Never Walked In High Heels

Athena will be back April 12, 2010 with tales from her very own wonderland. Until then…xristos anesti!

“Progress is not made by the actions of those who are sitting in their leather armchairs, it is made by those of us who fight for things that never should have to be a fight in the first place. We have no homeland, but the endurance  we have ensures that things will change and we will gain the rights that should have always been ours.” –Athena Stevens

A short story about life, death, and roadkill.

“God’s in an Art Deco mood today.” The sky was a perfect split between pink and blue. Airplane trails had streaked across the sky, and light sprayed over the earth as the sun rose to reveal its full shape. Every day has its own smell; today it was particularly overpowering. The morning air filled one’s lungs and scraped the old air from the inside. It was not a typical springy morning with birds and fresh creek water flowing against age and towards romance. It was more. But not in the car. The car air was stale despite the dawn. It had become difficult to move as the two drove throughout the night only to have more hours of driving ahead. They had fallen into silence for a few minutes until now.

“Shut up.” The intimacy of the car had annoyed her long before now. Yellow lines passed them at a constant beat. Buh-bum. Rest. Buh-bum. Rest. Buh-bum. They had become hypnotic to her as if the yellow lines acted as a baby mobile. She had a good mind to crash the car. At least that was she could get some sleep. She turned on the radio.

He kept talking about life and goals and fluff over the music. She gave up trying to drown him out and turned the radio off. Shaking her head, she rolled down the window to wake up. The fresh air rolled over her body and achieved its desired effects. Except now he started talking about how wonderful the morning wind was and gifts and such. She was losing her patience fast.

“I love long car rides. They’re so intimate. I always feel as if I know the people inside and out when they’re over. But I feel like I’ve been talking the entire trip. What about you?”

With that, she lost her temper. “Do you have to simplify everything like a two year old?” The car ride had suddenly become much more uncomfortable as the sun rose high enough to annoy. It was low enough not to be affected by visors. Where were her damn sunglasses? She continued her rant. “Name one thing that is beyond your understanding. Everything always turns out just joyfully in your mind, doesn’t it? Listen, in eighty years you’ll be gone, and nothing you have done will matter. That is the only thing that’s simple, predictable, and universal.” She stopped and tried to catch her breath. Her lungs pushed out until they touched her ribs and then collapsed to the motion of the lines on the road.

She almost regretted her explosion. Seeing him with his head rested on the back of the seat, his eyes closed, and his face beaming in the sun made her feel abandoned. The drive had gotten longer and her words hung in the air like a burlap curtain. She wasn’t even sure that he had heard her sine he just sat and stared at the sky. She gritted her teeth and clutched the wheel to straighten her spine. The stillness was deafening as they drove, and time sulked in between the cup holders. She wished he hadn’t told him the truth. He opened his mouth, thought, and then closed his lips again.

“Death.”

“What?” she snapped.

“Death isn’t simple.”

“Death is the simplest thing humanity knows. You simply stop breathing. It’s the end.” She had found her sunglasses and opened them with her teeth. They rode again in silence towards the end of the horizon. He pursed his lips in thought. Looking out the window, he could see her expression in the reflection. Her brown were knitted, and her neck was out stretched like a bird’s. He leaned his head against the glass. The sky now had wisps of clouds stroked across its canvas as if the bristles of a paintbrush had just barely tickled its edge. There was no other car in sight as she hit the gas and the engine roared.

“When I die I want someone to year bright yellow to my funeral. As a celebration.”

“This is depressing,” she shot back, flipping her head so hard to look at him that her sunglasses nearly fell off. She had meant to signify that the conversation was over, but that never stopped him.

“It really is so much bigger than us. I think that is why we think death is so frightening. The fact that at any moment we can be gone is humbling.” She didn’t want to answer him. The silence made the moments lag as the yellow lines spurred past with increasing intensity.

