Violins in the Subway

When I worked in publishing, I loved my commute. I enjoyed the solitude, the chance to listen to people and observe them without having to interact. In the evening, I switched off my brain so I could navigate the subway, being pressed by strangers on all sides. And when I stepped on the escalator, I played a personal lottery, hoping I might emerge from the heat and pressure of the subway and hear a violin in the station above.

Violins in the subway have always been a private pleasure. There’s something about the contrast of being so close to people you can smell the animal on them, and then the absolute civility of a string instrument. Those juxtapositions are the best thing about living in a city. They give you incentive to be grateful.

For years, I’ve wanted to give an extravagant tip to a violin-playing busker. I added it to my Life List and started plotting. I imagined standing out of view and handing small bills to other commuters, asking them to tip the busker on their way out of the station. I thought it would be fun to use two-dollar bills, so the busker would feel appreciated, but also know something was up. Of course, I wanted to film it for the site, so all of you could see it unfold, maybe take some photos of the violinist too.

I told Bryan about my plan a couple years ago, and he surprised me with a stack of crisp two-dollar bills from the bank. I started thinking more seriously about logistics. I’d need some friends — someone to film, someone to pass out bills while I took photos. We’d need to head out at rush hour so there were sufficient passersby to help us tip, and to provide cover. It might take a few days, because we’d have to ride the subway around in search of a violinist, and violinists are a little elusive in San Francisco. Maybe it would take a week.

You can see where I’m going. In my head I was taking a simple pleasure, a moment distinguished by its serendipity, and turning it into a three-person, week-long slog. The plan was pretty in theory, but it was built to surprise and delight everyone but me.

This past year I’ve had to put my Life List on hold, but a few weeks ago I happened to be on the subway by myself for the first time in a long while. I stepped onto the escalator, and listened with my heart in my mouth.

There he was.

So I wrote him a check.

And I dropped it in his violin case before I headed upstairs.

The Mighty Summit and Camp Mighty are coming up, both events we’ve built around the concept of Life Lists. It finally feels like the right time to get back in the game. So here goes.

Give $100 to a violin playing busker? Check.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

(Some of) The best parts of Freedom by Jonathan Franzen:

“Merrie, who was ten years older than Patty and looked every year of it, had formerly been active with the SDS in Madison and was now very active in the craze for Beaujolais nouveau.”

“She was a grave and silent little person with the disconcerting habit of holding your gaze unblinkingly, as if you had nothing in common.”

“… there was something congenitally undefended about Patty’s heart — she never ceased to be shocked by the sister’s lack of sisterliness.”

“The more time she spent with him, the more she was coming to feel that even though she wasn’t nice — or maybe because she wasn’t nice; because she was morbidly competitive and attracted to unhealthy things — she was, in fact, a fairly interesting person. And Walter, by insisting so fervently on her interestingness, was definitely making progress toward making himself interesting to her in turn.”

“‘He wasn’t nice to me,’ she said through tears. ‘And you’re the opposite of that. And I so, so, so need the opposite of that right now. Can you please be nice?’
‘I can be nice,’ he said, stroking her head.”

“…she was fully aware, from second to second to second, that it wasn’t a drug or a dream but just life happening to her, a life with only a present and no past…”

“Walter himself had great compassion for people attempting to be funny, and laughed loudly to reward them for their effort, and yet he instantly knew he wanted to be friends with the tall, unsmiling person.”

“She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable.”

“… he loved Patty in some wholly other way, some larger and more abstract but nevertheless essential way that was about a lifetime of responsibility; about being a good person.”

“Taking a cab to the city center, she was pierced unexpectedly by regret for… not walking the streets as an independent adult woman, not cultivating an independent life, not being a sensible and curious tourist instead of a love-chasing madwoman.”

“Walter was frightened by the long-term toxicity they were crating with their fights. he could feel it pooling in ther marriage like the coal-sludge ponds in Appalachian valleys.”

“The pedestrians in every neighborhood all seemed to have taken the same dowdiness pills. As if individual style were a volatile substance that evaporated in the vacuity of D.D.’s sidewalks and infernally wide squares.”

“These were the first seconds in which he’d ever experienced anything like coldness from her; and they were dreadful. What he’d never understood about men in his position, in all the books he’d read and movies he’d seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn’t keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.”

