Freudianlass Blathers

Pagan Hugs for Gypsy Jews

2011-12-24T12:47:00.000-08:00

The best writing teacher I've had thus far has told me a lot of that intuitive advice that I thought I knew but that was driven home by her words: write every day. Even if it's shit. Write, write, write. When I was a little kid I used to think about being a great artist and my drawing teachers would always tell me to draw every day, draw, draw, draw. We are these creative monkey machines that need to practice our crafts all the time every moment so that the engineered beauty of our minds may find a voice in the coupling of talent and a hell of a lot of practice. Practice, practice, practice.

I had so many jumpy dreams last night. I'm torn between doing my research in two different countries, not too mention my sudden consideration of the fact that moving for my work will and does involve personal upheaval and I should consider that. I've been so reckless with my own emotions. Pick up and move like a gypsy and act as if this is a natural path, the path, my path, as if wherever I am will just fall into place from simple gravitational pull.
I saw a really informative personal documentary last night and for anyone who's interested in the shifting flows of time, culture, and blood it's a very interesting sketch. The film is called Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness. According to my grandfather, we're related to this lovely poet, Sholem Aleichem...a pretty light in a past I can only see through the recollections of others.

Speaking of films, I'd also like to plug my friend John Ullyot's film in the making: Mulligan. It's looking creative and wonderful as his work has always been and I'm looking forward to seeing a character I've read in so many stories come to life on the screen.

Today's my father's birthday. Which is a good bit more important to me than Jesus' birthday could ever be, but it's a happy day in the US...I like how eager people are to congratulate each other with it, I guess I just like human warmth and it can be touching from strangers. Maybe that's why I like countries like Brazil where it feels like American Christmas every day.

Maybe that's my answer? Brazil. Brazil? Brazil?! Either way there's a warm tropical spot near the equator of my heart and it's spreading. Happy warmth day to all!

Hello Radio

2011-12-11T13:42:00.000-08:00

Last night, I had a silly spat with my darling. This turned into a malfunctioning alarm clock situation which turned into a late but nevertheless live and real as whoever-is-up at-that-hour-tuned-to-the-radio and to my wakeup voice situation. Domino effect and now I'm processing my absurdity. It's all good. If you want to listen to the fun in which Rick Kogan hilariously calls me "good old Marianna" help yourselves: http://www.wgnradio.com/shows/sundaypapers/wgnam-kogan-uncut-111211-university-of-chicago-writers-adam-rosenthal-sophie-werely-marianna-staroselsky,0,539501.mp3file

Perhaps the public humiliation combined with incredible fun will teach me to set five alarm clocks and time my love spats better. I have to say I did enjoy it very much it was really a wonderful feeling. (Live) life is a damn mushy mess sometimes but make the best of the...eggnog popcorn?

absolutely obvious things that take forever to learn

2011-12-08T18:39:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I have spent fall quarter taking writing courses and indulging my soul, both academic and creative. In both realms the wisdom acquired boils down to the same key point:
DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND DO IT AS BRILLIANTLY AS YOU CAN!!!!
Oh and don't get too bogged down with politics about what's the thing to do to get a certain kind of job or to please a certain kind of audience or to fit into a certain kind of category. Because that's all bullshit and it will slow down this incredible gift of life and opportunity.
With my creative work the message was...if it's good, ultimately it will get picked up by a publisher. With my academic work it was...if it's interesting and relevant someone will value it and you will find a job.
Does it sound like I'm high? I really don't think I am. I think hard work and using your talents to their fullest capacity can and does pay off and ultimately I'm a believer, baby.
If this sounds too American dreamy, I don't care. The best part about the American Dream is owning the damn thing. OWN IT.

chocolate almond butter and peer pressure

2011-10-15T13:25:00.000-07:00

Peer pressure, the good kind, is oh so good for you. Pick your peers and pears carefully. The good kind will be full of stimulation juice.

The good kind will show you that the person in the mirror is entirely up to what you make of her. And then you take a succulent bite and find yourself running down that yellow brick road seeking whatever magic man or treasure lies past the horizon and just around the corner.

I listened to a rabbi last night who didn't have much to say. He was blowing air out of his lungs and lips beautifully like an air-breathing fish. Metamorphosed into a creature that produces oxygen-filled, meaningless words.

Breathe it in and breathe it out, good mojo in bad mojo out.

Eat good food, drink good beer, enjoy Sukkot or whatever holiday haven you happen to find in your life.

Wow, world, wow.

2011-10-03T23:36:00.000-07:00

Say I to you world. um. I have had an amazing first two weeks back in Chicago. My mother knocks on wood in my head, superstitiously as I say this and so do I. Why be so superstitious about the good things btw? Is it post-Soviet Jewish fear that everything nice will be taken away from you by Big Brother or some kind of looming omniscient totalitarian force? When a people have been terrorized the scars show even in the minds of their children. Fear is a contagious thing we can learn and learn to live with and breathe with...inhalation and exhalation laced with it. If there is no trace, you must be doing something wrong, indulging too much, they're about to take it away from you...knock on wood!

Ha. Happiness like a tap, tap, tap. I just discovered it inside of me, this ability to be happy. Is that weird? Yes. Better late than never? Absolutely.

Not that I've never been happy...of course I have, oh so many glorious times that I have poeticized about. But that was just the problem, there was languish and pain and emptiness between those spaces of goodness and it was as if I did not know how to sustain it. I do now, somehow.

Maybe all the pushing and pulling of myself like taffy across the crevices of the universe have finally paid off. I like to think so. I like to think that my open mouth finally found itself.
:) The lips closed and smiling, like the dog who finally stopped chasing her own tail.

Post Number 100

2011-09-25T11:47:00.000-07:00

I'm back in Chicago, convoluted with strange weather patterns and too many decisions to make. It's a wet day, and there's a chilly white sky peeking through the window. I've been meaning to go to a capoeira batizado today and I will, (I was there most of the day yesterday and it was wonderful,) but too many thoughts/emails/pressing things (like computer keyboard buttons and jumpy jumpy thoughts) have kept me home for a bit. My favorite is of course working with a really good cup of coffee in my hand and anticipation that something lovely will happen just at the tip of this sentence.

I've been watching a few Meg Ryan movies lately to fantasize and smile about the "good life."

She makes me smile, has the appeal of a child and a woman in her innocent yet conniving expressions, and is one of the more joyful actresses you can watch on the silver or dusty laptop screen. I watched "Addicted to Love" and "Prelude to a Kiss," which are both very feel good and warming. Prelude to a Kiss is pretty strange of course, because Alec Baldwin ends up making out with an old man carrying the soul of Meg Ryan, but isn't that the fantasy - that it's her soul he loves best?

Anyway, I best pull on my sneakers and brave the wet pavement, lest Mestre Acordeon and crew finish off the day without me...too much fun, I have to say. Though I tried the berimbau for the first time yesterday and realized that my tiny child's hands are not exactly equipped for this instrument, "you just have to get used to it," said the man with giant man hands next to me.

Ah well! My raouls rock at least.

Manifest

2011-09-15T23:05:00.000-07:00

Comfort. In your favorite wine. In your sister's smile. Comfort zone...I want to wrap myself inside of you, I want to venture forth into the world while wrapped in the sturdiest of coats...I want that love to cradle me while I cradle the rest.

I marvel at my life for it is a marvel. What can't I do? I can fly. I can read minds. I'm working on my x-ray vision and my time travel but I'm getting there.

I'm so crazy proud of my little sisters. They are all grown up (well mostly) and considering I've watched them grow and become since day one it feels like such a victory. They are shining, they are taking the world into their confident little hands and making what they wish of an existence that seems overly complicated most of the time.

I love drinking with my parents as if we're out on a date. Or just that we're really old and sophisticated. Or just that I've earned their respect at some point in the game. It makes me happy.

How on earth did I manage to work with such incredible people already? Have I earned it? It's been wonderful. Sometimes life does give back and you should just rejoice because you probably did something.

Home is a set of plane tickets

2011-09-12T20:24:00.000-07:00

mainly because I don't have one location that is the traditional concept of "home" for moi. And really, I'm lucky enough to be able to jet around all over the place and piece together the puzzle pieces that make me, geographically scattered as they are.

I found a dish towel hanging from my mother's oven that reads "Home is where my mom is." And really, home is where my loved ones are, it's true, therefore home are where they are. Home "are" there or maybe "is" like a spilled bottle of wine or juice that trickles into different crevices but is still part of the same whole. Maybe in measurement, home is more of a liquid, divided in fragments but part of a whole.

I returned to Porto Alegre, Brazil, for a brief spell and then was pretty thrilled, anxious even to get back to the US. I was eager to retrieve my past you see. It all started with a dear childhood friend's wedding in Boston, followed by travel to DC and Colorado with another dear childhood friend/distant relative from Israel. All of the East Coast travels convinced me that I should just move back to the American East Coast because Home...maybe there are places on this planet that make me feel especially like "me" and maybe quite a few of them are concentrated over there. There's just a whole lot of juice in those parts and now my mind is working on that idea, of a wonderful return, a homecoming to a place that I love. How sweet.

Fresh Noons Blooming

2011-08-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

All right, I've rolled up my sleeves and I'm cleaning house. Mentally, of course, and socially. I take out the spiderwebs, the spider veins that spread below, the pests. I weed the unnecessary creatures out, the pesky ghosts. My mind is a repository of bad sediment sometimes, the words and deeds of others stay with me - angry ghosts.
It takes a lot of courage to let go of a ghost, even an angry one. We are used to his voice, we think we need it. All along it was my own mind that fathomed you that fashioned you into significance. In the end, perception is almost everything it seems, at least when it comes to the power of reality and dreams.
The truth is, there's nothing wrong with anything that has happened. My only issue is moving on, moving forward and into the fresh light of a new day. I was held back a bit this summer by obligations and spoiled love like spoiled coconut milk in the Bahian sun. Sometimes are own obligations tether us to the wrong coconut. But that's ok....
I keep meeting little princes along the way and they are not the polite one fashioned by Exupery but the real whinging ones that are forever glued to the nipple. Oh Puer Aeternus, go find another temporary mommy to suckle. Ok? Ok.
In the meantime I'll go enjoy this Latin city properly with its European houses and mysterious ports.
"Follow your own star!" - Dante Alighieri

Clones and Buenos Aires

2011-08-20T15:38:00.000-07:00

Should I get this haircut? That's my doppelganger right there. I'm wearing that same red shade of lipstick right now and it goes with all of the Audrey Hepburns and Marilyn Monroes that hang on the walls of hostels and restaurants in this city. Little kitschy items with their faces in the markets, old magazines with movie stars and fresh babes advertising cars. There is a repository here from the 30's-70's, a collection of odds and ends. Old children's toys, terrifying and dirty in their market stalls, the most fascinating little personalized postcards that parents used to send between countries of their children dressed up in the latest fashionable getup...I found most of this in the Feria de San Telmo.

My heart is heavy light at the moment. Flavored with Brahma Chopp bought at the corner store, unrefrigerated. I'm weighed down only by my own penchant for roller coaster boyfriends. Audrey how did you wear your love? And you Marilyn? Two opposite ends of the feminine spectrum it seems...both adored and salivated after to this day. Phantoms.
Are we stronger in flesh or in after-flesh? Sometimes the answer is less obvious than it seems.

I am not the woman of your dreams. I seem to wish to make that very clear very quickly. Maybe because fantasy is terrifying? I overdo it. Fantasy is what we need to survive. We need Audrey and we certainly need Marilyn. Buenos Aires has a point.

Grey sky calls for writing

2011-08-13T14:25:00.000-07:00

Although actually I'm starving. How wonderful that I trained all over the campus of Rio Grande do Sul today, on a gray warmish Saturday when most people were out and I practiced capoeira kicks in the windows of the buildings and did cartwheels across the lawns and did pushups on random cement blocks that lay on the grounds.

I had my palm read after the Batizado in Rio. It was a spontaneous thing, there was a sweet old woman sitting there, taking palms and telling their stories.
Mine seemed to cause a lot of emotion in the woman. My tiny soft hand had her exclaiming that I was feminine and delicate. At another point she kissed it saying I was very spiritualized. It was a sweet reading all in all.

I'm running away from Porto Alegre for a week on a beautiful trip to the Argentinian border...and at the moment I'm running away to the supermercado because my new amiga and I concur that food is pretty damn important.

calling on my orisha, my baba yaga, my hatikva

2011-07-17T10:52:00.000-07:00

I found this incantation/prayer to Yemaya, goddess of the sea, who last year was identified for me as my orixa. The sea has always been the most powerful, soothing, and grounding force for me. It's energy peaks my own and when I am in it I am a mermaid.:

Yemaya. Mother, goddess of the Sea,
Be in this place, come forth unto me,
Lady of the oceans, the lakes, and the rivers,
Beautiful Queen, ebb and flow bringer,
Heal my mind, my body
my soul.
For with your sweet love, I become whole.
Ashe, Great Mother
---------------------------------------------

Even seeing that blue depth from my window is soothing and perfect. I have missed you so, sweet ocean power. The sea, seeing and not seeing it, feeling its energy near me. The sea, the sea, the sea.

