So, apparently, the updates I’ve been scribbling on my laptop didn’t get posted like I thought they did. Never fear, you didn’t miss anything, and I don’t really want to repost.
My mother has been here for the past week, so my writing has been a bit scanty, anyway. Tomorrow, I’m going to write up a fanciful little entry about the Southern dinner I had tonight. Regular postings will commence tomorrow, you randy kids, you.
Man, I’m really tired of trying too hard with this writing gig. I’m frustrated because I feel pressure (from what? whom? I don’t know) to either be snappily witty (a la Sars, Dooce, Sarah B.) or poignantly poetic (Zeldman, Ftrain, whygodwhy). Sometimes I succeed but that’s rare because I’m experimenting with a lot of different styles and approaches, and I’m ready to settle down already with a style that is a mixture of impossibly witty and drop-dead beautiful.
So often I want to scribble down a funny anecdote and I’m suddenly frozen with, Shit, is this actually funny to anyone but me? I wanted to write about the counselor I saw the other week who talked non-stop for the entire hour and then ended the session tapping his legs, blessing his “rock-hard thighs” and then flopping on the floor to teach me how to breathe from my diaphragm, even after I told him at least 32 times I already knew how. Is that funny? I don’t know, but I was taking in his lisp, his neon purple shirt and his penchant for interrupting me, and I thought I could make a story out of it.
And then I want to tell you beautiful beautiful things, and I pause, because, again, I feel the pressure to be “funny” because descriptions of beauty often bleed into angst and your requisite teen journal. I’m too afraid of the cliché and the forced depth. After Chris’s concert, I wanted to rush home and write everything that went through my head during it. I wanted to say how it felt like the final conclusion to a year of relationship and friendship turmoil: Chris, singing the songs he wrote after he and I got together, while Erikrecorded them. Full circle.
I wanted to describe how wonderful Chris looked in the golden light, how he smiled on the stage in the sweet way I swore he only saved for me. How Beth sat in the row in front of me, looking miserable because she had the flu, and how for a moment I was sad that we no longer spoke. But that’s rambling, not beauty. “Golden light” is a cliché. But how else to describe it? How to describe the quality of the yellow as it highlighted the neck of the saxophone?
I can’t win with myself with this. I frustrate myself. I suppose: practice, practice, practice. But I want to be brilliant now! Words are so important to me; sacred, really. I so rarely feel connected, and reading something that moves me, gives that trainwreck twinge, makes me want to invest in a word religion. I want to move people like I’ve been moved. I think that’s all an artist ever wants, really.
The concert last night was beautiful. Almost 200 people were there, and Chris made me cry like the baby I am. We were all encased in a purple womb of sound. I forgot my camera, but I’m sure pictures will surface eventually. (Per some UMDStudents’ requests, I flopped up a quick lyrics page).
In order to scare the crap out of me, I’m going to make a list of things I need to do in the next two weeks:
1. Transfer my credits over to UMN
2. Find a place to live in Minneapolis
4. Before Thursday: write two one-page papers, one eight-page paper, one three-page paper
5. Before end of year, pref. ASAP: write three 5 page papers, write a forty page journal, answer about 100 questions from a workbook, write a 15 page paper, figure out a way not to fail my Women’s Studies classes (which means somehow begging my professors into submission)
6. Start cleaning the house and getting ready to move out
7. Get plane tickets home to VA
8. Plan massive road trip with Chris to Utah (friend’s wedding), Oregon (to see soon-newly implanted Dane) and Los Angeles (to see newly implanted Dan)
9. Chop off my hair
10. Start running
11. Faint
If you spent this week blind, deaf and oblivious and somehow didn’t know about this, I thought I would remind those in travel distance that tonight is Chris’s senior recital in the testicular-shaped Weber Hall at 9 PM. And no, this isn’t your grandma’s senior recital: this is Sunny Wicked, plus a 25+ piece orchestra, with six songs arranged for that orchestra by the lanky newly black-haired rockstar himself. If you’re not there, you’re so square that it’s not even remotely funny.
So go. Go now!
So. My eyes might’ve been bigger than my plate on this “updating every day” promise. Every other day should do because I don’t want to ramble endlessly on here with scraps of brain fragments, which might be what I do, anyway.
If I celebrated relationship anniversaries, which I don’t, (who wants one day out of the year to be one of those sappy mushball “Ohhh, dear Goddddddd, why did it have to enddddd, it would’ve been ten yearsssss on this daaay”?), today might be considered Chris and my’s (I’s? me’s?) one year anniversary. If such things were celebrated.
