Wrapped in RED

Castle, XS

2011-09-13T02:50:00.004-04:00

This story is very problematic, but there is an idea that I'm trying to explore that I like very much. Maybe I can have some help finding it? One day, one day.

Castle, XS

Inmy days of youth, as a girl so small she could barely climb into bed andmaneuver around the safety-bar that lined her 101 Dalmatian bedding, I thoughtI lived in a castle. My room expanded infinitely, the door miles away from thedesk, which in turn was a ferry-ride away from my bed, that of which barelystretched to the window, the very same window that I opened wide and removedthe bug-screen, little body crawling out and sitting on the roof top, shingleshot in the summertime, a view so expansive the children playing in the street,those who cried “CAR” at the top of their lungs when they had to scatter,looked like ants.

Mycastle: two floors, a basement, and an attic. It was so large that there was abathroom in the foyer that no one ever used, because we lived like kings and wehad rooms that were only for show and decoration. My brother, was way down thehall, my parents far off on the other side, and a balcony—yes, a realbalcony!—that overlooked the stair landing, a drop that looked like certaindeath indeed if I were to slip through the bars.

Thebackyard was truly stunning. There was the deck, of course, and the secretunderground passageway my father had cleverly constructed. We had tunnels,escape routes for emergencies, a dirty underworld that stained my clothes andgot my best friend banned from my home for at least a month. I mean, therecould have been raccoons under there. But the real treasure of the backyardwasn’t the deck, but instead the acres of fields it overlooked. First it was mowed,crew-cut grass, and then long high weeds that were perfect imagining a savanna,and finally the eruption of a dense forest, home to the deer that wouldcautiously wander to our gardens and eat Annabelle’s chives and bolted when theneighbor’s dog came too close.

Yes,it felt like a castle, in a strange land where the neighbor’s last names were aclash of vowels and consonants. Titles I could not pronounce. It didn’t matter;I listened to their accents and pretended that I, too, could be a sexy Russianspy. My next-door neighbor, deaf and mute, was clearly the town jester.Bright-eyed Michelle Cohen, three doors down, could have been our potionsmaster. He was so funny when he saw fireworks; he couldn’t hear them explode.He’d run around, clapping, pointing at the bright lights in the air, excitedfor what he must have thought was the end of the world. My mother, deeplyinvolved in her prayer books every Friday night, was easily leading a doublelife as both Queen and Clergy.

Mycastle lasted for years, but then I started to grow. It started to crumble.

Icould make it up the stairs, two at a time, in seconds. The balcony was just arailing, a precaution. My floor, always messy, would run out of surface areaand suddenly the door and the desk and the bed were all cramped together,almost touching. The journey out the window felt dangerous. I was too big; Iripped the bug screen, on accident, and as I sat on the roof my legs stretchedto the end, toes passing the gutter, rainwater splashing on my heels.

Thedining room and the living room bled together. Our kitchen table made deckaccess almost impossible. My father had to suck in his belly so that he couldsqueeze past a chair and slide the glass door open simultaneously.

Icouldn’t explore the underground anymore, not without scratching my gangly armson the wooden planks above me, or bruising my kneecaps on the rocky terrain Icrawled upon.

Mybody had outgrown the castle. It was just a tiny townhouse on Shadowbend Dr., ahousing complex full of immigrants and new, poor families, my father’s tradeschool degree unable to earn us something more glamorous. At fourteen, the yearwe moved away, I saw the house as my parents saw it: squashed, suffocating. Butalso, I saw it for what I yearned for: cozy. Safe.

Ihave never loved a size so much. Extra small. I can identify, of course. ExtraSmall. It means one thing: comfort.

Failed Submission

2011-07-31T20:33:00.001-04:00

I submitted to Longshot Magazine, a magazine that is produced in 48 hours. It's nice because you don't have to wait too long to find out if you got in or not. I knew ahead of time that my style isn't what they go for, but I'm still proud that I submitted. Let's pretend I stood a chance, okay? The theme was Debt. My submission below:

A Deficit of Memories; A Debt.

I imagine my memories as these tiny creatures with rapid flapping wings. They flutter right in front of my eyes, so close that my lashes brush against their spastic bodies. My breathing matches the rate of their beating wings and while I am on the verge of an anxiety attack I reach out and try to grasp a little personified memory, aiming to hold it so close that I crush its wings and its moth-like powder stains my hand. When I try to grab it, my reflexes are too slow and the little beast outsmarts me and vanishes, not a trace left in my brain.

The realization that I had terrible memory began when I found it difficult to describe movie plots, even those of films I had just seen. The credits would roll and already I would be scrambling to think of a character’s name or the opening sequence, and by the time I exited the theater all I could remember were slivers of scenes, like the strange facial reactions by supporting characters or an especially well designed costume on a glamorous leading lady. If asked about storyline I would automatically rattle off a narrative and wonder how the words mechanically escaped my lips without a visualized companion inside my mind. All information began to feel like pieces of data, unreadable code that would transcribe itself verbally but could not be internally computed.

I could deal with film being erased, as I could always find a way to watch it again and take notes if I felt so inclined to remember every detail. It was when unrepeatable actions began to fade that I started to worry. There was a brave instance when I tried to explain the experience I had with an emotionally abusive partner, and I found myself getting tongue-tied, trying to restring conversations and picture the way his jaw tightened when he spoke or how his eyes lost contact with mine and focused instead on the cars speeding ahead. We were driving. Or we were in his bedroom. I think, once, we were at dinner, and he played with a straw wrapper as I shared my anxieties about leaving for college. The visuals morphed, but the basic information, the raw data, stayed consistent. If I wanted to use specifics details I would feel like a liar because the memory was incorrect and the images in my head were ragged and dissolving.

Painful memories, I thought, were the ones that would disappear. I was uncomfortable but able to come to terms with that idea. I could cope with a subconscious defense mechanism that distorted the nuances of bad situations and for some reason decided that most films were not worth being recalled.

Then it spread to pleasant memories. Of my childhood, before five years old, the only solid memory I have is the Dalmatian print on my bed sheets. My tiny hands jumped from dog to dog, spot to spot, pronouncing the dogs’ names from the Disney movie I had loved. Nothing more. I close my eyes and contract my facial muscles until my brain tingles and there is not a single image that comes to mind apart form the dogs. It was not a painful childhood, nor traumatic or scarring. It is simply my memories flying out my of my head, perhaps leaving through my ear canals or nasal passages, trying to force me to live moment by moment even though I believe that I am designed to think in the past.

I am young, painfully inexperienced. I wonder what will stick with me when I reach old age. I fear that soon the only images I will have are actually visualizations of anxieties about future. They are large monsters that have nothing but empty words.

So I keep reaching out and clutching my fingers tight, praying that I have caught a memory. I hold my fist steady and pretend that it starts to suffocate and twitch and then begs for mercy, seeking refuge inside my brain.

Scenes on Tenth

2011-07-16T09:39:00.002-04:00

The large dog longs for exercise. It whines outside CrossFit, obedient enough not to jump on the glass and flash its genitals at the early birds who train inside. The glass is slightly tinted and the work out remains a mystery. From my post at the bus stop across the street, I see the dog stand on all fours and cry and then sit on its rump and cry louder. It’s a Great Dane, but not really, not quite. It black spots cover its snout and I cannot see its eyes. There’s only the high squeals that beg for attention and capture mine, which is all the way across the four lane two-way street.

A nice black car with the front windows roll down slows to a stop and the dog is no longer visible. The sounds shift to the radio playing at high volume inside the car, a female pop-star’s top 40 lyrics fleeing into the open air. Inside a large black man with a grey beard and a bald head shifts his body to the music. He looks like he is stuffed in his seat, and I see that he does not have enough room to wiggle, unlike me who can get down and dirty in a car but only when the windows are rolled and a vaguely Baltic-sounding track emits from my iPod. Because of his restriction, he moves his hands to trace the octaves of the singer. They start low and climb up an invisible mountain, lingering in mid-air for split seconds, moving higher and higher until they reach the peak. His hand splays and his whole body rumbles as he cries the words out of tune. This giant man’s pitch matches the dog that is still whining behind him, and as the music drops and the man catches the tonal shift a second too late, the dog and the man sing in harmony.

The light turns green and the black car cruises down the street. The large dog is now jumps to its feet and dances about excitedly. There’s a man in a dark gray shirt, darker on his chest and under his pits, petting the dog on its black snout, but also sort of slapping it, a mix of affection and discipline. Promptly, the dog sits back down, and he is quiet and attentive. For a moment the man hesitates, goes for the collar and then to the leash, but then abandons his actions all together and goes back inside CrossFit to continue his morning regime.

I am thinking of crossing the street to play with the dog when I hear the bus breaking. It stops a few feet behind the MARTA sign and makes me long for the dog as I take the five or six steps to reach the open doors. As I swipe my breeze pass and it starts whining again, the sound suffocated by the bus’s motor and the murmuring of a homeless man asking around for change.

Family Musings

2011-07-02T19:16:00.003-04:00

A rough draft of a short, personal essay. Currently untitled.

The family is enjoying this Pixar thing too much.

It’s my favorite studio, the home of my dream job: animation coordinator, or production supervisor, or assistant director. Really, the logistics are not as important as the prospect of working at that studio. So far, in my college days, I’ve submitted five internship applications in four years. Every summer of my studies and one spring. There are countless possibilities for Google searches from potential bosses, so I constantly look myself up on the internet, wincing at embarrassing information and urging people to click what is important. Never once have I gotten an interview, not even a halfhearted phone call from a recruiter.

I’ve been convinced that Pixar has ignored me. My existence to them could be no more important than the presence of a mosquito in the bedroom; a nuisance, if anything. Because I had written my life off to the minds of the Pixar creative team, I was shocked when they unveiled the new lead character for their 2012 release, Brave. Princess Merida's head is full of frizzy red curls. It’s my hair circa Birth – 2010. I’m astonished by the hair choice not because of the likeness—no, her head is too round. She doesn’t have my cheekbones—but because of the difficulties a 3D animator has to go through to animate hair. Fiber effects, dynamics, ray tracing. All this at a level beyond my slightly-above-basic understanding of computer graphics.

Uncle Randy starts an email sent to all the Reizmans. “OH – MY – GOD. It’s Renee!” He does not accent my name. My father jumps on board. My other uncle does, too. All three Reizman brothers send me different emails, all encouraging me to send headshots to Disney-Pixar. My theatre experience and distinct looks could land me the role of Princess Merida in Disney Land parades. I’m moving to Los Angeles anyways. I shake my head and file away the emails in my “important stuff” folder, which is more intended for amusing exchanges and not pressing conversations. I’m not beautiful in the Disney Princess way. I don’t send any headshots.

The frenzy continues to phone calls. My father is discussing logistics of my stolen car. We talk about buying a new one. He suggests a PT Cruiser. I say that I only want on in purple. He, my father, suggests blue. I say purple again. We find one in South Carolina, surprisingly affordable, and only two hours away form Atlanta. My dog growls and interrupts my father’s train of thought. He drops the subject and talks about Pixar.

He tells me to send in my headshots.

I scoff.

My mother starts screaming in the background.

“They stole your likeness!”

She talks about me applying to Pixar three times. She doesn’t know it was five. She says that they have found me on Google and they stole my appearance to make this character. I try to point out the rounded face, the lack of defined cheekbones. There are thousands—millions?—of redheaded, curly haired women in this world. I’m not the blueprint.

“Call Steven Spielberg!”

The obsession with Spielberg started in 2006. In that year, my mother left a greeting card on my desk chair. His phone number was inside. She claims that she found his phone number and address on Google. She hadn’t been taking her medicine. I never called the number. It is now 2011 and she still asks me to call Spielberg and request a job. I don’t think she recovered.

My father is sitting calmly in his recliner chair with the dog on his lap. He is trying to cover the phone with one hand as he mouths to my mother to shut up. I cannot see this, but this is the scene witnessed from home with my brother in the position that I’m in now. The family is stuck in a recursive loop. I think about the endless fights I try to start with potential and previous significant others and I feel sad. I try not to think about ending up like my parents.

Spielberg. Lawsuit. They stole your likeness!

My father wrestles for the phone. The call ends abruptly.

The dream of working at Pixar, which has floated in my brain since I was 17, is slowly diminishing. It wanes while my phone remains silent after an application is sent. It circulates slowly, dully, after days of eagerly checking my email, searching for a follow up to the automated “thank you for applying to Pixar,” and the blood flow stops when I get the cold feeling in my chest when the equally lifeless rejection appears in my inbox, months later, like clockwork.

My mother’s hysterical voice distorts the fantasy and makes me dread the possibility of working at the studio. I imagine myself coming into work every morning with my mother’s words imprinted in the back of my mind, threatening the artists, urging me to call Spielberg and call for justice. I would not be able to face my coworkers, knowing that my dream job has been associated with my mother’s mental illness. The fantasy becomes tarnished, just as so many other things I have strived for, by my mother’s paranoia and criticism.

So I grimly search for a new direction, half-heartedly, with passion unequaled by that I felt for the dream job at Pixar. I awaken other passions. They come slowly, and I have to nudge them out of my heart, but I raise them with determination and shelter them from the consciousness of my family.

Excerpt - "My Legs Are a Cluster of Birds"

2011-06-13T22:56:00.003-04:00

A professor of mine nominated this story for the Norton Writer's Prize. It's creative nonfiction. Here is a short excerpt. Full piece is ~2800 words.

"Sometimes, when I am alone, or near my best friend (and only him), I try to puff up my body like a small finch that has been wronged, or is frightened. I raise my shoulders and suck in my breath and puff out my belly. In my mind I look so birdlike, with my small eyes and fidgety (twitchy) demeanor. I even flatten my lips and move them together, pretending that I have a beak, pecking at my food, my bird-sized portions. Then I look in a mirror and I see my face, which is not birdlike at all. In fact, my lips stretched over my buck teeth look alien and uncomfortable, and my puffed-up body is nothing more than a too-thin young woman trying to look large when in fact stretching her shoulders makes her look more angular, more emaciated, even though she does eat larger-than-bird-sized portions, and often, though many would disagree.

My mother, for instance. She disagrees."

Salt Magazine

2011-04-26T22:08:00.003-04:00

My wonderful, amazingly talented classmate Caitlin made an iPad magazine for her Capstone project. (Basically a huge project seniors in the honors program do.) I was asked to write an article about the One Take Super 8 Event that I participated in a few weeks ago. Sharing this with you. Much more exciting if you have an iPad to view it on :

http://www.bridawson.com/projects/salt/story/a-film-underground-exposed/

edit: apparently the magazine isn't fully finished. So wait until May 11 to check out the whole thing!

