So, along with delicious green bean casserole and good times with my surrogate Minnesota family, our household acquired a cat. Chris’s aunt had friends who had given her the cat after said cat ate said friends’ pet parakeet. His aunt couldn’t keep the cat since her husband was allergic, and Abbey was looking to get a cat, so voila, instant kitty in our house. Abbey named her Lucy (her former name was Abbey, funnily enough) and she’s the laziest, most adaptable cat I’ve ever seen. Then again, I’ve never lived with a cat or spent a lot time with one before, so I don’t have much to base that opinion from. So! There’s my first internet cat picture. As you can see, she loves closets.
Dudes, let me tell you: in terms of Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for so much I’d have a Santa-sized list if I wanted to write it all down. But: last night, after spending a pleasant and fun evening at Chris’s family house, and after calling my Mom at work to wish her a happy Thanksgiving, I crawled into bed with my sweet sweet boyfriend, feeling warm, fed and completely loved. I can’t think of a better state to fall asleep in.
Happy Thanksgiving! I feel web-obligated to write something related to the holiday, but my obligation is overthrown by my consumerism.
So I bought a new computer, which is more exciting for me than you can imagine. My current computer and monitor are five years old, and when a tube in my monitor began emitting piercing squealing noises, thus radiating my organs and collapsing my eardrums, I decided that was a sign to buy a new computer. So, I did.
Now, however, I’m feeling stupidly sappy about my old monitor. I mean, it’s a screen, a vehicle in which to relay information to my eyes. No big deal. But I have poetry from four years ago written on the sides of it. I have concert tickets and pictures taped to the bottom of it. I have a printed picture of a plastic martian in a Nalgene Bottle on the back of it. (You had to be there.) This monitor is the heaviest piece of matter in the universe. I’ve never been able to carry it successfully for more than two feet, so the job has always gone to my boyfriends. My college sweetheart carried that monitor from the various places we moved to the front seat of my car numerous times. He would place the screen facing the seat and then he would turn around and kiss me. The last civil gesture during our break-up he made was to perform that very action as I was moving from Duluth, minus the kiss.
It’s little nostalgic things like that. And now, my monitor is going to sit in a corner of a room and watch with its sad, dying-tube eyes, a new flat black screen take its place. Sniff. The memories!
And now I’m off to Chris’s family’s home for Thanksgiving. It’s a grown-up Thanksgiving for him – first Thanksgiving out of college, not home on break, bringing a girl and wearing gray dress-up pants. I, however, have nothing so grown-up to boast.
Last night, I drank a bottle of nine dollar champagne that almost gagged me when I took the first sip. By the second glass, however, it was suddenly the best thing I ever tasted: so smooth! so flavourful!. I drank my champagne in a pudding glass and listened to Ella Fitzgerald while Chris taught me to play chess on his travel chess kit. The pieces were so small that I spent half the game squinting. I did win, however, which proves that either champagne is a natural education elixir or the more obvious option: I’m superior to Chris in all things intellectual. It was a perfect evening. In the morning, we woke to six inches of snow covering the driveway. There were tiny rabbit footprints leading to the backyard.
Tonight, my household got together and lit our little Peanuts-worthy tree.
This isn’t what I planned on posting tonight.
I just want people inside out, stripped of should-dos and formality. I want them bleeding, crying their eyes out, laughing so hard they hiccup, yelling with so much bass they stun fish, loving so much they lose their minds. I hate the small talk, the inhibitions, the layers, the nervousness, the awkwardness, the semantics, the egos, the partisan lines. I want to see organs. I want to hear stories about being so frightened you hid in the linen closet for three hours. I want to hear about being so shy you stood in the corner of a birthday party and wouldn’t turn around. Tell me how he broke your heart so fiercely that you couldn’t listen to the radio for six months in fear of hearing a love song. Tell me how you were so happy you broke your wrist hugging someone too hard. You loved her so much you spent three weeks writing a three sentence poem. You hated him so much you nearly cut through your skin making fists.
This isn’t practical. And if I had all this intensity 24 hours a day, I would combust. But the more I sit through my own forced smiles and nervous banter, and the more I argue with my lover because neither of us can see over our egos, I can’t help but think I need that intensity. Not drama, not unnecessary complications, just something to prove to me that everyone is human like I think they are. Knowing and understanding are so different, and I want to know.
