To Adam in Istanbul

Painting credit: W.J. Rathbone http://www.billrathbone-welshartist.co.uk/turkish-paintings.htm

 A word on this poem before I begin. It is based on a true story, but is not actually "true" in the sense that Adam does not exist as a physical person. The themes of the poem, loving and longing from a distance, the feelings of connectedness to someone through empathetic imagination, are all things I've experienced. Adam himself is based off of an amalgamation of a few friends of mine (none of them actually named Adam) as well as a few people who are not friends but I would like to think would be were we to ever be introduced. I normally am not one for introduction to cryptic poetry, believing the meanings to be a bit subjective based on the reader's interpretation (post modern, I know). However, for friends who read this blog as an update of my life, I don't want there to be any speculation or assumptions as to my current romantic state. I am not in a relationship with any handsome scholars of Arabic poetry. I'd like to be, but I am not.

Now then.

To Adam in Istanbul

We say our dual prayers
you and I
you coming home at sunset
kicking up yellow clouds of dust as holy offerings
me waking up to search the lonely ceiling cracks
as if hieroglyphs from God.

My days are an echo of your own
Once, you were awoken to the toll of minarets,
Now NPR is bleating me awake with the death rattle
statistics from the Middle East
Once, you blew your breath across the steam rising from your tea
so too will my cold fingers coil around a ceramic mug,
pulling its warmth into my knuckles
Once, your palms got dirty
glazed with the dust motes and ink of ancient Arabic text
Later, white chalk dust will find its way under my fingernails
and across the back pocket of my pants
Once, you gave a dollar to a beggar for rice
Everyday, a homeless man at my bus stop tells me I have a beautiful ass
and drunkenly asks for a kiss
An hour ago, you ate lamb with dill and lemon;
you smoked hookah with college faculty.
Tonight, I will boil noodles and gaze out my window and hum,
or maybe I will eat fruit naked in the bathtub,
or just watch tv and fall asleep,
forgetting to eat anything at all.

But for now
We say our dual prayers
you and I
you coming home at twilight
kicking up yellow clouds of dust as holy offerings
me waking up to search the lonely ceiling cracks
as if hieroglyphs from God.

Renee's 2011 List of the Best of Everything, Part 1

I had a good year. Well, actually, I didn’t have a great year. Since I got back from Korea, I’ve had a total of four different jobs, none of them being one that I want to stay with permanently. I broke up with my boyfriend of a year and a half. I lost my passport and didn’t get to go to India. I still don’t have a driver’s license. My bedroom is very cold. So what’s been good about this year? Well, I read a lot of good books, watched a lot of great movies, and listened to some truly astonishing music. This is my list of ten of my favorite things I read, watched, or listened to this year. (Note: Not everything on this list was made in 2011, that's just when I was introduced to it.)

10: No One Knows About Persian Cats
Persian Cats, is about love, death, revolution, and… music. Specifically, it’s a movie about music as a means of love, death and revolution. The movie follows two musicians, Negar and Ashkan (recently in prison for playing music banned by strict religious censorship) as they try in a few frantic days to find passports while assembling a band, finding a venue, and gathering a crowd to play a final concert before they leave the country. The movie is a veritable tour-guide of Tehran’s secret music scene. In the two days before the concert, Negar and Askan visit underground jazz dens, rappers in abandoned high-rise construction sites, ten-piece traditional mystic bands in countryside apple orchards. Throughout the whole movie, Negar and Ashkan sing their own songs, quiet indie-rock that is wispy, plaintive, and bittersweet. I watched this movie just before the Arab Spring started with a suicide in Tunisia. Later on during the summer, Iranian students would be shot during protests in Tehran. Two years before any of this happened, Persian Cats showed a secret revolution happening underneath, where young musicians risked their lives simply to play music both soft and sad. 

9. Reading Lolita in Tehran

If No One Knows About Persian Cats is a movie about music as an act of revolution Reading Lolita is about reading as an act of revolution. The book takes place just after the Iranian Revolution of the early eighties; Author Azar Nafisi tells about reading banned western literature with a private class of eight female former students.  She talks about how each book they read affects their view of themselves, the regime they live in, their hopes and dreams for the future.  What I loved most about the book is the way that Azar writes about books. Books to her become almost living beings with the power to break down, elevate, and change a person. The way she writes about books is both reverent and passionate, and reading about reading becomes a euphoric, transfixing experience through this book.

