"nobody knows what the world is for"

someone said this tonight. we were lying on our backs in the snow next to the huron river. our feet were propped up on the fence in front of us and i could not feel my toes. the sky was that weird peach-grey glowing color, the snow was blue, and the trees looked like roots. if you tilted your head back, you could see the whole line of trees behind you, waxy through the snow that was still falling, their tops jagged like so many scratch marks. and when he said that, that nobody knows what the world is for, i almost believed him, except for that my favorite memories of anyone are usually not of them at all but of the way the world looked curling around them. it is probably very selfish and silly to say that the world is for curling around a person, but truthfully i can't imagine lying like that in any other place than where we were, with the snow lighting the sky up the color of skin and the river not listening and the cold on us so that we could not even move, and the trees so still we could not even leave.

listen to "old times," by the elected

I think this is a wonderful time, the first long period when everyone has come back from school. After months of summer spent preparing for and imagining the ways we would and wouldn't change, now we finally get to see how right we actually were. It gives a rather stark perspective on who you are not and probably will not ever be friends with, but the friendships you do have now have to answer to all kinds of questioning- is this really sustainable afterall, or does it just not fit now that everything's been rearranged? When does a new room mean there is no room?
It's funny, the lengths we go for what's comfortable. When old routines and relationships are falling back into their places all around you, you think, well why not? Whether or not you want it falls by the wayside- easy plus familiar might as well equal something close to desirable, at least if you squint. Then you find yourself shoving everything around to make your life like a time capsule of itself. In a recreation of when you wanted what you insist you still want, it is important to arrange it so no one will notice how tightly the seams are stretched.
This week has seen the return of two people I thought I was probably done knowing, and there is no question that even though I can find no reason to, with both I am trying. Boredom is of course part of things, but how much really? I think a lot of it is a sort of opportunity-induced nostalgia, for what you didn't think you wanted until suddenly you could have it, and if you can have it then why bother not wanting it anymore?

But how long can someone go thinking that anyone or anything can fit anywhere anytime. Everyone's screaming about change, but when it comes half the time it's ignored. Of course, there's the counter argument, of how much going back to something is all about proving change. I think this might be the worst kind of nostalgia, because it thinks it isn't that at all, when really it is, but full of bitterness too. There is maybe no really easy way to leave and come back. If you come back, there must be something you're coming back to, and then there's all sorts of trouble to trick yourself into wanting. And it all looks so comfortable! You might even forget that once your hands were so full of why you were leaving it would have taken you a week to write all the reasons down.

christmas eve

is history fated to repeat itself, or are we fated to repeat our own history?

up too early, i'm eating frozen fruit for breakfast, last night it snowed but it isn't quite pretty. i'm starting to think that we're all ineradicably tied to narrative. the other night i had dinner with an old friend, and it was not long at all before the conversation broke into a back-and-forth between retelling the story of everything that had happened between us and a weirdly proud recounting of everything that's happened since our relationship ended (as if this is something it merely decided to do one day, end, and we just had to listen to it and walk away). i was thinking at dinner about who i understand him as and who he understands me as, and i don't see how we could be anything but stories to each other at this point. when we knew each other better i think we still knew each other as stories, nice things we'd made up. then we got tired of making our bodies try to fit into all of those nice things, and realizing that we were tired made it clear how irrelevant that initial narrative of how and why we were bending together was to the actual bending. perhaps we never even knew each other better at all.
and the things we say to each other now, the breaking down of what's happened since july, all of that is just stories too. it all turns so minimal, being warped in the arc of a beginning and a middle and an end. telling stories and turning to stories the way we always do because they seem so easy, you invariably come to some kind of end. stories really are easy. i think i love stories because even if they're messy and full of holes they still end. and when they end, because they end, somehow or other they've turned sickly and wonderfully easy.

It is either an awful kind of good dream or a perfect kind of bad dream when it could and perhaps already has all happened or in any way might, though not in the way it did in the dream, though you don't want to imagine it any differently than the dream which was of course only a dream and so upon waking the scene slides out like a projection dropped off the screen so that first it is on the wall and blurry and colorless and then warping on the floor until you can't make out anything from the original picture, and know only and firmly that it was just a picture, and what can you do with that anyway but look at it and think of it later and know it was always in that picture that it could blur and warp and slide off the screen, and so no matter how wholly you try to keep it in your memory inevitably some is left out, and knowing this you know you could never remake the picture or even really look at it again, because once it slid off the screen it was gone, and now that you think back you don't know what you'd want to recreate: the clear picture projected or the weird lit-up blur on the floor.

bread and better

Today is not the seventeenth, which I learned promptly after arriving at work for the bogus Sell Food! Have Fun! class needed to earn a raise. Gutting, given I woke at ten for it and now have far too much time to kill on a frigid afternoon. There is really only one thing to do when you're walking down Detroit St. with a stuffy nose on the day December relented and bloodily surrendered to winter, and that is seek shelter immediately in the drafty nostalgia of the People's Food Co-op. There's hot squeezed ginger root juice to drink, Community High students to annoy you, and the most attractively pierced people in town. If you get hungry, you can eat a block of tofu, or a muffin made out of vegetables. I love it here.

