recurring dream elements

Posted on January 3, 2009 
Filed under dream, lists | 2 Comments

  1. people talking about going to a place called “orange universe”
  2. geographical displacement, maps not making sense
  3. the government is watching everybody
  4. money in absurd denominations (a $7.47 bill, for instance)
  5. stoves with dials i don’t understand
  6. boiling eyeglasses
  7. hanging out with nineteenth century intellectuals
  8. a new colony on the pacific ocean, hard to get to, possibly post-apocalypse
  9. riding on trains
  10. going back to college, except the whole place is a mausoleum and i’m the only one who thinks this is disturbing
  11. animals with antlers, who are menacing

some possible explanations: #2 a vagabond life post-college, read too much homer.  #4 i lived in europe while they were converting to the euro from local currencies. #7 i wanted to be a scholar of german idealism way longer than was reasonable for me. #8 i live near the pacific ocean and with a rather apocalyptic science fiction writer. #11 i almost hit a moose driving in upstate in new york in 2002, narrowly avoiding certain death.

what about the others: fuck if i know. and, really, how much do the explanations above work either? i bolted awake five times the other night because of boiling eyeglasses. why is that even frightening? neuroscientists and psychologists who think they have consciousness so-very-nailed strike me as people who probably don’t have nightmares.

the length of a day and/or a feature film

Posted on January 2, 2009 
Filed under being all in love and shit, being difficult | Leave a Comment

dusk today is deep red and at 4:30 in the afternoon. is it the angle of the light or a reflection of paint on the house next door? i don’t know. just that the kitchen is steeped in this sunset’s bloody pink. a bordello or a crime scene.

i putter around the kitchen, thinking about what i should be doing. they say that the days are getting longer (that they always do after the solstice, whatever kind of science that is) but it doesn’t seem that way. the dogs read the sunset as “night” and fall asleep. maybe they have it easier: they go to sleep at dark. it doesn’t upset them that it’s dark at 4:30 or that they’re tired at 4:30 or that they’re tired because it’s dark at 4:30.

steve and i have a real problem with watching movies at home. my attention span, whatever it is, is less than a feature film. ditto my ability to sit still. i get up. i check my email. i start a conversation. he pauses the movie until i’m ready to give my full attention. all of which makes the contrarian in me worse at watching movies with him. i say to myself, “you need to be better at sitting still for 90 minutes to 2.5 hours.” which always, always fills me with the desire to watch the movie for 15 minutes, get up unannounced, get a bowl of ice cream and eat it on the porch while i ponder whether i capitalized the word “french” correctly in a letter i sent two years ago.

but, hey! at least he can watch the spaghetti westerns i won’t now that we’ve solved the “whether heather can watch movies” question.

(i did. a capital F.)

new years irresolution

Posted on January 1, 2009 
Filed under misc. feelings about stories | 1 Comment

i’m never all that into new year’s resolutions. i’m constantly thinking about what i should do or should have done– i’d blame it on being raised sort-of catholic, but that makes it way too simple and an unfunny joke. and implies that all people who are scrupulous are just-fucked-up excatholics.

that cultural reference drives me crazy, actually. mostly because i am an intensely ethical (read: obsessively self-critical) person and i get asked about my catholic guilt all the time. i used to call it that because i was ashamed to admit it was more complex– more than a cliched autobiographical artifact. and, to be honest,  i’m sick of it sometimes and want to discard it, the self-critical tendency. so i conjure up demographic prejudices and (even though i didn’t even take my first communion, officially) claim them for my own.

but i’m always left with this sense of culpability and dread and shame and resolutions for how to do better that have very little to do with going to catholic church every now and again. new year’s resolutions, however. ugh.

everything i can think of in the genre (eating more healthily, becoming healthy, not taking naps, biking more, gettting a better doctor), i’m already doing or planning to. making a resolution last night would just seem like patting myself on the back only slightly in the past.

i suppose this is why i don’t give much weight to people doing their best, trying, or doing all they can. it sounds like a get-out-of-it clause to me. it means if you try do your best and it doesn’t work, you still deserve praise for trying. and if you succeed, well, then you’ve tried your best and done all you can and, shit, it worked. it’s a win-win. the outcome of your actions doesn’t matter, only the intentions and effort you’ve announced. you’re blameless. and if there’s no way to go wrong, what’s so distinctive about being right?