“Kind of a shitty grand finale, don’t you think?” she found herself saying. It was the fact that she even answered that annoyed her. The last thing she wanted on this car trip was to get on a carousel ride the same argument up and down. Turning around and heading away from their destination wasn’t an option. Here they were, in the middle of their trip, where it would take just as long to go home as it would take to get there. Well, one thing was for sure, she was not going to allow him to make this drive into some sort of triumphant conversion experience where she came out with some balanced new attitude. It was either because she was so tired and her eyelids throbbed or because she was so irritated with her company, but she really wanted to crash the car. She could grab the wheel and fling it so the small car would flip so easily. There were wire coat hangers, cigarette lighters, tools, glass windows. At that very second the vehicle became a suicide machine.

“Well, I guess death is never considered as a possibility,” she blandly stated.

“Everyone thinks the sun will rise tomorrow. Nobody can prove it.”

He looked back up to the painted sky and began with his own wide expanse of thoughts. He curled up to the side of the car and squashed his cheek against the window. His thoughts and opportunities made the blue sea above them seem like wading in a tear drop. A hawk flew over the car and into his sight. It spread its enormous wings and floated, suspended in the sky. It glided just over his head so he could see the mouse struggling in its mouth. He could practically hear the small creature struggle in the sky. If freedom came it would only result in a plunge. The hawk tilted, turned away from the car, and soared away from the road.

She squinted from the glare on the road. Putting down the visor to shade here eyes, she took a deep breath and relaxed. The lines had begun skipping playfully along the road. She slowed the car as another came over the horizon. The lines ahead shifted from the heat. Her eyes rested on a lump in the middle of the road. As the car edged closer to the lump, she could make out where the fur had turned gray and the scrawny rat tail had flattened against the pavement. Flies had begun to collect on its rankling intestines. The festering eyes were staring at the sky. Sometimes she wished she weren’t so observant. The car sped past, and it was gone as soon as the intensity was at its maximum. The road was clear and now touched the end of the sky.

From the moment I laid eyes on him I was stuck by how much the illness had ravaged his body. I had grown up in a place where I had seen my share of AIDS victims, or so I thought. But the ones I had seen, leaning their partner’s arm at an evening benefit for the local charity, was nothing compared to how ill he was. As he sat up in bed I wondered where the rest of him was. Then I realized his legs were still under the blanket. They were just so small that it looked as if nothing was there.

I don’t remember his name at all, which is funny because I swore to myself that I would always remember sitting on his bed. During my time at university, I volunteered to visit individuals who were struggling with the final stages of AIDS. South of the Mason Dixon line, this meant many of those we visited had been abandoned by their families. This is not to say that none of these people had loved ones who regularly visited the ward, but many did not. Given my age, my mother had to explain to me later just how terrifying the HIV epidemic was and the stigma which still remained.

“Don’t you know I’m… gay?” the last word wasn’t even whispered- it was mouthed. I nodded and kept asking him questions about the horses he used to train before he became ill. No matter how sick people are, it’s always stories which provide the most targeted anesthetic. In this case he was telling me about himself, what he did and who he used to be. He didn’t spend his whole life in this bed being nearly invisible, he was someone. And then he went and did something very strange.

“Your shoe is untied.”

“Wha-… oh yeah. I can’t tie my own shoes. Fortunately I don’t really walk much so-“

“Will you let me tie it for you?”

To say I was taken aback would be putting it to moderately. I was shocked. Can you get your shoes tied by a dying man? Was there precedent for this? I hesitated, not wanting him to lose any more of his precious energy.

“Please. I’m a very good shoe tying kind of guy.” I nodded and moved my foot to where he could reach my shoe, his transparent fingers working the magic it takes to tie a shoe, the motions of which I still cannot comprehend. He did it deftly, as every adult I know does. In a flash, he was finished a simple double knot remained which was tied with such determination that it would take my friend seven minutes to undo that evening.

I am here. Even though I am ill, I lived. I am somebody.

