Caroline No

I'm being the mopiest teenage girl in the world today - staring sulkily out my window at the rain, listening to Fiona Apple, staring at Polaroid photos and sighing emphatically so that my roommate turns to me and says, "Are you okay, Kathee?" And yes, I'm okay, I'm just tired and homesick and burnt out after writing nine papers (with three left on my to-do list and miles and miles to go before I sleep.) It's ridiculous, really, sitting here and getting almost teary-eyed over the train sounds in "Caroline No" and the fuzzy, circular cassette noises off songs from Hot Garden Stomp (one of my favorite Mountain Goats' albums.)

Things have been wonderful and 2008 is likely the best year I've had in a long time, but I'm tired and today I stumbled upon Amy and Shiree watching America's Next Top Model and an anti-drug advert showed a man making a cocoon out of pot and crawling into it and all I could think was, "Gosh, I wish I had a cocoon that I could crawl into."

Last night was sort of rough. I had some scary nightmares, woke up at three and then four, wanting to be somewhere where I felt safe and comfortable and not so alone, my shoulder aching and my throat all tight. I worried that maybe I had been screaming, but Karen was sound asleep. I tried to reason it all out, remind myself, "I do not want to be emotionally manipulative, I would never force people to choose between us," but I still felt sick thinking about the ways in which I am left alone and the things I know, but will not share with anyone.

Everything is complicated and tangled and you can tell I'm a bit of an emotional wreck because every single song I hear makes me feel jittery and a bit sad (like right now, who really gets upset about Matthew Sweet? I think he just makes me a little homesick, mostly for my childhood and mom making brunch on Sunday mornings. And BARR - don't even get me started on BARR right now, it's just too much and too close to home.) On nights like this, I can't stop thinking of Caroline Knapp and that "basic fragility" she writes so well about, or The Virgin Suicides or that first Bonfire Madigan show I saw, the one where there were less than 10 other people there, or I don't know - at least these songs are on shuffle, every time I feel like I'm getting too sad something ridiculous involving Tim Armstrong comes on.

Rush Hour

I'm still discovering lost songs - today I listened to an old ShelfLife compilation called You're Still Young at Heart and I almost started crying when I heard Free Loan Investments' cover of "Rush Hour" by the Shermans and now - because I am too emotional and too easily manipulated by media - I am listening to both versions of the song in a never ending loop, remembering the days of the Moshi Moshi International Pop compilation - a two disc set rescued from the wasteland of Ultrasound's used CDs bin.

It's getting warmer everyday. Today I rode my bike around campus listening to "Geranium" by Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks. I wore my favorite yellow sweater and tried hard not to let school get me down. I only have five more weeks of classes and then - finals! But, more importantly, going home: summer, my own bed, mornings at the Enclave, sun coming in through the windows upstairs. Maybe I'll go to Portland, Boston, somewhere.

On Wednesday, November 14, 2003, I copied down two excerpts from Pitchfork's twee retrospective, "Twee as Fuck," into my journal:

"[Beat Happening's] sound annoyed the hell out of anyone who didn't love them, but that was a bonus. Henry Rollins could posture and yell and (famously) heckle this band, but Calvin could just lean out over his audiences and throw them candy. It was another snotty dare:

What, are you too cool for candy?"

&

"Suddenly there was a scene that made stars out of shy boys who probably got swirlied in high school and idols out of girls who dressed like librarians -- a scene where the pinnacle of style was to be a nice, normal person who made some tiny, lovely thing on your own."

In just a few minutes, it's going to be 11:11, and I am going to make a wish.

Well Well Well

Since 4 o'clock this afternoon, I've been struggling to write a paragraph proposing an independent study for Fall semester. After about 4 hours of work, procrastination, less work, and more procrastination, I finally came up with this:

Through the creation of a self-designed capstone, I hope to continue my study of the issues addressed in the “Cultural Studies and Public Life” thematic sequence that I completed earlier this year. As a pre-service teacher with a focus in Integrated English Language Arts for adolescents, I am particularly interested in studying youth culture and the texts that youths create and consume as a part of their non-formal education. Adolescent girls are the target audience for a wide range of texts including television shows, serial novels, and magazines, and they are also known to produce their own texts (diaries, notes, zines, etc.) I would like to explore the ways in which the “lessons” learned from non-formal education via mainstream and self-created media are aligned, and in conflict, with lessons learned in formal educational settings from “professional” educators and sanctioned texts. I am also interested in issues of non-formal education and power; much is made of the exploitation of adolescent female sexuality by the mainstream media as well as the mainstream media’s emphasis on promoting consumerism. Is the consumption of this media an inherently disempowering act or does regarding mainstream media as disempowering oversimplify and negate the complex process of consumption and production that girls engage in when they choose to read a certain magazine or watch a certain television show? By engaging in a study of adolescent girls and the processes or formal and non-formal education, I hope to further my understanding of the ways in which the traditional, classroom-bound educational experience is informed by a number of complex relationships that are formed and broken outside of the physical plant of the school and how I, as a future educator, can mobilize my understanding of these relationships to facilitate a more relevant, democratic educational experience for my students.

