[Philip II of Macedon to Sparta]: “If I invade Laconia you will be destroyed, never to rise again.”
[Sparta]: “If.”

Needs: Be Honest About What is Necessary

In the chaos of our lives just after the move, Jim, who is a software engineer, said we needed to run our lives in “safe mode” for a while. If you have had a computer that was not quite well, you may recognize the term: when something’s gone haywire in the machine, you can turn it off and reboot in safe mode, which runs only the computer’s core functions. It’s on, but just barely. Nothing is burning the machine’s cycles that is not essential.

I have a hard time coming up with a realistic “safe mode.” When I want something badly that is not on the “core functions” list, I slip it in instead of necessary things, which I assume will happen somehow, because they are necessary. But this is a dishonest way of living, and has its cost: I knew I needed that load of laundry run in order to be able to dress tomorrow, but I read a book instead. Now it is 11 pm, and I was right that laundry will happen because it has to; but what I did not acknowledge is that it is going to happen in place of sleep.

I put desires before needs because until I had attended to my desires, even the idea of safe mode felt like dying, like giving up on everything I cared about other than eating and sleeping. And in order to escape, I am tempted toward dishonest living. But once I have clear in my mind what I want, it is easier to say, Writing is what I want. I am going to pursue it. But right now we need food, and because Jim is the one making the paycheck we can live on, I am going to find us food. That does not mean I am giving up on the desire and the commitment to write. But it means that my next step in finding my way to a writing life is feeding us.

What are the things that must happen in your life? If you can come up with a core list of non-negotiables that would, in a good week, leave you a lot of breathing space, then you have a way of surviving in a week when illness or life explosions have sucked much of the air out of your life. And if you are a straddle-parent and work does not keep your lights on, it does not get a lot of air in a safe-mode week. But just as even the most minimal budget must include at least a token amount of “play money” in order to be survivable, so your list of core needs must include some amount of rest and of caring for your body and soul, and if work is part of caring for your soul, then find some tiny but meaningful things you can do that move it forward. (All this is assuming that your life is, though stretched, not in a situation of outright traumatic chaos like a war, hospitalized life-threatening illness, or sudden homelessness. Safe mode is your homemade guide for what to do with the control you do have over your life. Adjust as needed.)

It may be, in my above example about laundry and reading and sleep, that my sense of necessity was askew. Maybe what was most needed was that I sit down with that book and plan to do the laundry tomorrow. And order us more underwear, same-day delivery. Or wear the clothes in the Goodwill bag one more time. Or remind myself that I have never heard of anyone coming to serious grief by wearing underwear one extra day. Jim points out that there are usually more options than I am willing to acknowledge when I am feeling logistically overwhelmed.

It is not a good feeling to tell my toddler I am looking forward to her waking up, and to wonder what percentage of what I’m saying is a lie. Children are unpredictable, and even if we are full-time stay-at-home caregivers, unless we also have a full-time staff that takes care of every other imaginable domestic task (including dressing and bathing us), children’s needs are going to interrupt our projects. It is not emotionally realistic to expect us to respond with unadulterated delight to the fact that a doctor’s visit has suddenly taken the place of afternoon working or exercise time. Neither is it constructive to burden ourselves with guilt over the times when our children’s needs, or presence, do not awaken in us feelings of bliss.

But in her 1970 parenting classic Your Child’s Self-Esteem, Dorothy Briggs points out that one of children’s greatest psychological needs is the need to feel cherished. That means that while I do not need to be delighted by every interruption, I do, fundamentally, need to communicate to my daughter that I am delighted by the fact of her existence, that I am glad she is here, that I do look forward to her waking up, and that I care about her needs even when they interrupt my plans. I recently started listening to Sophie Harper’s podcast, called Not by Accident, about her choice to have a baby as a single woman. The podcast is in part a record for her daughter Astrid of how very much Sophie wanted her, how much, as the title points out, she is here on earth by desire and on purpose. Their story has been reminding me of something I do not want to forget: that Lucy, too, is here on purpose. And that means that making space in our lives for her is not a chore but a joy. Or if it sometimes feels like a chore, then it is a chore fundamentally motivated by joy.

How, then, can I get out of the straddle-parenting trap of comparing myself simultaneously to parents with full-time childcare, and parents who have chosen childcare as their full-time vocation? Here is one of the things that is beginning to help me.

