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[aslant]

From mthrtongue

1. Utne reviewed a film by Hirokazu Kore-Eda called After Life, a part-documentary in which “dead people's first stop is a seedy office compound where they're asked to choose a single memory from their lives. A crew then recreates the moment as a video shoot, and the deceased get to keep the video, their only link with the lives they've left behind." The interesting part is that he used real, unscripted people. Anyway. I'm sure you see the question coming. What would your memory be?

I suppose I should start by saying that I sort of dislike this idea---however clever and filmic and post-modern its appeal, I feel there are so many categories of memories in my mind. I could come up with memories of family, or of Kirk, or of friends, or of a solitary moment. If I want to pick a memorable moment, should it be emotional? Intellectual? An epiphany? A moment when I was surrounded by a beautiful place? A mundane moment that somehow encapsulates my usual free time? A quiet moment of realization? An orgasm? A hilarious moment? A blurry childhood memory or a clear recent memory? Something that lends itself easily to the film medium? The memory I ended up choosing involved friends and professors, and it combined the everyday with a feeling of magic that makes this particular memory stand out in my mind. But I still find the idea problematic---not only do I not want to believe in memory persisting past death, I do not want to believe in choosing one particular memory. Either way, am I partially invalidating everything left out of the memory? Anyway. Here goes.

There was one day, my senior year in college, when the Comparative Literature chair (my thesis advisor, Prof. Ann Jones) invited our small senior seminar group to her house for the final class session, on the same day that a department soiree was to be held there. She served us an impressive lunch in her impossibly gorgeous converted farmhouse, and we were witness to her domestic goddessy charms that day, in addition to our previous admiration for her as a compassionate, engaged, funny, and well-attuned academic. After the lengthy lunch, she handed us a case of beer and a bottle of wine and shooed us out into the yard, which was an acre of knee-high green grass sloping down towards a wooded stream; we were told to entertain ourselves while she prepared the house for the evening’s dinner.

The sun was so golden and we were tipsy with red wine from lunch and heady with theoretical ideas and possibilities for the future, which was so temptingly close that May; graduate school and research jobs and translation projects and academic articles seemed to be at our fingertips. When we went into the small wood by the stream, we found five wide hammocks strung between the trees---I was astonished. I could not have imagined a more perfect place, nor a more perfect day. We swung in the hammocks, all of us piled in heaps of girl arms and girl legs, smoking and laughing and stunned at how good life was.

Later that night, the dinner party began, and we spent the night playing surrealist parlor games, smoking cigarettes with our professors, drinking even more wine, dreaming up ideas, and in general applying all of these theoretical ideas to real-world situations and lives, something I don’t think I had comprehended was possible, until then. It was amazing, everything was charmed. I was in love with everyone and everything.

When we finally piled into cars and drove back to campus, past midnight, my eyes were heavy and I felt like a peasant who had been booted out of a fairy ring, like it was too good to be real. The intersection of academic life with domestic life on that afternoon and later at the dinner party was pretty much the most perfect of combinations for me---friends, professors, good food and good wine and good conversation. It was the proof that my expensive BA was worth it, it was the culmination of four years of intensive coursework and a thesis.

2. If I am remembering correctly, we're both Leos. Please read our FreeWill Astrology horoscope of the week (I posted it today in my journal) and then tell me what your second language is and how you use it to engage with others/the world.

Yes, I am indeed a Leo (Aug. 2). I am a firm believer in Rob Brezsny’s uncanny predictive abilities, although I am often too lazy to step up to his very thoughtful demands :)

I have to say that my brain is having difficulty with this one. I want to use his example to figure out my own: Rob is to Horoscopes as Jesse is to ______, but I can’t fill in that blank. I could say poetry, or metaphor. I used to feel that metaphor (or imagery) was the driving force in my life, the way I communicated with the world, and although I still believe it is in me, I don’t feel I have been expressing myself very well in that way, recently. If English is my first language, maybe my second language is variations-on-the-theme-of-English: I am constantly struggling with obscure pockets and phrases of this language, and I want it to perform and signify more than it wants to (like Humpty Dumpty, was it, who paid words extra to mean other things, in Wonderland?). I speak and write in English but often in my mind there is a parallel dialogue, in which I am constantly noticing quirks or beautiful-sounding words or obscure etymologies, filing away little things and noticing their beauty, but I am not necessarily able to articulate them.

