Hack
Hi, zosiablue.com was hacked last night by Angelina Jolie from Hackers, so we’re working on getting everything back to normal. Carry on.
Posted by: Zosia | 03-28-2006 | 09:03 AM
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Wheezy
A new one to add to the list:
Asthma!
What? I don’t know. I get winded climbing stairs and exercising and I’m tired all the time and have the stamina of a dead chicken, but I somehow never suspected breathing problems. Apparently, I only take in 70% of the air I’m supposed to, which could account for the myriads of weird ways I’ve felt over the years, including the anxiety attacks I’ve experienced in varying degrees since I was seven years old.
I don’t know what I’m going to do about this lung business, considering it’s a mild form of asthma that doesn’t include attacks (yet) and is mostly caused by my allergies (my allergies include, but aren’t limited to: everything in existence), but it’s still nice to know. I thought I was a total wuss about exercise this whole time. Not true! My lungs are just a wuss about breathing.
It’s funny, too, because Chris and I both got totally nailed to the fucking floor by exercise. We both started working out hardcore in the past month, but he got some crazy blood clot thing in his leg that took him out for weeks and now I have asthma. It’s like exercise was all, “HA HA HA HA DON’T THINK SO.” My doctor prescribed long walks around the lake, which sounds calming and easy in theory, but I know I’ll be bored in exactly five steps.
Anyway. Cool news. I was sort of jealous of the kids in middle school who had asthma. They didn’t have to take gym and they got to sit in the nurse’s office with their inhalators. (Which is the proper spelling of inhaler, something I learned from a book I read when I was 10, though I can’t remember the name of the book or what it was about. Asthma, I guess.)
At least I have this year’s disease out of the way. Can’t wait for next year!
Posted by: Zosia | 03-27-2006 | 11:03 PM
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Blue shoebox
Some more navel-gazey stuff added to the shoebox project.
Posted by: Zosia | 03-23-2006 | 10:03 PM
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Twin Cedars
Hey, one reason I’m writing about places is because my parents decided to sell the house I grew up in. They’ve never liked that house and toyed with selling for years, held back by their packrat natures and dislike of change. The fire gave them a good excuse to put a plan in action, especially since the house was essentially rebuilt from scratch. They’re moving to the neighboring city (the St. Paul to the Minneapolis, in backwater Virginia terms), which is close to their jobs and friends.
I don’t get sentimental with places, last few entries notwithstanding. I get sentimental with boyfriends and shoeboxes, but places don’t do much for me. It might be my Army Brat upbringing, though we moved far less than true Army Brats do. Either way, the idea that I’ll never see my house again - and I won’t, since it’ll be late summer before I visit - causes a weird heaviness in my chest and not much more.
I’ve started approaching change with a helpless throwing of hands, sitting on the side of the road in the grass while time fucking does what it wants, like killing my childhood dog or burning down my childhood home or aging my parents exponentially or even aging myself (one day, unblemished; next, lines on the corner of the mouth). I’m not bitter, but I’m not accepting, either.
I moved to that house in 1993. I was in 7th grade and thought that if I bought a really awesome backpack (black leather, gold buckles), I’d be popular. Then I cut my hair and lost the glasses. Then I got my first boyfriend. Then I made out on my front porch. Then the boyfriend I made out with was killed crossing a street ten years later. Then I slammed doors and ate dinners in the kitchen, dinners my Mom made on a stove that doesn’t exist, made in a kitchen that doesn’t exist, made in a house that doesn’t exist, made in a city that I can’t picture anymore without visual aids.
And now someone else will live in the house. It’s a young neighborhood, so it’ll be a couple with kids. Babies, crawling on the floors I ran on and sock-skated on and cried on and stomped on and made picnics on and - whatever. Here’s the only memory I’m keeping:
My bedroom was over the garage, with a big window facing the street. My friends would throw rocks against it when they wanted me to come out, sometimes late at night, which gave me half a heart attack and drove the dogs crazy. One time, I threw a cordless phone out that window and it smashed on the driveway. One time, my friend Julia from across the street rode her bike into the driveway while I was watching and slammed into the mailbox, her braces stuck to her lip.
