Struggle Takes A Napa

There are many ways in which I am nothing like an early 19th century prospector/explorer. For one thing, my greatest fear isn't dysentery or rattlers. I'm certainly not interested in forming my own polygamist religion featuring terrible hairstyles and bunkers, nor am I often found searching the soil for gold. I bear no ill will towards Native Americans (or is it first peoples, now?) and while buffalo is DELICIOUS I can usually resist the urge to kill one when I see it. So clearly there is a strong divide between me, Leah Franqui, strugglextrodinare, and, say, Louis and Clark. Nevertheless, I recently found myself unable to resist that great and wild urge present in all members of the United States (at least according to Fredrick Jackson Turner). That's right, my friends, I went West.

More specifically, I went to San Fransisco. Apart from the fact that Padre Struggle had a hankering to see some free lovers-turned-litigators (can you imagine California Law Schools in the 1970s? It's like, guys, guys, guys, look at this legal brief, but really, LOOK at it. It's beautiful.), Strugglemano only lives a brisk 6 hour drive south (you can cross five state lines on the East Coast in the same time it takes you to get from Los Angeles to San Fransisco. I cannot understand California).

On day one the trifecta of struggle found itself awash in the salty breezes of the Pacific, climbing up hills, more hills, some other hills (we took a walk around the city and it was uphill BOTH WAYS. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?), peering at charming Victorian homes and their filthy hippie residents (thank you, Haight Ashbury, but I would not like a hit of that), stuffing ourselves with Dim Sum in Chinatown, dodging gangs in the Mission, and generally having a wonderful time. We walked so much on that first day that my shoe literally fell apart, and when I bought a new pair and asked to dispose of the now-derelict sneakers, I was advised to give them to a homeless person. They were accepted gratefully, I'll have you know, which just goes to show that one man's trash is another man's treasure.

Having all pulled leg muscles exploring the city, we decided to spend day two relaxing in Berkley. First we went to Chez Panisse for lunch, and the only appropriate word I have for Alice Water's flagship enterprise is FOODGASM.

Then we saw the university. Maybe it's just because I went to not-Yale which, despite it's many graduate programs and hugely inflated ego, is really rather small, but Berkeley seemed enormous to me. I mean, I can't understand how students navigate the place without becoming extremely lost! We comforted ourselves with Ethiopian food and South African wine, as one does.


Day three had us wandering the hallowed halls of Stanford, whose golden buildings and palm trees made me think of the University of Salamanca crossed with Hawai 5-O. At this point Strugglemano and I also learned a new life rule, that every major university in the United States has an Alexander Calder. Every. Single. One. Any evidence to the contrary is merely an illusion. I then spent the evening hanging out with high profile lawyers in their late fifties/early sixties. If I ever recover from that experience, I will let you know.


Day four, ah, day four, a day that will live in my dreams, day four, we went to Napa. Glorious Napa, fragrant with the stench of fermenting wine and expensive brunches, filled with rolling hills of grapes and, well, nope, that's it, grapes. Strugglemano, being our resident wine expert, arranged three tasting for us at three different wineries, and may I just say, there is nothing quite like the buzz of wine you will NEVER be able to afford consumed well before 5pm (East Coast AND West Coast time). Dear lord, it was glorious.

And so, several thousand pounds heavier (give or take), Padre Struggle and I boarded the plane back to Struggledelphia, while Strugglemano contemplated the long drive back to Southern California. Take heart, Strugglemano, car beats wagon trail hands down. Nothing like a Westward Ho! interlude to refresh the soul, eh? Or at least get it drunk enough so it forgets about work on Monday.

Struggle y su avion

The worst thing about a vacation is having to come home. I recognize that this isn't a particularly original thought, but most essential truths turn out to not be original, for example, Love Hurts, No shoes, no shirt, no service, gravity is a rule, not a guideline. All true, all cliche, all painful if you find yourself on the wrong side of them (especially that gravity one, trust me on this as someone who falls down a lot).So I don't know why the hell I was so cheerful and optimistic when I stepped on the plane departing from San Juan heading back towards Struggledelphia. After all this time, you'd really think I would have learned that struggle dogs my every move, wouldn't you? Alas, my friends, just like the possibility of me tripping over a loud Puerto Rican family's luggage, the eventual epic failure was inevitable.

