Out With the Bad, on With the Good

(bear for introspection and protection)

This is another one of those rare early morning blogs. Usually I am rather like a mute beast in the early morning, shuffling and groaning, but once in a while a piece of insight comes bubbling to the surface in my sleep in surprising clarity. Clear enough to wake me up to write about it! Even though I may still get frustrated about the ways that I think my life is not coming together, (moving again, tight money, stuck somewhere in an abyss of career change), I had some clarity this morning on a part of my life that has come quite a long way in the last five years of transition. I want to talk about my perspective on a certain situation because, well, I never have before, and the weight of not talking has sometimes been a burden that I want to let go of now.

Once I was in a bad relationship. I was with a partner who often disregarded me and regularly made me feel bad and small. It didn’t start out this way at all, but slowly over the years the more em-partnered we became, the less I seemed to matter. I think that when people basically feel bad about themselves, they sometimes have a desire to make something or someone else feel bad too, and under these circumstances for my partner I was the safest, easiest target because I was there, and as my loyalty became more proven, I became more and more a chosen recipient of bad feelings. I’m not saying that I am at all without blame here. It takes two and I was never able to make this person feel better about himself. In foolishness, carelessness and youth I often made him feel worse. Also I don’t mean to paint my ex-partner with the mask of a monster. We were very young, inexperienced, passionate and sometimes unbalanced in our early, relationship building years together. He may well have regretted treating me with violent anger, apathy or verbal cruelty sometimes, and I’m sure that he did because we all do those things once in a while and then feel bad about it. The difference between an outburst of frustrated anger or a verbal dig and an ongoing, corroding, abusive situation lies in what happens after the anger or the hot words. If there can be an apology, a conversation about what deeper emotions were really at play, acknowledgement of a misstep, then the hurt can be quickly resolved for the time being. Pretending that it never happened though, that it didn’t mean anything, or worse, sticking to the conviction that one has a right or is justified in treating another in this way, that’s when the painful web of lies begins. And it is a web of lies. It keeps one person tied in the position of perpetrating abusive behavior again at will, because it’s been established that they can, and it keeps the other person stuck on the receiving end because it is established that they will.

The saddest thing for me now is that I let this happen to myself. I don’t generally believe in spending much energy on regret in life, but the fact that I let myself live in that situation for as long as I did is a small tragedy for me. I chose to believe, because it was somehow easier and less painful for me at the time, but worse in the long run, that it must really be my fault somehow. I complied with the justified act. I chose to believe that he wouldn’t really treat me like that unless I deserved it, because a lot of the time he was such a good guy, and he was really so nice to everyone else in the world. I was the only one that he was cruel to, and only in private, so it must be something about me like he said. I know now that that’s never true though. Nobody deserves to be made to feel small by the people they love most. I transgressed myself deeply by thinking that, and it has taken years and some help and a lot of luck to recover.

People who have never been in an abusive situation may not be able to understand what I’m talking about here, or may wonder for the umpteenth time why other people are foolish enough to let themselves be treated like that when they don’t have to be. For those who know though, these situations build slowly over time with the right combination of neurosis, manipulations and blind spots. It’s incredibly insidious and disorienting from the inside. If you have been in an abusive situation, then you probably don’t even need to read this, you know what I’m talking about immediately. I now realize that some pretty nasty things go on behind closed doors all of the time, and really smart, sane, normal or even extraordinarily wonderful people are sometimes taking part in them. If you are wondering if your relationship is abusive, and believe me I know that convoluted headspace well and climbed those walls for a long time before it finally ended, the answer is probably already there in the question. Human rights are a part of our biology. We instinctively know when we are being treated unfairly.

My final realization is that this is not some secret I need to keep anymore. I don’t want to talk about it all the time either, but I don’t need to not talk about it. When we broke up and my social world shattered I felt like I needed to keep my lips zipped for some reason. I guess I didn’t want anyone talking about me any more than they were already. I also still hadn’t fully realized that this wasn’t my fault, and quite honestly I had let my ex-partner assume such a role of power in my head that I was quite afraid of him and of the ways in which he could hurt me with words. I even found out about some ridiculous lies that he was spreading about me, and I still didn’t want to talk about the truth. Once an ugliness has been planted in secrecy it is hard to dig up. That plant is withered and gone now though. It was quite a while ago, and seems far away because I think that I finally understand it enough now that it will never happen to me again. I don’t think that I will ever be in that same dark place again, because I would never do that to myself now. And that is a huge step that my life has taken, with help from my loving husband and family who I thank so much.

