shiny, happy people

So, K.-the-amazing-photographer has come up with another set of really cool pictures, meaning pictures where I look good. Oops, you too, Edouard. "C'mon, it's a Saturday! I need to..."

Dave just looks so cool here. Total badass. Thing is, he almost always looks like this only when he's taking a drag and really thinking about something you just said, or something he wants to say which he wants to come out right. Weird is one of the least surprising descriptions about Dave. Good times.

Oh, to be this happy again. Well, to quote Rob in High Fidelity (movie version), "For the first time I can sort of see how that is done." Cue in "I Believe" by Stevie Wonder, as I lean back on my chair and try to live my life as honestly as possible.

P.S. Cool pictures courtesy of K. (see link to this post), but of course it wouldn't have been possible without any of the cool people in the picture! Haha, kudos to K., though. Really.

smokin' mama

like they say, a smoke is worth a thousand words.

Reading List

I remember all the books I've read to look cool, or hip, or intellectual, and I'm sad because now I want to read them again and I could have but chose not to. I felt that it'd be wasting time, because, hell, there's so much more other stuff to read.

But wouldn't it be better to read just one book and totally understand it (or admit that even after two or three readings you still don't get it), than to have read a hundred and not learned anything? That would be a fucking waste of time.

So. Here's a list of books I want to read (and understand) again:

1. The Great Gatsby -- I've totally forgotten what this book was about. It's as if I never read it. But I know I enjoyed it and I want to do so again.

2. Sense and Sensibility -- I just want to enjoy this one again. Probably the only Austen I haven't reread.

3. The Color Purple -- But this would make me sad. Again.

4. A Tale of Two Cities -- I hate Charles Dickens and his never-ending sentences, but I read the abridged version for a book report and got an A for it, which makes me feel guilty as hell.

5. Nine Stories -- especially the bananafish and Esme stories.

6. The Brothers Karamazov -- This was such a great book. Period.

7... I'm sure there's at least one I'm forgetting...

* * *

I remember too, having this really awful English teacher in college. (He replaced a terrific one midsemester, when the other had to go on leave to get married). He was this I'm-an-intellectual-and-I'll-have-you-know-it type and assigned us eight (8!) books to read in three months or so. The list is bellow if you're interested:

1. One hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2. Animal Farm by George Orwell

3. Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac

4. Social Contract and Discourse on Inequality by some French guy Rousseau

5. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

6. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (Hmm. This goes to #7 in the list above.)

7 and 8... I can't quite remember. Must've been really awful that I've blocked them out.

To survive the grueling pace of that class, I would barely skim through these books, just praying that their meaning would jump out at me like a really bad surprise, so that I could write a passable paper. Then on to the next book... and on and on... (I thought then that One Hundred Years was aptly titled: I thought it'd take me a century to finish it...)

And if that isn't bad, that teacher hated my guts. Once he gave us this 30-something-page of poems and songs related in one way or another to Nabokov's Lolita (which we were reading at that time), and he told us to chose anything (ANYthing!) and discuss. One of those poem/songs was The Police's Don't Stand So Close to Me, so I raised my hand and offered to talk about it.

He then gives me this really evil smirk, and drawled, "Oh, anything but that." So I gave him a dirty look and shut up for the rest of the semester.

But my best revenge was when I had to write my end-of-term paper. I chose to discuss Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, knowing that he hates books like these. (But anybody who'd choose Rousseau's Social whatever over Mockingbird is a pretentious asshole in my book.)

Anyway. I had a really old Mac Powerbook then (I now have a happy-shiny-new Smell* Inspiron 2200 named Charlie) with an illegally installed MS Word 6 with no spell check. And all over the paper, I spelled T-R-A-D-G-E-D-Y this way. (What a tragedy!) So he gave me a C-minus for the paper, and a C for the whole course (6 units, mind you), and he lived a very smug life thereafter, thinking what a stupid, spellcheck-deprived moron I was.

How is this the best revenge, you ask? I lead the rest of my life thinking he was a moron, too. And whereas he's wrong, I know I'm right. Haha. And I don't have to feel guilty about it.

By the way, his name was Ralph and I wish I had seen the movie (The Adventures of) Priscilla, Queen of the Dessert then. I'd have loved to call him Bernadette to his face and laugh like a loon.

Note *Smell Computers--for Tech Support, call somewhere in India or the Philippines. For further clarification, see Squirrelly Wrath link.

Break

Even if I have never experienced snow, I know it exists. But I cannot say that I recognize it. Not how it falls--Is it like rain? Or slower? Nor how it feels--Wet? Dry? Cold? How cold? And how does the air smell before and after snow? Is it fresh or heavy? Is there an electric scent of ozone, like just before a thunderstorm? And does it fall silently? Or in a hushed pattern like rain?

But I've known other things--rain and sun and cloud and wind. Such that when I feel the heat of the sun prickling my skin and making me sweat I can say, "No, this is not snow." When I feel a fine misty rain settle over my hair, or a driving rain pelting my umbrella like stones, I can say, "This is not snow." Or when clouds pass lazily overhead and the same breeze brushes my cheeks and ruffles the leaves; more so when heat rises almost visibly over concrete roads--"No, this isn't snow."

Then I realized that one could be aware of something but understand it not--and that one couldn't fathom how it really is, yet know definitely what it isn't.

But you, you were different. You gleefully took an axe to the bell jar of my preconceptions. And I realize that I've hidden from life behind opposites and antonyms--that I have defined my world by what isn't and my life by things I haven't experienced. And as I watched my carefully built walls shatter and pieces fall in slow motion, the fragments magically turned into snow, I stood bared--naked and quivering--cold, but very much alive.


For Dave. Thank you.

cigarette break # 2

I was putting a cigarette back into the pack. (Those things'll kill ya!) K.'s obsession with hands is the reason for this photo. But the real cigarette break (not a break from cigarettes) is on her blog. Click on the link to this post, darling, you'll see what I mean.

Anticipation #2

I sidestep sleep with the help
of coffee and cigarettes.

The latter rationed to last
until exhaustion overtakes caffeine--
or snow falls
come the wee hours of the morning.

The sky is an uninterrupted grey
of dense clouds--a convex, bulging
surface of unimaginable weight
which I pray it will release soon.

The night is silent--
Pregnant.
Expecting.

And I, ever impatient, look to
the window periodically, continually--
wiping mist-turned-droplets off the glass pane,

hoping to see
a sprinkle of white flakes--
not quite solid, not quite liquid--
or a mountain-head mantled in white.

Though all I see is darkness and stillness,
a quiet like a cat crouching--
muscles tensed and hackles raised;

though the smattering of fluorescent lights
through my window mock me
with snowflake patterns as streetlights
expand in the mist:

I pray that it comes.
In stingy spurts that won’t settle
or a heavy blanket that will stifle everything
except the morning sun.

And with it, pray
you remember me.