I’m going to be productive. Is there any person on the planet who has escaped the spiky desire to produce? I ate too much zucchini and watched too many disaster movies this weekend to go any further than that. Everyone in this house sleeps too early. I’m left with an unwellness in the back of my eyes and uncontrollable goosebumps.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-30-2004 | 11:05 PM
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I have this thing about contemplating the universe. It’s my psychiatric equivalent of a brain explosion. If I try to imagine even a fraction within a fraction of a black hole or blue star, I feel dizzy. It’s too much - too wide, too cold, too black, too variable, too out of the reach of my parameters. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was younger until I read a book that stated space has no end. I think this is comforting to some people, the idea of spatial immortality, but I was unhinged. I had horrible dreams that night about falling off planets, smashing my head on stars, smothering on nothing, flailing for infinity.
This is how I feel when I try to imagine Clint Watts being hit by a car, and then ceasing to exist.
Clint was my first boyfriend. We dated for only a few months, when I was 16 and he 17, but we were friends for a long time after until we lost touch as those things go. This past summer, we had begun e-mailing again, just short, unsentimental catching-up notes, but pleasant all the same. And then last weekend, he crossed the street in the rain and was killed.
Here is where the brain burn comes in. When I think to myself: Clint Watts has passed, my brain sends up flares. It flashes pictures, sounds, words, smells; it says: He can’t be dead because remember when he handed you his class ring on your first date? It was summer and muggy and you were on your front porch. Your shirt was sticking to your shoulders. He blushed when he pressed the ring in your hand, but was meticulous and pragmatic. A perfectionist.
And! Remember? Peach schnapps and vodka, your first alcoholic drink. You were spending the night at his house a year or so after you’d broken up, and he mixed you a drink, and you got wobbly and threw it up a half hour later. Bleary-eyed, a washcloth made contact with your face, and you turned, and it was Clint, laughing at you, but also caring for you. You both fell asleep fully clothed, on separate sides, in his bed and woke up, felt very grown up. For a few minutes, you both pretended to be married and old and suburban and made breakfast in the kitchen, and drank coffee while watching the news. And, you see, because this happened, his death is an impossibility. If I remember this so well, so detailed — and I do — then he must still be alive, must still be throwing off dark quips, must be standing somewhere, hands in pockets, right knee bent, with that pursed-lip smile that made you feel cellophane and stretched.
But, he is not alive and I’m flying past new planets. I’ve never had someone my age I’ve been close to die. And while I wasn’t close to him in the present, I feel unsettled and knocked out as if I’m 16 again, and he’s telling Jessica Gray he thinks I’m pretty. I can’t stomach this. There are the stupid, selfish thoughts: he was so smart, so funny, so irreverent, a president in the making — why is he dead, and why in such a random, hazard way? If I had done something different, just slightly different, seven years ago, would he have not been in that intersection last weekend? How can I think these things and stay upright?
I can’t sleep. My eyes are wound tight. I am calculating the exact dimensions of Halley’s Comet and I am hugging Clint Watts in my driveway in Virginia and I am reading an e-mail that says he is dead, and I am slivered in two. Time heals and all that, but I can’t comprehend time, either. He is in my cells and bundles of ideas, yet if I called his name, loudly, over canyons, I wouldn’t even get an echo, just static and still air.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-25-2004 | 01:05 AM
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Posted by: Zosia | 05-22-2004 | 05:05 PM
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My dorm room my first semester of college was a six by ten cell with a small window so high up I couldn’t even see a cloud out of it. My bed was a large, wooden lofted structure that took up 80 percent of the space, a piece so imposing that when I unlocked my door, the door slammed into the side of the bed frame. I could touch both walls with outstretched arms with no strain. My desk was under the bed, and my closet was a tall, skinny box bolted to the opposite wall. I chose a solitary room because I was scared of people. I lied to myself and said it was because this way, my high school boyfriend, who was attending the same school, and I would have privacy without the bother of roommates. The idea became a bust, anyway, since the boyfriend and I had a messy break-up one week before school began.
As you can imagine, I didn’t spend much time there. The time I did spend was lonely and restless. I sat in the dark under the bed, composing long, forlorn e-mails to my best friend and glib, hopeful ones to my parents. I lay on my bed with my small lamp glowing dimly from the top of the closet, listening to the Swan Lake suite over and over. It was all I wanted to listen to at that point because it was a neutral piece of music. It evoked no emotion from me other than the fact that I thought it was beautiful, and beauty of neutral tones I could handle.
I kept a white board on my door, like everyone else, and scribbled feminist quotations on it, not so much out of conviction, but more out of a way to give myself a personality. I was gone or holed up so much that the other girls on my floor thought I was mysterious and weird. A few times, I heard them whispering outside my door when they thought I was gone. “She’s never there. Why does she even pay to live here?” or my favorite because of the nonsense conclusion, “She must be a dyke.” The feminist quotes must’ve helped that one along.
