2010 note: you know, you'd think this would be one of the OMGCRINGE posts for me? but oddly it's not. maybe it's cuz the stuff i'm talking about is so long ago/far away that it matters less now!
--
broke up with bri. somehow this train of thought leads into the categorizing of my formative experiences with chicks. how they affected me, how they affect me. blah. then again, it's probably cuz i was having this convo with a friend of mine. two, actually.
***
earliest experiences i had with chicks as objects of worship was the incident with the porn mag. i was, what... 10-11? and i found a little porn mag in my parents' room. STRICTLY softcore, very tame, but back then it was SHOCKING. i mean, i'd had sex ed and all, but sex ed basically teaches you "the guy sticks the penis in the girl and THEN THE GIRL GETS PREGNANT THE GUY GETS AIDS AND THEY ALL DIE. the end."
not very informative.
so it wasn't until i found the porn mag that it even BEGAN dawning on me that sex was something you want to do. i couldn't even begin to describe the experience now -- the way it started unfolding to me, in pieces and parts. not all at once. it wasn't like i woke up one day and knew all about sex. i couldn't even tell you when the pieces all fell together. but that was definitely a start: staring at pics of mostly naked chicks looking all wanton in the arms of more or less faceless men, and wondering why the hell i was fascinated.
the articles helped, too. smut, to be exact. i think that's where it first occurred to me that sex was supposed to be pleasurable.
the weird thing is, when i first flipped the mag open, i literally had NO idea what i was looking at. the pics were too non-explicit. just posing. you couldn't see dick-in-pussy or anything like that. it just looked like ... weird hugs. nakedly. and yet immediately, without a doubt, i was certain this wasn't art. i just knew, instinctively, that this was taboo. it's weird how kids have an instinct for that.
***
then came the girls on the wavy channels, when i was maybe 11 or 12. you know that infamous hentai flick, La Blue Girl? well i know exactly why it's called Blue Girl. or at least, why it should be.
see, on the wavy channels -- aka playboy and spice, scrambled -- you get perfect sound. but the picture is distorted. most of the time, it's "wavy". you can't see anything, except for the insinuation of motion and the lurid color of flesh. it was infuriating, and so maddeningly compelling. i think i was turned on by the noises. i couldn't for the life of me figure out why, though. and i do remember being frustrated that the turn-on only went so far. i hadn't figured masturbation out yet.
but once in a while, the wavy channels would suddenly clear up. the picture would still be fucked up. but instead of waviness, you'd just get everything in a negative color. eyes would be gleaming white dots floating in black. mouths were black teeth in a void of white. and skin?
heh.
skin was blue.
and oh god, let me tell you. those blue girls of my early youth? goddesses beyond compare. part of the allure was the sense of taboo, and the scandal of it. the other part must've been their rarity. i remember coming home from school and leaving the TV on for HOURS between 3pm and when my parents got home, usually around 6-7pm. i'd sit there "doing homework", very distracted, while hoping for a glimpse. and when the picture resolved, it'd be like a glance into this whole other WORLD, especially with the eerie coloration. and i'd sit there rapt, hoping it'd last, literally treasuring every second -- until it flickered back to wavy.
they say you never forget your first woman. actually, mine proved rather forgettable. but really, the blue chicks? they were my first, in a way, because in all and absolute honesty, nothing could ever compared, then or since. nymphs of the wavy channels! so rare! just seen in glimpses, and heard, doing all manner of shit i'd never even imagined (and holy shit, had i just seen her put his dick in her mouth?). talk about your forbidden fruits of knowledge. when finally i got free and unlimited access to porn in college, it was too free -- too cheap. i could see it whenever i wanted. and missed that bit? go back, watch again. just flesh for sale, bare and full of imperfections, luridly pink and tan.
ugh.
***
first true sexual experience outside of wet dreams: the first time i jerked off, circa age 12 or so. if it even counted. i didn't know what the hell to do, so i think i was just grabbing and squeezing -- experimenting. well, it worked. but for the longest time i resorted only to grabbing and squeezing to incite a response. it's amazing i didn't cause permanent damage. then for an even longer time i was convinced that the moment of orgasm was just the start of what sex was supposed to feel like. i mean, it had to be, right? why else would porn stars moan like that, when i'd managed to stay quiet? it wasn't until i was 13 or so that i'd heard of orgasm (i'd heard of ejaculation, but come on -- the way sex ed taught it made it sound like it was just automatic response to insertion, and it wasn't like i could see well enough on the wavy channels to know differently. i guess i thought sexual pleasure came AFTER ejaculation).
***
first gf i ever had was when i was like. 13? 14? seventh grade, i think. end of seventh grade. i was still a kid! it hardly even counted. it was a slightly fucked up relationship. met her at my very first party, where i got smashed for the very first time, and she was like... a high school junior, like 17 years old. so i was so flattered by it all that i sorta fell for her, only i never even fell for her. i was just flattered. there was no feelings there, and i barely even knew her.
and it was pretty messed up. she was ... eh. weird. i couldn't say exactly why. it was just a creepy feeling i got. slightly pedophilic, probably. heh. i remember the first week i was so flattered i didn't care. then we went to a movie together, along with two of my friends, and i think, in retrospect, she was trying to give me a handjob or something? but her hand was squeezing somewhere in the vicinity of my thigh, so it was doing nothing for me. i had no idea wtf she was doing at the time, so i was like wtf are you doing?
it mighta been that, that tipped me off. or hell, maybe she was just shy and untutored? who knows. anyway, after that things went downhill.
the over-16 high schoolers with cars could go off-campus for lunch, so she visited me in my junior high. first week that was great. second week, post-movie-experience, i started avoiding her. so during lunch i kept dragging my best friend into various classrooms to hide from the creepy older chick who i was, quote-unquote, dating. then the week after that, one of my friends ratted me out, and then she found me. and so i told her to please stop coming around because she should hang out with her own friends in high school.
and that was that. i came out of hiding, and i figured it was over, amicably. until, of course, the NEXT day, she showed up again. and i LOST it. "in true damon style" was how i put it the first time, and in true damon style was, indeed, how it was.
you gotta remember that at the time, i was still a kid. i still was only vaguely aware that people other than me also had hopes and fears, feelings and hurts. so, when i got mad, i let loose. and in front of all my friends, i started yelling at her to get out of my sight and never come around again because i never wanted to see her again.
the sort of shocked, frozen smile on her face (she'd shown up with a smile) was the thing i remember best about her. the actual break-up i in fact forgot all about until my best friend reminded me years and years later. i felt quite bad then. but that i have no memory of it myself, or didn't until reminded, probably says something about how much that whole affair meant to me.
***
so.
before joanna, in early 7th grade, i had SUCH a crush on Amber, the bad girl. we were in the same PE class and she was SUCH a rebel. i had such a crush on her, drawn to her badness. she was dirty blonde, and already kinda heroin-chic from smoking pot and dropping acid all the time. she had a boyfriend (actually, several during the course of the few months i knew her), apparently fucked all the time too, and knew everything there was to know. or, you know, at least pretended to. she kept lecturing us on techniques and special moves and how they blew her bf's mind, or bfs' minds, and i was SO in awe. i kept hoping she'd demonstrated her reportedly mindblowing bj techniques on me, but alas, no, it was one of those later on anonymous jr high flings that got me started on that.
anyway, Amber flunked all her classes because she flouted the authority of her teachers and simply refused to work. and in PE she walked all the miles and shit. so prior to that, i was always great at PE. and after that, i was always great. but that one year, i was like, flunking PE with her because i'd walk all the miles with her (along with this other guy and this other chick, all of whom were wowed by her bad-girl-ness) and talk shit about everything. i think that year was the year i learned to cuss like a sailor.
then she got expelled. she got sent to like the special school for rebel children, and that was that. i'm sure some part of me still looks for her, though. rebel bad girls. see, the burgundy haired girl rant, somewhere in this jumbled journal.
***
first true non-solo sexual experience: after joanna, first psycho gf, came a normalish stormy-jr-high-affair. hanging out, doing homework, walking home, screaming matches. i don't think we even made it to heavy petting. the gf AFTER that, or maybe the one after that?, we indulged in experimentation. she'd had an older bf before, so she knew a few tricks that hadn't made their way into my knowledge store yet.
right around then my dad had a little red celica, a sexy little manual sports car, and we'd go sit in it (parked in the garage!) all the time so we could turn the lights on and off, flick on turn signals, stomp the brake and pretend to drive. god, we were just kids.
but of course, soon enough we figured out cars were good for other things. so one thing led to another, and then one day she blew me in the front seat. i lasted about 30 seconds, and didn't reciprocate. didn't know how! but heh, it certainly made that car unforgettable.
***
after joanna, and after the normal shortlived jr high relationships, came the jr high prom. and man, this 7th grader asked me to go, but for some bizarre reason i said no (probably thought it wasn't cool to go w/ a 7th grader) and the irony is, i really liked her. i mean, i really really liked her. i thought she was really cool. it was just... at the moment i had a brain fart, said no, and then it was too late to renege. gah! such regret.
anyway so i ended up going with this 8th grader chick who was kinda a friend of a friend. and to put things into perspective, at this point i had had a few kisses, some pawing experience, but strictly above the belt on a girl. it was just a month or two after my very first bj experience, and still like... almost 2 years before i actually lost my virginity. so i had like. VERY LITTLE IDEA of female anatomy and physiology.
despite all that, kids were pretty, er, daring. so heh. at the prom, EVERYONE was grinding up on everyone else. and during this one dance my date was grinding against my thigh, wearing this short, pretty silverish dress, and i felt a certain moistness on my leg, through my slacks? and i swear, i had no idea wtf i was feeling. my first thought was, the fuck, did she piss on me? i think i didn't figure it out until i was thinking back in like. college.
man, this is turning into a litany of sex!
***
one more purely sexual landmark and then we can pass into the realm of The Ones That Got Away, i think.
anyway: first hands-down unequivocable sexual experience: the week after i turned 16, i drove my car to my very first REAL party. even the one where i met joanna didn't really count. my parents dropped me off, and my parents picked me up -- same with everyone else. we had to hide the beer in the morning. this one? the parents were off for the weekend, there were college kids there -- it was Sodom and Gomorrah.
so i met a chick there, who was a bit older. actually i never knew her well enough to know just how old, but my guess is 17-18. a few drinks went down, we went somewhere private (my memory has it as outside against a tree -- sounds exciting, but wasn't really -- but then my memory could be alcohol-fogged, and i also remember a case in one of the bedrooms. might've been two different parties, who knows) and got it on. it wasn't my first time with a chick, if you count bj's and hj's, but it was my first time. i think most first experiences involves 10 second timespans, but mine was kinda opposite. i was so nervous (and so drunk) that i had trouble getting going. heh. but, eventually things worked out, and that was the absolute end of my innocence.
afterwards we saw each other for about a week, but we never really hit it off while sober. so soon enough that evaporated.
***
roundabout the same time -- early high school -- i developed two major crushes. one was on my french teacher, who was about 26, and was tall and sleek and, well, FRENCH. god, i had such a crush. and it wasn't fair! she was so young and hot! and word had it her hubby was like 57 years old or something.
so, our high school was too big for the cafeteria, so we ate all over the school. me and my friends sat in this circle of benches set into a hill (the hill sloped up behind the bench, but was chopped away and bulwarked with posts, against which the benches were nailed -- if that makes sense?) around a big oak tree. it was a pretty unusual place because, as high school goes, cliques associate by geography, but "the circle", as we called it, was right smack in the center of several major avenues in the school. so my friends were really a minicross-section of the school. mainly, this was because my best friend was such a social animal, and made friends with everyone.
anyway, point is, the circle was also just outside the teacher's lounge. so every day without fail (except the days i wasn't there b/c of extracurricular crap or whatever), when the 10 minute bell rang, i'd be sitting there in my corner of the bench, up on the posts, waiting for la mademoiselle Clevenger to walk out.
i had french for 3 years, so sophomore year, i was still bright eyed and bushy tailed, scrawny, and it'd be a peppy "Hi Mademoiselle!"
then by senior year i was cool, man. i'd grown up by then, had my growth spurt and all, and varsity beach volleyball had packed some muscles on. and i was always kind of a ringleader among my friends, so i was way too cool to be peppy. but not too cool not to say hi. so she'd come around, and i'd have it down: this cool-as-arctic-ice nod up of my chin, and this slurred "suuup, ma'amselle."
i wonder wtf she made of all that. heh.
(and yes, those of you who've heard me tell the story before: i KNOW i always say that!)
***
after i hit my growth spurt in sophomore year and got on the varsity team my junior year, gfs came a little easier. ironically, though, the one girl i remember best out of high school -- well, okay, one of two -- was never my gf. never even close. but i was completely in love with her.
in my sophomore year, there was a girl in my 6th period class named evangeline. this is probably why i've always liked the name, and will usually give a girl named evangeline at least a second look on account of name alone. i used to think it was such a perfect name for her -- evangeline, angel. unusual, too, not too flashy -- not one of those pop names so popular at the time.
anyway, she had some sort of health issue. neurological. she wasn't nuts, but she did have terrible headaches that caused her to miss school all the time. when she was there, she was quiet, frail, and maybe because of her difficult situation, always seemed far and above everyone else around her. dignified; so mature. i felt like there was a wisdom to her, and maybe there was. she sat across the room from me and i spent most of my 6th period trying to catch a glimpse without looking like i was gawking. i'd invent excuses to look her way: maybe i was staring at the bulletin board behind her! or looking out the window!
i don't think i ever even spoke more than two words to her. she was a senior, so she was way out of my reach even if she'd been at school more. add her health problems to that, and she was just completely unattainable. i think i remember her best from this one sunny spring afternoon. the classrooms were arranged in rows lengthwise, so that there were no windows on the shorter walls, but windows on both the longer walls. on one wall they were big windows; on the other, little windows up high. the way the classroom was set up for this class, half the chairs were in rows 4 deep against one of the longer sides, and half against the other. there were also short rows against one of the shorter sides and the other short side was the "front" of the class. our teacher usually lectured while walking around the middle open area, though, and he was an awesome lecturer. it was a literature class.
digressing.
point is, she sat on the side of the class with the big windows, which faced the west. so in the afternoon the sun would shine in. the way i remember her was from this gorgeous spring afternoon -- one of those days where the sky is shatteringly blue between these big puffy white clouds, because it had just rained. and she was sitting there in this off-white sweater, one of those with long strands of thread coming off so it looked kinda furry. she was blonde, not yellow californian blonde, but this gorgeous, layered blonde that ran the gamut from pale to honey. her hair wasn't totally straight; it had a soft natural curve to it, waves, and she wore it slightly in-curved at the tips. her skin was porcelain-pale, totally flawless, taut over her cheekbones and fine jaw, though this probably had a lot to do with the fact that she often didn't feel well. and -- god, can you imagine it? the sun hitting her from behind, through the window, just lighting her up like that, incandescent? it was unforgettable. she was luminous. she glowed. i gawked.
oddly, i don't have any memories of her past that. i'm not sure if the semester ended and she went to a different class, or maybe if she left school due to health problems. anyway, i still remember the way she looked perfectly. it's the ones that got away that stick with you, and if you look through my writing, and look at the women i'm attracted to, or the women i dream up, and you'll see plenty of luminous, achingly lovely blondes who don't say much and seem to know a lot more.
