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Four weeks of silence = graduation with my Master’s. Regular scheduled programming to resume shortly.
I have to let go of the phrase “linguistic glockenspiel” out of my portfolio’s introduction for a completely valid reason.
Damn. I loved that phrase. Just say it - linguistic glockenspiel - it’s amazing.
*sigh* For another time then.
Half written sentences have been the mainstay of my mental life lately. The severe apathy is welling up in several parts of my life, with a backlog of stress surrounding everything else with its halo. I had someone ask me once how emotion and apathy actually function together…well, that, baby, would be my life. I was not given a manual. Logic is not my foundation, and within the stream, I actually could not be happier for it.
I’m starting to get to the end of grad school, ever so slowly and ever so fast. I need to work on finalizing my portfolio and then stress about getting my committee together for my oral exams. A week ago I was told that a member of my committee did not have specially endowed graduate faculty powers. The documentation I handed in to them in December? I guess they hadn’t checked it that carefully enough, but the paper scheduling my exam at the end of April - oh yeah, that they checked.
Then on Thursday, two days after handing in the memos I had scrambled for to imbue my committee member with these X-Men-esque powers, my ueber boss tells me that the grad school called for me asking for transcripts. He shrugged and gave me their number.
“Hello, returning your call.”
“Why?”
“…You called my boss asking for transcripts.”
I hear the shuffling of papers, “Are you applying for a scholarship?”
“That would be a no.”
“Hmm, that’s strange.” More shuffling, “Oh here you are! Oh…you’re applying for graduate status for a commitee member?”
“That would be a yes.”
“Your papers were in the scholarship pile.”
Mentally sighing, “Am I in the right pile now?”
“Sure!”
Right.
As I bent to wash my hands in the sink at work the other day, I looked at the soap dispenser and thought that as a kid I probably used to be one of janitors worst nightmares in the restroom. I found, when I was about 9 or 10 and having delusions of grandeur regarding my epic rise as an ice skating star, that one of the best things to do in the restroom was to pump as much liquid soap on the floor as possible. Then you’d hang on the sides of two sinks and maniacally swish your legs in the goo and slide and slide and slide.
I think I had a good go at it then…and it’s a good thing too because thinking that I did makes me much less inclined to want to relive my youth when I eye the soap dispensers in the library restroom.
Mother of Mambo! Look at it in here - all smooth white and with a rather zen masthead.
I’ve been psyching myself up for a blog template change for a while since I noted that it seems that they’ve retired my old blog template to wherever it is old blog templates go to die. Thus, a changed in template was do or die; there was no return. And since I’ve been wanted to buff up my CSS and Photoshop skills/z (I’ve had custom CSS on my blog for a year), I figured I’d use my usual methodology for this - impulsive action.
[Cripes, a year. Sheesh.]
I like it. Kinda. Everything still feels a bit garish and misplaced to me, but I also finally feel that I’ve gotten out of the obviously templated (not a word Google condones I see) blog action and moved toward the clearer, visually succinct blogs that I like so much.
[AKA A Big Girl Blog.]
But I don’t like my widgets on the left *breath* and there is a horrible lack of green tones *breath, breath* and it’s all funny strange *breath* and yet, bemusing *breath* like being backed up against a car for a kiss you’re unprepared for. *hyperventilates*
[Not that that's happen. *cough*]
I might have a slight twang of buyer’s remorse for template changing. On the positive flip side, this just means I’m now able to break the ties of The Past… at least in my blog layouts.
[Read: custom mastheads! Oooh, tingly.]
I guess I sat around looking a little too forlorn. The great big Bloggers got wind of this and instead of beating me for my lunch money, they took me under their wing. I got a comment from Neil, whose project this actually is at Citizen of the Month, informing me that since my original interviewer didn’t come through for me, they had some overachievers wandering around wringing their hands raw and wanting to do my interviews. I have few of these in my classes and since the best way to placate them is to give them more things to do, so I thought I’d oblige.
I was told to write Pam of Nerd’s Eye View. She totally has my life. She’s a freelance tech writer and travels and writes and travels and writes…then she does NPR gigs and writes about travel at Blogher. Plus she’s got an Austrian husband and has jammies with garden gnomes. I’m tre jealous.
[And here's where you get a small blogging world story: I had actually sat with her in the same small session on podcasting at the Blogher conference.]
Pam did a great job, doing a couple of volleys of e-mails, whereas I wrote out ten direct questions to my interviewee and said, “Answer this.” I think her method was better.
The interview is here and after the jump.
She had to be in the ballpark of about fifteen to seventeen. Bleached hair and a nose piercing, she had a good lathering of foundation to give her a bland hue only contrasted by the vibrant eyeshadow that shouldn’t see the light of day outside of a rave.
I handed her my ticket. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, “Enjoy your meal today, Ma’am?”
It wasn’t the good Ma’am, the respectful salutation of status; no, it was the cold hard edge of ‘You’re old and I cannot relate to you’ Ma’am.
I gulped. “Fine.”
I remember the first time I called ma’am by an officious ID checker at the base commissary when I was about fourteen or fifteen. I knew that it was just a somewhat belittling, a mockry, but in the moment - in the moment - I felt it was right.
‘That’s darn right,’ I thought. ’Ma’am! The glory that awaits, the pooooower.’ I was then asked by Mom to grab a shopping cart.
As I slunk out with my ticket and followed J to his car, I mumbled to him, “Am I that old?”
He whipped out the standard answer of, “You’re fiiiine.”
“But…but…Ma’am… Ma’am is my mother.”
I own a few shirts of my father. Some were hand-me-downs, some were intentionally kept and tossed my way, and some were stolen.
One of my favorite shirts is one that I never can remember him actually wearing. I can’t know quite remember how I came by it - maybe I found in the back of the closet as a rummaged around in early high school, maybe my Mom pawned it off on my to clear space. Either way, as I pounced and slipped it on, hopping around giddily in front of my Dad, he just scrunched his face and said, “Oh, that one.”
It’s like gauze, soft with age, striped in pastels, and has a collar and a pocket. Everything a girl, in my mind, needs. It’s perfect for hot summer days, enough to wear with a tank top, but enough to afford me a flowing shield against the contours of my body. I have dozens of pictures of myself wearing it through the years.
I showed this to J and waited for him to laugh.
“I don’t get it,” he said slowly.
I slowly read it out, waiting for him to catch it.
“I still…don’t understand. Is this a song?”
“It’s Prince.”
“Oh.”
“When Doves Cry?”
“I don’t think I’ve heard that one.”
I give my best imitation. He shrugs.
I look blankly at him, “What I want to know…”
“Yes?”
“Is how the hell did you survive the 90’s without hearing that song?”
I get on the phone with my aunt this afternoon where she tells me that she finally showed her boyfriend my site for the first time.
“Shoot, I’ve haven’t done anything with that in a week or so,” I mumble.
