Thursday, February 14, 2008
Be Mine Teach For America?
Some might see Valentine's as the day for 'luv', but I personally will be finishing my Teach For America Application, or watching movies, all night long. Woohoo!
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Missing Pages Just Incase You're Interested
Okay, so in a crazy procrastination fervor, I checked out the book with the essay, and will now type out the missing pages from the Google Books Roar Softly edition . . . (just in case you're interested)
. . . In the elevator she sat in the wheelchair and reached out to tug at my pants. She rubbed the fabric between her fingers proprietarily. "Perfect," she said. I was twenty-two. I believed that if a doctor told you that you were going to die soon, you'd be taken to a room with a gleaming wooden desk. This was not so. My mother sat with her shirt off on top of the table with paper stretched over it. When she moved, the room was on fire with the paper ripping and crinkling beneath her. She wore a pale yellow smock with strings meant to be tied. I could see her soft back, the small shelf of flesh that curved down at her waist. The doctor said she'd be lucky if she lived a year. My mother blinked her wet eyes but did not cry. She sat with her hands folded tightly together and her ankles hooked on to the other. Shackled to herself. She'd asked the doctor if she could continue riding her horse. He then took a pencil in his hand and stood it upright on the edge of the sink and tapped it down on the surface hard. "This is your spine after radiation," he said. "One jolt and your bones will crumble like a dry cracker."
First we went to the women's restroom. Each of us locked in a separate stall, weeping. We didn't say a word. Not because we felt alone in our grief, but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two. I could feel her weight leaning against the door, her hands slapping slowly against it, causing the entire frame of the bathroom stalls to shake. Later we came out to wash our hands and faces, standing side by side in the ladies' room mirror.
We were sent to the pharmacy to wait. I sat next to my mother in my green pantsuit. There was a big bald boy in an old man's lap. There was a woman who had an arm that swung wildly from the elbow. She held it stiffly with the other hand, trying to calm it. She waited. We waited. There was a beautiful dark-haired woman who sat in a wheelchair. She wore a purple hat and a handful of diamond rings. We could not take our eyes off her. She spoke in Spanish to the people gathered around her, her family and perhaps her husband. "Do you think she has cancer?" my mother whispered loudly to me. There was a song coming quietly over the speakers. A song without words . . .
. . . Once he clutched my thigh when Joe left the room and told me that if I came to see him alone he'd give me heroin free. Another time he held his baby daughter, just a month old. I looked at her and smiled and told Santos how beautiful she was, and inside of me I felt the presence of my real life. The woman who I actually was. The kind of woman who knows the beauty of a baby, who will have a baby, who once was a baby.
The days of my mother's death, the morphine days, and those that followed, the heroin days, lasted only weeks, months -- but each day was an eternity, one staked up on the other, a cold clarity inside of a deep haze. And unoccupied as well. Just me and my mother, or the ghost of her, though others surely came and went.
Some days flowers came to my mother's hospital room, and I set them on the edges of tables and windowsills. Women came too. Women who volunteered for the hospital. Old Catholic women, with hair cut close to the scalp or woven into long braids and pinned to their heads. My mother greeted them as she did the flowers: impervious, unmoved, resolute.
The women thought it would be for the best when my mother died. They sat next to me on the vinyl furniture and told me in low tones about the deaths of their own mothers. Mothers who had died standing at kitchen sinks, in the back seats of cars, in beds lit with candles. And also about the ones who made it. The ones with the will to live. Of tumors vanishing and clean blood and opaque bones. People who fought it, who refused to die. The ones who went and then came back. The survivors. The heroes. It would be for the best, they whispered, when it was over. Her life, that is. My mother's.
People whom I knew came, and I did not recognize them at first. It seemed they all wore strange hats or other disguises during this time, though I am certain that is not true. They were friends of my mother's. They couldn't bear to stay in the room, so instead they left chicken pot pies and bread. Scalloped potatoes and blocks of cheddar cheese . . .
My mother was not dramatic or concise in her dying. She hadn't offered a single directive in the past days, and I was desperate for guidance. "That you won't allow me to be in pain anymore. I've had too much pain."
