This was going to be my Currently Listening for the last post, but it got kind of long, and I really wanted to post the whole song.
"Lonelily" - Damien Rice
I love this song. It's a sad song for sure, but also sort of cathartic to yell along with the chorus when he yells it at the end. And, to boot, Leo turned me on to Damien Rice, many years ago, and his music has been with me in so many times and places in the years to come.
While she was here, I showed Leo the house I used to rent a room in, way out at the edge of town, where I first met Mr O. I took her on the long walk there from town, past the ocean, and told her about blustery winter nights of howling wind and pounding rains, when I used to walk home from town to that house, to Mr O and all that excitement (this was in the beginning, back when we were flirting and fooling around and sleeping together and I was all psyched out over him), and how I'd walk to that house in that crazy weather, singing Damien Rice songs in my head. I also used to stand in my tiny room in that house, getting dressed for the day, feeling hotter than I ever had before, with Damien Rice in my head.
It's funny how music, though it means so much more than a simple backdrop, is such a soundtrack for all the memorable moments. Back then though, I had never yet heard this particular song. Now, it is the most played song on my iTunes (it constantly battles with Fiona Apple's "Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song) for that position).
Here are the words:
"I gave me away
I coulda knocked off the evening
But I lonelily landed my wants in her hands
In a way
I felt you were leaving me
And I was sure I wouldn't find you at home
And you let me down
You coulda knocked off the evening
But you lonelily let him push under your bones
You let me down
There's no use deceiving
Neither of us want to be alone
And you're coming home
You're coming home
You're coming home
You're coming home
I gave me away
I coulda knocked off the evening
But I was lonelily looking for someone to hold
In a way
I lost all I believed in
And I never found myself so alone
Then you let me down
You coulda called if you needed
But you lonelily got yourself locked in instead
You let me down
Well, it's one thing being cheated
But you took him all the way through your bed
And now you're coming home
I'm trying to forgive
You're coming home
I'm trying to forget
You're coming home
I'm trying to move on
You're coming home
You haven't called
But you haven't called
You're coming home
(x2 - this is where it's fun to yell along)
You're coming home
I gave me away
I coulda knocked off the evening
But I lonelily loomed her into my bones
You let me down
There's no use deceiving
Neither of us want to be alone"
Friday, June 20, 2008
A Totally Transformative Solstice Week
This week, my friend Leo came to visit. She left this morning. I am sad that she's gone, and at the same time, just so glad we had this time together. It was the best. Leo and I have had some wild times over the last eight years of knowing each other - shared concert experiences, drunken debauchery at her house with friends, trips to Seattle, trips to the Gorge, a "porn hotel room" (it had a hot tub, and the doors or windows or whatever between the hot tub and the rest of the room wouldn't stay shut), rituals of feminine spirituality, trips to Philly with her kids to the science museum, discussions about books and politics and the meaning of life, commiseration over unrequited love. I saw my first Tool concert with her. I used to call her in the mornings, when Mr. O still lived with me and things were horrible and I was careening in desperation, and whisper all my troubles to her. She once took the craziest trip ever (including buses, trains and an insane ride with a friend's younger brother) to come see me at my parents house in NJ when I was visiting. We've turned each other on to music, to authors, to concepts, to spiritual principles, to philosophies, to movies, and on and on and on. This really only scratches the surface of what we've shared.
And this past week, or rather, five days really, was the most time we spent one on one. She came here, away from kids, just us. As everything always seems to be with us, getting here was a complicated journey. After driving to the airport, flying cross-country via a connecting flight, getting on a shuttle to the ferry terminal and then taking the ferry to the island, she rode on the bus for the camp I work for (they were picking up some of our international summer staff at the same time), and so came to where I work, saw me in my stupid work uniform and got to eat some premium (really) camp food. And then we walked all the way to my apartment. It was cool, because earlier this spring I went through another decorating, rearranging and purging phase and feel like the apartment is really me now. So it was awesome to have a friend see that.
My boss gave me extra time off, without me even asking for it, which rocked, and we had a blast, non-stop, sun-up to sun-down. We took the ferry to Sidney, BC. I have lived on Orcas for over five years (and lived in Seattle for a few months before that), and in all this time, I have never been to western Canada, ever. I had a passport that had laid dormant for two years. Well, a few days ago, Leo and I got our passports stamped in Canada. It was really cool, the ferry goes right there, then we took a bus, totally winged it, found a hostel, visited a castle, went on a ghost tour, hung out in the hostel lounge drinking, reading tarot and eating samosas. The next morning, we took the bus back to the ferry terminal and began our trek back to american soil. We had to stop in Friday Harbor, and as we are prone to do, spent the whole time we were there in their used bookstore, Serendipity.
We did a fair amount of shopping. In Canada, we bought matching journals and I got some sage. On Orcas we visited the bookstore and both gave in to our insatiable addiction to buying books. It was an awesome experience, being in the bookstore together, because we kept looking at books together, recommending books, talking about this author who references that author, whose book reminds us of this other book, making connections and just feeding each other's hunger for stories and knowledge and literature. I have a handful of friends I can be that way with, really, really, be that way, and Leo's one of them. I realized for like the millionth time this year, that the books I'm drawn to almost all take place in other cultures. It's interesting, when Mr. O and I were together, and this goes along with all that soul-squelching stuff I wrote about in my last entry, I barely read. That is not like me, at all, and it's almost like now I'm trying to make up for all that lost time. Even during Leo's visit, whether on the ferry, in the mornings or at night before bed, I was always reading (right now my book of the moment is The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver). I'm lapping up words and stories knowing there probably aren't enough days in ten lifetimes to read everything I thirst to read.
So what else did Leo and I do? Well the one surprising thing is that the one thing we didn't do was listen to music. We were too busy talking. Or playing with tarot cards. Or dissecting and discussing our lives, our troubles, our dreams (literal and figurative). Or looking through Victoria's Secret catalogs (which is a bit funny or unexpected for both of us). We went clothes shopping together and got a few hot items each. We did spells with tarot cards, intentions and releases on the night of the Full Moon in Sagittarius. We each went for some energy healing sessions with my healer friend Elynn and had transformative experiences. We looked through a journal that has been passed around in a group we belong to, a journal I've had for two years (!!!) and couldn't think of anything to contribute to. As we were perusing it together, reading through others' entries, I was finally struck with inspiration, and it's funny, because in a way, the idea that came to me is, in a way, turning all the anguish I wrote about in my last entry, into a strange form of art. So, that's cool. I made Leo laugh as I pretended I was going to write obscenely sexual things (I'm a dirty minded girl for sure, but anyone who read that piece in Shark Reef can't be surprised by that) to someone we know, and we reflected on how different I was from when she first met me (I was really painfully shy then, especially about that sort of stuff), and how we both had grown and changed in the last few years. We sort of individually, independently, in different ways, at different times in the week, let go of old things, massively, and simultaneously accepted ourselves for what we haven't let go of, what we still carry, and I think we both totally came to a place of peace with that.
It was a week of growth, of change, of deep internal changes. I feel stronger. Really. I feel invigorated. I feel excited about life again, and trust me when I say I needed that. I've been in a major funk for months. A funk that has changed shape and tone over the last few years even, and has been especially heavy in the last few months, as I think is somewhat apparent here. I think I'm emerging somewhat, and that it doesn't come easy, especially when there's been a lot of dimming of the soul. Today I had to go back to work, and say goodbye to Leo before I left, but you know, I actually felt pretty good at work, even physically, which is a first in a looooong time, a radical turnaround from even a week ago.
Part of it, I think, is because I feel some direction about what I want to do. As a lot of you know, I've been considering going back to school, and put it off a year because of financial reasons. I'm really glad I did that, because as this voracious reader in me has reawakened, I've realized some things. I'm not so sure that Emerson College is the place for me. It's still hard for me to say that - I had the BEST time there last November, was just bursting with joy on that campus and on Boston Common and riding the T. I still think the school has the best writing program out of any I've looked at, for my particular interests. They offer a lot of classes in a lot of genres, including screenwriting, writing for TV and film, the regular fiction, poetry and non-fiction (with possible concentrations in any of the above), and even offer classes in comedy writing (including a class on writing for stand-up comdedy that culminates in actually doing a five-minute bit at a comedy club). I so would have taken all those classes. I have not found any other school that offers that same wide array of writing classes.
The problem though, is that I hunger for so much more. I want to study everything - world religions (which tops my list as one of the most fascinating things ever in this universe), international affairs, anthropology, philosophy, political science, psychology, other cultures. And I want to be able to study abroad. It's not that Emerson has no opportunities in these other areas, just that I feel it's somewhat limited. That's not to say Emerson is off my list, that writing program is still enticing and I had such a good feel from the school, just that it's wavering. I read somewhere that they have some exchange thing with Suffolk, where you can take some classes through that school, and if that's still true (I read it ina college guidebook that was a few years old), that might help. Suffolk also offers a prison literature class that I'm just plain dying to take.
So in the meantime, contemplating all this, marinating as I called it before on here, another idea popped up that I've been exploring, and that is Fairhaven College in Bellingham. It's part of Western Washington University, except that in this college, students design their own interdisciplinary majors. Which is exactly what I need. My brain is split right-brain left-brain, I'm right in the middle, and I wavered a lot on my major when I was in school, because if I was doing humanities type stuff I missed math and science and when I did that I missed the other things. So interdisciplinary classes and majors sounds hot to me. Plus there's the option of taking any of the classes that Western offers in any department, so there's a lot to choose from to make my own major. And they have this exchange thing with a few other schools in the country that also have experimental learning setups, and that attracts me too. So does something called the Adventure Learning Grant, which is all about spending time in a culture very different from one's own.
And that's what I want - variety, the whole wide world of learning, travel opportunities, adventure. That sounds like a great education to me, and like it'll be awesome in the meantime. I want to be living the dream, and this sounds like a way to do that and get a degree and really stretch myself intellectually at the same time.
Oh yeah, and a big bonus is that it's in my state, and a state school, which reduces cost so dramatically, which is always good. It's funny, I've done many tarot readings about different schools and they've always been a bit ambivalent, and I did one about going to Fairhaven while riding on the ferry with Leo, and it came out so overwhelmingly positive it almost blew my mind. So we'll see, my thoughts may shift and my needs may change, but I'm very seriously considering this option.
And it feels good. Just talking to Leo about it got me all excited to make it all happen, to spread my wings and take flight on new journeys. I feel long overdue.
And this past week, or rather, five days really, was the most time we spent one on one. She came here, away from kids, just us. As everything always seems to be with us, getting here was a complicated journey. After driving to the airport, flying cross-country via a connecting flight, getting on a shuttle to the ferry terminal and then taking the ferry to the island, she rode on the bus for the camp I work for (they were picking up some of our international summer staff at the same time), and so came to where I work, saw me in my stupid work uniform and got to eat some premium (really) camp food. And then we walked all the way to my apartment. It was cool, because earlier this spring I went through another decorating, rearranging and purging phase and feel like the apartment is really me now. So it was awesome to have a friend see that.
My boss gave me extra time off, without me even asking for it, which rocked, and we had a blast, non-stop, sun-up to sun-down. We took the ferry to Sidney, BC. I have lived on Orcas for over five years (and lived in Seattle for a few months before that), and in all this time, I have never been to western Canada, ever. I had a passport that had laid dormant for two years. Well, a few days ago, Leo and I got our passports stamped in Canada. It was really cool, the ferry goes right there, then we took a bus, totally winged it, found a hostel, visited a castle, went on a ghost tour, hung out in the hostel lounge drinking, reading tarot and eating samosas. The next morning, we took the bus back to the ferry terminal and began our trek back to american soil. We had to stop in Friday Harbor, and as we are prone to do, spent the whole time we were there in their used bookstore, Serendipity.
We did a fair amount of shopping. In Canada, we bought matching journals and I got some sage. On Orcas we visited the bookstore and both gave in to our insatiable addiction to buying books. It was an awesome experience, being in the bookstore together, because we kept looking at books together, recommending books, talking about this author who references that author, whose book reminds us of this other book, making connections and just feeding each other's hunger for stories and knowledge and literature. I have a handful of friends I can be that way with, really, really, be that way, and Leo's one of them. I realized for like the millionth time this year, that the books I'm drawn to almost all take place in other cultures. It's interesting, when Mr. O and I were together, and this goes along with all that soul-squelching stuff I wrote about in my last entry, I barely read. That is not like me, at all, and it's almost like now I'm trying to make up for all that lost time. Even during Leo's visit, whether on the ferry, in the mornings or at night before bed, I was always reading (right now my book of the moment is The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver). I'm lapping up words and stories knowing there probably aren't enough days in ten lifetimes to read everything I thirst to read.
So what else did Leo and I do? Well the one surprising thing is that the one thing we didn't do was listen to music. We were too busy talking. Or playing with tarot cards. Or dissecting and discussing our lives, our troubles, our dreams (literal and figurative). Or looking through Victoria's Secret catalogs (which is a bit funny or unexpected for both of us). We went clothes shopping together and got a few hot items each. We did spells with tarot cards, intentions and releases on the night of the Full Moon in Sagittarius. We each went for some energy healing sessions with my healer friend Elynn and had transformative experiences. We looked through a journal that has been passed around in a group we belong to, a journal I've had for two years (!!!) and couldn't think of anything to contribute to. As we were perusing it together, reading through others' entries, I was finally struck with inspiration, and it's funny, because in a way, the idea that came to me is, in a way, turning all the anguish I wrote about in my last entry, into a strange form of art. So, that's cool. I made Leo laugh as I pretended I was going to write obscenely sexual things (I'm a dirty minded girl for sure, but anyone who read that piece in Shark Reef can't be surprised by that) to someone we know, and we reflected on how different I was from when she first met me (I was really painfully shy then, especially about that sort of stuff), and how we both had grown and changed in the last few years. We sort of individually, independently, in different ways, at different times in the week, let go of old things, massively, and simultaneously accepted ourselves for what we haven't let go of, what we still carry, and I think we both totally came to a place of peace with that.
It was a week of growth, of change, of deep internal changes. I feel stronger. Really. I feel invigorated. I feel excited about life again, and trust me when I say I needed that. I've been in a major funk for months. A funk that has changed shape and tone over the last few years even, and has been especially heavy in the last few months, as I think is somewhat apparent here. I think I'm emerging somewhat, and that it doesn't come easy, especially when there's been a lot of dimming of the soul. Today I had to go back to work, and say goodbye to Leo before I left, but you know, I actually felt pretty good at work, even physically, which is a first in a looooong time, a radical turnaround from even a week ago.
