the dining room, an ice pop in each hand, and kicked the ball to make louie fly soaring up into the air, flip-style, nay, nintendo-style, back to his original position. it was one hundred and nine percent the most amazing thing i've ever seen.
9. the mannequin. this has been one of the more divisive things we have ever made happen at the sycamore house. to be clear, there is a mannequin that stands in the corner of our living room dressed in boxer briefs, a silver vest, a santa shirt, skiing goggles, and a tiara. typing the past sentence has clarified for me how unbelievably strange and probably unacceptably jarring the mannequin must be for outside parties. it came to us by the grace of God and the generous hands of wealthy do-gooders cleaning out their basement, and here it stands as a sentinel over our fifty copies of trivial pursuit. so, sorry, guests past and present.
10. my purse, slung over the back of a chair. it reminds me that i am broke almost always, and, that i am about to leave for a greek festival.

the memories are stacked, guys.

Nomenclature (or, nicknames I have held and where and why)

2009-05-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

Little Lizzy: My mother used to sing this to me to the tune of Rubber Ducky when I was young, and then, when I was old enough to like it again

Grouper: Once, when I was learning how to swim in Jessica Choat's pool, my sister told me I looked like one. Later, she would write "hey Grouper" on my wall in glow in the dark glue, and mom would make her chip it off. That's why, a year later, when we moved from Annapolis, my sister would be made to repaint my wall.

Hagar: There's a prayer during the Episcopal service, sometimes, that reads "we thank the God of Sarah, Rachel and Hagar." My sisters names' are Sarah and Rachel.

Comb Girl: Maybe I got a comb stuck in my hair for a long long time and had to have it cut out with a pair of garden clippers. Maybe I was in eighth grade.

Showbiz Liz: I nannied for some Russian children the summer after my sophomore year of high school. You know.

Elizabethan: Same Russians. Similar story.

Liz What It Is: Russians love nicknames, guys.

Ass Monkey: Sometimes high schoolers come up with unexplainable nicknames for their friends.

Laribou: My last name sounds like "caribou" sorta.

Hilaribee: My last name sounds like "hilarious" sorta.

Leez: After high school, I lived for a summer in Ocean City, MD. I lived with a bunch of Eastern Europeans, one of whom was named Polish Magda (alternately Drunk Magda). She pronounced my name this way, particularly when saying "Leez, I'm so drvunk. Vill you go vor a valk vith me?"

Liziferd: Freshman year of college, my roommate called me this. It later turned into:

Lucifer: by her, and the rest of the hall briefly, and then she alone forged on to:

Loose: which loosely sounds like my first name but describes none of my behavior.

Jelly Boobs: Once, later in life than should have happened, i dropped jelly from a sandwich down the front of my shirt, and my roommate Louie said "that's why we always call you Jelly Boobs", which turned out later to be the case.

rest for the weary

2009-04-30T19:58:00.000-07:00

these days are so full and long and lighted like underbellies of leaves. and i have one thousand socks exploding from my closet, not one of them with a legitimate partner. that's not a metaphor, guys. just facts. i have all but resigned myself to living in swill until i move out of this house. i only have thirty-odd days, and since each one will be full and long and lighted like underbellies of leaves, i don't care to make a priority out of my disaster of a closet. this paragraph is shaped like excuses.

i wish your socks a worthy pairing.

a stack of truths

2009-04-10T19:16:00.000-07:00

1. my mother hates moths. there are moths in the living room, and she has stopped listening to my story so that she can climb on top of sundry furniture pieces to grab at them with her bear hands. this choice hasn't been made based on a history of success. also she will probably fall by the time i finish this stack.
2. i finally did my taxes this evening. it didn't take as long as i thought it would (it never does) and i got more money back than i thought i would (i always do). because i filed online, i needed to call the IRS to check my adjusted gross income for 2007. the number doesn't really matter, and neither does this story, but i wanted to tell you that i spoke to a man named frank from the IRS, and he really did warm my heart in a way i wasn't expecting him to. he was funny at least three times, and it gave me hope in this world. five days before april 15, and there is still goodness left enough for frank from the IRS to crack a joke (three times) to a stranger over the phone. thanks, frank. thanks a million.
3. my parents' dog, mollie, ate my toothbrush last night. this is just a quark in the ecosystem of personal belongings of mine that she has eaten. once, she bit through an amnesty international button. and she also ate my application to study abroad in england.
4. easter at the laribee household is characterized by church. i have gone twice since coming home last night, will go twice tomorrow, and once again on sunday. each time i do, the old ladies grab me by the cheeks and tell me how nice it is to see me, and oh, how long have you been home from college?
5. i just received some Spam email entitled, "wear the friend in your pants with pride, confidence and masculinity." no thanks, Spam. no thanks.

cajones

2009-04-01T10:41:00.000-07:00

sometimes i make decisions that surprise me. for example, recently i made a decision to join the board of the YWCA even though i have less free time than our Lord. another surprising decision in all of this was that THEY decided to put ME on the finance committee. that's like putting me on the dancing committee. or the farsi committee.

that decision was surprising because of things like Common Sense and Time Management.

about eight minutes ago, i made a Surprising Decision to submit three poems to the New Yorker. the decision was surprising because of things like Fame and UnFame. but, it was a decision made because of things like Who Cares If I'm Not Famous and I Have Cajones. about three months from now, when i get a nice email from the New Yorker saying "oh you TOTALLY didn't get into this magazine, haha", i will let you know.

here are the poems:

“We kept our sins to ourselves
and they became less troubling.”
-Scott Cairns

My father, too, was a sinner. On the first date, he took her
slowly away from a cautious campus: folded hands bent on nixing
dances, cards and booze. It nixed smoking. It nixed sex.
It nixed profane questions of a god who can forgive
anything but doubt. He asked questions about her childhood
on a Greyhound into Manhattan headed toward pretzeled corners,
toward lovely lonely women, their heels clack clacking,
toward columned halls, the mustachioed art students sighing
confession to the Impressionist squares before them.
Later, there would be browned letters in a crackled album spilling
his story first, and then hers. There would be Kansas, there would be me,
there would be the slow ache of age creeping over their temples.
He grabbed her hand, the first heroics, on the bus, in the middle
of New York, at the beginning of their lives. It was a covenant
that she, in turn, ignored. She feigned sleep, her eyes
smashed in giddy panic. She slept to avoid confession
in the fear that a conversation today could involve more dangerous things
than Michigan and the slanted roof of her father’s home.

I used to believe that God screamed at us

through the blanched wizardry of snow
in riot against a shoutless night. Straggling,
gasping grass in sidewalk cracks. Two cherries
dancing at the bottom of a Shirley Temple.
Last night I saw God hunched half over
a diner table smashing his elbows into crumbs.
Offerings spilled over the ashtray, burning.

I demand the human race

to cease shaking, holding itself
by the fingertips flinging itself
disgusted atop
a folded copy of The New York Times..
I demand air in these lungs.
I demand the sweet, slow shadows of peace
to creep up on us hunched beneath
a folded copy of The New York Times
grinning like children not fearing
the government
the disease
the sweat of thankless toil
the breaking
the have trod have trod have trod
spilling out of us.

I demand singing.
(I demand singing.)

I demand the shaking, at last,
of shackles from ankles of children shaking
in the world (and maybe even in America).
I demand America
to shake out her wings
and perch somewhere else.

i have found what you are like

2009-03-24T06:57:00.000-07:00

i was at work (cafe) this morning earlyearly (7:45). i will never admit to being a morning person as i have come to understand the term to mean: annoyingly unannoyed to be awake. but i'm a pretty good fake, and i can sometimes even convince myself that the sky isn't busted looking when at its thin-slice-of-melon-iest.

read this poem. it's good for you.

i have found what you are like
the rain,

(Who feathers frightened fields
with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields

easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike

the air in utterable coolness

deeds of green thrilling light
with thinned

newfragile yellows

lurch and.press

-in the woods
which
stutter
and

sing

And the coolness of your smile is
stirringofbirds between my arms;but
i should rather than anything
have(almost when hugeness will shut
quietly)almost,
your kiss.

(e. e. cummings)

tiers and fears

2009-03-21T22:11:00.000-07:00

I have zero presence of mind, most always, despite having never taken illegal drugs. (The only possible exception to this was the summer before college when I lived with a gaggle of Europeans in employee-beach-house chaos. Upon my departure, Todd The Head Chef blew his pot smoke into my mouth while I was going in for a hug and saying “weelllllll, byeeee”.) This zero-presence-of-mind thing is annoying and often commented on. An example of this is when Louie told me that he sometimes worries what I’ll do once we both move out and he can’t explain what’s happening anymore. We both laughed and then nodded knowingly.

You should know, however, dear reader, that I put stock into paying attention enough to know where I stand socially with the general masses. And, the lexicon of personal facts I impart to said general mass must be custom-tailored for each ear. I offer a brief explanation of a paradigm I hold to. Borrowing from my sister’s model of the Tiers of Relationship*, I would suggest that each of us delineates importance to our friendgroup based on simple criteria like time spent together, likability, proximity in the Soul Bowl (a theory not to be explained in this blog entry), vulnerability, etc. The Tiers, as we will further refer to them, play out as follow:

1^st Tier: my familiars. These people have probably seen me pick my nose. Sorry, dudes.

2^nd Tier: my comfortables. Each of these people has bought me a burrito, and neither of us know quite whether we owe each other a Christmas gift.

3^rd Tier: my occasionals. I always mean to call these people, and sometimes I do, and likewise I’m sure.

4^th Tier: my forgotten heys. Every time I see these people, I remember they exist. Mostly with delight.

[Note: this pyramid scheme ignores an entire spectrum of human interaction ranging from indifference to spitting hatred. For this blog post, we are interested chiefly in warm feelings (the range being from constant to nearly never).]

The information I impart to a particular tier, obviously, is subjective. I cater my answer to the question based on what I imagine the person wants to hear. We all do this, but since you’ve decided to read my blog, I get to explain my own particulars. And if you think I’m going to offer apologies for the Aryan subdivision and clinical nomenclature of relationship, I mean, yeah. But further study of this phenomenon, specifically with the knowledge that I am a person who wears all sorts of hearts on all sorts of sleeves, I have come to expect certain indicators of familiarity. For example: I say, “I had a dream the other night that Heather Locklear was trying to run me off the road, that bitch.” This is how I imagine/ have experienced the reactions to carry out:

4^th Tier: “Hmm.”

3^rd Tier: “That’s so funny! Listen to this dream I once had about Heather Locklear.

2^nd Tier: “Yeah, you told me that earlier today. Remember? I told you I thought it was funny that you were driving in that dream.”

1^st Tier: “What? I wasn't listening.”

I actually did dream that Heather Locklear tried to run me off the road, that bitch.

The First Haiti

2009-01-19T21:58:00.001-08:00

Encourage your children and loved ones to learn French in high school. They will tell you that Spanish is more practical, but you will remind them that French is the language of cab drivers in Port-au-Prince, and as you are screamed around the corners of Champ de Mars, you will thank this story for the tip. When you go to Haiti, your cab driver will scribble his name (l’Egypte Jan-Couis) and a phone number (3318-3134), so charmed will he be by your noFrancais. A charmed l’Egypte Jan-Couis is no good in a time of duress (your twentieth hour in Haiti), and he will ask you grandly for a thousand gourdes and smile faux-sheepishly when you hand him five hundred. By the end of your time here, a friend will tell you that a cab ride anywhere in Port-au-Prince costs about fifteen gourdes, and you have overpaid like an American. You will curse in Spanish, the language you took in high school.

