Monday, April 4, 2011
The Unbearable Weight of Lightness
So... this thing happened the other day. Which happened to be my birthday. A bunch of people (spearheaded by the dearest of those) in an impossibly grand gesture of birthdayness (yeah, that happened too), got me a laptop. A real one, with a mousepad and a keyboard and a big pretty screen and programs and software and *gasp* microsoft word and *gasp gasp* access to the interwebs. Needless to say, I wept like a baby bitch baby drunk on cheap champagne and nineteenth century bitters. Which I wasn't. Why do I see you don't believe me? Nevertheless. I doodle around with my new toy, which is inappropriately elephantine in nature and I want to name Clay, after the LTZ character and through some happy accident of the Bretiverse is also a substance artists use to shape the brilliance between thri synapses, which, coincidentally is what this disgustingly light, sexy paperweight is for. It reminds me of the nega-guide, from the Hitchhiker's Trilogy, the super scary one with only one button on it that says PANIC. I think it turns into a dark bird and flies out of a filing cabinet out a highrise office building window at some point in Douglas Adams' opus. I feel like if I don't grip the smooth, ergonomic sides of Clay, he will perform a similiar disappearing act, and I will once again be toddling around the apartment with a two hundred page manuscript in my armpit and a deathwish in my heart. Yet, he remains. And he dares me, with his lopsided, invisible supermodel smile, not to give up. Not to make another excuse about the hoards of spies from the evil Uterati on their bloody warpath to my door and pants. He tells me I am not nearly tired enough, and not reading enough, or doing any bloody thing else for that matter, and his sculpted little mousepad wavers scintillatingly like waves of heat from the hood of a car. He is taunting me...my supermodel, serial killer, pachyderm. I have opened the door I was certain was rusted shut, and I have tested the key to make sure it is mine and mine alone, and shockingly, yes Mary, the garden is still here along with Dicken and Colin is doing backflips through the daffodils screeching wildcats cheers. My laptop...a dark uncle with a sorrowful secret lurking in the foreground. My laptop...a wad of pewter on a workbench next to a clean pail of water. My laptop...an elephant balanced on a beach ball, or flying down a sky scraper on a pair of brand new running shoes, dancing in a janet jackson video with a powdered vogue wig and a cleaver covered in sweet cherry brandy. My laptop is mine...and only the beginning.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Excuse me (or did my frail human body get in the way of your *&%ing Hummer)?
I'm certainly no Miss Manners. I say fuck when I cut my finger cutting onions. I sniff when I can't find a tissue. I have been known to let my underwear dry on the towel rack and even let an absolutely raunchy belch through the gates given the proper circumstances (which usually include pajamas and beer).
In the last few months, however, it has been brought to my attention that there are some issues of chivalry, kindness, and plain common decency about which I am very serious, and appallingly the general populous seems not only lax but utterly at odds with.
Earlier this week, after a brief flurry of snow, which left barely a schmaltz on the roads, which the city chose to salt rather than plow, I had the daily privilege of my three mile walk to work. I set out with my winter coat, knee high boots, gloves, hat and umbrella. Not a third of a mile into this commute, I was passed by a car traveling at a fairly high speed. The speed limit for cabot street can't be more than thirty mph, and this vehicle must have been going at least forty, giving its wheels the perfect opportunity to cover me from head to foot in filthy, thick slush.
Now, I am not a newcomer to this walk. I have trodden this same three miles since last spring, and I like to think I am not only a considerate and proper pedestrian, but that I ask very little in return, first and foremost DON'T KILL ME and secondly please don't treat me like another car.
This second one may be a smidge less specific, but think about it for a second. While you, driver, are safe and secure inside your four walls of reinforced plastic, metal, rubber and airbags, with glorious things such as climate control, windshields, moon roofs, seatbelts and antilock brakes, I am a sorry little sack of flesh and bones with all the protection of sunblock, fabric, sunglasses and an ipod. If I'm super flash, I have on a pair of shoes that are waterproof.
All I meekly demand is that you think before you honk at me for being not as speedy as a vehicle when I do things like cross the street, or when I startle because you clearly didn't look one way while shooting out of a side street and I was almost a smear on your passenger door.
