Friday evening was spent at Stiftungsfest, Minnesota’s oldest celebration. I’m not exactly sure what was being celebrated, but I think it had something to do with German heritage and giant blow-up Miller Lite bottles. As is turning into tradition, we listened to Bat Out of Hell:II on the car ride over, and at least three times during the 40 minute journey, someone exclaimed, “God, Meat Loaf is just the best.” And then we all cried during the power ballads. At the fest, I drank three watery beers, one of which came from Chris’s Mom’s purse, and I ate skin-on-fries made by a kid in a “C:/dos run” t-shirt, all while listening to a Queen cover band and hiding from Chris’s uncle, who nearly burned me at the stake when I told him I wouldn’t be having one of Stiffy Fest’s famous hamburgers because I was vegetarian.
. . .
In my new school, I keep my eyes to the floor when I walk through the Fine Arts hallway, as I do several times a day. It’s the only hallway in the building that’s painted a color (bright red) and it smells of ceramics and plywood. Ever since I quit the theatre, I haven’t been able to stomach seeing plays or even being in the vicinity of a theatre. It makes my throat and heart twisty in the way you get when you talk to an ex-boyfriend whom you never should’ve broken ties with. Acting was my life for 15 years and then suddenly, it wasn’t and I still feel uneasy about the loss.
. . .
Interesting new development: I think I’m allergic to chocolate. I never liked chocolate all that much, but now on the rare occasions I have some (such as the brownies a la mode I had for breakfast this morning), my head muscles spasm until I feel like crying. At least now when I decline chocolate I can use the allergy as an excuse; otherwise, people get very indignant when I tell them I don’t like chocolate, as if their life and career are built around chocolate and my denial of it is going to destroy their entire family and self-worth.
I start writing a lot of things in my head late at night when I’m trying to fall asleep, and magically, they’re gone by morning. I think I wanted to tell you something about school, how my first instinct when I walked into the main building was to swing around and flee out the front doors. That’s my first instinct for most things, so I didn’t pay much attention to it. But it was a very strange feeling to walk in new hallways with new smells and new secret short-cuts. In the first five minutes, I missed UMD so much I thought I might puke in my book bag. I felt like I had been just pushed off a rocket ship and left for dead and all these smiling, blonde faces were sharp-toothed alien predators aiming for my throat.
Except I really didn’t feel like that; I just felt all achy and dizzy for Duluth. Sometimes it seems like UMD is where my entire life started. I can still remember, very clearly, being completely lost in the hallways and baffled by Northern accents and the pizza-smell of the Kirby Lounge, and then suddenly, I was surrounded by people who were as lost and needy as I was, and before I blinked, I had every corner of that school memorized. I made out in the Ballroom at midnight, with the mirrors on the ceiling, and ordered the same drink at the coffee cart each morning, and I played Hide-And-Go-Seek in the Wedge after hours, and I read on Griggs Beach between classes, and I hid in the practice rooms, making up songs on the piano, when I was sad. And then, I was in Minneapolis.
So this new school has stiff competition. It won’t be the same, of course, because I’m 23 now, instead of 18, and I commute to school and there are no dorms and there won’t be underage drunken parties where we’ve mastered the art of silencing the ice clink in our glasses so the RAs don’t bust us. I’m interested in different things now, and I’m less self-conscious and I actually started my homework last night, two days before it was due. But the rooms are still unfamiliar and the lights too new. I haven’t figured out gravity yet.
But there was a moment yesterday when I walked down the stairs from my second class of the day, and I was greeted by an old man playing lounge tunes on a piano in the middle of the commons, and a long white serving table where people were giving away free food and drinks and actually smiling about it. I took my food and found a table in the corner and sat cross-legged, while listening to the piano and the chatter and the giggles, and I thought, “Well. Okay. Maybe.”
Here is a picture of Chris cracking his neck. It’s a small representation of what I want to do to my own shingle-ridden face and neck right now, which is rip my skin off my skull. There will be more pictures to follow tonight, minus the graphic captions.
In other news, it’s cold enough to wear long sleeves and this makes me happy.
Sometimes I’ll read over old e-mails and letters while I’m procrastinating on some menial task, and I’m surprised at how angry I can get over things I haven’t thought about in months. I’ll re-read some inciting comment and suddenly I’ll think, “Oh yeah! I forgot I’m pissed about that! Fuck!” And then I’ll start getting the terrible ideas you concoct when coming across past situations, classic ideas such as: Let’s write an e-mail to someone I haven’t spoken to in two years and tell them how pissed I am! or — well, that’s about the only idea I get. I can just imagine how an e-mail like that would go:
Dear ____,
Hi. Remember when you were a jerk all those years ago? Well, I still think you suck.
