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January 29, 2001
Chapter Nine: In Which I Think Only Of My Harper's Application
I am linking to this blog only because of the picture in the margin. I would include this picture in my application to intern at Harper's if I thought they would understand just how eerie the juxtaposition of Anime-style art and a Confederate flag is. It's their kind of weird, I think, but still I don't think they'd get it. It's still my kind of weird, of course.
(time passes)
This is to inform you that from now on anyone mentioned in my writing, for here or any other publication, will get a "-chan" suffix.
... and in the end, of course, it was discovered that Kissinger-chan had more to do with the orders to bomb Vietnam than Nixon-chan!!! X-D Here is a passage on the subject from Daniel Elsberg-chan which is s00per-niftee!
(more time passes)
Trixie Belden has a posse. I can't believe it. People are even writing fan fiction... Trixie Belden, for those of you who don't know, was like one-off Nancy Drew. Probably better for the teenage soul than the Babysitter's Club or Sweet Valley High, because any girl who faces down bandits makes for a better friend than the girl who spends all her time worrying about the neighbor's two-year-old, but still: garpy, badly-written, she always has to end up swooning over a redhead named Jim in the end, and there's just too damn many of them. and of course I read all of the episodes I could get my hands on. I wonder what that's done to my prose style in the long run. That and the Marguerite Henry.
Oh dear... Marguerite Henry passed away in 1997. Why wasn't I informed?! Goddamn it.
(I chew my nails and stare out the window)
I am exceedingly tired of people who blog about their daily purchases or what they watch on TV or even what they're listening to. If you're telling me you shopped at Dress Barn today or saw the last X-Files or are listening to Live, you could be one of about fifteen million people living absolutely anywhere in the U.S. and having 100% identical experiences. You are completely replaceable. Who the fsck cares what you think. This is not what your brain and creative capacities were minted for.
sorry, mom. there's another outburst of the sort you seemed to be trying to get me to temper in high school. I'm just frustrated. I sat for a quarter-hour today with a super-bright and exceedingly aggressive student of mine, having him run down his encyclopedic knowledge of whales, the solar system, and U.S. geography. At least part of his aggression is due to boredom. I wish I could send his classmates off to the mall where they belong and steal him away to the Natural History Museum for the rest of the week. (ok, not all of his classmates.)
Today I sent him off to computer class (it's how we keep him occupied and away from the reaches of his classmates' fists) with the admonition that he was not to open the control panels (which he did last week) or hack the Pentagon. "What's that?" he said. "Don't Hack The Pentagon," I said. "I'll explain later." He looked interested.
(agitated shifting)
What I am doing: Blog
What I am avoiding: Tinkering with my resumé, applying for grants, putting the final touches on my Harper's application, seriously considering what I want my future to look like
some days I want to let the dice fall where they will, and some days I want to aim for the New Yorker.
Posted by me at 10:56 PM | Comments (0)
January 28, 2001
Well well lookie!
I have fanboys! Nice to meet you, Flip and RJ.
Posted by me at 11:45 PM | Comments (0)
Facing the End
Facing the end of my term of government service is really a b!tch. I have to consider once again whether I'm competent to suppport myself with creative work in any medium. Ego gets all tied up in that. Then I have to wonder whether I will go berserk supporting myself creatively rather than using creativity as an outlet and mirror for the rest of my life. And if I choose that route, I wonder once again if I'm well-socialized enough as a human being to survive in any other workplace. All this was easy to ignore when I still had a few months of service left and a tedious worklife to transfer all of my negativity onto.
I do have pictures from Death Valley now, so I'm posting, but otherwise it strikes me that blogging is utter m4sturbation, and I plan to give it a rest.
Posted by me at 9:51 PM | Comments (0)
January 25, 2001
Lists: Miss Angeles Calls Roll
Lucky me -- I got to compare the list of after-school kids with the list of school kids at work today. The woman who handed me this task looked at me apologetically. It's hard to convince people that I don't mind brainless routines which involve lists -- same reason I've enjoyed doing menus for Nat. (The latest hits from the CACFP menus: Royal Lunch Crackers, been green, brand muffins, cereal hot creamy wheat, colid greens, hamburger bread, tomatoes souso, 2% white.)
