Magical Realism

Magical Realism. A literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of dream or fantasy.

I wish it had never been named. A name has sharpened it, has refined its presence into solid crystals that shimmer, nestled in the folds of my everyday. I hate that shimmer. With every spark, I'm a bit farther away from reality.

As I stare out into the room now, the edges of my vision begin to blur, darkening, dancing. The ceiling slowly starts to melt down into the seats, like tear tracks down dry cheeks. I flinch and blink hard, promising myself it's just a blood pressure issue, a low resting heart rate, something else with a name I can hold onto.

For a few blissful moments, the world stays put. Then, ever so slowly, it starts to drip again. The streaks grow into rivers of colors I can't name. The colors turn into a memory, then a smell, a feeling, and back again. I don't fight it. I can't. I think I'm losing my mind.

Cleaning

The piles of junk and stacks of half finished books have sat long enough to start to stew in their own personalities. The lumpy mass of jackets thrown over the rocking chair has grown to be motherly and comforting, while the torn, faceless book on the nightstand is a jealous cynic.

I was determined to clean, to scour, to renew. I thought I'd feel better then. But I couldn't bring myself to trash memories, so I stored them.

Faces trapped under frames were shut in cardboard tombs, and stacked in the closet. Too far away to keep up, too soon to throw away. In the picture, she's still my best friend. In the picture, he still loves me. In the pictures are the people I know.

As the stacks shrink, the room falls off balance, as though the empty space is yearning for exactly what it's not. The dizziness and distortion are overwhelming, and I sit amidst the personalities of trash, and the ghosts of personalities in pictures, knowing that really, there's nothing there at all.

Book Flask

The first few words bead on my chapped lips, and I lick them off hungrily. As words become sentences, sentences phrases, and phrases ideas, the droplets grow to a steady stream. I gulp at them hungrily, letting the surfeit dribble down my chin.

The flavor lingers after I've shut the book, sitting heavily in my mouth and mind. Instead of being swallowed and finished, it has soaked into everything it touched, and now leaks slowly out. I'm soggy and full, like a sponge having absorbed to the utmost.

My foggy, drunken mind remains caught between reality and fiction, struggling to pull back to the former. The story is disturbing, a dark and heavy flavor, and I'm caught beneath it. Drowning under someone else's fictitious weight.

Who Knows?

I haven't written lately. Well, I haven't written here. I'm trying to write something else. But it's not working. Maybe I'll end up here again. Maybe I'll finish it and share it here. Who knows?

Adventures in Having a Boyfriend

The AT&T store might as well have had me plugged into the wall with the other blinking lights warning low battery. I shift my weight back and forth and chew on my lip, begging for some distraction to make the clock move again. It's an eternity of waiting. Bored, I flick open one of the demo phones on the wall, and watch as it springs to life. It's dazzlingly bright, flashy, bragging to sell itself. I hit another button on the keypad. Surprisingly, it dials, and waits patiently for more numbers. Slowly, with my weary mind, I realize that the phone has a data plan and a number. Fully functional, just strapped to the wall.

I look over my shoulder, checking that every employee is busy with a customer, and dial his number. Pausing, I look around again, and hit "send."I see it rings, briefly, and he picks up. I hang up.

I smile to myself and start to turn away when I notice the next phone. Another phone. Another number. Faster now, I dial again, and call. He picks up. I hang up. And repeat. I move down the line quickly, invisible to the rest, dialing and hanging up, over and over again.

I'm nearly to the last phone in the row, when a loud beeping interrupts the whole store. Startled, I turn, and realize it's the first phone. As I step nearer to it, I recognize his number, calling back. I'm no longer invisible, as the volume is turned up to the highest. Stupidity. The ringing is following slowly down the line of phones.

At this point, my mother comes over and asks what's happening. Rushed, I explain who's calling and why. With a laugh, and to my horror, she picks up the nearest phone, which happens to be the one ringing. "Hello?" she singsongs into it. Even standing where I was, I could hear his angry frustration pour out from the tiny flip phone. "This is your girlfriend's mom," she answers to one of his threats, "here she is," and hands it to me. Laughing, I say hello. He sounds horrified.

"I think I just told your mom to go to hell."

