The Rice controversy has offered many frustrated progressive Christians an entry point into a crowded conversation about faith. I think it’s more than just coincidence that in the days prior to Rice’s post, Facebook was dotted with “likes” for the group “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.” There’s something in the air about this.

Interestingly, Rice is running out for all the reasons that I’m running back in, called to a fiery, deeply felt place where rage and devotion intersect. I, too, resent the way homophobic, misogynist, hypocritical and otherwise unbearable people are laying claim to “true” Christianity. But unlike Anne, I don’t want to punt. I want to fight.

I was baptized Presbyterian at the font of a stone church in 1980. Presbyterianism is marked by a freakish work ethic, austerity, an emphasis on education and, relative to other Christian denominations, a pronounced liberalism. As far as righteousness goes, a sort of sliding-scale spirituality prevails — more if you can, less if you can’t. There’s always a sense that forgiveness and regeneration are within reach. In a nod to Presbyterian gender equality, my eldest sister became a minister and has been for the past 22 years. In a show of characteristic thrift, my father once generated several pews’ worth of laughter by making change from the church collection plate, swapping his $20 bill for three fives.

At some point when I wasn’t looking — I was distracted by punk rock, alt.feminism or maybe yoga — the dominant tenor of Christianity became almost unbearably shrill. As America in general became more stratified along religious and political lines, I slunk to the margins, caring less and less. Now, something rebellious and itchy has awoken in me, and I care a lot. Despite the frequent impulse to just keep quiet and hope that someone will rescue Christianity for the rest of us, I want to engage. Even if I have to start a lot of sentences with “I’m a Christian, but…” Even if I end up sounding like a two-bit Anne Lamott with anger-management issues.

After all, the self-satisfied and self-righteous have come for me, too: “YOU, a Christian? With those politics? With that past? Not with those go-go shorts, missy, your Queer Nation stickers, your unrepentant cursing, and your premarital everything.” I knew they’d show up, those stingy, uncharitable moral goalkeepers, with their underlined passages in Leviticus and their pointy-finger God. It just ain’t a Jesus party without this particular turd in the spiritual punchbowl. Maybe it’s the believer’s rite of passage — until you’ve encountered this type and had them declare a fundamental component of your identity an “abomination,” you kind of haven’t lived. The challenge is to have your faith tested this way and not blink.

But private moments of grace shore up my belief, no matter what any Christian Grinch might proclaim. When my grandmother was in hospice care, in the final stages of metastasized liver cancer, my mother called everyone to Baltimore for a final visit. Seeing my once-industrious, stylish grandmother shrunken and dwindling with disease was crushing. Her mind shutting down, as well as her body, she drifted through periods of delirium. From her hospital bed, yoked to tubes and machines, she’d try to bolt from the room, fleeing an invisible attacker, or take an imaginary phone call: Hello? What number did you dial? Then, out of a period of silence, she turned her face, pale but still pink, to my mother and addressed her with perfect lucidity. “I just wanted to say ‘thank you.’” And my mother replied, kind and plain, “You’re very welcome.” To hear that soothing maternal voice, the one that comforted me as a child, turned on her own mother was the greatest gift. It let me know that among the kidney-shaped plastic bins for spitting up blood and ever-increasing morphine drips, God was in the room, too. A sublime memory that can both wreck and revive me all at once. I’ve had, also, examples of grace so stupidly obvious that a Hollywood hack would be embarrassed to claim them: One cold April day, when I was broke, drag-ass depressed, my marriage on the verge of cratering, I was driving, and heard, for the first time, Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus Take the Wheel,” a song about a woman so desperate, she turned her entire life over to God. After I wiped my eyes with napkins I’d stashed in the glove box, I thought, Well, that was a little on the nose, don’t you think, Lord?

Elegant or corny as the messages may be, they are consistent, well-timed and appreciated. They’ve enabled me to say, authentically, that I don’t fear God. But that doesn’t mean I judge those who do, or that I judge those who are just too sick of people being cruel in his name to put much stock in believing. There is no hell like man-made hell, no sting worse than rebuke in the name of God, and some of us never recover from being told that we’re not straight enough. Not obedient enough. Not submissive enough. Not pure enough. So they quit. When you want that gentle, open-armed Jesus with the soft eyes and lambs and love, only to be refused, over and over with “Not. Good. Enough,” it’s hard not to internalize it, this belief that you’re unworthy of God’s gracious care. If you’ve grown weary of being told you come up short, you may settle for stepping out of the way of the roundhouse kicks. You’re too bruised and tired to hear a safe voice saying, “Come back!” Salvation as the prize in this carnival isn’t worth another throw.

Of course, it is said that Christians, not Christianity, are the problem. I’ll give an Amen to that. I’ve had to devise ways to deal with the frustration born of small-mindedness and stupidity in the clown suit of righteousness. When I think people suck too much to justify a belief in God and all his mangy disciples, power ballads call me home. I sit alone, agitated and pulled apart by cynicism, blasting my praise music playlist on repeat until the beauty hammers me back into place. Some days I rely entirely on “Bring the Rain” by MercyMe, which starts off with the line: “I can count a million times people asking me how I can praise you with all that I’ve gone through.” There’s crashing drums and heart-quickening gospel voices on backup at the climax. My idea of joyful noise. A thousand hymns belched from church organ pipes couldn’t come close.

