love languages

Tonight I was sitting in the computer lab trying to write my story and this guy came in and sat down at the computer beside me and asked if I could tell him how to type a letter on the computer. So I pulled up Word on his computer and told him to type it in the white area and then push the print button when he was done. He had the letter written down neatly on paper beside him but was having the hardest time typing it. He asked me several more questions like how to start a new paragraph and how to capitalize letters and how to erase, and after a while he was getting so frustrated and only had one line of his letter. So I asked if he'd like it if he dictated it to me and I typed it. At first he said no no I won't bother you. So I thought he just didn't want me to hear the letter, which was perfectly understandable. I told him it wouldn't be a problem, and he siad "well the thing is my daughter wrote me a letter on the computer and I'd just like to send her one back on the computer."
And so I typed up his letter to his 18 year old daughter. I gathered that he hadn't seen her in a long long time and that she didn't really have much to with him. He wrote about how he hoped that she was getting in to all the colleges she wanted to go to. He told her about his new job and how he was learning how to work machines. He said that he thought about her all the time and wished that he could be there for her. He talked about how wonderful her letter had made him feel. It was so tender and raw and beautiful though, and I completely got this feeling that however different I am from everyone around me, it seems like we're all just trying to get by the best we can and love the people that we need to love even if we don't get it right. Everybody has a story. And we are all just fathers trying to learn how to talk to our daughters. I don't know. I was just incredibly moved, and I keep thinking that this is the story that I need to write, the one about that father...or maybe about that daughter, instead of this one.....

