“I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school.
They don’t teach you how to love somebody.
They don’t teach you how to be famous.
They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor.
They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer.
They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind.
They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying.
They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.”

-Neil Gainman

thank you.

It’s not about who leaves, its about who stays.

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.” -Neil Gainman

I like these.

These are by YELENA BRYKSENKOVA is studying illustration at the maryland institute college of art.

I am annoyed, and I wish to punch things. I guess I don’t have a good outlet for anger. The thing is I don’t punch things so I just let it stew inside of me and think about punching things.

I went on a date today, a bad date. Now I’m not even sure if it was a date, or a friendly lunch but for the sake of this post lets call it a date. Lets start off with me leaving my apartment around noon to make it home, where the date was, which is an hour away, by 1:30. I was running a little behind because of my ghetto apartment door deciding to lock me in- but thats another story for another time.

Its 1:20 and I’m exiting off the interstate perfect timing to get to the restaurant by 1:30, when the guy texts me asking to move the time back to 2:30. Not wanting to push it back, since I had planned when I was leaving around 1:30, I said “sure” to be accommodating and headed home to waste an hour before heading back out.

I arrive home, start my laundry, talk to my mom and then leave for the date. We both arrive within a few minutes of each other and are seated. Things are going well, we’re talking and catching up. Then the check arrives, and he doesn’t have enough money to pay. He asks me if I have any cash. I have $5, and I don’t mind chipping in for the tip, so I hand it over. It turns out he doesn’t have enough for all the bill. Flustered and just wanting to resolve the situation I just offer to pay and he’d get the tip. He collects the few bills he’d laid out the table and puts them back in his wallet, including my fiver.  I was a little put off when I realized this and asked him if he was going to keep it. I don’t know if he was embarrassed that I called him out or what but he definitely seemed ruffled.  After all I was paying for the whole bill, I didn’t want to lose my only cash too. I wouldn’t be so piqued if he has tried to apologize for the situation, say thank you or be gracious to me for covering the bill. But all I really remember him saying was some story about how he doesn’t have a check card anymore. Um yeah, k.

I guess what’s bugged me all afternoon most  was I kind of liked the guy. I’d known him for years and always thought well of him. I was exited to get to know him better and spend time with him. It was a disappointment that it didn’t work out.

Sanchita is a made up word.

When I write letters I try to give the recipient a narrative of my life. Usually it ends up being vague highlights and jumbled thoughts. Open Letter is a webzine that a since stopped publishing, but was devoted to “first-person writing in the form of personal correspondence.”  Telling stories through a letter. While reading through these I read one written by Jonathan Goldstein, my favorite CBC radio host.   I’ve reposted the letter here because it is just such a great letter-story. It reads like the monologs on his radio show.

Montreal, Quebec
July 7, 2000

Dear X,
I was watching Frasier and had just gone into the kitchen to get some crackers when the phone rang. The moment I heard Cassidy’s voice, I knew there had always been this small part of me that had been doing nothing in the past four years but sit by the phone, waiting for something out there to bring her back to me. Through all kinds of relationships, there had been late drunken nights where I had punched her name into every search engine on the net trying to turn up any stupid little trace of her I could get.

The last time I had seen Cassidy was about a year after we had broken up. I was sitting in a Second Cup when she walked through the door in a big Joni Mitchell hat. Right behind her was a big blond boy, also in a big hat. The friend I was having coffee with thought it was the most ridiculous thing she had ever seen, them walking in with their big floppy hats, but all I could think was that it could have been me. I could have been the schmuck in the matching hat trailing behind her.

Her new beau looked like her type, too. Whenever we ran into old boyfriends of hers on the street, inevitably, they were big boys in army shorts and Kodiak boots, the laces undone, and their Ray Ban sunglasses pulled up onto their heads keeping their floppy bangs out of their eyes. They were the kind of guys who loped around swigging from monstrous jugs of milk, jugs bigger than my upper torso.

