glimmer

Just another interview today, like any other. We talked about signaling pathways and molecular biology. But her voice was all yours. Its deep sincerity, accent and tone, the firm roundness of her syllables, a hint of caring, unafraid to question, to laugh, eager in its understanding of the subject -- it was so fully yours that my note-taking faltered as your face filled my mind. The idea of you, who might have soon have had your own lab, as she does. You who I might have called for an opinion on a paper. You who faltered, but still --always -- glow at the edges of memory.

Worth it

Thinking about words is what I do for a living. It's also what I do when I'm not working. And I never tire of asking people to choose their words carefully.

Mean what you say. Intent, I find, is easy. Most people don't intend to be hurtful, thoughtless, silly, etc. However, most of us also don't make sure that our words reflect our true intent, which is often caring, affection or simply a friendly exchange.

Here's an example:

"That's expensive! What do you get for [that much money]?" -- asking for information about the object.

"That's expensive! Is it worth it?" -- asking for an opinion; open to the idea that maybe it is worth the expense.

"That's expensive! Do you really think it's worth it?" -- asking for an opinion; the "really" inserts a hint that the questioner's opinion is perhaps that it's too much money.

"That's expensive! I don't think it's worth it."  -- expresses an opinion

Have you ever used one when you really meant another?

Before you pick an option, know whether you want to know the features of a pricey purchase, or whether you merely want to express your view that it's too expensive.

The words you choose are worth it. As a corollary, the words you hear matter just as much. Take the time to know what they mean. Is the other person requesting information or dissing your choices? Ask, listen, understand.

And if this seems like too much work for a casual chat, create -- or find -- a conversation that deserves the effort. That might mean changing how or what you communicate, or it might mean finding someone else to talk to. Either way, it's worth it.

Just some words

Excuse me while I rant a little. If you've read or otherwise cared to learn the basics of communication in any relationship perhaps you can help. How many communication errors can you spot in the following line?

"If you just answer the question instead of being smug and condescending all the time it would be better."

Here's what I came up with:

1. "Just answer the question" -- a poorly couched demand. Consider this conversation:

"Hi, my computer screen went purple and it makes a beeping noise. I tried pressing the power button and it didn't work. Can you tell me what to do?"

"What were you doing when the problem occurred? Is this the first time it's happening? Have you tried restarting the computer?"

"Can you just answer my question?"

As you can see, that went nowhere pretty quickly. Even experts sometimes need more information to answer a question, and non-experts such as myself often do.


2. "Smug and condescending"

I assume you asked because you wanted an answer. How does calling me smug and condescending invite a response?

3. "All the time"

If I'm smug and condescending all the time, why are we even talking? The first bit of relationship advice you'll hear from any person/book/website/wise aunt is to avoid the words always and never. They're rarely accurate and add little to the conversation. Amplifying or diminishing faults and good qualities to absolutes is also the quickest way to lose your own perspective.

4. "it would be better."

Better for whom, and why? To me, "it would be better" if you held back on nasty adjectives.

It's only one line, a few words out of the millions we have spoken with each other over the years. I hope there will be several billion more. Yes, I could overlook this, as I've done countless others. "It's just a few words," my mother might tell me. "Why do you have to analyze everything so much? Why can't you stop criticizing and just let people be?"

I could, and I have, and I probably will. But for once, I wanted to say this: It's only words, but words are how we connect, how we break apart, how wars start and relationships die. Scream enough words at a tree or a person and you can kill their spirit. Words are worthless -- try telling a depressed person to get over it, try telling them they're loved. Words are priceless -- remember feeling safe simply from the sound of your father's voice, the thrill of hearing you had won an award.

It's only words, and it was just one chat, and they're only feelings, and it's only someone I've known all my life. But knowing someone well seems, to me, like an excellent reason to nourish conversations with thought and time and affection.

They're only words, but they're the only thing we have to span distances that are physical, mental, and emotional. Why not choose with kindness and with intention?

