An Oakland Girl in the World
Struck me as though
we were all just trying
to hold it together—
our whole lives
accumulated
into pinched expressions,
hands on the knees,
the bit of hair
dented from sleep.
Fumbling for the phone
as it buzzes
in pockets
we can’t reach,
the bowels of purse
we carry like a cave
under ourselves—
“I don’t know what half this shit is anymore”
we’ll say with a half-laugh
as the semis circle
and the train bullets on.
I am not a waitress anymore.
It feels weird to say, weirder than I’d expected. I changed my Facebook status today, from “Works at” to “Has worked at,” and it was like breaking up with someone—the finality of it, at the top of your profile: “so I guess this is it.”
I am not a waitress anymore.
I never really think of it as a core part of who I am. You know, when you think of your life, all the components that make up that person you are and that life you muddle through, “waitress” is never at the top of the list. Or even close to the top. But the truth is, I’ve been doing it for a long time. Ten years. Always an ends to a means, something I fell into, never part of my self-definition. It’s been that thing that happens while you’re making other plans—somewhere, when I wasn’t looking, waitressing became a central part of my life, who I am.
So it feels weird to think I’m no longer a waitress.
I remember hearing that in French culture people don’t begin cocktail conversations but asking what a person does for a living (we Americans love to endow the French with enlightened qualities we have no real way of substantiating)—they talk about, I suppose, far more cultured and important things, the substance of a person, what they think and feel and believe in. I was thirteen, in a French A class I ended up dropping out of, when I heard this, and I’ve remembered it, sometimes try to play a game with myself where I meet someone and have to engage in that chit-chat and try not to ask them what they do. I never last long.
And what will I say now? Now that I’m not a waitress?
It was strange to leave, stranger than I’d expected. Surreal. I love the place I’ve worked the last year and a half—I love the food and the people and the vibe and the money and how close it is to my apartment and how I can wear whatever I want and listen to good music and bullshit with my tables like they were my friends. So I knew it would be hard to leave such a good gig.
I sat on the back patio on my last night—which didn’t feel like a last night but just another night—and two more people told me how awesome they thought my moving was, how bad-ass and brave, and I told them how it felt neither bad-ass nor brave, just really fucking surreal. They’d said at menu meeting how much they’d miss me, how they knew I’d do great things, and they said it again in the card they gave me later, candles and a fancy ice-cream cake, at the 12:30 at night, when I blushed and ate two pieces and felt sick.
People gave me hugs and loved on me and were unbelievably sweet and I tried my best to soak it all in, but it still felt surreal. I basked in the love and the dimming heat of the pizza oven, and then I walked out to my car. Alone. Because leaving is like that.
I went home and threw out all my wine notes. I took out my wine key and tossed my apron on the floor. It still felt like something I needed, something I would pick up in a day or two, sauce stains and all, and tie back on. It didn’t feel unnecessary yet, like a house key after you’ve moved. Because leaving is like that.
So I’m not a waitress anymore. I guess that makes me a writer. Or just unemployed. (Which could be the same thing.) I’m not sure what it makes me. It definitely doesn’t make me French. For now it’s just surreal and strange and much sadder than I’d expected.
Because leaving is like that too.
So I’ve started up on the going-through-boxes bit of moving: digging up, spreading out, wrenching off dusty lids and getting elbow-deep in scraps of memories—you know, the “ugh” of the to-do list. Not so much because it’s tedious and time-consuming, but more because of what it opens, draws you back into—old mix tapes and yellowed papers and skinny sheets of photo negatives, the cluttered corners of your own life.
So I brew a phat cup of coffee and put on a song that seems fitting (even if it’s just the shitty YouTube version) and let the confetti of my life explode across the bedroom floor.
It’s a kind of Memory Lane without street patterns or building numbers (and so in that way, kind of like Phnom Penh itself)—just a hodgepodge of unordered relics and artifacts. Memories are one thing, because you can distort them, whether you mean to or not; you can warp them over time, into what you want them to be or need them to be. The actual physical crap you accumulate is more like the facts—the hard, plastic facts, an old bedside clock covered in stickers—of what your life is and has been. If an autobiography is the facts, and a memoir is the memories (and thus inherently flawed, and those flaws often telling us more than the facts), then my room and my life have turned into an explosion of upturned facts, mini-autobiographies presented non-sequentially, with just a dusty trail of memory to string together any narrative meaning.
And you start to wonder, from an anthropological standpoint, what your life would look like to someone, if all they had to look at were your possessions. (I think there was actually an MTV dating show with that as the premise, and I’m embarrassed that I know that.) But this is more than just your possessions—the things you’ve saved. They tell a kind of story, it seems, about you, one that you probably couldn’t tell yourself—one that you’re probably only vaguely aware exists.
