you know what's sad?
we judge people the second we see them
and most of the time
we're right.
just once i want someone to dress like the opposite of their personality.
like you turn to a woman in sensible pumps and a-line skirts and cardigans and she talks like kesha/avril lavigne.
it's like expecting lollipop flavors based on colors. life would be so much more exciting if we just had no. idea. at all.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Day 25. Jalila.
Jalila slumped. Two message on the home phone. Keys got dumped on the counter. The front door was sticking again. Mail strewn on the floor. The morning coffee fermenting in the spilled puddle of itself.
Beep.
Seven fortah fah pee emm.
The machine enunciated, or tried.
Hey baby, it's Alan from the bar, come hang out tonight, my band has a gig at the Grateful Bread. Nine. We'll play a Throbbing Gristle cover, cause I know you're into that... call me, 310 555 4930.
Jalila couldn't help but wonder who Baby was. Could've been a mistake. Could've been, she switched the four and the six and now Alan would sit himself down facing the door trying not to look up whenever someone Baby-shaped walked in.
Or maybe she'd been smart, not forgetful.
Maybe Alan's bandmates would yell "GET SUM" as he called another girl Baby.
Maybe she'd seen it all before.
Maybe she was done being who she'd been, the type of Baby who meets guys in bars. Baby wanted a name.
Jalila sunk into her favorite chair and thought about calling the number to find out.
...to be continued?
Beep.
Seven fortah fah pee emm.
The machine enunciated, or tried.
Hey baby, it's Alan from the bar, come hang out tonight, my band has a gig at the Grateful Bread. Nine. We'll play a Throbbing Gristle cover, cause I know you're into that... call me, 310 555 4930.
Jalila couldn't help but wonder who Baby was. Could've been a mistake. Could've been, she switched the four and the six and now Alan would sit himself down facing the door trying not to look up whenever someone Baby-shaped walked in.
Or maybe she'd been smart, not forgetful.
Maybe Alan's bandmates would yell "GET SUM" as he called another girl Baby.
Maybe she'd seen it all before.
Maybe she was done being who she'd been, the type of Baby who meets guys in bars. Baby wanted a name.
Jalila sunk into her favorite chair and thought about calling the number to find out.
...to be continued?
Day 24. Annette.
They said she had lived there since the 40s. They said she had heartbreak, loneliness. They said that her family left; she stayed. They said nothing had changed since then. Her handkerchief got a little more ragged at the edges, a few teeth were lost by the wayside. They said lights never went on at the house on the corner. They said her only food was garnered from bartering fruit from house to house.
Me, I waved from the window, answered her occasional doorbell ring, accompanied as it always was by a cheery "it's me! annette!" As if that voice were commonplace, as if we could have mistaken those bright but greying eyes savoring whatever there was to take in. the blemishes on our meyer lemons were no more than beauty marks to annette. Once, when i was thirteen, she told me she envied my braces, told me how gleaming and strong my teeth would be, and suddenly i didn't mind the embarrassing way food lodged in between the wires.
Once, she told my dad about how she walked to City Hall, miles and miles of streets with new asphalt and new signs and new people who didn't understand that no, she didn't want to email in her paperwork.
It can't have been an easy life, but to my eyes it seemed happy. annette kept a yard of fruit trees and glass bottles, maybe a shopping cart, and these served as bare necessities. They said when they found her she was curled into a tiny ball, buried under years of carefully hoarded treasures. this newspaper would prevent her from being seen. towards the end, she feared being dragged away. the neighbors were complaining about the lawn and the broken windows weren't bringing up property values, and men came to tear up the peach tree sprawling, unpruned but loved.
i have the feeling annette died with the peach tree. without decorum. without consent.
for awhile, neighbors from all over left flowers in her yard, cut nice ones and plucked rough ones. today there was a bulldozer, post destruction.
i climbed up. touched the stick shift.
a braver girl, a girl who walked from house to house picking fruit and bringing cans in and having conversations would have torn it out bareclawed.
A braver girl would have hauled the torn up remains of wood and metal strewn in the falling house into the seat, to slow down the workers.
I went numb and kept walking.
Me, I waved from the window, answered her occasional doorbell ring, accompanied as it always was by a cheery "it's me! annette!" As if that voice were commonplace, as if we could have mistaken those bright but greying eyes savoring whatever there was to take in. the blemishes on our meyer lemons were no more than beauty marks to annette. Once, when i was thirteen, she told me she envied my braces, told me how gleaming and strong my teeth would be, and suddenly i didn't mind the embarrassing way food lodged in between the wires.