I realize that this is america and I have the ability and right to a vehicle of my own choosing, but for the moment that vehicle is me, and all I ask is the same amount of caution you would hope a driver would give you, if suddenly your ton of glass and steel and cushion was stripped from you, and you stood staring down a three mile plod along a poorly cleared road on a thirty degree january morning.
By the time I reached my job, on this particular day, I had been frosted like a cake. One or two or even three splashes are to be expected, but during this commute I had been drenched by EVERY OTHER CAR. I would like you to take a moment and think about that.
Every second car that passed me, either thought I was pathetic enough to deserve being soaked in salt and grit and ice cold water, or it never even crossed the driver's mind to consider what would happen if they traveled through a huge pile of precipitation at the same speed they travel on a highway.
I don't want anyone's pity. I got to work. I changed my clothes. I washed my face. i did my job. But I'd be lying if it didn't make me pay closer attention to how people are treating each other in general right now.
Sadly, the results are conclusive. Nobody gives a shit about anyone but themselves.
People don't hold doors anymore, not even for a person entering directly after them. People don't stop for crosswalks. Maybe one out of every ten people say please and thank you.
In my three years of grocery shopping in the state of massachusetts, I say excuse me, whenever I am in the way of anyone, and clear out as soon as possible. If I am obviously right in front of the product another person is reaching for, I excuse myself and move.
Not once, at all, have I ever seen this behavior in anyone else. I have never had someone say excuse me in a grocery store. Period.
In fact, I can't think of the last time someone said excuse me to me that wasn't a dear friend of mine because yes, my friends are polite, considerate human beings. I don't associate with cretins.
And yes, everybody else, I am talking about you.
It is common knowledge that a much more terrifying atrocity is committed by the person who thinks and feels nothing for his fellow man than the person who is filled to the brim with hatred for him.
I don't ask much. I just ask that everyone look around! We are all hurting right now. This economy is absolutely hammering us. Many of us are stuck clinging to jobs we can't stand or lost jobs we didn't like due to downsizing. Some of us are on the dole, or moving back in with our parents. Some of us have kids to feed or unemployed significant others. Some of us have all of the above!
What we do have is our commonality as humans, our decency and our ability to look around at those who suffer alongside us. Who cares if you drop your last ten dollar bill in the snow if you don't pick up the money the person beside you dropped and give it back to them? Who cares if you get cut in line at the store, or if someone breaks the drier at the laundromat right before you load your clothes into it if you don't do the same.
The more narrowly we carve our vision, the more people will turn blind eyes to our own hardships.
It took a couple of hours for me to dry out after that walk last week, but the apathy of so many people has been impossible to wash off.
Look around. Somebody always has it worse than you. Somebody always has it better. And at the exact moment that you are fucking someone over through pure bloody minded ignorance, someone higher up the ladder is unknowingly about to do it to you.
I'm not going to get preachy about karma or the threefold rule or anything, but I am going to say that I am not ready mourn humanity yet, but you are hanging on by a string.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Words Words Words
At the end of 2010, I crammed a book into five days. It felt really really good. In the last two days, I read another.
This means in the last week, I have read 12.5% of the number of books I read in the entirety of one year.
Things that make my brain squirm.
My two new years resolutions are to read more, and to be visible.
I want to be seen. I want to be noticed. Hold my head up and put myself out there and display my work and stop being so very very self conscious.
I remember when I was fourteen. It was my first year living in the U.S. after Canada. The school was very different from what i was used to and the cafeteria terrified me. In Canada everybody ate their lunch at their desk in the portables we had class in, or outside, when the weather was nice.
In this new school, there was this really terrifying set up called a Cafeteria. I had never seen one before, and I thought it was set up like a giant theatre, where everybody sitting down was watching all the people in line to buy their food. My Dad told me that when you're a teenager you think everybody's looking at you, but they're actually so worried about being looked at themselves, they couldn't be watching me.
Still, I was relieved I always brought a bag lunch, and I would never have to be up there in line being looked at.
It was the scariest part of my day, any time I had to walk up in front of the class and write on a board, or give a report, or even just find a table in the cafeteria to sit at and not get bothered.
I was a weirdo. I found a table of girls like me, who hid in the back and didn't want to be seen. They were the only people who asked me questions about where I'd lived and why my accent was different, who were interested in the answers and not just how strange and alien I seemed.
