Thursday, April 30, 2009
Dream
I live in Portugal and I play bass in a band. In fact, the entire dream is in Portuguese. I can't actually confirm this because there weren't any subtitles and I don't actually speak Portuguese.Our music is really simple one-note, like songs that you use to teach kindergarteners the alphabet, not that there's anything wrong with that per se. It's also a little whiny. Not that there's anything wrong with that per se either. Basically, our music is crap. Our first album was really cutting-edge, and our second album was pretty good too, but now we just keep producing the same crap over and over again and people eat it up. Our concerts sell out venues and the press is always camped outside the recording studio asking me who designed my shoes and who I got drinks with last night.
It's not that I hate what I do for a living; it's just I don't feel creatively challenged and truthfully, it's eating away at my soul. I feel like I've been wearing someone else's tight, smelly clothes for too long and I just want to feel comfortable in my own skin, in my own life. But Tinny, Meena and Pablo, my bandmates - they actually believe in what we do, and they're like my family. I've known them since high school. They're really sincere about the whole thing and they actually feel creatively challenged. This is what they've always wanted and they are fulfilled. Which alienates me from them even further. Also, the fact that the public loves us makes me feel like a fraud. But I can't strike out on my own, because I don't have the skills or the aptitude to create my own musical vision. And besides, if I did leave, I think it would wreck Tinny, Meena and Pablo. Who else do we have in this city, in this world, who understands our journey or what we do? This is their dream but I'm a part of it. Once upon a time it was my dream, but now it's not. The problem is, I don't have another one. And besides, is there anything worse than ripping someone's dream out of their hands, especially if you helped build it?
In the evenings I stand on the balcony of my apartment and watch the sun set over Lisbon. My apartment is my sanctuary, and it's beautiful. All light and windows and mid-century modern furniture and hand-blown colored bottles of glass.
It's not that bad, I tell myself as I chain-smoke.
I ask myself what I'm going to do over and over again. The thing is, I've been asking myself this question so long that I can't even hear the answer anymore.
normal behavior
len: I think some people shouldn't have to adhere to standard norms of behavior. Like you especially. so if you do this don't try to evaulate the normalcy of it. it's not normal. but you're not normal.
me: why me especially? wtf does that mean? you make me sound like some crazy erratic person.
len: ...
me: What, you think I'm mentally unstable now?
len: You are not normal.
me: ?
It's not like I come into the office naked or innapropriately grope people or fart in public places.
len: no, it's like more internalized than that. the crazy isn't on the outside. it's like on the inside. you're socialized to act normally but you find outlets for your inner crazy.
me: so you're saying i'm not like the guy who came into my office wearing like kilts and ate pie out of a garbage can, and he didn't shower
len: no, you're more original than that. but i bet that guy had a crush on you.
me: oh my god!! he did how did you know?
len: i swear, the crazies know you. they see pas t the facade of a relatively well adjusted person who talks faitrly intelligently about politics and has good manners. all the pewople who really really love you have some sort of weird dark shit going on. thy]re hiding their internal weirdness. and you're like a crazy magnet and when they're near you they like start vibrating and feel the need to act out. and they know you understadn them on some level. your soulmates are really weird poeple pretending to benormal. and they can relx in your presence becasue it's like oh here's a nice cute girl who is so fucking crazy she won't judge me.
me: kilt guy wasn't hiding anything. and i don't think he was dark, just unshowered and he's not my soulmate. as far as i know.
len: he's a bad example., but whatever, you like weird fucked up people too. you're all kindred spirit with them. normal people bore you and make you pouke. yoe have no interest in getting coffee with them
me: you make me sound liek a serial killer.
len: no you're just very diane arbus without the photography.
and indian
me: so i need to find myself like a furry robert downey jr.?
len: that was an aweful movie.
me: i know it was the bigges tpiece of shit. i wanted my money back.
me: why me especially? wtf does that mean? you make me sound like some crazy erratic person.
len: ...
me: What, you think I'm mentally unstable now?
len: You are not normal.
me: ?
It's not like I come into the office naked or innapropriately grope people or fart in public places.
len: no, it's like more internalized than that. the crazy isn't on the outside. it's like on the inside. you're socialized to act normally but you find outlets for your inner crazy.
me: so you're saying i'm not like the guy who came into my office wearing like kilts and ate pie out of a garbage can, and he didn't shower
len: no, you're more original than that. but i bet that guy had a crush on you.
me: oh my god!! he did how did you know?
len: i swear, the crazies know you. they see pas t the facade of a relatively well adjusted person who talks faitrly intelligently about politics and has good manners. all the pewople who really really love you have some sort of weird dark shit going on. thy]re hiding their internal weirdness. and you're like a crazy magnet and when they're near you they like start vibrating and feel the need to act out. and they know you understadn them on some level. your soulmates are really weird poeple pretending to benormal. and they can relx in your presence becasue it's like oh here's a nice cute girl who is so fucking crazy she won't judge me.
me: kilt guy wasn't hiding anything. and i don't think he was dark, just unshowered and he's not my soulmate. as far as i know.
len: he's a bad example., but whatever, you like weird fucked up people too. you're all kindred spirit with them. normal people bore you and make you pouke. yoe have no interest in getting coffee with them
me: you make me sound liek a serial killer.
len: no you're just very diane arbus without the photography.
and indian
me: so i need to find myself like a furry robert downey jr.?
len: that was an aweful movie.
me: i know it was the bigges tpiece of shit. i wanted my money back.
Monday, April 27, 2009
gender-o-meter, anyone?
Waking up in the middle of the night because you've woken up with words you have to write down is like tending to a crying child or something. It isn't a choice. I do it every night practically. I want my child to sleep an entire night already. But till it does, I plan on waking up whenever it cries.
I have to stop and ask myself why I think this way; why all my metaphors, all my processes, and impulses are somehow tied to the physiology of my body. Do men think about life in terms of cycles and maternity and childbirth? I don't think so. And this makes me think about the way we relate to one another across gender and the way we process life from the pure perspective of how we are embodied. It's like we're looking at the same lake, but from different shores. Cycles and web versus a linearity. Is it really true or is this just something I am reading intuitively and/or making up? I want to inhabit a male body for just a couple of months so I can fully understand what it is to think like a man. And then, just as I was pondering this the other day, I found a nifty little brochure in the waiting room of my Ayurvedic doctor's office that I felt the need to steal for the edification of my loyal four readers. So here it is, truncated for your viewing pleasure, a couple of personal notes in red. Bear in mind it is very simplistic but the lack of complexity gives a nice foundation that we can build on:
Guilt
... is quintessentially female energy. Guilt is the emotional response to cyclical thinking. Guilt is a command to return, to revisit, to repair, to recycle.
Female energies run in both male and female bodies. However, female bodies are happiest running about 70% or more female energy with 30% or less proportion of male energy. A female running toxic levels of male energy will feel stuck, unattractive, and vindictive.
Grief
... is quintessentially male energy. Grief is the emotional "trickle-down" effect of linear thinking. Grief is a command to stop, don't go anywhere, give up, forget.
Male energies run in both male and female bodies. However, male bodies are happiest running about 80% or more male energy with 20% or less proportion of female. A male running toxic levels of female energy (guilt) will feel weak, angry, and manipulated.
Guilt is "should" energy.
Guilt is very easy to find in your psychic space. You can feel the "should" pressure all over your body. You know the joke about the four major guilt groups: mother, money, mate, and mouth (Actually, I don't). There are probably more "should's" attached to our relationships with food, parents, spouse, and finance than all other topics combined! But don't limit your search for "should's" to these core subjects. "Should" guilt shows up in many interesting places.
Grief is "can't" energy.
Grief is similarly easy to spot. You can feel the "can't" pressure all over your body. Just start thinking about your major frustrations, blocks on what you believe you can't do. That's grief. Grief means it's over, done, finito. No returning, no cycling back, no second chance. Like a sports game. The team won or lost, it's an absolute win or loss (This is why I hate most sports). If our team lost, that's final. We don't complain to the judge or congress or mom that it wasn't fair (I ALWAYS complain to my mom when it isn't fair. Male energy is so fucked up; I could never be a guy). It just is what it is, a win or a loss. There's no second chance. It's like the common western concept of death. Finished, ended, so second chances. This energy is terribly sad, but also comfortingly absolute.
Guilt is passed from mother to daughter, down through the generations. Of the "four major guilt groups" :) surely the main one is Mother (Surely, it is). The most intense Guilt is passed from mother to daughter. Daughter soon has her own children and passes to them. is the energy that allows a mother to protect her children even when her children are not with her. She trains them from infancy to think of her, think of how she would feel, think of her sadness, anger, or disappointment if her children took undue risks (Like going to see an Ayurvedic doctor).
Thus her maturing children eat good breakfasts, wear their coats in winter, and finish their homework - even when she's not looking. They do this because they are thinking of her, thinking of what she wants from them.
Looking at the history of civilizations, there is no doubt that guilt is a good and useful energy for cultural survival.
Women in grief
When emotionally healthy women feel too much "can't" pressure they have weeping breakdowns which allow them to purge the toxic amounts of grief in their space (Oh my God! Like in that awful Eat, Pray Love with all the crying on the bathroom floor!).
Men in grief
Men don't necessarily feel bad when they are running large amounts of grief. They may feel a little stuck in grief, but they also feel secure in it. Men like linear process. "Can't energy" is nice for them because it sets a limit on how long any cycle can run. That makes the cycle more linear and more easy to think about and control.
Women and Cyclical Energy
For women, nothing is more satisfying than an eternally long unbroken repeating cycle (yeah, this is pretty true for me, looong, unbroken cycle). The cycle of the generations, the menstrual cycle, the cycle of the seasons: these comforting repetitive dances of the life force can bring deep cleansing awareness and happiness to the healthy woman.
Men and Cyclical Energy
Too much cyclical energy is hard on men. Men like a big burst of productive drive, then a full stop. Like a sports game, or a short war - that's a nice playing energy for men. Huge and small eternal cycles are exhausting for men. No wonder men get so toxic from female energies like guilt!
Manipulation through Grief
Men manipulate women by injecting the men's excess grief, which is highly toxic to women, into the women's psychic space. Women are multi-taskers who need to keep moving. Too much "stop" or "can't" energy is very unpleasant in the female space. Women get horribly stuck when they are overloaded with the excess grief of the men around them - especially their fathers & husbands.
Psychically, women can do anything. They can (and really naturally must) do two or three things pretty much all the time to stay at a nice female buzz. Feed the baby, fix the printer, dinner cooking on the stove, laundry washing, on the phone, planning events, staying in touch with family - that's a happy buzz for most psychically healthy women (I don't know, fixing the printer and feeding the baby aren't usually components of my "happy" buzz).
How could a woman possibly get stuck in "can't" energy? How can such eternal creativity ever "stop"?
It goes "stop" when excess male energy - the calm, linear, single-process energy that male bodies know and love - jams up her space.
Clearly, some problematic elements there, but also bear in mind that this is waiting room reading material. That I have posted up on my blog.