Desires: Give Yourself Space to Know What You Want

I realized that I was in rough shape when I could no longer say what I wanted. This happened on a small scale: I would find myself with a block of uninterrupted time, know that I was exhausted, and begin scrolling through restorative activities I normally enjoy. But none of them sounded appealing. Even getting myself upstairs to take a nap felt like too much work. I knew these were classic symptoms of depression. And it also happened on a large scale: I realized that I could no longer say what I wanted vocationally. Did I want to be Lucy’s exclusive caregiver, with enough breaks for me to recharge occasionally and give Jim time with her but no significant outside childcare? Did I want to home school her and go on learning adventures all over the city? Did I want to be the one to make our home inviting, to make it a place of welcome? Did I want to respect the dignity of daily tasks by not hiring them out to someone else? Did I want to write? Did I want to use my Ph.D.? Did I want to paint? I had feelings in response to each of those questions: guilt, fear, and anxiety. But not desire.

As I noticed this, I also noticed that I was afraid to know my desires because I was afraid they’d be impossible to meet, or that they would show I didn’t really want to be a mother after all. And I was afraid that knowing them would mean slavishly obeying.

My first assignment on the way to finding joy in this season of my life: do whatever it takes to hear your own desires. And realize that knowing you want something is not the same thing as pursuing it. My desires have no sense of responsibility or of reality; even before I was a mother, they did not limit themselves to twenty-four-hour days or sixty-minute hours, or respect my own need to eat or sleep. Once I know my desires, I will need to do the work of lining them up with reality, including the reality that Jim and I have brought a little girl into the world who depends for much of her health and gladness on us. But I cannot arbitrate between desires, or between desires and reality, if I do not know what each of those are.

It looks like there is going to be a Part IV. Next up: Figuring out what’s necessary.

A few weeks ago, Lucy got hold of the spout on the pot of the freshly-brewed coffee at church while Jim and I were getting ourselves decaf, and went from pottering about happily to grabbing my coat, screaming. Jim was the one who figured out what she’d done, and once he did we held her wrist under the stream of cold water in the drinking fountain for a few minutes. She stopped crying, and I gave the lower half of her fleece jacket sleeve a good soaking. By bedtime, amazingly, all that remained on her skin was a small pink zigzag mark. Before I put her down, I have been talking her through a summary of the day, to remind both of us where we are and where we have been. That evening, I asked her what she remembered about the day.

“Upup!” she said.
“That’s right. Upup watched you last night and put you to bed.” (My mom had watched her for Jim and me to go on a date to our favorite waffle restaurant.)
“Beh-beh!”
“Yeah, Daddy played a really fun game with you and the big Beh-beh.” (Lucy’s early Christmas present from my mom, with parental approval, is a huge teddy bear which, held up with its feet on the ground, is almost as tall as Jim. Lucy adores it with wholehearted abandon. In the mornings when she gets up, I say, “Do you want to go see Beh-beh?” and she gets a slow-growing, beatific grin and says in a low voice humming with gladness, “Beh-beh.” Jim had taken Beh-beh and hidden behind him and made him stalk into our bedroom, where Lucy was sitting on the bed. Being stalked by Beh-beh was the best thing that had happened to her all day.)
“—.” Lucy made a small noise that might have been “ouch” and seemed to be doing something with her hands (the lights were off).
“Yeah, you got that coffee spout open because Mommy and Daddy didn’t realize you could do it, and then you burned your arm, didn’t you. That hurt. Then we ran cold water on it and it felt a little better.” I finished the last song and picked her up to lay her in bed. “Du bist meine einzige Lucy, und ich hab dich ganz schrecklich lieb,” I said (“You are my only Lucy and I love you an awful lot.”)
“Dettich,” she said, repeating schrecklich (awful), which is usually the word she picks from that sentence. Then I told her I was looking forward to her waking up, and laid her in her crib. She was quiet, and then, as I stepped out of the room, she said, “Appy.”

In German, it is awkward to say “I’m looking forward to seeing you when you wake up.” Instead, what feels natural is to say Ich freue mich drauf, dass du aufwachst, which means “I’m looking forward to you waking up.”