Old fake ID, never once used to drink, only to get into shows.
Sketch by an old ex-boyfriend, found in a notepad
Show flier, and about 100 old Gilman cards. #scenecred
Second print piece I ever published, in August 2000.
New Kids On The Block newsletter I self-published back in the 2nd grade. Note the rub-on letters. #scenecred
45-page novella I wrote in the 4th grade, about little girls who had a secret club.
Mountain o' notebooks, zines, poems, etc.
And I think if you looked at it, without knowing me, you’d think, “Holy shit, this girl loves to write.” Cause that’s what I thought—surprised by it, startled like an animal in the lights of it, the reams of evidence—which I guess goes to show you how little you can know yourself. Like I’d forgotten, you know, how much writing has always been with me: the poetry and the zines and the pseudo-chapter books and the stories I dictated to my dad before I even knew how to write, that he transcribed for me and I somehow saved, in a dusty old box all these years later.
It’s kind of astounding, the sheer volume, and that some of the lines strike me as good. Really good. As in, “Holy shit, I wrote that!” It’s been a curious experience, like viewing my life from the outside, and it’s caused me to ask myself: Why? Where does this all come from? And the truth is, I couldn’t tell you why I write, where this need in me comes from, anymore than I can tell you why I travel. I’ve read great essays on these topics, even tried to write a few myself, but in my most honest of moments, I have to admit that I have no idea why, except that there’s that thing in me “that will not be still.”
So I guess you could say that digging out all this crap has helped to remind me of who I am, the fact of who I am (which might be different from what I tell myself)—that I didn’t just make this up, that I really have always wanted to write. And more than that: I’ve always written. Funny, that I’d have needed all this evidence to remind me.
But then there’s reality, which is that you can’t hang on to everything, save all these Xeroxs and yellow legal pads and notebooks that you really only ever go through when you move. It’s too much to possibly ever read, and besides, I’m trying to avoid the whole storage unit thing. So I set up two piles, the larger of which goes into the recycling bin, and I sift through and save the gems and take my own little stroll through Memory Lane.
You can all blame Emily.
I sat on the sofa of my brother’s living room. It was a few weeks ago; his wife Emily was still pregnant (Ethan John was born August 20th!). We were drinking tea and chatting, talking about my Big Move. They were asking me the questions people ask: logistics, money, “How will you support yourself?” I was running through my litany of answers, a hustle that involves waiting tables five days a week, saving, scrounging, selling off my worldly possessions, and generally be stressed as shit.
“Why don’t you fundraise?” Emily asked simply.
My shoulders raised as every muscle in me cringed. “You mean like, ‘I’m running a marathon for charity, please donate’?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” I took a deep breath and tried to articulate the crunch in my stomach. “I’m not doing anything for a particular cause. I mean, I’m moving to Phnom Penh to write a book, but it’s not like a charity cause where money is going to a particular place.”
Emily shrugged, unconvinced.
“And,” I admitted, “I hate asking for money. I hate asking for help in general.”
“But you don’t have to think of that way. There are lots of people who’d love to help you pursue your dream.”
I looked down, embarrassed, though I wasn’t sure why. “Like who?”
“Like me!” she exclaimed. “People that will never get a chance to do what you’re doing.” She looked down at her monumental belly and smiled back up at me.
So the seed was planted. So I’m swallowing my pride and my shame and my general co-dependence, and letting people support me. If they want.
I launched a campaign today on the fundraising site IndieGoGo. Here’s the link, and here’s how it works:
IndieGoGo allows people to create campaigns and generate funding. You create giving levels and rewards, as well as a goal amount and timeline. They take a small cut, the percentage of which depends on whether you reach your funding goal or not.
I liked the idea of IndieGoGo because it’s a relatively non-intrusive way of fundraising. The idea of actually asking for support directly makes me recoil, but this feels somehow less smarmy.
Because really, it’s not about the money. (I mean it is, but not my hesitations.) It’s about asking for support, and letting people give it. My imminent move abroad has already pushed me into all sorts of uncomfortable positions. I, the girl who hasn’t had a birthday party in over a decade, is having a going-away BBQ. I’m having an official last day at work—another first—and actually letting people know about it. And, instead of working myself into the ground so I can scrimp and save and scrape my pennies together, I’m reaching out. I’m scaling back on work so that I can do what feels more important: spending time with my friends and family, soaking in my sweet-ass life here.
