If anyone out there knows of a composer who either was born or lived for some time in Azerbaijan, has a familiar name, wrote chamber music, and is still alive, I would be very much obliged for the information. It's amazing how much not remembering a key piece of information to a fairly boring story can irk me for an entire afternoon and evening. I keep thinking of Shostakovich, but he's been gone for about 20 years or so. The only other person who had a serious guess went with Perlman which is rather absurd since I don't think he's ever composed, although I could be mistaken. At least he's definitely alive. Since I have spent the last hour of my life trying to dig up this information on the web and have been catastrophically unsuccessful I thought I ought to attempt to pass the burden on to someone else, or at least get it off of me. I do still want to know. If anyone has a 2002-2003 or 2003-2004 calendar of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, that would save me a lot of headache.
It's also amazing how much time I will waste in a frivolous pursuit of information like this when I have much more pressing matters at hand, like a midterm that will occur in approximately 36 hours, most of which I hope to spend asleep. My studying is quite incomplete and yet I feel no serious concern, and most likely will continue in a state of blithe denial until Thursday morning at which point I will slowly begin to panic and wonder why I put off studying when I had so much free time available Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. One can only wonder about the ostrich in the sand approach, particularly when it's a repeated trope. I usually end up cleaning or organizing my bookshelf or catching up on emails to friends, but today it was Composer X.
I wrote a story many years about Rachael and Matt watching the visual equalizer play something by Mos Def when they were both supposed to be doing homework. I don't know if they remember - in Palevsky Spring Quarter, for my Narrative-Non Fiction class. I didn't really know what I was doing in that class since I lacked the serious creative writing or journalism background of all the other students, but I knew that I liked to write and thought I ought to formalize my knowledge a little. I remember that we workshopped this essay in class and that everyone wanted to know what the underlying story was. It turned out, based on our discussion, that really the story was the conscious avoidance of work, done so subtly and so willingly. It appears, at least for me, that nothing has changed. One could even see this writing as another form of that. I should be studying, instead I sit here and write. I could write only one paragraph, even only one good sentence and there are many nights when I resolve to do just that, and yet I think that I have only produced one or possible two such examples. Ten minutes turns into an hour so easily. But tonight I am going to take a stand, and meekly proclaim, "No more?" And I shall back up my position by strongly finishing with the next sentence whatever I choose to write. With such an ultimatum, nothing good comes to mind.
So last night was a bust. I got home late and decided not to risk a momentous struggle with my computer to cajole it to actually turn on and find the internet when I would in fact rather just go to sleep half an hour earlier. But if thinking counts as writing, last night was solid. Most of my free time is, in truth. Never fear! This is not a pattern: tonight I will undertake to concretely verbalized.
I was eating pistachios tonight, sitting at my desk and cracking them open absentmindedly one by one while I read the last few chapters of Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout. A great mystery. In the last few chapters I began to suspect one of the characters and was proven right in the end, which I suppose helps add to my good feeling. I do prefer a mystery that presents all the fact to the reader, however, just like "Murder She Wrote" did although I was generally too young to pay enough attention to figure it out. The Stout I ended up getting from the library is actually a volume of three Nero Wolfe novels, and I am eager to read the other two. Thanks for the idea George - I'm sorry it has taken me so long to come around. Being very picky about style, I knew I was in for a good read when on the second page a woman was described thus: "The one glance I got was enough to show that she was no factory job but handmade throughout." I can't tell you what I like about this sentence, I just happen to think it's rather fantastic. It doesn't come across quite so well outside the flow of the narrative, now that I look at it above, but I'm leaving it in. Read the whole book if want to see what I mean.
I need this snappy sentence and other more luxurious ones when I spend days like today stuck indoors in the same desk and chair reading Euripides. I liked him fine in English, but in Greek he is terrible. Pedantic, melodramatic, a writer who seems like he's trying to hard. That's the worst kind - I'd much rather read simple and unsophisticated writing than pseudo-highbrow crap. I really hope I fall in the first category (or the unmentioned third, elegant but realistic) instead of the second. [And if I am in the latter, please please someone tell me so I can try to fix myself. I'm not kidding about that. I think I have a pretty good track record when it comes to not killing the messenger.] There is repetition for dramatic effect ("woe is me!" all over the place) and serious melodrama (in the first 300 lines Helen asks about three times why she is still alive, since she is the cause for all the horrific events at Troy). One of my friends in the program described Euripides as a kid with a thesaurus who doesn't quite know how to use it. I may warm up to him in time, but currently I am much more nostalgic for Sophocles and Antigone, which was dramatic without excessive melodrama, and didn't mince words, at least in the standard dialogues.
True to what I wrote a week ago I have not yet cracked open my Edward Abbey finds from the library. I look at the nondescript cover every morning when I gather up my schoolbooks and wonder what the pages hold. Someday, soon perhaps, I will pluck up the courage and lose myself in his prose for hours. After my midterm, I suppose, after the break also since I am leaving this small city in only a few days for the sprawl and shoreline that is Chicago. I want to put a sentence or two here about what Chicago means to me, but I find it difficult to express in words. It is simply the place that I have made my home over the past several years, and as much as I will always tell people I am from California, I go home to Chicago. My familiar city, my familiar faces and routine of life. The freight trains at night and the Powell's box during the day. And the sudden lack of my dependence on email, which gives me so many more hours to spend with the cause. I don't want to embarrass myself or him with an outpouring of emotion, sappy or thoughtful or otherwise, but all those sentiments are there. It is a daily struggle to keep that part of my life private since it is the easiest thing to think about and talk about and dream about. But we tend to be rather reticent in public, and once I sent this out it won't be private any longer. So I write about books and sentences and ultimate, feeling the false privacy of the drawn shade and the solitary lamp and the comfortable mess of laundry spilling out from my closet and hold in the words, sitting in the dark with my pistachios.
