I have a dream...

Disclaimer: The following was written under a state of extreme annoyance using some rather large-scale generalisations. I like to generalise. It’s my blog. I’ll write what I want. Nice one me.

Having been back in my home country for all of three days, it still surprises me that no one has yet juxtaposed the famously held view of Greece, by Byron, Massimo, and others (lovely place, shame about the people) onto the United States. Get out of most of the cities and much of the country is astonishingly beautiful; some of the national parks are stunning bits of the planet, but in the cities, the endless idiocy of the people subsumes any potential aesthetic merit. For me, the primary annoyance of American people stems from their general lack of awareness that they share their cities with other individuals. On the West Coast anyway, I think people pretend that the abundance of physical, geographical space means that there’s no accountability to others who live in the same city. Why would we need to consider other people, there’s plenty of room for everyone, seems to be the mentality. Arizona, and correspondingly, Phoenix are very large places, with plenty of room for people to spread. In London there’s no room anywhere; people live on top of you, you get crushed on the tube in the morning, navigating a Saturday walk on Oxford Street requires SatNav just to avoid the throngs. Consequently, an “awareness” of other people takes place, consciously or not, all of the time. But here people pretend that no one else exists on planet Earth. No man is an island simply does not apply. It’s why everyone lives in a huge house (flat-sharing is pretty much unheard of), drives a giant 4 x 4, petrol prices be damned, eats too much, talks too loudly, and generally does what ever the hell they please. As Prince of Planet Me, why act otherwise?

My European friends never fail to offer the counter argument that Americans are “lovely people, so friendly and helpful.” Let me clarify: Americans love strangers (qualifier – white, European strangers. Top marks scored by the Anglo-Irish in particular) and hate their neighbours. Don’t be fooled for a second by the Obama “change” fervour. Americans don’t want change – there is no love of the social welfare here. They just want their cheap petrol back and no negative equity on their mortgages. The NHS is suspiciously viewed by Americans (those who know what it is anyway) as a borderline socialist farce, hence the perpetuation of the sometimes efficient, yet financially inane US healthcare system. Friends pay $80-200 per month for health insurance policies - and this is only their cost, the remainder is met by your employer - they may use once every two years, if that, yet which in no way subsidises the cost of health care for the poor. In essence this means not paying a health insurance premium means no health care, full stop.

Public transportation is impossible in cities designed to subsidise the American motor industry. There is no social responsibility, least of all where environmental issues are concerned. No one carries a bag for shopping. A supermarket charging for plastic bags would probably start a riot. Yesterday at the supermarket I bought some houmous (which was disgusting), some radishes, a bunch of celery, and a bottle of water. Not only did this cost me $7.63 (sales tax results in annoyingly odd prices), but the cashier put my FOUR items in TWO bags. When I took them out altogether to carry, he looked at me like I ought to be committed to an insane asylum. If I would have faked a public school girl accent and said something like “Oh no really dahling, I have no need for a carrier bag,” he would have smiled brightly and said “Oh my god! Are you Irish? Do you guys, like, have supermarkets in Ireland? My great-great-great-great-grandfather’s from Galway? Do you know it/them/my relatives/etc.” Nutters. A dear friend has suggested I look at this involuntary exile as a learning opportunity for personal growth or some other such nonsense, but what I really want is just to go home. Now that I finally know where that is…

More observations from the “big island” coming soon. Less generalisations next time. I promise…

This one's for the ladies

Lately, I’ve been lamenting the loss of my headphones. In London, I walk pretty much everywhere, one of the benefits of living in the middle of town and I like to listen to music or the radio when I walk. Last week my headphones broke, and at first I hated it. I wanted my music back. I didn’t want to listen to babies crying or stupid tourist conversations. I wanted to etherize myself with music.

But then something brilliant happened and that brilliant something was Wednesday. I was walking down Gray’s Inn Road in the morning, on my way to work, when I overheard an interesting exchange. A taxi driver pulled a medium-sized suitcase out of the back of his cab and set it aside. As he headed up the steps (only about six or seven or them) to the office building on the side of the road, the woman in the back started shouting at him to stop. “No” she screeched, “just leave it down there.” The cabbie looked completely bewildered, asked her if she was sure, and when she insisted she could do it herself, toted the case back down the steps. I think there may have been more to it than that, but I was walking quickly and didn’t catch everything, but I got the general gist, and more importantly, I heard the unmistakably American accent.