8. Poetry

Poetry the movie unfolds itself a bit like a poem. The movie follows an aging female Alzheimers patient whose grandson is accused of a horrific crime; meanwhile she begins taking a poetry class. Plot-wise, the movie does not sound very exciting, but the main character has such a desperate search for meaning, inspiration, beauty in the midst of her own mind fading into obscurity and her world collapsing. Some of the movie you just watch the main character stare up at the sunlight filtering through trees searching for words. In these still, monotonous acts there's such a pressing urgency for significance underneath them, it leaves you almost breathless with anticipation.


7. Secret Garden and Phineas and Ferb

Hyun Bin <3 'nuff said. 

My sister often teases me for books I read or the movies I watch. Every time I want to watch something with her she asks me, "Is it like the stuff you normally watch? Am I going to have to comfort you afterwards? Are there any refugees in this movie? On a scale of one to pretentious, just how pretentious is this movie?" She pauses, "Actually, I probably don't want to watch this with you." It is true that I gravitate toward the more heady stuff, but I also love (and need!) pure escapist fun. My go to for that this year was Secret Garden, a South Korean body-swap melodrama. It was cheesy, it was predictable, it was girly, and oh my goodness, it was fun. I watched all sixteen hour-long episodes in about three days. I'm embarrassed by it now, but if I had the time to watch a bumbling a Joo Won woo Gil Ra Im while he was trapped in her body... well, I might not be able to help myself from doing it again.

Phineas and Ferb is my latest television love. I was talking to a friend about it the other day and he said, "I can't imagine any other show that has the exact same formula happen every episode still feel fresh and funny like Phineas and Ferb does." I guess it's hard to go wrong when the formula involves crazy inventions, crime-fighting platypusses, and elaborate expository song-and-dance numbers. And also, the coolest theme song known to man.

6. The King is Dead
I listened to this album so many times this year, that one night I went to sleep and literally dreamed myself sitting in a room listening to this album. And you know what? That was a pretty awesome dream. I don't want to say too much about this album because I'm a little bit of the opinion that analyzing music too much takes away from some of the mystical ways that it connects to people. Also, my words of description on how beautiful and affecting this album is seem paltry in comparison to the music itself. I will say the usual note about the Decemberists that their lyrics are ridiculously literary and complex. Who else uses words like "Andalusian" and "Bonhomie" in their songs? Listen with a tissue in one hand and a dictionary in the other.

Part two coming on Friday!
PS: What are your favorite books/movies/tvshows/music from the year?

Into The Woods

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” –Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I went to the park--the woods, alas, being very far away, and the park being very near. It was beautiful and empty, and at one moment I lay on my back in the middle of a golf course with winters frozen yellow grass penetrating through my sweater and into my skin, staring at the smear of sky and the barren gray tendrils of the tops of trees. At that moment, the park transcended its status as park, removed itself and me from the decay of the city, and, if only for a moment, became the “woods” I was seeking--because this morning I woke up with the lines from a Decemberist’s song repeating in my head:
“Big Mountain, wide river,
There’s and ancient pull.
These tree trunks, these stream beds,
leave our bellies full.”
I went to the woods, because my belly feels empty. I wanted something to fill my empty chasms.

 I am alone a lot during the day. I try to find a way to escape from my loneliness. I demand to be distracted from the unsettledness of being alone, so I find another person to talk to, I read, I watch movies, I sleep, or (lately) I glut myself with the internet. These past few weeks, I’ve felt like I’m living a half-life. I find myself almost daily in an internet fugue-state that I try to snap myself out of. A voice keeps calling to me saying, “arise, oh sleeper, rise from the dead.” And “awake, my soul.” I feel myself faltering, though, at a loss to know how to arise, how to awake my soul.

