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[Yes, another article for the newspaper. But GO LISTEN TO HIS SHOW! Ktuh.org on Wednesday from 12-3 pm.]
Ross Jackson, an undergraduate majoring in Religion who’s “been ready to graduate for about eight centuries,” has been at the KTUH radio station for four years. And what exactly does Ross do as a DJ? “They give me a button so I can talk to Honolulu. It’s like a button, and I’m like, press…Honolulu… ‘Hey buddies!’”
Hanging out in the dorm rooms in his earlier years as a fresh-faced college student, Ross was a self-proclaimed “record store snob”. A KTUH DJ heard Ross playing his cLOUDDEAD and Nico’s Chelsea Girl in his room, and decided that Ross would be great as a KTUH DJ. After forcing him to fill out an application and actually getting on the air all those years ago, Ross’ icy reluctance to be a part of KTUH thawed. He realized that the radio station gave him the opportunity to spread great music to the population of Hawaii, and to be the best local radio show in his idiom.
One of the aspects of KTUH that Ross loves the most is KTUH’s lenient guidelines. These allow Ross, and any KTUH DJ, to play whatever music they want, regardless of how “popular” it is. “Maintaining a semblance of independent music important. Playing top forty would be against the station’s unspoken rules. You wouldn’t want to be playing anything that someone could hear on 101.9. That would be tragic.”
When asked what genre of music he plays on his show, Ross quickly spouted out this anecdote: “Some one asked Dan Bejar from Destroyer [an indie rock band] what kind of music he plays, and he said that he plays European blues, which of course he doesn’t. He only said that for the people who read entirely too many books. So I play modern classics,” he tells me with a slight wink.
When pressed, he admitted that he plays indie music. Not wanting to get into the whole sub cultures of “indie,” he briefly describes the mainstream music industry and how they control the music the mass populations listen to. He says he plays “modern classics”, but he laments that hardly no one hears these classic bands. He cites the latest Band of Horses album, saying that it should have more exposure than it had.
Despite the lack of exposure great bands don’t get, the mainstream media has been steadily splintering into a less monopolistic industry, which is good for independent listeners. Ross, of course, isn’t part of conforming masses being force fed the mainstream pop music. So where does he get his music? KTUH receives albums from the labels for the DJ’s to peruse, and Ross sits down and listens to them about once a week, but tries to avoid the inevitable radio ear, which tends to box him in. He also hits the Interweb for inspiration. “Pitchfork [an online mp3 blog] was really good for a while. It helped out Broken Social Scene a lot. But Pitchfork really fell of badly, as even most of [the major online music blogs] did. So really, truthfully? Torrent sites are most effective for from the gut reviews.” He mentions indietorrents.com. “Maxim will give you a better music review than Pitchfork.” At this he cringes in distaste, and disgust fills his eyes.
Though he adventures around indietorrent and other such sites, Born Ruffians, Helio Sequence, Pete and the Pirates, Stereolab, Sonic Youth, Sea and Cake, Nick Drake, and Nico are some of his solid staples. As a DJ, Ross says, you have to explore music in three directions: past, present, and future. You have to know what’s classic, what’s great now, and what’s going to be good in the future. The driving base line type of “sexy rock and roll” will always be received well in a club type scene. As for twee rock, “I was going to start sock hops all over town and play Belle and Sebastian. It would be adorable.” He also mentions Andrew Bird, “the Edith Piaf of our time”, and some other singer songwriters musicians.
Andrew Bird’s live talent prompted the comparison to Edith Piaf. “He can’t sing the same song twice even if he wanted to,” and this is part of what makes him an interesting musician and something that enhances his live performance. The Shins, despite their ability to make write and produce great records, didn’t have this unique quality in their live performance when they came here in the fall of 2008. “Every song sounded the same as it did on the album,” he explains. That leaves something to be desired as a fan. You can listen to Andrew Bird live at Coachella, and his songs will sound different than when he played at Sasquatch, or the Pitchfork music festival.
And the constant line up of festivals in the United States make it an even more prosperous time than the sixties for music. “It’s an awesome time to be alive,” he smiles, and then corrects himself, “from a musical standpoint, not a political standpoint.”
