On the floor of my room are strewn pebbles of dirt and sand left over from my sister who likes to deposit unwanted things in places that don’t belong to her. There are no less than four boxes of papers that I cannot identify, an old computer keyboard without a computer, a pair of speakers and a garbage bag full of clothes my brother only sometimes wears, so he is often in and out digging through old t-shirts looking for a keeper. When I packed for home I thought, I won’t be there for very long, so I failed to bring anything fun to wear. I wander around in my sister’s old party dress because I am so depressed about being stuck here that it is the only way to pretend to be cheered up.
I have been listening to fleet foxes for days now. It makes me think of running, just running for my life, and it seems to be one of the few things I think of these days. I came home almost two weeks ago to watch my father shuffle around in a blue hospital gown, wheezing and hacking up his insides. There is a tumor on his esophagus that hasn’t hit bottom, and they’re shrinking it with radiation and chemo. I imagine he will glow in the dark soon, the tumor pulsing inside him like a second heart. I am mildly paralyzed in spirit and all I do is wander from day to day, wondering when I get to leave, having nothing really to do with my time but try to be helpful when all anybody ever says to me is just go, that’s fine. And I have all my relatives patting me on the back saying, it’s really good you came home, Sandy, your dad really needs you. Every time it happens I feel like screaming, what did you think I wouldn’t come home for this? Did you think I would really just ignore it?
All of my cousins are studying money or law. Or law in order to have to manage their own finances. My cousin had a baby with her investment broker boyfriend and now she has a 24/7 baby nurse who brings the baby to her bed in the night to nurse. I think there is a dearth of integrity in this world, and it is possibly growing by the second. I don’t know why everyone wants to give up good work, work that makes you feel lighter and more hopeful in the planet just for the sake of some monetary security that only provides a sort of superficial cushion against the things that are actually plaguing us. In a year, I might move to Berkeley with Siv just to see the things she does, just to document the way things actually should be done. It makes me happy that there is at least one person I know who has found what she loves and is pursuing it to the nth degree.
I am upset because I was just beginning to feel like this was a time in my life that I could be sure about, I thought I could stop thinking that at any moment a piano was going to fall from the sky and land squarely on top of me. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Unfortunately that time I tried to convince myself away from cancer was silly, was something I won’t be able to do again.
Also, Justin has disowned me as a friend. This is about trust, he said. I have never kept anything from you. Which is a lie, mind you, and I didn’t keep anything from him that was ever really worth knowing. We will be friends for life! I said ardently as he poured his soul out to me, drunk, the day after his birthday. Stay here, he said. I couldn’t, it was wrong from the beginning and will never be right, and I sailed away to someone else’s house and now I can never look back.
Filed under: academia, rants | Tags: being shy, poetry, romanticism, rosanna warren
I realized today that I am not entirely cut out for school. In the sense that I really enjoy being patted on the head and told how good I am, it is great, but over the course of the last few years my concept of good has gradually changed to mean something entirely different from what it used to mean. The problem with school is that it is forcing me to divert my natural attentions to things that are boring and alien to me, and while it is good to get out of my head and into someone else’s for a while, four years is a long time to spend poking at someone else’s brain. I have grown to resent the university for not contributing to my own arrogant ideologies and instead forcing me to praise someone else’s carefully constructed canon. I think I’m coming to terms with gratitude, however, because someone really needed to kick me in the head.
I identify too much with poets. Rosanna Warren said to our class, I never wanted to write, I just couldn’t make sense of the world without it. And this to me seems unbearably true, and tragic, and upon explaining it to people I feel silly and pretentious. Well, if you don’t want it then why are you doing it? Because I have to, I don’t have a choice. I have been writing since I was ten, it is the only way I can wade through the things that happen, the things I do that I should not do, the things that I wish I had done. I think it might be because I know I could almost never put to words what I am thinking, and thus am supplied with an endless amount of attempts to figure it out. The journey is endless. This is an embarrassing amount of words that are not rooted in concrete things or happenings, I am just trying to study for British Literature and am entirely frustrated by the fact that nothing can make me care about these dull old men with nothing to do but pat their own arrogant backs on their ingenuity.
