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Photography, Random Run-ins, and Cousin Cookie

6 Nov

Back in 2003, I, along with 22 other intrepid students, went on a year long expedition around the world, learning about politics, economics, ecology, feminism, and all sorts of other things. More than anything, though, I would say that we learned how to be proper human beings. We learned what it meant to go into other people’s countries, other peoples homes, and understand that we were guests there. We had to learn to suspend our own cultural norms in an effort to try and fit, as best we could, into our new and extremely different surroundings. This proved easier in some situations – Cambridge, England, for example, where our biggest concern was remembering that in England the word “pants” is actually synonymous to the American “underwear” – than in, say, Zanzibar, Tanzania, where in incredibly hot temperatures we kept our heads, shoulders and knees covered in an attempt to be respectful towards the majority Muslim population there.* I’m sure that as a group of 22 American, and one super awesome Bulgarian, students traveling through England, Tanzania, India, New Zealand and Mexico we unintentionally offended some people but the point is that we tried. We asked questions of our hosts and attempted to understand local norms and customs as best we could so as to represent ourselves, and our countries, to the best of our abilities. Overall I think we did a pretty good job.

One of the things that we learned about, and something that I have kept with me ever since, involved photography. We were taught that in certain cultures, people believe that when their photograph is taken, a piece of their soul is taken with it. Whether or not we believe this to be the case, it is important to respect the beliefs of those around you and so we were taught to always, always ask permission before photographing anyone. Consent is key. It might mean that sometimes you don’t quite get the photo that you hoped, but who the hell cares, really. There is something sort of fucked up about taking photographs of people without asking them first, especially when we are surrounded by those who have lived incredibly different lives than us. To me, it reeks of voyeurism. I know that when I have been traveling and have caught people taking photographs of me I have felt somewhat dehumanized. These people don’t know me, don’t know my name, where I am from, what I am about, and yet they want to capture this image of me and what? Show their friends? It’s this idea that an image of me could be in someone else’s home and I could have no idea that always makes me think twice about snapping a photo of someone I don’t know, someone who didn’t consent to it. The idea that a part of our soul is taken every time that flash goes off starts hitting a little closer to home.

Let’s maybe take this down a notch in seriousness, largely because I haven’t had enough coffee yet and this is making my brain hurt. So in New York City you come to find that the longer you live here, the smaller and smaller this town becomes. Partially that is because as we live here longer, our personal map of the city changes. There are certain parts of the city that we know nothing about  – for me it’s just about everything above 34th street and most of North Brooklyn – and then other parts where we can practically dictate the store fronts in order. The city just becomes smaller and the more we circulate within the territory of our truncated maps, the more people we end up seeing until the point when you go to the grocery store and run into about 12 people on the way home, all the while Toffuti Cuties are melting in your environmentally conscious shopping bag. In your own neighborhood, and especially when you are a neighborhood bartender, this is pretty normal. But it is always super fun and exciting when you run into people randomly in other parts of the city that you rarely frequent. Like that time I ran into some girls I went to high school with on the 6 platform in Manhattan, or the time my mom came to visit and we saw her massage therapist, who works in New Jersey, on University Place. I mean, really, what are the odds?! And every time this happens I think to myself

“Self, mere seconds in either direction, one different decision, one missed or caught light, and I never would have run into that person.”

And then I start thinking about all the people that I probably just barely miss. And then I think about how if my life were a sitcom, which I sometimes like to think it is, the audience would be like

“No! Turn on that street! That guy that you made out with in college is walking this way and it might be a love connection!!!”

And then would come the sad, prerecorded

“Awwwwwww….”

when I proceeded on course and missed what could have been the love of my life. Or some other bullshit. Anyway, back to photographs. So on a similar theme, have you ever thought about how many times you might be in other people’s photos? Like, just walking along and you get in the background of some group picture or something? Now, this is something I think about a lot, like, how weird would it be to go to someone’s house and look at an awesome family photograph on their mantel and then see yourself casually walking through the background? Mind blown, right? I mean, you could be on someone’s mantel right now! And not even know it! And they might notice you one day and be like,

“Huh, I wonder where that person was going on this day that is forever remembered as the day that Cousin Cookie drank too many pickle back shots and hasn’t been able to look at cucumbers the same way since.”

I don’t know, it’s just a thing I think about it. There was a This American Life on it a few years back but I was thinking about this long before I heard that episode. It just made me realize that other people think about it too and maybe, just maybe, some of you, dear readers, also think about it.

So this post totally just went on a really weird adventure from the ethics of photography to random run-ins and Cousin Cookie. Funny thing is that I was going to write about this weird thing that happened at work the other day and see what you guys all thought about it but now I have already written over a thousand words so it doesn’t seem the best time to ask you to read much more. So, that’s a post for next time. I guess just remember this: ask permission to take other people’s photos otherwise you might end up on the mantel of some family in the midwest that gives each other nicknames based off their favorite snack foods.

* I know that’s not that difficult but I haven’t had enough coffee yet so it’s all I could think of. Also, there were some people on vacation there wearing short shorts and tube tops and it was really, really inappropriate. Like, wildly.