With great power comes great responsibility, and KTUH gives that to its DJs. This can produce horrible shows or amazing shows, because despite the seeming ease of picking and playing good music, the formatting and the programming are challenging. The training director at KTUH helps them out, and most times they’re able to help them out. “Do a good show, or go away,” Ross chuckles. But he assures me that he’s “a huge fan of KTUH. It’s so much better than most of the college radio stations. People in Hawaii don’t even realize.”
[I wrote this article for the newspaper, but it's interesting so I'm reposting it here]
In early April at the Ihilani Resort, the Blue Planet foundation had a 3-day Global Energy Summit, where world leaders, energy experts, environmentalists and artists discussed the environmental problems we’re facing today. They explored the answers to the essential questions of our energy crisis: where do we need to go? How quickly? How should we get there? They plan to make this an annual collection of events that, according to their website, will “celebrate achievements, and inspire people around the globe with the power of human imagination to solve our energy challenge.”
The imminent environmental problems challenge our earth require a unique and unparalleled global response, making it necessary to put aside our partisan biases and come together to address these problems. Blue Planet foundation’s summit is a forum that will aid this need. The hope is that Blue Planet will be able to provide a platform for cooperation across interest groups, industries and national boundaries, and help create a new vision of the way we create and package energy. Their goal is to inspire a “global commitment to change” and the realization that the responsibility for the implementation of change falls equally on all of our shoulders. “Most of all, this will require a new level of communication, understanding, tolerance and trust, and a belief in new possibilities.”
The afternoon after the Blue Planet foundation had their last speaker, Bobby Kennedy Jr was lounging on the deck of a friend’s sail boat, relaxing in the Hawaiian rays and gazing out at the ocean. As one of the speakers himself, and as a man who has a passion for saving the environment, Kennedy had a lot to say on the concept of the summit: that Hawaii has the potential to become a sustainable model. “Hawaii has extraordinary natural resources,” he said. “Solar, wind, tidal, otech, biomass, everything. There’s no reason why they need to ship oil to the islands. Hawaii is the only state that’s still using oil as a major energy source. There are a lot better choices.” He turned his eyes to the horizon, his brows furrowed and eyes passionate.
Kennedy gave the example Iceland as a country that has benefited from almost complete switch to sustainable energy. With an unemployment rate of 1% and an extremely healthy economy, Iceland has gone from being one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest. They’ve also switched from being 100% oil dependent to 89% geothermal dependent. Consciously making the choice to be sustainable, Kennedy says that they have demonstrated how switching to environmentally sustainable energy resources has spurred economic growth. Hawaii could follow in their footsteps. He believes that sustainable energy usage gives space for entrepreneurs to make money and provide jobs that benefit the environment, but also benefit the economy.
But isn’t sustainable energy more expensive than oil? “It’s not,” Kennedy insists, shaking his head. “Sustainable energy is actually cheaper.” The difference is made up in subsidies: the seemingly cheap price that we pay for oil is all because of the tax dollars that went to the oil companies through subsidies. So, when the hidden taxes are revealed, oil is more expensive.
It also doesn’t help that ex-oil company executives have suddenly been reborn as politicians. And when lobbyists are wooing their way around checks and balances, it makes it hard for any honest and good change to happen in environmental policy.
What should we do?
“Take the oil companies by storm! Run for the hills!” he smiles playfully. “No, we need to take our government back.”
For the final project in Ideas in Western Literature, two friends and I assumed strange roles/characters and rode the bus as these characters.
The characters were as follows–
The stuffed animal girl: Emily carried around her stuffed animal on the bus, cuddling it.
The laughing girl: This was mine. I started laughing very loudly and animatedly at Hamlet.
(I’m not laughing in this picture, but I was for most of the time…)
The crack whore girl: Jasmine dressed up as a crack whore (using my pajamas) and stumbled around Chinatown and on the bus.
***
What if you were on the bus, and some weird girl started laughing erratically? What would you do? Would you feel out of your comfort zone or unconsciously deem what she was doing abnormal? This is what we’re testing: comfort zones and the concept of normal behavior, or the code of social norms. We’re observing the reactions of people on The Bus to slightly skewed behavior.
There are several different points of view to look at this cultural assumption from. The most obvious is from the perspective of the observer of the odd behavior. When does the observer consciously detect that something isn’t right? Does the observer ever feel endangered by this erratic behavior? Is it a defense mechanism to feel ultra aware of people behaving out of the ordinary? Then you can look at this idea from the perspective of the person doing the strange behaviors. Do they realize they’re doing the strange behavior? Is it a conscious decision to be different from the normal?
