Oh, My Life.

After weeks of vague bliss there is a lull in the conversation and an uneasy silence follows while we try to figure out where to go from here.

As human beings we depend on other human beings to leech our emotions from—we can’t feel things on our own, everything comes from those around us. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why does being around a depressed person make you feel depressed? Why do we grab onto optimistic people like they are our last lifelines to happiness? Because it’s better than not feeling anything at all—better than feeling an unknown, unidentifiable ache somewhere in your body that you wish you could stopper and put into a jar and analyze.

Analysis of ache: somewhere just above my ribs and just below my breast, there is a dull throbbing that is not quite pain—it feels more like a constant restlessness, a need to do something, but without the knowledge of what I need to do, the ache will not end. Additionally, my ankle actually does feel pain, probably because I must have rolled it over the course of the last few days, sometime when I was tripping around in heels, and maybe this pain isn’t related, but it makes me limp slightly and is a constant reminder of the melodramatic opera that has taken over the last 48 waking hours.

There’s something about happiness that makes me, and probably others, uneasy. It is like we are waiting for the wheel to continue turning and we know that we are at the top now, but we’ll be at the bottom very soon. So we force ourselves to the bottom, thinking that self-inflicted anguish will probably be better than what the universe can dream up for us. And sometimes we force others to the bottom with us, and this is much worse. I have been forced to the bottom by another person, and it is, to say the least, an experience.

Somewhere in the midst of wondering whether all of this is my fault or if I should never have let my happiness depend on someone else in the first place, I hear everyone around me telling me that I am better off without him, and that nothing is my fault, but none of it seems to register. It may not be my fault, but it is most definitely my pain, and am I a horrible person for wanting him to feel more pain than me? All of those beautiful stories about romance and love (not that this was anything close to love, I’m no fool) involve somebody being hurt, and still wishing happiness and joy towards the person that hurt them because they are in love. How can this be? What an inhuman feeling—all I want is for the person that hurt me to feel far more pain than I feel.

It is a circling darkness, and there is a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye, and I am dancing in a red dress and he is looking at me.

I want this.

I want him to look at me, to know what he is missing, and yet I feel like an unattractive, ugly soul.

It is a circling darkness and I am dancing in a red dress and I am yelling at him, things that he doesn't want to hear because he thought this was going to be a clean break, he thought I wasn’t the kind of person to create unnecessary drama. I wasn’t that kind of person, but I am tripping over my heels and dancing in a red dress and his head and my head will be throbbing with a hangover tomorrow and the drama is here.

It is a circling darkness and I am dancing in a red dress and he is not looking at me.

I don’t want this.

He is leaving with someone else and rage is building within me but it comes out as sadness. I can’t be here but I am not leaving. Then I am pulled upwards and an arm is wrapped around my waist and it is not his arm, but that seems okay. If this was a movie this would be the artistic club scene in which the camera moves quickly and jerkily and creates a dizzying confusion for the audience because that’s what it would feel like if you were there.

It is a circling darkness and I am not dancing in a red dress, I am stumbling outside and there is an arm around me and I feel a vague sense of comfort, but it is gone in the same flash that it came with. This is where the ache begins.

I hear the voice next to me saying that he made a mistake, that he still likes me, and in a haze I believe it because it is what I need to hear, and it is easy to pretend that the voice is him, even though the arm is not his.

It is a circling darkness and I am sprawled across my bed in a red dress, my arms tangled underneath me and I am in deep sleep. I am dreaming in flashes of confusion, and I am dreaming about ways that the night could have gone so that when I wake up I can’t remember any more what really happened and what was in my dream.

When I crawl out of bed I recognize the ache and this has never happened to me before. I can feel my face being a mask that is ready to crumble at any instant and everything around me is making me think about what has happened and I see myself in the mirror and I know what I was the night before. I wasn’t a girl dancing in a red dress, I was a train wreck in red dress who thought she could handle this but she can’t.

It is the longest day that I have ever known.

This morning I woke up and saw the sun filtering through my blinds and the ache lessened.

One step at a time.

In the shower I touched my face and felt the layers of tears I had not bothered to wash and makeup that had covered it and as I picked up the soap I had this thought.

I’m better than this.