I believe that a relationship with the church, like all relationships that sear your soul, will never be perfect. But I’m not going to flee the church because someone else thinks they know who belongs there. Religion can be freighted with heartache, disappointment, uncomfortable adjustment and the dreary slog through the vale of tears. But I believe we can fashion the pieces of a broken heart into a new shape of belief. I’d rather endure the contortions of worship than suffer the bone-dry refuge of refusal or a spiritual life half-lived.

And I believe that, in her way, Anne Rice is saying the same. While I’m not moved to join her, I sure don’t blame her. I was touched that she cared enough to come right out and say that she was willing to renounce organized religion as her high-dive act of faith. I hate that it had to come to this for her, but I’m grateful for what it has lit up in me. If that’s what it takes to praise you, by all means, Jesus, bring the rain.

Lily Burana is the author of three books, most recently “I Love a Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War, and Other Battles.” Her all-time favorite Jesus jam is Kutless’ “Word of God Speak.”

Only women my age who wear Eileen Fisher ensembles and thick rubber-soled shoes understand. All I have to say to my girlfriends is, “knee-high boots, four-inch heels,” and they scream: “We hate her.”

The truth is, I can’t really say anything bad about Alex, who’s smart, hard-working, and liked and respected by her students and the teachers in our department. Except maybe she’s too pretty or dresses too sexy to be a high school English teacher. I imagine she’s the daughter of movie stars: Glenn Close and Kevin Kline or Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. Some days, she wears pencil skirts and stiletto heels. Other days, she looks almost ordinary in her flared wool trousers and Dansko clogs. But no, she’s never ordinary.

I Google Alex with the same fervor that I Googled Sarah Palin when she became John McCain’s running mate and I spent hours digging for gossip. I find only Alex’s shadowy Facebook silhouette and have to wonder why I’m doing this. My obsession is clearly overdetermined. This is not a reaction to an educational system that values cost over experience. It is a visceral feeling that I’m being superseded by an astonishingly beautiful young woman. She is happy and thriving and wanted — and I am not.

In past years, my principal has told me by December that he wanted me back the following year. This year, no word in December, or January, or February. In March I realize Alex and I will be vying for the one open position in the English department. (The woman on leave whom I was replacing will return in September.)

Now, when I go to the principal’s office to speak about this or that, he doesn’t make eye contact. He is in a hurry to get back to his e-mail or to his next scheduled meeting.

New York State law prohibits discrimination based on age, and so we are told the job will be posted and we will have to apply for it and go through an interview process (to be fair!), despite our administration’s knowing me and my work for almost three years and their knowing Alex and her work for the last seven months. Surely they know whom they want. Surely any process we go through will be a charade to prevent a lawsuit.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

I’ll be 59 in two weeks. Ten or fifteen years ago, I realized I could not remotely rely on my youth and looks to get by. I no longer had an Oil of Olay complexion or a size 6 figure. I couldn’t get away with wearing short skirts or tight sweaters or acting cute or coy. I’d have to depend on other qualities, the ones my grandmother said you could see in the dark: personality, intelligence and character.

I consider cutting years off my résumé. Maybe I’ll be hired if they think they don’t have to pay me so much. (Compensation scales based on years of experience allow me to make twice what first- and second-year teachers earn.) The recession isn’t helping; districts are paring activities and staff. Nationally, according to the New York Times, 150,000 teachers may lose their jobs this year. Some districts have already received more than 450 applications for each advertised position.

In the last few months, I’ve applied for dozens of jobs. No response — except for automated e-mails thanking me for applying and advising they will call if they’re interested. One school asked me to call to set up a pre-screening interview. When I called within 20 minutes of receiving the e-mail, the secretary said, “All slots are already taken.” And that was for an interview for an interview!

I think of the Hillary Clintons and Ruth Bader Ginsbergs — women over 60 who are still active and vibrant and employed at a level they deserve. I worry I’ll have to do what I did when I graduated from college: answer phones, make coffee, and type carbon copies that have to be retyped if there are mistakes. I imagine working as a proofreader — editing and correcting the grammar of my grown-up students. I imagine myself behind the counter of a coffee bar or bookstore. Or taping up signs with my phone number on little flaps offering to walk dogs or tutor.

As I was growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, my mother encouraged me to date boys on the golf team and to wear pale pink lipstick; my father encouraged me to be a nurse, a librarian, a dental hygienist or a teacher — the kinds of jobs women could have until they got married and had children. In high school I bought into that dream. I even skipped chemistry and physics to take three semesters of weaving and three of sewing so I could be more “domestic.” Yes. I did use that word.

