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What are you doing here? Especially when I wrote a new story for all of you right here. And that's really all I have to say.
Tuesday, July 24, 2001
Cut ups Did I mention one of funniest things that happened this week? I was going into the deli where the Asian ladies love my pink linen shirt with embroidery and an older lady was standing out near the fruit, flowers and newspapers. She was looking at the New York Times cover page head lines and saw the one about the Tax Cut we are supposedly getting. And she cracked up. She read the headline and just started laughing. I wanted to hug her.
A few people at work noticed under a dollar less in taxes taken out of their recent pay check. I noticed that exact same amount that I quickly contemplate which bills to use it on. Coincidentally, these people are Associates, and therefore make more money. Funny, a Republican making tax cuts that seem to only apply to those making a certain amount. The up side is our apparent refund checks of several hundred are to be sent based on Social Security Number. Never before have I been so proud that my SSN starts with a 1!
Saturday, July 14, 2001
Nice Bowler I must vent this pent up frustration. I must let everyone know how completely outrageous this situation is. Sunday, on Sex in the City, Sarah Jessica Parker was wearing a brown leather old man's cap with the snap that goes from the hat itself to the bill of the cap. My grandpa used to wear caps like this and he looked very dapper in them. I think SJP was wearing the hat with suspenders and a belly-showing wife-beater (or is it a husband-beater when girls where them?) Her hat looked horrible, so silly and out of place. But it is all Sex in the City and SJP, so it must be cool.
Remember, this was on Sunday. And in the past 4 days walking within a 8 block radius of my work I've been just as many girls sporting the same grandpa hats and looking just as horrible. This is as bad as when people actually started to wear their pants backwards because that's what Kris Kross did (see: my roommate's dirty secrets). These hats are not charming or cute or attractive or even fashionable. Oh, but I guess since SJP wore one, it is fashionable. I have to give it to the girl who wasn't wearing the same brown one that everyone else was, but actually went out on a limb to vary color with a pale lime green one (kind of neon 80s, but fashion must evolve!)
So these shows try to push some sexy fashion stuff, but the problem is that few people lack the refinement to know what is actually nice and what is just some wardrobe lady trying out new things. At least follow something you saw at a show during Fashion Week. Geez. Fashionable and style rarely seem to meet anymore.
Friday, July 13, 2001
Houston Street Yesterday, despite barely being alive, I decided to walk further downtown before getting on the train. I know there is this Broadway/Lafayette stop on the F train because that's where all the supposedly hip Carroll Gardens people get off in the morning to go open their galleries in Soho or something. But the problem is that Broadway and Lafayette run along side each other for a while, and never do they cross and never are the actual entrances to this subway stop visible.
When I walked all the way to Delancey Street, I was only looking for this stop. I'd walked down Broadway that day and decided that if I walked down Lafayette I could actually find this sunway stop. I walked to Canal, and then turned around. Because the stop is on Houston Street (why it isn't called Houston is beyong me, it isn't as if Houston is some small unknown street) and caddy corner to the stop is the Puck Building. I always look up, hoping they'd put the P back on, but there is still the sad light shawdow of where it used to be.
The funny part about work lately is that I can sit here for hours without remembering to go eat since my work is seemingly simple but it has become compellingly compulsive. I format fancy tables, and sit there looking for something wrong, double and triple checking the left alignment on the names. I'm really sick. I think I need help. If they made me do this at any of the 10,000 temp jobs I held before, I'd shoot myself. But here, I manage to let the day creep by.
Tuesday, July 10, 2001
In the great green room Last night I slept horribly. As I was going to bed, Angel came in to say good night. We were talking in the dark of the bedroom and then he feel asleep. He'd been complaining about being tired so I really couldn't bare to wake him, assuming he'd wake in a while. And then all I remember is hearing blips and beeps and noises every 15 minutes it seemed. Angel was watching television before he came into my room, that stayed on until 3 am when I finally got up and shut it off along with his cell phone which was beeping that message noise for hours. He moves awkwardly in his sleep. I just didn't sleep very well is the point. I'm having trouble simply keeping awake. Being in a room without windows doesn't help.
The weekend featured me actually beating Jesse at Scrabble which would put our game stats at like 1000 to 5. I then threw my first barbecue which went over so well. There were my sisters, Marie, Jesse and I all gathered with our select friends for food and drink and the random composition made for lots of fun. I also impressed everyone with my ability to cook meat, something I generally don't even like to eat.