This long, really?

2011-04-20T22:12:00.001-04:00

My last post was really in February? Oh my goodness. I knew this year was going by very quickly, but the fact that I have no sense of time really proves it. I have done so much writing since then! Pages, and pages of it, for real. Here is a flash nonfiction to share with you, non-existent readers!

The Jazz Age

As usual, we are sidetracked. Alicia and I have long stopped looking at the second draft of the script, and now she is talking about her family. She describes some drama between her grandparents and her great-aunt. A love triangle that involved two beautiful black women who were in love with the same Asian man, which led the sister to become a spinster, bitter and abandoned by her old flame, betrayed by her blood relative. Alicia sighs and says, ‘if my grandpa hadn’t gone for my grandma, Adrian and I would have been my great-aunt’s kid.” And I think, no, that’s not true. You wouldn’t have been her kid. You wouldn’t have been anything at all. Her story sounds like a Victorian novel, but it happened in the jazz age, and if flappers weren’t almost entirely depicted as white women with bob haircuts, I would swear that these sisters were the ones depicted in old black and white photographs, straddling bootleggers and mobsters and strapping bottles of gin to their garters. Alicia thinks of what she could have had, but that life is reserved for a body inhabited by a different brain, chemicals, and a second set of genes. In an alternative thread of history, where Alicia’s grandfather and her great-aunt had stayed together, there is another girl with a name that I'm sure would not have been Alicia. She would not be having this conversation because there was no love triangle. But I say nothing and I let her think of her second life, a product of the jazz age.

Free Write - Penguins

2011-02-22T00:30:00.001-05:00

I'm taking a creative nonfiction course. I love it. The feedback I got on this essay was exceptionally positive, so I am sharing it with all. It is currently untitled, but I hope that I figure out a better name soon:

The penguin has an organ under its eye that converts salt water into fresh water. That’s how these animals can live so much like fish instead of birds. It is strange to me that a penguin has many features of a fish. They are even hunted by the same predators. Seals love fish and penguins.

…..

I started collecting penguins when I was in middle school. Plush animals, mostly, but I have a few figurines, stickers, pictures, and one lunchbox. I don’t remember why I started to collect penguins. I think it’s because my mother used to buy me plush toys all the time, and two or three times in a row I ended up with a penguin. She knew they were my favorite animal. They still are. Eventually there were about five plush penguins in my possession and I realized that I collected them.

Perched on my bed in my college apartment is a penguin I named Phat. There is very little sentimental value associated with Phat, but somehow he has become my favorite. I think it’s because his texture reminds me of a pillow. Sometimes, when I feel especially lonely, I’ll take Phat and snuggle up with him. However, I do not close my eyes and pretend that he is someone else. I am thankful that he has a pillow-like structure and that he will stay with me at night.

.....

Some biological traits set the penguin apart from fish. Actually, most biological traits define the penguin as a bird. What impresses me is how they mate and raise their young. All breeds of penguins are a little bit different, but the emperor penguin mates for life. Penguins value loyalty. What’s more intriguing is that even gay penguins mate for life. Some people are shocked to find out that there is such a thing as gay penguins, but I find it less than surprising. Most animals engage in homosexual behavior. It is only humans that think there is something wrong with this.

…..

My favorite penguin used to be one I named Hip-Hop. I got him right before Phat. There’s wire in his wings that puts them in a default position that reminds me of most rappers. Once I was in a store and I saw a jacket for babies that said “hip-hop” on the back. I used to regret not buying it, but Hip-Hop was a gift from an abusive boyfriend, and when that relationship ended I put Hip-Hop in a box and I never looked at him again. I’m glad I didn’t waste my money on that jacket.

…..

At one point I stopped receiving penguins as gifts. Occasionally my mom will see a photo of a penguin in her travel magazines. She clips them out and sends them to me. These are not gifts; they are reminders. I often think my mother does it for herself. We connect on so little, and I feel that if she can find one thing to please me, even as something as small as a magazine clipping of a penguin, she can remind me that she is my mother and that she understands me even though she does not.

…..

I once read an article about two male penguins that wanted a chick so badly that they took a pebble and pretended it was an egg. They took turns sitting on the pebble, keeping it warm, preparing it to hatch. The zoo thought it was adorable. I thought it was sad. I wondered what happened when spring came around, and all the other penguins saw their eggs hatch. This penguin couple would see all the chicks born, and try as they might to raise their pebble with love and care, theirs would never hatch. I imagined one of the penguins waiting for a sign of life; for the shell to crack or the egg to stir or even the smallest bit of warmth to come from that pebble. But there was nothing. The penguins never had a baby and they interpreted their endeavor as a miscarriage. It happens all the time in the animal kingdom, so even if the penguins were capable of feeling depressed, they would have shrugged it off and quacked “c’est la vie.”

…..

I am now the one responsible for keeping my penguin collection alive. On the day after Christmas I wandered into a toy store. I was feeling very out of it, having had a bad allergy attack and accidentally taking a Benadryl in the morning. I was so drowsy. I probably shouldn’t have been allowed to drive to the mall, but my mother hadn’t noticed the medicine take effect. I wandered the toy store for what must have been an hour. There was a display of animals, all with “Try Me!” buttons and little switches on their bottoms so that they could squawk and roar and stomp around. I picked up one that was a penguin, and I thought how fun it would be to have that penguin walk around my room, wings flapping. I took it home with me and in a medicinal haze I ripped it from its box and set it in front of me. However, batteries were not included. I flipped the “on” switch and the penguin sat in front of me, beak half open, wings outstretched, stiff and lifeless. Its legs were designed poorly and could not support the weight of the machine, and after a few seconds the penguin tipped over and lay dully in front of me. I need a small screwdriver to open the battery compartment, but I do not own one. Now the mechanical penguin sits on my shelf with a hand-blown penguin and a penguin ruler and a small plush penguin keychain. They collect dust and watch over me and wait for another companion.

J'écris en français

2011-02-18T10:20:00.004-05:00

I'm learning French. I love the language. I'm terrible at speaking it, but learning it is amazing. I've already started to look for French conversation groups in LA, NYC, and Chicago -- the three cities I'm likely to end up in this summer. I hope I can continue speaking it when I leave SU's campus this fall.

Since I love writing, and I love language, I decided to try to write in French. This is very hard. My vocabulary is limited and my grammar structures only go so far. So I wrote in the present tense. There is nothing original about this piece, but I'm posting it here more so to encourage myself to continue trying to write creatively in French, to play with the language, make it sound beautiful. I think that's the biggest issue. I love to write long, lyrical sentences, and I just can't do that in French. So, instead, here is a short, stubby, cliché poem, written in French, without the help of Google Translate! (Well, I used it at the end to double check my spelling. But the grammar was perfect!)

Sans Titre --

Les arbres sont sympathiques.
Dans le terrasse, les enfants jouent.
Leurs yeux sont petits. Très petits.
Je les regarde. et je pleure
je ris.

Arcs

2011-01-28T19:16:00.003-05:00

Nearly 50 of us stand in a line. We are each assigned a camel. All the camels are tethered together, but mine leads the pack. Sarah’s is behind me, and then the line continues until the very end, with that awkward kid, Mike, and his equally awkward camel pulling up the rear. I stand next to my camel, and I watch it chew a meal, probably three days old, with a bucktoothed smile and spit dribbling down its snout. Its jaw moves in a circular motion, looks as if it dislocates, but always stays in place and traces imaginary arcs in the air. The Bedouins shout to each other In Hebrew. Our guide, Bena, translates.

“Don’t get to close to the camels. They will spit and they will bite.”

My camel keeps grinning with his bucktoothed smile. His teeth are larger than my nose. Each one overlaps, is stained yellow and brown. One tooth in front is chipped. Upper central incisor. Just like me.

Trying to stare down my camel is a challenge. It looks so excited to chew its food. Its smile isn’t directed to me, but instead is a byproduct of habitual enjoyment. I want the creature to be intimidated because it has long been decided that camels are my mortal enemy in the animal kingdom. The animosity traces back to my youth, when a seven year old version of me in a St. Louis petting zoo fell victim to camel-chewing. My scalp starts to tingle as my hair braces itself in fear. It is not as long as it was back then, but it remembers the tugging and spit and the stares from onlookers, a mother gasping, mostly young boys laughing, at the tiny redheaded girl’s hair trapped in the jaws of a grinning camel.

Sarah stands next to me and she is terrified of her camel. Her camel isn’t smiling, chewing, or happy to see her. Hers opens its mouth wide and starts groaning. The mouth is expansive. I feel like I could crawl inside and live in the damp confines of the mouth. But then I think about my hair, and the spit, and I decide that I could never live in the body of my enemy no matter how safe and warm and enticing his body appears.

The sounds from Sarah’s camel ring out among our group. Nearly 49 heads turn to look at the beast. I find it strange that hers is the only one roaring. The other camels continue munching on their cud, smiling at us without actually feeling anything. They look bored.

“I’m scared to get on this thing,” Sarah says, squeezing my arm.

The grip on my arm gets tighter as Sarah’s camel keeps roaring. I keep staring down my animal, trying to send it signals with my brain. You’re my enemy, camel. I remember what your brethren did to me in St. Louis. I remember.

“Just think of it as riding dinosaurs,” I say to Sarah, trying to calm her down, hoping she doesn’t cut off circulation in my arm. “You know Jurassic Park? The movies? They distort camel noises to make the dinosaur roars. Camels, whales, and elephants. So you’re probably imagining a T-Rex, but that’s just a camel. Try not to touch its face. It’s not going to hurt you.”

Her hand moves back to her side. She looks more confused than relieved. The Bedouins are rushing us to our animals, urging us to sit on their saddles and hold on tight. The camels are lying down, their padded kneecaps resting on the ground. I love the way their knees look. There’s a fluffy protective layer on the joint, and when the knees are bent, it appears as the animal’s legs come to a sudden stop, with a deformed stump half-buried in the sand. Amputated creatures.

When I climb onto the saddle, I purposely lean over, draping the locks of my hair close to the camel’s mouth. I want to tease it. I dare it to bite my hair. But the camel has no response. It stares straight ahead. Its nostrils don’t even pick up my scent. A Bedouin grabs the reins, hisses something, and with a great effort the camel stands and I am lifted into the air. We plod forward for a few minutes. I graft a tuft of hair on the camel’s hump. It’s coarse and dirty. The animal still takes no notice of me. It looks off to the mountains, unaware of my vendetta towards its breed and of the incident involving hair chewing and a traumatized seven year old girl in an exotic petting zoo in St. Louis. It has become a docile creature, inching towards those distant mountains, always forced to turn away by a hissing Bedouin. It will carry me and a thousand more girls like me, and it will never be aware of the hate or fears felt by those future girls. Instead, it will walk in circles, the same invisible arcs traced by its forever moving jaw.

Man With the Holy Stomach

2011-01-19T22:29:00.005-05:00

There he is, arching over me in the aisle. The strings of his tallit dance before my eyes, brushing my shoulder as they sway to the tune of scuffling carry-on bags. His beard reaches down to the collar of his firmly pressed Western white shirt. The beard is dark gray with a few brown strands. They long for the days of youth, of peeking over the partition on Shabbos, trying to catch glimpses of Rachel Friedman's ankles. When she crossed her legs, her shoe would tug at her folded socks. Soft skin would breathe and wink at the young holy man and cause him to forget the words to the mourner's Kaddish. The pilot growls something over the intercom. The machine chips his voice and turns his words into that of an ancient tongue. The holy man sighs heavily and shuts the overhead compartment. He rests for a minute with his hands on the plastic, his body still arched over me. The Western white shirt has freed itself from his waistline. A round belly hangs in front of my face. The hairs are a youthful brown. They sprawl in all directions, moving to the rhythm of his breaths. I sit in my aisle seat on a Boeing 747, a once modest stomach jealous of my youth.

The Shore, November

2010-11-08T00:00:00.004-05:00

I stood at the water’s edge. The waves leapt forward and the icy cold ate away at my ankles. They were exposed to the wind and I saw water droplets beading on my skin, which was turning a rosy color that reminded me of the days in my childhood I spent sitting by the fireplace sniffling into a handkerchief that had I fetched from my father’s pocket. I remember the silver pocket watch he carried, the one with his initials carved in the back, a gift from gangsters. That silver now reflected in the water’s depths. The sun gleamed on the pebbles and the starfish, and there in the sand were metallic shards from the oil tanker that sank only seven months before.

Home

2010-10-30T11:00:00.000-04:00

We stumbled through the slick streets. Our feet moved in jagged angles as we tried to avoid the small, fat creatures that had been evicted from their homes due to flooding. Brown worms, some with their bodies flattened, their soft skin branded with a fresh footprint. There was one lying a few feet ahead of me. It was a large one. Juices from its plump body oozed onto the sidewalk. Both ends thrashed about., its nerves shaken.

I am laughing too hard. My sides are hurting from the last joke you made, something about a large woman sitting alone at cocktail hour. I see spit burst from your lips. You flash your perfect teeth, but I spot some lettuce stuck in the top row, a little off center. I reach over to flick it out. Dig my nail in your mouth, watch your body jerk away from mine; see how you like it when I lunge for you unsolicited. But my spitefulness gets the best of me. My heel glides against the wet pavement. My ankle rolls, and there I am falling, my leg throbbing before I hit the ground.

Without hesitation you grab for me, and I equate the pain shooting through me with your arms wrapped around my waist. The ground is unforgiving. My knees scrape against the surface, and all I feel is my body aching and your hands upon me. The worms crawl into my open sores and call them their new home. It is wet and moist and smells of iron, but they prefer it to the rain, and they prefer me over you.

Austin, Again

2010-09-29T23:16:00.001-04:00

I can't believe I wrote a sequel. But I did.
Sequel to Austin

Austin, Again (working title)

My arms start to ache. The horde of fiction weighs me down, and I’m eying the cash register with my bottom lip turning white, my large teeth biting with anticipation. I am rocking back and forth from my heels to the balls of my feet, anxious to unload these books, when I feel a hand brush lightly on the back of my shoulder.

I jump with surprise. The books tumble to the floor. My arms practically sigh in relief as I feel my cheeks burn and I angle my head towards the floor.

“Hey. I know you. From our business class?”

