Identification

While I was changing out of my Tyvek suit in the animal facility changing room this morning, I spent some time looking at my work ID. It was taken my first day of work, and I look really unbelievably terrible. The right side of my face was swollen because I had a wisdom tooth infection and I was dressed really awkwardly. Awkwardly normal. I was wearing a red cashmere sweater that R's sister had given me for Christmas the year before. And Khakis. I was in costume essentially. In the picture, I was trying to smile one of the big, beaming smiles I had been collecting on ID cards for years, but because of my swollen jaw, and in a bizarre attempt to straddle between propriety and sarcasm, I just look really uncomfortable.


I started working in the lab on the 6th of January, 2003. Back then I thought it was possible to live a dual existence - to have your job, your public persona and stacked on top of that your real life. While I was in the oh-so-delicate process of applying for the job (I'll have to get into that some other time), one of the selling points that my dad had given me was that I could still have all the time in the world I needed to work on my artwork - well, all the time in the world after 5pm. And it made sense, because really, what else would there be to do, and it wasn't like I was being particularly prolific in Ocean Grove. But when you work for my dad, its hard to treat your job like any other shift. It becomes your life. And his job had been a part of my life since I was a kid. Only now it was mine too. The more complicated thing about working for my dad, was justifying the fact that I had even been hired. (This is still complicated, but I care much, much less now) I was wholly and completely unqualified. No question about it, no maybes. I was a year out of school, and since then had done nothing really than work in a vintage kitchen store by the ocean, and fret about my future as an artist. So I worked late so I could get the overtime (because it turned out with those pesky taxes I was making less than I was at the vintage store), didn't take lunch, and I didn't joke much. Not so much because I was so serious about the job, but because I needed to prove that I deserved to be there as much as any other person there with a science degree and whose last name wasn't the same as the boss's. I felt that as long as I convince the people I worked with that I wasn't just hired because I am the P.I.'s (Principal Investigator) kid, my little self deceit would be defensible. That as long as I was convincing, it wouldn't matter that my real interests were on hold, because after all this was research.
And I was convincing, so convincing that I managed to believe it for a while. I registered for science classes, under the premise that I was going to go back to school and get a second bachelors degree so I could eventually get a masters in biology. I had every intention of doing so. But even as deluded as I was, I recognized that this would never, could never be the REAL goal. I was still artist. Whatever the hell that means.

Two and a half years later the same picture is still on my ID, along with my original title - Technical Aide. I am still not working (on my art) nearly enough, although what has changed in recent months is that it doesn't bother me so much any more. And really, thats why I started working in the lab in the first place - because I was totally disillusioned with art. Only then I thought I could rescue it from itself. Now, I think I am happy to let it be what it is. The new problem is figuring what the hell to do next.

Proof I Was Alive on Sunday

The Last Two Weeks

Woke up at 7 Sunday morning to inject the mice with Johana, feeling like I had fallen asleep with garbage in my mouth. I got home late the night before, by myself, tired, physically exhausted. I had felt waves of an impending cold all of Saturday night, and it continued into Sunday and into this morning. I have been going to bed far too late (for my standards anyways) and sleeping terribly. I wake up before the alarm, at about a quarter to five, groggy, with a sore throat and jaw (my wisdom teeth acting up again). My appetite has been seriously reduced, which is a strange sensation since I am normally always hungry. This has been going on for the past few weeks now, and its probably catching up to me and my body will soon collapse.

But its been a great couple of weeks. Let's see how long I can make it. In the meantime, welcome back Beef.

Old Air

This morning there was a thick, heavy fog - running through it was like treading through sludge and breathing was so labored, like breathing in someone else's old air*. But it was so beautiful. It almost reminded me of foggy mornings in Ocean Grove, except there was no ocean breeze to shift the moisture around every once in awhile. It was just like the lead apron they put on you when you get x-rays done at the dentists office.

*I hate this sensation. When r, (it never is anybody else who would be allowed to get this close, this intimate to my face) isn't wearing his glasses and we are laying there in bed and he comes in close so he can see me better I feel like my lungs are going to cave in. I feel guilty about it. I try and time my breathing so we take in oxygen at the same time, but it never works out right. I always end up getting a bit of his exhale and I start to panic. I start to picture negative air forming a vacuum in my chest cavity and all the cells caving in on themselves. Maybe it also has to do with the fact that when he's that close, I cant see him, and start to feel dizzy. So we can only see each other one at a time.

