that was the actual title of a one-act play submitted in my playwriting class last week. apropos of nothing, i submit to you this poem:
untitled I am empty here, barren of the night:
hurtling through this dusty void,
heart so bleak and bleeding.this dread so bleak,
a blackened hole,
thrown away;yet I wish for
your blood so warm.
hooray for the goth-o-matic poetry generator! (thanks to julie for the link.)
'twas a breast-filled weekend. verily, i say unto you, nothing makes a girl lose all sense of modesty like having to rip off her clothes (about four layers of tight sweaty cotton-lycra blend) for a two-minute costume change in the hallway of the Music and Dramatic Arts building, while the LSU hip-hop coalition ambles by, waiting for their turn onstage. at one point, i was tearing off black tights and wriggling into red ones--obviously in a panicky rush--and this random girl wanders up to me and asks me for directions to somewhere--i don't even remember what she was looking for--i stared at her blankly, half-naked and pulling on tights, and said, "um, i don't know." like, "i'm sorry, can you get directions from someone who isn't naked and in a hurry?"
it's funny, i used to be really shy about taking off my clothes in front of people--i'm talking, like, even in front of my female roommates at LSMSA--i used to change practically inside of my closet. but then came my dance performance junior year--and i was in, like, ten numbers back-to-back--and with all those quick costume changes, you just don't have time for modesty. that was a real turning point in my whole attitude towards nakedness. i don't know, i'm still pretty modest--i don't absolutely love being naked--but there's something different about being backstage at a show--somehow your naked ass becomes irrelevant.
that's part of what i love about doing shows--the backstage environment--it's so intense and other-worldly. the things that go on backstage...if only you knew. but you don't. you can't know: the comaraderie, the tupperware tubs of candy and the bobby pins and the hairspray, the ritual of mutual zipper assistance and shared lipstick, the laughing gossipping nakedness and the secret frenzied energy. that's what's so fun about it: the secrecy: inherent, necessary, because this is what we have to do behind the scenes so that once we get onstage the whole thing runs calm and smooth and, to the audience, apparently effortless.
my favorite moment this weekend: lying on my back onstage for the first number, staring straight up into the darkness, then the music fading in and the lights fading up--and in the dark, from the stage, you can see the shadowy outlines of the audience--but when those lights come up, all you can see is the stage and each other. everything else falls away. the lights come up blazing and it's all i can see and all i can think is "oh shit, it's on." it's the best fucking feeling. i love performing. i'm high for days after.
i got a lot of love this weekend from my friends, who are awesome and supportive and actually came to the show. i thought that was pretty cool. especially of the guys, who are squeamish about these kinds of things. me and ben and rikki and leif and breton and bradley all went to serrano's after the friday show for margaritas, and i got drunk, and then we went to tabby's, and i got drunker. which was exactly what i wanted to happen. i had my gigantic faulkner term paper (worth fifty percent of my grade) due on friday at midnight, but i had to finish it before the performance, so i'd been freaking out all day. in fact, i'd been freaking out all week. i hadn't gotten a chance to talk to ben in days--we had a fifteen-minute dinner date on thursday before my dress rehearsal--we went to atcha's, and i ordered chicken schawarma and he ordered ashta--and he got his ashta right when we ordered, but my food took a while. and it was time for me to go to rehearsal, and i was starving, and my food wasn't out yet, and i'm all frantic, and ben's like, all soothingly, "do you want some of my ashta?" and in this pathetic panicky voice i say "no, i want my schawarma!" and he's like, "um...ok."
saturday night after the show we all went to the varsity and booty-danced, which was good fun. and then ben came back with me to my apartment and there was an incident on the staircase, and that was also good fun. we went to bed at 4:30, and he and breton went to work at like 9:30 sunday morning. i slept all afternoon, then i got up and cleaned my room and met ben at highland at 6ish. and we read (joyce for him, faulkner for me) but mostly distracted each other. at 8:30 we left to get dinner at izzo's. when we got in my car, he said suddenly, "oh, ann!" and he showed me his neck. and apparently on saturday night i had given him a hickey. and apparently people gave him shit about it all day at work. i was so pleased with myself. i've never given anyone a hickey before. i told him, laughing, "that's fucking awesome," and he said, laughing, "that's your ass."
so we go to izzo's for dinner, and i ordered nachos and he ordered a burrito. but he forgot his money in my car, so he ran out to get it, and in the meantime the guy who took ben's order told the cashier that the veggie burrito belonged to the dude who'd just left. and i said, "oh, he left his money in the car." and so the guy at the cash register rang me up, and then looked at me and asked, "is he your boyfriend?"
what the hell kind of a question is that? what difference does it make? what, if i said "no" was he gonna ask me on a date? i was so taken aback. and uncomfortable, partly because i didn't really know how to answer the question. breton had asked me if ben and i were "official" and i told her no, and that i didn't expect to address the issue with him. but all weekend he kept coming up in conversation with the girls, and i was fumbling for words whenever i had to refer to him--anyway, so Izzo's Guy is like "is he your boyfriend?" and i'm like "um...yeah, kinda." and Izzo's Guy says, "kinda? that's too bad for him." and i don't know what that's supposed to mean either. so i sit down, all flustered, and ben gets his food and sits down too. and i kind of hesitate, and then i tell him what happened, like, "isn't that weird?" and he says, yeah, that's weird.
so we go back to my apartment. he told me he wanted to read my faulkner paper--which i was embarrassed to show him--and so he read it, and then he showed me his equally embarrassing harlem renaissance paper--and we ended up trading papers and short stories all night. it's hard to explain the significance of this event--sharing your written work. i mean, i guess for non-writers it's not a big deal. but we're both english majors. and for me, it's nerve-wracking having someone you like and respect read your shit--especially if it's "creative" writing, because you're trying to make something interesting, and you're putting a lot of yourself on the page, and so it's personal. but even with formal essays, it's personal--because it's like you're exposing your mental processes--laying out the way you think, the way you formulate ideas--it's all on display. it's you, innermost. and vulnerable. and that's scary. and you want the other person to not think you're an idiot. simultaneously, you're reading the other person's shit, and seeing the way they write/think, and that's a scary moment too--because if i'm reading someone's shit, and it sucks, i have a hard time taking them seriously. that's probably bad of me. but it's true. when i first met jesse, he mentioned that he wrote poetry, and it was very much an invitation for me to ask him to see his poetry, but i didn't ask him. because i was so impressed with him in that first meeting. and if i read his poetry, and it sucked, i wouldn't be able to respect him anymore. so i didn't ask to see it. i read some of it later, though, and it was good, and that was a relief. i mean, if the person doesn't call himself a writer and his writing sucks, that's one thing. but if he's like "yeah, i write poetry," acting like he knows his shit, and then i read it and it sucks--well, i suppose you could file that under "dealbreaker."
fortunately, ben's shit doesn't suck.
so at this point we're intermittently talking and reading and making out, and finally he kinda looks at me, and he says, "um. i'm not really sure how to bring this up. but. um. if we were to go back to izzo's. say, tomorrow. or next week. or two weeks from now....can you see where i'm going with this?" and of course i do but i want to hear him say it. so i say, "no. be explicit." and he says, "ok. so if we were to go back to izzo's, and you ordered nachos, and i ordered a veggie burrito, and i left my money in your car, and i had to borrow your keys and go get my money, and the guy at the cash register asked you if i were your boyfriend..." and i say "yeah?" and he says "what would you say?" and i start laughing and kissing his neck and i say "i don't know, ben, what would i say?" and he says, "i don't know," and i say, "what would you want me to say?" and he starts laughing too and he says "i don't know, i guess it's up to the Izzo's Guy. since he's the one running things around here." and then he says, "because you know, we never really talked about it," and i say, "no, and i didn't think we were gonna" and he says "it's not something that i wanted to take for granted" and i say, "you know, i'm so far beyond that point." and i don't know if he knew what i meant when i said it. but what i meant was that it doesn't even seem relevant, the title of it, and the officialness, because--i don't know--it is what it is. i know, i know, how profound: "it is what it is." basically, we're both in it, and we're both into it, and i suppose that means he's my boyfriend now, and that's fine, but it doesn't really matter what you call it, because what we're doing together is so much more important, and so much more interesting, than whatever it is that we're calling it.
i like him so much.
THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)
July 10, 2004 / The Globe bookstore / 4pm
-- went to Kafka's grave today--at least, we tried to--but apparently he's buried in a Jewish cemetery--and it's the Sabbath--so it was closed. gates locked.
we took the tram all the way across town to get there--mostly kids from rikki's fiction workshop--there's this older woman named joyce, probably in her 50s--apparently she's afraid of everything--travelling and cities and foreign lands--god only knows why she came on this trip--she was complaining on the tram that she'd forgotten to take her Dramamine and it became this crisis--is joyce gonna make it--"only five more stops, joyce"--and all i can think is that i'm so glad i'm here and young and getting over it now--because i am afraid of everything--and if i don't push myself now--i'll end up crazy and neurotic and panic-stricken--paralyzed at fifty, and that would be sad.
