Another Anniversary

One year ago today, I got off a plane in Prague. For the second time in my life, I left everything I knew behind to move across the ocean without a safety net. The first time, I only made it four months. But in that four months of feeling totally lost, I think I found myself. I climbed a mountain on my own and reveled in my ability to drop completely off the map. Without a cellphone, roommate, or much in the way of friends, I was free to disappear whenever I wanted. Sure, it was lonely and I wouldn't trade all of my Prague friends for that freedom, but there is something to be said for some self-discovery.

But in the past year, I feel like I've ridden a roller coaster of self-awareness. I find new things I care about, only to completely ignore them in favor of fitting in. I've tried so hard to fit in, much harder than I ever did in Korea, that I feel like I've lost myself. In the past two months, I've been rediscovering things about myself that I felt the need to hide. Little by little, I created this skin for survival. A month ago, I took my first big step to shedding it.

So many people had been complimenting my hair, which was longer than it had been since I was eight and hadn't been cut in a year. But one day, as I was walking home from the train station, I bought a clipper set. I started with the braids, which were not easy to cut off. What I thought would be two snips turned into a few minutes of sawing. Then they were gone. I could have stopped there, maybe I should have. But I continued, with a literal feeling of a weight lifted off my shoulders. It took over an hour to buzz my hair, with Bikini Kill playing in the background and intense nostalgia for that first buzz cut outside of Sessions House six years ago. At first, I had a few regrets. Now I have none. This wasn't so much a choice of aesthetics as a choice against aesthetics. I didn't want to have a more flattering haircut, I simply wanted my hair not to matter. I wanted not to judge myself on my appearance so much. And it's helped. After my birthday, I'm looking in the mirror at my wrinkles and grey hairs less. I choose my shoes based on what's practical. I've stopped caring so much about being, essentially, popular. I'm picking Saturday morning farmers' markets over Friday nights out. I'm remembering what it feels like to lie in a field and watch the grass blow in the wind. I'm waking up in the morning without regrets about the night before, stretching, and smiling at my own armpit hair.

While I'm not moving to a shack in Walden, I'm making a different sort of self-discovery move. Let's see how the anonymity of city life works for me this time around. So, anyone got a room to rent in Prague starting in December?

10th Anniversary

When I hang out with any queer friends, we always end up comparing Coming Out Stories. It's so cliché and you know that it's too cliché to talk about, but it's also impossible to resist. Trading our stories becomes more interesting when we are from such vastly different backgrounds. We were talking at a barbecue last week about coming out, trying to describe how our different (Czech/Vietnamese/American) communities handled it. I asked a friend what is the typical Czech response and it seemed to be fairly similar to the American response. Most parents want to say, "As long as you are happy, I am happy" and usually do, but how much they truly believe that is up for debate.

I feel like I've become really wrapped up in telling and learning coming out stories lately because this month is the 10th anniversary of my coming out. They story isn't big. Coming to terms with being a big homo wasn't something that distressed me in adolescence. It was more like, "Well, I guess I like girls." I told my friends and one friend told her boyfriend who worked with my mom. He told her and she confronted me about it. I told her I was bisexual and left it at that. While she didn't immediately form a chapter of PFLAG in my hometown, she didn't seem to mind. It took another year and a half for the final clarification of my homosexuality and her total acceptance. But since then, she's certainly been the ideal mom of a homo. She's never trivialized my relationships and holds my girlfriends to the same standards that she holds my sisters' boyfriends. She never lets a homophobic remark slide and takes every opportunity to tell me how proud she is of me. So, on this big anniversary, I am celebrating love and acceptance. I am remembering to always be thankful for the wonderful lady who birthed me and has supported me ever since. Thanks, Mom!

Food Musings

A topic of conversation that seems to come up a lot lately is whether or not one could kill an animal in order to eat it. Last summer, I lived with these guys. The turkeys wandered around camp, eating little bugs and pecking at anything shiny. When they were still babies, they would hop in my lap and I thoroughly enjoyed petting their feathers. This spunky guy tried to get into my tent.

But I had no amount of disconnect about the reality of the situation. Turkeys are food. When they wandered close to the fire pit, I would joke, "Yes, make yourself ready!" Why can't you play with your food and eat it too? Let the turkey live a nice happy spring and summer and come late autumn, he becomes dinner. But the question always is: could I kill the animal? Could I make dinner out of a living creature instead of a sterilized package?

Two years ago, I would have said certainly not. I also had trouble, for a while, cooking with raw eggs because they gave me the willies. But the more I learn about food, the more comfortable I am with the process by which it has come to me. I remember when I cooked a roaster one night in college and I spent so much time trying not to think about the weight of the animal in my hands or the feeling of its skin. But now, I can look at meat and imagine where on the animal it came from, what the animal must have looked like. I try to thank it for playing a role in the continuation of my life. So, I believe, with gratitude in my heart, I could turn one of my pets into my dinner. I've never had this opportunity, though I haven't sought it out either. Maybe that's a goal for next fall.

But this feeling of connectedness with my food is what makes me a comfortable omnivore. I am content to eat meat with the knowledge that it was at one point an animal. But what about the rest of my food? What WAS all of this at one point? I find myself, after having read so much about the American food industry, sticking to the outside of supermarkets--even here in the Czech Republic where the food industry is starting to follow the American standard. I get fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh bread, meat, and dive into the aisles only for grains and spices. Yesterday, however, I needed to make a banoffee pie. It was an urge I could not control. I had to find condensed milk and digestives. I knew that the can in my had contained milk that had been cooked down, I think, to be thicker. Okay, I can handle that. The digestives were the next step. More appropriately than in American supermarkets, the cookie aisle was one with the candy aisle. I scoured the shelves for something not made by Opavia, a Czech company owned by the one and only Kraft Foods. I pretty much came up empty on that front. So, I headed over to the natural foods section of DM where I was able to find cookies not made by Opavia and with a fairly short list of ingredients.

When I got home, I put away my groceries. I wondered why every week I suddenly felt by Friday like I had no food left. I made two piles of food as I unpacked my groceries: fridge and counter. That's why. Almost none of my food goes into a cabinet to store for later. I buy very few things with any sort of shelf life or which I don't intend to use within a few days. And while it's frustrating because it's not how I've been taught by society to shop, it's actually the most natural way to do it.