η γραφη, ο λογος

I am a master of prose, she said. But I am an anti-Wordsworth, transcending only transcendence with my flowing paragraphs, composed of inarticulate, inscrutable sentences. Mine are words without worth, rhetoric without logic, lost and alone in the beginning. Mine is an impotente poetry, finite, particular, devoid except to a momentary me.

A Letter to Everyone Sought by Someone Else

My dear,

I have never been much of a songwriter, and often my poetry is bad in the way of angsty adolescence, only without much angst. My mastery of language is in debate, in picking out weaknesses in others, and only on my best days, my own. So I write to you in the language of rhetoric, not to destroy your facade but mine, and to figure out how yours is built and why.

We were friends, but for whatever reason, we have reached a place where that bridge no longer totally connects, and I fear that soon it may break altogether and leave us swimming to shore, seeking less tenuous routes to travel.

That was a lengthy and inscrutable metaphor if ever I wrote one. Basically the truth is this: I like you, maybe more than you like me or even less. I know that I am attracted to you, for what you are, for what you try to be, and for what I think we could be together. This is a case where an expression of feeling has become cliche because it is apt. At the end, you are the person whom I have chosen and I just want to know whether you might choose me. Today I am not seeking forever, I am only seeking today. And maybe tomorrow -- we'll see how it goes.

In all honesty, I am frustrated that nearly everyone wants the same thing, and yet I am having so much difficulty getting it from you. This apparent failure on my part leads to some questions in my weakest parts that my rational self would prefer to disallow: am I inadequate? incapable? simply unattractive? too feminine, too masculine? too expressive? too veiled? too blind to see what is before me or too stupid to understand what it means?

What I fear most of all is that I have somehow left you asking the same questions of yourself, and so instead of our being a greater whole together than our loosed constituent parts, we have made each other individually less whole than before. I fear my ability to feel so much and fear the result of scarring so that I cannot feel at all: for me, for the world, for you.

I have come to this: some part of me is lacking, and some smarter part knows to seek it in you. Help me find it, and I will do my best to find yours in me.

Forever and today,
Me

Hazelnut

I am sitting at a tiny desk covered in computer equipment, in an office with four other slightly more spacious and less sharp desks, in the second story of a building at the top of a hill overlooking Hilo Bay on the Hamakua side of the Wailuku River. All this is lovely. The problem is, there are owners of each of the other four desks, and none of them are in the office today, or for the rest of the week. And so this spacious office is full of many, many machines and me. And the machines, of all sorts, keep beeping, chirping, binging, or otherwise sounding alarms at me. Every ten minutes or so, a watch will beep, a computer bing, a small unidentifiable machine chirp, and none of it with any apparent meaning. Even my computer is tinkling at me. I don't know why. I can only assume aliens are trying to communicate with each other. Or that I just consumed a very tasty soy hot chocolate with hazelnut with a lot more caffeine and sugar in it than I am used to.

Plus sometimes the phone, which is on the other side of the office, will ring once, and then my boss will decide she no longer needs to talk to me. Or she will use the speaker phone and so her voice will come out of the ether at me even though she works two floors down in another building. Which is startling.

Then there's Doug, the rogue office employee, who should not be working in a bureaucracy because he doesn't seem to like rules. He works in the office across the hall and likes to talk to me every time he walks past. He is very friendly, but he gives me the same feeling I always got in elementary school hanging out with the kids who got in trouble a lot -- the feeling that somehow, I am about to be implicated in something without even realizing it.

Also, I have a rollerball mouse which is unergonomic, and annoying.

Too much non-coffee, I think.

harboring

Most people rarely have occasion to read boat names. Usually a profusion of boats indicates a wealthy marina sort of place. In Southern California, such a place is Newport, which has boats with pompous (quasi)American names like the Whispering Wind or the the Santa Bella. In Camargue, they either have semi-drunken French names (Le Vin Rose) or pompous British names (the Jolly Archer). In Hilo, they are about an eighth of the size and have semi-sexual names (the Foolish Pleasure) or names referring to fish, which I suppose goes to show the duel purpose in Hawaii of owning a boat: fishing for ahi and ono, and having lots of sex. Or, if having a nice fishing boat doesn't get you all the girls, some good masturbation fantasies (e.g., the Wet Dream 1).

In any case, I think it may be a sign of dissociative fugue (which is at least a very symphonic sounding name for a disorder) when you begin thinking in forms of public media. As in, "That would make a good blog."

So I'll stop here, and go back to staring at my computer screen.

