Sandy

Hurricane supplies:

one can of cheddar pringles
one expensive bottle of mocha Starbucks stuff
one bottle of water
one macintosh apple.

I have my window open and the air is cold and the sky is sort of gray.

I went in to CVS after work to buy stuff and most of the water was gone.

My manager emailed everyone on staff to say that the store would be closed tomorrow, and possibly Tuesday as well. He ended the email by writing, "miracles happen during hurricanes, so keep your eyes open."

I love that idea, but the fact of the matter is that I'll be sitting alone in my room for all of tonight and most of tomorrow, unless I venture outside.

I'm sick of being alone. IT SUCKS.

Other people were talking about how they were going to eat dinner at a friend's house and then be driven home after, and other people are going to play drinking games for the length of the storm. A friend of mine told me to "stay safe during the hurricane", and I know that she'll be home with her family, where there will probably be candles and board games and plenty of food.

Anyway, I'm done whining now. If the power doesn't go out here I'll be able to spend time reading, maybe writing, drawing, sewing, watching movies. That isn't so bad. Not bad at all!

I just wish I wasn't alone. I am alone because I feel alone, to paraphrase something Jonathan Safran Foer wrote. Is "paraphrase" the right expression?

I kind of hope the power does go out at some point.

Lots of sleeping.

Womp

Lying in my bed. It's 6:17. It's dark in my room, except for my skeleton lights. I'm wearing the dress I wore today, the dress I've worn for the past few days and slept in the past few nights.

A bit gross, huh? I'm not catatonic right now, I could change my clothes. I guess I'm just lazy.

Today has flown by. Time passes more quickly, now, somehow. It's not that it's better spent, it's just that I barely even have to check the clock through out the day, because the hours carry themselves along fine on their own. Time never drags anymore.

Although I can't say that time has ever really "dragged on" for me. I usually become absorbed in my own thoughts, and so maybe the rapid passing of time has been normal and will always be normal.

I'm waiting for a phone call from my mother.

I talked to my sister for nearly an hour earlier this afternoon. She sounded good. I started laughing about something and couldn't stop for a few minutes.

I think it's because I don't laugh that much now. That sounds awful, but it's sort of true!

It's not that I don't feel happy, it's just that I live alone, I am essentially friendless, not really but effectively, sort of, and I don't often find occasion to belly laugh.

When I'm home I laugh more. I laugh at work. I guess I just don't laugh so much because I'm alone so much, and laughing alone for large amounts of time might be characterized as insanity.

I finished a book of ghost stories today, and also ate a tuna, lettuce, cheese, and pickle sandwich. I painted a bad, but not very bad, oil painting. I felt frustrated at the bank and did not clean my room. I did not want to be submerged in large crowds.

I considered walking to a park this afternoon but then I talked to my sister on the beanbag chair in the corner of my room and didn't feel like walking to the park, even though the sky was gray and it was not raining and the air was cool.

Words

I'm absolutely, positively obsessed with the song Dark Turn of Mind by Gillian Welch. It's from her album The Harrow and the Harvest.

My school's library is very nice. They have a wide selection of cds and dvds. Students can rent three dvds and three cds for a week, each, and we can take out books for as long as we want to. I just rented The Village (gorgeous) and Paranormal Activity (insufficiently scary) and all of the Beatles cds they had. It's a glorious, glorious system. The inside of the library is painted a neutral color, but then it has splashes of red and purple, too. Sweet, sweet splashes.

Anyway, I'm listening to Dark Turn of Mind right now. I've spent the afternoon (after my figure drawing class) listening to Youtube videos of Jonathan Safran Foer giving talks. He is fascinating! Lovely! I haven't read any of his books yet, but I really want to now, after learning a bit about him.

I know that he is married to the writer Nicole Krauss, who I am a massive fan of. She wrote Great House and The History of Love. I would say that They History of Love is one of my favorite books ever.

My only tattoo references a part of that story, and I can quote lines of it from memory, such is the extent of my adoration:

"Part of me is made of glass."

"Nobody makes me happier and nobody makes me sadder than you."

The book reminds me of someone, too. My idea of someone. That's part of it. I love the closing lines, too, but I'll refrain from writing them all out, and potentially ruining the surprise for someone.

Anyway, I intended to write a post about an idea of Nietzsche's that Safran Foer alluded to in a New York Times article written about Foer.

Safran Foer says, "Am I haunted by the story? Of course. The most haunting detail for me is that we don't know the name of the baby that was killed -- my mother's half sister. Maybe it goes back to Nietzsche's idea that everything we have words for is dead in our hearts..."

