[It is winter in my head and I have nothing to say. Please forgive me, dear readership, for regifting. Where is my old energy, do you know?]
Two-year-old words: 10.4.07
The Elizabethan Herald, opus __This is yet another self-satisfying effort to publish the unpublishable through my guinea pig friends and acquaintances, the words and words of a relatively unknown and unconquerable ego, the celebrity of her own life. As we all know or don’t know, writing for the sake of writing while strung up in the institutes of higher learning is hardly practical (at least in excess) unless we were to eliminate the acts of eating, sleeping, attending class, speaking with strangers, reading of such works as Moby Dick, and the occasional sports event.
And yet, I continue to believe I have a life.
Opus __, the summer report: the adventures and blah days and travels and sofa-meditations of a 21-year old imaginary Pulitzer prize winner who is now swinging in the season of Fall. I have a goal in life. I have several. I have large-scale purpose and direction. Do you? If so, please respond to emarhodes@gmail.com to make an appointment. I’d like to discuss it with you.
Again, the disclaimer: feel free to dismiss this body of thoughts in its entirety. Good excuses might include:
a) having something more important to do
b) upholding your right to selective friendships/relationships
c) meditating on the more exquisite routine of your own life
d) avoiding the unnecessary/necessary questioning of human existence
e) paranoia of student-teacher, married-unmarried, foreign-American, etc. relationships
f) the need to keep the corresponder in the past where she belongs
g) not knowing who on earth is sending this to you anyway
But writing these newsletters, I’ve discovered, is partially for the sake of communication, but mostly it’s a power-struggle. That’s correct. It’s this strange feeling inside, something like what happens when you eat apple crisp on a cold day, that I probably have a larger body of readers than most ho-hum literary journals, and very probably more than the number who’ve actually read BYU faculty doctorate dissertations in the past ten years. Victory!
Having said that, I’ve been meaning to write the summer report. But to canonize seasons of my life is always a little, just a little daunting, and I always spend hours going back and scouring over what I just said and to whom . . . It’s the curse of the self-aware (and if you’ve read
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (highly recommend, btw) you can probably tell that I just read it and it’s influencing my current thought processes heavily), it’s the same paranoia that makes me listen to Red and Yellow, my album, almost every time I give it to someone I know because I wonder what it will sound like to them. What will this newsletter mean to you? Nothing? Everything? Something in between? Is this a total waste of time or the culmination of life to this point?
Anyway, sometimes I get the impression that everyone is so secretive, that we don’t allow ourselves to be a part of each other’s lives for whatever reason when we’re all on the same journey to the ultimate end: death. Just kidding. I’m sure that’s not the ultimate end. What this has to do with my summer, however, I’m not sure except that summer was one of those excess seasons, the clip at the end of the credits that you’re hoping is there but isn’t always, but it was there this time. I’m not sure if you’ve ever had weeks of months or years where you honestly believe your life must be coming to an end—it’s the apocalypse!—nothing could be worse!—and you find yourself sitting in a ruin of ashes as the fire dies over the hill and you wonder what on earth could possibly happen next; what is there but square mile upon square mile of desolate gray? That’s where the summer began. Summer was the afterthought, the rebirth.
“Drama, drama. You don’t want no drama, drama.” –Black Eyed Peas
As far as what I did, although what you do has little to do with how you are—or then, maybe it does?—I didn’t do much on a daily basis. I slept more than one should, I’m sure (which is not making up for any lost sleep during the school year now or ever before, if you like to think that sleeping hours are transferable). I wrote a lot about what I hoped life would become (hope lessons?), I worked enough to pay the rent (which in Provo, is not much), I danced my brains out in the living room a few times, read a little—you know. It was the summer vacation every over-achieving student dreams of as they walk around with forty pounds of textbooks in a side satchel while kids are screaming down water slides at Seven Peaks.
And as far as big things go, which vary from the mundane to the earth-shattering, here’s a run down. And just like Harry Potter books, BYU summers always begin with my birthday, which was spent in transit from Colorado to Utah. This means I went home for a few days, which is where we left off with flower arranging, the new driver’s license, and buying a case of Bacardi Silver before crossing the border and dumping it out in the Utah desert just to say that I bought beer on my twenty-first birthday. “What a waste,” I was told. Meh.
I made my seventh or eighth move within a year (pathetic that I lost track), finally settling in a little condo apartment building south of campus, Hampstead Court. It’s brick with green shutters, small enough to know your neighbors and not feel like you’re trapped in run-down communist housing, but large enough to have access to a relatively active social scene. BYU 57th ward: the next best thing to country clubs, the YMCA, and Alcoholics Anonymous. We’re all about it. And, actually, I am too. I’m part of the “we,” holding fast to this intangible sense of belonging!
Oh, to dream, perchance, to belong!
I drew Paul again for the Christmas drawing. He is impossible to buy for. According to Scroogenomics, there is nothing I can possibly buy for Paul that will be as satisfying as something he would buy for himself. If he really wanted it, he would have bought it himself. Purchasing a gift for him would only work (without losing value in the exchange) if I were in a higher economic sphere and bought something he wanted for himself that he could not afford--like a Ferrari or something. Or a new wardrobe from J. Crew.
So Jack, I'm sorry I didn't finish your painting in Vegas this Christmas. I'm such a failure. I hope you're not jealous that Paul has gotten three paintings in the past year. One day it'll happen. I won't botch it. But the trouble is that I associate you with landscapes and calm colors, and not floating rolling pins or brightly colored ears that are like hallucinations. I'll finish something for you soon that isn't just another kitchen appliance.
