Wow. Id. Amazing. Try being exhausted and pissed off (and bored) at 7 in the morning. Will you come up with song lyrics? Maybe. I did.
fuck i wish i was drunk someone just upchucked on my new rug.
----------------------------------------------------------------
i'll bring the sex
if you bring the safety
you better hurry up
cause this shit is getting crazy
take off this shirt
drop those pants
give it a couple seconds
and we're doing a horizontal dance
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Airport Pity
I wish that the standby list wasn't decided chronologically, but rather, depended on whose travel story was the most heart-wrenching. "I just really want to get to Key West," would not be acceptable. Mine would probably be mid-course. "I left at three in the morning to get to the Syracuse 'International' Airport, only to learn my flight had been canceled. After crying and finding a hotel room, I had to spend a day in Central New York, which yes, IS as crappy as it sounds. Some last minute ticket trawling produced a jetBlue flight out at 9 in the morning, as opposed to 4 in the afternoon (the best delta *cough,hack,sputter,die* could do). Driving to the airport again, I almost died on the thruway, than started sobbing, positive that if I couldn't make it through this snow storm, there was no chance they were letting planes out, and I'd need to spend another godawful day in snowy Syracuse while my entire EXTENDED family, some members of which I hadn't seen in years, enjoyed each others companies and the warm Floridian sun". I can only imagine one wise guy would pull the, "My mother lives in Key West. She doesn't have much... longer... Every moment... counts." But I might get bumped up a few spots, at least.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Free Time
I dedicate this story to all the kids I've ever gotten the honor of teaching how to swim, to finally discovering who I am, and to the sport of swimming in general. You spend so much of it in silent, suffocating self-reflection, eventually you're going to find some sort of enlightenment.
I don't know if racism still exists. But I can tell you what I don't want to do--I don't want to argue with people about it. If you can't see it, you're not looking hard enough, or worse, you're blinding yourself to reality. And if it feels like a totally consuming, perpetual evil, you need to relax a little bit, and try to find something positive about the human condition. It's hard sometimes. But there's good out there. If given the choice, I don't think anyone would choose to be full of hate. I've seen that emotion tear people up. So given the choice, I don't think anyone would be a racist. Keep that in mind when you face ignorance. Keep that in mind whenever you feel surrounded by hate. People want love more than anything else in the world. Why do you think Valentine's Day is still a major holiday? (It's not the cards, I can tell you from personal experience).
My summer job was hard work: 9 to 5, 5 days a week. I’d be found in a freezing pool lying at the base of my high school’s natatorium. The calories I lost through shivering between shifts I’d attempt to replace with full boxes of honey nut cheerios—they’d get mooched by co-workers, or begged for by the kids with pudgy outstretched hands. I didn’t mind them asking though; I loved them—especially the kids. Even when they cried about getting in or blatantly stated they hated swimming. It was my job to teach them how, and I didn’t mind calming their irrational fears of the water because I, having swam for fourteen years, and having taught swimming for three, knew there was absolutely no way they’d drowned.
We were called Guards—the teenagers who taught five to twelve year olds how to swim. I still have no idea why. Many of us weren’t Lifeguard certified, so some of us couldn’t actually, if it misfortunately arose, guard a child’s life. I was in that category, but then again, I never intended to be a swim instructor. I was called in by a friend to sub, on one summer’s day with nothing else to offer. Figuring it would be a fast way to make thirty bucks, I accepted. It was nerve-wracking. B and Trish were the managers; one an old man with an unceasing love for candy, despite being a diabetic, who was either plotting a prank against you or was unsatisfactorily cranky, the other a middle-aged woman who when not smiling looked like she might kill you; like Hawkfish would eye me warily from their perches on the deck. One or the other would keep pulling me aside.
“Don’t always say good job. Make your comments constructive.”
“Start them off with the arrow first.” What’s an arrow?
“Smile more.” I can’t. I’m too paralyzed from fear.
That was my first day. I left the locker room shaking, wrapped up in a soaking towel. Once the sun hit my bare shoulders, I promised never to go back. But people kept asking me to sub. Having experienced one day of being a Guard, I knew that they of all people needed days off. I couldn’t say no. So I went back.
I slowly began to find small things to enjoy about the job. B was always managing to send someone’s sack lunch out into the middle of the pool floating precipitously on a kickboard. One small child kept quacking like the legion of rubber ducks we kept in the toy bin. In between lessons, guards would run over to the fiberglass turquoise diving boards and try to “outsplash” each other. One boy named Tomas, who was as old as the number of fingers on his extending hands, who still lisped and dreaded being left alone in the pool, would always run straight out of the locker room and sit on my lap, begging for a lesson from his favorite teacher. Our lessons were not constructive. “I’m a monkey! Ee-ee-oo-ah! I’m a frog! Ribbit!” And he’d push off against me while maintaining a tight safe grasp around my neck. “I’m a cat! Meow! Hiss!” And he’d bare his bright white baby teeth.
The next summer I applied to be a full time Guard.
The job was an escape from the collapse of the usual comfort I could count on from my friends. They didn’t understand me, couldn’t recognize the non-expressible pain I felt from being everything I didn’t choose to be: half-black, diabetic, depressed, female. They judged me on the way I looked, made comments that caused me to cringe and later cry, but refused to be blamed for how their judgments made me feel. Here I was seen and respected for one of the few traits that I had actually strived for. I had actively pursued becoming a better swimmer. And here, the kids and fellow guards respected me for all that I had actively achieved.
There were four lessons given daily, and each lesson was more or less an hour. Thirty minutes of instruction, ten minutes of the holy free time that kids would beg for, pull shorts to demand for, and then twenty minutes of in between time for changing and shuttling around from pool to parents. The class booklet described the program as helping children to:
“Develop skills that have lifelong benefits! Beginners will learn correct stroke techniques while they become more comfortable around water. Sessions consist of 30 minutes of instruction (by members of the New Trier Guard) and 10 minutes of free play.”
The first hour of the day belonged to the TWIGs. Every year during orientation, we’d sit down along the deck to listen to B overview everything that we’d need to know before we started teaching—what to teach at all the stations, beginning with the novice level one extending to the swim-club ready level six. It was never a long talk. Many things you’d pick up as you went. He’d be stern about many things, but he’d chuckle when he’d talk about the TWIGs. “They’re a handful,” then he’d laugh, and the first-timers would eye each other with nervous smiles.
The TWIGs, which I later found out stood for Together We Influence Growth, were different from the other classes. For one, they stopped by the pool for lessons every day, but before and after, they also engaged in other camp activities. They knew each other so well that they were our loudest group. They didn’t mind yelling across the deck or the pool to have their fellow campers watch how well they had learned to a new aquatic skill. They were also, as their name tried to suggest, racially diverse.
The pool is located in an affluent suburb, where the average income for a family is $150,000 for a family. The African-American population is 0.7%. I, myself, at only 50% African, was still a rarity in the area. To see fifty black city children walking, hand in hand, with fifty white suburban children down the sun bleached sidewalk to go swimming, here, was like awaking in some kind of bizarre dream. And yet they’d always be there the next day.
Having grown up in the city many were unable to swim. Their emotions about the five feet of water stretching out in front of them ranged from paralyzing fear to a crazed determination to learn, no matter what. Often I’d be stuck in the trenches, teaching the overcrowded level one. There hardly wasn’t enough room on the wall to hold all the kids, so they clung to each other, clung to their teachers, or climbed out of the pool, and sat, freezing, on the ledge.
There were two five-year-olds in the Twig class who were both very small, but they had big eyes and high pitched voices prone to enter into louder fits of laughter. Upon seeing them, I made a quick prayer that not all black people looked the same to me. But they were twins, thank god. Omani and Caylin were their names. “No, he’s Omani!” was a common phrase I’d hear on the pool deck before lesson. They were constantly engaged by the guards, who thought they were adorable incarnate. They couldn’t swim though. After lesson, one day, B’s adult daughter offered a theory that they had never swam before in their lives. I believed it. Omani spent his lessons curled up around the sides of his instructor, either to keep from turning to ice, or to avoid contact with the water. When he was in my group, he was my favorite. I’d never admit this to the kids, but it was something of a fact that the pool would become as icy as the arctic sea if you did nothing but stand around, halfway submerged in it. I would have to control myself to smile without chattering teeth. The less cold I appeared, the warmer they’d feel. But it was a painful endeavor. This twin that clutched to me out of fear was actually the warmest kid I’d ever held. Come to think of it, of all the kids I’d ever touched, hugged, or held, it seemed that the darker the child’s skin, the more relief they’d give me from the bleak water. I wondered if this was true, or if it was all in my mind.
A couple years later, my chemistry professor would define black body radiation as such:
As black objects absorb the most energy, black objects must also emit the most energy.
λ_max= (2.90 ×〖10〗^6 nm⋅k)/T_k
I wondered if having experienced so much, they were naturally warmer than other kids. In the years before and since, I have hugged many white kids. It never feels the same; I can never feel that same fever building within them.
My father had been born on a rickety taxi boat out in Leeki Lagoon, an inlet from the Atlantic ocean. As a result of African tribal superstition, he was kept away from bodies of water-least he be taken by water spirits. My mother had been born too late to take advantage of title IX, yet early enough to cheer on her younger sister at swim meets. My dad can float. My mom will sidestroke if properly begged. Despite their sparse aquatic competence, they still bought a house with a backyard pool, to prove how far they’d made it in life.
