| Telescope Eyes |
[Dec. 4th, 2008|09:01 pm] |
So, I put my itunes on shuffle to answer the following questions:
What do your friends think of you?
Peg- Steely Dan
If someone says, “Is this okay?” You say?
Spain- Return to Forever
How would you describe yourself?
Watermelon Man- Herbie Hancock
What do you like in a guy/girl?
Pretty Things- Rufus Wainwright
How do you feel today?
Baby, We're Really In Love- Hank Williams (aww)
What is your life’s purpose?
The Origin of Love- Hedwig and the Angry Inch
What is your motto?
Hooves- Bowerbirds
What do you think about very often?
Brazilian Girls- Berlin --Brazilian Girls
What is 2 + 2?
Why don't we do it in the road?- The Beatles
What do you think of your best friend?
Hangin' Round- Lou Reed
What do you think of the person you like?
Penny Lane- The Beatles
What is your life story?
You Used to Call Me Sadness- Stereolab (so angsty)
What do you want to be when you grow up?
I Want You- Bob Dylan
What do you think of when you see the person you like?
Cliquot- Beirut
What will you dance to at your wedding?
Back in the USSR- The Beatles (ha)
What will they play at your funeral?
I'm Too Young- Mellowdrone (OH NO!)
What is your hobby/interest?
Weeping Wall- David Bowie
What is your biggest fear?
Touched Something's Hollow- Of Montreal
What is your biggest secret?
I'll Believe in Anything- Wolf Parade
What do you think of your friends?
Hold it Now- Hit it- Beastie Boys
What will you post this as?
Telescope Eyes- Eisley |
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| Yo Miss! |
[Sep. 6th, 2008|10:07 am] |
So, listen, listen, I teach in Brooklyn now. And it's hard. Harder than anything I've ever done before in my life. I really like the school and I know things will get more calm in the classroom...but these first few weeks are intense. I have to step so far outside of my personality to basically yell at 26 teenagers for an hour. I've never yelled at anyone in my life before this, except maybe my sister. It's emotionally exhausting.
I don't know...the number of times that I've thought: "maybe this job isn't for me" these past couple weeks, is really only outweighed by the number of times I've looked at my students, looked at their low level skills, their potential, their struggles, and thought: "how can I not be here? how I can see this and know about it and not try to help?"
It's not like I fancy myself some kind of Michelle Pfeifer in Dangerous Minds, but I do know that these kids need me. I know that they will have so many enemies in their lives, that they have so many enemies now, that only a handful of people in the world care if these kids succeed at all. And I'm there solely to help them, because I want to be. And they are treating ME like shit? I get it. They're pissed. They have a lot to be angry about because the world has fucked them over. I don't know how much I can do to get them on my side, or at least have them realize that I'm on their side....but I'm just going to keep showing up every day. Eventually I think they'll get it.
Sincerely,
Ms. N |
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| Some old bag |
[Jun. 24th, 2008|12:57 am] |
I've been packing, getting ready my move to Brooklyn on Saturday. Tonight, while rummaging through the contents of my closet (which hasn't had a serious rummage-through in a while, I'll add) I found this old purse that I used to carry over a year ago. I guess, in switching bags, I neglected to fully empty this one, so it was still quite lived in, in terms of trash, small artifacts, receipts, lip gloss.
Now, if you aren't female, you may not understand the relationship of a woman to her purse. Even though the purse may be wildly disorganized, a woman generally knows its contents and their whereabouts, and can locate these predominantly by touch. This old purse, however, belonged to an older self, so the half a pack of gum, ticket stubs, and loose change felt foreign, as though this were the purse of a stranger. My fingertips sweeping the cluttered bottom of that bag also brought back images, a dark movie theatre with a plastic cup of wine, notes scribbled as reminders for details I probably forgot anyway.
The purse, however, is decidedly mine. I found a couple of strange objects (gems, really) that confirm this:
- a ceramic pipe from mexico, quite graphically shaped as a penis. (This was a present to me, I believe)
- a very, very poor fake ID that says "this unautorise by any government, school, or corporation" on the back.
- a receipt for a vibrator purchase (hey, even cowgirls get the blues!)
- a small tin of "scent block," a salve used by hunters to disguise their location from animals. (I REALLY do not know why I have this.)