“Ja, da war nicht viel los,” she said dryly.
It’s true; there hasn’t been a lot going on here. I’ve seen the light at the end of the grad school tunnel, but it’s that light that I’m shielding my eyes from instead of typing. I’ve been spending the last two weeks working on this beast of a reflective portfolio, dissecting what it all Means, and how you Feel, and how you can Connect between Theory and Reality. And I’m Getting Tired Of The Importance Of It All. So, the thought of coming here to give out more slices of my life in my life would have probably drowned me mentally.
In addition, I’ve had an influx of hormones the last week, reaching a crescendo late Friday night and petering out on Sunday morning. I felt as if I were stumbling around in a thick fog, head rearing backward, clutching my heart with one hand, waving my other arm into damp air and accumulating liquid in my lungs which made every breath rattle.
This, translated into reality, meant that I sit listlessly on the couch staring at the television. But if we ever actually did get preciptiation here, I’d be first in line for such a dramatic enacting of that imagery.
Nothing like going to the video store on a Saturday afternoon with its glowing couples to make you right as rain. Overhead:
Male, touching lightly the small of his girlfriend’s back, “I don’t want to watch a horror movie.”
“What are you talking about; it’s a comedy,” says the girlfriend.
“Knocked Up seems too much like a horror movie to me.”
“The question is not what you look at but what you see!”
- Henry David Thoureau
Neil at Citizen of the Month started this great ring of interviewing blogging goodness. You would comment on his site, the person who commented before you would interview you and you would interview the person after you. As per Neil:
I know most of you won’t agree with me, but I think anyone who decides to write about their life online is interesting, even those who may not do the best job yet of conveying that on paper. We all should be interviewed, at least once. [...] I’ve been complaining about how a combination of hierarchy, elitism, advertising, and plain old human insecurity will make the internet a less interesting place, especially to be a personal blogger lost in the loudmouth world of politics, celebrities, and product placement. [...] The minute I posted my first post, I was a “published” writer. Even if my writing sucked. Even if my audience was one crazy guy from Ohio and my mother.
Sadly I have only heard from my interviewer once…but I will not fail my interviewee, Jeanette from Jeanette Eats Spaghetti. I tried for hard and biting questions in search for t/Truth, what came out was:
You like fart and poop jokes - throw me your best one.
When it comes to fart and poop jokes, I am totally immature. Someone says DUTY and I hear DOODIE (note: if someone says “happiness” I hear “penis”).
Typically when I say something funny and/or inappropriate, it’s an impromptu situation. The other day I wanted to break the silence and busted in with, “I farted today and it smelled like cat food.” Or James will try to coax me to try a new food:
James: Go ahead and eat it. Your belly won’t know the difference.
Me: My butt hole will.
I had two situations happen to me this week, on the same day, that both left me speechless. Not that that fact in itself is earth shattering, given how quiet I am in general, but there was some sort of strange human etiquette puzzle piece that seemed lacking for me in order to know how to respond. That or wit.
I sat on the reference desk as a regular from out of town came in bright and early to view microfilms. We have an part time professor using our only microfilm so this man has to leave his ID with us in order to use the machines downstairs. I’ve spoken to him a couple of times in the last week or so, pleasantries and apologies for our uncooperative microfilm viewer and situation. This day though, the search room empty, when he gathers his boxes of microfilms and then walks to the desk to hand me his ID he says out of the blue, “What’s sad is that my best friend’s mother died yesterday.”
My eyes popped open and I murmured a slight, “Oh no…”
“She helped me through the death of my aunt four months ago, held my hand…” More murmuring from me. “And now I can’t even go to her funeral.”
I say, “I’m sorry” and he just shrugs as he bends toward the table to pick up the boxes and walks out. What compelled him to say that…I haven’t a clue.
Later in the day, as I was working in the back listening to my podcast, a heard a rustle and a flash of black behind me. I gave a little gasp and jumped as I pulled one headphone out my right ear.
“..but I scared you anyhow didn’t I?” said one of the people that works as the IT for the library. Rain or shine, this man always wears the same black leather outfit and slicked back hair. He drives a car that is too small for me. He unnerves me somehow.
I sheepishly coughed out a laugh. The man raced to the other side of the processing room, briefly stood in front of the computer, and as he raced off, “Cushy little job you have back here in hell, eh?” I couldn’t respond in time.
Not that I actually had anything as a reply. Because my first thoughts were, ‘Was that supposed to be a masked show of solidarity or a slight?’ quickly followed by ‘…Alliteration use makes me feel warm and fuzzy.’
Last Friday, while stopping for coffee with E, the wind blew over the sounds of music from the campus. Impulsively, we drove over. It looked like a haphazardly organized event; one band was still left, with only one oscillating and garish, colored lamp ornamenting the stage. It was late and the audience was petering out, clustering closely around and on the stage.
I remember an event similar to this one a few years back. It’s incredible that it’s been years now. As much as I was later touted as the experienced one, I still had to gather all my courage to walk up behind the stage, lean my arms over the cement barrier and to nudge someone obliviously wrapped up in music. His face then lighting up as he turned to me.
I crossed my arms and rubbed them for heat. I shuffled a bit, looking at the circle of people surrounding the band on the cement stage. I mumbled, “It sucks to be the guitarist’s girlfriend.” E glance over at me. “You’ve heard the song fifteen odd times that you really don’t really like but you still come out to ’support your man’. You just make yourself stand around alone in the cold.”
A group of few young students jumped around behind us, one of them in a puffed white jacket laughingly attempted to toot on a trumpet and gave up.
I like metaphors.
Okay, I love them very, very, very much. I have an obsession of trying to simplify the chaos in my mind verbally in a way that merges literal objects and my fondness for trying to tell stories. This doesn’t always work.
My Mom and I were talking today about the duality of genetics that I might be fighting internally. I realized where I was going with this chasm of absurdity, but I just could not stop.
“So imagine Dad hands me a box and you hand me, okay - no. We’re all sitting at a table. Dad gives me a box with his genetic code of restlessness and wanderlust and you slide a box over from your side full of the desire for security. Wait - this is better - in the boxes are bears. Baby bears. So I pull out these bears and they just fight. It’s the baby bear of “The Grass is Greener on the Other Side” and stability bear duking it out on the table.”
I exhaled.
I could feel my Mom furrow her brow over the phone. She slowly and tentatively said, “At least you know… about this…that might make you ahead of the game already.”
I now have a morning routine of unloading my lunch, drinks, and snacks into the break room at work. The break room over the last year has gone over quite an overhaul thanks to me being restless. In a fit of tedium, I reorganized and slowly it started becoming more homey. Back when I started at the Archives, it was dingy. The place where old archival boxes went to die. I remember that an old boss had endevoured to have pizza for the students which ended up having ten people shoved into this box of a room, silently munching pizza and staring at the floor.