I woke up today wondering why. Somehow in my early morning confusion I am still sane enough to realize that I am up on a weekend far before what is normal for me but I often find it hard to recognize the reason. I always had this problem of disorientation when I was an RA - whenever my phone would ring on duty nights I would always shut off my alarm blearily and then try to understand why the noise hadn't stopped. I rarely realized that it was actually my phone until my answering machine picked up. And I would always forget to reset my alarm. I am not at my best out of routine.
This morning was certainly one of the more successful in terms of coherence, helped by the fact that the sun was coming up. Light makes a huge difference to my mornings every day, and a sunny start like today is like a bonus round in pinball. It makes a good game that much better. I was up, as I am probably ninety percent of the time I am up early, for a tournament although today it was local and only a single day of competition in a round-robin format. An end to our winter hibernation, I suppose, although our next outing is not for an entire month so we have plenty of time to get rusty again. All in all it was a fun day with five short games, two byes, one field (nothing better than not having to move!), two wins, three losses (although one with a harrowing tale of a 4-8 comeback in hardcap only to lose on universe point). It started out cold (three layers, but no jacket) but the sun kept shining away and by the afternoon we were down to shorts and even just a single top layer. A fine day indeed. I was unsure about going, depending on the weather, and am glad that I decided in favor. The only real blight was my lack of cleats, since I didn't expect to need them before March although it only really hindered me seriously once, when I went from chasing my dump to falling flat on my face for no apparent reason. No friction, no motion. This situation should be remedied upon my imminent return to Chicago. Good luck to me!
But the most amazing part of the day was my discovery of chemical handwarmers. I have had a few packages lying around for at least a year, bought by my mother as a response to my frozen hands in Chicago winters, but I never really had occasion to use them before today. The problem is that once activated, they last for 7 hours and I don't believe there is a way to turn them on or off, since their chemical reaction is started by exposure to air. I presume it is self-sustaining after that point although I don't actually know. But it seems like such a waste to crack open seven hours of heat for a 20 minute walk to class, so I never bothered before. Today they were indispensable. I opened up the plastic right before our first game and was shocked by the instantaneous, pervasive heat that two little cloth-like packets with iron filings inside (among other things) can produce. How is this possible? and for so long? Perhaps my chemistry friends have some idea. Some kind of limiting reagent to slow the process down. Regardless, they were fantastic. It was warm enough that once you were running around on the field you could remove your gloves and be all right, but standing on the line in the wind calling an offense and a defense was too much for the bare flesh. The sideline naturally was worse since it lasted for much longer than the roughly ninety seconds between points. We passed the packets around from player to player - after they came out and cooled off, to heat them up again before they went back in. Most people had pockets to put them into, but at least one simply balled them up in her fists and put her hands down her shorts. The best of two worlds. By the afternoon no one even spared them any thought, so they were stuffed into my jacket pockets where they remained unthought of until I fished my keys out, six and a half hours later, on my way home. They were still hot, although by the time I had showered and changed, during which time they sat openly on my desk, they were down to room temperature where I expect they shall remain indefinitely. Overall I was amazed. The regularity and quality was astonishing. I almost feel like I could go to play now in even colder weather, with a pair in my pockets to heat things up during foul call discussions or counting-off on the line. There are toe warmers also, with an adhesive strip to attach to your sock, of which I have a pair although I have not tried them yet at all either. If I ever go back up to the Illinois woods in winter I may bring them along, but any other activity seems too trifling and shortlived to be worthwhile. Maybe someday someone will find a way to turn them on and off, or make reusable packets and then I can truly be free in the winter to go where I please when I please without concern. Amazing.
This may be the first post before midnight in a while. Go me! I've decided in the interest of actually managing to write something every night (which is harder than I expected) I can't completely avoid the mundane details of my everyday life or I get to soapboxing which is fun for the moment but I feel rather like a pompous jackass the next day. And I don't particularly enjoy that, but it seems contrary to my purposes to edit so much after the fact. This doesn't mean I plan to stop completely, I suppose I'm just going to give myself a little more freedom to write whatever I feel like at the moment I sit down to write. Show, not tell. We'll see (once again, or perhaps, as always) if I will ever find success.
I want to further the CrazyNomad shoutout to Weredog since that's pretty amazingly awesome. I'm assuming he meant the Chicago program which is even more awesome especially if we end up sticking around for a long long time, but that's a purely selfish angle.
I feel like I ought to apologize (never apologize!) for being fairly mopey in my writing recently but I'm currently confirmed at 0 for 5 and highly suspect it's as high as 0 for 7. Which leaves me with 5, but I don't have much hope for them. So we'll see. It's pretty painful to get three letters on the same day and I definitely had a bad end of the week as a result. All of us in the program are not doing well with our applications and either it's proof that in fact we're not very good at what we do, or the advice to only apply to the top programs was too optimistic for our purposes. But it won't be all said and done for another few weeks so we'll see. Chilly-o, as they say.
I did have a good evening today oddly enough to do nostalgia more than anything else. One of the girls on my winter league team invited us for dinner to her dorm apartment so we went and had freshly made butternut squash ravioli, spinach salad, sweet potato fries, garlic bread, chocolate peanutbutter rice puffs, and pumpkin cookies. Lots of tasty orange food. And while the sitting around and eating and watching snippets of the Olympics and telling people the story of my engagement was all fine and good, it was after when we were sitting in the hall trying silly contests and having random conversations that took me back to first year in Woodward Court, hanging out by Charity's room chatting until she came out to holler at us, or watching Dan and Don debate or seeing Matt hang his head in his hands, professing to be ashamed that I saw him drunk. As much as we had good in-room sitting time the hall was somehow more open and intimate at the same time. I remember crying one night to Adeoye in the hall (and maybe others) about my conflicted relationship state, and playing barefooted soccer or broomball after house meetings. The hallways in palevesky were too wide and dim and broken by the recessed doorways to be useful, and the suites too easy to disappear into. But Woodward Court was perfect, and holds so many good memories from where it all seems to have begun. Tonight I was with people I see once a week for a few hours and hardly know, but the night brings a certain sense of privacy and a relaxing of inhibition that spurred on our race walking and wall sit challenges - that allowed us to hear the story of how dingleberries got his name, and how Aneta has to wake up her roommate every day at 5:20am since she sleeps through her alarm. Silly trifles or random philosophy. Almost every day I feel like some kind of interloper on this campus, living a strange half-life, but tonight that all fled for a few hours.
