Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Campus Notes

A communist cause I'm left-handed
That's the hand they use
Well, never mind


A silently complex sound-filled murmur falls over this campus, my world, every time I take the time to really listen. I hear sniffling captured in the crisp golden fall air. Zippers. One o’clock bells. My hair matches the leaves on the ground and a chilled breeze reaches down my dress and up my legs. Fall wants some. High heels on bricks. Lazy sliding feet slouched against the dusted floor. I could hear that skateboard from a mile away. Cell phones. Face to face chat. “Like an authentic Chinese restaurant or like a white Chinese restaurant?” This stone is a cool pulse on my legs.

The plane is louder in the sky than the clicking gears of the bicycle before me. Walking alone with a smile. A crow, a squirrel, a hornet. They all peruse the leaves but on different levels and for different reasons. The wind tickles my hair across my brow. I send a pollenless thought to the yellow and black flies inspecting all things brown. Wasted time. Keys. Red pants, yellow tights. A loving hug between two people who don’t look suited for each other but then again I am left handed and love my country for the most part. “Do you have a cigarette?” Eyecontact: red eyes through small dark slits. Hardly English.

Bouncing injured walk. Silent walk only discovered on the crunchy brown fallen leaves. Julie. Mitch. Number 69 on the football team. My heart jumps for fear of a different number. And I owe you one. Free samples and hands dig into the tray hanging from his minimum wage neck, if that. We all attend the University of Freebies.

That guy. Where do I know him from? Psychology 200—answer dude with his hair falling upon his shoulder holding his arm in the air. Her dress is awfully short. Three skateboards, no helmets. Nicole Wilberding and her iPod; semi-skinny jeans. Red tights with black pointy, upturned clogs—she is a witch: wicked or good, West or East I cannot tell but in my lack of cynicism, East it is.

The leaves begin to dance as the low murmur rises to a vibrating hum and I know what time it is just by the number of feet that fall upon the ground. The atmosphere changes and a seagull calls, a leaf falls beside me, and the sun comes out. Just in time to go back inside.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Athletes and Romance

Tight pants and butt slapping must be what I go for. Sure, the aesthetic comes with the territory. The independence, the appeal of commitment, the being good with his body… all these things are true, but I’m trying to decipher whether it’s the man or the uniform to which I am attracted. So they’re all men of color. They’re mostly tall, nice to excellent bodies, physical people, arms. Got to have the arms. But it turns out that it doesn’t matter if he spends his time swinging a bat, making a touchdown, or scoring a goal: they’re all ass holes.

It’s simple to say, well, just stop falling for butt heads, but it’s not like they make these dudes wear signs. There’s no Brotherhood of Jerks membership jacket that all these homies wear (and if there is, I’m attracted to it). An interviewing process doesn’t occur, complete with a sweaty, wrinkled resume handed over by a shaking hand, so I don’t learn that it’s in this idiot’s track record to peace out before he even arrives…or after.

“Well think about it Kelsi, they’re football players,” tight end/defensive end Sean Brown said to me last night, “they run at 300-pound guys as hard and as fast as they can every night.” He said this to ask me if, when considering this, I still expect to be treated gently. Yes, actually, I do. He and I spent five hours on the phone last night (mainly this morning), covering all topics imaginable: memories from senior year, philosophical chat, people we’ve dated since, school and football, but we came around to my romantic life four or five times. And it was weird because I wasn’t concerned with sounding perfect to my ex—I was cozy in the conversation, cuddled up with that familiar but much matured voice of his I know so well, warm under the blanket of nostalgia. I didn’t really care what he thought of me, how he thought of me, or why. He was just my old friend in that time who knew me very well. This role was played off and on throughout our conversation.

While talking to Sean I realized that these fit, rough, goal-driven prospects always manage to get points and that while I do get to score, I never get a W on my schedule. Everything I pick up is an L. Even with the boxer. The football players. Soccer. Baseball. Save for Sean, whose innocence can only be attributed to the fact that I walked away with it, I have been treated the exact same way by each of these men and I think I have finally come to peace, terms, and understanding with it. “It’s the chase,” my senior year boyfriend said to me in the middle of the night as his California phone line stretched to Seattle, “you might surprise yourself.”

It is about the game. Of course it is. They don’t have to be wearing shoulder pads or a cup in order to want to feel in control. When he’s not wearing kneepads, the boxing gloves are still on in a way. “You’re so generous and giving—you’re everything,” so that when he wants to play for more, the clock’s already out. After all, football players will push through a snowstorm if they have to just to get the numbers on the board.


