Not to do a complete 180 on my audience - wait, yes, because that's exactly how my blogs always go - and go all vagina monologues on your ass, but when the fuck did "fresh" mean code for "YOUR VAGINA SMELLS, HERE LET ME FIX THAT."
I'm fucking serious though. Maybe it's because I'm reading a little book called Cunt and am currently doing my full-on "let's synch with the moon, my body is one with the universe" type bullshit but I am fucking raging over the fact that every single time I buy "sanitary" items I fucking have to learn a new language that involves stylized flowers and ambiguous adjectives written in pink cursive. Why not just explicitly say "perfumed" or "goddamn vaginas are so fucking gross, I wish women looked like Barbies down there."
I take offense that I have to search out the word "unscented" as if I'm some sort of deviant dirty hippie for wanting to stray from the norm of making my vagina smell like fucking grain alcohol, which is exactly what fresh smells like to Always.
Just a question: since my vagina is basically likened to a bloody, festering gash, where's the butterfly-print, perfumed for my pleasure surgical gauze for when I actually have a bloody, festering gash? Oh wait, no, those are fine and permissible. Injuries are accidents, unforeseeable, not my fault. Being a woman is an egregious offense.
In related news, the Women's Studies department thinks I need to have a more communal experience - because all my friends aren't WS majors and I'm not in a goddamn queer campus group - and because of this I probably won't be able to get a little validating piece of paper that says "Cara did far more credits than she even fucking needed to, here's a degree for that."
5.05.2010
5.04.2010
A Blog of Repeats
I came to Kansas to forget. I walked away from my parents’ car and into my dorm room with its sticky-clean linoleum floors, sat down with Jamie’s friends, and started a new life, a life that I thought would be better than the one I left in a place I never chose for myself. In Kansas, I would make all the choices. I would choose all new friends, people I’d tried to imagine for weeks before school started, blurry faces with cool haircuts, glasses, awkward, gawky, sassy, mixed nuts. I would not make the same mistakes with guys as I did in high school - eventually, I would get rid of them all together. I would pick new places to live, I would decide what’s for dinner, I would set the limits on when my parents saw and heard from me, and not vice versa.
I made all the choices. I alienated myself from my real friends, I slept with people I didn’t even care about, I drank and smoked to put a smile on my face the way life never seemed to be able to. My diet’s been inconsistent – I eat chips and salsa for dinner as often as I eat some semblance of a normal meal. I sleep odd hours in places infested with mice, with leaky roofs and doors that don’t shut and lock. I’ve almost ruined my relationship with my parents.
I have a way of throwing away all convention. I want to build everything myself. The way other people have lived their lives is of no matter to me – I will selfishly create my life on my own, my own meanings and understandings, I will forge in the smithy of my soul something something something, yada yada yada.
For the life that I create alone, I will be alone.
For my masterpiece, I will choose the best things with the worst intentions. I will plunge myself into the most challenging situations in life despite not weathering the simplest trials well. I will create a magnum opus of complications so I can say to those around me, look at what a crazy life I live! Think of all the strange tales I will have to tell! This is all fodder for my book. “You live a very Sedaris-y life,” Cay said. It’s a sick pleasure, like taking sugary butterscotch schnapps shots, licking your lips after you gag.
I will paint over the mistakes. I will forgive the people who have hurt me and then not learn from the pain. Instead, I will become them.
I will paint and paint and paint, layer and complicate so much that the past will be unrecoverable and inaccessible. It will be lost in the business of what’s in front of me now. I will repeat. No,
Alone, I will repeat.
I made all the choices. I alienated myself from my real friends, I slept with people I didn’t even care about, I drank and smoked to put a smile on my face the way life never seemed to be able to. My diet’s been inconsistent – I eat chips and salsa for dinner as often as I eat some semblance of a normal meal. I sleep odd hours in places infested with mice, with leaky roofs and doors that don’t shut and lock. I’ve almost ruined my relationship with my parents.
I have a way of throwing away all convention. I want to build everything myself. The way other people have lived their lives is of no matter to me – I will selfishly create my life on my own, my own meanings and understandings, I will forge in the smithy of my soul something something something, yada yada yada.
For the life that I create alone, I will be alone.
For my masterpiece, I will choose the best things with the worst intentions. I will plunge myself into the most challenging situations in life despite not weathering the simplest trials well. I will create a magnum opus of complications so I can say to those around me, look at what a crazy life I live! Think of all the strange tales I will have to tell! This is all fodder for my book. “You live a very Sedaris-y life,” Cay said. It’s a sick pleasure, like taking sugary butterscotch schnapps shots, licking your lips after you gag.