I find myself rather speechless tonight. I had the fine fortune of being near a large television projection of the Olympics this evening and couldn't resist the combination of men's skiing aerials and the women's figure skating long program. Both combine an amazing amount of skill and strength and artistry that I find my breath, and tonight my words, utterly stolen away. They have been hidden from me and I doubt I shall find either again until tomorrow. Or later today, depending on your point of view. Aside from my ambitions to be a veterinarian or astronomer as a child I was most intrigued by these two events, pole vaulting, and karate. I think karate was really just based upon my desire to get back at all those boys in first grade who tugged on my pigtails every day, but the others were about height and freedom and power. About flight. I know the smiles are part of the act (in skating at least) but you can see the energy in the limbs of the ones who love the moment they are in and the prowess they possess. I have rarely felt this kind of elation myself - once in a while after a particularly good throw or catch in ultimate, and once upon a time when I beat a girl in a cross-country race after trading positions repeatedly for the last half mile. Leapfrogging. I fought to be the toad without a belly of rocks and I was. These are the experiences you can't plan to repeat - you can only hope for and dream of and work towards. I find myself increasingly without motivation as the days pass and I am heartbroken by the downward-tending lutulent reality I find myself imposing internally. (I've been carrying that phrase around for days. Thank god for Joyce. Thank god for George reading it.) Scott Hamilton was very critical of the skaters who lacked "fire" in their program, who lacked the passion to demonstrate their purpose, their spark. You have to throw yourself in completely, recover after the falls, stick the landings, learn from the experience, look back without regret. The glass-box stage. So often we are in mid-leap and can't enjoy the suspension, can't relax into the landing, can't see anything but the precipice or the goal. Maybe the solution isn't to enjoy each leap more, but simply to leap more often.
It's pretty painful sitting on a soapbox for so long - you definitely start to go numb. The problem is once you're on one it's apparently rather difficult to get off. But I don't much care to make any sort of serious comment on life at the moment. I am contemplating the shift from being unscheduled to being over scheduled and I can never tell what is enough and what is too much. There's intramural soccer (apparently we have been dubbed the Kickeros and if you get the joke I'm sorry for you) and spring league (mixed and/or women's) and venus practices and venus running practices and venus tournaments (one every weekend in april, it seems) in addition to all the normal homework and hours spent writing emails. Clearly to do all of this would be madness but as always the question is what to sacrifice. Since I can't play in the college series it's very tempting to play in one or both spring leagues but then I prevent myself from going to any non-series tournaments and make it harder to have the time to attend practices. And I suppose it speaks to my perpetual nerdiness but I do like practices, sometimes more than playing and often more than pickup. But without them would I ever get better? Evidence points to the contrary, since last year I only played in leagues and probably atrophied more than anything else. This year I'm getting more confident with break throws and have actually put up a few i/o flicks and i/o backhands in winter league games and almost threw a hammer. The fact that I even contemplated it is phenomenal. Where would I be without marker drill? Would I ever have pulled off my totally awesome huck for a score yesterday without lots of handler drills? (I just can't resist. It was probably the most perfect huck I've ever thrown to a receiver.) And I still have a tendency to underthrow people in games which I would like to chalk up to people not actually running as hard in practices as they will on the playing field, but is something I ought to recognize and react to regardless. Doing suicides with a disc is about the most helpful drill I've seen to really get people to run all-out, and give me a chance to practice. I actually feel like I've improved this year, marginally perhaps, but any progress is exciting. I've felt stagnant since I left Supersnatch - Xolo had potential but I was too tired from the track workouts to make much progress in any other situation. And for the first time in four years I can be at a women's practice and only have to concentrate on my own skills and progress. It's very liberating. Although there are times where I really really really want to jump in and say something but I hold my tongue. It's not my place, after all. At least I passed along the CrazyNomad so-you-really-need-to-learn-how-to-huck? lesson with decent success to a fellow venutian. My own, and female, Legs. Funny how I can't remember the real name of the chicago Legs. Jason something? I wonder if many years from now people will think "what was trophy wife's real name again?" although I suppose my name wasn't ever quite prevalent enough to engender that kind of confusion. As an aside, I find the way I write is often different from night to night and it's not entirely conscious. I think I set the tone for myself by the way I write my first sentence and I try not to look back. That's not the point of this. It is in fact the opposite. Looking forward. Like my ultimate practices... like my hours in class... like when I first started playing musical instruments. Just 15 minutes a day, they'd say. You'll be better in no time - why that's already 90 minutes a week of practicing! Imagine if I'd been like Jenny and managed a whole hour every day. I would've been playing sonatas after 3 years myself. But that's looking back. I think I will end up playing soccer, mixed spring league, and practicing with venus but not going to tournaments. I will keep writing here, I will take up the violin again, I will move on to bigger and better things. A new education, a new life. Today really is just yesterday's tomorrow, as I'm sure someone has said. Tonight I flick this out hoping tomorrow's tomorrow will always look brighter than today's.
