If you go to my school, Hello: Wouldn’t you rather eat local produce in the cafeteria? Do you know that they bake laxatives into our entrees? There are plenty of resources, upstate and even on the outskirts of the city to get wholesale, nutritious food. Check out Just Food (www.justfood.org) for starters–there’s a market for this. And what about being served on non-disposable plates, salad bowls, in glasses? We are creating so much easily avoidable waste. I am truly not an activist by nature, I am only interested in living simply.

What do you think? Try bringing your own plate and fork to dinner. Bring some Tupperware if you want a salad. Don’t buy bottled water.

I have been learning about waste, gathering statistics about solid waste, industrial waste. My ecology class is dead boring, but the man sure knows a lot.

In Stacie Cassarino’s class the other day, she told us that Middlebury College, up in Vermont, is served produce out of a garden that the students maintain. She said, “It could be like this everywhere,” and my eyes got wet and my voice got shrill and I said, “I know!”

The next morning I got up and made myself a fried egg on cold bread, Radimus’s slow-cooked oatmeal, Stumptown coffee and Knudsen’s MorningBlend juice. I started adding ginkgo extract to it, to focus better during the day, but it’s not really working.

Probably because I have not slept very much this week.

We’ve all got a lot of work here. Especially the visual art students. They are often up all night, crying, their floors covered in Color-Aid, paint, two-by-fours, popping ADD medicine they pirated from somebody’s prescription. We are working constantly. And I was talking to Stacie Cassarino about Middlebury College, about taking a trip up there to sit in on one of her classes, see the school, and she said: No matter where you are, you are always going to have to make time to do what you truly want to do.

Had I forgotten? Make time! Make time! If you need to go run laps or take photos or make a slow, languid meal, do it! You are only hurting yourself over and over again by not honoring these pleasure quotas, by not feeding yourself. And if you don’t learn that now, you will be a fleshy, pale, forty-something with two babies at your tits, still waiting for that window of free time to manifest.

You-nifest.

Jenny, Robert, Amber and I read “Twelfth Night” out loud, and the last poem, which is a response to the first line (If music be the food of love, play on), made my heart pound. Never in my life have I had so many emotional responses to literature since I’ve been here.

Dear College, I feel like a machine. Please teach me how to make sense out of you, and then, once that is clear, how to keep up.

In the tide of several papers, three books to read, a stack of Joyce criticism, just having risen from belly-down on the library floor, I followed a parade of friends, by ringleader Knina, to a rustic, Dixie restaurant in a wedge shaped building, behind a giant iron door, under the train tracks. It was Robbi’s birthday. I got Corsendock and beets with sour cream, warm smoked herring and a hardboiled egg. Knina told me about her life in trades: knife-thrower for a traveling carnival, bike messenger, antique appraiser, manager of a vintage clothing shop, darkroom assistant.

We had made Robbi a cake the night before, in secret, collectively, though the festivities ended with Sweeney and I lying belly-up on Knina’s bed, staring at the constellations projected on her ceiling, “with randomly generated shooting stars.”

She was wearing a white mask when she said this. “But don’t wish for anything you won’t get.”

I went to Mandy Richichi’s wild book group, which is full of tears and upturned coffee tables. We talked about Don Quixote. Or rather, they did: passionately, inexhaustibly, about whether or not madness is subjective, about the ultimate truth, clutching 40s. I listened and ate cookies. Bit into these soft, chocolate cookies that sent music and tremors through my body that made me think, What the hell is it about butter and sugar and salt that does this to us? And then I thought, will I ever be able to discuss literature as thorough as I can tell you about this cookie?

I keep feeling like I don’t know enough.

Within an hour of coming back from Kansas, I got on the G and went to the MOMA. There was a Martin Puryear exhibit, and larger-than-life things like wagons and ladders that go up and up and up and taper off into infinity. It was dreamlike. I’ve been drinking tiny espresso and feeling sleepy.

Moment of silence. Please.

