file this under:

Things I wish I didn't like as much as I do.

current obsessions

This guy. Shoooo. 

I spent a lot of time thinking about who I would want to see this movie with, and then realized that it's the kind of movie best suited to a solo trip and a very dark theatre. It's a date, Fassbender. 

On that note, my hiatus ended this weekend. I may have been overzealous in marking its close. There's a fine line between versions of me, a mesh. At the same time, I think I've been building a wall. Does that make sense? I'm harder on the outside than I've ever been. Inside, everything is stirring. Sea changes. I notice how many questions I ask and how few I answer. I can promise you that I think more about you than you do about me. 

random act of bravery

I sat alone in a bar for the first time. Not the "I'm ten minutes early but I'm meeting my friend" kind of alone, the "I have two hours to kill and I'd like to kill them at a wooden table with a generous $4 glass of Portuguese red" alone.

It was pretty wonderful.

lately

SERIOUSLY THESE CATS.

current obsessions

I "rediscovered" this song on Emily's iPod this weekend, and proceeded to play it, like, 16 times. And now I've been listening to it all day. It is still so good. So good. I put it on and I'm 17 again, sitting on Mike's bed as he strums, with Telly and Ryan and Jackie harmonizing neatly, my heart bursting. In a movie, that's where it would freeze frame and then at the bottom it'd be all, "Ten years later..." and it would cut to evil New York City, where I live, and I'd be walking slowly through Central Park looking pensive and far more glamorous than I currently do in my thrift-store skirt and hair all sticky from the homemade salt spray because I'm on a budget.

Also, please to appreciate the meticulous fan video, in which every lyric is matched to its corresponding image, kind of like Pictionary. I don't really understand the random shot of Hawaii around 1:40, but otherwise, solid artistic interpretation. And the scary devil eyes! And how the fire gets bigger with each successive "burning!"

random act of bravery

I try not to regret too much. This has become a sort of cultural imperative, I think – we’re told to have no regrets, that regrets are a waste of time, that they diminish ownership, that they hold us back. I agree with this, for the most part. There are a few instances in my life where I took action or moved in a direction that caused someone else pain: those, I regret.

I danced last weekend. I mean really danced. I mean gave it up – control. I mean breathed through the terror that seizes my limbs when someone takes my waist or my hand. I mean let go.

The morning I left Louisiana I drove from Lafayette to Breaux Bridge, a short but slow drive through the most benign of the Bayou. On a small main street, there is a café that on weekend mornings hosts a Zydeco brunch that walks that fine line between tourist trap and authentic experience. I loved Louisiana. I shouldn’t have. Of everywhere I went on that road trip, it bore perhaps the least resemblance to anything I knew. It was February, 2007, not long after Katrina, and I got lost coming into New Orleans, wound up pulled over on the side of a road near what used to be downtown, next to the burnt-out shell of a Holiday Inn, my car surrounded by gigantic rats. A friend later escorted me through the Ninth Ward, past the signs scrawled on plywood: GO HOME TOURIST, and SEND HELP.

But there was something almost liquidly alive in Louisiana, some sort of tongue heat. I sat in a coffee shop one afternoon in New Orleans and watched this young white teacher, not much older than me, remove a self-described paedophile from the vicinity of his students with a stern, low voice, his hands clenched quietly at his sides. It was sort of breathtaking – all sides of it, the paedophile railing that he just wanted to talk to them, the students coiled and taut at their small tables, the young guy, bleeding New England blue, mustering everything in him to build some sort of invisible force field around these kids.

I’m getting off track. There was a man in a yellow suit with a trumpet. There was a whip-thin kid with a terrible sense of rhythm and a washboard around his neck. I sat at a table with an elderly couple who were driving around the country in their RV. Just like in the movies. They ordered a plate of beignets and shared them with me and I ate those clouds of dough and sugar and basically glued myself to my chair.

