I enjoy being a...

Thanksgiving is a lovely dinner. It's the only time I've had "dinner" in the middle of the day, save for when I went to visit my great-aunt and -uncle in Idaho. They called lunch "dinner" and dinner "supper" because lunch was always so much bigger than dinner in their home. This Thanksgiving I got to eat at the big kids' table, because it was that, the newlyweds table (more on that later...), or being squished between my sisters and my bratty cousin Christian, whom I've never liked since he poured orange soda on my white dress when I was, like, eight.

My mom is a Weight Watchers' success story, my dad just joined, my aunt is a Weight Watchers' leader, and my grandma is doing...something, I guess...so you can imagine the big kids' dinner topic. That's right--points. How many points is this roll worth? How many points do you think the potatoes have? Do leftovers have more points than normal food? I could have ripped my hair out, it was so tedious.

"All right, this is Thanksgiving. I don't want to hear another mention of 'points'--I just want to eat," I say, finally snapping. Where was the usual family gossip: who's had a baby? when is Aaron getting married? where are Grandma and Grandpa traveling to next week? That sort of thing.

"Someday you'll appreciate how fast your metabolizism is right now," Grandma says, as if the fact that I don't want everything on plate scored means I don't take care of myself. This is not true; I do take care of myself, for the most part. I exercise regularly--I spent an hour and a half the day before sparring my friend, Josh, and teaching a martial arts class. I love food with a gluttonous lusty passion, but I normally don't eat a lot, if anything at all. Why? Because I'm too poor to afford a lot of food. Yes, I have genetics in my favor, and I exercise, but frankly, I'm too poor to be fat.

I bring this up, and make a circle with my thumbs and fingers touching to indicate how much I usually eat, but I don't press it because my mom hates me telling people I'm poor. I think it's shames her more than it does me--I'm nineteen and a college student living away from home--I'm supposed to be poor. Even here at home I don't eat more than one serving, because my stomach has shrunk so far that I can't handle it. Gone are the days that I had an extra stomach in each of my long legs. My protest is enough to get them to stop talking about it for about ten, maybe twenty minutes tops.

So, the newlyweds table--I'm not one of them. That's what really gets my dad, I think. I'll be twenty in May. That's how old my sister-in-law was when she married my brother. I still haven't been kissed, let alone have a boyfriend. I date, as much as there's opportunity for that in Cedar, but guys aren't exactly throwing themselves over me, and I find it rather degrading to have to chase after someone. I don't even like anyone that much right now. My friend Laura says my dad is going to approach me about being a lesbian sometime soon.

The next day, I'm telling my mom about my latest disastrous date, in which the cad ditched me every five minutes to go talk to his friends, I mention that I'm tired of stupid boys. My dad says I should date men, meaning someone worthwhile who's been around the block. I inform him that I've had my fill of thirty-two year olds, that they're not really something to honk my horn about either. He says I have to date someone. I almost tell him that at least I haven't been on a date with a girl yet, but I'm not ready to open that can of worms.

Today at my cousin's wedding luncheon, my Grandpa Radmall, my mother's father that we've rarely seen before these last few years, talks to me about boys. He asks if I date a lot. Dad says, almost passive aggressively, that I'm not really interested in that sort of thing right now. I don't need to take that. I finish the sentence for him, "but my dad wishes I was."

My grandpa says something like "There's plenty of time for that anyway."

My dad, however, caught my tone. He says just snidely enough that only I notice the complete implications, "Rachel's so perfect--she's going to need a pretty amazing guy to ever get married. She'll have to look for a long time." Rachel thinks she's better than everyone else. She'll never be satisfied, and she'll never get married.

My eyes mist up with tears of anger and hurt, but not enough to cloud my vision too much. I look at my grandpa, but I'm talking to my father when I say, "I just need someone who will treat me like a daughter of God. That's all I need."

But even as I'm saying that, I wonder if my dad is right. If there was an uneducated, poor, unambitious young man who treated me like a goddess, I still don't think it'd be enough. I need an optimistic someone who I can talk to, who I can philosophize with, who's dreams I believe in, and who I want to be my best self for. If that's too much to ask for, maybe being an old maid at twenty is the best route for me. So next Thanksgiving, I'll be at the big kids table again, not the newlyweds, and I'll suffer through talk of points all over again, being grateful for every second the conversation doesn't turn to my love life.

