Rushofbloodtothehead: Unedited thoughts on AVATAR

Went to see that movie with all the blue giants in it yesterday. People—my mother—were comparing it to Dances With Wolves a week and a half ago, which I thought strange because all the previews seemed to lend it more towards some kind of hybrid Lord of the Rings and amped up Pixar animation flick. These are the circumstances, because it would seem that those are always important to how a movie is understood or enjoyed: pinchy new ballet flats, Dad, Cousin, Brother, Sister, slight headache, hot theatre, wet floor, bucket of popcorn, Sour Patch kids, an orange I found in my purse. Not in 3D, as this was sold out by the time we arrived. Slightly curmudgeon-y. Munch on this, then, your grain of salt.
AVATAR was one of those movies I emerge from thinking “That was good! I didn’t like it. What’s wrong with me?” It falls in line with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which I also couldn’t comprehend my dislike for. These are sound, Oscar-tailored films by wide regard—they’ve got panache, political undercurrent, fabulous special-effects, scenery out the wazoo, that sort of gravitas only really perceived in epic movies that were treated, months and months before they ever arrived in theatres, as promised, hit EPIC MOVIES. They kind of froth with high expectations, and I hold (held) both of these films to just that. And oddly, the first thing I think of when puzzling out of the theatre is not the direct issue I take with AVATAR, what exactly in the film I did not like, but it made me instead refer to that which I know I do appreciate on-screen. I’m in the process of boiling it down to a formula:
I like movies with real love in them. I like movies with strange, uncultivated, angry, crude, silent, talkative, ridiculous, estranged, unlikely love. Love in the world is all of these things, but to see the truth on screen is a rarity not typically endorsed by the masses and the makers so eager to conjure escape from this, our bleak existence (dun dun DUNNNN). Love on screen I am tired of, and AVATAR shows me why—between the good-hearted, dopey Marine ingénue and the willful, passionate native princess in the movie there erupts only the worst kind of love, as the media gives it to us—expected, almost promised from the first scene of sudden altercation. Completely predictable, from that first second of lingering eye contact right down to the sweet first kiss beneath the giving tree, and uncultivated in that we don’t SEE the actual act of people falling for one another, something I always find the most exciting. Deferring to my own movie cabinet when I get home, I take note of all the harmless mediocrities in the stack and realize that there is similar flaccidness found in the romances of other movies I didn’t like, or didn’t like as much as I might have: it’s easy, it is not electric, it is seen before. And it’s not even that I’m a cynical non-fan of the escapist culture at the movies, I love to escape—but I find a hard time escaping into something I can’t inject with even a teaspoon of reality. All our daydreams, they spin off from this, our bleak existence (dun dun DUNNN)—and conveniently acting as a microcosm for this whole condition, I see in AVATAR the whole plight realized. Without the grounding of some reality in a romance, I can’t believe in it. And love is so very exciting and earthshaking at its core that it’s almost hard to believe people can make it boring onscreen, can make it predictable. I feel gypped, even amid the fabulous blue creatures in their CGI crafted world.
Another thing I thirst for in movies is the multi-dimensionality of characters; AVATAR is all archetypes. There’s an angry colonel with a scar across his face, war-mongering, inexplicably cruel. There’s the sassy, cigarette-smoking scientist who seeks only the welfare of the native people. Dopey but heroic main guy, willful natives, all in commune with nature. Perhaps it’s not only that these characters are all predictable in and of themselves as recognizable and un-complex entities, but the mere fact that I’ve seen them all before in about thirty different films (DWW among these). And here I come to the kind-of crux of why I didn’t really like AVATAR, all that much.
There is something about storytelling that begs consistent reinvention. The cyclical nature of history dictates it, the consistent charge onwards in the way of media and special effects summons it, human hearts and minds want it, will keep paying upwards of ten bucks for something that is free online to get it. People—again, meaning my mother—have been rattling the cages of the Hollywood honchos for some time, noting all the remakes and the book adaptations that pepper our theatres with some amount of disdain. They’re not original anymore, she’ll say all the time. I tend to agree: there seem to be very few original stories winning statues or critical praise these days. I don’t know if they still exist at all, at least in the same way I assume they must have when the industry was in its heyday.
So the modern world believes in special effects. Perhaps that’s our new palette, our new motion for change. While storylines and characters suffer, explosions get bigger and giant robots grow more realistic—not-so-oddly in tandem with the military. But I for one am dissatisfied with this, especially when movies come out that seem as if they teeter on the precipice of accomplishing both a thrilling world landscape and truthfulness and marvel in character and story—AVATAR does just this, you see. But in so many other ways, this story is not a reinvention—it does not really add anything remarkable to a story I have heard told before a million different ways because the minutiae of these characters cannot draw me in no matter how many fabulous weird birds they can ride. And at ITS crux, AVATAR is the same story of disgraceful human (cough AMERICAN) colonialism without any real account made for the fifteen years of turning, reinventing, that our country has done since DANCES WITH WOLVES. I demand from my cinema that everything be, at least in some way, new, fresh, challenging. I had an English teacher freshman year who would speak of reiterating direct points in an essay without adding any new thought in a new sentence as a “BOTHSAME” (inspired by some small child cousin, I think). AVATAR is a bothsame, with the fabulous new special effects of a movie moving forward but the decaying soul of a story ten years past the sell-by date. And that’s the thing about reinvention and cyclical history: even if everything is ultimately the same, if our revolutions and our patterns seem to guarantee a cycle, we’re always trying new ways to fail, and doing it somehow differently. I ask the media to follow suit—with love, with colonialism, with characters. Tell me something new, show me something wonderful—and by this I mean old things in a new way. One Brittany, One AVATAR. Stand-off.
It’s hard to put into words exactly why I want to take issue with the colonialism story itself. For some reason it bothers me that the Na’vi (blue people) are really exactly like caricatures or stereotypes or perhaps even existing Native Americans—they commune with nature, and walk about unclothed, and draw all their energy from a majestic old tree in the forest. I wonder why we even needed to leave American soil to tell this story, besides the opportunity for special effects. It too feels oddly cheap. And then there is the money-grubbing suit with an eye for the land’s natural resources, calling the Na’vi “savages” and “blue monkeys” left and right. My mother (who features prominently in this treatise…) opines that frontier worlds, even those off-planet, might involve a certain amount of regression—Oregon Trail, prairies, etc. But in this phantasmagoric 2123 I find it so unbelievable that these words are being thrown about without even a nod to the candor of a hundred years past; America’s own painful histories with oppressed people. Really? I want to ask James Cameron. Really? Can we at least get the pretended credit of a suit feigning political correctness? What is this? Then, again, maybe I’m only uncomfortable because of the sharp, unpleasant glint of recognizing something awful about yourself. Still.
In STAR TREK, the most recent comparable multi-planet epic flick, there is a suggested racism emanating from the planet Vulcan towards Terra, but it’s treated very differently. There’s an elevated kind of scoffing, which allegedly comes from the Vulcan’s inherited sense of condescending, impressive intelligence and reasonable temperament. But we are meant to understand that this is a racism about human nature, and it is not an ancient word making an untreated revival. I believe that these constructs should be expected to change in the rotating reinvention of a hundred years history, if not in intent at least in the actual vocabulary. In my mind, I rationalize that the ‘savage’ word is disdainful, this way.
Spoiler alert! The Na’vi win the last stand. This is suddenly not the same as a lot of other stories that do similar things—we’re in Braveheart country now. Riding in on fabulous creatures and by the grace of their beloved tree they utterly slam mean, scarred colonel and his drones. But once again my history book and my movie cabinet protest—everybody knows that no matter how this particular fight ends, the humans come back. With bigger guns. They prevail and wreak havoc, until hundreds of years pass, the conscience is assuaged and only a few brave souls begin to lament the story and later make movies about it. You can’t convince me that these fabulous birds will win out against nuclear fall-out. And perhaps that’s the cynical reality coming back again, but this is something else in AVATAR that I’m not willing to buy from the movies anymore—red herring happy endings. This is the cheapest blow of all—I decide at this point that James Cameron did not have a clear intention towards a message or a history when making this film, despite all not-so-subtle-Bush-digs to the contrary.
Again, this isn’t about me wanting or needing truth from the movies—just the seedling of it, the spark the imagination emanates from. And I see in AVATAR myriad reasons why that small little fleck could not possibly be underrated, ever, no matter how fantastical the setting. It does not feel truthful that the world doesn’t even try to pretend it has not changed, socially or morally, years and years from now—if humans do anything, they slap new values on each era as if to create a sense of morale in people, to let them believe or (allow them to hope!) that things have changed in response to past mistakes. Myth of progress. The Na’vi subscribe to the circle of life; why don’t the movie crews? Why can’t they give me a love story? A character I can alternately hate or chide or adore or envy? Something to think about, here, in the real world as it is related to Pandorra (blue planet homebase. My, this is unedited…). Not because I’m too jaded or unwilling to ricochet off the face of my humdrum, slightly curmudgeon-ly headached world for two and a half hours, but because at the end of the credits I have to go home. And the point of the movies, to me, is to take part of the story with you when you leave.
So, ironically, it would seem James Cameron has succeeded in an unexpected respect. It is a full twenty-four hours after I left this movie and I can’t seem to stop…considering it.