-- which is why i came to Prague in the first place--it's been baby steps for me. NYC: big city, public transportation, total freedom/total responsibility, all alone. then London: abroad but not really, same basic cultural background, same language. France for three days: a culture that jealously guards its own. in London, there was literally a Starbucks on every corner. in Paris, there was none.
and i know my culture. i want someone else's. after London i wanted to spend time in a place that was completely foreign to me. the idea of it both attracts and repels me. i want to go to Budapest. but i'm afraid. i don't know the language, i won't know my way around--i know nothing about Hungary--but then, those are the very reasons i came here, to Prague--
but even here in Prague--it's a newly popular European tourist destination--and deservedly so--but i've been getting by with English and every place i've found in my Lonely Planet travel guide is decidedly Westernized--even "Americanized"--like right now. the Globe is a bookshop/bar/cafe. for ex-pats. it's an English language bookshop, and ok, what use would i have for a Czech bookstore--
but i've been on the hunt for a nice local coffee shop hang-out--a cozy one--which is proving hard to find. they're all new-looking and brightly lit, hard wooden chairs. this place is ideal: little round tables to write at in the bookshop section, a small loft space for used books, a smattering of cushy chairs covered in some plush maroon fabric--there's the cafe in back, noisier, music playing, more tables. but the cashier takes pounds and dollars along with crowns, and all the newspapers are in English. which is not what i was going for.
-- in our language class, the teacher--young, vibrant, enthusiastic--frequently has us close our workbooks and simply repeat after her. i find myself panicking in these moments, as she utters an unfamiliar word and we as a class are left to imitate the sounds--i know it's not exactly right, what i'm saying--maybe it's a "v," not a "b"--and what does it mean--and how is it spelled--what does it look like--i surreptitiously crack open my book and she scolds us for peeking. my heart has seized up in my chest. my stomach is in knots. i must look. i have to see.
i remember hearing when i was in grammar school about "visual learners," and it's only now occurring to me that i fall into that category. i've never considered myself a particularly "visual" person. but i have hazy memories of hating the listening sections on those standardized tests; my recall when i took exams was always related to the way my notes looked on the page. now, when people give me driving directions, i have to write it down. it's not that i necessarily have to refer to my notes when i'm driving. it's because, unless i write it, and see it written, it doesn't stick in my head. i worry that i don't deal well with "abstract" concepts--i hated biology on the cellular level--unless i can relate it to something concrete--
i don't know, maybe it has nothing to do with being a visual learner. i can remember conversations almost verbatim. and maybe i'm not part of some special category; maybe everyone is like me. but rikki laughed at me when i had that meltdown moment in the language class. and she tried to read her latest story to me last night, and i immediately groaned and grabbed it from her to read it for myself, thinking "i'm way too tired to try to listen to it"--it really takes a lot of effort for me.
-- so i was talking to this guy kelly while we were waiting for the tram to the graveyard--about MFA programs and whether or not to wait, life experience, etc--
and i'm starting to realize that i can go one of two ways. i can go straight to grad school, straight to teaching, teach and write for the rest of my life--
or i can graduate from LSU, try to find a job doing something--maybe an internship with a video production company since i have editing experience--or a theatre company--hell, like laura said, i could join the fucking circus--i'd probably have to wait tables or bartend to pay the bills--take odd jobs--get experience--
because what else do i have to write about? it's not that i "don't think i have anything interesting to say" or that "nothing ever happens to me"--the writer's gift is that she takes the common experience and elevates it with her unique style of wordplay--her own voice, her own take on things. so to write i have to live. in the world. to be a part of the "common experience."
and if i go straight through school, and straight into academia, i won't be living in the world. i'll be cloistered. i'll be hiding. i've been having this sense that i want to go straight into grad school because i don't know what else i'd do. and for that to be my immediate reason--that's chickenshit.
so we're back to fear, again. which is how i live my life. out of fear. where did this come from? my mother's pragmatic paranoia, my father's racism--they cultivated it carefully in me: the oldest, the only girl, over-disciplined, over-sensitive, over-achiever. my directors in high school--dance and theatre--told me that i was playing it too safe--that i had to "find the fire within"--i hated it, and hated realizing that they were right--how strictly i operate within my comfort zone--where i feel safe--it's hard for me to give up control, my careful plans. it frightens me.
but i'm starting to think that it may be the only way.
THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and unabridged)
Friday / July 16, 2004
I went home by myself
tonight drunk it was
past eleven when I left
the bar I didn't even
know where the metro
was you should have been
worried you should have
been very concerned I
had a shot of something it
tasted like nailpolish remover
smells I drank it in one
sip and three gulps and
then I had a vodka and grape-
fruit juice the difference
between vodka and water in
Czech is the "k" I had to
get out I had to get home
I was drunk past the point
of poetry but I wanted to
write you before this
buzzing in my bloodstream
fled
I navigated the interminable
escalators of the metro
reckless on these unsteady
legs I was wearing that
skirt the short gray one
with the pleats you
know and this hard-
faced man with a hairy
chest and tight blue jeans
he checked me out you
should have been worried
you should have been very
concerned
I went home tonight drunk
alone it was past eleven-
thirty when I got off
the metro and now I'm
here to let you know
that I'm leaving you I've
left you and I'm never
coming back I like it
here the weather's fair
to middling and the
architecture is really
stunning moreover I've
seen some good-looking
Czech men they all have
blue eyes I'm crazy about blue-
eyed men it's like running an
ice cube over your bare
skin and so I'm gonna
find me a nice Czech guy
with Aryan features they
all have Aryan features which
get kinda craggy when they
get a little older and
he will speak Czech to
me he will mock my attempts
to roll the ř he will
talk trash about Kundera
the way I gossip about Al
Copeland and he will feed me
ghoulash bread dumplings potato
pancakes it will be very
erotic it may even involve
a sausage so this is just
to let you know I will not miss
your eyes the way they crinkle
at the corners when you're on
the verge of laughter and I
will not miss your plate-
stacking compulsion I will
not miss your skin especially
not your back or the warmth
of you in bed or how you
scoot over so close to me
thereby taking up my side
of the mattress so I'm
practically falling off I
won't miss spooning you or
being spooned the winters here
will be very cold but I think
I'll just buy a nice down
comforter and hope for the
best
I will admit
the men here wear
socks with sandals
which is decidedly un-
sexy whereas you on
the other hand wear
flip-flops and you
do have very nice
feet.
THE TRAVEL LOG
(on the rocks)
July 21, 2004:
we did this revision exercise in class today, where we all wrote down the name of one person we knew, then traded names. with the name you got, you had to a) imagine what the person is like, b) write a sample of that person's work, c) ghost-write / revise a scene from your own work using that person's style.
for example, i got the name Dora Barzcus, and i imagined her as a little old lady who wrote trashy thriller romance novels. so i wrote an excerpt from one of her novels:
He paused. Thrillingly she waited. The eager, panting anticipation. He put his hand on her thigh. It was a warm hand, with a moist, fleshy palm. She waited."Hilda," he croaked.
"Yes, Ernest," she trilled.
"Hilda, I just wanted to tell you."
"You don't have to tell me anything, Ernest."
"I didn't mean to, I tell you. I want you to--"
"I understand, Ernest. I understand everything. More than you know."
"I love you, Hilda," he said. His head fell back on the white hospital pillow.She sighed. Relief flooded through her. It was finally over. Finally at peace. A flush spread over her cheeks. The poison had worked quicker than she'd imagined. And no one was the wiser. [D.B.]
then i wrote the opening scene from this play i'm starting--trying to start--but as if Dora Barzcus were writing it: two women in a new orleans bus station. carrie is in her thirties and she's due back in vermont, where her husband and kids are, but she doesn't want to go. sister sheila is a nun headed for the retirement community of destin, FL, to visit an old flame.
-------------------
CARRIE: I can't go back, I tell you. I can't, I can't. (She flings herself down on the dirty floor of the bus station.)
SR. SHEILA: My child! Get up! What in heaven's name is the matter? (She kneels beside Carrie, struggles to bring her to her feet.) Now, now. Tell me what ails you.
CARRIE: It's...my husband.
SR. SHEILA: Are you having difficulties with him?
CARRIE: Difficulties...well, yes.
SR. SHEILA: Is it another woman?
CARRIE: No.
SR. SHEILA: (hushed) Another man?
CARRIE: No, no.
SR. SHEILA: Is he bad with the children?
CARRIE: No. It's--well, he doesn't satisfy me.
SR. SHEILA: Emotionally? Psychologically?
CARRIE: Sexually.
SR. SHEILA: Oh.
CARRIE: His thingy is so small!
SR. SHEILA: Oh. I see.
CARRIE: It's hopeless, hopeless! (Flings self.)
SR. SHEILA: My child! (Kneels beside Carrie) Nothing is hopeless. Remember that despair is the only unforgivable sin.
CARRIE: What should I do?
SR. SHEILA: Well, I'll tell you. It involves a cantaloupe and a can of arsenic.
CARRIE: Oh, I just love a good murder mystery. I think I'm going to need a sandwich. [D.B.]
---------------------------------
it was a useful exercise, because i'd originally started the play with the two characters harrumphing a lot and being awkward strangers with each other. obviously i won't use this new dialogue, or the murder plot (although...hmmmm...), but i did find a starting point with higher energy, which was nice.
but the best thing about the assignment was that we read them aloud to each other, and i had written down adam's name, which this girl carey used for her scene. and she said she envisioned adam as a stoner guy who wrote exclusively in haikus. and this was her sample:
I said "Dude" to him
and he said, "What's up, homeslice?"