Vog on the Water

In one of my elementary school social studies textbooks -- second grade, I think -- was a page with three pictures on it. A City, a Town, and a Farm. We were taught new words for these places: urban, suburban, and rural. Looking out my office window to Hilo Bay, the view of the port, hotels, and church, looks very much like the picture of the Town. Less the palm trees. I find this very ironic, since this was a textbook in suburban Indiana, and this is the first time I have ever lived somewhere that I could identify as matching one of those pictures. In suburban Indianapolis, we were technically in a Large City, but all that was around us was housing developments and strip malls, and the occasional, randomly situated corn or wheat or strawberry field. Now I see the water, the steeple, the port, the tableau of multi-colored, tree-covered hills. It's very idyllic, just like that picture in my textbook. I just have to be careful not to look too much in the foreground, with its palm treet, or too much to background, where beyond the tree-y hills, there is a vast (oh, so vast) expanse of ocean, or two far to the south-west, where I can see the vog (volcanic fog) rising from the cindercone at Kilauea.

I also work at the most American of institutions, the US Department of Agriculture. As a federal employee, I help protect my country's ability to farm food for itself, protecting dairy cows and corn from poisoning and locusts. Or rather, since it's the Hawaii field office, protecting orchids and macadamia nuts from rats and liwi.

And then I will go to protect America's right to obesity, at the Coldstone Creamery.

from time to time

I am not what one would call a misanthrope. I generally find people enjoyable and worthwhile, and even when annoying, forgiveable. I am quick to come up with reasons for another's behavior and remember times when I have behaved similarly and thus excuse their actions, childish or rude as they may be.

Today, however, people were just being assholes. I have learned several things today.
1) I never want to run a business where I require employees and my profit margin determines my happiness or my ability to live day to day. I don't want to be the type of person who is willing to be a dick to better her profit margin and assumes that her employees are lazy or otherwise working against her. I learned this from dealing with my manager, Paul. He imagines himself to be an agreeable fellow; he is wrong. He is not horrible, he just needs to learn that shouting is not the best means of garnering quality work from most employees.

2) I don't want children. A moment of childlike delight and cuteness are blotted out by an insatiable preference for ice cream based upon its brightness of color, by whining, by the unmistakable signs of spoiling or more generic bad parenting.

3) If I am in any permanent sort of relationship with someone and he or she acts like an enormous asshole to service employees, he or she is going to be first gently corrected, and failing an apology and immediate amelioration, bitchslapped across the room. Anyone who thinks that another person is paid to take shit from them needs to have an ice pick lodged in his or her left ass cheek, be bound, gagged, and shipped to a third world country to eat maggots off the bodies of dead animals.

Not that I am feeling frustrated by my job or anything.

I did receive a letter in the mail today. I love the postal service (not the band, the actual government corporation). I love post offices and mailboxes and stamps and letters. Writing them, sending them, reading them.

So, send me your address. I'll write you a letter. Let's be penpals.

a date

It is still June 11 here in Hawaii. It's interesting to think that this is one of the last populated places where today is still today. There are not that many people in the world to whom that fact is interesting, but at the moment it strikes me as such.

In apparently unrelated news, the downtown Hilo glassblower has packed up and left shop. I am sad about this. He used to sell a variety of things, over-priced kitschy glass turtles and crap for tourists, and really awesome original jewelry, and I am told some very interesting pipes in his back room. Oddly enough it was this last item that I was searching for last time I went by his shop while I was at the farmer's market, only to find it is closed up and devoid of tiny glass hibiscuses (hibisci?). I was hoping to send souvenirs to some of my pothead friends, sort of by way of saying, I love you, thanks for being friends with me even though I'm not a stoner. So, sad day, I will have to keep hunting. With the number of hippies in Hilo, I'm sure I can find someone.

Speaking of friends, my parents, in their infinite parental wisdom, have noticed my off-kilter mood. Since "I'm fine" was getting me nowhere, I confessed to what I termed "homesickness." Despite the fact that, theoretically, I am at home. But I miss my friends, my social life, my reason to stay up past 10 PM. My mother began talking about how this was a poignant moment, that Mommy and Daddy weren't enough for me anymore, but that this was normal, a good thing, a sign that I am an adult. I spared her the news that Mommy and Daddy hadn't been enough for awhile and retreated to my bedroom to get dressed. I'm glad she thinks this is adulthood, since I feel like a whiny adolescent.

In fitting segue, I'm off to read the teen magazines that have been sitting on my bureau since I last came home. This way, I can find out such vital information as 10 MORE REASONS TO LOVE ORLANDO BLOOM! and Secret Signs He's In Love With You (I assume a generic "He" and not Orlando Bloom.).

