moment of truth.

something dawned on me on the bus ride home from cambridge today, thinking about the official start of graduate school tomorrow.  as far back as i can remember, i have had the same experience with the start of a new school year: i have forever experienced a kind of desperate hopefulness in the ability to change my image and start off fresh, reinvent myself and ameliorate past blunders of identity and action.  i switched schools at the start of fourth grade, and i recall so clearly feeling absolutely freed of all of the horrible things that happened before, full of hope for a new chapter where i could finally be the person i wanted to be. third grade!  a sign of impending severe depression and self-esteem issues to be sure.  what could have been so terrible in third grade and its preceding school years to make me feel such an overpowering need to escape? by fifth grade, i couldn't wait long enough for the succession of years, so i started intermittent reinvention via hair dye. ...and by high school i had figured out the therapeutic shock value of piercings and dramatic hair styles along with the ever-shifting rainbow of colors. because lindsay with purple hair on wednesday bears no physical or moral resemblance to that stupid, orange-haired bitch of a lindsay from tuesday? college was by far the most triumphantly liberating opportunity for complete and utter reinvention.  and how did that go, you ask? spending the bulk of one's freshman year dating boys from high school and feeling sorry for oneself is hardly a shift for the better, if you can call it a shift at all.

a recurring theme in all of this is inevitable disappointment.  in my own mind, the me of yesterday was always careless, naive, stupid, childish, selfish and disgusting.  every squandered chance to wash away the grit of the past left me feeling ever more like a failure.  and so we go down the rabbit hole. (but don't give up on me yet!)

that brings me to today.  looking out the bus window, i started giving myself a little pep talk, but not a particularly familiar one.  this was not the self-hating downer of a voice telling me that this time i can really fool them all into thinking i'm someone worth knowing.  this was a voice reminding me to stay strong and to stay true to myself in what will surely be a strange and trying new experience.  tomorrow morning i will meet my graduate cohort, many of whom i can imagine were pioneers in arts education when i was still that confused seventh-grader staining my bathtub blue with dye in a futile attempt to hate everything less.  these are smart people, aggressive people, accomplished people, personable people. these are people i find intimidating and inspiring, and i am already so grateful to be among them.  but for the first time in my life, i don't want to fall victim to the temptation of trying, at the last minute, to reconstruct an image of myself that is somehow more appealing or likable.  i have flaws a-plenty.  sometimes i stutter, i misspeak, i blank out and can't find words.  mostly i am not the smartest person in the room.  mostly i am not the prettiest person in the room, or the nicest. but it's awesome that i actually don't mind being just lindsay for a while, just the lindsay i am.  i am a work in progress, i am still becoming, and i'm okay. 

a walk in my new neighborhood.

*Last photo is a paste-up done by artist Shepard Fairey, whose work is currently on display at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art.  As part of the show, Fairey put up a few works throughout the city.  My sister and I came across this one, on Brighton Avenue in Allston, yesterday morning.  You'll know Fairey from his now-iconic "Hope" poster of Barack Obama. 

*Also, these photos were taken with my phone, so the quality is perhaps not what it should be.

epilogue. on loss, empathy, and unfortunate parallels.

the pure sweetness and beauty of my curious, precocious feline neighbor was done in today by a motor vehicle.  yesterday evening she came in through the back door again while i was in the bedroom packing my clothes into a suitcase.  after snooping around the closet a bit, she hopped up on the bed and began kneading some dresses i had laid out.

i heard the knock on the front door of my apartment building this afternoon and i heard someone answer.  then came the few words and phrases that made my heart sink as they became distinct from the muffled conversation. "dead cat." "saw it there this morning." "wanted to check if it was yours." then the faint scream, and the sobs, because yes, indeed, it was little arwyn the cat lying dead underneath a parked car just at the end of the driveway.  i immediately went outside to find my poor neighbor--the kitten's equally lovely owner--folded into herself on the porch, crying.  she said she couldn't bring herself to look and see for sure if the cat was, in fact, hers. so i did it for her.  a few moments later i kneeled down on the sidewalk with her as she slid her innocent little babe from underneath the car.  the cat had been dead since early that morning.  i don't think i will be able to forget that image ever.  time is swift and transformative.  the stiff, misshapen thing she wrapped in a towel was unfamiliar.  

