the scissor sisters show

I just went to an interesting show by a band I had never heard of until a few days ago. My friend Margo had extra tickets to the scissor sisters and we all went. I hadn’t seen her since we graduated college. It’s weird not seeing someone for several years and then going back to a concert of a band you have never heard. We danced like mad. It was the first concert I had ever been to where I hadn’t heard the band first that I had actually liked. It was at the Warfield on Market Street. Another place I’ve walked by so many times but never knew was there. Well, I danced like mad. I really liked them. I liked how they have two lead singers and that the man is the main sex object of the band. It was interesting that the whole place was gay men, dudes in really bling bling drag and a few hip San Francsico chicks.

We all bought beers when we got there and then the show started. We four hip chicks ended up chugging them as the band started because we couldn’t take them inside. It’s weird how a band can be so famous and I could never have heard of them. They had the number 1 album in the UK in 2004. Where the hell was I? All this uncoolness I’ve acquired all of a sudden. Where did it come from? Being a grad. student and working so much, struggling to keep my head above water forces me to try to always work, push for another teaching job, run around like a crazy person, push push push my way through things like a rude city person pushing onto the bus at rush hour, scuse me scuuuuse me. That’s why I must have pissed people off in the anal-retentive shark tank that is graduate school, where everyone is always keeping track of your shit in order to gain petty brownie points and get the cookie, whatever the perceived cookie may be. I’m always hustling that I forget to look up and see what’s around me.

This summer Ted and I took the trips of our lives. We traced a line from Crete all the way up through Northern Greece, then we took the train up through Bulgaria, Romania, and stopped in Bucherest. After that we went to Budapest and on back down again to Greece where we flew out. It was an incredible journey. We won’t have the time or money saved to do that kind of a thing again for a long time, maybe years. But it was well worth it. After being in Greece for two months, I don’t feel like coming back to the same rat race. I refuse. I resist. I want to enjoy my life. The part of me that carries heavy loads and takes on all the stress has stayed behind and is laying on a red-sand beach somewhere in the Greek Isles. Can you blame ‘er?

terribly smart, young and troubled

You ever see someone who reminds you of someone else you know? I think there’s this breed of young Greek guys who I am destined to meet who are messed up in some huge way. Okay, I know a lot of Greeks, from all different backgrounds, but i keep running into (be it family members or otherwise) these terribly smart, troubled young guys who self-destruct. Why does it happen? I had this one student who just seemed to have this huge breakthrough about his paper, and his life. Though now I’m quite worried about him because after he poured out all this deep emotional stuff, he seemed to leave our meeting very vulnerable. Of course today he didn’t show up. Hopefully he’ll come back. I know I’m reading too much into this, but I saw myself in him. I saw my cousin Chris who died from living a fast life, being too smart for his own good, taking drugs and crashing his motorcycle. I saw my cousin Stellios who was too smart for his own good, too and shot heroin in his veins, whose best friend OD’d the day he went into rehab, whose best friend had hiv when he died. Stellios who threw a rock at me when I was 5. Who shared souvlaki sandwhiches with me at four in the morning as we smoked and watched the MTV Euro on mute. I saw this kid Tassos, a 25-year-old Greek guy I picked up on the way home from a St. Anthony’s monastery in Arizona, who saved my life in a whiteout storm when I couldn’t see more that an inch in front of me suddenly when I was going 65 miles per hour in the middle of a crowded 4-lane highway. Coming down of Heroin, he steered the car like it was an old cadillac smoothly, a cigarette dangling fom his mouth, because he was from Chicago and could drive through blizzards. Who pissed in a bottle in the backseat of my car while we were driving on Superstition Highway and threw it out the window into the whirring screams of the trail of tears, who wanted to be a screenwriter, whose mother shoved fifty bucks of wadded up cash in my front pants pocket really quick-like before I could say anything, tears in her eyes, saying you’re my angel; you’re an angel. You saved our son’s life. Little did she know that he had saved mine. This one student reminds me of three other people I know. I hope he doesn’t meet a similar fate. I hope my cousin is okay and makes it out of rehab.