***
last formative experience. most of my real experience with women has been in college and after; somehow, it still feels like these were the ones that shaped me, more or less. anyway: kelly. that's not how she spelled it, but name changed to protect the innocent.
every school has its popular clique, right? and at the top of the popular clique, the alpha female, around whom the school orbits. i mean, yeah. everyone hates her. and yeah, her popularity was probably secured by the popularity of her boyfriends. but when push comes to shove, it's the chicks that play the popularity game, and it's the chicks that really determine the pecking order. we were just the prize bulls they fought over, most the times, though sometimes one of us, by rejecting the top chick hard enough, could cause her to fall.
kelly, though.
heh, kelly.
NEVER have i met someone else quite like her, and from what i hear from other people, nor have they. she was something else. a different beast altogether. i knew her in 7th grade -- she was already the popular girl then. but in high school, all the popular girls from their own middle schools mesh together and start reforming cliques, which then climb up through the years and, sometime around junior year, clash for supremacy. or i think that's how it usually works. how it worked with kelly: the minute she stepped in, she was under the wing of the most popular clique in the school. freshman status notwithstanding. and by sophomore year, everyone deferred to her. i don't think anyone didn't know who she was. she had this cat look to her. narrow wideset eyes. ash-blonde hair, slightly wavy. and this permanent, slight curve to her mouth, which wasn't by any means a smile. i think in Mean Girls, there was a line about the queen bee -- she always looked fierce? well, that was kelly. she always looked fierce, and she NEVER smiled. except when she wanted something, or was going in for the kill.
my god, she was a bitch. my god, we all hated her. and my god, if she'd ever given me half a chance, i wouldn't have thought twice.
alas, i never rose above the status of peripheral acquaintance with her. i was on the varsity beach volleyball team, which meant i qualified as jock and knew the jocks, but i was also in AP classes and knew the nerds. that alone probably disqualified me. plus, i wasn't on the football team, and the lucky few in her orbit were all on the football team. usually. i think she briefly had a fling with the class president, too, who wasn't on any athletic team, but was wildly adored nonetheless.
so, yeah. i brushed close enough, at least in the few brief weeks in... what was it, junior year? ...that i hung out with them in the jock area. talked to her a few times, but she always smiled more at someone else, or laughed harder at someone else's joke. grrr. and eventually i settled for one of her friends as gf, but that's a bitter pill to swallow when you'd come so close to the center of the (school's) universe. and i've never been good at staying close to what i couldn't have. it drives me nuts. so soon enough the relationship with her friend fell apart, and when that fell apart, i went back to the circle, somewhat humbled.
sometimes i think the truth of the matter is, though, that the perfect woman in my mind? the ice queen i rave about? in the end, it's just the impossible amalgamation of amber, evangeline and kelly. i mean, i can trace out roots in each of those three. the ones that got away, and all that.
ok -- tired of writing now!
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
er. i realized after posting this that i didn't give any sort of lead-in at all.
so, yeah. i've been meaning to write down my family history -- AS I HEARD IT, i stress, from a multitude of different relatives -- for a while now. this is by no means the complete, detailed account, but it's a beginning. there are tons of stories still left to be told, but... well, another time.
anyway. best place to start is with my maternal grandmother, because that's the story i know best. my grandmother's full german -- it's where i get my quarter from. her family was aristocracy by blood. my grandmother's father's father (my ... great great grandfather) was a penniless younger son of a destitute noble family, and he married a very, very resourceful woman, also a destitute noble. with her business instinct and his family connections, the young couple struck out in trade&industry and ended up making it big in the industrial boom. their son was my grandmother's father, who was technically merchant class considering how his parents made his money, but noble by blood. nouveau riche, old blood. his family was filthy rich at that point, so he had the assets to bag a noblewoman as his wife -- my greatgrandmother, from whom the good looks of the family come from.
i didn't say that, my mother did. and actually that's not true, because my destitute-younger-son greatgreatgrandfather was also rumored to have been a good looking lad. anyway, who knows where the family "look" comes from, but if you look back through the pictures, we all resemble each other to some degree. well, by the time you get down to me, we've been corrupted by my dad's family's big bones and gruff tanned-farmboy-sitting-on-the-tractor looks, but if you look at my mom's side of the family, everyone tends to be thin and tall and narrow-framed. the girls tend to be elegant and slender with graceful shoulders, and the men are whip-lean. shirtless, they're almost all racks of bones (though one of my more distant uncles is a notable, broadshouldered exception), for which my dad never stops teasing my mom, but put them in a suit and they look pretty damn good. and if you go up to my grandmother's generation, everyone also tends to have an aquiline nose (my maternal grandfather spoiled that for my mom) and a lean angular jaw, deepset eyes.
anyway. so, greatgrandpa and greatgrandma (both on my maternal grandmother's side) had ten (i think) kids, of which my grandmother was #3. i think a few of them died in childhood, but most survived. the ones i know semi-well are my grandmother (of course), her youngest sister, her oldest brother (though i think he was actually #2, but #1 died young), and the #4 greataunt in the family, her immediate-younger sister.
moving on. the family took a hit in the first world war, but through their industrial connections (and this is why it's better to be in industry than simply relying on inheritance and title), managed to get back on their feet admirably in the '20s. so my grandmother had a very privileged childhood at the family manor. i think i visited once when i was little -- all i remember are the hexagonal tiles on the great balcony. but my mom, who visited for months at a time in her girlhood, says it was a grouping of four manors around a central courtyard. eventually when my greatgrandmother died, her kids sold the estate and split the money up between themselves. a pity.
back on track. so my grandmother's father was very liberal, probably cuz he was the son of an aristocrat who had fallen from grace and then climbed back to the top tooth and nail. he didn't see his kids much (they were left in the care of a nanny or a governess or whatever you call it), but he always made sure they had a good education, the boys and the girls. as a result my grandmother was very well educated, etc etc, spoke a lot of foreign languages and played the piano. my mom always says that's where i get my musical talent from.
my grandmother actually majored in English in college. so when, in the 30s, the family fortune went down the drain (partly b/c of great depression, partly b/c of generally shit state germany was in, partly b/c they had to split the money amongst 10 offspring, not all of which made wise decisions), she ended up marrying an american intellectual studying in germany, and followed him back to america.
there she settled into a middle-classed life, to which she adapted admirably. i mean, not many people can grow up with private tutors, nannies and chauffeurs, and end up happy to raise two kids and pack them school lunches and teach at the local college. or university, or something. you know, i actually don't even know where they lived at first, i just know it was east coast. and they moved a few times while my mom was growing up.
anyway, they had two kids, my mom and my uncle. then when my mom was a teenager (and i'm not clear on the dates or the reasons, because no one in the family ever talks about this -- but i know it was in the 50's, and i suspect some connection to the Red Scare, seeing as how my grandfather was an intellectual who studied in EVIL germany, and had a german wife, and -- yeah.) my grandfather fell into a deep depression. from what i've heard, he seems like one of those guys who spent their whole lives writing poetry and philosophizing, and as soon as things got tough he caved in like a house of cards.
so he committed suicide, and that was that.
of course, this traumatized my mom deeply. i mean, she seems a very balanced, well-adjusted, bright, friendly woman, but if you knew her the way me and my sister do, you can still sense the scars. or well, i could after i got a little older. she has a bit of an instinctive distrust of the dependability of men, i think, and tends to doubt that the men in her life will always be there -- because her father literally jumped out the window when the going got rough. anyway, i just remember there was a period, around when i was about to leave for college and my dad was on a bunch of business trips and also thinking of going overseas on some venture capital shit, during which my mom seemed really convinced he was going to cheat on her. i remember my sister mandy enduring all these conversations disguised as "advice talks", during which my mom was really just railing against my dad and men in general, and how they only want the young and the beautiful and what they can't have, etc etc. she got over it, but that was the first (maybe only?) time i realized my grandfather's suicide probably left some serious emotional scars there.
anyway, back to the story. after my grandfather took a flying leap, my grandmother, a single woman in her early 40s, an immigrant, a post-WW2 german in america and the daughter of aristocrats at that, proceeded to work her hands to the bone to raise her two kids herself. she never remarried (and, btw, my grandmother was, like her mother, stunningly beautiful in her youth. it's where i get my good looks from. heh! though, alas, every generation seems to be a little uglier/less classy than the last. i don't remember my greatgrandmother well, but my grandmother's a real lady. it's in everything she does. it's not arrogance, either. quite the opposite. it's more this grace and dignity with which she holds herself, and also -- more importantly -- with which she treats other people. i've never seen my grandmother rude, ever. on the other hand, my mom's classy for her upbringing, always still a cut above -- but by the time you get to mandy? heh. my sister's a fucking hoyden.), never asked for help, and never gave up.
it was a tough time, y'know? but she pulled through all on her own. she's hands-down the most resourceful, intelligent and diligent woman i know. and SO talented. i mean, you think i'm multitalented? she can cook, sew, embroider, play piano, draw, paint, garden, write prose & poetry, and raise her kids right. and when push comes to shove she'll do whatever it takes to get through it.
so my mom got her selflessness from my grandmother. my mom's devastatingly intelligent. i mean, she's really, really smart. and she has charisma and people skills out the wazoo. but she never went to college because she got a job instead, and saved up money so my uncle, her younger brother, could go. then the wastrel went and blew his opportunity on girlfriends and drugs in the '60s, and ended up going to trade school. but then by some stroke of sheer luck he ended up making a living off his innate artistic nature (which he got off my grandma, i think), and became an architect, and then started up his own company (or jumped aboard a start-up and rode it for all it was worth, whatever). he married his teenage girlfriend, too, when he was a little older -- that's the stunningly sexy aunt i talk about. they got married the year i was born, i think. i can't remember.
anyway, not the point. so my mom got a job. and eventually, she met my dad, who was going to university at the time. and the way my mom tells it (my dad's mum on the subject), she despised my dad at first glance, and almost stood him up at their first date. in fact, she was lazing about moaning she didn't wanna see him until my grandma dragged her up and gave her a tonguelashing (something about keeping promises), and then she went, 30 minutes late and surly. and she made herself a promise that if my dad said ONE word about it, she'd dump him then and there. miraculously, my dad, usually hot-tempered, held his tongue that time, and the rest is history.
so that's my mom's side of the family. after my mom got married and moved to seattle where i was born, my grandmother moved back to germany to be with her siblings. so, that's where she is today.
--
i know a lot less about my dad's side of the family because my dad's a lot less interested in family history and stories. but i know my family's doctors and soldiers. from like, heartland america, i think. i think there might've been a few accomplished doctors somewhere back there, but most were country doctors.
both my grandparents were in the military (and before you start thinking i think all my ancestors were handsome, i'll say right now that my paternal grandmother is and was not a beautiful woman. she's squat, dumpy, loud, and coarse. my grandfather isn't ugly, but he isn't handsome either. he was passable when he was younger, but love's blind, and he wooed and won my grandmother, from which the loudness of the family thereafter stems. my god, when my dad and i get in a shouting match, the walls shake. my paternal grandmother's also the reason the ladylike-ness of the women of my mother's line stopped short at mandy, and she ended up a goddamn shrieking banshee.), and my grandfather's father was definitely a country doctor. i think his father was a soldier, but the one before that was another doctor, etc. so since it was skipping generations, i think i was supposed to be a soldier. but my dad wasn't a doctor (he's a PhD, not an MD), so i guess i had to take over.
there's a coupla cool stories in my dad's side too. i think one of my ancestors was caught in the civil war (i'm not even sure which side, but i'm inclined to guess the south because of the nature of the story -- fleeing and refugees, and whatnot). he wasn't actually a soldier, but he lived in the path of an army. so when they burned the plantation or whatever down he carried his stepmother, who'd always treated him like shit, on his back for three days on foot while he fled the soldiers. or so the legend goes.
oh, and on my mom's side, there's the story about how my grandmother's father's father, when he got married, had to borrow the sheets he slept on for his wedding night because he was too poor to afford nice sheets.
and also, the great stories of bloody jealousy in my family. they're all on my mother's side, ironically -- or maybe my dad doesn't talk about it. but this is where i get my jealous/violent streak from, obviously.
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so, one of my german great-great uncles (i.e. my greatgrandparents' generation) was a notorious womanizer. supposedly he was a very dashing guy, a strapping 6'5" and coal black hair.
i think he was the spoiled youngest son of the family, and this was back when the family had money. so in the roarin' 20s he was all over the gambling scene, wine women and song and all. and his wife had to stay home with the kids, over in their wing of the manor, and she had a bit of a wild streak of her own before she got married. so one day she decided fuck this married shit -- and started having parties of her own. so my great great uncle would be out running about cheating on her with a parade of women, and meanwhile she was at home cheating on him with a parade of men. so for a while the ancestral manor was quite the bawdhouse.
then finally my great-grandfather, the head of the household, put his foot down, marched into his little brother's clubs, and said 'control your woman or i'll throw her out myself.' so my greatgreatuncle came home to control his woman, but of course, he barged in on his wife shagging another man (...or two or three, depending who you hear the story from) and flew into a jealous rage.
details get all blurry here, but he either knifed her, or else pushed her down the stairs. either way, she ended up dead, and then he hacked her body up and stuffed it in a trunk. obviously, then the trunk started to stink, and he was caught. this is actually another reason the family fortune went down the drain -- his big brother spent INORDINATE amounts of money hiring lawyers and bribing people to try to get him out. but it didn't work, and he ended up facing the firing squad anyway.
so that was my notorious, violent, womanizing great great uncle. like a fucking movie char. in fact i think there was a made-for-TV miniseries in germany about him, or something -- or that's what my mom says. but then when you have a family as huge as mine, and with stories passed back and forth across the generations, they always get so embellished they end up indistinguishable from fiction.
