Please forgive me. I promise this is the first and only time i will ever do this.
oh the time will come up when the winds will stop and the breeze will cease to be breathin' like the stillness in the wind 'fore the hurricane begins the hour when the ship comes in
oh the seas will split and the ship will hit and the sands on the shoreline will be shaking then the tide will sound and the wind will pound and the morning will be breaking
oh the fishes will laugh as they swim out of the path and the seagulls will be smiling and the rocks on the sand will proudly stand the hour when the ship comes in
and the words that are used for to get the ship confused will not be understood as they're spoken for the chains of the sea will have busted in the night and will be buried at the bottom of the ocean
a song will lift as the mainsail shifts and the boat drifts on to the shoreline and the sun will respect every face on the deck the hour that the ship comes in
then the sands will roll on a carpet of gold for your weary toes to be a-touchin' and the ship's wise men will remind you once again that the whole wide world is watchin'
oh the foes will rise with sleep still in their eyes and they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreamin' but they'll pinch themselves and squeal and they'll know that it's for real the hour when the ship comes in
then they'll raise their hands saying we'll meet all your demands but we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered and like pharaohs tribe they'll be drowned in the tide and like goliath they'll be conquered
I read the newspaper religiously even when I don't want to know what the news is. I like listening to the neighbors laugh through the hallway. The sound gets deeper as it travels, made more complex by the brassy buzz of old television speakers. They sound like tiny happy monsters. I am alone here but I'm not lonely and, anyway, I like being alone. I need a haircut and I like it when it's cold inside, when I need an extra blanket on the bed. Then I start trying to remember what real cold smells like, what it feels like when it's not an air-conditioning chill.
I will always look like a child and never like a grown up and never presentable. I will never look like I could be a business class bitch with silicon shiny straight hair and clattering heels on marble floor. A costume change won't change that. I don't feel bound to the atmosphere here anymore; nothing makes me want to face another Florida winter and i wish we could just hurry up and move. The day I put my cousin on a plane home a few weeks ago, I imagined the train station and Lake Geneve and the little boats and the thin clean alpine air and I wanted to cry; I wanted to be there again so badly. I'd cut the cultural cord and never come back and I wouldn't regret it, I don't think. Soon I'd forget my native tongue and where I came from or how fate conspired to bring us to this godforsaken place anyhow. I'd show you the the Gare de Cornivan and the Rue Voltaire and the alley where I ate spinach quiche on the sidewalk in my fancy coat like an exiled eastern aristocrat. Then you could taste the novelty champagne chocolate in the gold foil wrapper that I almost brought home but now this would be our home and you'd forget where you came from too.
i love the oceanic feelings. I love being in a crowd or a room full of people and knowing that in one way or another, we're all feeling and experiencing the same thing and we're in it and for a second we are completely in love with it. This is what a good show should be, this is what defines it. When every person in that room becomes a collective, rhythmic mass and for about forty-five minutes we are in it together and we are not strangers, because we all know that what we are seeing and hearing will never be exactly the same again and only we can understand it and for a few minutes, we're understanding the music and ourselves and each other together. And there is a love there. A beautiful resounding awe for how easily we've been brought together.
I really love that feeling.
It's funny because for so long we're all tripped out on our own individualism, because we want to be different, because we resent being told to be the same. We all want identities and we all want everyone else to see them, out loud, up front. I do it. A lot of us do it. And we revile the people that live blindly the same, the people that drive their big cars and eat their processed foods and wear the logo on their chest like a badge of comforting similarity, a signal to find each other in a crowd. And how we scorn them and scoff like we're better because our fucking cotton is organic and our bicycles don't need one hundred dollars to accelerate on the road. We don't want kinship with those people. At a holiday gathering once, a family friend's young teenage daughter once commented on how much she liked my tattoos and how she hoped to get one some day. Later, I overheard her Dad telling her to stop admiring them because I'll never be able to get anywhere in life now, and he didn't want the same for her. No child of mine. Sure, it's an archaic view and most people don't feel that way. But how I loathed them for a moment for the judgement. And then it faded.
Because sometimes I like being the same too. I love when my humanity blends into the mass of other humans around me and we are all the same with eyes that see and mouths that smile and hearts that beat and thin thin skin.
I think about the time that's passed since I moved out of my mother's house, since we moved into this place, and I can barely believe that we're heading into our fifth month here. I can't believe how quickly the time has passed.
And then I really look around this place, and to my overwhelming surprise, we've actually fucking made it. I can't remember it being hard, I don't remember one moment since we found each other again that's been hard. Now I can't even recall one moment of my first real pass at adulthood, at real independent living, as being hard. I can't help but kind of smile when I look at the neatly stamped and return addressed bills under a magnet on the refrigerator and I can't believe I earned more than enough money for us to pay them and still buy overpriced t-shirts made by living-wage earning Mexicans in Los Angeles. And then I can't even really believe that all the walls and the wood floors and each piece of particle board Swedish furniture in psychedelic mindfuck prints belong to us. Sometimes I go the long way so I can drive around the front of our little building, our two story art deco-style apartment built in 1925 with real ivy growing up around our chimneys, and I still can't even really believe that I live inside.
And yes, the plaster is coming off of the ceiling and sometimes we get annoyed at each other and sometimes I don't do the dishes and everything sticks to my pop art plates and gets a little smelly and I have to stop making everything sickeningly idyllic. But then I look at all my ridiculous canvases hanging on the walls, all the things I've produced in the last five months, and it goes back to being picturesque in my head.
And its not in a fucking sentimental way. This isn't a "look how fantastic my young domesticity is." It's not like that. This isn't really even about being here with him, even though I love that very much. It's about being here with ME. It's about the fact that I did it (with a little help here and there from the transplanted Swiss - never with the bills, though) and I learned to love myself enough to accept that things might just be great, even if you don't think too hard.
Oh and I suddenly became a super awesome cook too.
My whole life i've been pretending I don't want to be an artist because i'm afraid i won't be good enough.
i know that sounds really insecure.
but it's true.
