The Silence Between Us

It seems, many times, that life is naught but one huge transition.

Well said, Sonia.

I am in one of those mini transition that makes up the one large, aforementioned-and-conversely-annoyingly-stated transition.

Moving back home.

It's not that I am despising my time. I sleep late, lazily walk to coffee, sigh, breeze through magazines, a mall, a salon, thank you notes. Lots of breezing and sighing and sleeping. It's nice really. It feels like time moves slowly, but then in a sigh it's Friday again and I have no where to go but my living room.

I read a short essay by a friend of mine who described an Anthropology lecture. The subject was more or less about communications between other cultures, one in particular whose young people did not speak to one another during courtship.A student volunteered his dismissal that it would seem impossible to chose your mate without conversation. The professor then ceased to talk for ten minutes, to the increasing anxiety of the class. As they giggles, twitched and shuffled she waited until the intensity of the silence seeped in. Then she asked of the class if they could imagine existing in that still and quiet space, while locked with their Other, slowly falling in love.

Jesus, can you imagine?

When I am in a damn post argument silence with my mother as she carts me around in her little Prius, five million angry little thoughts and quips are running around my head like mice in a maze. Over an argument about how much she hates Julia Roberts because her laugh is the same in every movie. NO IT'S NOT MOM, SHE HAS DEPTH. But picture a mandated silence surrounding falling in love, an experience that literally functions around over analyzing feelings, perceptions, and the potential of life binding. How do you tell someone about all those crazy things, if without a very long and verbal pronunciation? How do you send them a look that says "Set the date!" or "Hey, how about we make this thing official? I mean, unless you want to keep seeing other people. Because I'm kinda keeping quiet with two other guys but I'm at the point where I just thought we could keep the silence between us."

Anyway, Home is my silent place.

And my Other is my newly minted, almost graduated self.

And she and I are not in a good place.

But we're keeping it quiet.

Angel Cum

Today, on my second to last day of vacation in Hawaii, my grandfather cooked us dinner. He insists that the best way to prepare food is to keep it simple.

"Sauces," he'll scoff.

"I tell you what delicious," he looks my sister and I, bouncing his eyebrows up and down, lapsing into Hawaii's pidgin dialect. "You make it simple, wheew and it's ono."

My grandfather made beef macaroni and it was delicious. We melted cheese on top and sat around in the living room, eating off plates balanced in our laps and talking story. My mother had been looking through old pictures before dinner and she had found some from my aunt's wedding. As soon as she turned to my aunt and uttered the words I began to get a knotted feeling in my spleen. I knew picture talk would lead to talk of the DVD. Moments later, my knotted spleen tightened.

"Ohhhhh! We should watch the DVD!"

I was just about to turn twelve when my Aunt and Uncle tied the knot. Around that age I was inspired by things of the theatrical nature. I was enthusiastic about my eventual ascent to stardom, so much so that I was genuinely upset when Brittney Spears kept churning out more refrained hits. The competition, I thought bitterly to myself, was heating up.

Despite my limited resume consisting only of a few solos in the catholic Children's Choir, I trusted that my shaky soprano was the stuff of greatness. So I prepared myself to bestow upon my engaged Auntie and Uncle the honor of a song. Not just any melody, but a song composed by myself and consequently performed at the reception.

It took me a long time to write the lyrics. Since I did not know how to play a musical instrument, the tune was improvised. I only remember a bit of the verse.

Like an Angel, you came for me.
God must have sent you, we were meant to be.
We gave each other all we had.
And I will always love you.

You gave me all the strength I needed.
You're the reason I've succeeded
We've helped each other through so much
And I will always love you.

(Two more verses, a bridge with the climax of the song, in which I hit a high note, don't know which one because I DON'T KNOW HOW TO PLAY MUSIC, and then a wrap up, repeat verse in which I sing the first verse all inside out like B Spears on "Crazy")

Telling this story is making my fingernails want to separate from my skin. Under the lover as an angel metaphor, I had made a joke about orgasms. I desecrated the purity of angelic love with a preposition. I am not sure how much a 12 year old student of works such as "Baby one more time" knows about the institution of marriage, but apparently the idea of everlasting love and godly destiny resonated with me.

