Aw

Grateful

I just read over my thesis for the first time since school. Gosh, I have so much to be thankful for. I was telling Kaitlin and Patrick today driving to the beach about senior year-- taking a bottle of wine and some music into the art building, unlocking my brushes and canvases, and staying up all night painting; long, long days and nights researching and writing about what I love to research and write about; fulfilling evenings in the CDA doing theatre with my friends, building, memorizing, feeling really luscious and old words on my tongue. It was a series of incredible opportunity after incredible opportunity, mostly paid for by others. So many people put in effort to teach me things--not just professors and directors, but friends and family--and tonight, after a long, beautiful, day at the beach where I've been so heart-burstingly pleased to not be sitting at a desk for eight hours, I am more grateful than ever for those efforts and opportunities. I don't even know how to say it and it seems like it's almost been too long now to thank the people that I need to thank for having made it so.
Wow, though. Y'all. It is 68 degrees outside right now. That is enough to make me cry with happiness. But beyond that (ahh): I slept on the beach pretty much all day and when I wasn't sleeping on the beach I was getting pummeled by warm Atlantic surf or laughing with two really awesome people. While senior year was glorious, this carefree homeworklessness has its advantages. I still feel like I'm rocking in the waves. I love that feeling--like you're riding an elevator sideways.
I think I wanna go back to school though. Fall 2012? That or move to Biarritz and write a manuscript and ride sideways elevators.
Yes.

Henchmen

"[T]hese were...history's henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear--civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify."

- Arundhati Roy

I thought this was a really quick, smart way to say something that I've been thinking and writing about a lot lately.

With the oppressive Chapel Hill heat (heat that I've conveniently avoided the past two summers by ducking out on July and August and going to the utterly temperate Moscow and the tolerably toasty Cambridge, MA) and my thus-unbroken habit of sleeping until 8:06 when I need to be out the door by 8:30 for work, I rarely am able to run in daylight and sub-ninety-degree weather. Every once in a while I get frustrated and feel trapped and run after dusk by myself. I make it two or three miles from my house, confident in my abilities, my body, and my mind. But then it gets darker and I acknowledge that I am fifteen or thirty minutes from absolute safety. As impossible as it is to write it, it is consistently at this point that I think of hearing shots the night that Eve was killed and going to crawl in bed with Emily and trembling. It is at this point that I think of getting twenty messages the next day asking if I, fitting the description of Eve that the DTH put out, was still alive. I think of going on my first idiotic after-dark run that spring and ending up in my brother's basement apartment, crying and shaking because I was so appallingly sad for her and her family and for all of the prejudice her murder would perpetuate, and afraid that I would end up dead, and afraid that I would forever be afraid that I would end up dead.

Running in New York and Moscow were much worse--undoable--because of the way men acted. I will leave it at that.

So I go on these runs because I get in moods where I draw dark lines in my mind between women who are warriors and women who are worriers. I decide to be "progressive" or warrior-like or whatever (it's easy to judge myself as being stupid for this and it's never easy to understand how I end up in the place of feeling so oppressed when I live with so many freedoms). I know in my heart the most fearless women consider the risks of the safest situations, strategize, and protect themselves. That it is my obligation as an intelligent person to pay tribute to the women who have been victimized by acting responsibly, meaning to protect my body and my safety even if it means sacrificing basic rights, like the freedom to travel independently in my own home town.

This, of course, is the quotidian plan. The longer term is muddy. There must be a balance between refusing to let fucked behavioral algorithms and patterns take hold--conceding and consenting to the historical act of men "subdueing" women--and respecting their biological roots, or, as Roy puts it, "primal" and "wholly impersonal" "feelings" felt by men and perpetuated by both sexes.

Kaitlin's finally back from Africa. I rejoice! Yesterday went spent some time together and she told me about a Malawian obstetric surgeon she met through an American doula friend. Her vivid description of him was classic effervescent Kaitlin: hand gestures, her wordsrushedtogether, spiced with Shelby "Ooooh lawd!" But then she spoke about him as a surgeon, saying, "he could do a hysterectomy, he could do a cesarean section, and the respect he had for a woman's body and strength was overwhelmingly attractive." Her tone dropped into one of reverence and respect, matching his cited reverence and respect for women, evidently inspired by a beautiful mother who bore and raised eleven children.

