a little bit about a lot of me
I live in France.
I don't use capital letters when I write emails.
I do use capital letters in my blogs.
I turned 33 in October 2002.
I believe in God.
I am my own worst critic.
I have 11 piercings and 5 tattoos.
Sometimes I am very clever. Sometimes I am very stupid. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.
I love my friends and make sure they know it.
My pirate name is Captain Mary Vane.
I read music before words.
I conduct a polyphonic choir.
I am the grammar police.
I can turn catty when I don't get my way.
Spiders are my greatest fear. Worse than dying at the hands of terrorists. Worse than being guillotined or thrown into a vat of boiling oil or forced to watch Manos, the Hands of Fate six hundred times in a row with my eyes taped open.
I too often forget to pardon those who trespass against me.
I am lazy. And I love pasta. You do the math.
I have never ever ever been blonde. Orange, once. Serious chemical error.
I wear my scars proudly sometimes, but usually I hide them in my sleeves.
I love getting email.
Saturday, November 30, 2002
Boy Logic, an introduction.
You know, in the spirit of the soon-to-be-overwhelming holiday season, I thought it would be important to tackle this timely subject. Because it's one of those timely subjects all the time, but especially if you're a girl during the holidays and you don't have, like, an inkling (or even an inkling-let, or an inkling-let-esque smidgeon of an idea) about it, it can throw you for a damn loop. So let's take a brief glimpse, together, at what seem to be some of the precepts of boy logic. You may remember boy logic from this post, where I first brought up the concept.
(By the way, I assume that the "if" in the above sentence, "if you're a girl during the holidays and blahblahblah" is just a formality, and that most probably if you're female during the holidays you're female all year long. In case you are the exception to this rhetorical assumption, please email me, i'm curious.)
*Boy Logic Rule #1: Be as incommunicative as possible.
What this means, boys, is something I think you're already familiar with. Here's your scenario. You arrange to meet a girl for a date. You sit in a dark smoky corner in the bar, doing sexy things with your eyelids and pushing out your sensual lips in a particularly Gallic way, and from time to time you turn those seductively heavy eyelids toward the girl and make her little female heart go pitter-patter. You touch the girl's hand to offer her a cigarette, you lean back listening to funky Celtic-Senhalese fusion music (or whatever the combination du jour happens to be), you move your head in rhythm, you sip your beer and lick the foam off in a movement only James Dean could do better, you know, if he wasn't dead that is. Then you make your move. Lean closer, smile with just the edges of your mouth, and let your breath rustle against her cheek as you utter these magic syllables, which by the way are your first of the evening: "You know, I think I'm gonna try out my Spanish on those two guys at the next table. Dare me?"
You can also consider the horizons that open to you by telling your girlfriend a different story each time you see her. I don't mean like turning yourself into some kind of latter-day Scheherezade, but deliberately changing your mind about your relationship or friendship or whatever-the-hell-you-call-it-so-as-not-to-threaten-your-boy-ego and making sure the girl is up-to-date on each alternation and development. Ask about her dissertation topic, then interrupt her. Confusing a girl can translate to gestures as well, if you are less at ease with words. Call her five times in one afternoon and then not at all for three weeks. Smoke in her apartment, especially when you know she has just recovered from a protracted bout of bronchitis. Kiss her pantingly (yes, with tongue) and stroke her throat and hair, pull back, look her deeply in the eyes, and then say "good night!" in a cheery, I'm-Postman-Pat voice.
Next scene: My sister has a sometimes-he's-the-beast-from-hell sometimes-ex who came for a two-week visit, bought a car, and parked it in my sister's garage. The understanding: he'll be back. So ok, she's a happy camper except that of course he lives like 3500 miles away and plays in a band and can't come back as often as she'd like him to. But hey, she knows they have something going on, right, because after all he bought a car and left it in her garage. [An aside note. Hello, a car. Does this guy need a reality check or what? I mean, you know, it's been a while since I've had a long-distance relationship along these lines, but I think an underwear drawer and a slot in the bathroom toothbrush-holder is pretty much a statement. Not to mention, you know, the whole taking up less space concept. Maybe things really have changed in the years since I was single and bed-slash-apartment hopping. {Another aside note: just kidding, Dad.} Or maybe there's more to the whole sibling-generation-gap theory than I've given it credit for. Whatever.]