There is a similar part in myself, a part that feels like I could be the one with the problems. I hate rules, authority trips. I mess up all the time. I’m late everywhere I go. I piss off the passive agressive girls who keep time in my 9am graduate fiction class with a little egg-timer that they’ve shoved where the son don’t shine. I’m a bitch. I’m rebellious for no good reason. Teachers have often hated me. I’ve been told that I’ll never make it and here I am. I have ADD. I get ostracized from groups, often. I always fall on the wrong side of petty political in-fighting eventually if you give me enough time to really screw up. I was a druggie in high school. A slacker. A stoner. A lost young girl who reached out to people, grasped for whatever I could get. I hung out with people who are now dead, or whose brains are rotten by meth. I was only in high school then. I never believed in myself. I never knew how good I could be. That I was a worthy woman even then when I hated myself. I was lucky to find good mentors, and healers. They helped a screwed up kid grow up, helped me find the words to pick the locks of self-imposed oppression, to use words to sear through self-loathing. My life today probably depended on it. Here I am, now, a married grown-up all of a sudden with a professional job…It’s 2:58 am. What the hell happened?

Piss–When you gotta go, you gotta go

I got observed today by my mentor teacher. What a nightmare! Well, I really love her. She’s awesome. We end up our meetings usually raving about politics, the shit of life, the crazy things that happen over years when you teach in the inner-city and whatever else we can gadfly about. But it’s just nerve-wrecking knowing that somebody is going to watch your every move and then critique you, even if you NEED their feedback and if they are a totally safe-space. My ordeal: First of all, they were doing work on the bridge. What’s new! And then, I had to PEE after drinking two cups of coffee and a whole bottle of water I filled up from the tap. I got to College of A_____ in about an hour. AN HOUR! I had no time to go to the bathroom, because this girl started in on me with a whiny voice about how she had a toothache and had to miss class. Like I care, girl. This ain’t highschool. If you have to miss class, just don’t show up. And then class started, and my mentor walked in with her little roller-bag thingy that older professors like to cart around. I had to pee the entire class, but I forgot that I had to. The class lasted two hours. Then I went with my mentor to eat dinner and talk about the class and we went to this near-by Chinese buffet. Well, I think the food had MSG in it, and MSG makes me feel very very strange. I drank about 3 cups of tea and a glass of water. Finaly when my bladder felt like it was about to pop, I decided to get up and go pee, but then my mentor had to go at the same time. You know when you REALLY have to pee and somebody you don’t know very well but kind of know from work is in the stall beside you. You know them a little bit, and even like them, but the only person who you would care if they heard you pee with that kind of wild abandon is your best girl-friend who goes to the bathroom with you at a bar on Saturday night when you were shitfaced and giggled and applied make-up as you exclaim, “Well this is just damn near the longest piss in the world!” as you piss out Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and she gushes about who is cute. Well, I peed and peed and peed and peed and she had already finished and flushed the toilet, washed her hands and then askend me, Is everything all right in there?

How embarrassing. It was as if she thought I was having some kind of nervous break down or something.

I’m fine. Then I had been peeing so long, I wasn’t sure if I was still peeing or if I had stopped. Phew, I stopped. No wait a minute. No, ah yes.
Then I had to explain to her all about how I’d had to piss since 3 and that it was almost 8 and that I was going nuts. I think that whole having to pee thing, made me act very unlike myself. I had been holding tight for so long, that once I released the urine, my muscles started feeling numb and I couldn’t tell I was still peing or not. Then afterwards I kept thinking, what if I pissed myself and there’s piss running down my leg and the back of my pants I can’t feel it and here I am in front of my mentor teaher with piss stains. It’s not so far off. My mother and grandmother both had incontinence problems. It had never happened to me, but what if it’s hereditary? Well, I figured, if I did piss myself I’ll just hide it with my bag. We’re at the end of the meeting anyway. Luckily I was carying my school bag, my huge purse and I had a jean jacket, so one in front, one in back to cover in case of any wet places.