But some parts of it make me think. I have to admit that I am far more comfortable with guilt than with grief. The idea of something - anything - ending is anathema to me, but I like repetition. I like exploring a singular topic from various angles. I like the concept of return, of things coming back. Psychic volver is really important to me. (BTW, that's a good band name, don't you think? But it would be a lame band.)
Also, I don't know where the percentages come from. How the fuck do I know whether I'm running on 70% female energy? Do I go to an Ayurvedic practitioner (read below and you'll find out)? Is there a gender-o-meter around that I can check this stuff on?
So I asked my Ayurvedic practitioner what my male/female energetics ratio is and after running some tests, he informed me that my female energy is fine, and not at all threatened by my male energy. They're sitting side by side, relatively happy, not squabbling about asking for directions or needing space or open communication or anything like that. Apparently this is unusual for our era. Most women, according to my doctor are running highly toxic levels of male energy. It's just the pressures of living in the western world today. Sad, but true. Glad that I am keeping that male energy at bay. I guess. Is it something I'm eating? Is it my waist to hip ratio? Is it healthy levels of estrogen to testosterone? It's apparently all of that, according to my doctor. Or includes all of that in some form, either as a symptom or as a factor. It's all about chemical balance/emotional health. Mind-body connection, y'all.
I know, you guys. I make fun of it on my blog and then I go to this guy and pay him in full for a consultation because of course my insurance doesn't cover it. Clearly there's some sort of internal dilemma here that I need to work out. Actually, I shouldn't make fun because I've totally been into Ayurvedic medicine my whole life. But there are still some parts of it that my dad would call "hocus pocus." I think what confounds the whole thing for me is when they start using the 70%/30% ratios to please people who aren't into Ayurvedic medicine to begin with. Just lose the ratios and then you won't lose your core-demo. Me. I seriously need to do marketing for these people.
Also, and this is with regards to both men and women - when someone tells you you "can't" do something don't you just want to throw a tantrum or key their car when they're not looking? because I certainly do. In fact, I'm having trouble locating my "can't" energy right now so maybe this just confirms that my female-male energy is well balanced.
Also, this part struck me as interesting - that men don't necessarily feel bad when they're in grief. They just accept certain endings rather gracefully. I've had discussions with men in my life about this and most would agree with this idea on some level. Grief, for me, is just a terrible dead end that makes me want to kill myself/not get out of bed in the morning. Bargaining is like my favorite activity. Also wild speculation. Both of these activities allow me to never fully accept ends (And you wondered how I did it! I swear, my mind amazes me sometimes). But why would you accept ends when your mind refracts the world as cyclical? You can't even see a real end, it doesn't exist.
Guilt is so much cushier, you guys. You can just slink into it like it's this comfortable chair with big fluffy cushions that you can just sit in your whole life.
And then, when you have kids, you can just dump it on them.
I have to stop and ask myself why I think this way; why all my metaphors, all my processes, and impulses are somehow tied to the physiology of my body. Do men think about life in terms of cycles and maternity and childbirth? I don't think so. And this makes me think about the way we relate to one another across gender and the way we process life from the pure perspective of how we are embodied. It's like we're looking at the same lake, but from different shores. Cycles and web versus a linearity. Is it really true or is this just something I am reading intuitively and/or making up? I want to inhabit a male body for just a couple of months so I can fully understand what it is to think like a man. And then, just as I was pondering this the other day, I found a nifty little brochure in the waiting room of my Ayurvedic doctor's office that I felt the need to steal for the edification of my loyal four readers. So here it is, truncated for your viewing pleasure, a couple of personal notes in red. Bear in mind it is very simplistic but the lack of complexity gives a nice foundation that we can build on:
Guilt
... is quintessentially female energy. Guilt is the emotional response to cyclical thinking. Guilt is a command to return, to revisit, to repair, to recycle.
Female energies run in both male and female bodies. However, female bodies are happiest running about 70% or more female energy with 30% or less proportion of male energy. A female running toxic levels of male energy will feel stuck, unattractive, and vindictive.
Grief
... is quintessentially male energy. Grief is the emotional "trickle-down" effect of linear thinking. Grief is a command to stop, don't go anywhere, give up, forget.
Male energies run in both male and female bodies. However, male bodies are happiest running about 80% or more male energy with 20% or less proportion of female. A male running toxic levels of female energy (guilt) will feel weak, angry, and manipulated.
Guilt is "should" energy.
Guilt is very easy to find in your psychic space. You can feel the "should" pressure all over your body. You know the joke about the four major guilt groups: mother, money, mate, and mouth (Actually, I don't). There are probably more "should's" attached to our relationships with food, parents, spouse, and finance than all other topics combined! But don't limit your search for "should's" to these core subjects. "Should" guilt shows up in many interesting places.
Grief is "can't" energy.
Grief is similarly easy to spot. You can feel the "can't" pressure all over your body. Just start thinking about your major frustrations, blocks on what you believe you can't do. That's grief. Grief means it's over, done, finito. No returning, no cycling back, no second chance. Like a sports game. The team won or lost, it's an absolute win or loss (This is why I hate most sports). If our team lost, that's final. We don't complain to the judge or congress or mom that it wasn't fair (I ALWAYS complain to my mom when it isn't fair. Male energy is so fucked up; I could never be a guy). It just is what it is, a win or a loss. There's no second chance. It's like the common western concept of death. Finished, ended, so second chances. This energy is terribly sad, but also comfortingly absolute.
Guilt is passed from mother to daughter, down through the generations. Of the "four major guilt groups" :) surely the main one is Mother (Surely, it is). The most intense Guilt is passed from mother to daughter. Daughter soon has her own children and passes to them. is the energy that allows a mother to protect her children even when her children are not with her. She trains them from infancy to think of her, think of how she would feel, think of her sadness, anger, or disappointment if her children took undue risks (Like going to see an Ayurvedic doctor).
Thus her maturing children eat good breakfasts, wear their coats in winter, and finish their homework - even when she's not looking. They do this because they are thinking of her, thinking of what she wants from them.
Looking at the history of civilizations, there is no doubt that guilt is a good and useful energy for cultural survival.
Women in grief
When emotionally healthy women feel too much "can't" pressure they have weeping breakdowns which allow them to purge the toxic amounts of grief in their space (Oh my God! Like in that awful Eat, Pray Love with all the crying on the bathroom floor!).
Men in grief
Men don't necessarily feel bad when they are running large amounts of grief. They may feel a little stuck in grief, but they also feel secure in it. Men like linear process. "Can't energy" is nice for them because it sets a limit on how long any cycle can run. That makes the cycle more linear and more easy to think about and control.
Women and Cyclical Energy
For women, nothing is more satisfying than an eternally long unbroken repeating cycle (yeah, this is pretty true for me, looong, unbroken cycle). The cycle of the generations, the menstrual cycle, the cycle of the seasons: these comforting repetitive dances of the life force can bring deep cleansing awareness and happiness to the healthy woman.
Men and Cyclical Energy
Too much cyclical energy is hard on men. Men like a big burst of productive drive, then a full stop. Like a sports game, or a short war - that's a nice playing energy for men. Huge and small eternal cycles are exhausting for men. No wonder men get so toxic from female energies like guilt!
Manipulation through Grief
Men manipulate women by injecting the men's excess grief, which is highly toxic to women, into the women's psychic space. Women are multi-taskers who need to keep moving. Too much "stop" or "can't" energy is very unpleasant in the female space. Women get horribly stuck when they are overloaded with the excess grief of the men around them - especially their fathers & husbands.
Psychically, women can do anything. They can (and really naturally must) do two or three things pretty much all the time to stay at a nice female buzz. Feed the baby, fix the printer, dinner cooking on the stove, laundry washing, on the phone, planning events, staying in touch with family - that's a happy buzz for most psychically healthy women (I don't know, fixing the printer and feeding the baby aren't usually components of my "happy" buzz).
How could a woman possibly get stuck in "can't" energy? How can such eternal creativity ever "stop"?
It goes "stop" when excess male energy - the calm, linear, single-process energy that male bodies know and love - jams up her space.
Clearly, some problematic elements there, but also bear in mind that this is waiting room reading material. That I have posted up on my blog.
But some parts of it make me think. I have to admit that I am far more comfortable with guilt than with grief. The idea of something - anything - ending is anathema to me, but I like repetition. I like exploring a singular topic from various angles. I like the concept of return, of things coming back. Psychic volver is really important to me. (BTW, that's a good band name, don't you think? But it would be a lame band.)
Also, I don't know where the percentages come from. How the fuck do I know whether I'm running on 70% female energy? Do I go to an Ayurvedic practitioner (read below and you'll find out)? Is there a gender-o-meter around that I can check this stuff on?
So I asked my Ayurvedic practitioner what my male/female energetics ratio is and after running some tests, he informed me that my female energy is fine, and not at all threatened by my male energy. They're sitting side by side, relatively happy, not squabbling about asking for directions or needing space or open communication or anything like that. Apparently this is unusual for our era. Most women, according to my doctor are running highly toxic levels of male energy. It's just the pressures of living in the western world today. Sad, but true. Glad that I am keeping that male energy at bay. I guess. Is it something I'm eating? Is it my waist to hip ratio? Is it healthy levels of estrogen to testosterone? It's apparently all of that, according to my doctor. Or includes all of that in some form, either as a symptom or as a factor. It's all about chemical balance/emotional health. Mind-body connection, y'all.
I know, you guys. I make fun of it on my blog and then I go to this guy and pay him in full for a consultation because of course my insurance doesn't cover it. Clearly there's some sort of internal dilemma here that I need to work out. Actually, I shouldn't make fun because I've totally been into Ayurvedic medicine my whole life. But there are still some parts of it that my dad would call "hocus pocus." I think what confounds the whole thing for me is when they start using the 70%/30% ratios to please people who aren't into Ayurvedic medicine to begin with. Just lose the ratios and then you won't lose your core-demo. Me. I seriously need to do marketing for these people.
Also, and this is with regards to both men and women - when someone tells you you "can't" do something don't you just want to throw a tantrum or key their car when they're not looking? because I certainly do. In fact, I'm having trouble locating my "can't" energy right now so maybe this just confirms that my female-male energy is well balanced.
Also, this part struck me as interesting - that men don't necessarily feel bad when they're in grief. They just accept certain endings rather gracefully. I've had discussions with men in my life about this and most would agree with this idea on some level. Grief, for me, is just a terrible dead end that makes me want to kill myself/not get out of bed in the morning. Bargaining is like my favorite activity. Also wild speculation. Both of these activities allow me to never fully accept ends (And you wondered how I did it! I swear, my mind amazes me sometimes). But why would you accept ends when your mind refracts the world as cyclical? You can't even see a real end, it doesn't exist.
Guilt is so much cushier, you guys. You can just slink into it like it's this comfortable chair with big fluffy cushions that you can just sit in your whole life.
And then, when you have kids, you can just dump it on them.
a conversation. yesterday.
L: I think you should write a screenplay about a guy who reads a girl's blog and falls in love with her.
Me: That's not reality. Guys don't do that. That's female wish fulfillment.
L: Isn't that what Hollywood is?
Me: Yeah, but there has to be a hint of realism to it.
L: You would fall in love with someone if they were like, this really phenomenal writer.
Me: Yeah.
L: So why can't it be the other way around?
