Just Showing Up

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
 — God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut (1965)

The past few months have resulted in a slew of close friends experiencing personal tragedies of life altering variety – breakups that necessitate new digs, terrifying arguments that necessitate breakups, and coronary crushing losses that necessitate trips to see ailing or deceased family members. In each of these cases, friends turned to me. For advice, for a sounding board, for someone to listen, for a place to stay, for a trip to the airport. It's made me realize that despite the perennial state of single that most of the people I cherish exist in, we fill in the traditional roles of life partner for each other on a regular basis.
Amidst all this life mayhem it dawned on me that being the kind of person who shows up, who offers chauffer services and a comfy couch, who figures out appropriate distractions at necessary junctures are surely the qualifications I'm looking for in a life partner of the romantic variety. In holding myself to those standards, I would like to think I'll attract someone who values and lives by the same set. Sound logic, right?
Recent history is out to prove me wrong. Narcissism is a sharp-eyed, well-armored weasel who rides in on a dark and frothing bull named self-loathing. And self-loathing doesn't easily see someone else's needs, let alone cater to them. We've all seen Mean Girls...
I am regularly astounded by the realization that men who have treated me badly are clearly not the people they present to the world. I have a tendency to be attracted to the performer on stage, the person most engaged in the conversation, the kind of man who looks you in the eye unwaveringly. Too often I've seen that once you crack that charismatic shell, once you start paying a little more attention than the average flirt, you see the flicker of doubt flit across their faces. You see the fear when they realize you just might expect them to live up to their own hype.
Reading into this dichotomy a little more thoroughly, I found some alarming statistics. Mostly, studies have focused on body image and dissatisfaction with weight in females, but a few studies have compared male body dysmorphia to female body dysmorphia. A study from the Australian Psychological Society revealed that over the last 3 decades male body image dissatisfaction has more than tripled from 15% to over 45% in western societies. The authors go on to speculate that where once men had defined roles related to income ability and social status, those markers of self-worth have been somewhat eroded by the emergence of equal pay and social status for women. Consequently, the author's theory is that straight men's self-image has shifted fuel sources from their careers to their physiques. Social norms have convinced us that men are generally stronger than women, and their egos are aching to prove it now that the women around them have solidly staked their claim to advanced degrees and lucrative careers. It would be a curious study to see if there was a shift in self-perception affecting gay men over the same period. It could serve as a way to tease out if women being able to support themselves was really a culpable catalyst.
If I buy into this theory (jury's still out), I can't help but lament a society that teaches its citizens that the most attractive and important characteristics to show off to a potential partner are big muscles and a substantial pay check. I'd much rather bask in the mutual adoration of a shared partnership, where someone's concern for me and thoughtful attention wins the day (and night, obviously), and I don't get penalized for treating them with the same consideration and admiration. It seems the dating issue I run into and hear about most often is one of self-esteem. Men who have been trained from a young age to respect but still coddle women have realized that they no longer need to take care of and provide for a woman. These men have been hurt by women who had the ability to walk away when the situation was no longer satisfying. These men now don't believe that they will be appreciated beyond their facade – WOT stats, fancy car, stage presence. They are frozen in action, desperately wanting, but terrified that they might not be liked when the curtain falls and the lights come up. So they retreat, better to live to fight another day, right? And another, and another, until the fear of middle age supersedes the fear of being vulnerable or, more likely, they choose to be with someone who is not their intellectual or career equal.
I'm sure this pattern exists in equal measure going from females to males, too, and I realize I've slopped an entire gender into a single self-defeating bucket. But for me, right now, from my own myopic camera one and camera two (really, I'm super blind, guys!), this idea rings true. The closest I can come to beginning to fix such an intractable, entrenched societal problem like low self-esteem is to encourage everyone to go out of their ways to be kind to one another. Kindness is very different than being "nice". Nice can be false and flattering, aiming not to injure in the current moment; kind thinks long term and aims to be forthright and truthful in the interest of maintaining respect for and from the other person. To be more specific, don't ever ghost on someone or fail to show up. Call, text, send a carrier pigeon or a smoke signal, something, even if the news is bad. If your erstwhile romantic interest chooses to shoot the messenger, you've just freed yourself from someone who would not have been able to appreciate your perspective anyway. Showing up matters, even in a break up.