How’s your life? Still into that weird stuff you were into?
I mean, what can you do with an e-mail like that? What’s someone supposed to write back?
Dear ____,
Hi. Uh. I still think you suck, too.
Read More »
When I was 13, I created two ideals of what I would become in the next 10 years: I either wanted to be the cool redhead chain-smoking in back, no cares, quiet, cynical or I wanted to be the tangly-haired barefooted hippie, obliviously dancing.
I have always been attracted to the organized life, the everyday elegance you see in old magazines and movies. Something appeals to me about waking early and precisely, making the bed and showering and dressing immediately (no bathrobe, clothing always tucked in, shirt absent of weird food stains, a tasteful color of lipstick). There would be coffee in a blue china cup (an heirloom) and cream cheese French toast and I would sift through the morning news and then go to work where the pattern of beautiful neatness would continue. In the evening, the same. Before bed, I would always wash my face and splash it with cool water to close the pores. My nightclothes would be expensive thin fabric, something the moonlight would rush to highlight at 2 AM.
Instead, I’m the embodiment of “rough around the edges,” more tangly-haired than cool. Except I think this is more a self-perception than an actual one since no one has told me this, per se, but then again, who pulls someone aside and says, “You’re a mess, can you do something with your hair”? A mother, maybe, but I don’t have that kind of mother.
But here I am, with flyaways and stained pants. I’m always a bit of a mess, even when I’m trying my hardest to pull together. On days I have somewhere to be, I rise late and shower quickly. Inevitably, I knock the entire bottom row of shampoo and conditioner to the floor and it smacks against the wet tile and scares the hell out of me and I bang my head against the wall. There are no china cups or cooked breakfasts; there’s maybe a half-soft apple or a glass of orange juice, and nothing is ever tucked in. I attempt mascara, but it’s halfway down my face by noon. It would never occur to me to do something with my nails and on the rare occasions it does, I end up picking polish in nervous gestures for days. I’m a small girl, but I feel lumbery in my skin, all elbows and teeth. Even when I dress up, there’s an obvious awkwardness to it, a gross inelegance. By the end of the night, I will have made at least six inappropriate jokes (all met with silence) and punctuated each of them with the slosh of my spilled drink.
When I sleep, there’s no calm contained body in satin. I sleep naked and intensely, rolling and tearing at the covers, sweating and muttering in my sleep, drooling on pillows. The moonlight passes over me, recoils its light, saves it for some wood nymph or countess, or at least someone who doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night with her limbs half on the floor.
I have always possessed a gracelessness that has worsened with age. As a teenager, I covered up better. But now, I forget to have decency until it’s too late. I’ll go grocery shopping, braless with the morning’s eye crumbs crusted on my face, unbrushed teeth, three holes in my shirt, and sometime later, I will think, “Oh, shit, I really shouldn’t do this, I should try harder.”
I can’t tell if this really bothers me. It’s just completely dissonant with the image of me in my head. When I play through imaginary scenarios, my hair is always shiny and I’m smiling wryly and smoking discreetly (always interesting, as I don’t smoke in real life). My legs are lean and crossed demurely and my knees are round like planets, devoid of their usual stark boniness. I say: “Really, I must be going, I have no time for this,” and imaginary me floats away in a cloud of black cashmere, while real me burns her thumb on the leftover cigarette ashes
So I have shingles. Shingles is a reoccurrence of the chicken pox virus and usually strikes the elderly, so I’m a little nervous about my life span now. Except my friend Mary, also aged 23, had shingles over the past few weeks, so I’m thinking maybe it’s just that time of the year.
Disgusting pus-filled blisters usually accompany shingles, but fortunately I caught it in time, so all I have is the infection of my facial nerve, which means I go around feeling like someone has scraped the first two layers of my face skin and then positioned me three feet from the sun. Also involved in this is my mouth (canker sores), throat (swollen tonsils) and ear (clogged, rendering me half-deaf). I felt better over the weekend after high dosages of the herpes drug, so better in fact that I thought: “Hey! This shingles stuff isn’t so bad!” But now I’m back to feeling woozy and scraped.
The only good things to come from the shingles debacle are the jokes (”Shingle all the way” and “One Shingular Sensation”) and the fact that I can go around telling people I have shingles and they’re all, “What? Come again?”
