“You cannot be your own filter. If you’re always told that you’re right, you will eventually believe it, and that is dangerous to not only yourself, but to everyone you talk to. We all need editors. If you don’t believe me, go sit through all three prequels. You know the ones I’m talking about. I don’t even have to say the name.”
-John Cheese, Writer
Filed under Quotations., thinking
#25: Probably unknown (possibly “guilty”) pleasures. Talk about them.
Desperate Housewives. Any and all Investigation Discovery shows. Sweet Valley High books. V.C. Andrews novels. Nineties music, especially Alanis and Jewel. Twilight (OH, THAT’S RIGHT); the books, the movies, and anything else that has to do with it. Josh Hartnett. Putting soy sauce on my salad. Pretending to be in a music video when I listen to ANY MUSIC. Imagining what I’ll do when, someday, I run into the people that left me behind. Getting mildly drunk and letting my imagination take the wheel, completely. Dancing around in my living room when I’m alone, until I either step on a cat or run into the coffee table. Celebrity-obsessed, trashy magazines. Drawing naked ladies, ballet dancers and ethereal scenes. Painting with water colors. Watching videos of people having their dreams come true (think: competition shows’ winning moments). Kaiser Permanente commercials (that LADY always makes me cry). Talking about anything with my brother, except his girlfriends, who tend to suck a whole lot. Green olives and cream cheese, eaten together, usually in sandwich form. Zoos.
***
…because I just came back from an AMAZING trip to Hawaii (more on that later). But, I read this today and it did nothing if not resonate with me completely.
“I know from my own upbringing how useless it is to compare [a] child’s circumstances to the far worse circumstances other people have, i.e., “At least you never go to bed hungry.” When you are feeling miserable about the state of your family, a pantry full of Ramen is a cold consolation.” -Michelle Tea
I really wish more people understood this.
Filed under Family, Quotations.
“Help me out,” said the minnow to the trout
“I was lost and found myself swimming in your mouth
Oh, help me, chief, I’ve got plans for you and me
I swear upon this riverbed, I’ll help you feel young again.”
Oh, not your everyday circumstance…
The hummingbirds taking coffee with the ants
And I said, “Please, I know that we’re different
We were one cell in the sea in the beginning
And what we’re made of was all the same once
We’re not that different after all.”
“Help me out,” said the eagle to the dove
“I’ve fallen from my nest so high above
Oh, help me fly, I am too afraid to try
Now set up in this fear of heights
I’m praying you can set me right.”
Oh, not your everyday circumstance…
The elephants sharing peanuts with the rats
And I said, “Please, I know that we’re different
We were one cell in the sea in the beginning
And what we’re made of was all the same once
We’re not that different after all.”
- A Fine Frenzy, The Minnow and the Trout from the album “One Cell in the Sea”
Filed under Music, Quotations.
“The thing is, I don’t understand you. In fact, I’ve never understood you. You make decisions based solely on how the consequences will affect you, only you. You love me one minute, then hate me the next. You tell me that you can’t stand qualities about me that you exhibit yourself on the regular. You blame me for problems you’ve created in your life, problems that it’s not even feasible I could be responsible for. You lied to people about me, in a most unacceptable fashion, thinking yourself safe and justified in your cruelty. I know you don’t see it that way and I suspect you can’t, not even with a magic mirror. Not even with me telling you, right now. And, right now, you’re probably thinking that I’m the crazy one, the delusional one, the weak and unhappy mess that can’t overcome anything without someone else to blame. But darling, that’s you all over. You in a processed nutshell. I cared about us, I really did, but you’ve pushed me out with such violent silence and emotional wreckage that I can’t even muster enough emotion over you to be angry anymore. I just don’t really care. A little, sure. How could I not, when I’ve loved you so long? But not enough to try to bring you back to me. If you want to go, please go. If you want to stay, you know where to find me. Just know that I know more about what you really think of me than you’d ever suspect. You should’ve kept quiet. Humans, in general, are not trustworthy. It’s a unfortunate truth, but in this particular case, it allowed me to open the drapes and see the sky again. I’m not by any means the only person who knows what you are, and somewhere inside that broken heart of yours I suspect you know, too. You’re not dumb, just blind. Unwilling and really, irresponsible. A lot of us choose to be blind. I chose to be blind, with you, and so did so very many people. But from that blindness came confusion, pain, sadness, rage. I’ve cried over you for what seems like years. And now that I’ve realized that I don’t understand you, I’ve also realized that I don’t really want to. You’re a wreck, darling. And you’ll stay that way probably forever. Waiting for you to change is like waiting for angels to rescue me from this half-life I’ve created to make you happy. To hide from you, and your inexplicable outrage at anything and everything that displeases you. I’ve got nothing left for you, darling. You already took away everything I had to give, and when that wasn’t enough, you discarded me like a piece of unworthy trash until you needed me for some paltry errand again. When you fall from grace–and you will fall–I don’t want to be around to watch. And I certainly won’t be there to clean up after you. Not this time.”
-Natasha’s monologue from “Humans,” a short play by Maria Berkovsky. Translator unknown.