Marie is dazzling, or at least she dazzles me. When we were walking through Central Park on our way to the Ani DeFranco concert a few weeks ago, she began making up a little ditty which contained a line that still runs through my head.
"We put suntan lotion in the places
Place that weren't naked before."
She's too brillant. I spent most of the past week in New Jersey for one reason or another and completely enjoywed being able to spend so much time with my friends. That's what I miss most about not living in New Jersey; not being to spend obsessive amounts of time with these people who completely inspire me. I mean, putting suntan lotion on ex-naked places. . . how wonderful.
Monday, July 9, 2001
Ooooh, she's a little runaway This weekend I ran away from the heat. I ran to my parent's house where the air conditioner is always cranked high to the point tha people bring sweaters with them to our house in the summer. And I slept, as if I hadn't slept in weeks; I hadn't been sleeping regularly in over two weeks, if at all. And I cooled off, and didn't do anything and didn't measure or hammer or arrange or plot or plan. I slept.
The poem that Marie has had on her page for most of the past week is especially inspiring to me. Don't ask me to explain why, I managed to cleverly avoid all literature classes and therefore lack the proper dialect. But it soothes me and also makes me want to stand up, walk away, forget everything. (Stolen as follows)
Let my joyfully streaming face
make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise
and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,
one season in our inner year-, not only a season
in time-, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.
from tenth elegy, rainer maria rilke
Life seems exciting to me in the past few days as it hasn't in a very long time, since I returned to Ireland. Because for a very long time I was helping other people out, letting my view get wrapped up in that of other people. I worried too much and have to learn how to not worry. I learned a lot in past year about life and tough situations and the value of close people in your life. Now I'm back to learning about the silence between each person, the singular existence of the joy of living.
Monday, July 2, 2001
Superman Underwear Why can't work be moved outside today like college classes where we'd sit on the grass and pretend to listen while we watched the clouds? Today I feel blood in my veins, air in my lungs, thoughts dancing in my head. Today is it absolutely gorgeous. Why couldn't last night have been this beautiful?
This morning on the train, a little boy of 3 sat next to me from Park Slope to Carroll Gardens. He had a loose mess of curls on his head, these long lashes and blue velcro sneakers. He was telling his mom about things he wanted for his birthday when he was four (basketball hoop) and five (pogo stick). I immediately thought there is no way I can have kids because they are that cute. I wouldn't be able to raise them because the hilarious things they say would have me laughing too much.
He then went on to talk about how he is still sad that he'd dropped his Superman underwear on the tracks when he shouldn't have had them out of his bag to begin with. His mom said his new ones are just as good and he then asked her to tell Mina that. She said she wouldn't talk to Mina on the train, he began to pout and beg her to tell Mina. "Do you want us to turn around and for me to leave you back with your father?" was her threat to get him to stop crying. I wanted to bitch slap her.
I gathered (1) his parents were divorced (2) Mina was his imaginary friend (3) his mother is an ass. First, you refuse to talk to a three year old's imaginary friend. Who cares if he has an imaginary friend, he isn't hurting anyone, he's 3. Second, threatening your child is a good way to make them insecure. Like, what the hell. Thanks for ruining my moment with your bad parenting skills.
Angel made the world's best fish last night: flounder pan-fried with corn meal and flour with a sauce of reduced guava juice, jalopeno and cilantro. We should just quit our jobs, go to culinary school and open an restuarant. Either that or continue to impress each other with the elaborate meals we make.
I want salt air in my nose, seagulls crying overhead and dried sea water tingling my skin. I want a pony tail swishing agains my neck while I take long strides to keep up with the dog who is walking me. I want to have sex with a boy with blue eyes in the day light of a warm summer's bedroom. I want to catch up with an old friend while drinking sodas from straws. I want fire flies in an empty mayonaisse jar while eating Italian Ices on stone steps. I want somethings that is particularly surprising.
Friday, June 29, 2001
Deodorant for my amibtion Rob Bresney has been my favorite astrologer forever. There was a time in my life when I got his horoscope from the Village Voice, carrying the paper folded in half around campus on Wednesdays, getting my fingers all grimy with newsprint to mix with the nicotine, until I had a chance to sit down and read. First him, then Shelter and finally Dan Savage. That was my order of attack upon the Voice. But with no Voice newspaper boxes in midtown, now I look at it on the web (so sad).