Austin stands in front of me. His skin is pale. His cheeks are hallow, gaunt. He wears a navy polo that hangs loosely around his body, searching for his once prefect abs to pull and stretch the cotton. A nametag reflects the florescent lights. Austin. His name flickers. Austin.

We begin to pick up the books together. Austin cracks a smile and I see that he still has perfectly aligned white teeth. There is a cut below his lip, small and subtle. He’s clean shaved except for near the cut; I see there is a trace of stubble he left behind for fear of irritating his skin further.

“How have you been? How is that guy? Uhm. You know. That one. Patrick?”

The book in his hand looses its firm rectangular shape. It’s turned into an arc as Austin’s hands run along the cover, squeeze the binding, fold the pages inward. His ring fingers are stark naked. There’s dirt under his nails.

“I don’t know. He’s managing, I think.” I shrug and flash a small smile. I never spoke to Austin. How does he remember me? I think about Patrick waiting near the doorjamb of our business class. Austin and his friend with the curly blond hair would leave with their skateboards already grazing the ground. I would trudge behind, tired and weary, until I saw Patrick waiting for me. Both of us were stuck in the mechanics of our habits. He waited for me passively. I went to him passively.

Something triggers the aching in my arms. I see Austin setting the pile of books back in my grasp. For a moment, his hand lingers on the paperback he places on top. He pretends to scan the cover before his eyes drift upwards to meet my gaze. I say nothing, and move my bottom jaw rigidly as I think of the right words to fill the silence. Instead, I clear my throat and grin. I mumble thank you and run towards the checkout.

The register beeps with every book sliding through the machine. On a frail receipt my purchases will be documented. After closing, Austin will slip in and pull up my information, despite not knowing or caring much about me. He is excited that I am here and exposed, that I’m so easily accessible, that he will never have to read me because he knows that in mere moments he will know more better than any past or future Patrick ever will.

Three-Minute Fiction

2010-09-23T16:47:00.004-04:00

Entered into NPR's three-minute fiction contest (round 5.) It is not really the style that wins, but I am proud of myself for entering. Some problems with the story, still. Oh well.

Coup

Some people swore that the house was haunted, but Pauline could not help but to be entertained by the pigeons that had made the roof their home. She purchased the house with the intent of waking up to the hungry cooing of the baby birds, of sweeping feathers off the front porch, and scrubbing the mess that the pigeons left behind. She wouldn’t mind the smell. She would revel in the smell. Pauline needed to be cleaning all time. She needed something to do.
The rumor was that the pigeons were left behind by the woman who had previously owned the house. She fed birds in the park, talked to herself, flung breadcrumbs and glared at passersby who got too close. One day she won the lottery. She took the money and the birds home with her. When she passed, she could not part with the pigeons. Pauline listened for her ghost, analyzing every creek and moan of the house, but when she heard those pigeons coo she forgot all about the haunting and instead focused on cleaning.
One afternoon Pauline found herself sitting still in the kitchen. She had woken up early that day and had already run out of things to clean. The house was immaculate, and she felt her hands tremble on the glossy table. She would press one hand to the surface, hold it down until her fingers turned white, and then scrub the prints off with her free hand, which was ready and armed with a rag reeking of turpentine. She did this for hours.
The pigeons were quiet that day. Pauline feared that they had flown off. Her hands were growing tired and the stench was making her dizzy. She had forgotten to open any windows. Pauline, in a daze, stumbled to her refrigerator. She looked inside and stared at a loaf of bread. Quickly, she ripped a chunk off the bread. Some crumbs tumbled onto the shelf. Pauline stared at them for a while, and then slowly closed the refrigerator. She took the bread and walked out to the front porch, leaving a trail of crumbs behind.
Absentmindedly, Pauline tore the bread into smaller pieces and scattered them on the porch. They started to accumulate at her feet, falling on top of one another, a small pile of breadcrumbs rising to meet the tips of her heels. Pauline waited for the pigeons. She held her breath and strained to hear the cooing. She squinted her eyes and looked for fresh feathers. There was nothing.
There was no more bread in her hands. The crumbs lay at her feet. Some had even fallen into the folds of her skirt. Pauline did not bother to brush them away. Instead, she collapsed onto the ground. Her body shook and she raised her hands to cover her eyes, pressing her palms hard into her cheeks as if it would stop her tears from coming. She waited for the birds, but they did not come.
An old Ford came from down the road. It’s engine sputtered and it kicked up dust on its way around the bend. Pauline raised her head and saw the car slow down as it reached her house. She called out to the driver, “John?”
But the car sped up and roared away. Pauline sat with the crumbs caught in her skirt, mashed against the souls of her shoes, some buried under her nails. The dust had settled and still the pigeons were absent. Pauline was alone in the house for the very first time. Nothing was ever the same again after that.

There Are Three Birthmarks On My Left Leg

2010-07-22T23:00:00.010-04:00

Purposely did a lot of repetition. Does it work?

There are three birthmarks on my left leg. They weigh it down, and I walk with my big toe dragging behind me. The nail has worn down to a stub. Sometimes I hear it scrape against gravel, wrinkle my nose as I smell the smoke trailing from the embers that jump from my big toe when the friction gets too rough.

One birthmark looks like a tooth, a jagged molar with a corona. Solar flares fly out of crown. The roots are short and stubby and stubborn. On its side it takes the form of a bald eagle with mangy ruffled feathers. The beak is rooted to the majestic crown of the mangy bald eagle.

There is a welt on my left thigh. It covers my smallest birthmark on my left leg. It’s a subtle stain from blush wine. White Zinfandel bubbles up and returns to its origin as Crljenak Kaštelanski, bloody and bitter. The welt overpowers my smallest birthmark on my left leg and turns my left thigh into a bloody and bitter mess.

Dragged along on my left foot, face down and hidden from the sun, is the speckled birthmark. It is a gentle swoop, an arch that flattens as it crashes into the First metatarsal. Tattooists tremble at its detail. The darkened pigment is cloistered together, and only one speck stands exiled from the group. It stands alone trying to find the sun, but it is dragged along on my left foot, narrowly missing gravel and fading in color and from my memory.

Excerpt - "Middlesex" Jeffrey Eugenides

2010-06-23T23:20:00.006-04:00

This novel has been recommended to my by many people. I can think of three off the top of my head, and I'm pretty sure there's a few others who've passed the title along to me. Reading this in such proximity to One Hundred Years of Solitude had me worried. I didn't think I would be able to keep up with another generational novel. Well, sometimes we have to admit that we're wrong. (I could probably do a whole rant about my pride for admitting mistakes. Let's avoid that, for now.)

Anyways, I checked out the novel from a library, and I am frustrated that I cannot underline passages and write notes in the margins. I am extremely tempted to vandalize the book, but dog-earring the corners is as brave as I'm going to get. There was one passage, however, that I could not ignore. Thus, I am posting it here, to share with you, and to cement online for me.

pg. 217

"Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in 'sadness,' 'joy,' or 'regret.' Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, 'the happiness that attends disaster.' Or: 'the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy.' I'd like to show how 'intimations of morality brought on by aging family members' connects with 'the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.' I'd like to have a word for 'the sadness inspired by failing restaurants' as well as for 'the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.' I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can't just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in, everything I'll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events. Here's where my story splits, divides, undergoes meiosis. Already the world feels heavier, now I'm a part of it. I'm talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theaters, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn't been my world. Not my America. But here we are, at last.

Love Letters

2010-06-18T15:55:00.018-04:00

I had this idea months ago. I'm thinking it was October or November, somewhere around there. The inspiration seems obvious, but in reality, I wasn't really experiencing any relationship turmoil at that time.

I don't know how to feel about the piece, either. When I was writing it, it deviated immensely from what I imagined, but then I started to love where it was going. Now, I'm not too sure. The ending is sort of what I want it to be, but I think it could be done better. Or, maybe not. Hmm.

ANYWAYS.

"Love Letters"

June collapsed onto the coffee table. The ink smudged beneath the palm of her right hand. Her left hand carelessly sent a map gliding to the carpet. There were plenty more maps squashed underneath her chest. She covered Seattle’s metropolitan area, a panoramic of Canada, and a small-scaled reproduction of the Rocky Mountains with red ink winding through the most scenic route to the West.

“I don’t want to go back through cornfields,” June twisted her head to face Eric. Her cheek pressed up against Portland.

“But I’ve never seen Nebraska.”

“You’ve seen cornfields before. Remember Indiana?”

“I didn’t go to the dunes with you guys.”

“Oh.”

They were quiet for a moment.

“It’s just that you always talk about that trip. Running around in the sand drunk or whatever.”

“Stoned.”

“Whatever.”

“Sorry.”

June rested her hand on Eric’s knee. The ink blotted his denim jeans, the dot of red screaming against its new, faded-blue background. June absently stroked the stain with her thumb.

“You know, we’ll talk about this trip so much that all our friend’s are going to be, like, ‘hey, shut up.’ You can exaggerate all the stories. You can say we were shooting up while behind the wheel. I’ll back you up.”

“No one’s going to believe that.”

“I’ll paint on some track marks.”

“Stop it.”

“No, hey, I took that stage makeup class. It’ll look really good.”

“Seriously,” Eric forced June’s hand away from him. “Stop.”

“Hey. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It tickles when you do that. It’s actually really annoying.”

“Why didn’t you say anything before?”

“I did say something. I could only take it for what? 30 seconds?”

“No, like. You know. Months ago. The first time I did that.”

Eric shrugged.

The maps scattered off the table as June leaped onto the couch. She sat quietly next to Eric, arching her brows, scrunching her face into a melancholy expression. The focus was to shape her large brown eyes into those of a puppy, or, better yet, a deer. Doe eyes. Owl eyes. Squid eyes.

Eric laughed. He pulled the giant squid over to him, running his hands through her brown hair, fingers ruffling up her bangs, crowning her head, sliding down her spine. Her petite body almost got lost in his embrace, but June reemerged with a flurry of kisses attacking his rusty beard.

They stayed in their mode of childish foreplay for hours. Occasionally a foot or elbow would bump against the coffee table, but no traces of wet ink left prints on their bodies. Suddenly they came to a stop, June’s hands twisted around Eric’s belt and buckle, Eric’s hands trapped under June’s shirt, clasped around her bra.

June sat up, dragging Eric’s lanky arms to his side.

“I couldn’t do it.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. I tried, but I couldn’t.”

“We do this all the time. Wait. Couldn’t what?”

“I tried to write you love letters. I tried so many times. I couldn’t do it.”

Hesitantly, June stood up, staring at the maps scattered on the table and the floor. It was silent as she studied the ink, noting the bright circles drawn around cities with silly names: Zap, Nimrod, Square Butt. She left the room, went down the hall, into her bedroom. Eric listened to her rummage through drawers and knock books off shelves. She swore loudly as she stubbed her toe. June returned with a stack of letters in hand, tied together with pale blue string.

The pile was three inches thick, a combination of loose-leaf, stiff envelopes, miniature notebook pages, sketchbook paper, and cardstock. The items on bottom were frayed and faded. Most of the paper had dog-eared corners, or small tears from where they were ripped from their binding.

“I couldn’t finish a single one. Some I worked on for days. Look,” June untied the string. It fell lazily to the floor, winding around the border of North and South Dakota. She pulled up the first letter, purple jelly-pen on clementine-scented paper.

“It says, ‘my darling, don’t ever shave. I love the way you smell, even at 3 in the morning when your breath reeks of Chinese take-out. I was watching a movie with Clark Gable in it, and it made me think of you, so I thought I would send you a letter because…’ and you know what? That’s it. I couldn’t think of a reason.”

June tossed the letter aside. She pulled out another one, from the middle this time. It was a small napkin with an orange stain circled. There was an arrow pointing to it, and a label, “Curry hut! Yum!”

“This one just says, “Eric,” with a heart. There’s nothing else. I wanted to be spontaneous or romantic or something. I imagined your mailbox overflowing with these cute reminders. I thought maybe, like, maybe you would start being silly. You’re always so serious now. It’s like, no matter what I do or say, you make me stop. It’s like you’re embarrassed or something. I remember when you used to be proud to have me around. You’d take me to, I don’t know, a museum or something, and you’d be so affectionate. And now you’re concerned about holding my hand in public.”

“What’s this all about, June?”

“I liked you so much. When this all started I couldn’t even believe you noticed me. And now it’s been, like, almost two years? I said I loved you after six months, but I can’t write it on paper, and you know I think there might be something to that.”

June tossed the letters onto Eric’s lap. Without its string, the stack scattered in all directions.

“I’m going on the road trip with Alex.”

Eric thumbed through the letters that had landed on the couch. One managed to exceed three paragraphs. Another only said, “Hey—” It didn’t even have his name. It could have been for anyone.

“Who’s Alex?”

“Some guy. Well, more than some guy. But to you, a guy who lives around the corner.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. He was at some party. I bumped into him. Literally, almost knocked him over. Said I wasn’t too good with directions. Somehow it segued into the road trip and he was just so enthusiastic. It was like meeting you all over again. So excited, charming. Said he loved the idea, always wanted to go to Seattle, and I was all, “me too!” He wanted to go to Vancouver, and I was like, that’s it. That’s the deal breaker.”

“Because I don’t want to go to Vancouver?”

“Because you never want to go anywhere. Not with me. Not anymore.”

“If you want me to go, I’ll go.”

“No, that’s not the point. It’s not like, I don’t know. It’s not spontaneous. It’s always pulling teeth with you. And I’m sorry. I can’t force it anymore. I tried to force this trip on you, and I tried to force the love letters. It’s a disaster. I’m miserable. With you, I’m miserable.”

“I didn’t want to make you unhappy.”

“Yeah. Maybe. You know, for fun, I tried to write a love letter to Alex. Something sweet. Innocent. Nothing too serious, just wanted to excite those flutters I get when I see him. And you know what? I finished it. It’s like, four pages, I think, and I knocked it out in fifteen minutes. I’m not going to send it. I burned it, actually. But, you know? This is important, I think. And, like, sorry, but I’m not even sorry.”

An aching silence swelled in the room. June stood across from Eric, looking away from him, down at the maps and letters that covered the floor. There were miles between them, entire states, provinces, Pacific regions blotted with red ink. Love letters swirled in the ocean, the air conditioning pulling up the frayed corners and gently sweeping them into currents. They were tattered and torn and crumpled. They drifted for thousands of miles, drifted until they were completely off the map.