You have to understand that many people in Archives, especially students, are quiet, introverted People. We’re worked hard to change this. Well, others have.
I bent down to our itty, bitty refrigerator to throw in my sandwich and drink into my claimed area of the door. [Okay, the whole door.] I had a fridge like this when I moved out to college, but then it seemed huge, because, hot damn I had a fridge, and who has fridges - independent folks. My day had come!
As I’m putting in my Coke Zero [How I missed thee.], I saw again the salad cup on the door. I didn’t remember buying salad in a cup. How did that get there? I quickly calculated that I saw it last week too and was going to make the arbitrary decision to throw it out.
I’m one of those people.
I grabbed the cup and I pulled it out…Is it a salad in a cup after all? No… It’s half pineapple, half…decidedly not pineapple. Aww, it’s fuzzy - WAIT. WHAT?
I enjoy fruit cups that the University makes. Easy, if a bit pricey. My abiding antipathy toward pineapples remains. These remains turned into my pet biology project.
I realized I’m not only one of those people, but now That Person. One that will be whispered about. The one leaving the scary leftover food.
“Is that a new organic lunch in there?”
“No, that’s her three week old pizza. He’s quite friendly though.”
I found this in a very old notebook of mine. It’s still one of my favorites.
It’s been in the works for three months now. This picture to the right is a lot of things, but I like to think of it as tangible evidence that I’m trying my gosh darn hardest to move away from what a journalism professor spat at us in class, 
“You guys know nothing; you all have just a subsidized life anyhow.” (How’s that for inspirational academic advice? )
Well, not anymore buddy. Yours truly is now is allowed to use the professional e-mail signature “Library Specialist II.”
I’m the soul possessor of the key to the mailbox at our house. This means I get to peruse J’s gaming magazine’s before he gets home. I love, love, love reading the bad game reviews.
I finding such inspiration in the trashing talking; for example, today I read about how the dialogue and scenarios in a game were so disturbingly impossible that it was like “handing someone a bucket of fish and telling them to invent a new number.”
It doesn’t get much better with a line than that for me.
I was delighted to be invited out by classmate Camille to watch her train another classmate’s horse and daughter today. She’s an amazing teacher (who I’ve mentioned) and I will take every darn opportunity to watch her with horses. It never fails that I learn something that seems much more connected to life when I watch her teach. For instance, this time I learned that pulling your fingers into claws seems to be an instinctual sign of dominance from a human to a horse in order to get their attention and to assert authority.
[Meaning of course, I had to impress J with my very best claw imitation after I got home. I threw in a growl for effect, even though I don't think that's part of it.]
When we got out to N’s family’s ranch, I got a bit over giddy with showering love via carrots that N had brought, determined that even the shy, mottled donkey who kept getting nudged back by the rest of the crew, got one carrot of his own. I’m an equal opportunity animal lover.
In situations where I’m surrounded by animals, my ADD tends to show. As much as I was listening to the lesson in the round pen, the parade of animals kept tearing me away. I would bend to scratch my calf and a white cat would run into my hand. I would shuffle to a different angle around the pen and bump into a short, golden colored mutt. I’d turn my head from the dust kicked up from the hooves inside the pen and catch sight of a tabby I hadn’t yet hugged.
I turned to catch this huge, squat Labrador meander up past the pen. He was a ruddy chocolate and he was enormous. Barrel-chested and the ultimate image of how football quarterback would translate into dog, he had gentle intelligent eyes that almost spoke up to me, “So there’s this game tomorrow, see, my bets are on…”
I hadn’t even really expected to ride, but one of N’s family member pulled out a horse from the corral and tidied her up and then kept asking, “Wanna ride? She’s a good horse, she won’t bolt.” I hedged a bit, prodded N to get on, before my “Horsie? Me? Yay!!” excitement could not be contained any longer.
The ranch was a bit out of town and the mountains had a different angle and were tinged with a blue. It was blustery, but the dirt just rode waves across the ground and through my hair and I just let go. For about ten minutes, I let go… and let Horse.
I watched Atonement at the beginning of the week which led me to grab anyone I could by the shirt collar and shout, “You must see this film!!1!!11″ It’s insanely beautiful - vibrant and laced with colors that helped elevate the scenes to a more sublime level. It’s great film if you like love stories. And while I don’t particularly want a sad love story for myself (I’ve had my fill with that lately in real life), I would dig the kind of passion that the main characters had. Not a spoiler, but in one scene the woman clings to the man and strokes his face where he’s shaking with rage and whispers, “Come back to me. Come back.” He looks into her eyes and you can see that she just takes his emotion into herself.
Aaach! *clutches heart* …Plus they get jiggy with it in a library. That’s always a bonus.
I was slightly disturbed by the casting of the young girl. She looked eerily like me, down to the mole on my check. Even the same darn haircut. Not only that, but she liked to write and is obsessed about having things in their place (this is more alluded to in the book)…So I, um, am glad I don’t have an older sister whose life I could muck up.
I’ve noticed this similarity between people more in the last couple years. It seems that the more people I meet the more they tend to look the same. I wonder if this happens for the same reason I read about how the passing of time changes the older you become. I tried to find the link but was unable to, but let me recap the idea. The general hypothesis was that time passes quicker when you’re older because you’ve already created a pathway in your mind for a certain activity or experience. Thus, the mundane seems to go quicker because you’ve already etched those onto your mind. The repetition then glosses over the moment of time you take to do it. More reason for having unique daily occurences, I would think.
I may get used to this thing called being an adult. I realized that it comes with its own instances of fun irresponsibility. It reminds me of that thrill I used to get in elementary school; I realized eating dessert first at lunch was a decision I could finally make.
Now it’s decisions like: should I take a shot NyQuil for my cold or finish the rest of the wine in the fridge instead? Should I find out what that rancid smell is in the kitchen is or should I just light some more incense?
These decisions are easy!
At the literacy seminar, there were a range of different people, about twenty of us, all there for different reasons and motivations. As I stood by the refreshment table, as I’m wont to do in a room full of people I don’t know, I hear someone say to me, in German with a confrontational tone, “So…I hear you speak… German.”
I had an awkward hunk of cantaloupe in my mouth so I just shrug and say, in English, “Well, yeah.”
He has that strange, old man, macho masculinity stance going on, head tilted slightly up in order to look down at me, feet spread wide. It was too early on a Saturday morning for this sort of thing. I rattled off in completely suave and fluent German, with him hesitatingly punching in sentences. When I noted that his German had a Bavarian accent, honest to goodness, he took a step back from me. I haven’t spoken German that well in a while and was later rather impressed with myself. I do attribute how well I did to the utter lack of esteem I held for someone who has to confront me about a language at 9 on a Saturday.
