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My Life in Movies

2008-04-16T10:06:00.006-04:00

I was sent this rather long questionnaire in an email and thought that since I took the time to answer these questions, I'd post them here and try to get some of my blogging friends to answer them as well. There are some really good questions here.

1. Last film I saw in the theater:
The Grand. I really wanted to see something to make me laugh.

2. Last movie I watched on dvd/vhs:
Things We Lost in the Fire

3. Last movie I watched on tv:
Barber Shop 2

4. Last great movie you saw (for the first time, no repeated viewings):
Hearts of Darkness

5. Top three favorite movies of all time:
- Funny Girl
- The Color Purple
- Pride and Prejudice (A&E's version, not the new one with Keira Knightley)

6. Three comedies I can watch over and over and they still make me laugh:
- Old School
- Bottle Rocket
- Friday

7. Three dramas I can watch over and over without tiring of them:
- Legends of the Fall
- Nowhere in Africa
- Girl Fight

8. Favorite romantic comedy:
Knotting Hill

9. Favorite suspense/horror movie:
Alice in Wonderland

10. Favorite movie musical:
Chicago? My favorite musicals haven't been made into films yet.

11. My three favorite movies when I was a kid:
- School Daze
- Purple Rain
- Small Sacrifices

12. Three movies I loved when I was a kid that I still love now:
-Mississippi Masala
- Dirty Dancing
- Shag

13. Favorite movie based on a book:
Mansfield Park

14. Favorite sequel (think hard):
Dirty Dancing 2

15. Favorite movie that you know is kind of crappy, but you love it anyway:
The Last of the Mohicans

16. Favorite foreign film:
Y Tu Mama Tambien

17. Best documentary I've seen so far:
Control Room

18. Movie I put on when I'm really depressed:
The Mirror Has Two Faces

19. Movie that can make me cry even if I am in the happiest mood:
The Color Purple

20. A movie someone recommended to me that I ended up loving and the person who recommended it:
The War Room, Mrs. Lee (Gifted/AP Social Studies Teacher in High School)

21. A movie someone recommended to me that I ended up hating and the person who recommended it (but it's not their fault):
Something Japanese about a woman who has to learn how to cook while being trained like a ninja in the kitchen. Recommended by Ron.

22. Movie I recommend for everyone to see and why:
I think that everyone should see the Brazilian film Me, You, Them because it's about a woman who has been disappointed in love and so comes up with a revolutionary way that women can have all of their needs met by men in a committed relationship. It isn't the best piece of work cinematically but it is a particularly provocative conversation piece, not just between men and women but between women and other women and men and other men.

23. Movie I recommended for someone to see and still regret doing so:
I recommended Nurse Betty to my sister and cousin and they have never forgiven me for it.

24. Biggest movie let down:
G (Christopher Scott Cherot)

25. Biggest movie surprise (you liked it and thought you wouldn't):
Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins

26. Top three actors you would watch in anything:
- Roger Guenveur Smith
- Jeffrey Wright
- Don Cheadle

27. Top three actresses you would watch in anything:
- Frances O'Connor
- Julia Roberts
- Renee Zellwegger

28. Top three directors whose films you would watch no matter what:
- Alfonso Cuaron
- Julie Taymor
- Pedro Almodovar

29. Most overrated movie (please stick with stuff you've seen):
Office Space

30. Most overrated actor/actress:
Jamie Fox/Lisa Raye

31. Do you have a favorite screenwriter? Who and what is your favorite movie they have written?:
Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson as a pair

32. Three favorite movie quotes:
Too hard. Too many movies.

33. If you can remember it, worst dialougue in a movie ever:
Don't remember it.

34. Best dialogue in a movie ever:
Closer. Because it sounds like a play.

35. I can repeat every line from this movie verbatim while watching it:
Love Jones

36. Book you would like to see made into a movie and who you would like to see in it/directing it/etc.:
I think that books are just fine as books.

37. Favorite song from a movie:
My Man, Barbra Streisand's version from Funny Girl

38. Favorite use of a song in a movie:
We Are Men from Mulan

39. A musical artist you now love that you discovered by watching a movie and said movie:
Iron and Wine, In Good Company

40. Movie that you feel compelled to watch when you pass it flipping through channels:
Fried Green Tomatoes

41. A movie that you really related with in high school (like the maker was your kindred spirit/ these characters were your long-lost best friend): Only You, with Robert Downey, Jr. and Marissa Tomeii

42. Movie you loved when you were a teenager and thought you would always love, but does not hold the same place in your heart:
Dying Young

43. I was completely into __(name of movie)__ when it came out, I even thought about a t-shirt or action figures, but now I don't know what I was thinking.
No such movie.

44. I want to be _(this movie character)_ when I grow up:
Rose Morgan, from The Mirror Has Two Faces

45. Best movie character:
Gollum

46. Movie I could live in happily:
The Big Night, just for the food

47. Movie character soulmate (if only he or she was real and then you could live happily ever after):
Sam Shapiro, Adrien Brody's character from Bread and Roses

48. Deserted island movie (I know, why would you have a dvd player on a deserted island? just go with it): Saved this for last...still can't think of one.

49. Famous movie everyone's seen that I haven't:
All of the James Bond movies except the last one.

50. Movie I never want to see remade:
Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights or Jude the Obscure or Wide Sargasso Sea. No one gets them quite right.

51. Movie that inspires me:
Frida

52. Three pieces of movie memorabilia I own:
I don't believe in this.

53. A movie I saw and asked for my money back:
All the King's Men

54. Best movie watching experience in a theater (crowd rocked):
Jackass, the first one. Everyone was just as grossed out as her neighbor.

55. Worst movie watching experience in a theater (crowd sucked):
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I couldn't enjoy the movie as much because I was being sexually molested.

56. First movie I remember seeing in the theater:
I remember we saw Under the Cherry Moon...and that was a long time ago, but I don't know if it was the first one. The theatre we saw it in is now a porn theatre, though.

57. People I love to watch movies with:
Ron, because he always has something really "interesting" to say about the film and usually challenges me in one way or another about the film.

58. Fondest movie memory (home):
Does this count? Watching shorts in the middle of the night in the speech lab at Agnes Scott.

59. Fondest movie memory (theater):
The Island with Rajesh

60. If there was a movie that I can say might have changed my life, it was this one:
Nothing comes to mind. And I've been thinking through most of my 3rd period class. Plus, I can't take questions like this seriously.

I tag Mary and Mynna.

Calling it Home

2008-02-08T14:40:00.006-05:00

Whatever it is that has kept me from writing, I am coming out of it. All around me there has been coming and going. With me, too. For a little while, now, I think I will be comfortable sitting in one place getting used to the surroundings.

I've moved twice in the past five months. I have had two or three relationships end, depending on how you look at it, in the past nine. I started a new job six months ago. In September, I fell head over heals for two little girls who belong to a friend of mine. I separated myself from them last week with more difficulty than I had anticipated. I started and stopped therapy. I've been caught up in steady motion and now I'm ready to sit down some.

I think renting a house with my mother and sister will help to achieve this tremendously. Already, I eat out less, spend more nights in--not counting this weekend when I've been knocked down by something of the severe flu variety. Still. Something happened wherein living with my mother again just made an enormous amount of sense. She, my sister and I all had three separate residences in various places around the city with three sets of bills and one day I just couldn't figure out why we were doing that when we could pool our resources and everyone could be a bit less strapped financially. My mother and I have not always gotten along, though, which is what made this decision blog-worthy. We are now in the honeymoon phase. I swear as incidents pop up, I will madly put them here. But for now there are just home-cooked meals, familiar cigarette smoke, and even an occasional packed lunch.

Plus I'm writing again. And the talking in the distant rooms does not even distract. It feels like home in this house.

