We have failed you, dear readers. I promised we would return to our regular postings, but we haven’t, and that makes me a gross liar. We have been busy bees this fall. School, new jobs, and puppies have filled our time. Sometimes, all I want to do is cuddle and play with this babybabe, Geoff, all day long:
Show me one person who doesn't think this is the cutest pup ever, and I'll show you a liar.
Speaking of breathing. That’s the theme of my post for today! I’m sorry I’ve been absent for so long but I’m back now, and I’m trying, and I’m so glad you’re not like my puppy who pees on the floor when we leave.
So, I’ve watched this trailer like 30 times the past few days, and I’ll probably watch it few more times because I just. can’t. stop. I know I’m going to love this film. Just from watching the trailer I feel nostalgic for that feeling of falling in love for the first time. The way it wrecks you. It’s not a deep love but it’s honest– untainted, untamed. I remember crying the first time I realized I was in love, because I didn’t understand how to comprehend the emotions I was feeling. It was a new, selfless love that planted its roots in my chest and squeezed so tight I could barely breath. It’s that feeling I miss sometimes, that virginal realization that you’re all in and you can never go back.
Hottie husbad, right?
Okay, guys, I know I wrote recently about how I don’t “get” romantic love. But there is another type of love that I do get. I’m always the type of person to find pieces of pop culture and fall madly in love with them. Songs I’ll listen to until I can’t hear them ever again, movies I’ll watch until I know every line, hours spent on Tumblr looking at cast pictures and reading what other people have to say about my favorite TV shows. I’m obsessive, and mostly unapologetic about it.
Case in point: I went through a pretty intense “Star Wars” phase (we’re talking posters, action figures, books, an actual lightsaber, a fan club membership… everything). I was ostracized and ridiculed for it (particularly by one “friend” who is actually just a miserable human being) but I always tried to be honest about my obsession. It was the purest kind of love. It made me have swoopy stomach feelings thinking about it, I daydreamed about being a Jedi in class, I drew lightsabers in my notes like girls might write “Mrs. Justin Timberlake” in their notes. I have a framed photo of me standing next to a Darth Vader and R2-D2 made of Legos (it kind of looks like a prom photo, no lie).
That's not me, but you get the idea.
Eventually my “Star Wars” fervor cooled down and I became interested in much cooler things. Indie music, classic literature, foreign films, and all that pretentious shit. I was still a pop culture obsessed dork, but I had diversified.
Except for when it comes to television. I am in love with television. I think it is the perfect artistic medium. I think we’re in a Golden Age of television. I think that television is a great way to bring about social justice and understanding. When I picture my perfect job, I picture a job in television. Let me expound on this. Continue reading
Last night I went on a date with this hottie mcdottie.
THAT’S ME. Look at that Goodwill t-shirt and those Target brand knock-off Wayfarer shades. Who the hell wouldn’t want to date that?
Well, everyone, apparently. Or no one. Whatever. The point is that I don’t do dates with other people. Partly because no one wants a piece of this and partly because I don’t want a piece of them.
The point is that I don’t get love. Sure, I get familial love, and I love my dog, and I love my friends (although I’ve never been comfortable telling them – me and my sister are barely at the point where we can say, “love you,” on the phone). But I don’t see why romantic love is so necessary. Maybe it’s because I spent so long trying to learn how to get over depression and love myself. Maybe it’s because I’ve always been chunky and I never thought anyone would be interested in me. I’m mostly past that now – I like myself okay, and I’ve accepted the fact that there could be someone out there with eclectic taste who might go for me – but I still feel like it’s not as important as people make it out to be. Continue reading
Here’s the deal: I’m writing this at 12:30 AM today and wish I were sleeping. Dinner was General Tso’s chicken and crab Rangoon from China Express for the second time in forty-eight hours. (One dine-in with company, one delivery alone.) I’ve been sexxx-punching my brain with Lady Gaga, Kanye, and Robyn because it helps me stay focused on the several hours of InDesign and Photoshop work I’ve been gazing into yesterday/today.