"Yes," I said, "yes"
There was using heroin and also not using it. In the mornings when I woke, groggy and drained, I'd stand in front of the mirror and talk to myself. I was shocked by my own life. This was not meant to be, I'd think in the mornings. Stop it, I said. No more. And then I would shower and dress in my black pants and white shirt and black bow tie and take a bus downtown to serve people coddee and pancakes. At two in the afternoon I'd take the bus home again with hopefully sixty bucks in my pocked for another score of heroine. This is how it went.
Joe waited for me to get home. He cooked me macaroni and cheese and called Santos. He pulled me into his bed and jumped up when the phone rang. I made him stick the needle into me the first time, and then he taught me how to do it myself. What I loved about Joe is that he didn't love me, or himself. I loved that he would not only let me but help me destroy myself. I'd never shared that with another person. The dark glory of our united self-destruction had the force of something like love. I get to do this, I thought. I get to waste my life. I felt a terrible power within me. The power of controlling the uncontrollable. I get to be junk, I thought.
But this was not to be. My husband, Mark, called me. He was in town and wanted to see me. The friend I'd come to visit in Portland had told him about Joe and about my using heroin, and in response he drove from Minneapolis to talk to me. I met him within the hour at our friend's house. He sat at a table in the kitchen with the branches of a fig tree tapping on the window nearby. He said, "You look, you look . . . different. You seem so, how can I say this -- you seem like you aren't here." First he put his hands on mine, and we held on to one another, locked hand to hand. I couldn't explain it to him. The why. And then we fought. He stood up and screamed at me so loudly that I put my hands over my head for cover. His arms gestured madly into the air, at nothing. He clawed at himself and ripped the shirt . . .
. . . Pacific Ocean roar in while Joe locked himself in the public restroom to shoot up. I held myself stiff against the desire to join him. The ocean inched nearer and nearer to me with each passing minute. I was both sickened by Joe and compelled. I felt in the presence of a dying man, a young, dying man, and I knew that I could never see him again if I wanted to live. And I did.
My mother didn't have time to get skinny. Her death was a relentless onward march. Ther hero's journey is one of return, but my mother's was all forward motion. She was altered but still fleshy when she died, the body of a woman among the living. She had her hair too, brown and brittle and frayed from being in bed for weeks. From the room where she died I could see the great Lake Superior out her window. The biggest lake in the world, and the coldest. To see it, I had to work. I pressed my face sideways, hard, against the glass, and I'd catch a slice of it going on forever into the horizon. "A room with a view!" my mother exclaimed. "All of my life I've waited for a room with a view,"
I arranged the flowers closer into my mother, to the edges of the tables, so that she could see them without having to turn her head. Bouquets of pink carnations, yellow roses, daisies, and tiger lilies. Flowers that originated on other continents and were brought here to witness my mother's dying.
My mother wanted to die sitting up, so I took all the pillows I could get my hands on and made a backrest for her. I wanted to take my mother and prop her in a field of yarrow to die. I covered her with a quilt that I had brought from home, one she had sewn herself out of pieces of our old clothing. "Get that out of here," she said savagely, and then kicked her legs like a swimmer to make it go away.
I watched my mother. It was March, and outside, the sun glinted off the sidewalks and the icy edges of teh snow. It was Saint Patrick's Day, and the nurses brought my mother a square block of green Jell-O that sat quivering on the table beside her. It was the last day of her life, and my mother did not sleep, she did not wake. She held her eyes still and open. They were the bluest thing in the room, perhaps in all of Duluth. Bluer than the lake. They were the color of the sky on the best day of your life.
My mother died fast but not all of a sudden. A slow-burning fire when flames disappear to smoke and then smoke to air. She never once closed her eyes. First they were bitter and then they were bewildered and they changed again to something else, to a state that I have had, finally to see as heroic. Blue, blue eyes. Daggers of blue wanting and wanting. To stay, to stay.
