Note

Comments are back on. Sorry about that. I lost my comment spam virginity yesterday, and was overwhelmed with comments left by someone called “your fat ass.”

Posted by: Zosia | 10-30-2004 | 01:10 PM
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The things we promised

Erik, my ex-boyfriend, wasn’t a writer and hated to read. He didn’t have the attention span for either and, besides, he was a hands-on type of guy, the type who could wire a soundboard in under five minutes and recite every microphone manufactured since 1962. When we first began dating, he bought and read an entire novel, the first and last he’s ever read, as far as I know.

This was in the same vein as me feigning an intense interest in waterskiing and snowboarding when I learned he loved outdoor sports, as well as professing a deep interest in religion when I discovered his deep-seated Christianity. I considered myself an open-minded agnostic (though “spastic atheist” would’ve been more accurate), and he was an altar-boy Lutheran. At first, both of us were shaky on this point: could I date outside the literati? Could he date a heathen? Neither of us kept this up very long, however, and we soon settled into our own interests, mutually accepting the fact that I wouldn’t become a Christian cross-country skier anytime soon, or he, a poet.

I read him most everything I wrote, however, though he never sought it out himself. He would always compliment my writing and listen attentively, but his eyes kept that glazy-eyed ADD look and his knee would bob up and down. Eventually, I stopped reading to him and he stopped asking me to go up to his cabin or to church. During the last six months of our relationship, we were comfortable friends, but neither of us really knew what was going on in the other’s lives. I figured this was the inevitable path of a long-term relationship, and didn’t try to push the details of my day on him. He never asked, but I didn’t ask him, either.

Our break-up happened in two sections: the first, where he wanted to stay, but I didn’t; and the second, where I desperately wanted everything to stay the same, and he had moved on. During the first part, Erik would sit on the couch in the bedroom, next to my computer, and ask to hear everything I’d ever written. In the mornings, he’d come in, smelling of Nautica and his coconut shampoo, and stand behind my chair, almost begging to hear my new stories or poems. He’d come in at night, teeth brushed, in his blue plaid pajama pants with the hole in the back left pocket, and say, “Did you write anything new today? Can I hear?”

And I would feel a little claustrophobic because I wasn’t used to this type of attention from him. We had grown accustomed to giving each other a wide berth and only coming together at night, to sleep. But I would read to him, everything I had ever written. I described the plot of the books I’d been reading or the stories I read for my English classes. And he listened hard, his neck tight with concentration, his eyes never leaving my face. When I finished, he would practically be in tears. “That’s so beautiful,” he would say, quickly and earnestly, as if the more words I read and the faster he acknowledged them would save us.

A few months later, he began dating a new girl and he stopped coming into my room at nights. And, so, I went to him, to the old mattress he slept on in the basement since there was only one bed between us and neither of us had formed a contingency plan. I would wait until I knew he was almost asleep and tip-toe down there. I figured if he was half-awake he would be less likely to demand me leave.

I kneeled on the cement by the mattress and he told me about his new girlfriend, the Christian, skiing, elementary school teacher. Unlike his subtle pleas and tears to me earlier, mine were aggressive and ugly. I would cry the moment I walked into the basement, gulping, atrocious sobs that sounded like a squeezed cat because I had to be careful not to wake the rest of the house. I sat next to him and made every promise I could think of. I said: I’ll go to church, I promise, maybe there’s something I missed? Maybe there’s something about religion I’ve just been overlooking? I’ll try, I fucking swear to God, I’ll try. And I’ll ski, too. I’ve just been scared of it, but I’ll try it. I’m feeling adventurous. I’m ready to take risks. Just please. Please please please please.

For a while, he tried to be nice about things. He would sigh and let me crawl in next to him, and I would sob into his shoulder and wake the next morning alone. After a few weeks of this, however, he would start saying, “No no no no” the moment he heard my feet on the steps. And so, one day, I stopped coming to him at nights, and we drifted away from each other. Soon, I knew nothing about him, not where he spent the nights or even the color of his eyes.

I wonder now why we chose these things to sacrifice for each other, and how “sacrifice” is exactly the right word because our desperate promises were grudging, though I think we both believed deep in our gut we meant these things. I would go to church every Sunday. He would read novels. But why didn’t we promise the simple things? Why didn’t we just say, “I think I forgot to care about you, somewhere down the line. I promise to try harder. To love you.” But that wouldn’t have worked, either. You can’t promise to love someone you don’t know anymore.

