Aruba: The sand that burns your feet

Aruba. The spread of shockingly aqua bathwater out against an almost colorless sand. The ripple of palmtree shadows on the sand as they ruffle in the wind. A nearly clear powder blue sky, at long last allowed to be as big as it really is with only that iridescent, blue speckled sea holding it back from falling off the edge of the horizon. Yep. Aruba. This is some boondoggle.
Im in a rubbery blue lawnchair in a ridiculous-looking, big, white, old-lady sunhat (hey, it works) with my laptop propped in my lap, sand grinding in between the keys as I type. Swathes of shiny, speckly-red American bathers lounge in the shade all around me as the early-afternoon sun moves away from us and out over the sea. I am alone and aware of it. I don’t feel like falling asleep in the sun. I don’t feel like dipping my thighs luxiouriously into the clear shallows. I don’t feel like going back to the very corporate air conditioning of my hotel room to face the mess I made of my suitcase the night before. So I pick up the book I picked randomly off the shelf in Portland, the one I have been putting off reading on the assumption that it will be cryptic, overly academic and completely lacking in human mystery – yet extremely beneficial to my overall knowledge of the world. Therefore I will get to reading it when I have more time and brainpower to spend – which will probably be never. But somehow I feel stupidly better just by owning it, kept next to my Kant collection, along with whatever’s in my 401k and a one way ticket to the English countryside. However, in this instance, the steaming sun and the sunscreen bubbling on my legs bores me more. No company (my boyfriend is at the business conference that brought us here), no phone service and my ipods out of battery. I got time. Might as well go for it. Concluding that I will swap it out for another once it makes me heavy-eyed, I reapply sunscreen until my shoulders shine and reposition myself on the chair to optimize my tan lines, before opening the book as if I were opening a glossyTown and Country on a weekend excursion to the Hamptons – with only half, airy interest.

The book –“Africa Doesn’t Matter: How the West has failed the Poorest Continent and What we Can do about it” by Giles Bolton—turns out to be less boring than it is very simply direct in its message, one that crouches me over in my lawn chair to read better in a little slice of shadow. A message I immediately get: ‘why have you been waiting to so long to read this book? Because you were afraid to be reminded of what you know haunts the early mornings you have been sleeping through lately. What have you been doing for the world and what is your place in it?’
Fifteen minutes later I am doused in acute and almost painful awareness of the vast difference between where I currently sit in the world (on a beach chair at a tropical resort serenaded by chart-topping pop hits from the pool aerobics class somewhere behind me) and the places that I sit on (literally and figuratively), places that support my every move without any realization or graciousness on my part. The book addresses a few very big questions with the skepticism of an academic but without the pessimism of most academic theories. If so much of our taxes, charity dollars, 10k benefit races , foreign policies, public product awareness efforts and mental energy are going to the aid of the developing world, why are things not improving? If we cant possibly understand all the complex factors that contribute to third world crises (take your pick – HIV, malaria, national debt, famine, poverty and co.), then what can we understand? And why do we need to?
What is it that we give back to the developing world? Is it Bono, democratic dogma, P ditty posters, corporate responsibility (whatever that looks like) or foreign aid freckled like paintballs pointed in random directions by lobbyists, public sentiment and corporate agendas? Is it the tourism industry where we can enjoy foreign resources, accents and beaches without having to face any greater cost other than what we put on our Amex card? Aren’t our good intentions good enough? Can globalization be fair and still exist?

As they should, these questions lead to more questions - and I am sweating under my sunhat as I digest each crumb of knowledge (1 out of 5 African children will never reach the age of 5, hunger and simple malnutrition kill more people than all other diseases combined, and so on)– What about the first world has naturally pre-qualified us for a chance at a cleaner, longer, more resourceful life (Bronx-dwellers will tell you that even this is not gaurunteed, with or without social services and subsidized vaccinations). What would we as the first world have to give up if somehow we could extend economic and educational equity to the entire world? And would we give them up if we had the choice?