I myself started swimming when I was five years old. Before this I had been a dancer—of sorts. The grainy home videos testify that it was best that I had stopped. I hadn’t made it into the first swim club I tried out for. I remember being confused and scared at the thought of swimming in a strange pool, without a parent to guide me. Tears streamed down my face. My mom found a club that didn’t have try-outs. Soon I was swimming three times a week.
I was not a fan. It was hard work, especially when I turned nine and had to swim eight times a week in the summer. My skin was dry, and I always reeked like the insides of a Laundromat, chlorine clung to me so. I begged my mom to let me quit. I whined, I complained. “I hate swimming!” I’d yell when I couldn’t imagine going back to the natatorium, ever, again.
“You only have to keep swimming until you turn eleven, then you can quit whenever you want.” She told me, one day, in exasperation. I had jumped up and cheered. At age ten I became part of a state championship relay. Because of this, I thought I had a future in it. I’m still swimming, eight years later, so I guess I guessed right.
My mom made me keep to swimming with more enthusiasm then she applied to making me stick with basketball or soccer. At the time I thought it was because swimming was the most physically demanding sport, invented to torture me. It’s easy to run around with a ball; mundane and exhausting to repetitively stroke from one side of a pool to the next. For an upper level psychology class, a swimmer on my college team asked me why I swam, when very few African-Americans are in the sport (I am barraged by friends and acquaintances with psychology questions, because I am an oddity—half-white, half-black. It seems race relations remain one of the more difficult human behaviors to understand). I recounted the story of how my mother wouldn’t let me quit.
Later that day, I called my mom, and told her about my conversation. She laughed. Then she told me why she kept pushing me to stay a swimmer. “I wanted you to be in an individual sport, so that coaches couldn’t be biased and keep you from playing in games because you were darker. I thought they’d have to let you swim if your times were the fastest—which they often were.”
I often wondered how my mom felt as the white mother of three, African-American-looking daughters. I’ve seen Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, seen the scene where the mother of the white woman who’s about to marry a black man explains truthfully, that she doesn’t care who she marries, but doesn’t know if the 100 million Americans who oppose their union in the first place, will ever come to accept their children. I guess my mom had understandable concerns about the way the world might treat us—even if she never spoke of them explicitly to us, the affected.
Back in level one, I had a girl whose fear of drowning was colliding with her determination to swim. The result was frustrating. She could touch the bottom; I had held her small, skinny hands while she momentarily touched down onto the tiled bottom with probing feet, still gasping air like a fish on land. She was seven; she wore a cap to cover her dark braids and a white, Hannah Montana swim suit. I gave her a pair of old goggles that I had gotten for free as a division one swimmer. She loved them. Still she wouldn’t swim to me unless I was holding at least one of her hands the entire time.
I wasn’t easy on her. After each lesson I would get out of the water, kneel down on one knee, look her in the eyes and tell her not to be scared, to just try it, because she could swim, and why didn’t she think she could? She’d be fine. I had been swimming for fourteen years. I had yet to drown. Each time she’d look at me: “I want to learn how to swim”. And I believed her.
And she believed me. She tried everything I told her. Keep your face in the water. Hum to keep water out of your nose. Arms straight. Don’t bend your knees. Even when I wasn’t her teacher, I kept informed on her progress. During free time I would see her tottering from fear and the element, floating in an inner tube, trying to swim solo along a lane line, gripping it tightly, as the waves from the other kids splashing pushed her up and down. With the goggles I had given her, she’d put her face in the water for a few seconds, take it out and look astonished. That’s all I had wanted.
I often wonder what about swimming makes it so mesmerizing; why people think going to the lake or swimming in pools constitutes a luxury. It’s not something people get tired of, perhaps because it is one of the few activities one can never quite adjust to. It is always a novel interaction between just you and the water. You are alone, but you are surrounded. The feeling never dissipates, whether it’s your first time swimming ever, or if you reckon you’ve been swimming too much for the last decade. The feeling of weightlessness is something I still find mesmerizing—even after spending so much time in pools. At any moment, I think, if the laws of physics were to just go out, I’d be crushed to the bottom. I think that’s why swimming elicits fear and joy simultaneously in young children learning for the first time.
In the outside world, people will treat you like an oddity. I know. I’ve gotten the dumb questions, gotten the weird looks. I’ve heard words that make me feel like giving up; that make me feel uncomfortable being myself. I’m still living in a country where this comment: “Fuck Obama. That nigger ain't ever gonna win. He'll probably get shot down before January,” can remain posted in a blog without being taken down by anyone. In the aftermath of Obama winning the presidency, I still felt dissatisfied by the response of millions of Americans. Hopefully, one day, in the country where a half-black, half-white man can be elected president, people won’t hail it as historic, or extraordinary. It just will be.
At least until then, from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, most of the summer, I am free. I have found a haven, where the outside world no longer exists. My outward appearance no longer matters. I am just a person, teaching fellow humans how to swim.
We were called Guards—the teenagers who taught five to twelve year olds how to swim. I still have no idea why. Many of us weren’t Lifeguard certified, so some of us couldn’t actually, if it misfortunately arose, guard a child’s life. I was in that category, but then again, I never intended to be a swim instructor. I was called in by a friend to sub, on one summer’s day with nothing else to offer. Figuring it would be a fast way to make thirty bucks, I accepted. It was nerve-wracking. B and Trish were the managers; one an old man with an unceasing love for candy, despite being a diabetic, who was either plotting a prank against you or was unsatisfactorily cranky, the other a middle-aged woman who when not smiling looked like she might kill you; like Hawkfish would eye me warily from their perches on the deck. One or the other would keep pulling me aside.
“Don’t always say good job. Make your comments constructive.”
“Start them off with the arrow first.” What’s an arrow?
“Smile more.” I can’t. I’m too paralyzed from fear.
That was my first day. I left the locker room shaking, wrapped up in a soaking towel. Once the sun hit my bare shoulders, I promised never to go back. But people kept asking me to sub. Having experienced one day of being a Guard, I knew that they of all people needed days off. I couldn’t say no. So I went back.
I slowly began to find small things to enjoy about the job. B was always managing to send someone’s sack lunch out into the middle of the pool floating precipitously on a kickboard. One small child kept quacking like the legion of rubber ducks we kept in the toy bin. In between lessons, guards would run over to the fiberglass turquoise diving boards and try to “outsplash” each other. One boy named Tomas, who was as old as the number of fingers on his extending hands, who still lisped and dreaded being left alone in the pool, would always run straight out of the locker room and sit on my lap, begging for a lesson from his favorite teacher. Our lessons were not constructive. “I’m a monkey! Ee-ee-oo-ah! I’m a frog! Ribbit!” And he’d push off against me while maintaining a tight safe grasp around my neck. “I’m a cat! Meow! Hiss!” And he’d bare his bright white baby teeth.
The next summer I applied to be a full time Guard.
The job was an escape from the collapse of the usual comfort I could count on from my friends. They didn’t understand me, couldn’t recognize the non-expressible pain I felt from being everything I didn’t choose to be: half-black, diabetic, depressed, female. They judged me on the way I looked, made comments that caused me to cringe and later cry, but refused to be blamed for how their judgments made me feel. Here I was seen and respected for one of the few traits that I had actually strived for. I had actively pursued becoming a better swimmer. And here, the kids and fellow guards respected me for all that I had actively achieved.
There were four lessons given daily, and each lesson was more or less an hour. Thirty minutes of instruction, ten minutes of the holy free time that kids would beg for, pull shorts to demand for, and then twenty minutes of in between time for changing and shuttling around from pool to parents. The class booklet described the program as helping children to:
“Develop skills that have lifelong benefits! Beginners will learn correct stroke techniques while they become more comfortable around water. Sessions consist of 30 minutes of instruction (by members of the New Trier Guard) and 10 minutes of free play.”
The first hour of the day belonged to the TWIGs. Every year during orientation, we’d sit down along the deck to listen to B overview everything that we’d need to know before we started teaching—what to teach at all the stations, beginning with the novice level one extending to the swim-club ready level six. It was never a long talk. Many things you’d pick up as you went. He’d be stern about many things, but he’d chuckle when he’d talk about the TWIGs. “They’re a handful,” then he’d laugh, and the first-timers would eye each other with nervous smiles.
The TWIGs, which I later found out stood for Together We Influence Growth, were different from the other classes. For one, they stopped by the pool for lessons every day, but before and after, they also engaged in other camp activities. They knew each other so well that they were our loudest group. They didn’t mind yelling across the deck or the pool to have their fellow campers watch how well they had learned to a new aquatic skill. They were also, as their name tried to suggest, racially diverse.
The pool is located in an affluent suburb, where the average income for a family is $150,000 for a family. The African-American population is 0.7%. I, myself, at only 50% African, was still a rarity in the area. To see fifty black city children walking, hand in hand, with fifty white suburban children down the sun bleached sidewalk to go swimming, here, was like awaking in some kind of bizarre dream. And yet they’d always be there the next day.
Having grown up in the city many were unable to swim. Their emotions about the five feet of water stretching out in front of them ranged from paralyzing fear to a crazed determination to learn, no matter what. Often I’d be stuck in the trenches, teaching the overcrowded level one. There hardly wasn’t enough room on the wall to hold all the kids, so they clung to each other, clung to their teachers, or climbed out of the pool, and sat, freezing, on the ledge.
