Friday, February 3, 2012
The word Seattle makes me think of the word Cuttlefish.
This morning I saw miles and miles of mountains, and I wasn't really doing anything out of the ordinary. I was just driving back to Issaquah from downtown Seattle, and for the first time in many, many days there wasn't cloud in the sky, and the visibility was outrageously good. And there in the distance were huge snow capped mountains with jagged peaks, all around me like I was driving in the bowl of some enormous crater. I didn't know they were there before - the constant gray overcastedness of this area has kept the clouds low and the fog pretty heavy. I've talked about the mountains around my house before, but what I didn't know was that beyond that little cluster of mountains was a serious set of mountains, as if my mountains were teenagers who came to ask me out on a date and the mountains in the back were the parents, staying hidden by the fog so the teenager mountains didn't think they were hovering. Or, my mountains were fresh out of mountain college, and the big mountains were hanging back to oversee them and make sure they don't screw up the important task of being mountains. But then this morning, the fog lifted and I got to see that I'm not dealing with the big mountains at all, and the big mountains tried to duck back into the storage closet, but too late. Now I know. That's ok, I don't mind being surrounded by the little mountains. And I know they'll do a good job as long as the big mountains are in the background.
Thursday, May 12, 2011
My first lesson in originality.
I was awkward in sixth grade. Really awkward. I had braces and that weird half-child, half-teenager body that we curvy women were blessed with at the age of 11. I felt like a monster in sixth grade, too tall, too bulky, too zit-y, too totally, totally uncool. I have an official school picture of myself with dishwater brown shoulder length hair, a beaded necklace that I loved because it was rainbow colors but hated because it was choker, and a white t-shirt with three little lizards where the breast pocket would have been if I had bought it out of an LL Bean catalogue instead of those middle school fundraiser booklets that charges you $35 for a nature-themed t-shirt and promises to reserve an acre of the rainforest in your name. I wanted to be remembered as the adidas-track pants wearing, lizard t-shirt, rainbow choker kid, because that was cooool. Nevermind that choker necklaces make me feel like I need to puke. I suffered for beauty.
But I had friends! I guess. I had 3 friends, one girl and two guys, although I’m pretty sure now they thought I was a total loser back then and could have done without me. I think I was their hanger-on that they tolerated because my girl friend was actually pretty cool and liked doing guy stuff like snowboarding and skateboarding and re-making Blink-182 music videos. This usually entailed someone climbing onto a roof with a snare drum and banging on it for 2 minutes, and then some random artistic shots of beleaguered stuffed animals getting pulled along on a skateboard by a jump rope and neighborhood kids throwing those little spark-poppers on the ground. I don’t know, I was never there. I always watched them later. One time for Christmas we exchanged gifts at Ledo’s Pizza and they all got me cool stuff like a Star Wars Compendium and a walkman, and I got them all….wait for it….matching stuffed lizards. What was I thinking? I don’t know. I do know I labored over those Christmas gifts for weeks. It is SO. HARD. buying Christmas gifts for two 12 year old boys who listened to Snoop Dog and whose favorite card came was Bullshit.
Have you ever heard of Bullshit? You split the deck up with however many people are playing, let’s say 4. On your turn, you put cards face down into the middle pile, and say “3 Jacks,” or whatever it is. But you can lie. You can say “2 eights,” but really put down an Ace and a Seven. If someone around the table thinks you’re lying, they say “Bullshit!” and you have to flip the cards over. If you were lying, you pick up all the cards in the center. If you were telling the truth, the person who called Bullshit on you has to pick them up. Whenever I am playing a game, no matter what it is, I always reach a point where I’m tired of playing and don’t care about winning anymore, so I ruin the game for everyone. It’s my thing. When we were playing Bullshit at Ledo’s Pizza the day of the stuffed lizards, I put down 15 Aces. I just wanted to eat my triple bacon pizza and get the hell out of there so the guy friends could go hang out with the girl friend in peace and I could go home and watch CATS for the 30th time.
Awkward.
I used to say things, too, that were borrowed from other things because that’s easier than thinking for yourself and risking being original and thus being rejected. All those 80’s sitcom clichés, like saying “who died?” in a room of sad-faced people and “you fell out of the ugly tree and hit all the branches on the way down” were how I communicated. Verbally, that is. I found journals a while ago that me and the girl friend used to use to pass notes (no cell phones) and I can’t believe how funny I could be when I could write it down. We were smart note-passers. We had an entire composition book that looked like all our class composition books, so it only looked like we were helping each other study or something. I found it, and was really encouraged by what I read. It made me think maybe I wasn’t totally as awkward as I assume I was. But then again, I’ve always expressed myself better in writing.
Mom says I used to write her and dad letters when I was angry or sad or mad about something and leave them on their pillows. I remember resolving to keep a log of all the terrible things they said to me to have hard, written proof with dates and verbatim quotes for my final angry-letter magnum opus. They were going to find a hole burned through the middle of their bed and at the bottom would be my Letter of Wrongs Done. I think I kept it up for three weeks and only had two entries, like “dad made me feed the cat when he was sitting and the table NOT DOING ANYTHING” and, after digging the log out of a pile of detritus in the middle of my floor, “mom said I was a SLOB!” I gave it up when I realized I would never have much of a case.
But verbally I was like a lava floe of awkward. Searingly embarrassing and impossible to predict the flight path. Which brings me to my first lesson in being original.
One morning I got on the bus and everyone looked dreary. Well, sad. But it was about 6 in the morning, and no middle-schooler looks chipper at 6 in the morning on a Wednesday. Then I got to school, and we all sat in the cafeteria for about 15 minutes until the bell rang and we were released to our homerooms. I saw pockets of kids around the cafeteria looking sad, some were crying. A lot of the kids were people I knew in my classes, in my grade.
