I’m still alive, dear readers, if there are any of you left.

What I’m listening to in the background as I write this: Merry Happy by Kate Nash

Sorry I’ve been silent.  I’ve just been busy. Stricken with death *my grandmother* who I lived with and took care of for the past 6 years died at the age of 99, on July 31. My mom got diagnosed with breast cancer first of this year. I worked like a dog at my job between the two shitty events. Now I have moved back home to take care of her. Not working. Trying to write my novel–as always–. It sucks. She–my mom–is ok. Maybe going to live. Maybe not. I hope and pray the former is true. However, no matter how hopeful I am, I know that it’s not up to me and that no matter how good things seem to be getting or how hopeful I am, anything could really happen and this life is really not up to us. Basically–we could go at any time and we’re all going to go some time– And what do we spend doing most of the time? Not that which we truly love. Most of life is spent doing obligations, pushing papers around, pleasing people at a job, putting off that creative project one more year, saving, or paying off debt one 20 dollar bill at a time.

Random Kind Stranger #1
Every day in LA, I run into somebody (usually around my age) who left her job to take care of a parent with cancer.  I don’t know what attracts them to me, but they are all around.  The hairdresser today when I went to get my hair cut asked me all sorts of questions to start small talk: Do you live around here? Are you working today? Is this your day off? All specific questions that are hard to avoid the huge and horrible reason why I am really here. After the fifth question, I find myself explaining–confessing the whole story again.  Why are you cutting your hair so short all of a sudden? How come you don’t look at all your hair on the floor when we sweep it away? I shrug my shoulders and look at myself in the mirror.  Am I getting older? Are those worry lines on my forehead? God forbid.
For each new person I meet…I nervously wonder, how do I explain to them my silences… I’ve never been one to look back on my decisions. I don’t look down as they sweep away my hair. I am unflinching. Spartan. (Literally because my mom’s family is from Sparta on one side.)  My long hair is the least of my worries. I’m cutting my hair short in solidarity with my mom, etc.  *It looks cute by the way.* The hairdresser cut and styled it for an hour and a half, talking all about life, her mom, her vision for the salon, etc.  I think the woman liked me because we shared the same experience.  She hugged me at the end of the haircut, but not in a pathetic way. It was one strong, wise woman to another kind of a hug. We tactfully tried to talk around the fact, but I got the impression that her mother–who had stomach cancer–died.

Random Kind Stranger #2:

Finding time to write

Matala at sunset, 2006

My last post was a little bit negative. I know that negativity breeds more negativity.  But, part of being 30 means, I do not take shit. I’ve sort of starting invoking this idea and name over and over again. It reminds me of the beginning of a Fela Kuti song “you give me shit; I give you shit,” then a jumble of bass and drums and guitar, with horns churning to an afro-funk rhythm .

The thought of a Monday morning ahead of me breeds nervousness and anxiety. I have not prepared for my classes like I told myself I would. I have not finished all the things on my checklist and I am behind a little bit. Yes, I really need a vacation.

We can’t go away this summer. We are on a budget with a brief staycation.  But, I am taking most of the summer off to write. I found a way to make money to support all this free time, or errr….it found me.  And, now I have no excuses.

I am taking the summer. To finish up loose ends of a big project I have been working on.  (If you must know, it’s my novel. I feel sort of poncey for even saying “my novel” at all.)  Every time I think of it, I get nervous. I think: what will I do if it doesn’t work out? If I can’t finish? If I mess up? If I can’t pull through? If I disappoint myself. I know this is kind of crazythinking. It’s a small little piece of self-time that I have allowed myself. This post is all I, I, I.  Sorry for the solipsism, but I am so close to finishing this project, I can taste it.  And, why, then, does this scare me?