I think of these things, at night, when I’m on the verge of making new promises I know I can’t keep.

Posted by: Zosia | 10-30-2004 | 12:10 AM
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Links for you and me

I finally updated and added my Links page. This should really excite you. It’s still incomplete, but there’s some new additions.

Oh, and I also took down all my pictures. I’m going to re-format them and such, and plus, I was getting 100+ hits a day from Google images. People are really interested in drunk wrestling and boobs. Who knew?

Posted by: Zosia | 10-26-2004 | 07:10 PM
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When Bohemia goes to the cabin (Chris drinks an Amaretto Sour)

This weekend should have been strange, but the only actual strangeness came from the complete lack of surrealness surrounding the events. I mean, look at that picture (and ignore the general crappiness of the photo and the huge smudge, thanks to a weekend of hiking in thunderstorms). My sweet, pacifist boyfriend, the one who gets extremely nervous filling out forms and takes 82 minutes to make a breakfast burrito because he has to get it “just right,” is holding a rifle. But in the woods, this is what you do. And though I’m constantly feeling like an inelegant lumbering tomboy and I haven’t brushed my hair since 1997, I felt like the world’s worst city girl surrounded by men in loud orange vests and long skinny guns in camo cases.

I thought: I can’t be that much of a wuss. This is what you do at the cabin, you know, you sit on the front steps and watch your boyfriend and his Dad shoot cans off a fence. So I tried, but when the smallest of guns exploded, my whole body felt electrified. I actually leapt back and my heart flew back with me. I ran inside and sat on the bed and put my hands over my ears, and involuntarily shook as the guns fired. Where is my basis for this? I didn’t grow up around guns. I have no bad memories with guns — I don’t have any memories, in fact, so why should my entire body tremble as if I’m reliving some awful war? I can only guess I’ve seen too many movies.

And then, there was the casino, the one I didn’t really want to go to because casinos make me feel like I’m in a Stephen King dream sequence. But I told Chris: “If you drink, I’ll go,” and he got real quiet, so I took that for a yes.

First, you must understand Chris’s Thing With Drinking. He’s never done it. He’s 23 years old and never even had a sip of alcohol. It’s a strange phenomenon because Chris, who is Mr. Logical-Rational 2004 and must know the reason for everything in existence, couldn’t explain why he didn’t want to drink. He was a little afraid of it, but then it became one of those claim-to-fame pacts you make with yourself, one of things you’ve just not done for so long that doing it would ruin some invisible stronghold within yourself. He’s never minded the inevitable teasing and peer pressure, but it’s always been the running joke: “Hey, Chris, wanna a beer? HA HA HA JUST KIDDING YOU DON’T DRINK.”

So, we went to the casino and I ordered him the weakest mixed drink I could think of. The boy has a sweet tooth, so I wanted to start him with something light and full of sugar. And, so, he broke his 23-year streak and drank the top half of an Amaretto Sour over the course of two hours. The whole thing was very anti-climatic, though I’m not sure what either of us really wanted to happen. We stood, watching a cover band fronted by a Wayne Newton look-alike play Neil Diamond songs to a click track and then we won three dollars at a low-stakes blackjack table and then we stood under the planetarium dome in the middle of the casino, watching the fake Northern Lights and the fake shooting stars.

“I think my eyes are getting a little blurry,” he said once, but that was the extent of the corruption of Chris F., Non-Drinker. There was one point in the night when we joined his family around the bar and everyone was laughing at a table of drunken people with bouncing flamingo-headbands and Chris grabbed my 7&7 from my hand and took a swig, caught up a little in the revelry of breaking his own rules. But that was the end of that, and he went home without so much as a buzz. But I kept the straw from the drink, as my own commemoration. I always come home from bars with chewed-up straws in my pockets, but this one is special: the night my baby got blurry vision from half an Amaretto Sour. (I’m not sure if I approve of calling him “baby” in public, but there it is and so it shall be.)

Posted by: Zosia | 10-25-2004 | 12:10 AM
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Weekend hiatus

I’m going, as the Minnesotans say, to the cabin for the weekend, so regular updates will resume when I get back.