I’m twenty-four hours into Haiti, on this the day after the birth of our Lord Christ. I ought to be dead, or at least kidnapped, and I found out last night that not even the Gideons have been here (you should know that I’ve never been in a hotel room without rifling through each dresser drawer. These were markedly bible-free.) Of course, I’m here accidentally. I ordered my plane ticket for an arrival twenty-four hours earlier than I meant to, which meant that I have been in Port-au-Prince twenty-four more hours than have been accounted for me. I had been full aware of the dangerous implications of such a miscalculated exposure while sandwiched between Frenchwhisperers on the flight from Miami, twenty-seven hours ago. I let my similarly-aged and dissimilarly-wealthy plane neighbor look at me in horror while I asked her the best way to hail a cab from the Port-au-Prince airport. She breathed a “you’re going to be kidnapped,” flipped her cellphone open to Frenchurgentwhisper to her mother, and then bosomheaved a “we will drop you off.” And then we exchanged names. This is the way it began here: a kiss on both cheeks, a “Joyeux Novelle”, and then an introduction. (The immediacy of affection makes me think of the college-length amount of time I took to know this boy I know before reaching out to hug his shoulders.) My gratitude was clumsy and American and raging through my body as we shoulderbagged through baggage claim and the flickering electricity (the next time a blackout happened would be in the tenth hour of Haiti, in the shower: a choking spout of a thing. I screamed like the movies.) We squeezed past the shiny, clustered grapes of faces offering me rides and guides in a mess of Creole. I smiled Americanly and offered a strangled “No, gracias. I mean oui, no, si vous plait.”

This is my first hour in Haiti, and we pile into the maw of a Suzuki Trooper, a car which I think has a near monopoly on the island of Hispaniola. The other mode of transportation of note is the rickety disaster of tap-taps: gutted trucks and vans with screamingly painted tin shells, visages of pop icons, our Lord Christ, and the scene from Titanic during which they spread their wingspans unbelievable on the bow of the ship. The Suzuki Trooper dogs its way up a hill and connects the dots between potholes. The graffiti forms the shapes of businesses and shacks and restaurants indistinguishable from the other. The colors scream, the people congregate and tap-tap our windows. Hands reach. A woman wears five hats one two three four five all the way up, grandly footing her way past the pepe. When you go to Haiti, you will see stripes and stripes of clothes and shoes sold secondhand alongside the road, and you will call it pepe. I endure, again and again, my story being told in French and Creole (depending on the skin color), and the clutching of necks in horror. My wealthy plane neighbor’s mother bulge-eyes me, and it is translated to me that she is certain I would have been kidnapped, so white is my skin. I overthank them for the ride, an apology for the inconvenience, my noFrancais, the white of my skin, the grease of my hair, the smudge of mascara down my cheeks. I mean it every time. I mean it too when I thank a cleavage-y cousin of hers for explaining what is being heaped on my plate. We have, absurdly, arrived at my wealthy plane neighbor’s family Christmas celebration at an uncle’s house overlooking Port-au-Prince. This is how it begins. We meet in the morning, over the ocean, and by early evening fifty of her Haitian kin cup my face to kiss my cheeks in celebration of this, the birth of our Lord Christ, and in celebration of friendship and joy and another year alive. Introductions come afterward, along with more throat-clutching and bulge-eyeing from the cleavage-y cousins. My gratitude is clumsy and American and raging through my body, and I cling to my wealthy plane neighbor for the slim familiarity she represents. When you go to Haiti, you will cling to slim familiarity, and it will hand you a Kola which will taste a little bit worse than Diet Dr. Pepper but not as bad as Diet Sprite. I step carefully around the Haitians to avoid more face-cupping, and also to avoid Americanly breaking something (which happens immediately after I form the resolution not to do so. It is in the form of Kola-to-table-tipping, and it will happen again twelve hours later on the veranda.)

In my twenty-third hour in Haiti, I am sitting on the veranda of the Hotel Oloffson, a sentence that makes me feel Jay-Gatsbyian. I am a Suzuki Trooper ride, a hotel bed, a movie-scream-in-a-blackout, five hundred gourdes and one Kola past the end of the celebrated birth of our Lord Christ. Still, the Haitianscape has been relatively unmindblowinglypoor. Still, I see the ocean. The trees are still palm and undeforested, and the gingerbread lattice which ridges the porch makes this hotel the most photographed in Haiti. My International Caution lingers despite all this. An American man (who looks like the rest of the American men with khaki and white clothes to match their hair and skin) groans over a missing computer, and I clutch my shoulder bag closer, the American dollars and gourdes marrying in my wallet. I hear my mother’s warnings in my ear, groaning and clutching, and then the computer is found at the front desk, put there by a young boy sweeping beneath the tables. I clumsily, Americanly, unclutch my shoulder bag, and the khakis swish away toward the coconut grove. The next pair of characters on set are a man like Einstein and the nation of Haiti as played by a little girl. She wide-eyes me at the table over, and I can tell she’ll be a story of mine later. The man is gentle in his French as he speaks to her, the white tufts of hair gentle too. His shirt is not so starched, his khakis not so Dockers. They are beautiful and paternal. I ask her if she speaks English in my palsy French, and both smile kindly (which is how I knew I was an idiot, internationally). I ask him, and he says yes with a shrug. We struggle forth, and I learn that six years ago today, the day after the birth of our Lord Christ, he had happened along this child’s swollen, pregnant mother bleeding in the streets. Now, they celebrate her sixth birthday on this veranda. He can’t adopt her, because he actually is a professor of math and physics in Germany, but he comes back occasionally to speak French to her. I make fish and monkey faces to her so that I can see her toothy laugh. And, in the most concrete example in my life that I am a stranger with candy, I groan through my shoulder bag for the candy canes I’d smuggled in from home. After it is clear that my French has brought me to the end of what he can say to me, I thank him for the story and move back to my table. When their food arrives, she shows me every bite and how to chew it. I thank her every time, and I mean it every time. She eats it in small bites, one two three four five all the way up.

My twenty-fifth hour will snake me away from Port-au-Prince. I will gasp again and again as I see hospitals and brothels indistinguishable from the other, stripes of rotting oranges alongside the road, the lottery crippling a generation, the mud, the gutted riverbeds stinking. I will be driven in a Suzuki Trooper, its screaming tires dogging into the mountains. The trees will march fewer and fewer one two thee four five all the way up, and I have just knocked over my Kola. And oh the girl, the girl is scribbling over my notes. And now she has written and unwritten the alphabet, and she is teaching me my vowels in Francais. She spells out her name r i v a l d i n e and giggles at my unHaitian r’s. She scribbles a monster, or perhaps it is me, and holds it up to my camera. It has, at this point, occurred to me at least a thousand times that I am a fool to discourage this gratitude as it rages through my body, and that I am alive and eating avocado and am unkidnapped and in Haiti and a white American and a bit clumsy and all these things happening all at once. I am broken by this Haiti, this cupping of faces and scribbling over notes. This is enough for now. I will learn this Haiti first. I will eat each hour up in small bites, one two three four five all the way up.

so...

2009-01-04T19:00:00.000-08:00

a hilarious reality is that i GOOGLED "dana goldstein" to see whether Ruminate had published it yet and inadvertently found DANA GOLDSTEIN'S BLOG. so obviously, i attempted the leaving of a message that read "yo, we know each other! or else, we used to in kindergarten." but then, horribly, the dial-up connection i was using at my dad's house kirked out, and i couldn't tell if it had gone through. so, i attempted the sending of a message on facebook (when i found here there), and since the leaving of one and perhaps two messages about knowing her (or at least doing so in kindergarten), i haven't heard back from her. i suspect/ figure that i am That Creepy Girl Who Keeps Sending Me Messages.

dammit.

hope and hope and hope

2008-11-05T20:21:00.000-08:00

i watched his acceptance speech, and i cried. i wasn't expecting to, and i don't think it was even the best speech he's ever given or i've ever heard. but it felt like twenty-four years of crying were pressing against the backs of my eyeballs. i'm not who has fought the longest or hardest or most dangerously. i have been, for all intents and purposes, and despite a very real sense of loneliness sometimes and bad haircuts and bad roommates and bad religion, fine. happy, even. but that happiness has been tempered by an ache throbbing in the streets and stretched around the dinner table and fleeing fury. i am learning to hear that ache, and i am learning to want to respond. what catches in my throat is a hunch that something very important has happened here, and a very large number of people tried very hard to do the right thing yesterday. on both sides of the ballot box. i am reminded that i am part of something larger than myself, and that hope is a thing not to scoff at.

and i am reminded that hope is often heard from around the corner, or smudged across the newspaper headlines of someone else's country. tonight, after a day of grinning, i am thinking mostly of ache. in particular, the ache of these women. who throb their broken feet in the streets, who stretch themselves around the table together, who flee. my prayer tonight is that hope is not a saccharine, whining thing in their ears. i pray for reality, and that it is a thing that soothes us.

bless all the things we can't undo

2008-11-04T07:31:00.000-08:00

so, i voted for the first time in a poll booth. (last time was by absentee ballott.) the things i have to say about it are threefold.

1) at the risk of posting this picture more than once on my blog:

2) at the risk of implying that i am not terrified by this child('s hair):
3) at the risk of being disjointed: this past sunday night, we had two parishioners come speak to the youth group about the gravity of the political system, and the ways we should be engaging in it particularly as people of faith. john and kathy, our speakers, had met about thirty years ago when both lived in an intentional community. they learned together to speak intelligently about the explosions in their brains, the way their hearts bled, the ache of caring, the need to chew carefully on truths that should frame the actions taken. and then they got married. and then on sunday, they perched on sofas in our basement, and asked us to speak frankly and carefully about what should be expected of us, now, as we find ourselves caring at all about anything in a world that is dynamic and moldable and broken. (and first, they made us take a revised version of the citizenship test to see how we panned out. like this one. i got an 80%, so that means i only have 20% feelings of inferiority.) i was so encouraged by john and kathy. the conversation was slow and on purpose. the answers were kind. the questions were honest. the talking gets so fast sometimes, and the quotes become meaner, and the future looks bleaker the longer we let it grow mold.

i think about a week and a half ago, i had finally let my exhaustion replace my fascination with this political race. don't get me wrong; i'm feeling invigorated this morning (at the same time as trying to find anti-bacterial hand gel for my voting finger. those polls are a hot mess.) but, like so many americans i've been speaking to, i am ill over the turns this election has taken. at the end of the day, i would prefer to feel good about the dress this country is slinking over its shoulders. and at the end of a year of ripping, we've got a worrisome tatter to our morale.

on a more personal note, i would, at this point, remind the court that there is a glaring beauty in this world if we look for it. and THIS is what i think should be expected of us as people of faith. look for it, oh oh oh oh oh. one of the closest truths i know is that life will be very, very hard anyway, and there isn't much time to gladden the hearts of our friends. so we should try. we should hug, hard. we should share the kitchen to cook meals. we should hide mannequins in our housemates' beds. we should high five the room. i realize there is a silliness to all of us, and i value the silliness in a very serious way. if we are meant to be people who are leaving things better than we found them, then i will be damned if that doesn't mean wiping off some of the mud (and then humorously smearing it across my face). be joyful, my children. be joyful.

and vote today. participate in the mutual joy of those around you. care care care care.

