I finally have the internet and feel like there are frogs running my connection. Ah, modems. How I never missed parting with you. I have lots to say, but things to do, so that will have to come for later. But just a note to say I’m alive and well and spunky, the spunky and possibly alive being questionable.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-31-2002 | 01:05 PM
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Alright, kids, I’ll be leaving for Minneapolis in an hour or so. Be good. I won’t have internet access in my place until Friday or so, but I’ll still manage to check things. If I have the desperate yearning to write, it’ll be at http://zosiablue.diaryland.com until I get things settled. Wish me luck. Or don’t. Your choice.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-28-2002 | 12:05 PM
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Oh, I’m going to miss Duluth this summer. I just got the type of pangs you get right before you cut your hair to a drastic length - you know it’s for the best to cut it because it’s tangly and full of split ends, but there’s the moment of panic right before the scissors touch of, “Oh, no, shit, I love my hair like this.”
It’s been a great weekend. Really, it has. Saturday night, Beth, Corina, Jason and I went out with a few friends and played card games and went to bars, a practice I’m completed unadept at. I managed to keep my cool however, and started ordering drinks I remembered from movies, like Midori Sours and Seven and Sevens. I got slightly tipsy, but managed to keep a smooth, reserved character that I’m never able to pull off.
Yesterday, I finally saw Attack of the Clones. As I’ve been telling everyone: wow. The dialogue and acting and staging was so awful that it didn’t even make the scale, but it was Star Wars and as Beth noted, you just can’t say it was awful because of that fact.
Today was beautiful. I walked around and bought cottage cheese and sweet corn, sat outside and read The Shining and tried to not begin to feel nervous about my move to Minneapolis tomorrow.
I don’t have a job yet and I don’t know my way around. This could be potentially disastrous. But it also could be incredible, and that’s what I’m hoping for.
“Every key works differently, and I forget every time. The forgetting defines me - yeah, that’s what defines me.”
Posted by: Zosia | 05-27-2002 | 06:05 PM
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I know it’s blasé to love RENT now, but I still love this musical as much as I did in high school. I don’t know what the hell it is about it, but just listening to the music again touches me with the same intensity that it did years ago when I first saw it. I love it! Love love love love it, and it makes me feel empowered and almost fiercely giddy to sit here with my newly chopped hair (so short! the shortest yet! That’s another story for later), and my cup of half-caffinated coffee, listening to a piece of artistic expression that’s taken my breath away for years. It’s like coming back to a first love, a little, and feeling no bitterness, just a continuation of feeling begun a long time ago.
I don’t even remember the amount of times I’ve seen this show, but I have nothing but good memories from it. The best was seeing it in an outdoor amphitheater, and having a light thunderstorm occur during the funeral scene. The place was still; Collins was singing acapella and everyone was in tears. I’ve never felt shivers like that before at a show.
It reminds me of countless nights in Nick’s car and countless nights spending time in the line for tickets or the lotto and just being an all-around extremely romantic, idealistic, excessively passionate teenager. I think I’m probably all of that now, but you just learn to contain and squelch it when you grow older, whether for good or not.
I’m a ball of corn mush, but I can’t help it. I love this shit.
P.S.: On that list way down there I made a while back, I’ve crossed out a bunch of things, if you’re interested. You don’t have to be. Really.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-25-2002 | 03:05 PM
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On my quest to find accurate words, I had some Ani lyrics up here, but I found something I liked better, so I took those down. Here’s a quotation from the lovely Barbarella’s web journal:
“But sometimes, you never do get the whole truth. No matter, because the way it works is this: if truth is withheld, eventually, it becomes too much to bear for one person. And it will become heavier and hotter until it burns a ragged hole through good intention.
All you have left are the singed and ruined remains, melted ideas. I tend to want to be liked by everyone. I need to let go of that. Because you know, with as many people as I know, that’s statistically improbable. I know that there is a percentage of people in my circle(s) who have ‘none-too-loving’ things to say about me. I hear it all the time. And I think it’s funny. The things they think are worth telling other people, the things they spend so much time [talking about]…
I’m a contradiction, you know. I thrive on people, I love their stories, learn from their lives. At the same time, I can’t stand them, their fears, their insecurities, their arbitrary and unfounded thoughts of others. Hence, my need for a break. I want to be the life of the party. And I want to shun the party for even happening. See my dilemma? The storm is getting closer, I’m just grabbing my coat.”