In which Renée references the Usual Suspects

2010-06-12T13:37:00.005-04:00

I squeezed my way into the crowded car. Getting caught in rush hour on the Blue Line was never an enjoyable experience. Like me, most of the passengers would be heading far out into the suburbs, keeping the train packed until near the end of the line. I spotted a pair of empty seats, and dove for the one on the aisle. People are usually deterred from snagging the window seat when it’s mate is occupied. They like to avoid the awkward moment of asking a stranger to stand up for them, watching the commuter pull her purse tight to her body as she sucks in her stomach distrustfully, the requester tripping over her before falling heavily into the seat.

I enjoyed my solitude for only a few seconds. A nervous looking businessman stumbled onto the train, narrowly making it past the double doors. He scanned the car and I saw his eyes examine an empty seat next to a homeless man sleeping in back, and then to mine. I quickly moved to the window seat and immediately glued my eyes to the city blurring past.

“Thank you, miss.”

I glanced at him and smiled politely, and then turned back to the window. I had seen the terrain many times before. The peeling billboards and orange graffiti no longer interested me, and the only sights that delighted me these days were the glimpses of scruffy, plaid-wearing men waiting on the Damen platform.

I went to open my shoulder bag, ready to pull out my book and catch up on Humbert Humbert’s fevered road trip with his little Dolly, Lo, Lolita, when I noticed that my range of motion was severely cut. I tried to move my gangly arms gracefully, and found my elbow bumping into the flesh of the man next to me.

“Sorry,” I mumbled, casting another quick glance to the man next to me.

He shook his head and smiled, but said nothing. His teeth were a dull yellow and his lips were chapped. Those teeth were awfully close to me.

For a moment, I recalled articles linked by angry BBWs who had to pay for two seats on an airline because they were too large to fit into one. I would have been forgiving, me being petite and barely taking up an entire seat myself, but then I noticed that his huge torso eclipsing my view of the aisle was none to big at all. I looked for the space in between our plastic seats. All I saw were his thighs. This bastard was willingly taking up half my seat, cozying up to me, a stranger, on the crowded el during rush hour with no other seats to spare.

Even among my favorite people, I am not a touchy-feely person. I glued my face to my book and squirmed in my seat, pressing my body as close as I could to the window, reaching an unflattering angle to avoid my neighbor’s graze.

That’s when the shaking started.

His elbows cast shadows on the pages of my book. They shook frantically and caused the words to bounce and jumble together. I imagined the grey shadows and white pages causing an epileptic sensation. The pages flickered back and forth; grey white grey white grey white. The man had wrapped his arms around his briefcase, now hugged against his chest. The tremor spread to his legs, and then the entire seat trembled with him. I wanted to tie him down. I was trying to devise a way to acquire rope on the train when, to my horror, I felt his elbow drill into my breast.

His face red, he whispered, “sorry.”

He did not stop shaking. I could see him sweating, concentrating hard, and I could only assume that he was desperately trying to make his body come to a standstill. He looked so embarrassed, so helpless.

I decided that he had Parkinson’s disease.

Yes, that was it. It was an unfortunate situation, and neither of us could do anything about it. I tried to relax, press myself closer to the window, and look out at the city as his elbow occasionally touched my boob and we both pretended not to notice.

I considered leaving the train a few times. My first idea was to bolt out of the train when it reached Divisoin, run to the car ahead, and continue my journey. I wasn’t sure if I could make it in time. It would be difficult to climb over my seatmate, especially without being groped in the process. The stops were quick, and I would surely miss the train all together. I thought that maybe I could just leave the train and wait for the next one, but I grew self-conscious. I imagined my neighbor watching me leave, glaring at me as I stood on the platform. He would know that the only reason I got off the train was to get away from him. I, the cold-hearted bitch who couldn’t be sensitive to the needs of a middle-aged man with Parkinson’s.

“Are you on your way to work? School?”

Apparently my neighbor was determined to torture me. I thought we had a silent agreement not to acknowledge each other. I thought my discomfort was obvious. Regardless of his condition, I had no intention to chitchat with a man who kept fondling me with his elbow. I felt his breath on my neck.

“I had an interview.”

“Oh, really? What for? Congratulations.”

I shrugged my shoulders, which caused me to bump into him this time. “Thanks.”

He didn’t continue his interrogation. Finally, he sensed that I was at my breaking point. I turned my head from the window to the map of the Blue Line, mentally crossing off the stations passed. California: check. Logan Square: check. Belmont: check. Occasionally I would catch the man looking at me as I tried to look past him.

I grew anxious. There weren’t many stops left to go, and the excitement started to take over. The businessman and I shook together, our bodies bobbing up and down in perfect synchronization. We were quite the pair.

The car mechanically croaked out, “Harlem,” and I nearly jumped out of my seat. My stop was next. It was perfectly acceptable for passengers to stand by the exists before they reached their station, even if their was a five minute interval between stops. I thrust my book into my bag, knocking elbows with the man, not caring this time. Let him touch me all he wants, I’m getting the hell out of here. As politely as I could, I gestured towards the exit, already halfway on top of the man as I tried to climb over.

When I reached the aisle, he gently touched my arm. “Is this your stop? Thank you.”

I didn’t understand why he was thanking me. Maybe he had a long history of young women abandoning him on trains. Perhaps I made his day, his week, his year, by toughing it out and enduring the entire ride. Suddenly, I was proud of myself. I, the good Samaritan who kindly ignored businessmen suffering from Parkinson’s.

But then, as if in slow motion, the man leaned over slightly and lifted his body off the part of my former seat that he had encroached upon. He rolled his shoulders back and relaxed. The briefcase hung loosely from his arms, his hands grasped firmly about the handle. His feet were planted to the floor. The plastic seat was silent. No more tremors. Not a single twitch.

The bastard had gone Keyser Soze on me!

The train rolled into Cumberland. I stepped onto the platform in a daze. I endured that ride, forty minutes of hell, sympathizing with a man who faked uncontrollable shaking just so he could get free shots at my chest. It shouldn’t have been worth the effort. Why molest an A-Cup when there’s double D’s abound? I trudged to the staircase, thinking about the three showers I would take later that night. On Monday, I’d have to head back downtown. The Blue Line would be packed again and I would most likely have to surrender my seat to yet another pervert preying on my polite social graces.

Fuck it. I’m taking Metra.

A series of bad luck, concentrated in a few days, inspires this rant

2010-05-30T17:17:00.011-04:00

I’ve often battled with the idea of fate. It’s easy to dismiss it as superstition, or worse, as something closely linked to religion. I find it difficult, however, to look at my incredible back luck and brush it off as mere coincidence. I’m usually afraid to tell people that I may believe in some kind of higher power. They interpret it as faith in God; they see me as a spiritual person. Spiritual, I think, is one of the least desired words I’d like ascribed to me.

An ex-boyfriend criticized for reading into things too much. He looked down upon my efforts to find meaning in things. He said I took everything too personally. At first I tried to combat these claims, but now I admit that they are true. But these are not faults in my personality, as he desperately tried to prove. These are characteristics that I embrace. They allow me to be hopeful and optimistic, despite the fact that even the smallest of victories is so rare in my life.

I sound like I suffer immensely, but I suppose this isn’t true. I live in a decent-sized house in a friendly suburban neighborhood; I go to an acclaimed private university; I have a generally supportive family. All the amenities that make me middle-class are at my grasp, and I am thankful for it, but they are not as they appear: Our refrigerator and cupboards are nearly bare; I go to school for free because I can’t afford tuition; my mother is a paranoid schizophrenic and is far removed from my personal affairs.

Sometimes I wonder what I did to deserve such setbacks in my life, but then I assess my personality and my actions, and I think that I might encourage these difficulties. I know that I am selfish, aggressive around my family, and overtly emotional. I am a woman full of faults, and I often play the victim. I claim to hate drama, but I think there is an overwhelming part in my subconscious that thrives on it. This part is a key role to my identity as a human, but more importantly, I think it has its own deeper subconscious that is driven by fate.

Over the years, I have noticed that I continuously fall into cycles. Each time I try to break a cycle, I inadvertently fall into another one. I’m always determined to perform my actions differently, and usually to great success, but nevertheless it seems that I cannot escape the behaviors and relationships that revolve around my life. The most depressing realization I have had is that I don’t think I’m meant to have meaningful relationships. I have not been able to hold onto friendships for more than a few years, and the ones I have managed are cold, robotic formalities relating to the shell of a person I once was. Worse, is when I am surrounded by old friends and I realize that I have long since regarded any aspect of my personality to being in alignment with theirs. The few people I have met, ones where I feel odd connections or strange bursts of fondness, tend to be blocked in extraordinary ways. I still try to make these relationships work. I look at every problem and invent solutions that build from realistic to unfathomable, and no matter how close I am to creating what may be a permanent contact, fate will jump in the way and quickly break the connection, leaving me in a proverbial wasteland full of trash and darkness and fizzling electrical lights.

The easiest excuse for all of this is that, simply, I’m not a likeable person. This is the reasoning I believed in for the majority of my life, but somehow I’ve managed to conjure a skewed sense of self-confidence, and I refuse to accept this theory as truth. I admit that I can be an exhausting person, especially when I am in my judgmental phases, but I am always very kind and supportive of my friends, and on the rare occasion that someone gets close to me, they become one of the most important parts of my life. The truth is, I can be pretty wonderful.

I think that sometimes things just are not meant to be. Fate is a kind and wicked force that pushes me along in life, dangling my hopes and dreams above my nose, flipping a two-headed coin to see if I can actually grasp my aspirations. Sometimes I think that if I fight adolescently, trusting in powers of ambition, honesty, and love, I may be able to defeat what fate has decided for me and take control of my life. Unfortunately, a menacing power that fate unleashes is the ability to turn one cynical and hopeless. I think that my undying optimism, which shines through even in the most bleak of situations, proves that there is still a fighting chance for me.

I am here to disprove the fate I so faithfully believe in.

Ants

2010-05-24T20:48:00.006-04:00

Summer 2010. Goal is to write a good short story. Something of quality to be submitted to a lit magazine. I think that with another few revisions Fat Maria can reach that sort of quality, but I feel that the second revision put a juvenile tone on the language used in the piece, and it pains me to re-write every sentence (as well as the ending, which has to be changed for the 4th time.) The other issue is that Fat Maria's genre, magical realism, is too risky for publication. There are a lot of lit magazines that won't have anything to do with it. This new idea is also magical realism, but pulls back on the fablic aspect that over saturates Fat Maria.

So, here's the outline for what I am referring to as "The Ant Story"

1. Move in

2. The moldy traps

3. Invasion

4. Hostility

5. Connection

6. Imaginary Friends / Coping Mechanism

7. The Queen (mother?) and Technology

8. Restlessness

9. Move out

Swimming

2010-05-02T16:48:00.003-04:00

I have ideas swimming in my head.

Novels and screenplays.

Here's some sentences to write 'em down.

(this is for me, but I am sharing with "you")

1. old couple. slightly beyond middle aged, but not elderly. (late 50s, early 60s.) diva daughter. husband sick of wife. cancer. dealin' with it.

2. pregnant woman. exploring her "options." approached by man. one going nowhere, one going somewhere.

3. novel. each chapter different city. woman travels alone w/camera. cuts off contact w/home. (wish this could be an autobiography. one day.)

4. stolen robots. instruments. unwarranted fame. gotta work on this one extensively.

5. location is a house. takes place over decades (70s, 80s, 90s, present...?) about the people who live in it. crazy characters. crazy decorations. perhaps will be linked w/next idea:

6. drifter goes to live with friend. he has O.D.'d . crashes w/roommates anyways. Live in a commune/collective/thing.

7. woman investigated for murder. southern. sassy. bakes pies.

Ok. Have fun stealing these ideas. They all sound horrible. Only 2 are ready to be written. (Both screenplays.)

The Moving List

2010-04-10T13:57:00.008-04:00

My romanticism inspires me to think about the future. My body aches when I think about the possibilities that lie ahead, and my excitement stirs a visceral passion. I tremble. Currently, my dreams lead me to plan my life as a real human. Real humans need homes.

This is the list of cities I would consider relocating to after college.

I fantasize about them. I stare at photographs of their skylines, and those aches escalate and consume me because all I see is opportunity.

In no order:

The Realistic[s]:

1. San Francisco, CA

2. Vancouver, BC

3. Brooklyn, NY[C]

4. Austin, TX

5. Portland, OR

6. Los Angeles, CA

7. Montreal, QC

8. Washington, DC

The Unobtainable[s]:

1. Paris, FR

2. London, UK

The Last Resort:

1. Chicago, IL

[home]

Excerpt: Fat Maria

2010-03-23T19:28:00.005-04:00

An except from "Fat Maria", the story I wrote for my fiction workshop.

First draft. Critique welcome.

Tameron’s hands were hot. He juggled the pink sparks, tossing them from one hand to the other, faster and faster and faster until they blurred into a cyclone. He shut his eyes tight, the sparks blinding him, and he concentrated on his hands and the heat and ignored the oohs and aahs, but not quite, because there were thirteen oohs and fifteen aahs, which meant that he would make a fair amount of pesos today. He could use the money to buy a new pair of shoes, because his soles had turned black and no matter how many times he scrubbed them, he could not get his boots to shine again, and there was no longer a lake to wash himself, and over the past few months the river had slackened to a steady trickle because the draught had not let up and…

Ooh. Aah. Aaaaaaaaaaah.

Tameron opened his eyes, squinting, and saw a young boy yelling as he batted pink sparks out of his dirty hair, his mother close behind shaking him vigorously, shaking the sparks off of him. Tameron quickly clasped his hands over his mouth, and promptly screamed as his thick lips burned and blistered. The crowd started hissing and a few even stooped down to Tameron’s feet and snatched back their pesos. Tameron’s eyes widened as he watched his earnings slip away, and he sprung to the ground to gather the rest of his coins, jamming them into a small leather pouch full of bright pink powder, when he saw two perfectly shaped legs only inches from his face, so close that he could see the hairs threatening to sprout from beneath the skin.

“Fix the lake.”

Tameron looked up to see those harsh brown eyes. He gasped, and tried to shout in protest, but his lips ached and his tongue fought with his teeth and he could not get out the words, so he dumbly crouched there lusting over slender Ana’s legs.

“I need to swim across.”

Tameron furiously shook his head.

“My stupid sister won’t stop crying about her wedding, so if you don’t do it for me, do it for her.”

Tameron continued to shake his head.

Ana took a step closer, her ankles nearly kissing Tameron’s cheeks. She lifted her skirt and bent her knees and listened to Tameron pant and sputter. Then she quickly stepped away and placed her legs so close together that her thighs touched.