I want to see it all, splayed, autopsied, glowing.
Just after reading Styro’s post on feeling cool (or the lack of that feeling), I decided to go to the local trendy coffee shop to get a Gingerbread Latte because I fall for the special Christmas coffee marketing every damn year, without fail. I threw my black coat over my trendy sweater and jeans, feeling pretty good for being hungover and unshowered. Feeling cool, you could say.
So then I proceeded to do the following:
1. At the cashier, while pulling out my wallet, I also pulled out an extra-extra absorbency tampon and dropped it on the counter where it proceeded to roll merrily away onto the floor next to the male employee’s feet. We both looked at each other with a weird sort of horror and then he very gingerly reached down and handed it back to me. Let me make a disclaimer: I am all against the notion that a woman’s period or any indication of it should embarrass her or be a taboo topic, but dropping a tampon on the counter of Starbuck’s and having it handed back to you by a slightly grossed-out hot counter boy is decidedly not cool.
2. Exactly 1.5 seconds later, while I was biting my lip in consternation at the whole Tampon Rolling of 2003, a piece of lip skin got caught on my teeth. It’s winter and my lips, like most others, refuse to produce or accept moisture. So, when the skin caught on my front tooth and I opened my mouth to let it go, my entire bottom lip basically ripped off and started bleeding noticeably. I looked up, and there was the same counter guy, handing me back my change and looking like he didn’t know whether to offer me a tissue or a tampon. I quickly moved to the end of the counter and subtly dabbed at my lip with my coat. Classy.
3. And for the grand finale: when I took my coffee from the same counter guy’s hands, I managed to spill half of it on myself and on him. He yelped and jumped back in surprise. I apologized about sixty times and he offered to make me a new drink, all the while retaining an expression of “I am thoroughly frightened of you and your ability to be the uncoolest person in the universe.” I told him no thanks, and practically ran out of there.
Now my lip hurts and I have half a cup of coffee, but at least I can stay under a guise of coolness in the comfort of my home.
Tonight, I will post one of those prosey things I write about champagne and being totally uncool in a completely different venue. Because I’m cool like that.
I’m going to say something verging on New Age here, so bear with me. I’ve felt a little unbalanced in the past day since I posted my ranty paragraphs. I deleted the ranty-est and most negative one – the one in which I indirectly called a group of people “pious judgmental fucks’ – but I still feel a little uneasy with the tone the page took for a day.
See, here’s the thing. I have my issues with depression and anxiety. I have a long-fused Irish temper, a loud outside voice and a jadedness towards violence and gore. (Resisting cheesy urge to make presidential joke.) But, I’m a big new-agey softie in a lot of ways and that often surprises me because I picture new-agey softies quite different than myself. I picture them as a middle-aged women with Renaissance hair and dresses made entirely of silk scarves. They don’t mutter “motherfucker” under their breaths when they’re pissed and they cook wonderful vegan meals with organic spices instead of microwave dinners and rice in a bag.
But I believe in good energy and bad energy and negativity cuts me somehow, on a soul level. See? I just said “soul level” and my angry Irish side just said, “What the fuck is a ’soul level’? Go steal some little kid’s bike and lunch money as penance, right now!” I believe in being kind to people, genuinely kind to them because they’re just as human as I am and they make mistakes and get toothpaste on their shirts and drop juice glasses and all that shit. I cringe when I hear a case of cruelty or meanness, even if it’s just in word form. And yes, sure, I gossip and get a little catty about people to close friends, but even if that’s going on, something is constantly churning in my head, “But, wait, wait, what about this good thing and this thing and blah blah de freakin birds singing sweetly in a forest blah.”
Sometimes I need to vent and rant like any normal human being, but I guess I don’t feel comfortable doing it on this page, at least not with all the anger. And I know, I know, what I wrote wasn’t even that vingerary and it makes me feel like a passive sissy, but I want to be positive and fanciful and all that crap if I can. And this is also not to say I don’t enjoy reading other people’s ranty angerball entries because I do – I’m an emotional voyeur like everyone else. However, you have no idea how shady my head can get sometimes, so grossly dark and messy, and to tame it, I have to fake some cheer and not give in.