While I worked, I listened to Le Tigre - a band that I loved during high school and then moved away from for reasons I can't entirely pinpoint or put into words. I just know that at some point, it became difficult and painful and, at times, embarrassing to like them and listen to them. But, sitting in the writing center with my headphones on, I've re-discovered some of their beautiful moments. The spoken interlude of "Tres Bien":

because they will try to convince us that we have arrived, that we are already there, that is has happened.
because we need to live in the place where we are truely alive, present, safe, and accounted for.
because we refuse to allow our writing, songs, art, and political history to be suppressed or stolen.
because we refuse to be embaressed about the mistakes and faults and choose to move forward with a political agenda bent on the freedom of all.

And the fierce, life-affirming rhyms of "T.G.I.F." - where, at exactly two minutes and four seconds in, my heart breaks and my whole body begins to tremble and fill up with memories of my ninth grade social studies field trip - the one where I began to realize how much I did not, and never would, belong and how I bit my lips until they bled and listened to this song on repeat through whole states, hanging on desperately to Kathleen's words: We will survive as thieves/We will survive as freaks.



I'm back in Oxford after a week of being home on spring break and I'm falling right back into the complexities of being here - the negotiation of academic well-being with physical and mental well-being, sharing a room with Karen, carefully stepping around complicated situations. Sunday night and Monday were an exercise in liminality. The lines between home and school were messy and blurred. I saw Stephen "World's Cutest Bike Rider" Malkmus at the Southgate House and was so happy that he was playing with Janet "My Favorite SK Drummer" Weiss. I briefly considered dropping out to spend the rest of my life cycling across the country with SM, but decided to go home instead.

My bed was so cold on Monday night. It's not nearly as nice with just one person in it.

Exp. 1

Two posts in one day? UNHEARD OF.

Really, I just wanted to write this down so that I don't forget, I might need to hear it later:

K-

I continue to like the sense of you in all your work. I feel very much the presense of a "real" woman, living her "real" life in this moment. Only outstanding writers achieve this immediacy.

MF

I was blown away when I read this comment from Mary on one of my pieces for class.

Validity is something I have struggled with for my entire life, practically. It began when I was young and it's only gotten worse as I've gotten older. I've desperately sought validation for my ugly feelings and behaviors, for the scary things that I've lived through and the ways that I've responded to them and adjusted myself around them. I want, so often, to be told that I am real and tangible and to connect to other people through my "realness."

I can't remember when I started writing explicitly about validity and realness, but I do know that it comes up in the zine I put out the summer after my freshman year at Miami and it probably came up before that, in diaries and the margins of math notes (crammed in between proofs and graphs and desperate, jagged letters begging for death). And now, now it's all coming through and coming together and just in time for spring.

The Devil's Music

I have this spontaneous, childish feelings that days are today are what save my life over and over again.

It's beautiful out and you can tell we are living on the border of better times because I rode my bike everywhere today listening to "Never Forget, Ever!"by Defiance, OH on repeat:

We held our legs parallel to the ground - urethane cartographers of this small mid-atlantic town.
You were stuck in the mid-west making signs for opposing teams.
Do our lives now live up to all our dreams?
Do we write it in our skin, indelible?
"SK8 or Die," "Fuk'n Go," "Don't Give Up Hope,"
I guess I don't know.
Or maybe we'll assert in binary.
Dear diary, I wonder if words can make things real.
I hope they might.

You can tell things are getting better because I'm wearing sleeveless bike punk t-shirts and the other education majors call me Pippi because I roll my jeans up to reveal an inch or two of striped socks. I'm drinking a Dr Pepper with the window open and I'm looking down on the Western Campus. I've been listening to folk punk all day and feel stupidly hopeful about everything.

This afternoon I read poetry out loud to myself alone in my room and thought about the argument I got into with some other students this morning about sound poetry and whether or not poetry needs to be made up of "real" words. I think that sounds are real and that there's a performative aspect to sound poetry - it may not look like a whole lot on paper, but man, when you hear it...

12341234

It was sunny out today. I ran down two flights of stairs blasting "Josie" and bumped into Mike (who smiled out loud at the sound coming out of my headphones and shook his head at me.) I rode my bike to Asian American Literature, my coat unzipped and no gloves! On the way home, my keys fell out of my pocket and I braked suddenly and perfectly, jumped off my bike and kicked the stand into position in one fluid motion. It was a beautiful moment, not at all embarrassing like it is when I usually drop something.

I got nothing practical accomplished at work, unless you count taking an old diary entry and making it into a poem.