Here is why I found this task so appealing. The following is an unordered list of first names of parents and kids at the school where I work (I would have loved to include last names, as some of the combinations are fantastic, but I didn't want to spread people's names all over the web, especially kids):
| Baldomero Feladefo Baturey Jacmel Selayna Indiana Thayna Giset Maciel Edicta Birmania Nyima Wenster Albany Ime Mistura Dilcra Finlandia Eglys Yurby Turkana Ocynthia Timur Myasia Vladimir Smailen Mamertha Plinio Teodulo Australia | Alenairan Levinc Alpha Hotoniel Zulema Radhames Lennix Glorymar Noemi Solangie Luighy Eudi Efigenia Rangely Nieve Dasha Hemouti Nivian Guana Virgen Modesto Thais Aura Fabiola Eulalia Zobeida Gricelidys Liboria Bidyut Nurys | Isamar Praminio Adalgisa Blandina Milady Eduling Sol Maria Jemairy Chabelly Ambrosina Fausto Terallen Yenisel Waleska Harolyn Narovi Lorangy Braulio Consula Yeli Lenin Mailenis Shazardi Tahpaul Senovia Tyjahwon Edilema Yamilka Kengi Anima | Sagrario Gilardo Anelby Casmira Nitzauris Queen Asia Reynadid Nereida Lizardo Lady Wimer Zenabou Obdulia Mexi Franlys Bacilia Tamariz Sharasia Shamecca Argenys Loyda Ovelis Famuel Heclyn Frelin Dayonara Naiciry Tazrina Aixa |
And finally, four nifty last names -- Statuto, Escolastico, Monroig, and Toxqui -- and one unfortunate one: Bastardo.
Here's a bit of a key to what you just read: Most of the names are women's names; men don't get blessed such fancy confections at baptism around here. Anything ending in -a, -ys, -is, -yn, -ly, or -ry is likely to be a female name, whereas -o names are male. Names beginning in Y are mostly pronounced with a J sound, so you're hearing kids call out for Jeli or Jurby, not Yeli or Yurby. Some of these names are more common than others: I have met more than one Ovelis, and know of a few Grisels, but I have never seen the names Heclyn or Mailenis before. Very little nicknaming by way of abbreviation seems to happen. All syllables of Alenairan's name are brought out, which can make for a dramatic effect.
This list shows a bias on my part: Almost all of the names here had Hispanic surnames. I put almost no Indian, African, or Middle Eastern names on this list, though there were a few. They didn't catch me quite the same way. I don't know Hindi or Swahili, so I can't see the semantic primitives moving like bones under the sleek pelts of the names.* I admit I am also not as rapt when it comes to the La-, Ta-, Sha-, and -ay creations which are picked by long-established African American communities, though I still prefer their creativity to communities where it's OK to call a boy George because his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and on back had the same name.
It is the abundance of resources drawn upon by the namers in this community -- I guess I am focusing on Puerto Ricans and Dominicans here -- which amazes me. We see exploration of the atlas (Indiana, Australia, Finlandia, Albany), unplumbed possibilities of religion (Anima, Sol Maria, Virgen, Ambrosina, Edicta), history (Lenin), and literature (Fausto, Nereida). Old-time names which white people buried with their grandparents (Efigenia, Alpha, Famuel -- there were a number of mothers named Gladys) are still in circulation, and names from other cultures (Vladimir, Luighy, Lennix) are welcome. Neglected letters like X and Z are worn like medals.
The names of people I meet in the Bronx are a neverending delight. It's like we're in our best clothes all the time. The kids accepted my being a Gillian without any trouble, unlike my own elementary school, where my name was butchered by a playgroundful of Jennifers and Matthews. My students have made a mess of my last name, though. They call me Andrews or MizAndrew mostly, but one or two have decided I am Miss Angeles (that crown I'd never win back home!) and that has devolved into Miss Angel, despite the fact that they often claim to hate me.