To Dana Goldstein

2008-10-03T21:31:00.000-07:00

(My Childhood Best Friend Who Very Well May Have Forgotten Me In This Gap Of Seventeen Years Since We Were Alive and Seven At The Same Time And Making Primordial and Dangerous Allegiances Binding Us Together Against The Second Grade and Tim Welchons On the Blacktopped Playgrounds of Ossining New York, A Mere Handful Of Miles Up the Hudson From Sing Sing Prison, A Place and Concept I Never Visited And Never Fully Understood The Significance Of Until Years Later And In A Different State When I Watched A Lot of Crime Drama Marathons)

I don't totally know that I believe in God anymore. (I will later retract this statement, but you should know that I mean it in a way that isn't totally safe to express and that has given me heartburn at least twice.) That's one thing that's changed. You were Jewish. Probably you are still alive, and probably you are still Jewish. We're both old enough for marriage, and I would be making another "probably" assertion here if I didn't so totally hate feeling rushed into that absurdity.

Anyway, back to the Jewish thing. I may have known you before I had heard of things like hell and damnation, but there's a possibility that I HAD heard of it and thought you were going there. In the event that that was the case, and if the certainty of a seven year old means anything, I'm sorry for that. My bad. I don't have a talent for certainty anymore, and I usually land on the thought that the Jews are, at worst, a little silly for eating huge stretches of unsalted Saltines. Matza still sucks, Dana. You should know that.

Anyway, back to the God thing. Wait, one more other thing. I am scribbling into a notebook in a coffee shop, a thing that makes me feel sexier than my haircut makes me feel. I remember mostly your bangs: tiny moons of gold(stein) folding over your certain, certain eyebrows. There's this moment when you glance around and catch the glance of the only other person scribbling, and even though neither of you are very attractive, there's still sex in it. There's a knowledge of good and evil, a certainty that the other would know things about caesura and mis en scene and Yeats. The wild gut rush of a possible alternate ending of your life, with your elbows resting on either side of a yellowed sunset porch swing. But when the glances down happen, you are saved by the realization that even though he has an arm tattoo, and arm tattoos are cool, it's a bad tattoo. And now, a guy you remember remembering from college just swaggered in with a guitar to play, and the sex in that has overpowered everything else in the room, canceled everything else out, and the shift in power has numbed you flat, and you can finally focus back on the notebook and God and the present tense and the Jews. I don't totally know that I believe in God anymore. Or else, the stench of theology has finally drifted up to the rafters, and what's left is the hunch of men to the ground, waiting and holding arms out to each other full of bread and dollars and help. Mostly, Dana, I want to believe that we can help each other. That there is beauty left in the corners of this world that hasn't been stamped out by jealousy and anger. I remember once when you invited me to come to your house after school, and I told you I was busy. Actually, though, I had been invited to Shanae's house, and I knew that at her house I would find a swimming pool and Fruit By the Foot and joy and glee. I knew at your house I would find only matza and joy and glee. Mathematically, I was in the right. But I know I wronged you, and even though you most certainly don't remember even me, I am sorry. But Dana, matza sucks, really. I always liked the idea of being Jewish, mostly because I like throngs of family and tradition and community and deep deep holy things all in the same backyard party. And I like the sort of guttural certainty that I imagine comes from stooping low to light the candles on Friday night. And you get to read backwards sometimes, and that's neat. But it's mostly the deep deep holy things and the guttural certainty that I envy, that I remember remembering. My dad is an Episcopal priest. You may remember him (likelier if you remember me, actually). He looks exactly like he did back then, except that his mustache is grayer and he drives a Prius instead of a motorcycle. I look exactly like I did back then; or else, my haircut does. I wear fewer sweat suits now.

Anyway, back to my dad. There's this catchphrase that comes up sometimes in his sermons about God being always pleased and never satisfied. As in, God clapping those old hands in delight over the adorable act of my finally waking up from a month-long funk of disaster, and, the insistence that I learn from this something other than sardonic satisfaction in my own waking. Another thing that's changed is that I learned a lot of words since I was seven, Dana. One of those words is "sardonic." Another of those words is "Russia." A reason I learned those words is that I am a person who has learned to love the learning of words and how they shape thinking and how they fling from the tongue like noodles. So when I hear that God is certain of a delight in who I am but is also certain that I can become even more like Liz than I ever have been, it feels great and exhausting. It's later now, and the notebook has long since been flung across my room into a pile of other notebooks slimly dented by half-strung strings of poems and stories. A secret I have for you is that I have never, ever finished a paper journal. Not even close. My laziness catches up to me and slaps my face around to other things. Another secret I have for you is that threatening the disbelief in God is like a Christian's meth-amphetamine. It makes the heart race. The problem really, Dana Goldstein, is that I really actually do believe in God. Almost every scrap of theology on my table has been slyly fed to the dog while my mom was looking the other way, but I can't quite shake a wild gut rush of a possibility that there really is beauty in the corners. It seems like my faith has stretched along my skin because it's been there too long and I eat a lot of carbs. But I think, despite myself, I have a certainty that could rival even the Jews. I know for certain that you knew me at a time when I was still eating paste and when I didn't understand what "sardonic" means. (I still really don't. I am going to google it soon. I really only know it because I have a house mate who is studying for the GRE, and he talks a lot.) I just googled it, and "sardonic" means "sarcastic". I mean, it's pretty fitting.

Anyway, back to your bangs. There is a beauty that I will always think of when I think of your bangs, and I wonder if either of us would have anything more than hello to say to the other now. Once we had covered paste, prison and the alarming whirl of color in New York leaves in the fall, we would have only smirks and hmms left, I suspect. I wonder what God would say to me now that I have learned a couple things about good and evil. I hope you are well, and I hope you are still Jewish. I like thinking of you that way. I am interested in what you think about God and paste.

Cordially,
Liz Laribee

wisdom

2008-10-03T10:30:00.001-07:00

AshleighHill: I went to the circus last night and then watched the VP debates, which was kind of the same thing.

my sentences are chock full (of parentheses)

2008-09-17T20:43:00.000-07:00

today, i thought i was licked. i thought i would finally yield to the urge to apply for a museum guard job (that reference for julia) in the bush of uganda (that reference to not one but two new roommates who have just come back from years in uganda. it's a weird average) to escape who and where i am.

we talk a lot about who and where we are. (i laugh. i clean. i pray. i eat salsa. i hum. i watch jeopardy. i have really dirty feet.) (i am in america. i am in harrisburg. i am in a community of faithful people, certain of hope and the need to clean and pray and eat salsa.) i have been thinking a lot, lately, about the disconnect between hope and health. i am certain of what drives me (hope), and i am also certain of what i have largely sacrificed to it (health). it's difficult to express comfortably and charmingly what has haunted me these days, and what has haunted me is my worry that i won't have escaped this unscathed. i think for four years of college, i was able to live in deep deep ruts of unbelievably slant patterns to make ends meet and to have a blast and to be the Most Sterling I Could Be. and the elastic snapped me through the following year. and so now i'm at the end of five years of terrible patterns of Overdoing.

it's time to Just Do for awhile, i think.

i have learned, lately, that it is important to recognize i'm drowning even if other people can't see the water. it's important for all of us to do this. that, even if i become an unpopular sort of person, i need to make choices that i suspect i need to make .i'm not entirely sure how to do that being who i am and where i am, but i suspect that i may be overwhelmed by an overwhelming sense of God clapping those old hands in delight that i am finally coming around. i also suspect that i will discover my choices will not delight all human beings, and that is something i will need to get over. i am keen on the thought of joy and air and breath being part of my living. i had a really alarming conversation with a friend who knows me better than i want to admit, and who is not totally sure i have those things in spades anymore. i know know know i want to be a person who is sure of joy. again.

(my dad is a person who knows intuitively how to talk me down from every shaped ledge in my life. tonight, staring coldly into the susquehanna and hugging all kinds of knees to all kinds of chins and slapping a cold phone to my ear and crying out loud for the first time in a long long while, i could hear him reminding me of who i am and that i can stay that way if my where changes.)

craftastic

2008-09-05T08:27:00.000-07:00

O Harrisburg again.

not to use this blog solely as a venue to advertise events i am trying to sell crap at, but i'm going to do that again.

bekah leeper, justin arawjo, jill osielski and i are all selling crafts at Rambo Faire this weekend. come buy some old favorites (awesome tile coasters, glass bead earrings, handmade envelopes and cards) and some new delicacies (post earrings that i have begun making using vintage comic books. pretty excellent. i am currently wearing a pair that read

what is your EXCUSE, "lenny?"

and

you are such a jerk, samson.

i love them.)

and you. see you on sunday.

millions of peaches

2008-08-29T11:07:00.000-07:00

O Harrisburg,

please join us, your friendly neighborhood Sycamore House, at Kipona festival this weekend! Starting tomorrow, we will be set up outside St. Stephen's Cathedral (221 N. Front St) selling

PEACHES AND ICE CREAM

as a fund raiser to extend our ministry. here is an example of what you could be eating starting tomorrow:

Saturday: 12 noon to 6
Sunday: 12 noon to 6
Monday: 12 noon to 6

come by and buy.

also, we are selling crafts! a good time will be had, that is for certain. also, we have a TON of projects coming up that could really use the cash. those projects include:

1) completing the basement! (we are renovating it to be youth ministry space)
2) renovating Sycamore House: Allison Hill (we are starting a branch of the community, and the house needs some DRASTIC repair by the move-in date in January)
3) web space (we are starting a website SOON)
4) after school program (eventually, there is the hope that we can join with some programs in the area to teach craft-making and doing tutoring, etc. maybe we can have one of our own one day?!)

'preciate it.

crumbed and sugared

2008-08-25T19:45:00.001-07:00

we are working again, slapping paint into the corners. sweeping clean. scrubbing off. shelling out.

in the painting of what used to be bekah (1)'s and tiff's room (formerly colored like the inside of a traffic cone and now colored like the concept of tranquility and maybe grassy sage), there have been a lot of moments of silence. lovely, lean silence. the kind of silence that allows for a sideways, painty glance. a high five of the eyes, if i may. (i may. it's my blog.)

Though the air is full of singing
my head is loud
with the labor of words.

Though the season is rich
with fruit, my tongue
hungers for the sweet of speech.

Though the beech is golden
I cannot stand beside it
mute, but must say

"It is golden," while the leaves
stir and fall with a sound
that is not a name.

It is in the silence
that my hope is, and my aim.
A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing
sounds men's silence
like a root. Let me say

and not mourn: the world
lives in the death of speech
and sings there.
(Wendell Berry)

oh my God, shoes.

2008-08-11T09:38:00.000-07:00

my feet are not dainty. at all. i would say the fifth most frequent comment i get, about anything, is how huge my toes are.

this feature has manifested itself in tricky economics, because i am constantly having to replace my shoes. also, keep in mind that i wear extremely cheap flip flops, always, because i am the sort of girl who, if she weren't breaking her shoes all the time, would certainly have misplaced them somewhere, and why would i purchase anything that costs more than 5 bucks?

