When I am in depressed artsy mode, my depressed artsy beatnik soul dwells on the fact that I hate holidays. Hate them. Growing up, my mother treated holidays like poison and spent the day in a snit. I never understood her hang-up before, and now I think I do: holidays are landmarks. You’re whizzing by, driving aimlessly, when you stop at Halloween and think, “Oh, I was here last year.” And you remember playing dirty Jenga and drinking blackberry brandy, happily sitting next to the girl who, unbeknownst to you at the time, would slide into your groove, take your place, replace the ghost fingers still touching his hair with real ones.
Four years ago, you were in a blue Dorothy dress with spiked punch spilled in your cleavage, walking home at six AM from your first freshman party. You bumped into him on the sidewalk. You had been broken up two months at that point, and just the feel of his black shiny jacket, the one he purchased on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Washington DC, unhinged you.
My best friend’s mother is going to Cuba this year for Christmas. Last year, I think she went to Florida and the year before that it was probably London or Italy. Her husband died around Christmas, almost 10 years ago, but it’s impossible for her to stay home. See? For all the good cheer and merriment and goodwill, holidays are shoves off tightropes just when you thought you had finally gotten to the point where you had forgotten you were on a tightrope at all.
I would give anything for today to be November 1. I’m sure I could find many things to do tonight, but I’ve managed to haunt another town, and this time, unlike four years ago, I can’t shove all my things into my brown leather suitcase and hop on a plane. I have to nudge elbows with the ghouls and the zombies, the dead lovers and collapsed bridges.
Holidays are evaluations. I’m waiting for my pink slip.
“If I met you in orbit we could touch fingertips, and dive into the atmosphere as meteors.”
As always, touching well written prose from Paul Ford. That particular line reminds me of the most beautiful letter I’ve ever received – a love letter, of sorts – in which the following was said:
“…but you have burrowed deep into my planet of thoughts, past the atmosphere of dreams, the logical crust and the molten memories right to the indefinable core that is me and my bundles of ideas. You nestled into that part of myself that may not even exist, and then you exploded. Random pieces of everything are now just left floating around with no shape in any order in the space where my planet used to be. The only consistency that can be derived from the chaotic maelstrom of consciousness is that there is a fragment of you embedded in every piece. You’re mixed with everything. My cognitive space is speckled with your stars.”
Beautiful. I remember crying like the mushy baby I am when I read that, and the fact that it still touches me now makes me think that maybe memories aren’t as terrible as I’ve been believing them to be. In ten years, I want to still have that letter memorized, to be able to hold onto it when I forget poetry.
. . .
Also: this is the first slightly controversial subject I’ve participated in on the UMDStudents The forum is usually overrun by name-calling loud conservatives who tend to gang up and beat down any liberal that sneaks an opinion in, but this wasn’t as hot button an issue, so I’d thought I’d give it a try. It’s a topic I’ve never thought about before and makes me feel deliciously naughty defending. (P.S to Elinor: I always thought that you needed to go on this board and whoop some ass like I know you can. You don’t have to be a UMD student to post – read back over some old threads. Your jaw will unhinge.)
A terribly written, though mildly entertaining sonnet to a now defunct alarm clock:
One cold dull morning at seven A.M.,
I stood raging and breaking by your bed.
After dreams fell away from your limbs,
I smashed your alarm clock until it fell dead.
The pieces went flying across the floor,
a noise so loud it was heard in the bay.
The cracked black corpse lay there, broken and torn,
and I stood there stunned, not knowing what to say.
I cried into the wires, springs and the bells,
and begged Humpty Dumpty to reincarnate,
but the clock stayed broken, deaf to my wails –
See: I was weeping, five minutes too late.
So I bought a new one, to replace the deceased –
Lovely clock, sweet clock, may you rest in peace,
I curse you. May you be trampl’d by Swines. (via Megnut)
I am constantly asking myself why I have a need to write my personal thoughts in such a public forum, as I’m sure every writer does at least once a year. I wonder if I cheapen my experiences by displaying them, by disobeying the conservative society rule of keeping your angsty junk deep in the recesses of your dark angsty soul. But I do have a need to express myself in this fashion and I believe it’s because if I can organize my thoughts, put them into fairly coherent sentences and allow others to read them, then they are validated and less neon. Words are thoughts once removed.