I've only recently gotten into the habit of letting people see my artwork at all. when nobody's watching, i hang another canvas or photograph on me and russell's apartment walls and hope it can go without comment. most of the time, it does. i think he understands that i don't want him to say anything about them, positive or otherwise. i just want him to pretend they're naturally occurring parts of our home, like windows or the fireplace. he does this admirably.
so i didn't go to art school. i told myself i didn't want to. that was a lie, but a convenient one. it helped assuage the pain of not being able to afford any of the one's i got into.
today i took my russian exam and i realized, as i was failed miserably to conjugate verbs and remember adjectival endings, that i don't give a flying fuck about learning russian. i don't really have any desire to, one way or another. i have no real interest in it. i don't want to teach philosophy either. or go to graduate school for some painfully academic subject like contemporary media studies.
i just want to be annie motherfucking leibowitz. i want to construct big giant images in my head and then make anna wintour pay for them to become realities, complete with a dazzling cast prepared to match my every whim with unbridled enthusiasm. because annie leibowitz doesn't have to coax or schedule her subjects. if she wants to shoot you, they answer is always yes and it always takes as long as it takes and you do what she says and that's the end of it. these pictures mean nothing. they're just beautiful images of beautiful people that have sprawling narratives based on whatever little fixation she's chosen at the time.
and i don't even care. i just want to be able to make every thing in my head come to life and then take its picture.
I'm a vegetarian. I don't care if you are or not. I have no self righteous idealistic college age bullshit sanctimonious reasons for this choice. I got into the habit a long time ago and eating meat requires things like appropriate and safe storing and cooking temperatures, and I can't be bothered with any of that nonsense. These days, it simply easier to not eat meat than to preheat the oven to a high enough temperature to kill salmonella.
I do miss chicken though. It's the only meat I miss. Thankfully, such delightful poultry substitutes exist as to appease my craving for the noble chicken; natures least cute and friendly of livestock. To be honest, chickens have always sort of creeped me out. They're weird little eyes, their jerking head motions, the odd way they move, like they're trying to sneak up on you and peck your face off. They're the uglier cousins of swans, and everyone knows what big assholes swans are. But gee they sure taste good. At least, I think they did. I can't quite remember.
Anyhow, to indulge this occasional craving I have often satiated my hunger with Chik, the breaded soy alternative Whole Food shoppers ask for by misnomer! Unfortunately, unless one wants to made a breaded chicken sandwich, Chik isn't particular versatile. One couldn't say, apply a fine Marsala to it. Nor would it sit well in a lovely curry. So I just resigned myself to never enjoying these foods again.
And then Quorn came along! The British meat alternative Europeans have been enjoying for two decades. And it tastes...almost disturbingly close to the real thing! I can now enjoy any variation of faux-winged-animal-smothered-in-cheese-or-swimming-in-sauce I want! Why, just yesterday I used it to make a lovely tikki masala. Turns out though, since Quorn first won the hearts of the dirty-ass tight-pants-wearing crowd back in 2002, when it first made it to our fair shores, Gardenburger and that fucker that tried to get saccharine banned have been waging a outright war against my precious Quorn. The problem? Quorn is a fungus. It's soy-free, but it is a fungus. Apparently, the Quorn people want you to think it's a fungus in the same vein as truffles and mushrooms, and the Gardenburger people would rather Quorn bring to mind images of shower mold and athletes foot. Their actual claims are that it causes allergic reactions which make some people violently ill after consuming it. Apparently, this mysterious reaction didn't start afflicting innocent consumers until its introduction into the American market. And now, according to the Gardenburger people, it must be stopped. It must be stopped before we all grow third arms from this fungal culinary delight. Third arms out of our eyes!
That's it America. I've had enough of you. We are officially through. You can keep cigarettes out of my restaurants, you can keep boobs out of my basic cable, you can protect my saintly fucking ears from the f-word on the radio, but you will not keep Quorn out of my masala! Someone comes up with a good idea and you're the first to come piss on their parade with your accusations of brain tumors in lab rats and baby suffocation. I hope you hit a child on a bicycle exiting a Taco Bell while you're stoned out of your mind, America! I hope an abortion gives you breast cancer, America! I hope every piece of bad science you've tried to scare me with using poorly executed public service commercials comes back to bite you on the giant ass you've cultivated through the consumption of high fructose corn syrup, America!
Yesterday I saw a woman walking two dogs in raincoats. They were hound dogs and they had little bright yellow raincoats and hats but they didn't have galoshes. Still, they matched perfectly like the way people dress up twin babies when they take them out. I have galoshes, and they're red and they have sunflowers on them. My mom bought them for me when we went to New Orleans just before the hurricane came and washed all the trees away. The woman that owned the store in the French Quarter was tall and she had bright red hair and knee socks and mary jane shoes.
I can't smoke in our new house and so I feel less fabulous when I do things. I can't smoke when I'm making pancakes or taking a bath and I can't even take a bath anyway but it's alright because our shower curtain has orange and blue and green snowflakes on it so I guess it's okay. I can't smoke when I'm laying in bed or painting a picture or cleaning the house. I can't smoke when I'm listening to a record or tying my shoes or picking out my clothes. But I guess I can still smoke on the balcony when I'm taking pictures of people walking by on Portland Avenue and most of them have dogs too. This is a neighborhood of dog people. The lady downstairs has a dog but I think something might be wrong with it. Maybe it's deaf because when I go to check the mail and it's chained up on their porch, it doesn't turn to look at me. It's big and black and shiny and even though I think it's a bit touched, I'm still afraid of it.
I made a confetti cake yesterday but I forgot that you have to thaw out the frosting before you frost a cake, so the top came off and now it's a big lumpy chocolate rainbow mess. But it tastes alright. I'm going to go write a song now and it smells like cigarettes inside and I swear I didn't smoke in the house while you were gone.
This is a lot more personal and specific than usual...or ever:
I came into work the other day.
