It’s been so long since I’ve done Positives, but this morning I have a good one:
Blissfulness is having a five hour phone conversation with your favorite lounging lover until 7 in the morning and then making and devouring a delicious breakfast (is it breakfast if you haven’t gone to bed yet?) of scrambled eggs and extra buttered toast, and then standing on the back porch, reveling in the sweet morning Virginia scent. Perfect.
I’m working on a bigger (and very self-absorbed, of course) project for this site that should be up later today or tomorrow. Goodnight.
Along with my personal resolutions, I decided to have a few resolutions for this site. Since I began this website in the ancient caveman days of 1996, I’ve used it as a writing exercise. I don’t plan out my entries and any editing is sparse. I’ve experimented with different writing styles and influences, and while a lot of things didn’t work, I was fortunate to get a few pieces of worthwhile writing.
However, I’ve decided that I need to write more focused entries. If I’m going to be able to go in the direction I want to, I need to start making money from my writing, which means I actually have to write something bankable. This doesn’t mean every entry will be essay-style, but I am shooting for at least one focused entry a week. For now.
Also, no more gushy crying-in-my-soup writings anymore. Hey, did you guys get the fact that my boyfriend of three years and I broke up and I was, like, totally sad about it? And that, like, my friends totally hated me for a while because of why said boyfriend and I broke up? DID YOU HAPPEN TO GET THAT IN THE NINE THOUSAND WEEPY ENTRIES I WROTE ABOUT IT? Well, I won’t say I’m completely over things, but I’m close enough to the point where I don’t need to make my mascara-stained cheeks a public spectacle anymore. So no more teen angst entries. Maybe.
That’s it for now. I’ve been awake for exactly one hour, but this isn’t anything huge, as I didn’t sleep until 8 AM. Aloha.
So, look, it’s Christmas. ! The holiday has ushered itself in very uneventfully. Herbs and oil are lingering slickly on my lips. I found some sweet bread oil in the back of the pantry tonight and soaked it with leftover biscuits from our very Southern Christmas Eve dinner.
Holidays are uneventful at this house, a very tiny blip on the Christmas cheer radar. Our festivities lasted about an hour before everyone scattered.
So instead of thinking of Jesus Christ, today I am pondering:
How ironic it was for my friend with terminal cancer to sincerely congratulate me with awe on my bravery for tackling the mall on the day before Christmas Eve.
Also, this is how I love: I put up a terribly steep and treacherous wall with crooked slats, so while the prospective is climbing, there are hints of the country beyond. Then if they’ve accomplished the climb, I drown them. I go from barely loving to overcompensating, and then I am suddenly shocked when no one can match my flood.
Would it kill you to end your letters to me with “love” like you used to? Now, I know you still love me because you told me in the backseat of the car when you were holding my nose and tracing the freckles on my cheek. You were drunk as a proverbial skunk, and don’t all professions of love while drunk carry over?
I have no desire to be in Virginia for New Year’s. I want to be in Minneapolis spiking my lounging buddy’s Vanilla Coke.
I am not a jewelry person in any sense of the word. Tonight, for Christmas, my brother gave me a delicate gold bracelet with my birthstone interwoven between the bands. I haven’t taken it off. I’m fascinated by the sudden beauty of my previously bare white wrist.
I always make New Year’s resolutions. Someone on the vast internet wrote that their one resolution was to be able to say in December of 2003, “This was a fucking good year.” I think I’m stealing it.
5 AM Virginia thunderstorms could make me take up religion.
In previous moments, I thought: fuck, I’ll become an elementary school teacher and learn to swim and tame my temper and not lose my wallet every five minutes and not tell dumb jokes at the worst moments. I’ll be stick thin and find myself a twin sister and be perky blonde and athletic. But then there is always the magic moment: if you don’t love me for the fact that I talk in my sleep and write crap like this when I’m PMSing, then who do you think you are? I’m not changing for you. Then the next day: Is the YMCA teaching swimming over winter break?
Bill Frist’s voting record makes me want to vomit and punch innocent walls.
The way I fell asleep against your shoulder while we were in the airport is one of the most comforting moments I can remember.
I will now drink coffee.
For the third time in a month, I didn’t die a fiery death from a spiraling plane crash. I did, however, manage to screw up my flight and my luggage in a very dumb way, so I’ll be without clothing during this winter break, which could be hot action if I put up a webcam. Ha!