Which is a partial lie. As a hybrid mother-writer-painter (I’m nicknaming myself, probably not originally, a “straddle-parent”), I am subject to the constant temptation of feeling that I am running out of time, that I don’t have enough child care, that I am not going to get anything meaningful done, either inside or outside the house (not the dishes; and not that painting commission, either). The running-out-of-time part of me is hoping, devoutly, that Lucy will sleep as long as possible; and this part of me groans inwardly when I hear her crowing Dadoo! FWA!! after only an hour and a half.

In her excellent epistolary memoir Great with Child, Beth Ann Fennelly writes of a study she read that examined, by survey, the self-satisfaction of three sets of mothers with two aspects of their performance: the quality of their work, and the quality of their mothering. The first group, mothers who were staying home full-time with their children, reported high satisfaction with themselves as mothers. The second group, mothers whose children were in full-time daycare, similarly reported high satisfaction with themselves as mothers, and also high satisfaction with themselves as workers. The third group, mothers whose children were in part-time or no childcare, and who were working from home, or working part-time, reported low satisfaction with themselves both as mothers and as workers. Fennelly’s interpretation of this study is that the part-time-working mothers are comparing themselves, as mothers, to the stay-at-home moms, and as workers, to the mothers working full-time with full-time child care; and of course they cannot be both at once. But they cannot bring themselves to give up either ideal, and so they fight constant feelings of failure and inadequacy.

I want to leave aside for the moment the question of the needs of children, and the ways in which professional childcare and/or a stay-at-home caregiving parent can or cannot successfully meet those needs. (Although, as an aside, the most interesting perspective on that debate that I have recently come across is the chapter “day care?” in Pamela Druckerman’s 2012 Bringing up Bébé. It points out two things. First is that there is a history of upper-middle-class prejudice against institutionalized daycare in the U.S., which is not founded entirely on facts (one-on-one nanny care can be as low quality as any institutional day care). Another is that, in France, the position of a crèche worker is highly sought-after and competitive, reasonably compensated, and requires specialized training; whereas in the U.S., childcare work is often considered unskilled, compensated poorly, and does not by law require any training at all. Druckerman concludes that these two factors combine to explain why even French mothers who are not working vie for crèche spots for their children, whereas American mothers who can afford to stay home tend to be skeptical of daycares.) But I said I wanted to leave aside the needs of children for the moment. I want to focus instead on the needs of parents, particularly parents who are (like me) considering slow-tracking their careers in order to spend significant time being involved in their children’s daytime lives; and most particularly ones who are (again like me) doing at least some of their work on a freelance basis, and possibly in their homes. (These parents still tend strongly to be mothers, and mothers are the ones with whom I have experience, and so I will speak largely from their perspective. But I suspect the psychological pressures that stay-at-home, part-time-working dads face have at least something in common with the ones I face. If you are such a dad or know one, I’d love to know what you think.)

We are a privileged group on several levels: we can afford not to work full-time; we do work that scales and will permit itself to be done part-time (my husband, for example, could not in this country hold a part-time version of his software development job); and if we are the freelance work-from-homers, we have work that can be done at flexible hours, in whatever location we choose. And yet, if the study Fennelly refers to is accurate, instead of feeling like the luckiest people alive, we spend hours of our days battling a chronic feeling of time-shortage, and struggle under the weight of feeling that we never do anything well. We (and by “we” I now mean myself, although you are welcome) struggle to be present when we are working (the horrible clock is ticking), or to be present when we are with our children (how long till the next period of sleep?). We struggle to count anything as enough—“real” stay-at-home moms would be doing craft projects or nature excursions with their two-year-olds; “real” writers would be getting paid/publishing books/having contact with the outside world. We frequently feel, simultaneously, that we need more time for whatever we are currently doing, if it is to be done well; and that we can’t bear to do it any longer because we are so distracted by the other thing. At worst, desire and guilt become so tangled up together that we lose track of what we even want to be doing, and muddle along in a haze of misery. And that’s just trying to balance child-raising and work; never mind housekeeping. Or friends. Or service to anyone outside our immediate family.

