... like me, right now. I was here in Lamont at 12:30 last night, happily using the last 15 minutes of library openness to put the finishing touches on the 8th page of my paper... why, then, was I here again before 9 AM, when the paper is not in any way due today? Let me tell you.
So, at 12:30, the computer abruptly stopped everything it was doing and told me it had gone into a "Deep Freeze" mode and that the keyboard and mouse were inaccessible. I got up to inquire as to why this had occurred, and discovered that all the student computers had, in fact, done this. I then was told that they do this EVERY SATURDAY at 12:30, but usually they are closed so it doesn't matter, and I guess they just didn't both to tell anyone that this was going to happen. If I had known even 5 minutes ahead of time, I could have saved my document and sent it to myself with NO TRAUMATIC EFFECTS whatsoever... but I didn't. A fairly nice young man came over and tinkered futilely with the computer, during which process an appallingly loud FIRE ALARM started going off literally in my ear for a minute and a half. This is apparently the way that Lamont informs its patrons that it is time to leave, and also permanently damages their hearing. My ear is still slightly achy/itchy this morning.
So I left, with no knowledge of how much paper I had lost, and no copy of the paper on anything but this machine. It was, of course, dark and rainy, though thankfully I had an umbrella. I started stomping home, and as I got to the science center, I caught sight of a very drunk young man in something like a slightly oversized suit jacket. And other clothes too, but not a whole suit. He was walking along, swerving all over the path like I've never seen, totally alone. So at first when I saw him I was nervous, not certain of what he was doing or what was going on, but as he got past me I realized, as he stumbled over to the rope that bounds off the grass and then confusedly to a bush, that he was probably totally disoriented and trying to go home. But in this state who knew if he even knew where his home was. I really didn't know what to do. I didn't want to approach him in case he was agitated or scary, and even if I had I wouldn't have known where to take him if he told me he lived in X dorm, but I also didn't want him to keep wandering around and get hypothermia, or stumble into the road, or just fall asleep with alcohol poisoning or something.
So I followed him. It was a bit awkward, since he kept stopping and drifting off in different directions, or just standing there for a long time, but I tailed him all the way back to the other end of the yard. At one point there was a hopeful moment when he seemed to be veering towards the door of what I hoped was a dorm, but it was short-lived, and the next thing I know he was, in fact, stumbling into the road across from the Au Bon Pain, heading on out into Harvard Square. Now I really didn't know what to do. It didn't make sense to follow him all the hell over Cambridge, but it was stupid to leave him now after all that, and when he was potentially in a more dangerous situation.
I was hestitating on my side of the road, when a shadow figure sort of loomed up toward me out of the darkness... and it turned out to be a nice, sweet-looking young man in a big bulky coat who wanted to know when the buses stopped running. For no reason I understand except that I wanted to give him hope or something, I said that I thought they were still running (I actually didn't have the slightest idea) but that I knew the subway had stopped, or stopped around now, or something. When I looked up again I saw that I had lost the drunk boy, and so I decided to go over to the ABP, which apparently is open very late, and ask them if they had seen him, and also if they would call the police. I should interject that my phone had run out of batteries in the early afternoon. As I made it over there, I saw there was a policeman standing in the doorway! I went over to him and explained the situation. He said he had seen the drunk guy and wasn't sure what was going on with him, but, after ascertaining that I didn't know him or where he was supposed to be, he told me that he would check up on him and help him get home, and disappeared purposefully around the corner.
So I continued walking home. At this point my feet and the bottoms of my pants were extraordinarily wet, and I was extraoridinarilly agitated. Being outside in the middle of the night by myself was NOT AT ALL acceptable, and now I had an even longer walk ahead of me than I normally would. At one point I gave up and hailed a cab, only to find that the cab driver didn't know where Beacon St. was. Now, under normal circumstances I could have told him how to get there, most likely, but at this point I was so at the end of my rope that I wasn't sure I could think that clearly, and I also wasn't sure that I wanted to get in a cab with a driver who didn't know where Beacon St. was. It's an enormous street! It's the main street in Somerville, which is so much enveloped by Cambridge that there is NO REASON, at the proximity we were, for this man who navigates streets for a living not to have a clue where Beacon St. was. So I walked on. My shoelaces on one shoe were permanenetly untied at this point, and they and my umbrella made all sorts of unpleasant flapping and slapping noises that I tried not to attribute to frightening attacker people sneaking up behind me.
I finally made it home, called Charlotte and Rachel for some support, and got to bed probably a little before 3. I set my alarm for 7. I got out of bed around 8 and made it in the door here by 9. I came right over to the computer I was working on, and found that it had automatically saved a draft of my paper... that had nothing but gibberish on the very top line, a disgruntled arrangement of the words "Harvard College Libraries." It also had the most recent copy I had saved... about 2 pages short of what I had left with. Two fairly hard-won pages in a paper that is not going at all the way I want it to at this point.
So I went up to the circulation desk and asked the guy working there if there was someone I could speak with who dealt with the computers.
"Uhhhh..." he said with a little chuckle. "Well, there's no one who deals with the computers exactly, but there might be someone who could help..." "
Well," I began, "I was here last night at about 12:30..." And that's as far as I got.
"Oh. That sounds like... I don't think I can help you." He went and got some kind of administrator, telling him there was a "lady" here who needed help. (Am I a lady to college undergrads now? Not that I would necessarily want to be a girl, but it was weird. I've also noticed that in this post I've taken to using 'young man' for men younger than me, meaning they are younger than me but I'm not sure how much. Bizarre quarter-century-ness.) Anyway, the administrator came over--he looked uncannily like Ben from lost--and listened to my tale of woe, expressed doubt that anything would help, but came over to look at the computer. At least he told me that he had told the powers that be to stop the deep freeze during exams, but somehow it had not worked. Which is slightly better than if no one did anything at all and just decided it didn't matter. So Ben looked through my files, and poked through some other files, and came to the conclusion there was nothing to be done, unless I waited til Monday and talked to some computer expert folks at Widener. I said this would not be helpful, and explained fairly calmly that I lived off-campus, that due to this problem I had not gotten to sleep until 3 AM, and that I had to wake up again at 7 in order to get back here, so it really was a major inconvenience. He was not unsympathetic, but seemed more concerned with expressing his own innocence than actually listening to what I had to say, which I find a lamentable human trait. If I am ever in a customer service position again, please remind me that it is more important to hear people than to excuse yourself.
So that's it. Now I'm here, I'm starving, I'm exhausted, and I have to re-write 2 pages of an already plodding, idiotic paper.
Fuck you, Lamont library. If I knew how to dismantle this alarm behind my head, I completely would, and take it as a goddamn trophy to hang up on my wall. If I could dismantle this computer without causing further harm to my paper, I would be sorely tempted. I don't have anything more to say, but I have not exhausted my rage and disappointment. I want my two pages, my breakfast, and my equanimity. Fuck you.
Showing posts with label fear. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fear. Show all posts
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Monday, May 14, 2007
The Red Planet
I meant and meant to post something substantial about my trip, and never did... so here's a reflection I read at our reflection lunch. I hope you enjoy the strengths of the genre, and forgive the weaknesses.
Cindy moves around me in the shell of her living room. Neither of us knows what to say. I have followed her inside to get a soda and because the sun has started to mummify my brain and because I have an urge to be with her. I hope that words will descend like little doves into the part of my sweat-slicked hair. They don’t. I scale down my apostolic ambitions and drink my Fresca.
“This soda is great,” I say. “It’s really hot out there.”
“I can’t even be out there five minutes before I’m ready to fall down,” she tells me. She is moving all around me, making a semi-circle of chairs against the backdrop of stripped walls and broken appliances. I feel it in the way her muscles clench and unclench while her eyes search around us—this desire to do something when it feels as though helplessness is nestled permanently against your pulse-point like a spoiled perfume.
We are all battling helplessness. Cindy is battling all the time, arranging chairs in an empty room, finding a scrap of life to maintain. Outside someone strategizes and attacks a fence; another undoes vines; a third engages in quixotic single combat with a large segment of tree snagged in the upper branches of another. The little dog Tiffy, as big as my hand and ridiculous in a red and white cheerleading costume, is a one-creature anti-helplessness army. Later, I battle beside Cindy in her dim, dusty garage. I am familiar with the piled-up remnants of an exploded life, but grimly I do battle. This is a box of electronic things; this is a box of soft things; this of paper. My categories are haphazard and desperate.
There are lots of laminated sheets with popular lyrics and guitar chords, and Cindy insists that they all be saved. The ink has run pink and purple on some, a mini-sunset.
“Do you sing?” I ask.
“I used to,” she said. “Sing and play guitar. I don’t anymore, since the hurricane.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I keep putting the sheets of paper into boxes. I don’t know which side I am fighting for by doing so. What is it about a hurricane that would make a person stop singing?
I find a bizarre little book that Cindy’s son made many years ago. Her son is seventeen now, moved out shortly after Katrina to live with his father. This book is trying to teach the Solar System and grammar at the same time. On one page, the subject of the sentence is underlined, and the subject of the sentence is also Mars. “Mars is the red planet because it is red,” Cindy’s son wrote.
I show Cindy. I want to plant a flag, do a dance. Solar System Grammar Book 1: Helplessness 0.
But let’s be honest. It’s important that if I’m going to talk you about something as pregnant with the possibility of self-righteousness as a service trip, that I be as honest as I can stand. I am not going to win against helplessness, and neither are you. A hurricane can push a house askew like I push a pile of papers. The structure of society can leave people in crumpled heaps like old Barbie dolls, limbs all twisted up, because lives we have labeled worthless prior to crisis will not suddenly, magically be saved when the water rises.
And that very labeling, I’m startled to find, is a weapon wielded by dangerously frightened people… against helplessness. Bear with me. When we go on service trips and clean years, we are fighting helplessness. When we build glittering mansions and mark them off with gates, with a different garden from every window, we are scratching at helplessness. When we stand on Bourbon St. with white crosses and scrolling neon messages about the sins of Babylon, we are crusading against helplessness. When we slip inside the topless bar next door, with a sign that promises to let us wash the girl of our choice, it is helplessness we seek to wrestle to submission.
For myself, I know I must resist the temptation to be virtuous. Pull on a vine of motivation, you will surely find another, and another, tangled in yourself and in others. Fight the helplessness of one storm, and another will come and melt your sand castle. I may not have known this at the time, but I didn’t go to Ocean Springs because it was the right thing to do. I went because it was something to do. Cindy, and Tiffy the dog, and her absent son, and Mars the red planet are not antidotes to helplessness. But they are something. I am having trouble describing what it is that they are, what we are and have been with them—perhaps that trouble is part of my point.
In the garage with Cindy, the Solar System Grammar book goes in the box with tax forms and letters and song lyrics. I find a picture of her son and we stand looking at it together. When we run out of things to say we keep speaking, straining to hear each other. This is within the battle, but this is not the battle. This is two women in a dirty old garage looking at a picture—helpless, still working. It’s reality—a true grace, a force as mysterious as a storm and rarely rose-colored except in beautifully running ink. Mars is called the red planet because it is red. I stand with Cindy. (Amen).
Cindy moves around me in the shell of her living room. Neither of us knows what to say. I have followed her inside to get a soda and because the sun has started to mummify my brain and because I have an urge to be with her. I hope that words will descend like little doves into the part of my sweat-slicked hair. They don’t. I scale down my apostolic ambitions and drink my Fresca.
“This soda is great,” I say. “It’s really hot out there.”
“I can’t even be out there five minutes before I’m ready to fall down,” she tells me. She is moving all around me, making a semi-circle of chairs against the backdrop of stripped walls and broken appliances. I feel it in the way her muscles clench and unclench while her eyes search around us—this desire to do something when it feels as though helplessness is nestled permanently against your pulse-point like a spoiled perfume.
We are all battling helplessness. Cindy is battling all the time, arranging chairs in an empty room, finding a scrap of life to maintain. Outside someone strategizes and attacks a fence; another undoes vines; a third engages in quixotic single combat with a large segment of tree snagged in the upper branches of another. The little dog Tiffy, as big as my hand and ridiculous in a red and white cheerleading costume, is a one-creature anti-helplessness army. Later, I battle beside Cindy in her dim, dusty garage. I am familiar with the piled-up remnants of an exploded life, but grimly I do battle. This is a box of electronic things; this is a box of soft things; this of paper. My categories are haphazard and desperate.
There are lots of laminated sheets with popular lyrics and guitar chords, and Cindy insists that they all be saved. The ink has run pink and purple on some, a mini-sunset.
“Do you sing?” I ask.
“I used to,” she said. “Sing and play guitar. I don’t anymore, since the hurricane.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I keep putting the sheets of paper into boxes. I don’t know which side I am fighting for by doing so. What is it about a hurricane that would make a person stop singing?
I find a bizarre little book that Cindy’s son made many years ago. Her son is seventeen now, moved out shortly after Katrina to live with his father. This book is trying to teach the Solar System and grammar at the same time. On one page, the subject of the sentence is underlined, and the subject of the sentence is also Mars. “Mars is the red planet because it is red,” Cindy’s son wrote.
I show Cindy. I want to plant a flag, do a dance. Solar System Grammar Book 1: Helplessness 0.
But let’s be honest. It’s important that if I’m going to talk you about something as pregnant with the possibility of self-righteousness as a service trip, that I be as honest as I can stand. I am not going to win against helplessness, and neither are you. A hurricane can push a house askew like I push a pile of papers. The structure of society can leave people in crumpled heaps like old Barbie dolls, limbs all twisted up, because lives we have labeled worthless prior to crisis will not suddenly, magically be saved when the water rises.
And that very labeling, I’m startled to find, is a weapon wielded by dangerously frightened people… against helplessness. Bear with me. When we go on service trips and clean years, we are fighting helplessness. When we build glittering mansions and mark them off with gates, with a different garden from every window, we are scratching at helplessness. When we stand on Bourbon St. with white crosses and scrolling neon messages about the sins of Babylon, we are crusading against helplessness. When we slip inside the topless bar next door, with a sign that promises to let us wash the girl of our choice, it is helplessness we seek to wrestle to submission.
For myself, I know I must resist the temptation to be virtuous. Pull on a vine of motivation, you will surely find another, and another, tangled in yourself and in others. Fight the helplessness of one storm, and another will come and melt your sand castle. I may not have known this at the time, but I didn’t go to Ocean Springs because it was the right thing to do. I went because it was something to do. Cindy, and Tiffy the dog, and her absent son, and Mars the red planet are not antidotes to helplessness. But they are something. I am having trouble describing what it is that they are, what we are and have been with them—perhaps that trouble is part of my point.
In the garage with Cindy, the Solar System Grammar book goes in the box with tax forms and letters and song lyrics. I find a picture of her son and we stand looking at it together. When we run out of things to say we keep speaking, straining to hear each other. This is within the battle, but this is not the battle. This is two women in a dirty old garage looking at a picture—helpless, still working. It’s reality—a true grace, a force as mysterious as a storm and rarely rose-colored except in beautifully running ink. Mars is called the red planet because it is red. I stand with Cindy. (Amen).
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Cultivation
I'm experiencing that feeling. That feeling of dread and doom and fear, where each new event of the day seems unbearably full of chances to fail.
It goes right down the middle of me, and then runs around to all the tips of my body like static. Pins and needles.
I'm looking for something to redirect my attention and my feelings, but not in the frantic or lethargic way of most procrastination. I've been into lists lately, so here then is a list of the beautiful things in my day thus far:
*Sunlight and brilliant blue sky
*I think my professor for Hinduism and the Epics is more genuinely and passionately in love with what she studies and teaches than anybody I have ever met, ever.
*She also has a beautiful wrap-thing... like a shawl, but with sleeves, very thin and see through and flowy, in a sort of deep pink.
*While I was sitting outside to eat my lunch, my TF came by just as I had gotten some bleu cheese dressing on my mouth and was realizing I had no napkins, and he was like, "Do you need napkins?" because he had grabbed extras.
*Meeting a really exciting person who LOVES William Finn and is coming to my birthday party.
*A hot shower.
*A moment in writing my response when it really clicked in and took off, all at once.
*Having the thought "fuck everyone; I don't have time," and then thinking about the implications of that statement and laughing to myself.
*Saying no.
*These ridiculous little things serving as zipper pulls on my purse, which are eggs and circus people and have two alternate faces all at the same time! Really!
*The knowledge that people (you, at this time) will come by and read my list.
It goes right down the middle of me, and then runs around to all the tips of my body like static. Pins and needles.
I'm looking for something to redirect my attention and my feelings, but not in the frantic or lethargic way of most procrastination. I've been into lists lately, so here then is a list of the beautiful things in my day thus far:
*Sunlight and brilliant blue sky
*I think my professor for Hinduism and the Epics is more genuinely and passionately in love with what she studies and teaches than anybody I have ever met, ever.