“I expect it to be clear by midnight.”

Humpback Re-Write

2010-03-05T00:06:00.002-05:00

HOLY SHIT A REVISION

but it's not that different.

Verbal Seduction submission spring '10 (prob. will not get published.)

The Humpback

The men from the Coast Guard shouted obscenities into megaphones as they tried to shoo away the frenzied crowd. The Humpback looked so lost on the shore, his eyes swollen and reflecting the mass of onlookers strutting in their bikinis and swim trunks. His thick skin was bloated, and algae sprouted from his wrinkles, and a hermit crab scuttled across the fluke as if it were Columbus setting foot upon the New World for the first time. Children laughed and screamed when the helicopter arrived, jabbing their fat fingers towards the thick cords that fell clumsily into the sand. The Coast Guard damped blankets and threw them over the Humpback. His watery eyes shrunk to pinpricks as he began to lift up, up, up into the sky. When the Humpback vanished, the people returned to their beach towels and hot dogs, and the scent of sunscreen overcame the salt and the sea.

Had a very unnerving dream last night. . .

2010-03-01T10:11:00.002-05:00

Had a very unnerving dream last night. Now the details are fuzzy, but I remember a man chasing me with a camera. He made this growl, a tick, callous, scratchy noise that grated on my ears and penetrated my bones. I never found out why he was following me, but I knew that he wanted to kill me. I tried to hide in my house. I locked myself in my room, and hid under my bed in pitch black. I became paralyzed. He burst in, making that goddamn grinding sound, and I fought every nerve in my body trying to move. My muscles flexed, tightened, released, tightened, released, tightened tightened tight tight tight, released a scream that transcended my dream and broke through my consciousness and swelled about my apartment. I heard that scream echo through the walls and rattle off my vent. I lay in bed staring into the darkness, listening to my scream fade into silence. I half expected my roommate to rush in, or a tender knock at my door, but there was nothing. It was only me, heart-racing, hands shaking, sweat dripping down my brow, lonely and alone.

Outline

2010-02-18T19:36:00.008-05:00

I'm in a fiction workshop class again this semester. My short story will be critiqued at the end of March, but I've been thinking it over since the semester started.

I've lot a lot of my passion and motivation to write since breaking up with my boyfriend. A lot of my inspirational moments came when I was feeling romantic. I've always been an idealist, and being in a relationship elevated my unrealistic, unobtainable dreams for the starry-eyed moments I so desperately crave.

I guess I'm lucky I'm forced to write for class. Otherwise, I have no idea when I'd sit down and start typing again.

Here is the outline for the story I'm planning to write for class. It's vague, and it won't make sense to readers, but I figured I'd share it anyways.

Outline for Fat Maria (working title):

Tar Lake
Magician
Fat Maria's Wedding Laments
Ana & the Youth
Old Man
Rorschach Beach
Youth Exile
Fat Maria's Wedding

Empty

2010-01-14T13:01:00.008-05:00

Untitled

I’m numb.

“I just want you to know, this has nothing to do you with. I just can’t do relationships.”

We were making progress. We were getting better.

“I still care about you a lot.”

I’ve changed my major, I have a new apartment, I was going to start counseling, take anti-depressants.

“I’m not going to eliminate you from my life. I still want to be friends.”

All hollow victories.

I have so many questions. I’m overwhelmed with panic. I can’t control my breathing. Tears are flooding down my cheeks and suddenly my hands are wet. My phone is wet. I speak like a child. Please, please, please. This isn’t fair. Please, please, please.

He keeps going. I’m only processing pieces of it. He’s felt this way for a whileblahblahblahdoesn’twanttohurtmeblahblahblahpleasedon’tblamemyselfblahblahblah…

Is this spur of the moment? We had a fight, but I said I was sorry. He’s just angry. He doesn’t mean it. He couldn’t possibly have planned this out. Do his friends know?

“They said it was an unfortunate situation.”

I wanted to seek out his best friend, grab him by the shoulders, and start shaking him vigorously. Talk you dirty bastard! I’d thrust him against the wall; hear his skull crack. With blood dripping down his temple, I’d push his head into the toilet, ruthlessly screaming while he choked and gurgled. What did he tell you? How long have you known? Talk! and he, wheezing and gasping for air, he’d sputter information: the conversation they had, what he said about me, how he still cared. Is there another woman? He doesn’t know nothin’.

“We can wait until we’re back at school. We can take it slow.”

Yes. Prolong the inevitable until I see him again. It’s been nearly a month. He’ll see me, and he’ll change his mind. He’ll see how much he loves me. I’ll be good, and I won’t pick fights, and he’ll remember how great we are together.

“I’m sorry, we’re just not compatible…”

We have so much fun! We can talk for hours. We like so many of the same things. We can spend days and days together and not get sick of each other. We care about each other. I am comfortable around him, I can tell him anything. I am connected, invested. I am so unbelievably happy! Aren’t you happy?

“. . .”

You said you’d tell me if you weren’t happy.

“. . .”

When did you stop being happy?

“. . .

I’m sorry.”

Please reconsider.

“I’m sorry.”

Please give me another chance.

“I’m sorry.”

Please please please.

“I’m sorry.”

New Meixco

2010-01-06T21:11:00.003-05:00

It was out in the desert during the winter, on historic route 66, that I learned to fall in love. The four of us were exhausted, and I was curled up in the back seat with my coat thrown over my body like a blanket, my puke-green crochet hat an uncomfortable pillow. We had been driving all day, now trapped somewhere between the twelfth and fifteenth hour, though even a clock couldn’t quite tell me how long it had been, as hours had melted together and the day had been so long that I had no recollection of what time we had left.

There were no lights lining the highway. The occasional headlights from other vehicles signified signs of life, but we were cruising at 85, and I was glad that the company of other drivers only lasted for a mere seconds as we blurred past them.

I was restless, and I could not sleep. I thought it was unusual how bright it was, like the sun was shining in my eyes, but there was no warmth and the car was surrounded by a velvety darkness that sat heavily on my eyelids and tried to coax me to sleep. But I couldn’t sleep. The darkness was half-hearted, the illumination too sincere. I turned my face to the window and pressed my cheek to the cool glass and turned my green eyes to the sky.

O! It was love!

The moon hung in the sky, bright and alert, fondly shining down on desert below. It was so clear, and spread its luminosity with such fervor that not an inch of the sky could escape its intense light. The stars were more than small pinpricks in a deep blue curtain. They were grand, glowing headlights, burning with the same passion of the cheap LCD screens that littered Las Vegas. But they were honest, and twinkled and winked at each other, and twinkled and winked at me, the tiny girl in the car who stared at them with such admiration. I felt my heart breaking because I would not, could not, join them in the vast space so unattainable to us trapped under the clouted atmosphere.

I had an urge to climb into the drivers seat and thrust the wheel to the side, to harshly swerve the car onto the shoulder and scramble out. I wanted to dash out into the desert, to the distant mountains, and lay in the freezing cold staring at the sky, motionless, awestruck, letting the snowflakes cover my body in a thin layer, preparing me for death.

I felt my blood flow richly through my veins. I felt romantic. I thought of my boyfriend back at home, how I wanted to transport him here and make love to him in the desert, in the mountains, under the stars, under the earnest moon. I wanted to press his body to mine and feel his warmth and his irregular heartbeat and synch our fast, hurried breathing together in the endless landscape under the endless sky.

I felt tragic; lonely.

I felt my heart break.

Weekly Musing

2009-12-25T03:45:00.002-05:00

Never facebook stalk your emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend who vanished without a trace because you will feel completely worthless when you discover that he's now happily married.

Top Films of the Decade

2009-12-11T17:27:00.007-05:00

List time!

So the decade's wrapping up, and being a self-proclaimed cinemaphile, I had to think about my top 10 films of the decade. This is an extremely hard list for me to make. I'm very picky when it comes to film, and I don't think I'll ever place these movies quite right. But, as of now, here's my list. This may change before the New Year, and I'm sure it'll drive me crazy all the while.

10. Spirited Away (2001)

9. Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

8. Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

7. Moulin Rouge! (2001)

6. Adaptation (2002)

5. The Counterfeiters (2007)

4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

3. Wall-E (2008)

2. The Royal Tennenbaums (2001)

1. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

honorable mentions:

Talk to Her (2002)

Waitress (2007)

Little Miss Sunshine (2006)

Notes on a Scandal (2006)

There Will be Blood (2007)

Thank You for Smoking (2005)

Best year for film in the decade: 2007

Shhh, it's not video.

2009-11-10T15:48:00.005-05:00

This is a blog for my writing, yes.

But!

The previous post was a script for an animation I was making. So, I figured I would share the final product.

(Thanks to YouTube.)

Mikey

2009-10-15T12:30:00.005-04:00

Part 1 of a 3 part series.

*edit* Finished it. A weak ending, but it's meant to be acted out, so it won't sound as bad.

I'm going to animate (w/clay) a story to it.

The idea for this series was heavily inspired by the Australian artist Adam Elliot ("Harvey Krumpet")

Mikey

My brother had a good friend in the fourth grade, a scrawny boy named Mikey Winkler, who had straw colored hair and wore rugby shirts. They were not terribly close, but Mikey had been coming over to our house more and more recently, playing with our dad’s toy train set, and showing off yo-yo tricks: “around the world,” “walk the dog,” “time warp.” He knew them all. He was very good.

On Halloween Mikey had been walking home from trick or treating, a bucket full of candy in one hand, and his Duncan yo-yo in the other, spinning tricks in the quiet street. He was performing an amazing feat of completing the “Atom Smasher” while eating a fistful of candy, when blinding headlights stopped him in his tracks, and then stopped his heart.

My mother forced all of us to go to the wake, and I remember the large cross on the wall looming over Mikey’s coffin, Jesus staring down the room forcing us all to whisper and remain solemn. There weren’t many other children there, but my brother spotted Ben Friedman in the corner, a fellow Jew who did not understand this Catholic wake business, who was also distressed by Jesus and the nails digging into his outstretched hands. My brother ran to his friend and they stayed there in the corner, talking about Mikey, jealous that he would never have to do homework again, and upset that he would not be able to join them for recess on Monday.

I found myself standing in front of the coffin, looking at Mikey’s white face, which had ever so slightly been touched up. His lips were so red, the brightest feature on his face, looking so full of life compared to his colorless cheeks. He was dressed in a blue and green rugby shirt, the colors of our elementary school. They had crossed his arms and rested his hands on top of a Bible, and more peculiarly, a yo-yo.

It was an orange Duncan, the same one that he spun daily around the cafeteria tables. The toy was scratched, and there was a sizeable chip in it, but it had survived the crash. Mikey’s fingers were tightly interlocked, protecting his prized possession. Mikey would forever be remembered as the kid with the yo-yo, a boy who had fallen into a fad and took it to his grave.

I tried to look for Mikey’s parents, but I gave up almost as soon as I started because I had no idea what they looked like. I tried to spot a man or woman who looked more grieved than the rest, or perhaps was better dressed, but the sea or tear-streaked faces and black formalwear was too dense. I wondered how Mikey’s parents had perceived their son. He hadn’t been good at sports, and he wasn’t known for his brains. He was eight years old. What else did he have going for him?

Austin

2009-10-06T14:24:00.001-04:00

I hear the gravel crunch as Austin passes swiftly on his skateboard. His backpack is slung loosely over one shoulder, and as his body fades I see the back pocket unzipped, a black pencil case threatening to spill out. It balances carefully on the edge of the zipper, gently bobbing up and down as it continues on its journey. My eyes wander down his body, his tight jeans growing smaller, his shape gradually becoming less perfect and more blurred as he skates down the street.

I trip on the sidewalk. I hear a girl click her tongue as I balance myself on the uneven concrete. She has dark brown hair, orange skin, and black leggings that seem to be painted on squeezing her thighs. She rolls eyes at me before she turns her head, watching Austin shrink. Her makeup’s all wrong. Her eye shadow’s smudged. She’s wearing too much concealer.

She waves to Austin, her cold expression cracking into desperation. He does not turn. She calls to him, once, “Hey!’ His body is a speck in the distance. Again, louder, “Hey!” His body is microscopic.

When I pass her, I glare. She catches my look, and bumps me with her purse. I let my fingers wrap and tug around its long leather handles, and then she is picking up mascara from the sidewalk, hissing at me, spitting out colorful words. I am a slut. I am a bitch.

I think about the last time I saw Austin. In class, his friend with the blond curly hair nudges him in the side, chiding him for not coming out the weekend before. He’s whipped, tied down to his girlfriend. Austin smiles nervously. Is he going to marry her? No, he laughs, of course not, his hands twisting and turning, his fingers winding into the loose threads from a tear at the bottom of his jeans.

My mind wanders as I turn the corner, reaching the front steps to my apartment. I walk upstairs and immediately crawl in bed with my shoes still on, and wrap my arms around Patrick, who is wrapped under the covers snoring lightly. My hands caress his bare chest and I smell his hair, which always smells of jasmine. He mumbles a bit, and turns his body to face me, half-opening his eyes, groggily looking at me. I ask him to promise to never fool around with another woman. He does. I ask him to promise to continue loving me. He does. I ask him to promise to never to marry me. He does.

The Artist on being an Artist

2009-09-17T14:54:00.003-04:00

Huh. Writing this for class, but figure it is shareable.

Personal Essay.

Creative non fiction? Well, not that creative.

I don’t think that my parents would have predicted that they would have a child in art school. My father, a technological man, and my mother, who spent most of my childhood as a stay-at-home mom, can hardly be considered the artistic type. They never enrolled me in an art class, or encouraged me to pursue creative outlets. Instead, they forced my non-athletic, twiggy self into six years of little-league softball. In high school, they hung their heads in shame as I traded in my catcher’s gear for play scripts. They winced when I asked for rides to art shows. My senior year, my dad scolded me for not taking calculus.

By the time I applied for college, it was clear that things weren’t going to change. While they were relieved that I was hesitant to make a career out of the fine arts, I remember the exasperated expression on my father’s face when I told him that I wanted to pursue animation and filmmaking. It was only with my keen knowledge of the film industry, as I recklessly pulled up numbers and gross figures, that my parents grudgingly accepted the fact that I could pursue art and make money—if I were lucky.

