Things That You Love, They Will Disappear

I'm just gonna have a little bitch-tastic rant on here right quick. It really frustrates me to see people spending their lives in a haze of intoxicants, hiding from themselves and and the world in a fog of chemicals. I'm all about doing what makes you happy, and I understand the need to cut loose from time to time, but let's be real: there are limits. I don't understand how people can look back on times in their lives, not remember them and say, "Hot damn, man, wasn't that great?" Wasn't what great? Upon what can you reminisce? I can't help but wonder, when those people need to tell themselves something intelligent, something meaningful about their lives to make it seem like it's all worth it, what will they turn to? Hmm, well that vaporizer sure made things great when I thought everyone looked ten feet tall. I love that empty bottle over there that had me hung over the toilet for several hours. What does any of that mean? From what are you people hiding? I think most people, especially those about whom I am complaining, are genuinely terrified to look in the mirror and find out that not only do they not know who it is they're seeing, but also to look and find that person hideous from the inside out.

Another thing that bothers me in all this is that I feel I'm often unwittingly dragged into other people's "Quests to Find Themselves." I know who the fuck I am, why do I have to be a part of this oh-so-enlightening journey? Why can't I--just this once--get involved with people who know and love themselves and are both capable and ready to know and love someone besides themselves? Hey? Any takers? Or any of you people wearing your asses as hats ready to man up and see yourself for what you are? I know I'm not alone when I say that I've been through the "self-discovery" business, and there's not much to know except that who you really are is almost beyond your control, so just you might as well just wake up to it. If you're an idealist (like me), people will hurt you and you will feel stupid, even though there was really not much you could do about it. If you're a romantic, guess what? Same deal. And just a heads-up: to those of you searching for your passion or calling in life, you're not going to find it in a bong or a bottle, so cut the crap, stop hiding from your fear that maybe life isn't holding anything special for you, and start actually getting up and trying new things and listening to people who've already been there.

And while I'm on this bitch fit, let me also state that I deserve more than to be just another warm body to someone. That's really what all of my complaining boils down to: people think that in their quests to find themselves, other people are objects or of less emotional/mental/psychological complexity than they are, and can therefore be used to satisfy the need to be accepted, provide contact comfort, be around when it's convenient for the quest-bound people. That's absolute shit. Not to sound conceited, but to make a fair assessment: I'm a fairly good-looking, driven, intelligent, passionate, funny girl who not only likes to get dolled up from time to time and go dancing, but also enjoys football and camping and paint fights. I know who and what I am. I've had serious loving relationships, and I've had fun, fling-type relationshits, and I'm ready for someone to appreciate me as much as I am capable of appreciating them. I am so tired of giving the best of me, just to receive the mediocre of someone else. Go big or go home, I'm sick of people half-assing it. Wander on.

Making Sense of Your Experiment

Now, I see my room and all the places you are not.

Your face—its thousand crystal facets—

shines, a far-off oasis mirage, and your voice

smiles my simple name. My low tremolo of longing

cracks short of you, replaces itself with

a shrug, the flip of a coin into a fountain—

its arcing trajectory mirroring the curve

of your clavicle, the taut skin to which

my teeth would be a ring. You are

curious, you are searching for yourself

in the salt on my lips, in the hash pipe ash;

you want to follow the trail of your nails

down my spine, find the soft secret of passion

in a glance, in a book, in the act of skin on electric

skin. I want to tell you it hurts, this illness,

my want to live inside your body, my pen stabbing

me awake at two in the morning to search my wells for

anything as true as a sleeper’s sigh in the night,

your body’s rise and constant fall betraying

you. But your flesh is thin and hungry,

Newton’s action and reaction guiding your hands

across my stomach, leading you to the vapor in my nostrils,

my effervescent love too big and flighty like a crane.

My affections are a stone in my gut.

You squint your eyes, tilt your head and see

nothing beyond your fingertips, your own skin

a barrier between us, between you and the life you dream,

my warm muscles a distant land you have yet to find

or earn by blood. The tiny down hairs on my neck

rise, salute you—Oh My Captain—and you run

your hands over your head, wave from the shore,

ever moving forward to someone else’s body.

"You're a cool cougar, too!"

First, update: the title of this blog is something my roommate said to me upon realizing that I'm older than most of the people we know, meaning I'm also older than most of the people I date/like.

I watched the movie Julie & Julia yesterday and I must say, I want a Paul Child in my life. He was so loving and supportive of her, it made me want to cry just seeing how much he loved her. Beautiful.