By my junior year of college I’d discovered Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and consciousness-raising groups — and soon thereafter stopped shaving. Those of us who came of age during the nascent feminist movement disdained fashion-magazine beauty. We let our hair go natural, went bra-less, wore Birkenstocks or Earth shoes and no makeup. We rallied for the right to have careers as well as families, and we worked hard to do both. Now, before we’re ready, we find ourselves replaced by our daughters’ generation.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Interviews for the open English position at our school take place on a Thursday afternoon in early May. I get my hair cut and blown out. I take a Valium the night before so I’ll get a good night’s sleep. I lay out my clothes — freshly cleaned and pressed black slacks, a purply-pink jacket, and black Thierry Rabotin ballet flats. I wear make up (and take extra with me to apply just before the interview).

After teaching all day, I freshen up in the ladies’ room. I look in the mirror and feel overwhelmed with sadness. Tears are starting to pool. I tell myself that losing a job is not like losing a husband. But it is. Losing a job wakes all the other losses: the mother-in-law you loved, time with your children when they were young, the house that was home. I apply lipstick and somehow walk down the hall to the assistant principal’s office.

We sit around a table and talk and laugh. And then they ask me to prepare a demonstration lesson for Monday. As if they don’t know how I teach and relate to my students. The principal and assistant principal have already written at least 10 classroom observations, all surprisingly wonderful reflections of my work, for which I am grateful.

I take the demo seriously — as if my job depended on it. The kids are raising their hands, talking about the significance of the fallen tree in “All My Sons,” talking about the morality of selling cracked cylinder heads to the Army, comparing that to the faulty parts that caused the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf, talking about what’s at stake when Kate denies the death of her son.

It’s a good lesson: My students make connections, grapple with the unfamiliar, and go against and beyond the grain of their expectations — and mine. Still, I know I won’t get rehired.

The next day I’m wearing my red Hawaiian shirt, red clogs and chinos. It’s hot and humid and my hair is curly-wild. When I pass the assistant principal, I wave hello and smile big. My buoyant mood surprises me. She returns my smile with a pout and her empathic eyes connect in a way that says, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

The principal e-mails me to come to his office after school. Good news is conveyed during school, when you don’t have to go back to the classroom upset or angry. I warn my department chair that if it’s bad news, I won’t be at the meeting after school. I know I won’t be able to bear looking at anyone, especially Alex.

The principal’s door is open. He asks me to sit and says with a calm, low voice, “I am recommending Alex for the English position.”

“I knew in February,” I say.

He looks surprised. “I guess I don’t have a poker face.”

“I have to go,” I say. “This is too painful.” Like a spurned older wife, I leave with a lump the size of a peach pit swelling in my throat.

When I get home, I pour a cordial of Macallan 12 Year single malt scotch, and another, and another. It goes down smoothly with good dark chocolate — and helps numb the pain. It’s not about the loss of a paycheck (though, yes, that matters), but loss of community, of good friends, of form to my day, of my professional identity.

And so I return to work every morning for six more weeks: waking at 5:40, in my car by 6:20, heading up the West Side Highway by 6:30, slouching toward school where I must spend the day with my soon-to-be ex-colleagues and students. I run into a teacher-friend as I come into school. She tries to reassure me that I’ll be OK, that I’ll find another job.

I go sit on a stepladder in the back of the book room — among the “Hamlets” and “Mockingbirds” and “Jane Eyres,” waiting for my breathing to steady — before going into my classroom, where for a little while, my 9th and 10th graders — full of optimism and trust — help me forget.

We’re reading excerpts from the play “Red” and looking at Rothko paintings. I smile when they insist, “Any kid could paint like that!” and guide them toward discovering the incorporeal beauty of literature and art.

Later, I’m at one of the English-office computers checking e-mail when Alex approaches, rests her lithe arm on top of the brown Formica carrel, and says, “Hey, Beth. I know it’s awkward. I just want to say that.” Her face is animated, her blue eyes radiant.

“It is awkward, ” I say. “I appreciate your stopping by. Congratulations.”

I avert my eyes to my wrinkling hands on the keyboard. When I glance up, she’s stepping away, one foot in front of the other, posture erect, head high. She has her career in front of her: the joys and intimacies and pitfalls and pain. I’ve been there. I’ve walked that path.

I call after her, “You’ll have fun.” And I mean it.

Beth Aviv is the author of “Bearing Witness: Teaching about the Holocaust.” She’s taught high school English for 30 years.

She took a quick puff on her cigarette. “There are roles,” she clarified. “One woman in the couple is more like the man than the other. She’ll dress like a man, do things around the house that a husband would normally do. Like taking out the trash, fixing things, stuff like that. They live together like they’re married. But obviously, they’re not.”

I don’t remember what prompted the 12-year-old me to ask my mother about gay women right there in the middle of our suburban kitchen, in a cloud of her menthol tobacco smoke and the dust particles from a million decorative paper towels. I suppose I’d heard something on a sitcom. I know there was at least one episode of “The Facts of Life” in which Blair accused a girl of being a lesbian because she excelled at sports.