Christmas

I sit down with the intention of having poetry kind of erupt from her fingertips: I mean summoning charms, little rivulets of gold memory, ponderous, heavy question marks, the tinkling of baby laughter. How my kid brother describes fishing: awful twenty minutes, horrendous, misplaced hours, all for one minute of absolute joy.

Today is Christmas, 2009. I've been thinking all day about all the Christmases I can remember, and subsequently how my feelings about it have changed over the years. Christmas is a big deal, here. We have two trees because all of the handcrafted, handpainted German ornaments (and English, French, Canadian, Indonesian ornaments...) that my mother has spent her whole life accumulating, naming and lovingly fondling simply do not fit on one evergreen anymore. She has, also, a collection of porcelain Dickens houses--not strictly Christmas but winter-related--which are miniature replications of all the different buildings almost every character in every Charles Dickens novel has entered. Among these are Fagin's Hideaway and Scrooge and Marley's Counting House. They live above the bookcases. There are little lights, which plug into the wall, which we stuff inside the houses so it looks as if little people occupy them.

On the mantle, there are the Santas--I could run downstairs to count how many, but I'm in my pajamas. Probably around fifteen. There are some cloth Santas, some black Santas, some fabric Santas, human-sized, abstract, some carry puppies, some have lists or packs on their back, some have wands, some stand upright and others are squashy and must lean against things. There is one Mrs. Claus.

We have living things, too. Sticky fingers, stained with powdered sugar. Cold feet, from snow drifts outside (happy incident this year!), absurdly rosy cheeks from a) all the alcohol we consume and b) loud laughter, from large company or baking stress. Four dogs running around the house, and a cat. There is wrapping paper and Johnny Mathis and cider mulling in a pan, episodes of Mad Men competing with A Charlie Brown Christmas for airtime space, there are Spode Christmas plates made out of bone china, which we must be very careful when we handle in the dishwasher. The nitty-gritty of OUR LIFE, as a family, can simply not be summarized any more neatly than this--these, twenty years of Christmases, let's say fourteen spent sentient.

Once, I re-adapted "A Christmas Carol" and forced my cousins to perform it in the old Hendricks living room, Christmas Eve. Most of rehearsal was spent herding little ones and making the paper chain Marley had to wear. Once my Aunt Bessie came to Christmas with an oxygen tube and pack, along with my Aunt Margaret (or was this the same year?) who simply sat in a chair and stared into space, saying nothing to anyone. Once we gave my grandmother a terrorist of a golden retriever, just plopped the ball of fluff into her rickety hands. We've been sledding. Each year I go shopping, hardcore, with my cousin Leslie and we buy more things for ourselves than other people. More than once, my father has crafted some elaborate charade around my mother's gift--making everyone antsy about his failure to get her a good present until we learn it's stowed somewhere hidden, or masked in a different box. I've gotten bikes, chairs, all kinds of ways to play music, dolls, clothes, candy, a record player, guitars, a sewing machine. I've known six different pets on Christmas day. I've suffered through church services, methodically and dutifully, secretly loving carols and belting them as much as I can. There is just so MUCH here, and it's all about that semi-mythical state of existence that most people in college seem to start to want to deny--roots. This is where I come from: my family, at Christmas.

It's strange to be nineteen and remember. It's young, I know, but my sister doesn't wake me up at 3am anymore, and I don't get castles or tents or adventures of my own creation anymore. There's never been anything more magical than all that three week shenanigan to me--at least not until high-school, and delayed gratification, and recycling wrapping paper, and conceding to the "spirit of Santa" over the flesh and blood existence of a jolly, fat intruder. And don't get me wrong, it's still magical, but if if I were to trace the way I have changed and aged in a most deliberate, detailed fashion I could find it all in Christmas--the inverse time it takes me to wake up these days, the presents I receive, the way I write them down, and the way my heart feels. I miss being so outrageously JUBILANT! I try to look for the perks in being wiser. I know there are some.
I look at older people, receiving even less presents, and I sometimes think about dying. Fifty Christmases from now, maybe. Or, two.

People--myself included--like to ask "do you think you've changed much at college?" or more specifically "how have you changed since college?" And the first thing I think is--how can I even begin? How can I tell them about crying and colors and rolling around on the floor and "framing" and ardent believing and poor decisions, how can I explain art and emotion and what I have decided I know about love, friendship, solitude, family, confidence? I never can. I don't. I come up with some hackneyed, write-off of a reply: "I guess I'm a little more responsible" or "LOL I'm learning to feed myself or save money!" but beyond just cheap, these explanations are flat-out lies. I have changed--or perhaps the world around me, and what I take in has changed--so very drastically that I have a hard time these days knowing at all what I want, what I believe and what I need. Christmas reminds me, but twofold: sipping tea (or coffee. Who AM I?), fretting about my waistline in regard to a new pair of pants and a plate of cookies, analyzing the emotional journey behind episodes of "Mad Men", crying over "Our Town", sitting with my family and talking about the same old things as ever, I know that I am these roots (these comfortable comfortable roots) but also more. It's both bracing and strange, in the way that strange can feel sad. I know where I am, for certain, for real.

At dinner tonight my Aunt Caroline unceremoniously shoved a copy of that old editorial, "Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus" into my hands and asked me to read it before we all had dinner. This comes from a long legacy of rather thick prayers, so the rupture in pattern was welcome. The editorial was first published in 1897; it's an editor's response to a one Virginia O'Hanlon, who asked for a point-blank response to that question the title implies. I remembered it because timidly, in our old house, years ago, I shuffled outside of my mother's room one day while she was either getting ready to leave or coming in and I asked her the same question. She asked me what I thought, and looked me in the eye for a long time before she gave me a copy of this semi-epic testimony. And years later, I read it at dinner--only this time, paying attention to the words in a new way, and trying desperately to ignore a small devil in the back of my cranium who begged me to pay the slightest attention to voiced endings...

So childhood ought not be extinguished, says the editor. So all the world's delight is found in intangibles, says the editor. I am comforted. Ha. Was I ever sad?
V

"Our Town"

(Emily Webb asks) Does anyone realize life while they live it?

(Stage Manager replies) No.

The saints and poets, maybe.
They do some.

On 103rd Street, by the top of the hill, circa 4:30am, a blizzard:

Do we like things because they are innately likable? Is there something in ideas, people, items that is truly ATTRACTIVE? Or do we like things because we want to see things in them, we want to be attracted? Can love, in these terms, ever be an accident?

We are tripping drunkenly down mosaic stairs of a fourth floor walk-up, we are waiting for the six train soaked to the bone, we wonder aloud if falling for anyone or anything can ever actually be voluntary. Giddy, but go home alone.

Huh.

Meditations on PSYCHOPSYCHOPSYCHO

I wonder why people think Woody Allen is so harmlessly funny. In some ways, I find him frightening--it seems to me that there is no place scarier than the inside of someone else's head and no act more vulnerable than spilling out self-aggrandizing personal neuroses in public, and having people just kind of chuckle at your tongue-in-cheek wit while you lay yourself naked before them on the silver screen feels like such a heavy write-off. Not saying we should all revisit Annie Hall and watch it with a furrowed brow and unpleasant glints of personal recognition in that examination of HOW LOVE FAILS, I just want to drop that thought into the void--people laugh at things that are fearful all the time. That scene in The Dark Knight where the Joker stabs a pencil straight into some guy's head sent movie theatres rollicking, and I was so horrified! I wonder if we laugh because we're so uncomfortable, or if we laugh because we miss the point. Aren't those the two objective things that make up standard American humor anyways? Someone else being uncomfortable, or someone else missing the point? WHAT DOES THIS MEAN IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS???

I am uncomfortable. And as a response, I am going to directly spill self-aggrandizing neuroses out into the void. I don't think they're very funny, personally, but maybe I have no perspective, maybe I'm missing the point. BRILLIANT SEGUE!

I accidentally have a crush on a boy. I say accident because it was not premeditated or analyzed in the way that some crushes can be, it was like one single concentrated event at some point--like a hair toss, or some split second of eye contact. And it's uncomfortable because I have a bad juju feeling that this is going to make me crazier, and it is going to hurt me, and I am going to hurt and annoy other people over some indefinite period of neurotic time while I waver between plunging into and dodging this inevitability, I know it so well, I recognize it. It's happening anyways. Help! It's a mess of mixed signals and weirdness and awkward inadvertent messages and smallness amplified. Help! And I thought this was all going to end, so magically and cleanly, the day I got my high-school diploma. Is this really the world? Forever? I am thoroughly fucked, then, in every sense but the good one.