This is where Roy's note about deification comes into play: I think for many men, the best men, the primal henchman was long ago suffocated by a faith/faithfulness objective at work. If we give the opposite sex a reason to respect, revere, and deify, they will. I don't think God exists, but I do have reverence for all sorts of god-like things. What I've deified I have no desire to destroy. Just imagine if those men who have the utterly sexy capacity for a passionate understanding of a woman's body and mind could be apologists. Music could entirely change. The fucked algorithms, even grounded in heredity, could fade.*

I see the pursuit of deification as a way to thwart the destructive impulse as an alternative to being subdued as a way to thwart the destructive impulse. I think many men directly fight the henchmen, and many women (feminists, among others) admirably avoid destruction and any desperate attempts at deification or subduedness. I think both are opportunities born of convenient situations. Honestly, as a young white woman who likes to go running alone in nice weather I have already almost entirely limited my options in preventing destruction (i.e., never being in or feeling danger [proximate destruction]) or subdued behavior (compromising any one of those things that I like and want for myself).

The prescription, then, is taking steps regardless of one's sex towards meriting and being generous with deification and understanding and practicing the avoidance of destruction and subdue-ing. Being an apologist for those that already live with compassion and the bravery to be responsible. And maybe waking up at 7:15.

*If this seems like I professing to be one of these apologists, I must cite that, on the contrary, I watch The Bachelor and have a Weezy Baby station on Pandora because I think they're both fascinating.

Whoops

BTW: Totally failed on my summer reading list. Like... entirely.
I'm reading Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things right now and it's really excellent. It's part achronological vignettes of a big family--lots told through the vast imaginations of children-- and part larger, political portraiture of civil war. The author has a highly stylized way of verbing nouns and nouning verbs and such and plays with captalization. I like that for the most part but I think the character-driven parts would be more successful if they were more pure and stripped of some of the stylization.

Big Apple/Big Happy

A near-perfect weekend in New York City. The MOMA. I saw my first in-person Klimt. In school I designed a set for an imaginary ballet at Memorial Hall based off of Klimt's Hope I and Hope II that won a prize and I was real proud of it I had no idea it was in the MOMA. Scott and I wandered through the throngs and saw the Matisse and Picasso (nearly a whole floor dedicated to each this season). I was really overwhelmed by how crowded it was, by seeing my first Cezanne since studying Woolf and her colors, etc., but I decided to stick it out and see the 4th floor. So silly of me to not know to expect Kandinsky and The Starry Night etc., etc., then all of a sudden there was Hope II with not-too-big-a-crowd.

Delicious.

What Are the Most Important Things

To remember
When you've just moved into a new house?

I need to be more centered here.
I am, by the way, disgustingly happy.

Bewitching!

My friends are so deeply, candidly, humbly talented.

The Basil Plant

Yesterday Jaki and I bought basil plants.
I am going to kill mine.

EDIT: Yep, it died. Good thing my new house has a fantastic herb garden.

Summer Please

So far it's been a lazy, sleepy summer. Full of delicious, fresh, organic foods,* really good company, sleeping in everyday, and running.
No one seems to want to hire me (or anyone else, for that matter) for summer jobs, but I'm not devastated about that, just slowly running out of money. I start my GRE course in about two weeks and I'd really like to have a day job before so I'm not completely mad with foodlessness or shame.
Life after college is strange in that it just extends so far into the future. I kept joking on graduation day when I got my grades back and all was said and done that I didn't have any short term goals anymore. I've made some but they're a little silly and certainly less practical or guided or externally confirmable than academic goals. I have said for that past year that once I graduated I would shift my thinking from goal-driven days to soul-improvement days, being slower and more careful with my time and my decisions. I'm realizing over the past few weeks, though, it's a complicated shift and I feel much more comfortable and centered having short term goals. A vocation. A reason to use my planner. Income. It takes just as much discipline, it seems, to read on my own, to write for myself, to job search every day, to wake up, to relax, to know I'm completely normal and fine for having taken three weeks off.

I move out of Walter this week into my beautiful Carrboro sublet. I have loved this house so much. It's one of the first times I've lived in one place this long since college--I typically move every semester--and it's so peaceful to feel like I have a definite home. We've had such a hilarious, creative, productive year and I am so grateful to have gotten to spend 10 months with my brother. Our friendship has gotten even more awesome I think.
I will miss the theme parties, the circus ceiling, red room. I will miss the clompy footsteps of students running down the hill outside my front door in sandals to catch the bus. There are a bunch of things I won't miss.
I look forward to riding my bike around, going to the Farmer's Market every Saturday, seeing Elaine a billion times a week, Open Eye afternoons. Yes please. Yes.

