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[23 Oct 2005|11:54am] |
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When I woke up this morning, there was a kitten investigating my deck. It was a little scraggly-looking but visibly well-fed, so I suppose someone either let him out by accident, or with the recent storming he was somehow separated from him home. I gave him bacon and a can of tuna, and was able to creep out centimeter by centimeter until I was sitting about a foot away from him as he ate. I talked to him for a while, and all he did was eat ferociously and mew like he'd been struck or something, so naturally I was very touched. He wouldn't come close to the door--there was an umbrella drying outside. I remember my cat Koushiro-san being very very scared of umbrellas, so perhaps that deterred this little thing even more. I tried going downstairs, where I could walk up the deck stairs behind him to maybe usher him into the warmth of my house, but he jumped between the deck supports and landed about eleven feet down, on the grass. I hope he comes back. My mother wants nothing to do with pets, but if she sees something pitiful like that she's all for keeping them. Oh, he was black with white patches. He had little mittens. He looked like a Ludwig to me.
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[20 Oct 2005|10:51pm] |
My pleasure is in all the typical movements of your day. It's stupid and I won't agonize over the negative things.
You should never,
never,
never,
crash into...
your boyfriend's car.
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[18 Oct 2005|09:18pm] |
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Women are fragile animals, and I'm a fragile woman.
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[14 Oct 2005|09:24pm] |
My fucking essay can at most be 500 words. I have to cut 249 fucking words. This is never going to work. Nothing meaningful is ever concise when you're seventeen.
( 500 WORDS, BITCHES )
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[14 Oct 2005|08:24pm] |
The evening closes with a familiar scene:
Writing, my lower back aching from stooping over the keyboard, transfixed by the rhythm of the keystrikes, I begin to feel a peace. And then there's a noise that startles me, and it's the high pitched shrieks of little girls. They're running around outside, playing with each other. Standing around and talking on their cell phones. It's a congregation of all the children in the neighborhood, the boys kicking rocks or standing on things and the little girls running around each other and the older girls flipping their hair. I look down at them through the window and think about what I might not be experiencing. When do they organize these things? It's late in the evening and it's miserable out and very cold and wet, and all the children in the neighborhood are out playing with one another. Maybe it's an omen that the rain will stop for a while.
( My College Essay )
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[13 Oct 2005|11:41pm] |
It can't be true that those who live hard die young. It can't be--how will we ever get over our fears?
Every sliver cut out from my heart makes the rest of it resonate more strongly with the spirit of us.
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[10 Oct 2005|06:47pm] |
I'll give twenty dollars and an evening and home baking to the first person who burns me Chopin's complete works.
I swear Scriabin is really Chopin's younger brother, who outlived the elder and presented in a shade what the elder might have, had he. When criticts say that Scriabin's Opus 11 24 Preludes were an answer to Chopin's own and even "Chopinesque," they were understating. Regardless I'm completely touched and am sure that I could devote the musical enterprises of my life to Chopin and Scriabin more or less exclusively--maybe with trysts with the seductive and subtly controlling Bach, the tender and overwhelming Beethoven, the irresistible Liszt.
But whatever, there are a hundred other passive love affairs. And those are only the ones I would make public. For all poets and prose masters I hate through the skin and cherish only grudgingly in very personal places. And the artists, who make love through the eyes, themselves forsake words for symbolism and symmetry and asymmetry, so why ascribe them? Don't ever speak of them. Only be them, as you're powerless not to.
The music section of the Borders in the Plaza had: And You Will Know Us..., Sleater Kinney, Maximo Park, Cibo Matto, Cornelius, Shonen Knife and many other things I never thought I'd ever find in a store at the mall! Yet I saw a girl wearing a shirt that said "Play More Think Less." Are we getting better or more ill-advised? I don't watch (M)TV--could it be that the things that I thought weren't very popular are actually very popular? Or is the fact that corporate giants are using Blue Man Group songs in their commercials a sign that advertising is recovering from the messy orgy that was the last twenty, maybe thirty years of popular media? Maybe I'm just entering a different target market myself, and so am being met with different kinds of advertisements and products? Anyway I was ecstatic! Because I know that if I go back there with twenty dollars, I'll be able to get Belle and Sebastian, the Arcade fire and And You Will Know Us...! What a world. Maybe from now on I'll actually pay for my music?