What I thought about while our teacher rambled off on how we should not use sarcasm with our tutees [No, really? Damn.], was how incredibly awesome it is to have that reach into different languages. If you know even just one more language, think how many more stories of life and love and emotion you can gather. It’s mind-boggling to me. Even if those things are universal, to feel the touches of culture, environment, and individuality on those universals shows you that everyone has a different path to own these experiences and can share them as long as there is that exchange of language.
I have a lot of guy friends. In fact, out of my four closest friends, only one is female, who sadly is 9 hours away. What is up with that ratio? I realized a while back during the year’s mandatory “Crap, all my good pants have holes” shopping extravaganza that I really could have used someone that tells me that my putukas does not work that pair of pants. J will tag along, but he tends to get narcoleptic on me, sleeping in dressing room chairs.
To betray the home team, it’s not just all about clothes shopping. Not really the biggest fan, I’m too cheap and it is a lil’ boring. It’s something else I’m missing and I can’t quite put my finger on it.
The last girl that I really clicked with came from Austria. We hung out and did quintessential girly things, like admiring guys and dying hair. Our illogicality linked in a way that we both thought that we must be related. This wasn’t too far off. When discussing our backgrounds, it turned out that her grandmother and my grandfather grew up in towns about twenty kilometers away. Small world. Sadly, not small enough when she went back to Austria.
The thing that I like about men, even my friends who are a bit more in touch with their sensitivity, is that they are focused. They are logical, they do have the Problem = Solution way to address situations, and they do extend my thinking away from the neurotic. I sometimes severely need this. This though might be why I get frustrated with my sense of femininity, I don’t have anything to really reflect it.
But I think I would like that solidarity that was probably brainwashed into me when I was a 12 year old Spice Girls convert. Turns out Girl Power was a crock. Now I try to hang out with girls, but…at my age I think, how do you make close, female friends? How do you establish solidarity? How does that work? There are girls that I would love to just hang out with, but damn, asking them out to coffee feels like such a lesbian angle to me. There it is: it just seems icky.
Maybe I’ll ask them to go play ping pong with me.
I’m currently on lunch from a seminar on basic literacy education. It’s a program that the county does to teach potential community volunteers for literacy outreach. It’s spanned over two Saturdays and this could be entirely condensed into a four hour session. I get a certification for this (woo?), but I feel a bit like I’m detention.
I promise never to have altruistic thoughts ever again! I promise to never to have altruistic thoughts ever again! I promise to never…
[I never actually have been in detention. Hmm.]
In order to better relate to our students, our instructor handed out a passage from a graduate text book. Essentially, it was about truth vs. lie (a book for linguistics to better understand formal logic), but written in such dense, typical grad lingo, that everyone shook their heads. One woman said, “This isn’t really saying anything.”
Yep, some authors like to write so that they can show they’re so literate that they form mazes for their readers. A little against the idea of conveying meaning…but that is a whole other can of worms.
[Not that I do that. *cough*]
Of course we had one girl who needed to impress others with her verbosity. She tossed her curly hair and stated, “Now when talking about truth functionally…”, and lured in the instructor. They have at it until I leaned my head onto the table with a thump, where then the instructor comes out of her philosophical stupor and shakes her frazzled hair.
“This doesn’t matter!” she screeched.
And this is why you don’t feed the budding philosophers.
My hair aspires to be more than it is. More often than not I do absolutely nothing with it, so my hair usually skips the chain of command and does what it wants. Sometimes I walk into the bathroom in the morning, screech to a stop against the linoleum, and admire the work my hair did overnight. Shapely textured and correctly folded over a daring part, I can’t help but appreciate the effort. Then my hair sighs softly to itself as I step into the shower and pull it back into the librarian hawtness look. My hair and its efforts does sometimes get a reprieve because I’m lazy and it’s the weekend, and god, who again am I trying to impress?
As I sit here, waiting for the dye to adhere to my head, let me take an embarrassing trip back in time to see where I’ve been.
…and it’s totally back. Once the legwarmers and asymmetrical haircuts made a comeback, I knew neon tights and broad swatches of unflattering eye makeup wouldn’t be far behind. Now this I can handle. Makeup that takes in those with no artistic ability? Sign me up; I’ve been doing this for years.
Oh, and the song is also most excellent.
I’ll be glad when the clock ticks over. It’s really just in our minds that we conjure up meaning to things that happen all the time, but still the weight that the tradition of the New Year does provoke an existence and actuality for me that other holidays can’t. I explained it to J by way of this: the myth of Christmas or Halloween persists for the stereotypical family, but the happening is dependent on those celebrating it. You cannot have a Christmas filled with family if your family lives overseas. You cannot go trick o’ treating with your children if you have not made children with the fruit of your loin. (Etc.)
With New Year’s, there is a collective agreement that things will change. The simple act of people needing to change their habits by writing 2008 on checks, e-mails, and letters gives me a sense that there is an imbuement of power to the happening of the New Year.
This year has been trying. I’ve lost my father, lost people that are close to me, and am in the process of losing the route of guided “learning” that school has offered me. I’m actually not sad about that. I feel like in the last three months I’ve discovered the path I will walk for at least the next six months. Just having that level of security is comforting. I was hoping for the security of other things, but those are not meant to be for me right now and I will make peace with it.
It’s been a year of loss. I won’t be sorry to leave it behind, but I do understand that I will always carry it with me and at some point I will embrace it.
~
[Ed. Note: This was hard to type... and edit with J mentioning that I needed to change articles and my slightly inebriated self saying, "Sss, fine, what do you mean...oh, I'm lookin' at the wrong sentence. Okie, I change."
I'm getting a head start on the bubbly. *raises glass to everyone*]
During finals week, one of my classes, Rhetoric and Cultural Studies, gave a faux conference in order for us newbies to get our feet wet in the conference experience. [This would have been nice before the experience in October. *sigh*]
Thankfully this time I didn’t have to deal with deflowering stories or bloody heels, because by god, I was worn out and the fact that I was wearing pants and that most my hair wasn’t standing straight up was enough for me.
With the caveat that I did not go to all the panels, I do think mine was the best. It wasn’t my presentation that made it so. Lands almighty, the best thing about my presentation was my title, “Molding the Real from the Intangible: Blogging as Limina.” Fancy, fancy. The actual paper? Less so.
The fully amazing and riveting part of my panel was the reading of an essay by my classmate Aaron Goodman titled, “Deconstruction, Truth, Meaning: Personal Praxis in the Postmodern Everyday.” Coming back to get his MA after years working as an engineer in the Real World, Aaron has been in several of my classes and I’m always grateful. Aaron manages to ask all the brilliant and thoughtful questions, usually stirring up the best conversations.