So, I will not be writing the phrase “pious judgmental fucks” anymore. At least not here. Now in locked Livejournal entries which feel like sneaking a huge piece of Godiva chocolate cheesecake on a diet, that’s another story.
I’m feeling uncharacteristically ranty tonight. I’m not big on internet rants, especially not in this particular web space, but I was just laying in bed, looking at the swirl in the ceiling that looks like a twirly-mustached villain and I began to get ranty. I’m not cranky or irritable or even unhappy, just ranty. I promise that will be the last time I say that word. Okay, ranty. Sorry. Anyway, here’s the short list that made me get out of my warm bed to go to my cold computer. There may be some cursing. Young people beware.
1. The sentence: “He was a good person.” Or, reflexively, “He was a bad person.” Good and bad are so subjective, and when they’re used against people like some federal proclamation, I want to snap around and ask the use-e, “Hey, can I fetch a ladder for you? Or perhaps a very large step stool would help you descend from your high horse.”
My personal organic daisy chain belief is that there are no bad people, just lesser degrees of good. But beyond my own personal belief, you only make yourself look like an insecure zealot when you use those terms that way. I really don’t know if I used zealot correctly, but I’m going to keep it there because I don’t believe I’ve ever typed the word “zealot” before.
2. In the same vein, I get equally as crotchety when I hear someone say, “Oh, I wouldn’t do that. I have morals.” OH REALLY. I just looked up “morals” in Webster’s and the first definition that came back to me was: Conforming to standards of what is right or just in behavior. We all have different ideas of what we think is right or just in behavior, so when some scrunchy-faced person says to me, “I have morals,” I say: “ME TOO. They’re just different from yours.”
Then I offer the ladder/step stool combo from Rant One. One of my favorite quotes is, “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.” H.G. Wells said that and I’ve never read a truer thing in my life. Okay, I’m sure I have, but not dealing with morals.
3. This is going to be an obvious one, but cruelty for the sake of cruelty makes me simultaneously rage and hurl. Hurl, as in the Wayne’s World word for puking. I’d like to share an example here that always goes through my head when I think of this subject. I had a roommate once who lost a bottle of medicine. This was a medicine she needed to take every day or else she would start to have excruciating withdrawal symptoms. This roommate also had a habit of leaving her shit everywhere, from crusty plates to pairs of pink underwear found stuffed between couch cushions.
One day, me and another of my roommates were in the living room when Roomie#1 came tearing in the room, already in side effect hell, looking for her meds. I helped her search everywhere for a day and half until finally she found the bottle under a chair in the living room. Later that night, Roomie#2 turned to me and said, “I knew where her meds where the entire time. That should teach her to leave her stuff everywhere.” I was shocked. I didn’t say anything back to her and I later regretted it because I wanted to tell her how awful that was. Cruelty for the sake of cruelty. Ack. That still burns me up. Also: hunting is also cruelty for the sake of cruelty, but I’ll save that rant for some other time.
4. Similarly, people who are unable to realize when they say or do something mean/cruel, there’s a deeper reason behaving that way and it has nothing to do with the person they’re being mean to. Erik called my shirt ridiculous? He’s still bitter about our break-up. Duh. Or my shirt might have just been ridiculous. You feel the need to call the girl who chooses a different sexual lifestyle than you a “slut”? Hi, jealousy. I believe the Gin Blossoms have a song for you. It still makes you uncomfortable to see a couple who’s been together for almost two years because you disapprove of the way they got together? Fine. I don’t care if you’re uncomfortable, but you best be looking inside yourself. I will never say “best be” again. Promise.
I had a number 5 here, but in the morning, it seemed too glaring. Or, a more likely story: I wussed out.
Okay. That’s it. I think I’ve expunged all my inner anger for at least a good six months. Because I’m normally not an angry person, I will read this in the morning and I will cringe at my hyperbole and language. But for now, I’m going to make popcorn and watch the rest of the 5th season of Sex and the City. I’m starting to stay up until dawn again, and 2 AM has become my rush hour. Goodnight.
I think when I said “I was a corny metaphor and he was the embarassed laugh,” I was talking about a different relationship.
