this is peanut butter pie for Mikey

*Over the past weekend, peanut butter pies flooded the blogosphere. They were all for Mikey, the husband of blogger Jennifer Perillo. He passed away suddenly last Sunday evening, and she, with all the strength that could be mustered, asked bloggers to make a creamy peanut butter pie - Mikey's favorite - to honor and remember him. And bloggers did. Hundreds of them made peanut butter pie to in part, mourn a death, but mostly, to celebrate a life and a love.

*A peanut butter pie. It's nothing fancy or over-the-top, but it's not plain either. It's special, it's sweet, and it's comforting. Most of all, it's symbolic, and when objects defy their own physicality or their most basic, literal purpose by taking on something greater - an emotion, a memory, or an association - they become more powerful than ever. In fact, we all possess these objects - the trinkets that we keep because they seem to be the vessels for particular memories; we all possess these songs that are the vestiges of a person come and gone in our lives; we all know how the taste and smell of a certain food brings us back to the highest ecstasy or the lowest misery, a feeling that seems to exist outside of ourselves in a magical synthesis of ingredients. We know that objects and songs and books and clothes and food and sounds can be meaningless to everyone except ourselves, the possessors and builders of memories that stream out of moments and relationships and broken hearts. How can such trivial things shake us so? Because they are not so trivial at all.

*And when people see how a peanut butter pie can so encompassing as to hold both the grief and treasure of a family, they partake in it. Because they know how a little can mean so much. They have their own cookies that bring back a grandma's sweet scent, their own pasta dishes they've shared with loved ones, their own breakfasts that their fathers made every single Sunday morning without fail. Making peanut butter pie is an acknowledgment of all these things; even if they cannot ever fully grasp the interpersonal meaning of Jennie and Mikey's peanut butter pie, the recognition of peanut butter pie as so significant and loving and hurting is enough that they would make it, eat it, and share a slice of the same love and pain.

Peanut Butter Pie for Mikey from Evolution Multimedia on Vimeo.

*That empathy, love, support, and community can exist virtually is beautiful and surprising. It makes me optimistic. It fights back against the tragedies of an increasingly technological and wired world - the exploitation, the disconnection, the impersonal nature of a machine and device-based network. Hundreds of people making peanut butter pie in remembrance of a man whom they had never met means that people care, that people are good, that perhaps, in the wake of globalization and this ubiquitous connectedness, that there will be more opportunities to care and more people to care about. Maybe so many virtual encounters means that we will open up ourselves to more love and more relationships. Maybe.

*I guess it makes sense though, that if part of our lives exist online, we would want that part of our life to be full of the same things that make our non-virtual lives fulfilling - the things that are essential to our happiness: relationships, conversations, and love. Those are the things that stick with us through the thick and the thin, through progress and the changing of civilization. I'm glad so many people this weekend made and ate peanut butter pie because they knew that these things matter - people matter.

this is orange marmalade

*Today I was sick and just not feeling so hot - so toast sounded like a good option. Sometimes I forget about toast because it is so simple but when I'm sick and just want some comfort, it's what I crave - which goes to show how truly essential toast is. My daily toast.

*Spread with a newly-opened jar of Blue Chair Orange-Cardamom marmalade. Did you know that for the first 18 years of my life, I would not eat ANY fruit spreads except for orange marmalade? Actually, when I was really young, I refused to eat ALL fruit spreads, but then when I was 12 or 13 or 14 or so, at a hole-in-the-wall breakfast place in Hong Kong where the walls were concrete and the plates were plastic, I had a bite of thick, fluffy white toast with a 1-inch-thick slab of butter, smothered in orange marmalade and served up hot, and I decided then that orange marmalade was delicious.

*During my second summer in Northern Ireland, I stayed at the house of a cheery old woman named Lorraine who kept frozen yorkshire puddings, a large jar of orange marmalade, and a large jar of lemon marmalade in her fridge. In the mornings, when there was no one in the house except for Lorraine's cats and me, I would heat up a yorkshire pudding and eat it with orange marmalade or should I say - eat orange marmalade with a yorkshire pudding?

*Anyhow, this orange-cardamom marmalade is especially tasty because of the added spice and the fact that there are LARGE pieces of rind in it. Also, Blue Chair Jam is local and Rachel Saunders, the founder of Blue Chair, is just a pretty cool woman.

this is la bella lingua

* A couple weekends ago, I was waiting in line for the bathroom in the Ferry Market Building in San Francisco. It was Saturday morning - the busiest day of the week because of the huge farmers' market taking place, and the place was swarming with people - tourists and locals and peripheral-suburb locals like me. As such, the bathroom line was nearly a twenty minute wait.

*I stood there as most people do in bathroom lines - one hand crossed over my chest, the other hand holding my cellphone, weight shifted slightly onto one leg, the other hip stuck out little. I alternated between spacing out and mindlessly checking Twitter feeds on my phone. I wasn't really paying attention to the people around me, but I unconsciously eavesdrop (you can chalk it up to my good hearing or my nosiness), and I suddenly heard a sound that I hadn't heard for more than half a year - a mellifluous sound that rolls up and down like waves, a sound that makes me nostalgic and wistful and bitter at the same time - that sound is the Italian language.