When I was growing up, homosexuals weren’t exactly a popular topic in our house. They seemed to make my father intensely angry. He reacted to certain kinds of men on television by flinging the word “faggot” like a circular blade from between his front teeth and lower lip.

But long before words like “gay,” “lesbian,” “faggot” and “dyke” made their way into our household — before my mother, books or after-school specials helped refine the concept for me — I had an innate sense of what homosexuality was. It was played out among my dolls.

Malibu Ken and Kissing Barbie were the best of friends. They’d met in college, long before she was a movie star and he, her agent. They agreed to raise children together, from two separate but neighboring addresses, but it was understood that Ken would never marry Barbie. That was impossible, you see, because Malibu Ken was gay.

Of course, my 9-year-old brain didn’t yet know that word, “gay,” and certainly didn’t understand the machinations of gay male sex. But here’s what I did know: Ken liked to spend most of his time at the beach engaged in horseplay with bronzed male surfers. Furthermore, I had watched every episode of “Too Close for Comfort” and digested the fact that “Monroe,” the third-floor tenant played by Jim J. Bullock, was a different kind of man. Much different from, say, my Budweiser-guzzling, fawn-shooting father who liked to spend weekends biting his fingernails and spitting them at Howard Cosell. I understood, instinctively, that Malibu Ken was like Monroe.

I also knew that Barbie’s loyal housekeeper, Olga, secretly had the hots for Barbie. Olga was one of those hollow, blown-plastic fashion dolls who came cheap at Woolworth’s, sold in a cellophane bag stapled to a small folded slab of cardboard. Olga had crayon-yellow hair and wore a look of perpetual surprise. I kept her in a polyester double-knit jumpsuit in an orange-and-green psychedelic print. She was hip for a housekeeper. She was from Europe.

I was clear on the fact that Barbie could never return Olga’s affections. Barbie was solidly asexual (unlike her eldest daughter, a 1950s hand-me-down Barbie who was most definitely heterosexual and a raging slut). Kissing Barbie had deep, unspoken issues that kept her trapped in near-frigidity.

Yes, even at 9, I understood all these things about Barbie, and about Olga, and Ken, but without the benefit of the appropriate vocabulary nor any concrete knowledge of sex.

As for me, well, I had good reasons for sticking with boys, thank you very much. Mom made it clear that being a woman choosing to be with another woman suggested a personal failure; a tragic “settling” to avoid a lifetime of sleeping single in a double bed, masturbating on sweltering summer nights, and in harsh winters, stroking the wiry hairs springing from one’s facial warts in a repetitive self-soothing motion. What woman in her right mind wanted that? Being a fat, frizzy-haired, gap-toothed, socially anxious misfit child and teen had been quite enough. I was determined not to carry this freakdom, this substandardness into adulthood. I planned to blossom in adulthood, to amaze everyone with my transformation. “My, didn’t you grow up pretty,” they might say. “You slimmed down real nice,” “You filled out in all the right places,” “You went from an ugly duckling to a swan!”

——–

It was the day after Thanksgiving. I was a young 20-something with an office job and two adjoining rooms in my parents’ lopsided 1880s house. A group of us were gathered around the dining room table playing Pictionary: me, my then-boyfriend Rob, my mother, my aunt, my sister, my brother, and a friend of my brother. My dad was sitting in a recliner in the next room, watching TV.

Someone brought up Madonna, and opinions began to flit back and forth across the table — she was a trendsetter, she was a skank. And purely as a joke (because while I dig Madonna, I don’t really diiiig Madonna), I said: “Well I’d do ‘er.”

That was all. I’d do ‘er.

Really, I was just kidding.

I think my mother, aunt and boyfriend all groaned. My sister, then in her teens, went stiff in her chair, palms flattened to the air as though pressing it away from her, and bleated: “I. Did NOT. Just. Hear that.”

The next thing I saw was my dad’s face, arms and torso flying toward me across the table, like an evil, angry, mustachioed Superman sans cape. His hands went for my neck, and as he groped for it, one of them pressed my windpipe and produced a weird sensation in my throat, like the bonging of a bell. My boyfriend immediately shot out of his chair and I remember his voice shouting, “Whoa, whoa, WHOA!” He tried to push my dad off of me; my mother and aunt struggled to yank my father back in the opposite direction.

And then Dad said, with stiff jaw and spittle forming at the corners of his mouth: “If you wanna be a fucking faggot, you won’t do it under my roof!”

And that was just a joke.

So it was far easier, far safer just to stick with dudes. And it wasn’t torture. I never went for grunting cavemen with jock itch, or any loping bad boy with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip. But I did like smart boys. Strange boys. Boys who dressed like New Wavers, boys with Apple IIs who probably wound up billionaires, boys who painted or played guitar, or raised all manner of small rodents.

I also pored over the bra section of the Sears catalog, trying to detect the dusky outline of a nipple beneath a layer of white lace. I kissed my friend Danielle on the mouth while role-playing “house” as husband and wife.

