Burried Treasure

In my path of self discovery and rediscovery, I've found a lot of awesome crap that I forgot I owned. Here are some of the gems that have been uncovered:

• Re-Pete the Parrot- This is an electronic parrot, mounted on a stand, that you can record phrases on and repeat it back to you in a crazy parrot voice. How was I scared of dolls and clowns but not this as a child? I'm glad I kept it, though. It's going to make an excellent gift.

• High School Quote List- Through out high school, my friends and I each had a list we kept of all the crazy, hilarious and especially stupid things anyone said. They got extremely specific, with location, date, time and speaker all recorded for future reference. I'll list a few choice ones, anonymously, of course

“Really? It's a Pajama Day miracle!”

“I'm caught between two sides of a conversation going nowhere.”

“I have short hairs, and they will fly... like an eagle into the sea!”

“Will you lick my lolly?”

“Somebody broke the font and ugly spewed forth.”

• Travel Battle Ship- This toy was made sad by the fact that I never had anyone to play with when my family actually traveled. I think I just bought it because it was cheaper than the stationary sized one. I still long for the regular sized Battle Ship with sound effects and fake topographical lines across the grid.

• Journals- Oh my God. I was a crazy person. My journals sound like Girl Interrupted meets Running With Scissors. I smell an Oscar.

• Cape Cod Photos- In 7^th grade, my school took us on a four-day trip to Cape Cod in the middle of October. After our year, they considered never doing the trip again. Yeah, it was that bad. It made for great stories, though, filled with cases of hypothermia and claims of cancer. Don't worry; no one actually had cancer. Though, we weren't sure for a while...

• My Diploma- I was wondering where that thing got to.

A Bloody Mess

Recently, a friend of mine wrote that she disliked dissecting poems to analyze them. As she puts it

“if you try to put it back together, it will never look the same again. In general, things don't look better to me when the blood and guts are spilling out.”

I, as it turns out, couldn't be more opposite in my love of poetry. When it comes to art, in all its forms, I prefer the blood and guts. It might be because I'm Catholic; blood and body were always part of every mass. There are several self portraits by Frieda Kahlo holding exposing her insides that best illustrate my point. Any of the German masters' also serve nicely. When I see the insides of a poem, I see it for what it really is. I feel like it's letting me in, for a closer glimpse, a true artistic intimacy. But it's a trick. I never really learn it all the way to its core. There are always new things, though, with every reading, either silently or out loud. The Shirt by Jane Kenyon is one of those poems.

The Shirt

The shirt touches his neck

and smooths over his back.

It slides down his sides.

It even goes down below his belt—

down into his pants.

Lucky shirt.

Today's Forcast: Mostly Crapy with a chance of Frustration

Since my last post, I've been in a bit of a rut. It's felt like I've been striking out again and again and again. Absolutely nothing was going right. I suppose I could have written about that, but I absolutely loath people who share their angst.-filled Emo blogs. It's been difficult to write because of that. Things are getting better, slowly. What's helped has been both literally and figuratively “cleaning out my closet”. In the past week and a half I've hashed out a lot of things with my family, reconnected with old friends and emptied out one of our down stairs closets. It's supposed to be a walk-in closet, but it's so jam packed, it looks like a regular sized one. We got rid of four garbage bags worth of junk, not to mention several large boxes, and the closet was still full. A couple of boxes and bags had to be opened, not just to get rid of stuff, but because we had no idea what was inside them. One such box turned out to contain a bunch of memories from middle school and high school. It was funny, sad and heart warming to sort through the items contained there. After going through the box, I sealed it back up, labeled it, and stuck it to the rear of the closet. I'll probably open it back up again when I have my own place and I move all my crap there.

My point is this: every now and then you need to sort through your emotional crap and stare down the good, the bad and the ugly. Especially the bad and the ugly; those two bastards need to be put in their place. Understanding that crap from the past is the only thing that can help you deal with the crap of the future.

