Carole Maso at one side of a square table

Fiction she says, and the melding of it in this piece, into non-fiction.

She is talking about Jackson Pollack
Our desire to inhabit a character through fiction

She says, read with your senses as I always encourage you to do, and I think I am in love with her. With her fuchsia lipstick. With the ethereal thinness of her white blonde hair.

She is talking about Ishiguro: In any fiction workshop they’d say, ‘no! cut this! This needs to stop!’ but not here, no.

Forms of fiction are a reflection of how we see the world. In it we search for our childhood questions.

My questions:

What is the nature of memory?
The importance of objects?
The color, yellow?

Yesterday, election day, I rode the downtown three train from 96^th street to times square, heading towards eighth street and my weekly writing workshop. I’d cast my ballot hours earlier, but the experience of doing so is with me still. It sounds corny, but I wanted so deeply the outcome that, ultimately, came to pass, that I think I filled a little bit of my soul into the empty circle beside the name Barack Obama. Anyways, the importance of the election was on my mind as I stepped onto the three train and plopped down on the slippery blue bench. The car was crowded, peppered with difference – the woman in tweed pants and sneakers, the heels of her work shoes poking out from her handbag; the man in his carharts coming from one of the many construction jobs clogging up the UWS; and a kid in a football uniform, shoulder pads and all, smelling of sweat and looking nervously at the subway map posted across the aisle from him. I glanced at each of them, careful not to let my eyes rest too long on any one thing, but the woman looked up from her blackberry and caught my eye, forcing it upwards. There I saw it, posted in between the ads for 1 800 DIVORCE and Dr. Maury’s laser skin correction:

"The only freedom deserving the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest."

I’ve read this before – Freshman philosophy I believe, but never felt it so pertinent to my life as I do now. Here it is, republican and democratic ideals fused into one graceful form. And isn’t that what we are striving for? A balance of self care and respect for others, the kind which inherently affects a coming together of different political parties, different races, different places, and different ways of seeing, not with the aim of conversion or blame, but of common resolve to live peacefully and to strive for a greater understanding.

Yes, I thought as the doors dinged shut at 72^nd street and the train moved on, moved forward through the darkness as will we all, with Obama standing beside us at our collective helm. Yes we can.

End of the summer

Fake baked and orange
Metallic blonde
Beached out on blanket
Watching

Hoards of women in floral patterned
Skirted suits
Pass by with plastic buckets in their hands
Picked up from where they were discarded
By translucent skinned boys
Asking why
Standing with small stomachs sticking out
Coral colored bones visible below the skin

“We have four jelly fish”
“Release them! Release them into the wild!”

The Women. I just got home from seeing this movie. It was an experience that left me a bit appalled, and not just because the acting is so atrocious (it is) nor because it is a film rife with clichés and negative female stereotypes, but because it promises the opposite based on the premise that there are no men in the movie whatsoever. Whatever, the absence or presence of members of the male sex in a movie matters not to me. I was interested, however, in the way The Women would represent the central characters given that, unlike Sex and the City, the plot doesn’t revolve around their pursuit of the opposite sex.

In fact, it was far worse. Rather than depict a slew of sexy New York women obsessed with their boyfriends and husbands, The Women simply depicted a slew of sexy New York women obsessed with material things. (It also operated as a veritable 2 hour commercial for Dove bath products and Saks Fifth Avenue department stores, but that’s another essay altogether)

To be fair, a fixation with fashion is present in Sex and the City as well, but it takes a back seat to endless array of coffee and lunch dates during which the four friends discuss their love lives, sometimes with a modicum of introspection. Not so in The Women where the pursuit of Prada directly distracts from Meg Ryan’s suffering daughter, who not only professes a foreboding fixation with her weight (which her mother shrugs off with a chuckle) but who, at the age of 11ish is carting around cigarettes, contemplating sex, burning tampons and having inappropriate conversations with her father’s mistress who is simultaneously soaking in the tub. To top it all off, the film ends without addressing any of the aforementioned issues, but focuses instead on the central character’s self-staged fashion show, a parade of wafer thin models in Calvin Klein-esque pieces. The daughter, of course, is starry eyed, joining her mother on the runway and beaming like all is well. This parting scene is pointed at female empowerment but left this viewer wondering what the director/producer was smoking. Put the budding anorexic eleven year old on the runway alongside a string of walking hangers and an oblivious mother and you’ve got a recipe for disaster, not empowerment.

To me, womanhood is about connection and unification, about nurturance and self exploration. This movie, however managed to affect the reverse, reducing, objectifying and stupefying women while professing to do the opposite. It doesn’t help things that Meg Ryan started the film curly-haired, flat soled and digging around in her garden (pre-adultery induced epiphany) and ended it with stick straight locks, sky high Christian Louboutin heels, and a budding career on the New York fashion scene.

This transformation was intended to affect a “you go girl” sentiment, particularly because it followed the antics of a philandering husband, a disappointing father, (both alluded to, not shown) and a nasty divorce. It seemed to me, however, that the change was more indicative of a loss of self than a discovery of one. Perhaps I’m dragging my own baggage in here…or my own allegiance to curly-haired keds-wearers, but it’s been my personal experience that, regardless of the circumstance, and particularly when it pertains to females, movements away from the natural (curls, minimal makeup, gardening etc) and towards the artificial (flat ironed, manicured, couture clad, etc) indicates a movement away from one’s essential self. The fact that post-transformation the character is suddenly attractive to her husband again is beyond me as well.