(No Title Yet)

It took me four days to watch Fanny and Alexander.
A half hour here and there,
the tape paused for hours on end--
a woman in a green dress, two slight, blond children hidden in a trunk.
At night, the furniture seemed to rearrange itself.
Four slow days
metered out in thunderstorms
and the death of Amy's goldfish.
We marched downstairs
to bury it under the pink half moon,
our hands immersed in the soft earth and still wet scales.
Ellen said that goldfish can live up to ten years,
can grow bigger than two hands clasped together.
We buried such a small life that night,
hurried to toss it into the ground
so that we would not have to feel so responsible,
so close to death--
there, out on the lawn, out hearts like
split pomegranates. A core of red seeds,
glistening like fish scales, popping
when you hold them too close.
That night we ate pomegranates in the yellow light of Hilary's room.
Hearts on trays, a careful
vivisection. Plucking the seeds from the soft, red core.
A pomegranate as big as
a goldfish as big as
two hands clasped together,
exactly the size of a heart.

There's something about the breaks that doesn't read quite right, but what can you do? Okay, you can revise, but my shoulder aches and really, I just want to stop.

All Hour Cymbals

I'm sitting cross-legged at work, no shoes on and my favorite striped socks damp from the rain. There are puddles all over campus and each sidewalk is a miniature river. I have a pair of beautiful, durable galoshes. They're back in the room, under my bed. My canvas shoes are resting on the heater, hopefully drying out just in time to get soaked again on the walk home.

It's almost midterm and there's so much to be done - I'm working with Pat and Noah (two other adolescent ed. majors) to prepare a thematic unit on the American Dream. It's my job to research literature that deals with social class, so right now I'm reading "A Question of Class" by Dorothy Allison (from: Skin: Talking About Sex, Class & Literature) and am feeling awed and inspired by her language and writing, but saddened by the fact that this piece probably wouldn't fly in a high school curriculum largely because of Allison's frank discussion of lesbian sexuality. But gosh, she can really write:

My people were not remarkable. We were ordinary, but even so we were mythical. We were the they everyone talks about - the ungrateful poor. I grew up trying to run away from the fate that destroyed so many of the people I loved, and having learned the habit of hiding, I found I had also learned to hide from myself. I did not know who I was, only that I did not want to be they, the ones who are destroyed or dismissed to make the "real" people, the important people, feel safer. By the time I understood that I was queer, that habit of hiding was deeply set in me, so deeply that it was not a choice but an instinct. Hide, hide to survive, I thought, knowing that if I told the truth about my life, my family, my sexual desire, my history, I would move over into that unknown territory, the land of they, would never have the chance to name my own life, to understand it or claim it.

That's on pages 13-14 of my edition. Isn't is great? I'm probably going to end up reading this whole book as soon as I'm done with the Knapp memoir that I'm reading (Drinking: A Love Story). I read another memoir/non-fiction book by Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want, my senior year of high school and it helped me through some really dark times. Drinking is beautifully written and, even though I don't drink, there's so much that I connect to in her writing and link to what I drew from Appetites.

[...] we hide from others (and often from ourselves) the truth about our real selves and who we really are when we sit in our offices dashing off memos and producing papers and preparing presentations, about what is really churning beneath the surface.

Beneath my own witty, professional facade were oceans of fear, whole rivers of self-doubt. [...] Inside, I harbored a long list of qualities that made my own skin crawl: a basic fragility; a feeling of hypersensitivity to other peoples' reactions, as though some piece of my soul might crumble if you looked at me the wrong way; a sense of being essentially inferior and unprotected and scared.

Lately I've been going back and forth between feeling academically inspired and immobilized by fear and indecision. I've been obsessively researching graduate programs in my spare time, feeling torn apart by my dreams of relocating to the Pacific Northwest or New England and my roots in Northeastern Ohio and the Midwest. I daydream about the Evergreen State College and Smith College, but am careful not to rule out John Carroll and Oberlin as likely possibilities.

I have tiny cuts all over my hands and I don't know where they came from.I am feeling swept away by Yeasayer's "Red Cave" and my lips are bright red from the cherry pomegranate juice that I'm drinking. I'm hopeful and excited for the future - even if the future doesn't really begin until May 2009.

I'm ready for spring/summer - I can't wait for warm weather, bike rides, circle skirts, panini and cherry-strawberry soda at Kofenya, late night ice cream from UDF, parties on the roof. I'm excited for home and the possibilities it presents (including a car! Though, I'm going to do my absolute best to remain committed to my bike as my main form of transportation.)

Also, and I'm trying to figure out a way to talk about this without feeling conceited, I'm excited about my own writing. I feel like I'm getting better all the time and I'm starting to write about difficult things. My ENG 304 class (Advanced Theories of Composition) is really pushing me forward as a writer and my instructor's feedback has been really encouraging. We have midterm portfolios due in a little less than two weeks and though I haven't done much work on mine, I'm planning on setting some time aside tonight to edit some things and think about what pieces I want to include. I've also been doing a lot of work on a new issue of my zine - it's been a work in progress since the late summer/early fall of 2006, so it's been a long time coming. I'm probably going to print out the rough draft at the writing center tonight and read through it for typos, etc. I'm hoping to buy a gluestick tomorrow and start putting it together this week! My fingers are crossed for having it finished by spring break.