29 August

Everything's so very tipsy and muddled. So why do I feel so calm?

You are all cowards because you live in a world that is "once-removed", if I may excerpt you. I do not have any homage for anyone in your family, with exceptions of your grandmother, because you all are in the proximity of love, and all disavow love.

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

Sometimes one is meant, though, to live bits of one's life once-removed. This would be justified not in the proximity of love but in it's absence. Don't you think? Is it still justifiable to disavow the absence of love?

Younger

From this side of the front door i

Hear a giant chewing at the end of a pen.

Gravel crunches it's small grating

Gunshots along the walkway, and from

The kitchen window i see the tops of

Patent heels spark in the lights along the

Sidewalk.

Outside the sky looks like the inside

Of a closed fist.

An angel laughs-- but it is better than

An angel! It is my mother.

From my shy stance, sprawled,

Red rain-boots tucked beneath my legs

On the kitchen linoleum i smell

The ice-clouts and her mink-fur coat,

Her god-smile greets me with the

Reassuring scent of animal death.

I press my small face to her legs and she

Suffocates me smoothly in black fur. she hides

My tiny torso in the bulge of her coat, for

This is what family means in the presence of

Terror or love.

I breathe deeply frozen fur and count her

Rib bones with my fingers. I realize that you

Are more fragile than I, and so i must inflexibly exist.

I exist in case

You need to be protected.

the hanging (wo)man

The Hanging Man

BY SYLVIA PLATH

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.

I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard’s eyelid:

A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.

If he were I, he would do what I did.

(I really have no idea what specifically she is talking about in this poem, but I love it quite terribly. Such is often my relationship with Sylvia Plath...)

23 August

Ohhhh why am I sick the day before musical auditions! And whhyyy, world, do i have a dislocated knee? Pourquoi ca! (I say that so much that my computer should really have a cedille key...) I am a small bit freaking out. A small bit.

I am almost done with my applications for: Belmont, Furman, UNC Chapel Hill, Auburn, Covenant, Lee. Which is really all but Samford and UTK. Since so many of these apps are free anyway, and I'm pretty quick on my feet at the whole essay-writing thing, I'm thinking about doing a couple stretch-schools as well. (Although with my tightwad parents who think that as an English graduate I'm going to be bankrupt within a year, all of the above might be stretch-schools.) I'm thinking UVA or Michigan.... maybe? But Michigan is so cold! and UVA is so expensive!

My parents keep and keep and keep harping me on college applications and studying for the ACT. This is why I cannot stand to be home in the afternoons, and why I wish to get the whole shebang over with as quickly and painlessly as I can.... Now they've fixated themselves on me going to Lee, since it's close, but quite frankly I want to get rather far away from my family. We'll see how that turns out.... as for me, I shan't worry over it any longer.

Instead I shall worry about musical auditions. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

(Or perhaps I shall simply take my coffee outside and enjoy the weather! Less stressful, less productive....)

22 August

My future is the exact negative of my father. It's one feature stands out stain-like, the way photographer's sheets stand blue and white against the film's intended picture. This is the reason for my frantic fascination with the future, a frightening hopeful future that glares always in my eyes like a doctor's magnetoscope beam which I cannot turn from. That is and only is my future: the exact absence of his power.

20 August

Life is elsewhere, or else it is nowhere.

-Milan Kundera, Life Is Elsewhere

This is love, she thought, isn't it? When you notice someone's absence and hate that absence more than anything? More, even, than you love his presence?

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

Anyone whose goal is "something higher" must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. Is is the voice of the emptiness below which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Missions are stupid, Tereza. I have no mission. No one has. And it's a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions.

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

...that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet.

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

I regret that it takes a life to learn how to life, Oskar. Because if I were able to live my life again, I would do things differently. I would change my life. I would kiss my piano teacher, even if he laughed at me. I would jump with Mary on the bed, even if I made a fool of myself. I would send out ugly photographs, thousands of them.

-Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Today was not very interesting. Roughly half of my US History class can locate Canada on a map, I'm pretty sure I aced an AP Stats quiz, and Nathaniel and I were officially sworn in as Editors-In-Chief of the newspaper. Praise Band sang in chapel-- the success of which is widely disputed-- and I turned in my musical application form. But tomorrow is the Big Sleepover at Bena's cabin! I hope it sunnies up before then.

I love when it rains on sunny days. I love days like today when the sun spatters out all warm and pleasant, and all of a sudden-- jangling torrents of blue on the roof! That's me, I think. I'll always be all right in the rain, as long as the sun is still shining.

19 August

Laughing with Blue Lips, that's me, always me. You hit it, Regina Spektor, as always.

Then there are days like today when the sky is soggy and the rain blows in the screens, (aka my hair frizzes and my joints ache), and everything I know about Humanity waxes over with the sky outside. Days when the enormity of all the little changes of the years, the minute cracks in personages, swoop together and descend on all the subtly static ones-- the ones who can't realize that they've also been changing. Those are days when the laughing stops, but the lips are still blue.

And then there are the people who don't change, who don't re-program themselves like rusty computers every month or so; who do not pass you over like one convenient step in the ladder of their aspirations; whose insides do not swivel and re-arrange themselves into people I do not know. Then I am laughing again, for I really do not ever stop laughing; but sometimes it is a harder sort of laughter, for which of us is not quite often desperately happy; and the lips are still blue, always blue; they grow bluer and bluer and bluer.

11 August

I am not in control. I am not in control of anything. I have patted myself on being apathetic as to "controlling others", like some people, I am recently discovering, like to do. I do not want to control others because I am having enough problems controlling myself. But now, I am realizing, I have got to learn that I am not even in control of myself.

Because really, I have no idea what I am doing. Ever. Things just kind of happen to me, some vague force (God, if you will; fate, if you won't) pins circumstances onto my skin and I live in them. But I am not in control of myself. I realized this the other day, the day that I revoked all those decisions that I made just because they were decisions, and I was indecisive. (This also terrifies me, because when else am I making crappy decisions? But I am not in control of myself, and this is why.) I am going to major in something I like, I am not going to be a doctor, I am probably going to teach; I am going to throw myself into relationships even though I screw up sometimes and hurt myself. I am going to stop trying to control everything. Because even though I do not try to control others, I AM a control freak, because I cannot stand not being in control of myself.

But, for real, look at the past, what, three weeks? So many good things have come out of my lack of control! :)

8 August

Just got home from leadership retreat. Woooooooooonderful wonderful leadership retreat. I am really rather....... happy. That's all. Happy!

1 August

For all the reckless decision-making, for all the incarcerating brain fog, I am currently filled with a marvelous serenity. I feel like everything is mellowing, folding into itself and starting over. Here I am, right now, existing, and that is all that seems to matter.

I cannot fathom that one day my hair will no longer be soft and shiny and dark, that my face (of which I am, if nothing else, monstrously fond) will wrinkle into itself and no longer be beautiful. I cannot fathom that my thinness will be ravaged by childbearing and age, and that my memories will seal themselves into irretreivable compartments of my brain like taped-up letters. I cannot fathom it. And yet-- it will happen. I will age. What will be left of me then? What will be the crucible when the beauty is vanquished by time?

And yet, the serenity. Perhaps the serenity of those who are destined to die. The mutual comfort of the happy and the damned.

Good Music:

Regina Spektor - 15 Hero of the Story .mp3 : Hero by Regina Spektor

Us - Regina Spektor

Imogen Heap – First Train Home