I spit for thee

I know someone who is always speaking of how bad her luck is. Her luck is terrible with dating, she says, while turning down people who have expressed interest in her and manufacturing reasons that it is bad timing, the wrong person, or not a planned date up to her standards. Terrible luck at work, when others lose their jobs, and she keeps hers. Awful misfortune in life because her car needs normal repairs, that, yes, cost money, or because normal mishaps happen at stores, in her kitchen, when making plans with friends.


Another person in my life has done something both illegal and very, very risky multiple times, and as a result, has been in more than a few life-rattling moments, and been arrested about that number of times. He walks away physically whole each time, having not hurt himself, or anyone else. But talks always of how unlucky it was that he got caught. How a series of events lead the police to get involved, not his actions or mis-steps. Meanwhile, I privately think he has been exceptionally fortunate to be alive without harming anyone else, and know that that luck won't likely last.

So, pardon me if I say luck is sometimes a bad joke to me. It's hard to know, for sure, what I think about it. I'm unlucky that my last Toyota caught fire on the Garden State Parkway, but I'm lucky that it did so feet from the exit, and literally, 4 days before the planned purchase of my next car. I'm lucky that my new Toyota has a an even newer engine, but unlucky that that happened because Jiffy Lube ruined the engine that came with the car (don't get oil changes at Jiffy Lube!!). I'm unlucky in that I probably can't have children, but lucky in that I always had interest in adopting. I have terrible Scrabble karma - I mean really, I always have like 6 i's and a j - but, ummm, who cares. It's a game. (Maybe one I cheated on in a past life, causing someone else to lose their fortune?)

So, luck is a concept I don't always know how to handle. I will tell someone, "Good Luck!" because it's what we say, it's what we do. And it sounds better than, "Go forth and do as you will and see what you get in return." (Which, really, would make me sound like an ass.) But in actuality, It's hard to know what role luck actually plays in things. Often, as in the examples, above, luck seems to have nothing to do with anything. People ascribe bad luck to consequences they may have tacitly chosen but aren't willing to accept, or overlook that there are far more chances than they are willing or able to work with.

The other thing I think about luck is part and parcel with some of the examples from my life, cars, child bearing, Scrabble . . . those things may be part of a wider pattern, one we only get a glimpses of. What looks like bad luck today could end up being part of something far more positive tomorrow, or 4 years from now. Or, maybe, never. It's not so much that I believe in fate, or pre-ordination, because I think we are choosing, carving our path, deciding things all the time, every moment. Just that . . . things can work together for greater purposes, good or bad, I suppose. And we can't always see that in the moment that we are holding the parking ticket and cursing the Gods for the thing that made us late, for the meter-maid who got there RIGHT as our last minute ran out, for the 2 hour limit to begin with (why can't I just PARK there for 4 hours?).

Of course I think about this a lot as an unemployed person. Is it lucky or unlucky that I lost my job? Both probably, in the eyes of me, and also good and bad, for different people supporting me and trying to love me through this. Do I sometimes want to claim bad luck for not having gotten a couple of the jobs I interviewed for an wanted? Or, maybe even more so, for the bad interviews I went on . . . most notably the one that had me invest so much time only to change the details out from under me at the 11th hour (almost literally). Yep. For sure I sometimes begin to think, "What bad luck I have!." But then, when I land a job (yes, WHEN) I don't want someone to take the reverse and say, "You got lucky." All of the hard work I've done preparing myself, writing cover letters, applying, interviewing, networking, and fighting with my self-esteem would feel minimized by counting it as "luck" instead of accomplishment

At this point, I pretty frequently hear the phrase "numbers game" in that it is supposedly the case that getting a job is somewhat dependent on "a numbers game." I'm sure this is true. I have applied to over 100 jobs, and of course, I need to keep growing this statistic until I find the right one. But here's what this doesn't mean to me - that if you spew resumes out into the void at a high enough rate a job will boomerang back unto you. Because being ready, qualified, presenting well, and demonstrating a fit of skills and personal qualities has to matter too . . . doesn't it? It can't all just be chance and accumulation of attempts. Well, let me say this - for me it can't because it matters to me that I did more than stay on the treadmill.