I feel as if I have missed two days in a row tonight. Yesterday I forgot to write, due to a combination of exhaustion, too many mental lists, and probably some subconscious laziness. And tonight I have been cut off from the internet for the past several hours leaving me in an odd state of disconnectedness that is much more affecting than it really ought to be. I can, in fact, survive without my email and various websites for entertainment, and weather.com for the forecast. I have proven this time and time again when I am on vacation or at my parents' house or at tournaments. But somehow having something so closely near and yet so inaccessible is the worst possible combination. I don't claim that is a new and amazing point of view of human psychology, I just find myself experiencing it more fully this year than I have before. My touch-and-go internet connection, and now entire computer system. My suitemates. My pragmatically defunct program. My eligibility. Every so often people offer my their cellphones to call Chicago. It's free! they tell me Just take my phone for the night! Do it all the time! And I have to explain that there's a reason I don't call every night - the status quo of living alone would be shattered by too much contact and it would be more than I can bear. It's taken enough time to get to a point where I don't feel constantly alone that I fear too much contact with the people I care about, the people I miss. The worst days are right after we've been together. Everything is so empty. It is as if space has suddenly expanded to emphasize the void around me. The joy of the previous presence becomes bittersweet, and dully fades into the background until enough time has passed that I can pull out the memories and look at them through my glass box, keeping them contained - to marvel but not to be pulled in. I don't mean to imply that life is terrible, generally speaking, but these differences and juxtapositions are strongly revealing of what truly matters. I feel very poststructuralist writing that which is rather absurd since I can never keep all those post-s and -ists straight in my head. But I am fairly sure this is the school of thought that finds meaning in difference. My examples tonight may be petty and hardly worth such a multisyllabic title but I suppose it's about time I started using all the big words I learned in college. Regardless, my internet is obviously working again and I managed a phone call to Chicago tonight, although on a land-line. Connections restored - time to make hay while the communications shine.
I've been wondering about the truth of the American dream. I suppose this is the sort of question that one can't really answer in a satisfactory way, and I don't really care enough about it to devote all of characters to the subject, but the olympics are a prime example of this. Skater Johnny Weir was quoted saying that he saw skating on tv as a kid and said that that's what he wanted to do, and now he's in the olympics as the American champion. This is what the american dream is, and this is why NBC runs all those really annoying human interest focus segments on all the athletes from humble beginning and so on and so forth. You see this all the time in national sporting league commentaries too - the Steelers won the superbowl because (among other things) they wanted it more. I won't deny that desire to succeed and focus on that goal is very helpful in a sporting event, or any endeavor one might undertake, but I find it very hard to believe that it's all nurture and not at all nature. They say that Michael Phelps has a body that is particularly suited for swimming which helps predisposition him to win. Without hard training and the motivation to do well I am sure he is still capable of losing, but how much of an edge does that innate characteristic lend him? Is there a particular facet of Weir that allows him to be a better skater than others, no matter the training or desire for victory? No matter how much a little league team really wants to beat the Yankees, it's just never going to happen without an act of god. This is probably just a semantic issue, but it drives me nuts. What they really ought to say is that they take their overpowering desire and use it to enhance their existing physical ability. That may be able to make up the difference of a few tenths of a second or an extra basket or two, but it cannot simply be desire alone. And there are times when the body fails the mind - like when I really want to make a spectacular D in the endzone but my lungs simply can't transfer oxygen well enough to my bloodstream to make that happen. That's something I can train to improve, but I do have my ceiling (barring any blood doping, of course, but I'm much too poor and uninvolved to ever bother with that). We all do. I wonder how many of the athletes who come away with a silver, or bronze, or nothing at all honestly mean the drivel they pour out to sympathetic newscasters (I did my best and really it's just an honor to be competing here, so I'm very happy with my performance today). Why not admit your inner pissed-offed-ness (if only I'd cut that one turn a tiny bit tighter I would have won; If they planed the ice more often my skate wouldn't have tripped me up in that straightaway) if it's the truth? The aura of sportsmanship is fundamental to our understanding of the dream, I suppose, and the athletes have bought into it enough themselves that they don't want burst the illusion for us or for themselves. Is this then an even greater example of their disciplined selflessness? Tune in to NBC for regular updates in the next few days - I'm sure we'll have lots of opportunities to find out.
I met a coyote on the road once, only three days after I'd met cows. I had been driving on a small road over a fairly uninhabited hill near San Luis Obispo and came to a stretch that prominently featured a cow firmly planted in the middle. Swinging its head to look at me, so I stopped. And waited. Cows are very large. My parents crossed a field of cows when they lived in England and informed me of this fact, but I had never felt the truth of it so profoundly before. In my steel vehicle I felt rather fragile and small. So I waited. I think I may have honked. I debated before doing it, fearing a massive bovine retribution, and cannot actually remember today whether or not I waited in silence or let loose a sonic attack. I may have compromised and rolled down the window to holler. I can't remember. Such is the state of my pathetic memory, or an indication of the great anxiety I felt at the time. But obviously it did give way, or I would not have met my coyote.
I was on a road trip, foolishly trying to follow in the footsteps of the mighty essayists of our country, and naturally failing miserably. I'd like to think I failed in style, but I can surely say I had a good time doing it. Two days in SLO and back home and then I headed south but mostly east, towards joshua trees, full moons, and olive trees. The olives were at my history teacher's house - five acres on essentially wild land along with horses, mules, cats, and a dog. And for one night, me. I had been there many years before on a weekend rock climbing trip with other fellow high-schoolers. We went horseback riding after it was dark and climbed during the light. I was sore and dusty but loved it. I had come back a year later for a week of backpacking and climbing, and saw the brightest and fullest moon ever. It woke me up as I slept, so brilliantly blinding that I thought someone had shined a flashlight straight into my eyes.
