on hair

Hair is not just hair. Hair is a statement of belief, or of defiant non-belief. It’s a security blanket and a freak flag; a means of seduction or a mode of protection. Our hair intimately connects our inner selves to our environments: it becomes dirty with both our own oils and sweat, and with the special brand of grime particular to the place we call home. Our hair carries the smells of our bodies and of the products we choose to use on our bodies. Catching a glimpse of growing roots means unearthing your own lineage, of reclaiming the invisible hand of genetics: so there is the chocolate brown of my shtetl-born grandfather, the glinting gold hints of my peaches-and-cream grandmother.

When you meet me, you will see my hair first. It’s red – the bluish crimson of a chosen redhead, not the gentle strawberry tones of a genuine ginger – with bleached blonde bits scattered kind of randomly about (the exact pattern of which is apparently only known to my beloved colorist). I’m only five feet tall, but apparently easy to pick out of a crowd. Twice in the past week, in fact, my sister has been able to spot me diagonally across blocks when meeting me for dinner (we hang out a lot): I’m the low-lying red head perched atop a black-clad body.

I think my hair has a mind of its own. Sometimes, what is supposed to be red looks more orange-toned, the color of a citrus slice floating in a vodka-cranberry; under the glare of a high sun it’ll be straight-up fluorescent maraschino cherry. Sometimes the bleached blonde streaks are, indeed, the bleached blonde I intended them to be; days later the shafts will turn salmon-colored, while the roots remain yellow-white.

It’s taken years of evolution to get my hair the way it is now. And I feel like my hair is something I can claim honest ownership over. I only felt that I could truly claim my body after my adolescence, once I’d lived in it for a while, which took a lot of attention and honesty and generosity. But, once I was old enough, and sick enough of my boring natural color, I could control my hair in a way I couldn’t really control the exact shape of my thighs. My hair doesn’t only belong to me as a human being, but it belongs to me in the way a painting belongs to the painter: it’s something I’ve chosen to create, and the world sees exactly what I intended.

It’s true what they say about the slippery slope of a dye job: like tattoos and piercings, coloring your hair is an addiction. Regardless of how many hours and dollars and follicles I have harmed in the making of this ridiculous combination of sunset shades – regardless of how far away I am from the truth of the quiet mousy brunette hiding beneath the screaming red – I always want more. It’s the easy thrill of the thing, for sure: with just a few hours of lounging around on various salon chairs, you can become a whole new person. You can see, point-blank, the fiery cool chick, the flame-headed seductress, you’ve always dreamed of being actually becoming a reality. Plus, depending on the salon you go to, you can get some good girl chat and a coffee to go with it.

I think I’m mostly addicted to the idea that my hair can speak for me. I don’t speak often, but I’ve got a lot to say. I am a responsible adult, but I cling to irreverence. I deeply respect my elders, but I am obsessed with the sugar-sweet, flash-in-the-pan cheek of pop culture. I am drawn to peaceful stability but resist stagnation.

It’s probably wishful thinking to believe that my hair evokes these contradictions. But I think the beauty of hair is in its perfect combination of malleability and inevitability – so you may as well make it say what you want it to. 

*And: I apologize that this song is now definitely stuck in your head*

ada limon on becoming (or: on trial and error)

Oranges & The Ocean

Valencia in the '90s, nowhere
were the oranges, except one slight
sight from the train's blur. I burnt
my nipples right off the bat. No way
you could be as pretty as the girls
in Valencia, topless and tanned
all over. Pale blue hostel sheets
were barely bearable. All night
I thought I'd die when the moon
came in and I'd wake to the pinching
skin. But I didn't die. I went right
back the next day, but in a T-shirt
and didn't try to be pretty, just
swam like something ordinary,
something worthy of the sea.