Six years later and I still think of him almost every time someone ties my shoes. Within a month he had left his body and someone else had taken his place in his bed. Long after his name was gone from my mind the stories of who he was and the actions of what he did that winter night stay with me. He was a man who desired, like all of us really, to be known and loved rather than to be immortal. Even in our weakest moments we want to touch, interact , and even to serve in order to confirm that our existence will be snuffed out long after the breath has left the body.

In his case, I think that for the rest my life, his existence will keep burning.

Recently, my friends in the UK have been inundating me with horror stories about health care workers taking anything but a patient’s best interest in mind. Yes, I realize that malpractice occurs in America too, and no, this isn’t another health care reform article. My conversations relating the experiences of my mainly able-bodied friends began to make me think about how we, as a society, treat not simply ”the disabled,” but simply the sick, the injured, and the aged as well. Its something even the “experts” can’t seem to get right.

If the mark of how advanced a civilization is how much we have evolved away from barbarism, then surely one definitive measurement of this progress is how we treat the most vulnerable in our society. This, of course includes not only the smallest and the most impoverished but also those whose bodies have turned against them due to either time or condition. And yet, even in our modern age, this level of civility is a standard that has yet to be reached in all but the most exceptional of cases.

This breach of advancement becomes even more despicable when one considers that a breakdown of the human body, in one form or another, is inevitable in all of us. By ignoring or disgracing those whom this breakdown has already occurred in,

what exactly are we trying to accomplish? Perhaps it is that we are afraid to acknowledge that human frailty is everyone’s fate, and the feebleness, the pain, which we see in the eyes of the man lying in front of us from his bed will someday be our own. When we are all faced with our own vulnerabilities, it is within our prideful nature to behave in the worst way possible, particularly when it is embodied not within ourselves but someone else. And so, we go on creating a world which will surly be unprepared for even our weakest days.

For decades, we have made health and caring for those in need of physical help an issue of politics rather than an issue of humanity. Even if we did have universal healthcare throughout the solar system, it does little to care for people in imperfect health outside of an institution. In this way, would the world outside of hospitals and urgent care center be fairer, or would it simply be cheaper to institutionalize the frail who inconvenience us to be dogmatically watched after? If we mean to fix all our health related issues with improving our respect for the frailty of the human condition, both the politicians and the doctors have fooled us into we our much more evolved simply by keeping our weaknesses out of sight.

Of course the words ‘integration’ and ‘rehabilitation’ are words that we hear those dressed up as reformers on the news shows spout out as well, but there are little visible effects of an attempt to improve the quality of life for individuals who don’t have the most cooperative body. Even the most compassionate health care which costs nothing cannot alter the fact that even today, even in the richest and arguably the most advanced and compassionate nations in the world, some schools still refuse to open their doors to disabled children and architects choose to put steps rather than ramps outside of new buildings because the former “looks more traditional.” This says nothing about the countless small issues of discrimination and even hatefulness that occur at the checkout lines or railway platforms.

If we consider ourselves an advanced society we are grossly mistaken. If we think any sort of government act will force us into being more progressive or charitable, we are lying to each other. Those are the changes to a culture which cannot take place by asking doctors to see more people or even handing complicated issues over to experts so we can keep our hands clean. We do a terrible job taking care of people who we find inconvenient in life specifically because we have built a world where their life is inconvenient. But all to often, by the time we realize how inconvenient the human condition actually is, is the time we’ve succumbed to it ourselves.

Being an individualist is not terribly popular these days. There’s a lot of talk about what someone can do for society, how to help the faceless “others” who are less fortunate than you or even how to help charities of this nature by making a tax deductible donation to X. Theses are all good actions worthy of some (albeit often minimal) praise on some level. But even with the best of efforts to move towards utopia, something insidious almost always creeps in, and here is no exception.

Perhaps I simply see this because I am an American living in London. But recently it seems as though there is more attention given to the ‘toiling masses’ rather than the individuals who are either in need of help or those who can help. The power and the preciousness of the single human being has been replaced by concern for a faceless mass who seems to always be in need of help and never getting any. Charity has become an impersonal act of the bank account rather than requiring eye contact.