This film was the Sarah Palin of the cinema – seemingly supportive of women but secretly pointed at demeaning them, an aim obscured by sharp words, perfectly painted lips, designer labels, and of course, XX chromosomes.

HAMGIRL T-SHIRTS IS BORN!!!!!!!!
http://hamgirl.bigcartel.com/

Several years ago, inspired by what seemed to be a shortage of subtle, classy t-shirts in the horse world, I hatched a plan to turn my sketches and designs into an original line of shirts, appealing to fashion forward horse women. It's taken a while, but here are the images of my first batch of "Hamgirl" original t-shirts!



These shirts will not fit baggily, they are not silk screened so that the design is all rubbery and textured...I put a lot of thought into their creation. Am totally open to feedback and suggestions, however, so let me know what you think!
Also, I have a limited number of these tees available for sale. Take your pick - American Apparel unisex size small or Tultex brand women's size large (fits me loosely)
Anyone interested, shoot me an email (hamshoegirl@gmail.com)
and visit my new web-store at: http://hamgirl.bigcartel.com/
where you can buy one of your very own!!!

P.S.
The sketch is my own, the quote is from Shakespeare's Henry V (gotta give the man some credit)
"When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk, he trots the air, the earth sings when he touches it, the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes."

So the other morning I had this crazy experience…I awoke at a leisurely hour and rolled, half asleep, out of bed. As I headed towards the lu I had a half-conscious memory flash in the form of an obscure but recognizable image that projected itself across the forefront of my mind for a split second. In it I saw a curled up cat in a dimly lit room, set upon a window sill that overlooked a rainy outdoor setting. This flash of recollection startled me as it was at once opaque and intensely familiar. I quickly scribbled it down in my journal and spent the rest of the day mulling over where it could have come from. Acting on a hunch that said image had originated from some sort of cinematic experience I turned to youtube and, after many hours, found it’s source.

Upon stumbling upon the above clip I knew at once it was correct. What is more, as I watched the film, I found I knew it completely, singing along with whole songs and recalling with glee the names of pivotal characters. In short, am delighted, not only because I have reclaimed a movie that was central to my childhood (it is so fitting-watch and see) but also because I’ve been left to wonder what other treasures of love and loss and memory I’ve tucked away in my mind….to be continued I am sure….

The other day, when futzing around on my mom's computer, I came across this speech I wrote my senior year of high school. Upon reading it for the first time in years, I was struck by the extent to which it moved me, not only because it inspired a surge of appreciation of my own writer-ly self at seventeen, but because it still applies to our social climate. See below:

"Members of modern-day society move through life at a frenzied pace, always competing, afraid of being left behind or trampled. We have established a “power-over” culture, one in which we fight to control others, bending them to our wills with manipulation and destruction. At the root of our violent behavior is patriarchy, the empowerment of males at the cost of women’s equality. Taking into account the war, terrorism, and inhumanity that currently comprise our cultural struggles, it seems that now, more than ever, we have created an estranged global community. The closer we step towards components of distrust such as isolationism, nationalism and militarism, the farther we get from growth.
Connection has been constant throughout history. Issues and ideas that are seemingly unrelated are, in fact, linked together as part of the cyclical stream of events that comprise the past. Only through connection can we see the division that our society has created. We have become so clouded by the media and the culture of excess in which we live, that we cannot see how deeply embedded patriarchy is. But every time we subordinate ourselves, soften our voices or lower our heads, every time we obey the inner voice that punishes us for being too much, we feed the establishments that enable patriarchy.
We succumb to the patriarchal system unconsciously and should not reprove ourselves for doing so. Punishment only serves to disconnect us from ourselves and to disallow the inner strength that is essential for change. Rather, we must educate ourselves, we must nurture ourselves; for it is only once we are empowered within that we can empower each other.
In a way, adherence to a patriarchal world view is inevitable. Oftentimes we do not recognize its existence because it is all we know. Women occupy the margins, not the text of our history books. They are objectified on billboards and underrepresented in every area of government. Above all, they are told to be silent, quieted by a culture that nourishes itself upon their oppression. Balance is essential to a healthy lifestyle. With women so clearly marginalized can anyone, male or female, reach their full potential?
The answer is no, by suppressing women, we disable men as well. Just as we expect women to strive for an ideal defined by their gender, we expect men to do the same. Where women are encouraged to be unnaturally silent and submissive, men are expected to dominate, a role which separates them not only from the female gender, but from the female within themselves as well.
Enter feminism. A movement that is so often considered “man-hating” is, in reality, focused not only upon women, but upon humanity as a whole. Misconceptions of the feminist message keep it from total success. Labeling women as radical devalues their cause and it becomes acceptable not to listen. Although militant advocates exist, change will come from those who seek to unify, not divide. This “real” feminism, what author bell hooks calls “revolutionary”, is centered upon (in her words) “being able to confront head on the ‘enemy’ no matter what form the enemy might take-man, woman, child, state, church, school, friend, lover, and most frightening, “the enemy within”. [1]
Today feminism is associated with the woman’s movement of the 1960s, a time when women like Gloria Steinum and Delores Williams lent their voices to the feminist cause, silencing the inner enemy that kept women in the kitchen instead of the working world. We recognize these advocates for their innovation but forget the past from which their message sprung. Before them, centuries of feminists had woven together their visions, creating a tapestry in which the female voices of the past and present combine to cronicle the history that is ignored by most accounts; the history of women.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton once said, “The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.”[2]
I believe that with these words, Mrs. Stanton has summarized the objective of feminism. It is the furtherance of thought for all people that defines the movement and prompts the “divine floods of light”, establishing the inner-powers essential for growth.
But to meet ones inner strength requires connection and introspection, factors that are discouraged for the threat they pose to the patriarchal power. Instead we are taught to disconnect from ourselves, a separation that Starhawk, a modern-day witch and scholar, calls estrangement. Without autonomy we unconsciously maintain the patriarchal norms, trapping ourselves in a cycle of destruction. Detaching us from our individual power stops us from relating to the exterior world; it is no wonder that we culturally disregard our responsibility to the environment while we defend a propensity for violence. This destructive trend is perhaps the most guarded of our cultural doctrines. Change is associated with fear rather than perceived as natural. Indeed, people will go to extreme lengths to maintain a setting in which they feel comfortable.
The cultural disconnect that enables our estranged behavior needs mending. The dynamics of our “power-over” society must shift, causing people to seek power in positive, not negative forms. The awakening of our connections is vital to our survival and requires the discovery of what Starhawk calls immanence, the power from within. Unification within ourselves is only as strong as the connections it inspires with others. For women especially, who have been historically isolated from knowledge, from their bodies, and from each other, the formation of sisterhood is essential. Change comes slowly, requiring the strength and support that is the basis of sisterhood. Alone we cannot accomplish what we can as a cohesive whole. Unification within oneself is essential to establish a power from within; only then can we form a female power impassioned enough to counter patriarchy. Looking inside oneself results in the discovery of human nature and our connection to the earth. Recognizing power as internal and enabling instead of harnessing it to disable others would prompt our society to empower, not cripple, and love instead of hate.
There is no denying that history excludes women. They are omitted from documentation because to include them would be to acknowledge and empower them. Many of the challenges faced by women today are rooted in the same issues that they have struggled against throughout history. Education, for example, has been continually denied to women. Throughout the ages, female education has been halted at an early age, replaced with lessons in etiquette and home economics, areas of study which encourage restriction rather than expansion of thought. Even today, in a world that claims equality, women comprise two-thirds of the world’s 876 million illiterates, a statistic that is not expected to decline.[3] Without the opportunities afforded by literacy, women are left with little opportunity to challenge the social constraints that influence issues such as infanticide, genital mutilation, and spousal abuse.
The gravity of our global disconnect is overwhelming. Faced with a multitude of complex problems, one wonders where to begin change. So many of the problems that affect today’s women are established at adolescence or earlier. We are programmed from birth to fill our gender roles, boys get blue blankets, and girls get pink. For change to begin we must first come to terms with the masculine or feminine parts of ourselves. For men especially, the accepting of their own femininity serves to dissolve the cultural expectations that their gender includes. No longer bound to dependence upon “power-over” to define themselves, men, through knowledge of their own female identity, can cultivate their power-from-within and break away from the fear that supports estrangement. The world in which we live has been stripped of personality, power, and connection. Our society reserves value for a select few who are, traditionally, white males. The belief that they are somehow superior and more powerful is supported by the destruction for which they are responsible. Power is measured not by the strength of our connection, but by the range of our destruction. The more one devastates, the greater one’s power and the more societal fear and respect. Instead of spirituality and introspection we revolve around machines and technology; they have become our religion. We are constantly striving to create more and to further our profit, trying to fill a void with money that only connection to ourselves can dissipate. The domination of patriarchy remains, enabling the destruction that will eventually result in the demise of all things. To prevent ruination, we must overcome the fear that has trapped us in a “power-over” environment. This fear has to do not only with each other, but with what would result from change. What would happen if we were to cease dependency upon violence and manipulation? That is the question we must pose to future generations, and we must begin now.

---

[1] Bell hooks, Challenging Patriarchy Means Challenging Men to Change

[2] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1890

[3] UN Document: Main Findings and Future Directions

Urns for the ashes of tired hearts. Disappointed hopes.

I write because I can’t live otherwise.

I draw the sponge lengthwise over the countertop and watch as it inflates, one crater-like receptacle at a time, filling with the wetness I left when I washed that lettuce. Red leaf. Dirty.
Outside a choir of birds are singing down the sun, one shade of orange at a time until it blends into the dark horizon and disappears.

We can’t see how much we’ve lost until we see how much we had.

How I’ve come to love the water. And this bug filled garden. This dirty, speckled lettuce. These three ripe tomatoes.

Carol Maso: “the desire of the novel to be a poem. The desire of the girl to be a horse. The desire of the poem to be an essay. The essay’s desire, it’s reach towards fiction. And the obvious erotics of this.”

The black woman beside me in a sleeveless blouse. The white roots woven into her arms, marking the places where her skin has stretched to hold her, all of her, in.

Coca cola in glass bottles, clinking on glass topped tables. This is how I remember Europe.

That feeling, lodged beneath my ribcage, seated beneath my heart, that momentary rising. Excited and desirous. The moment before you’re inside me. Before the food filled spoon fill hits my mouth.

Moving fast to a slow song
This train set to speeding against a background of melancholy
And music
Autumn in the air.

To give a rushed kiss goodbye. To know you’ll kiss again soon. Assuredly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/us/politics/30law.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

a wise man once said that, "knowledge is power." In regards to the current political climate, it seems to me that the past eight years have shown that, despite cultural ideals of what is powerful (i.e. the ability to wield massive force) such has the tendency to affect only suffering and fragmentation. Perhaps, therefore, when we examine each candidate and compare what we consider their qualifications, it's time to revise what we believe makes them capable....
just some food for thought....