*When I arrived in Florence in September of last year, I had no knowledge of the Italian language, save the words that everyone knows - the ones that have migrated into the English language (and consequently been butchered. Case in point: last week in San Diego I heard a man say "moo-zuh-rella." It was so absurd I could only laugh). If you think about it, there's a lot of words that Americans have usurped: opera, spaghetti, pizza, villa, espresso (let's not even get started on coffee), gusto, marinara, stanza, diva, piano, soda, tutti-frutti (it means 'all fruits'), etc. Obviously, that minor, fragmented introduction into the Italian language is reflective of the absorptive nature of the American culture and the beauty of romance languages - not of any true knowledge or linguistic ability. So here I was in Florence, fluent in English, Spanish, and Mandarin but not a drop of Italian, and I was expected to navigate the city alone as well as live with an Italian host family? In hindsight, I realize I must have been foolish or blind not to have been daunted at all by such a task. I dove right in.

*I picked up Italian fairly quickly. I guess that's what happens when learning a language is a matter of survival rather than whim. My host mother and sister did not speak any English, and the first few weeks were filled with many blank stares and helpless silences. Federica, my little host sister, grabbed my wrist to tell me where she wanted me to go, and she pointed out the things she wanted me to take note of. Italian class was also the one class in my academic program that I actually found useful. Spanish gave me a light foundation for the sound and structure of the language, and as a result, by October, I could carry on a decently fluid conversation in Italian. My host family was surprised and told me they had never seen anyone pick up the language so quickly. My accent was impeccable, they said. Had it not been for my skin and hair color, I might have felt a little less like a foreigner.

*Italian is an emotional language whose intonations are mountain peaks and valley bottoms. It is a language that cannot be mumbled, that must be spoken confidently and is most beautiful when articulated brashly. It is as much a loving language as it is a fighting language, and I took as much pleasure in speaking it as I took resentment in hearing it hurled in screams every morning at 7 am. I felt comfortable in its rhythm and flow, but as time went by, I began feeling barraged in part by its assertiveness, but mostly by its strangeness which grew in direct proportion to my homesickness. I have good and bad memories of the Italian language, but luckily, the good memories are the ones I hold onto.


pomodori

*That day in the Ferry Market Building, I instantly perked up when I heard the old couple behind me speaking Italian. I wanted so badly to turn around and tell them, "I speak some Italian too! Parla italiano troppo! I can be a little bit of your home away from home!" A nervous ball of excitement welled up in my belly as I flip-flopped back and forth between bursting out with a discombobulated mess of Italian words and keeping respectfully silent. The latter wasn't much of an option actually - it was only a matter of how long it would take for me to push myself over the edge. After a few minutes passed by and the old man had walked away, leaving his wife to stand in the bathroom line alone, I turned around slowly, praying that I would not embarrass myself or worse, scare this woman away from America, I asked, "Sei d'Italia? Parlo un po' d'italiano perche ho passato un semestre a Firenze. Are you Italian? I speak a little Italian because I spent a semester in Florence." To my relief and delight, she smiled warmly and instantly began spewing out Italian. "Si! Sono di Firenze! Yes, I am from Florence!" She spoke quickly and like most Italians, was generous and unreserved with her words. From there on out, we spoke only in Italian, and for a moment I felt like I was back in Italy again, thousands of miles away from California. I'm not sure what the people around us made of the whole situation, an Asian girl and an older woman speaking Italian in the middle of a farmers' market in San Francisco, but in the moment, that thought did not even cross my mind. We talked about her vacation plans in the States and where she lived in Florence where I lived in Florence and what I studied while I was there. After 7 months of not speaking a word of Italian, I struggled to recall words and tenses and verbs and could not even remember the street I lived on in Florence. Perhaps I had banished many of those memories from my mind, I don't know.

*By the time we reached the front of the bathroom line, we had been talking for twenty minutes, and as I headed into the next open stall, I turned around, smiled, and said "Ciao." I wanted to say something fancier and more eloquent like "Have a good time in San Francisco!" or "It was nice meeting you!" but the only word I could find in my mouth was "Ciao." I'd like to speak Italian again, but I am not sure when I will have the chance. Despite the baggage of memories that Italian carries for me, I learned to hear and speak it like a whirlwind romance, and that romance is certainly bittersweet and unforgettable. For now, the language lives inside me, in memories, in dreams and in nightmares, in a little pocket of my soul that I will never throw away.

this is the bloom from then til now

*I spent this past weekend in San Diego visiting one of my best friends. We grew up in church together and stayed close throughout high school and college.

*With so many of my friends, I can recall a moment in the past when we moved beyond being mere amicable acquaintances (or "pals") into the realm of intimacy. This usually accompanies a shared experience or the special discovery of a shared interest or love or passion. With my best friend in San Diego, this moment occurred when we were fourteen years old in the small village of Ricaurte in Ecuador, on a muggy night when we were both wearing t-shirts, Bermuda shorts, and flip-flops.