Home thoughts

Nine years to the day since I left home to find my own. The word I've  carried most frequently close all this while is this: "Belum" -- because in a different, simpler time, I learnt that it meant "not quite yet" in a language I don't speak.

Each day is still a little discovery, and I still spend months, even years, chasing falsehoods I construct. For instance, this past year I've told more people than I care to count how I've found a home in what I do, how I learned to belong in many different cities, languages, cultures. Is a lie more honest because I believed it, thought it true while I told it? It took a professor's wish for me to realize it's reality.

"What I want for you? I want to see you belong, truly belong, in a group of people," he told me over a late lunch that we ordered off a brunch menu.

I wondered at that, how he had noticed my stranger's soul through all my words of homecoming. And wondering, I realized that perhaps some of us only truly belong as outsiders. We can never go home, because we only belong in a space that is not-home, our hearts and minds only rested when they search, constantly.

A line from Mary Oliver, a poet I've just begun to read: "They say you spend your whole life re-writing the first poem you ever loved."

This isn't the first, but it's one of the dearest:

"I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song."

(Growing Orbits, by Rilke)

What I might miss

Some days are productive because stories flow seamlessly and I check everything off my to-do list (this happens approximately once a year, at best.) Others are productive because of the hours I spend removing material from stories. No-one except myself knows the work I put into removing 100 words from a little news story that will slip into internet oblivion within a few hours, assuming it ever emerges from obscurity in the first place.

It would have been easy enough to let the two quotes slide. They added a little zing to my story, weren't entirely inaccurate, and would have been easily forgiven if found, I think. After all, I'm a journalist, they're the experts, and I faithfully reported what they told me. My previous editor would have chided me for being pedantic. My current editor didn't particularly care until I brought it up. Perhaps I am being a stickler, and I'd be more productive if I wrote fast and didn't stop to think. But I did, and I probably will every time I write.

Without an organization, an instructor or a boss to back me up, I'm the only one who can convince myself it was worth the extra hours and re-writing. This, I tell myself, is why it's called my reputation, not my editors' or my sources'. There's one misleading quote less among the reams of misinformation that inundate the interwebs. I've learned to fact-check at every single stage, even after an editor I trust reads my copy, even when I quote reputable sources who mean perfectly well. Some days, being productive is about spending three hours triple-checking my facts and teaching myself how not to screw up. Hello, freelance life.

Elemental

Some books have a way of coming home to roost. This one wandered in from a box left outside a library near a park, recommended by a friend as we browsed together. I sneezed over the musty pages, snuggled into the old-fashioned language, and remembered how a simple story can feel solid as the earth beneath my feet.

"She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and rearing and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions."

(The book: My Antonia, by Willa Cather)

Warp

I'd be happier, I think, if I could forget a little more. As it is, strands of memory slip and snag through time as I try to weave this story of us, continuous, a wholly unbroken pattern through my life. Each time leaves a little knot in my pretty picture, the unblemished version I tell people when I say we've been friends for so long that we've known each other longer than we haven't.

But remembering, I begin to see more clearly -- not the picture I was so focused on crafting -- but the pattern of these snags, how different we are. How far apart we've grown, and the impossibility of a pattern where we stayed close through nearly two decades.

Was the picture in my mind just a pretty fiction? It would be foolish to say the knots are reality and my weave wasn't. The knots only exist, after all, because I was intent on forcing the threads together. And would there be a pattern to the snags if I had forgotten where and when each one occurred? Perhaps this other picture only exists because I see it now. Perhaps if I forgot, we could simply let the threads of our lives mesh where they would, unravel where they chose. Perhaps if I forgot, I could stop seeking patterns where there's merely happenstance.

The song without the words

We fought once again last week, over something she and I have argued for years. She's held down, she says, by children and house-keeping and a husband who does not understand her. How much she'd love to let go and be like the women who work, she tells me every so often. She'd love to have a career, go out and buy her own drinks, dress up and be more than just caregiver and home-maker.