--Ada Limón 

happy 62nd joe strummer

Lots of Clash coming onto my shuffle today - thanks for the reminder, Joe. Happy birthday to a god among men. Thank you for contributing to a good chunk of my identity, and for helping me get into college with my application essay on "White Riot."

a long post on ayurveda (or: revelations on fat)

If eighteen-year-old me knew twenty-two-year-old me, Past Caroline would have probably been sort of disappointed in Current Caroline. Past Caroline would have raised a lethal eyebrow, judged Current Caroline a New Age hippie sellout, turned heel on her eighteen-hole Doc Martens and bolted. She may not recognize Current Caroline as an evolved version of herself, much in the way that, when backwards-stalking myself on Facebook (as one does), I feel a kind of maternal distance toward that misunderstood, kohl-eyed girl peering back at me.

I still am, essentially, that girl: I will always consider punk rock my first love; I will never pass up a Fucked Up concert; my Doc Martens, though a tamer eight-hole model, remain the most beloved item in my closet. But a few things have changed for the better. For one thing, the depression and anxiety that plagued my late adolescence has become manageable. A thing of the past, even.

The process of pushing out the dark and letting in the light (and this is precisely the New Age jargon that would have made Past Caroline cringe) involves a strategic combination of coping mechanisms.

Now I feel armed with the tools to fight my internal demons, but just overcoming isn’t enough. I don’t want to settle for just “okay,” either emotionally or physically: I want to be the best possible version of myself. So the past year has been one long experiment in How To Make Myself Feel and Act and Be Better, resulting in a daily yoga practice and a gradual evolution into a vegan diet and a true obsession with exploring, and adopting, ancient belief systems.

And I do feel better. I feel great, most of the time. I feel like I am doing myself a favor by eating clean and smiling more and taking slow, mindful breaths. But I also fear that this initial high will wear off; I know that a vegan diet, even a pretty loosey-goosey one like mine, isn’t necessarily sustainable over a lifetime. I worry that I’ll plateau. I worry that there’s still something about myself – physical, emotional, or spiritual – that I’m missing, and that still needs fixing.

No one can expect to heal all by themselves. And that’s exactly what Ayurvedic healers like Katie Grossman – a warm, grounded, radiant earth goddess armed with the knowledge of this over-7,000-year-old science – are for.

I’ve been meaning to visit Katie for almost a year. She’s a lifelong friend of my sister’s best friend Nikki (hello, Jewish geography); and when Nikki told me about Katie, I knew I had to meet her. I don’t quite know what stopped me from setting a time for my sister Alex (my partner-in-crime) and I to visit Katie at her apartment/studio. The pieces just weren’t falling into place, even though I knew this was something that I wanted, maybe even needed, to do. But last night, when we finally made it happen, Katie made me feel better about my lack of follow-through: she believes that people arrive at Ayurveda at exactly the right time in their lives. I believe her.

Here's a tiny little summary of Ayurveda, according to the Veda Holistic Health website: “Ayurveda is the science of life based on the Vedas, the Hindu books of knowledge and wisdom. Ayurveda is based on the idea that the universe is composed of five basic elements: Space, Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. These five elements combine to form the three vital energies called the doshas.”

I’d become a little familiar with Ayurveda (or as familiar as an auto-didact armed mostly with Wikipedia and Hare Krishna websites can become about a millennia-old science). I’d known the basics of the three doshas (vata, the air element; pitta, the fire element; and kapha, the earth element), and I’d known that the goal of Ayurvedic healing (and of life itself) is to harmonize these three aspects through diet and body work. 

Everyone has all three of these elements roiling around inside our fleshy vessels, but there is a hierarchy of dominance. Katie refers to the elements as our daughters: they are all equally ours, and we have to mind and respect each of them; but there is an oldest, a middle, and a youngest child, and each insists their own demands in varying degrees of obnoxiousness.

To “diagnose” our doshas, or our body types based on the balance of the three elements, Katie had us share our general health profiles, our diets , our exercise routines. She then took a peek at our hips and ran a surprisingly firm hand along our arms, gauging the fat and bone.

Then she did something amazing: she psychologized the shit out of us. By discerning our doshas, evaluating the hierarchy of elements, synthesizing our health histories – essentially reading our physical bodies like a book – she swiftly understood our personalities.