Some might ask (and many do), that confronted with the risks of foreign meddling, the innate complexity of international dynamics and the limitation of simplistic public awareness for the sake of optimism, who would be dumb enough to attack development? But with all that piercing human suffering, dedication, resilience, cruelty and livelihood all breaking through in every story you come across, how can you turn away? Once you know even just a paragraph beyond your basic CNN education of the mire of the international economics, policy and history that have created withering inequities and heartrending accounts of people just like you, only thumbtacked at birth somewhere else on the globe, why turn the page of your newspaper to keep your midnights from exploding with questions about where you sit in the pantheon of humanity and why. What would you do if someone switched those thumbtacks? Would you trade a whole week’s food of just one meal a day for you and your family to save up enough for a malaria mosquito net? If your life expectancy was thirty years and you spent most of it cleaning toilets or cutting salt in the heat, would you count your joys or your misfortunes, or would you just redefine your defition of joy? None of us made the world, but all of us live in it. Can I sit ankle deep in white sand and tell myself I owe nothing to the world and I cant change it enough to matter? What is it that I am so sorely missing, here sitting on a throne with a melting margarita in hand and letting that kind of logic keep me from looking down? Its not that I don’t have some sense of what I might see – its just that Im afraid knowing that once you look down, you might not ever be able to sit on that throne again without considerable discomfort. But is life better lived outside the palace doors?
It is a mistake to pity the developing world – intead, there is much to be admired, and supported at the same time. As that hot, raw humanity in every story keeps me in fiery pursuit of some kind of international work, what am I so afraid of discovering when I find it... and what is it that I’m so terrified I’ll be asked to give up? Perhaps it is not so much the rest of the world who needs my help, but me who is in desperate need of theirs. As I fold up my towel, I feel fairly certain that no amount of sleep will help this fever pass. Show me the road to riches and I’ll know which path isn’t mine. Africa or Bust.

Business Trip

Midnight sunset over Chicago. The bigger the hotel room, the longer the walk to the bathroom to get water in the middle of the night, the lonelier the unworn bath robes in the closet make you feel. A hotel bar unvisited, its characters unrevealed, a hotel notepad unwritten on. A cocktail dress worn for (practically) nothing. A heart unexplored over a cab-view of the windy city. Like a stranded showgirl somewhere very far away from Vegas. I shut the curtains at 11:13 pm over downtown Chicago fronted by a flashing neon "Chicago" sign. If I had any sense of adventure I'd throw my heels back on and walk till I reached that sign. And inside I would find the stories that Im dying to write. Instead Ill use up the entire bottle of hotel shampoo and wait for my outlook to load. Then spend a little time worrying about the people that I love for various reasons before falling asleep with the lights on. Where's "home" when you need one.

Chaos Casserole: Dreams with Holes that still Hold Water

Its almost my 25th birthday. Half of you are thinking "oh my god she is still a baby!". The other half are thinking, "damn we are getting old". I mean when did we get old enough for our car ensurance to drop? Who makes that executive decision that we are mature, old and responsible enough to do our own taxes instead of crashing our cars? Regardless, impeccably timed with this said birthday, I found my first broken vein in my leg, accompanied by a swath of quite unwelcome tiny spider veins on my previously unblemished thigh. This sent me into a frenzy of uncensored paranoia and overexaggerated despair. something, besides my brithday itself, reminding me that there were forces all around me moving me along in a direction I, excuse me, never agreed to go. And, it announced, it was taking my body with it, very much without asking. This realization, along with the lack of any ability to prevent this slow kidnapping of my youth, instantly unhindged me in the most unflattering way - I was beyond pacification, leaving a trail of feathers as I fluttered from person to person in my life asking them to somehow quell my panic while telling them at the same time that they couldnt possibly. This, as you can probably imagine, didnt go over so well, especially with those who had been rowing upstream against cancer all year. Most of them gave me a similar trying-not-to-look-annoyed look (this look can be also be effectively administered over the phone, by the way) and said.... "A vein." Ooooookay. "Yeah." says I. "With many many more to come, perhaps in torrents over the next few years!!!"
.....Was the answer. Somewhere deep down I know how silly it was. And how out of my control, either way. But somehow the symbolism of the find rose like the tide to my conciousness and suddlenly I was Paul Revere, riding like hell to deliver the bad news to myself as an unwelcome realization. "The denchers are coming! The vericose veins and the smile lines and the mortgages and the divorce lawyers and the viagra and the midlife crisis that never really resolve just become routine and your inevitable, undeniable end. They are all coming!" So I killed two birds with one stone and delivered the message to everyone I knew at the same time. And werent they just so grateful that I did!

