“The best thing is to place another before you”
Which is rather loosely quoted William Blake. I just watched the 9:50 séance of Darjeeling Limited. I thought about a lot of things coming back from the movie, whimpered a little bit, and am now unable to express it/anything, not that this is any different than usual. At the end of the movie, I saw Alex Albers who seems to me so different (what a relief), in the bathroom and said to her that “here we go back to our own shitty movie.” My own movie, where God or whoever doesn’t push the color enough and moments are not cut to be epic or pleasurable. Friendship montages.. The reality I come back to is my own buzzing brain that creates drama, the walk home where there is weird Bronxville architecture, the vaguely romantic bridge, cars that stop slightly that I imagine are men, a faint smell I stopped to smell completely today, and the stench of baby poop on the stairwell of my apartment. Maybe the place I live in is gross. People enter bars for the ambiance which is code that a room with decoration and lighting can be a different world. Coffee shops that play Putumayo and have eclectic furniture, and movies have the combination of music and pictures which I can’t recreate just listening to music. When you enter somebody else’s room, you see the paraphernalia scattered that is them, it might seem foreign sometimes. It smells and looks different. This stale place with the prefurnished drawers, stupid ship painting, and the too small freaking desk is probably repulsive, where I scattered my sunglasses and my contacts around. I decided today that my stuff is foreign to me, yet connected. It’s not the same when you look at your own room as when you judge somebody else’s. The light is yellow, the window does not let in enough sun, and I pretend like it’s a Raskolnikov enclave to continue mythologizing the Dina personage I keep adding to for shits and giggles. And Sarah Lawrence, which is somehow supposed to open to the world, is a freaking wasteland with its poor combination of stone/sometimes cobblestone buildings and nobody out at 12:07 AM on a Friday night. It seems like I strike gold when I infiltrate other people’s lives, their furnished rooms like alternate universe pods. But if you set another before you, I figure after a while they won’t be different enough. This is depressing. I’ve done it so many times, talked to a lot of different people about my inability to talk to people. Maybe the best thing is some kind of intuitive connection, a fluidity of speech that goes back and forth, which is what I really want, yet after a while you know the person’s mind. My friend probably sees this in a girl he is going out with, much like a horse with blinders zeros in on the thing in front of it, yet the people around lovebirds generally don’t see as much that is special in either of the two. Any of the “we found each other.” I think people are less looking for a connection than to be continually refreshed with difference. Maybe I just want to fall in love. I think that’s it. I’m really tired of living without passion.
But this melancholy and bullshit, middle class guilt comes when you look at another perspective. Children dying in Darfur, world problems.. But isn’t death ultimately a private problem as well? I don’t understand it. I can barely understand that my parents are in Prague and separated enough from me for me to be worried. Political dialogue should be considered a sport.
It’s surreal, my day as opposed to those of Darjeeling Limited is surreal. Because there is so much back talk going on in my head while the moment is going on differently for other people. So much schmutz.
I had a paper due on Thursday but instead I never read the book, stayed up till 5:00 in the morning the day before, skipped class and then Danny’s class at 3:35, stayed in my room for the purpose of hiding out until the class was significantly over, but ended up sitting on my bed checking facebook over and over again and having OCD episodes. So much for using my time wisely. That day I stayed up till 5:00 again talking to people because I got out of my room at 10:00 and again woke up at 1:37 today. I schlepped around, came to campus, and as usual was depressed that nobody is out doing anything fun. Still I haven’t read the book, just that same vague feeling of restlessness.
I went to Bronxville and ate at Haiku, paying with plastic which is no surprise for me. It was pretty crowded and there were lines, plus overly solicitous waiters that hung around too long pouring water, asked me if I was okay too much, and told me not to hurry when they might as well have said the opposite. As usual I was pretending to be Byronic (a Byronic girl?) and weird with my sweatshirts and notebooks by my chair. I ate the duck appetizer which was good and pleasant but encased in some egg roll shell and with two lettuce leaves to put a westerner to shame. I ate it with my hands and tried not to give a fuck who was looking at me. The sushi, the Passion Roll arranged in corny/flashy hearts was mediocre as Haiku sushi is, but the atmosphere is rather sensuous. Green tea ice cream to finish! Aka I’m an idiot for splurging and having a weak will.
I decided to see Darjeeling Limited and went to the bar with all the candles in it that I’ve been curious about for a while. I thought it was a wine bar because there were adults in it drinking wine, but ends up it’s more about food because when I ordered a glass of Pinot Grigio, the bartender asked me if I wanted food. From what I can tell, the food is pretty good, in big bowls, I saw risotto, what looked like stewed tomatoes, and one big biscuit. The bartender had a shaved head and a big curled black mustache and the maitre d’ had a shaved head and some pencil beard design, looked pretty severe, so I figured that they were Georgian. The music sounded pretty Eastern European and they seemed to be talking in a different language. I chose and cowered in the worst corner spot that the maitre d’ kept coming back to, tapping his hands on the bar for whatever reason, and the bartender hung around, I kept thinking they were looking at me when they were bored, drinking a half glass of wine forever until 3 minutes before the movie. The men seemed pretty rough and misogynistic to me for some reason (why I thought they were Georgian) and the way they were hanging around was oppressive. The ambiance of course rules inside, lanterns with candles in them, candles everywhere, understated enough, “intimate,” but I realize that means that when you’re alone, you can’t enjoy the display, design, and atmosphere for long, stroking the bar top and looking around before the bar becomes a mini world with an uncomfortable mini drama where you’re just sitting like on the subway not knowing where to look. They did have My Fair Lady playing on the tv. Plus the Eastern European nature of the waiters and the fact that the bartender talked to the customers/regulars made it seem authentic and an obviously good restaurant. Ends up the bartender is from Afghanistan. I wonder where the maitre d’ is from. The atmosphere was creepy, I don’t think I’ll be coming back.