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actually, my grandmother's big brother (this is one generation down from the notorious womanizer/murderer) ended up in a similar situation.
my greatuncle, my grandmother's eldest brother, stayed in europe after my grandmother moved to america. he went abroad -- either france or switzerland, i can't remember which -- and fell in love with a frenchwoman (this, obviously, is where i get my genetic disposition for frenchwomen from). so he had a torrid affair with her for like a year... and then she got sick of him. my mother, who's a romantic at heart and a storyteller, always says it's because she was a wild soul and my greatuncle was very dour (which he is), and she got bored. anyway, he went mad with jealousy, hurt and rage, and went out and bought a knife to kill her with.
i think they were actually married, now that i think about it. yeah, that was his first wife.
so as story has THIS one, he went and hid in the shadows at her doorstep for hours and hours, waiting for her to come home so he could kill her. but, by some stroke of luck (or probably just cuz she was out getting schtupped by her new bf), she never came home. so eventually he got miserably cold, and he left. the next morning he threw the knife into a suitcase, locked it, and never looked at it again, and ended up divorcing her. a few years later he married an opera singer.
oh. interesting appendix on this one. my mother actually keeps in touch with my first great-aunt, oddly enough. she likes my mother and i think my mother likes her, too. she lives in switzerland these days with her second husband, who owns vineyards. every christmas me, my sister and my parents would get swiss chocolates from her. when i was applying for college, she had apparently made some generous, though vague, offer to put me through one of those combined BA/MD programs in germany -- which my mother turned down, because 1) i don't speak a word of german and 2) who knows when my eccentric greataunt would lose interest in being a fairy godmother and leave me penniless?
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and finally, one generation down from that, my uncle -- mentioned earlier -- had his wild days in the late '60s, when he met a stunningly beautiful young girl. they got married the year i was born (i think), and i think they were both in their early/mid 20's. they had a kid when i was 5, my cousin, and soon after that my uncle, who had always lived by the seat of his pants, somehow hit it pretty big in architecture.
see, it's kinda weird -- my mom's side of the family is marked by either total destitution or filthy rich-ness, and it's always in things that seem to hinge halfway on luck. they swoop from one end of the spectrum to the other in a single generation, and even when they work for something, it's still got elements of luck in it. like entrepreneurial...ism, which is what took the family through its renaissance after the (way way way) ancestral funds dried up. on the other hand, my dad's family is slow and steady, hard work and brains over luck and wits, and while they're strictly middle class with every generation a bit better off than the last, they won't ever be filthy rich, and they probably won't ever be totally penniless either (barring major disasters like civil wars).
anyway, digression.
point is: my uncle hit it big, either started his own company or joined a startup that boomed suddenly, vaulting him up in the saddle. so he started livin' the good life, which meant, of course, he went out and started wining and dining and womanizing. and his wife, who was a celebrated beauty of her time (i.e., had quite a few men chasing after her before she picked my uncle), started renewing old acquaintances.
i don't know when it started, but i do remember when we had a family reunion back east, my uncle and aunt were barely EVER home. and they kept being away until like 2am, and when they'd come home, they give the usual excuses of working late. so i was amazed at how hardworking my relatives were! and of course, the rest of the family hemmed and hawed when i expressed amazement, and quickly changed the subject. YEARS later, i looked back and realized it was cuz they were running off having assignations all-but-publically, and everyone knew about it, and no one said anything. god, my family is so full of skeletons in closets.
i should probably add my own little bit of sordidity to the tale. my aunt was, as mentioned several times now, STUNNINGLY beautiful. i mean, i had the first real crush of my life on her, i think.
NO BLOOD RELATION! SHE MARRIED INTO THE FAMILY!
...just to make that clear. anyway: she had long dark hair, very sleek, and high cheekbones, the arched and graceful face of a dancer. at least that's the way i remember her. she had these incredible eyes, too, hazel-brown, but when the light hit them right they'd glow a resonant amber-gold. i remember being UTTERLY smitten with her, to the point of having a bizarre dream where i was being executed, and she and some other family members were standing there bearing solemn witness. i was marched past them and i pulled away from the guard to kiss her passionately (i had also grown like a foot in my dream, so i was bending down to kiss her, my hands shackled so i couldn't put my arms around her), and i didn't care who saw. then at the moment of my death (which was amazingly painless and beautiful -- i was dying on the electric chair for some crime and all i saw was bluewhite electricity expanding across my vision until the world was FULL of it), i declared my everlasting love to her. heh. oh man, freud, eat your heart out. even i can see so many damn symbols in there.
god, digressions. point is, i was so smitten with her. but that's not even the main point. the main point is: she was cheating on my uncle who was cheating on her (and this sucked for my cousin, obviously, who was totally neglected in his parents' cheatwar), and then suddenly one day someone snapped -- again, details grow vague -- and either my uncle or my uncle's girlfriend, or the wife of one of the men my aunt was seeing, grew insanely jealous and attacked my aunt with a razor. she ended up with a scar on her face which she covered with makeup, but she, always having been beautiful, was very sensitive about her face thereafter.
so i remember, in my bumbling adolescent attempts to woo her, telling her as earnestly as i could that i thought she was beautiful without or without the scar, which you could barely see anyway, and oh by the way, she had the eyes of a tiger.
(OH GOD. the SHAME.)
i think i had vague concepts of stealing her from my uncle, who obviously didn't deserve her (even though i was unaware of their mutual infidelity at the time), and protecting her from the world. etc etc. but, as these things go, the reunion ended, i went home, my uncle and aunt divorced, and she barely ever comes around anymore. she still keeps in touch with her son, i hear, but she just comes by to pick him up and she doesn't ever go into the house. i haven't seen her since i was fourteen. i heard after she got divorced she didn't do very well, though. she was beautiful, but didn't have many talents of her own, so when that began to fade, it was pretty rough on her.
anyway. heh. so that's the latest generation in my mother's line. i guess now it's my generation, so we'll see which one of us -- me or my cousin -- turns out to be the unfaithful, violently jealous womanizer of the family. i think it'll be him, though. i'm pretty damn faithful, and i'm more focused on career, stable life, yadda. he's about to graduate college now, i think, and he's a goodlooking kid. kinda the lanky, supercool kind with a burgeoning rep as a ladykiller. parties all the time, doesn't work hard. like father like son, though these days his dad is wigging out because he's such a slacker.
hmm. okay. out of stories for now. more later, maybe.
so, yeah. i've been meaning to write down my family history -- AS I HEARD IT, i stress, from a multitude of different relatives -- for a while now. this is by no means the complete, detailed account, but it's a beginning. there are tons of stories still left to be told, but... well, another time.
anyway. best place to start is with my maternal grandmother, because that's the story i know best. my grandmother's full german -- it's where i get my quarter from. her family was aristocracy by blood. my grandmother's father's father (my ... great great grandfather) was a penniless younger son of a destitute noble family, and he married a very, very resourceful woman, also a destitute noble. with her business instinct and his family connections, the young couple struck out in trade&industry and ended up making it big in the industrial boom. their son was my grandmother's father, who was technically merchant class considering how his parents made his money, but noble by blood. nouveau riche, old blood. his family was filthy rich at that point, so he had the assets to bag a noblewoman as his wife -- my greatgrandmother, from whom the good looks of the family come from.
i didn't say that, my mother did. and actually that's not true, because my destitute-younger-son greatgreatgrandfather was also rumored to have been a good looking lad. anyway, who knows where the family "look" comes from, but if you look back through the pictures, we all resemble each other to some degree. well, by the time you get down to me, we've been corrupted by my dad's family's big bones and gruff tanned-farmboy-sitting-on-the-tractor looks, but if you look at my mom's side of the family, everyone tends to be thin and tall and narrow-framed. the girls tend to be elegant and slender with graceful shoulders, and the men are whip-lean. shirtless, they're almost all racks of bones (though one of my more distant uncles is a notable, broadshouldered exception), for which my dad never stops teasing my mom, but put them in a suit and they look pretty damn good. and if you go up to my grandmother's generation, everyone also tends to have an aquiline nose (my maternal grandfather spoiled that for my mom) and a lean angular jaw, deepset eyes.
anyway. so, greatgrandpa and greatgrandma (both on my maternal grandmother's side) had ten (i think) kids, of which my grandmother was #3. i think a few of them died in childhood, but most survived. the ones i know semi-well are my grandmother (of course), her youngest sister, her oldest brother (though i think he was actually #2, but #1 died young), and the #4 greataunt in the family, her immediate-younger sister.
moving on. the family took a hit in the first world war, but through their industrial connections (and this is why it's better to be in industry than simply relying on inheritance and title), managed to get back on their feet admirably in the '20s. so my grandmother had a very privileged childhood at the family manor. i think i visited once when i was little -- all i remember are the hexagonal tiles on the great balcony. but my mom, who visited for months at a time in her girlhood, says it was a grouping of four manors around a central courtyard. eventually when my greatgrandmother died, her kids sold the estate and split the money up between themselves. a pity.
back on track. so my grandmother's father was very liberal, probably cuz he was the son of an aristocrat who had fallen from grace and then climbed back to the top tooth and nail. he didn't see his kids much (they were left in the care of a nanny or a governess or whatever you call it), but he always made sure they had a good education, the boys and the girls. as a result my grandmother was very well educated, etc etc, spoke a lot of foreign languages and played the piano. my mom always says that's where i get my musical talent from.
my grandmother actually majored in English in college. so when, in the 30s, the family fortune went down the drain (partly b/c of great depression, partly b/c of generally shit state germany was in, partly b/c they had to split the money amongst 10 offspring, not all of which made wise decisions), she ended up marrying an american intellectual studying in germany, and followed him back to america.
there she settled into a middle-classed life, to which she adapted admirably. i mean, not many people can grow up with private tutors, nannies and chauffeurs, and end up happy to raise two kids and pack them school lunches and teach at the local college. or university, or something. you know, i actually don't even know where they lived at first, i just know it was east coast. and they moved a few times while my mom was growing up.
anyway, they had two kids, my mom and my uncle. then when my mom was a teenager (and i'm not clear on the dates or the reasons, because no one in the family ever talks about this -- but i know it was in the 50's, and i suspect some connection to the Red Scare, seeing as how my grandfather was an intellectual who studied in EVIL germany, and had a german wife, and -- yeah.) my grandfather fell into a deep depression. from what i've heard, he seems like one of those guys who spent their whole lives writing poetry and philosophizing, and as soon as things got tough he caved in like a house of cards.
so he committed suicide, and that was that.
of course, this traumatized my mom deeply. i mean, she seems a very balanced, well-adjusted, bright, friendly woman, but if you knew her the way me and my sister do, you can still sense the scars. or well, i could after i got a little older. she has a bit of an instinctive distrust of the dependability of men, i think, and tends to doubt that the men in her life will always be there -- because her father literally jumped out the window when the going got rough. anyway, i just remember there was a period, around when i was about to leave for college and my dad was on a bunch of business trips and also thinking of going overseas on some venture capital shit, during which my mom seemed really convinced he was going to cheat on her. i remember my sister mandy enduring all these conversations disguised as "advice talks", during which my mom was really just railing against my dad and men in general, and how they only want the young and the beautiful and what they can't have, etc etc. she got over it, but that was the first (maybe only?) time i realized my grandfather's suicide probably left some serious emotional scars there.
anyway, back to the story. after my grandfather took a flying leap, my grandmother, a single woman in her early 40s, an immigrant, a post-WW2 german in america and the daughter of aristocrats at that, proceeded to work her hands to the bone to raise her two kids herself. she never remarried (and, btw, my grandmother was, like her mother, stunningly beautiful in her youth. it's where i get my good looks from. heh! though, alas, every generation seems to be a little uglier/less classy than the last. i don't remember my greatgrandmother well, but my grandmother's a real lady. it's in everything she does. it's not arrogance, either. quite the opposite. it's more this grace and dignity with which she holds herself, and also -- more importantly -- with which she treats other people. i've never seen my grandmother rude, ever. on the other hand, my mom's classy for her upbringing, always still a cut above -- but by the time you get to mandy? heh. my sister's a fucking hoyden.), never asked for help, and never gave up.
it was a tough time, y'know? but she pulled through all on her own. she's hands-down the most resourceful, intelligent and diligent woman i know. and SO talented. i mean, you think i'm multitalented? she can cook, sew, embroider, play piano, draw, paint, garden, write prose & poetry, and raise her kids right. and when push comes to shove she'll do whatever it takes to get through it.
so my mom got her selflessness from my grandmother. my mom's devastatingly intelligent. i mean, she's really, really smart. and she has charisma and people skills out the wazoo. but she never went to college because she got a job instead, and saved up money so my uncle, her younger brother, could go. then the wastrel went and blew his opportunity on girlfriends and drugs in the '60s, and ended up going to trade school. but then by some stroke of sheer luck he ended up making a living off his innate artistic nature (which he got off my grandma, i think), and became an architect, and then started up his own company (or jumped aboard a start-up and rode it for all it was worth, whatever). he married his teenage girlfriend, too, when he was a little older -- that's the stunningly sexy aunt i talk about. they got married the year i was born, i think. i can't remember.
anyway, not the point. so my mom got a job. and eventually, she met my dad, who was going to university at the time. and the way my mom tells it (my dad's mum on the subject), she despised my dad at first glance, and almost stood him up at their first date. in fact, she was lazing about moaning she didn't wanna see him until my grandma dragged her up and gave her a tonguelashing (something about keeping promises), and then she went, 30 minutes late and surly. and she made herself a promise that if my dad said ONE word about it, she'd dump him then and there. miraculously, my dad, usually hot-tempered, held his tongue that time, and the rest is history.
so that's my mom's side of the family. after my mom got married and moved to seattle where i was born, my grandmother moved back to germany to be with her siblings. so, that's where she is today.