The odds of me making it back to Lafayette, Louisiana are kind of hilariously slim. So for the rest of my life I’m going to have to tell the story the way it really was, which is that no less than 8 or 10 men asked me to dance, and I said no to every one of them. I wasn’t a prize or anything – everyone asked everyone to dance. Everyone danced. You go to Zydeco brunch in Lafayette, Louisiana to dance. You dance ineptly with your husband of 40 years, and then you dance with the stranger he hands you off to, and then you dance with the tiny boy with his washboard, and then with a sophomore from University of Texas on his spring break, and then you dance with whomever you get handed to next, until you find your table, hold a beignet in your palm, get sticky with icing sugar, and say yes to the next person who asks. Someone will.

I said no so many times that I couldn’t say yes, even when I started to think I might actually want to. I said no to the man in the yellow suit, no to the tiny washboard kid, to the sophomore from Texas and his cousin and his brother and his brother’s friend, and, worst of all, no to the old man who bought me the beignets, who was genuinely concerned for me, I think, for all my saying no.  I said no because I was embarrassed, of course, because I can’t dance. And because obviously all of these people were going to stop what they were doing to judge me all the way back to Vancouver, 3500 miles away.

Of all the insults levelled at me, the one that still hurts the most, as indirect as it was: being written into a play as a girl who doesn’t dance. “She doesn’t even dance,” I think it went, and that somehow encapsulated all that I’ve ever known to be wrong with me, how much life and spirit I lack, the dead space around me I could never quite manage to light up.

It’s all control, of course. When Em and I were in her apartment this weekend, slightly drunk on bad wine, we raved and raged with our whole selves, throwing our bodies around her kitchen, and it was deliriously wonderful. I usually can’t get to that place unless I’m in a dark room and I’ve had two over-full glasses and Kelly Clarkson is blaring and the only person watching is my best friend who has far more ammunition than this on which to judge me, should she feel the need. But I’ve been there a few times before, maybe the time at the wedding when I was berated into submission and then whirled so quickly that I broke the strap of my dress and didn’t even notice. And last weekend, celebrating dear friends - even though we were the only ones - I let this skinny guy throw me around a bit, because he could, because his grip was strong and firm and sure, because it was fun, because I'm striving for bravery beyond my means, because I don't want to carry around the weighty, clumsy-footed self I am too afraid to be. 

diatribe

I gotta say that this Penn State debacle is an epically miserable demonstration of the really shitty side of human beings. So Paterno was "a legend." A figurehead was shown to be fallible. Is it somewhat pitiable that these students - current and former - are being forced to confront some ugly truths that might shatter something they believed in? I guess. But looking at the photos of these kids in hoodies and jerseys rioting in the streets - smashing property and smiling widely - it makes me ill.

The headmaster of my insular, conservative, elite private school was ousted when I was 15 or so, having been accused - twice - of sexual harassment. This guy was a legend. He was a physical manifestation of the school itself: pompous, intellectual, and too big (literally) for his britches. But he had spirit and pluck and stamina and he was, in many ways, a damn good headmaster. The women who accused him were pretty loony. That wasn't contested. And the accusations, such as they were, could very well have been false. But you know what? That doesn't fucking matter. If you are in a position of power, a position that gives you access to children, and you are accused of conduct that could harm those children - you're gone. The way the Board and many students and parents rallied around this man was the one thing that got me close to being pulled out of that school (something I had lobbied for without success for years). I can remember a friend of mine crying the day his resignation was announced. I still can't understand why.

I worked for three years at an organization in which I was daily confronted with the ramifications of sexual abuse, of institutionalized ignorance, of people willfully turning their backs on the most vile sort of human behaviour simply because they were afraid to rock the boat. These men at Penn State bore physical witness to abuse - actually watched it happen, watched a grown man rape a 10-year-old boy - and turned a collective blind eye. And now we take to the streets to do more violence in their names. I'll make sure my next post is of a pretty shirt or nail polish or something, but for now - let's all just hang our heads.

can you taste what i'm saying?