Our world and our homework. I think Danny and the professors, all their complexities of thought, the way he pigeonholes Emma Bovary’s world as one without values is suspect. I thought this and forgot why. I was thinking about consciousness. I don’t know, I forget all the things I’ve been thinking about, I don’t think I’ve adequately talked about them.
Oh yeah, and Adrien Brody was hot.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Poetry class..
It's so hard to express oneself. And sometimes so unnecessary. I.e., with blogs, people diss them endlessly and bloggers unconsciously or consciously pander to the entertainment needs of internet passersby. Basically, we have to entertain them with the products of our ranty subconscious. Because it's lonely and unnecessary for some to express themselves on public keyboard. I'm taking a poetry class with Thomas Sayers Ellis and also a class with Danny Kaiser and am in a tailspin. I have a poor grasp on what I want to say, know that I want to say something, but seriously doubt if it's important. Why should anyone read my poetry other than my having to write some? If it came from the heart, when I attempt it, the limits of verse leave me stymied and confused. Some of the core issues I had in my heart, I tried to write them out in a poem and of course it turned out pretty bad.
Cosmopolitanism, reality, boredom with my lifestyle, confusion about the way things actually are or how they feel, that's what I'm trying to talk about. The things I dream of and imagine as liberated, cosmopolitan versions of reality are a combination of foreign countries and what I picture the lives of other people to be like there, science videos that show these sweeping visions of progress, the beauty and subjectivity that strikes me in certain art as well as hints of deviant sexual possibility/darkness, my right to experience this loungey, nightly subjectivity, etc. And plus how with movies I get a refreshing break from my own boring perspective.
Kids in school gas my head. Dina, you're so unique, weird, awkward, this, some things they say, they don't realize I take them as complements. So I become obsessed with my own personality and how I understand what people project back on to me. Dina has to be a certain way. Perhaps this is limiting. I hate the kind of thoughts that turn back in on themselves. And I have no clue what's important, what I should be thinking about, and how I should be experiencing life. This personality that is partially an exaggerated version of one part of me permits itself to be offensive and direct for the sake of humor. So sometimes, I overstep the line with people in thinking of what I can do. They get offended, get brash, and say something mean to me. I'm really sensitive and forget that the things I say could bother other people just as much in different ways. I.e., though I maintain my liberty to make jokes about flexible gender identity and sometimes even black people, when people say mean things about Jews or use the word "gay" I can't really take it. In fact, my brother called me a wuss. Plus, people hate those who talk about themselves but right now I need to.
In Danny's class, I store up so many objections to what he's saying and can't get a chance to say them or anything. When I mention it outside of class, he keeps on rolling with his own opinion. Even my friends have no idea what I'm talking about or can't consent to a session of mental masturbation where we agree/expand on our own viewpoint. Maybe I don't even know what he's saying, Madame Bovary is a confused jumble in my mind. Maybe I just didn't read Henry James carefully enough. Danny keeps dropping extreme statements about modernism but before I can contest them, I have to pinpoint them! I have no clue where I ought to go with conference either. Shrug. This damming up of my thoughts is gonna lead to silence and confusion. I'll have nothing in my brain, let alone nothing orderly. Just a vague feeling of unease and that I'm not learning something I should be or that we're not getting deeply enough into things.
Essentially, my heart and mind's concerns seem to be so reified that they have no way of connecting and I have no way of finding out what's most important.
Cosmopolitanism, reality, boredom with my lifestyle, confusion about the way things actually are or how they feel, that's what I'm trying to talk about. The things I dream of and imagine as liberated, cosmopolitan versions of reality are a combination of foreign countries and what I picture the lives of other people to be like there, science videos that show these sweeping visions of progress, the beauty and subjectivity that strikes me in certain art as well as hints of deviant sexual possibility/darkness, my right to experience this loungey, nightly subjectivity, etc. And plus how with movies I get a refreshing break from my own boring perspective.
Kids in school gas my head. Dina, you're so unique, weird, awkward, this, some things they say, they don't realize I take them as complements. So I become obsessed with my own personality and how I understand what people project back on to me. Dina has to be a certain way. Perhaps this is limiting. I hate the kind of thoughts that turn back in on themselves. And I have no clue what's important, what I should be thinking about, and how I should be experiencing life. This personality that is partially an exaggerated version of one part of me permits itself to be offensive and direct for the sake of humor. So sometimes, I overstep the line with people in thinking of what I can do. They get offended, get brash, and say something mean to me. I'm really sensitive and forget that the things I say could bother other people just as much in different ways. I.e., though I maintain my liberty to make jokes about flexible gender identity and sometimes even black people, when people say mean things about Jews or use the word "gay" I can't really take it. In fact, my brother called me a wuss. Plus, people hate those who talk about themselves but right now I need to.
In Danny's class, I store up so many objections to what he's saying and can't get a chance to say them or anything. When I mention it outside of class, he keeps on rolling with his own opinion. Even my friends have no idea what I'm talking about or can't consent to a session of mental masturbation where we agree/expand on our own viewpoint. Maybe I don't even know what he's saying, Madame Bovary is a confused jumble in my mind. Maybe I just didn't read Henry James carefully enough. Danny keeps dropping extreme statements about modernism but before I can contest them, I have to pinpoint them! I have no clue where I ought to go with conference either. Shrug. This damming up of my thoughts is gonna lead to silence and confusion. I'll have nothing in my brain, let alone nothing orderly. Just a vague feeling of unease and that I'm not learning something I should be or that we're not getting deeply enough into things.
