I had a conversation today about hair. And not hair in general.
Boy’s hair. And not just boy’s hair in general, but
the hair of boys for whom I have loved.
There.
Now it’s out in the open. It’s true. I notice people’s hair.
July’s hair was fair and cut short, coarse, (like the way he coarsely brushed off my feelings for him).
January’s hair was beautiful, deeply brown with gold and silky silky soft. I can almost imagine it under my fingers, but it turns out that the promise of gold was a false one. His hair is just brown, I tell myself.
March’s hair was fairly unremarkable, blonde with a little red, the way I imagined Nancy Drew’s hair to look whenever she was described as an attractive strawberry blonde. No roadster, though, just the blue blue blue of his eyes.
April’s hair has curl to it and is self-described as “puffy”. It reminds me of a dandelion, like maybe we’ll just float away… no setting down of roots, please.
August’s hair is almost femininely soft, something I tell him often. He resents it and tells me he uses Suave brand shampoo.
Hair hair hair hair hair hair there where snare bear care Zaire.
I like an illustration I saw once in a volume of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where there’s a kid sitting under a tree dangling a line into the Mississippi. He was just sitting there, doing nothing, and that’s something we need to do more of–to sit and do nothing, and dream, and to follow that dream.
I started reading Frank McCourt because I liked the way his books felt in my hands, the smooth dust covers comfortingly sepia-toned, promising at least a new color to add to the spines standing on my bookshelf.
I cried when I read in a Michigan newspaper that he had died, wondering how he could have gone and done that when I hadn’t even met him yet!
My brother is about to begin his final year of high school and is inundated with mail from different universities. When I sort the mail and my fingers slip over the glossy covers and bright words of the college viewbooks, I remember that feeling that life was so free and full of opportunity and possibilities. Now my letter is sent in, the check deposited and it’s bittersweet. New doors are opening, but it’s frightening to feel so many closing too.
I think dreams are dangerous.
Sometimes I’m convinced that I know, I know, I know that the love shared between me and him is real, I love him. He loves me, and every breath I breathe is one moment closer to him. And then I blink into the sun and wonder where I was to think those things. I’m afraid of my dream. I’m afraid of hoping, because I will be disappointed. I’m afraid of hoping, because maybe the realization of this dream could be more frightening than leaving it unfulfilled.
My mom’s not really a music person. When she drives her mini-van (dubbed the swagger wagon by me, the republic gunship by my brothers) she prefers to listen to sports radio in order to keep up with her favorite team, the Texas Rangers.
My dad, on the other hand, loves to turn on the surround sound and blast music whenever my mom’s not in the house. He plays a couple standards to entertain my brothers– Eye of the Tiger by Survivor and the Imperial March from the Empire Strikes Back Soundtrack (sensing a trend yet?), but his own taste veers back to his oddly-spent childhood. His year spent in England when he was 13 years old has left irreparable scars on him, causing him to listen to obscure ska bands like The Specials and constantly do a weird running-man/ski dance move which was apparently how people danced back in “the day”.
I basically grew up with no music in my childhood, unless you count the Music Man soundtrack which I still know word for word. I find this depressing, but an unavoidable fact. I wasn’t really allowed to listen to the Spice Girls or Britney or N’Sync, which I still find embarrassing when all the people in a room start singing along to a song I’ve never heard in my life but everyone else knows all the words to.
But I remember the moment when I started listening to music. It started with a mixtape burned onto a green cd, covered with the loopy scrawl of one of my best friends titled “Angela’s CD of AWESOME!!!!”, subtitled “we’re just two wild and craaaaazy guys”.
Those songs can bring me back to the kid I was four years ago. I remember distinctly hearing Reptilia by The Strokes for the first time, accompanied by their video that electrified me, nose practically pressed to the computer screen.
My own musical taste is hard for me to define, though I have no trouble criticizing other people’s. The closest I can come to defining my own musical taste, after all my phases– loving British soul/pop, folk, Top 40, Sufjan, Beach Boys, MGMT; detesting Arcade Fire and Radiohead– and many drives in the car with the windows rolled down and music at top volume, I can only say that it’s whatever I like.
I have to say, I don’t know why I like The Beach Boys and The Strokes equally as much. But I do. I guess that’s just what happens when your mom loves baseball and your dad loves ska. You grow up confused.
It’s not a very proud fact, but I mention it here because I think I am turning into 4th-grade Angela. In 4th grade, I was the terrible combination of too-smart-for-my-own-good and bored. I spent all of my time constructing a very complicated house for a paperclip named Clippy, although it was way cooler than that godawful one from Microsoft Word, mainly because it never spoke. I remember that I built a staircase and a bathtub filled with water (complete with taps!) completely out of construction paper, which is pretty impressive. While I was doing this, the rest of the class was learning… something. I’m not really sure, as I wasn’t paying attention at all. Then we got our report cards and I failed English. We were supposed to be writing a short story, but I didn’t turn mine in because a) we were only supposed to write a page, and my story was entirely too complicated to wrap up in that space so b) my teacher told me to redo it but c) she was so focused on other students who needed more help than a little snot who thought she was too good for the assignment that d) she thought she would just make something up at the last minute but e) I never did so f) was the grade I got on my report card. Suffice to say I got in big, big trouble. My teacher had to talk with my parents, my parents were very angry and probably very confused by me. Well (spoiler) I passed the fourth grade and went to a different school that was interesting for about 7 years.
