L'ode

Dear Blog,
You've been in existence for almost three years now and I'm sorry to say it but lately I've been questioning whether or not I want to permit any duration of your life. I feel horrible saying so, but it's true. You have been neglected - much like all other items and living things I have promised my time to - and I feel that this is yet another failure in my long streak of problematic conjecture. For this, dear Blog, I am sorry. I have found two (and only two) long-term relationships that I have not let dwindle, fester, or crack, only one of which I have never wanted out of. These two relationships, with my education and with my closest friend, have almost always received the attention and care they have deserved and have been the foci of my responsibility ellipse, equally placed apart from the center. The problem then is: what resides in the center of this ellipse of responsibility and what have I allowed to fly out of its gravitational bend, and then float away? Blog, I am afraid you are one of those things I have lost sight of.
There may still be hope; don't let me lose you yet. Do not tear or crumple this possible rejection letter and let it find its way into the trash (oh, Blog, I do hope you would recycle!). For in order to have a parameter of gravitational hold, there must be a center to which that gravity pertains. And while this center, to which the foci rest closest to and the ellipse surrounds, should be known, I am not entirely sure how well it is understood. While, too, this center should be me, I have not recently been residing in the center of my responsibility - I have not been my own leading role. This is changing, Blog. Change is coming (or here), so don't lose hope. I am slowly inching closer to the center and to you and maybe my gravity will then be so strong as to restart this relationship. However I need you to be patient.
I hope you can do that for me as you've already done so much.
Just hold tight.
Thanks for understanding,
Kelsi

Just some questions, no big deal.

Why is homework the absolute hardest to commit to when you know you absolutely have to?

What exactly is causing my ADD right now?

How, then, am I in any way considered to be a good student?

What is a "good student?"

Who facilitates the dubbing of excellent studentry?

Are they the same people who elect those in and running for office?

If so, may I have these peoples' addresses?

Would they even listen to me if I asked them for a moment of their time?

These people, would they try to see eye-to-eye with me on issues such as gun-control, gay marriage (and all equal rights, for that matter), immigration, abortion, and the like?

If they refused to see my point of view, how are they then "working for the greater good?"

Would their reason for not approving gay marriage be something related to the sanctity of it and God's will?

When they go to church in the morning, do they pray for their spouses?

Might they consider that those who aren't legally allowed to have a spouse to pray for talk to God about similar things?

Might they consider that those who can't get a safe job because they're illegal immigrants (because they couldn't afford to spend the time or the money required for citizenship) have similar prayers?

Might they consider, even for a moment, that the hospitals are missing important patients, patients in need of assistance, patients without health care to back that assistance, who clasp their hands together, look up, and whimper words of the same sort?

Or do they just pray for the well-being of their family?

And what defines "well-being?"

Is "well-being" money-driven?

It's definitely money-oriented, is it not?

Our country: are we in a state of well-being?

Would someone consider us - the US - to be in a real crisis?

Really, the richest country in the world?

Billions and billions of dollars?

Really?

How can we afford a war then?

And isn't this war pointless?

Then how have we lost over four thousand soldiers already?

Is the government the reason?

Did the man who sent us in lend a personal visit to each mother, each widow, each daughter?

Did he sit there and offer them tissues and company as they wept over the loss of someone they loved more than anything else in this world?

Did he even apologize?

Can he fix it?

I mean, can he really fix it?

Can it even be fixed at all?

I'm scared, because is there even a way out?

Is there?

Is there hope?

A chance for change in this seemingly doomed "empire?"

Will voting help?

Why don't we at least just give it a try?

Can you just vote?

Just go vote... can you do that?

For the couple who can't get married or for the man awaiting an affordable medication for his illness, or the woman being asked for her citizenship papers, or the young girl who just lost her father to a pointless war, for a better, more economical, environmental, more equal life for all citizens of this said "free" nation, can you just please vote?

Will you please vote?

Blends

Coffee is made usually by grinding whole coffee beans and running hot water through the ground remnants, past a filter. Serve hot or cold. Some add milk, or cream, or sugar. Non-fat milk. Half and half. No carb sugar. Anything you want. There are lattes, cappuccinos, macchiatos, americanos. No foam, extra hot, add syrup. It can be as bitter or as sweet as you want it to be, as strong or as weak. Coming from all over the world, coffee differs in taste due to its country of origin; there are people who specialize in coffee diversity—taste, that is.