I tried to make my way to my car that way, sidestepping And then guess what, my mentor teacher wanted to give me a hug. Of all things. She must have thought I took what she said to me pretty hard. But really she didn’t have anything that bad to say to me. Her only problem was I let my class get away with murder and that I wasnt confident enough. That I know more than every single one of them and that I should share more of my writing with them and not be afraid to let them in on my writing life. That’s really the best criticism I’ve ever gotten from an in-class review. Well, I guess I should be more confident. I know what the hell I’m talking about in some areas. Freshman English is one of them. So, I’ll lighten up on myself, I guess. I got home and realized that I didn’t piss myself, by the way. False alarm.

random factoids or why I can’t sleep at night

Being the news junkie that I am, I’ve been listening to the radio & here are some of the things that are currently bouncing around in my brain that I’m thinking about today.

* An American soldier named Timothy Joe Sounders died after spending most of his last four days with his arms and legs strapped to a steel bed in four-point restraints in a hot isolation cell. He was naked and soaked in his urine. He was 21 years old.”
May he rest in peace. The poor guy. May *god* have mercy on his soul.
*(insert your own word for deity)*

(Democracy Now, Sept. 27, 2006)

*Another soldier who just came back from Iraq is doing a 500-miles walk across
Utah in order to gain visibility and support for a withdrawal of American troops. What I found interesting about him is that he was a political conservative, his dad’s a mayor of some place in Utah, and he was an editor of a the Military newspaper at his base. He had a blog while in Iraq. He seems interesting to me.

*They are testing doing surgery in space by removing a benign tumor from a man’s arm while doing dramatic inclines and declines over and over airspace in France. Is that weird or what?

*They are softening the hard-ban on liquids at the airport. Hello Uncle Kosta’s home-made Tsipouro brought over in a Fanta bottle!

*I am eating a chocolate old-fashioned donut and drinking Earl Grey tea from Trader Joes

* According to the back of my tea-bag pouch, The dutchess of York says on Tea:
“As long as it’s hot and wet and goes down the right way, that’s all that matters.”
-I suppose she’ll forgive me then, for drinking Trader Joes and for not using a saucer–vulgarity that I am.

*I have to write an essay about WHO I AM as a writer. These are deceptively more difficult than they seem.

*My cat is crazy. Her favorite thing to do is run around and push things off tables late at night. So at random times I find things in strange corners of the room, pens, paperclips, my glasses case, one flip-flop.

*There’s always something else to do on the internet. There’s always something on t.v. Especially now, since I’ve never had cable before.

* In Thessaloniki, Greece the time is curently 9 am. Maybe I’m still on Greek Time.

*The young, impressionable USF co-eds living above me are giggling and walking down the hall in heels.

*I can’t think of another good reason right now of why I am still wide awake and probably will be for the next four hours, but if you think of one, let me know. Who knows, maybe writing this will calm me into sleep.

the complexity of people

I had this moment today where I sat and cried after watching the end of the movie called “The Other Sister” staring Juliet Lewis where a retarded girl gets married to her boyfriend who is also retarded. Something about the simplicity of their love for each other got to me and I started crying. It made me start to think about the beauty in all people and the purity of soul that is just simply there in everyone like these unlimited untapped pools, that at first glance, look like puddles, but really go down through the core of the earth. Natural beauty of the spirit is in all people and yet we hide it and stamp it and dull this beautiful spiritual flame with all of our armor that we put on. That’s why it’s so easy to see this innocence in children, animals, the ederly, a retarded person. They have let their guard down.

