Português brasileiro, Brazilian Portuguese is my latest language of distance. I am learning it and as it carries no emotional valence for me as of yet, my oral exams are like therapy sessions. Why? Because I get to rant about my life in a language whose signs trigger no emotional memory for me. I am just a neutral passenger, a lawyer cross-examining my consciousness through a vocabulary void of all personal significance.
I get to watch the strange sounds falling out of my mouth, as I "feel" whatever the initial language was telling me to feel. The two languages are temporally and emotionally disassociated. The two languages strip apart my feelings, partitions into the self, and I get to watch.
My brain absorbs new vocabularies quickly, but especially when I'm trying to express myself. Then suddenly whatever new language I'm learning starts to spill out of me imperfectly but forcefully like water. I can feel the meanings lining up like little train tracks, the cogs clicking a new outline of expression into place. A code on a code, a new alignment.
When pain feels language-less, when whatever distress you may feel is suddenly stripped of its vehicle in the strange liminal space of translation, the negative sensations themselves are somehow alienated from their associations. They sit in limbo, in an airport, at a train station, waiting, uncertain. It's a good way to leave your psychophysiological distress symptoms naked without any linguistic clothing to designate their identity.
Multilinguistic experiences demand a kind of clinical self-examination in which one can pick apart layers and interrogate them. Especially when one's thoughts spill out in someone else's sounds to talk about your life. Suddenly you can sit there and you're not even quite thinking about yourself in the first person any more. Just like here I am switching persons grammatically as I write this entry. I am switching between my selves.
**(These thoughts are based on both my own self experiences and my research; I often think that the most insightful thoughts should come from both.)
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
home? is where the mummy organs are
I moved again...when...was it two weeks ago? The movers finished scooping out my belongings, like so many moveable intestines ready for their next mummification treatment, just in time for my statistics lab.
Grad school, (and we know this from phdcomics but it's much worse than that) is ridiculous.
You pretend to have the carefree existence of a student (or is it the religious devotion to learning of a monk?) while adulthood and responsibility and reality and taxes and ovaries and bills and maybe people named Bill and, and, hunger and thirst and family and Maslowe are all there with you, staring you down as you pretend.
You stay away from tv and stores and people and material obligations and maybe your hair starts to dreadlock and maybe you forgot to make payments and returns and stuff like that and when you try to return crap to stores two months later they don't give a shit that you don't live on the same space-time continuum as the rest of the society...does the ivory tower sound like fun? Hahaha.
When mummies move from one world to another nothing is lost. Everything is put into perfect gold jars and it stays so immaculately preserved for archaeologists to fawn over. The artifacts of my existence are less perfectly cared for, I have no civilization of slaves to pamper my every whim or to pack my suitcases. Instead I do this late at night with a glass of wine or a bottle of beer so that I can pretend that packing and moving, this endless transitional process I seem to be in, is a constant party. The life of an amoeba. A jellyfish. A protean squishy creature that remolds herself until it hurts. And it hurts.A boyfriend packed my boxes once. Even some of my suitcases. Boyfriends are good for these things. If you'd care to apply for the position, I accept applications on a rolling basis.
Grad school, (and we know this from phdcomics but it's much worse than that) is ridiculous.
You pretend to have the carefree existence of a student (or is it the religious devotion to learning of a monk?) while adulthood and responsibility and reality and taxes and ovaries and bills and maybe people named Bill and, and, hunger and thirst and family and Maslowe are all there with you, staring you down as you pretend.
You stay away from tv and stores and people and material obligations and maybe your hair starts to dreadlock and maybe you forgot to make payments and returns and stuff like that and when you try to return crap to stores two months later they don't give a shit that you don't live on the same space-time continuum as the rest of the society...does the ivory tower sound like fun? Hahaha.
So there it is, my STUFF. The internal organs that get moved from one dwelling body to another where I sleep and reorganize the STUFF and re-place it, some of it gets frazzled, abused, lost, a frayed edge, another tragically lost earring.
Monday, February 22, 2010
thought-a-thon
So about all of those ideas I keep hidden in my closet, skeletons of genius...when they grow up, grow flesh and emerge will you, will you, oh will you take their hands and accept them? Oh, oh, oh. This is the coming out terror of academia. Ideas are these embodied beasts that come to represent all that you are and wish to be and if the world of your field's experts doesn't love them, woe, woe, woe.