"Day-um!"

This morning dawned with a decided air of reluctance. Thin dishwater clouds skimmed the horizon, fading the potential blue of the sky to a shade I’ve dubbed “spoiled milk”. In short, I considered showering, then tied my hair up and put on three day old jeans instead.
Given my residency in the state of disarray this morning, you can imagine my surprise when a man leaving the metro walked towards me, moved to block my path to the gate, and quite loudly said, “Day-um!” while looking me up and down.
With overly false glee, I replied, “You really think so? Just what I needed today, validation from a stranger! Gee thanks, homeless man!”
The guy furrowed his substantial brow, hunched his shoulders, and muttered, quieter than before, “I ain’t homeless.”
“Could have fooled me. But I guess you weren’t looking for my opinion on your appearance either.” I mime a mic drop while walking into the station, leaving the newly homeless letch to nurse his scalded ego. Provided he was smart enough to even figure out the parallel.

Don't think of an apple, think of an apple.

Many people have told me, “I just didn’t get the artsy gene” and “I can’t draw at all”. In my experience, however, art can be taught, but it’s more about seeing than doing. You also have to test what the materials can do, how the pen feels in your hand, pressed against the paper, before you say “can’t”. On the other side of this pendulum are the people who tell me, “I’m just no good at math” and “I can’t add to save my life!” They have failed to realize that math is a process of building blocks, advancing understanding incrementally. You miss one piece, and everything past that is Greek. And much like drawing and painting, you have to test the materials yourself. The epiphany after the 34th problem on the multiplication worksheet, when everything suddenly clicks into place and patterns emerge from digits, is breathtaking.
Observation and practice are often ignored in the presentation of both science and art. Scientific papers, news releases, and resulting technologies based on those discoveries focus on results, not on the process of controlled observation and repetition necessary to arrive at those decisions. The finished painting looks effortless and immediate, and the years of studying objects, light, and color or the way a specific pigment moves using a certain brush are discounted by the viewer. Talent steals the spotlight from years of dedication and obsession.
My cousins used to ridicule my drawing skills as a child because I couldn’t draw a perfect face from memory. Their one friend in class could & in under 10 minutes! Why couldn’t I draw that well? At the time I found it embarrassing, like I had to hide my talent and my love of drawing in order to not be compared to this unknown other artist with a photographic memory & Xerox-like reproduction abilities. Years later, during my painting BFA at Indiana University, it occurred to me that looking and actually seeing what was in front of me was one of the most difficult things about representational art. It takes time and an ability to let go of our cultural abstractions of the world around us in order to create a painting that breathes, that feels like there is air and distance moving within the two dimensional plane. The lexicon we’ve attached to everyday objects have such a strong hold on us that we often fail to see things as they are and instead see them as we expect them to be.
Take the example of an apple. When I say apple, some of you will see the word “apple”, likely written in the childish script used in children’s textbooks when teaching the alphabet*. Another group of you will see a red bulb with divots at the top & bottom and a bright green leaf and brown stem protruding from the top, all outlined in heavy black cartoon lines – the pictogram of an apple. Very few of you will see purely darks and lights, reflections and shadows, blending into one another along some edges and contrasting starkly at others. All three images are understood to represent the same thing – you can imagine the crunch of its flesh and the juicy tartness of its taste and know it to be an apple. Each holds it’s own place in our visual language, but only one is truly seeing without the bias ascribed by our short hand for an apple.
When you think about light and shadow, actively seeing the colors and contrasts instead of only the common idea of the object, you start to see a completely different sort of abstraction than the pictograms used to name everyday things. The kind of seeing where you stop calling a thing what you expect, and begin to trust your pure powers of observation, these are the bounds where both great art and great science begin to cross.
*Weird aside: The word apple would feel really wrong written in the same font as the movie title Dead Alive or even in Edwardian script. Equally jarring is imagining the word zombie written in the font of a Blow Pop. Something about it seems wrong and darkly comical, like a Hello Kitty Storm Trooper.

Inoculating against fear

Ever notice how when you first hear the sickeningly sweet strains of that Miley Cyrus song you've heard approximately 48 times in the last fortnight, you automatically start tapping your foot, maybe even singing along? Then once the chorus kicks in you realize that Miley's antics make you mildly nauseous, but now the song is stuck in your brain like the saccharin pink bubble gum that it is. But initially, in the split second before realization you think, "Hey, I like this song!" Just don't blurt it out to the attractive stranger standing next to you in the elevator, okay?