Not much, man. Not much. [A.R.]
---
Blam! Pow! Bang! Kaboom!
What is up in the Batcave?
Batman is angry. [A.R]
and that made me very happy. adam, this gives a whole new meaning to the [incredibly irritating] expression "you're a poet and you didn't even know it."
THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed and abridged)
July 24, 2004 / Saturday / from an email to Ben:
my class performed at the student reading on friday night. you're supposed to do five minutes of reading your own shit, but as playwrights that's a little awkward, so we did this in-class exercise called "prohibition" where we picked a prohibited object (a dictionary) and we each wrote a scene with a designated theme:
1) parents find child with object
2) congress debates prohibition
3) Public Service Announcement about prohibition
4) prohibited object sold on the black market
5) talk show debate about prohibition
6) performance art protest of prohibition
7) the ban is lifted
i had the black market one. we wrote our scenes separately and came together to read them, realized two scenes took place at a dinner table with a '50s sitcom family, and kind of worked it all the way through. so my scene was in the metro, with a Shady Man and the Mother. it was very dirty.
anyway, i got all cuted up for the reading--i was reading the Mother parts--and i ended up being about 20 minutes late for the reading because i forgot the scripts--typical.
on the walk to the metro station, this guy in the back of a parked car leaned out the car window and applauded at me. i cocked an eyebrow and walked on. then on the metro, i was sitting down--it was kinda crowded, and there was a little room next to me, but not much--anyway, this weird guy got on and said something in czech to the guy next to me--like "scoot over"--then he plopped down--he was practically sitting on me--and he started making slurping noises at me--which was really, really not funny. i bolted upright at the next stop and stood by the door.
when i finally got to the Ypsilon i discovered, to my relief, that our class hadn't gone yet. and everyone told me i looked cute, and then the reading went really fucking well, everyone laughed a ton--and people kept coming up to me afterwards and saying a) the scenes were great b) i was great c) i looked really cute. so that was fun.
----
Bohemia Bagel / 1:17pm
so hungry. chicken and leaf spinach sandwich. Bon Aqua--voda perlivá--
accidentally walked into some guy's room the other day, thinking it was mine--i'd taken a wrong turn at the elevator--the dorm is a goddamn rat maze. then last night at the reading, met greg from Tulane. told him he looked really familiar. he told me it was probably because i had accidentally walked into his room the day before. oops.
----
dear god.
(Shakespeare bookstore / 5pm)
am buying two books at this kickass fucking bookstore.
i miss ben. bookstores make me miss him.
these idiotic canadians next to me are having a very, very touristy conversation, about
("I yearn for decorated style!")
how to pronounce the letters of the czech alphabet, public transport,
("it looks like it's been iced, like an iced cake!")
how cool and not touristy they are, the difference between absinthe and absente--it's a guy and a girl, but they're not flirting--it's more like a pissing contest.
the guy was saying how he couldn't light the sugar in the absinthe spoon. i wonder if he soaked it in the alcohol first. jackass.
----
i thought i would feel isolated, being constantly surrounded by people speaking a foreign language, but in fact, it's convenient--they're so easy to tune out. whereas these two jerks, speaking american english--i somehow can't ignore them.
----
from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson:
'Don't you ever think about going back?'Silly question. There are threads that help you find your way back, and there are threads that intend to bring you back. Mind turns to the pull, it's hard to pull away. I'm always thinking of going back. When Lot's wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of salt. Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but it's a poor exchange for losing your self. People do go back, but they don't survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your heart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between two realities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can have your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left. Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.
THE TRAVEL LOG
(transposed, unabridged, apologetic)
Prague / July 27, 2004
I.
I watched two women walk the cobblestones of Old Town: eyes rolled back, clinging to each other, girlish laughing, white canes extended and tapping forward.
There's that saying about the blind leading the blind, but the reality of it is more optimistic than you'd think.
II.
(Close your eyes.)
There is an ache pressing up
from underneath my skin.
Maybe it's fever.
Maybe it's you.
There is a mouthful
of metal taste my own
chewed and bloody lip.
Petulant.
Petulant.
Restless and uncomfortable in my clothes
(Take it off.) my skin
(Take it off.) I
Lay bare, gutted,
glistening fishbelly white,
vulnerable as the bald woman
haunting the walls of the metro station.
I've lost my stomach.
This is delirium setting in.
Petulant.
Petulant.
Roll it around on your tongue
because that's what I love about you.
III.
Some you keep and carry inside.
Some you tear out and fling away.
Some you meet in passing,
gentle and unexpected as the first
brush of lip against lip.
our internet had been down for about 36 hours. reid said, "man, there's nothing to do. the internet's out, we don't have cable--" and i was like "oh god, we might have to actually talk to each other."
so rikki and i skipped ballet and we all made dinner and ate together and cleaned up together and watched Family Guy on DVD and played with the cat. it was really nice. this morning the internet was still down, and i called cox and figured out how to fix it. but i was almost reluctant to do it. it's nice sometimes when we all emerge from our internet holes and, you know, communicate in reality.
our little house is becoming a home. it's got a nice vibe. fred is really happy here, i think. he's got more room to play, and three people who dote on him constantly.
on that note: i'm taking an independent study on creative non-fiction with jim, and my first essay assignment was on location and description and how style reflects attitude. i wrote two essays because the first one didn't come out quite like i think jim expected. i told becca about the essays and she said i should post them. they're first drafts, and they're written a little differently than i write my posts, because they're aimed at a different audience. but anyway. here's the first one.
------------------
Becca came over at one-thirty this afternoon to help me set up for my Labor Day Pickanick Party. She started cutting up strawberries for fruit salad while I unearthed the cleaning supplies to ready the house for company. But first—
I inserted a CD into the living room stereo and turned the volume up: the Indigo Girls: Retrospective. “In honor of the Fortress,” I told her.
The Fortress of Women—or “The Fortress” for short—was the name bequeathed to my first college apartment. There were four of us living in a three bed/three bath at the Tiger Plaza apartment complex: Becca, Breton, Elizabeth, and me. The other three girls were a year behind me; we’d gone to high school together at a boarding school for academically and artistically gifted juniors and seniors, where we’d paradoxically absorbed both the fine art of cynicism and all the words to the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine.” I’d spent my first year of college in the honors dorm, which brought my sum total to three consecutive years of dorm living. The Tiger Plaza apartment meant, finally, my own room, a full-sized fridge, and a shower that didn’t necessitate flip-flops. I was satisfied—even despite the fact that we lived directly behind a bar that featured shitty and excruciatingly loud live music on its open patio four nights of the week. I didn’t even mind the dumpster view from our “backyard”; at least it meant shorter walks taking out the trash.
The apartment was full: of clutter, of drama, of people. All four of us had significant others who were spending the night more often than not. You were never alone in that apartment, but you were never lonely. I think it was the night we decided to decorate the Christmas tree. We got drunk on red and green sour apple martinis, courtesy of Elizabeth’s boyfriend Travis, who was the only one of us old enough to buy liquor, while Becca’s girlfriend Anna broiled a rich buttery steak she picked up on sale at Winn-Dixie. As my roommates and I played Bing Crosby Christmas records and strung up stolen restaurant forks on the tree, my boyfriend Jesse turned to Travis and slurred: “This apartment—it’s like a fortress. Of women. And not every guy is privy to the secrets of the Fortress. Only the select few are allowed to enter.”
To which Travis responded: “Yeahhh. It’s a fortress. A Fortress of Women.”
When the lease on the Tiger Plaza apartment ran out, the Fortress split up: Becca and Elizabeth took an apartment on State Street, and Breton and I moved to a townhouse a block away from our old place. The living room furniture moved with us. I unpacked and re-shelved the boxes of books and CDs and VHS tapes. I arranged the kitschy knickknacks on my desk exactly as I’d had them before. The pictures I put up on the wall next to the desk still had tape on them from the last apartment.
The stereo in our living room had a three-disk changer, with the Indigo Girls’ Retrospective always on rotation. Any major cleaning operation—mopping the floor, washing a giant load of dishes, preparing the apartment for a party—required the Indigo Girls’ musical accompaniment. We sang along, in harmony, at the top of our lungs: “Ghost,” “Watershed,” and of course, “Closer to Fine.”
Breton and I swore we were never moving, ever again. We liked our apartment and we were staying put. But Breton is a French major, and she decided to spend her junior year abroad, so when our lease ran out at the end of the summer she went off to Paris and I moved to my current house, a three bedroom I share with a writing buddy and her little brother. Elizabeth likewise transferred to an art school in Boston, and Becca has a new roommate at her old place. The Fortress has been effectively dismantled; but somehow, the more things change—
I realized as I packed up my apartment and transferred it, box by box, to the new house, that I have moved once a year for the past six years. By now I’ve got it down to a science: the order of my bookcase, the arrangement of trinkets and bottles on my dresser, the box in the back of my closet containing crap I’ve accumulated over these past six years which I have no place for but can’t get rid of. Jesse, now my ex-boyfriend, recently moved into a new apartment. He has arranged his living room and bedroom furniture exactly as he had it in the old apartment, which makes his new place seem familiar, but in an uncanny sort of way. I get the same eerie sense from my own bedroom, which structurally looks nothing like either of the bedrooms from the other two apartments, but is still filled with my stuff; thus my new bedroom resembles my other rooms in that they have all been my rooms.