But one time, right before I graduated high school, my parents were out and my boyfriend (different from the first and still alive) and I were napping on my bed. We loved sleeping next to each other more than the world, and when you’re 17, any chance to lay in a bed together is stolen sweetness. It was Spring and I was in a long light green dress I’d worn for a presentation earlier in the day. I woke up to the window blowing my curtains. The sun was setting, and there was this crazy orange-yellow light striping the walls. I got up, careful to not disturb my sleeping boyfriend, and walked toward the window. And that’s all I remember - me, in that long green dress (burned in the fire - not that it would fit), walking towards that weird Sahara light, the white curtains puffed up like cakes.
I don’t know what happened after that. Probably the garage door went up, and my boyfriend and I had to rush to the living room to look like we’d been there all along. Probably we ate dinner with my parents, and then had a long goodbye in the driveway. But it really doesn’t matter because I don’t get sentimental with places. In my head, the house isn’t even there. There’s a flat empty lot where my childhood scenes play out, over and over on an endless grinding loop. The house has nothing to do with me, which is the kind of thing you say when you want to hide a heart in disrepair.
Posted by: Zosia | 03-22-2006 | 10:03 PM
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Places I’ve Lived Since Age 18, Part the Two
(First installment here.)
January 2000 - May 2000
Corner dorm room in Griggs Hall at UMD.
Duluth, MN.
My roommate was a tall athletic girl named Allison* who worked at a liquor store and thought I was weird. The room was wider than most on the floor, but it was still impossibly small for two people. There was a bunk bed and two desks, and a wall full of blue pictures cut from magazines during a spurt of midnight creativity. Spiraled blue Christmas lights hung over my desk. Since I transferred second semester from 1000 miles away, nothing in the room was mine, save for the computer and some clothes and a stack of books I kept in a cardboard box under the bed.
Here are the memories I have of that room: once, ordering pizza with Allison, running to the lobby in our bare feet and pajama bottoms, and devouring half the pizza on the way back. Allison and I didn’t really get along, mostly because she was a closet anorexic who delighted in telling the other girls on the floor how fat they were, so the pizza night was a rare, but nice, moment. It made up for the night I came home at 2 AM and found two of her friends sleeping in my bed. I actually took off my clothes and lay down before I realized there were bodies underneath me. Bodies DOING IT, I might add.
There was the night I met Matt, Erik and Andrew, and we stayed up until 8 AM, doing stupid shit like hopping in the boys’ showers, fully clothed and rolling down hills. We got drunk off of Hi-C and Silver Wolf, and spilled punch and white bread all over the floor, which I didn’t clean up. Allison was rightfully pissed when I walked in, so I spent two hours picking out bread crumbs from her shag carpet, stopping in intervals to run to the communal bathrooms to puke.
The first night I thought I might like Erik, we fell asleep on my bottom bunk, which was narrow as all fuck, and Erik’s 6′5 frame hung half off the bed. Allison walked in the next morning and let out a low “oooh,” and I resisted the urge to sit up and yell, “This isn’t what it looks like!” But it was. And it wasn’t.
And then there was standing in the middle of the room, thin in khaki shorts and a black tanktop, my hair long and red, looking out the window in late April, and feeling happy for the first time in months. Real happiness, the kind that starts in your stomach, and zings to your face. I actually put my hand to my mouth because I felt like I looked like an idiot smiling so hard, even though no one was in the room.
I was happy in that room. I had my first orgasm in that room. I met Chris for the first time there, when my humidifier leaked and ruined the posters on his wall. (He and Minh had the room below.) I know I must’ve been lonely, having moved so abruptly from home, but I just remember lots of sunlight on the blue walls, and dim evenings under the Christmas lights, sitting on the floor with my new friends and my new crush, feeling like the Queen of Everything.
A happy time.
*You know, this isn’t her real name.