To sum it up, crap is important because, let's face it, everybody poops.

Dare to dream

Dream #6: You won't like him when he's angry.

I had this dream a few weeks ago, soon after I returned home. Like a previous dream, it's based on a Disney animated film: Beauty and the Beast.

This dream took place after the movie, once the spell had been broken and the Beast was human, or so we thought. In the dream, the spell had been broken; the prince was no longer a beast all the time. He, instead, could transform at will into the beast or the transformation could be triggered when he was extremely angry. Belle didn't know this and is now regretting her decision to remain by his side. She gets very embarrassed every time he changes, usually in front of guests, who she's sure to never return. Everyone in the court walks on egg shells, hoping not to invoke his wrath for fear the Beast will return.

So concludes my brief dream series. Unless, of course, I have a particularly crazy sleep experience that should be shared. You'll be sure to hear about it.

Nightmare on Queens Road

Dreams # 4 and 5: Peter Pan and Napoleon walk into a bar... I mean, my brain...

While abroad I had a few very strange dreams. The two that stick out in my mind both involve water, to a certain extent, the ocean to be more specific. It may have been due to the inordinate number of sea gulls that keep the city of Bristol in perpetual shade. It's the only place I've ever seen nocturnal sea gulls. I'm sure their 4 a.m. screech fests must have made it into my dreams at some point.

The first of these two dreams involves me, as Wendy Darling, trapped on the Jolly Roger with my kid sister, in the middle of a hurricane. Captain James Hook and his vile crew were about to slice us open, navel to nose, when suddenly a distance ticking was heard. Immediately the captain freezes up. Surfacing the water was a massive crocodile, as long and wide as the ship itself. Unable to reach Hook or his crew, it summoned more of it's crocodile friends, who proceeded to pile on top of each other to reach the deck of the ship. They made a tower, ten crocodiles high. Just as the top one was about to stumble onto the ship I shouted to the wind, “Peter Pan, where the hell are you?!” Can you believe the fool hadn't rescued us yet? He didn't even leave us any fairy dust to fly away. The nerve!

The second dream that comes to mind is one in which I was enlisted in Napoleon Bonaparte's navy. Never mind that Napoleon never had a navy, (in fact that may have been one of the reasons he lost), I was in it. Not to mention, my crew mates and I were all staying in Versailles. Never mind that there's no water near Versailles, that's where we were staying. We were having a grand old time, having balls, eating lolly pops and candy canes. Then, suddenly, it all stopped and all new recruits were forced to take a math exam. Everyone else seemed to know except for me; they all had calculators and pencils and rulers. All I had was my candy cane. I wrote my name on the paper and began to read the questions. The first one was a proof and that literally set me to tears. I woke up from that quite depressed. In fact, I might even call that a nightmare.

The Science of Sleep

Dream #3: Roommate Ricky

When I entered college, a lot of things in life changed. One of them was the patterns of my dreams. Before freshman year, with the exception of the Killer Orlando Bloom dream, my dreams rarely began as normal day, i.e. With me waking up from sleep in my dream. Once college started, however, I started to have many of these dreams. They began with me waking up for the day, then something ridiculous and fantastical would happen, and they'd end with me going to sleep at the end of the “dream day”. In the dreams, my room looked exactly as it did in real-life. Sometimes my roommate would be there, sometimes she wouldn't.

Now, normally in these dreams I would at least have to leave my room before the ridiculousness would begin. In this particular dream, however, the craziness began as soon as I “woke up”. The sound of my roommate making unnecessary noise. I woke, disgruntled, and turned to my roommate who was rummaging around my desk. The thing is, in the dream, Ricky Martin was my roommate. He happened to be making a mosaic on a plant pot. “Ricky,” I grumbled with agitation, “Do you have to do that now? I'm trying to sleep.”

He gave me an unconcerned shrug and continued gluing tiles. The thought of filling out a room change form occurred to me before going back to sleep and actually waking up from the dream.

The End

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Dream #2: If Legolas and Michael Myers had a son...