I’ll leave it up to you to interpret that “ha.”
My last night in Duluth was fabulous in a way nothing has been fabulous this semester. I went to three bars with my best friends, drank entirely more than I meant to and bonded tipsily with Erik in a way we haven’t bonded in close to a year. The night gave me a sense of closure with the situation I had yet to receive.
Plus, I hadn’t realized how much I missed getting along and laughing with that kid, as opposed to our usual conversations as of late which consist of smashed objects and lots o’ curses. What this proves, of course, is that whiskey and beer can bring your loved ones closer to your heart during this holiday season.
I am not feeling as hardcore as I was in that last entry down there. I’m reading it now and thinking, “Oh, look at me. I am so terribly badass.” It still felt necessary and empowering to write, whatever that might mean.
I slept most of the way to Virginia, dreaming of sweet airport cuddlings and warm weather, both which tickle my fancy.
With that, it’s off to bed. Sour dreams, as they say.
Well, kids, tomorrow I’m off on a big scary aircraft once again to my home territory of Virginia. I’ll be gone until January 6th and hopefully sometime in between there I can figure a way to revive my scholastic life considering right now a plot is being dug for it in some anti-scholastic cemetery.
I’ve had an excellent weekend, from drunken Clue matches to Bowling for Columbine to realizing that as messy as the past nine or so months have been, in the end, I believe I’ve gotten the better end of the deal, at least gushy romantic relationship wise. It’s taken me this long to realize how wonderful and fuck-yeah empowering it is to be spoken to and touched with respect, something I’m not sure happened in my previous relationship, at least not recently.
So I’m closer to being content, which is amazing, considering two weeks ago I was contemplating moving to the Congo to become a machete-wielding amazon lesbian.
On the same note as the fuck-yeah empowerment, this is also this week I have finally grown enormously tired of being sugary peaches-and-cream to people who continue to speak to me like I’m a disgusting specimen found jammed in the shoe of their high horse. I am still a nice person and I still preach compassion, but I will no longer be a participant in conversations that are equivalent to, as the happy orthodontic cliché goes, pulling teeth. So while I do still love you as the human beings you are and respect your right to be assholes, from now on, I will lovingly lift my middle finger and respectfully tell you to fuck off. Happy holidays!
Have a fabulous holiday, and I’ll hopefully be alive and well in Virginia tomorrow night with fun plane adventures to report.
Lately, in this year of hauntings, there are only two situations where I feel completely contained within myself:
In the early morning hours, 3 or 4 AM, I slip out of my house in the cold to go to my favorite lounging buddy’s apartment. This week the nights have been especially still with snowfall. Last night I stood scraping my car window at 4 AM, absorbing the the white silence and gray moon.
In between the overly haunted house I live at where every time I enter I give up at least 50% of my power, and the other place which isn’t mine in any sort of the word, I own the transition period. While walking to my car, wrapping my neck with my favorite rainbow scarf, opening the door with mismatched gloves, twisting blindly through familiar streets listening to Coast to Coast AM , in the most dramatic sense, I belong to no one.
Then there are the moments I walk into my house after being gone for a day. Before I can run into anyone, before I can lose the self-respect I’ve built in my absence, I sit in my computer chair, close my door and blast music until I’m nearly deaf and brainless. This is what I’m doing now, exploding my eardrums with Blink 182 and numbing any nerves that were plucked in the past hour.
I’ve been spending longer hours at my house, lately, though. It’s surprisingly getting easier and easier. Incidents that would usually result in me destroying several inanimate objects and collapsing in a Shakespearean-worthy sobbing heap are now only slightly abrasive and disappear within the hour.
It’s the last day of the semester. God speed.
I am moving to Middle Earth. Two Towers was incredible.