* * *
I have another piece to post later, if I can find it -- something from the archives, explaining why I am apprehensive about February. but I have spent hours on this and neglected my Harper's application yet again. plus I need to go to the Edels'. booga.
Posted by me at 10:40 PM | Comments (0)
January 24, 2001
Update
OK, so for all of you who have been so kindly inquiring about my health in the wake of the Ultrasound essay, I had another appointment with the doctor today. Surprise-- I'm anemic! And apparently I have a serious B-vitamin deficiency as well. (Funny-- the first NS Div I I never finished was about B-vitamin deficiency in rats; I gave it up because the prospect of research based on deprivation struck me as sadistic. Karma comes to bite me.)
This explains a lot, and is itself explainable because of my shoddy vegetarianism. The doctor claims you can't get B-12 as a vegetarian. My boss adds that nobody she knows has stayed vegetarian for long, and implied that my moodiness could have a lot to do with the deficiency. (My serious depression did kick in the first semester of my sophomore year of Hampshire, right after I went vegetarian.)
Somewhere in the distance I can hear at least one snobby pinko ex-boyfriend telling me I should get a second opinion from a doctor who is more sympathetic to Our Cause. I would like to hear from a doctor more used to treating vegetarians. I'm happy with this doctor, though, as her bedside manner is most reassuring. She couched the news about the anemia in the midst of routinely noting that all other systems were go, and speaking enviously about my cholesterol levels-- they're super-good, apparently.
Regardless, I think I might start eating fish again. Or bacon. I am not currently psyched up so that I remember carcasses and feces-smeared holding pens when I contemplate eating meat, so physical discomfort about it isn't an issue. Sometimes I think I should keep thinking like that, though.
Posted by me at 1:49 AM | Comments (0)
January 23, 2001
This post has been arrested for posession of an incendiary device.
Posted by me at 1:29 AM | Comments (0)
January 22, 2001
Report from the Coup
So I didn't see as much action in DC as I might have liked, although there was in fact action-- Presidain't's car stopped and then sped through a roiling protest zone on the parade route, people stripping in the freezing rain to use their bare young chests as the signs they could otherwise not bring into the bleachers, black and red flags and one upside-down American one raised on military poles, arrests, and a Black Bloc-er's head bashed in by the pigs. Tens of thousands of people shouting Shame, shame, shame. And of course, you saw it right here and not much of anyplace else, because the mainstream media are colluding with the Bush administration to "heal the wounds" that are invariably incurred by oligarchic rule.
I do not say that flippantly. Today I'm frightened. Bush's first act in office is to overturn Clinton's ruling on provision of American funds to other countries for abortion. I didn't think he'd do anything like that. I didn't think he'd dare presume he had the mandate to. This bodes ill for us all.
I had a nice time in DC, until late in the evening when, making the long ascension of the Dupont Circle subway escalator into falling snow, it hit me the man really was president, and nothing we had done had stopped him, or changed the minds of the thousands of silent sheepish inauguration-goers among whom I had wandered that morning. The protests had been totally segregated from the great mass of Republicans there to cheer on the man who had stolen democracy from their front porches at high noon. Probably this separation was good: I came across two burly white guys from Maryland who were yelling at the top of their lungs for all protesters to put away their signs. At first I thought they were rampaging Republicans themselves, but it turned out they'd been beaten by Republicans who had taken away their signs. I got them on tape, so I'm not going to say any more about that incident here-- once I get my short edited I'll post it on the soon-to-be-developed All Mirth No Matter Productions site.
Regardless, I'm pissed at what I perceive to be poor organization of this event on our side, and everyone's willingness to submit to the divide-and-conquer dictates of the government officials who doled out the three "official protest zones." I had such high hopes that this would a moment of consciousness-raising for so many people who had been asleep, and nothing seems to have happened. We are fighting overwhelmingly strong forces.