The trick with an epic failure is the build up. You can't fall from grace until you actually all up on top of grace, you know what I mean? In order for the fall, you have to have the pride goething, or it's not hubris, it's just ho hum. So as I was gently tucked into my soft, plush, fully reclinable first class seat (thank you, US Airways upgrades, you truly are amazing!), and plied with wine and warmed cookies and moist hot towels (I don't know why they do this, but I LOVE it. I want this service as part of my every day life. Note to self, marry rich...), I hummed gently with pleasure and curled up with Gogol's Dead Souls to enjoy myself. In the three and a half hours that it takes a plane to leave the Luis Munoz Memorial Airport and arrive in Philadelphia I had covered two hundred or so pages of the book, enjoyed two enormous glasses of cheap white wine, and stolen the majority of my mother's cookie. In short, I was really enjoying myself. And that's when tragedy struck.

Just as we were circling the landing strip, our valiant captain informed us that there was a storm directly over the airport. He also mentioned that the storm had come unannounced, which surprised me, as most storms send me a short email at least an hour before their arrival, but I went with it. He then mentioned that the plane didn't have enough fuel to continue circling the airport. This, frankly, terrified me. What the hell, enough fuel? What would he have done if we had been delayed in the air on the way? How was there no contingency plan? Come on, people, it's a giant metal object hurtling through the air, it's not going to propel itself! But instead of a fiery death in a heap of wreckage, instead we got the next worse thing. That's right, they decided to land us in Atlantic City.

I can't tell you anything meaningful about the Atlantic City airport because I wasn't permitted to enter it. Instead we sat on the plane for 2 hours (with nary an offer of more wine in sight) waiting for weather conditions to improve. Well, most of us did. A full 11 people actually opted to leave their baggage behind and get out in Atlantic City. I honestly didn't know you could really do that, treat a plane like a local bus line, but, hey, what do I know?

When we finally landed in Philadelphia, having been delayed for a full 3 and a half hours (for those of you playing along at home that is the exact amount of time it takes to get from Puerto Rico to Philadelphia, so it was double or nothing that night, apparently), my poor little family and I found ourselves waiting patiently at the baggage claim, dodging other passengers in their gladiator like attempts to wrestle with their luggage. Out came piece after piece after piece, but no bags marked Familia Struggle did we see. An hour later, my mother finally gave up and went to the US Airways  baggage center, where they told us that our luggage was patiently waiting for us at a completely different terminal. Sure. Of course. That makes perfect sense that our bags would be seperated from those for the rest of our flight and we would need to hike through a universe of car rental stops and concrete Escher-wannabes to find it.. And there they were, waiting patiently for us to find them, and finally, FINALLY, go home.

Upside to all this? I couldn't even remember my vacation to be nostalgic and sad about it. It all felt so far away...

Struggle Crosses Over Volume I

And, finally, after much back and forth and several tearful ice-cream eating sessions with my cats, I can present you call with a conversation between myself, struggle extraordinaire, and my friend Ben, of E. Plurbus Moron, gentleman, statesman, lover, documentor of our insanely strugglesome nation.   I can only hope that you enjoy our little cross-blog pollination attempt as much as we did. Who am I kidding, of course you will, because YOU, like both of us, continue to embrace the struggle!

Ben: Well Leah it is hot as Satan’s taint in D.C. now and we all know what that means: The Real Housewives of New Jersey are back! What’s fun is that most of the women in that show are filing bankruptcy. Now Leah, pretend for a second you’re a normal 22 year old and watch something other than 1980s British crime dramas on PBS, and tell us your thoughts on the Real Housewives. Do they deserve to be punished for their capitalist ways? Power to the reality TV proliteriate!