The odd thing about this whole encounter, seen through a larger context, is that idea of tinyness. How tiny can a relationship ever really be? Some moments are so small that you think you're the only one who noticed them pass by. Some are too small to tell your friends about. Some are too small to admit to, yourself. A crush, for instance, is a small small thing--it is not defined in the gravity of mutuality, or spoken words, or touching, it's just electric air and daydreams. It's silly. It's FUNNY, to be an adult and to be so vulnerable to moments of scary small strangeness. Now I'm back to this arch of vulnerability as humor, and it feels even less amusing in the second paragraph. In two years, hours, or weeks I will look back on these moments huddling next to my cell phone as idiotic wastes of time spent giggling and looking for kid-like glee, but right now I am in the midst of it. And why so serious?

Annie Hall is a movie about people being in love and then, quite suddenly, not. I love Annie Hall. I love living inside another neurotic brain, and I love how childish two adults feel in their world, and there are moments where it really is very funny. But I have a hard time laughing at it, even though it is so silly, having a kitchen to clean and a paper to write and a checkbook to balance, to believe in the hot/cold hilarity/harshness of electric air and daydreams. It's so delicate in the middle-ground, suspended between wanting and not knowing. I like this guy, and we watched a romantic comedy the other day, and suddenly that latter term feels like a very cruel oxymoron when the air is swirling with hushes and muted do I do do I's?. So maybe...think about what you laugh at this week. Maybe it won't be so funny tomorrow.

I've Got A Big Ego

Today in my Advanced Improv class, Rosemary Quinn spoke about actor and the ego:

"If I were the Quueeeeeeen of the world, actors would not be allowed to act in a production until the end of their second year of training. One and a half years is not enough time to escape that diseased love of being complimented. But that is not why we act."

What Was

I just remembered being in love with you. Not the nots, not what it looked like from the outside or through other people, not the could-have-beens, the regrets, the sadism, the unspoken, the stupid, but the magical irrelevance of flaws, snatches of single seconds that were entire. This keeps happening, it has been two and a half years, and sudden jerks of time and space put me in the center of the mushy dead tissue of THIS US (how? How?) even though now I know about psychoanalysis, art as therapy, New York City, pain through osmosis, talking through feelings, depression, absolute unflinching self-loathing, absolute unflinching vanity and self-aware self-obsession, the nobility and ferocity of what I do. I have words for things now, I have artistic diagnoses and mental health suspicions, this is not about YOU, let me just say! It’s about the music you left, and the book I won’t return. This is ‘why? Still?’ with an intentional capital letter of which you should be made very aware. Still is stealth is time passing, these are the days of my life, unentire and unfulfilled, scary, unbrave. Everything I do is unbrave. It’s easy to blame you—almost as easy as it is to dramatically believe that my entire life has been a careening mess since that lackluster, accidental, incidental trip of a destruction. There has been a lot of wondering.

Most people I know about want to be in love. It is supposed to be cheaper, less frowned upon, more durable, longer-lasting than synthetic, illegal replications of bliss. It’s the everyman’s acting gig, it’s the artist’s funnel and celebration. People feed it to us in sweet-smelling wrapped packages of Hollywood movies and matching pajama sets. My mother tells me, quite frankly, that she did know instantly looking at my father on a bus somewhere around Houston, Texas that he was her end-all be-all. If you consider yourself educated, it’s silly to completely ignore or discredit anything with bajillions of converts, it’s silly to pretend it doesn’t affect you, even if you’re ashamed of wanting it because it’s so very terminally predictable, forbidden, unbelievable, painful. The Catholic church may make you cringe but that’s where the money is, that is the crutch of an ancient civilization. Things exist. Know them. And if your disdain is only built on mutual distrust or fear, why not believe? Your excuses are pathetic! Sign me up. I will drink some of your magical potion, Mrs. Witch, I’ll leave my lasting will and testament to AIDS victims in Africa. My heart is whole and ready, let them come to me or I will go to them. We begin.

America. Diagnosis. Perpetuation: the kitchen counter is prepared for dinner, then, just not the inevitable mess of mashed potato forever trapped in the cruets. Stains on the supposedly stainless-steel, though no one wants to do the dishes! I only saw a feast when I rushed aboard. I was coerced. This is false advertising! Yet it’s my fault anyhow, I should have known. But we all have working reptilian brains at the baseline—we all should have known. This is the treatment and paradoxical reality of that which I am told (and willingly agree) to dedicate my life to the pursuit of. Fin exposition, okay?

So I gave it to someone. He didn’t hold it the way I wanted him to. I asked for it back, but it was too late—I didn’t want to hurt him, was worried I couldn’t hold them both without him seeing. His was heavy and warm and wide, I liked wrapping it around me in the cold. Time ticked on and I Told everyone, told everyone, told everyone, that I didn’t need mine, could definitely live without it, whatever, so not a big deal, was happy to see it safe (if uncomfortably clutched in a sweaty palm..). Really, it was hard to breathe, it was colder—and because it was colder, I needed the blanket all the more.

One day, he left it sitting out—just for a minute. I was furious, how dare he? How dare he let it lie unguarded for a split second, even, on the bottom rung of a staircase with no railing? I stole it back, quite selfishly. He went looking for it everywhere, but wouldn’t admit to me he couldn’t find it. This was a scary time but we lived this way for while—me, greedy, with my two, and him, terrified, searching for mine. I was so sad he couldn’t find some way to steal it back from me, so sad he didn’t even know. Furious that I had taken it in the first place. Weighed down with the girth of eight ventricles. One day, I said so—made my escape while still clutching that blanket to survive. Kept it for a long long time until it was gently pulled away from me, and I stood around naked forever after with my two hands grown together (so gnarled from that greedy death grasp) around my own. Blood runs through my fingers all the time and I watch it with a little thrill, but with two tied hands I can’t make it move anywhere, can’t give it to anyone. Watch it run, watch it run, let it dry along my elbows and ironize. Stand naked. I am so cold, all the time, having known the blanket. I am so cold, all the time, without the blasted lump working properly inside my own chest. We are unsafe this way. I freeze.

That’s the story.

To-do list. I suspect what I want is my proverbial money back. It would be nice to not feel static and preserved, it would be nice to find no shock in new Facebook relationships or feel the need to stalk you at all, it would be nice to have that cathartic, unfathomed rebound guy with some amount of ease. It would be nice to be warmer, but to be tighter, wrapped more comfortably. I’m sure it would be nice to find some way to generate happiness and validation from within, but the more I obsess the more I begin to think that that is not what it’s really about. I am loved, after all, people love me on a daily basis—but not without condition, and sometimes (lament the cruel waste!) I don’t love them back. Through with tongue-in-cheek self regulation, our heroine lays down the gauntlet—I want something so profound from all sides that I’m forced to change, I want an external deus ex machina. My mother tells me that she just knew, I want to just know, I want a chance to repeat but improve. Where (Still?) can I find those moments of being entire, how can I move past this and be better at everything? How can I even begin to respect you awful fictitious Hollywood or couples on the street outside my building sharing cigarettes and secrets, how can I not hate you for lying to me and then, after I called you on it, coming back to taunt me again with that beautiful little goodness of your lie, your exquisite lie? The playing space is no longer fertile or prepared (well, I should hope I’m still fertile) and I am weak, that’s the disease, but ultimately what I struggle with is how to open up to it again. Still? Still? I am over you, but not what it was to be with you. I am terrified. So I talk.

I want to walk through history now. I want to dance towards current events, and sentences that do not begin with ‘I’. Fat chance. On Netflix last night, I watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Here is John Cameron Mitchell’s interpretation of how (on earth and above) we got into this mess:

When the earth was still flat,
And the clouds made of fire,
And mountains stretched up to the sky,
Sometimes higher,
Folks roamed the earth
Like big rolling kegs.
They had two sets of arms.
They had two sets of legs.
They had two faces peering
Out of one giant head
So they could watch all around them
As they talked; while they read.
And they never knew nothing of love.
It was before the origin of love.

The origin of love

And there were three sexes then,
One that looked like two men
Glued up back to back,
Called the children of the sun.
And similar in shape and girth
Were the children of the earth.
They looked like two girls
Rolled up in one.
And the children of the moon
Were like a fork shoved on a spoon.
They were part sun, part earth
Part daughter, part son.