But it’s not this generalized stereotype that can reign true for all athletic men, or even for all athletes of a particular sport. I need to stop meeting prospects in classless arenas, such as clubs and through random mutual acquaintances. This is true. However what about those who I meet doing something I love or in class? What about these guys? What’s their excuse? They don’t have one. I’m the one who carries the big messenger bag of excuses. Sean even said it without knowing it—I’m so generous and giving. Too much so that he can never be wrong. He can never be sketchy. He can never be out of line (or out of bounds). Three strikes? Let’s try seven or eight. This here is the problem.

In practice if he runs the drill poorly, it’ll be known and it’ll be fixed. He’s taken out of the game if he gets too many penalties. He can only throw so many pitches before he’s jogging away from the mound to an honest or sympathetic applause. Injury, out. Altercation with a player, out. Not enough baskets, too many balks, fly ball. Out, out, out. There are seemingly more outs in sports, especially at the higher level, than there are ins and maybe, though I find it a bit harsh, it’s about time I start applying these no-guilt rules to my involvement with such players. It could be the age, my reliance, or my dumb open heart, but in my experience even if he’s not an athlete, he’s still a playa. However the clock is far from running out. Still little sweat. There’s barely a score. And it’s still the first quarter.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

About This Intense Guy I Know

I am challenged by the concept of emotion. My color-filled stark-white living room surrounds me in a soft silence that makes me feel comfortable and cold. The round white specks of this or that on my black laptop test my commitment and a bleeding chin blemish mocks me. They all want my attention.

Yesterday, Emotion approached me. “Hey you!” I looked around inquisitively, confused, I’m never a ‘hey you’ type person to Emotion. We generally have a good relationship. I’m never picked on. But yesterday, I did something to change the rolls. His acid-washed ripped jeans grazed against his hairless legs. When he talks, he waddles in a stance, swaying nervously back and fourth. He pierced his ice-green eyes not into mine but through them. Emotion meant business. “Hey you! It’s time you and I had a little talk.” He was serious and bossy. He said it in the kind of way that makes you question if he’s reading from a script. Because come on, who talks like that? Emotion does, that’s who.

He told me I wasn’t taking him seriously and so he placed a balloon inside my ribcage to see if I could pop it. I thought I did last night, but turns out I simply extracted air. It has since filled up.

My eyes have that feeling. They’re hot in the back. Warm. Rigid. Sticky. I can feel the crease when I move them around and attaining that soft focus is easier than ever. Emotion and I have a deal: he’ll leave me alone until I let him occasionally pound it into me. This day and the last I received the beating of a lifetime. He’s that sultry kind of violent; you know the one, the type with the fire behind the eyes, which evokes passion and not fury. He’s sexy when he balls up that fist, purses his lips, and squints his eyes. It’s scary to like that sort of thing—like when Emotion is slamming your head against the ground and you actually think it feels good, but when you spend so much of your time unaffected by his actions it’s nice to have that seemingly terminal hot coughing, screaming, insanely pitched cry. People don’t recognize it enough.

Sometimes, when he has time, Emotion and I just sit and look at each other. A mental conversation begins: Hi. Hi. I’m looking at you. I noticed. I can see right through you. It’s okay. You’re wasting my time. So go spend it somewhere else. I’m only nineteen but I’ve developed this passive relationship with Emotion because I accept that he’s quite the bully… but he’s like Judd Nelson and Bender and I’m Molly Ringwald. I’m Claire. A fat girl’s name, but he knows he loves me.

So we spend our days, ins and outs, eye contact and none, loving and fighting. He even has those funny leather biking gloves. Emotion thinks he’s a bad ass…he kind of is. I’d love to take him to dinner some night. Open him up smoothly like a Petrus 1982 Pomerol: rich and definite. But for now, this scalding stern figure must piece me apart, every bit of me, til he can move onto the next. And this is it: blogs into paragraphs into sentences. Words. Syllables. Letters.

When might he return and to whom will he visit next?

Friday, October 2, 2009

Yellow My Orange

I saw the two bags of oranges resting on the table as class started and went on; we played a game with tennis balls, triggering our awareness and memorization and I thought to myself, actors just love their props. He clearly had an orange for everyone. Was this linked to a game or an exercise or was Drama 251 just a preschool of undergrads, comprised of games and snack time? During that speculation, they were just oranges in bags: they all looked the same, smelled the same, had stickers, had green stems, and were orange. Ask me to find #4012 and cover its sticker and I’d have to make a wild, likely incorrect 1-out-of-25 guess, but it wouldn’t have mattered, because it was just an orange. And I was hungry.