Posted by: Zosia | 03-20-2006 | 10:03 PM
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Anonymous
One of the employees at Whole Foods recognized me from the bus. He’s all, “Hey, you ride the ____ every morning, yes?” And I immediately wanted to say no, drop all my groceries and find another store. Why is it that being known strikes panic in me? I want to be selectively anonymous, facing the world on my terms only. I don’t want to be recognized or known any deeper than I allow. I wish I had a twin I could pretend to be.
Posted by: Zosia | 03-20-2006 | 03:03 PM
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Bad moon wine again
Weekend highlights:
The Como Avenue Jug Band at the Varsity on St. Patrick’s Day. The band sounded great in the big room and Adrianne and I square-danced barefoot, hoping the crowd would take the cue. A three-year-girl stepped up to the challenge, and had better rhythm than I did, which isn’t saying much, since I have absolutely no rhythm at all. (Except when I drum on tables. I have exceptional table-drumming rhythm.) After the show and a few whiskeys, the Dodgeball crew, plus Chris and his parents, and I went to Annie’s for dinner, where I puked immediately after eating three tons of fries. Not by choice. It was one of those sweaty shaky moments where I didn’t think I’d make it out of the bathroom. I leaned my head against the wall, and started thinking of how to arrange myself to faint in an optimally attractive position. Consciousness prevailed, however. So far, I’ve only passed out in two public places, one being an airplane, and I’m not looking for a repeat.
Mary’s going-away party at Nye’s on Saturday, a Polish restaurant where drunk young professionals sing karoake while an old woman plays an electronic organ. Highlights include laughing so hard I collapsed on the floor and fractured a rib (it had something to do with comparing a breast to a hot dog) and listening to a detailed outline for the scrotum olympics. Yup. Mary leaves for Europe for three months tomorrow, and I’m going to die without her. Well, I’ll probably live, but it’ll be one of those deals where I cut out a small section of my heart and freeze it until she returns, a la Edgar Allen Poe.
By far, the best moment of the weekend was in the car on the way to Nye’s. I was in a crabby mood, mostly because I had a bunch of pent-up energy and it was manifesting in all sorts of violent ways (punching car doors, threatening the cat). I flipped on the radio, hoping for a song I knew so I could sing as obnoxiously as possible. I said to Chris, “Hey, why don’t they play Glycerine? Isn’t Bush required to be on the radio at all times?” And I switched 93X and the opening chords of Glycerine were just beginning. It must be your skin I’m sinking in, Gavin. And, so, Chris and I sang at the highest possible human volume, head-bangs included, all the way up Hennepin. It was a Wayne’s World moment, and when we pulled in the lot, I felt sixteen hundred times better. We walked by a very blue Catholic church and I saluted the Virgin Mary, who was trapped on the roof, holding a baby, with no help in sight.
Posted by: Zosia | 03-19-2006 | 04:03 PM
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Scans
I’m posting more shoebox memories here. A few are being posted friends-only, so grab a free Flickr account and add me as a friend if you want to see those. I feel like I’m declassifying parts of my heart, and now that those parts are out, I don’t have to deal with them anymore. Each scan makes me feel a little more present, and less anchored to something that doesn’t exist, and never existed, really, in the way my brain remembers.
Posted by: Zosia | 03-11-2006 | 01:03 PM
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Burn
Stay tuned for a super new feature in which I scan something from the dozens of shoebox memory boxes I’ve been hoarding, tell you the story behind it and then burn it before your very eyes! Okay, maybe not burn. But definitely the purge. This will be happening on Flickr, but I’ll link you in.
Posted by: Zosia | 03-09-2006 | 07:03 PM
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Hibernation
I’m hibernating. This is easy to do when you have a partner who hibernates 97% of the time and is willing to spend weekends watching sixteen episodes of Lost in one sitting, leaving only to get Krispy Kremes from the gas station and to lift our new free weights. We bring the gym to us now. I haven’t been out, beyond school and errands, in a few weeks. As opposed to a couple of years ago when hermiting would’ve been out of fear of everything, this is more a quiet-head thing.
