At the Buffet

     I think I love the way melted chocolate ripples more than the ripples of water. It's thicker and flows slower, with its narcissistic own sheen of dark browns. It piles on top of itself selfishly, gentle ribbons of chocolate upon chocolate, but only for a moment, before it melts into a puddle again. The fountain twirls it, spinning it into glory. I watch intensely through the plastic.

     "Want some?" Caught off guard, I stutter and nod. The woman who spoke takes a rainbow skewer of fruit and dips it under the fountain, expertly coating it as though it's an art. She smiles, as does one with experience does when introducing another to something new. 

     Hours later, I approach again, and timidly ask for another. Please. Something flits across her face, maybe exhaustion or annoyance, and without returning my smile, she dips it quickly and hands it to me, seemingly glad to be rid of it. I'm left confused, wondering what happened in between, and when, that let her start hating chocolate.

Costa Maya

     The sand moves below me, and I squeal as I trip over my feet. A tiny crab scitters away, leaving a twisted trail of tiny sideways footprints. I chase after it, childishly, until it dives under a tangle of leaves on the side on the beach. My focus into the sand brings a crowd. My parents, our guide, and two small children, a skinnier boy and a chubbier girl, both with dark hair and wide eyes, tanned skin that makes my sunburn ivory by comparison. We all stare at the half buried crab, as our guide pokes at it, prompting it to run again. Our group scatters as the crab escapes, and the children follow it, trailing shouts of Spanish behind them. They stare it down a tiny hole in the sand as I retreat into the shade with my parents.

"Go help it," prods my mother, "or they're going to kill it." Reluctantly, I hop across the hot sand back to the little crab and the kids. "Come on little guy," I coo, trying to coax it back to the weeds. The kids catch on and coo at it too, saying things I don't understand, but the crab understands none of us. The younger boy gives up and kicks sand on top of it, burying it. The girl squeals and shouts again, and this time I catch words.

"Muerto," she yells, "Está muerto." 

"No, no," I try to comfort, limited in high school Spanish. "No creo que está, um, esté muerto." Damn subjunctive. "Um, no debemos tocar. Su casa esta en las plantas. Yo creo." His house is in the plants. I think. I scoop my hands into the sand and sift through, finally bringing up a handful, and in the middle, a very scared and sandy crab. His left eye is tucked away in his shell and he hisses at me, blowing tiny bubbles. The two kids yell and follow as we race back to the plants. I drop it gently, and it latches onto a root and refuses to let go. Our sucess is interrupted by my mother, "Roo, we've got to go." I tell her I'm coming and wave adiós to the crab. 

The kids stare at me, "Hablas inglés?"I laugh and nod, "Sí, hablo inglés." 

As we're leaving the beach, our guide tells us a crab is called a cangrejo.
"But be careful," he warns, that's another name for..." lost for words, he strikes a pose, putting a hand on a popped out hip. He gives a little wave with his other hand and whistles. It's charades.
"Hooker?" we guess, "Dancer?"
"No," he says, "the men who..."
"Transvestite?"
Finally, he remembers the word he's been looking for. Gay! We laugh, all delighted with the translation and double meaning, and leave behind our tiny cangrejo.

Vacation!

Hello dear readers! I've been rather good about blogging more often lately, but vacation has stolen me away from the internet, forcing all of my musings into notebooks this week. As I edit and type them, I'll add pictures (my sister's a lovely photographer, see above) and post them here over the next few days. Much love!

Bruised Ego

       I wake up late with a headache, which pounds harder in complaints to the light. I pull myself up, disappointed to see that the rejection and unhappiness haunting me last night has congealed into an angry mess and settled onto the floor, refusing to be forgotten. I cough, choke, and fumble on the nightstand for water, knocking over a stack of books with clumsy fingers, before closing around a dixie cup, leaking with water that sat over night in lukewarm wet paper.

       Crossing to the dresser, I can see the bruise reflected in the mirror, having worked its way into the shadows under my eyes and corners of my mouth. A restless night has left me branded with frizzy hair and lines of creases pressed into my skin, leaving me with a faraway look racked with insanity that has come to naught. I reach for my phone, but the messages waiting threaten to press onto the bruise harder. It stays off.

       With nothing else promising to do, I trudge slowly to pull down the curtains, and curl up on the bed again, cradling my black and blue, in the fake cushioned darkness of late morning.

No More Than

"You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."
 -Francis Crick (one of the co-discoverers of the molecular structure of DNA)

What a comforting offense that is.
Nobody can ever be better than you, or worse. Or matter more, or less. Rejection, cheating, lying, dreaming, hoping, fearing. Maybe Francis Crick is right, and it's nothing deep or meaningful, just cells and molecules and biology happening.  Everything anyone is and everything they feel and think and do, matters nothing, nothing more than nerve cell behavior. You cannot hate or judge people any more than they can you, you cannot criticize molecular behavior and blame a person for it.

Maybe it's comforting to believe that. But to believe that, you have to accept that everything about you is nothing more than nerve cells and associated molecules as well. What are you worth?

Crush

"Unfortunately the situation was so wonderful to me that each time I saw Tommy I melted in delicious giggles and was unable to form a coherent sentence. After a while he stopped including me in his general glances." -I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I love this. So childish, so quickly infatuated and forgotten. Keep my secret, dear reader, his name's just not Tommy.