I'm Thinking That...

2007-12-14T15:16:00.000-05:00

There is nothing like a real job to make you absolutely aware of the unremarkable nature of your particular humanity.

I have been happiest as a student.

I voluntarily had my feelings muted. I regret it.

These days there is endless comfort in Scrabble. Sometimes three games in a single day.

My friends are all getting older.

More and more I am settling into womanhood much more easily than I had anticipated.

I long for a great romance but I believe that this notion is very much out of place in modern life.

I joined a book club of African-American women. I look forward to these conversations in a way that surprises me very much and my friends very little.

To be without passion for a man is like being hungry but not knowing for what.

I can't be mad forever.

Time By Myself?

2007-10-09T19:40:00.000-04:00

A lady that I was talking to said to me that she didn't think I was ready for a serious relationship. I am afraid that what she thinks may be true. It never occured to me before she said so but the things I do are telling.

Essential-seeming qualities like patience, paying close attention, being weak or vulnerable (or both), and perhaps even being able to bare the waxing and waning nature of love are things that I can't wholly give myself up to.

I had believed that either you are or are not ready, one or definitely the other. But I think I am in some in between place. I can't figure out how to adequately describe it. It is sort of the think you're ready and wanting to truly love someone worthy of you place while being afraid that you could get really hurt and also not wanting to let go of all the just in cases just in case the love doesn't move in a way that makes sense or makes life good or satisfies, thoroughly.

This lady says in order for there to be room in my life for the things I think I want, I have to make room for them. I told her I thought it was possible to hold on to the safe things until the potentially beautiful and risky ones come along. It is possible, I told her, to still want quality even if you don't make yourself so lonely you could cry for it.

She told me that no one dies of loneliness--that it might be good for me. But people die alone and lonely all the time. I don't want to.

Pants on Fire

2007-09-28T10:17:00.000-04:00

If you recognize the above then I am sorry for you. It means that you had, at least once in your life, a teacher who believed that creating something like this would help you to become a better writer and speaker of English. I am an English teacher who believes no such thing. But I teach this skill like it is sacrilege to forego it--with such fervor and seeming importance as I myself find it hard to believe. I have added articles and adjectives to the basic subject and verb structure of a sentence diagram today and as a result was asked by one of my brighter students the very same question I asked my graduate school professor of the History of the English Language when he introduced me to this, this...silliness: Why do we need to know how to do this?

I answered her as though I have been prepared all my life to answer questions I don't know the answers to.

I lied.

I told her that learning to diagram sentences would help her to understand the parts of speech better. I told her that learning to diagram sentences would help her to understand how sentences are formed better and so make her a better speaker and writer of English. And because you should be a trustworthy and upstanding person if you have my job, she believed me. I looked her right in the eyes and said to her words which will never be true for me.

What I could have said was that diagramming sentences can be fun, that it's like a puzzle you have to figure out with words and phrases, clauses and all of the grammatical pieces. I might have said that. It is that for me. I thought that it was ridiculous to sell it pretending it does something it doesn't do but I do like being given a complex sentence and being able to figure out the "picture" of that sentence. It makes me happy when I get it right. Brain teaser stuff. Like sudoku?

Anyway. I am an old-fashioned English teacher today. I pretend that breaking apart a sentence in this manner will help you to better understand how it then goes back together. I lie to innocent and not-so-innocent children about ways to improve their grammar. In this I do not buck the establishment. In this I do not want anyone saying about my students that they were denied a necessary portion of their grammatical education. So I persist.

I feel guilty, though. Like a follower. Like I'm not a revolutionary. But I've started now. Don't see how I can do a take-back.

Good Girls Get Flowers

2007-04-29T20:21:00.000-04:00

If you were a person who knew me in the everyday, general sort of happenings of things--my students and colleagues, you understand--it wouldn't be a stretch to say that you would be surprised if you saw me become so spontaneously made happy by way of full-blown feminine, emotional hysterics by a random occurrence that you would say to yourself, "Well, now, I didn't know she had that in her!" Such a day and such an occurrence were this Friday past.

To make gross light of a situation that has by no means been close to goodness, it is enough to say that the teaching position in which I landed myself this school year has been unpleasant. The last few weeks, especially, as I claw tooth and nail to extricate myself from this place, have been rather a fright much more than once over. It hasn't been good for me. As a result, I have felt that my "teaching-game" has suffered because being in this place has made me feel that everything has been diminished by this employment. And yet.

Just at the beginning of my 4th period class, as my students were paper-ball fighting, begging to go to the bathroom, and updating one another on who broke up and made up while they were away at their elective classes, one of the office secretaries delivered me an arrangement of yellow roses with the slightest orange trim and little purple wildflower looking things with a beautifully tied orange ribbon with yellow polka dots. Lord Krishna, you would have thought I had been wholly unaware of the existence of a thing in nature called "flower" so outside the bounds of the teaching personality I have donned did I step when I was handed that loveliest of tangible tokens of appreciation and endearment. As those who don't know me well at all in my place of employment were quite surprised to see, I immediately burst into tears from the joy that simple gesture wrought in me. I was rendered absolutely feckless to really teach with the composure I am usually able to cloak myself in, no matter what atrocity has been rained down on me on any given day, for the next two class periods. That first class, being the ones who actually witnessed the spectacle I made of myself and my mad dash to the ladies room to get-it-together, were so stunned upon my return that they were entirely silent, actually conducting their research on famous authors like they were supposed to have done with not a single prompting from me to do so! Not quite able to keep a pesky tear from streaming down every five minutes or so, I busied myself with filling the white board with all the bibliographic directives they would need for their papers due in two weeks' time. I could feel them, I tell you, watching me to see if I would explode with emotion or feeling one more time so that they could believe that it had truly happened. That it hadn't, actually, been a dream they'd dreamed brought on by the agony they suffered from not having had the opportunity to piss from 7:30 am, when they left their lovely and not-so-lovely homes, until now at 11:00, when it was time for their scheduled, supervised bathroom break. (Scheduled and supervised, you see, because of the unfortunate incident of two male students and one female producing an amateur pornographic video during an unscheduled, unsupervised bathroom visit. Lost everyone the privilege of pissing when one freely needs to piss. Shame, isn't it?)

I didn't care about the tears, they could look all their fill--it was the hyperventilating that I did feel the need to control before paramedics had to be called in. (And fuck that. It would have been ABSOLUTELY horrible--have you ever seen the SNL skits "Appalachian E.R.?" Right. Nothing further to say about that.) All I felt was the most sincere surprise, the utterest of utter shock, and perhaps, a tad bit of validation that I was still, through the haze of evil I've had to wade my way through day-in, in this school-house, doing something right, or at the very least, meaningful for one woman's child. My bouquet was from a mother whose daughter I have taken under my particular wing this year, even though, often, the care I try to take with her seems to fall on deaf ears. This child--one I call one of "my children" raises my blood pressure on a regular basis concerning her choice of boyfriend alone. That aside, I love this child. I hadn't known that her mother knew that I loved her. And further, how could her mother have possibly known that I needed--really needed--that small token which was like a ruby encrusted tiara for being teacher of the year to me. I was full.

There are twenty days more, all things falling in line as they should, of work in this place with these children of mine--angels and devils all mixed in together--in this rural town. I shudder to think in whose hands I will be leaving them after I am gone. But, "it is what it is." (What the principal of this school-house consistently says in lieu of dealing with inequity, injustice, racism, verbal abuse, harassment, and the like from a certain segment of the population of both parents and colleagues of mine in this rural community.) It has been hard to see what good I might have done in this place, constantly confronted with the ill I do, apparently, as deemed by certain parties.

My roses are blooming, they are gloriously fragrant, and when they are gone, their memory will help the next four weeks go by with substantially less anxiety.