These Friday afternoons in Grand Central Station, standing in line for Metro North, waiting behind rows of tartan shorts for my overpriced ticket on a crowded and sweaty train.

I judge them, those in front of me, standing in their sandals like caricatures of themselves, the men with collars perfectly popped, the women with pink pedicures glistening in the soft station light.

I judge them before I recall that beneath my canvas sneakers, my own toes are painted a pale pink, albeit by my own hand.

So I move my eyes upwards and leave them to linger on the Louis Vuittons slung over the bony shoulders before me, and the platinum cards being brandished nonchalantly at the ticket taker.

But I am saved from myself. For somewhere in between my stares and the prejudgment they inspire, I remember that despite the bags, the brands and the impeccable grooming, the wasps who flock eastwards on Friday eves with weekender’s plans for golf and boating and cocktails and beach...well, at 5:01 they’re all squashed onto the same sweaty train as the Bridgeport bound hard hats and the New Haven headed teens and one frizzy haired blonde girl with a big eared puppy and a bag full of books.

We’re all on this train together.

Life goes on,
Marked by constants we’ve created.

Bare walls,
Rituals of each day make whole years go by,
Streamlined,
Remembered as single uninterrupted days.

Mornings on the train,
Moving without moving.
Avoiding eyes,
And crafting this pretense of apathy,
Uncaring have been made a shell,
And underneath it, that great question.

That hope to be peeled,
And felt,
And forced into contact.

Am inspired, once again, by poetess Mary Oliver....

Mornings at Blackwater

For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.

~By Mary Oliver

On the menu for the rest of this life:

Word Salad.
Sumptuous but spare.

Served atop interwoven verbal place mats.

Sewn together with sentence and syntax.

Complimented by a side of my spirit.

And a bottle of soul.

All for the bargain price of $ No Regrets!

Much is taking place in my world these days, and much of it has to do with Ham. These changes and transitions have called forth from the past deep seated memories and emotions, recollections that are coloring my thoughts and dreams. In them, I am transported back, seeing myself in flashes; three years old wearing blue jeans, red cowboy boots and a skirt, refusing to sacrifice frills for the saddle, insisting I could strattle both worlds. Ten and playing with Breyer horses on the thick green carpet, announcing to myself the “1999 wooooorld champion,” as I moved the model horse and rider through their victory pass. And then I am thirteen and looking down at the New England tricolor around Barry’s neck, how the red and blue silk catches the afternoon sun, how his sweat stains the fabric, how the celebratory ad in the Morgan Connection said, “I am so proud, -Judy,” and how my heart swelled when I saw it. And then seventeen, hoof black imbedded beneath my finger nails, baby oil everywhere, driven and serious and with Ham, Columbine, Curiosity behind me, feeling myself a horse woman at last. Like the afternoon Judy let me ride Wham-O and how for a moment at the end I felt him rise up beneath me, hovering suspended in that magic and timeless spot. And that instant at Oklahoma when my number was called and Ham and I became the National Champions. How I thought to myself that I wouldn’t be the type to cry and how my body betrayed me, letting lose a flow of tears that started out slow and grew to an uncontrolled catharsis, ending hours later, quelled by the return to normalcy, the familiar feel of the pitchfork in my hands. How the next year we won the world, effortlessly, as if it had been intended all along, and how I knew somehow it was. How Judy said, “it’s about time,” and how we left the ring, a blur of ribbons and red roses. How somebody handed me a cell phone, and how my father’s voice sounded on the other end, “Oh Allie,” and then tears, and how even now, four years later, the memory of that moment makes me cry.

And how there is so much more. A million moments in between these memory flashes, a million times the New England sun stripped me of my last reserves and how I forced myself to move despite that. How Marion’s hugs pressed my sweaty shirt against the silky inside of my show coat after a winning class, how Ginny held the reins and popped a grape into her mouth and said something like, “well that went well,” or, “maybe next time,” as I slid off and ran my stirrups up. How the towel hung from my dad’s back pocket, and how he held the wet bucket in his right hand. How the beads on Judy’s jacket caught the light, and how I saw myself walking behind her, a part of something, at home in my role as I was in the saddle, settled there where everywhere else, I was displaced.

All this is living inside me now, nestled in my heart and mind, painful but alive. And I wonder what to do with it, what it all means, and how it can possibly hurt so much. Because behind these memories, these thoughts and feelings, I am indeed thirteen again, and my mother is moving out of our family home, loading pieces of our life onto a moving van. And my father is crying, and yelling, he is locking himself in the back room for hours. And I am alone with the anger, the sadness, the lies and the past, the things I thought forgotten that have now coagulated in my chest, having been covered over all these years by the one constant I have known, the horses and my Ham. And so I, in this moment, looking back and afraid to lose it all, find my world upside down all over again. But I realize as well that such shaking up of things is life in a nutshell and the changes I've feared may just be the ones I need. I don't know what will happen from here on in, not for me, not for Ham...not for anyone really. But I refuse to be afraid any longer.

“You tore this,” I said, “that night, remember?”
“It’s very little,” he said.
“A laceration nonetheless.”
I looked down at my chest, at the place where my shirt was torn. He’d reached up, excited, from below my body, moving to remove the blouse but tearing it instead. At the time, it’d been sexy, but looking back now, looking down at my chest, the finger-sized hole in my navy blue blouse seemed only a reminder of another tear. Of the navy blue hole in my rose colored heart.