I’m afraid I don’t have much of a better answer than that. My second language is my argument with the limits of my first language, and my subsequent struggle to document what is left out by the first language while attempting to clarify the second language (occasionally in poem form).

3. I am hesitant to imagine or talk a lot about the future. However. In an ideal world, where and who and how would you be in five years?

In five years, I would hope to have moved back to Portland, Oregon, to be closer to my parents and my two siblings (and hopefully my best friend Jennie, whose location I unfortunately can’t predict five years in advance) and also the climate that makes me happiest. Or, maybe I’ll be in Seattle; either way, in five years I don’t want to still be forcing myself to deal with crappy humid summers and depressingly icy winters.

I would hope to have taken steps towards buying a house at that time, or alternatively, I would like to be putting savings. I want to be able to create a house that reflects me, in a space that belongs to me in a permanent way.

In five years, I will be 29, which is kind of odd to think about since five years doesn’t seem like a long time, but 29 seems very far off. At 29, I would like to be working in a job that involves editing, or perhaps a job that involves assisting students. I have recently begun to think more about how my career can involve helping others, which is not something I have had the luxury of thinking about yet in this economy. I want to feel I am making a difference in others’ lives, in a way that is meaningful for my life as well. I want to be happy at 29, and I want to feel I can create stability and happiness around me without feeling a need to withdraw socially or emotionally from the world around me. I think Kirk and I both feel a degree of social isolation in Boston, we have to work at being social a lot of the time.

The big thing I wonder about is whether I might find myself drawn towards graduate school, and if so, where and in what discipline? That I do not know. Maybe just a teaching degree, maybe media studies, maybe something publishing-related, I really have no clue.

In five years, I would hope that a move to Oregon would allow me to reconnect with friends I made in high school. I know Kirk and I will still be together: it is exciting to think about the possibilities for the next five years, in that respect. I just hope I am taking the right steps now in order to get myself there in one (financial/emotional) piece :)

4. This is also a repeated question, but I am endlessly fascinated by it. What's your daily routine like? Please take me through a typical aslant day.

Okay, I am a little too much in love with describing my day, so this is very detailed. Caveat lector.

I get up around 7:30 am, after allowing NPR to seep into my dreams for half an hour. At that point, I argue with myself about whether or not to take a shower. I feel cleaner and more alert with clean, blow-dried hair, but I am lazy and our bathroom is perpetually, bone-chillingly cold, and there is usually a fear lurking in the back of my brain that maybe, just maybe, the pipes have frozen again and either the sink won’t work or the shower won’t drain, in which case my morning would be undeniably fucked and it might be permissible to blow off work. So, that half-hour of NPR-filtered dreams is really a tug of war between getting cold or getting annoyed by the plumbing, all the while knowing that either way I have to get up and either brave the cold or brave the disappointment of not getting to take a plumbing day off.

Let’s assume I take a shower. When I get up, Kirk is still sleeping, and I let the kittens into the bedroom so they can jump up onto the bed and bug him for scratches and kisses. I shower, get dressed, and argue with myself about what shoes to wear in regard to (in order of importance) 1) weather, 2) comfort, 3) color, and 4) fashion (in case the dean decides to inspect my footwear, unannounced). I blow-dry my hair and put on makeup. Lotion, foundation/powder, blush, mascara, eyebrow color: all of this just makes me look paler, really, and I suspect most of it gets rubbed off on mittens or paperwork by noon. I get a lunch together, take stuff out of the freezer to defrost for dinner if necessary, kiss Kirk goodbye, and walk to the corner to catch the #88 or #90 bus.