I had this dream in 10^th grade, when I was still madly in love with Orlando Bloom. The Two Towers had just come out that year and he was just about all that was on my mind when I wasn't thinking about field hockey. This dream, I certain, evolved out of that.

From the start, it was one of those lucid dreams, where you know you're dreaming at every step of the way. It began with me waking up in my bed on a usual morning. Strangely, there seems to be no one home as I walk from room to room calling out, “Hello? Is anyone there?”

I reached my living room only to find Orlando Bloom standing there with a vacant look on his face (you know, the one he always has). Immediately, I get super excited and think (in the dream), “Sweet! This is going to be an awesome dream.”

Wrong.

No sooner do I think this, does Orland lift his right arm, the hand of which is holding a butcher's knife pointed at me. Slowly he starts to come toward me and I realize that I need to get the hell out of there. I run out the door of my house, Orlando hot on my tail, and start running through every street in the neighborhood, banging on doors for help. There is no one anywhere. It was like the Rapture had taken place over-night. Realizing that I wasn't going to find any help, I went back home to figure out what to do. When I got back, there he was waiting for me.

Mind you, I knew this was a dream. I was still hoping, “Maybe this will turn into the dream I want to be having,” so I stay in the dream.

I find myself in the living room again with Bloom coming after me with a knife. Suddenly, a shelf with all sorts of random objects appears on the wall beside me. I start grabbing things from the shelf and chucking them at him to stop him; a spatula, a turtle, jars, ninja stars, and a scale model of an ocean liner. He went down when I threw the ocean liner at his skull and I thought I was in the clear. As I regained my breath, though, he rose straight up, just like Michael in the first Halloween movie.

Finally, I gave up. I said, “Fuck this shit,” and like the proverbial Open Sesame, I woke up.

The End.

Dream a little dream

For as long as I can remember, I've regularly had some pretty bizarre dreams. They're usually quite vivid and cinematic in format. I aways dream in color and sometimes even in panoramic wide-screen. No joke. Perhaps it's a sign I'm meant to direct big budget blockbusters. I don't know. All I know is there are a hand-full of visually spectacular dreams. I'll be writing about them in a short Dream Series over the course of my next few posts. They might be coming to a theater near you.

Dream #1: Star Wars, Shmar Wars

Long ago, in a galaxy far away...

I had this dream when I was in sixth grade. It was so powerful that I can still remember almost every minute detail.

In this dream I was watching the action unfold on a movie screen. I could actually see myself, the sole member of an audience with popcorn and everything, as well as the staring role of the movie. In the movie within the dream, (this is very meta), I was the daughter of Luke Skywalker. The action took place long after Return of the Jedi; peace and order had been restored to the empire, the Jedi Temple had been rebuilt and all that jazz. Little did everyone know, the Sith Lord lived! He had been amassing an army and teaching others to embrace the Dark Side of the Force.

Eventually, he gained enough power to strike the Jedi Temple and home of the Skywalkers, both as a form of vengeance and to collect new followers. After a gripping light saber battle with Pa Skywalker, I (kid Skywalker) am captured by the Sith Lord and taken away, with all the other children of the city, to an in-door city on the other side of the planet.

For the next ten-ish years, I was raised as the Sith Lord's god-child, under close watch, my memory wiped of my past life. Plagued by dreams of said past life, I search the bowels and towers of the city and find the archive of all the children seized, including myself. I discover a small crystal that had belonged to me and begin to wear it as a necklace.

After learning the truth of my heritage, I stage a daring escape from the city with my best friend, some guy who, sadly, doesn't make it. In the course of my escape, I crash-land in a black, ashen desert. After loosing consciousness in the desert heat, I'm discovered by Han Solo, my uncle, though I didn't know that at this point. He takes me back to the ruins of the capital where my family, like before, is organizing the rebel troupes. As time passes, I learn who my real family is and that the crystal I had inherited is actually mean to be the power cell to a light saber!