I think Keats was tragic enough to make me care about him. I think Wordsworth is responsible for changing the world, so I guess I can allow him my venerations. I don’t understand why we aren’t all always concerned with “renewing the universe,” when did people stop meditating on everyday occurrences? Have they? What are we thinking about anyway? As a collective? This is why I need you to help me, why I need everyone back here, in their right minds, ready to defend the art of poetry: we need to communicate. Writers think they are beyond communication with each other because they communicate with the world at large, but really, it is diminishing my faith in people. I want to believe that there are people who care deeply about making meaning meaningful. I think Jeffrey McDaniel was right and we should limit everyone’s word count to 150 – 200 words a day. I think there should be more silence. These are the reasons why I like you, and the reasons why I don’t. I have been too busy to be thinking about love, but it nudges its sleepy little head in even when I’m doped up on chocolate and caffeine trying to study romanticism.
I am terribly introverted and shyness is, to me, like a disease I might die from. The problem was I concerned myself with ghosts thinking they could cure me and explain things to other people for me, but this is entirely not true. I was in love with an extroverted Mormon boy for a long long time and only recently did I realize I just loved him because I thought he embodied the things I would never know. This isn’t true, and it’s naive to think that one person can complete another. There was too much violence between us: our meeting again might end in one of our deaths; how could you reconcile yourself with the other so completely that you become one person? This is why he fascinated me, and I still love him, but I am sure he doesn’t have any interest in the sort of violence between us that is inevitable, so I am moving on. I say this often, at least four or five times a year, and this time I am not promising he is out of my life forever. I am just saying that some people ask to be left behind and it is our responsibility to respect that wish, regardless of how much they cry when you turn them away.
The boy on the other side of my cubicle will not stop poking his pointy little head above our divider, and this is making me anxious about the type of noises I must be making to provoke such regular check ups.
Sometimes I wish my mind were linear, like an arrow. But then I guess I wouldn’t be as much fun.
love
I’ve spent the day rehashing the last two years of my life, most of which were spent involved in a long term, unsettling relationship with a charming Mormon boy who couldn’t get over himself to get to the east coast to see me. It’s not that I’ve come to a great deal of conclusions, it’s that I’m procrastinating.
I have a paper proposal due tomorrow, and I’ve waited until right now to begin thinking about it. It’s not that I didn’t start thinking about it before, it’s just that I’ve only just begun panicking. The problem with my version of panic is that it involves slowly unraveling the many threads of my developed resistance to panic. I have a shield ten years thick cultured from years of chemotherapy coupled by many, many papers all written within twelve hours before they were due. Rather than researching and writing, I am blogging. I am also desperately jabbing this wonky stapler into a twenty page packet on John Ashberry’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror that I will have to read before I even think about writing this proposal. The problem is I was never punished for this kind of behavior. The first college paper I ever wrote, I wrote junior year of high school in a six hour fervor from midnight to six a.m. I got an A+ and many applauses from my unbalanced foreign language teacher, and thus all of my papers have been written that way ever since.
I’ve been reading post cards from a boy I knew for twelve hours freshman year of college. How do I do things like that? And the boys I’m actually dating I find impossible to talk to. I like to make things difficult for myself, I think that is evident here, I think it’s evident in everything that I’ve done since I was born. Before I could talk I was talking back to my parents, who would have thought I’d make it to 20? Where can this skill of not panicking in panicky situations get me? I could be a suicide counselor. I could talk people down from ledges, I guess. But why would they believe me when I say, hey! It’s going to be okay, okay? And I can’t tell you why, and I can’t tell you how, but you’re going to be alright.
The photographs of my brother are peeling off the wall because this room has been so warm. I like to think of him there, watching over me in a brotherly way. And in that picture he is brotherly, conscientious, caring, because he allowed me to capture him like that for the five minutes of that first snow so many years ago.
After finally jamming this wonky little staple into this packet I’ve realized that it’s actually two packets, and that I’ve accidentally bound them together indefinitely via wonky little staple. This is unfortunate, seeing as how it will make the second packet doubly stapled on opposite sides, meaning impossible to open. I like predicaments like this however, because it means that I will fiddle with the staple for at least ten minutes before sucking it up and getting my shit together, and writing this proposal.
