Raj

Cat in the grass!

Posted by: Zosia | 04-23-2006 | 07:04 PM
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In media res

It was weird, too, because yesterday afternoon, I was proud of myself. I was walking back from the bus stop on a busy street, wearing flip-flops, an oversized hoodie and my hair in a bun, and I actually felt part of Minneapolis and saw myself as someone inside it, instead of a visitor. I walked past Liquor Lyle’s and the copy place and the office where I drop off my rent, and I started listing things.

I said, here was my original life plan for 25: living in New York, working as a stage actress, married to my high school boyfriend. I used to lament that none of those things happened, but now we know I don’t want any of those things. New York isn’t for me. Theatre, I guess, isn’t for me. My high school boyfriend – ha ha. Ha.

So I listed: I’m 25 years old. I live in an apartment with the great love of my life, no hyberbole. I’ve learned to cook almost well, elaborate meals with improvised ingredients. I buy fresh produce from the grocery store and cut it up and put oil and spices on it, and bake it and eat it. I pay my bills on time. I’m studying politics. I’m not hurting for money. I have friends. There is always someone to call. I have a cat. I do laundry and dishes. I fold towels. I water my plants. Some weekends I put on red lipstick and drink in dark bars. Some weekends I sit in jeans and old t-shirts and watch 36 movies in a row. I’ve developed a taste for blueberries and Raymond Carver. This is not a bad life to have, as removed from it as I feel. I could be worse, which is rarely a comfort, but should be.

This was yesterday, and today I didn’t feel it. I was disappointed today, hugely. I got a really bad grade on something I actually worked on. In all my fears of going back to school, the one I didn’t anticipate was trying hard and failing. I certainly anticipated self-sabotage, but not this. For hours this afternoon, I thought the bad grade meant I was stupid. I was nearly hysterical with this thought, the idea that I had fucking tried, and still failed. How many times has this happened to me? Not many. I said – I’m too dumb for college. I said – this isn’t worth it.

I’m still not sure if it’s worth it. I’m still not sure if I’m really cut out for academia, as much as I nearly fetishize it. I was ready to pack it in tonight. I was ready to bottom out in a fantastic fashion. I’d planned exactly how the bottoming out would occur, from hour-to-hour, place to place. There would be fanfare and lots of liquor. There would be yelling and dragging and sleeping it off. Instead, I stayed home and rearranged my class schedule. I did not look at the dreaded bad-grade paper, and when I mean bad grade here, I mean bad grade. I don’t mean B-. I don’t mean C-. I husked out my brain and my body and I dropped some classes and added others. Then I washed my sheets, and put my hand over my face and breathed through my fingers.

This has been a long, long road for me. It’s partly self-sabotage and partly something else. I have never made things easy for myself, and my body hasn’t made things easy for me, either, but I guess I’m still here, even when I feel zipperless and stretchy, thin enough to slip through sewers. Whenever I thought about being a grown-up, this is not what I imagined, the steel you have to shove into your heart and your brain to keep it from crapping out. But this is better, in its way. I have to think I wouldn’t have turned into this concrete person any other way, this flimsy girl who falls apart weekly, but gets up in the morning and does it again, anyway. Is there something to be said for resilience? Maybe. And so I go on.

Posted by: Zosia | 04-21-2006 | 11:04 PM
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Day after a full moon

It’s funny, because most of the time I bitch about school and how I feel like I’m in second grade when I have to write reports on African land snails and present the report in class, complete with snail diagrams on the board. I sit in class with my feet propped up, rolling my eyes at the professor teaching his Political Science class about dangling participles. But some days, when my brain is all twisted, feeling the pressure and push of the grown-up stroke, I’m almost giddy listening to a lecture about earthworms.

Today, I couldn’t be happier to be in jeans and a tank-top, flip-flops shoved off to the side and my bare feet tucked under me, watching my professor (only a few years older than me) diagram a worm. It’s so simple, this fucking worm, but there are so many pieces to it that I didn’t know existed. I woke at sunrise this morning, for some stupid reason, and sat on my back stoop, drinking tea, and feeling worried. It took a mountain of willpower to pack my bag and walk to the bus stop, and even in my first class, my neck weighed a million pounds and I had to physically hold my chin in my hands to keep from slamming my head into the chair in front of me.