So do it, I tell her. Nothing stops you, not your two-year-old or your eight-year-old, not the house or your husband. Figure out what you want to do and make it happen. Hope and dreams are only the spirit of it all. The heft of getting what you want comes from commitment. Give it effort, set your goals firm, create the body of this life you claim you want.

We fight, and she backs into her self-righteous shell again. I don't know what it's like to be a mom, or to have an un-supportive husband. It's easier, I think, for her to believe in her helplessness than in her immense capacity to do and be everything she claims she wants. After all these years, I know better than to cry over her. Her words are as fickle as her moods, and tomorrow she'll harangue me about having kids soon, because they are so much more satisfying than anything I might do with my life.

I don't doubt her words anymore. I think, in her mind, she truly does see herself as helpless, trapped in her little house and life, unable to build anything greater than her misery.

Today, tonight, I feel her shell. I know, for perhaps the first time in my life, what it is to NOT have a way to get what I want. To be clear, I don't always achieve everything I aim for. Nine times out of ten I fall short, or it takes me three times as long as it should have, or I realize I was heading in the wrong direction and switch tracks. But in every one of those attempts, I knew what the results of my actions should be, and what I'd do if method A didn't work, or plan B fell through.

For the first time, I have no control over the outcomes of my actions. I feel completely helpless even as I work toward my goals, and know that if I fail, I must start over again at the beginning. The experience and the effort do not count, this time. There is nothing to be learnt, except perhaps how to process sorrow.

I do as I'm told, and I listen when well-meaning souls like my mother or friends tell me to take care, be strong, have faith, expect a miracle. But when there are no guarantees that hard work and following the instructions will bring me what I want, I don't know how to do this thing called hope. Without the solid presence of knowing the commitment and effort count for something, hope flops over and dies too easily. Even as I mop up the blood and check for a pulse, it is gone quicker than it flickered alive. How do you hope, when nothing you can do gives that hope a physical form?

For now, I turn to the miracles I know. The impossibility of genetics, and yet, here we are. Human flesh and form, a million species on a piece of rock hurtling around an impossible star, an improbable universe. What are the chances that life as we know it could have existed? Atoms bunched together from stardust, molecules that bumped together in a primordial ocean, clumped into a living, breathing planet. An intricate dance of chromosomes that split and recombine and keep us going. The miracle of comets, of the earth, of us. Life finds a way, as a fictitious mathematician once said. And perhaps this hope will too.

Waiting

I spend a lot of time waiting. Okay, fine, procrastinating. After a while, the lines start to blur. So much of writing is this space where I wait for sources to respond to interview requests, editors to accept my stories, or instructors to respond to questions.

The one thing I'm much better at is not waiting for inspiration to strike. Feeling creative, I've learned, is 99% about refusing to look up from the page until I get the damn thing written. Sometimes the "not looking up" takes the form of a run, or a long shower, or cooking up a week's worth of food. But through it all the words fester and somehow, at the end of whatever process a piece takes, a story appears. I don't wait for words as often as I used to. This isn't to say there isn't panic, desperation, horrible first drafts and much worse. But I can make them happen. There's little waiting.

It's easy to wait, people say, when you distract yourself and keep busy. I have no dearth of things that must be done. Some are time-sensitive, others less so. I have hard deadlines, even in these last few days of spring break. Appointments, reading, research for new projects, prepping my house and life for another ten-week sprint of classes, assignments and other madness. There's so much to occupy my mind. This waiting should be easy. Instead, it balloons effortlessly to fill every crevice in my brain.