(another funny story about shoes is that when my sister lived in shang hai, she couldn't find any shoes, ever, that fit her american toes. so we, her family, shipped shoes to her. the shoes had been made IN china. and then we sent them back to the motherland.)

so here we are. my cheap shoes and me. the pair i'm wearing now are about a week from breaking. i can tell, the way the strip tethering my enormous foot to the flap of rubber is waning like a bad date.

white trash

2008-08-08T11:08:00.000-07:00

my friend julia shared an article written by a smarter person than me that exposes some of what's behind the awkward class issues still ruling much of culture. the article confesses for us that we, by harping on the experiences of those at either end of the rich-poor continuum, ignore the guilt and snobbery that shapes most of what happens between those poles. quite honestly, i fit within a bracket of transient middles that waffles between green bean casserole and pesto dipping sauce. i fit around either of those dinner tables and feel like i'm imposing on both. even in the eating of a hummus wrap, i chew on the reality that i bought discount tortillas.

the experience of many of my peers has followed a similar wave throughout their own lifetimes, and in fact, the reality of being unpoor and unrich has prompted the interests and ideals of my (my my) generation. when i was in middle school and Everclear sang about the joys of a welfare Christmas with smarting disdain, we said Hell Yeah and sang along. even though i never DID know the joys of a welfare Christmas, i still felt an emboldened camaraderie with the unrich because i knew my parents couldn't afford to buy me mechanical pencils at the beginning of the school year. and as a foil, i laughed richly with the unpoor at Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel because i knew i was supposed to see his rundown porch and squirrel-eating ways as the Other, the Low, the Hilariously Separate From My Own Experience. and the laughing wholly always went hand in hand with an overarching guilt that i was participating in the cultural skew of ideals. the other night, the same conversation that taught me that my friend smarts at the use of the term "white trash" because of how close it hits to home, also suggested to me that Tootsie Rolls used to be called "nigger toes." (i looked it up, and apparently it was actually Brazil nuts and not Toostie Rolls. either way, it calls for us to bury our heads in hands.)

these are things to work on.

war and pieces

2008-08-07T20:07:00.000-07:00

about twelve seconds after i stir the coffee through the sugar, the talking gets a little more dangerous. we are steered away from the way the cat shapes its belly across the stuff of a chair and toward, dangerously, the way a country can wrench itself from sense and decency, driven to evil by the itch of war. this country is haunted by itself, by an identical outrage forty years ago in kent, ohio, in atlanta, in chicago. and the only difference is that instead of screaming in the streets, we moan to ourselves on flowered couches stirring, stirring. and we haunt ourselves, the knowledge that an undrafted nation means an uneven nation fights the war. that it would be better, dangerously, to gamble on the possibility of a whole nation fighting an unjust war than to quietly moan over body bags full of minorities shipped back home; to let the upper classed clout-filled honchos keep their sons and daughters with them on their flowered couches than scattered brainless across the sand. and we shake our heads firmly, no. so instead we fill our hands with rakes and paint brushes to make our lives, our small worlds (after all) fit the ideal. if we can't fix the Big Bad, we can at least build a Small Good. so we go to college and learn about hope and sustainability and trying, and we learn to read. and we read. we read, read, read. we read enough to realize that things happen over and over again. and there are too many things to know, too many coups and distended bellies and hunted men and scowling women and unfilled bellies and and and and and. and, there is a very clear nodding of a head coming from the television and the pulpit and the dinner table and the apple-desked teacher that yes, we should know more about what is happening in the world. so, dangerously, we listen to the "should" more than the "know", and we convince ourselves that we understand what anything means when we read that it happened on the bbc headline. and we should our way across a thousand headlines, and we never know what happened to bring things to these times, or why, or what to do, or who cares, or when will it all happen again. and it's happening again. and we flop on our flowered couches exhausted. we have the luxury of being exhausted. and should i let the reality of toxicity keep me from the slap of hope across my face? oh, oh, i hope. i hope so many things, and most of them are silly and rushed and quaint and twenty-four, but i hope so much that some of this will become clearer for us, this silly and rushed world.

hahaha.

2008-08-05T06:52:00.000-07:00

food named after celebrities: a list by liz laribee and charlie hoppes

2008-07-29T08:21:00.000-07:00

johnny hash
edith pilaf
john candy
george stephanopolish sausage
melon hunt
robert downey junior mint
britney asparagus spears
jack lemon
olive stone
tom shanks
stewfan stevens
amy winebottle
miley citrus
jean claude flan damme
mike pizza
bread pitt
heath bar ledger
haggis gyllenhall
katie hummus
spam anderson
veal cosby
johnny depp dish
rosanne barr chocolate
captain morgan freeman

we will eat these foods at a picnic. we also welcome your suggestions. and praise.

you should go to this.

2008-07-28T07:20:00.000-07:00

Dresden

2008-07-27T15:37:00.001-07:00

Sure, God hovered over
the face of the deep. Scripture
is nebulous on what kept his attention
so long. That day, his interest waned.

It seems unlikely the deep knew
what was coming: sky spilling over
like tempura, resplendent with color
and looking very much like a mistake.

I doubt the German factories
could withstand so disruptive a Creation
swelling up from the Elbe.
And lo, God stretched out his hand.

pride

2008-07-26T20:56:00.000-07:00

this morning saw a thousand rainbows, mostly in the form of lollipops and boas. the harrisburg gay pride parade marched proudly in heels, in glitter, in clasped hands, in firm nods and loud cars. across my front yard. (one thing about living on the river in harrisburg is that it is a constant flux of funnel cake, fireworks and fests. at all times, there is a thing being celebrated. today, it was the pride of being absolutely who you are.) some of the most important people in my life are gay, and i have found it is a delicate thing to take umbrage on another's behalf. so much of my journey to this point has been an argument with myself about language, about semantics, about the importance of being law-abiding, about the consequences in choosing social justice over the comfort of a shared meal around my grandmother's dinner table. obviously i am a person interested in what happens when we allow each other to be each other, and i have seen that that often takes the form of a humanperson in whom i see godperson. my hope is that it becomes enough to choose goodness, and the politics of it will fall to the wayside. i am headed toward a person i long to be. the longer i practice tolerance and conscience and knowledge and understanding, i find my armor dissolving more and more. it becomes less important to clarify the "oh, but i'm straight. just remember that." i am convinced more and more that my support of my very good friends has to be about them more than what my support implies about myself. we cling less and less, i expect, the older we get.

this afternoon saw a thousand knowing smiles, mostly in the form of a friend sitting in my corner chair and letting me spew my neuroses across my bedspread. i talk too much and not enough. everybody is noticing how dirty my coffee table is and are wondering why i haven't elbow-greased it away. i have, by myself, wrecked the american economy (my bad). halfway through the gauntlet i put him through, i thought again that the most terrifying and beautiful part of this friendship is when we admit the egg on our faces. when i finally admit that i am completely insane. when i can unflinchingly confess my sins and fears and secret devils. it is a comfort to know that people can say very real very scary very unsafe things to each other in the same breath as a chuckle and the assurance that we will watch jeopardy later, obviously, and that there are still dishes in the sink and we will start making crafts again soon and oh, the crows, and there is an assumption of chuckling in the future in different corner chairs with different neuroses and different folds of life scrunched into the seams.

strange dream times

2008-07-08T06:12:00.000-07:00

this is what i dreamt last night. ready?

there is this little boy whose sole purpose is to explore earth
which he does until he dies
and then he becomes a cherub and CONTINUES to explore earth, but with his increased exploring cherub power
which he does until he dies
and then he becoms a higher order angel
and so on and so forth
until the final scene pans back and pulls away from earth and through the galaxy, and the last shot is this trembling, muscular angel perched on saturn's rings and reading a book.

Ashleigh: this is some sort of Mormon children's book.

honor roll

2008-07-03T06:14:00.000-07:00

was something that got me into the paper. like, three times ever.
and now Starbucks is.

hahaha.

all my titles repeat themselves. all my titles repeat themselves.

2008-07-01T18:36:00.000-07:00

i got a $40 coupon to Amazon for helping a friend with a thing, and it resulted in me buying, like, four books and a copy of Rusmore. shipping and handling for a $40 coupon accounted for $16 of the whole shebang.

it seems i could respond to this one of two ways.

Way Number One In Which I Write A Letter of Complaint to Amazon.com:

Dear Amazon.com,

I understand that you are not actually a thing that has a brain or sympathy or debt, but I want to fully convey my disappointment in your actions here today. Because of shipping and handling costs, I had to opt not to purchase a copy of Best In Show. The fact that it's owned by three of my roommates is not the issue.

Outragedly,
Liz Laribee

Way Number Two In Which I realize This is Probably A Good Thing

i worry that i will become one of these guys. in my attempt to cling to pieces of my childhood at the same time as develop a cache of classically hip pieces to pimp my mansion at the same time as dabble in creating economically and environmentally sustainable crafts, i am a girl in the reality of a tiny closet cram-jam-packed with tubs of stacks and stacks of things. couple that with the desire to participate in a lifestyle that embraces a theology of I Have Enough For Now and I Can Stand To Give Away All the Extra. which is WHY the idea to pare down my item count to 100 things is such a compelling one.

i suspect that sheisting IS going on in this risky online purchasing fiasco, and that really the shipping and handling should be, like, a dollar. but i think i will be just fine if i borrow a movie or book in my lifetime instead of having it on my shelf.

i would like to be Happy With What I Have.
i'll work on it.

the wings are wide, the wings are wide

2008-06-21T21:58:00.000-07:00

i've been talking a lot about change recently. i mean, obviously i have. i'm bumping up against the end of a year in this community, and i'm about to lose three roommates to the vein of their own lives. there have been so many moments cramped into the frame of this year, and each of them is pumping through my brain reminding me of things i've lost and gained and learned from.
when listing differences i've seen in myself throughout this year, i land on two which are of particular note:

1) i'm more assertive. (there are tiny slices of this jammed into every corner of my life. perhaps i am navigating the scarily abundant number of opportunities at my fingertips, and the choices choke me into snap decisions. and perhaps the presence of holes in the program and holes in the ceiling forces me into inventing sense where there isn't any. at any rate, i feel ever-so-slightly less agentless in my own life. i feel bullish. capable. sensible. ha, just kidding. i've never felt sensible.)

2) i feel a lesser compulsion to fill silence. (i fall into the category of Poor Souls Who Used to Never Talk At All Until High School, And Now Have Too Much to Say, And Can't Help Themselves, And Nurse Overactive Senses of Responsibility Toward the Social Dynamics at Parties. which translates roughly to a college-long string of jokes and props and jazz hands. i don't necessarily mind that about myself. i think i'm a nice kid. and i think i have cheered up at least nine people in my life. but, one of the most wrenching lessons i have to allow for myself is that the air craves silence sometimes. i am remembering that more and more.)

and i'm the same girl, sort of, but it's like i'm the same girl pretzeled. i like change. rather, i like healing. i like the hunch that i am tilting my axis a little less squeakily. but this sort of List of Things to Do For Self Improvement has morphed into a jigsaw puzzle, and each time i jam a piece of the fireworks in, i realize that there's a stretch of sky going through the tiger's jaw in the corner i thought i'd completed months ago. it's not even the same effing puzzle. don't get me wrong, guys. i'm pretty spectacular. but i could use a turn in the washer/dryer. (if anyone has a washer/dryer that they want to get rid of and which won't shrink my sweaters, gimme a holler.)

speaking of self improvement, check out this guy. named dave.

gay pinder is marvelous.

2008-06-14T22:42:00.000-07:00

(gay pinder is the mother of my boss, churchill. she is entirely southern, and entirely good. she is the sort of lady that makes me breathe easier. i will be seeing her at least twice this next week when i take part in a service trip to virginia with the youth group. you should be totally jealous, because i am going to give gay pinder at least four hugs, and she will give me barbecue.)