Me: Guys don't fall in love with you because of your writing. "You've Got Mail" doesn't really exist in reality. Just in Norah Ephron's mind. And now she has all the rest of us brainwashed.
L: When did you become such a cynic?
Me: I'm just telling you no one would watch that movie because it's woefully inaccurate.
L: What about people who write passionate love-letters to each other their whole lives?
Me: When was the last time you got a passionate love letter?
L: Never. You?
Me: Six years ago. But there was a misspelling in it and it completely turned me off.
L: What was the misspelling?
Me: Monkeys. It was spelled M-O-N-K-I-E-S.
L: Someone wrote you a love-letter about monkeys?
Me: No, it just happened to mention monkeys.
L: No wonder you're so cynical.
Me: That's not reality. Guys don't do that. That's female wish fulfillment.
L: Isn't that what Hollywood is?
Me: Yeah, but there has to be a hint of realism to it.
L: You would fall in love with someone if they were like, this really phenomenal writer.
Me: Yeah.
L: So why can't it be the other way around?
Me: Guys don't fall in love with you because of your writing. "You've Got Mail" doesn't really exist in reality. Just in Norah Ephron's mind. And now she has all the rest of us brainwashed.
L: When did you become such a cynic?
Me: I'm just telling you no one would watch that movie because it's woefully inaccurate.
L: What about people who write passionate love-letters to each other their whole lives?
Me: When was the last time you got a passionate love letter?
L: Never. You?
Me: Six years ago. But there was a misspelling in it and it completely turned me off.
L: What was the misspelling?
Me: Monkeys. It was spelled M-O-N-K-I-E-S.
L: Someone wrote you a love-letter about monkeys?
Me: No, it just happened to mention monkeys.
L: No wonder you're so cynical.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
There it was on the side of an MTA bus: a simple animation of a pump, with the word "cruel" written next to it, and then the MTA logo with the word "kind" next to it. I almost spilled my tea at the simplicity of it all. If only the world could be broken into binaries of "cruel" and "kind." If only cruelty and kindness could be that simple.
Cue Mary Oliver: "Mostly, I want to be kind./And nobody, of course, is kind/or mean,/for a simple reason.
Cue Mary Oliver: "Mostly, I want to be kind./And nobody, of course, is kind/or mean,/for a simple reason.
overheard
A: So your stomach is like two plates made of muscle, and when you're pregnant, they shift to the sides to make room for your pregnancy belly. Except if you do like twists in yoga or lift things too much then the plates overshift.
B: That's totally gross.
A: I know. I think I'm going to puke.
B: That's totally gross.
A: I know. I think I'm going to puke.
Dream
The town is broken into two halves; the first half is dotted with candy-colored Victorians that have been modernized with glass rooms and spiral staircases. They sit atop rolling green hills. In the summer, people come out on their porches and drink mint juleps. The second half of the town was built on a swamp, but people didn't know this when they were building their homes. The houses are sinking into the ground, slow and crooked. Owners feel no incentive to beautify their homes as they do on the other side of town, so the houses are crumbling, all broken windows and rust and chipped paint. People who live in this half of town bemoan their fate. They ended up on this half of the town by chance. And it makes them curse chance, and their lives, and the people who live in candy-colored Victorians on the other side of town.
I am invited to a party on the crumbling side. I don't want to go but I don't remember why. It is an office party. I show up in pajamas. I look at the crumbling structure and realize that I am in Havana. The house is broken but stately. I walk in and remember why I didn't want to come; Oprah Winfrey is hosting this party. She is standing in the foyer, leaning against a marble table. I sort of hate her and think she's false.
"You can't come to a party in your pajamas!" she exclaims in her overly self-righteous James Frey sort of way.
"It's just a dinner," I shrug.
"It's gazpacho!" she says.
"All right," I shrug again and leave.
I am invited to a party on the crumbling side. I don't want to go but I don't remember why. It is an office party. I show up in pajamas. I look at the crumbling structure and realize that I am in Havana. The house is broken but stately. I walk in and remember why I didn't want to come; Oprah Winfrey is hosting this party. She is standing in the foyer, leaning against a marble table. I sort of hate her and think she's false.
"You can't come to a party in your pajamas!" she exclaims in her overly self-righteous James Frey sort of way.
"It's just a dinner," I shrug.
"It's gazpacho!" she says.
"All right," I shrug again and leave.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
I am obsessed with people's hands, and for that matter people who talk with their hands. I talk with my hands and so does everyone in my family. If you watch us around a dinner table at meal-time, we are animated and verbose, communicating in words as much as we rely heavily on gesture and gesticulation.
I get caught up in observing people's hand gestures or just gestures in general when I'm talking to them, almost as much as I get caught up in words, and the words underneath the words. I like the way that certain gestures encapsulate who a person is - people reveal so much through a movement. I read somewhere that men are more finely attuned to body language than women; it's primal. Apparently it's how they pick up on whether we like them or not. All those weeks and months we spend second-guessing ourselves and doubting, and men seem to know how we feel in an instant - in the flash of an eye. So I don't necessarily buy this idea that women are more intuitive than men - I think we communicate in so many languages simultaneously, some that we are conscious of and others that we aren't.
I've at times fallen in love with a gesture, with the way a person walks, or touches their fingers to the table as they're talking, those still, empty moments where you know a person completely because of the way they are in the world. The way your unconscious does these calculations your conscious mind can't, the way it knows things that it just does. particularly when it comes to men. D.H. Lawrence has this quote (in case you haven't noticed, I'm obsessed with D.H. Lawrence, he writes women so well, and men for that matter, but he writes women so well), "How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression."
The first time I recognized this was in the 9th grade. It was the first day of high school and I was standing in the doorway of a biology lab before the bell rang. I was wearing a patchwork vest, and torn jeans. I was holding a map. A map to my new high school which was vast and overwhelming with all kinds of wings and houses named after Greek Gods - Ogden, Bella and former headmasters of the school I think? Folsom, Clark? Greenwich High School was designed by an architect who previously built prisons - this commision was apparently a novelty for him, but he chose not to be too experimental. And so there I was, my first day in an airless concrete maze, with a map in my hand, looking lost, blocking a doorway, and a boy attempting to leave the classroom, a boy I didn't know, placed his hands on my shoulders, moved me to the side gently, smiled sort of cheekily, and then left. It was a gesture that spoke volumes - it irritated me and caught me off guard - it was an invasion of my personal space at a time when those sorts of trangressions didn't happen between people of two genders - at least not between two people who didn't know each other - and on the first day of school. And yet there was a familiarity to it, an assumed intimacy. It was the gesture of an older person - it's the kind of thing that happens now, in bars. It happens once you're in college where everyone touches everyone to see what their reaction will be, but this was different because we were young and in Connecticut where no one touches anyone else and it was 1993, when high school students didn't have rainbow clubs and the like.
It was a transgression, a test - the smile confirmed that - and in the years since, I've found few expressions of male-ness that are so expressive and complete in their economy. In the gestural sense. Needless to say, this boy was my crush for the next four years. And I was madly in love with him because of a gesture. A gesture which went on to confirm and encapsulate who he was over the course of the next four years - confident and unassuming, transgressive and provocative - and ultimately, willing to push you aside to achieve his own means. A gesture that was perfectly timed to catch me off-guard in a moment of vulnerability - and the beauty of it was that it wasn't timed or schemed - it was completely spontaneous and fell from the sky like cigarette ash to take root in my memories in some way as a significant moment.
Three years ago I ran into him at the Guggenheim, walking through endless circles of whiteness. He was looking at a painting, a Kandinsky. I saw him from across the room and recognized him immediately. My hands started shaking. He had gained weight, lost some hair, but somewhere in the ten years that we hadn't seen each other, the manifestation of that expression of maleness had taken root, had completed itself. And he was exactly as I knew he was.
How did I know? How do we know? It's not a specific type of knowing. Like knowing the periodic table of elements or how many ounces in a pound, or that the capital of Bulgaria is Sofia. It's such an intuitive, amorphous, sensual sort of knowing, that engages both the promordial, biological part of you and something else, maybe your soul.
And you recognize it instantly, the way your mind processes a picture, takes an instant, a slice of time and sometimes knows the entire story behind it, like a photograph of an unhappy couple at a party. They're holding hands, and dressed up, but you know.
The photograph of Sonny and Cher on the plane is a perfect example. Of just one part. It was an American Airlines flight from Boston to Chicago and someone had left a vintage copy of Life magazine in the seat pocket in front of me. Seriously vintage, 1963. The kind of thing you find and then wonder if someone knew you were going to be on this flight and knew your seat number and placed it there for you to find it. I flipped to the back and there it was, a black and white photograph of Sonny and Cher in the pool of the first house they bought in Los Angeles.
A perfect snapshot, the kind of picture that tells the whole story. Or the part of it that you want to know, or tell, or invent, or believe. I don't always know the distinction between these things. In the picture, they are laughing, she is on his shoulders, arms out like wings. Neither of them is looking at the camera. Her hair is tangled and wet, her teeth are crooked. He looks as though he has been caught by surprise, as though it has just dawned on him that this pool, this home, this woman, this life is his own.“I didn’t like her at first,” he said about Cher. “I thought she was a stuck-up flip chick." They bought the house with the pool and cathedral ceilings after they recorded “I Got You Babe” and it went to No. 1 on the charts.
It happened so quickly and they were so young, they hadn't even decided on their own individual identities yet. They hadn't curated who they were, they weren't Sonny and Cher yet. In a sense they were, but in a sense they weren't. They quickly embodied the idea without fully inhabiting it. Like the space of time between buying a house and moving all your things into it.
It's clear that they don't know yet what direction their lives are going to unfold in and somehow, from this snapshot, you know that life will ruin them. Overfeed one part and starve another. Is this true? I don't know. I make up stories. But her arms outstretched in that way just makes you believe that she will spend her life reaching for things that won't be quite it. That all that reaching will deliver, but it won't be quite what she expected it to be. And it makes you feel bad for her because in the picture she is happy. And it makes you wonder if she was every happy like that ever again.
I once read an interview with Cher years later, after Sonny died, where she talked about how they could have met at any place, any time, even ten years before they had met or twenty years after, and they would have still been Sonny and Cher. This made me think too, about knowing, timelessness, psychic bonds that can't be broken, even if the relationship breaks, but maybe that's another blog post.
Look up the picture if you ever get a chance. Celebrities don't have that look of naivete and un-self-consciousness anymore, and maybe this is why this picture stuck in my memory. Actually, I kept the magazine and still turn to it occasionally. But I don't need to because it's imprinted in my mind and makes me wonder about the relationship between the gesture and time; a boy grabbing my shoulders on the first day of the 9th grade, Cher with her arms out like wings in a pool right when life was easy and fun. Both oddly precient, as all things are, as all things can be: a window into the entire story, with most of the rest missing.
I get caught up in observing people's hand gestures or just gestures in general when I'm talking to them, almost as much as I get caught up in words, and the words underneath the words. I like the way that certain gestures encapsulate who a person is - people reveal so much through a movement. I read somewhere that men are more finely attuned to body language than women; it's primal. Apparently it's how they pick up on whether we like them or not. All those weeks and months we spend second-guessing ourselves and doubting, and men seem to know how we feel in an instant - in the flash of an eye. So I don't necessarily buy this idea that women are more intuitive than men - I think we communicate in so many languages simultaneously, some that we are conscious of and others that we aren't.