Why does the observer react at all? We’ve narrowed down three main reasons: fear, curiosity, and discomfort. We received reactions to our behavior that fit into all three of these categories. There were the people who chose not to sit next to us because of how we were acting (fear), there were the people who exchanged amused/conspiratorial glances with other passengers and who looked at us with interest (curiosity), and there were people who looked away consciously and tried to neutralize the situation (discomfort).
What we were hoping to explore in our social experiment was normalcy. What is it and how did we disrupt what is generally considered “normal” behavior?
Our dialectic explores this question and others.
L: Hamlet hid behind the mask of his seeming insanity, and in the same way, we hid our own “normal” personalities behind our characters. And, like in Hamlet’s court, the people around us reacted to the craziness immediately. There were no suspended judgments of character, and despite our attractiveness and youth, people reacted negatively towards us. This implies that we are judged by our normalcy. Who we are inside doesn’t matter, neither does what we have all done with our respective lives, what only matters is whether we laugh out loud, etc on the bus or if we sit quietly and be normal. The consequences are obvious: if a person wants to move through live with the most ease, they need to behave “normally”.Out of the ordinary behavior is not rewarded by strangers or society.
J: So, what constitutes normal?
E: I would say that whatever people have seen repeatedly throughout their lives is what they think of as “normal.” An assumption I had going in to this project was that, because you always see crazy/weird/sketchy people on the bus, we would not invoke many reactions – yet we did. So, I think that what was really “abnormal” in people’s views was the fact that we were young, healthy looking girls acting this way. If we had been crusty, middle-aged, homeless looking guys, it would have still been “normal” to everyone to witness “abnormal” behavior from us.
J: I mean, every single person has a freaky or sketchy side to them somehow. They look normal, but inside they might have secrets… problems…fetishes, etc.
L: Maybe we all hide our freaky selves to try and be normal, but in actuality we are all like that.
J: If this is true, then how did society end up formulating the idea of “normal?” How did we all agree on what normal is? Is there something instinctual about it?
E: Well, in different cultures different things are considered normal. I think it develops as a result of survival issues. For instance, it’s not normal to invade other people’s personal space, because that is instinctively viewed as a threat.
J: I think we can see from our experiment that bizarre behaviors trigger a flight or fight reaction in people.
E: Yeah, because the black woman you accidentally kicked wanted to fight you! And when you were a mangy crack addict, people wanted to… flight you.
L: And there was that woman who kept moving away from Emily, and the man who didn’t want to sit next to her… it seems that more people wanted “flight” rather than “fight”!
J: In general, people reacted defensively, whether by wanting to run away or wanting to fight against whatever it was that was upsetting them.
L: But most people just wanted peace. Few people wanted to shake up the atmosphere.
J: I think they didn’t want confrontation, exactly.
E: That kind of brings us to our connection to Sartre and his idea of “hell is other people.” People dealt with uncomfortable (hell-like, one might say) situations because they didn’t want confrontation.
J: People are afraid to step out of their comfort zone, even if doing so will ultimately bring them more comfort. We didn’t only see this in other people’s reactions to our experiment, but on our own side as well. When that woman on the country express wanted to scrap with me, I kept pretending I didn’t speak English. It would have been way out of my comfort zone to tell her to leave me alone, or to ask for help.
L: You just ignored it – you hid behind your character, kind of like how people hide behind a fake “normal” exterior.
J: But I avoided confrontation because the situation was dangerous, not to appear more normal than I was.
E: so in your case, it was fear and/or a concern for personal well being that prevented you from trying to do something about it.
J: Yeah. And in that case, her behavior was not “normal” because it was so confrontational.
L: Maybe normal behavior is just neutral behavior, in that case. It isn’t normal to show strong emotions or emotional reactons.
E: And that fits in with our survival instincts idea, because revealing your emotions is kind of a weakness, I suppose…
J: I’ve got another example of how our society’s collective idea of what is “normal” has roots in our survival instincts…. we feel the need to find a mate, therefore we try to make ourselves attractive…preen, if you will. That’s why, when you see a “crusty” or unhygienic person, it isn’t “normal.” We base so much on appearances.
E: I think that makes sense. Even though in today’s modern society we may seem far removed from basic survival stuff like that, everything we have has all grown upwards from those concerns. Anything that’s “weird” to us is upsetting because we fear it will disrupt the natural order of things, like the circle of life, or the chain of being. (Like Scar killing Mufasa, or Claudius killing Old Hamlet, for example!)