I refuse to take responsibility for this leap of faith or this new-found semblance of humility. Instead, I blame Emily.
A Phnom Penh friend posted this video on Facebook. I’ve watched it a few times through; amidst the deluge of moving anxiety dreams and before-I-go to-do’s, it’s been a nice way to pause—a kind of moment of stillness, a stand-in for the meditation I’ve been entirely too busy to do.
So of course it’s a terribly idealized depiction of the city. (“What did they did with all the rubbish?” one person commented.) But I have to say that there were moments there that kind of felt like this—riding in a tuk-tuk at night, when the city was still, half-asleep with a cool breeze off the river, and it felt magical and precious and like home in a way you couldn’t quite explain.
It’s good to be reminded of that, even if the moments were fleeting and only one side of what it felt like to be there, live there—good because the move is getting close and I’m starting to stress.
I’ve been waking up unrested, unsettled from tangles of intense dreams, catastrophes that prohibit me moving: car accidents, robberies, deaths, pregnancy. In my waking mind, I don’t feel that worried, am still consumed with the day-to-day’s of a life that doesn’t feel like it’s ending. Except that I’ve started to stress about money. Money’s an easy thing to stress about—it’s measurable, tangible, far easier to stress about than the big blank horizon of unknowns.
“You’re still so young,” a friend told me over dinner. “Even if you go out there and it all falls through, and you have to come back and start over in a year, you still won’t be 30 yet.”
“I know,” I replied, nodding. I’d given myself the same rationalization.
“But,” she smiled, “I don’t think that’s gonna happen.”
I sighed. “Me neither. And that’s what really scares me.”
Didn't take a picture of The Keeper. Though he apparently doesn't mind. So here's a Flickr photo instead
His shirt flapped open in the breeze. The stomach was hard, muscles like little knots and skin tough as old leather. Cargo pants and sandals, not-quite-Birkenstocks. Eyes as spooky-clear and sharp as the river water, blazing from behind a scraggle of hair: shoulder-length gray and a light-socket beard that seemed reminiscent of those old miner photos, made you wonder if he wasn’t the descendant of some wayward band of them, a man born into the wrong era, or the last living vestige of an era that’s dying, been dying, might already be dead.
“He’s a dyin bread, for sure,” Alicia said as we tromped over the dirt path, stepping sideways so our worn old sneakers wouldn’t skid us into patches of poison oak. “Like a real-life troll gate keeper.”
Backpacks and coolers and limp plastic flotation devices—we were rolling 22-deep, a smattering of tattoos and a trail of cigarette smoke rode up from Oakland for an annual camping trip.
I could glimpse the river from the path: slick green between these flat, broad boulders, like a long line of really crooked molars. It was hot—Northern California hot, which isn’t really that hot—and each spot I saw along that Yuba River looked perfect, picturesque, a postcard of Sierra-Foothills pristine.
“The best spot is further down,” Chummy called back. “But we gotta to pay The Keeper.” And he smiled at the joke and people called out “Keeee-per” and we laughed.
“It’s the OG dude,” they’d explained, “that’s got one of the best swimming spots on the river on his property. There’s a fence and shit, a sign telling you you’re on private property, but you keep walking down and you get to this shack he built down there, where he lives and is always kinda hanging out. And you give him a couple beers or some weed or something, and listen to him talk for awhile, and he lets you pass.”
“I once took a photo of him,” Matt had said, “that I was gonna mail him, to some PO Box he’s got somewhere. I never did,” shrugged, “but he wrote the address down on one of those discharge papers they give you in jail—you know, we’re they’ve written down everything you have in your pockets and shit. It was all like: ‘$1.17 in change, a bus ticket, a pint of gin…’ Homeboy’d just gotten out of the drunk tank like the night before.”
“That guy is cool as shit,” Moe’d added, grinning. “The Keeper.”
And we tromped and skidded down, and sure enough: a wooden shack and the sharp glare off a tin roof and a gang of chickens clucking and a grizzlied old man standing in a semi-squat hollering at it all.
It seemed like a continuous stream of somewhat-intelligible drunk babble that we’d happened to walk in on—I could imagine him going on and on, with or without an audience, talking to himself and the chickens and the rocks and the river that didn’t ever stop flowing either.
“See that there,” pointed to a little fenced-in patch of green, “I call that My Feeble Attempt To Grow Something,” and yowled in laughter. A rooster yodeled back, as though in response. “Here you can hear the roosters crow all day long, yep. I been here, watching this tryin to grow—” pointed at the green again “—and haven’t left in damn near three weeks. Just had some people passin through to give me a few beers and some LSD from time to time and that’s all I need to live, you know what I’m sayin?”