Because I didn’t have much support from my parents, art was something that I had to completely self-teach. I found my inspiration mostly through contemporary filmmakers, practically idolizing directors such as Stephen Spielberg, Geoerge Lucas, John Hughes, Wes Anderson, the Coen Brothers, and Hayao Miyazaki. Above all, I worship the senior creative team at Pixar. Most of my daydreams revolve around working along side with John Lasseter, grabbing lunch with Andrew Stanton, and just chillin’ with Brad Bird.

Sometimes, my admiration for such people brings fault to my work. The biggest challenge I have as an artist is my lack of self-confidence. I tend to look at such accomplished filmmakers and wonder how I can reach their levels, both in quality and conceptually. I know it is nonsensical to compare myself to such famed people, but it is in my nature to push myself beyond my natural limits, to have grandiose aspirations for my work and goals set so high that even some of the most famed people in the industry have not reached them.

In the end, I just want to be a storyteller. I want to explore the dark, complex sides of humanity. I’m interested in the motivation and psychology behind emotion, especially mixed feelings like anticipation and disappointment. I want to pursue the ideas of luck and karma, and I would like to find out if fate really exists. I like to experiment with various forms of animation, so I can tell stories about people in surreal and abstract ways. I would like to be a formalist who does not abandon meaning, and a postmodernist with hope for humanity, a hope that is buried under all my discontent.

Despite negative feelings, however, I feel that I have succeeded at finding out who I am, not just as an artist, but as an individual as well. I know what values I hold, and how I would like my art to portray such ideals. At this point, I am only struggling to find a comfortable method for doing so. I have While I see myself as a pessimist, I do believe that I will be able to solve such a problem.

Sometimes, I like to put my artistic identity crisis aside. For now, I continue to bemuse my parents, thriving in my uncertainties and insecurities, watching them squirm, smiling slyly to myself.

Favorite time of day: 4 - 7 pm, late summer afternoons.

2009-08-16T12:44:00.002-04:00

Man I am not liking this at all, 'cept the last few lines. Oh well.

New vignette.

And The Trees Glow

It’s the late afternoon, and the sun grows tired and languid, yawning as it slowly descends behind the trees, flares dulling from a crisp yellow to a sultry orange. The shadows grow, stretching forever, the dirt road sprouting freckles, spotted by bursts of light and dark imprints, the light blocked by the leaves and the squirrels. And the leaves! The leaves glow, illuminate, a transfixing emerald green. They glow with passion! They glow with radiance! They glow and the squirrels scurry across the branches, and as the tree shakes, the leaves whisper, tell secrets, giggle faintly. Cicadas stretch and flutter their wings, bothered by the heat, awakened by the orange air, begin chirping oooooAAAAA oooooAAAAA oooooAAAAA. And the cicadas yearn for love, and summer yearns for love, and humanity yearns for love.

Excerpts

2009-07-30T01:20:00.005-04:00

I just read Dave Eggers' biography A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and found that there was a lot in it that I could relate to, on a weird level. Eggers grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and I can see the mark that has left on him.

Lately, when I've been reading, I've been marking up books by writing in the margins, underlining sentences, and circling entire passages that are particularly striking to me. Sadly, I checked this book out from the library, so I had to restrain myself from writing in it. I did end up dog-earring two passages, and now I will share them below.

Page 76.

"We grew up in a tightfisted house, where there was no allowance, where asking for $5 from our father elicited the heaviest of sighs, required detailed plans for repayment. Our mother was far worse--would not even shop in Lake Forest, where everything was overpriced, would instead drive ten, twenty, thirty miles to Marshall's, to T.J. Maxx, for bargains, for bulk. Once a year we'd all pile into the Pinto and would drive to a place on the west side of Chicago, Sinofsky's, where for $4, $5 each we'd buy dozens of slightly flawed rugby shirts, holes here and there, extra buttons, collars ruined by bleach, pink bleeding into white. We grew up with a weird kind of cognitive dissonance; we knew we lived in a nice town--our cousins out East often made that point to us--but then, if this was true, why was our mother always fretting aloud about not having money to buy staples? "How will I even buy milk tomorrow?" she would yell at him from the kitchen. Our father, who was out of work a year here, a year there, never seemed impressed with her worry; he seemed to have it all worked out. Still, we were ready for and expected sudden indigence, to be forced out of the house in the middle of the night and into one of the apartments on the highway, at the edge of town. To become on of those kids."

Page. 201

". . . my feeling is that if you're not self-obsessed you're probably boring. NOt that you can always tell the self-obsessed. The best sort of self-obsessed person isn't outwardly so. But they're doing something more public than not, making sure people know that they're doing it, or will know about it sooner or later. I guarantee that the applicants for The Real World--I guarantee that if you put all these tapes in a time capsule and opened it in twenty years, you'd find that these are the people who are, in one way or another, running the world--at the very least, they'll be the most visible segment of the demographic. Because we've grown up thinking of ourselves in relation to the political-media-entertainment ephemera, in our safe and comfortable homes, given the time to think about how we would fit into this or that band or TV show or movie, and how we would look doing it. These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational, indefensible. And thus, there is a lot of talking about it all-surely the cultural output of this time will reflect that--there'll be a lot of talking, whole movies full of talking, talking about talking, ruminating about talking about wondering, about our place, our wants and obligations--the blathering of the belle époque, you know. Environmentally reinforced solipsism."

I also hope that some people note that there are similarities in our writing. I don't want to imply that I am as good as Eggers--not at all. But, I do feel, especially when I read this, that my style is very much in the same vein as his, and that made me kind of happy. I loved what I read here, and it brings me joy to know that without trying desperately, I've created format to my writing that parallels great, wonderful writers whom intrigue me, make me think.

Weekly Musing

2009-07-15T00:17:00.005-04:00

Haven't done this in a while.

Weekly Musing:

"The average person only goes to one funeral during their childhood (birth-18) and then one every three years until they're fifty."

In my childhood, I have attended four funerals, and four wakes.

In my adulthood, which has only spanned two years, I have attended two funerals.

I've been a pallbearer. I've been asked if I've wanted to say a few words, (but haven't actually done so.)

I've been to a dog's funeral.

I've never been to a wedding.

Is this a trend, or is there such a thing as fate?

I saw a stuffed tiger on the street today.

2009-07-09T17:18:00.003-04:00

It inspired this.

Needs work, I know.

The Prince on the Median

The stuffed tiger lay in the middle of the road, on the flat median, just short of the left-turn lane. It was dirty and faded. Its orange back was bleached yellow from the sun, and the black stripes were a dull gray, and the gray spread into the white fur hugging the tiger’s jawline. It lay there so helplessly, so quietly. It paid no attention to the cars, refusing to rock gently as the vehicles breezed by, the artificial wind barely ruffling the tiger’s faux whiskers.

It lay there in the aftermath of father’s rage, or mother’s, or brother, or even grandma. He was stressed, on edge. She was nervous, waiting on the results for something important, something that daughter and her tiger couldn’t understand. So the girl sang to her tiger, called him her prince, brushed his matted, dull fur. Father or mother, hands shaking, asking daughter to be a little more quiet, asking again and again, took her prince and flung him out the window, and daughter’s tears only made it worse.

There was the possibility that there was no rage, or stress. There were no results and there wasn’t anything important for daughter to not understand. She had rolled the window down; let tiger’s snout pick up the scents of the suburbs, substituting for the puppy she asked for every Christmas. He was enjoying it all, the scents, the sounds, the sun, when suddenly the car jerked. It had hit a pothole, swerved to avoid another car, slammed on the breaks to avoid a squirrel—it had been something, anything, but daughter never knew, her eyes widening and jaw dropping as tiger slipped from her hands.

There, on the median, tiger watched his damsel’s tiny face grow smaller and smaller, until it was only a dot on the horizon, pink and blurry. Then cars began to gather in the left-turn lane, and his fur darkened more with the debris from exhaust pipes as the light turned green and cars revved their engines.

I lie in bed and listen to the world around me.

2009-06-24T12:18:00.003-04:00

First draft of a short thing here. Creative non-fiction. Kind of meaningful to me. Want to work on the emotional impact.

Untitled

In the late morning, the phone rings, and in her usual manner my mother answers, informally saying “hello” as she anticipates the sales pitch from a telemarker or Jewish charity. There is an unusual pause before she speaks next, and while I cannot see her reaction, as I am lying in my bedroom trying to fall back asleep, I can sense her body going rigid, her hands clenching tightly around the phone, her heart beating faster.

“You’re asking about Ryan?”

The way her voice cracks makes it sound as if someone is bringing terrible news about my brother. Her tone is suddenly sharp, distrusting, paranoid. Angrily, she asks the caller, “do you even know who Ryan is? Do you know him?”

I feel my heart break as there is a long, uncomfortable pause. “When was the last time you spoke to him,” my mother finally barks, and I wonder which long-lost friend the caller is. My first guesses are Grant or Patricia, but my mother never repeats the name aloud.

I imagine the caller is stammering, feeling interrogated and vulnerable, the horror creeping into their mind as they realize that they’ve just disturbed a grieving mother. “Ryan’s in the Air Force,” my mother says weakly, a small clear of the throat to hide the fact that she may be crying. The way she speaks, “Air Force,” could easily be replaced with the word “dead.”

Ryan is Dead.

In my mother’s mind, his enlistment was the act of signing his own death certificate. His infrequent calls and brief communication with me provide no consolation for her. While my brother will be stationed in a small base in Northern California, my mother firmly believes that soon he’ll be stationed in Iraq, dodging bullets and dropping bombs from planes, eventually landing in a body bag as a proud, Jewish soldier.

As I lay in bed, tangled in my covers, I try to hear more, but there is nothing. I strain my ears and suddenly I hear the bathroom sink running water, my mother shuffling around, the toilet flush, more running water. Then silence. The house fills with an emptiness, and for a brief moment, I feel like the air is thick with mourning, that my mother is sitting Shiva. Then my dog stirs, and the bright jangling of his collar remind me of dog tags. I picture my brother in the hot sun of Goodfellow, Texas, grumbling about P. T. and technical school, looking forward to the evening when he can swipe a slice of cake from the dining hall and then spend some hours online, telling stories to his sister about his pick-up softball games, casually mentioning a girl he spoke to that day, and making plans for when he eventually comes home.

I want to go to the Beach

2009-06-06T19:25:00.002-04:00

Humpback

They stood there, arms waving in a frenzy, as men from the Coast Guard tried to shoo the crowd away, shouting obscenities into megaphones. The Humpback whale looked so lonely on the shore, his big eyes swollen and reflecting the mass of onlookers strutting in their bikinis, and swim trunks. The whale’s thick skin was bloated, and there was algae deepest in his wrinkles, and a hermit crab scuttled across the fluke excitedly, as if it were Columbus setting foot upon the New World for the first time. Children laughed and screamed when the helicopter arrived, as the thick cords fell clumsily into the sand. The men threw damp blankets over the whale, and after a grueling process he began to lift up, up, up into the sky. When the whale was only a dot among the horizon, the people returned to their beach towels and hot dogs, and the scent of sunscreen overcame the smell of the sea.

Things My Family Fights About . Com

2009-05-25T16:08:00.003-04:00

Along the lines of sites like Texts From Last Night and F My Life, I got the idea of the ultmate depressing website : Things My Family Fights About (.com)

Today, I would submit these subjects :

Chairs

Toilet Paper

Cups

"Being a Maniac"

Money

I can't be the only one who does this.

2009-05-15T03:21:00.006-04:00

I swear I am not a stalker.

This is creative nonfiction, I guess?

I wrote this very quickly, while feeling down. It's probably full of odd syntax, weird grammar, and an incoherent flow.

Nocturnal Scavenger

Sometimes, when I am bored and feeling lonely, I will visit my Blogger profile and click on bands and films that I have listed in my profile as favorites. I scroll through the results, fondly regarding the multitude of strangers with whom I have at least one thing in common. On occasion, I spot a handsome man, and holding my breath I tentatively click on his profile, peering into the depths of his interests. I only get a vague feel of his life, but I smile, and I feel my cheeks glow when I see that we both share an appreciation for Wes Anderson flicks and the crooning voice of John Darinelle. When I am feeling especially brave, I plunge into his blog, skimming his lately musings to see if perhaps my soul mate is out there, wandering the streets of London or Sydney or Tokyo. I close my eyes, and I daydream about the wonderful life I could have with a man that I have built in my mind based off shallow information. Then I close the window, and I take careful precautions to never look for these men again. I erase them from my mind; I forget about our imaginary courtship. I return to reality, straining my ears to catch signs of life that surround me. Off in the distance, there are warm bodies held close by their significant others, oblivious to the emptiness that plagues me on these nights.

Too Many Symbols?

2009-05-12T16:24:00.004-04:00

I like the idea of this piece, but I don't like what I physically wrote. Perhaps there is too much symbolism going on? Or maybe it just doesn't make sense. I dunno.

___

Flags

The little white flags trembled, but they held themselves high, and tried to shout across the nation, but their words were ripped apart from the bellowing wind, and their tiny voices could not carry across the country, especially not to the flag way up in Juneau.

The flag in Davenport managed to cry out to the entire Quad Cities, and Rock Island’s inhabitant was surely impressed, but their exchange was cut off from the rest of the world, swallowed by the surrounding farmlands, and it wasn’t long until the cows and sheep and goats came and chewed their cloth to pieces and their wooden shafts to nubs.

Along the West Coast, the flags were stomped on, torn and tattered, and San Rafael and San Francisco’s flags hid in the sewers, and their words never traveled across the Golden Gate. Seattle’s flags could not overcome the rain and clouds and fog, and threw its words into the sea, and then came plummeting after.

The East was too prideful, so the flags whispered to each other, their words scrambled in their game of telephone. The South could never get along, and they let their words melt in the hot sun as they sat on their porches drinking sweet tea, and pretended they had nothing to say.

They tried to breach Canada and Mexico, but big men with large guns pushed them back, lining them across the borders. Some tried to swim across the Atlantic, but their words were garbled in the waters, and they wound up on the shores of Portugal and Morocco dumb and mute.

The flags grew in number, but they no longer held themselves high, nor screamed, nor whispered, for their necks were broken and their bodies were now homes for the rats and the worms. The cows and the sheep and goats were bloated, and the splintered wood and tattered cloth filled the farms and the abandoned words sunk into the soil.

The words took root and sprouted, and new red flags shot out of the ground, with steel shafts and silk threads. They screamed across the nation, and they reached Fargo and Augusta and Provo, and Juneau heard the loudest cry of all.

And the flags still shout, and tremble no more.