and so began insta-flashback time for me.  all over again, i was hearing the words "hank's dead,"over the phone, and learning that my 11-month-old kitten had, inexplicably, unfathomably, vomited, collapsed and died almost instantly while i was away visiting my parents. it is shocking, and horrifying, and crippling when someone who plays such an integral and intimate role in your daily life changes fundamentally from being alive to being dead. from being there to being gone.  parallel in our dead-cat tragedies is the presence of the abandoned sibling, the stark suddenness of the de-twinning. my heart broke for my delilah left without a brother, and it breaks for arwyn's sister, sophie.  this splitting of a matched pair is perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of it all.  i wonder how animals comprehend that contrast between the "thereness" and "goneness" of a close companion.  does their quality of life shift the way it does for us?  

i realize that in the full spectrum of universal occurrences, all tragedies are not created equal. today's events reminded me of movies i've seen where shocked and grief-stricken parents are carted off to the morgue to identify the body of the son or daughter they just saw at breakfast that morning.  how does one reconcile a living creature with a lump of a flesh? how do you bring yourself to deal with the post-mortem protocol when the deceased belongs to you, owns part of your heart?  

while some might consider the comparison of feline and human life insulting, i think it's unfair to rate some intimacy and affection as less significant than any other.  love is love, and loss is uniformly incomprehensible.  i recall the intermittent, gut-wrenching sensations of guilt i experienced during my several days of serious mourning for hank. guilt, because even the death of my grandfather years before hadn't evoked the same intensity of emotion.  it was then i realized that the value of relationships--and the experience of loss therein--is rarely determined by external qualifiers. 

a former coworker once reacted in surprise and disbelief when i described myself as empathetic.  probably because i was a super bitter, overworked and underpaid employee. but empathy isn't necessarily synonymous with niceness.  yes, i may misspeak, i may make inappropriate and hurtful jokes because i want so badly to make people laugh that i err in judgment, i may be crass or vulgar or not pick up on social cues, or be offensive or cold or bitchy or awkward.  but i am empathetic to a fault.  when i cried at the aforementioned grandfather's funeral, it was primarily an emotional reaction to the emotions of the people around me.  seeing my aunt, my widowed step-grandmother, my own father, cry and lose their breath and stumble over their words at the loss of the family's patriarch, is what triggered my own outpouring of sadness. 

my empathy has often gotten the better of me, and i have become completely overcome with surrogate emotions. thanks to therapy and pharmaceuticals i have learned to reel it in when it gets overwhelming--when i start expressing the anguish i feel for the sufferers of atrocities i've only watched pbs documentaries about and i'm being just generally insane and ridiculous.  i hold it close to my heart, too, though, because it reminds me that i am a good and decent--if horribly flawed--individual.  i have acted cruelly and without consideration of others' feelings.

in school i was the bully as much as i was bullied, i taunted and gossiped and glared.  but empathy does not stop at sadness.  i have felt the full spectrum of emotions of others as fully as if they were my own.  as i move forward in my life i am trying my darndest to be a caring and warm person, despite my natural tendencies toward introspection and judgment. 

it is the empathy, i realize, that is sending me to boston away from my life as i know it to pursue education, to try to create a career that i actually care about and like doing while actually improving the lives of others as much as possible.  i do not want to just be a taker in this world. strange that the personality trait that is driving my career and education forward is the same damned one that is making me burst into tears, over and over again, for arwyn the cat.  i'm not quite sure how to express it in a socially appropriate way to her owner.  these are the things i get less-correct.  do i write a thoughtful card even though i knew her cat better than i know her? do i just ignore it and slip quietly away at the end of the week? 