(I just want to say thank you as well to my Aunt Judy here who by her example and subtle encouragement helped me a lot! Thanks Aunt Judy! Oxoxo)

Saturday in L.A. Without a GPS: Circling the Culver City Triangle and Finding the Dosa Truck

This Saturday morning we awoke, made some breakfast, and went out to run a couple simple errands before getting on with the rest of our day. That's an uncertain presumption to make in L.A. though, that you will be done with something quickly and then get on with something else. Perhaps we should know better by now, but here is a tale of how we don't. Setting out to do much of anything in L.A. has an element of stepping into the void, mostly because of traffic. That famous, incredible traffic that we have here, created by our complicated web of clogged freeways and arguably the worst public transportation system imaginable for a city of this size in a country of this wealth, is a mysterious force influencing our every endeavor. Will the traffic gods be with you today? Or will there be a lane closed, a sports event getting out, a detour, or god forbid an accident in your path to impede your progress and remind you of how insignificant your plans or desires may be in the face of the universe. For those of you who aren't familiar with driving in L.A., when you request directions within the city on google it will give you the route, the mileage, and your best and worst case scenario, with the same trip often ranging from something like 23 minutes at best case to something like 2 hours and 15 minutes in traffic. And there's usually traffic.....and then inexplicably sometimes there's not! It's quite absurd. L.A. traffic is a mirror of that terrible reality of life that we all fervently yet pointlessly try and keep ourselves from facing all of the time in order to hold on to our sanity; you can't control anything and you never really know what's going to happen. And so it went with our day on Saturday, driving the streets of L.A.

So we needed to get some tools to start fixing up the yard of our new rental house. (Yes, we are moving and we did find a nice place but I am still in a little bit of denial about the whole thing so I won't start in on this subject until next week!) It was hard to find the tools that we needed without paying exorbitant prices near our house so after checking a slim yet very expensive selection at a local garden store we headed for the nearest awful chain store that I feel really guilty to support but I knew they'd have what we need at a price that we can handle. Anyway, off we head to Culver City. I had been to this particular Home Depot at the request of our landlords last fall to procure some garden supplies, so I knew about where it was but couldn't remember the street name. We don't have a GPS, which is somewhat unusual in L.A. I think, and leaves us prey even more to the whims of traffic chaos. Tim has a free navigation program on his phone which we have used once or twice with mixed results, but we decided to check the address on there. It came up and looked right to me so we worked our way along the freeways and then surface streets heading for the location. As we drove further and further east toward Hollywood the road became more and more detoured and complicated and the directions more and more incomprehensible. We drove back and forth and around and around this little area at the eastern edge of Culver City looking at warehouses and overpasses and stores and apartment rows and a sad river trickling through a concrete riverbed and the empty construction mess where in 3 or 4 years if we're lucky the metro train running through East L.A. may actually extend to the western half of the city. We became hungry, thirsty, exasperated and gave up. We couldn't find a phone number for this Home Depot and when we finally got through to another Home Depot they explained that this one had closed. Apparently all traces of it had been obliterated since I had been there last fall and shifting detoured streets and vanishing corporate retail spaces were creating for us a small Culver City Twilight Zone. We drove away from the vortex to Inglewood, a bit farther but nothing like the driving we had done so far in search of the lost Home Depot. We bought the tools, made one more stop on the way, and feeling alternately grumpy and slap-happy at this point we fought the traffic home five hours from when we had set out on a 45 minute to one hour errand, best case scenario that is I guess. But the day was not over yet!

We got home, unloaded, I made some late lunch and cleaned the kitchen up. Bricky's friend came over to play video games but the battery ran out so I helped them make and paint wooden swords to battle in the back yard sunshine. I made the kids dinner and then rushed into the shower to get ready for a fundraiser that we were going to for Nick's new school. I kind of dread schmoozy things like that where people stand around all dressed up and you have to make conversation with people that you don't know and usually don't really want to know. Nick's school has GREAT financial aid though, and fifty percent of the kids enrolled benefit from it including us, so it was totally worth it to support this cause. I put on my one cocktail dress and glued my black heels together in the car. We dropped off Bricky's friend and headed to the school, only like 35 minutes late. Except no one is at the school. So we call Nick and he finds out where the event actually is, somewhere in Culver City. Hmmm. We put the address into Tim's phone, head into Saturday evening traffic. We inch along the highway, we get off onto surface streets, and things begin to look eerily familiar. We're back!!! Back on the same detoured streets, underpasses, apartment rows etc. We're in that Culver City Triangle again! And once again the navigational system is making no sense and once again we are hungry and thirsty and exasperated only now we are dressed up! AND, now we are getting to know this mysterious little vortex of confusion. Much like the hero on his journey, we have acquired some powers and skills from earlier trials that we will use to overcome this one. We systematically drive the nearby streets, spotting sights that we recognize from before, until finally we find the right street and pull up to the valet parking for a converted warehouse event space. We're like 2 hours late. Whatever though, we're there. We go inside, get our free glass of wine, talk to some jerk, talk to some nice people, look around hungrily and fruitlessly for food. We get tipsy and bored. We go have fun dancing like crazy to some pretty bad d.j.'d music, find out that we didn't win the audi in the raffle, then we leave. We drive to a nice gallery nearby to see an opening, and amazingly don't get lost. The opening is ok, but we're getting tired though and starving at this point. It's been a very long day, and our trials have been many, but they are soon coming to and end for now. Luckily parked outside the gallery is the Dosa Truck!! Now as bad as L.A. traffic is, that is how good its truck food can be. It can be bad too, of course, but Dosa Truck is one of the good ones. Their cuisine is southern Indian and their motto is, "Ommmmm good." We stood on the curb with the other hipsters in our heels and tie and ordered a dinner of fresh off the griddle thin lentil pancakes filled with delicious sweet potato, spinach and ginger goodness and fresh ginger limeade all for under $20. Ommm good. We've faced confusion, uncertainty, frustration and felt our lives in the chaotic palm of the unknown. But we triumphed in the end, and it's over for this Saturday, and we go home.