The origin of love

Now the gods grew quite scared
Of our strength and defiance
And Thor said,
"I'm gonna kill them all
With my hammer,
Like I killed the giants."
And Zeus said, "No,
You better let me
Use my lightening, like scissors,
Like I cut the legs off the whales
And dinosaurs into lizards."
Then he grabbed up some bolts
And he let out a laugh,
Said, "I'll split them right down the middle.
Gonna cut them right up in half."
And then storm clouds gathered above
Into great balls of fire

And then fire shot down
From the sky in bolts
Like shining blades
Of a knife.
And it ripped
Right through the flesh
Of the children of the sun
And the moon
And the earth.
And some Indian god
Sewed the wound up into a hole,
Pulled it round to our belly
To remind us of the price we pay.
And Osiris and the gods of the Nile
Gathered up a big storm
To blow a hurricane,
To scatter us away,
In a flood of wind and rain,
And a sea of tidal waves,
To wash us all away,
And if we don't behave
They'll cut us down again
And we'll be hopping round on one foot
And looking through one eye.

Last time I saw you
We had just split in two.
You were looking at me.
I was looking at you.
You had a way so familiar,
But I could not recognize,
Cause you had blood on your face;
I had blood in my eyes.
But I could swear by your expression
That the pain down in your soul
Was the same as the one down in mine.
That's the pain,
Cuts a straight line
Down through the heart;
We called it love.
So we wrapped our arms around each other,
Trying to shove ourselves back together.
We were making love,
Making love.
It was a cold dark evening,
Such a long time ago,
When by the mighty hand of Jove,
It was the sad story
How we became
Lonely two-legged creatures,
It's the story of
The origin of love.
That's the origin of love.

Biologically, we are cells splitting constantly. We are fractions of a whole milling about and expanding, but expanding as less than—we are quantitative, rather than qualitative, aim to be massive over pure. This song is lifted (gently) from Plato’s Symposium, in which Aristophanes makes a speech in praise to the God of Love Eros and outlines his version of where the death trap comes from. Zeus “cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cuts them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that man might contemplate the section of himself: he would learn a lesson in humility”. So we see the grand design, yes? Later, Aristophanes writes of Zeus’s abject cruelty: “After the division of two parts of man, each desiring his other half…they began to die from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and one of the halves died and the other survived; the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them—being entire sections of entire men or women—and clung to that.” See how I was not wrong, to use that word entire to describe our most loveliest? What did we learn from this? There is no newness to this pain; it is beyond the beginning of time. There’s no solution. I refuse to tie up this reference neatly; I swear this is not some kind of exacted academic treatise. It was wealthy recognition to hear that magnificent Hedwig tell me why I feel this way and how I am not alone, in one sense at least.

I do not want to forget us. I won’t.

I want to be more of, and than, what I am.

Don't let yourself rot, don't flagellate, don't live forever crundled (which is an appropriate word I just made up), do not die. Live, somehow. Make yourself do it, that must be the answer. Infinitely awful, but you must do it because you honestly don't have a choice. How? Still? How? Still? How? Still? HOW? STILL? I AM SCREAMING, CAN'T YOU HEAR IT?

She tritely told the captive audience to breathe. To listen to Aretha Franklin's version of "Let it Be" when the going was tough, to make art, to whine, to blog, honestly. Do more to be more. Do..something. I worry that repairing to be whole hurts just as much and takes just as long as walking around halved and unentire. I worry about a lot of things. Fewer when I was with you.

There's a riff in my head that is very exposed and simple, like the way (meaning what it is when) I want. It's from "Passing Strange." The song is called Amsterdam. And it is so pretty, and I think it says ME right now better than words can (not because it's pretty; that's not what I meant).

Tonight will be a process of growing thicker skin. Every night of the week, I bet everyone grows thicker skin, as a reward and a retaliation for living through another 24 hours. There's a scene in one of the Chronicles of Narnia books where the jerk kid Eustace has a dream where he keeps shedding his skin and it is very painful, but eventually he's better than he ever was before. I suspect this is biblical. There's a shake, rattle and roll to rebirth I guess--wipe off the water of the day and be dry in the morning, ya dig?

A New Era

Down with wallowing! Down with fretfulness and forgetfulness, fear and mock self-deprecation! Down with wasted time, passive aggression, list of worries and guilt! Down with excessive exercise! To hell with treating love like a quest, to whining instead of acting, to talking more often and more loudly than thinking, than writing! FUCK COMPARISONS! This is a new era. These are my resolutions. I am getting older, it is true, but so is everyone else.

These are some questions I have been thinking about:

Is a relationship "worth it" if it doesn't lead anywhere? Are we--am I--actually capable of enjoying transient things while knowing that they are transient, of actually living in the moment?

How is it that some people can make a relationship work and others cannot? What is the formula, what is the fear, what are the things that break our backs?

How is it that people you don't even know can hold power over you? What is a CRUSH?

How do the excuses we make hold us back? If we believe in our faults, do they actually gain more power? 

Do you really kill the thing you love the most? And how do you do it? Is it really you, having too high expectations and being disappointed and so killing it for yourself? Or when you invest so much in something, do you experience guilt and possession and ultimately face the reality before you face the imagination?

Is everything we do--no, more like CAN everything we do be really self-love? Are we masturbatory creatures by nature, do we idealize and put so much stock into everything because we want to see mirrored back to us only the most perfect versions of ourselves? Is this all love? Is this any love? Can love ever really be selfless?

The concept of being separated from everyone by six degrees.

Something I've Been Working On:

And all men kill the thing they love,
  By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
  Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
  The brave man with a sword!

The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde

MOVEMENT ONE: try-outs.

 (Girl. Wearing glasses. Looking sheepish and frumpy. Clears throat, unfurls piece of very messed-up paper, looks around furtively, clears throat again, begins):

THINGS TO SAY/ QUESTIONS FOR/ UNRIGHTEOUS FURY DIRECTED AT/ A LIST OF THINGS AND RELATIONSHIPS AND CONTEXTS I DO NOT/MAY NEVER UNDERSTAND/ AVOID/ TO THE WORLD, TO THE VOID, TO JESUS CHRIST (pause) No, not Jesus Christ (pause, push glasses up, take out pen and erase this part)—TO MY MOTHER, TO THE BOY I AM IN LOVE WITH ACROSS THE HALL, TO MY BEST FRIEND, TO MY CAT: I am here. I am…announcing my presence to you. Welcome! (Lamely, coughs, tries once more for emphasis) Welcome!

So I’ve been doing a lot of research, since last we spoke.  About beginnings and endings and the stuff in between. (Each line is a totally new thought)

I wrote a story.

It’s not finished.

You can’t read it.

I’ll tell you about it.

I’ll…show you.

(Scurry to a corner where she turns on a light, “illuminating” a table in a cafe. A big mannequin is sitting at. Loud mood music. I have to talk kind of loud above it all.)

This is the café where two people fell in love one night. This one (motion to the mannequin) is Hildegart Sanchez Ramirovelta DeLaSoul Lasienaga Lasagna Pastille Monroe DeMarco. All of her friends called her Hilda. She loved to dance and her feet were like ice, or velvet or something, because they were so easy. She was so good at it. (Getting into it)

I sat across from them and I watched it all. I was by myself. She sat like this (shoving mannequin off stool, getting carried away), she was beautiful. It was night-time. Everything she said was unintentional poetry. (affecting Bette Davis):

I just adore old automobiles. Means of time travel. Old hats, old kid gloves, old standards of beauty, old books, old perfumes, old movies. Anything that had enough sense of a past to be chuckled at fondly, or shrugged off, or re-invented in the new millennium through some kind of stupid fashion craze. I hoard old things I find: ticket stubs, baseball gloves, board games, lamp shades. I walk  into every antique store. I simply do not concern myself with now very much at all, I am that outrageous.

Not until Tim, that is. (Snapping out of it) I mean, I don’t think his name will remain Tim, but--these are just some ideas. This is brainstorming. This is fiction. This is not fact.

Tim was either ruddy and unremarkable with a good smile or very tall with shoulder-length hair he wore in a sort of pony-tail or had very good taste in music but no sense of style or jumbled teeth and a guitar case or steel-framed glasses or a secret or a rather large penis and bright eyes or he smoked while driving his Subaru and had all these piercings which she hated but forgave or was a writer or was a veterinarian or was a wanderer or was a drummer or just had nice air about him, I guess. They sat here and she was breathtaking, looking at him, and he was breathtaking, looking at her, so I looked at them, obviously and ironically, I looked at them for either a few months or days or minutes or years I can never remember, but then we all got older, were kicked out of the restaurant, and sort of started to think about more important things.

They were mean to each other. They did and said unkind things. I watched from the outside, completely helpless. Like my favorite television show.

One day she looked in the mirror: (draws the curtain back to reveal a ghastly skinny mannequin, drops the real thing, looks smaller, somehow) She screamed: (scream!) and she knew right then and there that it was all over, that it was kaput. Because when you’re carrying around someone else’s heart it is always fat, it is always heavy, it is every single thing that you do, it is a feast, but suddenly she was so skinny and she knew it was gone, the both of their hearts (but for some reason men never seem to get as skinny…) but anyways she was thin and drawn and no longer beautiful. She hated him for it, even though it was her fault, too.