i feel this evening, for the gorgeous and sprightly little cat that brightened so many of my dreadfully boring days of unemployment simply by rolling over onto her back and purring at me while i was taking the recycling out or getting groceries out of my car.  it's just plain sad to see a sweet, tender spirit extinguished by something as stupid as a passing car. she'll be missed.

delilah, c. 2006. just for good measure. 

when curious neighbors come calling.

i often feel nostalgic for a time when neighbors might leave their screen doors open to the possibility of mid-day visitors.

today, my mundane chores were interrupted by the pleasantly nosy creatures who live in the apartment above. they left no corner un-nuzzled.

come again, kitten friends.

things i will miss

Meet SpacePlant. SpacePlant was a gift from Lenny, commemorating my graduation from UC Berkeley in May 2007. We had only been dating for a month or so at that point, so it was an appropriately nonspecific gift. Partly because I like Lenny and want to honor his present, and partly because succulents are relatively difficult to kill with neglect, SpacePlant is still with us today, sunning happily in a colorful pot atop the radiator shelf in our office. 

I realized recently that it really won't be practical to take my several plants with me when I move. There are many, many things I will soon be leaving behind: animal, vegetable and mineral. It is frustrating to have to start over in so many ways, abandoning objects and tools I've acquired in my 4 or so years of independent living, but the idea of leaving SpacePlant and his family of succulent friends just made me plumb sad.  

In a small way, SpacePlant is a symbol of the happiest stretch of time in my life: finishing my undergraduate thesis and graduating from college, putting a lid on some of my crazy, meeting and falling in love with Lenny, and starting a new life with him living in sin.  Now, I'm beginning school again, moving back on my own and leaving Lenny behind in California.  In many ways, two steps forward feels a lot like two steps back.  Change is a funny thing. 

This is my 54th Love Poem of the Second.

Today I am going through my things, attempting to organize my life into sidewalk "Free" piles and boxes for storage in preparation for my journey eastward. This process takes forever because every unlabeled box or expanding file turns into an exhumation of former friends, feelings, and, most recently, high school English homework. It takes a keen eye to separate the Crap from the Stuff Worth Saving. I don't write poetry anymore, probably because the years of antidepressants have effectively dissolved my Overly Angsty Bone. But I do enjoy finding and reading my old poems, which were the essence of survival in the hell of high school and teenagerdom. Sometimes they are good for a laugh and a self-shaming, and sometimes I kind of surprise myself with how awesome I once was and how true some of it still rings. Of course, it is not all 100% awesome, nor do I harbor any illusions of literary grandeur. I am attempting to use this blog as a testament to my creative endeavors, so why not invite the past to do some mingling with the present? I consider this a tiny reminiscence, a glimpselet, if you will, into the annals of my formerly creative mind.

I give to you, oh mysterious Narcissus lake that is the Internet, the first in what I think I shall make a regular installment. Behold, below, three specimens of poetic genius (!) representing the personal, the political, and the, well, personal again. (Tip: I think the last one is genuinely the best. I remember the feelings that inspired it so well! [See, this is what happens when I smoke a J in the middle of the day and start feeling sentimental.])

"My 54th Love Poem of the Second."

I am the girl whose spine is made of blue lines
who has red margin eyes and
compares things to spines and eyes most of the time.
I am prone to redundancies and I am not unique
like I thought I was when I was naive.
I am still naive and I cannot be
the bigger person.

I let piles heap up around my feet;
sleep in filth and then complain
that I feel dirty.

My boyfriend is a virgin.
I am not--
and he reminds me of that every time
we speak.

I am the girl who knows that secrets are
small black cavities
that we should always keep in teeth.
I cannot decide if solitude
means the same thing as being lonely.

I used to think I had wings hiding beneath
the bones of my back but now I know
I am nothing that can fly.

Sometimes I think:
"I am nothing."
I am seventeen.
I was born in 1985 and
this is my 54th love poem of the second.

