Jenny’s Gold Dress and the Persistence of Art

Very blurry Jenny Lewis at The Met Philly, October 26, 2019

The world seems to be ending in a million ways. The Getty, which seemed as eternal as any place I’ve ever been, might burn down. I spend time worrying about the denizens of the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, many of whom are probably long dead. In the grand scheme of things, there’s not THAT MUCH I can do for Kamala Harris or Greta Thunberg. And Yet.

We see the dress before the lights come up, a movement more than a color, a reflection of every kind of light, but unerringly, unceasingly gold. So many different kinds of gold. Gold in every light, heating up to pink or cooling to silver-edged shimmer, but always, always ALWAYS, gold, gold, gold.

This whole situation, this band, this stage, these multicolored neon landlines, this fancy new-fashioned chandelier, this rosemary-flavored hard seltzer, it all seems like a miracle to me. Like, how does anyone do anything? How does any driver ever make it where they’re going, never mind the logistics of this whole show?

And yet, this perfect gift, the actual prettiest person with her benediction of a voice. Somehow, out of all the world’s chaos, art. Solid, still, shimmering. It’s why I visit the Hope Diamond after the scariest protests, why I need to document nearly every flower. It’s important to take it all in, to honor it, to metabolize it into something new. This beauty, these perfect notes, this gold dress, this lifetime I’m in the middle of living.

I sat in the balcony with my cool cousin-in-law and her very ladylike friends, thinking yep, this is femme, and also thinking of the nearly 20 years since Rilo Kiley became my favorite band, my favorite almost-anything.

Though married then, I lived on a shifting sand of crushes, heartbreaks, and meltdowns. I played songs from beloveds’ MySpace pages to be close to them a little, watching a little blinking star near the cursor—I’m here, I’m someone, I’m someone else, I’m here in the world with you.

Though it seems like hometown, family, and true love would have stabilized me, would have made me feel safe, I was in a constant fight with the world to see if I belonged here, convinced that everything from closet-mold to weather was a personalized indication that the world was trying to push me out, that I would never be welcome anywhere.

I cried in the spring because I worried that I wasn’t looking at the lilacs enough. I cried in the summer if it wasn’t warm enough to go to the lake. I ate big salads with Amy on Sundays, read the paper, did the crossword, went over to our best friend Marc’s apartment to watch the Simpsons. I was in love with him too, and eventually that made us not friends, which could be the title of my memoir.

Since then, I’ve lost so much, but, miracle and meds, I’ve learned attachment. I’ve learned to (in my own extremely guarded way) belong in the world. My friendship with Amy is a stronger foundation than marriage ever could’ve been, a pedestal as important to me as the Statue of Liberty’s base. I feel, in some sense, permanent, though still glimmering, ridiculous, unsure.

Jenny’s voice and her gold dress plugged me back into something unbalancing though, and utterly vital. The way a cute guy or a good flower or a beautiful/sad documentary can grab me by the chin and face my attention in the right direction, toward my most central truth: art persists. There never wasn’t this ballroom, this flower, this gold dress.

And with that reminder, yearning comes back. Yearning to be solid and quiet and loved but also to be knocked off balance by the sheer force of gorgeousness, yearning for every destabilizing and grounding reminder that I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.

Song of the Week: Where Soul Meets Body

I was rifling around in the (inaccurately named) glove compartment and I found this old friend. I turned it all the way up and liked thinking about this particular intersection, where traffic will someday be less blocked.

Thanks Bookstore! And What Comes Next

Yesterday was my last day at the bookstore. It’s hard to overstate the gratitude that I feel for the place—what I took for a straightforward and undemanding job ended up, of course, meaning so much more.

The day back in February when I emailed the OM to see if I could pick up some hours, the email was the only thing I was able to accomplish that day. I was still panicking hard, trying for an hour walk each day, writing down my dreams and not much else. After I sent the email, I was petrified that I would let everyone down, especially Amy, who’d be one of my supervisors.

I was worried that I was so broken that I couldn’t even do my old standby day job, which I love and which has brought me so much comfort over the years. I was still having panics in the grocery store sometimes, feeling unworthy of groceries I knew my former students’ families couldn’t afford. (Once a lunch-party guest, the brightest and most determinedly positive girl in the class, expressed envy of my baby carrots, she said her dad couldn’t afford things like that. I gave her all of my carrots and was never the same again.)