I was kept up til two last night by the sourdough I insisted upon starting at seven pm. My parents were frustrated and said it was only bread and should not control my sleeping schedule (??) but they never experienced the delight of watching starter bubble in anticipation of feeding. It turned into a wonderful dough- the starter is fermented and active, and when you knead it all you can feel the internal energy. That sounds kinda kitschy, but it's true.

I talked to a friend during the last rising before the actual proofing (the dough's been relaxing in the fridge all night- this evening I'll wake it up and bake it. If it's been proofed properly the crumb will be airy and moist with a bright and not overpoweringly sour flavor, and a crust that's hard but not too chewy. Bread is so fucking cool.) It was not a very light conversation, and felt kinda like an intervention of sorts, trying to get her to finally leave a damaging person behind. There are many levels of knowing that something is wrong or hurtful. You can repeat what everyone's telling you so that you know the words, or you can know with your body, without any real need for words. The whole conversation she kept repeating I know I know I know but it was hard to tell exactly how much she knew, whether she knew what he was doing to her only because I and everyone else keep telling her, or because she- alone and for herself- was demanding something better.

A guy I know told me the best thing anyone has told me this year, which is that self harm (of any sort- I think what my friend was talking about qualifies as self harm at this point too) is like any other addiction. It's not like you just decide one day to be better and that's that. You make a choice not to do something, and then every day you keep on making that choice again and again. This whole semester has been filled with addict rhetoric- the whole grant me the serenity to expect the things I cannot change thing, and admitting you were powerless against something, and getting to some point where you respect yourself enough to see that there's something wrong about making a cutting board of yourself. I left Oberlin with someone's voice in my ear saying be better- I think about that all the time, as if his saying it was my motivation to do it. It wasn't, and then it kind of was. Hurt and comfort too often come wrapped together, and so it is uncomfortable to walk away. Better is what you walk away towards. But you have to want it more than all the shit and all the ease of what you kinda knew was shitty but ultimately stayed in because it was easy. There's a reason you miss what you miss.

january oh january what do you have in store?

As if antidepressants might make me a different person, I am both relieved and disappointed by sporadic sightings of this continued vague sadness. I think I spent so long trying to thrill everyone with the wild happiness they were all expecting I would, through genetics, of course have, that I never noticed how much of a performance it all was. By the time I did, I was already firmly settled in so many double lives that it didn't seem to matter, and the space without happiness was like a refuge. I didn't really want to be happy- what I was and was doing was reliable and constant, whether or not it was abusive or destructive didn't matter. Clearly, the cold is making me go into a major sadness-stalking obsession. In winter you have two choices: curl up inside of yourself, or relentlessly try to curl up in others. If you really don't know what you're doing, you can try for both, just to see what happens.

Once Thanksgiving happened the year went into turbo-mode. Suddenly it is time to apply for "re-entry" to Oberlin, which sounds exciting and kind of science-fictiony, like it is a solar system or a spaceship. It's fun imagining the Medical Leave Re-Entry Review Board dressed in metallic suits and bubble helmets discussing the results of students' screenings and whether or not they are fit to return. More fun than wondering what might happen if once I hit the atmosphere of Ohio, all stability quickly evaporates. Really though, that all still feels far away. Between now and then stands the month of January, which is to say I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen.

this saturday is on fire

Well I've neglected this writing thing for a little while, partly because it was starting to seem like a diary and I couldn't figure out why I was writing a diary if random people could read it, but mostly because I had nothing to say. I still have not much to say, but have less to do, so there you go.