(End)
. . . In the elevator she sat in the wheelchair and reached out to tug at my pants. She rubbed the fabric between her fingers proprietarily. "Perfect," she said. I was twenty-two. I believed that if a doctor told you that you were going to die soon, you'd be taken to a room with a gleaming wooden desk. This was not so. My mother sat with her shirt off on top of the table with paper stretched over it. When she moved, the room was on fire with the paper ripping and crinkling beneath her. She wore a pale yellow smock with strings meant to be tied. I could see her soft back, the small shelf of flesh that curved down at her waist. The doctor said she'd be lucky if she lived a year. My mother blinked her wet eyes but did not cry. She sat with her hands folded tightly together and her ankles hooked on to the other. Shackled to herself. She'd asked the doctor if she could continue riding her horse. He then took a pencil in his hand and stood it upright on the edge of the sink and tapped it down on the surface hard. "This is your spine after radiation," he said. "One jolt and your bones will crumble like a dry cracker."
First we went to the women's restroom. Each of us locked in a separate stall, weeping. We didn't say a word. Not because we felt alone in our grief, but because we were so together in it, as if we were one body instead of two. I could feel her weight leaning against the door, her hands slapping slowly against it, causing the entire frame of the bathroom stalls to shake. Later we came out to wash our hands and faces, standing side by side in the ladies' room mirror.
We were sent to the pharmacy to wait. I sat next to my mother in my green pantsuit. There was a big bald boy in an old man's lap. There was a woman who had an arm that swung wildly from the elbow. She held it stiffly with the other hand, trying to calm it. She waited. We waited. There was a beautiful dark-haired woman who sat in a wheelchair. She wore a purple hat and a handful of diamond rings. We could not take our eyes off her. She spoke in Spanish to the people gathered around her, her family and perhaps her husband. "Do you think she has cancer?" my mother whispered loudly to me. There was a song coming quietly over the speakers. A song without words . . .
. . . Once he clutched my thigh when Joe left the room and told me that if I came to see him alone he'd give me heroin free. Another time he held his baby daughter, just a month old. I looked at her and smiled and told Santos how beautiful she was, and inside of me I felt the presence of my real life. The woman who I actually was. The kind of woman who knows the beauty of a baby, who will have a baby, who once was a baby.
The days of my mother's death, the morphine days, and those that followed, the heroin days, lasted only weeks, months -- but each day was an eternity, one staked up on the other, a cold clarity inside of a deep haze. And unoccupied as well. Just me and my mother, or the ghost of her, though others surely came and went.
Some days flowers came to my mother's hospital room, and I set them on the edges of tables and windowsills. Women came too. Women who volunteered for the hospital. Old Catholic women, with hair cut close to the scalp or woven into long braids and pinned to their heads. My mother greeted them as she did the flowers: impervious, unmoved, resolute.
The women thought it would be for the best when my mother died. They sat next to me on the vinyl furniture and told me in low tones about the deaths of their own mothers. Mothers who had died standing at kitchen sinks, in the back seats of cars, in beds lit with candles. And also about the ones who made it. The ones with the will to live. Of tumors vanishing and clean blood and opaque bones. People who fought it, who refused to die. The ones who went and then came back. The survivors. The heroes. It would be for the best, they whispered, when it was over. Her life, that is. My mother's.
People whom I knew came, and I did not recognize them at first. It seemed they all wore strange hats or other disguises during this time, though I am certain that is not true. They were friends of my mother's. They couldn't bear to stay in the room, so instead they left chicken pot pies and bread. Scalloped potatoes and blocks of cheddar cheese . . .
My mother was not dramatic or concise in her dying. She hadn't offered a single directive in the past days, and I was desperate for guidance. "That you won't allow me to be in pain anymore. I've had too much pain."
"Yes," I said, "yes"
There was using heroin and also not using it. In the mornings when I woke, groggy and drained, I'd stand in front of the mirror and talk to myself. I was shocked by my own life. This was not meant to be, I'd think in the mornings. Stop it, I said. No more. And then I would shower and dress in my black pants and white shirt and black bow tie and take a bus downtown to serve people coddee and pancakes. At two in the afternoon I'd take the bus home again with hopefully sixty bucks in my pocked for another score of heroine. This is how it went.