This time I slept indoors, and left early after breakfast. There is one main highway that goes all the way from one end of the park to the other - I got my day-pass and started out. Joshua Tree is larger than the state of Rhode Island, which makes my intention to see and reflect on all of it in one day seem rather lofty and irrational. But I was determined. It was hot, and my car threatened to overheat with age so I opened up the front windows and let the vents run past the engine. I don't remember much from that day except for the endless miles of road, the dry hills, the scraggly trees growing up out of the earth like a teenager who desperately tries to prove his maturity. Joshua Tree may seem odd and barren but this is not so. There is a surprising diversity of plant and animal life, even large species like some kind of sheep or goat - I've never been good at tracks, but there was a distinctive hoof in my campground long ago. I remember stopping and going on a short well-marked hike that looped through a small bowl in a hillside, at one point clambering up a small pile of boulders to rest in the shade and with a view. I love the colors of the desert. The purple shadows, the gray-green mists of leaves. The rough edges of the hills jutting out in earthy browns. Here are there a flowered burst of color. The searing blue of sky.
I played with my water bottle as I drove along. If I let it sit for a while in one position a tiny dew of perspiration would build up inside the bottle as the drops tried to escape. I would lift it and tip, washing half of that dusting away, then replace it and wait again. I did this over and over, each time only washing half the area of the previous. For some reason I found the way the water continued to bead up fascinating - the way that the first section was much more densely covered than the second, the second than the third, and so on. It was like a fantastic endless venn diagram only with much odder shapes. Eventually I remembered that I had brought the water to avoid dehydration or sunstroke or any other related malady and drank, destroying all the evidence of my hard-won scientific discovery. I am not sure quite what this revelation was, I just know that I found it wonderful and mesmerizing and entertained me for many miles on the road.
Which was why I felt so unprepared when I had to come quickly to a halt, once again. He stood there, on the road, defiantly planted on either side of the yellow center line and turned his head to look. Regarding me for an instant, an hour, I am not sure. I had seen coyotes before when driving in the San Gabriel Mountains and knew they lived in the desert also but I hadn't expected to see one. Not so presently. It was present. Not by the side of the road, but in it. I felt challenged and evaluated. I felt more naked than I had with the cows, not because of the danger of a coyote (I'm sure, had I honked or shouted it would have fled immediately) but because of the sudden feeling that I didn't belong. That none of us belonged in that foreign landscape. Annie Dillard writes about her encounter with a weasel, quite unexpectedly making eye contact and suddenly crowding into his brain and life, and being crowded into in return. This was not that moment, but it was not far from it. We stared at each other through the windshield, in shock, wonder, amazement, resentment, fear. I am not sure how much of this we shared and how much was either of us alone. A long, long moment we sat like that and then he turned his head away and trotted off into the desert landscape. I lost him in the bushes and against the dun earth quickly and, feeling that the sentiment ought to be mutual, started up in first again and slowly took off down the road.
It was a long day. The heat wore on me and I took a break near the other end of the park at the visitor center, reading in the corner under a small air conditioning vent, drinking from my bottle. It wasn't mesmerising anymore. Just wet. When I finally left the boundaries and headed down to the highway I passed over the San Andreas Fault, a cavernous split in the earth spanned by a bridge that feels immensely too slight and infirm once you are directly over the gaping maw. It was majestic and terrifying, but I did not stop, I did not visit the lookout on the mountains above (or if I did I cannot remember). It had been one of my intended points of reflection, of the power of the earth hidden so deep within, of the fear that something as simple as a crack in the ground can muster in us when we are safely so far away. But I did not reflect. I never wrote the essays I meant to about Joshua Tree. I never wrote anything about the rest of my trip to San Diego or back home. My writing, turned in for my senior project, only discussed the northern half of my venture. Apricots and stars and airplanes. Subjects for civilization and normal life. I finally sat down six months later and added a scrawled page on my dusty encounter but I could not capture the alien nature, the discord of that meeting, in that place, at that time in a sleepy afternoon in the hot sun on the road. The pavement baking underfoot, the radio off for lack of any real signals.
I was alone, from the time I left to the time I arrived in San Diego, late in the evening with only myself to talk to. Martha Wyke has written that the elegiac poets used women as a means to define themselves, I doubt we in the modern world are so different - relying on friends and brand names to safely categorize ourselves. We exists, particularly in the teenage years, yearning after a means to determine our "true selves" our "identities" when in fact our method of searching probably indicates plenty if we ever bothered to pay attention. But in that one moment, I was forcibly defined. The opposition displayed such fundamentalism, such obviousness. When the moment passed my definition passed away with it. I have not been back to Joshua Tree since then. My sister has, to climb, but I have not. I don't think about going often, but once in a while I crave the desert. I am not sure if it is the color I yearn for, or the dry heat, the olives, the moon, my mirror.
Perfection is a frozen peppermint patty at the end of a long day in the snow. Laughter is the balm for lost, chafed souls. The cells of batteries now provide our inspiration, memory, experience of the world. I watch the planes land one after the other and then take off again in a silver glowing line. Where do they all go? Where are the people from? Why are they here? Whither shall they pass? Mysteries abound, so mundane they are overlooked. We are disconnected in a connected world; we are softened and hardened and magnified and reduced by everyone we touch and everyone who touches us. Will I ever cross the boundary waters and if so, which great nation will remain standing?
There is something very strange about being a new place - a sense of disorientation that leaves the wanderer in a state of uneasy awareness. Whenever I first step onto a college campus I have an intense moment of illumination when my visual surroundings attempt to correlate with the map I have in my head and there is a strange sensation of the knowledge settling in. We see so much more when are are new, when we are strangers, transient and curious. How many times did I take the bus down to the Loop before I noticed the giant red building? The very first times I went I was focused on the Lakefront, and my later familiarity prevented me from doing more than giving the skyline a cursory examination. But after I had been gone for a few weeks and not downtown for months I suddenly noticed the imposing edifice, painted a red shocking against the dull mirrored greys of the other buildings. I am again in the situation of newness, although this is the feeling of vague remembrance of a place - where you perk up every few blocks at the sight of a name or a familiar courtyard - and I sincerely hope that this time I will not lose my rapt exploration as time passes, although I suspect is it a pattern that is lost in the interminable tramp of the daily routine. If only we could maintain the wonder of ignorance throughout the acquisition of knowledge.