With twenty minutes left in that two-hour acting class, he handed them out. He had told us to find a comfortable spot on the floor, a good distance away from all the others. We were barefoot as a requirement of the exercise we had done just before. I liked the corner I chose. The ground there was nice and somehow attractive. My orange came to me in a requested cross-room chuck from classmate Joey who found himself close to the now ripped-open bags. The concept of throwing the orange made me nervous, but I caught it: #4012, orange sphere of chewy citrus.

“Don’t eat them yet.” The word yet was repeated by a few anxiously, eating the fruit was clearly on everyone’s mind. “You’re going to observe your orange with all five senses,” he said, holding a stopwatch, “and you’re going to do it for ten minutes.”

A slightly shocked, however somewhat expecting and speculative humph filled the room and escaped out the window as the two dozen of us sat cross-legged, speckled across the light brown wooden floor in room 211 of Hutchenson Hall, looking at, feeling, smelling, tasting, and, yes, listening to our oranges.

“Please do not peel them—that’ll just make a mess. I’m going to keep talking while you’re doing this,” and he did.

A small brown stain, the size of a pen cap, was the first thing I noticed. Positive it was caused by coffee, I tried to smudge and scrape it away but it wouldn’t budge. It had that look, though: a bizarre shape not even a Rorschach test could name the picture it formed, it was just a shape. Dark brown thin border and light brown inside. Part of it perfectly circled a pore of the fruit. Could it have been a blemish? If it was a stain, why didn’t it come off? These were just the first of my questions.

This texture that I felt on this orange, what was it made of? Small, circular pores covered the citrus sphere, going in and going out. There were concentrated points of outs that looked similar to bubbling hot tubs, mistakes in this orange’s growth, but beautiful and interesting in their imperfection. It occurred to me that while I couldn’t feel the individual ups and downs, I could sense the texture on every inch of the surface, its only smooth portion being the ring surrounding the navel.

The way the light interacted with this texture was like a sun drawn in one of the cartoons that went along with PBS’s Reading Rainbow: a circle of light in the middle and almost parenthese-like semi circles surrounding the main point of light, downsizing in density as they moved away and interacted with the rounded shape of the orange. Noticing this made the fruit seem almost majestic.

“Think about the smell. How would you describe that smell to someone who’s never smelled anything before?” It smelled like that feeling of right out of a great shower. It smelled like being ready for anything, feeling fresh and excited for what ever might come your way. It smelled like how the morning feels when you’re well rested and happy.

It smelled like clean, fresh happiness. That’s what it smelled like.

I licked it a few times, in confidence, trying hard not to be that girl but when you’re sitting in a room with a whole bunch of twenty year-olds all looking at, caressing, and smelling oranges, you kind of already are that girl…and so is everyone else. It didn’t really taste like anything. It tasted like the bottom of your sandwich that’s been resting in Tupperware or a plastic bag all day. It tasted like fourth grade lunchtime on a rainy day, kept inside, sitting on the floor… sometimes eating off of it. It tasted sterile, but not so just enough to make you feel uncomfortable admitting you actually licked the orange.

No, my orange did not talk to me. It did help me confide in it that it is known not only for—but as—a color it is not completely. My orange was mostly yellow and got to be more and more yellow as the ten minutes went on. This is what a chose to call it, in sympathy, in protest, and in observation. My ears did connect with the experience however as I listened to the silent room of twenty-five adults closely examining oranges for credit, as I dropped it in my hand from various distances (it made a “pat” noise, changing in intensity according it the duration gravity pulled it for), and I listened to the marble-like noise it made as I rolled it, almost out of my reach, across the floor.

The ten minutes were up before I even knew it. I had dots of citrus juice on my fingers and palms. I smelled like my orange. I knew its flaws and its number, what its sticker looked like and read (Naval #4012 Chile). The class compared experiences and agreed we could pick our orange, our specific orange, out of a bunch if they were to be recollected. I was no longer hungry. It wouldn’t have even mattered if I was, I had a connection with that piece of fruit: it had become a work of art, a gift from nature, a story, a complex mosaic of biology and history. Yellow my orange is known to me better than it knows itself (it does not have five senses like I!) and is known to me better than it is known to you, for sharing every detail would deface the experience and insult its sincerity. I have only scratched the surface. What fruit lie ahead?