*She also has a beautiful wrap-thing... like a shawl, but with sleeves, very thin and see through and flowy, in a sort of deep pink.
*While I was sitting outside to eat my lunch, my TF came by just as I had gotten some bleu cheese dressing on my mouth and was realizing I had no napkins, and he was like, "Do you need napkins?" because he had grabbed extras.
*Meeting a really exciting person who LOVES William Finn and is coming to my birthday party.
*A hot shower.
*A moment in writing my response when it really clicked in and took off, all at once.
*Having the thought "fuck everyone; I don't have time," and then thinking about the implications of that statement and laughing to myself.
*Saying no.
*These ridiculous little things serving as zipper pulls on my purse, which are eggs and circus people and have two alternate faces all at the same time! Really!
*The knowledge that people (you, at this time) will come by and read my list.
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Calling in the Night
Since I last dropped in, my Rumiesque guest house self has entertained many garden variety fears and anxieties, nasty cramps, and recursive thought loops, but also a very beautiful moment of understanding.
The latter is due to a sort of coming together of insights offered by Krsna, Charlotte, Roz's mix cd, and Christ crucified.
Holy Week, here I am. In the midst of the teeth-grinding what comes next day to day terror.
I should sleep. Goodnight.
The latter is due to a sort of coming together of insights offered by Krsna, Charlotte, Roz's mix cd, and Christ crucified.
Holy Week, here I am. In the midst of the teeth-grinding what comes next day to day terror.
I should sleep. Goodnight.
Monday, March 12, 2007
Not Quite Paradise
Before going to bed last night (which was weird enough anyway, since I had a sudden mild illness that has now disappeared, happily), I read a few pages of Toni Morrison's Paradise, which I have to read and write a response paper on for class next week. I find that reading novels before bed is way more successful than reading books about say, brain chemistry, or legal definitions of race.
I have read Paradise before, but, probably because we were going through all of Morrison's novels at breakneck speed, I remember almost nothing about it. The first few pages, in which women at a convent (but not nuns, I don't think) were being pursued and shot by men, reminded me a little. And then I fell asleep.
After a brief dream in which I went back to my old high school for a class with all my old classmates, I segued into a dream that was explicitly about the book. That is, in my dream, I was re-reading the book as I had been in real life, but my re-reading took the form of explicitly experiencing the things in the book, with a sort of fuzzy consciousness reminding me that I knew what would happen and that it will be all right.
In my dream, I was simultaneously a little girl and a grown woman caring for the little girl, and most of the time we were black. I remember looking at my skin with some fascination. But I think other times we might have briefly been white, almost like my brain forgot to make the switch. Anyway, there was this man coming after us, also mostly black, and he had seen a flyer that offered a reward if you killed women and children that were unaccompanied by men. He was someone we knew, but the woman knew he was going to try to kill them, and the little girl didn't. So the woman had to quiet the little girl and get her to hide. In my memory of the book, I had an image of the man sort of beating the top of a tree with a baseball bat while the woman and the girl hid below. This translated into us hiding in a sort of wooden structure below the floor of the the house we were in, and hearing the man crashing around with his bat. I think he was drunk, too. It was terrifying.
Then my perspective switched and I was outside, looking at the house and the man, although part of my consciousness was still with the girl and the woman. And I saw in an upper window that there was a doll house, and that the woman had convinced the girl to reach up through the floor of the doll house and manipulate the dolls inside, so the man would think we were playing there and come attack it. And I was shocked by this plan, even though I knew it had to work. The man saw the dolls moving and started to head for that part of the house. I knew he was going to smash up the doll house, but I didn't know how we were going to escape after that. I had images of us crawling out the bottom of the house somehow while he was occupied on top, but it was just such a terrifying idea, that we would have to lie there while he broke everything around us, that I guess I couldn't stay in it anymore, because I woke up.
Bizarre and scary, and I will be somewhat curious to see what it has to do with Paradise in reality. Hopefully not too much, but the novel already seems chilling and bleak.
I have read Paradise before, but, probably because we were going through all of Morrison's novels at breakneck speed, I remember almost nothing about it. The first few pages, in which women at a convent (but not nuns, I don't think) were being pursued and shot by men, reminded me a little. And then I fell asleep.
After a brief dream in which I went back to my old high school for a class with all my old classmates, I segued into a dream that was explicitly about the book. That is, in my dream, I was re-reading the book as I had been in real life, but my re-reading took the form of explicitly experiencing the things in the book, with a sort of fuzzy consciousness reminding me that I knew what would happen and that it will be all right.
In my dream, I was simultaneously a little girl and a grown woman caring for the little girl, and most of the time we were black. I remember looking at my skin with some fascination. But I think other times we might have briefly been white, almost like my brain forgot to make the switch. Anyway, there was this man coming after us, also mostly black, and he had seen a flyer that offered a reward if you killed women and children that were unaccompanied by men. He was someone we knew, but the woman knew he was going to try to kill them, and the little girl didn't. So the woman had to quiet the little girl and get her to hide. In my memory of the book, I had an image of the man sort of beating the top of a tree with a baseball bat while the woman and the girl hid below. This translated into us hiding in a sort of wooden structure below the floor of the the house we were in, and hearing the man crashing around with his bat. I think he was drunk, too. It was terrifying.
Then my perspective switched and I was outside, looking at the house and the man, although part of my consciousness was still with the girl and the woman. And I saw in an upper window that there was a doll house, and that the woman had convinced the girl to reach up through the floor of the doll house and manipulate the dolls inside, so the man would think we were playing there and come attack it. And I was shocked by this plan, even though I knew it had to work. The man saw the dolls moving and started to head for that part of the house. I knew he was going to smash up the doll house, but I didn't know how we were going to escape after that. I had images of us crawling out the bottom of the house somehow while he was occupied on top, but it was just such a terrifying idea, that we would have to lie there while he broke everything around us, that I guess I couldn't stay in it anymore, because I woke up.
Bizarre and scary, and I will be somewhat curious to see what it has to do with Paradise in reality. Hopefully not too much, but the novel already seems chilling and bleak.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
When the student is ready, the teacher appears
When I was writing my Holy/Dangerous Women paper, and I woke up the day it was due about 6 hours later than I meant to, I started feeling this horrible panic. I decided to take a shower to move through it, and in the shower this phrase came to me, one that my dad has said a million times but I never quite understood:
"When the student is ready, the teacher appears."
I realized this paper, this panic, this fear of failure, were all here to be my teachers. I don't mean this in a rainbows and puppies kind of way... though I'm sure rainbows and puppies can be teachers too, but not the kind I needed right then. I'd always thought of the phrase as more literal. Like some wise and knowing person was going to show up and gently enlighten me as soon as I attained some kind of readiness. And certainly the fact that this had not occurred was a sign that I was, as I secretly feared, inept and/or underdeveloped.
But now... this paper that I was fumbling through, that I was so scared to write because I was sure it would prove finally what a terrible student I am... was here to teach me? I was very clear on this for awhile, even thinking that what I was experiencing was far more valuable than getting an A and praise. Because what I was suddenly learning was why I procrastinate, the way in which fear drives me to a very specific system of behavior. It's not that I can't do the work in three weeks that I manage to cram into one frightening day. It's not that I'm somehow stupid or crazy or belligerent. It's specific fear management: I'm afraid of doing it wrong, so I put it off until I have to either do it or fail in a way that seems unthinkable. At which point I do it, but not with the time and care I know I could potentially put in. This way I can avoid both failure (finding out I couldn't do something even though I really tried my best) and success (finding out I really could). Plus, I get a nice adrenaline rush and the feeling of being a tough cookie.
It's not stupid. It's not random. It may not be based in reality, but it is, in its own way, a clever method of handling a very emotionally raw fear: that I'm not actually any good. At (whatever I may be doing) or (fundamentally at all).
So I had this realization and I kind of forgot, and then today I had to go meet with my professor about this paper, without having any idea of my grade or how I had done.
I was scared. I tried to talk myself out of it and steel myself for the worst, but I was scared. I had to wait while she talked to another student... of course, the student in the class who always seemed to have her shit together and knew what she wanted to write about in the paper from day 1... so I waited, hearing words float downstairs into the conference room where I'd decided to plant myself, and then went in to hear what was up.
She basically opened by saying I'd done a very good job with textual analysis and the application of theory, but essentially I hadn't written a research paper. Ok. What? Not ok. She was telling me I hadn't done the assignment correctly. Oh my God... I hadn't heard something like this since high school. I was sitting there in my seat with the paper written all over in my lap, and I couldn't look at it too closely, and I didn't dare check for my grade, all the way at the very back.
She went on in this back and forth mode, both saying that what I had done was fundamentally wrong, and that if it wasn't, if I worked on it, I could have this very good publishable thing.
I tried to say things that were intelligent and open without either defending myself too much or sounding like I had known what I had to do and just cavalierly decided not to do it... I have no idea how it sounded for real. I asked what specifically I should have done/should do in the future. I said that I had switched gears very close to the end, and knew on some level that I was shafting the research. I said that I was used to writing papers that required less background (I didn't say this, but I was thinking that I kind of jumped off from the model of my thesis, where I was all but ordered to use less background).
She seemed to genuinely wish she could have helped me earlier. She said that my paper was the first one she read, and she was really worried that maybe no one had understood the assignment (God!) But I was afraid of her, and I was afraid to be clear about where I was with my work because I knew it was not far enough.
She said that I could have asked for an incomplete, but that she understood if I just wanted it done. She asked if I had submitted a bibliography when she asked for it, and that's when the bottom really fell out for me. What bibliography? I remembered very clearly the email where she canceled class so we could have more time to research. I remembered meeting with her to talk about my nascent project ideas. I remembered NOTHING about a bibliography, which apparently everyone else had turned in! It became clear as we talked that people had either turned them in or just discussed them verbally, which is probably what I figured our meeting was... I don't know. But I felt ridiculous.
I think I started to crumble at this point, and I think she knew, because she wrapped up quickly and dismissed me. I don't know how I looked... I didn't burst into tears in her office or anything, but I definitely beat a hasty retreat. It felt so horrible that I had to endure all that and then say "thank you, ok, thank you, bye."
And did I ever mention that I HATE when people can see what I feel and I don't intend it? I always have this snarling animal reaction inside... if you've upset me, at least have the decency to let me lie about it. Which she did... but I think that she knew.
I made it outside and finally looked for my grade: Just a B. And a B+ for the class. I mean, at this point, I thought it was definitely going to be worse... what kind of grades do you get if you don't do the assignment? But the grade didn't really matter. I already felt that crunch inside that told me I had failed. And to be perfectly honest I pretend that I think Bs are totally fine because I get them and I know they ought to be and sometimes they are... especially if I get a C, too. But to be perfectly honest I don't want Bs. I want As.
Because I want to be perfect, and not perfectly honest. I don't want to be honest.
So there I was, walking home and trying not to cry, and I felt all the tightening start inside of me... all the reactions to the reaction, all the "this is so stupid, why are you being such an idiot, it's only a B, what is your problem, so you messed up, why are you doing this to yourself?" and "why didn't you just do something earlier, if you weren't so dumb and afraid you could have fixed this, or if you just took more time" and "you know it's really ok so don't get upset, let's think about this rationally," and my dad saying I really need all As and this voice in my head yelling at him about whether he is at Harvard getting his master's so how the fuck does he know what I need to get... noisy, noisy place, my head.
And I thought, I'm just going to stay with how I feel. It doesn't matter why I feel that way, it doesn't matter where this is coming from, I just want to stay with how I feel. Not fight. Not wallow. Be with.
I don't know how to describe being with how I feel. It's different. I had to keep reminding myself to do it, gently, like if a kid is riding a trike and keeps swerving off the path. It doesn't stop hurting. I got inside and sat here crying. But it's like sitting with someone, like sitting next to your friend while you are doing something hard together.
When the student is ready, the teacher appears.
I don't know what this all means, but I think it means something different, something a little bit new. And if that's true, it's worth it. The As don't feed my soul anyway. They just lessen the anxiety for a few minutes.
I'm going to read my comments now. Stick around, I'll be right back.
That was ok. I think she's right about most of the things that would strengthen my arguments... I think she's wrong about several critiques of my style. It's nice to be able to tell the difference between what I agree with and what I don't without categorically responding to the whole thing as a personal attack.
It's funny, when I woke up this morning, and started thinking about all the horrible things I had to do today (do you do that in bed, too?), I for some reason found myself saying a prayer, of gratitude, in advance, for the day and what would come of it. I never do that.
I don't know how to end this... I don't know why I wrote it... I wanted to share what I was thinking. I wanted to allow it to settle a bit in me.
"When the student is ready, the teacher appears."
I realized this paper, this panic, this fear of failure, were all here to be my teachers. I don't mean this in a rainbows and puppies kind of way... though I'm sure rainbows and puppies can be teachers too, but not the kind I needed right then. I'd always thought of the phrase as more literal. Like some wise and knowing person was going to show up and gently enlighten me as soon as I attained some kind of readiness. And certainly the fact that this had not occurred was a sign that I was, as I secretly feared, inept and/or underdeveloped.
But now... this paper that I was fumbling through, that I was so scared to write because I was sure it would prove finally what a terrible student I am... was here to teach me? I was very clear on this for awhile, even thinking that what I was experiencing was far more valuable than getting an A and praise. Because what I was suddenly learning was why I procrastinate, the way in which fear drives me to a very specific system of behavior. It's not that I can't do the work in three weeks that I manage to cram into one frightening day. It's not that I'm somehow stupid or crazy or belligerent. It's specific fear management: I'm afraid of doing it wrong, so I put it off until I have to either do it or fail in a way that seems unthinkable. At which point I do it, but not with the time and care I know I could potentially put in. This way I can avoid both failure (finding out I couldn't do something even though I really tried my best) and success (finding out I really could). Plus, I get a nice adrenaline rush and the feeling of being a tough cookie.
It's not stupid. It's not random. It may not be based in reality, but it is, in its own way, a clever method of handling a very emotionally raw fear: that I'm not actually any good. At (whatever I may be doing) or (fundamentally at all).
So I had this realization and I kind of forgot, and then today I had to go meet with my professor about this paper, without having any idea of my grade or how I had done.
I was scared. I tried to talk myself out of it and steel myself for the worst, but I was scared. I had to wait while she talked to another student... of course, the student in the class who always seemed to have her shit together and knew what she wanted to write about in the paper from day 1... so I waited, hearing words float downstairs into the conference room where I'd decided to plant myself, and then went in to hear what was up.
She basically opened by saying I'd done a very good job with textual analysis and the application of theory, but essentially I hadn't written a research paper. Ok. What? Not ok. She was telling me I hadn't done the assignment correctly. Oh my God... I hadn't heard something like this since high school. I was sitting there in my seat with the paper written all over in my lap, and I couldn't look at it too closely, and I didn't dare check for my grade, all the way at the very back.
She went on in this back and forth mode, both saying that what I had done was fundamentally wrong, and that if it wasn't, if I worked on it, I could have this very good publishable thing.
I tried to say things that were intelligent and open without either defending myself too much or sounding like I had known what I had to do and just cavalierly decided not to do it... I have no idea how it sounded for real. I asked what specifically I should have done/should do in the future. I said that I had switched gears very close to the end, and knew on some level that I was shafting the research. I said that I was used to writing papers that required less background (I didn't say this, but I was thinking that I kind of jumped off from the model of my thesis, where I was all but ordered to use less background).
She seemed to genuinely wish she could have helped me earlier. She said that my paper was the first one she read, and she was really worried that maybe no one had understood the assignment (God!) But I was afraid of her, and I was afraid to be clear about where I was with my work because I knew it was not far enough.
She said that I could have asked for an incomplete, but that she understood if I just wanted it done. She asked if I had submitted a bibliography when she asked for it, and that's when the bottom really fell out for me. What bibliography? I remembered very clearly the email where she canceled class so we could have more time to research. I remembered meeting with her to talk about my nascent project ideas. I remembered NOTHING about a bibliography, which apparently everyone else had turned in! It became clear as we talked that people had either turned them in or just discussed them verbally, which is probably what I figured our meeting was... I don't know. But I felt ridiculous.
I think I started to crumble at this point, and I think she knew, because she wrapped up quickly and dismissed me. I don't know how I looked... I didn't burst into tears in her office or anything, but I definitely beat a hasty retreat. It felt so horrible that I had to endure all that and then say "thank you, ok, thank you, bye."
And did I ever mention that I HATE when people can see what I feel and I don't intend it? I always have this snarling animal reaction inside... if you've upset me, at least have the decency to let me lie about it. Which she did... but I think that she knew.
