Filed under: Uncategorized
sdlfhdsalkghlsdakghdls ghdslahg
gsdhgldslhgldshgads
ahdsgklhgldsahgdsahgdsg
haglskdhgldahsghdsg
(more…)
Filed under: Uncategorized
This is my new life, the one without you in it. I cannot be sad because I haven’t lost something. It’s simply that, in this part of the story of me, you are mostly memory.
This is not something I have ever imagined for myself. But I suppose that is how it goes.
I came downstairs this morning to find my brother putting raw meat and eggs and a banana into a blender. First, I found him trying to get a piece of shell out of a tall glass with two eggs in it, and failing; holding up the glass and tipping it and making his fingers as long as possible, what are you doing! I asked.
you weren’t supposed to be up right now.
but what are you doing, you look like a bear looking for honey, oh my gosh, you’re pooh bear!
there’s a shell in my eggs!
are you going to eat those? like that?
you weren’t supposed to be up right now!
And so on. I managed to keep myself from gagging as I watched him slide pieces of raw meat into the blender, and then milk and a banana as if he were just blending a regular smoothie. Meat is not the best source of protein for you! I said, but I don’t really know anything about food, except for the difference between things that are disgusting and things that are edible. His death blend of animal products didn’t seem edible to me. Bruce Lee ate it, he said, and we all know how well he turned out. I don’t think this is okay, but when my brother gets it in his mind that something is going to make him manly and strong, he does it. He’s dug up what he can find of my father’s old running clothes and still wears them. He thinks that being stubborn and refusing to accept change makes him a pillar of tradition. It’s kind of exhausting . For instance, when my mom is trying to make changes to the house and he gets upset that she’s finally replaced the gold shag carpeting with a light beige, modern version.
This may sound petty, but it’s these kinds of things that distract me a little. I don’t have a job here, I wander around all day, trying not to talk about it. In the end it’s all I can talk about. The other day mare sent me a text informing me that brynn had found out about me and john, that she was upset, etc etc. I fretted about it for an hour, processed it, and then promptly forgot it had happened. I feel bad because I’ve obstructed the girl scout’s code of honor or something, but honestly feeling bad because you know you should feel bad (and don’t) is silly. I saw bean yesterday and her baby michael. I was fine the whole time until she hugged me goodbye and I couldn’t stop crying. Saturday I’m going to see nooka in brooklyn and go to a music festival, and drink kombucha with andy, and I’m going to pretend I am still far away, that this is still okay. That the inevitable isn’t happening.
I could not sleep last night.
I am not a doctor. I am not a scientist or a specialist or an expert on anything. I don’t know who is going to hire me for what I know. it doesn’t seem valuable to anyone but me and other people who are dealing with cancer. I feel like I am being robbed of the moment in my life when my father and I actually get along. When i am getting married, maybe, and we are dancing and he finally relents and recognizes that I am not all bad, that I will be alright, that maybe he should have wasted less time yelling and worrying and more time… talking. Don’t you think we all wish we had spent more time talking? I wish I had more memories of that. Of talking like people.
Lately all I’ve been thinking about is letting go. I’ve been thinking about the way it is key to getting anything back. I’ve been thinking about how so few people are good at it, my sister especially. She needs to control things, to feel like she is doing something obviously good and righteous. She is just like my parents. Things are plain to them. The world is informed by dollar signs. Happiness is informed the same way. I’ve never been so exhausted and sleepless. My muscles are always working. I almost went for a run today. I am restless. I hate running.
I can’t sleep. Last night I was wired until four a.m. when I took a benadryl. I sat on the couch with my father when I first got home and he said “did i tell you the doctor told me he can’t cure me? we’ll do this round and then see what happens.”
What am I supposed to do? I feel restless and wired. I feel like i can’t breathe. Nothing is calming me down. Nobody has changed. Is the secret to surviving cancer admitting that you’re wrong? Expecting that you’re going to die? Changing everything about yourself to something else? I don’t mean to privilege my experience. But it’s something you don’t understand unless you have gone through the tunnel alone. There are people around you but in the end it is an ultimately alienating experience. And my sister with her dumb face just filling with tears, I dont know what to do about it, and i feel so bad, but how can you explain it to her? You disgust me, she said to me once, using cancer as a crutch. My sister and I don’t see eye to eye. I have this constant urge to destroy all of her things just to teach her a lesson. She thinks I am just selfish. Things are so much more complicated than she wants to think they are. People try to simplify things into either right or wrong so that they never have to admit to being wrong 50% of the time.
I am not being very articulate right now. Save for my frustration, which is visceral, and making it very hard for me to breathe. It’s also hot in my airless room. I am taking another benadryl because i’m afraid I won’t be able to sleep otherwise. I am trying to not be affected by watching my father slowly ebb away. I have been trying all year. It’s not working. It hasn’t been working.