J: Take our goth girl experiment idea. Society has this idea that girls are supposed to be soft and delicate. When goth girl dresses tomboyishly or imposingly, she challenges the gender boundaries and thus makes herself seem generally uninviting.
E: And she seems that way because people are alarmed by her upsetting the chain of being or the natural order of the world. Because she doesn’t seem to be fulfulling her… biological function.
***
J: What doesn’t make sense though, is that if everybody has a strange side to them, normalcy really can’t be defined.
L: It’s not about the “strange” sides of people, though. It’s about what they present to everyone else. I think we could agree that we all have aspects of our true personalities that are strange, but the reason they’re still abnormal even if they’re common is because it is not acceptable to display these aspects openly. Kind of like, we have all these latent urges, but we don’t act on them.
E: Yeah, that is the interesting thing… basically, we’ve concluded so far that “abnormal” and “normal” are constructs of society formed from basic survival instincts: avoid anything potentially dangerous so you won’t get killed, appear alluring to others so you can… procreate. But then why have we developed ideas like… having sex in public isn’t normal? Because the constant drive to propegate the species is about as natural/survival instinct as it gets.
J: Well there’s also… culture
L: religion, piousness….
J: That all wraps it up in different packaging.
L: Our instinct may be to have sex, but… we’ve been raised to go with abstinence instead?
E: So it seems that some boundaries of “normalcy” do not stem from biological/survival instincts, but rather from our attempts to rise above those things.
J: Basically, memes!
L: Memes fight against instinct?
J: Not necessarily…memes coat them, I suppose. I don’t know how to describe it.
E: (Now I have this weird image of a meme coated instinct in my mind. It looks like an ice cream bar…)
J: I guess what I’m saying is that survival instinct may be the core of what defines normalcy. But memes have encased it and given it guidelines and rules. I think that, aside from our instincts, each individual is built up of other things that form their unique personalities…whether these are forged through nature or nurture, I do not know. But these variables interact, and this is what creates culture; people agreeing upon ritual and tradition, because we need to interact with one another safely.
E: So… culture / “normalcy” is basically the compromise between… survival instincts and human memes?
J: Yeah. And different cultures find different ways to channel their instincts. For example the Mayas and Aztecs: their idea of protecting their existence had evolved far beyond cavemen using weapons. They moved on to the spiritual realm, and engaged in human sacrifice, because they thought it could protect them from the wrath of the gods. Now we look back on that and think it’s sick, because in our modern society, we’ve evolved and come up with a new vision of how to protect ourselves and how to interact. But that is constantly changing. We can look back at our American history from a few hundred years ago and be disgusted by the fact that we had slavery – that is not “normal” now. And even if we look back a hundred years or so, we’re horrified at segregation and the fact that women couldn’t vote – again, that’s no longer a normal state of affairs. So hopefully, societies of the future will look back on us and be disgusted that gay people couldn’t get married in the same way that we are scandalized that women couldn’t vote until the 20th century.
” “The Irish don’t know what they want and are prepared to fight for it,” said British attorney Sidney Littlewood. I don’t endorse that assertion, since it’s an offensive ethnic stereotype, but I do want to borrow it to create a cautionary message for you. Please make sure that in the upcoming weeks no one can say to you, “You don’t know what you want and yet you are prepared to fight for it.” I definitely hope you aggressively champion an idea you believe in or a dream you care about, but you should get clearer about what exactly it is. “-Free Will astrology
What do I believe in?
To conceptualize my beliefs makes them seem less real. Inside of me, they run through my blood and my adrenal system like fire, or occasionally they just blend in and saturate me. Do I really know what they are? Can I define them with words?
Yes, but no. As soon as these beliefs leave my skin, they turn to plastic and with words loose their meaning.
My challenge is to find a way to stop this. My challenge is to learn how to express what’s complicated and what’s seemingly inexpressible. Because it is expressible, and once I can, I will have come so much closer to knowing myself. Then, I’ll know what I want, and I’ll fight for it. Or maybe once I know, I won’t have to fight anymore. Maybe there really is no fight.
But until then, the search for the perfect word combination is on.
THE DISSERTATION OF LINDSEA…to be continued indefinitely.