People mostly worry about the aesthetic (the color, density, or kind) of their coffee before they even give it a try. I know I do. Though the taste is ultimately the important part, the appearance of the liquid (black or brown or tan) is the first factor to be perceived.

Standing in line at a crowded Starbucks is neither pleasurable nor entertaining so I decided to take a quick survey of the room. Any other day, it wouldn’t have been as obvious but it was Christmas, I was high off holiday gaiety, and the world was more beautiful. What I found looking around was that for almost every kind of coffee design, there was a respective person present.

The San Francisco Bay Area is known for its unique diversity. It may be safe to say this block of cities is one of the most diverse areas in the world. Berkeley lends itself to diversity of mind, Oakland to diversity of color, San Francisco to diversity of lifestyle—and the list continues. It’s always been beautiful to me: constantly moving and constantly colorful, issues constantly changing. Try to find one person who looks, thinks, and lives exactly like you do and you’ll fail horribly. The experience of standing in a room with only people looking like you is rare; it’s normal to be in the presence of people who are obviously different (but potentially the same). People who, by their appearance, are perceived by the world in a different way than you are, receive different treatment, and drink different coffee.

The 25th of December and there I waited, in line at Starbucks. The woman at the counter waiting to receive my order stood behind the register with a pleasant look on her face; she didn’t seem annoyed to be working on Christmas Day or overwhelmed by the immense number of people forming a coiling line around the entire shop before her. In her face, her eyes and lips stood out the most. Huge round eyes and thin lips made for the only color on her body and around these features, set on ivory-like skin: a bald head and gauged ears. Recognizing her caused me to look around with more purpose. A tall, large black man stood behind me. Round paperboy hat, in his sixties. Peppery hair and peppery beard. He stood with his legs wide and his hands clasped in front of him below his rounded belly. A strong stance. He held a rolled-up newspaper. I smiled at him more than once.

A white woman in a wheelchair sat by the door, about forty yet never able to help herself, waiting well for her holiday cup.

An Asian man stood with patience for his coffee and for his little boy, pulling on his pant leg, to let off.

Dark Middle Eastern man. Pairs of friends. Man and woman holding hands. Man and man holding hands. Woman and woman holding hands. Children. An obese gentleman waddled through the door. Things I couldn’t see yet knew were present and differed a great deal: belief, religion, wants, needs, incomes.

We all stood in line together, for the sole purpose of coffee.

I couldn’t stop looking around. It was like each person was a bit of my drug and the combination of them promoted the best high possible: humanity. This was so beautiful that I was almost jealous of myself for getting the chance to experience it. How had it been arranged that it was Christmas day and every single type of person, flavor of coffee, was present at the Lakeshore Starbucks branch in Oakland? Did anyone else notice what was at play here?

Had we been chosen by ourselves, our love, or some higher power to take part in The Nativity Scene 2007? Starbucks was the barn and coffee was the child. And every kind of representation of human form was there, gathered around and huddled up from the cold, for the same exact reason. Happy Birthday, Jesus.

And as I moved up in line, only to wait more (this was good: more time to look around), I wondered how anyone could ever be opposed to the collection of lives—of stories—standing in that room. I thought about how Hitler might react, a sheltered white shop owner from Arkansas in the thirties, George W. Bush. How was this ugly? Or revolting? Or dangerous? What compelled thoughts of making the world so homogenous, and how could we possibly benefit from denying the world of color? I got my coffee black. The man behind me ordered a white mocha.

According to their website, Starbucks has “up to 87,000 different drink combinations—all customized for your own individual needs.” Isn’t this why they’re so popular? The fact that Starbucks gives their customers so many different options and so many different blends from all over the world is what makes them so successful. Where else can you order a triple non-fat caramel macchiato with sugar-free syrup? We love our coffee diversity, our blends and our extra milk. We love it that we won’t be judged for how dark we want our coffee.

Consider that Oakland, The Bay Area, where I’m from is like a Starbucks. You have it (or live it) exactly the way you want, no questions asked. And when your drink is ready, you’re defined by your name—not by the density, color, or kind of the caffeine in the cup. I’m proud of where I’m from. I’m proud that I can stand in a room like that and look around and not see mirror reflections of myself. Most of all, I’m proud that I learn from experiences like that and am able to appreciate the beauty in them. Gender, race, color, size, age, disability, gay, straight, wants, needs, families, incomes… all getting their coffee in one, absolute, specific way. But it was coffee nonetheless which makes me think: if coffee is referred to as a “blend,” are people so different?