Cesar Chavez Boulevard

(etching like the one I am learning to do, but not by me...)

Tim, my brave, self possessed and optimistic husband who rarely if ever complains, is often chagrined at my lack of good things to say about L.A. I know I do sometimes have a grudge against this city that I didn't choose, and that's NEVER a healthy thing. It's kind of like L.A. and I, with her botox lips and her Juicy Couture handbag, got stuck in an elevator together and I initially jumped to the conclusion that we have nothing in common, and that maybe this would be over soon, but the longer we're here together and the more we get to know about each other the more my presumptions get challenged. Like for instance, I can't help but admire her habit of sprucing herself up all over with jasmine and hummingbirds. Few other urban environments can boast those charms to the extent of L.A. Also she has an artsy/edgy side and a Dia de Los Muertos skull tattoo which I must admit is pretty cool. She is definitely Mexican-American, and this week I learned more about some righteous aunts and uncles in her heritage. I am going to try and up the ante for myself on communicating things that I like about Los Angeles. The longer that I am gone from Maine, the more I realize that we are really going to have to make friends! In fact, L.A. is probably already considering herself my friend, and I am just all self-absorbed and shy and not noticing it. Man, I live here now! That reality is STILL sinking in. I'm an earth sign, these things take time. I'm waking up, rooting in, getting my feet on the ground a little more all the time. L.A., sorry for my cold shoulder. Thanks for all the sunshine and flowers and the interesting places and sometimes beautiful scenery. I'll try to give you more of a chance!

Last week I started a printmaking class at an East L.A. community art center called Self Help Graphics. East L.A. is a long highway drive from my house, but I really want to learn printmaking, and this place has a nice print shop and the classes are very reasonably priced. Also, it turns out that this organization has a totally awesome history, and is in a really inspiring neighborhood! First of all, East L.A. is very Hispanic, and has a very strong, established community. It has its problems of crime and gangs sometimes, but the area that my classes are in has the feel of a very strong community which has fought long and hard, and is fighting still for a safe, positive and clean neighborhood. Self Help Graphics is located on Cesar Chavez Boulevard, which is a vibrant street of small businesses like carnicerias, groceries, auto body shops, panaderias, and hardware stores with broad sidewalks and parts of the street have nice, old fashioned iron streetlamps. Self Help Graphics itself is located on a corner in between a Community Youth Center and the local High School. The entire outside of the three-story building is covered in sparkling, colorful hand-set mosaics of glass and broken pottery. The back parking lot has canvas murals covering the chain link fence gates and a big Virgin of Guadelupe statue in the corner. It was started in the 1970's by a Franciscan nun and printmaker named Karen Boccalero and several other local artists whom I unfortunately can't remember their names. Their initial goal was to use art as a tool for social change in the neighborhood and in the Chicano rights movement. Their work came to be seen as part of a Chicano Renaissance of the 1970's, and many of the prints that came out of their shop are now preserved in archives and museum collections as important and instrumental art in the United Farmworkers Uprisings. I find this to be unspeakably cool, because anything having to do with Cesar Chavez pretty much reduces me to tears immediately; I admire him so much for being such a brave, powerful and peaceful warrior for human and ecological justice. Over the years the organization had a "Barrio Mobile Art Van", which drove around the area, (which is pretty rough territory slightly south), bringing art classes and materials to all. They had a punk club on the premises in the early '80's, and they currently offer lots of community and youth programs, including computer graphics and what is now a well-outfitted print shop. My class is made up almost entirely of 25-55 year old Latinas. There is one Asian fellow and myself to add some diversity. The class is taught in English but flows easily back and forth into and out of Spanish like waves crossing a line in the sand. There is warmth, "snacktime," and a very supportive and friendly environment. Many of the women in this class know each other and work together regularly on group projects and exhibitions. I am excited that L.A. has given me such a cooperative and active art community to learn from!