Plus!..."I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job, I love my job..."

I am an English Teacher. I am good. I get flowers delivered which say so. Equivocally.

27...plus a day or two

2007-02-22T21:48:00.000-05:00

It would seem I've accomplished nothing really important this past year. Last year at this time, birthday-ish, I said I needed a couch and a toaster and to fold my laundry. I still need all of that.

Isn't that ridiculous? But things HAVE actually happened to me.

I did finally get the degree in my hands from the grad school that I finished eons ago. Incredibly anti-climactic.

No longer have a roommate. These bills are kicking my ass.

Got a grown-up job much more easily than I believe you're supposed to be able to get one. Makes my ass clatter at least four times a week so much that I wish hillbillies would just fall off the planet.

Fell in love a few times. You know how that shit always manages to end up.

Was incredibly domestic by way of cooking up a meal for some man or other and watching him eat my cooking. No one died or got the runs, that I'm aware of.

Waited, waited, waited. And still haven't given that up. No change in the near future either, looks like.

Met some new people--always fun. Outgrew some old ones--never quite as easily done, that.

Discovered the best pedicure spot in town. I swear by Michelle's ability to cure cramps, heartache, boredom, water-weight gain, baldness, hammer toe (not on me, I saw her work on some cave woman's feet), etc., etc. Email me for her number, address, and whatnot. Sitting in her chair will make your entire week.

Had Thanksgiving and Christmas away from my family. Oh so refreshing!

Baby sat two little Indian girls all summer and learned all manner of phrases and food stuffs a la Hindi.

Linked back up with hundreds of old friends (actually 4) from high school who I never thought that I'd ever talk to/be with again. Words can't even describe.

Record low concert-wise. Can only remember one which is really sad.

My sight deteriorated at a significantly faster rate in the past year than in any other year before this one. Got that checked out. Still sexy as ever.

Freaked out an awful lot about turning 27 beginning almost immediately after I had turned 26. All that "it's the age where you have to decide" business. But it is a FACT that feminine biology begins working in a way that counters logic the closer you get to 27. It was my body turning against my mind, my intellect. Shit was real. No joke. Only now that there was no implosion at midnight on 2/18 am I starting to calm down.

I do know that what I've had is no longer enough. Everything good to you isn't good for you.

All that good for you can make you forget who you are. Roses still being roses and all. Actually a pretty powerful sentiment.

And have been told that I talk too much, am too outspoken, think I know everything, over-analyze and the like by all kinds of people. Never women. So that's the same, too.

My reluctant acquiescence on being a modern renewed. Seems I might be a character in a book. Can't wait for that to turn out.

Good to have some things carry over. Over and over more.

Wish you could've had some cake. The middle layer of icing was just...sinful. Thanks, GHP.

She doesn't believe it, I'm sure. It is hard each and every time.

2007-01-01T22:48:00.000-05:00

You can depend upon me attempting to take such tender care of a miscellaneous object, and always loving it so well that I become deeply concerned by the idea that it could slip through my fingers, that my losing whatever it might be, for sanity's sake, could be nothing other than fated. It makes perfect sense. A thing that I am not frantic about stays around for as long as can be. A thing that I should and feel I must hold onto so preoccupies me in a quest to keep it always about me, or in its proper place, that I am certain to quickly move it somewhere for safe-keeping thinking 'I will surely remember that I've stuck this here..." or "This place is so odd a pocket in which to keep something so unrelated to this place's function that when I think of the thing, I will remember immediately the oddity and be taken right to my loved keepsake..." It never turns out this way. Instead, my seeming secured thing is no longer in need of me worrying over it and I so thoroughly forget its existence that my recent little obsession over it would appear to be more superficial than it actually was to me. In those moments. I can forget things so well that their entering the realm of lost...being lost...of loss (what best to call it, I can't decide)...can take long and long whiles. Years, I'm saying. Weeks or months as well, but yes, even years.

When next I remember by wanting the thing--in that very moment, there is no lukewarm taste for it--it is a beastly hunger I can drum up. It puts me in the mind of those Medieval biles you learned of in school (if you were lucky in your bit of public education). Only I've got one all my own that comes out as a result of having lost my...or being in a state of loss about...my thing. It is as if it made me well, or helped to...as well as I am, anyway. Without it I froth and spill over, at the mouth and other orifices, a globule-filled, blinding green (that is neon, you understand), cottage cheese-like substance. And it burns, the realization that it is gone, which is how the loss manifests. The realization of the loss is the burning, blinding, green bile that my body expels from all the open orifices (not counting the skin's pores, which makes for a more meaningful and unsettling visual). And there are tears. Silent tears. It's hard to explain but it's something that Julie Taymor could effectively make three-dimensional and beautiful, even as the image breaks each heart it encounters.

All that and I haven't yet said what is gone from me. It isn't what you think it is, either. I can't write about that anymore, in explicit or inexplicit ways. What it is or what they are...books. Two. The first one is Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The other and newest is Graham Greene's Brighton Rock.

I was aware of having lost Wuthering Heights, this particular edition (because I still do have a less meaningful, really old and delicate copy taunting me from the shelf as I write), about a year ago. It was an academic acquisition, although my reading of it very soon turned into one characterized by the admiration that could only come from a sensitive and hopelessly romantic forgotten-girl where the favor of men is concerned. Do you know this already? But there is a character called Heathcliff. Do you know that he says "I ought to have sweat blood then, from the anguish of my yearning..." It is about Catherine. He loves her. Wuthering Heights is not a romance novel. It is a great, moving, insightful, skillfully crafted piece of literature. I'm sorry for you if you've stayed away from it because you believed what "they" say about it. Truly, I understand because I did, too. As I said, I was reading it then for a class. I came to love it like a finishing piece of myself. Now lost, that one I want--the first. With my notes. My first impressions. My talking back to the author and Heathcliff and Catherine and Linton and the Earnshaws and Nelly and Joseph and Hareton. Talking back in blue. I remember that my favorite pen then was blue and I used it to bleed all over it with. And I want those first reaction/impressions/interaction/conversations with the book back. It's the copy I think of as mine. I have and could buy more and more others. But I've lost mine.

Brighton Rock is what I wanted tonight because of how Pinkie made the damnedest effort to change, to get away from who he was, but it was all through him...I remember that more than anything. No one changes. We are what we come from and we are always who we have been. No matter the multitudinous ways we try to cinch a cloak around the truth, there is no getting out of you the very places and things that formed you. And I'm feeling like that tonight. And it's a comfort. But its a handicap as well.

God knows where my books are. And how many more of them I have been too careless of. I'm tired of losing things that I love. But I keep making it happen somehow. All I think I'm doing is being myself, but it's the myself that keeps pushing over into lost my loved things.

I want them all back. Right. Now. Burns with it.

I always think of this poem when I lose one particular kind of thing. Because of the place at the end where she doesn't want to admit that she has lost Him. Everything could be momentary, more misplaced...not nearly as decisive as having to admit to lost.

"One Art," by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

the high cost

2006-11-20T14:05:00.000-05:00

I am unfit for most everything except writing. Or trying to. Because the only people who don't make me feel odd and separate are crazy, sensitive, ostracized writers.

Woolf. Head. Bronte. Chopin. Walcott. Roy. Forster. Too much feeling, too many thoughts, too much introspection, too much analysis, all. Abnormal loving. Abnormal perspective. Abnormal expectations. Abnormal desires. Lonely. All in their little lives lonely in ways that people cannot conceive. Loneliness that does not dull. The feeling is the primary thing. Just too much of it. That won't quieten. That won't rest. That only agitates. Takes over. It seems sometimes.