People more readily like what they find familiar rather than what they perceive to have higher quality. This phenomenon is called the mere-exposure effect, and was first documented by Robert Zajonc in a series of experiments he conducted from the 1960s to the 1980s. One of the experiments identified the mere-exposure effect in people choosing characters from a group including some unfamiliar characters as well as some they had been primed to recognize consciously. The subjects were more likely to pick out the characters they had seen on previous visits. More interestingly, they were also more likely to pick out characters that they had been subliminally primed to see. Flashing the characters extremely quickly on a screen, faster than could be perceived consciously, produced the same mere-exposure effect as consciously seeing those images.

Zajonc took the conclusions one step further speculating that if recognition initially produces warm fuzzies, then novelty must produce fear or avoidance. He observed both this fear effect and that multiple exposures made the stimulus less novel and, therefore, led to less fear.

In Baba Brinkman's 2010 album The Rap Guide to Human Nature, he remixes an old Christian fundamentalist sing-along called There Ain't No Bugs on Me to point out that the lack of exposure to all kinds of culture, and the cultures that proliferate with them, might just be the problem that leads to xenophobia and racism as well as to shingles and measles. People living in large cities are exposed to germs and to ideas. Our bodies produce immune and emotional responses to these in turn. As ideas become more familiar, we become more capable of responding positively to them, instead of with fear.

The final leap I'm willing to make, a triple axel of a leap for some and a small skip for others, is that we can and do inoculate against fear of the unknown, fear of the other, and fear of novelty in the same way we inoculate against measles, mumps, and rubella: by exposure to milder forms of the hair of the same dog that would otherwise bite you. I'm not talking about hangover cures here, but I am talking about one of the most wonderful consequences of living in a place and time that allows us to access novelty of culture, religion, ideas, political views, and especially cat videos in abundance everyday. This constant influx of the new and exciting, combined with the interweb's echo chamber effect means we not only have access to what was novel two weeks ago, but in those 14 days that shiny new idea has become ubiquitous. The special bonus of all this connectivity is that if someone's herd has been exposed to the new idea, they can protect others by having a calm & collected, even accepting, attitude about what's novel for the person who missed last week's dose of culture.

Sorry, friends, but the curve of our existence bends towards tolerating, perchance even liking, that new Miley song!

Serendipity & a dead cell phone

The trouble with newfangled, fancy cellular devices is that rarely is anything about them universal. Including, rather unfortunately, the cords we use to charge them. My friend Phil recently got one of these new "phones" complete with it's own charger... that Phil conveniently left in Chicago when he came to visit a few friends in Washington, DC. His phone could handle about two days without being charged. He was here for four days. This story begins on his third day here, in the frigid January air at roughly two in the morning somewhere, somewhere in the U Street corridor.

I spent my evening at a party billed as the Obama-rama Pajama Party in honor of our newly elected President Obama (he was a total no-show, but we figure he's a bit busy what with saving the world & all). Slippers and Obey t-shirt adorned, I was enjoying the ridiculousness that comes from seeing all your closest friends in bathrobes, boxers, and eye masks, imbibing the finest the kegs had to offer, which, quite honestly, was not all that fine, tho perfectly good for such an occasion. At some point in the evening I texted the address to Phil in hopes that he would join in the fun, not really realizing that every text just might be his last.

When the rest of the party was well into their fourth, fifth, or sixth beers, and I had long since switched to water in anticipation of driving a friend's car back to my house, I received the last phone call made on Phil's phone during his DC trip. He was lost somewhere on U Street, cabs were non-existent, and it was horribly, face-numbingly cold out. Just as I was describing which store I would meet him in front of on U Street, his cell phone gave up the ghost. We were officially incommunicado, and my only hope of finding him was to troll up and down the street in a borrowed SUV searching the sidewalk for his black puffy coat, the only identifying characteristic that might stand out against DC's constant stream of black and grey trench and pea coats.