Part of it, I think, is because I feel some direction about what I want to do. As a lot of you know, I've been considering going back to school, and put it off a year because of financial reasons. I'm really glad I did that, because as this voracious reader in me has reawakened, I've realized some things. I'm not so sure that Emerson College is the place for me. It's still hard for me to say that - I had the BEST time there last November, was just bursting with joy on that campus and on Boston Common and riding the T. I still think the school has the best writing program out of any I've looked at, for my particular interests. They offer a lot of classes in a lot of genres, including screenwriting, writing for TV and film, the regular fiction, poetry and non-fiction (with possible concentrations in any of the above), and even offer classes in comedy writing (including a class on writing for stand-up comdedy that culminates in actually doing a five-minute bit at a comedy club). I so would have taken all those classes. I have not found any other school that offers that same wide array of writing classes.
The problem though, is that I hunger for so much more. I want to study everything - world religions (which tops my list as one of the most fascinating things ever in this universe), international affairs, anthropology, philosophy, political science, psychology, other cultures. And I want to be able to study abroad. It's not that Emerson has no opportunities in these other areas, just that I feel it's somewhat limited. That's not to say Emerson is off my list, that writing program is still enticing and I had such a good feel from the school, just that it's wavering. I read somewhere that they have some exchange thing with Suffolk, where you can take some classes through that school, and if that's still true (I read it ina college guidebook that was a few years old), that might help. Suffolk also offers a prison literature class that I'm just plain dying to take.
So in the meantime, contemplating all this, marinating as I called it before on here, another idea popped up that I've been exploring, and that is Fairhaven College in Bellingham. It's part of Western Washington University, except that in this college, students design their own interdisciplinary majors. Which is exactly what I need. My brain is split right-brain left-brain, I'm right in the middle, and I wavered a lot on my major when I was in school, because if I was doing humanities type stuff I missed math and science and when I did that I missed the other things. So interdisciplinary classes and majors sounds hot to me. Plus there's the option of taking any of the classes that Western offers in any department, so there's a lot to choose from to make my own major. And they have this exchange thing with a few other schools in the country that also have experimental learning setups, and that attracts me too. So does something called the Adventure Learning Grant, which is all about spending time in a culture very different from one's own.
And that's what I want - variety, the whole wide world of learning, travel opportunities, adventure. That sounds like a great education to me, and like it'll be awesome in the meantime. I want to be living the dream, and this sounds like a way to do that and get a degree and really stretch myself intellectually at the same time.
Oh yeah, and a big bonus is that it's in my state, and a state school, which reduces cost so dramatically, which is always good. It's funny, I've done many tarot readings about different schools and they've always been a bit ambivalent, and I did one about going to Fairhaven while riding on the ferry with Leo, and it came out so overwhelmingly positive it almost blew my mind. So we'll see, my thoughts may shift and my needs may change, but I'm very seriously considering this option.
And it feels good. Just talking to Leo about it got me all excited to make it all happen, to spread my wings and take flight on new journeys. I feel long overdue.
A Dark Night of the Soul
This was originally written on June 1st, in the wee hours of the morning:
I'm having a rough night. I'm also a bit drunk. It was karaoke night tonight at the local tavern, which is a fun event for going out with all the people I work with and I was totally psyched to go, and then when I was there I just felt really kind of left out. I mean, not like anyone intentionally left me out, I just felt like I didn't belong. Sometimes, I'm around people and I just wonder if I'm from a different species (in fact a few days ago while walking home I just started thinking about what if I'm an alien, not like for serious, but just feeling that degree of outsiderness). I've been a bit melancholic lately anyway.
So I was there at karaoke and I just started feeling terrible. I watched everyone else kinda being all huggy and touchy, sitting on each other and so forth and I just felt like, wow, I am so not part of this and I never will be. And the night before, I sort of felt the exact same way at a local dance. It's amazing to me, and I couldn't stop thinking about this at the bar tonight, how like, I'm ten years removed from the worst horrors of high school, yet in some ways I'm still there. Still the girl who sits alone, not out of choice, but because no one will sit with me. Still an outcast albino freak after all these years.
And it just made me wonder, when do those feelings end? Sometimes I feel like I never really get over anything. Does anyone? I can remember sitting with two friends during the end of my senior year of high school, hanging out in my room, reading over old notes we'd written to each other and laughing hysterically. I was pretty fresh from a breakkup and my friend Annmarie made me an award for getting over it so quickly, since we were all being so joyous and so carefree, unaffected by failed love. Even then, in between fits of giggles over those old notes we were reading, and in the midst of being proud of Annmarie's award and feeling like yeah, woo hoo, I'm over it, I'm moving on, some part of me knew I wasn't. I can just as easily recall when he wrote to me, "I don't love you anymore." Those words are hard to get over. And there are so many memories just as hard, if not harder. All the teasing, day in and day out, some of which I wrote about in that piece in Shark Reef, but you know, in that piece, I was aiming for the everyday stuff, so even that, as horrible as it was to write about, avoided some of the more extreme events. Like the time some kids stole the books from my locker and set them on fire. I didn't just feel left out then, I felt actively hated.
I just find it hard to put it behind me. I sometimes want so badly to be accepted, to be thought of as normal, as like other people, as belonging, and it's really hard with these memories still lingering somewhere underneath the surface of my skin. I take things really hard and I know it, what I don't know is how to forget, how to bounce back, how to live as if those things never happened, because all they do is make me want to shut down. There was one summer that I worked with this boy and totally had a thing for him, and we hung out all the time and had so much fun together and then when we got back to school in the fall he wouldn't even talk to me, and when a friend of mine told him that I liked him, he screamed "Ewwww!" Like I was a leper or something. How does a person, even years later, fully live as if something like that never happened? I haven't figured that out yet. And so far, down the line, any attempt at romance has kind of gone the same way.
For most of my early twenties I was in love with someone from the internet - it was a ridiculous situation in many ways and I feel kind of embarrassed about it now, but the feelings I had at the time were very real. I loved him with all my heart and I shared parts of myself with him that I had never shared with anyone and totally felt like he completely understood me, even the darker, heavier stuff, which was such an amazing feeling I hadn't really quite experienced before, and I just felt more connected to him than I ever had with anyone. I felt like I was totally seen and appreciated for who I really was, and that was new, and sacred. And in the end, he told me I wasn't his type, that he didn't love me (there's that line coming up again), and that he had gotten all sexual with some totally superficial girls we both knew.
Years have passed since all that, and I've tried six ways to Sunday to get past it all, and just this morning writing in my journal I realized the truth is, I'm just not. Even though I feel pretty removed from it all, every once in awhile I still wake up thinking about him. I wish I knew how to turn that switch off because every time it happens, I feel like an idiot. And it makes me sort of yearn for something I never really had anyway. Which in itself is pretty sad.
And then there was Mr. O - a legacy of hurt so thick I sometimes think I will never stop treading water trying to swim out of it. It was a weird situation where we ended up living together, in my apartment, and not having sex ever and not even sleeping together and never talking about our relationship or lack thereof and I used to wonder if he was messing around with someone else, and he always looked at porn online whenever I left the house and I felt more alone than I ever had felt by myself. I wish either of us had talked about things with the other. Thinking about it is making me cry pretty hard, I guess because it was like putting my soul through some sort of wringer, feeling constantly rejected, never knowing how to get out of this horrible pattern with him. I cried myself to sleep more often than not towards the end of things. But I didn't know how to say anything, for many reasons. And so not only did I feel abandoned and rejected by him, but more importantly, I was abandoning myself by not taking care of myself in the situation, and just continuing to stay in such horrible miserable circumstances.
Honestly when I think about it, my body still feels beyond exhausted just from holding all of that inside. I feel this is somehow "wrong" to say, but what bugged me the most was the sexual rejection and the lack of physical affection and closeness. Even as the months stretched on, it felt fresh every day. He would talk about every fucking girl on TV and make all these sexual comments and then sleep on my couch instead of in his bed with me. We were together for a year and a half, and this went on through most of it. You read and hear sometimes about couples who've been together forever and no longer get it on and I don't know how people do it. I mean, I think it could easily drive a person to madness. Sometimes I don't think there is any good way to describe in words how fucking painful it was, day in and day out, to love and want someone and want to be close to him and constantly be denied. It definitely had an effect on my self-esteem, on how I felt about myself as a woman. And I just didn't understand what the fuck happened, you know? He'd tell me he loved me, and then sleep on the floor. He'd talk to other girls on my phone, and I'd overhear comments like, "You want to marry me now, don't you?" joking, but still. Or one time I heard him tell one of his female friends that he was in love with another female friend's MySpace picture and go on and on about how hot it was. Sometimes he'd start fooling around with me, and get me all hot and bothered, and then go to bed, on the couch of course. That could incite a person to murder, let me tell you. I actually sort of wish it had. I mean not literally of course, but I wish I had gotten angry, but at the time all I could think was, "What? WHAT? What is it? What am I doing wrong?" and I'd go cry myself to sleep, alone, because I just couldn't figure any of it out. Sometimes he'd want to watch porn together and I wanted to ask him if he'd ask a starving person to watch a cooking show.
It felt like compounding interest, like all the feelings of sexual rejection and just being totally deprived of physical affection of any sort - it wasn't necessarily that I just wanted sex, but that I wanted something. Hand-holding, sitting together, cuddling, hugging, sleeping together, any sort of physical intimacy and closeness - just compounded and built up and got me at my core. It got to the point where I would consider something a good day if he was nice to me at all, if he didn't call those girls, if he came home drunk and semi-flirted with me (like, called me darling or something) or if we had a nice conversation about something, or one time we watched a movie together and our feet touched for a little bit, even though every day ended the same way, with us going to sleep separately, in different rooms. That's a definite sign of deprivation in a relationship, when horribly mediocre days seem so good in comparison to everything else. That relationship was like a mountain of hurt sitting on my heart, growing in mass with each new day. Like a cancerous tumor, metastasizing to my bloodstream and circulating through my veins.
I don't think I'm the same person I was before that relationship. Of course, hopefully, I've learned some things, but I mean on a deeper level. During so much of the time, I felt used. Mr O would talk me into going to the store to buy him beer or whatever, all the time, and I was taking care of all the bills, taking the dog on long walks so Mr O could be alone (and of course look at internet porn while I was out), shut myself up about my own opinions if I thought (or knew) he'd make fun of me for them, stopped doing the things I really loved, like reading and writing voraciously, because at its most basic, I just wasn't myself anymore.
The thing I feel the worst about in all that is that I stayed. For so long. I mean, what the fuck? What was I thinking? I guess I just wanted him to love me, or thought that if I could be more open and more affectionate, maybe things would get better. I totally thought it was my fault. I was convinced I had seriously disappointed him in bed and that's why all this shit ensued. I still kind of grapple with that feeling. I mean he was the first (and so far only) person I ever did have sex with. I also think I partly stayed because part of me thought there might not be anyone else. Mr O had been the first person to show interest in me in years and it was like, well shit, it may not come along again so might as well keep this one even if it's the most self-destructive thing I've ever done in my life.
I don't know if I had a point exactly in all of this, and if I did I've certainly lost it. I guess it's just that I've experienced what I'd consider some extreme wounding in the social and romantic arenas, and that all makes it that much harder to try to fit in, even now as an adult. I mean, it's like, I don't know how to sit with the fact that a kid once came towards me with a lighter and said, "I wonder if albinos burn like the rest of us," and then try to be normal in normal social situations now, even though it's years later. It's like those feelings of old are still in me.
I'm actually (surprise! surprise!) reminded of an episode of House from earlier this season. The patient was a kid with a very odd-looking face who's about to undergo surgery to change it and House says to him, "You can change your face, but you can't change who your face made you." And philosophically I could look at that statement and think about how maybe in some ways that's good, makes a person really unique. As a writer friend used to say, "Only the wounded are whole." And most of my favorite people (whether real life, fictional characters, famous people) are wounded in some way, kindred folk of some sort, and I can see how fucking special they are because of it, how sometimes going through something difficult or dealing with struggle can sometimes make a person more beautiful (and sometimes the opposite). So maybe in a twisted way there's some good to it. But man, it also sucks.
And tonight, being at karaoke just sort of brought it all home and for whatever reason, reminded me of high school dances, which is also how I felt last night at the local dance. I guess since I felt it in two places with different people, it's probably a lot more about me than the places or people. For whatever reason, this issue is surfacing for me. It's funny how the body can hold these feelings so strongly. I felt so socially awkward tonight, grotesquely different somehow. I know I'm not like other people, that I'm not typical, and a lot of times I like that. Other times, it's just really difficult. I just don't know how to fit in with all these touchy, flirty people, because I'm not really like that. It's like a language I can't speak. I feel like I'm darker somehow. A line I use often in my book is about feeling more "different on the inside" than I am on the outside. I mean, I had a really fucked up childhood and am pretty estranged from my family. There's sexual abuse in my history, I mean shit, that's fucking heavy! ometimes I think I picture everyone else as having a white picket fence life with perfectly functional families (which of course isn't the case) and I'm like the girl who lives in the sewer or something.
Actually, one of my favorite characters, Astrid from White Oleander, says it really well. I've had this page (and a few others) bookmarked for years (and am just now realizing some of the similarities in this passage I'm about to quote to the character of House): "I finished out the ninth grade at Madison Junior High, limping from class to class on my cane. My fractured hip was mending, but it was the slowest thing to heal. My shoulder was already functional, and even the chest wound that cracked my rib had stopped hurting every time I straightened or bent. But the hip was slow. I was always late to class. My days passed in a haze of Percodan. Bells and desks, shuffling to the next class. The teachers' mouths opened and butterflies flew out, too fast to capture. I liked the shifting colors of groups on the courtyard, but could not distinguish one student from the next. They were too young and undamaged, sure of themselves. To them, pain was a country they had heard of, maybe seen a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports. Where could I find a place where my world connected to theirs?"
On a related note, I'd much rather get into a deep conversation about something, or read a book by myself, or devour knowledge on a wide array of subjects, or write in a journal or just sit around and space out and contemplate. It's funny because I can distinctly remember being eleven or so, laying in my bedroom at home (and thinking over math puzzles and books I'd read, memorizing things in my mind before bed and having lots of feelings about everything) that being smart and thinking a lot and feeling things really intensely might alienate me a lot. It's hard to know how to reconcile that, how to not like, pretend to be someone else (puke) in attempts to make people see me as "normal" or just embrace the alienation. That was another thing I struggled with HARD in my relationship with Mr O - this is retarded and I can't believe I'm even going to admit this, but when he and I used to watch Jeopardy together, I would fake not knowing the answers sometimes (and I'm no whiz at the show or anything) because if I got too many right he'd start putting me down. That felt really shitty. I'm never doing that again.
My friend Emily walked home with me from the bar and we talked a lot and I told her some of what I wrote on here and it was really good to have a friend to listen and understand. It's just that sometimes I get all weirded out by being in groups and feeling somehow like I'm sitting on the outside. For whatever reason, I'm really getting triggered into the past in the last few days.