Essentially, my heart and mind's concerns seem to be so reified that they have no way of connecting and I have no way of finding out what's most important.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Saturn Return
I've been watching, shit, another sentence beginning with I've been watching, a lot of shows that deal with 30 year olds, like Sex and the City on the computer. Other than realizing how crappy the writing and characterization in that series is, I've kind of been observing that lifestyle and feeling 21 going on 30 in the magical way that you know it's safe since its not true. The same way I ask my dad "are you cheating" because I'm hoping it's not true. But I watch movies so I have to get the parallel advice from my parents about real, functioning relationships. 30 years old, in astrological jargon is the time of your Saturn Return. Saturn is a planet that deals in the harsh reality, so the years around this time are a reality check and usually difficult things happen. Basically, you've made your bed and now you consider whether you choose to lie in it. As you reflect on the things you did to get to this point, you grow up. This usually involves leaving or staying in relationships, reevaluating the way you deal with the people you know. It's a pretty scary time and often people you love die in it. Carrie and the rest of them have made their bed as single women and are considering whether to settle down, continue recycling relationships, as well as other dating problems. I've said it before, this and other stuff I've seen Sarah Jessica Parker in makes me cynical about relationships, particularly the fear of smooth sailing.
This idea seems to imply that we're babies at 21, or as a man I knew said "women are idiots until 26, men until 30." I read Joan Didion's essay, "Goodbye to All That," in which she talks about how she lived in New York for 8 years since she moved there in her early 20s and why she decided to leave. She calls it a city for the very young and the way she talks about appreciating so much more coming from Sacramento, California reminds me of the Midwest hipsters that move to Williamsburg. She can't imagine people from the East appreciating it as much as someone from far West bumblefuck who's never heard of it. I think she's wrong there, she's never met someone from Connecticut who would go there occasionally with parents whose idea of a New York outing meant getting up at 6:00, driving there at 9:00 for a museum, a theater production, dinner, and then leaving full of purpose. "Cultural" people like my parents. Or what it means when you can get up at 12:00, take a 15 minute van or 40 minute train that comes regularly and is at walking distance, and stay till fucking 6:00 in the morning the next day if you so desire. It is a city for the very young and the very not from there, I couldn't have said it better myself. When you're that close, you want to go every fucking weekend while you were far enough away before to come maybe once every month. I sympathize with a recently graduated senior I met on the last train to Fairfield who scored a job in an ad agency but still lives with her parents, except unlike her, I wouldn't have to be forced to come to happy hour.
Aanyway, she talked about how naive and happy she was, how she saw the world and New York as a new opportunity until at the ripe age of 28 every sight in New York began to seem the same to her.
Before Sunset, one of the most depressing movies to me, is a Saturn Return movie. It is our 30 year old selves looking back at our 23 year old selves and forecasting that the world full of opportunity is closed. Julie Delpy says that it makes her sad to think how much she believed in the possibility of romantic love on the night, she and Ethan Hawke review their past relationships and reflect how important a missed chance was and how their longterm lives turned out a mess. She slaps me, the viewer when she says, wake up, the world is a mess and doesn't even accept the possibility of good. It's weird to know that all the doors you think are open will close.
I hate how this mindset doesn't take 21 year olds seriously, yet my 23 year old friends comment that they feel old. What kind of Saturn Return is 21, when you're legally an adult? Me, I feel like I'm at the top of a downward rollercoaster, on the brink of sliding toward 30, when I'll feel like my days are numbered and start telling kids about how time flies.
Other than that, there's the open book of senior year. Even when a friend of mine that was a senior this year was drunk, she was telling me in the Malt House bathroom, "I don't know what I'm going to do with my life next year, I mean, I haven't heard from any of my grad schools, I don't have an apartment." I know everyone will be scared shitless. If they find a decent apartment and some job with hourly wage that has nothing to do with their background, they'll whine to me like my friend who sent out tons of job applications in the past two weeks that they miss college because they have so many responsibilities now.
I figure 21 is the age when you begin to make your bed. It's frightening because you may or may not find a (shitty) place to live with a roommate further away from Brooklyn, maybe in Astoria, maybe in Kensington or further, Brighton Beach. It will take you months to find a job even if you have a good GPA, likely in the storage section of a bookstore if you're lucky, with an hourly salary because the idea of getting $30,000 a year after your BA is a dream for someone with no major and "writing skills." As in research paper writing skills. Likely you're weekends will be spent with microwaveable burgers or going to free events around New York.
What makes the 21 year old so happy go lucky, so ready to travel to France with $500 and live in squatter settlements is like The Fool in the Tarot. You can choose to take the path of someone who goes with the flow and mysteriously ends up in foreign countries (teaching in South Korea, backpacking in Vietnam..) claiming to have no money. Most people do this throughout college and some in high school. Or you can pretend that this time doesn't present you with serious choices if you're like me and not quite done with being an undergraduate student. You can hope things will sort themselves out because you're a few years behind everyone else in development. The fool has their eyes to the skies and past some of the barriers that are actually in front of them, but I think the influence of the actually Saturnian age of 21 pulls you right down to graduate school or job, professor or editor, cupcake baker or cashier.