Hilda wanted to be the kind of person who read the paper and played the mandolin, never the kind of woman who sat by the phone. She wanted to write long and lovely poems about nothing to do with love or lack thereof, but maybe baby rabbits, or Niagara falls, or you know, Presidents and the way Gouda cheese tastes. She wanted to see Havana alone, she wanted to cut her hair short and eat as much ice cream as she liked and most of all learn to cry, because it was so weird, she had never learned how to.  (Dancing with the mannequin) I guess she will someday.

She doesn’t want to now, though. Even being skinny did not make her want to do anything. (Dropping the mannequin)

Hilda could think of nothing but Tim even though her name was so much better. And this was the only thing she thought knew how to do, (unexpected fury) THE ONLY FUCKING THING...“this” meaning dance.

But the problem is, I can’t think how to make her real. Most likely, in fact, she was a dream. But I think it’s a good story anyways. Anyway, that’s what I have so far. 

It's the weirdest thing, changing. I guess by nature of being CHANGE, it's always so different than how I imagine it. Like how spending so much time wanting something, and then suddenly not wanting it and not even missing wanting it...that's change, right? Abrupt and bizarre and unexpected and completely unfor-see-a-ble, but it's not like you're blindsided because more than likely it's been happening slowly for a long time, and only feels strange and new when you really stop to think.

It is almost time to go back to New York. I have been home for almost four months, which is almost half of a year (kind of). My summers are like sandwiches, usually, and this one was no different: I was uncomfortable and bored going in, got adjusted and had fun, now I'm uncomfortable and bored going out. I guess that's just the pinch of transitioning; we are so adaptable as human beings, right?

THINGS I'M EXCITED ABOUT

-seeing my best friends. SOOOO MUCCCCCCCCCCHHHH

-working again

-auditioning

-being in New York

-going to yoga every day (if all goes according to plan...)

-cooking for myself!

-wearing exclusively cute outfits

-becoming a better actor and writer

-lookin for love in all the wrong places

-COW!

-being on my own again

-this image of myself I have where I sit and write away in cute little coffee shops all over Manhattan

-Park Slope picnic

-my birthday!

-familiar faces

-being a mentor

-new friends! NEWNESS!

hahaha what a goofy list. Well to be fair, I'm not exactly forcing these thoughts on anyone. 

THINGS I HAVE DONE, THINGS THIS SUMMER HAS MEANT:

-getting a driver's license

-learning I never want to work in food service or child-care ever again

-shopping in the excess

-re-connecting with old friends in the easiest, most lovely way

-coming in to sexual power muahahaha

-noticing semi-unpleasant things about my family and why I probably cannot do this (meaning stay at home for four months) again

-missing New York, and Adin, and Liz and Molly and Will, and all my dearest friends oodles and oodles

-The Brusterhood of the Traveling Pants

-most likely gaining 45 lbs

-not thinking very much, not writing very much, being lazy enough to let myself exist in a kind of staticky limbo

I'm declaring myself asexual. Boys stink. 

Adam Sandler, The Spinners and The End of Youth (Why I Guess I'll Have to Hold on to My Facebook, in any case...)

I went to see a movie today about living an honorable life. It was called "Funny People," and it was written and directed by Judd Apatow, and it had a lot of heart but I thought it was too long and not especially funny, all things considered. I went to see this movie with someone I used to know. We has gone to high school together and bonded over poetry in Creative Writing class. There was a time in my life when this person would come and sit with my friends and I during lunch and we would flirt obnoxiously; during this time I was also involved in a long-distance relationship with someone I loved. This all feels like way back when, but was really just a collection of months ago. Not even a developmental phase, or the time it takes between leap years. Note: everyone involved in this backstory (except some of the cast of "Funny People"... is still very young.

I usually hate "first dates" with a fiery passion, but I was at ease on this one. Maybe this was because it wasn't technically a date--but in any case, it was the first time I had been around this person outside of school, one on one. I thought there would be a lot of...something...in the air between us: worry or trepidation or chemistry or even a little bit of bitterness, maybe. I was probably being dramatical. We laughed when "Funny People" was funny, we talked easily during the previews. And then at the end, leaving to go home, we talked about high school and the way all of these people in our lives now are fading away. This is a paraphrasing of that conversation:

Boy: "I mean, it happens. Did you really think WE were going to get together? I mean honestly?" 

Girl: "No, I guess not."

Boy:  "And we'll probably never see each other again. Think about it."

Girl: "What? No!..."

Boy: "Think about it!" (Meaningful look).

People don't usually say things like this in my real life--at least not in common conversation. This is of course one of those brutally honest things that is pessimistic and not necessarily but probably true; as such, blind optimists like myself tend to be thrown off guard when they are spoken aloud, supposedly because this is what makes them become true. After he said this, I hugged my friend goodbye and I watched him walk away while I did the same, and suddenly it was like this emotional landslide just opened up in my chest: what had any of this (this being the worry, the excitement, the friendship itself, the 10 bucks-a-ticket), all of this, been for? 

I am a neurotic actress. Lately, I am always having an existential crisis. But walking away from me now was a year and a half of guilty flirting, a maybe-reason for breaking up with a boyfriend, a perfectly good non-date, a friend, a summary of my boy mentality in high school--and it was called 'over.' People do not call things 'over' where I come from; they watch them fade and pretend to do something about it or pretend to care as it limps quietly away. And what scared me the most about this whole transaction was the actual feeling I was feeling as we said goodbye, which was not much of anything, really. I was reaching out for a sadness or a fondness or even a chuckle that wouldn't come--it was like that song in 'A Chorus Line.' I felt...nothing. And true to everything I was told this year as a freshman in acting school, this emptiness was actually worse than anything else I could have imagined thinking.

We are told all the time to seize the day, and live for the present, and that is what I suspect a lot of people think of when they lament their lost youth: seize the day. Toke up. Ravage your body with alcohol. Contract STDs. Stay out all night. Find love, break hearts, steal cars, make rock n' roll, study what you want to study, travel, do it all fast before a mortgage can get you. But being young isn't about any of those things on a moment-to-moment basis; at least not for me--the thrill of all the action is actually in that promise of having a very distant tomorrow. We take risks because we believe ourselves to be invincible, and we need to test the theory to keep things interesting. No teenager I've ever met has "lived for the moment"  more than any bona-fide adult; they are simply living to make memories. We are living for the future, and when the future is limitless and seemingly unending, you can get as high as you want and there won't ever be a consequence. There's a reason it's not cool to be an old hippie or a Rolling Stone anymore--they're disproving our theory, invading our turf; this is how young people are supposed to act, we are supposed to "get it out of our system"--and our bodies are nubile and our minds fertile for just that purpose. Adam Sandler and the cast of "Funny People" seem to understand this truth more deeply than anyone else I can think of at the moment, as irritating as that movie was: in the film, Adam Sandler contracts a rare blood disease and is forced to figure out what he's living for before he dies. And there it is again, this phantom measurement for relationships: what are they FOR? And if something is not for anything, is it pointless? It not for love, not for sex, not for friendship, not for any visible end but only for the actual seconds of the now, the very day, the three and a half fucking hours of "Funny People", is it worth it? Is it worth anything?

I am young. I have not seen very much of life. The world has always felt so limitless to me that I'm not even, have never even been worried about the scant few hundred dollars I have in my savings account, or the fact that I'm a Drama major. I do worry about finding love and being crazy and L-I-V-I-N to make memories; I go about exhausting and testing my mortality as thoroughly and as gleefully as the next college freshman. I'm in that teenage girl limbo-land where I suffer from severe self-obsession via egomania but a conjunctive case of shit-low self esteem and image problems; I am hypersensitive to me, I am a paradox. And with this kiss, this relationship, this bad date I could have told all my friends about over cosmos that did NOT happen, I find myself at a loss: this is not a list, a meditation, adventure or experience, it was a moment, and it is over. 

And you know what? I think I would much rather stay invincible. I do not like this new sensation that jumps out like a light being turned off in a crowded room or (v. cliche) a window being slammed shut when it's warm outside: I do not, as I had thought I would, like this feeling of getting older. I do not like it at all. 

Old School

I was thinking about time today. It occurred to me, halfway through a post-hangover Chipotle run (you know how food tastes super super delicious when you first get over a hangover? Is that just me?) that there was a time in recent memory where it was like a big fucking deal to be able to finish a burrito in one sitting. We used to sit in awe of one another's ability to eat...and this was the same time in my life when my friends and I would hear rumors about people "doing drugs" and recoil in fear and shock. But now I laugh at the burrito quest as I demolish my carnitas: all of the causes I championed and things I believed in when I was, say, fourteen, are now little more to me, retrospectively, than overzealous silliness or self-righteousness. I even look at my little sister, who is this beautiful young thing immersed in a world very different from the one I occupied at her age, and I can't even find a shred of sympathetic connection. Do you actually forget what it feels like to be a certain age, once you move past it? Is it like pain in that way, as in your sense memory won't retrieve it no matter how much of the circumstance you recall? 

