I wrote the following in an email to my brother. We tend to snub punctuation and capitalization when we communicate with each other in writing. I thought I would share with everyone else the kind of thoughts I have in the middle of the night.
--
i keep having these vivid flashbacks of the past. like yesterday night it was ice plant. remember how spongy it was beneath your feet? or the dining room chairs in natalie and gloria's house. how the beige cushions seemed thick but didn't have any give; you sort of floated on top of them. or auntie grace stirring spaghetti sauce. or riding my bike around creekside and steering around the loose gravel pebbles. baths. those bi-color foam turtles with cut-out numbers. my favorite was the yellow turtle with the purple number 4 inside him. how cold lunchtime felt at erikson, there was so much wind, so much shade. nothing sentimental or happy necessarily: just the pure substance of what my life used to be. so weird. it's almost as if i do not believe those things are gone: because i know without a doubt how real they used to be, they must still exist somewhere, in some way. think about it -- could it really be true that the only thing that is truly alive is the present moment? then everything that i know is constantly dying. the "i" of my childhood is dead. the "i" of yesterday is dead. everything is in a state of constant motion...can you really own anything, can you really know anything, can you really love anything -- because nothing is the same from moment to moment, so your love, your power, your understanding must adapt as rapidly and as complexly as the desired or studied or beloved object?
backtracking -- say the only really living thing is a next-to-nothing moment, the so-called "now," which seems, when you think about it, an infinitely, impossibly small space of time. how can it be true that virtually ALL of reality is either not-yet-existent or no-longer-existent? this can't be: the present is connected to the past, so closely that the line between the present and the past is fine to the point of invisibility. so, obviously, the past still has has power in the present. those that are no longer: they are still part of the world, though we don't see them or know them or love them. I think that the dead live. I think that all of life is an echo, an echo of all that ever was and all that ever will be or can be, and life just keeps echoing like the chorus of an ancient terrible haunting intimate song -- the song I believe every real artist is straining to hear and compose in language and in pictures and in music -- and i was part of that song before i was born and i will be part of it afterward too, because if i must choose between two camps -- either everybody is connected or we aren't at all -- i believe with all my stupid dead heart that i am connected to everything and to everyone and that spiritual agony arises from denying or forgetting or questioning or attempting to break our natural and fundamental and, yes, our eternal connections with one another.
thus my love for you is dead and dying, but it is also forever, because it is part of the universe, and it will last as long as the universe lasts. thus my childhood seems a long time ago to me, but it is still there, as real as yesterday, as real as five minutes ago, as real as five million years ago, as real as tomorrow. thus my mother's mother's mother's mother's father's mother is dead, but the world has no choice but to remember her and to dream of her and to love her in its vast, teeming, deep subconscious. the past is an inextricable component of the present -- and is only, if you ask me, a couple of steps away from being the present -- and thus i am hardly alive but i will be hardly dead, and the difference between "dead" and "alive" is perhaps not so very dramatic as people think.
and those are my thoughts tonight.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
Why I'm Happy I Moved
"Thanks for the serenade."
--my roommate P., after I got out of the shower
I got a voicemail from my former landlord today letting me know that he had a hunk of my mail at his shop and reminding me to leave a forwarding address for the local post office. I greatly dislike the post office, by the way. I need to run two urgent errands that require a visit to that veritable cave of gloom -- 1. new passport; 2. new address -- but I keep procrastinating, as everyone there is running on 21st century time and finding themselves subject to 20th century technology. To put even more pressure on the situation, we're in New York. This past Saturday I mustered up the courage to venture in and steal a passport app. The lines were frozen. I swear people shifted in irritation when they registered my mere presence. Everyone looked as though their soul were being needled. Like, tortured. As if their loved ones were in captivity. As if waiting in a line was a threat to their basic rights as people.
Anyway, seeing my landlord's name on my Missed Calls gave me shivers. How lovely is it that people can now hear me when I sing in the shower? The thing was, I didn't even realize I was singing. It's nice when someone points out something you've been doing unconsciously and hints that they've been enjoying it. As I write this, my roommate pours me a glass of 2008 Palacacio de Vivero wine. Sipping it. It brings to mind images of March walks through Midwestern public parks.
