Not everyone seems to have the same relationship with books that I do. After unpacking my library, which has been in storage for four months, I sat in a meditative state surrounded by stacks of my books, my gaze lovingly caressing the exposed spines. There you are, beat up copy of White Oleander from late high school; I haven't even flipped through your pages, Portable Dorothy Parker (I only bought you because I love Penguin Classic Deluxe Editions) but I love you just the same. My body floods with relaxed excitement, potential for both curling up and expanding at the same time, overwhelming and comforting.
I approach the idea of not being able to read every fascinating, well-crafted exploration of the human experience, every clever turn of phrase or twist or piece of witty dialogue, every in-depth analysis of our world, as an anxiety-inducing tragedy. I look up from my trance, panicked, and say to Greg, "What if I don't even finish all of these books?"
This is why I keep neglecting to get a job, lurking LibraryThing instead of LinkedIn. Funny how leaving an institution of higher learning awakens real desire to learn. Four years and thousands of dollars later, where has college left me?
I could have had four years of job experience and 200+ books behind me. Instead, I stare at my library like a lover who's slipped through my fingers, imagining what could have been, what late night conversations and deep connections and afternoons sitting silently in the sun enjoying each other's mere presence we could have had, if only I hadn't spent those four years with a moron who only cared about basketball.
4.29.2011
3.29.2011
I wish to be left alone with my happiness
I wish to be left alone with my happiness. I feel like this is a small request to make, but in the face of a world that trades in breaking people's willpower and telling everyone how they've failed, even if all they've ever done in life is worked and attempted to succeed, asking to be left alone with one's happiness is really the greatest request of all.
I may not have work nearly as hard as some people in certain fields, but in the field of my own, simple happiness, I think I'm reaching mastery. I enjoy reading, cooking and eating delicious things, talking to friends about their lives, speaking precisely, taking notes and making lists, smiling at people walking tiny dogs, and trying not to make the world a worse place for anyone. Simple things.
But nothing is simple, and the world is not concerned with my or anyone's simple happiness. No one looks anyone in the eyes anymore and says "your intentions are earnest and good." When I wake up in the morning I'm most proud of the fact that I took the time the last couple of weeks to make sure that I learned how to treat myself and others with more respect.
But there's no where on a resume to put that, and therefore it is useless.
This is the best way I can think of to describe my unhappiness. Like a calm pond that no one can resist throwing a rock into, I feel their disruption ripple on and on and on.
I may not have work nearly as hard as some people in certain fields, but in the field of my own, simple happiness, I think I'm reaching mastery. I enjoy reading, cooking and eating delicious things, talking to friends about their lives, speaking precisely, taking notes and making lists, smiling at people walking tiny dogs, and trying not to make the world a worse place for anyone. Simple things.
But nothing is simple, and the world is not concerned with my or anyone's simple happiness. No one looks anyone in the eyes anymore and says "your intentions are earnest and good." When I wake up in the morning I'm most proud of the fact that I took the time the last couple of weeks to make sure that I learned how to treat myself and others with more respect.
But there's no where on a resume to put that, and therefore it is useless.
This is the best way I can think of to describe my unhappiness. Like a calm pond that no one can resist throwing a rock into, I feel their disruption ripple on and on and on.
3.21.2011
Knowledge is poptarts
Sometime in the last decade, having three weeks with a library book went from ludicrously long to just enough time. When I was thirteen, I was making weekly trips to the library to check out foot-tall stacks of books. Scratch that first part, actually - when I was thirteen, I was volunteering for the library on a bi-weekly basis helping run their summer reading program. For my girl scout silver award, I spent forty hours scrubbing the sticky residue from years of old due date stickers off the front covers of reinforced hardback children's books. Just me, the Berenstain Bears. and all the tikes at the tiny kids table huffing paint thinner fumes for hours.
The library near where we're living frustrates me with its glamourous high ceilings and self-checkout lanes. The libraries I grew up with in Dallas - underfunded, musty, squat brown buildings from the late sixties, closed Thursdays (the day that every kid is banging out that end-of-week assignment) - were bastions of safety and security for all things old. Old books that no one would ever see stocked on the shelves of the bright, shiny Borders down the street (itself now an antiquated entity on its slow way out, thanks to the even brighter, shinier internet) and old souls. There was a camaraderie amongst the library-dwellers, slow movers in an accelerated world, disinterested in newfangled forms of entertainment and knowledge acquisition, leaving the tiny island of tan, half-decade old computers untouched in favor of getting a sweet spot next to the windows to examine crisp, yellowing pages closer.
The Charles E. Beatley Jr. Central Library is internet in solid form. At its core are table after table after table of flat screens. Beeps and clicks are more prevalent than the crackle of plastic-encased dust jackets. Bright florescent light bounce off the perfect white walls, creating a mood more like a supermarket than a cavern of centuries of knowledge. Everything is new, fast, instant, all inclusive - everything a book isn't. A monument to modern age intellect and desire - we invented knowledge, you know.