i guess i can’t make resolutions because i don’t think there’s anything particularly admirable about intentions– i mean, you only talk about intentions when they resulted in something unexpectedly awful, right? but maybe the misery in my particular moralism is there: when i’ve done things right, it’s just the base expectation of being a person. nothing to celebrate or be triumphant about. but when i’ve done things wrong, i don’t have any sloppy solace. all stick and no carrot.

pretty catholic if you ask me.  (there was some sort of custody fight about going to first communion classes. one day, my father told me i could just go up and take a wafer. i knew it was against the procedure, yadda yadda. i didn’t know how to hold my hands right! i didn’t know what it even meant! they had these rules for a reason! wasn’t it supposed to turn into a dead body or something? wouldn’t i, possibly, go to hell? or never be allowed to join the church? he put up with my principled refusal for awhile, but it looked weird that my younger sisters took communion and i didn’t. so one day he told me i had to. before church he showed me how to cradle my hands and told me to wait for the the cleric to say “body of christ” and then say “amen” unlike usual– “ahhhhhh-men.” i hated my fugitive piety. i hated him. i hated how he told me i’d done well, after i walked down the aisle, shaking like some one who’s, maybe sort of literally, damned if she does or doesn’t.)

this doesn’t explain anything.

whoever you imagine you are, i kind of doubt it

Posted on December 31, 2008 
Filed under found, other people's epistemology | Leave a Comment

4:25 PM me: oh god
it happened again
4:28 PM pandora delivered up coldplay
4:30 PM Steve: haw haw
me: oh god
it’s not coldplay
Steve: AND IT WAS YELLOW!
me: sweetheart
Steve: what?
me: it’s counting crows
oh god
what have i become
Steve: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
a monster
me: i liked them when i was 13!
it must be nostalgia
4:31 PM i mean, it was preparing me for nuanced love of piano ballads

maybe you’re just clever and weird and read something new.

Posted on December 26, 2008 
Filed under misc. feelings about stories | Leave a Comment

you know the kind of person i mean: every conversation is a dense reference to something else. and it’s not a shiftable something-else. it’s not a something-else you have any input into. it’s what she’s just read or listened to. she’s got it stuck in her head– like a chorus even if it isn’t one.

god help you if you don’t know that song or that book. this sort of person learns a new language every time she finds a song or book that explains everything. or, if it doesn’t explain everything, allows her to explain a few things.

i guess that’s the kind of person i used to be. must be, because i can recognize it so easily and it irritates me so profoundly in other people.

there was a character in one of the many european films with weird sex (don’t ask– no, really, don’t) i watched for my philosophy degree who came in to the cafe every week singing a different song. the professor liked even minor characters in terrible movies to have metaphysical significance. (like we all do.) this character was supposed to represent transience. or death. or being nothing but a hedonist. or something. the point was that he changed. every week he had a new song.

i used to reread and play everything to death. i didn’t know how to read someone other than to get my hands on everything they’d ever written. i used to know the lyrics to every song i really liked. obsessions ended, usually even when successfully indulged, in disenchantment and boredom rather than enlightenment.

figuring things out isn’t that great.

i guess i was trying to tell someone this tonight. i was trying to say: maybe it’s not an epiphany. maybe you’re just clever and weird and still in love with the wrong person and read something new.

but what’s so wrong, i imagined him answering (as i would have), with that?

thanks for leaving the shakespeare on the back of my toilet, dude. i worry about you, you know that? i miss it when you would skip work and watch me drink whiskey all afternoon. and the condescending tone of this post is mostly directed toward myself: as far as metaphors-for-everything go, neil gaiman’s pretty ok.

i haven’t been predicted

Posted on December 21, 2008 
Filed under dream | Leave a Comment

he’s tied up and holding a sheet of paper. it says: “you won’t be untied for six hours, but by then you’ll be tired. the person who unties you will bait the lions. it’s nothing to look forward to.”

he’s trembling and won’t talk to me while i unloop the ropes.

“what?” i say. “oh, christ. i’m not going to bait any lions. i wouldn’t even know how to bait a lion. and do you see any lions around?”

he’s shaking. “that’s what they said you’d say,” he stammers.