Once, she told my dad about how she walked to City Hall, miles and miles of streets with new asphalt and new signs and new people who didn't understand that no, she didn't want to email in her paperwork.
It can't have been an easy life, but to my eyes it seemed happy. annette kept a yard of fruit trees and glass bottles, maybe a shopping cart, and these served as bare necessities. They said when they found her she was curled into a tiny ball, buried under years of carefully hoarded treasures. this newspaper would prevent her from being seen. towards the end, she feared being dragged away. the neighbors were complaining about the lawn and the broken windows weren't bringing up property values, and men came to tear up the peach tree sprawling, unpruned but loved.
i have the feeling annette died with the peach tree. without decorum. without consent.
for awhile, neighbors from all over left flowers in her yard, cut nice ones and plucked rough ones. today there was a bulldozer, post destruction.
i climbed up. touched the stick shift.
a braver girl, a girl who walked from house to house picking fruit and bringing cans in and having conversations would have torn it out bareclawed.
A braver girl would have hauled the torn up remains of wood and metal strewn in the falling house into the seat, to slow down the workers.
I went numb and kept walking.
Day 23.
10 Letters to 10 People
1.
You're literally a radiator. Just, warmth and energy seem to leak out of you like...UH... puppy hugs? I don't even know. You make me, and everyone else, happy. Just from the short time i've known you, I know you're going to go exciting places in life.
3.
Something about you brings out the maternal instinct in me. I know I can't protect you but know I'm here for anything. Your smile, it kills evil and sprouts love.
4. I miss you jesus balls a lot. You're too far away. Stupid college.
5.
I always get the uncomfortable feeling you're making fun of me behind my back. (probably because you are) I'm sure I'd laugh if you said it to my face, you're funny that way. But your inconsistency gets really irritating. Not that I can or will leave, because it's really endearing when you actually give a shit about other people.
6. don't lose your perspective or self-respect in this mess. you can and will handle this.
7.
I could apologize to you for the rest of my life and I still wouldn't feel okay about it. road trip? solves everything?
8.
you seem so hollow and breakable. please quit your meds. please sing and write every day of your life. Your smile, it cures leprosy and probably eleventy other things!
9. i miss you i miss you i miss you i miss you i'm lying so much further faster every day.
10. don't leave again. you're like another sister to me.
1.
You're literally a radiator. Just, warmth and energy seem to leak out of you like...UH... puppy hugs? I don't even know. You make me, and everyone else, happy. Just from the short time i've known you, I know you're going to go exciting places in life.
3.
Something about you brings out the maternal instinct in me. I know I can't protect you but know I'm here for anything. Your smile, it kills evil and sprouts love.
4. I miss you jesus balls a lot. You're too far away. Stupid college.
5.
I always get the uncomfortable feeling you're making fun of me behind my back. (probably because you are) I'm sure I'd laugh if you said it to my face, you're funny that way. But your inconsistency gets really irritating. Not that I can or will leave, because it's really endearing when you actually give a shit about other people.
6. don't lose your perspective or self-respect in this mess. you can and will handle this.
7.
I could apologize to you for the rest of my life and I still wouldn't feel okay about it. road trip? solves everything?
8.
you seem so hollow and breakable. please quit your meds. please sing and write every day of your life. Your smile, it cures leprosy and probably eleventy other things!
9. i miss you i miss you i miss you i miss you i'm lying so much further faster every day.
10. don't leave again. you're like another sister to me.
Day 22. Franklin Hill
I am afraid of the dark.
It is the kind of afraid that brings an addicting hit of adrenaline.
In Looking for Alaska, Alaska tells Miles: run run run.
and that's the way it is.
I leave home accidentally, loudly. Fists balled at my hips in my pockets, making inconsequential noises to scare away crickets.
Walk up a hill a couple blocks away from my house and come back and it shouldn't make me different but it does.
L.A. isn't something I feel like i belong to until I get far enough away to see the lights.
I've seen countless sunsets, nine Fourth of July fireworks, twice, a lunar eclipse. But mostly I go for the city lights, on at midnight, on at two am. Sometimes a man stands in the middle of the street and turns to me complaining of headaches.
I go for the moon. Because the moon gives off no light itself; it only reflects the light of a thousand stars. It is coldly luminous; the aloof woman in the corner of the room smirking at you, whose lies become her.