I made it outside and finally looked for my grade: Just a B. And a B+ for the class. I mean, at this point, I thought it was definitely going to be worse... what kind of grades do you get if you don't do the assignment? But the grade didn't really matter. I already felt that crunch inside that told me I had failed. And to be perfectly honest I pretend that I think Bs are totally fine because I get them and I know they ought to be and sometimes they are... especially if I get a C, too. But to be perfectly honest I don't want Bs. I want As.
Because I want to be perfect, and not perfectly honest. I don't want to be honest.
So there I was, walking home and trying not to cry, and I felt all the tightening start inside of me... all the reactions to the reaction, all the "this is so stupid, why are you being such an idiot, it's only a B, what is your problem, so you messed up, why are you doing this to yourself?" and "why didn't you just do something earlier, if you weren't so dumb and afraid you could have fixed this, or if you just took more time" and "you know it's really ok so don't get upset, let's think about this rationally," and my dad saying I really need all As and this voice in my head yelling at him about whether he is at Harvard getting his master's so how the fuck does he know what I need to get... noisy, noisy place, my head.
And I thought, I'm just going to stay with how I feel. It doesn't matter why I feel that way, it doesn't matter where this is coming from, I just want to stay with how I feel. Not fight. Not wallow. Be with.
I don't know how to describe being with how I feel. It's different. I had to keep reminding myself to do it, gently, like if a kid is riding a trike and keeps swerving off the path. It doesn't stop hurting. I got inside and sat here crying. But it's like sitting with someone, like sitting next to your friend while you are doing something hard together.
When the student is ready, the teacher appears.
I don't know what this all means, but I think it means something different, something a little bit new. And if that's true, it's worth it. The As don't feed my soul anyway. They just lessen the anxiety for a few minutes.
I'm going to read my comments now. Stick around, I'll be right back.
That was ok. I think she's right about most of the things that would strengthen my arguments... I think she's wrong about several critiques of my style. It's nice to be able to tell the difference between what I agree with and what I don't without categorically responding to the whole thing as a personal attack.
It's funny, when I woke up this morning, and started thinking about all the horrible things I had to do today (do you do that in bed, too?), I for some reason found myself saying a prayer, of gratitude, in advance, for the day and what would come of it. I never do that.
I don't know how to end this... I don't know why I wrote it... I wanted to share what I was thinking. I wanted to allow it to settle a bit in me.
Thursday, February 23, 2006
This Would Be Entirely Self-Pitying, Were it Not for the Matter of the Opera
Well, I forgot about this.
The part where Hell Week always has at least one day or evening or whatever that is, actually, hellish. I'm sure it's just superstition, but it did hold true for most years at Bryn Mawr. And then there was last night. Really, I don't know what was wrong with me last night... and isn't that the worst? Just this feeling of anxiety that has no clear root and doesn't seem to go anywhere no matter how many times you remind yourself that, in fact, there is no impending doom. Not a full-blown panic attack or anything, just this feeling where you can't sit still, but you can't quite start doing anything, because it's totally unclear what needs to be done, but totally clear that there are many important things that must happen, and probably should have started happening a long time ago.
Add to this that for some reason I was suddenly much less attractive yesterday than I had been in several days. I looked strange and full of bulges, and my face was abruptly much less pleasant to look at, and I noticed the slight differences in the way I walk. Isn't it odd how perception can change in a flash? I'd been very pleased with my appearance for several days preceeding yesterday.
Add to this that Cristina may or may not be coming tonight, and she's had a really hard week. So I really want to be present to her and help, but I'm afraid I'll stay in Weird Stressland, and there's this selfish part of me that is afraid now I won't get my own crap done, getting ready for Friday, etc. Even though in truth I want to be with her. Feelings are so damn complicated. And when we got home last night she had left this message telling me that she wasn't going to work tomorrow, but she might still want to come today, and she was crying the whole time... and I really wanted to call her back, but she'd said she was going to bed, so I didn't. I think one of the problems is that whenever I think about this whole situation and I can't be with her I feel anxious and agitated and helpless. I mean, that's inevitable. When I can be with her I feel much stronger, much more certain and open and clear. So, we'll see, but goddammit. I wish I could fix it. I really do.
Add to this that I got a thin little letter from Cornell saying that I was not accepted to their English department, but they're sure I'll have a fine career anyway. I really thought I'd get in there. I also thought I'd get in to Duke. I don't know why, but I was much more worried about getting in to other schools. So now, I have this horrible feeling that I did all my applications wrong in some indefinable way and I won't get in anywhere. My mom and Liz will be disappointed that I'm not coming back close to home, though maybe it's good. I guess I have to trust that it's good, and that I'll end up somewhere right for me, just like at Bryn Mawr. But ugh. I hate hearing no. I hate the slippery hold I sometimes have on confidence and faith.
Add to this that we're trying to clean the apartment by Friday, a task I really applaud and want to do, but which is sure to lead to at least a few bouts of paralysis. I get so... irrationally fearful of actually dealing with the messiness. As though somehow that will actually make it worse, or prove that it is impossible to fix. Not helped by the fact that putting liquid plumr (or however that odd thing is spelled) in my toliet made the contents of it it bubble, turn green, and come this close to overflowing all over my feet (which circumstance was staved off my frantic plunging) before just sitting there. That is really not what I was hoping for in my efforts to clear the clog. I mean, actually we got a lot done in the living room. By which I mean that Rachel got a lot done and I put some decorations away, but still. It's a great start. I just have trouble seeing it.
I think that's all there is to add at the moment, but this morning I was just... dreading everything, especially the part where I left the house and went to work. I stumbled down the stairs and had my first shock of pleasure when I saw that there was still a cluster of people at the bus stop-- I hadn't missed it! I hurried over to join them, and there he was. This middle aged black man, casually dressed in jeans and work boots and a sensible, dark, puffy winter coat, with a stubbly almost-beard, carrying one of those little tape recorders, the flat ones about the size of a hardcover book, playing opera. Beautiful opera music shared with everyone! Well, I'm sure everyone didn't love it, but I did. I loved this crazy image of all of us just standing around waiting for the bus while this music floated all around us. I loved the music. It made me smile, this sudden spontaneous smile, and he was smiling too... and well, here I am at work, and I don't really feel that much more together or confident or anything. But I am going to try to remember the opera...
The part where Hell Week always has at least one day or evening or whatever that is, actually, hellish. I'm sure it's just superstition, but it did hold true for most years at Bryn Mawr. And then there was last night. Really, I don't know what was wrong with me last night... and isn't that the worst? Just this feeling of anxiety that has no clear root and doesn't seem to go anywhere no matter how many times you remind yourself that, in fact, there is no impending doom. Not a full-blown panic attack or anything, just this feeling where you can't sit still, but you can't quite start doing anything, because it's totally unclear what needs to be done, but totally clear that there are many important things that must happen, and probably should have started happening a long time ago.
Add to this that for some reason I was suddenly much less attractive yesterday than I had been in several days. I looked strange and full of bulges, and my face was abruptly much less pleasant to look at, and I noticed the slight differences in the way I walk. Isn't it odd how perception can change in a flash? I'd been very pleased with my appearance for several days preceeding yesterday.
Add to this that Cristina may or may not be coming tonight, and she's had a really hard week. So I really want to be present to her and help, but I'm afraid I'll stay in Weird Stressland, and there's this selfish part of me that is afraid now I won't get my own crap done, getting ready for Friday, etc. Even though in truth I want to be with her. Feelings are so damn complicated. And when we got home last night she had left this message telling me that she wasn't going to work tomorrow, but she might still want to come today, and she was crying the whole time... and I really wanted to call her back, but she'd said she was going to bed, so I didn't. I think one of the problems is that whenever I think about this whole situation and I can't be with her I feel anxious and agitated and helpless. I mean, that's inevitable. When I can be with her I feel much stronger, much more certain and open and clear. So, we'll see, but goddammit. I wish I could fix it. I really do.
Add to this that I got a thin little letter from Cornell saying that I was not accepted to their English department, but they're sure I'll have a fine career anyway. I really thought I'd get in there. I also thought I'd get in to Duke. I don't know why, but I was much more worried about getting in to other schools. So now, I have this horrible feeling that I did all my applications wrong in some indefinable way and I won't get in anywhere. My mom and Liz will be disappointed that I'm not coming back close to home, though maybe it's good. I guess I have to trust that it's good, and that I'll end up somewhere right for me, just like at Bryn Mawr. But ugh. I hate hearing no. I hate the slippery hold I sometimes have on confidence and faith.
Add to this that we're trying to clean the apartment by Friday, a task I really applaud and want to do, but which is sure to lead to at least a few bouts of paralysis. I get so... irrationally fearful of actually dealing with the messiness. As though somehow that will actually make it worse, or prove that it is impossible to fix. Not helped by the fact that putting liquid plumr (or however that odd thing is spelled) in my toliet made the contents of it it bubble, turn green, and come this close to overflowing all over my feet (which circumstance was staved off my frantic plunging) before just sitting there. That is really not what I was hoping for in my efforts to clear the clog. I mean, actually we got a lot done in the living room. By which I mean that Rachel got a lot done and I put some decorations away, but still. It's a great start. I just have trouble seeing it.
I think that's all there is to add at the moment, but this morning I was just... dreading everything, especially the part where I left the house and went to work. I stumbled down the stairs and had my first shock of pleasure when I saw that there was still a cluster of people at the bus stop-- I hadn't missed it! I hurried over to join them, and there he was. This middle aged black man, casually dressed in jeans and work boots and a sensible, dark, puffy winter coat, with a stubbly almost-beard, carrying one of those little tape recorders, the flat ones about the size of a hardcover book, playing opera. Beautiful opera music shared with everyone! Well, I'm sure everyone didn't love it, but I did. I loved this crazy image of all of us just standing around waiting for the bus while this music floated all around us. I loved the music. It made me smile, this sudden spontaneous smile, and he was smiling too... and well, here I am at work, and I don't really feel that much more together or confident or anything. But I am going to try to remember the opera...
Thursday, December 22, 2005
Syriana, or This is My Brain on Western Guilt and Human Fear, or Even the Hour When Wings are Frozen
Hah, I got my font back! And apologies to anyone who saw my blog yesterday/this morning, when it apparently gotten eaten by Vixen the reindeer. I had to try and delete Vixen three times before I got anywhere with it.
So, last night I went with Nathaniel and Rachel and Patrick and Mary, the latter two of whom I have not seen since summer, to see Syriana. We ended up with a choice between that, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Brokeback Mountain. While I did want to see Syriana, I was a little disappointed to be with a group of people for whom "gay cowboys" was not an immediate trump card in movie selection. I think Charlotte would classify it as one of those "not at Bryn Mawr anymore" moments. However, as I seemed to be the only one whose ears (and libido) were perking up at the concept, Syriana it was.
I'm not sure how to classify my response to this movie. It was... exhausting on many, many levels. I don't know if I've spent a more tense two hours in my life. My whole body was totally wired the entire time, and every scene, almost, I was waiting for someone to blow up or shoot someone else, or whatever. Which is kind of interesting, because that actually did not happen many, many times... it's just that the atmosphere was one of incredible tension almost all the time. More than in a fantastic movie, even, because here there was this incredibly palpable edge of reality to the horror. So it was physically and emotionally frightening, and also required rather intense intellectual attention to figure out what the hell was going on in the plot and with all the different characters. To be honest, I never figured out exactly when this was supposed to be going on. For some reason I had assumed it was in the recentish past (like, somewhere between 1980-2000, probably), and was therefore surprised when they made a brief reference to 9/11. Anyway...
It definitely impacted me, but I can't decide if it's somehow more or less of an impact because I was in such tension and terror throughout. Because of those very factors, I think I remained a little bit separate through most of it, holding myself tightly (so tightly-- my shoulders ached by the end), and therefore holding myself, not going into or merging with the story the way I did with something like Capote. It was so intense. There was just this sense of terror, tension, impending explosions pervading the whole thing. And it made me realize again the incredible importance of understanding history, and how little even the excellent instruction I received in school has given me even a semi-complete perspective on the forces and ideas that do shape the world, every day. I just don't know these things, and everything I learn about them makes me realize how much more I don't know, and on the other side how important it is to know. One thing that totally frightened me... one of the plotlines was about two big oil companies trying to affect a merger, and when they did manage to do that, they became the 25th largest economy in the world, or something like that, bigger than many countries. I know people have said things like this many, many times... but this made it make sense to me, the power of corporations, the way corporations are a potent force in the world. I found it chilling, though I'm not intellectually certain why it should be frightening to me for a corporation to have such power, while the (also intially arbitrary) concept of national sovereignty seems basically good. Or, maybe it does. I assume it does. I assume too much. This movie certainly showed me that. But I am not sure what to do. There was a website at the very end of the credits about changing oil dependency or something... maybe I can find that. I feel rather overwhelmed. Like I am part of a whole system of destructive power that I never understood, because it is not openly taught about. How are we supposed to actually be informed citizens if we are not taught basic things about the way the world is run? I see this insane dependency on oil, and I feel like whoa, we just have to stop using it right away... because it's bullshit, it's such bullshit that any substance, any thing should create such an economy of instability and need and death. But I can't do that, at least not if I wish to continue to participate in society in the ways I am accustomed to doing. What does it mean to be a part of an unjust structure? To me, as a person? How much do I have to question and fight before I can... I don't know, just rest, like I want to, and enjoy my life, enjoy that it is luxurious? Which makes it sound like I'm engaged in some kind of titantic struggle against the powers that be... I'm not! Just thinking about it exhausts me. But the situation is not right. What did they say in the film, we have, I don't know 5% of the population and spend 50% of the world's military budget, along with making 50% of its garbage?
It reminds me of this thought I keep having, with all the things I've been buying lately... like, the other day, I went to get a sandwich at this little deli, and I had to go get cash, because they didn't take a card. So I'm walking down the street with my ATM card, and I started thinking, geez, I have this card that symbolizes all the money I have. So I have this card that symbolizes paper money, that symbolizes gold which may or may not exist, that in turn symbolizes... what? My worth, I think, my worth in society. It's so odd. It's the oddest system. But it's true. I have worth in society because I am not poor. I can go and do the things I want, eat, buy clothes, whatever, because I have money as my passport. It's not true of everything, but in a large sense it is true. And that's... arbitrary and fucked up. It's totally ridiculous and impersonal. I receive personal courtesy, in places I go to, because of an assumption of my impersonal monetary worth, because I look... not rich, but like I have enough to buy what I need. And I do. So they'll be nice to me in big hotels and fancy stores, even if I don't buy anything, because I have that potential. But if I was a street person, I'd probably be back out on my ass. When, in that case, I would really need somewhere to be, if only for a little while. But the thing is... and I want to make this very clear... I love having money, I love that I make enough to buy myself things that I want, get hardcover books without flinching, buy lots of Christmas presents, or drop $50 on dinner and not panic. I want to have more... I want a truly rich and luxurious life. But... at the same time... there is so much injustice, and I am struggling hard to reconcile it all in my own mind, my own life. I do not want to feel that every time I have something lovely, somebody had to work in some degrading and ridiculous manner to make it for me, or that because I am eating a luxurious meal, someone else is starving. Which I think maybe is my fundamental problem with the mental conception of this whole thing: it isn't because of, or not directly because of. But it is while. Not because I am eating the meal, but while I am eating the meal. I think I'm struggling with this especially because of all the Christmas presents I've bought... and loved buying, I've had a wonderful time. This whole thing has produced such a feeling of competence and pride in me... like, look at what I have done for myself, look at what I am able to afford for you, I am doing a good job in the world. But I meant to give money to the Pakistani earthquake victims, I keep trying to budget it in and squeezing it out again, thinking, well, I'll wait until this and that and the other thing are paid for, and then I will write my check. And every time I go to do it, there's some other expense coming up, something I am nervous about not having enough for. So I have this sense, that people are freezing to death because I didn't put myself out to help them. I don't know if this is legitimate, or if it's a disordered way of looking at the situation. I do know that guilt doesn't help me get anything done, but I don't know how to avoid it. At the same time, guilt is a convenient veil between me and the truth, whatever that may be. Because I can stay behind my guilt and, shrouded in the unpleasant fogged feeling, not perceive with any clarity what I wish to do. Perhaps for Christmas I want some clear-seeing. Clear-seeing, and a nice dress.... it's funny, I read an article where George Clooney talks about this dilemma too, talks about the luxurious lifestyle that he loves, and talks about the desire he has to be socially just... maybe that's why his movie made this issue so present to me.