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| Mastering insanity |
[08 Oct 2005|01:05pm] |
I left a crippling fourteen out of fifty questions blank on the SAT II Math Level 2. There's only a five or six question curve. I'm almost 100% certain that all the ones I did answer were correct. That's eight or nine questions unanswered with the grace space of five--I don't know how they grade those tests. Anyway I wasn't in the mood for failure, so rather than taking the Physics test, I took Literature and am sure I did well. They don't tell you, but you don't really have to decide on what tests you're taking until the day you take them. Isn't that always the way it is, when you don't jump at them and crush them before they come.
In cycles I am Atlas and Indiana Jones. First Indiana Jones running through tropical tunnels. Then Atlas, where muscles groan and quiver. Then tendons stretch until they give, until the boulder rolls over the edge, until you or they snap, and you're crushed for a while. You rise again gloriously for a few sips of crisp, cool air in your freshly mended, still tender lungs; and it begins again. The essence of this cycle hasn't changed for some time, only it's manifestations have, and so I'm considering the possibility that it might not actually peter out as I step farther and farther toward adulthood. I want to cry, but I don't want him to comfort me, because I don't want him to see me like this. That's a sign, at least, that my sense of self-preservation is a healthy organism.
But: I'm a languid most fearsome animal. The life of animals on spartan wildlife documentaries is futile and cruel. I have my lower brains still, and god save us should we grow away from them; because it's in me to live live live. I'm no longer reptilian, latch locking onto life in the simplest sense. I'm quavering between the dull mammalian and the befitting, between the classless, dogging amassment of valuable items and traits and the clear and constant sense--among our animals, the uniquely human sense--of something greater and more purposeful than life for the sake of itself. For us, life is a sharp and dazzling faceted jewel, and not just a smooth, heavy but palmable stone.
When the goddess sleeps sickly in the safest chambers of my mind, I become a puppet on your strings, an identityless vessel for our pervading, torrential love. Air is thick as water! We're all wading through this thick murky water. My sight is equipped for those harmonious realms beyond the cloth, the silly tapestry of Sir Newton's reality.
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[06 Oct 2005|10:00pm] |
Poet, I'm a sister;
just a sister, sitting pretty, pitting pious
permutations 'gainst your insensitivities
He likes his women coy--
a ploy?
(for joy?)
--
Why do I find high school to be so hostile? Of all the things in the world I wish I had, I wish I had him again to just be there and understand, wordlessly, without question or remark, the what and why of my feelings. I wish I could see him again and joke about the silly things we did to one another. We're both such dramatic people. I wish I could be happy for him and he for me for all the new things we're forging all on our own.
I wish it didn't feel like I was fighting my way upstream to the fishermen. I wish I didn't doubt the shaky prism of my life as such. In some lights it's spectacular sapphire, regal and controlled, and in others it's ruinous ruby, and every nervous shade inbetween. Will I really only feel comfortable at the extremes, with my back against a wall? I've no articulation for my personal ambition. I'm swamped by more petty wishes that I can't even see the brightly paved path I may or may not have meandered past. It's bright like a runway. My treasured little air traffic controllers with their neon bright batons seem to have deserted me, or I them, anyway I can't remember if he was a principal one or not; but there are others. They're lost too, my air traffic controllers. I'm circling the runway, maybe, waiting for a turn--a return? It seems like a return, to what. I was never very glorious.