In my early 20s, I went to a lesbian nightclub called Hepburn’s in Philadelphia with some gay friends. Despite growing up in a house full of self-righteous bigots, I retained a socially liberal core. Like pancakes in a Teflon pan, my parents’ lessons had a tendency to smack the surface and slide right off again. So it wasn’t that strange to find me in a gay club. I rather enjoyed looking. And to my utter fascination, there were quite a few women there who didn’t look like lumberjacks. How could my mother have missed this?

A female ambled over to us. She was what you’d call “butch.” She thrust her face close into mine, scowling. “Are you gay?” she demanded.

I immediately felt foolish. The fact is, I didn’t know what I was. I dated guys because it was easier, but I felt like I could potentially be … well, anything. I was flesh and nerves and thoughts and emotions and electrical impulses. And in that moment, all of it was caught off-guard.

“I … I don’t know,” I stammered.

She shook her head and cackled.

She looked at my lesbian companion and said: “Certain people just have no business being here, ya know what I mean?”

To my dismay, my lesbian friend nodded.

——–

Ten years, several boyfriends and two fiancés later, I found myself an unattached 30-something woman in New York City. I opened myself up to dating again. And this time, I broadened my dating options to include women.

For a long time I felt like I wasn’t “allowed” to have a sexual and/or romantic relationship with anyone but guys unless I was willing to cut off all my hair, start listening to Melissa Etheridge 24/7, wear Birkenstock sandals and take up hiking. I’d also been under the mass spell that all females must prioritize their physical appearance in order to please men and stir envy in their fellow women, or otherwise be considered permanent outcasts.

But I began to recognize attractiveness in men and women I never would’ve considered attractive just a few short years before. I found more to be enchanted by. My mind exploded, as if I’d been living life from inside a tiny buck-fifty single-screen cinema, and was suddenly seeing the world on IMAX. My appreciation for the gorgeous variety and complexity of humanity was expanding.

At the outer reaches of my consciousness, there had long lurked a stubborn belief that enjoying the intimate company of a woman was a cop-out because you were fat, or hopelessly ugly. It was a surrender. My mother equated it to marrying a black man, like her fat sister Phyllis had done.

But if I were the kind of woman who settles, I could’ve settled for one of two men who wanted to marry me. And I could be getting halfhearted oral sex once every six years — provided I was willing to cover my entire crotch area with a huge swath of Saran wrap. Or I might still be pacing wildly from room to room in our Upper East Side apartment, at the height of a brain-searing panic attack, trembling and begging the gods to “Make it stop! Please make it stop! Oh dear god please, somebody help me!” and he’d be sitting at the kitchen table with his head bent over a map of an imaginary place, ignoring me completely, putting another tidy pencil mark on a nonexistent crossroads.

I ended those relationships, with good reason. That’s right, the fat girl did the calling off. It was the fat girl who willingly gave up a perfectly good, 32-inch-waisted Ivy League graduate with a handsome inheritance. The fat girl walked away from the chiseled, sexually artful would-be runway model (and yes, he was straight). Neither was as self-aware as I was becoming, and in both cases I ultimately didn’t feel we were growing together.

Nobody else’s “perfectly good” was going to be good enough for me. Not anymore. I listen to my gut now. Not to the twisted theories my mother used to parrot from god-knows-who. Not to the ads or movies or TV shows that tell me how I should look, dress, behave or spend, or who I should desire, pursue, fuck or fall in love with.

I had an instinct for certain things when I was a child. I understood more than I knew. I mean, my mom probably wouldn’t get this, but we’re all made of the same stuff, I think. Like a giant melted polymer mess in a vat at the doll factory. We don’t become an individual someone until we’re poured into a particular doll mold, and some line worker slips us into a pink chiffon dress or a pair of turquoise swim trunks, and maybe the marketing department gives us a name. But if that little doll-heart begins to glow from the inside, and the polymer begins to soften, and we begin to sense what we’re made of and can forget how we’ve been shaped or duded-up, should we be ashamed by who’s lighting us up? 

We all know “Eat, Pray, Love” has hijacked book clubs worldwide, and will only become more popular with next week’s release of the Julia Roberts movie, but less is known of the way it has affected international travel, creating a kind of bourgeois sexual tourism. I feel bad for these women, who seem to think that by following the same steps as one writer, they can somehow graft her happy ending onto their own frustrated lives. My disdain was such that early in my trip, I wrote a story about how they were ruining Bali (the story recently ran on Jezebel).

At 29, I’m not looking for a man. I’m six months out of a nearly two-year relationship so void of passion and emotion that I might as well have been alone the entire time. For the past few months I have enjoyed traveling by myself in Asia, avoiding all offers of romance. One pale Englishman in Laos asked me, his eyes wide and moist, if I wanted to have a bit of fun with him.

“Fun for whom?” I asked and went to bed early that night with my book, happy that I only had to share my room with the large frog on the wall of my bathroom.