In spite of sacrificial levels of childcare from my mom, who is splitting her time between my brother and sister-in-law’s four kids and Jim’s and my one, I spent a stretch of this past fall in that kind of haze. A lot of that had to do with moving to a Portland, a city where I now know almost no one other than my family, even though I’ve spent years living there. Friends are medicine for the haze; they help me get perspective, and best of all, they build a shining mesh of connections that lights up my life and reminds me which things matter, and why. I have started to have a mesh in Oregon now; it grows awfully slowly, but it does grow if you let it. And it grows in the most unexpected places. The week Jim had to fly back to Durham for work and I was alone in the house, for example, I locked myself out. I was holding Lucy and had no phone. The sun was just setting. After walking around the house confirming that all the side and back doors were locked and the windows fastened shut, I headed over to our neighbors’ house. They have two daughters, one almost two, like Lucy, and one who, as it turned out when I knocked, had just that week celebrated her eighth birthday. I asked to borrow a phone to call my mom and ask whether she had any ideas for getting in (we had not yet given them spare keys, because the bag of spare keys had gone missing early in the move-in process). She was at my brother’s house and did have an idea (it involved her nephew, whom she hires for yardwork, and a two-story ladder). She drove over immediately, and once she got there, the unidentified key from my brother’s ring turned out to be to our house, and the nephew, who drove up shortly later, was sent home without a ladder adventure. But while we were waiting for her to get there, our neighbors fed me miso soup, rice, and a delicious chicken breaded with potato meal, with a little plate cut up perfectly for Lucy. Lucy, however, could not be bothered with food because she was too interested in the playmates and their toys. As I sat at the kid-sized table they have been using for family meals (because their toddler had started standing on her chair when they ate at the breakfast counter), I heard Lucy’s happy shrieks as she crawled through the long fabric tunnel in the playroom over the garage. We went home with a huge, helium-shaped red balloon that had a tiny, sweet-scented, cat-like creature stuffed with something dense, like sand, as a weight at its end. When we left for Asheville over a month later, the balloon was still going strong, standing like a sentry in the living room, in spite of much attention from a two-year-old (“Ba-BA!”).

After that, I remembered that I love baking, and discovered that Lucy does too, and that she is remarkably good at it for a not-yet-two-year-old. She can pour flour and liquids into a bowl without spilling. She can stir. We are working on the overpowering urge to stick her whole hand into the batter. But we made a yogurt cake together (a recipe from Bringing up Bébé) and I mis-doubled the recipe and had to add more liquids, so that we ended up with four loaves and took some to the neighbors. A few days later, they sent back butternut squash soup and homemade bread. We made banana bread and took it to the other neighbors, and they sent back a delighted message about baked goods and morning coffee. There are a few glowing threads in my Portland friend-mesh. Not very strong yet, but all the brighter for being the first.

In addition to friend-medicine, though, I have decided I need a short piece of self-help writing for the straddle-parent, who is staying at home with kids and working freelance. So I have begun to write one. This is the first half. The second is coming next week, I hope.

Foof! – Fuss (foot); almost always said with an exclamation point, while pointing, in a tone of delighted surprise
 
Faffee – Kaffee (coffee); said of any hot drink being poured (although see next entry), and of the hot pot as it makes sounds while heating the water
 
Dee! — tea/Tee; repeated with great delight when she is told something is not coffee
 
ammals – animals; my mom’s bin of animal hand puppets
 
Upup – Grandma (inherited from her oldest cousin Isaiah, who used it to mean “pick me up” and then, also, “grandma,” as became clear when he saw my mom a hundred feet away in a church sanctuary and wailed “UPUP!!!!” Lucy was introduced to her as Upup, and whenever whe get in a car, she asks, hopefully, “Upup?”
 
Bapa – Grandpa, Upups sidekick, and the one who can entertain her for half an hour at a time with an empty Talenti jar of rocks they’ve picked up on walks together. They take them out one by one, examine them, put them back, Lucy puts one in her mouth, and eventually she pulls her collar out from her neck and wants him to put them down her shirt, which he does; and they fill up the entire front of her shirt with smooth rocks. If she is wearing an open shirt, they eventually all fall out; if she is wearing a onesie, I sometimes still find a pebble or two when I change the next diaper.
 
Apoo – Apfel (apple); said of all round and fruitlike objects, of any size, from the decorative berries on bushes outside to the pumpkins on everyone’s front doorsteps; resistant to correction (“Apoo!” “Yes, that’s an orange!” “Apoooooo!”)
 