Leah: First of all, Benjamin, D.C. doesn’t corner the market on hot humid summers, Philly is the mid-Atlantic  too, remember? As I write this my shirt is sticking to my skin so deeply that I’m concerned the two might fuse into some kind of shirt-skin hybrid, and isn’t THAT just the crappiest superpower ever? Second of all, I’ll have you know that I also watch the Disney channel, ABC Family, AND Law and Order reruns on USA, so how is that for hip? (Hep? How are the kids saying it these days?). But about this “Real” housewives business, honestly, can’t these ladies just defy convention and get a job? I just want to go hit them in the face with the Feminist Mystique. Of course, knowing them, they might think that was a feminine hygiene product….

Ben: Haha do you mean the “Feminine Mystique” or “Feminist Mystique”, Countess Luann De Lesseps line of erotic body jewelry?

Leah: What makes body jewelry erotic? Oh, god, please don’t answer that.

Ben: Speaking of famous ghouls with really bad debt problems, this past weekend was the first anniversary of Michael Jackson’s death. Where were you when this news broke, Leah?

Leah: Jesus, I don’t even remember, I think I blocked that out in a shame spiral of whiskey and one-woman reenactment’s of Bad. But then, who didn’t?

Ben: Certainly not me! But now that we have a little perspective on his death I have to say that the whole idea that his death was shocking is kind of ridiculous, no? I mean when Elvis died it was the first time people realized that a Rock music icons were mortal enough to die on the toilet and not in just in a freak accident/overdose. But Michael Jackson? People were weeping over the death of a man who weighed like 40 pounds and didn’t have a face. Was it sad? Yes. Was it the most shocking thing MJ’s every done? God no.

Leah: I know! What about the baby on the balcony? The Surgeries? The marriage to a (wait for it) POSSIBLE female! Honestly, in this case death is probably one of the most vanilla things he could have done.
Ben: That’s not to say Michael Jackson didn’t change lives. Leah his music taught you how to dance and be yourself. And he taught me a little game he ~sob~ used to like to call ~sob~ “Naked tickle fun time” ~sobs hysterically as Leah slowly finishes her coffee ignoring Ben’s weeping~

Leah: Yeaaaahhhhh, can we not wander down the memory lane that was your time at Neverland Ranch? It gets awkward for everyone else when you talk about the toys and the outfits and the totally consensual non-sexual acts that totally didn’t happen not even one time.
But seriously, think about this for a second, Michael Jackson is dead, Madonnna may secretly be the Incredible Hulk if her arms are any indication, everyone else is reduced to making fun of themselves on VH1, what happened to that generation of music? And they wonder why we like this indie-rock business so much, unwashed and pretentious it might be, but at least the artists don’t seem quite so mentally unstable. I say that, of course, but then you have GaGa….

Ben: Leah…please….you’re overloading me on pop culture references. I’m not strong enough. Can we please discuss politics?!?

Leah: FINE.

Ben: I guess I was wondering if you had heard that Jan Brewer, the governor of Arizona who totally isn’t a racist who hates Hispanics, said that “Most immigrants from Mexico come over as drug mules.” As a Mexican, how do you feel about this Leah?

Leah: Wow, Ben, I’m just going to breeze straight past your racist ignorance of geography and just remind you that Puerto Rico is actually not a part of Mexico. ANYway, I couldn’t agree with her more! It’s just like how most Chinese immigrants strolled in all “please, for the love of god, let us build your railroads and, eventually, populate your universities!”

Ben: Right. It’s like saying that Jewish immigrants came to this country to run our banks/media and add vigor to our meat sandwich culture.

Leah: Wait, isn’t that true, though? I mean, my ancestors, the non-drug mule ones, obviously, escaped a pogrom and crawled into Ellis Island with a copy of Adam Smith in one hand and an entire pastrami in the other. Didn’t yours?