Poem #2

How to Read my Mind Via my Clothes

Long sleeve cream sweater and

a pale undershirt with hair straight

means I'm whimsical.

Brown and circus color shirtdress and

amber pendant with hair flipped out

means today I choose to have fun.

Anything black means I washed my

darks the day before.

Anything with my quarter necklace

means I'm feeling lucky.

And if, heaven forbid, I wear ANYTHING

gray, it's quite likely I'm depressed--

and probably wearing someone else's clothes.

***

10/29/08 8:00 A.M.
Meeting with Counselor

Is there anything you don't like?

Of course. Losing. Killing things.
Any grade lower than a B.
Being alone.

Tell me about being alone.

There are 24 hours in a day.
I spend about 7.5 sleeping
alone.
I go home right after school,
don't come out of my room for
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 hours
alone.
Why? I know I hate it. (Secretly,
I think, I still loathe every aspect
of my personality, but we don't
talk about that anymore. Still,
why would I want to be alone
with that?) I sit with the phone next
to me, waiting for someone to call,
hoping someone maybe
won't be busy
won't be in a bad mood
won't be with a boyfriend
won't mind having me around.

Do you think people enjoy being around you?

Yes. I think I am an enjoyable person,
optimistic, fun, and caring
(which is to say, no, I can't imagine
anyone wanting to be around me—
I don't want to be around me.
For those 8 or so hours a day
I'm around people, I wonder if I'm
nice enough, friendly enough, happy
enough to keep them happy. And
some of them hate that. How do I
handle it? What do I do?).

Have you ever tried opening up to people? Letting them see that 5% of the time you're not happy?

Yes. And I set myself up to get hurt.
But it only really hurts after they're gone
again and I'm alone.

Poem #1

I'm pretty terrified, I'm not going to lie. I can read poetry a whole night through, but when it comes to writing it...auhha...

Bath at 2:30

cymbalcrash caress
my shoulders, heavy with
the weight of alarms
that go off at four-thirty ay em

I slip down until my mouth is
covered by bubbles.
The trumpet blows, by some
subtle wind, from
nineteen fifty-nine until it
is calling to me out
of the speaker on the marble counter
across the room,
clear of the hot bath water.

If there were once words
spun along with the piano,
the cymbal, the trumpet,
they were too heavy to
lift on a zephyr,
so all I get is clear,
oscillating praise--
the kind I always feel I deserve
after standing on
my feet for eight hours.

***

They Never Look Up

When you are walking down the hill at the
north end of campus—slowly, of course,
it must be at least a fifty degree angle—
if you should look up and catch a glimpse
of that God-graced blue, pause for a moment;
it won't take long for the autumn wind to
pick the prime yellow leaves from the top
branches of the heaven-grazing trees and
twist them down to you, fluttering, like
marmalade butterflies. Then you may turn
your head back to the ground—sandlicking,
grasseating, dirteye creature that you are—
and continue to your car in the far parking lot.

One of Those Faces

Thursday I was raking leaves with SUU Student Alumni when a girl came up to me and asked me my name. I was confused. She didn't look familiar and we hadn't been conversing, so I couldn't imagine why she wanted to know. "Rachel," I replied, my voice chipper. "Why do you ask?"

"Oh. Well, you look a lot like this girl Brooke, from America's Next Top Model and I thought you might be her."


"Really? Wow, that's so flattering! Thanks!"

This wasn't a new thing to me. I'm used people starting sentences with, "You know, you look a lot like..." One of the most popular endings to that phrase is Piper Perabo from Coyote Ugly.


I also get a lot of, "I have a friend who looks just like you." I laugh and tell them I want a name and a picture so I can keep record of all of these people. The Japanese have a saying that everyone has five doubles of him or herself (or so I learned from Barefoot Gen); I want to see if I can surpass that number.