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i know a lot less about my dad's side of the family because my dad's a lot less interested in family history and stories. but i know my family's doctors and soldiers. from like, heartland america, i think. i think there might've been a few accomplished doctors somewhere back there, but most were country doctors.
both my grandparents were in the military (and before you start thinking i think all my ancestors were handsome, i'll say right now that my paternal grandmother is and was not a beautiful woman. she's squat, dumpy, loud, and coarse. my grandfather isn't ugly, but he isn't handsome either. he was passable when he was younger, but love's blind, and he wooed and won my grandmother, from which the loudness of the family thereafter stems. my god, when my dad and i get in a shouting match, the walls shake. my paternal grandmother's also the reason the ladylike-ness of the women of my mother's line stopped short at mandy, and she ended up a goddamn shrieking banshee.), and my grandfather's father was definitely a country doctor. i think his father was a soldier, but the one before that was another doctor, etc. so since it was skipping generations, i think i was supposed to be a soldier. but my dad wasn't a doctor (he's a PhD, not an MD), so i guess i had to take over.
there's a coupla cool stories in my dad's side too. i think one of my ancestors was caught in the civil war (i'm not even sure which side, but i'm inclined to guess the south because of the nature of the story -- fleeing and refugees, and whatnot). he wasn't actually a soldier, but he lived in the path of an army. so when they burned the plantation or whatever down he carried his stepmother, who'd always treated him like shit, on his back for three days on foot while he fled the soldiers. or so the legend goes.
oh, and on my mom's side, there's the story about how my grandmother's father's father, when he got married, had to borrow the sheets he slept on for his wedding night because he was too poor to afford nice sheets.
and also, the great stories of bloody jealousy in my family. they're all on my mother's side, ironically -- or maybe my dad doesn't talk about it. but this is where i get my jealous/violent streak from, obviously.
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so, one of my german great-great uncles (i.e. my greatgrandparents' generation) was a notorious womanizer. supposedly he was a very dashing guy, a strapping 6'5" and coal black hair.
i think he was the spoiled youngest son of the family, and this was back when the family had money. so in the roarin' 20s he was all over the gambling scene, wine women and song and all. and his wife had to stay home with the kids, over in their wing of the manor, and she had a bit of a wild streak of her own before she got married. so one day she decided fuck this married shit -- and started having parties of her own. so my great great uncle would be out running about cheating on her with a parade of women, and meanwhile she was at home cheating on him with a parade of men. so for a while the ancestral manor was quite the bawdhouse.
then finally my great-grandfather, the head of the household, put his foot down, marched into his little brother's clubs, and said 'control your woman or i'll throw her out myself.' so my greatgreatuncle came home to control his woman, but of course, he barged in on his wife shagging another man (...or two or three, depending who you hear the story from) and flew into a jealous rage.
details get all blurry here, but he either knifed her, or else pushed her down the stairs. either way, she ended up dead, and then he hacked her body up and stuffed it in a trunk. obviously, then the trunk started to stink, and he was caught. this is actually another reason the family fortune went down the drain -- his big brother spent INORDINATE amounts of money hiring lawyers and bribing people to try to get him out. but it didn't work, and he ended up facing the firing squad anyway.
so that was my notorious, violent, womanizing great great uncle. like a fucking movie char. in fact i think there was a made-for-TV miniseries in germany about him, or something -- or that's what my mom says. but then when you have a family as huge as mine, and with stories passed back and forth across the generations, they always get so embellished they end up indistinguishable from fiction.
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actually, my grandmother's big brother (this is one generation down from the notorious womanizer/murderer) ended up in a similar situation.
my greatuncle, my grandmother's eldest brother, stayed in europe after my grandmother moved to america. he went abroad -- either france or switzerland, i can't remember which -- and fell in love with a frenchwoman (this, obviously, is where i get my genetic disposition for frenchwomen from). so he had a torrid affair with her for like a year... and then she got sick of him. my mother, who's a romantic at heart and a storyteller, always says it's because she was a wild soul and my greatuncle was very dour (which he is), and she got bored. anyway, he went mad with jealousy, hurt and rage, and went out and bought a knife to kill her with.
i think they were actually married, now that i think about it. yeah, that was his first wife.
so as story has THIS one, he went and hid in the shadows at her doorstep for hours and hours, waiting for her to come home so he could kill her. but, by some stroke of luck (or probably just cuz she was out getting schtupped by her new bf), she never came home. so eventually he got miserably cold, and he left. the next morning he threw the knife into a suitcase, locked it, and never looked at it again, and ended up divorcing her. a few years later he married an opera singer.
oh. interesting appendix on this one. my mother actually keeps in touch with my first great-aunt, oddly enough. she likes my mother and i think my mother likes her, too. she lives in switzerland these days with her second husband, who owns vineyards. every christmas me, my sister and my parents would get swiss chocolates from her. when i was applying for college, she had apparently made some generous, though vague, offer to put me through one of those combined BA/MD programs in germany -- which my mother turned down, because 1) i don't speak a word of german and 2) who knows when my eccentric greataunt would lose interest in being a fairy godmother and leave me penniless?
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and finally, one generation down from that, my uncle -- mentioned earlier -- had his wild days in the late '60s, when he met a stunningly beautiful young girl. they got married the year i was born (i think), and i think they were both in their early/mid 20's. they had a kid when i was 5, my cousin, and soon after that my uncle, who had always lived by the seat of his pants, somehow hit it pretty big in architecture.
see, it's kinda weird -- my mom's side of the family is marked by either total destitution or filthy rich-ness, and it's always in things that seem to hinge halfway on luck. they swoop from one end of the spectrum to the other in a single generation, and even when they work for something, it's still got elements of luck in it. like entrepreneurial...ism, which is what took the family through its renaissance after the (way way way) ancestral funds dried up. on the other hand, my dad's family is slow and steady, hard work and brains over luck and wits, and while they're strictly middle class with every generation a bit better off than the last, they won't ever be filthy rich, and they probably won't ever be totally penniless either (barring major disasters like civil wars).
anyway, digression.
point is: my uncle hit it big, either started his own company or joined a startup that boomed suddenly, vaulting him up in the saddle. so he started livin' the good life, which meant, of course, he went out and started wining and dining and womanizing. and his wife, who was a celebrated beauty of her time (i.e., had quite a few men chasing after her before she picked my uncle), started renewing old acquaintances.
i don't know when it started, but i do remember when we had a family reunion back east, my uncle and aunt were barely EVER home. and they kept being away until like 2am, and when they'd come home, they give the usual excuses of working late. so i was amazed at how hardworking my relatives were! and of course, the rest of the family hemmed and hawed when i expressed amazement, and quickly changed the subject. YEARS later, i looked back and realized it was cuz they were running off having assignations all-but-publically, and everyone knew about it, and no one said anything. god, my family is so full of skeletons in closets.
i should probably add my own little bit of sordidity to the tale. my aunt was, as mentioned several times now, STUNNINGLY beautiful. i mean, i had the first real crush of my life on her, i think.
NO BLOOD RELATION! SHE MARRIED INTO THE FAMILY!
...just to make that clear. anyway: she had long dark hair, very sleek, and high cheekbones, the arched and graceful face of a dancer. at least that's the way i remember her. she had these incredible eyes, too, hazel-brown, but when the light hit them right they'd glow a resonant amber-gold. i remember being UTTERLY smitten with her, to the point of having a bizarre dream where i was being executed, and she and some other family members were standing there bearing solemn witness. i was marched past them and i pulled away from the guard to kiss her passionately (i had also grown like a foot in my dream, so i was bending down to kiss her, my hands shackled so i couldn't put my arms around her), and i didn't care who saw. then at the moment of my death (which was amazingly painless and beautiful -- i was dying on the electric chair for some crime and all i saw was bluewhite electricity expanding across my vision until the world was FULL of it), i declared my everlasting love to her. heh. oh man, freud, eat your heart out. even i can see so many damn symbols in there.
god, digressions. point is, i was so smitten with her. but that's not even the main point. the main point is: she was cheating on my uncle who was cheating on her (and this sucked for my cousin, obviously, who was totally neglected in his parents' cheatwar), and then suddenly one day someone snapped -- again, details grow vague -- and either my uncle or my uncle's girlfriend, or the wife of one of the men my aunt was seeing, grew insanely jealous and attacked my aunt with a razor. she ended up with a scar on her face which she covered with makeup, but she, always having been beautiful, was very sensitive about her face thereafter.
so i remember, in my bumbling adolescent attempts to woo her, telling her as earnestly as i could that i thought she was beautiful without or without the scar, which you could barely see anyway, and oh by the way, she had the eyes of a tiger.
(OH GOD. the SHAME.)
i think i had vague concepts of stealing her from my uncle, who obviously didn't deserve her (even though i was unaware of their mutual infidelity at the time), and protecting her from the world. etc etc. but, as these things go, the reunion ended, i went home, my uncle and aunt divorced, and she barely ever comes around anymore. she still keeps in touch with her son, i hear, but she just comes by to pick him up and she doesn't ever go into the house. i haven't seen her since i was fourteen. i heard after she got divorced she didn't do very well, though. she was beautiful, but didn't have many talents of her own, so when that began to fade, it was pretty rough on her.
anyway. heh. so that's the latest generation in my mother's line. i guess now it's my generation, so we'll see which one of us -- me or my cousin -- turns out to be the unfaithful, violently jealous womanizer of the family. i think it'll be him, though. i'm pretty damn faithful, and i'm more focused on career, stable life, yadda. he's about to graduate college now, i think, and he's a goodlooking kid. kinda the lanky, supercool kind with a burgeoning rep as a ladykiller. parties all the time, doesn't work hard. like father like son, though these days his dad is wigging out because he's such a slacker.
hmm. okay. out of stories for now. more later, maybe.
ok. finally getting around to setting this down: the saga of the SUMMER OF STRESS.
so. basic background story you need to know: i work as a resident doctor with UCSF. now, i've always been happy with the prospect of practicing for the rest of my working life, but lately i thought that might just grow a little bit repetitive - patient after patient, case after case.
thus, i decided to look for some research opportunities. a lot of MDs do research, particularly at reputable university hospitals, and really, it's kind of ideal: science that has a real-life (clinical) application.
summer rolls around, and that's when my schedule frees up a tad bit. i start looking for a lab to join as a fellow. i home in on a lab in UCSF, which does stroke research. awesome doctor, very famous, one of the leading neurosurgeons of the world. so i'm thinking, how awesome would it be to work for him? he's got clout, he's got money, he's got great research going.
so, i approach him. ask him if he would like to take me on, and he says he'll have to test me out first for a month or two. i'm thinking, well, that's one or two months i'll have to essentially work overtime to cover for the time i spend in his lab, since he's not funding me yet, but i figure i have a pretty good shot at getting in.
i say yes. i join the lab on a temporary basis, and start cranking away. and i work HARD. i'm putting in like 10 hours a day at his lab, and that's on top of my other duties. i more or less LIVED at work for two months.
about a month into it, i talk to him about joining the lab permanently. he hems and haws and says, i can't make a decision yet. so i figure, all right. i gotta work harder. so i work HARDER. and now i'm churning out the data of three people, and he needs this data, btw, for a grant proposal.
fast forward a month. now he's got all the data he needs for his grant proposal. he's still not saying anything one way or another, and i'm starting to get antsy -- because if i don't find one this summer, i'll be too busy til next summer, and i only have so many years left in residency. after that, it might get a bit tougher to find a research fellowship at a place as good as UCSF.
so i finally ask him straight-out. he's like, let's talk next week. so i give him ANOTHER week of hard work --
-- and then his ass is like, i'm too busy for an MD research fellow. i'd have to mentor you from scratch, and it wouldn't be fair to you.
BULLSHIT.
what's not fair to me is keeping me on the line for 2 months, getting me to do all his crap work for free, and then telling me no at the end. oh man, i was FURIOUS. i think about it now and i'm steaming out my ears. i've worked with a LOT of famous doctors and professors, and some have been a little more -- er, brusque than others. but this takes the cake, man. i've never worked with anyone who was so utterly disrespectful of his underlings. i just hope i don't end up like him in 20 years.
so anyway. at this point, i'm in a mild panic, because it's now like mid-July and i'm starting from scratch. so i start looking into labs again, and this time i cast a wider net and look at labs down in Stanford too.
i get two possibilities: one very well-funded, youngish lab in UCSF, and another very established lab down at stanford. i weigh my options and i decide the latter lab's the one i wanna go to. better research going on, more interesting to me, more medically relevant, and the people seemed friendlier.
problem was, it's down in stanford. and money's the big problem. if it's in UCSF, i can talk to my program director, wheedle my way into some funding. if it's down in Stanford, there's all sortsa issues with funding and grants and applicable/nonapplicable yaddayadda... bottom line is, funding was VERY much in question.
so at this point, my life became a fucking chess game.
the pieces were:
1) Young PI (principle investigator, i.e. research professor) at UCSF, my backup plan.
2) Program Director, who's not at all obligated to pay for me to run off to Stanford and do research there -- however, he wrote an email in the course of the summer saying he'd be willing to offer a year's funding under the PI of the lab took over.
3) PI at Stanford, the one I wanna get in with.
4) Me.
So what I basically had to do was ascertain that that year's funding was still coming from the PD until the PI at Stanford can take over. Meanwhile, I had to avoid blowing my chances with the backup plan, and thus had to avoid showing him i was essentially looking for another lab. And at the same time, I couldn't make it look like I was going behind his back when all was said and done.
ERGO. Balancing act. Had to maintain enough interesting with #1 to avoid his backing out, while not locking in with him -- which would cause bad feelings if i then backed out. At the same time, had to remind #2 gently of the 1 year of funding WITHOUT asking him (because if I ask, it'd be much easier to say no), while making it clear to #3 that funding was the ONLY thing keeping me from going there so he didn't think I was waffling.
For about a week, it was the most delicate game of emails, phone calls and office visits I have EVER played. In the end, I visited #1 several times with made-up questions to make it seem like I was still trying to decide. Then, fortunately, he took a vacation, and I made my move! (hah)
I wanted to do it in person, because I'm pretty good in person -- but #2's busy as hell, and I figured if I interrupted something important, he'd be annoyed. And if I went away and let him contact me, he might ask about funding first, thus forcing me into a backhanded position where I'd have to admit that the professor didn't have funding -- which then gives him the opening to say "well sorry, we can't fund you either."
CHESS.
So, in the end, I dropped #2 an email essentially telling him I've settled on the Stanford lab, and *thanking* him for the funding. At the same time, I made it clear that without funding, I'd be unable to join that lab, thus backing him into a corner of guilt. Finally, to polish it off, I expressed my extreme gratitude at all his support, yadda, to top the guilt-cake with gratitude-icing.
Then I waited.
BUT HE WAS ON VACATION!
Oh no! Oh man! I almost LOST MY MIND when the autoresponder bounced back. I went to his old buddy, this lady who's very senior and powerful in the department, and basically pleaded my case there. With #2, I couldn't really give the full story -- or rather, couldn't play up the "if I don't get money I don't go" angle, because my angle there was "thanks for giving me the money". But with #2's buddy, I was completely hamming up the pity schtick, while simultaneously giving my best impression of bushy-tailed bright-eyed eager young doctor. The old and embittered docs love that.
