how i see it, the body deteriorates neurons collapse, synapse freeze, my yiayia seizures in a cold bed 87 years, thanksgiving and capillaries run dry. sometimes it doesn't happen in the first place. Mila Laganis was born with spring on May 24, 2012. Mila was born with a one centimeter hole in her diaphragm, a one centimeter hole in her diaphragm, a one centimeter hole that led her stomach up to the heels of her heart and kidneys and aorta and blood and one lung was too close to the crow, so crushed that it never grew, never had a moment's breath. I watched mila through glass upon glass this baby, my blood, fight to live/fight to die your baby your body plays tricks on you like that -- give it blessing, give it go And I think about how the power went out and how I see it, i all I'm left with is my own body. the body pushed down, hair pulled, legs split open, ears clogged, elbows twined, knees buckled, eyes shut the body built up, caressed, embraced, worshiped, the body i broke down, the body i healed. how i see it, if i see it at all, is that Sandy reminded us that we have forgotten about bodies. with trees fallen, skulls crack open brown out, goose mountains along long limbs rooms water full, wet. how the skin grows mold. how I see it, is that, when I'm sitting here, talking to you about employment and housing and dreams and fears and visions, i sometimes forget about your body. in my office we build the spoken word, freestyling off breaths full of gestures. all i can see is me leaving you in the middle of the night's hum, you whisper to me, "a man brings his sadness to the river and throws it away. a man brings his sadness and throws it away. but he is still left with his hands."

Cookie Crumbling

Today, I was thinking, I'm so naive that I keep coming back. Every morning I make cereal for Mary whose boyfriend threw her down to the pavement with her(their) baby Mariah still in her arms. Mary kicks it with TJ. Tj who came from the farmlands of Georgia, who checks my tires (of my yiayia's chevy lumina, the one she used to drive before the operation and before the dementia) and told me once over dishes about his mother who adopted him and other disabled children. After rinsing he said that she locked them up in an empty room for a check each month from our government. At 11 pm last night, I walked TJ into Pacific Garden with 500 men, a pack of evangelicals, a 5 am wake up call, and a big neon cross twinkling JESUS SAVES in the city twilight.

TJ would help us fold boxes after our food pantry which serves 120 families each week in the neighborhood with strollers and mesh bags of old bananas and frozen peas. Last week a mother told me that I should stay away from her 6 year old son because he was bad, wouldn't listen to anyone, and that his ADHD meds had been stolen by some good for nothing. She went to have a cigarette and stand outside only to be ushered back in by Johnny, who cleans the tables for our seniors club and helps set up the food pantry every Friday morning. Johnny, who according to (un)reliable sources (but who's to say?) married is sister and is up to shady shit, but who knows what. I painted furiously the night I heard rumors from a girl who wears burberry but wraps her hips in tattoos and drinks in bed with the director's son. The son of a man who drives a truck delivering snail mail for the graveyard shift, the father who is on disability for high blood pressure, for sticking around too long in an organization with ghosts and leaking ceilings. The ceilings could fall down any second, but something seems to hold them up. Maybe its Ma Benton herself.

Love is Labor, Not Leisure

The Occupy movement is raging from city to city, and I am here occupying Ma Benton's House of Happiness day to day. It is a settlement house, inspired by Jane Addam's dream to live democracy in our homes, from when we rise until we sleep. Nine of us live in century-old rooms. In my mind, the rooms are named after their previous owner, the growing list of ancestors. Nick's has a leaking roof, Nate's (mine) has the library ghost, Jessica's has the yellow and brick walls, the room that Jessica took an axe hammer too and tore down the walls, only to find that the walls were leaking with horse hair insulation, and little did she know she was allergic and went straight to the hospital. We live here, we work here, and we try to make it by everyday in whatever way is meaningful or comfortable.