Not everyone I've been compared to is an actual person. When I was about ten, I went with my father on a business trip and a woman we met told me I look like Kira from The Dark Crystal. I certainly had that exact same hair!


I've also been told that Rikku from Final Fantasy 10 resembles me. Her facial structure is very Japanese, and mine just isn't, but apparently there's a cut scene where she has my impish grin. And you know, I'm okay with that. I think Rikku rocks.


I think on the whole my lookalikes seem to be blond, with full lips and respectably sized ears. I bet there are tons of people who fit that description. There certainly are in my family. My grandma keeps mistaking me for an older cousin, but that's mostly because she's getting a bit senile. A few weeks ago, my little sister was very upset when I was home for the weekend and her friend said we look alike. She hasn't quite accepted the fact that my parents cloned me to get her and our younger sister.


I'm looking forward to see who I'll be compared to in the future. For now, though, I'm just really happy to be me! I think that's pretty neat, because whether I look like a model, an actress, a Gelfling, an Al Bed, a cousin, or a little sister, I'm always going to be myself.


...oh man, that last line was cheesy.

Two Photographs

We went to the Braithwaite gallery two days ago. There is a photograph in the far left wall in the gallery, where a black woman sits on a wooden bench (which is new, unscratched, and clean enough to reflect the back of her little girl's head) with one child wrapped in a blanket in her arms, asleep or nearly, and the other, three or four years old, sitting beside her, holding a shiny, black, imitation leather purse, and looking past the lip of her bonnet at the ceiling. People without faces wander in the background. They don't see her carefully pulled-up hair, her suit jacket, her wedding ring, her pressed skirt that folded underneath her when she sat down, so now the bottom her her thighs are touching the bench, skin pressed against the same spot countless others have touched.

On the back wall of the right gallery, there sits a 15-year-old in a wedding dress, who buries her face in her hands as her mother, covered in mine soot, lights up a smoke. I stood to the side of it, transfixed by the horror I could feel from the young girl, this unwanted future with a man probably twelve years older than she looming in both our minds, and by the nonchalance of her mother, the no-nonsense way in which she's about to tell her daughter her duties for that night. Two white-haired women didn't see me, just the picture. "She's probably wondering if her mother is going to be ready in time," one says to the other with a laugh.

How can they say that? Don't they understand the girl's torment? And then I realize that they are the same generation as the mother in the photograph. They would have married off their fifteen-year-olds, too, I can tell it. My contempt for them may be unreasonable, but it makes me want to write: write for that girl in the wedding dress, what she would feel there if some part of us were the same, the part that thinks marrying our father's mining buddy would be hell, and what she would feel here in the gallery with these women laughing away the worst day of her life.

Instant Wisdom

Education only begins when you open your eyes and realize there's more to the world than you.

Money is a sugarfloss cord in holding things together.

"Don't swing your fists after the fight." = Give it up, jerk.

***

I think I'll leave the proverbs to people who drink more than I do.

Terrible news, friends.

They're changing the freakin' penny. Pisses me off. What gives someone the right to change the penny? Is nothing sacred anymore? Beautiful old homes are preserved as part of our nation's history, and likewise pennies should continue to be produced in the same fashion that has suited them for the last fifty years. What are they going to do next, tear down the Lincoln Home in Springfield to build a skyscraper in "commemoration" for his 210th birthday? Leave my Lincoln alone!

Read the article that shook my happy little world.

Dunbar, I no longer lament to wear the mask

Just about every day before creative writing starts, I subject Kirstin and Alison (and everyone else within range of my mellifluous voice) to my own commentary on what I'm wearing that day. "This is my ADD necklace. I love having something to do with my hands." "I decided I'm so happy today that it would be a sin to be three inches shorter, so I wore my black heels." "I love curling my hair, but I hate how it looks afterwards, so I always end up pulling it back." "I was in a really weird mood this morning. I chose a plain t-shirt." "I kind of feel like a gypsy today with my scarf and ego earrings."

Well, I didn't actually say that last one in creative writing. Kirstin wasn't there today, so I decided to postpone it until I saw Wendy in Spanish. And then post my daily comment here, so Kirstin and Alison don't miss out.