"Oh look, a wasabi peanut. So that's where that went."
-- my roommate P., digging through her fleece pockets
The wine is getting to me. I'm afraid now I'll say too much. The truth is I'm being overly positive to stave off, or no, to stamp out, no, that's not even violent enough, basically to eviscerate the negative boy-oriented thoughts and mindsets that tend to be my default unless I've experienced one of my monthly (bimonthly?) supposedly profound spiritual epiphanies.
"Ooh. Oohh, my foot was asleep. It's going all the way to my buttock."
--rooommate N.N, half-bouncing, half-dancing on one foot
I'm sipping white wine, I'm blogging, I'm remembering Audrey doing yoga stretches on my kitchen floor, I'm listening to "Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangster," which I have encouraged Pandora to include on my "Paper Planes" radio station, along with Lily Allen, Bob Marley and, inexplicably, Weezer: this, this is what I am. Yes. I say Yes, I say Yes to myself, Yes to my life, Yes to my roommates, Yes to my wet hair, Yes. It's a flashing sword, slicing through the swarms of No's that I seem to attract -- you can't mess with this Yes.
--my roommate P., after I got out of the shower
I got a voicemail from my former landlord today letting me know that he had a hunk of my mail at his shop and reminding me to leave a forwarding address for the local post office. I greatly dislike the post office, by the way. I need to run two urgent errands that require a visit to that veritable cave of gloom -- 1. new passport; 2. new address -- but I keep procrastinating, as everyone there is running on 21st century time and finding themselves subject to 20th century technology. To put even more pressure on the situation, we're in New York. This past Saturday I mustered up the courage to venture in and steal a passport app. The lines were frozen. I swear people shifted in irritation when they registered my mere presence. Everyone looked as though their soul were being needled. Like, tortured. As if their loved ones were in captivity. As if waiting in a line was a threat to their basic rights as people.
Anyway, seeing my landlord's name on my Missed Calls gave me shivers. How lovely is it that people can now hear me when I sing in the shower? The thing was, I didn't even realize I was singing. It's nice when someone points out something you've been doing unconsciously and hints that they've been enjoying it. As I write this, my roommate pours me a glass of 2008 Palacacio de Vivero wine. Sipping it. It brings to mind images of March walks through Midwestern public parks.
"Oh look, a wasabi peanut. So that's where that went."
-- my roommate P., digging through her fleece pockets
The wine is getting to me. I'm afraid now I'll say too much. The truth is I'm being overly positive to stave off, or no, to stamp out, no, that's not even violent enough, basically to eviscerate the negative boy-oriented thoughts and mindsets that tend to be my default unless I've experienced one of my monthly (bimonthly?) supposedly profound spiritual epiphanies.
"Ooh. Oohh, my foot was asleep. It's going all the way to my buttock."
--rooommate N.N, half-bouncing, half-dancing on one foot
I'm sipping white wine, I'm blogging, I'm remembering Audrey doing yoga stretches on my kitchen floor, I'm listening to "Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangster," which I have encouraged Pandora to include on my "Paper Planes" radio station, along with Lily Allen, Bob Marley and, inexplicably, Weezer: this, this is what I am. Yes. I say Yes, I say Yes to myself, Yes to my life, Yes to my roommates, Yes to my wet hair, Yes. It's a flashing sword, slicing through the swarms of No's that I seem to attract -- you can't mess with this Yes.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Two Mistakes
I made two mistakes in my response to your message:
1. I wrote the word "meaningful" twice in the same paragraph.
2. I wrote "she think" instead of "she thinks."
The white wine, which I drank with the intention of lubricating my sense of humor and creativity, must have backfired.
I hope you will interpret my over-usage of the word not as indicative of limited vocabulary but as a clue that I haven't put too much effort into writing you.
At any rate, you can't just retract your invitation now, can you?
1. I wrote the word "meaningful" twice in the same paragraph.
2. I wrote "she think" instead of "she thinks."
The white wine, which I drank with the intention of lubricating my sense of humor and creativity, must have backfired.
I hope you will interpret my over-usage of the word not as indicative of limited vocabulary but as a clue that I haven't put too much effort into writing you.