(I work in an open design studio. Hardly anyone has an office. We all basically work in a giant square of desks and drawing boards. My desk is actually a little set apart from anyone else, it's in the front. But basically it's a very open space.)
A few weeks ago we all decided, since my has been traveling a lot lately, to commandeer his stereo and put it in the studio so we could all listen to music together instead of all isolated-like with our ipods. I lugged the giant, shiny, silver beast out into the studio and we've mostly been listening to the Beach Boys and the Beatles since. It's the only thing everyone collectively knows the words to.
Anyhow. I came into work, went to the back to get a glass of water and some leftover cookies from our last office part, and then walked back into the studio to try to clean up a bit. Then I heard something...
"You're a part-time lover and a full-time friend, the monkey on your back is the latest trend, I don't see what anyone can see in anyone else, but you..."
Now, I know the people I work with. Yes, they're young, they're fun, they're groovy. They aren't that kind of groovy though. Yes, they're artists, but...let me just say, after sneaking peeks at their various ipods in the last few months, I can safely say Feist is the most "off-the-beaten path" thing I ever spotted. And I was shocked even then, considering what else was in the line-up.
"I kiss you on the brain in the shadow of the train. I kiss you all starry-eyed, my body swinging from side to side, I don't see what anyone can see in anyone else, but you..."
Are the Moldy Peaches on the radio?!? Did someone in the office actually manage to find WPRK?! How am I hearing this right now, on the very stereo I dragged across the office and set up, only to hear the Beatles' 1962-1966 four million times for my effort? How in the HELL did one of MY coworkers procure a CD with the Moldy Peaches on it?! As it turned out, it was my supervisor's copy of the soundtrack to the new hit movie, Juno, which as I learned throughout the next forty-five minutes, also features about five other Kimya Dawson songs and even a Belle & Sebastian song from TIGERMILK (Expectations, as it happened). Apparently, the soundtrack to Juno has become something a phenomena, becoming the number one album in the country three weeks after it's initial release. The film, which I haven't seen, has also become something of a surprise hit and has even been nominated for several Oscars.
I'm used to hearing music I love all over the place these days. There's a fucking commercial airing right now that features a ZOMBIES song for fucks sake, and it IS NOT "Time of the Season". But...
That song just feels so personal to me. "Anyone Else But You" by the Moldy Peaches was a song I used to listen to in tenth grade, when Dadricar would drive my home from school in his mom's car, Blossom, except we didn't go home. We'd just drive around all afternoon listen to his cd's. And we listened to that song all the time and sang along, even though we didn't necessarily sing along to that many other songs. But we ALWAYS sang to that one, to each other. He, of course, did the Adam Green part. And I did the Kimya part. It always sort of felt like ours. It's an unromantic love song for our loving non-romance. We haven't done it in a long time.
This isn't some sort of rant about Kimya Dawson "selling-out", she's got a baby now (Panda!), and this is probably really good for her, I'm definitely sure she could use the extra publicity now, more than ever. And she gets to share her love and music with a MUCH bigger audience, which, if I know Kimya Dawson (And I KNOW Kimya Dawson, oh believe me. I read her livejournal.), she's probably all about. And it's not some sort of lame ass, "I-liked-it-first-all-you-Johnny-Come-Lately-poseurs" thing. It's a good song. I'm glad people like it. But I think about the people in my office, my sweet, adorable supervisor with her soundtrack. This song is a nice song they heard in a movie. Even if they end up really loving it and listening to it a thousand times, it's still a song they heard for the first time in a movie.
It just felt so weird, being surrounded by my coworkers, and suddenly hearing this song that is so familiar and so personal to me. To them, it's a cute song. To me, it sort of represents an entire period of my life and a whole relationship I've had with someone. Something big. Even before I heard it at work, every time I listened to it at home (which was seldom, really), it would make me think of those afternoons and those drives and the days when we didn't talk because we just understood that neither one of us wanted to face what was waiting for us at home just yet. Not that it was bad, it just didn't belong to us. The song, the drive, the rainy afternoon, the after school fatigue, the lack of gas money. That all belonged to us. We made it, and we could control it. We couldn't, and still can't, control anything else. But at least, for a few hours after sixth period and before dinner time, we could carve out our own little place in the world.
It reminds me of being safe and happy and drowsy and a little bored, restless, maybe a little sad. And it really caught me off guard, hearing it that day at work. My co-workers just kept working, chatting, gossiping, bitching. But I stopped and quietly sang along to the whole song and just sort of got daydreamy for minute. It sort of felt like having someone read my journal to the whole class. While I was naked. If I had heard it at one of my friend's houses, I wouldn't have been surprised. All my friend's listen to Kimya Dawson, Moldy Peaches, Belle & Sebastian, etc. But that's my real life. I share my memories and my real personality and my real experiences with those people, that's a different thing. But at work, I think I'm the most private of any of my coworkers. They all socialize a lot, outside of the office. And they all talk about their families and significant others and what have you. I don't. Most of them are about my age, but I still rarely talk in depth about anything except school. My work self is friendly, but relatively aloof and sort of personality-free. That's how I like it. It isn't my native environment. Maybe that's why it felt so jarring and odd.
Usually all I ever write here is things that seem extra to me. Spare observations and thoughts that didn't find a home in conversation that particular day. I don't have any desire to recapitulate details of my life because, well, that's what talking to people is for. But I would like, for just a brief moment, to touch on some real things that involve my actual real waking life. In the spirit of the time of year and what not, I guess it just seems necessary.