Reading at Night

There's a in magic books late at night, when exhaustion and fear of the eerie silence of the witching hour play with the mind to coax stories off pages and into life.
I lie on my stomach on the bed, propped up on my elbows, caught in an shot of light cast by a single lamp. The rest of the room seems to be sleeping in the dark greys and shadows that have seeped in from the corners. The lamp is bent over to point directly at me, skimming over the book, highlighting the textures of the pages with little bits and shadows lost in daytime. The paper glitters and my fingers' skeletal shadows grow long and dance on the paper. Each fiber is delicately woven into the page, the delicately detailed and gently yellowed paper, pressed flat and flickering, fighting, as though they're alive and trying to unwind. The ink of the print seeps into them, staining the paper in letters. In the shadows and tricks of night, the ink can leak out of its perfectly shaped letters and move around the page. I hold my face far too close, my nose almost touching the sweet old stories, and I can read softly out loud, gently repeating the words the book gives me in a soft whispers, my lips moving, nearly bumping against the pages in soft kisses.
I'm lost in the brilliant words, stories, and I'm in love.

MIKA

So I was sitting there in the bar and this guy comes up to me and he said “My life stinks,” and I saw his gold credit card and I saw the way he was looking at people across the room and I looked at his face and you know, what a good looking face, and I just said, “Dude, your perspective on life sucks.” 

Think about that. I love MIKA. I think he's brilliant in so many ways.

When the Pup Grows up

"Just as Gavroche was relieving a sergeant who lay near a stone-block, of his cartridges, a ball struck the body.

'The deuce!' said Gavroche. 'So they are killing my dead for me.'

A second ball splintered the pavement beside him. A third upset his basket.

Gavroche looked and saw that it came form the baulieue.

He rose up straight, on his feet, his hair in the wind, his hands upon his hips, his eye fixed upon the National Guards who were firing, and he sang:

On est laid a Nanterre,

C'est la faute a Voltaire,

Et bete a Palaiseau,

Cest la faute a Rousseau.

Then he picked up his basket, put into it the cartridges which had fallen out, without losing a single one, and advancing towards the fusillade, began to empty another cartridge-box." - Les Misérables

     This is possibly my favorite part of Les Mis. I find it hilarious, and beautiful, and darkly disturbing. Gavroche is the urchin, kicked out of his family and forced to live on the street. He takes it upon himself to collect cartridges to support the revolutionaries, and sneaks through the barricade to do so.

     I love his exclamation of "the deuce," his twisted argot way of shouting "what the hell!" So they are killing the dead. He ignores the fact that the shot was for him, and mocks them, mocks their war and the futility of it. Killing the dead. But even that's not enough. He stands and sings to them, fighting their shots with couplets as he comes closer.

"The people in Nanterre are ugly, 
It's Voltaire's fault,
And stupid in Palaiseau, 
It's Rousseau's fault."

     He hides and dances around, closer to them, and continues to sing. "Happy is my character," he tells them, "Misery is my possession." He laughs, disappears, reappears, escapes, returns. And the insurgents were scared. Racked with anxieties of fighting, they became panicked by the boy, the child, the strange fairy, the dwarf, dancing and singing through the fog, running faster than their bullets. They knew not what he was. And they fired. A young boy became an enemy. 

     They shot him in the face, and he starts his last couplet, "La nez dans le ruisseau, my nose is in the creek," and dies before his can blame his death, the fighting, all of the misery on Voltaire and Rousseau.

Semper Fi Fags

     In 2006, members of Westboro church picketed in an anti-gay protest at the funeral of fallen marine Matthew Snyder in Westminster, Maryland. The protesters claimed that God was punishing the United States for "the sin of homosexuality" by killing the soldiers. They shouted at the grieving family, and carried signs saying "Thank God for dead soldiers," "God blew up the troops," "AIDS cures fags," and "Semper Fi Fags." The Snyder family decided to sue the church for invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and civil conspiracy. In the link above, the spokesperson for the church, Shirley Phelps-Roper and a reporter for Fox News, Julie Banderas, get into an argument about the church's actions.

     They quote different parts of the bible, including, "Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart; thou shalt surely rebuke thy neighbour, and not bear sin because of him." and "Thou shalt not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Yes, we're supposed to argue for what's right, and yes, the bible does tell us what is morally considered a sin, however you chose to interpret that. But I think that ultimately, we must let everyone choose for themselves what is right and what is wrong, and we must love them for that. I believe that Christianity is distinguished from other religions by the belief that someone died for our sins, so that we could be forgiven. I think the message of Christianity is forgiveness, to forgive and accept each other. Tolerance is the greatest thing one can do. 

     What bothers me in this clip is that neither of them listen to each other. They're both so convinced that they're right that they don't pause for the other, they simply repeat their beliefs and call names. Before I make the wrong point, know that I side completely with the reporter's point of view, but you cannot expect to change someone's point of view just by yelling at them. 

     In the fall of 2007, the Snyders were awarded  $2.9 million in compensatory damages plus $8 million in punitive damages, which were later reduced to $5 million. However, the church appealed in 2008 to a federal appeals court, which reversed the previous decision and argued that the church's free speech rights had been violated.  After more appeals, the case was brought to the Supreme Court this year, in Snyder v. Phelps.

     In March, the court ruled in an 8-1 vote that members of Westboro Baptist Church had a right to promote "a broad-based message on public matters such as wars." CNN anti-gay church right to protest

     We live in a country where stranger can tell a grieving father at his son's funeral that God hates his family and killed his son for defending a country that tolerates gays. Ironically, the country they hate so much has protected their right to do this. We live in a country with free speech. Whatever that means.