I did meet one kid who'd traveled all the way from Arizona, alone, to get to the protests. He had been a campaigner for Gore. He was standing in one of the convergence spaces apart from everyone else, so I dragged him to an embarassing last-gasp event at one of the inaugural balls-- Billionaires for Bush protesters huddled like miserable dogs in the snow, singing to real rich people in precious brocade dresses who jeered back-- and then to a bar where he nursed a Heineken and watched IMC documentaries from Prague and DC last year. He deluged me with questions. He was apparently impressed. "The more I see things like this, the more liberal I become," he said. I told him he wanted to say progressive, not liberal, but I was relieved anyway. Every now and again I think the IMC is preaching to the choir, and then I meet someone who has been taken the last mile of persuasion by our coverage. (The Breaking The Bank and This Is What Democracy Looks Like videos are truly wonderful, and I'd recommend them for anyone, especially teachers. They do a good job of mixing progressive talking heads like Vandana Shiva and Robert Weissman with footage from the streets, and making a moving picture out of it.)
Anyway, DC: dancing salsa to techno in a gay bar with Lauren Saturday night... anarchist soccer in the snow Sunday... verbal tangoes with as many women in fur coats at the inauguration who would speak to me, and despite my failure on that front, enough good footage shot to make me fall in love with the new DV camera... sleeping in my hat to stay warm... riding down with Patty and a young blue-eyed pup who, being a Californian new to the East Coast, found toll booths an outrageous infringement on driving... all in all, a good time.
Back on the homefront: Took advantage of the chaos of the afterschool program to escape from my usual wards, who despite the presence of two teachers were not going to be allowed to do cooking. I went and invented a lesson on HTML for a friend of mine's computer class. It went pretty well. I tried out my metaphor of html-as-Russian-nesting-doll, which kind of confused them, but some of them did OK with it... I think guerrilla teaching will be the order of bizness for me for the next month. You really can't do anything with the public school system unless you fly straight in its face.
I've made a link to Marquise McGraw's homepage in my left-column; everyone visit this brilliant young man whom I work with in afterschool. If anyone should have a blog, it's Marquise. He's a co-teacher with me in my writing workshop in afterschool, and even though he of course doesn't have to do any writing he has been producing thoughtful stuff which shows more technical skill than most Poly students. I think he says he wants to go to Cornell. If they don't accept him, there really is no justice in the world.
Posted by me at 10:38 PM | Comments (0)
January 17, 2001
This Is A Website About Ken Burns
So today I come home to a big juicy envelope from Hampshire College. Oh goody, I think. My transcript? Maybe a copy of the alumni magazine, which for some reason I don't seem to get?
No such luck. It's the president's report. It's got an ugly gold cover, and it's called "Assessment and Innovation: The Foundation of Excellence." By Assessment, I presume the beloved pater Greg Prince means all the studies he ran us through and consultants he hired and that final bizarre spectacle, FutureSearch, a "visioning" conference held my junior year in which lots of us were asked to take what we wanted for Hampshire and write it on walls and act it out with flurries of fake cash and predictions about Internet courses for students in Botswana. By Innovation, I presume the man means his beloved Lemelson entrepreneurial development project, which fits the students' interests about as well as your doll's bloomers and booties fit the neighbor's tomcat. By Excellence, I would hope he means something fun like Hampshire's World Wrestling Collective or how many alumns and students are participating in the anti-globalization movement, and not something irrelevant like how many of us actually go on to gainful employment.
OK, I am rhetorically stealing fire from the bitterest laugh of the whole brochure: On page eleven, listed with a number of other titles of Div III (thesis) projects about plasmid constructs and urban planning and the Ramacharitamanas, is the simple Rick And Saurus Save The World.
Rick And Saurus Save The World. A comic by Jacob Chabot, who hated Hampshire as perhaps no person who stuck out more than a year there ever has. And well he might. Advisor after advisor abandoned him. His thesis committee made him take introductory painting classes his senior year and refused to acknowledge comic art as its own worthwhile genre. During his senior year, Jacob was almost drummed out of Hampshire by humorless students who took offense at a poster he made parodying the use of sex in advertisements. I don't think Jacob got anything of use out of Hampshire. It certainly didn't make its mark on him the way it usually likes to.
