1.
The biggest culture conflict in the ESL class I teach is eye contact. I explain to my international students that in the United States, making eye contact is a sign of friendliness and professionalism. But in many cultures, East Asian for example, downcast eyes communicate respect. My students are flummoxed by my insistence that in job interviews, they need to make eye contact.

On our end-of-the-year picnic in Golden Gate Park, one student points to two dogs nosing each other nearby; the beta dog, a silky-eared spaniel, has her head down. “See? See?” Amisha tells me, validated now by the natural world. Americans are the weird ones, she means.

2.
The “deer in the headlights” cliche describes the experience of freezing: not being able to move, staring head-on at an oncoming threat. Except my mental image of myself is not deer, but rabbit: I picture long, shapely ears perked, paws tucked uselessly in front of me, as if holding a dainty, invisible purse. The “freeze response” is recognized as a natural response to assault, more common even than “fight” or “flight.” Only recently have juries understood that you can be raped, even if you don’t resist. The person freezing cannot control a hardwired reflex.

I wanted to say, “No.” My lips wouldn’t open; my body was simultaneously stiff and slack. I was a kitten whose nape-of-neck was caught in the mother cat’s mouth, except of course it wasn’t a mother cat, it wasn’t the soft nape of my neck.

3.
In the Bible, Noah drank too much wine and passed out naked. Out of respect for their father’s dignity, all his children averted their gazes, except for Ham, who looked at his unconscious father. Boldly? Curiously? Accidentally? How many of us have unintentionally viewed something we never intended to see?

The other day, Maisie walked in on me while I was vomiting in the toilet, after too much wine. “Mom, are you okay?” she said. “Go away!” I said, and in Maisie’s face—concern transformed into something colder—I saw my words might as well have been a curse. She backed away. The toilet bowl morphed from vortex to mirror.

Later that afternoon, I walked by a PSA billboard for Alcoholics Anonymous. “Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired?” was the slogan. Yes, I was. I really, really was. I had a bad hangover; I felt exceptionally like shit.

4.
When his wife Eurydice was bitten by a viper and died, Orpheus went to the Underworld to beg Hades to let her return to the world of the living. Their hearts softened by Orpheus's plaintive music, Hades and Persephone released Eurydice, on the condition that she follow silently behind Orpheus, and that he not look at her until they left the Underworld. But right at the threshold of the Underworld, Orpheus looked back, and Eurydice vanished before his stricken eyes. Orpheus was a wimp. He wanted to reunite with Eurydice without taking the obvious, banal path of dying first. Perhaps the gods punished Orpheus for trying to have both life and Eurydice by making him look back.

Orpheus reminds me of my ex-husband, wanting to be free but still have everyone love him. We all know these wanting-to-have-his-cake-and-eat-it-too men. "Why do you always obsess about the past?" Robert asked me. As if I were the one with the perspective problem.

5.
Agamemnon could strike his sails at the first, belated breath of wind, only by pointing his prow towards Troy, and away from his own white cliffs. Away from the daughter he’d sacrificed to summon wind: dead Iphigenia in her wedding clothes, her face frozen in surprise, his knife in her breast. Away from her mother grieving on the shore, nursing her hatred and revenge, living only for the moment Agamemnon–blind, arrogant, forgetful husband—would return home.

Robert compares himself to a shark. Explaining why he hasn’t seen me or Maisie in three years, he says he needs to always be moving forward. To some degree, I understand Robert’s rationale; I understand how Orpheus and Lot’s wife validate his impetus to swim away from us, from what he sees in us.