At any rate, you can't just retract your invitation now, can you?
Thursday, November 5, 2009
NANOWRIMO
I carry with me everywhere a little spearmint-gum-colored notebook from Forever 21. On the cover there is a sketch of a preteen Parisian (or maybe Venetian?) riding on a motorbike and staring sexily at you. The bike is emitting exhaust in the form of a big pink heart.
It's National Novel-Writing Month, you see. While I'm not trying to write a novel, I have every intention of writing several stories. A bunch of students are riding the wave of my creativity, too, because I did an entire lesson on how to participate in "NANOWRIMO" and then left them with a whole lot of excitement around the idea of writing large quantities of fiction and virtually no guidance or explicit instruction in the matter. Which, I have to admit, is consistent with my experience of creative writing. Anyway their sign-up forms are the very first thing I have bothered to post on my classroom bulletin board. Also it's the first time I've followed-up with absent kids about anything, explaining to them why this month is so special and how they can join and be writers and look so-and-so is already on chapter 2.
I feel a very great urgency...I want to write in every spare moment. I write during my preps. I write on the train. I write during meetings. I write when there is no question in my mind that, practically speaking, I should not be writing.
November is the darkest month of the year. It's dark all the damn time. Writing is like my pathetic little candle; it doesn't really benefit anyone else, but I have to know it's there, I have to focus on the subtle dance of that flame no larger than my fingertip, and how fragile is this pursuit, how easily snuffed out.
Also, ladies and gentlemen, I have not been in a relationship for two and a half years. Writing neutralizes the desperation and panic that creeps in at times and threatens to cut off my spiritual circulation. Writing is a way to rid myself of or at least to bury the thought, I am not alive and real and beautiful, or else someone would love me right now. Writing is like highlighting my identity and then hitting control-B.
It's National Novel-Writing Month, you see. While I'm not trying to write a novel, I have every intention of writing several stories. A bunch of students are riding the wave of my creativity, too, because I did an entire lesson on how to participate in "NANOWRIMO" and then left them with a whole lot of excitement around the idea of writing large quantities of fiction and virtually no guidance or explicit instruction in the matter. Which, I have to admit, is consistent with my experience of creative writing. Anyway their sign-up forms are the very first thing I have bothered to post on my classroom bulletin board. Also it's the first time I've followed-up with absent kids about anything, explaining to them why this month is so special and how they can join and be writers and look so-and-so is already on chapter 2.
I feel a very great urgency...I want to write in every spare moment. I write during my preps. I write on the train. I write during meetings. I write when there is no question in my mind that, practically speaking, I should not be writing.
November is the darkest month of the year. It's dark all the damn time. Writing is like my pathetic little candle; it doesn't really benefit anyone else, but I have to know it's there, I have to focus on the subtle dance of that flame no larger than my fingertip, and how fragile is this pursuit, how easily snuffed out.
Also, ladies and gentlemen, I have not been in a relationship for two and a half years. Writing neutralizes the desperation and panic that creeps in at times and threatens to cut off my spiritual circulation. Writing is a way to rid myself of or at least to bury the thought, I am not alive and real and beautiful, or else someone would love me right now. Writing is like highlighting my identity and then hitting control-B.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
A Sacred Object
Well, my colleagues who know about the blog are still speaking to me, so that's a good sign.
Or maybe they're just in shock.
--
I taught my English lesson in a science classroom the other day, and I felt very out of place in there, as if I were listening to rap in a famous cathedral or something. I mean, in 6th grade science they discuss, like, levers and pulleys. And here I am, talking about Characters' Deepest Desires ("the deepest-deep down desire, not the obvious desire!") and reading aloud passages from Sherman Alexie's award-winning YA book about an Indian kid who transfers to a suburban school ("They were so white they were translucent"). In a science classroom! The math teacher walked by a couple of times and I felt self-conscious, as if teaching the kids to do intense psychological probing in that room was somehow altering the waves of energy coursing through the air. Which I am confident is a scientifically accurate interpretation of what was going on.