Even Ian didn’t know the girl’s name until she spelled it out to him when she applied for a post office account at the West Barnes Bureau de Post and Convenience Shoppe, even though she had passed by almost every morning and afternoon for three weeks. The Biddles most likely knew her name but they never used it, and he didn’t dare ask it, knowing that the Biddles would have all of East Lothian County thinking that he fancied the American over their girls.
The first time he had seen her was on a long rainy afternoon in late May. By then the rumor had circulated that Graham Bell’s au pair had arrived after great anticipation, and so he knew it was her when he saw the two Bell children, Hamish and Lucy, walking along each side of her. She had just picked them up from school, he presumed, and crossed the street in his direction. He felt the sudden, inexplicable urge to busy himself with something, or to crawl into the government issued mail bins and hide. So he slid slowly into that Postal Service half of the store where he could stand behind the glass, excused from being sociable, permitted to speak formally when spoken to through the steel vent in the glass. Truth is, he was and never had been good at talking to people. He felt that whenever he opened his mouth, he was trying to prove himself. It was only the Biddles that he spoke to with any ease, and only because he knew that they weren’t really concerned with anything he had to say.
He heard her footsteps on asphalt outside the door and he started arranging papers and found some sticky notes and began to scribble on them and stick them on various items on the counter: the stapler, the telephone that rarely rang, the corresponding phonebook that he never needed to use, and his Absalom, Absalom that he read during the long breaks between customers and mail pickups.
When she came in he looked up and acknowledged her presence giving a little nod. Hamish and Lucy headed for the sweeties counter, and although normally he would have told them something silly like “look, don’t touch,” he could not imagine doing so in her presence. After all, it was her job to keep them out of trouble, not his.
“Can I help you there?” he asked from behind the glass. The girl looked up and smiled a little.
“Do you have any postcards here?” she replied, looking around as if she had just arrived in a train station and was trying to orient herself. Her accent, the way she pulled out the word hear into two complete syllables, made him uncomfortable because he could not recognize it from any of the movies he had seen or the Simpsons or Friends. Postcards, he thought to himself, why would I have postcards? Who the hell wants to send postcards from the middle of a cow pasture.
“Afraid not,” he said. He waited for her to say “thanks anyway” and take the kids and leave, but she just stood there. Reluctantly, he moved into the shop half, noticing that she had no letter to mail.
“Hamish, Lucy, don’t touch the candy, please!” she said, picking up the Lothian Gazette, which she must have been getting for Graham, for it was made up mainly of classifieds for old fishing boats and livestock and not much else. The sound of the word “candy” made him cringe. Candy was the name of the neighbor hood slut in his mother’s daytime drama shows.
“Can we get a sweetie? Dad always gets us a sweetie.” Lucy said, swinging her school pack over her shoulder, knocking a box of chewing gum from the counter. The girl quickle went to pick up the gum, apologizing, flushing. Lucy looked for a minute as if she would cry, but then decided against it. Hamish went to the girl’s side and clung to her trousers leg and stuck his thumb in his mouth so as to disassociate himself with the actions of his sister. She put the paper on the counter and fished in her pocket for a pound. Ian smiled at Hamish
Ian like Hamish Bell more than he liked any of the other kids that he saw on a regular basis. Although Hamish was older than Lucy by over two years, it wasn’t evident, partly because of Lucy’s five going on thirty complex, but mainly because Hamish was what they called “delayed” which made him seem much younger. Antithesis of the perfectly clear and articulate Lucy, he also had a severe speech impediment that made him practically incomprehensible. When he was younger, when Graham and Stella were still together, before the need for au pairs, he would babble along not noticing that no one, with the exception of his mother, could understand him. But since he had started school, Hamish had become aware of the wall between him and others and stopped speaking in public. Ian noticed these things. Hamish and Ian were but two of the same breed.
“No,” she said, taking Hamish’s thumb out of his mouth.
“Why not?” Lucy asked, poking out her lip a little.
“Because I said so.” Ian laughed inside because this was the sort of thing you say without thinking and then realize that you have unconsciously become your parents.
“That’s not a proper reason.”
“Seems proper enough for me,” she said, as Ian handed her the change for the paper. She looked at him again and leaned on the counter, casually. “So, you know where I could find some postcards?” Again Ian didn’t know how to take her accent. It was like a slow waltz, rhythmical, sharp at times, and incredibly patient, as if nothing was or would ever be urgent.
“At the Dunbar Post,” he said, “Or at the Tourism Office down there. They get plenty of folks down from Edinburgh. Its just we don’t have visitors in West Barnes.
“You got one now,” she said, pulling the kids towards the door.
“Guess so,” he said. She opened the door and walked out and Ian just stood there relieved and watched as she disappeared down the cobblestone sidewalk towards Hedderwick Hill Farm, her head, sporting a jet black pixie cut, bobbing up and down with her dance-like stride. She had Hamish by the hand and he practically ran to keep up with her long stride. Evidently still pouting about the sweeties, Lucy lagged behind, stopping completely at times, and then running ahead when they other two got to far ahead for her comfort.
Ian had seen lives pass in front of him before in this manner. He had been sitting behind that counter for more than a decade, longer if you counted the long years of his childhood playing in the mailroom while his father worked with all the fervor that Ian himself would never be able to bring to the job. He had started working part time in the place when he was fifteen and his father was first diagnosed with lung cancer. He went to school in Glasgow for a year but came home when his father passed and took over as postmaster. Since that time he had watched babies turn into teenagers from behind that counter.
And he had seen American girls before, of course, when he was at university and sometimes when he would meet exchange students in the pubs in Edinburgh that his best friend, Kieran had introduced him to. But in the last few years, the night out in the city had grown few and far between. Kieran had, in the course of only three years, settle down in a small blue house in Portobello, gotten married to a Frenchwoman named Danielle, and had two babies, two girls, Olivia and Estelle, whose pictures Ian had pinned to his refrigerator. He was almost thirty now, and he wanted pictures of his own kids, or if not, he at least wanted a life that would convince him that settling down and making a family was undesirable.
He couldn’t comprehend the girl though, couldn’t even think of a way to ask her what her name was, couldn’t understand the way she made him feel unsettled and anxious to be someone different. He knew that their story, if there was to be one at all, would not be a love story for more reasons than he could tell.

Killing the White Man's Indian

I love American Indian Fiction. Finally we are getting to some in my class. Until this point we were reading dime store crap fiction from the 1800s, including (sob) this absolutely bitter, racist, monstrous Mark Twain piece called "Huck and Tom among the Indians." Mark Twain just can't be my hero anymore, this blemish on his record is too big for me to just glance over. Of course we read Last of the Mohicans which was nice and dull. We read some Willa Cather which I thought was really interesting, so much that I wrote a long paper on it in conjuction with a Phillip Deloria article on the formation of the Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls. In the early 20th century there was this identity crisis in America and for a time culture turned towards the indian who was our "authentic" Other-- the man that was in touch with nature, lived simply, and sustained himself with his hands-- at a time when all the real indians had been stripped of any power and herded onto poverty striken reservations. You know the phrase, the only good indian is a dead indian, well, this turned out to be true on many different levels. Anyway, I love it. And I love Geoff Sanborn. No really, I LOVE Geoff Sanborn....a lot. He gets a 9.98. Okay, so he doesn't make me blush like Eric does (and still does), but he's really great anyway.