A few days later, as I was picking up the feathers i had lost and sticking them back on, I thought, hey this is ok. Time to bite the bullet, accept the inevitable and make ammends. Everyone gets older, wiser, happier even if you do it the right way. And nobody does it completely gracefully. Except maybe budhist monks. (And damn they must have some spider veins something awful from all that sitting still.) Its the best I can do to keep taking care of myself the best I can and the rest will have to be just the buildup on the side of a good tub of yogurt. This was my thinking anyway. I could do this. I could make the best of this. I wouldnt make it out alive but I could still do my best to at least show up at the door of my 30s someday with clean underwear and all my sweaters color coded. With this new philosophy I felt almost redeemed and pacified for the most part. And ready to face the weekend with fresh energy. Seeing that almost everyone I knew was out of town, it was the perfect opportunity to regain control of what I could impact, eat well, cleanse my life's palette, buy a few small things I still needed for my apartment, improve my posture, save my money, give my hair an olive oil treatment and color code my sweaters. All that and just generally make the best of the great life I did have. Good plan! I was so excited about the prospect of bringing order, peace and overall health back into my life that went on a sideways bindge after-work mani pedi with my girlfriends and brought in two bottles of wine that ended at last at 3:30am in the morning.

I woke up this morning with no covers, light streaming in and contacts curled up in my eyes. There was a plastic bag I had evidently placed next to my bed in case I had to throw up (always thinking, even while not thinking...although i apparently stumbled all the way into the kitchen to get this instead of pulling over the trash can that was less than three feet away from my bed...but regardless). With the yard sale of clothing, underwear, jewelry and electronics around my bedroom I was shocked i was able to remove my clothing without ending up in it. I was one ipod holder down but somehow still in possession of my ipod. And, as I rove around wiht one blind arm for my blackberry (which is three inches from the charger cord but not plugged in...clearly i had made a good geographic effort anyway) I pick up a voicemail confirming my appointment with a hair dresser in the west village, "hairdresser to the stars" with a quote from britney spears and Calvin Klein on his brochure, for 3:30pm. Now THAT will be affordable, Im sure. My calls to cancel the appointment are fruitless into the afternoon. And no website seems to exist that give pricing. I dont even remember if the appointment I had so magnanimously taken the liberty of making for myself is for color or a trim. Right around then my alarm goes off at full blast (in hitting snooze I had accidentally turned up the volume ten decibels). It is 7:45 in the morning. My un color coded sweaters are pulled out like the pork innards from my closed in some desparate late night (or should I say early morning) hunt for something SO crucial I cant remember what it was. Now THIS is what I call graceful.

So, instead of cleaning up, I simply sat down on the fold of my already wrinkled rug hunched against the sharp edge of my bed, turned my alarm down but left it blaring, unburied my laptop from underneath the wet towel i let sit on it all night and started writing this blog, still enjoying last night's wine, as it has been sitting in my mouth all night.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury. Yes, I do have one last thing I would like to say to you. As I enter into adulthood, wether I have been sitting on its doorstep for 5 years or already cleaning its floors but havent known it, here is the biggest thing I have learned. Never stop trying to plug the holes...but always know your floor will always be wet. Seriously. For what I percieve to be the most important lesson Ive learned in early adulthood, and from what I keep observing as true throughout all the possible birthdays, it sure seems both random and pointless. But in everything you do ... work for world peace, solve the economic crisis, save the Siberian tiger, selflessly raise your family while you do someone elses finances all day, enjoy photography when you are not waiting tables, earn your yellow belt in martial arts, look for "the one" online or in seedy bars, whatever it is that you DO and no matter how successful or unsuccessful you are at it...you will always be doing it as if you were aiming for a beer can half a mile away with a colt .45 after 5 rounds of Wild Turkey. I mean life is so totally haphazard. And we are never prepared enough or sure enough of ourselves for it. And that is, like, somehow so totally ok. Since the thing about life is that no one makes it out alive, might as well ring 'er in ungracefully.