On Friday at work after I caught one Napoleon Complex-ed co-worker shamelessly under- and overcharging each U of M hottie and her Botoxed mom while he stared at their chests rather than the register, I teased him and he retorted by asking about my weekend plans. He, of course, would be pre-gaming, gaming, and post-gaming. I, of course, would be living the dreams of solitude. It would mean nights of heavy drinking for both of us, except he was probably not the one aspiring to make it through a whole box of Twinings by Sunday night. Tea consumption in this house is ridiculous. I am habitually 3-5 minutes late for everything due to last minute brewings, and my belly is an aquarium.
So while this co-worker is probably now catching the reflection of his toned biceps in the glint of his hair gel, I'm gulping chamomile and getting ready to watch sad naked people in Lust, Caution, my favorite movie I'm embarrassed to talk about. This plan doesn't go well with the current mood of the living room, dominated by some soprano mumbling hymns on Prairie Home Companion and my dad already asleep in last week's New Yorker. It's decidedly anti-lust. But that's how Saturday goes.

well

nothing is actually more complicated. or for that matter different.

at the old crow medicine show concert

my body felt limitless
i danced in the aisles until my hair was glued to my back
i realized that the person next to me looked remarkably like sean mcbrady, legend of slauson middle school
more remarkably, i realized that i didn't care
the music was living and so were we
i felt like this was a new city
by the encore, everything was 33% more complicated

night walking

last night i went to a devendra banhart concert with a friend and his cousin and some others. it was wonderful and alive and we danced the whole time. the room was terribly hip, like we were all on our way to a williamsburg-themed costume party, there was a strange transvestite heckler, and devendra didn't play my favorite song, but it was all great. afterwards we all went back to someone's house- i'll call the owners dan and jb. it felt like minutes but we were there for hours, talking and making music- i left tipsy on cheap wine and the bright absence of everyone who shifts in and out of mattering. jb walked me home. it was cold and our whole bodies chattered. the walk home always looks different very late at night and usually it is, there's a heightened sense of circumstance and why. some people seem different at night, where there's the danger of falling for them in that strange space of what you make them out to be and which you'll spend days trying to bend them to fit. walking home has that same duplicity and at night it's wonderful and secret and new. sometimes i think about ann arbor and see it all in walks home late at night, it becomes the best city there is.

fifth st. yard drama

While my father is at work building the Winter Palace, the lady hens are celebrating their womanhood with squawks and murmurs. Gladys, Bessie, and Doris have all laid their first eggs. One at a time they go up the ramp into their little house and nestle down in the hay while the others stand guard, yelling chicken yells. Edith, big and red and brassy, makes a point of being the loudest. She is the town crier and takes this job very seriously, but in her most private moments she worries, examining her body, wondering why no eggs have come yet. She will never let the others see this fear. She makes up for her egglessness with seeming big and important, she knows that volume and stature can work wonders. The others know they just have to put up with her. They follow her lead, clucking quietly behind her back that really they are the mature ones, that Edith does not understand the true and wonderful secrets of chicken adulthood. They pity her. Edith feels their pity and tries so hard to lay an egg she thinks her feathers may pop right out of her skin. She is tormented. If only they knew, she thinks, how shameful it is to have to question one's womanhood. If only they understood the pain I live with every long and eggless day! It is very hard to be a hen. Edith knows she knows more of the trials of life than Bessie or Gladys or Doris ever will. In the yard they regard each other with cordial bitterness. They peck at bugs in the dirt and comment on the weather, clenching their wings.

last night

I had a dream about Phaethon, who was bald, and we were in a room outside of a big theater putting on a terrible version of a nameless Andrew Lloyd Weber musical. The room was connected through small hallways to many other similar rooms, and people kept walking in and out. It was a very interrupted dream, and in the end nobody quite said what they had begun to, and in fact no one really said anything at all.

instructions

go to the grocery store after work. stare at the wall of bulk flours and remember the last time you were there. remember you bought spices. remember you felt grown up. notice that everyone around looks like someone you wish you did not know. wish everyone you knew was a different person. wish everyone you wish you did not know was actually there. mindlessly scoop flour into brown bags, forget to label them. pay too much money for a persimmon. walk home eating it, feel as if your mouth is full of fur.