I'm really not obsessed with fashion. I break a lot of the rules. I don't have many new clothes this year. But dressing up, even when it seems I don't have time for it, is very important to me. It gives me something to focus my energy on and clears my thoughts, like a strange kind of meditation. It's my own alone time, since my roommate and I go through our morning rituals at different times of the day. Most of all, knowing that I look nice lends me confidence and a positive attitude that I hope rubs off on others as I go about cheerful and relaxed.

Creeper

It's been a while since I've attracted a creeper, but here's one to make you raise your eyebrows. There's no hyperbole in this story, if you're wondering. I'm a writing assistant for the English 1000 classes. The other day, one guy approached me (I think it was in Institute, but I didn't think much of it at the time so I don't remember) and was like, "Hey, it looks like our writing assistants exist outside of class."

"Yeah, funny how that happens, huh?"

That wasn't an invitation, by the way, but apparently he didn't catch that. Today after classes I was headed to the library to do some homework and see my friends who work in the Media Lab when I ran into the kid again. "Hey Rachel, are you going to class?" he says, like he wants to detain me for a while if I'm not.

"Nah, but I'm going to meet up with some friends. How about you?"

"Yeah. Hey, do you think I could switch into your group?" We have about four groups in our class and I like all the students in mine. They aren't too open, but at least none of them stalk me. (Okay, it isn't that bad, but he gives me a bad feeling.)

"Why? Who's your writing assistant?"

"That other blond girl who wears the low-cut shirts all of the time."

I raised my eyebrows. He knows my name but not his own writing assistant's? "Tabby?" (That's a pseudonym, my friends, if you haven't caught on yet that I like those.) "What's the problem? She was my roommate last year. She's a really friendly, nice girl and she knows what she's talking about."

"Yeah, I just prefer girls with a more wholesome look."

I don't think my eyebrows can raise much higher without my nostrils flaring. Tabby's shirts might be a little low-cut, but who give a damn about what he prefers? It's not like he's dating her--he's certainly not going to be dating me. Even if you didn't put me on edge, that would be totally unprofessional, Mr. Creeper. I'm not afraid to slam you with a sexual harassments charge if you keep this up. "Tabby's standards might not be the same as yours, but she's a moral and good person. I've got to go."

So I hope that will be the end of Mr. Creeper, but I highly doubt it. Joe won't switch him into my group, though, especially if I say something. He's a really great guy, and I'm glad to be working with him.

Fish and Chips

Professor Petersen is random, just so you know. (It's true, you are!) He was especially so today. He had us bring in a paper with forty-two things we could potentially write a story on (I wrote forty-three, because I'm just a rule-breaker like that). Then he organized us into random groups and had us pick ten random words from random dictionaries. Then he randomly selected people to switch groups, taking the random words with them and randomly giving them out to their new group members. After that, we traded the aforementioned papers and initialed five story ideas--Robert Olen Butler would have my head for using that term--that caught our interest. The accumulation of all of this stuff is this: we need to select a story idea that we think would be the best, compare it to what people said they were interested in, and tell how we could incorporate into the story the two random words we were given as well as a third that was assigned to the entire class. And now I've just summarized to you my entire hour in creative writing. Neat.

So the story I'd like to tell is number 33, "Shameless hussy." This happened over the summer and it makes me laugh every time I think about it. It seems my group mates agree with me, as three out of the four selected it. Shameless hussy is just not a phrase people use anymore (except for my mother, apparently).

The story mainly takes place at a wedding reception, but there were no fish, so my first word, "tarter sauce," will have to be incorporated in a different way. I was pretty attractive that night, so I think I'll say I looked "zingy, like tartar sauce on catfish." (I know, cheesy, huh? This story is going to have an interesting narrative style, I can tell already.)

My other word is "point," as referring to a prominent headland that juts out to sea. I'm a little lost on this one, but I think I'll play with how I plowed into the party. I was like Moses, my friends; the sea didn't stand a chance.

The word given to the class was "illiterate." I'll use that to describe Sio's girlfriend. She was so illiterate in how to work his family. Me, I'm like a fish in water with them. A fish minus the tartar sauce in this instance. Yay for fish smilies.