In high school, we were the girls at the table that got food thrown at it. I stopped eating in the cafeteria after a while and stayed by the lockers just outside the big room. I sat on the floor and ate my lunch with one or two close friends.
One day in a humanities class run by a teacher who thought his methods were the very fanciest, we were each given a sheet of paper with the names of everyone else in the class on it. The teacher told us to write down exactly what we thought, truly thought, about each person, and then hand the papers back. We did, and the next day he handed us all back a sheet of paper with what everyone else had written about ourselves. It was entirely anonymous, so we could be as mean or revealing as we wanted.
I recall that out of twenty or so responses, maybe thirteen of the lines written about me said, "she seems nice, but I don't know her."
Mission accomplished.
I set out to right some wrongs when I went to college.
I vowed to do very scary things.
I picked the scariest thing I could think of: improv.
Standing in front of a huge room of people with nothing to save you but your mind and a lack of stage fright.
Shockingly. I wasn't bad at it.
I had so much fun, I buried myself in it, and I used it as an excuse to hide my writing. Why expose myself in other ways, when I was doing it so thoroughly already?
After I graduated, I fled. I dropped off the map. I didn't send anyone forwarding addresses. I never reached out. I lost good friends. I squandered opportunities and connections in an effort to vanish again, to fall off the radar and disappear from everyone's sight again.
A few of you refused to let that happen. Thank you.
Now it is 2011.
I am going to turn twenty nine this year, and it will be ten years since I stepped on an improv stage for the first time, and fifteen since I shivered in that cafeteria.
I have written. I have written. I have written.
And I have been terrified to ever let anyone see.
It is time to be visible.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Things I need to take into consideration
All anybody has ever needed is a little perspective.
I have extra days off this week, due to the holiday. While my bank account cringes, my sanity falls to its knees and weeps grateful tears. We were going down a bad road there for a while.
In updates:
I actually got my shit together this summer and I began running like a real athlete. I ran in a 10k (my first race ever) and made a very respectable fifty two minutes. For my troubles, two beautiful girls covered themselves in tiger lilies and offered me a bonsai tree and an ice cream cake. Then we flung ourselves into the ocean in front of a class of scuba divers, all while laughing hysterically. It was gorgeous.
About two months later, I realized I did not have the means to afford the entrance fee for my half marathon of 13.2 miles. So I woke up one saturday morning and just did it. For myself. Entirely alone. I ran 13.4 miles in two hours flat. Then I walked the 3 miles I always walk to work, and worked an eight hour day.
NBD.
Later, in early september, the charm of running was worn. I was sick of dragging myself out of bed so I could have barely enough time to shower after my run and scamper over the bridge to work. I was not reading books. I was not writing. I was just running.
And I think I needed to know that my body was capable of that.
But I choose to emphasize my brain's capability.
I have been really stressed out this year. Beyond any levels I have ever grazed in the past. I got migraines, insomnia, I ate until I wanted to throw up, I starved myself for a day or two. I ran and ran, I slept and sat. I drank glass after glass of red wine and one day my pants fit me and the next day they didn't. I had sex, I didn't have sex. I had shingles. I healed.
I have some ideas about how I want this year to go.
I am going to really attempt to let go of this obsession with food and my body. Really.
I am going to finish editing the book.
I am going to edit a dozen of my short stories and launch a writer's website.
I am going to drink more water and do a little yoga and meditate for a few minutes every day.
I am going to be more fucking confident.
Every gesture, every motion a purposeful one. I will not be afraid to disagree and have an opinion.
I am going to make time to read for at least an hour. Every day.
If I have to write out schedules for myself, I will do so. This is important.
I am important.
Today is thanksgiving, a holiday I have never felt moved by.
Instead of spending the day driving to my parents' house way the hell up in maine only to be trapped in limerick for six hours before the meal and the inevitable drive home, B and I have decided to spend the holiday with our non-blood family.
Yesterday I drank coffee in my living room with darling jess. We laughed and relaxed. In the evening, we went over to Benjamin and Lisa's house (where the festivities are today), and I used their fabulous kitchen appliances to make a sweet potato pie and individual garlicky bread puddings for the big meal.