Posted by: Zosia | 05-25-2002 | 12:05 AM
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I’m extra chatty today. I’m just poking my head in here now to tell you to read everything Elinor has written in her journal this week. It’s a mixture of perfect comedy gold (as we say around these parts) and poignancy. Special note to the Attack of the Clones bit, which, even though I haven’t seen the movie, made me laugh until I was a whimpering collapsed heap of amusement.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-24-2002 | 05:05 PM
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I make some sort of living on words, and it’s becoming tougher because I’m finding them less and less adequate. Not the words given to me, but the ones I give to others. I write letters and bits on here, and when I re-read, I’m constantly thinking, “No! That’s not what I mean at all.” I feel like I cheapen beauty and sweetness by trying to describe it or thank someone for it. I sit in these incredible moments so often, slices of time that feel so huge and so simplistic, and then when I try to record them, a few sentences fall on the page that encompass .005% of what I felt. I often give up and just try to write what happened, without the glitter or the frills, and that’s when I get the closest to accurately describing what I felt and saw and touched. But it’s never enough. I feel like people that I experience these moments with will never know how deep the moment settles within me, how they stun me into speechlessness, and it’s all I can do to smile, experience, savor and try to remember for later.
But I also think - the people that are the closest are those that don’t need this explained them. They know the type of reverence certain moonlight deserves and how talking about nonsense is the best thing to talk about and how humor has got to be there, in every situation, or else life becomes less life-like.
With that said, I’m not off for the weekend as originally planned, but rather, staying in Duluth to clean up my messes, even though I seem to create a new one with every clean-up.
God Speed.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-24-2002 | 02:05 PM
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These pictures won’t do the atrocity justice, but I thought I’d share with the masses the tangled bird’s nest my hair has become. I’ve let it go almost a year without so much as a trim, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve actually brushed it. Add that in with the fact that I had to rat it out every night for the show I was in during March, and you have yourself a bonefide tangly mess. I’m almost embarrassed to go get it cut. The camera flash is my friend, as it makes my hair look redder and shinier than it is. Lies, all lies.
Click to enlarge and also take note of the Top Girls poster in the background, which is the show that started off this hair disaster
Posted by: Zosia | 05-23-2002 | 10:05 PM
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Hi. I’m back. Though I took a shower, I still smell like campfire and dust and citrus and cabin, which is an altogether comfortable combination of scents. My head is a little more together than it was before I left, though my stomach is fluttery, as if something is about to happen, good or bad or both.
I stepped on the front porch this morning to find two dead birds, a golden finch and a brown bird with a white belly that I don’t know the name of. They were placed in such a way that they looked like plastic birds, carefully set down on the concrete. This seems like it should be a bad omen, but the only thing I can find that points towards that fact is a dream book, in which a dream about dead birds indicates coming worries. I don’t know if I believe in omens. I don’t know if I don’t, however.
I’ll be gone again tomorrow for Memorial Day weekend. I’m moving to Minneapolis next week, so everything might be a little sporadic on here.
I’m exhausted and in a bit of a wormhole. But I can’t stop smiling.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-23-2002 | 05:05 PM
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I’ll be gone for a few days. So, talk amongst yourselves. Spread some nasty gossip. You’re all good at that, right?
Posted by: Zosia | 05-20-2002 | 09:05 AM
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I happened to spy Matt playing devil stickis outside, so I decided to stop moping around the house in a blue funk and take pictures. This was the neatest one - my camera reflected something odd in the pavement by the grass, so the purple effects are purely natural and non-Photoshopped.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-18-2002 | 04:05 PM
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Tomorrow is the last day of school. How can that be true when I remember last summer so clearly? Slaving away in the hot theatre box office, spending a few months heartbroken, bonding with Beth and Corina and Minh and Lisa, being bored to tears, laughing until I cried many many times, wearing skimpy clothing, visiting Luke in a half-drunken stupor (that would be me, not him, in the stupor) at the hotel where he worked, shamelessly flirting with him while eating a a million apples and soaking in the hot tub, dates with police officers and having my first taste of real Scotch, sleeping naked and still waking up burning hot, and then leaving the summer feeling I hadn’t accomplished anything.