You leave home in stages. You are fifteen and your mother buys you a new comforter and a new set of sheets for your dorm room, so that when you’re in town for the weekends your bed is still the same. But the walls of your bedroom are different, they look war-torn and hastily abandoned, with pieces of leftover masking tape still marking the places where your favorite posters used to hang. The posters have moved with you. The posters are what make the dorm room feel like—
The first time you refer to the dormitory as “home,” it is the middle of your junior year, you are walking with your roommate across the parking lot, and as soon as the word inadvertently leaves your lips you cover your mouth with your hand. You and your roommate exchange a guilty horrified look. Your mother would cry.
But eventually you give in. And the closets of your childhood bedroom slowly fill with your mother’s dress clothes. And, when your grandmother dies, the spare furniture. The day you realize that your bedroom has been relegated to household storage is the day you realize that home has become the place you visit.
That realization has left me with a sense of rootlessness and questions about the difference between house and home. I’ve had six rooms in six years, all of which I’ve briefly considered my “home.” Physical space and structure have become interchangeable, and have thus been rendered somewhat irrelevant. Location has become the variable in my life. So what is the constant?
Well, there’s the accumulated crap. That seems to follow me pretty effectively wherever I go. But there’s also Becca, and standing in the kitchen preparing for a party, with the Indigo Girls blaring, with Breton and Paris in the back of my mind. There’s Jesse stopping by the new house to say hello, and Travis, Elizabeth’s ex, coming late to the party after work, followed by Anna’s new girlfriend Mary. My circle of high school friends has extended and unfolded and enveloped this complex community that, on the good days, feels like a family, and on the bad days, feels like a long and semi-incestuous string of exes. On the bad days I wish I could get the hell out of this town, cut all ties, meet new people. On the good days I remember with satisfaction that these ties and these people are what make this town my home.
so i'm bored and experimenting. approve or disapprove?
also. the second essay. sort-of essay.
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Your dad has his home office in the large corner room. At night he sits at the big oak desk and you lie face-down on the brown shag carpet, breathing in. The carpet smells musty and sweet. The desk is the same color as the carpet but a little less gold and a little more red. On the desk are: a mail holder that commands, in fake-gold letters, DO IT NOW. Business cards that say Steven G_____ and Guste Barnett & Shushan and One Shell Square. A paperclip container made of dark smoky plastic. The top of the container is black plastic with a hole in the middle lined with magnets. You like to dump out all the paperclips, silvery and small, onto the gold-brown shag carpet, then try to slip the paperclips back into the container, one by one, without letting them get sucked onto the magnetic sides. Sometimes your dad sits you on his lap and lets you write stories on his electric typewriter. The typewriter is black and the keys feel solid underneath your fingertips. You write the stories and he reads them back to you:
Once upon a time I went to Grandmotherdear’s house. We played pick-up sticks and solitaire and concentration. Lulu and Nutmeg ran around outside and made gold dollars.You stop him and request that he read what it really says. He reads: “akdjaklaj fijoa kjf f 9 8akldjfkladj jdfOIUW#Oru9u oshf adfiojaweoiur 3w.”
You laugh until you are breathless.
When your brother is born, the big oak desk moves to the living room. Every room in the house has either tile floors or that brown shag carpet, except for the living room, which has blue carpet and blue curtains and is therefore known as the blue room. The big oak desk sidles up against the floor-length curtains adorning the French door, which is not a door at all but a window that doesn’t even open. The desk is broad, with its desktop surface extending two feet beyond its sides, like wings. Underneath where the edge of the desktop meets the blue-curtained French door, you find a space enclosed on two sides, with a roof. The desk is high enough, and you are small enough, so that you can sit comfortably without bumping your head on the underside. You get nice light from the door-window. You can hide things behind the curtains. This is your fortress. This is your office. You move in.
Your Archie comic books are safe here, tucked away from the grubby grasp of your brother. You spend hours sketching in the gauzy filtered light: pointe shoes, ballgowns, a dancer poised in perfect arabesque. You write a novel detailing the misadventures of you and your friends, who have started a club of superhero ballerinas called the Nature Fairies. When your cousin spends the night, you sit together in your office, whispering secrets back and forth till midnight. She sleeps under one side of the desk, you sleep under the other. It is dark and the wood is silent.
When your parents divorce, the desk moves to Mississippi. So does the kitchen table. There’s an extra table in the blue room, but it’s too bulky for the kitchen. (You’d tried sitting under the blue room table once, just to see, but it wasn’t as good.) You get a new-old kitchen table from your aunt. It seats four, but it is round instead of rectangular, and it looks wrong in your kitchen. One day you come home from school to find that your mom has folded down one of the leaves of the table and pushed it up against the wall. Three chairs. You turn on her. “Do you have to rub it in?” you ask.
“You’ll get used to it,” she says mildly, as if it doesn’t hurt her as much as it hurts you. As if she did it for your own good. But you know she did it for herself. This is a reality and an absence unrecognizable in the abstract. One must rely on one’s furniture to provide the concrete terms.
i haven't posted in almost two weeks. partly because i hated that blue/gray design, it made me not want to look at the site. and partly because i've been really content, for the first time since i've been back from prague. for the past two months i'd been writing compulsively as a way of coping. so now that the need to cope has been alleviated, i need to find some other feeling to write out of.
also, i had a short story due, so that was taking up a lot of time.
anyway.
i love my house. i love, love my roommates. i love being at home. it's kind of bad, actually. i fear that it will be detrimental to my social life. er, "social life."
we seek out the cat from the dark underbelly of the bed, from his lazy sprawl on the ottoman, from atop the washer. we seek him out and we lift him up and we present him to each other. look, here's the cat. he is my gift to you. he's the best kind of gift. warm and furry and recyclable. i am reading on the uncomfortable sofa in the back room, the "parlour," with the piano and the cool lamp from my dead grandmother. i am curled up with a book and reid comes in beaming, brandishing the cat. "fre-ed," he sings out, depositing the cat at my feet. then he leaves, and so does fred, because, well, he's a cat and cats do that sometimes. but it's the thought that counts.
my dad emailed me this afternoon to ask what my BR address and phone number was. then he called at nine-ish and told me he was in town and that he had chinese food for me. he hadn't seen the house yet, so i ran around like an idiot pretending to clean up. the house wasn't really messy. it was a matter of principle.
i gave him the grand tour and introduced him to rikki (reid disappeared into his room, presumably to take a shower, though maybe he was hiding, who knows). and then we sat down in the back room and my dad and i played piano and sang. and rikki giggled. she said when he left that he was cute and had a good sense of humor. and that i must have gotten my "charm" from him. the thought of my dad being "charming" is strange. i suppose he must be, on some level, since he's doing very well with his insurance agency. but. you know. he's my dad. the one with whom i have the schizophrenic relationship. and anyway my mom is the vivacious one.
speaking of which, i met fran. i had to. he evacuated with my mother and michael when ivan was gunning for new orleans. my mom told me that my family was going to abbeville, then she asked if she and michael could sleep here, then she called back to say that fran needed a place to go. and i said fine, and then i called back and said that i didn't want him in my house, because in the almost two years they've been together, or pseudo-together, i'd only met the man once, for five seconds, in my driveway when he came to pick her up. and it's one thing for him to sort of invade my family life as i'm being very intentionally kept out of the loop. but for him to invade my home, which is, at this point, the only place where i feel safe. i thought that was a bit much. and i knew that he would end up here regardless, but i wanted my mom to know that i wasn't happy about it. so we ended up crying on the phone for an hour. we'd needed to have the conversation anyway. and as it turns out, fran is allergic to cats. thanks, fred. i owe you one.
actually fran was okay. he's a decent guy. very, very decent. friendly and outgoing and decent. kind of a putz, though. and my mom needs more than decent. she needs something closer to brilliant. and besides that, he's not in love with her. it's painful hearing her talk about how they're just good friends because really the infatuation period was short-lived and now he works for her office anyway and really, truly, they're just friends. when it's glaringly obvious that she wants it to be something more. i'm past the point of seeing my parents as superhuman; i know my mother is flawed and merely mortal. but it's still strange and awful to see her in this vulnerable position. it's a little bit pathetic; it makes me embarrassed for her. she's so logical and straightforward and strong. and she's my mother. she's the one who tells me when the guys i'm seeing are full of shit. she's the one who points out the red flags. for me to be the one to tell her, repeatedly, that he is totally mind-fucking her--it's a weird reversal.
i don't much like it.
i got my second graded problem set back from my linguistics teacher today. i fucked up an entire section of it, but i still got a 96. my teacher wrote across the top: What are you doing in creative writing?!? mcgee used to write that sort of shit on my papers for his class. it always makes me feel really good.
except after linguistics i went in for my creative non-fiction independent study with jim. and we went over my essays and revisions. and i left wondering the same thing. what am i doing in creative writing?
nothing i write fits where it's supposed to fit. my fiction is too essayistic. my essays are too narrative. my plays are non-existent. i have no sense of structure. i feel so mediocre.
and i'm graduating in may and rather than make plans for it, i'm just sort of pretending it's not going to happen.
this is frustrating.
but. becca came over the other night bearing ice cream: Bluebell's raspberry sherbet-and-vanilla swirl. i didn't think they still made that stuff. remember the night when i was dying of a sinus infection, 103-degree fever and i'd just broken up with jesse, and becca and breton got me ice cream? they looked all over for the raspberry-vanilla, but they couldn't find it, so they got sherbet and vanilla separately and mixed it by hand. talk about love.
talk about. i mean. really.
this is me walking around the house in my underwear. (rikki and reid are in lafayette.) this is me eating zatarain's yellow rice out of the pot. with a spoon, not a fork. and drinking blackberry tea. the tea is to give me caffeinated pseudo-energy to write the paper that i'm not writing. because i'm eating yellow rice and drinking tea instead. the paper is due tomorrow at noon. it's for my 4086 class on india and the short story form. i haven't started. i haven't even picked a topic. it's quarter to ten. instead of writing my paper, i'm writing this post. also eating rice, drinking tea, and hey, playing the piano! i learned a new song! instead of starting my paper! i went to ballet at 5:30 and took the barre, even though i'm so sore from modern class last night that i can't fucking stand up straight. because it meant that i could not-start my paper for a little while longer!
the words "procrastination" and "progress" both start with "pro-". this must be significant. i will look it up. right now.
dictionary.com says:
"progress" comes from the Latin progressus, from past participle of progred: to advance. pro-, forward + grad, to go, walk.