It was hard. For the first few bookstore weeks, I could pretty much only work and sleep. I rode with Amy to work most days, which, like the job itself, ended up making me feel both comforted and trapped. The shadows of school life lurked around with me, I was never sure if I was acting normal or like a mental case.

Sometimes, the young people who worked with me wanted to talk about Important Topics, and I would feel the fear and self-loathing and self-consciousness that precipitates a panic well up and I would have to stop them, but I found their existence so comforting—the wild-haired blogger who declared herself “sick of corporate America” and just stopped showing up, the philosopher who used the phrase “patriarchy as death machine” in casual conversation, they give me hope that everyone’s going to keep fighting evil, even as I move on to cozier ways of doing so.

But what I loved the most, what I’ve always loved the most, is idle work conversation. (This is why Clerks is one of my favorite movies, in spite of my brother’s complaint that nothing happens in it.) (see also: the season three OITNB conversation about the Black-Eyed Peas)

I love the genial, jokey exchanges of near-strangers, the kind that arises from the most exquisite boredom: parsing the intentions of cable radio pop singers, punning on book titles, eventually finding out what creative projects are lurking just beneath nearly everyone’s surface.

And in that spirit, another miraculous thing happened—I got a crush. One day a few weeks ago I was startled to realize that I’d flirted my way through eight hours, with only a break for lunch, and with a mix of embarrassment and exhilaration, I felt a return to myself. Another day went by like that, complete with him recommending an album and me typing while listening to it and settling back to the part of me that has muses, that gets a little giddy and then makes more things. He’s not a viable option, this isn’t that awesome of a story, but just to be off the rails a little, kind of dizzy in the head for someone, it gives me hope that I might still be capable of happily falling when the time comes. Also, it makes me just an eensy bit impatient for that time to happen.

I told someone yesterday during the process of goodbyes that I was broken when I started, and he asked if I was unbroken now. I’ll go with less broken—last week, I wasn’t sure if I had Lyme disease or was sick from all the racism news. I’m better able to engage with the world now, easing back to the Important Topics. It’s still hard to fight the sense of failure and the crippling self-consciousness that got exacerbated in the classroom.

Even though my poetry class is very fruitful and camp seems promising, it’s so hard not to feel like a failure about teaching. Talking to my brother-in-law, a born teacher, over the weekend, it’s hard not to envy the confidence he has with his career, with his place in the world. I envy my friends who all seem so settled, so at home in the world, in their families, in their work.

But playing Mario Kart with my nephew, I wondered aloud why I ended up off road so often. He said “Maybe you’re a…criminal? No, that’s not the word.”

“Outlaw?” I asked, and he heartily agreed.

Outlaw sounds about right. I hate the way that the school system is set up, the way it focuses on data and saps the creativity of teachers and students alike. I feel desperately jealous of my friends who slot so easily into their classrooms, but I have to sympathize with the intensely talented friends who’ve had their love and inspiration sucked right out—that waste isn’t okay with me. It’s not a sacrifice it seems right to make.

Somewhere in my love of connection and my madness for protecting creativity, I hope to find my next line of work. It may be in a nicer school or in homes or I don’t know where. I take comfort in knowing that summer art camp is a job that makes sense, that pays well enough, so maybe that can give me hope for the jobs that follow. My brain is still fragile, but I’m so grateful for the healing that the past four months have brought—thank you, self, for making summer come in February. Thank you, friends, who’ve supported and loved and written with me. Thank you, work, for bringing me back to myself. I’ll do my best with the road less traveled, and I’ll always choose the Kart with good offroad capabilities.

Toughness Lessons? No Thanks. (A Manifesto)

“Why do we spend our lives trying to be something we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we are made for?” Thomas Merton

In The Muppets (the Jason Segel one) there’s a moment at the end of Rainbow Connection where Animal, who hasn’t been able to drum the whole movie because of anger management treatment, just gives in to the muse and bangs the shit out of the drums. At that moment, my dear ex-wife leaned over and said “Aw, he achieved his telos.” In case you’re not a philosophy major like her, telos is the thing you were made for. Yesterday I had an Animal-achieving-his-purpose kind of day.