decide you will bake bread. cover the counter with bags of flour. do not open a cook book. do not use measuring cups. pay too much attention to the music you play. pour one bag of flour into a big bowl. in another bowl, put yeast, hot water, and sugar. stare at it while the yeast tumbles and puffs to the top and realize that the fact that it is alive makes you uncomfortable. on the stove, melt butter. add milk, honey, eggs. add this to the flour. add more honey. remember you hate things that are sweet. stir and stir. stir until bob dylan stops singing from the stereo. open another bag of flour. add the yeast to the big bowl, wishing it was dead. open all the bags of flour. pour all of them into the bowl. beat the dough with your spoon and wonder why you are angry. wish you had added oats. look everywhere for oats, find instead bags and bags of frozen berries. find instead sunflower seeds. keep looking for oats until you want to tear down the kitchen. wonder why you are sad. add handfuls of sunflower seeds. feel the dough turning thick and elastic. start mixing it with your hands. stop when you hear something. turn to the stereo and listen. it is antony & the johnsons. close your eyes and turn your heart off. when it does not turn off, turn and yell at your bread dough. open your eyes. notice it looks like the faces of everyone you wish you did not know. remember why you are sad. think about eating it now. remember what arie said about kindness and baking. touch it as kindly as possible. lift it up like it is living. don't allow yourself to hear the song end. when the next one begins, put the dough on the counter. joni mitchell is singing her song about drinking a case of you. knead and knead the dough. whenever the line about being bitter and sweet comes, want somehow to ruin your bread. wish somehow for it to be bitter. feel how tough it is. think that it will be terrible. wonder if it will rise. wish that it won't. consider tossing it now. pick it up and go to the trash can. feel like crying, slam it back on the counter. knead until the counter feels like it swims. remember the counter in the house on felch street. feel like a child.

rub oil in a large bowl. take your dough, lay it in softly. turn it once so that its back glistens. cover the bowl with a towel. promise to trust it. beg for it to rise. let it swell like a belly. touch it and feel it collapse. know this is your favorite part of the baking. do it again: waiting, rising, swelling, collapsing. lift up the dough. feel how heavy it is. know it may taste terrible. put it into the oven, don't let yourself think about that.

song of the day: kettering, by the antlers

It's a beautiful day, warm and stretching on too long. In that way it's very much like other days, which are less beautiful and long and cold. I don't know how to break out of myself. I don't know what I'm looking for and I think I've stopped looking. In a newspaper today I saw a picture of Sundararaja looking old and uncomfortable. Seeing it made me uncomfortable and I laughed and tore it out, then not sure why I had done that, threw it away. I have his kung-fu dvd in my bag. If he wants it he can have it. I'm tempted to mail it to Postsecret, but don't know what the secret would even be. Even this leaves me with the same waxy feeling that isn't quite sadness, is too dull for sadness, though its true I took a detour up his street last week listening to two choice Ani Difranco songs on repeat and thinking about jade plants. That was more like anger. I'm trying to turn it all into a story, but the narrative hinges on a kind of absence that he doesn't quite have yet. I want the present absence, when by being nowhere someone is everywhere; he has just been deleted it seems. And I'm rewriting in the blank space, rewriting him back in something we'll try and call fiction.

Yes, everyone feels very far away, I am drawn to astronomical comparisons. No one is truly the sun, Phaethon learned that and died learning it. I learn it and promptly rename everything, happy proof of how little I really did learn. Last night I had a dream about someone who I shall call Phaethon and whose face was two-dimensional and slid in and out of focus as if on a piece of paper moved too quickly in front of your eyes, like a reflection on water and the water being mopped up. I think I just want everyone to become stories. And then once they are there, I want them terribly to come back to life.

cool/creepy things about house sitting

-going through the kitchen cabinets
-using the owners shampoo
-photo albums full of people you've never met
-desk drawers!
-rearranging things, or thinking about how you would do so
-the moment of sitting on the fancy delicate chair, and it breaking
-experiencing the magic of cable, which your luddite family finds completely unnecessary
-walking around the neighborhood and chatting with people as if you actually live there too
-moving all the furniture a couple inches to the right
-ripping the owners' musical collection
-trying on their clothes
-taking photos of yourself in their clothes
-if there is a pet, taking photos of yourself in their clothes, with the pet
-thinking how uncomfortable it would be for the owners if you printed these pictures and replaced the nice black and white shots of paris in the kitchen with them
-leaving, hoping the owners won't know all the strange ideas you had about the private living space they kindly shared with you for the weekend

everything looks nicer when film stars do it

Have you noticed this? Sadness and loneliness and heartbreak and madness are all pretty attractive in movies. Like Audrey Hepburn leaving Gregory Peck at the end of Roman Holiday, because she knows she has to be a princess and he has to be a newspaper person so at the end of the press conference she just looks at him and her eyes tear up and she turns around and walks away, and he watches her go for awhile and then he turns and walks away too. And that's the end. I always forget when I watch that movie that they don't end up together. And if you think about it, the movie's over, but for those characters if they were real at all things wouldn't be over in the least. They'd keep on doing whatever they do but they'd miss each other and be unhappy. But usually you don't think about this- the lives of them as characters end at the credits, it isn't real.