I give thanks. I don blue today and in my heart, the blue of endless possibility, and believe that the world will open its depths to me if I just give it a little patience, a little care. I believe that there is poetry out there, and it awaits me. Poetry on the doorstep of my heart. Poetry that will tear us clean and new. Words that strip the pain and bring the light, I believe in hearts that heal each other and hands that warm each other and minds that help each other. I believe that some day we will be without a catch, ready for a better day. I believe that in this path we wretch, there is a better hand to play.

This imperfect thing we love so much.

2011-06-12T18:31:00.000-07:00

About a week, A WEEK, until I fly off to Brazil. It's sinking in and is a little terrifying. I'm terribly excited and as usual I'm finishing up a paper, getting last minute things together, and have not started packing. I lived in denial for 2 days this weekend during which I mainly slept and watched weepy lovesick episodes of Grey's Anatomy. I am a master hibernator, especially when there's work to be done. Ok, I also managed to go on a date on which I had fun stepping outside of myself and pretending to be some random hot woman in a pretty dress on a date, (dates are good for that because the role-playing is such a game), cleaned out my fridge, and had my first yoga class in years. Now I'm drinking some kind of coffee called "European" that consists of egg white and half-and-half and vanilla and attempting to plan a passable paper on the history of childhood in Brazil. (The coffee in my favorite local Chicago cafe is always really funny tasting but I'm mainly here for the calm, studious atmosphere and the soothing young Russian couple who runs it anyway...the caffeine boost can come in odd flavors and I don't mind too much.) Hardly easy considering kids aren't exactly anyone's focus most of the time historically unless considered a problem. My idea wasn't to write about pedophiles or child abandonment...though there it is, entire chapters dedicated to poverty and perversion.

I did however manage to find a subletter within about a day of advertising my place. It is a lovely apartment and made me feel so good to find a thrilled tenant in oh, about 5 seconds.

I also have a sperm donor in case I decide to have a child on my own. I like him a lot, I may be in love with him in a way, whatever that everlastingly loaded term means. God knows I freak out enough for my potential sperm donor and I and our beautiful unborn multi-ethnic babies combined. No committed partner as of yet, but hey Cinderella did you know that modern life would be so darn difficult to navigate for women with standards and brains?

The shoe might fit but we're a little past comparing men to shoes aren't we? Unless you're looking for a two-dimensional life, and some people do of course, a consumer metaphor is hardly appropriate. Fuck the fairy shoe and it's fatalistic implications. Of course, I'm a terrible shoe shopper though when I do find shoes I like they tend to be awesome shoes complimented by strangers so maybe it's not the worst metaphor in the world. But it's not just about taste. It's not just about a Bourdieun understanding of choice and class. There is something else some of us seek, something like the soul that cannot be pinpointed in music and food and the societal niche occupied by the Prince or the Pauper (whoever you happen to fall for.) There's something deep and terribly poetic and painful and inappropriate at the bottom of it all. Your mother probably wouldn't approve of it because it isn't right. It's uncomfortable. The connection with those we have that funny feeling for is somewhere in the neighborhood of the Id and some fairy space called Romance Fantasy and this fairy space is only somewhat rooted in practical teachings and tangible truths. We try not to Peter Pan into the great wide unknown but we do anyway, we have a mutual drugging experience that feeds into the fairy space. We float off. Things don't make sense. We try to explain it to our friends but we can't. We're self-fulfilling madmen.

On that note I'm going back to work, good evening fellow fruit loops.

chocolate pie ...and this title is complete

2011-06-05T16:25:00.000-07:00

I'm wearing a goofy shirt that reads "I <3 Capoeira". It's for a 7-8 year old boy and so it's a tiny bit tight around the sleeves. It reminds me of how when I was a teenager it was popular to wear itsy bitsy shirts and show off your midriff. I have backpedaled into my teenage self and my midriff is slightly on display in this way too small thing I'm not sure why I bought it (except that the mestre with the Arnold Shwarzenegger accent who sold it to me has a charm about him, so if he says it's woman's shirt maybe I'll believe it for a little while,) but maybe I should cut the sleeves off....my little sisters wouldn't approve. It's a high school thing, it's a petty thing, it's a family thing, how to display myself, it's a fashion thing, it's a bullshit, bullshit thing. They always judged me so harshly, my mom and sisters, ridiculing me like a gang of popular bossy girls on the playground. I always succumbed, if not in action, then in hurt feelings. Very hurt feelings and a very sore ego.

I had my first Batizado this past weekend. Mestres and students flew into Chicago from all over the country and world to teach workshops and to graduate students in an order of dancefightloving....I somehow passed, graduated into a level. A white-yellow cord signifying that I have some level of skill: totally unexpected.

I'm in from the "beach," the Lake Michigan Shore...this whole Chicago summer thing is a new and interesting experience for me. It's the first time I've experienced it at all...I'm meeting a lot of nice, fun people in this warm version of Chicago. Well I can befriend for a little while before I re-Brazil my life. Chicago will never be Brazilian or tropical or warm enough anyway. A part of my heart has given up on it even as I discover lovely new nooks and crannies and finally meet the kind of folks I could enjoy myself with.

Things, in some way only have substance if you believe in their thingy-ness. If you believe in them. And I make-believe my own things all the time and that's a good escape from the confines of a mostly senseless world. The only parts that matter are the warm ones. Not their substance but their temperature. Touch my forehead.

back to the people planet

2011-05-24T11:57:00.000-07:00

As if this reconnecting with what I care about meant coming back to Earth. Which it does. As if the sun warming my heart and hopes meant that I could wish and feel empowered on a daily basis about the things that push me out of bed in the morning, that stimulate me into engaging with the world.

When a man in a light pink shirt sat down across from me a minute ago and started staring as if I'm his lunchtime entertainment, I thought, maybe this is my cue to go?
This feels like a weird, unfathomable day/week/something. Span of time punctuated by the kind of heat that usually stays behind shower curtains in Chicago.

I feel, slightly, like I'm bouncing around in one of those pinball machines, back and forth in a frenzy to win points and make contact with momentary discotheques. Ok, it's definitely time to change locations, bump into other silly frenzied points of contact.

Ritual or not

2011-03-26T17:07:00.000-07:00

Skiing, like flying, changes my essence. I can soar down a mountain and I don't feel quite so mundanely human at that moment. I'm another species, and I've torn out of the mold of my daily routines and boxed spaces. My body is curving down gorgeously white slopes, and I'm singing to myself. The rhythm is just too good at those moments. It's at those times that I know that this life is so excruciatingly worth it.

I spent today at home and slept in, slept off some booze and a jazz-filled first date, nursed the cramps that rock my body into submission. At least the timing is good. A Red Tent phase between my travels and work days and lovers. I call my grandmother who has severe Alzheimer's. She picks up and we have essentially the same conversation that we've had for the past year or more. But it never gets old because it's still her voice and we love each other ever more painfully and well, sometimes you find that you are a packaged little matrushka set of emotion. I'm the little doll inside my mother inside my grandmother inside my great-grandmother. Inside of me is a painful little empty space waiting for a doll I suppose. Thanks for the Cavity within, Woman-Maker in the Matel Sky Factory.

I should really be writing or something so this is a low-commital kinda start....

Vanilla Whipped Honey in the Twilight Zone

2011-03-05T12:56:00.000-08:00

The sun doesn't really exist today. The sky is just an impenetrable white blur of snow and the snow comes down and sweeps over everything, a ghostly kind of snow. A ghost.

Somewhat solution? Coffee as can be seen in the picture below, plus honey, plus brand spankin new chalk pastels with which I smudge happy colors onto whiteness. I look at a beautiful photo from Pelhourinho last summer and I draw. It's Carnival there right now, it's the white ghost of nothingness that keeps on giving here right now.

Send me a serotonin boost or a flower...smile against the white

unprecedented chill

2011-02-13T10:16:00.000-08:00

The more I remember my melancholy imaginings of what this Chicago winter would be like, the sillier it seems. Ok, so I imagined it would be this poetic misery, me sitting alone in a cozy apartment, huddled over a laptop with a glass of wine with enough memories to pretend to be an old geezer writing her memoirs.

Except the problem is this: to get to the poetic, the sweet nostalgic poetic, you have to get past the misery. And the misery my friends, the frigidity that covers the Chicago streets and penetrates the soul, is awfully hard to get past. You have to cross a frozen Styx to get to a place where you can have enough hope to express yourself.

Misery. Misery. Misery.

Self-delve

2011-02-03T17:39:00.000-08:00

I'm not even remotely afraid of jumping into my own psyche. I'm a psyche-bungy jumper and have been since childhood. I will talk about the deepest, most seemingly embarrassing crevices of my mind and honestly, I just don't mind swimming through my id. An id scuba diver. Yes, I happily, enjoyably, speak Idish.

I know this is a language that for many seems too appallingly private. Why strip it all away and stand so naked in front of the planet? I'm an Id Nudist and I'm proud.

How can one write poetry or anything in which one strips for the reader, without being an Id Exhibitionist? I think this is simply part of the process. I yearn for the social mirror and damn it, don't we all seek a bit of this freedom where artifice is stripped to reveal the mess below?

I was in NYC all weekend. It's a kind of delving into friends that I adore and haven't seen in far too long, and yes there was a guy, a lovely one. The streets of New York, always magical, grumbling, full of possibility especially when the heart wanders, filled me with hope and excitement. I've never seen New York under so much snow. It was a mess but it doesn't matter, it's the same fantastic city full of every kind of person in every kind of establishment on every corner. I even heard a Carioca singing in a bar. Her voice was beautiful, I could tell almost immediately from her pronunciation that she was from Rio. I went to the New Museum for the first time and it was a little breathtaking. I saw an adorably painful play with Ethan Hawke about American middle-of-no-where blue collar family psychological dysfunction. Dysfunction and gaudy couches and too many phony kodaks on the walls. I reveled in my old friends. I felt a little overwhelmed because it never feels like there is enough time for the best moments in life. Moments need to be rewound, extended, slow-mo'd.

I had conversations that scurried and galloped into an enjoyment so high pitched it was excruciating. It was excruciating because I knew I couldn't put it in my pocket and bring it back out any time. Bring it back into my life...because some things are not portable. My old friends. A lovely guy who didn't turn out to be receptive to my openly emotional scuba world. Despite the conversation bliss. Or the clearly yearning kiss. A bit disappointing, this. Mermen welcome and wanted.

Life is a pale bitch sometimes. A scrawny bitch with dirty fingernails who scrapes your chalkboard and laughs like a mean little demon. Sometimes you have to wait for that bitch to shut it. You drink some wine, you get all artsy fartsy and try to write, draw, think your way out of it to some higher Platonic existence. Get me out of the fucking cave, already. Please?

Hope for the hopeful

2011-01-25T21:42:00.000-08:00

Thank goodness for my eyes. I can see. And my fingers with which I type.
And my mind, my mind best of all with which fine words I write
thrilling sights I see
happy soul can be

Placing the placeless

2011-01-12T22:20:00.000-08:00

Well December was eaten up by the country of Israel. A place so incredible and always so dear to my heart. I belong there, if I belong any where, if belonging has anything to do with looks and genes and the rage of jewish mothers.

I miss it again already. Like a brother, Israel is my brother - it is the most fraternity I feel for any particular nation of people.

My wandering heart, as usual, is torn by the people I have loved and love all over the globe. My heart has a map inside it, a spinning wheel of places that matter and sting with emotion, like a jeopardy wheel - who will I feel and think of next? Spin it. Not just places but faces that in themselves are placeless except that we all belong together, my virtual community of dear ones.

Moonlit nights in Jerusalem on the back of a motorcycle...I'm holding tight. I'm holding tight in my head.

I'm back in Chicago (a little over a week now,) where I have my own beautiful apartment and completely autonomous life. I feel a split inside myself...I'm opening the house of my soul up and letting a crying little girl walk out. The little girl has been fighting with her mother since she could speak. The little girl has been crying since she could make tears and screams and casualties inside her mind. It's time to love her. It's time to calm her down and let her play and enjoy being a cute little girl. I love kids and my inner kid, I definitely love my inner kid. Time to forgive my mom for thinking that little girl was less than awesome...it's that tiny, pained, dazed little fighter inside of me who still gives me much of my strength and insight.