“i don’t know who they are or what they said,” i try to reassure him, having loosed the final knot. “but i haven’t been predicted. i just found you here.”

we hear lions roaring and i clutch him.

it turns out my dogs were barking.

it’s dumb not to dress for the weather

Posted on December 15, 2008 
Filed under proustian moments | Leave a Comment

she was a student teacher, probably younger than i am now, a hesitant zealot about environmental matters. in fourth grade, i liked all things apoclyptic, so i eagerly listened to her grim foretelling of global warming, and thumbed through books titled Fifty Things KIDS Can Do to Save the Earth.

she was probably childless. she wasn’t used to having to stop herself from just speaking her mind when she was around kids. (i have this problem now; inhabiting this grown-up world where you can toss around the phrase “oh, for fuck’s sake” and being a bad influence on my friend’s children.) she wasn’t used to having kids outnumber her.

it was recess. my mother never dressed me up properly. there were feet of snow and i was wearing a windbreaker– a light jacket, and shivering near the door, so i would be the first to be let in.

the student teacher sidled up behind me. it was probably boring, supervising recess. she asked why i was standing near the door. she saw my light jacket, no gloves, no scarf. her voice was instructive and oddly casual, “it’s dumb not to dress for the weather, you know.”

then she brought her hand to her mouth. she probably remembered that she read somewhere that you shouldn’t use words like “dumb” when you’re talking to a child. or maybe she realized that i hadn’t dressed myself, that i was a child. that the absent mittens meant another absence that she couldn’t fathom or help.

it snowed in portland for the first time since i lived here today. standing on my porch and ambivalently welcoming the snow i fled, i thought about shivering on the playground when i was 10 and the weird shame i felt, how i didn’t understand why the teacher had covered her mouth. i thought, while i waited for steve and the dog to come home, about how someone i knew used to be really into freud, and would always say, usually with this wine-drunk smirk, “the child is the father of the man.”

i never understood what that meant until now– i mean, it’s so simple. but not true.

not exactly. not quite. not so neatly.

steve came back with my mittens on and the dog’s coat damp with snow. i had tied his hood tightly around my wool beret.

you don’t get a perfect spine out of this life

Posted on December 11, 2008 
Filed under illness, proustian moments, self-doubting aphorisms | Leave a Comment

it wasn’t a hallucination– and not really a delusion, either. yet i can’t look back and say i knew what i was doing, pulling a central line out of my neck.

it was in the hospital. a general medicine floor. my room mate was an indian reference librarian who was having her spinal fluid drained. or that’s what i remember, anyway. general medicine means the girl who can’t eat maddening from morphine and the woman becoming demented from spinal fluid disease lay three feet (& a curtain) apart. misery hates company, but some hospitals are old.

it was bothering me that sylvia plath was not appreciated as a formal poet and i felt like i had an earring attached to me that was somehow the cause of this misunderstanding. i repeat, i didn’t know what i was doing. i kept pushing my i.v. cart into the bathroom and frowning at the ear and tugging at it. i felt like i was pulling out a part of me that misunderstood something. that if i pulled this misunderstanding out of myself, it would be pulled out of the rest of the world. (they had been pushing morphine every two hours, even when i was sleeping.)

the doctors found me standing there, having pawed apart my neck stitches and holding several feet of tubing. there was blood. the resident screamed (& it had been hard to imagine him genuinely surprised before), “holy shit, she pulled out a central line! get the monitors on her!” i laid down and felt my blood pressure drop. there was shouting. i realized i had done what he said. i realized it had nothing to do with sylvia plath or an earring. i didn’t have pierced ears, even.

the thing that’s weirder than a hallucination or delusion is that i wasn’t doing what a normal person would in response to what they (in a morphine haze) thought was real. i wasn’t screaming at a person only i could see. i wasn’t paranoid and convinced that aliens were after me and acting accordingly.

there was a deeper disconnect– about what i was doing, how action is connected to getting what you want, where my necks and ears were– a disconnect that reveals the tenuousness of all these things. at the time, i thought i was refuting an academic thesis by getting an earring out of my ear. morphine disrupted not only my perception and my beliefs about reality, but also my idea of, well, who i was. what communication was. what physical acts versus talking versus writing papers accomplish. i  really thought i’d take the non-existent earring out (by pulling a tube out of my neck) and somehow everyone would understand things better.