Joe waited for me to get home. He cooked me macaroni and cheese and called Santos. He pulled me into his bed and jumped up when the phone rang. I made him stick the needle into me the first time, and then he taught me how to do it myself. What I loved about Joe is that he didn't love me, or himself. I loved that he would not only let me but help me destroy myself. I'd never shared that with another person. The dark glory of our united self-destruction had the force of something like love. I get to do this, I thought. I get to waste my life. I felt a terrible power within me. The power of controlling the uncontrollable. I get to be junk, I thought.
But this was not to be. My husband, Mark, called me. He was in town and wanted to see me. The friend I'd come to visit in Portland had told him about Joe and about my using heroin, and in response he drove from Minneapolis to talk to me. I met him within the hour at our friend's house. He sat at a table in the kitchen with the branches of a fig tree tapping on the window nearby. He said, "You look, you look . . . different. You seem so, how can I say this -- you seem like you aren't here." First he put his hands on mine, and we held on to one another, locked hand to hand. I couldn't explain it to him. The why. And then we fought. He stood up and screamed at me so loudly that I put my hands over my head for cover. His arms gestured madly into the air, at nothing. He clawed at himself and ripped the shirt . . .
. . . Pacific Ocean roar in while Joe locked himself in the public restroom to shoot up. I held myself stiff against the desire to join him. The ocean inched nearer and nearer to me with each passing minute. I was both sickened by Joe and compelled. I felt in the presence of a dying man, a young, dying man, and I knew that I could never see him again if I wanted to live. And I did.
My mother didn't have time to get skinny. Her death was a relentless onward march. Ther hero's journey is one of return, but my mother's was all forward motion. She was altered but still fleshy when she died, the body of a woman among the living. She had her hair too, brown and brittle and frayed from being in bed for weeks. From the room where she died I could see the great Lake Superior out her window. The biggest lake in the world, and the coldest. To see it, I had to work. I pressed my face sideways, hard, against the glass, and I'd catch a slice of it going on forever into the horizon. "A room with a view!" my mother exclaimed. "All of my life I've waited for a room with a view,"
I arranged the flowers closer into my mother, to the edges of the tables, so that she could see them without having to turn her head. Bouquets of pink carnations, yellow roses, daisies, and tiger lilies. Flowers that originated on other continents and were brought here to witness my mother's dying.
My mother wanted to die sitting up, so I took all the pillows I could get my hands on and made a backrest for her. I wanted to take my mother and prop her in a field of yarrow to die. I covered her with a quilt that I had brought from home, one she had sewn herself out of pieces of our old clothing. "Get that out of here," she said savagely, and then kicked her legs like a swimmer to make it go away.
I watched my mother. It was March, and outside, the sun glinted off the sidewalks and the icy edges of teh snow. It was Saint Patrick's Day, and the nurses brought my mother a square block of green Jell-O that sat quivering on the table beside her. It was the last day of her life, and my mother did not sleep, she did not wake. She held her eyes still and open. They were the bluest thing in the room, perhaps in all of Duluth. Bluer than the lake. They were the color of the sky on the best day of your life.
My mother died fast but not all of a sudden. A slow-burning fire when flames disappear to smoke and then smoke to air. She never once closed her eyes. First they were bitter and then they were bewildered and they changed again to something else, to a state that I have had, finally to see as heroic. Blue, blue eyes. Daggers of blue wanting and wanting. To stay, to stay.
(End)
Heroin/e
Lately I've been thinking about heroin. Don't ask why. (Just in case you, reader, are the U.S. Government, let me repeat that I've only been thinking about heroin. I haven't done it or distributed it . . . yet). Anyway, this story "Heroin/e" is one of the best things I've ever read about the topic. It a true story about a woman who was addicted to heroin, but it's also about her mother's slow, painful death, which became painless toward the end because of morphine (In Case You Missed It, morphine and heroin are both opium derivatives). Was her mother a heroine, or did heroin keep her from feeling the pain of death? And by heroin, I mean morphine, since that's the legal stuff she was taking.
