I think I am more affected by physical human beauty than most people because of my obsessive desire for wholeness, perfection, purity, symmetry, cleanliness. I feel really unsettled when things look ugly, messy, or dirty. Alternately, I feel a palpable joy when I lay my eyes upon natural, unsullied beauty, be it perfect porcelain skin or the unblemished whites of eyeballs or silky, thick, lustrous hair. I like to be surrounded by only beautiful things and people - they make the world seem right. On days when the world seems to be falling apart and my life doomed, I take comfort in my own physical beauty. I list and count the things I like about my physical self. My dreams betray this obsession with remaining pure and beautiful - one of my recurring dreams involves all of my teeth spontaneously falling out and my gums twisting hideously so that my mouth resembles a stalactite-filled cave. I wake up always rushing to the mirror to see if the dream has come true.
From "The Bluest Eye":
Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen. There at last were the darkened woods, the lonely roads, the river banks, the gentle knowing eyes. There the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt threw away their crutches. There death was dead, and people made every gesture in a cloud of music. There the black-and-white images came together, making a magnificent whole - all projected through the ray of light from above and behind.
It was really a simple pleasure, but she learned all there was to love and all there was to hate.
Monday, April 05, 2010
On crying
Today I subbed in a high school chemistry class. Going on 3 hours sleep and stuck in that overly air-conditioned room I was shivering and half asleep the whole time. But I tried to keep myself occupied as the kids watched a video on dinosaurs by continuing my read of Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye". As soon as I stepped outside the building at the end of the workday I was shocked by the sun's warm embrace, that moment bearing witness to the foolishness of civilized life.
On my drive home, for no particular reason - not for loneliness, sadness, or remembrance of trauma - I cried like I haven't been able to since last summer in between two portentous phone calls from the guy I was dating. It was that deeply satisfying cry that leaves your mouth hanging open gasping for air and your cheekbones so tense from the continual bursts of tears it feels like they are crouching, poised ready to leap off your face. He first called to say we should break up. I coldly and calmly accepted it and agreed to part ways. I did not love him, nor was I especially committed to continuing to see him, but when we hung up the phone I was overcome by a feeling of utter loneliness in that dark apartment alone having to instantly revise my vision of my future, to edit out from it this person who had volunteered reckless but confident promises to remain in my life indefinitely. By the time he called back half an hour later to take it back - to tell me what a silly thing to do that was, how he had made a huge mistake, and how sorry he was for scaring me - I could barely speak. The crying had started involuntarily and would not stop.
Growing up, crying was so frequent it was almost a hobby of mine, and so it composes the most salient of my childhood and adolescent memories. There was that one time when at 8 years old I was left basically alone in our apartment. My mother and sisters went to the laundromat but I wanted to stay home, imagining all the undisturbed fun that could be had. Actually, I wasn't alone at all, but it felt like I was - my father had fallen into a deep sleep on the couch. When my mother and sisters left, I decided to take out a board game and play by myself. But after a few minutes of sitting there pretending to be two different players and listening to the eerie silence of solitude, interrupted only by my father's soft snoring, I felt a wave of vast and unrelenting emptiness wash over me. I burst into tears, quite literally and audibly, and my father awoke to witness my tears but quickly went back to sleep. This was my first memory of that terrifyingly lonely feeling that was to become all too familiar to me.
It seems like I cried every night for almost a decade, from late childhood to the early college years. Sometimes I cried out of loneliness, like that time in the apartment, and sometimes out of fear. Irrational fears plagued me throughout the day, but at night is when they threatened to swallow me up. I had fears of my grandmother dying before her time, of my parents getting held up at their liquor store, of our house being broken into by dangerous men, of a gas leak exploding the house, of my older sister committing suicide and me finding her hanging in her closet. At the risk of stating the obvious, I was a morbid and excessively fearful child. Maybe I thought the tears would prevent my fears from coming true. I believed in a God then, and I thought surely He wouldn't let me cry myself to sleep in fear every night, only to have my fears come true. Surely He's not that unfair. I was wrong, of course.