that’s it: it wasn’t just the “what” of life that was confused (as it is when we see things that aren’t there or have deluded beliefs), but the “how” and “why,” which is a much deeper and more troubling disruption. it’s worse than most non-sense. it’s the kind of non-sense that makes you wonder whether you’re sensible right now. the basics of causation stopped making sense– or started to make a new kind of sense. i mean, i didn’t feel confused at the time; i felt urgently purposeful.

i told my physical therapist, swapping morphine freaked-me-out stories.  he told me he saw a woman from the forties taking his picture. huge old camera with clicking flasbulbs that burned him over and over again.

i like him.

while he was doing tissue manipulation today, we talked about how great it is that i don’t have m.s. “i’m not dying,” i offered, as a bit of relief. “not any more than everyone is,” he replied, chipperly. then we were talking more about my back during the exercises and i told him how neurosurgeon #1 said i have scoliosis. “we all do,” he grinned, every inch the basketball player / physical trainer. “i mean, just like we’re all dying. you don’t get a perfect spine out of this life.”

night sweats

Posted on December 6, 2008 
Filed under being all in love and shit, being all poetic and stuff, dream | Leave a Comment

night sweats is really the wrong word for it: when i fall asleep with my head on his chest during an afternoon nap, he soaks my hair. i breathe it in and have drowning dreams. as i fight to surface, i have to paddle through faces, some with pursed lips, some asking a question and i keep thinking i’m going to lose control and inhale someone.

i startle awake and say i’m sorry for ever wanting anything else.

i say really weird things when i wake up sometimes.

come one and all

Posted on December 6, 2008 
Filed under language and all that, misc. feelings about stories, my appreciation for literature, other people's epistemology, writing | 1 Comment

it’s sponsored by powell’s and i’m going to be there, enoying the spoils of having written an essay for them earlier this month! my gorgeous rockstar husband will be there as well.

i’ve been debating whether to write about this, but okay. so we all know how obsessed little heather is with disclosure and narrative truth and memoirs and memoirists and whether writing about something gives you any latitude in hurting people or making shit up. i mean, there are two things i object to in “personal essay” culture: the idea that simply because you can eloquently recount your motives and make it into a thoughtful essay, it’s okay. jessica of jezebel opines in this post:

I’m sick to death of people writing first-person essays about bad behavior and expecting that the mere act of writing about it absolves them of any responsibility and places them above censure.

word. i can write compellingly and beautifully about all sorts of mistakes i’ve made– but i think that my closeness to them makes me more accountable. i really can’t stand the idea that being a person who is concerned so intensely with communicating her experiences makes me not responsible for them! the opposite! i would hope! (though sometimes i just like to wallow in self-effacing stories about making out with the wrong people.)

i also am rather sick of the james frey culture. of course i think style & personality & the vicissitudes of memory effect what people write. but i don’t think that the truth is such a slippery thing that there’s no such thing as, um, making shit up.

so i got this rejection letter this week & it was mighty curious. it was for a memoir essay. the editor’s complaint was not that my piece was stylistically/formally/literarily lacking. no! it was that he wanted things to happen which would make the story more outrageous than the actually true story. he suggested several possibilities he could think of, of what might have happened and be WAY funnier and crueler (which would have been beyond embellishments– complete inventions) and offered this nuanced view:

Fiction / non-fiction who cares?

I DO, dude. i care rather deeply about both. moreso, i care very deeply about preserving the distinction that allows both to be useful as art forms, ways of understanding ourselves. let’s keep telling stories– both kinds. i’ll be there wednesday.

the natural part

Posted on December 5, 2008 
Filed under gender, hairstyles touch our lives, language and all that | 1 Comment

whenever i get my hair cut, they part it to the right. the stylist who gave me my most recent trim said it’s my natural part. she asked if it was okay if she cut the hair to hang that way instead, because i’d come in with a ruler-straight part down the middle. she said my hair doesn’t fall well that way. i said okay.

the problem is that i unconsciously push my hair to be of even volume on both ears. so now i have the right haircut for my hair but the wrong haircut for my reflexes.

none of this can be instinct. i mean, my mother must have brushed my hair that way for a long time. then i went to see pulp fiction at the dollar theater like 14 times when it came out and got my mia wallace fetish. but what about the natural part the stylist sees? how does she know how hair is supposed to lay?