I don't know why but it makes me sad...especially during this summer where I have totally subverted the static of my pre-college life; I've been chasing the same boys, making the same money, doing the same jobs now for most of high school, yet everything feels different now that I'm older. If this is supposed to be "perspective" I feel shortchanged: it feels more like prejudice, a narrowing of my mind...like I'm growing out of my blissful, imaginative Peter Pan complex and entering Boringville and Practicalland (nyuk nyuk nyuk). I mean, I think about real estate and casual sex the same way I used to think about Good Charlotte songs and elaborate games of Barbies...and while the former are arguably more important now, they weren't then. It's kind of silly. Maybe maturity is just a really nice, fancy way to say "pretending we are getting cooler while really just allowing ourselves more leeway because we have power and are secretly shocked at our own inabilities to actually learn from our mistakes".  Maybe I don't believe in adults. 

MY FAMILY ON VACATION: LOVEBOAT MEETS CABIN FEVER

There is not really a dusk in New York City; not one like this, anyways. I tend to hate idyllic stories of country life and landscape paintings and nature hikes, but it actually feels like my heart can slow down sitting here, in a white iron-wrought beach chair with mosquitoes just beginning to swarm, as my relatives play croquet (cousin Chris strums guitar) and the ocean laps laps laps like…like nothing, really. There’s not a perfect simile for peace.

            It’s nice to see people smiling. It’s nice to see them free. That’s the thing about families, allegedly: we are supposed to be our most candid in the circles where we don’t expect judgment or fear dislike. It’s a hotbed of neuroses and faces without make-up and nudity with abandon crammed into this island house: we sit and kind of simmer in our most grotesque humanity as the world moves by slowly around us, it meanders, rather than marches or clicks or stomps impatiently, demanding things of us. It’s almost strange having nothing to do—I for one have to look for ways to keep my hands and my mind busy. My mind will wander to very dark places indeed, left to its own devices.

            In an old secondhand bookstore halfway between our house and Vineyard Haven I crouch uncomfortably in the biography section looking at the diaries of Anais Nin. I know nothing about her but her face is so easy to remember on the jacket: heavily made-up eyes that don’t look directly at anything I can see, the way they sit kind of sadly in her face. I buy a stack of plays (I’m supposed to love reading plays, as an actress, but I’m twinging with guilt as I reluctantly fork over my first twenty for a stack of August Strindberg that honestly just looks super-dooper boring). I wheeze biking home; this is embarrassing. There’s a roll of fat around my middle nowadays that I swear wasn’t always there, that I swear comes and goes according to my self-esteem. Today it rages and wiggles like a giant spoonful of chocolate pudding, I mean if you look at it up close and study it like only a teenage girl or a precocious, observant little kid could. Things like this drift in and out of my mind, slow travel of cumulus clouds and lines of poetry I love and the sensation of toothpaste swilling in my mouth before I spit it back into the porcelain basin I share with my sister and two cousins: it leaves a trace, though. Everything leaves a trace.

            My grandmother gets up ten minutes before the last person has finished eating dinner like clockwork every evening, tottering towards the kitchen where she begins a slow and steady and scrutinizing scour of all the kitchen surfaces. She moves with strain and caution, having been the harbor for a vicious case of advancing rheumatory arthritis for the past twenty-five years of her life, but the twitch of pain I think I see in her face as she lurches away from the edge of the table (where she perches and does not sit, does not ever fully relax…) just makes me mad these days. I wonder why she feels this is her cross to bear, why she shoulders this burden of cleaning up after a massive dinner for fifteen when every other willing adult in the room has offered at some point to help. I’m tempted to write this off as yet another thing I do not understand, could not understand, about being a mother, but people treat this daily exercise like we are humoring her and she soldiers forward like it’s expected. Is this a cycle? I pause to think through a mouthful of something, anything (we eat well here) and there’s that shaving nick again: I am overanalyzing. Looking too deep into the fibers of what is supposed to be a really happy carefree vacation, noticing. People use the term ‘dysfunctional’ often enough when describing these entities, these knots of folks, but the more I think about it in this iron wrought chair overlooking the ocean I think there couldn’t be a worse term: we function, alright. We are perfunctory, mechanical, we operate, we cover-up: only our gears are sticky, our employees unenthusiastic, our product questionable. We are churning away with the reliability of the ocean waves year after year at our island escape, generation after generation of pain covered up for this single week of acknowledged family bliss, we are operating and doing and being everything we are supposed to be and then some, because we are puzzle pieces either forced or destined to fit together somehow…I guess I just wouldn’t buy what we’re making, if I were…shopping for it. There’s no real freedom in people, I don’t think. It’s always a little darker inside a house than it is outside.

 

Dizzy

Sometimes I take the long walk home from Bethesda down Connecticut Avenue; lately I have been getting fabulous ideas for sentences as I round the corner up East West Highway right next to the second J bus stop. I mostly forget them somewhere between this point and my front door.

I listened to Shadow Stabbing by Cake (while walking, today) and decided this was an emblematic anthem for all my failed relationships, starting with number one: we were all sitting around some kind of forced church bonding meeting playing our favorite songs and maybe trying to connect them to God (?) and this friend of mine put on Cake and I remember feeling like my life was a movie. Sometimes there is nothing so fulfilling as hearing an amazing song for the first time, I think, and I also think that when something is first it is an automatic emblem. There is something so wry and ridiculous and childish about Shadow Stabbing that its tempting to use it as a blanket, subsequently, for every other similar problem I've ever had in love--and all my problems in love are wry ridiculous and childish so thanks John McCrea, I'll make sure to send you a kitten when I'm a cat lady someday. Bitch.

This summer has got me down. 

I have a crush on a boy at work who may or may not have a soul. My bones are sleepy. 

Some Poems

Head and Heart Blisters

It hurt to be real

Fatigue was light and low

Down we fell

Down we fell

Our lyrical spit kind of crackles, or wiggles, like your eyebrows, like her grin—

Slides, slooms (your lips)

I was an Indian Princess, wrapped in gold leather kelp, glitter confetti and electricity

Regal in my throne

A precarious peach on a symmetrical vine

Our hearts stopped beating

You pumped us back to life

Swearing all the while that this was the Europe we understood from the storybooks

I got cottonmouth from waiting for each and every one of you, sickness

Styrofoam helmets colliding in a ring

Not to be believed, our contact

(I can’t believe we just touched)

the sheer lucidity of the side of the warehouse where I realized, as I was walking, that this was in fact air in my lungs and rancor in my retinas

stop everything.

Once more, for emphasis.

Peanut Butter.

And then the world poured out, liquid, from the webbed, sore crevices between her forefingers. Green and blue like land and sky on a map covered everything: moss, mud, clay, damp world that would be a blue spring, all to some kind of guitar song. And even though her lids were heavy and her back was tired and there was no love, really, between the commas or beneath the fingernails our girl Gaea didn’t cry but instead tried to summon marvel. Requisite and unabashed and expected and jubilant and righteously indignant joie de vivre, know what I’m saying brother?

Trying to follow the Brother Ali Code: I'ma be alright, you ain't gotta be my friend tonight. Ick. 

So Totally Clueless

The whole way to the DMV there is a chorus of redhead harpies in my head, pouting in plaid:

"You're  a virgin who can't drive."

Probably the most cutting truth/insult in the teenage girl lexicon. It's...repulsive. Reductive, Typifying, emblematic of the only two things that matter when you are eighteen: being free and being loved. I feel an ugly twelve the third time I try to parallel-park and the so-called "friendliest driving instructor in the state of Maryland!" tells me, in a sing-song chirrup, "You're not done!" I am done. This is the best I can do. Please let me show you I can back up in a straight line, you unfashionable immigrant (tempers run high; sorry).

When I have to get out, before a lot of people, and shuffle back to the driver's side it is humiliating. All the other eager parents, waiting for little Johnny to finish his right hand turn, are screaming the epithet also with their piercing eyes, shielded against the June sun: There goes a virgin who can't drive. More pathetically, she is in college. I mentally make a list of people in my head who I admire who are also virgins, who can't drive. I come up with...Mother Theresa. Mary. Maybe Mary.

My Dad won't let me drive because I seem too emotional so I hunch against the side door and let "Huge Ego" fill the conversational void in our car. It is so static in here I want to vomit--I'm wearing twelve year old shoes and twelve year old underwear and attending summer camp every day, like a twelve year old. I am a virgin who can't drive, I am a virgin who can't drive...

inexplicably I start to imagine irrational, crazy things to deal with the pain: I could get smack somewhere, and shoot up in the window sill while I listen to Otis Redding and gaze down at my neighborhood in the dark. I could dye my hair fierce fire-engine red and drink alone tonight as I watch Bladerunner. I could be more pathetic, but also somehow more cool--because at least I wouldn't be sitting shotgun in my Dad's company car journaling about boys and music and eating skittles while I walk to the grocery store to buy pads. Maybe it's like that awful movie Jack with Robin Williams, and I am twelve but no one has told me yet. Maybe this is Groundhog Day...somehow...