So #2's friend sounded pretty positive about the whole thing, and said she'd make sure #2 got back to me soon. Annnnd then I went home, fretful but hopeful.
Not four hours later, I get an email back. Two lines.
"We will fund you for another year. Congratulations on finding a good fit."
...oh man.
Went home that night? Slept 13 hours. I hadn't even realized I was so exhausted. Slept like a BABY.
I swear, this summer has taught me so much. I think my parents have been trying to teach me this all my life, but I finally figured it out for myself:
IT'S ALL ABOUT THE CONNECTIONS AND THE POLITICAL GAMES.
it's so fucking disillusioning, sorta. heh. i mean, it's not about brilliance and hard work at all. or it is? but in a place like ucsf or stanford, everyone's brilliant. everyone works hard. so you get ahead by under-the-table shoo-ins and connections and that extra smile in the hallway, that extra office visit when it counts.
ah well. welcome to life, eh?
so. basic background story you need to know: i work as a resident doctor with UCSF. now, i've always been happy with the prospect of practicing for the rest of my working life, but lately i thought that might just grow a little bit repetitive - patient after patient, case after case.
thus, i decided to look for some research opportunities. a lot of MDs do research, particularly at reputable university hospitals, and really, it's kind of ideal: science that has a real-life (clinical) application.
summer rolls around, and that's when my schedule frees up a tad bit. i start looking for a lab to join as a fellow. i home in on a lab in UCSF, which does stroke research. awesome doctor, very famous, one of the leading neurosurgeons of the world. so i'm thinking, how awesome would it be to work for him? he's got clout, he's got money, he's got great research going.
so, i approach him. ask him if he would like to take me on, and he says he'll have to test me out first for a month or two. i'm thinking, well, that's one or two months i'll have to essentially work overtime to cover for the time i spend in his lab, since he's not funding me yet, but i figure i have a pretty good shot at getting in.
i say yes. i join the lab on a temporary basis, and start cranking away. and i work HARD. i'm putting in like 10 hours a day at his lab, and that's on top of my other duties. i more or less LIVED at work for two months.
about a month into it, i talk to him about joining the lab permanently. he hems and haws and says, i can't make a decision yet. so i figure, all right. i gotta work harder. so i work HARDER. and now i'm churning out the data of three people, and he needs this data, btw, for a grant proposal.
fast forward a month. now he's got all the data he needs for his grant proposal. he's still not saying anything one way or another, and i'm starting to get antsy -- because if i don't find one this summer, i'll be too busy til next summer, and i only have so many years left in residency. after that, it might get a bit tougher to find a research fellowship at a place as good as UCSF.
so i finally ask him straight-out. he's like, let's talk next week. so i give him ANOTHER week of hard work --
-- and then his ass is like, i'm too busy for an MD research fellow. i'd have to mentor you from scratch, and it wouldn't be fair to you.
BULLSHIT.
what's not fair to me is keeping me on the line for 2 months, getting me to do all his crap work for free, and then telling me no at the end. oh man, i was FURIOUS. i think about it now and i'm steaming out my ears. i've worked with a LOT of famous doctors and professors, and some have been a little more -- er, brusque than others. but this takes the cake, man. i've never worked with anyone who was so utterly disrespectful of his underlings. i just hope i don't end up like him in 20 years.
so anyway. at this point, i'm in a mild panic, because it's now like mid-July and i'm starting from scratch. so i start looking into labs again, and this time i cast a wider net and look at labs down in Stanford too.
i get two possibilities: one very well-funded, youngish lab in UCSF, and another very established lab down at stanford. i weigh my options and i decide the latter lab's the one i wanna go to. better research going on, more interesting to me, more medically relevant, and the people seemed friendlier.
problem was, it's down in stanford. and money's the big problem. if it's in UCSF, i can talk to my program director, wheedle my way into some funding. if it's down in Stanford, there's all sortsa issues with funding and grants and applicable/nonapplicable yaddayadda... bottom line is, funding was VERY much in question.
so at this point, my life became a fucking chess game.
the pieces were:
1) Young PI (principle investigator, i.e. research professor) at UCSF, my backup plan.
2) Program Director, who's not at all obligated to pay for me to run off to Stanford and do research there -- however, he wrote an email in the course of the summer saying he'd be willing to offer a year's funding under the PI of the lab took over.
3) PI at Stanford, the one I wanna get in with.
4) Me.
So what I basically had to do was ascertain that that year's funding was still coming from the PD until the PI at Stanford can take over. Meanwhile, I had to avoid blowing my chances with the backup plan, and thus had to avoid showing him i was essentially looking for another lab. And at the same time, I couldn't make it look like I was going behind his back when all was said and done.
ERGO. Balancing act. Had to maintain enough interesting with #1 to avoid his backing out, while not locking in with him -- which would cause bad feelings if i then backed out. At the same time, had to remind #2 gently of the 1 year of funding WITHOUT asking him (because if I ask, it'd be much easier to say no), while making it clear to #3 that funding was the ONLY thing keeping me from going there so he didn't think I was waffling.
For about a week, it was the most delicate game of emails, phone calls and office visits I have EVER played. In the end, I visited #1 several times with made-up questions to make it seem like I was still trying to decide. Then, fortunately, he took a vacation, and I made my move! (hah)
I wanted to do it in person, because I'm pretty good in person -- but #2's busy as hell, and I figured if I interrupted something important, he'd be annoyed. And if I went away and let him contact me, he might ask about funding first, thus forcing me into a backhanded position where I'd have to admit that the professor didn't have funding -- which then gives him the opening to say "well sorry, we can't fund you either."
CHESS.
So, in the end, I dropped #2 an email essentially telling him I've settled on the Stanford lab, and *thanking* him for the funding. At the same time, I made it clear that without funding, I'd be unable to join that lab, thus backing him into a corner of guilt. Finally, to polish it off, I expressed my extreme gratitude at all his support, yadda, to top the guilt-cake with gratitude-icing.
Then I waited.
BUT HE WAS ON VACATION!
Oh no! Oh man! I almost LOST MY MIND when the autoresponder bounced back. I went to his old buddy, this lady who's very senior and powerful in the department, and basically pleaded my case there. With #2, I couldn't really give the full story -- or rather, couldn't play up the "if I don't get money I don't go" angle, because my angle there was "thanks for giving me the money". But with #2's buddy, I was completely hamming up the pity schtick, while simultaneously giving my best impression of bushy-tailed bright-eyed eager young doctor. The old and embittered docs love that.
So #2's friend sounded pretty positive about the whole thing, and said she'd make sure #2 got back to me soon. Annnnd then I went home, fretful but hopeful.
Not four hours later, I get an email back. Two lines.
"We will fund you for another year. Congratulations on finding a good fit."
...oh man.
Went home that night? Slept 13 hours. I hadn't even realized I was so exhausted. Slept like a BABY.
I swear, this summer has taught me so much. I think my parents have been trying to teach me this all my life, but I finally figured it out for myself:
IT'S ALL ABOUT THE CONNECTIONS AND THE POLITICAL GAMES.
it's so fucking disillusioning, sorta. heh. i mean, it's not about brilliance and hard work at all. or it is? but in a place like ucsf or stanford, everyone's brilliant. everyone works hard. so you get ahead by under-the-table shoo-ins and connections and that extra smile in the hallway, that extra office visit when it counts.
ah well. welcome to life, eh?
so it's occurred to me that your relationship with your parents change as you grow older.
when you're 5 years old, your parents are the All. they're never wrong, they're never bad, they're never human. they're your gods. like the old cliche says, every child's word for god is 'mother'.
then you get older. around 13, 14, you start growing aware of yourself as a person. of the people around you. in school, you're learning more profound, critical ways of thinking. and suddenly you see reflected in your parents the faults that you've been taught to see elsewhere. they're not perfect; they're not infallible, and sometimes, they have a rotten-ass day and take it out on you.
thus begins the process of growing up. you start pulling away. at the same time you see all their faults, you remain somewhat blind to your own. you think you know better; with typical adolescent arrogance, you think you're smarter than anyone else.
i'm using 'you' here. i shouldn't. this is from personal experience. those pronouns should be i.
i thought i was smarter than anyone else. which isn't to say i walked around telling myself that - it's just that i had an implicit arrogance that, i suppose, has yet to entirely go away. but any which way, i was embarrassed by my parents. i thought they were impossibly old and dorky. i thought they couldn't understand me and the problems and the triumphs i faced. they did things that humiliated me at every turn; i couldn't stand to be around them. at the same time, i sneered at my friends who treated their parents like dirt, never realizing i was doing the same thing.
i think my parents musta been really puzzled then. i'm their firstborn, and when they were growing up, kids were more respectful toward their parents. especially my parents, one of whom lost her father as a teenager and thus carried a burden that precluded defiance; the other of whom was the eldest of four boys, son to busy parents that were, while not neglectful, certainly not around very much. my mother became her mother's support and my father became a father to his brothers. both of them were the eldest of their family, and both of them grew up fast, skipping past teenage angst. then along comes me: surly, disrespectful, slouching, shying away from them, scowling whenever they followed me around.
must've hurt them. they must've been confused and sad, feeling like they were losing me. and, ugh, if i could, i'd take it all back.
freshman year of college, i couldn't wait for my parents to leave. could. not. wait. of course when midterms came along and stress crashed down like an avalanche, i missed them - but even that was transient. went home for break, and it was the same old thing. i was embarrassed by them.
then somehow things changed. sometime between freshman year of college and senior year of college, my attitudes changed. i missed my parents. i grew to love my parents deeply, or maybe rediscovered that. when they came to visit, i wanted them to stay longer. i tried to make them comfortable, as though doing that might undone what i'd done for the past ten years. i showed them around, introduced them to my friends, didn't slouch, didn't scowl.
i don't know how that change came about, but it's still happening. with every passing year i'm getting to love my parents more and miss them more. it's true, you know - before you've left home permanently, and even after, you think you won't miss them. you think you'll be glad to be free. but the farther away you fly, the more you'll want to go back.
i'm having trouble articulating this. i feel so cliche when i say this. i feel like i'm doing a self-satisfied pat on the back. i had the words in my mind so clearly an hour ago. i think clearly when i walk at night, and when i stand in the shower. something about both acts clears my mind of extraneous thoughts. i think it's something about the darkness and repetition of one, the utter relaxation of the other. either way, i think better like that.
i keep telling myself i'll get a tape recorder, so i can record the thoughts i have in the shower and while i'm walking. but of course that's ridiculous, and i won't ever do it.
i'm kind of dissatisfied tonight. i don't know why. i think i'm just stressed, but the things that usually interest me don't. and i miss my parents a lot. that's dumb, i know - i'm 27 years old, and missing my parents.
but it happens. my mother always said it happens. she'd miss her mother, and i know my dad missed his parents too, though he'd never say it. i didn't really believe her when she told me that the older you get, the more you love your parents. i was a teenager then, and now i'm just looping all my thoughts into a circle.
ugh.
sometimes i wonder what i'd do different if i could do it all again. i mean, the party line that i give to that is 'nothing. i regret nothing.' but times like these, it's not true.
i regret a lot. i regret that it seemed to be in my nature to cut myself loose from my parents and, in doing so, cut them to the bone. i think i wrote once on this diary about how after teenage, it was different with my parents, and that's true. before, they're your god. after, they're your friend. you still love them - you love them more than ever - but it's different. you see their flaws. you see them as human. most times this is a good thing, but i have to admit, sometimes i wish i could go back to the unadulterated, total belief in my parents.
i know why people worship gods. people always need something pure and holy to look up to. i know why eden was blessed blissful ignorance, too. times like these, i really know.
when you're 5 years old, your parents are the All. they're never wrong, they're never bad, they're never human. they're your gods. like the old cliche says, every child's word for god is 'mother'.
then you get older. around 13, 14, you start growing aware of yourself as a person. of the people around you. in school, you're learning more profound, critical ways of thinking. and suddenly you see reflected in your parents the faults that you've been taught to see elsewhere. they're not perfect; they're not infallible, and sometimes, they have a rotten-ass day and take it out on you.
thus begins the process of growing up. you start pulling away. at the same time you see all their faults, you remain somewhat blind to your own. you think you know better; with typical adolescent arrogance, you think you're smarter than anyone else.
i'm using 'you' here. i shouldn't. this is from personal experience. those pronouns should be i.
i thought i was smarter than anyone else. which isn't to say i walked around telling myself that - it's just that i had an implicit arrogance that, i suppose, has yet to entirely go away. but any which way, i was embarrassed by my parents. i thought they were impossibly old and dorky. i thought they couldn't understand me and the problems and the triumphs i faced. they did things that humiliated me at every turn; i couldn't stand to be around them. at the same time, i sneered at my friends who treated their parents like dirt, never realizing i was doing the same thing.
i think my parents musta been really puzzled then. i'm their firstborn, and when they were growing up, kids were more respectful toward their parents. especially my parents, one of whom lost her father as a teenager and thus carried a burden that precluded defiance; the other of whom was the eldest of four boys, son to busy parents that were, while not neglectful, certainly not around very much. my mother became her mother's support and my father became a father to his brothers. both of them were the eldest of their family, and both of them grew up fast, skipping past teenage angst. then along comes me: surly, disrespectful, slouching, shying away from them, scowling whenever they followed me around.
must've hurt them. they must've been confused and sad, feeling like they were losing me. and, ugh, if i could, i'd take it all back.
freshman year of college, i couldn't wait for my parents to leave. could. not. wait. of course when midterms came along and stress crashed down like an avalanche, i missed them - but even that was transient. went home for break, and it was the same old thing. i was embarrassed by them.
then somehow things changed. sometime between freshman year of college and senior year of college, my attitudes changed. i missed my parents. i grew to love my parents deeply, or maybe rediscovered that. when they came to visit, i wanted them to stay longer. i tried to make them comfortable, as though doing that might undone what i'd done for the past ten years. i showed them around, introduced them to my friends, didn't slouch, didn't scowl.
i don't know how that change came about, but it's still happening. with every passing year i'm getting to love my parents more and miss them more. it's true, you know - before you've left home permanently, and even after, you think you won't miss them. you think you'll be glad to be free. but the farther away you fly, the more you'll want to go back.
i'm having trouble articulating this. i feel so cliche when i say this. i feel like i'm doing a self-satisfied pat on the back. i had the words in my mind so clearly an hour ago. i think clearly when i walk at night, and when i stand in the shower. something about both acts clears my mind of extraneous thoughts. i think it's something about the darkness and repetition of one, the utter relaxation of the other. either way, i think better like that.
i keep telling myself i'll get a tape recorder, so i can record the thoughts i have in the shower and while i'm walking. but of course that's ridiculous, and i won't ever do it.
i'm kind of dissatisfied tonight. i don't know why. i think i'm just stressed, but the things that usually interest me don't. and i miss my parents a lot. that's dumb, i know - i'm 27 years old, and missing my parents.
but it happens. my mother always said it happens. she'd miss her mother, and i know my dad missed his parents too, though he'd never say it. i didn't really believe her when she told me that the older you get, the more you love your parents. i was a teenager then, and now i'm just looping all my thoughts into a circle.
ugh.
sometimes i wonder what i'd do different if i could do it all again. i mean, the party line that i give to that is 'nothing. i regret nothing.' but times like these, it's not true.
i regret a lot. i regret that it seemed to be in my nature to cut myself loose from my parents and, in doing so, cut them to the bone. i think i wrote once on this diary about how after teenage, it was different with my parents, and that's true. before, they're your god. after, they're your friend. you still love them - you love them more than ever - but it's different. you see their flaws. you see them as human. most times this is a good thing, but i have to admit, sometimes i wish i could go back to the unadulterated, total belief in my parents.
i know why people worship gods. people always need something pure and holy to look up to. i know why eden was blessed blissful ignorance, too. times like these, i really know.
so i decided to put this up again cuz truth of it is, i was afraid to put it up in fears that everyone will now hate me. then i hear that apparently these flaws aren't nearly as well-hidden as i thought, and that i'm just finally saying what everyone already knows.
since that's the case, fuck, i'll leave it up. heh. remind myself.