I've at times fallen in love with a gesture, with the way a person walks, or touches their fingers to the table as they're talking, those still, empty moments where you know a person completely because of the way they are in the world. The way your unconscious does these calculations your conscious mind can't, the way it knows things that it just does. particularly when it comes to men. D.H. Lawrence has this quote (in case you haven't noticed, I'm obsessed with D.H. Lawrence, he writes women so well, and men for that matter, but he writes women so well), "How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression."
The first time I recognized this was in the 9th grade. It was the first day of high school and I was standing in the doorway of a biology lab before the bell rang. I was wearing a patchwork vest, and torn jeans. I was holding a map. A map to my new high school which was vast and overwhelming with all kinds of wings and houses named after Greek Gods - Ogden, Bella and former headmasters of the school I think? Folsom, Clark? Greenwich High School was designed by an architect who previously built prisons - this commision was apparently a novelty for him, but he chose not to be too experimental. And so there I was, my first day in an airless concrete maze, with a map in my hand, looking lost, blocking a doorway, and a boy attempting to leave the classroom, a boy I didn't know, placed his hands on my shoulders, moved me to the side gently, smiled sort of cheekily, and then left. It was a gesture that spoke volumes - it irritated me and caught me off guard - it was an invasion of my personal space at a time when those sorts of trangressions didn't happen between people of two genders - at least not between two people who didn't know each other - and on the first day of school. And yet there was a familiarity to it, an assumed intimacy. It was the gesture of an older person - it's the kind of thing that happens now, in bars. It happens once you're in college where everyone touches everyone to see what their reaction will be, but this was different because we were young and in Connecticut where no one touches anyone else and it was 1993, when high school students didn't have rainbow clubs and the like.
It was a transgression, a test - the smile confirmed that - and in the years since, I've found few expressions of male-ness that are so expressive and complete in their economy. In the gestural sense. Needless to say, this boy was my crush for the next four years. And I was madly in love with him because of a gesture. A gesture which went on to confirm and encapsulate who he was over the course of the next four years - confident and unassuming, transgressive and provocative - and ultimately, willing to push you aside to achieve his own means. A gesture that was perfectly timed to catch me off-guard in a moment of vulnerability - and the beauty of it was that it wasn't timed or schemed - it was completely spontaneous and fell from the sky like cigarette ash to take root in my memories in some way as a significant moment.
Three years ago I ran into him at the Guggenheim, walking through endless circles of whiteness. He was looking at a painting, a Kandinsky. I saw him from across the room and recognized him immediately. My hands started shaking. He had gained weight, lost some hair, but somewhere in the ten years that we hadn't seen each other, the manifestation of that expression of maleness had taken root, had completed itself. And he was exactly as I knew he was.
How did I know? How do we know? It's not a specific type of knowing. Like knowing the periodic table of elements or how many ounces in a pound, or that the capital of Bulgaria is Sofia. It's such an intuitive, amorphous, sensual sort of knowing, that engages both the promordial, biological part of you and something else, maybe your soul.
And you recognize it instantly, the way your mind processes a picture, takes an instant, a slice of time and sometimes knows the entire story behind it, like a photograph of an unhappy couple at a party. They're holding hands, and dressed up, but you know.
The photograph of Sonny and Cher on the plane is a perfect example. Of just one part. It was an American Airlines flight from Boston to Chicago and someone had left a vintage copy of Life magazine in the seat pocket in front of me. Seriously vintage, 1963. The kind of thing you find and then wonder if someone knew you were going to be on this flight and knew your seat number and placed it there for you to find it. I flipped to the back and there it was, a black and white photograph of Sonny and Cher in the pool of the first house they bought in Los Angeles.
A perfect snapshot, the kind of picture that tells the whole story. Or the part of it that you want to know, or tell, or invent, or believe. I don't always know the distinction between these things. In the picture, they are laughing, she is on his shoulders, arms out like wings. Neither of them is looking at the camera. Her hair is tangled and wet, her teeth are crooked. He looks as though he has been caught by surprise, as though it has just dawned on him that this pool, this home, this woman, this life is his own.“I didn’t like her at first,” he said about Cher. “I thought she was a stuck-up flip chick." They bought the house with the pool and cathedral ceilings after they recorded “I Got You Babe” and it went to No. 1 on the charts.
It happened so quickly and they were so young, they hadn't even decided on their own individual identities yet. They hadn't curated who they were, they weren't Sonny and Cher yet. In a sense they were, but in a sense they weren't. They quickly embodied the idea without fully inhabiting it. Like the space of time between buying a house and moving all your things into it.
It's clear that they don't know yet what direction their lives are going to unfold in and somehow, from this snapshot, you know that life will ruin them. Overfeed one part and starve another. Is this true? I don't know. I make up stories. But her arms outstretched in that way just makes you believe that she will spend her life reaching for things that won't be quite it. That all that reaching will deliver, but it won't be quite what she expected it to be. And it makes you feel bad for her because in the picture she is happy. And it makes you wonder if she was every happy like that ever again.
I once read an interview with Cher years later, after Sonny died, where she talked about how they could have met at any place, any time, even ten years before they had met or twenty years after, and they would have still been Sonny and Cher. This made me think too, about knowing, timelessness, psychic bonds that can't be broken, even if the relationship breaks, but maybe that's another blog post.
Look up the picture if you ever get a chance. Celebrities don't have that look of naivete and un-self-consciousness anymore, and maybe this is why this picture stuck in my memory. Actually, I kept the magazine and still turn to it occasionally. But I don't need to because it's imprinted in my mind and makes me wonder about the relationship between the gesture and time; a boy grabbing my shoulders on the first day of the 9th grade, Cher with her arms out like wings in a pool right when life was easy and fun. Both oddly precient, as all things are, as all things can be: a window into the entire story, with most of the rest missing.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
My Side Project...
Open letter to all five of my readers,
E and N kindly alerted me to the fact that my blog has a strong Christian following. Oh wait, that's not my blog, that's:
http://aditikhorana.blogpot.com/
I didn't know I was running a "mega-site of bible studies" using my full name! Clearly my memory eludes me. Had too much sacramental wine the other night and felt a strong urge to do God's work. And in case you were wondering what God's work is, it certainly is not this:
http://www.aditikhorana.blogpot.com/Documents/Pornography_homosexuality_is_sin.htm
Check out the funky 70s disco fonts. My righteousness is nothing if not whimsical and festive.
Either way, I think this is an opportunity for a broad exchange between all five followers of my blog and the vast community of people who have accepted that they are sinners and given their lives to spiritual warfare, also people who accidentally type an "s" in their internet quest for Jesus.
Oh yeah, and if you're Jewish, blogpot might be able to offer you information about your culture that my personal blog can't as yet:
13. JEWS INFORMATION DESK COVERS 9 UNIQUE CATEGORIES ABOUT ISRAEL; ITS PAST HISTORY, PRESENT, AND FUTURE; ITS NAME; CALENDAR; AND A PHOTO TOUR TAKEN BY SOME AUTHORS OF THIS SITE.
Once my Jews Information Desk is up and running, I promise to deliver!
xoxo
a
E and N kindly alerted me to the fact that my blog has a strong Christian following. Oh wait, that's not my blog, that's:
http://aditikhorana.blogpot.com/
I didn't know I was running a "mega-site of bible studies" using my full name! Clearly my memory eludes me. Had too much sacramental wine the other night and felt a strong urge to do God's work. And in case you were wondering what God's work is, it certainly is not this:
http://www.aditikhorana.blogpot.com/Documents/Pornography_homosexuality_is_sin.htm
Check out the funky 70s disco fonts. My righteousness is nothing if not whimsical and festive.
Either way, I think this is an opportunity for a broad exchange between all five followers of my blog and the vast community of people who have accepted that they are sinners and given their lives to spiritual warfare, also people who accidentally type an "s" in their internet quest for Jesus.
Oh yeah, and if you're Jewish, blogpot might be able to offer you information about your culture that my personal blog can't as yet:
13. JEWS INFORMATION DESK COVERS 9 UNIQUE CATEGORIES ABOUT ISRAEL; ITS PAST HISTORY, PRESENT, AND FUTURE; ITS NAME; CALENDAR; AND A PHOTO TOUR TAKEN BY SOME AUTHORS OF THIS SITE.
Once my Jews Information Desk is up and running, I promise to deliver!
xoxo
a
Sometimes writing feels like taking a shit.
I once dreamt I was at a fancy dress ball in a gown and had to poo and the only toilet was in the center of the ballroom floor.
This is what writing feels like.
Both humiliating and liberating.
I guess when you have an idea and can't find a pen it's like having to take a shit and not being able to find a toilet. Even one on the ballroom floor. I don't know which one is worse.
But with the ballroom, at least once you're done, it's over. And eventually people forget you anyway.
I once dreamt I was at a fancy dress ball in a gown and had to poo and the only toilet was in the center of the ballroom floor.
This is what writing feels like.
Both humiliating and liberating.
I guess when you have an idea and can't find a pen it's like having to take a shit and not being able to find a toilet. Even one on the ballroom floor. I don't know which one is worse.
But with the ballroom, at least once you're done, it's over. And eventually people forget you anyway.
As Once the Winged Energy of Delight
As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
arch of unimagined bridges.
Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely grantedin passing through the harshest danger;
achievement can we realize the wonder.
To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,relationship is not too hard for us;
and being swept along is not enough.
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions...For the god
wants to know himself in you.-Rainer Maria Rilke
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
that bitch, Irony
A. nick drake died because people didn't listen to his music while he was alive.
or
B. he died and then they did (because of volkswagon)
whatever way you want to read the narrative. sometimes people die because they feel they're the only ones in the conversation.
and irony is such a mean girl, the most hateable of 10th grade creatures.
in her volkswagon listening to pink moon on her car stereo
that her parents bought her
or
B. he died and then they did (because of volkswagon)
whatever way you want to read the narrative. sometimes people die because they feel they're the only ones in the conversation.
and irony is such a mean girl, the most hateable of 10th grade creatures.
in her volkswagon listening to pink moon on her car stereo
that her parents bought her
what he said, what i heard
An unafflicted moon, a yoga in the 12th house. Mercury, Mars, Sun.
What does this mean?
A writer, an idler, a misanthrope. The twelfth house; the house of unconscious; latent power. It can be used productively or misused. Even your whole life. A lot of Jupiter though. So maybe you won't be an idler.
How generous, I think.
And the rest: a chart of endings, sunset, moonset. An end to this life. To these lives, rather. Revati, Uttarabhadra, Pisces, death, consciousness of the soul. The south node too, karmic ends.
The South Node, ketu. This I know about. The denial of material things for the purpose of spiritual growth. Even self-denial.
But I'm hardly a pauper. Or meditating in a forest. So how can this be the end?
That part has been completed, he says. No use doing it again.
south node, pisces, unafflicted moon. The end of what? I think. Something that can't be expressed in words. Something we don't know anything about. But there are glimpses of it. In my dreams. The 12th house. House of the unconscious.