Oh, packing is quite a project. |
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| Dating at the End of the World |
[May. 22nd, 2008|12:35 am] |
I know, without asking, that you have been in love. I know that sometimes, just before you sink deep into my warmth, you think of her. And then, even though it was forever ago, you miss her terribly, you climb fiercely on the tree of my body, clutching limbs like branches and pulling yourself to the top where maybe you can see with some clarity. We’ll never speak of it because it doesn’t matter. In the restaurant where we sit in companionable silence, the door could blow open any moment, flood waters could rush through the windows, and the swollen moon might swing down like a wrecking ball— a final disaster, an apocalyptic crash of dinnerware. So instead of talking, instead of remembering the perfect lips and hands we touched forever ago, I will wrap your hair around my fingers and we will shower, and make love, and shower again. |
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| 22 Things I've Learned in 22 Years |
[Mar. 10th, 2008|12:16 am] |
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I made a list like this a couple of years ago, but I thought I'd update it. Here goes:
1. Adequate sleep makes more of a difference on your life than you would ever imagine.
2. Being friendly and open is more important to success than academic or professional prowess.
3. Also important to success: confidence, confidence, confidence
4. (and a healthy dose of humility)
5. Eat as many colors as possible, and I don't mean Red 40.
6. Read everything.
7. Always wrap presents. Learn to wrap them perfectly, it's strangely satisfying.
8. Go out of your way to make someone happy. Do it often.
9. A genuine compliment can change someone's day.
10. You can't trust everyone.
11. Experimentation is beautiful.
12. Take emotional risks...within reason.
13. Dance as much as humanly possible.
14. Pay attention to your body and how it moves as you go about daily life. It will keep you from existing only in your head.
15. Orgasm. Do it often.
16. Give pleasure.
17. Cook.
18. Sometimes, play hard to get. With the whole world.
19. No one should be able to smell your perfume unless they lean in close.
20. Embrace your inner (or very obvious) nerd.
21. It's okay to be a music snob, especially if you like better music than everyone else.
22. Be quiet. |
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| March hair. |
[Feb. 25th, 2008|10:45 pm] |
I feel great, by the way. I wanted to howl it out to everyone. I anticipate March, I think it will be a great month. It also contains my birthday and I will be turning a palindrome age which is very exciting. I absolutely feel like I am 21 and 11 months and one week in every fiber of my being. I don't feel a second older or younger. I love it.
Teaching is fabulous, people in my life are fabulous, walking in the street knowing that life is fabulous is fabulous.
I wish I could wrap up this feeling and give it to you, dear reader. |
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| February Itches |
[Jan. 29th, 2008|11:27 pm] |
Well, in contrast to my most recent entry, I have told the poet that our two glorious months are over. Maybe I've broken another heart, and I feel terribly, but if I didn't end it now I would have continued to poison the relationship until it was dead. He sent me a letter in the mail, written on a typewriter and decorated with black inked stamps. It made me cry. When I filed it away in the box where I keep other things of that nature, I took out all my other love letters, and song lists from CD's that have been made for me. One letter was written on cream colored hotel paper, others on index cards, notebook paper. I have had, I still have, such beautiful friends and lovers. I felt good about this, reading over the letters and listening to that Dylan song, "I Want You."
Speaking of Dylan-- the times, they are a-changin. In a romantic sense-- I am alone, truly and deliciously alone for the first time in years. But also, more importantly, I start teaching tomorrow! Maybe with all of this newness, (plus some pills) February won't be so itchy this year. |
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| January |
[Jan. 8th, 2008|01:08 am] |
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The poet and I went to this supermarket in chinatown to look for weird ingredients. There were all kinds of rice buns and pickled things in cans and one bag that was just labeled "food." We bought some things to make dumplings with because we wanted to see if we could make dumplings. We laughed and laughed during this project because dumplings are funny. They tasted quite good if you closed your eyes, we decided.
We sat on the steps of the Met last night and talked about our old romances. No one was around and it was so warm we didn't need our gloves. The thing about past romances is that sometimes they are quietly, appropriately remembered, and sometimes they are preserved in pages of potent metaphors. Last night, we didn't care about any ghosts. We talked about them as though they were other people's lovers, bodies who no longer mattered at all. Talking about the past seems frivolous when you are so interested in the present. Right now, everything tastes so good--eyes open or closed. |
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| Read this Poem by Frank O'Hara |
[Dec. 26th, 2007|12:46 pm] |
Having a Coke with you is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluoresent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it
-Frank O'Hara
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| The Poet |
[Dec. 11th, 2007|09:35 pm] |
I met a poet and now I cannot un-meet him. Which is good, because I don't want to. Un-meet him, that is. He has bookshelves filled with slim glossy volumes and he sends me lines of Ashbery in text messages which seems like a weird place for Ashbery but I don't even care.