I'm happy.
and very grateful.
i'm grateful because i have a job i really enjoy and i work with amazing people who are so truly lovely and enjoyable to be around. My job has proved to me that you can be an adult without having to be a grown-up. And I love it for that. i'm also grateful that i have beautiful people to love in my life and they not only accept that love willingly, but frequently reciprocate. And I'm even grateful to the man who hit me with his car while I was on the first bike I got this Christmas. He ended up replacing it with one that is rad as fuck. thanks guy!
i believe everything happens for a reason. the world is governed by complex rules emerging from a logic we can't possibly understand. any time something bad happens to me, i know it's for a reason. I try to think of what that reason is. Later, when it reveals itself to me, I'm usually pleased.
it's one of those airs where everything in it feels electric you know everything you touch is going to light up. (i think in alliterative rhyme in winter)
your smile doesn't mean more than your song that doesn't mean more than your finger pointing at a deer out the window underneath the stars that don't mean anything more or less than the moon which doesn't mean anything besides what it means and that's beautiful the way it is. some people call that apathy if you don't explain it right i say no! no! no! it's inter-connectivity. my foot touches the floor touches the walls touches the ceiling touches the roof touches the air outside touches the branches touches the cars touches the atmosphere touches all the flying stellar particlethings and breezing breezes.
i just mean to say that every thing means the same thing outside your head so if you put something in the world it becomes part of everything else and that's really nice.
no wait no i just mean that every single part is matter that matters.
i think i just mean let everything becomes something because it all means something.
I have a theory. Now, I know what you're going to say. Yes, yes, I know. But please kindly hold all protestations and gentle reminders until after the performance. I beg you to please save all citations of previous, less-than-perfect theories (particularly the one about using pizza topping preferences as an barometer for human nature...which I still maintain is true, if you examine the data), until I have presented my latest creation.
I propose that no human being is completely whole, completely at home in their own skin, until they can truly entertain a child for one hour. And this will be my newest standard for all kind folks I allow to wander next to me closely. One child. One hour. Oh, it sounds easy, does it? But I mean truly entertain. As in, amuse fully, without having to be directed, prompted, poked, or prodded by said child. You see, in order to play with a child for an hour (and by play, I mean really play. not video games. not television. make believe), you have to be capable of letting yourself go entirely and disregarding any shred of pretense or ego you may have. To engage a child, you must more or less be prepared to be utterly foolish. To place yourself in the mind of child and act as a child would, no matter how blindly absurd, undignified, or unrestrained. And that means talking to a child. Not reasoning with a child, or talking down to a child, or displaying explicit tones apeasement to a child.
If you can play with a child, then I think you're probably alright.
I don't know precisely how to begin. But I want to phrase it, so put in a way, so that everyone understands. Brace yourself; I'm going to talk about love.
How complicated things seem to have become in the last few decades! Freed of the constraints of social expectation and the status quo, sexually and emotionally liberated. Instilled with new notions of how to love one another, new ideas of what it means. The material, naturally, has become particularly emphasized. If we really love each other, we'll show it by spending some hard-earned cash. But it's more than that. The simple notion of love, both in the romantic, familial, and friendly way, has changed so vastly. Subjected to the scrutiny of several apathetic generations of armchair psychologists, the intricacies of love have expanded to include an entirely new set of concerns. Love, much like everything else, has become a strategy. A game. It's political. It's business. It's about who does what and how much when. It's about maneuvers, machinations, and manipulations. And because the blessing of extrication has reached unprecedented levels of social acceptability, old notions of love and commitment have been stripped away to impart upon new generations of young people the idea that nothing last forever, love included. With so many choices now, we naturally have a hard time making up our minds. Now, finally, we don't have to.
So we become reluctant. Scared. Nothing lasts forever right? Trapped little cynics, we are. This is a consumer culture, afterall. We need things to break, to get destroyed. It's good for the economy. If something is broken, we don't need to fix it. You can buy newer, faster, better somethings.
But this is all very cliche, the common grievances of someone who feels slightly disgruntled and out of place in their own, rapidly changing era. someone who feels compelled to cite romanticized versions of the past to strengthen their arguments. don't pay any attention to me, to this.
but PLEASE PAY ATTENTION to what I'm about to say:
bad things happen. all the time. all over the world. thanks to some slightly evolved thinking and better hygiene, bad things happen less in the affluent Western world now. but they used to be a lot worse here, too. and those bad things still happen outside of the sphere of privilege. people, yesterday and today, loved each other. and they were dragged apart and forced to storm foreign beaches, boy soldiers with grown-up guns, when only a few months earlier they had been smoking cigarettes in dark rooms with friends bullshitting passionately about topics that seemed of earth-shattering intellectual importance. then suddenly they were dropped in strange places and told to fight devastatingly useless wars for the good of humanity, or some other lofty thing a speechwriter behind a closed door thought up. people loved each other and got separated and hauled off to prisons and cells and camps and slowly suffocated in confinement for who they were or what they thought or what they had the audacity to write. people loved each other epic plagues came and swept them into early, fearful graves. people loved each other and awful things appeared on the horizon and they were carried away and their love died with them.
that's not happening to you or me. that's not happening to anyone i know. so it seems stupid to dance around everything, to create melodramatic obstacles and problems in our heads to build walls between us. lots of people, who didn't need to inflict false wounds because they had already sustained very real ones, never got to give the love they wanted so badly to share. it just seems so silly to be so juvenile and dramatic about giving and receiving love when you think about it from that worn perspective.
I know Ian McEwan is a highly respected contemporary novelist and his works are hailed as masterpieces by the greats of the literary world and what have you. And I think each one of his books has a really interesting premise, is structured in a really clever way, and usually tells a very haunting story. But I have to be honest, I think his writing is too technical, distant, and too fucking high-handedly British. I like being privy to the story, but the actual reading process is just absolutely arduous. That's probably why all his good books get turned into movies, a medium where his clinical exposition of minute detail translates into tangible poetry.
With that said however, this observation of his really struck me. I thought about it for a lengthy period of time:
"...beauty, she had discovered, occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the other hand, had infinite variation."
I disagree, Mr. McEwan. Mr. Fancypants Commander of the British Empire, Mr. Reliquary, of all that is maddeningly impassive about British literature. Sir, you know nothing. Ugliness does not have infinite variation. The root of all ugliness is fear. All that is most hideous arises from the vociferously crouching silhouette of paralyzing terror. Fear is what warps, distorts, and distills even the most beautiful notion into something venomous. There is no variation to ugliness. It is all the vivid translation of absolute fear.