***
flaws:
ARROGANCE.
my god, do i have this in buckets. this very post is an act of arrogance. i'm writing it because rachel wrote one and i was like, ooo, i wanna do that. i wanna shake out my dirty laundry because i assume the world cares and wants to see!
i am an insufferably arrogant bastard. i can't help it - whup there i go again, the arrogance of pinning my blame on some undefined Other, which i can neither touch nor change, thus freeing me to be as arrogant as i like.
i am arrogant. i think i am the end-all-be-all of things. i think i am wiser because i am older; i think i am better because i'm going to make more money. i think my point of the view is the correct one, no matter how contradictory or self-contradictory, even, it might be.
i think my schooling and the letters after my name mean i am smarter than anyone else who doesn't have these things. hell, i think i'm smarter than everyone because i'm damned good at BSing crap (more arrogance - reducing the hard work of teachers everywhere in giving assignments and appreciating what i've given in return to mere chaff, bullshit, nothing of importance - EVEN IF I DID WORK HARD ON IT), because i'm damned good at taking standardized tests (1510 SAT, 36ACT, 41 MCAT, 2250 combined GRE, IQ in the 99.9th percentile - WORSHIP MY FUCKIN EGO), because i can't help but flaunt this and - UGH
okay i am now honestly drowning in my own arrogance. i can't stop it! look, there it is again! shifting of blame, unstoppable floods of arrogance; i am the niagara of egotism.
i am so arrogant that i think arrogance is a GOOD thing.
*
HYPOCRISY.
is that even a fucking word? no matter. i am also hypocritical. while i am allowed to be arrogant, no one else is. i can't STAND fucking arrogance in other people; i tear it to shreds, i shred it apart. i can't stand it, and yet i'm so arrogant i don't think i'd be able to stand living with me.
*
UNTHINKING CRUELTY.
i am. unbelievably, unthinkingly cruel. unintentionally, maybe, but perhaps that's just me pinning the blame elsewhere again. i excel at ripping things to shreds. all this goes back to arrogance, really. i think my POV is the only correct one, and i never hesitate to rip into another POV to show why it's wrong.
i love to debate; i love to fight; i debate deeply personal things with a careless, analytical glee, and i shred deeply personal beliefs like they were words on paper.
i do not care that this may hurt people while i'm doing it. i'm just happy that i can do it. i'm just happy that i can shout down anyone else and impose my will upon them.
*
SELFISHNESS.
this is an extension of all of the above. i am INCREDIBLY selfish. in my book, it seems to be me myself and i. i think i'm capable of caring for people, loving, all that, but even if i say i'll take a bullet for someone/something, i think if it should come down to the wire, i wouldn't sacrifice myself for ANYTHING.
*
TEMPESTUOUSITY.
another made up word. this is me in a nutshell. i think for the most part people consider me mellow, but god help you if i'm in a bad mood and you accidentally say the wrong thing and don't realize it in the 0.2 seconds it takes me to fly into a scathing sort of cruel rage, hot or even worse analytically cold, and begin my process of arrogance, selfishness and unthinking cruelty.
more than that, though, more hurtful than my hairtrigger piss-off time, is how fast i bounce back. i am arrogant about my bounce-back time; it is an act of selfishness that allows me to bounce back so damn quick, and it's also an act of unthinking cruelty to do so. i can get angry, i can roar and rail and bang things around, and then i'll be all right ten minutes later. i'll be happy. i'll be grinning. all the while the other party will still be losing white blood cells over my latest bout.
i have to admit, i say all this with a certain glee. i'm gleeful because i am, yes, selfish, arrogant, and unthinkingly cruel.
*
DECEIT.
i had to think twice about writing this one. actually i wrote it, erased it, rewrote it. writing deceit down kinda blows the cover, doesn't it?
i am DECEITFUL. i have to be. otherwise people would know i'm arrogant, hypocritical, unthinkingly cruel, selfish, and tempestuous. or rather, they'd know all this, and not forgive me for it. the only reason i can think that i still have friends is that somehow i've managed to mask my roaring shrieking screaming flaws as some sort of CHARM, some sort of CHARISMA, for god's sakes, and somehow people around me still like/love me.
which i love.
because i'm selfish, arrogant, hypocritical, unthinkingly cruel, tempestuous, and deceitful.
i'm sure there's more, but i'm sick of this adolescent whining.
since that's the case, fuck, i'll leave it up. heh. remind myself.
***
flaws:
ARROGANCE.
my god, do i have this in buckets. this very post is an act of arrogance. i'm writing it because rachel wrote one and i was like, ooo, i wanna do that. i wanna shake out my dirty laundry because i assume the world cares and wants to see!
i am an insufferably arrogant bastard. i can't help it - whup there i go again, the arrogance of pinning my blame on some undefined Other, which i can neither touch nor change, thus freeing me to be as arrogant as i like.
i am arrogant. i think i am the end-all-be-all of things. i think i am wiser because i am older; i think i am better because i'm going to make more money. i think my point of the view is the correct one, no matter how contradictory or self-contradictory, even, it might be.
i think my schooling and the letters after my name mean i am smarter than anyone else who doesn't have these things. hell, i think i'm smarter than everyone because i'm damned good at BSing crap (more arrogance - reducing the hard work of teachers everywhere in giving assignments and appreciating what i've given in return to mere chaff, bullshit, nothing of importance - EVEN IF I DID WORK HARD ON IT), because i'm damned good at taking standardized tests (1510 SAT, 36ACT, 41 MCAT, 2250 combined GRE, IQ in the 99.9th percentile - WORSHIP MY FUCKIN EGO), because i can't help but flaunt this and - UGH
okay i am now honestly drowning in my own arrogance. i can't stop it! look, there it is again! shifting of blame, unstoppable floods of arrogance; i am the niagara of egotism.
i am so arrogant that i think arrogance is a GOOD thing.
*
HYPOCRISY.
is that even a fucking word? no matter. i am also hypocritical. while i am allowed to be arrogant, no one else is. i can't STAND fucking arrogance in other people; i tear it to shreds, i shred it apart. i can't stand it, and yet i'm so arrogant i don't think i'd be able to stand living with me.
*
UNTHINKING CRUELTY.
i am. unbelievably, unthinkingly cruel. unintentionally, maybe, but perhaps that's just me pinning the blame elsewhere again. i excel at ripping things to shreds. all this goes back to arrogance, really. i think my POV is the only correct one, and i never hesitate to rip into another POV to show why it's wrong.
i love to debate; i love to fight; i debate deeply personal things with a careless, analytical glee, and i shred deeply personal beliefs like they were words on paper.
i do not care that this may hurt people while i'm doing it. i'm just happy that i can do it. i'm just happy that i can shout down anyone else and impose my will upon them.
*
SELFISHNESS.
this is an extension of all of the above. i am INCREDIBLY selfish. in my book, it seems to be me myself and i. i think i'm capable of caring for people, loving, all that, but even if i say i'll take a bullet for someone/something, i think if it should come down to the wire, i wouldn't sacrifice myself for ANYTHING.
*
TEMPESTUOUSITY.
another made up word. this is me in a nutshell. i think for the most part people consider me mellow, but god help you if i'm in a bad mood and you accidentally say the wrong thing and don't realize it in the 0.2 seconds it takes me to fly into a scathing sort of cruel rage, hot or even worse analytically cold, and begin my process of arrogance, selfishness and unthinking cruelty.
more than that, though, more hurtful than my hairtrigger piss-off time, is how fast i bounce back. i am arrogant about my bounce-back time; it is an act of selfishness that allows me to bounce back so damn quick, and it's also an act of unthinking cruelty to do so. i can get angry, i can roar and rail and bang things around, and then i'll be all right ten minutes later. i'll be happy. i'll be grinning. all the while the other party will still be losing white blood cells over my latest bout.
i have to admit, i say all this with a certain glee. i'm gleeful because i am, yes, selfish, arrogant, and unthinkingly cruel.
*
DECEIT.
i had to think twice about writing this one. actually i wrote it, erased it, rewrote it. writing deceit down kinda blows the cover, doesn't it?
i am DECEITFUL. i have to be. otherwise people would know i'm arrogant, hypocritical, unthinkingly cruel, selfish, and tempestuous. or rather, they'd know all this, and not forgive me for it. the only reason i can think that i still have friends is that somehow i've managed to mask my roaring shrieking screaming flaws as some sort of CHARM, some sort of CHARISMA, for god's sakes, and somehow people around me still like/love me.
which i love.
because i'm selfish, arrogant, hypocritical, unthinkingly cruel, tempestuous, and deceitful.
i'm sure there's more, but i'm sick of this adolescent whining.
It occurs to me that I like walking around at night, outside, and alone. it's somehow easier to think and let cool creative thoughts fill your head when you're alone and the world is dark and quiet than it is during the day, or when you're with someone. well, the latter is obvious, as you have to expend energy and thought to keep up a conversation most the time, but the day thing really matters too.
during the day everything's bright and you can see everything and everyone, and it all crushes in on your mind and takes up your attention. you walk down the street and you see stuff that triggers thought. you think, hmm do i want that CD or not? oh wow that smells good i'm hungry. nah wait i'm not, just greedy. damn nice car. shitload stereo, sucky song though. someone turn it off--yeowza, there goes hot girls in tight shirts.
stuff like that. you know? it clutters up your mind, and it's all mundane and everyday, and there's no room for anything else.
at night, though, it's different. it's all dark, so most of the world is murky and indistinct. most people are in their homes, and if you're walking in a place without stores, that sensory overload is taken away too. what's left is just yourself, your thoughts, and wherever they lead you.
i'm talking about this because i was walking from brianna's door to my car, and then from my car to my apartment building, and i was pretty late and everything was quiet. it was great. it was kinda cloudy today, partly cloudy i think it's called, and all these sort of soft, indistinct-edged clouds - they have them a lot in late summer/early fall in the bay, when the summer fog is just starting to turn into the winter clouds - were floating overhead, all nuclear orange from the city lights. that sounds awful, but it's beautiful in a odd sort of way. took me back.
all of a sudden i was remembering a summer i spent at stanford once. stanford has this church, the stanford memorial church, which is this huge, beautiful, spanish-influenced (all of stanford is spanish-influenced, which is great because it's not all faux-classical like most other big expensive good private schools are. it's a very californian school. everything's golden and red-tiled, and arches abound.)
anyway, i digress.
so, memorial church. mem-chu for short. the way stanford is set up, everything's concentric. heading into it, there's no mistake that you are entering Stanford University. you have this gate waaaay out, like a half mile, and then from there on out the road is straight and lined with humongous palm trees, each one worth like 50 grand. it goes straight up to the oval, which is where the road circles around in a, well, oval, the center of which is lined with flowers and a lawn.
beyond the oval, it's pedestrians only. you go through the big golden-stone arches into the outer quad, which has some rodin statues, and then you go through more arches into the huge, gorgeous inner quad. the ground is golden-brown flagstones, and there's a big sun or a compass or something laid down straight in the middle. f'ing amazing. this is all in a straight line, btw - palm drive (that's the name of the street), axis of the oval, middle arch of outer quad, middle arch of inner quad, and center of the church.
behind the church, off to the side, is a secluded little glade surrounded by trees, in which there are two semicircular stone benches. me and my friends would stay out all hours of the night in palo alto, and coming back toward the dorm, we'd pass through there at 3am, not a soul around, night's silence all around except for us and those nuclear orange clouds overhead, laughing and half-drunk on exhaustion, stumbling across the massive quad into the little glade that was a sort of refuge.
and this one night, me and my friends - two of them, jon and helen, were a couple - stopped in the glade and hung out and just talked about everything and nothing. helen was a drama major, or an english major, or both, and she had lines and lines from shakespeare memorized. so we were sitting there in this little glade on the stone benches, all in a loose circle, some laying down on the benches, looking up at the stars through the trees and the clouds, and helen recited shakespeare for us while jon lay with his head on her lap.
hamlet othello macbeth and caesar, lines and lines. i couldn't believe how many she knew. i think i was vaguely jealous. not enough to have any true enmity toward my friends, but i wished i had a girlfriend whose lap i could lay my head in, and watch her profile cast against the stars while she recited classical literature, the words of the ages, for me.
during the day everything's bright and you can see everything and everyone, and it all crushes in on your mind and takes up your attention. you walk down the street and you see stuff that triggers thought. you think, hmm do i want that CD or not? oh wow that smells good i'm hungry. nah wait i'm not, just greedy. damn nice car. shitload stereo, sucky song though. someone turn it off--yeowza, there goes hot girls in tight shirts.
stuff like that. you know? it clutters up your mind, and it's all mundane and everyday, and there's no room for anything else.
at night, though, it's different. it's all dark, so most of the world is murky and indistinct. most people are in their homes, and if you're walking in a place without stores, that sensory overload is taken away too. what's left is just yourself, your thoughts, and wherever they lead you.