Yesterday I came home after the shelter (the youth had a Sexual Discovery Group, Cathy says, "I think they've already discovered it. . .," through the door they were yelling about size matters, using douches, and keeping it clean), and Matt was building towers from food pantry boxes and hanging action figures from their windows. We decided we need a theme for Halloween (though isn't Halloween theme enough?), so its Zombies in Toyland. I didn't think much of this until I spent one night setting up a scene with a hundred dollars worth of action figures, and one morning sifting through hundreds of stuffed animals at Unique Thrift's 50% sale. Kristina, laughed when I came back wide-eyed, falling over from the plastic shopping bags, "you've fallen into one of Matt's traps."

There are other traps to fall into. A few nights ago around 11:30 p.m. I was sitting in my room thinking about social work school futures. Craig comes banging on my door, BAM BAM BAM, "It's an emergency!!," he says hastily flushed and sweating, curls in each direction, red flush on cheeks, "we need everyone to the food pantry! There are rotting bananas! Rotting bananas! We need to throw them out before the rats come in." I put on Benna's 5 year old converses that I've grown attached to wearing, even with the hole on the bottom. As I leave House of Happiness (Benton House's original name, until it was found to be cross-listed with a brothel), Megan walks out, still in work clothes, hands on hip, "are they mad at me? I have to wake up at 5 am. . .and I'm dressed like this. . . and I can't be carrying out bananas!." I rush out with barely a word. Bags and bags and boxes of rotting bananas fill the food pantry. Flys are everywhere and it smells like I imagine a banana farm would on a stuffy day. For some reason we are rushed, but it makes it funnier, rushing to carry boxes too big for my arms to carry, stealthily pattering into the alleyway, to bypass rats and angry neighbors (Bob-- our neighbor-- a short man with long hair and old teeth and tattoo sleeves and a black t-shirt with a cigarette- hates the compost pile- says it's brought rats to his house). We imagine all the things we could make out of bananas as we salvage one box of about one hundred bananas and start peeling (our freezer now filled with a garbage bag of peeled bananas). I imagine our lives as a sitcom or reality show (my generation's favorite thought train). "Fuck you for not carrying out rotting bananas!" "I'll put them in your goddamn personal fridge!" Uninspired by the garbage bag of peeled bananas (still sitting in freezer), we take a bag of rotting avocados, occupy the kitchen for the rest of the night eating guacamole and smiling at a hard day's work.

Swim In Your Sleep. Go On Swimming Until You Find An Island.

On Mondays, I head to West Town to edit resumes and cook meals for youth at a small shelter with bright fluorescent lights and a daffodil lined courtyard. Each week, I hear another story that makes my knees weak-- a second stint in prison, a new restraining order, a son traded in for a new car. Three weeks ago, one of my residents ran screaming into the street, hoping to get hit by a speed demon on Division. One week ago, I bumped into another resident screaming at her son on the pink line. Typing these words makes me wonder how I still make it to the front door.

Yet somehow, stepping on to the 9 bus to the shelter and going home, I have a burst of spiritual energy, a subterranean spring gushing forth. What it is that makes this happen? I'd like to say my inspiration comes from continental youth uprisings in the Middle East, but I think it may be more of the small revolutions. Catching the Pilsen ladies dancing on table tops; watching Rosa's evening routine of setting up clothes, cereal, spoon, coffee mug; listening to a young man at the shelter talk about the trials and tribulations of applying for a job at Foot Locker; spying on Benna braiding a challah with a telemarketer head piece on with musicals blaring; a mother explaining her cooking rituals. These are the crumbs of information that I clamor to hear from my students at Pilsen, the residents at the shelter, the boys I did research on in Northern Ireland, my catering co-workers during a slow night shift at the Met. My sustenance is in the stories and absurdities of our every day. "We tell each other stories to live," Joan Didion wrote, and this thought keeps strutting through my mind. The stories I crave to hear are sometimes poetic and profound, but are always a lesson in how we keep going. Thinking of these moments, as I ride the bus to a home filled with beans and art combustion lined walls, I am at peace with the mixture of suffering and questions and hopefulness.

On this Monday, as I get on this bus, I'll think of my house's floors lined with blankets and new friends, of education and social movements in a 100 degree room filled with miniature chairs, of cruising in a '97 Chevy on Lake Shore drive with too many passengers, no air conditioning, and a trunk filled with orange coolers, dried out corn, architecture magazines and leaf-stained soccer balls, of my roommates eating cherry-pie leftovers and musing on future paths. Hopefully, on the bus home I will have a new story from a resident: a hilarious encounter with a GED instructor or an adventurous run through a toy store for a newborn. I don't know, but I hope so.