Posted by: Zosia | 10-22-2004 | 03:10 PM
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This is fact, not fiction

Driving home today, I thought: I’m wearing my favorite sweater and it’s covered in kitten hair and my hands smell like the good lemon soap from the bathroom by the student lounge and I’m listening to a liberal talk station after years of only being able to receive conservative junk on my car radio and a random person whose name I’m unsure of wrote a beautiful poem about me today, calling me a “tangled-haired tomboy queen.”

I thought: I’m going home to a warm house full of people who sing in the shower and while I’m not enjoying the tree colors and burning leaves smell as much as I should, I’m still so happy to be in October and drinking bitter fifty cent coffee from the main floor vending machine, and tonight, I will be curled in bed with my favorite person, and smelling his sleepy boy smell, and though I have a headache, and though I’m tired from five hours of sleep, life feels good, like a warm hug.

And even though a small something happened tonight which put me at unease, which made me stand back and examine my ditziness and my casual trust in people, I still feel the warm-hug feeling. I’m going to brush my teeth, and crawl in already-warmed sheets and think about pumpkin-flavored things and democracy and all those gushy-warm things young people are supposed to dream about.

Posted by: Zosia | 10-14-2004 | 11:10 PM
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Bits

I’m alive, just sleepy and studious.

I spent my day off eating onion rings the circumference of my waist and napping in various places around the house. I’d try to be productive, I mean, there was sincere, earnest effort here, but then I would rest on the couch for a moment, and suddenly, I’d be waking up to cat ass in my face and the sweaty dizzy feeling of sleeping in the middle of day.

Chris said, “I feel weird. The nights are coming sooner,” and I made a sex joke and then fell asleep against the window on the car ride home from the restaurant with the waist-sized onion rings and the server who snuck up behind me and surprise-attacked by belting the specials in a loud mezzo-soprano.

I accidentally drank too much tea tonight, so tomorrow morning is going to be rough. The house is too cold, but not cold enough for heat. Last night, I slept in a ski hat, my face burrowed into Chris’s bony spine. One of us needs to fatten up if we’re going to survive the winter.

Posted by: Zosia | 10-14-2004 | 01:10 AM
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Why I don’t watch TV

Four instances in which TV has ruined my life:

1. Mr. Wizard: I’m not sure if I’m remembering this correctly, but I swear Mr. Wizard had a show on the causes of fainting. I don’t know why a kids’ science show would focus on FAINTING, but whatever. I remember something, obviously. And the something I remember is an example of a girl standing in line at the post office for three hours and passing out because all the blood pooled in her ankles, away from her brain, apparently, and she had no blood left to keep her conscious. This fucking ruined me. I can’t stand still for longer than 10 minutes before I get a creepy sense of doom. People in banks and stores and post offices think I’m batshit because I’ll start doing this little ballet hop move to keep the blood circulating.

In the same episode, Mr. Wizard performed a vulcan move on some little boy and made him pass out. Again, this doesn’t sound very feasible, and I might have Mr. Wizard mixed up with Mr. Nimoy, but whatever. Mr. Wizard gets the blame. He was trying to demonstrate the implication of pressing too hard on that nerve in the back of your neck. I’m not enough of a Trekkie to really know the science behind this, but holy shit, I can’t stand the back of my neck touched to.this.day. I hate it. Even light touches make me a little homicidal. So, thanks, Mr. Asshole.

2. Perhaps you remember the TV show Sisters, starring an alcoholic slutty Sela Ward and a young, mulleted George Clooney. I loved this show, even though now that I actually think about it, it was creepy with the whole younger-selves constantly showing up to save the day. Anyway. In one episode, Ashely Judd (playing Swoosie Kurtz’s daughter) is taking a shower with the door locked, and she SLIPS and bangs her head on the wall and knocks herself the FUCK OUT. And after a while, Swoosie is all, “Where’s Ashley?” And then horror crosses her face as she realizes she’s been in the shower for two hours and apparently Ashley’s been suicidal, so she expects the worst, and the bathroom door is locked, and oh my GOD, the drama.

And now, even though someone could totally walk in the bathroom and see my naked body, I will not, under any circumstances, take a shower with the door locked. Swoosie can find me if she needs me.