I drank a beer and a half. I ate hawaiian pizza. B and Benjamin and jess and I hung out in the cozy kitchen and listened to music. It was lovely.
Today, I am going to remind myself that there are beautiful things happening every day. Every minute. I want to take a little time to breathe them in, and be thankful that I am alive, I am healthy, I have food and friends and a husband who looks like a bear cub when sleeping.
I am love.
Monday, February 1, 2010
CAUTION: I will whinge you to death.
So I'm pretty sure the only time I ever blog anymore is when I'm having a particularly nasty bout of pms...er...depression...er...self hate...er...meltdown.
All of the above.
Which is where this beautiful flaming chariot of failure has brought us today.
This past saturday night was the biggest full moon of the year. If you were a lady or an ocean during the last three days, I am so very sorry for you, because most likely your tides were absolutely bananas. In a related story, I am sorry to all you super awesome dudes out there who put up with one or more of us and or any salty, sexy fishermen (I prefer the gloucester variety, deadliest catch can eat my ass) who dared to troll the oceans so very unfair this weekend.
As the witchy lady I am, I like to spend most days that I feel like absolute shite pawing through various witchy literature that tells me this is the coldest part of the year, I should be huddled around a fire with a goblet of wine and half a pig smoking on the hearth in front of me. I should have friends and or family snuggled up under blankets someone way craftier than me crocheted, and I should be plowing through self inspiring literature and trying out new slow cooker recipes and loving my curvy woman self and letting the rough winds of winter rouge my cheeks with the healthy blush of accomplishment.
I mean the holidays are over, ergo, gluttony is shameful, indulgence is a no no, and it is time to rise grogeously from the ashes of credit card debt and crinkly bon bon wrappers to become the ethereal being I need to embody to greet the first day of spring in an ultra clingy, practically illegal linen-type dress garment.
Pleh.
I find myself feeling oppressed by it all.
I can't even open the document my book is in because I'm so terrified looking at it will reveal the travesty it really is, and I will be so ashamed of it I can't even bring myself to edit it, and in some passionate fit, I'll drag the whole thing to the trash icon and click until I hiccup. What the fuck?! I can't even burn my manuscript in a wicked lavish victorian fit of hysterics? Tearing pages and sobbing while sparks fly, soot and heat streak my face and my hair swirls wildly and fragments of words crackle and pop in the flames? What is my life coming to?
I have worn the same clothes for about three days running now. Bob must think I'm some kind of hela monster grunting and plodding from room to room, which might be okay because he somehow manages to think our bearded dragons are cute.
Maybe he'll be all right with his wife turning into a great big lizard.
I came up wit the crackpot idea that it would make me feel good to run a marathon.
I told a bunch of people, and I ran three times this week (for the first time since october). I thought I was the shit.
Then I went to the gym with bob yesterday.
Bob is so amazing.
He's just totally redone his entire bank of bad habits, and he's going to the gym five days a week, and eating three super healthy meals every day. He even eats fruit, and he hates fruit! He's a foxy number anyway, and already I have terrifying visions of exactly how retarded hot he will be in about six weeks time, and all the lookyloos will be scampering around the purple palace of planet fitness perspiring perspicacity, making little perfumey winks and excuses "Oh, I'm so sorry, however does this big machine work" *titter* "Your arms are like sooooo big, they must be the size of my waist!"
My imagination sucks in technicolor. Often IMAX 3D.
Anyway. So I think I'll be cool, and I get on a treadmill, and I start it off, and I can barely run for twenty five minutes (three-ish miles)before I begin hallucinating, and the marathon I picked is 13 miles, and it's in may. Is this just the dumbest idea ever? I think it might be. I think I told everybody I was going to be a rockstar, and then I picked up a triangle and stuck my dick in it.
So I spent today moping for a number of reasons.
Those I have already listed, and the usual bubbling cauldron below the surface: ohhh how can you be almost twenty eight and done nothing with your degree? You suck at writing and your ears are really big. You will never be actually in control of any part of your life and will probably wind up fat, homeless, alone and most definitely scribbling on the walls of your cardboard box in your own fecal matter, and not in the marquis de sade/geoffrey rush from quills mega sass way.