What is it with American women and feminism? The poor guy was just trying to be helpful and your woman went and verbally castrated him. Perhaps she assumed he was fishing for a tip, or maybe she was just in a foul mood, but my guess is that it’s another case of the curse of the “I can do it myself” woman. Being a) female and b) American, I occasionally fall prey to similar expressions of over-the-top self-sufficiency. Growing up in America, the building blocks of my personality are created from an overwhelming sense of self-belief; coupled with the legacy of militant American feminism, not only does this spell disaster for cabbies everywhere, but for relations between men and women in general.

I can’t be bothered with a no-holds-barred academic diatribe on feminism, which strikes me as contradictory to the ethos of blogging, but this lady’s tirade cracked me up. While I appreciate her feeble attempt at an assertion of independence, the fight for feminism has, in some respects, seriously screwed women over. In general the women of my mother’s generation are so obsessed with the perception of equality that they don’t see how farcical and meaningless this “equality” really is. The grass is always greener symptom infects us all, but I think women especially. The bra-burners were so fixated on the power/gender status quo, that their efforts, while commendable, seem to have brought forth repercussions no one anticipated. First of all, there’s the “demise” of modern men, but I’ll come back to this.

Then there’s the idea that women must have it all, be it all, and do it all single handily. The 21st century feminine ideal, let’s take Angelina Jolie for argument’s sake: a wonder-mom, brilliant career, gorgeous husband, evidentially spectacular sex life (look at all those kids), humanitarian, etc. Whereas our mothers and grandmothers were chiefly expected to be good wives and caretakers, they weren’t necessarily burdened by the pressure to have sterling careers as well. Now, we’ve got to be Jolie about everything; feminism means that we’ve got to do everything that men do, better, but for less money, AND be full-time, bad-ass mothers too. What really enervates me about feminism is that it seems to have made femininity a pejorative word amongst women of my generation. Look at our role models now: Paris Hilton (and every other useless celebutante), Hilary Clinton (has buried her femininity so far underground, you wonder if there isn’t a penis hiding under those pantsuits), or the ubiquitous Joile (we all know a limitless supply of money and flexible working hours means motherhood – even if you do have twenty-six children – is a snap). We have to be good at school, good at sport, look physically impeccable, generate brilliant careers, have the perfect wedding, care for the children, make a beautiful home, and hold the family together, without showing any “feminine” weakness. We are made to feel guilty asking for, or even accepting, assistance, especially from men. We aren’t supposed to need help from anyone, and if we can’t do it ourselves, then we’re weak and womanly.

Sometimes we want him to carry our suitcase, or open the door, or pay for our dinner, or cheekily flirt with us in the office, or buy us sexy lingerie for no reason at all. This brings me back to my earlier point, about what’s happening to modern men. We’ve got Maureen Dowd asking whether men are even necessary any more and Steve Jones proclaiming the decent of the Y chromosome. More than this, when Puff Diddy (or Diddy or D or Puff the freaking Magic Dragon) boasts that it takes him longer to get ready than any of his ex girlfriends, including Jennifer Lopez, we know there must be a serious problem with 21st century men. Both biology and sociology are forwarding the ideas, flipping gender stereotypes on their heads, that men are in fact the fairer sex. Not only does men’s extra testosterone make then shorter-lived, but it also makes them more prone to disease and suicide. Jones thinks men are less able than women to cope in contemporary society and are ultimately doomed to descent in the coming “age of women.” How’s that for depressing? Personally, I can think of nothing worse than an "age of women" (at least in the literal sense), and whoever thinks that a world run by women will feature National Cuddle a Teddy Bear Day and a general sense of kum ba yah has another thing coming. That old philosophical maxim “power corrupts” is sad but true. Women can be loving and motherly and supportive, but they can also be conniving, and manipulative, and secretive. And they're just as capable of aggression and violence as men: British teenage girls are now more likely to smoke and drink than their male counterparts. But all of this also overlooks the unassailable fact that, despite what we occasionally tell our girlfriends, women like men. I like men. A world without men wouldn’t be a world at all. And even if we aren’t heading for a literal absence of men in post-modern society, we are perhaps already in the midst of a crisis of masculinity. I like it that men want to look nice and wear moisturiser or whatever, but when a man takes two hours to get ready, turns on the waterworks at the first sign of catastrophe, or doesn’t comprehend what taking some initiative means, I begin to loose faith. And what I really don’t understand is that smug female wink-wink knowingness, that “I’ve got my man under my thumb and I know it, he knows it, everyone knows it.” There is absolutely nothing sexy or equal or liberated or in any way positive about a “she’s the boss” attitude in a relationship of supposed equals. I’m not saying that I want to devolve into a Tarzan and Jane conception of male/female relations, but equality must surely be about more than “getting one over” on those bastardly men.