Oh, and the sun finally came out today. Jumping for joy. Tomorrow I think I'm going to go to Asheville and spend a solid 48 hours by the pool with a book.

*Except for the fact that I'm trying to clean out the pantry before I move and have been using condensed milk (bought in January for snowcream) in my tea. A little strange but ridiculously good. And WWIIish.

Sundries

I'm not really sure about this, but I think doing a bunch of handstands is giving me crazy deltoids. Thanks, dad (!) (?)

My show, Troilus and Cressida, goes up tomorrow! I'm playing the lubber Ajax. Quite a shift from the latest (Lady Macbeth). I think we've done good work. The monsoons have come as they seem to do when one is trying to perform out of doors.
I'm trying to find jobs of various sorts and generally construct a plan of action for the next three to six months. It's a frustrating vocation that I find myself putting off daily; fear of rejection, I'm sure.
I hope to read ten books before my Carrboro sublet ends. Here's my idea so far:
1) The English Patient...May 22 (rereading from freshman year)
2) The Waves...May 29 (revisit in order to try to write a third chapter of my thesis, sort of transitioning it from undergrad- to grad-style work)
3) One Hundred Years of Solitude...June 5
4) Coming Through Slaughter...June 12
5) Ulysses...June 26 (terrified; I'm giving myself two weeks)
6) Bell's Virginia Woolf...July 3 (I'll be reading this all through June if I can be disciplined)
7) A Passage to India...July 10
8) Orlando...July 17
9) Between the Acts...July 24
10) Roger Fry: A Biography...July 31
This is clearly Woolf-laden. Hoping I don't get sick of her. But 18 months in I'm not so that bodes well.
The order is completely random. And the selections. I could probably pick a more doable and varied menu but I want to have it planned now. So here it is!

Vampire Weekend's "Giving Up the Gun" is taking over my life in a fantastic, sunshiny way.

Books and Plays of Note, 2009

I miss that lamp. I left it in the lobby of my New York dorm when I moved away. Will Guzzardi and I raced to pack my too-many boxes into his hatchback to get back nine hours to North Carolina and drove off without it. Bye bye, lamp.

This is the dreadfully and embarrassingly short list of works that I read carefully in 2009. I would like to have read more, but I spent a lot of time reading for school, either for my Modernism and drama history courses in the fall or primary and secondary research for my honors thesis—the novels, letters, and diaries of Virginia Woolf and Woolf criticism and then information about synesthesia, color, and the Bloomsbury group (approximately respectively). I like to keep track of this kind of thing because some of the authors and people that I like did or do the same. I would like to remember what I read and when; it encourages me to develop as a reader. Hopefully my list will be twice as long in 2009 (though now, as of May, it’s even shorter).

Chaucer, The Love Visions†

Jose Saramago, Blindness

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita*

Franz Kafka, The Trial†

Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird*

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Voyeur

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy

Naomi Wallace, One Flea Spare

Patrick Süskind, Perfume*

Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths

Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury*†

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Luigi Pirandello, Henry IV

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Virginia Woolf, The Years

Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own*†

Virginia Woolf, The Waves*

Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

David Kessler, The End of Overeating

Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

Sophocles, Philoctetes

Aeschylus, The Oresteia*

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice†

Donald Barthelme, Snow White

*Indicates something I really enjoyed or something that was deeply affective or significant for me. These are things I might like to talk to you about. Important ones. I could probably say this for all of them, but I’ve tried to only pick a few.

†Indicates a conscious or intelligent rereading for pleasure or a deep analysis for school, possibly of something I read in high school, or something I had previously flown through for a paper.

Oh Glory

Hark! Indulgence. Happy graduation feet are in the future. But I gotta finish writing about some ghosts and merchants first.

Pinksplosion

I painted my room red last summer. This is one of my favorite videos I've ever taken. I like it for its simplicity, ridiculousness, and color.

Fruits of Elective Classes

My most recent painting. Acrylic and loose pigment on canvas, 36"x48"!

Also Worth Remembering

Blast from the Past

"Goin' a Buffalo" credits from Jim Haverkamp on Vimeo.

They Say

Oh, New York:
When am I going to go to you?
Who will I live with?
Will anyone let me be in their play?
(today I was told "sexy and scary" and "regal to a fault")

Will anyone pay me to work in their office?
Will you make me suffer?
Will you bring me joy?
Are you the right place for me to grow up?

The Greatest Compliment I've Ever Received

"Hurry up and make your mark so I can write your biography before I die."
-My grandmother and hero, Nancy P. Coward

NEW

First post! Test post! I need legions of fans.