This idea seems to imply that we're babies at 21, or as a man I knew said "women are idiots until 26, men until 30." I read Joan Didion's essay, "Goodbye to All That," in which she talks about how she lived in New York for 8 years since she moved there in her early 20s and why she decided to leave. She calls it a city for the very young and the way she talks about appreciating so much more coming from Sacramento, California reminds me of the Midwest hipsters that move to Williamsburg. She can't imagine people from the East appreciating it as much as someone from far West bumblefuck who's never heard of it. I think she's wrong there, she's never met someone from Connecticut who would go there occasionally with parents whose idea of a New York outing meant getting up at 6:00, driving there at 9:00 for a museum, a theater production, dinner, and then leaving full of purpose. "Cultural" people like my parents. Or what it means when you can get up at 12:00, take a 15 minute van or 40 minute train that comes regularly and is at walking distance, and stay till fucking 6:00 in the morning the next day if you so desire. It is a city for the very young and the very not from there, I couldn't have said it better myself. When you're that close, you want to go every fucking weekend while you were far enough away before to come maybe once every month. I sympathize with a recently graduated senior I met on the last train to Fairfield who scored a job in an ad agency but still lives with her parents, except unlike her, I wouldn't have to be forced to come to happy hour.
Aanyway, she talked about how naive and happy she was, how she saw the world and New York as a new opportunity until at the ripe age of 28 every sight in New York began to seem the same to her.
Before Sunset, one of the most depressing movies to me, is a Saturn Return movie. It is our 30 year old selves looking back at our 23 year old selves and forecasting that the world full of opportunity is closed. Julie Delpy says that it makes her sad to think how much she believed in the possibility of romantic love on the night, she and Ethan Hawke review their past relationships and reflect how important a missed chance was and how their longterm lives turned out a mess. She slaps me, the viewer when she says, wake up, the world is a mess and doesn't even accept the possibility of good. It's weird to know that all the doors you think are open will close.
I hate how this mindset doesn't take 21 year olds seriously, yet my 23 year old friends comment that they feel old. What kind of Saturn Return is 21, when you're legally an adult? Me, I feel like I'm at the top of a downward rollercoaster, on the brink of sliding toward 30, when I'll feel like my days are numbered and start telling kids about how time flies.
Other than that, there's the open book of senior year. Even when a friend of mine that was a senior this year was drunk, she was telling me in the Malt House bathroom, "I don't know what I'm going to do with my life next year, I mean, I haven't heard from any of my grad schools, I don't have an apartment." I know everyone will be scared shitless. If they find a decent apartment and some job with hourly wage that has nothing to do with their background, they'll whine to me like my friend who sent out tons of job applications in the past two weeks that they miss college because they have so many responsibilities now.
I figure 21 is the age when you begin to make your bed. It's frightening because you may or may not find a (shitty) place to live with a roommate further away from Brooklyn, maybe in Astoria, maybe in Kensington or further, Brighton Beach. It will take you months to find a job even if you have a good GPA, likely in the storage section of a bookstore if you're lucky, with an hourly salary because the idea of getting $30,000 a year after your BA is a dream for someone with no major and "writing skills." As in research paper writing skills. Likely you're weekends will be spent with microwaveable burgers or going to free events around New York.
What makes the 21 year old so happy go lucky, so ready to travel to France with $500 and live in squatter settlements is like The Fool in the Tarot. You can choose to take the path of someone who goes with the flow and mysteriously ends up in foreign countries (teaching in South Korea, backpacking in Vietnam..) claiming to have no money. Most people do this throughout college and some in high school. Or you can pretend that this time doesn't present you with serious choices if you're like me and not quite done with being an undergraduate student. You can hope things will sort themselves out because you're a few years behind everyone else in development. The fool has their eyes to the skies and past some of the barriers that are actually in front of them, but I think the influence of the actually Saturnian age of 21 pulls you right down to graduate school or job, professor or editor, cupcake baker or cashier.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
School starting
School is going to start. I decided to come to it with a healthy satisfaction with my own summer and a healthy refusal to be jealous of anybody else's. I decided to say, no matter whether they were in Paris or Africa, they must have been lonely or had lousy times occasionally as well. Because I remember the times I would finally go abroad on a trip and be completely dissatisfied. My trip to Paris when I was 14, I was depressed for the first two days and didn't really like the city, but liked Provence a whole lot better. I claim that I just didn't know to appreciate it back then to vindicate my Paris obsession. (For my birthday in senior year of high school, a friend got me a sign for my door that said I'm in Paris, come back later). Almost all the time, I would be upset about one thing or another when abroad, though. Lonely and embarrassed or uncomfortable because I've only ever traveled with my parents, unhappy in the knowledge that I should and ought to be happy but am not.. I imagined a map of the world with me as a before and after dot to compare how far away I was from the US when I travelled to Ukraine and to dramatize that I had never been there, but like I settle into losing things I really care about, I got blase about being in a place I never visited before. I got used to Thailand, Italy, Germany this way and then when I come back, I dream about going to Europe for months. My mom says this is because I'm never satisfied about where I am in the present moment and never will be (this is her cop out when I complained to her about Sarah Lawrence as if I'm trying to place responsibility on her), while I try to remind her that I have been happy before. When I told her that everybody complains about Sarah Lawrence, she says that it's our "artistic temperament" that makes us dissatisfied with everything. When I wanted to transfer, I would watch how people would say that they were much happier in other colleges. As far as whining about wanting to go abroad alone, my mom's first reaction is to cut responsibility from it with "We're not stopping you." Yeah, but fuck all are you helping.