There are other things from the movie I want to talk about... like the horrible, horrible torture I definitely did not watch most of. It was so frightening... so, so frightening. The stuff leading up to it was terrifying. They grabbed George Clooney's character, Bob, and put a black sack over his head, and just that image, of him with the hood over his head was so terrifying, and then there was this shot where we saw everything through the fuzzy black. It was excruciatingly horrifying. I could just imagine it, this sudden feeling of being totally unable to tell what is happening around you, with people who are going to hurt you. And then when the Mussawi (probably not how it's spelled) guy started describing the options of torture I thought I would... I don't know what. It was just viscerally, horribly scary. I mean, having your fingernails pulled off. God. And then I wasn't really looking, just hearing these horrible noises and every now and then glancing up and seeing blood or something... but I heard Mussawi saying he was going to cut off his head, and even though I knew he wouldn't it was like everything just went blank inside me. I don't know how to describe that feeling. I had my hands over my face and it was like something shut off, I was still terrified but in addition there was this blankness. And I was imagining what it would be like, to have my head cut off, but imagining this in a very serious way... like, how would I deal with that, how could I deal with that? It's rather ridiculous, but I had this whole idea... which actually I have had before... that maybe my whole fear of decapitation actually means that somehow I will eventually die that way. I never take it too seriously, this idea, but when I am forced to deal with decapitation in some direct fashion it often comes back to me. So I was thinking, I would have to keep my dignity, but I don't know if I could, in that terrible, terrible moment when you are waiting for the blade to come down. I would want so much to be brave, because my own composure would be the only thing I had left in myself to have sovreignty over, but I don't know if I could be, if I could help begging for my life. I became a bit obsessed with the idea of one of those cyanide tablets that I read about in Gone to Soldiers, because taking my life would also be an act of sovreignty and I could avoid that most horrible moment. And, when this idea happens, I worry about the people I love, that they will find out how I died and it will be terrible, because they will know how much I hated the idea of having my head chopped off. I think that it's even more important that I make sure to stay calm and dignified so that they can have some peace. Wow, I'm realizing how bizarre this whole negative fantasy sounds. I don't know why I get this way about this particular form of execution. And torture in general... I don't know if I could stand it. I have no conception of how I would be in such a situation, none. That disturbs me. It's possible that I would be brave... it's possible that I would try to give up even people I love to make it stop... it's possible that I would die of fear or pass out or leave my body until it was over. Aside from my personal fixation on the head thing... it's all disturbing because I can do everything I want to make myself a strong, good person, and I will still never know how I would be in this circumstance, what it would take to make me betray myself and others. Not that I want to know, or to be put in a position where I have to know... but it bothers me nonetheless.
The last few days of Advent... I've done so little Advent-related this year. I didn't even get out my book. But I have had a certain favorite Advent song in my head, and I feel like it will help me close this entry:
O come, O come Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come thou dayspring from on high,
Who orders all things mightily,
To us the path of Knowledge show,
And teach us in Her ways to go.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
What does it mean if Emmanuel comes to us? I think it's interesting that for some reason Jesus is never actually called or named Emmanuel, even though it is stated clearly that he will be called so. Emmanuel... God with us. There was a line in Syriana, something like, "If we're really made in God's image and likeness, God must be fucked up." God with us... God in us? Truly, I don't know. I don't know, and I don't know if I want God to be with/in me. I mean, Jesus, that could change everything. Or it could not, but it could change me, I guess is the point. I don't know if or how this relates to the state of the world, the terrifying and destructive state of the world... I had this whole stark moment where I really felt, during the movie, that we were going to self-destruct, that the Earth would end through human folly and evil. I don't know if somehow, having Emmanuel will change that, or what I want or expect or need. Can real truth be found in a strange system of beliefs? Not just religious beliefs... all beliefs. I don't know... I just don't know. Again, in the movie, there was a subplot about a young man who becomes a suicide bomber. He is a Pakistani living in Iran, and the idea of sacrificing his life for what is great in the next life appeals to him very much. He sort of gets involved in the whole Islamic school/movement that encourages these acts because of his poverty, because they get good food at the school, and he and his father have lost their jobs thanks to the aforementioned merger, and are in danger of losing their immigration permits. His father always talked about the snow-covered mountains in Pakistan, and I found the images of snow really powerful. I really loved the young man's parts of the story... his face was gentle and interesting... and I was so appalled by the scenes leading up to his actual death. Saying goodbye to his father, when his father had no idea of what he was about to do, and especially the image of him on the boat with his partner, getting ready to blow up this big oil tanker... seeing how he went from no, I don't want to do it, to yes, I am going to do it, to this expression of peace and transcendance at the moment of impact. I think... many, many people want something, be it religion, another person, an idea or something to work on, that they can give themselves completely to, essentially making a sacrifice of themselves to this thing. It's a strong urge. It can accomplish good or bad things... but is it ever good for the person? And why do we want to do this?
Clearly that song did not help me end this. I don't know if anything really can end this, so much as pause it so that I can get on with living. But here's another try, in the name of mystery:.
People, look East, the time is near
Of the crowning of the year.
Make your house fair as you are able,
Trim the hearth and set the table,
People, look East, and sing today,
Love, the Guest, is on the way.
Furrows, be glad, though Earth is bare,
One more seed is planted there.
Give up your strength, the seed to nourish,
That in time the flower may flourish,
People, look East, and sing today,
Love, the Rose, is on the way.
Birds, though you long have ceased to build,
Guard the nest that must be filled.
Even the hour when wings are frozen,
God for fledging time has chosen,
People, look East, and sing today,
Love, the Bird, is one the way.
--Eleanor Farjeon
So, last night I went with Nathaniel and Rachel and Patrick and Mary, the latter two of whom I have not seen since summer, to see Syriana. We ended up with a choice between that, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Brokeback Mountain. While I did want to see Syriana, I was a little disappointed to be with a group of people for whom "gay cowboys" was not an immediate trump card in movie selection. I think Charlotte would classify it as one of those "not at Bryn Mawr anymore" moments. However, as I seemed to be the only one whose ears (and libido) were perking up at the concept, Syriana it was.
I'm not sure how to classify my response to this movie. It was... exhausting on many, many levels. I don't know if I've spent a more tense two hours in my life. My whole body was totally wired the entire time, and every scene, almost, I was waiting for someone to blow up or shoot someone else, or whatever. Which is kind of interesting, because that actually did not happen many, many times... it's just that the atmosphere was one of incredible tension almost all the time. More than in a fantastic movie, even, because here there was this incredibly palpable edge of reality to the horror. So it was physically and emotionally frightening, and also required rather intense intellectual attention to figure out what the hell was going on in the plot and with all the different characters. To be honest, I never figured out exactly when this was supposed to be going on. For some reason I had assumed it was in the recentish past (like, somewhere between 1980-2000, probably), and was therefore surprised when they made a brief reference to 9/11. Anyway...
It definitely impacted me, but I can't decide if it's somehow more or less of an impact because I was in such tension and terror throughout. Because of those very factors, I think I remained a little bit separate through most of it, holding myself tightly (so tightly-- my shoulders ached by the end), and therefore holding myself, not going into or merging with the story the way I did with something like Capote. It was so intense. There was just this sense of terror, tension, impending explosions pervading the whole thing. And it made me realize again the incredible importance of understanding history, and how little even the excellent instruction I received in school has given me even a semi-complete perspective on the forces and ideas that do shape the world, every day. I just don't know these things, and everything I learn about them makes me realize how much more I don't know, and on the other side how important it is to know. One thing that totally frightened me... one of the plotlines was about two big oil companies trying to affect a merger, and when they did manage to do that, they became the 25th largest economy in the world, or something like that, bigger than many countries. I know people have said things like this many, many times... but this made it make sense to me, the power of corporations, the way corporations are a potent force in the world. I found it chilling, though I'm not intellectually certain why it should be frightening to me for a corporation to have such power, while the (also intially arbitrary) concept of national sovereignty seems basically good. Or, maybe it does. I assume it does. I assume too much. This movie certainly showed me that. But I am not sure what to do. There was a website at the very end of the credits about changing oil dependency or something... maybe I can find that. I feel rather overwhelmed. Like I am part of a whole system of destructive power that I never understood, because it is not openly taught about. How are we supposed to actually be informed citizens if we are not taught basic things about the way the world is run? I see this insane dependency on oil, and I feel like whoa, we just have to stop using it right away... because it's bullshit, it's such bullshit that any substance, any thing should create such an economy of instability and need and death. But I can't do that, at least not if I wish to continue to participate in society in the ways I am accustomed to doing. What does it mean to be a part of an unjust structure? To me, as a person? How much do I have to question and fight before I can... I don't know, just rest, like I want to, and enjoy my life, enjoy that it is luxurious? Which makes it sound like I'm engaged in some kind of titantic struggle against the powers that be... I'm not! Just thinking about it exhausts me. But the situation is not right. What did they say in the film, we have, I don't know 5% of the population and spend 50% of the world's military budget, along with making 50% of its garbage?
It reminds me of this thought I keep having, with all the things I've been buying lately... like, the other day, I went to get a sandwich at this little deli, and I had to go get cash, because they didn't take a card. So I'm walking down the street with my ATM card, and I started thinking, geez, I have this card that symbolizes all the money I have. So I have this card that symbolizes paper money, that symbolizes gold which may or may not exist, that in turn symbolizes... what? My worth, I think, my worth in society. It's so odd. It's the oddest system. But it's true. I have worth in society because I am not poor. I can go and do the things I want, eat, buy clothes, whatever, because I have money as my passport. It's not true of everything, but in a large sense it is true. And that's... arbitrary and fucked up. It's totally ridiculous and impersonal. I receive personal courtesy, in places I go to, because of an assumption of my impersonal monetary worth, because I look... not rich, but like I have enough to buy what I need. And I do. So they'll be nice to me in big hotels and fancy stores, even if I don't buy anything, because I have that potential. But if I was a street person, I'd probably be back out on my ass. When, in that case, I would really need somewhere to be, if only for a little while. But the thing is... and I want to make this very clear... I love having money, I love that I make enough to buy myself things that I want, get hardcover books without flinching, buy lots of Christmas presents, or drop $50 on dinner and not panic. I want to have more... I want a truly rich and luxurious life. But... at the same time... there is so much injustice, and I am struggling hard to reconcile it all in my own mind, my own life. I do not want to feel that every time I have something lovely, somebody had to work in some degrading and ridiculous manner to make it for me, or that because I am eating a luxurious meal, someone else is starving. Which I think maybe is my fundamental problem with the mental conception of this whole thing: it isn't because of, or not directly because of. But it is while. Not because I am eating the meal, but while I am eating the meal. I think I'm struggling with this especially because of all the Christmas presents I've bought... and loved buying, I've had a wonderful time. This whole thing has produced such a feeling of competence and pride in me... like, look at what I have done for myself, look at what I am able to afford for you, I am doing a good job in the world. But I meant to give money to the Pakistani earthquake victims, I keep trying to budget it in and squeezing it out again, thinking, well, I'll wait until this and that and the other thing are paid for, and then I will write my check. And every time I go to do it, there's some other expense coming up, something I am nervous about not having enough for. So I have this sense, that people are freezing to death because I didn't put myself out to help them. I don't know if this is legitimate, or if it's a disordered way of looking at the situation. I do know that guilt doesn't help me get anything done, but I don't know how to avoid it. At the same time, guilt is a convenient veil between me and the truth, whatever that may be. Because I can stay behind my guilt and, shrouded in the unpleasant fogged feeling, not perceive with any clarity what I wish to do. Perhaps for Christmas I want some clear-seeing. Clear-seeing, and a nice dress.... it's funny, I read an article where George Clooney talks about this dilemma too, talks about the luxurious lifestyle that he loves, and talks about the desire he has to be socially just... maybe that's why his movie made this issue so present to me.
There are other things from the movie I want to talk about... like the horrible, horrible torture I definitely did not watch most of. It was so frightening... so, so frightening. The stuff leading up to it was terrifying. They grabbed George Clooney's character, Bob, and put a black sack over his head, and just that image, of him with the hood over his head was so terrifying, and then there was this shot where we saw everything through the fuzzy black. It was excruciatingly horrifying. I could just imagine it, this sudden feeling of being totally unable to tell what is happening around you, with people who are going to hurt you. And then when the Mussawi (probably not how it's spelled) guy started describing the options of torture I thought I would... I don't know what. It was just viscerally, horribly scary. I mean, having your fingernails pulled off. God. And then I wasn't really looking, just hearing these horrible noises and every now and then glancing up and seeing blood or something... but I heard Mussawi saying he was going to cut off his head, and even though I knew he wouldn't it was like everything just went blank inside me. I don't know how to describe that feeling. I had my hands over my face and it was like something shut off, I was still terrified but in addition there was this blankness. And I was imagining what it would be like, to have my head cut off, but imagining this in a very serious way... like, how would I deal with that, how could I deal with that? It's rather ridiculous, but I had this whole idea... which actually I have had before... that maybe my whole fear of decapitation actually means that somehow I will eventually die that way. I never take it too seriously, this idea, but when I am forced to deal with decapitation in some direct fashion it often comes back to me. So I was thinking, I would have to keep my dignity, but I don't know if I could, in that terrible, terrible moment when you are waiting for the blade to come down. I would want so much to be brave, because my own composure would be the only thing I had left in myself to have sovreignty over, but I don't know if I could be, if I could help begging for my life. I became a bit obsessed with the idea of one of those cyanide tablets that I read about in Gone to Soldiers, because taking my life would also be an act of sovreignty and I could avoid that most horrible moment. And, when this idea happens, I worry about the people I love, that they will find out how I died and it will be terrible, because they will know how much I hated the idea of having my head chopped off. I think that it's even more important that I make sure to stay calm and dignified so that they can have some peace. Wow, I'm realizing how bizarre this whole negative fantasy sounds. I don't know why I get this way about this particular form of execution. And torture in general... I don't know if I could stand it. I have no conception of how I would be in such a situation, none. That disturbs me. It's possible that I would be brave... it's possible that I would try to give up even people I love to make it stop... it's possible that I would die of fear or pass out or leave my body until it was over. Aside from my personal fixation on the head thing... it's all disturbing because I can do everything I want to make myself a strong, good person, and I will still never know how I would be in this circumstance, what it would take to make me betray myself and others. Not that I want to know, or to be put in a position where I have to know... but it bothers me nonetheless.
The last few days of Advent... I've done so little Advent-related this year. I didn't even get out my book. But I have had a certain favorite Advent song in my head, and I feel like it will help me close this entry:
O come, O come Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
O come thou dayspring from on high,
Who orders all things mightily,
To us the path of Knowledge show,
And teach us in Her ways to go.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
What does it mean if Emmanuel comes to us? I think it's interesting that for some reason Jesus is never actually called or named Emmanuel, even though it is stated clearly that he will be called so. Emmanuel... God with us. There was a line in Syriana, something like, "If we're really made in God's image and likeness, God must be fucked up." God with us... God in us? Truly, I don't know. I don't know, and I don't know if I want God to be with/in me. I mean, Jesus, that could change everything. Or it could not, but it could change me, I guess is the point. I don't know if or how this relates to the state of the world, the terrifying and destructive state of the world... I had this whole stark moment where I really felt, during the movie, that we were going to self-destruct, that the Earth would end through human folly and evil. I don't know if somehow, having Emmanuel will change that, or what I want or expect or need. Can real truth be found in a strange system of beliefs? Not just religious beliefs... all beliefs. I don't know... I just don't know. Again, in the movie, there was a subplot about a young man who becomes a suicide bomber. He is a Pakistani living in Iran, and the idea of sacrificing his life for what is great in the next life appeals to him very much. He sort of gets involved in the whole Islamic school/movement that encourages these acts because of his poverty, because they get good food at the school, and he and his father have lost their jobs thanks to the aforementioned merger, and are in danger of losing their immigration permits. His father always talked about the snow-covered mountains in Pakistan, and I found the images of snow really powerful. I really loved the young man's parts of the story... his face was gentle and interesting... and I was so appalled by the scenes leading up to his actual death. Saying goodbye to his father, when his father had no idea of what he was about to do, and especially the image of him on the boat with his partner, getting ready to blow up this big oil tanker... seeing how he went from no, I don't want to do it, to yes, I am going to do it, to this expression of peace and transcendance at the moment of impact. I think... many, many people want something, be it religion, another person, an idea or something to work on, that they can give themselves completely to, essentially making a sacrifice of themselves to this thing. It's a strong urge. It can accomplish good or bad things... but is it ever good for the person? And why do we want to do this?
Clearly that song did not help me end this. I don't know if anything really can end this, so much as pause it so that I can get on with living. But here's another try, in the name of mystery:.
People, look East, the time is near
Of the crowning of the year.
Make your house fair as you are able,
Trim the hearth and set the table,
People, look East, and sing today,
Love, the Guest, is on the way.
Furrows, be glad, though Earth is bare,
One more seed is planted there.
Give up your strength, the seed to nourish,
That in time the flower may flourish,
People, look East, and sing today,
Love, the Rose, is on the way.