In trying to be and do everything to and for everyone, women are making it too hard for themselves, and perversely screwing up our men by stripping them of any responsibility and accountability, i.e. their masculinity. So, what do we do? I haven’t the slightest idea. But surely it couldn’t hurt to start by letting the taxi driver carry your suitcase up the stairs next time he offers.

Summertime

Today is the first official day of summer. Not that this is the official, official first day of summer. I haven't any idea when that is. I could Google it, but I don't really want to. The point is that it finally FELT like summer to me today. I don't know why today; it's not like there haven't been other sunny, summery, wonderful, skirt wearing, ice cream eating days, but today just felt like summer. Actually, I know what it is. I had lunch on the terrace at Somerset House this afternoon (gin and tonic for starters; fig, roasted tomato, buffalo mozzarella, and rocket salad for the main). Unfortunately it isn't the sort of place you go for the food, rather for the scenery. Someday someone will get the balance right and we'll have a café/restaurant with superb food and scenery, but alas, until then, I'll make do with feeling like I'm at a very civilised version of one of Gatsby's parties. The terrace itself is wonderful and for those who haven't been, you really are missing out on one of the hidden-ish pleasures of London.

But I'm getting sidetracked here. Summer. Somerset House. There wasn't anything particularly summery about my terrace lunch, though it was pleasant enough. But when I walked through the main courtyard it slapped me in the face. All the screaming, shrieking children running around like Tasmanian devils, playing, crazed and half naked in the fountains. It took me a second to place the smell. Ah ha! Chlorine! If there is one smell that sums up summer for me, chlorine is it. A childhood spent almost entirely in swimming pools is to blame for this curious Pavlovian response. Chlorine = summer.

And now, after all of today's exertion, I'm going to watch a borrowed DVD of Transformers. Because perhaps even more than chlorine, nothing says summer quite like a really crap film.

Thought of the day

Oscar Wilde was hot.

America is the only country that went from barbarism
to decadence without civilization in between.

les oignons

I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately, and I do mean a lot. With a looming thesis deadline, I’ve been up to my ears in Rousseau, Montesquieu, and other classically mad eighteenth-century Frenchies, but in an effort to maintain my sanity, I’ve been sneakily writing essays, poems, stories, radio scripts, and all manner of other procrastinatory things on the side. Sneaky, sneaky.

Sometimes thinking of things to write about is disgustingly easy – ideas flying over both shoulders like mnemonic devils. Other times, I can sit and stare at blank paper for hours. But lately I keep remembering all sorts of “writing exercises” we used to do in the creative writing courses I took as an undergrad (yes, they were as poncy as they sound), my personal favourite being the word association.

The recipe is painless: take one word, write, and enjoy.

Onions

Papery skin peels like silk under her
fingers. Their pearlescent sheen taunts with
thoughts of another woman’s skin. She cries
and she chops and she chops and she cries,
for the tears will not come without this prompt.
He buzzes downstairs and without missing
a beat, she wipes her hands, lets him in,
returns to her tears, and her mother’s recipe
for French Onion Soup.

I can never remember exactly what it is about onions that make people cry when cutting them. I’m sure I’ve looked it up a few times, heard someone explain the reason before, but it’s one of those facts that just never seems to stick. When I was a child I detested onions. Though to be equitable I refused to eat most things (for fun), then at ten, I began refusing to eat pretty much everything (on principle) when I opted for the life of a vegetarian.

While I’ve become quite fond of many things that I refused to let pass my lips as a child (this isn’t as impressive as it sounds), my adult relationship with onions hasn’t really evolved much since childhood. There is really only one respect where a deep-seated, covert love affair exists with these papery tear machines and that is the miracle which is French Onion Soup.

In some respects, onions, like garlic, salt, and other “condiment” cursed food stuffs have become standard issue rations; items to seemingly be added to every twenty-first century recipe. I don’t particularly care for onions in stuff – in sauces or omelettes or salads, but I do appreciate them when their uniqueness and individuality can shine, hence French Onion soup or onion purée (don’t ask), a friend even made onion ice cream once, not the most enjoyable thing I’ve ever eaten, but she was at least on the right culinary track.