I am trying to pin down my frustrations, to make them more manageable. It is hard watching a loved one suffer through cancer. It is harder than cancer because there is the most utter level of helplessness. At least when I had it I could grit my teeth together and pretend to be strong and cry every day for my eleven year old body that was riddled with chemo. But now i can’t cry and i can’t do anything to fix it and everybody just runs around throwing up their hands, freaking out, trying to be helpful. My mother is remarkably strong in the most silent way. I think I have a little of this. Or I’ve sharpened it. I am extremely private about things to certain people. But I do believe in openness. I believe it can save our lives.
I am not ungrateful, for the record. I just want to scream at him sometimes and say When will you stop being scared for me? But I think it is an innate part of parenthood, to be scared for someone else, constantly. I am so upset that my nose is stuffed that I can’t stop letting tears fall out of my eyes. I hate allergies.
I am imagining my conversation with his doctor. I want to say I need you to help me out, doc, I need you to give me some answers. But no one has answers. Is someone trying to tell me something? Anyone?
This was probably too personal to publish in public, but honestly, nobody is going to read it.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I got my diploma yesterday. I graduated May 17th, but forgot to do my exit counseling! So after nervously shaking hands with old professors in hogwarts garb and shuffling across a stage in the student union all the while being examined close-up by video cameras, I sat down and opened the impressive crimson holder to see a sheet of paper that said something along the lines of “whoops! you forgot to do your exit counseling. we’re holding your diploma hostage until this important life step is finished.” And then I had that sinking feeling you get when you remember you forgot something little but important, and then i almost started laughing because of course I would forget to do something, of course of course. Afterwards, taking pictures with my family, they were all “let me see, let me see!” and I said, now, don’t be mad, buttttt… And my mother said, I’m not surprised.
So yesterday I went to the financial aid office after trying to do this counseling online and failing several times due to pin numbers, lost accounts and what have you, it took all of twelve minutes to complete. Then I went to a desk where a nervous manboy with a beard said he would try to find my diploma. He sought help from a more experienced nervous boy and then, together, they returned with this sheet of naked, unprotected paper that is the sole representation of the last four years of my life. Congratulations! the more experienced nervous boy said and handed me a plain white envelope with my expensive education inside.
I have trouble negotiating spatial relations. Last night John was telling me a story about this dog his friend has who doesn’t believe things are quite where they are. After climbing into your lap the dog continues to try to climb all the way up you, even though there’s nowhere left to go; when called from upstairs he can’t figure out how to get around the massive couches toward the voice he hears and recognizes. I know I am not that dumb, but I was standing there holding the diploma envelope that would not fit in my messenger bag and trying to figure out how to carry it with me while riding my bike and not bending the paper. I tried to ride with it tucked under one arm but almost immediately fell over, and then ended up walking with this thing in one hand and leading my bike along with another. I felt like I was secretly in my graduation robe and in some kind of procession all the way back to the house I now live in. It was strange.
I think the sun is trying to come out even though it is supposed to be setting. I am fine here when it is sunny. I am more than happy to bask in this postgraduate limbo, not planning my future and scheming menial jobs to have enough money for drinking and eating. I went to sleep after five this morning and tried to wake up before noon, but failed and went back to sleep until 3. My day is only starting! My life has just begun! It’s freezing out though, I think boston’s trying to ask me to leave.
New york is my home anyway.
At 2:45 p.m. EST tomorrow, I will be done with my college career. Kind of.
I feel vaguely numb about the whole thing, and kind of bitter. I don’t know if this is normal. I would like to feel jubilant! excited! thrilled! But that is not who I am. I feel as though I still have not finished anything. I don’t think I made a significant enough difference. I spent too much time trying to fit myself in between all these other people trying to make a difference. I am sometimes too concerned about others, and sometimes not concerned enough. This has proven problematic for me in many ways.
I keep remembering this moment, last year, as mackie and I were cleaning out the death hole of our apartment. After having boxed all the utensils and pots and pans and thrown out everything in the fridge, we stood in the kitchen holding the only things that had been there all year: an untouched jar of grape jelly, an unopened bag of pretzels– these two things and us are the only things that have lasted in this apartment all year, the only things unwanted– we couldn’t stop laughing– the only things left behind. It was unbearably funny.