Birds, though you long have ceased to build,
Guard the nest that must be filled.
Even the hour when wings are frozen,
God for fledging time has chosen,
People, look East, and sing today,
Love, the Bird, is one the way.
--Eleanor Farjeon
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
On Leaving the Nest
Sometimes it catches you off-guard,
on an updraft when your wings are tired,
you remember the feeling of a whole tree to explore.
Hopping from one place to the next felt
like freedom enough.
And it was enough. I was a chestnut
robin with a scarlet front, I was a
red-winged blackbird, they are always
magic. I was a dragon, hot and full of
scales. I was something
else, leaving behind the old skin, the old
memory self.
Weeping and fighting
through the night will express
demons. You can find the
clensing in the cold new light
of dawn, seen with eyes tired and
relieved, in the sudden chirping
surreally floating through the window screen.
There was a hawk we used to see,
circling above the towers and the
wind-snapped flags and the tall
yellow-leaved branches. We did not
know, we did not know, or we pretended
not to know, that we someday would have to be the
hawks, circling solitary on strong broad wings, in the
endless pale blue, looking back down on the towers
and the spirit-laden flags and the tall pencil-thin
branches. Hunting now, for our own meat
with our own claws, and never mind the
stench, the stench was ours.
It is a fearful thing
to hold yourself cheaply,
sitting in a room full of truth, and
yet when she tells me this is what I've done,
I believe her for the fierceness in her tears.
All my perceptions are upside-down, and I do
not know, I do not know, I pretend not to
know, this is because I am now
flying. All the secrets that I tell
or keep cannot change the simple fact
of strong, sore, new, uncertain wings.
I thought the grief was over but perhaps
I am now strong enough to live with it
beside me. What sparrow does not want to
cast itself into the sky, and see that it has always been
an eagle? This one, this one, only you and I
and everyone that breathes. Oh God, how is it
you have made me a pheonix, when all the other girls
are peacocks, pigeons, and nightengales? I want to
be like and with and one of. I want to stay curled
in a little home of sticks and hair and books and
passageways. I want to stop but I am already
in the sky, and I have eaten meat that I
have hunted, from lives which I have gracefully
taken, as I was meant and built
to do.
Thing is, I went to Bryn Mawr
and it hurt me. And it was not
my home. Not
now.
on an updraft when your wings are tired,
you remember the feeling of a whole tree to explore.
Hopping from one place to the next felt
like freedom enough.
And it was enough. I was a chestnut
robin with a scarlet front, I was a
red-winged blackbird, they are always
magic. I was a dragon, hot and full of
scales. I was something
else, leaving behind the old skin, the old
memory self.
Weeping and fighting
through the night will express
demons. You can find the
clensing in the cold new light
of dawn, seen with eyes tired and
relieved, in the sudden chirping
surreally floating through the window screen.
There was a hawk we used to see,
circling above the towers and the
wind-snapped flags and the tall
yellow-leaved branches. We did not
know, we did not know, or we pretended
not to know, that we someday would have to be the
hawks, circling solitary on strong broad wings, in the
endless pale blue, looking back down on the towers
and the spirit-laden flags and the tall pencil-thin
branches. Hunting now, for our own meat
with our own claws, and never mind the
stench, the stench was ours.
It is a fearful thing
to hold yourself cheaply,
sitting in a room full of truth, and
yet when she tells me this is what I've done,
I believe her for the fierceness in her tears.
All my perceptions are upside-down, and I do
not know, I do not know, I pretend not to
know, this is because I am now
flying. All the secrets that I tell
or keep cannot change the simple fact
of strong, sore, new, uncertain wings.
I thought the grief was over but perhaps
I am now strong enough to live with it
beside me. What sparrow does not want to
cast itself into the sky, and see that it has always been
an eagle? This one, this one, only you and I
and everyone that breathes. Oh God, how is it
you have made me a pheonix, when all the other girls
are peacocks, pigeons, and nightengales? I want to
be like and with and one of. I want to stay curled
in a little home of sticks and hair and books and
passageways. I want to stop but I am already
in the sky, and I have eaten meat that I
have hunted, from lives which I have gracefully
taken, as I was meant and built
to do.
Thing is, I went to Bryn Mawr
and it hurt me. And it was not
my home. Not
now.
I Know These Are MUCH More Interesting To Me Than To Anyone Else, but You Can Take it Too.
Found this in Nathaniel's Blog.
Two Names You Go By
1. Becky
2. James
Two Parts of Your Heritage
1. Irish Catholic
2. German Lutheran (I feel like my mom would be sad if I didn't also say Italian even though it didn't fit in with the contrast-making!)
Two Things That Scare You
1.Being attacked by people I pass outside at night, mostly men.
2. That I'm going to suddenly go irrevocably and cosmically wrong with my life path, and therefore sacrifice all happiness and acheivement forever.
Two of Your Everyday Essentials
Two Names You Go By
1. Becky
2. James
Two Parts of Your Heritage
1. Irish Catholic
2. German Lutheran (I feel like my mom would be sad if I didn't also say Italian even though it didn't fit in with the contrast-making!)
Two Things That Scare You
1.Being attacked by people I pass outside at night, mostly men.
2. That I'm going to suddenly go irrevocably and cosmically wrong with my life path, and therefore sacrifice all happiness and acheivement forever.
Two of Your Everyday Essentials
1. A satisfying lunch
2. A little time to read
Two Things You Are Wearing Right Now
1. Cool brown and blue suede boots with manageable heels. (Arguably the most attractive and stylish footwear that I own, being that I own very little.)
2. Brown skirt that is tighter than it used to be, which fact I am not fond of.
Two of Your Favorite Bands or Musical Artists
1. Gogol Bordello! Gypsy punk!
2. William Finn (not really a band or a musical artists, but related to music and a favorite)
Two Things You Want in a Relationship
1. A place for my spirit to be free and my imagination to be fed.
2. Sex-- at the right time and in the right way and when I'm sure it's a good idea... but also with a sort of wanton and consuming passion. Hmm.
Two Truths
1. The world can be incredibly frightening, dangerous, and savage. Which sometimes I believe, and sometimes I don't.
2. To (perhaps quote, perhaps paraphrase) Julian of Norwich: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Which sometimes I believe, and sometimes I don't.
Two of Your Favorite Hobbies
1. Theater of any stripe except certain mainstagey weird stripes that pretend to be stripes but are actually polka dots.
2. Singing-- I miss it.
Two Things You Want Really Badly
1. To be a published writer.
2. To understand my direction in life and be at peace about it.
Two Places You Want to go on Vacation
1. India
2. Canada
Two Things You Want to Do Before You Die
1. Visit every continent at least once (including Antarctica!)
2. Walk in beauty every day. And go into space. Both are difficult, but worthwhile.
Two Ways that you are stereotypically a Chick/Guy
1. Wonderful and circuitous language skills.
2. Confusion about all things mechanical, or which have to be manually assembled.
Two Things You Normally Wouldn't Admit
1. What people think of me matters to me way too much (taken from Nathaniel because he's right)
2. I think about sex, my own sexuality, and tie myself in knots over real or imagined attractions more than I would EVER say. And I get very jealous about such matters.
Two Things You Are Thinking About Now
1. How to promote a Christmas Carol at Thanksgiving.
2. If anyone other than the people I know about actually reads this journal... and whether I want them to.
Two Stores You Shop At
1. A Garland of Letters
2. The Last Word (I'm picking the cool sounding favorites, not the grocery store and stuff)
Two people I would like to see take this quiz
1. Rachel
2. Katie (Because they will read it)
Two people I haven't talked to in a while
1. Cristina (and I really should because I'm head over heels about her being in Philly)
2. Kirstin (and I really should because I'm head over heels about her being in Pennsylvania)
2. A little time to read
Two Things You Are Wearing Right Now
1. Cool brown and blue suede boots with manageable heels. (Arguably the most attractive and stylish footwear that I own, being that I own very little.)
2. Brown skirt that is tighter than it used to be, which fact I am not fond of.
Two of Your Favorite Bands or Musical Artists
1. Gogol Bordello! Gypsy punk!
2. William Finn (not really a band or a musical artists, but related to music and a favorite)
Two Things You Want in a Relationship
1. A place for my spirit to be free and my imagination to be fed.
2. Sex-- at the right time and in the right way and when I'm sure it's a good idea... but also with a sort of wanton and consuming passion. Hmm.
Two Truths
1. The world can be incredibly frightening, dangerous, and savage. Which sometimes I believe, and sometimes I don't.
2. To (perhaps quote, perhaps paraphrase) Julian of Norwich: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Which sometimes I believe, and sometimes I don't.
Two of Your Favorite Hobbies
1. Theater of any stripe except certain mainstagey weird stripes that pretend to be stripes but are actually polka dots.
2. Singing-- I miss it.
Two Things You Want Really Badly
1. To be a published writer.
2. To understand my direction in life and be at peace about it.
Two Places You Want to go on Vacation
1. India
2. Canada
Two Things You Want to Do Before You Die
1. Visit every continent at least once (including Antarctica!)
2. Walk in beauty every day. And go into space. Both are difficult, but worthwhile.
Two Ways that you are stereotypically a Chick/Guy
1. Wonderful and circuitous language skills.
2. Confusion about all things mechanical, or which have to be manually assembled.
Two Things You Normally Wouldn't Admit
1. What people think of me matters to me way too much (taken from Nathaniel because he's right)
2. I think about sex, my own sexuality, and tie myself in knots over real or imagined attractions more than I would EVER say. And I get very jealous about such matters.
Two Things You Are Thinking About Now
1. How to promote a Christmas Carol at Thanksgiving.
2. If anyone other than the people I know about actually reads this journal... and whether I want them to.
Two Stores You Shop At
1. A Garland of Letters
2. The Last Word (I'm picking the cool sounding favorites, not the grocery store and stuff)
Two people I would like to see take this quiz
1. Rachel
2. Katie (Because they will read it)
Two people I haven't talked to in a while
1. Cristina (and I really should because I'm head over heels about her being in Philly)
2. Kirstin (and I really should because I'm head over heels about her being in Pennsylvania)
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Ghosties and Ghoulies and Long-Legged Beasties
And things that go bump in the night.
This post could be so many things. I'm waiting to see what is actually going to come out of me. Because I feel that I could be philosophical, or wildly angry, or just tired. Perhaps I'll have a shot at all of them.
First, I think, the anger. Yesterday anger was definitely my deadly sin of choice. First of all, Septa is certainly aptly named, if by Septa we wish to refer to a sort of sluggish and fetid septic system: it is irritating and it stinks, but you'd sure as hell rather it worked (in its own inimitable way) than not at all. And I DO NOT want to pay the normal amount for my transpass, and then have to pay all kinds of taxi charges and walk my legs off anyway because the train and the LUCY whatever don't actually run at the right times or take me where I want to go. But I don't know if I can keep getting up at 7 AM to get to work by 9. I mean, there were ways in which it was nice today, but I'm really tired now and it's only 10 AM, and because of the show I will have to be here for about 12 more hours. Same for the walk home- generally I like it, but sometimes I like to get home and start dinner BEFORE 8 PM. Septa: YOU DO NOT STAND UP TO THE TIGER. YOU SUCK HIPPODICK. PLEASE WORK AGAIN, OR FOR THE FIRST TIME.
Then, the CREEPY FUCKING NEIGHBORS. The CREEPY FUCKING NEIGHBORS decided to decorate their CREEPY FUCKING HOUSE for Halloween with a carefully detailed assortment of bloodied and mutilated baby dolls, complete with bloody handprints all up the front columns of the house and little nooses in the trees. Fucking gross, tasteless, creepy, and disturbing. I began to cringe from passing the damn place. But, at the same time, it is their house and they can, I suppose, decorate it as they please, whether or not I find it acceptable or pleasant. Granted, I don't actually feel this way... of course, I wanted to take all their baby dolls away and paint flowers and rainbows across their windows (in a vindictive kind of way). But I do understand what is the law of the land, and it makes sense to me. So I, while not accepting their decorations as such, was prepared to live in peace. However, I'm coming home from work... after a LONG day, with irritations that may be described hereafter... and I am hungry, and I've been walking for about an hour and forty-five minutes (see above re. Septa). And I see this crowd of people outside the CREEPY FUCKING HOUSE, having, apparently, a CREEPY FUCKING PARTY. Except at first I just thought it was a party. I even felt more kindly disposed toward them... I thought, hey, they're just having a Halloween party like everybody else, obviously they just got... carried away with the babies, and probably they are normal human beings after all. The I see this man in a creepy staring mask, walking up and down the sidewalk, dragging his shovel behind him so it scrrrrrapes all along the cement, then scrrrraping it back the other way. I don't know what the man is doing. At first I do not suppose it has reference to me. (I'm not sure why I'm switching tenses wildly in this narration, but please forgive as I do not feel like going back and making it all consistent.) Then, as I get closer, he starts following me down the sidewalk. I saw his creepy blank staring leering face entirely too close to mine, and I heard his shovel dragging and scraping along behind me even when I refused to look back, and it made me shudder and put my hand to my face, and I was sooooooooooooooooo angry at him for frightening me. I was a little electric bundle of anger and fear. Right before I went in my own building, I saw this man carrying a garbage bag coming toward me out of the shadows and my whole body tensed. It was a nice old Asian man, smiling at me as he brought out his trash! But my body did not believe.
Then Rachel came home and I gave her a violet plant and a card for our cohabitation anniversary, and we decided to go to the Indian buffet because they would have dinner ready right away and that is what we required at that time. So... back out the door, back down the street, and as we got close to the CREEPY FUCKING HOUSE I began to hear that scrape scrape scraping again and I saw the masked man was still going up and down the sidewalk. He started following close to Rachel and I as we passed, and this time we were hedged in on the other side by a man in a red demonic mask leering up at us too. The blankness of the masks was the most horrible thing about it. The fact that I could not tell where their real faces began, that they could see my whole, real face with my feelings on it and all I could see of them was leering, malevolent rubber. I felt such malice, from them and toward them. I was so hungry! I wanted to scream obscenties at them in a way I have never done. I walked a bit faster, and when I turned my head and saw the red mask right beside my face, tilted in ill-intended curiosity, it was more than I could take. I don't really know how it happened, but I felt something break inside of me and suddenly I was charging down the street away from them, not running but marching as fast as I could, getting away. I walked like this until I was halfway down the next block I was trembling deep inside with anger. Anger was all I could feel, and tension, and nerves, and a terrible boiling rage with only the lid of my skull to keep it inside me. I kept marching all the way to the restaurant. Ocassionally I felt my mouth stretch in a strange nervous/bitter parody of a smile, the social-ness of my self breaking through, the feelings breaking through in a way they knew was appropriate. But mostly... tension, anger, anger, anger, tension, fear, anger, anger, rage. This wholly hot and consuming, absorbing rage, and so much tension that I flinched when a man in a doorway lit up a cigarette, the flame flashing into its small life pulling some string inside of me. I could not calm down. I could not stop feeling it, though somehow I knew that it was my choice to feel it. How both of those things could be true I don't know. When I could finally speak I began to rant about what they had done, this harrassment, how they had no right to follow me and frighten me... and Rachel said, "They're just idiots, it's Halloween." And I heard my voice passionate and trembling, rage and tears bundled and wound up inside it, saying, "I don't care what they are, I don't care what it is." No forethought in that voice, no reason. Only pain and rage, and a sort of vocal ultimatum... I remember the feeling: They are my enemies, don't ever defend them, even with their own stupidity. The sound of my voice was... striking. Different. I stewed inside my anger, on and on, and I began to wish for it to stop. I had been imagining impossible revenges, and had taken great satisfaction in imagining stumbling upon a police car, magically stopped on a curb, waiting, and telling them that there were people harassing passers-by. But at 40th st., in front of the Fresh Grocer, I imagined killing them. It didn't just cross my mind, "I'll kill them," I imagined doing it. I imagined their fear. I imagined their pain. I imagined cutting their throats and I saw the blood. I wanted to kill them for real, and I imagined it all. And as the bloody images passed through my mind, I felt my shoulders begin to relax. I felt the tension seep out of my chest.
I had been thinking just hours before about compassion, and forgiveness, for matters so far beyond being scared and harrassed in the street. And here I was with this violent, explicit, burning anger in the heart of me. And I still feel it, when I think about what happened. In some ways I love my anger, although I refuse it often and I fear it, too. But it makes me feel more powerful, to know that it is there.
I have been thinking so much lately about evil and violence... Capote, Turtles Can Fly, The Autobiography of God... it's like I asked the universe, Evil 101, please. I've been dreaming about powerful male captives that kill and charm and break away. Captives I should perhaps kill but that I never do. My dreams have been very full, very vivid, very frightening. I am always in charge, and I capture these men, and I do not kill them, and they escape again. What is this evil of my soul? What am I to do with it? Has it been there all along?