The most telling part is that the old people don't come there. It's all travel coffee muggers in the armchairs. As I confidently navigate the stacks, people are drawn to me to teach them the archaic skill of finding information by hand. I love the internet - I hang out on fucking Reddit and have a unmanageable blog roll - but I respect books. Reading Jezebel might give you a taste of what it's like for victims of sexual assault - it provides the latest talking points, keeps you abreast of legislative developments - but rereading Alice Sebold's Lucky hit me like an earthquake. Food bloggers are hip in their exploration of forgotten foods, but no one tells you the history of your dinner the way M.F.K. Fisher does, beautifully intertwining history and culinary artistry. Books separate the wheat from the chaff, they work harder, they're more passionate, more complete. They've been tested, seen more eyes and more red pen rewrites. The don't win the race, but when has speed ever been the basis of understanding?
There's a scene from The L Word that's always stuck with me, and not because it's the prelude to one of the hottest trysts in the series. Bette, director of a prestigious visual arts center, hires carpenter Candace (who is the first and only person to make overalls sexy) to complete some renovations on the building. They have this exchange about quality right before Candace is hired:
Candace: Have you ever seen this?
[She hands the notebook back to Bette. On a page, she's drawn a triangle. On each side of the triangle, she's written a word: Fast, Good and Cheap.]
Candace: There are three sides to the triangle, see?
[Candace sits down in a chair in front of Bette's desk.]
Bette: Fast, good, cheap.
Candace: Yeah. You can have any two of the three in combination, but you can never have all three together.
Bette: Of course you can. I mean, if you have enough money - (looks at triangle) Oh. Right, then it wouldn't be cheap. Okay.
Candace: You can have fast and good. But that takes a big crew of skilled, highly-paid workers.
Bette: And I can have fast and cheap, but then the end product would probably look like shit.
Candace: You can have cheap and good.
Bette: (smiling) That's the one I want.
Perhaps the top .00001% of written knowledge has been created via the fast, good, expensive route - but this route also requires something even rarer that brings together the primary three qualities: luck. As the media continues to face financial crisis, and as huge hunks of the population (myself included) fancies themselves deserving of being published, having their voice and analysis heard, the world teems with the ability to create fast and cheap. But fast and cheap is only good for profiters - not those who want to consume knowledge. We deserve better than new, fast, cheap. Fast and cheap is pop tarts. You might feel full, but you're really starving.
The library near where we're living frustrates me with its glamourous high ceilings and self-checkout lanes. The libraries I grew up with in Dallas - underfunded, musty, squat brown buildings from the late sixties, closed Thursdays (the day that every kid is banging out that end-of-week assignment) - were bastions of safety and security for all things old. Old books that no one would ever see stocked on the shelves of the bright, shiny Borders down the street (itself now an antiquated entity on its slow way out, thanks to the even brighter, shinier internet) and old souls. There was a camaraderie amongst the library-dwellers, slow movers in an accelerated world, disinterested in newfangled forms of entertainment and knowledge acquisition, leaving the tiny island of tan, half-decade old computers untouched in favor of getting a sweet spot next to the windows to examine crisp, yellowing pages closer.
The Charles E. Beatley Jr. Central Library is internet in solid form. At its core are table after table after table of flat screens. Beeps and clicks are more prevalent than the crackle of plastic-encased dust jackets. Bright florescent light bounce off the perfect white walls, creating a mood more like a supermarket than a cavern of centuries of knowledge. Everything is new, fast, instant, all inclusive - everything a book isn't. A monument to modern age intellect and desire - we invented knowledge, you know.
The most telling part is that the old people don't come there. It's all travel coffee muggers in the armchairs. As I confidently navigate the stacks, people are drawn to me to teach them the archaic skill of finding information by hand. I love the internet - I hang out on fucking Reddit and have a unmanageable blog roll - but I respect books. Reading Jezebel might give you a taste of what it's like for victims of sexual assault - it provides the latest talking points, keeps you abreast of legislative developments - but rereading Alice Sebold's Lucky hit me like an earthquake. Food bloggers are hip in their exploration of forgotten foods, but no one tells you the history of your dinner the way M.F.K. Fisher does, beautifully intertwining history and culinary artistry. Books separate the wheat from the chaff, they work harder, they're more passionate, more complete. They've been tested, seen more eyes and more red pen rewrites. The don't win the race, but when has speed ever been the basis of understanding?
There's a scene from The L Word that's always stuck with me, and not because it's the prelude to one of the hottest trysts in the series. Bette, director of a prestigious visual arts center, hires carpenter Candace (who is the first and only person to make overalls sexy) to complete some renovations on the building. They have this exchange about quality right before Candace is hired:
Candace: Have you ever seen this?