Anyway, I can't find the whole story online, though you can find a pretty good sample here. If you're interested in the whole story, you can probably find most of it at the google book Roar Softly , though some of the pages won't be there, unfortunately . . . (the library has the volume the short story is in, if you're really were interested)
Anyway, I can't find the whole story online, though you can find a pretty good sample here. If you're interested in the whole story, you can probably find most of it at the google book Roar Softly , though some of the pages won't be there, unfortunately . . . (the library has the volume the short story is in, if you're really were interested)
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Drunk Pictures, Full Names, ENOUGH!
I was going to add this message to the end of my last post, but then figured it was important enough to warrant it's very own space.
Basically, can someone tell Dave to 1)STOP using our full names in posts; and 2) STOP posting pictures of ME, when I'm wasted. Seriously, there have gotta be close to ten pictures like that on the blog already, and it's only been up for a couple of months really. This is the internet, and anybody can read this stuff. What if someone who I apply for a job with googles my name and finds out that I played Russian Roulette with a nerd gun and shots of Tequila once, like three years ago? That's not cool.
P.S.- I know some might say that relaying a message in this way is passive-aggressive. I say that this is the internet, after all, and I see posting your issues with house mates on a blog as a perfectly reasonable way of getting a message across. Actual human contact is passé and overrated.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Geekdom
Beauty and the GeekWassup! Okay guys, sorry for the long break. I've been taking a break from the internet world to see if I could do some stuff in the real world. Unfortunately, almost none of my real world plans - like getting my résumé together - actually happened.
I read the "His Dark Materials" series over break. I don't really know what to say. The concept's definitely interesting, although it's also kind of western biased, in that it assumes that the Judeo-Christian God is the despotic ruler of all the known Universes. Although I guess that's par for the course. From what I can tell, the idea is that the Christian God is the actual Devil, and the Rebel diety isn't Satan but actually a She Angle that's really on the side of freedom and liberty. It's interesting. (Also, everyone has a "dæmon", like a totem animal. I kind of liked that). Definitely worth checking out if you haven't already.
On another note, the campus website just put up another one of those links where Jeanine Basinger was quoted, and she mentioned the movie Knocked Up, which got me thinking about a genre I really dislike on principle: The Nerd Wins Genre.
It's really epitomized by films like Revenge of the Nerds: Guys who were nerdy in high school end up showing the dump jocks that they're the real cool kids by making lots of money in the real world and getting all the hot girls who wouldn't give them the time of day in high school.
Revenge of the Nerds epitomizes this, although there are all kinds of movies in the genre (for some reason, a lot of Adam Sandler films come to mind: Happy Gilmore, The Wedding Singer, The Waterboy, Click . . . though films like Weird Science and Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion also count for some reason). Basically, it's about guys who play video games all day and spit on themselves when they talk, and don't really bath, getting these ridiculously attractive girls to go out with them.
I'm sorry, but this is just pure fantasy. Hot girls like guys with skills. They like guys who make lots of money. And you know what, those mean jocks from high school aren't working at the gas station. Only the "loser" guy who sold drugs in high school is working at the gas station*. That jock guy joined a frat in college, then went to business school, and now he works on Wall Street and has a huge house in Connecticut, and he married that really hot girl who "wouldn't give you the time of day in High School". The two of them will probably have really attractive, athletic children. The cycle perpetuates. Life Sucks.
I don't really think the genre is sexist, because women have tons of movies out there just like this for them, where the awkward girl from the wrong side of the tracks falls in love with the big football player, who's really "sweet" and "sensitive" on the inside, but also knows how to put those mean guys in place (Okay, this is definitely Pretty in Pink, which is like the polar opposite of the Nerd Wins-type movie since it appeals to "unpopular" but "interesting" girls. In this genre, the nerdy guy or the hipster guy never gets the girl. That's how we know this is a definitely a chick flick. See guys? It really is true. Even the cool girls like Molly Ringwald don't have a thing for awkward and insecure guys who take their music more seriously than their muscles or their career prospects. It's a sad reality we just have to deal with).
Also, I definitely don't have anything against awkward and nerdy guys. Let's be honest, it's Saturday night and I'm a perfectly healthy guy, sitting at home in front of the computer. I'm one of those guys . I just think it's better to be self-deprecating than to be delusional. Guys who spit on themselves don't go out with Cindy Crawford or Hally Berry. Both of those women are either married or attached to other super models right now**. The truth is that guys who spit when they talk date girls that also, though less than their boyfriends, accidentally emphasize "sporadically" too much and spit into your coffee cup.