Contracting the Move

I just got in a huge fight with my dad over nothing. The struggle in my mind was initially rooted by a seven page instruction manual he asked me to print out and has come to a screeching halt by my realization of my very sudden, yet very real, need to begin living on my own. It takes quite a bit of time and energy to make people believe how well of a relationship I have contained with my parents throughout high school so know that I've had an open mouth and an open mind in their regard for the past four years and it has been a constant that when I look back to my treatment of them in my middle school years, I often roll my eyes and turn a specific shade of pink. I am not saying that my treatment of nor attitude towards them is at all similar as it was when I was twelve and seemingly ruled the world or that I am at all the same (I am somewhat similar but let's just move on), the current issues have been triggered by similar bitty anecdotes however are latched on much tighter and grip much harder.

I have come to know and understand myself in the past six or seven months more throughly and rapidly than at any other point in my life so far (I am stressing "so far" because I realize I am still a baby) and I know that this shall continue to happen at many different times and for many different reasons in my life time. This particular growth - no, let's say development - started with a nearly fatal car crash and is being well established by music and education. I am becoming someone who I love, admire, and truly respect in all possible ways and am just coming to the realization that not only is it alright to be different for all those out there, it is completely acceptable to differ from those closest to you. This is my slow incline on my very cluttered path to self-discovery and independence. I don't have to agree with the people I love always, go figure!

It is more than important to me, as an artist and as a writer, to be able to comprehend first what is moving in my head and second what may be poignant in the heads of others. I think it the most amazing talent to be able to practice compassion and forgiveness and though I am not wholly there, I am on my way (and no, I do not need religion to assist me). My parents and I are experiencing right now what might be explained as a preparation of detachment and my mind, I have at least noticed, has rearranged its chemical make-up in order to protect me from extreme homesickness by provoking different emotions within me: maybe I'm reading too much into this.

What I know is that the seven page instruction manual was regarding payment for my education and I had no right to feel invaded, frustrated, bossed, or baffled. However when my way of executing processes is degraded at the time when I'm trying to do everything well and learn on my own, it isn't entirely out of line for me to feel a little bit shamed. I should apologize, and I will, completely understanding that swallowing my pride is a teeth-grinding deal I had to make with the unusually beautiful woman on the other side of the desk before I could sign the papers. It's good that someone else runs the contracting: imagine if they let the seventeen year-olds decide the deals.

The Hair Beneath the Baseball Cap

I distinctly remember looking down at my hands in middle school and thinking, these are my hands; if I were black, they’d be a different color. I don’t know what it was about that thought because it seemed so simple and obvious yet it shook me a little. It was almost like I was saying, hey these are my tools. They’d work the same if they were a different color. I often wondered if my mind, too, would work the same if I were a different color. I decided not. I can’t think of a time in my life when I was in a room just with people who were like me. I know I probably have been, it just doesn’t stick out in my mind. And I like that—I would feel boring if I could, I would feel vanilla.

Looking in the mirror I see fair skin and an ever-changing hair color. My hair is long, but when I’m at home it’s tied up: that’s important. I have freckles in the summer. I like to wear sweats and jeans and dresses and heels—in my closet, an A’s jersey hangs right next to an expensive, high-wasted pencil skirt. Let’s just say it like this: that’s how I roll. I obsess over make-up. I like jewelry but I don’t really do the whole perfume thing. There are tons of rainbow colored items dotted about my room. They came from Pride Weekend. There is a bottle of soy sauce and a pair of chop sticks on my desk which my Asian friends make fun of me for: it was a gift from a camper at the theatre camp I worked a couple years ago; a Japanese play, she was the Sushi Girl. But all these things are just tiny clues that I’ve placed (or that have been placed) on the outside to help explain the inside. There are a lot of things that can’t be known by simply looking.