The list  lies untended, while the waiting blossoms into a life of its own. It weighs my limbs down, lifts my fluttering heart into my throat, reduces words to meaninglessness. This waiting, it has grown into my whole self until I cannot give shape to what it is I am waiting for. An email. A phone call. A test result. A feeling. A life. The little delays meld into a formless whole, a waiting presence in the midst of what should be a mad rush to get the rest done. Distractions, work  -- even sleep -- fall to the wayside as this grows, this waiting. I lie awake, and when I dream I hold a talisman, bright blue and cats-eye to ward off some unknown evil. I could not tell you why it is I held it to my lips as I dreamed last night. When I woke I remembered the colors, the feel of the cold stone against my fingers, as though the cold and bright would hasten the end of the wait.

And all of this when I know full well there isn't an end. There will always be another editor, another story, another medicine. It's called being alive and a grown-up. In my brain, I know this. And still, I
struggle as though somehow, the world will be different at the end of my watch.

A little like rain

Rain's been on my mind, as it has for most people in California. But the lack of each drop hits my consciousness a little harder as I drive to my current workplace, 60 miles south of Silicon Valley. Surrounded by farmland, priorities for what a local newspaper should cover shift.

And as I write my "big" climate change story for them, my mind shifts too, now noticing fields turning grey-brown with dust, lands that lie fallow and parched. I am more careful than ever with my showers, with the dishes. As if my turning a tap off could bring prosperity back to these spaces.

The few sprinkles of rain so far have tinged the roadsides and hills a pale green. The air is fresh, the views gentler as I drive. It isn't enough to quench the land, but at least it refreshes our eyes, so tired of brown.

These little things -- struggling farmers, a lack of rain -- they'd skim so easily off international science journals, or editors' plates. Hardly anyone would pay attention to my little story. 1800 words in a daily newspaper with a circulation of 6000. A blog post about cats grabs more eyes than that.

But the story mattered to me, perhaps more than any I've written so far. And I said so, loud and clear, to editors at the two biggest journals there are. I said it's the best thing I've written, and look, this matters. Perhaps not to your impact factor, but to that salad you're eating as you read this.

I was selected for internships at both places, perhaps based on that pitch. For the span of one lovely, too-short day, editors from both publications stopped me in the hallways at a conference to ask if I'd be joining their magazine. I've spent three years waiting to gather my confidence/experience/wits enough to speak to them. For a brief while, I had some measure of all three.

For the span of a few days, I had no uncertainty about my place in this business, or calling myself a writer. For a little while, I was a small fraction ahead of the hundreds of other writers starting out in this game. For that small time, I was soaring, at peace with my choices and potential to make a living.

To be clear, this is only a ten-week internship, not an actual job that pays a living wage. But I'm fickle enough to be driven to tears or rants by one assignment. And a sprinkle of rain can lift my spirits, even if it doesn't quench deeper thirsts.

Light in dark places

So many voices lend themselves to fear. Gladly they clamor in my head, swooping in dark noisy crowds. There the voice of the award-winning journalist who will read my essay, and laugh of course. There the voice of my classmate, surprised at my ineptitude. There my editors waiting for my overdue draft. There the other who cannot be bothered to edit such poor work. There my instructor who doubted me from the first. There myself afraid of being labelled trite, silly, cliched. There my doctors, screeching against my sleepless nights. There myself trying to plan three things at once. They bounce and echo in mocking delight as I duck and cover. 

Their squawks grab words out of my throat before I can voice them. My silence cannot compete with the voices. I duck and cover, and fail to write. 

This time, the charm I struggle to remember isn't one of light, but a different darkness. On a deserted campus, near the one gate to the football field. My room lay at the other end of that unlit swath, in a building deserted as only a college can feel during the summer break. The tree by the gate filled with a silent swarm of fluttering bats. Without a light, without a friend, I closed my eyes and walked through, untouched. If only I could muster up a similar quiet in my mind today. 

Ordinary

There's a smudge on the grainy black and white screen. It shifts in and out of focus as we feel our way around it.

"It's shaped like a cat," I say. The doctor laughs and agrees as she traces its outlines. She tells me how big it is, which half familiar-looking and which part new. One part that's hung around harmlessly, the other inching out fingers for food.