In books, no matter how tragic the story, how tormented and tortured the heroine is, in the end, she either ends up happy or if not happy, has a nice neat moral to learn from her experiences. There is no detailed minute by minute agnonization, just clean type on white paper, once removed. If I can achieve that – if I can take my poor tortured artsy soul and place it into twenty six letters, into rows of 0s and 1s, then maybe I can breathe without daggers of memory piercing my skull. And if other people read it, then my words are twice removed.
I am not easy to wreck, but once I am wrecked, it’s an obliteration. There are no identifiable parts, just a dented black box squawking mercilessly in the dust. I want to grow up and out of this, but I am so self absorbed that I’m ingrown. I don’t sleep when I wreck like this, don’t eat well, don’t concentrate, make the same stupid mistakes over and over again. I become an after school special, wandering the halls with a red face and slumped shoulders. I think, there are hundreds of people in this school right now that are feeling like shit, but I’m the only one I see who is grinding her teeth to keep from collapsing like an accordion in the hallway. Why can’t I keep it together?
I write because I think it makes me feel better, even if you reading it, shake your head, roll your eyes and mutter, “What immature bullshit. There’s a real world out there, you know.” I write because suddenly it gives me clarity and organization. It gets me to a point where I can take a breath and say, well, okay, maybe this is survivable. I’m so often embarrassed that I spew my junk for everyone to see, but I think if I didn’t, there would be trouble.
I write because I miss you, so very much and I hope that some day my words will pluck your heart like harp strings.
And here is what just gets my goat about this whole “life” thing: one moment you’re in his office, absolutely flipping out in every sense of the word and you both are sort of yelling, though the quiet type of yelling that occurs when other people are around, and you both are sort of being violent, though only to inanimate objects and you both are dizzy with the thought of, “How did we ever get like this?” and there are ugly tears and red faces.
Five minutes later, he is paying you five bucks to write a paper for him and touching your nose in the cute way that you used to take for granted, and you are hugging him in an elevator, both your faces made garish by the green paint reflecting off the fluorescent lights, and you are smelling him and thinking of his Nautica and coconut smell.
Long after you’ve left him, as you are walking to your car in the cold and the snow, you stop and you think, “He didn’t smell like that at all. He didn’t smell like that at all, this time.”
. . .
And then in the shower this morning, you stop mid shampoo and think, “You know, this has been like a trial. I thought I was the hotshot persecuting lawyer this whole time, the type that everyone thinks is a fucking rock star, but it’s like the trial ended and instead of me going home with my leather attaché and winning smile, the bailiff slaps the handcuffs on me and I realize I’ve been the one on trial this whole time.”
You think this is such a brilliant analogy that you must write it on your site for all to see. But you write it and realize not only are you overdramatic, you are also quite unbrilliant and unoriginal. So you quietly have a mental kicking-your-own-ass session and then go to school.
I’ve never had a small puny cold, oh no – every time my throat begins to redden and swell, or a slight cough enters my lungs, I am Dying. I am the biggest whiny baby when it comes to being sick because I am convinced, no matter how minute the symptom, that I might as well get my affairs in order and compose my epitaph, because I Am Dying.
Last night, as I was laying in bed, feeling slightly achy and a little porcupine-in-the-throat-y, I had visions of hospital beds and my pale dark circled face hooked up to various life support machines. The wheezing of the respirator is competing with the sounds of family and friends’ wails as they crowd in plastic chairs around my hospital bed. Erik has specially flown in from Pennsylvania (he’s currently on a business trip there, in real life) and is now weeping regretfully into my dry parched hand. “If only I hadn’t stolen her Cetaphil(1), she might have lived -” I manage to dictate my will in a weak sign language to Ned the family lawyer(2), who is speaking shakily into a dictaphone because suddenly I Am Dying in 1942.
I woke this morning, however, to a slightly scratchy throat, but everything else annoyingly intact. I will live to see another day, quite anti climatically.