Instead of dealing with things like a nice little girl, all I want to do is smoke cigarettes with my back against brick walls and fake out smaller, more ordinary kids. All I want is to take to the larger ones, all the ones that threaten me, with a bat or some kind of club, just to get them down or dizzy them up and maybe incapacitate them so I can let loose with my hands. I want them to fight back, but I want it to be futile for them, the way it is for me in all my dreams. I want to catch some girl trying to kiss my lover so I can smash her face in. I want to rove around in groups of mean short-haired beautiful girls, catching all those cocky boys with lots of money and no class. I want to injure them in the name of every girl who's ever second-guessed herself and called it kindness. I want to leave them with permanent damage. I want them to remember to hold the doors open for us. I want them to remember to keep a respectful distance. I want them to remember.
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[06 Oct 2005|12:00am] |
There are three pillars in my red chamber: my father, recently reestablished, in the antechamber. Him. I want to honor him for teaching me everything I know about war in love. I wish some people knew that it was me, I was the crazy one, mostly. And there is you, my green vibrant living pillar of abundant harvests and sweet yearly inundations. We'll have been romancing one another for a year, soon. I put the letter here rather than sending it to you because I wonder, oh I wonder if it makes any sense to you.
( a letter to my lover )
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| Observations after Choir |
[05 Oct 2005|11:15pm] |
I am privy weekly to what is surely the topmost irritating piece of music in the operatic repertoire: The Mikado, which isn't even about the Mikado. It takes places in the town of "Titipu" and features such characters with the words "poo" "pitti" "tush" and "yum" in their names. It's more catchy than most Mozart, about twelve times as irritating, and not even half as serious.
Whoever Moses Hogan was, his arrangements involve a capella texture as thick as ten or twelve voices. That's SATB divisi'ed, like, three or four time each. Who needs that?
Jess and I are "Vanna Whites" for the cabaret. That's our job description. We Vanna White, holding up the items in an attractive fashion. What?
The (Second) Lead Tenor (With Mutton Chops) is a show hoe, and seems to spend most of his time at the Village Vanguard, even though his primary article of clothing is the safety pin. Even though he wears a shiny plastic red star earring. Even though he can trace the evolution of punk rock through the patches on his leather jacket. I tell you, the jazz scene has diversified, and I'm not talking about that world shit.
I have concluded that, once again, I am the only one on my voice part that knows all the parts! Because they're all so irritating that they play over and over and over in my head until I can sing them frontwards and back.
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[04 Oct 2005|07:32pm] |
Today Paul and I attended the dress rehearsal of the NYC Opera's Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (with music by Paul Dukas), which was real horrorshow. I can't figure out whether I liked it or not, because while the libretto was intensely poetic and the music was exciting and evocative, the plot and acting and costumes were, uh, at best they didn't make themselves clear. What I got from the plot is that, essentially:
Women sell their souls for love of men. Women will never be free; it's impossible to abstain from the love of men entirely, despite any abuses they might suffer. If they try to evade the masculine imprisonment they walk right into by coming together in a sisterhood, they'll be plagued with an unfulfilledness, a loneliness that they'll carry for the rest of their lives, possibly even after they turn back to the love of men again, by whom they'll feel scorned for the transgression of trying to live against their fate.
And all that compounds my current existential crisis. I'm, like, stewing in my own mortality, possibly because I've passed the biological threshold of self-regenerating youth, and my body is again in league with my sinister subconscious, which whispers little messages to me. Lets me know that my window of opportunity is closing. That I'm over the steep hill of adolescence. That it's all downhill from here, with low plateaus here and there.
But I did have an ass-kickin time with Paul. If you go to see an opera this season at the New York State Theater, and you've seen Turandot and the Barber of Seville and Tosca and Madama Butterfly--and your instinct like my instinct tells you that you don't need to see Mines of Sulphur, and that The Little Prince will only make you wish your imagination hadn't submitted to the cruel master of your more rational self--and you've got a good head and stay far, far away from anything Gilbert and Sullivan--don't see Ariane et Barbe-Bleue. Buy the soundtrack, which is good, but do not ruin it for yourself with weird spinning sets. See Capriccio instead.