This is not my idea. I got it from somebody I worked with today. At work, I helped a student with a paper write about spending three months in jail. I felt at first, strange about possibly getting to close, hearing too much personal information. (That can make it more difficult sometimes when people open up, what if they never close again? I have no therapuetic training. I’m not a trained professional or anything like that. Sometimes I worry, what if I listened to some student and they later get angry with me feel like my class is the cause of their pain? This has happened to me before with a very troubled girl who decided that our in-class political discussions were triggers from her previous life of sexual abuse and had to drop my class and sent me a letter from her therapist. How political critiques about the
Bush administration and her recovered memories of sexual abuse go together in that girl’s mind, I will never know, but I still I felt bad about that. So after that little incident, I have been a bit more cautious when talking one-on-one with students.

But here I was listening to this guy explain to me all these deep psychological truths about people. Before long, I found myself fanatically siting with him trying to make his personal essay come to life.

All my students are writing these really emotional essays about themselves. One girl wrote about how she used to get beat up by her boyfriend. Another guy wrote about the day his daughter was born. Another student wrote about how she flunked out of high school and then finally went back and finished. Another student wrote about how she grew up in a rural village in South America with no modern conveniences. What a trip these people are. How much they are making me learn. How much more interesting than the average pompous graduate student in creative writing. How much more full of passion and pain. These are the people who have lived, these are the people who feel.

I see them; I see these beautiful and noble creatures who are just beginning to really write, who are raising anchor in the harbor at sunrise, sails golden with promise. I feel what they mean. They give me strength.

Our society does similar things to people than prison does, some times. Prison is more absolute. All the problems of humanity are heightened. But we live our lives in this modern world like incarcerated people some times. Like an incarcerated person, I feel boxed in by feeling, jaded, pressured to hide my real feelings in the face of the professional world. That’s a shame. I never want to lose my humanness in favor of money, or pride or social acceptance or fame. I want to always be able to cry when something is beautiful.

I got cable

Yes I know it’s been years since I’ve had cable tv. In fact I only had it for a brief 6 months when I was kid when my dad ran a line to steal it from the neighbors and our whole side of the apartment complex got it without telling the guy on the other side who actually paid for it. Now my house has been transformed into a veritible multi-media playground. It makes it a lot more comfortable to stay home. I can go online anywhere and my husband can watch Mexican wrestling at any hour of the day. I decided to get the works. Why not? Plus, the cable guy was cute.

I’m over that whole Kill Your TV thing I was all about when i was a teenager and in my early 20’s. I still think that they put high frequencies in the t.v. at certain times of the day to pacify the masses. Who THEY is, I’ll never know for sure. I still cling to that with all my other mild conspiracy theory paranoias. For example, Fasttrack. That transponder can track your car wherever you go, man. Soon all cars will have tracking devices, and we may have to pay tax on how far we travel. No matter that you can never get away, not that I plan on becoming a fugitive, but still it’s a privacy issue. Sometimes, you want to go somewhere in your car, and not be found.

And no matter what happens in this world, or how insecure American homeland security becomes, I will never “take the chip” or allow any kind of RFID thing under my skin. Call me crazy, but these things are more real than one thinks. This weird guy up the street from me who always tries to make conversation at the local coffee shop and wears a wool-knit beanie with earflaps, works for the company that makes them in Oakland. He doesn’t see the problem with this. He says, well if the government wants to spend all this money buying RFIDs from me and my friends to put in drivers liscences and high security clearance facilities id cards, well, let ‘em. Hopefully they’ll go broke and me and all my buddies will turn a profit. I didn’t try to hide my disgust with that line of thinking. But still the man talks to me. Only until I ran into him once on the street with my husband, did he seem kind of dissapointed and shuffle away. He reminded me of an older, less-cute version of my ex, the kind of guy who still plays role-playing games with a passion, and is looking to be liked. Little do people know, he’s working on technology that could change the world.

OKay Okay, all late-night, Big Brother is watching me paranoias aside, I will still, however, enjoy my wireless cable internet and deluxe channel of cable. I got this great program on the other night about this woman activist whose name I can’t remember, who wrote a book called I.O.U. about Debt slavery of the third world and it traced her activism throughout the world. She gave a speach at (I think) the Hague and met with the president of Somalia, the head Foreign minister of Finland, and then spent about 15 minutes debating with Bono over how to activate the people and then she met with the president of TNT, it was crazy. Who knew tv could be more then Judge Judy, Dr. Phil and poor people arguing about who is who’s babydady. Not to mention the electric bus knocking my reception off every 15 minutes when it passes. As for now, I am pro-cable. I can even watch my grandma late at night and get reception from my apt. Awsome.