It also made me consider, again, how my life right now isn't really working for me. I work at a job where pretty much everyone is seasonal. I have watched so many people come and go. And because I work in the kitchen, I'm separated from the environmental ed staff to a degree, which only increases that feeling of wow they're all bonded and close and I'm not part of it, that outsiderness I'm so weary from. It makes it really hard to make good connections with people around my age. I have some friends from here I will treasure forever, but for the most part people just always come and go all the time. So there's a lot of loss, getting to know people just before they leave, wishing I got to know people better beforehand, missed bonding opportunities, getting to know people and really like them and then saying goodbye, etc. I wish Emily (and some others) weren't leaving in two weeks.
I have to say though, that the thought of going back to school, moving to a new place, being around a whole bunch of nineteen-year-olds, really scares the shit out of me. I have a hard enough time fitting in with older people closer to my age. I sort of never flet like I really was nineteen or any of those ages, even when I was, so I can't really imagine trying to relate now. But I definitely do need to figure out something in the tangible, physical world, as I continue to try to let go of these old hurts in the emotional plane or assimilate them or come to terms or find some peace or whateverthefuck might help, because I feel kind of clearer every day that my life as it is right now isn't working for me and that I want to make some changes and move off the island (which is socially isolating in itself, big time) and venture out some.
After writing all that, I am essentially sober. And ready for bed.
Currently listening:
"Eon Blue Apocalypse/The Patient" - Tool - Okay, this is a little weird. I have almost 4000 songs on my iTunes/iPod, and tonight while walking home from work, this song (a live recording from a Tool show I saw in Seattle with Mr O) came on, and now here I am at my computer at home and the same song, out of all 4000, comes up again. There must be some cosmic message to the synchronicity, though I'm not sure what. A lot of times, I've kind of listened to this song to calm me, especially the repeating part, "I must keep reminding myself of this," which just started playing this very second. Maybe the only thing to remind myself of is another repeating lyric of the song, "Be patient." Hmmm.
I'm having a rough night. I'm also a bit drunk. It was karaoke night tonight at the local tavern, which is a fun event for going out with all the people I work with and I was totally psyched to go, and then when I was there I just felt really kind of left out. I mean, not like anyone intentionally left me out, I just felt like I didn't belong. Sometimes, I'm around people and I just wonder if I'm from a different species (in fact a few days ago while walking home I just started thinking about what if I'm an alien, not like for serious, but just feeling that degree of outsiderness). I've been a bit melancholic lately anyway.
So I was there at karaoke and I just started feeling terrible. I watched everyone else kinda being all huggy and touchy, sitting on each other and so forth and I just felt like, wow, I am so not part of this and I never will be. And the night before, I sort of felt the exact same way at a local dance. It's amazing to me, and I couldn't stop thinking about this at the bar tonight, how like, I'm ten years removed from the worst horrors of high school, yet in some ways I'm still there. Still the girl who sits alone, not out of choice, but because no one will sit with me. Still an outcast albino freak after all these years.
And it just made me wonder, when do those feelings end? Sometimes I feel like I never really get over anything. Does anyone? I can remember sitting with two friends during the end of my senior year of high school, hanging out in my room, reading over old notes we'd written to each other and laughing hysterically. I was pretty fresh from a breakkup and my friend Annmarie made me an award for getting over it so quickly, since we were all being so joyous and so carefree, unaffected by failed love. Even then, in between fits of giggles over those old notes we were reading, and in the midst of being proud of Annmarie's award and feeling like yeah, woo hoo, I'm over it, I'm moving on, some part of me knew I wasn't. I can just as easily recall when he wrote to me, "I don't love you anymore." Those words are hard to get over. And there are so many memories just as hard, if not harder. All the teasing, day in and day out, some of which I wrote about in that piece in Shark Reef, but you know, in that piece, I was aiming for the everyday stuff, so even that, as horrible as it was to write about, avoided some of the more extreme events. Like the time some kids stole the books from my locker and set them on fire. I didn't just feel left out then, I felt actively hated.
I just find it hard to put it behind me. I sometimes want so badly to be accepted, to be thought of as normal, as like other people, as belonging, and it's really hard with these memories still lingering somewhere underneath the surface of my skin. I take things really hard and I know it, what I don't know is how to forget, how to bounce back, how to live as if those things never happened, because all they do is make me want to shut down. There was one summer that I worked with this boy and totally had a thing for him, and we hung out all the time and had so much fun together and then when we got back to school in the fall he wouldn't even talk to me, and when a friend of mine told him that I liked him, he screamed "Ewwww!" Like I was a leper or something. How does a person, even years later, fully live as if something like that never happened? I haven't figured that out yet. And so far, down the line, any attempt at romance has kind of gone the same way.
For most of my early twenties I was in love with someone from the internet - it was a ridiculous situation in many ways and I feel kind of embarrassed about it now, but the feelings I had at the time were very real. I loved him with all my heart and I shared parts of myself with him that I had never shared with anyone and totally felt like he completely understood me, even the darker, heavier stuff, which was such an amazing feeling I hadn't really quite experienced before, and I just felt more connected to him than I ever had with anyone. I felt like I was totally seen and appreciated for who I really was, and that was new, and sacred. And in the end, he told me I wasn't his type, that he didn't love me (there's that line coming up again), and that he had gotten all sexual with some totally superficial girls we both knew.
Years have passed since all that, and I've tried six ways to Sunday to get past it all, and just this morning writing in my journal I realized the truth is, I'm just not. Even though I feel pretty removed from it all, every once in awhile I still wake up thinking about him. I wish I knew how to turn that switch off because every time it happens, I feel like an idiot. And it makes me sort of yearn for something I never really had anyway. Which in itself is pretty sad.
And then there was Mr. O - a legacy of hurt so thick I sometimes think I will never stop treading water trying to swim out of it. It was a weird situation where we ended up living together, in my apartment, and not having sex ever and not even sleeping together and never talking about our relationship or lack thereof and I used to wonder if he was messing around with someone else, and he always looked at porn online whenever I left the house and I felt more alone than I ever had felt by myself. I wish either of us had talked about things with the other. Thinking about it is making me cry pretty hard, I guess because it was like putting my soul through some sort of wringer, feeling constantly rejected, never knowing how to get out of this horrible pattern with him. I cried myself to sleep more often than not towards the end of things. But I didn't know how to say anything, for many reasons. And so not only did I feel abandoned and rejected by him, but more importantly, I was abandoning myself by not taking care of myself in the situation, and just continuing to stay in such horrible miserable circumstances.
Honestly when I think about it, my body still feels beyond exhausted just from holding all of that inside. I feel this is somehow "wrong" to say, but what bugged me the most was the sexual rejection and the lack of physical affection and closeness. Even as the months stretched on, it felt fresh every day. He would talk about every fucking girl on TV and make all these sexual comments and then sleep on my couch instead of in his bed with me. We were together for a year and a half, and this went on through most of it. You read and hear sometimes about couples who've been together forever and no longer get it on and I don't know how people do it. I mean, I think it could easily drive a person to madness. Sometimes I don't think there is any good way to describe in words how fucking painful it was, day in and day out, to love and want someone and want to be close to him and constantly be denied. It definitely had an effect on my self-esteem, on how I felt about myself as a woman. And I just didn't understand what the fuck happened, you know? He'd tell me he loved me, and then sleep on the floor. He'd talk to other girls on my phone, and I'd overhear comments like, "You want to marry me now, don't you?" joking, but still. Or one time I heard him tell one of his female friends that he was in love with another female friend's MySpace picture and go on and on about how hot it was. Sometimes he'd start fooling around with me, and get me all hot and bothered, and then go to bed, on the couch of course. That could incite a person to murder, let me tell you. I actually sort of wish it had. I mean not literally of course, but I wish I had gotten angry, but at the time all I could think was, "What? WHAT? What is it? What am I doing wrong?" and I'd go cry myself to sleep, alone, because I just couldn't figure any of it out. Sometimes he'd want to watch porn together and I wanted to ask him if he'd ask a starving person to watch a cooking show.
It felt like compounding interest, like all the feelings of sexual rejection and just being totally deprived of physical affection of any sort - it wasn't necessarily that I just wanted sex, but that I wanted something. Hand-holding, sitting together, cuddling, hugging, sleeping together, any sort of physical intimacy and closeness - just compounded and built up and got me at my core. It got to the point where I would consider something a good day if he was nice to me at all, if he didn't call those girls, if he came home drunk and semi-flirted with me (like, called me darling or something) or if we had a nice conversation about something, or one time we watched a movie together and our feet touched for a little bit, even though every day ended the same way, with us going to sleep separately, in different rooms. That's a definite sign of deprivation in a relationship, when horribly mediocre days seem so good in comparison to everything else. That relationship was like a mountain of hurt sitting on my heart, growing in mass with each new day. Like a cancerous tumor, metastasizing to my bloodstream and circulating through my veins.
I don't think I'm the same person I was before that relationship. Of course, hopefully, I've learned some things, but I mean on a deeper level. During so much of the time, I felt used. Mr O would talk me into going to the store to buy him beer or whatever, all the time, and I was taking care of all the bills, taking the dog on long walks so Mr O could be alone (and of course look at internet porn while I was out), shut myself up about my own opinions if I thought (or knew) he'd make fun of me for them, stopped doing the things I really loved, like reading and writing voraciously, because at its most basic, I just wasn't myself anymore.
The thing I feel the worst about in all that is that I stayed. For so long. I mean, what the fuck? What was I thinking? I guess I just wanted him to love me, or thought that if I could be more open and more affectionate, maybe things would get better. I totally thought it was my fault. I was convinced I had seriously disappointed him in bed and that's why all this shit ensued. I still kind of grapple with that feeling. I mean he was the first (and so far only) person I ever did have sex with. I also think I partly stayed because part of me thought there might not be anyone else. Mr O had been the first person to show interest in me in years and it was like, well shit, it may not come along again so might as well keep this one even if it's the most self-destructive thing I've ever done in my life.
I don't know if I had a point exactly in all of this, and if I did I've certainly lost it. I guess it's just that I've experienced what I'd consider some extreme wounding in the social and romantic arenas, and that all makes it that much harder to try to fit in, even now as an adult. I mean, it's like, I don't know how to sit with the fact that a kid once came towards me with a lighter and said, "I wonder if albinos burn like the rest of us," and then try to be normal in normal social situations now, even though it's years later. It's like those feelings of old are still in me.
I'm actually (surprise! surprise!) reminded of an episode of House from earlier this season. The patient was a kid with a very odd-looking face who's about to undergo surgery to change it and House says to him, "You can change your face, but you can't change who your face made you." And philosophically I could look at that statement and think about how maybe in some ways that's good, makes a person really unique. As a writer friend used to say, "Only the wounded are whole." And most of my favorite people (whether real life, fictional characters, famous people) are wounded in some way, kindred folk of some sort, and I can see how fucking special they are because of it, how sometimes going through something difficult or dealing with struggle can sometimes make a person more beautiful (and sometimes the opposite). So maybe in a twisted way there's some good to it. But man, it also sucks.
And tonight, being at karaoke just sort of brought it all home and for whatever reason, reminded me of high school dances, which is also how I felt last night at the local dance. I guess since I felt it in two places with different people, it's probably a lot more about me than the places or people. For whatever reason, this issue is surfacing for me. It's funny how the body can hold these feelings so strongly. I felt so socially awkward tonight, grotesquely different somehow. I know I'm not like other people, that I'm not typical, and a lot of times I like that. Other times, it's just really difficult. I just don't know how to fit in with all these touchy, flirty people, because I'm not really like that. It's like a language I can't speak. I feel like I'm darker somehow. A line I use often in my book is about feeling more "different on the inside" than I am on the outside. I mean, I had a really fucked up childhood and am pretty estranged from my family. There's sexual abuse in my history, I mean shit, that's fucking heavy! ometimes I think I picture everyone else as having a white picket fence life with perfectly functional families (which of course isn't the case) and I'm like the girl who lives in the sewer or something.
Actually, one of my favorite characters, Astrid from White Oleander, says it really well. I've had this page (and a few others) bookmarked for years (and am just now realizing some of the similarities in this passage I'm about to quote to the character of House): "I finished out the ninth grade at Madison Junior High, limping from class to class on my cane. My fractured hip was mending, but it was the slowest thing to heal. My shoulder was already functional, and even the chest wound that cracked my rib had stopped hurting every time I straightened or bent. But the hip was slow. I was always late to class. My days passed in a haze of Percodan. Bells and desks, shuffling to the next class. The teachers' mouths opened and butterflies flew out, too fast to capture. I liked the shifting colors of groups on the courtyard, but could not distinguish one student from the next. They were too young and undamaged, sure of themselves. To them, pain was a country they had heard of, maybe seen a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports. Where could I find a place where my world connected to theirs?"
On a related note, I'd much rather get into a deep conversation about something, or read a book by myself, or devour knowledge on a wide array of subjects, or write in a journal or just sit around and space out and contemplate. It's funny because I can distinctly remember being eleven or so, laying in my bedroom at home (and thinking over math puzzles and books I'd read, memorizing things in my mind before bed and having lots of feelings about everything) that being smart and thinking a lot and feeling things really intensely might alienate me a lot. It's hard to know how to reconcile that, how to not like, pretend to be someone else (puke) in attempts to make people see me as "normal" or just embrace the alienation. That was another thing I struggled with HARD in my relationship with Mr O - this is retarded and I can't believe I'm even going to admit this, but when he and I used to watch Jeopardy together, I would fake not knowing the answers sometimes (and I'm no whiz at the show or anything) because if I got too many right he'd start putting me down. That felt really shitty. I'm never doing that again.
My friend Emily walked home with me from the bar and we talked a lot and I told her some of what I wrote on here and it was really good to have a friend to listen and understand. It's just that sometimes I get all weirded out by being in groups and feeling somehow like I'm sitting on the outside. For whatever reason, I'm really getting triggered into the past in the last few days.
It also made me consider, again, how my life right now isn't really working for me. I work at a job where pretty much everyone is seasonal. I have watched so many people come and go. And because I work in the kitchen, I'm separated from the environmental ed staff to a degree, which only increases that feeling of wow they're all bonded and close and I'm not part of it, that outsiderness I'm so weary from. It makes it really hard to make good connections with people around my age. I have some friends from here I will treasure forever, but for the most part people just always come and go all the time. So there's a lot of loss, getting to know people just before they leave, wishing I got to know people better beforehand, missed bonding opportunities, getting to know people and really like them and then saying goodbye, etc. I wish Emily (and some others) weren't leaving in two weeks.