So here’s the deal: I’m vata-dominant, with pitta coming in at a close second, and kapha coming in third. My body type reads as vata, mainly because it’s difficult for me to gain weight, but also because my current diet makes me look leaner. But the pitta is in there, and it wants to come out: it’s in the shape of my hips, which actually exist, unlike most vata-dominant women. It’s in the roundness of my eyes and lips, which take everything in and want to express out. “You like to talk,” Katie said, which at first I passionately denied, but then realized is absolutely correct. Just because I don’t speak often doesn’t mean I don’t like to speak: I thrive on self-expression. Self-expression is how I can live with myself, and within the world. I need to be understood, but the vata element, the thinking element, stops my tongue before the pitta element – which stokes the fires of action and passion – can emerge as forcefully as it wants.

This vata dominance, or excess of air, is the source of my anxiety. It’s also the source of my hesitance towards creating attachments to others; my lifelong battle with insomnia; my tendency towards feeling ungrounded and unsettled, which made my transition into city life – which requires a warrior-like armor – especially difficult. Katie also shared that vata types tend towards food aversion, or “food trauma,” which was especially enlightening at this moment in my life. Is that the real reason why I chose to go vegan? Because I’ve developed imaginary traumas to basically everything else?

The key to quelling a vata imbalance, Katie insisted, is fat. This was not necessarily what I wanted to hear, but when she said it, it was like a slap in the face. Or maybe a breath of fresh air. It just made a lot of sense, and the thought of eating the whole avocado (not just a quarter) already made me feel like my over-active nerves could relax, could soak in a good, palliative bath of velvety fat. Fire requires heat: to stoke the pitta, the body requires insulation.

We spent nearly four hours in Katie's little abode, and her wealth of wisdom was overwhelming but truly awesome. She actually believes that most of us don’t eat enough fat, and also exercise way too much, mostly because we’ve been conditioned to believe that eating fat will make you fat. But fat, as long as it's raw and unprocessed, and in balance with carbohydrates and protein in every meal, is actually a good thing. Fat is what makes you human, what connects your flesh to the earth. Fat makes your skin glow and your hair grow in thickets, like it did before you killed it with ridiculous, not-found-in-nature synthetic dyes (I’m talking mostly about myself, here). Most importantly, fat allows your body to develop real muscles, and to protect itself with a layer of padding – which is exactly what I’m missing, and what I need (what we all need, really), in order to feel safe and secure in this warzone of a city. 

So I think Past Caroline would be happy to know she's still a fighter. But I'm happier now arming myself with raw coconut oil and pranayama rather than the old Sturm und Drang.   

on carpe-ing the diem

on life and lost

It’s a cliché to say that you learn the most – about yourself, and the world, and your place within that world – when you endure hardship. That you can only find your footing when you stumble. That to be found, you first need be lost.

I’ve always known this, but what I’d never considered is that the sticky parts – the feeling lost and the falling down – can be not only as valuable as that consequent, glowing redemption, but they can actually be more exciting.

I am currently in a place in which I should be feeling very lost and nervous. Just graduated with a BA in English (seriously: what do you do with a BA in English?), zealously sending out resumes into an indifferent void. Technically, I have very few “marketable” skills (anyone need a sestina writer?). I will likely not be making any real money in the foreseeable future. Every day, I wake up, and I truly wonder what I will do, who will reach out and find me in my little warren. (Don’t worry, Mom: a big chunk of that day involves job searching). I have no structure to my life right now. I cannot see next month, next week, even tomorrow. My future is up to me, I know that: but, honestly, it’s also really up to whomever decides to respond to my inquiry emails.

Last weekend, finishing up dinner and watching the suburban sun set warmly over the deck, my parents suggested (albeit extremely tenderly) that maybe I should feel more nervous about my current position?

That position, I’ll admit, feels really sketchy. Sometimes I feel like a moonwalker: even when I have a destination (the drugstore is a great field trip to ferry myself to. Buying cleaning supplies really makes me feel like I’m doing myself a favor), I do feel like I am, essentially, wandering. Like my feet aren’t quite touching solid ground; like the air moves right through me: without a job, without a place to go, I’m a little ghost-like to the forwardly-propelled worker bees rushing past me on Houston.

This feeling both is and isn’t as romantic as it sounds.