I’m hooked in to the borg. But I like it so far.

FIRST Blog Ever

Current mood: quixotic

I’ve never made a blog before! How exciting. I hope students of mine aren’t on here reading this. Oh well, if you are, hellooooo! Geez, it’s weird writing for an instant internet audience. It’s like that chapter–Instant Mix Imperial Democracy, Just add water, then bomb.
It’s 2:41 am, the time I was born. I often seem to be up at this time. Since I got back from Europe, about a month ago, I’m having a hard time sleeping at night. It’s probably because day is night and night is day and because I tweak out in the middle of the night on the computer. I kind of like it. It’s a quiet time when I can just write, or twiddle on the internet, check out the ikea catalog and look at things I can’t afford, shouldn’t buy, or need. I recently told my husband while we were both falling asleep about a dream I was starting to have about an assembly line factory that was manufacturing trays of detachable ceramic kitty-molds for no reason and that it was calming to me. He said that my mind must be seriously warped by growing up in consumer culture. If you stay up real late on a Saturday night in North Redondo, I mean until 4 or 5, after a long night of partying, and you go outside, you can hear the hum of the city of Los Angeles. Actually, I think it’s the oil refinery in Torrance or Wilmington silently releasing cancer-causing pollution in the air at a time when they think nobody is paying attension. It’s so weird.

I’ve been meaning to start a blog for so long. My very wonderful friend, Christine has a blog which I truly admire. It’s www.cristine.net. I love reading it, and since she is a writer too, I admire her spunk for starting something like that. It seems to give her discipline in her writing and gets her to write a little something every day. I’ve gotten a bit flabby about working out the writing muscle. I’ve got to turn in a thesis at some point, and every time I think of myself as a writer, I think of all the arrogant people who fancy themselves writers that I know and I think, geez how lame and scary and what a waste of an ego and time.(Christine doesn’t fall into this category of course) Anyway, what I’m saying is, I don’t want to become an arrogant writer type, the kind that seem to be oozing out of MFA programs like mine these days. I want to retain some kind of sense of reality, but write the truth. After having my writing beaten down and abused by peers for a few semesters, I think I am now, dewy-winged and finally ready to emerge, ginergly, at first, willy-nilly, clumsily until I can stand on my own two feet and type feircely into the 3am void. I have arrived, a true blogger. Athena emerging, in full-armor, helmeted, born out of the head of Zues, ready to fight or defend. argghhh!

ok here I am again

Those other posts were from a myspace blog I started. Apparently, according to my much more savvy friend, Myspace sucks and I should try a seperate blog on it’s own. So here I am.
All blog posts will be on here from now on.

“staring death in the eye. singing in the storm. crying in the shower. smiling in the sun,

death, singing, crying, smiling, eye, storm, shower, sun

“staring death in the eye. singing in the storm. crying in the shower. smiling in the sun,” Thais (9/20/06)

Starting death in the eye. late night insular storm. crying in the shower, pressure building on lungs, smiling in the sun, sun white hot blinding searing to the eyes. Eagle, knowing, gloaming nothingness. Nothing can be as tense as this. Starting death in the eye. I am stronger than you, but you will get me in the end. The phoenix rising up from its own ash to snarl at the remnants of day. The father mother brother pain. The lightning crackle, that dawn of day. i am not alone, sister rain. you are not alone, brother pain. the moon wood wild eyed crazy bleats of the many angry sheep that get away just before being counted, the insomnia of our breath, mix together to form agency. One two three. Ghetto of the soul. Blossom of the poor. Kindness sprigs up from hard corroded things, like a hopeful beansprout out of a tetnus rusty hulk. Beached whale on the shore, tongue covered in black tar. Wondering where you are, my childhood, my ease on a swing, that steely picture-framed bliss that doesn’t really exist. Sucker punch death in the ear. Have no fear. twenty-six in two-thousand six. No more tricks. Where’s my fix. Check out these licks on the guitar. Here you are. Outstanding spahr, box death in the ear before it knicks you. Be not afraid. Defend yourself. You are strong. Box death in the ear. Am I being clear?