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[29 Sep 2005|07:25pm] |
Remembering what it felt like to say goodbye forever is making it hard for me to follow up on--a seance. Only I think maybe I'm the ghost this time, because of the empty way I feel.
I cut my finger open today. I always put the knives blade-down in the dishwasher, but there was one that was blade-up and I cut my finger on it. Why should I worry about money. Where are my quiet hours that I can inchwise consume my shelves, which I organize by importance. Have I read them, or haven't I? When I can buy five books for five dollars, I don't because I'm running low on something crucial (maybe it's a persevering spirit) and I spent my green-back dollar nothings on what. They seem to vaporize before me like Vicks, only they put the weight back on my chest.
I know I must be sanded down to the root, because I feel a sweet and gentle, fragile threads of silk wafting here and there, getting snagged on my noisy busted rackets, rather than: great waves of overwhelming joy that makes an acrobat of me, turning cartwheels. I smiled at some other girl today. I mailed him to ask how he's doing. I'm coming to terms with what it means to take care of business--us, myself and you are my three highest orders of business--and I'm chilling out. Keeping my mouth shut. Slipping into the tight, austere costume of he who wars on those heavenly Japanese chess boards, where sides are always turning, waves wash out the land. The key to great effect is to eliminate effort, replace it with immediate manifestation. There is no doing phase, there's only is.
I am I am I am complete in all the ocean waves and all the thorny flower bushes, but most appropriately to the nature of my soul dressed down as wise man, I am complete in you.
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[25 Sep 2005|08:17am] |
OH SHIT I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT MY WHITE SPOT.
I have a patch of white hair at the back of my head. No, now, as of last night, I have a patch of pink hair at the back of my head.
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[16 Sep 2005|09:11pm] |
School bores my face off. My father calls these mean times, meaning average, inbetween, but also unkind.
School really bores my face off. I never bring the right books in to read. By mid day I'm always miles off from the morning. The halls smell and echo, they're not good places to listen to music. I have too much free time. I take copious, intensely detailed notes. I make copies with paperclips and keep everything organized. I do all my homework. I walk from place to place and try not to buckle lazily like a card castle built by brackish, arthritic hands on the top of a patio table. In spring. Oh boy am I bored.
Every minute that I don't spend in one of Doc's lectures is colored by one of: I could be practicing; I could be spending time with him; I could be napping in the sun; we could be having sex; I could be reading a good book or seeing a good matinee; we could be laying in the middle of a dandelion family in the field the joggers circle. Also I wonder why the weather is so hot. It oughta be autumn.
After having my car jumped, I was afraid to open the (power) windows or put on the A/C. It was very hot inside for the half-hour it takes to get home. This evening, after my mother put the steaks on the grill, the entire top of the gril burst into big orange flames, though I don't know why. Vince managed to rescue the steaks, which were charred all around. They'd only been there for a short time, though, so the insides were pink and bleedy. We ate it and it was the best steak I've ever had ever in my life. I think they call it "black and blue." The risotto my mother made tasted like Doritos, and it was so weird eating soupy, creamy Doritos-flavored grain that I simply couldn't.
She'll be gone for ten days starting Monday. I think I'll miss her. I'm at a strange place with my parents right now. I'm at a strange place with everyone. I'd thought that fatigue showed itself first underneath my eyes, then in my voice, but really the first thing it poisons is my thoughts, which get bitterer and bitterer and less acute and then very dull as the week plods on. I miss her already. I miss my father too, I haven't seen him since forever. I miss the funny sort of feeling I felt the one and only time I saw them kiss like they meant it. I miss the idea that these people gave birth to me, that I move and talk and write like them. Does anybody know where it goes? I'm so civil with them, there's a foster-ness about my relationship with my parents. Like it's all temporary. It's because I sensed and feared the fall of my icons of strength and stability, way back when, it's because never wanted to burden them when they teetered like card castles placed precariously by withered, weathered hands on the tops of patio tables.
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gloriapatri's journal