i am not a brain in a vat (in which i admit to being a tweenage reader of horror novels)
Posted on November 16, 2008
Filed under ennui, hairstyles touch our lives, my appreciation for literature, what a strange person i am to love | 1 Comment
when i was 12, i moved in with my father and, in a sorta half-of-a-quarterlife crisis, read the book Shadows by john saul approximately 20 times. Shadows was about very special kids, the kind of kids who are too gifted to be in the real world. after nearly dying from no one recognizing their brilliance, they were recruited by what posed as a boarding school for geniuses– only to have their brains put into vats by evil scientists trying to make supercomputers. of course it was my fantasy to go to boarding school and of course it was my fantasy to be the subject of mad scientist cyberpunk brain experiments. i mean, i was a misunderstood introvert coming of age in the early 90’s. it was inevitable.
anyway, while i never went to boarding school (though a private secular liberal arts college came pretty close to my fantasies of orgiastic, impractical education in the company of the special-est of snowflakes) and never had the good fortune to be abducted by a mad neuroscientist, i have remained a pretty internal person. i forgot that i’m physically around. you know, like how i have long, thick hair that is developing chiapet properties now that it’s hit my shoulders.
and this blog is so ruminative. i think i’m less present here than most places. which is ironic. and not what i want.
so i submit to you that i am ten hours into a tattoo that will cover my left arm from shoulder to elbow and is inspired by the wallpaper at dot’s, a late night dive bar/diner in portland:
crashing everybody else’s allocution / reading the guardian at midnight
Posted on November 15, 2008
Filed under being completely maudlin, elegy for the nonspecific, misc. feelings about stories | 1 Comment
tonight i am reading about awful people: rulers who’ve ordered genocide and women in london who gave back adopted babies and narcissists and corporations who use slave labor and cruelly logical people and people who are in the grip of destructive emotions and alcoholics and the wardens of prisoner of war camps. every time i get to the part where they talk about why the person thinks what they did is okay-or-justified, i feel a twinge of identification– and then a wave of guilt that makes my eyes well. (not collective guilt; something much less sensible than that.)
it’s been too rough a week to be reading newspapers at night.
while steve was in the hospital, i felt powerless. reading the news while he sleeps beside me, i imagine now i am a general or a warden or a president, when nothing’s really changed. i’m neither powerless nor particularly powerful. there’s a danger in reading yourself into everything, right?
but when you can’t find yourself anywhere in any text you pick up, that kind of sucks too. i’d hate to reach a point where not even free will astrology feels like it could have (seriously) been written just for me.
gestures
Posted on November 12, 2008
Filed under self-doubting aphorisms | Leave a Comment
i’m looking at my calendar for the next couple weeks and thinking about calling up and canceling every single thing i’m supposed to do — not because i need to, but in order to know i could.
(i want to either prove that nothing is necessary or that everything is.)
steve is in the hospital. i brought champ-the-pug out and we video chatted tonight (after i was with him all day at the hospital). it was all good fun until champ recognized the voice and couldn’t find steve anywhere.
new post by me at backfence
Posted on November 6, 2008
Filed under misc. feelings about stories | Leave a Comment
there’s an essay by me at Backfence Pdx (warning: capital letters!). they’re a storytelling superpower organization in town. though i have miscellaneous feelings about the way people tell stories, if anything’s going to save us from anything else, it’s going to be through compelling narratives and frank sentiment. or i hope so, because those are the things i enjoy. go to their events in portland if you can.
the wage of skepticism is doubt or: selling a bike on craigslist (EXISTENTIALLY)
Posted on November 5, 2008
Filed under logic eating itself, meta internet stuff | 1 Comment
so i listed my bike on craigslist for $575 (yeah, i had a schmancy bike; leave me alone). the next day a woman called and asked me if i would consider giving it to charity. i said that i needed to either get significant money from selling the bike or hold onto it– i’ll probably be back to riding again some day. she called and offered me $100 ten minutes later. at this point, i flat out told her i didn’t plan to sell my bike for that little, that i wasn’t planning to take less than $400.
