Emo thought of the day :)

I wonder how many times you can give so much of yourself to someone before there's nothing left.

Because of Your Skin

Installation number 2 of the Erika saga.

So I come into class looking adorable (exhibit A: The myspace pic) I was a few minutes early and when I sit down, a girl to my left compliments my shirt. Before I can even say thank you, Erika says "and nice shirt too." I smile and say thank you and cite Forever 21 and H&M as the two stores who made this outfit possible. I settled in a little bit into my chair and Erika, from two rows of seats away slowly says, "Are you from... Greek descent?"

"No, Peruvian"

I get a look from Erika. You know how some people look like animals? Erika looks like a puffy faced fish, not a puffer fish, just a fish that might have gotten punched in the face a few too many times. Her blank stare is reminiscent of the glazed over eyes of a freshly iced trout.

In an effort not to lose myself in the black holes of her pupils, I said, "Sorry if that's disappointing...?"

"Oh no," Erika's had a cold since the beginning of school, her nasally voice is grating, "I just ask 'cause of your skin"

"Yeah, I'm kinda yellow..."

And that was it. She didn't elaborate at all. Didn't say, "oh no, that came out weird" or anything. I wasn't offended, I'm not an idiot. However, it does kind of piss me off that she thinks that's cool to say. I'm torn over whether it's because she's black, and minorities don't feel weird calling out other minorities (maybe?) or she's an idiot and didn't know any better. Either way, is that cool to say to people? "Oh, I'm asking because your skin is a strange color I'm not used to" is acceptable? I'd never think to say *just* that. I might say that and add something about someone's features or whatever.

Oh well, I kind of got complimented on having a tan, racism or not, that's pretty cool.

This girl in my film class is an idiot. Part 1

So there's this girl in my Film Studies class, we'll call her Erika, because that's her name. There has never been someone so undeserving of being in a high demand 400 level class than this girl. We did a little, "getting to know you" thing on the first day. At this point she wasn't officially in the class, she was trying to get into it and had come to the first day hoping that she would be able to get a spot. God knows why. The teacher, Professor Collier, (whom I absolutely love because he's passionate about what he teaches and teaches it well and in an interesting and engaging way) asked us to go around and say our name and the best and worst movie we saw over the summer.

The most popular answer for best movie was, predictably, Inception. Erika broke the cycle. It could be generally agreed that every movie that was suggested as the best of the summer, was "good." This is when Erika's turn finally came, she opened her mouth and my opinion of her was forever set.

"Awwwwm, I think my best movie would be Twilight Ellipse... I mean, like, Eclipse, and my worst movie is Dear John." Her reason for hating Dear John was because they fell in love "in like two weeks." Um, it was the whole summer, and how long did it take for Edward to fall in love with Bella you hypocritical moron? I'm not saying Dear John is amazing, but really? "Twilight: Ellipse"?

The next class we were talking about Alfred Hitchcock movies and Collier had a little spacey moment and was asking what the Norman Bates movie was. Obviously, we all said Psycho, but poor little Erika. She turned to me and said "Is he talking about just Psycho Psycho or American Psycho?" Well let's see Film Studies student, we're having an Alfred Hitchcock discussion and the clue was "Norman Bates." I swallowed back the creeping bile in my throat and politely said "Just Psycho."

Today she didn't know who Michael Cera was and when asked about the "mise en scene" of a still of the Buster Keaton movie we saw last week she said, "Well I see some oblique angles?" (there wasn't one) "And there's some vertical lines, and horizontal and then some diagonal... I saw a mixture of things." Wow. Never talk again.

She then granted me my wish, at least for that class period, and fell asleep.

Bitch.

Where can I buy motivation?

I'm going to start working out. I say this every summer before school starts. With the gyms that Ball State has I'll be able to get in the best shape of my life! I rarely make it a week before I quit.

I really want to do it this time. I'm not fat, I know, and I'm not trying to lose weight necessarily. I don't even have a scale in my house so I wouldn't know I had even if I did. I just want to be "tone" or "lean". There's a difference between being skinny and being in shape. I have fantastic genes. My hair almost always obeys me, except in unusual humidity. My nail beds are long and my nails are hard. I tan pretty well and my eyes have a good shape to them, even if they aren't the traditional shape of most white people and I have to put on my eye shadow a little bit differently. I eat whatever I want and my weight doesn't fluctuate. I'm spoiled. I know that I don't *need* to work out to look like I'm "supposed to look." I just want to be healthy. I want to get into the habit of working out so that when I get pregnant later on (very later on) in life, I won't have a hell of a time losing my baby weight. I want to work out so that when I get older and my metabolism slows down, I can still have pasta and rice pretty much every day. What's life without pasta? Nothing, that's what.

