Feed Me

Here it is, the GFam breakfast special: eggs with tortilla bits and a dash of Tabasco, fried potatoes (with Tapatio subbing for ketchup), and sausage. Whenever anyone in my family goes all out and decides to actually cook a breakfast (rather than pour a bowl of cereal), some variation of this meal is usually what results.

Ever since I permanently moved out of home after college and was obligated to feed myself, I'd occasionally resort back to my comfort foods from home. In reality, they were some of the few recipes I knew by heart. But over the years, I found myself adjusting and altering the recipes in a way that made them my own.

It was with McLovin that my fried potatoes took on a different, slightly healthier taste. I now used Yukon gold potatoes (mainly because they're so cheap at Berkeley Bowl) in olive oil instead of veggie oil, and I sprinkle some red pepper flakes while they're cooking for an extra kick and some color. I haven't quite reached a level of crispiness with them that satisfies me, but I love the flavor and am pleased with my new take on an old recipe.

Over the last year, I started coming to terms with the fact that I will never be able to cook like those who came before me. I'm not going to make a pot of posole or an empanada just like Grandma's, a pot of beans or apple strudel just like Nana, or even beef stroganoff just like Mom. Those dishes belong to them. Even though they have been passed down, they were probably never destined to remain the same.

Life is ever evolving, so it's only appropriate that food should do the same. A dish is always imbued with the spirit of the person who makes it, with a healthy dash of those whose influence lingers. I cannot make Grandma's or Nana's or Mom's dishes because I am not them. But I am Astrid, and it is up to me to make a dish my own.

Power Play

The first time I held a violin in my hands was a very special day in my life. I felt very powerful.

I was in the fourth grade, the year that students at my school were first allowed to choose an instrument to play. Fourth graders were only allowed string instruments, while fifth and sixth graders were allowed to move on to woodwinds, brass, and percussion. For no particular reason, I opted for the violin.

If you've never played the violin, it is a fickle, difficult instrument to play even decently well. Unlike a guitar or piano, there are no frets or keys that allow you to play a note just so. The musician creates the note simply on touch and sound alone, and all of this depends on if the instrument is even tuned properly.

Orchestra class was held weekly in the cafeteria. Mr. Bumatay started the period at the piano, where we kids lined up with our school-issued instruments and he tuned each violin, viola, cello, and bass one by one. Because we were beginners, each instrument had either small sticky dots on the neck of the violin to mark where our fingers should go. In time, we would learn if a note was right simply by its sound, but the stickers would gradually guide us there.

I don't remember if we paid a rental fee for our instruments, but whatever it may have been was surely minimal. We were a ragtag bunch of working class kids, and we were lucky to live in a school district that had a very solid, dedicated music education program starting as early as elementary school. We didn't pay for our lessons, and probably couldn't afford them anyway, but we were still expected to practice, play well, and be present in every performance.

Playing an instrument is not only an exercise in discipline, but also one in respect and maturity. We were admonished almost immediately for giving in to the obvious temptation of swordfighting with our bows. Mr. Bumatay taught us the importance of taking care of our bows, of tightening them only while playing, of maintaining the horsehair with rosin, of gently loosening our bows and tucking them away in our cases when they weren't being used. He taught us how to hold our instruments and how to place them down while not playing them. In many ways, the first year of learning the violin is more about how to respect the instrument itself than it is about playing it.

One of the earliest pieces I remember learning was "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's 9th Symphony. I loved how easy it was to remember, and how truly joyful it sounded. As I got better at the song, and better at the violin, I'd try to play "Ode to Joy" in different ways each time. Faster, slower, louder, even more upbeat than it already is. That piece always struck a chord in me.

By the sixth grade, not only had the violin had become a huge part of my life, but I taught myself the flute when M gave it up after a few weeks of her own lessons (she insists that it was a combination of headaches and her new braces). The first song I taught myself on the flute: "Ode to Joy". This pattern would repeat itself over and over, when M got a keyboard for Christmas, when Fatty started playing clarinet in school, etc. "Ode to Joy" was always my go-to piece.