Evil. The destruction of our spirits, the desecration of our bodies, the blinding of our eyes. Evil... the chimney stacks of Auschwitz. That evil before which our whole society trembles and turns away. That skeleton face with eyes gone that will haunt me forever. Evil, evil, evil... the death of a soul. Evil in the choosing not to see, not to know the evil that is done by other hands. Evil in the silence and evil in too much speaking. Evil in killing, in dogmatism (of any kind), evil in the refusal to listen and understand. Evil in the giving in to manipulators, be they rich or poor. Evil in the rejection of the self. Evil in the mis-seeing of another. Evil in my heart. Evil in the grasping, greedy, frightened parts of the whole. Evil in putting away the things I wish to do in the name of confusion or lethargy. Sometimes I am dogged by evil, followed by it like a man with a shovel, and I can feel it dragging, hear it scraping behind me though I dare not turn around and look.
I am tired. Evil is insidious. And I do not begin to understand it. Is there something in the cross, beyond all voyueristic sadomasochistic ecstasies of pain, that can teach me about evil? Standing at an intersection to itself, wrapping evil in the mantle of holy blessedness? (Or blessedness in a cloak of evil?)
Since it is All Saint's Day, and I have the litany in my head:
Mary Magdaline my name-saint, pray for us,
Peter chosen patron, pray for us,
Sweet beloved John, pray for us,
searching Augustine, pray for us,
Martha, Mary, Miriam, pray for us,
Sarah, Hagar, and Rebekah, pray for us,
Felicity, Perpetua, pray for us,
and all forgotten women, pray for us.
Andrew and Michael, pray for us,
John XXIII, pray for us,
Frank, Patrick, and Jon, pray for us,
Uncle Alan and my brother, pray for us,
Jane Divo, Father Norcott, pray for us,
Judas and Shawna's mother, pray for us.
All who perished under evil hands, pray for us,
all the hands which dispatched them, pray for us,
Pilate, Johnson, Lincoln, Kennedy, pray for us,
Theresa and Julian, pray for us.
C.S. Lewis, Meister Eckhart, pray for us,
Rumi and Mohammed, pray for us,
Hallaj and the Bal Shem Tov, pray for us,
Margery and Margaret, pray for us,
Paul and John the Baptist, pray for us,
Chrysogonus and Blaise, pray for us,
Lucy, Anne and Catherine, pray for us,
Rachel and Elizabeth, pray for us.
All you holy men and women, pray for us.
All the mysteries, and the greatest mystery of all to me is me.
I still feel the surge of fire-anger-heat inside, and the prick of fear.
November has come. I am stepping into it; take my hand.
This post could be so many things. I'm waiting to see what is actually going to come out of me. Because I feel that I could be philosophical, or wildly angry, or just tired. Perhaps I'll have a shot at all of them.
First, I think, the anger. Yesterday anger was definitely my deadly sin of choice. First of all, Septa is certainly aptly named, if by Septa we wish to refer to a sort of sluggish and fetid septic system: it is irritating and it stinks, but you'd sure as hell rather it worked (in its own inimitable way) than not at all. And I DO NOT want to pay the normal amount for my transpass, and then have to pay all kinds of taxi charges and walk my legs off anyway because the train and the LUCY whatever don't actually run at the right times or take me where I want to go. But I don't know if I can keep getting up at 7 AM to get to work by 9. I mean, there were ways in which it was nice today, but I'm really tired now and it's only 10 AM, and because of the show I will have to be here for about 12 more hours. Same for the walk home- generally I like it, but sometimes I like to get home and start dinner BEFORE 8 PM. Septa: YOU DO NOT STAND UP TO THE TIGER. YOU SUCK HIPPODICK. PLEASE WORK AGAIN, OR FOR THE FIRST TIME.
Then, the CREEPY FUCKING NEIGHBORS. The CREEPY FUCKING NEIGHBORS decided to decorate their CREEPY FUCKING HOUSE for Halloween with a carefully detailed assortment of bloodied and mutilated baby dolls, complete with bloody handprints all up the front columns of the house and little nooses in the trees. Fucking gross, tasteless, creepy, and disturbing. I began to cringe from passing the damn place. But, at the same time, it is their house and they can, I suppose, decorate it as they please, whether or not I find it acceptable or pleasant. Granted, I don't actually feel this way... of course, I wanted to take all their baby dolls away and paint flowers and rainbows across their windows (in a vindictive kind of way). But I do understand what is the law of the land, and it makes sense to me. So I, while not accepting their decorations as such, was prepared to live in peace. However, I'm coming home from work... after a LONG day, with irritations that may be described hereafter... and I am hungry, and I've been walking for about an hour and forty-five minutes (see above re. Septa). And I see this crowd of people outside the CREEPY FUCKING HOUSE, having, apparently, a CREEPY FUCKING PARTY. Except at first I just thought it was a party. I even felt more kindly disposed toward them... I thought, hey, they're just having a Halloween party like everybody else, obviously they just got... carried away with the babies, and probably they are normal human beings after all. The I see this man in a creepy staring mask, walking up and down the sidewalk, dragging his shovel behind him so it scrrrrrapes all along the cement, then scrrrraping it back the other way. I don't know what the man is doing. At first I do not suppose it has reference to me. (I'm not sure why I'm switching tenses wildly in this narration, but please forgive as I do not feel like going back and making it all consistent.) Then, as I get closer, he starts following me down the sidewalk. I saw his creepy blank staring leering face entirely too close to mine, and I heard his shovel dragging and scraping along behind me even when I refused to look back, and it made me shudder and put my hand to my face, and I was sooooooooooooooooo angry at him for frightening me. I was a little electric bundle of anger and fear. Right before I went in my own building, I saw this man carrying a garbage bag coming toward me out of the shadows and my whole body tensed. It was a nice old Asian man, smiling at me as he brought out his trash! But my body did not believe.
Then Rachel came home and I gave her a violet plant and a card for our cohabitation anniversary, and we decided to go to the Indian buffet because they would have dinner ready right away and that is what we required at that time. So... back out the door, back down the street, and as we got close to the CREEPY FUCKING HOUSE I began to hear that scrape scrape scraping again and I saw the masked man was still going up and down the sidewalk. He started following close to Rachel and I as we passed, and this time we were hedged in on the other side by a man in a red demonic mask leering up at us too. The blankness of the masks was the most horrible thing about it. The fact that I could not tell where their real faces began, that they could see my whole, real face with my feelings on it and all I could see of them was leering, malevolent rubber. I felt such malice, from them and toward them. I was so hungry! I wanted to scream obscenties at them in a way I have never done. I walked a bit faster, and when I turned my head and saw the red mask right beside my face, tilted in ill-intended curiosity, it was more than I could take. I don't really know how it happened, but I felt something break inside of me and suddenly I was charging down the street away from them, not running but marching as fast as I could, getting away. I walked like this until I was halfway down the next block I was trembling deep inside with anger. Anger was all I could feel, and tension, and nerves, and a terrible boiling rage with only the lid of my skull to keep it inside me. I kept marching all the way to the restaurant. Ocassionally I felt my mouth stretch in a strange nervous/bitter parody of a smile, the social-ness of my self breaking through, the feelings breaking through in a way they knew was appropriate. But mostly... tension, anger, anger, anger, tension, fear, anger, anger, rage. This wholly hot and consuming, absorbing rage, and so much tension that I flinched when a man in a doorway lit up a cigarette, the flame flashing into its small life pulling some string inside of me. I could not calm down. I could not stop feeling it, though somehow I knew that it was my choice to feel it. How both of those things could be true I don't know. When I could finally speak I began to rant about what they had done, this harrassment, how they had no right to follow me and frighten me... and Rachel said, "They're just idiots, it's Halloween." And I heard my voice passionate and trembling, rage and tears bundled and wound up inside it, saying, "I don't care what they are, I don't care what it is." No forethought in that voice, no reason. Only pain and rage, and a sort of vocal ultimatum... I remember the feeling: They are my enemies, don't ever defend them, even with their own stupidity. The sound of my voice was... striking. Different. I stewed inside my anger, on and on, and I began to wish for it to stop. I had been imagining impossible revenges, and had taken great satisfaction in imagining stumbling upon a police car, magically stopped on a curb, waiting, and telling them that there were people harassing passers-by. But at 40th st., in front of the Fresh Grocer, I imagined killing them. It didn't just cross my mind, "I'll kill them," I imagined doing it. I imagined their fear. I imagined their pain. I imagined cutting their throats and I saw the blood. I wanted to kill them for real, and I imagined it all. And as the bloody images passed through my mind, I felt my shoulders begin to relax. I felt the tension seep out of my chest.
I had been thinking just hours before about compassion, and forgiveness, for matters so far beyond being scared and harrassed in the street. And here I was with this violent, explicit, burning anger in the heart of me. And I still feel it, when I think about what happened. In some ways I love my anger, although I refuse it often and I fear it, too. But it makes me feel more powerful, to know that it is there.
I have been thinking so much lately about evil and violence... Capote, Turtles Can Fly, The Autobiography of God... it's like I asked the universe, Evil 101, please. I've been dreaming about powerful male captives that kill and charm and break away. Captives I should perhaps kill but that I never do. My dreams have been very full, very vivid, very frightening. I am always in charge, and I capture these men, and I do not kill them, and they escape again. What is this evil of my soul? What am I to do with it? Has it been there all along?
Evil. The destruction of our spirits, the desecration of our bodies, the blinding of our eyes. Evil... the chimney stacks of Auschwitz. That evil before which our whole society trembles and turns away. That skeleton face with eyes gone that will haunt me forever. Evil, evil, evil... the death of a soul. Evil in the choosing not to see, not to know the evil that is done by other hands. Evil in the silence and evil in too much speaking. Evil in killing, in dogmatism (of any kind), evil in the refusal to listen and understand. Evil in the giving in to manipulators, be they rich or poor. Evil in the rejection of the self. Evil in the mis-seeing of another. Evil in my heart. Evil in the grasping, greedy, frightened parts of the whole. Evil in putting away the things I wish to do in the name of confusion or lethargy. Sometimes I am dogged by evil, followed by it like a man with a shovel, and I can feel it dragging, hear it scraping behind me though I dare not turn around and look.
I am tired. Evil is insidious. And I do not begin to understand it. Is there something in the cross, beyond all voyueristic sadomasochistic ecstasies of pain, that can teach me about evil? Standing at an intersection to itself, wrapping evil in the mantle of holy blessedness? (Or blessedness in a cloak of evil?)
Since it is All Saint's Day, and I have the litany in my head:
Mary Magdaline my name-saint, pray for us,
Peter chosen patron, pray for us,
Sweet beloved John, pray for us,
searching Augustine, pray for us,
Martha, Mary, Miriam, pray for us,
Sarah, Hagar, and Rebekah, pray for us,
Felicity, Perpetua, pray for us,
and all forgotten women, pray for us.
Andrew and Michael, pray for us,
John XXIII, pray for us,
Frank, Patrick, and Jon, pray for us,
Uncle Alan and my brother, pray for us,
Jane Divo, Father Norcott, pray for us,
Judas and Shawna's mother, pray for us.
All who perished under evil hands, pray for us,
all the hands which dispatched them, pray for us,
Pilate, Johnson, Lincoln, Kennedy, pray for us,
Theresa and Julian, pray for us.
C.S. Lewis, Meister Eckhart, pray for us,
Rumi and Mohammed, pray for us,
Hallaj and the Bal Shem Tov, pray for us,
Margery and Margaret, pray for us,
Paul and John the Baptist, pray for us,
Chrysogonus and Blaise, pray for us,
Lucy, Anne and Catherine, pray for us,
Rachel and Elizabeth, pray for us.
All you holy men and women, pray for us.
All the mysteries, and the greatest mystery of all to me is me.
I still feel the surge of fire-anger-heat inside, and the prick of fear.
November has come. I am stepping into it; take my hand.
Friday, October 14, 2005
On Graduate School and the Research Process Thereof
It's been such a long time since I said anything here. I realized that, while I may not have hoards of readers, nonetheless they may grow bored with continued silence and seek other forms of entertainment.
That, and I sort of want to bitch about grad school.
Grad school is weird. I don't understand it. I feel a little slighted because I am not receiving the volumes of mail I did for undergrad, but beyond that, it is simply difficult for me to sort through the many, many programs that exist without something physical to look at, read over, and judge from. I don't know if I'm doing this for the right reasons, but to be honest I feel rather trapped. I certainly don't want to wake up ten years from now and find that I've climbed some sort of theater management ladder and am doing more of the same in a more high-powered way. Which, when I put it that way, doesn't sound too horrible. But it's not what I want... If school is weird, offices are ten times weirder. I find myself saying my new job (Marketing and Public Relations Assistant) with pride because I think it's a cool title and because I expect that people will be impressed, not because I think it's a fantastic thing to do. So, it's clear that continuing a long time on this path is not for me.
Of course, arguably this whole Merriam thing is just my day job, and nobody's day job is her passion, right? Arguably, I have Uncut Pages to fuel me and satiate my creative appetite. Another tricky question... because no one else in Uncut Pages is, in fact, solely working a day job and biding time until the next project. Which means I must either cut my strings and go it alone, or twiddle my thumbs while everyone else engages in stimulating activities. The question of what I would do if that were not the case looms large, but I truly don't know how to answer it. If everyone else in the group was totally gung ho about working as they needed to keep body and soul together, but otherwise devoting the majority of free time and energy to Uncut Pages, would that be enough for me, too? Not that I'm expecting or truly wanting anyone to do that... but would I be satisfied then without school in my life? Sometimes it seems that way... and it's easy to get caught up in confusion and the illusion that others can control the way I live my life. If they would just answer their surveys, I would know what to do... right? And the idea of losing the enterprise, of letting it drift slowly to an end before it's really begun... well, it fills me with a painful sort of panic, and I'm not even entirely sure where it's coming from. Perhaps I feel that this is my last chance to create my great adventure. But, if it comes right down to that, there's something in me that says I would still want to do this, even if Uncut Pages full time was a totally viable option. I hope that something is right and true. It seems very important to me. I'm quite afraid that I'm going to school as a sort of "everyone else is doing it/better than the other options" measure. And that seems... wrong. It seems like, if that is really the case, then I should not go. But not going... feels wrong, too.
When I first left college, I felt a sort of compulsive desire to return to school. Partially because school was familiar and I knew what to expect. After all, the vast majority of my life has been spent in school. At that time, just a few months after leaving, it felt extremely urgent. I needed to be studying, reading scholastic things, doing research, etc. Yet somehow I didn't need it enough to apply, not then anyway. Now it feels less urgent, somehow. I've seen that it's perfectly possible to survive without school, and have an interesting (and in some ways more relaxed!) time. I still think, I still read, I still have exciting ideas. But this time, maybe because it is less necessary, I am taking more concrete steps toward application. In the form of serious sustained research of schools, and signing up for the bitch of an English subject GRE. As stupid, insane, uneccessary, stiltified, prejuicidal, gratuitously expensive, and plain ridiculous as the thing is, I am in some ways clinging to the fact that I've registered and to my preparations for it... because it's concrete and clear, and it is something I have accomplished and can continue to accomplish in definite ways. You would think the applications might feel that way too... but in truth the applications just feel scary as hell.
Ok. Time to break it down a bit. Why do I want to go to grad school and in what? Last year, I was really gung-ho about the Comp Lit, despite the fact that I do not have a third language, let alone a fourth as many schools require. I felt that Comp Lit was my home, I understood it, I was fucking good at it, it narrowed the list of schools a bit, and, most importantly, I could continue to float around in interdisciplinary land; I could retain my precious transgressive flexibility. Maud's email on the subject confused me (in positive and negative ways) to the point where I stopped looking at schools for almost a year. Well, to be fair, I'm sure it was not entirely Maud's email that did this, but let's use it as a talking point. Maud said she did not recommend grad school in comp lit, because it was difficult, the resources were scattered, and you came out less employable. Also, I was not yet qualified for "any comp lit program worth its salt," because I do not have a second foreign language... whereas, in an English program, my Spanish would serve as a powerful asset. She suggested doing English or "something else altogether," like this gender studies thing her friend was running. I feel like I should have taken into consideration the fact that Maud did her degree some time ago at an institution I was not really considering, but in the long run... I basically took it on faith, abandoned (though not immediately) my Comp Lit search, and began to look at the English programs at schools she recommened for me-- Harvard, Yale, Duke, Princeton, UCLA, UVA... all completely big-shot, top of the top sorts of places... the other part that floored me. She seemed to take it for granted that I was qualified for such schools, that such schools would be the natural places for me to consider continuing my education. I hadn't quite grasped that...that my undergraduate education and performance has, in fact, made me more attractive academically than I was when applying to college. It makes sense... it just hadn't quite occured to me. So it took me awhile to deal with that. And now... well, I'm excited. :) I want to be the best. I just hope these schools are actually, also, the best for me. I hope I end up doing this, all of it, for the right reasons.