He was the last reader of the day and he read slowly and movingly. He spoke to the changes of life and his insecurity of academia. The refrain echoing in his paper was to the akin the idea of that the more you know, the more you realize that you just don’t know. A rather long excerpt, but completely worth it:
Walking on campus this morning I realized that twenty-five years ago, at the age of seventeen, I began my undergraduate program in this very place. I see today that there are piles of rubble being created by the wrecking machines whirring and roaring along where now only a portion of my old dormitory remains. Since the early 1960’s it had stood on this little hill as a monolith in its own right, but now no more. The piles are being sorted out as if to make some sense of it all; chunks of concrete here, twisted steel there, things defying categorization over there. I think to myself that I once worked and played, studied and slept, laughed and cried within the walls now crumbled before me. Within the rubble is a part of me, and within myself is a part of the rubble. I do not force the issue, I do not bother to ask if somehow this could make for an apt metaphor; you know, the idea of rubble, and time, and trying to organize it all into proper stacks and piles as if it might still be put to use. Nor do I bother to ask myself why a tear flows over my eyelid, and rests at the top of my cheek.
You learn things—and unlearn things—as time goes by. You learn that time passes all too quickly, and you learn that things are only temporary; our own failures and successes most of all. You learn that rubble unavoidably comes with life, and that rubble can become life. You learn that rubble is okay, that it is about give and take, about falling down and about being made new, about compassion and grace—about loving and being loved. You learn that the mystery of all these things is flooding through and making beautiful this very day, this very moment of the everyday. And you learn that this is enough.
The new dormitory across the way, with its earth tones glowing softly in the morning sun, looks far more attractive and fun than its predecessor. I smile with a solemn joy at the site of it, and for all its residents I make a wish that each may find all the most wonderful, most beautiful things in life; things that as yet they cannot possibly comprehend nor imagine. I wish for them rubble, and I wish for them rebirth: painful, joyous, inseparable. I said this essay is about a journey, and it is.
You could have heard a pin drop in the room during his reading. At the end, a wavering male voice expressed my sentiments (and I don’t think we were alone) with, “Man, Aaron, why did you have to go and make me cry?”
After getting multiple people asking to read his paper, I can only point you to his site, which has a lot of great work on it, and ask you to please read the full essay. You won’t be sorry. This, my friends, is what the work of a real grad student looks like.
…that make me truly enjoy my job. I have no idea why it was in his papers, it just was. Don’t ask, just read.
Frank was a bit of a joker, and my quick googling tells me that this probably isn’t real; but damn, it’s a shame. I could imagine a spitfire like that. Hell, I’d want to grow up to be that.
I haven’t been sleeping well the last couple of nights. I’ve been having maddening dreams that don’t make a whole lot of sense. For example, in one I’m needing to find my Dad the perfect Carl’s Jr. burger, because he won’t let me buy him a $65 dollar burger. Concurrent with that, two people who seem to resemble Jay and Silent Bob and are for some reason traveling with us, shoot a happless video rental employee. My Dad and I leave them behind and get slightly chased by cops, who have the latest in police transportantion - a train the size of the Titanic, shiny, purple, and black.
I have a car. They have train. Therefore, slightly chased.
Phew.
My turkey turned out mindblowingly well. But the crowning achievement were my homemade croutons, which turned into homemade stuffing. I am well chuffed with my handiwork, let me tell you.
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Now for the rest of the pictures… Read the rest of this entry »
Beautiful shot taken by my mother in her “New Camera!!!!11!!” ecstasy. She claims she has no idea how she did it and “did not want this at all.”
I think it’s a conspiracy and she used to be a world famous photographer that had to go into hiding. That’s a much cooler story, Mom. From now on, I’m doing your PR.
I have to keep changing the intro to this post because I’m such a bad person. It has started with “A few days ago” and went to “A week or two ago” to “A couple weeks ago” and now I have to say it’s been at least two months. I’m not a nice person indeed.
She wrote a post about how she wanted to get cracking on her photo work and challenged people to comment on her post. The people who commented by the correct time would get a lovely package of goodies.
I got on that. I love, love, love, LUV mail!
Lisa, a cohort at Blogher from last summer, is off on a journey to experience authenticity and peace in her life. She’s been working on issues dedicated to peace and runs PeaceThings.com. From the site:
We created PeaceThings to offer a visual voice to all who believe that conflict can be resolved by peaceful means. We create and sell peace symbol apparel, flags, buttons and other peace things, so you can speak up for peace every day. We promote fair trade, and aim to offer all sweatshop free merchandise.
PeaceThings is committed to generating income to promote peace and prosperity around the world. Our efforts help to promote the Dayton International Peace Museum.
Lo and behold, I got mail!
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What’s great is that she wrapped it with all this inspirational stickers. The most esteem-boosting package I’ve gotten in…well, it’s my first expressly esteem-boosting package I have to say.
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The hazy tree is probably my favorite. My meditating cow likes the Asian garden vistas. You can find the cards here, and there is a whole host of other nifty things in the shop as well.
If we have no peace, it is because we’ve forgotten that we belong to each other.
-Mother Teresa
The boobs just don’t do it for me, so I keep looking outward for confirmation that I am, indeed, a woman. Last Thursday at the theater where I go with J to do concessions, I got a very stereotypical validation.
As I was counting the bills, I happened to catch movement out the corner of my eye. I look down only to see the eyes of a very small, brown mouse peering up from under the refrigerator not two feet away.
I launched myself about two feet into the air, bump backwards into the J, who is propelled into the counter, and emit the time honored dance of shrieking, jumping, and pointing. J, undisturbed beyond being shoved and immune to most of my antics, just stared at me.
“What the hell?”
Gasping and pointing, “Mouse!”
He slowly looks over, “That’s a stain on the tile.”
“Mooooooooooouse!”
Resident Mouse then precedes to come out from the other side of the fridge to look at both J and I. I point, shriek more, and utterly terrify the mouse who skids back under the fridge. My sounds echoing off the empty theater walls, J says, “So there is a mouse. Huh.”
More nervous, repressed yelps from me as we try to catch him with a bag and a few kernels of popcorn so that we can transfer him outside. Resident Mouse, however, does not fall for it, dashes into the bag, pulls out a kernel and runs back under the fridge. But before the theater opened, I was able to stifle my screaming with murmurs of “How cute” as he bravely dashed back into the nether regions of the pantry, not to be seen again.
J kept shaking his head. “It must be a woman thing.”
“What?”
“You and your noises.”
Sheepishly, “Maybe.”
He sighed, “You owned a mouse once silly.”
Um, yeah. I did.
Our campus has a lot of stray cats. Depending on the season, you can see little kittens hopping through the bushes and staring out at you from drainage pipes. I followed one today that veered out in front of me who looked a lot like my kitty. Sadly, thanks to brutes on campus and them just being feral in general, they are very scared of humans.
What brings a smile to my face is that I’m seeing more and more food left out for them. Left under steps, next to bushes, on concrete walls, out by the pipes are little cups of water, little mounds of food, bowls of food and water - dishes of ceramic and metal and plastic.
