Wow, world, wow.

Say I to you world. um. I have had an amazing first two weeks back in Chicago. My mother knocks on wood in my head, superstitiously as I say this and so do I. Why be so superstitious about the good things btw? Is it post-Soviet Jewish fear that everything nice will be taken away from you by Big Brother or some kind of looming omniscient totalitarian force? When a people have been terrorized the scars show even in the minds of their children. Fear is a contagious thing we can learn and learn to live with and breathe with...inhalation and exhalation laced with it. If there is no trace, you must be doing something wrong, indulging too much, they're about to take it away from you...knock on wood!

Ha. Happiness like a tap, tap, tap. I just discovered it inside of me, this ability to be happy. Is that weird? Yes. Better late than never? Absolutely.

Not that I've never been happy...of course I have, oh so many glorious times that I have poeticized about. But that was just the problem, there was languish and pain and emptiness between those spaces of goodness and it was as if I did not know how to sustain it. I do now, somehow.

Maybe all the pushing and pulling of myself like taffy across the crevices of the universe have finally paid off. I like to think so. I like to think that my open mouth finally found itself.
:) The lips closed and smiling, like the dog who finally stopped chasing her own tail.

Post Number 100

I'm back in Chicago, convoluted with strange weather patterns and too many decisions to make. It's a wet day, and there's a chilly white sky peeking through the window. I've been meaning to go to a capoeira batizado today and I will, (I was there most of the day yesterday and it was wonderful,) but too many thoughts/emails/pressing things (like computer keyboard buttons and jumpy jumpy thoughts) have kept me home for a bit. My favorite is of course working with a really good cup of coffee in my hand and anticipation that something lovely will happen just at the tip of this sentence.

I've been watching a few Meg Ryan movies lately to fantasize and smile about the "good life."

She makes me smile, has the appeal of a child and a woman in her innocent yet conniving expressions, and is one of the more joyful actresses you can watch on the silver or dusty laptop screen. I watched "Addicted to Love" and "Prelude to a Kiss," which are both very feel good and warming. Prelude to a Kiss is pretty strange of course, because Alec Baldwin ends up making out with an old man carrying the soul of Meg Ryan, but isn't that the fantasy - that it's her soul he loves best?

Anyway, I best pull on my sneakers and brave the wet pavement, lest Mestre Acordeon and crew finish off the day without me...too much fun, I have to say. Though I tried the berimbau for the first time yesterday and realized that my tiny child's hands are not exactly equipped for this instrument, "you just have to get used to it," said the man with giant man hands next to me.

Ah well! My raouls rock at least.

Manifest

Comfort. In your favorite wine. In your sister's smile. Comfort zone...I want to wrap myself inside of you, I want to venture forth into the world while wrapped in the sturdiest of coats...I want that love to cradle me while I cradle the rest.

I marvel at my life for it is a marvel. What can't I do? I can fly. I can read minds. I'm working on my x-ray vision and my time travel but I'm getting there.

I'm so crazy proud of my little sisters. They are all grown up (well mostly) and considering I've watched them grow and become since day one it feels like such a victory. They are shining, they are taking the world into their confident little hands and making what they wish of an existence that seems overly complicated most of the time.

I love drinking with my parents as if we're out on a date. Or just that we're really old and sophisticated. Or just that I've earned their respect at some point in the game. It makes me happy.

How on earth did I manage to work with such incredible people already? Have I earned it? It's been wonderful. Sometimes life does give back and you should just rejoice because you probably did something.

Home is a set of plane tickets

mainly because I don't have one location that is the traditional concept of "home" for moi. And really, I'm lucky enough to be able to jet around all over the place and piece together the puzzle pieces that make me, geographically scattered as they are.

I found a dish towel hanging from my mother's oven that reads "Home is where my mom is." And really, home is where my loved ones are, it's true, therefore home are where they are. Home "are" there or maybe "is" like a spilled bottle of wine or juice that trickles into different crevices but is still part of the same whole. Maybe in measurement, home is more of a liquid, divided in fragments but part of a whole.