I called Jacob and told him, hoping to get one last scream out of him, but he was just amused. He never finished his thesis, he reminded me, and nobody but his committee or a few friends ever saw it. In that way Jacob compares favorably with Hampshire's most doted-on poster boy, documentarian Ken Burns, who according to legend never completed Hampshire. Ultimately, Jacob was a model Hampshire student: he taught himself most of what he knows in spite of school, refused to knuckle under to popular opinion, wore his hair long and grew up on a farm with llamas.
(no, really. I love my college, and I am gainfully employed. I don't cotton to other people messing with its reputation, either, so step off, Lorne Michaels.)
Posted by me at 12:12 AM | Comments (2)
January 13, 2001
Community Service
A girl in maybe eighth grade came up to me yesterday after the writing club at school. Solid-built girl, uneven braids. “Are you a teacher during the day?” she asked. I told her I wasn’t, but figured I could help her find one. We scanned the room to find the all-day teachers. I asked her why she needed one. “I need to do community service.”
I handed her off to a second grade teacher, who didn’t know what to do with her... some sixth-graders had already come through and cleaned up his classroom. I considered having the girl come over to my workplace. To do what? She couldn’t help the welfare clients or the drug-rehab cases. I figured I could get her to sort the last of the monsoon of clothes donated before Christmas. (The piles of garbage bags had been higher than my head and filled the bottom floor of a large stairwell; now they were ankle-deep, and we’d tired of getting rid of the rest.) And what good would that do to have her sort them? Well, surely if she saw there were that many clothes left unneeded it couldn’t fail to have some effect...
A memory of my first community service assignment came back to me. Standing in an assembly line with my second-grade classmates, we would slap together bologna and cheese and white bread for the homeless at Union Station. Sandwich after bland sandwich; so much mustard. They don’t get vegetables? I wondered at the time.
The material scarcity or sensory overload of inequity does a great deal of educating in and of itself. I remember the stench of the dead room at the Humane Society. I remember the feeble warmth of the pocketed sunflower seeds given to me by a public school child who insisted I do his homework. Trying to pay for what I couldn’t do for him. I remember the streets around the Tijuana orphanage had no sidewalks and dogs that limped.
Posted by me at 3:56 PM | Comments (0)
January 11, 2001
Bodies: The Ultrasound
i'm sorry. i tried to do that without a colon. really i did.
I went into the doctor's for an ultrasound today, stomach empty and bladder swelling with the last of the four glasses of water I'd been advised to chug an hour before the appointment. I had always thought ultrasound was just for pregnancy, but apparently they'll do it if you have a pain in your side, too. My two female doctors lent differing hypotheses in kind, concerned tones. Dr. Hussein thought an ovarian cyst. Dr. Hunter wanted the ultrasound technician to pay careful attention to my spleen. I laughed about that last one. Poetic justice. My spleen is considerable.
The technician, who was small and pert and accented, turned off the main lights of the ultrasound room. A light beamed upwards from some unidentifiable source on the floor. It cast shadows of machines on the wall, somehow reminiscent of a movie projection room. Having smeared me with turquoise jelly, the technician turned her attention to the little monitors.
I guess if you're not pregnant they think you don't need to see what's going on, because the monitors were turned away from me. But I wanted to see them. You think of your organs the way they appear on the 3D model in the science classroom-- lightweight, room-temperature, unchanging in shape. Hideous colors, real seventies stuff, burgundy and chicken-sh1t green.
Lying there, that conception changed. I was thinking about my bladder, feeling it re-adjust its control as the probe slid around my ventral hemisphere. Why did it matter that my bladder be full? Did it clarify the uterus behind it, like a glass lens? Why would it count if I breathed in? How far did my lungs extend? "Turn to the side please," the technician said; "your kidneys." The tickertape of pictures reeled out by my head as she focused on a tender area. I asked what she saw. "No, no problem. I am just looking at your liver." Squinting at the monitors. I certainly couldn't feel what she was seeing.