But whoever you are watching the movie, see, you actually are going to keep on doing whatever you do. And whatever you're feeling doesn't end when you turn off the television. It keeps on going and going until somehow it breaks on its own, and there isn't really any way to stop this. And no matter how glamourous something looks when Audrey Hepburn is doing it, in real life it might just be that hot itch of wanting what you can't have, or that empty, bridge-less space of what to do next. Movies are pleasant until they end, and then I kind of want to hit everyone in them.

I wish I was at Oberlin. Home is confusing and I don't know what to fix or how to do it. I miss everyone and the thought of going back is almost as unthinkable as the thought of staying here. I want to just keep the end of Roman Holiday playing on repeat, with them looking at each other and then walking away, over and over again, and everything they're thinking staying on the screen and not ending.

Open Letter to the Woman Having Coffee With a Friend to My Left, Whose Conversation I'm Overhearing/Eavesdropping On:

Dear Lady,

I'm sorry your teenaged son is having a hard time with his bipolar disorder, and that he tried to burn down that building, and that now he might be going to jail. We're the same age pretty much, and have kind of similar problems, though I'm not really bipolar, or at least not the arsonist kind. I'm sure the two of us (meaning your son and I) could have a very interesting conversation about things, and that maybe I might understand the desire to watch something huge go up in flames, and that maybe he might understand the desire to rebuild your body and make it inaccessible to feelings shaped like clawed and faceless animals. But I will never tell you all of this outside of this letter, which you will probably never read. You seem like a good mother, you don't seem angry with your son, you respect him. I hope that everything turns out okay, and I'm sorry for listening in. It's just that his name happens to be the same name as someone who lives approximately 12 blocks down and then up and then left from here, in a weirdly painted house that I'll be walking to shortly, where they used to have four chickens but then killed and ate two that turned out to be roosters. I helped eat them. We sat at the kitchen counter next to the mess of the living room we'd tried to redecorate, and ate animals formerly named after New York City boroughs. Sitting there pulling chicken apart with our fingers, I felt kind of at ease, and did not think about the lives of the men next to me or the way that I fit into them. I just sort of accepted that I did, and hoped very much that I would continue to. That was a sticky night in August. The house was always too hot in the summer. Another night, when the real owner of the chickens was out of town, I lay next to the man with the same name as your son while the voice of an Indian singer spidered out of the stereo and his hands spilled down my neck, when the air was too thick for normal breathing. He walked me halfway home and left me at Huron St. I never know what to think about that intersection now, but I look at it through the window when I'm running at the YMCA, and wonder if it was just something about August that made it possible to stand with someone under a street lamp and think that things would proceed in a way that made sense. Driving home from college some weeks ago, for perhaps the same reasons that you allude to in referencing the way you sent your son once to rehab, I thought about those nights in the house off of Sunset St., in that part of town across Huron. I don't know what I'm trying to get to in going there still, and what seemingly obvious facts of the matter I'm happily denying even as it is so clearly no longer August. I don't know what I mean to say here. I guess the point of this all is that I hope that your son gets better, and I hope that everyone does. I'm worried your son's name is jinxed. And I'm worried we're both kind of wound up with these jinxed named people, and are fated to lament loudly about it in too-warm cafes. Oh well. Here's to it.

-Abby

well...

Sitting on the couch eating the end of a roquefort walnut baguette (yes, really) and watching snl sounds like a good idea until you wake up stuck with crumbs and realize nothing you saw was that funny, mostly because you slept through it. Anyhow, that's all I feel like saying. Goodnight.

what we're meaning to say

I've been thinking about communication.

This has been a relatively pretty communicative week- catching up with friends, therapy, then those weird inevitable post-therapy talks with my mom in which she reminds me again to make sure that i'm telling the therapist everything, such as X and Y and Z, where X and Y and Z are uncomfortable past events my mom thinks she understands but doesn't actually know any real facts about. It's easy to hear that something happened to someone, and then fill in the blanks about what that something usually means- the ways that it's presented in movies and books. I don't blame her. I never tell her the real stories, so of course she comes up with something slightly false. I think I almost prefer the stereotypical, imagined version though. The way things actually happened can feel weirdly less authentic sometimes, as if since different from the expected, reality is wrong.

I also had a very interesting and probably overdue talk with the formerly-dreadlocked yogi musician whose life and mine happened to collide last June. I've thought it hundreds of times- how differently things would be going if only you could shave a decade and a half off of our age difference. The other day, on his couch in that weird late afternoon light that makes the world and reason discreetly turn their backs, I saw what I've known since August: age difference or none, things were going a very certain way. This time, however, Sundararaja (blatantly obvious code name) decided to point out that elephant in the room maybe both of us had been avoiding or denying. Our faces were very close, and the air from his mouth as he asked whether I ever think about how he's so much older than me felt like somewhere between a door opening and a slap on the hand. Either some feeling of complicity, of this exciting half-secret, kind-of-illicit agreement of hope, or my weird masquerade as a 30 year old falling down around my ankles, leaving me naked and very, very adolescent. Of course this was something we would have to acknowledge eventually, and in any case the conversation took some weight off of things: if everyone comes to terms with the fact that you're eighteen, they're not going to ask you how your masters program is coming.