And there are so many reasons... I want to be cool, I want people to talk about me and say, wow, she's going to ______, I knew she was smart, but I didn't know she was that smart. I want to be the first one in my family to get a PhD. I want to show my parents, and my uncles, and my cousins, and my teachers, and my friends... and my not-friends... that I, in fact, am the smartest bitch they're likely to know, and that is enough to excuse all the awkward moments, all the lack of boyfriends or a driver's license, the derth of knowledge on feminine arts of beauty... because there was always something greater in me, because I am, perhaps, an excuseable genius. Hmm. It's not them I want to show, really, is it? It's me. I have these problems with myself and I have this need to enhance my own opinion. And that's there. That's totally there, right beside my applications and my study book and my number two pencils (which I don't have yet but should buy before the exam). If I can't be the absolute 100% best, I at least have to show that I'm as good as anybody else out there. All right, so... let's not call it a bad reason, per se, let's just say it's an unachievable one. As long as that frosty drive is inside of me, it will never, never, never be satisfied. I could graduate from all of those institutions at the same time, and it would say that there was something left undone.
Writing that paragraph left me very nervous. Autumn cleaning? I hope so.
So... as of now, the list stands at Harvard (both for English, which boasts an impressive list of names and less exciting courses and for their Divinity School, which I stumbled on by chance, and which is so impractical and so enchanting--Amy Hollywood from my thesis, and tons of classes I want to take. Also Lilah.), Duke (for English. The friendliest, most complete and helpful website ever, and apparently they're very highly ranked for gender studies within the English field. And the classes sound wonderful.), Cornell (for MFA in Creative Writing leading into PhD in English--nifty little program, also very close to Syracuse-home. I think I found a couple of classes I like), NYU (for Comparative Lit, I think, one of the first programs I looked at, and the last Comp Lit holdout... it's beautifully funded, I like the organization of the program, and I promised Charlotte), Yale (for English, mostly because Rachel's into it... like Harvard, lovely professors, less exciting class descriptions. Also, in earlier years for some reason I always liked the idea of Yale better than Harvard, so it seems odd to just apply to the latter.) Not a bad list, you say, and it isn't. It just feels so... random. I'm entertaining a casual flirtation with Drew University, too, and I still want to look up Chicago, and Princeton one last time, because I remember being so impressed with them as an undergrad. Might want to take a gander at the D.C. options too, just because I still would love to get a chance to live and work there. I feel like a safety school or two wouldn't hurt, either. And there was that program in Madrid.... Any input would be lovely.
I was supposed to decide by today, and email my potential recommenders. I know I have to, but the idea of it is so nervewracking. But I can't let it get much later. I don't want this to slip by me again.
What is it I need? Is it patience and faith, that it will all work out somehow? Or perhaps a more decisive and dilligent approach? I try to remind myself that college was once this uncertain, and I agonized over my choices. I only hope something like Bryn Mawr, or the Bryn Mawr-esque experience (in terms of personal fit and importance) emerges now.
I feel like there is endlessly more to say, but this has gone on long enough, and should be posted. More on this and other topics soon, especially if it continues to be this slow at work.
That, and I sort of want to bitch about grad school.
Grad school is weird. I don't understand it. I feel a little slighted because I am not receiving the volumes of mail I did for undergrad, but beyond that, it is simply difficult for me to sort through the many, many programs that exist without something physical to look at, read over, and judge from. I don't know if I'm doing this for the right reasons, but to be honest I feel rather trapped. I certainly don't want to wake up ten years from now and find that I've climbed some sort of theater management ladder and am doing more of the same in a more high-powered way. Which, when I put it that way, doesn't sound too horrible. But it's not what I want... If school is weird, offices are ten times weirder. I find myself saying my new job (Marketing and Public Relations Assistant) with pride because I think it's a cool title and because I expect that people will be impressed, not because I think it's a fantastic thing to do. So, it's clear that continuing a long time on this path is not for me.
Of course, arguably this whole Merriam thing is just my day job, and nobody's day job is her passion, right? Arguably, I have Uncut Pages to fuel me and satiate my creative appetite. Another tricky question... because no one else in Uncut Pages is, in fact, solely working a day job and biding time until the next project. Which means I must either cut my strings and go it alone, or twiddle my thumbs while everyone else engages in stimulating activities. The question of what I would do if that were not the case looms large, but I truly don't know how to answer it. If everyone else in the group was totally gung ho about working as they needed to keep body and soul together, but otherwise devoting the majority of free time and energy to Uncut Pages, would that be enough for me, too? Not that I'm expecting or truly wanting anyone to do that... but would I be satisfied then without school in my life? Sometimes it seems that way... and it's easy to get caught up in confusion and the illusion that others can control the way I live my life. If they would just answer their surveys, I would know what to do... right? And the idea of losing the enterprise, of letting it drift slowly to an end before it's really begun... well, it fills me with a painful sort of panic, and I'm not even entirely sure where it's coming from. Perhaps I feel that this is my last chance to create my great adventure. But, if it comes right down to that, there's something in me that says I would still want to do this, even if Uncut Pages full time was a totally viable option. I hope that something is right and true. It seems very important to me. I'm quite afraid that I'm going to school as a sort of "everyone else is doing it/better than the other options" measure. And that seems... wrong. It seems like, if that is really the case, then I should not go. But not going... feels wrong, too.
When I first left college, I felt a sort of compulsive desire to return to school. Partially because school was familiar and I knew what to expect. After all, the vast majority of my life has been spent in school. At that time, just a few months after leaving, it felt extremely urgent. I needed to be studying, reading scholastic things, doing research, etc. Yet somehow I didn't need it enough to apply, not then anyway. Now it feels less urgent, somehow. I've seen that it's perfectly possible to survive without school, and have an interesting (and in some ways more relaxed!) time. I still think, I still read, I still have exciting ideas. But this time, maybe because it is less necessary, I am taking more concrete steps toward application. In the form of serious sustained research of schools, and signing up for the bitch of an English subject GRE. As stupid, insane, uneccessary, stiltified, prejuicidal, gratuitously expensive, and plain ridiculous as the thing is, I am in some ways clinging to the fact that I've registered and to my preparations for it... because it's concrete and clear, and it is something I have accomplished and can continue to accomplish in definite ways. You would think the applications might feel that way too... but in truth the applications just feel scary as hell.
Ok. Time to break it down a bit. Why do I want to go to grad school and in what? Last year, I was really gung-ho about the Comp Lit, despite the fact that I do not have a third language, let alone a fourth as many schools require. I felt that Comp Lit was my home, I understood it, I was fucking good at it, it narrowed the list of schools a bit, and, most importantly, I could continue to float around in interdisciplinary land; I could retain my precious transgressive flexibility. Maud's email on the subject confused me (in positive and negative ways) to the point where I stopped looking at schools for almost a year. Well, to be fair, I'm sure it was not entirely Maud's email that did this, but let's use it as a talking point. Maud said she did not recommend grad school in comp lit, because it was difficult, the resources were scattered, and you came out less employable. Also, I was not yet qualified for "any comp lit program worth its salt," because I do not have a second foreign language... whereas, in an English program, my Spanish would serve as a powerful asset. She suggested doing English or "something else altogether," like this gender studies thing her friend was running. I feel like I should have taken into consideration the fact that Maud did her degree some time ago at an institution I was not really considering, but in the long run... I basically took it on faith, abandoned (though not immediately) my Comp Lit search, and began to look at the English programs at schools she recommened for me-- Harvard, Yale, Duke, Princeton, UCLA, UVA... all completely big-shot, top of the top sorts of places... the other part that floored me. She seemed to take it for granted that I was qualified for such schools, that such schools would be the natural places for me to consider continuing my education. I hadn't quite grasped that...that my undergraduate education and performance has, in fact, made me more attractive academically than I was when applying to college. It makes sense... it just hadn't quite occured to me. So it took me awhile to deal with that. And now... well, I'm excited. :) I want to be the best. I just hope these schools are actually, also, the best for me. I hope I end up doing this, all of it, for the right reasons.
And there are so many reasons... I want to be cool, I want people to talk about me and say, wow, she's going to ______, I knew she was smart, but I didn't know she was that smart. I want to be the first one in my family to get a PhD. I want to show my parents, and my uncles, and my cousins, and my teachers, and my friends... and my not-friends... that I, in fact, am the smartest bitch they're likely to know, and that is enough to excuse all the awkward moments, all the lack of boyfriends or a driver's license, the derth of knowledge on feminine arts of beauty... because there was always something greater in me, because I am, perhaps, an excuseable genius. Hmm. It's not them I want to show, really, is it? It's me. I have these problems with myself and I have this need to enhance my own opinion. And that's there. That's totally there, right beside my applications and my study book and my number two pencils (which I don't have yet but should buy before the exam). If I can't be the absolute 100% best, I at least have to show that I'm as good as anybody else out there. All right, so... let's not call it a bad reason, per se, let's just say it's an unachievable one. As long as that frosty drive is inside of me, it will never, never, never be satisfied. I could graduate from all of those institutions at the same time, and it would say that there was something left undone.
Writing that paragraph left me very nervous. Autumn cleaning? I hope so.
So... as of now, the list stands at Harvard (both for English, which boasts an impressive list of names and less exciting courses and for their Divinity School, which I stumbled on by chance, and which is so impractical and so enchanting--Amy Hollywood from my thesis, and tons of classes I want to take. Also Lilah.), Duke (for English. The friendliest, most complete and helpful website ever, and apparently they're very highly ranked for gender studies within the English field. And the classes sound wonderful.), Cornell (for MFA in Creative Writing leading into PhD in English--nifty little program, also very close to Syracuse-home. I think I found a couple of classes I like), NYU (for Comparative Lit, I think, one of the first programs I looked at, and the last Comp Lit holdout... it's beautifully funded, I like the organization of the program, and I promised Charlotte), Yale (for English, mostly because Rachel's into it... like Harvard, lovely professors, less exciting class descriptions. Also, in earlier years for some reason I always liked the idea of Yale better than Harvard, so it seems odd to just apply to the latter.) Not a bad list, you say, and it isn't. It just feels so... random. I'm entertaining a casual flirtation with Drew University, too, and I still want to look up Chicago, and Princeton one last time, because I remember being so impressed with them as an undergrad. Might want to take a gander at the D.C. options too, just because I still would love to get a chance to live and work there. I feel like a safety school or two wouldn't hurt, either. And there was that program in Madrid.... Any input would be lovely.
I was supposed to decide by today, and email my potential recommenders. I know I have to, but the idea of it is so nervewracking. But I can't let it get much later. I don't want this to slip by me again.
What is it I need? Is it patience and faith, that it will all work out somehow? Or perhaps a more decisive and dilligent approach? I try to remind myself that college was once this uncertain, and I agonized over my choices. I only hope something like Bryn Mawr, or the Bryn Mawr-esque experience (in terms of personal fit and importance) emerges now.
I feel like there is endlessly more to say, but this has gone on long enough, and should be posted. More on this and other topics soon, especially if it continues to be this slow at work.
Friday, August 26, 2005
One Show Left, or The Post About Everything Ever
So much... so much... SO MUCH has happened, is happening. There are so many things to say. And I'm not entirely sure why I'm writing this, except that I want contact with someone, something, and half the apartment is cavorting at a bar, one quarter of it is cavorting in the shower, and the other eighth (excepting myself), is in some sort of catatonic state on the floor.
The problem with writing after so long is that I feel an obligation to catch up, and if I tried to do that now, I would be here for the next several months.
My God, the Fringe. The Fringe, my show, the Fringe, the apartment, the Fringe. Can I just say I feel everything about it? I feel everything about it. I feel that it is going wonderfully and horribly, and I love it and hate it, and all the gradations and shades in between. I know I couldn't keep this up for that much longer, but the fact that tomorrow is our last show might also break my heart. For good reasons and bad ones. Good reasons like love and wonder and delight in what we have done, are doing, in the talent and energy and the amazing women all around me. Bad reasons like panic over Philadelphia, and fear, the terrible cankerous fear of the moment when we all are definitively split. Fear that the moment has come and gone already, and that I am singularly disposable, less-than-ardently loved.
My own need to be loved haunts me. There's very little I can say about it without cringing. It follows me like a child, like a parasite... the more I hate it, the more it grows in power.
Well, and. And I saw a wonderful show tonight. It said lots of things, some things beautiful, some difficult, some weird. It was about terrorism, I guess, but about the terrorism in our hearts, too. Some of the things it said were so much like the things I was trying to say in my play. It was extremely frightening. I loved it, although it was sometimes extremely hard to handle. I think I sort of want to talk about it, but Crista has disappeared, and Rachel hated it so much she practically fled through the streets of New York to get away from it, which was extraordinarilly irritating for those of us trying to keep up with her. (I think you got that message from me, anyway, Rachel, but if not I apologize, because I don't want to be one of those weird passive-aggressive types who vents her frustration only in a private-public forum such as this one.)
So whatever... I mean, I'm annoyed... in fact, there are lots of little annoyances adding up to a little flame of anger inside of me, though the anger is not for anyone in particular, it just... is. I think mostly I'm lonely. Which is an odd thing in an apartment full of people. Or maybe it's to be expected. Why am I so concerned with having a place? Why do I need to be loved, not just at all, but in the right amounts by the right people at the right times?
I mean... it isn't all the time, but it's enough. The strange squeezed feeling inside, and the way I click, suddenly, into some kind of tunnel vision. I want to feel important! I may as well be honest. But inside I feel greedy, and grasping, and strange, for wanting this. And I hate being angry, but at the same time I can feel myself making decisions about it. Like, going down the street after Rachel, I could feel the anger come and offer itself, I could feel the warring desires to move toward it and away... the need to stay with the depth and the open space in me from the play vs. the need to be tethered and responsive to other people's feelings. What I don't feel is the moment of decision. I just seem to slip by, from one to the other, and then it has occurred, and my distress at that fact serves mostly to entrap me the more.
What is it that would be enough? When I was walking down the street, I had a moment of clarity, and before that while sitting and watching the play. In the play it was about compassion, about the tricky, particular nature of compassion, and the simplicity of it, that it is compassion that is holy and filled with truth, and compassion that tells the truth to our hearts in the face of horror and confusion and pain. Walking down the street, I was arm in arm with Crista and I realized that connecting is what matters, connecting with whomever is beside you, with as many people as you find... that it isn't who or for how long that detirmines connection and love, but only the magic that happens, between so many people. Like that old footprints on the heart thing, I guess... but it was very powerful. It made me see that I have not lost the people I loved, that the love is real even if it is only for a little while.
But somehow I moved from that to the complete particularity of anger, self-pity, grief. Anger at being abandoned, self-pity at same, grief at losing. Perhaps I am just afraid to be alone with myself... not to tangle myself up in my feelings but simply to be with them. I don't know, but I want to tell someone, Please don't go. Please don't forget me, Please love me. I'm here, please love me enough, love me with an ardent sort of echo in your eyes. Notice all the things about me that no-one has, and tell me so that I should know.
Am I talking to a friend, many friends, a lover, someone I want? Am I talking to God? No, I don't think it's God. Am I talking to me?
Weechee-in. Help me.
At the play there was a warm certainty. You must pray, I thought to myself, you must pray, pray and be full of compassion. But when I thought of prayers, of praying, of the supplicating act, that was not it. That was not what the warm certainty was asking for. My faith is perhaps being shredded by claws. Perhaps they are divine claws, or my own. Perhaps I shall make scarves out of the tatters.
The woman in the play said that great things are seen, are built, are understood through bodies and bloodshed and seeing such things. She did not name the cross, but I thought of it. She was wrong, I know that she was wrong. Or... that's not it. She was right. But there is another way. Make eyeholes in the mask of my beliefs, let me see it, let me see.
Then there is the voice that says I am afraid to see, that I am afraid always, that I am... Well, you know all about it. My God-- just realized I've turned into Professor Dilexi. Stuck between going forward and going back, between the unknown something and the known purgatory. Limbo! Like Bingo only less singing involved.
All right. Starting to ramble now. One show tomorrow. One show left. I'm scared. I feel sort of pierced. I will see my aunt tomorrow. Why doesn't my father call me back? Why doesn't he want to see me? Well, that's another thing.
One show left, one show. I do love you, you know.
The problem with writing after so long is that I feel an obligation to catch up, and if I tried to do that now, I would be here for the next several months.