I'm doing something really special tomorrow. I'm going house-looking. At 1:30 tomorrow. All I know is that it is a blue house with lots of bushes and trees in the front. Trees!!! It's really close to the Black Swan where I play. I'm really excited about the prospect of living in a real community, and more importantly away from the "i'm finally free so I'm gonna be an idiot all the time" thing at Bard. Thinking about it makes me feel more independent, like I'm taking charge of my life, like driving alone on the highway with a destination in mind, or better yet, no destination at all. Of course maybe it will be a shithole and I'll have to keep on looking, but that's okay too. The price is right too. 500 a month rent makes living off campus still cheaper than Bard, but 400 makes a marked difference.
I'm worried about losing my Stafford Loan. I don't what I'll do. That's 5000 dollars a year that I'll have to borrow from someplace else and have to start paying interest immediately. Hopefully that won't happen, but if it does, then I don't know what.
I'm worried about the Double G. I know that you can't expect your grandparents to live forever, but there is something incredibly painful about thinking that those people at the the head of your extended family no longer holding it together. That breaking point where the children become grandparents. Of course, no one in my family is having babies anytime soon unless Shosha's got something up her sleeve, but that's not the point. Mama said over break that I needed to hold on to my time with my grandparents and it made me shut up about not wanting to go over there and visit, but it is true. We think that they will be there forever and that's not how it works, and if we don't realize that now, then it will be too late later on down the road. And those people are more important than we think. Who they are is a part of who we are, because they shaped our parents. And I grieve at the prospect of loss more for my parents. My grandparents are still once removed from me, but Gan-Gan is my mother's mother. Her mother. I don't even want to think about it.

The rain has washed away where my shoes have been

and it does matter. It does. This is not liberating, not at all. I knew I should have gotten that Glow-in-the-Dark Plastic Angel at the nields concert, and I could have put it on my computer, and it wouldn't have crashed. It crashed because I didn't buy that angel even though deep down I knew I needed it. The loss is not as bad as it could have been. Most of the fiction I have in some unedited form somewhere else. THe academic essays are gone. A lot of the essays from Nonfiction class at GS are gone, although if I looked hard enough I might could find early hard copies in my files at home. Most of the poetry was shitty anyway so i don't really care if it got eaten up by cyber space. But there are letters, drafts of emails that were difficult to write. I started a sequence of letters to my daughter when I was 15 where I told her about how it felt to be a teenager, how it felt to be insecure, how it felt to love so much it hurt, how it felt to hurt someone, how it felt to be free. These were the most honest things I had ever put down on paper, so honest that I was afraid to print them out. Maybe I'll never have a daughter, and so it won't be such a loss. And there are other things, self indulgent fiction that I can scarcely mention on this blog much less ever save or print out, things that I worked on with more pleasure than my more serious pieces, silly things with no literary merit, novels that I began when I was 14 where everyone eventually finds true happiness, so much of my fantasy world that is harnessed in my real fiction. I have old drafts on some of these, but a draft is not anything like what it becomes when you've worked on in word by word for years.
So what is to be done? There is still hope, I suppose. I've contacted some computer people. Maybe they can salvage my C-drive or at least the my documents folder. But maybe they can't and I just have to pick myself up off the floor and move on. And maybe it won't matter five years down the line what was lost. Maybe when i start from the drafts it will be ten times better on the second try. But it matters now. And I've gone to my computer several times today and tried again, hoping that maybe the results will be different, and they never are and I just end up crying in frustration. If they somehow manage to save my files then I can get closure and just throw the damn thing against a brick wall and smash it with a sledge hammer...nothing would give me more pleasure, but if it they can't, then those files will just be stuck there, and I'll never be able to take my mind off it. I'll be able to look at my computer and say, there they are, and it will be so frustrating to not be able to reach them.

Sensible people run, but I'm holding out my tongue

Today it snowed, and I almost cried. It shocked me, looking out the window and not seeing the ground again. It was supposed to stay nice forever...But then, I said to myself, "This snow is good for making snow things" and so I made a gathering of snowmen. I started a story today in my Indian Fictions class (HATE HATE HATE) and I'm gonna see if I can try to work on it some tomorrow if I have time. It's in the third person...about a girl named Valerie who finds herself in Scotland one summer scooping shit out of chicken coops and taking care of these two kids, and her relationship with the slightly odd postmaster at the local post office. That idea just came out of the blue...what do I know about scooping shit out of chicken coops and falling in love with postmen? I'm excited. Happy Snow Day....