1 I am addicted to Cetaphil lotion to the point where I must apply it every three seconds to various body parts. It is no where to be found now, and I am convinced Erik sneaked (snuck?) it into his suitcase before he left on Thursday. He’s always sneaky with my Cetaphil.
2 My family does not have a lawyer as far as I’m aware of, and if we did, he would not be named Ned.
3 Surprise third footnote and a note to self: Requiem for a Dream is not the ideal movie to watch when one is thinking death is imminent, especially when one professed never to watch it again. Finis.
Though I haven’t followed the elections closely, I’ve read enough about them and about Wellstone for this article to make my heart jump into my mouth, as rarely anything can do lately. This changes everything for the November election, but mostly, it’s incredibly tragic.
As much as I preach compassion to even the most snarkiest of human, I had a certain sense of righteousness flow through me tonight when I told a person who has been disrespecting me for a good 10 years, “Fuck off.” I’ll feel bad about in the morning, but now I can go to bed feeling like a dignified badass.
. . .
Also: how to figure out where you’re from (Chester and Duluth, tied).
This morning at 6:30 AM I was lost in a place that might have been Rice Lake, Minnesota, eyes budged up against the windshield since I have absolutely no night vision and the sun had tricked me by hitting its snooze button too many times (what would the sun’s snooze button be? Mercury?). Erik had somehow convinced me to take him to the airport at 5:30, and our conversation in the car went something like the following. Keep in mind Erik had only two hours of sleep, and I hadn’t been to sleep yet:
Z: I think I might drive like a grandmother.
E: You drive worse than a grandmother. Look at you! You’re absolutely nuts. I feel unsafe.
Z: I AM DOING YOU A FAVOR.
E: I know, I should have called a cab.
Z: If I get lost, I’m calling your plane and telling them, um, well, telling them something, I don’t know what yet, but I’ll figure it out.
E: You won’t get lost.
And 20 minutes later, I had somehow swerved out of the Duluth metropolitan area, far far from the warmth of home, and into a cold dark place called Rice Lake.
I wasn’t worried, however, because I only have 5 days to live anyway, as I’ve seen The Ring and I cannot go back. The movie didn’t live up to the hype, but had some fairly scary parts that were enough for the manly frat boys around me to scream like little Catholic school girls. Why Catholic, I’m not sure.
In other bits: My hair has evened out and is now a fairly nice shade of dark red. I’m craving hashed browns right now, after having them taunt me on Minh’s food shelf. I miss Abbey and don’t see her nearly enough. My car smells like wet dog. I keep dreaming about snipers and squirrels. Dane just IMed me with the command “BRING ME A DRAPERY TO COVER THE MOON!” and I think that’s quite lovely. I just described Texas as the “Code Red Mountain Dew” of the south.
And now Dr. Faustus and I have a romantic candlelit date with Word and my 4.5 pound Brit Lit book.
The first snowfall, almost to the day as last year’s first snowfall. The view is from my bedroom window, so you’re seeing what I essentially space out into at least 15 hours a day:
In the spirit of Dane, an incomplete list of objects currently on my desk:
- Fake orange leaves stolen in a drunken stupor from the Norshor, after Andrew’s gig
- Extra potent vitamins
- Cetaphil, wallet, keys
- A snow globe with Times Square trapped in it
- A packet of sweet corn seeds
- A pine cone, a rock and a box containing odd things such as a stale gummy worm
- One glove with extra gription, minus its mate
- Fake nerd glasses
- Packing tape and cough drops
- Three million bottles of various girly scented things
- Pictures of my parents
- A three hole punch stolen from Matt two years ago
- Red nail polish, used once
- A broken clay lemur, tail and head only
- A music box with Rhett and Scarlet making out on the front
- Melted wax on every surface
. . .
On a completely untrivial note: I came across this link (via Metafilter) a few days ago and it completely stunned me. I’ve looked at the pictures several times now, and each time they hit me right in the gut. I’ve hesitated on posting the link because it somehow feels a little voyeuristic, but the girl herself gave permission for the photos to be up, so I suppose it’s okay. She’s currently in an anti drunk driving campaign across the nation.