My God, the Fringe. The Fringe, my show, the Fringe, the apartment, the Fringe. Can I just say I feel everything about it? I feel everything about it. I feel that it is going wonderfully and horribly, and I love it and hate it, and all the gradations and shades in between. I know I couldn't keep this up for that much longer, but the fact that tomorrow is our last show might also break my heart. For good reasons and bad ones. Good reasons like love and wonder and delight in what we have done, are doing, in the talent and energy and the amazing women all around me. Bad reasons like panic over Philadelphia, and fear, the terrible cankerous fear of the moment when we all are definitively split. Fear that the moment has come and gone already, and that I am singularly disposable, less-than-ardently loved.
My own need to be loved haunts me. There's very little I can say about it without cringing. It follows me like a child, like a parasite... the more I hate it, the more it grows in power.
Well, and. And I saw a wonderful show tonight. It said lots of things, some things beautiful, some difficult, some weird. It was about terrorism, I guess, but about the terrorism in our hearts, too. Some of the things it said were so much like the things I was trying to say in my play. It was extremely frightening. I loved it, although it was sometimes extremely hard to handle. I think I sort of want to talk about it, but Crista has disappeared, and Rachel hated it so much she practically fled through the streets of New York to get away from it, which was extraordinarilly irritating for those of us trying to keep up with her. (I think you got that message from me, anyway, Rachel, but if not I apologize, because I don't want to be one of those weird passive-aggressive types who vents her frustration only in a private-public forum such as this one.)
So whatever... I mean, I'm annoyed... in fact, there are lots of little annoyances adding up to a little flame of anger inside of me, though the anger is not for anyone in particular, it just... is. I think mostly I'm lonely. Which is an odd thing in an apartment full of people. Or maybe it's to be expected. Why am I so concerned with having a place? Why do I need to be loved, not just at all, but in the right amounts by the right people at the right times?
I mean... it isn't all the time, but it's enough. The strange squeezed feeling inside, and the way I click, suddenly, into some kind of tunnel vision. I want to feel important! I may as well be honest. But inside I feel greedy, and grasping, and strange, for wanting this. And I hate being angry, but at the same time I can feel myself making decisions about it. Like, going down the street after Rachel, I could feel the anger come and offer itself, I could feel the warring desires to move toward it and away... the need to stay with the depth and the open space in me from the play vs. the need to be tethered and responsive to other people's feelings. What I don't feel is the moment of decision. I just seem to slip by, from one to the other, and then it has occurred, and my distress at that fact serves mostly to entrap me the more.
What is it that would be enough? When I was walking down the street, I had a moment of clarity, and before that while sitting and watching the play. In the play it was about compassion, about the tricky, particular nature of compassion, and the simplicity of it, that it is compassion that is holy and filled with truth, and compassion that tells the truth to our hearts in the face of horror and confusion and pain. Walking down the street, I was arm in arm with Crista and I realized that connecting is what matters, connecting with whomever is beside you, with as many people as you find... that it isn't who or for how long that detirmines connection and love, but only the magic that happens, between so many people. Like that old footprints on the heart thing, I guess... but it was very powerful. It made me see that I have not lost the people I loved, that the love is real even if it is only for a little while.
But somehow I moved from that to the complete particularity of anger, self-pity, grief. Anger at being abandoned, self-pity at same, grief at losing. Perhaps I am just afraid to be alone with myself... not to tangle myself up in my feelings but simply to be with them. I don't know, but I want to tell someone, Please don't go. Please don't forget me, Please love me. I'm here, please love me enough, love me with an ardent sort of echo in your eyes. Notice all the things about me that no-one has, and tell me so that I should know.
Am I talking to a friend, many friends, a lover, someone I want? Am I talking to God? No, I don't think it's God. Am I talking to me?
Weechee-in. Help me.
At the play there was a warm certainty. You must pray, I thought to myself, you must pray, pray and be full of compassion. But when I thought of prayers, of praying, of the supplicating act, that was not it. That was not what the warm certainty was asking for. My faith is perhaps being shredded by claws. Perhaps they are divine claws, or my own. Perhaps I shall make scarves out of the tatters.
The woman in the play said that great things are seen, are built, are understood through bodies and bloodshed and seeing such things. She did not name the cross, but I thought of it. She was wrong, I know that she was wrong. Or... that's not it. She was right. But there is another way. Make eyeholes in the mask of my beliefs, let me see it, let me see.
Then there is the voice that says I am afraid to see, that I am afraid always, that I am... Well, you know all about it. My God-- just realized I've turned into Professor Dilexi. Stuck between going forward and going back, between the unknown something and the known purgatory. Limbo! Like Bingo only less singing involved.
All right. Starting to ramble now. One show tomorrow. One show left. I'm scared. I feel sort of pierced. I will see my aunt tomorrow. Why doesn't my father call me back? Why doesn't he want to see me? Well, that's another thing.
One show left, one show. I do love you, you know.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
I Want to Post!
But I have to go to work.
Hello, Rachel and Katie and anybody else reading this.
I will actually communicate soon.
Just one thought-- why, whenever I am not clearly busy and focused, do I experience a strange feeling of panic about whatever tasks I have not yet done? And seem to think that such tasks are impossible because of a certain deficiency within myself? This is obviously incorrect thinking...
But I am uncertain about my relationship to work and busy-ness and accomplishment. That is, it seems to be often a negative cycle, working to not experience bad feelings rather than to experience good ones. Anybody else feel this way?
Damn, I really do have to go to work.
Hello, Rachel and Katie and anybody else reading this.
I will actually communicate soon.
Just one thought-- why, whenever I am not clearly busy and focused, do I experience a strange feeling of panic about whatever tasks I have not yet done? And seem to think that such tasks are impossible because of a certain deficiency within myself? This is obviously incorrect thinking...
But I am uncertain about my relationship to work and busy-ness and accomplishment. That is, it seems to be often a negative cycle, working to not experience bad feelings rather than to experience good ones. Anybody else feel this way?
Damn, I really do have to go to work.
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Anxiety, Compassion, Mardi Gras Beads
Here are some people I saw today:
Coming into work, I passed this shirtless man. His chest was handsomely contoured, but sort of a pale, ashen color, which seemed different from the rest of his skin. He seemed to have some nicks or cuts on his body, but I couldn't tell if he had been hurt externally or if this was some kind of disease. He lurched when he walked. He seemed tired. I was struck by him. I thought he was in trouble. I sort of stopped, uncertain of what to do. Everyone kept moving, including me and him. We were going in opposite directions. I thought about going back, and asking if he needed help. I kept looking back as he got farther away. Almost as soon as he was too far to go back to, I became convinced that this is what I should have done. I prayed that he would find help if he needed it, and that I would get another chance...
Then, I had to go to Rite Aid on my lunch, and I passed this old, scrawny guy sitting on one of the planters near there. He had pink feathers and Mardi Gras beads around his neck, and some ratty, dirty shirt and shorts on his body. I think he was sort of talking to himself. I was struck by him, too.
On the way back to work, I passed this tall black guy selling flowers. He had roses this time, lovely red roses. He says he's homeless and trying to earn money honestly. I've bought flowers from him a couple of times before. I said I had to go to work. He said he could walk right with me, I didn't have to slow down. He follows you with this hangdog hopeful look that will instantly turn to disappointment and disillusionment if you say no. I didn't want to buy them and take them into work. I wanted to get away this time, and I did.
Michael let me out of work early. We were watching the Sopranos all day. Violence and heart, and I don't know which there is more of. Anyway, I was gonna come down here to this cafe to use the internet where it's cool. And on my way I pass this guy sitting there with his cardboard sign, and his head is down over his hand, and his face is crumpled like he's in despair. He looks sorta young, like maybe when he lifts his head he will be handsome. And I think fuck, I just can't, I just can't go by while somebody looks like that. I think maybe he'll be handsome when he looks up. I read his sign. It doesn't make much sense. Something about a train he needs some money for, his dead father, some aunts in Connecticut, he's so depressed, he had to spend his money on two days of sugar medication, please, please. So I go off, thinking I'll get him some food and bring it back. I walk halfway down the street, and I don't see anything but McDonalds. I'm thinking, what if he hates McDonald's. What if he's a vegetarian. What kind of thing is it to get somebody food without knowing what they want. Besides it's sort of near Bally's and I don't want to risk running into Rashool.
Back to the man with the cardboard sign. I see myself in the window. You don't look as hot as you think you do, in that skirt. I see myself, bending down to him, before I get there. I am very aware of my skirt. It's pretty. I am becoming, maybe, a girl who wears clothes that other people admire. I have, maybe, earned admittance into the female club. Or maybe it's the money club, or the make-up and plucked eyebrows club, in which case I am out.
"Hey," I say. "Hey." He looks up at me. He is not handsome. His face is full of troubling angles. His eyes are red, bloodshot. He is not ok. I don't think I ask. "Hey, are you hungry? Are you thirsty?" His mouth spills words. Words about getting out of here, about how excited he is, just needs the 8 dollars. I lie and tell him I don't carry cash money. I ask, where is your train. I offer to go with him to 30th St. and get his ticket. He says somebody will give him the money, whatever. He voice is confused. It wanders around, trailing his meaning behind it, in tatters. His voice is not hopeful. It is not excited, when he says he is excited. "Listen, I bet you're hungry. Thirsty. Why don't I get you something to drink?" Ok maybe Pepsi. "Ok, you stay here. I'll go get it, I'll be right back."
Back on over to Rite Aid. I find about a million kinds of Pepsi. It is dazzling. Lime and lemon and diet and vanilla and one calorie and caffeine free. I pick caffeine free. I decide to get some food. There's a sale on cereal. I pick a heart healthy bran thing. I think that means love, and caring. When you give somebody nourishing food, and not candy or something. When you know it's probably the only food they have right now. Maybe he will think it's stupid. At the counter, it turns out that you have to buy the two cereals to get the discount. It is only 70 cents less to get the one than it would be to get two. I feel I am in the hands of destiny, a bit trapped by logic. I go back and get cornflakes with bananas already in them. I didn't know that was an option. My bill is $6 something.
The man is still bent over himself when I arrive again. I think about how I would feel in the heat, how crazy I felt when there was no air conditioning yesterday. I bend down and say I got him Pepsi and cereal, too. He doesn't want the cereal. He says he would only want the cereal with milk, anyway he's going to be on the train for like 4 days. So take it, I say, to eat on the train. No, honey, you keep it, it's better you keep it. Only enough medicine for two days anyway and then when I run out I can't eat. Keep it, I say. For those two days. Ok? Maybe you will get hungry. I take out the heart healthy one. You take this one. You keep this one. Ok? Good luck. Thank you, he mumbles. I do not know what our eyes said together, his and mine. He bent back over his body.
I straightened up. I wondered what the man across the way is thinking of us. Does he think I am a good person? Does he think I am a foolish person? A little white girl who thinks she's some kind of angel?
I am afraid of these things... I am afraid I am a fool. I am afraid I do not understand the world, or that I understand too much. I never know what to do, and I do not approve of other people nor of myself.
But I am trying to see him. Because he said he would be there. And I am afraid, I am afraid of leaving him on the street, alone, because he was wearing pink feathers and had sores or a crazy drugged brain. I am afraid that I am already like them, already crazy. I do not consider that I too have that face within my face.
I see you hungry all the time. I see you mad and frightening, with your signs all full of words. I am full of words too. I am frightened of you, and of myself.
O Lord come back, and this time...
Redemption? I kept the cornflakes with bananas. I too am a child of God.
Does anybody else think about this stuff?
Coming into work, I passed this shirtless man. His chest was handsomely contoured, but sort of a pale, ashen color, which seemed different from the rest of his skin. He seemed to have some nicks or cuts on his body, but I couldn't tell if he had been hurt externally or if this was some kind of disease. He lurched when he walked. He seemed tired. I was struck by him. I thought he was in trouble. I sort of stopped, uncertain of what to do. Everyone kept moving, including me and him. We were going in opposite directions. I thought about going back, and asking if he needed help. I kept looking back as he got farther away. Almost as soon as he was too far to go back to, I became convinced that this is what I should have done. I prayed that he would find help if he needed it, and that I would get another chance...
Then, I had to go to Rite Aid on my lunch, and I passed this old, scrawny guy sitting on one of the planters near there. He had pink feathers and Mardi Gras beads around his neck, and some ratty, dirty shirt and shorts on his body. I think he was sort of talking to himself. I was struck by him, too.
On the way back to work, I passed this tall black guy selling flowers. He had roses this time, lovely red roses. He says he's homeless and trying to earn money honestly. I've bought flowers from him a couple of times before. I said I had to go to work. He said he could walk right with me, I didn't have to slow down. He follows you with this hangdog hopeful look that will instantly turn to disappointment and disillusionment if you say no. I didn't want to buy them and take them into work. I wanted to get away this time, and I did.
Michael let me out of work early. We were watching the Sopranos all day. Violence and heart, and I don't know which there is more of. Anyway, I was gonna come down here to this cafe to use the internet where it's cool. And on my way I pass this guy sitting there with his cardboard sign, and his head is down over his hand, and his face is crumpled like he's in despair. He looks sorta young, like maybe when he lifts his head he will be handsome. And I think fuck, I just can't, I just can't go by while somebody looks like that. I think maybe he'll be handsome when he looks up. I read his sign. It doesn't make much sense. Something about a train he needs some money for, his dead father, some aunts in Connecticut, he's so depressed, he had to spend his money on two days of sugar medication, please, please. So I go off, thinking I'll get him some food and bring it back. I walk halfway down the street, and I don't see anything but McDonalds. I'm thinking, what if he hates McDonald's. What if he's a vegetarian. What kind of thing is it to get somebody food without knowing what they want. Besides it's sort of near Bally's and I don't want to risk running into Rashool.
Back to the man with the cardboard sign. I see myself in the window. You don't look as hot as you think you do, in that skirt. I see myself, bending down to him, before I get there. I am very aware of my skirt. It's pretty. I am becoming, maybe, a girl who wears clothes that other people admire. I have, maybe, earned admittance into the female club. Or maybe it's the money club, or the make-up and plucked eyebrows club, in which case I am out.
"Hey," I say. "Hey." He looks up at me. He is not handsome. His face is full of troubling angles. His eyes are red, bloodshot. He is not ok. I don't think I ask. "Hey, are you hungry? Are you thirsty?" His mouth spills words. Words about getting out of here, about how excited he is, just needs the 8 dollars. I lie and tell him I don't carry cash money. I ask, where is your train. I offer to go with him to 30th St. and get his ticket. He says somebody will give him the money, whatever. He voice is confused. It wanders around, trailing his meaning behind it, in tatters. His voice is not hopeful. It is not excited, when he says he is excited. "Listen, I bet you're hungry. Thirsty. Why don't I get you something to drink?" Ok maybe Pepsi. "Ok, you stay here. I'll go get it, I'll be right back."
Back on over to Rite Aid. I find about a million kinds of Pepsi. It is dazzling. Lime and lemon and diet and vanilla and one calorie and caffeine free. I pick caffeine free. I decide to get some food. There's a sale on cereal. I pick a heart healthy bran thing. I think that means love, and caring. When you give somebody nourishing food, and not candy or something. When you know it's probably the only food they have right now. Maybe he will think it's stupid. At the counter, it turns out that you have to buy the two cereals to get the discount. It is only 70 cents less to get the one than it would be to get two. I feel I am in the hands of destiny, a bit trapped by logic. I go back and get cornflakes with bananas already in them. I didn't know that was an option. My bill is $6 something.
The man is still bent over himself when I arrive again. I think about how I would feel in the heat, how crazy I felt when there was no air conditioning yesterday. I bend down and say I got him Pepsi and cereal, too. He doesn't want the cereal. He says he would only want the cereal with milk, anyway he's going to be on the train for like 4 days. So take it, I say, to eat on the train. No, honey, you keep it, it's better you keep it. Only enough medicine for two days anyway and then when I run out I can't eat. Keep it, I say. For those two days. Ok? Maybe you will get hungry. I take out the heart healthy one. You take this one. You keep this one. Ok? Good luck. Thank you, he mumbles. I do not know what our eyes said together, his and mine. He bent back over his body.
I straightened up. I wondered what the man across the way is thinking of us. Does he think I am a good person? Does he think I am a foolish person? A little white girl who thinks she's some kind of angel?
I am afraid of these things... I am afraid I am a fool. I am afraid I do not understand the world, or that I understand too much. I never know what to do, and I do not approve of other people nor of myself.
But I am trying to see him. Because he said he would be there. And I am afraid, I am afraid of leaving him on the street, alone, because he was wearing pink feathers and had sores or a crazy drugged brain. I am afraid that I am already like them, already crazy. I do not consider that I too have that face within my face.
I see you hungry all the time. I see you mad and frightening, with your signs all full of words. I am full of words too. I am frightened of you, and of myself.
O Lord come back, and this time...
Redemption? I kept the cornflakes with bananas. I too am a child of God.
Does anybody else think about this stuff?
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