There were two five-year-olds in the Twig class who were both very small, but they had big eyes and high pitched voices prone to enter into louder fits of laughter. Upon seeing them, I made a quick prayer that not all black people looked the same to me. But they were twins, thank god. Omani and Caylin were their names. “No, he’s Omani!” was a common phrase I’d hear on the pool deck before lesson. They were constantly engaged by the guards, who thought they were adorable incarnate. They couldn’t swim though. After lesson, one day, B’s adult daughter offered a theory that they had never swam before in their lives. I believed it. Omani spent his lessons curled up around the sides of his instructor, either to keep from turning to ice, or to avoid contact with the water. When he was in my group, he was my favorite. I’d never admit this to the kids, but it was something of a fact that the pool would become as icy as the arctic sea if you did nothing but stand around, halfway submerged in it. I would have to control myself to smile without chattering teeth. The less cold I appeared, the warmer they’d feel. But it was a painful endeavor. This twin that clutched to me out of fear was actually the warmest kid I’d ever held. Come to think of it, of all the kids I’d ever touched, hugged, or held, it seemed that the darker the child’s skin, the more relief they’d give me from the bleak water. I wondered if this was true, or if it was all in my mind.
A couple years later, my chemistry professor would define black body radiation as such:
As black objects absorb the most energy, black objects must also emit the most energy.
λ_max= (2.90 ×〖10〗^6 nm⋅k)/T_k
I wondered if having experienced so much, they were naturally warmer than other kids. In the years before and since, I have hugged many white kids. It never feels the same; I can never feel that same fever building within them.
My father had been born on a rickety taxi boat out in Leeki Lagoon, an inlet from the Atlantic ocean. As a result of African tribal superstition, he was kept away from bodies of water-least he be taken by water spirits. My mother had been born too late to take advantage of title IX, yet early enough to cheer on her younger sister at swim meets. My dad can float. My mom will sidestroke if properly begged. Despite their sparse aquatic competence, they still bought a house with a backyard pool, to prove how far they’d made it in life.
I myself started swimming when I was five years old. Before this I had been a dancer—of sorts. The grainy home videos testify that it was best that I had stopped. I hadn’t made it into the first swim club I tried out for. I remember being confused and scared at the thought of swimming in a strange pool, without a parent to guide me. Tears streamed down my face. My mom found a club that didn’t have try-outs. Soon I was swimming three times a week.
I was not a fan. It was hard work, especially when I turned nine and had to swim eight times a week in the summer. My skin was dry, and I always reeked like the insides of a Laundromat, chlorine clung to me so. I begged my mom to let me quit. I whined, I complained. “I hate swimming!” I’d yell when I couldn’t imagine going back to the natatorium, ever, again.
“You only have to keep swimming until you turn eleven, then you can quit whenever you want.” She told me, one day, in exasperation. I had jumped up and cheered. At age ten I became part of a state championship relay. Because of this, I thought I had a future in it. I’m still swimming, eight years later, so I guess I guessed right.
My mom made me keep to swimming with more enthusiasm then she applied to making me stick with basketball or soccer. At the time I thought it was because swimming was the most physically demanding sport, invented to torture me. It’s easy to run around with a ball; mundane and exhausting to repetitively stroke from one side of a pool to the next. For an upper level psychology class, a swimmer on my college team asked me why I swam, when very few African-Americans are in the sport (I am barraged by friends and acquaintances with psychology questions, because I am an oddity—half-white, half-black. It seems race relations remain one of the more difficult human behaviors to understand). I recounted the story of how my mother wouldn’t let me quit.
Later that day, I called my mom, and told her about my conversation. She laughed. Then she told me why she kept pushing me to stay a swimmer. “I wanted you to be in an individual sport, so that coaches couldn’t be biased and keep you from playing in games because you were darker. I thought they’d have to let you swim if your times were the fastest—which they often were.”
I often wondered how my mom felt as the white mother of three, African-American-looking daughters. I’ve seen Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, seen the scene where the mother of the white woman who’s about to marry a black man explains truthfully, that she doesn’t care who she marries, but doesn’t know if the 100 million Americans who oppose their union in the first place, will ever come to accept their children. I guess my mom had understandable concerns about the way the world might treat us—even if she never spoke of them explicitly to us, the affected.
Back in level one, I had a girl whose fear of drowning was colliding with her determination to swim. The result was frustrating. She could touch the bottom; I had held her small, skinny hands while she momentarily touched down onto the tiled bottom with probing feet, still gasping air like a fish on land. She was seven; she wore a cap to cover her dark braids and a white, Hannah Montana swim suit. I gave her a pair of old goggles that I had gotten for free as a division one swimmer. She loved them. Still she wouldn’t swim to me unless I was holding at least one of her hands the entire time.
I wasn’t easy on her. After each lesson I would get out of the water, kneel down on one knee, look her in the eyes and tell her not to be scared, to just try it, because she could swim, and why didn’t she think she could? She’d be fine. I had been swimming for fourteen years. I had yet to drown. Each time she’d look at me: “I want to learn how to swim”. And I believed her.
And she believed me. She tried everything I told her. Keep your face in the water. Hum to keep water out of your nose. Arms straight. Don’t bend your knees. Even when I wasn’t her teacher, I kept informed on her progress. During free time I would see her tottering from fear and the element, floating in an inner tube, trying to swim solo along a lane line, gripping it tightly, as the waves from the other kids splashing pushed her up and down. With the goggles I had given her, she’d put her face in the water for a few seconds, take it out and look astonished. That’s all I had wanted.
I often wonder what about swimming makes it so mesmerizing; why people think going to the lake or swimming in pools constitutes a luxury. It’s not something people get tired of, perhaps because it is one of the few activities one can never quite adjust to. It is always a novel interaction between just you and the water. You are alone, but you are surrounded. The feeling never dissipates, whether it’s your first time swimming ever, or if you reckon you’ve been swimming too much for the last decade. The feeling of weightlessness is something I still find mesmerizing—even after spending so much time in pools. At any moment, I think, if the laws of physics were to just go out, I’d be crushed to the bottom. I think that’s why swimming elicits fear and joy simultaneously in young children learning for the first time.
In the outside world, people will treat you like an oddity. I know. I’ve gotten the dumb questions, gotten the weird looks. I’ve heard words that make me feel like giving up; that make me feel uncomfortable being myself. I’m still living in a country where this comment: “Fuck Obama. That nigger ain't ever gonna win. He'll probably get shot down before January,” can remain posted in a blog without being taken down by anyone. In the aftermath of Obama winning the presidency, I still felt dissatisfied by the response of millions of Americans. Hopefully, one day, in the country where a half-black, half-white man can be elected president, people won’t hail it as historic, or extraordinary. It just will be.
At least until then, from 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, most of the summer, I am free. I have found a haven, where the outside world no longer exists. My outward appearance no longer matters. I am just a person, teaching fellow humans how to swim.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Internal
The hallways of my high school are very bright. The floors are composed of always polished, beige marble and the walls are painted in a soothing peach tint. Despite the lack of windows, chains of fluorescent lights held in the ceiling succeed in illuminating everything. During passing period, thousands of teens pushed into the halls, and the noise of chatter became as reverberant and painful as the lighting.
Today, like many days before it, I am both deaf and blind to what is going on. People walk quickly to be the first person in line at lunch or to get to class on time. Occasionally there is a loud excited shout, but I block that out, just as I have learned to block out the light: my head bends over to focus on walking; my eyes squint so that my feet are all I can see. My feet shuffle, bump in to each other, not given the energy to leave the ground. I lack the motivation for movement, again, but I cannot stop moving. That would call attention to myself. I do not want that. I want to get to biology class. But not really.
At the beginning of the year, which lay before my “discovery”, I had loved the class. It was an honors course with lots of students that were just like me; quirky nerds who approved of allusions to Star Wars movies and laughed at math jokes. The teacher was sarcastic and irreverent. He would make fun of any of us at any time but always found a way to teach us something in fifty-minutes. My pre-calculus class seemed impossible to calculate and my English teacher was as harsh as her dyed red hair. Biology began as a nice, mid-morning escape from the harassment of my junior year curriculum.
But somewhere between the lectures on the cardiovascular system and the labs spent dissecting fetal pigs, the class’s appeal vanished. The kids were the same and so was the teacher; they easily laughed at his dumb, dark jokes. But I had changed. I couldn’t laugh anymore. Not just in room 104, but in life. And for the longest time I didn’t know why I had stopped laughing and remained silent throughout the majority of my day. I would sink into obsessive thoughts that I couldn’t let go of, even though they were killing me.
My best friend thought it was just teenage moodiness, arising from a summer break-up she reasoned I couldn’t get over. But that didn’t explain the perseverance of my silence, not to me. No one person could make me mute for weeks on end. I couldn’t tell my friend that though, because I was still struggling to fight my silence. If I could ever get out more than a sentence I would have tried to explain everything to her, if I could figure out what everything was.