But the ‘faceless mass’ way of thinking has done more damage than simply disguising taxes as alms. We have forgotten that each of use are created and not generated. This fact has little to do with any sort of deity and more to do with just how many fingerprints and events it takes to form a constantly evolving person. Our current popular views on biology and society, taken to the next logical step, teach not only that life is random but also that each of us are not particularly unique. If we are nothing more than cells and labels, existing for eighty years or so, then the value our impact for the history of man is small, we can do little to change the world, and there is a vast amount of feebleness in any of our actions. Often when I talk to people is seems as if they refuse to hold their own sprit, the part of them which has yet to be defined by any scientist, dearly. The willingness to compromise to things which insult the soul for the security of feeling others standing beside us is rampant within ourselves.

If we stop recognizing the value of the individual and his unique spirit, we cease to acknowledge the most powerful natural resource in existence. It is not enough to try and help in order to ‘do good’ in the world, like everything else ‘doing good’ can quickly become yet another form of legalism. But when you look the individual, be he servant or the one in need, you begin to value that person until it is impossible to generalize a person back into a faceless mob. Looking at a person means understanding them, their conditions, and valuing him for it, rather than expecting him to relate in predetermined way which ultimately casts him back into obscurity.

Less and less people want to live forever. This is not to say they don’t want to die, they just want to go on surviving as a biological entity rather than being themselves to the greatest of their ability. A group of such people no doubt make a homogeneous mass which is easy to define and then dismiss. It is the unique individual who understands that he is fearfully and wonderfully made which makes the conditions of society better; it has never been the other way around. Most people who cannot acknowledge their own value, simply as people who will never again exist are content to live simply at the status quo. If you look at every civil rights movement in history and think of where it would be without the individuals associated with leading it, it doesn’t take long to see the value of the human spirit who sees people living rather than a group surviving.

Each person has value because man is an end unto himself. He needs to be nothing but himself to the best of his ability. Even if you don’t believe a part of you lives on forever, your own individual uniqueness acts as a form of accountability simply because you will never exist again. In some way, a person by being himself has value because he is one, and with that single man, he can only reach people by seeing what each person is.

It’s the simple things in life that you usually don’t bother to understand. This is particularly true if you’re have a physical disability from very early life. You watch your father cook maybe once, it being difficult to see the countertop from a seated position, and after that you hear words like boil, sauté, fry and they literally mean nothing. Everything is simply something that Dad does standing in front of a stove. The idea of me, heat, metal, and sharp objects strike most people as a very bad combination. So when someone is always going to fry your eggs for you, you never learn what exactly frying an egg means.

Three weeks ago, when I committed myself to learning how to crack an egg, I couldn’t even think of holding one. The logic in my head went something like this: eggs are wrapped in special containers at the store, despite this, they still often break before one gets them home, the empty eggshells I see are brittle and paper thin. Ergo: eggs are extremely fragile and given my hand’s amazing ability to crush things I have no business holding them. When my friend asked me to hold an egg for the sake of warming it up from the fridge, my hands shot to behind my back and I took a step away.

I’m not sure why I even was so determined to learn how to crack an egg except that’s it’s the most difficult thing that I could think of to do. Holding one for the first time was shocking: its weight was something which was unexpectedly assaulting to my system. I thought they would be like air to hold, a brittle shell which would require just the pads of the fingertips to touch. In my twenty five year old brain, an egg felt like paper Mache, having never touched one for myself. What I found was a slippery stone that was so unexpectedly smooth that it took all five of my fingers to hold onto it.

“You’re going to have to whack the thing harder than that if you ever want to crack it,” my friend stated as I gingerly knocked it against the bowl. I was afraid the shell would end up in the bowl. Which it did. And the entire contents of the egg ended up in my lap. The worst outcome possible of attempting to crack an egg had come to reality. And the world did not end. So we move on, grabbing another egg out of the pack. (I had bought one of those super cheap value packs with fifteen low quality eggs for under a pound. I figured if I ever showed a real talent for consistently cracking eggs successfully, then I might be able to move on to organic grade free range eggs.)