II.

I've got salt crusted onto these white cheeks;
My face, like an illuminated moon,
has been the subject of biology:
I am a melanin study.

They used to ask me,
"Girl, what you mixed with?"
Thick blood and anxiety.
They didn't know my ancestors were evil white men
of the sea,
bearing silver swords
beating hearts
and injustice for centuries.
I am a walking peace treaty.
Just look at me.

I am the seed and the greed of every
European country.
I hear engines racing down California pavement.
On long rides home I wonder
how soon I'd die if I
just sat in the street
and waited.

I've got too many emotions, too many words
but everyone
can say it better.
I stutter. My tongue slips and I remember
third-grade fights with my sister when she
made fun of my lisp.

She was fat then but now I am too.
My thighs are blue
Instead of pink
Stretch marks have torn the flesh and exposed
veins where my slow blood is flowing.

III.

I am the girl who sits in the steam
of the bathtub three times a day.
Something is right for me
Privacy.
It is like an ocean,
but not cold or salty.
I feel my paint chipping.
I can't get up early enough in the morning.

I grew up under the firm lock of
daddy's ideology but now every time I hear
the President talk of God I think
it's bullshit. But I am too afraid to say so
Respect has been branded
in some invisible place, but I can't respect
my nation.

My nation has taught me about abortion
molestation
pornography
and murder.

But that's all okay
I've got skin like lead
I am the girl who waits for a phone call
and ends up dialing instead.

Waiting is endless and I
am a restless girl.
I want pearl earrings and I want to feel pretty;
I am obsessed with vanity.
But I have not discovered her mystery.

I do not understand beauty. It evades me.
I am sick of apathy and of empathy.
I cough deep from lungs under the shower every morning
and something always comes
up.

I wonder what happens when I'm sleeping.
I have dreams where I'm doing drugs and
dying.
I have dreams I can't remember even while
I'm having them.

Jesus is trying to tell me something and I don't even believe in him.


----------
I find this poem equal parts incredible and hilarious. Firstly, I clearly recall writing this during my completely lame, bullshit senior economics class taught by my completely lame, bullshit economics teacher. I think it's funny not only because it's so righteous and so glaringly wanting to be a bad-ass slam poem, but because it totally disproves my family's theory that Berkeley turned me into a liberal. I clearly had some political issues on my pre-college brain, and I don't think they were even vaguely republican. Oh, well.


Where would I be without these
big tall trees conveniently repackaged
and refined into fast food bags soaked with grease,
sick and see-through?

They remind me of my skin with paper veins just below
all that blood surging
so quick
and my economics teacher said once
to a sea of dead eyes, "kids, it should be no surprise,
we live in a fat, fast food society."

A society of subways, instant gratification
cigarettes smoked through the perfect V of gray fingers
painted neat and high heels
1950s Barbie doll physiques,
and street sweepers
homelessness and
homosexuality
anti-depressants and anxious red tongues
gun metal, free speech, blow jobs
white teeth, STDs and
amphetamines
hate crimes, barred windows, fossil fuels
television screens
and sodomy
landfills
and prostitution.
"There is pollution, too,"
she said,
"The sky is sagging and soon, it will
touch the ground,
as fat and heavy as stomachs bearing the weight of
all that fast food."

But where would I be without
the glow of the TV, blue
against the white chipping walls
of my bedroom?

Where would I be without a solution
where can we go with these
potholes in roads and the false notion that
everything is status quo?

It's time to gather up our silicone
our razor wire
our marijuana
our midriffs
our landfills and lipstick
our synthetics
our free speech hiding in sugar rotting cavities
our piercings
our acne
our industry and obesity
in plastic bags and let the ocean swallow the blemish
whole.
so the glow of our society's cleanliness with show
from the great canopy of the big gray sky as it
again begins
to rise.
And we'll be in a society of
alive
and
righteous
instead of a society of drive-thrus
and quick pay, no pain.

