Beige

I have spent a lot of time being beige. Nondescript, goes with everything, nothing really flashy to it, you can't have too much or you'll die of ennui. I'm not a lot less beige now than I was then, I can name three different people in the last two years who have had to be introduced to me anywhere from four to nine times before it stuck. Not randoms, people I interacted with anywhere from once to five or six times a week for three months at a time, and it wasn't like they were drunk the first few times either.

The thing is, I'm not all that beige on the inside. Unfortunately on the outside, at first glance, I am. Even more unfortunately, our kindergarten teachers were lying to us, because it does matter what we look like, what we sound like, our appearances, the impressions we give. I suppose I should say me, since it is conceivable that nobody else got this crock from their kindergarten teachers, or that they simply didn't believe them. My disillusionment aside, I'm really not all that beige. There's all kinds of interesting stuff going on, but it's not on the surface, you have to be looking for it.

This is what I get for walking the lines. The line between extraversion and introspection. I take my energy from people, but I love to hide out somewhere inside myself and just think. The line between selling out and buying in. The line between being what and who I want to be and what and who I have to be. Instead of keeping to the razor-sharp edges of liminality, the boundaries all went blurry.

The problem with education is that it's about answers, even though learning is about questions.

I'm not as beige as I once was. Maybe I'm turning a little dusty rose, a touch of periwinkle. Maybe a lovely cafe latte shade.

I hope to get less beige in the future. Rather, I hope to appear less beige. To act less beige, to speak less beige.

Still Dreaming
Daydream Believer

Visitation

I refuse to get my hopes up. I'll believe he's coming when he shows up on my doorstep. Probably just as well, my hopes are so bloody high about everything else lately, and here I am pretending they're not. Well, not really pretending, just highlighting the part that's not so hopeful. Aggravating and emphasizing the parts of me that are sad, stressed, scared, and hurt. Maybe that's the reason for all the tears, the longing looks at those little pill bottles in the drug stores. Suppression isn't really so healthy. Which is why I'm not so sure that not getting my hopes up about this is a good thing. I don't even know what to expect, really. If he shows up (he'll show up, when it's important, he's a good guy). I don't know what will happen (and will I want it to? Am I really as important to him as he says I am?). Maybe (hopefully?) he'll be as out of place here as he wasn't there. Two different worlds I live in, shouting across the divide. This is my world, and this one isn't his. Maybe he'll have no control here, it'll be my turn with some power. A shit disturber, what'll he pull this time? And what will it mean in a month's time? And was this maybe the worst idea yet?


I don't want him to arrive, but once he's here, I don't want him to leave. Be careful what you wish for much? He's upset, I'm upset, and I feel like I'm in a holding pattern, like I'm waiting to land, to actually get on with my journey. Sometimes I wish it didn't hurt so much to hurt him. I could've made this like ripping a band-aid off, but I didn't. I thought I did it for him, but maybe I really did it for me. Is this easier? I don't even know. I probably couldn't have done it anyways, I'm a terrible liar. Yesterday was so fantastic, but maybe that kind of thing is just making the whole thing worse. He wishes, I wish. We all scream for ice cream.

Keep Dreaming
Daydream Believer

Ad Astra Per Aspera

I was talking to Ace the other day and without really meaning to, I kinda crystallized what I'm trying to do here. Here as in this particular blog, and here as in during my life and work. Kinda trippy stuff. All because I was defending myself from an in all likelihood imagined verbal assault on my value and worth. Because I blog... yeah... I'm still sorting it out myself. Anyhow, Ace said that he wouldn't want to have his thoughts on the internet, because someone might read them. I kinda see this kind of thing as a microcosm* of The Golden Record. In August and September 1977 respectively, NASA launched Voyager 2 and Voyager 1 (Yes, Voyager 2 was launched before Voyager 1). Each one has a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk with a greeting intended for any life form either Voyager might encounter. This (1977) state-of-the-art technology contains a number of sounds and images meant to portray earth and give anyone or anything that might find it an idea of where the machine containing it came from. Similarly purposed plaques were placed inside Pioneer 10 and 11, which were the first two human artifacts to escape the solar system. Each of these spacecraft had a scientific purpose, which throws off the allegory slightly. The idea behind the plaques and later The Golden Record, was to throw something of ourselves out as far as we can just in case maybe, someday, someone will find it and find something they can understand in it. Is it a little bit out there? Absolutely. But there isn't much that makes more sense to me than the drive to connect, to communicate, to reach out. Even if in forty thousand years by some strange turn of fate or physics, one of the Voyagers comes hurtling back to Earth in a twisted mass of flaming metal, there's still a time capsule in there that maybe someone will understand.

This is a present from a small, distant world,
a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music,
our thoughts and our feelings.
We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.

U.S. President Jimmy Carter

*for some reason, my favourite word lately

Sondheim, Uta, and Kurosawa
Sondheim- Stephen Sondheim, American composer and lyricist. Born March 22, 1930. Known for the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, and composing the music for A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. Also Sweeney Todd, Into The Woods, and A Little Night Music.
Uta- Uta Hagen, German-born American actor and acting teacher. June 12, 1919-January 14, 2004. Author of Respect for Acting and A Challenge for the Actor. Notable for training, among others: Matthew Broderick, Al Pacino, Whoopi Goldberg, Sigourney Weaver and Liza Minelli.
Kurosawa- Akira Kurosawa, Japanese filmmaker. March 23, 1910- September 6, 1998. Best-known works: Seven Samurai (七人の侍, Shichinin no samurai), Yojimbo (用心棒) aka The Bodyguard.

Keep Dreaming
Daydream Believer

Baby Write This Down

This post is completely unabridged and uncensored. Kanpai is Japanese for cheers.

