My apartment is on a noisy, busy street. I have a ground floor apartment, but because of the way the street slopes down, my bedroom window is about eight feet from the sidewalk. It’s sort of a bay window, coming about two feet out from the side of a building. Now that it’s spring, and we’ve been getting a lot of rain, my window seems to serve as a shelter for people stuck outside on the street. People gather underneath it and chat, waking me up, scaring me into thinking someone is in my apartment. It literally sounds like someone is in my bedroom when they stand under my window and talk. It’s especially nice after the bars close, and drunk girls from the Thirteenth Floor like to stand under the window, protecting their hair from the rain. Being a writer, you would think I would enjoy this, people watching without even leaving my bedroom. But I don’t. It kind of makes me feel exposed. If I can hear people outside so clearly, then they must be able to hear me as well. It creeps me out. I wish I lived on the second or third floor.
Spring Fever April 11, 2008
What a beautiful day! Instead of doing my taxes and homework, I sat in the sun for a few hours. Now I want to take a nap next to an open window. Spring makes me lazy. perhaps I’ll save the work until after the sun goes down.
Mexico City April 7, 2008
I want to go to Mexico City but none of my friends want to go with me. They told me that you have to wear masks on certain days because the air is so polluted. Is this true? They say I will be raped, kidnapped, robbed. My boyfriend tells me if he goes to Mexico it will be to somewhere he can surf, not to a dirty, poverty-stricken city. Why does everyone hate on Mexico city? I only know a couple people who have been there, but they said it was amazing. I hear they have really good street food there.
Bodyworlds exhibit April 7, 2008
I finally went to see Bodyworlds at the Science Center. It was pretty cool, but I started getting bored with it toward the end. I had heard that it was really hard to get through, that it was intensely graphic- but I didn’t think so. The bodies were preserved in a way that trumped the graphic nature of the exhibit. The bodies kind of looked dried and shrunken, not what you typically think of when it comes to corpses. It was hard to identify them as once being living beings. I found myself wanting to know their names, wanting pictures of what they looked like when they were living (I’m sure this would be more upsetting to the general public). If you looked really closely at some of them, you could see bits of hair on their skin, little sprouts of what they once were. You could still see the color of their eyes, little shrunken balls placed strategically in the sockets. One body had the most stunning green eyes ever, and I thought about how you almost never see a person in real life with eyes that green. I tried smelling them, but my boyfriend kept telling me to stop, that I was embarrassing him (they didn’t have a smell anyway, they had a distinct lack of smell).
Marjane Satrapi Reading April 2, 2008
I haven’t read Persepolis yet, but I am going to soon. I went tonight to Marjane Satrapi’s reading with my Experimental Forms class and loved her. What an intelligent, funny woman. She is very human and straightforward. I love smart, artistic woman who are comfortable being themselves, woman who don’t try to be intensely intellectual. Her ideas about culture and war are realistic. She talked about anger and revenge, saying “I’ve learned that you can’t wash blood with blood. If the smart people do the same thing that the so called stupid people are doing, how does that make them the smart ones?” (I feel bad putting that into quotes because she probably didn’t say it exactly like that). She also talked about the Bush administration’s labeling Iran as part of the axis of evil. She stated, very evenly, that when someone in power labels something as evil, and people believe him, without investigating for themselves, then that becomes fascism. I was traveling in London and Amsterdam in 2005, and I was offended that so many people were trying to engage in a conversation about how fascist the United States government comes off. One very priveledged British man asked me “Haven’t you ever thought it was weird that school children pray to the flag every morning.” I was like “You’re British. How do you have room to talk? The British colonized the whole world.” Anyway, my interest in politics is small, but it was nice for me to hear someone speak about fascism with such simplicity. I can almost understand what the Europeans were trying to get at while I was traveling a few years ago (although I really still resent that pompous British man to this day). Perhaps he was allowing the media and it’s portrayal of America be in a way, fascist as well.
My boyfriend’s hat March 30, 2008
As of lately, my boyfriend insists on wearing this hat everywhere he goes. It’s fine when he puts it on with a suit, but he loves this hat so much that he throws it on with a t-shirt and Dickies. Baby, that hat does not go with that outfit, I tell him. You got to have a certain flair for men’s fashion if you want to pull that one off. It’s just too much, save it for special occasions. He gives me the finger and walks out the house, confidently swaggering, feather at the side of his hat blowing in the breeze. I think it makes him feel stately. Either way, me and the hat need to become friends because I have a feeling we will be seeing a lot of each other.
I am totally vulnerable until I get laser vision surgery March 24, 2008
I left my glasses at my boyfriend’s house today, and my contacts burned my eyes so badly that I was forced to remove them. Sometimes that happens. My problem? I would drive to my boyfriend’s house to get them, but not without my contacts. I am legally blind in one eye, can barely make out a person’s facial features when they are only a few feet away. Without corrective lenses, I am useless. What if I am kidnapped and the kidnapper breaks my glasses? What if one of my contacts falls out, or both – how would I escape? My chances of survival would be grim. I would probably not find a way to escape.
Procrastination March 21, 2008
I’m doing that little dance with myself right now, that dance I do when I am trying to sit down and write a story. I always find distractions. I just ate a bologna sandwich, and now I feel a little sick, so I might lay down. But really, I don’t even feel very sick, I’m just telling myself that so I can procrastinate even longer. Maybe I do feel a little sick. Bologna isn’t very good for you and I don’t really ever eat it. I just had a craving for it. Sometimes you just want cheap, super-processed meat. Maybe I’m pregnant, but probably not.
Blogging slipped my mind. March 19, 2008
Oh no! Blogging slipped my mind last week. My brother got married over the weekend, so this past week has flown by. I will blog twice as hard this week! Right now I am trying to decide what to cook for dinner. Shall I go for pork, even though I always seem to dry it out? My life is oh so exciting! Stay tuned for more profound blog entries from me…
Da Bonks March 10, 2008
I just had an argument with my seven-year old niece that lasted way too long. She was telling me about her friend’s mother, who according to her, is from a neighborhood in New York called ”Da Bonks”. I corrected her, as any adult would, and explained that the neighborhood was actually called “The Bronx”. She looked at me like I was stupid, and very carefully, as if I were a child, explained to me that I didn’t know what I was talking about. After all, she had a friend with a mother from this mysterious place, not me. This went back and forth for fifteen, twenty minutes. Finally, I threw a tantrum and asserted myself. I was an adult, she was a child, and therefor I always knew more than her. I’m an adult? Really? That’s when I realized I had become one of them.