I’d like to say two things:
First off, a junior high clarification: a few people have said/written to me: “WTF? Why are you moony over Erik Do you want to get back together with him? What about Chris, shizznit?” I was slightly worried a portion of my audience would believe I was mooning and pining when I posted my last two writings, but never fear: No, I don’t want to be with Erik again. I suppose I was using him as a sampling of the entire city of Duluth and my feelings towards it. Some writer bullshit like that. Mooning, pining, fretting and seething are absent in the face of exes.
Secondly, the “making of” section on the DVD of 28 Days Later is the scariest making of you’ll ever see. And very little of it actually had to do with the making of 28 Days Later. It was pure viral propaganda and a hypochondriac’s worst nightmare.
With that said, I dreamt about zombies all night.
Chris drove the Bonneville to the main doors of the Kirby Cafe and all of a sudden, my heart began to spaz wildly in my stomach. This was nerves – not an excited kind of nerves, not an ugly metallic anxiety sort of nerves – but the type of dreading nervousness I used to get before theatre auditions. I walked into the cafe, slightly drunk from a pre-party at Minh and Timothy’s and saw Abbey, Andrew, Rick and Erik in that order. I saw Erik and I immediately had the urge to quietly turn around, unlock the car and sit in the passenger seat playing with the radio for the rest of the night. Instead, I adopted a strut and went in smiling. My mouth tasted like whiskey and my teeth felt glued to my upper lip.
*
There were several failed attempts at being gaily perky and smooth. I said: “Hey, you like my shirt?” It was a tight tank top with the words “Rock Fever” printed in neon turquoise writing. I got it at the thrift shop for two dollars and I thought it had an indie look-at-my-boobs type of appeal. He crinkled his nose and said, “Yeah, that shirt is ridiculous.” I backpedaled, waved my hand and told him it was obviously a joke shirt.
This was no joke shirt. I meant it to be cool.
Halfway through the night, I gave him the guns. You know, the gesture where you form your fingers into pistols and pretend to shoot them at someone while winking cutely. I don’t know why I did this, but it happened.
Finally, after the show, past the point of silly drunk and well into sleepy/crabby town, I went to his sound board, gave him a hug and said, “Look, I was nervous about seeing you. I’m still nervous.” He looked at me in a way I couldn’t interpret and asked why. My answer was obvious: “I haven’t see you in forever and you’re my ex-boyfriend. You know?” He didn’t say anything. Something in my throat thickened, and I walked away. This was the point where if everything was how it was supposed to be, he would yell after me, and I would turn, my hair gorgeous and shiny in the blue stage lights and we would smile at each other and we would both be absolutely sure what that smile meant. But now we speak foreign languages. So that didn’t happen.
I sat in the car in my ridiculous shirt and my maroon faux leather raincoat that I’m sure he thought was stupid, too, and waited for Chris to finish cleaning up inside. I had my cinematic moment as The Postal Service played through the speakers. I stared through the windshield, into the glass doors of the school and felt overblown and self-important. I couldn’t be leaving Erik in his red shirt and Duluth in its indigo lake again. I needed to stay here, wander the streets in my old jeans and headphones, figure out what the hell happened. But instead, Chris got in the car and we drove away.
I didn’t even say good-bye.
I would end this with the sentence “But I have a feeling it didn’t even matter,” but I don’t know if that’s true. There was something, and there might have been nothing, but I was drunk and he was a wall. I then could end this paragraph with the quip, “That pretty much describes our former relationship.” But it doesn’t. That would be: I was a lake and he couldn’t swim.
I was a corny metaphor and he was the embarassed laugh
Okay, as soon as Chris gets home from work and brings me a sandwich* for lunch, we’re going to be on the road to Duluth. Tonight, Sunny Wicked> is playing at UMD and there are about sixteen million people I want to see, so I’m going to tag along. I haven’t been to Duluth since I left, so my return will feel very dramatic. I’m going to make a mix CD of cinematic “girl returns to town she left, a town full of scintillating and devastating memories” songs, so when we round the corner over I-35 and first see the lake, I will feel like a teen girl in a Mandy Moore film.
But seriously: I’m excited and nervous about this trip. Last night, I had a terrible dream involving fencing and massacre, though I think that could’ve been a result of starting The Dark Tower series before bed.
There will be hopefully lots of pictures when I return (Thursday night) if I can figure out why my camera is being wonky. So, until, be naughty.
*A footnote in a row! The sandwich gets a star because the other day, Chris and I got in a very intense argument over this particular sandwich until we realized we were both PMSing and made up.
