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My senior year of high school, I had a typical very-cool-not-like-the-other-teachers English teacher (who I thought was just so dorky-hot, DUH). He would affirm the way I was playing around with my writing which often looked like literally smashing words together and making them up because I liked it. It was most definitely not grammatically correct, but he simply encouraged it and didn’t qualify that what I was doing was “wrong”. Such a small act was so revolutionary. The language I would use to describe that act now is he was honoring my intuition, something I was wildly unused to in my Evangelical Purity Culture do-it-all-right-all-now mindset. I was so hungry for that in even the smallest of ways. He also didn’t make us take stupid tests and let us watch Stranger than Fiction and 10 Things I Hate About You in class (both Maggie Gyllenhaal and Julia Stiles became crushes and aspirations with their unbridled self-confidence and tiny unbra-ed boobs). So yeah - how can my little burgeoning mind not have a teacher-crush? We had these packets of poetry and through that I was introduced to a poem called Corners by Stephen Dunn. It has since become a pivotal piece in my personal canon. The poem describes what the author calls a “corner person”. A corner person exists “in corners at parties hoping for someone who knew the virtue of both distance and close quarters, someone with a corner person’s taste for intimacy, hard won, rising out shyness and desire.” Reading that, I resolutely decided that above an oldest sibling, above an Aquarius, above a dancer or Bible study fanatic or any other personality qualification I had in my vocabulary at the time - I was a corner person. I have always been someone who is concerned with earning what is given me. I want to earn the proper amount deserved when I work - no more, no less. I want to earn your respect. I want to earn your affection. I want to know that I can trust it. I need it to have teeth, merit. Hard-won love has been a consistent meter I hold up to measure, for better or worse. I am skeptical of things that seem too easily given. I am skeptical of people that say I love you too quickly because I am unsure if they know what that love entails - if they are aware of the full spectrum of flaws before them. One reason I have been hesitant to get married to my partner whom I love wholeheartedly is my long-held knee-jerk reaction to a celebration for young love. Our celebrations for youth seem to out-weigh the celebrations for love that has lasted ages. And why in the first place elevate coupled love so much more than communal love, familial love, friend-love which often seem like more lasting loves anyways. ***** I grew up in coastal Southern California, straddling Los Angeles County and Orange County, becoming familiar with two entirely different places - one: expansive and diverse and overwhelming; the other: widely concerned with maintaining aesthetic sameness, a lulling comfort of its own sort. Many people would say that this is an easy place to live. At least, it’s a desirable place to live. It’s not easy as far as insane rent prices, gas prices and overall cost of living prices goes. It’s not easy that communities have been pushed out by gentrification and even kids from middle class families can’t buy houses near their parents. It’s not easy that fire season decimates livelihoods and homes every single year and gets worse because we don’t listen to indigenous wisdom. That’s not easy at all. But people migrate here for the weather. And the dreamers come to LA. I have met multiple people who have moved here from elsewhere so content to live in a tiny expensive apartment just to be by the beach. I’ve always been curious of these people. Envious, even. So content with broad sand and sea water. Even if that sea water is polluted by the massive port nearby. Or populated by tar-balls, residue from the oil wells a mile off the coast. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to really understand the allure of it because this was my landscape growing up. Some might call that spoiled, and maybe it is. I never really felt connected to Southern California. My sister and I were walking back from the bay in Long Beach and we were talking about how it felt so strange that we are from here - the self titled “Aquatic Capital of America”, yet we never learned to surf or kite-surf, we didn’t swim much in the ocean or do Junior Lifeguards like so many kids around us did in the summers. It wasn’t a part of our family culture to do much more at the beach other than sit on the sand and dip our toes in. I don’t think that makes us or anyone like us less of this place, it just makes us feel a bit foreign in our own hometown. ***** I have always felt a deep connection to the Midwest. My grandmother grew up in a tiny Dutch town in Iowa. Maybe it is because my mom spent all of her childhood and adolescent summers there, she loved it so much more than California and I must have inherited and absorbed that. Maybe it’s because it felt more intimate than where I lived - neighbors knew each other, everyone went to the summer festivals, the weather felt like something everyone was aware of, things felt slower. Last summer, the two non-family friends I spent time with the most got me out to the beach more than I had in my adult life. They made it a point to go as often as possible. They would be leaving LA next year and wanted to soak up being next to the coast as much as possible. They taught me to really body-surf for the first time - it was exhilarating! People describe surfing as a high of some sort, and I started to understand an inkling of why that is. Learning to read and catching the waves even in this small way does something really nice to your brain. You begin to play. I asked Meg and Jesse if they’d always loved the beach and the ocean like this and Jesse answered that he realized that he had grown up his whole life so close to the ocean and never enjoyed it like this before. And now that he was about to leave, he wanted to make sure to go as much as possible. To enjoy it for what it is. I’m grateful they guided me into my own resurgence of loving the Pacific Ocean, realizing the privilege of being so close