But here's the thing: even after the whole big conversation, recognizing that yes it's weird but no neither of us really care, that things couldn't really work now but who's to say about down the line, and the final decision that things won't be serious, I had absolutely no idea where that left us. Just like how my mom hearing my curt, fumbled answers on the phone after therapy has no idea how I am, because no matter how I answer her questions I can never bring myself to say the things I mean to say and need to say. I have no true idea of my friends' realities, no matter how much detail they put into describing their dorm rooms. There's this theory that everybody's like a sphere, and we all move around hitting each other but the walls of us never uncurl: no one ever truly connects with anyone. It's terribly bleak, I know. But if we all did live in the same world, so to speak, would we need so badly to try to communicate? Of course though that's all it is, a try. And sometimes a half-assed one; we can bring someone in as much as we want, but communicate too much and it's like your skin's been peeled off in long strips of the oversaid-- and so, everything we do not say stays warm in overcoats of our throats. At the end of the day, how much has been communicated? These big talks are had, but rehashing them in your head later you realize the things that matter most are what you are still unclear about. Like where exactly Sundararaja and I are at. And what I'm mad at my mom about, and where it was that I lost track of someone's life. And what it is that I miss about Oberlin, and why home makes me uncomfortable. I have some of the answers. They're just kinda hard to say out loud.

a kind of useless list

dear readers:

probably the 4-5 of us are pretty similar, this is why we are friends. therefore, the items, theories, places, people etc. listed presently probably already have your support. if they do not, or if--bafflingly--someone else is reading this blog, and you (whoever you are) are on this fine day looking for something new on which you might place your theoretical seal of approval, i offer the following as suggestions:

1) alison krauss and gillian welch. they sound like honey. they make you yearn for the southern life you never knew. they trick you into thinking you have every reason to yearn for this life. you change your middle name to lou or may (copycats) and sip whiskey on the front porch, wondering if it's time to start picking up that old banjo again.


2) the science of sleep. i stayed up really late last night watching clips on youtube, and consequently have been exhausted all day. but its worth it. especially the horse bit, which isn't even on youtube it's so great. watch it with someone you think you're falling in love with. or alone. or high. 


3) diego luna and gael garcia bernal. kind of like alison krauss and gillian welch except not at all, minus the fact that they are also two people. bernal gets double exposure in this list as he is also in the science of sleep. so you could kill two(ish) birds with one stone and just watch that movie. and then watch another movie with both of them in it. except not with someone you think you're falling in love with because you might not love them as much after seeing these guys. that said, be careful with the science of sleep too. make sure you're really in love with whoever you're watching it with, or be okay with falling out of love with them in case you fall in love with someone in the movie instead.


4) huck finn-like childhoods. dirt, whittling, bullfrogs, rafts. i think i grew up more comfortable with these things than with social situations involving other young humans. so maybe my support is biased. oh well.


5) "on my way"- ben kweller. heard for the first time in cassie's car on one of those awful-wonderful nights last summer when everything felt shitty and therefore hopeful. whichever you're feeling, it's a good song.


6) farmers markets. does this really need to be on a list like this? really. really.


7) daniel johnston. underdog of my heart. he is sad and crackly and old and young. as his website says, hundreds of songs, dozens of fans. i like the song mind movies.


8) giving spontaneously. not stuff like cars or uncomfortable gifts like exercise balls or haircuts. but i think gifts become obligatory when they should really just be because you care about someone and they are in your mind. 


9) orchards. no matter when you go they're this demanding shoutout to the validity of growth. i know its elementary but it baffles me every time that trees and bushes and vines make fruit and continue to do so year after year- the weather turns warm and the fruit just grows. and they're so quiet about it. the plants just sit there, making fruit. i think i could stand in an orchard forever maybe. 


10) robert hass. his poems remind me of a line from an ani difranco song: one minute there was road beneath us, and the next just sky. you don't really notice the moment the lines pick you up like an undertow until the end when you realize you're swept up in them. you've gotten somewhere- you don't know where or how, but you don't really want to turn back. check out privilege of being and meditation at lagunitas. 


11) annie's bunny grahams. esp. cinnamon. but also they come in chocolate and cheddar and wheat and i think saltine, which is strange but whatever. 