Six months go by. They talk, she travels to see him, even gets her first tattoo during the visit. And girls, you know, the guy you let hold your hand while you have permanent ink injected under your epidermis is pretty much the guy. One day the guy calls and says to my sister, you know, I think I'm gonna bring my car out here. I found a service in L.A. that will collect and ship it for a thousand bucks.
And she's like, right, um, what do you mean?
And he's like, you know, in case the car bugs you.
And she's like, it's kind of starting to now that I know you would rather pay a thousand bucks to somebody to haul it out of my garage than come and get it yourself for the price of a two-hundred-dollar airline ticket.
And he's like, you're not gonna make a big thing out of this are you?
Here endeth the first lesson.
**Boy Logic Rule #2: Cultivate a cheap mentality.
Cheapness is not solely a financial quality. On the contrary, it has ever so many applications.
You are a boy in a bar. Your bartender is cute, with bright blue eyes and muscular calves and perfect lipstick, and you order five mixed drinks with complex chromatic patterns in the space of two hours and don't give her a tip. At the end of her shift you give her the above-mentioned seductive smile and ask for her phone number.
You are a boy in a dress. (Ok, so you're a priest, but when it comes to boy logic, sorry, you're actually just a boy in a dress.) You have a friend, a girl, who has just spent two months in the hospital - mind you, because you learned the lessons in Rule #1 so very well, and even advanced a couple steps to Rule #3, you didn't go see her during that time - and who is back in her apartment for the first weekend since that time and has to write a dissertation in a month. You approach her after mass on Sunday, give her a big happy smile, and invite yourself for lunch on Monday.
Let's consider the logic of having a lunch guest. It involves getting up, cleaning the apartment which is by the way full of dust and spiders and still has stains on the floor from the unfortunate pre-hospitalization incident; planning some kind of edible menu; shopping for ingredients (selzer water for the carpeting); doing the dishes that manage to accumulate in the sink even when you're not there to eat off them; and cooking something that you will feel at least not totally ashamed to offer to someone whose life is consecrated to the Lord Almighty. I mean, this is a boy in a dress not-thinking, but his hands have the power to bless things and he feeds you Jesus, so you kind of want to serve him something, you know, yummy.
And because you are a girl (and let's face it a wus) you smile back and say "Monday? Monday, like tomorrow? Let me think ... um ... Does noon work for you?"
Boys, congratulations, you've just earned your level-two diploma.
***Boy Logic Rule #3: Suck. Suck frequently and suck hard.
You know you have it biologically inscribed, all you have to do is exercise those functions a bit. Here are some ideas, tried and true by boys everywhere, card-carrying members of the International Boy Logic Fraternity.
When in public, ignore the girl you asked out when you see people from school or work who you maybe didn't want to have see you with someone besides, you know, your girlfriend or wife or boyfriend.
Say things like "I don't think I can have a relationship with you because I need to get away from things that you remind me too much of my mother" and "You know, we could have sex but I'd just be doing it for you." Or, when you're a boy who is fifty-something years old and you're a high-school history teacher and you want to get a the attention of a student who happens to be kneeling to pick up a pencil while chatting with a friend, "I know you spend a lot of time on your knees in front of men, but if you can save it for later I'd like to start class now." Or "You've lost weight haven't you? That's great! I mean, the last time I saw you, you looked like a watermelon." Don't feel limited to these quotes only; I'm sure you have a whole library of possibilities to choose from, and the repertoire expands infinitely.
Three months into a relationship with a girl, be sure to go spend a night with your ex on Martha's Vineyard. That's a treat for everyone.
Lie. Lie to the girl (goes without saying). But most especially, lie about her, and whenever possible do so to mutual acquaintances who you know will repeat what you've said to her.
When your girlfriend or wife develops a passion for some craft or hobby, make sure you mock and ridicule it as much and as often as you can. If someone compliments her on it and suggests, for example, that she sell her homemade paper or handpainted picture frames on eBay, you can tell her "hey, good idea! People buy all kinds of crap on eBay."
Show up late for big events like New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day. Bring a couple of your buddies along, preferably the one who "accidentally" walked in on her in the shower one time and the other one who always makes fun of her ass.
