Thursday, January 18, 2007

Marzipan

I decided to begin eating my Milka Marzipan bar today, but I wanted to savor every single experience this chocolate bar offers. The crinkle of the foil as I unwrap it, the firm bar itself, caressing its sections with my fingers, that finest-on-earth smell of almonds and chocolate and sugar that makes my mouth water. I could just sit here and smell it forever.... carefully breaking one section off and wrapping the rest for later, holding the chocolate in my mouth as I type, nearly exploding as my saliva rushes up to greet the familiar taste, as the cocoa melts away and dissolves into my mouth. I nibble, wanting to make this moment last as long as I can, pulling away tiny layers of bittersweet chocolate before I reach the marzipan I so long for. I suck at the chocolate, afraid that biting will ruin everything, pulling the whole square into my mouth. Then it happens, the chocolate gives way to marzipan underneath and I close my eyes in ecstasy, carefully chewing that paste which makes my world go 'round.

Umbrella Chasing

Stepping off the bus at the University of Massachusetts's Amherst campus, I had little trouble finding the library, a 26-story brick tower standing above a long, still-unfrozen pond where the Canada geese who have been migrating much slower this winter were flocking, filling the air with their honks as I slipped through the automatic doors and moved to the elevator. A quick glance at the directory told me that I'd want the 11th floor, and I pushed the up button.
"Here they are, two North Americans, a man and a woman just over and just under forty, come to spend their lives in Mexico and already lost as they travel cross-country over the central plateaus." (Harriet Doerr, Stories for Ibarra)
I love libraries, always have. Because UMass's library is so huge, you can get lost much more easily. Another girl got out of the elevator on the same floor as me, but I didn't see her again, although I spent over an hour wandering the rows, carefully pulling the books I had listed, taking them to the desk where I had set up camp, casting off coat, scarf, hat, mittens, and then copied the first lines of each book down into my notebook, taking care not to miss a word, and not to read beyond the sentence I copied.
"As soon as the Ford Touring car crossed the St. Paul city limits on April 20, 1934 ("You Are Leaving St. Paul, Minn., Home of the Inlagd Sill Herring Festival, Please Visit Us Again!"), and passed into the great, square-upon-square expanse of the surrounding farmland, Bena jotted down the odometer reading with the golf pencil she kept in the ashtray: 5,434." (Heidi Julavit, The Mineral Palace)
My mind drifted back to the Girl with the Red Umbrella as I pondered my own first sentence. I knew she'd feature in my book. I knew that she'd come to represent the obsession that would drive my characters, who would start lingering in public spaces each time it rained, searching the crowds for that flash of color, unsure what to do should She appear again.
"A freakishly August-like afternoon in May of that year, Mark Singer stands overheated and spattered with light at the altar of the Episcopal church on Third, makes his vows to Olivia Stavros, turns and lifts the gauzy veil from her face." (David Long, The Falling Boy)
It was sunny today. The first such day in a while. Sunny, and bitterly cold. I spent a lot of time at bus stops, still learning the Wintersession schedule, which is infrequent and less convenient than usual. It makes me think about last year, waiting at the bus stop in the bitter cold, by myself. Maybe that's why I wanted to speak German so much today. I think my first novel should be in Yiddish.
"One afternoon, three years after the beginning of the new century, red dust that was once rich mountain soil quivers in the air." (Hari Kunzru, The Impressionist)
Katie read somewhere that people with attention disorders are more creative because they see the world as many disconnected parts and thus have an easier time combining the pieces to make something new. I've never had trouble focusing. I'm the most rational, logical person I know. I don't enter anything without careful consideration. Hence today's research. Rather than sitting down, letting a few words fly out, calling it the first sentence of my debut novel and being done with it, I decided to see how other authors began their foray into the literary world. I chose books I've never read, books I know nothing about. Many of the sentences intrigued me, offering me a whole story in their implications, laying a framework for what was sure to come.
"Some nights she still goes over every detail, beginning with the weather and proceeding to the drop of blood on the sheet- her quick wish for a man with straight white teeth and red lips- and then his arrival." (Elizabeth Hay, A Student of Weather)
I closed every book after reading the first sentence. Closed it, took it back to the shelf, replaced it among the hundreds of other volumes that I'll never open, never know. Hundreds of roads I'll not explore, hundreds of lives I'll never touch, hundreds of girls walking away from the mailbox, umbrellas swinging in unison with their singular gait.
"We used to stay in bed most of the weekend, Hugo and I, when we lived in the attic of a rambling house with pinnacles and gables, among chestnut trees, on the edge of a park in South London." (Nuala O'Faolain, My Dream of You)
A girl was reshelving books while I was working. I was embarrassed to put books back if she could see me. I feel like it's against library etiquette. They have one special shelf for the books you've picked up, as if you're not smart enough to put the number written on the spine back in order with all the others, as if PS3559.8715 R63 is a code that only the specially trained can decipher, and not simply a label to be put in numerical and alphabetical order with all the rest. When I had a book to replace on the aisle she was working on, I slipped it onto her little cart, hoping she wouldn't notice the sudden addition. I'm certain she did.
"You should have seen us when we had our act together, top of our game, toast of the town, walking and talking miracles and- you'd better believe it- the real American thing." (P. F. Kluge, Biggest Elvis)
My bus came at 5:25. I had hoped to catch the 4:45, but I'd only written down 7 or 8 sentences by that point, and I needed more time. I didn't find the 25 books I'd intended, but was forced to stop at 21. I spent at least 7 minutes waiting at the bus stop. Time for 1 or 2 more sentences. Time to figure out the winning formula. Time to determine if the most interesting titles really do lead to the most unassuming first sentences, with the plain titles pouring life and tension and interest into the space before that first period. Instead, I stood in the cold until I could return to Hampshire, eat dinner, go to Yiddish class, do all the things that continually keep me from writing.
"Mike always teased me about my memory, about how I could go back years and year to what people were wearing on a given occasion, right down to their jewelry or shoes." (Ann Packer, The Dive from Clausen's Pier)
I don't write fiction. I don't write poetry. I don't write plays or movies or stories or any of the other things that spring from the imagination. I write about the things that happen to me and that I cause to happen. I embellish to make it sound well, to make the sentences line up nicely on the page, to please whatever meager aesthetics I possess. Were I ever to write a novel (which would be nice to accomplish), it will have to arise from the things I have known. And so I return to the image that I've been carrying around, red umbrella, mailbox, antiques store, fog, mountains, feverish typing, cold, puddles, sleep, dreams. My first sentence.