Anyway, enough looking at walls and wall posts. Long story short, I procrastinate, it’s rooted in me and unchangeable. I should probably look into therapy, but who are we kidding, I am a college student and how would I afford that kind of help? I submitted an essay today to the New York Times for their column on Modern Love. I don’t think it was well written enough to win, but my story is probably a bit more interesting than some they’ve read so far. I should hope it entertains at least one bored out of their mind intern who has to sift through all that garbage. But who wouldn’t want to hear the tragic love story of a young cancer survivor and a future Mormon missionary? There are so many reasons why I don’t panic, and how could you panic? Your life couldn’t possibly go as wrong as mine, and my life couldn’t possibly go down from here. So really, we’re all looking up.
Filed under: rants
This has not been a break. Breaks do not include screaming matches with your father, screaming matches with the bank, and a dentist appointment. Breaks do not mean waking up before noon, getting dressed or working on your resume. Breaks do not mean constantly facing the question of what the hell are you doing with your life, which is constantly posed by people who should not care: dentists, doctors, the drunk guy who sat next to you on the train. Why is this a question that even strangers feel comfortable asking? That is unfair. Just because someone has it all figured out doesn’t mean everyone does.
I am always running into my past, which makes me fear that my life is on some twisted time warp in terms of developing in circles. Or maybe everyone’s life develops in circles and I am one of the few people who notices, I don’t know. I just know that I’m sitting here, and I’m missing the train to the city to meet an old friend, but I am just too tired to move. Rather, I am tired of moving. I am tired of the endless questions: what are you doing? What will you be doing? Where will you live? How will you pay for it? What happened to all your money? Why are you drinking so much coffee? Why do you feel the need to skip the country?
I think my problems come mostly from listening to other people and thinking they are right. They aren’t, were never, not even my father who could never convince me that I would be smarter if I had majored in business, example:
We are in the kitchen, and he is teaching me how to make cole slaw from a bag of cabbage and a jar of mayonnaise. “This here all cost me about a dollar to make, and then you package it, and sell it for two!” To which I reply from all my years in boston, “Add some raisins and apple to that slaw and sell it for four!” And he laughed. “You would be smart, you know. If you had majored in business.”
If only! But you couldn’t convince me I was wrong. You could convince me I should have gone somewhere else, you could convince me I should have tried harder, but you could never convince me away from what I’ve done because I felt it was right. I don’t think enough people do what they feel is right these days, and it presents us with a great deal of problems that shouldn’t even arise.
I have a day and a half left here. The other day I ran into someone I haven’t seen or thought about in years. It made me feel really old, and lately I’ve just been wandering around feeling fully grown and completely unable to fathom why.
It’s quarter to five, at least I’m not tired. I kind of like doing this to myself, mostly because I am a masochist, mostly because I can’t help it. I like pressing my face against the universe and asking it to hit me, I don’t know why. I do it all the time. Every time I have a paper I think, I will never do this again. And by this, I mean stay up all night the night before pulling out my eyelashes and writing till dawn. But I will do it again. I will do it every time, because how else could you make writing a paper exciting? Why else would I do it except if I absolutely had to? I can only bring myself to do these things when my life love and survival depend upon them. And they do right now, even if it’s not really for real.
I talked to my friend Harry last night, and he never fails to make me feel better and still a hundred times worse. I often feel like I’m not doing enough here, or enough of the things I’m supposed to be doing, and he always asks me about photography and I hate telling him that I’ve hardly taken a decent photo since high school. I feel like I’m blind here. Maybe it’s just a different way of seeing. I think it’s getting better.
I really came here to write down this quote, because you know, I’m trying to educate myself while also write this paper:
“In reading Keats one feels that man is rediscovering his body; and in reading Crabbe one feels as if man is rediscovering his social world.”
George Crabbe is one of the most boring poets and yet there is so much written on him, so little I can find substantially on Blake. Weird right? I guess it’s more that boring poets are easier for academics to relate to, and free radicals such as Blake are often only worshiped by pot smoking english teachers who feel for him. And I wanted to remember that quote about Keats, because I haven’t really learned anything about Keats yet and it is my intention to do so as soon as possible.