I have to say though, that the thought of going back to school, moving to a new place, being around a whole bunch of nineteen-year-olds, really scares the shit out of me. I have a hard enough time fitting in with older people closer to my age. I sort of never flet like I really was nineteen or any of those ages, even when I was, so I can't really imagine trying to relate now. But I definitely do need to figure out something in the tangible, physical world, as I continue to try to let go of these old hurts in the emotional plane or assimilate them or come to terms or find some peace or whateverthefuck might help, because I feel kind of clearer every day that my life as it is right now isn't working for me and that I want to make some changes and move off the island (which is socially isolating in itself, big time) and venture out some.
After writing all that, I am essentially sober. And ready for bed.
Currently listening:
"Eon Blue Apocalypse/The Patient" - Tool - Okay, this is a little weird. I have almost 4000 songs on my iTunes/iPod, and tonight while walking home from work, this song (a live recording from a Tool show I saw in Seattle with Mr O) came on, and now here I am at my computer at home and the same song, out of all 4000, comes up again. There must be some cosmic message to the synchronicity, though I'm not sure what. A lot of times, I've kind of listened to this song to calm me, especially the repeating part, "I must keep reminding myself of this," which just started playing this very second. Maybe the only thing to remind myself of is another repeating lyric of the song, "Be patient." Hmmm.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Err on the Side of Audacity
Today I was perusing Sue Monk Kidd's website (and discovered that The Secret Life of Bees is being made into a movie and will be out in October), and came across this little tidbit she posted in a list of advice she'd give to writers. Here was number seven:
"Err on the side of audacity.
One day it occurred to me that most writers, myself included, erred on the side of being too careful in their writing. I made a pact with myself that I would quit playing it safe when what the story really wanted... what my heart really wanted, was to take a big chance. The best writing requires some daring-- a little literary skydiving. Look at your idea and ask yourself: how can I make this larger? The novelist E. M. Forster once said that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. After I finish each chapter, I read it with an eye toward figuring out where I’ve played it safe, where I backed off, where the small astonishment was lost."
It rings true for me. As a writer, it's much easier to play it safe. It's something I've definitely struggled with in my manuscript, especially on the first round. I mean, I thought it was pretty out there, scary, revealing. But then some of my readers pointed out how I avoided the darkness, avoided really talking about albinism, skimmed other issues, and that it would be better to really dig in. In rereading and rewriting, I realized how much I had sugarcoated or glossed over. It's hard not to sometimes, out of habit. Not that it's a writing habit, but a life habit - making things sound somehow easier to swallow than they are, filling in details that aren't always really there, sidestepping the really deep territory. I mean, the deeper and darker territories are hard to go into. And yet I also think in some ways, they're the richest.
As a reader, I hate it when I feel a story doesn't go to its own depths. I mean, in that case, really, why tell the story? It's frustrating as a reader, somehow empty and not quite totally satisfying, and if I'm going to spend my time reading a book, I want it to go to the depths, and not just hover on the surface. Some examples come to mind. One was this book, I think it was called Find Me or Finding Me, by Rosie O'Donnell. A friend loaned it to me years ago. I knew just about nothing about the woman, as I often feel like I grew up in a virtual pop culture vacuum, having almost zero exposure to those sorts of things. So I just read it like any other memoir or novel, and in it she talks about basically meeting someone with multiple personalities. Which is something that completely fascinates me to no end (I like the unusual, and that's like the cream of the abnormal psychology crop), but every time she wrote about this woman (whose name I can't remember) or her reactions to it, she'd write something like (and I'm completely paraphrasing, this was probably four years ago now), "Well this is getting pretty weird so let me tell you about something else," and every time she wrote something of that nature, I felt ripped off. Like no, give me the real experience. Stop distracting me (or yourself) by constantly changing the subject, and let's dig into it. It was really frustrating as a reader, scattered, unsatisfying. In the end a potentially really rich and interesting story was just sort of sprinkled in bits and pieces.
And there have been other times and other books where I feel the author has sort of cheated me as reader out of the full experience. It sucks. Still, as a writer, it can sometimes be hard to avoid. It's hard not to write with the ghosts or memories or expectations of everyone you know sitting on your shoulder. At least it can be for me. I mean I usually feel relatively free when writing something, but there are those habits I mentioned earlier, which I think mostly manifest themselves subconsciously. For me it's in the editing and the thinking of making something public that all those ghhosts come up. Sometimes I cringe at my own difficult material, thinking about how it will come across, how I might be judged, who might get mad at me, what society at large might think, and all other assorted forms of bullshit that lead to self-oppression.
So it's good to remember, I think, to err on the side of audacity. A passage I marked off in Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird goes like this, "If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act--truth is always subversive."
I do worry a bit about my manuscript, that maybe there are still places where I'm a bit absent. It's hard to know though, because there are other places that, like I said, make me cringe with how vulnerable and revealing they are. Places where some part of me still wants to pull back. I almost feel like reading through my book yet again, but honestly, I'm pretty sick of it. I'm planning on sending out my proposal to some agents, like, tomorrow, so I'm just going to put it out there, and remember to err on the side of audacity in all my writing.
Speaking of that, I wrote a blog post last Saturday night, and it was pretty difficult, pretty personal. In the morning I woke up sort of panicked about it and took it down. I liked it. It was honest. It was just sort of rocky territory, deep shit, and I'm a bit afraid of what some of my readers would think if they knew the darker side of me (though honestly my book itself goes into some darkness so maybe it's worth it), and I worried that some people might be mad if they read it (b/c I alluded to them, even without giving any identifying info about them). Maybe it's worth being unliked. Maybe I'll repost it. Still feeling a bit tentative.
Edited to add: After sitting on said blog post for two weeks or so, I read it over and decided I really liked it, it was candid, and candor is so rare sometimes, and I liked the writing, it came from somewhere deep and real, even though I was drunk when I wrote it, and some of it came out pretty, despite the sadness. And I think, why not tell the truth about my own life? If people don't like it, fuck 'em. So that's that.
On a totally, completely unrelated note, I've been kind of thinking of audacity in other ways lately. I'm really bored with my life. I do think I want to go back to school next year, and a lot of my efforts right now are geared towards saving money for that and really taking the time to find the right place for me. And yet I feel like if I don't do something exciting in the meantime, I might go a bit crazy (crazier?). I am really itching to leave the country. Starting to feel kind of handicapped by my lack of foreign experience. I have tons of time off in the winter. Last year I went to Hawaii. If I'm really good with money, I keep thinking I'll go somewhere foreign this winter. I'm hoping I could do it without dipping into the allotted amount I set aside every month for college. We'll see. My top pipe dream choice would be to go to Egypt on some sort of spiritual journey. A close second would be Ireland. Who knows...I've been known to make wild ideas into reality, so I don't count anything out just now.
Currently Listening:
Okay I am totally embarrassed here, but since I just wrote all that stuff about being real, I might as well admit it, "Bless the Broken Road" - Rascal Flatts - not the typical music I'd listen to AT ALL (and it has all this god stuff in it that I have to just sort of ignore). I heard someone sing this song at our local Orcas Idol contest last year (actually the guy who ended up winning), and I loved his performance, so, there you have it, I like this song and I love to sing along at the top of my lungs. Oh, but I do think the guy who sang it at Orcas Idol actually sang it better.
"Err on the side of audacity.
One day it occurred to me that most writers, myself included, erred on the side of being too careful in their writing. I made a pact with myself that I would quit playing it safe when what the story really wanted... what my heart really wanted, was to take a big chance. The best writing requires some daring-- a little literary skydiving. Look at your idea and ask yourself: how can I make this larger? The novelist E. M. Forster once said that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. After I finish each chapter, I read it with an eye toward figuring out where I’ve played it safe, where I backed off, where the small astonishment was lost."
It rings true for me. As a writer, it's much easier to play it safe. It's something I've definitely struggled with in my manuscript, especially on the first round. I mean, I thought it was pretty out there, scary, revealing. But then some of my readers pointed out how I avoided the darkness, avoided really talking about albinism, skimmed other issues, and that it would be better to really dig in. In rereading and rewriting, I realized how much I had sugarcoated or glossed over. It's hard not to sometimes, out of habit. Not that it's a writing habit, but a life habit - making things sound somehow easier to swallow than they are, filling in details that aren't always really there, sidestepping the really deep territory. I mean, the deeper and darker territories are hard to go into. And yet I also think in some ways, they're the richest.
As a reader, I hate it when I feel a story doesn't go to its own depths. I mean, in that case, really, why tell the story? It's frustrating as a reader, somehow empty and not quite totally satisfying, and if I'm going to spend my time reading a book, I want it to go to the depths, and not just hover on the surface. Some examples come to mind. One was this book, I think it was called Find Me or Finding Me, by Rosie O'Donnell. A friend loaned it to me years ago. I knew just about nothing about the woman, as I often feel like I grew up in a virtual pop culture vacuum, having almost zero exposure to those sorts of things. So I just read it like any other memoir or novel, and in it she talks about basically meeting someone with multiple personalities. Which is something that completely fascinates me to no end (I like the unusual, and that's like the cream of the abnormal psychology crop), but every time she wrote about this woman (whose name I can't remember) or her reactions to it, she'd write something like (and I'm completely paraphrasing, this was probably four years ago now), "Well this is getting pretty weird so let me tell you about something else," and every time she wrote something of that nature, I felt ripped off. Like no, give me the real experience. Stop distracting me (or yourself) by constantly changing the subject, and let's dig into it. It was really frustrating as a reader, scattered, unsatisfying. In the end a potentially really rich and interesting story was just sort of sprinkled in bits and pieces.
And there have been other times and other books where I feel the author has sort of cheated me as reader out of the full experience. It sucks. Still, as a writer, it can sometimes be hard to avoid. It's hard not to write with the ghosts or memories or expectations of everyone you know sitting on your shoulder. At least it can be for me. I mean I usually feel relatively free when writing something, but there are those habits I mentioned earlier, which I think mostly manifest themselves subconsciously. For me it's in the editing and the thinking of making something public that all those ghhosts come up. Sometimes I cringe at my own difficult material, thinking about how it will come across, how I might be judged, who might get mad at me, what society at large might think, and all other assorted forms of bullshit that lead to self-oppression.
So it's good to remember, I think, to err on the side of audacity. A passage I marked off in Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird goes like this, "If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act--truth is always subversive."
I do worry a bit about my manuscript, that maybe there are still places where I'm a bit absent. It's hard to know though, because there are other places that, like I said, make me cringe with how vulnerable and revealing they are. Places where some part of me still wants to pull back. I almost feel like reading through my book yet again, but honestly, I'm pretty sick of it. I'm planning on sending out my proposal to some agents, like, tomorrow, so I'm just going to put it out there, and remember to err on the side of audacity in all my writing.
Speaking of that, I wrote a blog post last Saturday night, and it was pretty difficult, pretty personal. In the morning I woke up sort of panicked about it and took it down. I liked it. It was honest. It was just sort of rocky territory, deep shit, and I'm a bit afraid of what some of my readers would think if they knew the darker side of me (though honestly my book itself goes into some darkness so maybe it's worth it), and I worried that some people might be mad if they read it (b/c I alluded to them, even without giving any identifying info about them). Maybe it's worth being unliked. Maybe I'll repost it. Still feeling a bit tentative.
Edited to add: After sitting on said blog post for two weeks or so, I read it over and decided I really liked it, it was candid, and candor is so rare sometimes, and I liked the writing, it came from somewhere deep and real, even though I was drunk when I wrote it, and some of it came out pretty, despite the sadness. And I think, why not tell the truth about my own life? If people don't like it, fuck 'em. So that's that.
On a totally, completely unrelated note, I've been kind of thinking of audacity in other ways lately. I'm really bored with my life. I do think I want to go back to school next year, and a lot of my efforts right now are geared towards saving money for that and really taking the time to find the right place for me. And yet I feel like if I don't do something exciting in the meantime, I might go a bit crazy (crazier?). I am really itching to leave the country. Starting to feel kind of handicapped by my lack of foreign experience. I have tons of time off in the winter. Last year I went to Hawaii. If I'm really good with money, I keep thinking I'll go somewhere foreign this winter. I'm hoping I could do it without dipping into the allotted amount I set aside every month for college. We'll see. My top pipe dream choice would be to go to Egypt on some sort of spiritual journey. A close second would be Ireland. Who knows...I've been known to make wild ideas into reality, so I don't count anything out just now.
Currently Listening:
Okay I am totally embarrassed here, but since I just wrote all that stuff about being real, I might as well admit it, "Bless the Broken Road" - Rascal Flatts - not the typical music I'd listen to AT ALL (and it has all this god stuff in it that I have to just sort of ignore). I heard someone sing this song at our local Orcas Idol contest last year (actually the guy who ended up winning), and I loved his performance, so, there you have it, I like this song and I love to sing along at the top of my lungs. Oh, but I do think the guy who sang it at Orcas Idol actually sang it better.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
I stayed up waaaaay too late last night because I couldn't put this book down for anything. I even took it to the bathroom with me when I had to pee (TMI, I know, I'm just sayin, it's a really fucking good book). And now I'm sharing some commentary when I really should be crashing. In some strange way, even though its pretty tragic, I still want to stay in the world of The Kite Runner.
Okay, SPOILER ALERT! If you haven't read the book, DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER!
Also, if you haven't read the book, after you abort mission and exit this post so as not to spoil the ending for yourself, go out and get the book, and start reading!
The Kite Runner was definitely the most intense book I've read in a really long time. I cried a lot while reading it. It's pretty heart-wrenching, and just extremely psychologically intense. Which I really love when it's done well, and here, it was.
In the beginning, I only read in tiny chunks, because I was sort of dreading The Event. The first paragraph of the book is, "I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years."
Aside from being an incredible hook (as the aspiring to be published writer in me who reads tons on query letters, proposals and the importance of gripping first pages, paragraphs and sentences, duly notes), it carries incredible emotional impact. I know immediately that some drastic event changes Amir forever, even before I know the main character's name is Amir. And it kind of scared me.
I kept paying attention to the timeline, to how close we were to the winter of 1975, and reading in smaller snippets. In fact, I read a majority of The Kite Runner while on break at work, which was a little difficult, because of the emotional intensity of the text.
When I verrrry, verrrry first began reading, I had a very different impression of what the said event might be. Starting out, all I really knew was that the book took place in Afghanistan, and that some line in one of the testimonials on the back of the book called it "...a story of fierce cruelty..." For some reason I was anticipating some sort of political violence or cruelty, but as the book builds towards chapter seven, it becomes clear that what's going to happen is of a much more personal nature. And in some ways, a lot more devastating.