The night I met him he quoted Bishop in my ear at 4 am on the subway when we were both drunk and too tired to speak in words of our own. And I thought then, that we would arm ourselves with poems, always, that we might shout out stanzas to each other while standing on a park bench at night when it's freezing. I guess I forgot that not everything is a war. Sometimes a thing can feel gentle and soft and good. The readiness is all. |
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| Nothing of my own this time. |
[Nov. 25th, 2007|07:32 pm] |
"There is," he said, in a voice of pure abstraction, "a final me which is stark and impersonal and beyond responsibility. So there is a final you. And it is there I would want to meet you-- not in the emotional loving plane-- but there beyond, where there is no speech and no terms of agreement. There we are two stark, unkwown beings, two utterly strange creatures, I would want to approach you, and you me. And there could be no obligation, because there is no standard for action there, because no understanding has been reaped from that plane. It is quite inhuman-- so there can be no calling to book, in any form whatsoever-- because one is outside the pale of all that is accepted, and nothing known applies. One can only follow the impulse, taking that which lies in front, and responsible for nothing, asked for nothing, giving nothing, only each taking according to the primal desire."
-- D.H. Lawrence, "Women in Love"
Also: this is pretty-- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjeh6P4sRfw |
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| Debbie Downer on Thanksgiving (Be warned.) |
[Nov. 19th, 2007|07:28 pm] |
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I like Thanksgiving because it means family and cooking and reminders to be grateful. That is all important.
But Thanksgiving always makes me think about how weird and unbalanced our culture is. I guess the holiday is rooted in something historical, you know, being glad about bountiful harvests and new land that we stole and corn. However, at this point in time, you have to admit, it's a holiday based entirely on the murder and consumption of turkeys. So many people actually refer to the holiday as "turkey day." This all seems really primitive and carnivorous to me. There are better ways to celebrate gratitude. I am thankful for the fact that I have so many food options that I have the choice to abstain from eating animals. We aren't cavemen anymore, or even colonial settlers. Here's the thing-- I'm not meaning to be pedantic or sound like I think I'm morally superior. I understand the importance of tradition and comfort and taste. I just feel like many of the people I meet are not aware of what goes on at factory farms because they refuse to learn. I'm not trying to ruin anyone's holiday, but maybe this year we can all just try to be grateful for things other than the flesh on our table.
Thoughts, anyone?
http://www.goveg.com/factoryFarming_turkeys.asp |
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| Sweet talkers, etc. |
[Nov. 15th, 2007|09:19 pm] |
Men who yell sexual things to women in the street will never cease to amuse and delight me.
Today I got stuck in the rain so I put my gigantic faux fur trimmed hood over my head. Since it covers my eyes, I had to tie it tightly around my chin to secure it, which squeezed all of my neck skin, giving me a pseudo- double chin. Very beautiful. I was also wearing my gigantic glasses which were dotted with raindrops at this point. If you aren't getting an accurate picture, let me put it this way: I looked like a chubby, nerdy, eskimo. STILL a sleazy man cat-called me. I wanted to turn around and say "Seriously?"
A couple of weeks ago I swear I heard a man murmur "Heyy Senor Sexy," as he passed me by, which is brilliant and makes no sense at all. And my favorite of all time was in Atlantic City this past summer when someone said to me "Oh my goodness! That is very sexy here in America. My goodness, that is sexy in America."
I guess I am supposed to be a little bit offended, or something. I find the whole thing pretty harmless. There has been only one time when I was seriously disturbed by a comment...and it was so gross I would never repeat it here. I think I'm going to start hooting and hollering at men in the street... the more conservative the better. They will be so confused. |
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| Babies, etc. |
[Nov. 14th, 2007|06:00 pm] |
So today I had to tell Stacey that I can't babysit anymore, starting in February, because of student teaching. It's not an easy job for me to walk away from, to start with, but what made it worse was that she cried. This is the mother I'm talking about, by the way. I was touched by her tears, which I think were "I'll miss you" tears, and not, "I'm screwed I need another babysitter" tears. I was on the verge of tears myself, and I won't even be leaving the job for a few months. I love those two baby girls, really love them. I've spent 15 hours a week with them since Gracie was born. I can go to work in an awful state of mind and, within minutes, my mood will be lifted considerably because of something Sophia said, or because of her wild giggle.
Maybe it's true that a person's strengths are also weaknesses. I think that my ability to love so fiercely means also that I love without prudence, that walking away from anyone or anything that I love is almost impossible.