Ben: This country was founded on the idea of freedom from drug mules and fatty beef sandwiches! And I will be damned ~sob~ if these Socialists ~sob~ try to stop Jan Brewer from ~sob~ keeping America White, er, constitutionally grounded. Wow if I’m turning into Glenn Beck I think it might be time to shut this conversation down.

Leah: Yes, I’m feeling a little dirty right now just from listening to you. Well, there you have it folks, reality television, 80′s pop stars, blatant racism, Ben crying twice. Happy 4th of July. This is just how the founding fathers must have spent it!

Socratic Struggle

I pride myself in the fact that I avoided most of the common pitfalls of college. Oh, sure, I had my fair share of less-then-collegiate moments at not-Yale, most of which involved a bottle of Cuervo and a sudden obsession with a capella , and, on one occasion, the loss of a friend on a midnight falafel run (hi, Ned!), but by and large I missed the classics, the hospital visit for alcohol poisoning, the waking up in a frat house, Econ, Psych, dread-locks, starting a band, writing poetry, sleeping with a professor, and, of course, this being not-Yale, the joining of the GOP. But I did make one fatal mistake by cliche standards, and that was my enrollment in a little thing they call philosophy.

If you want certainty in your life, if you want absolutes and rules for how to live, do yourself a favor and don't take philosophy. If, on the other hand, you want doubt, you want uncertainty, you want, in fact, to question the very fabric of the universe to the point when your brain feels on the point of explosion, filled to the brim with Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Kant and Aristotle (that's a dinner party worth attending...) to the point when you snap and, obviously, reach for the Cuervo, then sure, by all means, go nuts. Take a philosophy class. Be my guest.

No, that's not entirely fair. The truth is that I had amazing philosophy professors and learned a great deal in their classes. But most of what I learned concerned how impossible the act of learning really is. I think. I'm not sure. Hang on, I have to go check that with Nietzsche.

If I had to guess, I would say that what concerned me the most about my philosophy classes was how subjective morality became for me. And why am I even thinking about this now, at least 4 years since I last put down a copy of the Republic and decided it was all Greek to me? Well, as part of maintaining my real estate licence (which I got before I was legally able to drink....true story), I recently found myself sitting in an office building on Delaware Avenue with a gorgeous view of Camden on a Wednesday morning well before 9am being instructed on ethics. Specifically ethics pertaining to Real Estate. Which, frankly, is a subject I didn't know warranted an hour, let alone seven! Ah, ZING, I'll be here all night! Tip ya bartender!

The sad thing is, most people just assume that real estate agents are unethical sharks who are trying to steal your money and deceive you into buying houses made of cardboard. The even sadder thing is that a lot of real estate agents really ARE unethical sharks who are trying to steal your money and deceive you into buying homes made of cardboard. And apparently, all of them were teaching me on Wednesday morning. Seriously, that had to be the group of least ethical, slimiest, sketchiest purveyors of houses I have ever met, and I have been doing this for a solid four years. Forging your client's names, deception, cash only deals, blockbusting, undisclosed dual agency, private interest, you name it, it was represented. Here's a hint, dude, if you want to teach a room full of people how to be ethical it's not a great idea to ply them with stories about how you committed, and got away with!, fraud. It's bound to be more of an inspiration then a castigation, if you know what I mean.

I can't really decide which I found more troubling, my year of philosophy classes or my seminar on Real Estate ethics. I left my philosophy class confused and concerned about the state of the universe. I left my Real Estate ethics class needing a silkwood shower. So I guess Real Estate class wins on the scale of more mind blowing life experiences, and not really in a good way.  Worst thing of all? They served us terrible pizza. There has to be something morally wrong with that.

A Struggle is Worth A Thousand Words: Shanghai Edition

China is the future, people, and not just because it's at least 12 hours ahead of the Continental United States. No, China is the future because it's huge, inexplicable, the people dress like chaffing is something that happens to other people, and no one knows what the hell is going on. Ever. And if you've ever seen an episode of the Jetsons, I think you'll find this is pretty much exactly what we all thought the future was going to look like. OH! And everyone has a maid. So, yeah. Welcome to the future, hope you know how to eat with chopsticks, because they will MOCK you if you don't, and you wont even understand them, or worse, you will, and in your flustered embrassment almost knock over an entire box of sausage stuffed onion buns when all you wanted to DO was get a CUP of COFFEE. Or something. Not that I'd know.