It becomes clearer and clearer that something happens between Amir and Hassan - Amir's friend who he never quite thinks of as his friend, Amir's first memory, a boy who always read his thoughts, but in many ways, it's such an uneven relationship from the very beginning, before they were born. Partly because of Amir's privilege, being a Pashtun instead of a Hazara, his father's wealth, his literacy, the fact that Hassan is his servant. Early on in the narrative, Amir says,
"Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words.
Mine was Baba.
His was Amir. My name.
Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975--and all that followed--was already laid in those first words."
And Amir toys with Hassan - asks him if he'd eat dirt if he asked him to (Hassan says yes, in the end), makes up totally wrong meanings to big words Hassan doesn't know when he reads to him, finds other subtle ways to taunt him, which I think he does in part because of how disappointing he feels he is to his father. He has to one-up someone.
I did not guess what would actually happen to Hassan. I thought Assef (the evil bully who idolizes Hitler and later becomes a member of the Taliban and publicly stones people while wearing John Lennon sunglasses), might beat Hassan into oblivion, maybe kill him, maybe injure him permanently. It wasn't until about two paragraphs before it happened that I realized that Assef would rape Hassan. I was glad Hassan didn't die or get beaten into oblivion, but in another way, what did happen could be worse.
And in the critical moment of the book, Amir watches it happen, and he doesn't do anything to stop it, even though Hassan had defended Amir against Assef earlier. In a way, it's the defining moment of Amir's life, and definitely something I've mulled over in my head ever since I read it. Because it changes him forever. Amir says, "I had one last chance to make a decision. One final opportunity to decide who I was going to be. I could step into that alley, stand up for Hassan--the way he'd stood up for me all those times--and accept whatever would happen to me. Or I could run.
In the end, I ran."
After I read that part, I just couldn't stop thinking about that, how one moment could could shape a lifetime, change someone irrevocably for the rest of their life. In some ways, it was hard to sympathize with Amir at this part of the story. I think that what he did was really wrong, possibly, in some ways, worse than what Assef did, because it was a real betrayal of someone who would have done anything for him.
It actually reminded me of this book Back Roads by Tawni Odell (SPOiLER SPOILER SPOILER ALERT). That book was about a very dysfunctional family. The father beat the kids. One of the daughters, Misty, always went hunting with the father. Later in the book it's revealed that the person Misty really was angry with was the mother. I can't remember the exact wording, but (narrated by the oldest brother and seen through his eyes), it becomes clear, Misty was angry with the mother because she had failed the first rule of the wild, she had failed to protect her young. In reading the Kite Runner, I felt a similar way, that in a way Amir's crime of negligence, of running rather than intervening, was in some ways the worse of the evils.
On the other hand, I can identify with Amir and what he did. And I can see how the whole fabric of his life up until that point informed that moment. I pretty much agree word for word with what Rahim Khan writes to Amir later on in his letter. It didn't happen in a vacuum. He was twelve. He was kind of a sensitive kid, not much of a fighter. He was so desperate to win his father's love and he felt like getting that kite would be his ticket into Baba's heart. So he let it happen. In that moment, running away was the easier thing to do. Certainly over the trajectory of his life, it wasn't, but in that moment, it was. I don't know if I was twelve and faced with something like that, I might make the same choice Amir did. In a way, he sacrifices Hassan in order to be able to bring that kite home to Baba. And in a way, Hassan sacrifices himself for that too in his refusal to give Assef and the others the kite, as always putting Amir first before anything.
And, I think, Amir was also affected by the prejudices that he himself internalized, which I think in some ways, is true for all of us to some degree. He says in the paragraph after he runs away, "The answer floated in my conscious mind before I could thwart it: He was just a Hazara, wasn't he?" It's horrible, but I'm glad that line was there, because I think it's true for Amir as a character. It wasn't something he wanted to openly think, but he did treat Hassan differently even before this - didn't play with him if other people were around, things like that. That line had a certain level of honesty to it that I really appreciated, because like I said, I think all of us at some points are guilty of that, and Khaled Hosseini really does a great job of writing this story from Amir's adult perspective in an unflinchingly candid way. I love that, even when it's difficult.
Just today I brought Derrick Jensen's End Game Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization to work to start reading on my break, and came across this which I think relates to what I'm saying in the above paragraph. End Game starts with a bunch of premises that the rest of the book is built on. Here is Premise Four: "Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinking, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victim." I think this premise plays into what happens in the Kite Runner. Amir is the privileged one, Hassan is the servant. They are of different classes, different religions (Amir is Sunni, though his father doesn't believe in religion at all, and Hassan is Shi'a), and definitely different social classes as defined by their society. I think it's another one of those things that builds the context for what happens on that winter day in 1975 in the world of this book that is there since before either character was born.
And afterwards...afterwards was more heartbreaking than the event itself, for me as a reader. This is where I lost it and cried and cried and cried. The way that Amir pushes Hassan away after this happens, it just killed me. I kept thinking of Hassan, who just survived getting raped - so unspeakably horrible and of course going to change Hassan's life just as irrevocably as Amir's cowardice does his - and then his best friend, the person he would do anything for, the person whose name was his first word, completely pushes him out of his life. Amir does this in a lot of different ways. The one that got me the worst was when Hassan comes to him and asks him what he is doing wrong, asks Amir to just tell him, and whatever it is, he'll stop, and Amir tells him to go away.
I mean, again, I get it. Amir can't deal with what happened, with his own guilt, with what he saw and did nothing about, his betrayal, his conviction that if anyone knew they would hate him, and I think, the fact that Hassan could always read his thoughts, know things about him that Amir never spoke. So he pushes Hassan away. It's so interesting how in this story, and in life, all of these moments are like a tapestry, each woven out of everything that came before. I'm not quite sure how to say what I'm getting at, just that none of this happens in isolation, everything is formed by everything that happens beforehand, so it's not like these are single, separate decisions Amir makes, but more a path he walks down, and each step he takes down that path of pushing Hassan away makes it more likely that he'll take another step on that same path. It's sort of like once you tell one lie, it almost necessitates more lies, makes it harder to start telling the truth. And he does, pushes Hassan and his father completely out of his life partly by planting a watch and some money under Hassan's mattress to make it look like he stole it.
The point I was trying to make earlier, about the social hierarchy playing into the way things played out in that alley in the winter of 1975 after the kite tournament, is brought out also by Rahim Khan and the story he tells Amir at his thirteenth birthday party, about the time he was in love with a Hazara woman. Rahim Khan's father sends the girl and her family away, and Rahim Khan reflects that maybe it worked out for the best, because his family never would have accepted her. He says, "You don't order someone to polish your shoes one day and call them 'sister' the next." I don't think it makes anything acceptable, just that it does show the cultural context for all that happens. And I don't think you can separate out the events of a person's life from their cultural context. Rahim Khan also says, "It was Homaira and me against the world. And I'll tell you this Amir jan: In the end, the world always wins." Kind of a bitter pill to swallow. I wonder if that's true. It definitely reminded me immediately of The God of Small Things, the world (or History) certainly wins there. But it's sort of really horrible to accept that "that's the way it is" or something. I don't know, I dn't have any answers, but it's made me think.
I like how the personal and political are interwoven, inseparable, in this book, because I think our political contexts do shape all our lives, I just think it's maybe more invisible here in America, maybe because of the largeness of the country or the largeness and unreachableness of the governmental hierarchy. It can seem like our lives are divorced from the political landscape and plenty of people go along without ever thinking about it (which is unfathomable to me but I think pretty common).
I also really appreciated, throughout the entire book, getting a view of Afghanistan, because I don't really know much about the country. I mean I ate at an Afghani restaurant once in NYC while visiting a friend. We had dinner and played with tarot cards there, and later I realized I'd accidentally left one of the cards there (which, interestingly enough, was a card in the Osho Zen deck called We Are The World). But aside from that, which barely counts as anything, I really just didn't know much about Afghanistan at all, which is sort of ignorant on my part, considering we're at war there. So I really drank up that aspect of The Kite Runner, anything about the country, the people, the customs, the culture.
The way that the first confrontation with Assef, when Hassan rescues Amir, happens right after the monarch is overthrown, really brings it home how the political landscape and the personal are inherently co-mingled. And it's the same way when Amir and Baba escape to Pakistan, and how it sort of accentuates the differences and the distance between them: Amir being somewhat weak, getting carsick, and Baba defying Russian soldiers on behalf of someone he doesn't know.
In America it seems that things are easier for their relationship, if not necessarily easier for them personally. Baba especially has such a hard time in America, works a job that is really physically hard on him, and does so for Amir. He really does well by Amir in America, in my eyes. I'm not quite sure how to pinpoint what the shift was when they came to America that made their relationship better. Maybe it's because Baba was no longer so overwhelmingly wealthy and larger than life in the community the way he was in Kabul. Also, early on, Amir says of Baba, "With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was hite. You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe hating him a little." I think a lot of that sense of Baba evaporates in America, perhaps because he isn't as powerful anymore, just a guy working in a gas station.
The whole sense of Amir being a disappointment to Baba seems to have dissipated, almost entirely. Baba seems proud of Amir, of his graduation, of him going to college, and especially happy about Amir's marriage to Soraya. There is so much hardship in this book, and there is here too, with Baba dying of cancer, and yet it seems like a time of reconciliation in some ways. Not overt ways, but more subtle ones, in the way they seem closer, getting along better. In the way that there's a small sense of peace.
My favorite part of this section is right before Baba dies, when Amir comes home to find that Soraya has been reading his stories to Baba, because in a way it's like Baba finally appreciates Amir for the person he truly is, instead of how he reacted years before, when Amir was a kid in school winning "Battle of the Poems" and Baba was trying to make him into a soccer player, back when Amir said, "That was how I escaped my father's aloofness, in my dead mother's books." It's just really touching to finally see a real rapport between the father and son before Baba dies. And it's really nice that Amir has some happiness, after so much struggle. Happiness with Soraya and with his career.
And then of course is the phone call from Rahim Khan that brings Amir back to his past. In Rahim Khan's telling of life with Hassan in Baba's old house in Kabul, I was also really glad that Hassan had found some happiness with his wife and his son, and living with Rahim Khan, glad he got to reconnect with his mother and find some peace, glad that his unabashed smile had returned, before he met such a violent end. It's funny how out of the two of them - Hassan and Amir - Hassan seems the happier one at this point, the more healed. And the way Hassan's asked Rahim Khan about Amir, and the letter he writes to him, and how clear it is how he's told his family fond memories of his early years with Amir, it just struck me, Hassan's forgiveness, the way he still loves Amir. And just the fact that he seems like he was so much more at peace about things between them than Amir was. It's just interesting to think about, how in a way the whole situation was harder in a long-term way on Amir, the one who wronged his friend, than it was on Hassan, the one who was wronged. Just gives me things to mull over some more.
I was glad Amir decided to go to Kabul to get Sohrab, to take on that journey. Something changed in him that night after Rahim Khan tells him the story of Hassan's life, and the truth that Baba was Hassan's father. It's good to see him finally finding his courage, fighting for himself, for Hassan.
I was again glad to get a sense of Afghanistan and what it was like, because it's important to know, even though it was devastating to read - Wahid's children going so hungry, the destruction in Kabul, the beggars, the conditions at the orphanage, and of course, the public stonings. I just think it's really important to really know what's going on in the world.
It really was hard to read, though.
So one thing I was trying to figure out - when Amir meets Assef to try to get Sohrab, Assef was a heroin addict (or some similar drug)? He has track marks on his arms, and Amir mentions countless times how bloodshot Assef's eyes were, and some other odd physical behavior that made me think of long-term drug use.
What disturbed me most in this section was actually the way that Assef touches Sohrab - it's sick. More than Assef's cruelty, his violence, or the way he tastes the words "ethnic cleansing" like they're some kind of new delicious delicacy, it was the way he touches Sohrab that made me want to throw up, like for real.
The fight was great. Brutal, but great. Amir finally faces almost exactly what he was afraid of facing that winter day in 1975. Later when he says that he and Assef both got what they deserved, it's kind of true. And how can you not love Sohrab here? And see Hassan in him so clearly? Rescuing Amir again, but this time it's on more equal ground, Amir is also rescuing Sohrab. What struck me was how similar Sohrab was to Hassan, both threatening Assef with a slingshot, both being pretty calm about it, almost deferential, saying please.
The book starts with Amir saying that he is what he is today because of that long ago day, and I started to wonder, is that really bad? Maybe his guilt shaped him into someone who could finally stand up for himself, someone who had to. Maybe what Rahim Khan says in his letter about Baba's remorse turning into good in some ways is also true for Amir. Because, as an adult, Amir really is a great person. In the end he even gets involved with humanitarian projects for Afghanistan, the way Baba might've. He includes Sohrab in his life the same way Baba's family had included Ali and Hassan. In a lot of ways, I see Baba's more positive traits in Amir, Amir just had to grow into them. And Amir is very generous - with Farid, Wahid and so on. It would've been better of course, if Amir could've stood up for Hassan way back when, but I think in many ways, he couldn't. And maybe he had to live through everything that followed to get to a place where he could. Maybe he needed that journey.
Where it really becomes clear to me that Amir has really grown to be a great man is how he deals with Sohrab, how gentle and attentive he is. There's real sweetness there, and god knows they both need it, especially Sohrab for everything he's been through. I think this passage exemplifies it the most: "I touched his arm again and he drew away. I reached again, gently, and pulled him to me. 'I won't hurt you,' I whispered. 'I promise.' He resisted a little. Slackened. He let me draw him to me and rested his head on my chest. His little body convulsed in my arms with each sob." I've been pondering the possibility that what happened in that alley shaped Amir from a kid who taunted his friend about not knowing big words into someone who is this tender with Sohrab. I kind of can't help loving Amir here.
I really, really kind of wish the book could have ended there, that they could have easily gone back to San Francisco and lived with Soraya and continued to try to heal the wounds of the past. Amir and Sohrab were on such a good path there. It's funny because just a few days before finishing this book, I was thinking about how in books and movies I think I'm sometimes more okay with "unhappy endings" (ones where the main character dies, for example) than some of my friends are, IF the ending fits the story well. I was even going to make a post about that.
In The Kite Runner though, I was really heartbroken beyond belief when Amir has to break his promise and consider putting Sohrab in an orphanage, and Sohrab tries to kill himself because of it. Things are never the same ever again and Sohrab becomes so terribly withdrawn. On a side note, I was a little puzzled when Amir questions himself about whether he really just fell asleep that night that Sohrab tried to kill himself - I wasn't entirely sure where he was going with that. I just wanted things to be right - Sohrab has gone through soooo much in his young life and Amir had been so good to him and it was just, they were really on the road to some sort of healing.