*After a couple days spent in Quito - where my most salient memory was of the freezing cold hostel showers we had to endure every morning - we boarded a rickety old bus whose rusty, broken windows would not close. We were headed out of the city and up into the mountains, where civilization was dispersed much more sparsely. E and I sat next to each other on the bus, I by the window, she in the aisle, and we shared headphones and ate the plantain chips we bought through the bus windows from the tanned men on the side of the road. After one bus breakdown and several sightings of bloody hogs hanging like sacks off the shingles of roadside food stands, we arrived in a town where we were greeted by lonely and misplaced murals. As we stared out of the bus windows, blown-up faces of politicians stared back at us - unashamed remnants of propaganda from past campaigns; the roads we cruised along were without street signs and lined by barefoot kids who waved to us ecstatically because the fact that were were strangers or intruders was less significant than the fact that we were novelties in their small town. By the time we arrived, it was nearly dusk, and after a much-needed dinner of greasy fried rice, we were sent off to our host families. E and I went off with a young man named Pablo, who lived across the river from the town in which we had disembarked. On the way over, we struggled to communicate. I spoke the Spanish I knew and gestured when necessary.



*I know what it is like to be a foreigner, a visitor in a place where you clearly do not belong - physically, racially, ethnically, visually - and that feeling, when intensified to that of being an intruder - makes one vulnerable, and uncomfortably so. The feeling of vulnerability - felt so acutely by both E and I - escalated through the night as we realized how many stares were directed our way from old women, little children, and the teenage boys loitering on their scooters who were clearly scouting out girls, as we began to understand the departure from the familiarity and comfort of suburban America that we had committed to by having boarded the plane to Ecuador in the first place.

*That night, after we had kissed Pablo's sweet, citrus-scented mother on both cheeks and were sitting on our dusty beds in a room where cats lurked in the corners and shadows, where the wooden panels beneath our feet were dusty like outdoor patios, we were restless and itchy from the mosquitoes that had already began to attack us and from the thought that we had no bathroom - save a faucet on an outdoor balcony. We sat on our adjacent beds silently staring at one another, not knowing whether to laugh or cry - or sob violently - and it was in that very moment that the vulnerability and shock this new place had laid upon us was also blooming into an immense gratitude for each other and an empathic bond which found its strength in the knowledge that we would be the only ones to have this exact experience together. We wouldn't realize this until much later, when, back in the States we were laughing at the tears we almost cried together.

*Much has changed in the six years since our time in Ecuador. Now, she in San Diego, and I in Northern California and Boston and beyond, we are different people than we were then and our friendship has certainly grown and changed similarly. But this past weekend, as we spent hours sitting lazily in coffee shops, driving around, walking, sometimes chatting, often not, I saw how so much of what is between us has not changed at all - a fact that is as comforting as the fact that so much of us does and has to and will continue to change.



*I can only hope that fifty years down the line - even sixty or seventy - when the precariousness of our lives becomes increasingly apparent with each passing day - that we will still be laughing and crying and aching together, sitting silently and talking lovingly, with the kind of comfort and contentedness that can only spring from the vulnerability of a moment and the years of friendship that follow.

this is amy in my head

*For most people, music extends beyond pleasure: it is a crutch when things get rough, it is a place of refuge when times are bad. I used to think this was the case for myself (read: the epitome of attempted teen angst is listening to Neutral Milk Hotel blasting out of a boom box, in the dark, on your bed. Good ole 14-year-old days!), but if I wasn't wrong, then things have certainly changed.

*When I am sad, I can't stand sound. All I want is silence. Music holds no allure, whether it is sentimental or heartfelt. I shut down, and I turn it all off. It's as if I want solitary confinement for myself, either for respite or for deprivation (I can't pinpoint it). But I know without music, I am a hardened person who does not like to be touched or moved, who is irritated by sensory stimulation, and who only wants to wallow in her own puddle of tears - silently.

*In high school, when I was angry, I would sit in my car with the windows rolled down and blast jazz. Something totally intense and incomprehensible, like Brad Mehldau. I'd lay my head back and let Brad blow off the steam for me. If things were alright, then it'd be a Ken Burns jazz CD, and if I was really feeling the love, I'd cue up Ella & Louie's silky duets. Music made me fall in love, but somewhere along the way, as a self-imposed separation or punishment, I fell out of love with music.

*I used to sing in the shower a lot. I rarely do this anymore, though I'll still sing along to anything on the radio when I'm driving to work (my favorite: Picture by Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow). I used to strum my guitar and play my piano when I was sad. I used to write lyrics to show my sorrow. I don't anymore. In Italy, on the coldest days, I walked up and down the streets of Florence listening to Bach's inventions or NPR. That's the most I could I bear. Losing a love is a sad, sad thing.

*I've been thinking about my relationship with music because Amy Winehouse died yesterday and in the end, her love for music was not reason enough to live.