On my drive home, for no particular reason - not for loneliness, sadness, or remembrance of trauma - I cried like I haven't been able to since last summer in between two portentous phone calls from the guy I was dating. It was that deeply satisfying cry that leaves your mouth hanging open gasping for air and your cheekbones so tense from the continual bursts of tears it feels like they are crouching, poised ready to leap off your face. He first called to say we should break up. I coldly and calmly accepted it and agreed to part ways. I did not love him, nor was I especially committed to continuing to see him, but when we hung up the phone I was overcome by a feeling of utter loneliness in that dark apartment alone having to instantly revise my vision of my future, to edit out from it this person who had volunteered reckless but confident promises to remain in my life indefinitely. By the time he called back half an hour later to take it back - to tell me what a silly thing to do that was, how he had made a huge mistake, and how sorry he was for scaring me - I could barely speak. The crying had started involuntarily and would not stop.
Growing up, crying was so frequent it was almost a hobby of mine, and so it composes the most salient of my childhood and adolescent memories. There was that one time when at 8 years old I was left basically alone in our apartment. My mother and sisters went to the laundromat but I wanted to stay home, imagining all the undisturbed fun that could be had. Actually, I wasn't alone at all, but it felt like I was - my father had fallen into a deep sleep on the couch. When my mother and sisters left, I decided to take out a board game and play by myself. But after a few minutes of sitting there pretending to be two different players and listening to the eerie silence of solitude, interrupted only by my father's soft snoring, I felt a wave of vast and unrelenting emptiness wash over me. I burst into tears, quite literally and audibly, and my father awoke to witness my tears but quickly went back to sleep. This was my first memory of that terrifyingly lonely feeling that was to become all too familiar to me.
It seems like I cried every night for almost a decade, from late childhood to the early college years. Sometimes I cried out of loneliness, like that time in the apartment, and sometimes out of fear. Irrational fears plagued me throughout the day, but at night is when they threatened to swallow me up. I had fears of my grandmother dying before her time, of my parents getting held up at their liquor store, of our house being broken into by dangerous men, of a gas leak exploding the house, of my older sister committing suicide and me finding her hanging in her closet. At the risk of stating the obvious, I was a morbid and excessively fearful child. Maybe I thought the tears would prevent my fears from coming true. I believed in a God then, and I thought surely He wouldn't let me cry myself to sleep in fear every night, only to have my fears come true. Surely He's not that unfair. I was wrong, of course.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
New blog
I'll be posting on dubiously.tumblr.com from now on. I was going to use it just to reblog interesting things and post links, while posting my private thoughts here, but consolidation is better.
Saturday, January 02, 2010
New Year's Resolutions
1. Kick ass in school.
2. Lose 5-10 lbs.
3. Finish my stained glass piece.
4. Get a poem published.
5. Write a song with piano part.
6. Learn to knit.
7. Have lots of (good) sex.
2. Lose 5-10 lbs.
3. Finish my stained glass piece.
4. Get a poem published.
5. Write a song with piano part.
6. Learn to knit.
7. Have lots of (good) sex.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Doughballs
You take the fluffy center of a slice of bread, roll it into a ball between two fingers. As the oil from both the bread and your fingers turns the bread dense and shiny, you roll it into a flat disc. It's as if the bread has devolved into its earlier state. Doughy, oily, pliable, full of promise. You admire it between your fingers then take it into your mouth like a Communion wafer. Bread tastes better this way, all that flavor condensed into a tiny disc. This is why you don't eat fluffy things.
Substitute Teaching
My contributions to a high school literacy classroom today:
Substitute Teacher Observations:
1. There is nothing funnier to middle school boys than the word "balls".
2. Nobody ever reads classroom wall posters. What a waste of lamination.
3. Students get an inexplicable thrill from writing/drawing on the blackboard. They will write "Ms./Mr. ____ is the best teacher ever!" just so the teacher will allow it, no matter how much they hate said teacher.
4. There is exactly one attractive male teacher per high school.
4a. There are exactly zero attractive male teachers per elementary school.