I want to keep on looking nice even after I have kids. I think it's a tragedy when women cut their hair super short and stop wearing makeup when they have kids. Ugh. I watched my cousin's 7 month old all day for two and a half weeks this summer. Yeah, I wasn't sure how to take a shower when no one else was home. What if she woke up from her nap while I was in the shower? Other than that I definitely had the ability to put some makeup on and brush my hair while she was up and about. Although my clothes had little spots of smashed green peas and I reeked of formula I still tried to look presentable. Maybe? Alright fine, I wore yoga pants pretty much everyday. I had no where to go! If I had errands to run or a husband, or any reason to look nice other than because I was watching music videos I would have. Really. I would have...

I'm also going to start working out. Yeah... It's totally going to happen this time. Totally.

Final Reading for my Creative Fiction Class. Dec '08

*The "I" in this story isn't me, I just wrote it in the first person because I liked how it felt that way. My friend in class an I had an idea that our final readings should be sort of deranged and should make the teacher want to recommend us to the counseling center. This is my attempt, and I'm pretty sure it worked.*

I had to go to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. I had awoken before my alarm and lay staring at the clock until the red numbers exploded into noise. I can’t afford to keep my small apartment at a normal temperature. I sleep in sweats, a pair with a crotch that skims the knees. I shuffled to the shower that I’ve never had sex in and began my tired routine.
You know how sometimes you’ll be driving and you wonder what would happen if you twitched just enough to crash into oncoming traffic? The oncoming driver wouldn’t be wearing a seatbelt and would go through his windshield and land on mine, blood seeping in the splinters of safety glass. Our cars would collide and twist like metal fingers. Glass would shatter and fall like crystals, dancing on the asphalt as they searched for a resting place. My airbag would malfunction, my face crunching against the steering wheel, fracturing my skull and splitting the skin. A second car, trying to avoid the collision would hit the left side of my bumper, jerking my car and sending my temple into the driver’s side window knocking me unconscious and sending pulses of blood down my face. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks like that.
I stayed on my side of the road long enough to stop in at the only coffee shop on the way to the BMV. I was third in line. I handled all the merchandise and knick knacks on the way to the register. The barista’s expression when I ordered a plain black coffee made me contemplate whether I should fling it in his face when he handed it to me. Not everyone wants a half caf. Caramel latte with a mocha twist, Mr. Barista, so don’t look at me like I’m an idiot for liking my coffee to actually taste like fucking coffee. After taking my order he smiled and said he liked my shirt. I don’t know why, I was wearing an ugly grey sweater; I guess it’s a nice grey. I just looked at him and waited for my coffee as his smile slowly faded and he turned to the next customer. Some say my natural expression is off-putting. I grabbed my coffee from a peppy barista who’s too old to still be working at a coffee shop and much too old to wear her little hat backwards. It’s just pathetic really, people like that.
I finally made it to the BMV. The line ended at the door so I stood with my back to a draft. I didn’t bring a book, not that I would have read it standing up. I hate lines. It took twenty three minutes to get to the front of the line and explain the triviality that had brought me there. The woman who helped me was almost as bored as I was, monotone, she fit her situation, the weather, the time, everything except her clothes. She looked to be one of those people afraid to go from misses to women’s sizes. Her breasts shook while she wrote, her grubby fingers grasped the pen, dwarfing it. Her warbling double chin was covered in a soft down of hair. Answering her questions was made difficult by the disgust that was building up in the back of my throat. She asked if I was ok, I looked ill. I just took my papers and a pen and went to sit at the only empty seat at an available table.
I sat and breathed, trying to think of something else. The table was right below an analog clock with a loud second hand. I filled out my paper work and sat. There was a girl sitting to my right, reading a supermarket rag. She was chewing gum. Loudly. She was completely done up, big earrings, lots of makeup, lots of hairspray, lots of money. Three hookers had to die so she could look the way she did. I looked back to the metal table where I was sitting. I tried to find a pattern in the scratches on the stainless steel surface. That girl kept clicking her gum. I tried to read the magazine out of the corner of my eye. I could hear the spit swirl in her mouth as she chewed. I tried reading the only thing on the table, Chicken Soup for the Soul. Really? She blew a bubble. Can you ask a stranger to shut the fuck up with their gum? I just wanted to smash her face in. So I did.
I found myself with my hand tangled in her hair. My wrist rested in the hollow spot at the bottom of her head and my fingers wrapped around her skull like I was holding a basketball. She didn’t even have time to make a noise before I stood up a little and put every ounce of my strength and weight into slamming her face down into the table. I don’t even know what you’d call that noise. Like dropping a rotting melon onto a table. I breathed in deep, calming the surge of adrenaline I was enjoying. Her hands were clutching the magazine in her lap, her earrings were against the table, her hair splayed around my hand. Blood was beginning to pool. I pulled her head back. I looked closely, her nose had broken, it looked like a movie. It was flat, squashed, gone, she would never be on a coin. I broke one of her teeth, they were tilted in and twisted, one went through her lip, and there was a chip of one on the table, swimming in the beautiful crimson. Her eyes were partially open but were red; there was a stream of blood from her forehead dribbling into the corner of one of her baby blues; color contacts. It’s amazing how the life literally goes out of the eyes. A big strip of highlighted hair stuck to the blood when I had brought her head back up. I was still holding her skull. I used my other hand to put the hair back behind her ear. I didn’t know blood had a smell.
I’m glad I took everything in so fast. The few people who did look up at the noise immediately screamed, shrieked bloody murder actually. No one knew what to do. I didn’t look like a threat at the time, well besides holding a mutilated face over a pool of blood, I guess. I noticed I had indented the table a little bit. I didn’t think I was that strong. They had to remove my hand from her hair. The police took me and gave me my rights. The back seat of the squad car was more comfortable than I thought it would be. We passed by the coffee shop on our way to the station. I wondered if anyone else had gotten a plain black coffee since I had. I saw in my reflection in the window that I had some splattered blood on my face. Once we got to the police station they sat me in a chair next to two other people. I was in line again, for the third time that day. I was third in line for the second time that day. And so I waited again while the man next to me tapped his foot, for seventeen goddamn minutes.