Beauty, not ugliness, is the master of variation. A true contortionist, an escape artist, remarkably acrobatic. It manages to grow through the tiniest cracks, circumventing even the most graceless execution to transcend, radiant and so perfectly alive. It exists in total humility and blushing excess. In clean lines and intricate ornamentation. How can you even comment on the omniscient nature of beauty without resorting to this kind of hackneyed, trite language? Fuck words, man, you're so mistaken I'm incapable of articulating how mistaken you are.
Only the most bitter, colonized mind can't see that.
I've heard so many things I want to remember lately that I don't even have room in all those little books for them. I wrote them down next to the single-beaked topiary things and the sparking elephant-house and all the other little objects that fill the little books and fill the hours when I'm supposed to be remembering Locke's State of Nature but I remember! I remember! how could i ever forget? so instead I make single-beaked topiary things.
Acoustical labyrinth. That was a good one. When I spell words I draw the shapes of the letters out in the air in front of me. That's my way of remembering. I used to do it under the table or on the desk when I thought nobody was watching but now I just do it in the air, the mad gesticulations of the spelling beekeeper. What's an eight letter word for beekeeper? Apiarist, from the latin apis, meaning bee.
And in a way that's what I'm doing right now.
fingers spelling out the memory like Lachesis pulling out the threads of each life deciding how long each one gets to be.
I wanted to keep this to myself for a little while longer, like an open secret (since plenty of other people who saw her are aware that this exists). But my desire to share the feeling I got when I first heard it and the feeling I get every time I hear it won out. I promise you won't be disappointed.
and this is where it starts little one! here is the past; tired and feeble; open the door; wave goodbye to the people. you see what your going to see is maybe what your going to do but you think about it so hard, little one, too hard! and when you stop they shake heads and fingers and say "maybe you should have thought about that before..." Well maybe you should have, but what's burned is burned if you ignited the fireworks to sleep underneath the sparks then now why are you surprised that you woke up warm and dizzy.
there's nothing to be afraid of, little one. there was a house of people shuffling the floorboards downaround you if you really dont want to stand in the corner there's a circle in the middle and youre welcome to dance.
seeing joanna newsom is going to have this lovely gold hazy halo light shape around it and i bet we all felt like she was there just for each of us individually because i dont remember a hall full of people around me. lovely. just lovely.
oh and the leaves do change under the southern skies so dont give me that anymore i saw it with my own two eyes.
cotton fields look like someone's growing snow, in time to harvest for winter.
and i'll let you know how the ivory tower built of strings holding the secrets of the universe together like plato's two rainbows and a spindle (it's totally in the Republic, book X!) sounds from a balcony above it where i'll gaze serenely onward and make throaty squeals of content
For the most part, i've always felt very isolated from femalekind for a good portion of my life. I don't know if the byproduct of being raised in a very dominantly female household has sort of put my off the idea of women, or if maybe i've just been very eager to distance myself from the sort of stereotypically female behavior i've witnessed over the years (let me say that on the whole, I have not been able to avoid it...but i have now been to the deep dark crevices of the "reactionary female", as I'm calling it, and i can say it's a hole you never want to fall into...terribly difficult to dig yourself out). In college I've tried to sort of develop an affinity for the sisterhood, first by attempting to make closer female friends, and second by electing women's studies as a minor concentration. I've since abandon that field of study after growing highly discouraged with the way a united front of women seems to have the tendency to implode in a mess of jealousy, mistrust, and resentment. There isn't a sisterhood, there never was.
Now, I'm comfortable just believing everyone (regardless of gender), is fundamentally good and waiting for anyone to prove me wrong. I still have few female friends, something I really have a difficult time understanding, but I love the ladies in my life and they're good enough for me (sara, al(ysha/icia), emily, jenny, i'm talking about you).
But I think I've also narrowed down the reasons why, in general, I've come to find womanhood a very skeptical thing. I've always been very suspicious of female musicians, authors, and artists. For years, I've wondered if secretly my disdain was simply a healthy dose of (typically female) jealousy towards a bastion of talented and creative women who I sometimes wonder if I'll ever be able to join the ranks of. I know now that this isn't why, fundamentally, I find myself already rolling my eyes at Miranda July before she even does anything.
It's because, girls, we're just a giant mind-fucking contradiction. You heard it here. Girls don't know what the fuck they want. Shocking, I know. But I mean that in terms of definition and identity. Women in art and music and fiction and so on purport to want to be recognized for their talents, and not idealized because of their sex. But that isn't really what they want, not really. We make art that's overriding narrative and distinctive feature is feminity. And more than half of that creative output isn't just about the experience of womanhood, it's about the experience of womanhood in relation to MEN. Once we become pop-culture icons, we allow ourselves to be interviewed in magazines about our clothing preferences. Not to pick on Miranda July, that poor wretched waif who recently made...now brace yourself...a breakout film about...AN AWKWARD QUIRKY GIRL TRYING TO FIND LOVE! I know right, who could have seen that one coming? But I was recently leafing through a magazine and found a short piece on July, half of which included the interviewer asking her where she found her clothes, to which Miranda delightedly elaborated on her "clothing philosophy" for some time. July is a musician, performance artist, filmmaker, and actress. You would think she might want to talk about that instead of which estate sales she hits up. But the thing is, most of her creative output in any of those fields is about herself, or more specifically, about herself and her observations on relationships and love...jesus. And women still wonder why we aren't being taken seriously. July even claims to consider herself a nouveau feminist...well, she certainly is feminine.
It's just that half of what women end up creating implies that all the female voice is concerned with is relationships and ourselves. So...we're vain co-dependant narcissists. Awesome. That one does Gertrude Stein proud. Back in the day when women we're trying to break into a "man's world", to be taken seriously, we produced bodies of work about the beauty of day to day living, about politics, about the gorgeous minutiae of childhood and nature. Now our subject is ourselves. And how some dude made us cry. How evolved.