Cassidy and I looked nothing alike. She was this sparkly-eyed child star all grown-up, and I was someone’s uncle Shecky as a young man. Cassidy had long blond hair, and I had friends who called her Miss Piggy. When she shook their hands they said it was like a little pig had gotten right up on its hind legs and offered them a hoof. Cassidy was a very eccentric dresser, wearing sparkly little gloves and skirts made of neck ties. She wore Superman T-shirts, big British combat boots, and colourful leotards like a little girl. There was something about her that made me feel like she was my sister, my baby-sitter, my daughter, and the bank teller I could never have all rolled up into one. But she was also so oddly beautiful to me and I remember nights where it felt like I could have stared at her face forever.

One time we were sitting in a bar, drinking gin and tonics and not saying much when a very drunk woman came over and said that we really looked interesting together.

“When people say stuff like that,” I said afterwards, “they make the world a less cold place to be.” And for the rest of the night I felt like we were Nico and Lou Reed.

We had met in an intro to Shakespeare class at McGill. After years of dead-end jobs, I had decided to go back to college and I was easily four years older than anyone in any of my classes. She sat beside me and we played hangman. She would choose quotes from Richard the Second, and I would use lines like “I feel like chicken tonight.” Cassidy later told me that she and her friends had nicknamed me “Fonzie.”

“In a good way,” she said.

Cassidy started having me over to her house for study sessions where she’d make me fish sticks. I hadn’t had stuff like that since I was a kid. Pretty soon we started dating.

From the get-go, we never got along. Once as we were leaving a party at her friends, as we were walking down their winding staircase, Cassidy, being the playful drunk kitten she was, ran off ahead of me, and that was how we walked all the way back to her house, with her at least a block and a half ahead of me, and she never looked back once. I tried to be cool. I even lingered over a box of books someone had thrown away. I rooted through it for a while and withdrew a copy of Soul On Ice, but by the time I made it to her house I had wrung it to shreds. There was the time she so thoroughly insulted my artistic vision that I came very close to running her over as she got out of my car to walk through the McGill campus gates; but instead I sat there, revving the engine and honking the horn as though to say: “Look at me! I’m impotent with rage!”

But there was tenderness, too, like how she would greet me at her door in the middle of the night in her Little House on the Prairie flannel night gown and sleepily babble about the dream she had just woken out of involving Theodore Dreiser; how she told me, when we took showers together, that with my hair slicked back I looked like a 1950’s teen idol; how she said I had the perfect penis, and I said that was the kind of compliment that sticks with a person; how she would repeat over and over about how she and her Chinese roommate, living under the same roof together, were every freshman boy’s wet dream; how she said in her little-girl voice that from this time forward she was going to “keep her pie-hole shut”; how she told me that if she had to choose one person to spend the rest of her life with on a desert island, it would be me. There were picnics on Nun’s Island that started off with Camembert cheese and foreign beer and ended in horrible fights about things I can no longer remember. There were so many fights, fights with yelling in the park, fights in pup tents, fights that scared her roommates.

To be honest, much of her anger towards me was justified. I had just gotten over a three and a half year relationship, and was never willing to commit in the way that I should have. Every so often, as we lay in bed she would smilingly ask me if I wanted to “go around” with her. That was what they used to call going steady in her old high school.

“What’s the point of all that?” I said. “What’s so bad about taking things as they come?”

She explained to me that if I was her boyfriend, or even just her friend, she would bake me a cake on my birthday, but as her fuck-buddy, baking me a cake would just somehow be a really cheesy thing to do.

And now here was her voice again. I could hear her eyes, off to the side and uncertain, her leotarded legs twisted around each other like licorice.

One of the first things she said was that she was thinking of becoming a mortician in order to best deal with her death anxiety. I told her that a lot of morticians fuck corpses and she said that I was still the same old asshole. We argued for a while and then she told me that the only reason she had even called me in the first place was to tell me that she was engaged.

If she was looking for some kind of reaction, she certainly got it. My stomach suddenly felt like a sandwich bag filled with sea-monkeys leaking water all over the place. I sat down on the kitchen floor and stared up at the dirty dishes in my sink as she talked about her new life.

“I’m brilliantly happy,” she said.

She described her fiancé as some kind of saint, the kind of guy who spends whole afternoons talking to homeless people and really trying to solve their problems.

“Is he tall? ” I asked.

