The Curious Umbrella

Moving on

2009-01-04T13:12:00.001-05:00

I now have a blog here:

http://curiousumbrella.wordpress.com/

Sorry Blogger! Who knows, maybe some day I shall return.

2008-07-16T14:49:00.001-04:00

Verizon 'accidentally' cancelled my DSL without my permission, for no apparent reason. My bills are all paid automatically and on time. I have spent, literally and without exaggeration, more than six hours on the phone being shuttled from tech support to billing to customer service to, inexplicably, Apple (twice!) and back again. Literally: hours. I watched the unedited Fellowship of the Ring. I made bread. I organized my digital photos by year. All of this while on the phone with people from Verizon, half of whom had accents so thick I couldn't understand them. One of whom hung up on me.

Yesterday when the problem became apparent, they told me that before my service was restored, it had to finish going through the process of being canceled. They gave me "complimentary dial up" (which I'm now responsible for canceling). Gee, thanks. Not that the dial up worked. More calls to tech support. Finally, while on hold, I hung up trying to put the fellow on speakerphone. I'd been pleading for them to expedite the service restoration, and I suppose it finally went through, though the IT people apparently didn't see that. I reset my network preferences and everything finally started back up again, mysteriously.

I am so, so, so aggravated and frustrated and, well, angry! I missed a day and a half of bookselling (though when I mentioned this, they told me technically I'm not 'allowed' to use my DSL for work purposes). I probably went over my alloted minutes on my cell phone.

2008-06-06T10:25:00.002-04:00

When I was thirteen I had a little portable TV on the nightstand next to my bed. The shows I remember watching were Sliders and Frasier and Cheers and maybe that show Coach. I don't remember much about the shows but I remember the feeling of having my *own* TV (I had found it in the trash) was thrilling. Something that was mine (my own) that wholly belonged to me.

I never watched much TV after I left for college, and until Thom moved in and discovered that I had free cable, I still didn't. Now the TV is a pleasant background sound with infrequent bright highlights of funny sound bytes and interesting commercials. When Frasier is on I'm reminded of that first happy thrill of independence. When Thom mutes the sound to scan the channels, the silence bothers me.

2008-05-30T12:30:00.001-04:00

home is the place where they catch you when you fall · 6 June 05

Something in my dreams or sleep at night has me waking up in the morning short of breath and with a racing heart. I can’t recall my dreams, really—something about a man who was very tall, something about kissing girls, but nothing I can remember would warrant this panic that lasts halfway through the day.

Brin tells me that he spent the weekend in Boston with Amanda and Brian, filming a dvd. I sent him a shirt and had him deliver a letter, but it’s not the same. Although I don’t miss the city or the subway or the smells (well, most of the smells) I do miss my old friends badly. I miss the costumes and the talks and the inspiration. I want to go gather them up—Franz and Emily, Meredith, Jack Terricloth and Yula and Amanda (Brian too), not to mention the notorious Peter Hess—and set them up here, in my living room in the woods, and just sit for a while.
I love my friends here, the few close ones I’ve made. I wouldn’t trade them for the world. But it would be so nice and sweet to see some old familiar faces among them, drinking and laughing and singing our lives away, screaming, speeding down the BQE at four in the morning after hours and hours of song.

2008-05-29T10:07:00.001-04:00

Sometimes I'll read an old entry written on the day's same date, years back. Here's one from exactly a year ago today:

· 29 May 07

I picked up Human Growth this weekend at the Q-Mart. It was published in 1950 and written for Junior High students. Here’s one of my favorite pages (click to see it bigger on Flickr):

There’s another great one of sperm marching in formation into a vagina.

Yesterday I made a million foods: Japanese soup, brown rice, daikon radishes, iced rose tea… Momo came over and she was sleepy so I put her to bed and she slept and slept. While she was sleeping I cooked and Thom and I watched The Others and he gave me a haircut and then she woke up and ate the soup.

Later we went to my friend Dawn’s house for a party and I sat in a hammock by a fire and drank bourbon. Then we went home and I read the most boring book ever: All the Pretty Horses. If anyone wants me to keep reading this instead of hurling it into a river and hurling the river into space, now is the time.

Oh yeah! I also saw the third Pirate Movie. It was wonderful and stupid, the way third movies should be.

2008-05-28T21:41:00.000-04:00

Dislike: When someone refers to their male partner as 'the boy'.