But maybe that is in a way, too much to ask for the circumstances. I feel like the book was very honest about the difficulties Amir had adopting a child from Afghanistan and how much red tape there was and all the obstacles. And I think this part really shed light on and deepened in some way, my understanding of the suffering that children in Afghanistan might experience. It felt important that that was in there, and how extremely strongly Sohrab reacted to the news that he might have to go to a home for children really brought that home. It conveyed a certain horror, and depth of horror that the earlier visit to the orphanage didn't quite get at. And it felt really honest to the story. So did Sohrab's becoming withdrawn, though I so wanted him and Amir to really connect again the way they were starting to. I was devastated that in a way, Amir had to betray him (not intentionally, it was more the system and the way things worked that did that, but I meant that he had to be the messenger), and that the trust between them was broken. But any other way might have felt dishonest, somehow unreal or not quite down to earth. The ending the way it is feels apt, so suited to the story, and in that way, perhaps more beautiful.
And there is some healing in the end. There isn't happily ever after, but there is some healing. Again I'm not quite sure how to get at what I'm trying to say, but it's like after all that Sohrab has been through, the actual ending of the book feels right, feels realistic. I love how Amir says, "It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight.
But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting."
And I also think that a subtle yet significant real redemption for Amir is just before that. When Hassan ran the kite for Amir in the winter of 1975, he said, "For you a thousand times over." And later, Farid says it to Amir (and he breaks down crying). And finally, Amir is saying it to Sohrab. It's turned around.
That is one thing I really loved about this book, there's so much of what I would call "literary symmetry" though there's probably a better name for it. The way things turn around and reverse themselves. Early on, Amir puts a watch and some money under a mattress to push Hassan out. Later on, he gives Wahid's children a watch and puts some money under the mattress as a gift to them. Hassan starts out with a harelip, Amir ends up with one. The moment where Sohrab and Amir end up standing in the same way as Hassan and Sohrab in the polaroid. The way that Amir's grandfather had adopted Ali into the family after Ali's parents were killed and the way that Amir does the same with Sohrab. The way that Assef tells Amir about laughing while he gets beaten in prison, and then Amir ends up laughing during his fight with Assef, and the two scenarios are almost identical. And especially how in that critical moment in Amir's life when he's peeking behind that mud wall, he says, "In the end, I ran," and then the last line of the book is "I ran." Here, it has almost the opposite meaning this time. He is running the kite for Sohrab, out of love. I love this, it's gorgeous.
In general, I have huge writer's envy. It's sort of giving me an inferiority complex, this book, but honestly, I think that's a good thing. Nothing quite pushes a writer, I don't think, as feeling like, wow, I want to paint magic with words as good as this guy does. The prose in The Kite Runner...just stunning. Seamless. So emotionally evocative. I don't think I have felt this invested in a book I've read perhaps since the first time I read White Oleander or The Secret Life of Bees or The God of Small Things. There is so much depth in this book. It's got a timeless sort of quality, a quality I don't know how to name, something magical, something that is rare to find. I already want to read the book all over again, partly to immerse myself in the story again, but partly to stay in the language, to fall all over myself over how good it is.
I also want to watch the movie (even dreamt about it either last night or today during the day), but have to see if I can see it in English (I just can't keep up with subtitles, and miss a lot of the action while trying, because I have to look so closely at the bottom of the screen). I almost don't see how it could be as good as the book, but I do want to see it. I also want to read A Thousand Splendid Suns. There are also some personal changes that The Kite Runner sparked in me, but those are best left for other posts. This one is already my longest blog entry ever.
It actually took me now five days to complete this post, mostly because I was working loooong hours and could only get to this in bits and pieces, and partly because I'd be writing here, and then just get lost in the book while trying to find passages. I've thought about this story almost non-stop while at work, just contemplating and musing.
To sum up (as someone I once knew always used to say), a masterpiece.
Currently listening:
"Famous Blue Raincoat" - Tori Amos (Leonard Cohen cover) - usually I just let whatever song comes up on iTunes shuffle when I'm done with my post be my "currently listening" but today every song just felt, so, I don't know, so totally not appropriate, and I just kept pushing next, next, next. Until this song came on. I don't know why it feels right, but when it first started, the music just grabbed my heart and it felt right. It was weird, I couldn't even remember at first what song it was, (that happens to me sometimes, a song'll come on and instantly I'll just feel a connection to it, but not quite be able to place it, almost like I'm running through my mind trying to find the right name for what grabs when I'm in a more emotional state, and I'll come up with at first is well I know it's by so and so, this album, track 16. It's like the feeling comes first and then the facts follow), just that the first notes seemed to exactly mirror what I felt.
Okay, SPOILER ALERT! If you haven't read the book, DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER!
Also, if you haven't read the book, after you abort mission and exit this post so as not to spoil the ending for yourself, go out and get the book, and start reading!
The Kite Runner was definitely the most intense book I've read in a really long time. I cried a lot while reading it. It's pretty heart-wrenching, and just extremely psychologically intense. Which I really love when it's done well, and here, it was.
In the beginning, I only read in tiny chunks, because I was sort of dreading The Event. The first paragraph of the book is, "I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years."
Aside from being an incredible hook (as the aspiring to be published writer in me who reads tons on query letters, proposals and the importance of gripping first pages, paragraphs and sentences, duly notes), it carries incredible emotional impact. I know immediately that some drastic event changes Amir forever, even before I know the main character's name is Amir. And it kind of scared me.
I kept paying attention to the timeline, to how close we were to the winter of 1975, and reading in smaller snippets. In fact, I read a majority of The Kite Runner while on break at work, which was a little difficult, because of the emotional intensity of the text.
When I verrrry, verrrry first began reading, I had a very different impression of what the said event might be. Starting out, all I really knew was that the book took place in Afghanistan, and that some line in one of the testimonials on the back of the book called it "...a story of fierce cruelty..." For some reason I was anticipating some sort of political violence or cruelty, but as the book builds towards chapter seven, it becomes clear that what's going to happen is of a much more personal nature. And in some ways, a lot more devastating.
It becomes clearer and clearer that something happens between Amir and Hassan - Amir's friend who he never quite thinks of as his friend, Amir's first memory, a boy who always read his thoughts, but in many ways, it's such an uneven relationship from the very beginning, before they were born. Partly because of Amir's privilege, being a Pashtun instead of a Hazara, his father's wealth, his literacy, the fact that Hassan is his servant. Early on in the narrative, Amir says,
"Hassan and I fed from the same breasts. We took our first steps on the same lawn in the same yard. And, under the same roof, we spoke our first words.
Mine was Baba.
His was Amir. My name.
Looking back on it now, I think the foundation for what happened in the winter of 1975--and all that followed--was already laid in those first words."
And Amir toys with Hassan - asks him if he'd eat dirt if he asked him to (Hassan says yes, in the end), makes up totally wrong meanings to big words Hassan doesn't know when he reads to him, finds other subtle ways to taunt him, which I think he does in part because of how disappointing he feels he is to his father. He has to one-up someone.
I did not guess what would actually happen to Hassan. I thought Assef (the evil bully who idolizes Hitler and later becomes a member of the Taliban and publicly stones people while wearing John Lennon sunglasses), might beat Hassan into oblivion, maybe kill him, maybe injure him permanently. It wasn't until about two paragraphs before it happened that I realized that Assef would rape Hassan. I was glad Hassan didn't die or get beaten into oblivion, but in another way, what did happen could be worse.
And in the critical moment of the book, Amir watches it happen, and he doesn't do anything to stop it, even though Hassan had defended Amir against Assef earlier. In a way, it's the defining moment of Amir's life, and definitely something I've mulled over in my head ever since I read it. Because it changes him forever. Amir says, "I had one last chance to make a decision. One final opportunity to decide who I was going to be. I could step into that alley, stand up for Hassan--the way he'd stood up for me all those times--and accept whatever would happen to me. Or I could run.
In the end, I ran."
After I read that part, I just couldn't stop thinking about that, how one moment could could shape a lifetime, change someone irrevocably for the rest of their life. In some ways, it was hard to sympathize with Amir at this part of the story. I think that what he did was really wrong, possibly, in some ways, worse than what Assef did, because it was a real betrayal of someone who would have done anything for him.
It actually reminded me of this book Back Roads by Tawni Odell (SPOiLER SPOILER SPOILER ALERT). That book was about a very dysfunctional family. The father beat the kids. One of the daughters, Misty, always went hunting with the father. Later in the book it's revealed that the person Misty really was angry with was the mother. I can't remember the exact wording, but (narrated by the oldest brother and seen through his eyes), it becomes clear, Misty was angry with the mother because she had failed the first rule of the wild, she had failed to protect her young. In reading the Kite Runner, I felt a similar way, that in a way Amir's crime of negligence, of running rather than intervening, was in some ways the worse of the evils.
On the other hand, I can identify with Amir and what he did. And I can see how the whole fabric of his life up until that point informed that moment. I pretty much agree word for word with what Rahim Khan writes to Amir later on in his letter. It didn't happen in a vacuum. He was twelve. He was kind of a sensitive kid, not much of a fighter. He was so desperate to win his father's love and he felt like getting that kite would be his ticket into Baba's heart. So he let it happen. In that moment, running away was the easier thing to do. Certainly over the trajectory of his life, it wasn't, but in that moment, it was. I don't know if I was twelve and faced with something like that, I might make the same choice Amir did. In a way, he sacrifices Hassan in order to be able to bring that kite home to Baba. And in a way, Hassan sacrifices himself for that too in his refusal to give Assef and the others the kite, as always putting Amir first before anything.
And, I think, Amir was also affected by the prejudices that he himself internalized, which I think in some ways, is true for all of us to some degree. He says in the paragraph after he runs away, "The answer floated in my conscious mind before I could thwart it: He was just a Hazara, wasn't he?" It's horrible, but I'm glad that line was there, because I think it's true for Amir as a character. It wasn't something he wanted to openly think, but he did treat Hassan differently even before this - didn't play with him if other people were around, things like that. That line had a certain level of honesty to it that I really appreciated, because like I said, I think all of us at some points are guilty of that, and Khaled Hosseini really does a great job of writing this story from Amir's adult perspective in an unflinchingly candid way. I love that, even when it's difficult.
Just today I brought Derrick Jensen's End Game Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization to work to start reading on my break, and came across this which I think relates to what I'm saying in the above paragraph. End Game starts with a bunch of premises that the rest of the book is built on. Here is Premise Four: "Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinking, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victim." I think this premise plays into what happens in the Kite Runner. Amir is the privileged one, Hassan is the servant. They are of different classes, different religions (Amir is Sunni, though his father doesn't believe in religion at all, and Hassan is Shi'a), and definitely different social classes as defined by their society. I think it's another one of those things that builds the context for what happens on that winter day in 1975 in the world of this book that is there since before either character was born.
And afterwards...afterwards was more heartbreaking than the event itself, for me as a reader. This is where I lost it and cried and cried and cried. The way that Amir pushes Hassan away after this happens, it just killed me. I kept thinking of Hassan, who just survived getting raped - so unspeakably horrible and of course going to change Hassan's life just as irrevocably as Amir's cowardice does his - and then his best friend, the person he would do anything for, the person whose name was his first word, completely pushes him out of his life. Amir does this in a lot of different ways. The one that got me the worst was when Hassan comes to him and asks him what he is doing wrong, asks Amir to just tell him, and whatever it is, he'll stop, and Amir tells him to go away.
I mean, again, I get it. Amir can't deal with what happened, with his own guilt, with what he saw and did nothing about, his betrayal, his conviction that if anyone knew they would hate him, and I think, the fact that Hassan could always read his thoughts, know things about him that Amir never spoke. So he pushes Hassan away. It's so interesting how in this story, and in life, all of these moments are like a tapestry, each woven out of everything that came before. I'm not quite sure how to say what I'm getting at, just that none of this happens in isolation, everything is formed by everything that happens beforehand, so it's not like these are single, separate decisions Amir makes, but more a path he walks down, and each step he takes down that path of pushing Hassan away makes it more likely that he'll take another step on that same path. It's sort of like once you tell one lie, it almost necessitates more lies, makes it harder to start telling the truth. And he does, pushes Hassan and his father completely out of his life partly by planting a watch and some money under Hassan's mattress to make it look like he stole it.
The point I was trying to make earlier, about the social hierarchy playing into the way things played out in that alley in the winter of 1975 after the kite tournament, is brought out also by Rahim Khan and the story he tells Amir at his thirteenth birthday party, about the time he was in love with a Hazara woman. Rahim Khan's father sends the girl and her family away, and Rahim Khan reflects that maybe it worked out for the best, because his family never would have accepted her. He says, "You don't order someone to polish your shoes one day and call them 'sister' the next." I don't think it makes anything acceptable, just that it does show the cultural context for all that happens. And I don't think you can separate out the events of a person's life from their cultural context. Rahim Khan also says, "It was Homaira and me against the world. And I'll tell you this Amir jan: In the end, the world always wins." Kind of a bitter pill to swallow. I wonder if that's true. It definitely reminded me immediately of The God of Small Things, the world (or History) certainly wins there. But it's sort of really horrible to accept that "that's the way it is" or something. I don't know, I dn't have any answers, but it's made me think.
I like how the personal and political are interwoven, inseparable, in this book, because I think our political contexts do shape all our lives, I just think it's maybe more invisible here in America, maybe because of the largeness of the country or the largeness and unreachableness of the governmental hierarchy. It can seem like our lives are divorced from the political landscape and plenty of people go along without ever thinking about it (which is unfathomable to me but I think pretty common).
I also really appreciated, throughout the entire book, getting a view of Afghanistan, because I don't really know much about the country. I mean I ate at an Afghani restaurant once in NYC while visiting a friend. We had dinner and played with tarot cards there, and later I realized I'd accidentally left one of the cards there (which, interestingly enough, was a card in the Osho Zen deck called We Are The World). But aside from that, which barely counts as anything, I really just didn't know much about Afghanistan at all, which is sort of ignorant on my part, considering we're at war there. So I really drank up that aspect of The Kite Runner, anything about the country, the people, the customs, the culture.
The way that the first confrontation with Assef, when Hassan rescues Amir, happens right after the monarch is overthrown, really brings it home how the political landscape and the personal are inherently co-mingled. And it's the same way when Amir and Baba escape to Pakistan, and how it sort of accentuates the differences and the distance between them: Amir being somewhat weak, getting carsick, and Baba defying Russian soldiers on behalf of someone he doesn't know.
In America it seems that things are easier for their relationship, if not necessarily easier for them personally. Baba especially has such a hard time in America, works a job that is really physically hard on him, and does so for Amir. He really does well by Amir in America, in my eyes. I'm not quite sure how to pinpoint what the shift was when they came to America that made their relationship better. Maybe it's because Baba was no longer so overwhelmingly wealthy and larger than life in the community the way he was in Kabul. Also, early on, Amir says of Baba, "With me as the glaring exception, my father molded the world around him to his liking. The problem, of course, was that Baba saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and what was hite. You can't love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe hating him a little." I think a lot of that sense of Baba evaporates in America, perhaps because he isn't as powerful anymore, just a guy working in a gas station.