I started my U Street reconnaissance mission around 11th Street, driving slowly towards 16th, and Phil's last known whereabouts. A group of young and obviously intoxicated brave souls who had more than likely shut down the bar were waving frantically for the only taxi in sight as I passed 16th Street. None of them had on a black puffy coat. I decided to pull over to make one final last ditch effort to call Phil's powerless phone. After a text message and a straight to voicemail call, I flicked my turn signal to pull back into the ever thinning traffic, only to see out of the corner of my eye a black puffy coat worn by the person walking past my passenger side door. It was Phil!

I honked the horn because there was no way I was getting out of the car in slippers and thin pajama pants, and Phil turned, ready to be mad at whoever was causing the unwelcome din. I waved frantically and rolled down the window, ripping my hat from my head in hopes that he would more easily recognize me. His annoyance turned to disbelief as he opened the door, peering inside to make sure it really was me. He stood there with the passenger door wide open, momentarily awed that I had actually found him, until I insisted he get in and shut the door because of the insanely cold draft the open door was letting into the car. As it turns out he had been considering the merits of finding an unoccupied park bench to sleep on because he had lost the slip of paper with where he was staying scrawled on it, just in case being completely lost and not remembering the address of my friend's party wasn't enough.

In the end, I drove us back to the now dying down Obama-rama Pajama party, made sure Phil had a beer, and enjoyed the rest of my evening, feeling mildly like a superhero. At least I saved one person from a chilly night fraught with the perils of a DC park bench, no thanks to cell phones!

Nine feet of hat

Walking in the front door to my parents' house is always a glorious visual assault on the eyes. Usually, the onslaught consists of all the oil paintings and mission style furniture I'm used to, a few new objets d'arts, and the latest of a constantly changing stream of exercise equipment (more on this later). The front room in our basic four square on the near north side of Indianapolis is brimming with oriental rugs, dark wood cabinets, and gilded frames on contemporary and century old paintings alike. It's a veritable kaleidoscope of patterns and colors.

This year, however, upon jostling open the old wooden door with its beveled glass panes, I managed to trip over a beach-ball-sized white sphere, a little too plain to not be suspicious in such a melee. I picked it up in order to inspect it, and maybe even discover it's purpose in my living room, lying on the floor between the elliptical machine and the African spiked sword hanging next to the front door. I found that it was trailing a stretch of red material coming out of a black plastic trash bag. I continued pulling the ball up until my hands were over my head, and I figured, at about five foot seven inches of me, plus my arms in the air, this thing had to be about six and a half feet of fuzzy white ball and red felt, but the red cloth was still filling the bag. I abandoned the ball & started pulling on the cloth until I came to a fuzzy white band about a foot and a half in width. I was holding the largest Santa hat I had ever encountered. Most likely the largest Santa hat anyone had ever encountered.

So I did what any sensible person with a nine or so foot Santa hat slung over her shoulder would do. I threw it over myself & started doing a cross between the robot & the sprinkler. The potential for tripping over the extraneous material at my feet was monumental, so I stuck to mainly flailing my arms around until I could no longer take the heat (that many yards of felt get stifling) and began searching for a way out.

The next day family & friends would be coming to our house for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner of spaghetti & meatballs. It's traditional in my family anyway, turkey & gravy be damned! Mom wanted to move the elliptical machine to the garage so that guests would not have to navigate around it's hulking presence. I had a better idea. The giant Santa hat fit nicely over this most recent instrument of torture masquerading as exercise & completely blocked the view of our front table brimming with Christmas cards, yet-to-be-paid bills, Dwell and Vanity Fair magazines, and solicitations for donations from my high school and college. The tepee sized mass of red felt also created a more festive mood considering that the living room lacked a Christmas tree.

My dad later informed me that the Santa hat's intended recipient was the seven foot tall brick sculpture of a serene head, with eyes closed and a slight Mona Lisa-like smile, that we had helped install two years ago with the artist James Tyler. He had sculpted the head out of clay, then cut the clay into bricks and fired batches at different temperatures. This made some of the bricks appear glazed almost blue while others were standard reddish brick color. The sculpture is equipt with speakers and motion sensors so that when pedestrians stroll past, the sculpture starts making any one of a dozen random noises, from honking cabs to saxophone serenades. It's a surprising din for a head with such a calm expression.