And, once again, the song was going to be sung acapella. In front of a wedding reception of about 200.

So amidst heartfelt and trembling speeches from relatives and close friends, my little warble of a accidentally porny Christian rock love song was to debut. The parts of this build-up sometimes hit me in waves of reflective shame and embarrassment. Acapella. Age 12. Inside Out Last Verse. High Note. Awkward Stage. God Love is Lyrics.

However, those things I can usually let go. Chalk it up to inexperience and 12 year old bravado. But what makes me wince as my mother and aunt gush over the idea of watching the wedding video is the bit of improvisation I decided to throw in before I performed my song that fateful evening.

As I made my small way to the podium I felt a sense of increasing dread. I hadn't really bargained for these nerves, I thought, as my hands started shaking bit. Then I remembered my secret weapon, tucked away in my funny-things-to-say arsenal.

My aunt introduced my song and me to the patient audience. I stepped up to the podium and accepted destiny.

"Thank you all for coming tonight," I quoted. (I hadn't invited them) "I just wanted to say a few words before I begin." Pause for effect. Intake for breath. "For those of you who have your hearing tonight, I'd like to apologize ahead of time."Pause. Still holding breath. "And for those of you who are hard of hearing," Pause for effect. Lungs hurting "Tonight, you are the lucky ones."

Sound familiar?

It's from the film Mr. Holland's Opus, in the last, dramatic and tear inducing scene. A line that made sense in the movie because Mr Holland was addressing a room full of hearing disabled people, not, a party.

I plagiarized. Poorly.

There I was, a twelve year old junior bridesmaid in a red halter dress reciting pilfered lines from a film she saw on Lifetime as the preface to a song that began with a line that could have been substituted into a soft core.

This is why I cannot watch the video of me. The physical evidence of it happening will shatter any dignity I am trying to hold on to from that memory. I told my Aunt that we could maybe watch it when I am thirty.



Congrats on 10 years of marriage, Auntie and Uncle. I love you guys. Sorry I plagiarized at your wedding.

Hag Time

Right now I am in Hawaii, on vacation.

I never realized I had anal tendencies. What I have realized about my newly discovered anal tendencies is that they are not the slight OCD type that manifest themselves usefully in things like recycling or wiping bathroom mirrors down. My tendencies tend to lead me to do things like try on all my clothes as I attempt to pack them for a trip, inspect the divots in my shoes at four a.m., or blog on vacation.

So, here's to all those with unproductive anal tendencies. This wandering, gap-in-thought of a muse is dedicated to you.

While I was driving home from being graduated, sort of, I saw a hawk hovering over I5's uninspiring strip of grass medium. One time my good friend saw a beautiful white bird as we drove together, going somewhere. She was so excited at the make and model of such a lovely animal, she called her mother who was equally enthused about the fowl. I understood her excitement then, when I saw the large bird who was able to sustain his position by his instinctual knowledge of the buffering air currents and his own physical ability.

It got me thinking as I flew by inland central California's monotonous landscape, how I wish I could AIR HOVER. It reminded me of that enviable athletic ability of hang time. In seventh grade I was the first girl who had a jump shot. This jump shot of mine had the accuracy equivalent of a first time urinal user. Still, I was the first pick of the girls for the Folsom Youth Basketball Association that year. I remember my coach discussing my impressive hang time. However my glory was short lived. In eighth grade, all the girls had jump shots and mine was still the pee hitting the wall.

But I think hang time is an impressive skill. To be able to delay one's return to the ground; sounds like something R Kelly would sing an inspiring ballad about. I wish this skill could translate to the non-corporal realm, since nowadays I consider shopping a cardiovascular activity. I don't really get my kicks at the gym.

So maybe something like emotional hang time. The strength to delay a reaction or outcome that is often unpreventable, like gravity. Often times I am placed in situations that...rub me the wrong way. Dramatic, violin-music scenarios, the kind that even your friends will roll their eyes over as you explain it to them over a salted margarita rim. I wish in those instances I could leap high into the subconscious and half conscious state of my slanted, charged deliberation, and instead of plummeting magnificently back down into an angry text message or booze induced monologue,I would hover. Like the hawk, I'd employ my knowledge of previous mistakes and current irrational state and stay their until I figured the best time or way to swoop back down.