It must be why we still name our pets, our children, inanimate objects, sometimes - because they exist and are special in themselves and are also part of our own stories. Names serve as identification, identification combined with affection and history and identity and choice. Of course that idea is a little ironic, because names our, after all, forced on us by our parents. We don't have much choice. Even then, they would probably arrive with a sense of good will. Then there are names which are forced on people for a different reason, like the people who arrived in Ellis Island and had their last names changed. Those names have a different weight, a different color, but even so, they are no less drenched in history and identity and story and hopefully some echo of affection, and a new sense of a new sort of...personhood. 

Foer was saying that he can't forget the woman and her child, especially, maybe, the child...can't lay her to rest, because he doesn't have words for her, and sometimes when we name things, it is both a sign of affection, and proof that that thing belongs and exists. And once we know that something exists, once we can point to it and name it, it may then be easier to let go of, because we know exactly what is being left behind.

For example, say you fell in love with a man (or woman) named Charlie. Charlie likes cooking spaghetti for you and rubbing your back when it aches. Then one day Charlie sleeps with your sister and becomes a drug addict and an alcoholic and punches a baby all in the same day. So you think to yourself, after much crying, and attention to the baby, that you've gotta let Charlie go. You could call him (or her) on the telephone and say good bye, Charlie. Good riddance.

On the other hand, say you're walking home from work alone and a man (or woman) comes up to you and taps you on the shoulder and you see immediately that they're beautiful, glorious - they have the face that you immediately want to kiss and cradle like an angora rabbit. What if they said, "I just saw you, and excuse me for bothering you, but may I just tell you that you look wonderful tonight, right now." And then they turned and walked away, down the street, and you blushed but you didn't run after them.

That person would be at least as hard to forget as Charlie, because the imaginary person could be thought of as everything you want and will never have. They are infinite possibility, and their lack of personality and identifiable name allows you to project your own fantasies onto them (maybe you've always wanted to date a fisherman named Redford, or something) and so thusly that imaginary person is perfect, because they're your imaginary person, and there's no reason for them not to be perfect. Anything can happen.

A similar experience happened to me with a woman wearing green tights not too long ago...

Anyway.

Nietzsche's idea of things being "dead in our hearts" hit home with me, for reasons that I can't exactly explain.

It reminded me of this passage from ts eliot's East Coker:

"In order to arrive there,
to arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way go ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not."

So...Eliot and Nietzsche both suggest that when one can articulate their feelings, and make sense of them, and see them for what they are, then the source of those feelings must be, at that point, dead. In a sense, it sounds like people realize who they are and what they have too late.

Does that idea apply to love? I guess that is what I'm really wondering now - the question almost always comes back to love, for me. If I can say that I love someone or something, surely that does not mean that my feelings are dead for them, and only remembered? But maybe it is so, because relationships and people change every day...

Maybe Safran Foer, Eliot, and Nietzsche would say that my statement above is too broad. Maybe it would be more truthful to say that once someone can define something exactly, and find little magic in it, then that thing is dead in their hearts.

But that too sounds wrong - because my sister and I watched a documentary narrated by Stephen Hawking in which he described some of the mysteries of space, like black holes. He also spoke a bit about the division between religion and science - Hawking essentially said, at one point, that there is just as much magic in science, in knowing, as there is in "magic" and stories and ignorance. He didn't say that in so many words, but essentially he believed that pure facts and explanations behind the workings of things make them more beautiful to witness, instead of less.

That coincides with part of Mariko Tamaki's graphic novel Skim (illustrated by Jillian Tamaki). At one point Skim says that Romeo and Juliet is an okay story, but she thought it would have been a better and more interesting story if the lovers had gotten over "their shit", and figured it out, and figured out a way to love each other.

And I agree with her! There's dark beauty in tragedy but also a deep sense of...wholeness one can feel when something just...works out.

So, in a relationship that is working, if I were to know everything about someone, then I would only love them more. They would not become dead to me. It does seem that that happens, though, in many marriages...the "spark" or whatever fades...what was once extraordinary can feel commonplace.

But no! If I am being optimistic...the more I know about something I am meant to love, the more I will love it. The better we will be. The closer to life we will be. The more we learn about space and the workings of the universe the closer we will be to real, honest magic, magic that we still cannot explain or take credit for, but can trust in its honesty.

I'm currently listening to ts eliot read The Four Quartets aloud. I've never heard him read them before. My favorite poem is East Coker, but I haven't read or listened to the other three very closely, yet.