Sometimes, there are stars, which seem to me the distant headlights of cars twinkling as they rocket around curves of universe. Sometimes I expect someone to stop me, or follow me. But in the night. people take separate paths.
It is the kind of afraid that brings an addicting hit of adrenaline.
In Looking for Alaska, Alaska tells Miles: run run run.
and that's the way it is.
I leave home accidentally, loudly. Fists balled at my hips in my pockets, making inconsequential noises to scare away crickets.
Walk up a hill a couple blocks away from my house and come back and it shouldn't make me different but it does.
L.A. isn't something I feel like i belong to until I get far enough away to see the lights.
I've seen countless sunsets, nine Fourth of July fireworks, twice, a lunar eclipse. But mostly I go for the city lights, on at midnight, on at two am. Sometimes a man stands in the middle of the street and turns to me complaining of headaches.
I go for the moon. Because the moon gives off no light itself; it only reflects the light of a thousand stars. It is coldly luminous; the aloof woman in the corner of the room smirking at you, whose lies become her.
Sometimes, there are stars, which seem to me the distant headlights of cars twinkling as they rocket around curves of universe. Sometimes I expect someone to stop me, or follow me. But in the night. people take separate paths.
Day 21. start of a shitty graduation speech
Well, this is graduation, and I have nothing against time-honored traditions, so I'm just going to get through every graduation speech cliche in 30 seconds: Definition of a common word. Joke that sounded better in my bedroom. Allusion to pop culture. Awkward reference to that crazy party one time. Metaphor comparing our lives to rivers, stairs, or books. Pauses. Between. Every. Word. The phrases "gathered here today" and "through good times and bad."
Day 20. About string instruments, and songs in general.
It's so alien to me, the idea of playing music without breathing, without it coming from the same place where loneliness and pride and love travel their way through nerves and veins and gore to the hands-- of having something in between you and the sound.
there's nothing quite like those first few listens to a song you're completely in love with. complete detachment. like flying. you feel it inside, as if the song is just someone else recording your inner fermentings and letting them breathe.
and for those instants all problems vanish into spontaneous dancing, ridiculous, irrelevant to whatever else is going on in life.
it fades.
and the next time you hear it, at a friends house or driving home, you feel only disappointment and a certain emptiness.
we keep changing.
we find something new.
there's nothing quite like those first few listens to a song you're completely in love with. complete detachment. like flying. you feel it inside, as if the song is just someone else recording your inner fermentings and letting them breathe.
and for those instants all problems vanish into spontaneous dancing, ridiculous, irrelevant to whatever else is going on in life.
it fades.
and the next time you hear it, at a friends house or driving home, you feel only disappointment and a certain emptiness.
we keep changing.
we find something new.
Day 19.
We have this fascination with places where long ago things happened-- with us, or, more often, without us. Even the least spiritual of us feel something different about places where we know a murder or a bombing or a fall transpired. It is as if no concept of time exists when we walk through-- no concept of past or present. The events of the past are not immovably stuck there, and it seems possible that all moments happen within this one: that faint outlines of long-bygone people whirr around us like mechanical toys, forever reenacting the same storied scene.
Monday, June 7, 2010
cut my hurr
I'm not sure why i get this compulsion to cut my hair late at night... i guess it's the self reinvention? Anyway i like it, though it does look kinda like a chopper attacked me from the back.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
this started out being a college essay about someone that influenced you--not sure what it is now. a love letter, haha.
Ms Hernandez cuts our high school Concert Band off mid-measure, pauses, searching for exactly the right words. "Play it like... like you're shaking bees in your hands."
Weirdly enough, we know exactly what she means. The next run, when we play it, is more soft, rhythmic, sustained-- maybe even the quiet buzzing of rattling bees. If I have a thousand days of band under my belt, I have a thousand metaphors tucked in my pockets. I can tell you which passage of Variations on a Korean Folk Song should be played like you're "painting with rollers"; which phrase in Sundance should be "tossed like air mattresses across a volleyball net being stabbed with fencing swords", which notes in Komm Susser Tod have to be played "like pillows"-- solely from Ms Hernandez's endless efforts to get us beyond the written-on-the-page music. Her metaphors and stories can be my-ribcage-is-collapsing funny, but they also connect music to my everyday life-- when I look at people painting, I hear the musical expression in each stroke; when I hear the bus is coming, I distractedly harmonize in my head. After a long day of rehearsal, it seems like every sound is a part of a chord, the beginning of a song-- something to tell me what the world is one more time, when words fail.