I will paint over the mistakes. I will forgive the people who have hurt me and then not learn from the pain. Instead, I will become them.
I will paint and paint and paint, layer and complicate so much that the past will be unrecoverable and inaccessible. It will be lost in the business of what’s in front of me now. I will repeat. No,
Alone, I will repeat.
4.15.2010
Happy Birthday, Antidepressants
I'm so depressed I can't even finish writing a journal entry to myself about my depression, let alone compile the evidence that I will present to whoever I can threaten into seeing me ASAP in order to convince them that I need to be on pills. When it's bad enough that I can put aside my consuming paranoia that antidepressants are just one small step away from sci-fi style social control, it's really bad. When you have a post-it note that lists the things you must focus on in order of importance, and the top two things have to be "eat" and "sleep" because you keep forgetting to do both and really have no desire to even fix those things, maybe it's time to recognize that you are sick in the head.
I literally care about nothing.
The best part is, going to therapy has actually made things worse, since my therapist is under the impression that I have some sort of self-awareness problem, as if years of journaling and writing and blogging have not made me obnoxiously absorbed with my own head. I go in and sit down, and she stares at me until I start talking, and for 50 minutes I just fill the air with concerns that I didn't even know existed, that I might just be making up to make sure I get my $15's worth. I leave empty handed. The one time she gave me something constructive and concrete to do - exercise and change my sleep schedule - I almost jumped up and down with glee. The whole point was to go and figure out how to fix things, to get help. But then at the end of our session this week when I asked her what I could do to make things better, she plainly explained to me that I knew how to fix things, I just needed to do it. "I'm not here to tell you what to do, that won't help you. I'm here to listen and try to understand."
To Lena, later that afternoon: "As a patient and an essayist, ideally, she should be paying me to entertain her, if that's what this is going to be."
It doesn't help that my in-training therapist just seems so goddamn therapisty. She wears turtlenecks, glasses, and solid fabric circle headbands that hold back her perfectly rounded mass of short kinky hair. Her voice is smooth. She is generic in a soothing and reassuring way. When she fails to help, I look at myself and say, she's the sane one, she probably knows what she's doing. Way to fail at therapy again, Cara.
My head is sick, it's that simple. At the slightest trigger it vomits up the most insane, anxious, insecure bullshit it can manage. Tonight I went from being playfully made fun of for my Harry Potter love to questioning my intelligence and self worth, my ability to remember "important things" (including late 18th century painters) or even anything, my skills as a conversationalist, as an intellectual, as a decent girlfriend - all of this in a matter of mere handful of minutes. Everything and anything becomes blown epically out of proportion until something like not cleaning my room becomes the lynchpin in my academic success this semester, in college, success in my work life, in the rest of my life - the fear and panic sweeps in so rapidly. It's a rough time for everyone, being so close to graduation and the uncertain future, but while everyone's house occasionally has a small kitchen fire, I'm like a housing development full of cookie cutter homes with faulty wiring, soaked in gasoline. Every day I trigger in a flash and destroy myself and then wake up and do it again.
Besides, I always wanted some Zoloft to match the pharmaceutical swag post-it notes my first therapist gave me.
It's finally time for the real deal.
I literally care about nothing.
The best part is, going to therapy has actually made things worse, since my therapist is under the impression that I have some sort of self-awareness problem, as if years of journaling and writing and blogging have not made me obnoxiously absorbed with my own head. I go in and sit down, and she stares at me until I start talking, and for 50 minutes I just fill the air with concerns that I didn't even know existed, that I might just be making up to make sure I get my $15's worth. I leave empty handed. The one time she gave me something constructive and concrete to do - exercise and change my sleep schedule - I almost jumped up and down with glee. The whole point was to go and figure out how to fix things, to get help. But then at the end of our session this week when I asked her what I could do to make things better, she plainly explained to me that I knew how to fix things, I just needed to do it. "I'm not here to tell you what to do, that won't help you. I'm here to listen and try to understand."
To Lena, later that afternoon: "As a patient and an essayist, ideally, she should be paying me to entertain her, if that's what this is going to be."
It doesn't help that my in-training therapist just seems so goddamn therapisty. She wears turtlenecks, glasses, and solid fabric circle headbands that hold back her perfectly rounded mass of short kinky hair. Her voice is smooth. She is generic in a soothing and reassuring way. When she fails to help, I look at myself and say, she's the sane one, she probably knows what she's doing. Way to fail at therapy again, Cara.