WARNING: This post is excessively Indian

So...I was on TV guys. Exciting, right? (Please tell me somebody is reading this)

Should you want to watch 30--or 27, to be exact--minutes of me singing, a link to the video is posted below. Before you watch it, though, there are some things about the style of music that you should know.

1) This style of music is called Hindustani, and is originally from the northern regions of India, although pretty much everyone sings it now. Original South Indian music is called Carnatic.

2) Almost everything in the video you are about to see is improvisational. That is correct, other than the words, I am making everything up on the spot. Of course, there are guidelines for what you can make up, and these guidelines for what notes you can use and when you can use them are called "Ragas". Think of it like the Indian classical version of jazz. Additionally, everything has to be in the correct cycle of beats, provided by the instrument that the boy in the video is playing, called a tabla.

3) The first part of the video is called an Alaap. This is essentially the vocal warmup where I show the audience what Raag I am singing by just basically experimenting with the notes a bit. The next section is a "Bhada Khayal", which is a very slow piece. These are more difficult, because you have much more space to fill with your improvisations, but it is also harder to understand if you do not know anything about Indian music. It will basically be like, why is she singing so slowly? The third part is a "Chota Khayal", which is a shorter, much faster piece in which I do some shorter improvisations. This will be probably be much more impressive to the viewer because it will sound fast and you will be like, wow, did she just make that up? The answer is yes, yes I did. The last piece is a "Bhajan", which is just a short devotional song that is entirely not improvised, and is in a different Raga than the rest of the performance.

4) If you do not want to watch 30 minutes of me singing, but still want to be a good friend to me, I recommend skipping towards the end, when I do the faster, more impressive improvisational stuff called "Taans", and also a Bhajan that is pretty. If you, for some reason, want to know even more about Indian music, talk to me at another time.

5) If you are wondering why I did not tell anyone/force anyone to set their TiVos for when I was going to be on TV, it is because this only aired in Northern California, so I am not a TV star or anything.

Without further ado, here you go:
http://www.swaralahari.org/site/playvideo.php?concertid=150

For a time breakdown of what I do in this video so you can watch selected parts of it:
Bhada Khayal is till about 17 minutes in.
Chota Khayal is till about 24 minutes in.
Bhajan (PRETTY SONG THAT YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO) starts at about 24:30, and goes till the end.

Hope you enjoy it...

Allegory

Some days are meant to be sat down and spoken to like children
In the dark, I will pretend that this day is one of those

Clear the fiction and fact and fiction from every hotel room
That was ever privy to any secrets that hotel rooms maintain

Be alive until the day of your death and on that day you will be
Deadly in your rotting heart and alive in your growing nails

Cry only when you have been given explicit permission
To allow the display of your excess emotion

Take a picture of every creation that you meet in your life
Except for those that you yourself have created

And then you can ask yourself
Is that how you speak to children?

Adventures in Pretentious Behaviour

Recently I have been having some adventures in pretentiousness, and they are somewhat amusing as well as quite disgusting. I think the pretension level of the general population has risen in the past few years, probably because people found out that if nobody could understand what they were saying, they would be forced to think it was awesome in order to blend in. This has resulted in an explosion of the incorrect usage of words--on a sidenote, which is more pretentious, to use a sophisticated word, or to correct someone on the misuse of a sophisticated word?

Now being in college, I see more and more pretension in the forms of philosophy majors, non-philosophy majors who are taking one philosophy class, people desperate to find friends and think that being smart is a good way to go about that, etc. Note that in the title of this post I spelled behavior in the British way. This was on purpose, to prove some point that I have yet to think of.

Let me give you a glimpse into a recent day I had that will make you throw up in your mouth a little bit.

I am in the cafeteria, and I have just picked up my food. Nobody knows anyone yet, and I need somewhere to sit. Seeing somebody wearing an Arcade Fire shirt, I think "Well, at least there's a built-in topic of conversation", and I sit down next to said person and the group of people he was with. Ridiculousness follows:

ME: Hi, can I sit here?
BOY IN SHIRT: Sure, I guess.
ME: (silence as I listen to the conversation at the table)
BOY IN SHIRT: So, what about (insert old school video game here)? That was a great game...
GIRL WITH BLUE HAIR: Yeah, but (insert other video game) was so much better. Racing games don't get much better than that.
BOY IN SHIRT: Okay, so what if there was a racing game in which you were the steering wheel instead of the person behind it? And like, the controls just randomly changed?
BOY WITH GLASSES: Yeah, except you were in a dark box and you couldn't see anything and you couldn't get out...
ME: (thinking) What??
BOY IN SHIRT: It would be like, a metaphor for life...
ME: (very quietly) I think I just threw up in my mouth.