I scraped my chair back on the humid deck, pushed my grilled eggplant around on my plate, felt the adoring but also expectant eyes of my mom and dad and sister on me. “No,” I suddenly realized, and so responded. “I don’t think you have to be nervous to work hard.”

I knew, then, that I sounded a little naïve, a little quixotic, a lot like a recent English major grad lolling through her first post-grad summer. My family respects me too much, I think, to admit that to my face, which I appreciate.

But I’ve found a kindred spirit in Rebecca Solnit. In her brilliant book “A Field Guide to Getting Lost,” the writer explores the many iterations of losing and loss: losing things is strange, but getting lost in the world, or becoming lost to yourself, is truly uncanny. Solnit turns to an obvious example of getting lost when she asks a Search and Rescue team in the Rockies to recount their experiences finding wayward hikers and hunters. Here’s what she learned:

“The lost are often illiterate in this language that is the language of the earth itself, or don’t stop to read it. And there’s another art of being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn’t cause for panic or suffering, of being at home with being lost.”

People get lost when they won’t admit they are lost. They get lost when they fight the circumstances of their ungrounding; when they try to fight the system, try to fight nature itself, try to assert their lordship over the woods and over what they do not know.

So here’s what I’m trying to do: Stop. Look and assess. Read the moss on the rocks. Accept what I don't know and can't see. Do the work that I can – because I am not lost in the woods, I am lost in my own life, and only I can clear the trees to make a path. But I can’t rush through the woods, frantically looking for a way out even if it’s the wrong way out. “‘Children,’” a Search and Rescue team member told Solnit, “are good at getting lost, because ‘the key in survival is knowing you’re lost.’”

Maybe I can take this time – a time in which I’ve never felt more like an adult – to remember what it’s like to be a child. To be in the weird moments, safe in the knowledge that these moments will pass. But also secure in this insecurity; to feel, always, at home with myself, even when I can’t remember what “home” is supposed to look like.

  

on repeat this week [8/11]

...It's not Metallica.

Now, Now - "Dead Oaks"

This album feels very wintery to me (but maybe it's just because the first thing I learned about Now, Now is that they are from Minnesota). Makes me excited to break out my pilled wool beanie, push my side bangs very much to the side, and slather on some lived-in black liner a la the band's adorable emo-throwback frontwoman Cacie Dalager.

Tigers Jaw - "Spirit Desire"

...I'm sensing an emo-revivalist theme on this here playlist. Say what you will about the genre, but few other bands cut right to the heart of no-fun feelings - shame, boredom, falling hard in unrequited love - with quite the same charm and verve like Tigers Jaw and their generic peers. I find something really compelling, sort of irresistible, about the juxtaposition between this messy, sexy, lolling drumbeat and the embarrassingly honest, sticky-sweet lyrics.

Eisley - "Shelter"

The celestial Dupree sisters are sort of my life idols. (Not only because they made one of the best albums of 2013.)

Speedy Ortiz - "Bigger Party" (listen here)

(Speedy Ortiz, via NPR)

I cannot get enough of Speedy Ortiz (Major Arcana = the second best album of 2013). I know they're probably sick of all the Pavement comparisons, but seriously - it's a little uncanny. (Or it would be, if Stephen Malkmus had boobs.)

on metal

Last week I visited France on vacation (3 days in enchanted Paris, 4 in haunted Normandy), but I really want to talk about Metallica.

France is such an intense sensory experience: everything is so damn beautiful, and the butter is so damn creamy (and well worth breaking my veganism for), and I left feeling both very full and strangely dissatisfied, like I had missed something vital. I just wanted to breathe in all of Paris. I just wanted to tattoo Normandy’s fairytale half-timbered houses, the twisted cobblestone streets, the treacherous hedgerows and the ghostly bloodied beaches onto the backs of my eyeballs. But the damning thing about being a visitor is that, no matter how hard you want to consume the beauty of these foreign places, they are just too much of exactly that: foreign. I think you really need to be a local for some beloved place to satisfyingly seep into your bones.

There is too much there, in that trip, for me to sum up in one simple statement. So I’ll just talk about Metallica instead.

