Monday, December 17, 2007

for the struggle

I feel no pain for you, only sadness.


It's been such a terribly long week, and a longer evening. I think of the time when you told me that sleep would make everything seem better. My intent was not to push you away. And I am sorry that I foreclosed on our limitlessness but really, child, there was more than enough dealing to be done.

Don't taunt me, and don't prejudge my sadness. It is more than a little bit lucky that I've emerged on the other side of growing-up whole, if you look at who I was a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. Emerging strong and dreaming and learning altogether even better. There are things about the young life that I miss -- the endorphines, the competition, the limitless sense of acceleration and pain. Those things yet to be discovered.

When I am quiet and boring and sad, realize that I've waited a long time for the freedom to lie in bed and reread old books for an afternoon, and feel whatever it is that I feel.

Sunday, December 16, 2007

per le say

Still slogging my way through exams. I'll be done on Tuesday.

There's really nothing else happening with me. I feel heavy and awful and weak all the time; I sleep too much and at the wrong times and I desperately need to work out more. Only I don't want to become a rabid distance runner again and I don't know what else I can do. Maybe I'll go to the gym not for karate, for once (I have been saying that all week).

I keep making "I'll see you soon" promises to semifriends and I don't really intend to keep very many of them (which is a little sad, I know).

I never got to see you over my little break even though I desperately wanted to. I was too busy heaving my guts up all morning (period sickness wtf).

As Barry said, I hate December. I will be so glad when the stress of exams and family and holiday and travel (eesh, all of those things combined look like death) is OVER and I can sit back under the windowsill, enjoying the way the wind plays through the naked trees and riding my horse on cold cold pure mornings.

reading: Women and Gender notes
listening to: Long White Arms // Paula Cole

Friday, December 14, 2007

i'm walking on a wire

I came home today, to learn that the itty bitty high school seniors are finding about their colleges of choice around now.

The giving, loving, sweet part of me wants to see them get into Smith and Cornell and Oxford and Princeton and UC-Berkely, pack their matching suitcases and leave this little hill town behind, preserve memories of coffee shops and early morning bagels and lovely fall country roads in translucent fossilized amber.

The bitter, unmitigated part of me wants them to taste failure and rejection, to face the next four years and see unchanging surroundings, lowered expectations. To see them move from hope and new life to a sour, biding-my-time sort of attitude.

Maybe I am more well-suited to this restraint, though. I've been saying it for a long time and I still think it's a little true -- I'm not invested in my own happiness. My academics are about competition, departmental status and proving other people wrong. My athletics are about reaching for perfections, accumulating knowledge and skill and using it to its fullest extent. Whatever I do socially, I do out of obligation to old friends, family members, or those people I need to keep diplomatic relations with. I love my girlfriend because I love her and it is not what I would have chosen, but I invest the future of my life in her, instead of myself.

reading: nothing, actually.
listening to: curbside prophet // jason mraz

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

and the wind cries mary

I don't think our journey is done yet.

You're so highly intellectualized, so smart and calm and ineffable, that I forget how charged your life is with the sexual, the erotic, the lovely. Even if it's not the usual expression of personal physicality, the things you read and encounter and digest and share with me (with that little attachment of "this makes me think of you, a little" under lines about submission) remind me how dissimilar we are.

I could never have lived with your restraint, but I love the intellectual openness it's given you now.

listening to: All At Sea // Jamie Cullum
reading: Love and Death in Renaissance Italy // Thomas V. Cohen

Sunday, December 2, 2007

maybe all we can do, is to see each other through

I created a book drawer. A drawer, under my bed, to hold all the books that were living on the floor. I also converted a hatbox into a little stool for my foodstuffs (also former denizens of the floor).

I love it.

In other news it is raining and I want you to pick up your phone so badly, Noni! (is it irreverant that I call you that? is it too familiar, or too childish, or altogether out of style? or does it make you miss me a little?) I need to tell you how I've been feeling. There are so many things I share with you that I don't have in common with anyone else -- so much life, and experience, and through all of that changing business you have consistently and lovingly been there.

listening to: Hour Follows Hour // Ani DiFranco
reading: Fearless: The Complete Personal Safety Guide for Women // Paul Henry Danylewich

Friday, November 30, 2007

square frames

I put on my new dress and it made me lonely.

My suitemates are at Rocky Horror. Really, I don't care about the show -- I love it, I've seen it a thousand times, game over.

Sometimes I get so tired of being attracted to everyone.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

glamorous

I am looking through the pictures of a friend who is spending her fall in Paris. She's talented and lovely and free and her pictures reflect all of those things. I have an aesthetic crush on the angle she captures things at. Her use of perspective turns me on.

And I am still left wondering, what happened to Paris? Where has my light little traveling heart gone, anyway? I don't want to look back on my time and Charlottesville and feel like I was just biding that time, waiting around until something came along. The days when I get to the barn and the air is so cold that we ride our horses up the stream and across the field to the barn instead of leading them, risking slippery backs for their warmth, is that biding my time? Hours and hours of being in the dojo, flying on the same techniques endless times, bare feet sliding across wood floors, what does that amount to?

I have no answers, but in other news, I DO have official advice/permission to take a less fucking demanding class load next semester. Thank goodness, maybe I can start riding a majority of days out of the week now.

listening to: Cursive
reading: my Western Civ paper

Monday, November 12, 2007

sun flower

Stop haunting me, for the sake of everything.

You've changed almost beyond recognition. I've changed in the same direction I've always been changing (tame and away from danger).