Coming back into my house (as a virgin, who can't drive) I meet the neighbor's dog, Hobbes: he's a black and brown dachsund with a really melancholy expression for a canine. Nobody seems to be watching him, and I suddenly recall a conversation my mother told me about where she talked to the family and they all claimed to hate the little dog; he'd been some Christmas present no one had really had the gumption to take care of. With Red Dye 52 burning a hole in my hand, the sun overhead, a friendless animal and me in the frontyard of my parents house in suburban Washington, I get this weird feeling that I've been given the gift of immortality on the condition that everything will always be "almost" and no real changes will hold.

I'm rescheduling the test. 

The World, The Worldview and Me

I feel like I am on an island. The water that surrounds me is actually carpet, though, and debris and bric a brac and dirty laundry and a weird smell I suspect comes from some dish I forgot to put away a while ago. I'm prone on the two mattresses I've shoved together here, kind of mentally catatonic in that I'm so tired I have to directly channel my energy into performing even the smallest tasks: typing, thinking, one by one. A moment ago I lurched across the room and pulled out these three beat-up albums: Bad, Jackson: Live and Goin' Places. I put Goin' Places on the Stack-o-Matic. I went, places, back to my island, so I could sit and concentrate on breathing. 

I. Man of War: A mild-mannered, vague uptempo anti-war ballad. 

People sob in the streets when celebrities "die" and then FaceBook and Twitter electrify, everyone presumably determined to make sure everyone knows they're sad, devastated, coolly ambient, or totally beyond the celebrity culture and wishing everyone would get over it because they didn't KNOW them, after all...I mean, that's what I do. I hear something sad and my first response is to form an opinion quick, and it had better be a good one so everyone can assume I'm either simpatico or not with the wave, so I'm funny, so I'm employable, so I'm a huge fan. I like to believe this is just the culture's fault and not my actual need for attention going to town on tragedy, especially because my status updates are as much for myself as they are for everyone else I know. I want to have things like death and heroes set in stone; they are the rules I am governed by as a person who tends to glorify romantic, fatalistic popular lifestyles and rock n' roll and pop gods and goddesses. I need to know I loved something intangible, that I I can be made to feel deep things through art, and that I have a real capacity for a general kind of grief. 

This is why I hate those people who pretend that the deaths of celebrities don't affect them at all. For one, this is assuming you have to individually know everyone who has ever died to feel sympathy for something and this strikes me as inhuman--and another, pretending you are above the current of popular music and television and movies is just stupid even if you happen to live in the woods. It seems silly to some but this, commercialist or not, is the reality of our Culture, it is the air we breathe and the soda we drink. And of all things to reject in our oxygen, why reject the ability to feel unity with strangers in Arkansas over someone who, sure, you never spoke to, but I'm sure you have myriad memories associated with? "I Want You Back" was the first song I ever HEARD, in the sense that it was the first song on the first CD I ever received on my first own stereo when I was first old enough to take ownership over anything I liked. I would crank that shit on individual repeat for days, I'm not kidding, days, and while I don't necessarily HAVE to thank Michael Jackson for days spent jumping on a bed or dance parties in high school or ex-boyfriends' inspirations or inexplicable moments of car-ride bliss, I could. I should thank someone, considering I don't believe in God. I know I didn't make everything myself--after all, I failed Precalculus twice. Couldn't make you a paper crane so cannot take full credit for making what surely also became a part of other peoples' memories.

Sidetracking. 

All of Side One, I think about the MNBC documentary with Anne Curry. This must have been whipped up at top speed, in a frenzied newsroom. In Harlem, two women standing behind the camera already brandished T-Shirts that they must have made in bulk at like 5:45, maybe, bearing "RIPs" and "We Love Yous". They're thinking about Off The Wall, probably. Anne Curry's pretty pre-occupied with the most tragic, enigmatic human descent I've ever seen profiled: not one person who has spoken so far has been able to give any real insight into the kind of person this man was who sang my favorite song so well. Did people love him intimately? (As in, not because of his music?) Why, most of all, I'm asking as I watch him go from Bad to Dangerous: this went unchecked, this happened at all, this is what they mean when they say the line between genius and insanity is thin, it's surreal. I'm sad because I think of this living literal shell of a person, a shell maybe even while he was making really fucking good music, and all of these fans willing to send white doves into the air at his child molestation trial they're so enamored but unable to tell you, for instance, what his real laugh sounds like, when he's caught offguard by something hilarious. I sound like a raving groupie most likely--but that's painfully tragic, the living part. That's what you notice when someone dies, but that's what sticks: some kind of sticky, dark form of useless regret and a thousand unanswerable questions hovering in the air like a swarm of angry mosquitoes. 

II. Jump for Joy!: What can only be described as a lighthearted romp

My cousin Lauren used to love the Michael Jackson of Beat It: at six, she would boogie down in front of family reunions and swish her little butt back and forth, and we used to provoke her with harrowing allusions to his many misdemeanors but she would defend her pale idol to the bone, to the point of screaming. Aunts would have to tell us to quit it, to concede that maybe he wasn't a child molester, just so Lauren could get some peace of mind; probably useless reprimands, because we were just being obnoxious and she was a more vigilant fighter anyways. She died two years later in a car crash and of course I've always thought of her fierce expression and waggling hips, the serious devotion, every time I hear MJ on the radio or something. I am not crying about her now--I am not crying at all. Since these associations my MJ adoration persisted into a brief uncontrollable desire to learn the Thriller dance (fulfilled last summer, bitches), but of course this is something that lingers also. Now I'm forced to break down the literal make-up of this music, now on Goin' Places, a more mediocre production from a talented set: is there a formula somewhere in this melody that begs perpetuation? Is this shit, has he been successfully double-martyrized somehow in the timeline of my life? Where do music and memory fuse? Really, I'm talking I suppose about textbook reality and personal perception, but once again I don't see a difference. 

My selection is limited. I idly (that's a lie: rapidly) head to eBay to hunt for Off The Wall on vinyl, sneering at my own cliche and the escalating-before-my-eyes prices. Why am I doing this? I Want You Back and Beat It and Thriller clamor for attention on the discotheque of my medulla but I buy Off The Wall and Thriller, I listen to Goin' Places. I bet no other fan anywhere is listening to Goin' Places. That's not why I'm doing it. I just like it: and that is all, I just LIKE it. Goin' Places is the National Anthem of my Island. The thing about missing people after they're gone, or missing times in your life that passed before you understand what they were, or missing times in your life that are happening while you are missing them, or missing people in love, or missing a person you never met, or being a missing person, is that you want to be able to explain them and commemorate them and speak about them drolly at parties or move on, carrying them with you always. You blast it loud and you should not have to try. You should not have to think. This is what I believe: it should all be feeling, and it should all be about you being allowed to languish in the agony of everything you wanted to eulogize but never got to, every passing pain you need brought up for a moment. We are strapped to mortality while they transcend, and when the documentaries end what will have died a little in me, been commemorated and put to rest, are memories. Things to make you cry now, perhaps just a bit more than before. It's like...a changeover. New emotional property. And it is in a way about You The Man for the World, running totally parallel to You The Icon for The Me.

Does this make sense? I hope not. I will have become predictable to myself. And once my emotional range has been widened and resucitated, regrouped and rehabilitated, what will be left for me is the adult ache, the ironic, adoring fever, and "Goin Places". 

RIP Michael Jackson. I hope so deeply that you are happy now. 

RIP Farrah Fawcett. 

I Got A Brand New Pair of Roller Skates

A List Of Things I Have Thought Today:

*There's something about Chuck Klosterman: right when I feel like he's pretentious or a living, patented Rob from High Fidelity complete with bizarre ideologies and write-offable 'cuteness' he says something that smacks me in the chest it makes so much sense. Reading "Killing Yourself to Live" (lifted from Courtney) and there's this passage in it where he muses about Cotard's Disease, this syndrome where the afflicted is convinced they are dead. I have moments like this a lot, weirdly, and I always think I'm the only person in the world who thinks this--so having it identified was so amazing. Ditto to his articulation of how weird it is to go somewhere just to say you've gone somewhere...I mean I could go on and on and on, but the gist is, I'd like to be trapped in an elevator with him on a rainy day.

*I can't decide whether or not to quit my second job. I feel jipped by the world job-wise this year (oh how obnoxious, Brittany, who isn't?) and I've kind of come to realize that I just honestly don't ever want to spend time doing something I know in my heart to be useless, even for money, again. It's partially cowardice and fear, but I also want to prove to myself I can do it for some weird vanity reason. 

*If I could cover a song and make my own music video for it (which I can. And WILL!) I would do Kiss, by Prince. It would be sooooo hot.