As an artist, sometimes the world can get you down. It seems like everything is geared toward making money and filling up all the empty spaces with things and consumerism and fast-track.  Working and working and working, even if it is meaningful and usually fulfilling work, like teaching, can become a burden.  People are always expecting things of me. I am always late on some project, or a batch of papers or a book order. There is always a really long to-do list that never gets totally done.  Not to mention–the horrible realities of budget cuts, cut-throat jockeying for position of being a grad. student, then again as an adjunct professor, random firings of administrators, not to mention all the obligations brought about by engaging in protests, organizing and resistance against said budget cuts.  Everything–even positive statements of community–like the budget cuts protests– drains my energy.

In my work life, I’ve tried to slowly build a sense of respect by doing my best and putting in some good old-fashioned hard work, and I’ve tried to be humble and learn my craft as a teacher.  There was a time when I thought I would never, of all things in the world, become, in my life, world without end, a teacher. Maybe that’s what makes me one. I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I chose this profession as a side to my writing.  But at the same time, teaching has been good to me.  It has kept me reading and discussing good books, it has given me something positive to bring to the world.  It has kept me fed and clothed and it has given me a kind of small status in the world.

Sometimes teaching can get so big, so over-encompassing that it bubbles over and takes up my creative energies that I could be spending on making art. I am constantly nurturing others and not being nurtured by a teacher in my own writing. I am at a strange predicament in my career as a writer. I haven’t finished anything major yet, but I feel like I don’t benefit from being a student of writing anymore.  But I know that if I don’t give up, I will finish.  Soon. Soon. I keep saying soon.

It’s times like these when one needs to retreat and release and just draw inward towards self. I’m sure other teacher/writers know what I’m talking about. I know first hand that teaching can take over a person’s life.

At this point in the semester I feel like a hamster fiendishly running on a wheel.  I want the rebirth of this blog to be the end of that.  I need to let go. I don’t want my work as a teacher to consume me to the point where all my creative energy gets directed towards that. So, I am hereby stopping the flow. Creativity, I declare of you. Come back! Redirect yourself towards selfish navel-gazing wonderful internally focused craft of an artist.  Flow like water to the part of the soul that must create something and don’t let the semester eat me away.  Even if the rest of the world crumbles down around me, give me peace in my creative process so I can get this project done. Let the rest of the world around me not crumble down, give it strength, balance, and support. So I can enjoy myself and give myself up to the sensuous moment of creation, so that I can write till the sunset of my days.

To all my creative people: never give up on yourself or you art. Sing your song. Drum your drum. Life is only worth living if you can enjoy yourself along the way. Most of life is spent becoming.

I have a bad temper *sigh*

I know I have a bad temper. I got mad at somebody today. It was the plumber. He is a nice guy, but it seemed like he had been giving us the run around. He’s been our plumber for nearly 5 years. We found him through a cheeky add in the phone book and we discovered that we are both Greek. Today, like a true Greek, I yelled into his voicemail. His honor was offended by what I said.

He called our house while I was still on the way home and talked to my husband, in a shaky, pained voice. He really did kind of leave us in the lurch with something, and my grandmother’s tenants have had no shower head for two days and he didn’t tell us he was going to go that route and now they’re pissed and sending me nasty, kind of uppity emails and phone calls, flaying their rights around. I was right to be upset with our plumber for not showing up today when he had promised, but now I feel bad about screaming at him via voicemail and saying “This is unacceptable” in a really bitchy tone into speaker phone while in gridlock traffic on the Bay Bridge. I also accused him of keeping us on the back burner because we weren’t one of his richer clients.

I have to stay here tomorrow when he comes and say sorry. At the moment, I am not sorry, but I want to be. I should really let it go, but, here it is 1:23 in the morning, and I still can’t sleep. I know it’s because I let my temper get the better of me…again.  Sometimes my bad temper scares people when they have seen only my good side.

Our plumber is an ex-fighter, a huge, muscular, former boxing champion and I was able to insult him to the point of humiliation. He also has confided in me that he has anger management issues. But because he is a big strong guy, he kicks people’s asses, I just yell at them and say just the right mean thing to break them.

I feel like a total douche.