4b. Research pending on middle school male teachers.
5. Public school lunch "food" is a travesty. Ranch dressing makes up about 40% of a student's meal, while processed starches and mystery meats make up the rest. Sometimes there's wilted greens and slimy canned fruit to round out the meal.
6. Math education in America is a travesty. Everything before geometry (and sometimes including it) is able to be grasped intuitively and explained concretely, but for some reason many kids think they're just "bad at math". Impossible.
7. High School Drama Students: lame sense of humor + lack of self-awareness + unearned sense of specialness = the most annoying kids in the world.
8. When I hear high school students say, "I hate to read", I cry for their younger selves who were enchanted by books, opened books easily and eagerly, and couldn't wait to become immersed in colorful fictional tales. What went wrong? Reading became a chore. No high school kid should be assigned The Iliad, only to sleep through it until the teacher shows Troy in class as a "literary supplement", i.e., "Let's ogle the glistening bodies of Brad Pitt and Eric Bana to make up for the fact that we got absolutely nothing out of this classic book because its language is too difficult and the story has no relevance to our lives." Shakespeare: good for youth. Homer: zzzzz.
9. Form matters. Presentation matters. Most teachers, like most people, are SLOBS. Clean up your dirty ass classroom. Other people have to use it too.
10. Homophobia and heteronormativity are the subtext of just about any dialogue between two high school students (of any gender).
11. In a quiet classroom, all it takes is for one student to start talking and then EVERYONE will think they have permission to speak. It will go from volume 1 to volume 10 in about two seconds.
Substitute Teacher Observations:
1. There is nothing funnier to middle school boys than the word "balls".
2. Nobody ever reads classroom wall posters. What a waste of lamination.
3. Students get an inexplicable thrill from writing/drawing on the blackboard. They will write "Ms./Mr. ____ is the best teacher ever!" just so the teacher will allow it, no matter how much they hate said teacher.
4. There is exactly one attractive male teacher per high school.
4a. There are exactly zero attractive male teachers per elementary school.
4b. Research pending on middle school male teachers.
5. Public school lunch "food" is a travesty. Ranch dressing makes up about 40% of a student's meal, while processed starches and mystery meats make up the rest. Sometimes there's wilted greens and slimy canned fruit to round out the meal.
6. Math education in America is a travesty. Everything before geometry (and sometimes including it) is able to be grasped intuitively and explained concretely, but for some reason many kids think they're just "bad at math". Impossible.
7. High School Drama Students: lame sense of humor + lack of self-awareness + unearned sense of specialness = the most annoying kids in the world.
8. When I hear high school students say, "I hate to read", I cry for their younger selves who were enchanted by books, opened books easily and eagerly, and couldn't wait to become immersed in colorful fictional tales. What went wrong? Reading became a chore. No high school kid should be assigned The Iliad, only to sleep through it until the teacher shows Troy in class as a "literary supplement", i.e., "Let's ogle the glistening bodies of Brad Pitt and Eric Bana to make up for the fact that we got absolutely nothing out of this classic book because its language is too difficult and the story has no relevance to our lives." Shakespeare: good for youth. Homer: zzzzz.
9. Form matters. Presentation matters. Most teachers, like most people, are SLOBS. Clean up your dirty ass classroom. Other people have to use it too.
10. Homophobia and heteronormativity are the subtext of just about any dialogue between two high school students (of any gender).
11. In a quiet classroom, all it takes is for one student to start talking and then EVERYONE will think they have permission to speak. It will go from volume 1 to volume 10 in about two seconds.
Thursday, December 14, 2006
My beloved doggie ChooChoo is dead. I loved her more than I love most humans. She was a reminder of my growing up in Atlanta, together with my family. She was always there to comfort me with her fluffy cuddly self, when my family couldn't or when they were the problem. Yesterday when I found out she passed, I cried all day and woke up with very bloated red eyes. My students told me I looked like I'd been smoking dope.