Super Simple Action Plan

For information on tracking, you can find SOPA on this page, and PIPA on this one.
SOPA is currently in committee, which means it could still be tabled and killed for good, or could pass. PIPA has just passed committee, and is up for vote in the Senate on January 24.

Help kill these bills. Email your senators, look up their contact information on senate.gov.
Take another step, and email your representatives,look up their contact information on writerep.house.gov.

The emails I've sent have gone something like this:

I'm writing to you about SOPA and PIPA.

As a student, I'm an avid consumer and user of the Internet, and I oppose the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act in their current forms. I know it's important to protect copyrighted material online, but these bills are flawed.

Congress should focus not just on the goal of protecting copyright owners, but also on protecting the speech rights of consumers, like me, who are reading and producing wholly non-infringing content.

Please set aside these bills in their entirety or reformulate them to protect my rights.

Thank you for your time.

By the way, if you're in Connecticut, like me, both of your senators are currently sponsoring PIPA. Go do something to change that.

Blog Rambling

It's not really smiled upon to butt into random conversations with fun facts, but lucky for me, it's totally acceptable to post random fun facts on a blog.

Today, I overheard someone say "A tumblr is an online blog," which made me cringe slightly, like when I hear "ATM machine."

Firstly, a tumblr is not a blog, unless you write your own blurbs or take your own pictures. By definition, a blog contain's the writer's, or group of writers', thoughts, experiences, collected information, etc. If it's all someone else's work, and not original, I wouldn't call it a blog. Though, I suppose if you collected a theme  and put in effort to keep things in that theme, it may be technically "collected information" or something.

Anyway.

"Online blog" is redundant. The word "blog" is short for "web log," or a log on the web. If it's not online, it's just a log.

Weblog. Isn't that cute?

It may not always be so; and I say

It may not always be so; and I say
That if your lips, which I have loved, should touch
Another's, and your dear strong fingers clutch
His heart, as mine in time not far away;
If on another's face your sweet hair lay
In such a silence as I know, or such
Great writhing words as, uttering overmuch,
Stand helplessly before the spirit at bay;

If this should be, I say if this should be --
You of my heart, send me a little word;
That I may go to him, and take his hands,
Saying, Accept all happiness from me.
Then I shall turn my face, and hear one bird
Sing terribly afar in the lost lands.

I stumbled on this poem by ee cummings. This strikes me as so sad and beautiful that I just wanted to tack it up here. 

Be Italian

She's spewing something about my heritage. How I don't know it and don't appreciate what she went through. How I don't know anything about her. I don't point out that she asked me what my middle name was this morning, which I figure is something a grandmother should know, so admittedly, I'm indifferent to learning anything I should know about her. She rambles on about how her grand-kids should know her story to carry it on, about her 17 cousins and nephews and nieces and so on, none of whom I've ever heard of before.

As she babbles hysterically, I just stare, a tad accusingly. And all I can think is "Gee. It would've been really nice to know some of this in third grade, and not get a check minus on that family tree project."

Deserving

"You deserve better than that," they say together. And they seem to mean it, staring intently at me, "You don't deserve anything they put you through." I stutter a bit, trying to come up with a nice way of explaining this that won't lose me my friends, or at least, that won't stop the tangled hug keeping me warm. It's interesting to me that I can pass as a normal, deserving person.

They don't see what I see, what's so glaringly obvious just beneath the skin. I'm a bad person. There, I've said it. Shame on me for nearly thinking differently. Shame on me. I thought maybe today, I was good. I thought singing at the retirement home was good, but I just fooled them too. I got my reminder before I forgot.

My phone lit up. Glancing down and flipping through the unread messages, there's a new text. "Look in a mirror," it advises, "You manipulate and control people for attention," and then goes on to explain that I'm self centered, I've alienated every friend I had, and of course, that they hate me too.

I look up, still smiling, and click the phone off. That's a skill I've mastered. To keep smiling. Even when it hurts enough that you want to fall to your knees and beg them to stop hurting you. Please. But that's a privilege reserved for people who were wronged. Still smiling. That smile bothers me. There's something so wrong about it. There's something so wrong about all of it.

It's not that I don't deserve it. I must, mustn't I? Or maybe I've just gotten used to it.