"procrastinate" comes from the Latin procrastinare. pro-, forward + crastinus, of tomorrow (from cras, tomorrow).
aha. even as i "put off doing something"--even in my "habitual carelessness and laziness"--i am moving forward!
pro-crastination. pro-gress.
see, it's totally, like, the same thing.
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p.s. ...looking for ways to join in the procrastination fun? go read breton's moto post.
From: Paula Vogel 2/09/2005 10:31 AM EST
To: Ann E G_____
Subject: Re: thank you note
Dear Ms. G_____:
Thank you for your kind note.....best luck on the play! We're typing at our computers at the same time, you in Louisiana, and me in New York.
Best from my computer to yours,
Paula Vogel
<<
<<
<<
At 06:18 PM 2/8/2005, you wrote:
Dear Ms. Vogel,
I am a senior creative writing/lit major at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. I'm attempting my first full-length play for my honors thesis project, with the hope that I might be able to submit it as part of my application to an MFA playwriting program. So I've been freaking out about writing this play, dreading it, completely blocked for ideas. This morning, desperate for some kickstart, I flipped through my Bedford Drama anthology and came across "How I Learned to Drive." A past playwriting instructor had recommended it as an example of Different Ways of Storytelling. Anyway, I just finished your play, and I read all the headnotes and footnotes and companion articles and reviews and interviews included in my Bedford. And suddenly I'm really, really excited about writing.
So I just wanted to say thank you.
Sincerely,
Ann G_____
these are good things:
-- the first draft of my playwriting thesis project--a full-length play--is due on tuesday. it's due on tuesday because i said so. i think it will end up being at least fifty pages long. in the past two days, i've written twelve pages. these are the only twelve pages i have; still, it's twelve pages more than i started with. because i started with zero. procrastination is a bitch. on thursday, in a panic, i asked two professors to be on my thesis committee--i hadn't yet named my committee, my defense date, or the location of my defense, per the honors college advisor's request. at this point i'm convinced that any teacher i ask to be on my committee will either laugh or spit in my face, because i've waited so long to get my shit together. but both professors agreed. in fact, jenny actually said "i'd love to be on your committee!" which made me very happy.
maybe possibly i'll actually be able to pull this thesis thing off.
-- i met with wilcox for our midterm conference. he's the head of the MFA writing program, and he's teaching the undergraduate capstone fiction class. he rarely teaches undergraduates. my first story for the class went over about as well as could possibly be imagined, considering. protocol for workshop is that wilcox returns our stories to us with his line edits and a cover letter giving suggestions. after my workshop, he gave me his letter with suggestions, but he didn't give me his marked-up copy of my story. i asked him about it, and he said that actually he didn't make many line edits. wilcox used to be an editor at randomhouse. he edited hunter s. thompson. he's telling me, "i really didn't see the need to change much, as far as line edits go." i was like, "well, cool." i started to walk out of the classroom and he says, "i really enjoyed your story."
so when i went to his office we talked about the story, and the class, and he told me he thought my story was "promising" and that it "really affected" him. i told him how i have no idea what i'm doing with my life and he said everything will fall into place. i hate when people say this. they say it a lot: everything will fall into place. the thing is, i believe it. but i can't plan for it.
he told me he thinks i'm going to have a lot of fun in the meantime.
i want to go on a grand adventure. and then dear god i want to get into grad school. i want to get into a good grad school. and i want them to pay me for it.
wilcox, dear man, help me make this happen.
-- boys have been calling me. since i've been single--and i'm counting from when jesse and i broke up--i've noticed that although the boy action certainly undergoes peaks and valleys, on average i have an interesting boy encounter once a month. in moments of loneliness and despair, i look at the calendar and remind myself that basically, i get boys like a monthly period. charming. so i guess it's that time of the month for me.
boys, unlike menstrual periods, are only partially unpleasant experiences. for example. there's this guy-who-shall-remain-nameless. he's GM for a popular 24-hour restaurant north of campus. i've seen him around a lot, we've introduced ourselves, etc. i'm at highland coffee doing homework last week and he comes over to sit with me and we chat. it's an amusing, if somewhat oversexed, conversation. he's in his early 30s and has a twelve-year-old kid. he keeps talking about how lonely and desperate he is, all the while waving his hands dismissively and saying "not to cast aspersions on this conversation."
okay. so the next night i'm at highland and he comes up to me. actually what he does is he gallops over to me with a mug of steaming hot coffee in hand, and he's grinning, and with every galloping step he's sloshing coffee everywhere: his pants, the floor, he's left a wet trail of coffee in his wake. i'm like "man, what are you doing, you're spilling your coffee everywhere." and he's like, all smiles, "i spent four hours in here earlier today waiting to see if you would pop in."
right. i'm like (and this was actually true) "hey, i've got a ton of homework, i can't really talk." he says "well can i sit for a minute" and i say sure.
he cuts to the chase. he says "since you're busy i'll get right to the point. are you seeing anyone? do you have a boyfriend?" and i shake my head no. he says "can i get your number so i don't have to wait around this coffeeshop all day?" and i say (and this is not true at all) "um, um, i don't think i believe in giving my number out."
undeterred, he asks if he can take me out to dinner sometime. i'm like, turning four shades of pink. i say "maybe we should just stick to highland." it occurs to me how red i'm turning, and for some reason i start babbling about how embarrassed i am. maybe so he wouldn't have a chance to ask me any more questions. i don't know. i don't know why i was embarrassed, either. i was the one telling him no, but somehow it ended up with me saying "this is really mortifying" and him apologizing fifty times, going "really it's okay." he left me alone after that--for a while. for thirty minutes. then he came back to see how my homework was coming. i was afraid that i'd made things horribly awkward, but he played it very cool.
a few days later he sat with me again at highland. afterwards he tried to walk me to my car. my car was up on the hill, in the parking lot directly across from the coffeeshop. we were standing on chimes street, staring at my car. he's like "let me walk you to your car." i told him i could see it from where i was standing, really i'd be okay. he said it was the gentlemanly thing to do. for safety. i was like, "what, do you think i'm going to trip on a tree root?" i was afraid he was going to try to hug me or something.
the next night i went to perks instead.
-- matt came to 80s night with me last week. i hadn't been since may. since breton and becca. matt actually danced, despite his y chromosome. matt is the coolest.
-- barrett called me yesterday to go to blues night at phil brady's. he came and picked me up. it was me and him and amy. and then it was me and him and amy and this guy named john. i'd met john at perky's apartment a few weeks ago. he went to jesuit. he's cute and friendly and whatever, but i didn't know he was coming. i tend to get paranoid in these situations; i hate feeling like i've been set up, and this had all the earmarks of a double date. so i got really self-conscious and ended up ignoring him for half the night, because i'm smooth like that. but after a while, a five-dollar jack and coke, and a lot of mediocre blues music, i managed to act not-socially-retarded. we went back to his house and played darts. him and me against barrett and amy. i suck at darts. but i got a bull's eye, entirely by accident, and we ended up winning. so that was cool.
barrett and amy are going over there for the st. patrick's day parade. i am invited as well. but i also got a phonecall from matt inviting me to eat chicken soup at his apartment. and also an email from courtney inviting me to the english dept grad student parade party. and another email from eloise, another parade party. and also a phonecall from chris, another parade party. all this and what i'm supposed to be doing tomorrow is writing my goddamn play. oh well. when it's all over next week, i can go to jes and alanna's party. and oneal's party. dear god.