Speaking of beautiful, I've found a lot of poetry and lyrics really resonating with me lately. For one thing, check out Laura Marling's songs "Ghosts" and "Alas, I Cannot Swim." I heard these while driving to and back from a great solo art show by Caleigh Bird. Funny story: my good friend, my roommate and I were leaving the art show, and our friend looks at us and says "You know what would be really good? Ice cream," at which point I look out the car window, pointing and shrieking "BASKIN ROBBINS!!!" so we eeeeessssshhhh turn into the parking lot on a dime. There was a line both outside and inside, making us think there may be a party going on and temporarily making us question whether or not we could go in. But it was ice cream. So we nonetheless barreled on past the small children and their parents, and got inside the shop. I walked up to the counter to the boy working and smiling said "I'd like a single scoop of World Class Chocolate," to which he replied "Don't you mean a kids scoop?" Thoroughly baffled, I just stared at him quizzically until he said, "You know, 39 cent kid's scoop today?" WHAT?! "Yeah, you can get two scoops for 61 cents, too." Insert my purposefully flirty giggle and smile, "Wow, I can do that? Wonderful." Talk about success.

Anyway, back to the inspirational/resonant poetry business: I'd like to share this, probably my all-time favorite poem. No copyright infringement, I'm attributing it as best I can.

"The City In Which I Loved You"

by Li-Young Lee

And when, in the city in which I love you,

even my most excellent song goes unanswered,

and I mount the scabbed streets,

the long shouts of avenues,

and tunnel sunken night in search of you...

That I negotiate fog, bituminous

rain rining like teeth into the beggar's tin,

or two men jackaling a third in some alley

weirdly lit by a couch on fire, that I

drag my extinction in search of you...

Past the guarded schoolyards, the boarded-up churches, swastikaed

synagogues, defended houses of worship, past

newspapered windows of tenements, along the violated,

the prosecuted citizenry, throughout this

storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed

city I call home, in which I am a guest...

a bruise, blue

in the muscle, you

impinge upon me.

As bone hugs the ache home, so

I'm vexed to love you, your body

the shape of returns, your hair a torso

of light, your heat

I must have, your opening

I'd eat, each moment

of that soft-finned fruit,

inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.

The vein in my neck

adores you. A sword

stands up between my hips,

my hidden fleece send forth its scent of human oil.

The shadows under my arms,

I promise, are tender, the shadows

under my face. Do not calculate,

but come, smooth other, rough sister.

Yet, how will you know me

among the captives, my hair grown long,

my blood motley, my ways trespassed upon?

In the uproar, the confusion

of accents and inflections

how will you hear me when I open my mouth?

Look for me, one of the drab population

under fissured edifices, fractured

artifices. Make my various

names flock overhead,

I will follow you.

Hew me to your beauty.

Stack in me the unaccountable fire,

bring on me the iron leaf, but tenderly.

Folded one hundred times and

creased, I'll not crack.

Threshed to excellence, I'll achieve you.

But in the city

in which I love you,

no one comes, no one

meets me in the brick clefts;

in the wedged dark,

no finger touches me secretly, no mouth

tastes my flawless salt,

no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming

in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;

hulls clogged, I continue laden, translated

by exhaustion and time's appetite, my sleep abandoned

in bus stations and storefront stoops,

my insomnia erected under a sky

cross-hatched by wires, branches,

and black flights of rain. Lewd body of wind

jams me in the passageways, doors slam

like guns going off, a gun goes off, a pie plate spins

past, whizzing its thin tremolo,

a plastic bag, fat with wind, barrels by and slaps

a chain-link fence, wraps it like clung skin.

In the excavated places,

I waited for you, and I did not cry out.

In the derelict rooms, my body needed you,

and there was such flight in my breast.

During the daily assaults, I called to you,

and my voice pursued you,

even backward

to that other city

in which I saw a woman

squat in the street

beside a body,

and fan with a handkerchief flies from its face.

That woman

was not me. And

the corpse

lying there, lying there

so still it seemed with great effort, as though

his whole being was concentrating on the hole

in his forehead, so still

I expected he'd sit up any minute and laugh out loud:

that man was not me;

his wound was his, his death not mine.

and the soldier

who fired the shot, then lit a cigarette:

he was not me.

And the ones I do not see

in cities all over the world,

the ones sitting, standing, lying down, those

in prisons playing checkers with their knocked-out teeth:

they are not me. Some of them are

my age, even my height and weight;

none of them is me.