It’s been a while since I used that phrase and the inside joke was made, but I feel it’s appropriate right now.
My cats are some of the cutest things I have ever seen. I posted about Fluffy when I first got him (his name is actually Sydartha, Fluffy is merely his pen name) and he’s still adorable even at his old age.
My cats are rather clingy and cultish, and they circle their fascination around certain things, and when they do, their whole life revolves around it. Until they move onto another object of their affections, of course. Two things are currently holding their fancy.
The first is a flokati area rug. My kitties love it. Well, only Rocky loves it. Syd loves it because Rocky loves it, but he feels that he cannot let his body completely touch the rug. That’s why he is currently lying on my English award envelope on top of the flokati. And he’s stretched out with his belly exposed and his legs spread wide. Even in this position, he is one of the most attractive cats I’ve ever seen. He’s a siamese stunner.
The second is a small Buddhist water feature that we installed into our living room last night. It’s beautiful. Rocky seems to agree, and he hasn’t stopped playing with it since we first got it started. It’s behind the couch, so he’s on the back of the couch with his head facing the stream of water, pawing lightly at the water.
The fountain works really well for Rocky. It’s a great natural resource for him; he’s able to get his water there. Previously, he’d have to MEOW and MEOW to get our attention, and then we’d turn on the tap in the bathroom for him to eagerly consume, his bulbous backside hanging off the side of the sink. Things have become much simpler in his already simple life.
And now they’re sleeping in their respective locations, dozing most of the day away. A huge part of me wants to curl up on the sofa next to Rocky, and have Syd sprawled at the feet of the couch, and just dream. Another part of me wants to rush down to the beach park with my friends and throw myself onto the sand, letting the sun bake my thoughts away. Another part of me (is there much left?) wants to go back to bed with coffee and my laptop and write.
But unlike these two hepcats (the ska band or the comic book, I leave for you to decide), I have responsibility (which is the easiest way to avoid responsibility–admit that you “have it”).
Enough with these parenthetical phrases. I must attend to my large pile of work.
I’m restless and optimistic sitting in my room tonight. My elbows are resting on my desk and my face is turned toward my open window. The rain is finally coming down in torrents and the air is sweet; succulent nature pouring back into me again. I am reunited.
There’s a strange energy in the air, like the darkness and the dripping sounds outside my window are calling to my elemental roots with a powerful pheromone. Longing overwhelms me, but longing for what?
Down, down deep in my chest cavity there’s an eruption of warmth that contrasts with the just below body temperature breeze. Breathe. In and out, here I am: an animal that longs to dance in gentle tropical showers, that wants to call to the full moon.
A calm has taken over me, and I’m glad it’s here at last–it’s come in with the rain, it seems.
Diclaimer: I’m not against any religion, and I try to keep an open mind. This is not a declaration of my faith or what I believe in, it’s just an expression linked to a southern TV preacher. I’m not pro-satan or anti-satan or anti-Jesus or pro-Jesus.
There are five things that we need to do to set ourselves up for a miracle, according to the shiny headed preacher on the TV screen. It’s glowing through the darkness, the TV screen. The words that he says blur together like the tangled blankets on this bed. The amens and laughs become one. His jokes about walking downstairs to pray and finding that his “dog had been there first” and his stories about talking to the Lord, conversationally wise; those words enter my half awake mind jarbled. My mind is soggy with slumber, and only a fragment of my consciousness is paying attention to this now.
1. Only a fragment of my consciousness. Only a fragment of my amusement, and none of my prayers, because for some reason his excitement and passion and faith in me (sitting alone in my dark air conditioned room vaguely watching the blue light and hearing the white noise) doesn’t translate to the unstatic of my organic Earth bound mind. “Seek the faith in the Lord. Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord,” he says. I’m not sure I can hear you clearly, I’m fading off to dream land and transcendental meditation with the Maharishi and I see the Beatles over in the corner and Yoko and John are holding hands and I’m gone now.
2. “You’ll find if you study the Bible…and we American’s seem to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If we treated our prophets like we did thousands of years ago…dead…I’m bring you a prophetic statement…” I don’t study the Bible, and I don’t study at all and my baby and my bathwater are definitely solidly together. I’m not sure I should or want to specify the babies and the bathwater in my life. I’d much rather take them both and not throw anything out. “Hear with your heart. I’m giving you a prophetic statement from the Bible tonight. Don’t listen to me because I’m saying it, listen because the Lord is saying it.” And I know you’re saying it to the teenage girl drifting away from you, my red, shiny faced salvation. Do you really believe that I will raise my hands up and up and up until I can feel the blood rushing Earth bound, now, right now?