As you may have guessed, we defeat the Sith Lord when he comes to retrieve me.

The End

For everything else, there's Mastercard

• Waking up when you're ready and not to an alarm clock.

• Having an action movie marathon.

• Finishing a good book.

• Realizing you can pump two lbs more than last week.

• Putting on a sun dress after a hot shower.

• Catching the express train home.

• Tea and biscuits at 4pm.

• Starting a good book.

• Steamed dumplings and strawberries for dinner.

• Getting past all the math sections in your G.R.E. study guide.

• Knowing there's ice cream in your fridge.

• Finally having your wireless internet working.

• Knowing you're going to see someone you love tomorrow.

• Going to bed tired but not exhausted.

It's the simple things in life that bring me the most joy.

Davey Jones 'aint got nothing on THIS locker.

As previously mentioned, I got a gym membership for the summer. So far I’m really enjoying it. There is, however, one major issue I take with the locker room: loitering, naked, old ladies.
I’ll be the first to admit, I’m something of a prude when it comes to my clothes. I prefer to keep them on in most situations. I loosened up after playing varsity sports for a while as it put me in situations where I had to get dressed and undressed rather quickly. Still, I wouldn’t say I’m ready to run the naked mile, go streaking on campus or anywhere else for that matter. Yes, I’d say I’m a good deal to the right of center when it comes to wearing clothes, not just for me but also all people I come in contact with. In locker room situations it’s impossible for one to not be exposed at some point but I still make an effort to keep a towel handy at all times.
Does shame disappear after the age of 60? In ten minutes in the locker room I see no less than twenty naked old ladies. Maybe it’s just me, but if I’m naked, I’m not just standing around. I’m usually on my way to get clothes and I’m usually in a hurry. These women just stand around, blow dry their hair, do their makeup, chit-chat, figuratively and literally “hanging out”. Do I really need to be seeing that when I just finished a refreshing work-out? I don’t think so. To any elderly women who may be reading this, please, I beseech you; don’t be naked and loitering in the locker room. Seriously lady, I know you’re old, but get a towel. Perhaps you claim to be on your way to a towel from the shower. Well, you should have had it with you in the first place. I mean, eew. I’m not a home care attendant or a physician or any other medical professional nor do I plan to be one in the future, so I really don’t need to be looking at you. Ever. Period.

The Hierarchy of Man

I spent most of today at the beach. It was glorious. There are few things more pleasant than lying on a beach, the gentle breeze embracing you, the waves lulling you to sleep. It’s second to a nap in the perfect bed. Perhaps I shouldn’t set my expectations so low, but it’s highly unlikely that I’ll have another day this week as good as today was. The quality of my day, however, came in 2nd place when compared to my friend’s, whose day began with finding a Speed Racer toy in her Lucky Charms. Now that's what I call lucky. Without a doubt, breakfast cereal prizes trump a day at the beach for three simple reasons.

1) The beach will always be there, (or at least until the ice caps melt, which is like, 50 more years), but promotional toys are only offered for a limited time and while supplies last.

2) It involves Speed Racer. ‘Nuff said.

3) It involves breakfast, the greatest meal in existence, that is, with the exception of brunch, but few are lucky enough to have brunch as a part of their every-day life.

f(x)= i d0n'T (aRE

Math is the bane of my existence. It has been the source of much pain and many tears since the third grade when I began learning multiplication tables all the way through momentum equations in college. I thought I had left behind this evil beast birthed of Pythagarus and Arab scholars. With Olympian skill, I slalomed past any sort of algebra or calculus in order to fulfill my quantitative reasoning requirement. Yet, once again, as I study for the G.R.E., I find myself face-to-face with my old adversary. I actually considered finding graduate programs in other countries just so I wouldn’t have to take the friggin’ thing. What’s the point of a test that measures your ability to take a standardized test? You don’t even take standardized tests in grad school, so how does it judge whether you’d be a good candidate for a program? This is one of the major problems with the S.A.T.s and most other standardized tests. I get the sense that everyone in academia knows this, so why stick it right in the middle of someone’s academic progress?
Better question: Why bother caring anymore? I’m already in more debt than I can literally conceive and need to get a graduate degree to accomplish anything. Maybe I could just join the circus. I’d have no problem shoveling elephant shit as long as it didn’t involve factoring quadratics or finding percent increases.