Perhaps one day I will publish just one little story and people will read it widely and in it there will be something that makes them say, "Yes...she got that right. I never thought that anyone could understand that inside of me, and here on this page she has gotten it right." And then the people I love can begin to believe that there was a purpose for how they suffer being loved by me.

Patricide and Father-Echoes

2006-10-22T13:54:00.000-04:00

My father says that I am still a child and must be treated like one. No requests made of me, you understand. Rather, I am to be told what is expected of me and I am to complete the task or attempt to live up to the expectation as well as I sincerely can. This time, it was the task bit. I do not live with my father. I support myself financially. I work a real job, now. It is hard. I earn the weekends. I deserve them. Some people do not deserve weekends. I do. And Friday night is a part of the weekend.

My paternal grandmother decided to have a very large family dinner at "The House" yesterday. I love and admire and adore and girl-crush on every atom that makes up my grandma. She is the best grandma that has ever walked the face of the earth. And not because I will inherit anything of material worth. She lights up my entire everything. And ordinarily, I would figure an integral force in an out-of-the-blue family gathering with REAL FOOD bringing us together, but this time, I was just too tired. I wasn't in the mood. I had other stuff to actually do. And a few things that I ache to happen that I try to keep my life open enough for. You know--just in case. So, I ignored all of my Gram's phone calls this week not because I didn't want to talk to her but because I knew what she wanted. I was going to have to cook 90% of the food for this whim of hers. Do you know how long it takes to do something like that? An entire day. A full twenty-four hours. And we only expected 40-50 people. It was like Thanksgiving, only larger. And I just didn't feel like it. Thanksgiving is a few weeks away anyway and I'll have to do this ALL OVER AGAIN! I just wanted to be left alone. My father wouldn't accept brushing off my grandmother.

He made me do it. No Friday night. No Saturday. Complete disregard for my actual life. When I tried to explain that this time I just COULDN'T (and I ALWAYS DO, you understand...I am ALWAYS the CAN DO DAUGHTER/GRANDDAUGTHER, though I am not the only one!!!) nothing I said reached him. He didn't see me at all. Even did that thing he is very good at. He added the guilt factor. Said that if it had been one of my friends wanting me to do something, I wouldn't hesitate. Said I was needed by my family. Said was I going to choose him or whatever else I would rather be doing. Just like he would when he and my mother realized that the two of them together was not, actually, a fantastic decision. He would say, "Me or her? She has wronged me. If you love me, you cannot love her. If you do love her, it means, then, that you do not love me as you say you do." It isn't a secret or anything. My father is a bastard. Through and through. I mean I don't want him to die tomorrow, but he is not a good man. Not a good father. Is almost completely incapable, it seems, of getting it right where any of his human relationships are concerned.

How I feel about my father scares me for a dear friend of mine. He has two daughters. Their age differential is exactly the same as mine and my sister's. He, too, didn't quite make the love thing between himself and their mother last forever. I mean as a romantic couple. And not that it was his "fault," I have no idea about those particulars, but now that I know him, I cannot really think of my father without thinking of him and his daughters.

The older girl, from what I have gleaned, is like me at that age. The younger, eerily similar to my little sister--as she was a long time ago and how she is now. The older is very agreeable. A pacifier who doesn't want to be the cause of any additional ripples. The younger is very bold and much more free. She says exactly what is on her mind. Asks for what she wants, no matter her desire. And I'm pretty sure, but perhaps I'm transferring here, that she hasn't seen all that the older girl has seen; doesn't know all the stuff the older girl knows. These parallels, I know, are not...the strongest or most unique parallels...but they do not sit easily with me.

My friend is nothing like my father. He, you know, is human, but he is not my father. I just say a little prayer for him--for all three of them--that his girls will never see him with eyes like the ones through which I see my father. If there is anything to know that is ugly about him, I don't ever want them, especially the older girl, to happen upon that knowledge. I envy his girls for what they have, I believe, in him. For a father. He seems to me this miracle, for so many reasons, in that role. I think that, perhaps, he even believes it to be the role that has been the making of him. You know, as a man. And that whatever else he does (or more specifically--gets all wrong), he will get that right. He doesn't know it, but I am his secret champion where they are concerned. I want him to be good and beautiful in their eyes for forever.

I do not want them to be afraid, suspicious, too, too cautious, or unwilling to take risks.

I do not ever want him to hurt them. Not ever. Because I am so afraid that they will not forget it. And I don't ever want them to forget the love-light that comes over his face just for them. How he loves and NURTURES them is like a secret healing for me. I could never say that out loud, you understand. No one could really understand just how thick that feeling is in me about the three of them being good together because it doesn't involve me, in any way, ONE BIT. All I know is if they ever become blind to that light on his face that they put there, it would break his heart.

More over, it would break my heart.

On Psychologically Warfaring (and stillness)

2006-10-05T17:33:00.000-04:00

My friend does not believe that I am a victim of this. She is wrong. She is also a linguistic pioneer, verbing it with that noun as she has done above. When she used my own language against me, today at lunch, in a way that made all the fire in my belly-ness, resignation, and painful clarity I had forced myself to drum up so that all I could do was laugh far too loudly, she helped me remember that she is a genius. That is why we are such good friends. Two geniuses who can't get enough croissants and Coca Cola. And also meat. We will never understand the veggies. But back to this genius moment of hers. She succeeded in redirecting my fatalistic thoughts and put an absolute halt (however temporarily) to a potentially bridge-burning conversation I had completely worked out in my head last night and this morning. What I was going to say was very clever. Cut to the quick-ish stuff. Show some such-and-such that I am smarter than he is and I will decide for the both of us rather than continue living in the most horrific sort of limbo a girl could conceive of. Even a writer-girl. Even one who can formulate worst case scenarios like no other human being on the planet. Even one who always, always thinks the worst so she's always prepared for...whatever. But it is much more awful, I'm saying, to leave someone like me in the wind...unattended...without an anchor...without even an iota of certainty. Because I am the queen of inventing my own certainty. Even if all I needed to do was be patient. I am not the queen of patience. At. All. Waiting is like a brain disease with me. Waiting makes me feel like I'm being made a fool of. That my intelligence is being insulted. That my capacity for reason...all my smarts, as well...are corroding the more I do it. And I don't want tiny portions of my brain to be eaten away at. I value it. Ever so much. I can't bear the thought of labels like "foolish girl" and "stupid girl" and "ridiculous, waiting, idiot" to be attached to it. I can't hardly sit still for something like that. No sir.

So, here is what it is like. This is an extended metaphor. Prepare yourself.

It is as though everyone sitting around a table full up with edible possibilities all have their eyes so full that they want every thing on the table. And everyone knows that if there was a table a football field long with food piled up so high we couldn't see the top of it, no one would be able to eat all of it. It is impossible, even if you want to so badly, to get everything you think you want. All that food would make any one of those people quite sick if they did actually try to gobble up all of it. All right. I've set the scene and I hope you can see it clearly. Now, also imagine that I am one of the people at this nightmarishly filled table. And I'm not nearly as hungry as all the other people around it. I'm the type of eater who can't help but consider all the things that could be wrong with all this food; all the differently combined ways one could make a meal out of so much food it seems unreal. There is bacteria crawling all over. (We're outside on a football field with a bunch of sweaty people breathing all over everything, remember?) And the e-coli debacle which has gotten into everything. Not to forget that there's the Mexican tomato crop fiasco. And I'm lactose intolerant. And let's not even get into who in the hell prepared all this food and where they did it and how they transported it to this seriously nightmarish table. I am THAT kind of eater. I am leery of the whole process--all I can see is that what goes in might morph and become a WMD inside me and come out like so many stealth Iranian nuclear warheads ground up in an icky brown flood of pudding. Do you understand me? I am the kind of eater who knows that I must eat to live. I KNOW that I was born to eat food. That there are millions of people who eat food and it is good for them. But who cannot let go of the FACT that there are other millions who wish they'd never even heard of some such-and-such kind of sandwich or some fuck-bowl of ice cream.

