object memory

i was cutting fruit for the amazons' breakfast the other morning and i was overwhelmed by a sense of sadness. looking at the rows of organic strawberries neatly laid into the plastic boxes, i could almost see the fingers of the mexican workers carefully placing them there, the big ones at the bottom, the small on top.

i remembered reading somewhere about the way the migrant workers are treated, the abuse at the hands of foremen and business owners. i remembered reading about "the fields of panties" - where pretty young girls are raped between the rows.

i don't know if my particular box of strawberries came to wholefoods that way. i don't know if i was feeling particularly sensitive or if the articles just flashed into my mind at that moment.

but it occurred to me that objects might retain a memory, an energetic impression, of the emotions of the people who touched them or used them.

as i sliced the strawberries, i wondered about things, our every day things here in this first world, in this modern, convenient, upper middle class world and whether their journeys to us could infuse us with their sadness or satisfaction.

is it a purely poetic thought that food grown in pain would bring suffering to our bodies as we ingest it?

or that clothing pieced together by political prisoners, toys made underpaid children, would introduce yearning and hunger to our nervous systems.

there is a story - is it medea? where she makes a dress for her husband's new wife and the minute it touches the new wife's skin, it burns her alive, so that she experiences the pain that medea feels.

i wear a pair of burmese earrings my grandmother left me. she didn't leave them to me exactly, but an uncle bequeathed them to me since he is not married.

i don't know if they are the most beautiful earrings but when i wear them and look at my ears, i see my grandmother's pale pink earlobes. i feel i disappear into her, as reality bends, just for a few seconds. i can feel her love of opulence and magnificence.

my teenaged daughters are wearing saris that my mother brought back from india and i wonder if they can feel the hands of the tailor who used to use a pedal operated sewing machine when i was a teenager and is now part of the "new india" with a cell phone and a fancy electric machine - though his living conditions don't quite keep up. the new india is not so good for everyone.

if our objects, our clothes, our stuff, retain the emotions of their last owners or creators, then we have a responsibility to ourselves as well as to our consciences to look after the laborers who make them.

memories

standing on the edge of last year, letting the memories drip into the beginning of this one.

what a year.

my thrilling news: i walked out of the pool and back to my locker and miracle! i remembered the combination of my lock.

yes, my short-term memory is slipping back in. little by little.

i am beginning to think clearly. beginning to remember how to work.

the amazons are acting out, but i think it's finally the relief giving way to all the pent-up fear and anger and pain of the past year.

on january 26, i found myself watching the demonstrations in egypt and crying. and crying. i am frightened of the violence getting out of control. i am frightened for what will happen when the government collapses. i am worried that revolutionaries often don't think things out.

i don't know why, miles away in new york, it feels so immediate. so real. so possible.

working on park51, i see how close the anger - even in this country - is to the surface. i read the blogs, the diatribes. i see the frustration with unemployment, the unceasing bill collectors, the banks, the unclear government policy. people complain that americans are unintellectual, they just want things simple.

and i get it.

i just want things simple. i want little things.

like most people everyday, here's what i think when i lie in the dark:

if i can just get sasha into college (and figure out how to pay for it), get the hole in my roof and the stairs fixed, my car rat-proofed and get caught up with my mortgage and all those medical bills...

will i be able to sleep peacefully at night, then?

(the insomnia's also part of the remains of the chemo)

will the rightwing fundamentalist tea partiers take over? or will the obama administration manage to get ahold of things. will we ever get medicial care for everyone? medical care that doesn't leave you buried in so many bills you wonder if you should have just tried to treat yourself?

but in the snowy mornings, i am smiling again, looking around and feeling very grateful. for heat, food in the refrigerator, electricity, a telephone and the internet. peaceful streets.

for being here.

is it better to be alive than dead? i don't know. but it does seem better for the amazons to have me here.

(and thank you thank thank thank you again to all my friends and family for all their help physically, financially, emotionally. you are the reason i keep body and soul together. )

excuse the crazy hair

15 days' later

so it seems there is enough of the beaucell product to last at least a month and a half, unless you knock one of those superheavy jars off the edge of the sink and spill it all over the floor. (i am amazed i haven't done that yet). what you'll notice, if you can tell from these low-res images, is that my face is rounder all over - basically, it's lost its post-chemo old-witch gauntness.

personally, i was never bothered by the gaunt look because it gave me cheekbones - but after getting so skinny and dehydrated, it looked pinched rather than sculpted.

and of course, my hair keeps sprouting like the crazy afro it is. though now it's flopping to the sides a bit, like tulips after they've bloomed. i do have a list of vitamins and products that will make your hair, eyelashes and eyebrows grow faster and better after chemo so if you want to know, email me directly.

i know i should cut my hair. everyone tells me it'll get better. given all my overwhelming post-cancer expenses, the haircut is not top of my list for a splurge.  i am so relieved to have the stuff on my head for the winter (it was VERY cold being bald in january and i hate sleeping with a hat on, even if it's cashmere and versace or marc jacobs or chanel).

back to park51 and juggling the expectations of muslims, the support of the downtown community and the inexplicable desire of so much of the american public to prefer rumor to fact.

live for today

live in the moment. i am trying. but along with the actual pouring rain and darkness today, i've got a metaphorical cloud over my head.