(happy father's day, daddy! AND happy birthday! i will, obviously, be calling you soon.)

a recent and formative realization

2008-05-29T22:18:00.000-07:00

for those of you who don't know, i share living space with six people. five of those are actual people, and Dane, a sheltie, is being counted as his own person. the reasons for that are:

1. he owns more things than i do (even though the things he owns are only to be chewed. a mere 33 % of my possessions are for chewing.)
2. a substantial portion of our conversation coalesces around Dane, specifically our suggestions of what he would say if he could talk. (we think it would be similar to, "hey! guess what? guess what? hey! that's all, just hey! guess what?? hey!")
3. he sort of looks like a classmate i had once.[a note on the picture: this is ACTUALLY an etching of a sheltie. in cherry wood. on purpose.]

anyway, back to my realization. since i specialize in a weird mix of cultural references and lowbrow humor, i had taken to crooning "Daaaaaaaane" in homage to the final scene of my dad's favorite film: Shane. the movie ends with our hero slung low in his saddle slumping to the west, and some blonde kid whimpering his name iconically. OBVIOUSLY this was something i had to attach to such a rhymed-name bastion/ dog.

so, assume that this has been maintained since the summertime. fast forward to my final days of working at Starbucks. (oh, for those who don't know this yet, i quit Starbucks to work full-time at the Cathedral.) this fella, Shane, undertakes his training for the world of steamed milk. and in effort to make as thorough an impression as possible before leaving, and because i couldn't help myself, i began announcing his presence by bellowing "Shaaaaaaaaane" when he came through the door.

my realization: i am NOT referencing the film when i do this. i am referencing Dane. the dog. even though my byproduct reference is the exact name of the original source, i think about Dane every time.

this probably has some significance.

emigration

2008-05-26T04:40:00.000-07:00

i'm back from the lovely and talented Mediterranean. i knew to expect a wonderful time, and so of course i was caught off-guard again and again by how marvelous and dear the world can be around some of its corners.

it'll take me some time to write about all of it, so i'll just do it in chunks. up first:

Naples, Pompeii, Sorrento, the Amalfi Coast (all toured on the same day under the steering hand of an Italian delight named Rafaeli. the spelling of his name has been more or less guessed at).

We've docked at Naples, but the pickpockets pick quick here, and so instead I'm kissed on the cheeks by Rafaeli, and he ushers us to his otobus to be skirted past the docks and crooks and corners. The Italians call it Napoli, and I hold the word on my tongue like a bird. Rafaeli drives us through chunks of colored blocks, hibiscus, and triangled valcanoed mountains. Pompeii comes to us fast. Since I've done entirely no research on what I'll have seen by the end of the day, I'm jarred by the one thousand pizzarias and bulbs of oranges straightened strand by strand by a man leaning like Pisa away from his stand. I had thought Pompeii was only ruins, and it is a surprise to see regrown life. We can't see the riots, but we can see that the trash hugs the streets and waits for higher wages to come until it allows Pompeii to tow it away to the dumps.

Vesuvius dumped stacks of ash onto Pompeii for no charge. As Rafaeli drops us off outside ruin, Estefano's sunglasses bark at us to hurry, aniamo, aniamo. The strays bark too, and their long bodies squeeze through sidewalks that tunnel a dead city. The vaulted gate into Pompeii echoes and aches with shadowed bricks and cracking frescoes. My sisters frame their bodies into polaroids, and I snap snap. We are too slow for Estefano, because we want our faces in pictures alongside the frozen dead, the surprised bodies, alongside the crumbling pillared Apollos, alongside Pompeii. Estefano is needing now, yes, to show us a premium example of stone bakeries. We aniamo, please. Snap snap later, please. He is echoed by The Ladies, their American necks burning. "Now hurry, girls." We are always called girls by women. But I feel like a woman today as I breathe the dust, as I peer into eyes sunk into ash to ash to ash. As I glint into a sun blocked mostly by American necks, among the long-ago dead I feel particularly alive.

I am kissed on two cheeks by a gracious and newly-paid Estefano. I climb into the bus and am trucked away from destruction and toward Sorrento. Sorrento is, to me, a plump gnocchi after the ash. We crowd into the carnival and look look look down ivied avenues and stiletto shops. The breathing explodes with gelato, and it seems absurd that these people won't strip off their costumes later and slip New Jersey into their mouths, puffing and hacking in the movie set trailer. Rafaeli snakes us down the streets, hugged too with rioting garbage, and we I Spy out the window at Italians. Rafaeli lives in Sorrento, and his cursing gets more familiar as he calls out the close drivers by name. We practice our arrivedercis with all the necessary flair it takes to mambo with Italian. The view gets waterier as we drive toward lunch. Slices of the Mediterranean interrupt our oohs, and we are choked with it.

The waiters grin their tans and teeth at us. I long for Italian, and I fumble and crunch too Americanly. The olive oil drunk slaps the table in eggplant and crusts, and the gnocchi clumps down my throat like Italy. Rafaeli joins the other tour Italianos in a restaurant across a shared stretch of dirty sand and stray dogs, the boats crowding. Later, he will eye me with a grin in a woodcarving shop as I chew his language between my lips and spit it out clumsily. He forgives me again and again for my sin, and instead points my shoulders back to the bus. We leave the garbage and the wide stretches of cobblestones and houses, and we hug the water on the rib of the Amalfi coast. We weave back and forth against the slapping blue, and opera bathes us over the radio. The olives fall. The lemons.

you're a wasp nest, you're a wasp nest

2008-05-04T10:58:00.000-07:00

last night, we saw the National play a show at Messiah. the lyrics drip, man.

I know, I know the nations past. i know, i know they rust

2008-05-03T09:20:00.000-07:00

in a week, i'll be eating peanuts on the plane stretching me toward the mediterranean. for most of may, my family and three old women will be pilgrimming around, kicking God's dirt into our sandals. besides the normal america growing up (trucking around the states and into the mexicanada places), and three visits to northern ireland in college, this will be my first legitimate travel experience (which of course means that i am vastly unprepared and will attempt my return to the states without my passport and with two turkish rugs under my arms) . i never studied abroad in college, which is a regret of mine. it made sense at the time NOT to, but it's also true that i don't have much to bring to the table during Florenceconversations, which happen comparatively often. i'm glad for the opportunity to travel now, at such a formative time of my life, while i'm young, while my sisters and i are incrediblysingle, while we all have our knee caps. and, i'm aware that this being Baby's First Trip Abroad means that i will be starkly changed. more than i'm admitting, more than i'm guessing.

i like the idea of a pilgrimage at this point in my life. life is normal, these days. the patterns and shapes of my days are ones i've worn already. i'm ready to see what surprises me about myself, and i hope that i will find God in the corners where maybe i'm not expecting to.

all sentences in this post will end in "wii."

2008-04-30T14:11:00.005-07:00

the sycamore house has a wii.

more truthfully, Steve has a wii, and we will never let him move out of the sycamore house, wii.

i can't write anymore. i have to play the wii.

coffee, writing, diabetes. (and porn.)

2008-04-29T13:26:00.000-07:00

so, here we are in starbucks. [a note: i work at starbucks. i understand you're annoyed about the prices. sorry.]

writing is a very, very good thing that i never do. neither does tasha, and that is why we're here. we've decided to get together and stare each other down until we both tremblingly grip our pens to the page and spew our wonder over the margins. of course, the number two (over easy with wheat) came first. and so did the long amble over the sidewalk while we compared childhood haircuts.

she tells me, "one day i'm going to write a book called 'artists never have real jobs, and that should be okay.'" i tell her it'll be a hit, but on the inside i think, "yeah, but i mean, i really do need health insurance." i think about the dull ache in my left knee leftover from the days of tray hockey in the back of Friendly's, when weighed down with scraped-clean ice cream vases, i stepped like an elephant to my clumsy ruin on the floor before the dishwasher. i think about the two-thirds of fake that make up my right frontal tooth, a temporary patch for a mistake i made when i was sixteen. one day, the patch will wear, will wane, and my looks will fall to the floor in a quarter inch of plastic. i think about the diabetes God splurged on my family members, and the fact that i can't hear very, very well anymore (see below entry for an ironic parallel to my hearing loss).

some days i feel very, very human.

i love writing. it feels like waking up. like i'm coming back again. for awhile there, i was crazy. liza minelli crazy. olive loaf crazy. and now, with the ear buds and the sips of African Red Bush tea and the crazy sunlight slapping my face, i remember what this is like. it's been awhile since i've felt like i have enough creative energy for writing, or crafts, or singing. i'm coming back again.

tasha tells me that one summer saw her working in woodland hills, ca, which turned out unexpectedly, to be the porn capitol of the world. the garage she worked in was, apparently, a testament to that fact. this is a crazed world, friends, and each of us has unexpectedly worked in the porn capitol of the world, i expect. while there, i suggest writing about it.

an open letter to ear buds

2008-04-28T18:28:00.000-07:00

dear ear buds,
you worked really, really well for about eight minutes. then, when your spit-thin rubber rim fell off after that eighth minute, you fell out of my ear during each chorus of mr. jones.

i hate you, and i forget how much i do until i'm at the gym, and i'm gross and sweaty, and you fall out of my ear and get wound around the handle of my eliptycal machine. i hate you. you are on par with silence.

hatefully,
liz

Early in the Morning

2008-04-11T19:37:00.000-07:00

While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher's ink.

She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.

My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.

But I know
it is because of the way
my mother's hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.

(Li Young Lee)

i have a virus on my computer?!

2008-04-10T19:43:00.000-07:00

that's all.

buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

2008-04-08T15:51:00.001-07:00

a temptation of mine is to Jazz Hand the world into a better mood. this trait has very unfortunately tended to run rampant, and i've been confronted pretty consistently by veryhonestpeople about this personal deficiency of live-and-let-live. part of me nods slowly along, gently mumming myself. and part of me knows that What Makes Me Me includes that temptation. and part of what i like most about myself is a wish to help out, to clean up, to razzle dazzle. so this tension is oftentimes just fine, and oftentimes an absurd joke told to a sleepy morningtime customer who wants only coffee and NOT an absurd joke.

each morning, i arrive veryslightlylate to starbucks to open up shop with Big Dave Little Drink (so called because he is huge, and sometimes i make him hold the tiny sample cup so that i can laugh at how much bigger he is than the cup). because we've worked together for strings and strings of days, we've gotten the dance down pat. we brew, we mock, we high five. it's comfortable to the point that when i open up shop with someone else, my dance is thrown off and i am Too Many Words and Not Enough Meaning. i am too many sentences tumbling out of my own mouth, and every third one of them sounds like a line of buffalo.

buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

so today, when i opened with someone else, it catapulted me into a snatching, snarling version of myself. the self i like least. the self as a cornered wolf, overly defensive to otherwise harmless jabs, unable to interact with even the dopi(o)est of customers without feeling markedly stretched. i, of all people i have met, handle my bad moods least gracefully. most especially because i hate feeling cramped and whiny, and the desire to overcome my whiny-ness becomes unbearably poetic and valiant, and i annoy all parties involved. i breathe irregularly when i'm grumpy, which is something that louie told me about myself. (he also said i breathe irregularly when i feel sorry for people, and when i think something is interesting.)

but the day has petered nicely into submission, and i have remembered that there are many, many cures to this. one of them is trivia (which, coincidentally, we go to each tuesday night at Ceolta's Irish Pub should any harrisburgers want to join us). another is African Rooibus tea (which, coincidentally, is my favorite tea of all time). another is remembering that i am liz, and that means that I Really and Honestly Believe That People Can Be So Good For Each Other.

tonight, i wish trivia and tea and goodness for you each.

the good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow. do good anyway. [mother theresa]

a stumbling, an oversight, a blunder

2008-04-07T20:14:00.000-07:00

i should have included amish beard jeremy in my list of nicknames. you'll notice that on HIS blog, in HIS post about the dopio bastard, he spells it "doppio," which is one p too many if you ask me. and i think, by reading my blog, you just did.

p.s. the final sentence in this post was plagarized.

ashleigh hill

2008-04-02T07:56:00.000-07:00

is one of the brighter spots in life, i expect. and she reminded me that april is national poetry month. you should expect poetic things in this life, and certainly, on this blog.

