brooklyn

is where i am. ben drove me (thanks ben) from cape cod, where we went to stay w/ his parent(?s) just like we did last august. the best part of the visit came the last evening when, after we conventional beached for a while, we wound our way from twisty road to off-road dirt path and deadended at a gorgeous underpopulated cove where signs warn you sea turtles and seals come out to laze. finding neither, we settled for watching the sun fall, casting a long straight bright orange shadow along the water.

that adventure didn’t derail us from the initial plan: seeing charlie’s angels: even more ridiculous at the wellfleet drive in. drive-ins! i’d always wanted to go to one and never had. ben’s dad and lisa stayed in the car. ben and i took a blanket and sat in front on the ground. most people occupied folding chairs. the best part was that instead of previews they showed a road runner cartoon, and instead of requesting that you be quiet during the film they requested that everyone stand, place hand over heart and sing the national anthem.

comotion ended on an up note, too. the last day, we prepped, cooked, and hosted a bbq for the campers’ families; cleaned up said bbq; cleaned up from the camp; went back to the dorm exhausted and proceeded to stay up til 3:30 discussing interpersonal dynamics, limits, and leadership styles. we ended with a round of affirmations that reminded me of high skool, when my superclose group of friends had open’n’honest conversations about what we liked about each other.

as always, comotion was a great experience. the camp ran better this year because we knew what to expect. i felt more confident handling children, and we had no major issues.

now i have to start work. nerveracking. stef might walk me around the neighborhood for a bit first so i can acclimate or at least not feel entirely so foreign.

ding dong, the witch is dead

what a terrific coincidence. bowers v. hardwick and strom thurman kick the bucket on the same day. i wonder if anyone’s howling vast left-wing conspiracy.

and the headlines on the nytimes webpage, delightfully, read, “strom thurman dies, at age 100,” followed by, “gays celebrate …”

since finishing hpV, i’ve been too emotional to do much except comb the net for all the reviews i didn’t let myself read before. though i appreciated the nytimes’ glowing review (and it forced me to realize SATC didn’t make up the name of their foremost critic), the one i identified most with is salon’s. but i’m desperate to know what other people think. none of my fellow counselors have read the book. i need to talk about it with somebody.

in short, i gobbled it up so quickly and so ravenously it’s hard to even gauge how much i liked it. my instinct is that i liked it a lot. obviously it’s not as enjoyable as the 3rd one, my favorite. it’s not easy reading. but i am very intense about this book at this moment. in fact, since i started reading it, i feel as if the book’s moodiness and passion, both, have been seeping into me. i got irritated when interrupted, defensive when people were derisive, and generally i was on edge. i still am.

… it’s something, all right.

three days into co|motion i feel much more confident than i did three days into it last year. the fact that i’ve done it before helps. last year i had no experience working with a group of kids at all. while i never panicked, i panicked that i might panic, and so on. i also remember, early on last year, finishing a day in tears, sure that none of the campers liked me and that i alone had no maternal instincts.

when the other counselors ooh and aah at length about one of our campers, who, at 11, still looks and acts 6, that same concern springs to mind: ohmygod, i’m missing the Everything She Does is Cute! Gene. but so far it hasn’t been keeping me up at night.

very little, i feel, at this point could keep me up at night. by the time we go to sleep we’ve been up since 7:30. some of the girls show up as early as 8. camp starts at 9 and goes through 5. once we nudge them out, we spend an hour debriefing and occasionally obsessing over the campers, after which we spend the rest of the evening planning. we’re lucky to have 2 hours of free time before we crash.

last night i used those 2 hours to devour the first 220 pages of hpV. i didn’t have my own copy yet, it hadn’t arrived, so i stole sorelle’s. thanks-be-to-god (and amazon.com) it slid in today and i read in snatches until i was halfway through. i think it’s gripping though, yes, as all accounts have mentioned, unrelentingly dark. it kind of reminds me of she’s come undone in that way.

hpV is a sore spot among my fellow counselors, none of whom have succumbed to their impulses to start reading yet. a few of our campers/CITs have dragged their tomes with them and pore over them at every opportunity. having gotten enmeshed in mine myself, i kind of understand; i find it hard to put down. in fact maybe i’ll return to reading now.

Lenin’s bones

In Russia, everyone talks about Lenin

(who says

you can’t lie in poetry?)

Lenin lies in his tomb and visitors mass like pigeons

in Venice, a calmer place, to his square

squat & clay-colored

monument (I won’t lie:

I never went in to see the bones

I felt it sufficed to see Russia.)

(Of course, that isn’t

fair. the old woman I saw

by the summer-colored Summer Palace

sprawl, pulling handfuls of sticks from

fistfuls of snow, may have as easily been the pinkie toe

of C. the Great)

Pinkie toe

pinko

why didn’t Russia

just say no?

My father has traveled to:

Britain

France

Mexico

Israel

Costa Rica

Guatemala

The Queen Charlotte Islands

Never Russia,

though he was a Trotskyite at

Chicago

nowadays, he and my brother

who studied history and government

with a convert�s zeal in college argue

about Stalin

he brought industry he stood up to Hitler

he was brilliant he was crazy

twenty-million dead.

Lenin has a tomb

He can be understood

or at least stood over, and

examined

Russian vendors hawk Stalin

to tourists

on streetsides, on clifftops, by the

hundreds, along with Matrushka dolls

and liquor flasks flagged with hammer’n’sickle.