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This is Me, Trying not to Give a Fuck About Assholes

21 Oct

I originally learned to bartend from a guy I used to date. He had just opened his own bar and had been in the game for awhile. I had done pretty much everything Front of House but bartend, save for pouring a few beers here and there. So there I was one night, having a glass of wine at his bar after coming back from a shift of my own in the West Village, when all of a sudden he got busy. I hopped back behind the bar to keep him ahead of the quickly mounting piles of dirty glasses and, while I was at it, I poured a few pints, giving him time to make all the carefully crafted cocktails he was known for. I decided right then and there that if I was going to continue in the service industry, I didn’t want to be anywhere but behind the bar. It felt safer, more in control and, dare I say it, a little bit cooler. So he started teaching me. He set me up with a speed-pourer equipped liquor bottle full of water, a jigger and a rocks glass and set me to work pouring out glass after glass of perfectly counted neat waters. He gave me a book of drink recipes and went through, X-ing out all the drinks he didn’t think I would ever have to know, and telling me to memorize the rest. He also gave me a piece of advice that I held on to, tightly, until, well, now. He said, and I am paraphrasing here, that bartenders are like a community, and it is each of our responsibilities to educate people how to behave, and how to tip, so that other bartenders don’t have to deal with the crap. But today, October 21, 2014, something like 7 years after I was initially given that advice, I am calling bullshit. Not on the community thing, or the fact that in some way or another many of us are in this together — we warn other neighborhood drink slingers about dickheads and problem customers, call each other when there’s an incident, send our friends good customers when they decide to drink in another bar. I am calling bullshit on the idea that a lot of people are open to learn how to be, well, human.

Here is the thing. I have a super strict standard of behavior for myself. When I deviate from the standard, I am sent into an incredibly intense moral hangover that involves long walks, sulking, ill-fantasies, maybe some tears, apologies and, on more than one occasion, the purchasing of small (admittedly unnecessary) gifts. I really don’t like to act like an asshole. It doesn’t agree with me. And I operate under this misconceived notion that other people also don’t like acting like assholes. Or, perhaps more specifically, that they shouldn’t like acting like assholes or, even more specifically, that they actually don’t think they are acting like assholes at all. They are just being themselves. But realistically sometimes “themselves” actually just means “assholes.” Did that make sense? The point is that some people are just dicks. They are dicks and they don’t care. Well, you know what? As of today, October 21, 2014, I no longer give a fuck.

So here’s the deal. My dad once told me, and this is one of my favorite pieces of advice, that we can only have expectations of people that are in keeping with what they have previously demonstrated is possible for them. Like, if someone is a liar all the time, we can’t expect them to just randomly start telling the truth and we can’t really be that mad at them when they behave the way that they have always behaved. They are doing what they always do, I am just placing my unreasonable, in context, expectations on them. So I get to make a choice. I can either be cool with the fact that they are a liar and deal with it to whatever extent is necessary, or I can get myself all bent out of shape about it. But then who’s the chump? Me. I’m the chump all bent out of shape about an entirely predictable situation. And I don’t like being a chump just about as much as I don’t like being an asshole. So now let’s put this in conversation with bartending.

I like to think that when I go into a bar and order a drink I am pretty polite. I sit in my stool, I take out my $20 and place it on the bar (especially if I don’t know the bartender), I know what I want to drink, I wait my turn, and then I ask for my drink, book ended with pleases and thank yous. I love please and thank you. I might make friendly conversation, I might just read a magazine. I rarely, if ever, tell people I bartend unless they ask (sometimes the 20 gives it away) because to me that just reeks of asking for buybacks which is something that polite people just do not do. In the process of drinking my drink, I do not rip up my coaster or stir up shit, and when I leave I tip. Plain and simple. I like to think that I am a good bar customer more often than not. I even think that if I were serving me a drink I would like me and I might even say to myself,

“Self, that girl drinking the Powers sure is polite.”

And there are plenty of people who drink in bars that are polite. Or at least well-behaved. Or maybe they just don’t offend me in any way. But then there are lots of people who just down right suck. They also seem to travel in packs. They are rude, demanding, condescending, sexist, messy and all sorts of other things. Bartenders can smell them when they walk in the door. I don’t know what it is about these people but you just know, from first sight, or first order, that they are assholes. And in the past, I would want to let them know they were assholes, to educate them, or to prove a point, but not any more. Because you know what? That is not my job. It is not my job, or really my right, to force my own moral compass, my own standards of behavior, on other people. They want to be dicks, to a point, then fine, let them be dicks. That’s cool. They want their drink strong? “Okay,” I’ll say with a smile, and I will make it the same way I always make it. They want less ice? That’s cool, they can just get more mixer. They want to wave their glass at me, snap their fingers, flash their cell phone screen? I won’t tell them they did anything wrong, I will just send them to the back of the line. They might think I’m a bitch. They are welcome to their own opinions. Because here is the thing:  I am doing this for the foreseeable future. Maybe not forever, but for now. And the name of the game is self-preservation. And you know what makes it easier? Not letting it in. (Also, the fact that the new bar I am working at comes staffed with security. At a certain point, shitty behavior actually stops being my problem and that is a luxury I am happy to accept.)

So all you people who are awesome? Come see me! It’ll be fun. And all you people who suck? I will gladly take your money. And I’ll turn all the negative energy into creative motivation for my book. Because, yea, I’m doing that.

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I have some NEWS

9 Apr

Hey so you guys.  You know how the other day I said that some crazy things were happening which had led me to looking at reviews for the InterContinental Hotel on Marine Drive in Mumbai?  Well, I feel as though now I can offer you all some (extremely limited) information.

I got offered a job.

And I took it.