she called the next day and offered $200. i reiterated that i didn’t want to sell my bike for less than $400. she called back a few minutes later and offered $300 at which point i was sort-of-angry with her. it was a menace. well, okay, maybe just an annoyance. but i’m not in a position to donate a bike that’s worth something. i don’t particularly enjoy appeals to sympathy– both because i know they’re stupid AND they always make me feel bad.
i told everyone that it probably wasn’t a real charity. that it was really asshole-ish for people to pose as charities when they’re just trying to buy cheap goods on craigslist.
then she called and told me i drove a hard bargain; she’d found some donors and would pay me that $400. i gave her my address and then just sat dumbfounded. i flicked back through my email. there was a link to the charity in her email (though her email address didn’t tie her to it). so i simultaneously felt still skeptical and bad that i’d possibly not given someone the benefit of a doubt. (is there a converse of the benefit of the doubt? i mean, like, the harm of a doubt? yes.) i felt pestered and guilty.
when she went out to the car to get her money, i kept expecting– the kind of expecting that’s very near to hoping– that she was going to come in with a check or something i’d told her i wasn’t going to accept. but she gave me 8 crisp fifty dollar bills. she didn’t seem like she knew what she was talking about with regard to bikes specifically– so she was probably a pr person for a bike charity. or maybe ignorance is the easiest thing to feign. i’m left here wondering whether my pretty european bike really went– not that i really care. i mean, i would have sold it for that to anyone at all. but i wonder who she is, the other woman who’s thin and wobbly from chemo and needs a comfort bike like mine, if she exists.
i was doing what i would have done anyway. i don’t know why this woman who paid me–who talked too quickly, but might just not like the telephone, who had a generic email address, but just might not have one associated with the organization–upset my resolve so. i feel like i have been uncharitable in several senses of the word even though, i guess, i didn’t set out to be charitable in the first place. i got so oddly tangled in someone else’s life– or possibly just their fiction. anyway, sold the bike.
3 legs & a spare
Posted on November 2, 2008
Filed under being a crazy dog lady, language and all that, self-doubting aphorisms | Leave a Comment
my dog’s leg was broken early in his life and (presumably) never set. it could have been a birth injury– most likely was because it was all healed when we got him at 4 months old. it’s permanently stick-straight, though he can flex the foot. he has no concept of disability: he does not feel sorry for himself or like other dogs are doing way better than him. he just gets around. treats going down the stairs the same way you or i would treat going down a slide– tuck your limbs and give yourself a push.
the vet was saying yesterday that if his leg really bothers him, we could amputate it. it’s longer than the other legs and sometime he drags it a bit. this particular vet raises three legged dogs. he says he doesn’t think of dogs as four legged animals; they’re three legged animals with a spare.
that’s so absurd and poignant i feel like it must be a metaphor for something. maybe things can be absurd and poignant without being a metaphor. maybe.
i also write shrill blog posts
Posted on October 31, 2008
Filed under illness | 3 Comments
when people ask me what i do/where i work/what i do for a living, i say, “i don’t work because i’m sick right now.” the reason for this is two-fold. one, i don’t think that’s a relevant or appropriate question for light conversation. mostly because two, i know plenty of people who are in my shoes, or have been, who are made uncomfortable by that question.when your primary occupation is taking care of yourself, it’s hard to answer that. Read more
on certainty
Posted on October 30, 2008
Filed under logic eating itself, slightly autistic tendencies, what a strange person i am to love | 2 Comments
i am very, VERY uncomfortable with uncertainty. steve is very, VERY uncomfortable with things being locked in stone. this results in endless frustration. when i ask something about which there’s some teensy-tiny doubt (but is pretty-for-sure and i’m usually asking for reassurance), steve responds, without fail, “i don’t know.”
example: he went into work a few nights ago while i was in the bath tub. left in a rush. told me he’d be back when they were done. from his point of view, he didn’t know when they’d be done. it was unlikely that it would take more than an hour (i know now), but to him the world is full of wild woolly uncertainty and anything can happen at any time. i asked, gauging whether to make plans, “well, how long are you going to be there?”