At my locker, my friend Heidi’s locker was right next to mine, and she was crying. It was time to get to the bottom of this. And so I pulled from my Arsenal of Awkwardness and said, “who died?”
Our classmate Jessica died. I hadn’t really known her that well. Her appendix had burst the night before and she was dead before the ambulances could get her to the hospital, because we lived in horse country and the nearest hospital was 30 minutes away. And that was the last time I snarkily asked anyone who died.
That was a changing moment for me. I think this was the moment I really became self-aware. I remember praying that Heidi didn’t hear it as a sound byte I borrowed from a sitcom, but a sincere question that I’d heard someone had died and didn’t know who. I remember holding back my tears until I got home and immediately running up to my room to create a set of self-imposed interaction rules, like “now we’re only going to listen to people and say the absolute minimum of words in response,” or “before we say it, let’s decide if it’s a good idea to say.” I was so altered and saddened by my own foot-in-mouth awkwardness that I went home and wrote a set of rules I knew I needed to follow from then on, a manifesto that no one ever saw but myself. I found them when I was cleaning out my room when I was 20 and my parents moved to a suburb. They went something like this, and please keep in mind I didn’t have any internet top 10 lists of Things You Shouldn’t Say to help me, and never discussed it with any of my friends, since they were 12 and busy making music videos:
1. Only say it if you really mean it.
2. Don’t try to make people laugh anymore because it doesn’t work.
3. Wait and listen for the whole thing before you say something.
4. If you don’t know, just say you don’t know.
5. If you like a boy, just don’t talk to him. Just ignore it.
6. Only talk about what you know about from now on.
7. If you didn’t think of it, don’t say it like you did.
And there was more of the same. Basically I was about 25 rules saying “Don’t Say Stupid Shit” that I kept writing over and over and over, like a punishment for being so flippant in the face of a death anyone with an appendix could suffer at any time. Hell. I could die that death. And the angry god I believed in at that time was probably plotting it for me, because I handled it so callously. It can be so very painful when you finally become self-aware. Now, when I go home and dig out my old yearbooks I always end up looking at Jessica’s picture.
My mom gave me a sympathy card after Jessica died that still makes me cry to read it. But I still never know if I’m crying for her or myself.
But I had friends! I guess. I had 3 friends, one girl and two guys, although I’m pretty sure now they thought I was a total loser back then and could have done without me. I think I was their hanger-on that they tolerated because my girl friend was actually pretty cool and liked doing guy stuff like snowboarding and skateboarding and re-making Blink-182 music videos. This usually entailed someone climbing onto a roof with a snare drum and banging on it for 2 minutes, and then some random artistic shots of beleaguered stuffed animals getting pulled along on a skateboard by a jump rope and neighborhood kids throwing those little spark-poppers on the ground. I don’t know, I was never there. I always watched them later. One time for Christmas we exchanged gifts at Ledo’s Pizza and they all got me cool stuff like a Star Wars Compendium and a walkman, and I got them all….wait for it….matching stuffed lizards. What was I thinking? I don’t know. I do know I labored over those Christmas gifts for weeks. It is SO. HARD. buying Christmas gifts for two 12 year old boys who listened to Snoop Dog and whose favorite card came was Bullshit.
Have you ever heard of Bullshit? You split the deck up with however many people are playing, let’s say 4. On your turn, you put cards face down into the middle pile, and say “3 Jacks,” or whatever it is. But you can lie. You can say “2 eights,” but really put down an Ace and a Seven. If someone around the table thinks you’re lying, they say “Bullshit!” and you have to flip the cards over. If you were lying, you pick up all the cards in the center. If you were telling the truth, the person who called Bullshit on you has to pick them up. Whenever I am playing a game, no matter what it is, I always reach a point where I’m tired of playing and don’t care about winning anymore, so I ruin the game for everyone. It’s my thing. When we were playing Bullshit at Ledo’s Pizza the day of the stuffed lizards, I put down 15 Aces. I just wanted to eat my triple bacon pizza and get the hell out of there so the guy friends could go hang out with the girl friend in peace and I could go home and watch CATS for the 30th time.
Awkward.
I used to say things, too, that were borrowed from other things because that’s easier than thinking for yourself and risking being original and thus being rejected. All those 80’s sitcom clichés, like saying “who died?” in a room of sad-faced people and “you fell out of the ugly tree and hit all the branches on the way down” were how I communicated. Verbally, that is. I found journals a while ago that me and the girl friend used to use to pass notes (no cell phones) and I can’t believe how funny I could be when I could write it down. We were smart note-passers. We had an entire composition book that looked like all our class composition books, so it only looked like we were helping each other study or something. I found it, and was really encouraged by what I read. It made me think maybe I wasn’t totally as awkward as I assume I was. But then again, I’ve always expressed myself better in writing.
Mom says I used to write her and dad letters when I was angry or sad or mad about something and leave them on their pillows. I remember resolving to keep a log of all the terrible things they said to me to have hard, written proof with dates and verbatim quotes for my final angry-letter magnum opus. They were going to find a hole burned through the middle of their bed and at the bottom would be my Letter of Wrongs Done. I think I kept it up for three weeks and only had two entries, like “dad made me feed the cat when he was sitting and the table NOT DOING ANYTHING” and, after digging the log out of a pile of detritus in the middle of my floor, “mom said I was a SLOB!” I gave it up when I realized I would never have much of a case.
But verbally I was like a lava floe of awkward. Searingly embarrassing and impossible to predict the flight path. Which brings me to my first lesson in being original.