12) la strada. arguably the most accessible fellini film- your circus pipe dreams may die a little, and the ratio of giulietta masina's words to facial expressions might make you reconsider your stance on mimes, but anthony quinn's sexiness will not diminish. 


13) looking inside other people's windows at night. nosiness is nothing to be ashamed of. other people are fascinating. why not glance at their lives?


14) rope yoga. discovery of the week. the first yoga class i didn't spend the whole time half-assing everything and wondering what kind of coffee drink i'd get afterwards. 


15) baths. might go take one right now. wait no it's too late- but still. it's actually pretty nice to sit in hot water of your own filth, as one boy once said. but really, it is. 

I'll tell you how the sun rose...

...a ribbon at a time- or, how shall I describe the sun?

Really though, describe anything, explain anything, and see how long it takes before you've gotten away from it- when you're not describing the sun anymore but the way it appears from earth, and suddenly you realize there's no way to really explain the sun without telling about the sky, and the ground and darkness and other planets that are really only names to you. The sun is kind of an excessively poetic example, but I noticed the problem of explanation today trying to tell a friend from school about a friend from home and running into all sorts of walls. It should be said right now: I really am stuck on this whole past/present thing. This may seem like it's a different topic so far, but it's not. I guess the question really is, when are you truly separate from what has affected you and what you affect? Whatever I tried to say about this girl to make some sense of who she was invariably led back to a description of her house, her mom, then my mom and my house, and eventually the whole web of everything around us. It wasn't so much that I couldn't describe her without telling about these things, I couldn't explain her. And that's what I wanted to do- I wanted him to get it, to get why the things I was telling him mattered. As it began to get broken down, it became clear that what I thought was integral to the explanation of what makes something important was really just a sort of portal into something bigger and more invisible and more crucial.

This happens all the time, in explanations of everything. Someone asks you a question of how or why something is, and the simple affirmative fact you think you are answering with becomes a prompt for another question. It's a wonderful defense mechanism for protecting the information and honesty you're maybe even too scared to let yourself know that you have somewhere. I don't know how many asked questions it would take for me to even figure out what I'm doing here home. I don't know when it was that things went wrong, how they did if they even did. Every possible beginning just turns into a sign pointing to someone or something else, until suddenly I'm back at the point of being born when I'm sure things must have been okay. Or maybe that was it. My mom had a c-section because I was sideways, maybe there's something to being pulled up like a fish out of belly water, seeing light and hands for the first time through the film of your own walls. I don't really believe that though. It's terribly gloomy. And if it were true then hundreds of thousands of kids would be leaving their blindly functional normal lives each year to kick habits that are, they say, against normal human nature to even start. I don't know. The blame game is silly, I never even meant for this to get into that. But I suppose that's how rambling just sorta goes.

I wonder if he feels like he understands her- the boy from school, the girl from home- I can't imagine that he does after our short conversation. Of course it doesn't really matter. In that same way though, do any of us understand anyone, if we're given only the present to have known them? I think if you divorce yourself completely from the past you become unknowable, knowable only in a flimsy shade that is perpetually some degrees off, like printing understanding through a filter spread with vaseline. I've always found the ideas of inaccessibility and secrets and veils really tantalizing, I remember the day in my mom's car when I figured out the thrill of telling lies. But when you get past the glitter of all that, I'm not sure there's much to it. It wasn't until last year that I realized I hadn't been telling the truth about nearly anything really important for ages- and even then I didn't really start telling it. This is why, on Wednesday, I shall start seeing the person hired to make me do it. Of course I don't want to talk about anything important, and invariably every answer will just become another question. It's ironic that I left my glasses at school, like I'm subconsciously trying to blur things just as they threaten to get terribly, monstrously clear.

after james baldwin

So I'm re-reading Giovanni's Room. It's a beautiful book, I've turned down the corners on so many pages because they contained passages that just felt extraordinary- I would quote them all here now, but it would be so long, you're probably best just reading the whole thing. I find it sadder now, I think I was too young the first time- what's striking now is the way in which the sadness feels so inevitable, like it's something the characters had all signed up for right from the start and that they now have to recount with a sort of sheepish reluctance. It's that strange phenomena of knowing what's coming and walking towards it anyway- in the end there is no room given for apologies or excuses, and somehow not even regret. Just resignation, and some twisted form of comfort that comes from having known the sadness all along.