Simple Truth 

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes,
took them home, boiled them in their jackets
and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt.
Then I walked through the dried fields
on the edge of town. In middle June the light
hung on in the dark furrows at my feet,
and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds
were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers
squawking back and forth, the finches still darting
into the dusty light. The woman who sold me
the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone
out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses
praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables
at the road-side stand and urging me to taste
even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way,
she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat," she said,
"even if you don't I'll say you did."
                                                   Some things
you know all your life. They are so simple and true
they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme,
they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker,
the glass of water, the absence of light gathering
in the shadows of picture frames, they must be
naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.
My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965
before I went away, before he began to kill himself,
and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste
what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch
of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious,
it stays in the back of your throat like a truth
you never uttered because the time was always wrong,
it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken,
made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt,
in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

                                                                                                        Philip Levine 

random act of bravery

Oh, right. 

I swear I've done something brave lately. We had a work event that was filled to the brim with famous poets and I didn't make up words or spill things down my cleavage or call any of them by the wrong name. New York has been good for me that way. Captain Kirk was at this Halloween Party with terrifically over-priced drinks and I almost got away with seeming like I didn't care. Heather Graham walked by and I barely blinked. 

(As a side note, I wonder if anyone has ever studied at what point the average person stops caring about famous people in New York. Six months, maybe? I could make money on this.) 

Okay, how about this: I am on a one-month hiatus from dating. From any sexual interaction of any kind. You might not think this is brave. BUT IT IS. I will tell you why. 

No, I don't know why. But I do know that it is against my nature, and that it feels good. Really good. In a way that my old therapist would tell me is actually unhealthy, because I am giving in to my controlling tendencies and creating a false sense of security and power in a world in which I actually have none (I am such a good therapy patient, guys), but I'm sticking with it, because this is the first time in a year I have been able to recognize that if I ignore the gaping hole where my heart used to be and which is now host to this sort of ugly void or hastily patched with guy-o'-the-moment who inevitably hurts and/or disappoints me in some way, a hurt that I then inflate to proportions far beyond what is warranted, I am actually sublimely happy. I finished graduate school. I moved to a new, wild city. I have friends of a greatness I cannot possibly deserve. I have a family that sends me a full case of wine when I am stressed at work (good wine, wine that is now fueling this post). I have WORK. Real work, a job, a salary, healthcare, in an economy where that is a rarity. And it is a job I truly enjoy, which is a rarity in any economy. I just ate greek yogurt with honey and I'm about to make some tea and settle down to work on my novel. I have the luxury to pursue my art. I have a blue bike in my room. I have the second disk of the 4th season of The Wire in my DVD drive. I have two adorable new cats who sleep with me at night and don't even laugh at me when I have to wear my mouthguard. Good god, I have a mouthguard! A PLASTIC MOLD OF MY MOUTH MY DENTIST MADE ME TO HELP MY HEADACHES! THIS IS AN IMMENSE GIFT! WHY AM I LETTING MY LONELINESS DEFLATE ME? 

So, there. And proof positive that this is working: A poet/law student who looked like a skinnier Penn Badgley asked for my number last week, and I gave it to him, and for the first time in a long time I hoped he wouldn't call, because it would save me having to explain why I couldn't meet him for a drink at random Williamsburg bar X. And he hasn't (which, let me just say, is a whole other thing, because why ask for a number if you don't plan to call?), and I really, really don't mind one bit. 

R train, Prospect to Atlantic

I think all of New York can be summed up in that moment when you're on the subway, travelling alone, and you're keeping your eyes on something that gives purpose, and the drunk across the aisle is calling you "beautiful" amidst the story of how he lost his house, and it has been so long that it actually means something, and then another train is suddenly beside you, moving at the same speed, going the same place or someplace different, it couldn't matter less, and you watch the people suspended in their car, in slow-moving windows that glow through the darkness, and your eyes meet those of someone across that insurmountable gap, close enough to tell their colour and to know if their day has been long or if they've been hurt of if they've just found joy, close enough to know them, and then they are gone, their train having slowed while yours sped up, and you will never see them again.

(I looked for a photo to accompany this, but every single photo I've taken in New York is of the beach or of a park. Which might say something, I guess.)

(Let's all move to a big farmhouse in Vermont.)