But thats the plugging holes part - you cant STOP trying to create your perfect life, stop trying to fight the aging process or stop trying to save the world. Just like you cant just stop wearing sunscreen. You cant stop chasing your dream even if you eventually realize its not really your dream. Because everybody needs things to DO, waves in the world to make, people to love even if you loose them in the end, one way or another. No matter how far on or off the mark your everyday or lifelong efforts might be, the world still knows YOU were here. Its your tree-trunk initials on the soul of the world and on the sould of everyone around you. How about that for immortality. And sometimes, if you look in the right places and in just the right light, you get to see the fruits of what you DO. And thats what keeps you going on, doing what you do. For the other times, like when you end up facedown on an unswept floor on top of sweaters that are not color coded in a heap on a saturday morning that was intended for order, well sometimes our spider veins get the best of us. Keep on trying trying to plug the holes, knowing their will always BE holes. Big ones. Like this morning. Me? I want the world. I want Africa, I want China, I want Peru. I want to help people across the world see themselves in each other. Somehow. Sometime. Thats what I want to DO. And Im doing it, in small ways, the only way I know how, hoping for days when I can DO that even more. But in the meantime, you could say Im still living my dream. But who put all these damn holes in it? :)

Writer's Blo..g? Excuses for having nothing to say

I keep meaning to write a blog post. I really would like to get regular about writing this thing. Time managing, and all. And...its not like I dont WANT to write it. Its just that... I dont know what it is. But every time I carve out time to write a post, (a really really insightful one this time), I just cant think of anything truly interesting to say. Anything truly interesting that takes less than five minutes to read, that is. And if you can only think of interesting things that take longer than five minutes, then they are no longer interesting. True? I think so anyway. I thought of ten different topics sitting here staring at a cursor on an empty screen - the search for meaning in everyday life. The resounding truth of inevitable imperfection. Career - a calling or a copout? Why being in love deserves to be taxed just like beer and cigarettes. Airports (just airports. enough said). How I really believe (really) that entrepreneurshialism has the power to save (and brave) the world at large. Skinny jeans - they dont make us look skinny. All of these topics and more presented themselves to me for the taking. And yet not one of them seemed worth translating, even into a measely blog. Whether they reeked of Conde Nast (can blogs come with scratch-n-sniff perfume samples? because some of mine probably should), bordered on cynicism that is just trying to be cool, sounded suspiciously sentimental, or lily-leaped all over self-reiteousness in snow-white ballet slippers, none of them were worth pursuing. No offense, skinny jeans. And so, after fifteen minutes of my slotted "artistic" time elapsed, I found myself barbarously scratching off the dead skin on my right shin leftover from my sunburn two weeks ago while slurping cold bedtime tea and asking myself how long I had to sit here until I would be allowed to break into the no-transfat cardboard cookies I bought for four dollars more than delicious oreos. It was then that I decided to throw in the towel and call it a wash. Its a BLOG, not a term paper on French philosophy. Or a United Nations proposal for 2009 socio-economic development programs in 23 developing countries. Or even a self-help book (paperback, even). Better luck next time.
Until then....

Hurry up and Wait

This isnt the best time to start a blog post. Round 11 on a Tuesday night in the middle of a week that should have been over more than a week ago. I could use a spot of sleep. Maybe one full day in the sun with no money to spend and nothing to keep clean. But if I waited for the best time to do things, the only doing I would be doing would be waiting...and thats not doing, now is it.

They say we wait, what, 75% of our lives is it? And I ask, you, what is it that is so damn important? I mean what, world at large, are we waiting for? For that great new job, waiting for "the one", waiting for the wife who wont nag, the divorce that will never end, the rain to stop, the morning to come, the workout to be over, the next thing to break just so that you can pick up the pieces. Maybe, I mean just maybe, we spend so much time waiting that we miss whatever is in between.