But then I went on the facebook. The place I learn what normal people do or would like others to believe they do. And of course I'm jealous of the people that went to Africa and Buenos Aires and want to pretend that their parents funded it all or to ignore the friends that come back all transformed from abroad. I won't even bother asking them how it was. The American tradition is to either say 'fine' or to give a partial answer that I can't bother waiting to puzzle out in their later passing remarks and stories. I get overwhelmed enough when I think someone sincerely wants to know how I passed the time and am meanwhile trying to remember all the details myself. It's weird, the in between path is bad, the full revelation is exhausting even though I have to chronicle a trip I took for myself in full, and the 'fine' is a big fuck you. If they say fine, I am not going to juggle around for the appropriate questions to get them to spill it. Saying instead of how was your summer, 'What did you do this summer,' (every week of all three months, I mean), 'What things in consecutive order did you do every day of this summer,' I have no time to figure out how to rephrase these questions while they get annoyed. I'll probably just write them off for a while. I don't know how to seek an empathetic middle ground where I don't try to see their humanity by saying that they must have had tough times too or enviously make them out to be something more than human, a smiling, travelling, simple person, the kind that according to my mom don't go to my school. Plus ignoring them with an "I bet the change that took place in you your junior year abroad is so overwhelming that I don't even want to hear all or half of it, or to talk to your modest ass until you get in the depressed Sarah Lawrence rut and forget you were ever enviable" is pretty stupid anyway.
I'm reading The Bell Jar right now because I never have and I think I'm starting to sound like Sylvia Plath's main character. I thought it was supposed to be dark and kind of forbidden like Go Ask Alice. What strikes me is all the antiquated expressions (gosh!, I can't think of any, but so weird to think that Sylvia Plath thought or talked like this, you'd think her cosmopolitan and Bloomsbury) and ideas, the lack of options girls of the time had. The amount of miscommunications in the book could make it a tragic situation comedy. The things that the girl leaves off saying and explaining, shite psychiatrists that give her shock treatments for no apparent reason, a mother and other people that have no idea of what's going on in her head. Tragic dramatic irony. And the dumbass things that supposedly intelligent people or the misguided adults in the book say. I could never picture rich, college educated girls in wild New York waiting to be scooped up by a career man or someone who hates the idea of marriage to have a broodful of kids and a husband as a back up plan in the whole book, typists, shorthand...
But then I went on the facebook. The place I learn what normal people do or would like others to believe they do. And of course I'm jealous of the people that went to Africa and Buenos Aires and want to pretend that their parents funded it all or to ignore the friends that come back all transformed from abroad. I won't even bother asking them how it was. The American tradition is to either say 'fine' or to give a partial answer that I can't bother waiting to puzzle out in their later passing remarks and stories. I get overwhelmed enough when I think someone sincerely wants to know how I passed the time and am meanwhile trying to remember all the details myself. It's weird, the in between path is bad, the full revelation is exhausting even though I have to chronicle a trip I took for myself in full, and the 'fine' is a big fuck you. If they say fine, I am not going to juggle around for the appropriate questions to get them to spill it. Saying instead of how was your summer, 'What did you do this summer,' (every week of all three months, I mean), 'What things in consecutive order did you do every day of this summer,' I have no time to figure out how to rephrase these questions while they get annoyed. I'll probably just write them off for a while. I don't know how to seek an empathetic middle ground where I don't try to see their humanity by saying that they must have had tough times too or enviously make them out to be something more than human, a smiling, travelling, simple person, the kind that according to my mom don't go to my school. Plus ignoring them with an "I bet the change that took place in you your junior year abroad is so overwhelming that I don't even want to hear all or half of it, or to talk to your modest ass until you get in the depressed Sarah Lawrence rut and forget you were ever enviable" is pretty stupid anyway.
I'm reading The Bell Jar right now because I never have and I think I'm starting to sound like Sylvia Plath's main character. I thought it was supposed to be dark and kind of forbidden like Go Ask Alice. What strikes me is all the antiquated expressions (gosh!, I can't think of any, but so weird to think that Sylvia Plath thought or talked like this, you'd think her cosmopolitan and Bloomsbury) and ideas, the lack of options girls of the time had. The amount of miscommunications in the book could make it a tragic situation comedy. The things that the girl leaves off saying and explaining, shite psychiatrists that give her shock treatments for no apparent reason, a mother and other people that have no idea of what's going on in her head. Tragic dramatic irony. And the dumbass things that supposedly intelligent people or the misguided adults in the book say. I could never picture rich, college educated girls in wild New York waiting to be scooped up by a career man or someone who hates the idea of marriage to have a broodful of kids and a husband as a back up plan in the whole book, typists, shorthand...
Sunday, July 22, 2007
overshare
Something I just realized, these are four of the songs that shaped my childhood sexuality:
"Cherish"
"Love Will Never Do Without You"
"If"
and "That's The Way Love Goes"
are by Madonna and Janet Jackson respectively, and there are probably others by them, I can think of "Like A Prayer," "Human Nature," and "Take A Bow" which always used to disturb and depress me, but those in particular. And the crazy thing is the resemblance between the first two that I knew subconsciously but did not think about until now due to the fact, as I just discovered, that they were both directed by Herb Ritts! Janet Jackson criticizes Madonna for her limited vocal range and use of scandals and yet uses her "preferred photographer" to produce a video to revamp her image as sexy and he churns out a video suspiciously like "Cherish." oneupmanship much? So it was Herb Ritts who made me doubt my sexuality because I thought I was supposed to be attracted to men who look like Chippendales and wasn't. (thank god for moving to a new middle school and the medium built to waifish trend that hit around that time and has apexed about now with the indie boys, seriously, plus my somewhat newfound appreciation for more aggressive male musculature since thanks to college I have an idea of what waify boys look like without their flattering shirts). And of course Herb Ritts is gay, which explains the butt exposure of muscular, naked men, because I believe that gay men have a butt obsession only equalled by the 40 year old, Fabio loving women who hire Chippendales at bachelorette parties. I think most of my peers dig their men slightly scrawnier (and paler?) and don't have as many preferences with regards to minor muscles, like how big a guy's latissimus dorsi ought to be. The Chippendale man rolling around under the sheets with Cindy Crawford is about the idea of sex I had in 4th and 5th grade even though I learned about it when I was 6 and friends with 13 year-old Olga who told me about menstruation and I responded "nah,"
aka I'm a spring chicken, when I first learned about sexual things:
penis: an elevator, the pale blond kid in preschool
before and after that, Greek statues. Boy was I surprised (and grossed out, actually) after my first experience with porn that they can be hard, or even big. I was particularly grossed out because I compared them to something I knew better, excrement. I had no idea what was so attractive about women mouthing long bloodshot poo or gargling white stuff in their mouths.