2008-05-28T20:22:00.001-04:00

The Lovely Bones: Alice Sebold · 27 September 04

I remembered those summer nights my father spoke of. How the darkness would take forever to come and with it I always hoped for it to cool down. Sometimes, standing at the open window in the front hall, I would feel a breeze, and on that breeze was the music coming from the O’Dwyers’ house. As I listened to Mr. O’Dwyer run through all the Irish ballads he had ever learned, the breeze would begin to smell of earth and air and a mossy scent that meant only one thing: a thunderstorm.

There was a wonderful temporary hush then, as Lindsey sat in her room on the old couch studying, my father sat in his den reading his books, my mother downstairs doing needlepoint or washing up.

I liked to change into a long cotton nightgown and go out onto the back porch, where, as the rain began falling in heavy drops against the roof, breezes came in the screens from all sides and swept my gown against me. It was warm and wonderful and the lightning would come and, a few minutes later, the thunder.

My mother would stand at the open porch door, and, after she said her standard warning, “You’re going to catch your death of cold,” she grew quiet. We both listened together to the rain pour down and the thunder clap and smelled the earth rising to greet us.

“You look invincible,” my mother said one night.

I loved these times, when we seemed to feel the same thing. I turned to her, wrapped in my thin gown, and said:

“I am.”

2008-05-27T23:04:00.002-04:00

and why · 22 December 04

We were sitting on a smelly subway platform somewhere in Brooklyn, and she had just given me a bunch of presents. It might have been Christmas. The presents were in a garish pink shopping bag and inexplicably they were all Hello Kitty-style things- notebooks, paper, pens, etc. The Kitty on the presents wasn’t exactly Hello Kitty. It was one of those weird rip-offs. I could tell she’d been shopping at one of those stores in her neighborhood where none of the items were labeled in English.

I thanked her and we sat together a while in comfortable silence- we’d known each other for eleven years, and loved each other, and we were fine when there was nothing to talk about. We waited for the train and watched other people wait for the train. I wanted to push them all onto the fucking tracks.

After a while she chuckled to herself quietly and I looked over at her. ‘What?’ I asked.

‘Look at that guy over there,’ she said, pointing to a flushed but non-descript businessman checking his watch. ‘His face is all red from drinking all day because he hates his family.’

I marveled at this insight. ‘You’re completely right,” I said, impressed. She nodded sagely and we sat together some more.

Eventually we felt a gust of wind on our faces, and half a minute later the train arrived. We leaped up, clutching our things, and rushed to be first in line. The car doors opened and a wall of people began to trudge out, listlessly leaning against each other like zombies. Suddenly she grabbed my free hand and yanked me forward, grinning and shoving people out of the way. She was looking for two adjacent seats so that we could be next to each other.

The people she jostled jerked out of their stupors to sneer at us. ‘Wait your turn!’ one thirty-something in a suit snarled.

‘I have a penis!’ she shouted, mocking him. She mocked anything that would stand in her way. We flung ourselves into our seats, clutching each other and howling with laughter as the train sped up, taking us forward and away.

2008-05-27T23:00:00.001-04:00

I'm half Jill · 7 February 05

I had another dream with you in it. It’s been a while.
We were… somewhere… and we were talking. You pulled off your shirt so I could see your pale, scrawny ribs and you arched your back. You wanted to show me your new tattoo, you said- a huge piece, that stretched across your ribs and your side. It was black and white and beautifully done: two women, conjoined twins, writhing there on your damp white skin. I peered so closely that I could see individual marks of the needle: tiny black dots, hundreds of thousands of them.

Later I had to leave- it was time to say goodbye. Here, you said, leaning your face in. Give me a kiss. You were so close and I could feel your breath faintly and you turned your head so that I could see your profile and the kiss landed on your cheek: chaste, on the very corner of your mouth, rough stubble under my lips. My blood was thick and my heart was racing and something gasped and quivered in the space between us. To this day I’ve never kissed you. Even in my dreams it can’t happen.

What is a Dinosaur?

2008-05-27T21:34:00.004-04:00

8 May 05

Here are some of the wondrous MadLibs® Sarah and I did last night, while inebriated:

What is a Dinosaur?