There was a point when we were walking through several thousand year old ruins in the North of Israel that it became clear that I simply can't take it any more. Maybe this was the problem: I was used to heart break since childhood. My mom was always my heartbreaker. That's just how I saw and felt it for many years. I could never be good enough, I could never line up inside those blurry dotted lines, wherever they were. Mirror mirror on the wall, love me. Implicitly, heart break was normal. Not just heart break but the breaking of myself into little insufferable pieces. Painful little shards that just yearned to form a whole. Whole
some
of us are luckier than others. But in the end the power is in the hands of those who take it.

raining in Chicago

2010-11-29T21:14:00.000-08:00

I've been dreading the winter for a while. About a day ago I finally pulled my thick Northface out of the closet, it's so well padded you don't need much else until it truly freezes and Chicago becomes tundraland.
I've been traveling a good bit around the US in the past few weeks - a lovely trip to New Orleans followed by Thanksgiving in Miami. I meet so many interesting people when I travel, even if it's in the US and New Orleans turned out to be such a spectacular city. I visited the above ground tombs, (Nicholas Cage already has a giant pyramid sized tomb waiting for him it turns out, talk about delusion of penile grandeur) a voodoo temple where the priestess actually hugged me, drank in the jazz that flows as freely as the booze there.... I met Tim Robbins, that was quite a silly celebrity encounter in a jazz club. I also met an adorable Canadian. I was there for a conference and made some interesting contacts...all in all as perfect as a trip gets.
Now just a little more coursework and writing/revising to get through before I'm free for December in Israel. How lovely that will be!
I feel that I have been pushed around like some imperfect little drudge in a program for genius wannabes. I'm done wannabe-ing, I'm just gonna do and be and I'm going to follow my own damn path.
I have listened to too many self-satisfied white haired men in hefty positions with big books that bear their names. Too many self-applauding people in my life, cyclically, telling me what to do and who to be. Fit me into this box, looks kinda coffin-like that's funny. This supposed drone is no one's clone she owns her cell-f like it or not. I'm falling asleep, I'm dreaming of all the wonderful places I'll go, the beautiful people in my life, the sunshine that will touch my skin in days to come.

reefed in Recife

2010-09-15T20:42:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting at the moment in a dark (because the bulb is apparently dead), quiet professor's study in Recife. Tomorrow mid day I will travel on to Aracaju for a long layover and some crab and then finally in the wee hours I will fly back to Salvador. It is becoming more uncertain whether I'll land back in Mama America on the 26th or 27th or what depending on my weird ticket, but somehow it will be fine. Recife gave me space to think and look at myself and Brazil and such. Though too much and too little space. I'm possibly in love with a wonderful man and I have no idea when I'll see him again but I will see him for several days starting tomorrow. You know there is a short story by Vonnegut called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. You should read it if you haven't. I know that I will let myself be sucked into the rising tide of Chicago again. But this time I will get a much better apartment. And it will probably be in Ukrainian Village. And I will set up shop in this lovely apartment in this chique neighborhood and focus on my studies and plan my ambitious career and imagine how I will come up with something good and useful and insightful for people by the lamplight as the Chicago snow falls outside my window like a spectre and I will imagine the wonderful man in Salvador as he plays capoeira in the summer heat and kisses some other beautiful woman under the sweat of carnival as I sweat under the lamplight from the thought of it and pour myself some wine and the academic musings will turn into poetry on my computer screen as they always do and I will think about love and whether sitting here under the lamplight slaving away for some unseen goal is worth it when I could be holding you right now. Tangibility, friends. It is the difference between dreaming and having. Oh Brazil, thank you for letting me have. Though now I can think ahead how it will feed my dreams. And so the cycle goes. Why is it so rare to have both, and maybe my melancholy will turn into something stronger and I won't feel stuck in some cyclical poetic musing in which love is tragic but the dragon....Cimorene will fly off on his back, I mean maybe some unexpected bizarre fairytale will still come true in my life. I'll lower my hair or weave gold or simply become an empowered heroine. Nevertheless, we're always looking for some expected ending before anything has a chance to happen because we're so damn afraid to turn the page----

too good to leave

2010-08-28T14:17:00.000-07:00

Though in other ways a fantastic beginning to the rest of this living. I'm stretching out the time in Salvador more just like I did in Rio I can tell that I will. Though the "flexibilidade" in my airplane ticket and my life only goes so far. Classes will start, a new Chicago move awaits, and I absolutely must visit my grandma the minute I get back. I will insert a few more blissful, tropical weeks --->there. And then we'll see.
I've been waiting and waiting and I'm blooming.

12 minutes or less

2010-08-22T16:33:00.000-07:00

until a few new friends come to my apartment in Salvador and we spend an evening drinking and simply enjoying. Maybe forro, maybe just caipirinha.
I have no idea if anyone reads this blog at this point but it's a fun outlet at moments. When I have enough time to stop to think about myself, I remember that I think in narrative form. As if I'm writing the book of my life as I live it. I write as I live in my head. If only I could insert a little laptop up there. Maybe someone will invent that one day. I only re-realize this about myself when I have time to. If I'm moving about frantically, there is no time for head narration and I am simply swimming in somebody else's book.
Since I have a few quicky minutes and a rising mood because I'm about to see lovely people....
Brazil, what I love: a gazillion fruit and plants I've never heard of before that make it all the more dr.seussy exotic like cupuacu and guarana and cacau, people that are blunt and sexual and sometimes even more starving for human connection than I am, music-making in all corners, attempts at creativity and sweetness by strangers, trustworthy friends made within a few minutes time, men who zip up my backpack as I walk down the street, capoeira - a fleshy celebration of every muscle that hurts so good the next day....
what I don't love: being pegged as a money pot and stalked, attempts at thievery and deceit, racism, lack of hot water, electric showers that can easily shock and kill you, hungry children, terrifying cops, crack everywhere popped like a tic tac

pulled into context and loving the living

2010-08-03T15:24:00.000-07:00

I'm boiling water without olive oil. It's a kind of useless traveler's way to make pasta but will work just fine. Especially as there is still tomato sauce in the fridge and tomato sauce has oil and salt and all the fixings in its fine little packet.
I mainly blog on slow or tired days when I either really feel like writing something creative or want to procrastinate from doing something else. This is a rainy, tummy achey kinda day.
I can hear the sounds of traffic 13 floors down. I could go over to Carlos' house for wine and snacks and random company. I could keep working on an essay I owe a kind professor, fascinating I swear, on the body in lusophone space.
I also, should get back to writing that groundbreaking novel the world will so love eventually and which will so improve my lifestyle. Mhm. The question is always finding the time and space, mental and physical to produce. To do. Do. Do.
There's some low budget Brazilian soap opera playing on low volume on my tv, there's a woman attempting to melodramatically jump out of a lexus to proclaim her anger as she parades down the highway in stilettos only to stop a giant yellow truck in and jump in. I plan on a less dramatic evening of pasta and writing but who knows, I'm constantly pulled into context these days. ;)

um pouco cansada

2010-07-31T18:07:00.000-07:00

I tire myself out so easily. It took forever to figure out how to buy tickets to Salvador...in the end I ended up giving up on the Brazilian websites and booking a flight through good old Expedia. I tried to buy a phone, but I didn't have my CPF number with me (a Brazilian identity number that anyone with a certifiable identity can get by sitting in a room with a bunch of other people and waiting for them to call the number in your hand so they can give you another number) and by the time I started walking down the smoky Copacabana streets for the second time in a row today, I walked for a few miles and it became clear that everything was already closed.
It bothers me immensely that my phone is gone. And that the altercation was so nasty. I walk forever here and feel my legs getting stronger and this in itself is satisfying. I got a little dizzy and light heated because I hadn't eaten much. I stopped in one cafe to buy a chicken pastry. Then I stopped in another for coconut juice + milk, mmm.
Oh yeah, why no phone? One night last week, I was out with some lovely Bostonians I met through the language school. We went to a giant indoor market called Sao Cristoval. It's like an all you can buy, drink, smoke, consume fest inside a building the size of a football stadium. Every trinket imaginable, a plethora of restaurants, clubs, music venues, bars, meat shops, juice shops, it's kinda like a mall but much dirtier, cheaper, funnier, stranger, wilder, poorer, etc. Some big time singer was supposed to be performing that night and this hiked up the entrance fee. As the night wore on it became clear that fans were getting pumped for the performance and I didn't see this but apparently some girl was escorted out, sweating profusely. I had been trying to get deeper into the crowd to catch a peek of Donatello or whatever big time performance man's name was, but at this point the group I was with freaked out and did a 180 towards the exit. I only understood this later, but they caught a cab for us to go home in and bargained on a fixed price for everyone with the driver. As we only live a few blocks away from each other this sounded fine. As soon as we started explaining to the driver that he would be making two stops, one for me and one for them, he got extremely angry saying that that was too much and they hadn't given him enough money. I had a bit more Portuguese than the others and tried to negotiate with the driver but he was a nasty money digger who pretended not to understand. It was a frustrating cab ride. When we pulled up to my building I tried to negotiate again and got into a nasty argument with him. In the heat of it I forgot my cellphone in that lovely man's backseat. I had just received a text from a guy I had met days before who has been inviting me out, asking "where are you beautiful?" But the cell is gone now and has been for days as are many of the new contacts in it. Shit like this must happen when traveling especially alone, frantic, and adjusting. I'm buying a new phone and it will be even cheaper than the lost one and I have a pang of regret in my chest. If only I had been a smoother negotiator when the taxi driver picked up the phone and offered more money or shown less anger and indignation. He asked me, "how much will you give me for your phone?" and when I reluctantly said 10 reais, he decided to take revenge on me and never pick up again.
Anyway, this has been a bit of a tired Saturday, and the night will pick up in beautiful Lapa for some dancing. Rio is so beautiful, how to swallow enough of it, how to do enough. It's wonderful and overwhelming.

Brazil, layered and maravilhosa

2010-07-29T04:39:00.000-07:00

I've been in Brazil for a bit over 2 weeks now. Summer has already been incredible and deeply fulfilling.
First I went to see incredible Sicilian sites with my loving family. They are always there for me, to help me breathe and vacate when reality feels overwhelming. Now I'm in Brazil, studying Portuguese on this fellowship and enjoying every minute of the lovely new experiences, the dramatic, funny, kind (and sometimes treacherous,) people, the scenery, the soul moving music. Tudo bom.
The classes are getting a little tiring as they are early in the morning and last for several hours each day. Maybe today needs to be a day off. I was supposed to go to the countryside with a boy but we had a falling out over class differences (he thinks I'm an American princess who looks down on him.) It reminds me of a book I read recently, Goodbye Columbus. Some of the words he hurled at me were way too much, and he ran away after throwing them like useless old rocks. He wanted to take me on a field trip to see poverty, show the over-privileged "Beverly Hills" (he called me,) girl poverty, see how the American ginnypig reacts. His own experiment, his own environment. As much as I want to see the country, I don't appreciate being called Beverly Hills by an angry lover. Hilarious for someone who has been living most of the year on the South Side of Chicago in cheap rooms because a graduate student stipend is hardly enough to cover rent any where in the US. I'm not saying I'm a terribly poor person. I'm not. I've got a great family who supports me when I need it, and even treats me to lovely experiences most people never have. But I'm no Beverly Hills either. Anyway, enough. I wrote him an email explaining...maybe I'll post it here later out of interest.
So either he'll get over the economic battle he picked with the wrong tourist, and I'll go to the country today, or I'll do the more typical bourgeois thing and enjoy the glorious rays at the beach with a couple new Brazilian friends. It's going to be an interesting day regardless, and I'm going to make the best of it. I want to be the best of me but I want respect too. I want to be a good person but I also want to enjoy and enjoy the beauty and truth that is here without being pigeonholed in hurtful ways.

almost free of dead weight...rapunzel spins again

2010-06-02T21:37:00.000-07:00

I'm reading this marvelous article on the imagination. Let it set mine free. Tonight the goal is to revise my overwrought thesis to the point of presentability.

I have lived monastically, scholastically, and in a lonely ivory tower for two years now. I am my own witch. I let down my own hair. I climb down my own hair and hope to find a prince or a kingdom or a reward for sitting up here spinster style, spinning, spinning, spinning.

What do I weave with my golden threads? I weave attempts at thoughts that are supposed to be meaningful in terms of the wondrous human experience. They are supposed to fit into the box you give me. Society gives us boxes to fill. I'm sitting in this interesting box. It's lit with candles and full of other isolated spellbound zombies.

I've got my cappuccino and thoughts to keep me company. Courage said Goethe. The Faustian striving spins on, curse-like, making self-punishing soldiers of men.

It's rainy as hell inside and out. If life were a movie this would make for a good depressing scene. Drip, drip, write. Drip, drip, write. The faucet is open again. I want to sink into the waterfall of my imagination with a merman and an endless ocean of time and body. Expanse, expand.

May-be

2010-05-10T12:43:00.000-07:00

May's a month of possibility where this caterpillar turns to the ultimate self-fulfilling metaphor and butterflies the pain and shit away.