Also, I lost my right big toenail last week. My toe doesn’t really look as ghastly as I thought it would, or as anyone would think it would, but maybe I’ve just gotten used to its general ugliness. I can’t stop listening to third eye blind, and lover, you should have come over by Jeff Buckley. I don’t know why some things never get old. I think Third Eye Blind is just quintessential college rock that I can’t help but listen to at this point in my life. The problem with them is that they never really grew up, so I can listen to them on repeat until I graduate and probably for a while thereafter, but there will be a point in my life where I will say I can’t feel them anymore in my bones, and I’ll have to hang up my headphones. I’m wasting precious morning hours posting on Keats and Third Eye Blind, and I just sent poems out to strangers. It’s kind of terrifying, kind of exciting. I wish it were easier for me to speak. Especially when everyone is awake, and listening. I’d rather just pretend that no one hears me, sometimes.
I like writing papers. It’s so rare that I feel like I’m learning something.
I spent the day trying to outrun my anger. I want the giants to win the superbowl. This is not why I’m angry. Though it is a little. The superbowl is the silliest day of the year.
I don’t even really have words for how it went. It went down so quickly, and I guess it’s been unraveling for a while. This is not something you notice when you’re in love, blahblahblah, and in the end it always takes you by surprise. I am mostly angry with myself, for falling for it, every time. I wanted you to come through for once, and get over your inadequacies. What I mean is that I wanted you to grow a pair, and you couldn’t. I didn’t want to hear you crying, but even when I did, I didn’t really care.
Here is what happened: You said you might come to visit me, and I said I’ll believe it when I see it, and then you asked me to marry you, and then I said maybe yes maybe no, and then I said when will you come visit me, and then you said, I think I’m going to go to Scotland instead of to you, during this slim time we might have together. Mind you this is a rather subjective account of what’s been happening. And then I had an aneurysm and bled through my ears all over the kitchen counter.
Actually, I just blew up. I exploded into a million little pieces and said some of the meanest things I might have ever said to anybody I love or loved. It began with I’m just really tired of this kyle, I’m not even surprised, and ended with, It’s like I have this weird attraction to boys who refuse to grow up. And then I said, I’m gonna go, I need a week. And he said OK.
I think I will be able to go to sleep just fine tonight. I think the anger has subsided enough to let me take a rest, and I don’t want his last memory of me to be furious and fuming nonsense. Saying silly angry things like, I’m not holding my breath.
In the ends the giants won, and the superbowl still sucks.
I have been anxious for days. I stopped drinking coffee because of it, because so many sleepless night have left me a waking mess and tiresome bundle of nerves. And I still don’t know what’s wrong, something is bound to jump out at me someday and tell me why I’ve been feeling this way, but I’m just not there yet.
Yesterday my friend Emily and I tried to get our group The Feminist Literary Collective officially off the ground. Unfortunately, Emily had dance practice and I had to pitch our group to the wolves alone only to have it immediately lumped with other “feminist” groups on campus and defeated. What makes your group different? Maybe because we aren’t doing any of the same things as the other groups on campus. Maybe because we’re interested in art and publications, only a few of those things you will not recognize for their opinions. We’re a bunch of girls looking for sponsors, and nobody is feeling charitable. It’s just disheartening, really, that nobody wants to pass a book club with a cause. It’s like we just want to do things right by this school, and they just force us to bend and break the rules. I had to fake a smile as I was leaving, I hate feeling defeated, and I wished everyone else luck. Really I want everyone to be able to carve a place for themselves, but it always seems to be at the expense of someone else.
These past two weeks have made me see people differently. I am not judging really, just juxtaposing myself against others and feeling all full-up and blown out of proportion. Normally I see Kyle as my polar opposite and significant other, but this week has left me seeing him as kind of small, unformed. And I’m beginning to see a lot of people that way, as if they’re all holding onto something that will not last as some kind of vestige, some proof of their survival. The problem with me is that I don’t need proof, nor do I want it, but how else are you supposed to get people to believe you when you tell them you lived? I don’t want to use you to believe in love or anything else. And I realized that Kyle was my reason for creating something that should ultimately be for myself. From that, everything seems to unfurl and make less sense. I was using him to make sense of myself when, really, I have to learn to make sense on my own.
