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harry potter
Jun. 23rd, 2003 04:33 pmNo, I've not finished it yet, I'm just unable to contain myself on a variety of subjects.
( some spoilers, but mostly ranting about Snape )
( some spoilers, but mostly ranting about Snape )
Jun. 23rd, 2003
(no subject)
Jun. 23rd, 2003 11:58 pmThe people who stoop sit at the barber shop and liquor store across the street are blasting Al Green, and it's the first truly hot night of the summer. I'm feeling a little quiet and off, tired from rehearsal and full of echoes, thanks to the music and weather and the close scent of parafin from the red and green seven-day candles that always burn in my bedroom.
I've been on the palest edge of a nostalgia I'm disinclined towards since the release of the new Harry Potter book. I was one of those resisters -- annoyed by the popularity of a children's book and convinced it would be as appealing as the worst of the second-rate animated Disney musicals, when the fourth book came out, and the man I was most messily involved with and foolishly and constantly acquiescent to informed me, as Urban Fetch delivered his copy of Goblet of Fire, he had no intention of speaking to me until he finished it and dumped the other three books in my lap.
I remember quietly reading the hardcovers, snacking on ginger snaps and chocolate covered grahams and glancing up occassionally to see him lying on the couch on his stomach, kicking his legs, and I would watch his fat calves and marvel at this latest and most bizarre tactic of avoiding another argument about something foolish or something I cared too much about that wasn't to his tastes -- including him.
I remember that summer, too hot, and his occupation of a former friend's former apartment in Brooklyn. I remember when I would call a cab back home, razor scooter in hand as I jokingly tried to devise "land quidditch", and mornings when I'd been allowed to stay or needed, with the curtains billowing into the bedroom, and the masses of differently textured cotton which made up the bed. We would order sushi in the evenings, and watch films that were always pointedly uncomfortable for at least one of us. And while that relationship was very long and had many defining moments and themes, perhaps the simplest thing I can say about it that doesn't necessarily involve my placing blame, is that during those years I was afraid to love. Certainly, I can't imagine feeling and being happy feeling any of the things I do now during those years -- there would have been no room for it, and no safety in it.
I have lived many lives, many of them foolish, and which ones people would label in which fashion is always a good test of what they would want from me, and if I can afford them. I don't really regret anything I've done, except as it's prevented me from doing other things.
I'm going on a business trip tomorrow -- just a single night that will eat two days. I used to love business trips, love the anominity, hotel rooms. Now, I find myself frustrated not to be in my own bed, in my own home, with my own orders of things, and my own spirits. I travel as a restless and sleepless nation.
There are things I cannot get out of my head. The accent of the desk clerk at a Super 8 in Albany and the orange lights of the highway. Things that have transformed my life, in truth or in moments, that I only discovered through the most foolish of reasons -- nearly all of them men. The Harry Potter novels make that list. As does Guitar Craft, opera and Sioxsie and the Banshees. Each of those stories is long, and nearly without a punchline; common confessions most would not bother to make. In looking for one form of love, I have nearly invariably found so many others.
And yet I still persist in a certain sort of lonliness, because it is so important to me to always have room for things. And it doesn't make me unhappy, far from it, although it often tires me. I would write stories about my heart, the only organ in my body that is too flexible, small recompense for my steel-corded tendons, except there's no way to explain that my heart is not like other people's without sounding like the wrong kind of sixteen, without remembering that Gattaca's already got it covered.
Not all of the valves of my heart close all the way, not like they're supposed to. It's a sort of heart murmur, troublesome, occassionally dramatic, and in my case, clearly far from deadly. But it is a fundamental fact of who I am, something that made me shake and sob uncontrollably when I was first told of it at twelve, that later and quickly seemed to become a talisman and explanation for everything that has ever happened to me, that I have ever felt. The tests done on it were always in darkened hospital rooms, so the doctors could see the monitors lit up with ugly flesh, and we would listen to the wet loud sound of those valves, as they would jab at my chest with sensors and gel. A common malady that yet managed and perhaps manages to convince me I am not like other people.
I am not like other people. I feed constantly not on the socializing and networking of people, but on ideas and concepts, shapes and objects recognized in odd places, secret messages from the universe that encourage me precisely because they mean nothing, because they are so private, so peculiar to my own brain. This tendency, more than any other, is the one that gets me called arrogant, which is funny, for a girl who likes to watch herself in mirrors when she talks, who hides in the bathroom for phone conversations for this very reason.
It's not arrogance though, my signs and symbols; it is not a belief that the universe is speaking just for me, that makes me see myself in all things. It is that I am small, and trivial and without siblings, and to see myself reflected in the randomness of the world... it is hard to explain sometimes, the way I put my faith in math.
There are things I know are true. I makes lists, in my mind, pillow books of my emotional and physical residences.
