Should have taken acid with you
Touch the stars and the planets too
Should have taken acid with you
Melt our tongues and become ungluedShould have taken acid with you
Take our clothes off in the swimming pool
Should have taken acid with you
Told my parents that I’m staying with you- Neon Indian
I was looking for one of my wax seals this evening and while digging through my box of stationary I stumbled upon a lost relic. A letter, intended for my best friend, was wedged in between stacks of cards and stamps. Though it was unsealed, the envelope had already been addressed and tastefully adorned with puffy cat and heart stickers. I looked at the address. I looked at the return address. The letter was written during college. Five years ago this month. I’m dropping it in the mail for her tomorrow because, hey, half a decade late is better than never.
During college there was a small gang of students that liked to pick on me. They thought I was too melodramatic, too verbose. They couldn’t handle my teenage livejournal entries or the fact that I knitting during lectures. Looking back, I honestly think they were just socially gauche and didn’t have much else to do. I was in a sorority but I was also in the Honors Program which made me a rather strange anomaly, at least in the eyes of the other honors kids. The honors house, where a lot of the students lived, was wedged tactfully in between houses on Frat Row. The juxtaposition was to die for. Though neighbors, the students who pledged Greek and the students who studied Greek weren’t all that friendly toward each other. From my experience I gathered that anomalies may not be well received. Years later I’m over it. Being slightly retarded is part of growing up.
Taking a stroll down memory lane is always a worthwhile endeavor for me. I like to see how I’ve changed and how I’ve stayed the same. Hopefully by now my powers of brevity have increased. I am also proud to report I no longer craft improvisational rap songs at the end of my letters. Wait. Maybe that’s not a good thing.
Below is an excerpt from the letter I found.
3/1/05
Dear Cooper,
It is 2:18 pm and I am sitting in my art history class listening to the professor lecture about Romanticism with a fitting European accent. Typing away on my withered, superannuated ibook I am reminded of a conversation had last week during class.
Boy: brushes by me indifferently before pausing and pretending to care Hey, it’s an old ibook. Haven’t seen one of those in a while.
Jen: giggle. smirk. vomit. Heh. Um. Yea. Represent, right?
So I’m definitely sick. I was in bed all day yesterday struggling to keep my lungs afloat in a wide sea of phlegm. My poor ribs pathetically bobbing in my own bodily fluids as tsunamis of snot crest over the guttural horizon. Ahoy! Land, cartilage . . . BONE STRUCTURE! When sickness and pirates meet and unite as one, pillaging the high seas of bacteria-laden waters. Who could ask for more?
Right now my professor is talking about the 19th century nude. She makes the distinction between the “idealized” nude (e.g. hot babes reclining in oriental shades of desire) and the “realistic” nude (e.g. us flapping around in our target bikinis untanned and munching on yoplait). She makes special note that the idealized nude was permitted and praised but the realistic nude was socially taboo and rejected on the basis of immorality. OH, COME ON. What a bunch of historical BS. We all know the real truth is that no one wanted to look at the fatties. *sniffles* Now I know why we have photoshop.
Ok, so check it. What in the world is a “Viscountess” ? Is that a female count? Cool. Let’s be Viscountesses when we grow up! Like Count Dracula, maybe. Dark vampiric lords of chocolate cereal. Man, I love that cereal. Let’s manufacture sugary breakfast products once we reach our state of Viscountessness.
I need a kllllleeeeennnnnnxx. I’m afraid to leave class though because I’ll ahve to go downstairs to the bathroom and that means I’ll miss part of the lecture. Oh, the dilemma! Not much time to think. Must act quickly. Excersize mental power over sinuses. Play mind tricks on phlegm. Utalize the power of the force when dealing with snot. I can so handle this.
The rest of the letter consists of a rap song I wrote. I will spare you.
Ok. So maybe I was a bit of a spastic student in college. And yes, I had the potential to be infinitely geeky. And sure, I could have laid off on the snot/pirates of the high sea metaphors, BUT, all in all I think I was a pretty rad 18 year old. To all those kids that made fun of me: I AM AWESOMER THAN YOU. That is all I have to say at the moment. Oh, and I’d still consider ”Viscountess” as a plausible future profession. Please contact me if you’d like to endorse my forthcoming line of cereal.