Being so emotional is somewhat of an inconvenience. It also won't get me anywhere. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 11th, 2007|04:38 am] |
I feel like I have the February itch and it's way too early for that. Right now I am tired in such a way that everything under my skin feels close to the surface. I feel like if someone poked me, or shoved me lightly, I would cry.
Tonight we saw a late show of Darjeeling Limited, and then a lot of talking and laughing. Which is good. I need that sort of distraction from what I really want to do which is any form of carousing or inhaling or swallowing, and definitely fucking. The latter is typical sign of my attempt to cope with monotony or depression which I used to think was pathetic, but now maybe I own it. I don't find that there is any reason why I can't sexually operate in this world just as a man does, as long as I don't hurt any feelings. Or is it different, because I am bound to hurt my own?
Tonight I felt manically happy which I think might have been my unconscious wearing a costume. I am looking forward to feeling equivalent happiness in a pure way, a happiness that is neither a drunken euphoria, nor a smile so wide it looks like a grimace. It's coming soon. I have some irrational and naive faith in that. |
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| Love Taxi |
[Nov. 10th, 2007|01:38 am] |
Tonight the Matchmaking Cab Driver drove me to the west village. How silly. I'm under 25, though, and therefore not eligible for his services. He said he doesn't think I need them anyway. Sweet as pie, that man, although I'm not entirely sure he's right.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article510959.ece
Click on that to learn who the Matchingmaking Cab Driver actually is! |
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| The voice at 12:30am |
[Oct. 31st, 2007|12:27 am] |
Ooh it's witching hour. I haven't had a good halloween costume since I was a praying mantis at age nine. I feel like that is nerdy in the best way possible. I skipped Halloween this year because I am a party pooper.
This is what scares me: that depression can be the warmest, most familiar blanket ever. That you can crawl completely under it until you can't see anyone and no one can see you. And once you're under there you can sigh a big long sigh with jumbles of letters thrown in, like ughghhhhspekfhajkfustmlohhhhhhhh. You can sigh as many of those sighs as you want because no one can hear you. (Unless you sigh outside of the blanket, which is just terrible manners.) In any case, the hardest part about it is throwing back that blanket and stepping your bare feet onto the cold floor, putting one in front of the other until you get to the shower. But when the water hits your face, and soaks your hair, and drips down your back...it can start to be okay.
Another thing that scares me is zombies. But I also think they are neat.
That's all. |
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| That's what it's all about... |
[Oct. 27th, 2007|05:40 am] |
| [ | music |
| | Shout Out Louds- Comeback | ] |
Ahhh 5:40 am and I got home only twenty minutes ago. We went to the Shout Out Louds show in Williamsburg tonight and I drank too much tequila. This is what happens. At Union Pool afterward I was bored because my companions were making out with eachother. Someone tried to take me home. I'm bored with that sort of thing, too.
In other news: earlier today I was at a toddler birthday party. I did the hokey pokey and I turned myself around. I just thought you should know. |
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| Babble |
[Oct. 24th, 2007|11:57 am] |
I'm not sure why or how I found this journal again. I feel like my entries have become more and more spaced out over the past couple of years. I guess I just feel like writing lately, and I'm having trouble writing poetry. The last poem I wrote I am actually mildly happy with, though. I thought I'd try writing a pantoum, which was fun. I like writing sestinas, and pantoums, and vilanelles, playing with form in general.
I'm worried about poetry, though, and what it wants from me. I'm worried about cheating on poetry. I feel like I need to commit my life to it entirely, but I am commiting my life to teaching, essentially. Any teacher I speak to says that teaching isn't a job, it's a life...which is daunting but makes sense. I don't want poetry to become the other woman, so to speak. I think poetry might be one of the only things I can do. I compiled a short mental list the other day of things I feel capable at. It went something like:
1. writing poetry, maybe.
2. cooking
3. taking care of babies
4. one thing that is inappropriate to mention.
Based on this list I will make a perfect housewife, which is a horrible conclusion to come to. Ahhhh I am so exhausted, and I am walking around exhausted and that is not the face I want to show the world.
This is what I want to do right now: I want to sit in rooms filled with sunlight and eat strawberries and jump in lakes naked and take naps with dogs. That's all. |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 21st, 2007|10:05 pm] |
I woke up this morning and tried to stay in bed for as long as possible. I haven't felt this broken in a long time. Later, Kristen and Danielle came over. I can't remember the last time the three of us were together, which is strange, because before the last couple of years, we were inseparable since childhood. It was the exact comfort I needed, though-- slow and warm and safe.
Someday, someone will make me feel like I am enough. |
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