I will not write about my roommate

So, I'm going to write about something kind and caring...or not

I wrote another song today, and Leah says that it is the best yet, but something is just not speaking to it. It's called Groundswell. In one of the first classes I ever took with Jan, she talked about the concept of the groundswell. A groundswell is that moment when you first realize that you are alive and part of something bigger than yourself. I tried writing a poem about it in that class and it didn't come out right, and so I started writing a song, which has less pressure. And then I realized that I couldn't narrow down to just one groundswell, so I did three. First, I did my first memory of playing on my father's grandmother's walker, then I did singing with Shosha, and finally a moment in Scotland where I realized that I didn't have to redefine myself with every move, that who I am travels with me.
This last one is of particular interest. Something happened to me in Scotland that changed my whole life. I found myself taken out of context and I wasn't really comfortable enough with myself for that not to cause outrageous panic. Who are we when everyone we love, everything we care for, and everything that has changed us and molded us, is across the world? And so I thought of this line that I remembered writing in my journal in Scotland after I came to the answer to this question. "Love knows no nation". I found some teeny bit of truth one day walking up the Coastal Trail, that you make your home inside yourself and you fill it with all the events and people in your life that have brought you comfort and joy, and you take it with you like a turtle. Problem is, I forget that all the time, and I have to sit back and remind myself of that, and work at making it become more real. And now that I think about it, its really not a good idea to harbor bad feelings in my home, so I need to make them go away, let go of bad feelings towards my superficial, inconsiderate, inwardly hostile roommate who happens to go to bed at 12 which is the only reason I live with her instead of sweet, slightly troubled, but kind hearted Tanzina (see! this is easier said than done!), and also let go of the complete hatred I feel towards George Bush and Crew. Hating them does not change anything, and it only makes me feel icky, like there's mold growing under my floorboards.
There are three kinds of people in Buddhism (they have proper names but I can't remember them): Selfish, Dark, and Diluted. The selfish one internalizes everything around them. She panics and worries and fixes things all the time. The Dark one wears lots of black, thinks that nothing is right in the world, has bad feelings towards the character of people, and generally is annoyed with the world around her. The Diluted doesn't know where she is, and doesn't really care. She is generally the happiest of the three. Supposedly everyone can be catogorized into one of these types. I'm afraid I'm spread out in all three, although (OBVIOUSLY!!!!!) I think I'm more a Selfish than anything else.
Speaking of selfish....I set viggo by the hall window so he can wait for me to come back from class and some asshole came upstairs and TOOK HIM! Just took him, as if he was theirs. WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE!!!! (that's my dark side coming out). Fortunately, Hazel saw him in another dorm and took him back. So now, he's not leaving my room. This is why I sometimes feel like Bard is a real shithole (this is the Vulgar coming out in me) because people destroy your igloo and take your Viggos. Just yesterday, I was out by the window playing Twang (that's her name now) and somebody threw a big piece of ice at the window and cracked it. They were drunk or stoned or both and in a big group. It wasn't even somebody I knew. And I wonder, were these people raised by wolves? WHere the hell were their mothers at that crucial stage in life where you learn that you aren't supposed to throw things at windows, or when you learn to not take what isn't yours, or to respect other people's work. My God...

Okay, enough of that. Boots for Maggie (that's us by the way) has a gig on Sunday. BReak a leg us!

I made this thing pink manually

Troubleshoot

You gave me this ring, but you said it wasn't gold,
but by the green on my finger, you think I need to be told
that a love like cheap metal leaves its mark on everything,
on my carpet and my clothes and on this semi-precious ring,

But I'd rather be alone tonight
than out here with you waiting for the fight
cuz you don't really love me,
you just think I'm kinda cute
and my computer's in the corner flashing you better troubleshoot

CHORUS
Troubleshoot, Troubleshoot, Troubleshoot (2X)
If you want the truth, you gotta
Troubleshoot etc

It's the middle of winter and we're kissing on the beach
and that big old sun's looking like a big old peach
and you say long distance works, but only if I'll try
and you'll pay for my ticket and I can just enjoy the ride

But I'd rather be alone tonight
than on this beach with you getting ready for the fight
cuz you don't really love me
you just think I'm kinda cute
and that sun's in the corner flashing you'd better troubleshoot

CHORUS

Well that train to Northampton just ain't worth what it cost
so I can sit and here you tell me about all the things you've lost
so I call up my sister, so she can tell me what to do
and she says baby leavings never easy but you gotta learn to...

CHORUS

And I'd rather be alone tonight
than on this train to you, getting ready for the fight
cuz you don't really love me
you just think I'm kinda cute
and those wheels on the tracks are screaming you better troubleshoot

CHORUS lots of times