I’m sure there are the anti-animal naysayers on campus and they mutter that this is dangerous and disgusting and just aiding the mongrel population. Personally it makes me think that it’s just a heart-warming sign of human kindness.
Unless it’s actually a sign of zombification.
I remembered this article about the how the stereotype of Cat Lady may have a scientific explanation. I also remember reading about how this worked in mice. Toxoplasma gondii (which I remember correctly is what woman have to watch out for during pregnancy to protect the fetus by not dealing with cat poo) is something that when gets into the brains of mice and actually diminishes their ability to instinctively stay away from cats. In theory, the parasite creates a zombie out of its host with the goal of getting back to the stomach of the cat. Thus, the mouse gets manipulated to go over to a cat and get eaten.
The theory for cat ladies is essentially that they’ve somehow managed to ingest toxoplasma gondii and are now zombie peons for cats. Thus the food left out for cats? Should I expect to see glassy-eyed professors chained to stairs ready to meet their true masters?
I’ve known a few cat ladies and I am not finding this that hard to believe.
Well, there are really some moral truisms. One of them is that opportunity confers responsibility. If you have very limited opportunities, then you have limited responsibility for what you do. If you have substantial opportunity you have greater responsibility for what you do.
-Noam Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellectuals
I have not fallen into a margarita stupor. I’ve been off doing adult things - jobs applications, resume tweaking, mindless worrying about the future.
I realized something important while brushing my teeth and talking to myself about a week ago. I’m not sure how I got on this topic of conversation with myself. It’s quite like how I end up on weird tangents with external sources - sometimes, but not always, with humans. Nevertheless, somehow I hit an epiphany while water dripped off my elbow and onto my foot.
I was debating whether or not a job offer I have would be a good choice for me (more information at a later date) and if it would be something I would want as a career. I’m hedging a bit because I’ve finally realized that what I do irritates me so much because it doesn’t truly seem to have an impact on any sort of forward movement. Untangling that line, what I do doesn’t really deal with the future. Day in and out, I dredge up the past. I am, writing this with a flair of dramatic, responsible for the portions of a person’s soul left behind in written material.
*cough* Less dramatically put - I’m currently an archivist in training.
It wasn’t so much my flirting with morbidity which was the epiphany, but I realized that, hey, I have concrete wants and desires when looking at what I would like to do in fifteen years (…if I actually mobilized my butt for action). I no longer just have “I don’t want this” or “I would go crazy if faced with that”, but actual, honest-to-goodness attributes to look for in a job.
Hallelujah. (’Tis the season after all.)
Tomorrow - new blogging. Today - more drinking.
I’m not sure why, but I always seem to give myself a sturdy two days to accomplish writing a paper. Or multiple papers.
I get to write create meaningless sentences like, “They reconstitute thoughts, invoke political activism, express social theories, and change ideologies” or talk about blogging in the sense that it is a “democratizing aspect” and how it can clash with and/or “change value systems to which bloggers ascribe, emulate, or reside.”
Right. RIIIGHT.
So until Thursday at noon, when I swagger back to my blog with a margarita in one hand, it’s going to be a bit dry around here.
Unless I need to do some procrastination blogging. Outlook - good.
I’ve decided that I’ve lost a lot of ability to have fun recently. Now some of my life’s circumstances make that relatively understandable, but looking deeper at the reoccurring wellspring of my dour nature, which I would say has been trespassing over here at IP, I’m wonder when exactly I’ve lost “it.”
I say it and I mean fun. I’m back to listening to my podcasts at work and Escape Pod’s Stephen Eley had a comment on the nature of having fun and what that means in the science fiction society. He spoke to the passion that sci-fi enthusiasts in general tend to have and how they find a way of having fun without giving a damn to the consequential negativity that may arise from society due to their nonconformity. I thought, ‘When was the last time I said: I don’t give a damn, I’m going to do this anyway because it’s fun for me?’
Should just blame grad school like I usually do?
There is the same man on campus that walks around with a shorts, Teva sandals, and a bag. He’s old, with a salt and pepper beard, a little pony tail, and a baseball cap. I assume he’s a student for some reason. He doesn’t quite seem to have the air about him that the homeless, who come into the library, seem to have. They use our computer and their possessions lean against columns - camping bags, sleeping bags, dirty bags.
At the beginning when I started at this school, it seemed I would see him around campus at steady intervals. I don’t know what really struck me except that he would walk around with a white, plastic, bookstore bag. Every time I saw him, he carried nothing but that bag and as time passed, the bag slowly fading and growing more decrepit with wear, I would wonder, ‘Why no backpack? Why this bag?’
From one sighting to another, he abruptly transitioned to another crisp and clean bag, still from the bookstore, and that struck me as well. Why always these plastic bags?
It’s been several years. About a year ago, I noticed him walking into a coffee shop with an actual bag. It was a beige, canvas shopping bag. I remember staring at it and remarking to myself that he finally had made the step up. I felt silly to notice that. He carried that for a while. But when I left work today, I noticed him walking into the library, with a sturdy, padded, black and green handbag clutched in his left hand.
I wonder if I strike other people the way that certain people strike me. I wonder that I notice this. I thought about this as I walked to the car. I wonder if other people notice the same things and have the same thoughts about them as I do.
I see cars coming to the intersection. A mini van hits a bump just right, the front wheels dipping it deeply forward and slanting the top of the car. It becomes animated to me, seemingly bowing toward the intersection. I wonder how the person inside reflects all my connotations of the bow.
I see a young man in front of me, mid stride, reach up to rub an orange-reddish leaf between his fingers. I hear the rustling of his touch and his laugh from it. I wonder why he laughs. I rather hope he laughs in wonder.
As we sat at a light late last night:
“I do think he’ll become rotund in the future,” I mused.
“What?” J replied.
I reflected that mused means mumbled in my world.
“I think he’ll become rotund in the future.”
“He’ll what?” J fidgeted with the clutch and gear shifter.
“He’ll become portly.”
“Quit answering to a word I don’t know with another word I don’t know!”
“I was hoping you’d know portly! I’m trying to be discreet.”
“Do you mean fat? Because, just say FAT.”
I’ve been asked by Silent K to tell the world seven more tidbits of IP random. I do well with random.
There are rules too: Link to the person that tagged [Check.] Tag 7 random people participating in NaBloPoMo at the end of your post and include links to their blogs. [Ooh, I get to use the NaBlogPoMo randomizer!] Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog. [Score! Procrastination!]
1. It’s the point of the semester that Red Bull makes a good bit of money of me. I get all pent up with energy so that I can do my string of all nighter’s that could have been easily avoided. It can get very bad. For example, this morning (note the procrastination blogging), I got so jazzed on RB that I try to turn down my music, wonder where the hell my Winamp program went on my desktop, wonder why it’s not on, quickly debate that I’m losing my mind and hearing music in my head very vibrantly today, and then remember that under the random stacks of paper it’s my iPod that’s plugged into my stereo instead of my computer.
