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.