Perhaps I will learn something important.
Or at least useful.
Or, not.

friendship with alcoholism

I e-mailed the professor of the philosophy course I took spring of my senior year in high school at the UH. I wanted to see if he and his fiancee, who was also a friend of mine as she taught French at my high school, might want to have coffee to catch up. Turns out they've separated. Well way to start out on an awkward note. I hate it when people I like break up. Except when I don't. (For the in tune listener [reader?] that was a note of irony. For those who are confused, that last note had nothing to do with this story, so don't worry.)

Meanwhile, I probably have to drop the summer courses I was going to take because so far, out of the dozens of applications and resumes, I have one job offer, and she needs me only 20 hours a week, which would fit perfectly around Stats 121 and "Pidgins and Creoles", except that she needs me, you guessed it, at exactly the time those classes are offered. This is especially unfortunate considering that I expect this job to be of the sort where you can sit and do homework all day.

Because I am pathetically lonesome trapped in my beautiful Hawaiian home, the new summer TV shows seem like news in my life. Ha. ABC family has a new show, brought to me by the people who created my favorite genre of TV show: the Canadian teen soap opera. That's right, folks, Degrassi has evolved into Falcoln Beach, a show about college age people who have no life, and yet plenty of drama. How enlightened, how perfect! There's even a bitchy but reforming blonde named Paige to have a love-hate relationship with, and date the hot surfer-type guy. What more could I ask for? Besides some tequila. It would have gone really well with my guacamole tonight.

I miss tequila. I miss my friends who get drunk and do unadvisable but entertaining things while drunk on tequila, and I miss doing it with them.

Emily, Earl, Jose, why are you so far away?

seeking a contented cat

My cat has become very demanding. She mewls insistently for attention, sits in my lap vibrating, and periodically nudges me for greater attention and petting. She wakes me up in the morning by climbing up my body and howling in my face till I touch her. I am not going for some gross innuendo here; this honestly is my cat. Her name is Fiona. She is watching me type this, or rather, sitting disinterestedly, hoping that my paint speckled fingers will quit their venture across my keyboard and pay attention to her, dammit. Instead, I am typing my daily cup of tea and listening to the rain pour down on my backyard jungle. The last two days have been the perfect version of Hilo weather; a morning dawning bright and clear, allowing those who rise about forty-five minutes earlier than myself these days to watch the sun rise out of the ocean. (this doesn't happen that often--usually the east is cloudy at dawn) Then, the afternoon clouds and cools down, a breeze blowing, and then with nightfall comes the rains to dampen and refresh everything. Several nights this week I have been able to see hundreds of stars, even the Milky Way one night. So why, for the love of God, do I wish I were back in Orange County, the land where the sky is the color of the namesaked fruit and you really can number the stars, often even if you cannot count without the use of your fingers and your right arm has been amputated at the elbow and your thumb paralyzed in a stroke? (go back and follow where that question mark comes from)

My outlook has ameliorated some since I have good prospects of obtaining a job (or two) that does not involve any likelihood of suntanning, muscle tone improvement, or weight loss, or the desire to lay down on my scaffold and sleep the sleep of the past caring. Especially good will be if I can sell shoes to boost my commission at Macy's --how bout, "Buy a shoe, save a South African AIDS orphan!" as a tagline?

With all this goodness in sight, I still wish I were back at school. Standing with one hand clutching the roof next to my head and the other swabbing paint onto eaves, receiving $10 an hour to paint a house that I (or at least my stuff) will inhabit in Hawaii with a view of both ocean and mountain, I reminisce on times spent in Tijuana, painting someone else's house (an orphanage to be precise) for no money at all, with only a clothesline and a creek/sewage line for viewing, and missing the latter. You see, dirty jokes become many times funnier when one is imbued with a sense of altruism and a(n un)healthy dose of enclosed paint fumes, and I have acquired, in Orange County, some acquaintances who are quite good with dirty jokes.

It's a pain in the ass to go home and still be homesick.

inscription

I need a new set of pens. I adore my Pilot rollerball pens. in five colors (or four since someone absconded from the Interfaith Center with my black one!), with their delightful liquid ink that permeates the epidermus quite nicely, leaving a nearly indelible, tatoo-like impression. It turns out, however, that using them to emboss one's personal design on one's skin during New Testament or Political Theory classes is not conducive to the extension of pen-life. Somehow, someone intended them to write on paper, and so as they have traveled hundreds of feet across both paper and skin (mine and others'), my beloved pens have begun to lose their longevity. I went to inscribe a book with my name so that I could lend it to someone else, and discovered that my blue pen, though clearly tinkling full of ink, has lost its writing capability. Alas and alack, woe is me.