It wasn’t just that I was mad at him. I was mad that this plumbing problem keeps happening, I was mad at the entitled messages that my grandmother’s tenants, two twenty-something bankers and one type-A chemistry teacher who expect perfection sent me, I was mad that I have to manage their apartment, I was mad that I have to grade papers all day tomorrow, I was mad that these writers I know were  dismissive of me, I was mad that I have all these responsibilities when all I want to do is write, I was mad that I didn’t eat anything until 5pm tonight, when I pulled over before getting on the freeway and scarfed a tuna sandwich, I was mad that it took me 30 minutes to exit the parking structure at work because of an accident right outside and rush hour, I was mad that I let a student guilt-trip me into making free photocopies for her when I wanted to go home, I was mad that the 50-year-old work-study student who works for the English department refuses to get out of my chair when I need to meet with students, then was rude to me in front of all the other colleagues, I was mad that the secretaries at my college turned their noses up at my student when she tried to make conversation in the elevator, I was mad that the administrators turn their frowning gazes to the corner of the wall  to avoid making eye-contact with me in the same elevator because they think I am a student. I was mad overall. I’m a bitch with a bad temper, and look out. I am now 30.

The only person I was not mad at today was my husband, who understands about my temper and who tried to explain my temper to the plumber, who was like get your woman in order, man. Ted and I laughed over that idea together over tacos. Ted was nice to me anyway even though he had to listen to our plumber talk for fifteen minutes about how much my voicemail had hurt his feelings and diplomatically console him on the phone. Everybody else in the world is on my shit-list except for Ted. He made me dinner and then watched my favorite show with me.

I keep struggling with my bad temper. Maybe one day, I’ll learn to be more like Ted and let it all go.

Why Public Schools Rock [and do not turn you into a cockroach]

A writer friend who lives in the Bay Area told me that she was worried that she and her husband could not afford the 20 + grand a year per kid that it would cost to send her two children into private schools in the Bay Area. Her children’s ages? 3 and 6 months.

They are nowhere near the school age, yet this young mom feels the pressure that many middle class professionals in the Bay Area feel: Should I put my kids in a private school because the public schools will turn them into cockroaches, or should I let them turn into cockroaches on their own? “Hey, I went to public schools from age 5 to age 24,” I said, trying to console her, but when she got  strangely quiet, I thought that maybe I wasn’t the best example.

The problem with private K-12 education is–it porports to be better than public school. But what are you really getting for all that money except for excellently tended grounds, ionic columns, and an experience of social isolation based on socio-economic class?  What does it really do for the kids except for shelter them from the rest of society and teach them to be entitled?

It probably didn’t help that my one experience as a student at a private school was in graduate school which caused me to come home and pass out in my unmade bed every night like a narcoleptic after being stressed out by all the competitive bullshit.

Believe it or not, I was actually taken aside and told in the cafeteria to start dressing better by two of my classmates. I was told to wear Prada during my critiques by these women, because they felt like if I wore Prada, at least I would feel strong and not collapse into a bubble of tears after the fellow students in my class told me that my story about my family’s historic village was crappy, or that they just couldn’t stand my main character who was a thinly veiled autobiography.  ”What’s Prada? Can you get it at Ross?” I asked.  The whole time I was at a private school, I felt like most of the people didn’t get me.

But, my professors at the public college I attended were prestigious, and in many ways more accessible than the professors I had at my private graduate school and my classmates from public college all have jobs and are doing something interesting. Though, to talk to some of the young undergrads at the private school I went to, you’d think that they were paying all that money to learn from Socrates himself.

I’m not really against the idea of going to a private school for college, and I could see many reasons why somebody would choose one.  Since UC tuition is through the roof now, maybe private schools are really not that much more. But  I think any middle-class parent should not choose private schools for their children aged 5-18.

So, what should we public school advocates say to our private school leaning friends as they fret over whether they can afford to cough up half a million bucks to send two kids to private schools for their entire childhood?