3. “Who cares what we feel. What matters and is true is what God says,” you say in return. This makes my head spin in truth and untruth and feel and believe when I try and work around the logic of this. This reminds me of something I heard earlier today: freedom of speech is only valid if what you’re saying is true. That type of truth worms it’s ugly way into my mind and pickles it. My own personal truths fight bitterly to the end with the truth worms until victorious, and then they lie freely to themselves about the mess they made in my mind. Returning the weird cycle again.
4. “And there’s no way we can be saved until the Holy Spirit sees we’re born again.” When was I born? When I came out of my mother’s vagina, blood red pulsing with life and screaming for air, that wasn’t enough? That wasn’t enough in the eyes of God? When I was little and realized that my mother and father weren’t married, that they never were? “According to the Bible,” I’m told, “there’s no way I can be saved…” UNLESS. Am I cursed to Hell unless I become born again to a man who has died on my sins? Or do I mean for or against or upon or underneath or above my sins? I’m confused now.
And now he’s saying that if we only put the gospel singers in front of the fighters in Iraq, we’d win, because that’s what someone in the Bible did. And for the guy in the Bible it worked out pretty well. This triggers unholy thoughts. Very unholy. I am inoffensive to the Devil because I don’t believe in right or wrong or morals, you say to me indirectly with your watery eyes. Subjectivity, I’ve heard spoken by someone other than Jesus. Put your praise singers in front of the armies, please, as you eat your microphone and buy hair regrowth ointment. Do it, and I will watch from the far fetched sidelines.
5. “You look to people, and you will be let down every time.” Thanks for the warning, my human friend. It took me .34 seconds to realize that these words were falling out of your lips—your lips like sin smeared relics of pagan times. So why should I believe you? You are not my God. I depend only on myself now. That’s what I spit in the eyes of the unconvinced complacents sometimes, but I don’t really believe it’s true. Trillions of people, and the universe too, conspire for my happiness. That alone is more unbelievably meaningful and amazing and miraculous than I ever realized.
“Heavenly Father, in the name of Jesus, I receive these five things. And tonight, I make a vow. That tonight, I’ll make the changes that God requires.
1. seek the lord
2. listen to the prophetic the words in the bible and the prophet god sends my way
3. worshup lord in spirit and truth
4. believe in the prophet plant my seed and prosper in jesus name
5. praise of lord shall be upon my lips
Repeat after me: Satan, take your hands off my property, take your hands off my soul, take your hands off my money, take your hands of me because I am God’s, paid for in full by Jesus.” But the return policy is valid within 100 years if you have the receipt.
“Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.”
–Shakespeare
She sits here in front of me, eating a steaming hot loco moco and gazing out of the window.
“Burning.” she says,”Burning heat.”
My mother is the only person in my life that I trust completely. I feel safe with her. She will always be honest with me, which is the quality that I admire the most. I can ask her anything–be it completely shocking or mundane; and she’ll put thought into the answer.
“What’s a ? How does this work ? Why do guys do this ? Is this wrong ?”
“Well…” and she tells me. She tells me exactly what she’s thinking and everything that she knows.
My mom is the best gate crasher ever. She’s gone into the super bowl multiple times without tickets. She’s busted into private parties. She says that if she were to be a criminal she would be a long con artist. You get huge money. She’s an actress and she bends rules.
She once told me that she expects great things out of me.
“You have it all, honey. You have the height, the beauty, the brains. You don’t ever have to have a ticekt. I expect you to get on an airplane without a boarding pass one day. It’s been done before.”
We laughed hard at that.
“If you had to be a criminal, what would you be?” she asked
“I’d be one of those criminals that appears completely normal, but that lives above the law. I’d rob from the weakness of society.”
“But what would you steal? How would you pay rent and food?”
“I would rob from environmentally unsafe companys.”
“You’re so cute!”
Even now as I type this we’re talking about things that moms and daughters usually don’t talk about so openly and freely. I’m not going to enumerate what that subject is exactly, but it’s usually a large elephant in the rooms of moms and daughters. No subject is taboo for my mom and I, and this makes me feel comfortable. As David Sedaris says, “Parents forbidding something is the quickest way to make an addict.”