Right now my lady heroines are people like Joanna Newsom. Why do I love her music so profoundly? It's about everything in the world as she see's it through her eyes. And if being a girl or being in love occasionally slip in, it's neither overwhelming nor does it upstage her wonderful abstractions. But that isn't what it's about. It's about seeing the world if you were Joanna Newsom. Not necessarily about being the girl, Joanna Newsom.
"Everything in you is perfection....even the fact that you're so thin and pale...one has no wish to imagine you otherwise...I wanted so much to come to you...I...forgive me."
"Don't ask forgiveness," Nastasya Filippovna laughed. "That will ruin all the strangeness and originality. And it's true, then, what they say about you, that you're a strange man. So you consider me perfection, do you?"
"I do."
"Though you're a master at guessing, you're nevertheless mistaken. I'll remind you tonight..."
You will come to a place where the streets are not marked. Some windows are lighted. But mostly they're dark. A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin! Do you dare stay out? Do you dare go in? How much can you lose? How much can you win? And if you go in, should you turn left or right...or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite? Or go back around and sneak in from behind? Simple, it's not, I'm afraid you will find, for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind. You can get so confused that you'll start in to race down long wiggled roads at a break-neck pace and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place... ...for people just waiting. Waiting for a train to go or a bus to come, or a plane to go or the mail to come, or the rain to go or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow or waiting around for a Yes or No, or waiting for their hair to grow. Everyone is just waiting. Waiting for the fish to bite, or waiting for the wind to fly a kite or waiting around for Friday night or waiting, perhaps for their Uncle Jake, or a pot to boil, or a Better Break. Or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants, or a wig of curls, or Another Chance.
Below the hill grows a field of high Indian grass that changes color with the seasons: go to see it in the fall, late September, when it has gone red as sunset, when scarlet shadows like firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves sighing human music, a harp of voices.
there are only two philosophies of life but an endless combination of ways in which to apply them, most certainly as many possibilities as there are people in this world. a mere two philosophies, though? i fear i would be reprimanded for such a bold declaration within the confines of my academic life, but i am not standing at the desk of j.t. cook today, staring faraway at the fading pine panelling and almost automatically reiterating the finer points of my thesis concept. i am here and now (where is here? where is now? imagination can point you to any place other than the one option i have just previously eliminated).
one can live blissfully and perfectly detached, miraculously skimming the surface of a hundred vast and unyielding oceans while careful never to break the ice. the earliest conceivable resolution towards this principle can permanently affix this philosophy with only little difficulty. one has to start minutely, apply the notion to something insignificant. eventually it becomes entirely conceivable to dust off the will to stay on dry land, to hide in a desert of indifference, whenever it becomes necessary. this approach is mercifully safe, although i'm hesitant to condemn it with my own bias. who could fault those who find such enormous satisfaction in remaining emphatically unmoved? certain individuals, particularly those (i have observed) who enjoyed decidedly stable but solitary childhoods, are especially drawn to this approach. a life shadowed by a few early disappointments and lacking the robust energy to joyfully (some would say recklessly) brush them aside, can seal the fate of a person to a quiescent heart.
the other approach, i have always believed, is more dangerous. infinitely more romantic and befitting more pleasurable adjectives, but most certainly carrying a greater risk. this philosophy involves keeping the windows and the doors wide open, allowing every crack to further degrade until each is a periliously exposed canyon. one who embraces this road, who freely elects to travel on (however blindly), must dive-headfirst-into each freezing pool of experience after unapologetically and wildly cracking the serene and icy surface. vulnerability is the persistent and unending hazard, the ever present possibility that cruely hangs over like a dark cloud only intending to taunt with the notion of rain. this philosophy is great, vast spaces of time and moments which must surely be filled, but how? frantically, defiantly, constantly. because the only consistency that is welcome to these poor souls is the promise of perpetual motion, the only breath of relief in a crowd of stubborn breath-holders. dignity is sacrificed for the quality of a moment and while both sides may argue that they are present-minded individuals, only this philosophy is truly evangelical about it (when precisely did "evangelical" become an adjective in this context? the dictionary leads me to believe it must have been more recently).
oh i could say volumes more about the subject, but look at the time...and i've lost your attention already.
my sleep schedule is completely and mercilessly cruel to me. summer makes restless people and irritable minds and insect infestations and they all conspire to rob me of precious unconsciousness. not that sleeping is such a terribly grand endeavor these days, what with my constant nonsensical and frequently confusing dreams which aren't dreams at all but images and symbols and moments that are strung together purely to disturb me upon waking.
maybe if i'm a very lucky girl, when i finally do go to sleep, i'll dream about shiny bicycles and blueberry pancakes and sunflower fields and bob dylan circa 1966.
I was told in a very vivid dream last night that was crowded with frightening and powerful visual metaphors and symbols, that Hinduism is the one and only true religion. This is quite difficult for someone who has invested her entire education and a rather large sum of money in justifying her humanistic beliefs through promotion of the atheist philosophy. Furthermore, I have never thoroughly studied Hinduism, even for my own amusement, in my entire life. I assure you I was not contemplating the wisdom of it before I went to sleep, nor have I contemplated Hinduism since my cultural anthropology class a year and a half ago. And even then, I wasn't deeply contemplating it, rather trying to memorize the caste system for the final. Which I wouldn't say reflects any great and profound spiritual awakening.
Therefore, I'm not quite sure what to do with this new knowledge, should I believe it to have originated from a legitimate source. I've never considered my unconscious mind a very credible authority on any matter, however, so perhaps I should just disregard its insistence on the complete validity of the Hindu faith.
I would like to think that I didn't have the kind of parents that spoiled me. As an only child, mind you, there was a certain element of singular attention that was unavoidable (and not always beneficial, to clear up any illusions of the sort). My family is firmly and solidly middle class, so presents and the like were confined to holidays and the occasional event worthy of a celebratory material gesture.