My largest chunk of nationality is from my mom: I’m a quarter French. The remaining three quarters are scrambled nationalities and races, only a few of which I actually know. I was never told that I was white; not even in casual conversation. White was a word I learned at school, in the fourth or fifth grade. I never thought about it before then, but my brother definitely did. His realization of his color and the colors of the world around him dictated innocence in my mind. When Alex was six, he started playing tee-ball. I was two at the time. We live in Oakland, so naturally my parents placed him in Oakland Babe Ruth, an intercity league for kids, mostly lower-class and almost all minorities, who just wanted to play ball. On my brother’s first day of practice, he started running out to the field. Upon seeing the other kids, he stopped half way, turned around and ran back to my mom. “They’re all black,” he said. This, by the way, is my mom’s favorite story. She bent down and asked him if it mattered. Alex said no and ran off to play.

Every weekend for the next ten years, I would be lugged to Greenman: a set of land with three city baseball fields primarily for the Babe Ruth kids. I guess you could say it was in the ghetto. I suppose you could also say that it was in the backyard of a lot of these kids’ homes. It was worlds away from what would be assumed a middle class, white life, but Greenman became another home and the people, family. This really rooted a pure foundation in my young mind regarding race and class (gender and disability, too). There were kids playing whose parents were doctors and there were kids who we drove home nearly every day because their parents didn’t come to their games. Some girls played. There was even a deaf kid. Hispanic, Black, White, Asian kids—they all were there because they wanted to play ball. I realized at a very early age that race had little significance in the game. Practice. Baseball. Friendship. Family. Life.

I often forget that most privileged white kids have not had the same exposure my family has had. I often forget about Babe Ruth as a whole because it seems so fundamental, almost like how I don’t remember my first steps or my first homework assignment. I mean, of course I remember it, but it’s the race thing: the integration that frequently slips my mind. How wonderful it was. How what the coaches taught (‘at the end of the day, it’s not whether we win or lose that matters…did we have fun?!’) is not only true in baseball.

So my hair is tied up and it’s long, but not as long as I want it to be. My hair and I have an interesting story to tell. If a photo montage could be easily shown in this paper, my gender development process could be mostly established simply with pictures of my head from the ages three to seventeen. I’ll do my best to describe the evolution. When I was about three, my mom took me and Alex for a hair cut. I had been wearing his hand-me-downs and had been playing with his toys, watching his shows… I idolized my big brother. So when I knew I was getting my hair cut, I told my mom that I wanted it to look like Alex’s. Our hair cutter made the decision to listen to my innocent request but keep my hair long and girly. It was a compromise: a half Alex, half Kelsi do that ended up being business in the front, party in the back (I still tease my parents for giving me a mullet; it was so white trash, everything that wasn’t who we were). The result of my gender ideals and my hair cutter’s soon grew out and was touched up with shoulder-length blonde hair and a set of bangs but by that time, Alex’s hair had grown and from the front, we still looked ridiculously similar.

When I was in the first grade, I decided to grow my bangs out. I wanted to because it looked more girly, more like Barbie. By the third grade the bangs were fully grown out and my hair was longer but I relapsed in the quest for femininity. I was playing basketball, like my brother, and (as it had always been) most of my buddies were male. My hair was tied back everyday: scrunchies became my best friends. I never combed my hair and a giant knot in the back of my head formed every time between baths. Baths. I used to dread them because I knew what followed. After each bath, I’d make my mom pay me a quarter for every time she hit a tangle. She agreed, but never paid up. It was so painful but I liked my tom-boy look: I sported the Airwalk sneakers just like my brother; I wore pants and tee-shirts. I loved my hair in a pony tail. I couldn’t believe my mom used to put me in dresses. Late in the fifth grade, my favorite, baggy cargo pants ripped really high up the leg in the middle of class. The girls laughed at me, I cried. Soon after that, my dad and I were at Beauty Center where I saw this beautiful brush, fifteen dollars. I looked up at him, my hair in a frizzy pony tail with knots galore, and asked him if he would buy it for me. “I will buy this brush for you if you promise you’ll use it every day.” Now I can’t imagine waking up and not using a brush.

Through middle school, I experimented with color and rarely tied my hair up because I didn’t like how masculine my shadow looked when my hair was in a pony tail or a bun. A couple of days before high school began, I took a pen and paper and drew out probably twelve different hair styles because I vowed to do a different hair style every day. That’s what high school girls do, I told myself. I wasn’t able to keep up with changing it every day and I felt like a failure. Now, at seventeen, my hair is down most of the time. When it’s not down, it’s up—simple as that. I don’t fret about my silhouette or the clothes that I wear: one of my favorite shirts has a T-Rex on it and the other one is a pretty, girly top.