Dad's plan was to install the hat on the head and gather our family on one side of it for a "calm amidst the consumer storm" family Christmas card. The day after Thanksgiving my mom and I ushered the family dog, Star, into my brother's miniature, red gas-sipper and drove downtown to the sculpture site to meet my dad & brother in order to orchestrate this Christmas scene. Mom & I were taking bets on how long the hat would remain on the head since dad's plan was to leave it as Christmas decoration once our photos had been taken. My theory was that such soft, extensive amounts of felt would beg to be stolen and used as a sleeping bag for one (or more) homeless person(s). Fortunately, when I returned to Indy for Christmas, this had not come to pass, and the hat, soggy and slightly off kilter, was still in place upon the statue.

Utopian work ethic and a calf (calves?)

I flew from Indianapolis to DC this afternoon on the tiniest commercial jet I have ever encountered. I say tiniest COMMERCIAL jet because when I was still in the painful, pimpled, in between stage of adolescence, my mom and dad loaded my brother and me into a six seat Cessna double prop plane to go to New Harmony, Indiana. It was an oddly proximate destination for a family who easily could have fit in a car to drive the two hours to New Harmony from Indianapolis, but rarely has my family done anything the conventional way. So my younger brother and I, he sporting a rat tail and baggy pants with an elastic waste band, me in a garish, teal-striped sweater and glasses so heavy they slid down my nose regularly, loaded into a tin can with wings to discover the colony started by Johann Rapp as a Separatist community of German Lutherans and continued by Robert Owen as an enlightenment-by-way-of-work Utopian community. I never really did figure out how those two themes reconciled with each other. Work and Utopia, I mean.

My parents' reason for the high altitude journey to "the wonder of the west", as New Harmony was called after the economic achievement possibilities of a "working" Utopia became apparent, was that my mom, an art aficionado and conservator of oil paintings, had been commissioned by the city to restore the ancient, yellowed murals that spanned the two story front staircase of the town's museum.

My previous knowledge of the word museum, garnered mainly from the Indianapolis Museum of Art and my mom's books of paintings, was altogether inadequate to prepare me for the wonder, the pure carnival madness, that was this museum. It was grandma's attic, Barnum and Bailey's warehouse, and an ancient toy store all rolled into one Rube Goldberg domino effect of impending disaster. Touching anything would not only leave finger prints in the thick covering of dust, but would start a chain reaction resulting in the table at the far corner of the room collapsing with a shudder after all the objects between your clumsy hand and the doomed table had flown from their resting places to wherever they could cause the most possible destruction and embarrassment. It was not only the most cluttered and nightmarish place I had encountered, but also the most dreamlike and fascinating.

The one object that held the most awe and revulsion, amidst the antique toy trains, stacked leather bound volumes, bell jars covering crumbling bouquets, and gear laden apparatus (for which I could determine no reasonable function), was the taxidermied carcass of Siamese twin calves. It was facing the back wall of the upstairs room behind a glass case, sandwiched between an old rocking chair and a display of dolls, seeming, in my memory at least, to be following my movements beneath the heavy layer of dust on it's four ears, two noses, and single back. The small hand-written explanation for its presence stated only that the creature had been born in New Harmony and had survived for 20 months, much longer than such an abnormal animal was expected to remain alive. At that point it appeared that the town had grown so attached to the calf (or calves) that it was stuffed and placed here in this strange room full of forgotten objects so that out of town guests like me could balk at it's eight legs, two tails, and four eyes. It appeared almost as if the calves were merely stacked on top of each other from the side, but upon a full frontal inspection, it's face left no mistake that this creature had one spine, one torso, and presumably, in it's non-stuffed form, had contained only one set of internal organs.

During my mom's lunch breaks from restoring the museum's murals from her perch atop a rusty, yellow scaffold, we explored the rest of the small city, discovering a rose garden and plant nursery, some modern architecture on the Wabash river, and even a full sized labyrinth. Yet that strange, sad creature covered in dust has been inextricably tethered to my memory of New Harmony far more securely than anything else we found. I think my whole family makes the same association because every time New Harmony is mentioned one of us will blurt out, "Do you remember that calf in the museum? I wonder if it's still there."

I have never been back to New Harmony, and I presume that the calf will not be making an appearance in DC any time soon, so I doubt I will ever see it again. In my memory however, I still wonder if it's watching me through its dust-glazed marble eyes... all four of them.