The whole sense of Amir being a disappointment to Baba seems to have dissipated, almost entirely. Baba seems proud of Amir, of his graduation, of him going to college, and especially happy about Amir's marriage to Soraya. There is so much hardship in this book, and there is here too, with Baba dying of cancer, and yet it seems like a time of reconciliation in some ways. Not overt ways, but more subtle ones, in the way they seem closer, getting along better. In the way that there's a small sense of peace.
My favorite part of this section is right before Baba dies, when Amir comes home to find that Soraya has been reading his stories to Baba, because in a way it's like Baba finally appreciates Amir for the person he truly is, instead of how he reacted years before, when Amir was a kid in school winning "Battle of the Poems" and Baba was trying to make him into a soccer player, back when Amir said, "That was how I escaped my father's aloofness, in my dead mother's books." It's just really touching to finally see a real rapport between the father and son before Baba dies. And it's really nice that Amir has some happiness, after so much struggle. Happiness with Soraya and with his career.
And then of course is the phone call from Rahim Khan that brings Amir back to his past. In Rahim Khan's telling of life with Hassan in Baba's old house in Kabul, I was also really glad that Hassan had found some happiness with his wife and his son, and living with Rahim Khan, glad he got to reconnect with his mother and find some peace, glad that his unabashed smile had returned, before he met such a violent end. It's funny how out of the two of them - Hassan and Amir - Hassan seems the happier one at this point, the more healed. And the way Hassan's asked Rahim Khan about Amir, and the letter he writes to him, and how clear it is how he's told his family fond memories of his early years with Amir, it just struck me, Hassan's forgiveness, the way he still loves Amir. And just the fact that he seems like he was so much more at peace about things between them than Amir was. It's just interesting to think about, how in a way the whole situation was harder in a long-term way on Amir, the one who wronged his friend, than it was on Hassan, the one who was wronged. Just gives me things to mull over some more.
I was glad Amir decided to go to Kabul to get Sohrab, to take on that journey. Something changed in him that night after Rahim Khan tells him the story of Hassan's life, and the truth that Baba was Hassan's father. It's good to see him finally finding his courage, fighting for himself, for Hassan.
I was again glad to get a sense of Afghanistan and what it was like, because it's important to know, even though it was devastating to read - Wahid's children going so hungry, the destruction in Kabul, the beggars, the conditions at the orphanage, and of course, the public stonings. I just think it's really important to really know what's going on in the world.
It really was hard to read, though.
So one thing I was trying to figure out - when Amir meets Assef to try to get Sohrab, Assef was a heroin addict (or some similar drug)? He has track marks on his arms, and Amir mentions countless times how bloodshot Assef's eyes were, and some other odd physical behavior that made me think of long-term drug use.
What disturbed me most in this section was actually the way that Assef touches Sohrab - it's sick. More than Assef's cruelty, his violence, or the way he tastes the words "ethnic cleansing" like they're some kind of new delicious delicacy, it was the way he touches Sohrab that made me want to throw up, like for real.
The fight was great. Brutal, but great. Amir finally faces almost exactly what he was afraid of facing that winter day in 1975. Later when he says that he and Assef both got what they deserved, it's kind of true. And how can you not love Sohrab here? And see Hassan in him so clearly? Rescuing Amir again, but this time it's on more equal ground, Amir is also rescuing Sohrab. What struck me was how similar Sohrab was to Hassan, both threatening Assef with a slingshot, both being pretty calm about it, almost deferential, saying please.
The book starts with Amir saying that he is what he is today because of that long ago day, and I started to wonder, is that really bad? Maybe his guilt shaped him into someone who could finally stand up for himself, someone who had to. Maybe what Rahim Khan says in his letter about Baba's remorse turning into good in some ways is also true for Amir. Because, as an adult, Amir really is a great person. In the end he even gets involved with humanitarian projects for Afghanistan, the way Baba might've. He includes Sohrab in his life the same way Baba's family had included Ali and Hassan. In a lot of ways, I see Baba's more positive traits in Amir, Amir just had to grow into them. And Amir is very generous - with Farid, Wahid and so on. It would've been better of course, if Amir could've stood up for Hassan way back when, but I think in many ways, he couldn't. And maybe he had to live through everything that followed to get to a place where he could. Maybe he needed that journey.
Where it really becomes clear to me that Amir has really grown to be a great man is how he deals with Sohrab, how gentle and attentive he is. There's real sweetness there, and god knows they both need it, especially Sohrab for everything he's been through. I think this passage exemplifies it the most: "I touched his arm again and he drew away. I reached again, gently, and pulled him to me. 'I won't hurt you,' I whispered. 'I promise.' He resisted a little. Slackened. He let me draw him to me and rested his head on my chest. His little body convulsed in my arms with each sob." I've been pondering the possibility that what happened in that alley shaped Amir from a kid who taunted his friend about not knowing big words into someone who is this tender with Sohrab. I kind of can't help loving Amir here.
I really, really kind of wish the book could have ended there, that they could have easily gone back to San Francisco and lived with Soraya and continued to try to heal the wounds of the past. Amir and Sohrab were on such a good path there. It's funny because just a few days before finishing this book, I was thinking about how in books and movies I think I'm sometimes more okay with "unhappy endings" (ones where the main character dies, for example) than some of my friends are, IF the ending fits the story well. I was even going to make a post about that.
In The Kite Runner though, I was really heartbroken beyond belief when Amir has to break his promise and consider putting Sohrab in an orphanage, and Sohrab tries to kill himself because of it. Things are never the same ever again and Sohrab becomes so terribly withdrawn. On a side note, I was a little puzzled when Amir questions himself about whether he really just fell asleep that night that Sohrab tried to kill himself - I wasn't entirely sure where he was going with that. I just wanted things to be right - Sohrab has gone through soooo much in his young life and Amir had been so good to him and it was just, they were really on the road to some sort of healing.
But maybe that is in a way, too much to ask for the circumstances. I feel like the book was very honest about the difficulties Amir had adopting a child from Afghanistan and how much red tape there was and all the obstacles. And I think this part really shed light on and deepened in some way, my understanding of the suffering that children in Afghanistan might experience. It felt important that that was in there, and how extremely strongly Sohrab reacted to the news that he might have to go to a home for children really brought that home. It conveyed a certain horror, and depth of horror that the earlier visit to the orphanage didn't quite get at. And it felt really honest to the story. So did Sohrab's becoming withdrawn, though I so wanted him and Amir to really connect again the way they were starting to. I was devastated that in a way, Amir had to betray him (not intentionally, it was more the system and the way things worked that did that, but I meant that he had to be the messenger), and that the trust between them was broken. But any other way might have felt dishonest, somehow unreal or not quite down to earth. The ending the way it is feels apt, so suited to the story, and in that way, perhaps more beautiful.
And there is some healing in the end. There isn't happily ever after, but there is some healing. Again I'm not quite sure how to get at what I'm trying to say, but it's like after all that Sohrab has been through, the actual ending of the book feels right, feels realistic. I love how Amir says, "It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make anything all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight.
But I'll take it. With open arms. Because when spring comes, it melts the snow one flake at a time, and maybe I just witnessed the first flake melting."
And I also think that a subtle yet significant real redemption for Amir is just before that. When Hassan ran the kite for Amir in the winter of 1975, he said, "For you a thousand times over." And later, Farid says it to Amir (and he breaks down crying). And finally, Amir is saying it to Sohrab. It's turned around.
That is one thing I really loved about this book, there's so much of what I would call "literary symmetry" though there's probably a better name for it. The way things turn around and reverse themselves. Early on, Amir puts a watch and some money under a mattress to push Hassan out. Later on, he gives Wahid's children a watch and puts some money under the mattress as a gift to them. Hassan starts out with a harelip, Amir ends up with one. The moment where Sohrab and Amir end up standing in the same way as Hassan and Sohrab in the polaroid. The way that Amir's grandfather had adopted Ali into the family after Ali's parents were killed and the way that Amir does the same with Sohrab. The way that Assef tells Amir about laughing while he gets beaten in prison, and then Amir ends up laughing during his fight with Assef, and the two scenarios are almost identical. And especially how in that critical moment in Amir's life when he's peeking behind that mud wall, he says, "In the end, I ran," and then the last line of the book is "I ran." Here, it has almost the opposite meaning this time. He is running the kite for Sohrab, out of love. I love this, it's gorgeous.
In general, I have huge writer's envy. It's sort of giving me an inferiority complex, this book, but honestly, I think that's a good thing. Nothing quite pushes a writer, I don't think, as feeling like, wow, I want to paint magic with words as good as this guy does. The prose in The Kite Runner...just stunning. Seamless. So emotionally evocative. I don't think I have felt this invested in a book I've read perhaps since the first time I read White Oleander or The Secret Life of Bees or The God of Small Things. There is so much depth in this book. It's got a timeless sort of quality, a quality I don't know how to name, something magical, something that is rare to find. I already want to read the book all over again, partly to immerse myself in the story again, but partly to stay in the language, to fall all over myself over how good it is.
I also want to watch the movie (even dreamt about it either last night or today during the day), but have to see if I can see it in English (I just can't keep up with subtitles, and miss a lot of the action while trying, because I have to look so closely at the bottom of the screen). I almost don't see how it could be as good as the book, but I do want to see it. I also want to read A Thousand Splendid Suns. There are also some personal changes that The Kite Runner sparked in me, but those are best left for other posts. This one is already my longest blog entry ever.
It actually took me now five days to complete this post, mostly because I was working loooong hours and could only get to this in bits and pieces, and partly because I'd be writing here, and then just get lost in the book while trying to find passages. I've thought about this story almost non-stop while at work, just contemplating and musing.
To sum up (as someone I once knew always used to say), a masterpiece.
Currently listening:
"Famous Blue Raincoat" - Tori Amos (Leonard Cohen cover) - usually I just let whatever song comes up on iTunes shuffle when I'm done with my post be my "currently listening" but today every song just felt, so, I don't know, so totally not appropriate, and I just kept pushing next, next, next. Until this song came on. I don't know why it feels right, but when it first started, the music just grabbed my heart and it felt right. It was weird, I couldn't even remember at first what song it was, (that happens to me sometimes, a song'll come on and instantly I'll just feel a connection to it, but not quite be able to place it, almost like I'm running through my mind trying to find the right name for what grabs when I'm in a more emotional state, and I'll come up with at first is well I know it's by so and so, this album, track 16. It's like the feeling comes first and then the facts follow), just that the first notes seemed to exactly mirror what I felt.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Radically Updated Link List
So, after not updating my link list since about a week after I started this blog, I gave it a radical overhaul. There are blogs I've meant to add for ages, and I meant to just do that.
But then I sort of went on a rampage. I started adding pages for my favorite bands and authors, and then I wanted to add pages for LOTS of authors, including plenty whose books I haven't finished reading, but who I'm really interested in and who have interesting sites.
You'll notice new blogs like Silver Lining's Adventures in First-Time Home-Buying, StargazerLeo's Samsara, Kalidurga's das Ding an Sich, Tara's Daily Dose of Cynicism, Stephen Kuusisto's Planet of the Blind.
There are also some music pages - the FAQ on that TOOL page answers just about every question you could have about TOOL, well up to 2001 anyway, and the Tori site, Hereinmyhead (named after one of my all-time favorite Tori songs, btw) has such a comprehensive collection of information, especially song lyrics and their variations, and commentaries about them. I also added pages for Fiona Apple and Damien Rice - those two currently dominate my iTunes Top 25 Most Played list, almost exclusively.
And authors, authors, authors and MORE authors. I added a lot of fucking authors, because I love them. A lot of my favorites are here, and there are so many more I would have included, but I got tired and the list got crowded. I added the authors of some of my all-time favorite books, like White Oleander (Janet Fitch), The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd), A Wrinkle in Time and sooo many others (Madeleine L'Engle), Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley), A Language Older Than Words and sooo many others (Derrick Jesnsen, my author crush, and I say that because my crush is on his mind, his writing, his depth, his politics, his philosophies, his insights and his sense of humor), My Ishmael (Daniel Quinn), Brave New Girl (Louisa Luna), The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy - still think this is possibly the best book I've ever read).
I had to include Khaled Hosseini, because The Kite Runner is SUCH a compelling book. I can't put it down. There will definitely be a full-length blog post fully loaded with spoiler warnings, once I finish it. It's intense. It makes me think about a lot of different things. I can hardly get through a chapter without crying. It's good.
I also included some of my favorite esoteric writers like Jan Spiller (her astrology book is by far one of the best and most accurate I've read), Angeles Arrien, Aldous Huxley (who I used to always call Aldo, in affection, with a group of friends who were all fans of his), Terrence McKenna (whose Food of the Gods I'm still halfway through), and The Secret Teachings of All Ages.
Then there are the esoteric scientists, the ones who mix metaphysics, religion, philosophy and spirituality together with science (and sometimes activism). I love that, because I'm fascinated by science (spent a bit of my time in college as astronomy/physics major) and equally fascinated by religion, philosophy, anthropology, the history of spiritual experience in humans and also how fucked-up it has gotten in our world. So when authors can bring those together, like a Ven Diagram that largely overlaps, I'm fascinated squared, you know? Almost nothing is more intriguing to me, and I think this is reflected in some of my authors too (Madeleine L'Engle most notably). So I've included Fritjof Capra, Carl Sagan, Zecharia Sitchin (my verdict's still out on him though, he may just be nuts, I don't know), and Mario Livio.
And there's the political authors, too. And the feminist writers. Activists. Environmental writers. So many authors who overlap in so many of these categories. Two comedians (so far). Two magazines (in which I've been published). A few organizations - Artsmith, where I had my writing residency in March, PNWA, and more. The site for the Orcas Island Writers Festival, happening this fall (come check it out, fellow writers). The Psychedelic Library - you can find some verrrrry interesting literature links on there.
I'm sure there'll be even more to come. They are all worth checking out, so pick your interests and have fun exploring! See how Diana Abu-Jaber's novel Crescent (about Iraqis in America) was banned in Texas. Read about Judith Herman's extensive research into psychological trauma (whether domestic or political). Check out David Cross's hilarity. Get real news with Democracy Now!
I just hope this new link list doesn't put me on some government watch list or something!
Note: A lot of the authors I've listed here are more on the "to read" list than the "already read," but such is the case with any hungry mind, don't you think?