I tend to think of myself as being one piece. If I must be a number, I would like to be an integer. Whole. But I am getting older. I have spent the last few days talking at length with my landlady, a former professor. Our conversations tend towards what is wrong with her, and me, and people we know. This one's asthma and that one's agoraphobia. Sciatica, diarrhea, dementia. Someone said to me recently that this is what growing up is about: talking to people about how you are falling apart. On the ultrasound table, I thought I should re-figure myself as a sack of meat and balloons in decay. The role I was born to play.
I looked at the tape of photographs afterwards. Apparently, I am made up of constellations! I couldn't pick the science room dummy out of the image. It could have been a black and white scan of anything. My liver the security tape of a convenience store, say. My spleen a submarine on the radar.
The receptionist said she would fax the picture-tape to Dr. Hussein. Do doctors have special fax machines for ultrasound tapes? Surely the image quality would decay in transit, scrambling the ones and zeroes of me like cancer. What if the fax machine invented a baby in my uterus? Facsimile Fathers Fetus; Girl Aghast.
* * * *
I noticed a lot of women wearing fur today. They were in the streets midtown talking on cel phones, and in the subway tucking hems under their fat bottoms. Every time I wanted to, but never got up the courage to, say something snide. I workshopped it in my head. "That's quite a fur coat, where'd you get it?... Uh huh? And have they been reported to the ASPCA yet?"... "You know, you don't look like the kind of person who would kill and skin sixty living beings simply because you had a social advantage over them. How does a society woman like yourself build up the courage to commit murder?" and when the man in the leather coat next to her speaks up rudely: "And yourself, sir?... Do you mean to tell me you both hired hit men to do your dirty work? How nice to have so much money! Have you considered investing in the banana industry?" and when someone else gives me a rotten look, "You'll notice I don't have a stich of dead pelt on MY back--" which would be lucky for today, that I wasn't wearing my red Mary Janes or carrying the leather backpack from my aunt. And everyone knows I ate all that bacon at Christmas. "A ritual bloodletting," I think about calling it. "I think next time, I will have to eat your children. It's only fair."
Posted by me at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)
January 8, 2001
Detritus: Leftist links, Langston Hughes
I am really not sure how VoteAuction.com got past my notice... here, to make up, I will proclaim my hipness by noticing that rTMark affiliates the Yes Men slipped a fake WTO rep into a conference in Austria somehow. Breathtaking. I still don't understand why I can't find someone to pay me to pull that kind of art. ok, well, that story's a little stale too. While I'm at it I want to call attention to more scary things that rTMark is on top of right now. And this makes me hip even though I had nothing whatsoever to do with them.
I think I'm putting this blog on hiatus for a while. There's other parts of my site I want to work on-- develop a few of the funny little side projects, for instance. I should be posting some major stuff around the time of the inauguration protests, but right now I'm feeling a little too navel-contemplative and should be writing in more private media.
Did have another absurd moment with my third-graders today, though. Noticing that Jasmalyn was doing a mimeographed worksheet on Langston Hughes, I handed her a copy of "A Dream Deferred" which I'd been using in a lesson with her older brother's class a few weeks ago. She and Amanda got very excited about copying the poem out, which is not my preferred means of getting kids engaged with poetry, but it's one of the many anti-intellectual appproaches to literature their teachers have beaten into them (along with copying ad nauseam, using writing as punishment, and having kids drill glossary terms by rote rather than giving word definitions in their own terms), so what could I do. At the end of class, in the chaos of flung backpacks and last surreptitious sabotages of the day teacher's classroom supplies, the two of them and another girl stood before me and read the poem... "what happens to a dream defreanbblt?... does it sang like a heavy load?", ending with a chorus line of skinny little hips bumping side to side...
sigh... 'wish the poet laureate of Harlem would wake up....
Posted by me at 11:07 PM | Comments (1)
Pa'lante La Dada: Capitalism Becomes Surrealist Humor
I love the Internet. When you do searches on certain search engines, they will give you suggestions of where to go, mostly pointing you at places to buy things. So when I did a search for a bread icon on AltaVista, it suggested:
Extend Your Search for bread:
Shop the web for bread
Find bread and millions of other cool items at eBay!