I had training for summer camp yesterday. I’ve worked at the art camp, mostly part time as a poetry teacher, for four years. This year, I signed up for full time even thought they weren’t planning to do poetry.  But then they decided to do poetry! I know it’ll get squirrelly when it’s time to put on the play, but it’s such a relaxed, happy place to work—diverse, kind, and queer friendly. There was even a part in the training where the management told staff, in no uncertain terms, that they are to respect little boys who wear dresses, and to be sensitive with pronouns.

The team skews young, but the music teacher is close to retirement age and kind of old school. When I told her a little about what had happened at the school, she said “Oh, Miss Jane, I’m gonna have to give you toughness lessons.” Though I shut her down pretty unequivocally, she still proceeded to give me an example wherein she told a child she could “Squash him like a bug.”

“Just stop,” I said, trying to be cool. “You don’t know that school.”

“But I know hood rats.”

Now, she’s African American so I guess that makes it less offensive, but I am unspeakably angry to know in my heart that that often when people have told me I’m “too nice,” they mean “Too nice for poor black kids.” The number of times I’ve heard them disparaged, that I’ve been condescended to about it, the number of times I’ve had empathy mistaken for weakness,  the number of times I’ve been told to get a thicker skin, has caused me an enormous amount of stress and sorrow. I’ll never forget the day last winter that my grade partner, who I looked up to and loved so much, went off on me for giving our students “praise they don’t deserve.” A mostly-praise classroom tone was the official policy of the school (and of my heart) but policy isn’t any match for what’s already expected, what’s been expected for generations. Everyone saw me how they saw me, everyone sees the kids the way they see them, and it will take me the rest of my life to write out the pain of that.

Though my music teacher friend meant to be protective and certainly didn’t mean to open a wound, I’m glad she did. I’ve never realized more deeply what a destructive waste it’s been all this time to fight being sensitive, to fault myself for the thick skin that never seemed to grow. I’m very sad about the times I conformed and  tried on that authoritarian armor, and I’m glad soul-sickness made me take it off for good.

The idea that I need to be tougher is bonkers for two reasons. First, anyone who really knows me understands just how resilient, how stubborn, how passionate, what an immovable force I can be. In addition to the sizable amount of strictness I can actually sneak into my handing-out-stickers ethos, I’ve pulled myself through traumas, crossed boundaries, made connections and lived deeply in ways that most people would have shied away from. Yes, I can be really fragile and crappy at life a lot of the time, and I have plenty of regrets, but I’ve turned nearly every mess into art by having compassion, faith, and creativity. I’ve made change at times when I was expected to have no voice, in situations that seemed (okay sometimes actually were) impossible. I may have failed to keep teaching the population I wanted to serve, but while I was there I brought peace and love every day into places most people would be afraid to go.

The fact that my game face happens to be an adoring smile doesn’t mean that I’m weak, it means that I am ale to reach through the ugly, rotten, violent noise of the world and see goodness, see love.

The second reason “toughness lessons” don’t make sense is that sensitivity is a resource. Being a delicate little seashell may limit the number of hours I can work or the number of insults I can field without taking it personally, but it also allows me to feel more deeply, to see and hear and feel details that others might deem unimportant. The best thing is that I get to empathize with people that others might dismiss, and that above all else is what makes me a teacher. It makes me feel beauty and gratitude and love so deeply that yep, I’m often overwhelmed, but I’m also amazing at the art of being alive.

There were no toughness lessons at camp. After lunch, breathless and nervous but sure I knew what the heck I was talking about, I got to give the training in positive behavior support and de-escalation—I gave a sensitivity lesson. We practiced shouting out each others’ awesomeness, praise-only corrections, rewards instead of punishment. We got to practice taking a breath before we speak, using active listening, giving someone space when they’re upset. I told everyone to remember these two things for the rest of their lives:

1. At least 10 positives for every negative.

2. Use a soft voice.

They were already so nice that I cut the training almost in half. I can’t believe how at home I felt. This is me. I was nervous, but I taught, and everyone learned. I don’t know what my job will be when the summer is over, but I know that I will teach, and I know that I will always be strong enough, because I have the most powerful thing in the universe—fiery, bubbly, witchy, goddess-y, sparkly LOVE. (Also, stickers.)

2015 Goals, Take Two