P.S. I'm sorry for being a parenthesis whore today.

P.P.S. There's subtext.

Unwanted Visitor

Oh, to share a room with a stranger; what a many fangled curiosity!

My roommates aren't a very lively bunch until midnight rolls around. Then their boys come over, different ones every night, and they stay up until all hours. I close the door and turn off the light about the time the brouhaha starts.

2:50 A.M. I'm asleep and justly so. The door opens. A boy walks in, carrying my giggling roommate. He lays her in bed with much pomp, making a show of tucking her in. My heart is pounding against my ribs; there is a boy in my room.

I can't explain why this scares me so much, not really, but my room is my safe place, where things of the outside world don't bother me. When that boy, even more of a stranger to me than my roommate, walks in I feel as if my sanctuary has been invaded. I feel half-naked under the sheets in my nightclothes and completely defenseless despite my nine years of martial arts training. He lies down in her bed and they share a whispered conversation. I grab my pillow and my cell phone and head down to the couch. My other roommates have their door open and are laughing loudly, but at least the living room is empty, if not quiet.

I can't sleep, what with the noise and the panic attack I'm caught in, so I text. First I text my roommate and tell her I'm not okay with our sleeping arrangements. Then I text my mom, who is sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night and might pick up her cell phone, and tell her my roommate decided it's okay to let a guy sleep in her bed while I'm there so looks like I'm sleeping on the couch. Then I text a friend who lives a fence climb away and has insomnia. I ask her if she's awake and if I can come over. I can't sleep with this fear in my chest like a stone.

I only get one text back. "Rachel he didn't sleep. He was in there for two seconds but no problem." The boy leaves, Paige gets into the shower, and I crawl back to bed, hiding underneath the covers. The blissful sleep that was mine ten minutes ago doesn't return quickly. It's hard feeling safe when I don't know who could walk in next.

Too busy to get into trouble

I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew.

My Longest Run-On Sentence

I'm reading Noah Lukeman's A Dash Of Style right now. He has an entire chapter about periods that fills my soul with rainbows. At the end of the chapter, there's a list of exercises one can try to improve their usage of the punctuation mark. He says:

Start a new novel (or short story), and let the opening sentence run at least one page long. Where does this lead you? How did you compensate? Did you find a new narration style? Did not stopping allow you more creative freedom? Can you apply this technique elsewhere in your writing?

Well, I've never written a sentence that long in my life, so I decided to stretch my writing muscles and give it a try. I've had a novella idea bouncing around in my head that's been distracting me from other writing projects, and I've discovered that the best thing to do with that sort of thing is to get as much of it out as possible before going back to other projects. It just works better for me that way. So here are my first two sentences. The first one is hard to follow and not heavily edited (let alone perfect) but I had a lot of fun writing them!