you see where i’m going.

i remember once this boy was taking my picture when i was thirteen. we were practicing portrait camera work. i have a mole on the right side of my face. i was on the only girl in the a/v club. he had me on close-up on the monitor. he called me by my nickname, “ever-ready,” he said, “you’ve got a mole on your face just like cyndi crawford.” he zoomed. “not the hair or the body, but definitely the mole is in the exact same spot.”

i’ve always hated (& never been able to escape) that kind of analogy. i’ve never gotten the mole removed. i hate how natural comes to mean what’s easier– inviting the question, of course, easier for who?

i totally fail at buy nothing weekend

Posted on December 1, 2008 
Filed under self-doubting aphorisms | Leave a Comment

but seriously people. i traded a bunch at powell’s. and i have a HUGE GNAWING NEED for anatomical woodcuts & sappy zines in my life that a lack of consumption cannot and will not ever fill.   gluttony

all the stupid things that make it make sense

Posted on November 30, 2008 
Filed under misc. feelings about stories | 5 Comments

steve broke his toe. he tells people he’s wearing a blue boot and limping because of the puppy, who pees. the actual sequence of events went something like this:

the puppy peed some time during the night, and the puddle spread between the wood floor of the living room and the tile in the kitchen. steve decided not to mop up the pee, but to use his feet to move a towel over the spill. sleepy, he didn’t see that he was going to slide off the wood floor onto the tile. so he slammed his full body-weight on his toe trying to catch himself against the wall while he slipped.  he mostly hurt his front left toe. which we didn’t think was broken until it got purple later in the night. and didn’t know for sure until we got an xray, which actually hasn’t been read yet.

so steve might not have a broken toe.

when people ask how he broke his toe (because he probably did so we’re going with that), he says it’s because the dog peed. but that omits this whole causal chain (the tile, the towel, the slip): all the stupid things that make it make sense.

my only recurring dream

Posted on November 26, 2008 
Filed under dream | 3 Comments

i’ve never had a seat number before, but everyone else has one–a sticker on their chest–and that’s starting to make me nervous because i’m already on the train, unable to find an empty seat. i pause on the platform to talk to the conductor. i tell him that i’ve made this trip a lot and something always goes wrong. i laugh and say this is one of the least weird things to happen.

“weird things happen on this train?” he asks. he sounds vaguely russian, transplanted, unsure in diction. i notice that he’s dragging a huge, dead animal with huge antlers behind him. i recognize it as a moose. it’s not really a moose.

the trains are bigger– new tracks have been laid down and now trains can move buildings, a whole city at once. most people only make one trip, to the new colony. for some reason i keep going back, trying to get more people to move to the new colony. sometimes the conductors recognize me. they tell me i shouldn’t do this so much. i don’t know if anything’s even going to be there. it’s a waste of time.

this conductor is so naive. he’s feeding the moose into the train’s fuel burning compartment, which is right over our heads. that’s what the trains run on, i guess, dead things. when he’s stuffed the moose in, and we hear the fire roar, the trap door opens. the moose leans out, like a cartoon, smoke coming out his ears and his eyes glowing flames.”so you thought you could kill me?” he whispers in this very intimidating-for-an-undead-cartoon-moose sort of way.

the conductor and i startle, and he pulls me away from the moose into a seat car. “i guess the weird things do happen on these trains,” he admits. his speech has lost its accent. he sounds like an american. the pacific ocean is chugging beside us. we’re not worried about anything.

barely noteworthy inconsistencies

Posted on November 22, 2008 
Filed under lists, my appreciation for literature | Leave a Comment

  1. i warm up my neck wrap in the microwave. whenever i walk toward the microwave to get it, i catch myself thinking about whether the forks are in the dishwasher or the drawer, as if i am about to eat.
  2. i hate people who insist on watching the credits at movies as if they know about key-grip and set manager politics, but i read the newspaper back to front.
  3. right now i think that i have a good grip on what’s true, but i’ve always thought that before when i didn’t.
  4. i don’t like fish except for sushi.
  5. i’m willfully obscure but i hate feeling misunderstood.
  6. james joyce reads like the newspaper. the newspaper bores me. except for alternative weeklies.

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