i'm talking about this because i was walking from brianna's door to my car, and then from my car to my apartment building, and i was pretty late and everything was quiet. it was great. it was kinda cloudy today, partly cloudy i think it's called, and all these sort of soft, indistinct-edged clouds - they have them a lot in late summer/early fall in the bay, when the summer fog is just starting to turn into the winter clouds - were floating overhead, all nuclear orange from the city lights. that sounds awful, but it's beautiful in a odd sort of way. took me back.
all of a sudden i was remembering a summer i spent at stanford once. stanford has this church, the stanford memorial church, which is this huge, beautiful, spanish-influenced (all of stanford is spanish-influenced, which is great because it's not all faux-classical like most other big expensive good private schools are. it's a very californian school. everything's golden and red-tiled, and arches abound.)
anyway, i digress.
so, memorial church. mem-chu for short. the way stanford is set up, everything's concentric. heading into it, there's no mistake that you are entering Stanford University. you have this gate waaaay out, like a half mile, and then from there on out the road is straight and lined with humongous palm trees, each one worth like 50 grand. it goes straight up to the oval, which is where the road circles around in a, well, oval, the center of which is lined with flowers and a lawn.
beyond the oval, it's pedestrians only. you go through the big golden-stone arches into the outer quad, which has some rodin statues, and then you go through more arches into the huge, gorgeous inner quad. the ground is golden-brown flagstones, and there's a big sun or a compass or something laid down straight in the middle. f'ing amazing. this is all in a straight line, btw - palm drive (that's the name of the street), axis of the oval, middle arch of outer quad, middle arch of inner quad, and center of the church.
behind the church, off to the side, is a secluded little glade surrounded by trees, in which there are two semicircular stone benches. me and my friends would stay out all hours of the night in palo alto, and coming back toward the dorm, we'd pass through there at 3am, not a soul around, night's silence all around except for us and those nuclear orange clouds overhead, laughing and half-drunk on exhaustion, stumbling across the massive quad into the little glade that was a sort of refuge.
and this one night, me and my friends - two of them, jon and helen, were a couple - stopped in the glade and hung out and just talked about everything and nothing. helen was a drama major, or an english major, or both, and she had lines and lines from shakespeare memorized. so we were sitting there in this little glade on the stone benches, all in a loose circle, some laying down on the benches, looking up at the stars through the trees and the clouds, and helen recited shakespeare for us while jon lay with his head on her lap.
hamlet othello macbeth and caesar, lines and lines. i couldn't believe how many she knew. i think i was vaguely jealous. not enough to have any true enmity toward my friends, but i wished i had a girlfriend whose lap i could lay my head in, and watch her profile cast against the stars while she recited classical literature, the words of the ages, for me.
this will be short. i'm tired, and i need to sleep, and i'm getting up in about 5 hours.
this is about the song, firefly (faye wong). great song. in chinese, though, so be sure to get the translated lyrics. it's worth it. the song is good; the lyrics make it great.
this is about this line, to be precise:
by day you don't even see me/but by night there is only you and i
you kinda need to read it in context of the rest of the song, so i'll tack the entirety of the lyrics to the end.
is it just me, or that an incredibly evocative line? i know, i associate all the songs i love with 1) sex or 2) tragedy. but there's already been an entry on why that is, and the link between sex tragedy emotion and music.
no need to go over old topics.
but come on now. by day you don't even see me. by night there is only you and i.
fucking sad! i can't explain it, but i'm sure you know what i mean. and so...imageristic. haha, i made a new word. but like, listening to it, i can almost see it: daytime, busy-ness, big city, skyscrapers, two people; somehow related, see each other often...casual lovers, or so the guy thinks, never for a moment imagining it could be more (or maybe knowing it, but ignoring it) - the way their eyes don't ever really meet; the way her eyes seek his out, but his gloss right over her like she wasn't even there, moving on to smile at someone else.
then, night: light's gone, no moon, no stars. inside, bedroom, everything's pitch black, utterly black, and all there is, is silence and ragged/languorous....fuck i can't spell that word - you know what i mean - breathing; touching, skin on skin, and the brief green flares of light behind the eyelids sparked by the caress of a lover. nothing else in all the world. and in those moments he knows she loves him, and he knows he loves her, too, but what does it matter? the sun comes up; he forgets.
by day you don't even see me, she tells him, but he doesn't hear it. by night, there is only you and i.
ag! i can't put it into words.
another subject, just something i want to jot down before i forget again. there was a girl in my third-grade class who sat next to me a lot. in retrospect, a startlingly pretty little girl. blonde hair, slender and small...blue eyes. that's the key - her blue eyes, which were the bluest eyes i have ever seen before or after.
her name was vanessa. i shouldn't forget that.
i've spoken of the winter sky here in the bay before, i think - that's the only blue i can compare it to, though the two shades are nothing alike. hers were a deeper blue, and clearer; the sky is a hard-edged, flat/deep thing, without facets - or the whole thing is a facet too big to see the edges of. her eyes weren't like that. i know i've read it somewhere, limpid blue pools for eyes, and it's so stupid and cliche, but that's exactly how her eyes were. unbelievable, the color. even now i can close my eyes and seen them in perfect clarity (blue - not electric, not shocking - just...so vibrant, clear, but dark too, and with a large dark pupil, threads of dark interlaced among the deep, rich, full, bright hue; god, it's hard to describe), though i've forgotten the details of her face.
it's easy to blow this out of proportion. it's so easy to call her my first crush. it'd be so much more dramatic and bittersweet. but i have to be honest and say she wasn't. she didn't like me much, and i didn't particularly care about her, i don't think. it's easy for me to wax poetic on the hue of her eyes, too, but that's only because i can't put it into words, so i use a vast abundance to try to make up for it.
i'll say this much, and this will be the last on the subject of the color itself: SURREAL.
so anyway, one day, i was sitting next to her - i remember this clearly - on the floor, while our teacher, Ms. Redling, was teaching us something, or reading a story, or something. that doesn't matter much. i wasn't listening anyway.
i was looking at her eyes. god knows why. this was before puppy love, btw, so i had a healthy contempt of girls, and while i think i did understand that her eyes were beautiful, it didn't really matter. she was still a girl (ew, gross), etc...but still, i was looking at her, at her eyes.
and all of a sudden, i had this thought: so that's what blue eyes are really like. it wasn't profound, and it wasn't melodramatic. bells didn't ring in my head. it wasn't an epiphany. it was very natural, just a passing thought i happen to remember. i, very simply, honestly thought that i had never really seen blue eyes before after all. i honestly thought i had been fooled all along, and had suddenly discovered what blue eyes were REALLY like, and all that i had thought were blue before that was just another shade of gray, duller, not as real.
i thought the shade of her eyes defined blueness. there was never a doubt in my mind; her eyes were the real deal. blue. all else that had come before was only a very paltry imitation.
this is about the song, firefly (faye wong). great song. in chinese, though, so be sure to get the translated lyrics. it's worth it. the song is good; the lyrics make it great.
this is about this line, to be precise:
by day you don't even see me/but by night there is only you and i
you kinda need to read it in context of the rest of the song, so i'll tack the entirety of the lyrics to the end.
is it just me, or that an incredibly evocative line? i know, i associate all the songs i love with 1) sex or 2) tragedy. but there's already been an entry on why that is, and the link between sex tragedy emotion and music.
no need to go over old topics.
but come on now. by day you don't even see me. by night there is only you and i.
fucking sad! i can't explain it, but i'm sure you know what i mean. and so...imageristic. haha, i made a new word. but like, listening to it, i can almost see it: daytime, busy-ness, big city, skyscrapers, two people; somehow related, see each other often...casual lovers, or so the guy thinks, never for a moment imagining it could be more (or maybe knowing it, but ignoring it) - the way their eyes don't ever really meet; the way her eyes seek his out, but his gloss right over her like she wasn't even there, moving on to smile at someone else.
then, night: light's gone, no moon, no stars. inside, bedroom, everything's pitch black, utterly black, and all there is, is silence and ragged/languorous....fuck i can't spell that word - you know what i mean - breathing; touching, skin on skin, and the brief green flares of light behind the eyelids sparked by the caress of a lover. nothing else in all the world. and in those moments he knows she loves him, and he knows he loves her, too, but what does it matter? the sun comes up; he forgets.
by day you don't even see me, she tells him, but he doesn't hear it. by night, there is only you and i.
ag! i can't put it into words.
another subject, just something i want to jot down before i forget again. there was a girl in my third-grade class who sat next to me a lot. in retrospect, a startlingly pretty little girl. blonde hair, slender and small...blue eyes. that's the key - her blue eyes, which were the bluest eyes i have ever seen before or after.
her name was vanessa. i shouldn't forget that.
i've spoken of the winter sky here in the bay before, i think - that's the only blue i can compare it to, though the two shades are nothing alike. hers were a deeper blue, and clearer; the sky is a hard-edged, flat/deep thing, without facets - or the whole thing is a facet too big to see the edges of. her eyes weren't like that. i know i've read it somewhere, limpid blue pools for eyes, and it's so stupid and cliche, but that's exactly how her eyes were. unbelievable, the color. even now i can close my eyes and seen them in perfect clarity (blue - not electric, not shocking - just...so vibrant, clear, but dark too, and with a large dark pupil, threads of dark interlaced among the deep, rich, full, bright hue; god, it's hard to describe), though i've forgotten the details of her face.
it's easy to blow this out of proportion. it's so easy to call her my first crush. it'd be so much more dramatic and bittersweet. but i have to be honest and say she wasn't. she didn't like me much, and i didn't particularly care about her, i don't think. it's easy for me to wax poetic on the hue of her eyes, too, but that's only because i can't put it into words, so i use a vast abundance to try to make up for it.
i'll say this much, and this will be the last on the subject of the color itself: SURREAL.
so anyway, one day, i was sitting next to her - i remember this clearly - on the floor, while our teacher, Ms. Redling, was teaching us something, or reading a story, or something. that doesn't matter much. i wasn't listening anyway.
i was looking at her eyes. god knows why. this was before puppy love, btw, so i had a healthy contempt of girls, and while i think i did understand that her eyes were beautiful, it didn't really matter. she was still a girl (ew, gross), etc...but still, i was looking at her, at her eyes.
and all of a sudden, i had this thought: so that's what blue eyes are really like. it wasn't profound, and it wasn't melodramatic. bells didn't ring in my head. it wasn't an epiphany. it was very natural, just a passing thought i happen to remember. i, very simply, honestly thought that i had never really seen blue eyes before after all. i honestly thought i had been fooled all along, and had suddenly discovered what blue eyes were REALLY like, and all that i had thought were blue before that was just another shade of gray, duller, not as real.
i thought the shade of her eyes defined blueness. there was never a doubt in my mind; her eyes were the real deal. blue. all else that had come before was only a very paltry imitation.
Just...babbling.
*
Sunsets. this one night in san diego, when i was 17, i took my dog for a walk. we had canyons near our house, so i took him for a walk there. looked a lot like steppe-land. grasslands.
it was summer, so the grass was long and yellow, and the hills rolled and tumbled down from black mtn, which is this 1000-ft tall "mountain" in the area. not big, but you grow to like the way it looks. but anyway, there's this sorta frontier there at the edge of the canyon.
there's Del Mar on the west near the sea, and Penasquitos, where i live, inland, and canyon in between. so there's this squiggly line where the houses end and the canyons begin, and all the way at the horizon you can see del mar, and beyond, the sea. so that's what it looks like, this line of houses and then just open canyon. and the farther into the canyon you go the less you can see the houses until eventually you see nothing but canyons, some stands of eucalyptus trees, some parts where the grass grows green, and in the ravines, little streams.
(or actually, they were mud. but there were still reeds)
that night, there were these clouds in the sky. streaking out of the west in long strips. and when the sun set, they went red. and the whole. fucking. sky was on fire.
i'd never seen anything like it, and i haven't since. i've seen sunsets were half the sky was red - that happens a lot. but not when there was red all the way into the eastern horizon. and it was right before a storm, right? and in san diego the storms roll out of the east. so you followed these streaking clouds east, and there were these huge, huge round thunderheads sitting there
and there was me and my dog beneath this incredible sky. in the middle of this canyon. silence and birdsong all around.
*
When i was in fifth grade i knew this chick named carole. she had greasy black hair and a really raucous laugh. i didn't like her. once we were on the playground crawling through a tunnel in the jungle gym, or something like that, and i had the bad luck to be behind her. her underwear had a big yellow stain on it.
since she was the first girl other than my sister whose underwear i'd seen, it put me off the idea for a long time.
*
When i was maybe eight, my dad took me for a hike. it started out with this trail winding up the side of a mountain, and the pebbles were loose. there was no handrail to the right; the left was the rock face of the cliff; the path seemed about a foot wide to me. i slipped and fell and i was dead certain i was going to die. but i didn't.
when i got to the top of that mountain, the trail wound into the forest and it was damp and dark and peaceful and earthy-smelling, but i kept wondering where the cliff went. it didn't make sense to me then, that half the world could be a cliff one minute and not the next. it makes sense now, of course. we simply passed through the summit.
*
Heh. once, in kindergarten, this kid reached for the scissors i wanted, so without a thought i sank my teeth into his arm. he howled. i was immensely proud of myself, especially since i could see the marks from my teeth in his forearm.
*
I've been so high/I've been so down
Up to the sky/Down to the ground.
It doesn't sound like Madonna. But it's so. SO. heartbreakingly beautiful. such a great song. i love it so much. it reminds me of...oh...shadows in blue and green and shades of pale...slow-motion waterfalls that are water, but more like sheets of fabric. not silk, not that smooth. something a little coarser, with texture. linen? is that what it's called? it reminds me of looking back through that waterfall after you've died at the world you've left behind. and it reminds me of some last dance with a lover while your world goes gray and you lose yourself. and it reminds me of making love beneath the northern lights while the world burns away to ash, somewhere.
it's a fascinating song. it's called Paradise.