3. There was an after school special I caught one afternoon. I don’t remember the name of it, but it was about a group of high schoolers who were experimenting with drugs. Except I totally didn’t get the drug part when I was little and I thought they were just eating candy. So, when one of the girls ran on the sidewalk and collapsed and died, I thought it was because she fell on the hard cement and broke her skull. I didn’t realize until several years later that she had just OVERDOSED on drugs, and that the whole point of the special was to tell kids drugs are bad. I thought the special was about not running on hard surfaces. For real. I was terrified of going faster than a stroll on sidewalks after this show. And I still get extremely nervous if, for whatever reason, I’m running on something harder than grass. Thanks, after school special. You sure didn’t keep me away from the drugs*, but I’ll never run on a sidewalk again.

*I actually did stay away from the drugs. BUT NOT BECAUSE OF THAT CONFUSING SPECIAL.

Posted by: Zosia | 10-09-2004 | 03:10 PM
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Oh, Travis, how I ruined thee

It’s very annoying to me that after a month and a half of doing all my homework several nights before the expected date, I still do my best work the night before.

. . .

And because I haven’t posted a picture in a while, here’s one of Andrew locked in his sweatshirt, which reminds me of a certain 7th grade lunch period when I locked my friend Travis Flippin in his Miami Dolphins starter jacket so tightly that he was unable to move from the waist up or untie himself. I left him like that for the whole lunch period, and only relented when the lunch monitor threatened to send me home for the day. I really wish I knew where Travis Flippin was now, so I could totally call up him and say, “Hey! Remember when I locked you in your jacket at lunch? Still funny, isn’t it?” And then he would probably come to my house and punch me in the face.

. . .

Today, I was close to sliding into my worst blue funk in months, but I walked in my favorite professor’s office this evening and saw he had six framed pictures of his cats sitting on top of his computer monitor. I swear to God, that is the cutest thing I’ve seen in three thousand years, and I kept grinning to myself all through poetry class. And when someone asked me what I was smiling about, all I could say was, “Cats! Framed cats!” Which was true enough.

Posted by: Zosia | 10-05-2004 | 12:10 AM
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The sad tale of my ugly stick

So, I have some pictures to show you, but I need to address my photogenic quality first, namely, my complete lack of it. You know those people who photograph absolutely beautifully, but when you mention this fact, they say, “Oh, no, I take horrible pictures,” and it’s all a socially humble game, and the person in question is actually thinking, “Damn. Whew! I’m hot.”

This is not the case here. I take ugly pictures. There’s no false humility here. I take really ugly pictures. It’s something I’ve been dealing with since birth. My baby pictures are just plain frightening; in each one, I look like a flubby evil orc-king. In all my school pictures, you’ll find three expressions: dazed, dumb and constipated. 5th grade was a special year as I actually have a line of drool leaking down my chin. I am absolutely not joking. If I could find that picture, I would scan it, but I’m sure the government sanctioned it to be burned.

My boyfriend in high school, Nick, was stunning in real life, but he also took terrible pictures. And when we took pictures together, we had no chance. We could be perfectly posed against a sunlit, peaceful background, faces set in charming, yet tasteful smiles, and when the film was developed, you would’ve thought we were purposely making scary buck-toothed monster faces. Even the photographer who took our senior pictures offered us a refund. He thought it was his fault.

The pictures you see on this site are ones that took several (meaning, billions) attempts. I have to crane my neck, suck in my cheeks, lower my eyelids, stand in a shadow and wear lots of eyeliner for any picture to be decent. Otherwise, I look like a lumpy, stupid ogre-woman with a face full of humongaloid teeth. I always try to take some comfort in the Ani DiFranco line that goes, “I don’t take good pictures / because I have the kind of beauty / that moves.” Well. Ani DiFranco looks gorgeous in all of her photos, especially the candid ones. So she doesn’t know shit about not taking good pictures. This is my cross to bear.

So. Here are some pictures Kip took at the party I hosted last June. I’m not at my worst here, but there are a few where I look chinless and toothy. Everyone else, of course, looks glowing and young and full of vigor and beer. Enjoy.

P.S.: I promise I’m not fishing for compliments. And if you say something nice, I won’t believe you.

Posted by: Zosia | 10-02-2004 | 12:10 PM
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Poland II

I sense a new cult phrase emerging. (Check the URL name.)

(Thanks, Elinor).

Posted by: Zosia | 10-01-2004 | 12:10 PM
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