One morning I got on the bus and everyone looked dreary. Well, sad. But it was about 6 in the morning, and no middle-schooler looks chipper at 6 in the morning on a Wednesday. Then I got to school, and we all sat in the cafeteria for about 15 minutes until the bell rang and we were released to our homerooms. I saw pockets of kids around the cafeteria looking sad, some were crying. A lot of the kids were people I knew in my classes, in my grade.
At my locker, my friend Heidi’s locker was right next to mine, and she was crying. It was time to get to the bottom of this. And so I pulled from my Arsenal of Awkwardness and said, “who died?”
Our classmate Jessica died. I hadn’t really known her that well. Her appendix had burst the night before and she was dead before the ambulances could get her to the hospital, because we lived in horse country and the nearest hospital was 30 minutes away. And that was the last time I snarkily asked anyone who died.
That was a changing moment for me. I think this was the moment I really became self-aware. I remember praying that Heidi didn’t hear it as a sound byte I borrowed from a sitcom, but a sincere question that I’d heard someone had died and didn’t know who. I remember holding back my tears until I got home and immediately running up to my room to create a set of self-imposed interaction rules, like “now we’re only going to listen to people and say the absolute minimum of words in response,” or “before we say it, let’s decide if it’s a good idea to say.” I was so altered and saddened by my own foot-in-mouth awkwardness that I went home and wrote a set of rules I knew I needed to follow from then on, a manifesto that no one ever saw but myself. I found them when I was cleaning out my room when I was 20 and my parents moved to a suburb. They went something like this, and please keep in mind I didn’t have any internet top 10 lists of Things You Shouldn’t Say to help me, and never discussed it with any of my friends, since they were 12 and busy making music videos:
1. Only say it if you really mean it.
2. Don’t try to make people laugh anymore because it doesn’t work.
3. Wait and listen for the whole thing before you say something.
4. If you don’t know, just say you don’t know.
5. If you like a boy, just don’t talk to him. Just ignore it.
6. Only talk about what you know about from now on.
7. If you didn’t think of it, don’t say it like you did.
And there was more of the same. Basically I was about 25 rules saying “Don’t Say Stupid Shit” that I kept writing over and over and over, like a punishment for being so flippant in the face of a death anyone with an appendix could suffer at any time. Hell. I could die that death. And the angry god I believed in at that time was probably plotting it for me, because I handled it so callously. It can be so very painful when you finally become self-aware. Now, when I go home and dig out my old yearbooks I always end up looking at Jessica’s picture.
My mom gave me a sympathy card after Jessica died that still makes me cry to read it. But I still never know if I’m crying for her or myself.
Monday, May 9, 2011
I'm all, WTF at this post, but here it is. Nonsense.
When I was a teenager my friends A and E went with me to the Renaissance Festival in Maryland, which I feel pretty safe in saying is the best Renaissance Festival in the country. My mom has a friend who actually works at the Renaissance Festival in Texas and the size and sheen of her Faerie Queen wings along with her brood of children dressed like fairies in sunshine-y Facebook pictures once led me to suspect my Renaissance Festival was NOT the best Renaissance Festival in the country. But then I remembered her Renaissance Festival was in Texas, and I felt better. Sorry, Texas. You’re like the rich kid in Catholic school who wears his tie all loose and shirt untucked and has a cocaine addiction. You’re really loud and obnoxious and think everyone wants to be you. Every now and then we kind of do, but really we just wish you’d transfer out of our class.
Anyway, we went to the Renaissance Festival, and one of them forked up the $20 it took for a tarot card reading. In all the years I’ve been going there, about 15, there has been a dude (the same dude), sitting on the balcony outside the Tarot hut, every weekend, every season, every year, ALL DAY, without fail, screaming “foooortUNES, GEEEET your fortUNES, FORTunes read HEEEERE” like he’s selling hot dogs at a baseball game. And he’s one of those uncomfortable hollerers who makes eye contact with you when you walk by. We always joked about doing it but this year, I think it was E, was ready to do it. E and A’s attraction to mysticism began and ended with Jesus, but E had a serious dose of Buffy the Vampire Slayer coursing through the religious centers in his brain that allowed a modicum of benign fascination with things like Wicca, séances, graveyards, and the occult. As a Star Wars nut flirting with atheism who really didn’t care if she pissed off any gods or spirits, we had a pretty fantastic time doing whatever ridiculous thing we decided to do that day. A didn’t care for half of it, but he stuck around for our daily Moulin Rouge! and Whitney Houston sing-alongs. I miss those guys.
Now that I think about it, it might have been A who got the Tarot card reading. All I know for sure is that one of them got it, cajoled the tarot reader into letting all three of us into the reading room, and somebody kept kicking me under the table to get me to stop snickering. And one of them spent $20 to be told, by a shirtless, bearded, 70 year old man, that “they have some hard times ahead, but ultimately they’ll triumph.” Because if you’re a weekend tarot reader making some extra cash at the Renaissance Festival to supplement your day job as a produce stocker at Whole Foods, what else do you say to middle class, white, high school boys?
All my snickering and atheism aside, though, I wasn’t the one to get my cards read (although they first offered to pay for ME to get the reading), because I do know certain truths about myself, and knew them even as a 15 year old high on chocolate-dipped cheesecake and curly fries, excited to go to the Rennfest without her parents for once. The first thing I know is that I am terrified for anyone to know my innermost thoughts, desires, hopes, and dreams. The second is that I’m pretty sure that anybody, even a hack tarot reader, will be able to see them in my eyes if he sits in silence with me in a dark room for a few minutes. The third is that NO ONE is allowed to know my future before I do. I was terrified of prophesy before I even knew what it was. All those philosophical/physical postulations about the observed object changing behavior for the sake of being observed and the mere act of knowing the outcome dictates your present actions were scary and real, because I knew I would do that. I don’t need no Tarot card reader telling me I’ll have hard times ahead. A and E’s great fortune was an overarching belief in the Lord, and so all other spirit magic was declared null and void and thus a non-threat. Even at 15 I had a vague appreciation of the One Soul concepts and space-time jumbles my hippie grandmother used to feed me, that Time as we know it is less of a line and more of a cloud and the past, present and future were actually one.