When you send your children to school, basically the main lesson they are supposed to learn is how to be citizens of society. When you send them to a private elementary, jr. high or high school, you are turning a willful blind eye to 88% of America. You are teaching them to be elitists, to be entitled, to have servants, to demand service, and you are not teaching them how to be a citizen of society, but in effect removing them from any perceived unsavory elements and you are constantly forced to buy into the fact that people with money are safer, that people with money have better schools, and that people with money never have enough money, because if you are the family like my friend’s who are struggling and can’t really afford to put your kids in private school, you are saying to yourself and your children that you are not as good as the people with more money than you. You will chase the money and you will teach them to chase the money the rest of their lives, and it will never end.

That will be what breaks the civil society apart, not terrorism, or economic collapse. If anything will kill the American Dream, it will be the crumbling of the socialized education which has been a cornerstone of the American Dream since the beginning, and as you opt out of public school, so will you opt out of the free municipal service that you pay taxes to support.  And when savvy parents who are educated and intelligent like you pull your kids out, heaven help public schools, because the poor and the downtrodden don’t have the resources to fight for their kids that the educated middle class parents do and that could do away with democracy itself.

That’s why it makes me so sad when I see the horrible budget cuts that are being imposed on public schools in California and all over the country. It’s threatening the essence of our ability to believe in ourselves.

The Day Lady Died

(Originally written October 14, 2009)

Do you ever wonder, if you were to die all of a sudden, what would your life be worth?  If you were to die slowly, say, of cancer, like my writer friend did last October, would you write like your life depended on it?

I met a kindred soul in Leila Abu-Saba, author of Dove’s Eye View.  I have known her since my MFA program at Mills College. We were classmates. Sometimes we disagreed on things, other times we dished back and forth, other times we shared intimate details of our lives and histories. Because I was blogging anonymously and so was she (She had a secret blog that has since been taken down in addition to her public one), we were able to really share personal information. Then things got in the way.  We both ended up falling out of each other’s lives, and we got busy with life obligations, etc.  At one point, we each thought the other person didn’t like them.  We didn’t realize that we were both wrong until much later.

I visited her on her deathbed in the hospital a few months ago.  She was all alone at the top floor of UCSF medical center. It was dark and she was scared.  I brought her this special holy oil from the Holy Virgin Cathedral in San Francisco that I had.  I didn’t know she was dying. I knew she had been sick.  I decided to contact her and ask me if she wanted me to bring it.  Bring it! She said.   She opened up her hospital gown and said to put it on her scars.  I did. I rubbed the oil on them with my finger, all over her abdomen and we chanted prayers. Her body looked like it was beat up from the inside out.  Her scars were huge.   Then, I went back to see her in the hospital the next week because she woke up at five in the morning and wanted me to bring a priest. I didn’t know how I was going to get a priest there, but somehow he showed up.  He sang to her in four languages and wrapped her in the purple silken mantle of a saint and anointed her with holy oil from three different monasteries, one from a shrine in Syria that she had a connection to.  Her whole family was around her then and watched the beautiful and sad and happy and peaceful ceremony.

The first time I went to visit her, late at night, when she was alone, she had asked me to hug her and I did.I was afraid to break her fragile bones.  Then she said, “If I get better, can we become better friends?” or maybe it was “I wish we could have been better friends.” I was afraid deep down that she wasn’t going to get better.  I said something wise that I never usually say: I said, In this moment, Leila, we are perfect friends.  And nothing else matters between now and then…because the universe is infinite and this moment our friendship is perfection and our spirits and our hearts will always be friends.”

I am glad I said that, but I also feel like I might have lost the chance to really let her know how similar we really were. But, maybe she had known all along.

I told her that I was starting this blog and that I was finally going to stop being anonymous.  So, I guess, I have to keep good on my declaration. She cheered me on. Then she prayed for me.  For my life to be peaceful and for my writing to be successful.  She even offered me food and something to drink.