Spiritual types like to say that Bali is a great power center of the world and that the island itself is a woman. I am wary of assigning gender to land masses, but the place does feel different than the rest of Asia, almost nurturing, and it’s hard not to feel supremely happy when you are paying $15 a night for a ridiculously beautiful hotel with carved teak canopied beds and volcano views. One night on the shared balcony I become fast friends with Susi and Nicole, two independent travelers. In the mornings we share coffee and in the evenings we stay up drinking beer and rice wine, a cloying drink sold cheaply around the island that tastes good mixed with guava juice. We laugh loudly and talk about the things we’d change about the world — men should be more in touch with their emotions, people should be more tolerant. These are not new ideas, but watching the light sink behind the temples while nearby children practice Balinese music, the ideas feel, at the very least, worth repeating.

One night we go to a local warung, a popular food spot called Dewa’s. We sit at a communal table with an extremely tall Dutch guy with disheveled hair named Jorick, whom Susi engages in some intense debate that I am too drunk on local Bintang beer to care about. We all agree to go dancing the next night, but it’s raining, and so Jorick stays on our balcony with us, drinking wine and playing music from a tiny iPod speaker. We play question games like college kids, the kind of silly philosophical head-scratchers only enjoyed by those with the luxury of time to burn.

“If you had to choose, what would you give up for the rest of your life? Pasta, bread or rice?” someone asks.

“Easy, pasta,” I say.

“Sex or music?” Jorick asks.

“Music,” I say. “No, wait!”

He shows up on the balcony the following evening as well, his lanky frame ducking around the dangling light fixtures. That night, as the bats barrel past after the rains, diving at the insects clustering around our lanterns, we continue our conversations from the night before. I find myself agreeing with Jorick often, and understanding both his accent and his point of view when the others don’t. We have moments of prolonged eye contact, but I don’t think much of it until we go to the store for more beer. Inside he picks up a basket, and we walk together to the stand-up cooler. “How many do we get?” he asks. I know it sounds crazy, but there is something I love about the way we get those beer bottles together and the way the veins on his arm stand out a bit as he holds the basket. It feels almost carnal, like a prehistoric desire, as if holding a shopping basket were the modern equivalent of being able to club a woolly mammoth. All I know for sure is that as we check out I feel my first shiver of attraction for Jorick.

I could write what happens next, after the wine and beer bottles are all empty, but Gilbert already has done such a lovely and accurate job: “Yes, I did come to his bed with him, in that bedroom with its big open windows looking out over the nighttime and the quiet Balinese rice fields … It had been a long, austere season of solitude. I had done well for myself … What I remember most about that night is the billowy white mosquito netting that surrounded us.”

Here is my movie montage with Jorick: The impossible beauty of Bali becomes even more vivid, the edges crisper, like a two-week magic mushroom trip. We rent a motorbike and drive around the countryside, dipping into valleys and ascending to views of volcanoes. Children run out from homes built like temples to wave, kites fly above us, always airborne. It is so perfect that it almost frightens me, like stumbling upon a house made of candy in the woods. There has to be a downside to this. We stay in our room so much that the housekeeper tells me later she had no time to clean it.

Do I realize I have become completely, embarrassingly Gilbert-like? No, at this point my blissed-out body has overtaken the judgmental, cynical part of myself. The New York part of me — the part that sneers at romance and sincere, naked emotion — has disappeared in favor of an unself-conscious, googly-eyed sap. When Jorick leaves to meet a friend in Vietnam, I have a physical reaction so intense I think I might be pregnant. (I’m not.) Over the next days, I behave like a love-addled teen: listen to Coldplay, gaze meaningfully from the bus at the passing scenery, scribble in my notebook about the beauty of the sky reflected in the water of the rice paddies. Recently I reread “Eat, Pray, Love,” and I realized one sentence was almost a direct quote.

It is only when I arrive home that I fully comprehend the irony of the past month: Cynical writer goes to Bali to make fun of Elizabeth Gilbert wannabes only to become perhaps her closest emulator.

I feel stabs of guilt for being so harsh on those women, searching the island for their romantic bliss. Who am I to laugh at their longing? By all means, ladies, come to Bali, I want to tell anyone within smiling distance. Find a wonderful man in a wonderful place. But if I could tell those women one more thing, it would be that maybe they should stop looking so hard. Because if there’s a romantic cliché that’s held true — for Elizabeth Gilbert, and now, for me — it’s that bliss usually happens when you aren’t hunting it down.

These days, as I plan to go meet Jorick in Europe, my “Eat, Pray, Love” overlap still makes me a bit uneasy, like carrying around a book with an Oprah stamp on it. My spontaneous romance has a whiff of the already discovered, which is both annoying and embarrassing. I can anticipate future conversations with women.

“So. Where’d you two meet?”

“Bali, in Ubud. I was there alone having some time to ponder my life’s purpose and –”

A flicker of recognition spreads over the listener’s face. “Wait. Isn’t that where –”

“Yes, but it’s different,” I’ll protest, trying not to sound too defensive. “I’m not divorced, and he isn’t even Brazilian.”

