two years ago today...

...I got a call from a nurse practitioner telling me that I needed to come in the following day to speak to the surgeon, whom I hadn't met. I'd had a biopsy days earlier. She wouldn't tell me on the phone that I had breast cancer, so I didn't find out officially until two years from tomorrow. But when the phone call says, "I need you to come in imminently" rather than "everything is clear; as you were," it's pretty damned obvious that there's a problem. So this is, essentially, the two-year anniversary of when life turned upside down. 

It's how I track the passage of time now: That was all happening around September 11. One of my followup mammograms last winter was the day of the Newtown shootings—I watched the horror unfold alongside a bunch of anxious strangers in the breast center waiting rooms. It was the only visit of many to the hospital where everyone was much more upset by outside events than by the fact that they were patients in a breast or cancer center. I learned a few hours later that a close friend lost a loved one in those shootings. And yet I still mark time by how often I have to don a hospital robe.

just fyi

I've been a tad obsessed with the interface on a site called Medium recently, so a few essays that might've appeared here are there instead.

budapest, in pictures

Saint Stephen's hand, housed in St. Stephen's Basilica

The view of Pest, from Buda

more brussels, plus bruges and ghent

When my family reached a cafe for breakfast yesterday, all the booths except two were filled by people. One other place was occupied by a sleeping cat. When another man came in behind us, he attempted to work around the cat, perching his espresso on the table corner, since it showed no intention of moving.

After that entertainment, we spent the rest of the day with my oldest friend. She lived here for a year, and came to see me and show my family around some. She took us to see the Manneken Pis, a famous statue of a peeing boy that's reproduced into any bit of tourist-trap merchandise you can imagine. The real thing is more disappointing than the Mona Lisa. Not only is the Manneken Pis tiny, it's also high up and obscured by an outfit from its extensive wardrobe. So, here is a photo of a more entertaining reproduction, because what isn't better holding a waffle?

welcome to brussels

Waffles waffles waffles waffles

I am over-tired right now—my family took an overnight flight on Wednesday and then jumped straight into doing things. Upon arrival, we were delayed because a strike at the Brussels airport meant we all had to fetch our bags from the runway and then take shuttles to immigration. Then, my parents had arranged a private tour guide for us. For reasons unclear, the four of us ended up on our private trip on a full-sized bus. I slept through a lot of it. (I also fell asleep on the floors of JFK and Brussels International.) But Brussels seems quaint and cobblestone-y, and any place where every block has French fries, a chocolaterie, beer, and decadent waffles earns my endorsement (at least, that seemed the case in the tourist-friendly areas where we stumbled around, jetlagged out of our brains).

when ancient met modern

A group of yoga devotees came together yesterday afternoon to listen to Eddie Stern, Beryl Bender Birch and Elena Brower discuss how yoga fits into 21st-century life. We left with swag bags—essential oil samples, vegan energy powders, incense variety packs. When I left the studio, there was an ostentatious VitaCoco truck parked out front. This shouldn't have surprised me—people devoted enough to yoga to attend a lecture on a Wednesday afternoon are the target audience for all this stuff, and shalas can't run on fumes—but it did. Maybe it's because I'm naive, or maybe it's because I don't identify three respected teachers with material goods.

Eddie is my current teacher; I've taken a workshop with Beryl, and I just adore her. Elena is a celebriyogi, no doubt, mostly known in ashtanga circles for being one of John Friend's most prominent acolytes—until she became one of the most prominent teachers to resign her certification after Friend, the founder of anusara, was implicated in a sex and money mismanagement scandal. (I touched on some of this in a piece I wrote at the time for GOOD.)

So while I was more interested in a personal path sort of way to hear what Eddie and Beryl had to say (I know, I know, spoken like a true ashtangi), I was super curious to hear whether Elena would mention anything about her break with John Friend.

'being a journalist is harder than most people think'

Yesterday I attended "Information on Trial," a daylong conference at NYU's journalism school with Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect Journalists, an event to mark World Press Freedom Day.