. . .
Oct. 20’s fine print:
The maybe last weepy my-boyfriend-broke-up-with-me tribute I will make:
“I was cleaning up, putting stuff away, when I found it there, yesterday. It was late – you were drinking, the picture was dog-eared, we both were blinking…”
—John Mayer, COMFORTABLE
I had exciting thrilling plans for Friday night, but they were thwarted by a sleepy head hitting a soft pillow. I lay down for two seconds at 1 AM and was out for the next 10 or so hours.
It’s a lovely autumn day in Duluth, quite cold and colourful and biting, and I’m forcing myself to step into a good student superhero costume and study for midterms. The town seems a little empty, with various nerds off in exotic places such as Green Bay and Fairmount. It makes me wish I had an exotic locale to escape to, but Duluth, essentially, was my escape plan from eons ago, and home is pushed up against the Atlantic Ocean.
Zosia Finds a Dog, A Play In One Act
ZOSIA pulls her car up to the meters, and hops out into the rain, already late for her 10:00 class. As she’s shoving quarters into the coin slots, a black DOG saunters up to sniff her ankles.
ZOSIA: Oh, hello, are you lost?
DOG: Sniff.
ZOSIA: Let’s look at your collar.
DOG: (various canine like noises)
Seeing a number on the collar, ZOSIA pulls out her cell phone and calls the number.
DOG OWNER: Hello?
ZOSIA: Hi, did you lose your dog?
DO: Yes!
ZOSIA: Well, I have her, would you like me to bring her by?
ZOSIA is feeling very gallant, as to bring the dog to the house will cause her to be late for her class, thus sacrificing John Donne for animal rescue.
DO: Sure.
ZOSIA: Great, I’ll be right by.
DO: Um, actually, could you wait like a half hour? We’ve got people over.
ZOSIA: . . .
Fin.
Follow-up: said DOG was sadly stuffed inside ZOSIA’S mess of a car for an hour during her class, and then driven to said DO’S home, where a very much underage child, the type that couldn’t see over my big toe, casually ushered DOG in the front door.
Moral: Dogs are cute.
Today I walked around in a black overcoat with a mean glint in my eye, as if I was concealing a sawed-off shotgun in my lower left pocket. I didn’t have time to run home and get my books for class today, so I sauntered in, all punk-kid like, and sat in the back row chewing non-existent gum and looking very tough. Ha! Notes and class are for sissies! The clock struck 11:50 and I clomped my way out of the classroom in tall shoes, and promptly ran smackfaced into a door. I always love reminders like that, as if the inventor of the world, whoever that might be, is puffing on a clove cigarette somewhere, watching me stroll like a bad-ass and then digitally placing a door in my path as if to say, “You think you’re hardcore? Ha! You can’t out hardcore nature.”
In other news, it’s time to stop drinking caffeine again.
In an ever-growing series of self-fuckage, I realized I completely fucked myself academically today. I realized this and my hands very dramatically went numb. I stood in the middle of my bedroom, staring at an unruly blue string jutting out of my carpet and thought of all the hundreds of little ways this could somehow be funny, how I could somehow portray myself as the comic relief in the perfect collegiate sitcom, the character who continually jabs bread through the lion cage right below the large engraved sign reading, “Don’t feed the fucking lions, you pathetic illiterate moron.”
But instead I couldn’t find a single redeeming humorous quality and I listened to the October wind rattle my windows, as it did this time last year, and I stared at the ugly naked box springs in the corner of the room, the couch piled with blankets and my teddy bear with one cushion slipshoded onto the floor, probably out of self relief as I’m sure the couch is just uncomfortable for it as it is for me, and I stared at my 4.5 pound American Lit book which contained material for a paper I hadn’t written, and I stared at my white plastic container of extra potent vitamins that only seemed to cause more trouble than they were worth, and I very nearly screamed, except I very nearly didn’t. I just threw my hands to my side, my fingers slapping my jeans almost painfully and I walked outside without a jacket in the 30 degree breeze and I bought Southern Pecan coffee creamer.