My head is sick, it's that simple. At the slightest trigger it vomits up the most insane, anxious, insecure bullshit it can manage. Tonight I went from being playfully made fun of for my Harry Potter love to questioning my intelligence and self worth, my ability to remember "important things" (including late 18th century painters) or even anything, my skills as a conversationalist, as an intellectual, as a decent girlfriend - all of this in a matter of mere handful of minutes. Everything and anything becomes blown epically out of proportion until something like not cleaning my room becomes the lynchpin in my academic success this semester, in college, success in my work life, in the rest of my life - the fear and panic sweeps in so rapidly. It's a rough time for everyone, being so close to graduation and the uncertain future, but while everyone's house occasionally has a small kitchen fire, I'm like a housing development full of cookie cutter homes with faulty wiring, soaked in gasoline. Every day I trigger in a flash and destroy myself and then wake up and do it again.
Besides, I always wanted some Zoloft to match the pharmaceutical swag post-it notes my first therapist gave me.
It's finally time for the real deal.
4.04.2010
Fragment
...it is a delicate balance, a hundred spinning plates atop wobbly dowels, and I haven’t been a circus performer for very long, just street shows for passersby, I haven’t tried to impressed crowds or met the demands of loyal fans. I don’t know what it’s like to have a long-term gig, it’s only my first night and my adrenaline’s pumping, my hands are shaking, I’m running back and forth trying to make sure everything whirls and dances beautifully, that nothing wobbles off while my back is turned, while I overconfidently conduct more plates onto their perches. Keep them all afloat, keep the crowds oooing and ahhing rather than gasping and sighing, collecting their coats and bags and leaving me to sit in the solitude of the harsh spotlight with my plates all crashed on the floor.
3.30.2010
Ian S. is sitting on my couch trying to convince me - and we are in a state of easily being convinced - that I'm responsible for his women problems, and I'm worrying he's turning more into Woody Allen by the day, or Spencer Pratt if Ian kept up his loud boisterous way of talking and Spencer Pratt did more downers. He's trying to convince me I'm a cheater and a bad person because I didn't transition seamlessly from euro-traveling singleton to whatever I am now and I'm telling him to chill, motherfucker, chill. "Ian, I'm about to lay some hippie shit on you." "You're about to blow my mind! I really wanna here the hippie shit!"
It wasn't that good. The thorough discussion entertaining the possibility of my mother having a crush on me was far more enlightening.
Things are what we want them to be. 6 hours in South Park and Watson Library thoroughly notating The Subterraneans will teach you that. You want Mardou Fox to be crazy, to be a slutty limitless free-fucking dance of deep sea darkness? You want to blame it on race or drugs or women having "the essence"? You make what you want of things, Leo-Jack and Ian.'
I realized that most of what's going on right now doesn't even matter, which isn't quite helping my depression, but numbers have no feelings and they're the best thing to cling to right now, my number line, my security cable. 10 days. 17 days. 43 days. 60 days. End of the year, free fall
It wasn't that good. The thorough discussion entertaining the possibility of my mother having a crush on me was far more enlightening.
Things are what we want them to be. 6 hours in South Park and Watson Library thoroughly notating The Subterraneans will teach you that. You want Mardou Fox to be crazy, to be a slutty limitless free-fucking dance of deep sea darkness? You want to blame it on race or drugs or women having "the essence"? You make what you want of things, Leo-Jack and Ian.'
I realized that most of what's going on right now doesn't even matter, which isn't quite helping my depression, but numbers have no feelings and they're the best thing to cling to right now, my number line, my security cable. 10 days. 17 days. 43 days. 60 days. End of the year, free fall
3.23.2010
Melinda Remora
Once you start living, everyone else want to latch onto you, commensally. Remora, sucker-fish, along for the ride but not steering the ship. Eating whatever scraps they can get from the actors, the king pins, the sharks of the sea - whatever they can get as long as they don’t take (a) life themselves.
Melinda Remora to Great White Cara: “What kind of sushi does Greg like?” I should tell her what tuna tartar tastes like, just to make a scene. I wanna taste the fish! That’s why I ordered it!
She wants to know more about him, just like she brought up Ian for months after the incredibly brief fact, just like she still asks after Mr. Lewis, jumps at the mention of a male name. She wants to know more about me, which is why they don’t even have a wikipedia intro level of understand of bisexuality, why I have to give them a seminar about how it and monogamy are not incongruous, how the arrangements within my relationships have cease to be any of their business anyway.