I’ve had prophetic dreams for as long as I can remember dreaming. I’m not talking about an oracle coming to me in my dreams and proclaiming crucial world events as it hovers in a blinding white light. I’m talking about stupid little moments in my life that I can only recall dreaming about when they happen to me. This weekend I went for a walk and there was a point where a man I’d never seen before walked a dog I’d never seen before on a stretch of sidewalk I’d never walked before, and I had dreamed it all before. That one little instant in time like a snapshot (man in khaki pants. Dog with red collar. Pink flower petals in grass. Blue and white sneakers. Taking a walk. Gray shorts.) was something that happened in my brain before and I feel a pulling sensation in my chest like the moment I’m living now is lassoing the moment I dreamed and syncing them up into one. I’ve tried to talk to people about it before and everyone is pretty convinced it’s still just re-constructed moments from previous days sifted together into a dream that happens to match the moment I’m living now. But this time, that explanation doesn’t work. I bought those gray shorts in the morning at Marshalls, having never seen them before, and put them on 2 hours later to take a walk in the afternoon. I’ve never owned a pair of gray shorts in my life until Saturday.
I’m fascinated with books that can assess my character based on the day I was born or what my name is. We have a book at my parents’ house that describes “Jackie” and “Jacqueline” and I’m a perfect meld of each. But why? Is it because I actually am that way, or is it because I read those entries when I was 16 and, having known them, grew into the person I was prophesized to be? Can the power of suggestion really be so great that I can be influenced by 6 paragraphs in a compendium of names? And why, if I am so susceptible to all this otherworldly influence, do I think hypnotism is such a crock of shit?
Despite how eerily accurate I’ve found these predictions to be in my own life, I suspect they are catered to play to social norms that most women will conform to in their life. One entry tells me a Jackie “wants it all – the job, marriage, and children; she’ll have at least three,” which is probably true of almost all Jackies out there. On that same token, I don’t believe that all Jackies “will excel in music and will probably pursue a career in teaching or writing.” Whatever. The more I talk about it, the less equipped I feel to talk about it. Probably won’t have three kids, is all I can say. And, I spell my name with a Y. So that MUST affect SOMEthing in your little runic interpretations, Mr. Prophecy Book.
I like the idea that Time isn’t linear. I think it would explain a lot of things, like how I can dream moments in my life before they happen and how I can meet someone and feel like I have an instant connection with them, like I’ve known them forever. I think it would explain a lot of things, like the soul mate concept. I’m pretty sure quantum physics is going to explain it all. I just have to wait for some smartypants scientist to bring it all down to my level.
I always feel like a monkey banging on a keyboard when I talk about this stuff. I had a prophetic dream and wanted to talk about it, since no one believes me and I can never remember it when I wake up to tell anyone, unlike my dreams about splitting myself into three off-beat personas disguised as professors named Dino (a guy with a blond beard), Bino (a woman who wore scarves and funky glasses) and Gino (a turtleneck wearing guy with black hair). I remember that dream really well. I adopted different personas to steal my students’ credit and buy a bunch of stuff. I was a benevolent crook, though, because I would only steal credit from underage kids, and their credit would just re-set when they turned 18. So one day one of my students was crying in class because her credit had been stolen and I consoled her by saying “don’t worry, you’re only 17. It’ll clear on your 18th birthday.” Then she told me she was 19, not 17, and her credit was ruined forever. I had racked up $516 billion worth of credit card debt on her name. I felt so bad, I confessed to my three personas and everyone felt betrayed. But then they invited me to a dinner party. I asked if I could come as one of my personas, because “I’m so boring when I’m just me.” The dream people let me do it, and then for the rest of the dream I kept at my three professor’s jobs and interacting with everyone, and all the people I met knew I was playing a character and they played along with me because they felt bad for me and knew I was uncomfortable being myself.
The deeper meaning there is hardly deeper. But I take comfort in the thought that it indicates I can at least pretend to be more than just myself, and my imagination can’t fit into a mold laid out by some book on a coffee table, even if my personality can.
Anyway, we went to the Renaissance Festival, and one of them forked up the $20 it took for a tarot card reading. In all the years I’ve been going there, about 15, there has been a dude (the same dude), sitting on the balcony outside the Tarot hut, every weekend, every season, every year, ALL DAY, without fail, screaming “foooortUNES, GEEEET your fortUNES, FORTunes read HEEEERE” like he’s selling hot dogs at a baseball game. And he’s one of those uncomfortable hollerers who makes eye contact with you when you walk by. We always joked about doing it but this year, I think it was E, was ready to do it. E and A’s attraction to mysticism began and ended with Jesus, but E had a serious dose of Buffy the Vampire Slayer coursing through the religious centers in his brain that allowed a modicum of benign fascination with things like Wicca, séances, graveyards, and the occult. As a Star Wars nut flirting with atheism who really didn’t care if she pissed off any gods or spirits, we had a pretty fantastic time doing whatever ridiculous thing we decided to do that day. A didn’t care for half of it, but he stuck around for our daily Moulin Rouge! and Whitney Houston sing-alongs. I miss those guys.