Bicycles seem to be a funny part of childhood however. Everyone remembers their first bike and everyone seems to recall having a slew of them somewhere between their first and current one. Some we grow out of, others are destroyed in incidents that involve ditches and fences and generally produce casted limbs, one inevitably gets stolen in a moment of confidence towards the benevolence of humanity. Regardless, it seems that no childhood goes more than a few months without a bicycle. So it comes as a mighty shock, when your last gifted bicycle meets its end, that bicycles cost money. A lot of money, in fact. As a child it seems that bikes grow on trees, if one is dispatched in the line of duty, another will surely appear by the next birthday or christmas. Certainly you'll wake up one morning with a new bike neatly parked in the living room with a bow attached thoughtfully somewhere on its new shiny body.
Somebody should warn you, before it's too late, that your shiny new bike under the christmas tree days are drawing to a close. It should be included somewhere on a calender of adolescence that the occasions in which to request a new bike are dwindling, that with the advent of a drivers license, your chance of receiving a bike along with your birthday cake is unlikely. No, your parents are not obligated to provide you with a supply of bicycles for the rest of your life. But still, at some point it goes from being a normal childhood request to a wholly inappropriate luxury. Someone should tell you that, before your last parentally funded bicycle is out of commission and your chances of saving up enough for a decent new one are about as good as your chances of waking up one day to find a one bedroom apartment near the college for under $700 without a finicky landlord who insists neither smokers nor pets need apply.
First of all, love is joint experience between two people-but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world-a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring-this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.
Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else-but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.
it is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relationship with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.
Fly into Paris again and it's cold but it looks the same. Going through customs saw two Tibetan monks getting completely searched, french agents are trying to find the drugs and weapons they have no doubt folded into their suspicious exotic robes. Walking in Paris is better than walking in any city in the world even when it's raining, as cliche as that may sound. It also has the best metro system ever, each stop is decorated to reflect what you might find if you get off the train and climb about three hundred steps to the alarmingly different quarters and neighborhoods above. Japanese tour groups everywhere in the louvre again and you have to push to get to the stuff everybody comes to see be thankfully the dutch realist wing is fantastically empty. Switzerland with the family and everyone drinks wine and we take a boat across lake geneve to a historic village in france and eat summer pastries with sorbet and my acrobat cousin and i communicate with our warped words in each other's native tongues. we communicate just as easily as we did when we were both nine years old building little villages out of rocks in my aunt's garden. she buys me big hoop earrings with an antique design engraved in the metal. my cousin joel gives me copies of his french philosophy books from college. In Vienna the most wonderful young couple is on the train riding to Salzburg. Her birthday is the next day. We all buy each other imported American beers and fill the six-person smoking cabin with a thick cloud of cigarettes and broken english. Her mother is an artist. He makes music with synthesizers. She speaks good english, and flawless german, italian, and french. she doesn't wear shoes on the train, which is tiny and cramped and dirty and Hungarian. They are the most lovely people, it is easy to fall in love with them both as one perfectly melded and marvelously symmetrical unit. they invite us to stay the night at her mother's house for her birthday party. can't resist the urge to watch them walk off the train and all the way out of the station, into the street. Schiele and Klimt and Vienna is so strange. Unlike any other place I have ever been. Majestic and lazy-regal and still fucking dark and seedy. The heat is awful. Munich is cooler and the room overlooks the famous theatre where an acrobatic circus is preparing to replace Elton John's opus, in German no less, Aida. The road crew comes with an assorted rainbow of circus-tent cotton candy haircolors. English gardens and swans and nude sunbathers and the most perfectly cool river running through the whole thing. The Berlin wall really is fucking amazing. What remains, like every possible surface of the city, has become a testament to abilities of kids with cans of spray paint.
On Wednesday the Supreme Court delivered their opinion on Gonzales v. Carhart. I knew this decision was coming, I knew it was on the docket this year and that oral arguments started in November of last year. But I have to say, when the decision was announced, I was completely surprised. I thought we had more time, frankly, although I don't know why. The Supreme Court voted to uphold the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, in a 5-4 decision. All the usual suspects voted to uphold the ban, Kennedy, Scalia, Roberts, Alito, and Thomas. Of course the dissenters were exactly who I predicted they would be, Ginsburg, Souter, Stevens and Breyer. It's gotten to the point where I don't even have to look anymore, regardless of the case, and I can tell you which justices are for or against things. Over ten years ago, Scalia said in a court opinion that he basically thought the Roe v. Wade decision was a poor one and if given half a chance to overturn it, he would. Justice Blackmun, the author of the Roe decision, responded by saying that he was getting old and he couldn't stay on the court forever. When he was gone, a woman's right to choose would be left in the hands of justices like Scalia and Rehnquist, and it would be gone before you know it.
So, while this decision hasn't completely outlawed abortion in the United States, it is a major victory for pro-lifers. And I can't imagine it will be their last one. This Supreme Court has a majority of justices with well-documented records on issues like abortion, freedom of speech, and Fourth Amendment matters. With everyone distracted by our President, nobody seems to realize that the greatest threat to national security at the moment is five men with a fucking agenda that sit on the highest court in our land. I don't want to hear about President Bush anymore, I'm tired of listening to people gripe about how terrible he is. This is the real threat people, our court is the real danger to our personal freedom, so take a good long look at your civil rights and liberties and get ready to say goodbye to half of them.