I started getting free tickets from my orchestra teachers for local symphony concerts, and I appeared in every single school performance with my violin that was available to me and my classmates. My family and godparents (Dad's brother and his wife) were my constant guests. For Christmas in sixth grade, my godparents gave me one of the greatests gifts of my life: my godmother's mother's violin, the one she used when she herself played in an orchestra. I was touched and very, very happy.

My godfather passed away a year and a half later, and my godmother would ask that I play "Ave Maria" at the funeral. At all of 13 years old, that was a tall order to ask a girl so devastated by her uncle's death, so I declined. Knowing that my violin was so tied up in the memory of my uncle, I couldn't bare to look at it anymore. I stopped playing for many years.

After I moved to Berkeley, I would often return from trips home with loads of things I'd left behind. One of these things, a last minute decision the night before I loaded up the moving van and moseyed my way up the 5, was my violin. The strings are ancient and the bows could use restringing, but I nonetheless wanted to keep my most treasured possession close by my side. On my most recent trip home, I returned with my bag full of sheet music. Pieces are dogeared, the books are yellowing, and most everything in the bag is at least 15 years old, but I still hold out hope that I'll someday play again.

Last night I watched the webcast of Gustavo Dudamel's inaugural performance as the new music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. I had the chance to watch him conduct the Youth Orchestra of LA (YOLA) and I was moved to tears watching those kids play on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl, knowing that their parents were directly below in the pool circle, proud and overwhelmed. What did they play? "Ode to Joy". They didn't play perfectly and it sounded an awful lot like many of the concerts I played in in elementary school, but that's okay.

What matters is that with those instruments in their hands, they felt powerful. They felt all the possibilities before them.

Image via the Los Angeles Times, "A Night of Awe for L.A.'s Youth Orchestra"

Upstream and Downstream

In the sixth grade in 1994, we were asked to write predictions for the yearbook of what we thought we would be doing in 15 years at age 27. This is what I said I'd be doing this year:

"I, [Astrid], will be a pediatrician who also plays violin in a movie orchestra and in animated films."

That single statement pretty much sums up most of my life's experience. Obviously, I am neither one of those today, but the struggle I felt between both of these career paths when I was 12 was no less intense than the types of indecision I face to this day. I am the very definition of a pisces, a being of two minds pulled in opposite directions. Big life decisions are extremely difficult for me to make, mainly because I find myself often faced with one logical, structured choice and one emotional, untested choice.

This is probably precisely what is causing me the most anxiety about McLovin. All the smaller, albeit significant issues we've discussed since he's been gone (and mostly during this last week) are symptomatic of this larger question. It's an existential crisis unlike any I've gone through before, and trust me, I've seen them all.

I love my job. I work for the University, I counsel students all day, and I have really amazing colleagues all across campus. I've managed to carve out a pretty nice career for myself in the five years since undergrad. But when push comes to shove and someone asks what I'd most like to do with my life, what makes me happiest, what makes me feel most connected to the world and to myself, this is not it.

I am a writer. I am a photographer. I love to travel. I have a thirst for adventure and living outside the box. If I could do nothing but these three things for the rest of my life, I would be the happiest bitch you've ever known.

The thing is, McLovin is offering me exactly this. I have a standing invite to join him in Singapore, an invite he mentions damn near every time we speak. So why am I so hesistant to just fucking grab it and go?

This is where the pisces in me kicks in. I am being pulled in two directions. In this corner is the promise of a relatively stable career in higher education, continued residence in Berkeley, a city I fucking adore, and relative proximity to my family. In the other corner, I have companionship and my dream, but also the possibility of failure.

It's the possibility of failure that has me completely stymied, and completely crazy. This is where being my father's daughter and constantly thinking five steps ahead is to my great detriment. I'm already wondering what the hell I would do if things don't work out between us and I'm left stranded in Singapore.

And why? Why am I already thinking of failing? What the hell does that matter if I'm simultaneously working on what I really want to do? The reality is if I stay here, I will be further pulled into the higher ed world, which is a place I don't even really know I want to be five years from now. It's like me and math: I'm good at it, but I don't have a real passion for it. It's just something I do.