I have been meditating on how I’d like to shape my life when I get back to the city. Sometimes deep evaluation starts in shallow water:

Cait and I pulled on skate hoodies and did kick-flips in her garage, pretended we were thirteen-year-old boys. And when her dad came to check on us, we were like, “Ugh! Dads!” and threw our boards to the ground saying: “Come on; Lemme try another nose dive.” Even after we came inside, this personae wouldn’t budge. We slumped to the couch, put our feet on the coffee table, ignored the family, called each other “man.”

But everyone was laughing and we couldn’t stop. There is so much freedom in adolescence. I need an insolent, thirteen-year-old boy to surface in me every once in a while.

We all ate pie and watched another installment of “Weeds,” of which we’ve observed the majority of the second season this holiday break.

And today Cait and I drove to Lawrence, Kansas where the university is, and got sandwiches. She dictated the history to me as we sped through the flats. Lawrence was an abolitionist junction during the Civil War–the home of crazy John Brown. We bought thick-rimmed spectacles with fake lenses, and wore them home, biting on the ends, plunged in thought, whipping them off with an intellectual toss the hair. We poured cream soda into wine glasses and swirled.

“Mm, this one leaves a nice trail.”

And her parents looked at us like, “Oh my god, we send them to college, and they return to us, idiots.” And we sputtered and giggled in our fake glasses all night, all through dinner.

Apparently, Kansas City, Missouri is the sister city of Seville, Spain (both of them, “The City of Fountains”) and so their plaza is made up of Spanish architecture. Who knew? We wore our glasses and filmed a music video on the strip. It’s all lit up for Christmas.

We’ve been getting eleven hours of sleep every night. Drinking dark coffee, reading the paper. Her grandparents came over this morning and brought me, Cait and her brother Tupperware full of home-cooked pulled pork to take back with us to college. As we all recapped the most recent episode of “Weeds,” her grandmother reminisced:

“I smoked marijuana, once, just once. I was forty-five-years-old and I thought, ‘God, if you let me live through this, I promise I will never do it again!’”

Her grandparents are lovely. We dined with them on Thanksgiving. They’re wry, and they sat side-by-side, knocking back bottles of Bud, observing. Cait’s brother told me his grandfather has always reminded him of Jack Nicholson.

“Mine, too!” I said.

“I think, if you have a cool grandpa, then that’s usually who he’ll resemble,” he said.

Cait took me around K.C. (Mo) and we stopped by a sweet coffee cement-block building called the Filling Station where we had an intense brainstorm regarding a new project that goes into effect tomorrow, Sunday, November 25th, called GreenDevelopment. Think Studs Terkel with photography: I will expound at a later date!

The night before I met her best friend Jing. Jing is on a fire. We went out for barbecue. Jing is very small, fierce, raised in a stoic, traditional Chinese family. She ordered a pulled pork sandwich with a side of ribs, and tore away at it with her tiny teeth and her tiny fingers.

On a different note: Sometimes I feel so weighed down by the sheer weight of shit-to-do, of things to know that I don’t, things I want to say but shrink under, shy away from. I have all this power and I am not doing enough. I am doing a lot of running around, making a lot of noise. I am putting my energy in so many different places, and am still looking for something to hook & sink me, to earn my attention, to demand my service.

I am thankful for family, both biological and beyond, carmelized onions, Thanksgiving dinner preparation scuffles, the sound of coffee machines, deep sleep, seen and being seen, digging and being dug, potatoes, Dubliners, warmth & fertility.

Make lists. Economical lists. Share those lists with me & everyone else. Quick!

Happy Thanksgiving.

There’s snow on the branches. A train goes by my window every hour, rattling the glass of water on my nightstand. I am in a suburb between Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri, where everything is quiet. I have been awake for forty-two hours, and my stomach is blistered with coffee, and I am snuggled under the still, coolness of guest bedding and patchwork quilts.

Oh, here’s the train now. I can hear it rushing over each rail.

Cait and I caught a cab at 4am heading to LaGuardia. I had not slept, and neither had she. That was the plan. I had just come from a dinner that had lasted all night, and I was full of red wine. A glowing, Nordic writing major named Asheley had some people over for a pre-Thanks vegan feast: cranberry sauce, stuffing, sweet potatoes, bulgar & walnuts. Real food.