I don’t think this year was nearly as funny or traumatic as last year. I don’t know if any year of my life will ever be as funny or traumatic as last year, and even though I went crazy with self-doubt and shame all the time on account of certain people’s passive aggression, at least I wasn’t bored. I am deathly afraid of becoming bored and not realizing it and dying at the ripe age of 87 wondering where all the time went. College, when I think about it, was kind of boring to me. I wish someone had warned me that classes aren’t really all that interesting, and to get to the interesting ones takes years and years, and by the time you get there you’re going to be so fed up with classes in general that you won’t even appreciate them except in the slightest way. The things you actually learn you could have learned in high school if only you hadn’t been so studious, so intent on escaping your small town to get to a city where people are just as uninteresting as they were when you knew them the year before. It’s kind of disheartening.
But I am oh so excited to go someplace new.
Also, I cut all my hair off on Friday. I am a happier person with short hair. After it happened (a lovely lady named Katy did it) I looked in the mirror and recognized myself for the first time in a long time. And I can’t remember when my hair was last this short, high school? Early eleventh grade? But I feel like I am myself again.
I feel like tomorrow is going to be incredibly strange.
I am in Boston. It is snowing again. Outside I can hear car doors slamming and an ignition starting. Tomorrow the roads will be slick and full of muck, and I’m going to wonder why I am here. But whenever it gets warm I immediately forget the winter. It melts, too. On Monday I went to an ice sculpting competition of groups of local art students. They did not know how to sculpt ice, there was no professional supervision, and after being given 1200 pounds of fresh ice, the final result was a bunch of smaller ice blocks, rearranged in a way that resembles some other cube-ish-object. Okay, so one group managed to make a lobster, and one group made a boat, but I wanted swans and angels and things with faces. Suffice to say, I was disappointed. There was also an unhappy looking ice queen there, though I regret to say I failed to take her picture, who tied the whole thing together with her electric blue, poorly applied eye shadow and cheap wedding dress that was supposed to be some kind of whimsical.
It was funny.
Did I say that it is snowing again? I know I was getting too excited when we had a few fifty-degree days in a row and I thought, YES, this is the end of winter! I know that it is still February, but somehow my mind just can’t believe it. What’s funny in Boston is that they don’t do jack shit about the snow. You’d think, well, this happens all the time for about half the year– maybe we should have a system. There is no system. The system is there’s going to be a foot of snow in the road and it’s every man for himself, boots or no boots.
Speaking of disappointments, I saw he’s just not that into you on Friday. Don’t do it. Don’t give in to the possibilities of girly-movie-therapy. There is none to be found here, and this is not because of the overall mission statement of the movie which is to make its viewers explicitly aware of its title. Everyone rolls their eyes and says duh that movie was bad, but I love girl movies, and I thought this one had some possibilities. All it did was confirm my suspicions that girls have little self-respect or self-esteem, and allow all these things to happen that shouldn’t happen. Where does that come from? Also, Scarlett Johansson needs acting lessons. Lots and lots of acting lessons. The most entertaining part of the movie was a confessional of two black women talking about being dumped. They were irrelevant to the story and still the most uplifting part of the whole trashy thing.
Anyways. Right now, I have less than a hundred days to graduation. I’m excited for this whole thing to be over, but I know I’ll be sad when it is.
The First Straw
for Christine Caballero
I used to think love was two people sucking
on the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger,
but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape,
traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth.
I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone solo
in the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakers
from a phone line, and you promised to always smell
the rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminal
pelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaled
all over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongue
ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts.
I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirror
over his knee, till you helped me carry the barbell
of my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouetted
in the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believe
in fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep’s clothing
and felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipper
of my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cord
around my ankle and yanked me across the continent.
And now there are three thousand miles between the u
and the s in esophagus. And being without you is like standing
at a cement-filled well with a roll of Yugoslavian nickels
and making a wish. Some days I miss you so much
I’d jump off the roof of your office building
just to catch a glimpse of you on the way down. I wish
we could trade left eyeballs, so we could always see
what the other sees. But you’re here, I’m there,
and we have only words, a nightly phone call — one chance
to mix feelings into syllables and pour into the receiver,
hope they don’t disassemble in that calculus of wire.
And lately — with this whole war thing — the language machine
supporting it — I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they’re
injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants,
naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes:
Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers,
so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo,
and it’s the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso
looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint,
washing his brushes in venom, and I think of Jenin
in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes,
like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver
in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth,
like I’m the executioner’s fingernail trying to reason
with the hand. And I don’t know how to speak love
when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste,
and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting
into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing
open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself
with the thought that we’ll name our first child Jenin,
and her middle name will be Terezin, and we’ll teach her
how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers,
and to never neglect the first straw, because no one
ever talks about the first straw, it’s always the last straw
that gets all the attention, but by then it’s way too late.
Jeffrey McDaniel.
This is probably illegal, but I think this poem should be everywhere. I want it written on desks and in bathroom stalls. It keeps from being overly sentimental and yet it’s entirely desperate and childish. I think what makes that okay is the complete honesty with which he displays his helplessness. I also feel betrayed by language. And I felt I learned something at the end of it. I always neglect the first straw. And it’s always way too late.