to fresh air, expansive water, saltiness. It was a turning point for reexamining my constant dissatisfactions and critiques of this place. I am not content here because I choose to not be content here. It doesn’t have to be my favorite city or people or climate, but I am here. And I am from here. ***** I dearly miss the Midwest. I miss the Great Lakes. I miss the seasons. I miss summer thunderstorms. I miss the headiness of a place with weather. I miss the intoxicating feeling of that much-anticipated First Day of Spring. Nothing can replace that. You can’t just spend the whole winter in a sun-soaked place and show up in Chicago on the First Day of Spring, say “Hey, I’m back and I’m here for Spring, baby!” and expect to feel the same way. You have to earn it. And that’s maybe a reason why I like it so much. Your good days of weather feel earned. In Long Beach, the average temperature is 75 and sunny. It literally has one of the “best” climates in the country. Being someone who has spent the past 8 or so years equally divided between these two places has me attuned to a climate-induced spectrum of feelings. When I came back here for the first time after living in the Chicago area, it felt strange to have no more changing of the seasons. Don’t get me wrong, I loved visiting in the dead of winter. It was a glorious respite from the relentless cold and gray. But actually living here again, the 75-and-sunnyness started to make me feel numb. My internal clock felt off. There was no communal celebration or commiseration of the weather. I’ve always felt a kind of true awkwardness about being from here. I was born and raised in Long Beach pretty much my whole life, but I had a very “privatized” experience. Until age 12 we lived in neighboring Huntington Beach on a little suburbic island (a literal island). We then moved to Long Beach to a gated community on a hill. I went to private school my whole life - first a Catholic elementary school, and then a historically Dutch Christian middle and high school more inland. Going to private school usually means your school friends aren’t your neighbors, and that inevitably means your neighbors aren’t really your friends. My life existed in these concentric bubbles and I never really engaged with Long Beach as a place, as a whole. I think about this passage from Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett when I think about my relation not only to Long Beach, but to familial national heritage which I feel equally so attuned to and so alienated from: “If you are not from a particular place the history of that particular place will dwell inside you differently to how it dwells within those people who are from that particular place. Your connection to certain events that define the history of a particular place is not straightforward because none of your ancestors were in any way involved or affected by those events. You have no stories that relate and compare, you have no narrative to inherit and run with, and all the names are strange ones that mean nothing to you at all. And it’s as if the history of a particular place knows all about this blankness you contain. Consequently if you are not from a particular place you will always be vulnerable for the reason that it doesn’t matter how many years you have lived there you will never have a side of the story; nothing with which you can hold the full force of the history of a particular place at bay. And so it comes at you directly, right through the softly padding soles of your feet, battering up throughout your body, before unpacking its clamoring store of images in the clear open spaces of your mind. Opening out at last; out, out, out. And shimmered across the pale expanse of a flat defenseless sky. All the names mean nothing to you, and your name means nothing to them.” - Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond
My great-grandparents immigrated to San Pedro (a port-town directly next to Long Beach) from Croatia and I had the privilege of knowing my great-grandmother for 20 years of my life and our identification growing up being of Yugoslavian (Croatian) heritage felt so present and so deep. We visited Croatia with her for the first time when I was 15 in 2006 and my sisters and I spouted off to everyone “We are Croatian! We are Croatian!” with such pride. Proud to be connected to our Noni and this place in this way. In 2019, I am nearly 30, and our whole family did another trip after my great-grandmother has passed. This time I had such a stark feeling that I was not Croatian. I was distinctly not Croatian. I knew nothing of this language, of this culture. I knew the food from my grandmother’s cooking, and habits and images of hers, but that was it. I knew Noni’s Croatia, which was really Noni’s Vis, the tiny isolated island she grew up on. I became embarrassed of my appalling lack of knowledge of this place, other than the fragments I had gathered over the years. I have been thinking so much about the American predicament of nationalism and heritage and fragmentation and melting pot mentality and all of it. During that trip I really came to accept how American I was. As Americans abroad especially we want to dissociate ourselves from being American. We are embarrassed. We aren’t like those Americans. But aren’t we? And aren’t we not? This is being American - this confusing place of muddled lineage. Some people can trace their family history back multiple generations. Many people have been robbed of such historic knowledge. And everyone is trying to piece together what is means to be “of this country”. I made a decision somewhat unconsciously to try to internally identify myself as truly American - no qualifications, because that is what I am. Not because of immense pride in everything this country does. Not as blind patriotism. Not because I even particularly want to. Just because it is fact. I am not a-cultural. America is not a-cultural. I am equally complicit in its problems, as well as a tiny part of the hopefulness of its future. And it’s time that I started looking at it not just for its flaws, but also for its uniqueness, its beauties, its great thinkers and creators and change-makers. ***** A thing I really love about where I’m from, and something I had taken for granted, is