But I said, from that
shimmering sea of expressionless stares,
"Your society is more blinding an obstruction than the golden arches,
Your society is a lie,
and I won't
buy it."

And since I'm fond of metaphors, I let her continue.
She said,
"You live in the society of filthy green and
white bread and don't say you've never shed a dollar
into the economy which is raping you silently
and secretly
right beneath your suburban streets."

I don't understand the
economy.
But she told me, "You live in a society where
governmental trust is vague
because the President's face is masked behind the waste of
the cement space every fast food restaurant takes
and this red-and-yellow place is what constitutes
our race.

So when you have
that greasy fast-food bag in between your
white, see-through hands
think about the fact that
it is America in your arteries sending you to
an early death.
All those purple mountains majesty and
amber waves of grain causing
cardiac arrest.
But I just shifted uncomfortably in my plastic desk
and said,
"Where would I be without these biased,
masked, and metaphorical economics lessons?"

--------

Break-up poetry.
At all those poetry readings when we were seventeen,
We composed a secret language to
speak in silence whenever the room was filled with
scars on wrists and souls
"Pain in the rain" and all the rest
of the rhyming redundancies that kept our
eyes rolling.

I would think of speeding down the freeway,
eyes pressed
to the roof of your car, with retinas dilating tiny
stars would begin to spin
in sight and as those broken yellow lines became
one blurred stripe
I'd say,
baby, we are so inspired.

And all this freeway time I've spent
from your house to mine
has given me a million beautiful words
just waiting to slip into verse
and your poetry makes me feel like I'm
spinning out of control
Makes me feel like I'm losing my skin

Then we'd make love with our perfect red lips,
and turn that break-up poetry into comedy
On nights like those, every failed attempt at suicide
became a punch line.

Those were the nights
you'd get up on stage
the object of waiting faces and you'd put that
break-up poetry to shame
because you took each letter of my name and made
it synonymous with
red hearts
rainbows and
bee wings
and you put it so goddamned uniquely that everyone
would turn around just to look at me
gauging my beauty
seeing if I was worthy of words
that didn't quite belong between land and sky
words that split the universe open wide
when you opened your mouth
and my face was inside.
And you recounted every time how
complete I made your life and how
good I made your bed feel when it was quiet,
and there were no lights.
Jaws would drop everywhere,
no eyes rolled
and there were no secret languages of boredom and
annoyance to decode.
Every girl sat on her palms
and let her binder of break-up poetry fall
against her ankles
and from every angle I'd hear
the release of sighs at my perfect boy
pronouncing his syllables of
infatuated joy
with perfect clarity

I'd think,
that's right, bitches,
he's in love with me
and tonight, when the stage shifts to abstract memory
we are going to speed down
dark streets,
evading police, listening to loud pop music
with all the windows rolled down.

He shares that fresh night air with these
hands and eyes and feet
these two eyes and heart that on those nights would beat
so hard I thought it would it explode
right there in my chest,
and cliches were okay back then
because we were poets.

Those nights continued when we'd exchange glances
as teary eyed strangers
confessed the deeply personal emotions
we'd heard quiet throats regurgitate
a million times before.
This break-up poetry
always spilling, slippery, white sheets
spotted with ink.

The unrequited loneliness,
the emptiness just wasn't good enough for you and me,
and when we'd leave we'd
walk holding hands and go to examine
the shadows of the trees and each others' faces
and I remember one time
when you said
"These poetry readings are killing me,"
And then I think you wrote that
in a poem
So now my poetry is quoting your poetry
which seems somehow fitting.

I found that after the majority of those
poetry readings
I was speeding alone down freeways
as black as the sky, the stars were blinding
when tears blurred the dividing lines and tires
swerved to both sides
the miles accumulated over
months of holding hands, sideways glances and
pushing the spedometer to feel romantic.