M reminded me of the time in my life when I felt the most alive. I studied abroad in college for one year in two different countries. I had never left the United States in my life when I bade a tearful farewell to my family and boarded a flight to Madrid on September 10, 2002. A very different Astrid returned from Heidelberg, Germany to her family on August 18, 2003. That time away awakened in me a lust for travel and adventure that I didn't know I had. I came home about 40 pounds lighter with a nose ring and a taste for wine and passport stamps. I spent my entire senior year of college depressed and miserable because this amazing period of life was over, and I had no idea if it would ever return. My move to Berkeley was an attempt to recapture this spirit, but the relative safety of my situation that I now enjoy still makes it fall short.

I now realize that this isn't a struggle between my current career and following a guy. This is a struggle between doing what's safe and taking a chance on what might be my next great adventure.

This realization has given me more clarity than perhaps anything else that McLovin and I have discussed in recent days.

Image by me, Grand Central Station, NYC, October 2008.

Oh I like this song

McLovin's and My Top Five Albums (in no particular order)

1. Sam Cooke - Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963
2. Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
3. Liz Phair - Exile in Guyville
4. Townes Van Zandt - Live at the Old Quarter, 1973 (Disc 2)
5. The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground
   

Believe everything they tell you, kids. Long distance relationships are HARD.

McLovin and I just went to Hell and back this last week or so. Or rather, it feels like it. We had the "where are we?" conversations before he left three weeks ago, but we didn't really get into that scary "what is this going to look like when we're separated by a big fucking ocean?" discussion. We figured we'd cross that bridge when we got to it.

Unfortunately, McLovin reached that bridge before I did, crossed it, and didn't want to come back for me. We were realistic about the distance and some of our more immediate needs, but we never hammered out the details. With the perspective I have now, I know that it would have been hard to have that conversation before he left anyway, considering that we didn't know what we were dealing with until he got there. But it was necessary to flesh out the ground rules before we started settling too much into separate lives, and my anger and disappointment mainly had to do with not setting those rules first.

There've been a lot of tears and terse words shared, though admittedly mostly from my end. Tuesday morning's video chat was especially bad, as what had been a series of productive discussions devolved into our very first—yes, our first—argument. Understandably, we both felt shitty for the day that followed.

And then, something amazing happened. We realized that we were listening to each other. We weren't just arguing, we weren't just throwing words at each other. We were listening.

Last night, almost as an act of the Universe acknowledging that it's not entirely fair to make things so hard on us, some of my college friends flaked out on dinner all at once, leaving me at home for the evening. It was also McLovin's day off. This provided a window of time that is hard to come by most days because of the time difference, and what followed was an almost four hour online date.

Lemme tell you what a wonderful little invention the webcam is. It makes the world so very small. I don't feel like we're half a world apart, and it helps to convey all those little nuances about each participating party that telephones and instant messaging strip away. We could talk to each other and watch each other and get much of the experience that we so loved while we were practically living together.

Not only that, but we also realized how much we could do with what little we have. We listened to two of our favorite albums together and it felt so amazingly, indescribably good, it was almost better than all the times we listen to them together because of how hard things had been the few days prior.

Things are good. We know what's going on, we've laid out the rules, and most important to me, I feel secure in my relationship with him. Perhaps we won't make it past a month or Christmas or a year from now. Perhaps the distance will get so excruciating that we won't have any choice but to end things. But we're talking and communicating and being open and honest about everything, and that's what matters.

We just have to take this one day at a time.

Departures & Arrivals

I don't like the recent cold snap. I don't like that I shivered myself to sleep last night in a light sweatshirt and long yoga pants, or that I've been forced to begrudgingly wear socks and shoes in a month that should normally beg for only sandals. I've come to enjoy summer in the Bay, but it still doesn't feel normal to me.

More than that, I don't like that the cold intersects with the coming of a new academic year at work. It might still be August, but fall's a comin', that's for damn sure. Fall always feels like the end of recess: the bell rings and playtime is over. Time to get serious. Time to learn, to grow.