Other Evidence of Being a Loser

This morning while I was making my coffee at the Wawa's little coffee island, I did something amazing: I joked with a stranger. Kind of. It wasn't very good, and the timing was a little late - but the guy laughed! He had just made his coffee and for some reason was putting one of the flat white lids on it (instead of the black travel type) when a perfect stream of coffee came shooting out in an arch out of the little hole at the top of the lid. I laughed, he laughed. Then he said something about finishing off the romance with a little candle - which I didn't get, but quipped back, 'and you have an elegant little fountain there'. It was lame, so lame but I was losing time in the moment so I pushed it out. 'I can throw some coins in it and make a wish'. Mutual laughter, and I finished making my cup.

Now that I have actually written this down I see how pathetic this actually was. But it felt like such a victory!
Then I went back home, crawled back into bed with r and told him about it. We had a great morning laying in bed with our coffees telling eachother how we spent the day yesterday (since I hadn't seen him since the morning), until we started arguing about cleaning up. Nobody apologized, and the conflict was never really resolved. Its blown over by now, and it is thundering and lightening here in Philadelphia. I haven't been so happy to just be home, in our tiny apartment, doing domestic things like cleaning up, reading, bickering - in months. I definitely neeed to talk to strangers more often.

Irony

Felipe-in-2004
Originally uploaded by beefandsalt.

The roll of film that this picture was shot on has been to Argentina twice.

The first time was in 2001. That trip was saturated with detention centers, guerilla attacks, justice and justification. Death. Disappearances. Complicity. My trip was steeped with the aura of the early 80's - I was drawing it out everyone I met, out of all my family members.

And nobody liked being reminded of that time, that stain in their history. One night in 1976 the military took over the government and initiated what became known as the Reign of Terror. The now infamous "disappearances" began, the fear started to set in.

What shocked me at the time was the phrase that I kept hearing over and over: It had to be done. And for many, for those who weren't students or activists at the time, who were older, had families, it was what had to be done. Because what they were being faced with was much worse than the tug on their conscience that a young person had gone missing, his apartment raided by an agent in an unmarked Ford Falcon. They were afraid that the bus they were going to take to work that morning would be the target of bomb attack. Afraid of the bombs that might be laying in wait at the schools of their son. That was the situation then, before the military coup, a guerilla war waged in the name of the people, against the people.

I am reminded of this because first, of course, the bombings in London last week. But really because yesterday I found myself missing my grandfather.
The photo was taken in 2004, only a few months before he passed away. In 2001, I never finished the roll, so I rolled it back in its cassette to use later. The irony is, that it was the same roll I happened to take out of the crisper to bring with me in 2004, on a trip that was exclusively about family, quiet, revisiting the margins of time around the war.

All of the frames were double exposed, except for this one. Aesthetically, they are stunning images, but I can’t bring myself to look at them for too long. The sense of outrage is too great, too concise to be coupled with something as complex as the lives of the living.

Fireworks

Every year I think that I kind of start to understand fireworks a little better, but this year was a step backwards in my progress. In the past, I have always just eased my anxious boredom at the 4th of July with the knowledge that they make r so happy. Unbelievably happy. I have tried so hard to find something new in them, something interesting, or jesus, just to enjoy the pretty patterns. Usually, at least in the past couple of years, its worked. But this year I could not stop thinking that this is the same fucking thing we saw the year before and the year before that. I wanted to go home. I was hating the fact that they didn't start until 11:15 and knowing that we wouldn't get to the car until at least 12:30. I wasn't tired, but I wanted to go to bed so I could get up at 5 the next morning and escape into my run. I was angry at the fireworks for making me angry at r for caring so damn much about them. Jealousy? Perhaps.

But it wasn't the fireworks fault. Or r's. It was mine. Because at that moment I was coming to understand that my days for the past few months have consisted of me trying to find small moments of escape. For example, I discovered that the 30 second walk to the bathroom at work is just enough for a snippet of fantasy. The trip to the animal facility is slightly longer, so it gives a little more time for elaboration. But nothing beats the sometimes solid 2 hours of being totally in my head while I run.

This is why I was so pissed. Because life, my admittedly good life, was getting in the way of my daydreaming.