Tonight was also the first time Chris and I, as a couple, encountered Erik and his new girlfriend, as a couple. The two of us, decked out in Saturday scrubs – ratty pajama pants, hoodies, bed-mussed hair – plodded into Blockbuster like a couple of teen hoodrats. In the check-out line, there stood the happy couple: Erik, chewing his cheeks, towering over the crowd, looking distracted, as usual and she, small, blonde, red-cheeked. We waved several times to get their attention. Glances were exchanged, something along the lines of, “Ha. Er, ha. Ha,” and then Chris and I ducked in the aisles until they left.
Not to get all trippy-down-memory-lane on you, but a year ago, Erik and I were in a comfortable, long-haul relationship in which we were both bored to sobs of each other. Chris and I were writing hesitant e-mails and having long, electrically tensed conversations on my bedroom couch. Now, Erik is cuddled into a strange bed I’ve never seen with a girl who could look just like me if you saw her from far away, and I’m sitting on a rock star’s bed in dim yellow light, watching his shadowed profile.
No nostalgia here. Really. Just one of those “isn’t time fuckin’ craaazy, man” type of moments.
To bed.
I’m going to be writing everyday now, no matter how painful and mind-bending it is, and believe me, trying to scrap the discipline together to do anything that requires an attention span is an amazing feat lately.
It’s an anti-social day, which is unfortunate because it’s a Friday night and young beautiful hip kids are off doing young beautiful hip things, and I am pouting like the pouter I am in my green milkmaid dress, listening to the same Gloria Record song on repeat. When I get anti-social, I hole up in my bedroom and stare down the computer monitor until my eyes break. I shop online at the GAP and congratulate myself for daring to buy jeans online when it takes me fifty googolplex billion years to find jeans I like in real life. I blare music sulkily and listen to the ornery 14-year-old across the street scream for his cat in a way that leaves no doubt he’s screamed at the same way.
When I get sulky on weekends, I usually can count on some liquor and good company (in that order) to bounce me back, but I unfortunately can’t have any alcohol for two weeks. Why? Well, it’s the same reason I spent the day scavenging my cupboards for something that wouldn’t singe my stomach, and came up with powdered mashed potatoes and can of corn. Wednesday night, at six AM or so, an ulcer decided to inflame in my poor defenseless stomach, so I ended up in the emergency room feeling like a dragon had sneezed all over my heart.
Despite all my pain, all I could think of as I was changing into the hospital gown was, “I have absolutely not a drop of underwear on.” Then I checked myself out in the mirror above the sink and thought, “Heyyy, not too bad there, look at meee, workin’ the goowwwn.” I hadn’t slept yet for the night and was close to delirium between my fuzzy head and fiery chest. They first gave me a triple dose of numbing medicine, which gave me muscle spasms and made me break out in hives because I am the most medicine sensitive poor soul I’ve ever known. The young male nurse then proceeded to hit on me around 8:30 AM when I was half-dead and splotchy. If I had been able to lift a hand at that point, my middle finger would’ve greeted his smarmy grin. They did a bunch of tests and finally concluded, around 11 AM, that an ulcer was trying to eat my body, so they gave me a prescription and sent me on my way. Everything burned for a day or so, and now it seems to have neutralized, but I’m still on a Retirement Home diet and no alcohol.
So. Anti-social. Yes. Anti-social and starving. I refuse to go grocery shopping because that would mean interacting with human beings, and I feel as if every human being on the planet is a knife in my eye right now. So, I’ll keep this song on repeat and think about the only food that’s mine in the freezer right now, which is, of course, cream cheese Jalapeno poppers.
I’ve been writing in my other semi-private journal more often, so this site is getting neglected, only because it takes more work to keep it up. Never fear, because I know you have been, things will pick up over here, eventually.
A couple of things:
My mother is awesome. What isn’t awesome, however, is when she says things like, “Your father was moping around the house yesterday, saying, ‘I hope I get to see my baby get her diploma before I die!’” Thanks for that Guilt Trip of 2003. My father, while pushing 70, does not have an imminent death, but of course now I’m seized with this morbid academic pressure. Good grief.
This is a fabulous letter by Margaret Atwood in The Globe and Mail.
Right now, Duluth is sieged by 45 MPH winds. My windows are rattling so severely that I feel like the house is going to blow away into the lake, and I’m not sure I would mind.
I listened to Lou Reed’s re-write of The Raven in class today, and found that I actually liked it, despite its lack of musicality compared to Poe’s version (God, I am so literate and educated!). (No perma-links, scroll down to almost the end of the page for it).
What I’ve done in the past weeks: slept an enormous African sleeping sickness amount, gone to a smoky bar with new friends (the smoke still remains in my jacket and strangely, in my hair), had two of my roommates move out, and…stuff. Tonight I’m planning on speed writing a paper and then attending a Swedish Fish/Yahtzee party. Great fun, this college thing.
Disjointedness, all around.