Except that they are, there are charges to insurance and forms to be signed. And by god, they’ll sign them, and everyone knows why. “You know, they’re probably thinking, ‘Well, at least she’s living with a man,’ or ‘…at least she’s not sleeping with women.’” Risky behaviors in an unconventional relationship, a-okay. Notarized signatures, as long as the gender’s right.
She just wants to know more about me, she knows he’s a big part of my life now. As if, somehow, he atones for the last year of my life, or the last few years of knowing, or all the signs and questions and suspicions before that. Danny, Danko, Claire, Cay, Ian, Sara, Lindy, Jen, Alex, Sam, Edward, Stephan, Cole, Hilah, Colin, Sara, Kevin, Bryan, Carl - some of those names are female, mom. You’ve seen the postcards from Europe and heard me laughing on the phone in the attic. You know their names; they’ve slept in your guestroom sheets and exchanged pleasantries with you over coffee. Know them, ask about them, you have no excuse.
She’s already(!) chomping at the bit for me to get married, as if an official name erases every name before it. As if a white dress will make everything okay, like it always does – baptism, first communion, confirmation, graduation. Wrap her in white, slit a chicken’s throat and throw its blood on the sheets. I’ve worn enough white dresses in my life, the trappings of my family’s morality and holy propriety. I've curtseyed in front of hundreds and been married to Jesus and St. Ursula, I shook the bishop’s jeweled hand, twice. I’m done wearing white and but I’m still waiting until marriage - waiting until I could marry any of those names on that list if I so choose.
I’m happy, so happy, as long as I forget about you, dear family, for with you I can’t ever be so, because you keep drawing my attention to that one stain, the one you’ve marked me with, immorality. Out, out, damn spot, there’s blood on my hands - but it’s not me, it’s just this role you’ve penned for me. Somewhere there’s a different story, an alternate universe, different society, where I don’t have blood on my hands, blood from sex and countless murders.
(One a month, she says. Of all the methods, you chose one that allows conception and then disrupts it. And you’re okay with this? I’m just saying, we have different morals. As if different morals exist. As if, at the end of the day, the baby-killer and the mothers'-rights-infringer can come together, shake hands, and call it a difference of morals.)
That place is Kansas, the center of the (google) earth, where we’ll live in sin – we’ll bask in it, as long as we have to, as long as sin exists.
Dear Melinda Remora, I’m in love with a man and fuck you, you don’t get to be happy about it. You don’t even get to live off the scraps.
Melinda Remora to Great White Cara: “What kind of sushi does Greg like?” I should tell her what tuna tartar tastes like, just to make a scene. I wanna taste the fish! That’s why I ordered it!
She wants to know more about him, just like she brought up Ian for months after the incredibly brief fact, just like she still asks after Mr. Lewis, jumps at the mention of a male name. She wants to know more about me, which is why they don’t even have a wikipedia intro level of understand of bisexuality, why I have to give them a seminar about how it and monogamy are not incongruous, how the arrangements within my relationships have cease to be any of their business anyway.
Except that they are, there are charges to insurance and forms to be signed. And by god, they’ll sign them, and everyone knows why. “You know, they’re probably thinking, ‘Well, at least she’s living with a man,’ or ‘…at least she’s not sleeping with women.’” Risky behaviors in an unconventional relationship, a-okay. Notarized signatures, as long as the gender’s right.
She just wants to know more about me, she knows he’s a big part of my life now. As if, somehow, he atones for the last year of my life, or the last few years of knowing, or all the signs and questions and suspicions before that. Danny, Danko, Claire, Cay, Ian, Sara, Lindy, Jen, Alex, Sam, Edward, Stephan, Cole, Hilah, Colin, Sara, Kevin, Bryan, Carl - some of those names are female, mom. You’ve seen the postcards from Europe and heard me laughing on the phone in the attic. You know their names; they’ve slept in your guestroom sheets and exchanged pleasantries with you over coffee. Know them, ask about them, you have no excuse.
She’s already(!) chomping at the bit for me to get married, as if an official name erases every name before it. As if a white dress will make everything okay, like it always does – baptism, first communion, confirmation, graduation. Wrap her in white, slit a chicken’s throat and throw its blood on the sheets. I’ve worn enough white dresses in my life, the trappings of my family’s morality and holy propriety. I've curtseyed in front of hundreds and been married to Jesus and St. Ursula, I shook the bishop’s jeweled hand, twice. I’m done wearing white and but I’m still waiting until marriage - waiting until I could marry any of those names on that list if I so choose.