I remember thinking as a teen, ChooChoo will die someday, when I'm in my twenties, or with luck, my early thirties. I wondered what kind of person I would be then, what my husband would look like, and what my life would be like without her. It seemed so far away. That's why it was such a shock to find out that ChooChoo had gotten old and ill, that the time had finally come. She stayed unusually young - puppy-like - for a long time. It was like this with my grandma, too. She was such a sprightly 70-something. But then when illness hit, old age caught up to her and she deteriorated so quickly...
It feels silly, to grieve so much for a dog. But she was a part of the family, and in some ways she held us together. I worry for my parents, who must be devastated at the loss. My mom told me they will get a fish to replace her. I wanted to tell her, No, don't do it, as I thought of the time I saw a fish die before my eyes, in painful slo-mo, and how traumatized I was by it. But everything beloved dies, it's part of the cycle of life, as they say. And I guess it could be worse. There is an age you reach when death arrives in rapid succession. Your parents are long dead, your friends are dying one by one, and you've outlived your spouse. All that remains is your own death. How burdensome that knowledge must feel! If only death didn't come with all those emotional strings attached - the missing, the grieving, the heaviness, all the regrets and what-ifs...
I remember thinking as a teen, ChooChoo will die someday, when I'm in my twenties, or with luck, my early thirties. I wondered what kind of person I would be then, what my husband would look like, and what my life would be like without her. It seemed so far away. That's why it was such a shock to find out that ChooChoo had gotten old and ill, that the time had finally come. She stayed unusually young - puppy-like - for a long time. It was like this with my grandma, too. She was such a sprightly 70-something. But then when illness hit, old age caught up to her and she deteriorated so quickly...
It feels silly, to grieve so much for a dog. But she was a part of the family, and in some ways she held us together. I worry for my parents, who must be devastated at the loss. My mom told me they will get a fish to replace her. I wanted to tell her, No, don't do it, as I thought of the time I saw a fish die before my eyes, in painful slo-mo, and how traumatized I was by it. But everything beloved dies, it's part of the cycle of life, as they say. And I guess it could be worse. There is an age you reach when death arrives in rapid succession. Your parents are long dead, your friends are dying one by one, and you've outlived your spouse. All that remains is your own death. How burdensome that knowledge must feel! If only death didn't come with all those emotional strings attached - the missing, the grieving, the heaviness, all the regrets and what-ifs...
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Safe Harbor
(for a painting by the same name)
Divided into two rectangular panels,
it looks like a hundred-year-old photograph,
romantically blurred so that everyone's imagination
has room to roam inside its vast spaces.
I stare at the dark green swirls of the picture
hoping to reach into their faint center to my own destination,
a place that I cannot see but feel
whole-bodied inside the deliberate paint strokes,
warm tones and opaque smudges.
I smile childlike, contented
at the thought of a place where clocks
never stop running
and one can fall asleep in a room with a locked door and never
run out of air.
Where the most satisfying of dreams don't just happen
during the day, with your consent, but too at night
when sobbing and sweaty terror never arrive
to initiate the long tortured night.
Where intestines don't boil
and screams don't run away or hide,
nothing hides.
Where the path trails off in a cozy
blur she must have mixed so thoughtfully
on her palette.
I sit here contemplating my home among the swirls
but away from them, safe in the color of forests,
my surroundings clean and earthy,
simultaneously warm and chill,
like mud packed near the base of a tree.
(for a painting by the same name)
Divided into two rectangular panels,
it looks like a hundred-year-old photograph,
romantically blurred so that everyone's imagination
has room to roam inside its vast spaces.
I stare at the dark green swirls of the picture
hoping to reach into their faint center to my own destination,
a place that I cannot see but feel
whole-bodied inside the deliberate paint strokes,
warm tones and opaque smudges.
I smile childlike, contented
at the thought of a place where clocks
never stop running
and one can fall asleep in a room with a locked door and never
run out of air.
Where the most satisfying of dreams don't just happen
during the day, with your consent, but too at night
when sobbing and sweaty terror never arrive
to initiate the long tortured night.