Today though, I chose to be alone. Rather, I chose to be in solitude. I’ve always tried to draw a distinction between being alone and being in solitude. Being alone is often something I have no choice over, being in solitude is something I choose into. In aloneness, I seek to end my isolation. In solitude, I use the quietness of my isolation to connect to something eternal. Being alone makes me want people to rescue me, distract me. Being in solitude makes me think about how I can connect better to other people. Being alone makes me want to escape; being in solitude is itself an escape.

There were no words spoken this morning. I sat on a ledge and watched a red cardinal flit through the tangled branches of leafless trees. The gray clouds moved like a city crowd, each personality emerging; here one is menacing, aggressive; here one is demure and sad. Brown leaves curled upward on the ground, their frozen tips like fingers trying to grasp the sky. I thought about Jesus telling people not to babble in prayer, thinking their many words could save them. I thought about my feelings of remoteness, of my desperate want to fill my silences with noise.  I wondered if one could pray without talking, could pray simply by staring out in the static silence of the winter air.

I went to the woods to pray.  

Sorry I Didn't Have Time to Write, Here Are Some Silly Pictures to Appease You Blog

I was going to write a blog about race, and indeed I started penning the blog this morning. My evening kind of got away from me though, through late-night trips to Wal-Mart and conversations with a friend about life, and finally, some Christmas cards I'm making for my co-workers. But I want to start a regular blog schedule, so I thought I'd post what I did instead of writing a blog.

Incidentally, when I went to scan these I found this picture scanned onto the computer. I can't remember why I drew this, but I think it's hilarious.

Off the Cuff

I follow my blog statistics like a farmer monitors crop growth during a drought. Every minimal gain in numbers is a tiny triumph, a comment cause for celebration, a new follower a major victory. My second-most read blog (with 141 hits so far) is Lexicon, a blog about the joy of learning ghetto slang. My first most read blog (with double the blog hits of all my other blogs combined, at 2,149 views) is How Super Junior Changed My Life: A Blog with Pictures! This is a little bit dismaying--The blog with the most views is not one of the blogs about grappling with poverty or trying to understand the dichotomy of words and pictures to communicate. No, the blog with the most views is the one with pictures of handsome Koreans. Blogger statistics reveal the majority of people who come to my blog (from as far away as Singapore, Indonesia, the U.K and Germany) do so on google image search for "super junior" "super junior wearing hanbok" "Suju" and "sj". I guess in the end I find it a little funny. But far be it from me to ever try to manipulate blog statistics by posting ridiculously cute pictures of Donghae offering you (yes, you, female fan) a rose:

Or Kim Heechul playing with a kitten:

Or  Li Seung ki holding a baby:

Or Kim Hyung Joong being, to quote Zoolander, "Really, really, ridiculously good-looking."

Far be it from me to do that. That would just be tacky.

Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged. Also, You Know, Some People Are Super Cool and You Just Don't Realize It Yet. Also, MOTORCYCLES.

A woman got on the bus dressed entirely in denim. Her too-big jacket was denim, her skirt that swept all the way to her ankles was denim. She even wore a stiff denim scarf. I couldn’t tell how old she was, but she seemed too tired and old for her face. Her eyes (dark blue like denim, of course) were sunk into her sockets, loose skin around them sagged over her cheekbones.  “This lady,” I thought, “Is really weird.”

Another lady got on the bus, even older and more tired than the first. She walked with a cane, and her hands fluttered as she gave the bus driver her fare. She shuffled next to me, and I could see foundation caked on her face, fushia lipstick, and dark brown eyebrows penciled with a shaky hand. Underneath the mountain of cosmetics, I could still see her river-like wrinkles, spreading out in hundreds of estuaries across her face. “This lady,” I thought, “Is frail and sad.”

The two ladies began to talk to a college student on the bus. He told them about how he was taking off of school to bike across the United States, from Boston to Portland. The woman in Denim spoke up, “I know about the body’s need for a wilderness exploration,” she said. “I canoed from Chile to California. I needed adventure, so I did it.” I looked up from the floor, sat erect to listen to everything the woman in denim was saying.

“The biggest adventure was Skydiving. I always landed in cornfields in Illinois.”

The college student asked her if she had sky-dived more than once.

“About five times,” she said. “Each time I went a little higher up, you know, one thousand feet, then fifteen hundred, then a mile. The last time was the best, because I had so far to fall. It was just me, flying by myself in the sky.”

