Nixon in China

Dunk, Dunk, Goose

I just finished Jhumpa Lahiri's new collection, Unaccustomed Earth, and you should finish it, too. Not because every story gets you. Not because every story sneaks up behind you like a teenage bully at the neighborhood pool, presses down on your shoulders until you feel the world open up around you, flooding all the the strange, dark spaces inside you that account for breath. But because some of the stories do, and sometimes some is enough.

A lot of people have said a lot of things about what makes Jhumpa Lahiri's stories good. And though I do enjoy repeating myself and others, I've run five miles today and am tired, so I'll just say that, apart from the musculature, apart from the cruelty and the strength, the thing that elevates the best of the stories is the contrast between the shock of submersion and the inevitability that follows. Something is strange or new, exotic; then suddenly it's the standard, the truth, the blue all around.

"Going Ashore," the final story in the collection, is both tragically conventional and conventionally tragic. Yet, embedded in the slow descent of the piece is a description of a moment I remember vividly from my own life, of giving up something you want not because it is the right thing to do, or the smart thing to do, but simply because you can't seem to do anything else.

It is the kind of private turning, the kind of intimate quake, you never expect to see articulated outside of your body. In fact, until you see it there, splayed on the page, letters thrusting into blank, you could imagine that it happened differently, that it never happened at all.

Around and Stop

It's tough to break up: you've invested so much time and energy in someone that even the fact that he's a schlump with a taste for emo rock can't seem to dim your resolve to stay together no matter what the cost.

Similarly, it's tough to admit to yourself that something you've spent years working on is something that no longer interests you. I was listening to yet another high-Baroque trio sonata on the radio program Harmonia when it dawned on me: this was boring. There went the two solo instruments schlepping through the circle of fifths; there went the baseline, lumbering on its way. The harpsichord provided obligatory flourishes as the whole self-satisfied burgher of a piece strolled past, never breaking a sweat.

The truth is I'm getting more musical satisfaction these days messing around on the tin whistle than doing anything I'm actually supposed to be doing. Celtic music may be eminently predictable, but at least it's got the kind of instinctive thrust good music should have. I once explained to a professional bodhran player that one of my principal weaknesses as a musician was that I neglected to justify my musical choices with historical precedent. He looked at me askance. "Why the hell would you want to do that?" he asked.

Why indeed?

Still, there's something sad here. The death of love is the death of love, no matter that my lover was only a certain collection of sounds, that the death was a wearing away so slow it was years before I noticed I was all by myself.

Hello to Regular Joe

I was in it for the coffee.

I'm not really a see-'em-in-person kind of gal, but there was fresh-brewed liquid energy on offer, plus diner breakfast, so I dug my coat out of the closet and walked out the door into the bright chilly blue of my vacation day. It was 11:00 AM and Barack Obama was speaking two hundred feet from my favorite breakfast joint.

34,999 other souls apparently didn't even require the lure of caffeine: downtown Indy was packed. People pressed themselves into metal barriers, climbed trees, ranged themselves around the overflow screens the campaign had set up to broadcast the event. Barack was running late: by the time he strolled onto the podium in the middle of the American Legion Mall, Senator Evan Bayh had already warmed up the crowd, then handed it over to be cooled down by one of the mythical tribe of "regular people," a woman who told a sad, incoherent story about descending the rungs of the economic ladder.

(Who ARE these "regular people?" I've noticed that, campaign-wise, the defining characteristic of "regular people" appears to be an uneasy relationship with the English language. This is probably why so many "regular people" are suspicious of Obama's fluency and comforted by Sarah's slaughter of syntax. Spreading your words around smacks of Socialism.)

See, that was a nasty, cynical aside designed to illustrate my nasty, cynical streak. A streak that rendered me doubly unprepared, standing there jammed against 34,999 fellow Obama supporters and a couple of eerily life-like cardboard cut-outs, to be ambushed by that wily opponent of cynicism, inspiration.

My day-to-day relationship with inspiration can be summed up in three words: Kiss my ass. Yet, there I was, howling like a maniac, raising my arms to the heavens and choking back the lump in my throat that kept materializing whenever I looked around at 34,999 businessmen, mothers, schoolchildren, bums, camera-wielding cyclopses, aging hippies, union men, apprentice chefs, bicycle messengers, hoodlums, crazies, grandmothers, amputees, and "regular people." For once, maybe the only time in our lives, we were all in it together.

Barack Obama: better than Metamusil.

Whazzup, Sarah?

Today's NY Times Week in Review section contains a chilling article on Sarah Palin's popularity with men. McCain's VP pick was selected at least in part to appeal to women, but it turns out that the big Palin fans, the ones who paint letters of her name onto their hairy chests and yodel their devotion to the cameras, are men. From the day McCain announced his choice, men's approval of Palin has led women's by a 10-point-margin.