Andrew, Matt, Chris J. and Erik in July 2000
It’s like a case of before-they-were-stars. I knew you before you were the campus musical hotshot, when you were setting up projectors for the scholastic elderly program, nothing more than a glorified AV tech; when we would drink terrible concoctions of Hi-C and vodka, knowing jackshit about classy liquor; when the idea of business meetings and credit cards were laughable. It’s not a case of “I knew you before everyone else did!” It’s a case of longing for the stripped down unmarked version of you.
So we’re sleek now. We dress in expensive gingham button-downs and faux diamond bracelets and, bored, we order foreign beers from bartenders who know our names. We cross our legs, place a conservative hand on a loved one’s shoulder and wax about the job market and money in the millions. Everyone knows our face. Our cell phones hold 250 contacts and we cry when they get erased because we don’t know anyone’s name without looking first.
But it’s so fresh: before any of us had portable technology or hundred dollar suits, a Friday night could mean running, half-drunk, in a snowstorm to a party down the street. And kissing in the rain – well. That was worthy of cardiac events.
One time, we built a fort of kitchen chairs and sofa pillows in the middle of the living room in the dorm apartment. We held hands, side-by-side, in the shadow of your down comforter and we talked about the future. This is no surprise: the future was very far away and very cinematic.
Here is the future. We don’t build forts anymore. We compose letters laced with small talk that say nothing about how we really feel. We go out with our adult friends in our adult skin, laughing at appropriate times, commenting on the wine selection, fingering the hems of tablecloths.
But I remember. I have X-ray vision. I see you leaning business-casually against the wall, hands in pockets, fingering lambskin wallets. But I see you: the boy who rode his bike to the flower shop at 6 AM to buy me tulips and the boy who decided the body pillow from the linen closet would make the best ceiling for the fort. Having to pretend I don’t see this is where the heartbreak comes.
This isn’t about you, though it is a letter to you. You’re tangled in these years, every one of them, so you become my star example, my scapegoat. This is about all of us – our history and our ability to disguise it.
I’ve recorded our memoirs. They sit stiffly on storyboards in my room. I can’t be the only one.
Okay. I’m going to have to totally copy SJ and institute an emergency FAQ:
1. Why don’t you have a commenting feature on your page?
This is the number one question I get asked. I’ve tried a commenting feature and I’ve found I don’t really like it. I realized comments make me feel like I’m being graded in a weird way. I enjoy rambling on and pretending that people who read this site are complacent deaf-mutes. Not really. But maybe you know what I mean. I like e-mails. E-mails are good. Commenting just doesn’t do it for me. When I finally upgrade this site, I will probably have commenting turned on occasionally, but for now, no.
2. Why aren’t you using Moveable Type/Blogger/etc? And why does your navigation suck?
Well. I’d like to start using an automated updating service, but right now, the idea of rehauling everything to fit into a service makes me cry. I will do it, in the near future. And yes, I’m sorry about my shitty navigation. I know very little about the mechanics of web programming so I just tried to make things look as uncomplicated as possible.
3. Wait, so, you’re from Virginia, but you live in Minnesota? How did that happen?
Well. There’s no exciting way to tell this story. Basically, I went to college for a semester in Virginia, was miserable, then my best friend Abbey (whom I met in Germany while my family was stationed overseas) encouraged me to apply to school in Minnesota. I did, and here I am.
4. Why did you quit school?
I didn’t quit school, per se. Just taking a year off. I’m taking the year off because I went through some 20something emotional trauma my last year in Duluth and my grades suffered. Also, I’ve been paying out-of-state tuition and if I live in Minnesota for a year without going to school, I can apply for residency.
5. Is Erik the same guy who runs Late Night Kirby and books the concerts and won the National Student Employee of the Year Award at UMD?
Funnily enough, I’ve been asked this many many times by Duluth people who wander onto my page. Yes. Erik is that guy.
7. Is that your real hair color? How tall are you? What color are your eyes?
Yes. 5 feet 4. Okay. 5 feet 3. Green. A/S/L!
8. ____ from your cast list is smokin’ hot. Are they single?
Here are the single people from cast list: Dane, Kip, Mark, Rick, Timothy. Meat market, have at ‘em.
9. You’re not as cool as you think you are.
That’s not really a question.