For tonight's example, I think of things that never close:
the bodega across the street
the curtains of La Boheme
Yaffa Cafe
the Port Authority Bus Terminal
and the valves of my heart.
And it is only in these lists, these illogical and desperate similarities, that I am sure I am real. That's many things. Including vanity. But it's not arrogance. Not ever. Not for a moment. And oh how I wish it was.
I've been on the palest edge of a nostalgia I'm disinclined towards since the release of the new Harry Potter book. I was one of those resisters -- annoyed by the popularity of a children's book and convinced it would be as appealing as the worst of the second-rate animated Disney musicals, when the fourth book came out, and the man I was most messily involved with and foolishly and constantly acquiescent to informed me, as Urban Fetch delivered his copy of Goblet of Fire, he had no intention of speaking to me until he finished it and dumped the other three books in my lap.
I remember quietly reading the hardcovers, snacking on ginger snaps and chocolate covered grahams and glancing up occassionally to see him lying on the couch on his stomach, kicking his legs, and I would watch his fat calves and marvel at this latest and most bizarre tactic of avoiding another argument about something foolish or something I cared too much about that wasn't to his tastes -- including him.
I remember that summer, too hot, and his occupation of a former friend's former apartment in Brooklyn. I remember when I would call a cab back home, razor scooter in hand as I jokingly tried to devise "land quidditch", and mornings when I'd been allowed to stay or needed, with the curtains billowing into the bedroom, and the masses of differently textured cotton which made up the bed. We would order sushi in the evenings, and watch films that were always pointedly uncomfortable for at least one of us. And while that relationship was very long and had many defining moments and themes, perhaps the simplest thing I can say about it that doesn't necessarily involve my placing blame, is that during those years I was afraid to love. Certainly, I can't imagine feeling and being happy feeling any of the things I do now during those years -- there would have been no room for it, and no safety in it.
I have lived many lives, many of them foolish, and which ones people would label in which fashion is always a good test of what they would want from me, and if I can afford them. I don't really regret anything I've done, except as it's prevented me from doing other things.
I'm going on a business trip tomorrow -- just a single night that will eat two days. I used to love business trips, love the anominity, hotel rooms. Now, I find myself frustrated not to be in my own bed, in my own home, with my own orders of things, and my own spirits. I travel as a restless and sleepless nation.
There are things I cannot get out of my head. The accent of the desk clerk at a Super 8 in Albany and the orange lights of the highway. Things that have transformed my life, in truth or in moments, that I only discovered through the most foolish of reasons -- nearly all of them men. The Harry Potter novels make that list. As does Guitar Craft, opera and Sioxsie and the Banshees. Each of those stories is long, and nearly without a punchline; common confessions most would not bother to make. In looking for one form of love, I have nearly invariably found so many others.
And yet I still persist in a certain sort of lonliness, because it is so important to me to always have room for things. And it doesn't make me unhappy, far from it, although it often tires me. I would write stories about my heart, the only organ in my body that is too flexible, small recompense for my steel-corded tendons, except there's no way to explain that my heart is not like other people's without sounding like the wrong kind of sixteen, without remembering that Gattaca's already got it covered.
Not all of the valves of my heart close all the way, not like they're supposed to. It's a sort of heart murmur, troublesome, occassionally dramatic, and in my case, clearly far from deadly. But it is a fundamental fact of who I am, something that made me shake and sob uncontrollably when I was first told of it at twelve, that later and quickly seemed to become a talisman and explanation for everything that has ever happened to me, that I have ever felt. The tests done on it were always in darkened hospital rooms, so the doctors could see the monitors lit up with ugly flesh, and we would listen to the wet loud sound of those valves, as they would jab at my chest with sensors and gel. A common malady that yet managed and perhaps manages to convince me I am not like other people.
I am not like other people. I feed constantly not on the socializing and networking of people, but on ideas and concepts, shapes and objects recognized in odd places, secret messages from the universe that encourage me precisely because they mean nothing, because they are so private, so peculiar to my own brain. This tendency, more than any other, is the one that gets me called arrogant, which is funny, for a girl who likes to watch herself in mirrors when she talks, who hides in the bathroom for phone conversations for this very reason.
It's not arrogance though, my signs and symbols; it is not a belief that the universe is speaking just for me, that makes me see myself in all things. It is that I am small, and trivial and without siblings, and to see myself reflected in the randomness of the world... it is hard to explain sometimes, the way I put my faith in math.
There are things I know are true. I makes lists, in my mind, pillow books of my emotional and physical residences.
For tonight's example, I think of things that never close:
the bodega across the street
the curtains of La Boheme
Yaffa Cafe
the Port Authority Bus Terminal
and the valves of my heart.
And it is only in these lists, these illogical and desperate similarities, that I am sure I am real. That's many things. Including vanity. But it's not arrogance. Not ever. Not for a moment. And oh how I wish it was.