She isn't as talkative as she usually is. I feel more pain than usual from this now-routine procedure. We both fall silent as the sound waves bounce around within, pinging off organs as she marks them off for size, weight, shape. We don't know any more than this, for now: This is not usual. How unusual, she's not sure.

We won't do anything just yet, she says, but wait and watch. Nothing's wrong enough to warrant more invasive measures. But it's not quite fine either. For now, we pick the lesser of two evils.

For a while we talk of what might happen with surgery, and what comes next. She mentions the risks and it's my turn to probe. It is easier to be in journalist mode here, ask what might happen. What does it look like, when a shell designed to bear life rips apart in the process? At what stage is it a problem, how much blood spills over, does it harm mother or child and when?

I want to know how much blood a "2-5% risk" can spill. How far it can seep into my life, how permanently it can scar.

We've had these conversations before, she and I. She's one of the brightest doctors I know, and we talk, often, of her PhD and mine, of my science writing and her conferences. So it's normal for her to begin to draw charts and tell me what happens to such children. Until she stops herself short: This isn't a side of things you should be thinking about right now. Why were you reading about second-trimester miscarriages anyway? For work, I answer. I was reading feature stories and personal essays as I try to write my own assignments.

But we cut this short, and agree we will wait and watch. Another month, perhaps two. These things die on their own sometimes. They choke when they can't feed, then twist and blacken on their stalks until they're small enough to lurk once more.

I'm not good with odds, though. I'm the kid who reacted to fluorescent dye. The girl who was sick for two days after tooth surgery. The woman who over-reacted to the less harmless drug, that fewer than 5% of women react to. So I really would like to know what 2-5% means for me and any future child, even if it is a small risk.

A month, perhaps two, which I will fill with proving, over and over again, that I am extraordinary. I will attend networking events, meet deadlines through sleepless nights, establish my fine command of journalism and science. Over and over again, in thousands of words and smiles, I will proclaim I am not their usual candidate. I'm one of the top candidates they'll have, as my program director (and tireless mentor) will remind me and them. I take edits seriously, and can bring abstract concepts to life with vivid language, he says.

The growth is shaped like a small black cat, its ears perked high, mouth puckered as it sips blood.

All my life, I wanted to be in that top 5%. I tried to excel, ride the rare wave that's always ahead of the curve, stand out from the rest. Except now, when I want nothing more than to be ordinary. Just another woman who has a child, like people have always had them. For this grainy, black and white smudge to dissolve into snipped off tissue and clot, as such things are supposed to do. Be gone the next time we look, little cat.


(This isn't cause for worry. I'm not having a child, or seriously ill, or even in physical pain. It's just something in my life that's been on my mind, and in my body, for a while. I'm figuring out how to deal with it, as I usually am when I write here.)

Of cooking and answers.

Her inability to cook was, for the longest time, a pointed, personal attack. Against me the independent woman supporting myself. Me the girl who taught herself to cook. Me who learned to cook for myself, not to feed my husband or because my parents expected me to. It was an affront to this grand version of "me" -- a person who had never meant to learn to be domestic but pulled it off anyway.

She, on the other hand, was brought up in the traditional ways. She drew kolams and married early, followed her husband obediently, did as her parents asked. But she'd never learned to cook. More, she hadn't learned to live on salads, bread and the many kinds of food that do not require anyone to cook. She wanted elaborate Indian food, and I was the one stuck providing it.

I complained and blogged, and eventually moved far enough away that I'm no longer concerned with what, or if, she eats. It's been five years, and I never figured out why she was in my life.

Until today, when I was forced to come up with a sharp moment of clarity that changed the way I do things.

Because of her, I don't think of cooking as a domestic chore. It's about having fun, taking care of yourself, and enjoying what you create. It's also about getting over grandiose notions of who I am, and just turning the heat on under the rice cooker, which anyone -- even she -- can do. Because of her, I now have a story to tell.