Now that I think about it, it might have been A who got the Tarot card reading. All I know for sure is that one of them got it, cajoled the tarot reader into letting all three of us into the reading room, and somebody kept kicking me under the table to get me to stop snickering. And one of them spent $20 to be told, by a shirtless, bearded, 70 year old man, that “they have some hard times ahead, but ultimately they’ll triumph.” Because if you’re a weekend tarot reader making some extra cash at the Renaissance Festival to supplement your day job as a produce stocker at Whole Foods, what else do you say to middle class, white, high school boys?
All my snickering and atheism aside, though, I wasn’t the one to get my cards read (although they first offered to pay for ME to get the reading), because I do know certain truths about myself, and knew them even as a 15 year old high on chocolate-dipped cheesecake and curly fries, excited to go to the Rennfest without her parents for once. The first thing I know is that I am terrified for anyone to know my innermost thoughts, desires, hopes, and dreams. The second is that I’m pretty sure that anybody, even a hack tarot reader, will be able to see them in my eyes if he sits in silence with me in a dark room for a few minutes. The third is that NO ONE is allowed to know my future before I do. I was terrified of prophesy before I even knew what it was. All those philosophical/physical postulations about the observed object changing behavior for the sake of being observed and the mere act of knowing the outcome dictates your present actions were scary and real, because I knew I would do that. I don’t need no Tarot card reader telling me I’ll have hard times ahead. A and E’s great fortune was an overarching belief in the Lord, and so all other spirit magic was declared null and void and thus a non-threat. Even at 15 I had a vague appreciation of the One Soul concepts and space-time jumbles my hippie grandmother used to feed me, that Time as we know it is less of a line and more of a cloud and the past, present and future were actually one.
I’ve had prophetic dreams for as long as I can remember dreaming. I’m not talking about an oracle coming to me in my dreams and proclaiming crucial world events as it hovers in a blinding white light. I’m talking about stupid little moments in my life that I can only recall dreaming about when they happen to me. This weekend I went for a walk and there was a point where a man I’d never seen before walked a dog I’d never seen before on a stretch of sidewalk I’d never walked before, and I had dreamed it all before. That one little instant in time like a snapshot (man in khaki pants. Dog with red collar. Pink flower petals in grass. Blue and white sneakers. Taking a walk. Gray shorts.) was something that happened in my brain before and I feel a pulling sensation in my chest like the moment I’m living now is lassoing the moment I dreamed and syncing them up into one. I’ve tried to talk to people about it before and everyone is pretty convinced it’s still just re-constructed moments from previous days sifted together into a dream that happens to match the moment I’m living now. But this time, that explanation doesn’t work. I bought those gray shorts in the morning at Marshalls, having never seen them before, and put them on 2 hours later to take a walk in the afternoon. I’ve never owned a pair of gray shorts in my life until Saturday.
I’m fascinated with books that can assess my character based on the day I was born or what my name is. We have a book at my parents’ house that describes “Jackie” and “Jacqueline” and I’m a perfect meld of each. But why? Is it because I actually am that way, or is it because I read those entries when I was 16 and, having known them, grew into the person I was prophesized to be? Can the power of suggestion really be so great that I can be influenced by 6 paragraphs in a compendium of names? And why, if I am so susceptible to all this otherworldly influence, do I think hypnotism is such a crock of shit?
Despite how eerily accurate I’ve found these predictions to be in my own life, I suspect they are catered to play to social norms that most women will conform to in their life. One entry tells me a Jackie “wants it all – the job, marriage, and children; she’ll have at least three,” which is probably true of almost all Jackies out there. On that same token, I don’t believe that all Jackies “will excel in music and will probably pursue a career in teaching or writing.” Whatever. The more I talk about it, the less equipped I feel to talk about it. Probably won’t have three kids, is all I can say. And, I spell my name with a Y. So that MUST affect SOMEthing in your little runic interpretations, Mr. Prophecy Book.
I like the idea that Time isn’t linear. I think it would explain a lot of things, like how I can dream moments in my life before they happen and how I can meet someone and feel like I have an instant connection with them, like I’ve known them forever. I think it would explain a lot of things, like the soul mate concept. I’m pretty sure quantum physics is going to explain it all. I just have to wait for some smartypants scientist to bring it all down to my level.
I always feel like a monkey banging on a keyboard when I talk about this stuff. I had a prophetic dream and wanted to talk about it, since no one believes me and I can never remember it when I wake up to tell anyone, unlike my dreams about splitting myself into three off-beat personas disguised as professors named Dino (a guy with a blond beard), Bino (a woman who wore scarves and funky glasses) and Gino (a turtleneck wearing guy with black hair). I remember that dream really well. I adopted different personas to steal my students’ credit and buy a bunch of stuff. I was a benevolent crook, though, because I would only steal credit from underage kids, and their credit would just re-set when they turned 18. So one day one of my students was crying in class because her credit had been stolen and I consoled her by saying “don’t worry, you’re only 17. It’ll clear on your 18th birthday.” Then she told me she was 19, not 17, and her credit was ruined forever. I had racked up $516 billion worth of credit card debt on her name. I felt so bad, I confessed to my three personas and everyone felt betrayed. But then they invited me to a dinner party. I asked if I could come as one of my personas, because “I’m so boring when I’m just me.” The dream people let me do it, and then for the rest of the dream I kept at my three professor’s jobs and interacting with everyone, and all the people I met knew I was playing a character and they played along with me because they felt bad for me and knew I was uncomfortable being myself.
The deeper meaning there is hardly deeper. But I take comfort in the thought that it indicates I can at least pretend to be more than just myself, and my imagination can’t fit into a mold laid out by some book on a coffee table, even if my personality can.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
Written yesterday.