Onions’ infamous layers are another reason I love the pungent little bulbs. One of the most over-used metaphors is that one about onions, perpetuating the mistaken belief that humans are full of hidden layers. What no one ever seems to mention is that, excepting the skin, the outer layers of an onion are exactly the same as its heart.

There’s a useful lesson in human psychology here I’m sure. I just can't quite make it what it is. You know, through the tears and all.

It all starts with a toothbrush...

I'm pretty sure he didn't ask if he could leave it; one day it suddenly appeared, and I didn't notice it until after he had gone. White and pristine, standing out proudly in a sea of blues and greens. One thing particularly amusing about this orally-hygienic intruder is that normally The Boy leaves no trace. He constantly teases me about how much of my hair I leave behind: in his bed, his clothes, his house. He informs me cheerily that, should he desire to do so, it would be no trouble at all to construct an effigy of me out of my stray hairs. But when he leaves my flat in the morning, there is never any trace, no sign he was ever there. When he disrobes, he does so with a dispassionate exactitude; laying out coat precisely underneath, neatly folding trousers and jumper, phone on top of wallet on top of dresser. I find this ritual all very amusing - it is so particular to him, so of him, that I cannot find fault with it.

When he leaves the ritual is reversed until shoes are laced and wallet is safely cradled back in pocket, then out the door, jaunty as a pirate captain at sea. In the days between our assignations I think of him often; not in a dehabilitating way, for I jealously guard my freedom and sincerely enjoy the time spent apart, but certainly with much affection as well as pleasure in the anticipation of our next meeting.


But the white soldier that is his toothbrush catches me off guard at strange moments. For obvious reasons, these disconcerting moments usually occur in the morning and in the evening. Though peculiar, I suppose it has become my own effigy of him and apart from its practical uses, I do occasionally speculate that he left the toothbrush on purpose, knowing that it would remind me of him at least twice a day. For all the good there is between us, it may seem odd that a small, defenceless toothbrush could provoke such conflicting emotion. The arrival of a toothbrush is an event significant and trivial, symbolic yet meaningless, simultaneously representative of the present and perhaps indicative of the future. Conceivably the dichotomy lies in a conflict between the toothbrush as a symbol for what I sometimes hope the future might hold, but also as a cautious reminder of what it might not: once upon a time it was someone else's toothbrush sitting in my cup and, in the future, it may be a different someone else's toothbrush too.

This would have been much less of an issue had he merely left dental floss...

Home is not where you live, but where they understand you...

In my drug induced (migraines people), hazy, mostly-asleep state last night, I started writing this post in my head. Times like these, I wish I had some kind of dictaphone imbedded into the walls of my bedroom, which I could activate simply by saying “dictaphone on,” or perhaps something slightly more clever. Though wasn’t Worsdworth’s definition of poetry something along the lines of a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity? I must transgress and disagree with Wordsworth on this matter as I certainly wish I would have gotten up last night to write down the jumbled (but I suspect altogether far more interesting) thoughts on my topic yesterday evening, rather than try to rationalise them at my computer this morning. Though, having said that – this difference is perhaps why I am not a household name and Wordsworth is.

No matter. On to the subject of my drugged-up musings. Something I’ve been spending rather a lot of time thinking about recently is the idea of “Home”, or what it means to be from somewhere and to belong to one place. These scintillatingly introspective thoughts have been triggered primarily by my looming application for permanent residency in the UK, but also by a recent trip to the North of England to trace the ghostly footsteps of The Boy's adolescence. Then there’s also the excellent book I finished reading yesterday, Kevin Myers’ “Watching the Door: Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast,” as well as Arthur Miller’s “Man Who Had All the Luck,” which I saw at the Donmar on Friday night.

Now you might be wondering how the unlikely combination of the UK Home Office, a trip to Lancashire, a book about 1970s Belfast, and a play about small-town America in the 1940s might conspire to inspire a blog post, but it will all make sense in time.

This August I will have lived in the UK for five years, which doesn’t seem that long in relative terms, having lived the twenty one years prior in various US states, but consider that this has been between the ages of 22 to 26, in other words, some petty important years. Two and a half of these five years were spent in Edinburgh, nearly two years in London, and the rest of time in Belfast (ah ha! A picture emerges). Edinburgh feels like home in one way, London in another, Belfast in yet another, but none of these places is actually home for me. I’ve come to think of them, each in their own way, as my home, but it’s simply not the same thing. I don’t think I really realised how true this was until my recent visit to The Boy’s family home. His grandparents and parents were both married in the small church adjacent to the house where his parents now live and generations of his family are buried in the same church’s cemetery. Seeing all this, the legacy and proximity of the history of a single family, affected me in a strange way. Sure, back home there’s still the first school I went to, the park where I kissed my first love, the canal across from my grandmother’s house where we spent endless hours playing in the summer, the desert fields we used to drive to, lie in the back of my truck, and stare up at the sky for hours, talking teenage nonsense. But none of these things, none of the places, people, or events that built the foundations of who I am today are here in this country; they’re all back home in Phoenix.