So here is basically how it all went down.  I had gone over to my friend Emily’s house to talk to the super about some shit that has been going on in the building.  I also had to talk to some people the building brought in from outside the management company about the shit that has been going on.  Apparently, I scared the person in charge of the people brought in about the shit. How do I know this?  Because the guy in charge (who, I have to tell you, was a little scary himself) said to me:

Guy: On a scale of 1 to 10, how serious do you think you are? Because to me, you seem like a very serious girl.
Me:  Well, I mean, it really depends on the circumstance.  I can be pretty not serious a lot of the time but this is a serious matter so I would say I am about a 9 on the serious scale right at this moment.
Guy: Well, I have to tell you, and I don’t intimidate easy, but you are actually scaring me.

I felt really proud.  I was like on cloud nine.  I have always wanted to be a little bit scary.  It was like I had reached my goal in life and everything else was just gravy.  I celebrated by eating a spinach pie from my favorite store.  Then I took a big long walk over to visit my friend Kendra.  In the midst of this walk I received a call from a number I didn’t recognize so I ignored it because I get oh so many spam phone calls.  But the person left a message!  So I listened and it was this entrepreneur who my Uncle Scott had sent my CV to earlier in the week and he wanted to talk to me about the job.  So I called him back and he told me about it and it sounded really amazing.  And I was like, wow, this is really amazing.  It cannot possibly be true.  But you know what? IT WAS!

I get to go traveling!  And talk about ways to help the environment with these really amazing new products!  And I get to do all this while I am getting paid!  And all the while I am not serving drinks to people who throw things at me!  It is like, a dream come true!

So I don’t have all the pertinent information as of yet.  Like, you know, when I leave.  But the answer, as far as I can tell, is very soon.  I will still be based here so I am not moving, just taking a small leave of absence.  I will fill you all in as things start happening.  I am sure there will be some fun adventure stories.

I am telling you all this because the tenor of the blog might change a tad.  But I am pretty sure it will be even more awesome than it is now if you can imagine it.  So keep reading!  I can’t wait to fill you all in on the next exciting chapter!

Dear Naughty

5 Apr

So I have been having a very weird week.  Things are maybe on the cusp of happening and when they do, or don’t, I will inform you all about it.  But in the meantime, and sort of related to this whole thing, I have found myself on the website of the InterContinental Hotel on Marine Drive in Mumbai.  I decided to look at the guest reviews because, for whatever reason, I always find it really amusing to see reviews of really fancy places.  I like to see what people who can afford these places complain about.  I know this makes me sound a little bit like an ass because, I mean, just because you have money does not mean that you don’t have the right to complain.  Maybe you have more of a right because you pay so much for the places you stay or the things you do?  Of course, as a percentage of income maybe it really isn’t that much at all.  Maybe, relatively speaking, staying at the InterContinental Hotel on Marine Drive in Mumbai is equivalent, percentage of income-wise, to the time me and my then-boyfriend stayed at a Super 8 Motel off the highway in Dallas.  Let me tell you about that disaster.

Okay, so this was like, 2009 or 2010 or something like that.  We had flown down to Dallas for the wedding of an old friend of my boyfriend’s that was being held at the friend’s sister’s super awesome house.  We decided to stay at the Super 8 because I really liked saying “Supah 8!” and throwing my hands up in the air.  Seriously. That was the one and only reason we stayed there.  Anyway, so we get there late after our flight, after renting a car and after getting lost and the hotel had somehow lost our reservation.  We were tired.  We were maybe a little bit grouchy.  We were being helped by someone who, it seemed, had no idea what he was doing.  We also happened to have arrived on the weekend of some really super important college football game or something so all the rooms were booked up with bros toting cases of Miller Lite.  The only room that was available at the point was a smoking room.  Let me tell you this room reeked.  It was the smelliest room I think I have ever been in.  But whatever, we were tired and figured we could maybe move into a different, less stinky room the next day.  I got in my pajamas, I crawl into bed, pull the covers up to my face, breath in and holy hell.  The sheets smelled like fucking dead people.  Serisouly I am not kidding.  I shot up out of bed, covered my mouth and pointed at the sheet.  My boyfriend, not overly shocked by my behavior, smelled his portion of the sheet.  It didn’t smell.  I told him to smell my portion.  He smelled it.  Dead people.  I mean, to be honest, I don’t think either of us had ever really smelled a dead person up close and personal but if I had to tell you what a dead person smelled like, you know, if I had to imagine it, it would be that portion of that sheet in that Super 8 in Dallas.  No joke.

So the next morning we woke up, after switching to the other double bed in the room and not getting into the blankets obviously, and I saw a roach run across my pillow where I had literally just been sleeping.  Just then.  Like a second before.  With my head.  On what was in actuality maybe a roach highway!  It was horrible.  Obviously, we switched hotels.  I have never been the same.

Anyway, that was a complaint.  What sorts of complaints are on the review page for the InterContinental Hotel on Marine Drive in Mumbai?  This one:

Really not happy with the Room service.Had ask for curd and change of buttery in remote of Set top box.
No body has turned up for the same.Very Very disappointed with the room service.

I think I would be sad if I had to ask for curd with my food or a buttery remote.  (Don’t make fun of spelling errors, Rebekah, it is not nice.)  The thing about this that was SO amusing to me is that this person called himself “Naughty” on the complaint.  I think what he meant to do was imply that he found the room service to be “naughty,” which is kind of a weird and sort of dirty way to describe it.  I am assuming this is an English as a second language situation.  But what makes it funniEST is that the hotel then responded to the complaint and addressed their response to Naughty.  Like, as in, “Dear Naughty…”  I have a lot of respect for Dhan M, the Case Manager of the InterContinental Hotel on Marine Drive in Mumbai for taking Naughty so seriously and writing Naughty a letter.