Here is a bad iPhone pic of Columbia J-school prof Ann Cooper and
New Yorker writer George Packer, during their keynote conversation

George Packer said a few interesting things about the state of journalism during his keynote talk, things that went beyond hysterical "the media is dying" hand-wringing that I hear and read about all the time as a CJR editor.

the battle he didn't choose

All photos are by Angelo Merendino and are used with his permission

Jennifer Merendino was back in the hospital again. It was a warm May morning, and the 39-year-old was a few days into yet another stay at Memorial Sloan-Kettering to treat her metastatic breast cancer. It had spread to her bones by then, making it hard for her to stand. But she was standing then, in front of a mirror in her hospital room, while her husband, Angelo Merendino, prepared to shave her head before she lost her hair to chemotherapy again. He stood behind her, wielding an electric razor in one hand and holding a camera with the other, finger on the shutter.  

He said, “I've got to make a quick photo of us doing this, of you and me.” She assented, holding onto a support pole attached to the bathroom wall. “I just fired off two quick photographs, then I put the camera down.” The resulting photo was one of many black-and-white portraits that comprise “My Wife’s Fight With Breast Cancer,” which documents, through Merendino’s lens, Jennifer’s 20-month illness and eventual death at age 40 in December 2011.

inequality

Last night, I took the subway home from a "Mad Men" viewing party (complete with good friends, great conversation, pizza, apple pie, and so-gross-it's-amazing ambrosia salad). I got out at the 59th Street stop on the 4/5/6.

Between there and reaching my door, I walked by a man passed out on the floor in a bank's ATM lobby, and a woman trying to fall asleep atop a sidewalk grate, fidgeting beneath a thin blanket, right across the street from the neighborhood's newish Whole Foods. It was Sunday around midnight, so there wasn't anyplace open in the vicinity to grab something warm for the woman to nurse into the wee hours.

I'm not the first, or most eloquent, person to articulate this, but: This is not OK, this disparity between how I get to live and how much some fellow New Yorkers are suffering. Team, we must do better.  

on memoir

The New York Times Sunday Review section had a piece today on memoir and how writing about family involves appropriating real people to use as characters in a narrative that only reflects the writer's perspective. Alexander Stille writes:

The writer is taking events that belong to several people, appropriating them for himself, and turning them into something that feels alien to those who have lived them ... It must have been like seeing someone else wearing your favorite coat: it would look recognizable, but totally different and totally wrong. 

In short, I had not treated my aunt as a human being, as something infinitely complex and, in effect, unknowable. I had turned her into a character in a book. A book in which she wasn’t even the protagonist.

It's an apt summary of something I was already thinking about this week. I published an essay on The Hairpin detailing my dog's diagnosis of cancer and how it relates to my own recent bout with the disease. Reminiscing about my dog, I wrote:

When my family first met Kippy 13 years ago, we didn’t want him. He was part of a litter of Tibetan terriers, and we had our pick. I was in love with a little black lady. My mom was starry-eyed for the litter’s chunky alpha puppy. Nobody noticed the brown guy in the corner. But he picked us, toddling over to my brother and making it clear that, when we left, he’d be coming too.

It was a short passage, apart from the central point, to illustrate how much the dog grew in our hearts, from unwanted to adored. But it wasn't how my brother remembered it. 

"u need to edit this, there is a factual mistake, i wanted to bring him home the first time we met them," he wrote on Facebook.

I replied in a way I hoped would both sound relatively kind and would shut him down. "It's not a factual error because that's not how I remember things, the 'we' doesn't necessarily include you, and it's a piece from my perspective." But there's the rub: I'm the writer in the family, so my perspective is the one the world is going to see, shaped and shined both to reflect my memory and to fit into my artistic vision for a given work. 

My brother was a passing mention in the piece. But in real life, he's a real person with his own internal narrative about events we both experienced and who is also grappling with the impending death of our beloved pet. As I writer, I stand by my right to narrativize my life in my art. And my life includes other people. But as a person, I'm bracing for what may well be a lifetime of listening to friends and family protest their presence in my prose, and I proceed mindful that my ability to tell stories comes with great responsibility.  

clip dump

Here's some recent work:

NYRB celebrates its 50th (CJR)

Dog Shadow (The Hairpin)

Tracking the NYT's evolving Koch obit (CJR)

Good Times (CJR)

i hate everything

Yesterday, according to my parents, the family dog refused to eat anything until Mom made him a fried egg. Kippy has always had a sensitive stomach, but my parents claim his pickiness has worsened since I lived at home for four months in late 2011—when he wouldn’t eat breakfast, I sat next to him and coaxed him to eat his kibble, feeding him, by hand, one piece at a time. Now he sometimes demands to be fed that way just for kicks.