And now I have creamer, but no coffee, and a paper to write, but no education, and I have a box springs, but no bed and I am very very weary and sad, and frozen with the taste of pecans on my tongue and a very frightening low thud in my chest.
Implosion.
The girl next to me in American Lit was flipping the bible-thin pages of her book every three seconds. Each turn of a page struck my consciousness like a nun methodically smacking my forehead with a metal ruler, the displaced air sharply whooshing through her habit. So the class was like this: teacher drone drone drone, my eyes open but brain nestled under a warm quilt and then SMACK SMACK SMACK, pages turning, my head snapping back into place. I felt like my snooze button was set for thirty second intervals. Peaceful dozing and then SMACK, a girl’s robust desire to absorb Phillis Wheatley during class jamming into my ears like a fish hook scraping an empty and hopelessly frozen pond.
In other news, I decided to start drinking caffeine again.
Duluth is supposed to get a blizzard tomorrow. The sky and lake are quietly graying.
This article isn’t all that funny, but the accompanying picture is. And I’m a vegetarian.
P.S. to James who wrote and let me know that my two pictures down there depicting me as Jekyll and Ugly were taken at different angles, therefore the discrepancy isn’t entirely my camera’s fault. To that I say: “True dat.” The camera gets let off this time.
So, I dyed my hair. Please take note that I have dyed my hair exactly three times in my life. Please also take note that this is the reason my hair came out a gross uneven colour, full of pinks and oranges and reds and browns that look like a 70s shag carpet with cat vomit embedded in the fibers. I tried to take a decent picture of it, and I also tried to take a smiling picture, as Chris F. mentioned that I only take pissed off looking pictures of myself for this site, but since decent and smiling could not be pulled off, here is a small picture which doesn’t do the monstrosity justice:
.
Notice the pinkish tone in front and darkish brown in back. I was trying to dye it a darker red. This picture is a fairly accurate representation of what my hair looks like normally, though with my possessed camera, you can never be sure. This will be the last time I dye my hair without supervision.
Post-script: Okay, my camera is ridiculous. I just attempted to take two more pictures of my hair, and the pictures turned entirely two different colours. In fact, it looks like I took pictures of an entirely two different people. This one: Smirking, orange-haired bright-eyed vixen. This one: chubby-cheeked, stringy-haired angtsy serial killer. The second one is probably closest to what my hair looks like. These will be the last pictures I post of myself as I think I’ve taken the old joke too far and actually broken my camera.
My longer entry from last night is here, as I think I might be embarrassed that I wrote it, though I’m not sure yet.
. . .
Indication that the day might not go well:
American Lit Teacher: Okay, who can tell me why Equino was enslaved? Let me see here . . . Finn? Is that your name, Finn?
Me: Jenn? [which is my real name, in case you thought it was Zosia]
ALT: Yes, you. Can you tell me?
Me: Um. Well. I’m not sure.
ALT: Is that an ambiguous answer? Hopelessly ambiguous, isn’t she folks? Thanks, Finn.
. . .
In other news, I woke this morning to Tom Daschle giving into Bush’s Iraqi resolution and John Warner’s achingly familiar Tidewater accent. One made me lovingly homesick; the other made me want to begin the day puking. I’ll let you guess which one
“Sunrise tantalize, evil eyes hypnotize: that is the morning, Congo Pink.”
The weekend:
A rather embarrassing and awkward, for me at least, dinner on Friday night. The dregs of graces at the bottom of my social barrel sucked dry, despite the fact that several Long Island iced teas were used in compensation.
A play on Saturday. As Chris and I are leaving, a friend (who I won’t name, as she seemed a bit mortified) yells out, “Bye, Jenn! Bye, Erik !” and a look of horror paralyzes her face as the wrong name slips into the air. Funny how the brain refuses to give up verbal patterns, even when the visual contradicts the pattern. Abbot and Costello, Clinton and Gore, Jennifer and Erik . Re-programming the tongue to match the eyes is an interesting effort.
