It wasn't long ago that I finally figured out what a meme is. Thankfully, nobody had ever tagged me before this. Even now, I am not powerless to resist, but I'd rather write two MA theses than disappoint my tagger, wicked_danu who is brave, kind and clever beyond words (not to mention, as recent prom photos confirm, hot). Rather than give you 10 facts, though, maybe I'll give you nine facts and a fabrication and let you decide which one is the fib?

1. Everybody seems to know where they were on 9/11. I was working in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in a village near the Dead Sea and the site of biblical Sodom where I did Aids Education and taught English. My highschool boys were impressed by how incredibly slowly I practiced my Kung Fu forms (I was doing Tai Chi - but who am I to part romantic youth from their illusions?!). They were considerably more impressed when they saw me speed up my Kung Fu in order to disarm an attacker who had a gun to my head.

2. Contrary to popular belief, the uvula is not a component of the female genitalia. I used to have one. I snore. The surgeon roto-rootered my nose (deviated septum), removed my tonsils, my adenoids, part of my soft palate, and yes! my uvula. It hurt like the dickens (once the Demerol wore off) - and I still snore!

3. My paternal grandmother, who is alive and well and in her 90s now, was a librarian for many years. That, along with a family of readers, assured that I'd be weened on books. My faovrite books as a kid were Ferdinand the Bull and The Phantom Tollbooth. The first book I read that I found erotic was Robinson Crusoe. As I prepared to return to Israel for grad school in 2004, I hauled countless loads of books downtown to sell at Powell's City of Books in a bike trailer made from a lawnchair. When that gave up the ghost, bikelovejones kindly loaned me her biketrailer. That was an incredibly sad week but at the same time, incredibly freeing: I was willing to give up everything to follow a dream.

4. As much as I love words and books and languages, I see myself primarily as a musician. Felix Mendelssohn once said, "People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words." I play an assortment of instrument well enough to perform a bit, and have written a good deal of chamber music. I played piano with a men's choir for three years, and harpsichord with a chamber orchestra. When asked what I intend to do when I finish grad school, I'm quick to answer: I shall devote my life to the clawhammer banjo!

5. I first studied Marxism with a Roman Catholic nun (Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary). She told me about different sorts of utopian groups, and eventually, about the Israeli kibbutz. Later, I lived on kibbutz for 7 years - as a volunteer, as a language student and eventually, as a member.

6. I'm usually not terribly impulsive. When I woke up one morning when I was 12 and wondered why we eat the corpses of animals, I didn't rush to conclusions or make drastic changes out of sheer revulsion. I considered how much I liked my dad's homemade spaghetti which admittedly had cow sauce. After a lot of thinking, it occured to me, though, that what I liked so much was the care and love he took preparing it, the tomato sauce that simmered for hours and made our house smell like home. One summer at a county fair, I met some vegetarians. I think they were 7th Day Adventists. I now had a name for my predilection for a plant-based diet. Watching dad slaughtering chickens and rabbits on the back porch to fill our freezer and hearing them cry cinched the deal. I was vegetarian for almost 30 years before becoming vegan more than 4 years ago. I made the transition to veganism with the help of my doctor and a registered dietician. This is one of the best decisions I've ever made because it's about compassion. It's brought me lots of joy and transformed my relationship to other sentientt beings. Hopefully, I haven't caused my non-vegan friends too much aggrivation. They're sentient beings, too.

7. When asked in an 8th grade Civics class what I planned to do when I grew up, without hesitation, I stated that I would become a monk. If I were Catholic, I'd be a Thomas Merton sort of Trappist monk. When I was 12, my mom and I talked about the gulf between organized religions and faith, between faith and certitude, and about the importance of good questions and the stagnation of pat answers. She gave me her copy of the Bhagavad-gita. I listened to Alan Watts on the radio and read D.T. Susuki. I gave Aquinas's Summa Theologica a shot, but liked San Juan de la Cruz's Noche oscura del alma much better (but honestly, what teenager wouldn't?), and found Spinoza entirely to my liking. Personally, Judaism always made more sense to me than Christianity. Still, there are inherent problems in revealed religions that are difficult to circumvent. My first time in London in the fall of 1978, I went to see the musical, A Chorus Line. There's a brilliant song call 'Nothing' in which the character describes her improvisational theater class:

"Ev'ryday for a week we would try to feel the motion,
Feel the motion down the hill.
Ev'ry day for a week we would try to hear the wind rush
Hear the wind rush, feel the chill
And I dug right down to the bottom of my soul
To see what I had inside.
Yes, I dug right down to the bottom of my soul
And I tried, I tried!
And everybody goin' "Woosh... woosh ...
I feel the snow, I feel the cold,
I feel the air..."
And Mr. Karp turns to me and he says:
"Okay, Morales, what did you feel?"
And I said...
"Nothing, I'm feeling nothing,"
And he says "Nothing could get a girl transferred."
They all felt something,
But I felt nothing
Except the feelin' that this bullshit was absurd!"

What a breath of fresh, non-theistic air to discover Shunryu Suzuki's classic, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. I had come to value books and here was one describing my own practice from as early as I could remember myself: just sit, just see, just listen, just feel, just taste, just smell, just breathe. Years and many adventures later, trying to pull my life back together after serving in a combat unit of the IDF, I began doing meditation (zazen) in a Soto Zen Buddhist monastery. After a few years, I received the precepts in a week of intensive meditation (sesshin) and Dai Jukai ceremonies, formally becoming a Buddhist.

8. When I was 15, I told a close friend that I am Gay. He gave me the silent treatment for months and months and imposed a unilateral moratorium on friendship. Just before the school year finished, he invited me to have go out for a coke and a chat. Instead, he drove me directly over to his pastor's house where, together with the elders of the church, they jumped me, held me down, forced my eyes open and performed an exorcism on me. For all their screaming, cursing and praying, they may not have cast the devil out of me, but I discovered wells of inner strength that day.

9. During my sophomore year of highschool, I was reading Dante's Commedia Divina. While it was great fun to read out long passages in the original Tuscan dialect, even then, I preferred a streamlined Zen aesthetic to Dante's terza rima. Virtually everything I wrote that fall and winter, unless specifically commanded otherwise, was haiku with the odd Limmerick thrown in for variety. Years later, when teaching ESL, I found that clearly cadenced texts rolled easily off my international students' tongues:

There once was a guy named Tetsuya
Who walked in, shouting loudly "Hallelujah!"
You can flaunt it, it seems
When you look good in your jeans
But don't touch
'Cause he'd certainly sue ya!

10. At the end of 1999, my long-time boyfriend, Farzan Zaheed and I broke up. What can I say? I really thought he was the one. If January was dismal, February was downright funereal. I remembered that Viktor Frankl had written something about being able to get through anything if you had something to look forward to. I bought a ticket for Mexico and planned to leave at the end of semester to forget about love gone awry. I would have quit my job (I was teaching Hebrew at a university) but for the salvation of routine. March was melancholy, but not overly oppressive. I arranged for a visiting professor to take my apartment for the summer. When June rolled around, I was feeling human again. I turned in grades for my students and then, flew down to Mexico City. From there, I took a coach to Cuernavaca, Morelos where I lived with a host family and attended an amazing school called Cetlalic that my buddy, Abigail had told me about. Towards the end of my stay (3 months and four days, but who was counting?!), my host family and I went to Acapulco. Fess up! You remember Elvis Presley's 1963 flic, "Fun in Acapulco" in which he plays a former trapeze artist named Mike Windgren who overcomes his fear of heights and eventually dives of the cliff into the sea below. I didn't dive off the actual cliff into the actual Pacific Ocean. I did, however, dive off the fake cliff into the fake ocean (the pool). That out of my system, I sat the rest of the trip on the beach sipping coco locos and relishing my new cliff-diver status, un clavadista de Acapulco!



I hereby tag anyone in need of the cathartic experience of confession or those who want to try an exercise in autobiography but eschewing such niceties as chronology and narrative, opt to paint their lives with the freehand of verbal Pointillism.

Happy July to one and all!

Tags: acapulco, banjo, books, dante, elvis, farzan, jordan, kibbutz, kung fu, marxist nuns, monk, sodom, tai chi, uvula, vegan, vidui, wait wait don't tell me, zen
Current Mood: bleary-eyed
Current Music: Melanie: I've Got a Brand-New Pair of Rollerskates