On the other hand, having said all of these rational, perhaps overly logical, Spock-like things about luck, I'll admit the other side to you. I recently told the person I'm in a relationship with that we couldn't go out anywhere nice - nowhere that I need to dress for (this is a real measure in Boulder, where jeans and flip flops appear in abundance, everywhere). When asked why I said, "Well, you had mentioned doing this when that job was supposedly checking my references (which they did not. They instead asked for my references to keep me on the hook while they decided they couldn't afford to hire anyone full-time, in case they ended up wanting to hire me. Arg). And then I said we shouldn't celebrate until there was something to celebrate. No jumping up and down. So, now I don't want to jinx any other options." And so when we go out, we eat burgers and burritos, which are super tasty, but which I'm sure he'd rather take a break from.

I also have been doing a lot of spitting. this is because I am a massive West Wing fan (ahem, nerd). And on election night there is a whole thing where one of the characters is shocked to find his boss has written a concession speech for an election he is sure the incumbent President is about to win.

Sam Seaborn: You wrote a concession? 
Toby Ziegler: Of course I wrote a concession. You want to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing? 
Sam Seaborn: No. 
Toby Ziegler: Then go outside, turn around three times and spit. What the hell's the matter with you? 

I can't afford to tempt the wrath from the whatever from high atop the thing. So, I spit. And when another friend was jumping through the hoops academia asks some of the most highly trained and educated people on the planet to jump through to get jobs, I spit for him too. (Literally. Yes, I know it's gross, but that whole week of job talks and committee meetings and dinners I went out on my porch each evening and spit.) Apparently I have earned that favor being returned because I informed him today that I am on a strict program of merely noting pros and cons of jobs I'm applying or interviewing for, but that nonetheless, I thought it was worth mentioning an interview for an intriguing non-profit. He replied simply with, "I spit for thee."

Smile.

I'm not that superstitious. Though, I spit, and am pleased to be spit (spat?) for. I do not want to get dressed up and go out to dinner prematurely, because . . . well, partially because that dinner will taste better when I know I earned it. And partially because I'm afraid of the wrath, of the you know, up atop, wherever. I know athletes that need to wear certain things for luck, or surgeons. My brother, when he wrestled, had a hand-me-down Grateful Dead tie-dyed tee shirt that my uncle rescued from the liberal arts college he worked at. And wearing that t-shirt became a necessity at every wrestling meet. (It wasn't even his shirt originally!) This is all fine. Some of this, I think, is security and habit. And for all that I am attached to my routines, I don't have a lot of these. At least not that I can think of off the top of my head. "Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember, it didn't work out for the rabbit." R.E. shay comes to mind. And this is also a reminder that what seems like good luck to my neighbor, might be very bad luck for me . . . or the rabbit.

I do think that what we call luck is often a strange combination of factors, and that we attract opportunity to ourselves, but not always easily. And, it's worth noting, we can attract bad opportunity to ourselves, as when those who have been victims of muggings become victims a second or third time. (It's important to note, I am not saying this is the victim/survivors fault. As a survivor of a violent crime, myself, I know the pain of blaming ones' self. What I am saying is that I took it as my responsibility to make sure I would not appear vulnerable in that way again . . . and it has worked out. So far.) I can't say for sure what counts as luck and fortune, but think, "Being deeply learned and skilled, being well trained and using well spoken words; this is good luck." Buddha. That's the kind of luck I'd like to attribute success to . . . once I find it.

Like my person said recently, "Luck, to me, is simply the vision to recognize the opportunities around us, and the ability to take advantage of them . . . Being able to see what good we can make of what we have in front of us. Not everyone gets all opportunities in front of them but . . . I think there are a lot more opportunities around than most people are able to grab hold of." The ability to see what good we can make of what's before us has been present for me for several months now. My blog-assigning friend quickly jumped on my job-loss as good fortune, intended to be a way out for me. And it brings me back to my dear friend who happens to be in jail and still able to say he is choosing to be happy, choosing to take this time to plumb the foundations of his faith.

But I will also note that my person said all he said about what luck is to him, and then he said, "I'm not 100% sure." No, none of us are.

Mostly, I don't want to fall into treating my good days and bad days as being random, or worse, somehow a punishment visited on me, as with the people in my life who fall back on "bad luck" to explain everything they aren't happy with or aren't prepared to take responsibility for. I'd rather believe, simply, "I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it. " Thomas Jefferson (man, do I love him as a writer, founding father, and perplexingly contradictory figure)

I am working hard, on all fronts. I will make a slight nod towards the wrath from high atop the thing (much like Bell-ringings at Hampshire College. When I first arrived I used to intentionally walk under the bell to see the heart-stopping looks that DivIII students would give me, thinking, "Umm, yeah. It's a BELL." After seeing a few of these celebrations though, the myth had power, if not for belief in it controlling graduation, for the people I had seen earn their way to it and the respect I had for them. Honestly? By the end of my third year I was carving a wide path around the bell and by my 4th year, trying not to even walk on that side of the building.) but mostly, I'll just keep trying to bust my ass to get what I want. And spit.