“This is so huge,” I tried explaining to her. “Truly nourishing food here is so far and in between.”

We ate at a glass-top table with a light underneath that illuminated it like a dance floor.

Asheley is from a cow town on the coast of California, and she wears old, thin dresses. Her friend Laura was visiting from Berkeley. Laura had this familiar, warm, Northwest beauty, and we danced to ABBA. Knina talked about buying a brownstone, renting out two floors, turning the basement into a venue, turning the whole building into a focused and open work/living/presentation space for artists. I have no doubt this will happen within the next two months. Because she can. She cultivates. She’s kind of sorcerer. She smoked long cigarettes and lamented that the only types she found herself interested in were those people who were most likely to shoot up the school, the mad scientist, the beast.

Love connection in the elevator going up, right after Sweeney, one of the Huck Finn boys who hosts the Thursday night salons said, “Steinbeck said ‘Man’s greatest triumph is his ability to persist even after his endeavor has been proved impossible.’ But what’s interesting is that he said ‘triumph,’ not ‘plight’ or ‘pitfall.’”

I reached for him as the doors slid shut.

Oh! Another train is rushing by. Ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chunk.

As Cait and I were hurtling down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, we gazed at the skyline and had an “I Heart New York” moment.

“Look. It’s the prettiest thing on earth,” she said.

“I know,” my eyes got wet. “I know.”

Sometimes the truth is humbling.

Midwest Airlines is awesome, by the way. The seats are wide and deep. I read the first two pages of “East of Eden” and then fell asleep, awakening every fifteen minutes until the land was flat and prairie like. Cait got some work done, and flashed me looks. Her sweet parents met us in the terminal, and wheeled us through the suburbs back home. The more I travel, the more I realize that most of America is exactly the same. I sat in a Seattle’s Best, inside a Barnes & Nobles, in a strip mall that could be anywhere in the United States while Cait got a haircut. Apparently, three years ago, the area was primarily agrarian. It’s the fastest growing strip mall in the nation.

We made peanut butter cheesecake and chocolate ribbon pie and watched Oprah give away her Favorite Things. I watched Cait and her brother leg wrestle, parents and children word wrestle. It’s like their kids, as kids should, have eclipsed them, and they just back out of the way and let their lives expand in waves. Their kids are full of fluent languages, criticism, fancy schools, East coast savviness. Cait is an Internet superstar, her brother, John, is studying law. Their parents have been married for thirty years, next month, and sometimes dad still takes mom for spins on his motorcycle.

Oh, Thanksgiving. How can we ignore the role of food in our lives? A couple of weeks ago Mandy Richichi, whose stories and friction sparkiness I’ve grown fond of, had some of use over for a potluck. I brought pecan pie and Stumptown Coffee’s Holler Mountain Blend. Ellen made raw cucumber-avocado soup. Jaime made couscous with chard and pine nuts. Lucy made deviled eggs and bean salad with red ones, black ones, canellinis and corn.

Cait’s parents took us out for sushi, and we got Alaskan rolls, served warm, and soft with salmon.

Food even showed up in my Free Will horoscope:

Because of changes in agricultural techniques, food is nowhere near as nutritious as it used to be. Vegetables grown on modern factory farms have 27 percent less calcium and 37 percent less iron than they did in 1975, for example, as well as 21 percent less Vitamin A and 30 percent less Vitamin C. So if you want to avoid being starved of essential nutrients, you either have to eat a huge amount, take supplements, or consume organic food. Are there any other areas of your life where the sustenance levels have dropped, perhaps without your full awareness? Is there an activity that no longer provides you with the boost it used to? Your assignment is to explore this possibility. If you find something’s lacking, take immediate measures to make up for what you’ve been missing.

Back here in Kansas, we all wrapped ourselves in afghans and watched re-runs of “Weeds.” I needed this domesticity, and so did Cait. More than five times today her mother said, “And later, jump into your PJ’s, snuggle onto the couch, and watch movies.” This is about rejuvenation and so, as her mother was going to sleep, she said to us:

“Caitie, don’t stay up too late–you’ve already been up since Tuesday.”