Currently listening:
"Opiate" - Tool - one of my favorite songs ever. Two summers ago, when Tool played at the Gorge, some friends and I asked each other what one Tool song they'd want to hear if they could, and I chose this one. I think it's brilliant in its sarcasm towards organized religion. The music, especially the first few notes, are just perfect. And Maynard sings it sooo convincingly and ominously, like an evil preacher. And of course the title alludes to Karl Marx' quote that religion is the opiate of the masses, which gets points with me right there.
Here are the words:
Opiate
Choices always were a problem for you
What you need is someone strong to guide
Deaf and blind and dumb and born to follow
What you need is someone strong to guide you
Like me, Like me, Like me, Like me
If you want to get your soul to heaven
Trust in me, now don't you judge or question
You are broken now but faith can heal you
Just do everything I tell you to do
Deaf and blind and dumb and born to follow
What you need is someone strong to guide you
Deaf and blind and dumb and born to follow
Let me lay my holy hand upon you
My God's will
Becomes me
And when he speaks
He speaks through me
He has needs
Like I do
We both want
To rape you
Jesus Christ, why don't you come save my life now?
Open my eyes, blind me with your light now
Jesus Christ, why don't you come save my life now?
Open my eyes, blind me with your lies now
If you want to get your soul to heaven
Trust in me and don't you judge or question
You are broken but faith can heal you
Just do everything I tell you to do
But then I sort of went on a rampage. I started adding pages for my favorite bands and authors, and then I wanted to add pages for LOTS of authors, including plenty whose books I haven't finished reading, but who I'm really interested in and who have interesting sites.
You'll notice new blogs like Silver Lining's Adventures in First-Time Home-Buying, StargazerLeo's Samsara, Kalidurga's das Ding an Sich, Tara's Daily Dose of Cynicism, Stephen Kuusisto's Planet of the Blind.
There are also some music pages - the FAQ on that TOOL page answers just about every question you could have about TOOL, well up to 2001 anyway, and the Tori site, Hereinmyhead (named after one of my all-time favorite Tori songs, btw) has such a comprehensive collection of information, especially song lyrics and their variations, and commentaries about them. I also added pages for Fiona Apple and Damien Rice - those two currently dominate my iTunes Top 25 Most Played list, almost exclusively.
And authors, authors, authors and MORE authors. I added a lot of fucking authors, because I love them. A lot of my favorites are here, and there are so many more I would have included, but I got tired and the list got crowded. I added the authors of some of my all-time favorite books, like White Oleander (Janet Fitch), The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd), A Wrinkle in Time and sooo many others (Madeleine L'Engle), Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley), A Language Older Than Words and sooo many others (Derrick Jesnsen, my author crush, and I say that because my crush is on his mind, his writing, his depth, his politics, his philosophies, his insights and his sense of humor), My Ishmael (Daniel Quinn), Brave New Girl (Louisa Luna), The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy - still think this is possibly the best book I've ever read).
I had to include Khaled Hosseini, because The Kite Runner is SUCH a compelling book. I can't put it down. There will definitely be a full-length blog post fully loaded with spoiler warnings, once I finish it. It's intense. It makes me think about a lot of different things. I can hardly get through a chapter without crying. It's good.
I also included some of my favorite esoteric writers like Jan Spiller (her astrology book is by far one of the best and most accurate I've read), Angeles Arrien, Aldous Huxley (who I used to always call Aldo, in affection, with a group of friends who were all fans of his), Terrence McKenna (whose Food of the Gods I'm still halfway through), and The Secret Teachings of All Ages.
Then there are the esoteric scientists, the ones who mix metaphysics, religion, philosophy and spirituality together with science (and sometimes activism). I love that, because I'm fascinated by science (spent a bit of my time in college as astronomy/physics major) and equally fascinated by religion, philosophy, anthropology, the history of spiritual experience in humans and also how fucked-up it has gotten in our world. So when authors can bring those together, like a Ven Diagram that largely overlaps, I'm fascinated squared, you know? Almost nothing is more intriguing to me, and I think this is reflected in some of my authors too (Madeleine L'Engle most notably). So I've included Fritjof Capra, Carl Sagan, Zecharia Sitchin (my verdict's still out on him though, he may just be nuts, I don't know), and Mario Livio.
And there's the political authors, too. And the feminist writers. Activists. Environmental writers. So many authors who overlap in so many of these categories. Two comedians (so far). Two magazines (in which I've been published). A few organizations - Artsmith, where I had my writing residency in March, PNWA, and more. The site for the Orcas Island Writers Festival, happening this fall (come check it out, fellow writers). The Psychedelic Library - you can find some verrrrry interesting literature links on there.
I'm sure there'll be even more to come. They are all worth checking out, so pick your interests and have fun exploring! See how Diana Abu-Jaber's novel Crescent (about Iraqis in America) was banned in Texas. Read about Judith Herman's extensive research into psychological trauma (whether domestic or political). Check out David Cross's hilarity. Get real news with Democracy Now!
I just hope this new link list doesn't put me on some government watch list or something!
Note: A lot of the authors I've listed here are more on the "to read" list than the "already read," but such is the case with any hungry mind, don't you think?
Currently listening:
"Opiate" - Tool - one of my favorite songs ever. Two summers ago, when Tool played at the Gorge, some friends and I asked each other what one Tool song they'd want to hear if they could, and I chose this one. I think it's brilliant in its sarcasm towards organized religion. The music, especially the first few notes, are just perfect. And Maynard sings it sooo convincingly and ominously, like an evil preacher. And of course the title alludes to Karl Marx' quote that religion is the opiate of the masses, which gets points with me right there.
Here are the words:
Opiate
Choices always were a problem for you
What you need is someone strong to guide
Deaf and blind and dumb and born to follow
What you need is someone strong to guide you
Like me, Like me, Like me, Like me
If you want to get your soul to heaven
Trust in me, now don't you judge or question
You are broken now but faith can heal you
Just do everything I tell you to do
Deaf and blind and dumb and born to follow
What you need is someone strong to guide you
Deaf and blind and dumb and born to follow
Let me lay my holy hand upon you
My God's will
Becomes me
And when he speaks
He speaks through me
He has needs
Like I do
We both want
To rape you
Jesus Christ, why don't you come save my life now?
Open my eyes, blind me with your light now
Jesus Christ, why don't you come save my life now?
Open my eyes, blind me with your lies now
If you want to get your soul to heaven
Trust in me and don't you judge or question
You are broken but faith can heal you
Just do everything I tell you to do
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
I have been so ON lately
It's strange because I have felt kind of out of touch lately. I haven't wanted to read tarot for people because I feel sort of detached, disconnected from whatever it is - universal energy, the collective unconscious, cosmic forces, whatever deeper, nonverbal thing I usually tap into while reading cards. I feel almost out of touch w/myself. I know I'm coming out of it, but it's still there, residually.
So I feel off, inaccurate, scattered and out of touch when it comes to things like tarot, but give me movies and TV and I am ON IT, figuring out all the plot twists way ahead of time. The other weekend, a friend and I went to see 21, which is based on a true story about some MIT kids who counted cards. I liked the movie a lot, it was a great story, and I happen to really love numbers, and also anything about geniuses. I mean, that's a huge part of why I love House. So I was really fascinated by the whole concept of counting cards, kinda wanted to learn how to do it just to see if I could, if I have the mental capacity to be able to do it. So we're watching the movie and I kept leaning over and telling my friend what was going to happen. It wasn't a wholly unpredictable movie, so it's not like super impressive, but still. I can't really explain it, I just feel kind of on top of my game, really noticing subtle clues.
And actually, the same thing has been happening with House, which makes me feel really awesome, because that show is really unpredictable in some ways. I mean there are certain formulas the episodes follow, but anything you think you know could just as easily turns around and upside down, and part of why I love it so much is that it's such a smart show, and usually way over my head, at least medically. But when the show first came back for three episodes, starting in late January, I was way ahead of the game for the first one. It's an episode called "It's a Wonderful Life" - it was a Christmas episode, and when House did a Secret Santa, I knew immediately that he was putting his own name in five times. Later, I knew when the patient was lying and what her secret was before House figured it out.
Last night's episode was a doozy. It reminded me of the season 2 finale, called "No Reason," because some of the episode is in hallucinations. That was the case with last night's as well. House is involved in a bus crash and can't remember it, but he knows he saw a symptom of someone in real medical trouble. In true House fashion, when he regains awareness (the beginning of the episode), he's at a strip club! So he spends most of the episode trying to remember who he saw and what the symptom was. He undergoes hypnosis, tries to hold all the people in the ER there by faking a meningitis scare so he can study them, has his team comb through all the files of everyone admitted, tries to reenact the bus scene so to jar his mind, takes alzheimer's meds to help him remember. The whole storyline really appealed to me massively.
But I figured it out waaaaaaaaaaay ahead of time, who it was that he saw. It just clicked into place for me. There was something Wilson (House's best friend) said about someone, and then something he said about the bus driver, who for most of the episode, is the person House thought he saw with a symptom before the crash. That went on for so long I started to think I was wrong with my guess, but I wasn't. This probably won't make sense to anyone who hasn't seen the episode, but oh well. I felt really high on figuring it out, solving the mystery, picking up on the subtle clues.
Still though, if I had to draw a conclusion about all of this, it would be that there are MUCH better uses for my mental abilities than predicting the outcomes of TV shows and movies, and I must be somewhat intellectually bored. It's definitely true. I need more mental stimulation. I remember when Alanis' Jagged Little Pill first came out (wow, second post in a row mentioning that album), I was fourteen, and I just LOVED the line, "All I need now is intellectual intercourse." That's a good way to put it.
One place where I wasn't quite so "on" was reading The Kite Runner. From the first sentence of the book, you know there is an event that changes the main character, Amir, forever. And you get the growing suspicion that this event involves something really bad happening to his friend Hassan, and I was dreading reading on, imagining all sorts of horrible things, and didn't actually "get" what was going to happen until like a paragraph before. In a way, though my guesses were more physically scary (I thought the guy was going to get killed or something), in a way what actually happens in the book is worse. And the aftermath, though more subtle, more small, is even more devastating. What a book. I'm not even close to halfway done yet. It's fucking intense. I'm reading it mostly on break at work and it's hard to read it without crying. I'd definitely recommend it though. It's a great book, just not the easiest on the heart, but sometimes that's good. Really gives you a lot to think about and explore about the human condition.
Currently Listening:
"Accidental Babies" - Damien Rice - funny, when I first heard this song, I hated it. Not like it didn't grab me kinda thing, but like actively disliked it. I thought it was silly, and almost pretentiously intimate. Now, it's one of my favorite songs on 9 Crimes. I love the line, "Does he drive you wild, or just mildly free?" It's an important question, not just about lovers but about life. I want my life to drive me wild, but at the moment, it's a lot more like mildly free. Which means there's a lot to consider and contemplate, which I relish.
So I feel off, inaccurate, scattered and out of touch when it comes to things like tarot, but give me movies and TV and I am ON IT, figuring out all the plot twists way ahead of time. The other weekend, a friend and I went to see 21, which is based on a true story about some MIT kids who counted cards. I liked the movie a lot, it was a great story, and I happen to really love numbers, and also anything about geniuses. I mean, that's a huge part of why I love House. So I was really fascinated by the whole concept of counting cards, kinda wanted to learn how to do it just to see if I could, if I have the mental capacity to be able to do it. So we're watching the movie and I kept leaning over and telling my friend what was going to happen. It wasn't a wholly unpredictable movie, so it's not like super impressive, but still. I can't really explain it, I just feel kind of on top of my game, really noticing subtle clues.
And actually, the same thing has been happening with House, which makes me feel really awesome, because that show is really unpredictable in some ways. I mean there are certain formulas the episodes follow, but anything you think you know could just as easily turns around and upside down, and part of why I love it so much is that it's such a smart show, and usually way over my head, at least medically. But when the show first came back for three episodes, starting in late January, I was way ahead of the game for the first one. It's an episode called "It's a Wonderful Life" - it was a Christmas episode, and when House did a Secret Santa, I knew immediately that he was putting his own name in five times. Later, I knew when the patient was lying and what her secret was before House figured it out.
Last night's episode was a doozy. It reminded me of the season 2 finale, called "No Reason," because some of the episode is in hallucinations. That was the case with last night's as well. House is involved in a bus crash and can't remember it, but he knows he saw a symptom of someone in real medical trouble. In true House fashion, when he regains awareness (the beginning of the episode), he's at a strip club! So he spends most of the episode trying to remember who he saw and what the symptom was. He undergoes hypnosis, tries to hold all the people in the ER there by faking a meningitis scare so he can study them, has his team comb through all the files of everyone admitted, tries to reenact the bus scene so to jar his mind, takes alzheimer's meds to help him remember. The whole storyline really appealed to me massively.
But I figured it out waaaaaaaaaaay ahead of time, who it was that he saw. It just clicked into place for me. There was something Wilson (House's best friend) said about someone, and then something he said about the bus driver, who for most of the episode, is the person House thought he saw with a symptom before the crash. That went on for so long I started to think I was wrong with my guess, but I wasn't. This probably won't make sense to anyone who hasn't seen the episode, but oh well. I felt really high on figuring it out, solving the mystery, picking up on the subtle clues.
Still though, if I had to draw a conclusion about all of this, it would be that there are MUCH better uses for my mental abilities than predicting the outcomes of TV shows and movies, and I must be somewhat intellectually bored. It's definitely true. I need more mental stimulation. I remember when Alanis' Jagged Little Pill first came out (wow, second post in a row mentioning that album), I was fourteen, and I just LOVED the line, "All I need now is intellectual intercourse." That's a good way to put it.
One place where I wasn't quite so "on" was reading The Kite Runner. From the first sentence of the book, you know there is an event that changes the main character, Amir, forever. And you get the growing suspicion that this event involves something really bad happening to his friend Hassan, and I was dreading reading on, imagining all sorts of horrible things, and didn't actually "get" what was going to happen until like a paragraph before. In a way, though my guesses were more physically scary (I thought the guy was going to get killed or something), in a way what actually happens in the book is worse. And the aftermath, though more subtle, more small, is even more devastating. What a book. I'm not even close to halfway done yet. It's fucking intense. I'm reading it mostly on break at work and it's hard to read it without crying. I'd definitely recommend it though. It's a great book, just not the easiest on the heart, but sometimes that's good. Really gives you a lot to think about and explore about the human condition.
Currently Listening:
"Accidental Babies" - Damien Rice - funny, when I first heard this song, I hated it. Not like it didn't grab me kinda thing, but like actively disliked it. I thought it was silly, and almost pretentiously intimate. Now, it's one of my favorite songs on 9 Crimes. I love the line, "Does he drive you wild, or just mildly free?" It's an important question, not just about lovers but about life. I want my life to drive me wild, but at the moment, it's a lot more like mildly free. Which means there's a lot to consider and contemplate, which I relish.
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