And so if China is the future, Shanghai is the capital of what is to come. I had always hoped the future would hold jet packs and flying cars and mandatory silver uniforms to make my morning outfit battle easier. What a fool was I, therefore, to expect anything other then struggle. I'll say this for Shanghai, though, in the future, the struggle moves at the speed of light.

Struggle Plays Around

Since I've joined the ranks of the working girls (no, not THOSE kind of working girls, get your mind out of the gutter!), I've discovered something miraculous. While the daily grind doesn't just extend to my coffee, and while the work week can seem endless at times, one of the most amazing things about working, rather than being a student, is, with some exceptions, your nights and weekends are fairly free. Now, this might not sound that revelatory, but stay with me here. For the last 22 years, excluding the brief respite given by vacation times, my evenings were occupied, initially with piano lessons, play practices, vocal jazz rehearsals (am I painting a solid picture for you concerning both my dorkiness and my mother's saintliness?) and later, as the years went by, with part time jobs and meetings and always, through it all, the endless homework, coursework, paperwork and schoolwork, designed to turn the average human being into a pedantic philosophy quoting machine. Or, you know, teach us something. Whichever way you slice it, it took up most of my time, so between classes during the day, working in the evenings and chasing this elusive "sleep" creature all weekend (between drinking bouts. What? Not-Yale was tough!) , I pretty much kept myself busy.

But now that all of that is behind me (at least for the next few years) I'm discovering this amazing thing known as "doing things during the week". Wild and unconventional as this concept is to me, it seems to me that I may be a little behind the times on this one. For example my friend Jon, (hi Jon!) Has drinks and dinner dates with people all the time. When we trade stories about the previous evening, I regal him with tales of Netflix and Sleepytime, while Jon counters with exciting stories about his dating adventures in the Capital. Once I started asking around, it seemed that all of my friends had ceased to reserve their "out of the house" moments for the weekends. So I thought, why not?

Now, given my innate uncoolness and my deep seated need for sleep, I figured I couldn't do anything that crazy on a Monday that might mean I couldn't make it to work on a Tuesday. So body shots, Roman orgies and road trips to Washington were all out, (Sorry, Jon), as were assassination attempts on Latin American dictators were all out. (Just ask the CIA, that last one can take YEARS.) So what was a girl to do to fill all her new found time? The obvious choice, attend two different one-man plays about the lives of Truman Capote and James Baldwin, respectively. Duh.

The Maukingbird Theater Company is a small but prolific company here in Struggledelphia who produce work which looks at questions of sexuality and gender in a new and often striking way. I've seen a great deal of their work, and for a new company they are interesting in tackling some of the most disturbing and perturbing questions facing society today. Their current work is kind of a two parter, two separate plays, each a one man show, each with the same set, but each with a different subject. "Tru", a blustering and meandering 2 hour Odyssey, is told from the perspective of an aging Truman Capote, whose tenuous status in society is quickly plummeting due to his indiscreet, if acute, descriptions of the socialites and dilettante around him. "The Threshing Floor", a singing, zingingly tight hour long chronicle, probes into the life of James Baldwin. While Capote made a career of being the ultimate hanger on, Baldwin exiled himself from the United States in every possible way, I mean, the man practically put the ex in ex-patriot. Perhaps I preferred the piece on Baldwin because of my own recent regression to US soil, because of my own concerns, post graduation, post travel, post life as I've come to know it, about what to do next.

Or maybe I just liked it because it was shorter. Now that I know weeknights are an option, I'm going to fill them just as high as I can. After all, I've got 22 years to make up for. Just don't tell my choral teacher, okay?