And yet, and yet. I can't get the lines of you, silhouetted against dark curtains, out of my mind. Your hair is just as bright, that shining river of honey strawberry yellow-red that crashed through everyone you stood too near. You were forever standing too close to me, watching my pulse twitch.

I love the newness and the sanity of you, but at the same time, I can't let that gorgeously messed past you've got quite go.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

miscellany

Still sick, more updates forthcoming.

I should be reading Noble but hey, I'm not. It's boring and I'm going to go help paint Beta Bridge in 20 minutes, I guess.

Also, Feministing.com isn't loading and that is upsetting.

Class signup is tomorrow. Whooooos not ready. Oh right that would be me.

I need more friends.

listening to: Umbrella // Rhianna feat. Jay-Z
reading: Les Liaisons Dangereuses // Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Friday, November 9, 2007

i have gone marking your body with crosses of fire

It is still hard to translate from my head to the blank white "update blog" screen, I think.

In other news, tomorrow is Caturday. Don't laugh at me, I will tell my horse to bite you. I am sad because I am sick and I can't go to karate tonight so I am sitting here not knowing what to do.

Today was a little sad when my Classics professor expressed her doubt that any of us read poetry. I've always read poetry -- maybe not classical love poetry, until now, but give me a break; it's hard to get through if you haven't been familiarized with all those references already. But I've done Keats and both Shelleys, Blake and Marlowe and Marvell and all those other silly dead white men I had to read in high school.

And by myself I fell in love (back in those days when I thought love grew from nothingness and lasted forever) with Shakespeare's sonnets -- I have a complete book of them, each carefully scanned and annotated in my twelve-year-old handwriting. Pablo Neruda still makes me cry and one day I want to read him in the original Spanish because I *know* I am missing things. I spent a week translating T. S. Eliot's French poetry but I still love The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock like none other. I have Emily Dickinson, Alice Walker, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop sitting on the shelf for the times when I need to listen to things that intelligent women have to say. I still look for James Wright's "A Blessing" every time I go to a bookstore, and I can't read Ezra Pound without wishing for the days when A. and I wrote so freely and so together.

I reject a world that lives without poetry. I fantasize about joining the Renegade Poet Society, those masterful night poem-chalkers who use e. e. cummings and Rainer Marie Rilke to vandalize construction walls. And most densely of all, I know those swaying, rhythmic poems that bring us to the sacred, those studied poems that are prayers. Those catholic ones that are milennia old and transliterated directly, those pagan ones that make us divine with ecstasy, ecstatic with the divine.

Last but, naturally, not least, I am always writing poetry. I am pulling metaphor from thin air and spinning nothingness into somethingness and back into infinity again. I am recording that which is in the past (the smell of blood, deeper than roses) and those things that are still coming (my first Paris in Seoul). How could this ever be alien to me?

listening to: Buffalo Soldier // Bob Marley & The Wailers
reading: The Joy Luck Club // Amy Tan

Thursday, November 8, 2007

get lucky sometimes

Oh Lesbia, who are you? And who are we?

I have a torrent happening in my mind, a literary hemmorage -- Sappho Sulpicia Seneca Tertullian Ovid Dante Petrarch Catullus Thucydides Homer Virgil Valla Guardino (to name the last few days).

I've been feeling cut off whenever I talk to you these days. I spend my days thinking about the sex and my nights dreaming about uncertainty -- what does this say? And yet sometimes it is quite the reverse.

listening to: even the losers // tom petty and the heartbreakers
reading: the italian renaissance // paula findlen

moisturizer problems

i officially have no money, after filling my gas tank up 4 times last month and a 200$ moving violation fine from last month. i mean, not literally no money at all, but i'm working ten hours a week and i need:
clothing related things
to pay emilie back for the 300$ plane ticket
800$ for tack in the spring
christmas presents
a new gi
gas money
food money
laundry money
etc.

& not want to die when it's all over.

reading // women's life in greece and rome, by levkowitz and fant
listening to // malcom mclaren, about her

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

strawberry sunflower red

You just explained your train of thought to me for the first time, and I just abstained from comment for the first time.

How our roles have reversed.

If you're the only friend from high school that I can hold onto, I'll still count myself a lucky kid.

listening to: 100 years // virginia belles
reading: The Italian Renaissance // Paula Findlen, ed.

in spite of myself, I still think on you sometimes.

And I find it hard to read when you are writing, harder to write what you are reading.

I had a thought last night that escaped me as I stretched – breathing, hands wide – that all of this is because of you. Irrationality bowled me over and the intenseness of your lack of faith still presses on me. When I am sleeping, when I am working, when I am practicing, you come back to me and lie close down against my chest, making it heave, spinning me around.

In some ultra different universe, where you are like me and I am alone, I imagine you walking through those smooth glass double doors. In my mind’s eye I see my eyes dilating at the sight of you, two years older and finer and smoother like fine liquor drawn from the cask, and doubly inappropriate. I see me as you might, with wilderness in the frame and the sense I’ve let myself go.

listening to: i bet that you look good on the dance floor // arctic monkeys
reading: Korean History notes

Sunday, October 28, 2007

I've been pushing the Catullus too hard tonight.

So this is the first new blog in a long, long time.

Perhaps I should introduce myself. I'm a student, a feminist, a martial artist, a horseback rider, and several other things also. I find blogging and pop culture mildly ridiculous, like a big cosmic joke, and I am gunshy.

I need somewhere to make my lists and meanderings and thoughts and wanderings around that happen after there has just been too much Famous Literature (tm) extant in my day.

I am a writer and a lover and a fierce, fierce independent all at once.

listening to: Tegan and Sara // We Didn't do It
reading: Edge of Empire, by Maya Jasanoff