Filed under Life., Quotations., Writing.
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Filed under Life.
Once upon a time, a girl met a boy. They fell in love, but couldn’t be together. The girl said she was afraid. The boy asked why, and she said she didn’t want to lose control of herself. He stared at her. He made her feel adored, but still she wouldn’t leave the safety of her castle, a place she’d grown too comfortable in. A place where the dust settled in thin, pretty layers around her picture frames and books. If you moved her figurines, her snow globes and ivory rabbits, the shape of their bases and little feet could be seen clearly in the quiet dust. She loved her castle. It was home.
The boy tried, lazily but persistently, to make her leave her sleepy castle. He made her laugh. His eyes pierced her very heart. His hands were rough and his history fascinating to the girl. She lived and died a thousand times when he spoke to her, sweet words, whispered words, private words. They never did anything more. Never took a picture together, never held each other, never did another thing but gaze and dream and confess, like some people do with the smattering of stars in the sky on a clear winter night.
One day, the boy left. He had to leave. She knew this was going to happen someday. They cried, and stared, but he went and she let him, knowing exactly what she was losing despite her imagination being the only place she’d ever fully loved him.
He wrote to her, on parchment. He telephoned. She hid in her high castle and forgot the world outside. It was a game of pretend, a dangerous one, too. She had always loved playing dress-up and he had always loved playing Prince Charming; in their minds it was innocent because it was just words, words, words. But they forgot that, while some words mean nothing, there are others that mean everything.
Without warning it stopped being a story of star-crossed lovers (if you can call lovers lovers when they’ve never made love), and instead twisted into a tale of desperation and anger and hearts breaking, breaking so loudly like a gunshot obliterating glass, and then there was silence. The boy found a more willing princess and the girl cried in her castle, and the castle kept her safe.
The girl never stopped loving the boy and the boy pretended he’d never loved the girl. She knew better, and that made it worse. It made it all worse.
Worse still was that her castle continued to keep her safe. She didn’t care if she was safe anymore. Her trinkets and photographs reminded her of her duty to the world beyond, and she hated her world. Love settled at the bottom of her heart, a pool of stagnant water. She never allowed herself to remember and she was never able, not for one second, to forget. The impossible irony stupefied her and left her cold and quiet.
It occurred to her that this icy version of herself existed for a reason, and that reason was because she didn’t know. Not for sure. The girl didn’t know if the game she had played with the boy had ever been more than that. She questioned it, reasoning that since she clearly hadn’t been worth fighting for, she certainly wasn’t worth sticking around for, and her story became a tragic song of unrequited love and doubt. She heard her story in every soulful ballad of heartache and finally concluded that it had been real. Very real. For her.
The world spun on its axis, and with every heartbeat the girl’s memories faded. Sharp words fell by the wayside, but she saved the pretty ones for her dreams. She watched, from a distance of course, as the boy became another person, someone she had never met. She started to forget his face, but she could never bring herself to forget his voice. She wasn’t willing to do it. She had nothing else.
The girl grew older, and her smile grew back, and she fell in love again. But this time it was different. It was easy, and it was nice. But it wasn’t the same.
Somehow, she knew it never would be.
***
Things to keep in mind:
- If you’re an adult, act like one.
- If you hate something about someone and then display those same irritating characteristics, look in the mirror and slap yourself.
- High school is the time when you get a somewhat free pass to act like a giant, hormone-filled brat, torture your parents with excessive emotional bipolarity, feel “love” in a way that is literally known only to teenagers, and contemplate death and dying with more sincerity than is generally normal for healthy people. If you’re still doing this shit when you’re beyond the age of 26 (and I’m being GENEROUS), god help the people close to you.
- If you need help, ask for it. If you don’t know that you need help but someone tells you (genuinely) that you need it, listen. Very few people are cruel enough to suggest that to someone under the guise of sincerity just to hurt them.
It’s like, oh. My god. You know? Like, right?
***
Filed under Conversations., Life.
#26: What element do you most identify with?
The stars say air. I’m a Libra, after all, and it’s my assigned element. It’s supposed to rule me, my actions and thoughts, my essential character. But air is fickle; it’s intangible, unpredictable, and while necessary in a shit-that-is-alive-needs-it-in-order-not-to-suffocate-and-die way, it’s not generally at the forefront of anyone’s thoughts.
Until they don’t have it anymore.
I’ve often felt that way, depressing and e-hee-hee-mo as it is. As though I’m sort of floating around, passing in and out of peoples’ lives, only truly missed when I’m not actually around anymore, and maybe not even then. Pissing people off when I blow too hard (go ahead. I’ll give you a minute to giggle and think of manparts); relieving people, if only momentarily, of any dreadful heat, knowing that they’d prefer water if it were available but hey! At least I’m there to take the pressure off. And, still somehow essential enough that I get only the coldest of shoulders offered when I stop busting my ass to please people, or if I fail to rise to my expected position of “chick that stands in the middle and wishes you’d just freaking TRY to acknowledge that a perspective exists outside of your own, explains the other person’s side to you even though you don’t really care and just want someone to listen to you, tries to nudge you into accepting that you’re wrong or have done something wrong AT LEAST SOMETIMES OHMYGOD.”