The woman who is slapped, the man who is kicked,

the ones who don't survive,

whose names I do not know;

they are not me forever,

the ones who no longer live

in the cities in which

you are not,

the cities in which I looked for you.

The rain stops, the moon

in her breaths appears overhead.

The only sound now is a far flapping.

Over the National Bank, the flag of some republic or other

gallops like water on fire to tear itself away.

If I feel the night

move to disclosures or crescendos,

it's only because I'm famished

for meaning; the night

merely dissolves.

And your otherness is perfect as my death.

Your otherness exhausts me,

like looking suddenly up from here

to impossible stars fading.

Everything is punished by your absence.

Is prayer, then, the proper attitude

for the mind that longs to be freely blown,

but which gets snagged on the barb

called world, that

tooth-ache, the actual? What prayer

would I build? And to whom?

Where are you

in the cities in which I love you,

the cities daily risen to work and to money,

to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts?

Morning comes to this city vacant of you.

Pages and windows flare, and you are not there.

Someone sweeps his portion of sidewalk,

wakens the drunk, slumped like laundry,

and you are gone.

You are not in the wind

which someone notes in the margins of a book.

You are gone out of the small fires in abandoned lots

where human figures huddle,

each aspiring to its own ghost.

Between brick walls, in a space no wider than my face,

a leafless sapling stands in mud.

In its branches, a nest of raw mouths

gaping and cheeping, scrawny fires that must eat.

My hunger for you is no less than theirs.

At the gates of the city in which I love you,

the sea hauls the sun on its back,

strikes the land, which rebukes it.

what ardor in its sliding heft,

a flameless friction on the rocks.

Like the sea, I am recommended by my orphaning.

Noisy with telegrams not received,

quarrelsome with aliases,

intricate with misguided journeys,

by my expulsions have I come to love you.

Straight from my father's wrath,

and long from my mother's womb,

late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,

bearing the mark of one who's experienced

neither heaven nor hell,

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,

in league with stones of the earth, I

enter, without retreat or help from history,

the days of no day, my earth

of no earth, I re-enter

the city in which I love you.

And I never believed that the multitude

of dreams and many words were vain.

After My First Real All-Nighter of College

I came to a really terrifying realization around 12:30 this morning while attempting to write an 8 page essay for my Brit Lit class: I hate the English major. I hate essays, I hate destructing beautiful works by measuring every word of them, I hate being forced to read things I don't care about, I hate that it's making me hate reading and writing. So I'm not going to do it. I'm done. I did a totally different, fallibly short essay about how one of the major works we studied can't be properly understood today. That essay is crap. It's way too short, cites no sources, and will piss off my professor. But it's the only thing I can believe in and support as far as literature classes go these days. I'll choke out something acceptable for his final exam. But no more. The truly scary part about it is that I have been so sure for so long that English was where I was destined to be, that I feel like I'm throwing out my whole life and starting over. I'll have to declare a different major, meet different requirements, FIND something I'm interested in. But I feel so free, so happy with my freedom and my realization that English has never been right, I just thought it was good enough, or where I had to be to write at all. Oh no. Was I ever mistaken. I went through all the required courses for the English major and picked out the ones I would actually be interested in taking: all but one of those classes is covered by a Creative Writing minor. My life feels like a sham. I feel like I'm awake to myself for the first time. Now I just have to figure out where the hell to go from here.

Contrary to Popular Belief

Who among you has seen the movie Mona Lisa Smile? If you haven't, stop reading, because you probably won't get any of my references for the rest of this post. I've watched it a lot recently, and it's made me wonder: what's changed? I don't mean the argumentative "What happened to suffrage?" or "What about my equality?" stuff (I resisted the urge to say crap), but I mean what happened to those days? I know I just pissed off every activist who will every read this, but isn't equality about having the option to do and be whatever you want? What if (very hypothetically) I want to be a housewife? What if I want to find my husband in college and, screw the workforce, want to pop out a couple kids instead? What if I want to wear full skirts? What if I want a guy to actually put some effort into winning my affection? What happened to getting swept off my feet?

In that movie, most of the lead female characters are forced to re-examine what they want out of life; some end up choosing what they had originally planned anyway, some have a complete change of heart. Ironically, now that it's 2010--over 50 years since when this movie was set--I feel like a new norm, new constraints, have been made, and in a different way, we're all just as trapped as we used to be. I'm not saying I long for the girdles of yesteryear or that I trust middle and upper-class white men to vote for everything, but as a woman, I still don't have the option of doing or being whatever I want. Most people don't. So today I'm gonna have some fun, play devil's advocate on all this, and see where it goes.