This conversation continues for some time in this manner. I am becoming desperate to change the subject or leave. In what was a huge mistake and something I hate myself for, I turned to music

ME: (turning to boy in shirt) So...did you know Arcade Fire is coming across the street from here next month?
BOY IN SHIRT: Yeah, I like Arcade Fire, but not as much as some other bands...I mean, they've totally sold out now.
ME: Um...okay. (wishing I had never brought up the subject)
BOY IN SHIRT: So what kind of music do you like?
ME: Um...I don't really know what it's called.
BOY IN SHIRT: What's your favorite band?
ME: Have you heard of Wolf Parade?
BOY IN SHIRT: Yeah, of course...(condescendingly) that's your favorite?
ME: No, actually there's this other band called Sunset Rubdown that's like...
BOY IN SHIRT: I haven't heard of that band.
ME: Okay...well...
BOY IN SHIRT: I guess I'd say the type of music you like is neo-psychedelic art rock...

At this point, I nodded, pretended to be done with my food, and left.

END SCENE


And here ends the story of how I re-learned two lessons that I had already known:
1) Never talk about music with people, especially if you don't know them.
2) Never, EVER say that you like neo-psychedelic art rock.

New Things

Shall I give myself a fake name? Anyone who is anyone seems to have a fake name (this is a lie). While I'm feeling all philosophical and shit, I thought I'd post, and as soon as I had that thought, the philosophical shit feeling went away.

I'm moved into college, ready to start in on four years of torturous fun that is named "school" but everyone knows that's code for "parties". Did you know I hate exclamation points? Probably, since every time I write something like "Fun!" it comes out like "Fun."

Which is not really fun. And makes me sound sarcastic, even when I'm not being sarcastic. Despite this fact, I do sometimes get excited about things, and when I am excited (such as this moment when I am suddenly under the reign of no person other than myself and probably everyone who has any expectations of me whooops) I am very bad at showing my excitement. What usually happens is I don't do anything at all, or I fall down because I tripped on my foot and am acting really awkward. As you can see, I am well on my way to becoming socially aware and adept at making friends. Ha.

In other news, now that I am in college, I am free to begin my seductions of multiple men that are bound to fail because I have no skill in seduction, but the point is that I can at least try!

I pretty much felt obligated to write this post because this marks a very important change in my life that I have yet to feel any particular way about.

Additionally: Since I am desperate for comments, anyone who was on the mailing list before is still on the mailing list at their other email addresses. You couldn't escape that easily...

Writing? What's that? SORRY.

Even though it's been like, two months or more since I wrote this, here is the second story I wrote in fiction writing.

A Change of Dress

Although she had never seen the ocean, Emily knew that it would be violent and beautiful and very possibly the most awe-inspiring thing she had ever seen. If she was honest with herself, she hadn’t really seen much of anything—the mountains, the countryside, or any true city—only the small town she had grown up in and what lay on the skirts of that town, but she had never slipped off the dress entirely.
When her mother had suggested that they drive to the ocean, Emily had felt an irresistible tug towards the unknown, and she had run upstairs to pack her bags with a swimsuit and—what else? She didn’t know anything about the ocean or the beach, she didn’t know what she would need there. She glanced around her room, but there was nothing that particularly called out to her as belonging on the beach or to the water. She realized that she did not have any idea where the ocean even was in relation to her town—how far they were, how long it might take to get there, whether or not she should bring a book for the car ride.
Deciding to take only a notebook and a pencil, as well as her swimsuit and a towel, Emily raced back down the stairs.

“Emily, dear, are you ready? How do you feel?” Her mother was still standing at the kitchen counter, slowly dicing vegetables, and Emily had a sudden wish for her to be like the professional chefs on the Food Network, if only so that she could dice through the vegetables with lightning speed and get into the car.