(Note: I am very computer-less so this will have to count for today and yesterday)
Last night when I wrote I was trying to escape my panic, and failed. I posted with the same nausea I felt when I started to write, and felt my lightheaded heart pounding just as fiercely. I found no comfort in the words I wrote, and felt no relief until I turned to the written word which, in retrospect, I simply should have done from the start. Reading is how I escape, and has been since I first picked up a book. My mother forced me to attend "Summer Sports" when I was nine and ten every afternoon from twelve to four so that I wouldn't sit in the library and read every day. How many parents are anxious that their children read too much? But it was an addiction for me, and still is. Just like LeVar Burton tried to explain for so many years on Reading Rainbow, every book contains a whole world you can dive into if you only try. I have lived the lives of military men, swordswomen, witches, american girls, wanderers, musicians, dragonriders, caterers, and silversmiths. I was enchanted by fiction and non-fiction alike - in third grade my favorites were the Little House books and the Young Americans series: biographies of famous americans with a special focus on their childhoods. I graduated to fiction - fantasy and mystery were the best, and I spent countless hours with The Cat Who... and Tamora Pierce. I still come back to these books time and time again - there are certain texts I find myself craving every year, and I will rush through a series of juvenile fiction in a day or weekend ignoring all other responsibility. I used to draw myself so far into the stories that my mother would speak to me and I would not respond. I wasn't simply ignoring her - I honestly didn't hear the speech. I would promise to stop when I finished the chapter but wouldn't see the break in the words - my mind would skip ahead and I would continue. I gave up this obsession in college, mostly due to the lack of time and resources (Chicago is not particularly fond of fantasy books, and the personal libraries of my friends were suddenly 1745 miles away). I found myself immersed in Marx and Durkheim and then Tibullus and Plato which never quite held the same thrall. Perhaps I should note this is a sign that I can't hack it as a classicist, but I hold out hope. There are bits and pieces of ancient literature that still manage to transfix my mind if they can take me unawares, transport me beyond the dictionary and commentary. I can't give up on Greek and Latin until I know them well enough to be lost in a text, not surfacing even at an insistent call. If I get to that level of facility and can find no texts to be lost in, that becomes a different problem, and most likely will herald the end of my foray into academia. My favorite writer to get lost in was Edward Abbey, for whose acquaintance I must thank my first boyfriend. He gave me one of Abbey's novels to read and I was immediately taken in by the language, the setting, the story. I suppose it is best considered historical fiction, or memoiric fiction, if such a thing exists (Mr. Frey, I suppose, can tell us about that). I had never read anything quite like it and was blown away. Today in the library I found a volume of his collected essays, a combination of articles, fictionalized truths, and outright fantasies which I am as eager to dive into as I am hesitant. I have been away from my friend Abbey for a long time, and like all friendships in suspension I cannot be sure if my memory truly matches our imminently future relationship. I am terrified that he will disappoint me, and fearful that I will be so enchanted again that I will lose my taste of other authors and be trapped in some crystal ball of diction and syntax from which I have no recourse. He writes with a passion for language that is entirely different from what one sees in someone like Joyce. Abbey is not ornate but he is poetic, he is not flowery, but has written one of the best accounts of the desperation of lost love that I have ever read. I knew from the first sentence that I would love him, just as I knew from the first page of Catcher in the Rye that I would never like anything written by Salinger. I can't explain very often what it is that seizes me about an author, about writing. I am hastily judgmental and rarely change my mind. I have given no author, in recent memory, a second chance unless I felt there was some additional value to reading the work that superseded my dislike (like Marx, who I read much to early in life). I gave up on Faulkner, Wright, Dickens, Austen after reading only one book, or short story, or page. Why return to something that brings no pleasure, no joy, no delight in the sensuous pleasure of language well-used? I am a sentence-narcissist myself. In my attempt to self-soothe last night I first re-read everything I had posted and then turned to Reading Lolita in Teheran which I am enjoying immensely. It takes a great deal of control for me to put the book down each night and not feast on the pages of deft prose and poignant wit. But I must confess that I found my own writing about snow to be the most pacifying. When I write what I feel is a truly good sentence (and this is not terribly common, although I hope it becomes more so), I feel an attachment to it as if it were alive. I have found myself reworking academic papers so as to preserve a particular sentence that I valued about all the rest - not necessarily because of a proven point, but simply because of how it was written. This level of connection verges on obsession and is absurd, but it is the truth and it is how I look at language, particularly mine own. I have quirks with language, as I'm sure many others do - my second attempt for a site name was spackle.blogspot mostly because spackle is probably my favorite word in the English language. It's just so much fun to say, especially if you say it like a pirate. This speaks to my admiration for Margaret Mahy who writes the most fabulous chapter books for children I have read. She is absolutely fantastic and I think anyone who read her will instantly be filled with an urge to play hopscotch and skip through the halls. I particularly recommend The Librarian and the Robbers or perhaps The Robbers and the Librarian, but there are many others also. I didn't quite mean for this to turn into a reading list - my initial feeling was to write about escaping and how we manage such a thing - but I suppose this is an example of me doing exactly that. I tried to do the same last night and simply lose myself in my own prose which was stilted enough to keep me distant. But writing this, writing tonight, every time I think of a new author I am carried into the pages of that book, my mind whirled into the fictive, or at least poetic, my eyes glaze over as I recall the elements I found so moving and I almost become recaptured by them, in spite of my obvious and current distance from them. What I write about them can never truly capture the rapture I feel on every encounter. The fictions allows me dive into the characters and worlds and live lives I've always dreamed of. The non-fictions lose me more in the words than in the described - some phrases seem like such a perfection of the language that we ought to build shrines to them and pray that they may guard our tongues to only produce speech of the same eloquence and worth. If only. If only. Enough for now. I have lost my thread and begin to fear the minotaur.