I wonder what Naughty would have said if he(?) had been sleeping in death sheets on a roach highway.

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Don’t You Wish You Were Cool Like Us?

22 Mar

I know that a while back I wrote a blog post about how much I love my friends.  Maybe some of you think that one post on such a topic would be enough but I disagree.  My friends are just really super awesome.  By the end of this post you are (a) going to think me and my friends are all incredibly weird and you’ll thank your lucky stars that you only read about our antics on the interweb, (b) you will want to come hang out with us all the time because we’re funny (c) you will oscillate between those two things, which is normal, but eventually will you come to the dark side AKA the side where you are friends with us or (d) you will be totally grossed out and never read my blog again.  Anyway, here is why my friends are awesome:

So yesterday I spent the day sort of rewriting an article for a magazine I occasionally contribute to.  (You can read my past article here!  It’s about consent!)  I had to rewrite it because my editor was, shall we say, displeased that the direction my article took was only (in my estimation) 70% related to the proposal I had sent her back in January.  Apparently when you write for other people you can’t just write about what you’re interested in at that exact moment, you have to somehow get back to what you were interested in months prior.  Live and learn, right?  Anyway, so I had to do some fine-tuning so that the article I wrote better reflected the approved topic.  I spent the better part of the morning/early afternoon working on that and then I decided to take a stroll to visit my friend Heather at work.  She is nice and fun and you should all love her.  Also, she is apparently gifted in the art of cleaning eyeglasses.  I digress.  On my walk to visit Heather I texted one of my friends to see how her second week of work at her new job went and I received the following reply:

“Things are getting busier and making more sense…. (smiley face)… best part of farting in my own office is that I can open my own window.”

I replied that having my own window that I could open at my leisure, but especially after farting, was my new goal in life.  Not in so many words but she got the point because she, like, gets me.  Anyway, no more than a half hour later, and out of nowhere, I received a g-chat from a different friend that led to the following conversation:

Friend: can you remind me tomorrow that I ate beets today?
Me: Yes.
Friend: Thank you! (You understand.)
Me: I had beets on Wednesday night and set myself a phone alarm for Thursday morning.

If you don’t understand why that last conversation was funny then you don’t pay even nearly enough attention to your bowel movements which, in my personal opinion, is ill-advised.  Also, you clearly don’t talk to your friends enough about poop which is unfortunate.  I have this sort of friend-o-meter whereby I know that I am really, truly friends with someone when we can talk about poop together.  And not just like, me telling stories about my own poop but us having a real and honest exchange about it.  I have a lot of poop stories.  I think talking about the embarrassing bathroom things that happen really sort of demystifies the whole thing.  Let me tell you a story about what happened to me recently (you might never look at me the same again or touch my left hand, FYI).

So recently I was in Peru for a trip with one of my friends.  And we were at this cafe and I had to use the bathroom because I pretty much always have to use the bathroom. I inherited my dad’s stomach, something I am not in the least bit thankful for.  Anyway, I went up into the little art/book/miscellany store above the cafe to use the bathroom and realized, too late as it turned out, that there was no toilet paper.  Not only was there no toilet paper, but there also were no paper towels.  Catastrophe!  So I did what any well-traveled individual would do:  I wiped my ass with my left hand.  So there I was, wet and clean butt, wet and unclean hand, pants down, standing in this teeny tiny little bathroom above a cafe on a random street in Lima.  What to do now?  Obviously, I had to wash my hands but here was the little trick: I somehow had to dry my ass without using any paper products because there weren’t any.  Luckily, I had managed to keep my right hand both clean AND dry and there was the leftover cardboard tube from the paper towels sitting to the right of the sink.  Oh, happy day.  So I, by turning the tube inside-out, managed to semi-dry my ass with that and my dry right hand (more absorbent than you might suspect!) and then use my right elbow to turn the water on as hot as it could go to wash my hands about 12 million times.  I then went downstairs, looked at my friend and said:

“You might want to bring napkins up there when you go.  There was an…incident.” I think looked meaningfully at my left hand.

She understood immediately.  And that is why my friends are awesome.  (And also why journalists really need to not complain about the fact that they had to, GASP!, throw their toilet paper away in a garbage can next to the toilet instead of in the toilet while covering the Sochi Olympics.  I think probably they have done worse and that there were more pressing social issues surrounding those games than plumbing that can’t handle an influx of paper.  Just sayin’.)  Oh! And this one other thing.  Sometimes my dad tells jokes and my one friend does this with them.  Don’t you wish you were cool like us?

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I Want to Be Friends with the Person Who Runs the Jet Blue Twitter Account

4 Feb

I figure that since my blog is sort of blowing up thanks to a rather, um, unkind message I got on an old blog post, that I would take advantage of the situation to share with some of you readers, both new and old, a bit about the minutiae of my day.  So come along!

Tomorrow I am going to New Orleans.  Well, let me reword that.  Tomorrow I am supposed to go to New Orleans.  For those of you who don’t live on the East Coast and/or don’t program the location of some far flung friends into your phone so you can obsessively check their weather and alternate between intense jealousy and a sort of self-righteous belief that you made the superior geographic life decisions, there is a storm a’coming.  But didn’t the we just have a storm, you might ask?  Yes, yes we did.  It was yesterday.  Starting this evening we are supposed to have a sleet and snow extravaganza.  I decided that, given the forecast, I should probably go on the Jet Blue website and check the status of my flight.