I was ten years old when my mom and I began to look for a horse. For several years prior to that, I had ridden and leased a myriad of horses from Andrea, my first instructor. There was Kingston, with whom I learned to post; Benji, with whom I learned to canter; Yankee, with whom I learned how to fall off; Premier, with whom I learned to stay on despite his efforts at unseating me; Pickles, with whom I learned the intricacies of a bouncy trot; and Victoree, with whom I learned how to play horse show.

My relatively short term relationships with each of the aforementioned horses prepared me for the commitment of owning my own and after several years, my mother and I ventured forth to find me a Morgan of my very own. We drove around New England, my mother with her camcorder and me with my optimism. I think my pickiness was surprising because at one point, after I'd vetoed yet another prospect, my mother turned the camera on me and said, "What is it exactly that you are looking for in a horse, Allie?" We have this on tape, me sitting in the passenger side of her Volvo, responding to the camera as one would answer the question of an ESPN correspondent, "Someone who is serious, committed, and who wants to work with me as much as I want to work with them," I replied.

When we met Barry in early November, I announced that the search was over, I'd found my partner of choice. Such is not to say that he didn't put me through the ringer. In fact, for an entire year following our initial meeting, Barry would stop dead between the second way trot and canter and refuse to move forward, backing away from my insistent leg pressure. Initially, I was completely disappointed. "How could this happen to me?" I wondered, discovering then that if something looks to good to be true, it usually is. What I know now, and couldn't know then, is that, perfection is overrated; it is more desirable to weather a complicated storm and come out that much stronger and more appreciative of calm seas, than to float forever on docile waters, going nowhere in the process.

In any case, the challenge Barry presented was solved only through creativity and a method of compromise developed with the help of my trainer Judy, to whom we had moved, hoping she could help. Help us she did, and Barry and I developed into a team, moving around our points of conflict rather than trying to force our way through them. Our teamwork was reflected in our show ring success. Likewise, when my adolescent increase in height matched up with a maturation of my riding style and it became time for Barry and I to go our separate ways, we did so with love and acceptance, albeit many tears on my part…and indifferent looks on his.

But then, I met Ham. My true love, a true partner, an animal ushered into my life because of the bond I'd made with Barry and the lessons we had learned. Through my teamwork with Barry, I'd grown as an individual rider, becoming ready for a more mature partner, a partner like Ham. In trying to convince my parents of this point, I composed an essay, purposefully entitled, "Why Cabot Courage Command is the Horse for me," in which I asserted that, "he matches me in desire and work ethic, and is the most beautiful animal I've ever seen." My belief in him proved positive, although, as with Barry, we certainly had our challenges, particularly because that which we grappled with as individuals was mirrored by our trials as a team. Nevertheless, our relationship has been one in which we've both grown, coming together to achieve great goals. And even though these days we spend most of our time apart, each of us having focused on other areas, people and pursuits, he is forever in my heart and mind.

Ok, so what does all this back story have to do with reflection on the present? Stay with me, here is the tie in. Last night, walking home in the heat and observing the disparate love affairs that litter Manhattan's streets this time of year, I got to thinking about the initial stages of a relationship; any kind of relationship. It's about getting to know someone, trying them out if you will, just as it was so many years back when I rode a multitude of different horses, learning something new from each one, and assembling those experiences into an idea of what I did and did not want in a partner. So although my girlfriends and I oftentimes bemoan the annoyance of disappointed hopes and the fear that builds when it comes to our love interests, maybe we just need to adjust our angle. With each date, with each brief affair or each year of a committed relationship, rather than ask how we can control the other person, perhaps we should wonder what we're learning about ourselves. What are we learning about what we do and don't want in a partner? I think the modern day myths that promise a "one and only" can sometimes serve to obscure the fact that each encounter, no matter how brief, is a gift. I think about the guys I've known and the friendships and heartache they've left me with, and I realize that, without all that, I'd not be so far along the road to realizing what it is I really want. Somewhere though, I've known it all along. Maybe, for me, it's just easier to identify when talking about a horse.

"Someone who is serious, committed, and who wants to work with me as much as I want to work with them…"

There’s this odd thing that happens in New York City. Maybe it happens everywhere else as well and I’ve just been here for so long I’ve forgotten, but for weeks, sometimes whole months on end, the moon disappears. Her absence almost always coincides with an unsettled feeling within me. Or maybe her absence affects that feeling. Either way, the moon goes away and I am restless, unsettled, discontent.

For a while now, the city sky has been empty. Likewise, I’ve been moving through life on edge, feeling more a passenger to the daily wave of Manhattan’s movement, than an agent of its momentum.

This has been one of the hottest weekends New York has seen in years, and has certainly constituted the first heat wave of the summer. I’ve spent it in a bit of a funk, perhaps partially due to the lack of air conditioning in my small and brick oven like box of an apartment, but for other, inexplicable reasons as well. I haven’t been able to escape a sense of expectancy, as if I am full to the brim with some feeling in need of expression and without any avenue through which to find it. It’s easy, in such cases, to expect the key to said expression to come from an outside source: the object of your affection, your friends, your finances, your vodka soda – the list goes on. I realize this, I realize this as I fall into it, knowing from experience that it’s a dynamic that needs to be humored, weathered and then released, and only in that order.