Now it’s year 8 of that school and my English teacher just emailed my parents telling them I’m in danger of failing English this semester. This would actually be a travesty because I would not get to go to university. It’s just…. I am bored. And uninterested. And this blog is becoming my construction paper house for an inanimate object. I just want to go somewhere else where I can be interested and excited by books and challenged by the things I am learning, and not by the tedium of the assignments. So I guess it’s time to write this paper.
When I was little, I used to play this game where I would try to capture a specific moment in my mind by taking a mental picture and thinking “I will remember these moments forever”. I don’t. But I do remember what kind of moments they were. Usually it was when my entire family was collected in a room with an invisible web stretching between us. But though we’re connected (sometimes too closely) I don’t know these people at all. I’ve had lots of time to deal with my older brother growing up and away, but it’s scary to me that my little brothers aren’t just adorable and exasperating beings who look like me, but people. Real people who have thoughts and opinions and hopes and nightmares and personalities just like me.
And with the complexity of children is the added complexity of adults. My parents. Who are they? Who was my mother before she was my mother? Who was the young girl who fled Vietnam with her parents and grew up to marry a white man? Who was she before she made pot roasts and refereed fights between small children? Who was my father? Who were his high school friends? Why did he choose to go to a small, private, liberal arts school miles and miles away from his Midwest home? How did he feel when he told his parents he was marrying an Asian woman a foot shorter than him? Who was he before he began running to meetings and flossing our teeth?
I want to hold on to these moments forever, where we’re together and I know I’m more comfortable with them than anyone else, but I already feel growing pains. I’m scared. I want to go away from here, but I don’t ever want that web to disappear.
That’s the thing that’s been going through my mind the past few days. I’m bad at this. I can’t seem to do anything right; I can’t seem to analyze poetry or write or read critically or retain information about the rise of Stalin or connect to people.
My typical c’est la vie, life goes on attitude isn’t working right now. Last night, I was just so frustrated I wanted to punch something and to be honest, today has been even worse. I know in that just three weeks I will not even remember today as being bad because I will have new challenges to face.
This isn’t the calm before the storm. This is the weird green sky before a tornado, this is the snapping sound beneath your feet before the ice cracks, this is the collective gasp of the crowd as the tightrope walker slips.
This is me, dramatically complaining about my life in a terrible blog post.
completely lost
through shady streets
(range rovers and lexuses park on the sides)
me
in my pickup truck
blasting the avett brothers
(a mix from a brother, grown up)
i broke down crying in the parking lot
and how you knew
the strumming of guitars would make me cry
and hearing track number two
you know i’m smiling
don’t bulldoze the woods yet,
boy,
i’m not done running through.
look away dixieland–
already missing the freedom of denim,
just a sad southern girl
I have a friend named Karen. I say we’re friends, but sometimes I think we’re in that awkward stage between being family acquaintances (our brothers go to school together) and socially associating (we went to camp together! in the 9th grade!). But she gave me an awesome nickname, and I gave her a slightly less cool one, so I’m sticking us in the “friend” category.
Among her many talents, Karen is an ace people spotter. Seriously. Freshmen/sophomore years, Karen and I were party buddies and every time I wanted to locate someone, Karen would turn on her spidey senses and find them in seconds. It’s uncanny.
Recently, Karen has added to her repertoire of uncanny skills. Her bright spanking new blog is called Stuck in the Middle with You and is, no joke, my autobiography. Karen, like me, is from a frighteningly large and intimidatingly awesome family with too many siblings too count. Her posts are humorous, honest, and just all kinds of awesome. Every post she publishes I could swear she has stolen from my brain. I cannot express how happy this blog makes me. I think you should check it out, 3 people who read this blog. I think Karen needs 3 more readers.
On that hot Monday night in June, when I finally got home from the day of heart-pounding nervousness and anticipation, I lay on the floor of my room, trying to preserve all the good moments in my memory forever. I asked her what to do, and she told me it was okay to get hurt, it was worth the risk. And I believed.
When I fell with no one to catch me, I think my expression was mostly one of frustration. I raged half-heartedly knowing all the while that I was responsible for the bruises that I carried with me on my heart.
I feel regret, and sorrow, and anger, and silliness. I know that this experience of going for it and failing won’t matter a whit in the overall scheme of things. I suspect in just a few weeks I will look back and roll my eyes at the fuss I made. But this is important. Was it worth it? I looked before I leapt, and I believed that the sensation of falling would be worth the sharp rocks at the bottom. Was it?
I’m still healing. The scars will remain to shape me, but who cares? They look cool. And when I talked to a different him on Saturday night, I didn’t feel like jumping or dancing, but like walking. And reading. It’s the beginning. A new face, a new friendship that could be crushed, or blossom into something more beautiful than I could imagine, or just grow shortly and greenly into grass to cover the lawn. I’m ready for it all.
Everyone knows you can grow flowers where dirt used to be.