So now, break-up poetry equals
Saturday mornings when voices
pour through telephones to say
"This just isn't working,"
"This just isn't working for me."
"Your knees under blankets,
those eyes in close proximity,
they have stopped inspiring me."
"There will be no more odes to your
breathtaking beauty."
"40 minutes of gasoline is just too much
for me."

And when heavy tears stained my bedsheets
I thought how
trite break-up poetry might start
inspiring sympathy in me
because all those "honey"s and "baby"s and "lovely"s
have toned my ears to sounds so sweet
and your tongue on
your teeth have made me sting
daily in that place between my ribs
I just got so used to it.

So now, break-up poetry is blooming
up from my gut
so at the next poetry reading
I'll get up on my feet and spew about wrist bleeding
and the expanding void inside of me
the worthlessness of a girl so un-pretty;
how you were the only boy who could ever love me
And how love meant sharing things like
summer sunlight and
new CDs and cones of ice cream and
reality TV and rented movies--
nights after poetry readings that were so freezing
we'd share our skin while we
slid our lids over tired irises and joked about the
pseudo-talented poets,
their sad tales of masochism.
Our laughter would ring up loudly from our stomachs.

starting over again, again.

Let us commemorate this atypically productive day by breaking the self-defeatist, over-analytical and just-plain-lazy silence that has plagued this stillbirth of a weblog.  I can do it!  Since the January layoff that was such a textbook Blessing and Curse, my days have become hazy, amorphous, forgettable chunks of hours linked together by absurd lengths of sleep.  My notion of productivity exists on a sliding scale, and I'd say my current standards are relatively low.  I feel best when I can create a super-smooth cocktail of activities, blending the completion of mind-numbing chores and errands that require showering and putting on a bra, and dedicating some time to those pursuits that I feel enrich my brain/soul or otherwise work toward one of my many long-held, ridiculously lofty goals (my image of myself at my zenith.) Today I mixed that sucker particularly well, and I'm feeling rather proud of myself. 

Feeling good mmm hmmm:

Took my computer to a cafe 

Worked on graduate school loan application at said cafe

Located missing unemployment claim form, found last remaining stamp, mailed that sucker

Combined letter-depositing walk with visit to newly opened neighborhood vintage boutique

Downloaded the new Camera Obscura and Grizzly Bear albums on iTunes

Purchased airline tickets for myself and my sister, one way from Oakland to Boston (one way!)

Reserved rental car online for first two days in Boston (this is a first!)

Presently baking blueberry clafoutis, a custardy French dessert dish was unknown to me until roughly an hour ago

Did a little wikipedia-ing and learned a little about the origin of clafoutis. If it's made with something other than cherries, it's actually called flognarde.  And it's from the 19th century! 

Some other ongoing pleasures include: 

Looking up a recipe for wheat-germ breaded fish and executing it for tonight's dinner sensation *the above really didn't work out very well.  Once Lenny finishes watching the latest episode of Charm School on VH1, he's going to Wendy's to get a spicy chicken sandwich.  Yeah, the fish was that good.  Strangely over- and undercooked at the same time.

Watching Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel

Reading Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's "Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History" (which deals at length with Ms. Woolf's treatise to which the title of this space refers)

Knitting the "Smock-a-Rouche" scarf from the One Skein Wonders book in the very nice and soft City Tweed in Cajun (The knitting project is such a relief to my psyche.  I was really starting to believe myself incapable of every finishing anything I start, and my lack of patience and ability in the textile and fiber arts was really making me blue)

I still haven't grooved in my hoop for a week or so now, nor have I continued with my attempt at painting a somewhat fantastical portrait of Hilary F. in oils.  I was tentatively scheduled to show some new paintings (to be fair, any paintings by my hand would be "new" by default, seeing as how there must be some statute of limitations on artistic blocks.)  That, I must tell myself, is not going to happen.  Stalled due to an initial overestimation of my own talents and work ethic, much like my plans to launch an Etsy shop of my beaded jewelry.  These things are still on the Grand To Do List, though. 

Okay, first time, let's not overdo it.