So it’s been a painful past week or so, waiting for this funk to pass. And I’ve done what I can to ease the waiting. I’ve gone out a bit, shopped in moderation, wandered the aisles of Fairway, etc. Today, for example, following last night’s low key evening of cocktails and girl talk with one of my best friends, I slept until two, before treating myself to Starbucks, and a movie. Maybe it was the copious exposure to air conditioning, maybe it was the iced frapuchino or whatever it was called, but I walked out of the cinema this evening feeling like the frustrated clouds of confusion that have colored the past two weeks, were finally rolling away. So I wandered a bit, testing out the waters of my emotional shift, walking up sixty ninth street to Columbus and stopping on my way to buy flowers, a weekly habit I surrendered years ago out of financial necessity. Nevertheless, it remains a decadent and delightful way in which I treat myself….even if these bodega bought blooms only last for three days before drooping.

Anyways, on the way home, turning the corner of 71^st street, bouquet in hand, I looked up and saw the moon, reappeared in a crescent incarnation and sitting like relief, low in the sky. Like my awkward mood, like the feeling of expectancy and the inescapable waiting period necessary to go through for it to pass, she was back in Manhattan’s sky, a return that coincided with my own.

It’s a reassuring thing, the constant change that comprises our lives. Like the way this hot weather descended upon the city, oppressive and bearing down upon us, affecting anger and annoyance. But as I write this, the thunder is rolling in and a summer storm approaches, heralded in by change and promising to the break the heat. If only for a little while.

Ode to an Owl~

Tonight I did a month's worth of laundry, loading up several washers, feeding my ten dollar bill into the change machine with chagrin. I cleaned three sets of sheets, twelve pairs of panties, my favorite jeans and, for the first time ever, my long standing stuffed animal, Mr. Owl.

He is small, Mr. Owl, and speckled grey. His furry feathers, once fluffy, have become matted with time’s passing, with each hour spent pressed into my sleeping chest. Lately, my dog Calvin has taken to removing Mr. Owl from my bed and dragging him down onto the floor. Covered in slobber and looking rather bedraggled, it seemed to me that Mr. Owl was finally in need of a bath.

So into the hamper he went with the laundry, down to the basement, and into the wash.

When I transferred my wet clothes, by the armful, to the dryer, I checked him over, ensuring that the rinse cycle hadn’t done him in. He was soggy, but markedly cleaner, smelling less of slobber, sweat and tea rose, and more like Mountain Breeze detergent.

I shuffled downstairs on the last leg of my laundry chore, arriving seven minutes early. So I sat there, perched on a washing machine, and watched my clothes circle round, tossed in concentric cycles of color.

And then, there was Mr. Owl, pushed to the forefront by a wad of bedsheet, flying around the dryer, wings flapping and squat form flipping himself over and around. It was a comical sight, to see how freely he bounced, reverberating off walls of cycling clothing. I laughed at him then, sitting alone in the laundry room, Indian style on machine number four. Me and Mr. Owl, old friends.

“I wheeled with the stars, my heart broke lose on the wind” – P. Neruda.

I think of what you’ve left us
Bright greens and pristine waters
Crisp breezes
And clean all around

Nothing but clean
And this cabin on a lake

If you had left us nothing but this
It would have been a world of enough
It would be just right
But you didn’t
Couldn’t
And in trying to give it all
You poisoned it at the roots.

I rode the train home
Up from Fulton Street
Late
One New York City night.
Across from me
Sat a mother and daughter
Dreadlocked
And embracing
Sleeping
And a portrait of love

Their entwined arms encompassing
Inclusive
And me across the car
Hungry
And made safe by their circle

This legacy
This land
This intersection of skin
Your body into mine
The planting of this seed

And the circle
The inherited repetition
Of these days
Reflecting back to me
In a blur.
When, in times to come,
I look for them in memory’s mirror

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21369007/wid/11915773/

totally my style.

Soon I will be twenty two years old.

That sounds old.

I feel young.

I am numerically advanced, but have yet to have a boyfriend.

I’ve yet to…well I can’t think of anything else that I’m “supposed” to have done by this point, but somehow, the perpetually single thing feels like a big one.

A big glaring sign, broadcasting my freak status to the rest of the committed relationship settled world.

Thing is, when you’re single, and the rest of your age group isn’t, it can get lonely. Which is maybe why a myriad of successes, accomplishments, and personal growth spurts are easily eclipsed by said singleness.

Or maybe it’s just the sadness one feels upon realizing that they can’t remember when the last time they really liked someone was. I don’t mean the “yea, why not? I sort of like him,” reaction, but more like the stomach flip, face hurts from smiling, can’t stop thinking about that person, I want him so bad and not just because I can’t have him, kind of like.

I certainly don't deign to believe that a significant other makes one's life worthwhile, or even fun...such has most definitely not been my observation. But it's sometimes hard not to slip into believing oneself less whole by virtue of a single status, simply because everywhere you turn, there's another couple, or another commercial featuring couples, or another chick flick toting an optimistic happy ending embodied by formerly single people becoming a couple, or another billboard with two entwined people, 100x their actual size and, surprise surprise, a couple.

Maybe my angst has nothing to do with all that, maybe it's just the fact that another year has passed and I'm still writing these whiney blog posts bemoaning single life. Fast forward fifty years....will it be the same? Will it even matter?

Hopefully not. I mean, it's usually the single ones we remember once they're gone...probably because they have the time and patience to produce what people in relationships miss because they're too busy having sex or fighting. Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson...single and brilliant, here I come.