I feel as if I’ve hopped back and fourth so many times that I just got tired and found equilibrium. Most of my friends are still guys. I like trucks and dinosaurs. Dresses. Flowers. Baseball. But I love the mix. I think it’s charming. When I was four, I told my mom I wanted to be Aladdin for Halloween. She asked me if I wanted to be Jasmine. I was Aladdin. I had an Abu. It has been hard for me, though, through high school to be free in my gender identity. I am female. I love being female; I am woman, hear me roar… all that good stuff. But my humor is crude and I deal with situations up front. I identify with men mostly because I appreciate the honesty and the humor. Yet in high school it’s hard to be that girl without being a lesbian or easy. Why can’t I just get along with guys? Senior year: people are not so uptight about it anymore and I think every one is beginning to show their true colors, mine being green or yellow, by baby shower standards.

I am white and I am middle class or “well off.” I have never been to public school. I suppose my statistics suit the cultural norm but I know my heart doesn’t. It never did. I am female, yes. I find comfort in the company of men and select women. I guess my appearance may meet the cultural standards but my mind is far from them. I think it’s wonderful that everyone has a story. I am excited to see how mine will evolve. My heart will change. My mind will change. But as for my hands, they’ll always be white.

Adventures on the Internet

whitehouse.gov I have to admit that I was stunned that the White House has a website and was extremely eager to see what I might find on it: a diverse (hah!) collection of encouraging and dispiriting results. After I typed the address and pressed enter, I immediately saw a photograph of Laura Bush, taken today, speaking to the public at a Preserve America congregation, an engaging sight. Just a few hours ago, I was talking to my mom about Lady Bird’s time as a First Lady. She told me that she had a lot to do with Johnson’s presidency, “A la Eleanor Roosevelt,” she said. “A la Hillary Clinton,” I added. Then I asked her how many First Ladies she thought held a stable crutch to their husband’s body and she said that she figured almost every woman had one thing or another to do with her corresponding man. I bring this up because I’ve just finished reading the constitution which states that the President will become such when he gets elected and so on. If there were an internet over two hundred years ago, I’m sure our founding fathers would not be thrilled to see the First Lady on the main page, nevertheless to see that she has been speaking at assemblies.

To the right of the daily goings-on, the news can be found; it’s an extremely optimistic twist on reality as we know it to be, glorifying the War on Terror and downsizing the battle for global warming. Toward the bottom of the page, I found a link for photo essays (an odd link for such an official website), covering everything from “Tee-Ball on the South Lawn” to “Hurricane Relief.” The thing that stood out the most to me was to cover links of the photo essays. On one titled “White House at Work” showed a photograph taken outside the White House, showing a festival going on in the front, with a marching band and many people. Another called “War on Terror” was a picture of Bush speaking on a shiny, very large podium that says Plan for Victory on it with a light shining into the camera, as it was taken from an angle cutting from the floor into the ceiling kitty-corner from it; I find both of these photographs to be immensely ironic and utterly symbolic on so many levels. Many of the pictures found in these essays contradicted what we see and hear from our local news. I also saw a link for an application to practice a non-career job in the White House and I was very curious to see what types of questions are asked on such an application, but I couldn’t get past the first page without submitting personal information and I automatically got scared that someone might get mad at me if I were to make up an identity just to get further in the document so alas, I left the site. And I still have many questions: if the White House has a website, then does George Bush have a myspace?

The End

I'm in Oregon right now taking care of my grandfather and visiting my step-grandmother, Corky. I was really bummed to come out here since my best friend came home the same day I left. I felt shitty about leaving but also felt shitty about not wanting to leave. Being here has sparked a lot of thought in me, and it's a thought process I'm afraid to possess. Death.

