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.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Friday, March 26, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, March 5, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Finding ground
My writing is in need of a new landscape.
Returning from Guatemala, I realized my own need to share experiences and reflections from the places I'm engaging with. (Or, maybe just a need to get it all down.) Grounded neither here nor there, I hope to use this terrain as a place to sink my feet into, and take time to piece together thoughts on where I am, where I come from, and where I'm going.
poco a poco.
Returning from Guatemala, I realized my own need to share experiences and reflections from the places I'm engaging with. (Or, maybe just a need to get it all down.) Grounded neither here nor there, I hope to use this terrain as a place to sink my feet into, and take time to piece together thoughts on where I am, where I come from, and where I'm going.
poco a poco.
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