So I am reading bonfire of the vanities and hating most of humankind and wanting desperately to live in a bret easton ellis novel and flickering through the colorwheel of jealousy over any of my friends who travel or live in sf right now and don't need to worry about silly little items like seasonal affect disorder because it never ducks below forty-five degrees in northern california, and the sun doesn't leave to alone for five months like some terrible parental figure, but flirts with you on a daily basis behind the seven veils of every gossamer type of fog you can imagine.
I wanted to drink red wine and read and at least be depressed in a sort of enviable locked in the turrets sort of way, but I couldn't even manage that. Instead I watched 500 days of summer (which was pretty forgettable) walked the dog and didn't even make it into to town for coffee like I usual manage on my days off.
You know.
I wonder sometimes if I'll ever look back on blogs and journal entries from this time period of my life when I have kids, and if I'll invent a time machine just so I can go back to this moment and punch myself in the face for being so bloody self wallowy.
*oof*
Monday, November 9, 2009
my problem with music.
Okay.I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but I keep putting it off because I think it might piss a few of my friends off, then I remember that if you're my friend, then you're an intelligent, enlightened individual, and besides, sometimes it's healthy to be mad.
Perhaps it's an american thing. Maybe it's universal now, but I think it's pretty secular at the moment. Music is no longer a form of art, a medium of expression meant for revelation and experience and beauty and celebration...or...at least it sure as hell doesn't seem to be anymore.Lately the good folks with whom I share the bench at the bakery have been compiling cds of the music they survived on during their teenage years. Everybody's all into it, touting the benefits of sharing secret little soul crevices through the music they leaned so heavily upon and tore their hair to, lacquered posters on their walls for, and felt completely alone and misunderstood with."You should make one!" an enthusiastic fan of the idea effused a few days ago, and I wondered why my gut reaction was to balk and shy thoroughly away from any such project.Then I realized, I didn't really listen to much music in high school.Not until my freshman year of college, did I really begin to open up my tastes and explore all the different genres available for my consumption, and being the partner of a very world weary music traveler with quite discerning tastes, it has frequently been my duty to digest enormous slices of humble pie as my ignorance of the many "standards" and "classics" was revealed.
I had never consciously listened to a led zepplin song until I was twenty six.There. I said it.
It's not that I lived in some terrifying religious household where anything other than hymns was burned and my terrified sisters and I rolled on the lawn in our nightgowns at midnight singing songs along with a radio we tuned to the devil's music. Well...we might have done some of that, but it was all in good fun.My parents played a few specific albums that I recall. 1. The soundtrack to the film the big chill (which my sisters and i can still sing both sides of in order)2. tchaikovsky (most memorably the 1812 overture) 3. the greatest hits of buddy holly 4. Queen's the works
As far as I was concerned up until middle school, Queen was hardcore and buddy holly was pop and cannons were classical and motown was pretty much everything else.My sisters and I sang along with the radio, and used our father's voice recorder from his interview journalist days to record songs off of Alex's boombox. Yes. We held it up to the speaker thus a lot of our early mixed tapes held vague interruptions as we were called to dinner or sarah decided to join the party and didn't grasp the grave silence required for such a task. Alex was way more into being a dj than i was, and I would rather read, so I sort of let the mixed tape thing fall by the wayside until high school.I was fifteen when we could finally afford cable, and we lived in america and that meant exciting, luxurious choices like HBO, Nickelodeon and MTV. After we got home from school, there was a top ten countdown on mtv, and it lasted about an hour, and that was exactly how long i was allowed to watch television until dad kicked us off to respective homework duties. I watched this countdown religiously, partly because those marketing guys knew who their audience was, and they geared it toward the pocket change of the blossoming tween empire, partly as a weird way to get to know american tastes (what the fuck was cool here? why did nobody want to eat lunch with me? etc). It was on said countdown that I first saw a little band called savage garden, and for some reason, my brain clicked on. I can try to make this sound cooler than it was, but that would be a farce. In short. They were cute, their songs were catchy, and the stars aligned with my hormones to create the cataclysmic inaugural rock crush.I bought the cd with my saved up pocket money. I locked myself in my room and listened to it and wrote poems and wore a lot of black and generally behaved like a massive jackass for the better part of my fifteenth year. Afterward, I didn't move on to