Of course, there’s a good chance our relationship, like most, won’t work out. Not everyone is as gifted with happy endings as Gilbert, whose marriage to Felipe became the basis of her second tome of self-discovery, “Committed.” No, in the end, I’m just Jessica Olien, unknown writer and walking example of the Murphy’s Law of Relationships. But, like Jorick says, it would be stupid for us not to see what happens. You never know.

I just don’t expect a book deal out of it.

Jessica Olien’s writing has appeared in Slate, Bust, theatlantic.com and Jezebel.

But “normal” is not good. Normal means the things that didn’t work in Haiti before the earthquake have endured. That which seemed reassuring when I got back now seems depressing, tedious and ominous: Even the earthquake couldn’t change this place?

I am told that the American reading public has “Haiti fatigue,” that they don’t want to read stories about the disaster and its aftermath anymore. Part of me wants to retort, “You know who else has Haiti fatigue? Haiti.” But in truth, I don’t want to read about the earthquake, either. I don’t want to read about the conditions in the camps, or the increase in violence against women, or hurricane season, or what Sean Penn is saying today. When news stories about Haiti cross my in box, I skim them and then move them to a folder that I imagine, maybe wrongly, that I’ll be able to process someday. Most of the time, it’s too much. Knowing about something doesn’t mean you know what to do to fix it. Sometimes it feels as though words don’t matter as much as they used to, that we no longer live in a time when a persuasive essay or a provocative novel could change the world. Images and words flicker across our screens and minds, alighting only momentarily, and little surprises us. News stories and images of suffering rarely compel us to action but resign us to apathy and feelings of powerlessness. Why search the news for the stories that weigh on us and break our hearts when these only lay bare our futility and the inevitable gulf between our best intentions and our capabilities?

I’m sick, too, of stories about the Haitian people’s “resilience,” their indestructible spirit, their hardiness (which is eerily reminiscent of the justifications for the enslavement of Africans) — as if their minds and bodies are different from those of the rest of us, as if their endurance of the unrelenting sun, hurricanes, homelessness is anything more than what it really is: survival amid suffering when one doesn’t have a choice.

So I am back in Port-au-Prince, trying to find a perspective on things that isn’t coming out elsewhere, hearing stories. People are eager to talk, especially when they find out that I was anba dekomb (under rubble). Sometimes it feels as though the whole city has turned into a casual support group, meeting every day and everywhere.

On Haiti’s Jou Drapo, Flag Day, which in any other year would mean uniformed schoolchildren parading through town with paper flags, a woman named Nicole sits on a low wooden chair in the tent community in Pétion-ville’s Place Saint-Pierre, giving manicures and pedicures to other residents of the camp. She is in her 40s, compact and strong-looking with her hair in six puffy braids and a pair of glasses low on her nose. She wears a black tank top and a pair of jeans covered with the residue of her work — splashes of spilled polish, dustings of filed-away keratin. Like manicurists everywhere, her own fingernails are a mess. She is applying false nails to a young woman’s hands — super gluing long, clear extensions onto each nail and trimming them to the requisite length. They still look long and cumbersome, and I ask the young woman, “Can you do anything with those? Can you wash clothes?”

“I can do everything with these,” says the young woman. “Even braid hair.”

Nicole, whose home was damaged in the earthquake, lives in the tent community with her four children, who are 9, 12, 14 and 15 years old. She wonders aloud where all the supposed aid money is going. Haiti is in a fog of humanitarianism. That was the case even before the earthquake, with countless NGOs of different size and provenance and mission bumping up against each other, stepping on each other’s toes, obscuring each other’s projects. But it is a continual surprise how uncoordinated and piecemeal the aid effort is. No one seems to know where the aid is. They are aware that billions of dollars have been donated for Haitian recovery and reconstruction, but in everyday experience no one sees much of anything. They say, “Préval’s got it,” or, “It’s still in Clinton’s and Bellerive’s hands.” The aid is invisible — despite the “We Are the World” broadcast, despite the huge outpouring of international cash and international sentiment. Change, in the end, is not what we imagine it would be.

“They should build houses out of wood, or plywood,” Nicole says. “It wasn’t the earthquake that killed people. It was the cement blocks. We can’t afford to rent houses — houses are expensive! All this that I’m doing now,” she says, gesturing to the tray of different colored polishes in the plastic tray beside her, “is just so I can feed my children. We don’t know how long we can survive under these prela [tarps]. The state has to give us a little help.” She begins to buff the young woman’s nails, trying to even out the surface between the glued-on acrylic and the natural. I ask if her kids are in school.

“Not now,” she says. While her children’s school did not fall in the earthquake, it is still, like most schools, a multistory cement building — the sort of structure that gives Port-au-Prince residents chills. “The earth is still moving. I’m afraid. I want my children near me. If they are far away, I can’t control what happens to them.”