Canceled.

Damnit.

So I poked around the website and since at that point I had not received any information about how I might get to New Orleans as soon as possible, I decided to call them up.  I was informed by the prerecorded lady that it was going to be at least a 30 minute wait.

Damnit again.

So I did what any other reasonable person who lives in this technological world but is also tied to the phone and its accompanying hold music:  I took to Twitter.  What happened amused the hell out of me and made me come to the following three conclusions:  (1) Twitter is an incredible source of entertainment; (2) I want to become friends with the person who runs the Jet Blue Twitter account because that person is hilarious; and (3) I will make even more of an effort to fly Jet Blue because clearly they know a little something about staffing.  Like I always say (or, well, like I am going to start saying now): make me laugh and you’ve got a customer for life.  So this is what went down:

@franklyrebekah (that’s me!): Stuck on hold with @JetBlue.  Seriously, “The Power of Love?” Please do something about this hold music.
@franklyrebekah: AND now it’s Benny and the Jets.  Talk about instant gratification. Thanks @JetBlue #onhold #sobored #canceledflights #travel

(At this point my old high school friend, Seth, asked if it was Huey Lewis, Marty McFly, or Jimi Hendrix.  Unfortunately, it was Celine Dion.  I hashtagged that my ears were bleeding)

@JetBlue: @franklyrebekah Sorry about that one…
@JetBlue: @franklyrebekah… but we’re glad it got better so quickly! Thanks for hanging in there.  Someone will be with you as soon as possible.

Anyway, blah blah blah, then I told them that I talked to someone and she was really nice.  Then they told me to send along my confirmation number and they would pass the compliment along.  Then I admitted that I don’t understand how to use Twitter properly.  Then they managed to not mock me.  Also they sent funny hashtags like #NoMoreHoldMusic and, in regards to my flight actually taking off on Thursday AM (I got on a new one!) #FingersCrossed #ToesToo.

You know, this all seemed a lot funnier when it was actually happening.  But I guess here is the actual thing.  Sometimes it is easy to forget that on the other side of the computer is a real person.  I guess it was a nice thing to know that I (potentially) amused the person in charge of the Jet Blue Twitter account and that they, in turn, decided to amuse me right back.  In a world overrun by anonymity, it is nice to know that there are people out there that, even though they are anonymous in that they are the voice of a company and have to represent and promote a specific image and message, they still find the space to express a little good humor.  Also, and this is sort of an unrelated lesson that I learned this week, we should always assume that the person we are talking about online could potentially read the words that we type.  So we should be aware of whose feelings might get hurt and decide whether or not we care.  I know that, going forward, I will continue to write my posts with my opinions and observations and I will continue to put my name on it, but I will take a step back and really think about the impact my words might have on the person I am discussing.  With some people, honestly, I could give a shit.  But there are some who I don’t think I have necessarily been fair to.  So, I will work on that.

Anyway, thanks to the person who is in charge of the Jet Blue Twitter account for amusing me in the midst of an otherwise disappointing situation.  Keeping my fingers crossed for a Thursday departure.  New Orleans, here I come.

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What Did I Ever do to You, Ears?

13 Jul

My ears and I have never had the best of relationships.  This isn’t a superficial thing.  I have no problem, visually, with the way my ears look.  They are neither particularly big nor particularly small.  They neither stick out too much nor hug my head too closely.  I do sometimes think that they are a little bit high because wearing a hat can be somewhat problematic at times.  I either have to tuck my ears into the hat, thereby looking foolish, or let them stick out, thereby looking foolish.  My solution?  I don’t often wear hats and I’m okay with that.  The poor relationship that I have with my ears, and particularly my left one, is predicated on the fact that for my entire life they have caused me quite a bit of pain.

For the first 5 or so years of my life I had near-constant ear infections, or at least that’s how I remember it.  I think it was more a seasonal thing in reality but I have always been one for exaggerating so let’s go with it.  I think it had something to do with the development of my ear canals and so my ears didn’t drain themselves properly, or something.  Regardless of the reason they occurred there was no denying the fact that I was a walking ear infection.  It was so constant that my pediatrician, most awesome lady ever, considered draining my ears out to stop all the build-up of whatever it was that was building-up.  She told my mom that if the following ear-infection season (read: all the fucking seasons) I got another infection, then she would drain them but she was reluctant to do so because she said there was a risk of me losing my hearing.  My ears, upon hearing this news of having tubes painfully stuck into them, decided to stop infecting themselves.  For then…dun dun DUUUUUN!

Fast-forward to the winter of 2004, west coast of India.

There I was with some of my friends from my study abroad program on the beach at night.  We decided to go swimming despite the relatively large waves crashing down on the shore.  I was doing that thing that I love doing where I turn my back until a big wave comes and then I jump and ride the wave all the way onto the beach, only sometimes bloodying my knees.  For some reason right when a monster wave was approaching I looked over my left shoulder and CRASH!  The wave hit me right in the side of the head, absolutely pummeling my left ear.  My ear became clogged with water and remained that way for the following 2 months.  The annoying aspect of that was completely offset by the fact that I got to say to people, in my best Jewish Grandma voice, “Eh? Talk into my good ear, sweetie, I got some schmutz in the left.”