Updating From San Antonio

2009-05-02T10:16:00.002-04:00

Weekly musing:

Infatuation is easier to find on land rather than in air.

The New Yorker

2009-04-23T16:37:00.007-04:00

I decided that I'm going to submit a piece of fiction to the New Yorker.

I don't know when that will be, and I am not working on anything that could be considered worthy of being published, but I am going to do it.

It's one of those things that I can be proud of, regardless of the outcome. I can imagine myself printing out the e-mail I get when my piece is rejected, framing it and putting it on my wall. People will come over and stare at my letter with bewilderment. They'll ask why I perserved something so depressing, and I'll just laugh.

I see people hestitate when they choose to follow their ambitions. There is such a negative stigma about rejection; it becomes a paralysis, and sometimes it prevents us from ever trying at all. I don't want to be trapped by such a fear. I have faced a lot of rejection already in my life, and I am ready to take more.

I don't aspire to be a professional writer, but it's a hobby I love and adore. If I ever did get published in something as incredible as the New Yorker, I would be elated, and it would make every rejection worth it.

The Water Bearer

2009-04-18T11:57:00.005-04:00

So I posted my blog publicly, and I am thrilled to have three followers. I don't know if I will get more, of if you guys will actually read this thing, but I'm excited nonetheless.

For the third time, I have re-written this short story. I first wrote it in my senior year of high school, but I like it a lot. Now I changed it for my fiction workshop, but even if it were unsocilicted, I'd probably work on it anyways. I hope it's better. Critiques please?

The Water Bearer

I was surprised to see only a handful of people standing there when I reached the shore. It had taken me half an hour walk from the El stop, and my watch dimly reminded me that it was 7:15. The event, which was supposed to last all evening, had started at 6:30, yet there celebration hadn’t even started by the time I arrived. I looked out at the scarce amount of people gathered on the beach with disappointment. Tightly huddled together, standing where the sand met the sidewalk and looking very out of place, were three men wearing finely tailored suits. I perceived that the first one was a fat balding man wiping his glasses with a silk cloth; the second looked like a weasel, and kept darting his eyes from the sidewalk to the shoreline, and I could feel his discomfort and desire to leave even from my distance. The third man was the one whom I thought to be the Mayor, and I thought he looked quite healthy for a man that recently recovered from his first heart attack.

It was chilly that summer night—a good sign that the years of hot, blistering weather were soon coming to an end. A cool breeze drifted from the lake, sending goose bumps along my arms. I shivered as I took notice of the other onlookers. There was a young woman wearing a sundress made entirely out of hemp. I assumed that she was either one of the last PETA activists still standing, or part of the large political empire that was NORML. She was beautiful, with her long blonde dreadlocks, and I quickly turned away because I felt my face getting hot, and the blood rushed all throughout my body. There was a cluster of hipster men and women about my age, fidgeting nervously as they were no doubt suffering from the recent worldwide cigarette ban. I chuckled to myself, the thought of nicotine turned my stomach, and I silently congratulated myself because I had never been a smoker. Out of the corner of my eye, I took note of an elderly couple, standing barefoot with their toes sinking into the sand. Their presence made me feel calm, and I commended their bravery.

The beach was supposed to be decontaminated, but the sand was still covered in patches of a moldy, yellow-green, crystallized gunk. I looked down at my shoes, the laces double knotted, and knew that I was safe from any contact with the beach. I was scared that there might have been holes in my shoes, but I had inspected them thoroughly before I left, checking for loose seems or tears and was very relieved when I found none.

The water was a skewed shade of navy blue, which wasn’t much better than the black goop it used to be, but I took joy in any form of color, and the fact that the water could now reflect the hazy sky made me feel prideful for Chicago’s efforts. Tonight was the grand re-opening of Lake Michigan. It was proof that the Midwest was saved from artificially engineered water and weak solar power. Chicago’s economy would start thriving again, and it would become the safe haven from the deadly outer limits that I called America.

My attention turned from the sand and water as the mayor cleared his throat and addressed the crowd. I could not believe that such a small group of people had the courage to attend this piece of history. I worried that by standing here I was at risk of getting radiation from the beach’s purification. By the expression on everyone’s faces, I knew that I was not the only one with this thought on my mind.

“Thank you for attending this wondrous occasion! Chicago’s success with Project Green is truly a magnificent accomplishment,” the Mayor said, hands quivering as he backed as far away from the shore as possible. “We are proud to once again open the beaches of Lake Michigan to all people, near and far! We are the first of the Great Lakes to be cleansed of all harmful pollutants, and Washington has ruled Lake Michigan safe for human contact!”

I applauded the mayor’s speech, but my mind drifted from the rest of the Mayor’s words. Chicago had cleaned up, but I felt that the rest of humanity seemed resistant to harness this change. On paper, the beach may be safe to walk on, but my caution proved that no one actually wanted to touch Mother Earth. I wasn’t even sure if those standing here wanted to embraced nature and wished to restore it to its former, glorious self.

The three officials were in a huddle again, and I watched as the hipsters prepared for the long walk back to the El. The woman in the hemp dress was taking pictures of the beach, and my heart sank when I noticed a Chicago Tribune press-pass dangling from her neck. Suddenly, I knew that we had nothing in common, and I could feel my skin cool down with every click of the camera. The old couple looked content as they watched the sun set behind the murky horizon. They seemed so peaceful, and I longed to feel as safe as they did.

I slowly bent down and untied my shoelaces, and carefully, I removed my Keds. When my feet touched the sand, I winced, expecting to feel some sort of acidic burning sensation. There was nothing of the sort—only the warm, soft, squishy feeling of sand between my toes. I felt like I was in a movie. This was something I had only seen in pictures, but now I was experiencing for the first time. It felt like freedom. I cautiously stepped to the water’s edge, frightened by the small waves that threatened to nip my toes. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, and then walked, with giant steps, into the water.

Suddenly, my feet were in pain, as if thousands of needles were thrust into them simultaneously. The water was so cold it sent a shock throughout my entire body. The feeling overcame all my senses at once. I couldn’t breathe. I was running through the lake, splashing everywhere. I lowered my trembling hands to the surface, drowning my hair, my face, and my neck. Soon, my body was soaked. I captured water in my palms, and raised my hands to my lips. I gasped as I tasted the sweetest liquid on Earth.

A rapid sequence of flashes startled me. I awoke from my trance and turned to see the woman with the press-pass lowering her camera away from her eyes, her jaw dropped in disbelief. All eyes were upon on me. I slowly stepped back onto the crystallized sand, picking up my shoes by their laces, letting them dangle by my side. I said nothing and looked at no one. I walked back to the sidewalk, ignoring each witness.

I paused when I reached the elderly couple. I took hold of the old man’s hand and squeezed. Without a word, I thanked him for his bravery, and I apologized for the mess that my generation made of nature. Our eyes met, and for a second I felt a divine connection. I must have stood there for minutes, for the old man forced his hand out of my grasp. He smiled, nodded, and directed his wife in the opposite direction I was headed.

I walked home, leaving Lake Michigan behind forever. The others had lost their chance to redeem themselves, but I knew that I was the one who had been saved.

New Musing and Flash

2009-04-17T14:43:00.005-04:00

Weekly musing:

Passion is not a substitute for talent.

NEW FLASH!!! It's a working title. I need to change it.

It will probably be submitted to the lit magazine on my university because I realized my writing isn't a total shitfest.

The Flood

When she signed her name, the pen burst, and black ink poured and poured and flooded her bedroom. It dirtied her shoes and her stockings, and reached up to the hem of her skirt and then to her breasts, until soon her chin was tickled by the wet muck and the smell became too much to bear. She paddled to her window, and with all her might she forced it open, and watched as the ink rushed out and filled the streets, dirtying the paws of stray cats and the tires of cars and bicycles speeding by. She saw children playing on the sidewalk wail as their gameboys fizzled, and bewildered fathers waited until working mothers came home to console their sons and daughters. She witnessed the city turn dark, and she sighed and picked up a rag, and began to blot up the ink. She cleaned and cleaned, but the stains never vanished, and the smell still lingered, and she could no longer remember how to sign her name.

Favorite Moments in Film

2009-04-12T15:29:00.004-04:00

After watching Noah Baumbach's "Kicking and Screaming," I decided to make a list of some of my favorite scenes in film. While this film will not be considered a favorite, the last scene, which may have been less than a minute long, was absolutely beautiful.

In no order:

1. "Kicking and Screaming" - *spoiler* The end scene when Grover tells Jane that he wishes they were older.

2. "Cinema Paradiso" - *spoiler* When the main character finds the reel of all the kissing scenes strung together.

3. + 4. "Rushmore" - The collage of all of Max's activities. Also the dinner scene after Max's play.

5. "Love Actually" - When Hugh Grant dances

6. "Le Faubleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain" - When Amelie sends Nino on her blue-arrow scavenger hunt.

7. "Wall-E" - The entire first 30 - 45 minutes.

8. "When Harry Met Sally" - The lunch scene. ("I'll have what she's having")

9. "Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo" - The rapid close ups between the three before they have their shootout.

10. "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" - The Siren scene

11. "The Full Monty" - *spoiler* The stripping scene in the end, of course.

12. "Ghostbusters" - The Stay Puft Marshmallow man

13. "Moulin Rouge" - Spectacular Spectacular song

14. "Jerry Maguire" - "Show me the money! Show me the money!" scene

15. "Raiders of the Lost Ark" - Indie swiping his hat from under the closing-wall thing. Classic.

16. "8 1/2" - Guido's harem

17. "Almost Famous" - "I am a golden god!"

18. "Office Space" - Kicking the shit out of the copy machine.

19. "There Will Be Blood" - The entire final scene

About a Year

2009-04-11T18:26:00.004-04:00

Wow, I started this blog that I show to no one about a year ago. Awesome. I'm proud of myself, because even though updates are rare, they still exist!

I'm thinking about doing one or two sentences a week to reflect what I've been pondering.

This week's musings:

Andrew Bird and I will never be friends because I don't know how to whistle.

Joy and Wood

2009-03-26T23:43:00.008-04:00

My short story, "A. Mississippiensis" made the lit magazine at my University. Je suis heureux!

My french is terrible.

A Rant:

I recently auditioned for the reality t.v. show, America's Next Top Model. I had to do so in a small open call, set in Albany NY, because it would have been impossible for me to attend any other call. Apparently, Top Model producers penalize you for not flying out to a big city to audition, and decide not to tell you on the spot if you have been cut or not from casting. I heard that if I had made it, somebody would have secretly told me to stick around for another round of casting, but seeing as that didn't happen (not to me, or the 100 + girls that went before me,) I think I can safely assume that I will not be making an appearance on television any time soon.

I think that the biggest problem with my audition was my wooden response to the stock question, "why do you want to be America's Next Top Model?" Well, intern wearing a CW t-shirt, I don't have a sob-story to tell, which makes my chances of making this reality show dangerously low. I wanted to say that I was a recovering drug addict, or that I was clinically insane, but instead the generic question floored me and all I could choke out was that I was "unique," and that "I wanted this more than any other girl," and other unoriginal phrases that surely pushed me off the list of secretive call back contenders. Even if I had given a good reason--that I had been made fun of to the extreme as a child, to the point where my high school counselor enrolled me in friend-building peer sessions without my consent--it's not a sad enough tale to sway the mind of melodramatic Tyra Banks. I wanted to say that I would be a spokesperson for abused women, but because I've never been abused myself (physically, at least. I am an emotional abuse "survivor,") that would never fly.

I'm a bit aggravated. I know I would be great on that show, and even though it would jeopardize the possibility of having a respectable career in the future, I really wanted to be on it. It's not April 1 yet -- I believe that is the last possible day I will hear from any CW producer. They haven't had their LA open call yet, so I don't know if they've picked out all their girls from semi finals. Hopefully my giant red hair will win the heart of a casting director and I'll get a phone call in the next few days, but I'm not holding my breath. I curse flat responses and an average life for my poor audition. For once I would like to see a girl like me. . . no, wait, a girl that IS me, on ANTM.

FOUND

2009-03-05T23:56:00.006-05:00

Found this the other day. Forgot I wrote these two sentences. This is a Word document that describes the passengers surrounding me on my last train ride home from Syracuse to Chicago (Dec. 2008)

Document title: ohno

I am surrounded by sorority girls, a mentally challenged teenager, a crying baby, and I’m seated next to a fundamentalist Christian.

This thirteen hour train ride suddenly seems much, much longer.

A. Mississippiensis

2009-02-26T16:07:00.001-05:00

The pipes rattled, and the metallic clanging sound grew more frantic with every second. The hollow pipes screamed with urgency, and from them echoed a quick, desperate scratching. The source was that of powerful claws, and squeezing through the tight tubes, the razor sharp appendages thrashed about, splashing water to and fro. It’s long, flat snout was first to penetrate the surface, and as the creature emerged, slipping and sliding upon the porcelain throne, it grew more fretful and anxious to know that once again, it had made a wrong turn. Perhaps it was somewhere along the Mississippi, it wondered, as it fell heavily to the ground. I must have traveled north, it thought, as it wove between the legs of screaming girls, peering up their skirts and fondly regarding the schools of fish and scores of butterflies. I would very much like to leave the suburbs, it yearned, as it traced the faint scent of gumbo. It grinned, flashing a wide, toothy smile, and then it continued on its journey back to the Bayou.

Rigatoni

2009-01-21T18:51:00.003-05:00

A script for an experimental animation I am working on. It is a bit rough around the edges; supposed to be performed as a monologue.

RIGATONI

Every night, I have the same dream. I’m sitting in my living room, dressed in my cutest date outfit, debating whether or not I want to meet Daniel for dinner. He’s a sweet guy with good intentions, but he views himself as a Casanova, and insists that he’s a professional fashion photographer. In reality, The only female interaction he gets stems from silly photoshoots. I know that during dinner, he’ll ask me to model for him, nude, and I don’t want to witness the emotional breakdown that will follow when I decline his offer. Daniel will ask me where he went wrong in his life, blame it on a childhood incident where he massacred a nest of baby birds, and then sob until I redeem him for his past sins.

I have never met Daniel in person, yet he is my only companion in dreams. He is the entity of every man I have ever had a relationship with; a symbol of self-loathing, personal insecurities, and destructive behavior. I resist his dinner invitations because I have perfected the art of running away from old flames, yet lately, as my dreams become more vivid, the scent of his cheap cologne and weary smile suddenly seem alluring.