2. I used to dislike web comics, but now, I’ve rather grown to like random ones. Here are two:
3. I have noted that there are similar traits in the men I date beyond the physical. They all have the salient ability to trust the world so implicitly that they can be, and repeatedly are, taken advantage of. This makes me worry about where I am in this equation.
4. I still say I speak fluent German, but I debate that my years of inactivity are making me more and more rusty in it. I can still understand everything, that never has gone away even though I go through stages of speaking very well and very poorly depending on my exposure to the language. This fact of understanding it makes me unable to fake a German accident for a humorous effect because I’ve never been able to really clearly distinguish the key wrong intonations that would make the delivery recognizable. In other words, I’ve never heard German as the harsh, guttural language that people always claim it to be and thus find it nearly impossible to imitate.
5. I love the university’s Inter Library Loan dearly; sadly, they’ve managed to employ the most curmudgeon, stereotypical “SHHHH” librarians they could find.
6. If there were a massive, end world scenario, and we figured out that we could survive by eating lotion, me and mine would be in the butter. Rephrased: I have accumulated a lot of lotion for some strange reason. [And it's not for Those Reasons people.]
7. I have to write a bio for myself for a mock conference a class of mine is staging. I remember that in high school that I was put in the local newspaper as Student of the Week and writing down as a hobby on my bio that I “cultivated peaches”. I thought this was hysterical, especially when I got asked by a classmate if I really did grown my own peaches. Guess I look the part too.
I’m only going with two honest to goodness random NaBloPoMoer’s. This was a little strange doing in itself. I got a porn link, the closed LiveJournal community, a private Myspace blog, a bunch of people that were presently already doing tags (I can see the whole community running on empty), and then I gave up. Need more Red Bull for this endeavor.
It was one of those things that looks so deseperately anti-After School Special (and quite possibly Blair Witch wannabe) that it made me naturally want to wander down there.
Um, after someone else did first. I’m the reporter, not the Marine.
Let it be simple. Let it be that I see you wave to me from across the room, across the tables and the bobbing heads. Let it be that I walk over calmly and let it be that I just smile.
Let it be that we keep it simple. Let it be that we keep an image in our minds that negates blame or claim to injury. Let it be that we delete the need for reoccurance. Let it be that there is no need for future forgiveness, for we’ve let it be that there is nothing wrong about what we have chosen.
Let it be that we make our own lives and that we wish each other well on this strange journey. Let it be that we look back with no regret because the additional pinpricks of weight aren’t needed for our trip. Let it be known that there was love through looks. Let it be that the words aren’t needed today. Let it be for a change that postive strains of imagination take over from negative impulses of worry.
Let it be that there will be silence. Let it be that the silence carries the undercurrent of our conversation and that so for the banter we invoke the gods that are intellectual and not the gods of emotion. Let it be that we carry the silence well and without obsession.
Let it be simply done for love and let that be the only thing that really mattered.
I left a sad comment about not getting tagged from one of my friends and boom, Erik from Electronic Replicant sent me a pity tag. It’s most excellent since I’m spending most of today in the car with a disgruntled cat. And since I’ve had someone complain to me that I’m not blogging on Myspace, for her I decided to add a little Myspace spice.
…I feel dirty. And it’s not a good type of dirty.
I saw this over at Silent K’s blog and had to steal it for here. Gave me chills; but then, I’m a nerd.
I’m not slouching on the blogging today. I just really wanted to put this up so that maybe I’ll provoke an interesting discussion with someone. Maybe with someone tall, dark, and handsome who writes a nicely crafted blog? One can hope.
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Cat: You’re an uncivilized beast.
Dog: I’ll share my rawhide with you?
Cat: How about not?
Dog: Well let me smell your butt; it’s how we say hello.
Cat: Heathen.
Today has been still. It hasn’t been a wooded retreat type of still, but a still filled with ghosts and misplaced thoughts. The cold seeped into the windows and the overcast skies reminding us of another country filled with family.
I made a turkey. I’m a bit stiff with the preparation, never having made one by myself before, noting only that a turkey handles a bit like a very lethargic baby.
I have been scouring the Internet for interesting blog posts to read and they’re all filled with schmaltzy giving of thanks. Pesky holiday. I’m thankful too, don’t get me wrong. I’m thankful for my health, the health of my friends and family, love given to me seemingly undeservedly from said friends and family, and the fact that my turkey wasn’t dry.
I’m phoning it in today - I’ll be back tomorrow.
Watch some documentaries, or read some short stories.
As I bent over to view the bargain books at Hastings, I realized that the section was right next to all the D&D gaming material. Pouches of dice, gaming guides, novels creating a world that is heroic, scantily clad, and filled with darkness and light that doesn’t really manifest itself outside the hearts of average people in our world.
Say, Hegar, want to fight dragons? Let me get my diamond studded bikini. Of course it’s a magically endowed diamond studded bikini, that’s how this works - naturally.
I thought to myself how odd it is how many people I know game and how strange it is that I never fell into the experience beyond having many close friends and boyfriend as gamers.
I should have fallen to it. It should have encroached on my mind like a slow, sticky molasses. I tried first in seventh grade. I had a crush on a kid who I followed faithfully over about three years. He played in the classroom where they held shop class and on year two I debated that this mystical game might be my gateway in. My friend and I took a look at a deck that she had illicitly procured for she too had similar romantic aspirations. She rose to the challenge to try the game; I shook my head at the absurdity of the dynamics of it. I decided I’d rather be single.
Spending hours and hours in a car is useful for catching up with podcasts, especially when traveling across the desolation that is the Southwest and the different sort of desolation that creeps up from moving into the Great Plains - sadly, not that great in traveling excitement, more plain.
Going back to podcasts though, I love me some Escape Pod, a sci-fi podcast, and Deo’s Shadow, a pagan podcast, but I’ve stumbled across a new podcast Philosophy Bites which seems entirely too dry to be fun, but…then, I’m typecast as a librarian so there you have it.
What I like about this podcast is that it’s breaking down bits of philosophical thought into handy fifteen minute segments and from what I’ve inferred they have some rather reputable people voicing their opinions in a interview style format. The one I really like today was called, “What is Philosophy?”. That segment’s speaker was Edward Craig, a retired professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, who tried to sum up the value and meaning of philosophy.
Doesn’t one deserve a margarita cupcake?
I kid you not.
J and I went to Bennigan’s last Saturday for the hell of it. It was a long night of indecision, typical of these parts, pulling into drive-thru’s, pulling out, walking into restaurants, walking out, until we reach the “Bennigan’s, Bennigan’s? We haven’t been there in forever” stage of the night.