Habitation

Marriage is not
a house, or even a tent

It is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back, where we squat
outdoors, eating popcorn
where painfully and with wonder
at having survived this far

we are learning to make fire.
(Margaret Atwood)

To Know the Dark

2008-03-27T11:08:00.001-07:00

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

- Wendell Berry

good. friday.

2008-03-20T18:53:00.001-07:00

If I'm going to be honest with all of us, I've not glided so harmlessly through my days as I would like each person here to think I have, and that sometimes I leave finger prints on photographs and muddy footprints on rugs and gossip in ears. In the end, despite any well-wishing on my part, I will have left unintentional Liz-shaped bruises in each life I encounter in any significant way. And that's just the unintentional bruising.

My life, and I suspect many other lives gathered here, are riddled with ugliness, with pettiness, with avoidable pain inflicted when I figured the other guy had it coming. Most of my regrettable decisions I made when I felt fully justified in making them. Christ's words "they know not what they do" sound too kind to be applicable. Most of the time, I know exactly what I'm doing, and in attempt to make a name for myself, to save myself embarrassment, to make a point, my actions skew the axis of whatever world God would have chosen for me.

The tricky part about grace is that the hardest thing in the world is the admission that we need it. Grace and forgiveness can seem, as Donald Miller writes, like charity. Like needing food stamps. Needing grace, help, forgiveness, is a very unpopular trait in our world. The declaration of need falls on our ears like failure. Like we aren't making it work ourselves, like we can't cut it, like we need a huge, huge break. We have the hunch that needing help means, in essence, that we have lost our dignity, and that everyone in the room, can see our blundering plainly. Inevitably, in the end, I'm struck with the shame of my humanness, and there is nothing to do but admit it and ask pardon for the blunder. And it is this person, even me, that Christ forgives.

Frederick Buechner writes, "we are welcomed not as the solid citizens that our Sunday best suggests we are, but in all our tackiness and tatteredness that nobody in the world knows better than each of us knows about ourselves–the bitterness and the phoniness and the confusion and the irritability and the prurience and the half-heartedness." It is at the cross we are reminded that God extends grace even to the most delusioned of us. Even to me.

We are created in God's image, which, I have a hunch, means that we are engineered to go crazy if we hurt people, or when we inevitably DO hurt them, to ask forgiveness. Perhaps even more difficult is our own extention of grace to those that don't deserve it. Equally riddled in our lives are the names of people who have personally betrayed us. Each one of us, right now, is thinking a name of such a person. It is what makes Christ's words impossible in our minds.

From our historical vantage point, we watch Judas kiss Christ on the cheek every year. And every year, Christ forgives the kiss on the cheek. The significance of this is more than emotional voyeurism; more than our rehearsal of sadness on Good Friday before the joy of Easter. It is the terrifying reality that we too must forgive the kiss on the cheek.

Anne Lamott writes, "not forgiving is like eating rat poison and waiting for the rat to die." Holding fast to what has harmed us will be our undoing. There is a deeper peace to be had, and as the hymn goes, "let it begin with me." I am, we are, called to participate in the healing of this world, in the ushering in of the Kingdom of God. The root of this is the reconciling of Christ to the world, in an aching sweep of grace. With this grace, he pulls us up out of the mud and puts us to work.

We are closing in on the end of Lent, which means that we were supposed to eat less chocolate. We were supposed to jog a mile longer than we usually do. We were supposed to trim or not trim our beards, or something. Anything. Whatever addiction rules me, I was meant to fling it frantically to the wind with all fingers waving wild. That flinging of chocolate and beard trimmings was supposed to sit stewing in my guts to remind me of what God is. And what I am not. And why that matters.

I suspect a life of intentionality requires a harrowing look at my own shadows and admitting where light isn't. I thank God for the presence of people in my life who tell the truth when I need some of it in my ear, and who continually show me grace in my daily fumblings. When I can myself admit that these fumblings exist, but that they do not necessarily compose the fabric of my life, I am able to breathe more deeply and see that your fumblings don't necessarily compose the fabric of your lives.

Admission of guilt, a plea for grace, has become a way to let myself be known by God, I suspect. to know that God will see even this, and in this, to forgive. It is my part to allow that forgiveness to breathe new life into the corners. One of my favorite Mennonite hymns reads, "to write the love of God would drain the ocean dry." The cross brings us face to face with this God and the waltz he invites us to.

i like this poem.

2008-03-20T11:23:00.000-07:00

In our secret yearnings we wait for your coming,
and in our grinding despair we doubt that you will.
And in this privileged place
we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we
and by those who despair more deeply than do we.
Look upon your church and its pastors
in this season of hope which runs so quickly to fatigue
and this season of yearning which becomes so easily quarrelsome.
Give us the grace and the impatience
to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,
to the edges of our finger tips.
We do not want our several worlds to end.
Come in your power and come in your weakness
in any case and make all things new.
Amen.

(Walter Brueggemann)

if cher could turn back time, would she maybe not wear assless chaps?

2008-03-18T14:55:00.000-07:00

i suggest, yes.

nickname times

2008-03-14T07:59:00.000-07:00

some of you may know that i tend to give (as well as encourage the giving of) wildly apt nicknames to the more bizarre and wonderful characters in my life. here is a brief rundown of some of the more prevalent/relevant:

nick perfect: i am not going to pretend that i don't remember his full name, including the middle. this guy. oh, this guy. when i was a freshman in high school, he was a junior in college. we sang in the same briefly-existing band together. he had this hott, and i intend that second t, scar on his chin. so hott. anyway, he also had a girlfriend he was interested in, and then he moved to russia.

paul the fountain guy: a rediscovered friend, actually. but at the genesis of the nickname, he was just a fountain guy. which means he scooped ice cream at friendly's while i forgot to wait on my tables.

summer camp: this name refers to chris rogers, a boy i know from college, and whose demeanor embodies the abstraction of the concept 'summer camp.' you know exactly what i mean. blonde, tossed hair; shell necklace; perma-tan; jovial demeanor.

joycey joyce: a youth group member named joyce. joycey joyce sounds like juicey juice which makes me laugh out loud everytime.

shandy: probably my favorite. a lady works on the first floor of our building. for a long time, it was unclear if her name was sandy or sharon. thus, a marriage. we now know her name. dooooesn't matter.

crazy bible guy: a customer at Starbucks who is crazy, who is a guy, and who taps his bible to tell me that the Lord's goodness is behind that tricky kindness in his eyes and the cup of coffee i hand him.

my sister's dreams are more interesting than my life

2008-03-10T10:14:00.000-07:00

in one, my roommates and i sold the sycamore house under the cathedral's nose, and then we fled pennsylvania because churchill came looking for us.

in another, and in her own words:

Rachel: so i was in this horrible plane crash
me: rachel, your dreams are so self-important
Rachel: shut up. only half of us survived, and they brought us in this room and then the plane people were like, "we are so sorry this happened but we have a surprise for you."and in walks obama! and he gives this great speechand we are all so happy, inspired and forgive them. then he says "um, i need to talk to rachel." so everyone leaves, and he says, "my divoce papers went through. i am now free." and then we make out. hahahahah

this was left as a note under the pop tarts post. i'm serious.

2008-02-25T14:54:00.001-08:00

The pop tarts sound like a very thoughtful gift. She had to have known how much you like them in order to know how appreciative you would be once you saw what she did for you. It must have been a special occasion. No matter what the occasion is nothing shows a person how much you care about them like jewelry. Especially something like a dimaond necklace. They may be expensive but there are other ways to get a hold of them. Like logging on to http://www.mydovechocolate.com and submitting the most creative way to say "I love you". The winner will receive a 5.58 ct diamond necklace that is worth 21 thousand dollars. If not jewelry, then of course chocolates. Purchasing a customized box of chocolates and having a personalized message on the wrappers would also make a great gift for a male or female. You can also pick the color of the foil that it comes in. I work for My Dove which is how I am aware of all of this onformation, and wanted to share it with you.

also, i am very openly listening to sinead o'connor

2008-02-24T08:57:00.000-08:00

i'm in the middle of an accidental vacation. right now, this minute, i'm supposed to be attending a seminar on Safeguarding God's Children, a seminar which will tell me things i know and agree with, but because of which, i will be certified to hang out with kids. so instead of certifying anything, i am wheezing all of my insides into a kleenex and gaping listless at the dog who is barking at me to tell me to, oh please, let her outside, but i'm pretty sure you all know that i'm not going to let that dog outside, no sir. i am also nursing my over-developed sense of guilt which is nudging me gently and calling me lazy for
1) not becoming certified to hang out with kids
2) not letting the dog out
3) not having filed taxes yet
4) wearing my dad's socks instead of going down to the laundry to find my own
and a whole host of other, small, kind of dumb things to feel guilty about. i figure that guilt is excellent for the skin, and someday i will glow unprovoked.

i was supposed to go back to pennsylvania this morning, but my mother made me stay in bed. i was grateful in a coughing sort of way. and it also makes me think of all the things i have to say to my roommates. or not to say to them. we could talk or not talk for hours and stil have things to not talk about.

but, it's nice to sit quietly on the couch and let rachel braid my hair and tell me about international development, which i don't understand because of all the Sudafed, and here's mom with that sugar-free chocolate pudding we had allllllltheeeetiiiiiiiiime growing up and which is kind of clumpy, and dad cackles when he reads aloud the movie reviews. and the dog has grown older and quieter, and she doesn't eat my bras anymore. thanks, the dog.

so now, all i'm missing is sarah, the sycamore house, and my health. and wealth. (fill my needs as you see fit.)

matching

2008-02-22T17:34:00.000-08:00

my mom has a wonderful way of knowing that when i'm bone tired and throat sore, the only thing that will feel wonderful will be plaid pajamas. yeah, you know the ones. matching pants and top, the waist stretching wonderful down to my knees. (plus socks and my dad's sweatshirt.) immediately, i am eleven. my bangs are cowlicked, my tummy is sore, i want to drink only YooHoo.

and i feel wonderful.

the best gift i have ever recieved

2008-02-21T07:31:00.000-08:00

tashya leaman, one of the dearest people i have befriended, which is a recent thing, presented the sycamore house with Trivial Pursuit Pop-tarts. i don't think i need to emphasize how apt a choice she made.

tashya, i'm sorry i didn't capitalize your name but DID capitalize Trivial Pursuit Pop-tarts. i hope you understand.

fireside chats.