Untitled and Possibly Unfinished Poem

I want to live in the space where our vapors coalesce.

I want to take your fingernails from their beds and sleep there

Until your hair licks the fleshy backs of your knees.

I want to gnarl my fingers through that hair;

Drag you through the mud and

Scrape your knees to the bone.

I want to pound every knot in your spine flat

With clenched fists, iron like the hammer.

I want to drown in the blacks of your eyes

And drink the red of your lips.

I want to plunge into your muscles

Until their fatigued spasms carry me through your body.

I want to set your marrow on fire

Just to watch you dance.

Your limbs too long

Skin too pink

Soul too gone

Slinking Sludge and the Sweet Salty Sea

I remember the smell of low tide. As we began to see marsh land covered in tall beach grass the odor would waft into the forest green caravan. It was the late 90s and we didn’t have air conditioning in our ’95 van. Instead we would open the windows and sit in the back seat in our bathing suits and shorts. My mom drove, her curly hair longer than she keeps it now, next to her in the passenger seat was Linda. Linda was one of my second moms, the wife of the pastor at our church; we grew up with her boys, Kip and Corey, who were on the trip with my sister and I along with their older sister Brooke, who had babysat us when we were younger. Derek came too, he and Corey were inseparable and Derek was the glue that bonded us all together. He was the endlessly positive friend, beginning to gain the heft that would plague his teenage years, but never without a joke followed by a laugh that was reminiscent of Woody the Woodpecker.

We were on our way to First Encounter Beach, on the tip of Cape Cod in my home state of Massachusetts. This was the beach my mother had spent her summers on growing up. Her grandmother used to have a house on the beach but sold it around the time my parents were married, forever depriving me of growing up a true Cape Cod ragamuffin. Instead we would make day trips. My mom packed sandwiches, chips, soda, water bottles, fruit and veggies into our blue cooler.

The cooler jumbled around in the trunk along with squeaky beach chairs, brightly colored buckets, plastic shovels and overused towels. We always snacked on the way; it seemed to take forever to get from where we lived on the other side of the Cape Cod Canal to Eastham. During the offseason Cranberry Highway, one of the main ways to get to “Cape Cod and the Islands,” was a five minute drive from my house and getting to anywhere of importance was maybe an additional five minutes, but the same trip could take double the time or more when the summer heat would bring the tourists in droves to my beloved hamlet. It’s not difficult to imagine the hell that was driving to the beach; your car slowly rolling towards your lifeblood, the sweet salty water that teased your nostrils as you hung your head out the window to see how far ahead the holdup was.