In some ways all my moving around has made me feel a bit like I’ve sectioned myself into smaller pieces and left the clichéd “piece of me” in the places I’ve lived. The biggest piece of me is rooted in Arizona, with smaller pieces left to seed in Edinburgh, Belfast, and London. Friends left behind, family, memories, boyfriends, animals, cars, books – all left behind.

So what does this make of me? I know better than to assume that knowing exactly where you come from, or exactly where your family has come from, is no help in trying to figure out where you’re going or even where you belong. After coming back from Lancashire, I found myself strangely envious of the subterranean roots of The Boy and his family; generations of a single family, born, living, and dying in the same 30 miles radius. There is something about this that part of me longs for, connection to a single place, “home” as an absolute certainty. But then remembering an earlier conversation The Boy and I had about belonging, he told me that, growing up especially, he wasn’t always sure where he belonged. Sometimes when the sense of being from somewhere is so strong, it overpowers other facets of personal identity. If you leave your home community (not a very original term, I know, but hey) for work, travel, or education, you might be seen as something of an outsider, both in your new community, as well as back home. This is something that makes complete sense to me, and it is part of why I left Phoenix to begin with. Arizona may be the only place I can truthfully call home, as well as being perhaps the only place that I will always feel rooted to, but it is also one of the few places where I feel like a misfit, where I don’t understand the tribal code and don’t always speak the same language.

As for the UK, I still can’t say for certain how I feel about calling this country home. To be sure, it is easier on a day-in-day-out level for me to live here, but this is tinged with a certain hypocrisy. I would be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes like being a bit of an outsider. At home, I’m one of millions of other American girls, living in an American city. Here, I’m a definite (read unique) member of an expat minority. Not that I don’t aim to distinguish myself in other, more respectable arenas, but being an American girl named Crystal still marks me out as unique, even in a multicultural megalopolis like London. Even more so in a smaller city like Edinburgh and in Belfast it bordered on the celebrity with my “say-it-again” accent.

People always ask me what brought me to the UK, or if I miss my family, or if I plan on staying here forever. Most of the time my answer to these and other similar questions is that I don’t really know. Not a very exciting reply, but true nevertheless. I can’t really say if I’ll always want to live in the UK. I like it for now; some cities, Belfast, London, and Edinburgh; I love, and look on as sort of surrogate mothers to my birth-mother Phoenix. I’m starting to think that home is where your friends are, your 21st century family (or is this something made up by transient people who are more inclined to leave their families behind?), but then what happens when you move around too much and leave friends behind as well? What happens when you fall in love with a city itself, like I have with Belfast or with Edinburgh or London? Is this all it takes to have a home – to feel as if it is your home in some way? Walking through Soho some time ago with The Boy, I asked him how long he thought he might stay in London. I nearly fell over when he said he planned to stay here forever; that this was it, he’d moved to his final destination and he wasn’t leaving. I don’t know if London feels like home to him yet, but I suppose he’s got the rest of his life to make it feel like home. While I do love living in London and occasionally entertain thoughts of setting up shop here, I still feel like most days I don’t even know where I’ll be next month, let alone five years from now.

But I’m really wishing I wrote all this down in my dreamy, drugged-up state last night. It sounded a lot more meaningful in my head than it does on paper today. I suppose the root of all this is that I’ve been feeling really homesick lately, but then when I think about it, I’m not really sure where I’m feeling homesick for – if it’s Edinburgh, Phoenix, or Belfast. And then the more I think about it, the more I realise that there really isn’t anywhere I can properly call home, and how can I be homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist? Maybe what I’m really missing is old me: me at 20 as a University student in Tempe; me at 22, alone and on my adventures in a strange new country; me at 24, in love with a crazy Irishman, living in his hometown and loving it; or me now, at 26, in London, living out a lot of dreams, but still feeling like life could change direction in an instant. I suppose I don’t really know what I’m missing. I just know that it’s missing…