As long winter months wracked against the shores of northern Chicago, I painfully dawdled around logical explanations. At first my depression was thoughtful, inquisitive. Why do I feel like nothing I do matters? Well, I would start out, trying to find reason in my own teenage feelings. Learning about clichés in my English class, I realized that knowledge was a dangerous thing. I was simply discovering too many cynical ideas at once. I didn’t really think that learning about evolution alone would make me depressed, but simultaneously learning about the fundamentals of nihilism in AP English made the entire situation inescapable. I was insignificant. One day I would die and that would be it. And I’d be even more alone in death than I was now, because I wouldn’t be able to think these stupid thoughts to myself. Teenagers aren’t supposed to think about death or know anything about it. We’re supposed to feel invincible; ride motorcycles without helmets and make poor decisions. But at the innocent age of sixteen I was already imagining the last day of my life, laying in a bed somewhere, probably unsatisfied because my life had accounted for nothing, and truly meant nothing. I was just one person, a trend in the random mechanism of evolution. I wasn’t important. Hell, I wasn’t even famous. And even if one day I accomplished something, became like Oprah Winfrey on this earth it wouldn’t matter. Death kills everyone. Even epic heroes like Gilgamesh end up dust. At the end of this mental torture sometime in February, I was left with the disturbingly rhythmic playing of one thought on repeat: Where’s the importance of living in a world with no meaning?
In desperation after finding no sufficient answers to flip the switch, my thoughts began to shut down my body. When I walked into biology class that day, I wasn’t functioning anymore. We were assigned to groups to discuss the validity of assigning monetary values to ecosystem resources. I didn’t discuss. I nodded and doodled. My teacher made a grating comment about my sad attempts at drawing. My hand continued to trace lazily on a blank portion of a class handout but my face fell, I raised my shoulders apologetic. “This whole idea sounds dumb,” I whispered, “You can’t say leopards are worth $20,000.” The group continued to talk on this point. I fell into the background again.
Twenty minutes later the bell rang. As I left, in no hurry to get to wherever I was going, my teacher asked me if I was alright. I shook my head, but I didn’t want to tell him anything. Once, in eighth grade, a teacher had asked me if I was alright and I had responded, I thought playfully, saying, “I want to kill myself.” Twenty minutes later I was being driven to the ER by my mother. I wasn’t going to repeat that experience. “Stop by my desk later if you want to talk about it.”
I really didn’t want to. My depression didn’t seem like it could be alleviated by talking about it with a confirmed atheist.
But I wanted attention.
It sounds awful, and selfish, and disgusting.
But that’s all I wanted.
I hadn’t told my parents how I felt because I didn’t want them to worry again (I had been in and out of therapy since I was eight years old). I hadn’t told my friends because I was fearful that my thoughts were more concrete than normal ones, like a virus, that would spread among them, causing a mirror depression, laying waste to the student body.
I hadn’t told anybody, and I didn’t talk to anyone. Every day I had to talk with myself. And nobody wants to talk with a depressed person.
So I went to talk to my atheist science teacher to find out if there was any meaning in this world.
It didn’t start out well. I felt embarrassed crying in front of a teacher. I wasn’t a third grader anymore. I felt disappointed with myself for not knowing how to explain why I was sad even though I had spent thousands of hours figuring it out for myself, glazed over and half-asleep in the past months.
I tried to explain why but it sounded so awful I couldn’t even say it. I just started crying harder. Thankfully my teacher really didn’t care why I was depressed but was more adamant about making sure it stopped.
Two years ago, a girl had committed suicide. I imagined her as a goth, with long black hair and heavy eye make-up. I heard bad things whispered about her afterwards from the girls in my advisory, but I didn’t believe them. I had felt such strong pity that I stood up for her against anyone who questioned her character or her decision. I did so because I knew how easy it is to get that close to doing it. I had never tried, but I had thought about it. It’s so easy to convince yourself that it’s right. “Better to do it intentionally than have death befall you accidentally”, I’d think, before realizing the sentiment’s illogicality.
That girl, of course, had been in his biology class.
I told him I was sorry. He told me he was sorry, too. He had become the teacher liaison for a club on campus called Erika’s Lighthouse which tried to think of ways to deal with teenage depression. It’s a widespread problem that most people don’t talk about. I surely hadn’t wanted to.
He told me he was going to call my parents. I said he shouldn’t, that it was no big deal. I stopped crying just to prove it. No sense in worrying my parents about the feelings I couldn’t even vocalize. I even smiled. I hadn’t done that all day.
I walked around the rest of the day slightly happier. No matter how bad things got, at least I had one reason to continue living. If I killed myself, my biology teacher would no doubt be devastated. I couldn’t imagine doing that to anyone.
At home the next day, my parents sat me down at our lacquered dinner table and asked me if I was okay. I nodded, “I’m fine.” Fine. It was sounded like a plea for further intervention. But I didn’t know how they could help me. “Your teacher called,” my mom said, sounding not too worried, “He said you were upset.” That traitor. “No. I’m okay. It’s just been tough. Pre-calc is really distracting me.” I said, making something up. They nodded. My dad gave me some of his repetitive mini-lectures on the importance of persistence. I walked slowly up the creaky, carpeted steps to my room and sat on my bed after laying my heavy backpack by the closed door, trying to go to sleep. It was only six.
I was called down for dinner. I called back down that I was too tired to walk downstairs. This was partially true, if being tired really was a synonym for lacking motivation to live. I didn’t mind it, living I mean, for the sake of my teacher and my family. But I didn’t enjoy it.
A few minutes later my sister walked up stairs carrying a plate with a slab of steak on it and a side of corn. She had to turn on the lights when she opened my door because I was still laying on my bed in the dark. I hadn’t been sleeping, but I hadn’t been awake. Time had passed while I slowly dwelled on thoughts, moved them around in my head like I’d move this food being presented to me around on its plate. It was utterly useless, I had reasoned in a timeless past, to continue to think. The only problem was I never seemed to be able to stop thinking thoughts. Even in sleep, my dreams forced me to do it.
My sister is shorter than I am, and annoyingly thin, though she still looks like a child even though she’s now in eighth grade.
“Are you alright?”
“No,” I had said it. It should have felt like a monumental achievement. Instead it hung in the room, between us. A few moments passed. I picked up the plate and put it on my lap.
“What’s wrong?” She sounded worried. I missed that, people worrying about me. My lips started to vibrate; I felt my eyes get hot. I took a deep breath. “I can’t explain it,” I said, fearing the mind virus.
“Elora, please cheer up. Mom and Dad are worried about you,” this she whispered.
“Really?”
“Yes. Elora. Really. What’s wrong?”
“I can’t tell you, it’s really depressing.”
“Well you’re depressing me, and I want you to stop.”
“You are so selfish.” I told her.
“Just cheer up because I’m tired of worrying about you.”
I nodded.
Later that night it occurred to me that I alone had no importance. I was drifting in and out of sleep. My thoughts were dreams and vice versa. I could see my life as I had lived it in the past few months and could see it as it one day would be in the future. It seemed feasible. The sound of my little sister’s television blared through our adjoined walls into the darkness of my room, and I realized, that by extension, I had meaning, if only because my happiness made others happy, and my success was tied with the success of others. I was only as alone and useless as I made myself.
No matter the isolation people still found me.
I got a B+ in biology and I turned seventeen. Time passed. I smiled.
Today, like many days before it, I am both deaf and blind to what is going on. People walk quickly to be the first person in line at lunch or to get to class on time. Occasionally there is a loud excited shout, but I block that out, just as I have learned to block out the light: my head bends over to focus on walking; my eyes squint so that my feet are all I can see. My feet shuffle, bump in to each other, not given the energy to leave the ground. I lack the motivation for movement, again, but I cannot stop moving. That would call attention to myself. I do not want that. I want to get to biology class. But not really.
At the beginning of the year, which lay before my “discovery”, I had loved the class. It was an honors course with lots of students that were just like me; quirky nerds who approved of allusions to Star Wars movies and laughed at math jokes. The teacher was sarcastic and irreverent. He would make fun of any of us at any time but always found a way to teach us something in fifty-minutes. My pre-calculus class seemed impossible to calculate and my English teacher was as harsh as her dyed red hair. Biology began as a nice, mid-morning escape from the harassment of my junior year curriculum.
But somewhere between the lectures on the cardiovascular system and the labs spent dissecting fetal pigs, the class’s appeal vanished. The kids were the same and so was the teacher; they easily laughed at his dumb, dark jokes. But I had changed. I couldn’t laugh anymore. Not just in room 104, but in life. And for the longest time I didn’t know why I had stopped laughing and remained silent throughout the majority of my day. I would sink into obsessive thoughts that I couldn’t let go of, even though they were killing me.
My best friend thought it was just teenage moodiness, arising from a summer break-up she reasoned I couldn’t get over. But that didn’t explain the perseverance of my silence, not to me. No one person could make me mute for weeks on end. I couldn’t tell my friend that though, because I was still struggling to fight my silence. If I could ever get out more than a sentence I would have tried to explain everything to her, if I could figure out what everything was.
As long winter months wracked against the shores of northern Chicago, I painfully dawdled around logical explanations. At first my depression was thoughtful, inquisitive. Why do I feel like nothing I do matters? Well, I would start out, trying to find reason in my own teenage feelings. Learning about clichés in my English class, I realized that knowledge was a dangerous thing. I was simply discovering too many cynical ideas at once. I didn’t really think that learning about evolution alone would make me depressed, but simultaneously learning about the fundamentals of nihilism in AP English made the entire situation inescapable. I was insignificant. One day I would die and that would be it. And I’d be even more alone in death than I was now, because I wouldn’t be able to think these stupid thoughts to myself. Teenagers aren’t supposed to think about death or know anything about it. We’re supposed to feel invincible; ride motorcycles without helmets and make poor decisions. But at the innocent age of sixteen I was already imagining the last day of my life, laying in a bed somewhere, probably unsatisfied because my life had accounted for nothing, and truly meant nothing. I was just one person, a trend in the random mechanism of evolution. I wasn’t important. Hell, I wasn’t even famous. And even if one day I accomplished something, became like Oprah Winfrey on this earth it wouldn’t matter. Death kills everyone. Even epic heroes like Gilgamesh end up dust. At the end of this mental torture sometime in February, I was left with the disturbingly rhythmic playing of one thought on repeat: Where’s the importance of living in a world with no meaning?
