and the words of the prophet are written on the subway wall...
Today I had a tiny cavity drilled, and the novocaine shot didn't go in completely so I was able to eat afterwards. I went to a french cafe called The Bread Factory and finished The Stranger over a croissant and then came back for lunch with Harry at a sandwich shop I hadn't known existed. I found the booklist Camille gave me the other day, and I'm happy to have it back--I'd misplaced it for a while, which made me sad.
I'm babysitting for the Harry Potter/Star Wars kids again tonight! I kept thinking about them while Elena and I watched the That '70s Show episode about when Star Wars first came out, in which R2D2 gets made into a vacuum cleaner. Their names are Lissa and Daniel and they're adorable and very easy to manage. I remember when my mom used to ask me what I did with my babysitters and she'd get mad if they'd been reading magazines all day or left me alone for a few hours. One cut my hair once, and it looked horrible. My mom got really angry.
Babysitting is a strange thing in that sense. When I was staffing at a Y camp in Wisconsin, they told us during training that a child is someone's most valuable posession and the most important thing in their lives, so we had to be absolutely certain that no physical or emotional harm of any kind came to them. Isn't it strange, though, to think that people are trusting you with their kids?
After organizing my bookmarks and cleaning the house a bit (Rosa is angry because my dad made us pull all these boxes out in an effort to clean the house up and left a mess behind for her to clean up) and eating cold mac and cheese between the last graf and this one, I've decided that my life is pretty uneventful. And yet it constantly fascinates me. I never find myself bored or uninterested or zombie-ish. I'm decidedly not an existentialist; I appreciate my life for its petty humane emotions and its decidedly pointless ups and downs. I like feeling great one day and shitty the next. I like being in love and everything that goes with it. I like being happy and positive and I'm willing to accept a little depression, too.
Lately I've been really into this appreciate-the-unappreciated kind of thing. I've been reading obscure novels by really famous and really great authors and shopping at places people don't usually like shopping at and listening to bootlegs and vinyls selected at random with my eyes closed. Everyone keeps bugging me to read War and Peace but I really just feel like reading Patti Smith: Early Work and old National Geographic issues. My friend Lauren, mentioned previously, collects magazines. How cool is that? Who the hell collects magazines? I consider telling people I collect jewelry, sunglasses, undeveloped film and used batteries but it just doesn't have the same ring of conviction to it. A psychologically-driven addiction like shopping is not the same as a hobby, and neither is a lazy accumulation.
Come to think of it, I do collect a few things, unwittingly, like old Bradbury cover art and Poe anthologies and Dylan biographies. I save all my concert tickets in a box on my dresser and all my letters in a drawer--does that count? I have every Monty Python's Flying Circus episode and a hell of a lot of vinyls, so I guess I do collect things sometimes.
What I'm talking about is appreciating things, and the feeling it gives you. It feels great and terrible at the same time to play a record that you know nobody appreciates the way you do, or buy a book for a quarter that you've been looking for for years, or find a piece of history, personal or otherwise, that nobody seems to understand but you. You feel like a great person because you understand it, but you're smothered by a kind of sadness at the same time because you know the object isn't appreciated the way it ought to be and it's terribly depressing. Do we associate ourselves with these objects? Is that why they make us sad?
I'm an idealist. I know this. But physical things sometimes symbolize ideals for me. Even clothes and jewelry that nobody seems to want to buy but me--it stands for something. Buying it and wearing it makes me somehow a bit of that thing. Do I put myself in these positions as a way of defining myself? Sometimes I feel like clothing itself affords us cowardice. It gives us another way to be judged other than by our actions and our behavior, and we cling to it.
I know I'm insecure. I'm much less insecure than I used to be, and these days I have a fair number of mornings when I wake up and feel beautiful; is it mere insecurity that drives me to shop more than other people, obsess over these physical trifles?
I know one thing, at least:
Harry appreciates me, and I appreciate him.
We could all be nudist anti-consumers on a commune, and it wouldn't change that.
I'm babysitting for the Harry Potter/Star Wars kids again tonight! I kept thinking about them while Elena and I watched the That '70s Show episode about when Star Wars first came out, in which R2D2 gets made into a vacuum cleaner. Their names are Lissa and Daniel and they're adorable and very easy to manage. I remember when my mom used to ask me what I did with my babysitters and she'd get mad if they'd been reading magazines all day or left me alone for a few hours. One cut my hair once, and it looked horrible. My mom got really angry.
Babysitting is a strange thing in that sense. When I was staffing at a Y camp in Wisconsin, they told us during training that a child is someone's most valuable posession and the most important thing in their lives, so we had to be absolutely certain that no physical or emotional harm of any kind came to them. Isn't it strange, though, to think that people are trusting you with their kids?
After organizing my bookmarks and cleaning the house a bit (Rosa is angry because my dad made us pull all these boxes out in an effort to clean the house up and left a mess behind for her to clean up) and eating cold mac and cheese between the last graf and this one, I've decided that my life is pretty uneventful. And yet it constantly fascinates me. I never find myself bored or uninterested or zombie-ish. I'm decidedly not an existentialist; I appreciate my life for its petty humane emotions and its decidedly pointless ups and downs. I like feeling great one day and shitty the next. I like being in love and everything that goes with it. I like being happy and positive and I'm willing to accept a little depression, too.
Lately I've been really into this appreciate-the-unappreciated kind of thing. I've been reading obscure novels by really famous and really great authors and shopping at places people don't usually like shopping at and listening to bootlegs and vinyls selected at random with my eyes closed. Everyone keeps bugging me to read War and Peace but I really just feel like reading Patti Smith: Early Work and old National Geographic issues. My friend Lauren, mentioned previously, collects magazines. How cool is that? Who the hell collects magazines? I consider telling people I collect jewelry, sunglasses, undeveloped film and used batteries but it just doesn't have the same ring of conviction to it. A psychologically-driven addiction like shopping is not the same as a hobby, and neither is a lazy accumulation.
Come to think of it, I do collect a few things, unwittingly, like old Bradbury cover art and Poe anthologies and Dylan biographies. I save all my concert tickets in a box on my dresser and all my letters in a drawer--does that count? I have every Monty Python's Flying Circus episode and a hell of a lot of vinyls, so I guess I do collect things sometimes.
What I'm talking about is appreciating things, and the feeling it gives you. It feels great and terrible at the same time to play a record that you know nobody appreciates the way you do, or buy a book for a quarter that you've been looking for for years, or find a piece of history, personal or otherwise, that nobody seems to understand but you. You feel like a great person because you understand it, but you're smothered by a kind of sadness at the same time because you know the object isn't appreciated the way it ought to be and it's terribly depressing. Do we associate ourselves with these objects? Is that why they make us sad?
I'm an idealist. I know this. But physical things sometimes symbolize ideals for me. Even clothes and jewelry that nobody seems to want to buy but me--it stands for something. Buying it and wearing it makes me somehow a bit of that thing. Do I put myself in these positions as a way of defining myself? Sometimes I feel like clothing itself affords us cowardice. It gives us another way to be judged other than by our actions and our behavior, and we cling to it.
I know I'm insecure. I'm much less insecure than I used to be, and these days I have a fair number of mornings when I wake up and feel beautiful; is it mere insecurity that drives me to shop more than other people, obsess over these physical trifles?
I know one thing, at least:
Harry appreciates me, and I appreciate him.
We could all be nudist anti-consumers on a commune, and it wouldn't change that.
posted by VVM at 12:16 PM
0 New Ideas
New Ideas:
Post a Comment
<< Home