Maggie mailed me a memo card printed with information about a gypsy queen named Pamela Coleman Smith, who illustrated the Rider-Waite tarot deck, and went to Pratt Institute in 1897 (exactly 110 years ago). Maggie said, “She reminded me of you even before I saw where she went to school. No wonder New York feels so homey.”

Other than her tarot deck, Ms. Smith never created anything of acclaim. She died in 1951 (five years before my parents were born.)

Lily and I spooned and watched movies for two days. Cry Baby, Shirley Temple, Hunter S. Thompson documentaries. Robert found a contest sponsored by R.H. Reality Check to make a video discussing the re-invention of sex education, and we gathered for breakfast to plan our contribution–the tag line: Why is sex so interesting, and sex-ed so boring? I watched Alisdair iron his clothes for work in the morning. I’ve been reading “Paradise Lost,” which is tricky, as Milton writes according to inflection rather than logical word order. I’m writing papers on the roll of call-and-response for Hatian women recovering from the 1937 Trujillo massacre. I’m writing a paper on the shift of attitudes toward women from pre-classical literature to the renaissance. I am finding that, like Pandora, as a whole, most women were regarded as box-like: keepers, wombs, both withholding & and withheld.

Last night, after hours of diligent, silent study, Alisdair and I called for food. We had nachos, swamped in refried beans, cheddar, jalepenos, chunky guacamole and two heaping horchatas delivered to his door.

Horchata is this sweet rice milk drink, with sugar and cinnimon so thick it’s like sand.

Spending time with Alisdair makes me realize I want to know more. Period. I want to know another language so that it comes out like music. I want to know the English language! Jesus. I want to know more about the economy, fossil fuel emissions, 20th Century world history. I want to be able to cite examples of what I am talking about. So often I speak in broad statements and conclusions. I want to know the history of tea, the history of the city Kate is in, how to compost, what the plastic recycling process is like. There is so much to know. It makes me swoon. I want to faint. When will I learn the rest? When will I learn?

Our rooms have been hot, so it’s hard to sleep. Janine, Allie, Vicky and I just gathered in our bathroom to talk about toilet paper, hair on the floor, pasty white stains on the counter. We ended up laughing, lying in the grime.

Lily’s father and brother drove from Baltimore to pick her up for Thanksgiving, and I went out for sandwiches and espresso with them. They are made of the same clay, the same dimples, inflection, logical word order. Her brother is fresh out of rehab and this familiar, strained, energy and cheerfulness surrounds him. I know this feeling so deep in my throat. Shit, do I know! And her brother is so grounded and beautiful, but just hanging, and his family is swallowing hard, just waiting. And her father is saying, “He’s doing great, he’s so clear!”

And it’s one of those things that’s uncomfortable, but in your face, happening right NOW, so you can address it in conversation even if the person is present, and the person can chuckle and say, “And along with the clarity, my facial hair is coming back, too.”

You don’t know whether to stay silent, or stir your espresso, cut through the social coffee filter and say: Oh, I’ve been there. I know what you’re all going through. Let’s acknowledge this island that we share–this island where our knuckles are white from clutching onto the collars and seams of our dear, dear, dear kin.

“Antiphony or call and response, function, improvisation, and audience performance can all be thought of as part of the group or communal nature of art. This theory of art is interactive, process oriented, and concerned with innovation rather than mimetic, product, or static. Call-and-response patterns provides a basic model that depends and thrives upon audience performance and improvisation, which work together to ensure that the art will be meaningful or functional for the community.”

Call and Response as Critical Method: African-American Oral Traditions and Beloved by Maggie Sale. African American Review, Vol. 26, No. 1, Women Writers Issue (Spring, 1992), pp. 41-50.

Lily has been leaving me many messages in my letter box. Most recently, a bit by Diane DiPrima, one of the ‘beat’ ladies. This afternoon, we walked around Prospect Park and the Slope. It was the first day that has left my hands numb. Beyond cold. Pieces of fingered ice. The kind where you get inside and your rings are suddenly stuck, because your hands have swelled with the sweet relief of blood.

While we walked, we read passages from Diana DiPrima’s book, Dinner and Nightmares. It’s all about different times in her life told through the lens of whatever food she was eating a lot of at the time.