I want this summer to be exciting and worthy of my youth. In high school, I had incredible summers. Must return to that.
I must be studious now. I’m feeling sort of happy. Damn caffeine. I feel hopeful. Hopeful! Running through wheat fields barefoot in a long summer dress hopeful. The world hasn’t actually exploded yet. I’m stagnant in the Twilight Zone - maybe I’m not supposed to exit yet. Less abstraction, more hard cold facts to follow.
Come meet me in when I live in Minneapolis, unless you’re a scary stalker.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-15-2002 | 10:05 PM
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Soon, some glorious sunkissed day in the future, I’ll return to regular entries here.
Today you get a to-do list:
I’ll let you decide for yourself what will and will not get accomplished. Now time for a 30 minute nap. Must have adequate rest to tackle world.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-15-2002 | 09:05 PM
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“too
young
to hold on,
and too old
to just
break free
and run -
too deaf, dumb, and blind to see the damage I’ve done;
Well, maybe I’m too young to keep good love from going wrong.”
–Jeff Buckley
Posted by: Zosia | 05-15-2002 | 11:05 AM
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Open Letter to My Lungs: Part of the Epistles to my Body Parts, 80 millionth in a Series:
Breathe! I know when the brain sends you “Holy shit, I’m upset” signals, your first instinct is to freeze. One breath per six minutes does not an alive girl make. Don’t freeze. In and out. The world will go, no matter - oh, fuck it, do want you want. Maybe you know what’s best.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-15-2002 | 12:05 AM
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Exiting the Twilight Zone: Part Three, in a Series:
3. You’re lost. You sit down, twiddle your thumbs, and then pick up the broken bottles and rotten tomatoes. Thunder rumbles in the distance. The lightening you prayed for strikes you and suddenly you have shocking new knowledge: you’ve been the one throwing the glass this whole time. Somehow, or another, the sound of pain that you thought was your own, echoing only in your head, was actually of those on the border. Squint your eyes in the darkness, and notice the outstretched hands of the Border People.
Their hands are cut and red, from you, but they’re still outstretched, not teasing, but sincerely trying to help you exit. Don’t take the hands yet. It would be easy to let yourself be carried out, but the purpose of this exercise was to discover the way on your own. Scrawl apologies and pleas for directions onto a carrier pigeon, and fly him across the border. Wait for a response. In the distance, watch a blood run sunrise begin to crawl sleepily from the horizon. Make a promise to yourself not to write anymore abstract analogies. Then remember that you never make promises. Drink coffee. Wait.
(several centuries pass)
You see a bird in the distance. Is it your pigeon? No! It’s a carrier . . . canary. On it’s back, a rolled up piece parchment rests. Curiously wonder to yourself how this turned into an RPG. Read the parchment:
“Zosia,
Following the second part of ‘how to leave the twilight zone,’ if indeed you are lost, perhaps you shall find this advice useful. Or perhaps you will find it better to print this note, put it in a glass bottle, and thrust bottle out of hand in the direction of oncoming meanies, or delicate clothing or, wuss rain drops, or the dryer, or all of the above:
(this is taken from McSweeney’s.net):
What you do want to do — the very second you realize you’re lost — is drop your possessions and run. Capitalize on that blind, unreasoning terror and sprint as hard and as fast as you can in any direction. Nothing else matters, just go — repeating, as you do, ‘This is not happening!’ or more simply, ‘No! No! No!’ If you can keep your speed up, without slamming into a tree or rocketing yourself off a cliff, you will automatically find yourself not lost anymore. Congratulations.
If you’re still lost after all that, don’t give up. Take big, gulping, wasteful drinks from your canteen. You may feel like collapsing into a heap on the ground and sobbing pathetically like a schoolgirl (’I'm going to die! I’m going to die’), but don’t. Save that for later when it’s dark and you clearly hear a pack of bears nearby mauling a faun.