Last year it was Dad's surgery. This year, it's the Boyfriend moving to Singapore. Perhaps I didn't shiver myself to sleep last night from the cold. Perhaps my body was missing that extra boost of heat that warms a bed when another body is nestled in your arms. It's amazing how much I got used to it after so much of my life without it.

I don't have a history of the best luck or, let's face it, taste in men, but it all changed when I met McLovin. I was in that post-catastrophic break-up period where I thought I'd never meet another person who meant anything to me, so I wasn't even really looking for anyone. Nor was he. Yet somehow, we found each other.

We had a wonderful six months together, even if I spent much of that time talking myself through my anxieties. Can't get hurt. Can't get hurt. Can't get hurt! And when it was glaringly obvious that that wasn't the case, that he would bend over backwards to not hurt me, that he only ever praised me and never showed any disrespect, that's when we had the most fun. That's when I felt most at ease and ready to laugh. That's when I was totally, completely, unabashedly in love.

I don't like talking in the past tense about him, about us. We both hope that we still have a future, even if it doesn't last forever. Time spent together is time well spent.

It's just that, well... When will circumstances align when we can go back to the happy little nest we had before? Only time will tell.

For now, we've got video chat. It'll have to do.

In Pace

I was stirred from my sleep at 2:30 yesterday morning by the ringing of my phone. Only bad calls come from Home at odd hours.

"What's going on?" I mumbled. I could tell that the family was gathered with Dad and that my absent sisters were also on various siblings' cell phones. "Grandma passed away."

She was 98, and boy, did she live a long life. Feisty, persistent, and always independent, Grandma died peacefully in her sleep. There is sadness, but there is also relief.

Grandma outlived all of her eight younger siblings, her husband, and two of her children. She's been ready to go—eagerly—for a long time.

I can think of numerous deaths in my life that were tragic and heartbreaking. This is not one of them. Grandma lived a full life. She ventured from Albuquerque to LA as a newlywed with barely a few bucks in her pocket during the Depression, raised my father and his three older siblings, was the primary breadwinner for her family, was a community activist and all-around force to be reckoned with, and inspired everyone who met her until the day she died.

But above all, she was my Grandma, and I miss her.

R.I.P.

Biznass

Today wore me the hell out. This is how it went:

• McLovin (aka the boyfriend) and I were mildly embarrassed this morning. Oops.
• The entire fam (Mom, Dad, 25 younger siblings) was in town this weekend and were headed back down south today. They left the hotel before noon only because they had to check out by noon. They met me in Berkeley and I took them to see my office and meet my coworkers. When we got back to the elevator, Dad immediately asked, "Is that the nimrod (i.e. your supervisor)?" "Yes, that was." "I should have asked her if she was the nimrod."
  
• We briefly visited Telegraph. M, 411 and I went to Bear Basics, where I gave the dude at the door guff for making me check my bag. I make sure they know every time I visit how asinine it is that my bitty little bag is a threat to their merchandise.
• There was a mad dash to the airport where in true GFam fashion, they made it to the terminal with a mere 30 minutes to departure. CPT thrives, my friends.
  
• I returned to B-town to fetch McLovin so that I could take him across the Bay to SFO for his flight to his fam in SoCal. Did I mention that he's moving to Singapore indefinitely in less than a month? Groan. Anyway. Two airports, one day. I'm still in the Bay.
• After everyone was gone, I hauled my cookies to the Lower Haight where I bought a new lens via the beauty that is Craigslist. That brings the grand total up to three lenses, all mediocre, but dammit, I'ma make those bitches work for me!
• Back in the EBay I stopped at Kragen to buy replacement bulbs for my left turn signal (a continual and continually annoying problem) and right brake light, as well as wiper blades. After numerous purchases and exchanges later, I installed the wiper blades and dirtied my pretty little fingers to reach those brake lights, by god. THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKIN' 'BOUT.
• Finally back at home, I had a scant few minutes to change my clothes. Monday nights are softball nights and I promised I'd be there. And then we friggin' lost. The summer season is now over for us. Le sigh. Fall softball will come along soon enough.

Aaaaand there you have it. I'm still alive. Just need to spend more time writing than sucking face.

Besos, meine Lieben.