"She'd never seen the antiques store on Pleasant Street open before, but, then again, she rarely walked this far from the center of town, and wouldn't have today if the mailman hadn't come so early, forcing her to walk to the post office to mail that letter, which had to arrive by Tuesday or everything would be ruined."

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Out of Order

Last night, I printed off 18 Out of Order signs. Today, I posted them around school, hoping to cause mass social breakdown and general mayhem. Tomorrow, I plan on taking pictures of whatever signs are still up.
Things I put an out of order sign on today:
1. The shower, just before I stepped into it to take a shower. (Later, Jack showed up, saw the sign and said "What! Not the good shower!" He knows that I am doing this prank today, but is still unsure if the shower works or not.)
2. Jack. At dinner, he ate the sign, which I think proves my point.
3. The bus stop.
4. Scotties's post office box.
5. The inside of an elevator at the library, over the button for the first floor. (I put it in when riding up. When I went to return down in the same elevator, someone had moved the sign away from the buttons. I replaced it.)
6. The outside of the other elevator on the third floor.
7. A container of napkins at the Bridge.
8. A bench in the middle of a field.
9. Somebody's bicycle parked outside of the Funky Party House.
10. The mirror in a bathroom inside the Funky Party House.
11. Alex's crock-pot. (It'll probably be a while before he finds this one.)
12. The television in the lounge of hall J3.
13. A sign pointing to the dining hall.
14. The chocolate milk dispenser in the dining hall.
15. Some graffiti on the outside of the dorms about how you shouldn't join the military, which has already been responded to with some paper signs about how graffiti is not cool.
16. An emergency phone.
17. A dish-rack in the bathroom of G2.
18. My hall's balcony door, on the outside coming in.

What Providence, What Divine Intelligence

I'm wrapped up quite thoroughly in the process of Finding Myself and of learning Yiddish these days. I'm also busy trying to have strange adventures to make my friends wonder. In any case, expect a shift in the sorts of things you read here. Also, enjoy a few days worth of back-posts that have just been discovered by leading scholars.