*
Las Vegas.
it's kinda sad. i'm always disappointed by Vegas. i love driving there over the desert. all the white heat and the asphalt and stuff? and i always love Vegas when i'm leaving and i look back and it's all glittering and blatantly artificial. but then when i'm in it, i HATE it.
i think it's because i love the idea of las vegas. imagine - a city almost completely devoted to the vice of gambling, with prostitution walking side by side along with stage magic, exotic animals, and the ever-pervasive dry heat of the desert. Las Vegas. this completely man-made city of sin rising out of the desert, all glitz and glitter and gambling and whoring. it's attractive in a gaudy, perverse, wicked way. it sounds sandy, stifling hot, crackling and blistering with electricity and neon lights and desert heat. it sounds corrupt. it sounds like the electric serpent east of eden.
eden would be california.
but then you get there. and there's a billion other tourists just like you, with their Illinois plates and their station wagons full of luggage and crying babies, wandering around clutching their children's hands and telling them not to get lost, stealing peeks at the Hustler magazines in the newstands as they pass. looking for the fabled city of sin.
but it's not there.
it's not there.
it's overrun by tourists looking for it, and it's lost in its own glitz and hype. and really, it's sad. it's a mirage. you can only see it when you're outside, and dreaming, and it disappears when you get there. all you have left is an empty wallet.
*
It rains so much in the Bay that i had dreams that the world was flooding, just like Noah's Ark. i remember looking out the window and seeing rain pouring down so thick it was hard to see through it. i remember it at night, looking out at the ivy dark green and soaked and wet, pounded in a monsoon-sized rainstorm, listening to the thunder boom once before the sky cracked open.
i remember it during the day, even better. it was like a haze. i remember the mist pouring over the mountaintops and tendriling between the eucalyptus at the summits of those mountain ranges. and the way the trees looked, especially the cherry trees in spring when the blossoms were this shocking, vulnerable pink against the dark, dark, dark brown of the wet, slick bark. and how the ones with greenery seemed so much more vibrantly green because it was humid and the sky was dark. and the bay in the distance, when it began to rain and the water falling made the sea ripple in millions of tiny places, and made it seem shimmering silver to me far away.
sometimes i think i love San Francisco all the more because i'm not in it, because when i go to the east bay i see it from afar, lit from behind by the setting sun which makes the fog rolling in under the silhouetted Golden Gate Bridge glow luminously silver-white. and the city is white, too, at times like that...glowing white, but also backlit.
but it's not like las vegas. i love it just as much when i'm in it. driving into it, there's nothing like seeing that great city rear up before you on the Bay Bridge, or appear out of nowhere around the mountain. or, even, taking the BART up and suddenly rising out in the midst of the pigeons and the people and the towering, towering skyscrapers.
*
i don't have anything else to say tonight. except that sometimes when i'm awake in the middle of the night looking out at the world that's all quiet and dark, i really love everything.
*
Sunsets. this one night in san diego, when i was 17, i took my dog for a walk. we had canyons near our house, so i took him for a walk there. looked a lot like steppe-land. grasslands.
it was summer, so the grass was long and yellow, and the hills rolled and tumbled down from black mtn, which is this 1000-ft tall "mountain" in the area. not big, but you grow to like the way it looks. but anyway, there's this sorta frontier there at the edge of the canyon.
there's Del Mar on the west near the sea, and Penasquitos, where i live, inland, and canyon in between. so there's this squiggly line where the houses end and the canyons begin, and all the way at the horizon you can see del mar, and beyond, the sea. so that's what it looks like, this line of houses and then just open canyon. and the farther into the canyon you go the less you can see the houses until eventually you see nothing but canyons, some stands of eucalyptus trees, some parts where the grass grows green, and in the ravines, little streams.
(or actually, they were mud. but there were still reeds)
that night, there were these clouds in the sky. streaking out of the west in long strips. and when the sun set, they went red. and the whole. fucking. sky was on fire.
i'd never seen anything like it, and i haven't since. i've seen sunsets were half the sky was red - that happens a lot. but not when there was red all the way into the eastern horizon. and it was right before a storm, right? and in san diego the storms roll out of the east. so you followed these streaking clouds east, and there were these huge, huge round thunderheads sitting there
and there was me and my dog beneath this incredible sky. in the middle of this canyon. silence and birdsong all around.
*
When i was in fifth grade i knew this chick named carole. she had greasy black hair and a really raucous laugh. i didn't like her. once we were on the playground crawling through a tunnel in the jungle gym, or something like that, and i had the bad luck to be behind her. her underwear had a big yellow stain on it.
since she was the first girl other than my sister whose underwear i'd seen, it put me off the idea for a long time.
*
When i was maybe eight, my dad took me for a hike. it started out with this trail winding up the side of a mountain, and the pebbles were loose. there was no handrail to the right; the left was the rock face of the cliff; the path seemed about a foot wide to me. i slipped and fell and i was dead certain i was going to die. but i didn't.
when i got to the top of that mountain, the trail wound into the forest and it was damp and dark and peaceful and earthy-smelling, but i kept wondering where the cliff went. it didn't make sense to me then, that half the world could be a cliff one minute and not the next. it makes sense now, of course. we simply passed through the summit.
*
Heh. once, in kindergarten, this kid reached for the scissors i wanted, so without a thought i sank my teeth into his arm. he howled. i was immensely proud of myself, especially since i could see the marks from my teeth in his forearm.
*
I've been so high/I've been so down
Up to the sky/Down to the ground.
It doesn't sound like Madonna. But it's so. SO. heartbreakingly beautiful. such a great song. i love it so much. it reminds me of...oh...shadows in blue and green and shades of pale...slow-motion waterfalls that are water, but more like sheets of fabric. not silk, not that smooth. something a little coarser, with texture. linen? is that what it's called? it reminds me of looking back through that waterfall after you've died at the world you've left behind. and it reminds me of some last dance with a lover while your world goes gray and you lose yourself. and it reminds me of making love beneath the northern lights while the world burns away to ash, somewhere.
it's a fascinating song. it's called Paradise.
*
Las Vegas.
it's kinda sad. i'm always disappointed by Vegas. i love driving there over the desert. all the white heat and the asphalt and stuff? and i always love Vegas when i'm leaving and i look back and it's all glittering and blatantly artificial. but then when i'm in it, i HATE it.
i think it's because i love the idea of las vegas. imagine - a city almost completely devoted to the vice of gambling, with prostitution walking side by side along with stage magic, exotic animals, and the ever-pervasive dry heat of the desert. Las Vegas. this completely man-made city of sin rising out of the desert, all glitz and glitter and gambling and whoring. it's attractive in a gaudy, perverse, wicked way. it sounds sandy, stifling hot, crackling and blistering with electricity and neon lights and desert heat. it sounds corrupt. it sounds like the electric serpent east of eden.
eden would be california.
but then you get there. and there's a billion other tourists just like you, with their Illinois plates and their station wagons full of luggage and crying babies, wandering around clutching their children's hands and telling them not to get lost, stealing peeks at the Hustler magazines in the newstands as they pass. looking for the fabled city of sin.
but it's not there.
it's not there.
it's overrun by tourists looking for it, and it's lost in its own glitz and hype. and really, it's sad. it's a mirage. you can only see it when you're outside, and dreaming, and it disappears when you get there. all you have left is an empty wallet.
*
It rains so much in the Bay that i had dreams that the world was flooding, just like Noah's Ark. i remember looking out the window and seeing rain pouring down so thick it was hard to see through it. i remember it at night, looking out at the ivy dark green and soaked and wet, pounded in a monsoon-sized rainstorm, listening to the thunder boom once before the sky cracked open.
i remember it during the day, even better. it was like a haze. i remember the mist pouring over the mountaintops and tendriling between the eucalyptus at the summits of those mountain ranges. and the way the trees looked, especially the cherry trees in spring when the blossoms were this shocking, vulnerable pink against the dark, dark, dark brown of the wet, slick bark. and how the ones with greenery seemed so much more vibrantly green because it was humid and the sky was dark. and the bay in the distance, when it began to rain and the water falling made the sea ripple in millions of tiny places, and made it seem shimmering silver to me far away.
sometimes i think i love San Francisco all the more because i'm not in it, because when i go to the east bay i see it from afar, lit from behind by the setting sun which makes the fog rolling in under the silhouetted Golden Gate Bridge glow luminously silver-white. and the city is white, too, at times like that...glowing white, but also backlit.
but it's not like las vegas. i love it just as much when i'm in it. driving into it, there's nothing like seeing that great city rear up before you on the Bay Bridge, or appear out of nowhere around the mountain. or, even, taking the BART up and suddenly rising out in the midst of the pigeons and the people and the towering, towering skyscrapers.
*
i don't have anything else to say tonight. except that sometimes when i'm awake in the middle of the night looking out at the world that's all quiet and dark, i really love everything.
I was heating a Marie Callender's TV dinner--country fried steak with mashed potatoes and gravy--and for some strange, inexplicable reason I suddenly remembered this little snatch of a moment from my childhood. I guess I was maybe thirteen, fourteen then, just starting to rebel against parental authority. Actually, by then I was just starting to really rebel. I'd been subtly rebelling for a while. But anyway, the point is for some reason my parents and I weren't getting along all the time anymore, especially my mother and I. We used to be really, really close...and we still are, I guess, but it's different now that I've grown up and the change came in my teenage years when I sort of pushed Mom away and tried to stand on my own.
The way I say it makes it sound justified and normal, but it's really not a time I'm proud of. Now that I think about it, it must've really hurt my mother. Impatience, surliness, snappishness, all that great teenager stuff...
I've drifted off the subject again.
My memory: thirteen, fourteen years old. Lotsa tension most the time. My mom's a pretty frugal person. Now my parents are pretty well-off, I'd have to admit, but they weren't always like that. When I was a toddler we lived in a two-bedroom apartment and worked our way up from there. I won't say how much my parents' house is worth now, but I will say I'm damn proud of my parents. My father's really a pretty brilliant guy, and incredibly hardworking, and my mother is the glue that holds the family together. They've come a long, long way in the space of twenty years.
And I've gotten off topic yet again.
Anyway, my mom's always been kind of frugal. If she wasn't, we wouldn't be where we are today. But along with that is this sorta curiosity to try new things. As a result, when she sees a big sale at the grocery store for something she isn't really sure of, she usually buys it and takes it home to test out hoping we'd like it.
Anyway, this memory comes from this time when my mother bought these instant mashed potatoes home. Actually, they weren't mashed potatoes. They were seasoned potato flakes, or something. I think my dad was on a business trip, and my sister was at a sleepover, so it was just me and my mom. We were making these potato flake things, mixing milk and laughing and talking.
I don't know why it suddenly came back to me, or why I'm even writing (so disjointedly) about it, but I think I should write it down because it's a very bittersweet experience. The memory itself is beautiful. My mom's one of those people who deserves more joy than she has. Not that she's depressed, or anything--just that if we're proportionate, then for all the good that she does, she should be repaid with more joy in her life than a human life can hold. But the memory was one of those times I like to think my mom was really happy. And that's why it's a beautiful memory.
It makes me so sad to think about this, but sorta in a good way. I can't even really explain why. It has something to do with the fact that she was trying to save money, but still hoping that her family wouldn't get the short end of the stick because of it, or something...and I really can't put it into words, the whys of it all. It just is.
I think I'm also sad because it reminds me of an earlier, better time. Early childhood. Best friends. Nowadays she's my mother, and I love her for that, but way in the beginning when I was little she was my mother, my best friend, and my hero. That's how it was like in this memory of mine. She was my mom, my best friend and my hero for a little while, but then the general timeframe of the memory was when I started pushing her away, and by the time I woke up and realized what I was doing I'd already distanced myself too much for her to be a best friend and a hero anymore.
Argh. I think I'm kind of rambling in circles. It's pretty irrational, how much I miss my mom right now. I almost wish we didn't have to grow up. Didn't have to go through the teenage years where we start exploring independence.
...
I'd like to call my mom right now and just say, "Hi, Mom. I love you." --and really mean it. I'd really like to do that.
But it's 3:30am. So I'll just write in here and go to sleep. When I read this tomorrow I'll probably wonder what was wrong with me tonight...heh.
Well, okay. Bedtime. Goodnight.
The way I say it makes it sound justified and normal, but it's really not a time I'm proud of. Now that I think about it, it must've really hurt my mother. Impatience, surliness, snappishness, all that great teenager stuff...
I've drifted off the subject again.
My memory: thirteen, fourteen years old. Lotsa tension most the time. My mom's a pretty frugal person. Now my parents are pretty well-off, I'd have to admit, but they weren't always like that. When I was a toddler we lived in a two-bedroom apartment and worked our way up from there. I won't say how much my parents' house is worth now, but I will say I'm damn proud of my parents. My father's really a pretty brilliant guy, and incredibly hardworking, and my mother is the glue that holds the family together. They've come a long, long way in the space of twenty years.
And I've gotten off topic yet again.
Anyway, my mom's always been kind of frugal. If she wasn't, we wouldn't be where we are today. But along with that is this sorta curiosity to try new things. As a result, when she sees a big sale at the grocery store for something she isn't really sure of, she usually buys it and takes it home to test out hoping we'd like it.
Anyway, this memory comes from this time when my mother bought these instant mashed potatoes home. Actually, they weren't mashed potatoes. They were seasoned potato flakes, or something. I think my dad was on a business trip, and my sister was at a sleepover, so it was just me and my mom. We were making these potato flake things, mixing milk and laughing and talking.
I don't know why it suddenly came back to me, or why I'm even writing (so disjointedly) about it, but I think I should write it down because it's a very bittersweet experience. The memory itself is beautiful. My mom's one of those people who deserves more joy than she has. Not that she's depressed, or anything--just that if we're proportionate, then for all the good that she does, she should be repaid with more joy in her life than a human life can hold. But the memory was one of those times I like to think my mom was really happy. And that's why it's a beautiful memory.
It makes me so sad to think about this, but sorta in a good way. I can't even really explain why. It has something to do with the fact that she was trying to save money, but still hoping that her family wouldn't get the short end of the stick because of it, or something...and I really can't put it into words, the whys of it all. It just is.
I think I'm also sad because it reminds me of an earlier, better time. Early childhood. Best friends. Nowadays she's my mother, and I love her for that, but way in the beginning when I was little she was my mother, my best friend, and my hero. That's how it was like in this memory of mine. She was my mom, my best friend and my hero for a little while, but then the general timeframe of the memory was when I started pushing her away, and by the time I woke up and realized what I was doing I'd already distanced myself too much for her to be a best friend and a hero anymore.
Argh. I think I'm kind of rambling in circles. It's pretty irrational, how much I miss my mom right now. I almost wish we didn't have to grow up. Didn't have to go through the teenage years where we start exploring independence.
...
I'd like to call my mom right now and just say, "Hi, Mom. I love you." --and really mean it. I'd really like to do that.
But it's 3:30am. So I'll just write in here and go to sleep. When I read this tomorrow I'll probably wonder what was wrong with me tonight...heh.
Well, okay. Bedtime. Goodnight.
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