One thing I am proud of her for was what she did in her last months on this earth is: she wrote her heart out. She wrote every moment as if it was her last. She never gave up and she never believed she would die. Two days before she died, her former professor and a mutual classmate offered to edit and publish her book for her if she could not go on living.  On her last lucid day, she heard the good news.  I heard that she couldn’t even hold the phone to her ear but she was happy inside.  I’m crying but I have no tears, she whispered to our classmate, Sara.

When I went to see her in the hospital the first time, when she was all alone on the 14th floor, she told me that I was beautiful and full of life and breathed me in as I hugged her. I felt guilty for being young and healthy. But I also felt like the future that is unfolding in front of me for whatever length of time is a tremendous gift and I made a promise to the universe then to be real, to be myself and to love people.  We even talked about the craft of being a writer.  She felt sad to be dying, and one of the reasons was that she was going to have to stop writing and she hadn’t yet published her novel.  As a writer, I totally get that feeling.

When I saw her the second time, I hugged her more greedily, knowing that it was probably going to be the last time, now wholeheartedly invested in being her friend. I didn’t hold back anything in that hug that I held back in life.  I was honored that she let me be so close to her in her last moments. I think it was because she had been praying for somebody to come with holy oil and then I called out of the blue. She had been anointed with oil by a nun in a cave in Syria and was hoping for the same thing, but gave almost gave up, thinking, where on earth am I going to get such a far out thing?  And then it showed up, it had been right next to her all along.

I’m not a holy moly person. I don’t believe that the religion I grew up with is superior to other people’s way of life, and I think that anybody can find a way to the divine.  I am not a very worthy  ambassador of faith.  But somehow, I was strangely called upon in this moment, and the holy oil is the only thing I really knew how to bring. It was the thing that my culture has used to comfort itself in its most dire moments.  It’s a culture that I shared with her since we were from the same general part of the world with similar religious traditions.

She died at 7:15 on Thursday night, the same exact moment that there was a service in the Russian Orthodox Holy Virgin Cathedral in San Francisco.    I never got a chance to tell her about the service, but I thought she would like it because she liked byzantine icons. It’s a Russian church and it hosted for the first time outside of Russia a byzantine icon of the Mother of God that is known for it’s miracles: Namely, softening hardened hearts.

Independently, I heard from Sara online that she felt like her heart had been “unfrozen” by all the love she had been receiving from family and friends.

I told her that I was restarting this blog and that I was finally going to go public with it, to be seen by the world, instead of hiding in the shadows.  So, I guess, I have to keep good on my declaration.

Leila, wherever the cosmic dust of the universe has taken you, may your memory be eternal.  You were the real, deal, girl.  You have my utmost respect.

Your friend,

Alexandra K.

I had a dream last night that everybody at work read my blog

Is that weird? Oh well.

I dreamt I was at an English Dept. meeting at the school where I teach, the same one we have at the beginning of each semester to discuss the semester’s business and of all things,  my blog came up as a subject of discussion on the agenda. Then I dreamt that my boss said that she had been reading it eagerly and had been an avid follower of it for years. Then different coworkers, some I get along with and some I find to be difficult, also brightly looked up from their agenda items and yessed and ummhmm’d in agreement.  I felt like everybody thought I was special and important. And isn’t that what we all want people to feel about us? That we are special and important and that our ideas matter?  I know I am just a lowly part-time worker/ employee, and I am a petite in stature young woman who often gets spoken down to and/or discredited and or overlooked. But, for once, in my dreams, where I can construct my own world, I was important and people were listening to me. And even if I get rejected from the outside world, and the artistic and academic powers that be prefer to bestow accolades upon others in reality, even if my some of my coworkers borrow my ideas about teaching or writing sometimes and then act like they was their own, maybe, at least in my dreams, I am intelligent and worth following and reading about.

And at least in my dreams, I get respect.

Athena

I love this painting.  It’s Athena by Susan Seddon Boulet.  I didn’t know this, but she was an artist who lived in Oakland and died of cancer in the late 1990′s. I found post-cards of her work when I was 16 in an eclectic store in Hermosa Beach. Kind of reminds me of the idea of rebirth.