-- i gave ross a copy of my last short story. i'd used an anecdote of his, how his aunt makes him fig cakes every year for his birthday. so i gave him the story on his birthday. it was more like an awkwardly worded thank-you note than a birthday present. i wasn't expecting him to say anything about it, but he left a post-it note on my windshield saying how much he enjoyed it. it was a sweet note, and generous, and right then it was something i really needed to hear.
we went to highland monday morning--i had questions for him about his parents' divorce, for my play. we ended up talking for three and a half hours. straight. i can't even remember the last time i had a marathon conversation like that. probably with adam over AIM, a year ago. i was exhausted by the end of it. anyway, ross kept asking me why i wanted to write about him, what did i think was worth writing about. i didn't ever give him a straight answer. it's hard to explain. because it's not as direct as he thinks it is.
it's not like i meet people and decide that i want to write their life story. sometimes i steal anecdotes, like with the fig cakes. but most of writing is filling in the details, and you get the details by observing people you know pretty well, and catching the little quirky gestures.
one night, about a month after ben and i broke up, my roommates and i went to Great Wall for dinner. halfway through our very super-exciting meal, i saw rikki look up and smile at someone behind me. i turned around, all smiles, to see who it was. it was ben and sharky. and my face sort of froze. but i had the upper-hand: i was with my roommates, it was three against two, we were at my table. my turf. i was sitting down and ben started to lean over to hug me hello. but i didn't budge. and he saw that, and caught himself: he straightened up and did this shoulder-roll. as if he hadn't bent down to hug me at all--he was just rolling his shoulders back. and it was this barely perceptible thing. i doubt anyone else at the table noticed. but i knew his body language, and when he did that shoulder thing--it was like i had won. it was like we'd fought this three-second silent battle that no one else could even see. and i won. and gloated, too.
that will probaby end up in a story.
rereading old journal entries is supposed to be funny/humiliating, right.
and hopefully you can see some sort of progression.
so how is it that i feel like i've lost my voice?
maybe it's just different.
maybe it's that i'm older, or more experienced.
or maybe it's that i'm more full of shit.
enough of this gaspy girly melodramatic lorrie moore (the tedious repetitive fact of it!) crap.
i need to start writing again.
and not journal entries and grant applications.
is how much i spent tonight at the grocery.
i'm not sure when i last went and bought actual groceries. as opposed to a single frozen dinner + deodorant + cat food.
i think it was february.
march april may june july
five months.
two hundred dollars.
i suppose i should feel bad about spending two hundred dollars on a single grocery trip. i do not. here's why:
i eat out for every meal. the only time i don't eat out is when i have leftovers from eating out.
although my social life often seems to revolve around eating out (because this is southern louisiana, we love food, and we are all lazy twenty-somethings with generally non-functional kitchens/empty fridges/no cooking ability), eating out as much as i do is expensive and unhealthy.
i am semi-horrified at the condition of my body: consequence of a haphazard exercise schedule and a retarded diet of whatever-is-available-and-doesn't-overly-disgust-me.
there are way stupider things to spend two hundred dollars on.
the only thing i maybe regret is going grocery shopping while both hungry and hormonal. i'm pretty sure the latter explains why i purchased four kinds of ice cream and three kinds of pickle.
specifically:
a pint of häagen-dazs rum raisin (it makes me nostalgic for that summer at ailey.)
a pint of ben & jerry's cherry garcia (it reminds me of dad, who lately has taken to gently microwaving a little bowl of it for me when i go over to his house.)
a pint of häagen-dazs triple chocolate something something (because, uh, i have to have chocolate in the house or.......or nothing, there's no alternative, i just have to have chocolate in the house at all times. and lately i've been living off spoonfuls of nutella.)
a half-gallon of bluebell's strawberry low-fat frozen yogurt (it didn't come in a smaller size, it's fucking delicious, and i don't feel like a bad person for eating it. not that i feel like a bad person for eating real ice cream, since i never eat much of it in the first place. i guess what i mean is that the strawberry frozen yogurt makes me feel like a good person.)
as for the pickles, it's mt. olive jalapeño dill strips, sweet relish, and banana pepper slices. yeah, i know banana peppers aren't pickles, but categorically, i mean, it's the same weird hormonal impulse, so. it counts.
also i don't know what my deal is lately with the sweet relish. i find it so appealing. it started at barrett's house one night, i was staring into their (perpetually impressively stocked) fridge and had an overwhelming desire to eat a spoonful of sweet relish.
i'm pretty sure i went ahead with it.
.
mid-afternoon i realized that even karen was out of town this time and i had absolutely nothing to do for the rest of the day. instead of staring desolately at the walls, though, i managed to think of a few things i wanted to do and a few things i needed to do. then i did some of them: started a new book, filled a prescription, balanced my checkbook, got rubber cement for my prague scrapbook, wrote the rent check. went into the grocery for frozen dinner and lightbulbs, left with two hundred dollars worth of reasons to keep living.
it's really like that. the same way that this journal is a barometer of my mental health, not in terms of my mood when i'm writing, but whether or not i'm writing at all. i'm starting to feel in that good place again. it's been a long time. i'm paying attention. there's food in my fridge. there's flowers in the bear-mouse.
at some point in my life, a frozen chicken pot pie dinner-for-one will sound terribly sad.
right now it feels like some sort of achievement.
.
PJs, clean face, fed cat.
i could have gone to chelseas tonight.
instead i'm going to sit on the sofa and re-watch in good company. because it feels good and topher grace is cute.
and i have four kinds of ice cream.
maybe it's irrational and impractical to buy four kinds of ice cream for one person.
or maybe i should go grocery shopping shot full of crazygirl hormones more often.
i am so sorry
self
i have not written you
i don't know what
i don't know what's the matter.
i did write a poem.
it was not very good.
a while ago
i wrote the beginning of something
i'll finish later.
i have not read a decent book in
god knows how
long
i can't finish the ones i bought
they are flat and long-winded
and written by men
but i ordered 'revenge of the lawn' for forty-nine cents
anyway because that's what has coffee in it
and that might make it better
no good reading, no good writing,
i miss all of you
and
i don't feel like leaving the house right now
i can't see past tomorrow or the end of the week or the end of the month
i don't care
which scares me a little
caught in the middle,
i guess i'll start moving
when i'm either very happy or very sad
one way or the other.
Pretend you have never been told anything about poems or poets. In place of that pretense, try to recall a very early experience you had of reading or hearing language that interested or excited or confused or enlightened you. Maybe it was something you overheard, or something someone else read, or a comic-book, or a sign on a billboard. Now write about that experience, trying to describe what about the text got to you and why.
before i knew how to read (or type) i would sit at my dad's electric typewriter in his 'office' (turned michael's bedroom, now my bedroom) and write stories. i liked the hum of the typewriter and the feel of the keys, the thick white paper, the shotsharp sound of a letter struck. when i was finished i would sit on dad's lap and ask him to read me the story i had written, which, by his account, usually involved a visit to grandmotherdear's house. then i would ask him to read me what it said really, and he would say, slowly, with effort, "dksdfj32 4w42sldkfj dsdkfj slkdfjao2q3w" and i thought that was hilarious.
-
when i was four or five, my mom bought us matching journals. they were bound with pink calico floral-print fabric and they looked like real books. we wrote in our journals together at night. sometimes she would read hers aloud to me and i must have read mine aloud to her too. once i found her journal (years later) in her 'office' (the closet in the laundry room) and cracked it open. i read a few lines about a hangover and tomato juice and immediately stopped. i didn't actually want to know what was in her journal. i even have trouble reading books she has been through first - with her pencil, making notes. it's too personal, the marks of someone else's thoughts while they're reading. it's too unfiltered. i won't pick up notebooks in brett's room either. not even if i need a sheet of paper.
i have four journals now, three in baton rouge with me and one at home. they are all the same size and shape, and all look like books, and three of the four are clothbound. the first one was my childhood journal; the second one i requested for my 11th birthday (green floral calico); for the third one i couldn't find a cloth journal so i bought a black leatherbound (or something like that) journal at the book merchant in natchitoches, right before i left for london; and the fourth one was a lime green clothbound journal i gave to michael one year for his birthday which he never used. it's mostly prague. i'm about due for a new one. there's a nice set of fat bright clothbound primary color journals at b&n, with lined (always lined) paper, and it's bound so that you can open the book all the way when you write in it - my old journals didn't open flat, and i got crampy trying to write in them while also trying to keep them open. the only problem with the ones at b&n is that they have "journal" stamped in white letters on the front cover. but i'm sure i could find some way to get around that.
i only write in my journal when i'm traveling (even just to go to the beach. there's something about traveling that makes me want to write by hand) and when i am thinking about things that aren't appropriate for the internet.
-
my first set of sheets depicted mickey mouse and his friends. they were in the sky, with clouds and maybe balloons and kites. the pillow showed them all in a hot air balloon, but it was one with a fan motor thing (so it was a dirigible, but i didn't know that word when i was five). and on the balloon part it said "MICKEYMOBILE." i knew enough to recognize the first word as "mickey" and assumed the rest of it said "mouse." but after a while, i realized the second word was too long for "mouse." it kept me up at night, this pillow puzzle. i propped myself up on my elbows, stared at the string of unfamiliar shapes. they held - not a secret, really, but some mystery, something more annoying than a mystery. finally (over months or maybe a year) i managed to sound the word out: moe-bill. but a mobile was something you dangled over a crib for a baby to look at. i knew this because we had a baby in the house, which was named michael, and he had a mobile above his crib. the thing on my pillow did not look like a mobile. it looked like a bunch of people in a hot air balloon thing with a fan on it, and they were going somewhere, and they were not above a baby crib. nevertheless. the words were "mickey mobile" and that was that.
(until a few years later, long enough probably to need a new set of sheets, when i realized it was a 'mickeymobile' - mickey moe-beel - like an automobile but with mickey. they were on the go. i don't think i ever told my parents of my epiphany. i obviously never told them about my quandary in the first place or else they would have cleared it up for me with much less agony.)