“Yeah, so are we going?” Emily noted that her voice sounded like the impatient whine of a much younger person, and so she counted to nine, her favorite number, and took three deep breaths, three being the square root of nine. After all, square roots were so rare, and Emily took every opportunity to use them as they should be used and appreciated by all people.
“I thought we could leave after lunch.”
“I thought we could leave now.”
“Emily, patience. We’ll only get hungry half way through.” Her mother was reasonable, and Emily was passionate. She could feel the claustrophobia of sixteen years in the same place building up from her stomach into the spot in her chest that was just below her throat and made her want to gag. She was surprised at herself for having such a violent reaction. It wasn’t as if she had never been for a drive before, but this idea of seeing the ocean had taken hold of her, and she was determined to go today, or to go never.
The phone rang. Emily’s mother spoke to somebody in rushed tones, and then hung up almost immediately.
“Emily, the doct—the man from the beach just called. They’re ready for you now.”
After eating lunch—her mother had made stew, and every spoon felt difficult to swallow, the bowl never-ending—Emily and her mother finally got into the car.
* * *
When Emily reached the beach, it was the peak of the afternoon, when the day had reached its hottest and the sun had begun to retract the intensity of its rays. There was a general mass of people spread out evenly over the sand. Emily found it disturbing that no individual face registered to her, there was only a low murmur of sound that settled over the entire beach, and the streaks of beach balls that caught her eye like shooting stars, in perfect little circles with areas of pi-r-squared that completed a pretty picture.
There were many fish encased in water, and she could almost reach out and touch them but for some kind of barrier. Her mother sat down in a chair, and began to read a magazine. Emily stared at the seashells arranged decoratively on the blue walls, and thought to herself that she had never seen anything but clouds in the sky before. The beach was an entirely different world, the alien feeling of the carpet under her feet when she pulled off her shoes. Was this what sand felt like?
“Emily, dear, please put your shoes back on. This isn’t our house anymore.” Emily wanted to cry; she liked wiggling her toes around the plush of the sand, but she pulled the sandals back around her feet and sat down on the floor. She looked back up at the fish, and began tapping on the barrier between her and the fish. A man emerged from what seemed to be the depths of—the ocean? Probably. He called out her name, and she stood up suddenly, giving her a dizzy feeling, as if she had been hit by a wave.
Emily braced herself and looked back at her mother, who stood up and held her hand, guiding her towards the dark doorway. They walked into the ocean together, like Emily had not thought possible. In another room, she was still somehow breathing, sitting in a chair across from this man. He gazed at her and she wondered if he was a mermaid, but his legs seemed firmly attached to his body. She moved her arms experimentally, attempting to swim, but the man gently took her hands and lowered them.
“Emily, how are you feeling today?” She wondered why everyone kept asking her that.
“Good.”
“Do you know where you are right now?”
“The beach.” He looked at her sympathetically, but said nothing. Then he began to speak in low murmurs to her mother. She could not distinguish what was being said. She looked around the walls, which were painted blue. She suddenly felt overwhelmed; the ground beneath her feet pulled away from her, and she slipped into the water, choking and grasping at the carpet that slid between her fingers.
Moments later she found herself back on the chair, her mother’s hand back in hers. She was coughing and gasping and she didn’t feel anything anymore, as if she were truly in the water, but she felt another rush, this time of understanding. She was not at the beach, she was only in yet another office of yet another doctor who would talk to her as if she was an infant. She wanted to scream that there was nothing wrong with her, but her mother’s face looked disappointed and Emily bit her tongue and her hopes along with it, and let go of the string attaching her to the beach.

Fiction Writing #1

Here is the first story that we wrote in fiction writing. I am under the impression that it came out a lot better than our teacher seemed to think it came out, so please tell me your (possibly honest) opinion.

Distance

When Christine showed up at the door, the first things she noticed were the azaleas on the doorstep in desperate need of watering. It hadn’t rained in a few months, so perhaps it was excusable, but Christine knocked on the door slowly, with a growing annoyance at having to be here on a Friday night, mixing with her irritation at uncared for plants. Although she had nowhere else to be tonight, other than her studio apartment with its sloppily painted walls and a quickly deteriorating sofa bed, these jobs always made her feel more than inadequate. The door opened with the same reluctance Christine felt, but the parents thrust their baby into her hands with excessive enthusiasm. Just for this she hated them a little, but she knew that her kind were hard to find—an adult, not a teenager, who had a college education and suggested in advertisements that she planned to become a teacher, even if that was not the whole truth.