I’ve been wearing the same bracelets for three days

15 Sep 06 Friday

I’ve been wearing the same bamboo bracelet on my left hand and wooden bracelet on my right hand for three days. I think sometimes, that they are connecting my arms to my hand. I even slept in them. I must have taken them off to shower at some point.

Does this say something about me?

Who knows. I suppose it does display some kind of mild neurosis, or maybe even a more elevated compulsion. But who cares. I really like the way they feel on my wrists.

The one I wear on my left wrist is like a fat bangle, it has thatched straw and coconut leaves slipped into a plastic casing. I got it for 6 bucks in Waikiki a few years ago when I went to Maui with my boyfriend and his family. I thought it would be fun to fly out seperately and have a 6-hour layover on Oahu. I took the bus from the airport and visited Waikiki where I snuck into a fancy hotel, talked with an old man who couldn’t afford to retire so he worked at the gift shop there even though he was in his 90’s. He was from somewhere near the LA Airport and felt some kind of comraderie with me because of it. Then I went out to the pool and had a Bloody Mary and watched a frenetic hula show where women with hair so gelled it looked like plastic, came out and did a 1950’s Hula to Elvis’s rock-a-hula. I sat on the inside patio that had glass doors opening to the pool area under these oscillating fake leaves and stared as the Hula girls on speed did a different number and costume change every 2.5 minutes. It was wild. I felt like I was in the Disneyland of Hawaii. All that tourism really can taint a place.

I ended up buying chicken terriaki in an overpriced restuarant but they took so long making it that I had to go. I didn’t want to miss my plane, so I grabbed it and shoved it in a styrofoam container, threw some cash down, and ran to find the bus. The bus stop on the way back wasn’t as easy to find as the bus on the way there. It was just this sign in the middle of a busy street, and who knows when the bus actually came by it. So, at the last minute I decided to hail a cab. I had spent my last cash on that damn chicken terriaki and moments before, I had come accross this interesting bracelet and bought it from an artsy young guy with black spiky hair who thought it was cool, too. When I hailed a cab, I thought it would take plastic, but alas that was not the case. The cab driver was a disheveled 3rd generation Japanese Hawaiin. in his fiftees. He wore a button-down shirt that was open all the way down with a greasy and yellowing v-neck undershirt that clung to his stomach, emphasizing his spare tire. He seemed drunk. When we got to the airport, he drove around the terminal three times looking for an atm. He pretended not to know where one was in all of Waikiki. I’ve been through this bullshit in taxis in so many places, now, even my home town. It’s just the universal taxi karma. There’s good one’s and bad one’s no matter whether you are. I’ve had bad taxi experiences in Santa Barbara, LA, San Francisco, Athens, Crete, Katerini, Bucharest. Compared to those, this one wasn’t really that bad, kind of interesting, really.

The other bracelet, that I’m wearing is more humble. It’s just a simple pattern of round and oval beads woven in a criss-cross pattern on two peices of elastic cord. It was given to me from my friend who got it from a small village in Malawi where he worked in the peace core. Apparently, it’s all the rage in that small village. I can’t even say how much I love this bracelet. It is so simple, but was given to me with such humility and such generocity that it has good vibes. When I put it on in the morning, I feel happy, and I purse my lips contentedly. I imagine the woman who made it to have a good story behind her work. Maybe a little girl made it as she helped her mother. There’s something beautiful behind this bracelet. It is worth next to nothing, and it’s beginning to fall apart, but it’s my truly favorite bracelet. I think once, I wore it for a year straight. It was given to me about 2 years ago and I wear it almost every day.