I have a habit of immensely enjoying repetition, it whatever form it comes in. I listen to the same songs and albums over and over again. I watch the same movies again and again. I don't think it's uncommon to enjoy the familiarity of certain music but I would argue that this is less common with movies. Perhaps it's because I have a short attention span and can find myself riveted by the same thing to a similar degree of intensity, again and again. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for nostalgia and I'm always trying to relieve the best things I've ever experienced, trying to recreate them to varying degrees of success. But none the less, I watch the same movies again and again at night. It's a bad habit actually, it started just because I needed to having something stimulating going on in my room to fall asleep. I used to read, but it became all but impossible in my haunted little townhouse, where silence invites awareness to every odd noice and flickering of lights, creating a tense sort of anxiety that is not conducive to sleep. I also couldn't stand falling asleep with the lights on and waking up at five in the morning to find them still blazing, for some reason having bright lights on seems to wake me up at intervals too regular to for a fully enjoyable evening of sleep. So i switched to movies, forsaking the obvious choice of records, which turn themselves off once finished, because inevitably I'll fall asleep during a lulling moment in the album, only to be jolted back awake by an experimental attempt at guitar distortion torture ten minutes later. No single record seems to offer an even amount of sleepy whimsical little songs. So it became movies, which presents the only problem of waking up to the looping of a dvd menu, but for the most part this set up works. But I still watch the same movies every night, cycling through the same thirty stories, sometimes watching two or three specific ones for several nights in a row. I enjoy the feeling I get from the movies, which isn't dulled by the passage of time or the repetition of viewing. Roman Holiday still makes me feel like I'm back in Europe, making myself an obvious tourist by scaling crates and heaps of things in the street to take a better picture of some absolutely charming architectural find. Amelie is perfect serendipitous love. The Royal Tenenbaums is the family I should have had in the new york city I always dreamed of living in. Band of Outsiders is for my romantic fantasy of waking up Anna Karina, all ivory and silk and french and doe-eyed. Gosford Park for when I want to imagine myself as a glamorous British flapper-era aristocrat, bound by some antiquated notion of social etiquette and seemingly proud of it. Rushmore is just high school, it never fails to remind me of the days some perfect adolescent innocence, of riding my bike and listening to music and just waiting for another opportunity to plow into a fence or get my skirt caught and break something else.
While I've always thought the absurdly strict film rating system America has "voluntarily" adopted was utterly unfair and often arbitrary, there is something inherently amusing about their standards guide. For instance a film that includes the expletive "fuck" 1-3 times can still get a PG-13 rating, as long as the word isn't applied in a sense. i.e.: "fuck you!"-okay, "i will now fuck you!"-not okay.
But as simultaneously amusing and outrageous as the MPAA rating system is, I have discovered a rating system far more entertaining and mystifying than I could have ever imagined: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Rating System.
Some may have been aware that the Catholic Church has devised it's own film and television rating system and that it thoroughly analyzes any and every film and television program it can get it's pope-loving hands on. I was not. Until today. The bishops have done their homework. Whoever goes to see these films and then rates them has not been laying down on the job. Every conceivable film imaginable has been scrutinized and given a catholic appropriate rating. But the most amusing part? It seems that some of the film critics have a genuine eye for artistic merit. Thus they lavish praise on films they find to have excellent scripts, breathtaking cinematography, and exceptional acting, before almost grudgingly declaring that unfortunately, it's not catholic-friendly. I recommend to anyone interested in looking this up themselves, to take a peak at the review for the infamous Brokeback Mountain. There you can find the most utterly conflicted catholic film critic in the world. I swear the review is more heart-wrenching than the film is.
The rating system spans from A-I, acceptable to all audiences, to O, which means morally offensive. The A-I rating appears to only be appropriate for the animated films with the most mild content imaginable. Any live action films is basically unsafe for small ears and eyes. The morally offensive brand is applied to some of the most hilariously unlikely films possible. A lighthearted comedy starring Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore is morally objectionable on the grounds that mother and daughter characters talk too frankly about their sex lives. Amusingly enough, the catholic church has a very positive stance on Harry Potter films. Apparently to catholics, especially catholic film reviewers, Harry Potter is not an enemy of god afterall. I learn something new every day.
"We consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials." -Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.
"Restrictions of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us." -Justice William O. Douglas
Everybody knows where babies come from, right? But do you know where license plates come from? Well in case you don't, license plates are issued by individual states through the Department of Motor Vehicles. Which makes sense, no? So what does that have to do with babies? Plenty, my friends, plenty. You see, in addition to the regulation state issued license plates, states can also elect to offer specialty plates to state residents. These specialty plates can range from college-themed license plates to specific charity organizations plates. A portion of the proceeds from these plates goes to the charity affiliated with the specialty license plate. Florida is one of thirteen states that offers a "Choose Life" license plate. Yeah, you see them everywhere here, but only twelve other states even offer such a license plate. And the extra funds earned for these specialty plates go directly to Choose Life, Inc., an organization dedicated to ending abortion. But, oh no, that's not all! We also offer a "Family Values" license plate, partial proceeds from the sale of go to a ministry, and a "Family First" license plate, which advocates avoiding divorce at all possible costs (aka 101 new ways to say "Oh, this black eye! No, no, I fell...I'm so clumsy!"). Oh and that "Choose Life" license plate? It's the 8th most popular plate in the state of Florida. The "Keep Kids Drug Free" plate? Number 35. And the "Stop Child Abuse" license plate? 48th. Apparently it's more important to Floridians, by a wide margin, to prevent women from having unwanted children than it is to prevent unwanted children from getting the shit beat out of them. Things we don't have a license plate for? Planned Parenthood, HIV and AIDS awareness, and ending domestic violence. Now I know you may be thinking "But Danielle, if Planned Parenthood really wanted a specialty license plate, I'm sure they could try to get one!" Try being the operative word here, because those specialty plates have to be approved by the state, my dears.
What the fuck does "Choose Life" mean anyway. As if all those who don't "Choose Life", support death? For some women, motherhood is not a life choice they're ambitiously pursuing. They don't want children, and furthermore they do not think that having a child, regardless of their age or circumstances, will significantly enrich their lives. Does that mean they're supporting death? No, I think it means they're affirming life, the lives they want to live as individuals and the things they want to accomplish, which do not include a baby. I'm choosing life. I'm choosing to live a life consistent with my desires and goals, and those goals do not include a baby.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
laundromats's journal