sex with women: One time my neighbor Stephanie and I covered our mouths and pretended to kiss under the covers of my bed. I was tortured by the idea that I had sex with a girl for a long time afterward.
hard on: a play called "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me" about three men locked up together in a cell in the Middle East. One guy had a dream with another man in it, the man did something and he said, he/it "gave him a hard on." And I thought that meant a guy gripping your penis hard while you give him a piggy back ride for the longest time.
porn: in 6th grade my parents and I were invited to the house of Michael K., a good guitar-playing boy with no tv.
semen: in 6th grade I was in the Westport YMCA after school program run in their upstairs daycare before it was transferred to Mahackeno, the Nilla Wafers and stale carrots snacks and "Sex and Candy," that Fastball song, and that Goo Goo Dolls song until I was about to puke.. are memories beside the point. Maureen was the caretaker who wore dowdy sweaters over turtlenecks and had huge hips over which she wore pleated slacks, played gin rummy with me, and lived in Seymour, CT as I recall, ironically. She had the habit of using the word seamen instead of sailors and the bitchy, advanced Westport kids used to laugh when she said it and I didn't know why. And I was similarly confused when Emily in 6th grade TAG laughed at the name Alan Cumming.
I know I must have learned something in middle school health other than Coach Simone's "Rearls of Wisdom" and coffee addiction, but the only time I fully understood or memorized the workings of the penis, the purpose of the testicles or that men even had them, sperm, and words like vas deferens was in high school health. I was asked the question "spit or swallow" way before I knew what it meant, maybe like in elementary school.
urinals: Fuck you, Marcel Duchamp. Though I've seen plenty of movies with guys peeing next to each other, I remember my surprise when I entered a men's bathroom by mistake (in Heimbold??) and realized that the urinals were backwards.
jacking off: thanks again, Michael K who went to Adventure Camp with me a while after our first meeting. Some boys ran out of their cabin and told us that they caught him jacking off with shampoo. Though I had no idea how this was done, I called him Jack for the rest of the summer.
cunnilingus:
my friend maxene's George Carlin poster
"Cherish"
"Love Will Never Do Without You"
"If"
and "That's The Way Love Goes"
are by Madonna and Janet Jackson respectively, and there are probably others by them, I can think of "Like A Prayer," "Human Nature," and "Take A Bow" which always used to disturb and depress me, but those in particular. And the crazy thing is the resemblance between the first two that I knew subconsciously but did not think about until now due to the fact, as I just discovered, that they were both directed by Herb Ritts! Janet Jackson criticizes Madonna for her limited vocal range and use of scandals and yet uses her "preferred photographer" to produce a video to revamp her image as sexy and he churns out a video suspiciously like "Cherish." oneupmanship much? So it was Herb Ritts who made me doubt my sexuality because I thought I was supposed to be attracted to men who look like Chippendales and wasn't. (thank god for moving to a new middle school and the medium built to waifish trend that hit around that time and has apexed about now with the indie boys, seriously, plus my somewhat newfound appreciation for more aggressive male musculature since thanks to college I have an idea of what waify boys look like without their flattering shirts). And of course Herb Ritts is gay, which explains the butt exposure of muscular, naked men, because I believe that gay men have a butt obsession only equalled by the 40 year old, Fabio loving women who hire Chippendales at bachelorette parties. I think most of my peers dig their men slightly scrawnier (and paler?) and don't have as many preferences with regards to minor muscles, like how big a guy's latissimus dorsi ought to be. The Chippendale man rolling around under the sheets with Cindy Crawford is about the idea of sex I had in 4th and 5th grade even though I learned about it when I was 6 and friends with 13 year-old Olga who told me about menstruation and I responded "nah,"
aka I'm a spring chicken, when I first learned about sexual things:
penis: an elevator, the pale blond kid in preschool
before and after that, Greek statues. Boy was I surprised (and grossed out, actually) after my first experience with porn that they can be hard, or even big. I was particularly grossed out because I compared them to something I knew better, excrement. I had no idea what was so attractive about women mouthing long bloodshot poo or gargling white stuff in their mouths.
sex with women: One time my neighbor Stephanie and I covered our mouths and pretended to kiss under the covers of my bed. I was tortured by the idea that I had sex with a girl for a long time afterward.
hard on: a play called "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me" about three men locked up together in a cell in the Middle East. One guy had a dream with another man in it, the man did something and he said, he/it "gave him a hard on." And I thought that meant a guy gripping your penis hard while you give him a piggy back ride for the longest time.
porn: in 6th grade my parents and I were invited to the house of Michael K., a good guitar-playing boy with no tv.
semen: in 6th grade I was in the Westport YMCA after school program run in their upstairs daycare before it was transferred to Mahackeno, the Nilla Wafers and stale carrots snacks and "Sex and Candy," that Fastball song, and that Goo Goo Dolls song until I was about to puke.. are memories beside the point. Maureen was the caretaker who wore dowdy sweaters over turtlenecks and had huge hips over which she wore pleated slacks, played gin rummy with me, and lived in Seymour, CT as I recall, ironically. She had the habit of using the word seamen instead of sailors and the bitchy, advanced Westport kids used to laugh when she said it and I didn't know why. And I was similarly confused when Emily in 6th grade TAG laughed at the name Alan Cumming.