I recently got a compliment on my blog through a facebook message and the utter shame I felt at abandoning it a few months ago was akin to the shame I feel for not calling back certain friends and family who definitely, definitely need call backs, and so today, on my 25th birthday, I resolve to:
1. Keep up the damn blog
2. Call my damn friends
So there you go. I don’t know why humanity needs milestones like birthdays and new years to do things they could just as easily begin at 2:41 p.m. on any random day of the week. We just love bookends. Whether they are weighted-bottom brushed bronze Atlas statues we found at Barnes and Noble to keep our collection of Garfield compilations upright or they are arbitrary days thrust upon you in the grand scheme of space-time, we all like a starting place and an ending place.
I’ve been doing some stuff – new job, grown up apartment, zumba classes. Had a tearful goodbye with my beloved scrapyard (who were happy for me that I was advancing myself, imagine that) and began a full time with benefits job in advertising. And no, it’s nothing like Mad Men.
Really, with the routine I have found myself in, I should have plenty of time to keep up with this. Lately, I’ve even had islands of time during my work day in which I’m completely caught up and can take a few minutes breather, but my computer screen faces the door so anybody could stick their head in and see I’m updating a blog. The internet has some image or e-card or something that says “My fondest wish is to have a job where only I can see my computer screen.” Where’s the trust? She asks, as she writes a blog in a word document to throw off the scent at noon on a Friday.
The thing about having a steady job and a nice place to live with a schedule and a routine that is the same every day is that nothing really interesting happens to me anymore. I love it, I’m such a creature of habit, but life sometimes falls into a quiet sameness like rocking back and forth on a calm ocean on a sunny day. Maybe one day it will get on my nerves and I’ll go stir-crazy, but right now it’s sure as hell pretty nice. It’s not so much giving in to domestication as it is enjoying stability. I graduated college with a massive amount of debt into a job I was quickly fired from (twice), into almost a year of unemployment and then a year of a job that destroyed my mind, body, and will to live, to a part-time job handing out cash at a scrapyard that didn’t make nearly enough money but restored my faith in the American workplace, and now to a job with a sustaining salary that I can foreseeably stay at for a long, long time. Jesus Christ, can anybody blame me for actually wanting to go home, make dinner, clean up a little, watch Iron Chef and go to sleep at 10? Mmmmm, spiney lobster challenge.
Personally, I think it boils down to my selfish need to declare myself autonomous, to have things that are mine and didn’t belong to anyone else first, which I’ve never had before. Things have recently become mine:
1. Bed
2. Couch
3. Bookshelf
4. TV
5. Kitchenaid mixer
6. Whisk
7. Nesting rainbow mixing bowls
8. Bamboo spoons
9. Garlic press
10. Seat covers
11. Pillows
12. Shower curtains
13. Tea pitcher
14. Toaster
Of course, all these things are joint-owned and sometimes purchased solely by CS, but come on. We know who really owns the nesting rainbow mixing bowls.
But anyway. That’s how things are going. I’ll be back to regularly scheduled updating now – I feel like I have a few blogs backed up that could get posted. And if not, somebody guilt me out and I’ll start up on the next person’s birthday. Dad’s is in June.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
It begins.
I made this blog so I would make myself write again. I started an essay about a year ago that I never finished, and taking my own cue from the My Office Diaries, I guess if I start posting it in unfinished chunks I'll force myself to get it done. Once this story is finished, I'm going to try to make everything that goes up here essay-ish.
My degree is in creative non-fiction, which means I write memoirs. I realize I am 24 and don't have that many memories worth writing about, but sometimes I can work with what I have. I heard from my most prolific writing professor that writers are lucky to get published more than twice a year, and shouldn't even hope to get a book published until they're about 50, so here's my plan: write essays and post them online, then take them down when they are finished. Y'all get to read them, and I have a completed essay that becomes future material for my book that I'll publish...25 years from now. So no one will remember my stories even if I become an internet SENSATION, and the internet should be some kind of hard-wired molar implant by then and no one will give a monkey's about my dinky little blog anyway.
I'll be posting this story in chunks, not by creating new posts but by editing the original post so it's easy to read and not broken up into backwards pieces in blog post form. Once it's up and in some kind of finished state, I'll leave it up for about a week and then take it down and turn it into something final. Them's the rules. Let's see if I can stick to them.
Enjoy. As of now, this essay is called People Walking.
****
This road is not pretty anymore. For about 12 hours last week it was absolutely beautiful – snow covered everything, and the trees were coated with a thick layer of hoar frost, which happens when wet fog descends and its water droplets freeze onto trees and mailboxes and signposts like the fuzzy ice that grows on condensed lemonade cans in the back of the freezer. The world was in white and black but seemed to reflect a million colors from the sun, as if the glitter and googly-eyes aisle from Jo-Ann Fabrics had exploded all over I-83. Driving by, you could almost hear the tinkling and jingling of icy, perfect snow crystals as the heat from the sun locked them all together, melding them to every single thing in sight, like glaze in a kiln. Then, on that day, this road was pretty.
Now, it’s like something out of a Great Depression documentary. It’s not white and black but grey and brown with plowed snow and churned up salt. The clouds have blotted out the sun, taking away that lightbulb radiance from the sky and replacing it with some washed out florescent equivalent. Every now and then there is a glimmer of that beauty this road wore so serenely just last week – through the bent and broken trees, bowed and cracked by the weight of 45 inches of snow, a hill lies untouched by plows or sleds, and over there is a car no one shoveled free of it’s terrible prison, perfectly domed and pristine. “Somebody’s unemployed,” I thought, as I looked at that car, almost jealous. I don’t know why, since I just spent the majority of 2009 lying in a festering pool of my own abject unemployment, begging the working world to take me back. It finally did, and now I am one of these hideous, salt-colored cars lined up to merge into the one lane Baltimore City bothered to plow on this four lane interstate. We are waiting in the highway soup line, wondering if we’ll make it through the green light before traffic slams the door shut in our faces.