A few weeks ago, I ran across this television show on the sci fi channel called Ghost Hunters. It's alot to think about, not only on the spooked level but also in the sense that thinking about death really isn't something most of us humans love to think about. Of course there are exceptions: the "Ghost Hunters" in the show, most hard-hitting religious people, and others who might have somehow made their peace with death. But let's be honest, we're afraid to think about death because we don't like trying to solve a problem we know is currently unsolvable. Being in this house, especially at night or alone (as I am now) causes me to think about death even more. It's a strange feeling, being here alone. There's something about being here with all the old furniture and still artwork that makes me feel a bit unsettled at times. My grandpa was in WWII, he was in the AVG (the Flying Tigers) and his den, where I am sleeping, is decorated fully with memorabilia and old photographs from his time in the war. Corky's collection of artwork is displayed all over the home, much of it is absolutely beautiful, but right now I feel the following eyes of a little girl and her dog who are resting on the wall. We brought Henry, my dog, with us up here this time. I read or heard somewhere that dogs and babies have the ability to located ghosts much better than grown people; Henry lay in his bed, staring at the same spot in the room for a long time. He had interest and complexity in his eyes. I am becoming more relaxed in this old home but there are still moments where I feel, for lack of a better word, quite spooked.

Ghosts and 'spirits' have always been things that have pondered me greatly. I can't remember the first time I started thinking about them but my fascination with life with humans after death began to really grow in middle school, as most girls' do. In seventh grade, I got an Ouija board for my birthday and I found a large attachment to the thoughts this game provoked. Seances then followed, the visiting of accordingly haunted places, wanting to have a sighting, scary movies... inside this girl who so badly wanted to have a connection with another world was a girl who was truly scared of knowing the answers to the questions she was asking. Now, five years later, I try to avoid thinking about the entire subject. There is no doubt it is extremely provocative but I am trying, for my sake, and clearly I have not been all that successful.

However this element of death has not been the only concept to rest in my ever-questioning mind. The whole idea of death is so tricky to me. Cut off: that's it. Life goes on without you, isn't it crazy? The end. Game over, did you win or did you lose? How many points did you have when you peeled your hands off of the controller? And I am sitting in this chair thinking, I'm going to die. I should be so lucky to reach 91, like my grandpa will on Friday. So what am I doing home alone? I should go spend time with him before it's too late. But my brother is in Canada and could die on his way home. I can't call him to tell him that I love him because calls up there are so expensive. Wait. Why are we worrying about money when there are much more important things to worry about?
I need to think some more about this.

The End, for now.
(Now, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could say that about life?)

My black, gay and disabled kid named Dave

A friend of mine asked me today if people who would chose to have a straight child over a gay child are homophobic. I automatically said no, which surprised me. I thought about this scene in the movie, The Family Stone, where they're all at the dinner table: the mother, the father, the two brothers (one with his partner and one with his fiancee), the two sisters, etc. They are talking about fashion or something when the mother says, "You know, I secretly wished all my kids would be gay. That way I'd never look like a wreck and I'd never make terrible curtain choices." The whole table laughs except for Sarah Jessica Parker's character, the fiancee, who replies: "That's terrible. I don't know why anyone would wish for their child to be gay; it's like wishing for you kid to be black," the other son's partner is black, she looks embarrassed but she continues, "Being gay is really had to do, I just don't understand why someone would wish another struggle on their child." Well of course the family retaliates but thinking about this got me to thinking even more.

If a seventeen year old boy is presented with this question, the guy to whom my friend had asked the question, no doubt he's going to say straight. A barren couple in the fifties or sixties would rather adopt a white baby than a black baby, not for their own comfort but for the baby's. Does that make them racist? When I imagine myself as a mother I automatically imagine myself with a girl. Does that make me sexist? I chose a black ipod over a white one. Do I not like white? Our choices and preferences are not by any means our wants or our needs. That is what I was thinking. But here's the other aspect to it: science has gotten so intense that mothers who choose to do insemination can choose the sex of their baby before actually being pregnant. Women who go to sperm banks know a lot about their sperm donor so that they can pick the best genes for their child. The latter seems more ethical, for that's what it's all about right? Pairing your genes with the best genes and having children... but does a woman who does the selective choosing and none of the searching really benefit? To me, both of these still seem completely inhumane. Gay, straight, black, white, boy, girl, whatever.

Bottom line is they're your kids. You should love them no matter what, right?

I dropped a rock in a lake just to watch the ripples.