I know I must have learned something in middle school health other than Coach Simone's "Rearls of Wisdom" and coffee addiction, but the only time I fully understood or memorized the workings of the penis, the purpose of the testicles or that men even had them, sperm, and words like vas deferens was in high school health. I was asked the question "spit or swallow" way before I knew what it meant, maybe like in elementary school.
urinals: Fuck you, Marcel Duchamp. Though I've seen plenty of movies with guys peeing next to each other, I remember my surprise when I entered a men's bathroom by mistake (in Heimbold??) and realized that the urinals were backwards.
jacking off: thanks again, Michael K who went to Adventure Camp with me a while after our first meeting. Some boys ran out of their cabin and told us that they caught him jacking off with shampoo. Though I had no idea how this was done, I called him Jack for the rest of the summer.
cunnilingus:
my friend maxene's George Carlin poster
Sunday, July 15, 2007
I just woke up to sounds of human wolf-crying and caterwhauling, maybe several people talking, maybe three youngsters homicidally drunk walking on the road arguing with each other, maybe people laughing, maybe, on closer inspection, it is the party advertised on the road across me by two signs near the road sign with a picture of a Ziggy looking man with a fedora opening his trenchcoat and a red arrow that said something like DSBB2 on it hiding his goods. When we walked by the house that was going to have it, there were a series of white round tables, some under a tent, and only one outside of the tent actually filled with four older men, one sitting on a cooler. They were blasting fifties music and it didn't look like we could come over and ask what party they were waiting for so my mom and I went on walking. Maybe it was a reunion of classmates in the fifties or people who like fifties music or a charity ball or a hobby convention. My house is on a main road and the house in question is on a road adjoining the main one that forms a loop.
This is what the road looks like, it appears between some trees. I come from the Ernest Shepard school of drawing.
This is what the loop as we call it would look like on a map.
I live in a small, very wooded suburb with two acre zoning (the "center" consists of several brick houses, a small market, a gas station, a post office, a gift shop, and a pharmacy) so the only noise I hear at night is typically cars rushing by, coyotes, other animals and I have no idea who my new "next-door" neighbors are who built a driveway separated from us by a large stone wall and live right in the woods, and who I am nervous can hear us arguing. And of course, though I walk around all the time, I have no idea who lives in any house I pass other than people who were once on my bus route (who I haven't seen since they were on my bus route) and get very excited to see someone my age or anyone walking at all because it happens so rarely.
So at night, I hear what I think is the barking laughter of men and a fifties song which isn't "In the Still of the Night." Maybe it was a reunion reel because the laughter was so measured? Maybe they were barking drunk? And my imagination, old and brittle as it is, went to the first movie media and pictured one of those giddy fifties outdoor parties with Christmas lights, bottles on the trees (Southern), and libidinal shy girls dancing with greasers. Why is it that I have these stereotypes about "when life was exciting?" Like cows fed on human growth hormone or the flesh of other cows, I am a girl fed on terrible commercial movies from the HBO2s, HBO familys, HBO cinemas, of the IO generation. Or maybe just some lonely person with no view past a failing academic life and shitty summer.
This is what the road looks like, it appears between some trees. I come from the Ernest Shepard school of drawing.
This is what the loop as we call it would look like on a map.
I live in a small, very wooded suburb with two acre zoning (the "center" consists of several brick houses, a small market, a gas station, a post office, a gift shop, and a pharmacy) so the only noise I hear at night is typically cars rushing by, coyotes, other animals and I have no idea who my new "next-door" neighbors are who built a driveway separated from us by a large stone wall and live right in the woods, and who I am nervous can hear us arguing. And of course, though I walk around all the time, I have no idea who lives in any house I pass other than people who were once on my bus route (who I haven't seen since they were on my bus route) and get very excited to see someone my age or anyone walking at all because it happens so rarely.
So at night, I hear what I think is the barking laughter of men and a fifties song which isn't "In the Still of the Night." Maybe it was a reunion reel because the laughter was so measured? Maybe they were barking drunk? And my imagination, old and brittle as it is, went to the first movie media and pictured one of those giddy fifties outdoor parties with Christmas lights, bottles on the trees (Southern), and libidinal shy girls dancing with greasers. Why is it that I have these stereotypes about "when life was exciting?" Like cows fed on human growth hormone or the flesh of other cows, I am a girl fed on terrible commercial movies from the HBO2s, HBO familys, HBO cinemas, of the IO generation. Or maybe just some lonely person with no view past a failing academic life and shitty summer.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Theorists
Wow, on perusing the post below, I do go to college and ain't it obvious? The time when students are stimulated to put a padlock on their mouth and writing when realizing that someone's trying to help them climb up a giant. (In the sense that we suddenly realize that what we might write might be sophomoric, can't hope to be original, is merely us... the more we, as Faulkner says, "write write write, read read read"). Even that now I feel certain people, including myself, must shut up and not even make small chit chat about certain subjects (like personal philosophies, my pet peeve) unless they have a pHD. That's what it feels like. I have wanted to bone up on the greats, to devour them all, to "gird my loins," in my whole career at Sarah Lawrence College. I'm going to be a senior now.
