Last night after some bad comedy (Jeanine Garofilo is smart, funny & pretty but the format was lame, at least for Sue Ellen and I, trapped in the front row. She and 2 smart funny guys (one of them was pretty too) riffed about upcoming summer movies for an hour. 15 bucks?!), I came home and looked more closely at my junior-high pal on FB. She hasn't blocked her photos so I got to see her as a bride, a young mom with 2 little boys, a film maker, actor, and still an animal lover with a whole album of pet pics. (For my 14th birthday she gave me a certificate for a free guinea pig. Rest in Peace, Thistle.) There was even, unbelievable, several scanned pages of a hilarious photo album titled, "This is your life, David Cassidy." She must have made this shortly after I broke it off with her in search of normalcy. While I was seriously crushing on David, occasionally daring to admit it might be hopeless, she and her pals were making fun of the whole scene. I'm afraid she was having a better time.
And then... I dreamed of her! I'm in a junior high class room with the desks pushed together to make rows and I see her in the second row. I go right up to her and say, "Hi Leslie." And then I ask her to dance. We do a slow sort of sweaty galumphing waltz around the room- the same way I danced at the first junior high dance, when we asked Kevin Roberts' older sister for a lesson beforehand and she taught us the box step. She must have been messing with us, right? At the dance, the others quickly abandoned the box step when they saw what was really going on- kids swaying back and forth or gyrating rhythmically, but I hung on desperately to the four steps, terrified, in the equally scared arms of Larry Kosenko. In this dream waltz with Leslie, both of us silver-haired 50-somethings, I apologize. "I was wrong," I say, and go on to explain how I now understand that the weirdos turned out to be artists. I can't tell if she's hearing me but that might be because sound systems in dreams are notoriously unreliable.
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Pushing Send
I did it. I sent a friend request to my high school best friend I haven't talked to in...? A decade? I looked up some of the other "kids" yesterday. The boy I crushed on & off for years, who I kissed beneath the giant tree in his back yard during a ritualized make-out party before 7th grade... has an incurable brain disease which affects his balance and he's making a film about how surfing helps. The girl I idolized still looks fab in a recent pic with her high school sweetheart handsome surfer dude. Yes, I grew up in a beach town, adding to my teen angst as I ducked in the face of the oncoming volleyball. But we also had a fantastic bookstore two blocks from the beach, with a whole 6-sided room for poetry, so that saved me.
Along with those tacoburritos that we used to scarf down at the pier.
Along with those tacoburritos that we used to scarf down at the pier.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
"Talk To Me In A Year," they said.
Tomorrow is my year anniversary of arriving in Portland. Whenever I said how much I love it here, locals would say, "Talk to me in a year." Well I still love it and yes it's still raining. Here is my journal entry from April 12, 2011: (I'd been on the road two months)
In a sleeping bag on a couch in a house full of antique typewriters. And a very loud clock for which I used my earplugs for the first time. An absolutely gorgeous drive up Redwood Hwy yesterday from Eureka to Coos Bay. Gorgeous! What could be better than white indigo waves crashing onto black craggy rocks, beaches strewn with driftwood, curving freshwater streams from rich dusky forests, cute roadside displays of carved bears, the surprise of an elk herd lounging in a bright meadow. Stuff like that. Jim (my aunt's hubbin) just brought me coffee, the dear man.
Today's the day! To Portland! The wandering comes to a close but the adventure continues.
(Within that entry was a flashback to a luscious evening deep in the Mendocino forest when I crashed Serra's friends, Cadence and Mike's wedding, but I'm afraid it can't be shared in this format. That's the difference between a diary and a blog.)
Today I sent 25 pages of teen diary and a really embarrassing unsent letter to Susan. She's going to knock it down to maybe 5 pages. Curious to see what she does.
In a sleeping bag on a couch in a house full of antique typewriters. And a very loud clock for which I used my earplugs for the first time. An absolutely gorgeous drive up Redwood Hwy yesterday from Eureka to Coos Bay. Gorgeous! What could be better than white indigo waves crashing onto black craggy rocks, beaches strewn with driftwood, curving freshwater streams from rich dusky forests, cute roadside displays of carved bears, the surprise of an elk herd lounging in a bright meadow. Stuff like that. Jim (my aunt's hubbin) just brought me coffee, the dear man.