-
once when i was four or five, my dad was fixing me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and he accidentally took down the maxwell house coffee can (which was, we later established, his favorite color blue) from the cabinet instead of the jiff. i was sitting on the barstool at the counter and i exclaimed Daddy it's not peanut butter!
he held up the coffee can, he looked at me, he said incredulously, mock-accusingly, "It SNOT PEANUT BUTTER?" and i had never heard anything so funny in my life.
i just ran from my apartment to the library in dark clouds and thick wind, a green sundress and penny loafers. this morning i thought i lost my favorite brown sweater, but they had it at highland. i don't remember leaving it; i virtually always remember where i put things, and it made me feel like i was drunk last night, that i have no recollection of leaving my sweater at highland.
mom called me last night at 10:30, which is crazy, and she had just gotten home from baton rouge. she'd been waiting all day for her bill to go up in the legislature. but it didn't. and we chatted about stuff, and i mentioned that i'd gotten a notice from the women's clinic saying i owed a balance of 22 dollars on the second installment of my HPV vaccine. i don't generally ask her for extra money. lately i've been asking for gas money if i drive long distances with/for michael, because my current gas budget is 2 tanks per month. but other than that i don't ask for extra help. my budget is so tight right now, though, that there's not even room for the 22 dollar vaccine balance. i don't feel too guilty asking for help when it comes to health-related stuff. and it's just 22 dollars.
but when i asked her, she hesitated. and told me that money was really tight, all of a sudden, because dad stopped sending a check every month for child support (michael just turned 18 and graduated from high school). but she could give me 22 dollars, yes, she could do that.
and i'm thinking, jesus, she's reluctant to give me twenty bucks for a vaccine? what about the other stuff she'd offered last month to pay for?
-- electric piano repair (circa 1995; middle C is messed up; michael will use in college)
-- digital camera (going-away present for spain)
-- buy my car (for michael to use in college)
so after we hang up, i'm considering my options. i can get an estimate on the piano and forgo the repairs if it's going to be unreasonably expensive. for the past month or so, i've been working odd jobs (sewing, line edits, scanning stuff for dad, selling clothes, video editing job lined up at a local nonprofit), the earnings of which i've saved first for my trip to chicago in july, and now with an eye towards new dance clothes. but instead of dance clothes, i could use that money to buy the digital camera myself. or i can buy it now with my current savings and pay myself back with some of the money from the car.
the car. this is the kicker. i am budgeting my income so that i'll have $10,000 in savings when i leave. according to the kelly bluebook, my 1999 corolla (CE) with 103,000 miles on it is worth $4740 in good condition.
the money from my car will go towards:
1) paying off my car note ($440 by september)
2) buying my plane ticket (between $400 - 800 depending on if i buy a return ticket for christmas or just get it one way)
3) more savings.
my plan is to be financially independent when i leave for spain.
right now, my mom pays:
-- car insurance (about $100 / mo)
-- health
insurance ($100 / mo and superfluous since i also have it through work!)
-- cell
phone ($60 / mo)
-- low-limit credit card ($350 / mo).
when i leave, she can take me off the car insurance and credit card for sure. she can take me off the cell phone plan, too, but i want to review the policies to see how i can keep my number for when i return (breton, what did you do with your phone?). and she can also stop paying for my health insurance (she can stop immediately!) but she's reluctant to do it, because even though i'll have health insurance with my job in spain, she doesn't seem to think it will be good enough.
i should have enough in savings to cover anything my monthly income (631 euro, or $845 at the current rate) doesn't - and still have enough left over to be okay when i come home. but the money from the car is important. that's my real cushion. i need to get as much money out of that sale as i can, so that when i come home from spain i can get on my feet.
coincidentally, my brother will need a car when he starts LSU. you can live in baton rouge without a car, but it's far from ideal. i lasted till october of my freshman year - i ended up getting my mom's 1994 corolla so that i could drive myself to dance class at the studio on bluebonnet, twenty minutes from campus. (for the first two months of school, my boyfriend drove me to dance class. there wasn't enough time for him to drop me off and go back to the dorm, so he would sit in the parking lot for 1.5 hours and read or nap. he never complained. his selflessness was astonishing. finally we went to visit my mom and i told her what he'd been doing and i was like, "it's ridiculous. i need a car.")
as brett pointed out, it's customary for family members to sell their cars to relatives on the very cheap. so i'm sitting here, looking at the blue book value of my car, and knowing that my brother needs this car, and that my mom offered to buy it, and that she apparently has very little money - so little that she might not be able to buy the car for any price, cheap or not. and also that i need all the money i can get, so i can be in a position where i don't have to ask my parents for help. and simultaneously feeling like i'll be a bad, selfish, ungrateful daughter to ask for more than, like, $2000.
and i'm thinking maybe michael and i can ask dad for help, maybe dad will buy the car. or maybe michael can take out a loan from dad. or he could take out a loan from the bank and dad could co-sign on it.
but michael would have to start working now - and he'd have to take the room & board scholarship option, and work not only on-campus but off-campus as well, waiting tables or something equally lucrative. we talked briefly on google chat - i told him the latest with the car stuff, and told him my ideas for how we can make this work. he said he'd followed up on a couple of the craigslist job posts i'd sent - reginelli's and landry's in lakeview. the lakefront is a five-minute drive or very reasonable bike ride away, although the thought of michael on a bike on veterans boulevard makes me want to vomit. but still, restaurant jobs for the summer - this is good.
then i called my mom for lunch (she said she would be in baton rouge again) and she was still in new orleans and apologized for not having let me know. i wanted to bring up the money situation but couldn't manage to do it. then she called again while i was finishing my lunch and said she'd talked to michael about the car stuff (i guess he brought it up after we'd talked about it) and that she'd thought i was asking $2000 for it, but if it was $4000, she couldn't afford it. and i said yeah, i know. and i said the thing is, michael needs a car. he's not going to have to take out student loans for school, so maybe he could take out a loan for the car.
she said she didn't think he could take out a loan.
i said, you could co-sign on it.
she said, i don't know if they do that.
i said, i'm pretty positive they do.
she said, i don't know if i could even take out a loan right now.
she said, he'll have to work and save up money to buy a car.
i said, "the thing is, he needs the car to get the job to make the money to buy the car. you know?"
she sighed yes. we talked frankly about finances, what she was paying for me, what she could get rid of when i left. i asked her if it was going to help much and she said "are you kidding? it will help a lot." and that made me feel good. i told her i was willing to sell the car for less than it was worth, but not much less, because i needed that money so that i could quit asking her for help in the long run. she said of course. she said i needed as much money from the car as i could get. i actually choked up when she said this. i said, "it is such a relief that you understand about the car thing." she said of course she understood, that when family members give their cars away it's because they don't really need the money - but when you need the money, it only makes sense to make as much as you can. i told her hearing that made me want to cry. because i'd felt like i was selfish for even asking for money. and she said, "oh my god, i'm sorry you ever thought that. we should have talked about this sooner." and i told her about all the extra work i'd been doing, and she said she was proud of me.
and she said, you know what, i think we can make this car thing work.
i brought up the other expenses we'd talked about last month: the piano repair and the camera.
i told her i was waiting for the price to drop some more on the camera i wanted, and that i was hoping to get an estimate on the piano this week.
and she said she wanted to hear the estimate on the piano (she asked if i was taking it to spain with me - !!!! - i was like, yeah, mom, i'm going to wheel it around on a rolly cart while i'm looking for housing in granada. and also, seriously, that michael would really like to have it while he was at LSU.)
and she said she wanted to buy the camera as my going-away present.
i said, i can split it with you if you want.
and she said, no, you know, i really want to buy it. i want to do something for your going away.
and i said, well, that would be the perfect present.
not only was it a huge relief to end this conversation feeling like michael's and my needs will be met with effort on all our parts - but it was also nice just to talk calmly and seriously about practical things with my mom. she usually tries to keep this stuff a secret from us so we don't 'worry' about money - but then we can tell money is tight and she is obviously stressed out and acts kind of passive-aggressive about it, like it's our fault for not knowing what she didn't tell us and for being expensive. it's so much better to have it out in the open. then we can actually do something about it.
buy this car to drive to work, drive to work to pay for this car.
in other news, i found a craigslist post requesting short stories about one's first menstrual period. this is the first creative writing post i've ever had a stomach feeling about - not counting my first round of craigslist queries and the play adaptation that ended up being urban erotica. i emailed the lady and she said she's based out of boston, trying to compile a collection of first period stories because she thinks it's interesting, she works as a technical writer, and she has friends in the industry who could help her get it published. she said her own story was well underway: "Think sharing one hotel room, on vacation with my entire family, including a very loud, overly proud-of-an-emabarassing-event mother." and she said she was looking forward to reading my story.
i don't know. like i said, i have a stomach feeling for this. there are some stand-out moments i can think of (i'm sure that's true for everyone) but i don't know if i could make it an interesting narrative. but it's worth a shot, i guess. i'm half-inclined to post a draft on this journal, but i worry about grossing ya'll out. what do you think? if i tell you mine, will you tell me yours? maybe you can even send in your own versions. she says she'll pay $500 for each story if the book gets published.