The people in school, because it is such a crazy liberal one have been way against my 1950's history textbook reading, 101 mentality. Or at least, they have a different idea and I suspect think that my hungry ghost thing is stupid.
In college I also discovered academics with different opinions. Journal articles that sum up all the research that's been done before and variously dis it as stupid or inadequate or missing an avenue that the article will spend filling. Critics that denigrate maybe what I like or each other's work as vapid or missing something. At the core, I think, they think of themselves as people who make good judgment calls. And I've wanted to be that, to analytically piece something apart and realize why I'm the best judge. Or to be like Peter Abelard, the young academic whippersnapper who goes against all the other old opinions and proves they are right. Frequently these academics shift the perspective in a mind-boggling way. They make me realize something new, an alternative I've never seen before. And that's frightening. That's what a lot of revisionist historians, critics, theoreticians of race have done, pulled the ground from under us in a cocky, snobby way. A way that refuses to translate from ancient Greek and Latvian, sometimes (in the case of postcolonial theory) a way that fires off references we're supposed to know without explaining and simultaneously mind-fucking us, a way that sneers at the "undergraduate mentality" or "well, this is good enough for undergraduate students" in comparison to serious scholars. The word scholar, such a humbling one indicating continuing learning.
I'm afraid of these theorists who make the ground spin underneath me just when I thought I was getting it. Maybe they've been spoiled comparing too many greats or observing too much historical phenomena. But critics are mean. Telling us that, "No, you don't understand how things really are, they're much more complicated," and imply, "I understand, I'm right, let me show you, you dolt."
And us with our undergraduate papers, bumbling through various essays not quite at ease with casual academic talk and jargon. The best thing about honorable academic speak is at least it's trying to make things clear. Maybe underneath someone's reinterpretation of Henry James is a lot of heart.
But the thing is, I'm in no position to talk about this, I'm the worst procrastinator I know and barely read. Plus, the worst thing is to do some idiosyncrology (a term from the genius Hipster Handbook: http://www.foodcourtdruids.com/idio.html), or make fun defining generalizations about something you know nothing about. Something that less qualified Sarah Lawrence students than me do all the time.
The people in school, because it is such a crazy liberal one have been way against my 1950's history textbook reading, 101 mentality. Or at least, they have a different idea and I suspect think that my hungry ghost thing is stupid.
In college I also discovered academics with different opinions. Journal articles that sum up all the research that's been done before and variously dis it as stupid or inadequate or missing an avenue that the article will spend filling. Critics that denigrate maybe what I like or each other's work as vapid or missing something. At the core, I think, they think of themselves as people who make good judgment calls. And I've wanted to be that, to analytically piece something apart and realize why I'm the best judge. Or to be like Peter Abelard, the young academic whippersnapper who goes against all the other old opinions and proves they are right. Frequently these academics shift the perspective in a mind-boggling way. They make me realize something new, an alternative I've never seen before. And that's frightening. That's what a lot of revisionist historians, critics, theoreticians of race have done, pulled the ground from under us in a cocky, snobby way. A way that refuses to translate from ancient Greek and Latvian, sometimes (in the case of postcolonial theory) a way that fires off references we're supposed to know without explaining and simultaneously mind-fucking us, a way that sneers at the "undergraduate mentality" or "well, this is good enough for undergraduate students" in comparison to serious scholars. The word scholar, such a humbling one indicating continuing learning.
I'm afraid of these theorists who make the ground spin underneath me just when I thought I was getting it. Maybe they've been spoiled comparing too many greats or observing too much historical phenomena. But critics are mean. Telling us that, "No, you don't understand how things really are, they're much more complicated," and imply, "I understand, I'm right, let me show you, you dolt."
And us with our undergraduate papers, bumbling through various essays not quite at ease with casual academic talk and jargon. The best thing about honorable academic speak is at least it's trying to make things clear. Maybe underneath someone's reinterpretation of Henry James is a lot of heart.
But the thing is, I'm in no position to talk about this, I'm the worst procrastinator I know and barely read. Plus, the worst thing is to do some idiosyncrology (a term from the genius Hipster Handbook: http://www.foodcourtdruids.com/idio.html), or make fun defining generalizations about something you know nothing about. Something that less qualified Sarah Lawrence students than me do all the time.
Monday, December 25, 2006
Julien Sorel, The Red and the Black
Hi, I'm considering moving to this blog if I can make it look attractive and comfortable. I also plan to fill it with whatever tripe strikes my mind because this is the trend on these things. I have a blog-type thing I've been on and think it's okay to pollute the internet more with my writing because it is already a barrel of crap as it is. The first thing I would like to say is that I am amazed at the idiocy of "well-read" bloggers and Amazon reviewers. The pompous tone, the things they say, oh what very curious-minded single "stitch bitch" ugly fiance Harry Potter bookworms we are. I have a cow against these sort of female bloggers that I've found that stink of English major exhaust or those that stand on their purple prose soap box with their long-winded rambles about the World Wars. The things you people deign to read. As long as it has a picture, capital letters with a short caption about one's cat or latest knitting creation, it's a-okay. We'll be flooding the comments with "you go girl." And meditations about life written in outrageously long sentences. Dag yo. I advise these people to get/work on a doctorate before they attempt to sympathetically discuss anything. Katrina, literature, or anything. I mean picking up self-help books, Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging in the Barnes and Noble along with your crap translation of Madame Bovary... So let me get right to what I was trying to say: whatever dumbass thinks that Julien Sorel is an unsympathetic character who is just full of crusty ambition, did you read the book at all?
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