The 8.5-hour plane ride home, which I was sort of dreading (I have this weird thing about plane food, which I can’t eat, so I mostly subsist off of dried fruit and chocolate, which is great in small doses but not so much if you are expecting it to sustain you for a full day), turned out to be SO great. I experienced so many cultural revelations: for one, I started and finished Rainbow Rowell’s newest novel, Landline, which is less a testament to my speed reading skills and more evidence of Rainbow’s incontestable genius. Seriously, I wish she were my best friend.

Then I was left with a weird amount of time, and there were no good TV choices, and I was feeling intellectually and culturally curious. So I lept into Metallica Through the Never.

I say "intellectually and culturally curious,” because this is how I genuinely feel about exploring metal, and Metallica in particular. Throughout my nearly-10-year love affair with punk music and its many offspring, I’ve never been able to puncture metal’s steel armor, never been able to sink into those overly-testosterone’d power chords and industrial-strength, teeth-chattering basslines in the way I could with other very loud, very un-lovely musical genres. But I’ve always really wanted to understand metal. Not just understand it, though, but like it. I wanted to not feel like a poser in my vintage Iron Maiden T-shirt, which I nevertheless wear a lot because it’s super badass, but which has always made me feel sort of guilty because if I’ve learned anything from punk music, it’s that the posers and the diehards are separated by one major thing: the former are in it for the fashion; the latter are defiantly not.

So I went into this movie with an open mind, open heart, open ears.  With nonjudgmental immersion. With unconditional curiosity.

I don’t really know how to best explain the mindfuck that is Through the Never, so I will defer here to Wikipedia: “Metallica Through the Never is a 2013 American IMAX thriller concert film featuring the American heavy metal band Metallica…the feature follows young Trip’s (Dane DeHaan) surreal adventure during an urgent mission he is sent out on, sewn together with concert footage from a set of concerts Metallica held in Vancouver and Edmonton, August 2012.”

IMAX thriller! Heavy metal! Urgent missions! Metallica! Nothing more American than that. Iffy grammar aside, I appreciate Wikipedia’s apt summation of the film, which is, indeed, equal parts concert footage and surreal horror film. The footage and the drama unfold in parallel, with the young roadie Trip (the dreamy Dane DeHaan, who, to be honest, was a major reason for my watching the movie in the first place) being the sole uniting factor between the threads.

Verdict? I am in total awe of Metallica’s musical skill and bravado, and also this coterie of four middle-aged men’s ability to chug through a fast and tight 90-minute set better than people half their age. I understand why they are one of America’s treasures. I understand the success of their decades-long career, their open-arms embrace by both the mainstream and the cultish, the wholehearted recognition of their hero status even by non-metal fans. And I am proud to say that I found myself headbanging-lite (because there is only so much room on an airplane).

But I was also completely, totally horrified. The stage effects were the gnarliest, most intricate, least punkest carnival of Tesla coils and machine-gun spray and all manner of fiery danger imaginable. The narrative, too, was gorgeously shot – the setting, a dark, nameless, wet city, brought to mind the velvety gloom of a Romantic oil painting – but it was shockingly violent. Which is saying something, because who among us 21^st-century media consumers can rightfully claim shock at violence? Maybe it was because of my fragile constitution, compromised as it was by the altitude and the recycled stale air, but the violence was actually sort of nauseating, made all the more disturbing by the relentless soundtrack and Dane DeHaan’s sleepy-eyed perfection and those gorgeous Gothic shades. 

But being disturbed is never reason enough to stop me watching something. I actually couldn’t pull myself away.    

I wouldn’t recommend Metallica Through the Never to the faint of heart. I actually wouldn’t recommend it to too many of the discerning hearts that I know. But I just spent a week in France and this movie is what’s sticking with me - for good or for ill.

mapplethorpe on facing death, elegantly

Robert Mapplethorphe, "White Gauze" 

Saw this image at the Musée Rodin while visiting Paris last week. Immediately burst into tears, which *rarely* happens. I'm a private cryer (not as in Jon). But I studied this man's (boy's?) face: love, unadulterated, and it's pretty clear that he - or his devoted - is headed towards some irrevocably doomed fate, and I just couldn't help it. The stuff of Shakespearean tragedy.