The thing is about eggs, they are built in such a way that seems like they are meant to be cracked. Between the support of the yolk to the membrane which keeps the shell together after it’s cracked, man has yet to engineer any better form of packaging. But I never knew that because I had never come near holding one. The fact of my inexperience was interpreted as I could not crack an egg when, in actuality, I simply didn’t know how. To complicate the situation I technically could tell someone exactly how to crack an egg. I knew how to complete the task in theory but because I knew nothing about an egg itself, I was petrified of doing it at all. My own condition didn’t directly stop me from accomplishing a task, it was simply a lack of occurrence.

In a way, that lack of experience is them most disabling thing about being disabled. When three different therapists are watching you at age seven attempt to pour juice into a cup, there isn’t much room for the spills that come whenever you are gaining experience. And when Mom has always poured your juice for you, how can you even remotely begin to know what fine motor skills it really takes to hold a jug. There’s so much of the world you don’t even know how to begin to experience unless you can sit there and honestly be given a chance for a raw egg to fall into your lap. It’s not that you don’t know unless you try, it’s that you don’t know until you’re given the opportunity to really make a mess in order to figure out how things work.

Six days later, my friend and I made a fifteen egg omelet for a dinner party. It was made of free range eggs.

“Redistribution is only as meaningful inasmuch as it is rooted in love.”

The summer marks my forth year in London. I realized the other day that I have now spent longer being graduated from school than I have spent in my undergraduate education. And although I’m not exactly where I want to be, I like where I am.

The problem is the shift between living three years somewhere and four years is drastically different physiologically speaking. It’s like for the first few years out of college one is allowed to make whatever mistakes you can or be wherever in the world you want to be. And then the timer goes off with a ding and we are all supposed to come home and settle down, leaving our stories of adventure to tell the next generation. But as I get closer to the forth year milestone to pressure to come back to “the real world” increases. Adults who taught me growing up now call me to ask when I’m planning on coming home. And then they get upset when I tell the truth. That I don’t need to go home. For right now, I am home.

In the US, college is four years long for most people. After that, most people move to a drastically different life before coming into where we are going to actually be growing old and having a family. Its like that fourth mile marker signifies it’s too far away to turn around and come back home. And as I approach that point the questions become much more persistent… Athena, when are you coming home?

It’s taken me until now to actually realize this question does signify a certain rationality which everyone who is annoying me by asking this question is, ultimately aware of. It takes three years (as in full years) to settle into a place and make it yours. In the past year, I’ve notice a shift in my own life, my friends call me up to see how an audition went, or arrange for informal picnics where we used to have stilted and even semi-rehearsed coffee dates. We don’t notice who brought the last tickets or cup of tea. My friends here know that I am not going anywhere for a while (barring a fabulous opportunity… everyone knows I’m not settled down that much). The friend who lives in the red Dutch barge in the opposite quay and I are already making plans for our Christmas Cakes.

This is where my life is right now. It consists of understanding art and acting as well as boats and tides. It means waiting all week in patient expectation to bake with the women who live in the quays and learn how to weigh flour on an eighty year old scale given to her by her grandmother, while my American measuring cup sit uselessly in my kitchen. I get to listen to actors debate about Mamet and offer my opinion over Turkish coffee in our local pub run buy the old man from Ephesus who swears he’s in love with me. And no, while I was getting my degree and sitting with my hand raised and my ankles crossed, this was never where I envisioned my life being.

But now I’m here, I see no reason to go back.

I’ve seen the commercials. The male announcer almost teases you with the idea that all your problems will be solved if you only buy the correct application for under a dollar. And from the stance of creative businesswoman, the App Store for the iphone is enthralling. With no overhead, a constantly changing storefront and boundless creativity, this is, without a doubt, the correct formula for the next stage of entrepreneurship for the new frontier.