Ma ma mia
The words the words
to free ya,
are you are you
gonna tell me
the little girl who watched little boys
like ants on her hands kept in boxes
of childhood manipulation fantasy
gets to come out and play?

April creeping up...brushing off the crawlies

2010-03-28T01:39:00.000-07:00

creepy, comes from creep. it's an interesting word.
from wiktionary "creep (plural creeps)The movement of something that creeps (like worms or snails)A relatively small gradual change, variation or deviation (from a planned value) in a measure.(informal, pejorative) An annoying irritating person(informal, pejorative) A frightening and/or disconcerting person, especially one who gives the speaker chills or who induces psychosomatic facial itching.Stop following me, you creep!"

So what is implied is creepy, wormy, insect-like slithering movement, either emotional or purely physical that makes the experiencer of this movement uncomfortable. You could say that relationships are in some ways based on movements that we make towards each other communicatively. Communication and interaction is a movement. So "creepy" is a movement that is buglike, uncomfortable...maybe this is where primal fear of the unknown and distrust of strangers hooks up to allow us to figure who we can and can't trust in this short little blip of a life.

permeability

2010-03-26T11:42:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but I'm far too socially permeable. I've known for a long time that I can be extremely (or overly) affected by what people say and do towards me. My mood, my thoughts, my disposition...I guess I should live alone again (soon!) until/unless I find people who I'm happing cohabiting with. I'm very high in empathy but at times I wish I could just switch it off. Click.
Really, people can take advantage of the permeability and good will of others. These amoeba layers that separate me from other people, they could use a few body guards in there. I think I'd like a couple Israeli soldiers patrolling mine. Got them. Ready.

helloooo

2010-03-25T02:56:00.000-07:00

I want to write an article called: America's Next Top Woman
stay tuned, it will be a linguistic anthro expose of how Tyra Banks is a self-made policer of the American model woman prototype, whitening strategies and all.

I am on a kick that involves bouts of attempting to thesis write and then taking breaks by watching the silly, wise, and rude Patti Stanger. I am a sucker for certain kinds of television. Oh the personalities. And a yenta?
Come on. If Patti calls herself a 3rd generation matchmaker I'm probably at least a 10th. It's just a guess, but come on. I was born in yentaville. I will shuffle love like an easy deck of cards and deal your hand and read it as if I'm psychic except I'm not, I'm in yentaville. I know that doesn't make any sense. Um.

Good night love-wanters. (don't we all)

Brazilian dreams

2010-03-22T22:55:00.000-07:00

I found out today that I won a fellowship that's gonna send me to the beautiful Brazil this summer. I'm going to ride this happy wave of anticipation for all it's worth, baby yeah!!!
I've never been to Brazil, and the goals for this summer could include:
1. Improve Portuguese (well this is obvious and the point)
2. Check out potential dissertation research sites and ideas (the second obvious point)
3. Write a novel
4. Learn the capoeira
5. Fall in love
6. Enjoy life
7. Write a novel about:
   a. falling in love to the beat of a Brazilian drum
   b. autoethnographic self-fun
   c. something wildly fictional where Kurt Vonnegut meets J.D. Salinger meet Lev Tolstoy meet Emily Dickinson meet Louise Gluck meet my mother
8. write poems and prose-poems, and stories, and articles and other fun things
9. draw, paint, dance, smile, laugh

I'm into lists at the moment. Lists this organizational thought process where numbering and sub-numbering is supposed to provide order. I'm so damn excited!!!!

on self-displacement

2010-03-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

When you were a child, did you cuddle with a beloved stuffed animal before nightfall? Maybe you pressed it to the beating wish for human connection in your chest and recalled stories of Cinderella or maybe Ruslan and Ludmila or whichever love story happens to be passed on in your iteration of modern culture. Maybe when you grew up you met some approximation of this fairytale, adjusted the goggles through which you process reality, and settled down with Ruslan or Charming or Bill. Maybe you didn't. Maybe instead you got a lonely dog or cat reflective of the hungry need that has only increased in its beating from childhood chest to adulthood chest that craves and craves. You got a job as a social worker or a teacher. You got a job as a nurse. You help people. Or you don't, you just own a Sims colony in which virtual families live and die and fart and procreate and tell you that they love you.

The self is hunger. The self is hunger for hunger. The self is hunger for mutual hunger. And however your hunger happens to displace, form, mold itself, the drive is a constant need to eat people. We are the self-congratulatory vampires.

PS: This is why we love dogs and cats so much. They are our own hunger, down on all fours, they have submitted to hunger completely and honestly, always hungry for food and love which essentially becomes the same thing. Food-love, love-food, to eat to love to talk to drink to eat to love to talk to consume, consume me-you. Across the table, the table on which we consume each other. The wedding table the coffee table the dinner table, the consumption slab across which we displace food with love with food.

ta ta and hello

2010-03-20T00:15:00.000-07:00

the world is full books and books after hours in stacks and stacks and stacks of them make me dizzy. Which is what happened today. I stayed in the library and sucked up so many ideas into my skull that I fiinally got dizzy after oh maybe 10 hours of this and so then finally, I went home to feed myself and rest up for the next round.

I will get there, damn it. In the mean time the reading and breath-reading (as in inhaling words through the nostrils and mouth, sort of like a knowledge-inhaling human that is produced by overzealous university environments,) will continue. I need to write. First I must read. I have no time. At least I can breathe. In
hale
ex hale.

Good night, shona tova, tova, tova.

sleep-living

2010-03-18T15:29:00.000-07:00

My entire day seems to be over-determined by how much sleep I get and when I get it.
Woe to my suprachiasmatic nucleus. I remember first reading about this little mechanism we are all born with that does or does not happen to conform with the 9 to 5, 24 hour, 7 day a week, bla, bla, bla tick tock rhythms of modern society. For example, if you're a lucky little "morning person" you'll probably feel so much happier swinging with the rhythms, getting your coffee and toast when you want it. If you only need what 5 hours of sleep, even better.
I, as you can probably guess from my bitter mockery, am not one of you lucky birdsong at dawn break people. I love to sleep, need to sleep, sleep to sleep. I'm terrible at getting up. I need multiple incentives or a really amazing one to force my body out of bed at a certain time. If I ever marry, this will be good for my getting up problems because I find that the best alarm clock is definitely another human being. In the meantime, I continue to be monkish, to fall asleep with books in bed with me, sometimes my clothes on, ick. Yes, I'm literally sleeping with my books. And do I want to get up the next...cycle? Not usually. My disrupted rhythm is so bad that lately, because I am "trying" to do nothing but mainly work, I wake up with a headache and hungry belly and an unhappy mood. This little soldier is not a good drill sergeant to herself, especially in the realm of movement. Get up. Get up, woman!

It goes deeper, little nucleus beware. Bed is the place of denial, a hide out, a sleep hide-out from responsibility and life and people and places, and well, no matter what signals you might be sending me, my denial is stronger. I can sleep-hide from my own body...it seems that it is not so hard to corrupt whatever healthy path you are supposed to lead. Intention is stronger than pain.

reaching for perfect

2010-03-18T02:07:00.000-07:00

There are so many things I want to do with this life. Just like Sylvia Plath in her terror, unable to deal with the tree of endless possibilities, unable to choose, and the inability to choose causing the possibilities to die but the very act of choosing cutting off all other branches and the tree well it's an endless mind fuck the end.

I'm going to bed, I've over done it and can't examine myself under this bell jar any more this fine night.

My mother still thinks of my freelance journalistic writing with longing. Should I be doing that?

Am I losing myself here, or will I find whoever is supposed to come out between the scholarly citations...I mean can I still be expressive and not over-burdened with academicese to the point of stomping out what makes a soul beautiful. Or will it just be more so?

spillville

2010-03-16T00:54:00.000-07:00

The best page is the one that wants to take your words and love them. Cradle them in its expansive white arms and say, yes dear words, you're the little screaming infant voices I've been waiting for. You want the page to love and affirm you. Give you that positive reinforcement every baby or writer-baby seeks from the page, the mother, the other.

I am writing. Pishu, j'ecris, escribo...and while I don't have much time to deliver these fetal first steps into thesis-writing, I can hear the little voices inching out, they are happening. They have wanted to happen and breathe life and make what I went through worthwhile, ever since I went through it. I mean who donates all this time, researching and working alone, and feeling lonely and inspired and anxious and isolated and terrified and thrilled to not finally hope to bear fruit.

The pregnant nun goes on giving birth through her fingertips.

What if you are just a figment of me on the page? Mary asked Jesus.

Pinocchio in the Whale

2010-03-13T12:12:00.000-08:00

I read some of my poems live last night. First time since this summer, when I read at a lovely Anglophone open mic in Belleville, Paris. Last night was an academic audience in Hyde Park, Chicago, much less random than a bunch of English speakers in a Parisian bar. There was much less anonymity there, my voice was highly contextualized there, because more and more of my experiences are filtered through the highly specific experience of a social sciences grad student jumping through the hoops of hell. Ok, ok, in part it is just obvious that I've been scarred by fieldwork and isolation both in school and out there. Oft repeated themes include: loneliness, isolation, frustration with men, frustration with women too, the shrinking circle of people who relate to the experience, masochistic protestant ethic work schedule, loss of a sense of time, space, body, and materiality, a complete restructuring of values, yes these symptoms are typical and real. Some symptoms are liberating, enlightening, you just want to gloat about them and have a chain-smoking, coffee and liquor drinking festival under the moon. Most symptoms make you fear for your sanity and wellbeing. The smart thing to do is to plan things to look forward to so that the work doesn't swallow you up, so that Marx and complete and total alienation through your work does not become you. Although the truth is, for a while I'm going to have to be Pinocchio in the whale, waiting to get through this storm, learn from it, and become a real girl again.

languages of removal

2010-02-27T02:42:00.000-08:00

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.)

home? is where the mummy organs are

2010-02-25T22:23:00.000-08:00

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.

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.

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.

thought-a-thon

2010-02-22T17:56:00.000-08:00

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.

fisticuffs and hallucinations

2010-02-17T23:50:00.000-08:00

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.

fantasy inside this memory box

2010-02-17T21:52:00.000-08:00

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.

open heart un-surgery

2010-02-16T23:17:00.000-08:00

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.

poetry experiment

2010-02-15T11:06:00.000-08:00

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

script in my head

2010-02-14T13:53:00.000-08:00

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.

move

2010-02-13T11:54:00.000-08:00

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...

hilarity and jenga dating

2010-02-05T16:54:00.000-08:00

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.

to sleep, perchance to scream

2010-01-25T23:59:00.000-08:00

I'm starting a secret blog (that will purge away secret stains and pains and drains on this finicky life,) you'll never find it, maybe you will. I'm staying up and not working, not working, because home sometimes just wants to mean a glass of wine and a sigh of release.

Can you hear it? I can't. I haven't had a released moment in ages, this heart is always beating too attentively, every instant is pitter patteringly hyperactive, manic, maniac, maaaaaaaaama?

This is when the child cries for help, "save me from the unmanageable world, Mother, who hath brought me into this unfortunate struggle where I pee on myself and my stomach hurts and then..."(and yes with a Stewie-like British accent)...but forget receding into infantile helplessness, how about, how about, slowing down this over-stimulated nervous system. Less coffee more REM? Less stress more sex? Less late nights more massages and long walks on Greek or Italian or French or Brazilian or Caribbean beaches, peaches, soft yellowish relaxation zones.

That's what this life requires perchance. A chance to dance, to dance, to dance.

lets talk about sex, american style

2010-01-20T13:40:00.000-08:00

Hypothesis: White (straight) american men are more insecure (on average) when it comes to the bedroom, the bra, and the boob. Than whom? Probably than almost everyone else. I wonder if educational achievement correlates with sexual dysfunction? Maybe for some men.... The "smarter" and better in one achievement area, the dumber in the other. The more seemingly secure in intellect, the less secure in lack there of. What if intellect is just totally over-rated when it comes to pure physicality, what if we just disconnect with our bodies and become scared of them? How absolutely awful. Although it depends on the kind of intellectual practices one is socialized into, as well. This could go the other way too, education could open sexually, the right kind of education. So I'm talking Puritan-descended American mentality. If this generalization holds any truth, it all comes down to specifics. The body should be hidden, the body reeks of sin and skin.

This goes for women too. This is a societal problem. More specifically though, it could just be a WASP problem too, the common occurrence of identity diffusion in Wasps is something I'm pretty certain of. So we're talking Christian and mainly European descended, super-mixed descent to the point of almost impossibility to identify with one original cultural group, 1/124th this, 1/18 that...a fraction problem.