***

The red sandstone offered me a seat and a drawing board as I etched a picture into the stone with a coarse brown stick that bit into my hands with its sharp edges, and gave itself as a lookout to the valley, which was busy, as usual, with the cars that traced the same lines up and down Main Street and darted into the back roads and were pulled over by the black police cars with their flashing red and blue lights—they didn't use sirens, hardly ever, and that was good enough, since the sound always made my ears ring even after they'd died away—and sleepy as usual, paradoxical as it may seem, since the city was never really busy, not really busy in that urgent way that people were doing things that had to be done, that needed to be done, that must be done in order to survive, to exist, to cope with the every changing world; there was no need to be busy in that way, since the world didn't seem to touch the city, at least not in any way that really mattered; people didn't die in the valley save for natural causes, because everyone was too busy spying on their neighbors, showing off their new boats and sports cars, fatting up on elegant desserts or lard-soaked fast foods, playing golf in one of the city's three courses, shopping at the Wal-Mart or the CAL-Ranch or the Farmer's Market but never the little shops that made the city unique (and they were all dying out from the lack of customers anyway, and when they were gone the city would lose it's real soul and just become another town along the interstate where people only ever stop to fill up on gas, not even to run into the Denny's for lunch or the gas station to pick up a candybar), to be irked enough to pull the 12 gage out of the gun cabinet to mow down their neighbors, and you had to wonder about that, really, because the city's liquor store and two clubs (clubs, never bars, because the city considered itself too classy to abide them) were always busy enough to make at least a sixteenth of the adult population constantly drunk and if there were drunks there had to be angry drunks at some time or other, or at least you would think there would have to be, and angry drunks could, on occasion, remember where they kept their gun cabinet key, especially if it was on their key ring (and I wouldn't put it passed some of the avid hunters in the city to open and close their gun cabinets enough to keep the key with them, but at least they put their guns back after they'd used them), and find the damn 12 gage, or at least some sort of hand gun, and be able to take out a few people before the black police cars came with their flashing red and blue lights—and sirens this time, because a murder would merit sirens—or if they couldn't find an angry drunk, at least some sort of pimply teenager who thought the world was conspiring against him and was determined to take a few other pimply teenagers out with him before he beat the world to that great ultimate ending, that final adieu, that great curtain close that I've begun to believe I'll never see, angry drunks or no; and in truth I don't think the city really gave a damn about the rest of the world other than what they read in the World News section of the local newspaper, and even that section was so small you would have to pull out a magnifying glass to see it and a juicer to get anything out of it (sorry, that was hyperbole; I'm given to it sometimes, tragic as it is); and sometimes I had to wonder if the pretentious city down in the valley was really that big, or if the tiny world that was comprised of me, the stick, and the rock was really bigger, if the three of us together had more insight than the city with its population of 20,867 people (as according to the latest census), if the three of us together could do something real, something big, something devastating; in truth I knew I didn't need the rock or the stick, or even the fresh kid I'd taken under my wing who wasn't with me there on the cliff, to help me do something that would turn this city on it's head and scare the sleepy inhabitants to the alert of an angry mob. I could handle that on my own.

Eavesdropping

I have a few weird quirks. One is that, at school, I like to write on my laptop in my bed, because I have a corner and if I put a couple of pillows there I can sit up and it's very comfortable. Another one is that I like to have the door open during the day. My roommates from last year and I were very close and all had an open-door policy for our hall. We could walk in and out as we pleased. Well, my roommates this year and I aren't that close, but I don't want them to feel like I'm being aloof or something stupid, so I leave it open. This allowed me to realize something fantastic: I have the perfect spot for eavesdropping.

Eavesdropping is a guilty pleasure of mine. I wish I could stop myself, but I can't. It doesn't help that I do it for a job. I work at a treatment center for troubled girls, and staff have to hear what they're saying at all times. (I like to joke that I have the best job in the world: I get to eavesdrop and tell people what to do.)

My eavesdropping experience from 9/02/08, I'm sitting in my room working on a short story when suddenly I zone out and hear what's going on downstairs. My roommate...um...(sorry, coming up with pseudonyms on the spot is hard)...Spunky Spice has a boy she likes over...(pseudonym time)...Spunky's boyfriend #1 (she has quite a few). And they're discussing...nipples.

Spunky says, "Why do guys have nipples? You don't even need them."

Boyfriend #1 doesn't even have to think about it. "Pleasure," he says. "Sexual pleasure."

"What?"

"I'm not kidding," Boyfriend #1 says. He's pulling his shirt off. "Lick my nipple."

"I'm not licking your nipple."

"Come on, lick my nipple," he says again. His voice is coxing; he wants it.

Spunky pushes him away and says, "I'm not licking your nipple! I'm just saying, you don't even need them."

If I don't include that exchange in completed piece at some time or other, I will die with a life uncompleted.

Promiscuous

Promiscuous is my favorite word. Why? Because it's beautiful. "Pro." In favor of a position or opinion. "Pro" always makes me happy. "Misc." Short for miscellaneous. Consisting of members or elements of different kinds; of mixed character. Miscellaneous sums up everything! I love it. "Uous." Not actually a word, but sounds neat. Promiscuous! What joy! I love it. It sounds like a kitten purring. The incongruity between the sound of the word and it's meaning is the true source of my happiness, though. Definition 1: characterized by or involving indiscriminate mingling or association, esp. having sexual relations with a number of partners on a casual basis. Tee hee. It makes me giggle.