What gives? And why is it dangerous?

I call it the hot babysitter effect. Now, more than ever, our country needs someone to look after it. Each of us is busy with our own affairs, our own homes, our own towns; the country needs someone to watch it for us while we go about the business of living. Ergo, electing a President is like hiring a babysitter.

So what do women consider when they hire a babysitter? Most of us look for competence. We want our babysitter to know about the important parts of babysitting: feeding, bathing, ensuring diaper security. We want to the babysitter to have babysat before. We want to hear that she has good references from her last job.

And men want to know these things, too. But some men -not all men, mind you- look at the babysitter and think to themselves: DUDE, she's HOT.

Never mind that the babysitter thinks reading the label on a Pampers box that one time at Safeway makes her an expert on diapers. Never mind that she can't string together a grammatically coherent sentence. Never mind that the babysitter slapped around some kid at her last job.

Sarah Palin is the kind of babysitter -the kind of woman- certain men love. She responds to, and is appreciative of, the male gaze. She does not gainsay male pleasures, even if they involve killing things or drilling enormous holes in wildlife refuges. Her primary personae are those of wife and mother: these are helpmeet roles, roles that prop up, and are integral to, the lives of men. There's no part of the life of Sarah Palin that is unavailable to, or separate from, men. She likes men. She approves of men. She smiles at them, tells them she likes their big boots and their big guns, that she'll take good care of their child.

The woman is dumb as a post. But I can report (only a trace of bitterness, folks!) that intellect is not usually the first thing men look for in their babysitters or any other woman. Maybe they look for it second, or third, or fourth. Palin's male fan base looks for intellect sixty-seventh, between skill at rabbit gutting and ability to whistle Yankee Doodle.

Alright, I'm getting snarky. But the fact remains: Palin's base of support skews, and always has skewed, male. "Palin is our kind of woman," a male fan tells the reporter.

Dude. Scary.

Like, um, so, do you wanna...

Yesterday, I screwed up the courage to ask my coworker out.

At least, that's what I imagined it felt like. I wouldn't know: I'm past the asking-people-out stage of my life and, honestly, I never did it anyway. Asking people out is scary, and I am -let's be blunt- a Wuss Extraordinaire.

(One of the secret, shameful satisfactions of girlhood is that girls, in heterosexual culture, can get with this kind of cravenness. Boys, unless they're inordinately attractive, can't. Not that I really endorse the sitting-on-your-ass approach to dating. You unfailingly end up dating people who are braver than you are, which brings its own set of problems.)

Yet, there I was, a grown woman, dangling an ostentatiously casual invitation for a beer after work. My co-worker and I were both new to the area. We'd already gone through the awkward dance of "we should get together at some unspecified time in the future." I simply picked a time and a premise, then walked into my colleague's office sweaty-palmed.

And what, you might ask, drove me to this dark pass? The thing is, life after college and graduate school is isolating. We spend our whole lives moving apart: from sharing a room, to sharing an apartment, to setting up shop in detached houses with lawns. The lawns get bigger and bigger as we get older and richer, and then, eventually, we die. Alone.

OK, I got a little carried away there. But once you start your "real" life, after all that education has gone in one ear and out the other, how are you supposed to make friends? It's not like in preschool, when you both shared an abiding love of sand. All the way through school it was almost too easy: everyone around you was around your age, was at the same stage of life, shared geographic proximity. Friends practically fell in your lap.

Nowadays it's different. The only people I even lay eyes on are the people I work with. They are every age and every time of life, all of them locked in their own little nuclear cells all around the city. No one can go out for a spontaneous beer, because to do so would involve an hour of driving, not to mention the disposition of spouses, children, small animals in sweaters, etc.

This kind of sucks. Everyone knows it's harder to meet a mate after college or grad school. Fortunately we've developed a mechanism for that. It's called Internet dating. But simply making friends? There's no Craigslist for that. It's easier to find a dominatrix online than a friend. No, if all you want is a few folks with whom intermittently to have beer, you need to do it the old-fashioned way.

Better late than never, I suppose.

Spelling it Out

You used to have to remember stuff. Now you can let your brain go to screensaver (hello Barack-in-Speedo!) and throw yourself on the mercy of technology.

Take that little search rectangle in the corner of the browser. Type in a single letter and the industrious mole that lives in your machine unearths an alarmingly large, alphabetically cataloged chunk of your search history. Did you really look for this crap?

Under W:

Whiskey Island
wrack
WFYI
Weschler
Wat Zalmen


Under O:

opposite of iamb
one eighth percentage
Oberlin College Police
open window snowstorm
out of the depths I cry


Under R:

Rothko works
Ruth Miller
rectitude
red suit


Under D

duck wedding
despair
drive to the basket
dead sparrow
daily office
defile


Hmmmmm.