[She hands the notebook back to Bette. On a page, she's drawn a triangle. On each side of the triangle, she's written a word: Fast, Good and Cheap.]
Candace: There are three sides to the triangle, see?
[Candace sits down in a chair in front of Bette's desk.]
Bette: Fast, good, cheap.
Candace: Yeah. You can have any two of the three in combination, but you can never have all three together.
Bette: Of course you can. I mean, if you have enough money - (looks at triangle) Oh. Right, then it wouldn't be cheap. Okay.
Candace: You can have fast and good. But that takes a big crew of skilled, highly-paid workers.
Bette: And I can have fast and cheap, but then the end product would probably look like shit.
Candace: You can have cheap and good.
Bette: (smiling) That's the one I want.
Perhaps the top .00001% of written knowledge has been created via the fast, good, expensive route - but this route also requires something even rarer that brings together the primary three qualities: luck. As the media continues to face financial crisis, and as huge hunks of the population (myself included) fancies themselves deserving of being published, having their voice and analysis heard, the world teems with the ability to create fast and cheap. But fast and cheap is only good for profiters - not those who want to consume knowledge. We deserve better than new, fast, cheap. Fast and cheap is pop tarts. You might feel full, but you're really starving.
3.14.2011
Dots
I guess I should keep blogging since someone still has my blog at the top of a very short list on the side bar of her's. And I keep reminding myself that I used to be a writer and that Ira Glass said you just have to power through the drudgery of creating a body of work and so it follows that I should just ignore how shitty my writing has gotten lately, maybe.
I guess I'm still an okay writer since I edited that last sentence to have more effective adjectives and nouns, and I've got a twitch in the corners of my mouth about using blog three times in the first sentence.
Blog, blog, blog.
Life's gotten weird the last few months and I've stopped most things I enjoy doing for so long that I've kind of forgotten what those things are, and subsequently who the person was that enjoyed doing those things. According to my new life as a squatter in Alexandria, Virginia, I enjoy playing turn-based strategy games, cooking (the bastion of sanity and identity grounding pre-move me and post-move me), and neurotically documenting hygiene and mood control efforts on a tiny calendar with a code of colored dots.
Did you brush your teeth twice? Dot.
Did you start your period? Dot.
Did you take your (possibly fake helpful, possibly placebo-helpful) homeopathic drugs to keep you (at least thinking you're) sane(ish)? Dot.
Did you take a bath (also mood-altering)? Double dot. (Single dot for shower, less helpful in terms of keeping my muscles from controlling my ability to take criticism).
Things that I supposedly do not like anymore: sunlight, telephonic contact with friends, achievement.
The dots are the only thing telling me anything about myself anymore that I trust. Indisputable, factual records. How can I trust anything else, when I constantly hear conflicting reports about my level of skill, who I truly am, what I can achieve and what I'm worth. My liberal arts degrees have granted me skills and intellectual prowess that are competitive with educations from fancier colleges that cost far more, says my state school, but why do I feel like my brain is at least three years spoiled? What am I really good at? What can I securely put a dot next to to remind myself of what I am and what I've achieved?
I guess I'm still an okay writer since I edited that last sentence to have more effective adjectives and nouns, and I've got a twitch in the corners of my mouth about using blog three times in the first sentence.
Blog, blog, blog.
Life's gotten weird the last few months and I've stopped most things I enjoy doing for so long that I've kind of forgotten what those things are, and subsequently who the person was that enjoyed doing those things. According to my new life as a squatter in Alexandria, Virginia, I enjoy playing turn-based strategy games, cooking (the bastion of sanity and identity grounding pre-move me and post-move me), and neurotically documenting hygiene and mood control efforts on a tiny calendar with a code of colored dots.
Did you brush your teeth twice? Dot.
Did you start your period? Dot.
Did you take your (possibly fake helpful, possibly placebo-helpful) homeopathic drugs to keep you (at least thinking you're) sane(ish)? Dot.
Did you take a bath (also mood-altering)? Double dot. (Single dot for shower, less helpful in terms of keeping my muscles from controlling my ability to take criticism).
Things that I supposedly do not like anymore: sunlight, telephonic contact with friends, achievement.
The dots are the only thing telling me anything about myself anymore that I trust. Indisputable, factual records. How can I trust anything else, when I constantly hear conflicting reports about my level of skill, who I truly am, what I can achieve and what I'm worth. My liberal arts degrees have granted me skills and intellectual prowess that are competitive with educations from fancier colleges that cost far more, says my state school, but why do I feel like my brain is at least three years spoiled? What am I really good at? What can I securely put a dot next to to remind myself of what I am and what I've achieved?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