So here I am, writing it down. Because somebody said I should. A parable? Maybe.

I once knew this woman, a university professor, who had all sorts of things to say, about all kinds of things. Art, theatre, liminality, juxtaposition, the importance of the live event. Every word out of her mouth was profound, a revelation, brilliance. She knew so much about these topics, and had so much to say about them, that she began to sound like a broken record. The repetition of themes, words, and phrases grew so distinct that someone made a bingo card out of them. All of a sudden, rather than quotable, she was mockable. Did she get less brilliant? Did we get more jaded? Does why it happened matter? Maybe if she hadn't had to get us through a set of exams and projects, she could have branched out a little more, brought in more new ideas, given us more profundity. Or maybe that's all there was, she was so specialized that she'd said her profound piece, and that's all there was to it.

It was profound to you, but I got it out of an Amanda Marshall song. I said everybody wants to believe that they're special, God's chosen people. She said "every soldier in the war's got God on his side, and that's why we can't stop the slaughter".

It's entirely possible that in every relationship, romantic, friendly, platonic, adversarial, you run out of things to talk about. Eventually you know what they think about religion, politics, themself, you, the future, the way the world works and whatever else is important to the both of you. And unless something drastic changes with one of you, there's no more to say. Maybe that's simply a symptom of growing apart, or maybe it just happens to everyone.

Somewhere there's a line between wanting to see them every day and seeing them every day out of habit. Usually just this side of that line there's another one, the line between seeing someone because you have something to do with them and seeing someone because you have nothing to do with anyone else. The line where the default option changes from "alone" to "with them". The line where you become their appendage, or they become yours. Where the world is small and insular, and every decision has them as a factor. You enjoy that for awhile, and then you hit another line, the one where you begin to resent all of the above.

A flutter somewhere around the solar plexus, a flock of thousand-pound butterflies, a flush, a slight sheen of sweat, a stammer, and standing there saying to yourself "Did I seriously just say that?" That place where a "Hi" can have you on a high all day, where anything is possible and it's absolutely brilliant and you swear they'll hear your heart thudding in your chest if you don't faint from the blood rushing to your head first.

Maybe I'm crazy to miss that. I know a lot of people who have said "Yeah, all that stuff is great, but I'd never in a million years trade it for what I've got." Maybe when I'm sitting here thinking that maybe I would, that's the beginning of the end. At the very least, it's probably the way I know that the decision I've already made is the right one. Not the only way, I guess, but at least one. Someone once told me that there's no such thing as a wrong choice, it's just the ones we make, and the ones we don't. That has made all the difference, according to Frost.

Sometimes I think I'm asking for too much. Maybe it is too much to ask for a job that doesn't make me cry before or after nearly every shift I work. Maybe it's too much to ask for freedom. Maybe the truth is too much to ask for in Kindergarten, when they tell you it doesn't matter what you look like, only what you do. Maybe a dual-axis spectrum is too much to ask for. Maybe a spectrum at all is too much to ask for, a middle ground. Maybe there can be no compromise. Maybe a secret is too much to ask for. Maybe being alone is too much to ask for.

Be careful what you wish for, I suppose.

A List Update:
Know/understand all the references in the musical Rent, particularly those in the song La Vie Boheme.
Sontag, Sondheim, Maya Angelou, Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham, Cage, Lenny Bruce, Langston Hughes, Uta, Buddha, Pablo Neruda, Pee Wee Herman, Gertrude Stein, Antonioni, Burtolucci, Kurosawa, Carmina Burana, Vaclav Havel, The Sex Pistols, 8BC, Musetta's Waltz, Heidegger.

Stay tuned for my discoveries.

Dream On.
Daydream Believer

On Bread Alone

Considering my utter lack of aspirations in that direction, I'm a fucking domestic goddess. I probably got it from my mom, kitchen maven and PTA parent extraordinaire. I clean when I'm freaked out, I find washing dishes oddly soothing, I love to cook, even if I'm usually not motivated to do it for myself, and today I baked bread. That's right, bread, not brownies, cookies, cake, pie, or any other sugary confection. Bread, sustaining, simple, wholesome bread. At least it has cheese on it.

Some people say that a person can't live on bread alone. I'm kind of banking on it, in fact, considering my prospective career choices. But sometimes you need bread too. And it's even better when you bake it yourself.

Daydream Believer

'Festo

There are a lot of little things that make it up. It's nowhere near complete, but then again, neither am I. There'll be some additions along the way, and probably some subtractions as well.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to prove John Cougar Mellencamp wrong. The first time I remember hearing that song and noticing the lyrics, I think I was twelve or thirteen. I was singing along with the abandon of childhood, then I realized what words my mouth was unthinkingly forming, and I couldn't help but think:

If it's true that "life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone", then what's the point?

Since then, that's been the cornerstone of my many varied answers to the inevitable, often aggravating question of "So what are you planning to do with your life?" I figure it's less important to try to set the answers in stone than the reasons for them. This is one reason I doubt will change anytime soon. I never want to sit there looking back at my life and say, "Well, those were the best days, and there's nothing that good coming my way ever again." I never want the feeling of just waiting for the clock to run out, for the last grain to drop through the hourglass. I don't want to run out of adventures, things to look forward to, experiences I want to have. Which is why I keep the lovely list on your right, to help me remember the whims, the crazy ideas, help me have something to shoot for.

It's funny, I always had a hard time coming up with goals on those annoying sheets they gave me after every report card in high school. I always insisted that I didn't have goals. What I really meant was that I didn't have goals that had to do with high school, beyond "get the hell out". Once I was, I was suddenly full to bursting with goals, missions, aspirations, dreams.

Especially dreams.
Keep Dreaming.
Daydream Believer