My mom says that she will never be angry with me as long as I’m honest with her. She’ll never hold something against me or stop loving me.
I’ve made mistakes in the past, but I’ve owned up to them, and she forgives me. Yes, I’m in the teen angst stage of my life, but no, my mom is not my worst enemy. She’s my biggest ally. I’m not her mirror so much as I’m her partner in crime.
This is the second time this week (or was it this week? I’m confusing my days as they blur into sleepless blobs highlighted by hyperventilating happiness and the dull doldrums). I’m writing this after a SMALL coffee and a night at nextdoor watching movies. Er, I mean films. So I thought I’d be ok because it was a small coffee, and I really needed it. I woke up too late today, and my lovely living mates had already drunk all of it.
And right now I’m being followed by a insect. A large one. As I was about to lie down to not sleep in my bed, it crawled out of my pillow. I whacked it repeatedly with Hamlet, the brave, brave soul. (If you had trouble killing Uncle Claudios, babe, this insect is ten times worse.) When I thought I had at least subdued it enough to keep it in that corner of the room, I retreated to my desk again and to this sympathetic key board. But just now as I looked to my left, it was ON MY PRINTER.
“Stop following me you deranged insect!” I shouted to it as it hobbled feebly around the white printer paper.
“I am injured,” it seemed to say.
“Damn right you are!”
“Do you not take pity on me?”
“I will end you.”
Grabbing my to do list and attempting to end it, I hit the insect. Or I seemed to. Apparently it’s one of those super insects that move in the super speed dimension. Like those blonde dreaded guys in the Matrix Reloaded. As I thought this, it ran into the deep depths of my HP. EF THAT!
I can’t sleep now. No, that’s it. I’m done. I’m never sleeping again. Just call me Edward.
[Yay. I made my vampire reference for the day. Much like Kariume's crack jokes.]
My friend just IMed me, and I thought that our discourse (that’s my favorite word this week) is applicable to this post:
him: you there?
me: yes
him: 2am. go to bed crazy woman
me: yeah. no.
him: k
me: a insect is in my room. it’s following me.
him: eat it! kill it
me: I tried
him: which?
me: the latter. it’s a super insect
him: O RLY?
me: brb, killing
him: use kryptonite
Seriously, I can see the affects of humanity’s obsession with bug spray and immunizations right here. Genetic mutation has caused these organisms to employ Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest. The fittest have survived the bug spray overdose of 2007 in the Lindsea Hood and have now mutated to become SUPER INSECTS. Dun dun dun. This is ridiculous. I’m calling the EPA. I’m calling the FDA.
And the worse part is, in my late night hysteria, I think that everything that touches my epidermis is an inspect. I am flinching and jumping like a heroine user going cold turkey (which, incidentally, I saw recently in Barnes and Noble). This is not ono kine grindz.
So this post was going to be about semi-intelligent musings. But no, the genetically mutated freak of nature that is hiding in my printer has ruined it.
[Edit: Ok, so then it ran out of my printer and somehow got under my bed. Yes, I thought, at least it's moved away from the immidiate vicinity. BUT NO. The genetic mutation obviously made it a million time stupider and gave it a death wish. It ran out from under the bed and onto my FOOT.
"What the ef what the ef what the ef??? What are you doing?!"
No response.
I ended up murdering it for good and then rolling over it with my chair a couple of times. I'm not certain this means it's safe to go to sleep. I'm thinking it might have a mate somewhere. If it does, IT IS GOING DOWN LIKE ITS WIFEY. That is all.]
The golden goldfish are cracking under the weight of my teeth, and my salvia is rushing towards them like a tidal wave. I am here, sitting in the cold studio, filled with computers put here for newspaper and literary magazine editors. I am both. This place–with it’s distinctly student mess, and disgusting burber carpet–has become comfortable for me. I’ve been here as the sun goes down, well into night, and tumbled out with my fellow newspaper editors, our eyes blinking and unfocused. I’ve eaten Korean food and endless chocolates at the table to my right. I keep my copy of the O.C. season 1 here. I first joined Students 2.0 at this computer I’m typing at right now. I had a project global cooling conference with Korea using this isight.
It’s like this place has become a tangled web of memories, vaguely resembling what it once was. It’s become mine, and I love it.
Even the broken stapler and my old garbage.
This has become of big part of my “where.”