But do I hover? Nooooooooo. I plummet.

My girlfriend once told me (after I described to her a particularly embarassing case of plummeting) that my, erm, displays work for me.

"I knew you would," she said, as we lay on our beds. "It's just so you. And you get away with it. More power to you."

I guess I can sort of get away with the crazy. But then I have to own up to the crazy. And while I think that people who are sane aren't really as much fun (cue Kerouac quote yeech), I don't always want to be mad, as it drives me nuts.

I think I am going to work to my hang time.

Advise Me.

When you "graduate" from college, people want to give you advice.

I say "graduate" because I still have to take one more class in August (another thing people want to give you advice about, failing classes).

So for all intents and purposes, I "graduated."

Recently my father gave me a self help book from a female author who really gets him. Its title I can't remember, something along the lines of "How to REALLY get past your break-up." It's full of great idiomatic one-liners that punctuate the author's points. The paragraph about not stalking your ex's profiles on social networking sites ends with "If you don't want to get your hair cut, don't hang around the barber's shop!"

Thanks, no haircut, got it.

I read a few chapters aloud to my dad and sister, reading her idioms in a few of my well matured impressions. "If you hang around dogs, you're bound to get fleas!" sounds cooler as Cookie Monster, well a Cookie Monster that sounds more like Eartha Kitt.

I remember my commencement speaker at graduation. She was a fancy international journalist, impressively accomplished, New York accent. A portion of her speech explained how the study of humanities prepared her for her career and life. "My degree in humanities taught me the importance of communication, but it doesn't take the place of learning how to communicate in life."

Okay, those were not the precise words of her speech, but that is the way they felt to me as my brain processed them, hot in my itchy robe and fold-out chair. Her graceful and well thought out arguments sort of clumped together and formed that fuzzy, Charlie Brown's teacher ball of sound. I squinted my eyes up at the podium, hoping to cling onto some piece of her wisdom that would propel me to another state, any other state than my current numbness. Like a sad, hysterical one. Or a thoughtful, reflective one. Not my itchy and sweaty butt one.

It got me thinking about advice. I feel like I am getting advice from all ends of the spectrum: old, young, furry, sober, drunk, male, lesbian, well-meaning, bored, lonely, equally confused, angry, motiv-ed. All this wisdom flying in at newly porous me, permeating my skull and vulnerable, unemployed being until I get off the phone crying:

"I DON'T WANT TO EXPAND MY HORIZONS."

People, like the aforementioned two, give advice to help and guide those in a time of flux. I am, by definition of my age, education and maturation level, and relationship status, in a time of fluuu-huuuux. But I feel like these disciples of success, happiness, and life satisfaction are failing me a little. If my options are to "Shoot for the moon" or "You miss 100 % of the shots you never take," then I might as well live my life with a 22 caliber, aiming at the pie in the sky while during the day I run in circles like a discombobulated hamster, shooting hoops until its time to kill the moon again.

I wish someone would tell me to take a shower everyday. Go get your teeth cleaned, it's good for you. Read a book. Write down your thoughts. Go for a run (haha yeah right). Don't drink so much. Don't forget your mistakes, but forgive yourself. Buy more shoes.

I guess giving yourself advice is the hardest thing to do. But imagine that you have two parts, both of which can aid in "showing you the light." You and your dummy self are of one being, and can help each other out. Sometimes my dummy self drinks too much and passes out. BUT it was the right thing to do because my real self was all raw and pissed off and dummy self made any potentially embarrassing displays of wildebeest anger and drunken emotion impossible by consuming too many vodka sodas and being sleepy.

"Trust yourself, whether it be the real or dummy, because you never know when dummy will drink too much and save your real."

How's that for advice?

Whistle Blower

When my family lived in Virginia Beach, my parents spent time with a group of adults and their subsequent children who loved to party. It felt like so much of our Virginia time was spent at soccer games or parties. My father had a short party-time span. For 3-4 hours he would be the belle of the ball, making jokes, being active, flitting around the space with his bottled beer and great attitude, aiding along the general festive atmosphere.