Show up unannounced, ask what she has for dinner, make a face, belch, knock over a plant, borrow money, tell her next time she should leave the chicken in ten minutes longer, promise you'll get together soon, then at 2:30 a.m. the same night call her drunk after you've been at the pub with a bunch of friends, ask in a maudlin voice why the two of you never "got it on."
Say you'll call. Don't call. I think this one comes genetically encoded on the Y chromosome, but even so, certain things bear repeating.
When you're a boy with a girlfriend you don't love anymore and you want to break up because you've been secretly seeing someone else for the past month, don't under any circumstances break up with your girlfriend. Keep up the pretence and the lies. Take the other girl to the prom. Get your parents in on the plot, so they'll lie for you. Blame it on your girlfriend when she finds out. Tell her she's clingy.
Stay tuned for forthcoming lessons in Boy Logic.
05:49
Friday, November 29, 2002
Some random things I've come across on the Internet:
i don't wanna marry this guy, but i sure wouldn't mind having a good old-fashioned bacchanalia with him and letting him quote bukowski and emily dickinson to me in classical latin.
I heard it was a white Thanksgiving in Boston, and that made me jealous. I love snow in November.
My first year of grad school, sometime in the last millenium, I had to leave my cozy North Cambridge studio for an orchestra rehearsal, and when I stepped out into the street I realized it was snowing. I'm a California girl, and snow may well always be an event for me.
(I mean, it does snow in California, in the mountains and stuff, but well, it's a stretch of the imagination to picture bobsleds in Seal Beach.)
So I walked out to Mass Ave with my violin and happened to look up right as I passed under a streetlamp. It was a T.S. Eliot experience. The streetlamps in North Cambridge are orange, or were in the last century, and with snow falling around it the light looked like a halo. Granted, a kind of 1970s tasteless urban-trash-chic orange halo, but still.
That was the year of a blizzard every month between January and April, and snow every Wednesday (why? why?? it was clockwork, and so weird) for February and March. David Letterman made fun of stranded passengers who used their backpacks as pillows and napped on the out-of-service-for-weather-reasons luggage belt. People on the eastern seabord gave up hoping to get out of the cold and go somewhere sane (like, say, the Bahamas or Belize or other hot places starting with B). I finished my first semester of graduate work, dropped out of the orchestra, got sick and stayed sick (until summer, when I went home for two weeks that turned into three months, got a whole different kind of sick, spent a lot of time vomiting, and finally got better). I typed all my papers on my biggest life-investment to date, a Mac Classic2, which didn't yet have a modem. My grandfather died. I got hooked on Star Trek: The Next Generation (Data. The hottest almost-human on TV.) and Stephen Sondheim musicals. And somehow got through the winter.
Somewhere around President's Day, snow stopped being fun. The city was filthy, Porter Square sported an increasingly large, and increasingly grey, heap of plowed snow-dirt that loomed over the parking lot and T station like Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout's garbage pile, and I tell you, once you've taken one false step on something that looks like perfectly normal snow but is in fact an ice patch and found yourself flat on your back (read: flat on your ass) in the cold in the middle of a sidewalk of people in a hurry, the charm wears off fast. January in a city where it snows every week like clockwork is the gritty underside of those picturesque Christmas cards where everyone is red-cheeked and charitable. Come January, charity is about as bountiful as penguins in the Sahara. Even the snowmen looked sulky.
But in November it was new. The city had fallen quiet, traffic and industrial noises hushed. Brick sidewalks worn with three hundred years of footsteps speckled with soft tufts of down that would wrap the city in white silence overnight. Rooftops edged in crisp white relief against the sky.
I was 23, I had a navy pea-coat that kept me warm and made me look cute, I had just read Carson McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, and I was on my way to play Beethoven's Eroica Symphony in a basement in Harvard Square. And snow falling around the streetlamps sang purity and simplicity in the autumn darkness, and when I stopped to look up it made a halo.
01:26
Thursday, November 28, 2002
A Question:
does everybody have a "Wonder Years" voice-over inner voice that comes and narrates the soulful introspective moments of your life you want to hold onto for time immemorial?
so i'm editing my favorites list and in amid the catholic liturgical links and rare-books sites there's this place. if i were a better catholic i'd probably remove it. i'm just me and i think i'm gonna go ahead and broaden my horizons and have another few damn good laughs. especially over the definition of dichotomy.