It’s nothing I wouldn’t tell him to his face, if I could stomach it. The problem is I could never stomach to hurt him, and everything needs a face lift every once in a while, and who knows maybe we can get out of this one alive, together. But don’t cling to your church and tell me it’s real, and don’t use me as a replacement for something you lost once and think you’ve found in me. Maybe it’s not there, maybe it was never. Or maybe this is love and we have to learn to deal with it.
I fell in love with a Mormon boy when I was fourteen. I didn’t want to, I couldn’t help it, he was just so charming with his broken arm and green eyes and otherness that I’d never experienced before. I think the feeling was mutual. It was mutual fascination with an opposite so extreme: he was white white, western, corn-fed, farm-raised, god-loving, church-going, straight-edge, future Mormon missionary; I was half-Asian, east coast, newly confirmed, deeply cynical, city-loving, frisbee-playing, barefoot, litmag revolutionary. What did we even have to talk about? I don’t know. But we managed. And we still talk today. And I still am madly in love with him, despite the fact that at the heart of it, we don’t agree on anything.
Two nights ago, the boy, named Kyle, decided to have the “abortion talk” with me. I was infuriated. It was three in the morning and I was exhausted, and why is it that these boys who parade themselves as independent are, deep down, fundamentally exactly the same as every chauvinistic, women-hating redneck from the deep south? This is how it went, roughly:
Kyle: I think that if a girl is stupid enough to get pregnant that she is responsible for carrying that baby to term instead of flushing it down the toilet, which is murder. BUT in the cases of rape or incest, of course, I wouldn’t expect her to want to keep it.
Me: I am not having this conversation with you right now.
Kyle: What? Tell me what you think, I mean I already know, but tell me anyway.
Me: Silent, seething anger.
Kyle: What? Why won’t you tell me? Why won’t you tell me? Why do you sound so angry?
Me: I’m not angry.
The rest of the conversation was sparse and uncomfortable, as I was, of course, lying, and eventually we just said I love you and called it a night. It was at this time three-thirty a.m., and I was fully awake, stewing in anger in my bed, and I was fully unable to articulate exactly what it was that made me so goddamn furious.
Maybe it was the full realization that we truly have nothing in common, I was afraid of getting into the argument to start pulling at the stitches of our rocky, heated relationship, to have him realize that indeed, I do believe abortion should be an option for a pregnant woman who does not want to be pregnant.
Why doesn’t she just give it up for adoption? It’s a “life.” But the whole anti-abortion charade is rooted in an impossible feminine standard in which women are expected to be both virgins AND mothers at the same time; they are to be the all-giving, all-self-sacrificing trees of life that angelically carry to term every screaming, shitting baby that ever grows inside her uterus (this is better stated in an article by Caitlin Moran). What I don’t understand is why people don’t see that bringing an unwanted child into the world is terribly more irresponsible than not having the kid at all; if the resources aren’t available to care for it; if she is without support from her work or her family members; if the male involved is no longer involved in the situation. Her life as she once knew it is therefore over, her body will be forever changed, and all because she let some guy get off in her one night and somehow ended up with a baby.
It’s insulting to think that he would think a girl is “stupid enough” to get pregnant. Maybe she’s dumb, but maybe the condom broke, or the birth control didn’t work, or she took every precaution against getting pregnant and it happened anyway. She just shouldn’t have had sex. Curiously, abstinence is not realistic as a contraception method. The most effective, yes, but people are going to have sex. And you can’t do a thing to stop them. It’s a choice. Why wouldn’t you want women to have choices?
Oddly enough I ended up having a dream about Kyle that night. I dreamt that I was madly in love with him, which happens to be true, but woke up enraged and spewing the planned parenthood campaign and screaming about choices and false feminine standards and the fundamentally flawed construction of ideals and so forth. He told me later that day that he had angry dreams, and woke up infuriated as well, which secretly made me happy that I’d managed to convey my anger to him subconsciously in dreams, over two thousand miles of rocky American terrain. Just wait until he finds out I don’t believe in God.