i've just met my second friend in the past few days who had her cancer "cured" - through chemo and/or radiation and surgery - and had it come back a year or two later, and then come back again.

it doesn't help that this is around the same time last year that i was admitted to hospital and was well into my chemo treatments - so every subway ride reminds me of my weekly trips up to memorial sloan kettering. the holiday season from halloween to christmas is when i lost control of my life.

as someone who used to see myself as totally in-control, self-possessed and capable, i was so incredibly helpless that i couldn't even walk to the kitchen and make myself toast. just thinking about it fills me with nausea and exhaustion. i can almost feel the burning in my veins as the chemo drugs surged through me. and the panic, the panic.

i was saying something to sasha about thanksgiving last year. i was cross because i had ordered a deep-fried roasted garlic turkey from jiveturkey.com and i hadn't been able to taste it because i was sick and vegetarian at that point.

and sasha said, "i don't remember anything at all about last thanksgiving."

i think my kids blocked out the whole winter.

this year, i just kept thinking how grateful i was to not be living that any more. i am so relieved to have come out the other side.
i'm also so grateful for all my friends, especially zia and my brother, who did research into alternative therapies and diets when i was too sick and weak and paralyzed with fear to search the internet.

one of the reasons i was able to recover so quickly and so completely, was all the juicing, vitamins, fresh vegetables; the poly-mva, the zhikr and meditation. the supplements mary schook and sheikha fariha and mona chopra recommended. i had a great support system of people who didn't trust the medical establishment.

and i was lucky to have my parents come and hold down the cramped and miniscule fort for the amazons.

for all the adolescent struggles - myself and my parents, me and the amazons - we are almost back to normal.

now just praying to stay that way. breathing and remembering that fear never helps.

as the sufi poet hafiz says:

Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living
In better conditions.

30 days of beaucell!

the end of 30 days of testing the beaucell skincare. given that my skin was cooked to a weird brown tone, it was sunken and sallow and my eyes tiny and swollen, i am totally impressed.

again, it's expensive. and i don't know what would happen if you used it every month.

if you want a topical product that will actually grow collagen and change the structure of your skin, this seems to be it.

here i am in july - rara videotaping my new hair - before i attempted anything on my face.

day 26, 27, 29

day 26

day 27

day 29

ok, it's almost over. sitting here with a gel-mask thing on my face for the LAST time.

i got home from dc and mary schook was hysterical - "oh my god, you look better than you did before you left!" (that was tuesday)

her friend ronnie kroell, who i haven't seen since i emerged from chemo in march, said, "you look BEAUTIFUL!"

i thought i looked great (and so did all kinds of random guys on the street, which is pretty thrilling on its own) but my mum didn't notice at all. 

i had to say, "doesn't my skin look good?" 

she said, "it always looks good. your skin has looked good since you were a teenager and i made you drink lots and lots of water." needless to say, she didn't notice that i lost my nosepin in the swimming pool either. what i notice is the big dark circles under my eyes have faded, the hollows in my cheeks and forehead have filled in. last check, the sun damage was greatly reversed, the circulation was improved all over my face. my upper lip pulled back up.

mary thinks i've taken 10 years off my face.

as i am typing, zarina and rara just came over and stared at me and said, "your skin is so oily!" (just slathered on the night cream and eye cream. i swear, this product works but it IS high maintenance. thank god i live with three teenaged girls and not a man because he would walk out the door - i would).

tomorrow is day 30. the moment (or photograph) of truth.

also day 29, i still have enough product to probably last me another 2 to 3 weeks, so it's less expensive than $2,000 a month.

if i had the money and the time to do this to my face forever, i probably would. mary's going to keep testing my face to see if the effects last over six months.

in the meantime, back to gossip girl and being low-maintenance, except for $1,500 a month worth of vitamins and supplements and psychic healing.

beaucell: to buy it & try it yourself on ms apothecary

day 18

what i notice is that my skin is getting brighter - less of the darkened, sort of "cooked" way it looked post-chemo. the brown spots are fading away and my jowls are less jowly.

my hair is just as mad curly as ever and it doesn't curl in the way i want it to. sadly. it is not keeping up with my improving face.

what's silly about this part of the experiment is that the photobooth images are so bad that you can't really tell the difference. i will have to ask sasha, my genius photographer, to photograph me properly.

after the three-hour harry potter movie, the minivan battery died last night, it took about an hour for AAA to get there and it was freezing cold and 11:30. by the time i dropped rara's friend sarah back off on sutton place, checked out the preparations for the MS Apothecary event tomorrow, and massaged all the products into my face, it was 2:15am.

and then the next you know, i was wide awake at 7am in a panic thinking about all my unpaid bills. then i tried to be all metaphysical about it. i tried to separate from the concerns of the material world and i closed my eyes. i decided to do that sufi thing of "dying before you die."

so i lay there and meditated on making all the material things unimportant. i thought about how, if i was dying, all the struggles and pleasures of life would seem so brief and ethereal. i imagined myself sinking into darkness.

then i thought about rara, lying beside me, and suddenly i panicked. i had so many things i needed to tell her. and the darkness seemed so scary and i had no idea where i would be if i ended up in that cave where i couldn't talk to anyone.

i freaked myself out so well that i came up breathless and choking - as if i had almost suffocated - i had to kiss rara ten times and inhale and exhale so deeply to remind myself that i was still on this plane.

god knows i am still very superficial.