*President Obama smokes. Honestly, my first thought is 'cool!' and I can't really explain why. He seems quite human with a crutch. And also, I am a weak-hearted victim of the subculture, I cannot tell a lie. A lot of the time people look cool smoking. They don't look cool dead or in hospitals or with tracheotomies or black lung or "BAD PERSON" stamped across their forehead or fishing butts out of gutters or wearing Nicotine patches or with yellowed teeth, no, it's true, but the physical act of inhaling a little death and blowing spirals into the air is sexy. I think that's just fact.

*It was very scary riding the Metro today; it felt like being inside of a movie. How horrible for everyone involved in the crash.

*I still haven't made it onto Texts From Last Night despite a few of these winners:

-we're sitting around drinking margaritas and discussing marky mark's enormous dick in boogie nights. this would be like a great episode of sex and the city if these people weren't my parents...

-played rock paper scissors with osmar for an hour last night on the couch at 5am. so stoned we threw the same thing over and over. best party ever!

-dad on juno: it's not like he met her in a club and thought she was 23. this movie is unrealistic.

???

-do you think a water fight will damage my brand new biofit??? fuck it already in car, wet t-shirt party i guess.

*I just feel, in the world, that it should be easier to have sex. If everyone is so desperate, we shouldn't even have to try, right? It should be like the inevitability of seasons changing: if we treat the planet pretty good, we should be able to expect at least a little bit of snow, right?

In summation, I am...troubled.

Credo

"One must be drunk always. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time that breaks your shoulders and bows you to the earth, you must intoxicate yourself unceasingly. But what with? With wine, poetry, or with virtue, your choice. But intoxicate yourself."

Charles Baudelaire

Fell a bit in love last night, was surprised, feels like "Oh, Sweet Nuthin" by The Velvet Underground and the taste of popcorn. Looking for something profound and non-indie to say, but it's really just the best kind of ache, isn't it?

Fireworks

I have been on a handful of first dates: you know the kind I mean. Not the accidental sweetness of an outing of mutual friends that sort of turns into a date, not "hanging out", nothing on the internet or the phone I mean picked up, dropped off, paid for, awkward, scattered conversations and lingering silences, physical contact that feels dangerous in even the smallest increments, fake smiles, reassurances, the wait for the first kiss. The world as I know it (popular culture) tells me that this has been going on forever, this is what has always happened and what will always happen when someone likes someone else they will do this dance, shuffle through the motions, both parties will have to struggle and sort of writhe on the inside trying to figure out if this is worth it, if the interest is enough to pursue. But a problem I have always had in this weird little culture has to do with standards: how do you know when it's worth it? Should I be thinking of budding relationships on a sliding scale, judging by the evening's end whether this is second date-acceptable, third-date possible or long term obvious? I guess what I'm trying to articulate also has to do with fear, and disinterest, and even desperation--let's say we all want it to work out, you go on a First Date because you want to see a future, but it so rarely is either a BAD DATE or an AMAZING DATE. This is an awkward social encounter with a stranger, so if something feels PRETTY GOOD, ALRIGHT/OK, NOT DREADFUL, KIND OF NICE, is it worth following up? This has always felt like a set-up to me, but now I'm beginning to think my standards are too high. You see, I look for fireworks from the very beginning, I dream in passion and conversation and frenzy and the sense of not wanting to end an evening. This is so pretentious, but accepting that average first date feels too rigidly mature, too much like feeding fish and shopping at Anne Taylor and going to bed at 11:30 and the office at 9:00. Why should I settle, I think halfway in, noticing that our conversation has stopped, that we don't like the same movies. But then the Devil's Advocate on my shoulder reminds me I am writing someone off before I truly get to know them. How much does Spark and Instant Chemistry account for in a relationship? How much should we expect from the very beginning? I'd just as soon keep shopping for the person who's car I never want to leave, who's giggle beside me in some dumb movie makes me want to swoon, and who's prickly question or awkward conversational fumble I won't even register, I'm so caught up in the moment of being. First Dates as I know them are too future-oriented anyways, too frenzied, too contrived, as if all the Single People in the world had been sent out on some kind of timed quest by a higher power to find The One, to relax and recoup only when a second meeting was secured. 

What am I doing then? Who am I to whine about loneliness if I challenge every single poor, stumbling gentleman to whisk me off my feet or simply let the friendship fade into harmless flirtation? What I want I can't articulate, I just have the smallest image, the smallest faith, that it exists somewhere. And as much as I don't believe in judging or impossible standards, as much as I hate to complain, as dysfunctional and lonely as I feel sometimes, I'll defer to Carrie Bradshaw on this one: some of us refuse to settle for anything less than butterflies. It's just something we'll all have to remind ourselves, us brave, lonely people, when we're all heading out as third wheels on date night or serving a third sentence as a bridesmaid or buying fifteen dollar watch batteries for our vibrators every week at a store where the sales associates look at you with the most pitying, the most knowing of grins: we are stupid, we are impossible, but we are hopeful and we are waiting. 

Found This Video on the PostSecret Website:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWt5oswXarE&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fpostsecret%2Eblogspot%2Ecom%2F&feature=player_embedded

I think it perfectly explains the reasons for creating an internet persona in the modern age. Very deep, check it out. 

Fits of Bravery: Poorly Produced (Putting it Lightly) Summary of Brittany: 2009

Have decided never to be bored, to take more ridiculous chances and have a whirlwind romance starting immediately. Fave pics from 2008-9 (in no particular order) synched up with first extreme rough cut of the one song I've managed to write on the guitar. My cat is crawling all over me as I write this.

Old song I wrote (Working Title: Romance or the Art of Breathing)

now (with this here melody)

i'm feasting on that agony

foresworn when you promised me

I'd never die alone

lined up like a guard brigade

the boy toys march, they serenade

but plastic is the new charade

so to the flames they go

watch close for you might guarantee 

the queen will take you out to tea

yeah, everyone's afraid of me

that's just the way i show.

chorus/bridge: 

I recognized you from the other day

when we were younger; we were kind

you'd give me this for some that

you could read my mind

so is it sposed to be just you and I?

how bout we sit back and watch the wicked time fly?

candy wrappers and cellophane, all the boys and all the pain, 

diamonds in the pouring rain,

baby.

2. so boys put away your magazines

and wander from your bleary teens

just love the girls who write you things

keep the fear at bay

and girls just put your wands away

no magic keeps them where they lay

it's up to fate and baseball games

that's what the experts say

chorus/bridge.

so here's the game, it's undefined:

the whip back gets me every time

let's try our best to skip the line

I'll carry you for real

but here's the simplest, smallest curl:

you're a boy, and I'm a girl

we live in an imperfect world

and that's all that I know.

Triflers

A wise woman once said:

"No, I don't want no scrubs. A scrub is a guy who can't get no love from me. Hanging out the passenger side of his best friend's ride, trying to holler at me."

There are many things I don't pretend/hope never to know about the mysterious, elusive opposite sex, but the practice of Trifling is not among these. A Trifler, not unlike a Scrub, texts or calls at bizarre or seemingly unrelated intervals and makes plans he promptly breaks. You are left waiting--most often in a very cliched fashion by the phone with hair all done up and nails all filed--to be jerked around later, given noncommittal replies or fumbling "My bad's, what are you doing in the next twenty minutes?" kind of texts. This is Textbook Trifling. I know of no person who deserves such treatment based only on the external merit of his/her good heart and character, but at the same time the whole reason such beings are allowed to exist and walk around untouched or unscorned in this world is because we (I) want them. I enable because I need. It's deeply fatalistic, pursuing a Trifler, yet I find myself fuming while still buying push-up bras or clearing weekends on the offchance I could be...summoned. We ask for all of this and then complain when it happens, and that's how sexism is probably best perpetuated.

Last night talked about Hume, sex and biological tendencies at length with a bunch of girlfriends over a handle of Captain Morgan. Now, have to go to work. Have resolved to spend the rest of this week working, hanging with family, recording songs, writing, working out, reading The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and living a double life that demerits instantly all the previous good intentions--ruthlessly struggling for power via text message with people who likely won't find these "ambitions" interesting. And I'm not even upset about it, I'm just sort of mildly bewildered, when I stop to think. I think.

Pet Names (Before I Forget): Rude Gus, Boba Fet

The Four Moon Planet, Billy Collins

"I have envied the four moon planet." (The Notebooks of Robert Frost)

Maybe he was thinking of the song

"What A Little Moonlight Can Do"

and became curious about

what a lot of moonlight might be capable of.

But wouldn't this be too much of a good thing?

and what if you couldn't tell them apart

and they always rose together

like pale quadruplets entering a living room?

Yes, there would be enough light

to read a book or write a letter at midnight,

and if you drank enough tequila

you might see eight of them roving brightly above.

But think of the two lovers on a beach,

his arm around her bare shoulder,

thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight

while he gazed at one moon and she another.