In desperation after finding no sufficient answers to flip the switch, my thoughts began to shut down my body. When I walked into biology class that day, I wasn’t functioning anymore. We were assigned to groups to discuss the validity of assigning monetary values to ecosystem resources. I didn’t discuss. I nodded and doodled. My teacher made a grating comment about my sad attempts at drawing. My hand continued to trace lazily on a blank portion of a class handout but my face fell, I raised my shoulders apologetic. “This whole idea sounds dumb,” I whispered, “You can’t say leopards are worth $20,000.” The group continued to talk on this point. I fell into the background again.
Twenty minutes later the bell rang. As I left, in no hurry to get to wherever I was going, my teacher asked me if I was alright. I shook my head, but I didn’t want to tell him anything. Once, in eighth grade, a teacher had asked me if I was alright and I had responded, I thought playfully, saying, “I want to kill myself.” Twenty minutes later I was being driven to the ER by my mother. I wasn’t going to repeat that experience. “Stop by my desk later if you want to talk about it.”
I really didn’t want to. My depression didn’t seem like it could be alleviated by talking about it with a confirmed atheist.
But I wanted attention.
It sounds awful, and selfish, and disgusting.
But that’s all I wanted.
I hadn’t told my parents how I felt because I didn’t want them to worry again (I had been in and out of therapy since I was eight years old). I hadn’t told my friends because I was fearful that my thoughts were more concrete than normal ones, like a virus, that would spread among them, causing a mirror depression, laying waste to the student body.
I hadn’t told anybody, and I didn’t talk to anyone. Every day I had to talk with myself. And nobody wants to talk with a depressed person.
So I went to talk to my atheist science teacher to find out if there was any meaning in this world.
It didn’t start out well. I felt embarrassed crying in front of a teacher. I wasn’t a third grader anymore. I felt disappointed with myself for not knowing how to explain why I was sad even though I had spent thousands of hours figuring it out for myself, glazed over and half-asleep in the past months.
I tried to explain why but it sounded so awful I couldn’t even say it. I just started crying harder. Thankfully my teacher really didn’t care why I was depressed but was more adamant about making sure it stopped.
Two years ago, a girl had committed suicide. I imagined her as a goth, with long black hair and heavy eye make-up. I heard bad things whispered about her afterwards from the girls in my advisory, but I didn’t believe them. I had felt such strong pity that I stood up for her against anyone who questioned her character or her decision. I did so because I knew how easy it is to get that close to doing it. I had never tried, but I had thought about it. It’s so easy to convince yourself that it’s right. “Better to do it intentionally than have death befall you accidentally”, I’d think, before realizing the sentiment’s illogicality.
That girl, of course, had been in his biology class.
I told him I was sorry. He told me he was sorry, too. He had become the teacher liaison for a club on campus called Erika’s Lighthouse which tried to think of ways to deal with teenage depression. It’s a widespread problem that most people don’t talk about. I surely hadn’t wanted to.
He told me he was going to call my parents. I said he shouldn’t, that it was no big deal. I stopped crying just to prove it. No sense in worrying my parents about the feelings I couldn’t even vocalize. I even smiled. I hadn’t done that all day.
I walked around the rest of the day slightly happier. No matter how bad things got, at least I had one reason to continue living. If I killed myself, my biology teacher would no doubt be devastated. I couldn’t imagine doing that to anyone.
At home the next day, my parents sat me down at our lacquered dinner table and asked me if I was okay. I nodded, “I’m fine.” Fine. It was sounded like a plea for further intervention. But I didn’t know how they could help me. “Your teacher called,” my mom said, sounding not too worried, “He said you were upset.” That traitor. “No. I’m okay. It’s just been tough. Pre-calc is really distracting me.” I said, making something up. They nodded. My dad gave me some of his repetitive mini-lectures on the importance of persistence. I walked slowly up the creaky, carpeted steps to my room and sat on my bed after laying my heavy backpack by the closed door, trying to go to sleep. It was only six.
I was called down for dinner. I called back down that I was too tired to walk downstairs. This was partially true, if being tired really was a synonym for lacking motivation to live. I didn’t mind it, living I mean, for the sake of my teacher and my family. But I didn’t enjoy it.
A few minutes later my sister walked up stairs carrying a plate with a slab of steak on it and a side of corn. She had to turn on the lights when she opened my door because I was still laying on my bed in the dark. I hadn’t been sleeping, but I hadn’t been awake. Time had passed while I slowly dwelled on thoughts, moved them around in my head like I’d move this food being presented to me around on its plate. It was utterly useless, I had reasoned in a timeless past, to continue to think. The only problem was I never seemed to be able to stop thinking thoughts. Even in sleep, my dreams forced me to do it.
My sister is shorter than I am, and annoyingly thin, though she still looks like a child even though she’s now in eighth grade.
“Are you alright?”
“No,” I had said it. It should have felt like a monumental achievement. Instead it hung in the room, between us. A few moments passed. I picked up the plate and put it on my lap.
“What’s wrong?” She sounded worried. I missed that, people worrying about me. My lips started to vibrate; I felt my eyes get hot. I took a deep breath. “I can’t explain it,” I said, fearing the mind virus.
“Elora, please cheer up. Mom and Dad are worried about you,” this she whispered.
“Really?”
“Yes. Elora. Really. What’s wrong?”
“I can’t tell you, it’s really depressing.”
“Well you’re depressing me, and I want you to stop.”
“You are so selfish.” I told her.
“Just cheer up because I’m tired of worrying about you.”
I nodded.
Later that night it occurred to me that I alone had no importance. I was drifting in and out of sleep. My thoughts were dreams and vice versa. I could see my life as I had lived it in the past few months and could see it as it one day would be in the future. It seemed feasible. The sound of my little sister’s television blared through our adjoined walls into the darkness of my room, and I realized, that by extension, I had meaning, if only because my happiness made others happy, and my success was tied with the success of others. I was only as alone and useless as I made myself.
No matter the isolation people still found me.
I got a B+ in biology and I turned seventeen. Time passed. I smiled.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Sins & Virtues
I am an evil person.
Seven deadly (incomplete) Sins
- Lust
No. No. I'm not going to talk about lust. Well, I won't talk about my own personal experiences with lust. I will talk about the late night sleep over conversations with my best friend and our arguments over whether or not teenagers can feel love. "At our age it's only lust" she would say so cynically. I wouldn't believe her. I'd find some sort of conclusion to prove otherwise, later in the night. "Adults don't get better at understanding the distinction between lust and love…" I'd say, with a killer conclusion in mind. "52% of marriages end in divorce." You can't deny the truth of a statistic, I'd think, and feel so superior. Proof that love exists! Or that it doesn't… but that it can, sometimes, for teenagers as much as adults. Although, always the devil's advocate, I'd remind myself that 99% of high school sweethearts remain just that—high school sweethearts. I'm not going to talk about the first person I thought I was in love with, or, to take an opposing view, the first person I was in love with. I will mention, in passing, just casually, and without any emphasize or emotion, how, when I visualize him now, I see a knife jutting out of his head. I wouldn't even tell you that occasionally when I wake up from a nostalgic dream it sometimes takes me a few seconds to remember that I don't love him anymore. I hate him. Yes. Where's that knife? Or the first person I lusted after, I won't talk about that either. I don't want to revisit the humiliation, so I won't talk about any of it. I'll just remind you, respectfully, that it's not nice to gossip. So don't tell anyone these things I didn't just tell you, kay?
- Gluttony
"Fat is not an emotion." I don't know what that means, but I continue to stare at the minimalistic piece of paper tacked up to the cork board on the first floor of the Coop. My face falls. "I'm fat," I think, still unsure of what the sign means.
Then I wake up. No-I'm not fat. I could be skinnier, but legally, medically, I'm not fat. Therein lies the problem, I think, when I get closer to the sign I see more writing: Colgate University Eating Disorder Group. I wondered how many other people had at one time thought to themselves, "I'm fat" later to end up skipping the most important meal of the day. Then the second most. Then the small, low calorie midnight snack. Then the everything.
I fortunately, was spared from that. Food is delicious. I don't think there's anything wrong with eating. And I can definitely think of more reasons to eat than to not to eat. Just off the top of my head, living. Living's a good reason to keep eating. One time I stumbled into my sister's food diary from her formative, high school years. I was shocked. Had she really only snacked on a single apple for an entire day?! And she was skinnier than me. She wasn't fat, ever. Was I?
"I don't feel fat" I tell myself, reassuringly, sucking in my gut.
Ah. Feel. I feel fat. The sign finally made sense to me. But you really can't feel fat. I feel sad that I'm fat. But I'm really not. I'm not. Am I?