I’ve also been more social this week than normal, which I assume is a shingles side effect. I went to a fashion show, a few plays and met some people for something or other on Lyndale, except when I got off the bus, I walked a mile in the wrong direction, all while feverish and swollen up like an ego.
There’s more to say, but I need to return to being a Big Huge Baby(tm) about this, which involves lying about the couch and touching my face every few moments to see if it’s stopped hurting.
Illnesses I have had:
1. Whooping cough (pertussis)
2. Scarlet fever
3. Mono
4. The Norwalk virus
Illnesses I have not had:
1. The flu
2. Bronchitis
3. Warts
Illnesses I currently have, as of three days ago:
1. Shingles (without the rash)
There’s something surreal about watching a live fashion show and seeing the model’s knees shake.
Welcome to Fall in Minnesota. Today, I closed all the windows and put on a sweatshirt. The cats are curling up together, shivering on my bed like orphans. This type of weather is my favorite — windy, cold, a little gray, non-descript. Sunshine makes me feel guilty for holing up inside. Snow, which used to thrill me, baffles me. I don’t know how to dress for it or how to play comfortably in it. So I’m the happiest now, when the air is taking a break. I can sit out in the yard in a sweater with my library books and drink gas station coffee and feel okay about things.
In other, more vague news: the entire court system of Chesterfield Country, Virginia can eat shit. More on that later. Also, I think Vegas is going to become one of those symbolic towns for me, the type I hold unfounded grudges against because I don’t understand.
Also number two: I start school in two weeks. I have never felt more ready to learn and less like a student. I think I’m approaching the age where the hip young teenagers in the class will either a) ask me to buy them beer or b) be annoyed and bewildered by presence.
I think there comes a time when your own memories cease to be yours only. You share childhood memories and snippets of stories, and maybe you’re doing so over the third 7&7 or maybe you’re just trying to impress a new friend. Whatever. At a certain point, after you’ve repeated a story enough, you lose ownership. Now the people who have listened hard enough have a piece of the memory in their files and when they see you, the thought is: “Ah, Jennifer. The scar on her knee is from when she fell on a grating in the third grade. She’s a little allergic to chocolate and she threw up the first time she saw Ani DiFranco in concert and she won’t drink red wine.” And so you’re compartmentalized to the point where you’re almost fiction; a loose bag of inter-connected verbiage and trivia.
So I think that’s why the little things we haven’t shared with people (or at least, not in depth) tend to mean the most to us. It’s almost a territorial feeling when we indulge a secret habit or are struck dumb by a memory we were sure we’d forgotten.
And that’s why I’m listening to the Swan Lake Suite right now admist a very invasive day, and feeling grounded. I have loved this particular song playing now since I was young, and during an awful time my first year in college, one of those horribly painful transition periods where you’re trying everything and liking nothing and hating yourself for both, this song was the only thing I could listen to. Every other album or song was attached to someone or something else. I threw all of my CDs, except for this one, in a box in the closet and didn’t take them out for six months. When I was in my tiny dorm room, alone and feeling two dimensional, I would play this CD, this song, on a loop and lay on my bed and feel okay for a moment. It’s what I picture when people in movies cheese out the line, “Find that place inside you that no one can touch.” Immediately, in whatever place that supposedly no one can reach but me, this song plays.
Now I haven’t given this to you. It’s still mine. I didn’t tell you why this song is so special to me, or what it makes me think of. But it doesn’t matter, really. Because the truth is, it doesn’t make me think of anything. The only emotion that pulls through when I hear the beginning notes is a kind of exhale. Because even the inhale doesn’t belong to us.
Chris in Vegas, so you know what that means. That’s right, I’m going to stay up all night and read Stephen Hawking.
I’m pretty sure I used to be cooler than this.
P.S.: My good friend Minh is going to design me a new layout very soon.
P.P.S.: Best out-of-context quotation of the night: “At the next meet-up, we should all pretend to be Bono.
I am stowed away in the Non-Fiction section of my local library, feeling like a total bandit, only because I haven’t set foot in a library for recreational purposes in years. It took being dirt poor (in the 20something suburban kid sense) to appreciate the value of free books.
All libraries smell the same. And this keyboard is the loudest thing I’ve ever encountered and people are giving me looks. I am trying to think of every book I ever wanted to read, but am coming up blank.
Oops. I don’t think these computers are for Blogger use.
“August rain: the best of summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.”