One night, I heard yelling outside my window which I took to be drunk college freshman heading to parties. When it didn’t stop, I dragged my desk chair over to the wall, and stood on my tiptoes to open the window. Outside was a group of three young girls, wearing striped scarves and pink hair. One of the girls shouted, “Hey! I had that room last year!” I smiled. “It’s a great room! You’ll never forget it,” she added, before locking arms with her friends and moving on.
I closed the window, but stayed standing on the chair. I looked around at the bare walls, the white barely-used sheets and scratched wood of the bed. On one side, I noticed a carving, dusty and ground in. I squinted closer and saw it was a day count-off, like those you see in prison movies. Beside it was a heart filled in with crude red ink.
I’m tempted to go back to that dorm and that street and yell at the window, see who lives there. I can’t help but wonder what face I’ll see peeking over the tip of the small smudged glass, and what my face must’ve looked like. I can’t see myself saying anything different than what the girl yelled to me. “You’ll never forget it,” I’ll say, then adjust my scarf and walk to my car.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-22-2004 | 12:05 PM
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I had a brief two hour period last night where I realized my life is nothing like I thought it would be at this age, and while I’ve had moments like this every other millisecond for the past two years, this particular thought train was sharper and more sudden.
I spent a few hours with my interesting, accomplished friends at an Indian restaurant earlier in the evening, listening to their tales of grad school for psycho-analytic philosophy and engagement and law class homework and physical therapy training. I marveled at their competency, their ability to actually finish what they started and their great hair. Then I came home, and ended up watching a sleazy show called Hollywood Bling, which was exactly as it sounds. Usually, I’m fascinated by these type of shows and never have an ounce of celebrity/wealthy envy, but last night, my stomach was whipping around my skin. Where was my million trillion dollars to buy diamond-encrusted boats and gold-plated toilet paper? I asked the Gods of Money. I can’t even afford to buy a dresser! My underwear is out on a rickety wire shelf-thing for all the world to see!
It’s so easy to get caught up in the life-envy. I usually don’t — not in that fashion, at least — so I was surprised to find myself starting to cry over Hollywood Bling. I continually remind myself this is what your 20s are about, or so I’ve been told. I’m supposed to feel this wrenching, retching life-vertigo! I’m supposed to have no clue what I want to do or how to do what I don’t know what I want to do or exactly how the frozen horizon in black holes works.
But I don’t know if I believe these sentiments. Everyone around me is doing something and going forward and getting married and buying Mini-Coops and receiving promotions and moving to Miami and opening their own businesses and dying their hair hip-red and knowing exactly what they’re doing the next day and how they feel about it. There are mornings where I wake up, and I am stuck for an hour on what socks to wear. It’s not like I expect college degrees and dressers to magically appear in my hands. It’s not like I expect college degrees and dressers to magically appear in my hands. The uneasiness comes from not knowing if I’m doing everything I can to get what I want, and if I am, why don’t I have it yet? When does the coping and the dirt and the clenched teeth turn into exhalation?
The only difference I can see between now and and a year ago is that I don’t get so blindly panicked about these thoughts. Instead, I get a weird lump in the bottom of my esophagus that I can’t swallow away. And then I move into the next room, and hope that my next choice will lead to something other than white knuckles and split ends.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-16-2004 | 11:05 PM
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I’m really restless, almost to an uncomfortable point. I can’t think of a single thing I actually want to do. I think: maybe I want to bring a book I won’t read and sit in the corner of a coffee shop or maybe I want to bike to the park and lay in the itchy grass and breathe in flies. Maybe I want to organize my closet. Maybe I want to make pear and gorgonzola salad from scratch. Maybe I want to write a screenplay! Maybe I want to give the cat a bath! Maybe I want to wear silly sparkly things and gold eyeshadow and go into the city and sit at a bus stop.
I don’t know. Nothing appeals. I feel like I’m stretching out of my skin. I’m listening to Radiohead and one song by The Postal Service and Joan Jett, and nothing’s coming. I’m walking around in my high school bathing suit. No inspiration. I feel like someone asked me a question that I almost know the answer to, and it’s on the tip of my lips, and I can’t spit it out.
I don’t think I’ve gone this long in my young-adult life without something either exciting or catastrophic happening, and I’m feeling the absence. I don’t want catastrophe. I’m definitely seeking balance and contentment and all the shit you’re supposed to yearn for. But an element of adventure is missing. I don’t think I know how to create thrills without causing chaos. I’m not talking bungee-jumping or race track thrills; I mean human interaction thrills — sex and brilliance and spiked coffee. Something needs to snap, but in the most sane way possible.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-11-2004 | 10:05 PM
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Well. I’m wide awake. This isn’t anything new, necessarily, as I’m a lifetime insomniac and night owl, but it is new in the fact that I’m actually completely energized and jittery awake, something I never feel unless I’m newly in love or very drunk. Which are probably the same things. Ha! Comedian here.