and
from How I Grew, sort-of sequel to Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, by Mary McCarthy:
The power of choice I held affected me as an urgency, forcing me to take out a book before I was fully prepared, hurrying me to make up my mind as though behind me there were a crowd of other borrowers. Summoning resolution, I picked a book from the shelves and advanced to the counter. It was The Nigger of the Narcissus. The librarian looked at me; I looked back at her. She took my card and tucked another one, stamped, in a flap at the back of the volume. I had the impression that she might say something, but she let me walk away. In my mind was only the vaguest notion of who Joseph Conrad was or had been.
i haven't felt like writing
i am busy and have a cold or
my sinuses are revolting in any case.
both interpretations apply.
i want to take a nap but i want to go to ballet but not on tuesdays or mondays either
not really on wednesdays
i wish christine would teach on tuesdays again
i wish the modern class wasn't boring
i wish my shoes didn't have holes in them because the good ones got eaten by chicago
last class shoko complimented me on my new pink leotard, though
and five people said they liked my pink bandanna
even though i'm pretty sure i've worn my hair like that to ballet before
also for the past two weeks i've gone legal and wore ballet tights and nothing over them
i wasn't really breaking the rules before because i am so old that the rules ("ABSOLUTELY NO JUNK ALLOWED") don't apply to me
i can cover my ass if i want to
which means need to
but i don't right now
i got myself in decent shape
and now i've been out (or one class a week, which is the same thing) for a month or something
and i feel gross
our sink is full of dishes and so it is full of dishes
we can't afford groceries
i'm waiting for my visa to buy my plane ticket
i haven't scheduled the GRE general exam because i want to wait till i feel ready
but i don't feel ready because i can't study hardcore every night
i can study math OR vocab
OR spanish
OR edit video
OR, now, unpack the bedroom, make curtains without cutting the fabric because brett is sensitive about his fabric
i put in my notice
but by the time i have the time it will be too late for everything
somehow i am still engaged
which means i am not depressed in spite of a whole bunch of bullshit
which is a good sign
even though as it comes i feel the urge to crawl in bed
but i don't stay there long anymore
two years is a long time to be sad
i have lost my tolerance of salt or grease or television
exercise as always makes me feel good
somehow this will work out
bank account pet deposit walmart winn dixie whole foods cab company photoshop
no clutter on the desk
no clutter in the drawers
i dream of sewing and knitting and cooking and reading and dancing all the time
i need someone to fund my hobbies
i need someone to write to and for
i need something to write about
jumping out of my skin
i think i might submit a piece to nola art/lit magazine constance. it's edited by two guys i know through becca, one of whom she dated and one of whom i went on dates with. this is either a pro or a con, or neither.
becca had mentioned the other day that erik (her ex) had invited her to submit work for the second issue, which we agreed was very sweet/professional of him. (it was a semi-dramatic break-up.) i was googling around at work today and came across the website, which says the submit deadline is september fifteenth. i hadn't even considered submitting anything until i saw the deadline. in fact i've never considered submitting anything anywhere. the theme is "delicate burdens" (translated as "what everyday life is like in new orleans"). delicate burdens is maybe not the way i would put it, but i think it's a good idea as far as themes go. or maybe just inevitable.
so i thought i could submit something from my journal, which is, at times, a fair chronicle of what everyday life is like in new orleans, right. i came here and looked at my categories and realized i didn't have anything called "new orleans," which i guess i could have used to label katrina-related posts. then i considered that it's kind of stupid for someone from new orleans living in new orleans to have a category called "new orleans." that's like having a category called "my day," or something.
anyway. the post i think would be most relevant for submission is "broken city," from 9/12/06. i think i would retitle it (probably "there's a you-shaped hole in my dancing heart," which is actually the name of a post from a few days later). i made up a draft with proper caps and cut out a couple of lines to make it easier to read. the thing is, i like this post and i also think it's not particularly good writing. i find it (have always found it) a little bit repetitive and tedious. not the content, necessarily, but the diction. so i sent it out to a few good readers and have already gotten feedback or promises from: ben, becca, barrett.
anyone reading this, feel free to check out the old (unedited) post and let me know what you think. becca has suggested some alternate posts as well. (for the record, i feel funny/uneasy about trying to write something fresh about life in new orleans. not only have i not lived there since march, but i also feel like no one in new orleans actually spends time contemplating the state of affairs unless they absolutely have to. mostly we're pretending [in order] to get by. to sit down and 'write about' new orleans, like on purpose, in a reflective summative way, feels totally unnatural to me, considering the whole city necessarily operates in a state of bizarre denial. the journal/snapshot format feels more authentic.)
anyway. barrett said, via email:
i like it (probably b/c of the name drops). just put it into context that it was a journal entry w/ a short preface. in (slight) contextualizing you might also have to do something about the namedrops too.
how many words is it now? if you have space i'd update & mention that you're now going to spain for a year & mention how you feel about it - writing should be concise & natural. There might not be room for that, & as it stands i think you could get the piece in w/ very little editing. but, if there's a theme at all - in cnxn w/ the theme of the issue, it feels like things are still up in the air as it's just a snap shot. I like that.
that being said, adding an update could be more "honest" (for constance) & hits closer to relevance for the current state of affairs for the city. you are one of nola's artists & you're on your way out for some reason. maybe watching to see what happens in the future - things were up in the air a yr ago & they are still there now 4 u at least. i think you can update it w/o putting too much forced closure on the issue & not losing the things that i like about it. but can you do it w/in 1500 words?
anyway, good piece
i saw him on gchat later:
ann: you really don't think it's boring?
or stupid?
barrett: none of those things came to mind while reading. then i tried to imagine myself reading the constance magazine
ann: and it became stupid and boring?
barrett: no
& i imagined i would read something like that about as often as i read a harpers
ann: which is never?
i like harper's, actually
i would subscribe to it if i actually paid for things like that
barrett: almost never. i know you do. so i decided i would enjoy reading your article
ann: mostly i'm interested in submitting because i think there's a fair chance i could get in
and i'm also interested in submitting because i actually felt like i could submit something, and that never happens
barrett: & that i would probably be reading the magazine in the bathroom, & i would stay to finish your article even if it took an extra minute or 2
ann: hahahahaha
that's so sweet of you
seriously
the dog behind my house howls with the trains
even before the train comes he starts howling really weird
because he's making train noise
barrett: he has a friend
or she
ann: yeah
the first time i heard it i was like what the fuck is wrong with that dog
and brett was like, i think he's....making the same noise as the train?
and i was like, haha yeah maybe
but then he did it again a few nights later and it was before i even heard the train
he is definitely saying what's up to his train friend
barrett: i tried to howl to a coyote the other night
ann: fuck you
are you kidding
were you drunk?
barrett: no - it was silly. i was on my bike on the way home & he was crossing the path <50 ft in front of me & started to move away so i made one of the most pathetic attempts to make a dog noise
he slowed a little
ann: hahahaha
barrett: so you are going to submit that thing eventually right?
ann: yeah
barrett: good
ann: i'll be proud
barrett: me too
email / ann to rick
12:03pm spain time
subject: personal statement = NO FUN
Howdy Rick
I hope all is well with you - Lynne emailed me a few days ago to say she'd seen you (and that you were writing my rec letter, hooray)
Man you weren't kidding about the personal statement - I've been working on it for the past month and it is seriously driving me up the wall. I'm on my eighth draft.
There's a lot of internet advice about the Right Way to write a statement of purpose - and it's all pretty contradictory (be formal, but casual!) - I'm particularly stuck on how to address my reason for choosing writing as a field of study without talking about life before college (verboten!).
In fact there was not a particular moment when I had a writer epiphany. It was a logical progression from my interests, which did not magically appear my freshman year in college, but (obviously) much earlier. There was a specific moment when I chose my field of study - I was filling out the common app for undergrad, I got to the line about declaring my major, and I thought, "Well, I'm probably not talented enough to audition in dance or theatre - I might as well be realistic" - and I wrote down 'creative writing.' But again this occured in high school. And I'm not 'supposed' to talk about high school.
So seriously, what can I say about this stuff without 'risking' coming off as naive or immature? Am I supposed to pretend that nothing relevant to my decision occurred before age 18? I realize that this is not the time to brag about being co-editor of my high school lit mag ("who cares about your high school lit mag") but in fact it was that kind of experience - things that happened all along the way - that informed my decision to study writing. The decision to pursue an MFA came later, but I don't think I can (or should) make any argument for why I want an MFA without also addressing why I wanted to write in the first place.
Also, I don't know how to address the early stuff in a super brief way without it being too general. 'I always liked to read and write' is obviously a dumb and boring thing to say, but 'I read so much that my family accused me of being anti-social and my mom declared books off-limits till my homework was finished' and 'I made an office underneath my dad's desk where I wrote a third grade novel about ballerina superheroes' is maybe too much about being a kid. I don't know. But I'm getting mighty frustrated.
Any advice on how to do this without sounding super lame?
And is it okay if I really hate starting my essay with a 'clever' 'original' 'hook'? It's so freaking obvious. 'Isn't this a clever sentence? Aren't you intrigued? You weren't expecting that, were you. That's me, Miss Unconventional!' I'd so much rather be direct.
Gah.
Un saludo and safe biking!
--Ann
.
email / rick to ann
4:28pm spain time
subject: RE: personal statement = NO FUN
--
Rick
.
email / ann to rick
6:21pm spain time
subject: RE: personal statement = NO FUN</