Mirrors and potholes

I have a friend who recently was incarcerated.

It shocks even me to write this, so I imagine this is news to any of my readers.

He is not just my friend - more like an adoptive big brother. He and his wife took me in when I was lost and lonely. They may not have realized that's what they did, but that's how I remember it.

I arrived in New Jersey for grad school attached to someone. And suddenly that whole situation changed and with it, my living arrangements, my feelings about relocating from one of the most beautiful places I'd ever been, to one of the meanest. And about three weeks after that I was diagnosed with a very serious and complicated illness. So, then not only alone, but scared and alone and pretty miserably unhealthy.

Some months later a series of weird coincidences brought me into a karate school of all places. And within a week I knew I was hooked. I had zero natural ability for the sport but I was fascinated and determined. I was also sick and hoping to do what I could do to feel better. So I kept going. As the months went by I had treatments and medical procedures, I had good days and bad days, I had care packages from my best friend from college, and homework, and tests, both academic and medical, but I also had karate classes, growing confidence, and a better handle on what it felt like to feel powerful and safe as I walked through my new world. (Which, for me, as a young woman who had experienced some  violence, was a pretty significant change in my outlook and sense of security.)

The routine I settled into was to go to class on Monday and Wednesday, and so I would pack my lunch and dinner, show up for classes, cross the river to head to the lab on the north side, do some research, and then head to the karate school . . . because it was time consuming to cross back and forth over the bridge. So I'd go to the dojo about an hour early, change, and ask permission to microwave my dinner. I'd sit and watch the pre-teens and teens work out, and think about what it would take for me to get to that level of technique. It only took about a week of this before a tiny little brown baby girl (she was almost 3, but talked like a 6 year old, and was small enough to look like she was still entering toddler-hood) walked directly up to me and said, clear as a bell, "That smells good. Can I have some?" I asked her mother, and discovered her mother was my Sensei's wife, and we all agreed roasted veggies or rice and beans were good food. That's how S brought me into this family. Sharing dinner with S became them wanting to share lunch with me . . . on Shabat. And that became babysitting. Babysitting became them thinking, "If we trust her with our kids, we can probably trust her with other people's kids. And that became them expanding the Kinder Karate program and adding me as a new instructor.

Over time, I stopped just working for them, and started working with them, and, additionally, being part of the family. I would help with things as disparate as bathing kids, moving the dojo, teaching karate, writing lesson plans, covering birthday parties, setting the table for Shabat, making salad, and saying prayers with the daughters and mothers. After a couple of years, it actually became an expectation that I would bring fruit to Shabat and to other holidays, and for certain holidays it was routine for me to help out with the preparation of certain dishes. I spent almost every Friday night at the Shabat table saying prayers, eating dinner, drinking shots, discussing (read: questioning. Asking questions is not at all considered rude or disrespectful to belief in the Jewish belief system. In fact, it's considered a responsibility of that faith) Torah, and telling tales of the karate school that week, teasing and being teased for four straight years.

Family. Plain and simple.

Ask yourself this - if someone in your family went to jail, would they still be part of your family? Of course, the answer is yes. At least if you're me, it is.

When my friend was first accused of this infraction, I actually never even wasted time asking if he did it, or anything like it. I knew everyone involved, knew the politics, and knew my friend's heart. There is just. no. way.

But, can I say this? Even if he had done it, he's still my family. And his family is still my family. I still love him, and them. And so even if we, the extended family and loved ones of my friend, really thought he did this, I think we would still be struggling with the same question: how could this happen to the generous, funny, sometimes-difficult-but-also-eye-opening person we loved and what can we do to be part of the good person and worthwhile objectives we knew him for?

Having indulged me to say the above, I will also admit to you that it's much, much easier for me to arrive  at that place because of my certainty that he was not involved in this crime.

So, I ask myself a lot of tough questions when I think about him and my family :

• What do people say about him to his kids?
• What do his kids know or understand?
• What must it take for his wife to get up every day and keep going, knowing that everything is, and always be different, knowing that it's all on her to keep her family safe and healthy at the moment.
• Why does accusation equal guilt and responsibility in the court of public opinion?
• As someone who believe victims of violating crimes should speak up and be heard, and not treated EVER as having been at fault for what happened to them, what kind of stance can I take on the fact that sometimes people do lie about this and have other goals beyond telling the truth
• What does it mean to plead guilty to a crime you didn't commit? What did it take for him to stand up in court and agree to that?