My story, “Banquet,” was for a reading my Writer’s Studio put together last night at a wine & cake cafe called Smooch. The cafe was narrow, and covered in mirrors. The lamp shades were made of photographs. There was a bit about Alice’s Restaurant in my story, so I got to sing and talk like Arlo Guthrie. It was cozy. Ellery Washington bought us cake, and a few of us started plotting ways to get him to go to a bar with us at the end of the semester, so we can pick his brain, uninhibited, before he goes back to Berlin.

After Smooch, some of us hopped over to Tillie’s Coffee Shop for another open mic. Then, Lily and I met two gals from the program at a musty pub called Alibi with shallow ceilings and Irish men. “Walk on the Wild Side” began to play and we swayed, and went home, kicking up the leaves that covered the ground, whooping.

The sky has been dark lately, like the threat of a Midwestern tornado, and the leaves have been flying through the air like locusts.

We had a reading in the engine room where the cats sleep, and the steam makes the walls sweat. The engine room was built in 1890, the same year that students first enrolled. Charles Pratt had the engine constructed so that, in the event that his art school bombed, he could quickly turn the compound into a shoe factory. Despite the school’s success, the engine still spits and hisses, and is monitored and maintained by a skinny old man who looks like the Elvis Impersonator who hangs around Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland.

Charles Pratt died, mysteriously, a year after the school opened.

If I have not made it clear, I am living my the seat of my pants! I am biting off more than I can chew, but I have always done this. I am asking for all the information, knowing that I will only absorb a third of it. I am beginning new projects, friendships, romanceships, knowing that nothing is permanent, that things will change and change again, and that one day, you may pass these people or things on the street and they won’t even look you in the crazy face. I am emptying my pockets of trash on my way to the subway, and learning to breathe differently–from my diaphragm, like an umbrella.

The thing about this hipster culture I am immersed in–as a student, an urban citizen, in New York and Portland alike–is that a lot of them don’t make themselves vulnerable. This idea of ‘the hipster’, is not bad. It’s about creativity, it’s about topping other people’s originality in dress, life, music, and writing, and those are positive things. It’s about innovation and being cute. But the hipster culture does not allow room for critique of itself. And it does not allow, above all, room for vulnerability. So you’ve got a roomful of really cool people, who have done really cool things, and they’ve got cool stories and cool boots and are blase about sex and money and morality–but they’re solitary, like Greek columns, with no entrance and no interest in reaching out. Often, there is not a lot of warmth.

I am interested in holistic hedonism as a way to make the world a better place. Doing what you love or seeking pleasure from a place that gives something back to the people and the plants simultaneously.

Apparently, according to a recent study, and in spite of popular belief, New York is the most economical “big” city in the country.

On Tuesday I was kneeling at a shelf, stocking Tom’s of Maine toothpaste in narrow rows when my boss, Radimus, asked me if I believed in a creator.

We had been talking about Thanksgiving. Earlier that afternoon, I had started a piece called “Banquet,” about a cramped, panicky Thanksgiving in my aunt’s apartment two years ago, and the tradition was on my mind. I wanted to know if Radimus’s family adopted American holidays when they arrived from the Dominican Republic. “Sure,” he said, “but to us, it was only an excuse to feast. We just went through the motions.”

Thanksgiving led to a discussion of Christmas, and then of Catholicism: his outraged and compliant relationship with the Vatican, the practice inherited from his extensive family, half-heartedly perpetuated for his children’s sake.

“But I don’t know, Adrianna,” he said. “The world is so corrupt. It is hard for me to believe in anything.”

Under stress, he repeatedly calls me “Andrea,” and the fact that he got my name right meant that he was fully present. I turned to him with toothpaste in my hand. I wanted to explore, but sometimes the language barrier brings us to a stand still. We start speaking in sweeping generalizations because they’re easy to express.

“It’s complicated,” I squeaked.