The frail woman spoke up, “I’ve always wanted to sky dive,” she said. “My whole life. I haven’t done it… yet. All I’ve done is hang-gliding.”

All this to say that people surprise me all the time.  People defy my labels, my judgement, my expectations. My dad once told me a story about sitting at a gas station listening to classical radio while his tires filled with air. A burly motorcyclist began to make his way to my dad’s car. The biker had leather chaps, no shirt over his big, hairy belly save a leather vest. Tattoos covered his arms, his neck. His long beard had been knotted into two twisting braids that hung from his chin. As he approached my father, my father felt nervous. My father’s hands tightened on the wheel; he looked for an escape. The motorcyclist stuck his head in the window and said, “Is that Rachmaninoff playing? I love this piece.” Like I said, people defy expectations.

My conception of most motorcyclists is like that of the man I described: Big, hairy, tatted up, and very scary. When I was in Korea, I was shocked to find everyone rode motorcycles. Businessmen would ride to work on their motorcycles, dressed up in three-piece suits. Crazy ajummas rode motorcycles with furniture on tied perilously on the back (remember that Seoul is built on the mountains—imagine having a motorcycle with a couch tied to the back barreling down the mountainside path you walk to your dorm at!). Every young, barely pubescent pizza delivery boy rode a motorcycle. Every biker challenged my preconceived notion of what a “biker” is or should be.

Speaking of, I rode my first motorcycle last week. My brother Josiah (who’s huge, somewhat hairy, and awesomely tattooed) took me to a restaurant in the Loop on the back of his motorcycle. I was dressed up like a little kid, in a neon-pink shirt with golden lace trim and an oversized sweater. When we got to the restaurant, I skipped in and said to my waiter, “Guess what? I just rode on a motorcycle. It was my first time ever! I was riding on a motorcycle! It was awesome! Isn’t that cool? A Motorcycle.” Other people in the restaurant began to glance over at me, beaming and babbling about riding a motorcycle. And you know what? Maybe I defied their expectations of what a biker should be.  

Don't Worry, It's Just Me.

“You’re not in India!” Someone said this to me as I walked into a prayer meeting at my church on Sunday. They were at the moment getting ready to pray for me on my trip to India.

My mind rushed trying to think of the cleverest response to this. Perhaps a shocked look, then “Wait, are you trying to tell me I’m not in India?” Or perhaps I could go with a more subtle, slow realization that I wasn’t there like, “Whoa. Dude. I am so not in India.” I thought about inventing a crazy story about how Renee was in India and I was just her doppelganger, but as my mind was working out the logistics of how I (the doppelganger) had escaped the lab where I was grown, my mouth spoke the truth, “Yeah. I’m not. I lost my passport and wasn’t able to get a replacement visa in time.”

So if you see me in St. Louis the next few days, you can rest assured that it’s probably not my doppelganger or evil clone you are seeing, it is me [note: If you see me doing something like holding up a bank, kidnapping orphans, or listening to pop music, it is actually a doppelganger and not me. These distinctions can be confusing sometimes.] When I first realized that I wasn’t going to able to go to India, I was very disappointed and sad. I have wanted to go for so long, and I felt like this trip would be the culmination of years of longing. I felt like the trip might be an indicator over whether or not God was leading me to serve in India or not. Not being able to go felt sort of like a loss of purpose… if I’m not going to India, then what am I supposed to do with my future?

Over the past week, I’ve had a lot of my disappointment alleviated. It’s true that I don’t know why I’m not going to India. It’s true that in some sense, I still don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. But I keep being reminded of all this scripture where God promises again, and again, and again, so that we, anxious, doubtful, mistrusting creatures that we are, cannot ever forget that “I know the plans I have for you, they are plans to help you, not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” “Remember that all things God works for those who love him.” In not being able to go to India, I’ve had an incredible amount of comfort that God is sovereign in my not going. For whatever reason, I am staying in St. Louis for a purpose. And what about my future, where am I going, how I’m supposed to live right now? This verse keeps echoing through my head, “I will instruct you and teach you in the ways you should go; I will counsel you and watch over you with my eye.”