I like to stand under the Yummy Hut awning (as opposed to the City Pizza awning) to demonstrate my solidarity with their fabulous Sweet and Sour Chicken (a.k.a. Mr Chicken) even though I haven’t ordered it in weeks (progress!). I take the #88 (usually) to the Davis Square Red Line T stop, and I take the inbound train two stops to Harvard Square. The bus ride to the subway takes less than five minutes; the subway takes less than five minutes; the walk from the subway to work takes less than five minutes. Here are things I love to do during those fifteen minutes: check out the books other people read on the bus or subway; glance at the newspaper headlines at the newsstand in case a disaster has happened overnight and NPR overlooked it; look for non-commuters on the subway and contemplate why they’re up at that hour; watch the small children being dropped off at the child care center at the First Church; watch the subway tunnel walls for blue sparks from the third rail; scrutinize sources of sudden noise in the stream of traffic or pedestrians to be on the lookout for 1) out of control cars that may jump the sidewalk and kill me, 2) crazy people who may be carrying weapons or simply wish to talk crazy at me before I am fully awake, or 3) accidents which may require me to heroically perform CPR or call 911 on my cell phone.

At work, I shove my mittens and hat in my bag usually on the way up the stairs to the second floor, and by the time I get in the door I have opened my coat and removed my scarf, because by then I am overheated. At that point, it’s usually about 8:45. I push the green button magnet next to my name on the board from OUT to IN---crucial information for the front desk receptionist, obscure point of obsessive compulsion for me.

I turn on my computer and open programs in a pre-determined order so that the programs are in the right order in the taskbar. The icons are lined up in order on the desktop to facilitate this. Here they are: Meeting Maker, Eudora, Excel spreadsheet used to track student calls or drop-ins, SIS telnet window for checking term bills, PowerFAIDS (financial aid admin program), Internet Explorer. Secondary possible windows, also in strict order: HERS telnet window for checking tuition histories, Access window(s) for entering applications, Windows Explorer for accessing network files. I have been known to close all windows in order to re-open them in the correct order, if for some reason they get messed up. It rarely happens. I fill my purple Nalgene bottle from the cooler and put miscellaneous forks or spoons or mugs left on my desk from yesterday into the dishwasher in the kitchenette. I get coffee with one cream and two sugars and sit down to read my Yahoo mail, the NY Times, Salon, LiveJournal, the Astronomy Picture of the Day, Memepool, and any other various blogs I feel the need to check. Unless compelled by outside forces, I never begin actual work until after 10:00 am. Sometimes I am on instant messenger with bellyfish for a while, or occasionally my younger brother Josh, up early in Oregon before his university classes start, or anyone else who’s around in the morning.

Until noon, I respond to work or personal emails, check more websites, answer phone calls, deal with students who drop in with questions about anything from how to write down a budget to how to apply for Federal aid, help students fill out our yearly financial aid report form, set up appointments for students with their Financial Aid Officer (either Janie or Judy, my bosses), and during Admissions season (which is right now until March) I spend a lot of time making meticulously straight photocopies and compiling rank lists of PhD candidates and yield reports and other assorted data.

I take a generous lunch around 12:30. The rest of the afternoon is pretty much the same; if it’s a boring day, I will read websites until my eyes are bloodshot. Usually around 2 or 3 is when I start to run through my blog bookmarks, and when I come across interesting things, this is the time I use to begin writing blog entries, which I edit for quite a while before actually posting them.