I've kept a dream journal since I was seven.
Dreams that crumble and disappear, like Angela Chase's dream of a dress made of saltines, always things left behind. I dream every night. In complex webs, tangles of color, music. People I have yet to meet. A trail of bread crumbs, saltine crumbs. Like the dream of a boy on the street with a boombox listening to Stevie Wonder who manifested in reality the next day. The dream of a monk in orange robes, drinking Coke at the bus stop. I see him a week later and my heart stops. He smiles. And other things I can't explain in words.
I read studies about dreams about sunlight about the human brain cognition neurotransmitters circadian rhythms music language emotion bipolarity. I read and I dream. Beyond this, I don't know what there is. I don't know what other people do, really that is important. And I write. But that is something else, beyond even the scope of those things. I offer writing a gold medal and make it stand up on the top of a three tiered ladder as some vague anthem of my life plays.
But dreams are like dust. Like how some of my best thoughts come while I am in my car, hands occupied with another kind of navigation, one that feels meaningless in comparison to writing. In fits of urgency I pull over, and the words are gone. Sometimes I'm afraid I'll die this way, hands tied, occupied with something meaningless, without having ever found the right words to express what I wanted to, and somehow this seems infinitely more important than anything else.
And then I am defiant. Maybe the thought was intended just for me, like the dream, I say to the desperate part of myself, the part that can't ever let go. To become a part of my DNA, not intended for broadcast. Broadcast is an obnoxious word. It seeks to offend, or rile. I worked as a broadcast journalist once. It overfed one part of me and left the other part starving.
Pluto, Sun, Soul.
I inhabit others, I inhabit myself. A woman in a torn shirt and chapped hands bends over to pick up a rusted can and my stomach twists in knots in a kind of psychic recognition. An elderly man in the grocery store picks endives with so much care and I am him for a moment. He is making a meal for his daughter. She is coming home for the weekend. It is easier to inhabit other people sometimes even. It is easiest to inhabit my mother. She is an extension of me, and I am of her. A hand throws a ball, and there is a singular movement. Momentum, trajectory, arm, ball. it is all the same, it doesn't matter. Her Pluto, my sun. Join the literary magazine, she told me in the 6th grade. It wasn't a question. Not would you like to join the literary magazine? She thought it but maybe she dreamt something in me. Or something in me told her to remind me. To set an alarm clock. Like asking someone, Will you wake me up at 7:00 am? Don't let me oversleep.
Can you outgrow your chart? Start living in the margins of it? Perhaps the natural trajectory is from unbelief to belief and then neither. Because both of these things constrain and bind. I could have been anyone, I could have been born in another country, to other parents. I could have lived out so many of the identities that I curate, I could have been the woman picking up cans, the man picking out endives. I could have lost so much more, I could have gained so much more.
But I wasn't born in a different place. mahadasha north node, antardasha south node. A transcontinental flight, foreign lands, a new life. I was three. And my trajectory shifted. or didn't. It went where it was told. We landed at JFK and there was a sea of white faces, and then snow, for the first time, and then cold. I wore my father's jacket all the way home to an apartment that had parquet floors and a TV that my mother and I watched when we woke up from jetlag at 3:00am.
It's all there, in your chart. Some things you can't change, he says.
Really, I think? Even the snow? Even the parquet floors and the TV? Even my mother and I in the bathroom of our apartment in Queens, me sitting by the sink, brushing my teeth in a new foreign land? Does my chart know of my memories, of the things I said and felt, of cobalt skies from the balcony of my apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, of the moments where it felt I had escaped my fate and felt relieved? Of petty meannesses, loss of hope, of sand between my toes after a day at the beach, a vestige of an important day, of the remembrance of things that shouldn't have been laughed at, of the time that my parents called and told me that a field mouse got in their kitchen and fell into a bottle of olive oil? Trapped and sealed in his fate, despite desperate attempts to escape the slippery green deathtrap in the cupboard beneath the stove. What must that have felt like? To be drowned in an unctuous green prison.
I think of the weary old woman who inhabits me. Not old chronologically, old in a different way. ages old. Mars, Mercury, Sun. Does she live in my 12th house? the house of dreams, a bread crumb trail to my life? Is she the reason I walk away from the Big Things before they reach fruition? Love, Success, More. I toe the line, but she won't have it. I tell myself maybe I am a coward, she disagrees. What does it matter, she shrugs, and then smiles a toothless old grin. She alerts me to this habit of overfeeding and starving. The paradox of it. Why does it even exist? I ask, exasperated? Why can't it be easy, for all of us? Not just me, but for the woman collecting cans, for the man in the grocery store, his aloneness, her survival. Why can't we just take what we dream and beyond that not feel ambivalent or guilty?
Unfriendly planetary energies, he says. An opposition or a square. A lack of harmony, a thing to be untangled. For your own growth. Like the red drawstring collar on a peasant shirt accidentally thrown into the wash. An afternoon with a needle attempting to untangle it. At starts patient and irritated. The compulsion to throw the shirt away. To break things in anger. I don't like your system, I want to scream, at him, at her. I want to show them the mouse in the bottle of olive oil and shame them for believing that this is how it should be. or accepting that this is how it is.
They both shrug. Throwing the shirt away is your choice. It's your compromise. And we didn't make up these rules. But we advise that you live by them. Or don't.
But I can't live by them. And I am trapped in this body, in my thoughts, in the glass green bottle of my past and my future. And I don't feel like I am approaching any sort of end because I should be better at this by now, shouldn't I? if I've done it so many times. If this were a real life shouldn't I have been given some sort of instruction on where to go and how to live? And I don't have the right words to express it or the right tools to live it. Like learning how to write letters and numbers, my hands uncomfortably gripping a pencil for the first time, the outstretched appendages of my 3 attempting to hit each of the three lines properly. I was weary, even then. Can't I start at a different place, next time? Can't I be born 44 or go back and redo high school? Can't I be like the Aymara and see my future behind me and my past in front of me? Aren't you just as tired of this as I am?
Why am I the only Pinko in this office? Why am I the only one talking in a loud voice about how much this place sucks, trying to get fired? And for that matter, why won't anyone just fire me already?
south node conjuncts mars, explosion, passion, karma, endings.
She sighs. Don't think your desires your exasperation your rage your questions your ideals your hopes are any different than anyone elses she says. I sigh. I want to believe I am terminally unique, but maybe I am not. None of it is a reason to compromise, she says. Do i have a choice? I ask. not really. She says. And so we are both resigned and weary. She is always right. She is my mother telling me to join literary magazine. The recongnition like an alarm clock. I told her a long time ago to remind me.
Venus conjunction Uranus, November and December, then march, then November and December again.
Unexpected encounters, but don't expect a resolution, just yet.
When will the resolution come, I ask?
2011. he says. I laugh at how concrete this answer is. See? I say to her. he gives me real answers. She laughs. I could have given you those a long time ago, she says. For a lot cheaper.
What does this mean?
A writer, an idler, a misanthrope. The twelfth house; the house of unconscious; latent power. It can be used productively or misused. Even your whole life. A lot of Jupiter though. So maybe you won't be an idler.
How generous, I think.
And the rest: a chart of endings, sunset, moonset. An end to this life. To these lives, rather. Revati, Uttarabhadra, Pisces, death, consciousness of the soul. The south node too, karmic ends.
The South Node, ketu. This I know about. The denial of material things for the purpose of spiritual growth. Even self-denial.
But I'm hardly a pauper. Or meditating in a forest. So how can this be the end?
That part has been completed, he says. No use doing it again.
south node, pisces, unafflicted moon. The end of what? I think. Something that can't be expressed in words. Something we don't know anything about. But there are glimpses of it. In my dreams. The 12th house. House of the unconscious.
I've kept a dream journal since I was seven.
Dreams that crumble and disappear, like Angela Chase's dream of a dress made of saltines, always things left behind. I dream every night. In complex webs, tangles of color, music. People I have yet to meet. A trail of bread crumbs, saltine crumbs. Like the dream of a boy on the street with a boombox listening to Stevie Wonder who manifested in reality the next day. The dream of a monk in orange robes, drinking Coke at the bus stop. I see him a week later and my heart stops. He smiles. And other things I can't explain in words.
I read studies about dreams about sunlight about the human brain cognition neurotransmitters circadian rhythms music language emotion bipolarity. I read and I dream. Beyond this, I don't know what there is. I don't know what other people do, really that is important. And I write. But that is something else, beyond even the scope of those things. I offer writing a gold medal and make it stand up on the top of a three tiered ladder as some vague anthem of my life plays.
But dreams are like dust. Like how some of my best thoughts come while I am in my car, hands occupied with another kind of navigation, one that feels meaningless in comparison to writing. In fits of urgency I pull over, and the words are gone. Sometimes I'm afraid I'll die this way, hands tied, occupied with something meaningless, without having ever found the right words to express what I wanted to, and somehow this seems infinitely more important than anything else.
And then I am defiant. Maybe the thought was intended just for me, like the dream, I say to the desperate part of myself, the part that can't ever let go. To become a part of my DNA, not intended for broadcast. Broadcast is an obnoxious word. It seeks to offend, or rile. I worked as a broadcast journalist once. It overfed one part of me and left the other part starving.
Pluto, Sun, Soul.
I inhabit others, I inhabit myself. A woman in a torn shirt and chapped hands bends over to pick up a rusted can and my stomach twists in knots in a kind of psychic recognition. An elderly man in the grocery store picks endives with so much care and I am him for a moment. He is making a meal for his daughter. She is coming home for the weekend. It is easier to inhabit other people sometimes even. It is easiest to inhabit my mother. She is an extension of me, and I am of her. A hand throws a ball, and there is a singular movement. Momentum, trajectory, arm, ball. it is all the same, it doesn't matter. Her Pluto, my sun. Join the literary magazine, she told me in the 6th grade. It wasn't a question. Not would you like to join the literary magazine? She thought it but maybe she dreamt something in me. Or something in me told her to remind me. To set an alarm clock. Like asking someone, Will you wake me up at 7:00 am? Don't let me oversleep.
Can you outgrow your chart? Start living in the margins of it? Perhaps the natural trajectory is from unbelief to belief and then neither. Because both of these things constrain and bind. I could have been anyone, I could have been born in another country, to other parents. I could have lived out so many of the identities that I curate, I could have been the woman picking up cans, the man picking out endives. I could have lost so much more, I could have gained so much more.
But I wasn't born in a different place. mahadasha north node, antardasha south node. A transcontinental flight, foreign lands, a new life. I was three. And my trajectory shifted. or didn't. It went where it was told. We landed at JFK and there was a sea of white faces, and then snow, for the first time, and then cold. I wore my father's jacket all the way home to an apartment that had parquet floors and a TV that my mother and I watched when we woke up from jetlag at 3:00am.
It's all there, in your chart. Some things you can't change, he says.