During my senior year, my 3 roommates and I realized that all four of our horoscopes could easily be cut out together and we took to the habit of posting any week that we found excessively relevant. At the end of my senior year, as we were swung from ecstatic to terrified in knowing it was all to end and we had the entire world outside of Barnard's wrought iron gates with the little bear on top, I can still recall what one of his horoscopes said (or can paraphrase): that my new innocence of the world was not based on knowing only the good but knowing all and choosing the good.
Then, for a really long time, I didn't like his horoscopes. They not applicable or relevant, they irritated me with assertions and suggestions that did not resonate within me. I was a bit annoyed he was letting me down that way. And then this week, as he has been doing now and again in the past months, he seems to have the poignant things to say that makes me love him:
If you want to know a secret, Capricorn, you're the only sign of the zodiac that's strong enough to make good use of what I'm about to say. Not only that: The astrological omens suggest you're especially ripe to act on it. Here goes. "The secret of life," declared sculptor Henry Moore to poet Donald Hall, "is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is -- it must be something you cannot possibly do."
That seemingly torturous statement is anything but for the likes of me. Thanks Mr. Bresney for telling me giving myself seemingly insurmountable challenges is actually just fine. I can now accept the "where did you come from" and "I don't understand how you think" comments from the world. I'm just determined and I love it.
Determination for whatever reason always makes me think of perspiration.
Wednesday, June 27, 2001
Last night a DJ saved my life with a songRight now I want to go home. Right now I’m happy that I am going home. My family will eat dinner, all together. We won’t bicker, really, because it’s my grandmother’s last night before she goes to Georgia for, as she says, three years. My uncle is there too, after having spent the last couple of days doing the work the contractor never did (i.e. putting window frames on our porch and covering thus covering the insulation). He is the baby of my mom’s family, the uncle I’ve always known, the man who still calls me Tara Bara as if it is truly my full name like calling my sister Jennifer instead of Jenn.
I want to laugh and be around happy people. Maybe I’m suffering from getting to spend good times with Jesse and the emptiness that not having your friend making you dinner leaves. But it also me moving on, and me not wanting to think about it any more. I’m happy to be going home, the alternative would be to have a long drawn out conversation tonight that does neither party any good. Because I’m ready just to stop caring, just to stop forcing the togetherness. The following Lisa Loeb (who creeps me out with her cat-like glasses) song has been going through my head. I realize I must start bringing my cd-man on the train since it’s so silent without it.
I'm starting to ignore you, I've doubted you so long.
I tired of over-thinking, I know you don't belong.
Now I'm asking questions - no one pushes me around.
Everybody feels this way sometimes, everybody feel this way
Tuesday, June 26, 2001
Did I disappoint you? Leave a bad taste in your mouth?
My sisters and I went to U2 on Friday along with Jesse, who I kept to myself for the entire weekend. I don't actually own a single U2 cd but sisterly adventures are great, especially when we drag other people along to force them into our particular insanity. But the problem is that there is only really 1 song I like, Angel of Harlem. And they haven't played it the two times I've seen them. And frigging Bono acts as if we actually buy his "politics" which are no more than sound bites from the most badly written, poorly conceived pamphlets handed out by patchouli smelling Northeastern college students.
And then I got all Jesse. We went into "the city" and had dinner. Afterwards he said didn't Bess live in the neighborhood, and I said, yeah, some place near 23rd Street. And for about 15 minutes we just walked around looking for her. We walked into a doorman building to ask if she lived there (they looked at us like we must be strung out on something and looking for more of it). Finally, when I felt the whole idea was truly ridiculous, Jesse began reading names on a buzzer off a random building and saw her name! Bess rocks. It was completely wonderful to see her. I got me some Jesse cooking in the kitchen on Sunday as I drilled holes in the wall. I think it was just for the sake of having gender roles reversed. That and the fact he made yummy chicken.
I've decided there is too much comp latency in this world. I've decided there is too much giving in going around. The Beatles all singing happy-like about "we can work it out" told me lies. Sometimes, it's just not worth it. Sometimes, it's too much like picking scabs. I'm all into Band-Aids now, preferably the clear ones like the one on my foot. I'm not going to pick this scab, I'm going to leave it covered. The Band-Aid has addressed the problem, no need to pick or touch since it just hurts more than it's worth and will leave a scar (This metaphor goes on and on). Right now, I have too many exciting things going on to let anything get in the way; right now I'm more interested in working on exciting things than letting anything in the way.
Monday, June 25, 2001
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