And yet. I am hungry, too. I want to eat something. But I don't feel rushed about deciding what I really want. I am, with a few qualifications, open for lots of different things as long as it's quality. Quality. Superb. Beautiful. Intellectual. Tender. Funny. Kind. I mean...nutritious. Delicious. Well-balanced. (Metaphor, Tony, metaphor!) So someone comes along and says, "You...how are you? I know you don't know me and so have no reason to trust or believe in what I am going to tell you but I want to tell it to you anyway. The look on your face, as you sit at this table, looks like what I am feeling about this eating process, too. I think that we could do it this other way...what do you think? This is so antiquated...I'm a modern. Are you a modern? I think that, yes, you are a modern. We moderns should eat our meals together the way we want to eat them. See, look...I've come up with this nutrition plan that is perfect for me...and if you'll allow me to be so bold, I think, would be perfect for you, too. Especially if we sit down at our table together, away from this garish ridiculousness they are calling a feast. What do you think? I can't wait to hear what you will say when you respond to me, by the way. I love to hear you talk." And so of course I, reluctantly, sign up to be a part of this modern case study on this nutrition plan. And although the person who walked up to me asked for patience as he got everything in order, I have yet to be fed anything substantial. I have nibbled. I have thirsted and been satisfied...only for the same thirst to pop up again because there are some thirsts which require an ongoing sort of quenching.

And now we have time passing.

More and more.

When just a little nibble or two to keep me quiet is all it takes to keep me signed up for this plan. And this is known...so just when I think the plan has been recalled, there is a seeming miraculous affirmation that I must learn to HOLD. To sit still. Even as I am not built for this kind of thing. Miracles like there were at Christmas. And Father's Day. And was that MLK Day?

You see, I am easily distracted by other things that look almost as good (to eat), when they really aren't, but are more than pleasant tummy-fillers for the time being. The trouble is that eventually...someone will stand up and say "Eat this way or the highway!" And I will be powerless to stop myself from going for the security of the cookie in the hand over the uncertainty of the whole box of cookies on the shelf.

It comes down to this FACT. I am being psychologically warfared by one or two or both of the following things. One: you know. Two: my biology. Or far worse: the intersection of these two...you know...because of my age. 26. That time...I hate to type the rest...in a woman's life.

If I could just make it over this hump without doing anything too drastic and stupid or too close to either end on the long spectrum of possibilities, I just might could win.

Don't you think?

thump, a-thump, thump, thump...

2006-09-04T23:37:00.000-04:00

Knowing that I love someone has never happened to me as it did yesterday. Not in love. Just the regular kind. The, supposedly, least complicated variety. We were having a conversation just like all the others that we have all the time and as we completed the goodbye-play, I almost slipped and said "I love you." Now, there is no reason for me to deny this to myself or to anyone at all, having no fear that the person in question will ever get wind of my epiphany, so I can honestly write that neither the idea or the feeling had ever occurred to me before concerning this person. I've felt rage, the thoroughest tenderness, utter confusion, total have-nothing-to-do-with-it-ever-again-ness (and that again and again over), typical (for me) careless disregard, and so on and on. But never, truly NEVER, love.

It is a nice thing, my new secret. And that it will certainly remain because my newly loved being couldn't handle the knowledge of such a feeling. I must say--feeling like this makes me feel young. And that is a relative thing, so yes, even young for me. It makes me feel like I used to when I thought I was in love with a boy in high school but I was only momentarily attracted to. But similar because that feeling made me feel as if I could pick up mountains and transplant them anywhere that my "love" would like for them to be. Or that I could feed off the thought of my "love" alone. And that everyday could be sweet and that I could have a piece of that sweetness because I was born to wake up and feel like this as a guarantee. As in, if I was alive, then the possibility for me feeling this way is ordained. It is for us all to walk in for as long as the feeling lasts.

I have not felt love that buoys and makes me smile spontaneously and makes me sing out loud even louder and with more ardor than I already do in a very, very long while. All the expressions of this I come up with make this love seem like it is that nasty, touch-me-not kind, but it is not. It is that I only just realized that my friend is not as tangential a player in my life as I had believed. He is essential. He is undeniably necessary. My walk would limp if he didn't stand up and take his place at my round table. And I really want to say so but know that the fall-out would be disastrous. Utter calamity is what I would unleash, so I'm going to leave everything as it is. But these smiles had better get gotten under control before we next see one another. I plan to not give myself away. Even though I staunchly believe that if you love someone you MUST tell them so. There are no excuses. Although, this time, I cow away from my own "philosophy" because some people would rather not be loved, like my friend, have you noticed that? They don't want you to lay down on train tracks for them. All they can see is that you might expect for them to do the same thing for you one day and they're not sure if they would do it.

So, that's why I shush. For my friend's sake. In consideration of my friend's too faint heart. I am content to let mine thump, a-thump, thump for the both of us. And to let that thump make me full. Full up of my love, full up of the possibility of sunshiny days, full up of the secret wish that my love will be returned one day.

Complete shock is what I've been working through since my epiphany. I hope it isn't just the season. I've already got the soundtrack to this new love half completed.

Playlist to follow shortly.

Static

2006-07-12T22:30:00.000-04:00

People are amazed when a person in whose life they used to be an essential player is quite a different being when they happen to make an inquiry some time later. That everything is not just as they left it gives them great pause. This past week, I have been on all sides of a coming-going-reconnecting frenzy the whole world seems to be all caught up in these days. One of my oldest friends--from 7th grade--breezed into town on hiatus from a show he's touring in. Missing him doesn't even describe what I hadn't even been fully aware of until he was back in front of me. I tried to soak up every bit of his time, and he mine, before he was whisked off again into the world. You see, he is out, away from here. I am home. Although nothing like how, still, all the same, exactly where he left me. I like it here, I keep having to say in defense of not having strayed too far for too long a time after high school. I wasn't who he expected to see. Or expected to talk to. He was rather enchanted by me. And I can say that because I know his eyes. I know what way they used to look at me. With something like pity, and perhaps a sprinkle or two of protectiveness, and just a dash of futility. There was nothing he could do for me, back then. As thoroughly sad as I was. As uncompromisingly righteous (not in a religious sense). As tightly as I wrapped myself up in the unfair hand I bemoaned, daily, I had been dealt. But it is not that way anymore with me. I have my moments, like everyone, where misery is what it seems I do best. But I saw myself in his eyes. For just one week. And I was happy. Relatively. And I was vibrant. And I was in motion, despite the geographic sedentary-ness. And he could love me without sympathy being the greater part of it. At our last dinner together he looked across the table at me and said, "You're face just...lit up...just then."

"Did it?" I asked, a bit embarassed about having shown too much enthusiasm about whatever it was we were talking about.

"It did," he said, in a way that let me know that it was all right if I had done. More than that. All week, he kept looking at me as though he'd never seen me before. Not really. I'm...happy...he had the chance.

I guess it is natural that people who come back to this place expect that all the things they left behind would be just as they last remembered them. But there is movement, everywhere. For all things. Within all of us. There keeps being reason for me to reflect on my portion in that.

It's a good thing. Everyone is right where they need to be.

Attuned

2006-07-03T02:35:00.000-04:00

That you are not alone, not really, in feeling anything at all that you might feel is certainly a comfort. Why I like novels and song lyrics so much. I cannot explain how normal it makes me feel to hear song lyrics that speak what happens to be on my mind. Without them, the depth of despair, I imagine, would be this irrecoverable place. As it is, nothing can't be gotten past, it seems. Because the proof is in the piece of art someone else has created that was inspired by the feelings they once felt. Or do still feel, whichever. The point is that they were able to step outside those feelings for long enough to create something beautiful. Or telling. Or important--whichever, however. The perspective is the thing. Gotten during a respite from the onslaught. Where that leaves me is if they can do it, then so will I be able to.