Really, I think? Even the snow? Even the parquet floors and the TV? Even my mother and I in the bathroom of our apartment in Queens, me sitting by the sink, brushing my teeth in a new foreign land? Does my chart know of my memories, of the things I said and felt, of cobalt skies from the balcony of my apartment on Commonwealth Avenue, of the moments where it felt I had escaped my fate and felt relieved? Of petty meannesses, loss of hope, of sand between my toes after a day at the beach, a vestige of an important day, of the remembrance of things that shouldn't have been laughed at, of the time that my parents called and told me that a field mouse got in their kitchen and fell into a bottle of olive oil? Trapped and sealed in his fate, despite desperate attempts to escape the slippery green deathtrap in the cupboard beneath the stove. What must that have felt like? To be drowned in an unctuous green prison.
I think of the weary old woman who inhabits me. Not old chronologically, old in a different way. ages old. Mars, Mercury, Sun. Does she live in my 12th house? the house of dreams, a bread crumb trail to my life? Is she the reason I walk away from the Big Things before they reach fruition? Love, Success, More. I toe the line, but she won't have it. I tell myself maybe I am a coward, she disagrees. What does it matter, she shrugs, and then smiles a toothless old grin. She alerts me to this habit of overfeeding and starving. The paradox of it. Why does it even exist? I ask, exasperated? Why can't it be easy, for all of us? Not just me, but for the woman collecting cans, for the man in the grocery store, his aloneness, her survival. Why can't we just take what we dream and beyond that not feel ambivalent or guilty?
Unfriendly planetary energies, he says. An opposition or a square. A lack of harmony, a thing to be untangled. For your own growth. Like the red drawstring collar on a peasant shirt accidentally thrown into the wash. An afternoon with a needle attempting to untangle it. At starts patient and irritated. The compulsion to throw the shirt away. To break things in anger. I don't like your system, I want to scream, at him, at her. I want to show them the mouse in the bottle of olive oil and shame them for believing that this is how it should be. or accepting that this is how it is.
They both shrug. Throwing the shirt away is your choice. It's your compromise. And we didn't make up these rules. But we advise that you live by them. Or don't.
But I can't live by them. And I am trapped in this body, in my thoughts, in the glass green bottle of my past and my future. And I don't feel like I am approaching any sort of end because I should be better at this by now, shouldn't I? if I've done it so many times. If this were a real life shouldn't I have been given some sort of instruction on where to go and how to live? And I don't have the right words to express it or the right tools to live it. Like learning how to write letters and numbers, my hands uncomfortably gripping a pencil for the first time, the outstretched appendages of my 3 attempting to hit each of the three lines properly. I was weary, even then. Can't I start at a different place, next time? Can't I be born 44 or go back and redo high school? Can't I be like the Aymara and see my future behind me and my past in front of me? Aren't you just as tired of this as I am?
Why am I the only Pinko in this office? Why am I the only one talking in a loud voice about how much this place sucks, trying to get fired? And for that matter, why won't anyone just fire me already?
south node conjuncts mars, explosion, passion, karma, endings.
She sighs. Don't think your desires your exasperation your rage your questions your ideals your hopes are any different than anyone elses she says. I sigh. I want to believe I am terminally unique, but maybe I am not. None of it is a reason to compromise, she says. Do i have a choice? I ask. not really. She says. And so we are both resigned and weary. She is always right. She is my mother telling me to join literary magazine. The recongnition like an alarm clock. I told her a long time ago to remind me.
Venus conjunction Uranus, November and December, then march, then November and December again.
Unexpected encounters, but don't expect a resolution, just yet.
When will the resolution come, I ask?
2011. he says. I laugh at how concrete this answer is. See? I say to her. he gives me real answers. She laughs. I could have given you those a long time ago, she says. For a lot cheaper.
In the face of formidable initial disadvantages and life-long delicacy, poverty that lasted for three quarters of his life and hostility that survives his death, he did nothing that he did not really want to do, and all that he most wanted to do he did. He went all over the world, he owned a ranch, he lived in the most beautiful corners of Europe, and met whom he wanted to meet and told them that they were wrong and he was right. He painted and made things, and sang, and rode. He wrote something like three dozen books, of which even the worst page dances with life that could be mistaken for no other man’s, while the best are admitted, even by those who hate him, to be unsurpassed. Without vices, with most human virtues, the husband of one wife, scrupulously honest, this estimable citizen yet managed to keep free from the shackles of civilization and the cant of literary cliques. He would have laughed lightly and cursed venomously in passing at the solemn owls– each one secretly chained by the leg– who now conduct his inquest. To do his work and lead his life in spite of them took some doing, but he did it, and long after they are forgotten, sensitive and innocent people– if any are left –will turn Lawrence’s pages and will know from them what sort of a rare man Lawrence was.”
Obituary of D.H. Lawrence
Obituary of D.H. Lawrence
Monday, April 20, 2009
Sometimes I don't now what part is dream, what part is real
Because it's so easy to curate an identity, to reinvent history, to tell stories and forget them. Especially about yourself. Sometimes I don't even know if my memories are real or things I once read in books and internalized. But it's not difficult to have a sort of affection for time, especially lost time, to unspool the threads of narrative and watch the direction they fall in if they didn't have the opportunity to materialize into something concrete, something that could have been worn and would have been remembered. Something that would have eventually torn or would have to be given away.
Apology letter
I'm sorry I insisted on getting Towelhead that night on pay-per-view. I know it's been months and we promised never to speak of the incident ever again, but I feel like we've all had some time to process it and I need to break the silence. We were all violated, okay? We were all betrayed. This was the description that HBO gave us of the movie:
This coming-of-age tale follows the topsy-turvy life of Jasira, a 13-year-old Arab-American girl wrestling with the challenges of adolescence, bigotry and life with an overbearing father.
It sounds so benign. Maybe a little depressing. At worst a cinematic Catcher In the Rye with brown people. And we're all brown, right? It seems so up our alley. Oh and Allan Ball! How could it not be good?
We should have listened to the Time Warner representative when the pay-per-view busted out and we were on hold for like 25 minutes and then he sounded kind of judgemental and asked us if we knew that it had R-rated material. We scoffed at him and tried to get a free month of cable as indemnity for the natural resistance of our cable box to go there. We didn't take it as a sign. We were filled with hubris. We were ready to enter the lion's den.
In our fucking pajamas eating pizza and drinking wine. We were like Nero, playing his lute or lyre or whatever-the-fuck instrument people played during that time while Rome was burning. We had no idea what we were in for. None of us. I would speak in greater detail about the actual violation but the truth is I still don't know if I'm ready. Maybe in a few more years, when we have a survivor's group, because I still don't feel emotionally safe discussing it.
So I'm sorry. I'm sorry that this is something we have to carry with us for the rest of our lives. I, for one, will never be able to look at Aaron Eckhart the same way ever again. Or have sex, for that matter. I'm sorry for all the shame and hurt. I'm sorry you had to see me in a foetal position on the floor moaning, "Make it go away."
Next time, we'll rent 13 Going on 30.
This coming-of-age tale follows the topsy-turvy life of Jasira, a 13-year-old Arab-American girl wrestling with the challenges of adolescence, bigotry and life with an overbearing father.
It sounds so benign. Maybe a little depressing. At worst a cinematic Catcher In the Rye with brown people. And we're all brown, right? It seems so up our alley. Oh and Allan Ball! How could it not be good?
We should have listened to the Time Warner representative when the pay-per-view busted out and we were on hold for like 25 minutes and then he sounded kind of judgemental and asked us if we knew that it had R-rated material. We scoffed at him and tried to get a free month of cable as indemnity for the natural resistance of our cable box to go there. We didn't take it as a sign. We were filled with hubris. We were ready to enter the lion's den.
In our fucking pajamas eating pizza and drinking wine. We were like Nero, playing his lute or lyre or whatever-the-fuck instrument people played during that time while Rome was burning. We had no idea what we were in for. None of us. I would speak in greater detail about the actual violation but the truth is I still don't know if I'm ready. Maybe in a few more years, when we have a survivor's group, because I still don't feel emotionally safe discussing it.
So I'm sorry. I'm sorry that this is something we have to carry with us for the rest of our lives. I, for one, will never be able to look at Aaron Eckhart the same way ever again. Or have sex, for that matter. I'm sorry for all the shame and hurt. I'm sorry you had to see me in a foetal position on the floor moaning, "Make it go away."
Next time, we'll rent 13 Going on 30.
Excerpt from The Great Lover
These I have loved:
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such --
The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,
Hair's fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers
About dead leaves and last year's ferns. . . .
Dear names, And thousand other throng to me!
Royal flames; Sweet water's dimpling laugh from tap or spring;
Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing;
Voices in laughter, too; and body's pain,
Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;
And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;
Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass; --
All these have been my loves.
-Rupert Brooke
White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;
And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;
And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,
Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;
Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is
Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen
Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;
The benison of hot water; furs to touch;
The good smell of old clothes; and other such --
The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,
Hair's fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers
About dead leaves and last year's ferns. . . .
Dear names, And thousand other throng to me!
Royal flames; Sweet water's dimpling laugh from tap or spring;
Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing;
Voices in laughter, too; and body's pain,
Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;
Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam
That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;
And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold
Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;
Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass; --
All these have been my loves.
-Rupert Brooke
Is the name of this blog really that ugly and creepy? It's a reference to my favorite Li-Young Lee poem, in my first blog post. Veronica says it reminds her of birds pecking out people's eyes. Now I can't stop thinking about this. And then I think of Hitchcock. And Marissa dressing as Tippi Hedren that year for Halloween.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
I Heart My So-Called Life.
- Rayanne: [After Angela has been talking loudly as Jordan walked by] Angela, he's gone. You can talk like a normal person.
- Angela: Oh, God.
- Rayanne: You have got to progress to the next phase of this. I mean, think of Rickie and me. How much more can we take?
- Angela: I just don't want to look like I'm throwing myself at him.
- Rayanne: Excuse me. People throwing themselves at people? Is, like, the basis of civilization.
- Rickie: She has a point.
- Angela: [voiceover] If Jordan Catalano is, like, nearby, my entire body knows it. Like one of those dogs that point. I'll keep talking and stuff, but my mind won't even know what I'm saying. I keep wondering if there's like, a term for this.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Have you ever read Madamme Bovary? Because I would totally cast Ryan Gosling to play the role of Leon in the film version. He's got that conflicted thing going on. Like this line in M. Bovary is soo Ryan: "He didn't dare question her; but realizing how experienced she was, he told himself that she must have known the utmost extremes of suffering and pleasure. What had once charmed him he now found a little frightening. Then, too, he rebelled against the way his personality was increasingly being submerged; he resented her perpetual triumph over him." Look at the man. Closely. Doesn't he seem both charmed and frightened and resentful and not entirely sure which emotion to convey? No, seriously, look closer.
I would cast Ryan Gosling in anything though. I would cast him to hang around my house and mow my lawn and read me passages from O'Neill plays.
Also, if I ever needed legal services, I would hire the character he played in Fracture, Willie Beachum.
He spent a lot of time brooding and staring at people in that movie but it was seriously hot. Generally when people brood and stare it's annoying and creepy, but not Ryan. he stares well. Also, he totally gaze-stalked some corporate lawyer into sleeping with him. Ryan doesn't waste any time. And in the end, he outsmarted Anthony Hopkins which seems like it would be a difficult task, but maybe not, considering my recent Gabriel Byrne discovery. Sigh. Actors.My Ryan Gosling crush started a while ago, with Half Nelson, and then turned to full-on love with Lars and the Real Girl. Then I heard he was dating Natalie Portman and I was like "Yawn. Who hasn't dated her?"