The passage I am at though, the one I was thinking about that made me want to start writing, is near the end of the book, where the main character, David, who narrates, is leaving Giovanni, whom he's been living with and sleeping with for some months: His body, which I had come to know so well, glowed in the light and charged and thickened the air between us. Then something opened in my brain, a secret, a noiseless door swung open, frightening me: it had not occurred to me until that instant that, in fleeing from his body, I confirmed and perpetuated his body's power over me. Now, as though I had been branded, his body was burned into my mind, into my dreams (p. 144).

It's terrible and I think it's true. Somehow in leaving something (in fleeing it even more so) we make it more a part of us, if only just in the negative space of its absence- we acknowledge it in those grand terms of having to leave because it is something we cannot tolerate, and this gives it power. When something or someone is suddenly not there, their absence takes on a presence almost larger than life. Often where we are not is more important than where we are. In a way, hating someone or fearing them puts them on the same pedestal as someone you love- in this way, hate and fear and love become the same, strong, over-powering thing.

This is all a tangent off from what Baldwin was saying. What he was saying though, this is perhaps more terrible. It seems like we unknowingly build our own tethers, either this or we have no say at all what we're leashed to. You think you can divorce yourself from something, you think you can go from something and call it leaving, but who's to say whether that crucial part of you will still be there when you've walked out. David never leaves Giovanni's room, I nearly chewed through my cheeks last year trying to leave New Zealand. It's very difficult to be where you are, maybe more so to be grounded in what is present, not to be ruled by something you left a long time ago. Today, talking about the concept of past, my friend Drew said he thinks the most important thing to do is respect it. I had a therapist awhile ago who talked about having to integrate the past, which at the time fit beautifully with my theory that self was everything you'd been or done, that self = past. Thinking about it now though I think I prefer Drew's idea. You obviously have to acknowledge what's happened, and its effects on you and everything else, but this doesn't mean it has to become you. It can exist separate from you, stay in that past place without being laid constantly out at the surface.

Perhaps the passage from the book would argue otherwise. Perhaps I've just made a huge circle around myself and this whole maze of a concept. Oh it's so late. This is such a long rambling. I know I've established nothing save for the difficulty of the whole thing...if you are reading this, if you've made it through to the end, please tell me your thoughts. Goodnight.

plans

Today I went with my mom to Target and felt gloriously midwestern. I tried my hardest to dress Oberlinesque- see visable socks, clumsy shoes, big scarf, difficult patterns and mess hair. It was like my own little silent announcement to the town that I am in fact not from here, also a louder announcement to myself that this is a lie. Oh well.

Until things get put together, I am in a weird no-man's land of what is home and doesn't feel like it, and what feels like home and isn't. It may be that familiarity bores me- I feel like I'm in a time capsule of things and places that no longer apply as mine, but are just as much now as they ever were. I sit in the web of Ann Arbor cafes and inevitably see a summer spent at the same window tables, and behind them four, seven years of the same. I was so anxious to leave, but now it seems there's no question that I wouldn't really, that I'd always end up back. I'm one for absolutes, and so this quick and unexpected return feels silly and taunting. I'm exasperated by how happy my mother is. I was supposed to be gone. It must be, of course, possible to stay in one place and be different. Obviously I changed some between the fifth and twelfth grades. Then why does this all feel like such a regression?

There's a lot I can use these next four months for: actually reading Proust instead of pretending to have done so, getting a drivers license, making money, making a zine, learning the banjo, plus the actual school-mandated reason for leave. I don't want to go into that one. We'll leave it for when it comes.

something about light

I write this from the living room. When Harry Met Sally is on and I am half-watching. I have a cup of hot chocolate that I didn’t really want but made anyway.

Here is the point of medical leave: you get better. You leave your normal life of friends and campus and debauchery to spend the remaining three and half months of the semester fixing what (it has become undeniably clear) needs fixing. Here is the problem with medical leave: no matter what you do and where you are during it, it also becomes undeniably clear where you were, the point being, I miss Oberlin.

I’m having trouble multi-tasking here- watching the movie, writing this, facebooking, thinking that everyone on the screen looks like someone I know, thinking about everyone I know…it’s that age old phenomenon of don’t-know-what-you’ve-got-til-its-gone. That said, I’m going to leave this first blog entry in the capable linguistic hands of Jenny Holzer: There’s something about light that’s right for these terrible subjects. It’s a way of having beauty let you come closer than you might otherwise.

The point of this is documentation. I feel like this decision to come home and deal with what I’ve been avoided dealing with for years is kind of crazy and ridiculous- see, I’m not in the habit of dealing with things. So, without further ado, I bring you terrible subjects, but hopefully light somewhere. Honesty and boredom and the cruel things I find funny and frustration and the weird opposite of home-sickness. And maybe, inexplicably, somewhere, beauty.