With the assistance of:

1. "The Build-up" by The Kings of Convenience feat. Leslie Feist
2. "Put Your Records On" by Corinne Bailey Rae
3. "Lonelily" by Damien Rice.
4. "Miss Magnolia" by Matt Costa
5. "I Wish You Love" by Rachael Yamagata

That's all. Just those five. It's been a good summer for music.

You bade me come...

2006-06-20T18:09:00.000-04:00

and I shall...and shall...

Giving Birth, Reconsidered

2006-06-09T21:32:00.000-04:00

My mother took me out to lunch today. The last time my mother and I shared a meal together in a restaurant was a very long time ago. Years. I do not even remember the occasion or the exact time. But it must have been a special circumstance. Because I wouldn't ever just choose to be out with her at a table, in public, with people around us, all alone, just her and me. She and I can't really spend long periods of time together without a situation bubbling up. I wish things were different. They are not. Just before she got out of my car, all of the venom in her dried up enough for her to ask me "What's wrong? Are you frustrated?"

The meal itself was fine. Although we were both a little nervous. My hair, today, isn't quite what she would wish for a daughter of hers to have. And there was my skirt. Too billowy. Too long. Which I thought would please her, since my skirts are usually too much that other way. But we made it through the meal. Even talking, some. And it isn't as if my mother and I are shy of one another in private. When I haven't committed some crime, we have plenty to say in the way of family gossip and work. But in that restaurant, we were both reserved. There is also that my mother doesn't like crowds. Once the food came, though, you almost forgot about the silence. The drive to the restaurant had been too long, I think, and we'd exhausted all the things we would normally talk about. Like I said, we don't ever do long periods of time.

It was the ride home, however, when the margarita had relaxed her enough for her to tell me:

that I wasn't REALLY looking for a job (Only pretend-looking.)

that I sleep too much (I am entitled. I am a teacher. It is summer.)

that maybe I should wax in places where I don't believe I need to wax. (Not at all.)

that I drive too fast (Well. Whatever.)

that I'm going to blow out my tires because I hit speed bumps without slowing down

that I have road rage (I've never shot anyone, though, have I?)

that I need to take some sort of pill to stop me from tensing up everytime a car around me changes lanes (Because taking pills has made anyone-EVER-really all right.)

that I paid too much for the gas (Everyone is paying too much for gas.)

that the route I was taking was too long ( I was going around rush hour...quite successfully.)

that when I was a child, I cried too much; that I wasn't disobedient, I just cried too damned much

I wonder why, Lord Jesus! Why would I cry all the time? With a mother as warm and sober and chemically balanced as I have. What...about my mother and father, either separately or together, would make a child (even an overly sensitive one, if I was overly sensitive) feel like crying? Perhaps...everything? I'm sure she never, ever asked herself that. Only what was wrong with me, probably. That was the problem...me. No one is born wanting to cry. Or maybe I was. Maybe I look for ways to be miserable so that I can cry and cry. It would seem that I do. After all, when I was asked out to lunch by my mother, instead of having something else to do, I had all the free time in the world. Yes, I was suspicious that she hadn't asked my sister to come. You see, my sister was available and they do things together all the time. They have a lot in common. They speak in the same idiom. I rub them both wrong in the very same ways. The point is I should've known.

Well, that'll do until Thanksgiving, I think. More than.

On an Afternoon in Summer...

2006-06-02T16:47:00.000-04:00

I walked around the bookstore today wondering where all the chairs had gone. There were none. Instead, there was one round sectional ottoman. Just the one. Although I'm pleased that the shelves have all been heightened and that there are more free-standing shelves than there used to be as well, I couldn't help but think that the disappearance of chairs has more to do with increasing profits and less to do with making more room for books. When you're test-driving a book, it's easier when you can do it sitting down. It's comfortable. And standing isn't necessarily uncomfortable, but I'm not going to do it for as long as I might sit while I test out the fit of my stack of books. This bookstore is now much too impatient for me to make a purchase; I felt so rushed. Amongst the trash, I picked up and leafed through these:

Whiteman by Tony D'Souza.
I spent most of my time here, even laughed out loud...but there was something a bit too arrogant about this writer...his face looked too sure we would think he would say something meaningful about Africa. Although there was also that other posture that I wouldn't put past him..."Look, I know how most Westerners usually behave when they go to Africa. I'm not that way. I'm different from the rest of them." And even there, he still managed to seem patronizing. Or maybe it was what the people on the back cover said about him that ruined everything..."Africa hasn't been loved like this since...[someone I can't remember]". Really?

The Good Works of Ayela Linde by Charlotte Forbes.

I really liked the organizing idea of this book, the story of one woman told through the eyes of the different people who knew her in different stages in her life. I was put off a bit because the various narrators all spoke as if they were having a conversation with Ayela Linde, i.e., "Ayela, do you remember when you...and then I said...and then you said...and then when I...". If they had each just told the story to me, instead of reminding Ayela of her own experiences, I would have liked it better. However, Ayela seems to have been a creature just heartbroken enough to suit my thirst for this type of resigned wisdom.

Theft by Peter Carey.

I didn't like this at all.

Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb.
I didn't read much of this at all because I was ready to go; I didn't have the patience for it by the time I got to it. It seemed interesting at first, then I remembered that I already had one book set in Africa seen through white eyes. That was enough for one day. But I am in love with the title. It alone could send me back to it.

In Spring

2006-05-30T10:39:00.000-04:00

My cousin's dog is in heat. He put underwear on her. I couldn't believe it; I'd never heard of someone doing this. He said if he hadn't done it, she would rub herself on the ground or anything at all seeking relief. And that she'd just make it worse for herself. I kept looking over his shoulder out into the backyard where she was. It seems criminal to keep her penned in away from other dogs and then further, to prevent her even from trying to do something for herself. He was protecting her from herself, he said to me. He was punishing her for her biology. For living. It was so cruel that I had to excuse myself. But when I was alone, after a while, I thought that maybe he was doing a good thing. The consequences of the natural acts that would alleviate some of her desire are so many, afterall. And they are out of all proportion, it seems to me, as what should follow the acts themselves. Women pay for sex, for desire. In all kinds of ways. A price that I have never thought was fair. My cousin's dog's life is not fair.

Happy Anniversary!!!

2006-05-11T23:58:00.000-04:00

Well, I...I think that...If you...All right.

I'm desperate. Today is the anniversary of this blog. Two years. Two years, friends. And I can't think of anything I want to write about.