“i don’t know.”
“like an hour? two? three?”
“i don’t know.”
“well, you’re not going to be there until midnight, are you?”
“i don’t know. look, i can’t predict the future.”
he was home in less than an hour. he stood by not-knowing-when-he’d-be-home: that virtually anything could have happened and detained him. steve does not operate with even the vaguest ballpark figures. life is too crazy. you can’t promise to be anywhere; you might turn into a vampire or encounter an alien or write a song or something.
it’s a source of both amusement and pathos, this deficit. because when i ask him to do something really important, the most sincere thing he can say to promise it will be so is, “i’ll try my best.”
which generally causes me to freak out and go all yoda-raised-by-a-negligent-father. (”there is no try. there is just you saying i’ll try and THEN NOT CARING.”)
i’m going to try to be less anal, but i don’t know.
self(?)-medicating
Posted on October 29, 2008
Filed under elegy for the nonspecific | 2 Comments
dear internet, you know those sets of weeks when your diagnosis is being reshuffled, you don’t know what’s going on any more or who you are, you’re trying to buy a house, your husband suddenly needs to be in the hospital for embarrassing reasons and you’ve surprised yourself by becoming fixated on hair products no longer available in the us, to the extent of ordering them on ebay?
ME TOO.
pathology is my first language
Posted on October 20, 2008
Filed under language and all that | 1 Comment
i thought i was developing trichotillomania. seriously worried about that.
then i said (to myself), “no, dude, it’s just that your hair is a different texture since last week and you like to touch it.”
still a choirgirl, probably
Posted on October 19, 2008
Filed under elegy for the nonspecific, misc. feelings about stories, proustian moments | 1 Comment
that summer in boulder i decided to be a bad person. my definition of a bad person, anyway. i’d skirted being a bad girl before, tried terribly hard. shawn would always laugh when i said “fuck” and i would anger, especially when he tried to excuse himself with “it just sounds like you’re trying to dare yourself to say it!” i admired girls who existed in some sort of fluid space where they weren’t trying to be bad any more. like the first women who got me drunk at college: it was like they were both dorothy parker. their house had velvet drapes and tom waits was playing on a victrola, an honest to god victrola. they poured me gin & tonics and watched me closely for the first signs of introxication. they were incredulous i’d only been drunk once in my life, years ago. one of them mimicked anal sex on the other. i tried not to flinch but to study them. their voices were gravelly. they did not go outside to smoke. they did not seem sad except, possibly, secretly. Read more
emo magic realism: my nano project
Posted on October 18, 2008
Filed under writing | 4 Comments
i know only dorks do national novel writing month. that said, i am doing national novel writing month. i am writing this story i’ve thought about for awhile, an unreliable narrator stuck in a never-ending tuesday. sort of ground hog day, but funny in a different way. no, i have not been corrupted by marrying a science fiction writer. this is the scribbling on a napkin that started everything four months ago:
Nobody could tell me it’s any day but Tuesday. You’d have a hard time convincing me it’s not Tuesday. This all seems cruel and scripted by a machine. I call every day Tuesday.
I have thought for a while since I last saw her that she was wrong. Now I am angry at her, so I imagine and fear how angry she is at me. I hound her, so I closely study and worry about how she hounds me. I have told her secrets, so I’m sure she’s told mine.
I fear what will never happen more than anything. I can’t get out of Tuesday.
“don’t rage against the dying of the light! just, um… enjoy the dimming.”