Ever since that incident over 9 years ago, my ears, and particularly my left one, have consistently acted up.  It’s sort of like, when my doctor threatened to stick tubes in them they ran scared but they were really just biding their time.  Maybe they even forgot.  But then one day my mom told me my old pediatrician had retired and seeing as how they get the information before the rest of my body a spark of an idea was born and they were all “we’ll show you, thinking you can control us.  You got nothing on us, bitch.”  So now every time I swim and every time I wash my hair they suck water into themselves and hold onto it for dear life.  For days everyone else’s voices are muffled while mine is in stereo.  Then comes the headaches on the sides of my forehead just up and out from my eye sockets.  The occasional searing pain and the embarrassing realization that I am probably the only adult in the entire world who still gets ear infections.  But that’s not the worst of it.  The worst thing ever is flying.

I have never loved flying, per se.  I enjoy the idea of going somewhere new, of boarding a plane somewhere I know and ending up somewhere completely different.  But the flying itself, boring.  I can’t sleep on planes because I can’t sleep sitting up.  Also, my butt falls asleep and it is always so damn cold on those planes and I, without fail, forget to bring a blanket.  I always end up sitting dangerously close to the bathroom, children, or both.  Or someone who smells.  But the worst of it is the excruciating pain that shoots through my head.  It literally feels like my ear drums are about to explode or my head is just going to split in half.  I sit there, doubled over with my head on my knees, stupid ass earplugs sticking out of my ears that are supposed to help relieve the pain but really just make me look like an asshole, chewing like 12 pieces of gum in order to try to salivate enough so that I can continuously swallow thereby popping my ears (which, by the way, hurts like a motherfucker) and crying.  Crying.  Almost every god damn time.  I routinely bring scarves or just take off my sweatshirt so when the moment comes when tears are pouring down my face I can at least cover up.  Sometimes I take Sudafed but then I often lose it between journeys and have to buy another box, again landing myself on the national “is this person a meth head” registry.  And it only helps like half of the time.  And you know what else?  The flight attendants never stop to see if I am okay.  I am doubled over in pain and only one time did someone stop and she told me to chew gum.  Bitch!  I have like a whole pack in my mouth right now!  The only people that ever seem mildly concerned are my seat neighbors and mostly they just look at me like I’m nuts and/or click sympathetically. This last flight my neighbor goes to his wife,

“Oh her ears must be clogged.  Quite a production.”

It’s like, I can hear you!  It sounds like you’re about 10 miles away but I can ever so slightly hear you and if my eardrums explode I hope you get eardrum gore all over your stupid golf shirt.

So yea, my ears like totally suck.  Especially the left one.  I went swimming on Tuesday afternoon and you know what? Still clogged!  Still can’t hear shit except my own stupid self!  So, yea, that’s what’s up with my ears and why if you see me any time in the next few weeks I might ask you to repeat yourself 12 times.  I think I am going to make a doctors appointment but don’t tell my ears, especially the left one, because who knows what torture they’ll have in store for me next.

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The Time I Slept on a Marble Slab in the Aiport and Lived to tell the Tale

10 Jul

So you guys.  The other day I had one of the most epic travel journeys of my entire traveling life.  Those of you who know me (which, at this point, is most of you because you are the only people who would happily put up with my sort of unfocused rambling) know that I do a fair bit of traveling. I have been a number of places.  I love leaving the country.  I love seeing how other people live their lives and having a context for all the international things I like to read about.  I also really like eating fruit so I tend to go to fruit-heavy places.  I am one of those people who does not think that papayas taste like vomit.  Anyway, one of the things about traveling is that you have to actually get to and from the places you are going which can be the most trying part of it all especially when you book flights ass-early in the morning.  Clearly, I always book my flights at the most inconvenient times possible because it makes them cheaper but it also means that I get sort of stressed out and occasionally have to sleep in airports.  Sleeping in airports is pretty much as shitty as it sounds.  So, here’s the story.

A little over a week ago I traveled to Merida, Mexico to visit a good friend of mine from graduate school.  My flight there left at 7am from JFK.  No problem, I had my favorite driving friend pick me up from my house at 4:30am and take me to the airport.  I took the direct flight and then waited in the airport for like two hours reading The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and then I got on a bus for 4 hours and voila!  There was my friend and her friend, who is also now my friend (yay!), waiting in the bus station when I got there!  The way back was not nearly as neat and clean.

We had decided to travel a little bit the last weekend I was in town and ended up at this cute little town on the water called Mahahual.  It was fun and nice only the cash machines all had no money in them and a lot of the places didn’t accept credit cards.  It was slightly problematic but we made due.  We left super early on Sunday morning, the day before the flight, in order to drive up to Cancun and spend the day at Isla Mujeres which is slightly less touristy and bro-infested.  As a side note, we stopped at a gas station and although the original guy we asked said they accepted cards it turned out, once the gas had been pumped, that they actually did not.  Clearly, we had no cash other than American currency which they also didn’t accept.  In the end one of the dudes ended up climbing on top of an adjacent building to try and get service to run the card.  It worked and it was hilarious.  Made my day.