- Greed
When I was five I stole a stack of post-it notes from a small store. They were returned the next day. I still feel guilty. I recall my mom making a large fuss about it, though if you asked her about it today she probably wouldn't remember. It was a crummy store; I remember that much at least, with a bunch of cheap trinkets and bad, fluorescent lighting. But cheap trinkets are exactly what five year olds collect. How much crap did you accumulate simply from being a small child who liked to beg for things, even though you really weren't sure what they did? WHAT USE would a FIVE YEAR OLD have for post-it notes? I've got to remember my busy schedule… of playing around… so post-it notes will help me organize my cluttered life. Or hey, I'd really like to practice writing my name on post-it notes because I don't get enough of that in kindergarten. And still I'm so ashamed. Whenever I'm asked if I've ever stolen anything, I either lie (more sin!) or must confess that I have. I am tainted by an unclean record—all because I couldn't keep my hands to myself when I hadn't yet developed an understanding of money. How badly did I want those post-its? Why hadn't I learned yet that I was living in America? Not some communist country where, theoretically, you can take whatever you want?
And now I have to suffer the consequences. Games of ten fingers can be lost by my past. "Never have I ever…" I wait silently, "stolen anything." I put a finger down. People stare. I feel uncomfortable. I was only five! I wasn't some amoral shoplifting teen trying to steal lipstick. I had become transfixed with the pretty colors of a playful post-it note pack. Oh, if only I could return in time and stop myself from stealing in the first place. Then I'd be free.
- Sloth
It's been about six days since I managed a full night of sleep. Nearly a goddamn week. My eyes reflect the internal choppy conflicts of my exhausted mind—they shake, jump, refocus, unfocus, shatter. It is hell to keep them open, and I don't know why I insist on seeing everything. Very little of it is important.
I'm floating. Right now, levitating specifically. I believe it was the Romans that first defined the two actions differently. Floating involves movement. I am not moving. I am standing, still. I cannot feel any sensation in my hands or legs, though I'm nearly positive they're still there. I can't see them though. Remember my eyes? They've shattered. Remember? I don't.
And those Romans? They never said that.
A mid-winter gust of air strikes across my face as I stand on a cemented path in mid-autumn. They probably never even existed. Some sort of lie to convince people of the importance of western history. My eyes revive. Leaves fall around me. They are vibrant. My face is not. I can't remember why I'm standing in the quad—can't remember the date or time, the last person I talked to, or the last time I went to my bed and actually slept.
- Wrath
I clench my fists, hidden away in happy, pleasant, warm mittens. My music is turned up too loud, I know. I don't want to hear anything as I walk to class, because I know that anything could set me off. My breathing is short, my gait is incomplete; my eyes wander. Frost has collected on the grass of the quad as ravens and squirrels crunch the grass as they move around, in search of food. And all I want is a megaphone.
It's only 8:20 in the morning and I want a megaphone. I want to shout across over the quad and wake up the freshmen still sleeping in their dorms. I want to distress teachers preparing for their classes in their quaint academic offices. I don't want to be the only person losing sleep and concentration over this matter. I want to be heard, because I'm tired of being seen as a thing, not even human—without a voice. I've become some sort of mangled idea that everyone has unclear thoughts about. And I'm sick of it.
I'd hold the megaphone in my mittened hand; scroll the volume to max, to yell. I'm going to tell everyone exactly what to think about me.
"What the fuck?! It's 2008! AH!"
Steam would condense directly in front of my mouth and lift up into the atmosphere, leaving only the sound to reverberate against buildings. My scream would send me, hunched down, to my knees. But I'd keep yelling until stopped by sobs. Tears fill up my eyes. My face is simultaneously fire hot and ice cold. Maybe I wouldn't be crippled by my frustration. Maybe it would fuel me to keep yelling. I can see it now, people who should be walking, stopping, to stare. They stare all the time anyway, at me. Because I must be some kind of extra-human. Not extraordinary. Just something else."Why can't you ever just stop ruining lives? You just take and take and take. What have I done? What could I have possibly done to deserve the fear that hangs over my head at all times in my life? I'm a good person. I'm a moral person. I don't understand why, simply because I'm dark, I have to be subjugated to this fucking nonsense. How much longer? How much longer will this last? How long can your incompetence cause pain?"
I probably wouldn't be able to talk so coherently for so long. Most of what I feel is unintelligible.
"What have we ever done to you? Why must you destroy us then continue to destroy? Fucking slavery wasn't enough? Then we all moved through the horrors of a so called Reconstruction. Then the civil rights movement, where you killed how many people who looked enough like me?"
I don't even know what I look like. I spent my youth looking at myself in mirrors trying to figure out which parts of my face belonged to my mom, which parts to my dad. I didn't see any particular color staring back at me. But I guess it makes a lot of fucking difference.
"And yet you still want more? You burn down churches and you continue to threaten. But why? I won't understand your failed logic. This country breeds the immoral."
At this point, one can only assume that I am insulting the entire student body that is now standing in front of me. They don't try to calm me down, or take away my megaphone. They just stand silently, watching me."As a moral person I won't stand for this. God give me a crowbar so I can take down this hatred with violence. Peace won't resolve this issue. Clearly only death will."
That shouldn't have been said, clearly, but I'm angry for more than just myself.
"How can I ignore all of this? I thought I could, but I can't. And I won't. My children don't deserve the level of injustice I've felt brought against me. And in their names, I would destroy everything to deliver onto them the simple promise of happiness in life."
But killing is wrong. A megaphone is just annoying. And a daydream accomplishes nothing.
- Envy
Jealousy is a strong emotion—a potent combination of anger, greed, and disillusionment. Evolutionarily it is supposed to motivate towards self-betterment. I must be broken because the only thing jealousy motivates me to do is break people's faces. I know I can't improve myself as easily as I can destroy others.
Case in point—I am not a particularly fast swimmer. I could've been, had I not been afflicted with diabetes. I would complain more about it, but all you really need to know is that every morning, when you wake up, as you eat breakfast, you're a damn fool if you're not thanking god for being able to eat whatever you want, whenever you want it.
Anyway, I believe that had I not contracted such an awful disease, I would've been a pro. Instead, I am forced to suffer through low rate, hardly D1 training schedules, and the inability to get any faster. When I see my bipolar coach getting all buddy buddy with one of our top swimmers during practice, I feel as though I could completely lose it. Why do they get all the benefits? Why doesn't he give them shit that they're not perfect? They aren't. Their strokes make me feel nauseas. That could've been me. That should be me. No one's worked as hard as me. No one's run into so many obstacles. And where's my congratulation? Where's my thanks? It's things like this that make me want to break in my coach's car windows.
- Pride
How is pride a sin? I don't understand that. I always thought pride was a good thing. I have pride in what I am and in what I do. Maybe it's all-consuming pride. Maybe it's pride that ends up making you envious of others. I don't compare myself to others with my pride, though, because I have never met anyone who has the same things to be proud about. The Greek word for destructive pride is hubris. I wonder if that's the sin; a pride that causes the gods to hate you (maybe because they have nothing to be happy about—those Greek gods were miserable human beings). Regardless, enough about Greek gods, let's talk about me.
My arms are six feet, three inches long. That's something I'm proud about.
My parents were both straight A students, that's something I'm regrettably proud about.
I listen to awesome music.I own a pair of purple pants.
I watch cartoons and I am 19 years old.
One time, probably, though I'm not aware of it, I saved somebody's life.
How's that for great? I used to suffer depression something fierce. Then I realized something, I'm not an awful person. True, I could be better, but if that could is keeping me from happiness, forget it.
Another thing I don't understand about pride: Black pride. If it's so bad to have pride, why is black pride so far spread? And gay pride? Maybe being attacked gives you something to be proud about. Hurrah! We're still here! Take that world! I feel like being attacked makes me tired—how much more? Does all of life need to be an uphill struggle? I don't want to be proud that I can withstand a lot of suffering.
Though I really haven't done anything else… I've gotten good grades, but grades don't matter. I've been swimming for the past 14 years, but as I'm not an Olympian, I'm going to say that swimming doesn't matter either. People like me. I'm friendly. Not important. I'm smart. Don't care. I'm responsible. Big deal.
But you've got to be proud of something. Or else how do you look at yourself everyday and not cry? You could just not look. Or you could just not cry.
I am not an evil person.
Seven heavenly, short, virtues
- I know they exist, but I really couldn't think of any short anecdotes to prove that I followed any of them.
Monday, November 17, 2008
People are Dumb as Fuck
"I believe that my faith is best placed in my ability to stop anyone who would reduce my freedom to naught. I am opposed to abortion, same-sex marriage, larger and socialist government..." - Ed White
The number of contradictions a person can believe in is astounding. And sickening.
The number of contradictions a person can believe in is astounding. And sickening.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Priority #1: Education
Poor CNN. Now that the election is over, it seems like they have nothing else to talk about, except the elections aftermath. Regardless, one of their new programs sounds like they're going to feature viewers expressing what they think Obama's number one priority should be.
I have one. I don't think, with all that's going on in the world, that it will be the number one problem the government will try to tackle. I don't think it was ever the first priority of any American government, ever. But it's my number one worry. It's education.
Of course, I'm not worried about my education. I'm enrolled at the seventeenth best liberal arts college in America. 17? You may say. Yes, I know. I should've gotten better grades. But I believe that I am intelligent. In elementary school, I always was 99th percentile on the skill tests we took. I managed to get an A+ on papers from an English teacher who never gave out A+s. I wrote a novel. I titrated.