I painted today. Most of the parts of my body which, when moved excessively, cause pain, do. You can go ahead and follow those clauses again, or this one: I hurt. Badly. and though I scrubbed myself all over with pumice and a brush, I am beflecked like one jaudiced, or else like I have really terrible dandruff of the palms. But the eaves on half of the house my parents will inhabit are primed. And I am, theoretically, $80 richer. I'm not totally sure it was worth it. But I'm going again tomorrow, and probably Friday, and then I think I will give up in hopes of finding a real job. This will give me a long weekend to remove my attractive speckles, sooth my interesting, construction worker type sunburn, and paint my toenails with allowance for sufficient hardening time before my shoe vendress interview.

Because remember: no one likes an unattractive foot. Especially on someone selling one's shoes.

It is most

poetry e motion

Someone once told me that the use of imagery and symbolic language is the refuge of the compositionally incompetent. I shrugged it this aphorism off as the creation of a mind all too fond of order and precise or careful descriptions. However, I recently came to a series of realizations: This blog, a sort of public journal, easier to keep up with because I have an audience other than myself for my immense wit, is also different from a journal: because I know that occasionally other people read it, it's sort of like facebook -- a social interaction without the bother of interacting with anyone socially. It is a refuge for my social incompetence, or laziness. Poetry, on the other hand, is the medum to which I turn when I do not wish to articulate my feelings in precise prose. I tell myself that I am trying to avoid diminishing complex feelings, feelings that are not capturable by normative grammar. Perhaps, though, poetry is simply my refuge when I do not wish to confront my feelings, to encapsulate them in overly didactic or scientifically objective language, when I would rather paint them into a beautiful or dark or fanciful image, veiling myself in the mystery I so angstily aspire to and the angst I so annoyedly reject.

In other news, I watched Pride and Prejudice this evening. The new one, with Kira Knightley. I didn't think anyone could top the BBC version which I love like a crotchety old man. But while less true to the original Jane Austin, it is a beautiful piece of cinematography.

Too bad I'm not a film student. Perhaps I would abandon poetry for a much more, er, accessible art.

PS. poetry: from the French poème, from Old French, from Latin poema, from Greek poima, from poiein, to create.

That's me. A creator. Or a creatress?

three pairs of sandals for my birthday

South Africa, here I come, unemployed or not. I have had no job offers as yet, and I am declaring myself going to South Africa anyway, if I have to beg, borrow, or, well give up Christmas presents. Actually, that's not quite true. No, I am giving up Christmas presents, but I have had some interesting quasi-job offers. I have an interview on D-Day to sell shoes at Macy's. What better place to employ a person with a shoe fetish? I have an offer from a fellow I could swear was Hilo stock except that he's a transplant from East Oakland, to clean rooms at the Wild Ginger Inn in Hilo (not its finest tourist accommodations), beginning June 28th, if I haven't found anything else by then. He says, however, ("Not to be racist or sexist or anything...") that I am too pretty to be a maid. I think that's a compliment. I may also be painting some things. This is the most solid offer yet.

So just to clarify for you, in order to have the opportunity to help feed the hungry, heal the sick, and free the oppressed half way around the world, I am going to be spending a summer either doing manual labor or selling shoes to tourists. I really am not sure which would be more ironic at this point.

I really hope I get a call from Borders. A book fetish is so much more respectable than a shoe fetish.

edible is not equal to reedible

So it is my opinion that no person should be required to contract an influenza virus more than once every two years or so, once a year if for some reason fate decrees it. My relationship with fate must be particularly bad; this is my second flu in almost exactly five weeks. Friday evening, when I belatedly celebrated my birthday with my parents, over Pizza Hut's tasty (meat-free) pizza and my mother's deliciously home made chocolate cream pie, I began to feel a sore throat, which turned into a sore all-over-my-body, which about four Saturday morning turned into vomiting. For those of you who are connoisseurs of vomit, cancer patients and the like, note: if you think you may be going to retaste it, do not eat bell peppers. They do not improve the second time around.