Love,
The Girl from the Land of Lemurs”
Fill up on coffee. Begin walking again.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-14-2002 | 03:05 PM
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As I sit here, enjoying the sounds of the classic “One Jump Ahead,” from Aladdin, I ponder the source of my jubilant mood - is it the caffeine? The organic cottage cheese I just inhaled? The ever-contagious happiness of Disney musicals? The fact that I don’t really like cartoons, but damn, if Aladdin doesn’t make me 10 years old again, with long ugly hair, big ugly glasses and mismatched ugly clothes?
I have a place to stay in Minneapolis for the summer, as well as a possible job. Things are coming together. If you’re going to be in Minneapolis, I want to meet you. I’m going to make sure I have adventure this summer. Adventure!
Posted by: Zosia | 05-13-2002 | 08:05 PM
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“I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him.
If I am dumb beside your body
while silence blossoms
like tumors on our lips,
it is because I hear
a man climb the stairs
and clear his throat outside our door.”
– Leonard Cohen
Posted by: Zosia | 05-12-2002 | 02:05 PM
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How to Exit the Twilight Zone: First Two Parts, in a Series:
1. Sit and wait for someone to rescue you. Watch everyone flounder right outside the borders, throwing tomatoes and glass bottles at you. Watch your super invincible shield deflect the debris. Sing strong woman power songs, write a lot of bad poetry and annoying poetry-prose, and put your hands over your eyes in thesunissobrightbutIdonthavesunglassesand I’mlookingforsomeone gesture. See the said person putting plastic flowers in the broken bottles. Decide you’re not a damsel in distress. Start walking.
2. As you walk, get angry. Get in a foul, awful, black funk. Start removing all the trash around your feet and start yelling at inanimate objects. Something in your laundry says it can’t be washed in the dryer because it’s “delicate”? Fuckin’ shove it in the dryer, and if it doesn’t survive, what were you doing with “delicate” clothing anyway? Yell at the rain for only falling in wuss frail drops. Scream that you want a thunderstorm. You want lightening to hit you. Realize that you don’t have, and have never had, a sense of direction, and are now incredibly lost.
Brought to you by the council of Abstract Angst.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-11-2002 | 03:05 PM
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Okay, here’s the plan: I haven’t done Participation Positives in weeks because things have been pretty sticky over here. The lovely Jess has kept me on her links page, however, and it’s always good to bring a little cheer to this gray box.
The lake today was insanely gorgeous. I went down to the park to practice for my Acting final (it’s a Shakespeare course, and we’re doing a classy and campy Shakespeare in the Park deal) and the lake took my breath away. Perfect blue with the sun reflecting thousands of pairs of eyes into the water. I just ruined that image for myself by imagining eyeballs bobbing around under the waves. It was still pretty.
I love my mother. I’m so thankful to have a good relationship with her when so many other people are on strained terms with their parents. I love my father, too. But my mother extra much this week. She makes me stay true to my Southerness and also keeps me from spiraling into Drama Queen-dom.
Perkin’s Everything omelet, minus the ham and green peppers. A really sweetly sincere smile from someone I don’t know very well, but is being unexpectedly kind to me lately. Coffee (how did I go without it for almost a month?). Using headphones as earmuffs. Everyone in my Acting class because no matter how much I want to throw myself into the lake, they still manage to make me laugh - good laughs, too, the all-out, head-thrown-back, crying kind. Beginning to learn and value simplicity. My Nalgene bottle.
Thank you to: the makers of Pepto-Bismal and Wal-profen. The birds of Duluth, who continue to sing, even when the world ends. Matt’s laugh. The Duluth Transit System. Gustav Klimt and Stephen King. The inventor of dogs.
Hugs to: Abbey, who is the true superhero. Dane, for understanding the comforts of Vonnegut and Irish Creme. Andrew, for buying me gum and ear-plugs. All the nerds. Elinor, who is my favorite Canadian impractical arts student. Ralph Fiennes, ’cause he’s hot.