Sometimes I get to be lazy on Sundays, and sometimes Sundays make me do all the work, and sometimes I am just mad at being reminded that Saturday and Monday are never as far removed from each other as I want.
February helps none of this. This month always feels time-crunched, desperate, eons away from spring. Some days I swear I’ve hallucinated every memory I’ve ever had of sunny weather because winter feels so undeniably endless. I’ve started to think of sidewalks as permafrost.
My room is increasingly cluttered with things friends have given me – handwritten words on note cards and scraps of lined paper, mix albums, old jewelry, dresses – pinpricks of warmth worth remembering when most days feel pushed to the edge of an icy cliff looming awful in my panicked head. Reminders of who’s closer than arm’s length.
Sometimes when I step outside the cold yanks me hard by wrist and tells me how much it’s going to enjoy wringing my neck. I wanna bite its hands, growl at it to fuck off; if I’m gonna suffocate it’ll be in my broom closet of a bedroom, lungs filling up with trinkets and music and ballpoint-inked words saying that everything I’ve ever wanted to believe about myself is true.
And that’s where I’m at this Valentine’s Day.
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Note: So two robots punched each other, one thing led to the next and we didn’t get the guest post up yesterday – you know, these things happen. It’ll be up this coming Sunday, cross our little hearts.
My best friend says that Oprah is my mother and Maya Angelou my grandmother. If that were true I probably wouldn’t be stressed out about future student loan payments (education is expensive as shit). Anyway, it seems that Maya Angelou has been following me my entire life. At nearly every turn and transition, she’s shown up and made herself into someone or something I needed. I didn’t always know it was her, but I was always left with something tangible to wear around my neck. Something to keep close to the thump-thump-thumping in my chest. She says that words have weight, and one day, we will be able to measure the weight of what we put into the world. She makes me want to be heavy with meaning and good.
When I was six, I moved back into my mother’s home after living with my grandmother in Missouri for over a year. I wasn’t happy about it. I loved living in the old farmhouse with my grandmother, and even at six years-old, I was well aware that my mother and I did not get along. One day she rented the movie “Poetic Justice” for a night in. I fell asleep early and didn’t get to watch it with the rest of the family. The next morning my aunt came to borrow it and I heard my mother say, “Not yet. Ashley didn’t get to watch it.” So, I woke up an watched it. I remember feeling surprised and pleased that my mother out my desires before someone else’s. There’s a moment in the film where the leading character recites the poem “Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou. I don’t remember understanding it. I do remember loving it, and deciding in that moment, that I loved poetry.
In middle school I was angry. My boobs were growing as fast as my ass, I was sometimes fighting other students, but mostly fighting teachers. The oldest of four children being raised by a single mother, I felt years ahead of my peers, and immaturely mistook adult responsibility for being an adult.
It would have been easier for me in school had I been more respectful. Being emotionally responsible for three other people, I had a hard time allowing for the condescending tones of most of my educators. For the record, I still think it’s bullshit for a student to be reprimanded for having read ahead in a book OR finishing before the rest of the class. Seriously, what twisted logic does that pretend to come from?
In the seventh grade, the principle and I came to the conclusion I would do much better in my classes if I were given time in the school day to do something I wanted to do. That something became an hour in the library during homeroom, first thing in the morning. I had the entire library at my disposal for 1 hour and 15 minutes every. single. day.
One of the first books I read during that time was “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings“. At that point it was the most beautiful prose I’d ever experienced. Experienced is the right word. To say I read the book is not inaccurate but it isn’t accurate enough. I lived in that book. I rubbed it under my arms, rolled in it, and slept with it under my nails. It wasn’t just a reading. By this time, I’d read and forgotten many stories. This story pulled out my hair and stuck in the back of my throat. I didn’t stop fighting teachers, but I did begin talking to them. That was a good start.