Refine your search for bread with LookSmart Categories
Search for a job and win $10,000 at JobsOnline!
Set your own price for bread at uBid.com
Posted by me at 12:25 PM | Comments (0)
January 7, 2001
Dirty Sock Redux
Alex Hessler has put up some pictures of our trip to Death Valley. Boy haz some photo skillz! In addition to the great shots from Dirty Sock, I'm really fond of this very hep one taken atop the Stovepipe Dunes. When I get mine developed, provided the sand in my disposable camera didn't scratch the film, I may put some up too.
Posted by me at 2:34 AM | Comments (0)
January 5, 2001
New Year's
New Year's: I was still in California. Now I am back in New York. The trade off? Here I have dried skin from the water locked up in snow. There I have the desert, which also leaves me dry. Here I have clementines. There I had oranges, and they tasted better. There I had years of history: mine, my family's, the families of the names of the streets and schools and the grocers' and the florist shops. Here, I have my one landlady, and she has undergone a bizarre shift. Abandoning takeout, she has filled the fridge with jars of soup and offers to cook when I come home.
I made a resolution that I would spend more time this year reprogramming and cosmetically altering animatronic devices. This because on New Year's I spent a great deal of time picking apart an animatronic pot of daisies, pondering what could be done to make it more interesting. Someone thought it would be great if it burst into flames. I suggested perhaps if it dripped blood. When we got back Robert stopped by his house and grabbed one of those irritating singing fish. I flopped its rubber body back and forth between my hands and considered its possibilities. Perhaps taking it to its antithesis: re-scaling it with something beautiful and expensive, and having it sing opera. I stuck my finger in its metal jaw and let it chew.
Seriously: I resolved not to become a small-souled, unloving person. (That may not be what those with me on the beach that morning heard, but it is what I was thinking.)
Sometime last April I guess it was I decided to be single, which I have been to varying degrees of fidelity and clarity... wasn't going to swear off being with anyone at all; my sister had done that, and I admired her, but I just needed to re-center myself, and I didn't figure a little sex now and then would get in the way of that.
I had a fling while I was home, just a little one, an evening, no two-year-warranty. A guy who agreed calling it love was an excuse for lust, yet still let his arms go slack one moment and apologized he was missing the last girl he was with.
Afterwards I drove home, the light already a clinical yellow on the buildings of Pasadena. An NPR reporter announced that members of Congress were to be sworn in that day. I howled at the cars flying around me. No, no, NO, NAAAAOOOOOWWOWWWWOWWWWaaagh. It was not morning, I was not flying to Newark via San Francisco from L.A. that day, Congress was not going to take its vows and blindly welcome in these zombies engaged in nightmarish infighting, I had not, certainly not, come unfastened from that sweet slender chest, or perhaps I had never attached to begin with.
Why. This dream had been going so well. why I deceive myself.
I was startled by the roar of my re-awakening, the tenacity of my thoughts and hormones. I had convinced myself I could just have a fling and walk away with a pleasant feeling of euphoria; I misremembered, thinking I'd done it before. But I'd forgotten. Physical contact breeds fever dreams of posession and of permanence. All day I had a tail of lusts and questions and ill-advised ideas trailing out behind.
I'd forgotten more than that. Coming back from San Diego I told an old friend the story of my rotten job for the past year. It was like doing surgery on myself. Picking out pieces of bones and guts. Not sure how it all goes together, though it's so familiar. Painful. I hadn't told the whole story for a while, if I had ever told it. I am so out of practice with talking intimately that the effort of trying to drag it out left me in a fetal curl, sweating and crying.
* * *
manatees
so in pink through lather
together enormous though delicate
raw with the worship we
leave when the day licks
the skin of our pantsuits
how bare the elaborate
tiny eternity
man has no ache in his
love like our frantic
--magnetic doggerel from the fridge
Posted by me at 7:52 PM | Comments (0)