Not one of our tour guides

would speak his name

the hunched bundled woman pried branches

from the snow outside the Summer Palace where

C. the Great once flooded a ballroom

and left the windows open. C. came back

to ice skate. now tourists shod in plastic booties

slip delicately from room to room. Their feet

never touch the ground.

Trotsky had an affair / (is an ice pick

with Frida Kahlo. How bad / an absolution? Stalin

could he be? / just died)

our tour guides would mention

the Great Revolution, perhaps V.I. L

then skip to 91 and say, Russia opened! they would talk

about hotels. one pointed out

the first McDonalds, for which, at lunchtime,

people mass like pigeons to Venice, a calmer

place, even today.

Venice, I found

uninteresting, and smelly. From Moscow,

I contracted a parasite. Like a tattoo, it fades

but never goes away.

My mother saw Moscow in the sixtees

When she left her hotel room, people would come

dig through her bags, tap her phones

She expected this

My trip went smoothly, but I never saw Lenin

Only from the outside, only his trackmarks, never

the bones, which I hear they have to bury now

after all. What I regret is not buying

a Matrushka doll

My boyfriend�s Russian father

received one from a neighbor, filled with vodka,

and laughed and laughed and laughed.

more advice on my personal life

striding through campus in my black boots and green-and-floral polyester danish dress, i ran into my wacky-beloved history professor. she asked what i was doing around and i told her about co|motion. after a while:

she: so that’s great. enjoy it.

me: yeah, thanks. i mean, it’s interesting for me cuz i’m not naturally good at working with children. last year taught me a lot.

she: kids aren’t your bag, huh? … yeah, i can’t handle them until they’re 4.

me: right. until they can have a conversation and offer some valuable insight. then they’re worthwhile.

she: okay, but be careful. don’t take that too far. i told you before, smart people don’t procreate.

toast

this time i’m spending in swarthmore prepping for co|motion isn’t salaried, but como does pick up the tab for more or less everything, which i appreciate.

more includes the bagels we went out for early this morning after a 7 a.m. firedrill rushed us out of our firetrap of a building to wait in flip flops, squinting through the rain, as ever increasing numbers of golf carts, public safety vans, police cars, and finally firetrucks blocked our view and authority figures sought what filled the basement — and, somehow, third floor by extention — with smoke. the answer: toast. somebody in the basement not only BURNED TOAST, but then (panicked and?) HID THE TOASTER.

as my parents are fond of saying, And these are the smart ones?

the authority figures lectured us on smoke inhalation and personal responsibility. the person who hid the toaster was probably already in tijuana by then. i was irked cuz last night i was supposed to catch up on sleep. my b.lovd had been visiting. he’s so used to being around como that our discussions no longer phase him. he came to nifty fifties with us when we went to gorge ourselves with milkshakes and talk body image, and he read franzen, not perking up once despite the repeated use of the word “boob.”

as of yesterday he&i have been we for 2 and 1/3 years. that’s rather a long time. quite likely that’s what caused addie to take me by surprise by asking, Are you getting married? no, i said; or at least not til i’m 30. good, she said. otherwise i’d come to your wedding and cry.

veronica, when related this conversation, said, i don’t think of you has the kind of person to get married. you’re cynical.

later they amended that to mean Free-spirited. i’d never realized those two words are interchangeable.

and …

as some of you have figured out, i’ve gotten myself an lj, shorterstory. i’m still playing around with it so bear with me. the best part is easily filling out the Interests and User Info stuff, just like in friendster. ahh, internet cultworlds.

terms of endearment v. bridget jones

the train to philly only broke down once today, in a densely wooded middle-of-nowhere type area. behind me, a travelling salesman in his 70s said, “uh oh! it’s probably terrorists.” he had already incurred my wrath by chattering loudly and inanely the whole trip, at one point saying, “everything’s virtual now. it’s a virtual world and no one has any real sense. the only people with any sense anymore are the senior citizens”. i pitied the beleagured woman sitting next to him whose murmured responses i never made out, until i realized she was his wife.

immediately everyone drew cellphones from scabbards and made the same call: “hi xxxxxx. no, i’m still on the train. it’s stopped, can you believe it? i guess i’m going to be late …” too bad you can’t send out generic cell-phone calls like mass emails. some people added spice, moaning and wiping their brows: “the electricity is out! it’s BROILING in here!”

the travelling salesman remained cheerfully morbid. “maybe they’ll make us walk to the nearest town. maybe jesse james is robbing our conductor. anyway, this is nothing. one time, in world war two …”

a metroliner pulled up next to us, as if offering moral support, and in seconds the lights and air conditioning returned. our conductor, who didn’t seem to have suffered an interaction with bandits or who otherwise was speaking coherently from underneath the gag they’d put on him, had told us to prepare to change over to the other train. i’d been reading david sedaris and i’d been jealous of all the exciting adventurous things he was writing about. part of me leapt at the chance. instead i found my seat again, next to the puffy-haired old woman with an eastern european accent who, coincidentally, was also named ester.

unlike me, however, she was enthralled by the travelling salesman and, equally enthralled to have a new audience, he hung over her seat regaling her. finally i couldn’t take it. i begged god silently for another electricity outage, for the ability to change trains in the middle of the tracks, and went god didn’t come through, i moved to the back of the train and stood reading naked in peace.

more trotsky!

would trotsky have supported the iraq war? usually hypotheticals are worth their weight in hot air. but this one draws comparisons between trotskyites and neo-cons and it makes me nostalgic for the history of 20th century russia seminar i never took.