“He’s shorter than me,” she said.

As we talked, she kept interrupting to get her cats a treat.

“I’ve become a real cat person,” she said. “My cats are my life.”

Of course I was tempted to say a great many things on the subject of her cat-personhood, but I wasn’t going to take the bait.

“That’s great,” I said, and there had to have been a trace of something other in my voice—how could there not have been—but she wasn’t biting either.

She told me that for Y2K, she and Richard, her fiancé, had gone up to his parents’ place in the country with enough food and water to last them a few months, just in case something happened. I imagined her doing the shopping for them the way she did for our picnics, not skimping on anything, getting Dijon instead of regular brown mustard.

As stupid as it was, I sat there listening to her and wondering how she could have failed to fit me into her plan, how she could have been willing to leave me to die in the final reckoning.

Her cats were driving her crazy, being “very bad” so she had to go. I told her Richard was a very lucky man. I was tempted to add, “as long as you manage to keep your pie-hole shut,” but I refrained.

There are some mornings where I wake up and feel like every woman I’ve ever loved is right on my chest, just sitting there, drinking coffee and talking to each other. It’s like a part of you never entirely lets go. I wish I could say I’m going to get up now and toss away the nutty mix tapes Cassidy made me, but I never get around to buying much new music.

I’m going to leave a special request in my will, asking for Cassidy to be my mortician. Look at him, all smug, she’ll probably say.

Jonathan.

Maybe I’ll write a letter like this one day, maybe even to you, dear reader. Maybe.

New Years Resolution Generator

Stereotyping people by their favorite Indie Band. Is it sad that its true, or true because its sad?

Laura Gibson- new interview and round of songs is up on Daytrotter.com. She’s amazing, please check out “Funeral Song.” It is simply beautiful and brings me a sad joy. Gibson says that “Despite the title, I’ll always consider this a love song.  Understanding love in a way that if death comes, I won’t fear the letting go, or being let go. Like most people, I often wonder if I’m capable of such love.  But I suppose the song is less a testimony of my own selflessness, and more a hope, or perhaps faith, that my love might be realized in this way.  Although it’s such a simple composition, I chipped away at Funeral Song for a long time, and of all the songs on Beasts of Seasons, it’s probably the most meaningful to me.  I hope to sing it as an old lady someday”

___________________

In response to my own posting on 12/20, yes that is the only way. A few days ago I spent the afternoon cleaning out my closet at my parents house. They’re preparing it to go on the market and so I need to claim whatever it is I want to keep or it’ll all be taken care of by my mom. Going through things that ranged from childhood, to middle and high school to painful ex’s and exfriend’s things that once meant so much to you. I’ve now decided its best to just throw them, and it all away.

The pain is not lessened but it’s easier to deal with now that you don’t have reminders of what you’ve lost. When the people mean nothing, its hard for the things they gave you to.

haircut. Today I will get a hair cut(e). My hair is the longest it’s ever been in my life. I’ve always had super short hair and so I’ve always gotten it cut/trimmed often. But not that I’m trying to let it grown out I’m having problems I usually never have, like dry, split, dead ends. Its absolutely driving me crazy and its making my hair look so ratty. Heres a photo of my hair over the past four years, each around christmas time. Its crazy, my hair always used to be as short as the first two.

Today I’m going to go be the best daughter in the world. This afternoon I’m going to go hold my Dad’s hand and help him pick out a new cell phone. One that does everything he wants and one that he doesn’t need a manual to figure out. We’ll see how that all turns out. I think he’s narrowed it down to the Droid or one of the Blackberries. His phone really is dead and can’t hold a charge anymore so he does need a new one, so lets hope we come up with one today.

I’ve just started reading “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan and so far it’s amazing. Its hard for me to explain exactly how this book is so eye opening to how we, Westerners eat so I’ll let this blurb about it help explain.

“Food. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it? Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” – no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.”

The book is divided into three different sections, The Age of Nutritionism, The Western Diet and the Diseases of Civilization, and Getting over Nutritionism. Once I finish this book I plan on reading Pollan’s first book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”

I’ve written before about genetically engineered food,so this book just keeps compounding my belief in real food.