Sadie opened her bag and handed him a few cold beers.
“Well alright, alright,” The Keeper said, nodding. “You are officially no longer tourists, you are guests, welcome. The only rules are that you bring back your cans and that you remember to come back, cause—” a pause here “—if you didn’t, it’d break my heart.”
“Yessir!”
“Keep coming back, it works!” The Keeper called out and laughed as we shuffled by. “And be careful on the rocks, watch your step—these are the most difficult steps you might take. Twelve steps, my own twelve steps,” and howled again in laughter, a not-quite-crazy kind of laughter that got swallowed by the rocks and the river and passing of the river, as we marched on to our swimming spot.
Feedback from my workshop with Tim Cahill, featuring a personalized note to Jim Benning (World Hum) #donthatemecauseyouaintme
I spent the last few days on the greener, cleaner side of bridge in Corte Madera, at the 20th Annual Book Passage Travel and Food Writers and Photographers Conference, AKA “summer camp for travel writers.” AKA “the perfect book end before I launch into the next chapter.”
The conference and the Book Passage bookstore in which it’s held occupy a special place in my heart: it was where Things Began for me. Or at least this blog.
Two years ago, I walked in to the conference, unsure and on a whim. I’d heard about it only the week before; it was expensive but I decided fuck it—it couldn’t hurt. I’d been getting my feet wet in travel writing doing an editorial internship for NileGuide, but was largely feeling lost with it. All I had was this hunch that there was more for me in it, that I loved the two things—writing and travel—not to give it a shot.
I left the conference buzzing with inspiration, and something like a sense of direction, the idea that I wanted to write first-person narrative. It’d been a long time since I’d felt that excited about my own writing. A few weeks later, I started this blog.
I wanted to do the conference a second time for one main reason: to get into Tim Cahill’s workshop.
“If you want to write well,” Spud Hilton told me at an event last year, holding up a copy of Tim’s Hold The Enlightenment, “just buy this book and study it.” I did. I read it like a textbook, scribbling notes on the structure and craft of each piece. I read it in lieu of grad school.
After my experience with Glimpse, I’ve been convinced I need more constructive criticism. I’ve been craving and seeking workshops. So once again, I said fuck it and coughed up the conference fee—it couldn’t hurt.
So I got into the workshop and it was great. I even got a copy of my piece back with notes from Tim (see photo), which I plan to frame (or at least put up on the refrigerator). And everyone in the workshop was great—gracious and respectful and enthusiastic, and there weren’t any big egos bashing about. I think I may have even made a few new friends.
I got a chance to hang out with writers I respect and editors I want to write for and editors I’d like to write for again. I got to drink absurd amounts of coffee and eat surprisingly decent food and sit on the patio beside Mount Tam and talk travel and talk writing and talk bullshit and witness a bizarre sighting involving a Segway. It was all fun and inspiring and motivating and really really great.
But more than anything, being at Book Passage again made me think about how far I’ve come in two years—all that’s changed and all that will change.
It often doesn’t feel like I’m going anywhere with my writing. I send queries I never hear back from, labor for months over the few articles I do get published. But being back there reminded me that, yes, there’s been progress in the last two years. It may not be as fast or dramatic as I’d like, but there’s still slow-but-steady movement in the right direction. Two years ago, I didn’t even have a piece to submit to Tim’s workshop, let alone something that would land me a seat in it.
My life is also different. Two years ago, I was still waiting tables full time; the idea that I could partially support myself freelancing was a far fetch. Let alone the idea that I could, oh say, move out of the city I’ve lived in my whole life and expat myself to Cambodia to work on a book.
But beyond even that, all that, my internal life is perhaps what feels the most different—the shift that’s made all the other, more tangible changes possible. When I attended the conference before, I felt awkward and paralyzingly shy; I barely talked to anyone. This year, I kept finding myself chatting and hanging out and genuinely enjoying myself, not feeling that anxious what-are-people-gonna-think-of-me twist in my stomach.
Andrew McCarthy was the keynote speaker on Saturday night, and he said something that made me snap to attention: “I feel like a better version of myself when I travel.”
I used to say the exact same thing. Almost verbatim. Perhaps even on this blog. And I realized in that moment that I don’t feel that way anymore.
Somewhere in the last two years, the chasm between my Home Self and my Travel Self has shrunk. I don’t feel dramatically freer, more open and alive on the road. I don’t feel that curious paradox of being more at home away from home, more comfortable where I fit in the least, less lonely when I travel sola than when I’m sitting in the middle of my own life. There’s less of the longing, the craving, the fantasy and the distance.