Today, we are going to study the lifestyle of huge and gum slicing animals. The word “dinosaur” comes from the Greek word deinos, meaning dehydrated colon and saurus, meaning rattling skull cavity. No one has ever seen a vaginally abrasive dinosaur. We know about them because flying D and Cs called paleontologists found their cirrhotic livers preserved in rocks. Dinosaurs were almost evenly divided between carnivores, who ate alarmingly fractured glass dildoes, and herbivores, who only ate neglected great grandmothers. At one time, there were over 336 different types of these futile beasts roaming the face of the prepubescent androgynous fatty. They ranged in size from those as large as a Tyrannosaurus Henry the Bug-eyed Fish to those as small as a swing used to pound the cervix. Today a dinosaur would be as impossible to find as a decaying condom left in a wallet too long in a haystack.

Proverbially Yours

Although we believe ourselves to be red as a Thai boy’s butt thinkers, most of us really repeat thoughts first expressed by poets, writers, and zebra entrails many years ago. These thoughts are called proverbs. Here are a few covered in mung samples:

1. Behind every farm animal semen is a silver kitten urethra
2. Don’t look a grotesquely swollen horse in the yak placenta
3. Too many cooks donkey punch the nine-year-old owned by child molesters
4. A bird in the ruptured small intestine is worth two in the foreskin
5. Early to bed, early to abort, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and penilely flaccid.
6. Don’t count your triple testicles before they abuse you in the middle of the night.

Virginia

2008-05-27T21:28:00.000-04:00

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

Inundated with flood water.

2008-05-27T21:12:00.003-04:00

Dislike: The term 'community' used to describe people who share a common interest.

I still have dreams about the post-apocalypse.

I want caring about things to be less complicated.

I want to be less complicated.

(But just as smart.)

I don't want things with the veracity I used to but don't feel satisfied, either.

I want to hit my head against the hardwood floor until things are fine.

2008-05-26T22:20:00.002-04:00

Just Imagine Fierce Winds in a Circular Motion

2008-05-24T17:36:00.004-04:00

True: Though I do not necessarily believe in telepathy or ESP in general, I dreamed about the 2005 tsunami two weeks before it happened.

Don't Think I Don't Know What it is.

2008-05-23T10:32:00.000-04:00

Fiddler's Green · 16 November 04

I had the most amazing time and I am sick, sick, sick. It doesn’t matter. I was up drinking $70 scotch. I don’t even like scotch, but after the first four or five shuddering sips, it started to grow on me. I was awake all night listening to extremely well-told stories about Klingons and Transformers, and matted stuffed animals. I couldn’t go to sleep and I couldn’t stop laughing. I didn’t want to. I wanted to talk and laugh and listen all night. I wanted so much.

And there were nights before which held no sleep either. Someone had a collection of heartbreaking artwork, and was very fashionable and intelligent and interesting to boot. We stayed up rambling at each other until seven, when I collapsed, exhausted and out of opinions. I woke up confused, with his jacket over me like a blanket. Blankets. Later he laughed when he found out my name.

There was nothing negative to say. You’re beautiful, they told me. You look like you’re fourteen, they said. How old are you? This artwork is wonderful, they said. They petted my hair and made me tea and let me sleep. And all the excitement burned in me, like a fever, burning my clothes, heating the pillow. It burned me all up inside, burned everything away, and they exclaimed when they put their palms on me. Poor thing, they said. How pale and sick. How small and sweet.

I smiled.

Then it was time to go. The airplane lifted up and away, and things grew smaller and smaller, fainter and fainter. I watched the city recede and I understood how small we are, and how many, and how everything was going to be all right again. Up in the sky I drifted off to sleep, my fever melting the hotel chocolate in my pocket. I drifted off into a dream, foggy and hot and chaotic, which faded quickly as we came closer and closer to landing.

Home again, and lonely, but I know that you will always be there, in my heart and head.

Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota

2008-05-22T20:58:00.000-04:00

The Secret History (2) · 24 April 04

I had never been in a boat in my life. Henry and Camilla went out with me- Henry at the oars, his sleeves rolled to the elbow and his dark jacket on the seat beside him. He had a habit, as I was later to discover, of trailing off into absorbed, didactic, entirely self-contained monologues, about whatever he happened to be interested in at the time- the Catuvellauni, or late Byzantine painting, or headhunting in the Solomon Islands. That day he was talking about Elizabeth and Leicester, I remember: the murdered wife, the royal barge, the queen on a white horse talking to the troops at Tilbury Fort, and Leicester and the Earl of Essex holding the bridle rein… The swish of the oars and the hypnotic thrum of dragonflies blended with his academic monotone. Camilla, flushed and sleepy, trailed her hand in the water. Yellow birch leaves blew from the trees and drifted down to rest on the surface. It was many years later, and far away, when I came across this passage in The Waste Land:

Elizabeth and Leicester
Beating oars
The stern was formed
A gilded shell.
Red and gold
The brisk swell
Rippled both shores
Southwest wind
Carried down stream
The peal of bells
White towers
Weialala leia
Wallala leilala

To Remember:

2008-05-22T20:55:00.000-04:00

My future husband will:

• Dress up on Halloween
• Not be afraid to dance

People Just Like You

2008-05-22T20:53:00.000-04:00

Floating · 16 April 04

I’ve been doing this strange thing lately… I’ve noticed it usually while walking alone, either in a shop or down the street, or while standing in line. My mind will start to wander a bit, as minds will do, but it always seems to drift off to the same thing- which isn’t a thought, specifically, but more of a feeling or an image. I start to imagine that I’m slowly lifting off the ground, lightly and steadily, like a balloon. My feet lift up and I go slowly, lazily twirling off into the sky, light as a feather, spinning happily like an astronaut and smiling down at the world I’ve left behind.

I’m not really sure what this is all about but it’s started to creep into my dreams as well. A couple nights ago I was inspecting the side of a red wooden building in the center a field when off I went, drifting up into the eaves of the building, the white nightgown I was wearing drifting around me like a ghost.

Not that I mind these reveries at all. I have, I think, more than my fair share of nightmares sometimes and these strange thoughts and dreams are a welcome respite. I wonder if this happens to anyone else? It would be interesting to talk about.

Paradoxical Undressing

2008-05-21T17:17:00.000-04:00

The Snow Story · 6 August 04

I’d been living in Georgia and it had been two years since I’d seen snow. Growing up in Pennsylvania, snow was an integral part of my childhood and I loved it- how soft it was, and how white, and how it dampened all the sound so that sometimes you could wake up, and without even looking out the window, you would know it was a snow day. Flushed red cheeks, ugly knit caps and sleds that still had those runners you had to wax, and we’d go sledding down the hill in the graveyard, screeching with joy and terror and trying to avoid all the gravestones.

Georgia was different- it was very beautiful, but it was flat- no hills. No snow, either. Hot, hot humid heat all the time, everything wet and lush and green. It was gorgeous but I missed the snow and eventually I returned to the North and moved to New York.

It was a rough time there for me- I’d never really known I was a country girl until then, but pretty soon it was painfully obvious. There were good times, too- I was seeing a great guy, threre were stores and clubs and shops I’d never dreamed of, and the burritos were great. But I guess somewhere I knew that I still hadn’t found what I needed.

By Autumn I had a job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What a great place to work! I thought, but soon I was going nuts there, too, falling apart a little at the seams.

One evening after work, I walked out onto the steps and it was snowing. Big, wet, flakes, light as air. There was snow everywhere, already three inches deep on the pavement, lit up against the dark sky by the Museum’s spotlights like motes of dust in a sunbeam. The knot inside me loosened a little and I looked up and smiled. Snow! That’s what I’d been missing. Snow.

I noticed that there was this tiny Latina woman who had been staring at me during this little reverie and I turned and smiled back.

‘You look so beautiful with the snow caught in your dark hair,’ she said. Wow, I thought. It’s snowing and someone in New York is being nice to me.

‘Thanks,’ I smiled. ‘You know, this is the first time I’ve seen snow in two years. I missed it so much.’
She laughed. ‘I’m from Argentina. This is the first time I’ve seen snow in my entire life.'

A Fine, Biting Snow Across the Fields

2008-05-21T16:59:00.001-04:00

In lieu of original entries, which I seldom find myself capable of creating, I'll get started by rifling through some colorful pre-medication entries from my website's journal.

I.e.:

May 8, 2005

rayna, here is your happy birthday message:

you are very probably made of up of small dead children who died very happy deaths, but are still very nostalgic for their happy baby lives. you might subsist solely on the hearts and souls and vaginas of seriously hot fifteen year old girls. and i know that when you are an old woman, you will have a cane so you can whack the backs of the knees of school children as they scamper past you on the sidewalk.
congratulations on existing, subsisting, and growing older and closer to your inevitable caning future.
yours,
emilyn.

p.s. this is a picture of you and me in brain’s car on the way to jersey that day that you realized how awesome i was, and that day that i realized that you didn’t need to give me panic attacks anymore because you are superbly awesome (even though they didn’t really subside until like six months ago).

...

And so on. This will prove to be a cattle prod up the tookus of my creativity.