Excerpts from my personal journal:
05.30.02
This is bullshit. Last night, I was cuddled up into a rockstar’s body, drunk off the concoction the cute girl bartender with the low voice made for me, letting the music take me. The images: lights, people, alcohol, kisses, seriously contemplating driving to New York at midnight on a Wednesday, blow jobs on side streets, coconut tongues, video games, short blonde hair and sunglasses, a vampire body, cramps and healing, Bibles and Lesbian Erotica on the same shelf, coffee, no money, no job, almost failing out of school, the sweet smell of the lilac bushes as I sat on the corner of the street blowing dandelions in the rain, hugging someone too long, black lines scratched in the form of a phone number on white paper, invincibility in the art of youth, soft mouths, soft hair, sex, green midori drinks, cigarette smoke clinging to hair, dreams, stomachs, black shirts, white shirts and dark jeans, floating, experiencing, drinking, laughing, singing, crying until my eyes bleed, smiling until my lips hurt, kissing until I’m raw.
06.05.02
I am driving home, and I am thinking of the way words can be tricky, the way a single verb can change the view. I want to say the 5 AM fog is strangling the trees and the landscape, but I also want to say it’s enveloping, holding, cuddling. I am doing my best not to fall asleep and I am composing letters in my head to you, trying to find metaphors for the hollowness.
I will say, the first three days during a fast is the worst. You are constantly hungry and sick and you want to give in. If after three days, you still feel this way, then fasting is not for you. I will say, when a person gets a limb amputated, they feel what is known as “phantom pain,” the ghost of the limb aching where now there is only air. I will say, I miss you so much that I am gripping the steering wheel to keep from crying out. I will say, I’m sorry, I still don’t have the answers. I am so tired. I rub my eyes and am surprised that my fingers come back wet. I have been crying on this back road at dawn and I didn’t even realize it. I will tell you this.
Instead, I walk in my room, wrap myself in three blankets to keep the bed from freezing me and I say nothing. In the end, there is nothing to say at all.
Lack of content and e-mail replies is due to my hectic scheduling of outside lounging, which is not to say that I’m lounging on the icy grass, but rather that I’m lounging in a vicinity away from my computer. This is finals week, which means I flick off all the hardworking pale souls in the library as I drive to get free chips at Little Angie’s. No matter what classes I’ve had, I’ve never concerned myself with finals week, so it feels like I’m getting a mini-vacation.
While lazy, this week has been sweet in a few ways: first, you know those “to do before I die” lists that people make? Well, I’m too much of a lounger to make lists, but I do have a casual mental one flipping around in a corner of my brain somewhere, and on that particular list is the item: see a falling star. I’ve gone through my entire life narrowly missing them.
Two nights ago, Chris and I were walking out of his place, and I commented on how clear the sky always is above his roof. You should see the view – the constellations are neon against the red radio towers on the hill. I looked down for a moment, then looked back up at something inconsequential, and there it was! A flash of white light tumbled down the sky. I will not believe that it was a spaceship, airplane or parachuter – it was the falling star I have been seeking. I didn’t remember to make a wish until 10 minutes later, however, but I did get the wish in and now it just absolutely has to come true.
I’ve also played a lot of Clue this week, heard my favorite lounging buddy play a beautiful sax piece, watched good artsy films (Beckett), met a million new nerdy people, made a lot of sweet sweet love and slept about 12 hours a day. On Sunday, I’m going home to Virginia for a few weeks and then a new year is upon us. Upon us!
Have a sexy happy Tuesday.
Anyway, I’ve been in blue pajama pants all day, eating candy canes and dreaming about a time when papers will write themselves with a fantastic type of magic. This weekend consists of a Sunny Wicked concert and two parties, for I am young and invincible and a social butterfly, though I wouldn’t quite describe myself as a butterfly, maybe more like a slug. A social slug. May choirs of angels sing you to sleep.
This has been brought to you by an eccentric Zosia, who consumed nothing more potent than decaf coffee with skim milk today, yet still has the jumpiness and weirdness of a some-sort-of-drug consumer.
Well. It’s pretty quiet in here, “here” being the spectacularly undimensional place I pay to occupy on the false idol known as the Information Super Highway. As I’ve said approximately 3,389,348,393 times this semester, everything I’m composing as of late is depressing image-laden prose that leaves readers either confused or puking. What can I say? It’s been one hell of a depressing image-laden prosey semester and I can’t, as I’ve said also approximately 3,389,348,393 times, seem to crawl my way out of it yet.
It’s Christmas in Duluth. Tonight, I went to school for the sole purpose of eating dinner as going to school for any other reason right now is a bit of a bust. I took my plate into the Bullpub, a quiet hang-out/small concert venue at school, to escape fluorescents of the school cafe. In the corners of the Bullpub were fake trees with blinking colored lights. The fireplace looked like it could start up a roaring winter fire at at any moment.