Let's go fly a kite!

For a long time, language has been a barrier between me and my grandfather. He never learned more than a few words of English and I’ve always had issues with the fluency of my Spanish. We always found ways to joke with each other but even once language was surmounted, his own conservativeness and general kookiness has made it difficult to connect with him. I had all but given up on having any sort of connection with him, but today he taught me how to make a kite.

My grandfather is 89 years old. Like my father and like me, his entire life he’s been very good at working with his hands. As a young man, he used to work on cars. Now, he fiddles with and fixes watches. My dad has always told me about how he and his brother always had the coolest kites growing up, all made by my grandfather. In particular, he always told me about this one kite his father made that looked like an aircraft carrier ship. When I was little he used to make birdhouses and doll houses for me out of milk cartons. Thus, when he suffered from a stroke about five years ago and lost much of the use of his left arm, my grandfather fell into a somewhat deep depression. In his stubbornness, he refused physical therapy and now has virtually no mobility in his left hand.

Having lived in the kite capital of Britain for the past five months, (I even got to make one), the image of an aircraft carrier in the sky has been gleaming in my mind. Today, when I asked him how to make the ship kite, I wasn’t sure if he’d remember exactly how to make it. More so, I knew it would really excite him that I was interested and that it would give his mind something to keep busy on. Imagine my surprise when he remembered every detail of the kite’s construction. He even proceeded folding and drawing on paper to make a miniature model. I helped with some of the folding and cutting, but mostly it was him. He said that the construction of the kite is too complicated to show on paper, so he has it in his mind to make a scale model of it. He’s happier now that he has a project and something to occupy his mind but more than anything, I’m glad we finally have a connection.

Drive Me Crazy

In true New York style, I don’t know how to drive. People always think I'm joking when i tell them this. It seems crazy but it’s true. As a resident in a city with the least amount of parking and one of the best public transportation systems in the world, it was just completely unnecessary to learn. Also, there never seemed to be any time to study, take the test then driving lessons. I’m determined now, though, to at least get my permit by the end of the summer. It’s a lofty goal, I think. Okay, not really. Most people are able to do it in a summer. The problem is that I’m super lazy. Yes, I’m quite the human sloth. It’s been a pretty big deal that I’ve decided to get a gym membership and study for the G.R.E., which I’ll be taking August 22nd. I scheduled that date a while ago knowing that if I scheduled it, I would force myself to study.
Today I got a call from a friend, one who, like me, can’t drive. He told me, “By the way, we’re you need to do something with me. We need to go to the D.M.V. and take this test…” So, apparently I’m talking my permit test on August 7th. Now that it’s scheduled, I guess I’ll force myself to study. Wish me luck and drive safe; I may be on the road soon.