I would say I don’t mean to complain or sound snooty but seriously. This is my life at least eighty percent of the time, and these situations can arise in any environment: relationships (usually not mine, thank god), work (always fun to be the deciding factor between two of your superiors. Ha.), friendships (::cries::), dance class (ridiculous), tutoring the wee ones. For example, one of my (very young and not at all worldly) students recently said something so totally, incredibly wrong that I ended up spending the better part of his lesson explaining to him why ethnicity does not necessarily indicate birthplace and that it certainly doesn’t require you to belong to, or keep you from being a part of, certain religions. Conclusion: kids are pretty ignorant. And so are a lot of adults. Especially the kind of adults that would tell their nine-year-old son that black people are all from Africa and therefore (aBUH?) can’t be Christian.
Can I get a “What the fuh…?”
I almost asked him if his parents knew my very religious, VERY Midwestern family and if they had perhaps sat down to dinner with them and been brainwashed. But I refrained. I happen to like the sixty dollars a week I get from these fools super forward-thinking people. ::cough::
So. The stars are right. And, it’s important to note that nothing on this earth–including fire, water and the dirt beneath our feet–can survive without air.
***
Filed under Life.
I never have what a normal person would call “dreams.” I dream every night, in bright colors and great detail, but the nature of the dream is rarely beautiful. Hell, it’s rarely nice in any way. I’m not sure I’d call them nightmares, either–although many of my…dream-mares? (awesome. Now I’m picturing gorgeous lady horses prancing through fields of poppies and rainbows. I have never been blessed with a dream of lovely equines skipping merrily through anything. WHAT THE HELL.)
Anyway. Many of my dreams are of destruction and catastrophic events. Mostly natural disasters that kill my loved ones and leave me desperately trying to escape up hills in the utter darkness and shit. Or of my own death and the afterlife. I usually chalk it up to my obsession with true crime shows, books, and news stories, serial killer biographies, mystery novels, and a small but well-loved collection of Mary Roach books and science-fiction. I’m not an outwardly morbid person–after all, I’m blonde and like colors and laughing–but this kind of information, the science and the trivia and the suspense of it, intrigues the hell out of me. And if the trade-off is strange, unsettling dreams, fine.
But not two nights ago.
I know exactly what caused this effing nightmare, and as usual, will blame an article I’d read that morning. It was about famously strange diets and the people throughout history who’d subscribed to them. I don’t mean strange as in Jenny Craig/ Weight Watchers strange. This was not an article about people who get suckered into thinking that eating a bunch of miniature, over-processed versions of foods that are really bad for you will help you lose weight. These people ate rocks, and gold, or nothing but whiskey and meat and cheese (actually, THAT dude is still alive and super healthy, for no explicable reason). One of them ate the weeds from his yard because he didn’t believe in the necessity of groceries. Another consumed bird brains at every meal, and yet another, live kittens (and any other live creature, but dude. Kittens? FOR REAL?). But what stuck with me were the two scientists mentioned in the article–Charles Darwin and William Buckland.
Quickly: if you don’t know who Darwin is, you go away. If you don’t know who Buckland is, that’s cool–he was the first person to ever discover dinosaur remains. Both were revered and ridiculed several times over, and continue to be. But the strange thing they had in common? A singular desire to eat at least one of every animal on the planet. Darwin did it by eating at least one of each animal he discovered (beware, fancy pigeon); Buckland just wanted all the fauna ever to pass through his presumably steel-lined intestinal tract (dude also ate a human heart, but I don’t know what to do with that, so…moving on).
Back to my dream: I’m somehow tasked by an unseen force to hunt, kill, skin, dismember, and grill an armadillo. I realize that some people won’t find this gross, but you kids probably live somewhere in the desert and think that armadillos are a normal food source. They are not, but do what you want. I’m *totally not* judging you.
So I do it. I hunt down this giant beast of leather armor (that’s what that is, right?), shoot it, drag its big ass back to a bedroom that has an outdoor grill in it (makes perfect sense), skin the creature in a bathtub (gross), cut off its appendages (GROSS), and throw it on the rack (SO. GROSS.). Before I even realize what the hell is happening, the thing is charred and, as dead things are wont to do, has its legs and whatnot all curled up like a Lysol-ed spider. Sort of like this:
You are welcome.
Only, imagine claws attached to that.
In the dream, I know I have to eat this thing. I am horrified by it, but this dude in a suit, who I only now realize has been standing silently next to the grill the whole time in this lovely, French-style bedroom, tells me it must be done. He emphasizes that it is absolutely necessary that I eat this thing and that I eat every last bit of it. But then his eyes grow wide and he goes very, very pale and says, “You MUST eat the armadillo. But don’t eat the aardvark.”
That was it. And now I’m actually hoping that I reenter this particular dream some night so I can ask that scary asshole why I can’t eat aardvarks.
I hate being told what to do.
***
Filed under Food, Les Animaux., Life., Science, thinking