There is that I:

...Am still reading Bessie Head. All of her. She was an amazing intellect, personality. I can't imagine what it must have been like to be her child. She was apparently sort of skittish of other people, new situations. But her smile on the back of all the books doesn't seem to say that. She looks like a smoker. And she liked to eat. In one of the pictures of her, her eyes are open very wide and the picture was taken mid-sentence. Her mouth was open and the point she must have been making was serious in nature. It was political, I hope. It is the younger of the two main pictures of her you find around. I would like to talk to her child. It is probably hiding somewhere on earth from people like me. Those in love with its mother and who want to suck it dry for information about her that would probably demystify all I feel for her. When I think of her, it makes me angry that not as many people as I would like have read her writing. And then I feel special for being in her secret club. Which my admittance to was a complete accident. The professor who taught her to me only teaches her in alternate years, you understand. So, a friend of mine who took the same course in postcolonial literature (And found nothing of value there, which makes me look at her in a certain way, when I think of this, that paints her as this ridiculously blind person. You don't take this class with this professor passively. Perhaps she was numbed by a death in her family. Otherwise, I can't make it out.) ...anyway...my friend wasn't taught her. But I can't believe my professor deciding to include her in his syllabus was just good luck. I want to believe that she would've turned up in some other place for me to find her. I can't describe what it feels like to read her words. Its too much like trying to tell people who I am. And I have never been able to do that with much truth. It always comes out something like what I imagine people would want to hear. The truth is, depending on who is receiving the telling, much more or much less than would make them comfortable. I know it. So, what happens is that pieces are all any one person gets. Which are just swatches. As in of fabric. But a collection of swatches can make a quilt. And to look at one part could be really jarring to all your senses. And then you incline your head a little to the left and tilt the head down a bit and there is comfort and love and harmony. And if you turn your back on the quilt, god only knows which corners will stand up and skulk to new places altogether. You may turn around and say, "My god, whose work is this? What has happened here? Why would anyone put these things up against one another into this thing (a girl) that is supposed to be, ultimately, a unit? A single one. An entity. This is madness." And you might think it ugly. Or you could think it (me--the swatch quilt) is beautiful (which you should NEVER hesitate to tell me). Or you could think me incongruous and refreshing. Because you're like that. Underneath. But you keep quiet about it. It's easier. Letting people have the one idea of you means you never have to worry about authenticity. Now where did that come from? Hmmm...

I guess that's what this blog's function has been. And there is no reason, though there be echoes. Like mushrooms, popping up in the most unexpected of places, the same strange food.

...I began writing about all the Bessie Head in my head that I am reading slowly and completely schizophrenically. I feel like they are all the same story, though, and can't help myself. I'm learning her rather than any single work of hers, though there's that, too, especially with Maru. And I'm quite far gone in the memorization. There are these...well let's only do ones I haven't done before here...don't want to reduce the impact in case you seek her out yourself:

The rains were so late that year.

The roar in his heart choked his throat.

Those he wanted or loved became the slaves of an intensely concentrated affection.

And then there is the large one. This one, I claim as my own. I've written it in blood in a secret place where blood does not wash away. The lunatic in me has decided that my author wanted me to have these words to explain a portion of my life. And that she would let me give them to someone else. To say, "Hello, there. Look--here we are. We are not the first because she wrote this decades and decades before either of us was born, although you are much older than I am. You see? Things are fine just the way they are. Let's continue for as long as we do." But the words...

They were talking...Soon she stopped taking note of what she was saying, because afterwards she could not remember a word of the conversation , except the feeling it had left behind: 'Why,' she thought, 'I've seen him somewhere before, and I'll keep on seeing him again and again in the future. I'll keep on meeting him.' It was the vastness and freedom of it, a friendliness toward another which was always tentative and yet secure. He liked to bang into her...

from "A Question of Power." I have robbed this passage of its context. It does not actually have anything at all to do, in the story, with how I have fit it into my life. But I don't think Bessie Head would mind. She would be quite embarrassed of how intensely I feel about these words. And about that roar in his heart business up above. As if men have roars in their hearts, really. See-I was being facetious. Of course men have roars in their hearts! Only they ignore them. Or run from them altogether. Or ration and pace the amount of listening to it that they will allow themselves. Foolish. Completely foolish. But they go on. All signs indicate, as well, that they have every intention of persisting in this way of acting. What to do but love it, right?

(I'll have two servings, please.)

All right I am dangerously close to the deadline. I'm going to stop. But I'm still here. Writing. Trying to do some loving. Asking, every which way, for forgiveness. Getting angry about the state of things and trying to put it on paper. Still believe in writing letters...no matter if they go unanswered most of the time. Talking as much as I ever have. But dancing, too, much more. Planning for big reckonings with ballet again, soon.

And, more than you know, tremendously awed that some of you found this pocket right from its inception and still come around today. I am buoyed. And some of you who lurk, and never chime in...I am incredibly anxious about you. I'd love to say hello to you sometime...

Thank you for being here with me. And reading all the way to the end.

calling out to you...yes, YOU!

2006-04-27T09:45:00.000-04:00

Hey there. With the second anniversary coming up, I decided it was time for a new outfit. So Greenhushpuppies got to work. Bear with us as she works out the kinks. It may look really odd in your screen's resolution or the sort of browser in which you view it. If it does, leave a comment and tell what it's doing. Please. That would be a big help.

I really like it, so far. Those stripes were really getting hard to look at, don't you think?

A Big Work in Sienna

2006-04-23T15:30:00.000-04:00

People who believe in the Bible often invoke the acts of their lord and savior when they do good deeds. They believe that because Jesus and friends did nice things for people in the stories in that book, that they, too, should do good deeds. They also say that when you help someone out, you shouldn't tell the whole world about it. And it isn't as though I'm a Christian and so am bringing this up. It is more that I believe that, too. Not because the men who wrote the Bible said so, though. It just feels right. Deep down in me, somewhere in the place where my Mama put all the consideration of others and my Daddy put all the consideration of the soil, it's there. To shut up about it when you help your friends. But not this time.

Yesterday, my friend had me and another friend come over to help paint her living room. It is a new day and I am still here. When I signed up, they were going to be the labor and I was going to be the comic relief. Because I'm good at that. On painting, I couldn't say, having no real memory on which I could form an accurate telling of my wall painting skills. Also, when I signed up, there was one wall to be painted. We have ended with three. And there's the ceiling to be re-painted white. And the base boards have spots on them that have to be whited. And two of the strings on the blinds. But all that doesn't matter. I decided to participate. And it turns out that I am a really good wall painter. My walls are all even and solid. I took great care. I really wanted to do a nice job. I'm not really one for working with my hands. Or sweating. I'm more...the delegator.

This was fun, though. Because we ran out of paint last night and, try as my friend did to find one, there is no such thing as a 24 hr Home Depot, we spent the night to help finish the work we started. Just like I tell my Montessori students to do at my place of work. When I woke up this morning, on the futon in the dining room, and rolled over to look into the living room, all I could do was smile. The walls are now burnt sienna. They're glorious. It's something I couldn't see when I fell asleep. It was dark out. They hadn't dried. I was tired and a little annoyed about not getting to choose the mood music. But when I woke up today, with the addition of sunlight, I was so proud of my work that you'd think her apartment was a Habitat house. I was full. Really full.

There's something to be said for that feeling you feel at the end of a Big Work. You're required to stand back and it's permissible to admire what you have achieved. I keep going back to the spaces of wall I painted all by myself and marveling at how they were blank a day ago. They used to say nothing. Now they say "I know you ain't talking to me, bitch!" Because they have serious attitude, these walls.

Imagine. She was going to paint them blue or green. Blue and green ain't got shit on burnt sienna.

I feel like I can do all kinds of things, now. Like plant flowers. Put up curtains. Buy a book case. Maybe I'd stay at home every once in awhile if I ever did anything to fix up my own apartment.

Feeding

2006-04-07T22:33:00.000-04:00

I was reading last night about a man who does not love easily, but when he does, his object becomes quite overwhelmed by all the emotion he drenches her in. There was a beautiful line about the object being the target of an intensely concentrated affection. One that chokes. One that wants to control even the minutest detail of the object's doings. One where the object does not feel like a loved item, rather she is driven to this desperate and alienated state. Because this man wanted to be the only source of illumination in his object's life. Through him alone would pass all beauty, color, peace, comfort. Although the object never made an utterance calling him to her, the lover thought he had better rescue her from a life where her will, all by itself, directed her course. Quite far from what the lover intended, his object became even more wild and unpredictable, and in the most inopportune moments, ever so much more unfathomable than the other great mysteries of his life. Serious mysteries, that is. Like the existence and/or nature of Godly things. Like the extent to which his power could be exercised in an effort to be one of the actors in life, as opposed to the enacted upon, like she, his object. And, most importantly, what Work he would devote himself to fully. More fully than he would ever think it necessary to devote himself to her. She was just a woman. And he would go on and on with machination after machination, with spying and lies, with never revealing to her who he was even after he had secured, or trapped, her. However you look at it. He was, in the end, forced to acknowledge just how he would never get to the core of her by hacking away at the pieces of her he saw as hindering his penetration. The object was able to keep the darkest stores of her personhood, even as it ate her up, inside to out, and she became what I'm sure you already know she became without me having to put it down. Yes. Mad.