You are laughing now. You didnt need to read a blog to know that! The buddhists even built an entire religion around it. Unwrap your little soul from around tomorrow and set it at the foot of today. No more waiting to spring once you get what you've been waiting for. Should you not get what you waited for (or what you didnt wait for), you'll probably spend the rest of your life seeking it. That fiery Spanish flame, that autobiographic novel, that nobel prize for the half of the world you saved, that love you never fought for. You'll go looking for it, wont you, for years to come. In dark musty bars and in plastic dentist chairs, in carpeted cubicles and pretty much everywhere but crosswalks... Because no one really looks for anything in the middle of crosswalks, have you noticed? They are really only looking to get the other side. Maybe thats what is so great about that Beatles poster.
(I was kissed in the middle of a crosswalk once. And it was, well. Very romantic. Like most moments though,I eventually had to end up on the other side before the light changed.)

Today one of my best friends in New York got a call from one of the biggest agencies in the world. On her cell phone. On a Tuesday. The creative director had seen her self-made portfolio randomly online and he thought it was just amazing. He said he was coming to New York this winter. He'd love to meet with her. Of course he would. When the world calls, you dont send it to voicemail. It might not call you back.

But like I said, it won't do to sit at home waiting for it to call. Its not a very good prom date. If you wait for it, eating up that 75% like daily calories on a jelly donut, it wont ever call. Its when you're sitting there putzing your way accross the crosswalk, jaywalking eating an enormous deli sandwhich typing on your blackberry and reaching in your purse for your subway card, that is when life will call you up and say "So...whatcha doin?" "Um, what am I NOT doing?? Can I call you back?" you will answer. At that point, if you dont stop and look around and stop looking so hard for the other side, then you get hit by a taxi.

Dont wait for things to get better and dont wait for things to get worse. Dont wait for an engagement ring so that you can wait to take it off when he is not looking. I mean I think about it like this -chances are if you add up the time I spend waiting in line at H and M and at the post office, along with the time that we have spent as a family waiting for results from the oncology lab, then we dont have much of that 75% left. By that logic, Alec, you're screwed buddy, you've actually been forced to take out credit on waiting. That means you have a lot of crosswalks to stop in. A whole month of deli sandwiches. And a lot of love to fall in. And a lot of calls from the world to return.

I wake up a lot at night lately. Then I wait to go back to sleep. And while Im sitting there awake I look at my life--my job in this wierdly skinny glass building, my squished PB and J sandwhiches I bring for lunch that never get old, my family and their unfunny jokes that are much funnier than funny jokes, this tallish chap that I am, yeah, really in love with and this outrageous year in a New York crosswalk and I think, so am I, like, happy? Or something? Is this happy? Or is this some kind of misguided, urbanized manic depression in disguise? No, it sort of just stinks of happy. And if so, what is it that I am still looking for? Maybe happy is like those people I used to see in San Francisco who ride the bus all day... but dont ride the bus to get anywhere in particular.

So tell me. What are are you waiting for?

New York’s nuclear Winter: How one city wears the 2009 winter woes

The second day of March and no sun over the highrises for these New Yorkers. Only blowing snow with a sneaky, shifting wind and a loud Monday morning blizzard. Like the rest of the northern hemisphere waiting for spring to break and the first sign of life to stir from underneath the crust of the stock market, its still winter in every direction you look. Those of us who have jobs try not to complain. Those who dont are looking forward to warmer days. Pretty much everyone is waiting for the storm to break.

New York city is already a very different place now than it was one year ago when I first arrived with two suitcases and one shot-in-the-dark interview at L’Oreal. Corporate neon logos are burning out over Times Square. Downtown rush hour is thinner than ever – half of the train cars are in jeans. It seems the only people who don’t feel the wear are reality TV stars, and for good reason. Even Manhattan rent checks, signed in gold, are being forced to throw a few barrels overboard. The top of the world is crashing into the bottom. The bottom still keeping eyes upturned for a break in the clouds, ducking debris from the crumbling top. Whether you are working the bar in Prada shoes or watching the offices around your cubicle empty, the workforce has been forced to its knees. Not a good time to be in business. Or be president. Not even, some people are saying as they survey the ruins of their 401ks, a good time to be alive?