I leave at 5:00 pm sharp, push the green button magnet from IN to OUT, and walk back to the subway. (In warmer weather, I will walk home, which takes about 30 minutes, uphill, and involves a very intense list of objects to be watched for and backyards to obsessively peer into.) I meet Kirk at the T stop in Davis Square, and we either drive home (if he drove his car to the T that morning) or take the bus. The kittens mill around until we feed them, and Kirk and I make dinner together while watching the Simpsons, Mad TV, or various SciFi channel things that Kirk likes and I’ve learned to tolerate :) For the rest of the night, we spend plenty of time squirting the kittens with the squirt gun to get them off the counter. And, although sometimes I have a book that calls to me, or a random art project I need to do, we generally watch movies or play video games until bedtime around midnight, when we lure the kittens out of the bedroom with toys and then shut the door before they can scamper back inside. I sleep on the right side of the bed, Kirk on the left (from the lying-down perspective) and usually we both sleep on our stomachs. Neither of us snore, but we do both kick occasionally. Sometimes I will wake up only a little bit, to yank the comforter back over to his side, since I tend to pull it over to my side a lot. I generally sleep all the way through the night.

And thus ends my day. I told you, way too many details!

5. Here's an easy one. How'd you meet your boy? Y'all are so cute. Tell me all about it.

Aw. That is a fun one to answer :)

Back in January 2002, I first added Kirk to my friends list because I liked his poetry and the fact that he painted. We used to chat on AIM while he was in the light booth, working late nights at the theatre. Early on, I had a dream which I’ll always remember: we were sitting under a tree in a group of people, and everyone was trading a kiss around in a circle. I said to him in the dream, “Baby, let’s eliminate the middle man.” I had never dreamt about kissing someone like that, for some reason it stuck with me. We talked about so many different things over email and instant messenger, and there was always a buzz of attraction between us. I was fascinated with the stories about his childhood, growing up on a cotton farm in Texas, and in turn I told him stories about working in the law library at Harvard and going to a girls’ school and living in a city, etcetera.

We used to trade a lot of things back and forth. He sent me scraps of light gels for art projects. I told him about the cocktail I invented, which was Bombay sapphire gin with a drop of cranberry juice (only enough to make it pale pink, no more) and a spoonful of sugar stirred in---this made it fizzy for some reason. We just called it fizzy gin, it was our drink, and he used to drink it so often at a bar in Texas that they got used to bringing him handfuls of sugar packets without him having to ask. This was all way before we ever discussed meeting. We traded poetry back and forth, mail art, eventually phone numbers: then we talked nearly every single day, usually until the battery died on his portable phone. Kirk was looking at the theatre and creative writing graduate programs at Emerson College in Boston, although this was only a semi-legitimate reason at the time because all we really wanted was to meet each other.

He flew to Boston from Texas on May 2 and I picked him up at the airport. My heart has never beat that hard, I think. I hid behind a column and almost lost him at the gate, but we found each other and hugged so tight, neither of us could breathe. We were dizzy and infatuated and we didn’t leave my house all weekend :-0 Kirk doesn’t even remember what that apartment looked like, now, although I remember it in absolute detail. It was sunny but chilly; we had green tea and read the paper in bed; he wrote a poem over columns of stock numbers. He gave me an elliptical lens, you hold it up to the window with your hand on the other side, and an image of the window in miniature is projected onto your hand! He always gives me things like this, beautiful and different.

After that, we visited back and forth about every two months or so. I visited him in Texas in September for his birthday, we spent time in Oregon together with my family for the fourth of July; we stayed with his family the next Thanksgiving. Last May, exactly a year after we first met, we drove together from Texas to Boston, where Kirk moved into the apartment I had picked out :) Although we spent a while pretending that I was still living at my old apartment, for six months I never slept at my old apartment. I moved in, finally, and now we are where we are! With two kittens and a tiny kitchen and way too many books and not quite enough money but such an incredible amount of happiness.

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If you want to be interviewed, leave me a comment and I'll get back to you with five questions.

Comments

[souvenant.livejournal.com]

[aslant.livejournal.com]

i'm glad you enjoyed it :) it really is such trivial detail, but it's everything that people online would never know about me, otherwise. when i write it all down, it seems different and particular, but if people ask me (verbally) what i do during the day, i'll just say, "nothing, helped some students maybe. watched hbo." ha! and that explains nothing to anybody.