I watched a Charlie Chaplin movie today in history about the perpetual spiral of industrialization. Good ol' Charlie played a man in a factory who screwed bolts on some metal plates which were moving past him at a rapid speed (however for some reason everything seems fast in a silent movie and it reminded me of that I Love Lucy episode). His bodily reflexes become reliant on that motion: turn and spin... even on his break his arms are continuing those motions. I am having one of those days where you can't stop the factory in your head. I'm sure you know the one. Thought, ponder, thoughts, etc. I don't know how I plan to sleep tonight.
I'm sitting in my
What the hell, Dad? What's with the attitude today?
Friday sleepiness. I changed the background on my computer the other day. And just as I wrote this, I imagined your, the reader, I imagined your reaction to this. But it is important. It is of substance. Let me go on. I haven't talked to my um.. ex? best friend? since March, when she stood me up at my show. Ouch, right? Yes and now somehow I'm at fault. Don't let me get into it. Seeing her picture made me happy when I signed on. No longer. Loser sees the fucking default of the moon. And I see this as I turn on the computer to wright.
I am beginning to realize that everything has a link to its neighbor, to its principle/principal (which homonym shall I use...?), to its Nation's enemy far, far away but held too close for comfort. I read somewhere about a theory stating that everyone is related to everyone by a connection of six people. So by a connection of six people or less, I know President (Lovely President) Bush, I know Christina Aguilera, I know Ryan Gosling. Okay, let me try one: I know my friend, Kelli (1), who worked at a famous movie theatre and had a boss (2) who deals with a lot of movie premiers at the theatre, which, I guess, are ran through the movie's publicists (3), who know the producers (4), who know the actors (5). Me to Will Smith in five people. (And it goes on: Will Smith knows a lot of people, and that's six.) So there we go, it's seemingly factual. My dad said something to me about five minutes ago which made me a little angry. I am still a bit upset about it and my ore has suffered. I lost my posture, I feel a little bit more weight on my chest. I'm going to bed soon, but what if I carried this out into the world? Say I walked down Telegraph with this changed demeanor. A woman smiles at me and I don't smile back, but she knows I saw her. This effects her greatly. And on and on six people out. Another six people out. Have I soon effected the whole world with a plague of unhappiness, the feeling of weight? Have we turned in after a send-out of unhappiness hence generating the "Generation ME" theory? Fuck, what have I done? Ripples upon ripples of sickness.
I think that sometimes education burdens people in the sense that when well-off, American people hear about issues in other nations, in other poorer nations. Take Darfur for example. A man from Sudan came to speak to my school about the problem in Africa. The upsetting, hurtful and violent magnetism between the Muslims and the Africans. An amazing speaker. I really wanted to do something. But what could I do? So I educate others, hoping this will help and thanks to me, I trigger their own restlessness on the subject. So these people respond in the same way: six people out, and so on. Ripples upon ripples of angst.
What can we do to improve our connections?
What can we do to help our members of this club: the human race?


Help me understand.

describe the heart.

AUTOMATIC WRITING
-forces you to let go of censor
-time self for 15 minutes or so.
-write, write, write... don't stop.
-NO crossing out.
-NO thinking.
-try not to write neatly.



June, 2006
A heart. A heart. Beating, bleeding, your never-failing worker-bee, as long as you know it to be. Never a dull moment, never a second of rest. As we say we owe our lives to love? To nurture? No. To a heart that never quits. Pumping a pulsing, sometimes so loud to hear it: your best friend. Knows when to rush and when to slow down. When to be joyful and when to cry. Never a dull moment, never a second of rest.
And look where this has all brought us to. A heart we never think about, a brain we never talk to. Things we take for granted like courage and a home. What would be without it. Ask the tinman or scarecrow, the lion or dorothy. They know the routine. They know what its like to be spared of lie's greatest wonders. Funny, how so many things have the freedom to rebel, have the will to go against the grain, and still we find ourselves in a fairly trusting humanity. A world where we ask a complete stranger to take our picture, a reality where we don't hear a loud pulse when walking alone. Why? He said the mammals have the biggest hearts, in so many words. He gave us the gift that's never quitting: A heart. A heart. Beating, bleeding, yournever-failing worker-bee. But why do we fail it? Why have we found ourselves, a people, dooming our most valuable gifts? [What's] next for this life? What's in store for a people with hearts full of fire and war? What's up with our world, with a heart of money... not love? What can we expect? Has there even been a time that wasn't like this? I find myself on the yellow-brick road too often, seeing too many men and women without a brain... or a heart.