Meet Tommy and Franky and Isabel. I swear I gave birth to these flashy light bulbs, these bedazzling fire crackers, as I labored over mountains of dusty, overly-fingered books, the sweat, the dust, the blood of my brain running in light frothy drips of in
sight. Drip, drip,
get the gore? Get it? If it hurts you better get it. Birthing pains produce a fetus, no? Isn't pain supposed to emerge as productivity in this painstaking life? What if it simply produces more misery? And what if, after all the self-induced eye-straining, scalp-bursting concentration it comes to yawns, apathy. Horror. Horror beyond Frankenstein and zombie monstrosities. The horror of chasm: the yawn, it will swallow you up like oxygen, a simple passage of air into the lungs. The continuation of a diagram. In and out, you are going in, being recycled, one more molecule in a matrix of everything and nothing.
Meet Tommy and Franky and Isabel. I swear I gave birth to these flashy light bulbs, these bedazzling fire crackers, as I labored over mountains of dusty, overly-fingered books, the sweat, the dust, the blood of my brain running in light frothy drips of in
sight. Drip, drip,
get the gore? Get it? If it hurts you better get it. Birthing pains produce a fetus, no? Isn't pain supposed to emerge as productivity in this painstaking life? What if it simply produces more misery? And what if, after all the self-induced eye-straining, scalp-bursting concentration it comes to yawns, apathy. Horror. Horror beyond Frankenstein and zombie monstrosities. The horror of chasm: the yawn, it will swallow you up like oxygen, a simple passage of air into the lungs. The continuation of a diagram. In and out, you are going in, being recycled, one more molecule in a matrix of everything and nothing.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
fisticuffs and hallucinations
If the sinews of your hand tighten and the skin is tautly spread over your beautiful knuckles and if your beautiful knuckles travel at 22 miles per hour towards the face of a deserving bully and if the deserving bully doesn't move his head but lets those sweet little weapons of yours sink in will I have my retribution?
Says the voice of the little maiden as she waits to be avenged by the man with the knuckles and the fists and the sinew.
At half past three, a strange picture, a kind of circus of silhouettes begins to play on the moon, the shadows seem to become ever more frantic to the bewildered earthling eye. Little did you know, there is a puppeteer who has taken residence on the moon.
The 7-11 near the Starbucks at the corner of Smith and Harrison is the most exotic place a girl can go after a night of fine wining and gourmet boredom. The all night snacks beckon her horny little head. The cashier has been waiting for her.
At the left bottom corner of his sock drawer is a picture of it. It is slick and thick and perfectly black as the night during which he will finally own it. His fist will bulge with the brilliance of it, just before it slackens.
Says the voice of the little maiden as she waits to be avenged by the man with the knuckles and the fists and the sinew.
At half past three, a strange picture, a kind of circus of silhouettes begins to play on the moon, the shadows seem to become ever more frantic to the bewildered earthling eye. Little did you know, there is a puppeteer who has taken residence on the moon.
The 7-11 near the Starbucks at the corner of Smith and Harrison is the most exotic place a girl can go after a night of fine wining and gourmet boredom. The all night snacks beckon her horny little head. The cashier has been waiting for her.
At the left bottom corner of his sock drawer is a picture of it. It is slick and thick and perfectly black as the night during which he will finally own it. His fist will bulge with the brilliance of it, just before it slackens.
fantasy inside this memory box
For several hours I did not pine
for my work. I talked to a merman
who swam up to my laptop and reminded
me of fantasy. It seems like there is always
strange magnetism on this planet
from unexpected directions and it will take
all my will to stay here
on my little piece of focus,
before it all churns under
and I become wherever fancy
wanders or wherever memory streaks.
On a black beach where you pull my hand,
a cold wave where you swim beneath me
merman, a fire around which we croon
to the moon and the light turns to
tangerine creases in butter.
Yellow morning, we don't even need to wake up
we have been sleepless, kissing and swimming
like children,
don't wake me.
for my work. I talked to a merman
who swam up to my laptop and reminded
me of fantasy. It seems like there is always
strange magnetism on this planet
from unexpected directions and it will take
all my will to stay here
on my little piece of focus,
before it all churns under
and I become wherever fancy
wanders or wherever memory streaks.
On a black beach where you pull my hand,
a cold wave where you swim beneath me
merman, a fire around which we croon
to the moon and the light turns to
tangerine creases in butter.
Yellow morning, we don't even need to wake up
we have been sleepless, kissing and swimming
like children,
don't wake me.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
open heart un-surgery
Don't pick at your
brain and don't
pick at your heart.