For Inspiration Day # 12 and counting, maybe each of us can take time to think of what stories we've heard and told today and every day this year. What stories ride with you on the bus? What destinations are they taking you to?

Here's to the absurd poetry of this day sustaining us,

Serve from the Left

At 6 a.m. this morning, donning my wool blend navy jacket and polyester tuxedo pants, I walked home from Cortelyou Road awash in iceberg light and hors d'oeuvre crumbs. I fell into bed, tucked in with back-stings and feet-sores, the proud spoils of my current rite of passage. This summer I have (at long last) made my food industry premiere.

I have entered into the distinguished world of catering. In 5-9 hour shifts, I am shipped from one New York institution to the next (the Natural History Museum, the Intrepid, Rockefeller Center, to name a few), clothing tables, placing silverware, pouring wine. As with any new environment, there is a whole new folk-language to learn:"plate sweep," "pour and go," "crumbing." And with my new vocabulary, there is a shift of position. I've found myself alienated from my familiar seat at the table, re-located in the backstage of the dining experience. Working as a server is a true lesson in this, in being "the help." The faceless figures who transform the Temple of Dendur room at the Met from an exhibit installation to a chic Middle-Eastern lounge for 600. Setting the scene is more than just a spatial transformation, we are actors in the performance. We are told, by Umberto, the staff captain and duke of refinement, that we are to "blend in with the scenery." As you can probably guess, my first few nights were rough. "Blending in" was easier than expected. Unless you pour beef gravy into their coffee cups, the guests only very selectively reward you with eye contact or a syllable. Yet, you still have to have serve their plate with the meat at 4 o'clock, replenish glasses endlessly with red wine and stay an hour over my end time to serve a select table extra cups of coffee, and then extra extra cups of coffee. My first few nights, I left tainted with bad lower back pains that stung with resentment.

So, instead of contemplating my [lack of] rapport with guests, I've started my own personal solidarity movement with the rest of the staff. The rich variety of individuals whom I work with is the highlight of this job. I work with Broadway stars (and less than stars), comedians, an ex-wall streeter, advertising and law students, an interior designer, new mother, old mother, a friend of Junot Diaz, TV extra, a man from the hills of Ireland, a recent immigrant from the Dominican Republic, another from Malaysia, a budding writer, a child of homeless parents, a saxophonist, pianist. As most are artists of some form, I feel as though I've unearthed a pot full of New York's dreamers, those who came to start lives of endless restaurant gigs to support hopes of "making it." I fill my nights with their stories of coming to the city, their first breaks, the trials of the life they've chosen.

As I rode the train back home this morning with the late-night partyers and early morning workers, I thought about what the girl working at the K-mart told me as I tried on a hideous pair of slip resistant restaurant loafers. "I could never leave New York," she said, "I love the struggle, I can't get enough of it." I have been thinking about my own sort of struggles these days. About graduating from school and trying to find a ground for my next step. I've had this conversation over and over again with friends who have also recently graduated from college. We run in circles around questions that seem too complexly grandiose to fit into our mental space-- questions about doing, about wanting. Maybe there is something to learn from my fellow butlers, to have the strength to believe in what we do. Without knowing what to do or want, maybe all we need is to have the strength to believe in this struggle, in this unknowingness.

Fieldwork.

First day back in New York from the Middle East.

Subway Taxonomy:

Things to do on the subway (as noted on March 25, 2010)

-Play pinball on Blackberry phone
-Read novel in Spanish
-Scoop peanut butter out of jar with plastic knife
-Talk to one's self
-Read Arabic newspaper
-Do the AM New York crossword puzzle in black ball point pen
-Flirt with big hazel eyes
-Walk across the subway car to say hello to an acquaintance
-Talk about long days at work, prioritizing
-Doodle
-Sleep
-Text
-Apply thick black mascara over blonde eyelashes and under sky blue eye shadow
-Read hardcover novel about the saga of Guns N' Roses
-Listen to Celine Dion on Ipod loud enough for surrounding neighbors to hear
-Stare the thousand mile stare.