But here I am, taking notes on dirt. And my professor is so excited to be talking about dirt, and I’m pretty thrilled to be learning about it. Summer has sometimes been a moonstruck season for me, but not this year. Already I can sense what’s coming: logical magic, earth, animals, dirty nails, sunburned face, prose and a steady heart. Today I am a scientist, not a poet.

Posted by: Zosia | 04-14-2006 | 10:04 AM
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A piece of it

I didn’t see The Strokes, though I had the best seats in the house. Chris and I stood in an alcove behind the ushers, holding three cups of water because the bar didn’t have cups big enough for one bottle. The ushers kept shooing people away from the alcove, but they let us stay, though I don’t know why.

The music was muffled and loud from the room, and kids flowed in and out of the doors, looking for bathrooms and refilling beer. I turned to Chris and said, “Let’s go home and eat pizza.” It was the tail-end of the conversation, one in which he kept his back to me, balancing the water cups against the wall. It was a joke, the pizza thing, but if he said – let’s go, I would’ve, good seats and all.

In the theater, I left 30 seconds into one song, my head down so I didn’t have to see if people were looking. The pit floor vibrated and shook and there were visions of a collapse, of screaming people tumbling while the band looked over the edge. This time the lobby was empty, and I sat in a chair by the door, in between the ushers, pretending something on my cell phone was Very Important. The floor did not shake out there. The band was supposedly still playing and people were presumably still cheering, but I heard them far-off behind thick walls, and was not affected. The security guard who had earlier yelled at me for bringing in an apple passed by and didn’t see me.

When Chris came out, I was almost better. We walked by a drunk girl who begged us for tickets and we gave her ours. She said, this is a miracle! And I said, it’s a ticket. In the car, Chris asked if I wanted to go home. The Jesus station was playing “Old Rugged Cross.” I said, not yet, just wait. My ears were still ringing.

Posted by: Zosia | 04-13-2006 | 02:04 PM
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Two things I like to do in nice weather

Take pictures in pink bathrooms with pretty girls.

Listen to 1030 AM, the Bible station for classical orchestral gospel. I flip the station during the anti-choice commercials and the lispy sermons. I like driving through Uptown with the windows down, feeling as if I’m in the end scene of Romeo and Juliet. (Which is what the music reminds me of. No poison or true love involved.)

Posted by: Zosia | 04-10-2006 | 10:04 PM
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My first

I asked you once if you’d ever seen a dead body. I don’t know how the subject came up, but I remember feeling like it was a daring thing to say. We were sitting in your cramped office and you were helping me with some homework and I was half in love with the way you explained things, the way you leaned back in your chair when considering a problem, your fingers at your neck. My face turned bright red with the risk, but I asked anyway, in the context of that long-forgotten conversation, if you had ever seen a dead body. You were surprised at the question and surprised that I hadn’t seen one, because I’d been to a funeral, right? (I’d been to one, closed casket.) You told me how you and a friend saw a dead man floating in the river in upstate New York when you were 18 years old. I asked you, was that weird? I don’t remember your answer.

But I thought of this conversation when I saw my first dead body last weekend. He was 25 years old, a track buddy of Chris’s from high school and he died of what might’ve been colon cancer, no one was sure. He was in the Air Force overseas when he got sick, and he was dead within a month. At the wake, his parents stood by the casket in matching Air Force sweatshirts, their eyes glossy with shock and sedatives. I’d never met the deceased before or his family, so when Chris introduced me, I went in for a handshake. The mother grabbed me by my shoulders and hugged me tightly and I said, “I’m sorry,” and she made a little noise that came from another planet.

The boy had always been thin, said Chris, but in the casket, he was emaciated. The surgeries had slapped 20 pounds off of him. His face was black and gray, and didn’t look real. One of his brothers stood just outside the room. He hadn’t seen the boy in six months and he said when he walked in the room and looked in the casket, he thought his brother’s face was papier mache, that maybe it was a new type of undertaker make-up.

We left the place, and I was sad for the family, but I didn’t feel differently. I thought seeing death like that would change me existentially, but I didn’t feel anything until later that night, when Chris and I decided to rent a horror movie. My head started to swim duing the first frame, and all of a sudden, I had the strangest compulsion to drive back to the funeral home and shake the boy until he was alive again. I couldn’t stop thinking about how when everyone left the funeral home and the undertaker took him downstairs, how the boy and his gray face still would not move. The undertaker would leave, and the boy would not get up and stretch and peel off his papier mache mask and go back to whatever he was doing the moment before he died. I couldn’t watch the movie. The boy had nothing to do with The Exorcism of Emily Rose, but suddenly I didn’t need to see that sort of thing.