By the time I started high school, I was much more in control of my mouth. I still wasn’t one to stand for pejorative language being thrown in my eyes, but I was much more likely to choose my battles. One morning, after a doctor’s appointment, my mother dropped me off at school. I gathered my books from the floor of the car and headed toward the building. Putting the books in my locker, I found I’d accidentally taken one of my mother’s. It was “Heart of a Woman” by, who else, Maya Angelou. I had been finding and stealing my mother’s books for most of my life. I even got in trouble in third grade for reading my favorite Danielle Steel novel during silent reading time (Assholes). I hadn’t read anything of Maya Angelou’s since “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” but knowing how I felt about that, I thought it’d be a good idea to read this one. One of the lines in the book is,
“We are all human beings, therefore no human being is more capable of greatness than any other. If you’ve seen anyone be great, so can you. You are a human being. Nothing that is human can be alien to you.”
When I read that, I decided I could go to college. My hunger for learning was insatiable, and according to Ms. Angelou, I was worthy of an education. I could do it. I could make it work. Yes, even me.
This morning I woke easily and happily. I’d DVR’d an episode of “Oprah Presents: Master Class” with “guest lecturer” Maya Angelou. There was so much packed into that hour, I was gasping during the commercial breaks. I’d been holding my breath when she spoke. I sat on my futon, pad and pen in hand, writing feverishly, sloppily because I didn’t want to look down and away from her face. Maya Angelou smiles with her whole body. Tyra says smile with your eyes, but I’d rather smile like Maya. Shoulders squared and thrown back, eyes thin and tight, cheeks high, corners of mouth making a beeline for the tops of your ears. A smile that forces other’s to smile back.
For such a happy woman, I don’t smile as much I should. I’m blessed in a way some people will never be. I have the honor of knowing for sure that it is possible to overcome the conditions you were born into. Statistically speaking I should be dead/addicted to drugs/HIV positive/uneducated/impoverished (with children)/domestically abused. In this morning’s “Master Class” Maya said,
“Love liberates. It frees you and gives you room to grow. It will not bind you.”
What a revelation. Where I have bound myself with negative thoughts, doubts, and general feelings of unworthiness, I have been liberated by the love of family, friends, and educators who encourage me despite my inclination to engage in self-sabotage. How do you repay that? How do I say thank you for being feet, hands, and tongues? Thank you for falling on my neck and gathering me up? I’m still not sure.
Ms. Angelou you make me shed tears of joy and understanding. You are palpable inspiration in my thoughts and I am thick with your words.
“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful … Love begins with a metaphor. Which is to say, love begins at the point when a woman enters her first word into our poetic memory.”
(The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
So, my best friend loaned me this book called “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” I know it’s been around since the eighties or so, but I’m not sure of its fame and audience. But, I really want to dedicate a post to why certain people need to read this book.
Important point/disclaimer: I say “certain people” because a vast majority of fiction connoisseurs will not/can’t possibly enjoy this book. It has a tangled plot and leads the reader round and round and round ideas that might be too outlandish for some to grasp in the first place.
But, there are people (people like you Chickz) who can take this book and find the beauty in it.
With every ounce of my being (honest), I can say that this book taught me more than any other book I’ve ever read. It challenged me to think about the intricacies of love. For a long time, I held onto the archetype of love—the sentimental bullshit that most teen-aged girls and even grown ass women consider primordial and invincible. How can our hold to that nonsense still be so strong in today’s day and age?? My parents are divorced. Most of my friends’ parents are divorced. I know so many unhappy couples that it makes me gag a little. But worse than that, I see “happy” couples all the time and they are the saddest to me. You can’t pretend love.
“Unbearable Lightness” demonstrated a philosophy of relationships that feels real to me. A belief system I can cope with and even embrace. I won’t spill the details (because you truly must read it to know) but the relationship between the two main characters, Tomas and Tereza, is terrifying yet beautiful. It betrayed my hopes. But, I can’t be more pleased with the outcome.
(Also, “Skinny Love” by Bon Iver is such a good song.)
CHICKLITZ 