Thus I explain my failure as a nightly blogger. The other parts of my Friday were fairly good. I spent much of the day wandering around Hilo, prostrating myself before anyone who might hire me, and then returned home to be turned away at the door because my mother was wrapping presents. That's okay, I've been turned away at the door because they were having sex; this reason was more beneficial to me. Anyway, I had my dad bring me a bottle of water and went to Kolekole. The surf was up, and I thought of my surfer friends. There were some high school kids who had the day off and were cooking something that smelled marvelous on a bonfire, and I wished both that I ate meat and that I weren't still vaguely afraid of locals. I installed myself among some slightly damp (as everything in Hamakua) tree trunks and read Isabel Allende's latest, Zorro, smelling the smells and watching the waves crash upon the rocks, and listening to the cars trundling across the bridge overhead, hoping it was sturdier than it sounded.

Then I drove home, ate pizza, peppers, and pie, and about nine hours later threw them up. I spent most of Saturday in bed, but I took it as a good sign that by evening food sounded like a good idea.

I had pie for lunch today. I didn't throw it up.

annhilism

I have taken to writing these entries while watching TV. Perhaps I am like those kids in movies who have such big brains that they watch eight channels and play four video games all at once. TV is emotionally drawing, but insufficiently interesting to occupy whatever part of my brain controls my hands. So I sew, bead, write, blog. Blog. It's such an icky word. It sounds like an acronym for a medical procedure that removes nasal polyps or something.

So with all this pointless television watching, and accordingly the realization that my life, for the moment, is kind of purposeless, I have taken to exploring nihilism. Anbd realized that nihilists, like a fair few existentialists, and some philosophers in general, are self-absorbed shitholes. I like philosophy well enough. And I well understand the reasoning for nihilism. Sometimes the world feels like a great wad of nothingness. I get that. Insofar as one's own douchiness keeps one from realizing that there are other people around you, even if you don't feel you have a purpose.

So, I like the X-Men. FX has been showing the first and second ones the past couple of nights. I don't know why I like action movies so. Perhaps because I have given up romance movies. Actually, comedies are my favorite, but oddly enough I don't own any. I just find that they are less worth watching over and over again than, say, I Robot or other sci-fi inspired "earnest" movies as my dad calls them. I also own ridiculous romances, and nineteenth century literature movies like Little Women.

Perhaps because I am one. Ha.

More likely Prided and Prejudiced.

hugh grant is the devil

I have come to a realization. I hate romance movies. Somehow I have reverted to that elementary school state where watching people kiss makes my shoulders try to crawl off my arms. In person, in public, in movies, whatever, I kind of want to go, "Ew. Icky. Get a room." I don't want to watch Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant fall in love. Clearly, something is very very wrong.

Today, I did the domestic thing. I cleaned things. I removed clothes and stuffed animals and a tupperware full of a sticky goo that, until it reached the Hilo climate, was a large pile of Jolly Ranchers that I received for my sixteenth birthday. I cleared my closet of things that I hope that I will continue not to want for awhile. Then, I cooked things. I made muffins for breakfast, both chocolate chip and raisin bran. For lunch I made veggie burgers with English muffin buns, broccoli, and oranges. A perfect iron-vitamin c combination. For dinner my dad bought a roasted chicken, and I made mashed potatoes, roast carrots, and sauteed vegetables, and a pretending-to-be-chicken patty for myself.

I combat boredom by cooking things. I don't know if this is healthy, but clearly, I am a domestic goddess.

a female player

My mother is perplexed and disturbed by my description of a male friend as a slut. In her understanding of the universe, sluts are women. My mother is not a prude; in fact, she wishes she were a sex therapist. She would enjoy nothing more than to teach women that sex is supposed to be enjoyable for them (she still imagines that they [we] need this instruction). But still, somehow, a slut, someone who enjoys sex too much and has it with too many people, is only a woman. Such a condition is not possible for men; apparently they can only be described in the more recently developed term of player, as in one who plays on another's emotions by fooling around with her and someone else at (or approximately) the same time. She asks, "What constitutes a male slut?" I answer, "The same thing that constitutes a female slut. Only with a penis." This just doesn't, as it were, fit her frame.

Really now.

So today I spent most of my afternoon hunting through online classifieds for a job that doesn't require driving to the hospitality-industry-soaked Kona side of the island every day. I spent hours altering and reformatting and printing and sending my resume all over the island. It got me to thinking, there are two jobs that I just don't think would require such a rigorous application process.

1) Hawaii requires no bartending license. All I have to do is be 18 (which I exceed by a year and four days) and prove my knowledge of mixed drinks. Surely my awareness that tequila and Fresca go really well together will satisfy that requirement.

2) Just about anywhere in the world, if there is a minimum requirement to be a stripper, it's to be 18. As mentioned, I qualify. Now I just need to learn to pole dance.

And take off my clothes in public. That will be harder.

I'll let you know how it goes.