Somewhere in the last two years, the two versions of myself have moved closer together—if not becoming one person, becoming almost one person. And holy shit!—I think I might even like that person. Or at least be able to live with her.
Most changes I experience happen gradually, over time, so slowly it takes something external to remind of how it used to be. Attending the Book Passage Conference again was like that: the perfect book end.
I feel like a little bird ready to fly the nest—the carpeted, crisp-shelved, strip-mall nest of Book Passage, past that big green mountain and over an ocean into a whole lotta unknown. And, with the sun finally down and this finally written, I also feel ready to crash out.
So now that it’s all out in the open—now that I’ve told my roommates, my parents, my managers at work and you all—my move to Cambodia has become a helluva a lot more real.
You know, it’s one thing to think it, to talk hushedly about it to your close friends, your confidantes. It’s even one thing to have one-way tickets (yes, plural, more on that later). But when it becomes known, brought up in casual conversation—when I run into people and they say, “Oh, when are you leaving?” or “I heard…”—well, that’s when it feels real.
And the thing I’m most struck by is how damn supportive everyone is.
Part of me wonders if it’s some hair-brained, quick-fix scheme, like applying a shock jumpers to your life: “Now I have purpose; I’m moving to Cambodia!” Part of me wonders if I’m not just isolating, running away, distancing myself from Real Life. (Part of me wonders what the fuck Real Life is anyway.)
It all very well could be. But, as I’ve explained to people, I’ve got a few tangibles to go on…
1. A project
So I went to Phnom Penh to do the Glimpse thing. And now I’ve got the overwhelming feeling that my work there isn’t done. (Imagine me saying that in a super hero cape, it helps.) I want to write a book/memoir/collection of essays, and I’ll have more than enough material to do it. I just need the time, and the immersion.
2. It’s cheap and easy, AKA: I could support myself writing
In Phnom Penh, I could live a comfortably modest lifestyle on $500-600 a month. Which means that, if I hustle and step up my game, I could potentially support myself writing. Which, by the most generous estimates, I’m 5-10 years away from in the Bay Area. If ever.
I’ve wanted to move abroad since my first trip—almost always, I must admit now, in an escapist way, in a way that was a diversion from my life instead of an extension of it. This actually feels like the most realistic manifestation of that fantasy I’ve carried with me.
3. It’s cheap and easy, AKA: Not the Schengen Zone
Them: “Oh, so you really must have fallen in love with Cambodia…”
Me: “Ah, well, I wouldn’t say that exactly…”
We’d all love to live in Paris in the 20s. (See the new Woody Allen movie.) But those days are gone. And the beautiful thing about Cambodia is that there’s no such thing as residency visas, work permits, nada. You show up, get a business visa, pay someone enough money, get a year-long extension. (There’s a bit more to it, but in a nutshell…) I personally haven’t been to other countries where it’s that simple to just show up and live.
4. This Period Is Ending
I’m old enough now that I can view my adult life in little chunks, 2-5 year periods characterized by where I living/working, who I was dating, how I spent my time. This last little chunk has been really good—living at G, working at B/P, getting my freelancing going (being single). But it’s ending. Like that first crisp autumn breeze, or like that scene in that William Carlos Williams poem when the roots of the flowers buckle down against the icy earth, I can feel the change a’coming.
5. The Calm Certainty
More than anything else, more than any other good reason/justification, the thing I keep coming back to is this feeling I’ve got in my gut. “It just seems like the right move,” I keep hearing myself say.
And goddamn if it’s not the truth.
And goddamn if there aren’t a hundred blogs out there by people who “packed up, sold everything, quit the corporate job, left to travel the world.” In most of them there’s this edge that’s always turned me off—self-congratulatory, which seems like a thin veil for justification. As though they’re trying to explain to all the nay-sayers why they did it.
Which I haven’t had to do at all.
Maybe the nay-sayers are just keeping their mouths shut (which I thank them for). But everyone, everyone, I’ve talked to has been massively supportive. No one’s given me the crazy eye, the you’re-going-WHAT?!?!? eye, nor have they waxed romantic about how exotic and brave it is.
“Congratulations!” “That’s great!” “We’ll miss you, but we’re happy for you.” Or, the one that made me tear up, from my manager, “I have total confidence in your ability to go out there and make it with your writing.” (Jesus.)
I guess you could say I’ve surrounded myself with some quality fucking people, who might know me better and have more confidence in me than I do.
It makes it more bittersweet, but a lot less scary.
Lonely Girl Travels 
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