Monday, January 15, 2007

My Rainbow World

I colored a map of the world today, color-coding it based on my feelings towards visiting various places. I'm not very discriminating when it comes to visiting things, really. I'm kind of restless, so, after coloring the few little green (places I've been) bits I could manage (and I'm selfish enough to divide my own country into states but nobody else's), I just kind of scribbled everything in with my yellow marker (places I'd like to visit). Except Brazil. I hate Brazil. And Uruguay is hardly worth my attention, so it's red too. (Everyone should go to Rio at some point, though, so I gave Rio a little purple dot) Then I felt kind of guilty at the monochromatism of the whole thing, so I decided that the very very northern regions of some areas could maybe be red too.

And then I looked at it for a while, and decided that another level of information was in order. Yellow means "it would be cool if I went here at some point," sure, but I decided to add a purple layer for "these are places I am honestly interested in visiting, rather than just having an insatiable need for Newness." And then I started adding stripes to places that are somewhere between yellow and purple, and stripes to places I have been but should go again (I need to make a serious trip to Italy and France because I have only spent a few days in each of these places and there's a whole lot more to see. Ditto to Austria, except I need to see the cities and not the mountains next time I'm there.)

A lot of the purple turned kinda brownish over yellow, so I enhanced it with Adobe Photoshop Image-Editing Software.

Yes, Japan is red too. I don't have anything against Japan, but I have a whole lot against silly Americans who are obsessed with Japan and silly Japanese people who are obsessed with America. So my refusal to visit is sort of a collective "screw you" to those people, as is my general ignoring of Japanese culture.

Purging

Sometimes we hold on to things that we like long past their use to us, just because they make us smile. Today, looking in my sock drawer, I realized that I have a pair of socks that no longer have any heels. These socks are neon green, and each depicts a vampire playing the upright bass, and they have little non-slip music notes on the other side. They're thick, fuzzy on the inside, so warm, which is why they've been worn through- I wore them frequently last year on my long walks to school, their thickness keeping my toes from freezing as I trod through the snow. I've clung to them, certain that, even in their lack of a heel, they are still useful to me. They still make me smile. I feel Hallowe'enly festive when I put them on, although I usually forget to wear them on Hallowe'en.

But they're past their prime. Their time has come. I walked down the hall to the trash can, carefully spread them out from the tight ball I keep them in, and dropped them in, never to be seen again.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

The Girl With the Red Umbrella

Today was a good day to find True Love, and so I set out to gaze at every person I encountered, hoping to find a special connection. For hours, wandering the streets of Northampton, (I was there to buy a birthday cake for Jack) I saw nothing of interest- the same sorts of people I always see, middle-aged parents, young ne'er-do-wells, the elderly, silly college girls. I spent hours wondering, what would I do when I saw my true love- how would I recognize him or her? Would music play? Would s/he glow? Would we make eye contact and be transported to some field of flowers?
But none of this happened. My errands completed, I returned to the bus stop, where I sat and mused on just what to do should I see my true love. Then I got distracted by my Hebrew-English dictionary, which of course always lives in my purse. As I flipped through it, Katie suddenly said "What if it's her?" I looked up. Standing at the mailbox, scant yards from me, She slipped a letter into the box. Well, she fumbled a bit with it, making a face when she finally got the mailbox to work. She was dressed in a long black coat, and, as I watched her, something in me paused. I wasn't sure what. She stepped back from the mailbox. She turned. Swinging by her side, a bright red umbrella. Bright red like the bag I carry. We matched almost, black coats, red accessories. She walked down the street. I followed her with my eyes to the antique store, a store whose hours are "by chance," according to the sign on the door. She went in. I wondered if I had enough time to jump up, run after her, ask her name, her age, anything. She came out of the antique store. She headed to the corner, pressed the button for the pedestrian crossing light. The light changed. She disappeared, red umbrella swinging at her side. I stared down the street until my bus came, my failure sinking in. I boarded the bus. I watched the fog embrace the mountains as I rode home. Once there, I stared out the window until Jack decided it was time to eat cake and watch Rammstein music videos. But the girl with the red umbrella haunted me. Around 11:30, Katie and I headed for Debi's birthday party at Mod 65, where I failed to find any sort of true love, although Megen and I had fun discussing uses for the lounge on the hall we plan to share next year, and I gave Noah my Heartstring and tried to trap Scottie under some fake mistletoe. When we'd had enough of Jello shots and awkward dancing, we I left that mod for the kosher mod, and I eventually walked back to my dorm in the rain, alone, thinking about a red umbrella and a girl who makes cute faces, and how we could have held hands and how she'd giggle when I said something funny. How we'd be extra-delicate about avoiding puddles, and then jump into a really big one just before we reached my door, just for the satisfaction of peeling sopping wet pants off before climbing into a warm bed.