I am trying to write an essay on Derek Walcott. It is not going well. It was due a week ago, I have never done this before. I have all sorts of excuses in my mind, in my mind it is justified, but in reality I have been reading too much Derrida again and doubting my faith in language, meaning, the whole construction of the linguistic dream.
I am also reading a blog about aprosodia, the condition in which one is unable to recognize/produce/comprehend language. But they understand every other kind of expression beneath the words. This condition is juxtaposed against those with tonal agnosia: people who can only understand the exact literal meaning of words, and nothing else. So poems have to operate on both fronts, for both critics, in order to be in full working order. The conclusion reached is that to go undeceived you must be brain damaged. Basically, we’re all liars being lied to.
Anyway, I was just trying to understand. And my problem is that I am always trying to understand, especially when things cannot be understood. Or made sense of. You have to walk away and say there is no way to fix this, and you have to let it go. I have trouble not fixing things. So this essay has about five works cited so far, I’ve read so much on Walcott that I feel I could draw you up his whole family history and ethos of verse, and still this essay is not done. Still I’m sitting in the library thinking about poetics and not finishing what it is that is necessary for my survival, for my pending graduation. You’re such a little sister, Raphael said to me once, you wait for everyone to fix things for you.
I think this is true to an extent. I like to think it’s more about humility than it is about being lazy and/or spoiled. It usually just comes off as arrogance, ironically, that I mull everything over for weeks before ever saying anything. If i ever say anything, which is rare. I learned silence though. I learned that sometimes it’s no use to say anything. You’re not changing anybody. I know this is a dangerous space to occupy, it only encourages the lack of a dialogue, letting only idiots voice their opinions. I’m afraid that this is how the world works anyway, that the people with the strongest will to be heard are operating mostly on their arrogance, the inflation of their egos, their personal will to power and nothing else. They just want to change things for the sake of being known, and nothing else. Outwardly they want to do good. Inwardly, they are just selfish.
I have been ignoring everyone lately. And still nothing seems to be getting done. I saw Rachel Getting Married last night again. I think it’s a beautiful movie. I’m also intrigued by anything that attempts to paint a properly psychological portrait of the american family.
So this paper is about caribbean poetry. The problem is that I cannot make it relevant. Sophie and I were talking about our loss of motivation. She told me about how her presentation went terribly sour, and how she and sarah just sat there and laughed about it afterward. That was horrible, they said, laughing. This is our problem. I am standing here, looking at all these things I have done and not done and thinking about how it just doesn’t matter. We are clutching our sides and giggling, and thinking about how we just dropped everything, but what can you do? It’s all over, it’s all happened already, we can just shake our heads and think it’s hilarious. I think things get to the point where you realize you neither have tears left nor do you have the time to lament, so you move on because you have to. And it may have been your fault, or it may not have been, but it’s over now and you’re still alive and that’s what matters.
The Back Bay Review is finally here. Published, printed, ready for distribution. And we’re starting all over again. So maybe it’s November, but really, who’s counting?
Filed under: Uncategorized
I am writing because I am tired. Because I’ve spent this week in the library buried under books and can hardly breathe, and I’ve been meeting with old friends who are now strangers and feeling nauseuous. I need a way out of my own head, this seems to be the proper place for that.
From somewhere above me an electric guitar is cooing, and I can hear furniture shifting and footsteps. My apartment is finally warm again, the heat is clanking and the tip of my nose doesn’t get cold at night anymore. Boston isn’t such a bad city when there is working heat and hot water. My eyes are closing. It is almost midnight. Today I returned raphael’s books to him, that I’ve had since he brought them to me in march when I had a cold. There were a lot of them. We chatted awkwardly, he explained the economic crisis to me, I pretended to listen. This week has just been full of terrible revelations. Not revelations so much as the finishing of circles that should have been finished a long time ago. Justin indirectly called me a cunt for keeping things from him, and then I decided that our friendship was clearly unable to thrive in the vast shadow of his pride and pansy ways. I have a habit of trying to make things work that will never, and I don’t know exactly where this comes from. I assume it comes from my overwhelming need to make things right with people, to make people who aren’t well better, and to try to be good. And there comes a point where it’s just not worth it. I came home to tara and spewed all of the things that had been laid like led on me and she said dude, no way. There is no way that could ever be worth it. And she’s right.
Riding my bike home tonight was kind of like flying. Even though it was freezing, and my eyes were glassing over with tears from the cold, it was like being carried to my door. I feel like concluding things was a step forward and it has given me energy, despite how tired tired I am. When tomorrow is finally over I am going to come home and sleep hard, finally, for a long long time.
