H is for Happiness

Fat Chance Bellydance via Ouled Nail

Perhaps this seems like an obvious one, but I actually wanted to take today to talk about a few things having to do with happiness that are oddly hurtful. And -- aww, geez. I was searching the internet for an appropriate picture to put up here, and I accidentally clicked through to a pro-ana blogspot, and now I'm a little derailed. For those of you who don't know the term, "pro-ana" is short for "pro-anorexic" and is exactly what it sounds like: a website that treats anorexia as a "lifestyle choice" and not a terrifying, life-wrecking eating disorder. Pro-ana websites tend to be run by young anorexic girls, and this was no exception. You know, it's one thing to see unreal standards of beauty pushed by the media. It is much, much, much worse to see them pushed by a sweet, ordinary girl who just wants to be happy and believes that her body is getting in the way -- and I don't know about you, but for her to believe that I, and anyone else who looks even remotely healthy, am fat is so strikingly and heartstoppingly awful that I just need a moment to breathe, here.

My healing instinct on this one is to immediately put up a picture of the amazing ladies of Fat Chance Bellydance -- for a number of reasons. First of all, check out the variety of bodies there! Second, look how totally blissed out they look - and how fierce. Although FCBD was actually named as a joking reference to the response founder Caroleena Nericcio used to give to creepy dudes asking for "private dances," the troupe is also famous showcasing a diversity of bodies and has done a lot to break down the Western stereotype of bellydancers as Barbies in coin belts. But also I want to put them up there in order to illustrate something I'm going to say in a few paragraphs...

E is for Exploratorium

via Everything Science

The Exploratorium, which currently sits in the gorgeous Palace of Fine Arts in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco (which was built by Bernard Maybeck, a major mentor of my own heroine Julia Morgan - he helped convince her to apply to the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she became the first female student!) has been and will probably remain one of my favorite places in the world. I recently learned that it's moving to Pier 15 in 2013, and while that's kind of heartbreaking to me in some ways because I love the vast and beautiful building in which it lives, I just don't feel that worried about it becoming any less awesome. (Unlike, say, the museum which must not be named this place.)

My love of the Exploratorium begins not with me but with my father, who got a job there in the very early years under Frank Oppenheimer, the founder and brother of Robert Oppenheimer of Manhattan Project fame. My dad was fresh out of college and wanted to be a scientist - but not, you know, a boring scientist with a white coat. He wanted to be a weird scientist. Maybe not a mad scientist (although he does do a pretty good malevolent laugh), but someone who got to work with the peculiar and the wonderful and the mystical aspects of science. I mean, this is a kid who at age ten or so was skipping school to hang out in a hidden lab somewhere on 2nd Street (I'm pretty sure it was 2nd Street, because I got a job working for some foofy internet company on 2nd Street one summer and my dad came to have lunch with me and pointed up the road at a nondescript building and said "Hey look! That's where my secret science lab was when I was a kid!") to play with his chemistry set and dream about Science. The Exploratorium, home to some of the best weird science in the country, was about as close as he ever came -- maybe as close as any of us will get to come to the playful, mutable borders between science and imagination. Some of the signs my father wrote are still there, over a quarter of a century later. (I hope those will make it in the move, but that much I'm prepared to doubt...)

D is for Delight

via Cream Your Day

Delight is a word I use a lot. Like joy, it is not the same as happiness, although not entirely unrelated -- which is to say, a life full of joy and delight tends to be a happy one, although I'm not sure, somehow, that it goes the other way. I think of happiness as a state of being, one that can last moments or years. But both joy and delight strike me as transient, the hummingbirds of emotion: one flash of brilliant feathers and a lingering impression of vividness and color, and that's it; you don't get to hang onto it. Happiness you can have, I think, but joy and delight you only get to taste. But that taste, that glorious flash, is one of the things that makes life most worth living.

C is for Chapel of the Chimes

Reflecting Pool at Hearst Castle (via Destination Design)

After I got bored of wanting to be a paleontologist at the tender age of seven or so, I discovered architecture. Specifically, I discovered Julia Morgan. I spent hours poring over books about her. I read The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge, which has a fabulous stone mansion in it, and I decided to design my own -- borrowing liberally from pictures of Hearst Castle and the fanciest building I had ever been in at the time, the Claremont Hotel in Oakland, California. I couldn't draw for beans, so every night when I went to bed I would lie awake building it in my head. I managed to perfect it to the point where I could walk in and out of most of the rooms in my my mind as if they were physically around me. I can still open the drawers in the tower bedroom I build for myself, which had a stream running through it and a yellow sandstone balcony. (I had expensive taste for a ten-year-old living in a grungy house in Oakland with orange shag carpeting.) I thought I was all set: great, cool, got a life dream and a career plan, what's so hard about this stuff, anyway? At a certain point, however, it occurred to me that I wasn't going to be able to just waltz into the Ecole de Beaux-Arts (partly because I couldn't draw for beans) and I would have to go to boring school for years and years and then build ugly apartment buildings instead of just, you know, being the next Julia Morgan, already. It was hard, being surrounded by her gorgeous work everywhere I went (Oakland and Berkeley are full of her buildings). But after a while I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker instead (a plan which lasted me all the way through my second semester of college!) and gave up on her buildings.

Well, mostly. There was just this one, you see...

B is for Bellydance

Khairiyya Mazin, one of the last teachers & performers of Ghawazi dance,
in 2003 - from an awesome article about her on the Gilded Serpent

The word "bellydance," if you were unaware, refers to a group of dances originating in the Middle East & North Africa that share a common movement vocabulary making use of the natural mobility of the pelvic girdle. In recent years, dialogue with Western forms and influences has added a number of stylistic elements to the mix, so that bellydance can now mean anything from a dance practiced by members of a small nomadic Egyptian tribe in traditional costuming to a live music ensemble to one performed by an American woman interpreting a piece of electronic music while wearing a costume that looks like it came out of the mating of an Orientalist painting and a 1920s film spectacular. Does that sound a bit dry? (Geez, I hope not.) It encompasses a lot. But bellydance is one of the most inherently joyful and expressive dance forms I have ever encountered, and my experience of it is one of the formative elements in my desire to build a museum dedicated to joy.

A is for Academy of Sciences

Image credit: Cal Academy of Sciences Research Archives

Welcome to the A-Z Challenge Entry for A on the Museum of Joy! This month, I'll be writing about 26 inspirations for the Museum of Joy, one for every letter of the alphabet. To be fair, this entry is actually about the California Academy of Sciences, but I've got something else lined up for letter C, and living in San Francisco there's no need to refer to what state you're in. When I was a kid, it was just The Museum with Dinosaurs.

My family moved to San Francisco just before I turned 2 and just after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. We were pretty poor, apparently, although I had no idea because I was a toddler and we lived at the edge of Golden Gate Park, which is still one of the coolest places in the world that a kid can possibly have at her doorstep. (Although the Inner Sunset, our neighborhood, is a whole bunch ritzier now, there still remains a shop that was for me a magical cave at the age of 2, which we called The Badge Shop because it sold dozens of tiny enameled pins and other treasures. It's really called "Oriental Import Co" or something, and it looks exactly the same. You can still buy a really great pin for five bucks, too.) Back then, a member ship at the Academy of Sciences was affordable. As this article says, a family membership was $25 in 1996, and this is even earlier. Now it's $500. Poor kids like me don't get to go any more, but then there's a lot less to see these days....