(I'm thinking anomie, and the wonderful Greenfeld again.) Anomie, namelessness, the inability to know who and what you are, the inability to locate yourself culturally, spatially, physically, mentally, socially. You have 37.8 careers every minute, you flip your brain like a tv set with 100+ channels, you flip your thoughts at the speed of google - which is why you need to be constantly hooked up to google, your fingers are always picking at your I-phone, you can't make constant eye contact, you can't focus on one lover, one job, one thought, one thought, one thought. You have given yourself ADD when it comes to knowing what you want and when you look in the mirror which face do you see? I am talking about a typical WASP problem.

On a grander world scale, I think Europeans, Aussies & Kiwis, South Americans, etc. are better off than Americans...I think the less regulated dating interactions and the more comfortable the society at large is with bodies and physicality (enter dreaded puritanical history) the better. I think the more socially-regulated and metricalized and fearful of offense and morally and legally inhibited people are in sexually-related interactions, the worse the likely outcomes. If you throw all this grammar between us, between every touch, and interpret in a myriad ways the most seemingly animalistic of connections, you're well...screwed. I mean the more we overthink the more bodily warmth and flow gets sectioned off into over-regulated little boxes. Soon, we could draw a flow chart of the date, and that would seem more sexy than the date itself. Or here's a better idea for regulation: write me sonnets, dream your Petrarch dreams, the metricality of romance is artistic-encouraging of creativity, and with that we have passion and a striving instead of constriction and fear.

Favorite defense mechanism in this life: Intellectualization

Super weapon of choice: charm, intelligence, and fairy tales

And then, the smart little lady lived happily ever after, pursuing thoughts,

those balloons that flow ever upward and offer their stringy little hands

up, up.

it all comes down to escapism

2010-01-18T10:42:00.000-08:00

I realized that today...I didn't want my hot little date to be over because a date, and another person, particularly one that has nothing to do with my academic/professional world of warfare, can be such an amazing escape. Another world that has nothing to do with this one. This one which is overwhelming (mentally fulfilling yes,) but draining, and Protestant Ethic crazy...except alas ironically the man himself is a monk of sorts too and ran off to pay his ever-churning dues to the Faustian machine.

Another world I say:

Vacation = another world, but this concept has been sitting officiously in my thoughts ever since Liah Greenfeld's amazing Modernity seminar years ago...one of the students did her paper on the modern concept of vacation, the bourgeois routinization of reality avoidance.... You change location and activities for a specified period of time, so this is the most obvious as escape yes? You vacate your yearly routine, and this is the acceptable way to "stop the clock" and open the wallet or whatever. Time and space are altered, the wristwatch removed, the tummy filled, the skin tanned, the brain emptied like some kind of overfull receptacle of shit. Clean your hard drives ladies and gentlemen.

My point? You probably guessed it, everything except the dreaded (whatever your most constant existence happens to be,) is escape. Everything. This blog, almost everything about the oh-so-efficient but reality-consuming internet, movies, novels, coffee time, tea time, lunch time, booze time, drug-of-choice time, conversation of almost any kind unrelated to "it"...it just depends on how badly you wish to escape from "it" and how much of "it" you do every day. In the neuron-killing dead end jobs of my past, I remember bathroom breaks being escape too. I remember going to the bathroom and hearing my boyfriend's mocking voice in my head "at least they pay us to take a shit, hahaha." - and this was the sad solace of office work for me. The smugness of being paid to take a shit. Any wonder I'm in a monastic, bombastic, soultastic, starvation-causing, existential crisis-inducing, nerve-wracking, brain blowing, PhD program now?

Now too, with the overwhelm that comes with this year, everything that isn't my work is escape...people and places and movies that conjure other worlds all provide pleasures guilty and wonderful. At least the work is delicious if totally terrifying because as you can see I'm a rambler. My ideas coagulate and clot. I have to make sense of them and stick them into academicese. Easier to just be a poet? Probably. Not that poetry is easy, not the kind that gets chopped up on market blocks to fit parameters of editors who are looking for the latest fetishistically styled lines. Little meat parcels, little sushi lines that used to make sense as perfectly good verbalized soul

food.

The Queen of Cups

2009-10-18T22:52:00.000-07:00

Apparently my potential and goal for the year should be the queen of cups. (I had a tarot reading done the other night, and this was the card that was to represent moi.) It fit. That's exactly who I want to be, and as I peer into my glass it is hard to separate cynicism from intuition. Maybe I've seen enough to know what to avoid? Or maybe the void will fill with more worthwhile things now that I know a bit more about the flow.

Or maybe, maybe each minute of life seems so precious now that it's hard to know how to be the perfect queen of cups. Drink, see, offer, be.

My latest therapy is kittens and living in a beautiful house with lovely people.

My last two nights went to partial waste. Wash your hands, water's gone, weekend's gone.

Boa noite. Drink to worthwhile time, and time not regretted but savored.

and now

2009-09-18T01:07:00.000-07:00

Morning. I'm behind and I can never catch up: that's how it feels sometimes. Life's too quick, short and brutal. And I have to stop for sleep and food. This marathon is almost over.

Some boxes to pack and last words to record. As if I'm covering something sacred?

I'm a really imperfect detective and I'm not the chipper Angela Lansbury type. I'm more like the lonely man version, (Hercule Poirot maybe?) sipping his whisky cynically in a random bar as he examines the other beings around him and takes a break. But he can never really take a break because people tire him out. They zap the life force from him because he's not relaxed enough, he's always talking to people but never fully connected. Aw, that's so sad, right.

Well, it's ok. I'm past the deep brooding whiskey point hopefully. And the mystery is less mysterious certainly.

bonne nuit quand meme

2009-09-14T17:26:00.001-07:00

I wonder how many of us there are - there must be hundreds, thousands? People who self-induce insomnia because the internet is so distracting and attractive and seductive and the day never seems long enough. (Tiring as it is!)

The day just stretches on and on and it's hard to turn off a day sometimes. To cut off wakefulness can feel like giving up when there's too much to do. Or maybe it's because you want to do just one more thing, and just one more, and one more before finally your fatigue takes over so ov

whelmingl

In wonderland

2009-09-06T04:15:00.000-07:00

I used to think that location mattered ever so much. I switch mine repeatedly, almost compulsively. I am dreaming about the psychology of movement. Like a rat in a maze, why not try to find that ever-elusive piece of cheese, memorize the walls, find it faster, faster. If we keep changing up the path, go to the fromagerie at the corner, switch it up to the Monoprix, or the grocery store in Hyde Park or Auckland or Brighton or Brighton Beach or the 5th arrondissement of Paris what difference does it make?
The truth is objects are just that. What matters is how you feel, who you love, do you see yourself reflected in the eyes of others - do you exist?

Streets, rues, avenues, and the prize at the end. I seem to keep wanting to confuse myself, to remind myself that geography is pointless.

admitting and tossing addictions that rot the brain - TSAA

2009-09-02T13:35:00.000-07:00

I'm going to admit it right here and now and then I'm going to destroy it, somehow.

Ever since I was a little kid growing up in the States, I was highly engaged by television. A little too highly. Yeah, that rotten black box with the fictional people and their fictional lives inside. You can forget yours, why live yours when you can watch theirs?

This is possibly one of the scariest aspects of the entertainment industry. Entertainment can go beyond occasional amusement to complete and total consumption of your life. The consumer is consumed by the box. The brain matter is wasted: simulating the lives of others, you live your own that much less. Your mirror neurons allow you to experience a percentage of that luscious, thrilling kiss between the two beautiful lovers, the pathways activating your lips, tongue muscles and salivary glands are lit up, your heart too, palpitates a little. You feel a percentage of the heat and love on the screen, the excitement, pain, fury, happiness, anticipation -- you are living their created lives.

Possible hypothesis and question: are those of us with more active mirror neurons, with a higher capacity for empathy, more susceptible to tv shows and soaps? After all, that could explain why some people get lured in more than others. Why some of us swoon with the characters from the get-go while others are relatively unaffected and uninterested.

There is quite likely at least a correlation here, more empathy = more soap-susceptibility.

The second key ingredient that sucks viewers in is the ongoing storyline. An ongoing storyline is like a life, it goes on and on, there is no definite end (as with a movie,) those characters continue to exist and they ask you to exist with them. It's scary, they're asking to be incorporated into your life, you into theirs. Suddenly, 6pm central time on Tuesday, you are no longer you, you are Rori Gilmore, you are Hiro Nakumura. You are sucked in. That's why there are "favorite characters." They're not just favorites, they are us, we are them; we love them because more than anything we want to be them, we want to live their lives. And at 6 o'clock central time we do.

All through college I had no tv access and did beautifully, and I was happy to be living tv-free, to be filling my free time with much more fulfilling things - books, people, places, poetry. During the two years after college I watched on occasion but not so much, I watched films a lot more but I didn't get too tv-happy and this was excellent. I got into the Colbert Report and the Daily Show which I used to watch during lunch breaks at one of my admin gigs and that was about it. A life not too intruded upon by fictional tv people.

Then during this past difficult, stressful first PhD year, (also the first year that I have lived completely alone,) when alone and tired I have been sucked into the streaming tv shows online and this is a habit I need to kick, hard. I think I'm particularly sucked in by shows about powerful women, superwomen more or less: Ugly Betty, Dollhouse, Alias, Heroes, Desperate Housewives, United States of Tara. (All of these shows and their gorgeoug no-bullshit female characters entered my life this year, and superficially filled the emotional gaps for episodes and seasons at a time.) This way, I can pretend that I'm kicking the world's ass when when I'm not, I'm just sitting on mine. Important note: these superwomen have very full social lives and no time to mope around in their studios, I was going on their dates, living their romances, and advancing their careers....

It's a catch, a terrible one. Particularly in this modern lonely tuna can existence. It's an easy drug, a virtual world where all the lines have been written, there is no need to stress, it will all be done for you, lived for you.

Kick it, destroy it, stop it. Be the superwoman instead of watching her, or at least be the woman, that can be more than enough.

Frangulation

2009-08-19T17:51:00.001-07:00

Sink humping

was discussed this evening

my fault: as the pub ladies inspired

a bit of sharing about my expertise.

The female orgasm is always a topic piquant et parfait.

Et maintenant en francais:
Ce soir comme d'habitude

les mecs francais avec ses penis francais ses mots francais

ses visages et jugements vachement francais...

ce soir j'ai me senti jeune et vielle aux meme temps:

parfait.

Comme un dessert, parfait. C'est ca.

Et la je te dis

que toi tu seras jamais l'homme

qui j'adore toujours l'homme qui m'ennui

comme la plupart des hommes

bah, comme d'habitude.

J'suis honnete. Ma pet.

So so now that franglais has entered

the flow what will you do ma petite

chou-chou

that's what the sleazy older guy kept

calling the teen with her teeny legs

all tan, squeaky clean.

I will tell you that men

and mecs sont partis dans le monde

de mes reves ou cauchemars

ou on va se voir,

meme si je ne veux pas.

Meme si je ne veux pas.

power trips and paninis

2009-06-18T13:27:00.000-07:00

Hello Paris. You are a sparkling majestic damsel of a city that always lives in my heart and charms me into sighing at your never-waning,

at your never waning.

You are perfect and blue and dark dark like night when

your brasseries beam and your falafel joints wink

turkish, eurasian, african, subsumed under versace

and versailles.

Paris.

You pull me into your rich arms and taunt me,

a reckless lover, never another

as full of luxurious svelte

melt me, dear city of de-lights

open up your beggar's palms and cathedral calls

take me under the bridge,

curve me up the thighs of your boats,

swallow me into your jazzy caverns

and crevices creeping with people

little ants in the fantasy maze.

I crawl to you and propose

have me.

connect and disconnect

2009-04-19T13:34:00.000-07:00

I hate scripts. Social scripts that we follow: what is ok to say now, what isn't.

Step 1: Ask her out to dinner.

Step 2: Ask her to your home.

Step 3: Kissing followed by sex? Dinner followed by intimacy? Love as a consummation of stipulated, presupposed social processes? Or just, just that I feel too disconnected from the whole process to connect to it any more? Or just, that I am still in love with someone else or someone in my head or, or, my heart where the hell is my heart?

I want to jump out of an airplane, I want my parachute to cruise me over the flowing, cold, windy beauty of the world. I want to be unencumbered of presupposed body and self.

Place labels on the woman, she is supposed to enjoy them: beautiful, smart, beautiful, cute, very cute. Beautiful. Bonita. Belle. Krasavitsa.

I want to laugh, laugh past the social ramifications, I want to laugh like a child free of the rules of sociality, playing, enjoying, imagining. That's what I look for in a man.

My heart is still so crushed, like that island of stilled lava. Tiri Tiri Matangi. Black shards of surreality, that is my heart. Betwixt the lava rock exotic growths are sprouting, reaching for the sky. My heart is an island in transition.

On Nuclear Families/Wars

2009-03-07T23:02:00.000-08:00

What is family? The nuclear family is too tight-knit for relationships to work unless you all happen to get along. Unless your personalities cosmically match up. Lucky bastards.