I returned to Porto Alegre, Brazil, for a brief spell and then was pretty thrilled, anxious even to get back to the US. I was eager to retrieve my past you see. It all started with a dear childhood friend's wedding in Boston, followed by travel to DC and Colorado with another dear childhood friend/distant relative from Israel. All of the East Coast travels convinced me that I should just move back to the American East Coast because Home...maybe there are places on this planet that make me feel especially like "me" and maybe quite a few of them are concentrated over there. There's just a whole lot of juice in those parts and now my mind is working on that idea, of a wonderful return, a homecoming to a place that I love. How sweet.

Fresh Noons Blooming

All right, I've rolled up my sleeves and I'm cleaning house. Mentally, of course, and socially. I take out the spiderwebs, the spider veins that spread below, the pests. I weed the unnecessary creatures out, the pesky ghosts. My mind is a repository of bad sediment sometimes, the words and deeds of others stay with me - angry ghosts.
It takes a lot of courage to let go of a ghost, even an angry one. We are used to his voice, we think we need it. All along it was my own mind that fathomed you that fashioned you into significance. In the end, perception is almost everything it seems, at least when it comes to the power of reality and dreams.
The truth is, there's nothing wrong with anything that has happened. My only issue is moving on, moving forward and into the fresh light of a new day. I was held back a bit this summer by obligations and spoiled love like spoiled coconut milk in the Bahian sun. Sometimes are own obligations tether us to the wrong coconut. But that's ok....
I keep meeting little princes along the way and they are not the polite one fashioned by Exupery but the real whinging ones that are forever glued to the nipple. Oh Puer Aeternus, go find another temporary mommy to suckle. Ok? Ok.
In the meantime I'll go enjoy this Latin city properly with its European houses and mysterious ports.
"Follow your own star!" - Dante Alighieri

Clones and Buenos Aires

Should I get this haircut? That's my doppelganger right there. I'm wearing that same red shade of lipstick right now and it goes with all of the Audrey Hepburns and Marilyn Monroes that hang on the walls of hostels and restaurants in this city. Little kitschy items with their faces in the markets, old magazines with movie stars and fresh babes advertising cars. There is a repository here from the 30's-70's, a collection of odds and ends. Old children's toys, terrifying and dirty in their market stalls, the most fascinating little personalized postcards that parents used to send between countries of their children dressed up in the latest fashionable getup...I found most of this in the Feria de San Telmo.

My heart is heavy light at the moment. Flavored with Brahma Chopp bought at the corner store, unrefrigerated. I'm weighed down only by my own penchant for roller coaster boyfriends. Audrey how did you wear your love? And you Marilyn? Two opposite ends of the feminine spectrum it seems...both adored and salivated after to this day. Phantoms.
Are we stronger in flesh or in after-flesh? Sometimes the answer is less obvious than it seems.

I am not the woman of your dreams. I seem to wish to make that very clear very quickly. Maybe because fantasy is terrifying? I overdo it. Fantasy is what we need to survive. We need Audrey and we certainly need Marilyn. Buenos Aires has a point.

Grey sky calls for writing

Although actually I'm starving. How wonderful that I trained all over the campus of Rio Grande do Sul today, on a gray warmish Saturday when most people were out and I practiced capoeira kicks in the windows of the buildings and did cartwheels across the lawns and did pushups on random cement blocks that lay on the grounds.

I had my palm read after the Batizado in Rio. It was a spontaneous thing, there was a sweet old woman sitting there, taking palms and telling their stories.
Mine seemed to cause a lot of emotion in the woman. My tiny soft hand had her exclaiming that I was feminine and delicate. At another point she kissed it saying I was very spiritualized. It was a sweet reading all in all.

I'm running away from Porto Alegre for a week on a beautiful trip to the Argentinian border...and at the moment I'm running away to the supermercado because my new amiga and I concur that food is pretty damn important.