Today's the day! To Portland! The wandering comes to a close but the adventure continues.
(Within that entry was a flashback to a luscious evening deep in the Mendocino forest when I crashed Serra's friends, Cadence and Mike's wedding, but I'm afraid it can't be shared in this format. That's the difference between a diary and a blog.)
Today I sent 25 pages of teen diary and a really embarrassing unsent letter to Susan. She's going to knock it down to maybe 5 pages. Curious to see what she does.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Mom Said I Was Too Serious
I gave away my books on the enneagram when I was in the expressive arts training, learning not to turn to prescribed systems of meaning. But before I did, unfortunately, I photocopied one important page and taped it into my journal. Every once in awhile, I come across it again and say, "oh how true" and copy it again and tape it into my current journal. This just happened, yet again. At the bottom of the photocopy I've written, "How many times am I going to tape this in my journal?"
It's about "Fours," the "tragic romantics" of the enneagram and how they need to "focus on something beyond their feelings and their imaginations." The line that always gets me is about how the "Healthy Four" has "found the courage to act without reference to their feelings and have thus freed themselves from the relentless tug of self-absorption." What could be more self-absorbing than a project which requires reading back over old journals? For a Four, could there be anything worse?
There is, however, a saving grace. Telling people about the Mortified show usually leads to them telling me their story. One woman told me she misses writing, that she hasn't kept a diary since her father read hers twenty years ago. Another told me how she too lost all her friends in a sudden turn of the popular tide. And at my little Easter party here yesterday, Jen brought some of her actual archives from age 12, including the first time she realized something remarkable was happening, worth writing about, and ran to get her special pen. The entry began, "Journal, I have a lot of questions to ask myself," and then went on for several pages describing the behavior of a covey of quail- how they moved and hid and ran and flew. I could hear the marriage of budding consciousness with the reaching for language to describe what was happening out there.
This is actually how expressive arts therapy does work- to ask a question from within, and then, instead of circling endlessly in the interior darkness, to look out, and see what the world has to say, or show.
I don't know how to make this funny. I would like it to be funny. Once, a woman in Storymakers told me, "You don't always have to be funny." I will try an experiment: that's my question for myself- how to make it funny. And I will look out to the world and see what it has to show me. It doesn't hurt that the Bridgetown comedy festival starts Thursday.
What did you want when you were 12? What obsessed you at 15? What were you on the brink of at 17? Do you know? Do you remember? If you have your teen diaries, do they surprise you?
It's about "Fours," the "tragic romantics" of the enneagram and how they need to "focus on something beyond their feelings and their imaginations." The line that always gets me is about how the "Healthy Four" has "found the courage to act without reference to their feelings and have thus freed themselves from the relentless tug of self-absorption." What could be more self-absorbing than a project which requires reading back over old journals? For a Four, could there be anything worse?
There is, however, a saving grace. Telling people about the Mortified show usually leads to them telling me their story. One woman told me she misses writing, that she hasn't kept a diary since her father read hers twenty years ago. Another told me how she too lost all her friends in a sudden turn of the popular tide. And at my little Easter party here yesterday, Jen brought some of her actual archives from age 12, including the first time she realized something remarkable was happening, worth writing about, and ran to get her special pen. The entry began, "Journal, I have a lot of questions to ask myself," and then went on for several pages describing the behavior of a covey of quail- how they moved and hid and ran and flew. I could hear the marriage of budding consciousness with the reaching for language to describe what was happening out there.
This is actually how expressive arts therapy does work- to ask a question from within, and then, instead of circling endlessly in the interior darkness, to look out, and see what the world has to say, or show.
I don't know how to make this funny. I would like it to be funny. Once, a woman in Storymakers told me, "You don't always have to be funny." I will try an experiment: that's my question for myself- how to make it funny. And I will look out to the world and see what it has to show me. It doesn't hurt that the Bridgetown comedy festival starts Thursday.
What did you want when you were 12? What obsessed you at 15? What were you on the brink of at 17? Do you know? Do you remember? If you have your teen diaries, do they surprise you?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)