A pair of evangelical Haitian women arrive, two “servants of God” with lace kerchiefs over their hair, who have come to preach in the camp. The leader is a robust woman with a commanding presence; her tone is accusatory, angry, and she speaks of the earthquake as God’s revenge on sinners. Some camp residents watch with mild interest, and others ignore her.

One of Nicole’s neighbors in the camp shows me how the tents have electricity, wires running illegally from nearby electrical poles and crisscrossing the camp, cellphones charging in outlets dangling in midair above the canopy of tarps and sheets, light bulbs fixed in the entrances of crowded tents. I can’t imagine what will happen if an electrical fire breaks out in the camps. They don’t have electricity all the time, only when the state turns on the grid. “You should see the camp when they give electricity,” he tells me, smiling. “Everyone turns on their music, and you can’t sleep for all the noise.”

Nearly seven months after the earthquake, strangely, I find myself missing the emergency. Amid the tragedy, the sickening uncertainty, there was hope for change. The hours and days after the earthquake were hell, but an urgent and emergent hell: Because everything was thrown into tumult, no one knew where the pieces would land. Now it is clear how much institutional brokenness has endured. The crisis that, just half a year ago, felt like the end of the world is now chronic and stretching into an infinite horizon. Disaster, it turns out, is not an event but a process; the real crisis in Haiti comes not from the movement of the earth but from those structural, social and political factors that remain, seemingly intractably, intact amid so many broken things.

This is my selfish wish: to have been involved in relief at a time when things seemed morally unambiguous and every action was useful, even limping around the U.N. logistical base trying to find food for the injured, even scraping hardened sugar off the counters to mix with the oatmeal powder I found in the pantry, even sitting on a pee-scented cot holding someone’s hand and talking about anything. There was no question of what to do; the only choice was to do.

Now things are at once normal and completely strange, but the strangeness has a way of being absorbed into the landscape.

It is late May. Monica, Claudine, John and I drive out of Port-au-Prince. Monica and Claudine are both 22, the daughter and niece of Melise, the woman who lived, worked and died in the house I stayed in before the earthquake. Claudine was raised by Melise after her own mother died in childbirth years ago, and considered Melise her mother. John was my former landlady’s driver, who ran for hours to find the hammer and the flashlight that Frenel used to break me out of the cement on Jan. 12. Bathing suits under our clothes, plastic sandals on our feet: We are going to the beach in an overheating borrowed car, the radio on and a man singing, “Bondye renmen m, li ba m kouraj…” (God loves me, he gives me courage).

We drive past the uncleared rubble and the collapsed buildings hanging open with their plastic Venetian blinds drooping from crushed windows like the gills of a dead animal, and then we turn and drive more, until at last the roads become less congested with aid vehicles, up the coast through a treeless landscape that, viewed at a distance, is a patchwork of tents as far as the eye can see, white and a color I’ve begun to think of as “tarp blue.” As we drive far down Route 9 and draw near the tarp-dotted, shimmering hillsides at Bon Repos, Claudine exclaims, “Mezanmi! How can they do this?” Suspended in the foreground of this camp as you approach it from the north, there is a billboard for cigarettes featuring an attractive young light-skinned couple lounging with a yacht in the background. The woman reclines in the man’s lap, and her long, wavy hair cascades. “Mete w alez!” it commands, in Creole. “Make yourself comfortable!”

The water is clear and blue; the shore is rocky, not sandy, and burns our feet. We buy little plastic cups of freshly cooked conch doused in vinegar and hot pepper, and fried plantains, and eat them in the shade of a palm tree. To our right, we watch a group of Brazilian peacekeepers. They have their own section of the beach carved out, with palm trees painted U.N. blue and white and yellow tape demarcating the borders. One soldier stands in military fatigues with a machine gun while the others man their barbecue wearing board shorts and shiny blue Speedos.

The water is warm and salty and stings our eyes and we take the sorts of ridiculous, unflattering photos one takes when seawater keeps washing into your eyes and the tide keeps pulling you around and menacing your bikini top. Claudine wears a pink shower cap. Around us, several couples engage in protracted submerged make-out sessions and, as we lounge in the shallows, I glance about in mock-seriousness and say, “We’re all going to get pregnant.”

I remove myself for a moment and try to view this scene through a God’s-eye lens, rising up and over the beach like the camera setting up the establishing shot at the beginning of a film: In the blue water, I see Monica and Claudine, recently motherless. On the shore, watching our clothes, leaning against a palm tree with one leg bent behind him and chewing on banann pese, I see John, who found and retrieved Melise’s body in the rubble four days later and buried her in a temporary grave, and who says, “She was like my sister.” But today we don’t look like victims or players in an international humanitarian event that, for a while, at least, captured the attention and the imagination of the world. For this moment, we are a group of friends, sticky with seawater, looking for our sandals and squinting into the sun. Our feet on the ground, toes digging into the rough sand as we look out over the ocean into uncertainty. Haiti is not hell, or even limbo, however biblical it may appear at times. Amid the suffering and the absurdity, it is still a place, as all places are, on this sometimes-shifting earth.