So, we drove up to Cancun, parked in a lot, and took a ferry across to Isla.  Keep in mind that at this point it was like, 1:30 and we had been traveling since like 7:30 am.  My flight was the next morning at 6:10am.  Obviously.  I figured I would take the last ferry off Isla at midnight, take a bus to the airport, get there around 1:30 and just wait till my flight.  Just to be sure I looked online.  At 8pm I discovered that there were no buses that left from the Centro to the airport after 10pm and a taxi from the ferry to the airport was going to cost me $70.  It was decided that I would take the previous ferry, at 9pm, grab a cab to the Centro, take a bus to the airport and then wait. I got to the airport at 10:30.  I wanted to die.  After eating some toast (nothing on the menu at the only open restaurant in the airport was meat-free) I found a nice little slab of marble to attempt to nap on.  At around 12:30 I put my bag on the floor, extracted a sweatshirt to pad my hip, and laid down, using my luggage as a pillow and hugging my purse like a teddy bear.  It was the coldest, hardest, florescent-lightiest piece of marble in the world.  I’m serious.  I set my alarm for 4:45am because there was NO WAY I was going to oversleep my flight but it was unnecessary, I didn’t sleep.  At 3:45 I grew tired of pretending to sleep, checked into my flight and went through security.  It was then that I discovered that the Cancun airport is infested with the biggest, grossest cockroaches I have ever seen outside of the Benares train station in India.  Those fuckers were the size of rats.  I thanked my lucky stars that I had not discovered them the previous night because then my bed of marble would have been entirely out of the question.  Finally I boarded my flight.  But that’s not all!

My first flight went from Cancun to Mexico City.  Then I transfered to another plane there and flew from Mexico City to Hermosillo.  The international wing of the Hermosillo Airport was the same as the domestic wing of the Hermosillo Airport and probably if I threw a rock as hard as I could I could make it land clear on the other side.  Of the entire airport.  A rock.  Me.  I do not have a good throwing arm.  Also, there was a Subway there and the entire teeny tiny airport smelled like Subway sandwiches which is really gross.  I ate Pretzel M&Ms for lunch.  I then boarded a new plane with the same flight number at Hermosillo to fly to my 4th and final airport of the day.  It was so small.  So bumpy.  Not my favorite ever plane by far.  Finally, 17 hours after leaving Isla Mujeres I had arrived in the Phoenix Airport.  But that wasn’t the end!  I still had to get to Tucson!  My friend was outside waiting to pick me up only the Phoenix Airport is roughly the size of my hometown and I got lost like 12 times.  But I persevered!  I made it outside and we headed back to her house.  But first….

We stopped at an Ostrich Farm where we fed ostriches and deer and donkeys! It turns out ostriches are scary.

The end.

Oh, wait, one more thing.  Tomorrow morning I have a flight out of Phoenix at, you guessed it, 6am.  Have a shuttle picking me up at 2:50am.  Stay tuned.

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Because the Opinion of Fortune 500 Companies Matters More than Yours

1 Mar

Sometimes people make me really crazy.  Right now I am sitting in a coffee shop in The Treme neighborhood of New Orleans, reading my morning news and (theoretically) working on my thesis.  Really, I am gchatting with my friend and it just took me about a half an hour to read one article on the New York Times website.  The article I read, which I am now going to write about a little bit, is called “Refusing to Arrive Late on Same-Sex Marriage” and can be read here.

So first of all, I am a little put off by the title of this article.  The full title of the article, if my knowledge of common English sayings serves me correctly, which I am 100% certain that it does, is “Refusing to Arrive Late to the Same-Sex Marriage Party.”  In the idealistic and naive part of my brain this sounds great!  It’s like, yea! A party celebrating marriage-equality??  I wouldn’t want to be late to that either!  In fact, I would probably be EARLY because, in fact, I have been outside the venue waiting for this party for years now.  But the thing is, this is an article about businesses and so the “party” that this article is alluding to is not the happiness surrounding the fact that this country is finally en route to doing the right goddamn thing already, but instead that supporting gay marriage is a good business decision.  And that’s what kind of gets me about this whole thing.  It gets me that businesses and corporations, while legally they are treated like people just like the rest of us, which is a whole other issue that is all kinds of fucked up, are only doing the right thing because they will potentially reap financial benefit from doing so.  Not simply because treating all people equally is right.  Not simply because who are they, or anyone really, to tell people how they can and cannot celebrate their love and who they can and cannot include on their health insurance policy and who they can and cannot allow to have visitation rights and make end-of life decisions.  They are supporting it because now, in 2013, they don’t see it as a feasible business model to systematically discriminate against a whole group of people.  Because finally businesses have come around to realize that gay people aren’t only some small little proportion of the population who live on an island and have absolutely no impact on the economy whatsoever.  Gay people have money!  And that means that now, finally, they have power.  Or, better yet, that the power that they have had forever, because they are people, has finally been recognized because they have some green.  Businesses can say something now partially because they can’t afford not to.

I know that maybe I am being unfair.  I know that it is a good thing that companies like Goldman Sachs (who was ahead of the curve and whose chairman and chief executive Lloyd Blankfein participated in a commercial in support of same-sex marriage 5 whole years ago! Wow!), Estee Lauder, Abercrombie, Nike, Google, etc. are coming out in support.  That they are lending economic credibility to the movement, that they are making the legalization of same-sex marriage almost (thankfully) unavoidable.  But the movement was credible before.  It is 2013 for crying out loud and it is only recently that we are seriously addressing a disgusting, systematic form of discrimination.  It is only recently that people with money, people that control huge companies, feel brave enough to step up and speak their mind in support of their friends, family members, co-workers, customers.  What took so long and why does it take money to make it happen?  What is wrong with us?