I wanted to explore! But his thick accent makes me nervous to talk about complicated things, my words seeming to burn up once they enter the atmosphere, and his face, devoid of response, as he tries to piece together the flowery way I’ve learned to speak, and maybe I had no idea how to answer his question in Spanish or English or French or any other way, accents aside, and so I said–

“I don’t know. Yes.” I put the toothpaste down, my hands on my hips. “I mean, I don’t think that we’re accidents. But I don’t believe in God, like a human figure, like the Catholics believe. I don’t think there’s like, this individual in the sky, directly responsible for the good and bad things of the world.” I was using my hands. “I don’t believe in a God that makes decisions. I believe that our presence is intentional, that there’s something that holds us together–and whatever that is–that’s what I believe in.”

“You don’ need to ’splain, honey,” he said, laughing from his belly. “I understand, I understand everything.”

A customer came in and the conversation ended. I started to clean the wheat grass machine. Only the faucet and the cockroach wiggling across the floor could be heard.

From the sink, I asked Radiums if he had a good oatmeal recipe.

“Oh, I am the king of hot cereal!” he said.

And then in detail, with great precision, he divulged.

***

Radimus’s Perfect Oatmeal

Cook time: 5 minutes

½-1 cup Irish style rolled oats (depending how hungry you are)

½ cup water

¼ cup whole milk or creamy soymilk

1/8 tsp. butter or soy spread

½ tsp. ground cinnamon

Pinch of salt

Handful of trailmix (nuts & dried fruit)

This oatmeal’s perfection lies in the order of operations. First bring water to a boil. Add cinnamon and let dissolve. Then add the butter or soy spread. Once it has melted, slowly pour whole milk or soymilk. This will bring the boil down. As soon as it’s worked back up, add the oats, just a little at a time. Bring heat down to medium. Let sit until oats look thick and creamy. Finally, add salt and trailmix to taste.

***

The next morning, I gathered some friends into the first floor kitchenette and served, extending their bowls like orphans. It was delicious. We ate in the gray, quiet of morning. Quiet is good. Later I got a message in the letter slot I’ve affixed to my door. It was from Lily. She had transcribed Hunter S. Thompson’s dissertation on his relationship with breakfast onto two index cards, held together with a bobby pin:

Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner. … I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every 24 hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home -– and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed –- breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning and something like a slice of key lime pie…

My mother and I took a roadtrip through Oregon a couple of Junes ago, taking only the lost and forgotton highways. We used maps drawn in the 1800s, and kept a stack of books at our feet with titles like, “Ghost Towns of the Northwest.”

One night we were caught in between an abandoned hot springs motel and a village called Little Rock. We parked in a clearing to the side of the road and slept in our car. As it got dark, I started to read Jame Joyce’s, “The Dead” outloud. I read the whole damn thing, and afterwards we both looked at each other, puzzled.

This morning I woke up at dawn and read it again. I don’t know what changed in me, but it was one of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever read. ”Dubliners” is all about impoverished Irish people living mediocre lives, unable to find emotional connection or love or real spirituality–and “The Dead” comes at the end, shakes up the main character and finally leads him to a safe, dark place where he can say: What am I going to do?

And everything covered in a blanket of snow.

In other news, my dad sent me a litany in response to my recent post, “Da Bears,”:

Great description of Chicago! That’s exactly how I see it. There’s a piece of it that you may not have seen, and which is largely responsible for the vibe: Illinois is a farm state, and Chiacgo’s history is dominated by Germans, even though the Italians and Poles are more out front. So it’s that Teutonic, lumbering, aloof, hard stone-like quality that ripples through the city that makes it seem . . . more town-like instead of city-like. Lotsa Germans emigrated there, brought their beer-brewing industry with them, Chicago became the crossroads for the cattle industry, meat-packing slaughterhouse industry was the mainstay, railroads intersection - a lot of money came into the city, but it was mostly in the hands of people who butchered animals for a living, so it’s very down-to-earth. The Classism isn’t quite the same there. The Cheap Seats for classical performances have always been there, seeing the babuzhkas in their thick overcoats and head scarves laboring into the upper balcony each week to see another Chicago Symphony concert - it’s all there with a sort of earthy humility and embarrassment, because - again, the vibe - the soles of everyone’s shoes are painted in the blood of beef and pigs. Links everyone together.

Love,
Dad