That was my education. I am now an articulate, intelligent individual. And I have excellent teachers and an excellent school system to thank for that. But America as a whole isn't looking too hot. 66% of kids graduate from high school. High school. Which I thought was mandatory. It's not. And 33% of kids peace out without ever finishing, without ever receiving a diploma representing a completion of the most basic form of education. Do I blame these kids, though? How can I. Very rarely, I think, is it their fault for not being able to make it to the finish. Parents, maybe, are at fault, more often. But schools themselves push away students by their complete lack of basic services and their poor teachers, with poor curriculum.
Education is important. Education is what produced the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. America's founding fathers were, above all else, scholars. I think that everyone in this country should be able to, or even forced to, at least gain a basic education. The American job market needs educated people. If we are simply content with people taking grunt jobs because they are not qualified for anything else, well then, we should be content with becoming a third world country. Not to mention, the health benefits of higher education. From lower pregnancy rates to lower addiction rates to nicotine, the more you know, the healthier you are.
I can't stress how important education is, for individuals, for this country. But I personally feel that we are running out of time. In about ten years, with any luck, I'll start having kids. If this country is unable and unwilling to give them a good education, I don't know what to do. I see a country without education as a country in chaos. And I don't want to have to raise a family in that.
Also home schooling is lame.
I have one. I don't think, with all that's going on in the world, that it will be the number one problem the government will try to tackle. I don't think it was ever the first priority of any American government, ever. But it's my number one worry. It's education.
Of course, I'm not worried about my education. I'm enrolled at the seventeenth best liberal arts college in America. 17? You may say. Yes, I know. I should've gotten better grades. But I believe that I am intelligent. In elementary school, I always was 99th percentile on the skill tests we took. I managed to get an A+ on papers from an English teacher who never gave out A+s. I wrote a novel. I titrated.
That was my education. I am now an articulate, intelligent individual. And I have excellent teachers and an excellent school system to thank for that. But America as a whole isn't looking too hot. 66% of kids graduate from high school. High school. Which I thought was mandatory. It's not. And 33% of kids peace out without ever finishing, without ever receiving a diploma representing a completion of the most basic form of education. Do I blame these kids, though? How can I. Very rarely, I think, is it their fault for not being able to make it to the finish. Parents, maybe, are at fault, more often. But schools themselves push away students by their complete lack of basic services and their poor teachers, with poor curriculum.
Education is important. Education is what produced the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. America's founding fathers were, above all else, scholars. I think that everyone in this country should be able to, or even forced to, at least gain a basic education. The American job market needs educated people. If we are simply content with people taking grunt jobs because they are not qualified for anything else, well then, we should be content with becoming a third world country. Not to mention, the health benefits of higher education. From lower pregnancy rates to lower addiction rates to nicotine, the more you know, the healthier you are.
I can't stress how important education is, for individuals, for this country. But I personally feel that we are running out of time. In about ten years, with any luck, I'll start having kids. If this country is unable and unwilling to give them a good education, I don't know what to do. I see a country without education as a country in chaos. And I don't want to have to raise a family in that.
Also home schooling is lame.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Bitter Litter - More Pity Prose
I leave my sterile needle covers around the school. I like to imagine I make people think the student body has a drug problem. Maybe you’ve seen them. They’re purple pieces of paper, with white Helvetica letters: BD. Sterile Needle. It’s the least I can do, really. You don’t have to jab the actual needle into yourself. I figure I’ve done it almost 10,000 times in my life, and I’ll have 100s of thousands of more shots to complain about before it’s over.
Before I knew it was diabetes, I thought that whatever was wasting my body away was pretty awesome. I lost my all consuming, pre-teen hunger that had been nauseating to keep up with. I was only ever hungry for water, losing an appetite for all things—including cookies. I thought, maybe, hopefully, briefly, that I was becoming an adult—that part of growing up was learning that you didn’t need to eat everything. But that wasn’t the case. My body began to dissolve away, and along with it, hopes of reaching adulthood. My parents noticed first, as baby fat, then everything else melted from my face. They made me weigh myself everyday for two weeks—within that time I went from a healthy 120 pounds to an anorexic 99. I wasn’t even old enough to enjoy that side effect (I was too young to make the connection, like so many women make incorrectly, that the less of me there was, the more attractive I’d seem).
I got to stay home from school, lying in bed, almost perpetually. I’d wobble, with my long, now stick like, legs, to the bathroom frequently. These trips were the most exercise I could get in, because everything that I ate or drank would find itself, shortly thereafter, in the vomit bucket that had been installed in my room. My mom demanded I go to the hospital. I begged that I stay in bed and rest; it was the only thing I had energy for. My body had never felt so weak, so ethereal. It was like I was slowly floating to heaven.
But my parents wouldn’t let me go—not in a house of two surgeons was I going to die of a mysterious ailment. I couldn’t walk, but my dad scooped me out of bed and laid me down in the passenger seat of my mom’s car. It was the last time he’d be able to carry me.
I didn’t know what Diabetes was when the doctors first suggested that’s what I had been fighting. I could hardly think anymore, and I heard very little, a result of my brain shutting down. But in my peripheral vision I could see my parents standing over me, like two worried saints. My mom rubbed my bony shoulder. “Gary Hall has diabetes, honey, and he’s an Olympic swimmer.” I must’ve smiled. She was crying. My dad looked overly-thoughtful, his dark face somewhere else—probably trying to recall all the information on autoimmune diseases he’d picked up in med school so many years ago.
Diabetes sounds much more pleasant than it actually is. The ending, be-tees, sounds so funny, when pronounced. I call it Diabetus, and get funny looks. But no one understands. The disease is a wary opponent—I address it with respect, with its Latin name, praying that it will spare me. I’ve tried to explain diabetus mellitus to many people, but few understand it, so I will simplify it here. My blood is toxic. If your veins form the highway on which you get the nutrients and oxygen you need, my blood is slowly strangling me with its own, iron drenched hands.
I now have to figure out how much synthetic insulin I need to inject after eating on a daily basis. But my brain didn’t evolve to be able to calculate such a thing. It’s like attempting to solve quantum mechanics with an abacus. It’s not going to happen. The consequences of this are wide ranging. In the short term, the hell I put up with isn’t so bad. Headaches and the sudden inability to understand where I am or what I’m doing because my brain is no longer getting sugar aren’t too bad. If that were all diabetes was, it would just be an annoyance—no worse than having asthma, or allergies, or any one of the trite diseases that so many of us manage to put up with.
But the things I have to look forward to in life seem grotesque and awful—it is an unjust series of ever-worsening fates that result in diabetics dying six to nine years earlier than their contemporaries. First you go blind, losing the ability to see with any clarity because the blood vessels in your eyes overcompensate for poor circulation and choke vision from you. In much the same way, you will lose your toes and fingers, then your legs and arms. You will become a blind torso that was once a human being.
Well, you won’t. I will. In the future, you cradle your great-grandchild in your tangential, albeit wrinkled, arms. Meanwhile, I’m dead. Gone, lifeless, unconscious, decomposing in a lonely, dark grave. I feel like this gives me the right to litter.
Before I knew it was diabetes, I thought that whatever was wasting my body away was pretty awesome. I lost my all consuming, pre-teen hunger that had been nauseating to keep up with. I was only ever hungry for water, losing an appetite for all things—including cookies. I thought, maybe, hopefully, briefly, that I was becoming an adult—that part of growing up was learning that you didn’t need to eat everything. But that wasn’t the case. My body began to dissolve away, and along with it, hopes of reaching adulthood. My parents noticed first, as baby fat, then everything else melted from my face. They made me weigh myself everyday for two weeks—within that time I went from a healthy 120 pounds to an anorexic 99. I wasn’t even old enough to enjoy that side effect (I was too young to make the connection, like so many women make incorrectly, that the less of me there was, the more attractive I’d seem).
I got to stay home from school, lying in bed, almost perpetually. I’d wobble, with my long, now stick like, legs, to the bathroom frequently. These trips were the most exercise I could get in, because everything that I ate or drank would find itself, shortly thereafter, in the vomit bucket that had been installed in my room. My mom demanded I go to the hospital. I begged that I stay in bed and rest; it was the only thing I had energy for. My body had never felt so weak, so ethereal. It was like I was slowly floating to heaven.
But my parents wouldn’t let me go—not in a house of two surgeons was I going to die of a mysterious ailment. I couldn’t walk, but my dad scooped me out of bed and laid me down in the passenger seat of my mom’s car. It was the last time he’d be able to carry me.
I didn’t know what Diabetes was when the doctors first suggested that’s what I had been fighting. I could hardly think anymore, and I heard very little, a result of my brain shutting down. But in my peripheral vision I could see my parents standing over me, like two worried saints. My mom rubbed my bony shoulder. “Gary Hall has diabetes, honey, and he’s an Olympic swimmer.” I must’ve smiled. She was crying. My dad looked overly-thoughtful, his dark face somewhere else—probably trying to recall all the information on autoimmune diseases he’d picked up in med school so many years ago.
Diabetes sounds much more pleasant than it actually is. The ending, be-tees, sounds so funny, when pronounced. I call it Diabetus, and get funny looks. But no one understands. The disease is a wary opponent—I address it with respect, with its Latin name, praying that it will spare me. I’ve tried to explain diabetus mellitus to many people, but few understand it, so I will simplify it here. My blood is toxic. If your veins form the highway on which you get the nutrients and oxygen you need, my blood is slowly strangling me with its own, iron drenched hands.