Things I am thankful for (in the spirit of my native land ...):
My dissertation being almost done.
The 5 (4 ... damn. you really can't just say the word) remaining Oreos in the package my friend Marie-Doha smuggled over for me.
Fog over cobblestone streets between the hours of 9 p.m. and noon.
Dvorak's "New World" Symphony.
Being able to speak French.
My family remaining present in my life, even though I keep moving far away from them.
Being out of the hospital (happy one-month anniversary to me).
Having spent two months in the hospital so that I could come out and be thankful for them.
Gregorian chant, especially the "O" antiphons of the Advent season. And the First Sunday of Advent Introït, "Ad te levavi," which is of an austere beauty that makes something broken in me want to soar.
Christmas lights in the streets. It doesn't matter where. When cities decorate for Christmas, no matter how humbly or extravagantly, they do it movingly and beautifully.
The people in my choir. My friends, French, American, Polish, British, Italian, past, present, future. My former students who have become (and always were) friends. My priests. The place I have found to worship and express my soul.
Being so lonely some nights that it hurts my chest, then waking up and finding a message from someone who wrote "just because."
The many things the people I love keep teaching me.
The French accent pronouncing "Thanksgiving."
The fact that the more things I put on this list, the more things I think of to put on this list.
03:02
Wednesday, November 27, 2002
bowing ...
i hate fun evenings that end with me hugging my gay friend goodbye and going home alone wondering how much whiskey i have left and whether or not i have the energy to cry about all the usual damn things.
i hate being in love with someone i can't even touch. i hate that when i speak toads seem to coagulate in the back of my throat and jump out poisonously one by one. i hate being 5000 miles from my family because even when they're stupid they're still the ones i want to have rub my back when i feel like dropping out of high windows. i hate how many high windows my apartment has.
i wish i was funny, or driven, or had a cute nose or an infectious laugh or one of those hoarse female voices that makes you want sake and sex, preferably more than once, and didn't care about being ordinary and undecided and chubby. with just a stupid normal nose (though i like the piercing, even if it scandalizes the ladies at church).
if it wasn't so late here (and i didn't play so badly) i'd think about getting out the violin. it's gonna be another long one tonight ...
When I was a kid, birthdays were Big Special Days, second to Easter and Christmas in that family-loves-you way. When it was your birthday you got the special plate. (An aside note: my father, bless his beautiful heart, gave my husband and I a special plate of our own as a wedding present. Of course my husband didn't "get it," but he's a boy and works according to boy logic, a concept my sister and I have been developing for several years now in long-distance conversations about how much boy-logic sucks. But that's a subject for another blog entry ...). The special plate: a fire-flavor-Jolly-Rancher-red ceramic entity with "You are special today" around the edges in copperplate gothic calligraphy. And Mom made a chocolate cake. With chocolate frosting. The kind parents of small children everywhere have nightmares about, nightmares that probably feature sticky hands touching linen curtains and silk dresses, or cavity-causing tooth beasts running rampant through little mouths laughing in malicious glee.
I spent my birthday this year in France, in the hospital, no cake anywhere, nightmares aplenty.
French friends called me. Former students called me. My family called me. A priest sent me a text message.
Armelle gave me a hug. Christian kissed me three times, once on each cheek and once again because he's from the south where they do that sort of thing. Abdel said "Happy Birthday, how you say, take care of yourself" in English and gave me a chocolate bar (it was really good). And we watched Star Academy and the Sunday night movie and went to bed anticipating Monday morning's doctor's rounds and maybe the chance to walk to the hospital cafeteria - a place to talk more freely, while keeping an eye on the schizophrenic man who takes off his shirt and circles the tables, walking faster and faster and talking to himself; a place to smoke, a place where they sell Diet Coke in tiny cans for 1 € 50. Or to collect stale bread and go feed the deer and the goats, if it wasn't raining.
In the dark of my double room, listening to Odile snore, I felt more or less at peace. I felt special that day.
02:49
I had all kinds of thoughts yesterday and swore I didn't need to write them down because I'd remember the important stuff when the website finally accepted my attempts to create a blog. Let this be a lesson to you. Write things down. And don't swear. It's bad manners.