I have a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon on a bulletin board over my desk, one of many cartoons my mother is in the habit of sending along with miscellaneous mail and packages. It's from the Sunday paper and the entire space (quite large, since it used to be at the stop of the front page) is one large cel showing the two erstwhile friends careening down a hillside in what looks like a Radio Flyer. Hobbes says to Calvin, looking rather morose, "Well, summer is almost over. It sure went quick didn't it?" To which Calvin wisely answers, "Yep. There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want." I was trying to think of what to write tonight, and failing in inspiration utterly. I am filled with a dull and pointless panic about my future which unfortunately wastes my time in blind agitation and prevents me from having any sort of creative, constructive thoughts. These first two paragraphs have probably taken me as much time to write as most of my last post (granted, it wasn't long, but I think the point is evident). Panic gives you time to do lots of nothing, and yet it's not a satisfying kind of nothing. I find the afternoons when I stare out the window and watch the planes land, one every minute it seems, pass much more easily and quickly than five minutes spent with a deer-in-the-headlights brain, watching my email inbox in hopes of getting a new message from someone that I can respond to, and ignore my present plight. How do we qualify nothingness? For it is true that someone spending an afternoon doing nothing can either be quite pleased with this occurrence or be quite upset that their time has been wasted. I can spend two consecutive Saturdays this way and feel differently about each of them. I remember my sister writing a five page paper on nothing in King Lear (about Cordelia's speech when King Lear asks the daughters to tell him how much they love him) although I never read it and can't comment on the details. Clearly there is a lot to be said about nothing, and I won't manage to do the topic justice here. I have been wondering recently how many people are actually doing nothing when they say that they are. Calvin is, after all, wagoning down the hillside with his tiger, and I would consider my nighttime sledding excursion to be something similarly. I read an article about how people are happier and have less stress when they take some time for things like meditation - perhaps the truest form of doing nothing. The article praised the value of time spent without constant sensory input or metal activity. Hence if you listen to music while you walk to class or do a crossword puzzle while you eat lunch you have just lost the nothingness of that time and added value to it. Does staring out the window at my planes count? I do watch them as far as I can, and often count the time between planes. They seem to land and take off in batches, appropriate for the ease of air traffic control, I suppose. The fact that I have learned from this, or at least made a supposition, suggests that I have been doing something, however nothinglike it seems. My third year of college contained a class on Storytelling which I had a lot of fun with. At one point we read a short story by Hemingway, called The Killers in which, as we all protested in class, "nothing happens!" We meant by this that there was no real character development or even a normal plot line. The action of a man getting killed in no way changes the exterior world, and hardly changes the interior world either. The man is still sitting in the armchair in his apartment only instead of sitting rigid in fear of his death, I suppose he sits in the rigor mortis of the death he feared so much. We had mutually agreed in class that a story per se, and not just a work of fiction, needed at the very least a beginning, middle, and end, which were more than just a progression of plot. We needed progression of attitude, of feeling, of spirit. The end needed to indicate a different situation from the beginning. Under this criterion I suppose Samuel Beckett's play Endgame would fall under the same non-story heading. Nothing happens. I wonder what I am writing at this moment would fall in the Hemingway/Beckett category of fiction (or nonfiction) or if it could possibly fall with the range of acceptable storytelling. I suppose to earn that moniker my current writerly self-awareness is not sufficient but I shall have to show some kind of change or new understanding to take back with me. I think the chances are slim to none, but perhaps, being within the world I create, I can't truly judge for myself. And yet I suppose I understand this world, to the extent anyone can, the best out of us all. Funny how life works like that.
I will certainly proclaim at this point that I have written a whole lot of nothing. Pointless drivel again, although this time compelled not by exhaustion but by a lack of inspiration. Interesting to note that panic has various forms also. I do quite well with the panic of a paper being due the next day, and usually manage to turn out a credible piece of writing. And yet here, when my panic is contrary to my goal (or at least not aligned) I find myself stuck, trapped in the mire of a seething mind. Like trying to pull a mastodon out of tar. I am tempted to delete this entire page and start entirely over, but I fear I would only have the courage to write about my failure. But keeping this, and publishing it, I feel a certain sense of shame. Where is the wordplay? Where is my childlike excitement at the first flakes of snow? Where is the rich comfort of recollection? Why instead must I resort to rhetorical questions, which I have been taught means the writer is so unsure of their point that it cannot be committed to a sentence? Can one be uncertain about nothing?
I noticed that in the last 2 days, since I actually started writing, my profile has magically doubled the number of visits it's had, and I just want to take a moment to clarify my identity: I am not actually a trophy wife. I'm not even married (although that's in progress). I'm not sure why I identify with the name - it's not who I am or who I ever really was, but it is the only nickname (not counting parts of my actual name) I've been given that's stuck for any length of time and for that reason it's comfortable and seems appropriate. It was passed along in the fine tradition of ultimate teams when one is suddenly struck with inspiration and dubs a team member something so appropriate at that moment that henceforth they are called by that name, and that name only. I didn't know Tiger's real name for at least a year, and didn't find out the reason for his name until fairly recently.. such is the world of ultimate nicknames which occasionally are transparent (Flipper, Legs, Tricky) but often form the punchline of an inside joke, sometimes so old that few remember the actual meaning. I was dubbed Trophy Wife upon my team's discovery of my engagement rather spontaneously - I'm pretty sure it was intended somewhat sarcastically but we all took to it so here I am. Trophy Wife. It's a hell of a lot better than other names that stuck around for brief periods of time - who really wants to be known as "dump truck" or "shorty" or "poo-stick" or "scrappy-doo" for years? (the last one isn't quite so bad, I'll admit) although they have the distinct advantage of being enigmatic enough to not stereotype the holder at least. I could write paragraphs more (and maybe even think up some really nice metaphors) about nicknames and real names and identity and masks and whatnot, but honestly I'm quite tired and not feeling eloquent, as I'm sure anyone with half a brain will have noticed. I'll try again tomorrow.