When Ms Hernandez gets us to concentrate our ADD minds on a piece, we get beyond ourselves. For minutes at a time, we are not high school students or teenagers or even individuals-- we are performers. I've started seeing changes in everyone in band-- because she has this expectation of us. I vividly remember one day in junior year: I had signed up to be the narrator of my school's drumline show. "Emily! You're saying every line like you're apologizing for something! Bring out your inner power bitch! Yeah? Is she in there?" She sighed, frustrated but hopeful.
I sighed, doomed.
Or maybe not. Over the next couple of rehearsals, I started pretending I had the unadulterated, fearless passion Ms Hernandez unfailingly brought to the podium. I brought out the power bitch-- some strutting instead of shuffling, some declarations instead of questions. Even if the confidence only lasted until I got offstage, it was a strange kind of high. The way I went through life, I tried a little of everything and hid my lack of self-respect behind my mediocrity. Band-- Ms Hernandez-- is changing that for me. Band, orchestra, drum line-- doing music in high school is the most focused effort I've put into anything. It became something I could take pride in, something I could both claim and belong to.
When I came to Palisades, I played a dingy french horn that had previously been rusting underwater from an ancient shipwreck (and sounded twice as bad with me playing). I feel in retrospect that it was a pretty good representation of the band program. Two years later, Ms Hernandez had basically birthed (not a word I use lightly) a new program, with kids who were motivated to be in band and create music. She garnered enough community and administration support to buy two like-new absolutely beautiful french horns. But I'm no finalized result, no "full-circle moment" of a person-- I know I have forever to go, infinity to learn. Somehow, that's more exciting than intimidating-- I know Ms Hernandez will be there urging me to feel more and play more, exaggerate the highs and the lows, the pianos and the fortissimos.
Weirdly enough, we know exactly what she means. The next run, when we play it, is more soft, rhythmic, sustained-- maybe even the quiet buzzing of rattling bees. If I have a thousand days of band under my belt, I have a thousand metaphors tucked in my pockets. I can tell you which passage of Variations on a Korean Folk Song should be played like you're "painting with rollers"; which phrase in Sundance should be "tossed like air mattresses across a volleyball net being stabbed with fencing swords", which notes in Komm Susser Tod have to be played "like pillows"-- solely from Ms Hernandez's endless efforts to get us beyond the written-on-the-page music. Her metaphors and stories can be my-ribcage-is-collapsing funny, but they also connect music to my everyday life-- when I look at people painting, I hear the musical expression in each stroke; when I hear the bus is coming, I distractedly harmonize in my head. After a long day of rehearsal, it seems like every sound is a part of a chord, the beginning of a song-- something to tell me what the world is one more time, when words fail.
When Ms Hernandez gets us to concentrate our ADD minds on a piece, we get beyond ourselves. For minutes at a time, we are not high school students or teenagers or even individuals-- we are performers. I've started seeing changes in everyone in band-- because she has this expectation of us. I vividly remember one day in junior year: I had signed up to be the narrator of my school's drumline show. "Emily! You're saying every line like you're apologizing for something! Bring out your inner power bitch! Yeah? Is she in there?" She sighed, frustrated but hopeful.
I sighed, doomed.
Or maybe not. Over the next couple of rehearsals, I started pretending I had the unadulterated, fearless passion Ms Hernandez unfailingly brought to the podium. I brought out the power bitch-- some strutting instead of shuffling, some declarations instead of questions. Even if the confidence only lasted until I got offstage, it was a strange kind of high. The way I went through life, I tried a little of everything and hid my lack of self-respect behind my mediocrity. Band-- Ms Hernandez-- is changing that for me. Band, orchestra, drum line-- doing music in high school is the most focused effort I've put into anything. It became something I could take pride in, something I could both claim and belong to.
When I came to Palisades, I played a dingy french horn that had previously been rusting underwater from an ancient shipwreck (and sounded twice as bad with me playing). I feel in retrospect that it was a pretty good representation of the band program. Two years later, Ms Hernandez had basically birthed (not a word I use lightly) a new program, with kids who were motivated to be in band and create music. She garnered enough community and administration support to buy two like-new absolutely beautiful french horns. But I'm no finalized result, no "full-circle moment" of a person-- I know I have forever to go, infinity to learn. Somehow, that's more exciting than intimidating-- I know Ms Hernandez will be there urging me to feel more and play more, exaggerate the highs and the lows, the pianos and the fortissimos.