3 > 5

I must admit, unlike most New Yorkers and Americans today, I’m really glad the weather’s been crappy. It’s meant we’ve had a somewhat lackluster 4th of July. It’s always annoyed me when I’ve seen people who wear their patriotism on their sleeve, but it’s been particularly hard to tolerate since my return from Bristol. That may sound a little snotty but I feel I can be honest with you. I’m more one to pay tribute to the huge contradiction that George Carlirn was first to point out to any large, white audience: that the country was founded by a bunch of slave owners who wanted to be free. (Taxation without representation, my ass! Go tell that to your German slaves in Ohio George Washington. How’s Sally Flemings these days, Tommy Jefferson?) Personally, I believe all the pomp and circumstance cheapens the whole notion of citizenship, American Spirit and United Statesiness. I don’t even enjoy saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
While we’re on the subject of the P.o.A., isn’t funny how the things we think of as traditions are actually not that old? Congress didn’t officially recognize the P.o.A. until the 1940s. Before that, the left arm would remain outstretched toward the flag while reciting the pledge, but that was too similar to fascist salutes and was changed. Also, the “under God” part was only added in the 1950s to stick it to the godless Commies during the Cold War. Damn Commies!
In spite of this, on all the 364 days of the year I actually quite content being a citizen of the United States. I do get a little thrill when I see the Statue of Liberty or watch Field of Dreams in spite of the fact that I can't stand baseball and, let's face it, I LOVE yelling "Damn Commies!" What could be more American than that? The fact that I live in a country where I’m able to write something like this means a lot to me. Our reflexive, self-criticism, sometimes taking the form of sarcastic narcissism, is part of what makes this a great and often times hilarious land. So, happy birthday U.S. of A. Keep kickin’. You got this.

"...a dimension not only of sight and sound..."

It’s less than 24 hours before the 4th of July and that can only mean one thing: Twilight Zone marathon! For certain holiday weekends, the SciFi channel gives a 48 hour marathon of the complete series of The Twilight Zone, a.k.a. one of the greatest shows ever made. Rod Sterling, creator and primary writer for the series, (a guy who had some serious cerebral traffic), was in every way a genius writer and director. Each episode displays absolute mastery of writing, filming and acting. In less than twenty minutes a complete story unravels, with characters that have depth, plots that twist but close. The stories are simple but have no less of an effect on the mind; after every first viewing of an episode your brain will explode.
Sterling not only produced entertaining television full of horror, thrill and mystery, most of the episodes are also direct social commentaries on the 1960’s. The Twilight Zone is a place the viewer enters and leaves at the start and end of each episode. It serves as an imagined literal and figurative space to discuss many of the issues affecting Americans and the Western world of 1959-1964. The Cold War, space race, roles of men and women, capitalism, religion, the institution of the family and many other issues are constantly challenged and examined from many different angles. We enter the Twilight Zone with a warning, a dare. This challenge, like the eerie quality of each episode, is meant to carry on after the 20 minutes of the show have ended. These challenges and reevaluations are really what the 1960’s were all about.

Film foux

Yesterday I rediscovered a 1948 cinematic masterpiece. Every Girl Should Be Married, staring Cary Grant and Betsy Drake is the hilarious comedy of a deranged Anabel Sims, (Drake, clearly an inspiration for Single White Female), determined to marry a gay man, Dr. Madison Brown (Grant). Throughout the film we witness the numerous and creative ways Anabel stalks Madison, no matter how hard he trys to explain to her he’s not in love with her or how firmly committed he is to his “bachelorhood” (i.e. homosexuality). One particularly comedic moment takes place at a lecture Dr. Brown delivers to a hall of feather-hat’ed mothers, to which Anabel has followed him. There, it is revealed to Madison that women are actually quite crafty creatures who usually must trick their would-be husbands into marrying them in a rather roundabout way, as women aren’t allowed to walk up to men and say “How ‘bout those big brown eyes and lets go bowling on Thursday”. He is appalled, and storms out on the maniacally cackling mothers.
The film finishes with Madison conceding to defeat and agrees to marry Anabel (presumably to protect the public from la femme psychopathe) and admits that he was quite impressed by her tenacity and imagination. Besides, after they have a kid, they’ll never have to have sex ever again and he won’t need to try so hard to keep the door to the closet shut.
The moral of this film is that in the 1940’s, no matter what, a woman can wear down any man into marriage, no matter how much he loves his freedom or how gay he is. The institution of marriage shall overcome, after all, Every Girl Should Be Married.
Okay. I’ve clearly been a bit imaginative with my interpretation of this movie but in all honesty it is quite funny, both by 1948 standards and today’s simply because you can read it as I have. I’d recommend this one for any lazy afternoon. For a different take on this film, check out Amy's Classic MovieBlog.