Bypass roads

It's Friday evening, and the old city is getting dressed for Shabbat. Candles in windows, girls in long skirts, pilgrimages towards the wall, the light turning jerusalem stone into gold. I left the heritage house with my dormmates studying siddurs to run off to this internet cafe in a cave. If it wasnt for the change in keyboards (from spanish accents to arabic and hebrew hieroglyphics), I could be anywhere.

Every country comes with its own heaviness. The past two days I have gone back and forth of the wall(s). Today we drove through beautiful stoney hillsides to Herodian, one of Herod the Great's palaces/fortresses. The only thing I can ever remember about Herod was that he was an ancient version of Stalin and drowned his wife in a pool of honey. Something magical about this place is the incredible wealth of archeological sites, of fallen temples, of old mosaics. Today I ran my fingers through a roman capital with engraved magnolias that had fallen off its column and picked up shards of centuries old pottery. "This country is a history of fences and ruins," our guide, Nevet's friend said, as we drove out, past the soldiers in army green leaning against a fence lined with barbed wire.

we drove through "the wild, wild east" through fences and land and settlements and fences and land. Each road seems to be a bypass road to another, one for Israelis, one for Palestinians, one avoiding Arab villages, another avoiding Jewish Israeli settlements. some settlements look like american suburbs, with slanting roofs for non-existent snow, swingsets, fancy cars. others are caravans covered with laundry for 2, 4, 6 kids. broken strollers and empty water bottles thrown into bushes, and kids playing in old, old automobiles. we were warned to stay away from the settlements in hebron yesterday, but today our guide said that 90% of settlers are non-ideological, it they come in a suburbia flight for the cheap land.

I came back to the hostel this afternoon and last night, tired, sun-stroked, heavy. I think of my cousin, Allen's hands wide open describing the "atomization" of the Palestinian land, the non-contiguous portions of land, where buildings rise up with no insides. It's a show, to build high stories, to sell fancy cars, to build the illusion that there is a growing economy, that everyone is doing fine. but building buildings is not state-building. Yuval at the dinner table, a son of a cousin of my grandfathers, the only person to turn religious at harvard's philosophy dept ("I had to leave israel where religion was repugnant"), gave me little hope, his questioning the very humanism of this land, the very desire of any individual to actually have a peace. "i will shave off my mustache if the palestinians get a slice of land" says a cartoon graffiteed on the wall of the Deheisheh refugee camp in the birthplace of the savior. slowly the beard grows and I think of Mrs. Arafat smoking Gauloises in pearls in a Parisian cafe, and I think of Guatemala and Lily asking me about poverty in the states as she writes her thesis on women who have lost their villages, their husbands, their children and who are trying to start a jam business, something new.

And what new is being built? Here the old is always being built. The girls at my hostel who leave every morning to their yeshivas, to complete their aliyahs, their "return home"s. "Hebron!" they said to me as I walked through the door, "did you see the patriarch's tombs! other graveyards are contested, but our forefathers are there, they are actually there!" And I did see the candles through the peephole in the hole of the mosque down to their graves-- the mosque where I put on a veil and where i told the israeli soldier outside that i was christian, because jews cannot enter. muslims cannot enter the street outside the synagogue, palestinians into israel, and israelis into Area A of the territories. Our guide today said his brother invented a holy space on the galilee. Even the pope visited the site on the sea through his helicopter seat. Here Jesus made the madman sane, here the Prophet tied up his horse, and here Hagar was banished from her land. Israel. Jacob was renamed Israel after wrestling with an Angel. To struggle with God is Israel and Israel is to struggle.

But in Israel, I always come back to a bed, heat, clean water. To cities of crowded museums, beaches with lit up hookahs, markets filled with young people and falafal heaps. Somehow I wake up new each morning here in my land of wealth. "Israel is amazing for the people it wants," Nevet said, and it is. But maybe these images and these struggles will carve their own place in my mind, my future memory and action. Or so I hope.