One year ago next week I came to the city. My life had no plot, my teenage story already undergone a center-stage, heart-searing climax and my protagonist looking for a scene change. One chapter to the next. One curtain call after another. And whoever said the sequel is never as good as the original doesn’t like the right kind of movies. New York to me then was an untamed jungle for an untamed heart – a world so far out of my reach that I could never again get bored with it wrapped around my fingers. I was both frightened, naïve and thoroughly broken-hearted…and I found that when you are any one of these three things, there is never a better time to do something so totally dumb and terrifying. I was ready to make myself and everyone who knew me ashamed and proud at the same time. Wether it was love that had let me down or I who had let it down – either way, I knew life would take me in and I was happy and confident that love would no longer recognize me if we ever crossed paths again. I'd gone away - and letting the old version of myself roll to voicemail. Looking up at a highrise on 5th avenue for my very first big-brand interview, I had felt I was at the feet of the world. What I didn’t realize that entire time was that it was the world who was at mine.

One year later under a fiery March blizzard as the Wall street heavyweights and corporate monarchies hunker down for the economic Battle of the Bulge and as we watch the snow cover the Brooklyn bridge and melt into the icy East river from our office windows, we know that history is in the process of being rewritten, borders redrawn and emperors brought to trial across this wintry economic landscape. This isnt a year that I’ve let pass me by. And it isnt one to laugh too loud at. Except when one has had one too many dirty martinis. In March I bought an airmattress to sleep on. In April I found a job. In May an apartment I still cant afford. In June my brother got cancer – and there isnt a month that passes that I don’t still grieve a little bit for that day it became official. In July I entered into my mid-twenties. In August, I took a breath, wondered what I was doing in New York and spent a sickening amount of money on shoes. In September I met the best kind of someone at the absolute worst time – and I still don’t know how such amazing things can be so completely random. (I asked a similar question the other way around when they told me that leukemia isnt genetic). In October I saved someone’s life – or my genetic material did anyway. In November I spent all month thanking whoever was telepathically listening for that scrap of matching genetic material. Starcrossed or just lucky? - you decide. In December I cried a lot – for better and for worse. In January I helped build a team and hoped they wouldn’t hate me. In February I decided I was both out of shape and in love – so I signed up for 3 days of kickboxing a week with a couple of ex-gang members who call me "Woman". And today on the second day of March I am right back to where I started – the world at my feet and me there at its, just waiting for spring.

These are tough days. I don’t blame the big brands for feeling sorry for themselves as lights go out all over New York city. And you cant blame the newspaper headlines when they too are running low on ink and out of advertisers. I like my job – but I still make sure I don’t keep more than one cardboard box worth of personal items at work. No one can say they feel like investing in anything except happy hour recession specials and what’s left of our futures. But then again – when you’re flying high its awful hard to find a good place to land. So you land right where you are. 24 years old and planless – worth nothing but what you can write your way in or out of. Or 21 years old and 150 days out of a stem cell transplant calculating the probability of relapse with every day that goes by ...because leukemia doesn’t always negotiate. Still, at the bottom of a recession there are less shadows to live in and fewer excuses to put anything off at all. In a universe that is flying away from its center by an accelerating number of Kilometers per second, every solar system becoming more and more isolated with billions of light years of empty space in between…and yet somewhere in all that space every once in a while, galaxies still collide. And I don’t know about you. But Im pretty much good with that. No time is ever a bad time to be alive. Especially if you’ve ever had to work as hard at it as one person I know.

So here’s to warmer days. And all the cold ones in between.

A note on life goals...

Work hard for what you want. Work long and hard - into the night and under the gun, overtime and under the wire, up an appetite and down a rabbit hole, towards what you want and away from what you used to. Work hard and don’t let anyone tell you how long to hold out for what you are so convinced that you really really want. And then, when the time comes, get ready to walk away. Leaving the all the unsigned papers and unfinished sentences and unclosed deals and unrequited hours just where they are. Give up. And give in to the next. Because life is all about unfinished business. The commission from one closed deal in life will give you the rolodex for the next unclosed one. If walking away is hard, then you know you’re walking away at the right time. When the time does come, turn away from yesterday’s paperwork and toast to tomorrow’s. Just make sure the wine is good.

Sometimes what you are looking long and hard for, is just what you need to start looking for something else.