the confidence that the sun will make an appearance eventually at some point in the day. It must. It doesn’t matter if the sun hasn’t shown its face show all day, it will most assuredly peak out at least an hour before sunset for it’s grand performance. It’s too egotistical not to. This is the agreement between the Sun and Southern California. Some kind of deal was made amongst the gods in ancient times that the god above what is now Southern California won rights to the most sunlight in all the Land. This did not set me up well for living in a place like the Midwest. In the Midwest, you wake up in the morning, you look out the window, you feel the air - that is how the whole rest of the day will look. No sun in the morning? No sun for that whole day. The weather might change to incorporate rain or snow or some other form of climactic dramatics - but it most certainly won’t be warmer or sunnier. So many days in Chicago I made the programmed and woeful mistake of assuming that though the day started out cold and overcast, I didn’t have to dress as warmly because it would surely heat up. Spoiler: It did not. I made the decision 3 years ago to move back to Southern California to be closer to family again. I wasn’t infatuated with a new relationship, I didn’t have a career keeping me tied there. I did, though, have nearly all of my community there, and that’s what made it so very hard of a decision to make. It was the first time in my life I was making a move devoid of a desire to escape. I was, in fact, feeling like I could live the rest of my days in that very same perfect apartment, working at that very same perfect restaurant, pal-ing around with that very same expanding artistic community and be so blissfully happy. But I felt I needed to make this move then or it might be too late. I am so grateful I made that decision, I’ve been able to reconnect with my family in the most meaningful of ways, doing local daily life near them rather than hastened trips here and there. Though my family can be quite overwhelming and the amount of dinner parties feels like a part-time job, I feel like an integral part of them again, and I am re-learning this place where I was raised. I am learning to see my home as a place I can love. ***** I did a poll a while ago asking for unpopular opinions, and it was wildly entertaining. 99% of them were of things people disliked. “Ketchup is gross”. “I don’t like dogs”. “The Beatles weren’t even good”. “The Lord of the Rings sucks”. “Friends is an awful TV show”. I love when we feel like we can express that we too hate something that seemingly everyone else fawns over. It’s relieving and it can be fun. But I am wondering why that is. Why is it easier to express our hate than our love? Is it because admitting love, or even ardent like, of something leaves us more vulnerable? Disdain is an armor of apathy, a badge of coolness to stick on our faux-leather jackets (because leather is not cool). Not-hating is less definitive than despising. The posture feels different. The grammar invites different answers. As I am getting older, these skepticisms, this need for hard-won things above all is getting softer. There seems more room for subtlety. I am grateful. It is hard to carry around constant skepticism. I think young love is beautiful to celebrate! I admire people who can say I love you so quickly and so readily. I don’t even mind going to a crowded beach anymore (too much). And I am learning to love this kooky place that is technically my home. In one of my favorite films, Before Sunset, the main characters who are one-time young lovers from 10 years ago meet up again by-chance in their 30s and walk around Paris for one day discussing ideas and the ways they’ve changed since they were wide-eyed 23 year olds. I relate so strongly to Celine when she says: “I always feel this pressure of being a strong and independent icon of womanhood, and without making it look like my whole life is revolving around some guy. But loving someone, and being loved means so much to me. We always make fun of it and stuff. But isn't everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?”
Often times we have an instinct to dislike because we are unfamiliar. Other times we dislike because we are too familiar. Or so we think. In Valarie Kaur’s book See No Stranger, she opens by saying, “Wonder is where love begins, but the failure to wonder is the beginning of violence”. I had a professor say once off-handedly, though it stuck: “If anyone says they have seen something already, they haven’t really seen”. I wonder if so much of my dislike and distaste is because I have not put in the effort to really observe and to know. I have already told myself I have seen it and I do not like it. But maybe I am just intimidated by what I don’t know. I am intimidated by the cute skater kids, the surfers, the people who are so happy to just be living here. I complain about the lack of “weather”, but Dusty reminded me that there is in fact so many changes here, they’re just more subtle and you have to pay more attention. The poet David Whyte writes: Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. … To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings.
Dramatic is right. I have been acting mighty dramatic claiming three is no depth here. That all is ease and same-ness. I would not say that had I been paying attention. As Whyte says: “Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity”. ***** I think often about Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In the book, Marco Polo is regaling Kublai Khan of all of his travels and describing in depth each city he has seen and spent time in. Each city is entirely varied and has its own unique characteristics. At the end of the book, Marco Polo and Khan have a final conversation: “There is still one of which you never speak.' Marco Polo bowed his head. 'Venice,' the Khan said. Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?' The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.' And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”
There are as many ways to see a city, a place, as there are people. So I guess I must be on to having some fun about it - this must be the place,
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