There was a tornado watch in the city today. I was dawdling my way home from the grocery store when I noticed the streets were completely empty and the trees were bending in half. The sky was piss yellow and the sirens were starting to wail. I felt very much like the doomed ingenue, especially with the timbre of the sirens which were completely what you hear right before the young blonde 20something loses limbs. I ran home, grabbed the cats and locked myself in the basement for a few hours, but no tornados came. Apparently, this happens all the time in Minneapolis.
I was in the very edge of at tornado when I was 12. My family had just been transferred from Germany to Virginia that week when a twister* came down three blocks from our house and ripped the roof off the Wal-Mart. My only clear recollection of this event is being in school the next day, listening to a boy (Justin Laughter! Hi! I hope you Google your name) relay his harrowing tale of being in the purse section of the store when the roof split in two. It was middle school, so instead of getting congratulated on surviving a deadly storm, he instead never lived down the fact that he was in the purse section. I’m sure he was with his mother or something, but we were 12 and boys and purses were deadly combinations.
Speaking of deadly combinations, last night I went to a party where both a boa constrictor and a 10-day-old baby were present. The snake licked my forehead and the baby fell asleep to acoustic Pink Floyd.
I’m sure there’s a reason I can’t sleep right now. My eyes are starting to fuzz, but my brain is hopping out of my skull. I just want to run downstairs and shake Chris awake, and say: “Look! There is a world where tornados and snake tongues exist! There’s no time to sleep.”
*I feel like the biggest lameass using the word “twister,” but “tornado” was getting a little repetitive.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-10-2004 | 02:05 AM
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23 is an interesting age to be because I’m totally having one of those “not a girl, not yet a woman” stages of life. (This may be the first time I’ve quoted Britney Spears.) During Easter at aunt’s house, he and I were ushered to the Kids’ Table, with paper plates and plastic utensils. I didn’t mind this, really, since the Kids’ Table is notoriously more thrilling than the Big People Table. But then I was the oldest person at that particular table, and the only one with a glass of wine, and, also, the only one in a skirt, and suddenly I felt a hundred years old.
I haven’t yet mastered the art of Adult Dining Talk, either. Eventually, dependent on the amount of alcohol involved, all conversation will inevitably lead to sex, politics or variations thereof, and that I can handle. But it’s the hour beforehand where people seem required to talk about their careers or their house repairs or the price of this and that, and I fall short. I’m interested in what everyone else has to say on these topics, but when I join in, I feel 16, toothy and awkward, and like I sound like a complete fake. They say: “What do you do?” and I say: “Oh, I’m in the _____ business,” and I’m convinced they don’t believe me. How could someone as young as I have an actual day job? Shouldn’t I be making hair appointments for prom or something?
It’s a very strange self-consciousness that makes me gulp my drink out of nervousness, and then I get tipsy, and then even more kegger-speak spews forth, and suddenly, I feel like I have walked into the entirely wrong life. I should be cruising my old neighborhood after-hours, or riding my bike to the gas station across the street, or doing my math homework, or just something that doesn’t involve stock options and health care benefits.
I’ve talked about this many times before as it seems to be persistent chatter in my ear. I have always wanted to maintain some of my Bohemian status into adulthood - the long, tangly hair; the house with the band practicing in the basement; the old T-shirts and ripped jeans; the impossibly late hours and the exhausting mornings where I smell like a smoky bar and my mouth is a drain and I feel head-imploded because I was in the middle of something the night before, some bright lights or crushing noise, or even just the pale light of my computer screen, writing writing writing.
But there needs to be a transition somewhere. I think that’s what I’ve been waiting for this past year, some turning point or corner that says: “Okay, you’re a Grown-Up now.” But if I’m going to be a Bohemian adult, I need to find my way over this bump. I want to be able to sit down at dinner with lovely, intelligent people and feel like my presence is needed to complete the circle. Some mixture of white wine and finger foods; Mr. Rogers and Alan Greenspan.
Posted by: Zosia | 05-03-2004 | 11:05 PM
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At the end of a rock show at the Uptown Bar a few weeks ago, my friend Adrianne tugged on my shoulder and pointed: “Look! Mystery pastries! They’ve been sitting there for the past three hours. When did they get there? What are they for?”
And thus begins May’s theme: social experimentation. Except I don’t actually bestow themes on my months. And even if I did, social experimentation wouldn’t be the chosen theme. So, basically, this a crappy segue. Anyway!
It was pointed out a few times that I don’t actually talk about what’s going on in my life on this site anymore. That might be because, in the past year or so, I’ve begun to feel uncomfortable talking about myself. This would be the point in the paragraph where I say, “Well, that’s all going to change,” or where I would go into a fanciful tale about life, love and whatever else is related to those subjects, but, fortunately for all of us, nothing’s changing and I’m short on fanciful tales. So.
I did drink a lot of free Guinness with some Metafilter nerds on Friday night, a crowd I always have a blast with. With whom I always have a blast. You get it. (Pictures here, by the indomitable Mark Danielson). I learned a lot about stalkers, gardening and law, and, really, what more is there to a mild windy Friday night in Minneapolis?
Posted by: Zosia | 05-02-2004 | 08:05 PM
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