FAQs are fun and pretentious. If you have additional questions, let me know. Tonight, I’m going to get Wordsworthian* on you and wax about innocence lost.
*Using the term “Wordsworthian” is also pretentious.
Every week I go into my therapist’s* office with the same tentative hope: please let there be hot water for tea. The first day I was there, I noticed a new-fangled cordless water heater thing and a wooden basket full of all the tea I could ever desire in the waiting room. The water was hot; the tea peppermint. I poured myself a cup and relaxed into the warm sensation that occurs when drinking tea in place other than your house. (I don’t know quite how to describe that. There’s just something classier and warming about drinking tea in public.)
At my next appointment, I rushed to the water heater, poured water into a cup and dipped a tea bag in. When I put the cup to my lips, I was shocked to taste a mouthful of cold, peppermint-flavoured water. The water wasn’t hot! I was crushed. I had been looking forward to this tea all week.
So, every week for the past few months, I’ve held the unflagging faith that the water heater will be warm. It hasn’t been. Not once. These last couple of weeks I’ve only half-heartedly checked it as I looked longingly over the bags and bags of tea I could not use.
Well. Today, I walked in, dropped my coat on the waiting room couch and faced the water heater. I touched it. It felt warm! Shaking, I pulled a styrofoam cup from the pack. I poured the water. I dipped my finger in. Warm! Lukewarm, probably not hot enough to even dissolve sugar, but warm enough to mix with sweet peppermint tea goodness. I ripped opened a bag, lowered it in.
And then I spilled the entire cup over the table and my jacket. I hadn’t even taken a sip yet. Crushed, but determined, I cleaned the mess, poured a new cup of water. And in the three minutes it took for me to make a cup of tea, then spill it, the water had cooled. Not one molecule of warmth was left. It was cold. Less than room temperature.
So the quest for the tea goes on. Someday. Someday.
* I put a star by this because I still feel a little out-of-place saying the phrase “my therapist” or even talking about that portion of my life. But I suppose if Lance Arthur can do it, so can I.
Sometimes my heart breaks in a clean two and I can’t focus very well, much less write. It’s all part of the process of recovery, of getting limbs to work correctly again. There will be two weeks of goodness, of snow-covered pumpkins and Northern lights, and then there’s a few days of lying flat on my back thinking, “It’s never been this bad before!” But it has. And it won’t last forever.
Yesterday he said: “I was in the grocery store and I saw this stuffed alligator as big as you. You wouldn’t believe how green it was.”
He said: “Did I tell you how the guy I work with pushed the button on the gas chamber at the humane society for two years? Can you imagine doing that?”
I couldn’t really hear those things then. It’s a web, a fog, a dissociation, just like the commercials claim. But when he left, I opened the book of poetry I have on the night stand. The first page I opened said: “This is a letter to you: live.” Something in my stomach fluttered, then settled.
Last night I dreamt I was driving on a street. Kids began throwing rocks at my windshield, cracking it. I dove out of the car, into a shed. I watched as the police drove in, arrested the kids, took them away. But I could still see the rock and glass fragments on the sidewalk, so I stayed in the shed. That’s kind of what it’s like.
But it’s also like waking up in the morning, feeling lung infected, stuffy, groggy. You take your cup of water upstairs and turn on the computer. Your room is dark, a yellow sort of dark – the result of gray shades in need of dusting. Shielding your eyes, you snap the shade open. To your surprise, the ground is blinding white. It’s still falling. There are four pumpkins on the front stoop dusted with snow. In spite of the early morning pain, something flutters, then settles.
Maybe you know what I’m talking about.
Snow! The first snowfall always nails me. I guess I’m still a Southern girl at heart.
Trip home: good. First wedding experience: good. Coming home with a bronchial lung infection thingy and coughing up disgusting lung chunks: not so good. Spending Halloween with the household watching The Smashing Pumpkins complete DVD, while furtively hoping for trick-or-treaters and only getting two: pretty good. All the leftover candy: excellent. Remembering that I don’t really like candy, but eating it anyway: oh, my aching tummy.
I know, I know, I’m always sick lately. I’ll blame it on the Mono of Summer 2003 one more time, and then leave it at that. I’ll have more to say when my eyes don’t feel hot and spiky.
Happy November.