The marrow the arrow the neurons
a part.
Don't tuck or touch it or pull on the glue
of the things that go bump in your chest
in the night the demons
the cupids the vultures
in flight. In transit or utero
dead or alive the pickings
the sickling is moaning
in
side with the hero
open your mouth
but don't pick at the lining
the trimming the cloth.
Open the brainwash book
and close your eyes
sometimes it's just better
to keep it
in
side with the lady
that stands by the road
she's waiting for Billy
to take her on home
where the buffaloes
don't exist any more.
It don't matter she'll never
ask questions that ring
chime or scream
belt or bleep
in the ear of the man
who'll never he'll never
love you again.
brain and don't
pick at your heart.
The marrow the arrow the neurons
a part.
Don't tuck or touch it or pull on the glue
of the things that go bump in your chest
in the night the demons
the cupids the vultures
in flight. In transit or utero
dead or alive the pickings
the sickling is moaning
in
side with the hero
open your mouth
but don't pick at the lining
the trimming the cloth.
Open the brainwash book
and close your eyes
sometimes it's just better
to keep it
in
side with the lady
that stands by the road
she's waiting for Billy
to take her on home
where the buffaloes
don't exist any more.
It don't matter she'll never
ask questions that ring
chime or scream
belt or bleep
in the ear of the man
who'll never he'll never
love you again.
Monday, February 15, 2010
poetry experiment
What if I started posting actual poetry here...or what if I used this as an experimental poetic thought space. Poems-in-process, not quite edited, just fresh out of the scull like new brain matter. Just like all of stuff I spew in this space it would be unedited, unrevised, a place for first attempts and half-baked musings. Thoughts and words on the quick. Not perfect but thick in inspiration.
I knew him
there
and there, my mind had prefabricated
every possibility.
The wedding or the parting,
the grandchildren or the awkward goodbye email,
you could be the one or you could be another one.
These cutouts in which we place wished-for lovers,
what if the part can never be played and it is only
when for an instant we stop playing
stop fitting
let it go
and it arrives. Whatever "it" is, the bright eyed
recognition and empathy you seek.
-----
Well that two minute half poem half advice column thingy was done on a very hungry belly...it is early and I need coffee and carbohydrate nourishment. Mmmm. :)
Current song:
http://popup.lala.com/popup/2810527646861754578
Current mood:
motivated, content
I knew him
there
and there, my mind had prefabricated
every possibility.
The wedding or the parting,
the grandchildren or the awkward goodbye email,
you could be the one or you could be another one.
These cutouts in which we place wished-for lovers,
what if the part can never be played and it is only
when for an instant we stop playing
stop fitting
let it go
and it arrives. Whatever "it" is, the bright eyed
recognition and empathy you seek.
-----
Well that two minute half poem half advice column thingy was done on a very hungry belly...it is early and I need coffee and carbohydrate nourishment. Mmmm. :)
Current song:
http://popup.lala.com/popup/2810527646861754578
Current mood:
motivated, content
Sunday, February 14, 2010
script in my head
I seem to be good at...
showing my mind to people like a movie - see the latest episode of my life, friend, here: and then the spiel unwinds. Soon, the close friends who see the show of the episodes of my life that I render in words are asking about the sequels and continuations of the same plot lines, they're asking the same questions, they want to turn the pages. I'm a pretty good self-narrator, narrator of myself. Or at least a pretty consistent one. It's funny when friends run into you at the same time and they are asking about the same page-turning moments in your juicy thriller of a life.
How important is it to be of entertainment value to others? Do we all want a thrilling novel of a life after reading so many succulent renditions of how it could be. Or a thrilling film that shows instead of telling...there is no time to tell a thing in a film unless it's closer to theatre with asides and soliloquoys and a thought-connection with the audience.
The umbilical cord between my brain and those I talk with is mediated by words that wish to be Salinger and Vonnegut and Gluck with some Vygotsky and Durkheim and Foucault....and Freud of course. Do not scoff at Freud if you haven't read him, btw, he remains brilliant.
I know that because I have hardly the time lately to write what I wish to write I have become an endless out-of-breath list of things. I can't get them all in, can barely cram in all the matter, and no time to go back and edit for clarity. Write, write, right.
showing my mind to people like a movie - see the latest episode of my life, friend, here: and then the spiel unwinds. Soon, the close friends who see the show of the episodes of my life that I render in words are asking about the sequels and continuations of the same plot lines, they're asking the same questions, they want to turn the pages. I'm a pretty good self-narrator, narrator of myself. Or at least a pretty consistent one. It's funny when friends run into you at the same time and they are asking about the same page-turning moments in your juicy thriller of a life.