Whatever. At least I’m not at work. And thank God tomorrow is Saturday. I’ll sleep until noon, not because I want to or because I can, but because I have to. I can’t erase the week otherwise. I have realized, if set my alarm for 30 minutes before I have to get up and if I hit the snooze six times in a row, it’s a little easier to get up on work days. I have also realized if I use that last 5 minutes before 7 a.m. to remind myself that my day is going to be horrible, I can handle it.
This has been the worst week of my working life. Ice dams in the gutters of the condominium complex where I work have forced running, melting water in through the windows, walls, ceilings, and up through the carpets of almost 72 units, causing untold water damage and unholy mildew growth. Now that things have begun to melt a little, glassy icicles seven feet long are hanging over every doorway like claws, and three-inch thick frozen waterfalls have adhered themselves to the siding. The Complex looks and feels like it’s being eaten by an enormous ice monster - one that wraps its victims in a white sheath before liquefying its insides, like a spider. The phone in the site manager’s office is ringing off the hook. People call me every day to let me know their ceiling is falling down and beg me to do something about it. They have packed up their children and moved into hotel rooms, which they expect us to pay for after we’ve fixed their leak damage for free. They are demanding appointments with the contractors we brought in, denying us access to their units when they are not home, and blaming every issue they’ve ever had on the embarrassing rain dance we have the gall to put forth as property management. I am the assistant to an emotionally stunted site manager and a skeleton crew of El Salvadorians trying to steer this ship away from an iceberg it has already hit. It is not going well.
****
Stay tuned.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Eyes.
I have this self conscious thing about the way I look at people. Not looking at them dead on, because that's easy enough, but if you are on the side of me and I'm turning my head to look at you, I'm pretty sure I look just like the dramatic hamster. I know my eyes get super wide and my eyebrows go up in the air and it's not out of surprise or panic - it's because of my glasses. If I'm looking sidways at you, you're probably falling into that nether zone of non-glass/wire rim where nothing is focused and there are obstructions all over the place, making it impossible to react appropriately to any incoming facial expression or talking point. I still haven't mastered the side glance with these glasses that I've had since 9th grade. It's like every single time I look to the side, my eyes are suddenly surprised by this cage they find themselves in and can't decide if they're going to look up or down or out or to the side even MORE, which is undoubtedly the most off-putting expression you can throw at someone. I feel like whenever someone is casually trying to get my attention, "Hey, Jacky?" my eyes turn to them and scream "WHAT oh my GOD where ARE WE what's HAPPENING hey, there are glasses here! NEXT CHALLENGE! wait, that's too much, back it down...ahem, yes?"
Then my head tries to adjust by turning even more which gives me this terrible cheek-smash neck gobble along with crazy eyes, and I realize this too slow as its happening so the rest of my body follows my head to try to compensate for crazy eyes and chipmunk cheek, and all of a sudden I'm doing this Frankenstein upper body turn like some Egyptian hieroglyph.
I remember when I first got my glasses. Well, no I don't. I remember the days leading up to getting my glasses. I was in chemistry class and Miss Whatsername who got married and became Mrs. Mudd was writing on the overhead projector. Do they still have overhead projectors and chalkboards? Because I've been hearing some crazy stuff about smartboards and handheld clickers. Anyway, Miss Whatsername was writing on the overhead projector and I couldn't see it, but not because it was fuzzy. Because it was red. For some reason, this sweet little hippie woman who was probably only as old as I am now with hair down to the backs of her knees (until she cut it when we were in 11th grade and caused an uproar with her fan club) - for some reason, this chick would only write in red. I don't get it. Red is such an angry color. Red makes a statement that I don't feel chemistry makes. Chemistry seems like a blue discipline to me. Math is black, because it is like the death of my soul. I am so glad there are math people around so I don't have to math all the time. Man, that would suck.
So she would write in red all the time, and I'd be at the back of the class with my long hair and unusually sweaty underarms, writing in my 3 ring binder with the loose leaf paper in it with a mechanical bic pencil (you know the black ones with the different color shirt clips? I would save the purples clips. I don't know why. I always thought their erasers were better, and god knows you don't want to use a good eraser. You hoard it. It's public school law. And then you find your best eraser again when you're 20 and it's a rock hard piece of leather covered in pulverized lead pencil dust. Life is cruel sometimes.) and I couldn't see anything on the projector. When she would use the blue pen, I'd see it. I could see the black pen. The green pen was pushing it, but that red pen, man. And it was just me, too. Everyone else was A-ok with the red pen. It made me worry for a while I was color blind. But I did some research (the old fashioned way - by going to the school library and getting one of those paper bookmarks you had to shove into the stacks to mark where you got your book from) and I found that color blindness is mostly a male affliction, although women have been known to suffer from it. I don't remember how I ended up going to the eye doctor and getting my first classes but not being able to see red overhead pen had something to do with it.
I'm not color blind. I just have a brain that misbehaves. Once in psychology class, the teacher was testing students to see if they matched up with the norm for memory recollection. Basically, when you are asked to recall a certain type of memory your eyes will look up, down, or sideways depending on where in your brain the memory is stored. So if you are asked to recall a melody your eyes will look toward the part of your brain that remembers music. If you are asked to recall a mathematical formula or do an equation your eyes will look toward the lobe of your brain that handles math. It's all very fascinating stuff, and he tested 10 students. I was one of them. And as he graphed the results there was one little dot on the graph that always plotted in the opposite quadrant to all the other dots. So when everyone's eyes looked right, this person's eyes looked left. When everybody looked down, this person looked up. The teacher asked us to guess who the person was who had the backwards brain, and everybody guessed the dyslexic, didn't-give-a-shit football playing kid in the class that all the girls had a crush on, but no. It was boring old me, and I was a celebrity for 10 minutes.