So let's say I have a deep interest and curiosity about learning (which is true). And I am in college, since I now am allowed to attend them at all (which is also true). Let's say I'm overwhelmingly compelled at times to write and read, but have no illusions or desires about making a living at either (again, true). So what are my options in an ideal, complete freedom/equality universe?

Option 1: I could find a husband who wants an equal partnership in household and home-life, but who would let my "job" be taking care of the house and kids during the day, managing finances, keeping the fridge stocked, and reading and writing as I so choose, while he takes on the role of breadwinner since he's interested in things you can actually make a living at.

Option 2: I could do odd jobs that temporarily interest or amuse me to make ends meet, scrape out a living, and hope for the best, while still fueling my internal passions in what little free-time I'd have left over.

Option 3: I could scour the career world over until I found some other thing that I would hope would interest me for long enough that I would do it long enough to retire and live the life I had wanted to live in my younger years.

Husband optional for choices 2 and 3.

Here's the part that gets me. Options 2 and 3 are pretty much what I'm stuck between now (only, it's a bit more optimistic, in all fairness). If I could ever find a man who would be the slightest bit interested, let alone prepared, for Option 1 with whom I could actually fall in love, I would nonetheless be looked down upon by almost all of society for seeming like a backwards thinker, washing years of feminism down the drain. Wouldn't you think, if I was really equal and free to be whatever I wanted, that my choice should be supported no matter what? And wouldn't you also think, since you my dear reader are oh so clever, that since I am free to live Option 1 if I wanted that there would be the necessary resources (aka: HUSBAND MATERIAL) available for me and those like me, who are in fact not backward thinkers but simply realistic about the potential monetary profit of their interests?

I look around my college and don't see anyone with enough interest, understanding, or empathy to be ready to marry. How was it different 55 years ago? I know the expectations were different, but what happened? Back then, it was "Get through high school, go to college, find a husband, have a family, play house," for women. Now it's more like, "Get through college, get a job, find time to date, maybe a husband, be married, keep your job, have kids, keep your job, teach your kids that the only right way to do things is the way you've done them, hire a shrink, try to relax, be sleep deprived, and barely have enough socked away for retirement." There's something really fucked up about both of these.

Fifty-five years ago, I would be expected to be married if not before I graduate college then at least within months of it. My primary concern should be my husband's life, tonight's meat loaf, and my house and children. Present day expectations: date in college, but nothing too serious; go to grad school at some point; get a job; have a career; marry if I want (but I don't need a man. or family. or traditional "home"); have kids if I want; raise them, or let my husband turn into the stay-at-home Dad, which ironically is considered admirable; retire; maybe get a divorce once the kids are grown; do what I want as long as I'm doing something in the outside world until I die. It's going from one extreme to the other. Back then was "It's all about everyone else!" Now it's "It's all about me!" Where is the happy middle? Why can't I do what makes me happy, even if taking care of my family is it?

I'm done ranting. I'm hungry. I have no answers on this one.

Wander on.

Pete and Repeat

Lately, and for the first time since I was about six, I've been having this recurring dream. It's not really the dream that's recurring, but the people in it and the major events. It leaves me every morning wishing that I really had been kissing that guy, and then wondering if I should go for it for the next few hours. It's also started to make me wonder what desires other people are constantly fighting within themselves.

The dreams I have always include this one person, us being in a large group doing something illegal, and always seems to end with a kiss just as my alarm starts going off. And half the time I get in a fight with this guy at some point in the dream, too. I have no clue what it means, I don't know if I want to know, and I'd really like his dream self to leave me alone. Or maybe I wouldn't. Maybe these dreams are affording me the opportunity to do whatever I want and be as impulsive and finicky as I so please without any real consequences. Maybe it just lets me be and do all the things I tell myself I'm too smart to do in real life.

So now I'm asking this: am I really being so smart for not living my life the way I dream it? Sure, logically none of it can happen or work or be that good for me or anyone else, but what am I losing by passing it up? How different would I be and feel if I just woke up tomorrow morning, said "Fuck this," and did whatever I felt like doing until I got sick of it? Just a shot in the dark, but I'm guessing that's an answer I'll never know.

Wander on.