I was at the gym a week or so ago and although I was listening to music, I caught a glimpse of one of the TVs in front of my elliptical. Airing were the last few minutes of some run of the mill Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy and, despite my best efforts to resist, I fell prey to reading the closed captioning. The climactic scene was as follows: Although I am unclear what the plot has been up to this point, Jennifer Aniston is trying to win back Mark Ruffalo. He expresses annoyance with her pleas and says something to the effect of “Don’t try to tell me that you can’t live without me.” He rolls his eyes just waiting for the cliche to slide of her lips, but it doesn’t. Well, not THAT cliche at least. Instead she replies: “It’s not that I can’t live without you, because I can. It’s just that I don’t want to.” Mark Ruffalo leaves, seemingly unmoved by her candor and vulnerability. Minutes later he reappears, stopping her at the elevator, pausing coyly, and then madly kissing her fears away with the reassurance of a life together, forever. They make a joke about having children and the movie ends with them embracing or something equally as unoriginal.
Now I realize this may not appear to be the most likely catalyst for deep thought. but in the middle of my workout I felt like I might spontaneously combust into tears. It doesn’t take much these days to trigger my emotions. Two things resonated in me, though neither of them especially enlightening, both of them were pertinent to my current situation, The first being that I have never met someone I cannot live with out.
People leave. It sucks. You deal. Sure, it’s great to share your life with someone, especially in a romantic role, but hey, I open my own doors, take myself out for solo dinner dates, appreciate my inner and outer strength and beauty, and excel without the affirmation of a partner. Of course I also have an incredible family and spiderweb of supportive friends, so it’s not like I’m pretending I can pull a full out Thoreau and live in the woods without the occasional compliment or lipgloss. I definitely need compliments. And lipgloss. That being said, it’s still empowering to get out of a relationship and realize you don’t have to mope around all day in a puddle of un productivity.
But the second poignant truth Jennifer Aniston’s performance honed in on is that, unfortunately, the world is not overflowing with maleable Mark Ruffalos. Meaning sometimes, or most of the time, you can run Jennifer’s heartfelt lines by and still be rejected, no matter what your efforts or intentions. And cut to the scene were there is no sappy response from Mark Ruffalo, just an empty room with an empty girl with an empty heart.
This year I’m coming to terms with the fact what I want sometimes just doesn’t matter.
It’s not that I can’t live without you. I can. It’s just that I don’t want to.
“Although the nature of love is not easy to define, it has intrinsic order, an architecture that can be detected, excavated, and explored. Emotional experience, in all its resplendent complexity, cannot emerge ex vacuo: it must originate in dynamic neural systems humming with physiologic machinations as specific and patterned as they are intricate. Because it is part of the physical universe, love has to be lawful. Like the rest of the world it is governed and described by principles we can discover but cannot change . . . “ – from A General Theory of Love
It’s almost a comforting idea at first– the thought that explaining love is not so different from explaining the laws of motion. Don’t panic! There is, in fact, a perfectly logical explanation behind your broken heart and it involves not only poor judgement on your part, but also Isaac Newton! I dream of the day one of my girlfriends gives me that kind of pep talk before throwing back a six pack of PBR.
Actually, I have tried to implement a more scientific approach to romance in my personal life. I promised myself the youngest I will marry is 25. No ifs ands or buts. Neuroscientists say the brain is not fully matured until that age and, after stumbling upon this information a few years ago there was no turning back for me. I mean, why chance my future bliss armed with nothing more than tangle of immature brain cells?
The next time a man under the age of 25 flirts with me I am going to politely decline his advances:
“Um. Look, I’m really sorry but your frontal lobe just isn’t quite there yet. Call me in three years.”
Principles we can discover but cannot change. When something is illogical and absurd it is fairly easy to accept you can’t control it. Why would you even expect to? BUT, when you have unlocked reason yet still have no control, that is another story.
Welcome to love. And science. Tried and true, but ain’t a thing you can do.
Love shook my heart,
Like the wind on the mountain
Troubling the oak trees.
- sappho
In honor of the month d’amour I will be doing some themed reading and research. Book reviews, poems, recommended music and candid opinions to follow. I’m not ambitious enough to aim for solving age old questions, I just want to think about them a little more. Who knows? By the end of the month my noble aspirations may dwindle down to nothing more than self-indulgent sentimental musings and a wealth of Jane Austen excerpts. My only objective? To engage in metacognition of the heart.