Not sure where I'm going with this. I guess I'll just conclude it with some wisdom:
Life is to short to hoard your good erasers.
Then my head tries to adjust by turning even more which gives me this terrible cheek-smash neck gobble along with crazy eyes, and I realize this too slow as its happening so the rest of my body follows my head to try to compensate for crazy eyes and chipmunk cheek, and all of a sudden I'm doing this Frankenstein upper body turn like some Egyptian hieroglyph.
I remember when I first got my glasses. Well, no I don't. I remember the days leading up to getting my glasses. I was in chemistry class and Miss Whatsername who got married and became Mrs. Mudd was writing on the overhead projector. Do they still have overhead projectors and chalkboards? Because I've been hearing some crazy stuff about smartboards and handheld clickers. Anyway, Miss Whatsername was writing on the overhead projector and I couldn't see it, but not because it was fuzzy. Because it was red. For some reason, this sweet little hippie woman who was probably only as old as I am now with hair down to the backs of her knees (until she cut it when we were in 11th grade and caused an uproar with her fan club) - for some reason, this chick would only write in red. I don't get it. Red is such an angry color. Red makes a statement that I don't feel chemistry makes. Chemistry seems like a blue discipline to me. Math is black, because it is like the death of my soul. I am so glad there are math people around so I don't have to math all the time. Man, that would suck.
So she would write in red all the time, and I'd be at the back of the class with my long hair and unusually sweaty underarms, writing in my 3 ring binder with the loose leaf paper in it with a mechanical bic pencil (you know the black ones with the different color shirt clips? I would save the purples clips. I don't know why. I always thought their erasers were better, and god knows you don't want to use a good eraser. You hoard it. It's public school law. And then you find your best eraser again when you're 20 and it's a rock hard piece of leather covered in pulverized lead pencil dust. Life is cruel sometimes.) and I couldn't see anything on the projector. When she would use the blue pen, I'd see it. I could see the black pen. The green pen was pushing it, but that red pen, man. And it was just me, too. Everyone else was A-ok with the red pen. It made me worry for a while I was color blind. But I did some research (the old fashioned way - by going to the school library and getting one of those paper bookmarks you had to shove into the stacks to mark where you got your book from) and I found that color blindness is mostly a male affliction, although women have been known to suffer from it. I don't remember how I ended up going to the eye doctor and getting my first classes but not being able to see red overhead pen had something to do with it.
I'm not color blind. I just have a brain that misbehaves. Once in psychology class, the teacher was testing students to see if they matched up with the norm for memory recollection. Basically, when you are asked to recall a certain type of memory your eyes will look up, down, or sideways depending on where in your brain the memory is stored. So if you are asked to recall a melody your eyes will look toward the part of your brain that remembers music. If you are asked to recall a mathematical formula or do an equation your eyes will look toward the lobe of your brain that handles math. It's all very fascinating stuff, and he tested 10 students. I was one of them. And as he graphed the results there was one little dot on the graph that always plotted in the opposite quadrant to all the other dots. So when everyone's eyes looked right, this person's eyes looked left. When everybody looked down, this person looked up. The teacher asked us to guess who the person was who had the backwards brain, and everybody guessed the dyslexic, didn't-give-a-shit football playing kid in the class that all the girls had a crush on, but no. It was boring old me, and I was a celebrity for 10 minutes.
Not sure where I'm going with this. I guess I'll just conclude it with some wisdom:
Life is to short to hoard your good erasers.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Batteries.
I have an alarm clock.
It's one of the little portable ones. I got it for Christmas in 2008 to take to London in 2009. It's red and you can change the color of the display, and it tells you the temperature and the date and the phase of the moon. In my mind, this gives it some electronic complexity, but who knows what that actually means for alarm clock circuit boards. I remember putting AA batteries in it on Christmas day and learning how to set it, and then taking it upstairs with its plug in cord and plugging it in on my nightstand.
That was in 2009. It lived next to my bed until December 2010. Every now and then I'd take it to another room to sleep in another bed, but it always came back to my nightstand to get plugged back in so the batteries wouldn't get wasted. I'm always terrified it'll run out of juice three hours before I'm supposed to get up for work and I'll sleep in and be late.
So I moved in December 2010. My alarm clock was one of the last things to go, so it would waste as little battery life as possible in a bag. I dug around under the bed for the extension cord that powered my clock...and pulled out an unused extension cord. It was plugged in, but nothing was plugged in to it. I thought, there must be another cord under there, so I kept grabbing around the dust bunnies until I pulled out a heavy black plug...and kept pulling until I watched the charge cord for my alarm clock slowly drop from my nightstand and fall behind the bed. My alarm clock was never plugged in.
All this time I've been diligently plugging the charge port into the side of my alarm clock, and the plug itself has been lying in a tangle of dust and tissues under the bed since I first got it.
How is this possible? Is technology so power efficient now that it can live off of two AA batteries indefinitely? Or is it the batteries that have become so advanced they can power an alarm clock for two and a half years that knows the phases of the moon, has two separate alarm functions, and can project the time on the ceiling so you don't have to turn your head to look?
It seems amazing to me. We are capable of so much. Remember all the other stuff that used to be a pain in the ass, just a few years ago? Honestly, I can't. Shit's been awesome for a long time. And I have an immortal alarm clock.
All I'm saying is it's time to make a better Wiimote. It's been long enough, Nintendo.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)