Some of this is why I've been working on this post since December 14th (for reference sake . . . t-minus one week before losing my job). That was the last time I spoke to him on the phone, knowing he had already plead guilty, and knowing he would be facing sentencing and leaving his family in two days. His family threw a Chanukah party, and family and friends came from all over to celebrate, and have a moment to love and support my friend and his family.

Another good friend had tipped me off, and I was able to call and talk to my friends for about an hour before the party got too loud, too busy, too much. And we did what we do best - we talked deep.

Of course, there are some obvious lessons to this. For one, however angsty I am feeling about unemployment, and the prospect of re-creating my life from the ground up, things could be worse. That's the gimme. That's not a reach as something to keep in mind.

The other thing this has caused me to dwell on is what justice means. My dear friend being faced with losing his home, business, and life as he knows it, for a possibly longer jail sentence vs. saying he did something he didn't do and accepting 1-3 years inside, isn't what I thought of as just. But in the same way that someone being acquitted doesn't mean their innocent, my friend pleading guilty doesn't mean he is. What I said to him when we talked that night was, "Hashem (God) knows the truth. And your real friends do too."

To a lot of us, justice is about acknowledging, or righting a wrong, or the administering of a punishment or reward in order to partially give back something which was taken. But justice is also defined as morality, or adherence to a moral code, just conduct, or rightfulness or lawfulness. It's lawful that he's in jail, in that the law provided for him to plead guilty, and he did. But it's not right. It's not moral, to me, that those were the choices he faced. But, it was a moral choice for him to not spend years putting his family through this.

What I've thought a lot about is that our court system isn't really about justice so much as it is about applying laws(often imperfectly). In general, when things get taken into a court room or trial, things have already failed deeply enough that they can't really be recovered. A really smart lawyer once shared with me, "In my experience, people are rarely satisfied with a legal resolution to their problems." Honestly, it was really easy for me to understand that from the complainants perspective before, but I also now know that it applies to defendants. It's all so easy for us to hear about someone hauled into the police station for hurting someone, or accused in court of something really violating, and assume that if they were accused they did it. But hey, one out of every nine times we sentence someone to die in this country WE'RE WRONG. We're so wrong, DNA proves that we're wrong. (I like what this speaker says. If airline pilots were wrong this often, if pharmaceuticals were distributed in error 10% of the time - we would never accept it as a society. But we accept it in our legal system. Crazypants) If our justice system has this much injustice built into it in crimes where the burden of proof is so much higher not just for trial, but for sentencing, then how often are we wrong for "lesser" crimes?

And what do those errors mean for real people? For my friend it means 1-3 years of not being there for his wife and kids. Of not earning money. Of not voting or being a citizen. And it means a lifetime of people assuming that if he was accused, he must be guilty, and worse, with an irrefutable criminal and prison record following him to help people to that conclusion.

But I've also spent some time thinking about something he and I started to talk about that Chanukah night. He said, "There are people that are mirrors for us. and I just want to stay grateful for the people who have held up that mirror for me and kept me honest, kept me walking towards what's good in me. And there are potholes. They can slow us down, but they only stop us if we let them. I just need to remember that every day in there. I'm still me. And I appreciate so much you saying that my real people know the true truth. I hate the idea that people think of me as a scum bag. And I need to remember that I get to choose whose opinions I care about. I get to choose my mirrors, if not my potholes."

Of course, he and I haven't spoken since then. I hope in 12-36 months to sit at his Shabat table, drink some shots, and talk about this topic with a lot of heart, and attention, live. And in the meantime, we write. Nearly every week. and this is often the theme. I mean, he also tells me about his friends on the inside, how inmates make wall hooks for pictures, and trading for apple peels or playing basketball. But we also talk a lot about his faith, about his attitude, about his understanding of what this means to him. In his first letter he said, "It's not that I'm happy to be in prison, it's that I'm choosing to be happy while I'm in prison."

More recently, he reminded me that not everything is good, but that we can always choose to get good out of it, to work the bad together into a good. It's a little humbling to be sitting on my comfortable couch, with all the wall hooks I need, being reminded this by my friend in jail. Mostly, I'm proud of him and hope that his heart can stay this strong, and positive.

I need to believe that the bad can be worked for our good. If he can do it, there is certainly hope for me too.