Vocabulary

sui generis – unique or particular, constituting a class alone

cicatrix – new tissue that forms over a wound and later contracts into a scar.

uric – of, concerning, or derived from urine

passerine – of, belonging, or pertaining to the order Passeriformes, comprising more than half of all birds and typically having the feet adapted for perching.

necromancy – a method of divination through alleged communication with the dead; black art.

fetor – strong, offensive smell

Our Skin

I’ve been following the comments on my link to the Dark Girls documentary over the last few days, and it has been an education for me. Excerpts from a few comments that I thought deserved more attention.

“…When I came to college, I was able to learn more about the history of Africa and learn about where my family comes from. I didn’t meet black guys who were interested in me which I thought came from me not being involved in a black sorority or in the Black Student Union. When I started to interact with other black students through work and volunteering, I still felt very separated from the “traditionally black” groups. Save for black girls with real (meaning really close) roots in Africa or the Caribbean (a girl whose parents are from Senegal and another whose roots are Native American and Haitian have been two friends I’ve made in the past four years) I’m dismissed by other black girls, too.

I feel guilty saying that it’s because of my dark skin color, because that discounts the fact that maybe I’m an awful person (and maybe I am!) or maybe our personalities don’t sync up. But, I’ve seen girls and boys who have ignored me in African American and African Studies classes excitedly interact with groups of friends I have who run the gambit in personalities but who represent the whitest end of the color spectrum. So, in four years, I’ve learned to draw conclusions.

It’s complicated and it’s a big deal, as evidenced by the little girl in the video who sees race as an indicator of intelligence and beauty, so it’s really hard for me to draw conclusions outside of the ones that I’ve made for myself.

It sounds so trite and Dove campaign-y but I love my skin. In my skin I see my grandmother, a woman I’ve only known in pictures; I see the skin of my ancestors, whom I’ve never seen but who I know looked like me. I see history and I am so lucky to be able to carry that around with me.” –Beatrice

“[On my camera,] I use the ‘lighter skin tone’ setting and flash, sickened by my preference for a lighter me…

The girl I babysit, a sweet, Caucasian girl of age seven, asked the other day, “Do you like having brown skin?”

I stuttered and said something along the lines of, “I guess,” ashamed that I was ashamed of something so natural and uncontrollable as the color of my skin, hating myself for hating myself.” From “Let us be colorful, darling” a post by Lamisa

“…I am Indian. My mother was light/fair skinned and my father was dark skinned. I inherited my father’s darker tones. My mother would scold me constantly for being in the sun and hated when I looked dark. She had stupid creams on me when I was little that would blister and burn my skin.” -Calypso

“You know what’s crazy? That a lot of white girls spend a ton of time and money trying to make their skin darker… Understand: I am in no way trying to say that it’s the same thing as the experience of dark-skinned women… But it just struck me, why are we all programmed to want to be different from how we are?” -Amy

“Wow…unfortunately, this brings back sad memories for me. As a dark skinned African American woman I too heard these comments throughout my life. My saving grace was my beloved grandfather who told me every day that I was beautiful and special and a gift from God. Because of his counter attack on all the negative comments, I grew to love my brown skin. Just goes to show that love can wipe away a multitude of sins.” -Dar

Dark Girls Documentary

Dark Girls: Preview from Bradinn French on Vimeo.

Whoa, watch this please. Did you know how much of a difference it can make for a woman to be a slightly darker shade of black, at least in the U.S.? I had no idea, and I’m a little shocked. I mean, I’ve heard girlfriends mention it jokingly in passing when we’re talking about dating or whatever, but I didn’t get it until I watched this trailer. So upsetting. (via bb-blog).

How Do You Fight Insomnia? My 10 Tips.

10 Tips for Fighting Insomnia | Mighty Girl

Tempur-Pedic asked me to track my sleep habits with a Fitbit and share the results. This is the first time I have been paid to sleep, but I have made it a professional goal to pursue further opportunities in this field. You know how to reach me.

Raise your hand if you ever have trouble sleeping. Actually, if it’s 3 a.m. you can let your hand fall listlessly by your side, I already saw you on Twitter.

A few of you have asked me how I like my Fitbit. Until Tempur-Pedic asked me to use one to track my sleep, I never bothered to learn how. Now, after sleep tracking for a week, I think it’s the most useful feature. It proved something I always suspected about myself. When my health and stress levels are in order, I have a straightforward relationship with sleep. Things have been going better lately, which means the worst night of sleep I got last week looked like this:

While waking up 11 times may not be ideal, I’ll take nearly nine solid hours of sleep any day. You can even throw in a nap, and I will not complain.