On one fretful night, I find myself in a cheap Italian restaurant, a plastic tablecloth

expanding infinitely to keep Daniel and me apart. He’s nervously speaking, and I can see the apprehension weighing down his expression as he prepares to ask me about the modeling job. My body is rigid as I contemplate the various ways of saying ‘no,’ when Daniel pulls a mesh hamper into view, filled to the brim with dirty underwear. He takes the underwear, and starts unfolding it onto the table, until there are miles, and miles, and miles, of boxer briefs between us. He quietly asks me to do his laundry for him. At this moment, I would rather be in a dank photo studio, naked and smothered with marinara sauce.

Now, while fully awake, the task of doing laundry haunts me in the most self-conscious, embarrassing manner. I let my clothes pile up, and when I finally run out of underwear, I concede to the task. I take my clothes downtown to a Laundromat, and the most flamboyant fashion I can muster, I turn the mundane task into a full production. As I watch my clothes spin in the washing machine, a blur of suds and color, I feel the dream slip away from my mind. I close my eyes, yet I cannot picture Daniel gummy teeth or smell his cut-rate aroma.

I never see Daniel again. Instead, I dream of the Italian restaurant, empty except for myself, pushing rigatoni across my plate and a freshly ironed dress on my back. The table is lined with photographs of woman, naked, contorting their bodies in catlike positions. Each one of them looks at me and tells me that I’ve done right. They say from here on out, I’m free to do what I please, that I’ll never be forced to do anything again It’s good to hear these women say these things, but I don’t feel any different. I don’t feel enlightened, or powerful, or anything. I only feel satisfied, but I think that’s all I’ve ever been looking for--satisfaction.

USC Transfer Application Essay

2008-11-10T00:58:00.003-05:00

My 2008 essay for USC's transfer application. Another one about my dog.

It was the winter of my junior year of high school. I had just been cast in the spring play, and I was also preparing for the State series for the Speech and Acting Team, as well as vying to become a Captain of the team for the upcoming school year. I had a research paper due for my honors English class, and I still managed to work twelve hours a week at my local library.

On a frosty February afternoon, the first day in months that I came home from school before sunset, I was wondering how I would juggle all my activities when I saw my Mother standing in the foyer with a Butternut Squash in her hands. It looked strange; it was furry, it moved, and, when it saw me come in, it peed on the tile floor.

This was how I met Kirby.

The last time I begged my parents for a puppy was when I was seven. Now, I was seventeen, and my Mother’s birthday present to my Brother and I was a cream colored Schnoodle—half Schnauzer, half Poodle, and completely hypoallergenic to adhere to my Mother’s needs.

Kirby was supposed to be a standard sized dog, but as he grew we discovered that he was a miniature. My Brother, who never wanted a dog, and especially not a small one, refused to take care of Kirby. My Mother, discovering that dogs barked and had to be housebroken, abandoned caring for him as well. I was too busy with school and work to make any real impact on the dog’s upbringing, and so it was my Dad who ended up caring for the Schnoodle.

Even though he worked from home, my Dad had to fly out of town often. It was on these days when I took care of Kirby, since my Mother and Brother refused to deal with him. I would walk him along the snowy streets of my suburban neighborhood, holding him back as he yapped at other dogs, moving in as if he were ready to kill, but really just longing to play with another of the same species.

I was very harsh when training Kirby. When he peed on my bed, I would chase him with a squirt bottle filled with lemon juice. When he ripped up toilet paper, I would put him in his crate and endure his whining for hours. “The Everything Puppy Book” said these actions were all right, but I couldn’t help but think that Kirby’s treatment was awful. We were terrible owners.

I began to regret my Mother’s decision to get a dog when, on a gloomy day in March, Kirby padded into my bedroom. He leaned his body against me, rested his head on my lap, and looked to me with his dark brown eyes.

This was unconditional love.

At that moment, I learned to love my dog. My general dislike for the mutt melted into affection, and I urged my Brother and Mother to put more effort into raising the pup. With my encouragement he burrowed a place into the hearts of each member of my family. Kirby became my roommate when his crate was moved out of the kitchen and into my bedroom. He has his own place at the dinner table. He gets taken to the dog park every Sunday for a proper playtime. He eats the best dog food money can buy.

Now, I could never view Kirby as a possession; he’s family. Kirby displays love that requires nothing in return, and I believe that this is something that humanity can learn from. To hate is simple, but to love one another is a challenge. It sounds unbelievable, but from witnessing a dog’s unfailing affection, I decided that I wanted to become a better person. I try to be less quick to judge others, and to love someone despite their faults. I try to encourage others to do the same, and I long to make a positive difference in the world. I never thought that a dog could change my outlook on life, but sometimes it takes a puppy whining at four in the morning to make that wake up call.

To Do List: Before Death

2008-09-27T15:09:00.005-04:00

In lieu of another piece of writing (I have three half-written stories.) I will post a list of things I would like to do before I die.

In semi-order:

1. Become a member of Pixar's Senior Creative Team.

2. Travel (locations: Most of Europe, South America, Australia, Tokyo, Safari Thing in Africa)

3. Live in Europe.

4. Work in Europe. (maybe not for an extended period of time)

5. Enter a short film in Cannes and/or Sundance

6. Direct a movie

7. Be happy for an entire year

8. Own a dog

9. Live in Los Angeles

10. Live in San Francisco

11. Work or Own a Chocolate Shop

12. Open my own film stuido (focus on animations and short films)

13. Be in a long term relationship

14. Have some close friends

15. Go skydiving

16. Go ripcording

17. Learn to play the ukulele or tambourine (decently)

18. Do a professional modeling photoshoot

19. Appear in a magazine

20. Make art I am proud of

21. Wirte something that gets published

22. Stay up all night playing board games

23. Feel successful

24. Join the Peace Corps

25. Teach film and/or animation to students

The Hunt

2008-05-08T11:11:00.004-04:00

Here is a short one for you guys to read ---

It’s late spring, and a warm breeze drifts through my window. I can hear my dog in the yard, the tags on his collar jingling as he romps around, occasionally sniffing tennis balls and making a mess by digging in the dirt. Kirby has always been a digger, and is the only dog I’ve ever known to and burry his prized possessions in the backyard. He zigzags along the grass, and then sniffs the clematis lining the fence of the yard, the stump of a tail frantically wagging. Suddenly, his body becomes rigid. A low growl escapes his muzzle. Kirby’s interest in the clematis escalates, as his growling transforms into high-pitched barks. He then begins to paw at the plants in a frenzy. His barks are rapidly increasing, from a curious few to a series of alerted yelps, signaling that he has found an astounding treasure. With his paws caked in dirt and his muzzle blackened, Kirby emerges from his finding with a baby rabbit in his mouth. The only visible parts of the unfortunate creature are its tiny legs, which feebly twitch and kick in a pathetic attempt for freedom. From my window, I see Kirby take his prey and prance around the yard in a victory lap. From his jaws the weak rabbit squeaks a grotesque, ear-piercing cry for help, and I feel spring fade into summer.

Workin', Workin', Workin'

2008-05-05T19:11:00.004-04:00

I am working on two essays right now, but I don't know when they may be posted. One I think is too personal to be put on here, and the other is perhaps too long. I think I'll upload the longer one on a different server and post a link to it so it doesn't take up the entire blog page.

My Movie Epiphany

2008-04-18T22:06:00.006-04:00

I’ve always been a really big movie person. I can’t go far enough to say that I’m a film buff, but I know that I enjoy good cinema. I feel that there are a few things that qualify me as a movie lover. First, there’s the fact that I used to be the assistant entertainment editor for my high school paper, which allowed me to write a movie review or two. Though not a professional setting, I can always discard the “high school” part and tell people that I’m a published movie critic. There’s also the fact that I’m incredibly picky with my movies. I think there’s something in my subconscious telling me that I have good taste, because without even trying to be pretentious, I find myself generally agreeing with film critiques and squirming in my seat at the hoards of stupid comedies that litter theatres each year.

Needless to say, picking my favorite movie has been a big ordeal. I have seen countless films, and disregarded most of them as being decent, while others I discarded as trash. There are a lot of classics I have not seen, which might invalidate my love for cinema, and it spans a wide array from the arguably best movie of all time, Citizen Kane, to every film Martin Scorsese directed. Still, I’ve seen my fair share of cinematic masterpieces, as well as movie duds, to do the grueling task of picking a favorite.

My shelf of DVDs can give a good guess at what type of movies I like enough to purchase. There are no horror movies in my collection, and action movies are sparse. There are a few comedies, teen movies, and romances here and there, not to mention a handful of foreign films. Most of the movies I own are almost genre-less. They have some drama in them, but it’s counteracted by comedy. There are romantic tensions, but plenty of other plot devices to pull away from the romance category. There really is no singular type of movie that I like, apart from what I consider to be the “good” type.

Most of the movies in my collection have won or been nominated for a few awards, and some of them are even Oscar winners. In fact, my favorite movie had been nominated for the Best Picture category, and even won two Oscars in categories that many didn’t care about. Still, when I declared my favorite movie as Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!” people took it as a shock.

“Moulin Rouge!” is a romance musical. Though there are two other musicals in my collection, (“The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and more embarrassingly, “Rent,”) it does not seem like the type of movie that would land as my favorite. Perhaps this is the reason why, after three years of declaring it as my favorite, I moved it down my mental list and dethroned it of its former title.

Demoting “Moulin Rouge!” stemmed more form the fact that people would raise their eyebrows and silently judge me when I shared my love affair for the movie. It came from a sort of epiphany I had on a Saturday afternoon. I was browsing through my movie collection, trying to find a flick to watch in lieu of doing schoolwork, and I had a hard time making a selection. I wanted to put in “Moulin Rouge!”, but I just wasn’t in the mood to watch the dizzying first half hour of this quick edited flick. It was then that I realized that I was never in the mood to watch this movie. Even if I were in desperate need of a love story, I would settle on “When Harry Met Sally” or “The Princess Bride”. I had even recently purchased “Paris, je T’Aime” for days when hoped for romantic stories and the language of love. I could always think of a million reasons not to watch “Moulin Rouge!” and the only reason I ever had to watch it was to blow the dust off this unused disk.

On this Saturday afternoon, I popped “The Fully Monty” into my DVD player, and the realizations kept coming. This movie was probably the most watched in my collection. The witty, hilarious, and heart felt tale of six men trying to score some quid during a recession by taking their clothes off was a gem of a movie, and there’s almost never a time where I am not in the mood for this charming tale. It was about five minutes into the film when I covered my mouth as I gasped dramatically. “The Fully Monty” is my favorite movie.

I wanted to shout this relevation out to the world, but instead I played it cool. While I had to go out of my way to weasel into conversations about my favorite movies, when I dropped my British comedy bomb I got wondrous responses. The people who had seen this movie admired my sophistication. This wasn’t a film that just anyone could appreciate, and it appeared that only a truly witty and intelligent person could put this flick on his or her top-ten movie list. Others were impressed by my favorite by the obscurity of it. While not unheard of, many I’ve encountered have never seen “The Full Monty.” It elicited responses from those who had been enthusiastic about seeing the film, but never got around to doing so. Age played another factor in the unawareness of the movie. “The Full Monty” hit theatres when I was eight years old. I didn’t even see the film until I was 17, but luckily for me it was within months of the 10^th anniversary edition of the movie, and I was able to purchase it in a timely manner. Still, most people my age haven’t seen this movie because they were too young to process it’s greatness when it was released, and it isn’t regarded as classic enough to be forced to watch it at a later period in life.

I guess this puts my taste in film with middle-aged people, but I feel that some undesirable assumptions are the burden one must carry for the sake of being open with personal preference. Enjoying a film like “Moulin Rouge!” would place me with my younger peers, but I want to be one with my movie loving self. I am a cinema coinsure, and whittling down every movie I’ve seen to one ultimate favorite is a job that I should be proud of. With every movie I see, I dread that I will become enamored with these new flicks. The idea of ridding “The Full Monty” of its “my favorite movie” title is almost too much to bare. This must be the trouble of loving film. People expect you to have a favorite and be steadfast on that favorite for a lifetime, but as we movie lovers keep adding onto the list of flicks we have seen, we threaten our taste and have to be prepared to change our mind on our favorites. In my mind, this is where being picky is beneficial. My mind isn’t going to change any time soon. “The Full Monty” has buried it’s way into my heart, and it won’t be replaced until I see another small film ten years after it his Hollywood.

Sedaris: My Muse

2008-04-16T18:18:00.004-04:00

I am going to start off by saying Yes.

I don't know what your question was, but the answer is Yes.

This is a blog.

I will be whining and moaning and bitching and complaining.

I hope to do this, however, in a relatively unique way. Instead of just writing spur of the moment rants, I feel that I will discuss my life in a personal essay format. I've been reading David Sedaris' book "Me Talk Pretty One Day," and I decided that I want to write amusing ditties about my life as well. Unfortunately, I'm not as old as Sedaris, and I don't have as many humorous tales about my life as he does, but I feel that there's plenty of awkward and crazy things that happen to me that would make me a decent essayist. I hope I can dig out some humor and make these tales entertaining. My family never found my writing remotely funny, so I'm dreading that public doesn't feel the same way. The only thing that makes me feel any different is that a complete stranger usually "gets" me much better than my mother or father ever will.

Perhaps another interesting thing about this blog is that I'm not going to tell any of my friends about it. This is relatively easy, since out of the few close friends I have, most of them don't give a crap about reading. If they do happen to read, they limit the genre to some pretty narrow categories (one of my friends only reads war-inspired science fiction novels, and hits the jackpot if he encounters some futuristic setting that serves as a throwback to WWII.). Safely assured, none of them will want to read about my life.

I'm hoping that I'll end up writing some really neat things and that really neat strangers will come across these things and find them intriguing. At the very least, I hope that people who end up hating my not-so-neat things don't feel the need to comment and tell me how boring my life is. On the Internet, I feel that people are much quicker to hate a blogger rather than appreciating her.

I will admit, this post does not count as an essay, and I'm sure that the essays I write about my life will come along really slowly. So, how often will I update? Well, let's be honest. I don't know. My first goal is to finish one essay. My second goal is to actually post it to this blog, and not let this be the first and last post.

I'm going to go now. There is a wonderful woman's rights event scheduled today called "Take Back the Night" that I am participating in, and I need to get ready to go to it. I'm sure any reader has instantly pegged me as a feminist, but in reality, I don't even know if I can label myself as such. This will no doubt be a topic that I write about in the distant future, but for now, I just need to focus on what to write in the near future.