After he ate the egg, Mom took him for a walk around the block, and they stopped at her friend’s house. The friend is one of a few people along Kip’s walking routes that keeps treats for him. There, he cheerfully devoured the same treats that my parents undoubtedly offered him before resorting to cooking. My dog is the best asshole I’ve ever met.

A few hours after that walk, the vet called to tell my parents that Kippy has cancer.

rip

Lauren Rousseau's funeral was yesterday. I was there as a mourner, not a journalist, so I'm not going to go into any detailed rundown of the day. Plus, Lauren the person is more important to me than Lauren the media focus, although I never met her.

Amid all the remembrances, there were copied stacks of a one-page essay called "About My Daughter, Lauren G. Rousseau," a piece Terri wrote in 2004 for a senior sorority honors day at UConn.

"The first time I saw her," it begins, "her nose was smashed and her face was smudged with blood. I was drugged and felt like throwing up. It was the happiest day of my life." Terri proceeds to describe Lauren's feisty, smiley childhood, her "sunny disposition" and love of singing.

It was the P.S. that killed me: "I love her more than she'll understand till she has a daughter of her own."

on newtown

The Danbury News-Times broke the news on Saturday that one of the victims of the Newtown, CT, school shooting was 30-year-old substitute teacher Lauren Rousseau. The police had yet to release the names of all 27 people killed in Adam Lanza’s rampage. But Rousseau’s mother, Terri, is a News-Times copy editor.

Terri's colleague, Bob Miller, wrote the story. Bob is also a childhood friend of Terri’s longtime partner, Bill Leukhardt, a reporter at the Hartford Courant. Lauren Rousseau lived with him and Terri.

At the Courant, Bill was my first internship editor, back in 2006, and has since remained a caring mentor and friend. And Bob and I covered Ridgefield, a nearby community similar to Newtown, at the same time, so we spent hours at nighttime municipal meetings trading sarcastic quips sotto voce, as reporters do. Newtown is a story that is being covered by journalists I care about and one that affects people I know.

western medicine's blind spots

One thing breast cancer treatment has taught me is that Western medicine has its faults and limits. Yes, I probably should have realized this earlier. But my father is a doctor, and I grew up with the sense that he could fix anything, which slid into a general faith in the profession. Western medicine always solved my meager medical needs before, and Western cancer treatment saved my life. Now, though, I’m disillusioned:

Tamoxifen is the hormone therapy pill that many women with breast cancer take for five years after the initial treatment regimen (surgery, radiation, often chemotherapy) ends. Taking tamoxifen prevents estrogen from binding to cells in the body. For people with estrogen receptor-positive tumors—meaning the hormone was involved in activating cancer cells—the idea is to prevent any lurking enemies from growing and spreading.

But keeping estrogen at bay causes side effects, too, because by decreasing its ability to fulfill its normal roles, the drug is essentially inducing a temporary menopause. So, hot flashes. I’m hot most all the time. That’s not unpleasant in winter weather, but it’s torturous during, say, weeklong heat waves (I’m looking at you, last summer). I’ve heard other women say they couldn’t sit still on tamoxifen, grew depressed on it, and in older women it can cause blood clots and uterine cancer. (Fun fact: Most cancer treatments increase other kinds of cancer risk. Win some/lose some?)

Effexor, an antidepressant, is commonly prescribed to help ease hot flashes. So when I complained to my doctor, she offered to write me a prescription for a rather hefty dosage. She told me to try taking vitamin E. I didn’t want to put more chemicals into my body. There were no other solutions forthcoming from my medical team.

Then, via dumb luck, I learned about You Can Thrive, a sliding-scale wellness center for breast cancer survivors. Moments after we met, the founder took my hand, dripped a bit of peppermint essential oil onto my fingers and told me to rub it on the back of my neck. I cooled down immediately—no drugs, no unnatural interventions. I’m also using castor packs—oil-soaked cloths covered with a heating pad—to reduce the my scars’ redness and tenderness. It was recommended by a knowledgeable yoga teacher, and it’s working.