Specifically I’ve been wondering how I can love those I care about more intentionally and express my feelings in a more impacting way. What does it mean to love? Does love really have reasons that reason does not know? Maybe reason needs to man up. Can we control love? Does it even make a difference in the end? Is it really better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?
I want the way I love to be active and alive and confident. Sure, I want to be loved but moreover I’m interested in loving. Practice makes perfect, right? I have a high school diploma, a college degree, and while I’m sure there are some fine fellows out there who would vouch that I have a P.h. D in love . . . that’s not exactly what I’m talking about here. People don’t generally expect to be good at something automatically. If that’s true then why do we think that falling in love (whatever that means) is as simple as a a good RomCom, a bottle of champange and a round of myspace correspondence?
I’ll be 25 this year and I’m at a point in my emotional and intellectual development where I want to start pinning a few things down. I hear it all the time: “But you’re SO young! You have your whole life ahead of you. Stop worrying.” Personally, I find this particular line of logic, not comforting, but enabling and ultimately detrimental. While I do agree that I have time to figure things out I also realize that my time needs to be spent wisely. To all of the other 25 years olds out there I would say this: You are not that young and you most likely do not have your whole life ahead of you, seeing as how the average life expectancy is 66. Start worrying.
An important relationship in my life surprised me recently. The surprise was that it ended. In my romantic upheaval of 2010 I’ve been channelling John Cusack, a la High Fidelity, and this mood has led me to re-read a book my best friend sent me a few years back, Love is a Mix tape, by Rob Sheffield. I’ll write about it in my next post.
Until then I will be drinking a lot.
Not because I’m depressed but because I’m on a seven day liquid diet.
Cheers!
xo,
j.
P.S. Did you get a good look at what’s happening in that painting posted up above?
“And while I sing, now of happiness, now of sorrow,/ Let no bird stir among these trees,/ Nor waves break upon these shores;/ Let the slightest breeze be stilled in its course.” – L’Orfeo Act I, prologue
Why illegally pirate music off the internet when you can just come to the library with your laptop and import all the music you want into itunes?
Today’s spoils:
Public library: 1 Vuze: 0
So I have a crush. A literary crush. I have a literary crush on none other than the fabulous Amy Stewart.
Let me tell you a little bit about Amy: She’s written a book about how remarkable earthworms are (which is on my list to read soon) and she tends her own poisonous garden. These two facts alone should be enough to induce total infatuation. There are enough copies of her books to go around so I don’t mind sharing my literary crush with anyone who’s smitten by this author’s dark and diverse resume.
Amy’s written a few books but her most recent publication is what I’ve been reading. Now I don’t particularly like horror movies or scary stories involving scary people but I do love scary plants.
Her latest book, Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities is beautifully crafted and finely written. It is a compendium of plants that are living life on the edge. Deadly plants. Illegal plants. Plants that would skip class. Plants that are complete and utter bad asses. These plants are dangerous— dangerously sexy.
Forget all the Twilight rage over the mysterious and intoxicating Edward Cullen, the plants in this book will redefine intoxicating as their poisonous daggers pierce your flesh silently and with more grace than any vampire.
The design is splendid and the book features detailed illustrations of the leafy criminals in question. If Edgar Allen Poe and Amy Stewart had a literary love affair this would be the resulting book. Victorian-gothic -meets- backyard- garden- trumps- vampires.
If you need some excitement in your life, look no further my friend.
Watch the book trailer with Amy here:
She even recommends the best places to visit poisonous gardens. Field trip anyone?
Amy and her husband run a bookstore in Eureka, California. If you are ever passing by check it out: http://www.eurekabooksellers.com
who holds your leash?
I have been mildly obsessed with taking photos on my iphone lately. See above evidence. Pete and I went for a walk this afternoon and enjoyed a game of tag followed by a lazy nap in the sun. Piled on top of clustered clovers we reclined and enjoyed the breeze. Under a nearby tree I found a marker I had never noticed before. Today it was highlighted by a bundle of carnations, not yet wilted by the sun. It is nice to know that people care for one another and that remembrance is an art worth practicing. Sincerity is everything.
The past week has been beautiful. Life is bustling. I am hustling. Spring comes not to mock me but to greet me with lilacs and honey. I imagined my heart healing in the absence of love, as an act of perseverance.
Instead, it has become an act of preservation. Love mends, love soothes, and my favorite, love saves.