Where intestines don't boil
and screams don't run away or hide,
nothing hides.
Where the path trails off in a cozy
blur she must have mixed so thoughtfully
on her palette.
I sit here contemplating my home among the swirls
but away from them, safe in the color of forests,
my surroundings clean and earthy,
simultaneously warm and chill,
like mud packed near the base of a tree.
when alone..lone..lonely..lo..
loneliness echoes, but
a drink or two or more's the salve
i'll have a beer, red wine, spirits to raise the dead
or string me up to the rafters,
i'll take what i can get.
the first cool mouthful incites urgency
down there, a tingling that feels like desire.
Now i write with abandon,
after all i have been abandoned
oh, drink brings out the narcissism best
woe is me, why oh why me oh my
i talk of things that shock and you squirm
i'm that drunk for whom you feel neither pity nor affection -
isn't contempt all we ever have for others,
when not for ourselves?
alone again - still - with a sorry excuse for a friend,
drowning, tiny, swimming, flailing foolishly in the bottle
like a patient whose operation has gone terribly wrong,
screaming, in a tone more muddled than rage,
what is this botched life worth
and why do we hear only our own echoes
loneliness echoes, but
a drink or two or more's the salve
i'll have a beer, red wine, spirits to raise the dead
or string me up to the rafters,
i'll take what i can get.
the first cool mouthful incites urgency
down there, a tingling that feels like desire.
Now i write with abandon,
after all i have been abandoned
oh, drink brings out the narcissism best
woe is me, why oh why me oh my
i talk of things that shock and you squirm
i'm that drunk for whom you feel neither pity nor affection -
isn't contempt all we ever have for others,
when not for ourselves?
alone again - still - with a sorry excuse for a friend,
drowning, tiny, swimming, flailing foolishly in the bottle
like a patient whose operation has gone terribly wrong,
screaming, in a tone more muddled than rage,
what is this botched life worth
and why do we hear only our own echoes
Friday, May 05, 2006
Trog and Og
I am a monster, he says.
If you're a monster, then what the hell am I? I ask. Of course I am the monster in this relationship. I am a monster with or without him. A big hairy one. I scare myself frequently.
OK, then, we're both monsters.
I realize his self-assessments have no bearing on what I think of him. And vice versa. We reach our own conclusions.
Nobody hates us like we hate ourselves.
And yet we go around caring so much about what other people think of us, projecting upon them our cares and insecurities!
Fuck that. I want to live freely. I want that for everyone I love too. Especially my younger sister, for whom I've taken up the role of the anxious, overprotective mother. I sit down to write holiday cards to her, trying to refrain from writing hackneyed Hallmark messages. What I really wish for her, besides a season's greeting or a happy birthday, is that she live burdened by nothing but responsibility to her chosen life.
But it's a cheesy thing to say, so I write jokes or cliches instead, year after year. There is so much I want to tell her, but don't. Somewhere along the line we decided that sincerity and mature displays of affection were to be reserved only for non-family members. I do not live freely.
For more on this subject, see: Reflection
If you're a monster, then what the hell am I? I ask. Of course I am the monster in this relationship. I am a monster with or without him. A big hairy one. I scare myself frequently.
OK, then, we're both monsters.
I realize his self-assessments have no bearing on what I think of him. And vice versa. We reach our own conclusions.
Nobody hates us like we hate ourselves.
And yet we go around caring so much about what other people think of us, projecting upon them our cares and insecurities!
Fuck that. I want to live freely. I want that for everyone I love too. Especially my younger sister, for whom I've taken up the role of the anxious, overprotective mother. I sit down to write holiday cards to her, trying to refrain from writing hackneyed Hallmark messages. What I really wish for her, besides a season's greeting or a happy birthday, is that she live burdened by nothing but responsibility to her chosen life.
But it's a cheesy thing to say, so I write jokes or cliches instead, year after year. There is so much I want to tell her, but don't. Somewhere along the line we decided that sincerity and mature displays of affection were to be reserved only for non-family members. I do not live freely.
For more on this subject, see: Reflection
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