And this other thing.  At the end of the article there is a quote by the Family Research Council which, obviously, filed a brief against gay marriage and blamed a “a corporate environment dictated by wealthy, pro-homosexual activists” for the business movement towards support of the issue.  The Council then went on to applaud Exxon-Mobile, which is the world’s largest company by market capitalization, for not taking a stance on the issue.  The Council said,

“We applaud Exxon Mobil for refusing to cede the moral high ground to the special interests of the left.”

Cede the moral high ground?  Treating people as your equal is ceding the moral high ground?! Special interests?  Seriously, how does someone wake up in the morning, with a brain that thinks these things and actually believes them to be right, look himself in the mirror and think,

“yea, I am an awesome person who deserves to be here and treated with respect.”

Cuz to that person I want to be like,

“No, dude, you’re just a bigoted asshole. Go suck a lemon.”

This spokesman for the Family Research Council thinks the business reasons behind supporting marriage equality are “trivial” and that the companies signing the briefs were “motivated by political correctness, pure and simple.”  You know what?  Maybe they were motivated by “political correctness” and if that is the case, then yea, that sucks.  They should be motivated by “correctness,” plain and simple.  They should be motivated by the fact that we all deserve all the same rights and opportunities, regardless of religion, color, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, and everything else.

And one last thing and then I am done.  I am really sickened by the fact that people are willing to go on the record and say hateful things about other people and think that it is okay because there are a lot of people who agree with them.  That makes me sad.  It makes me sad for all of us that people go out into the world every day somehow believing that they are more entitled to being treated like a human being than somebody else.  I look forward to the day when marriage-equality is just the norm.  When we look back on that the way we look back on the women’s liberation movement and say, god, can you believe there was a time that marriage equality wasn’t a given?  I really do but until then, I am going to continue to be disappointed no, livid, that it is taking us this damn long.  And I am going to continue to be pissed off that, as with everything else, it takes a person, or corporation, with economic power speaking out to really get this done.  When will people just do things because it is the right thing, the only possible thing, rather than when it makes sense from an economic standpoint.

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A Fear of Fire and Ice Explained?

28 Feb

This might sound strange to some of you but I am fairly convinced that in a past life I died in a fire.

For those of you who have spent a significant amount of time with me, I might have mentioned to you this discomfort I have with extreme temperatures, both hot and cold.  I’m pretty sure the dislike of cold, and more specifically of ice, stems from an experience I had as a young child.  I was 3, maybe 4 years old, and I accompanied my mom to the grocery store, something I still do when I am home.  I love, I mean love, the grocery store.  I was wandering the freezer aisle with my mom while she put whatever it was that she needed into her cart — I imagine it was Welsh Farms Coffee Royal Ice Cream, now discontinued, but I could be wrong — when I decided I wanted something from inside one of the freezers.  I somehow opened the door, reached in to grab the thing that I desired, and promptly got my lower lip stuck to the metal shelf.  I shrieked.  My mom had to quickly pull my mouth off the icy structure.  There was screaming, crying, bleeding.  To this day I can’t eat an ice pop without first washing it in hopes of melting that first sinister layer of ice and I simply cannot sit through A Christmas Story without getting queasy.

The fire thing I cannot explain through past experience.  I remember when I was younger I had this reoccurring dream of being locked in my house, although it wasn’t my actual house and I wasn’t actually me, but I knew that I lived there and even though I didn’t look like myself I was somehow still the same person.  Know what I mean?  I would be locked in this house, at the window, and I would be looking outside as someone got into a car, preparing to drive away and leave me unprotected.  Right as they closed the door to their vehicle I would smell smoke, turn around and see fire entering the room.  I would try as hard as I could to unlock the window but nothing, it was locked.  I would bang on it and bang on it as the fire got closer and the smoke got thicker and then, right as it approached me, I would wake with a start, breathing heavily and sweating.  I had this dream at least once a month, with slight variations, for years.

And then there was this other thing.  You know how sometimes people talk about out-of-body experiences?  I only had one of those once.  I was in the kitchen of the house I lived in from the middle of fourth grade until I went away to college, baking cookies.  They were raisin drop, if memory serves.  We had one of those two-tiered ovens and I was using the one on top.  I had decided, and this is something I would never ever ever do now because it is like playing with fire (no pun intended), to put the cookies in the oven without using oven mitts.  I figured, whatever, the oven is hot but the cookie sheet isn’t.  As I prepared to slide the cookies into the oven I said aloud to myself,

Okay, Rebekah, don’t burn yourself.

It was at exactly that moment that I saw myself from above.  It was like I was floating up by the ceiling but then corporeal me was down by the oven, mittless, holding the cookie sheet.  I saw myself slide the cookies into the oven and then I watched, in horror, as my body panicked, my hands lifted with a jerk to touch the top of the 350 degree oven and the cookie sheet tipped back, all the small blobs of dropped dough sliding back towards me and onto the floor.  As quickly as I left my body I was back inside it, looking at the mess on the floor and feeling a dull throbbing on the tops of my hands. That was literally the only time I really burned myself and the only time I saw myself from the outside.  I honestly don’t think it was a coincidence.  It was if something in me, my soul maybe, knew what was about to happen and was protecting itself, if not its physical manifestation, from the inevitable.

I literally haven’t thought about all that stuff in years.  I also haven’t had one of those fire dreams since I was in grade school.  But New Orleans is a spiritual city and I guess, when you spend enough time around all that unseeable energy you can’t help but engage with your own ideas and experiences with life and death and whatever comes in between.  Anyway, as I said, I am fairly certain that in a past life I died in a fire.  Let’s hope this go around ends slightly less painfully.

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