I decided to go skiing with my family for a weekend, it was supposed to be a break from my stressful, overly intense grad school life in which I get too much and too little done and meet too few and too many people and feel too lazy, inadequate yet somehow sharp and creative at the same time. An ongoing struggle. I always just want people to "get" me. So my attempts to hone language and to create unusual, vivid metaphor since early childhood have probably been my ongoing cry for understanding. There is the hope that if the words are piercing and unique and human and strong enough, that we will connect, that you will get closer to my consciousness. That this alone-ness will lose some of the alone as we connect in a closer understanding of the other.

Get me?

I did have a good time the first two days. Then my mother had to lose it and be unbelievably rude and insensitive. This callousness of hers has always been the pitfall of our relationship. I have never and will never be able to put up with it. I just don't put up. That's not how I function. I get incredibly upset with her laziness in controlling her own words, not that my control has ever been perfect, but then again she is usually feeling justified in her rude outpourings, during and after.

You cannot teach your mom new tricks. You cannot teach yourself new ways to feel. Sometimes, the sad truth is that you are stuck in painful repetition. Sometimes progress just doesn't happen. I am always dying to bring more empathy into her brain, to get those mirror neurons working harder, creating my reality and pain in her brain. It just doesn't work. I've been trying to since I was a little kid. I felt this inability of hers to be a proper mirror as incredibly painful, and injust. But maybe it's because she just can't do it, not that she doesn't want to, but that she can't. There can be a painful separation between people, when the walls between our separate consciousnesses seem impossibly thick.

I always want to bring consciousnesses together, but this fusion of reality is hard to forge. What do we want? Who are we? Do you want to be me and do I want to be you and are we? I was in love and felt inseparable. In love was a chance for me to fuse realities in the way I guess I am always kind of trying to do. Become me, become you.

I guess I hate being misconstrued and caricatured...there is so much projection here.

Labeled, ugh. The labels, the mean power dynamics within family, not my bag, baby.

Competition starts within the family when parents pit their children against each other in a battle of compliments and ridicule. The family in this sense can be a constant war, a constant modern competition to prove yourself again and again, sans end. Forget those warm, loving images in which family is supposed to be cuddly love and good times. Encouragement, fun and games...the family is also where some of the most painful modern struggles occur.

Yes, I love mine and find them in many ways to be impressive and wonderful. I am not saying that all I see is the struggle and pain that can be caused. I'm just having a so-so night, I am hurt by bullshit...too easily, but that's beside the point, I just am.

Salut from the Regenstein

2009-02-17T21:48:00.001-08:00

I'm happy in the library. Does that sound like an unlikely sentence? I don't really care. I am.

Not only in the library, but in my apartment (which incidentally has many practical issues that I have neglected, it is time to call my lovely Croatian maintenance mafia again,) in Hyde Park, Chicago, the University of Chicago, here, today, now hello. Happy.

I'm working on a midterm paper, the topic is Ebonics. Language, identity, nationalism, culture, self issues - questions that interest me.

Reading over my last entry, it was soaked with Michael Silversteinian linguistic anthropology language(I mentioned deixis which is a linguistic term for locatability in time and space)...whew, last quarter was tough but I have come out smarter. Now I have to keep getting smarter, sharper, full of the intellectual tools that will allow me to probe the questions that stir souls. That may sound corny, but like the Mexican spoken word artist I saw tonight, I don't care. It's like Hogwarts but much more intense. Magical, powerful forces, spells, modern witchcraft that self-reflects. I used to secretly dream of knowing every language, of knowing everything really, of stirring the world with insight, it's like this super nerdy idea of paradise where knowledge penetrates, validates, harmonizes and connects everything. My paradise is knowing and learning. Understanding.

Omniscience is not possible, if it were, if there were some knowable limit, then it would all be so much less exciting. It's limitless, and that's fun. There is no end, there is an end to a human life but there is no end to the learnable, the knowable. There is an endless drive that connects us. Maybe this was part of that connection, that transnational, all-encompassing pantheism-like feeling, that I've had at times, the way I imagined it, my sense of spirituality.

Yep, I'm in a super corny, humanity-loving mood, and it's all good. Be a Jesus, an Anne Frank, be nice people, it does go around.

movement and stoppage

2008-12-19T16:54:00.000-08:00

Hyde Park is stifling and liberating. Colorado is sunny. I will use simple, or somewhat simple adjectives to index my life here and now. Let's talk about deixis. Mine is free-flowing and ever marked by airplanes, tickets, airports, houses, apartments, locales, hermit holes, mountains, beaches. Languages, people, thoughts, moi.
I am cloudy, expanding, imploding, revolting.
Spaces are my hands, these walls, that doorway, the face with which I am speaking, the thoughts that I am segmenting into community-defined confinements a.k.a. words which you understand at least somewhat.
I pour my imperfect self into books, thoughts, attempts at metacognition, metalevel analysis of this ephemeral biological chance.
Happy holidays citizens of Abraham land. May you sleep well, eat well, think well. May your biology compliment your evolution as a self-aware entity. L'chaim.

The tradition of mid night attrition

2008-09-07T02:35:00.000-07:00

I left dear Manhattan.
Manhattan was a lovely busybody man.
He was beautiful but he stressed me out a bit
and he never cleaned up after himself.

I then had a sweet honeymoon with northern California.
She was pretty and sweet tempered.
I had lunch at Google, yes you Google who designed this blog interface
and I drank lots of Napa wine and looked at pretty bridges and paintings
and whimsical things.

2 days until blast off - Fort Collins seems to be an appropriate military launching pad.
Chicago awaits. I'm coming, dear sir.

Fast, fast, slow

2008-07-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

I am loving the chance to connect with another human being. Between these moments of connection I have been trying to learn spss statistics so that I can get something done for my research study like a mofo. Once I start grad school, there will be NO TIME.
Life is funny, love is funny, but connection is much needed, and my heart is a squirmy, confused little animal.

Weddings, and birthdays, and more weddings. Parties, parties, new york, new york, new york.

Monogamy, or something like it, has re-sprung itself on me like a hair rooted in the skin of my life. Shave it, tweeze it, but it always grows back.

Less than 2 months left of office drudgery, thank you sweet jesus. And then I can be a full professional nerd at last.

Though I may still be confused about men and love, and about how to deal with myself as a passionate woman always looking for a worthy vessel for that passion...at least I can appreciate human goodness. This wedding-studded summer makes me consider what I want. As my friends walk down the aisle and promise themselves to each other I see that this promise, this faith, this promise to struggle for as long as they both can in this complicated, fucked up, convoluted human existence in which nothing will ever be "perfect" is more beautiful than any fairytale.

Metamorphosis vs. Stagnation

2008-05-06T09:40:00.000-07:00

Woman is a place. Just read Angier's Woman: An Intimate Geography, a wonderful book, which did much a few years ago for my envisioning of female sexuality and selfhood.

People are places. Therefore home is likely to be a person. Like you or I, or the combination thereof.

Groundedness is far more based on self-understanding and comfort than latitude and longitude.

People morph more quickly than places, more like frogs or butterflies, but like places in that we keep our foundations. The groundwork, all those geological layers unavoidable - certain volcanoes and tsunamis uncontrollable.

Is that not modern life? We are all either constantly in transition to becoming something else, or we are stuck - and then yes, there is a category of people that seems pretty content with its status quo.

The pressure to morph, the need to morph, the flapping of wings against the gauze, and then flight?

Death, rebirth, the rising of Frankenstein - rejuvenation, artificial rebirth, identity creation/recreation, we are our own creators?

Identity order and disorder: construct a city in your mind, construct yourself, deconstruct/reconstruct yourself, clean up the mess, the facades, the fake buildings (like in one of those old western flicks) - your self should not be a movie set, your city should be thriving full of warmth, nourishment, people, movement. I want people to empower themselves, to take control over the rotting buildings, to spring fresh life from the neglected earth.

"There's a chair in my head/On which I used to sit/Took a pencil and I wrote the following on it"
-K's Choice

Sprung

2008-05-05T09:34:00.000-07:00

Twilit, happy, silly, floaty.
The season of love and baby-making makes me smile. New York smelled like the country yesterday. Overwhelmed by spring-ness I suppose.
I like where I am right now. I like who I am right now.
I've been meeting so many people lately. I've gone out a lot, gone on a few so-called dates, but mostly enjoyed myself with good people. I don't think I want to tie myself down right now, monogamy can wait, sorry suitors. Life's too good for haste at the moment. ;) (I think.)
Yay for the rebirth of earth. I always liked Ceres, though the mystery and power of Artemis inspires as well. I'm pulling my arrow taut this spring and aiming at the moon.
(Howls, smiles, goes back to work.)

Haunted hearts and pithy shorts

2008-05-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

Walking home last night, my head abuzz with the stars of Tribeca, (the series of shorts, "Cold Feet" was pretty swell,) the hollywood and international actors/filmmakers were exactly in life as you see them on screen - no surprises, but oh the rapture of the flesh - my own life became cinematic for a minute.
- - -
I came upon a box of love chocolates from my past, near my front steps. They were staring up at me from the sidewalk, the plastic torn open by a bum, who-knows-what chocolaty creep crawlies spilling out. He must have rummaged through the garbage bins in front of my apartment building, upended the bags, discovered the lusty chocolates, left the torn box body like a sad little carcass for me to find.

I ended up talking to a hollow voice mail system for a moment, a loved voice explaining his unavailability to the world. For the best? Don't know. I proceeded to call an old friend, to bitch and screech and rejoice into the night. Until I passed out, of course.

Good morning.

To monks, nuns, and ascetics

2008-04-22T14:02:00.000-07:00

Today I wrote a letter to someone who is rather preachy with his Buddhism. This is my response to him and to monasticism in general. Marianna the Prophet-much? ;) Warning, the content you are about to read is itself preachy, serious, abysmally long, and full of helium. Beware before you take on this acid trip.
PS: Oh yeah, it's also biased, argumentative and probably overly confident and cocky. Forgive me, I would like to be the first to admit my flaws galore. On the other hand, I do believe in the way in which I try to live, and I am not sorry about that. Take it with a grain of understanding, this is my blathering blaaah-g after all.

About your monastic longings:

I appreciate that the skills you have acquired through meditation are useful for controlling yourself and I realize that I myself could benefit from such an ability - I overreact to life sometimes, and yes I see the value in your ability to separate yourself from your surroundings, to float above it all and be at peace with the world. That's a great skill to have, one that I could have used while growing up with my mother - I turned to poetry writing instead. It helped, but of course only afterwards, not during the horrible fights, the skandali we used to have. (In fact, the more I think about having such a skill, the better it sounds because yes I am overly emotional and reactive at times, and sometimes wish I just didn't care so damn much.)

While I agree that your ability to not be bothered is a wonderful one, I see that it is ruling your life, and I would not want such a thing. The monk and nun's life was never for me, nor the life of any ascetic. Only at times of great pain have I wanted to be "comfortably numb," to anesthetize myself from the hurt, the bullshit, the prickly thorns everywhere. I would like to have access to this "skill," it is obviously really useful, but everything in moderation. The problem for me with the preachings of ascetics, monks, and nuns, is that while they can teach you to live a peaceful existence in which you are constantly striving for some connection with a greater being or knowledge, this is too extreme a disconnection from the world.

You say that you love people. In an "at peace" sort of way, through the lenses of the monk that you wish to be, I'm sure you do. But you do not love the world. You do not want to be part of it. You want to be beyond it. You do not wish to be involved with it or with the people that reside here, you just want to "love" them from a distance, like a god or a deity looking down on the silly humans with their silly, silly emotions. For me, this is not "living," this is a fear and restraint of the corporal, the emotional, the bodily, the animalistic, the physiological. I am proud of my ability to feel pain, love, attachment, anger, irritation, warmth, affection, frustration, etc. Yes, pain and all the negative stuff as well. That is experiencing life - not being afraid to experience the nuances of emotion that come with this strange condition of being human. I embrace it.

You want to escape involvement with others, and that is your choice. I cherish my involvement with others. I have understood much about myself from the reflection of myself in the eyes of the other, mainly through my relationships. That is the most intimate place in which you find out who you are. You can separate yourself from that for the rest of your life if you want, some do, but you will never experience the passion, the joy, the bliss, that I do. I'll take the emotional roller coaster over the monk's peaceful nothingness on most days.

As you have noted, I love the workings of the human mind. But the mind is not some disembodied, spiritual entity floating in outer space. It is physical, corporal, chemical, and emotional. There is no disconnect, disconnect can be a useful or detrimental illusion - depending on the circumstances. The body-mind split has been a topic of debate for centuries, but now we understand that the only split that exists is a fantasy. We are not gods, we are incredibly intelligent animals, endowed with self-consciousness, with the ability to appreciate the absurdity of being Einsteins who shit and sleep and fuck.