A few years ago, I wrote a post where I said this: “Someday, I’ll go to a party or a club or a rock show and it’ll be no big thing. I’ll throw on the mascara and the tight young thang shirt five minutes before, hop in my car and rock out…[It”ll go like this:] I slam my keys in a basket by the front door, flip on The Cure on the stereo and change my shirt in the bedroom. I think: eyeliner? Nah. A spritz of something not too intimidating, and then keys back in hand, I’m out the back door before the house even realized I was there.” I wrote it during a period when I wasn’t working or going to school and was terrified of going anywhere, so going out in the makeup-dressup way was a big deal.
It was always a big deal. I never hung around the type of people who put on make-up and went places every weekend. I envied the lifestyle; as a kid, I wanted to be some mysterious, smoky jazz singer who loitered on the fringes in dark clothes and red lipstick. I had this image in my head for years, but I never attained it because I was too much of an introvert. Going out taxed me with all that preparation and the anticipation and the endless talking and drinking and laughing and crowds and smells and feelings. I liked it when I went out, but I couldn’t do it more than once every few weeks.
In the past year or so, something changed for me, and I started morphing into the image my kid-self had imagined. I wasn’t mysterious by any means, but I put on the eyeliner and the endless tight shirts and I smoked on stages and I knew at least five people in every place I went. There wasn’t any anticipation anymore; it was just - throw on the clothes, go to the show, drink too much, talk too much, reapply liner in a shitty bathroom mirror, smoke in the cold with no gloves, start a reputation, lean against car doors, nod and smile and listen and then go home and not even write about it.
Half the people I know do this every night and have for years, but I can’t. Something in me snaps after a while. I start to feel shelled and exposed and finely wired, as if I’m waiting for someone to connect red to blue and then, explosion. I start to cry whiskey and sew clothes with smoke. I’ve never been good at changing who I am. There’s a part of me that’s an insane lashing cat in heat who skims poles and feels dangerous and hedonistic. It’s a strong part, one that overtakes all sense when present. But most of the time I’m silent and still, which is not to say calm because we all know my head and skin are bundles of fried nerves.
I’m typing this on a Tuesday afternoon and it’s raining and the cat’s on the arm of the sofa and Chris is at work and I should be doing homework. I don’t want to leave the apartment because it seems exhausting beyond it. So much color and noise and potential for injury. This is where I feel natural; it’s 40% fear, and 60% steadiness. This isn’t to say I’m hibernating forever, but my cells and my insides need healing. It’s a form of waiting. I’ll know when time’s up. Not yet.
Posted by: Zosia | 03-07-2006 | 04:03 PM
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Two pet peeves and one thing about almonds
1. TV Haters: Listen, guy in my class who, when asked his favorite TV show, snarled, “I HAVEN’T HAD A TV FOR YEARS AND NEVER PLAN TO TV IS EVIL AND ROTS YOUR BRAINS.” I don’t have a TV, either. I also don’t have a microwave, a toaster, cups that aren’t coffee mugs or more than three forks. But when people bring up microwaves, I don’t secretly think in my head, “Boy, I’m certainly better than all these people because I reheat my leftovers on the stove.” If you don’t veg out in front of the TV, then you do it other ways. Not having TV or not watching TV does not somehow guarantee you a spot in the Best Heaven. It just means you don’t own a TV. Do you spend your valuable TV watching time doing something more productive? Probably not.
2. Honkers: okay, if you’re in your car and you honk your horn for reasons other than reminding someone to go at a green light or warning someone not to crash into you, then you are an asshole. If you angrily slam on the horn to express the honking equivelant of “fuck you,” you’re an asshole. If someone is driving too slow and cutting in front of you and you slam on the horn, CONTROL YOUR GODDAMN SELF. Think, what’s going to happen if I honk my horn? Will I aid the person in learning to drive faster or better? No, I’m going to upset them and cause a chain reaction of angry drivers. Whenever I hear an obviously unnecessary horn-honking, I have the urge to pull over, climb on the roof of my car and start scream-singing campfire songs.
And the good thing:
3. I like when mean-looking people do something unexpected, like pull out a baggie of almonds in class. Do mean people eat healthy snacks? I really don’t think so.
Posted by: Zosia | 03-02-2006 | 11:03 AM
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