Baboo – the mystical union of bamboo, Blumen (flowers), Bäume (trees), Blätter (leaves), balloons, and other living plantlike things
 
Papa, Daddee, Dadoo – Jim. Used when pointing to his office door during the work day; when we hear his footsteps on the floor above us or on the stairs; when he clears his throat or coughs or talks during a meeting; when he flushes the toilet or runs the water or makes, really, any noise at all. (Dadoo also occasionally retains its earlier meaning of “friendly adult who I assume would take care of me if the need arose.”)
 
Mämmy – me, when I am away, or unavailable, or being spoken of in the third person; said with a sometimes-fake, sometimes-real frown, and in a tone of something between complaint and lament
 
Mama – me, when I am present and being directly addressed (as in bedtime, when she unzipped my sweatshirt partway, put her hand on my chest, and said “Mama!” To which, of course, the correct response was “Lulu!”
 
Dudu – Lulu; usually repeated when anyone has said anything particularly nice to her (like before naptime, when I tell her she is my only Lulu and I am glad she exists, and am looking forward to seeing her when she wakes up)
 
Achee – OK; I do not know how long she was saying this before I realized, finally, as I was putting her down for a nap, that I was ending my sentences with “…OK?” She was repeating back “Achee, achee, achee.”

This fall has been harder and more disorienting than I expected. One of its great gifts has been a painting commission from Ryan Spurrier for a prayer room he is designing (he is the Wesleyan minister at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). He wanted a piece that incorporated the United Methodist baptismal liturgy, and that evoked water. One of the great difficulties in being a freelance-everything is the breathtaking lack of any external structure. And I am one of those people who get things done if there is a deadline; and otherwise, well…

Therefore, having someone expecting a particular thing from me at a particular time was an absolute Godsend. Thanks, Ryan. You helped me get my art room in working order again, find my watercolors and gouache and brushes and calligraphy nibs and metallic inks, get a light on the table and a chair in front of it, and got me actually to sit myself down and make something. Thanks also to Jeremy Begbie for the commission (at Duke Divinity) that inspired Ryan to get in touch.

Here it is, in stages.

 
 

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

 
 

[This is a poem by Jane Kenyon that has meant a lot to me especially since Lucy was born. I did not anticipate how overwhelmingly mortal I would feel the instant I had a baby. I have been intending for a long time to write it out and put it on the nursery wall. You can find a print copy either in Jane Kenyon’s Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2007), or in Let Evening Come: Poems (Graywolf, 1990).]

“I’m going away forever,” Jim says, standing at the foot of the stairs and holding his travel mug of peppermint tea in one hand and the lid in the other hand (the mugs seal so well that the lid must be left off for a time if one wants to drink the tea in under three hours without scalding one’s tongue).
“Okay,” I say, half looking up from my novel. I have a cold and am giving myself permission to re-read my favorite Dorothy Sayers mysteries (the ones with Harriet Vane). “Have a nice life.”
“You too,” he says. “It’s been nice knowing you.”
“Mm-hm,” I say, turning back to my book.

He does this nearly every time he comes downstairs and goes back up (he is working from home, so there are many opportunities). It is the upshot of a conversation that was almost an argument, and would have been a fight if it had happened any later in the evening. The conversation happened after Lucy was asleep. Jim had gone to work out, and was getting back.
“Do you mind if I shower?” he asked.
“No,” I said, from my reading chair. I had asked him, however, to help me with planning the next day, which was an especially complicated one involving lots of packing Lucy up and taking her to different places. I felt the cold coming on and was feeling foggy-headed and wanted help thinking through the logistics. So when he did not come back down after the shower, I eventually went upstairs. I found him online, buying ham radio supplies.
“So, question.”
“Yeah?”
“Why do you ask whether I mind if you shower, and then after you shower, you disappear indefinitely?”
“If there is anyone in the room, I ask permission for doing anything. It is a nervous polite thing.”
I nodded, scrolling through the past. “That’s true. You do. You ask permission to go to the bathroom, even.”
“Yeah. It’s ridiculous.” He grinned.
“But it sounds like you don’t mean anything by it,” I said. “When you ask, I always think that you mean you are going to come back down afterwards.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Well, why else would you ask whether you can shower? You’re a grownup.”
“Yeah, like I said, it’s a nervous thing. I’m not really asking. I’m going to do it either way. But I’m checking in, giving you a chance to let me know if you want anything.”
“So what you’re really saying is ‘I’m taking off and if you want me you should speak now or you’ll have to come dig me out of the computer.’”
“What I’m really saying is ‘I’m getting the hell out of here. I’m leaving forever. This is it.’” He paused. “Wanna see the cool stuff I found? The Amazon reviews are so helpful. I got these awesome cheap electrical pliers, and everyone says they totally get the job done.”