He is an amazing man, this fictional character. Breath-taking. Powerful. Charismatic. Intelligent. Fey. Selfish. His object never had a chance. His entire posture was defined by a sort of mocking mastery. Because he believed he had figured out her inner workings, thought that he could even read her mind, he designed a universe for her where every decision that looked something like what people consider "The Good" would lead her to him. More than that, he also appeared to be "The Healing" she hadn't known she was in need of that only he could manage. And further, because he helped to magnify the divide between her and all other things in the world, where she was completely unable to connect with any other thing, he succeeded in making himself her entire existence. Know why? She was a fine sort of representation of the kind of wife he would need to complete the image of the kind of man he thought he was born to be. His love was not particular. His puppeteering was not personal. Her sacrifice was irreparable.

This is the seventh time I've read this novel, probably. I don't know why I picked it up again this time. But the other night, I was desperate to find it. My books are only sort of together in one place. Sort of as in half are stacked together, half are scattered all around my bedroom in crannies and nooks and boxes and bags and such. When it popped into my head that I wanted to re-read this novel, I couldn't find it. I searched everywhere. I ended up buying two copies online. One for me. One not for me. But I didn't stop looking. I finally found it in the glove box in my car. After 11 at night. It was cold out there. I don't remember feeling it. So, I've been reading it again slowly. My two new copies arrived today. And I'm trying out the feel of various inscriptions. It may be a while before I can deliver my gift. I am half afraid it will be dismissed and/or lost and/or misunderstood. If none of those, then completely effective.

*

I have a serious preoccupation with symbiosis among lovers. All the possibilities for richness and breadth and density in love become exponential, if only in my mind, when thoroughly different personalities collide and try to enter into one another. Set up shop. And what have you. I am most interested when the lovers are not only different in as many ways as possible, but when they come from polarized locales. When all the things about them make it seem as though they should be in opposition with one another, every voyeuristic atom in me twitches a special twitch to see how they go about their going about life together. How they feed, in particular. Both ways, as well. Feed each other. Feed off each other. Fertilizing and Parasite-ing.

*

I'm sitting in my room, and have been for hours now. I was telling a friend that I used to do this absolutely contentedly when I was a little girl and a teenager. I loved the power of shutting my bedroom door. I would pick up a book, lay down on my belly, and have at it. For hours. Or days. If I was left to it. And sometimes I was. Now, this space feels too small. Or I just can't shake the idea of all the things going on outside that I am missing, in here reading the same old books, adding layers to the same old too-serious for a Friday night thoughts. But I can't get up and actually go to any place I want to be. At least here, I can imagine being where I want to be. There are no distractions. There is no shame. And my frantic and ache-y and hopelessly, intensely concentrated little obsessions aren't making anyone uncomfortable, out, as they are, living. Without me.

2006-03-20T03:03:00.000-05:00

Be proud of me, all. I've been working so much. Writing-work. Not pay-the-bills-work. A day or two more being away. Promise. Thanks for checking up on me.

Sunrise, Sunset

2006-02-28T02:26:00.000-05:00

Everything is slowing down, I think. I feel as though I am making moves that all lead toward settling in. Comfort. A sort of routine. A rounding of edges. And even more than being able to tell exactly what I am doing that makes me feel this way, there are the sort of thoughts that won't allow me to ignore that settling in and seeking comfort and rounding off edges are things that come with the territory. This time in life.

This really makes me angry. I think it ridiculous that I should feel as though I had better bunker down. I'm 26. Only. Whenever I say this, it is always in just this defensive a manner. I have to qualify my age. I can't just be 26. It's always I'm 26 and have never even...or, I'm 26 and don't even know about...But so many other 26 year olds have made decisions that write incredibly large chunks of the next 20 years or so of their lives. Children, for example. They decide to have children. Or having children happens to them, I think some of them would argue. Still...they are Papa's and they are Mama's. And I can barely wipe my ass in a straight line. What a stupid postulate that I could be somebody's mother. Right now. Or that I should have known for certain at least 6 years ago what job I would want now. Also for example.

The best way to keep up with being myself, it seems, is to do everything double. Have two sets of clothing. Have two hair style categories. Maintain fluency in two dialects of English. Fall in love in two kinds of ways. With two kinds of men. In short, because this could go on, I never want to be caught without a backup. I have to have at least one other option. Because having to make a decision one way or the other concerning anything is much too much pressure. And all it is is that I could choose badly. Just choose the wrong thing. I am much more comfortable with blurring, where things slide back and forth into one another, sharing, ambiguity, by day-ness and by night-ness.

My father says I'm the type of girl who never wants her right hand to know what the left one is doing. My grandmother says I was and still am the kind of girl to throw a rock and then hide my hand. My mother says being around me makes her desperate for a cigarette. My students say they want me to be their mama. My friends say I am special. My sister says I am Little Miss "I know this/I know that." My employer says I am invaluable. My roommate says I need to come home and sleep in my own bed more often.

I like t-shirts that state my philosophies.

"Bacon is a vegetable."

"Nothing is any good if other people like it."

"Lucy's Truck Stop: Park it in the Rear."

"Stuff is Awesome."

"Women hold up half the sky."

"Chu-Chu-Taco: Cute and Often a Little Bit Forward, Taco Doesn't Hesitate to Ask her Boyfriend for a Kiss."

"Agnes Scott College: Not a Girls' School Without Men but a Women's College Without Boys."

"Official Which: In charge of choosing which words are to be used for all occasions, which ones to say and which ones not to say, which ones to write and which ones not to write."

...and next on my list of acquisitions...

"M.C. Menses: My Flow Be Fresh"

I know. Gross. But I really don't care. It makes me laugh so damned hard.

Can't really show up at the bank asking them to finance a starter home wearing any of those, could I? No going to the boys' ballet recitals and the girls' soccer matches either. But more importantly, that is rather too much philosophy to try to tame. But I have real bills and real responsibilities and real consequences to flights of fancy and whims. Mercurial and fey are standing down for consistent and ordinary. By day. And I'm dying while the sun is up.

And my friends keep trying to domesticate me. They want to buy me things like book shelves and hand towels. Lamps and DVR's. Novelist's non-fiction (that isn't Bessie Head who doesn't count because it is all sort of the same with her). But, really, me? Nonfiction? Since when? For what?

Hand towels are not all. There is trouble, too, with loving. Or to be more precise, love's inconstancy. And the more it happens, the more someone teaches me how to live without them, the easier it gets to forgo fighting it. I can't pinpoint a time when being resigned to something or other was OK. I would holler and fuss and cuss and charm til my desire was my actuality. I concede too much, these days.

I bought hand towels. I bought a curtain rod. I apologize for my pint-sized, woman-with-no-kids car, Magdalena, with no back seat to speak of.

My power is waning. The jig is up. And I'm 26. Only.

All this to say, it is more and more difficult, in the face of all the ideas of you other people have decided on, to walk it your own way.

+1

2006-02-16T00:04:00.000-05:00

In 50 hours I'll be 26.

I'm freaking out just a bit.

I shouldn't be.

Last year at this time I compiled a list of things I learned when I was 24. I'm at a loss concerning 25.

I need a toaster.

And a couch.

And to fold my laundry.