Sunday is Red Dragon, which, while I enjoy the Hannibal Lector series, I only attend to see Ralph Fiennes , my beloved. I had no idea he was to be running up stairs and flailing around large rooms naked. The movie was fair. Nothing special, except, of course, for Ralph Fiennes’s spectacularly tattooed ass.
Sunday is also realizing we’re already forgetting details about each other. He hands me a large cup of lemonade: “You like this, right?” Do I? He notices a small scar on my right cheek. “What’s that?” “It’s always been there. Dog bite. You knew that.” “…oh.”
And today has been coercing snooze buttons out of people, seeing my breath in the October air, blanking out through each class of the day and then returning to a quiet house.
Today is also October 7, whatever that might mean to you.
Coming down from Long Island, the tea kind, early early in the evening, to a quiet dark house, a quiet dark island. I’ll save my contemplative entries for my private journal, but: I’m encased in the bubble of the end of drunk, and I don’t want to sleep on my couch tonight. I don’t want to sleep on my couch tonight. I don’t want to think about leaving the light on because I’m alone in my room, and I don’t want to sleep on my couch tonight. I don’t want to sit in the young evening, wrapped in my skirt and chair, thinking of how I don’t want to sleep on my couch tonight. I would like a home of my own, I think, a bed to crawl in that belongs solely to me, that contains covers I’ve picked out, and is invitation only.
Coming down from Long Island.
In honor of the perfect cup of coffee I made just now, here are some links that have been lounging around in my bookmarks folder, not quite ripe enough to play in my surflist:
Bad things that can happen to you
Someone left the cake out
Official US Time
Vitamin Deficiences
Facade
Silver Tongued Devil
Poetry
Adrianne
Bean
Heart’s Gladness
whygodwhy
Dooce
And as always, lots of fun:
Four years ago: Wow, if I had met me in high school, I would’ve kicked my own ass.
Enjoy!
P.S.: Day Six of Nose Watch : Ow. Still.
In a valiant effort not to read The Faerie Queene , the management has provided some images for your viewing pleasure. Click to enlarge all, and also to view extra commentary.
First, my nose:
Second, my foot, which is not that tan gross colour in real life, promise:
Now back to your regularly scheduled Edmund Spenser.
Senses:
The taste of the bland watery pasta coating my tongue, taunting me with the fact that I could have had something better, something that didn’t quite taste like pickled waxed worms. The honeybee, swooping crookedly in and out of my window, chattering lowly, landing on the picture of blue indigo above my monitor, contemplating and then hovering discontentedly on the blinds. The fuzzy dullness behind my eyes that indicates another somewhat sleepless night, the crumbs of mascara and sand still clinging to my lashes, a result of waking ten minutes before I had to leave for class.
The house across the street garishly dressed in shiny Halloween garb, paper ghosts, silvery pumpkin windsocks, plastic battery powered Jack-O’-Lanterns. The crows crowding the neon orange gravestone in the yard, the stone that should read RIP, but is inside out and looks faintly written in Russian.
Leaving the heated laughing school hallway abruptly, drinking in her tan freckled skin and green eyes, and the way his eyes shifted and his lie smacked me in the ears when I asked what he was doing at the moment. Taking the stairs three, four at time, almost stumbling, then running through the doors, down the pavement, sloppily wiping my cheeks with the frayed edge of my shirt, screaming my brain into submission. Composing letters in my head, then standing over the stove, stirring the pasta that would soon lazily and dully slide to my stomach, stimulating nothing.
We gather these little hurts grain by grain, some so small that no one notices, not even you. You shove your thoughts forward, back on the road, speeding speeding until you hit a familiar landmark that either cheers or crushes you. You sit idly, thinking you have nothing and everything, creating mantras of self worth: I have poetry. I have a mother who sends me care packages. I have hugs on demand, naps that are sweet, a love of literature and coffee. I have a window that lets me watch the little yellow dog paw at the front door of the house across the street. But, always: I don’t have this and this and this, and that overtakes, because hollowness is heavier, louder than anything else.
The taste of sharp mint toothpaste, masking coated tongues. The honeybee, restlessly circling the room, narrowly avoiding the window glass. The fuzziness behind the eyes, the plummet of the stomach, the feeling of a life blurring.