Where I'm going with this is we really have a crazy role as English teachers; we teach more than literacy, we teach identity, we teach art and beauty generally, we teach a kind of of intra- and interpersonal awakening. This year in particular there's this atmosphere of intimacy in my class....I know their "fiercest wonderings," as we call it, and they know mine. They know more than the teachers know. They know more about some things than my own mother knows. There are still a couple of "bad eggs," but the rest are gold, pure gold, my teaching when at its best like a veritable Golden Goose, if you'll pardon the simile from left field.
We did a "sacred objects" lesson today. I sat down in my half-conscious first-period-prep state and made a sample list of "sacred objects" in my life.
The first item on the list was "who the fuck cares," which was of course removed in a timely manner.
Then I wrote down a few uninspired entries -- a book I used to read to Miles; the grand piano; my first pair of ice skates -- and then I thought of my father's old bible and my heart started pounding hard and I sat up straight and my pupils probably dilated, which is what happens when I'm inspired.
Of course there was some part of me that was wringing her hands and stuttering, Would it be somehow unethical to write about my father's Bible? Is that, like, legal? Could I be sued for so much as mentioning a religious text? Then came my answer: "Oh, F you."
And below is the kid-friendly, yet still authentic, model.
---
my father’s bible
It’s heavy. As a kid I thought it must weigh 25 pounds. It’s old, too, so old that if you try to pick it up it comes apart your hands, whole chunks of it slide around or fall out, and you have to be very careful transferring it from one part of the room to another, careful as a server balancing a tray laden with a whole family’s food. It's got a black leather cover, which has come almost totally loose from the rest of the book. He never wrote on the pages, which are ultra-thin, sensitive as the skin around your eyes, but he would write on loose leaf paper in his scratchy, scrunched, hunched, un-readable writing and fold up the paper and stow it inside the book and leave it there forever. There are years and years of his notes hidden inside his Bible, as if they became part of the book, and if anything they became even more sacred than the Bible itself, because there are millions of copies of the Bible but only one copy of my father’s notes, and because the Bible is printed in a font but my father is the only person on earth who has that handwriting.
In the mornings he read. In the dark early morning I would find him up, the most disciplined person I know, the light on in the family room and nowhere else. I remember the hazel eyes and the bags beneath them he used to complain about, I remember how those eyes filled with light when they saw me, but he wouldn’t say anything, so focused he was on his reading. My day began then: not with the light from the sun but before the sun, with the light that dawned in his eyes, with the two of us in the family room, with that black leather book in his lap, overflowing with his messy, smudged, triple-folded, personal, holy, mysterious daily notes.
Or maybe they're just in shock.
--
I taught my English lesson in a science classroom the other day, and I felt very out of place in there, as if I were listening to rap in a famous cathedral or something. I mean, in 6th grade science they discuss, like, levers and pulleys. And here I am, talking about Characters' Deepest Desires ("the deepest-deep down desire, not the obvious desire!") and reading aloud passages from Sherman Alexie's award-winning YA book about an Indian kid who transfers to a suburban school ("They were so white they were translucent"). In a science classroom! The math teacher walked by a couple of times and I felt self-conscious, as if teaching the kids to do intense psychological probing in that room was somehow altering the waves of energy coursing through the air. Which I am confident is a scientifically accurate interpretation of what was going on.
Where I'm going with this is we really have a crazy role as English teachers; we teach more than literacy, we teach identity, we teach art and beauty generally, we teach a kind of of intra- and interpersonal awakening. This year in particular there's this atmosphere of intimacy in my class....I know their "fiercest wonderings," as we call it, and they know mine. They know more than the teachers know. They know more about some things than my own mother knows. There are still a couple of "bad eggs," but the rest are gold, pure gold, my teaching when at its best like a veritable Golden Goose, if you'll pardon the simile from left field.
We did a "sacred objects" lesson today. I sat down in my half-conscious first-period-prep state and made a sample list of "sacred objects" in my life.
The first item on the list was "who the fuck cares," which was of course removed in a timely manner.
Then I wrote down a few uninspired entries -- a book I used to read to Miles; the grand piano; my first pair of ice skates -- and then I thought of my father's old bible and my heart started pounding hard and I sat up straight and my pupils probably dilated, which is what happens when I'm inspired.