But as dusk started to set during the wet summer evenings, my father would lose interest in clever small talk and bacon-wrapped figs. Then the previously engaged would become brooding, and usually take to a small patch of lawn somewhere slightly distant from the party.

With this removal came the jangling of his keys, a sound in which my sister and I remained spectacularly in-tuned too, even though we rarely bring our father to the thuper cool house parties we now attend. Then, about 20 minutes later, he would blow a small whistle he had attached to his jangly keys.

I don't know if my father foreshadowed this use for his whistle. For its berth, it emitted an impressive sound. Like a train.

WHHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOWWW

My sister and I would whip our eight and six year old heads to the lawn. Then back to where our mother was sipping a decently full drink with a tall blond lady.

WHHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWW

My mother's head whipped to the lawn

WHHEOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWW

The rest of the eight and six year olds' heads whipped the lawn.


WWWWWWHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOOOOW

Even the dog's head whipped to the lawn.

We were far from the Von Trapp family and the whistle did little to assemble us into neat, obedient lines. More so it made my mother grumble, my sister and I giggle, all of us a little embarrassed. But at the end of the train noises, when we four Lucygas made our way to the car parked in a neighborhood, the whistle made me feel like I belonged to something important.

The rest of the party watched us depart, probably amused at my mother's disgruntled look, the way my father swung his arms triumphantly as we walked. Perhaps they laughed, but it felt like the point, the traveling comedy troupe Lucyga.

And as eight year old me bucked my seat belt in the Mazda, I grasped my sister's little hand tightly, in on the joke, and happy to go home.

So thanks Dad, for being a whistle blower and a great father.

Happy Father's Day.

Aunt Frida, stop!

This one's directed right back at you, dead pants.

You are getting way to foreshadowing and reflective for your own good.

One time this nice and handsome man I knew made me watch an episode of South Park. It was about Facebook, and Stan or Ryan or whatever the cool one's name is...he got so popular on Facebook that he got sucked into the virtual world and had to battle his own profile! It took on virtual life.

Clever, you Colorado stoners, clever.

I am beginning to think my blog is turning into the Jewish aunt I never had. The one that starts to tell me things "for my own good" and they end up being painfully, uncomfortably true. It's as if she tells me all the things that are wrong with me, all my jokes about myself or my hard-to-follow-bc-they're-not-properly-thought-out metaphors are really her criticisms and bits of advice, sneaking their way into my consciousness through my narrative voice!

I might have to rename this blog. Auntie Frida.

Hold me Hostage, baby.

I am supposed to be writing a paper on metamorphosis, the individual vs the collective. If a man turns into a beetle but no one notices him is he still a bug? Who the hell knows.

I am sitting on a couch with the volume turned super loud for a bad cop movie, so my topic sentence ideas and quote intros are punctuated with epithets like "Don't fuck me on this one Jimmy!" or "Four of our guys are dead, what do you want me to do, throw a fucking party?!?" Not really conducive to deciphering the delicate and at the same time steely prose of Kafka, but good enough to keep back the tears that want to leap out of my eyeballs and make streams, order 1,2,3, AND 4 down my face.

I am just going to spray it, Relationships are not for the meek. Relationships are beautiful, and terrifying. You find your being, your awesome singular being confronted with things you never knew about yourself; neurotic behaviors, split ends, the ability to text ridiculously sappy shit and at the same time declare emotional nuclear war the next day.

I sometimes feel, for us "young adults," like its all naught but a hostage situation. We both stand facing one other, sweaty, looking like we've been ridden and put away wet. I am holding his pulsating, metaphorical heart in my hand, gun ready and finger twitching on the trigger. To borrow form my cop movie: "I swear to God I'll fucking shoot, I'll fucking kill it. Get me out of here, I want a nice movie and dinner date, foot massages, and for you to love me for who I am!"

And he's across the room, quivering. "AW shut the fuck up of I'LL shoot! I want sex twice a day and verbal appreciation!"

This was supposed to be funny. I am just sad.

Relationships are hard.