When I’m under heavy stress, however, my body prefers to be conscious enough to fret. As you might imagine, a few months ago I was awake. For weeks.

Because insomnia is such an indicator of anxiety for me, I do everything I can to get my sleeping habits back to normal. These are the top ten tricks that work for me:

1. Clear your head. Anxiety is a stimulant. I put stressful tasks at the top of my to do list in hopes of making headway before bed. For larger tasks I find it helps me to make a plan — a detailed list for the next day, an outline of a project that will take weeks to complete. If my worries are more emotional, I write stream-of-consciousness in a journal. This way I don’t waste sleep time worrying about things I can tackle in the morning. Speaking of which…

2. Keep a pen by the bed. There will always be something you forget to write down. Something so pressing that it jolts you from sleep at 3 a.m. Don’t regain consciousness while you worry about remembering the important thing. Write it down and roll over.

3. Get off the couch. Exercise. Harder than you usually do if you’re athletic. One of the less-touted benefits of strenuous exercise is that it exhausts you. Perfect.

4. Stop the nightly grind. This isn’t an issue for everyone of course, but I grind my teeth in my sleep. I didn’t realize how much it was waking me until I got a mouth guard, and so I mention it here. Consider it, my stress-ball friend.

5. Clear out electronics. They say you need to remove even the tiniest lights if you don’t want to mess with your circadian rhythms, and maybe that’s true. Illuminated clocks are so accusatory they might as well have an exclamation point after the time. But the little charging lights on my computer, phone, iPad, camera? Those are more of a problem if I’m already awake in the dark. Each one is a tiny siren song, coaxing me to conquer another level of Plants and Zombies. Not to mention how often my phone wakes me with a late-night text or call from one of the many inconsiderate louts who I have come to love. So when I’m having trouble sleeping, all the gadgets go in the living room.

6. Don’t play dead. When I’m up, I just get up. I won’t stay in bed awake for more than fifteen minutes because I don’t want my bed to become a place where I worry about not sleeping. I’ll take a bath or go read on the couch, any activity I can do supine. And if you fall asleep in the bathtub? Success.

7. Stop taking uppers. No more caffeine. If I can’t sleep, I stop ingesting stimulants because they are chemically designed to keep me awake. (I’m wacky that way.) I’ll take a two-day withdrawl headache over a month-long stint as a zombie.

8. Shower before bed. The warmth is supposed to sleepify you, and maybe it does, but I find it relaxing just to climb into bed clean. Sleeping with freshly shaved legs is also a nice bonus.

9. Get stuck. I get regular acupuncture, and I almost never have trouble sleeping on days when I have a session. The effect is similar to a good massage.

10. Powder your nose. When you finally do get to sleep, the last thing you want is to be woken by your bladder. Use the bathroom right before bed, and limit liquid intake an hour or so before you (hope to) go to sleep.

According to the Fitbit, my bout of insomnia is mercifully in past. To whit:

BAM! How you like that, Insomnia? Come and show your face, if you got beef! Or perhaps you should come back in the morning when I’m awake. We’ll discuss your behavior over a leisurely breakfast. You can do the dishes.

So that’s what works for me. How about you? How do you get to sleep?

Let me know if you need me to come over and spoon.


http://thirdparty.fmpub.net/placement/427691?fleur_de_sel=%5Btimestamp%5D

If you want more information on how to buy a good mattress, you can get it here. The folks at Tempur-Pedic want me to remind you about this, “This post is sponsored by Tempur-Pedic, because we think you deserve to get your best night’s sleep every night.” Thanks, Tempur-Pedic. You’ve got my back. (Pun brought to you by Maggie as a reward for reading the fine print. You’re welcome.)

Democracy by Joan Didion

Read this, please. So many of the best parts are dependent on character development and context, so these are the best parts of Democracy by Joan Didion that make sense in this format and don’t give everything away:

You did all right.
You filled your dance card, you saw the show.
Interesting times.

Water under the bridge and dynamite it behind you.

Many people are intolerant of the accidental, but this was something more: Jack Lovett did not believe that accidents happen. In Jack Lovett’s system all behavior was purposeful, and the purpose could be divined by whoever attracted the best information and read it most correctly.

In fact Carla Lovett made a convincing army wife… indifferent to her surroundings, passive in bad climates.