Spring in New York is an incredible contrast of the old and the new. On the Upper West Side, this change is complemented by a community comprised mostly of the very old and the very young.

Today, Calvin and I walked for an hour in Riverside Park. There we saw children playing, moving in energetic bursts over the newly grown grass.

We also watched the groups of old people, set out on park benches beside their caretakers, soaking up the sun their younger counterparts sprout and bloom beneath.

One gets the feeling the day rolls pleasantly by for these park go-ers. For the children, I imagine time flies…particularly because they aren’t aware of its existence. For the old folks, I would think the day is short and filled with long periods of day dream.

Perhaps this is wrong of me to say. Perhaps I am mistakenly interpreting the long and displaced stares characteristic of the very old, but they seem to me the gaze of someone who’s slipped away. I hope for their sake that they’ve gone somewhere with tulips just as yellow and breezes just as sweet as they were in Riverside Park just this afternoon.

You.

I sat next to a man on the plane tonight who looked like you.
Like you will someday.
Someday, with your wife and a blonde haired baby boy
Who sits on your lap.
Who looks out the window.
Who says, “Look daddy, clouds,” and points.

The You I sat by,
The father, the boy,
Had hands like yours.
Bony and pale,
With wide veins that ran atop them like roots.
Like gopher tunnels atop the skin.

The You I sat by
For those few small hours,
Held his son.
And later on,
Slipped into half sleep with the child in his hands,
And picture books balanced atop his knees.

And this You had a wife who was fresh and plain
And pretty.
She held her son and said, “I love this boy so much,”
She was like yours will someday be.
Will someday be fresh and pretty.

And will not be me.

The Push Pull Phenomenon~

Don’t get me wrong, I love my dog. But sometimes, he positively epitomizes typical characteristics of the male sex (evidence to the argument that gender roles aren’t solely socially constructed…but that’s another essay)

I’ll be sitting at my desk, settled in my chair, typing away and Calvin will come sit right at my feet to stare up at me imploringly with beautiful black button eyes.

Because we are so well acquainted, Calvin and I, I know this look is not asking me to feed him, or to take him out but is more a “let me curl up in your lap to love and be loved” look. For Calvin, life in a human’s lap is a deeply embedded biological desire. He’s bred for it. His ancestors adorned the laps of everyone from Marie Antoinette (who supposedly gave the breed it’s name…girl was good at turning phrases) to King Henry III (yikes) to Madame de Pompadour (probably the best choice of the three). I love that in my wanderings round the Met, particularly through the Robert Lehman wing, I’ve come across several grand accounts of royal family life, complete with little Papillions seated demurely in their ladies laps.

In short, in Calvin’s rather limited world, my lap represents a certain fulfillment of his life’s purpose. So it really makes sense that he so ardently desires to be in it. Which gets me back to the point that I started out with--the way in which my little dog behaves in a similar fashion to other, human, males in my life.

When Calvin sits there, on the floor, staring up soulfully at me, I smile down and ask, “Do you want to come up?”…he keeps staring. I reach down to lift him into my lap and what does he do? He scampers off, turns around, looks at me, and scampers in the opposite direction. “Fine” I say and turn back to my work. A few minutes later, however, he’s back to staring. The process repeats itself. “Fine”, I say, and turn back to my work. Tired of playing games, when he again comes and sits at my feet to stare, I ignore him. When he realizes his attempt at my attention has failed, he hops from the couch to the bed and sits on the edge of my mattress, right behind my chair, and stares some more. If you’ve ever tried to work with someone looking over your shoulder, you’ll understand why this absolutely doesn’t work. So I cave, I give into the request on his terms and turn the chair to face him. Only then will he hop from the bed, onto my lap, to curl up and snooze contentedly for a while.

It’s the old “push pull” syndrome worked out in canine form. He does it with his own kind too. We’ll be walking along, and towards us will come another canine-human pair. If the other dog perks up, interested and alert, Calvin feigns indifference. Once that dog has passed by however, Calvin does a complete 180, intending to follow the now disinterested animal down the street. Likewise, should another dog seem disinterested in him, Calv is all ears and eyes, fixated on the elusive other.

Let me paint a parallel situation for you, just to exemplify the connection my little dog’s actions have to those of his human counterparts. This is a fabricated example, although, one that is assuredly well founded. Girl and guy are in class together. Guy thinks to himself that girl is hot. Girl thinks guy is hot and suspects he thinks he is as well. As such, she warily and wisely ignores him. Guy’s interest grows, fueled by the girl’s indifference, perhaps because it poses a challenge of sorts. She notices him noticing her so is unsuprised when he finally gets it up to comment on her outfit, or something smart she said in class discussion. Girl is glad…everyone wants to be appreciated. Guy and girl strike up a conversation and leave class together. Girl gives guy her number. They part ways. Girl waits and wonders. Guy waits until the next day dawns before sending a text...nobody wants to seem desperate. Girl receives and is excited. She checks the clock, counts ahead four hours and decides that she will text at that point….again, nobody wants to seem desperate. As this dynamic goes on, and as the two get to know each other and eventually begin to hook up, one of the two, the girl most likely, starts to like the other, or to think she likes the other, more than the other wants to reciprocate. Once the more interested party feels this increase of emotional attachment, waiting the requisite four hours before returning a text becomes much more difficult than before, as does wondering for days on end when next she will hear from the guy whose attention she’s now invested in. On the flip side, the less interested party, having now solved the mystery of what the other looks like without her clothes on, is demonstrably less interested in the mystery of the back and forth text messages, when they’ll arrive and what they’ll have to say. What is more, because the other is more interested, the aforementioned texts come more often. Suffice it to say, the relationship fizzles, leaving the female party upset and feeling vulnerable for having put herself out there and undesirable for being rejected. These feelings are strong at first, giving way with the passing of a few weeks, to anger. This anger causes a cessation of all contact between the two, be it telephonically or in class where the girl ignores the guy with a nonchalant air of indifference, smiling and talking with other people, making clear that the hooking up that once was, really meant nothing at all. This lull in contact between the two goes on for a while before the guy finds himself wondering where the “other” went to. Ergo, he sends a text. The recipient of said text is at once satisfied, angry and intrigued by the reinstatement of contact. And so the process starts again.