I am not afraid of this. I love it. I love the paradox that we are. I would never wish to escape my appreciation and connectedness with the world, except perhaps temporarily, to avoid getting unnecessarily upset about something that is not worthwhile, but otherwise never constantly. Restraining yourself too much from physical pleasure, desire, connection, and emotion is a denial of what you are - I would not wish to live under a rock or in some monastery, (real or symbolic.) The very understanding that I have of the world, the clarity with which I appreciate its nuances, comes from the openness with which I experience its complexity. It is unhealthy to be avoidant of your body and its needs. That is when a human being can eventually explode from the buildup of imbalance in his or her life. I believe in balance, and in not unnecessarily restraining the body but understanding how to help it best work in the crazy, complex reality in which we live. And keep this in mind: while some cultural ideas are useful, others are not. Just because an idea has survived for a long time does not mean it is a good one. Obvious examples being kamikaze pilots and suicide. The same goes for religion, customs, traditions, stereotypes, etc. Try to see beyond what your mother or your father or your teacher or anyone (including me of course,) tells you about the world when you make up your mind - question, question, question - that is one of our greatest powers as human beings.

Questa notte e per te

2008-04-14T12:14:00.001-07:00

Buonanotte fiorellino, good night little flower...there seem to be quite a few little flowers I have said good night to this year. Who and what are these flowers? They could be people for whom I must set the sun of my affection, or hopes that have become frustrations, a flower that has become a weed in my mind.

Sometimes we encounter a lovely flower and for a while it blooms beneficially, we water it tenderly as the little prince watered his rose, we listen to it, care for it, we might even draw it a sheep to keep the Baobabs away. How often is that rose a rose that by any other name would still be meant to stay in the garden after days, months, years have passed? The Garden of Eden will always be a confusing place, full of posers and half breeds, snakes and lilies, apples and poisonous fruit.

I revel in the wisdom of my 16 year old sister. While my gift is imagination hers is wisdom. She was born with it, as healers, psychics, and witches are fabled to be born with certain powers she was born with an innate understanding of the social world. My eyes are perceptive but innately naive. Hers are innately wise. I am always seeking the greater truth, always fiddling in the bowels of the clockwork, looking for the switch, but I think in some way she was born with her hand on it.

Can she describe that magic button? Probably not fully, but she can tell you what it does...the symptoms of power are fascinating, spasms of reality unknown to the blind - blinding to the sighted. There is an illness in this world, a disconnect, there are few with whom I can speak so as to be heard. When I talk I feel like I am either speaking to those who half-hear me or to those that think they have already been/there done that merry go round of thought, or I am listening to others who are repeating everybody else, a collection of monkeys with whom I am acquainted, all monkeys and geniuses with little in between. I am also speaking of the confusion, the "anomie," the identity disorder of modern society in which everyone is grasping for easy answers, buying into this or that religion, car, pack of cigarettes, drug, false prophet, etc. (And perhaps we are all monkeys and geniuses, gyrating between repetition and insight, inspiration and regurgitation.)

All right, buonanotte fiorellinos, amores mios, back to coffee and keyboarding and daydreaming about fall, fall.

On people, expectations, brains, sex, etc.

2008-04-07T21:22:00.000-07:00

The usual issues...I'm going to bed too late once more. It's simply clear that I need to cut men out of my brain as a concern (if that is at all possible,) because most of the time they are not worth thinking about.

Let's see, let's focus on the good stuff again: my study - analysis and final article, my poetry, friends, seeing plays in New York, more art, more shows, more goodness. I've blogged it so it must be official. Also health: I'm joining the Columbia gym damn it, time to move those little legs - plus they found that exercise is the only effective prevention for Alzheimer's and memory loss, the dentate gyrus in the hippocampus (a brain region significant for memory,) actually regenerates after a work out!

It's official and wonderful: I will be a professional geek at Chicago next year, YES. Yay!! I want this. Focus, happiness, goals, life...the rest will fall into place like a silver chain around the neck of a beautiful woman.

artistic masturbation

2008-04-06T12:01:00.000-07:00

In honor of today I'd like to say: Boo.
I'm going to make poetry and music with a jew.
He plays on his flute and his guitar verrry nice,
could I be the Ali G to his Miss Piggy?
Alter ego puppets making sweet poetry,
out in the park, on a bench, on the grass?
In a tree, on a plane? Could it be, super jews?
Making juice in New York, so sweet, so sweet,
tangerine delicious, I'd like to eat that richness,
mmmm...
--------------------------------------------------

That was just a warm up, friends. I can't give you the good stuff only the appeteasers. I'm concerned about copyright - what if someone decides to be me?

Happy Sunday-ness.

March on

2008-03-28T10:13:00.000-07:00

Dear random readers: I almost completely neglected you, this entire massively moving, marching, thumping, month. No, I will not neglect you.

Let's see: did I fall out of love? Not entirely, but the future Dr. Mar will be ok.
Did I fall into some kind of unusually more-defined future-ness? Kind of.

Is cross-examining the things that stick out of the back of my consciousness like a bunch of assembled busy bodies telling me "Hi I'm problem Grad School." "And I, I'm Mr. Man of Not Your Dreams but you need to talk to me, tell me what you're gonna do." "Hello I'm the voice of reason and grandmotherliness and everything will be ok." etc, kind of interesting? Sure, it stimulates me on a slow Friday when the over-priced starbucks caffeine runs out and there is not much I'd like to pretend to do while sitting in my little office. Bad girl, yes.

Schizophrenic self-conversations aside, I'm gonna go grab some lunch with a side of sanity.

Later humans. :)

The Wrong Chardonnay

2008-02-13T15:18:00.000-08:00

I was at the Greek Kitchen today enjoying a chicken souvlaki dinner, (it's just down the street from my new home,) and decided to try some Greek chardonnay. Big mistake: yet another chardonnay that tastes more like apple juice than wine. Where oh where is the good New Zealand stuff? Mostly in New Zealand, though I've found a few imports....

The chardonnay may be shot, but my job hunt is not. I'm starting work at Columbia on March 10th. I just accepted the job offer - thank God. I plan to march in pretty triumphantly and enjoy my own little office - I'm going to be in charge of the new doctorate of nursing, there appear to be heaps of responsibilities involved to keep me busy, and yay for amazing university benefits and free tuition!

My Boston weekend was intense/awesome/fun, the snow seems to have found its way down here from there, I'm going to walk down the aisle in Olivine (an olive green color that the bridal gods created,) as a bridesmaid in August, I'm trying to use these next few free weeks productively, and really it's all pretty bitchin'. ;)

Happy Vaginal Thursday tomorrow, eat lots of chocolate, a friend of mine is making me brownies, what better way to cope with all the hearts.

Manhattan witchiness

2008-02-04T19:41:00.000-08:00

Like clockwork on the 4th I write again. Almost like I planned this...visit. I am living in a "haunted" apartment and I like it. At least this one comes openly smothered with history, murder, love, sex, kick ass vintage furniture - the works. I like it. Bring it on ghosts, I have a bit of spirit of my own. Anyway, the wonderfully loony landlady is dancing to classical music in the kitchen, I moved out of South Brooklyn three days ago and feel beautifully autonomous and happy with my new dwelling, and today I'm starting to feel settled, yay.

Listen to The Pierces if you haven't, I'm loving them, and we're cohabitants of the same witchy Manhattan soup now. That's their whole shtick: witchiness. Same with the women I'm living with now, but they're good "witches" and I'm glad they're on my side. ;)

I'm drinking a stout that was brewed with chocolate.

I'm going to jip you on this post and cut it off right here. I will come back again in February month of love or loneliness or apathy and write again, make it up to you.

Brooklyn mochas and reflections on cities

2008-01-04T14:17:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in a Brooklyn cafe called K-Dog and drinking one of the best mochas I've ever had...it must be the chocolate they use in this mocha, it tastes like they mixed high quality hot chocolate with espresso, mmm.

As I sip this I'm applying to more jobs, getting ready to check out apartments, etc. The internet connection at Totya Rita's (the family friend I'm staying with in Brooklyn,) is pretty on-and-off as I'm pilfering it from some neighbor, and I have begun my exploration of Brooklyn cafes with free wifi. There are none directly in Rita's neighborhood, as it's located in the bowels of Brooklyn, not far from Brighton Beach. What can you find there? Orthodox and Hassidic Jews, Russian food stores, random junk stores, and if you happen to be heading home at 5am (I don't really recommend it, I did that on New Year's,) there might be strange men cat or more like dog-calling at night. I say dog, because when I think of cat-calling I think of harmless Parisian stalkers who might pester and follow but never do a damn thing about it. The men in NYC have much more of a sense of desperation about them, so little girls beware, look local, and walk fast. After that night I started to look up pepper spray vendors, but really it's much better at most other hours, even at 1am it's less creepy.

A little black boy just came up to me and popped his head at my computer screen, he startled me and I pulled my computer to me and recoiled scaring him away too in the process. In the past two days I've noticed that these little clean bohemian cafes seem to be a safe haven for kids in Brooklyn. Earlier this little boy came in and used their phone to call his mom because he didn't know where she was, and yesterday a little girl came into a different cafe on the other side of Prospect Park and sat in a booth doing her homework - she must have been only 8 or 9 years old. Brooklyn is certainly a weird mix of religious, hipster, and dirt poor people from every continent. I never had a chance to take such a close look at it before and see the socioeconomic problems of America so vividly. Capitalism is at it's best and worst in this city. The struggling, the dreaming, the successful, the hopeful and the hopeless. Of course the faces on the trains are typically incredibly tired and sagging - but still people are moving here, always moving.

Ok, I have to be a little more productive now - and I'm seeing my first prospective apartment tonight - it's in the East Village, wish me luck.

On the brink and into Newness

2007-12-20T21:24:00.000-08:00

Ok, so Annalise was right - I skipped a month of blogging my heart out, sorry. Been rather preoccupied with heaps of "serious" endeavors. Almost done with grad school apps and I took the psych GRE and aced it, or as much as that is possible with a standardized test - I scored higher than 95% of all the other test-takers. It's good to kick a murderous test's ass, yay.

Now I'm moving to New York. Officially starting tomorrow - well tomorrow morning I'm flying to Miami for a week to celebrate the holidays with my family and get a little sunshine. Go sunshine. And THEN I'm flying to NYC on the 30th, for a New York New Year, mhmm. I'm going to stay in Brooklyn at first with a friend of my grandma's, a little Jewish lady who remembers me as a little kid in Ukraine, she says she wants to be my New York Grandma and make me "soupiki," so yay for that. This way I'll be able to take a bit of time to find a decent place to live and a job.

I figured since I'm totally free for the next 8 months at least, (if I get into one of the grad programs I want, they won't start until September,) I might as well New Yorkify my life. As in culture, art, proximity to friends, something new as I've visited but never lived there before, and a hell of an exciting place to be - plus I love big cities - I was definitely happy living in Paris.

So here I come, my bags are (just about) packed, and I'm ready to dazzle. ;) What does Carrie Bradshaw have that I don't, anyway? A newspaper column? I've got this blog, not that I promise to turn every sexual and men-related morsel of my life into an advice column from now on, but I do promise to be just as, if not more fun.

Happy holidays and a toast: (yes I'm toasting in a blog, so pour yourself something delicious and at least 10% alcoholic,)

Be brave, throw yourself into situations in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of a new city, in the middle of the middle of anything that you don't know - it's exciting, terrifying, and unbelievably good for you.

Wikipedia's etymology of stir crazy:

2007-10-11T22:29:00.001-07:00

Stir crazy is a phrase that dates to 1908 according to the Oxford English Dictionary^[1] and the online Etymology Dictionary. Used among inmates in prison, it referred to a prisoner who became mentally unbalanced because of prolonged incarceration. It is based upon the slang stir (1851) to mean prison.

It is now used to refer to anyone that becomes restless from being stuck in one place too long, with a similar meaning to cabin fever.

Riiight. Not that my prison is so bad. And it's voluntary. But still, 'tis true, I am going stir crazy, must escape CONfiNemEnt....

Marianna is blogging more often, a definite symptom of too little action in LIfe. Life, that funny thing where action is goooood. My excitement consists of helping my little sister with her school projects. Though yes, sister bonding = good. But still, in Colorado, me borededed.

Wish me luck cyber humans.

In The Middle-Of-No-Where With Newlyweds

2007-10-05T22:21:00.000-07:00

There's something that reminds me of high school and college and absolute independence/solitude about having my own bedroom. Perhaps because that is exactly what it is. Independence and solitude. The independence bit has perks, after all, my creativity needs a good, painful kick in the rear sometimes. Not to mention the sudden overwhelming need to propel myself into greatness, happiness, something, if only to leave the place with too much space and time and this awkward futon where I have no one to nudge me with his elbow, no tangled arms and legs and odd awakenings, no kisses either, just me and my thoughts.