Unsurprisingly, since it’s right across from the campus, it was drunk frat-boy night. Now, a couple weeks ago I had a weak moment that included a bad choice in company combined with a bad choice of locale and ended up drinking at Bennigan’s. It’s one of those place that you know you’ve hit some sort of bottom, even if it’s just the salted bottom of an overpriced margarita, if you find yourself going there to get drunk. It’s not a proper bar and grown men should not link arms and sing Red Hot Chili Peppers together and still try to be “on the prowl.” But I think I’m digressing.
Too…many…margaritas…must post…in the next half hour…will do…the meme I was tagged for…
Thanks Jen! [Jen is awesome. She tags me. *sniff*]
My Mom takes a cursory interest on how I handle my schoolwork at best. She came to the realization long ago that fretting about my procrastination is probably the least productive worrying that she can do. As I spoke to her last night at about ten, I yawned into the phone, “I have to start the work on my presentation for tomorrow morning.”
“I hate it when you tell me things like that,” she replied dryly.
Apathy is my friend and cohort when comes to the repercussions of procrastination. As I sat down to give my presentation this morning bleary-eyed from watching TV too late more so than staying up and doing homework, I spread my hands on the table and thought back to my tried and true axiom in high school, “What’s the worst that could happen?”
And the presentation, on a wing and riding on a breath of a prayer, went smashingly in contrast to the spiral of hatred I thought I was going to encounter. Ayn Rand tends to bring out that chorus of negative sentiment, and I’m a wee bit sad that there was more nodding than indignation, even though I got to throw in the line that Ayn Rand “seems to have beef with Jesus.” Even against PhDboy I seemed to hold my own, to which he noted after class that he enjoyed that I had veritably “brought it” via my Rand arguments. (Hey, hey!)
In my second class, Camille (who comments here, but who I won’t out just in case, enthusiastically requested if she could make up a codename for herself) asked me if I bought into Rand completely. Like I mentioned to J and to which Camille spoke to in class, Rand holds up a mirror for examining how altruistic our motives are, but I don’t completely buy the idea that all men are islands unto themselves. Rand’s writing tends to not seem very clear to me and her explanations are a bit muddled…but I did run across her writings after I had issues with being told how condescending I am with my knowledge experimentation [Hi HWSNBN.] so being told that I should be proud of my accomplishments, that pride isn’t always a bad thing, and that without that sense of pride I’m not really going to progress any further, was really something I resonated with.
PhDboy then sat down next to Camille and again, “I read your blog…you know.” He nodded slowly, “Who’s calling me inconsistent?” After I stated I was leaving the party nameless, he laughed and just said that being inconsistent made him “more complex.”
“I read that too,” said Camille and jokingly said, “And I now like you less.”
I laughed, “You’re a mini Internet celebrity. Like Roger.”
PhDboy looked pleased for a split second until he blinked, “Roger the horse?”
I like to read the 400 Words, a blog that collects mostly the life stories (or snippets of such) in four hundred word essays submitted by its readers. This one struck me in a dark way. It’s about how this woman is a mother and a grad student - a grad student entranced by the lure of the intellectual elite. The essay for me sparks the tone the aloofness, and every notion about how academics might truly just live in ivory towers, that I dislike so much.
But in those brief moments of self-consciousness, when the music in my head took pause, I could feel the ridicule of a younger student…the transparency of my idiocy. I had been whispering some nonsense aloud. I bit my lip so hard it began to bleed. But soon none of it would matter. The post-rock in my ear would revive my belief in an ideal truth, and the importance of aiming toward it.
I think this whole essay is a summation of my fear of losing sight of whatever reality is beyond what you construct in your own mind. I think the author realises that too after her daughter asks her to join in dancing,
“She wanted me to join her, but I couldn’t fain interest in being silly. My thoughts swirled around the book I hoped to write one day about becoming a mother. My insights on the subject were entirely theoretical. Then I caught a glimpse of her slow squat followed by an awkward spin. She made me smile and forget myself.
My pie was sweet, my house was warm. Yet my lack of contentment with such mundane accomplishments drove the flux between my inadequacy in any single role, and my purpose.”
I wonder how exactly to retain that balance between the flux because I truly must believe, if I believe anything at all, that there is a path to that balance. It’s on the darker days that I’m just not sure if the idea of balance exists at all.
Happy Veteran’s Day.
I was going stir crazy tonight, so I opted for a little remote and faux chic blogging with taking my computer to the local swank and happening café in the grad scene. My computer had been off to the Never Never Land of repair so in theory I have a legitimate excuse of testing it out – the technology equivalent of taking it out on the highway, albeit with chai.
It’s an interesting thing, Yuppiedom. You try to test the waters on how the Yuppie scene would fit you and then get booted from the table because you have the wrong chips.
“Can I get a dirty chai,” I ask.
“Now what is That,” the girl behind the counter tilts her head and then thrusts it forward.
“Oh, um, well,” I stutter, “Chai with a shot of espresso.”
“Do we do that here?” She whips around and two other trendy barristas give me blank stares. A chorus of no’s, until the main girl nasally replies, “Well we call that a ‘chai charger’.”
“Oh. Well… one of those then.”
“So confusing,” she snaps.
No tip.
I sat in class the other day and across the table sprang up a discussion of only children, stemming from one classmate mentioning that she wasn’t raised to be a “girly-girly”. A few seats down, another gal mentioned how both girls knew immediately when they met that they were only children. Both girls are talkative and boisterous and one said, nodding knowingly, ”You can pretty easily figure out who’s an only child.”
I felt like a ninja only child.
I’m on the non-boisterous end of the only child spectrum. I think that’s due to shuffling around the world as a child and developing the habit of being the observer before being a participant. It’s interesting that I’ve stumbled into rhetoric because the art of persuasion manipulation is something you tend to learn as an only child. A line from the movie Now and Then struck me a long time ago. It said that a only child is “a typical upbringing for actors and pathological liars.”
I’ve enjoyed being an only child. The only downside is that I can’t hand off my daughter duties to a brother or sister with a harried phone call saying, ”Deal with them already; I’m done for the week.” A lot of people seem skeptical to raising only children, but I would recommend it. My personal study seems to show that middle children have more issues than any only child I’ve ever met.
I’m going to try and have two children though. I would enjoy watching the dynamic even if I wasn’t able to experience it. And I can’t say I won’t be above goading them into fighting in the backseat like weevils in a small bag of flour. It’s damn hard to provoke the classic ”Don’t make me turn this flippin’ car around” when you’re alone in the backseat.
Humans aren’t very random, but J is definitely the best I have.
“Give me a number between one and a hundred,” I lean into his room, hanging on his door frame.
“Do we have to?” He asks as Stinky looks up and babbles in Cat to my question.
“Yes.”
“Sixty-nine.”
I sigh, “Another number?”
“Forty-seven.”
“That’s my favorite!”