Why aren’t these simple, natural, cheap solutions common knowledge?   

much more extreme, but sad to say i get it

wig shopping

The young women filling the crowded salon on a recent Monday afternoon were engrossed in the intimate conversations with stylists that make haircuts just as much therapy as a coiffing. Their chatter bounced off the mirrors and converged into the high-pitched hum that Beth* and I walked through en route to a wig sale in the back. As I followed my friend, I noticed that the hairdressers weren’t touching the clients’ actual hair—they were all cutting wigs, resting on head-shaped holders, some newly purchased.

Welcome to Cedarhurst, one of the “five towns” on the border of Long Island and Queens, where the mannequins in the Benetton window all conform to Orthodox Jewish modesty standards and there is a restaurant called Sushi Metsuyan, Hebrew for “excellent.”

Behind screens that would prevent men walking by the salon from seeing wigless women through the front windows were two long tables stacked with crates full of wigs of all lengths and colors, all made from human hair. There were full wigs, which created a complete, standalone hair replacement, as well as “falls,” the back half of a wig meant to be worn with a wide headband or a hat. Beth selected a couple of falls, gathered her own wavy, brown hair into a low bun, and prepared one of the many headbands she’d received at her wedding shower the day before to cover the seam of the wigs she was about to try.

In the ultra-Orthdox tradition, married women hide their hair in front of men outside their immediate families. This tradition can manifest itself multiple ways: some women wear hats that hide the top of their own hair. On the other end of the observation spectrum, Hasidic women wear ugly wigs covered with ugly hats, calling attention to the fact that what you’re seeing is absolutely not theirs. Beth, and most of the women we passed on the streets in Cedarhurst, fell in between, wearing wigs that the uninitiated would read as their real hair while still keeping their actual locks tucked out of sight.

Some of those women, mostly in their 20s, rifled through the wig sale bins. They grabbed a few possibilities and then, vying for space at the mirrors behind the screens, tried them on, primping the wigs, discussing different styling possibilities. One young employee wandered around in a long, wavy wig half pulled back in a butterfly clip. Most wouldn’t be able to tell it wasn’t her real hair, except for the price tag hanging against her neck. It takes time spent in the Orthodox community to learn the wig tip-offs—straight-hair wigs hang a bit too heavily, without a glossy lock out of place; wigs never show gray roots and, most tellingly, the bangs are not growing out of the wearer’s scalp.       

I know all this solely thanks to my friendship with Beth. I was raised a Conservative Jew and spent years attending religious school three afternoons a week, perpetually getting separated from my best friend when we weren’t paying attention. When I entered high school, my mom said I could quit Hebrew school if I joined the swim team. Done. Beth, on the other hand, would never wear a swimsuit outside of an all-female environment. Her clothes always cover her elbows, knees and collarbones.

We met midway through my freshman year of college, when I decided to try copy editing at the school newspaper. Beth was the copy boss on my shift. We chatted between checking athlete names and comma usage, soon getting around to that evergreen subject, siblings. I have one younger brother. What about you? I asked her.

“I have 10 younger siblings,” she said, not uncommon for religious Jewish families. She dealt with my shock with unwavering class, and we bonded through late newspaper production nights and a shared devotion to punctuation, novels, and Diet Coke (I’ve given the latter up, which makes her shake her head, disapproving). But she never disapproves of my curiosity about why a college-educated feminist would practice a tradition in which women are considered a distraction to men. Orthodox women must dress modestly, hide their hair and sit behind screens in the synagogue. I wonder why men penalize women for an apparent inability to control sexual desire. I’ve also wondered about how gay Jews avoid these temptations in such a single-gender environment; Orthodox Judaism considers homosexuality wrong, so same-sex attractions are not part of the calculus.

Beth, an academic with a liberal intellectual life, never dismisses my concerns and doesn’t always disagree with them, either. But being thoughtful about faith is not the same thing as wavering in her devotion, and though I question many of her traditions, I never question the beauty and the strength of believing in something, even when it’s hard. It’s a loyalty that years of religious school can’t instill, and it makes her the treasured friend I can call at 3 a.m. So even though I think it’s bizarre to walk around twirling $800 worth of someone else’s hair, I was there for her, scrutinizing the shades and thickness of different fall wigs.