It's snowing tonight. The flakes started this afternoon lightly, meandering down in the breezes, melting on the pavement as I tried to focus on my Greek and ignore the first real winter weather of this calendar year. When I finally left it was coming down thickly, blowing straight into my face no matter which way I turned (how does that always happen? how does the wind know?) and upon my final return the sidewalks gave off the squelching crunch of light powder compressed underfoot. Not as satisfying as the crunch of breaking through the icy crust, but it's certainly a start. There's something magical about the snow for me that goes beyond the wonder of a dull cityscape transformed into a playground. A big storm like this one, projected to drop 8 to 10 inches, takes me back to the snow in my childhood (both distant and recent) when the mountains would be covered and we'd rush home after church on Sunday to drive to the snow. "Up to the snow" we would go, swinging around the curve at 4000 feet - the lowest it ever really came and lasted - onward past Chilao and Newcomb's Ranch with all the motercycles out front. Good french fries, especially after 40 minutes on the road. Up to the ski lifts or Buckthorn where there were picnic tables and small ravines. I could never stay on course, always diving off our giant plastic saucers at the last moment to avoid trees. We would eat frozen thin mints and cheddar cheese sandwiches with gherkins and French's Mustard; drink hershey's hot chocolate from the big green thermos, still burning hot from its pot on the stove. We would know it was time to leave when my hand and feet go too cold and I would start to cry. That is the snow for me - the mountains, gaters over my boots, building snow-cats or snow-bears but never snow-men it seemed. A quiet oasis and escape from the city. I still get excited when it snows enough to make angels on the quads or for a good midnight snowball fight around campus, although I've never been any good at those. I'm going sledding tomorrow down the little hill by the library, sitting on my little yellow Daredevil disc. It's not much, but it will do when my mountains are so far away, and warm and dry this winter. Maybe my canadian saucer will bear as well as it did last year, careening down the hills made by the plows - a four-foot course but thrilling for the few seconds you slide down, trying to keep hands and feet in the air, feeling the power of gravity and the rush of the wind. Why does snow gleam so white? I suppose the same reason that Mirror Lake in Yosemite gets its name. Some reflective quality in the bonds of hydrogen and oxygen that shines our light back at us, gleaming under streetlamps and headlights. It's odd to look out a window and watch snow falling between two buildings without external light - it's backlight by the opposing structure and seems like black rain falling, changing to ethereal white when it hits the ground and is finally lit from above. I am tempted to run giggling through the flakes, kicking up the dusty clouds, twirling on the slick sidewalk but mostly I refrain, and only skip here and there when I think no one is paying attention. It seems unfair to me that all these people get their snow so easily. I had to work for it as a child - an hour in the car each way, a wet and cold tramp to a good spot for sledding, peeing behind a log, watching the heat melt a hole one foot? two feet? deep, looking for tracks which I could never identify. Here snow is only exciting while it falls, for how can it entrance when covered with the black soot of city life, crusted and churned? I wonder about the way the snow reflects us, in so many ways. I wonder how this writing reflects me. Is the mirror it displays warped or clear? Bubbled, or like the funhouse that twists an image but keeps it smooth? Refracting like broken glass - the same bits and pieces mingled and seen from different angles all at once? I try to be myself, but I never speak like this - I suppose I am afraid of the ridicule of such pretension, as it would seem, in conversation. And I don't quite think like this either, although I do for this purpose since I don't edit once I write. Mostly. Here's hoping I don't lose faith, and keep writing as I have hoped to do for so long, and failed time and time again. Here's to the futile hope of sketching every snowflake before your intent breath melts the crystals away.
Well Crazy Nomad, we'll see how far I wander with this one... Your blog and my utter lack of conventional entertainment have turned me back to the world of words which I find myself wanting to be a part of, however small, once again. So you have thus inspired me, and your last postings have left me with my site address, since trophywife and spackle were both taken, and I am tired enough to not have any other vivid ideas at this very moment. Stealing directly from your post, as a reminder,
oojamaflip = A thing whose name one cannot remember, does not know, or does not wish to mention; (by extension) a useful implement, a gadget. Also: (Mil. slang) a sauce or custard.
Despite my whim in choosing this name I find it actually quite accurate for my intentions. I think of this not as a daily or weekly or monthly chronicle - it is more of my space reserved for quiet thought, my chance to challenge myself to finally do what I learned long ago from Mr. Henshaw - that if one is ever to aspire to any true writing, one must endeavour to write every day. I doubt emails to Mr. Man count for much in this regard, I certainly lack the appearance in them of producing anything eloquent or vibrant or touching (not to belittle them, but they have become commonplace and ordinary and lack the sparkling newness of email so many years ago), although there is no apparent sign of that yet here. Space to write, space to think, to ramble, to explore. So we will see how long this lasts, and how far I go with it. I wrote emails long ago, young and passionate and seeming so full of energy and life compared to the drivel I produce these days, and envisioned my act of sending them the way that one might flick a crumpled ball of paper from a tall building off into space - the small circle of forefinger and thumb containing surprising power so that when you finally look up and wonder, the paper is gone and hidden, floating off in a void where others may or may not find it, may or may not ever let you know that they have.