We would play games as we sat idly in traffic, looking down at the canal from high on the Bourne Bridge, picking out our favorite boats and seeing all the people cycling, fishing and walking beside the canal. Once we got farther and the traffic thinned out as cars went to different beaches, my mom would tell us stories of when she spent her summers here. We passed the windmill where she had dreamed of getting married, the Superette, or “Super Rat” as I thought it was called, a small convenience store her grandfather, Tramp, would take her. We always stopped there, even if we didn’t buy anything. She loved the smell of the miniature store, like that of an old book stored in the attic. It had been untouched since her childhood: comic books in the same place, tobacco behind the counter.

We would then finally arrive at the beach. From the parking lot it simply looked like dilapidated fences crookedly clinging to sandy mounds with some long grasses trying to gather together the entire beach in their roots, like thin wispy fists. We unloaded everything from the back of the van, our small bodies weighed down and struggling to walk through the loose, hot, dry sand. Slowly ascending the hill we would see the blue of the sky meet the copycat blue ocean, quickly receding from the beach, leaving behind sandbar islands. The kids, with the exception of the teenage Brooke, would dump all of our luggage on the shore where our mothers indicated, whip off our shorts, dig through the piles for some tools and run out to the sandbars.

Despite the offensive smell, low tide is the best time to be on the beach. I love the dense sludge smell slinking along under the cool breeze smelling of heat and salt. As you trek from small island to island the mud smell dissipates into the pure smell of water, clean and soft. We did not bring buckets and shovels to make sand castles. Our purpose was much more sinister, we were hunters at heart. Our prey of choice: the razor clam.

I remember the hopeful tension of hunting for razor clams. When the tide is out, razor clams dig into the sand and leave small holes; they’re unmistakable once you know what you’re looking for. Once the hole is seen, you need to take your bare foot and press down right next to the hole, making sure not to cover it with a stray toe. If below your toes a razor clam is anxiously hiding, a stream of water will spit out, an admirable twelve inches in the air. I remember the frenzied caution of digging quickly to catch the clam before it burrowed beyond my reach. I’d drop to my knees and dig with my hands like a frenzied badger. Razor clams are quick and fear death with an appropriate vigor. They are called razor clams because of their resemblance to a straight razor, long, thin and rectangular. I remember the triumphant feeling of wrapping my hand around the razor clam, my arm elbow deep in tight wet sand. I also remember the pain that came along with the poignant realization that they had earned their keen name. I can’t remember if I brought out the clam with my bloody finger or if the pain made me let go. I ran back to the beach, a considerable jog.

Once back on the beach, Linda saw my finger and wrapped it in paper towels and pressed down. Hard. So hard I think she squeezed all the flesh out of my finger, like toothpaste. When she left me to get a Band-Aid I took the paper towels off and dotted the white sand with my garnet blood. I grinned morbidly.

Years later I returned to my beach. I was eighteen. I had been living in Indiana for five years. I brought my boyfriend, my high school sweetheart, the boy I thought I’d marry. He had never seen the ocean. I thought we would have the same fun we did when I was small. I imagined getting a new scar to accentuate the small faded mark only I knew about that I had garnered years prior.

We had grown up. We went out on the sandbars for a while, everyone quickly grew tired and returned to the beach to snack and lay out. We could do this at the pool, I thought. We were on my beach, we were breathing in the sea air, being invigorated by its quick and lingering touches. Our feet were cradled in warm sand, being solicited to move toward the cool water. The gulls were calling us to shed our worries and run with wild abandon, free of form or pace.

But instead we clung to our towels, fruitlessly trying to lay flat on the sand. We futilely tried to keep the beach away, brushing the sand off our blankets, keeping our sweating drinks off the ground, putting out hair up to bar the wind from running it’s fingers along our scalps. We were at the beach but trying to remove ourselves with every action. We no longer tried to become the beach, we didn’t gather up crabs and make them fight to the death in makeshift sand coliseums. We didn’t take dead jellyfish and throw them all over each other. We didn’t want to get dirty.

We left. I felt cheated. Why is it that I couldn’t enjoy the beach as I had when I was smaller? Was it because of the people I went with? Was their hesitation to play along with me the cause of my lackluster trip? Or was it in fact that, though I tried to deny it, I had changed. The same things didn’t entertain me as they once had. I didn’t want to ruin my nails digging. I didn’t want to taste the burning shot of pain that another encounter with a razor clam may serve me. I didn’t want to suffer from unconventional tan lines. I wish I had simply let go and embraced my inner rascal, but I suppose I’ll have to try again. Perhaps I’ll bring my own children there and their excitement and whimsy will inspire me to return to that mindset. I’ll teach them how to spot the holes, how to step, how to dig, how to avoid being cut. I’ll teach them about the cycle of life, so that maybe when they eventually realize that things change even when they also stay so much the same, they’ll be a little more prepared.