I now have to figure out how much synthetic insulin I need to inject after eating on a daily basis. But my brain didn’t evolve to be able to calculate such a thing. It’s like attempting to solve quantum mechanics with an abacus. It’s not going to happen. The consequences of this are wide ranging. In the short term, the hell I put up with isn’t so bad. Headaches and the sudden inability to understand where I am or what I’m doing because my brain is no longer getting sugar aren’t too bad. If that were all diabetes was, it would just be an annoyance—no worse than having asthma, or allergies, or any one of the trite diseases that so many of us manage to put up with.
But the things I have to look forward to in life seem grotesque and awful—it is an unjust series of ever-worsening fates that result in diabetics dying six to nine years earlier than their contemporaries. First you go blind, losing the ability to see with any clarity because the blood vessels in your eyes overcompensate for poor circulation and choke vision from you. In much the same way, you will lose your toes and fingers, then your legs and arms. You will become a blind torso that was once a human being.
Well, you won’t. I will. In the future, you cradle your great-grandchild in your tangential, albeit wrinkled, arms. Meanwhile, I’m dead. Gone, lifeless, unconscious, decomposing in a lonely, dark grave. I feel like this gives me the right to litter.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
GOBAMA
BARACK OBAMA.
I cannot think of tonight without wanting to cry.
For my hometown, for my father, who has only once, in his life, talked about the racism he experienced when he came to this country for a college education in the late 60s.
But this isn't about race. No. Never.
It's about the race. Greatest, most important, presidential race of my life (which really isn't saying much, as I'm only 19).
And I've never been prouder to be an American.
I cannot think of tonight without wanting to cry.
For my hometown, for my father, who has only once, in his life, talked about the racism he experienced when he came to this country for a college education in the late 60s.
But this isn't about race. No. Never.
It's about the race. Greatest, most important, presidential race of my life (which really isn't saying much, as I'm only 19).
And I've never been prouder to be an American.
Monday, October 27, 2008
Sex In Class
It's been five years since it first happened, and I still loath it--I hate it when teachers talk about sex, at all, in class. I was so flustered this morning that I even wrote a poem about it so that I could avoid making any sorts of eye-contact.
Pre-February romance
No estoy listo--not yet.
With arms as sledgehammers
I push it aside.
"Get this the fuck outta my face!
I don't wanna view this shit!"
I can only assume it will end with an awkward:
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!!
But that will come in later drafts, so I won't worry about it.
Pre-February romance
No estoy listo--not yet.
With arms as sledgehammers
I push it aside.
"Get this the fuck outta my face!
I don't wanna view this shit!"
I can only assume it will end with an awkward:
FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!!
But that will come in later drafts, so I won't worry about it.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
It's been six years since I've gone a best time in the 50 and the 100, five for the 200. I thought I could live with diabetes. At the time I didn't think it would be that bad. It has a funny name. My mom cried in the hospital room when my parents got the news; my dad even sounded haggard, beaten up almost. They thought I was being brave. I was just naive. At thirteen I couldn't fully comprehend my health. And I didn't think it would effect my life too much. A few shots here and there, and I'd be fine. I didn't know it would cause me to stop improving physically, that I'd gain weight and that my eyes would lose their focus. I was only thirteen, I would've had a great career left. I was so motivated to keep improving, I forced myself to go to doubles. I was only thirteen. I don't know why God or genetics would choose to be so merciless.
I'm nineteen and I'm dying. And I'm fucking upset.
I'm nineteen and I'm dying. And I'm fucking upset.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
writ 205
HOMECOMING
by elora apantaku
I had bought the entire Kanye West CD, Graduation. Yes, I bought it. A college student never buys music; there are too many illegal ways to get what you want. But I felt respect for this rapper, because he was from
I sat on my bed previewing the CD through my MP3 player, an obscure one that no one here knew of, a Zune. Track twelve started with hopeful piano chords, a rising and descending bass line, and a slow throbbing drum beat. It didn’t sound like a rap song, especially not to me when John Legend sang the chorus, “I’m coming home again.” It sounded like a tugging reminder of what home used to be like. My room was dark; my roommate was out. I waited for my mind to catch something else—an interesting thought, a distraction—so that the feeling of bittersweet nostalgia wouldn’t overcome me and I’d be able to focus on the present—getting back to homework or falling asleep.
But I couldn’t stop listening to the song. I’d keep hitting play as soon as it was almost over, cradling my Zune in my hand, letting myself relax on the crisp softness of the twin XL sheets of my bed. Headphones were shoved into my ears so that John was whispering rhymes just for me. “Do you think about me now and then, do you think about me now and then? Oh! Cause I’m coming home again. Maybe we can start again.” As my body lay weak from a sudden urge to just stop, alone in a blank dorm room, my mind drifted with the song back home.
I don't remember much about my childhood, but I do remember swimming. At least three times a week, my mom would drive me through downtown Wilmette along
On the third of July, my family would always drive over to that same Northwestern Natatorium parking lot, and walk across onto the coast of
We'd talk about whatever was happening in July. Usually nothing. No school work to be harassed about. No school friends to gossip about. The only thing left were our own internal rarely reflected feelings, and of course, swimming. Every once in a while I'd ask my parents about what they did at work. I knew they were surgeons, but that didn't mean anything to me. I spent my days at home or at the pool. What did my parents do? Was work anything like school? They'd always respond with answers that didn't help much, or that were helplessly jargon-filled for the comprehension of a child. "Work was good, honey. Performed an appendectomy-"
"Mom, what's that?"
"It's when you remove an appendix-"
"What's that?"
"It's an organ-"
"Like the heart?"
And they were always talking about cases. Cases held things. How could they have cases at work? What were they holding onto?
Regardless when we got to the field that spread out and then crashed into a cliff composed of those square quarry rocks there were always things to capture attention. Fireflies were always fun to look for, and I could spend an unhealthy amount of time just looking for them, sitting quietly. Bug spray was administered in seemingly dangerous amounts. It burned the parts of my skin that had been broken, and it stung my eyes and nose. And yet the mosquitoes still persisted. Large clouds of gnats stationed themselves between the crowds of people, as though they also wanted to watch a patriotic display, but were operating on another plane.
If mom and dad had gotten into a fight on the way over, I would escape onto the rocks and try to get close to the lake as possible without falling in. My sisters would do the same. We stretched out our short legs over the gray slabs, and descended to the lake. Our parents would always express concern, but my sisters and I communicated in high, nasally voices, quite aware of each other and the apparent danger of falling in the lake. We were a team, and no danger we faced couldn’t be overcome when we faced it together. That included tumbling into
If mom and dad hadn't gotten into a fight, which was always a possibility, we stayed together, spread out on towels and a singular chair for mom. There were lamp posts nearby, and of course, ten miles away was the greatest city in the world, so you couldn't watch stars. But if you were lucky, there would be a lot of planes and boats, with flashing red pinpoints of light that would reflect over the black lake. The popcorn would be gone in a hurry, and I'd stomach diet coke out of boredom or maybe genuine thirst (or to wash the bug spray out of my mouth). I'd always be itchy, messing around in the grass too much. But once the fireworks started, it was hard to pay attention to much else.
Baby, do you remember when fireworks at
They were being launched at least a mile away, and the muffled noise of controlled explosions dragged far behind the actual scene. But the fireworks would reflect off the lake, and lighten up the coast over in our hometown. It was always quiet.
As with any firework performance, the grand finale was always the best part. There really was no other good part to a firework show, unless they managed to put in a star, or a heart, or a smiley face. We'd always point out our favorite kind, but this was not something we'd remember the next day. If we were in
Once the finale finished, we'd always clap a little bit, then hustle back into our minivan to get home, but as always, we'd run into the same traffic going as coming. We'd talk about swimming and work some more, and we'd talk about the fireworks. We'd talk about what we wanted to eat for tomorrow's dinner, and we'd talk about, or perhaps the better verb would be, beg for sparklers so that we could run around our pool the next day with little fireworks of our own.
Spark your lighters wave ‘em around; if you don’t know by now I’m talking ‘bout Chi-town.
I was rejected from Northwestern and U of C. I couldn’t stay at home. I had found consolation at the time by talking with one of the teachers who wrote me a teacher rec. He told me that he didn’t like the idea of me staying in the area. He said, and I remember him saying it, and being cheered up even though I had been rejected from two of the best universities in the nation, “You need to go far away to become yourself. It’ll help you find out who you are.”
Everybody got the game figured out all wrong. I guess you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone.
I know my childhood wasn’t nearly the same as Kanye West’s; different time, different place, different experiences and privileges. But that didn’t matter to me, hearing that song on repeat for the better part of an hour.
There must be a quiet pulse that infects everyone who lives by it. And by it, I mean the greatest city in the world. I can hear it literally as cars and trucks hum by my house on I-94 into the city. It pulls people in with the sort of magnetism that is found in other pleasures—like falling in love. But it’s not a constant. It’ll always push as it pulls. To what? Pushing me to what? Without that pulse I felt lifeless, not myself.
I’m not saying the fourth of July was ever a happy time for me, or for anyone else. Around the fourth of July,
I guess you never know what you got till it’s gone
I guess this is why I’m here and I can’t come back home
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