Of course there was some part of me that was wringing her hands and stuttering, Would it be somehow unethical to write about my father's Bible? Is that, like, legal? Could I be sued for so much as mentioning a religious text? Then came my answer: "Oh, F you."
And below is the kid-friendly, yet still authentic, model.
---
my father’s bible
It’s heavy. As a kid I thought it must weigh 25 pounds. It’s old, too, so old that if you try to pick it up it comes apart your hands, whole chunks of it slide around or fall out, and you have to be very careful transferring it from one part of the room to another, careful as a server balancing a tray laden with a whole family’s food. It's got a black leather cover, which has come almost totally loose from the rest of the book. He never wrote on the pages, which are ultra-thin, sensitive as the skin around your eyes, but he would write on loose leaf paper in his scratchy, scrunched, hunched, un-readable writing and fold up the paper and stow it inside the book and leave it there forever. There are years and years of his notes hidden inside his Bible, as if they became part of the book, and if anything they became even more sacred than the Bible itself, because there are millions of copies of the Bible but only one copy of my father’s notes, and because the Bible is printed in a font but my father is the only person on earth who has that handwriting.
In the mornings he read. In the dark early morning I would find him up, the most disciplined person I know, the light on in the family room and nowhere else. I remember the hazel eyes and the bags beneath them he used to complain about, I remember how those eyes filled with light when they saw me, but he wouldn’t say anything, so focused he was on his reading. My day began then: not with the light from the sun but before the sun, with the light that dawned in his eyes, with the two of us in the family room, with that black leather book in his lap, overflowing with his messy, smudged, triple-folded, personal, holy, mysterious daily notes.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Introduction + First Gaping Thoughts
I am a woman.
I am a young woman.
I am a young and -- some would say -- beautiful woman.
(Some would not say. Beauty is of course not a fact.)
My name means "song" in an ancient language, but I will not tell you the name or the language, because these are my private thoughts. I am making them public because I believe that it is valuable to know the private thoughts of other people. I believe that much of our ignorance, selfishness, and loneliness is due to our unwillingness or inability to access the private thoughts of other people.
So here are some of mine.
--
Of what value is a man's sexual interest?
When he has targeted you, when his body has woken to you, when he has found himself tied to you even before his conscious mind has had the chance to say "yes" or "no" in the matter, you know. Of course you know. The looking at you. The touching you. The subtle edge of desperation in every comment, badly masked behind banter or flirtation or flattery or that false over-attentiveness. You know that you have become a Wish. You have become a Fantasy.
You know he is confused, he is delusional, his eyes are telling him lies and his eyes are telling you lies, because you are no fantasy. You are a self, you have eyes that also see, hands that have wills of their own, a head full of nightmares. Yet some part of you wants to play along with his dream, wants to exacerbate his desire, wants him to build a palace for you in his mind in which you are the queen, naked beautiful and worshiped.
This splits you in two. Two identities. One as someone else's Fantasy: you cannot really define or control or have possession of this identity. It is entirely dependent on the perception of others (of men). This part of you is a lover of lies, disguises, games, manipulations, enchantments; it is determined, desperate to become and embody the sexual Fantasy of a man. This is the part of you that wants to be "beautiful," to be seen and acknowledged as a "Beautiful Woman."
The other identity is your actual self, your own desires dreams sex body etc.
That part of you wants to be ugly.
That part of you wants to be all wrong and ruined and different and unsuitable and subject to change. Because that's what you really are: what your body is what your face is what your life is what your heart is. You know that no matter how many eyes are drawn to the illusion of your sexually attractive features, you are not a fantasy and you will never be a fantasy. You can only be a person, no more than a person, and no less than a person, and that is the truth. And this secondary identity (how sad that it's secondary) doesn't want to have anything to do with being "beautiful" because "beauty" is a disguise and disguises are difficult and stressful to maintain, and you do not enjoy being dependent upon a disguise, always fearful of exposure, nervous, insecure. How you want to throw off the disguise. How you long not to be a naked and perfect Fantasy, but a naked and horrible and surprising and weird and grotesque and fully, beautifully flawed person.
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