Posted on October 15, 2008
Filed under being all in love and shit, language and all that | Leave a Comment
i dashed across hawthorne to powell’s today (and my hair is dark brown, natural as we could make it) while we waited for our food to come at coney island. i was buying the book Full Catastrophe Living. it has been recommended to me by sick people and buddhist people and sick buddhist people.
i slid the book, with predictable self-help font, across the coney counter-top to steve, who raised an eyebrow.
“looks a little hippie, dear,” he said.
“eh,” i replied. “such is the way of all buddhist self help books about dealing with hard shit. they all say, don’t rage against the dying of the light! just, um… enjoy the dimming.”
he snorted with true appreciation of my deadpan. also part of our ecolect, which i realized while we were driving home, is that whenever someone seems a little too into their rocking-out, more than is warranted by their musical skill or the music they’re listening to or their ability to rock-out in general, we make our fingers into devil faces, pump them in the air and say “slayer” with complete listless detachment.
i repeat, we are going to be married FOREVER.
things not to google in my present state / ear infections suck
Posted on October 14, 2008
Filed under illness, lists | 1 Comment
- prednisone induced psychosis
- “[my ex’s name]” “[my ex’s more googleable current location]”
- any ex’s name for that matter
- prednisone heart failure
- prednisone heart failure symptoms
- “[this girl i envy who was mean to me who i think wrote a critically acclaimed book but i’ve been too scared to check]”
- prednisone flesh eating bacteria
the post at three rivers fog today made me think. i don’t want to see beauty standards expanded just to include my (average-sized for america, gigantic for hipster-ville where i live) ass either. i think there’s too much in the feminism/fat acceptance culture of people just wanting “in,” just wanting a me-too into what’s a fucked and unsatisfying way to be: being included in any preset ideal of what we should be, the opportunity to enter commerce as eye-candy, arm-candy, fantasy-fodder. when someone rejects me based on his or her comparisons to other women, i can’t help but think they aren’t encountering me in my singularity.
and i am very into the stupid singularity thing. even though the first guy i slept with pretty much looked like a beta version of my husband. TOTALLY A COINCIDENCE.
but, then, we’re kind of always interpreting (at least) ourselves, aren’t we?
sigh.
going to go google, “prednisone making me dumb”(.)
tattoos / why we want stuff and how
Posted on October 10, 2008
Filed under being all in love and shit, logic eating itself, other people's epistemology, what a strange person i am to love | 1 Comment
i have plans for half-sleeve tattoos, which commence on october 18. today i was wearing the blue dress i wore for our wedding and steve and i were eating at the vietnamese retaurant where we had our second date. it wasn’t as dripping-history as it sounds; our preferred area of southeast portland is small. the number of dresses i have on hand to wear when i’m feeling sassy is also small.
we were talking about tattoos and body modification. steve says he prefers blank flesh and has been very anxious about my plans. i show him the sketch and he winces. he says it’s my body. i say it’s sort-of his body too, kind-of.
then i say, “is there such a thing as blank skin? i mean, skin that you don’t approach with an interpretation? i have scars on my arms from surgery. isn’t medicine, seen abstractly, a kind of body modification?”
he agrees with me that the whole pure, unsullied skin vs. tattooed, stained skin dichotomy doesn’t work. is puritanical. is out of line with blah blah blah.
then he dips his spoon into his soup and says, “i’ll just enjoy your arms while they’re not full of black ink.”
even if you deconstruct the shit out of interpretations, they stick around.
i’m getting the tattoos, because it’s mostly my body and kind-of his, and he says it’s really (on balance) okay; he’ll just miss my arms. my arms being blank.
and he wants a tattoo of a robot from stanislaw lem’s cyberiad. my getting-another-tattoo has awakened his ambivalence about never-getting-a-tattoo. i cover my now-blank, soon-ornate arms with a black sweater while we walk to the car. i love how portland in the autumn gets just cold enough to justify wearing thermal tights and tossing a scarf around but you’re never actually cold.
i really think desire is the weirdest thing in the world.