And you know what? That's how the world should be! Guys who are into sci-fi go to Comicon and meet girls who also happen to be interested . . . in sci-fi! And they have crazy and dorky conversations together! And the world keeps spinning 'round and 'round like a hula-hoop, and it's all good.
That said, I really like just about everything Judd Apatow has ever written or directed. Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Superbad, and Knocked Up. I guess 40-Year-Old Virgin is kind of a wash, because even though Steve Carrel's wife is pretty hot, guys hear "I've got 3 kids" and they think "I've gotta get outta here!", so the fantasies balance out into some semblance of realism. But Knocked Up? Come on. Katherine Heigl is hot. Really hot. What does she really see in Seth Rogen? The guy didn't even have a job! That is just ridiculous. Same goes for Superbad. What did those girls see in those guys? I mean, we, the audience, laugh at them, and we're also supposed to feel like they're more "deep" or something, because they're not the "pretty boys" or the "jock" guys, but come on. Jonah Hill's character was still an asshole. And he wasn't any less of an ass than the "jock" guy or the "pretty boy". We're just rooting for him because he's the underdog, and he's kind of funny.
Still, Superbad was a great movie. Hilarious. And so was Knocked Up. These films wouldn't be the same, you have to admit, without the hot girl.(And by not the same, I mean they would be worse). So what does that mean? Does that mean I don't stand by my morals? Maybe not. Maybe I'm like one of those upper-middle-class Democrats who was secretly really happy when Bush cut taxes in 2002, and went on vacation twice that summer in the Caribbean to celebrate. I don't know.
But I'm still against all this entitlement and self-delusion. The vast majority of films that come out of Hollywood - especially the comedies - are some type of fantasy. They give people the chance to be whisked away into the lives of people who are relatively rich, successful, and more physically attractive than we are. Men get to be warriors, thugs, and cool guys. Women get the chance to fall in "luv", though occasionally they get to be the heroine as well (think Catwoman). For most movies, however, you can leave it and think "Well, that was nice, but totally unrealistic. My life is nothing like that." The problem with the Nerd Wins genre is that it shows real geeks doing real things that real geeks do. The viewer really can identify with the geeky guys in the film, and instead of leaving the theater thinking "I should find a girl that I think is cute and really chill,"*** they think, "Why don't I have a really hot, blond girlfriend? I need to work on that." If we don't check the influence of these films, we're gonna end up with a bunch of conceited arse-holes in the vein of Shallow Hal (a very clever Anti-Nerd Wins movie, btw, even though most of the film highlights Gwyneth Paltrow); super picky about the girls they like, but totally unaware of what they bring (or don't bring) to a relationship. We gotta fight that. We need more movies out there about self-deprecating geeks, and less about the delusional ones.
That said, keep making movies, Judd Apatow! We "luv" you! (but more Napoleon Dynamite-esque films wouldn't be so bad either. . .)
*Does anybody else remember having conversations with guys in high school who were like, "we're gonna be so much better than them one of these days", while glaring at the basketball team with expressions of mixed hatred and envy? Were you one of those guys? It's okay to admit it. Seriously though, what's up with that? One of the good things about Knocked Up, I have to admit, is how they didn't try to make the geeks any "better" than the normal people. Even though it seems pretty crazy that Seth Rogan gets Katherine Heigl, there's no denying that he and his friends were pretty lame.
**I just found this out through Google, so I'm not a celebrity fiend. Really
***I'm sure you've noticed that I didn't write "I should find a girl that's really chill, and who likes me," but "I should find a girl that's cute and really chill". I know that sounds really superficial, ladies, but I've never personally met a guy who wanted to go out with a girl just because she was "interesting". Guys wanna think their girlfriend is kind of hot too. Fortunately, for every girl out there, there are a ton of dudes who think her type is kind of hot. Really, girls have all the power in choosing who they date, though how they choose who they choose, is a mystery to me. Feel free to fill me in on this secret of the sexes, via the Comments section.
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