Psychic Disillusionment
I wish Gabriel Byrne was my therapist. I don't actually have a therapist, but I could totally listen to his psychic insights in Irish brogue all day long. I swear, I've crushed him since I was like seven. So sensitive, so thoughtful, so slightly pained and weighed down by the burdens of life. He's like a human sigh. Also, he seems like someone who reads a lot in his free time. Like he's read Ulysses and understands it and would explain it to you, kindly, not patronizing and all. And I bet he's kind to animals and kids and knows how to talk to them so they don't feel stupid. This is what I thought. But then I saw this picture online:
This isn't about her, Gabriel Byrne. Because I'm sure she's a perfectly nice person. I don't want you to think I'm judging her because she chooses not to wear a bra in public, or because she's half your age and made of plastic. This is about you, Gabriel Byrne. This is about the lies you've been propagating through your "I'm-so-pained-and-sensitive-and-see-the-beauty-in-things-other-people-don't" act. Really, Gabriel Byrne? Because I'm beginning to think your tastes are pretty conventional. Also, could you lend her your jacket because her nipples are showing through her shirt. I expected more from you, Gabriel Byrne. What else have you been keeping from me? I'm so disillusioned you a-hole.*Friday, April 17, 2009
My 25 things from stupid facebook
1. I used to think that it was coincidental that all my best friends, boyfriends and significant crushes have been left-handed, but now I think there's some sort of identification here. lefties are the world's privileged minorities; they'll never share with you sorrowful tales of marginalization and oppression but they'll switch places with you at Sardi's so your elbows don't bump while dining; they know the world won't change to accommodate them and for the most part that's ok.
2. Sometimes, if I'm invited to an event that's going to be crowded, I lie and say I'm sick or have food poisoning or that the cable guy is coming in to repair my broken Tivo.
3. I tend to divide the world up into binaries: samoa people vs. thin mint people. English Patient people vs. Braveheart people. This helps me, on a practical level, place people but it rarely gives me any sort of deeper insight into their psyches. Really, in a larger sense, I don't believe in binaries. Most Buddhists don't.
4. One of my favorite things to do is drive up to the top of Griffith Park when it's really really foggy and stand with my arms outstretched till I can't see my own fingers.
5. I have a specific playlist when I write. It's a mix of Afro-beat stuff, Caetano Veloso, Cuban music and (ambient) Brian Eno, a lot of Aphex Twin. It's like a writing crutch. I'm always asking music junkies to add to it.
6. My dad is a really methodical cook in terms of precision and timing. He marinates eggplant while he roasts tomatoes, he seasons couscous while he braises vegetables. he always knows which knives to use and cleans the counter after every step. I rarely cook like this but when I do, the food tastes better. It tastes like my dad's.
7. I'm good and lively for the first 3-4 hours of a party. Then I fall asleep. it's not like I'm narcoleptic or anything. Just all that talking makes me really tired.
8. My favorite brunch is the brioche French toast at Square One with roasted cherries, almonds and creme fraiche. After this meal, I am always happy.
9. At some point, I'd like to lock myself up in a room for a year, tell people not to call me anymore and just write. Right now I'm just training for the marathon by...I don't know, writing a couple hours a day and eating raw food and...lounging on my couch watching tons of Battlestar Galactica. Yeah.
10. I wish I had the capacity to move forward and never look back but I am driven by nostalgia. I am forever looking back, forever worried that I've left significant things or people behind. I am forever torn and conflicted, forever existing in a space of ambiguity. And I'm not even a Gemini. But my Vedic sign is Pisces, perhaps this is why I am constantly swimming in simulataneously different directions.
11. Re: the living in ambiguity thing, I wonder if all that walking while looking back is the reason I am constantly breaking toes or spraining ankles.
12. I make fun of hippie dippie people, even as the offending words are coming out of their mouths. But then I realize that I have no right to laugh at them behind their backs because I have an ayurvedic doctor and consult a Vedic astrologer (I know).
13. I want to be friends with certain authors. Definitely Arundhati Roy, definitely Murakami, definitely Erica Jong (even though she seems full of herself) maybe Milan Kundera (Even though he's kind of a mysogynist). Definitely Joan Didion.
14. I really liked Kim Gamble's Modern Love column in the NYT this week. I kind of identified with the idea of dropping $3000 to fly to China to meet a guy. Actually, I have on several occassions engaged in (or helped friends (and by "helped" I mean actively encouraged)) massively coordinated, heavily complicated plans in order to "make something happen." It always blows up in your face but I still think the euphoria of the adventure is worth it.
15. I think all desserts are better with sea salt sprinkled on them.
16. I like people who are able to construct temporary realities and then slip into them for a time, at least until the accomodations become uncomfortable as imaginary accomdations eventually do. Curating your reality always has an expiration date.
17. Like Amelie, I love stratagems and am fairly skilled at them.
18. I was an East coast snob before I moved to LA but I think it was the nostalgia factor, again, that pulled me in. LA reminds me of India - the traffic, the pollution, the mango, chile and lime vendors downtown, the mediterranean style homes.
19. I live for yoga in Runyon Canyon. It's really one of the best things that LA has to offer. And the Hollywood Forever Cemetery screenings (though they've kind of jumped the shark). And the LA Conservancy tours. And that fig farm in Malibu.
20. Sometimes I take the subway down to Union Station and sit in one of those big leather chairs just to think. I used to spend an inordinate amount of time at Grand Central too. I love train stations.
21. The worst feeling in the world is coming up with a writing idea and not having a pen or paper to write it down.
22. I love writing letters. Long, confessional, Jane Austenian, handwritten letters. I wish more people wrote letters.
23. I admire restraint in people. I think its a pretty sexy quality overall but to be honest I haven't ever found a pure version of it in anyone. The flip side of restraint is always repression and that's no fun.
24. My problem is overexpression, not repression. It's not that I have no filter, just a really poorly functioning one.
25. I always run into people I know in airports or in foreign countries. I like this. It makes me feel as though I am connected to everyone through a large and complex web that doesn't just exist in the virtual world. Sometimes, if I have some sort of epiphany or signifcant memory emerging later as a result of these chance encounters, I think the chance meeting was somehow mandated by our unconscious. I know. Hippie dippie. Again.
2. Sometimes, if I'm invited to an event that's going to be crowded, I lie and say I'm sick or have food poisoning or that the cable guy is coming in to repair my broken Tivo.
3. I tend to divide the world up into binaries: samoa people vs. thin mint people. English Patient people vs. Braveheart people. This helps me, on a practical level, place people but it rarely gives me any sort of deeper insight into their psyches. Really, in a larger sense, I don't believe in binaries. Most Buddhists don't.
4. One of my favorite things to do is drive up to the top of Griffith Park when it's really really foggy and stand with my arms outstretched till I can't see my own fingers.
5. I have a specific playlist when I write. It's a mix of Afro-beat stuff, Caetano Veloso, Cuban music and (ambient) Brian Eno, a lot of Aphex Twin. It's like a writing crutch. I'm always asking music junkies to add to it.
6. My dad is a really methodical cook in terms of precision and timing. He marinates eggplant while he roasts tomatoes, he seasons couscous while he braises vegetables. he always knows which knives to use and cleans the counter after every step. I rarely cook like this but when I do, the food tastes better. It tastes like my dad's.
7. I'm good and lively for the first 3-4 hours of a party. Then I fall asleep. it's not like I'm narcoleptic or anything. Just all that talking makes me really tired.
8. My favorite brunch is the brioche French toast at Square One with roasted cherries, almonds and creme fraiche. After this meal, I am always happy.
9. At some point, I'd like to lock myself up in a room for a year, tell people not to call me anymore and just write. Right now I'm just training for the marathon by...I don't know, writing a couple hours a day and eating raw food and...lounging on my couch watching tons of Battlestar Galactica. Yeah.
10. I wish I had the capacity to move forward and never look back but I am driven by nostalgia. I am forever looking back, forever worried that I've left significant things or people behind. I am forever torn and conflicted, forever existing in a space of ambiguity. And I'm not even a Gemini. But my Vedic sign is Pisces, perhaps this is why I am constantly swimming in simulataneously different directions.
11. Re: the living in ambiguity thing, I wonder if all that walking while looking back is the reason I am constantly breaking toes or spraining ankles.
12. I make fun of hippie dippie people, even as the offending words are coming out of their mouths. But then I realize that I have no right to laugh at them behind their backs because I have an ayurvedic doctor and consult a Vedic astrologer (I know).
13. I want to be friends with certain authors. Definitely Arundhati Roy, definitely Murakami, definitely Erica Jong (even though she seems full of herself) maybe Milan Kundera (Even though he's kind of a mysogynist). Definitely Joan Didion.
14. I really liked Kim Gamble's Modern Love column in the NYT this week. I kind of identified with the idea of dropping $3000 to fly to China to meet a guy. Actually, I have on several occassions engaged in (or helped friends (and by "helped" I mean actively encouraged)) massively coordinated, heavily complicated plans in order to "make something happen." It always blows up in your face but I still think the euphoria of the adventure is worth it.
15. I think all desserts are better with sea salt sprinkled on them.
16. I like people who are able to construct temporary realities and then slip into them for a time, at least until the accomodations become uncomfortable as imaginary accomdations eventually do. Curating your reality always has an expiration date.
17. Like Amelie, I love stratagems and am fairly skilled at them.
18. I was an East coast snob before I moved to LA but I think it was the nostalgia factor, again, that pulled me in. LA reminds me of India - the traffic, the pollution, the mango, chile and lime vendors downtown, the mediterranean style homes.
19. I live for yoga in Runyon Canyon. It's really one of the best things that LA has to offer. And the Hollywood Forever Cemetery screenings (though they've kind of jumped the shark). And the LA Conservancy tours. And that fig farm in Malibu.
20. Sometimes I take the subway down to Union Station and sit in one of those big leather chairs just to think. I used to spend an inordinate amount of time at Grand Central too. I love train stations.
21. The worst feeling in the world is coming up with a writing idea and not having a pen or paper to write it down.
22. I love writing letters. Long, confessional, Jane Austenian, handwritten letters. I wish more people wrote letters.
23. I admire restraint in people. I think its a pretty sexy quality overall but to be honest I haven't ever found a pure version of it in anyone. The flip side of restraint is always repression and that's no fun.
24. My problem is overexpression, not repression. It's not that I have no filter, just a really poorly functioning one.
25. I always run into people I know in airports or in foreign countries. I like this. It makes me feel as though I am connected to everyone through a large and complex web that doesn't just exist in the virtual world. Sometimes, if I have some sort of epiphany or signifcant memory emerging later as a result of these chance encounters, I think the chance meeting was somehow mandated by our unconscious. I know. Hippie dippie. Again.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Ode to David Lynch
I love you, David Lynch
Except for that Inland Empire thing
We'll just pretend that it never happened
And never let you near a digital camera ever again
Also, I'm impressed that you got Isabella Rossellini
Because who doesn't want to be with her?