The fireplace – four years ago, I sat next to it with a girl from my sorority (yes, sorority) playing Connect Four. Later that night, the tall goofy kid from the dorm across the street sat talking on my bed with me for hours and then accidentally fell asleep at my feet. Flash forward four years today, the tall goofy kid that lives in the bedroom across the hall from me enters the Bullpub in a blue shirt I’ve never seen. We exchange glances, but he keeps walking and I look down at my food.
And when he left the Bullpub and I stared at my food, I knew I would write about that moment later in the evening, and I knew he wouldn’t remember in five minutes.
Outside, after my dinner, I walked into the most beautiful twilight I’ve experienced in Duluth. The air was sweet and fall-like, the sky lilac and indigo, extending past the radio towers and the high school track where a herd of deer live, and into the gray lake.
Tonight, I am in my room with candlelight for the first time in months. Last spring, I sat religiously at this desk every night, three candles burning, the house alive with warm voices. Now I spend my nights at a house I don’t live in, reading in a room that isn’t mine, lighting candles that I didn’t buy. When I walk in my bedroom now, I feel like I am in an uncurated museum, ancient and sad.
. . .
So, I’m sipping Drambuie and listening to Heather Nova/Moby’s version of “Straight to Hell” and feeling not so ancient and sad right now, so I thought I would record that fact. Mostly what made me feel a tiny bit happy was seeing one of my roommates blushingly cute and happy herself. Infectious joy and all that.
I’m working on the one class I’ve managed not to bluster outright and then, when I’m good and liquored, I’m seeing Stuart Davis , the charming guitarist who I overheard ask today, “Now, are you sure it’s illegal to start a fire during the show?”
Peace be with you. And also with you!
I wanted to arrive to church-like silence,
the entryway dark as a prayer. The entrance
would be executed like this: the door slides shut,
the shoes fall flat, the stairs whisper under winter-cold toes. Bedroom doors would be white slabs,
blanketing the hallway and I would quick peek in
stillness, survey the scene, finger the spilled
glass and smashed red wine. But
instead there is yellow light extending into
rooms like so many Sunflowers, and there is
a harmo
In the middle of writing last night at 12:55 AM, I was stopped to survey the damage. We quietly counted: five cracked CD cases, one busted shelf of books, a bruised left cheek, a scraped right elbow and two Shakespeare-worthy cracked hearts.
The next evening, slinking back in. The thought is: please, no one notice me. Please, only you notice me. The greeting is suspicious and I stare straight ahead, untrusting, left hand straightening the tangles in my hair.
At the crook of my arm lies three needle pokes from my hospital stay and a three-fingered shaped bruise. Boy Scout’s honor.
The house smells of spoiled fruit and the last-picked kid for volleyball.
I am alive and in Duluth. That is all, for now.
Hi. I am still moderately alive and barring a tragic fiery plane crash, sudden illness relapse or any other such catastrophe, I should be back in Duluth tomorrow evening. I’ll be arriving home to a towed car, angry professors, a room still lacking a bed, one pissed roommate and possibly dead plants, but I will also be arriving home to good friends, my room with my stuff in it and my favorite lounging buddy.
Today I have consumed a grand total of a half a glass of water and one Cheez-It, neither which made it successfully to my stomach, but the fact that I’m able to remain upright and conscious is progress at this point. Duluth or bust, I say and bust I might.
So, I’m still in Virginia. Why? A nasty bout of the Norwalk virus that left me the sickest I’ve ever been in my memory. Throwing up, not sleeping and not eating for over a day straight will render any nubile young girl unable to walk or see straight, and in the hospital.
At my most pitiful, I was congratulating myself for being able to keep down a single ice chip and then at the next moment, puking in my hair because I was too weak to lean over into the garbage can. Delicious. Fortunately, due to the extra strong and crazy-inducing drugs they keep at hospitals, I woke today weak and drained, but not puking, which is always a plus. Unfortunately, I’m stuck here until Wednesday, maybe Friday, and I’m ready to be back at school.
Special shout-outs go to: My parents, who lovingly wiped the puke from my hair. Also: Jason, Abbey and the sweetest boy I know, Christopher Thomas Fahey. Thank you and goodnight.