Also, I met a dog named June yesterday.

It's 2:56 in the morning. I can't sleep. I haven't tried to sleep. I'm lying in bed listening to the faucet dripping. The green, orange, and purple skeleton lights I bought from Duane Reade are glowing from beneath my bed.

My bed is on stilts, sort of. I don't know exactly how to describe it. It's made of wood, with railings all along it. I have a thick white mattress that I spilled black ink on a few days ago. Beneath the bed is a wooden desk, where my typewriter sits, along with a hot pink lamp and bits of paper.

I almost always sleep with my window open, until it gets too cold, that is. It may be because when I was younger, I would open my three bedroom windows and sleep with the curtains blowing in the breeze and the soft sounds from the street.

There is traffic here, of course, but it sounds muffled now. Sometimes I hear sirens, but not too often.

I started, and finished, The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets by Kathleen Alcott today. It is an incredibly beautiful book.

I just finished Leaving The Atocha Station by Ben Lerner yesterday. It is beautiful, too, but I think a lot of his ideas may be a bit over my head. Maybe not. Maybe that's a cop out. I loved reading about the man weeping in front of the painting, potentially experiencing a "profound experience of art". I liked that Lerner included the banalities of life: meals, driving, walking around, meeting people, wondering what other people are thinking. I really liked his book, but maybe I just wasn't focused enough while reading it, or something.

Kathleen Alcott writes in a way that I would love to be able to write. Her writing just...is appealing in a way that made the book feel like it was written especially for me. One of those books. It had plot twists that were devastating but believable, and interesting subject matter...Anyway I loved it. A girl in my art class today commented on it and picked it up to read the inside flap, and the polite thing for me to do would be to offer to lend it to her. I didn't, though. I'd lend it to my mom or sister, if they wanted, because it would still be in the house...

The bones in my fingers just cracked violently when I coaxed them to. The background of my computer is a black-and-white photo of Ernest Hemingway wearing glasses and sitting in something that looks like a bathtub. I have no idea where the picture came from, or who took it, but it's been my setting for months.

It's 3:05 in the morning. Last night around 1 am I heard someone banging on a door in the hallway. They would knock multiple times, loudly, and then say, "GEORGE!" Knock, knock, knock, knock knock. "GEORGE!"

It went on for at least five minutes, and I laid in bed, half hoping that someone would tell the knocker to be quiet, half wanting to open my door and hiss, "hey, shut the fuck up!" Then George, whoever he was, opened the door, and the knocker said "you left your keys in the door!" George must have mumbled something and the knocker spoke in a loud voice. He almost sounded drunk. He said, "hey, wait, wait a minute!" and there were a few more moments of speech and then quiet again.

The light from the skeleton lights is orange on my wall and the smoke alarm is blinking its red light periodically and sleep still feels far away. I don't know what time daylight arrives here, but it can't be that far off. I once heard that 3 am is called the witching hour.

A little red house

First Post

I have two holes in the right leg of my blue jeans. They're new, I think. One  hole is right at the crotch, and I can see my teal underwear through it. The other is slightly further down my leg, at the thigh.

I went through a phase where I stopped wearing jeans. It was more comfortable to just wear a dress. But, I've started wearing blue jeans again. My watercolor teacher said that I need to stop wearing dresses to class, because "sitting side saddle" puts me at a weird angle to the paper when I paint, and to sit and paint cross legged will earn my a crooked back.

I wore jeans quite often when I was younger - in elementary school and middle school. They felt like camouflage. I had one pair of jeans that my mom bought me from Abercrombie. They were faded, very pale blue denim with intentional rips and shiny green rhinestones on the back pockets. They cost about $80, which I would never pay for jeans today. I wore them until I grew out of them, and then they were passed down to my little sister, so I guess we got our money's worth.

I never really feel sexy in jeans, though. I'm not one of those girls that looks...sexy in jeans. They're just comfortable. These days I'm usually either at class or at work or walking around, and so there is no one I feel that I need to impress. No one seems to care if I look good in jeans or not, and I don't think I want them to. It makes me feel crazy when there's some boy or whatever that I want to look good for, because more often than not they probably don't notice. It doesn't matter.

These jeans have ink stains, and pizza oil stains, and white gesso stains, and colored ink stains. They're a bit large for me at the waist but the legs are a perfect length. I forget where I bought them from - probably H&M. I'll keep them until they fall apart, but it is tempting to pack up most of my clothes and bring them to the Salvation Army.