Beth wasn’t excited about any of the ones at that first salon, so we walked to a second salon a few blocks away. It was quieter there, and the man who dealt with wigs had to be called in to help us. An older guy in a plaid shirt and no yarmulke, he said he’d grown up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, another area with a large Orthodox population. He started working in a salon as a child, he told us and, too young to cut actual hair, his boss started him on wigs. Some 40 years later, he’s an expert. He found falls that matched Beth’s exact hair color and gently eased them around her scalp while fielding my questions about how to conceal her hair without a visible bun bump.

“Are you paying such close attention because you’re going to cover when you get married?” he asked me. Beth grinned at the characteristic wide-eyed glare I shot him in response.

“No,” I told him. “I’m paying close attention because this is fascinating.” He nodded, and then we refocused our attention on preparing Beth for the next phase of her life, and our friendship.    

*pseudonym 

news

New job new job new job! I'm an associate editor at the Columbia Journalism Review. My first piece for them is here. Two other recent published bits, at GOOD.is, are here and here.

Unrelated: I was going to find someone to pay me to rant about how people shouldn't desert Komen even though yes, their actions vis-a-vis Planned Parenthood were despicable and yes, they emphasize screening much more than scientific research when it should be the reverse. But someone else did it first.

yes, this

Anne Lamott on Twitter is my new Favorite Thing.

same old story

Since Barnard College announced a few days back that President Barack Obama would be the school's commencement speaker this year, I've joined fellow alumnae in rejoicing in our school's lucky opportunity. Barnard—a prestigious women's college in a city with a disproportionate amount of media—is indeed the perfect place for Obama to address the war on women's health, which is gaining steam in Washington just as he prepares to run for reelection.

The reaction in Columbia University's undergrad community, on the other hand, has been a storm of insults and ill-will passing between undergraduates at Columbia College, the storied liberal arts school at Columbia University, and Barnard, which is both an independent women's college and another of Columbia's four undergraduate schools. (The other two are the School of General Studies, where older students can matriculate, and the engineering school.) The issue is that Obama is a Columbia alumnus, and his decision to speak at Barnard reads as a snub to many Columbia's students and a coup to Barnard's. Pair those perspectives with a long-standing legacy of teenagers shit-talking one another across the Broadway divide between the campuses, and there's fodder for bottomless horrid Internet commentary. 

This old issue—as an undergrad in 2006-ish, I wrote a story about the Barnard-Columbia relationship, and it was ancient history then—wouldn't be news except, as the White House realizes, things that happen at New York City institutions are covered in publications with national audiences. So when The New York Times published a story yesterday headlined "After Barnard Gets Obama for Speech, Tensions With Columbia Bubble Up," people noticed.

And by people, I mean the website Jezebel, which ran a post today quoting some of the evil name calling found in the comments of a couple campus publications. (Other local pubs, like Gothamist and The Village Voice, also published pieces, but Jezebel's made me angsty.) The post scolded Columbia and Barnard administrators for characterizing the unpleasant sentiment to the Times as a small slice of the student body ranting in the wee hours: "It's pretty fucked up that Barnard's president would dismiss the comments as the ramblings as '19-year-olds,' given that 19-year-olds are the people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend the college over which she presides," they wrote.

But the presidents, Deborah Spar and Lee Bollinger, are right. The anti-Barnard bullshit—the quietly pervasive sentiment that Barnard students were back-door entrants to Columbia University who steal College students' spots in classes and nab all the men—abates after about sophomore year, as students mature and realize that they really are a part of one big, diverse intellectual community. One of my best friends from Columbia spent two years living in Barnard dorms. I took one of Columbia's core curriculum courses (not technically open to Barnard students, but I have my methods) and thrived there. Five years after graduation, my college friends and I reminisce about our joint college experience regardless of which schools we attended. The fact that Obama's politically-strategic decision would be seen as a snub and then ignite vitriol really is because undergrads are young and immature, and they lack perspective. Like all of us before them, they'll graduate and enter the (shitty) job market and realize that a.) they're still starting their professional lives at the bottom and b.) they're doing so with brilliant, driven, amazing people from all sorts of backgrounds and all sorts of colleges. Then they'll put on their grown-up undies and be thrilled with the opportunity they had to spend four years in a place that the leader of the free world would consider a plum location to make a statement.