Later on we still had a fight about the planning, but this part of the evening was fun. And it is one of those gifts that is keeping on giving. He’ll be down soon for lunch.

Last spring, I graduated for the last time in the foreseeable future. I have been going around collecting degrees for the last couple of decades, and each time I finish one, I feel like more of a beginner than when I started. Repetition might have taught me to expect this. Instead, I am surprised, again, to come to Oregon and feel more like a junior in high school than a Dr. Gehring.

One reason for this is the nature of knowledge: the more you gather of it, the less you realize you have. Another reason is that I did my doctoral work in a writerly way, reading slowly rather than broadly (except during exams). One of my committee members said, “You know, it’s interesting-—all the books on your lists are beautifully written.” Without realizing it, I had chosen my sources in part for the quality of their sentences. This is a fun way to do research, but it is not the way to arrive at the end feeling like an expert who has covered all possible angles.

Another reason is that two of the main things I am doing (helping Lucy grow up well, and writing) are things that do not care about academic degrees. Toddlers are oblivious (though Lucy did love the hat), and writers and their institutions are often actively suspicious of degrees. I will have to show that I can actually do good silly dances, appreciate the fascinatingness of red berries, and do a good job being patient with boxes of unrolled dental floss (or get them out of reach). I will have to write good sentences and put them together into good paragraphs and send them to magazines with cover letters that judiciously avoid mentioning what I’ve done with the past fifteen years of my life. I will have to start, again, at the beginning.

Maybe the most obvious reason I feel like a junior in high school is that that is what I was when I first lived in this state, and city, and house. My strongest memories here are the last year and a half of high school-—a time, mostly, of lostness. Until I met my one, dear friend Sandy, if people asked me who I hung out with, I scrambled to remember the names of my chemistry lab mates. I had joined the school at the beginning of junior year, moving from Germany and coming in so late that I missed the qualifying tests for honors English and spent a semester watching Monty Python on witches and penciling in the blanks in interminable packets of questions about minor details in The Scarlet Letter. If I succeeded at finding a group to sit with at lunch, I struggled to follow their conversations and then, sensing their irritation with my constant requests for information, lapsed into silent incomprehension. Who’s that? What’s that? What does that mean? How do you do that? I sounded pretty much like an American by accent, but American teenage life felt untranslatable to me. I hadn’t found my way much into listening to music, so I had only perfunctory familiarity even with the bands that were popular in Germany. But I could keep up a polite conversation about Roxette or Ace of Base; I knew the proper tone in which to mock David Hasselhoff, and what kind of social group you probably belonged to if you listened to ska. The Chili Peppers and Smashing Pumpkins and REM, however, meant nothing to me. And it was not forgivable to ask “who’s that band?” when “Losing My Religion” played during physics lab. Or to ask “what’s a no. 2 pencil?” when reading the instructions on my first Scantron multiple-choice test. Or to walk down the hall slowly, staring at the three numbers on the slip of paper the administrator had handed me, and have no idea how they were supposed to lead to an open locker.

The high school memories in this house mean that I have to make it a constant practice to remind myself that I know how to do some things. I will be able to find the café for the writers’ meetup. I will be able to make small talk if I visit a moms’ group. I will be able to negotiate with the daycare owner. I can make a joke and people may think it is funny. I know what Arnold Schwarzenegger means to Americans. I still like books better than music, read slowly, and struggle to keep up with the news. But even if most of them do not live in this city, I have friends here now. And they know all the things. One of them turns on music and we have dance parties in the kitchen (that one also knows all the Back to the Future movies by heart). One loves opera arias. One says that Sufjan Stevens sounds like the mental soundtrack for her brain, two of them just flew across the world to visit, another sends me playlists of German children’s music, and thanks to another one, I know the Velvet Underground is the favorite band of many epic indie groups.