…she resolved to reconstruct the details of occasions on which she recalled being happy. As she considered such occasions she was struck by their insignificance, their absence of application to the main events of her life. In retrospect she seemed to have been most happy in borrowed houses, and at lunch.

“‘Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.’ W.H. Auden. But I don’t have to tell you that.” He paused. “The English poet.”

In fact they did run into each other.
Here or there.
Often enough, during those twenty-some years during which Inez Victor and Jack Lovett refrained from touching each other, refrained from exhibiting undue pleasure in each other’s presence or untoward interest in each other’s activities, refrained most specifically from even being alone together, to keep the idea of it quick.
Quick, alive.
Something to think about late at night.
Something private.

“There was a sound in the autopsy room like an electric saw.”
“Right.”
“What was it.”
“It was an electric saw.” Billy Dillon shuffled and cut the cards. “Don’t dwell on it.”
Inez said nothing.

“Why air family linen?”
“Exactly,” Dwight Christian said. “Why accentuate the goddamn negative?”

The click of her heels struck her as unsynchronized with her walk.

“Listen, Inez said. “It’s too late for the correct thing. Forget the correct thing.”

When novelists speak of the unpredictability of human behavior they usually mean not unpredictability at all but a higher predictability, a more complex pattern discernible only after the fact.

“Anyway, we were together,” she said. “We were together all our lives. If you count thinking about it.”

Vocabulary:

balletomane – a devotee of ballet

casuarina – is a genus of 17 species in the family Casuarinaceae, native to Australasia, southeast Asia, and islands of the western Pacific Ocean:

codel – Abbreviation of congressional delegation, government-paid trips abroad, designed to give lawmakers first-hand knowledge of matters relevant to their legislation.

crazy eight – A wild card

D.S.C. – Distinguished Service Cross is the second highest military decoration that can be awarded to a member of the United States Army, for extreme gallantry and risk of life in actual combat with an armed enemy force.

guard hairs – The longest, coarsest hairs in a mammal’s coat, forming the topcoat (or outer coat). They taper to a point and protect the undercoat from the elements. They are often water repellent and stick out above the rest of the coat. Guard hairs add the sheen to the coat of an animal.

hemotoxins – toxins that destroy red blood cells (that is, cause hemolysis), disrupt blood clotting, and/or cause organ degeneration and generalized tissue damage.

kapu – refers to the ancient Hawaiian code of conduct of laws and regulations. The Hawaiian word kapu is usually translated to English as “forbidden”, though it also carries the means of “sacred”, “consecrated”, or “holy”.

liana – A liana is any of various long-stemmed, woody vines that are rooted in the soil at ground level and use trees, as well as other means of vertical support, to climb up to the canopy to get access to well-lit areas of the forest:

merc – mercenary

moue -a little grimace

Nisei – a Japanese language term used in countries in North America, South America and Australia to specify the children born to Japanese people in the new country.

quarter mastering – In land armies, especially US units, it is a term referring to either an individual soldier or a unit who specializes in distributing supplies and provisions to troops. The senior unit, post or base supply officer is customarily referred to as “the quartermaster”. Often the quartermaster serves as the S-4 in US Army, US Marine Corps units and NATO units. In many navies it is a non-commissioned officer (petty officer) rank for personnel responsible for their ship’s navigation. In the US Navy, the quartermaster is a position responsible for the ship’s navigation and maintenance of nautical charts and maps.

schitzy – slang for schizophrenic or exhibiting the effects of hallucinogenic drugs

Silver Star – awarded for gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States not justifying one of the two higher awards – the service crosses (Distinguished Service Cross, the Navy Cross, or the Air Force Cross), the second-highest military decoration, or the Medal of Honor, the highest decoration.

Small, Good Thing: My Business Card


(Photo from Oh Happy Day!)

I’ve had a version of these business cards for years, though never as lovely as the ones Jordan made as a gift, above. (Thank you again, sweets.)

They’re blank on the back, so I write in whatever information I’d like a particular person to have. I can put an @ in front of the “Maggie,” write just my phone number, a little note, whatever.

For me, they’re perfect — evergreen information, versatile, google-able only insofar as I’d like them to be, and they double as social cards so I don’t feel like I’m “doing business” at a party when someone asks for my contact information. Yes, I know I am alone in thinking about this. Allow me my WASPy pleasures, they make me feel alive.