“Our phone numbers are next to the fridge, and so is the doctor’s number, and he’s already eaten but if he gets hungry there are some jars in the cupboard next to the microwave and thank you so much for doing this. Good night!” Parents often spoke in run-on sentences that drifted in and out of Christine’s ears; in their desperation to leave the house, which mingled with worry about the wellbeing of their child, speaking was never at the top of the priority list. She nodded in what she hoped was a polite, not surly, manner, and looked for the first time at the baby whose pudgy limbs were entangled in her arms.

He was looking up at her with wide eyes, and his expression was impossible to read. He could have been about to cry or scream, and if she didn’t feel him breathing in her arms he could have been dead. They stayed that way for a few moments, looking at one another, blank, irritable, mirror-images, and then he kicked out with one chubby leg, breaking the moment. Christine carried him over towards the sofa, and placed him on his back. He began making gurgling sounds in the back of his throat. She turned away, suddenly nauseous.

It was the little things that made her angry—the inability to walk without stumbling, the drool that dripped incessantly onto the clothes of the carrier, the constant incomprehension of instructions. Then there were the aspects of babyhood that disgusted her, made her want to drop the child she was carrying and leave—the throwing up on shoulders, the perpetually sticky face and hands, the crying that seemed to be on call for every baby she had ever cared for. They tired her, all children did, and she would never be a teacher in an elementary school, or find a job in child care, when anybody who spent over an hour with her realized that her disgust for babies was ever-present and threatening.

Christine walked to the sink, where dirty dishes were piled in precarious towers. She wondered if she was expected to wash them, and suddenly felt so exhausted that she sat down on the floor of the kitchen. She stared at the magnets on the fridge, wishing that they spelled out a sign, but the letters were only arranged in random orders—FCRBOHJGW—and she closed her eyes, memorizing the room. When she opened her eyes the room, only two seconds later, looked different than she remembered it—the light was too bright, the lines too sharp.

Disoriented, she heard the hiccupping coughs of the baby, signifying that he was about to begin crying. She got to her feet, rubbing the small of her back, and made her way over to the baby. She got there before he started crying completely, and he immediately stopped his short, breathless tears, and gazed up at her, searching her face for signs of comfort. Finding none, he immediately started wailing. She bobbed him up and down in her arms, looking around the room for any props that would quiet him. Seeing a pile of plastic toy dinosaurs in the corner of the room, she carried him over to them. She picked one up and waved it in front of his face. The dinosaur felt waxy in her hands, and the surprising smoothness of it made her feel the strange urge to sink her teeth into its rounded, ridged body.

Instead, she handed it to the baby, who proceeded to gum the head of the dinosaur. She looked at the clock, and back at him, his saliva dripping into the body of the green dinosaur. It was a diplodocus, her least favorite type of dinosaur. She got up to check if there was any milk in the refrigerator, feeling useless, needing something to do with her hands. This baby was surprisingly agreeable, and she felt her worthlessness in every moment he did not need a caretaker. Christine thought of her mother, feeding her, rocking her, changing her diapers, and most tiring of all, unconditionally loving her.

She retrieved a bottle from the fridge, and handed it to the baby, who eagerly drank from the bottle. Christine’s voice felt like she had never used it, when in fact it had just been a few hours of silence. She needed to clear her throat. She rocked the baby back and forth, the bottle in his mouth. His eyelids fluttered, then began to blink shut, the bottle falling as if in slow motion out of his hand, her eyes not seeing it falling until it was on the ground. She felt a wave of nausea come over her, and suddenly she had to get out of this house. She looked at her watch. The baby’s parents would return in only ten minutes, and his eyes were shut, his chest moving rhythmically up and down. Her mother’s voice echoed in her ear: “You’re not like me, Christine. You won’t have any children.” Her desire to prove her mother wrong in every way flared up inside her, but died down just as quickly, the fight emptying out of her through her tired fingertips. She wanted to scream.

When the baby’s parents returned home at 10:00, he would be in his crib, sleeping softly, fingers curled around a green plastic diplodocus, a note next to him.
I’m sorry for leaving, there was an emergency. I left at 9:50. You don’t have to pay me.
- Christine

Christine lay on her fold out couch, staring up at the ceiling, trying to summon up the tiredness that had overcome her earlier into a sleep, but her legs were itching to run.