In the same way that Calvin is invited into my loving lap only to run, the guy in the above situation balks at the girl’s attention and the attachment it alludes to. Once she seems less invested however, he becomes more. Push pull.

A marriage to myself in a wedding gown made of bloodless white veins,
The insides of an orange,
Laced about my skin.

Deep blue outside my body, my chapel,
And dark blue of my pen,
Pulling itself in concentric circles over the orange peels wrapped around my wrists
And tattooed in their place.

Dark blue henna, by my pen,
In preparation for a marriage to myself

Tonight the sun set like a blood orange in the sky, bleeding red and rusty over the blue. I saw it out my kitchen window while I washed a head of lettuce, red leaf and dirty. This house, my life, is set on a hill, deep seated in a long row of other beach cottages, ornamented with sunburnt front porches and unkempt lawns. But we all overlook the water, a wide California sea whose waves hold together the seam of earth and sky, stitching the two into one at the horizon line and adorning their union with layers of sea shell pink clouds.

At first this place…was like he was, soft and fluttering in my mind and in my body, like a warm yellow washing over me, each time lasting long after he closed my door behind him. It was a crazy love, one that swallowed me whole. And I'll never know if I was in it alone, even if I asked him, I'll never know.

People wonder what I do here all alone, how I spend my time. It seems inconceivable to them that I could have things to do. Maybe I don't, maybe I'm still doing nothing…but it doesn't seem that way. I go for long walks and let myself sink into the sand. I spend silent evenings on the front porch, cool and blue in the twilight…just like I am.

And I look at myself differently, settled in my solitude. My body is beautiful for it, glowing in its owner's recognition and undivided attention. I still shave my legs, all the way to the dips before my hips, even though I know no man will feel their softness, even though I can't remember what it feels like to want one to.

I've been here for a year, the most of which has been spent coming back to life, feeding my brittle body with ocean water. The third night I spent in this house, I walked down to the water and waded in, sitting heavily at first, where the sea meets the land. I let it caress me then, from the tips of my toes to the top of my head and everywhere in between. It was a surrender, sexual and serious, but effortless, the way it must be for animals, the way it can't be with a man.

The difference between us is embodied by this place, this California so foreign to Manhattan, so spacious and so soft. The change is in my body, in the muscles in my back once as dry and knotted as the roots of New York's sidewalk planted trees.

We had met in the springtime, as stereotypical lovers do. I'd overlooked his failings accordingly and likewise, he had put me up on a pedestal. I fell hard into a love I thought could hold me, sinking down deep into hope like one falls into a hammock, fully and with an entirety of form. And then, the hammock gave way and I landed hard on my ass where I stayed a while, shocked and windblown, before picking up and moving forward.

So here I am now, standing over the kitchen sink with a head of lettuce, a setting sun and Joni Mitchell singing For Free somewhere in the background.

Joni Mitchell, you've been on my mind.
Opinionated and opal,
Free where I am not.
Where I am stuck with this anger, growing in my bones,
Growing in this body, this space that I take up,
This protest I can't quite mount.

The semester is slated to start on Tuesday and for once, I find myself unexcited. The thought of new books, new professors and the accompanying ideas encompassed by both, is somewhat uninspiring, a point that is quite unusual. I’ve been cuddled into New York for the past few weeks, going out, staying in, and partaking of happy hour…it’s been great and I don’t want it to change.

My friends are gearing up to graduate in May and I am worlds away, knowing I have at least another summer session to go in order to make up those credits I lost upon transferring into Gallatin. Perhaps such is why I’ve blissfully banished all thought of the post graduate career hunt.

I’m starting to get curious though, wondering what I’ll do when I’m done at NYU, wondering who will hire me and whether I can weather Manhattan’s job market. Part of me wants to give it a try and part of me wants to hunker down for another four weeks of hibernation. Maybe I’m so adverse to yet another semester of study because it’ll bring me that much closer to an entry into “the real world” or maybe I’m burnt out on theory and ready for practice.

Ever since our respective birthdays, my best friend and I have been relishing our “old age”
With every high school posse I pass or each fake id carting college kid, I feel myself somehow superior, in years at least. But lately, given the proximity of the colloquium, the diploma, the dates, the dog and their culmination in a continuing march towards maturity, I somehow feel myself more infantile than adult. It seems to me this insecurity shines through, although no one seems to notice…perhaps the truth of it is we all feel rather childish underneath it all. Perhaps that’s more a natural state than hyper maturity anyhow.

I won't grow up,
I don't want to wear a tie.
And a serious expression
In the middle of July.
And if it means I must prepare
To shoulder burdens with a worried air,

I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up
Not me,
Not I
~Peter Pan