How important is it to be of entertainment value to others? Do we all want a thrilling novel of a life after reading so many succulent renditions of how it could be. Or a thrilling film that shows instead of telling...there is no time to tell a thing in a film unless it's closer to theatre with asides and soliloquoys and a thought-connection with the audience.
The umbilical cord between my brain and those I talk with is mediated by words that wish to be Salinger and Vonnegut and Gluck with some Vygotsky and Durkheim and Foucault....and Freud of course. Do not scoff at Freud if you haven't read him, btw, he remains brilliant.
I know that because I have hardly the time lately to write what I wish to write I have become an endless out-of-breath list of things. I can't get them all in, can barely cram in all the matter, and no time to go back and edit for clarity. Write, write, right.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
move
So hello. I'm here but I can hardly catch up with myself. Deadlines come and pass like street signs. Who am I again? What's the point of all the incessant moving...there are days when I have sat in my car inbetween things for several extra minutes, not wanting to go on to the next destination, and then the next. The car a kind of limbo space, a liminal space of escape between all the points of responsibility. Moving, moving, moving...
Friday, February 5, 2010
hilarity and jenga dating
I played a game of "Jumbling Towers" (knockoff of Jenga) last night. I won. And then I won again. And then I won at Chinese Checkers. It looked like an absolutely unoriginal dive bar EXCEPT it has tons of board games, random ones. It attracts an older businessy crowd, and just a middle-aged Chicago crowd. And there I was on yet another "date." Squirming, uncertain what this latest member of team testosterone wanted or didn't want as he caressed my leg and made incessant half-funny comments and quips and soliloquoys flavored with something like a weird blend of intelligence and ignorance. How can people be so intelligent and so ignorant at the same time - I think the sheer ridiculous ratio of intelligent-funny-ignorant had me laughing. This dating thing, it is such a put-on in this obnoxious country. Yes America, I have qualms with you sometimes. I'm beginning to think that WASPy men always have ulterior motives, and the sooner you find out what they are, the better. Relations between men and women are so convoluted, there is constantly some kind of bizarre social and sexual and commitment calculation going on between the guy's brain and his royal member, lets call the royal member Bob and the Brain Bill. Imagine a conversation between Bob and Bill... (forget Ego, Superego, Id, just Bob and Bill)
ACT 1: The One and Only Act
Bob: Ass, I see ass, hot, hot, I want!
Bill: Yes, yes, I want to touch, but....
Bob: Oh Bill, don't be a pussy! Go for pussy!
Bill: But Bob, you know I do think she's hot...but what about Karen?
Bob: Fuck Karen!
Bill: Maybe you're right Bill, I want, I want...
Bob and Bill: We want, we want, we want!!!
-a few hours later-
Bill: Bob, I don't know I have thoughts, and they scare me.
Bob: Ignore them, Bill, they will kill you.
Bill: I have thoughts and insecurities, and, and, and-
Bob: I'm done with you, you wanker.
END
---------------------------------------------------------------------
I wasn't expecting to go there, whoa...but I can say that every day lately has moments when something or someone pulls out that last Jenga block and everything collapses to humpty dumpty smithereens. Except there's only me to pick it all up, and if I really can't stand it, at least I can turn it into caricature. At least I can laugh! When life isn't beautiful, it can still be beautifully funny.
ACT 1: The One and Only Act
Bob: Ass, I see ass, hot, hot, I want!
Bill: Yes, yes, I want to touch, but....
Bob: Oh Bill, don't be a pussy! Go for pussy!
Bill: But Bob, you know I do think she's hot...but what about Karen?
Bob: Fuck Karen!
Bill: Maybe you're right Bill, I want, I want...
Bob and Bill: We want, we want, we want!!!
-a few hours later-
Bill: Bob, I don't know I have thoughts, and they scare me.
Bob: Ignore them, Bill, they will kill you.
Bill: I have thoughts and insecurities, and, and, and-
Bob: I'm done with you, you wanker.
END
---------------------------------------------------------------------
I wasn't expecting to go there, whoa...but I can say that every day lately has moments when something or someone pulls out that last Jenga block and everything collapses to humpty dumpty smithereens. Except there's only me to pick it all up, and if I really can't stand it, at least I can turn it into caricature. At least I can laugh! When life isn't beautiful, it can still be beautifully funny.
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