Special acknowledgments: again, to the lake and its flat rocks. The Ven Den, which provides me with chemically flavored, yet sweet delicious French Vanilla coffee. Gravity, which is fickle, but continues to persevere. Ani DiFranco. My couch and bodies full of cans. Hoodie anythings. Citrus. Freckles. Naps. You!
Whew.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-10-2002 | 03:05 PM
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Thanks for e-mailing me and asking if my existence was still ocurring on a regular basis. It is. Alive! Alive! I’m alive!
I’ll write a longer, more intensive, entirely sexual in nature update later tonight, minus the sexual, intensive and longer.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-10-2002 | 12:05 PM
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“Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.”
Posted by: Zosia | 05-05-2002 | 01:05 PM
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After five months of being 21, I went to my first bar ever on Saturday night. It was to see Sunny Wicked play and only a few of us were there, but it was fun and people bought me drinks and I felt hot and cocky and youthful. The night is blur.
All I seem to remember is the neon green of the bartender’s answer to “give me the girliest fruitiest drink you have,” old guys in suits, drunk girls tumbling into each other on the dance floor, one lone woman with long black hair and a camera strapped around her neck dancing like a hippie, 3D glasses, taking a break at Dairy Queen and asking for a “scoop” of ice cream (I think I’ve been to Dairy Queen three times in my life), buying earplugs with Andrew and his comment that you never know what situation you’re going to end up in (his observation of the fact that we went from a loud crowded bar to a 24 hour drugstore to buy pieces of plastic without remembering the in between) and feeling quite hedonistic, and knowing the moment I stepped out of the smoke and noise, I was going to pay for it.
I should have more humor on this site. Shouldn’t I? Introspection turns into a dead zone after a while. I’m going to sleep now, anyway, and have my alarm set to wake up with the sunrise. I can’t quite catch my breath right now. I think I’ve been holding it for two days. I’m not the superhero I thought I was.
“You sign Prince of Darkness - try Squire of Dimness.”
Posted by: Zosia | 05-05-2002 | 01:05 AM
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Here is what numbness feels like:
Driving over ice. Like 10 below. You’re watching the icicles form outside your window, and your hand bumps against the cold pane trying to reach them.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-04-2002 | 02:05 AM
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May Day
Lately I’ve been having these inarticulate thoughts about fleeting youth. Fleeting, indeed. Mostly it’s because I was extremely studious during the beginning of this semester, in which we learned about the Romantic poets and their absolute obsession with youth lost, and the manners in which they idealized and obsessed over it.
Well, damn it, I’m still young and ripe, and I am constantly aware that this won’t last forever. Isn’t a 21-year-old supposed to think they’re immortal? There’s always something in the back of my mind that is screaming, “Savor this! You’ll be middle-aged and pumped full of regrets before you know it!” People who are considered (and I say considered) past their prime pat us kids on the head all the time and tell us to enjoy this while we can. How the hell do you enjoy something when you constantly think, “I must enjoy this”?
How long can I walk around with unbrushed hair and untied shoes, lurking through crowds in a hoodie sweatshirt, the hood pulled over my eyes? and how long can I ride the hump in the car when there’s no other room, and put my head through the sunroof, hair redgold and flying? How long can I eat chinese food for breakfast and pancakes for dinner; sleep five hours one night and 12 the next; drink coffee like it’s going to save me and wear t-shirts in the freezing cold and have headphones blasting Ani on the bus and run up muddy hillsides, only vaguely aware that I might fall?
This shit plagues me, you know. Sometimes I think I’m the oldest 21-year-old alive. But that would be lie, as I don’t know anything and any type of enlightenment I might have thought I had once was only a heightened sense of arrogance.
. . .
This was the first morning I ever woke to the truck outside picking up the recycling. I heard glass break over and over, an angry sound, as if one of the workers was smashing bottles against the side of the house. I wanted to run out and break glass with him. Break it against his truck and the sidewalk and my skin. I woke up this morning and smelled so unlike myself and like another that I tried to peel my skin off, strip it in layers, wash it down. But I had to catch the bus instead.
. . .
If you’re a UMD student or are in the Duluth area, make sure you check out Rock Stock, the two-day music festival at school this Thursday and Friday, organized by the lovely, tall and ambitious Erik.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-01-2002 | 02:05 PM
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