2008-02-17T11:16:00.000-08:00

i didn't grow up with a president that meant much to me. i remember hating george bush sr in, like, first grade. which is of course something i heard from mom, which is of course something she heard on talk radio. and then there were the clinton years. which were also my middle school years, and i was too distracted by boys and acne to pay attention.

and then george whatever bush.

i have never considered myself political. certainly, at least, i have not put much faith in the idea of the political system being the source of social change and redemption of a broken world. and to my discredit, that has made me a little lame in the conversation. but quite honestly, i feel bogged down with the effort to weed out what i can believe from what i can't believe, and push-and-pull-polity makes me want to nap for two days. the choices i make and the things i care about are going to look the same, i reckon, regardless of who sits in that chair. that has been the case for the last eight years despite my suspicions that our president is dangerous and stupid. what i regret is the equation made between the love of peace and the hatred of the president. my inherent longing to be looking toward a leader i respect has been unmet in that role. this country is a long way away from the fireside chat litany. my source of comfort has had to come elsewhere. and while i feel a little politically lame, i also find a swirling, boiling energy looking toward others who seem to know how to wipe the mud off. you know. like gandhi. and tiffany derewal.

and in other not-necessarily-supporting-my-thesis news:

my dad sent me the link to this video of Barak Obama brewing his magic with extremely politically sexy faces humming and strumming along. he also said, "And I don't wanna hear no nonsense about this being pure, unadulterated propaganda. Of COURSE it is. That's what a good president does when the president is at the president's best."

and in the spirit of cynicism, you should also probably look at this and this.

the top ten truest things about me*

2008-02-08T13:01:00.000-08:00

1. i never listened to hip hop growing up, and that has caught up to me in much the same way as never-playing-video-games did when people started talking about Wii and Guitar Hero all the time. anyway, a redemptive moment happened this morning when i correctly identified the singers of "what a man, what a man, what a man, what a mighty good man" as Salt N' Pepa, and NOT En Vogue as was being carelessly splashed around.
2. since laziness has dictated that i use mostly lowercase letters, i get a stab of panic in most sentences when i recognize the value in clarity. like, it'd make more sense to you The Reader if i were to capitalize "salt n' pepa" for instant recognition as the proper noun and not the condiments. sure, the n' is a tip off, but it comes a hefty third of the way through the term.
3. i have a fake tooth, and most days i wonder if THIS is the day it'll fall off. (it's been a temporary fake tooth leftover from when i was 16.)
4. one of my favorite ways to fall asleep is on-the-couch-just-left-of-the-conversation.
5. i tend to use outrageousness as a defense mechanism. my friend mollie told me that one of my standard closing greetings followed the format of
"well, i'm sure [insert ridiculous claim]. goodnight!" such ridiculous claims have included:
-i'll buy you a pony one day
-you'll become a nun before TOO long
-al gore could have invented the internet
and other such factual atrocities. it probably has to do with not knowing how to ease out of a conversation gracefully, and so i revel in ungrace.
6. i use strange hand motions when i speak to accentuate the point. actually, i contest that as a top ten truest thing about me, but i've included it here in the knowledge that those who know me best would notice its absence from this list.
7. my skill in games is exceeded only by my love for games. if you are trying to plan the perfect date with me (and certainly i hope that's what's happening, internet readers), please include either trivia or scrabble. i'm not picky. but i'll kick your ass.
8. leftover from my days as a baptist pastor's kid, i'm verrrry conscious of the fact that the word "ass" was used in that sentence. and i will probably have deleted it by the end of this listing.
9. my concern for crass-free language has sort of been trumped by my hunch that it doesn't really matter.
10. i love fruit on my salad. try me. i bet you can't find a fruit i wouldn't want to eat on salad. exceptions: fake fruit.

*these are not the top ten truest things about me.

waking up

2008-02-01T20:33:00.000-08:00

in one of the more ironic twists of fate in my life, i have taken a part time job at Starbucks, the whore of Babylon, or whatever. the health benefits situation, however, is enough for me to have sold my soul. and so, i have resolved to don that corporately green apron and steam your soy with flair.

this means that i now wake up at 5:00 am each morning for my 5:30 am shift. (so does louie. his shift at Cornerstone Coffeehouse, the foil to my Starbucks, starts at 5:45. so he is my very intentional ride.)

i don't think i have to describe how terrible this situation is. at the end of a full shift of work, i'm still able to greet customers with "good morning" (i leave at 9:30 am). that's char-ay-zee. it also means that now, at 11:39 pm, i am already two hours past my ideal bedtime. i'm exhausted. i feel drunk with how sleepy i am. and this is not necessarily a feeling i expect to have left while my employment there lasts. the problem lies in the following:

1) i wake up at 5:30 am.
2) i am sort of lazy.
3) i get done with my second job (in the Cathedral office) at 2:00 pm. in theory, still plenty of time for a nap before normalpeople get home. however, i feel unbelievably guilty sleeping in the middle of the day when i'm supposed to be The Change I Want To See In The World, know what i mean?
4) if there is someone awake in my house, i desperately want to be awake. and talking. or playing trivia. which means that i go to bed at my PREVIOUSLY ideal bedtime, ignoring the CURRENT ideal bedtime like the heel slice of the loaf of bread.

last night, i woke up on the hour for four hours. 1:00. 2:00. 3:00. 4:00. the next time i woke up, it was 5:30 am, and louie was standing over me saying "get up. we're late."

and it's true. we were late, louie. my bad.

breaking up with college

2008-01-22T17:14:00.000-08:00

thinking about a pony doing anything is funny, but especially if that thing is boxing. i imagine a mane of silver billowing in the prairie winds, a tossing of an indignant neck, and then a left hoof hook coming out of nowhere to level the competition, a cowboy, splaying eastward toward the barn. whinnying. hilarious.

this is a recent realization. the pony thing. tiffany and i are drinking varying degrees of lattes while she reads bits from the newest installment of the 2007 Best American Non-Required Reading out loud. one of those bits is a list of the funniest opening lines to stories about ponies, and sure enough, one such funniest opening line was about a boxing pony. the pony thing isn't really the point. when you're an english major (which is a recommendation), you'll learn that nobody will really want to read what you write without the help of a hook, a sort of involuntarily brilliant compulsion to keep with the text. the pony was my hook.

(side note: two women, shirking their day jobs, are sitting at the table next to us. and one son or another has come along, and whoever's-son-he-isn't is being introduced as Gloria, a woman met in the supermarket on account of the fact that she was wearing huge earrings. the unGloria woman was also wearing huge earrings. i tell you right now: my heart warms to a world where huge earrings can lead to this close and wild murmuring in a corner coffee shop. there is absolutely no reason to remain strangers. they are talking about parenting and addiction and pain and beauty. Gloria the unMother says, slowly, "i am such a spy." she doesn't even know.)

(oh heck, another side note: a wrinkled old couple of married people just sat down, and as he had handed her the salad, his half-sandwich toppled over the edge and thwacked its fate on the floor. i, along with everyone else, glanced away to give him the few moments of privacy needed to decide Whether to Eat the Sandwich Anyway Even Though We're All Pretending Not to Notice That's What's Happening. and i, along with everyone else, flitted my eyes back in time to see that dusty first bite. good for him.)

my point is just about to come into being: it is so, so hip to pretend to be done with college. a friend and i were mourning academia the other night, and she told me that she'd dug up an old scholarship essay and shuddered at each dripping "community", "holistic" and "vocation." we howled at ourselves. the thing of it is that i secretly regret language that so accurately describes my vantage point. those words smack so heavily of a very narrowly packed four years of process. and now, upon graduation, i have had to become a commentator on the process because i am no longer a part of it. and that is a drag, as lame and weak as it is to confess, especially on the internet. my roommates and i have talked about how strange it feels to hang out on campus, even though it's fifteen minutes away, and even though some of the dearest people i know are still students there. i think i'll admit to feeling ultimately panicked that i'll find myself in a life of chronic gestation if i don't hold my formative experiences at arm's length, ah yes, and see them necessarily as things of brevity. even though i'm not half as smart or articulate as some cats i know still IN college, i must still chalk it all up to a flash in the pan fling of the past. and now i'm on to an experience i can grow old with. that experience is, of course, owning a Sheltie. yes yes, Owning A Sheltie is the new Being In College.

actually, now that i'm thinking about it, the ponies are relevant. and so are Huge Earrings and the sandwich grandpa. i want life to be irreparably important. i want to be chilled through with caring so, so much that each of these things have a place to be and be known and be scribbled about on the backs of coffee napkins. i want this to be what i'll have learned by the end of it all. and very honestly, it is a TREAT not to be graded on anything.

this post is about resolutions.

2008-01-03T20:15:00.000-08:00

for this new year, i have carefully selected three fully formed promises to myself and, indeed, the world.

1) i resolve to get any use at all out of my YMCA gym membership. [one time, about a month ago, i was in the fitness room breathing heavily and looking bleary-eyed. i was also shuffling through the magazine rack. suddenly, i became immediately interested in not shuffling through the magazines anymore. and i swirled, not unlike an elk, into an easel of health pyramid information. i was also, at the time, shamefully losing the battle of keeping ear buds in my ear, which meant that waves of music smashed through my head sort of occasionally. anyway, the easel went down, and a mildly attractive man helped me set it back up. and by that, i DO mean that i laughed-too-loudly and watched while he set it back up. i am hoping not to ever see this man again which makes my resolution kind of contrary.]

2) i resolve to write more letters. [one of my favorite memories of writing a letter was when i helped louie send a thank you note to Kate Winslet for having been the ultimate source of a get-to-know-you game he had played with his staff. we sent it in an envelope made from a tax form. later, the letter was sent back because Kate Winslet hates gratitude.]

3) i resolve not to buy a beverage until i have successfully drunk and/or given away at least half the tea in our house. [in an unrelated story, our new roommate Steve moved in today. he brought a new cat with him. the cat's name is Fresh Prince.]

happy, new.

An open letter to the town of Lititz (or, Merry Christmas)

2007-12-23T20:59:00.001-08:00

Dear Lititz,

everytime i think about you, i notice that my name is right there. in you. l-i-z. it just has an extra tit added in the middle (which probably never did anyone any good).

after thinking about my name, and an extra tit, i also think about lyle lovett , john lovitz, and that chorus number from the musical Chicago about some foggy man whose name i can't remember but which probably sounded an awful lot like Lititz since i think about it every time.

merry Christmas.

cordially,
liz

murder

2007-12-05T08:12:00.000-08:00

for weeks we exploded out the door at dusk, roaring at the sky and clanging our unwelcome toward the trees. get out, crows. no roosting here, no sir. for weeks. okay, you bang those blocks together. what will i use? there's a tostone maker here in the closet. you press it in at the middle, and it folds your corn maize in half again and again until you have a tostone. what's a tostone? i'm not sure, but i think it's puerto rican. but, it clamps loudly like palms, and anyway, we're out of wooden blocks. there aren't even any crows here. it's a hoax, a trick, a sleight of hand. for weeks.

we laughed out loud, clutching our sides from aching of how funny a story we'd found ourselves in. the wooden blocks were to be banged firmly together, a firm banging reminder of how unwelcome they were. it seemed like fiction between two yellowing book covers: the vein of life twisting in and around on itself until it arrives at the age of twenty-three in an old mansion with friends and no dollars, and then the wooden blocks are found in the mailbox, a note that reads "for the crows. it's important. bang these together at dusk." all i could do was clutch my sides, bang the blocks and know the crows would never come.

it was this irreverence that caught in my throat that morning. there was a shouting from her bed, a nudging on my shoulder. my window screamed with the moonlight, the high rises. and the crows. the walnut tree dripped crows like honey, the shrieking in the wind, the swirling. crows spilled and looped around branches, five thirty on the clock. they clamped their beaks like palms, mocking our blocks. daring us. they had won the morning, the tree, the yard shadowed.

we yawned the window and shrieked back to them. we insisted, our voices swelling above the morning. one by one, the murder flapped slow, black wings like sailboats across the waning night. the sky teemed with beaks, wings, talons. the shadowed ceiling above my window waltzed back and forth, a line of crows leading away from our walnut tree. i shrunk back to bed, certain of a defeat that had taken place.

blogging

2007-11-20T23:06:00.000-08:00

is hard. not for any particularly noble reason, but more for reasons like "i'm too busy to blog. i spent all of yesterday catching up on season three of Project Runway, and now i have to take a nap." time is, of course, money. and the blog (the opposite of time) is in direct conflict to money. while i am blogging, right now, i am also in the act of not earning dollars. (in the event that you like to play devil's advocate to logic, please send me a hefty check, and i will be proven happily wrong.)

it's true that i can Not Earn Dollars while doing a host of other activities, luging, for one, but blogging offers a more sinister reality than luging. my reasoning:

1) blogging, says wikipedia, "can sometimes have unforeseen consequences in politically sensitive areas." in contrast, "The rules are fairly simple in luge." the choice is clear, here (rhyme intended).