If only that ‘boundless creativity’ would come in the form of faster evolution.

After all, what exactly is the use of a program which is an alarm clock on a device where one is automatically build in. Better yet, how about coming to and end of a fine dinner and being unable to calculate the tip without the help of your trusty technological companion. Or there’s always the program, that tells you about what other programs have come out and which other programs you need. (This one, much to my surprise, was not created by Apple.)

I bought an iphone in hopes to make my life as a disabled woman easier. With life in this position one is dependent on barons of industry, invention, and software to make life not simply more convenient but also simply livable. To say that my iphone has changed my life would be an understatement. But I was also one of the first people investing in voice activation all the way back in 1994, and have since thrown money at nearly every piece of assistive technology conceivable. In the case of adaptive tech hardware and software, it really doesn’t matter what sort of resources you have, if can’t be sold to the mainstream population the software will not advance.

This is how we get over 200 software developers which create alarm clocks, and no program that will actually call a London black cab. After all, my friends argue, its easy to hail a cab off the street. But figuring out what fifteen percent of your dinner bill is… that’s a real challenge.

The App Store illustrates to me that the leaders of industry are few and far between while those who have the programming skills but lack the imagination are well in abundance. It’s proof that just because there are lots of hands which can make the industry move forward, without the brains there is little guarantee of it doing so. Looking at what sells today will only show you what you should’ve been selling yesterday. And so to hop on the ‘alarm clock bandwagon’ only serves to tell you where the industry is. As with any other form of progress the market has to look to the needs of people who are not in the mainstream to figure out what comes next.

There are few stories told today about women. An inspirational story has to have someone such as Sandra Bullock in it in order to sell, and even then there is something about these female characters which seem either glossy or angular; a rough mock up of what a woman might possibly look like. Recently, I’ve been looking for a fictional female character that I wanted to emulate. This meant finding a woman who was strong in the face of adventure and gentle in the eyes of loved ones. This is how I rediscovered Mrs. Kay Miniver.

Mrs. Miniver was a film produced in 1942 and follows one woman’s adventures during the opening of the Second World War. What would no doubt be looked down upon as being “a common housewife” by many today, provides the heroine ample opportunity for courage, grace, grief, and even humor within an ordinary backdrop which produces a most extraordinary life. Between the open communication she shared with her husband to her fierceness in finding the joys in life even in difficult times, we watch a rare sight in the unfolding of this movie. We see a woman in the fullest sense of the word.

We are bombarded by images of two types of women today. Surprisingly, I’m not talking about the vixens and the angels, which you’ll hear feminist academics drive on about at intellectual conferences. Rather, I see the two poles of femininity today as being victimized or being controlling. She must either have no strength left within her that she must depend on someone else to be happy, or, she must be steely and cold, demanding that someone else make her happy. Neither makes for a particularly stable or happy individual.

Today I think we see the controlling woman as the standard rather than the other. A woman must have her life put together and have a goal beyond her family which, she will, come hell or high water, succeed with. I’m a career woman myself and I’m not saying that a housewife is somehow superior. But the grace of a woman, I think, comes from fully facing the challenges which are in front of her… all of them. What makes Mrs. Miniver so special is that she can be facing a German gunman in one moment, and overjoyed at the return of her husband the next. For her, there is no point in fantasizing how life ought to be, when there is so much to discover within how life is.

In the movie, there are no sex scenes or cleavage shown, nor is there any room for a damsel in distress fainting at the most climatic moment. In this way, Kay Miniver’s story is remarkably modern. Oddly enough, I think hers is a life which most women have in front of them, were we not so preoccupied with fairytale endings and Hollywood love scenes. What we learn from Mrs. Miniver is that it is not in making things how they ought to appear which leads to a life of beauty, but in accepting things as they are. Or in the words of another admirer of Kay Miniver, “: What goes to make a rose, ma’am, is breeding… and budding… and horse-manure, if you’ll pardon the expression. And that’s where you come in…”