I just wish I’d remembered what you felt like because the image of you, 20 years younger, leaning over the bank of the river and seeing a floating dead man has stayed with me since I went to the wake. How different are the dead before they’ve been messed with? Before the rot gets covered with make-up. Am I being irreverent? I don’t know what to say. I didn’t know him. It would be different if the body in the casket was someone I knew or, worse, someone I loved.

Seeing the boy didn’t make me glad to be alive. It didn’t make me cherish the fresh spring air or any bullshit like that. It made me clinically removed and a little crazy. I just know that if I went back and touched his face, it would crumble. It wouldn’t be a joke; he would still be dead. But the real body would have disappeared with the rest of him, and this fake one would be just a placeholder. That way, there would be no mistaking the gray face in the casket for the real thing. Did you think the man in the river was a fish?

Posted by: Zosia | 04-03-2006 | 11:04 PM
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Bathrooms

Night at the Turf Club, as captured by Adrianne. (I have a few photos, too.)

Posted by: Zosia | 04-02-2006 | 01:04 AM
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Survey

Oh, and it’s time again for a brief zosiablue.com demographics survey. It’ll be up for 10 days, and is anonymous and all that jazz, so feel free to tell me stuff about yourself. Be kind. And please enjoy the title of this survey, which is [Your Survey Title]. I’m great at following directions. (The link is http://www.zoomerang.com/recipient/survey-intro.zgi?p=WEB2256SEY9KEH.)

Some of the comment boxes are ridiculously short. Feel free to carry over answers in other boxes. I’ll figure it out.

Posted by: Zosia | 04-01-2006 | 02:04 PM
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Morning in the burned house

My parents have decided to sell their old house, and move into an huge Victorian fixer-upper from the 1920s. My parents are 59 and 72, and when their house burned down in January, they’d originally planned to find something more managable with no stairs and a small yard. Friends think they’re nuts, and I think they’re sort of nuts, but there’s something so-very my family in this: they’re wild in a weird, short streaks, but crave the perfect home base. They’re insanely restless, and they’d been in the same routine in the old burned house for 10 years.

When I was home for Christmas, a couple of weeks before the fire, I was worried about my parents. The house was cluttered full of old stuff I knew they’d never throw out. The curtains were closed. They went to work, came home, watched TV and went to sleep. They’d burrowed themselves, waiting to be old, in whichever way it came. But then the house burned down, burned all of the clutter with it, and now they’re buying haunted Victorians and taking spontaneous trips to the beach. My Mom called me from the foyer of the old Victorian, her voice echoing in the hallway. She said, you’d love this, Zosia. It has window seats and chandeliers. My Dad said, this is too much work. We need something smaller. I said, why don’t you get something smaller? He said, oh, but I’ve always wanted to live a house older than me.

I think about these ruts, and my genes, and how the restlessness is embedded there, how I sink into everyday life, and then explode within it. Chris and I have been sitting in this apartment, night after night, collecting things we don’t use, watching movies we don’t remember, picking at each other, having explosive arguments about recycling and red lipstick, then coming back together saying, what are we doing? Why are we doing this?

But then something changed. He’d been depressed for months, about his music and his finicky bandmates, and I’d been there with him, about school, about fires, about writing, about everything, and then one day, he got his hair cut and his face was there again and his walk was there again and he said, I’m going to make orchestra music, and I watched a documentary on Charles Bukowski and I said, I’m going to rat out my hair and write what I really want and not be scared and see all of this as an adventure instead of something trying to kill me. And we threw away our clutter and burned down nothing and moved into our own imaginary Victorian.

There was a feeling when we first started dating that we could do anything. I’ve mentioned this before, but it was neon and pervasive and we knew, absolutely knew, that we were young and beautiful and insane, and we swallowed that knowledge whole every night in each other. It faded, because it does, but there’s something of it back in the burned house, in my parents’ ability to live 70 years and still want to start over and not find starting over stressful, but to find it inevitable and necessary, and, so, we take their lead. Fiction for me, writing it, lines and lines of crappy written fiction that will someday be good, and music for him, notes of it, endless stages of it, and while we’re not in the golden age yet, we will be, and it’s nice to know these things come around.

Posted by: Zosia | 04-01-2006 | 01:04 PM
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