2) if you blog, your title is "blogger" which sounds grumpy and dull. if you luge, your title is "luger" which is only funny and redemptive.

3) luging is very similar to bob-sledding, and Cool Runnings is a teriffic movie.

i think, though, that the real reason i sometimes resist maintaining a blog in any capacity, why my online journal will ultimately end up as a failure in the pile of broken, brittle branches of the Internet Christmas Tree, is this: i enjoy being mysterious. this kid in high school once told me that i was the least mysterious person he'd ever met. at the time i pretended to think this meant that i was honest and a little bit like Laura Ingalls Wilder, but now i'm certain that even in high school, i was struck with a gritty, primordial fear that i was a gnashing heap of spilled secrets. no cards close to THIS chest, no sir. but regardless of whether Kid in High School guessed my (un)secret, i still enjoy the illusion of being shrouded in intrigue. it was for this same reason that i enjoyed not owning a cell phone for as long as i did. i loved the fact that at any given moment, i was completely unaccounted for, that no (un)emergency would need to befall my ears, that i was free of responsibility to a tiny humming box of obligation (see the part of this blog where i mention being embarassingly interested in watching Project Runway for irony).

to sum up: blogging is a tiny bit evil because it promotes no money and unforseen consequences. luging is always great, and i have terrible conclusions.

commerce

2007-11-15T16:02:00.000-08:00

the posting of the following crafts (handmade by us here at the Sycamore House) took me eight hours today.

it took longer than it should have.

please take a look here.

if you're interested in ordering anything, please email sycamorehouse@gmail.com

a correspondence.

2007-11-08T11:17:00.000-08:00

Dear McSweeneys,

Tomorrow is my last day working for the Pride of the Susquehanna Riverboat. I haven't regretted the decision to quit at all except for once, a week ago. I went to the post office as I always do at 11:00 am sandwiched between Dunkin Donuts (where a woman named Keepta has stopped asking my order and instead smiles like a train track and reaches for the Reduced Fat Blueberry Muffin. My favorite.) and the bank (where Flirtatious Josh, as my roommates know him, works. He still hasn't asked me out yet.)

When I got the mail after my muffin and before the compliments, I saw a piece of junk mail addressed like so:

Riverboat Liz
Harrisburg Area
PO Box ***
Harrisburg, PA 17108

And it was then that I knew. I knew that this will have been the only time of my life when my very identity would be swept up in the swift paddles of a river vessel. (A note: while working for this organization, I have had to serve pasta salad to the Red Hat Society as well as dress up as a pirate occasionally. Once, I got to serve"Susquenanas", chocolate-covered bananas in the spirit, nay, the Pride of the river.)

Let's keep those paddles turning,
Liz Laribee
Harrisburg, PA

a poem. please critique.

2007-11-08T07:13:00.001-08:00

Tangerines, in bags, in season,
camp like soldiers on the floor
of Kansas: kitchen corners
hold us chaired, the peels chanting

to the floor in triumphant piles
of fire ants. We are five fingers
of a family hand, dug knuckle
deep in five bags. We heap, we

heap. Later we will sweep up
sooner, linger less. A sister
or two will hold hands (a boy
or two). Our bodies lean, we will

see Colorado. We will burn and peel
our coats, triumphant like birds
from ashes, flinging madly into sun.
Our youth will hang dripping, round

in the trees. When we are old,
when we've seen enough Colorado,
I will hold my mother's hand at a zoo
in Washington. She will remember

as elephants camp like soldiers,
graying at the temples. She will
peel her glove from my fingers
and hand me a tangerine.

to be looked at

2007-11-07T07:40:00.000-08:00

according to the bbc, attractiveness is a head-long gaze.

my sister sat like a photograph from behind, her hair streaming in sunlight over shoulders, gently clipping wisps of barbie bangs into place. i burned, i pined with envy as i roped cabbage patch yarn through a rubber band.

both dolls gazed dumbly back into our eyes.

i want most to sit and smile together. (julia sanders)

2007-11-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

a confession for you.

i worry a little that my kindness has dripped slowly away like the ends of ice-pops, stuck clinging to the plastic but mostly gone. the more i sink my teeth into friendships, the more i think it stings. i have cultivated a brash sort of joviality, and i sort of think that when i'm going for the gentle-chuck-under-the-chin-you-devil-you, i actually wrench someone's jaw from their joints. and that's just a shame.

the problem, as far as i can tell, has stemmed directly from interaction with children (the choice of that word is meant to be a gentle-chuck-under-the-chin-you-devil-you to devon powers who i think reads this). i'm involved in the youth group at church, and there is no quicker way to forge friendship with that demographic than by calling them sissies. mocking their shoes. feigning horror at their taste in film and music. She's the Man? surely you jest.

i swear to each of you: stardom is at your fingertips via mild abuse.

all i'm saying is that i want most to sit and smile together. i am trying to re-learn kindness. i dearly wish to be nice to my friends. i hope you know that. i hope you know i wake up each day brimming with things to say to you. perhaps i'll give up sarcasm for Lent this year. i mean, it's clear that i won't, and that i will likely continue rubbing you raw, but it certainly means only good things.

oh gosh.

yes anderson

2007-10-30T06:06:00.000-07:00

i argue that wes anderson could film dentist chairs and still swoon up an audience. last night, we saw The Darjeeling Limited, his latest, and a film that tasted exactly like i hoped it would. anderson excels at swaggering us toward a standing ovation.

evidence:

1) imperfection. the wrenched noses of owen wilson and adrien brody are a cinematic high five. all i ever want to do, ever, is to look at their noses. as wilson's character peels the gauze from his smashed face revealing nine thousand scars, brody's says, "it'll add character." my bet is they had to shoot that frame at least twice to account for the knowing laughter from all three (jason schwartzman has a mole like kansas on his face).

2) props. each frame explodes with a thousand, tiny important things things things. the attention to detail is ridiculous, and i get the impression that wes anderson either overpays his props mistress or else drives her crazy with micro-management. but i refuse to intervene, because a million images stick to my ribs after seeing his movies. in the prequel short film, Hotel Chevalier, a shadow box of butterflies flashed across the screen, and i have thought about it at least forty times since last night.

3) india. is so hot right now. whether it's a benevolent discovery of a culture or the social bastardizing of globalization, america hearts india. i dread the reality of an entire culture being a postcard for american consumption. but anderson does well to jump aboard the train of what seems to be a national fascination. there is an eagerness for what we paint as a holier, hipper culture. i think we have the hunch that all indians are staring furrow-browed at us, waiting for us to catch up. like the brothers in Darjeeling Limited, we are pretty sure our souls would run a bit cleaner if they were draped with marigold garlands, bent mumbling to the ground of crushed incense, hovering in a temple canopy of trees.

4) dignity. this is, as far as i can tell, anderson's beating pulse. the character development in each film of his that i've seen, i think most especially in Royal Tenenbaums, highlights the struggle to remain fully intact and without a life bubbling in shame. as his characters pull on their father's prescription sunglasses, peer into the mirror and shave their hair and life expectancy back, and save latin, there is a dull thud in the gut that if these things were ignored, the secret would spill out that we are wallowing clownishly before the world.

and other things i haven't thought about yet.
peace to you.

the tiger springs in the new year. us he devours. (t.s. eliot)

2007-10-26T10:48:00.000-07:00

pennsylvania is beautiful in a way that sneaks up on you. i live on front street in harrisburg. the river snakes past our windows, and episcopal children hurl walnuts at each other in our backyard. we fold paper into envelopes. we bake apples and pork together. we snap photos of ourselves blowing bubbles into the air above the walnut street bridge, the businesswomen power-walking past us in floral skirts and keds.

(i see that i've listed sort of sleepy things to describe what life is like, but it's actually more like a tilting-head-back-screaming-laughing-chopping-onions thing most days. we fold paper into envelopes every single night because we need to sell a certain number of them at each craft fair. the walnuts stain our feet when we step on them. i haven't cleaned my room in a full month. we have had to call an exterminator for the cockroaches AND the mice, and the dog barks when our friends visit. sorry, guys.)

i am trying on new habits these days. the most notable of these is staying put. i'm not used to making a choice to remain in a place. i now live in an intentional community with some of the most beautiful people i have known. part of me is going stir crazy being so unutterably here. i've made a long history of shaking the dust from my heels in different places and with different people and wearing different styles of just-so-slightly shabby clothes. now, i'm trying to learn something from breathing the same air over and over. letting my jokes get old. cleaning the same room again. letting the floor boards stub my toes again. i am trying to let the smoke of friendship settle into a deeper thing than i've let it be before.

i love so much about how life is unfolding itself tirelessly. and, i so absolutely need a nap.

i know it's too late to begin an account of life these days. too many things have happened to catch you up to. i should have written one bajillion things down into the corners of napkins while they were still happening and then responded thoughtfully and with a sensible number of literary allusions. but i didn't, and there's nothing any of us can do about it now. instead, let's dance.

this will mark the third blog i'll have kept in my life. this is probably further evidence of wanderlust. i have wondered what that will mean for me in My Potential Life As A Famous Writer of Literature. the situation is this: i am embarassingly lazy and undisciplined in everything except for facebook maintenence. this re-entry into writing is an effort to curb that sloth. it's an important thing, i think, to say things. out loud. (side note. on the flipside of this personal mantra is my wild annoyance with the assumption that everything is worth saying. i am a really nice person. but i think that MUCH room has been made for inexcusable art. i am referencing thomas kincaid and petra here. sorry, petra.) (and while we're talking about it, i have made some pretty awful art. even very recently.)

but, i think the idea of working out one's mumbling thoughts in a public square is a tiny bit redemptive. it seems like a helpful thing to have a cache of writing at hand, especially because reading old writing is extremely embarassing. you know. humility. in all honesty, though, i will wince at these words in probably two months. and that is probably something to worry over. perhaps all of this self-improvement leads me to impatience with who it is i'm improving.

i hope i don't wince too whole-heartedly.