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Taking out the pseudo-funny blurb on my love life. It's too unfunny and caricaturish--I know I have a tendency to caricature my life, but here I'd like something very true to form instead: imagine an exotic porn star plastered in this space instead. Fill in the blanks, this could be like a choose your own adventure blog blob.
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New beginnings: find job, take psych GRE, finish research writing/analysis, apply to grad school. Show world hot, amazing Marianna self. Talk like cave woman.
Oh and yeah, my folks have newlyweds staying over tonight. The girl's fresh from Ukraine, here to start a brand new life. I think I'll take her out dancing.

Benefits of the middle-of-no-where

2007-09-17T20:49:00.000-07:00

Maybe the beautiful thing about living/being in bum fuck Suburbia is the compulsion to grow beyond it that such a dreary locale inspires. For me at least: there is nothing to see, therefore maybe it's easier to get productive, to save yourself from hell. In urban places full of incredible museums, parks, cultural districts, and theater, there is too much wonderful stuff to do - this is really only an issue of course, if you are a traveler passing through but simultaneously have it at the back of your mind that you should be looking for a job, finishing the statistical analysis and article writing for your research study, picking up the pen again, and applying for grad school.... Ah yes, that shit. So that was me as I enjoyed visiting friends in Boston, Connecticut, and New York - it was fun, more play than work. Then I visited my grandparents in Iowa, and I would like to send a heartfelt thanks to the boring nature of West Des Moines which at last inspired me to be more productive. And then there's here - Fort Collins, Colorado, where my nuclear (explosive) family dwell. Being around them stirs up so many emotions, issues, reactions, that every time I visit I never fail to be reminded why I started to write in the first place...at age ten or so. The pen was my emotional refuge early on, so maybe in that way I could be grateful to my family for rubbing me the wrong way, as it compelled me to sublimate, to write. (And still does!)

Now here I am, still unresolved but getting there - I BELIEVE it.

Have I stopped moving yet? Not quite. I've now added another city name to be printed on a sticky white luggage tag - Minneapolis. I'm excited to go, to see Joe, to hopefully remind him that I'm not a total nagging bitch, but also this lovely girl he loves - maybe we'll get a bit of resolution as to what to do next about the "us" question - to see if we can be for the other person what we would need to be to make happiness happen. I'd like to. But let's be realistic, though of course optimistic, because who gives anything another chance without some optimism? And mostly, lets be the best versions of ourselves.

I am definitely not the best version of myself with my family, and though this selection of best self is also dependent on others, I was definitely disappointed with myself today: I hurt my little sister. She is incredibly good at rubbing me the wrong way herself, can have a maddening, rude, I-am-the-teenage-queen-of-the-world manner of speaking, but nevertheless, I should restrain myself from reacting negatively and I didn't. I think I never agreed with my parents' parenting style - I've always felt, and still feel, that they let her get away with too much. The dinner tonight was not dinner, it was The Elana Show. Welcome viewers. If you did not subscribe to this program, too damn bad. Eat your food and deal with it, The Elana Show is on, and there will be no commercial breaks or channel changing. Bon appetit.

I could go on but for now I'll simply end it with wise words: try to keep the negativity down and the flow happy, happy, joy, joy. If you're the princess that has pearls spilling out of her mouth instead of reptiles, it'll come back atcha in the end - pearl instead of frog. With that I kiss you frogs good night and will dream of a princely metamorphosis. The best hope for changing anyone and anything around you is through changing yourself. The end.

Finally, some time in my grasp

2007-08-15T23:59:00.000-07:00

Hi. I left New Zealand, stopped traveling (no, not exactly, there will still be a bit in Mama Amerika,) I am on my own (Joe and I are visiting family and friends separately,) and I finally feel like yes, I'm here, I can write, I can step back and start to reflect. I was looking forward to this, to America, to my family and friends, to comfort, to a little less uncertainty. I spent most of today hanging out with my youngest sister, Tina, which was an absolute blast. I'm in Fort Collins, in suburbia, but the location is really of no importance whatsoever, the point is I'm back with people who love me, whom I love. I was pretty homesick during large lapses of the past year in New Zealand, and seeing Joe's family pretty often made the longing for my own worse at times.

Sometimes, being in a relationship can increase your alienation and loneliness - an odd thing that I found to be true. When you're on an island in the Pacific Ocean where you know no one and are quite isolated from anyone you do know, and your partner on the other hand has family as well as almost immediate friends (enter le hockey team,) and you don't get to see him nearly as much as you thought you would, well it kinda sucks. Most of his friends were men's men who were not only uninterested in the amazing moi, (yeah, bit of an ego killer,) but as a result I found most of them completely uninteresting (most of the time,) as well. I don't speak hockey and now have some pretty bad associations with this language that dominates the world of certain folks. True, there were a few nice guys that I would have good conversations with, but a good bit of the time I was overwhelmed by the obnoxious, loud, insulting ones - made it very difficult for me to not associate an isolated, sick feeling with the whole lot of them. If I think about it honestly, I've exaggerated the amount of them that were actually dicks, but you know what they say about rotten apples. I am particularly unhappy(yes I'm gonna bitch and get this out there,) about a certain guy (Psychology BA help me now!) who got under my skin in the most horrid way by completely questioning who I was, my right to live, the point of my existence besides being his friend's girlfriend, etc. Yes, these are the sort of things the drunk bastard said to me, before I (yes!) kicked him out of the house, but unfortunately, though I was really hoping to avoid this, I did encounter the jerk again and I lost it...again. Couldn't help myself, wanted to pick on him for being so inhuman, insensitive, outrageous.... I had worked myself up, it's true, but I wasn't going to tolerate him ever again. Oh, shitty people who get under your skin and stay there like some nasty splinter you should have gotten rid of long ago. But you can't, you can't because he's not your friend, he's your partner's friend, and suddenly you have much less control over your environment.

Ok, now that I've spilled out some of the poison in my system, yeah there's some bitterness there, I admit it - it might be easier to write about the good stuff. Good stuff coming soon. Doing a poor job of battling jet lag, ah well. Hello to Harry Potter 7 and catching up with Gilmore Girls = good stuff. Leave comments, leave comments, leave comments...! :)

On Pumpkin Soup and Other Important Matters

2007-06-28T23:51:00.000-07:00

What do you do when you come home from work? Is it a 9 or 8:30 to 5ish? Are you exhausted? Do you feel like your mind and energies have been put to good use? Are you fulfilled by your day?

My mind is put to disintegration, or at least it did feel that way the majority of the year. I think the numbness and lack of stimulation made the dwindling connections between my neglected little neurons palpable -- can you feel yourself get "stupider"? Oh yes, I definitely think so. Filing, counting (or "auditing" in office bullshit lingo,) spreadsheet concocting, mail handling, email composing, phone calling, and last but as it turned out for me, most horrible of all - proofreading. Not that after much time and rumination I didn't discover that I was learning something from my experiences, that being spit in and out of various parts of the corporate machine as a strange, versatile little cog called "temp" could be a valuable insight into what so many people "do." It's all much less of a mystery, and now I understand what it was about corporate life that I so badly wanted to avoid. It's the painful repetition, the long hours in which nothing grows and everyone sits in their farty little gray cubicles all day, you get up to get a coffee, to use the john, and that's the majority of your movement for the day. It's the sessile existence of a plant -- you are planted in front of a PC or a Mac and there your buttocks shall stay. Of course, my experience is skewed because my jobs were usually not the most exciting ones in a place - temp work is usually not exactly orgasmic. The people, lovely and nasty, also are of course the soup in which you as a temp, get to stew for a while (yes I'm eating pumpkin soup, a good source of nourishment as well as inspiration,)- I met plenty of fantastic and not-so-fantastic individuals: Pakeha (white kiwis/New Zealanders), Maori, Brits, South Africans, Pacific Islanders, Europeans, South Americans. This is one aspect that I have loved about New Zealand - the incredible diversity of this new immigrant nation.

For example, last night I went out with a group of beautiful girls spanning five continents. The eight of us covered: Brazil, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Germany, Taiwan, and then there was I with my Ukraine/US background. I think I felt at home in the way the protagonist in L'Auberge Espagnol(great flick by the way, see it if you haven't yet,) feels at home, his own cultural confusion reflected by the situation, comfortable in cultural friction.

Speaking of comfort: it takes so long to get comfortable any where. Here, I'm just beginning to really have fun and I'm about to leave. It's sad, but it's also OK, because I think I will settle down some where eventually (more so, anyway,) and my life won't be so arrhythmic. Figuring out where, how, what, not easy - what makes a home, any one have an answer for that? Maybe part of the issue for me is that usually home seems to imply ONE place whereas because I've lived and grown attached in various ways to different locations and usually more importantly, the people in those locations, "home" is a number of places which I love and miss and which give me that fuzzy I need-to-be-there feeling. "Coming home" to people you love, perhaps that's the most important point? Although there is more to the feeling of being "at home," (like culture, language, experience, etc.,) and there is more to identity, but being loved certainly doesn't hurt.

A Hello

2007-06-24T00:15:00.000-07:00

So the point here (obviously) is not to create a travel blog. I'm well past the expiration date for that, and having a casual, undefined, blathering blog like this suits my love of possibility far better.

On issues of self-consciousness: I find that I am hopelessly sensitive to what other people say and do, I take it all personally, seriously, I mull over it for days, I end up thinking about it and talking about it. What others say about me attacks me at inopportune moments in the shower, in bed, while I'm riding the bus, while I'm (supposed) to be feeling great. So undertaking a blog is probably a dangerous thing for me - blogaphobia? - but here I am, I love to share and discuss too much to not give it a go for now.

Do you find that old friends always look at you in the same way no matter what changes happen in your life, in theirs? (In the past couple of weeks I've been calling good friends back home, I'm leaving New Zealand in August to make an attempt at Mother America, and I've been trying to catch up with people in the good old 50.) I suppose I do much of the same, when you have a long history with someone, that history seems to hold a strong sway in how you view them, for better or worse. If you want to prove anything new you're going to have a bloody tough time doing it, if you want the reassurances of the past they're ready as ever.

The time difference between the states and New Zealand is quite the handicap when it comes to attempting calls. On weekdays, and often on weekends as well, I can't make calls until after 5pm Auckland time, which in the states is somewhere between 11pm and 1am depending on the state...great timing, right? So when people pick up there's usually a pretty exhausted you-just-woke-me-up grit in their voice, but oh well, at least it's fantastic to catch up with old buddies and family.

On status quo: It's a beautiful country - Aotearoa (New Zealand in Maori), and I've learned a hell of a lot from my experiences here. Three apartments, 6 jobs, moving in with my boyfriend in a new country, lots of constant change, ups, downs, merry-go-round inbetweens. Travelling here is fantastic, you can point the car in any direction (outgoing from Auckland) and you'll hit lovely terrain. We're going to travel for a month before returning to the states. South Island skiing, hopefully a Pacific Island, lots of other fantastic stuff....

What I'll do when I return is a big, looming question. Votes and input welcome.
Let me know if you vote for:
1. Flying into LA, staying there, stalking Hollywood celebrities for a couple weeks, visiting places like UCLA (which yeah I've been looking into a bit lately.)
2. Thoughts on cross-cultural psychology? I've been looking into grad. programs and jobs in this looks-like-it-was-sort-of-made-for-me area - it's emerging, new, interdisciplinary and I'm definitely thinking about it.
3. Going to directly to Denver from LA, hopefully getting along happily with my folks for a while, helping my little sister think about college, hanging out with the star sisters, having a good time camping out with the 'rents in general...? This could last for a bit and I do miss them.
4. Visiting friends and family for a couple weeks. Friends who want to make travel plans with me, let me know, US flights are cheap now and I'm looking into a multicity ticket so I can visit a good number of friends and family....
Also let me know if you want to plan a trip with me or would just love me to grace your doorstep.... ;)
5. Where to settle in after? Follow a job, or a professional course that I could register for anytime, or the location of my fam or friends, or a program in Europe or Israel or Asia? I'm attempting to not think about my boyfriend as difficult as that is, because that's the way he wants it, and I probably wouldn't be happy just "following him" anyway, though it's tough, we're young, we're figuring it out, knowing what we want or how we want it to work is not always easy. Basically, I'm being forced back into total independence and self-sufficiency. This is good, but also tough and complicated. I could definitely use some time on my own, to explore whatever I want to explore (and there is plenty of that,) and I probably shouldn't hold my boyfriend's uncertainty about how to live next year (in the same flat? where/how?) against him, though I find myself doing this quite a bit. Maybe in some ways it would be easier if he were totally certain, passionate, and Prince Charming about "Darling, I just want to do whatever I can to be near you but also I want you to do whatever makes you happy." (He's got the 2nd part down.) But maybe then life would be too perfect for blogging.
Advice and thoughts, warmly welcome.