And never let you near a digital camera ever again
Also, I'm impressed that you got Isabella Rossellini
Because who doesn't want to be with her?
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
I was three when the Asian Games were held in Delhi. We all went to the opening ceremonies, my parents, my uncle, my uncle's friends and me. We were high up in the stadium when Indira Gandhi made an appearance. First a helicopter emerged and flew over the stadium, then I heard her voice, thundering above us. Then we were showered with marigolds, thousands, millions of them. I was three. I remember this. It's one of my first memories. It was the marigolds that got me, the hush and then the applause of the audience. I had never seen anything like it and I didn't yet understand the laws of gravity, of optical illusions, how microphones and speakers worked. I quickly collapsed Indira Gandhi with God because I didn't know anyone else who could make marigolds fall from the sky like orangey-gold rain or appear only in voice. Thundering above. Via helicopter.
It took me years to learn otherwise.
It took me years to learn otherwise.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Dream
I went to see a fortune teller. She worked at a bank. You had to open a bank account in order to see her for a session. Her name was Elsa and she had orange hair and a sympathetic face.
"You can't do this to yourself," she said. "You can't live here and live another life in your head."
"But I've been doing it forever," I told her. "my whole life, maybe. I've always had two different lives. The one in my head and the real one."
"Hmm..." she said. "One day you'll stop. Don't push the envelope before then."
Pushing the envelope, I thought. A pilot's term for flying an aircraft at or beyond it's limits. I do this too. Notice the discursive elements of other people's speech. Etymology, symbol, metaphor. I have a conversation with myself about language even as I'm having a conversation. I guess I even do it in my dreams
There was a time when there weren't two lives. Only one. There were a couple of times. But I started to see the seams of reality, the foundation, the structure, the stitches that held it together. The scaffolding all around. It always happens eventually and then the world splits out of necessity.
One day, in the midst of this singular life, I had a dream about you. You owned a helicopter. You "lodged" it on the top of a building in Silverlake. You would fly over my neighborhood in it. I could see you above, you would look for me at my favorite places. At Intelligentsia Coffee, at the Farmer's Market, in Runyon Canyon. The helicopter was rusted gray, old. Sometimes you would wave, sometimes you would pretend you weren't looking for me. But you were, I could tell. When I woke up, I realized this was true. You did have a helicopter. I flew with you in it once. I remembered this memory so clearly that I couldn't tell what part was real and what part wasn't. Then I realized that none of it was.
Monday, April 13, 2009
An Enhaced Intelligence for Strategery
An enhanced intelligence for strategery is developed by necessity. It is not genetic. It is a learned intelligence. Most good manipulators are skilled in this variety of intelligence. They know how to stay five steps ahead of you in mental chess. If you want to enhance your strategery skills, it is good to find a manipulative person and practice with them.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 2009
This was Then: IM from a Long Time Ago
me: this is my sister's definition of love:Meeting Street Cafe
220 Meeting StProvidence, RI 02906
Phone: (401) 273-1066oh wait that's not it
that's the address for meeting street cafe that's not the definititon of love
K: thank god
me: it's about accepting another person in their totality
K: i think meeting street is over rated crap
me: and it's not about lust at all. i get where she's going but that's all theoretical. in reality i think that part is bullshit.
K: yeah. i side with you. not that love can't be extremely generous. But it grows in tension
me: tension, yes. but i think love is about a psychic connection. Someone has access to your psychic roadmap. it's primal. And it's about balancing love and hate . ikt's much mroe dynamic than just accepting someone. Although accepting is part of it. accepting isnt growth though.or maybe it is. i don't know
K: ? no i don't hate the people i love
me: i think the reality of love is that you're with your best friend and your worst enemy all at once, because of the level of unusual access you have to one another. but i read this in necessary losses. it's the only book i've ever returned because it offended me on so many levels. but i'm impressionable and believe everything i read.
K: NO wrong lol
me: it's TRUE you don't want to believe it but it's true
K: I ahve no enemies except for puneet and i don't lvoe him
me: you ahte your parents a little bit the people you're closest to are the people you're going to have tension with and hate a little
K: That's not about hate or enemies. It's about hope and dashed expectations. Love is the hope for love and loved ones fail you
me: no, that's expectation stemming from romanctic delusion that's not love. i'm not talking about enemies hate, i'm talking about feeling misunderstood/disconnected blame-hate
K: I want to know what love is I want you to tell me
me: Can we be serious instead of song lyrsidc?
K: ishk ishk
me: and it's "i want you to show me." my sister's like, whatever, lust goes away anyway it's habituation.
K: Sorry, my eighties crappy music brain is rotting
me: either that or she's an old soul and i'm the one who is retarded
K: I don't see the point in the exercise of articulation
K: I don't see the point in the exercise of articulation
me: you have to be able to define wht you want
K: :) NO
me: otherwise you're floating through life with blinders on
K: You don't 'want love' the way you want a screen writing job
me: don't do that
K: do what
me: don't patronize me.
K: I fall in love twice a month it's like my period. I worry when i'm off a couple days
me: can i steal that?
K: yeah
me: what are you to do when you hit menopause
K: I i'll be freee to fuck with abandon
me: recessary losses
K: I gotta work
me: no you don't. it's all about relinquishing expectations and accepting loss as a path to growth
K: some of us work for the meager salaries we're given
K: I"M GOING! STOP SOTP
me:
K: SOPT SOPT!
867-5309
867-5309 was a campus number while I was in college. It was actually (401) 867-5309. The number was for a freshman double in Keeney. Apparently, the two girls who lived there were foreign students. They didn't know the song. They couldn't understand why people kept calling them at all hours of the day, drunkenly reciting it. Sometimes at unreasonable decibels, sometimes aggressively. Sometimes mockingly. They had to change the number because one of the girls, the Pakistani one, not the Korean one, was about to have a nervous breakdown. She threatened to transfer or go back home to her country. And her parents called the Dean of Admissions and told him they were deeply disappointed in the quality of life the college had to offer their daughter. So now it doesn't exist anymore, the number. I only heard this story. I didn't know either of them so I don't know if it's actually true.*
I thought about this the other day because of the elderly man who sang it at a karaoke bar in Burbank. It sounded dirty when he sang about finding Jenny's number scrawled on a bathroom wall. Maybe it wouldn't have sounded as dirty if he weren't as old.
*I embellish stories I can't corroborate. Sometimes I just tell them coolly. Embellishment and tone are the keys to good storytelling.
I thought about this the other day because of the elderly man who sang it at a karaoke bar in Burbank. It sounded dirty when he sang about finding Jenny's number scrawled on a bathroom wall. Maybe it wouldn't have sounded as dirty if he weren't as old.
*I embellish stories I can't corroborate. Sometimes I just tell them coolly. Embellishment and tone are the keys to good storytelling.
Boldness has Genius, Power and Magic in it
Unless one is committed,
there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back,
always ineffectiveness.
Unless one is committed,
there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back,
always ineffectiveness.
Concerning acts of initiative (and creation)
there is one elementary truth
the ignorance of which kills countless ideas
and splendid plans:
there is one elementary truth
the ignorance of which kills countless ideas
and splendid plans:
That the moment one definitely commits oneself
then Providence moves too.
then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one
that would never otherwise have occurred.
that would never otherwise have occurred.
A whole stream of events issues from the decision,
raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings
and material assistance which no man could have dreamt
would come his way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Begin it now.
-Goethe
This, I like
Dogfish
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman's boot,
with a white belly.
If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.
And you know
what a smile means,
don't you?
*
I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.
*
It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don't know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.
*
Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don't we?
Slowly
*
the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.
*
You don't want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don't want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it's the same old story - - -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
*
And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.
*
And probably,
if they don't waste time
looking for an easier world,
They can do it.
~Mary Oliver
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Full moon over LA
Why. Does. My. Period. ALWAYS. Align. With. The. Full. Moon?
I swear it makes me crazy. I want to be all "What? The Japanese don't PMS. It's all psychosomatic," or "Shut up, Eckhart Tolle about my pre-menstrual pain-body." But it's true. Full moon + period = tears and some sort of really irritating pebble-in-my-shoe type of saudade (see below).
Readers: (all two of you) Please send pickles and stracciatella gelato my way. This fucking condition has a cure and it involves Italian delicacies. And the pickles.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Alberto Balsam
I know how these things end. I've read Anna Karenina. Twice. Was all I could think then. It sucks to know thyself. As well as I know myself at least.
There's a moment in the song Alberto Balsam where a dream is interrupted so distinctly, like the feel of hobnail boots on reverie. Reality laughing at you saying you actually doubted I'd catch up? Like the cliche of an algebra teacher waking you from a pleasant daydream to answer a question about the surface area of a rotating cylinder. Like getting off one of those flat-escalators and tripping*. Like having the rug pulled out from under your feet so roughly that you don't know if you'll survive it, and then a moment when you realize you will. And perhaps this is worse, but either way it isn't a choice. No one's asking you. And then comes the struggle of reality. The fact that you do have to. You do have to get back on your feet, you do have to survive. You do have to reach some sort of equilibrium and it won't be easy. But it comes. First you're off-kilter, like the song, building a kind of steady momentum. Channeling your resources because there isn't room for indulgence. And then it's steadier, and richer somehow. There's a path and you're not without a fate, a route, a lifeline.
But it isn't the dream. And you still wonder.
I love this song. Or no, that's not true. It isn't love, it's something else. It just makes sense.
*This happened to me once, incidentally. At Schiphol Airport. I know, I'm worse than Gerald Ford
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Magic
My apartment in Atlanta had Christmas lights and an orange tree. My bed was a Moroccan horse cart. I had a balcony overlooking Peachtree. People would come over and drink. I didn't drink that year. Alcohol or caffeine. And I was vegetarian. And come to think of it, celibate. My life was simple. And things dropped into it. There was a French restaurant two metro stops away that was housed in a crafsman cottage with mismatched tables and chairs. I would go there and order strawberries and cream and read. I went to the Iranian film festival down the street at the High Museum. I laughed sometimes but not a lot. I thought a lot. I watched people. I watched people on the subway. Soldiers my age being deployed to Iraq. Old ladies. I wondered what I would be like as an old lady. I was self-involved but not in a vain sort of way. I wondered about myself and who I was outside of home, college, outside of a circle of friends who knew me, in a city where no one did. I was no one's girlfriend. And for once, it wasn't sad. It just was. I didn't need much. I was happy when the orange tree sprouted two oranges. They were green at first, then slowly, they turned orange. For a moment, I liked the passage of time. I liked the way light reflected on buildings at night, I liked the swish of cars in the rain while I was under the covers. Once I got so sick I was snotting all over the place, but I had my Moroccan horse cart bed and my orange tree and Christmas lights. And I could order in hot and sour soup. I had no TV. Sometimes I listened to music though. This is when I started listening to Brian Eno. I wondered if Brian Eno had a girlfriend and if he didn't if I could be her. Then I abandoned this thought. I was happiest in the evenings, on my balcony, in my pajamas. Just thinking. I was 23. I knew I wouldn't be in this apartment, in this city for long. And I was right. But it felt like the perfect respite from the life I was supposed to live. It felt like I had escaped and no one had noticed, not even me. And this made me smile.
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