I’m happy, so happy, as long as I forget about you, dear family, for with you I can’t ever be so, because you keep drawing my attention to that one stain, the one you’ve marked me with, immorality. Out, out, damn spot, there’s blood on my hands - but it’s not me, it’s just this role you’ve penned for me. Somewhere there’s a different story, an alternate universe, different society, where I don’t have blood on my hands, blood from sex and countless murders.
(One a month, she says. Of all the methods, you chose one that allows conception and then disrupts it. And you’re okay with this? I’m just saying, we have different morals. As if different morals exist. As if, at the end of the day, the baby-killer and the mothers'-rights-infringer can come together, shake hands, and call it a difference of morals.)
That place is Kansas, the center of the (google) earth, where we’ll live in sin – we’ll bask in it, as long as we have to, as long as sin exists.
Dear Melinda Remora, I’m in love with a man and fuck you, you don’t get to be happy about it. You don’t even get to live off the scraps.
3.17.2010
Don't Call It a Comeback
Placing a mirror behind a desk is not conducive to working, Charleston Place Hotel, unless my thesis, or rather, this thesis-distraction blog post were on what types of lighting suit the contours of my face, how to tilt my head just right so that my eyes don't look so deep-seated and tired. Cigarettes and and hitting the sheets at seven a.m. are not treating me nicely. I should stop both, but really I'll just cut back - 3 am a night, 2 cigarettes a day. It's settled.
Against Miley Cyrus's incredibly astute advice for America's youth, I'm documenting the shit out of my life lately, and in turn I'm living it more, not less - although I guess playing sports "or something" might do me some good. I'm going out and seeing more of the people that will soon be out of my grasp; I'm getting on planes and crossing the country on a monthly basis; I'm putting miles on my car and I'm never home on the weekends. I've filled paperback moleskin notebooks with musings and scenes, fleeting thoughts and undeveloped projects. Scraps that I'll never do anything with: "luxury is hiring a cab just to sleep in the backseat," "at half-squint, my eyes look like pheasants," "all the women in this paragard brochure are wearing wedding rings - intentional?" I've written reviews of contributors to NPR's voices, talking about Maureen Corrigan's crisp, appley c's; I'm cataloguing podcasts, treating them like advice from well-respected mentors. I'm going out, noticing more, caring less; I'm reevaluating the standards I've evaluated my life by these past, oh, 17 years, and I think(?) that's okay.
But as much as I'm writing, or taking notes, or rambling, or really whatever you call all this incessant journaling, margin-scribbling, and post-it note sticking, nothing beats having something polished and public. Which is why I want to come back to this, even if it's slowly and scarily becoming more public with every person who mentions they've seen it. Even if almost all I can write are transcripts of therapy sessions and barely inconspicuous love letters. Even if I can't seem to ever make this thing cohesive. As good as raw is, complete and concise are nice, too. More polish, more editing, more.
Against Miley Cyrus's incredibly astute advice for America's youth, I'm documenting the shit out of my life lately, and in turn I'm living it more, not less - although I guess playing sports "or something" might do me some good. I'm going out and seeing more of the people that will soon be out of my grasp; I'm getting on planes and crossing the country on a monthly basis; I'm putting miles on my car and I'm never home on the weekends. I've filled paperback moleskin notebooks with musings and scenes, fleeting thoughts and undeveloped projects. Scraps that I'll never do anything with: "luxury is hiring a cab just to sleep in the backseat," "at half-squint, my eyes look like pheasants," "all the women in this paragard brochure are wearing wedding rings - intentional?" I've written reviews of contributors to NPR's voices, talking about Maureen Corrigan's crisp, appley c's; I'm cataloguing podcasts, treating them like advice from well-respected mentors. I'm going out, noticing more, caring less; I'm reevaluating the standards I've evaluated my life by these past, oh, 17 years, and I think(?) that's okay.
But as much as I'm writing, or taking notes, or rambling, or really whatever you call all this incessant journaling, margin-scribbling, and post-it note sticking, nothing beats having something polished and public. Which is why I want to come back to this, even if it's slowly and scarily becoming more public with every person who mentions they've seen it. Even if almost all I can write are transcripts of therapy sessions and barely inconspicuous love letters. Even if I can't seem to ever make this thing cohesive. As good as raw is, complete and concise are nice, too. More polish, more editing, more.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