another band. I remember I bought a real fancy like stereo with a three disc changer and a subwoofer with money I saved from my summer job at an ice cream parlor, and I used to listen to the radio constantly. I purchased music very rarely. I had a cd tower with barely twelve slots filled, while across the hall, Alex had hers already overflowing onto the floor, and her door constantly open blasting whatever music she was moved by at that moment. I wasn't very social in high school, and I studied hard and read a lot. My friends weren't really music people, and I never lay on a floor sharing headphones with someone just basking in communal rock love.Like I said, it wasn't until college I realized there was more to the whole music thing. People were serious about their music. They were more than serious, they were rabid, livid, passionate. Some of them were even musicians, which was an entirely alien concept to me, asking me to play an instrument has always produced the same reaction as would asking my cat to don leiderhosen and make bratwurst. I was taken under many wings. People were all too willing to impart their musical wisdom upon me, except, there's a lot of schools of rock out there, and trying to be a student of all of them is really fucking exhausting. Then of course there's the holier than thou attitude of any music type attempting to enlighten a pupil. I had my indy rocker, with his junked out frankenstein guitar with an old nintendo controller imbedded in the base of the neck, who would play easy rock from twenty year old college students crooning about problems not unlike our own, voices and strings breaking with emotion and desperation and a need for beer money. There were my folkie girlfriends who dreaded each others hair and mended their quilted skirts on bunk beds while a super hot lesbian strummed an acoustic guitar and we all listened to soft spoken girl poets lullabyes about abortions and thwarted revolutions and poisoned rivers.There was the dark boy with the collection of creepy angry music that we would sit in his basement room and listen to with only one dim lamp blurring the shapes of the bookshelves and couches. These were songs about pain and anger and alienation, and after a while they filled the room with so much angst I wanted to laugh out loud at the thick bog i had to wade through just to find the door. As I went from room to room, and later from town to town, people passed in and out of my life and experiences came along and some of them brought their music like troubadours in a blaze of identity and tangibility so solid they would become inextricable from one another. Others brought music like gifts, quiet and sweet like little wrapped boxes that I could open then, and pack away and open again and again and be precious for different reasons every time. In time I would find bands that just made sense to me, depeche mode for one, the cure, the dresden dolls, bands that just seemed to be waiting in the velvet curtains for me to stop staring into the lights and catch me off guard and whisper things that made me trip or curtsy. But more than anything, music has become this beautiful woven tapestry, forever being woven and unwoven from the middle outward, and I reach the point of this whole diatribe now.What the hell is with the music nichery?!Why is it so important to be the first to "discover" a band and introduce others to it? Music is always best uncovered by the individual on his own time and terms. This is how the ties are formed between listener and listened.
This new practice of forcing the newest craziest weirdest band and thrusting it on people just because it's new and neat and weird is absolutely against the whole notion of music being art. Art is something you aren't looking for, but finds you, standing alone in an atrium under a skylight next to a palm tree, like my favorite sculpture in the whole wide world did. Music is the same.
I don't care if it's three year old inuit children who play world war two tank relics inside of a walk in freezer and manage to replicate the tokyo ska/klesmer scene, so it's unique, that doesn't mean it's forged any kind of musical/sexual/artistic/life altering with anyone!
Unless you can prove to me that a toddler screeching hebrew in an icy steel tomb while his bandmate rocks a helmet solo truly moves something inside of you, stop trying to tell me that it's worth listening to just because it's the nichest niche in nicheville.
I didn't even know I was in nicheville. I was just enjoying the bloody view.
With that tirade out of the way, I would like to take this time to encourage anyone who is, like me, music challenged, and maybe didn't get the magical musical education that seventh graders seem to be mastering these days via wonders like the internet and rockband and guitar hero, to keep falling in love with music the way you should fall in love ever, by happenstance, by accident, by keeping and open mind and saying, "
gee, what is that playing just now, in this perfect moment in your car, while we feel the sand crumble off our feet from watching a moonrise on the beach on a sickly sweet humid august night?"
and then having the grace to reply,
"oh...in a walk in freezer, really?" and taking the moment, the music and life distilled into that single perfect drop, and playing it all the drive home.
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